expositions 4.1&2 (2010)] expositions (online) isnn: 1747-5376 editors’ preface john a. doody, gregory hoskins, john paul spiro with the publication of vol. 4, nos. 1 and 2, we mark the successful transition of expositions from a print publication to an on-line journal. the all-electronic format will allow us to provide more of those features that make expositions a unique presence in the world of academic publishing: a forum for work that is broadly interdisciplinary and more experimental, conversational, and timely than the typical academic journal. in this volume and those to come, readers will find the features that have helped define us – overheard in the academy, academic roundtable, notes & insights – as well as new features, such as interviews. our inaugural interview subject is the eminent historian john lukacs. we are pleased to announce now that with vol. 5, no. 1 we will inaugurate a new regular feature of the journal, teaching the great books, with the publication of “teaching the analects” by william theodore de bary, john mitchell mason professor of the university and provost emeritus of columbia university. contributions to teaching the great books will offer pedagogical insights as well as personal reflections on the enduring – and sometimes neglected – core texts of the humanities. our current issue’s overheard in the academy addresses the supreme court’s 1980 yeshiva decision denying university faculty collective bargaining rights under the national labor relations act. the focus of this overheard is not so much the decision itself; instead our contributors reflect on current conditions of “collegiality” in the american university. our articles, “avignon vs. rome: dante, petrarch, catherine of siena” by thomas renna and “gods and friends: c. s. lewis on divination” by francis caponi, o. s. a., bring together history, literature, and theology. our academic roundtable considers the monstrosity of christ, itself a debate between philosopher slavoj žižek and theologian john milbank. in her reflection “of virgins and vampires,” in notes & insights, noël falco dolan ponders a young woman’s apparent eagerness to give up her immortal soul. book reviews consider selected recent works in art history, philosophy, and theology. we gratefully acknowledge the falvey memorial library of villanova university and its director, joseph lucia, for hosting the journal and the work of darren poley, stephen spatz, and the entire outreach team for assisting us through this period of transition. we also offer our deepest gratitude to dr. peter busch, the first managing editor of expositions, for his efforts and commitment to the success of the journal. [expositions 6.1 (2012) 9-10] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 introduction to the roundtable: holmes rolston iii’s a new environmental ethics: the next millennium for life on earth christian diehm university of wisconsin, stevens point in the 1970s, when the contemporary environmental movement was still in its infancy, holmes rolston, iii began publishing philosophical essays in environmental ethics, and it is no exaggeration to say that his early efforts contributed to establishing this subject as a serious academic field, one in which he has played a leading role ever since. indeed, over the past five decades rolston has not only developed and defended one of the most comprehensive and recognizable positions in eco-philosophy, but he has also used it to address some of the most difficult and challenging issues that environmentalism in the modern era has had to face. it should come as no surprise, then, that the appearance earlier this year of his a new environmental ethics1 represents both the culmination of a professional lifetime of dedication to the discipline that he helped to create, as well as a guidepost out ahead of those of us who have only recently ventured into the territory that he began to explore so many years ago. readers familiar with rolston’s work will quickly recognize that a new environmental ethics is at one and the same time both a familiar and a novel text. on the one hand, it straightforwardly presents most of rolston’s now well-known positions in environmental ethics, positions on things such as the intrinsic value of organisms and the ethical priority of ecological wholes that have changed fairly little over the course of his writing. on the other hand, this book is an entry into an ever-changing academic field in which new questions are continually arising, and thus it incorporates rolston’s most up-to-date reflections on subjects such as the current fascination with the notion of “sustainability,” the looming threat of global warming, and the ongoing academic debates about the social construction of nature. one thing that the contributors to this roundtable discussion have in common – marion hourdequin (colorado college), nicole klenk (university of new brunswick), and myself (university of wisconsin-stevens point) – is that we are all from a generation of environmental thinkers that has always been able to look to the pioneering work that rolston did long before we came on the scene. that we are still so thoroughly engaged with his texts, and find our own thinking so thoroughly illuminated by his, is testimony to his intellectual rigor, the broadness of his intellectual scope, and the importance of the issues that his work has consistently addressed. the pieces collected here stand, no doubt, as just one of the first of many thoughtful conversations that a new environmental ethics will inspire, and they are offered in the same spirit that one finds in rolston’s own works: that of passionate, reflective and critical engagement with the question of how best to live a meaningful human life on a valuable planet earth. introduction to the roundtable 10 reference 1. rolston, holmes, iii. 2012. a new environmental ethics: the next millennium for life on earth. new york: routledge. [expositions 4.1&2 (2010) 1-3] expositions issn: 1747–5376 yeshiva, thirty years later bernard g. prusak center for liberal education villanova university thirty years ago, the united states supreme court decided, by a vote of 5 to 4, that the full-time faculty of yeshiva university should be categorized as “managerial employees” and, as such, excluded from the benefits of collective bargaining under the national labor relations act. the majority opinion in what has come to be known as the yeshiva decision noted that “the faculty at each school [at yeshiva university] effectively determine its curriculum, grading system, admission and matriculation standards, academic calendars, and course schedules.” 1 moreover, “the faculty at each school make recommendations to the dean or director in every case of faculty hiring, tenure, sabbaticals, termination, and promotion,” and “the overwhelming majority of faculty recommendations are implemented.” 2 these facts led the majority to reflect that, whereas “[t]he [national labor relations] act was intended to accommodate the type of management-employee relations that prevail in the pyramidal hierarchies of private industry,” contemporary universities are in the main organized quite differently, with a “system of „shared authority‟ evolved from the medieval model of collegial decision-making, in which guilds of scholars were responsible only to themselves.” 3 given the persistence of the collegial model, the majority reasoned, yeshiva‟s full-time faculty “exercise authority which, in any other context, unquestionably would be managerial.” 4 since managerial employees are charged with representing management interests and so excluded from the benefits of collective bargaining under the act, the court‟s conclusion followed that full-time faculty are excluded as well. in this iteration of “overheard in the academy,” we have asked four faculty – one scholaractivist, one adjunct with experience in faculty governance bodies, and two former administrators now returned to teaching and research – to reflect on the relationship, thirty years after yeshiva, between faculty and administrators in the american colleges and universities that our contributors have come to know. in other words, we have asked our contributors to think about the current conditions of collegiality, an oft-invoked word on academic campuses, though one whose meaning all too often reduces to “niceness.” (if words are like pockets into which we stuff meanings, as friedrich nietzsche once claimed, then the word “collegiality” has had its pocket picked.) the majority opinion in yeshiva has been contested from the day of its delivery, perhaps nowhere more forcefully than in justice william brennan‟s minority opinion. according to this opinion, “the court‟s perception of the yeshiva faculty‟s status is distorted by the rose-colored lens through which it views the governance structure of the modern-day university…. [t]he university of today bears little resemblance to the „community of scholars‟ of yesteryear,” 5 yeshiva, thirty years later 2 instead having become “big business,” subject to the same corporate imperatives as “any large industrial organization.” 6 arguably due in part to the yeshiva decision – after which the faculty union movement of the 1970s came quickly to a standstill, and many collective bargaining arrangements between faculty and administration broke down 7 – the status of faculty at “the university of today” has also changed markedly since 1980. according to recent research, whereas in the late 1960s “fewer than 5 percent of full-time faculty hires nationally were for nontenure-track positions,” in 2008 “over half of full-time hires [were] for non-tenure-track positions.” 8 so-called contingent faculty – full-time non-tenure-track, post-docs, adjuncts, and graduate students – have become the majority faculty nationwide, constituting nearly sixty-nine percent of faculty at all degree-granting institutions in 2007, as opposed to forty-three percent in 1975. 9 finally, it is worth noting that, with the prioritization of research at many institutions, tenure-track and tenured professors have become “more likely to identify with their disciplines than with their campuses.” 10 so it is not surprising that, “[i]n 1989, forty percent of professors reported that they felt loyalty to their institutions; seventy percent said they felt loyalty to their discipline.” 11 what would be surprising is if the first number were not now lower and the second yet higher. what do these trends mean for the future of american higher education? whose view of the role of the faculty in the present-day university is closer to the reality, that of the majority in yeshiva, or that of the minority? and what special considerations and issues are there for institutions, like catholic colleges and universities, with distinctive missions and commitments, for example to the principles of catholic social teaching? marc bousquet is an associate professor of english at santa clara university and the founding editor of workplace: a journal for academic labor. jeanne brody is an adjunct professor of art history at villanova university and formerly chair of its adjunct faculty committee. john w. carlson is a professor of philosophy at creighton university and formerly dean of the college of arts and sciences at the university of scranton, dean and academic vice president at le moyne college, and vice president for academic affairs at creighton. john j. johannes is a professor of political science at villanova university and formerly dean of the college of arts and sciences at marquette university and vice president for academic affairs at villanova. notes 1. national labor relations board v. yeshiva university, 444 u.s. 672, 676 (1980). 2. 444 u.s. 672, 677 (1980). 3. 444 u.s. 672, 680 (1980). 4. 444 u.s. 672, 686 (1980). 5. 444 u.s. 672, 702 (1980). 6. 444 u.s. 672, 703 (1980). 7. see on these developments marc bousquet, how the university works: higher education and the low-wage nation (new york: new york university press, 2008), 111–114. 3 prusak 8. michael j. dooris, david h. monk, and rodney a. erickson, “building, sustaining and developing research university faculty” (unpublished), 4, delivered at the 35 th annual conference of the northeast association for institutional research, providence, ri, november 2008. dooris is director of planning research at penn state; monk is the dean of the college of education there; erickson is the executive vice president and provost. they cite as evidence for this claim work by m. j. finkelstein and j. h. schuster. 9. see the document “trends in faculty status, 1975–2007,” compiled by the american association of university professors (aaup) from information culled from the federal government‟s integrated postsecondary education data system (ipeds): http://www.aaup.org/nr/rdonlyres/7d01e0c7c255-41f1-9f11e27d0028cb2a/0/ trendsinfacultystatus2007.pdf. 10. louis menand, the marketplace of ideas: reform and resistance in the american university (new york: w.w. norton, 2010), 144. 11. menand, marketplace of ideas, 122. 02boettcher.indd © equinox publishing ltd. 2008, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expositions 2.1 (2008) 007–012] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v2i1.007 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 care of the soul: service-learning and the value of the humanities james w. boettcher department of philosophy saint joseph’s university contemporary debates about the proper role of the humanities in college and university education have been shaped by a multitude of exigencies and trends both within and outside of the academy, from ordinary budgetary constraints to changing institutional and professional norms, and from increasingly consumerist attitudes about education to the emergence of new media and communications technology. value pluralism, recognition of the importance of cultural diversity, and processes of globalization have led to ongoing and sometimes quite heated discussion about curricular content. moreover, the remarkable achievements of the natural sciences, which have yielded so many practical gains, only heighten the anxiety of those who would seek to determine just what “use” the humanities serve. while some of the terminology in these debates may be new—witness the pressure on instructors across disciplines to specify measurable “learning objectives” and “outcomes assessments”—the underlying questions are not so different from those which motivated matthew arnold’s classic defense of the humanities over a century ago. the “humane letters,” arnold argues, uniquely engage our emotions and exercise a valuable influence on our conduct and sense of beauty. arnold’s conclusion is that the humanities are not “in much actual danger of being thrust out from their leading place in education…so long as human nature is what it is, their attractions will remain irresistible” (arnold 1975, 72). according to a new book by anthony kronman, the humanities have lost not only their leading position in post-secondary education, but, more important, their relevance in guiding students through a critical examination of what it means to live a good life as a human being (kronman 2007). kronman places much of the blame for this http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/expo.v2i1.007 8 care of the soul © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 loss squarely on the shoulders of those who work in the humanities. in our aspiration to realize a misplaced research ideal, it is we, kronman suggests, who have renounced what was once widely understood to be—and, indeed, what should be—the principal goal of an education in the humanities, namely, the disciplined pursuit of ultimate questions about the meaning of life. stanley fish, by contrast, is suspicious of the notion that members of the professoriate are especially effective at or well qualified to direct others in such a pursuit, and so he reaches a very different conclusion. because the humanities fail to “bring about effects in the world,” their only justification lies in the pleasure experienced by those who enjoy studying them. by locating the potential value of the humanities in either observable practicable results or the subjective experience of pleasure, fish’s conclusion is based on a false dichotomy. even if the humanities don’t “do” anything useful “in the world” in the way that, say, accounting programs perform useful social and economic functions by training a necessary group of professionals, the knowledge, skills, and habits of mind that are cultivated through a serious study of the humanities still do something quite significant for students. robert pippin’s conception of the aims of liberal education is instructive in this regard (pippin 2000). pippin reminds us that the humanities, along with the other liberal arts, contribute in an essential way to the good of human freedom. freedom as liberality of mind consists in the ability to stand in the right relation to one’s convictions, values and identity: that is, to acknowledge them as one’s own by being able to give a reasoned account of why one believes, values, or identifies with this or that. having good reasons typically depends upon weighing evidence, engaging in dialogue with others, responding to their criticisms, and, as kronman rightly emphasizes, considering traditional claims about and illustrations of the true, the good, and the beautiful in history, literature, philosophy, and the arts. at the same time, kronman’s book is not without its shortcomings. i suspect that the simplistic understandings of diversity and multiculturalism which he associates with the demise of the humanities are not nearly as widespread or damaging as he would have us believe and so are something of a straw man. more germane to my james w. boettcher 9 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 own experiences teaching in the humanities is his treatment of religion. according to kronman’s somewhat stylized history of american higher education, the humanities flourished in their proper role during the era of the so-called ideal of secular humanism—that is, from roughly the 1860s to the 1960s—when they provided the opportunity for exploring rival frameworks of meaning in an increasingly pluralistic and disenchanted world. that ideal affirms neither religious dogma nor radical doubt; but it is distinct from religious conceptions of a well-lived life. all religions, kronman maintains, are “fundamentalist” in the weak sense that they reject the “ultimate pluralism of values” and demand acknowledgment of supernatural realities that are inaccessible to human reason (kronman 2007, 199). kronman regretfully admits that, given the recent abandonment of the secular humanist ideal, the most influential institutions providing instruction today in the question of life’s meaning are religious institutions, and he cites as evidence of this fact language from the mission statements of oral roberts, regent, and liberty university (kronman 2007, 200 and 292, n. 41). many of the religiously affiliated colleges and universities in the u.s., however, are quite unlike the particular examples cited by kronman. some, like my own institution, are rooted in a vibrant intellectual tradition according to which there is no final inconsistency between the demands of faith and the claims of reason. moreover, just as in the case of some religious convictions, skeptical and naturalistic attitudes and beliefs are sometimes adopted uncritically and even dogmatically. to be sure, kronman would recommend that students in the humanities encounter reasoned challenges to both religious and nonreligious worldviews. but it’s far from obvious that this goal is best accomplished by following the ideal of secular humanism, whatever its other merits. it may turn out that this educational goal, along with the more general aim of critically examining rival frameworks of meaning, demands that questions in epistemology and the philosophy of religion be recognized as central to the humanities curriculum, as they are at many catholic institutions. kronman is right to insist on a renewal of the humanistic alternative to various fundamentalisms. but it’s just as important that questions about god, the divine, faith and the rationality (or irration10 care of the soul © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 ality) of religious belief are not dismissed altogether, as they might be by students who would equate all forms of religious commitment with “fundamentalism.” kronman observes that the meaning of life is perhaps a more familiar and pressing matter for us when put in the form of the question, “what, in the end, should i care about?” (kronman 2007, 23). my own view is that teachers and students must respond to this question intellectually, but not without also considering its affective, practical, and spiritual dimensions. what i care about is revealed in part by what i believe on due reflection and value as good or beautiful, and in part by what i do and how i respond emotionally to others and to the world we share. thus one of the ways that college and university communities can care for the whole person and facilitate student reflection on the question of what to care about is by organizing and encouraging meaningful activities outside of the classroom which complement traditional forms of academic learning. service-learning, an academic program that combines academic coursework with sustained reflection on regular community service, is one such example. my own experiences at jesuit universities, first as a graduate student and then as a faculty member, suggest that the humanities provide a natural home for this particularly effective method of combining intellectual inquiry, practical engagement, relationship building, and self-reflection. in my service-learning sequence of introductory philosophy courses, students examine long standing philosophical and moral problems in light of their experiences working in service placements. so an examination of the problem of free will and determinism is complemented by the experiences of getting to know addicts and recovering addicts. examination of the social nature of the person is complemented by discussions of solidarity through service work; the problem of evil by reflections on human suffering; the meaning of race by consideration of the demographics of philadelphia; end-of-life issues by students working at nursing homes; moral questions concerning impairments and disabilities by students serving wheelchair communities; theories of distributive justice by stories from soup kitchens and homeless outreach agencies—and so on. service experiencjames w. boettcher 11 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 es contribute to our academic objectives by providing illustrations, concrete examples, and counter-examples, as well as sources of insight, inspiration, and wonder. at the same time, student reflection on both service and the social problems to which their service sites respond is more informed and disciplined when it is connected to a careful study of philosophical texts. in these courses, the question of what one should care about is always at least in the background, even when more specific philosophical problems and moral controversies occupy our class readings and conversation. at other times, the question is addressed directly through an encounter with classic works in philosophy. for instance, students begin my introductory course on the “human person” by making their way through plato’s apology and republic, with special attention paid to socrates’ investigation of how and why young people are attracted to various goals and projects. my second course, “moral philosophy,” revisits plato’s question of the relationship between happiness and morality by turning to mill’s defense of the higher pleasures, kant’s ideal of the morally good will, and aristotle’s treatment of the different models of friendship which contribute to a happy and virtuous life. it is unlikely that these courses could be shown to have “saved” anyone, but that’s not the term i would use to characterize their purpose in the first place. indeed, one of the lessons that students learn through their service is just how difficult it is for one person to save another. but, especially among first-year students, these courses do, i think, often have an impact, and sometimes a transformative impact, on the kind of persons that students become over the next few years, on their academic and non-academic interests, their sense of responsibility, and the choices that they make about how to participate in campus life. my hope is that students learn to care for themselves, for what socrates calls the “best possible state of [the] soul,” by pursuing the sorts of questions that he asked and by serving and caring for others (plato 1975, 32). there are more possibilities in heaven and earth than are dreamt of, apparently, in professor fish’s philosophy. 12 care of the soul © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 references arnold, matthew 1975 literature and science. in the complete prose works of matthew arnold, vol. 10, ed. r.h. super, 53–73. ann arbor: the university of michigan press. kronman, anthony 2007 education’s end: why our colleges and universities have given up on the meaning of life. new haven, ct: yale university press. pippin, robert 2000 liberation and the liberal arts: the aims of education address. the university of chicago record, september 19, 2–4. http://www.uchicago.edu/about/ documents/chicagorecord/pdfs/35-1.pdf plato 1975 apology. in the trial and death of socrates, trans. g.m.a. grube, 21–42. indianapolis, in: hackett. http://www.uchicago.edu/about/documents/chicagorecord/pdfs/35-1.pdf http://www.uchicago.edu/about/documents/chicagorecord/pdfs/35-1.pdf © equinox publishing ltd. 2007, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expositions 1.2 (2007) 223–240] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v1i2.223 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 book reviews seyyed hossein nasr. islamic philosophy from its origin to the present. albany, ny: state university of new york press, 2006. 380 pp. $26.95 pb. isbn 0791468003 rahim acar, marmara university islamic philosophy from its origin to the present provides a survey of islamic philosophy with respect to the relations between philosophy and prophecy in islamic thought. in this volume, philosophy is treated not only as something historical but also as a living tradition, especially in contemporary iran. nasr takes the term prophecy in a broader sense, such that it has not only “legal, ethical and spiritual significance but also … a sapiental one concerned with knowledge” (1). as nasr presents it, prophecy has different degrees but mainly consists in “bringing a message from another world or another level of consciousness” (5). in its narrower sense, prophecy indicates the messengers of god as envisaged by islam; in nasr’s broader sense, however, prophecy also includes some forms of inner, esoteric, knowledge. as far as islamic philosophy is concerned, nasr argues, this knowledge is related to the inner dimension of the quranic revelation. nasr’s enterprise in this book concerns prophecy in both the narrower and the broader senses of the term, as it has been understood by intellectuals in islamic civilization. hence nasr wants to show how islamic philosophy—its major themes and the historical figures contributing to its formation—“functions in a world dominated by prophecy” (8). nasr’s book is divided into four major parts addressing different questions regarding islamic philosophy and its relation to prophecy. part one provides an overview and evaluation of the study of islamic philosophy in the west. nasr considers the meaning of the term philosophy, surveys its application to various intellectual currents, and examines the relation between al-hikma al-ilahiyya (a synthesis of rational philosophy, illumination, gnosis, and islamic teachings) and islamic theology in its sunni and shiite branches. western studies in 224 book reviews © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 islamic philosophy are also discussed from nasr’s well-known traditionalist point of view. nasr praises corbin’s histoire de la philosophie islamic (1964), which was written in collaboration with nasr himself and osman yahya, for taking into account the relationship between philosophy and revelation; corbin’s book is, in nasr’s view (27), a major turning point in this regard. nasr even seems to think it the only proper history of islamic philosophy “written by europeans and their muslim imitators” (107), which is a highly objectionable assumption indeed. having criticized the manner in which islamic philosophy is studied and interpreted by western and muslim scholars, nasr devotes the rest of the book to discussing “philosophical questions and ideas of particular islamic philosophers … seen from the point of view of the islamic philosophical tradition itself ” (29–30). in the second part, nasr discusses some prevalent topics in islamic philosophy, such as existence, quiddity, and the relations among intellect, reason and intuition; he also explains how these topics have given rise to a range of postions adopted or rejected by various figures in the tradition. nasr underlines that muslim philosophers did not see a dichotomy between intellect and intuition but considered them to make a hierarchy within the totality of the sources of human knowledge. he discusses the limits of theological schools and philosophers who restrict knowledge to that which is attainable by demonstration. part three is devoted to the history of islamic philosophy, treating that history in a manner that remains faithful to the reality of the islamic intellectual tradition, unlike “histories of philosophy written by europeans and their muslim imitators” (107). in this part, which draws a framework for the study of islamic philosophy, nasr discusses theological, philosophical, and spiritual or gnostic movements. his exposition concentrates on the philosophico-theosophical movements developed in iran and azerbaijan, such as the school of isfahan and the school of tehran. nasr devotes a chapter specifically to mulla sadra’s thought, which is the best example of the prophetic philosophy in islam. this is because mulla sadra sought to unify the knowledge received through burhân or demonbook reviews 225 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 stration, ‘irfân or contemplation, intellectual intuition and gnosis and qur’ân … thereby giving full expression to philosophy cultivated in the land of prophecy. (224) despite this emphasis on movements in iran and azerbaijan, however, nasr talks about all groups and important figures in the muslim world. his aim is not to give a full-fledged account of the thought of each and every person or group, but to study their thought insofar as it is related to the issue of the relationship between philosophy and prophecy. in the last part, nasr tries to identify the modern western understanding of philosophy and compares it to that understanding of philosophy which is islamic or traditional. he points out the revival of interest in premodern islamic philosophy despite the fact that in academic circles the philosophical activity is generally separated from prophecy. nasr’s book certainly provides a good overview of the story of intellectual movements in islamic societies. whatever topic he chooses to deal with, he paints a fantastic picture, as he does when highlighting the etymology of such words as wujud (existence), wajd (being enraptured), hastî (existence) ist (is), and so on. he writes with the erudition and vision indicating the culmination of years of experience and thought in islamic philosophy. this can be seen, for example, in his explanation of the sense in which avicenna understands existence to be accidental (69–71), or when he traces the adventure of ideas from one generation of thinkers to another or from one perspective to another. the fact that he introduces the ideas of well-known figures and groups alongside those of the less known or misunderstood shows the breadth of his knowledge. due to the fact that some of the material in this book consists of revised versions of articles written for different occasions, topics of different chapters overlap and the book is not quite systematic. nevertheless, nasr’s work is quite a valuable source for pondering islamic philosophy with regard to the relation between philosophy and prophecy. one key problem in the volume is the author’s use of the terms “islam” and “islamic” in a manner that seems to over-interpret the data. consider, for example, his statement about the divine essence: “islamic metaphysics places the absolute above all limitations,” and “it knows that the divine essence … is non-being or beyond-being” (63). it 226 book reviews © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 might be true that for some people, for example ibn arabi (90) and some ismaili thinkers (148), god is beyond being, and non-being comprehends being. but it is quite difficult to generalize and call this islamic metaphysics. passionately defending a certain interpretation of islamic thought, nasr tends to suppress the diversity. he talks about authentic islamic philosophy (65) as if there were a platonic idea of “islamic philosophy” on the basis of which one may discriminate whether one’s philosophical activity is authentically islamic or not. defending a certain interpretation or a certain school of thought is not objectionable in itself. however, nasr seems to implicitly identify that which is “islamic” with the interpretation that he favors. although in principle he welcomes the contribution of all parties, such as sunni theologians or rationalistic philosophers like al-farabi and ibn sina, nasr prefers what might be called gnostic-theosophical trends. on this preference he makes unwarranted generalizations about islamic philosophy. nasr’s evaluation of attempts to write islamic philosophy is another example of misuse of the term “islamic.” nasr mentions two attempts to write a history of islamic philosophy “from the islamic point of view” (107). what does it really mean to write a history of islamic philosophy from an islamic point of view? does religion in the narrower sense, i.e., the quran and the prophetic tradition, have anything to do with writing a history of islamic philosophy? does he mean islam as the religion announced and exemplified by the prophet, or does he mean islam as understood and lived by people in general? it is difficult to find a clear-cut, one-to-one relation between islam in either sense and a certain manner of writing a history of philosophy. attempting to interpret the whole islamic intellectual heritage from a traditionalist viewpoint, nasr seems to operate with false dichotomies and to make big generalizations. his conception of homo islamicus provides a telling example (265–67). contrasting homo islamicus with the modern conception of man, nasr states that the islamic conception of human being is similar to the conception of man in other traditions, such as christianity, hinduism etc. if he is talking about islam as a religion, and about homo islamicus as something prescribed by islam, then the dichotomy might rather have been between islam and other book reviews 227 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 religions. this nasr does not accept. if he is talking about islam in a broader sense, as the interpretation and implementation of the religion by its followers, then the dichotomy is roughly between interpretation of islam by some traditional figures and interpretation by some contemporary or modern figures. but this time, both instances of interpretation of islam should be welcome and deserve the rubric “islamicus.” this might be because of nasr’s use of the terms in senses different from their ordinary meanings. however, nasr does not assign new and different meanings to terms by mistake. on the contrary, he is fully aware regarding his use of these terms, because they are crucial for his interpretation of islamic philosophy. he uses the terms modern and traditional as opposites and religion and tradition as synonymous (260). then by definition that which is modern cannot be compatible with religion. but in fact it is difficult to clearly identify the teachings of islam with the philosophical outlook of the ancient or medieval world, and it is also difficult to find exact opposition between the teachings of islam and the modern philosophical outlook. nasr certainly takes the conception of man that culminated in the later development of islamic philosophy as the criterion of that which is islamic. however, this is simply one way of being a muslim. it is not something exactly prescribed by religion, but something cultivated and assumed by some muslims. similarly, as far as our modern world is concerned, no muslim is obliged to assume blindly the anthropomorphism, secularism, or lack of metaphysical principles identified by nasr as the characteristics of modern thought (267). the role nasr ascribes to prophecy with regard to philosophy in islamic civilization also seems problematic. in general it is true that muslim thinkers did pay attention to prophecy. but is it true that they all more or less had the conception of prophecy identified by nasr? it is true that some philosophers and theologians welcomed both the broader and the narrower meanings of prophecy. for some others, however, accepting prophecy in the narrower sense meant rejection or severe modification of prophecy in the broader sense. one must pay attention to the fact—which is also attested by nasr’s exposition—that there was no uniform understanding of prophecy in islamic intellectual 228 book reviews © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 history. for example, the way asharite theologians understood prophecy is not easily compatible with the ismaili or ishraqi conception of prophecy. hence the relation between philosophy and prophecy must be carefully treated before identifying one orientation with “islam” and “that which is islamic.” nasr looks at islamic philosophy from different viewpoints, and he not only writes about well known figures of islamic thought but also provides useful information about less known figures. he explains how different figures or intellectual trends in islamic societies took prophecy into account and considered it as something related to or even as the ground of intellectual activity. none of this is a surprise. everything in nasr’s book is consistent with the ways he approached and analyzed islamic philosophy in previous work. his main theses will receive divergent reactions, and they definitely deserve to be considered and discussed carefully. his emphasis on the metaphysical dimension of islamic thought is likewise important, but his scorn for nontraditionalist historians of islamic philosophy and his assumption that certain schools of islamic philosophy represent the criterion of being islamic are quite open to discussion. references corbin, henri 1964 histoire de la philosophie islamic. paris: gallimard. kathryn hughes. the short life and long times of mrs. beeton. karen armstrong, the great transformation: the beginning of our religious tradition seyyed hossein nasr. islamic philosophy from its origin to the present. © equinox publishing ltd. 2009, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expo. 3.1 (2009) 115–121] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v3i1.115 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 in and out of context nicholas popper california institute of technology popper.nick@gmail.com quentin skinner. hobbes and republican liberty. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2008. 245pp, hb $70.00 isbn 9780521886765; pb $22.99, isbn 9780521714167. quentin skinner indisputably numbers amongst the past half-century’s most important historians of political thought. his investigations of the inextricable bond between political discourse and political behavior helped restore intellectual history as a critical component of the study of politics. perhaps the clearest sign of his impact is the ubiquity of his formerly controversial foundational premises. most historians now assume that a sincere, if vexed, relationship exists between political thought and action, often without reflecting on the exertions of skinner and j.g.a. pocock to counter lewis namier’s and g.r. elton’s revisionist insistence that political thought merely amounted to retrospective justification for political business. skinner’s contributions extend far beyond this assault on revisionism, and his work engages with that of berlin, strauss, oakeshott and other luminaries of modern political philosophy. his innovation within both the historical and political philosophical traditions lies in his emphasis on notions of discourse and context as critical to the formation of political ideas, as displayed in his stunning 1978 analysis of the origins of the modern state, the foundations of modern political thought. skinner drew on collingwood and the later wittgenstein to define context as the totality of political utterances available to motivate historical actors, while discourses were constituted by statements sharing ideological continuity. he brought antiquarianism to philosophy and politics to erudition. not all historians of political philosophy embraced his recalibration of their methods. many were loath to exammailto:popper.nick@gmail.com 116 expositions © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 ine forgotten pamphlets as well as acknowledged classics, the context in which ideas were shaped as well as their formal characteristics, and the past on its own terms as well as its relationship to the present. nor were all early modern historians convinced by his effort to integrate their canon—kristeller, baron, garin, pocock, to name a few—into a teleological narrative of the emergence of the modern state. this methodology has become far less controversial as skinner’s students and inheritors have populated academia. his students have earned considerable influence in the disciplines of history, philosophy and political science for their application of his vision to figures from marsiglio of padua to john locke. cambridge remains the site of new and vibrant skinnerite scholarship, with important outposts in boston, helsinki, sydney and beyond. meanwhile, foundations has been the subject of two collections of essays and a cottage industry of scholarly examination. skinner’s insistence that scholarship be useful perhaps best accounts for his continuing impact. when one surveys his work—and that of his students cum colleagues—the charge of bloodless antiquarianism sometimes levied against him appears wholly unconvincing. his work has focused adamantly on questions of vital contemporary significance. while foundations traced the development of modern notions of state and sovereignty from late medieval italy to the french wars of religion, his more recent works have elaborated the late seventeenth-century eclipse of republican conceptions of freedom by a modern understanding of liberty. the republican species—which skinner has grudgingly ceased to call “neo-roman”—derived from a particular reading of roman authorities, and it defined freedom as a condition in which men exercised their will in a free state unimpeded by any arbitrary power. modern liberty is, to skinner, far more troubling, for it is defined by humanity’s freedom to abrogate certain rights to receive, in return, the covenanted promise of protection from one’s state. this state is the absolute and legitimate seat of all sovereignty in any government, whether despotic or democratic. and though the state might impede individual action, its obstruction cannot be considered arbitrary because of this covenant. the decision to submit to the state’s authority always constitutes the covenant’s renewal in an act of free will. book reviews 117 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 thomas hobbes is the central figure in this narrative, and hobbes and republican liberty builds on skinner’s 1996 intellectual biography reason and rhetoric in the philosophy of hobbes, as well as his 1998 essay liberty before liberalism to offer focused readings of the alteration in hobbes’ definitions of liberty from his service as secretary to the cavendishes to his 1651 leviathan. meticulous interrogation, skinner argues, enables recognition of two features of hobbes’ career denied or underappreciated by existing scholarship: hobbes’ definition of liberty did not remain static throughout his career, and these shifts were driven by hobbes’ desire to respond to the outpouring of works propounding the republican theory of liberty. such works, hobbes believed, divided england before the civil war, hardened parliamentarian resistance, and supplied the grounds for charles i’s decapitation in 1649. skinner traces subtle alterations in hobbes’ theories of freedom, liberty, impediment, and will with admirable verve and technical rigor, while succinctly encapsulating the opposing polemical literature. a vibrant hobbes emerges, one whose untangling or circumvention of philosophical knots derived from his unfailing compulsion to ignore, overcome, or appropriate criticism. still locked in combat with those who wish to empty the history of philosophy of the diachronic and biographical, skinner injects hobbes’ work with a dynamism that renders the crusty old philosopher human, with ideas subject to all the deficiencies that entails. an unsympathetic reader might suggest that there are few new ideas in this work, but they should nonetheless concede that such close readings strengthen skinner’s account of hobbes’ philosophical positions, even if grounds for dispute still remain. skinner also compares hobbes’ positions with those of antagonists such as algernon sidney and john milton more directly than he had previously. though the book introduces few conclusions that will surprise those familiar with skinner’s work, it nonetheless paints with masterful detail the formal characteristics of his notion of modern liberty. if the work is one of retrenchment, its methodological decisions reveal skinner capable of arraying in different ways to fight recurring battles. most noticeable is the influence of herbert butterfield, whose insistence that polemical debates be viewed as the factory of ideas here 118 expositions © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 resonates from title to last word. much of the work hints at another butterfieldian investigation of hobbes—steven shapin and simon schaffer’s leviathan and the air-pump (1985); in fact, their last line is evoked in skinner’s final word. shapin and schaffer conclude with a paradoxical “hobbes was right” to argue that hobbes was defeated in debate for reasons more sociological than evidentiary—that is, because the dispute was adjudicated according to the human grounds that hobbes argued were determinative of truth, rather than judged on logical merit. skinner’s conclusion is, however, devoid of irony: “we can hardly fail to acknowledge that [hobbes] won the battle. but it is still worth asking if he won the argument” (216). such a conclusion might suggest that skinner should be understood as a paragon of humanistic scholarship, for this would resolve the apparent contradiction that he prizes study of the past on its own terms and for the profit it bestows upon the present. but that would overlook skinner’s explicitly political stance. in fact, he does not value contextual analysis for its own sake, as a transferable skill applicable to any social, political, and intellectual problems and capable of countenancing merits in all ideas. rather, he believes that directing his method at a canonical question of political theory should yield a specific answer infused with singular truth—in this case, the superior nature of republican liberty. his contextualism is a social scientific tool, rather than a humanistic one. and the result is a teleology that reinforces or, worse, determines his perceptions of the past. this point is significant, for if contextualist methods have lost authority in the social sciences, they continue to exert tremendous impact among historians precisely because of their ability to decipher enigmatic ideas. a generation of early modern european historians reared on carlo ginzburg, natalie zemon davis and robert darnton analyze their seemingly inscrutable subjects to show that they synthesized disparate traditions and adhered to a foreign, though explicable, set of motives. despite skinner’s advocacy of contextualism, his polemicists never seem to possess alien motives. rather, they all operate with unflinching rationality, never inspired by prophecy or patronage, always dogged in pursuit of convenient truths. for example, skinner ends with hobbes’— pragmatically accepting the legitimacy book reviews 119 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 of the protectorate in 1651 while revising leviathan. at no point does one receive the impression that hobbes suffered from the recognition that his enemies had triumphed, nor does hobbes appear attentive to france’s absolutist regime in which he lived. rather, in skinner’s account, the aging philosopher calmly and monastically adapted his theory of legitimate sovereignty to include the protectorate once it assumed responsibility to protect the subjects charles i had failed. certainly the protectorate fit hobbes’ definition of the state, but one wonders whether there was quite so little intellectual violence or so much solipsism as skinner describes. the best contextualist studies adumbrate their contexts as much as they do their interlocutors and skinner’s work does not meet this standard. the motivations of those whose bellicosity led to the civil war are here reduced to undiluted republicanism. very little attention is devoted to the significance of the common law, and only slightly more to the critical role of puritanism in overturning the stuart state. and if pym, milton, and hobbes’ other opponents appear less stimulated by their own contexts than collectively constitutive of hobbes’, fellow absolutists receive even less attention. few readers will emerge from this work with a better understanding of charles i, archbishop laud, or robert filmer. to be fair, skinner’s apparent narrowness derives from the fungibility of the term “context.” for those who follow the current historiographical orthodoxy and believe that the term refers to the complete nebula of events, institutions and ideas available to historical figures, some of hobbes’ invocations of context may seem misplaced. for example, the two chapters on the elements of law examine the status of liberty in this 1640 tract, but the political events contemporaneous with its circulation are not introduced until the subsequent chapter. skinner here reminds us that his notion of context serves primarily as a tool of debate against the formalist history of ideas assaulted by his earliest work. it refers to a discursive field, but it excludes material events and exigencies, along with, in this case, religion and local legal traditions. it is for this reason that one never encounters the bourbons during hobbes’ exile in france, just as one never encountered the chancery or exchequer in foundations. skinner’s context is too stridently language-oriented to demand their inclusion. 120 expositions © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 of course, such an approach does yield material that might otherwise fall into obscurity, and it would be ungenerous to overstate skinner’s narrowness. for example, he reveals hobbes’ indebtedness to early modern emblem books. hobbes culled material for visual and rhetorical eloquence and pithy annunciations of political positions from the large number of such works available to him. though they periodically disappear from skinner’s analysis, he uses the emblem books to populate the field of utterances available to hobbes. in this case, the pursuit of new discursive contexts brings to the surface a deeply politicized genre central to hobbes’ conception of political discourse and crucial to his responses to republican ideas. one wishes that skinner might have focused more closely on them; though his analysis of emblem books sometimes fits uncomfortably within his text, these moments illuminate the intellectual fertility of the expansive search for obfuscated contexts. given the duration of skinner’s engagement with hobbes, it is remarkable that he remains capable of finding fresh material, and it illustrates the vitality of skinner’s project. it also suggests that new contexts for hobbes may be unearthed, perhaps in the exchanges during his younger years with the cavendishes, perhaps in his lengthy experience in france, perhaps in studies of his readership. but it also inspires curiosity as to why skinner so resolutely resists including local religious discourses within the formational context of modern liberty, and the neatest explanation is simply his pronounced secularist presentism. his emphasis on discourse and context, when inflected by his own secularism, does not accommodate the special potency of religion in early modern europe. indeed, the limitations of skinner’s own scholarship are best illuminated by the potency of his methodology. for at the heart of his project lies the pursuit of neglected sources. his work has helped kindle a scholarly culture of erudites eager to recover new sources with which scholars reconceptualize the genesis of ideas. if his own scholarship appears less definitive for its narrow conception of context and overdetermined by his pursuit of contemporary relevance, he should credit himself. his insistence on the importance of context has nourished the revitalizing entanglement of intellectual history and the history of political thought, even as it reveals the limitations he imposes on his own work. book reviews 121 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 references schaffer, simon, and steven shapin 1985 leviathan and the air-pump: hobbes, boyle, and the experimental. princeton, nj: princeton university press. skinner, quentin 1978 the foundations of modern political thought. 2 vols. cambridge: cambridge university press. 1996 reason and rhetoric in the philosophy of hobbes. cambridge: cambridge university press. 1998 liberty before liberalism. cambridge: cambridge university press. © equinox publishing ltd. 2009, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expo. 3.2 (2009) 215–221] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v3i2.215 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 living, breathing jewish people and augustine’s “jews in the head” rebecca winer villanova university as a medieval historian of christian, jews, and muslims, my charge as a member of this roundtable is to address the repercussions of paula fredriksen’s augustine and the jews for medieval jewish studies. i must begin by clarifying that, as its subtitle, a christian defense of jews and judaism, implies, this is not really a jewish studies work, but rather one of religious studies and patristics. “framing” her inquiry, fredriksen states, is the deterioration of jewish/christian relations during the period of the crusades, and she asks in her prologue: “why and how did relations between christian and jews ever become so terrible in the first place?” (xiii)—but this is a question this study was never geared toward answering. the aim of fredriksen’s book is very firmly (and engagingly and usefully) to situate augustine’s thinking about ancient israelites, jews, and judaism within the overall evolution of his hermeneutic and theology in light of recent scholarship—one of the heights of which is fredriksen’s own meticulous and convincing close readings of the augustinian corpus. in that context, i highly recommend the book to any teacher of the work of augustine in any discipline. it is very readable and succeeds in its goal of situating augustine’s scholarship in the context of the late antique world, neoplatonism, the gospels, and the adversos iudaeos tradition. although neither religious studies nor late antiquity is my specialty, i must say i am impressed by everything this work attempts and accomplishes. augustine and the jews is a step by step vade mecum to the evolution of augustine’s thought on the major issues: how to read scripture, time and history, original sin, the will, election, divine justice, divine mercy, divine omnipotence and divine omniscience, among others. fredriksen painstakingly relates each major issue to the developments in augustine’s personal and religious life: e.g., his specific goals as student, rhetor, champion of african catholicism, and 216 academic roundtable © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 bishop. the book’s description is thick and vivid; fredriksen uses her encyclopedic knowledge of the immense body of augustine’s work (“5 million words in all” or the equivalent of “a modern three-hundredpage print book every year for forty years” [184]) to introduce details that bring his world alive. so she invites the reader to imagine augustine’s discomfort about his african accent as professor of rhetoric in milan or to “overhear augustine as he (literally) thinks out loud” by reminding us that he dictated his compositions, “writing in antiquity [being a] specialized technology” (175). as the senior historical authority on augustine, peter brown, says in his review of fredriksen’s study in the new york review of books, “in the best tradition of the religious studies world from which this book emerges, fredriksen is, when need be, didactic. there are many idées reçues about the relations between christians, jews, and pagans in the roman world of the first centuries that readers are urged not even to think of thinking” (2009, 42). indeed it is through this encompassing sweep and intimate detail that fredriksen wants to lead us to understand the magnitude of augustine’s innovation in proposing a new understanding of jews and the old testament. in the face of augustine’s struggles with the heretical manichees and given the strength of the adversus iudaeos tradition in all intra-christian polemic up to that point, “a revolution is precisely what he achieved” (102). if there was any doubt in the reader’s mind, fredriksen establishes clearly that augustine’s reading of jews and judaism was not a byproduct or side-line of his thought—it was integral to his method of reading, to his thinking about the life and work of st. paul, and to any effective defense of catholicism in the late antique world. she crowns her achievement by laying out “the salient elements of augustine’s new teaching” on jews and judaism from the ancient israelites, through the apostles, and to his own time: 1. god chose israel, he gave them his law as a benefit and as a privilege, and israel genuinely received it all according to divine will.… 2. traditional jewish praxis—sabbath, immersions, holidays, food laws, and most especially blood sacrifices and fleshly living, breathing jewish people and augustine’s “jews in the head” 217 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 circumcision—truly and appropriately fulfill god’s command…. 3. jesus, the original apostles, the churches of judea, and paul all kept the commandments piously and sincerely, according to the traditions of their fathers…. 4. god and the jews, and thus the church and the jews, maintain an abiding relationship. this relationship is founded upon their shared biblical text…. 5. god protects the jews as he had protected cain. he has placed his mark upon them, protecting their special identity by protecting their ancestral practices; and these ancestral practices are themselves god’s mark. (316–319) within the adversus iudaeos tradition, there were scholars who disputed each and every one of these points, for example arguing that “the law” was given to israel as a punishment, or that once they became apostles paul and peter never lived by the commandments. augustine stands as a singular, and formidable, critic of such claims. i wonder still, however, if the senior jewish studies scholar of the augustinian doctrine of jewish witness and its legacy, jeremy cohen, might well remain unconvinced of the overall force of fredriksen’s conclusion. in her acknowledgements, fredriksen gives thanks to cohen (368). thus i would have expected in her fifty pages of notes and twenty-five pages of bibliography to find cohen’s living letters of the law: ideas of the jew in medieval christianity (1999), which devotes almost fifty pages to augustine’s formulation of the doctrine of jewish witness and the augustinian legacy in medieval europe. fredriksen does explain that in this monograph, the more popular presentation of her ideas, her notes “are discursive and only minimally bibliographical,” and she refers her reader to her website at boston university where admirably and generously all of her scholarly articles can be downloaded—although there is no overall bibliography on the site (xxiii). indeed, it seems that cohen and fredriksen differ on the chronology of the development of augustine’s thought as well as on the importance of his interpretation of psalm 59:12, “slay them not lest at some time they forget your law: scatter them by your might,” the quintessential 218 academic roundtable © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 text concerning the doctrine of jewish witness as it was understood in later generations. fredriksen argues that contra faustum manichaeum (against faustus), begun in 398–399 ce, is the first text in which augustine shifted his thought on jews and judaism, whereas cohen places this shift at least a decade later. similarly, fredriksen sees psalm 59:12 as a final flourish to augustine’s case, while cohen does not discern augustine’s formulation as complete before augustine integrates his interpretation of psalm 59:12. nor is fredriksen’s assessment of the degree of augustine’s originality of thought on jews always shared by cohen, who sees a real foreshadowing in the peri pascha of melito, the mid to late second-century bishop of sardis, whom fredriksen does not indentify as a major figure in the discussion (cohen 1998, 89–90). perhaps most interestingly, cohen argues that the position of actual jews under christendom was relatively unimportant to augustine: “relative to other issues on the agenda to augustine the bishop and augustine the theologian, that of the proper christian attitude to the jew paled in its urgency” (1998, 92). it seems that fredriksen would like to be able to put forward a response here, but her attempts at a contextualization of the place of real jews in the mediterranean cities of the fourth century is hampered by the fact that there is no solid body of evidence concerning augustine’s interactions with actual jews. as fredriksen explains, augustine’s jews were “jews in the head”— totally mutable in the service of the argument he was marshalling at the time he was writing. however, fredriksen certainly gets as much as she can from what evidence does exist: she leads the reader by the hand into the cities of mediterranean late antiquity (from the time of alexander the great through to that of augustine) and introduces us to the ethnically and religiously diverse people who brushed shoulders there. for example, she sets her scene by explaining how it might be that at certain times and places jews would have been perceived as a threat because of christian judaizing, e.g. to thinkers like cyril of alexandria or commodian of north africa: “the vitality of habitual contacts, both social and religious, between christians and jews—as among christians of all various sorts, jews, and pagans—probably accounts for much of the shrillness and the obsessive repetitiveness of the patristic invective” (101). and fredriksen is careful to lay old misliving, breathing jewish people and augustine’s “jews in the head” 219 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 conceptions to rest, for example by explaining that late antique jews were not active missionizers: what makes the synagogue so dangerous—or at least so very aggravating—to many christian bishops in the fourth century ce is precisely its continuing exercise of the practice that stretched back to the hellenistic centuries bce. late roman synagogues, like their earlier hellenistic counterparts, received interested outsiders without trying to convert them. (96) this lays valuable groundwork and enables her to move the discussion towards suggesting how augustine’s thoughts on jews might have shaped his actions towards real jewish people, such as the jews of majorca who were, notoriously, forced to convert. fredriksen proposes that, in his work as a civil magistrate as bishop of hippo, augustine consciously rejected the example of the church of majorca in not pressuring the jews of north africa to convert. this was in spite of the fact that hippo too possessed the relics of st. stephen that had been the source of anti-jewish preaching and riot and the illegal forced conversion in 418 ce of the 540 jewish residents of the city of magona, on the island of majorca. she notes that augustine: never praises severus [the bishop who wrote the account of the forced conversion]. so far as we know, he never read severus’ letter aloud to his congregation in hippo…. augustine too had dedicated a chapel to stephen in hippo, where the saintly dust also made miracles. when augustine reviewed the details of these miracles, he dwelt upon the saint’s healings, exorcisms, and acts of charity: no contra iudaeos theme sounds (city of god 22.8). (362–363) fredriksen also analyzes a tantalizing recent find: a letter that describes a lawsuit that was brought to augustine in his secretarium where, in his capacity as bishop, he decided civil cases for the people of hippo. augustine’s letter 8.1, to an unidentified bishop victor, concerns a jewish landowner called licinius whom victor had evicted from a piece of property that was lawfully licinius’s. augustine categorically instructs bishop victor to return the property: “this man must in no case be deprived of his property…. justice is on his side; the laws cry out in his favor” (312–313). the fact that licinius was a jewish plaintiff in a case against a christian bishop was irrelevant to augustine: licinius had a 220 academic roundtable © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 right to the return of his land. these fascinating examples, however, are more suggestive than conclusive, as fredriksen admits. despite fredriksen’s excitement at augustine’s innovative brilliance in incorporating israelites, jews, and judaism into god’s plan for the church, her suggestive assertion that augustine avoided putting pressure to convert on the jews of hippo, and the discovery of his equitable treatment of the jew licinius, the degrading overall tone of much of augustine’s work must not be lost on the reader. augustine, like all late antique churchmen, often wrote in the adversos iudaeos tradition, and, as fredriksen notes, in augustine’s sermons on “john’s gospel, the bane of modern interfaith dialogue, [which] contains some of the harshest language about jesus’ jewish contemporaries of any writing in the new testament…, augustine takes this gospel’s highly hostile representation of jews, and, in the course of creating his sermons, usually makes it worse” (304–305). furthermore, fredriksen includes david efroymson’s assertion that 60 of the 124 of augustine’s sermons contain “appreciable anti-jewish material, and between fifteen and seventeen are extensively or completely taken up with it” (305, quoting efroymson 1999, 198). although we might appreciate that such sermons were part of intra-christian polemic and dialogue and thus sometimes had no real negative effect on everyday relations between jews and christian in the cities of late antiquity, they sometimes did cause riots, and their afterlife could prove lethal. the many statements made by churches during the last half of the twentieth century and beyond testify that the adversus iudaeos tradition cannot be considered to be in the true spirit of the gospel. interfaith dialogue today would perhaps not be possible had augustine not rethought ancient israelites, jews, and judaism in a more positive light in relationship to the church; but images like the jewish mark of cain still unsettle. thus it is important that, like the roman catholic church’s nostra aetate, we continue to state categorically that “the jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by god, as if this followed from the holy scriptures” (paul vi 1965, section 4). living, breathing jewish people and augustine’s “jews in the head” 221 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 references brown, peter 2009 a surprise from st. augustine. review of augustine and the jews, by paula fredriksen. new york review of books, 11 june, 42–43. cohen, jeremy 1998 “slay them not”: augustine and the jews in modern scholarship. medieval encounters 4(1): 78–92. doi:10.1163/157006798x00043 efroymson, d.p. 1999 whose jews? augustine’s tractatus on john. in a multiform heritage, edited by b.g. wright, 198. atlanta, ga: scholars press. fredriksen, paula 2008 augustine and the jews: a christian defense of jews and judaism. new york: doubleday. paul vi 1965 nostra aetate: declaration on the relation of the church to non-christian religions, 28 october. http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651028_nostra-aetate_en.html http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/157006798x00043 http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651028_nostra-aetate_en.html http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651028_nostra-aetate_en.html © equinox publishing ltd. 2009, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expo. 3.2 (2009) 141–142] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v3i2.141 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 overheard in the academy crisis, opportunity, danger? mark c. taylor’s “end the university as we know it” bernard g. prusak center for liberal education, villanova university as no doubt all too many academics do not need to be reminded, the recent and ongoing economic crisis has many colleges and universities running scared—cutting budgets and courses, if not faculty and programs, freezing salaries and new hires, warily watching every dollar and every report of the latest “economic indicators,” as well as buzzwords. this is the context for the bombshell opening sentences of mark c. taylor’s april 26, 2009 new york times op-ed, “end the university as we know it.” “graduate education,” taylor wrote, is the detroit of higher learning. most graduate programs in american universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few likeminded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans). what, then, are we to do? taylor went on to propose six reforms, among which doing away with “[t]he division-of-labor model of separate departments” in favor of multidisciplinary “problem-centered programs,” and abolishing tenure in favor of multiyear contracts. of course, taylor—long a professor of religion at williams college, more recently chair of the religion department at columbia university—is hardly a lone voice in his criticism of what alasdair macintyre, to name another critic, has called “the fragmentation of the american university.” macintyre, in an article published in commonweal in 2006 under the title “the end of education,” noted that “[e]ach part of the curriculum is someone’s responsi142 overheard in the academy © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 bility, but no one has a responsibility for making the connections between the parts” (macintyre 2006, 11).1 macintyre’s focus in this article is undergraduate education; if the claim to be “the detroit of higher learning” is taken, perhaps we could say that, for macintyre, undergraduate education is the ikea of higher learning, where the job of assembly falls to the student—only without instructions. taylor’s proposals have provoked, predictably, much discussion, celebration, and consternation; the times’ online site lists 437 readers’ comments, and a quick google search shows bloggers found yet more to say. expositions has asked four scholars to reflect more deliberately on taylor’s criticisms and proposals. though it appears, pace popular opinion, not to be an “ancient chinese proverb,” perhaps there is still, after all, opportunity in crisis, in this instance for higher education. or perhaps there is only danger. note 1. compare macintyre 2009, 135 and 174. references macintyre, alasadair. 2009 god, philosophy, universities: a selective history of the catholic philosophical tradition. lanham, md: rowman and littlefield. 2006 the end of education: the fragmentation of the american university. commonweal 133(18), (october 20, 2006): 10–14. [expo. 3.2 (2009) 238–244] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v3i2.238 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw reformation now william monter northwestern university (emeritus) bridget heal. the cult of the virgin mary in early modern germany: protestant and catholic piety, 1500–1648. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2007. 358 pp, hb $103.99. isbn-13: 9780521871037. benjamin j. kaplan. divided by faith: religious conflict and the practice of toleration in early modern europe. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2007. 432 pp, hb $29.95, isbn-13: 9780674024304; pb $18.95. isbn-13: 9780674034730. james simpson. burning to read: english fundamentalism and its reformation opponents. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2007. 368 pp, hb $27.95. isbn-13: 9780674026711. kirsi stjerna. women and the reformation. oxford: blackwell, 2009. 280pp, hb $94.95. isbn-13: 9781405114226; pb 34.95, isbn -13: 9781405114233. the reviewer admits to a mild case of amnesia, not having taught the age of the protestant and catholic reformations in this millennium. in addition, this effort represents a very brief and timid dip into a bit of the deep waters of recent scholarship: i have sampled only a very few of several possible recent titles, all issued by prestigious presses. but i can report that the protestant reformation has survived, and probably even benefited from, the ecumenical second half of the twentieth century. it has reacted to the feminist challenge by incorporating feminist scholarship—probably a necessary step. it even seems in reasonably good shape, judging from the fact that a large majority of the 150 panels about to be presented during the sixteenth century studies conference at geneva in april 2009 still deal with religious subjects. i shall discuss these four works by moving from the most narrowly focused to the broadest-gauged and from the least to the most noteworthy: book reviews 239 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 1. more than thirty years after first dipping into roland bainton’s elegantly-written three-volumes of biographical profiles entitled women of the reformation,1 i enjoyed a truly retro experience leafing through stjerna’s volume with an almost identical title (which incidentally tells me that bainton’s work has also been reprinted as recently as 2001).2 it is specifically designed for the women who will ensure the continuation of protestant seminaries and ministries while learning about their historical marginalization by its founding fathers, but employs basically the same method as bainton, concentrating on “mainstream” protestant women worthies of the sixteenth century. excluded are the confessionally-incorrect, although undeniably brave, anabaptist female prophets and martyrs on the left, and the single most important woman in the history of sixteenth-century protestantism on the right (elizabeth i “had her own reasons to remain in public as asexual and neutral in religious matters as possible” (17). probably the most valuable section of the work is its bibliography, which offers impressive testimony to the depth of scholarship produced by the generation working after bainton. 2. james simpson, a senior professor of english at harvard by way of australia, proposes to break a lance attacking what he polemically calls “english bible-reading fundamentalism” through a close investigation of the circumstances surrounding its birth in the england of henry viii, thomas more, and william tyndale. while it is always laudable to watch one’s academic neighbors make an effort to venture into intellectual and social history, this work is by far the lightest of these three. it is elegant (what else can one expect from an author with these credentials?) but somehow seems destined to become as ephemeral as the polemical works by more and tyndale which it dissects. there are no intellectual heroes here, only a single omnipresent villain. simpson’s polemical stance adopts the egregious tactic of frequently viewing tyndale through the lens of a major uncritical recent admirer, david daniell, who serves as the author’s surrogate defender of tudorera biblical “fundamentalism.” here lays the book’s heart, filling half of its eight chapters, sandwiched between a brief retelling of the heroic age of english bible translation and a profile of more as his rhetorical strategies increasingly came to resemble those of his heretical enemies. for a 240 book reviews © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 historian, one of simpson’s most satisfying chapters revolves around the essentially ahistorical approach of early evangelical biblicism. a narrowly british focus deprives simpson of the reflection that protestantism is not the only, and much less the first, scripturallybound major religion. to anglo-american readers, the term “fundamentalism” evokes iran rather than utah. (simpson might retort that non-arabic versions of the koran are officially prohibited for believers, so for them his topic of “vernacular fundamentalism” becomes an oxymoron.) a third major book-based religion, similarly omitted here, judaism is much older than either christianity or islam. but none of simpson’s intellectual players considered it, nor did henry viii until he became deeply enmeshed in old testament textual glosses during his divorce proceedings. looming in the background is a purely academic nemesis, the power of representations. simpson deplores that the “historiographical default position” of humanistic scholarship since the 1980s has been that “everything is constructed” and warns against “forever relocating ‘reality’ into the field of ‘representation’ when we are dealing with how threats to life were experienced” (67). as simpson and his readers know, both of his major protagonists, more the relentless persecutor of heretics and tyndale the bible translator, experienced public executions within a few years of each other. discussing more’s precocious activism against lutheran heresy, simpson briefly evokes (47) his personal leadership of a raid on london’s steelyard, which lodged hanseatic merchants from germany, in december 1525, and the subsequent ceremony at london’s cathedral where four german merchants abjured heresy on pain of death while their books were burned. as this detail reminds us, early protestantism, from its name downwards, was originally german; and we accordingly turn to german-centered essay in comparative religious history. 3. after the obligatory introduction to the state of her subject around 1500, bridget heal’s meticulously-textured investigation of the cultural impact of the virgin mary effectively begins where simpson ends, around the mid-sixteenth century as luther’s reformation hardened into institutional rigidity. here we confront a carefully revised version of a 2001 doctoral thesis, done under the supervision of a leading book reviews 241 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 social historian, robert sribner, and revised after his death under guidance from his star pupil, lyndal roper. heal’s research design becomes simultaneously biconfessional and trilocal, comparing and contrasting the post-reformation religious situation of the virgin mary in three carefully-selected major german free cities: augsburg, nuremberg, and cologne. the first was germany’s largest biconfessional city, an early convert to zwingli’s form of reformation rather than luther’s, but divided after 1555 between lutherans and catholics; it provided material for some of germany’s sharpest contrasts between protestant and catholic devotional practices, including those involving mary. the second was germany’s first major city to adopt lutheranism and it governed a sizable rural hinterland; both developments tended to produce more cautious responses to traditional forms of marian devotion, for example keeping about forty hausmadonnen (sculpted house signs depicting the virgin) into the mid-nineteenth century (23). her third city, cologne, was the only major catholic free city. it remained deeply traditional and uninterested in the kinds of militant counter-reformation, jesuit-led forms of marian devotion that became dominant in biconfessional augsburg. fortified by scholarship emerging between her thesis and her book, especially beth kreitzer’s reforming mary,3 which demonstrated a sharp downgrading of mary in lutheran sermons after 1550, heal sustains her approach convincingly. it is, for example, useful and pertinent to note the different protestant responses to both venerable and newer feast days honoring the virgin. augsburg kept only one while nuremberg maintained three, and traditionalist cologne kept seven. gender history is deftly managed in heal’s final chapter, which once again softens the oversimplified dichotomy between the powerless and insignificant protestant mother of jesus and the militaristic jesuit-promoted queen of heaven leading catholic armies. catholic women expressed more agency than protestants, sometimes with a marian tinge: cologne’s margareta lynnerie founded a community of devout virgins in the 1590s where the mother of god “was to be emulated in daily life, [but] not imitated in fervent visions” (273–274). 4. last but best comes benjamin kaplan’s valuable and persuasive 242 book reviews © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 reformulation of the outdated “rise of toleration” hypothesis. his well-written and broadly-gauged exploration of the modalities of confessional coexistence from the early protestant reformation to 1800 downplays the importance of the eighteenth-century “enlightenment” while emphasizing the various processes of accommodation tried out almost everywhere that rival christian confessions lived in close proximity to one another. this book could only have been written by someone grounded in dutch history—a land where confessional coexistence was uniquely vital to political survival and where the eighteenth century is perceived as an age of relative decline, an “age of silver” following an “age of gold”—and its author teaches in both london and amsterdam. kaplan precedes the central section of his triptych with a sketch of the mutual exclusivity of various churches in post-reformation europe. this is now very well-explored terrain, thanks to the proliferation of studies of “confessionalization” (into which heal’s mongraph fits), but it is a necessary prelude for a secularized european and american audience, because it emphasizes the seriousness of the problem that results from combining “no salvation outside the true church” with “compel them to enter,” both of which were truisms for sixteenth-century christendom. the heart of kaplan’s account is an elegant, richly-developed description and analysis of the workings of three major strategies (suburban churches, secret churches, and shared churches) which developed after luther’s reformation had hardened into rival confessional churches whose members lived in close proximity to each other, often in neighboring villages or even inside the same set of city walls. such situations, kaplan points out, existed almost everywhere in europe north of the iberian and italian peninsulas (a solidly catholic bloc, policed by state inquisitions) and south of scandinavia (a solidly lutheran bloc). he calls the three most workable strategies by their contemporary names (auslauf, schuilkerk, and simultaneum) and introduces each with an especially vivid local example: herstal, a suburban church serving the large lutheran population of late sixteenth-century vienna; “our lady of the attic,” the best-preserved and one of the largest secret catholic churches in amsterdam; and biberach’s single well-preserved parish book reviews 243 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 church, which served both the lutheran and catholic congregations of this small imperial free city. i had no idea of the extent of these practices across the heat of europe before reading this section. for example, i knew that his leading example of a concealed catholic church in seventeenth-century amsterdam had become a museum, but i had not realized there were about twenty others functioning in the city at the same time, with proportionately smaller numbers in other major dutch cities. it is also instructive to read kaplan’s tales about heal’s three exemplary cities. augsburg, a much-studied city, fills eight lines in his index and provides some of his most interesting information about religiously-mixed marriages, including the memorable example of twins where the boy was raised lutheran and the girl catholic (281, 284, 288). nuremberg served to illustrate “the high degree of sacral unity a city could achieve” through the reformation and subsequently handled the problem of confessional coexistence through two “satellite communities” outside its walls, one for jews and the other for french huguenots (62, 169–170). at cologne, lutherans acquired a “secret, oppressed house-church” by the late sixteenth century; its reformed protestants subsequently developed two or three, for linguistic rather than doctrinal reasons. and, in 1716, its catholic students went on a raid beyond the city’s border in order to destroy a calvinist church being built in protestant territory (183–184, 166–167). i never expect to encounter a more persuasive explanation of why certain kinds of non-official protestant churches should be partially (but not completely) concealed, nor a more sophisticated discussion of why non-christian communities of this era not only accepted but generally welcomed their spatial segregation. the central part of divided by faith (chapters 5–8, headed “arrangements”) should be required reading for anyone teaching an undergraduate course on reformation europe. if your students are motivated elitists, assign it; if they are captive time-servers, steal a lecture or two from it. the same advice applies to his tenth chapter on conversions and mixed marriages. nobody sees everything. kaplan offers an excellent summary of the treatment of europe’s jews, while orthodox christians receive only negligible attention. it seems significant that kaplan pays consider244 book reviews © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 able attention to the peculiar circumstances of both jews and muslims in the city of venice, by far the most tolerant oasis in mediterranean europe, but says virtually nothing about its numerous greek orthodox residents. this account also pays little attention to the social history of the uniate church in catholic poland or the difficult conditions afflicting “old believers” in europe’s easternmost reaches. i also wish kaplan had been able to discuss the situation in europe’s largest traditionallychristian city under long-term islamic rule during this period. when budapest fell to the ottomans in 1541, its latin christian population fled en masse; after its bloody reconquest by a christian army 150 years later, most of its orthodox residents fled. kaplan also overlooked the only occasion in reformation-era europe when a sovereign territory split itself along purely religious lines. the relatively small swiss canton of appenzell divided into protestant and catholic micro-states at its annual general assembly in 1597, after reaching complete political deadlock over a fundamental political decision: whether or not to accept a perpetual military alliance with the spanish monarchy (appenzell’s catholics pointed out that the alternative meant introducing taxation). the result created two intertwined “half-cantons” which still exist today, providing material for numerous jokes from their neighbors about protestant/catholic differences. looking back at how i sketched the so-called “rise of toleration” over 25 years ago, i am genuinely delighted that the current generation of reformation historians has been able to describe and rearrange it with such subtlety and richness of detail. benjamin kaplan has made a convincing case for the significance of the various subterfuges through which reformation-era europeans persuaded themselves to accommodate religious diversity long before their leading cultural values became secularized. i wish i could have written such a work myself. notes 1. philadelphia: fortress press, 1971. 2. lima, oh: c.s.s. publishing, 2001. 3. oxford: oxford university press, 2004. [expositions 4.1&2 (2010) 133-138] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 kearney, richard. anatheism: returning to god after god. new york: columbia university press, 2010. 272 pp, hb $29.50, isbn: 978–0–231–14788–0. taylor, mark c. after god. chicago and london: university of chicago press, 2007. 482 pp, pb $35.00, isbn: 978–0–226–79171–5. ever since nietzsche pronounced the death of god, philosophy has been searching for a second opinion. it can often seem as though western thought is marked by the five stages of grief: many thinkers are in denial about nietzsche’s diagnosis; many are angry and generous in casting their blame on those deemed responsible for the tragedy; and many more exist in a state of depression: numb and indifferent to the divine in a world disabused of its former fantasies. yet there are also those who exhibit a peculiar blend of acceptance and bargaining. they grant that the traditional god has met his demise, but they reason that if only a few conditions are met, religion could carry on post-mortem; it could return to god after his death. among nietzsche’s progeny are theorists of the well-known “religious turn,” the rebellious teenagers of post-metaphysical thought. they prove resourceful in their attempts to modify theological concepts, developing new perspectives on religion capable of overcoming the life-negating parodies of ages past. but how are we to think posthumously in a culture so deprived of its taste for higher things? and more importantly, what kind of god can we expect to rise from this modern graveyard? one answer to this question is provided by richard kearney in his latest work, anatheism: returning to god after god. having studied with two pioneers of the “religious turn,” paul ricoeur and emmanuel levinas, it is unsurprising that kearney has risen to prominence among religious thinkers in the continental tradition. from his earliest work, heidegger et la question de dieu (1981) to his more recent, the god who may be (2001), kearney has been haunted by the question of god’s fate in a postmodern world. 1 in anatheism, he specifically addresses the challenge of man’s return to the sacred at the dawn of the third millennium. he offers readers a “philosophical story” (xvii), introducing “reasonable hermeneutic considerations into the theistatheist debate” (171). according to this story, modern disenchantment is a symptom, not of atheism, but of a pervasive and dogmatic sense of security. kearney’s self-appointed task, then, is to unsettle believers and nonbelievers alike, to guide them into a post-theism and a postatheism. faith, either in god or his absence, can never be a possession or a finished product. it is rather a wager made again and again, constantly renewed to remain enduringly authentic. but to wager rightly, man must be a proficient interpreter of his own experience. even the god-denier must accurately interpret the god he denies. thus underlying the wager of faith should be a disposition of hospitality toward the other who exceeds all of our self-certainties. such a disposition fosters openness to the divine as the stranger always remaining beyond our comprehension: the third way along which a renewed quest for god can proceed. this, according to kearney, is the path of anatheism: a “religion of agnostics,” as wilde called it, defined and inspired by a space of “holy insecurity” (5) and radical humility. 134 the argument of the book unfolds as kearney explores the various dimensions of this disposition at the levels of lived experience, poetic expression, and ethical practice. he begins in chapter one (“in the moment”) to develop a phenomenology of the stranger as a paradigm for all human-divine encounters. in his view, authentic religion makes possible the experience of god as a stranger irreducible in his strangeness; and thus preceding the judgment of faith is the response of either hospitality or hostility to this unexpected visitor. kearney supports his interpretive framework by demonstrating a textual precedent in all three abrahamic faiths for seeing god as the stranger par excellence. he then goes on in chapter two (“in the wager”) to examine the five aspects of “a multilayered hermeneutic drama” (47); the conditions, as it were, for such an encounter on the side of the interpreting subject. imagination, humor, commitment, discernment, and hospitality all have parts to play in structuring experience as a dynamic between host and guest. and this dynamic has a profound impact on the character of the god that appears. as kearney argues in his third chapter (“in the name”) – perhaps his most controversial and intriguing – the fate of traditional theism was sealed more definitively by the horrors of the concentration camps than by any nietzschean proclamation. consequently, drawing from major figures in post-holocaust literature, kearney argues that the only god still viable for anatheism is a powerless god: one who renounces his sovereignty and his distance from humanity so as to suffer with us, even rely upon us, and imbed his transcendence within the very immanence of the world. this modified notion of transcendence is what holds the promise of restoring a sacramental vision of the world. chapters four and five (“in the flesh” and “in the text” respectively) are of particular interest for nonbelievers, as they invoke philosophical and literary authorities either agnostic or explicitly atheistic in their creeds. nonetheless, according to kearney, these authors appropriate sacramental language to describe the irreducible dimensions of everyday life, which are to be encountered and welcomed as strange (thus atheism has a viable alternative to reductive naturalism). kearney draws out the implications of this immanent transcendence first by analyzing the idiom of sacrament that maurice merleau-ponty and julia kristeva employ in their philosophies of embodiment, and second by describing an analogous idiom in the literary works of james joyce, marcel proust, and virginia woolf. these retrievals of sacramentality create a space of reverence and wonder in the midst of our mundane experience that can, if one so wagers, “clear a landing site for the divine stranger” (15). finally, in chapters six (“in the world”) and seven (“in the act”) kearney turns to the practical consequences of his new understanding of transcendence. with a god no longer above but within the world, imitatio dei becomes an “ethics of kenosis” (133): the believer must turn toward the world rather than away from it, affirming the secular (i.e., the temporal) beyond its supposed opposition to the sacred. anatheism ultimately terminates, therefore, (though it is always renewed) with a faith that embraces and affirms life in the heart of secularity, intimating god in the complexities of action and suffering (as exemplified in the struggles of dorothy day, jean vanier, and mahatma gandhi). this is, in short, kearney’s blueprint for building a world beyond the death of god. 135 an alternative blueprint is provided by mark c. taylor in his most recent work, after god. taylor established his reputation as an authority on religion and postmodernism most definitively in his derridean-flavored erring: a postmodern a/theology (1981). after god represents his most ambitious project to date, tying together all the dimensions of his scholarship into a single complex narrative. not only does taylor construct his own definition of religion using concepts born of contemporary information theory, he also proceeds to trace the contours of this definition as it manifests itself in a comprehensive genealogy of secularism. in his view, the relationship between religion (principally western christianity) and the secular is in need of a conceptual overhaul: the typical dichotomy has continually caused people to misunderstand the nature of religion and its influence. for taylor, as for kearney, the nihilism of contemporary culture is rooted not in secularity but rather in absolutism (neofoundationalism). to overcome it, one must retrace the steps of history in order to see the secular as an intrinsically religious phenomenon, co-emergent with and codependent upon belief. taylor therefore tells his story to demonstrate how and why religion remains deeply influential in the modern and postmodern world, while also constructing “a more adequate religious vision and ethical framework” after the death of god. 2 in chapter one (“theorizing religion”), taylor develops the concept of religion that shapes the structure of the entire book. as he succinctly defines it, “religion is an emergent, complex, adaptive network of symbols, myths, and rituals that, on the one hand, figure schemata of feeling, thinking, and acting in ways that lend life meaning and purpose and, on the other, disrupt, dislocate, and disfigure every stabilizing structure” (12). here, according to taylor, the insights of contemporary information theory allow for a more comprehensive account of religion than has ever been possible. according to this view, religion is not a static and timeless set of truths but a living and evolving network of meanings that ultimately disrupts all of its determinate forms. it emerges and develops as part of a “relational web” in which it shapes and is reciprocally shaped by other natural, social, and cultural systems. as taylor notes, ways of thinking about god influence ways of thinking about self and world (and vice-versa) (22). and in a world that is so deeply interconnected, conceptual patterns that favor oppositions will ultimately fail as reliable guides to reality. this judgment allows taylor to delimit the inflexible alternatives that have haunted theology throughout the christian tradition: history bears witness to a repeating oscillation between monism and dualism, two ways of failing to grasp the codependent relation of god to world. as taylor reveals throughout the book, these false dichotomies of both/and and either/or reverberate beyond religion into the discourses of media, technology, and politics. his solution is to affirm (like kearney) a third way: a schema of neither/nor that can think god and the world in their complex relation. the bulk of taylor’s narrative unfolds across chapters two through six, describing in detail how “what begins as a theological revolution becomes a political revolution, which in turn, inspires the philosophical and aesthetic revolution that eventually culminates in twentiethcentury secularity” (84). the story begins with luther, who represents, for taylor, the true father of modernity. luther functions as a “tipping point” (66), a moment of rupture for traditional 136 religious schemata, opening up radical new ways of figuring god, the self, and the world. taylor then traces the history of luther’s paradigm shift as it gives shape first to the autonomous self of modern democracy and kantian thought. he then traces it to the romantic identification of god with creative imagination. this, in turn, leads to profound new theories in twentieth-century aesthetics and finally culminates in both the death of god and the neofoundationalist reactions we now face. at each stage of the development, the unresolved tension between immanence and transcendence is renewed and deepened. while one sees shades of derrida and altizer in his analysis, taylor’s argument relies mostly on a creative fusion of hegel and kierkegaard. only with a new appropriation of hegelian logic (modified to resist closure) can we overcome the nihilistic drama of absolutism, exemplified today by the american religious right. taylor therefore calls us to adopt a religion without god and an ethics without absolutes (chapters seven and eight): a vision in which we embrace the relational nature of reality and open ourselves to an infinite now identified with the formless source of religion’s adaptation. transcendence then must be seen as the interplay of identity and difference, the “emergent self-organizing network of networks” (346). it is never itself figured, and yet it never stands apart from the networks of meaning that emerge within it. a number of family resemblances unite kearney and taylor in their analytic and constructive endeavors. one can easily discern a similar narrative framework held between them: opposing absolutism, pursuing a third way beyond the sacred-secular divide, and ultimately affirming a transcendence reciprocally determined by immanence. both kearney and taylor are storytellers and openly confess their philosophical biases. they share a common debt to deconstruction and post-structuralism and a common appreciation for the artistic dimension of religion. they also share the limitations of their common philosophical heritage. for instance, both kearney and taylor describe the nature of transcendence in terms that either explicitly mention (in taylor’s case,) or closely resemble (in kearney’s case), the postmodern sublime. kearney’s “god who may be” and taylor’s “altarity” exist as infinite creative principles to the degree that they lack any determinate form. neither thinker considers how god might be thought of as infinite form or actuality, and how such an alternative might alter their stances toward the tradition and even open up a more radical path for god’s return. ironically, kearney is a bit too hospitable toward heidegger’s history of metaphysics and taylor is perhaps still too beholden to the terms set by hegelian totality. but the real danger of their grammar of transcendence is the reductive logic that tempts it. though kearney’s anatheism includes an ethical imperative of reverence for the claims of diverse religious traditions, he stresses that there can be no absolute knowledge of the absolute – just a pluralism of interpretations always subject to revision or even dissolution. such is the “surplus of meaning” and the “deep ground” that precede and exceed all religions. this gives the impression that the claims of particular traditions are little more than contingent metaphors lacking the power to reveal god in any final or definitive way. but the abrahamic faiths claim precisely this kind of revelation for themselves, insofar as god has shown himself uniquely through particular forms in history. how well then can kearney’s hermeneutic integrate particular traditions without doing them violence? it would seem that the only absolute 137 knowledge about the absolute that kearney allows is precisely the truth of this law governing different faiths. taylor’s account also suffers from the same fundamental limitation. his “groundless ground” (or the sublime) acts as a heraclitean flux, destabilizing every particular religious form that claims stability. the particular shapes that religions have therefore appear ephemeral and all but indifferent to the truth that taylor wants to elaborate. consequently, his language of complex adaptive systems seems to reduce the content of religions to a purely descriptive analysis of systems forming and disbanding (a danger he shares with overly reductive accounts of natural selection). this kind of meta-discourse alone supplies the enduring truths of religion, rising above the particularities of faith traditions and governing them. it alone attains the kind of truth that escapes the deconstructive rhythm of an adaptive network. though this antinomy is present both in anatheism and after god, theists will find a fellow traveler in kearney far more so than in taylor. though he sees a future for religion, in the end taylor does not hold out much hope for god. he declares near the end of his book that the creative infinite is older than god and outlives him; that all claims favoring an infinite god simply mask his finitude. gods for taylor ultimately fall among the set of finite forms subject to dissolution, and worse, only serve to “hide the originary abyss from which everything emerges and to which all returns” (345). one would be technically mistaken then to say that taylor intends a return to god after his death. kearney, however, is more hopeful. for him, god is indeed identified with the infinite whose truth we must constantly interpret and to whom, therefore, we can always in a sense return. while at times kearney’s exegesis strains the texts from which he draws, overall his analyses are illuminating and his arguments compelling. he is clearly engaged in an enterprise of creative appropriation that, fittingly, shows great hospitality to the authors upon which he calls. noting that anatheism is not something new but rather a phenomenon that recurs throughout religious history, kearney appears more to conduct a symphony of voices than to impose his own novelties: he lets the thinkers and the artists speak for themselves, but in such a way as to lend credence to his own claims. similarly, taylor’s work at times struggles under the weight of the author’s ambition: each chapter of his genealogy could serve as a book length study and could benefit from the more detailed analysis that such an expansion would enable. nonetheless, taylor’s ability to don the masks of philosopher, historian, cultural critic, art critic, economist, etc. with such ease and finesse is truly impressive. his arguments are clear and his style is eminently accessible. both anatheism and after god are important contributions to the ongoing debate about god’s place in a postmodern world. one may wager that their authors have stumbled upon the only paths forward, or on the contrary that they have sacrificed too much of what god once was. i myself often found them to be strangers to my own intellectual proclivities; but nonetheless, these are two strangers i gladly welcome as guests. patrick x. gardner university of notre dame 138 notes 1. kearney, anatheism, xiii. 2. taylor, after god, 42. © equinox publishing ltd. 2008, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expositions 2.2 (2008) 213–222] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v2i2.213 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 academic roundtable robert alter and the resistance to theory david richter program in english cuny graduate center before there was robert alter the biblical translator and commentator, there was robert alter the literary critic, who published with basic books a pair of immensely stimulating and evocative monographs, the art of biblical narrative (1981, hereafter abn) and the art of biblical poetry (1985, hereafter abp), along with a third book, the world of biblical literature (1992, hereafter wbl), a fascinating collection of largely occasional essays that extend his discussion of narrative and poetry and go on to critique specific works and methods of biblical scholarship and literary criticism, detailing the implications from his own perspective of views that differ from his. the translations, all published by w.w. norton, begin in 1996 with his genesis, and now include the alter version of the book of samuel (the david story, 1999), the entire pentateuch (the five books of moses, 2004), and most recently the book of psalms (2007). everywhere the commentaries are richly detailed, whether original with alter or carefully and generously attributed both to post-biblical commentaries (the talmud and the midrash, along with medieval annotators such as ibn ezra, rashi, nachmanides, and david kimchi) and to more contemporary scholars and critics writing in english or modern hebrew. in addition to enhancing our sense of the text’s meaning, alter uses his below-the-line notes to discuss, in ways that will be appreciated by the general reader as well as the scholar, some of the textual and translational cruxes that complicate the smooth rendering of the masoretic hebrew text into stately contemporary english. alter’s translation-commentaries are so judicious and extensive that teachers of bible as lit courses like me may feel they have little to add. going through his annotations to one of my favorite episodes in genesis, cain’s slaying of his brother abel, the only verse alter skips over where i tend to pause is 4:13, where cain’s reply to the lord’s judgment, “gadol ‘avoni minso’ ” can mean either that cain’s “sin” or his “punishment” is greater than 214 robert alter and the resistance to theory © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 he can bear, an ambiguity that suggests that cain may be the first guilt-ridden penitent as well as the first murderer.1 alter evidently had less fun annotating the legal and ritual sections of the pentateuch than the narratives and poetry, as indicated by the volume of commentary on different passages, but nowhere does he give short shrift to his texts. even when alter endorses a particular interpretation of some notorious crux (e.g. the vexed question of precisely what moses and aaron did at meribah to be denied entry into the promised land, numbers 20:12), he presents other solutions and arguments and leaves the reader with the sense of an open question. alter’s great gift is a critical “negative capability”: he is willing to believe not only that he has not found the solution to all difficulties, but that the biblical authors may in fact not have meant for every narrative episode to be transparently clear. whatever giddy financial prospects may have induced alter to undertake these arduous translations-with-commentary, they derive programmatically from his 1990 review of the first three volumes of the jps torah commentary, reprinted in wbl. there alter elucidates the internecine warfare within that multi-volume work, where the learned commentators (nahum sarna on genesis, baruch levine on leviticus, and jacob milgrom on numbers) implicitly argue against one another’s views of jewish history and law, while all three commentators attack, on the basis of contemporary philological study, the 1962 jps translation of the pentateuch that was the occasion for bringing them together (wbl 136–137). in contrast, alter’s the five books of moses has the virtue of consistency and coherence: translation and the commentary are mutually illuminating. my own interests being primarily theory of narrative rather than hebrew philology, what follows will concern primarily the critical commentary to the first two translations and their relation to alter’s biblical narratology as he presents it in abn and wbl. and it is at this level, what we might call that of the theoretical crux, that we sometimes find incoherence and inconsistency in alter’s readings and commentaries. sources and redactors from the very first page of his critical explication of the bible, alter has been leery of, or perhaps merely impatient with, the scholarly obsession with source criticism. alter introduces his analysis of genesis 38 (abn, chapter 1) with a glance at speiser’s commentary in the anchor genesis, which consigns the judah/tamar chapter to limbo as a mere interruption to the joseph story, which had begun with chapter 37 and is complete, really, only with joseph’s death in genesis 50. for speiser, chapter 38 is a fragment of pure j-narrative, etiologically explaining the birth of peretz, the remote ancestor of king david, richter 215 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 intruded into a longer narrative about joseph consisting primarily of two sources, j and e, edited together after the fall of the northern kingdom of israel. alter’s literary exegesis, by contrast, is an elaborate demonstration that, far from being an intrusion, the judah/tamar story links up with the joseph story on both verbal and thematic levels, and, more important, contributes to our ethical and psychological understanding of why it should be judah, rather than any of the other brothers, who is capable of pleading for the life and liberty of benjamin as he does in genesis 44. it isn’t exactly that alter rejects the “documentary hypothesis” as such (as many conservative and almost all orthodox jews would), although he does claim that “efforts to distinguish between j and e on stylistic grounds have been quite unconvincing.” rather he contends that academic scholars have now gone far beyond the basic notion with which he would concur, that the book of genesis is a composite of three documents (j, e, and p), and have begun to see temporal layers within each of these traditions (a j1, j2, j3, etc.), and have bickered with what he terms “diminishing returns” about where each source and each layer within the sources starts and leaves off (genesis xli). in place of this uninformative hairsplitting, alter propounded an exegesis where “the weight of literary interest falls upon the activity of the final redactor” (abn 20, quoting joel rosenberg).2 that would be a coherent position, except that, just one page earlier, alter had attacked the analyses of menahem perry and meir sternberg, which operate on the reader’s interaction with the redacted text and ignore any hypothetical sources, arguing that “they tend to write about biblical narrative as though it were a unitary production like a modern novel that is entirely conceived and executed by a single independent writer who supervises his original work from first draft to page proofs. they turn their backs, in other words, on what historical scholarship has taught us about the specific conditions of development of the biblical text and its frequently composite nature” (abn 19). accusing perry and sternberg of treating biblical narrative like a modern novel is not merely unfair, but ironic in the light of alter’s own practice as a commentator on the narrative of genesis and samuel, whose success owes so much to his ability to illuminate the terse and subtle hints by which the biblical narrator portrays the complex personalities behind the rise to power and wealth of jacob and david, the slow establishment of their family and line, and finally their pitiable degeneration into passivity, weakness, and senility, which in their different ways form the story arcs for both patriarchs. similarly, in his introduction to his translation and commentary on the book of samuel, alter contends that “much of the richness and complexity 216 robert alter and the resistance to theory © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 of the story is lost by those who imagine this book as a stringing together of virtually independent sources” (the david story x). these hypothetical sources include an early “ark narrative” ending around 1 samuel 7; a set of variously oriented traditions (some pro-saul, most pro-david) concerning the accession of saul and his adoption of and then conflict with the youthful david, ending with the establishment of the davidic kingdom at 2 samuel 5:12; traditions about the wars of david; and finally a succession narrative, elsewhere known as the court history of david (2 samuel 11–20 plus 1 kings 1–2). alter is willing to grant the idea of an originary ark narrative, so long as one is not thereby blinded to how skillfully it has been integrated into the david story as a whole, in particular to the parallels alter sees between the aged eli waiting in the gate of shiloh for news of the war with the philistines (1 samuel 4) and the aged david waiting in the gate of mahanaim for news of the civil war with absalom (2 samuel 18). but that is as far as alter is willing to go: “the argument for an independent succession narrative, long embraced by scholarly consensus, is shakier. [leonhard] rost’s contention that it is stylistically distinct from the preceding text is unconvincing, and his notions of style are extremely vague” (the david story xi). and alter ridicules the idea that there are “saulide” and “davidide” strands knitted together in the narrative of 1 samuel. this would sound like an argument for a pure redaction criticism, except that the ultimate redactor of samuel was the editor of the deuteronomistic history (the five books of the hebrew bible from deuteronomy through kings), and it is precisely this set of editorial contributions that alter both minimizes and wants nothing to do with.3 alter in fact wants us to separate out the deuteronomistic moralizing in david’s last words to solomon—that he “keep what the lord your god enjoins, walk in his ways, keep his statutes, his commandments, and his dictates and his admonitions, as it is written in the teaching of moses…”—from the practical content, urging solomon to execute on his accession both joab, david’s general and nephew, and shimei ben gera, an opponent in the civil war whose life david had promised to spare. alter argues in the introduction (the david story xiii) and all over again in a lengthy note to 1 kings 2:3-4 (374) that the phraseology quoted is taken direct from deuteronomy and that no one else in the david story talks in such terms. alter sees this as an editorial intrusion, with david’s “real” last words found in verses 5-9. alter seems to have lost track of the fact that the david story is not factual but textual, not reported but constructed, and that we experience no reality apart from the reality-effect generated by the narrative.4 another problem that arises, once one begins richter 217 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 questioning the narrative, asking whether dialogue in a private moment is genuinely historical, is deciding where to stop. if the first part of david’s last words are deuteronomistic moralizing, the second part may be considered solomonic propaganda, laying on david the guilt for the execution of joab, a powerful man whom solomon had ample reason to hate and fear, since joab had supported the accession of solomon’s elder half-brother adonijah. here, as with genesis, we see a preference for redaction criticism over source criticism but with fatal reservations that render alter’s position incoherent. i don’t doubt that the deuteronomist had a hand in 1 kings 2:3-4, but my own feeling, reading the redaction we have, is that david’s last words are even more horrifying in their combination of hypocritical moralizing with brutal raison d’état. but i can say this partly because i take far more seriously than alter does the dreadful things we learn about david and his reign in what is sometimes called the samuel colophon (2 samuel 21–24), which alter calls “stylistically distinct” from the rest, an unusual claim coming from him, and one which, turning the tables, i myself find less than convincing.5 twice told tales a similar incoherence operates wherever alter deals with the biblical narrative elements that are often called “doublets”: episodes that seem to happen more than once in slightly different ways, as in genesis 20 and 26, where abraham and isaac each tells king abimelech that his wife—sarah and rebekah, respectively—is actually his sister, or as in genesis 27 and 28, where isaac transmits the abrahamic blessing to jacob twice, the first time by mistake, deceived by jacob’s masquerade as his elder brother esau, and the second time with full intention. doublets are usually explained in terms of the composite text: jacob’s deception belongs to the j document, about which p, from which the start of chapter 28 derives, knows nothing. but why does the redactor of these documents allow implicit contradictions to stand? some biblical scholars argue that the redactors included as much as possible of each of their original documents. but alter ridicules the idea that “the redactors” of genesis or samuel “were in the grip of a kind of manic tribal compulsion, driven again and again to include units of traditional material that made no connective sense” (abn 20). alter’s lengthy note on the double blessing of jacob in genesis argues that the “tension” between chapters 27 and 28 is not necessarily a contradiction, that the two blessings agree with isaac’s character, accommodating what he cannot change, and that the priestly writers have artfully combined two strands of tradition (genesis 147). this accords with 218 robert alter and the resistance to theory © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 alter’s chapter on “composite artistry” (abn 131–154), which contends more generally that doublets can be complementary rather than contradictory, explicating a complex truth by seeing it from different directions. thus the creation story of genesis 1:1–2:3 evokes god as the transcendent ordering principle and man as made in god’s image, while the complementary creation story of genesis 2:4ff evokes god as an immanent principle of moral choice and man as a flawed moral and social being (abn 141–147). but of course there are more intransigent doublets whose contradictions can be harmonized thematically but which fail the test of story logic. david may be both the warrior king and na‘im z’mirot yisroel, the sweet singer of israel, but, if david first meets saul on the battlefield just before slaying goliath (1 samuel 17:31), then he cannot also have first met saul earlier on, as a musician brought in to assuage the king’s melancholy who becomes his armor-bearer (16:21). alter suggests at one place that the solution lies in understanding that doublets function as alternatives, like conflicting sources in contemporary historiography. “we may still not fully understand what would have been perceived as a real contradiction by an intelligent hebrew writer of the early iron age, so that apparently conflicting versions of the same event set side by side, far from troubling their original audience, may have sometimes been perfectly justified in a kind of logic we no longer apprehend” (abn 20). this notion of a paleo-postmodern version of spatial form sounds like fun, to me at least, but the harmonizing maneuvers of the samuel redactor suggest that in fact temporal contradictions were perceived then precisely as we perceive them now. the redactor’s solution was to make the positions of shepherd, court musician, and armor-bearer into part-time jobs. “and david would go back and forth from saul’s side to tend his father’s flock in bethlehem,” we are told at 1 samuel 17:15, and later at 18:2, the redactor brings the bethlehem job to an end: “and saul took [david] on that day and would not let him go back to his father’s house” (the david story 103, 112). the really problematic crux comes at 1 samuel 17:55, when saul seems not to know who david is, even after meeting him twice for the first time. alter rejects pathological solutions like amnesia, and returns in his commentary to the argument that for the audience and for the redactor the contradiction was “inconsequential” because thematically justified (the david story, 111). he who dares this far might dare further, though, by more closely reading the form of the question saul chooses: it is, “whose son is the lad?” (ben mi zeh ha-na‘ar), repeated twice more at verses 56 and 58. given that saul already knows who david is, his insistent question about the identity of david’s richter 219 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 father may be taken as expressing a wish to become the father of david, which he accomplishes, in the only way he can do so retroactively, by marrying one of his daughters to david.6 that desire is of course highly ambivalent, as one might expect from a man welcoming his already-anointed successor into the royal family. saul first offers his elder daughter merab, then reneges and gives her to adriel, then offers his younger daughter michal, who becomes david’s first wife until she too is taken away after david’s defection from saul’s court and given to palti ben laish. nevertheless, saul several times thereafter refers to david as “my son” (1 samuel 24:16, 26:17, 26:25) although david reciprocates by calling saul “my father” only once, at 24:11. against theory erich auerbach’s mimesis (1946) may have founded the practice of analyzing the biblical text on an equal footing with secular narrative and poetic literature, but robert alter has surely been one of its earliest and greatest exponents. it was reading alter’s abn that sparked my own fascination with the bible, which has taken me down paths i could not have foreseen. and his readings of individual passages, whether i find his arguments compelling, as i usually do, are always phrased so as to bring the text to life in ways i can only envy. i have been concerned here with inconsistencies and incoherencies in alter’s theoretical position with respect to the biblical text,7 but i cannot explain them. alter may be ambivalent about source studies because the fragments that the source scholars leave us with are not by anyone’s definition literature, as the redacted text is. but at the same time he may feel a need to acknowledge the importance of source studies because this research project anchors the biblical text in history, dispersing the cloudy fantasies of orthodox fundamentalists who want to believe that moses wrote the torah at yhwh’s dictation on sinai or that david wrote all the psalms, including ones that refer to an era over three hundred years after his death. that is only a guess, though, and perhaps a better guess is that alter would wonder why i would suspect him of anything so out of character as having a theoretical position, since to alter theory in most of its manifestations is anathema. the last essay in wbl, “scripture and culture,” first published in 1985 at the height of the “culture wars,” attacks feminists, marxists, deconstructionists in general, and for some reason jonathan culler in particular as “a product of the sds [students for a democratic society] of the 1960s who has settled in comfortably as a successful member of the academy at an ivy league institution, carrying the banner of deconstruction as his own equivalent of the question authority bumper sticker, and of late channeling the 220 robert alter and the resistance to theory © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 revolutionary impulse of his early years into a strident version of feminism” (wbl 198–199). alter sees in academic culture “the tendency…to deny the privileged status and the very distinctiveness of literary discourse, putting the plays of shakespeare on a level with menus, graffiti, and bureaucratic directives” (202). with the literary canon gone, alter goes on, the bible, as the canonical text par excellence, is clearly in danger as well, since it will keep its authority only with fundamentalists who will use it to shore up their bigoted prejudices, while losing traction with liberal humanists for whom it used to be the bulwark of a civilizing culture. nearly a quarter of a century later, the culture wars seem to have quieted down to occasional sniper fire, and it may be possible to separate the bad manners of some of the exponents of theory who offended alter from the trenchant questions they provoked. the bible is one of the great wellsprings of what feminists decry as patriarchy, but many feminists are now turning to the bible, perhaps brushing it against the grain as mieke bal does in lethal love, in order to understand some of the voices and silences that emerge from the women who are there represented. marx may have called religion the opiate of the people, but marxists too have interesting questions to ask of the bible, about the class structure of ancient israel, for example, and how that structure is represented and critiqued in texts by jeremiah, ezekiel, and second isaiah. and even deconstruction, alter’s particular “abomination of the desolation,” may have something to teach us about the knotted and gnarled quality of biblical passages that may seem to encourage, and then punish, suspicious readings.8 doing theory can be advancing a radical social program, but it can also be nothing more radical than asking yourself hard questions about the readings and interpretations that make a text live for you, and your assumptions about texts, about reading, about history, that underlie those interpretations. greatly as i admire alter’s readings, i think there is no danger in it for him if he were also to ask himself some of those hard questions. notes 1. there are only four widely scattered passages in the tanach where ‘avon seems to mean “punishment” for a civil crime or a sin against religious law, and several hundred where it clearly means “wrongdoing” or “sin.” 2. alter cites “meanings, morals and mysteries: literary approaches to the torah,” response 9:2 (summer 1975): 67–94. this joel rosenberg is the scholarly author of king and kin: political allegory in the hebrew bible (bloomington: indiana university press, 1986), not to be confused with the neoconservative evangelical joel c. rosenberg. richter 221 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 3. alter “strenuously disagrees” with robert polzin, who finds the final editor’s hand manifested all through the book of samuel (the david story xii). 4. a differently constructed reality-effect entirely favorable to david is found in 1 chronicles 11–29, which leaves out of the narrative or reworks all of david’s morally questionable deeds. 5. see richter (2005). alter does not explain what he means by “stylistically distinct,” but i hope he is not merely pointing to the fact that the samuel colophon contains lists and psalms, which are found elsewhere in the deuteronomistic history, even elsewhere in samuel. 6. saul’s insistent question “mi” (who?) may be connected as a form of wishful thinking to the biblical idiom “mi yiten li”—literally, “who will give me,” but best translated as the optative,“would that i were….” 7. a third issue i have not space to take up is alter’s position on whether the narrative portions of the bible are best read as prose fiction or as history. alter opts for fiction (abn 24), whereas meir sternberg, the poetics of biblical narrative (1985), opts for history, more consistently and defensibly, i think, because the biblical text usually makes truth-claims, whether or not we take them seriously. 8. see, for example, my own analysis of the readerly paradoxes inherent in 1 samuel 15 (richter 2005, 289), which, i should add, is not in any strict sense deconstruction. references alter, robert 1981 the art of biblical narrative. new york: basic books. 1985 the art of biblical poetry. new york: basic books. 1992 the world of biblical literature. new york: basic books. 1996 genesis: translation and commentary. new york: norton. 1999 the david story: a translation with commentary. new york: norton. 2004 the five books of moses: a translation with commentary. new york: norton. 2007 the book of psalms: a translation with commentary. new york: norton. bal, mieke 1987 lethal love: feminist literary readings of biblical love stories. bloomington: indiana university press. richter, david 2005 genre, repetition, temporal ordering: some aspects of biblical narratology. in the blackwell companion to narrative theory, ed. james phelan and peter rabinowitz, 285–298. new york and london: blackwell. doi:10.1002/9780470996935.ch19 http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/9780470996935.ch19 222 robert alter and the resistance to theory © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 sternberg, meir 1985 the poetics of biblical narrative: ideological literature and the drama of reading. bloomington: indiana university press. [expositions 4.1&2 (2010) 4-11] expositions issn: 1747-5376 yeshiva, thirty years later: tension remains john j. johannes department of political science villanova university the yeshiva decision, in significant measure, was premised on a notion of shared governance traceable to the earliest days of european universities. arguably, none of these earlier models of faculty governance holds sway today. universities, as many have recognized, now resemble businesses in many aspects. what has happened to change the situation and our understanding of it? is there a way to re-establish the earlier model or at least move in the direction of genuinely shared governance? or, as dr. prusak has framed the issue, what does and what should “collegiality” mean today? based on forty years at two universities (twelve as a faculty member, eight as a department chair, five as a dean, and fifteen as academic vice president), i offer the following. at least five interrelated factors produce today’s tensions between faculty and administration: expectations, perspectives, size and complexity, time pressures, and faculty professionalism. unless these are addressed, there is little likelihood for advancing our common goals. 1) expectations differ, sometimes dramatically, reflecting the old adage that “where you stand depends on where you sit.” faculty members, whose focus is on academic matters (students, teaching, research, scholarship), rightly expect administrators to support these efforts. although at times the extent and particulars of those expectations can seem overwhelming, in the vast majority of cases they are perfectly reasonable. faculty members want support for their activities: good salaries, quality classrooms, adequate technology, a good library, funding for research and academic travel, summer support or access to summer teaching, assistance in securing grants, top-notch equipment and instrumentation, recreational and cultural amenities (the students have taught us a lesson here!), and so on. they tend to want these things when they are needed – which often means “now.” administrators genuinely want to provide these, and they work hard to do so within existing constraints. there are three problems relating to expectations. most often, the faculty can have most of what it wants – but not all of it, and certainly not all at once, because the cost of providing these goods and services exceeds the university’s abilities to provide them. thus there arises the need to prioritize and choose. priorities are not self-evident except to the individuals in need. even assuming the administrators agree to focus solely on academic issues (which they cannot actually do), it is not clear whether the marginal dollars should go to the engineers, physicists, philosophers, accountants, nurses, or sociologists, or whether they should go to hiring new faculty members, increasing salaries and services for current ones, purchasing new equipment and instrumentation, recruiting better students, supporting graduate students more, enhancing 5 johannes technology, or remodeling labs and classrooms. these are not decisions that can be easily left to a committee, let alone an entire university’s faculty. trying to do so invites tension and turf warfare – or at least lowest-common-denominator decisions – and it would greatly delay decisions. administrators readily step into the breach and “make the call,” hopefully based upon a strategic vision. in my experience, these decisions are made with good will and with as much faculty input as possible, even though that input is often ambiguous or inconsistent, and even though some administrators, at least, do not understand or sympathize with the faculty’s needs and wants. second, academic expectations held by the faculty rub up against a host of other needs and expectations that flood administrators’ email inboxes. like it or not, academic matters are not the only item on administrators’ “to do” lists. more on this issue below. third, some members of the faculty expect to have a major voice in decision-making in nonacademic matters. defining the scope of that voice, however, is messy at best and full of conflict at worst. although in academic matters (curriculum, tenure, promotions, instructional approaches) the faculty certainly should have the dominant voice, there are times – for example, when faculty members’ desires and goals conflict with institutional mission and values (something particularly sensitive at religiously-based institutions), or when faculty interests are inconsistent with externally-mandated requirements such as accountability or outcomes assessment – when such expectations cause real tensions. usually these academic issues can be managed. however, the rub comes when faculty members want to make, or be involved in making, decisions outside the academic area – decisions for which they usually have neither any particular competence, nor the knowledge base, nor the warrant needed. these general governance issues – facilities, macro budgets, athletics, student life and housing issues, for example – not only reflect different expectations but also fundamentally different perspectives and responsibilities. administrators appreciate the wisdom held by the collective faculty, and they understand the need to frame and orient many of these matters in terms of the academic mission, but tapping into that collective wisdom is much easier said than done. moreover, even in those areas where faculty voices should dominate or at least play a role, disagreement, slowness, operational conservatism, and often turf protection combine to frustrate the administration (look at curricular reform, for example). 2) different perspectives constitute the second challenge to shared governance. perhaps the beginning of wisdom in this area is to acknowledge that “the faculty” and “the administration” do not exist, even though many faculty members see “the administration” as a whole, sometimes in a conspiratorial manner, and not a few administrators often see “the faculty” as one, sometimes with negative connotations. first, any university has multiple layers and silos of administrators, ranging from the president and his or her cabinet down to unit and division managers and workers, with the latter multiplied by the number of colleges, divisions, and other units. some administrators are themselves academics or at least are attuned to academic matters; others haven’t a clue. yet, when it comes to important issues, faculty members seem often to assume that administrators are in constant touch – or collusion – with one another when, in fact, yeshiva, thirty years later: tension remains 6 weeks often go by without administrators talking with each other. (even in my own vice president’s office, sometimes i did not talk with my associate vpaa for days at a time, let alone with the other vice presidents, most of whom i saw only at weekly or biweekly cabinet meetings.) both the faculty and the administration are extremely diverse in terms of interest, expertise, and involvement. a college dean may be no more aligned with the president’s views than is a newly minted philosophy professor with a veteran accounting professor. indeed, the tendency to see “the other side” as unified and quasi-monolithic may be one of the greatest barriers to progress. at the same time, the diversity within the administration allows – perhaps encourages – some administrators to play off one against the other internally: a dean may blame the provost, or the provost may blame the cfo, and so on, when talking with faculty members. because some administrators may be more sympathetic than others to faculty requests (even if they have no authority in the area of the requests), it can be very tempting for a faculty member to seize on the words or expressions of one administrator and use them to pressure another. likewise, one administrator might seek to ingratiate herself or himself with faculty members at the expense of administrative colleagues. one of the big problems occurs when one administrator seems to agree with a faculty member whose request is subsequently denied by the administrator actually responsible for the issue. it is too easy to see this as administrative doublespeak, or even disingenuousness. the faculty is fragmented, with those of one college or department sometimes seeing colleagues in other colleges or departments as the cause of their relative lack of resources – a situation that can frustrate administrators seeking to do right by “the faculty.” nonetheless, there are some perspective-related attributes that should be appreciated. the faculty, correctly, is first and foremost concerned with educational and scholarly issues. it would be insulting and inaccurate to claim that faculty members do not see and appreciate the other elements of university life, but it is likewise accurate to say that they do not have the consistency, intensity, and immediacy of concern or the depth of detailed knowledge and understanding – not to mention the pressures – that administrators have. faculty members are intellectuals, trained to analyze, question, discuss, and criticize – and to take time doing so. consensus, entailing logrolling and least-common-denominator solutions, tends to emerge from faculty deliberations. high level administrators, by contrast, tend to be people of action and decision who do not have, or do not perceive themselves as having, the luxury of time before making decisions and who need to make “the right decision” (taking into account a host of issues and consequences) – not merely one that pleases the greatest number. although deans may be more in synch with the faculty of their colleges and schools, non-academic administrators often live on another planet from the faculty; and central administration inevitably has a different and broader perspective, focused to a considerable extent on long-term macro issues, strategic matters, government regulations, trustee wishes, and alumni views. those administrators often must march to different drummers, shaped by the changing nature of the modern university. 3) the third general problem area concerns the size and complexity of the institution. it may have been true at one time – maybe as recently as the pre-world war ii era – that universities 7 johannes were all about, and could focus on, matters academic. that, however, has changed in the past fifty or so years. triggered first by the flood of veterans after the war, and subsequently by waves of “generations x, y, z” and their successors, colleges and universities have either chosen or been forced to expand dramatically, both physically and in terms of new functions: residence halls, dining facilities, career counseling and job placement, extra-curricular activities, intercollegiate and recreational athletics, health and counseling, recreational activities, weekend entertainment – to name but a few. on top of that, the information and technology revolutions have added complexities and huge costs that faculty members, and indeed many administrators in other areas, do not comprehend. and why should they when they have their own concerns to worry about? student financial aid in its many forms, public and private; concern for mission (and in religiously affiliated schools, ministry); public relations; and above all fund-raising have dramatically altered the face of the academy. colleges are expected to relate to federal, state, and local governments on a range of matters – grants, compliance, service, and traditional “town and gown” issues – and they often are pushed to be involved with secondary and elementary education, the business sector, and other non-profit institutions (e.g., local libraries, churches, and civic groups). those held responsible for all these facets of higher education life naturally see the university as a different creature from those whose focus must be on teaching and scholarship. many of these concerns are 24/7/52 in nature, and all are costly. they drive the perspectives of administrators but may not be at the forefront of faculty awareness. 4) administrators, or at least most of them, are both pressured and incredibly busy. depending on one’s position, pressures for top administrators come from trustees (a debatable number of whom know and care little about the particulars of academic life – they of course have general concerns and interests ranging from admissions and graduation standards to faculty quality to wanting the school’s u. s. news rankings to rise). all administrators must answer to their supervisors, some of whom can be aggressive. (administrative hierarchy and politics are not matters that faculty members readily relate to.) other pressures come from accrediting agencies; from government at all levels; from the media, which needs and is needed by universities; from parents (most faculty members seldom hear anything but the “good stuff” from parents, but administrators can be swamped with complaints and requests); and of course from students who seem to have endless needs and questions. more generally, administrators bear the responsibility for promoting and advertising the university, tasks that move their focus to the external rather than the internal. the consequence of all this is that administrators simply are swamped with both big and trivially small issues. too often, administrators are forced to deal with the urgent at the expense of the important. 1 faculty members, of course, see this and wonder what is going on. here, again, is where expectations and perspectives, often linked to the enhanced nature of the modern university, join to create tension. incredibly busy administrators can fail to exhibit the sort of patience and engage in the sort of dialogue necessary to meet any reasonable standard of collegiality. when that is seen as ignorance, disinterest, or arrogance, the embers of difference are fanned and can grow into flames of real problems. yeshiva, thirty years later: tension remains 8 most administrators are eager and willing to fight these pressures in order to engage with faculty on matters not only of academic concern but of broader concern – especially when the faculty members have some degree of expertise on a topic and approach it with open minds. administrators, in my experience, generally enjoy the give-and-take with faculty members, and they do seek out faculty input where they see such input as relevant. however, doing so is not always easy. first, as strange as it may sound, some administrators are simply uncomfortable around faculty members – even to the extent of being intimidated. when this is interpreted as being dismissive or arrogant, we have a problem. the reverse, likewise, is true. i’ve seen the most outspoken faculty members shrivel into silence in the presence of senior administrators, especially the president, which leads to a sense of distrust when those administrators know how the faculty members speak out in other venues. most faculty members likewise are under extreme pressures – to teach, to publish, to participate in governance at least at the departmental and maybe college level, to engage in service, and to live a normal family life at home. many non-academic administrators simply do not understand the academic life and its pressures. second, formal faculty governance bodies that presumably represent the faculty and have an institutional role in governance seldom work as intended and needed. many are not in fact genuinely representative, even though elected, because many of the university’s leading faculty scholars and teachers do not have time, or do not wish, to become involved. accordingly, they do not seek out positions to be part of “shared governance.” some of those who are involved can be very naïve – sometimes i was amazed at the extent of this – and hold unrealistic expectations despite their best intentions. this can create frustration on both sides. note that none of what has been described is to be construed as having anything to do with evil intent, inordinate selfishness, power-grabbing, or any other pejorative attribute. with perhaps the occasional exception, both high and low level administrators and faculty members are decent human beings seeking to promote their universities (and, of course, themselves) and to do what is right. it is the definition of “promotion” and “right” that comes into question, as does the means needed to do so. 5) there is a final consideration worth thinking about, and it concerns the professionalism, status, and stature of the faculty that are essential for any claim to shared governance. professors neil w. hampton and jerry gaff have written eloquently on the “social contract” that the academic profession enjoys with society. 2 among their insights is the recognition that members of the academic profession – the faculty – who would lay claim to the right to be involved in institutional decision making (within but also outside of academic matters) have abandoned or forgotten the obligations that accompany the privileges of their status. thus, to extrapolate, the faculty’s warrant to engage in shared governance depends on living up to the responsibilities of a well-defined profession: ethical considerations, productivity obligations, fiduciary duties, socialization functions (for new members of the professoriate), accountability and oversight obligations (rigorous peer review of non-performing colleagues, for example), and, in general, professionalism. to the extent that the faculty has abandoned or fails actively to take 9 johannes responsibility in these areas, its status and stature are diminished, most notably in the eyes of administrators and trustees. for example, if there is grade inflation, or if students are violating academic integrity standards, or if some faculty members fail to hold proper office hours, who is responsible to make the needed corrections? too often, the faculty has turned these obligations – squarely academic obligations – over to deans, provosts, and the like. is it any wonder that those administrators, and others, question the faculty’s claim to shared governance in budgetary, athletic, student life, or physical facilities matters? there is need to establish credibility. another aspect of professionalism may be causing problems. faculty members have become increasingly professionalized in the sense that they have become much more attached to their disciplines and their academic careers, serving as “independent contractors” at their universities and colleges. only marginally do many of them identify with the institutions that employ them – the sort of identification that once was very strong. even less so do they willingly take up the mundane tasks that underpin a university’s operations. advising of students, serving on committees, even attending commencement – these are things no longer embraced by today’s faculty members as they once were. collegiality among faculty members – never mind collegiality with administrators – has declined dramatically at many schools. as one’s attachment to one’s discipline and career grows, the attachment to and involvement in one’s home institution often wanes. the effect is to distance faculty members from the administrators whose lives are much more directly connected to and dependent on their employer and who do not have the freedom and perceived mobility that faculty members have. with growing detachment, where is the justification for shared governance? a word on collegiality is in order. what does it mean? in a recent and successful effort to revise and revitalize the faculty handbook at villanova, we sought to make collegiality one of a number of essential faculty functions. what was intended was to establish the norm that people should treat other people in a respectful, considerate, and caring fashion – to avoid the shirking of the mundane duties all faculty members face in their departmental lives. collegiality in this sense, of course, was to extend to the relationship between faculty and administration. in the end, we substituted “community” for “collegiality” because a number of faculty focused on one definition of collegiality that incorporated shared governance, which they saw as nearly nonexistent. (indeed, a faculty committee’s published statement on collegiality became, at least to the eyes of some administrators, a claim for more decision-making authority across the board.) in the end, the claim to a greater role in governance depends on a range of issues – respect, professionalism, competence, commitment, responsibility – that are politically “loaded.” what might the future bring? a focus on the issue of faculty professionalism and the development of a clear strategy for engaging in shared governance are essential. the faculty collectively must take more responsibility for academic matters, including those that transcend departments and colleges, rather than pass them off to chairs, deans, provosts, and others; and they must do so in a collegial manner in the name of the academic profession. doing so establishes a legitimacy to lay claim to a greater voice in other areas that touch academic life. in turn, that legitimacy, coupled with genuine faculty expertise (in, for example, information yeshiva, thirty years later: tension remains 10 technology, investment, areas of psychology and counseling, or architecture), would lead to more invitations to be part of the decision-making process in other non-academic issues, allowing issues to be framed in relation to the core mission of education and scholarship. in short, “the faculty” must give “the administration” an incentive to invite it into higher level decisionmaking, and it should push for such a role only in those areas where faculty expertise and concern justify such involvement. naïve wishful thinking, unrealistic requests, claims, and expectations (which actually are quite rare), and self-induced shyness and reticence must be avoided. to earn the respect of administrators, faculty members must seem more like administrators in their appreciation for the complexities of modern day university life and for the need for a division of labor that inevitably will empower administrators. such empowerment, however, must be linked to sharing of information and transparency. in turn, administrators, especially those in non academic areas, need to be exposed to the faculty experts in those areas, and they surely must understand that the “core business” of the university is the discovery, dissemination, and application of knowledge; all others are support functions. one simple step would be to establish opportunities to bring faculty and administrators together to chat and discuss issues. both groups need to understand the others’ expectations and perspectives better. this of course runs up against the time pressures that administrators and faculty members face, but my hunch is that most would gladly take the time. agendas would be needed, lest conversations merely ramble, and they should focus on real university issues and problems requiring resolution. i witnessed one superb example of this when our chief information officer held a “town hall” meeting with faculty on matters of technology. a second suggestion – one i most regrettably did not implement when i might have – would be to establish a set of faculty administrative internships. putting faculty members (ideally faculty leaders) into administrative offices for a semester or a year would go a long way toward mutual understanding and enhanced respect. there is nothing better than “walking in another’s shoes” to enlighten one’s attitudes. it would be costly and might require some alterations in office space, but it surely would help enhance understanding, change perspectives, and, eventually, alter expectations. it would also provide a trainingand testing-ground for future administrators. conversely, it would be useful to bring administrators into the classroom as guest lecturers on occasion to expose them to students and academic perspectives. neither of these suggestions is a panacea. assuming that both faculty members and administrators are of good will, are intelligent, understand the other’s concerns and expertise, and realize that they are in this business together, much good can be accomplished. perhaps the goal of genuinely shared governance in all matters cannot be reached, but surely it can be approached to varying degrees in different areas of university life. notes 1. email traffic – from other administrators, faculty, students, alumni, vendors trying to sell something, accrediting agencies, and a host of others – has become almost unbearable for most 11 johannes administrators. spending an entire morning answering emails and trying to solve the problems they raise was, in my experience, a two or three day a week task. 2. neil w. hamilton and jerry g. gaff, “proactively justifying the academic profession’s social contract,” university of st. thomas school of law legal studies research paper no. 09–17 (2009). see http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1444587. see also gaff, “what if the faculty really do assume responsibility for the educational program?” liberal education 93.4 (2007): 6–13. © equinox publishing ltd. 2008, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expositions 2.2 (2008) 239–250] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v2i2.239 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 translating the bible: a new approach to an old task richard a. taylor dallas theological seminary introduction robert alter’s published translations of significant portions of the hebrew bible are a direct outgrowth of his well-received literary-critical studies.1 three aspects of alter’s translational work stand out. first, his translations of the torah, the psalter, and the david story are very sensitive to the details of the hebrew text. he is consistently in touch with textual and grammatical features of the text, and he is equally alert to features of its composition and texture. at every hand his close reading of these texts in their original language is evident. second, alter’s translations achieve a high level of literary skill and clarity for the english reader. his translations are remarkably well expressed; they are informed by modern biblical scholarship; and they are very readable. third, alter’s translations of the biblical text are accompanied by extensive notes that explicate various aspects of the text, mainly from the standpoint of justifying textual or interpretational decisions reflected in his renderings of the text. in this way readers are invited to enter into the decision making that the author went through in order to reach the final result. all readers, whether lay or professional, are likely to benefit immensely from these translations. i warmly recommend them. but where do these translations stand in relationship to the plethora of other english translations of the old testament that are now so readily available? what is it that sets alter’s work apart from similar works, to such a degree that publication of yet another translation of the bible can be adequately justified? it is clear that alter’s translations have a carefully conceived theoretical framework that defines his method and informs how he proceeds. a casual reader might either overlook or perhaps not understand these theoretical aspects of his work. for that reason, in what follows i wish to call attention to several features that i regard as particularly significant. it will become clear from what follows that while there is much in alter’s approach that i appreciate and with which i heartily agree, there are also reservations that i have about certain aspects of his approach. 240 translating the bible © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 some strengths there are many strengths to alter’s work. here i will select only a few that are particularly evident in his biblical translations. fidelity to the hebrew text those with a high view of the bible as sacred text cannot help but appreciate alter’s rigorous attempts to capture as accurately as possible the nuances and niceties of the old testament in its original language. alter takes the text seriously, sparing no effort in his attempts to understand it and to find equivalent and effective ways of rendering it into english. he is also blunt in faulting almost all modern versions for failing to provide bible readers with an adequate feel for the text in its original language. concerning this failure he says, there is, as i shall explain in detail, something seriously wrong with all the familiar english translations, traditional and recent, of the hebrew bible. broadly speaking, one may say that in the case of the modern versions, the problem is a shaky sense of english and in the case of the king james version, a shaky sense of hebrew. the present translation is an experiment in re-presenting the bible—and, above all, biblical narrative prose—in a language that conveys with some precision the semantic nuances and the lively orchestration of literary effects of the hebrew and at the same time has stylistic and rhythmic integrity as literary english. (alter 2004, xvi) as much as is practical, alter attempts to retain features of the source text in his translation. in this attempt to replicate as nearly as feasible the contours of the hebrew text he makes a distinct contribution. at times he even tries to imitate in english the assonance of the hebrew text. for example, in genesis 1:1 he renders the hebrew expression tohu wabohu as “welter and waste,” a subtle attempt to reproduce the word-play found here in the original language (alter 2004, 17). all of this is a carefully thought-out strategy on alter’s part. he understands the role of a translator in a rather distinct fashion. there is a sense in which it might be said that he wishes to bring the reader to the text, whereas many modern translators might be viewed as bringing the text to the reader. such differences in self-understanding will lead to significantly different approaches to the task of translation. nonetheless, the care with which alter approaches the ancient text and the thought-provoking way in which he renders it into english are characteristics that should be valued and applauded by all. keen literary insight one thing that informs and enlivens alter’s translations is that he seems to taylor 241 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 know so well the characters of the story he is translating. his summaries of biblical figures are extremely perceptive and well expressed. for example, he sums up the life of samuel in this way: “the prophet samuel may have god on his side, but he is also an implacable, irascible man, and often a palpably self-interested one as well…. he is proud, imperious, histrionic—until the very end, when he is conjured up by saul as a ghost on the eve of the fatal battle at mount gilboa” (alter 1999, xv–xvi). or of david he says, beset by mortal dangers, david is constantly prepared to do almost anything in order to survive: with the help of his devoted wife michael, wordlessly fleeing saul’s assassins; playing the drooling madman before the philistine king achish; serving as vassal to the philistines, massacring whole towns in order to keep his real actions unknown to his overlords; profiting politically from the chain of violent deaths in the house of saul while vehemently dissociating himself from each of the killings. he is, in sum, the first full-length portrait of a machiavellian prince in western literature. (alter 1999, xviii) it is clear that as a translator alter has gotten inside the characters of the story. this insight informs in subtle ways his translation of the text. alter also has a keen appreciation of the anonymous authors of the ancient texts he is translating. of the author of the books of samuel he says, from1 samuel 1 to 1 kings 2 is one of the most astounding pieces of narrative that has come down to us from the ancient world. the story of david is probably the greatest single narrative representation in antiquity of a human life evolving by slow stages through time, shaped and altered by the pressures of political life, public institutions, family, the impulses of body and spirit, the eventual sad decay of the flesh. it also provides the most unflinching insight into the cruel processes of history and into human behavior warped by the pursuit of power. and nowhere is the bible’s astringent narrative economy, its ability to define characters and etch revelatory dialogue in a few telling strokes, more brilliantly deployed (alter 1999, ix).2 later he again expresses appreciation for this biblical writer, averring that “[t]he person who wrote this story is not only a formidably shrewd observer of politics and human nature but also someone who manifestly delights in the writerly pleasures of his craft and is sometimes led to surprising insights by his exploration of those pleasures” (alter 1999, xxii). what he says of the author of the books of samuel might also be said of him. like the author of samuel, alter “manifestly delights in the writerly pleasures of his craft and is sometimes led to surprising insights by his exploration of those pleasures.” 242 translating the bible © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 fluent english style the lot of a translator is difficult. to render an ancient text into a modern language in such a way that the translation is both faithful to its source and at the same time fluent and readable in the target language is an immensely complex task. few people are equipped to do it well. translations usually do better with one part of this equation than they do with the other. versions that attain a high degree of correspondence with regard to rendering the technical aspects of the original language are sometimes greatly deficient in english style. the corollary is true as well. reflecting on the inadequacies of translations, john denham in the seventeenth century is said to have remarked, such is our pride, our folly, and our fate, that only those who cannot write, translate… (glassman 1981, 17) the adage does not apply to alter. in my view, he does a commendable job at both of these levels. his translations are typically accurate and true to the hebrew text; they are also characterized by a straightforward yet graceful english style.3 users of these translations will not only grow in their understanding of the biblical text; they will also find themselves reading the bible with renewed enjoyment and enthusiasm. this is an achievement not easy to come by, as anyone who has attempted translations of ancient texts will probably agree. avoidance of semantic anachronism there are certain terms in the theological lexicon of christianity that have become very familiar due to their long history of usage. these terms include such common words as “iniquity,” “transgression,” “soul,” “salvation,” and many others (alter 2007, xxxii–xxxiv). the problem that many such english terms present for translators is that often they have come to mean something very different from their hebrew counterparts. the hebrew word for “soul,” for example, is often used as a circumlocution for one’s self rather than as a theological reference to the immaterial part of a human being. yet when many bible readers see the word “soul,” they immediately think of the familiar theological meaning of this word. likewise, “salvation” in the hebrew bible usually refers to imminent deliverance or rescue from threatening circumstances rather than to spiritual redemption. yet many readers immediately think of personal redemption when they see this word. when this happens, the proper interpretation of the text has become obscured, or perhaps eclipsed altogether. the fault lies partly with the translation. taylor 243 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 when rendering such words, alter has deliberately avoided english terms that may anachronistically conjure up misleading ideas. instead, he prefers less theologically oriented terms. while some readers may miss seeing certain familiar words in his translation of the hebrew bible, it is his insistence on accuracy that has guided him in these choices. this is a prudent course of action. some difficulties in what follows i will focus on some reservations i have concerning selected aspects of alter’s approach. i do so in a spirit of keen appreciation for his work overall. still, there are some features that are worth considering in terms of their adequacy. text-critical conservatism before a translator sets about his task, he must first determine exactly what text it is that he will translate. ancient biblical texts have come to us in a variety of manuscript and versional forms. unfortunately, there are often serious discrepancies between them so far as the precise wording of the text is concerned. translators must often arbitrate between these variant readings and offer a rendering based on what seems to be the closest approximation of either the original text or some early stage of that text. text criticism is thus foundational for any translation that acknowledges the difference between original readings and later scribal accretions or mistakes. a good translator must also be a reasonably good text critic. in the case of the hebrew bible, from the end of the first christian century onward we find a very uniform type of text (i.e., a proto-masoretic text). but in the pre-christian period this uniformity gives way to several competing forms of texts, as attested directly by the dead sea scrolls and indirectly by the ancient versions, such as the greek, syriac, and latin. a translator must decide how best to use this variant evidence. alter has approached his task with a reluctance to differ with the masoretic text of the hebrew bible. to be sure, he does on occasion venture to correct the masoretic text, usually on the basis of either a reading found in the dead sea scrolls or in the greek translation of the hebrew bible known as the septuagint.4 but one senses his reluctance to do so.5 in my opinion he does not depart from the masoretic text as often as the evidence requires. the masoretic text is the result of scribal activity that flourished during the medieval period, roughly from the sixth to tenth centuries c.e.6 though the masoretes were scrupulously careful and unflinchingly conservative in their 244 translating the bible © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 handling of the biblical text, it is nonetheless clear that serious difficulties in the transmission of the text had already taken place in the pre-christian period, long before there were any masoretes. consequently, the text that the masoretes carefully guarded and uniformly reproduced was a text that long before had fallen victim to many text-critical problems, some of them intentional but most of them due to unintentional scribal error. how does all this affect a translator of these texts? it means that very often—more often than alter seems willing to admit—a translator must prefer readings that are found, for example, in the qumran manuscripts or in an ancient version such as the greek or syriac or latin. the masoretic text is but one text among several, and a translator ought not to show bias toward (or, for that matter, against) that text. all the textual evidence must stand on equal footing, at least in the preliminary stages of investigation and evaluation of readings. alter, however, expresses his own approach to textual difficulties as follows: nevertheless, as a matter of methodological principle i strenuously disagree with the practice of those biblical scholars who put the masoretic text and the septuagint on an equal footing and choose variants between the two strictly on the basis of what seems to them the more attractive reading. the greek translators obviously had before them an older version of the book than appears in the masoretic bible, but there is no reason to assume that it was invariably a better version. and the fact remains that the greeks were translators, obliged as translators to clarify obscure points, resolve contradictions, and otherwise make the hebrew text with which they labored intelligible to their greek readers. (alter 1999, xxvi) alter’s general approach is as follows: “in this regard [i.e., toward emendation] i have exerted the greatest caution, again assuming that if the received text made any sense, it should stand” (alter 1999, xxvii). this approach, however, is problematic. such a method can lead to acceptance of faulty readings that, though they may make sense, are not original and should not be preferred. such a method can also lead to rejection of certain readings that should in fact be preferred over the masoretic text. for example, in 1 samuel 11:1 the masoretic text makes sense. however, a samuel scroll found at qumran has a variant reading here that explains the practice of nahash the ammonite in gouging out the right eye of his military opponents, a practice that terrified the israelites who contemplated fighting him. what are we to make of this textual variant? is it a later addition to the text of samuel, or is it a part of the original text that was lost in the transmission process? it is hard to say for sure, but a strong case can be made for regarding taylor 245 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 it as original. in that case, it should appear in the text of our versions and not as a footnote to the text, which is where alter (and most others) leave it. in my view, such text-critical conservatism does not serve the reader well. the quest for textual purity should trump timid acceptance of traditional readings every time. philosophy of translation according to the talmud, rabbi judah made the following rather exaggerated claim: if one translates a [biblical] verse literally, he is a liar; if he adds thereto, he is a blasphemer and a libeler. (b. talmud, kiddushin 49a; tosephta, megillah 4[3]:41) if taken seriously, this counsel of despair puts all translators on the horns of a dilemma: they can either choose to translate the bible literally and thereby resign themselves to lying, or they can resort to paraphrase and thereby resign themselves to blaspheming. obviously, neither option, that of becoming a liar or that of becoming a blasphemer, is desirable. though we might sympathize with the rabbi’s anguish regarding the possibility of accurate translation, we cannot agree with his conclusion. still, there is some truth to the italian play on words, traduttore, traditore. in other words, translators are traitors. prior to the mid-twentieth century, most translators of the bible adopted a philosophy of translation that, for lack of a better term, might be called formal equivalency. in this approach, translators rendered the text for the most part in a literal fashion, largely retaining the text’s lexical and phrasal features unless there was good reason for doing otherwise. the classic example of this approach is the time-honored king james version of 1611; a more recent example is the stilted but usually accurate american standard version of 1901. by the middle of the twentieth century a different approach had taken hold in bible translation work; it came to be known as dynamic, or functional, equivalence. in this approach translators do not necessarily seek to replicate the lexical and grammatical cadences of the ancient text. instead, they take greater liberties in accommodating the text to the target audience, attempting thereby to make the bible more relevant, accessible, and userfriendly to modern audiences. some form of this latter approach is generally favored by most bible translators today. alter, somewhat surprisingly, aligns himself more with the older approach than with the newer one. one is almost taken back by his advocacy of a strongly hebraized approach to translation. he says, “if one keeps in mind the strong element of stylization of the ancient language even in its own time, 246 translating the bible © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 there is no good reason to render biblical hebrew as contemporary english, either lexically or syntactically” (alter 1999, xxviii; cf. alter 2004, xxxii). alter’s translations are therefore intentionally on the literal side, avoiding as much as possible the temptation to paraphrase or interpret. an example of this overly literal approach may be seen in alter’s use of the expression “pisser against the wall” (cf. kjv) in 1 samuel 25:23, 34 to refer to a male individual. although it is utilized in the hebrew text, this is not an expression commonly used in the english-speaking world to identify gender. the hebrew expression simply means a male rather than a female. surely a less literal translation would be preferable here. likewise, in 1 samuel 20:30 alter sets forth a very literal translation of saul’s inflamed reaction to a son he regards as treasonous: “o, son of a perverse wayward woman!” while this translation corresponds to the wording of the hebrew text, it fails to capture in english the force of saul’s response. a closer approximation would be “you son of a bitch!,” although some bible readers might find this rendering a bit surprising. the point is that, given the differences between the source language and the target language, a literal translation is often not preferable for conveying the actual sense of the text. alter summarizes his approach as follows: “my notion of an effective translation of the bible involves a high degree of literalism—within the limits of reasonably acceptable literary english—both in regard to representing the word choices and the word order of the hebrew.” (alter 1999, xxix). such comments are noteworthy, since they seem to harken back to an earlier age and to an older approach. alter also speaks in stringent terms of the use of lexical variation in bible translation. he says, a suitable english version should avoid at all costs the modern abomination of elegant synonymous variation, for the literary prose of the bible turns everywhere on significant repetition, not variation. similarly, the translation of terms on the basis of immediate context—except when it becomes grotesque to do otherwise—is to be resisted as another instance of the heresy of explanation. finally, the mesmerizing effect of these ancient stories will scarcely be conveyed if they are not rendered in cadenced english prose that at least in some ways corresponds to the powerful cadences of the hebrew. (alter 1999, xxviii–xxix)7 concerning his own translation of the psalms he says, what i have aimed at in this translation—inevitably, with imperfect success—is to represent psalms in a kind of english verse that is readable as poetry yet sounds something like the hebrew—emulating its rhythms wherever feasible, reproducing many of the effects of its expressive poetic syntax, taylor 247 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 seeking equivalents for the combination of homespun directness and archaizing in the original, hewing to the lexical concreteness of the hebrew, and making more palpable the force of parallelism that is at the heart of biblical poetry. the translation is also on the whole quite literal—something that the king james version has probably conditioned english readers to expect—in the conviction that the literal sense has a distinctive poetic force and that it is often possible to preserve it in workable literary english. (alter 2007, xxxi) alter is thus self-consciously out of step with certain aspects of modern approaches to the science of translating. he prefers a literal translation, not a dynamically equivalent one. he prefers to adhere closely to the hebrew forms and structures, rather than to adapt the text to contemporary english.8 there is a place for such an approach, but not exclusively so. alter is particularly blunt in his criticism of translations that blur distinctions between translating a text and explaining it. he rejects attempts to build into translation a layer of interpretation that clarifies for the reader the meaning of the text, labeling such attempts with the pejorative expression “the heresy of explanation.” he says, “the unacknowledged heresy underlying most modern english versions of the bible is the use of translation as a vehicle for explaining the bible instead of representing it in another language, and in the most egregious instances this amounts to explaining away the bible” (alter 2004, xix). his characterization of alternative models of translation as heretical in this regard is intentionally arresting and provocative. but this language strikes me as a bit extreme and rather unfair. it is one thing not to favor excessive attempts at paraphrase and textual expansion that allegedly distort the meaning of the text. it is quite another thing to besmirch all such attempts to assist the reader, even when they are exercised with discipline and caution. i believe that alter is too insistent on a literal approach to bible translation. he is also too condemnatory of certain conventions that have been widely accepted by the modern guild of biblical translators. conclusion alter’s translations of the pentateuch, the psalms, and the david story offer fresh insight into the biblical text. they excel in attention to the semantic niceties of the hebrew text. they are in touch with contemporary biblical scholarship. and they are for the most part skillfully expressed in effective english style, making them a delight to read. while one might not fully subscribe to all aspects of their theoretical underpinning, particularly with regard to text criticism and translation philosophy, these translations earn their keep. they succeed in leading users into a fresh and engaging reading of the bibli248 translating the bible © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 cal text. to the degree that they encourage fresh engagement with the text, especially on the part of those who may have thought that they already knew these texts well, the purposes of their author will have been well served. notes 1. for a complete list of alter’s published english translations of the hebrew bible, see the list of works cited below. 2. alter regards 1 kings 1–2, rather than the end of 2 samuel, as the conclusion of the david story. 3. one is not surprised to find alter berating modern versions in the area of style. he says, “nothing traduces the power of the original more egregiously than the nonstyle cultivated by the sundry modern versions” (alter 1999, xxix). elsewhere he speaks of the “arrhythmia” of modern english translations. he says, “i know of no modern english translation of the bible that is not blotted by constant patches of arrhythmia” (alter 2004, xlii). 4. concerning the date of the greek translation, alter speaks too loosely when he refers to the septuagint as “the greek translation of the bible completed during the third century bce” (alter 2007, xvi; cf. alter 1997, x ; xxvi). according to the letter of aristeas, which is our main primary source for the origins of the greek version, it was only the torah and not the septuagint as a whole that was translated in the third century b.c.e. the translation of old testament books other than the pentateuch continued over a long period of time. the septuagint was probably not completed until sometime in the first century b.c.e. 5. for example, alter says, “this translation is relatively conservative in adopting emendations, and some biblical scholars may look askance at this cautiousness” (alter 2007, xxxviii). here he has correctly anticipated criticism of the very sort that i am raising. 6. alter is inconsistent in his dating of the masoretic period. was it “between the seventh and the tenth centuries c.e.” (alter 1999, xxv), or “between the sixth and ninth centuries ce” (alter 2007, xxxvi)? 7. some readers of alter will be surprised to note his defense of what he calls “the cardinal principle, not to translate according to context” (alter 2004, xxxiii). 8. alter’s literal style of translation is especially evident in his imitation of the paratactic style of the hebrew text. in his translation of the david story, which comprises fifty-seven chapters of biblical text, all but one chapter (i.e., 1 samuel 13) begin with the word “and.” it is not uncommon to find a dozen instances of “and” within the space of a few verses in his translation. such use of the conjunction makes for good hebrew; in english, however, it rather quickly becomes wearisome. taylor 249 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 references alter, robert 1999 the david story: a translation with commentary of 1 and 2 samuel. new york and london: w.w. norton. 2004 the five books of moses: a translation with commentary. new york and london: w.w. norton. 2007 the book of psalms: a translation with commentary. new york and london: w.w. norton. glassman, eugene h. 1981 the translation debate: what makes a bible translation good? downers grove, il: intervarsity press. preface final draft.indd © equinox publishing ltd. 2007, unit 6, th e village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expositions 1.1 (2007) 001-002] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v1i1.1 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 editors’ preface john a. doody, kim paffenroth, and peter busch we introduce our new journal assuming two things about the humanities: fi rst, that they should be understood less as islands of specialization than as centers of conversation; and second, that they interest us not only as scholars, but also and especially as human beings. th ese assumptions come from our experience teaching in programs like the villanova center for liberal education. when socrates converses with abraham, augustine with w.e.b. dubois, and virginia woolf with karl marx, their exchanges concern our common humanity; no single discipline comprehends them all, and we naturally turn to our colleagues for insights we have missed. such conversations are remarkably scarce in existing academic journals. although philosophers, theologians, historians, and poets all discuss courage, for example, or beauty, or freedom, or the tangled relationship between faith and reason, they seldom do so in the same space, and almost never are their approaches weighed with rigorous concern for the truth. expositions satisfi es this need for a forum where scholars meet across disciplinary lines to investigate central themes in the humanities. ecce homo our fi rst issue begins with a theme that, in a sense, includes all the others. what do the humanities reveal about human nature? asking the question in this form is bound to provoke objections. some will deny that the anthropology of a particular faith-tradition can be evaluated from any allegedly universal perspective called “the humanities.” others will insist that what we call “human nature” is only a cultural artifact or social construct. our response is neither to be frightened away from our subject nor to dismiss the objections out of hand. we are curious to see how various disciplines respond to the question of our nature, and we are no less eager to ponder the perplexities that arise along the way—as in fact they do. preface final draft.indd 1preface final draft.indd 1 17/06/2007 14:15:1817/06/2007 14:15:18 2 editors’ preface © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 th e fi rst of our articles, by timothy fuller, describes john stuart mill’s hesitation over whether his defense of individual liberty is true for all time or only in a certain social context. linking this diffi culty with mill’s dubious account of the roots of our tradition, fuller calls for renewed exposition of classic texts in order to distinguish the perennial from the historical. in keeping with this suggestion, rémi brague argues that anthropology is so far from being culture-bound that our very notion of “culture” derives from the anthropology advanced by paul of tarsus. but while brague still emphasizes the continuity between paul and his greek and jewish predecessors, m. katherine tillman fi nds in cardinal john henry newman a multilayered account of human nature whose upper reaches are distinctively christian and only analogous to the perfection attainable through liberal education or philosophy. th is challenge to rationalism’s self-suffi ciency is continued, if in a diff erent way, by eva brann, who proposes instead to understand humans as “ultimately aff ective” in nature. among the diffi culties to emerge from these refl ections is whether what is most profound in humanity varies radically among diff erent cultures, tribes, classes, or individuals. if so, then perhaps human nature exists only on the most superfi cial level. our book reviews help us think about this possibility. our featured roundtable is on jesus and yahweh, in which harold bloom warily regards the transition from particular judaism to universal christianity. emily wittman, meanwhile, reviews the works of albanian novelist ismail kadare with particular concern for the politics of translation and international literary prizes. finally, farhang erfani asks whether ernesto laclau’s populist reason explains the mystery that has led so many academics to wonder about human nature: how do peoples as peoples determine their passions and interests? an invitation we hope our belief in this project will resonate with others who share similar concerns. ever optimistic that our scholarly community is hungry for dialogue that transcends both ideological and disciplinary boundaries, we invite you to become part of our future. preface final draft.indd 2preface final draft.indd 2 17/06/2007 14:15:2317/06/2007 14:15:23 brague.indd © equinox publishing ltd. 2007, unit 6, th e village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expositions 1.1 (2007) 015–028] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v1i1.15 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 jew, greek and christian: some refl ections on the pauline revolution rémi brague th e sorbonne, paris paul of tarsus addresses a central human problem: why do we not do what we know we should? th is presumes that we know what we should do. paul’s claim that even those without the revealed law know what is right by means of “nature” and “conscience” may seem to impose greek notions onto hebrew religion, but in fact articulates suggestions already present in the law and prophets, namely that the revealed law codifi es and concretizes the law already written on the human heart by the creator. since this core of universal principles lacks specifi c normative content, pauline christianity necessarily seeks to absorb what is good from the content of existing civilizations. in so doing, it separates the literature, thought and practices of the civilizations it absorbs from their religion, thus giving birth to the very notion of “culture,” and specifi cally to greekness as a cultural entity that could be preserved and passed on without losing its otherness. if we propose to refl ect upon jews, greeks and christians at the beginning of our era, this should not be understood as taking for granted that these three groups were already there during the period that we will explore. for one could claim that this period is precisely the one in which the three groups came into being or, more precisely, were defi ned either from the inside of from the outside, from themselves or from one another. th at the christian group did not arise before this period, but precisely during it (acts 11.26) will come as no surprise: in order to get christians, you must have a christ. yet the other two groups received some new features, too, that gave them a decisive twist. brague.indd 15brague.indd 15 19/06/2007 11:12:0019/06/2007 11:12:00 16 jew, greek and christian © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 th ree groups a central fi gure in that story of mutual defi nition is paul of tarsus. i should like to make some very introductory statements about what he introduced into the ancient world in the fi rst century of our era. th is revolution of sorts has something to do with the three human groups mentioned above. paul articulated the three elements relative to one another in a new confi guration that proved stable. to begin with, the very way in which the topic is named has a pauline ring. for we say: “jews and greeks.” we do not say “jews and pagans” more generally. th is would be anachronistic, since the word “pagan” was coined when christianity had already seized power, as a term of abuse lampooning those rednecks down in the sticks who still clung to their ancient gods. but it would make sense to say “jews and romans,” since our story takes place when the whole mediterranean area was under the roman empire. th e formula “jews and greeks” is almost a quotation from paul (rom. 1.16 et al.). th e very fact that we choose to put things this way already betrays the depth of paul’s infl uence over our parlance. but more importantly, paul’s revolution launched a process that was due to produce one of the three groups, the christians, out of an original identity with the people of israel. furthermore, this separation may have contributed, along with other factors, to the shaping of what was then crystallizing as “judaism.” th is point is diffi cult to assess, so that it can be claimed that, without paul, judaism probably would have evolved along very much the same lines as the ones along which it really did. th e rabbis applied to the new religious group their usual tactics of “killing by silence.” as a consequence, it is pretty diffi cult to pinpoint a precise allusion to paul’s teaching in the whole talmud. one of them, however, may be rabbi yehoshua b. levi’s famous sentence about the only free man being the one who sticks to the torah.1 finally, the pauline revolution had an eff ect on the “greek” element. it enabled it to enter the christian synthesis in a certain way. greek is the name of a language and of a culture, not of a religion. greek is, as it were, what is left of ancient culture when it is shorn of its religious dimension. greek is the fi rst example of what we now call “culture.” brague.indd 16brague.indd 16 19/06/2007 11:12:2519/06/2007 11:12:25 brague 17 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 now, my claim is that this rump hellenism was the indirect result of the pauline revolution. th e problem paul’s problem is not what to do, but: how is it that we do not do what we should do? paul casts it in the form of a personal confession: “for to will is present in me; but how to perform that which is good i fi nd not. for the good that i would i do not: but the evil which i would not, that i do” (rom. 7.18–19). probably, we should not take this too literally or too psychologically as a sigh of “mr. paul of tarsus.” th e literary “ego” stands for the situation of each and every son of adam. little wonder that paul echoes well-known formulas in the “pagan” literature, greek and roman in expression, of roughly the same period, like ovid, seneca or epictetus.2 we do not have to ask what to do, for we somehow know that already. what we have to look for is the reason why we do not abide by a law that we are perfectly familiar with. paul’s positive answer moves in two directions, towards the past and towards the future. towards the past, there is god’s mercy that forgives our trespasses. towards the future, there is god’s grace that enables us to do what we could not do if we were left to our own resources. th is would lead us deep into paul’s theology, where i cannot follow him here. instead, i will focus on paul’s fi rst thesis, i.e.: we know what we should do. norms in order adequately to appreciate the breadth of paul’s revolution, we have to cast a glance at the whole realm of human action. whatever we do or make is regulated by a set of rules. no human society is devoid of such rules. th ey extend from phonology and grammar to limitations of marriage, prohibiting the wedlock between some parents, and include cooking recipes, table manners, etc. in each case, some behavior is supposed to be the right one, whereas the other ones brague.indd 17brague.indd 17 19/06/2007 11:12:2519/06/2007 11:12:25 18 jew, greek and christian © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 are excluded and punished in various ways, from a sneer to death penalty. i am not allowed to marry just any female; some are excluded. i cannot utter meaningless sounds while pretending to make sense. i cannot do whatever i want to my body, but i have to paint it, tatoo it, cut it, wash it, clothe it in a defi nite way, etc. th e presence or absence of some defi nite rules may defi ne the identity of a human group, hence, the identity of the person who belongs to this group. judaism, by the way, is the paramount example of a human group defi ned by its abiding by a defi nite law and only thereby. th e presence of rules in general defi nes humanity, because it defi nes culture at large. th e basic question is kant’s second query in the critique of pure reason: “what should i do?” as kant himself observed, this question branches off from the more fundamental one: “what is man?”3 paul’s revolution implied a full-fl edged new anthropology. for the jews of the fi rst century, the question “what should i do?” was not a central issue. if they were pious, they had a ready answer with moses’ law and in the “right path” [halakha] that was already evolving from it. paul, himself an observing jew, is no exception. jesus’ original message already supposed that the rules were known: “change your heart” [metanoeite] supposes some knowledge of the direction in which we have to turn in order to fi nd god; “the reign of god is at hand” [èggiken hè basileia tou ouranou] supposes that we know what the laws of his kingdom will be; “god forgives your sins” supposes that we know which sins are forgiven, etc. th e problem already took a trickier turn when the christian mission turned towards larger circles—fi rst, probably, towards half-pagans standing on the threshold of judaism but hesitating in front of some unpleasant commands like circumcision, the so-called “god-fearing” [seboumenoi, metuentes] who did not accept the law in its entirety, but chose à la carte. ultimately, the most diffi cult question arose: what about real pagans, who simply do not have moses’ law to tell them what to do? brague.indd 18brague.indd 18 19/06/2007 11:12:2519/06/2007 11:12:25 brague 19 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 th e answer according to paul, non-jews possess another principle by which to distinguish the right from the wrong: for when the gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature [phusis] the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves [heautois … nomos]: which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience [suneidesis] also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another (rom. 2.14–15). from the point of view of the historian of ideas, paul introduced into the religious view of moral life concepts that are philosophical in origin: nature and conscience. he may have borrowed them from the kind of popular philosophical literature, mainly stoic in origin, that fl ooded the roman word. it looks like paul is “greek to the greeks,” as he claimed to be jew to the jews (1 cor. 9.20). he thinks in greek terms while addressing greeks. th e problem that paul answered by bringing onto the stage ideas from the outside, “greek” ideas, was solved by the talmudic sages in a purely immanent way, on the basis of inner-biblical history: there are, prior to moses’ law, seven commands that were given to noah and that hold good for whoever left the ark, i.e. the whole mankind.4 are paul’s two basic ideas utterly foreign to the bible (the “old testament”)? as for words, this is clear. th e old testament has no word for “nature”; the hebrew word for that is not to be found earlier than in the mishna. furthermore, this word [teva’] hasn’t anything to do with the idea of growth that greek ears felt in the word fu/sij (nature), despite scientifi c etymology (see aristotle 1957, 4.4 (1014b16–18)). paul knew enough greek to feel this (rom. 11. 21–24). but the hebraic word meant rather the cast, the mold, the type that gives a thing its character. th e idea of a moral conscience is expressed in modern hebrew by a medieval word [matspûn], which in turn is a loan translation from an arabic word [damîr]. th e oldest example quoted in klatzkin’s philosophical th esaurus is to be found in judah ibn tibbon’s hebrew translation of bahya ibn paquda’s duties of the heart, in the prologue. with that we are as late as the twelth century already (klein 1987, brague.indd 19brague.indd 19 19/06/2007 11:12:2519/06/2007 11:12:25 20 jew, greek and christian © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 376b; klatzkin 1968 (vol. 2), 260). whether the idea itself is extant in earlier times is controversial. y. leibowitz fl atly considered conscience as a pagan idea that has no place whatsoever in judaism (quoted in falk 1981, 66). i will endeavor to show that paul develops some possibilities contained in the old testament.5 pagan conceptions played the part of the midwife and helped out what was implicit. conscience in the old testament, some passages suggest that rules of conduct need not be formulated, because they are there already and have always been there. a well-known passage reads: “he hath shewed thee, o man, what is good; and what doth the lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy god?” (mic. 6.8). th e verse is never explicitly quoted in the new testament, but it may be alluded to, rather obscurely, in the first gospel: a harsh critique of the scribes and pharisees is put into jesus’ mouth, who taunts them with stressing minute details of the law and neglecting the weightier elements [ta barutera], i.e. judgment [krisis], compassion [eleos] and faith [pistis] (matt. 23.23). in micah, the context is an attempt at playing down the importance of the sacrifi cial cult. th e verb that is translated here by “to show” is often used for the instructions given by priests on the right way to offer sacrifi ces. micah may have played on the word of art and given it a twist that runs counter its original context. th e subject of the sentence is not that clear, however: who does the teaching? i have quoted the authorized version. it translates the masoretic text that has in fact the active form [higgîd], “he has told you”; but the septuagint supposes the passive form [huggad], understood as an impersonal: “it was told to you.” if we stick to the masoretic text, we still have to ask who the subject is, and the context does not help us a great deal. a further question is the content of the teaching: it might be that each of the three keywords alludes to the basic message of earlier prophets, i.e. amos (justice), hosea (love), isaiah (humility). but this does hardly more than push back the question: what those brague.indd 20brague.indd 20 19/06/2007 11:12:2619/06/2007 11:12:26 brague 21 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 three forerunners have preached is alluded to only vaguely. we do not know how to act justly, how to love, how to walk humbly. to put it in quite anachronistic terms: we do not receive any law-book, any handbook of ethics, any treatise on spirituality. now, this very imprecision may be essential and emphatically positive in nature. a similar question occurs in deuteronomy: and now, israel, what doth the lord thy god require of thee, but to fear the lord thy god, to walk in all his ways, and to love him, and to serve the lord thy god with all thy heart and all thy soul. to keep the commandments of the lord and his statutes, which i command thee this day for thy good? (10.12–13). again, the verses are never quoted in the new testament, at least in a recognizable way. th e fi rst verse sounds very much like the passage from micah. th e second, which many commentators consider as simply a later addition, defi nitely bears the stamp of deuteronomic style. it introduces the idea of divine commands. hence, the text that began with rather sketchy indications, shifts to a more precise focus and ends with a circular reference to the content of the book in which it is to be read. by so doing, the movement of the text mirrors on a smaller scale the whole evolution of later judaism: the rather vague appeal of the prophets crystallized into a whole “teaching” [torah]. and the torah was to become a code of behaviour that is supposed, at least in principle, to answer any possible question about the right path [halakha]. nature th e idea of nature is delineated in another complex of ideas. we have just seen that the basic rules of decency are known to mankind. let us ask at present what kind of attitude god can have towards this set of rules. let us have a look at the famous song of the vineyard in isaiah. th e peasant does not spare any eff ort and does for his vineyard everything that can be done. th en it is said: “and he looked that it should bring forth grapes” (5.2). as we know, he was bitterly disappointed. but i will leave this aside and focus on his attitude. th e formula is repeated brague.indd 21brague.indd 21 19/06/2007 11:12:2619/06/2007 11:12:26 22 jew, greek and christian © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 in the dialogue of reproach [rîb] in which the wine-grower addresses the men in judah: “wherefore, when i looked that it should bring forth grapes, brought it forth wild grapes?” (5.4). finally, we are given the key of the parable: this peasant is nobody less than the god of israel in his dealings with his chosen people: “he looked for judgment, but behold oppression; for righteousness, but behold a cry” (5.7). th e verb here translated by “look that, look for” [le-qawwoth] frequently means, in other contexts, “to hope.” in the former passages, other verbs were used. micah said that god “requires” [li-sh’ol] something from man, i.e. justice, pity, humility. th e deuteronomy passage in the king james version has “to require” too, though for a diff erent hebrew word [lidrosh]. th e diff erence between “expecting” and “asking” can be accounted for by the diff erent identity of the addressee: god can talk to the people and tell him what he expects. but you simply cannot speak with a vineyard. nevertheless, there is a common feature. what isaiah stresses is that the wine-grower was not expecting something extraordinary. as a rule, a vine produces grapes and not, say, bananas. growing grapes is what the vineyard spontaneously does, and the grapes should taste good provided the soil was well tilled, etc. it is the nature of plants to yield seed and fruit “after its kind [mîn]” (gen. 1.11). th is example enables us to draw a line between two kinds of actions. let us call them “asking” and “expecting.” we can ask a person to do something; we can expect from him that he will do something. in this second case, we hardly need to ask. at most, we can remind a person to do things: do not forget to do this or, more politely: i am sure that you will do that, etc. when we really must ask is when some behaviour is not natural, not spontaneous. even when god asks something from mankind, he only recalls what he expects from it. to expect is what we do when we are facing the nature of something. even when god addresses his people and gives commands, he is not looking forward to miracles, but to plain decency. th is involves that good behaviour is somehow “natural” to mankind. as a matter of course, this does not mean that we spontaneously perform just actions, brague.indd 22brague.indd 22 19/06/2007 11:12:2619/06/2007 11:12:26 brague 23 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 without our having to go through a process of education, of self-improvement, etc. th is means that such behaviour is nothing more than the way in which mankind can reach its own fulfi lment, by developing the features that make it specifi cally human up to their fullness. a contrary behaviour would thwart the progress of mankind; it would even endanger its survival in the long run. hence, deuteronomy can make at the same time, almost in the same breath, two statements: (a) the choice between good and evil is not a trifl e, what is at stake is ultimately life or death (30.15), and (b) the criterion of choice is “not hidden from thee, neither it is far off ,” far-fetched, but “very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart” (30.11, 14). curiously, this formula echoes seneca’s later words about conscience as the inner god: “god is near to you, with you, in you [prope est a te deus, tecum est, intus est]” (letters to lucilius (in seneca 1965), 41.1–2). a shift in the origin of norms what the pauline revolution achieved did not amount to simply casting away the yoke of the law. what paul did discard was the idea according to which god has to dictate rules of conduct. paul kept the idea of a set of rules, and even the idea of a divine origin of those rules, but he put the idea of a divine origin of norms at one further remove. norms are not dictated by god through the mediation of a prophet at some point of history; they are inscribed in the “heart” of man (rom. 2.15). if i may bring to bear an anachronistic opposition, they do not belong to the realm of history, but to the realm of something like “nature,” such as it was understood as god’s creation. th is has to be brought back to our memories, because the pauline revolution was misunderstood by many, from the beginning, as if it boiled down to simply casting away the yoke of the commands. now, the frequently levelled accusation of anomianism is hardly fair. paul himself, probably, had coined the catchword that “everything is permitted” [panta <moi> exestin]. he had to qualify it by adding a rider: “all things are lawful for me, but all things are not expedient; all things are lawful to me, but all things edify not” (1 cor. 10.23; see 6.12). “everything is permitted” does not mean that the boundary between good brague.indd 23brague.indd 23 19/06/2007 11:12:2619/06/2007 11:12:26 24 jew, greek and christian © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 and evil, between life and death is erased. th is means that this limit is not adequately expressed by the opposition of the permitted and the forbidden. when we address children who have no idea of electricity, we can take a short cut and say that it is forbidden to put one’s fi ngers into the electric outlet. what we really mean is that this is dangerous. some things are allowed because they are intrinsically good, whereas some other ones are forbidden because they are intrinsically bad. th e basic idea is that god does not replace our judgment of the right way to do things. no doubt, he sheds light upon it, he reminds us of some basic principles, but he never dictates what is to be done. what remained after paul’s razor was the basic survival kit of mankind. th e content of this kit is already part of the seven commands given to noah and the ten given to moses (exod. 20.1–17). we could even say that it is nothing more than the eternal tao without which mankind could not lead a human life or even, perhaps, could not live tout court. culture th ose basic rules of decency are admittedly not enough for us to answer the manifold questions that arise from human life in its personal and social dimensions. th is is obvious as for legal systems and political organisation. th is is all the more blatant if we think of the ways in which human life can fl ourish in the diff erent realms of higher culture, which involves artistic creativity, religious imagination, care and control of the body, refi nement of mores, etc. about all this, paul has nothing very much to say, barring some elementary principles about the necessity of a government to which obedience is due (rom. 13.1). as for the other elements of culture, paul probably had some smattering of greek popular literature and philosophy. he can quote from aratos (acts 17.28), epimenides (tit. 1.12) and menander (1 cor. 15.33)—all stock-phrases, anyway. but his writings betray scarcely any interest in those issues. nevertheless, the religious revolution he introduced had among its most lasting consequences a new stance towards culture, not to say the birth of the very idea of culture. brague.indd 24brague.indd 24 19/06/2007 11:12:2619/06/2007 11:12:26 brague 25 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 why? pauline christianity lacks a defi nite content, it is empty, it produced a momentous ebb that left bare the whole realm of norms. precisely for this reason, it had to fi ll itself with a content that it had to borrow from the outside. christianity has to suck into itself what was already available on the market of civilizations. th is is what it later did, fi rst with roman culture, i.e. the roman system of law and of administration, together with what the roman world already had borrowed from greek scientifi c, literary, philosophic, etc. lore. th is brings me back to my fi rst remark on things “greek.” th ere is something like greek culture only since the pauline revolution. what undoubtedly existed previously was the greek paidei/a (education, formation). it was a way of life. to be sure, paidei/a included what we call “culture,” i.e. literature and art, and even culture of the body: it was inseparably gymnastic and music, two pursuits that are, in plato’s words, “sisters.” but the package included at the same time what we call “religion,” wherefore plato is careful to sketch a “theology” too.6 th is cult addressed the gods of the po/lij (city) or, later, of the ko/smoj (world) as the stoics experienced it and as it was mirrored in the roman empire. th is cult was not palatable for jews and, for that matter, not for christians either. we cannot capture the essence of the pauline revolution by simply saying that it built a synthesis between the greek and the jewish by enabling the greek element to enter the christian synthesis. at the same time, it allowed the greek element in culture to develop as such, i.e. while keeping its otherness with regard to the synthesis in which it entered without its melting away in it. th is enables me, let me say en passant, to build a bridge between the theses developed in my last book on divine law (brague 2007b) and a previous book that i wrote more than ten years ago on nothing less than the essence of western culture (brague 2002). to cast the matter in the mold of the concepts that i coined there: “secondarity” towards judaism enabled “secondarity” towards hellenism; greek culture could be “included” and not “digested.”7 in conclusion, let me sum up my thesis: paul’s revolution may have helped rabbinic judaism to shape itself indirectly. it certainly gave brague.indd 25brague.indd 25 19/06/2007 11:12:2619/06/2007 11:12:26 26 jew, greek and christian © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 birth directly to christianity as a group diff erent from judaism. at the same time, it produced indirectly greek culture as an independent entity. paul was the father of at least two of the three groups that we are concerned with. endnotes 1. pirqey aboth 6.2. for other examples, see urbach 1979, 258, 295, 302, 427ff . on the context, see pines 1984, 247–65, esp. 256–259; my translation in pines 1997, 67–73. 2. see ovid 2004, 7.20f; seneca 1965, 21.1; epictetus 1898, 2.26.4; for jewish literature, see book of secrets (1q 27), 8–12 (garcía martinez and tigchelaar 1967, 66–68). 3. kant, kritik der reinen vernunft a 804f. / b 832f. and introduction to vorlesung über logik. in kant 1921–23, vol. 8. 4. tosefta avoda zara, 8 (9), 4 and b sanhedrin, 56a; see zuckermandel 1970, 473. maimonides 2000, commentary on sanhedrin 9.1. 5. for further discussion, see brague 2006. 6. see plato, republic 404b4–5; 379a5–6. on the greek idea of culture, see jaeger 1934. 7. more on “inclusion” and “digestion” in brague 2000; french version in brague 2007a,167–185. references aristotle 1957 metaphysica. ed. w. jaeger. oxford: oxford university press. brague, r. 2002 eccentric culture: a th eory of western civilization. tr. s. lester. south bend: saint augustine’s press. 2000 inklusion und verdauung: zwei modelle kultureller aneignung. in hermeneutische wege: hans-georg gadamer zum hundertsten, ed. g. figal, j. grondin, d. j. schmidt. tübingen: mohr. 2006 dieu ne nous demande rien. critique 62.704–705: 179–191. 2007a au moyen du moyen age: philosophies médiévales en chrétienté, judaïsme et islam. chatou: editions de la transparence. 2007b th e law of god: th e philosophic history of an idea. tr. l. cochrane. chicago: th e university of chicago press. brague.indd 26brague.indd 26 19/06/2007 11:12:2619/06/2007 11:12:26 brague 27 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 epictetus 1898 dissertationes. ed. h. schenkl. leipzig: teubner. falk, z.v. 1981 law and religion: th e jewish experience. jerusalem: mesharim. garcía martinez, f. and tigchelaar, e.j.c. 1967 th e dead sea scrolls study edition. leiden: brill. jaeger, w. 1934 paideia: die formung des griechischen menschen, vol. 1. berlin: w. de gruyter. kant, immanuel 1921–23 werke. ed. e. cassirer. berlin: cassirer. klatzkin, j. 1968 th esaurus philosophicus linguae hebraicae antiquae et recentioris, vol. 2. new york: feldheim. klein, e. 1987 a comprehensive etymological dictionary of the hebrew language for readers of english. new york: macmillan. maimonides 2000 mishneh torah. ed. s. frankel. jerusalem: shabse frankel. ovid 2004 metamorphoses. ed. r.j. tarrant. oxford: oxford university press. pines, s. 1984 on the avatars of the term ‘freedom’ [hebrew]. in between th eory and practice: essays in honor of n. rotenstreich, ed. y. yovel and p. mendesflohr, 247–265. jerusalem: magnes. pines, s., ed. 1997 la liberté de philosopher: de maïmonide à spinoza. paris: desclée de brouwer. plato 1976 opera, vol. 4. ed. j. burnet. oxford: oxford university press. seneca 1965 epistulae morales. ed. l.d. reynolds. oxford: oxford university press. brague.indd 27brague.indd 27 19/06/2007 11:12:2619/06/2007 11:12:26 28 jew, greek and christian © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 urbach, e.e. 1979 th e sages: th eir concepts and beliefs. tr. i. abrahams. jerusalem: magnes. zuckermandel, m. s., ed. 1970 tosefta, second edition. jerusalem: wahrmann. brague.indd 28brague.indd 28 19/06/2007 11:12:2719/06/2007 11:12:27 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expo. 3.1 (2009) 73–96] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v3i1.73 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 notes, insights and flashes an analysis of augustine’s argument in confessions that evil does not exist bernard g. prusak villanova university bernard.g.prusak@villanova.edu for augustine, following genesis, it is a bedrock belief that creation is good. perhaps this is the augustinian belief. but it immediately gives rise to what is perhaps the augustinian problem, namely, the problem of evil. for “[w]here then does evil come from, seeing that god is good and made all things good?” (augustine 1992, 76; 1963, 130). in book 7 of the confessions, augustine famously denies that evil exists. his argument (book 7, chapter 12) takes the form of a reductio ad absurdum. §1. analysis according to augustine (i employ in the following [augustine 1963, 140–141]): things that are good are subject to corruption.• things would not be subject to corruption if they were either • 1) supremely good or 2) not good at all. supremely good things are by definition incorruptible. things that are not good at all have nothing that could be corrupted, since corruption does harm, and harm is the diminishment of the good of a thing. what is to be demonstrated is that things that are deprived of • all good cease to exist altogether. if things can no longer be corrupted, yet go on existing, they • would be better than they were before they were corrupted. (why? unspoken premise: it is better for things to be incor-• ruptible than to be corruptible.) mailto:bernard.g.prusak@villanova.edu 74 expositions © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 but it is absurd to assert that things could become better by • being deprived of all their goodness. therefore, if things are deprived of all their goodness, they • must not exist. (again, to assert that they could exist without goodness is absurd, for it is to say that things could be in a better state [namely, incorruptibility] by becoming worse.) it follows that all things that exist are good. so long as they • exist, they are good. it also follows that evil is not a “substance,” that is, not an • existent thing, since if it were a substance it would be good, because all things that are, are inasmuch as they are good. §2. observations given augustine’s bedrock belief that creation is good, it only makes sense for him to think that things move toward evil by being corrupted or by losing good (think of a rotting piece of fruit). but what if something did not become evil through corruption (the deprivation of its good), but were evil to begin with (which is the manichean view)? augustine rules out this possibility by postulating that “god is good and made all things good.” the point of his argument is to secure this postulate: that is, to persuade us that it is credible despite the problem of evil. nevertheless, the possibility that evil might be coeval with good has not been disproven. augustine might counter that to assert that an evil thing exists is absurd for a different reason: it is absurd to assert that something without any good, and for this reason incorruptible, could be in a better state (namely, incorruptibility) than something that is good yet corruptible. the critical premise in augustine’s argument that i analyzed in §1, as well as in the counter that i just formulated for him, is the unspoken one, namely, that it is better for things to be incorruptible than to be corruptible. recall that there are, according to augustine, two ways to be incorruptible: 1) to be “supremely good”; 2) to be “not good at all.” it makes sense to say that something that is incorruptible because it is “supremely good” is better than something that is corruptible. why? notes, insights and flashes 75 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 the obvious answer is: something that is incorruptible because it is supremely good is better than something that is corruptible because the supremely good thing is, as supremely good, “more good.” but what makes the supremely good thing obviously better is its goodness, not its incorruptibility as such. in other words, it is not incorruptibility that makes the supremely good thing good; perhaps we should say instead that it is the thing’s supreme goodness that makes its incorruptibility good. the important point is that in this case it is right to say that the incorruptible (the supremely good) is better than the corruptible. but what reason do we have to agree with the claim that to be incorruptible is in every case better than to be corruptible? the case of the supremely good does not give us any reason to agree that this claim holds for something that is “not good at all.” why say that a thing that has been totally corrupted or that is not good at all—and for this reason is incorruptible— is better than when it was not corrupted or than a thing that is good yet corruptible? it seems much more sensible to reject this claim as absurd, which, however, undercuts augustine’s reductio ad absurdum. the upshot is that augustine’s argument in book 7 does not logically compel us to agree with either his conception of creation (that it is good) or his conception of evil (in terms of corruption of the good). other reasons must be given. it is interesting to consider shakespeare’s king lear in this regard. in the words of the critic a.c. bradley, king lear is the tragedy in which evil is shown in the greatest abundance…. on the one hand we see a world which generates terrible evil in profusion. further, the beings in whom this evil appears at its strongest are able, to a certain extent, to thrive. they are not unhappy, and they have power to spread misery and destruction around them…. on the other hand, this evil is merely destructive: it founds nothing, and seems capable of existing only on foundations laid by its opposite. it is also self-destructive…. thus the world in which evil appears seems to be at heart unfriendly to it. and this impression is confirmed by the fact that the convulsion of this world is due to evil, mainly in the worst forms here considered, partly in the milder forms which we call the errors or defects of the better characters. good, in the widest sense, seems thus to be the principle of life and health in the world; evil, at least in these worst forms, to be a poison. the world reacts against it 76 expositions © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 violently, and, in the struggle to expel it, is driven to devastate itself. (bradley 1929, 303–304) is shakespeare augustinian here? references augustine 1992 confessions. edited by j.j. o’donnell. oxford: oxford university press. 1963 confessions. trans. rex warner. new york: signet. bradley, a.c. 1929 shakespearean tragedy. lectures on hamlet, othello, king lear, macbeth. london: macmillan. © equinox publishing ltd. 2009, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expo. 3.1 (2009) 41–56] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v3i1.41 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 santo, santo, santo: dante’s union of prophet and theophany in paradiso 26 stephen little university of notre dame stephen.m.a.little@gmail.com abstract in paradiso 26, st. john tells the blinded dante that beatrice’s gaze has the power to restore his sight. paradoxically, beatrice’s gaze does not directly heal the poet; rather, dante sees anew when the blessed souls sing, santo, santo, santo! these words and other clues in the canto evoke the biblical theophanies of isaiah, paul, and john. dante’s direct vision of god does not come for another seven cantos; why then does he allude to several theophanies at the significant moment when he regains his vision? focusing on one source for the santo verse—the sanctus in the mass—i propose that dante does depict a theophany. he has a revelation of god—as the mystical body of christ—and of himself as a member of it. dante is united to his own theophany. keywords: dante; divine comedy; theophany sì com’ io tacqui, un dolcissimo canto risonò per lo cielo, e la mia donna dicea con li altri: “santo, santo, santo!” as soon as i was silent, the sweetest song resounded through that heaven, and my lady chanted with the others: ‘holy, holy, holy!’ (dante paradiso, 26.67–69)1 this tercet marks the midpoint of paradiso xxvi in dante’s comedy. dante-pilgrim has arrived on the threshold of the primo mobile, the nexus between the created world and the empyrean. he has been blind since the end of canto xxv, when he tried to see st. john’s body withmailto:stephen.m.a.little@gmail.com 42 santo, santo, santo: dante’s union of prophet and theophany in paradiso 26 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 in the latter’s covering of light. during the first half of canto xxvi, john questions him regarding charity. at the end of his interrogation, dante-pilgrim hears beatrice and the other souls present singing, “holy, holy, holy!” [santo, santo, santo!]. according to the general consensus among dante scholars, these words allude to the biblical and liturgical phrase, sanctus, sanctus, sanctus, an incipit that also occurs in the biblical books of isaiah and the apocalypse; in each of the latter, the sanctus marks a theophany. by invoking the theophanies of the biblical prophets, dante seems to suggest that he, too, has a prophetic vision at this point. however, the only figures around him are human souls, though of course god’s presence is evident to the pilgrim; where, if anywhere, is dante’s theophany? at stake in this question is how we understand dante’s self-presentation of his prophetic vocation. for he appears to invoke several theophanies of other prophets at this point. if therefore dante-poet’s theophany differs from theirs, he is making an important point about his own nature as prophet; but if he alludes to their theophanies while leaving such a vision out at this point, he could be making a different point entirely. as we have said, the healing follows immediately after dante’s sanctus, a text with two biblical precedents, both of which mark theophanies. the first of these appears in the old testament, at the theophany of isaiah. just before isaiah receives his prophetic commission, he sees two seraphim attending god in his temple, singing: sanctus, sanctus, sanctus dominus, deus exercituum; plena est omnis terra gloria ejus. holy, holy, holy lord, god of armies; full is all the earth with your glory. (isa. 6:3)2 at this moment, the protagonist isaiah exclaims: væ mihi, quia tacui, quia vir pollutus labiis ego sum woe is me, because i have held my peace; because i am a man of unclean lips (isa. 6:5) the words “for i have been silent” [quia tacui], which the doueyreims translates as “for i have held my peace,” are evoked in dante’s phrase “as soon as i was silent” [sì com’ io tacqui] which thus both stephen little 43 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 echoes and contrasts with isaiah. whereas isaiah exclaims “for i have been silent” just after hearing the sanctus, dante-poet writes “as soon as i was silent” just before the pilgrim hears the hymn. isaiah breaks his silence and professes unclean lips, or speech, while dante-poet ends his speech and is applauded, by means of the sanctus. isaiah’s speech is only beginning; dante’s is drawing to an end, and his silence calls attention at this moment to the fact that he has not been silent—he has spoken out. he has spoken prophetically. dante does not situate only himself in the theophanic scene from isaiah; he does the same to beatrice, drawing on an image in isaiah’s account. after the latter confesses his silence and incapacity for pure speech, one of the seraphim approaches him: et volavit ad me unus de seraphim, et in manu ejus calculus, quem forcipe tulerat de altari, et tetigit os meum, et dixit: ecce tetigit hoc labia tua, et auferetur iniquitas tua, et peccatum tuum mundabitur. and one of the seraphims flew to me, and in his hand was a live coal, which he had taken with the tongs off the altar. and he touched my mouth, and said: behold this hath touched thy lips, and thy iniquities shall be taken away, and thy sin shall be cleansed. (isa. 6:6-7) the seraph purifies isaiah’s lips with the sacred coal from the altar of the lord. in paradiso xxvi, beatrice serves a similar function. she had been sent to dante from heaven (back in the purgatorio), and now, as st. john says, she has the power to heal dante’s sight [la virtù ch’ebbe la man d’anania]. and like the seraph healing isaiah, she heals dantepilgrim at the singing the sanctus. dante not only sets himself up as revelatory prophet in this scene, he also positions beatrice in the role of angel, literally “one who is sent,” on the prophet’s behalf. in isaiah’s scene, there are actually two angels; it would be significant, therefore, if we were to find two angel-figures also in dante’s account. such seems to be the case if we consider the other biblical source for the sanctus, the new testament book of the apocalypse, in which four angelic beings, called “living creatures” [animalia], sing before the throne of god in heaven. the author of the apocalypse writes: et ecce sedes posita erat in cælo, et supra sedem sedens. … et in conspectu 44 santo, santo, santo: dante’s union of prophet and theophany in paradiso 26 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 sedis tamquam mare vitreum simile crystallo: et in medio sedis, et in circuitu sedis quatuor animalia plena oculis ante et retro. et animal primum simile leoni, et secundum animal simile vitulo, et tertium animal habens faciem quasi hominis, et quartum animal simile aquilæ volanti. et quatuor animalia, singula eorum habebant alas senas: et in circuitu, et intus plena sunt oculis: et requiem non habebant die ac nocte, dicentia: sanctus, sanctus, sanctus dominus deus omnipotens, qui erat, et qui est, et qui venturus est. behold, there was a throne set in heaven, and upon the throne one sitting. … and in the sight of the throne was, as it were, a sea of glass like to crystal: and in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne, were four living creatures, full of eyes before and behind. and the first living creature was like a lion: and the second living creature like a calf: and the third living creature, having the face, as it were, of a man: and the fourth living creature was like an eagle flying. and the four living creatures had each of them six wings: and round about and within they are full of eyes. and they rested not day and night, saying: holy, holy, holy, lord god almighty, who was and who is and who is to come. (rev. 4:2, 4:6-8) in the comedy, beatrice, john, and “the others” [li altri] take over the role of the “living creatures” as singers of the sanctus. this is particularly significant in the case of john: by shifting him from the role of author/protagonist to that of singer of the sanctus, dante opens up the role of apocalyptic protagonist—and theophanic prophet—for himself. nor is this all; after john’s final question to the pilgrim, dantepoet records: non fu latente la santa intenzione de l’aguglia di cristo, anzi m’accorsi dove volea menar mia professione. the holy purpose of christ’s eagle was not hidden. indeed, i readily perceived the road on which he set my declaration on its way. (26.52–54) dante terms john “the eagle of christ” [l’aguglia di cristo], drawing attention to john’s link to the eagle in sacred art. the four “living creatures” entered christian art early on as symbols for the four evangelists: matthew, mark, luke, and john. initially, which creature was associstephen little 45 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 ated with which evangelist was somewhat variable; by dante’s time, though, the association of each creature with one of the four evangelists was well established. john’s connection with the eagle, in particular, was historically one of the most stable (jenner 1910, 100–102). as john-qua-living creature and eagle joins in the sanctus, he links dante’s hymn back to its occurrence in revelations—and isaiah. he is the other primary angelic figure in dante’s scene. lest it appear that the theophanic nature of this scene is tenuously based only on dante’s use of the sanctus, let us observe that dante also evokes the theophany of paul on the road to damascus. at the end of paradiso xxv, he tried to perceive the body of st. john the evangelist—a body which, john tells him, is but earth back on earth (25.118–124). however, john assures dante-pilgrim, at the beginning of canto xxvi, that his sight will be restored: “perché la donna che per questa dia regïon ti conduce, ha ne lo sguardo la virtù ch’ebbe la man d’anania.” “for the lady who guides you through this holy place possesses in her glance the power the hand of ananias had.” (26.10–12) “the hand of ananias” [la man d’anania] recalls the story of the conversion of st. paul in acts 15:1-28. on the road to damascus, seeking to persecute the church, paul had a vision of christ—once again, a theophany—that left him blind. he entered damascus, where a christian named ananias laid hands on him and cured him. paul then joined the church and actively sought to spread his new faith. beatrice’s glance has the same power to cure blindness, and thus to designate dante as a new paul, a new prophet sent to convert his world. however, it is not her gaze alone that marks dante’s restoration of vision. rather, the pilgrim’s healing comes immediately upon hearing beatrice and the other blessed souls cry out, “holy, holy, holy!” dante-poet thus combines the sanctus with the moment of healing that signifies paul’s entry into the church and designation as a speaker of god’s revelation—a prophet. in other words, dante appropriates paul’s theophany and prophetic calling for his own at the same moment that he invokes those of isaiah 46 santo, santo, santo: dante’s union of prophet and theophany in paradiso 26 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 and john of patmos through the sanctus. dante appears to indicate quite strongly that this moment, marking a step in his development as prophet, draws on these three theophanic scenes from the bible. again we return to the question, where is dante’s own theophany? a clue may be found in the stanza immediately preceding the one with dante’s sanctus. this verse is the climax of dante’s responses to john concerning charity, the theological virtue of love. remember that dante believed john the protagonist of the apocalypse to be the same as the author of the johannine epistles, in which we read: carissimi, diligamus nos invicem: quia caritas ex deo est. et omnis qui diligit, ex deo natus est, et cognoscit deum. qui non diligit, non novit deum: quoniam deus caritas est. dearly beloved, let us love one another: for charity is of god. and every one that loveth is born of god and knoweth god. he that loveth not knoweth not god: for god is charity. (1 john 4:7-8) in this verse, god’s essence is defined as love; but it is also something in which men can participate. love is the locus of the union between god and man. it is therefore significant that dante’s responses to john climax with the following declaration: le fronde onde s’infronda tutto l’orto de l’ortolano etterno, am’ io cotanto quanto da lui a lor di bene è porto. i love the leaves with which the garden of the eternal gardener is in leaf in measure of the good he has bestowed on them. (26.64–66) the theme in these verses is divine love, both as flowing from god and as an act of man. this paradoxical love is the context of dante’s sanctus and healing. let us see, then, if we can glean some insight from these verses. while it is obvious that the “eternal gardener” [l’ortolano etterno] is god, dante scholars still debate the nature of the garden and the leaves. many commentators, as early as jacopo della lana and as late as charles singleton, understand “the garden” [l’orto] to be all of creation, and “the leaves” [le fronde] to be all creatures. to cite one examstephen little 47 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 ple, singleton’s commentary: “dante is saying that he loves the various creatures of god’s creation (the leaves of his garden) that make up the world, in proportion to the goodness which their maker (the eternal gardener) in his predestination has bestowed upon them” (singleton 1970–1975, 26.64–66).3 this interpretation would have dante expressing love for, in part, the old order of creation, that which has its origin in the old adam, not the new adam. so, too, for the similar view that interprets the leaves as all men, not simply those within the church, though not necessarily all creatures.4 while there is in theory nothing wrong with loving the older creation—indeed, dante does describe his love for it in line 58 and elsewhere—it seems odd that a discourse on divine love, situated in a context of dante’s entrance into the new creation and becoming a new adam, should climax with a look backwards, as it were, to the world being left behind. another group of commentators, however, interprets the “garden” as the church militant ( the christians still alive on earth), and the “leaves” to be those humans who have been, in umberto bosco and giovanni reggio’s words, “touched by grace” [toccati dalla grazia]: le fronde onde s’infronda tutto l’orto dell’ortolano eterno, indica il prossimo, o, meglio, l’insieme dei cristiani redenti e in grazia di dio. le metafore nascono dall’immagine giovannea… : dio è l’ortolano etterno, l’orto la chiesa militante, già così indicata in pd xii 72 e 104, le fronde non sono tutti gli uomini, ma, come è detto nel v. 66, gli uomini toccati dalla grazia. “the leaves with which the whole garden of the eternal gardener is in leaf” indicate one’s neighbor—or better, all christians who are redeemed and in god’s grace. the metaphors arise from the johannine images… : god is the eternal gardener, the garden is the church militant (as indicated already in paradiso xii.72 and 104), the leaves are not all men but, as said in verse 66, those men touched by grace. (bosco and reggio 1979, 26.64–66)5 similarly, emilio pasquini and antonio quaglio explain that “[the] leaves [are] the souls who live in the garden (the church militant) that has been redeemed by the gardener, the ‘vine-grower’ of the gospel [god the father]” (pasquini and quaglio 1982).6 this view is defended by bosco and reggio based on the following passages from paradiso 48 santo, santo, santo: dante’s union of prophet and theophany in paradiso 26 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 xii: domenico fu detto; e io ne parlo sì come de l’agricola che cristo elesse a l’orto suo per aiutarlo. he was called dominic, and i shall speak of him as that laborer chosen by christ to help him dress and keep his garden. (12.70–72) di lui [domenico] si fecer poi diversi rivi onde l’orto catolico si riga, sì che i suoi arbuscelli stan più vivi. from him there sprang still other streams from which the catholic garden draws its moisture, so that its saplings grow with greater vigor. (12.103–105) in each of these cases, the garden appears to refer to the church on earth. in light of john 15, however, one could argue that the mystical body is so intimately united that, insofar as st. dominic helped a part of the church, he helped the whole. perhaps this is demanding a greater consistency in dante’s use of “garden” than need be, however. in any event, bosco and reggio themselves also define the leaves as “men touched by grace,” and not all men touched by grace happen to be still on earth; some are in purgatory, others in heaven. “garden” would then take on a wider sense in canto xxvi, with dante-pilgrim professing love for the entire mystical body of christ. this last possibility, that the garden is the mystical body of christ, seems more consonant with the subtext of dante’s allusion, john 15.7 there the biblical author integrates the themes of charity and the union of all christians in christ. in his last supper discourse, christ says, ego sum vitis vera, et pater meus agricola est. … ego sum vitis, vos palmites: qui manet in me, et ego in eo, hic fert fructum multum, quia sine me nihil potestis facere. … sicut dilexit me pater, et ego dilexi vos. manete in dilectione mea. i am the vine: and my father is the husbandman. … i am the vine: you the branches. he that abideth in me, and i in him, the same beareth much fruit: for without me you can do nothing. … as the father hath stephen little 49 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 loved me, i also have loved you. abide in my love. (john 15:1, 15:5, 15:9) the vine is christ, the father is the vine-grower, and the branches are christians. a strict parallel with dante’s metaphor makes his garden equivalent to the vine, christ; his leaves to the branches, christians; and the gardener to the vine-grower, god the father. this would support the idea that dante-pilgrim’s metaphor expresses the unity of all christians in christ, the unity of the church that is the latter’s mystical body. moreover, both metaphors are contextualized in a discussion of love. what kind of love is the love in this gospel passage? not a love for all creatures, but for fellow christians. in short, it is a command to love the other members of the mystical body of christ. there are additional reasons to prefer the garden-as-mystical body interpretation over the old creation one. both john’s and dante’s metaphors are contextualized in a discussion of love. in the former case, christ describes not a love for all creatures, but for fellow christians; he commands his followers to love the other members of the mystical body of christ. then, too, there is the parallel between dante’s metaphor and the song of songs, in which the bride is compared to a garden: “my sister, my spouse, is a garden enclosed, a garden enclosed, a fountain sealed up” [hortus conclusus soror mea, sponsa,/hortus conclusus, fons signatus] (song of songs, 4.12). in the middle ages, the bride/garden was interpreted as an image of the church, the bride of christ—and also his mystical body. it is not unthinkable that the italian orto recalls the latin hortus as an image of the mystical body. one might object to the garden-qua-mystical body on the grounds that one could interpret christ as the gardener, not the garden.8 such critics point to the passage from the song of songs just mentioned and to john 20.15. in the gospel passage, mary magdalene encounters the risen christ, but mistakes his identity: “she, thinking that it was the gardener…” [illa existimans quia hortulanus esset…]. the similar terminology, ortolano and hortulanus, would suggest that christ is the gardener of dante as well as john. fortunately, the two views of christ— as garden and gardener—can be harmonized. for this purpose we can turn to st. augustine’s commentary on john 15:1-3, the passage that serves as dante’s precedent: 50 santo, santo, santo: dante’s union of prophet and theophany in paradiso 26 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 numquid unum sunt agricola et vitis? secundum hoc ergo vitis christus, secundum quod ait: pater maior me est; secundum autem id quod ait: ego et pater unum sumus, et ipse agricola est. … denique cum de patre tamquam de agricola dixisset quod infructuosos palmites tollat, fructuosos autem purget ut plus afferant fructum, continuo etiam seipsum mundatorem palmitum ostendens: iam vos, inquit, mundi estis propter sermonem quem locutus sum vobis. ecce et ipse mundator est palmitum, quod est agricolae, non uitis officium, qui etiam palmites operarios suos fecit. are the vine-grower and the vine one? christ is the vine according to the passage in which he says, “the father is greater than me”; but then he says, “the father and i are one,” and he is the vine-grower. … finally when he says that the unfruitful branches are removed by the father as by the vine-grower, but the fruitful are pruned that they may bear more fruit, immediately he also shows the purifier of the branches to be himself: “now you,” he says,” are clean because of the word which i spoke to you.” see, he is the purifier of the branches, which is the office of the vine-grower and not the vine, who yet makes the branches his workers. (augustine 1976, 2.4–9, 2.15–20)9 in other words, both the father and the son are the vine-grower, through their intimate union; and the son is also the vine. the two interpretations of the garden metaphor, both finding support in scripture, can thus be brought into harmony. christ in union with god the father is the “eternal gardener”; christ in union with his mystical body is the “garden.” dante and the rest of the mystical body, rooted in christ as the garden, are the “leaves” or “branches” [fronde]—yet mystically also co-workers with christ and the father. thus, dante’s final answer to st. john becomes an expression of love for the church, the mystical body of christ. since the only persons visible to him at this point are the saints, the members of the mystical body of christ, could these somehow be the focus of his theophany? it is noteworthy that dante replaces the biblical singers of the sanctus, the angels, with the humans in the mystical body. is there a precedent for the mystical body singing the sanctus? yes, within the context of the mass. until now, dante scholarship has focused on the te deum hymn as the primary liturgical source for dante’s “holy, holy, holy,” as stephen little 51 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 in kevin brownlee’s “why the angels sing italian” (1984); the sanctus of the mass has never before been used extensively to interpret these verses of the comedy. yet dante follows the mass exactly by putting the sanctus in the mouths of humans instead of angels. in the biblical texts in isaiah and in the apocalypse, it is angelic beings who sing the sanctus, never humans; even in the te deum, the words “holy, holy, holy” are put in the mouths of angels—they are effectively quoted, not sung as direct speech on the part of men and women. only in the mass do we find human beings directly singing the sanctus. in the mass, therefore, we find the key to dante’s missing theophany. the liturgy of the mass unites the faithful in the eucharist, the sacramental body of christ, for the very purpose of unifying them in the mystical body of christ; thus the mass is a fitting sub-text for dante’s scene. but the theme of the mystical body’s unity also arises specifically from the mass’ sanctus itself. for, as liturgical scholar josef jungmann notes in his book the mass of the roman rite, the text of the mass’ sanctus serves to remind the community of believers of two things (1986, 135). the first part of the sanctus—“holy, holy, holy lord god of hosts. full are heaven and earth with your glory.”10— recalls the theophanies of isaiah and revelation, and thus reminds the christian that he or she participates in the liturgy of heaven. but there is a second part—“hosanna in the highest. blessed is he who comes in the name of the lord. hosanna in the highest”—which recalls the words with which the crowds greeted christ’s entry into jerusalem on palm sunday. according to jungmann, this second half reminds the christian that he or she is destined for the heavenly jerusalem. the sanctus in the mass thus signifies that all christians form part of a community that exists both on earth and in heaven—the mystical body of christ. that is the mode through which god manifests himself in dante’s theophanic moment. dante uses the sanctus of the mass to create a theophany both similar to and yet different from those of isaiah and john. as with the two biblical prophets, the sanctus marks dante-pilgrim’s vision of god. unlike them, however, his theophany is of god revealed in the mystical body of christ, the unity of all believers with and in god. the key consequence is that, as a member of the church, 52 santo, santo, santo: dante’s union of prophet and theophany in paradiso 26 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 he is himself united to the mystical body; consequently, and also unlike the biblical theophanies, dante is united to his own vision. he sees the divine, and yet in a mystical sense he is also divinized. united to christ and his church, dante sees fulfilled in himself the sanctus’ promise of divine unity. he thus becomes a new kind of prophet, capable of perfectly communicating the divine reality which he has seen because he is united to it. prophet and theophany, poet and revelation, are one. notes 1. all dante quotes are from the paradiso. except where noted, i have used the giorgio petrocchi text and robert and jean hollander’s translation of the paradiso, as available online at the princeton dante project (http://etcweb.princeton. edu/dante/pdp/), and the latin vulgate with the douay-rheims translation for the bible. see works cited for more information. as is usual when citing the comedy, i have used the canto and verse numbers rather than page numbers. 2. my translation. see previous note and works cited for information on biblical texts used in this article. 3. all references to commentaries are given by the canto and verse of the paradiso to which they refer. all commentaries used in this article are the versions available online through the dartmouth dante project (http://dante.dartmouth.edu/). commentaries are listed in the bibliography by commentator. 4. see also the following comments on this passage: alighieri 1340–1342; barbi and casini 1921; benvenuto da imola 1375-80; codice cassinese 1350–1375[?]; daniello 1568; lancia 1333; mestica 1921–1922 (who includes not only all men but all “intelligent creatures”); tozer 1901; vellutello 1544. 5. my translation. the same position, or a similar one, is taken by chimenz 1962; gabriele 1525–1541; giacalone 1968; porena 1946–1948; sapegno 1955–1957. (tommaseo 1837 takes an equivalent view of the orto and fronde, but interprets the ortolano as christ.) 6. “[le] fronde [sono] le anime che vivono nell’orto (la chiesa militante) redento dall’ortolano, l’«agricola» evangelico.” 7. cf. bosco and reggio 1979, 26.64–66; scartazzini 1900, 26.65; singleton 1970–1975, 26.64–66. 8. as in the commentaries: andreoli 1856; francesco da buti 1385–1395; tomhttp://etcweb.princeton.edu/dante/pdp/ http://etcweb.princeton.edu/dante/pdp/ mailto:stephen.m.a.little@gmail.com stephen little 53 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 maseo 1837; vellutello 1544. 9. my translation. 10. my translation. references alighieri, dante 1994 la commedia secondo l’antica vulgata. trans. giorgio petrocchi. firenze: casa editrice le lettere. 2007 paradiso. translated by robert hollander and jean hollander. new york: doubleday. alighieri, pietro 1340–42 petri allegherii super dantis ipsius genitoris comoediam commentarium, nunc primum in lucem editum... florence: g. piatti, 1845. http://dante. dartmouth.edu/. andreoli, raffaello 1856 la divina commedia di dante alighieri col commento di raffaello andreoli. florence: g. barbèra, 1887. http://dante.dartmouth.edu/. anonymous 1865 il codice cassinese della divina commedia...per cura dei monaci benedettini della badia di monte cassino. 1350–1375[?]. tipografia di monte cassino. augustine 1976 tract. 80 in joan. catalogus verborum quae in operibus sancti augustini inveniuntur. vol. 1. eindhoven, augustijnendreef 15: thesaurus linguae augustinianae. barbi, s.a., and tommaso casini 1921 la divina commedia di dante alighieri con il commento di tommaso casini, 6a ed. rinnovata e accresciuta per cura di s. a. barbi. florence: g.c. sansoni, 1944. http://dante.dartmouth.edu/. benvenuto da imola 1375–80 benevenuti de rambaldis de imola comentum super dantis aldigherij comoediam, nunc primum integre in lucem editum sumptibus guilielmi warren http://dante.dartmouth.edu/ http://dante.dartmouth.edu/ http://dante.dartmouth.edu/ http://dante.dartmouth.edu/ 54 santo, santo, santo: dante’s union of prophet and theophany in paradiso 26 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 vernon, curante jacobo philippo lacaita. florence: g. barbèra, 1887. http:// dante.dartmouth.edu/. biblia sacra juxta vulgatam clementinam 2005 m. tweedale, ed. n.p.: published privately online at http://vulsearch. sourceforge.net/. http://www.newadvent.org/bible/index.html. bosco, umberto, and giovanni reggio 1979 la divina commedia a cura di umberto bosco e giovanni reggio. florence: le monnier. http://dante.dartmouth.edu/. brownlee, kevin 1984 why the angels speak italian: dante as vernacular poeta in paradiso xxv. poetics today 5(3): 597–610. doi:10.2307/1772382. chimenz, siro a. 1962 la divina commedia di dante alighieri a cura di siro a. chimenz. turin: utet. http://dante.dartmouth.edu/. daniello, bernardino 1568 dante con l’espositione di m. bernard[in]o daniello da lucca sopra la sua comedia dell’inferno, del purgatorio, & del paradiso.... venice: pietro da fino. http://dante.dartmouth.edu/. francesco da buti 1385–95 commento di francesco da buti sopra la divina commedia di dante allighieri. pisa: fratelli nistri, 1858-62. http://dante.dartmouth.edu/. fischer, bonifatius, and robert weber, eds. 1994 biblia sacra: iuxta vulgatam versionem. ed. quartam emendatam. stuttgart: deutsche bibelgesellschaft. gabriele, trifon 1525–41 annotationi nel dante fatte con m. trifon gabriele in bassano. bologna: commissione per i testi di lingua, 1993. http://dante.dartmouth.edu/. giacalone, giuseppe 1968 la divina commedia a cura di giuseppe giacalone. rome: a. signorelli. http://dante.dartmouth.edu/. http://dante.dartmouth.edu/ http://dante.dartmouth.edu/ http://vulsearch.sourceforge.net/ http://vulsearch.sourceforge.net/ http://www.newadvent.org/bible/index.html http://dante.dartmouth.edu/ http://www.jstor.org/pss/1772382 http://dante.dartmouth.edu/ http://dante.dartmouth.edu/ http://dante.dartmouth.edu/ http://dante.dartmouth.edu/ http://dante.dartmouth.edu/ stephen little 55 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 the holy bible 2005 richard challoner, ed. english college at douay, 1609 (old testament). english college at rheims, 1582 (new testament). http://www.newadvent.org/bible/index.html. jacopo della lana 1324–28 comedia di dante degli allaghieri col commento di jacopo della lana bolognese, a cura di luciano scarabelli. bologna: tipografia regia, 1866–1867. http://dante.dartmouth.edu/. jenner, henry 1910 christian symbolism. chicago, il: a.c. mcclurg. jungmann, josef a. 1986 the mass of the roman rite: its origins and development (missarum sollemnia). vol. 2. westminster, md: christian classics. lancia, andrea 1333 l’ottimo commento della divina commedia. testo inedito d’un contemporaneo di dante.... pisa: n. capurro, 1827–1829. http://dante.dartmouth. edu/. mestica, enrico 1921–22 la commedia di dante alighieri...esposta e commentata da enrico mestica. florence: r. bemporad. http://dante.dartmouth.edu/. pasquini, emilio, and antonio quaglio 1982 commedia di dante alighieri, a cura di emilio pasquini e antonio quaglio. milan: garzanti. http://dante.dartmouth.edu/. porena, manfredi 1946–48 la divina commedia di dante alighieri commentata da manfredi porena. bologna: zanichelli, 1981. http://dante.dartmouth.edu/. sapegno, natalino 1955–57 la divina commedia a cura di natalino sapegno. florence: la nuova italia, 1968. http://dante.dartmouth.edu/. http://www.newadvent.org/bible/index.html http://www.newadvent.org/bible/index.html http://dante.dartmouth.edu/ http://dante.dartmouth.edu/ http://dante.dartmouth.edu/ http://dante.dartmouth.edu/ http://dante.dartmouth.edu/ http://dante.dartmouth.edu/ http://dante.dartmouth.edu/ 56 santo, santo, santo: dante’s union of prophet and theophany in paradiso 26 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 scartazzini, g.a. 1900 la divina commedia di dante alighieri riveduta nel testo e commentata da g.a. scartazzini. 2nd ed. leipzig: brockhaus. http://dante.dartmouth. edu/. singleton, charles 1970–75 the divine comedy, translated, with a commentary, by charles s. singleton. princeton: princeton university press. http://dante.dartmouth.edu/. tommaseo, niccolò 1837 la divina commedia con le note di niccolò tommaseo e introduzione di umberto cosmo. 1865 ed. turin: utet, 1927. tozer, h.f. 1901 an english commentary on dante’s divina commedia. oxford: clarendon press. http://dante.dartmouth.edu/. vellutello, alessandro 1544 dante con l’esposizione di cristoforo landino et d’alessandro vellutello sopra la sua comedia dell’inferno, del purgatorio & del paradiso… venice: f. marcolini. http://dante.dartmouth.edu/. http://dante.dartmouth.edu/ http://dante.dartmouth.edu/ http://dante.dartmouth.edu/ http://dante.dartmouth.edu/ http://dante.dartmouth.edu/ © equinox publishing ltd. 2008, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expositions 2.2 (2008) 157–162] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v2i2.157 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 enhancing me, enhancing you: academic enhancement as a moral duty muireann quigley centre for social ethics and policy and institute for science, ethics, and innovation school of law, university of manchester introduction enhancements come in many shapes and forms: physical enhancements, cognitive enhancements, emotional enhancements, and, there is even a new kid on the block, moral enhancements (see persson and savulescu 2008; douglas 2008). it is, however, the issue of cognitive enhancement that really gets the debate going. the controversy created by the commentary “professor’s little helper” in nature at the end of last year is an illustration of this point. it is a piece that is ostensibly about the increasingly common “off-label and non-prescription” uses of drugs such as methylphenidate (ritalin) and modafinil (provigil) (sahakian and morein-zamir 2007, 1157). nonetheless, reading the ensuing news stories and online comments one could be forgiven for thinking that the article was solely about the use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by ailing university professors and students desperate to gain an academic edge. while not yet a professor (i am instead a “lecturer”), and i hope not yet ailing, i was intrigued by the commentary and some of the ensuing responses to it. as pointed out by bernard prusak in his introduction to this controversy, the concerns arising often focus on issues of “safety…, fairness and justice…, coercive pressure…, whether the use of such drugs is in fact unprecedented…, and…whether pharmacological enhancements are different in a morally significant way from more mundane forms of life-enhancers.” all of these concerns are generally raised in an attempt to answer the question of whether or not a particular type of enhancement, or means of achieving that enhancement, is morally permissible. here, however, i do not want to look at whether cognitive enhancement by chemical means is permissible or not. this has been dealt with at length elsewhere (see harris 2007; rose 2006; and sandel 2007). for the purposes of this article, i am going to 158 enhancing me, enhancing you © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 start with the premise that a competent individual crosses no moral boundary when voluntarily choosing to take drugs such as ritalin and provigil purely for the purposes of augmenting cognitive abilities. from this premise that cognitive enhancement by chemical means is morally permissible, i am going to take the argument one step further and suggest that, for academics at least, there might even be a moral duty to do so. although i am sure there will be many objections to this suggestion, i will start by addressing just one possible objection, and i will then move on to sketch out an argument in support of the contention that academics might be under an obligation to take steps to cognitively enhance themselves. academia, sport, and the ethics of cheating the possible objection that i have in mind is that it is cheating to use cognitive enhancing drugs. this objection can be found implicitly in an article entitled “brain enhancement is wrong, right?” by benedict carey in the new york times. in it, he says: so far no one is demanding that asterisks be attached to nobels, pulitzers or lasker awards. government agents have not been raiding anthropology departments, riffling book bags, testing professors’ urine. and if there are illicit trainers on campuses, shady tutors with wraparound sunglasses and ties to basement labs in italy, no one has exposed them. (carey 2008) the analogy here is, of course, with doping in sport. the implicit accusation is that academics who take drugs to enhance certain aspects of their cognitive function are cheating. thomas douglas points out “[e]nhancement in sport and enhancement outside of sport are often discussed in parallel” (douglas 2007); but, if you will excuse the pun, these two playing fields are not the same. academia and sport operate under different sets of rules and have different sets of expectations placed upon them. in the context of sport, bennett foddy and julian savulescu point out that “doping is the most widespread method of cheating” (foddy and savulescu 2007). cheating it most certainly is, but the reason that the taking of enhancement type drugs is cheating in this context is because of the rules of the game that athletes are playing. whatever the particular sport that individual athletes take part in, they are engaging in that sport at a competitive level which has preset criteria for their participation. one of those criteria is that competitors do not take certain chemical substances. this is the deal that they must agree to. as a result, if individual athletes choose to take banned quigley 159 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 substances, they are contravening both the rules and the ideals of fair play and sportsmanship (see further douglas 2007). if, however, the rules changed and these banned substances were permitted, then taking these substances would no longer be cheating. the equivalent situation in the academic context is, perhaps, that of students taking drugs in order to perform well on examinations. yet even in this situation, the accusation of cheating can only be levelled in virtue of the rules of the game. if the rules are such that they prohibit the use of chemical enhancers, or at least certain classes of them, then it would be wrong to use them in that particular circumstance. we are, however, free to change the rules and permit the use of enhancers; if we were to do so, this use would no longer be cheating. this is true whether we are talking about education or sport. of course, if we were to allow the use of these enhancers—for the sake of argument, let’s say modafinil—it might well be the case that students would either choose not to use them or find that they could not afford them.1 such inequality is not, however, an argument in itself for proving that the use of modafinil by students should not be permitted. after all, there are other enhancement type technologies out there that students choose not to use or cannot afford: for example, availing of a private tutor. if enhancements are ever to be deemed morally problematic, then the problem will be not the enhancements themselves, but the context in which they are used. despite the obvious similarities between cheating in an examination-type situation and cheating in sport, no such equivalence exists for those of us who work as academics. there might be a resemblance in so far as there is definitely an element of competition in academia, but this is where the comparison must end. while i was quite tickled by carey’s notion of university campuses being raided to test professors for illicit substances, the level playing field is not the paradigm upon which academia is built. far from it, academia in fact encourages the participants in the academic game to excel, push the bounds of knowledge, and stand out from their fellows. and we reward those who do so with promotion, large research grants, and prizes such as “nobels, pulitzers or laskers” (carey 2008). so perhaps the enhancement of cognitive abilities is not inimical to the role of an academic, but actually a requirement of it. academics: a duty to enhance? if academics are to act as role models for the next generation, then they may in fact have a moral obligation to take cognitive enhancers. the intellectual and moral shape of the nation in which they teach is arguably in their hands as educators. this brings with it a not insubstantial responsibility to fulfil 160 enhancing me, enhancing you © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 their role and discharge any corresponding duties. while it has been noted in studies that enhancement drugs are of benefit to “military commanders and air-traffic controllers,” nick bostrom claims in a letter published in nature on “professor’s little helper” that [o]ther jobs are just as important and intellectually taxing—including the jobs of many scientists and academics. anything that can help our brains deal better with the complex challenges of the twenty-first century is to be not only welcomed but actively sought. (bostrom 2008) to amplify this point, it is clear that there is an expectation upon the researchers and lecturers in our academic institutions not only to be competent in their roles, but to excel in them. it is not acceptable for them to sit comfortably on their laurels, happy with the knowledge and skills they have attained thus far in life. as part of their jobs, they are supposed to be constantly in pursuit of new knowledge or ways to push the bounds in their chosen fields. they currently do so through the development and expansion of their knowledge and skills base, including those needed for teaching, researching, publishing, presenting, obtaining and managing research grants, and public engagement activities. in this way they are continually improving and expanding both their cognitive and other abilities. these more traditional means of cognitive enhancement are undoubtedly helped chemically through imbibing unhealthy amounts of caffeine. the constant improvement and augmentation of their abilities helps them to be intellectually sharper, perform better at tasks, and produce higher level research. the point that i am making is that it is not simply considered to be a matter of personal preference whether or not academics take the necessary steps to fulfil and excel in their roles; it is seen, by both the institutions that employ them and society at large, as an obligation that is part and parcel of the job. in this respect, cognitive enhancement in academia may be considered a duty. it is one that is generated by virtue of the role that academics have taken on. it is an obligation generated by the special relationship that they have both directly to their students in their role as educators and more generally to society in their role as researchers. it is an obligation to produce the best possible kind of research and deliver the best possible teaching. if we are content that our cognitive development as academics through skills development, training, and the attainment of knowledge is a duty by virtue of the role we have taken on, then, when other methods become available that can also enhance our cognitive abilities, the employment of these might also be part of that duty (given, of course, that the chemical compound quigley 161 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 is safe). i acknowledge that there will be those who may disagree with my characterization of both the responsibilities incumbent upon individual academics and the strength of the duties generated by these responsibilities, but that is going to have to be a debate for another occasion. a final word i have argued that the use of enhancement-type drugs in the academic setting is not comparable to their use in sport. the professional academic plays by a different set of rules, and the improvement of our cognitive abilities is something that is not simply desirable, but is in fact expected as part of our roles. academics are undeniably engaged in the business of cognitive enhancement. it could even be argued that the business of cognitive enhancement is the raison d’être of our academic institutions and those who work in them. accordingly, it may well be the case that we have a duty to enhance our cognitive abilities in any way possible, including by chemical means. having argued for a moral obligation that might fall upon academics to enhance themselves, i hasten to note that, while researching for and writing this paper, i did not neglect my own duty in this respect. i consumed not one but several cups of that most enhancing of beverages: coffee. it does occur to me, however, that with modafinil i might have produced a markedly better piece of work. at the very least, i might have produced it faster and actually met the deadline for the paper. note 1. this is unlikely to be the case, however, for modafinil. the price listed in the british national formulary, which has details of all medicines prescribed in the uk, is £55.80 for 30 tablet, or £1.86 per tablet—less expensive than my daily latte. references carey, benedict 2008 brain enhancement is wrong, right? new york times, march 9, week-inreview. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/weekinreview/09carey.html. last accessed 19th feb 2009. douglas, thomas 2008 moral enhancement. journal of applied philosophy 25(3): 228–245. doi:10.1111/j.1468-5930.2008.00412.x 2007 enhancement in sport and enhancement outside sport. studies in law, ethics, and technology 1(1): article 2. available at www.bepress.com/cgi/viewhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5930.2008.00412.x http://www.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&amp;context=selt&r=1 162 enhancing me, enhancing you © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 content.cgi?article=1000&amp;context=selt&r=1. foddy, bennett and julian savulescu 2007 ethics of performance enhancement in sport: drugs and gene doping. in principles of health care ethics, ed. r.e. ashcroft, a. dawson, h. draper and j.r. mcmillan, 512–519. 2nd ed. new york: john wiley and sons. harris, john 2007 enhancing evolution. princeton, nj: princeton university press. persson, ingmar and julian savulescu 2008 the perils of cognitive enhancement and the urgent imperative to enhance the moral character of humanity. journal of applied philosophy 25(3): 162–177. doi:10.1111/j.1468-5930.2008.00410.x rose, stephen 2006 brain gain? better humans? in the politics of human enhancement and life extension, ed. p. miller and j. wilsdon, 69–78. london: demos. sandel, michael 2007 the case against perfection: ethics in the age of genetic engineering. cambridge, ma.: belknap press. sahakian, barbara and sharon morein-zamir 2007 professor’s little helper. nature 450(7173): 1157–1159. doi:10.1038/4501157a http://www.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&amp;context=selt&r=1 http://www.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&amp;context=selt&r=1 http://www.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&amp;context=selt&r=1 http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5930.2008.00410.x http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/4501157a chapter ix [expositions 4.1&2 (2010) 80-86] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 of virgins and vampires: twilight and the issues of beauty and soul noël falco dolan villanova university stephenie meyer’s popular twilight series plays with double horror, offering a new take on not only the popular gothic creatures, but also on the trials of high school life and romance for a teenage girl. along the way, her main character, bella swan, must wrestle with fitting into a new high school community, coping with divorced parents, choosing between two very attractive boys, wanting to be beautiful and graceful, and, oh, a little thing like sacrificing the immortality of her soul for love. interestingly, it is her vampire beau, edward cullen, who is more concerned with preserving her soul (and, as their romance progresses, bella’s virginity), while bella’s ethical code prizes love more highly. while the question of the immortality of the soul is the root of this argument between the two that extends over four books, neither meyer nor her characters stop to consider fully what soul means. still developing his understanding of the relationship between the soul and the body, st. augustine writes in on the immortality of the soul that mind is life; it animates and thus correlates with soul, and thus every inanimate thing animated by the mind is alive. in keeping with his neoplatonic roots, in which he comes to see the soul as superior to the flesh, he argues that if one possesses one’s mind and reasoning, one must necessarily be alive (and thus human). he was obviously not familiar with vampires, let alone teenage ones. meyer’s vampires are fully rational beings capable of learning new languages and ideas, capabilities which would suggest by st. augustine’s definition that they are alive: “for nothing which is not alive learns anything.” 1 st. augustine argues that mind correlates with soul in that it is immortal and can exist beyond the physical limitations of the body. yet, it is unclear that meyer views the life of the soul as anything beyond something that exists independent of both body and thought. for undead edward, who frets about what will happen to him if his body is destroyed, soul clearly has a moral element, and thus he worries about the value of his inherent goodness. feeling the desires of and pressures on young women today, bella has looming insecurities that are resolved only through her attachment to edward and mark a focus on the physical side of life, culminating in the price she willingly pays for beauty and eternal love: her soul. when we first meet bella in book one, twilight, she describes herself in ways that cast her as an outsider: “but physically, i’d never fit in anywhere. i should be tan, sporty, blond – a volleyball player, or a cheerleader, perhaps – all the things that go with living in the valley of the sun.” 2 she describes attributes that could be seen positively – as indeed several of the young men at her new high school see them – and twists them into 81 dolan negatives. she muses, “i was ivory-skinned, without even the excuse of blue eyes or red hair,” and contextualizes the appearance of her skin with her surroundings. if in phoenix, her skin was too pale, in forks (wa), “i looked sallower, unhealthy…. i had no color here.” she is happy on her first day at her new school to find that she blends in with most of her classmates, seeking only to attract no attention to herself. as contrast, the cullen family of teenaged vampires stands out as wildly attractive, and they become her new paradigm for beauty. while the boys are written off quite quickly with limited description – big, muscled, lanky, taller, leaner (about two adjectives and a hair color apiece) – the girls are described with greater attention: the tall one was statuesque. she had a beautiful figure, the kind you saw on the cover of the sports illustrated swimsuit issue, the kind that made every girl around her take a hit on her self-esteem just by being in the same room. her hair was golden, gently waving to the middle of her back. the short girl was pixielike, thin in the extreme, with small features. her hair was a deep black, cropped short and pointing in every direction. (18) meyer chooses these details once and deliberately; she hearkens back to many of the same choices again and again over the four-book series (count how many times vampire alice “dances” across a room). it is important to see the immediate impact on bella, in that she recognizes that the beauty of all five vampire “siblings” is beyond her reach, that they are indeed what she calls “devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful” (19; emphasis mine). she aligns their look with the beauty that functions as the standard for most young women today, that of advertising (and secondarily, that of great art): “they were faces you never expected to see except perhaps on the airbrushed pages of a fashion magazine. or painted by an old master as the face of an angel.” thus, both art and advertising are logically connected with that which is inhuman, and, for art at least, the further connection is to immortality. great works of art – and beautiful vampires– are forever. throughout the series, bella will refer to edward’s angel face and often compare him to a marble statue, a “carving of adonis” (299), not only for his beauty but for the cold skin of a vampire. as the series evolves, bella will long again and again for the beauty and gracefulness of the cullens, and as she approaches the need to be transformed into a vampire, these aspects will be part of her motivation. in the interim, during the developing romance between edward and bella, what is disturbing is how frequently bella puts herself down in comparison to edward. it is as if in the face of his ideal beauty, she cannot see any worth in herself. in twilight, as she contemplates whether edward might like her, bella thinks, “of course he wasn’t interested in me .…i wasn’t interesting. and he was. interesting … and brilliant … and mysterious…and perfect…and beautiful ….” (79). bella does not consider that she is pretty or charming, even as other boys in her high school ask her out and she turns them of virgins and vampires 82 down. it is edward who informs her that on her first day of school, “every human male” was thinking of how attractive she was (210), and even then she does not believe it. edward’s beauty is all the more otherworldly when he dispels the myth of vampires and sunlight for bella, revealing a diamond-like sparkling of his skin in the light of a protected meadow. if bella thought edward was dazzling before, well… even while bella feels clumsy at prom in a cast, frilly chiffon dress, and curled hairstyle (“like guinea pig barbie”), she marvels at edward’s smile: “would i ever get used to his perfection?” (481). for brevity’s sake, we can skip over the moody whining of the break-up book, new moon (where bella’s self-esteem is perhaps at its lowest), and the action-packed reunion of eclipse and turn to the last book, breaking dawn, to note bella’s pleasure at her physical transformation once she has been made a vampire. for the first time, bella feels beautiful in edward’s presence. at their wedding, the still-human bella, who never notes her human prettiness on her own, is surprised when her husband edward points to a mirror: “i caught a glimpse of edward’s reflection – a perfect duplicate of his perfect face – with a dark-haired beauty at his side. her skin was cream and roses, her eyes were huge with excitement and framed with thick lashes. […] [h]er body looked elegant and graceful – while it was motionless, at least.” 3 to her, this is a fantasy, and she even hopes not to “blink and make the beauty turn back into me,” an ironic disassociation from her own name, bella. it is through both her union with edward (“at his side”) and the makeover that she was given by his vampire sister, a prefiguring of the more radical makeover of being turned into a vampire, that she attains a level of satisfaction with her appearance. bella’s strong desire is to be with edward forever, which means becoming a vampire, undertaking a three-day process of being inflicted with fiery vampire venom until her heart stops (i am not making this up). after the painful transformation, and the even more painful literary pronouncement “i was a newborn vampire” (392), bella first recognizes her new inhuman beauty in her voice, which now sounds like bells or song” (394). when she sees herself for the first time, she puts herself on par with the cullens, whom she had seen as so unattainably beautiful on her first day in forks. bella looks in the mirror, and “[her] first reaction was an unthinking pleasure. the alien creature in the glass was indisputably beautiful, every bit as beautiful as alice or esme. she was fluid even in stillness, and her flawless face was pale as the moon against the frame of her dark, heavy hair. her limbs were smooth and strong, skin glistening subtly, luminous as a pearl” (403). why the skin that was unremarkable as pale ivory at the beginning of the series is only lovely now as pearl is not clear; the ideal of beauty is left to the reader and is colored only by bella’s own critiques or satisfactions. if at first bella judged herself within her physical context, now her self-assessment depends upon the company she keeps. this first glance in the mirror, like that early reflection on the day of her wedding, reveals a disconnect between image and self. “who was she?” bella asks herself, for “at 83 dolan first glance, i couldn’t find my face anywhere in the smooth, perfect planes of her features,” markedly keeping the first person pronoun for her thoughts and the third person for this gorgeous reflection. her new looks distract bella from the problems of her transition, such as controlling her new bloodthirstiness and a connecting to her human emotion. motivated by looks and love, she dismisses any downside, such as not being able to maintain her family relationships (since she will remain eternally a teenager in appearance while her parents age), having red or amber eyes when thirsty (depending on whether she feeds on human or animal blood), never sleeping, subsisting on blood, and – a small item – not having a soul. these difficulties had earlier moved edward to suck out the venom when bella was bitten by another vampire in twilight, preventing bella from being transformed (the implicit sexual metaphor of being bitten extends throughout the series as edward, who was born in 1901, is a remarkably chaste vampire who withholds not only this bite but the sexual relationship that bella craves; bella in turn makes it clear that she would be happiest if edward would be the one to bite her, but that he is not the only one who could). when bella asks edward why he stopped the venom, he replies, “i refuse to damn you to an eternity of night and that’s the end of it.” 4 his later clarifications focus mainly on human physical experiences. he wants bella to be able to grow and to change, to be able to have children. he says, “it’s not right! i don’t want you to have to make sacrifices for me. i want to give you things, not take things away from you. i don’t want to steal your future,” 5 making a distinction between future and eternity. future to edward has developmental possibility, while eternity is indicative of stasis. at this point, edward distinguishes immortality (such as of the soul) from eternal existence (edward resists using the word life), although by book four, bella will use immortality to stand for eternal physical existence, more in the character of mythic deities than of the soul. for one thing, even though they are not alive, vampires can be “killed” by being ripped to pieces (possible only for other vampires and werewolves to do since meyer’s vampires are as hard as marble) and then burned to ash. for another, edward fears that he does not have a soul. when bella asks edward if he finds her attractive halfway through book one, his answer reveals the simplicity with which meyer treats the question of being alive: “i may not be human, but i am a man.” 6 this is a neat bit of semantics; how edward can be a man and not be human is unclear. that meyer allows edward to have both rational thought and emotion (as alluded to here, lust) but still defines him as not human calls into question st. augustine’s definition of the soul, which in this text marks an intermediary ground in his philosophical development. it would seem as if the distinction between man and human for meyer – and edward – hinges on the question of the soul. yet, if as st. augustine writes, “for whatever dead thing is said to be abandoned by life, is understood to be deserted by the soul. moreover, this life which deserts the things of virgins and vampires 84 which die is itself the mind, and it does not abandon itself; hence the mind does not die,” 7 then we must consider the continuity of the mind for edward and bella. in twilight, edward is puzzled by what he deems human hungers, meaning desire, for he is accustomed only to thirst for blood, yet he says, “i have human instincts – they may be buried deep, but they’re there.” 8 telling bella his life story, edward clarifies that though human memories fade, he can “remember how it felt” (287) to be saved. saved, with its evangelical overtones, is used as a synonym for transformed, and later, edward tells bella, “you’re resurrecting the human in me” (304, emphasis mine) of her ability to make him feel jealous of other boys. if edward is correct and he has retained his human instincts and feelings in his transition from being human to becoming a vampire, then does he not exist as alive? if he has a mind with which to think, and this mind recalls that which was there in the human form, then can it be said that mind has abandoned body in the transformation? and if not, if mind indicates life, then does he not have a soul? meyer seems to build a case for this in one of her subthemes. each vampire in edward’s family has a special quality that defines him or her, and for some these become talents. edward explains, “carlisle has a theory…he believes that we all bring something of our strongest human traits with us into the next life, where they are intensified – like our minds, and our senses” (307). it is carlisle, the oldest of the vampires in this family and thus the father figure, who has the most to say on religious faith. his struggle with the faith of his clergyman father defined the conscience he brought to his vampire existence: “but never, in the nearly four hundred years now since i was born, have i ever seen anything to make me doubt whether god exists in some form or the other.” 9 it is the existence of god that gives life meaning for carlisle, although he admits of vampires, “by all accounts we’re damned regardless. but i hope, maybe foolishly, that we’ll get some measure of credit for trying” (36–37). thus, being a vegetarian vampire (and doctor!) count as forms of good deeds, which when allied with faith may allow for salvation. edward accepts the existence of god, as in his explanation of where vampires come from when he first speaks of evolution, then pronounces, “or, if you don’t believe that all this world could have just happened on its own, which is hard for me to accept myself, is it so hard to believe that the same force that created the delicate angelfish with the shark, the baby seal and the killer whale, could create both our minds together?” 10 although he is not sure how to clarify the beginning of his existence as a vampire, waffling between born and created (342) because of the need of another being to effect the unnatural change, edward recognizes a greater force at work in the world, one with whom he must connect in some way. in part, this connection comes through his first existence, but otherwise it comes through his mind, specifically through his conscience. he reflects on his need to stop drinking human blood, “i thought i would be exempt from the…depression…that accompanies a conscience…. but as time went on, i began to see the monster in my eyes” (342–43). surely if he has a conscience, must he not have a soul? 85 dolan it is carlisle who explains to bella in new moon that edward’s belief, while it extends to god, heaven, and hell, does not allow for an afterlife for vampires: “you see, he thinks we’ve lost our souls.” 11 this fear will not allow edward to change bella, for he cannot allow her to risk her soul for him. carlisle makes this clear to bella when he pointedly asks, “if you believed as he did. [sic] could you take away his soul?” the possibility of losing her soul does not seem to concern bella. of more pressing concern is a teenage girl’s fixation on looks, and the second novel opens with bella’s nightmare of being an old woman while edward has remained frozen as a seventeenyear-old. she wakes on the morning of her eighteenth birthday to examine her face in the mirror, searching for wrinkles. after reassurances that being one year older than edward is no big deal, she automatically thinks of her desire to become a vampire because of its physical benefit: “[i]f i could be sure of the future i wanted, sure that i would spend forever with edward, and alice, and the rest of the cullens (preferably not as a wrinkled old lady)…then a year or two one direction or the other wouldn’t matter to me so much. but edward was dead set against any future that changed me” (10). for bella, the material benefits of the change are what matters, and she dismisses any discussion of greater consequence – or more disturbingly, never engages any discussion at that level of thought. “what was so great about mortality?” she wonders, focusing again on the physical rather than spiritual level. “being a vampire didn’t look like such a terrible thing” (emphasis mine). perhaps it would be a hard conversation for bella to enter, as she notes, “my own life was fairly devoid of belief” (36) – an interesting comment from a girl who accepts wholeheartedly the possibility of vampires because of internet research she does one afternoon. bella does not debate whether edward has a soul so much as discount its importance when compared to the power of love. faced with a break up in new moon, bella cries, “this is about my soul, isn’t it? …i don’t care! you can have my soul. i don’t want it without you – it’s yours already!” (69). love is the proof and purpose of existence, and meyer uses bella’s powerful love as her special vampire trait: her love becomes a protective shield she can extend. the novels end with a happy satisfaction at the endless time for love that stretches before them (the point has been made in the last novel that coupled vampires have quite active nights): “forever and forever and forever.” 12 instead of fearing that there is no afterlife for vampires because they have no souls, edward and bella, having escaped destruction at the hands of the nefarious italian volturi coven, rejoice in the immortality of their physical life and love, even as it seems illogical to trust in this physical existence if what they are celebrating is the fact that they were not destroyed. meyer’s surface-level treatment of this is clear in an interview in which she discusses whether one of the werewolves is immortal: “jacob can continue to be the same age as he is now as long as he keeps turning into a werewolf every now and then, which is really not that hard for him. so luckily for [him and renesmee], they’re both set up for immortality, which is nice.” 13 immortality: that’s nice. of virgins and vampires 86 am i expecting too much of a teenage vampire romance? most likely. yet i am more disconcerted by bella as a heroine. she has to trade her human life for the things she wants the most, love and beauty, and to her it seems like an obvious and easy choice. for bella, love is stronger than improbability and danger: “about three things i was positive. first, edward was a vampire. second, there was a part of him – and i didn’t know how potent that part might be – that thirsted for my blood. and third, i was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.” 14 the message that young women readers receive is that romantic love is the most powerful force and deciding factor of existence. love overrides any difficulty; love is more durable – and desirable – than the soul itself. notes 1. st. augustine. “mind is life, and thus it cannot lack life,” in on the immortality of the soul. trans. george g. leckie (new york: d. appleton-century, 1938). creighton university, 2009. accessed june 21, 2010, http://puffin.creighton.edu/phil/stephens/ augustine/on%20the%20immortality%20of%20the%20soul.htm 2. stephenie meyer, twilight (new york: little, brown and company, 2005), 10. 3. stephenie meyer, breaking dawn (new york: little, brown and company, 2008), 57. 4. meyer, twilight, 476. 5. meyer, breaking dawn, 28. 6. meyer, twilight, 311. 7. st. augustine, “mind is life.” 8. meyer, twilight, 278. 9. meyer, new moon (new york: little, brown and company 2006), 36. 10. meyer, twilight, 308. 11. meyer, new moon, 37. 12. meyer, breaking dawn, 754. 13. tami heide, interview with stephenie meyer (royce hall, university of california, los angeles, august 7, 2008) in stephenie meyer, breaking dawn (new york: little, brown and company, 2008). 14. meyer, twilight, 195. © equinox publishing ltd. 2009, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expo. 3.2 (2009) 209–214] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v3i2.209 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 two augustines? david p. efroymson la salle university beyond the decision to keep what christians call the old testament, probably the only positive christian contribution to jewish-christian relations from the patristic era was augustine’s “witness doctrine.” its claim was that the dispersion of the jews after the destruction of jerusalem in 70 ce was not simply punishment for their “rejection” of jesus, but also had a more positive role in god’s plan. bearing their (biblical) books wherever they were forced to wander, they bore witness to the nations of the truth of christianity by the prophetic content of the books (which they failed to understand), while the jewishness of the books proved that christians had not fabricated them. augustine could then read psalm 58:12 (59:12 in our modern bibles), “slay them not…,” as god’s or christ’s command not to harm jews physically and to let them live as jews; their continuing existence as jews (until their ultimate conversion at the end of time) fulfilled a divine purpose. bolstered by the inherited precedent of roman law, and with the authority of augustine behind it, the teaching helped to preserve jewish lives and judaism itself for centuries. anyone who knows the precarious situation of jews and judaism in medieval europe knows what might well have happened otherwise. we cannot but be grateful that worse was avoided. paula fredriksen’s contribution in the book under discussion is to show when and how augustine arrived at his position. but her achievement goes beyond this. she situates augustine’s thinking on this matter in the context of early christian history and christian anti-judaism prior to him. further, she is rightly insistent that anti-judaism was not the whole story: there were individual friendships, urban social mingling, christians visiting jewish synagogues and joining in jewish celebrations, all contrary to the wishes—indeed the legislation—of the leadership on both sides. she reinforces her case for augustine’s contribution with an astute discussion of his correspondence with the far less 210 academic roundtable © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 accommodating jerome (on the legitimacy of the jewish practices of the earliest followers of jesus) and with a cogent presentation of what the bishop does not say on the use of force against jews (as compared to his approval of it against donatists). nor, as she points out, does he say a word about the forced conversion of the jews on minorca in 418—an event he had to have known about and which certain of his christian colleagues celebrated. finally, she makes no effort to hide augustine’s own anti-jewish rhetoric. my part in this conversation will be to express some reservations, not at all about fredriksen, but about augustine. in a project on the fate or “after-life” of the ioudaioi (usually translated “the jews”) of john’s gospel at the hands of several early christian writers, i found augustine as antagonistic as any of the writers i have examined (efroymson 1999, with full documentation on what follows on augustine on john). augustine produced 124 homilies (tractatus) on john’s gospel; fully 60 of them contain noticeable anti-jewish material, and between 15 and 17 are extensively or completely taken up with it. perhaps the most striking thing about the johannine jews in augustine’s hands is the sheer number and variety of crimes, vices, and other evils with which he characterizes them and the extent to which this practice pervades the homilies. some 57 homilies have at least one dose of this antijewish rhetoric, and frequently far more. we hear of the jews’ carnality, pride and impudence, envy, lies and calumnies, and culpable blindness; more generally, their infidelitas (both unfaithfulness and a refusal to believe), sinfulness, wickedness, and perversity. he is emphatic about their hatred of jesus and their “raging” against him. altogether, there are 250 such references. in addition, there are some 60 further passages, in 29 homilies, referring to “the jews” (rarely: “leaders,” etc.) having killed, crucified, or having sought to slay jesus. an important aspect of this last set of charges is the contexts in which they appear. a third of them occur in homilies 112–118, which cover the trial and death of jesus in john’s gospel. another 15 appear in earlier homilies, commenting on references in the gospel to the jews persecuting or seeking to kill jesus. some 23—over a third—appear, however, in homilies on gospel passages having no bearing on either jesus’ death or any effort to bring it about. for examtwo augustines? 211 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 ple, at the end of john 3, commenting on jesus’ hidden authority, the bishop says: “what the disciples saw, who loved him, that the jews also saw, who crucified him” (homily 14.12). at john 12:21, where jesus is told that “some greeks” wanted to see him: “see how the jews wish to kill him, the gentiles, to see him” (h 51.8). the role of john’s gospel itself in this ugliness is far from negligible. in the gospel, the ioudaioi frequently criticize, attack, and seek to kill jesus. at least as often, and almost as fiercely, jesus criticizes and denounces them. and the author or narrator takes his own turn in disparagement of the jews. augustine, of course, believed that jesus said and did what john had narrated, and that the jews said and did what john had accused them of saying and doing. he is angry about it and expresses that anger in these homilies. is augustine, then, merely a “victim” of john’s portrayal of the ioudaioi? there is almost certainly more to it than that. let us move on to other biblically-oriented material. we have now, after some recent discoveries, 569 of augustine’s sermons, on biblical passages as well as on various kinds of liturgical celebrations (epiphany, easter, saints’ feasts, and more). anti-jewish references or assertions have found their way into some 154 of the sermons. they tend to be less extensive than those in the homilies on john, sometimes only a sentence or two, but often more. but given augustine’s reputation by the time he became a bishop, people came to listen to him preach and would not likely have missed many of his words. here again, references to the jews killing or crucifying jesus merit special attention. the assertion appears in 68 of these sermons, not a high percentage. thirteen of these references come from easter season sermons, one on isaiah 53 and one on samson’s sacrificing his own life. thus, references to jesus’ crucifixion are not surprising. beyond the “unsurprising” 15, however, every one of the remaining such accusations is completely gratuitous: on the feast of the epiphany, on the good shepherd, on the judgment of solomon between the two harlots, and far more. in sermon 214.3, on the handing over of the creed to catechumens, he notes the great good conferred on us through the crucifixion of jesus but insists that god achieved it through and despite the malice of the jews (and the devil); the jews 212 academic roundtable © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 deserve not reward but punishment, as their will was to do harm. more dramatically, in sermon 136.4, on the healing of the man born blind in john 9, commenting on the argument about who can see and who is blind: the defenders of the law, teachers of the law, intellectual masters of the law, crucified the author of the law! what blindness! … he was not recognized by the jews, he was crucified by the jews…. becoming more hardened than ever, becoming blind, those who boasted they could see the light, they crucified the light. what colossal blindness! the most extensive block of augustine’s reflections on biblical material is the set of 208 “expositions” (enarrationes) on the 150 psalms. we encounter anti-jewish material in 93 of the 208, generally longer than those in most of the sermons; the list of crimes and vices roughly parallels that found in the homilies on john. there are 97 references to, or accusations of, the jews killing or crucifying jesus. they occur in 54 of the expositions, sometimes several separate times in one exposition. this could seem puzzling until one notes that augustine has in these expositions brought to a kind of summit the patristic tradition of reading the psalms as “christian,” which is to say as spoken typically by, to, or about christ. thus the jews who are castigated tend to be jews contemporary with jesus. if the psalmist is ridiculed, it is “really” jesus being ridiculed on the cross; laments are the laments of jesus about the suffering imposed on him by the jews; a cry for justice is a cry for the punishment of the jews who had crucified him, and so on. is there anything characteristically augustinian in all this? there are a few possibilities: his fondness for the blinding “veil” of 2 cor. 3:15, for example, and his predilection, in all three blocks of material, to use rom. 10:3 (the jews’ “attempting to establish their own righteousness” and “not submitting to god’s”) as a divinely-sanctioned and empirical description of how “jews” operate. but perhaps the most striking is augustine’s emphasis, especially in his later preaching and writing, on the power, the omnipotence, of god. what god wants done gets done, and what does not get done is the result of god not wanting it done. this takes a funny turn in some gospel passages. when jesus prays from the cross, “father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (luke 23:34), augustine is clear about which jews jesus is two augustines? 213 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 praying for: “among the many hostile people, he saw [from the cross] some of his own [quosdam suos]; for them he sought pardon [illis jam petebat veniam]”(homily on john 31.9). later, in homily on john 38.7: “among that people by whom he was crucified…, there were [future] members of christ for whom he said ‘father, forgive them….” (see also sermon 229e.1.) finally, and more generally, in homily on john 47.4, on john 10:14 and 15 (“i know mine…”), augustine claims that jesus was sent not to the jews generally, but only to the jews who would ultimately accept him. this (later) augustine cannot have jesus pray for forgiveness for those who he believes will not accept it, nor can he have god send jesus in vain. otherwise neither god nor jesus is in control. characteristically augustine, indeed. are there then two augustines? i will first repeat that fredriksen’s augustine is no fabrication. he is a towering, maybe even a courageous theologian who, out of his own resources and his biblical reflections and against the current, was able to re-imagine the relationship of god and israel and find a positive role in god’s plan for jews and judaism. augustine thereby almost certainly helped to prevent persecution and forced conversions, saving lives in medieval europe in the process. further, fredriksen has some real wisdom to offer on how difficult it is, maybe even impossible, to get at what a skilled rhetorician like augustine “really thought” or “really felt,” and the importance of context and intent in seeing the differences in the “rhetorical jews” he constructs, e.g., between those in the homilies on john and those in against faustus (fredriksen 2002, 261; 307). nevertheless, the anti-judaism is also real, and, because this material (the tractatus on john, the enarrationes, and the sermons) tends to be neglected in histories and studies of early christian anti-judaism, it is imperative to point to it. augustine is too important, and these works are too weighty, for them to continue to be overlooked. at the very least, they can serve as a warning about the critical care with which john’s gospel and the “christian” reading of the psalms should be treated. one last point (by way of “concession”?): if augustine had not written or preached a word of such obloquy, the christian anti-jewish tradition would still be there. if, on the other hand, he had not in214 academic roundtable © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 troduced the witness doctrine, the history of medieval jewry would almost certainly have been far more tragic.1 note 1. it may be useful to mention here that one can find a welcome account of the way some heavyweight medieval theologians handled the witness doctrine in jeremy cohen’s living letters of the law (1999), as well as an interesting earlier analysis of why he thought it did not survive the onslaught of the friars (1982). the influence of the doctrine on papal policy and some attempts to circumvent it are treated passim in the history volume of shlomo simonsohn’s the apostolic see and the jews (1991). references cohen, jeremy 1999 living letters of the law: ideas of the jew in medieval christianity. berkeley: university of california press. 1982 the friars and the jews: the evolution of medieval anti-judaism. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. efroymson, david p. 1999 whose jews? augustine’s tractatus on john. in a multiform heritage: studies in early judaism and christianity in honor of robert a. kraft, ed. benjamin g. wright, 197–211. atlanta, ga: scholars press. simonsohn, shlomo 1991 the apostolic see and the jews. vol. 7, history. toronto: pontifical institute of medieval studies. © equinox publishing ltd. 2008, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expositions 2.2 (2008) 133–138] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v2i2.133 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 overheard in the academy socrates on drugs: the controversy over cognitive enhancement bernard g. prusak center for liberal education villanova university you are renowned throughout the city-state for your great feats of endurance. whereas those ninnies in homer’s odyssey are always stopping to eat and sleep in desperate hopes of restoring themselves to “form,” terrified as they are of the ravages of time, you, without even thinking of food, once had a long, winding, and extremely demanding discussion with a number of men much younger than you that lasted over a whole night! (the young polemarchus had enticed you to come to his house with the promise of supper, among other distractions [republic, 328a]; but things more permanent and beautiful freed even the young men from the tyranny of the belly. poor odysseus: “belly must be filled” [odyssey, bk. 7]. how the poets lie!) then there is the story of how, after a night of feasting and drinking and story-telling about love—and after alcibiades, and then a number of other drunks, broke into the party and made everybody drink yet more!—you went off, fresh as could be, and spent the whole next day as was your wont, discussing with young men at the lyceum (symposium, 223d). neither aristophanes nor agathon, try as they did, could stay up with you. how do you do it? the secret? well, what would we think if it were…modafinil?1 “professor’s little helper” is the title of a commentary published in december 2007 in the journal nature by cambridge university scientists barbara sahakian and sharon morein-zamir. the two discuss the “off-label” use of cognitive-enhancing drugs and remark that, “[i]n academia, we know that a number of our colleagues…already use modafinil to counteract the effects of jetlag, to enhance productivity or mental energy, or to deal with demanding and important intellectual challenges” (sahakian and morein-zamir 2007, 1158). it might be thought that this should hardly count as news—the use of the methylphenidate ritalin and amphetamine adderall by cramming college students comes as no surprise, even if it has not lost the power to 134 socrates on drugs © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 shock—but news this story became. among other examples: only days later, the chronicle of higher education invited comments online (see the news blog “brain-boosting drugs hit the faculty lounge”). nature both opened a “public forum” online (see, “would you boost your brain power?”) and conducted an anonymous online survey to determine the prevalence of off-label use of such drugs. the journal also published multiple letters in response to sahakian and morein-zamir in its january 31, 2008 issue.2 then, in march, the new york times took notice with an article in its week-in-review entitled “brain enhancement is wrong, right?” according to the times, “an era of doping may be looming in academia, and it has ignited a debate about policy and ethics that in some ways echoes the national controversy over performance enhancement accusations against elite athletes like barry bonds and roger clemens…” (carey 2008).3 all these articles and discussions are well worth reading; the conceit of socrates on drugs is taken, in fact, from the nature public forum.4 it might be wondered, however, whether the questions and concerns that these articles and discussions raise go to the heart of the matter. the questions and concerns that come up again and again are safety (for example, whether there is a risk of harmful side-effects, or a danger of addiction); fairness or justice (would the drugs be available to all? would disparities increase?); whether there would be coercive pressure to use such drugs—and have our children use such drugs—should “everyone” be doing it in the most competitive, highly-compensated professions and in the schools that prepare students for these professions;5 whether the use of such drugs is in fact unprecedented (think of coffee, tea, and nicotine), or in other words “only” different in degree rather than kind from the consumption of more familiar substances;6 and finally whether pharmacological enhancements are different in a morally significant way from more mundane forms of “life enhancers” that some people have the fortune to benefit from (like tutors or test-preparation courses).7 these are surely important questions to ask, and the answers are not obvious.8 but there are other questions that might be considered just as or even more important and that find expression less frequently, perhaps because they are difficult to articulate, and because some involve considerations that our individualistic, capitalist society has become largely blind to. to return to academics on drugs: why devote one’s life to study? why seek knowledge as a profession or vocation? surely “academic success” should be, if it is not always, a secondary consideration. (if people go into academics with the principal aim of becoming academic “superstars,” do they go into it for the right reason? or is there, after all, nothing truly sacred in the “sacred bernard g. prusak 135 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 groves of academe,” such that one may behave there as one wishes?9) most academics hold ph.d.’s: doctorates of philosophy, which etymologically means love of wisdom, not simply knowledge. and wisdom has to do with living well as human beings. yes, it may be natural to human beings, as aristotle remarks at the beginning of his metaphysics, to reach out to know; and knowledge does appear to be a basic human good.10 further, cognitive-enhancing drugs may serve and advance the accumulation and discovery of knowledge. but does knowledge so discovered serve the person who discovered it, or does he or she begin to serve it? in other, more dramatic terms, has such a person made him or herself a slave to the discovery of knowledge—to change the terms, but keep the drama, made knowledge an idol that he or she serves, to the sacrifice of his or her humanity? the claim that a human being risks sacrificing or distorting or otherwise damaging his or her “humanity” in doing this or that—in other words, that there is something “essentially human” at stake in a practice—obviously needs clarification and elaboration, and needs it quickly. the claim needs clarification and elaboration since it is undeniably vague; it needs clarification and elaboration quickly lest it be simply dismissed as “nostalgic, sentimentalized” nonsense, another instance of “right-wing arguments that have been made for centuries in the face of anything new”—which was the judgment of a blogger on a recent article in the new republic by leon kass and eric cohen on the use of biotechnical enhancements in sports.11 kass and cohen make such a claim; what they mean by it deserves at least attention. kass is a notoriously controversial figure in the debate on enhancement and in bioethics generally, no doubt in part because of his occasional rhetorical excesses. another reason, though, may be that he challenges the dogma, whether true or false, of our time and place that the way to happiness or fulfillment is to do what i want, as i want, when i want—and who is anyone to tell me that i could be wrong? kass’s principal criticism of the use of biotechnology “beyond enhancement,” whether for improved cognition, mood, or strength, is that “[h]uman experience under biological intervention becomes increasingly mediated by unintelligible forces and vehicles” (kass 2003, 22), such that the human being becomes “less doer and more done-to” and “[h]is doings become, in a crucial sense, less ‘his own’” (kass and cohen 2008, 36). in other words, we become fields where the drugs we take express themselves; our achievements become effects, no longer of the exertions of our character and cultivation of our native gifts, but of the armamentarium of drugs that happens to be at our disposal. whereas kass claims: 136 socrates on drugs © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 [i]f human flourishing means not just the accumulation of external achievements and a full curriculum vitae, but a life-long being-at-work exercising one’s human powers well and without great impediment, our genuine happiness requires that there be little gap, if any, between the dancer and the dance… (kass 2003, 23) there are yet further important questions to raise about cognitive-enhancing drugs. for example, is it the role of medical professionals to supply such drugs to “patients”? if we answer yes, would this mean a significant change in the nature of the institution of medicine—which is arguably already in a state of conceptual confusion (caplan, mccartney, and sisti 2004)—and, if so, would this be a change for the better or worse? also, do we, as a society, really want pharmaceutical companies to be developing new classes of drugs without a disease in mind, but instead with the aim of “augment[ing] normal encoding mechanisms” (chatterjee 2006, 110)? it is happening already. for, though most of the earth’s people still lack basic healthcare, these companies, which make staggering profits as it is, “have significant economic incentives to expand their markets to healthy individuals” (chatterjee 2006, 112). the poor can’t pay. that healthy academics, many of whom lean politically to the left, would provide these companies a new market—where is that gadfly socrates when we need him? the editors have asked our contributors to this second iteration of “overheard in the academy” to take up and enrich or rebut these reflections. notes 1. modafinil is marketed under the label provigil by, remarkably enough, the biopharmaceutical company cephalon. (cephalus is the name of polemarchus’s father. the name means “head.”) according to the manufacturer, “provigil is a prescription medicine used to improve wakefulness in adults who experience excessive sleepiness (es) due to one of the following diagnosed sleep disorders: obstructive sleep apnea (osa), shift work sleep disorder [swsd], or narcolepsy” (see www.provigil.com). the u.s. armed services are apparently studying modafinil intensively (chatterjee 2006, 110). 2. to quote a bit from two of the more provocative letters, nick bostrom writes: with the cockcrow of enhancement medicine, we need to retool our regulatory paradigm. it is not only special occupations such as military commandos and air-traffic controllers that would benefit from good enhancement drugs. other jobs are just as important and intellectually taxing—including the jobs of many scientists and academics. anything that can help our brains deal better with the complex challenges of the twenty-first century is to be not only welcomed but actively sought. but it will require substantial investment bernard g. prusak 137 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 to develop interventions that are both safe and effective in long-term use (bostrom 2008, 520). to which john harris and muireann quigley add: science and technology will continue to generate all sorts of new enhancers, and the quest for enhancement is not necessarily unfair or unethical. we humans are inveterate enhancers, striving to increase our intelligence and to improve our memory and powers of perception…. we must press for wider and more equitable access, turning our backs neither on technology nor on improving the human condition (harris and quigley 2008, 521). 3. the analogy of doping in academia to doping in sports is often invoked, but sometimes only to be rejected. for example, “a phil prof” contributing to the chronicle blog writes that “the analogy with baseball is silly. research is a joint effort, whether one realizes it or not. another’s good research helps us all. if you need to be hopped up on something, i won’t worry that you’ll break a record before me….” see http://chronicle.com/news/article/3673/brain-boosting-drugshit-the-faculty-lounge, number 28. 4. a blogger identifying himself as nicolau werneck writes: “we must change all of this, the tests and the competitions in science and teaching. that’s not what science is all about! can you imagine socrates taking ritalin? what would be his motivation? i bet he would drink conium before that.” see http://network. nature.com/forums/naturenewsandopinion/816?page=4. 5. as michael j. sandel nicely observes: unlike the drugs of the sixties and seventies [for example: marijuana and lsd], ritalin and adderall are not for checking out but for buckling down, not for beholding the world and taking it in, but for molding the world and fitting in…. the steroids and stimulants that figure in the enhancement debate are not a source of recreation but a bid for compliance, a way of answering a competitive society’s demand to improve our performance and perfect our nature (sandel 2007, 60–61). 6. it is worth noting that not all drugs that have the same effects, and so could have the same uses, necessarily figure in the same ways in human culture. for example, coffee may be used as a stimulant in order to “buckle down,” but it may also be used, and often is, as a way to “check out” from the pressures of work. it shouldn’t be forgotten that people go to cafés to socialize or read! 7. a blogger identifying himself as charles eaton writes: as to the bug-bear of “competitive advantage,” that is not a public health issue at all but a personal ethical and philosophical question. today i will give my 7-year-old granddaughter a piano lesson, lead her in a chemistry experiment, listen to her sums, and encourage her to enter any new words of her vocabulary into her personal dictionary. do i intend to nurture her toward a “competitive advantage”? oh, you bet! see http://network.nature.com/forums/naturenewsandopinion/816?page=2. 8. see for a synthesis of these questions and concerns chatterjee 2006. 138 socrates on drugs © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 9. plato’s school or “academy” was located in and took its name from the sacred groves of athena. 10. it is good to know; even denying it depends on acknowledging it and seeking to know. 11. see the comments of “jsmith125” (#2 of 14) at http://www.tnr.com/talkback. html?id=ea669633-6736-4302-ac23-cd967bbe64f4. references bostrom, nick 2008 drugs can be used to treat more than disease. nature 451/7178: 520. doi:10.1038/451520b caplan, arthur l., james m. mccartney, and dominic a. sisti, eds. 2004 health, disease, and illness: concepts in medicine. washington, dc: georgetown university press. carey, benedict 2008 brain enhancement is wrong, right? new york times, march 9, week-inreview. chatterjee, anjan 2006 the promise and predicament of cosmetic neurology. journal of medical ethics 32: 110–113. doi:10.1136/jme.2005.013599 harris, john and muireann quigley 2008 humans have always tried to improve their condition. nature 451(7178): 521. doi:10.1038/451521b kass, leon r. 2003 ageless bodies, happy souls. the new atlantis 1: 9–28. kass, leon r. and eric cohen. 2008 for the love of the game. the new republic, march 26. sahakian, barbara and sharon morein-zamir 2007 professor’s little helper. nature 450(7173): 1157–1159. doi:10.1038/4501157a sandel, michael j. 2007 the case against perfection. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/451520b http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/jme.2005.013599 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/451521b http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/4501157a book reviews 229 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 kathryn hughes. the short life and long times of mrs. beeton. new york: alfred a. knopf, 2006. $29.95 hc. isbn 0307263738 marylu hill, villanova university the ideals of mother, home, and hearth are fraught with contradictions in western culture. in the abstract, they are praised unreservedly, but in practice they are often scorned and despised as unimportant, secondrate, or trivial. with the exception of the odyssey, all of the great epics of the world are about leaving home and hearth behind, and even today, “woman’s work” is disdained by women and men alike. nothing important seems to happen in the drudgery of the kitchen, where, as virginia woolf reminds us in a room of one’s own, the same mundane tasks are repeated on a daily basis throughout one’s life with nothing ultimately to show for them. and yet, as woolf also famously remarks in the same book, “one cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” our food and homes shape us, perhaps even more than we care to acknowledge, and one wonders if the paths of philosophy or science, for example, might have been adversely affected due to an ill-prepared meal and the resulting dyspepsia in the stomach of a great thinker. so it behoves us to examine carefully the claims made by kathryn hughes in her impressively researched book the short life and long times of mrs. beeton. through the lens of the life of isabella beeton, the iconic figure behind the most popular british cookbook of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, hughes pinpoints the welter of contradictions at the heart of the cult of domesticity which the book of household management helped to create, as well as demonstrates how the reassuring voice of “mrs. beeton” led a generation of young wives to navigate successfully the rapidly-changing social structure of mid-nineteenth century england. furhermore, hughes challenges her readers to look carefully at ourselves and consider what exactly we continue to want from our contemporary mrs. beetons, such as martha stewart, rachel ray, and others. at its best, this book holds up a mirror to our innermost longing for “domestic goddesses” to guide us in how to live. 230 book reviews © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 and indeed, the most stimulating question that arises from hughes’ book is precisely the one that the humanities profess to examine, namely, “what is the good life?” socrates may have had a difficult time answering this question, but, as hughes shrewdly points out, mrs. beeton reveals no such hesitation. in the pages of the book of household management, mrs. beeton is more than happy to answer it, in a voice which remains worth reading: at once knowledgeable, reassuring, practical, and nostalgic. it does not matter that the real isabella beeton, the young wife and mother turned journalist, did not necessarily possess first-hand knowledge of all she wrote; the voice she projected was enough for the other young inexperienced wives and mothers to trust her advice. the good life, for mrs. beeton, was tied up with the project of transforming chaos into order wherever it appears—in the kitchen, the household budget, and even on a national level. “a nation,” says mrs. beeton, “which knows how to dine has learned the leading lesson of progress. it implies both the will and skill to reduce to order and surround with idealisms and grace the more material conditions of human existence” (279–80). as hughes adds, “dining well isn’t simply a pleasure, it is a civilizing duty, part of the obligation of those who have access to culture to take it to places where nature might otherwise run amok” (280). no wonder, as hughes aptly points out, the book of household management became a beacon of culture for the upwardly-mobile, helping them assimilate into the middle class and beyond. hughes’ reading of the book as a means of indoctrinating the lower classes into middle class attitudes is revealing, especially as she notes mrs. beeton’s tendency to both idealize and demonize the natural world as a lost eden now in serious need of controlling. for example, mrs. beeton’s comments on “the prolific power of the pig” which, if left unrestrained, would allow these animals to “degenerate into vermin” are mirrored by what hughes calls “bourgeois anxieties” about the similarly prolific working class in need of restraint. hughes’ reminder that “everyone in mrs. beeton’s imaginary household is rising, moving upwards, heading somewhere” (71) is another point well-taken; the book of household management is all about transibook reviews 231 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 tions—from rural to urban, from local economy to mass market, from traditional class structures to a more fluid upwardly-mobile system. and in the midst of all this, home itself had become something in need of defining and safeguarding, even while it became detached from older customs and traditions. as hughes points out, mrs. beeton’s book replaces those customs and traditions, which had broken down as people migrated from country to city and adopted new class ideals that in theory relegated cooking to the servants. the book also marks a critical change in attitudes towards women and women’s work—indeed, it may have caused the change—as mrs. beeton redefines the mistress of the house as no longer drudge but now “the commander of an army,” efficient, scientific, and capable of transforming the world one meal at a time. but where the short life and long times of mrs. beeton sometimes fails is in its own disinclination to thoroughly address the questions it searchingly raises. in some ways, hughes would have done better to downplay the biographical angle and focus more on the relationship of the book of household management and the perceived persona of “mrs. beeton” to the british public. the “short life” of isabella beeton (and indeed, she died sadly young at age 28 of puerperal fever) ends up filling the book with occasionally numbing details of courtship arguments and unpaid bills, while the “long times” get undeserved short shrift. at times, the half-glimpsed and sometimes surmised details of isabella’s and sam beeton’s lives are incapable of bearing the weight of significance that hughes places on them, but the larger problem is the use to which hughes sometimes puts the details. as much as she wants to give mrs. beeton her due, she occasionally relies on unsubstantiated anecdotes and theories to either discredit her or distract the reader from the genuine accomplishment of the book of household management. if mrs. beeton strove for order in the pages of her book, hughes seems determined to show the chaos underneath, even if she has to concoct or over-interpret it. hughes’ obsession with the possibility that sam beeton infected isabella with syphilis early in their marriage reflects her attention to the seeming chaos beneath. even though hughes herself states in a 232 book reviews © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 footnote that “of course we will never know for certain that isabella and sam had syphilis,” even warning the reader against the dangers of “retrospective diagnosis,” she maintains it as a fact for much of the book, speculating frequently on such questions as what sort of syphilitic fetuses isabella may or may not have miscarried, and whether sam went a little mad at the end. were it an undisputed fact, this would be necessary knowledge; if it had direct bearing on how isabella edited the book of household management, it would likewise be useful; but as it is, it is unclear what purpose it serves, except to suggest a vague underlying dark terrain in the beetons’ lives. this emphasis on unsubstantiated details highlights what seems to me to be a distracting tension in hughes’ attitude towards her subject in general. she wants to celebrate isabella beeton as a sort of new woman—enterprising, sharp-eyed, modern, clever, and effective as a sort of victorian spin-doctor—and yet she also wants to discredit her as a woman capable of creating the book of household management. her effort to prove that mrs. beeton did not test every recipe in the book, alongside her insistence that mrs. beeton did not simply plagiarize all her recipes, is indicative of this double-sided approach. yet, to be fair, this is not entirely hughes’ failing; rather, it reflects the ambivalence which is alive and well in modern culture regarding our views of domesticity. over a hundred years after her death, the enterprising and modern mrs. beeton can still be condemned for not really being a domestic goddess, and it is not just kathryn hughes leveling the charge. as a society, we remain uncertain about how domestic we want our women (or ourselves as women) to be, and hughes helps to draw attention to that troubling fact. isabella beeton’s life and achievement was to begin the redefinition of women’s lives in and beyond the home, and hughes reminds us that this task remains very far from complete. kathryn hughes. the short life and long times of mrs. beeton. karen armstrong, the great transformation: the beginning of our religious tradition seyyed hossein nasr. islamic philosophy from its origin to the present. [expositions 4.1&2 (2010) 114-122] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 monstrosity exhibition clayton crockett university of central arkansas asylums with doors open wide, where people had paid to see inside, for entertainment they watch his body twist behind his eyes he says, ‘i still exist.’ this is the way, step inside… you'll see the horrors of a faraway place, meet the architects of law face to face. see mass murder on a scale you've never seen, and all the ones who try hard to succeed. this is the way, step inside. –joy division, “atrocity exhibition” creston davis has pulled off a remarkable encounter by setting john milbank and slavoj žižek up against each other in the monstrosity of christ. 1 his introduction lays out the theological stakes of this exchange, which involves both the reevaluation of hegel‟s philosophy for philosophical and theological thinking, and more importantly, the resources of theology to oppose contemporary capitalism (4). in the 1990s, both milbank‟s invigorated radical orthodoxy and žižek‟s strikingly fresh hegelian-lacanian philosophy jolted readers out of their moribund complacency with regard to capitalism. both offered new resources to think and act against and beyond the suffocating “infinite undulations of the snake,” as gilles deleuze puts it in his “postscript on the societies of control.” 2 today, at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, we are much better placed to evaluate their respective contributions. this exchange on paradox vs. dialectic is a clear and illuminating encounter that shows not only how united žižek and milbank are on what they oppose, but also how profoundly divergent their theological visions are. in this book, žižek throws his lot in with protestant death of god theology, as fundamentally shaped by hegel‟s thought and expressed theologically in the work of thomas j.j. altizer, whereas milbank elaborates his positive catholic vision of christian harmony and transcendence. structurally, however, this is not an equal exchange, and žižek has both the first (after davis‟s introduction) and last word, with milbank caught in the middle. furthermore, this debate spills beyond the book into the pages of a recent issue of the journal political theology, 115 crockett where both reiterate their positions and where ultimately, as žižek admits, “our exchange has exhausted its potentials.” 3 žižek is correct in the terms in which it takes place, although that does not mean that the questions themselves are exhausted; in fact, in the same issue of political theology joshua delpech-ramey raises an important question, namely, whether it might be possible to foresee and hold open other versions of transcendence besides the orthodox catholic one that milbank champions. 4 so who is right? well, to employ žižek‟s provocative understanding of the hegelian triad, we have to understand first that neither milbank nor žižek is fundamentally correct in their theological understanding of the christ. second, there is the temptation to imagine that the correct position is “between” žižek and milbank, and this is how sublation is usually understood. but we cannot sublate milbank and žižek and get to the authentic, true version of christ. what žižek‟s interpretation of hegel teaches us is that to get to the right meaning of something, christ in this case, you have to subtract. so, the correct interpretation is a subtraction from žižek‟s position. in this sense, the “true” theological position lies not between žižek and milbank, but rather between žižek and john d. caputo, as i will explain. i will also associate this position with deleuze, and reflect briefly on the monstrosity – the crucifixion and resurrection – of christ and the death of god from the perspective of deleuze‟s thought. another lesson of žižek‟s interpretation of hegel is that you cannot get to the correct reading directly; you have to go through the wrong ones. so, in the spirit of hegel and žižek, i will go through the reading of milbank on paradox and then the reading of žižek on dialectic and show why they are “wrong,” before turning to the right interpretation. in his response to žižek, milbank elaborates his impressive catholic vision of transcendence. in contrast to žižek‟s dialectical version of christianity, milbank claims that “there is a radically catholic humanist alternative to this, which sustains transcendence only because of its commitment to incarnational paradox” (117). dialectics, protestant christianity, and all of secular modernity is wrong, because it forecloses catholic transcendence and ends up with an atheist nihilism. material reality can only be meaningful if there is “recognition of a mediating link between matter and spirit” that atheistic materialism denies (125). milbank‟s incredible erudition is marshaled to force an unavoidable either/or: either dialectical atheist nihilism or paradoxical catholic transcendence that can along retrieve and restore beauty in a harmonious world (158, 165). he gives a phenomenological account of driving along windy roads in the mist, from which things emerge and stand out in an evocatively intense way (160–63). the background mist and the forms that stand out from it exist “in a mutually constitutive tension” that is experienced as “mutually affirming” (163). ultimately, transcendence mediates material reality in a way that allows it to be experienced as beautiful and meaningful in itself, and without this catholic transcendence we lose the thread that stitches our world together for us as a world. this “genuine mediation […] remains to the end – even in god and as god” (166). it is because we have meaningful, true and beautiful experiences that we know and trust that transcendence mediates and provides for the possibility of these experiences in a paradoxical way. milbank claims that “the soil of the finite, within our experience […] paradoxically „runs monstrosity exhibition 116 out‟ into the sands of the infinite” (168). i do not want to deny the richness of either milbank‟s language or these phenomenal experiences, but i do think that he exploits them in order to paint his over-arching metaphysical picture of a harmonious, transcendent world that is ultimately an illusion. not that beauty does not exist, but it‟s not the only thing that does exist, and the existence of beauty does not exclude its opposite. milbank wants to have his transcendent cake and eat it materially too. is that too much to ask? yes and no. it‟s natural to want cake but that doesn‟t mean that some grain or wheat doesn‟t have to die in order for you to bake and eat it. the idea of the god-man, which is the paradox of the incarnation, “may be an absurd mystery, but it strangely seems to clarify the mystery of the huge gulf between human beings and mere animals” (170). here milbank sets up a gulf in material physical reality that seems odd given his desire for material and metaphysical harmony. why are animals “mere” animals? because they lack “creativity, self-mutation, and new accessions of power” that are the provenance of human beings (170). milbank wants to re-enchant nature, all of it, although he still runs up against some difficulties, such as, in this passage, the gulf between humans and animals. his anglo-catholic vision is no doubt appealing, but it seems incredible in relation to the complexity of experience, unless that experience is honed and shaped into the forced choice that milbank wants us to face. on the one hand, modern culture operates with an explicit or implicit notion of progress, such that non-modern values are seen as irrelevant and obsolete. milbank paints us an attractive picture of a non-modern world, and these non-modern values are important insofar as they provide alternatives to modern and contemporary capitalism and its value system. on the other hand, milbank‟s project seems impossible and undesirable in its attempt to restore a catholic world that is medieval at its heart, because it is based on an imperial vision of christianity that is incompatible with a pluralistic world no matter how dressed up in postmodern terms. milbank stresses the contingency of western history. he claims that “one should ascribe the historical triumph of the modern rather than the ancient model not to any outworking of a material logic but to contingent processes of ideological and political struggle” (183). he asserts the contingency of protestant modernity, and he appeals to this contingency to counter the inexorability of its processional logic, but he fails to radicalize that contingency to christianity itself. why should christianity have emerged as the religion of the west, other than as a result of processes of “ideological and political struggle”? why not stoicism, paganism, buddhism, or islam? milbank sees the problem with protestant/modern/dialectical supercessionism, and he offers an alternative, but at the same time he legislates an unavoidable and unsurpassable medieval worldview. he claims that “we are still living out a „certain‟ middle ages that is univocalist, voluntarist, nominalistically equivocal, and arcanely gnostic,” that we mistake for modernity (218). “it is time,” however, “that we abandoned the paganism of progress and recovered a more authentic middle epoch” (218). this epoch would necessarily be christian and western. 5 žižek pursues to its radical end this logic of contingency and necessity, which is also necessarily western and christian. but he also perceives that the universality of western 117 crockett christianity is simply the flip side of the universal logic of capital, which is truly universal at a global level. žižek‟s gospel is not ordinarily seen as “good news,” but he is a better theologian than milbank, at least in terms of radical theology as opposed to orthodox theology. žižek says that “my claim is that it is milbank who is in effect guilty of heterodoxy, ultimately of a regression to paganism: in my atheism, i am more christian than milbank” (248). most forms of orthodox theology are heretical in the etymological sense – they consist of picking and choosing histories, rules, doctrines, and beliefs that are then imagined as a tradition and a truth. žižek opposes this fantastic wishful thinking of theology with his hard-core christian atheism. here the truth of christianity is that god dies on the cross: “incarnation is the birth of christ, and after his death, there is neither father nor son but „only‟ the holy spirit, the spiritual substance of the religious community” (33). the lesson of christ‟s life and death is that god becomes human and dies, really dies, and does not continue to exist. of course žižek does not believe that god really expires, but rather that what the crucifixion teaches us is that god does not exist, but not in the stereotypically atheist way. god really doesn‟t exist, and the other does not exist, and the crucifixion is the dialectical gap between god and godself, which is the same gap at the heart of human being, as well as reality as a whole. žižek appeals to altizer‟s apocalyptic hegelian theology as a counterpoint to the “„soft‟ postmodern theology” of caputo, which in its post-secular guise of religion without religion is “aseptic, lifeless, bloodless, lacking the properly religion passion […] in comparison with someone like altizer” (260). žižek ends up affirming the radical core of christianity over against post-secular religious appropriations of postmodern insights dressed up in christian garb. this can be rhetorically appealing, but it is also somewhat disingenuous, because žižek appropriates these same postmodern insights and then positions himself as somehow beyond them. notions like violence, truth, hardcore theology and sexual frankness appeal to him as ways to tweak the political correctness of contemporary multiculturalism, even though žižek personally is not nearly as monstrous as he wants to appear at times. this is not in any way to dismiss žižek‟s philosophy, which is incredibly important. his reading of hegel and german idealism through lacan is absolutely stunning and brilliant, and his analysis of popular culture through films, music and other phenomena is sharp and powerful. furthermore, žižek is resolutely leftist and refuses to compromise with corporate capitalism. finally, his religious insights are sincere and extremely relevant. i just think that he exaggerates his distance from postmodernism and its representatives like derrida, caputo, and others, in order to appeal to readers who are turned off by stereotypical distortions of these thinkers. at the same time, there is a sense in which the movement of postmodernism is a politically conservative phenomenon, which is why derrida resisted the term, despite its embrace by so many english speaking readers. so in his reading of hegel and christianity, žižek emphasizes irreducible conflicts, deadlocks that he exaggerates in his dialectical readings, and this is from where milbank draws the conclusion of nihilism. but i think that milbank goes too far; these dialectical deadlocks are not nihilistic because they are ultimately resolved, but the resolution is not a conventional sublation. rather, the resolution is the cutting of a gordian knot, the dissolution of the conflict as such. monstrosity exhibition 118 however, the question remains to what extent žižek has over-emphasized the conflictual nature of the deadlock itself in order to provide his own brilliant solution. žižek asserts that “something traumatic erupts in death-of-god theology, something that is covered up by postmodern theology,” which is the insight that all of christianity consists of a psychoanalytic defense mechanism deployed against “the traumatic apocalyptic core of incarnation/death/ resurrection” (260). so the event of christianity is an incredibly traumatic event, as one might imagine the death of christ on the cross should be, but christianity itself as a religion consists of an incredible repression of the reality and truth of that event. but there is always a return of the repressed and this traumatic apocalyptic kernel keeps insisting itself, which is what keeps christianity going, and also what drives western history. so is the spirit of christianity also the spirit of the west? and what relation does this spirit have to the spirit of capitalism? does capitalism also have a traumatic core, or is its core the complete absence of trauma, at least at its center? does not capitalism always spit out squashed birds at the margins, like a hegelian machine run amuck? žižek says that “for christianity, the true miracle is not the dead christ walking around, but the love in the collective of believers” (291). but isn‟t that also what caputo says in the weakness of god when he opposes the miracle of the event to magic and resuscitated bodies? maybe it‟s simply that caputo doesn‟t devote enough time to what žižek says is the condition of the miracle, which is “the bird‟s body squashed somewhere – like christ on the cross, this supreme squashed bird” (291). the reference here is to a magic trick from the film the prestige. a little bird disappears, seemingly killed, and then reappears miraculously. when a little boy asserts that they are not the same bird, the magician denies it, but later you see him, as žižek explains, “throwing a squashed bird into a trash can – the boy was right” (286). hegelian synthesis seems like a cheap trick, but you have to keep in mind there is always a squashed bird somewhere. christianity fastens itself upon the squashed bird. in her novel surfacing, margaret atwood has an unnamed narrator come upon a dead heron senselessly killed and strung up in the canadian wilderness. her character reflects: whether it died willingly, consented, whether christ died willingly, anything that suffers and dies instead of us is christ; if they didn‟t kill birds and fish they would have killed us. the animals die that we may live, they are substitute people, hunters in the fall killing deer, that is christ also. and we eat them, out of cans or otherwise; we are eaters of death, dead christ-flesh resurrecting inside us, granting us life. canned spam, canned jesus, even the plants must be christ. but we refuse to worship; the body worships with blood and muscle but the thing in the knob head will not, wills not to, the head is greedy, it consumes but does not give thanks. 6 žižek says that hegel is the true christian philosopher, because his speculative dialectical standpoint demonstrates that the crucifixion and the resurrection “should be perceived not as two separate events, but as a purely formal parallax shift on one and the same event: crucifixion 119 crockett is resurrection – to see this, one has only to include oneself in the picture. when the believers gather, mourning christ‟s death, their shared spirit is the resurrected christ” (291, žižek‟s emphasis). this is correct; the only distance is the necessary temporal delay that is required to shift from the first position (crucifixion) to the second (resurrection). and also to keep one‟s eye on the trick, because there are always at least two birds. christianity focuses one‟s attention on the broken body of jesus precisely so that believers do not pay any attention to the other bird(s), whether jewish or pagan. or today, muslim. the fact that according to the interpretation of rené girard christianity is the sole religion that exposes the mechanism of mimetic violence and scapegoating does not mean that it ceases to function; it functions all the more effectively and insidiously for all that by scapegoating the religions like islam that do not overcome substitutional violence. take also the more traditional claim, that christianity is the religion that absolutizes christ‟s sacrifice in order to put an end to sacrifice. but sacrifice does not end; it gets taken to a whole „nother level, as nietzsche pointed out in the genealogy of morals. we could say, with weber, that capitalism is the highest and most sublime spirit of christianity, because sacrifice is entirely overcome, and the most selfish greed accords with the best and most perfect wealth. there is something monstrous about all of this, including the elimination of externalities that allows us to drive birds and other animals to extinction while celebrating them in zoos and on nature shows. i claim that deleuze offers resources to better understand the death of god and the monstrosity of christ than either milbank or žižek. deleuze‟s notion of the death of god is less christocentric than žižek‟s, and in difference and repetition 7 he explains it in reference to time. in chapter 2, “repetition for itself,” deleuze elaborates three syntheses of time, which roughly correspond to present (habit), past (memory), and future (eternal return). the transition from the second to the third synthesis occurs along a break that is opened up by kantian transcendental philosophy. according to deleuze, “if the greatest initiative of transcendental philosophy was to introduce the form of time into thought as such, then this pure and empty form in turn signifies indissolubly the death of god, the fractured i and the passive self” (87). instead of setting the self in time in an ontological sense, kant places time within the self, and this division between the active (apperceptive) and passive self splits the self in two. why would the splitting of the self lead to the death of god? because descartes founds the modern idea of god upon the self as the cogito. “god survives as long as the i enjoys a subsistence, a simplicity and an identity which expresses the entirety of its resemblance to the divine” (86). deleuze claims that the pure and empty form of time that kant isolates at the heart of the self also accomplishes the death of god. this is a non-dialectical, non-hegelian version of the death of god. 8 the pure and empty form of time constitutes the third and final synthesis of time for deleuze, and it is the break or caesura of this form of time that opens onto a future. the past, the present and the future are all distinct forms of repetition, and it is the third form of time that concerns the eternal return, and deleuze‟s appropriation of nietzsche. the “repetition of the future as eternal return” is a kind of repetition that “affects only the new, what is produced under the conditions of default and by the intermediary of monstrosity exhibition 120 metamorphosis” (90). the conventional reading of nietzsche‟s idea of the eternal return is the return of the same; the idea that everything returns exactly and identically. deleuze claims that this is a misunderstanding of the eternal return: only what becomes returns, or what becomes differently. the eternal return is repetition by excess, and it excludes all identity, including “my own identity, the identity of the self, the world, and god” (91). if deleuze is right, and only that which is different returns, then there is no self-identity that can be substantialized or eternalized, including that of god. to think the death of god is to think the death of the self, and the impossibility of human and divine identity. this death, however, is an opening, a passage not to some higher form of identity, but to a future that is different because it returns, or repeats. this death does not lead to a future resurrection, but in fact it is directly resurrection. resurrection properly understood is the new, the different that emerges out of the process of repetition or iteration that becomes the future. we can attempt to cling to our identity, but it is a false identity, and a more reactionary kind of death, death as claustrophobic suffocation. with deleuze, though, we can think about the death of jesus as the death of god, as the death of identity that opens onto a future, a repetition of difference beyond identity. in terms of deleuze‟s book the logic of sense, 9 jesus offers up a body that suffers passion and death, which is the reality of his crucifixion, whereas his resurrection refers to the sense of this death, which appears nonsensical in conventional terms. for deleuze, there are two series: a series of signs and a series of bodies, and the series of signs express what the series of bodies endure (23). an event is the sense that the series of signs express, but the impetus for an event is embedded in (a) body, and occurs as a wound. events are actualized in sense as the expression of a trauma, a cut, or a wound, which is why “every event is a kind of plague, war, wound or death” (151). christ is the sign of a death/body that is proclaimed by his followers like peter and paul as life, an event that has revolutionary sense. the cut of the crucifixion is the intensity that drives the repetition that constitutes christianity, and this process is singular to christianity but not exclusive to it. we could also think about cosmic buddha-bodies, ethical jewish bodies, whirling sufi bodies, and subtle hindu bodies, among others, that constitute different dispersals, and distinct relations between body and sense. it is not that jesus dies, and then he is resurrected, and that event holds the promise for our own resurrection after death so long as we believe in it. it is not that jesus dies, and he is then resurrected in us, the community of believers in christ, as žižek has it. it is that the message of jesus‟ death is the resurrection, purely and simply. christ dies, and this is precisely good news. everyone dies. in his book the weakness of god, 10 caputo provides a thinking of resurrection that has affinities with deleuze, even though caputo does not explicitly refer to deleuze in his discussion. in chapter 11 of the weakness of god, in his reading of the lazarus story, caputo claims that “rebirth and resurrection – that is what the kingdom is all about” (237). this resurrection, that jesus performs in the case of lazarus, is the “singular transformation from death to life,” but it is a not a magical transformation that reverses the decomposition of a rotting body (238). caputo 121 crockett discusses the time of the world in terms of ruined time, which is evil. not that worldly temporality is evil, but the crushing of possibilities is evil, the destructive power of pain and death. in contrast to ruined time, caputo brings in what levinas calls “the time of salvation,” which pertains to the event. salvation means “being saved from ruined time for a new time” (241). the redemption of a person like lazarus seems to mean either the resuscitation of his body or the elevation of his soul to a state of eternal life, but i do not think that caputo‟s view of time is either reversible or dialectic/dualistic. salvation is a miracle of new life, but it is wholly situated “not in a heavenly pleasure but in the pain of the present” (252). we can only be saved by the other, by the appearance of a new birth, a child as the miracle of a new beginning, beyond death but not outside of death. lazarus is also a squashed bird. according to caputo, “neither time nor salvation, neither rebirth nor resurrection, is possible in the solitary ego” (252). reading caputo in the context of deleuze, resurrection can be understood not as the self-transcendence of the ego into another, higher (soul) form of ego. rather, life is a resurrection or rebirth, because it is predicated upon and conditioned by death, even as death is only possible for what lives. lazarus is not a person who was dead and then was physiologically restored to life by some magic spell cast by jesus, and jesus is not another (very special, even super-human) person who was physiologically restored to life magically by a transcendent divine being. as i read caputo and deleuze, the message of jesus is that death is resurrection and rebirth, and that the only kind of death that does not constitute resurrection is the suffocation-death of an enclosed or imprisoned ego. so long as we try to preserve and maintain our ego, our persistent identity, we can only die. but only insofar as we release our identity and recognize that we are not, the death of the self is the resurrection because it is the gate by way of becoming anew. becoming is becoming differently, becoming in and as difference, and the death of god and self are the only possibilities for resurrection, because that death is resurrection itself, which is immediately divine. we can either reactively cling to life, which delivers it over to death, and then our death seals this death-in-life cutting it off in an impossible manner; or we can embrace and accept death as the opening up and out of ourselves as we recur differently and eternally, but not as us. as i read milbank and žižek, milbank wants a theology in which death simply has no place – there are no squashed birds. žižek, on the other hand, comes incredibly close to the position i have just set out in terms of deleuze and caputo, but he wants to assert a quasi-dogmatic mode of christianity along with the formal parallax that he explicates. žižek‟s hegelian framework threatens to overwhelm and over-determine the process of repetition, insofar as history appears as the working out of an internal (protestant) teleology. so to sum up my response to this extraordinary book: the correct theoretical understanding of the monstrosity of christ lies precisely between žižek and caputo, held together by the tension between caputo‟s affirmation of jesus‟ genuinely paradoxical – as opposed to milbank‟s contrived paradoxes – anarchic logic of the kingdom in the weakness of god and žižek‟s dialectical elaboration of the christ‟s crucifixion and resurrection. monstrosity exhibition 122 notes 1. slavoj žižek and john milbank, the monstrosity of christ: paradox or dialectic? ed. creston davis (cambridge, ma: the mit press, 2009). 2. gilles deleuze, “postscript on the societies of control,” october 59 (1992), 3-7, http://www.n5m.org/n5m2/media/ texts/deleuze.htm 3. john milbank, “without heaven there is only hell on earth: 15 verdicts on žižek‟s response,” political theology 11.1 (2010): 126–35; slavoj žižek, “the atheist wager,” political theology 11.1 (2010): 136–40, 136. 4. joshua delpech-ramey, “supernatural capital: a note on the žižek-milbank debate,” political theology 11.1 (2010): 121–125. 5. see milbank‟s recent essay pitting the christian west against islam in stereotypically conservative ways: “christianity, the enlightenment, and islam,” august 24, 2010, http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2010/08/24/2991778.htm 6. margaret atwood, surfacing (new york: random house, 1998), 141. 7. gilles deleuze, difference and repetition, trans. paul patton (new york: columbia university press, 1994). 8. we could say that deleuze is right ontologically, that there is no separation between death and resurrection, but žižek and žižek‟s interpretation of hegel is right epistemologically or in terms of conscious recognition: there is always a delay between the recognition of death as death and the realization of death as resurrection. so thinking and understanding operate dialectically, but the truth or reality of the matter is that it resurrection as repetition of difference is a non-dialectical process. 9. gilles deleuze, the logic of sense, trans. mark lester with charles stivale (new york: columbia university press, 1990). 10. john d. caputo, the weakness of god: a theology of the event (bloomington: indiana university press, 2006). whither traditional catholic institutions [expositions 4.1&2 (2010) 12-27] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 whither traditional catholic institutions? john w. carlson department of philosophy creighton university in recent years, concerns about “identity” have increasingly arisen at what may be called traditional catholic institutions. these colleges and universities, most of long standing, typically were founded by orders of religious men and women (jesuits, christian brothers, franciscans, dominicans, augustinians, sisters of mercy, etc.), often at the request of local diocesan bishops. in some cases, the institutions were founded by bishops themselves and operated as units of their respective dioceses. as has been chronicled rather fully in recent studies, 1 many of these institutions now face serious questions about what, precisely, it means for them to be catholic, about how and by whom answers to such questions are to be reached, and about the implications of all this for their standing in the larger american higher education community. i myself have been occupied with these questions for some time; 2 but it was not until contacted by overheard editor bernard prusak that i explicitly adverted to the connections between such questions and ones raised by the u. s. supreme court decision in yeshiva. my contribution to the present symposium will focus on these connections. 1. to begin on a personal note, in may 2010 i completed my fortieth year of full-time service in american catholic higher education. i first encountered issues about faculty roles in college and university governance in the early 1970s, while employed as an assistant professor at saint louis university, sponsored by the society of jesus (or jesuits). after two consecutive years of financial distress at the university – resulting in no faculty salary increases – a movement developed to form a union, with the local chapter of the aaup to be designated as collective bargaining agent under the national labor relations act. unsurprisingly, this movement was aggressively opposed by the university administration. (i remember being button-holed on campus by a prominent jesuit, who warned darkly that unionization of the faculty would mean the end of collegiality at our institution.) for whatever reason or constellation of reasons, the movement failed to gain sufficient support. during that time i understood rather little about pertinent issues (although, as prusak suggests in his introduction, “collegiality” certainly sounded like something good and important, not to be recklessly jeopardized). now, having served many years in both teaching and administrative ranks, including a stint at one institution with a faculty collective bargaining agreement, i have developed more perspective on the matter. as noted, i also have developed serious concerns about what are, for many catholic 13 carlson institutions, important related issues (although ones that barely appeared on the radar in the early ’70s) – namely, issues of “catholic identity.” 2. at the end of that decade came yeshiva. 3 the majority opinion (which surely was applauded by my button-holing jesuit mentor) noted that universities typically are organized in a manner different from that of the “pyramidal hierarchies of private industry;” instead, they operate according to a “model of collegial decision-making.” thus the majority held that full-time faculty members are, in the sense pertinent to nlrb concerns, “managerial” employees – and accordingly not protected under the national labor relations act. this opinion, of course, was strongly opposed by the minority, which argued that the majority’s view of faculty status in the modern university was distorted by a “rose-colored lens” and that, given governance structures as they actually exist in the academy (which seemed to the minority more like those of “any large industrial organization”), faculty indeed should enjoy collective bargaining rights. the decision involved a 5–4 split. by now, we are used to such outcomes. however, unlike many cases, the yeshiva split did not bespeak strongly held, and opposed, matters of principle. rather, the main disagreement was over the interpretation of facts – i.e., the actual operation of american colleges and universities. seen in that context, a closely divided court should have come as no surprise. indeed, as it seems to this writer, in a number of instances the facts tended to support the majority opinion, while in a number of others they tended to support the minority opinion; moreover, points about institutional operations could be adduced on both sides of the issue. 3. today, thirty years later, relevant facts about college and university governance and other pertinent issues are changing – and their implications for yeshiva still seem subject to dispute. (certainly, the percentage of recent non-tenure-track faculty hires, as cited in the introduction, seems to call for a re-evaluation of some basic assumptions.) as indicated, i wish to focus on a set of governance issues in flux in distinctive ways within one particular set of institutions – those we have identified as traditional catholic colleges and universities. there are over two hundred such institutions across the country. a handful of them – led by notre dame and georgetown – hold carnegie status as doctoral-granting, are genuinely national in their recruiting bases, and have excellent overall academic reputations. if annual u. s. news and world report rankings are to be credited, 4 many regional “comprehensive” or “master’s level” catholic schools also are of very high quality and are recognized as such by their american institutional peers. (for example, among universities under catholic sponsorship, the recently released 2011 u. s. news rankings list villanova, providence, loyola of maryland, and fairfield among the top ten regional universities in the east; belmont and loyola of new orleans among the top ten in the south; creighton, xavier of ohio, and john carroll among the top ten in the midwest; and santa clara, loyola marymount, gonzaga, seattle, and portland among the top ten in the west.) a similar profile emerges for regional liberal arts colleges. the wither traditional catholic institutions? 14 reputations in question have been earned; nonetheless, it seems doubtful that these results would have been achieved by traditional catholic institutions if they had not, beginning in the late 1960s, adopted governance models in keeping with the norm in american higher education – i.e., ones that were more “collegial,” as well as ones that rendered the institutions independent of juridical relationships with the catholic church. 5 4. however, the cutting of juridical ties, and the movement from top-down decisionmaking structures (with members of the founding religious orders and/or local bishops at the top) to more typical american models, came with an institutional price: the opening of these schools to a possible decline in their catholic identity. this opening has been potentiated by several other factors – in particular, a reduction in the number of religious order members among these institutions’ faculty and staff; a concomitant increase not only in instructors who were lay men and women, but ones who had no prior personal affiliation with catholic higher education; and the rise in federal regulation of american colleges and universities, as well as the increasing demands of professional and regional accrediting agencies. during the past few years, a number of difficult issues related to catholic identity have arisen on the campuses in question. without claiming to be exhaustive, i suggest that most of them can be grouped under three headings: a) determinations of curricular offerings and requirements; b) sponsorship of outside speakers and other para-curricular events; and c) hiring of faculty and academic administrators. some concrete cases involving these issues have been handled rather smoothly; others have not – with accompanying uproar and public embarrassment to the institution. our concern here is not so much with the details of individual cases as with the range of answers, and the institutional methods of arriving at answers, to which these issues seemed to admit; and also, mindful of yeshiva, with the different answers’ implications for an assessment of faculty roles in institutional governance. 5. let us consider briefly salient examples from each category. regarding the first, concerning curriculum, a most salient fact also is a near-universal one: change in the “core” or “general education” requirements for the bachelor’s degree. at catholic colleges and universities in the 1960s, such requirements typically included four or more courses each in theology and philosophy. today, while there is considerable variation, the standard seems to be one or two each – and sometimes philosophy is folded into a more general requirement in the humanities. now, arguably, a keystone of the catholic intellectual tradition has been high regard for – indeed, insistence upon – the study of philosophy and theology, with the latter itself conditioned by its interaction with natural or philosophical reason. 6 the reduction in curricular requirements in recent decades seems to entail a diminution of catholic identity. but how if at all might this result have been forestalled – and how is further diminution to be prevented? it should be noted that significant pressure has been placed on core curricula by increased requirements from professional accrediting agencies – e.g., for students of chemistry, the acs (american 15 carlson chemical society); for students of business, the aacsb (association of american colleges and schools of business); and so on. still, there is little doubt that in many cases the curtailment of core requirements in philosophy and theology has been driven by concerns of faculty (and their students) in other disciplines – in particular, by a perceived unfairness in allotting such a large share of the curriculum to these two departments. such a perception in part has stemmed from the idea that, as regards the core curriculum, all disciplines are essentially equal. this idea is a common one within american higher education; that it should have become influential at catholic colleges and universities reflects the faculty diversification noted above. but, i would argue, it also reflects the loss of the traditional organization of courses within philosophy and theology programs themselves, as well as a general loss of commitment – by faculty of catholic as well as other backgrounds – to these institutions’ historical missions. all this has been compounded by lack of nerve (or implicit agreement) among many academic administrators, who might have rejected the faculties’ new curricular models and called for retention of serious theological and philosophical study. absent direct intervention by senior officials or boards of trustees, or renewed fervor among faculty with traditional catholic commitments (and colleagues who also recognize the value of these disciplines), there is little reason to suppose that this trend will be reversed. perhaps less significant overall, but often highly publicized when they occur, are issues about particular courses. a current case involves a course on gay marriage being taught at seton hall university in the fall semester of 2010. the developer and instructor of the course is a tenured member of the political science department; he also is a gay man who previously upset people concerned about the institution’s catholic character by writing and making public remarks that not only went against church teaching on marriage but, in the judgment of the individuals in question, subjected it to overt ridicule. now, seton hall is somewhat distinctive in that the local catholic “ordinary” (i.e., diocesan bishop) has a formal role in the governance structure of the institution. in this case, the bishop determined last spring to try to have the gay marriage course cancelled – in part, he said, because the issue of same-sex marriage already has been settled in the negative by authoritative church teaching. at its june 2010 meeting, the board of regents debated the matter but was unable to reach a decision. thus the course, which had passed through regular academic approval channels, remained on the fall schedule. 7 by any account, this situation is an extraordinary one; it raises questions about the extent to which senior administrators, the board and even local bishops are prepared to “reach down” into the details of curricular offerings. such persons, it is true, have a responsibility to ensure that core traditions at the school are maintained. but instructors at seton hall, as well as at other institutions where such moves might be contemplated, understandably will ask: “if the faculty, through regular academic channels, cannot make determinative judgments about the courses taught in our curriculum, about what can we make determinative judgments?” wither traditional catholic institutions? 16 6. regarding the second category – sponsorship of outside speakers and other campus events – readers will remember the controversy in the spring of 2009 when the university of notre dame invited president obama to be commencement speaker and receive an honorary degree. 8 although the university has a long history of welcoming sitting american presidents to campus, a significant number of the nation’s catholic bishops, as well as many lay people (including many notre dame alumni), protested the university’s decision because of obama’s aggressive stances on abortion-rights and related issues. (the local ordinary boycotted the commencement ceremony.) perhaps a more important – because more common – example involves the annual performance, at a number of catholic as well as other institutions, of the play called “the vagina monologues.” this play (or, strictly, staged reading of parts) was developed by its author to call attention to the plight of women who are subjected to sexual mistreatment or to discrimination because of their sexual orientation. unsurprisingly, its themes often are expressed in language that is graphic and, by many standards, obscene. diocesan bishops and others – notably the cardinal newman society, 9 which focuses on maintaining and enhancing catholic identity at church-affiliated institutions – have called for performances of the play to be halted. to date, the results have been mixed – in some cases successful, in others not (and, in either event, sometimes with a residue of hard feelings all around). another relevant incident took place a couple of years ago at my present institution, creighton university. the center for health policy and ethics, which sponsors an annual “women in health” lecture series, had invited a prominent feminist who devotes considerable attention to issues about health care in this country. a few weeks before her scheduled appearance, the invitation was cancelled by the university president. he explained that, while persons are welcome to express a variety of points of view at creighton, in this case the speaker’s history (which, it turned out, included an essay in the los angeles times detailing her participation in an assisted suicide, and defiantly challenging anyone who might object on moral grounds 10 ) made university sponsorship via a prestigious lecture incompatible with our catholic mission and identity. this move, which pleased officials of the omaha archdiocese, produced considerable consternation on campus. similar cases occur rather frequently across the country. happily, in the present instance, the occasion was used constructively to develop, through an alluniversity committee, an explicit set of policies regarding the selection of outside speakers. questions pursued by this committee have significance for all traditional catholic schools: what are the implications of an institution’s catholic identity in choosing which speakers and events to sponsor? in cases where the events are arranged by academic departments and programs, how much scrutiny by institutional officials is to be expected and recognized as legitimate? 7. the third category of difficult issues – related to the hiring of faculty and academic administrators – came to wide public attention in spring 2010. at marquette university, a year-long search for a new dean of the college of arts and sciences yielded the 17 carlson recommendation of a candidate who had been a successful department chair at another jesuit institution, but one who is a lesbian living openly with her partner and who focuses, as a scholar in sociology, on gay and lesbian sexuality and its treatment in american public policy. one of the writings on her resume (by no means an isolated instance) is titled, “seeking normal? concerning same-sex marriage.” in this article, she indicated her belief that public recognition of such marriages is virtually inevitable; but, as one directly affected, she wondered whether gay and lesbian couples should even aspire to participate in an institution so deeply corrupt. at first, marquette’s president approved the search committee recommendation, but then – after a contract for the deanship already had been sent to the candidate – he reversed himself and rescinded the offer. in an interview with the new york times, 11 the president insisted that the candidate’s personal sexuality was not a major factor in his decision; rather, it had been discovered that some of her writings were incompatible with catholic teaching. a press release added that a person who had produced such writings could not credibly lead the university’s arts college, whose dean in a special way must represent marquette’s catholic identity. predictably, the rescinding of the deanship offer led to great uproar on campus. marquette’s faculty senate passed a resolution condemning the president’s action and declaring that the episode sullied the reputation of the university and gave reason to wonder whether it in fact was committed to diversity and collegial operation. 12 no one – including the university officials involved – regards this issue as having been handled well. (to the further chagrin of many faculty members, it later emerged that milwaukee’s archbishop had privately expressed to the president grave concerns about the appointment – although the archbishop recognized that the decision was the university’s to make.) but, whatever should or should not have been done in the present case, the more general question raised concerns the role and autonomy of duly established university bodies, especially those with a preponderance of faculty, when they are directly concerned with the institution’s academic mission and operation. in what types of cases, and for what types of reasons, should senior administrators and boards feel free to reject such committees’ findings and recommendations? less-publicized cases occur with some frequency on catholic campuses in the hiring of full-time faculty. the reason is not difficult to discern. consider that a modern liberal education hardly can avoid exposing students to the writings of, e.g., karl marx, notwithstanding the fact that church authorities have been cool or even hostile to marx – in part because of his declared atheism, but also because of the notorious totalitarian regimes that have claimed his writings as their inspiration. in some cases this curricular need, along with other considerations (e.g., the range of courses to be offered in a department’s graduate program), will entail hiring a specialist in marx. now, such a specialist will not necessarily agree with everything marx wrote; but he or she is unlikely to be without sympathy for the author’s basic themes. how, and by whom, are the subtleties of this situation to be negotiated – and, if necessary, explained to the catholic wither traditional catholic institutions? 18 institution’s various publics? similar questions arise in connection with the hiring of expert faculty to teach evolutionary biology, feminist literature, and a range of other important topics. each spring such questions can become the daily bread of catholic college and university deans and academic vice presidents, as well as (if they are alert to the issues) departmental search committees. 8. given the various factors at play, it is predictable that – now and for the foreseeable future – issues related to mission and identity, as well as the question of how and by whom the issues are to be resolved, will loom large for traditional catholic institutions. in practice, the modes of resolution can take an indefinite number of concrete forms; moreover, such forms can evolve over time. in theory, however, the general types of resolution seem to this writer to reduce to three. before exploring them, let us summarize the relevant constellation of forces currently affecting traditional catholic colleges and universities. first, as noted, there are powerful forces pushing these institutions toward greater and greater secularization. beginning in the late 1960s, there has been, in most cases, a severing of juridical ties between the college or university and the institutional church. further, in virtually every case, there has been a severe reduction in the number of faculty and staff who are members of the founding religious order. these individuals’ places sometimes have been taken by lay catholic men and women who are imbued with the spirit of the founders; but often – and increasingly – they have been taken by persons who have little or no prior exposure to the catholic intellectual tradition. adding to the effect is a sometimes noticeable loss of fervor among the (generally older) catholic faculty who remain. finally, along with increased funding of higher education by federal agencies has come increased regulation (and thus a tendency toward homogenization); further pressure along these lines has come from program accrediting bodies. in light of these factors, it should be no surprise that traditional catholic institutions face challenges to their missions and identities. as our illustrative cases reveal, in many concrete instances the challenges are vigorously met by countervailing forces – ones seeking to promote a return to a strong sense of catholic identity. sometimes, however, these forces involve what are perceived as heavy-handed moves by senior administrators and boards, as well as by persons and groups that are not formally part of the institution – in particular, local bishops and organizations such as the cardinal newman society. the upshot of all this can be confusion – and even open conflict – as to who is responsible for and who actually determines the school’s identity and mission. such confusion and conflict takes a heavy toll on the morale of all stakeholders: students, faculty, administrators, boards of trustees, and, often, diocesan chanceries. a certain amount of ambiguity about these matters probably is inevitable, given the complexity of the institutions in question. and the natural tendency toward inertia that characterizes all institutions of higher education can be expected to manifest itself, at a number of 19 carlson catholic schools, in continued “temporizing” and issue-avoidance. (however, recent events make it seem unlikely that this mode of operation will continue to be viable for very long.) among catholic colleges and universities that do address their identity issues squarely, it is to be expected that varying approaches will be undertaken. moreover, as noted, very likely there will be some evolution of approach in individual cases. but a sketch of the general types of resolution available should help to clear the air, as well as to concentrate the mind. 9. as indicated earlier, the general types of resolution to issues about catholic identity seem to reduce to three. i) first would be to continue and even to strengthen the trajectory suggested by the rescinding of the dean hire at marquette and, at least in terms of the local bishop’s intention and effort, the elimination of an approved course at seton hall. institutions that choose such a trajectory would, to be sure, solidify their bona fides as catholic; but this approach also would hark back to the “top-down,” pre-1970s model of institutional governance and perhaps even lead to re-establishing formal, juridical ties with the local diocese. as suggested at the outset, it is difficult to believe that traditional catholic institutions could do this without losing a good deal of their hard-won standing in the american academic community. if this option were adopted, instructional staff would come to be viewed simply as another category of employees – ones engaged by the institution to deliver a curriculum more or less prescribed by institutional leaders. this doubtless would negatively impact the morale of many faculty members on the campuses in question. of these, a significant number who could leave and find full-time employment elsewhere surely would do so. 13 ii) second, it might come to be acknowledged – with or without the intervention of local bishops – that full secularization at certain historically catholic colleges and universities either already has occurred or is inevitable. from the standpoint of catholic orthodoxy, these institutions will be seen as “too far gone”; thus they may as well be set free to pursue their own paths in american higher education. as happened in many (of course not all) schools founded by protestant religious bodies, there no longer would be allegiance to, or serious education in, themes of a christian and catholic nature. 14 no special emphasis would remain, for example, on the role of natural reason in conjunction with religious faith in students’ coming to develop a matrix for personal choices and discussions of public policy. such schools might retain optional religious services, as well as a skeleton team of campus ministers, but they no longer would provide an environment dedicated to the holistic development of students (intellectual, emotional, social, and spiritual) in line with catholic traditions. iii) the third general possibility would be to rebuild an explicitly catholic culture on the campuses. such a culture would be expressed in many ways, including ones related to the areas of concern discussed earlier. institutions that pursued this third model once wither traditional catholic institutions? 20 again might come to be imbued with the spirit of catholicism; this would display itself, inter alia, in these institutions’ curricular offerings, their policies regarding outside speakers and events, and their administrative and faculty hires. rather clearly, such a renewal of campus culture could come only from inside the institution; it could not be imposed by external fiat. it also would need to proceed, so to speak, organically – growing in influence on various dimensions of campus life as opportunities and circumstances permit. speaking for myself – but also, i believe, for many academics of long-standing at traditional catholic institutions – i have little interest in being part of an educational endeavor that involves either the first or the second model. at the same time, however, i am concerned about the practical possibilities of implementing the third. let us explore what would be involved in a transformation of institutional culture, as well as the difficulties this effort predictably would face. 10. what would be required in rebuilding an institution’s catholic culture? as i see it, at least the following: initially, and crucially, there would need to be renewed fervor for the school’s traditional mission – updated in light of the needs of contemporary students – among a sizeable number of faculty, staff, and administrators who are catholic, as well as colleagues who might be recruited to this cause. excellence in teaching and research is of course to be highly valued in whomever it is manifested. (the same is to be said for excellence in counseling students, preparing and monitoring institutional budgets, the provision of campus food services, etc.) however, the coalition here envisioned would constitute a necessary foundation for, and a principal resource in pursuing, other things required for cultural change, including a gradual reexpansion of the numbers of catholics employed, especially in direct teaching roles. (one of the more difficult provisions contained in pope john paul ii’s 1990 document on catholic higher education, ex corde ecclesiae, 15 is that a majority of instructional personnel at the institutions in question themselves should be faithful catholics. at many catholic-sponsored institutions in the u. s. today, the percentage of faculty members who embrace and follow the religious tradition is well under that mark.) for there to be an expansion of the number of catholic instructors at a college or university, the institution would need to be quite intentional in its hiring policies; moreover, given reasonable legal restrictions on according preference to candidates with a particular religious profile, the institution would need to be explicit about this matter in position advertisements posted through various media. as suggested, such an expansion also would need to be gradual; and in any given year important instructional positions may need to be filled for which no catholics with excellent credentials make application. hard-won academic reputations should not be sacrificed even for the good here envisioned. 21 carlson there also would be required a return to a well-conceived core curriculum – and in particular, well-sequenced sets of courses in philosophy and theology. this would not require the numbers of courses that characterized pre-1970s curricula; but it is difficult to see how basic elements of these crucial areas of catholic tradition could be effectively communicated via fewer than two or three courses in each department. the design and implementation of these core sequences would fall primarily to the departments themselves. however, the whole faculty has a stake in an institution’s core curriculum; thus the voices of interested and knowledgeable persons across the college or university also should be heard. given typical academic approval processes in american higher education, it is almost certain that they would be. let me offer two specific observations and recommendations. regarding theology, although this discipline in no way should relinquish its critical function, students are illserved by a steady diet of historical and form-critical studies of scripture, social science based approaches to ecclesiology, and “revisionist” accounts of ethics (according to which there is no basis, natural or supernatural, for judging any type of act to be intrinsically wrong). the views of those who dissent from the catholic magisterium should be presented as having the gravity they in fact have. however, students also must be exposed to the best work of theologians who “think with the church” (latin sentire cum ecclesia), not least regarding moral issues of sexuality and family life. 16 somewhat similarly, philosophy core offerings once again should come to exemplify, not the “introductions” that typify general education across american colleges, but rather an ordered sequence that gives students access to the reflective thought on which the church’s understandings of the world, human persons, and god, as well as the foundations of morality, in part are based. 17 these courses also should make students aware of, and encourage them to grapple with, challenges to these understandings posed by aspects of contemporary intellectual culture (relativism, scientism, fideism, etc.). finally, the renewal of catholic culture on the campuses would require the development and maintenance of offices of campus ministry that are fully oriented toward christ and the church. such offices would take as their primary mission helping students develop spiritually in keeping with catholic teaching and practice. of course, students of all faiths and of none should continue to be welcomed at these institutions; and, insofar as this can be accomplished, arrangements should be made to address all students’ spiritual needs. however, in many and varied ways – e.g., through prominent displays of religious symbols, regular availability of catholic worship services and sacraments, frequent weekend retreats, and faith-inspired service programs to assist the poor – it once again must become clear that the spirit imbuing the campus is the spirit of catholic christianity. if the cultures at traditional catholic institutions could be renewed in these ways, not only would there be a clarification of mission; neuralgic campus episodes of the types mentioned earlier in this essay would be much less likely to occur. moreover, when wither traditional catholic institutions? 22 faculty as a matter of course approach curriculum reform with an eye to better fulfilling the college or university mission, when campus speakers and other events are carefully selected to complement academic programs (with competing viewpoints presented in a responsible manner, without derision of catholic teaching), and when search committees are selected and educated so as to pursue their tasks realistically and conscientiously, the institution will come to model the important catholic principle of social justice called the “principle of subsidiarity.” 18 that is, decisions by and large will be made at the institutional levels best equipped to make them and carry them out, with higher levels offering assistance (latin subsidium) as requested or needed. 11. but while rebuilding a school’s catholic culture may appear the best of the three general approaches to resolving issues about institutional identity, anyone wishing to undertake it should have a sober awareness of the difficulties that in most cases would be faced. first, the initial coalition of catholics and other interested parties would, as such, have no institutional authority; and in the beginning their efforts are likely to be greeted with some skepticism and even ridicule. moreover, a number of well-intentioned colleagues who do not share the catholic faith may be genuinely if misguidedly distressed at this initiative. and questions – some of them legitimate and needing to be carefully addressed – will be raised about the legality of the hiring policies contemplated. will the stalwarts required for such cultural change come forth in sufficient numbers? will they express their ideas adroitly and maintain their resolve over what is likely to be a very long haul? further, even in the best of circumstances core curriculum reform is fraught with difficulties. and it is no easy matter to address cogently the issues here raised, especially when key members of the audience have no personal background to help them appreciate the significance of theology and philosophy. will patient and effective communication of the need for strong core sequences be undertaken? will what now tend to be very diverse departments in these disciplines come to agree on the design of such sequences? finally, as currently operated, campus ministry programs at traditional catholic institutions often communicate somewhat heterodox messages to students. or rather, and more charitably, the staff members involved seem to act from an inadequate notion of what the jesuit tradition calls cura personalis (care for the individual student). in an effort to meet students “where they are” – i.e., as they currently think and act – campus ministers often soft-peddle catholic teaching, especially regarding sexual morality. thus important concerns, e.g., the “hook-up culture” on many campuses, never get meaningfully addressed. 19 will campus ministry staff be open to a more forthright presentation of catholicism? will college and university administrators – who sometimes strongly support the “softer” approach – come to be persuaded of the importance of promoting institutional church teachings? in sum, implementing this approach to the enhancement of catholic identity indeed would be difficult; in some cases, practically speaking, it very likely would be 23 carlson impossible. but in other cases such an endeavor, prudently and sensitively undertaken, would have a reasonable chance to succeed. in a recent interview, the new president of the catholic university of america, layman and former law school dean john garvey, expressed great hope about the catholic character of his institution. 20 he correctly pointed out that in the late 1960s leaders at catholic institutions did not think carefully enough about how they would preserve their institutional identities with the implementation of, e.g., the famous “land o’ lakes” statement. but he is confident that things now are different, at least at cua. of course, this university is unique in the u. s. in being pontifically chartered and having a board of trustees that includes a large number of american catholic bishops, including one who serves as chair. thus historically it has had a bulwark – although a controversial one, for which the university doubtless pays a price in its reputation among american academic peers – against classroom teaching and ministerial practice that fail to support the catholic magisterium. 21 however, it is widely recognized that, in addition to relying on formal institutional structures, the former president, rev. david m. o’connell, c. m. (himself now a bishop in trenton, new jersey), was highly resourceful in promoting the development and maintenance of a vibrant catholic culture on campus. on this third model, obviously, the latter type of effort – institutional renewal from the inside – would serve as the pattern to follow. 22 12. let us consider, finally, the implications of the three approaches to institutional identity sketched above for issues debated by the majority and minority opinions in yeshiva. i) on the first model (continuing and even strengthening the trajectory toward topdown control), faculty hardly could be characterized as “managerial employees.” since the curriculum – or constraints on the curriculum – would be determined and communicated by senior administrators and boards, faculty members would be reduced to specialists who deliver various components of that curriculum. this model perhaps would be compatible with a very limited sense of collegiality on campus; and those who chafe under administrative dictates presumably would attempt to find employment elsewhere. nonetheless, this institutional governance structure would invite a renewal of the movement toward faculty collective bargaining. and, although catholic college and university administrators might object, and even file court appeals against successful attempts at unionization, it seems likely that judicial majorities would decide the matter differently than the yeshiva majority did in 1980. for with a return to top-down governance the prior suppositions about faculty managerial roles clearly would not be borne out. ii) on the second model (acknowledging that full secularization at certain historically catholic colleges and universities is inevitable), the de facto manner of resolving concerns over institutional identity – i.e., by essentially eliminating such concerns – itself would be neutral regarding issues of faculty roles in governance. confirmed secularization of a historically catholic school’s mission, curricular programs, etc., wither traditional catholic institutions? 24 simply would mean that, as at most american colleges and universities, other matters would provide relevant points for judicial scrutiny – e.g., levels of faculty involvement in the setting of academic standards, their roles in the selection of administrators and in the institutional budget process, etc. diverse modes of institutional governance and day-today operation – some favoring the yeshiva majority, some favoring the minority – all would be consistent with this outcome. iii) on the third model (rebuilding the institution’s catholic culture from within), there would be great hope for genuinely collegial functioning. decisions about, say, curriculum reform would be made by those specifically trained and positioned to make such decisions, i.e., the faculty, with facilitation and final approval by deans and other appropriate academic administrators. since faculty members themselves would be imbued with (or at least accepting of) the institution’s catholic intellectual culture, in general they could be counted on to make judicious decisions: ones that respect and promote catholic traditions in light of contemporary developments in the disciplines as well as the needs of their students. senior administrators, boards of trustees, and local bishops only rarely would feel a need to intervene – and any such action should be able to avoid the heavy-handedness that has characterized recent, controversial events. in this way, the principle of collegiality in american higher education – as well as the principle of subsidiarity in catholic social teaching – would be preserved. moreover, supposing faculty members also come to have meaningful – although less decisive – roles in the discussion of other important issues (e.g., overall budget priorities), they will be participating in a number of appropriate ways in the management of the institution. in circumstances such as these, there would be de facto governance relations of the sort contemplated by the yeshiva majority; accordingly, there would be no credible or judicially sustainable basis for an effort at faculty unionization. there also, of course, would be little perceived need among the faculty to undertake any such effort. in the end, therefore, we come to the question: “whither traditional catholic institutions?” as this essay has sought to demonstrate, this question has great importance for the present and future identity of these institutions themselves; it also has implications for the question of how the operation of one significant sector of american higher education squares with the decision in yeshiva. notes 1. see, e.g., james t. burtchaell, c. s. c., the dying of the light (grand rapids, mi: eerdmans, 1998) and melanie m. morey and john j. piderit, s. j., catholic higher education: a culture in crisis (oxford and new york: oxford university press, 2006). 2. see my reflections on a recent episode, discussed below, that occurred at marquette university: “catholic identity: shall we talk?” the catholic thing, may 21, 2010, http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2010/catholic-identity-shall-we-talk.html 3. national labor relations board v. yeshiva university, 444 u.s. 672, 676 (1980). 25 carlson 4. u. s. news & world report, http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com. 5. a principal impetus for this development was the 1967 “land o’ lakes” statement, prepared at a meeting of officers of several premier catholic universities at a wisconsin retreat center maintained by the university of notre dame. 6. for a comprehensive statement, see john paul ii, fides et ratio (boston: daughters of st. paul, 1998). see also alasdair macintyre’s recent work, god, philosophy, universities (lanham, md: sheed & ward/rowman & littlefield, 2009). 7. see the extensive coverage of this case on the website of the new jersey star-ledger, www.nj.com/. the present author disagrees with the local ordinary’s reasoning; but he is sympathetic to concerns raised by this course. one solution would have been to have the course go forward, but be team-taught – with the gay activist professor’s counterpart being someone who could clearly articulate catholic teaching on the question of gay marriage. 8. see, e.g., tom coyne’s article for the associated press: “obama’s notre dame visit met with controversy,” march 27, 2009. 9. see the society’s webpage: www.cardinalnewmansociety.org/ 10. anne lamott, “goodbye, friend,” los angeles times, june 25, 2006, http://articles.latimes.com/2006/jun25/opinion/op-lamott/. 11. sam dillon, “marquette rescinds offer to sociologist,” new york times, may 6, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/education/07marquette.html 12. see, e.g., the coverage in the milwaukee journal sentinel, available at www.jsonline.com/. 13. it should be noted that several newer catholic institutions (e.g., christendom college in virginia and ave maria university in florida) were formally founded upon allegiance to the church and recruit students and faculty accordingly. whether they will be able to achieve prominence in the minds of their peers in academia remains to be seen. in any event, the situation of these schools (and of their faculty) is rather different from that of a historically catholic institution seeking to regain its identity via administrative fiat. 14. that most traditional catholic institutions now in fact can be described in this way was the burden of a paper delivered in july 2010 by father michael sweeney, o. p., president of the dominican school of philosophy and theology in berkeley. see “the abandonment of catholic education,” california catholic daily, july 29, 2010, http://www.calcatholic.com/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=36c186d5-4595-4ecb-8e007a16977a36bf. 15. available in latin (http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/apost_constitutions/ documents/hf_jp-ii_apc_15081990_ex-corde-ecclesiae_lt.html) and english (http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/apost_constitutions/documents/hf_jpii_apc_15081990_ex-corde-ecclesiae_en.html) on the vatican website. 16. for an account of revisionist moral theology by a long-time proponent, see charles e. curran, directions in fundamental moral theology (notre dame, in: university of notre dame press, 1985). for a scholarly critique and a defense of the magisterial approach, see william e. may, an introduction to moral theology (2nd ed.; huntington, in: our sunday visitor press, 2003), esp. chapter 4. wither traditional catholic institutions? 26 17. see the september 2008 study by r. e. houser, “a rekindling of the light: the past, present and future of a catholic core curriculum,” the center for the study of catholic higher education, http://www.catholichighered.org/portals/3/docs/houser%208-1808%20web.pdf. (incidentally, in neither theology nor philosophy would this enhancement of core offerings mean an abandonment of excellent, up-to-date majors in the disciplines – although it would, in some cases, strain departmental resources and call for additional faculty “lines.”) 18. for an account of the principle of subsidiarity, see the pontifical council for justice and peace, compendium of the social doctrine of the church (washington, d.c.: u. s. conference of catholic bishops, 2005), 81–83. 19. on the “hook-up culture,” see donna freitas, sex and the soul: juggling sexuality, spirituality, romance, and religion on america’s college campuses (new york: oxford university press, 2008). 20. see “new cua president reflects on greater calling for catholic higher ed.,” catholic news agency, august 17, 2010, http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/new-cuapresident-reflects-on-greater-calling-for-catholic-higher-ed/. 21. perhaps the most famous manifestation of this bulwark was the much-celebrated and much-decried 1986 dismissal from his tenured position in the cua school of theology of the above-noted “revisionist” moral theologian rev. charles e. curran. 22. after the present essay was completed and submitted, news broke of the statement by the u. s. conference of catholic bishops’ committee on doctrine regarding the book by creighton university theology professors todd a. salzman and michael g. lawler, the sexual person: toward a renewed catholic anthropology (washington, d. c.: georgetown university press, 2008). the penultimate paragraph of the bishops’ twentythree-page critique (“inadequacies in the theological methodology and conclusions of the sexual person: toward a renewed catholic anthropology by todd a. salzman and michael g. lawler,” committee on doctrine, united states conference of catholic bishops, september 15, 2010, http://www.usccb.org/doctrine/sexual_person_2010-0915.pdf) declares that “neither the methodology of the sexual person nor the conclusions that depart from authoritative church teaching constitute authentic expressions of catholic theology.” from the standpoint of the issues treated in this essay, the public release of the bishops’ document must be regarded as an instance of the first model discussed – i.e., as being (in intention) top-down and interventionist – rather than of the third model promoted here. (the event also tends to confirm that the time for temporizing about catholic identity is nearly over.) in connection with the public release, both omaha ordinary archbishop george lucas and creighton university issued official statements the morning of september 22, 2010. archbishop lucas said he was “confident creighton university officials would address the catholic bishops’ concerns with salzman and lawler in a manner consistent with the mission of a catholic university” (“cns asks creighton president to clarify academic freedom remarks and consider canon law requirements,” the cardinal newman society, september 24, 2010, http://www.cardinalnewmansociety.org/home/tabid/36/ctl/details/mid/435/itemid/840/ default.aspx.) for their part, university officials’ opening gambit was to affirm that “as a catholic university, creighton – in accord with ex corde ecclesiae – presents to its 27 carlson students as catholic doctrine only that which is deemed to be true doctrine” (“u. s. bishops criticize book by two creighton theologians,” catholic voice online, october 1, 2010,http://www.catholicvoiceomaha.com/main.asp?sectionid=9&subsectionid=9&ar ticleid=14380.) now, as far as i am aware, neither professor salzman nor professor lawler ever has presented his views about sexual morality as catholic doctrine. however, in the book in question they certainly claim that their methodology and conclusions constitute – to say the least – “authentic expressions of catholic theology;” and thus they stand in formal conflict with the bishops’ doctrinal committee as quoted above. the manner in which university officials, church authorities, and the two authors negotiate this matter will have implications far beyond the archdiocese of omaha. © equinox publishing ltd. 2007, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expositions 1.2 (2007) 241–246] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v1i2.241 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 neglected classic in each issue of expositions, we draw attention to a “neglected classic,” an important contribution to the humanities that has lost favor or fallen out of fashion. in particular, we spotlight works that foster interdisciplinary thinking. for our first issue, we present a review of a new scholarly edition of edwin a. abbott’s “flatland: a romance of many dimensions,” a beguiling piece of victorian literature that addresses the connections—and conflicts—between the humanities and the sciences. edwin a. abbott. flatland: a romance of many dimensions. introduction by thomas banchoff. princeton, nj: princeton university press (princeton science library), 2005. 136 pp. $9.95 pb. isbn 0691123667 a.c. mccarthy, city university of new york graduate center a classicist by training and an anglican clergyman by profession, edwin a. abbott (1838–1926) published some fifty volumes, including studies of shakespeare, an edition of francis bacon’s essays, and a number of theological works. he corresponded with george eliot and was intensely interested in the cause of women’s education several decades before female students could take university degrees. as the headmaster of the prestigious city of london school from 1865–1889, abbott initiated a cutting-edge curriculum that required the study of english literature and chemistry and offered instruction in advanced mathematics and shorthand. yet, despite his involvement in the rich intellectual life of the second half of the nineteenth century, abbott is best known today for a single novel, flatland: a romance of many dimensions. first published anonymously in 1884 and continuously in print ever since, abbott’s flatland tells the story of a. square, a member of the professional class in a two-dimensional reality. through the intervention of a mysterious sphere, he journeys to the three-dimensional spaceland and becomes convinced of the truth of the “gospel of threedimensions”—and the possibility of even higher-dimensional spaces. 242 book reviews © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 by narrating the efforts of the sphere to convince a. square of the reality of the third dimension through example and analogy, abbott gives his three-dimensional readers a sense of the method by which they, too, might be able to infer other conceptions of reality that evade the traditional standards of scientific proof, human perception, and language itself. the analogical method of flatland has proved flexible enough to serve as a touchstone for more than a century of scientific investigations, and the book has something of a cult status among mathematicians. in his introduction to the recently reissued princeton science library edition of flatland, leading abbott scholar thomas banchoff, a mathematics professor at brown university, notes that, as today’s computer animation technology makes it possible to visually represent multi-dimensional objects, “there is no better introduction to the problem of dealing with higher-dimensional slicing phenomena than this book” (xvii). however, the mathematical usefulness of flatland cannot fully account for its enduring popularity, nor explain the novel’s relevance in the context of the liberal arts. victorian readers understood flatland as a satire of the more repressive aspects of nineteenth-century british society, particularly its restrictions on women’s opportunities and the privileging of social status over ability. anxiety about identity and the potential for deceit underlies the whole of flatland’s politics, which provide for the control of the lower classes (represented as isosceles triangles), restrictions on women (who are invariably straight lines in a world of triangles, squares, and polygons), and repression of irregular shapes. social interaction is a matter of life and death: if even the angle of a respectable triangle in the middle class is not without its dangers; if to run against a working man involves a gash; if collision with an officer of the military class necessitates a serious wound; if a mere touch from the vertex of a private soldier brings with it danger of death;—what can it be to run against a woman, except absolute and immediate destruction? (12) flatland is, moreover, a society that has traded aesthetic creativity and intellectual discovery for safety and security: the practice of painting was banned after the chromatic sedition threatened to make women visually indistinguishable from the priestly circle class. neglected classic: flatland: a romance of many dimensions 243 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 the construction of flatland society allows abbott to foreground the disruptive power of higher dimensionality. seemingly secure binaries, such as inside/outside, are revealed to be dimensionally-bound constructions. just as a. square, a being of two dimensions, is able to view the “insides” of lineland’s one-dimensional inhabitants, the sphere’s three-dimensional perspective gives him access to flatland’s private inner spaces. a. square first reacts to the sphere’s visitation as a kind of home invasion, and for all his talk about male “rationality” (as diametrically opposed to feminine “affections”), part of his resistance to the sphere’s logical argumentation originates in a powerful feeling of violation. he is deeply offended when the sphere touches him in the stomach—a feat that no two-dimensional being could perform on another: “it seemed intolerable that i should endure existence subject to the arbitrary visitations of a magician who could thus play tricks with one’s very stomach” (79). visiting spaceland proves that the sphere is no magician, but it cannot allay the more deeply disturbing implication that higher dimensions of perception do not correlate with increased moral sensibility. when a. square moves to worship the sphere for his “omnividence”—a divine attribute in the teachings of flatland’s theologians—the latter replies: “is it so indeed? then the very pickpockets and cut-throats of my country are to be worshipped by your wise men as being gods: for there is not one of them that does not see as much as you see now” (82). indeed, no advanced visualization techniques can dispel the deeply disturbing realization of the fragility of the distinction between inside and outside, human and divine. the spiritual shock of the inter-dimensional encounter is as much a part of flatland’s story as what it has to teach us about scientific perception. in his introduction, banchoff contrasts flatland’s first section with fictional travelogues told by visitors to exotic lands. “it is as if the story of gulliver were told by the mayor of lilliput or the adventures of alice by the white rabbit,” he writes (xxii). however, both lilliput’s mayor and the white rabbit are characters with stable “insider” status in their communities. the situation of abbott’s narrator is at once more complicated and more poignant, for his experience in spaceland isolates him from his countrymen both intellectually and physically. he is arrested and thrown in jail at the end of the novel for speaking publicly about 244 book reviews © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 the third dimension, and it is here that he remains, vainly attempting to hold on to his memories of spaceland, reduced to the quixotic mantra, “upward, not northward” (103). a. square’s imprisonment makes his often approving descriptions of the social arrangements of flatland, even those he apparently repudiates in his confinement, particularly— and tragically—ironic. though the author’s introduction to the second edition (published just a month after the first) claims that a. square has relaxed some of his more extreme views on women and the lower classes, he evidently persists in regarding himself as a unique case of wrongful imprisonment in a system that is otherwise sound. the central sections of banchoff’s introduction ably situate flatland within the context of victorian science as well as that of modern computer animation techniques, which use the methods devised by abbott and others as the basis for creating visual representations of objects in four dimensions and beyond. the clarity of his explanations of flatland’s mathematics will be especially helpful to readers from humanities disciplines, whose scientific education may have stopped at the undergraduate or high school level. he anticipates some of the confusions that may arise from popular misconceptions of current science, such as the assumption that the fourth dimension is always time. for a. square, banchoff notes, time would be the third dimension, and for beings whose universe has a spatial fourth dimension, the fifth dimension would be the one assigned to time, and in general we can expect that time will come in right after the dimensions that are reserved for space. (xxvii) the structure of banchoff’s introduction, however, privileges the mathematical aspects of flatland and treats them as largely independent of the novel’s other concerns. while it is certainly appropriate to dwell more fully on the former in an introduction aimed at an audience with scientific interests, banchoff perhaps overstates his point when he claims that the major reason for our interest in flatland [is] that for the first time we can achieve some of the dreams of our ancestors a century ago and obtain direct visual experience of phenomena in a dimension higher than our own. (xxvi) neglected classic: flatland: a romance of many dimensions 245 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 his examination of flatland’s social satire, style, and historical context appear perfunctory next to the more fully realized section on “flatland and new modes of visualization.” the latter section, for instance, contains a number of references to other works on the dimensional analogy, but he does not provide any suggestions for further reading on other subjects, implying that the literary and social levels of flatland are so self-evident as to need little examination. banchoff provides a more in-depth discussion of the philosophical and historical sources of flatland in his article “from flatland to hypergraphics” (1990), which places abbott more fully in his religious and intellectual milieu. a less simplistic treatment of flatland’s relationship to nineteenth century culture appears in an article by elliot gilbert, who argues, “in flatland we are dealing with an unassuming but insightful study of a persistent nineteenth-century preoccupation, the quest for new creative directions in a culture powerfully—if more and more uncomfortably—committed to history and tradition.” however, if banchoff too quickly dismisses the complexities of flatland’s social dimensions for modern readers, gilbert tends towards the opposite extreme of marginalizing the science of the novel’s “quirky geometric fantasy” (gilbert 1991, 396), a view of the novel obviously not shared by mathematicians. perhaps the fullest and most balanced portrait of abbott can be found in ian stewart’s introduction to and notes in the annotated flatland (2001). while he gives ample space to the mathematical concepts in the novel (and includes a number of detailed diagrams), stewart presents abbott as a consummate victorian intellectual and clergyman, who was concerned not only about the search for scientific knowledge but about its spiritual consequences, an orientation that links abbott to more canonical nineteenth-century authors such as arnold and tennyson. he draws upon abbott’s other writings, particularly the spirit on the waters (1897), to illuminate the principles set forth in flatland’s dedication, which wishes that we, the inhabitants of spaceland, may aspire yet higher and higher / to the secrets of four five or even six dimensions / thereby contributing / to the enlargement of the imagination / and the possible development / of that most 246 book reviews © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 rare and excellent gift of modesty / among the superior races / of solid humanity. banchoff, for his part, pays little attention to abbott’s theology and perhaps overstates the uniqueness of his view that “the techniques of literary criticism developed by classical scholars should be used with the same vigor to examine the scriptures” (xxi). at a time when science and religion are frequently portrayed as being mutually exclusive, if not actually hostile to each other, the marginal role given to abbott’s theology represents a missed opportunity for a profitable discussion. given the interdisciplinary range of abbott’s own interests, it is clear that flatland should be read at the intersection of science and the humanities. indeed, the most important reason for reading and discussing flatland, particularly in an undergraduate classroom, lies not in what it teaches about dimensionality or victorian culture specifically, but in the process of engaging the methods from across the liberal arts curriculum. the brevity and readability of flatland, not to mention its social, mathematical, and political suggestiveness, makes it a quintessentially “teachable” text, offering numerous possibilities for classroom discussion. though instructors will want to have stewart’s more comprehensive edition on hand, the reprint of the princeton edition provides an ideal starting point for undergraduate reading in multiple dimensions. moreover, it gives humanities scholars in particular the opportunity to make the non-scientific possibilities of flatland as compelling as banchoff has made its mathematics. references banchoff, thomas 1990 from flatland to hypergraphics: interacting with higher dimensions. interdisciplinary science reviews 14(4): 364–72. gilbert, elliot l. 1991 “upward, but not northward”: flatland and the quest for the new. english literature in transition (1880–1920) 34: 391–404. stewart, ian 2001 the annotated flatland. cambridge, ma: perseus. 00preface.indd © equinox publishing ltd. 2008, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expositions 2.1 (2008) 001–004] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v2i1.001 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 editors’ preface john a. doody, kim paffenroth, and peter busch it is an exciting time of growth for expositions. last year we launched the journal in order to publish peer-reviewed articles for a wide audience—not only for specialists in a scholar’s own field but for curious readers in other humanities disciplines and the wondering public at large. as we begin our second volume, we are now (as nietzsche would say) “becoming what we are”: growing into ourselves, discovering new ways of inviting authors into a conversation that is worth reading. socratic questions one of these discoveries is actually a rediscovery. this spring our issue investigates socrates as a model for interdisciplinary studies. although his research and teaching methods were less than popular in his own day—the athenian democracy saw fit to execute him for impiety and corrupting the young—socrates is now applauded by academics across the political spectrum. allan bloom, for example, declares socratic inquiry to be nothing less than “the soul of the university” (1987, 268). for martha nussbaum, meanwhile, socratic questioning is central to the life of the mind and to life itself: “socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being. in other words, this life of questioning is not just somewhat useful: it is an indispensable part of a worthwhile life for any person and any citizen” (1998, 21). finally, cornel west holds up “socratic questioning” as “the enactment of parrhesia—frank and fearless speech—that is the lifeblood of any democracy” (2004, 209). what then is the significance of socrates today for all students of the humanities? should we think of the humanities as a grand socratic dialogue, as the aforementioned scholars would seem to recommend? or would a socratic approach only take us so far in understanding some topics, authors, or texts? to take a few not-so-random examples, what if we happened to be studying a novelist and teacher in victohttp://dx.doi.org/10.1558/expo.v2i1.001 2 editors’ preface © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 rian england, a black social reformer in post-civil-war america, or a christian theologian and bishop in late antique north africa? how do these wildly disparate writers answer the questions posed by socrates? do they even ask the same questions that he does? and what do they think of his questioning activity itself, his whole “examined life”? three articles in this issue help us begin such a reconsideration of socratic inquiry. thomas hibbs opens with a study of w.e.b. dubois, whose souls of black folk invokes socrates (alongside st. francis and the “sorrow songs” of former slaves) as an alternative to booker t. washington’s practical education for economic advancement. according to hibbs, socrates’ example is no less important for understanding souls of black folk as a whole, because the work should be understood as dubois’ own apologia or socratic defense. our second article, by todd breyfogle, introduces readers to saint augustine’s confessions by helping them appreciate its qualified continuity with the socratic tradition. on the one hand, breyfogle advises that we read confessions as if it were a platonic dialogue and so to engage augustine’s text in active conversation rather than accept it as an authority; on the other hand, he emphasizes that the book moves beyond dialogue in using poetry to stir the reader’s imagination. finally, we are pleased to include a hitherto unpublished manuscript by walter pater, edited and introduced by gerald monsman. as monsman shows, pater’s “gaudioso, the second” was intended as a response to his wayward student, oscar wilde. against wilde’s picture of dorian gray and what pater saw as its detachment of beauty from morality, pater reaffirms a platonic view of beauty as exemplified in a very different portrait, one that our readers will literally see for themselves in the pages of the article. new features at expositions we have an unofficial motto: “scholarship that scholars actually like to read!” one way we live up to this boast is by including essays that explore intriguing questions without following the usual formula for scholarly articles. whether by holding a three-way interdisciplinary roundtable on harold bloom’s jesus and yahweh (as we did in issue 1.1) or by reviewing a “neglected classic” that has as much to say about life in victorian england as it does about physics in four doody. paffenroth and busch 3 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 dimensions (as in 1.2), we have already found new occasions for inviting otherwise bashful disciplines into conversation with each other. this spring we continue this work with two features that we expect to offer as regular sections in upcoming issues. the first we call “overheard in the academy.” unlike our usual academic roundtables, which review recently published books, “overheard” is an exchange about a matter of present concern which all sorts of people in the humanities are talking about. ripped from the headlines, bullied from the blogs, cajoled from the cocktail parties, these are the issues that get us wondering or arguing with each other. in this issue we have invited four scholars to weigh in on a typically provocative proposition from stanley fish: that the question, “how are the humanities useful?” has only one honest answer, namely, that they aren’t. our second new feature is a section called “notes, insights, and flashes.” perhaps hard to classify within conventional categories, these short pieces will reflect upon or challenge existing scholarship, provide intriguing new paths of interpretation and close analysis of a text, or take a position that is still too experimental or risky to be developed in an ordinary article. we expect some of our most exciting scholarship to appear in this section. in this issue we begin with a note on susan neiman’s reading of eichmann in jerusalem. what did hannah arendt mean when she spoke of “the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil ”? for neiman, arendt meant that evil has shallow roots and can therefore be uprooted by human hands. according to bernard g. prusak, however, arendt actually meant that evil has no roots at all, no ultimate cause that we can discern. we are now accepting submissions of “notes, insights and flashes” for upcoming issues of expositions. please see our website for details (www.equinoxpub.com/expo) . the evolution continues our last article this spring reviews recent books on charles darwin. as andrea d. wolfe notes, darwin’s account of our biological origins continues to meet popular resistance despite what researchers see as ever more robust empirical support for evolutionary theory. why do http://www.equinoxpub.com/expo 4 editors’ preface © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 we find this gulf between ordinary and scientific opinions? how have recent defenders of evolutionary theory sought to bridge it? wolfe’s essay is a fitting conclusion to an issue with so many new features on display. no doubt expositions will continue to evolve as we adapt and survive in the competitive, dangerous world of academic publishing. as the editors, however, we also hope that the journal shows some evidence of intelligent design. references bloom, allan 1987 the closing of the american mind. new york: simon and schuster. nussbaum, martha 1998 cultivating humanity: a classical defense of reform in liberal education. cambridge: harvard university press. west, cornel 2004 democracy matters: winning the fight against imperialism. new york: penguin books. [expositions 5.2 (2011) 1-2] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 the future of the classics: introduction donald e. lavigne texas tech university i firmly believe that if modern western society is to continue to endorse the study of the classics, it is essential that we, as classicists, actively participate in a public discussion of what exactly it means to pursue such study. too often, we allow anachronistic definitions of our field and its significance to populate the marketplace of ideas. do we really expect those who hold power over the dollars that fund education to make informed decisions about the value of classics if we ourselves are not regularly reminding them of exactly what that value is? the following papers represent an effort to contribute to such a discussion of the discipline, its value and concerns for the future, and to foster an on-going, public debate of the future of the classics. when i was first asked by the editorial team of expositions to offer my ruminations on the state of classics, i had the good fortune to be in residence at the center for hellenic studies (chs). as one of chs’s missions is to act as a conduit between classicists and society at large, i, in consultation with the director and the rest of the management team, arranged to host a symposium on the future of the classics, in order to provide a jumping off point for a selfexamination of the discipline, in the hopes of spurring more analysis and debate. the breadth we were seeking is embodied in the contributors themselves, who represent several countries, from greece to the us, and have various institutional associations, from middle schools to top-rank research universities. the resultant picture of the state of the discipline contained in these papers is rather varied and nuanced, informing as much through the similarities as the differences revealed in each contribution. yet, the contributions all share a basic approach, in that each surveys the past with an eye toward how that past has shaped the present state of the discipline, finally offering some suggestions for the future. as evidence of the fecundity of this approach, many unforeseen connections and unaddressed problems, as well as other visions of the state of the discipline and its future, were broached in discussion after the oral presentation of the papers. while it has proven impossible here to include a sense of the vibrant discussion that followed the live presentation of the papers (presented to an audience of classicists at chs and broadcast on their website), i encourage readers to watch a recording of the original event (including both the papers and discussion) at the following url: http://vimeo.com/channels/chsfellows. it seems that such a broad-ranging and free discussion of the state of classics as a discipline could only be possible in the context of the center for hellenic studies. indeed, time and again chs has shown its leadership in the field (and in the academy more generally) by supporting innovative projects that address concerns far beyond those deemed traditional, and the present endeavor owes its existence to the center’s progressive agenda. i especially would like to thank greg nagy (the director of chs), kenny morell, and doug frame for marshaling the resources of the center for http://vimeo.com/channels/chsfellows future of the classics: introduction 2 hellenic studies in support of this project. special thanks are due to rob jensen, for recording the symposium; and to ruth taylor, lanah koehl, and allie marbry for ensuring all aspects of the event came off without a hitch. it remains to thank my fellow contributors, who took time out of their ongoing work to share their thoughts on the state of the discipline – these papers stand as testaments to their commitment to fostering the kind of public debate without which the future of the classics would be rather uncertain. © equinox publishing ltd. 2009, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expo. 3.1 (2009) 1–4] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v3i1.1 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 editor’s preface peter busch villanova university peter.busch@villanova.edu perhaps no portrait of modernity is so dark yet so funny as charlie chaplin’s masterpiece, modern times. in the opening scenes, chaplin is a hapless factory worker who turns an endless series of identical screws on a conveyor belt with no discernable purpose. one day he is chosen to be the test subject for an invention that will eliminate inefficient lunch breaks by feeding the workers automatically. after that experiment ends in a messy failure, an increasingly erratic chaplin tussles with his foreman and lies down on the belt, entering the gaping mouth of an enormous machine and winding around its mighty gears like a half-digested sandwich. like shakespeare’s polonius, he goes not where he eats, but where he is eaten. rediscovering enchantment but if modernity first appears as a machine that devours the human beings it was meant to serve, its portrait in the rest of the movie may be more promising. chaplin falls in love with an orphan girl whom he has saved from the police, and together they bravely join in the modern pursuit of happiness. returning to work as a night watchman in a department store, he dances backwards and blindfolded on roller skates, unaware that every turn brings him within inches of falling into a precipice that he somehow, miraculously, avoids. later, he goes to work in a mill, and this time a worker who gets stuck inside the machine does get to eat his lunch—as he is fed by chaplin himself. the movie enters the new age of “talkie” technology when chaplin sings a nonsensical but definitely naughty song. in these moments, the soulless mechanism of modernity is transformed, if only briefly, by the beauty of romantic love, dance, compassion, song, comedy, and wonder. while it is a commonplace to describe our world as “disenchanted,” we are thus led to mailto:peter.busch@villanova.edu 2 expositions © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 consider whether some enchantment does not remain in our lives. what is it that we glimpse in chaplin’s story? can enchantment find a home in modern times? what exactly is the power of poetry, music, and beauty in our souls? can enchantment be understood philosophically? is it rather (or also) a variety of religious experience? what must be true if enchantment is to bring the happiness that it promises? these are some of the questions that we will be investigating in our themed issue this spring. articles in this issue our first article, by james wetzel, argues that modernity is in fact defined by its resistance to enchantment, and specifically to what modern philosophers regard as the hocus-pocus of religion. “the mark of the modern in philosophy,” wetzel maintains, “is a skeptical disposition, directed especially towards alleged revelations of what is good or right.” for wetzel, this skepticism has resulted in our ongoing quarrels over whether to side with reason or imagination, will or vision, altruism or self-interest. wetzel proposes that these divisions are not so necessary as they might seem; they are avoided in advance, he argues, by an augustinian-platonic understanding that draws no stark distinction between philosophy and religion because it understands the good as the one, true god. is it possible to revive platonic notions of beauty without embracing the pre-modern theism of augustine? we can examine this alternative in the nineteenth-century classicist and historian of culture, walter pater. our second article, by gerald monsman, presents pater’s understanding of beauty as an aesthetic experience that links the sensuous with the spiritual and exerts its power at the turning points of history and culture. monsman illustrates his reading with “tibalt the albigense,” a fragment by pater that is published here for the first time. our third article turns to an account of enchantment more in keeping with wetzel’s call for renewed seriousness about religion. instead of reuniting theism with philosophy, however, stephen little reunites theism with poetry. little interprets canto 26 of paradiso as ascribing to dante the poet a prophetic vision of god that recalls the revelations of isaiah, paul, and john in the bible. editor’s preface 3 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 perhaps, however, artistic expression offers an enchantment all its own, apart from all claims to prophecy? in our fourth article, “what has mozart to do with coltrane?” cynthia r. nielsen explores the wonders of innovation and improvisation to be found in the world of music. other features this spring marks the return of “notes, insights, and flashes.” bernard g. prusak examines the famous argument in confessions that evil, strictly speaking, does not exist, and he finds augustine’s argument to be something less than persuasive. this philosophic (not to say skeptical) reading was so provocative as to inspire a much longer critical response from an augustine scholar, jonathan p. yates. such conversations are exactly what we hope to accomplish with this feature, and so we are publishing the entire exchange, including prusak’s reply to his critic. if modernity is defined by its skepticism concerning religion, as wetzel maintains, how should this remarkable process of disenchantment be understood? what are its causes and implications, beyond the academic discipline of philosophy? distinguished political theorist charles taylor has taken up this question in a secular age. micah j. watson and bruce ledewitz discuss taylor’s book in our academic roundtable. our book reviews include two review essays. in the first, nicholas popper discusses quentin skinner’s hobbes and republican liberty as well as his longstanding and influential practice of studying authors by situating them within their social and historical context. in the second essay, david schalkwyk reviews two recent books in which shakespeare is read as a philosophic thinker. to what extent does such an approach reveal what is most profound in the plays? dawn if we turn to the end of chaplin’s movie hoping to learn the fate of enchantment in modern times, what we find is deeply ambiguous. having escaped from yet another disaster, apparently by running all night, 4 expositions © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 chaplin and the girl now sit on the side of the road, exhausted. she has been wrapping a loaf of bread in a kerchief to carry on his cane, but now she breaks down, sobbing, “what’s the use of trying?” chaplin’s earnest response, “buck up—never say die. we’ll get along!” restores her spirits, and the two of them set off towards the rising sun. their path is a modern road, but they are headed for the hills, to the countryside rather than the city. it is unclear, therefore, whether happiness is to be found in modernity as they have known it, or whether it would require them to be unmodern, or at least differently modern. one way or the other, the two of them believe they see their happiness ahead, and only the most intransigent skeptic would insist that they are wrong. 07breyfogle.indd © equinox publishing ltd. 2008, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expositions 2.1 (2008) 059–082] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v2i1.059 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 on reading st. augustine’s confessions1 todd breyfogle the aspen institute this essay is intended as a guide for beginning readers of augustine, for teachers charged with helping these readers understand augustine, and for those interested in a problem that confronted augustine first as a reader and eventually as an author: how does a book help us understand ourselves even as we understand its author? a famously dysfunctional reader, don quixote de la mancha, opens the essay as an example of a soul imprisoned by books because it is subject to slavish imitation. with this caution firmly in view, i offer a series of tips on how readers of the confessions can approach the work with appropriate freshness, developing strategies for reading not only augustine but other great authors as well. i stress especially the dialogical character of confessions and, with it, augustine’s qualified continuity with the platonic-socratic tradition of text-as-conversation. in so doing, i emphasize augustine’s emerging pedagogy based on his understanding of the function of signs and the affective character of the poetic imagination. in this way, augustine translates the socratic tradition into a distinctively christian idiom while providing a prospective antidote to quixote’s misplaced flights of intellectual and moral fancy, inviting the reader to begin his or her own independent spiritual journey. introduction augustine was a north african of the fourth and early fifth centuries but our journey begins in sixteenth century spain, with the escapades of cervantes’ fictional adventurer, don quixote. we pick up cervantes’ tale at the end of part one of the book. don quixote has been apprehended by his friends, themselves in disguise, and is being carted back to la mancha in, well, a cart—he is behind bars. as the errant don’s companions walk alongside the rolling cage, the canon chastises him with these words: http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/expo.v2i1.059 60 on reading st. augustine’s confessions © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 the truth is, my dear sir, that i myself consider these so-called books of chivalry to be prejudicial to the public good.… in my opinion this kind of writing comes under the heading of milesian tales, which are absurd stories, concerned only to amuse and not to instruct, unlike apologues, which amuse and instruct at the same time. and even though the main aim of such books is to amuse, i don’t know how they can succeed when they’re full of so many monstrous absurdities, because the soul can only take delight in the beauty and harmony that it sees or contemplates in what the eyes or the imagination places before it, and nothing that contains ugliness or disorder can give us any pleasure…. fictional stories should suit their readers’ understanding and be written in such a way that, by making impossibilities seem easy and marvels seem straightforward and by enthralling the mind, they amaze and astonish, gladden and entertain, so that wonder and pleasure go hand in hand; and none of this can be achieved by the writer who forsakes verisimilitude and imitation, because the perfection of all writing consists in these two qualities. (cervantes 2000, 439–440) here cervantes contrasts beauty and harmony with ugliness and disorder; the canon is platonic in his conception of the structure of reality and of the imagination’s capacity to be deceived (and to deceive itself ). a well written book should edify, carrying its truth in every line as an antidote to misunderstanding and as a challenge to think for oneself. imitation must capture the imagination; verisimilitude must incite the reader to understand the truth of things. while not necessarily cervantes’ authentic voice, the canon does reflect cervantes’ understanding of the delicate tension between the allure of fiction and the challenge of truth. the novel is a profound meditation on the delights and perils of reading and helps us appreciate how our own self-narrations are informed by books—that is, how words, images and stories inform our imaginations, give structure to our memories, and create the patterns by which our souls strive to understand themselves and their highest longings. at stake for cervantes is nothing less than the freedom of the soul from the temptations of slavish imitation (see especially girard 1976). one leaves don quixote with an acute sense of independence—the reader has learned, but has not been prescribed a definite path on which he is to embark. in confessions,2 augustine confronts a similar problem: how can the breyfogle 61 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 written word sustain a spirit and practice of conversation in which one learns to think for oneself? the soul, for augustine, seeks wisdom; the longing for this wisdom is innate, but the object of our highest longing is obscured by the countless distractions of lesser goods pursued in disorderly fashion. the awakening of the soul to wisdom would seem to require a teacher—a midwife whose questioning exploration of an individual soul can clear away enough of the soul’s clutter to allow the light of wisdom to draw the soul to itself under its own power. yet, once stretched, the soul is prone to contract and to attach itself not to wisdom’s questions, but to the human teacher’s answers. the teacher is always at risk of being intellectually both the seducer and the seduced.3 the human teacher can resist and deflect the student’s desire to possess him or her instead of wisdom, just as socrates resists alcibiades’ misplaced advances and redirects them towards the good. a book, however, has fewer defenses against the student who would possess it and its answers instead of wisdom itself. a book may become an occasion for the soul’s complacency under the guise of the pursuit of wisdom rather than a stimulating guide encouraging its readers on their upward journey. augustine understood that books could become for us not conversational companions but masters under whom we place ourselves, like don quixote, in slavish imitation. confessions resists its readers’ voluntary servitude. like cervantes, augustine wrestles with what it means to read and be read. like cervantes’ canon, augustine understands the power of words both to inform and to mislead the soul. consider the importance of the book for augustine: he is moved to philosophy by cicero’s hortensius (book 3), he is inspired by the conversions of victorinus and ponticianus (book 8)—who are themselves, by the way, converted by a book, the life of st. anthony—and the arguably decisive conversion in the garden in book 8 is prompted by the mysterious injunction to “take up and read”…a book.4 and of course, the book of books—the bible, and especially the psalms (which augustine would have read daily and seems to have memorized in full)—serves as a basso continuo, the pulsing harmonic foundation of confessions’ interwoven melodies.5 despite the significance of these books, none of them in fact tells augustine what to do. augustine understood from his own philosophical-spiritual journey—especially his slavish adherence to manichaeism 62 on reading st. augustine’s confessions © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 for a decade or more—the disequilibrium that derives from the unreflective affirmation of a taught doctrine. correspondingly, he portrays his readings of books in confessions not as conclusions, but as starting points. rather than foreclosing further learning, these books are gestures which suggest a direction to be striven towards in one’s own way and in one’s own time. books read properly demand interpretation, and interpretation requires the cultivation of reflective judgment. one can learn from another’s self-narration, but one cannot adopt it as one’s own. there are, however, yet two more books to be considered as informing a reader’s independent self-narration: first, the book of nature and nature’s god, which presents itself through reason and empirical observation; and second, the book of the self, which simultaneously discloses and conceals itself to reason, feeling, and meditation. confessions is, then, a book in which augustine strives to read himself and so to know himself against the backdrop of his understanding of nature and the god it presents. the self-narration is already embedded in a context, if only because one has a body, a pre-reflective history, and a medium of reflection—language—which are always already inherited. unlike don quixote, the augustinian soul is rooted in a real world which presents itself, materially and immaterially, for interpretation. as a bishop and international intellectual personality, augustine is fully conscious that his book, confessions, is going to be read by people who want answers.6 he is aware that his own series of conversions may be instructive for others, but he knows that his readers bear responsibility for their own experiences and cannot simply adopt his. confessions is therefore a book designed to assist us in reading ourselves and our relation to nature and the god it presents. it is, self consciously, a book understood to be an aid to reading other books, including the book which is ourselves. in this respect, confessions is truly a classic in george steiner’s sense of the word: i define a “classic” in literature, in music, in the arts, in philosophic argument, as a signifying form which “reads” us. it reads us more than we read (listen to, perceive) it….the classic will ask of us: “have you understood?”; “have you reimagined responsibly?”; “are you prepared to act upon the questions, upon the potentialities of transformed, enriched being which i have posed?” (1998, 19) breyfogle 63 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 a classic articulates, opens up a space for fruitful, if difficult, deepening of the soul. it is a space which demands a response because it forces the reader to judge himself, to reorder the data of memory (as we shall see) in responsible self-narration more accurately approximating the truth. “to read plato or pascal or tolstoy ‘classically’,” says steiner, “is to attempt a new and different life” (27). in contrast to augustine’s experience and the experience augustine expects of his readers—that of coming to think for oneself—quixote’s new and different life is absurd because he imitates without examining himself, without reading his books of chivalry “classically.” the subject matter of the books quixote reads is only partly to blame for his folly, which is at least equally the result of how he reads the books of chivalry. for us to be read even as we read requires a certain mental preparedness and spirit sufficiently open to hear the questions asked by a text. augustine understands the need for this preparedness; correspondingly, confessions is full of practical and theoretical strategies for reading the text and for reading ourselves. in the remainder of this essay, therefore, i would like to accomplish three things: 1. identify and dispel some common impediments to reading confessions; 2. suggest some strategies and note some rhetorical cues that will aid readers’ understanding of augustine; and 3. show how augustine’s manner of writing educates his deep understanding of signs in the formation of an affective imagination. part i: learning how not to read one of the perils of literary fame is that everyone knows already what it is you are going to say before they read your book. as one of my professors once put it when i asked him whether he had read a particular book: “read it? i haven’t even reviewed it yet.” let me outline six great temptations which inhibit our ability to read augustine well. 1. he’s one of the greatest thinkers to have lived; otherwise we wouldn’t be reading him. true, and while i will speak later about the importance of deferring to augustine’s intellect it is worth saying here that augustine is not to be taken lying down. i mean this both literally—confessions is not best 64 on reading st. augustine’s confessions © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 approached from the prone position—as well as figuratively: he challenges us to think for ourselves. his words aren’t worth reading because he is great; he is great because the power of his intellect and expression draw us—if we let them—to the heights of human thought. he doesn’t tell us what to think; he invites us into the depths of his own, internal conversation. it is not enough to know that augustine thinks this or that, we must explore why he thinks what he does, following his own thought process to begin to grasp the deeper logic of his thought. if we are to agree with augustine, it must be not because of his reputation, but because of the integrity of his thought; if we are to disagree with him, we must do so with genuine arguments equal to his own. 2. augustine is a saint. true again, but he was not made a saint until many centuries after his death, when canonization procedures were formalized. but even at that point and under those guidelines, he was made a saint because of what he wrote and did; he did not do and write what he did because he was a saint. let me enumerate three minor temptations here. a. of course he would say that, he’s a saint; b. of course he thinks that, because it’s traditional catholic doctrine; c. as a saint, he of course thinks that revelation (the bible) solves all intellectual problems. each of these minor temptations commits a fallacy with respect to causality, inferring from his sainthood necessary conclusions about augustine’s thought and person. he’s not a saint when he writes, he defines much of traditional christian doctrine (and not the other way around), and he has a commanding sense of what rational reflection is capable of achieving. read without prejudice, confessions is the story of a highly rational philosopher who finds that reason itself points him to the christian faith.7 his positions, again, cannot be explained—or explained away—by ex post facto historical judgments. and, after all, confessions reveals how unconventional and un-saintly he was, laying bare his sins, doubts, and struggles. at the very least he may be seen as the patron saint of the passionate procrastinator—“grant me chastity,” he prays, “but not yet” (conf. 8.7). breyfogle 65 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 3. the confessions are confessions—it is so dreary listening to augustine unload his hypersensitive feelings of guilt. our english word “confessions” has a much narrower valence than the latin confessio and augustine uses the term quite uniquely in defining a literary genre. he does confess his guilt, to be sure, but confessio has also the sense of testimony or witness, as well as of meditation. in confessions, augustine has in mind a threefold audience: god, to whom his confessional meditations are primarily an act of worship; himself, for whom his confessional meditations are acts of conversational selfunderstanding; and the reader, to whom his confessional meditations are addressed as silent but attentive partners in socratic conversation.8 meditations (marcus aurelius’ meditations, for example) do not imply or require an audience. confessions, by contrast, presupposes an audience and, consequently, a multi-dimensional dialogue.9 this threefold audience demands our attentiveness to three levels of confessional dialogue—an attentiveness which prompts a new set of dialogues: between us and augustine, us and ourselves, and us and our god. 4. confessions is an autobiography. confessions does indeed present an autobiographical narrative, but it is not autobiography strictly speaking and is certainly not merely autobiography. arguably, because of confessions, we know more about augustine’s life than we do about the life of most any other figure in pre-modern western history. augustine paints a fascinating personal portrait, but to what end? augustine is wrestling in part to re-collect, to reorder the data of his memory to render more intelligible the meaning of the events of his life. simultaneously, he sees his own struggle for meaning as an index, or pointer, to a more specific exploration of reading on the part of the reader. confessions, then, is not merely the recounting of a life, or even an intellectual life, but the halting, contingent record of a soul’s ascent to the divine—an account of the peeling away of intellectual and moral error toward an ever purer vision of the divine order and its temporal expression.10 augustine’s narrative, for example, is not, strictly speaking, chronological—the narrative structure is guided by myriad other progressions which will reveal themselves only if the reader ceases to think in terms of a linear autobiographical chronology. 66 on reading st. augustine’s confessions © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 5. confessions is primarily a conversion narrative. this temptation is related to the fourth, viewing the work as a linear path to augustine’s decisive change of heart and life. but the narrative does not conclude with the apparently decisive conversion in the garden in milan, as described in book 8. indeed, there are multiple conversions—perhaps even one in each book of confessions—but at least these: the conversion to philosophy, the conversion to manichaeism, the conversion from manichaeism, the conversion to spiritual reality, the conversion to platonic ascent, the conversion to the authority of christ and the catholic church. which of these is necessary? which sufficient? which uniquely decisive? what is augustine trying to tell us about the character or permanence of conversion more generally? we must be careful not to read our own, tentmeeting notion of conversion into augustine’s narrative.11 additionally, the rhythm of the narrative would seem not to culminate in the conversion of book 8, but in the mystical vision at ostia in book 9, the first successful ascent of the soul (after a series of interrupted attempts to glimpse the divine). and of course there are 13 books to the confessions—the narrative of the first nine books ushers the reader into a meditation on remembering (book 10) and an exploration of time (book 11), and with time (“in the beginning”) two further books exploring the first chapters of genesis. viewing confessions as primarily an autobiographical conversion narrative will obscure for us the far richer and more complex trajectory of the work. remembering outward, in time, augustine turns within to the very nature of memory and time, and finds his search for meaning culminating in an everexpanding attempt to understand his origins and ends. his conversion to catholic christianity does not conclude augustine’s intellectual and spiritual quest; rather, it sets the terms and provides a grammar for broader and deeper inquiry which has no unconditional resolution.12 6. finally, there is a temptation to see augustine as overly hostile to the material world—to the body, to sex, to entertainment. it is true that he is no hedonist, but when compared with his stoic and (especially) manichaean contemporaries, augustine is remarkably well adjusted. augustine is not hostile to the body—the human being, for augustine, is by definition the unity of body and soul, not breyfogle 67 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 a soul trapped in a body as the gnostics would have it. for augustine, the body is a good and essential part of our human nature, not to be escaped but to be ordered properly with respect to the divine. similarly, the world of nature cries out, augustine says, “do not worship us but him who made us.” much of the philosophical movement of the confessions is augustine’s progressive understanding that human fulfillment—the satisfaction of our highest longings—is not found in material, but rather in spiritual realities. like one exemplary rock star, augustine can’t get no satisfaction; like a thirsty man who drinks salt water, augustine’s pursuit of material satisfaction leaves him spiritually parched and more intently restless. only when augustine begins to see the material would as ordered to the divine do material things take on their full delight and significance. even then, the ever-self-critical augustine says that he still cannot detach himself from the beauty of the human voice and the taste of a good wine (conf. 10.33, 10.31). like socrates, augustine knows acutely the charms of the material world and guards against their immoderate enjoyment precisely so that their proper significance might be preserved.13 six temptations, then. if we can get beyond: (1) an undue historicist notion of augustine’s intellectual significance; (2) preconceptions of conventional piety and augustine’s saintliness; if we can get beyond the sense that the book is primarily (3) an abject confession of guilt, (4) a simple autobiography or (5) a conclusive conversion story; and if we can resist (6) the temptation to see augustine as hostile to matter as such—if we can resist all of these temptations, then we might begin to open ourselves as readers, as hearers, to a more distinctive, authentic augustinian voice in confessions. if we are to discern a new and different pattern in confessions, we must refrain from imposing our own. like don quixote, we must learn to see things as they are, and not as we have learned to understand them through a perverse imagination. part ii: learning how to read how do we know how to read something we haven’t read before? before i turn to clues augustine himself gives for becoming better readers, let me say a few words about the modern condition of reading. we have ceased to understand, or ceased to understand fully, the 68 on reading st. augustine’s confessions © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 richness of the christian mystical tradition because we have forgotten how to read spiritually. by this i mean that the mode of thought and reading which we customarily inherit today is dramatically dissociated from the spiritual mode practiced at least through 1500 ad and that, consequently, much of the classical “mystical” texts like confessions have been obscured from our view. t.s. eliot spoke famously of the “dissociation of sensibility” which characterized modernity’s break with the past (1996). this is not the place to examine the many theories of modernity’s emergence, its precise date, its villains or its heroes. the spiritual problem has been adequately diagnosed; it remains to re-cultivate the habits of thought and being which will allow us once again to draw nourishment in the present from the considerable resources of christian spiritual texts. nor would i wish to argue that this pre-modern spiritual sensibility does not have clear extension into the modern period, for clearly the mode i seek to describe is consciously conserved. but the spiritual mode of reading is a subterranean inheritance, the light of fireflies at dusk amidst dry intellectual stalks, intermittent light obscured by chaff and unobserved by eyes too dazzled by modern light to be accustomed to discerning traces—and too distracted by an untrained will no longer attentive to the sparkling simplicity of the divine. intellectually—or perhaps better, academically—this modern dissociation may be expressed as the separation of theology and spirituality. yet, to treat the separation of theology and spirituality as a matter solvable by an academic exercise of getting the history right or rearranging the intellectual data to achieve a new, coherent theological model is to address the issue while remaining within a modern mode. to correct one’s map and synchronize one’s instruments are necessary, but are not the same as readying one’s craft and setting sail. one can be prepared by another to embark upon a journey, but ultimately setting sail is something one must do for oneself. but if the very handbooks for setting sail have been rendered obscure, how are we to proceed? for reading great works—itself a kind of setting sail—can only be partly taught and perhaps it can only be learned. the engagement of reading spiritually requires a disposition to allow ourselves to be read to. if indeed we have forgotten how to read spiritually, a book which breyfogle 69 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 tells its reader how to read the great mystical texts would itself scarcely cease to inhabit the modern analytic mode. indeed, it would be merely to perpetuate it. here the image of socratic midwifery reminds us that the philosopher aids in the delivery but himself is neither part of the conception nor the creature born. augustine is conscious that the intellect perennially lights from spiritual reality to concept, that it habitually seeks to insulate itself from the penetration of the divine light to the soul, if only by neglecting the thing signified by remaining in the company of the sign.14 conscious, then, of the soul’s weakness—even the willing soul is distracted— augustine has provided insight into cultivating and sustaining a habit of spiritual reading which culminates less in knowing than in loving and being. if learning is a matter of forming the soul, attentiveness to the spiritual masters will contribute to the re-forming of our own selves, progressively ironing out, as it were, the wrinkles of our modern souls. i might summarize this excursus as follows: non lectio, sed meditatio— not reading, but meditation; let your reading become meditation. and if what i have said has any truth to it, neither augustine nor i can be of much help except to be occasions for your movement from reading to meditation, for that is a task only you can do for yourselves. let us turn to augustine to see what practical conclusions we might draw from the opportunities for meditation he provides for us in confessions. we begin with the opening of the work: magnus es domine et laudabilis valde. great art thou, o lord, and greatly to be praised; great is thy power, and thy wisdom is infinite. and man wants to praise you, man who is only a small portion of what you have created and who goes about carrying with him his own mortality, the evidence of his own sin and evidence that thou resistest the proud. yet still man, this small portion of creation, wants to praise you. you stimulate him to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they can find rest in you. grant me, o lord, to know and understand which should come first, prayer or praise; or, indeed, whether knowledge should precede prayer. for how can one pray to you unless one knows you? if one does not know you, one may pray not to you, but to something else. or is it rather the case that we should pray to you in order that we may come to know you? (conf. 1.1, translation modified) 70 on reading st. augustine’s confessions © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 beginnings and endings are essential for augustine, just as they are essential for any great writer. magnus es domine. these confessions are not about augustine but about god, the god who is great. as such, the work is not conceived as the record of philosophical musings; it is an act of prayer and worship, an act of speech in which augustine can express himself to god only with god’s own words, words from scripture. god himself gives us the words to speak if we have become open to the possibility of hearing them.15 the opening of confessions gives us several indications of the disposition augustine expects us to bring to our reading of the work: first, an openness or humility before god and the text, a suspension of our pride; second, an expectation of the pleasure of reading; third, an attitude which takes questions seriously; fourth, an inclination of the soul toward appropriate curiosity, what augustine elsewhere articulates in the phrase “faith seeks, understanding finds” (on the trinity 15.2.2). we must bring to the text a desire to know. in addition to a disposition to let the text read us, we must bring to confessions a set of skills which we might broadly characterize as “attention.” indeed, much of augustine’s reflection in confessions is anchored by the soul’s movement from distraction to attention—a training of the soul to be attentive. correspondingly, the skills of attention include: 1. careful consideration of beginnings and endings. consider for example, how the expectations of the opening of confessions, in which augustine asks how it is he can hope to know god, are met by the end of book 1, where augustine writes “so you will preserve me and those things which you gave to me will be increased and brought to perfection, and i myself shall be with you; for my very being is your gift.” similarly, the beginning of book 13—“i call upon you o lord” echoes the opening refrain of book 1. the end of book 13 provides both a conclusion and an injunction to begin anew. but you, the good which is in need of no other good, are always at rest, because you are your own rest. how can one man teach another to understand this? ... this must be asked of you, sought in you, knocked for at you. so, so shall it be received, so shall it be found, so shall it be opened. (conf. 13.38) themes from the beginning recur—our restlessness and the uniqueness breyfogle 71 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 of god’s restfulness, our inquiry after a teacher, our asking and seeking answered by god’s gift. as we close the book we are left with the final word—“opened.” reading confessions is an act which is only properly concluded by opening the book—and ourselves—to be read again. 2. attention to beginning and endings suggests hidden structures and symmetries in the work which guide our interpretation. how do the parts contribute to the whole? how does the whole illuminate the parts? what are the echoes that resound? how does the music of one passage cause sympathetic vibrations in another? books 1–9 form a kind of unity. consider the following symmetry: the garden of the pear tree of book 2 foreshadows and is answered by the garden conversion beneath the tree in book 8. how does the garden of book 8 help us re-read the incident of the pear tree garden of book 2? the work’s structure and symmetry suggest, at least, both foreshadowing and backshadowing.16 3. related to structure and symmetry, pay attention to the repeated images. let’s continue with gardens. the theft of the pears in book 2 obviously has resonances with the eating of the fruit in the garden of eden. so too the garden in book 8, perhaps—but the suffering in this case recalls also the garden of gethsemane. we could multiply the images almost indefinitely. let me mention only a very few persistent ones: restlessness, water (tears, baptism), bitterness and sweetness of taste. each of these is rich for meditation and explication if the reader is sufficiently attentive. 4. pay attention to multiple treatments of the same subject. why is it that augustine criticizes his tears over his friend’s death in book 4, and yet excuses his tears over the death of his mother monica in book 9? consider the contrast between his treatment of friendship (with his unnamed friend) in book 4 and that of his friendship with alypius in book 6—and note again the structural symmetry for interpretive clues.17 5. consider how often augustine asks questions, and how he proceeds to answer them. often his questions appear to be rhetorical (e.g., conf. 1.1–4, 10.3–4), but what rhetorical strategy does he have in mind in asking them? 6. think about the relationship between books and the transitions augustine makes between them. for example, in book 1 he identi72 on reading st. augustine’s confessions © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 fies and relinquishes his attachment to physical necessity and infantile selfishness. book 2 is concerned in part with social approbation. book 3 wrestles with intellectual loves, book 4 with the love of friends. each book builds on another in identifying a progressively higher love, only to show how each love considered—even friendship—becomes corrupt if not rightly ordered. consider the central transition: book 3 begins with the titillating evocation of his “sizzling” and “frying” of unholy physical loves at carthage, while in fact book 3 is really about illicit intellectual loves. 7. take time to attend to the poetry of augustine’s work (about which more below). in undertaking his narrative self-reflection, augustine became a puzzle to himself (conf. 10.16, 10.33). to develop the skills of puzzling through a text is to begin to understand the tensions within an author and within oneself. don quixote is morally bewildered because he is not equipped to read his texts or judge his own imagination. augustine’s careful reader, by contrast, has begun to acquire the mental discipline of thoughtful wonder. in cultivating an open disposition to the text, together with the skills of attention, you will find yourself ready to be surprised, and with surprise comes the possibility of being changed. this is so because reading, for augustine, is not simply a means of acquiring knowledge. in confessions augustine—like cervantes in don quixote—wishes to inform the mind, stir the spirit, and elevate the soul. reading is not simply the accumulation of facts but the training of the mind and improving the spirit’s powers of discernment. when we read, augustine demands that we attend not only to what we think, but also to how we think—how our thoughts and memories may be transformed into a new and different pattern. part iii: participating in augustine’s poetry the transformation of memory has a poetic rather than dialectical logic for augustine. in the same way cervantes’ pedagogical gestures follow a literary logic of their own, augustine’s instruction is not an attempt to prove, but by suggestion to change the disposition of the souls of those who read him. augustine’s text must be felt in order to be fully understood. for us both to feel and to understand the poetic quality of augusbreyfogle 73 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 tine’s text, it helps to have some sense of how he thinks words work. a brief story from confessions introduces us to augustine’s understanding of language. one day augustine sneaks up on st. ambrose only to discover a most marvelous thing: ambrose reads silently. this is not, of course, startling to us, but it does draw a considerable line between our own and augustine’s age with respect to reading. latin in the fourth and fifth centuries, as before, was written in all capitals, with no punctuation or spaces between words. to discern a written text’s meaning, those less virtuosic than ambrose had to read the syllables aloud to discern the shape of words and sentences. far from the solitary silent reading of our own day, reading for augustine was an audible, social affair—all the more necessary in an age with low levels of literacy. confessions was intended to be read aloud and the work takes on a very different texture when we take the time to fulfill that intention. reading aloud prompts a different kind of attention, produces a different kind of affect, than does silent reading. reading aloud underscores the author of a text as a vicarious conversation partner; and, of course, to read aloud in a group is almost certain to produce conversation once the reading has finished. but reading aloud has a deeper, philosophical significance for augustine. in his unfinished on dialectic, part of an aborted series on the liberal arts undertaken shortly after his conversion in milan, augustine articulates the place of the spoken word in his understanding of language. there are signs and there are things. the word is a sign which points to a thing; the written word points to the spoken word, which points to the mental concept, which points to the thing itself. here the contrast between augustine’s oral culture and our own privileging of the written word becomes sharp. for augustine, the spoken word is closer to the reality of the thing than the written word; it is less material and so more intelligible than the written word, and in its pronunciation and articulation is shot through with spirit, nuance, affect, and life in ways the written word can never be. the spoken word makes more accessible the disclosure of the thing signified (on dialectic 5.7–8; on the teacher 4.8ff.). ambrose’s silent reading, which bypasses the spoken word in favor of the mental concept, is even closer to the signified (though in so doing it precludes the communal, con74 on reading st. augustine’s confessions © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 versational character of the spoken word). thus, while augustine the rhetorician understands the power of the spoken word, augustine the philosopher acknowledges the fragility of language at all levels, the inability of a single word or group of words to exhaust the meaning and reality of the thing being signified. words impose a pattern (however unintentionally) on the signified and falsify the ever freshness of experience of the thing itself. here we see augustine’s affinities with plato’s socrates, who was similarly concerned about the difficulties of using words to disclose the things themselves. indeed, in the phaedrus (274b–278b), socrates criticizes the practice of writing altogether because it falsifies and fixes words (the platonic dialogue may well be an attempt to write so as to mitigate this problem). augustine himself wrote dialogues in the years immediately following his conversion. one of these early works, on the teacher, stresses the limitations of words in teaching us what we long to know. consider the following passages: when a sign is given to me, it can teach me nothing if it finds me ignorant of the thing of which it is a sign. (10.33) when i learned the thing itself, i trusted my eyes, not the words of another—though perhaps i trusted the words to direct my attention, that is, to find out what i would see by looking. to give them as much credit as possible, words have force only to the extent that they remind us to look for things; they don’t display them for us to know. (10.35) [in questions which probe part-by-part and their relation to the whole] the words nevertheless do not teach him, but they raise questions in such a way that he who is questioned learns within…. (12.40) or consider this exaltation: the good—you hear this word and you take a deep breath; you hear it and utter a sigh....we cannot say, and yet cannot be silent either.... we are what we do, employing neither speech nor silence? we ought to rejoice! jubilate! shout out your heart’s delight in wordless jubilation!18 when it comes to the most important things, therefore, there is no teaching, only learning. the word can instruct only by reminding the reader of something he already knows or prompting the discovery that only the reader can make on his own. at the center, of course, is christ the word, the teacher, so beautifully expressed by augustine in one breyfogle 75 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 of his sermons: “he cried in the manger in wordless infancy, he the word, without whom all human eloquence is mute.”19 recent scholarship has brought to the fore the literary and philosophical sophistication of augustine’s early dialogues, long mistakenly criticized for their clumsy imitation of cicero’s dialogues, themselves clumsy when compared to plato’s (see conybeare 2006). regardless, augustine himself seems to have found the dialogue form insufficient for his therapeutic and pedagogical purposes. ever more deeply aware of the limitations of words, the maturing augustine shies away from precise definition and instead uses multiple words and complex images in the hope that the reader will not be content with the word— the sign—but will discern that which is signified. let us take the most obvious example, “god.” the word “god” is a sign that points to the reality, god. no single word will do. augustine’s only hope is that, through a constellation of words, images, and narratives, the reader will discern that for which the word “god” stands. the same is true for truth, the good, light, life. for augustine, these concepts are best intimated in a multitude of verbal gestures, only one of which need strike a chord or affect the imagination to provoke a moment of insight— a recognition of something already present but not yet discerned. it is clear that by 396, when he begins on christian doctrine, augustine is sufficiently troubled by the relation of words and things to begin looking for a new, more adequate genre of thought and expression. toward the end of his meditation on signs, augustine puts the work aside to begin confessions: he cannot tell the complex relation between signs and things, he must show it.20 it is for this reason, i would suggest, that augustine creates the unique genre that is confessions. he says at the end of book 12: “i should prefer to write in such a way that my words could convey any truth that anyone could grasp on such matters, rather than to set down one true meaning so clearly as to exclude all other meanings, which, not being false, could not offend me.” words are aids to thought, signposts on a journey that one can only undertake for oneself in conversation with the “inner teacher.” augustine understands his responsibility to suggest the truth without using words that lead to misunderstanding. but he also acknowledges that his text will have a life of its own, a different 76 on reading st. augustine’s confessions © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 tenor and resonance for each reader, a set of words and images that could be suggestive beyond his own intention—suggestive because well-crafted words themselves reflect the divine word spoken at creation, the silent sound that undergirds all that is. in confessions book 3, augustine advances a critique of fiction akin to that of cervantes’ canon in don quixote, and not unlike tolstoy’s later critique of art (in what is art?). confessions succeeds in avoiding the perils of fiction by demanding the participation of his readers into their own conversation with the word made flesh in the affects of poetic imagination expressed in thought and sound. several passages from confessions exemplify these consistent poetic affects, which are naturally most forcefully evident in latin, but which are still discernible in good english translations. take, for example, this passage, from book 9: si cui sileat tumultus carnis sileant phantasiae terrae et aquarum et aeris, sileant et poli et ipsa sibi anima sileat et transeat se non cogitando . . . et loquatur ipse solus non per eas sed perseipsum, et audiamus verbum ejus . . . . if to anyone the tumult of the flesh were hushed, hushed the images of earth, and waters, and air, hushed as well the very heavens; did the soul, indeed, fall silent to itself, and mount, by not thinking on itself, beyond itself . . . and he alone spoke, not through these things but through his very being that we might hear his word…. (conf. 9.10) or this passage: sero te amavi, pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova, sero te amavi. vocasti et clamasti et rupisti surditatem meam, breyfogle 77 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 coruscasti, splenduisti, et fugasti caecitatem meam, gustavi et esurio et sitio, tetigisti me, et exarsi in pacem tuam. late have i loved thee, beauty, ever ancient, ever new, late have i loved thee! thou didst call, cry out to me, and shatter my deafness; didst flash forth and shine to me, and scattered my blindness; didst send forth thy fragrance, and i drew in breath and now pant for thee. i have tasted, and now hunger and thirst for thee; thou hast touched me, and i burn for thy peace. (conf. 10.27; tr. o’connell 1978, 119) the reader—the hearer—whose imagination is affected by these words begins to understand a peace which passes understanding. this moment of insight is formative, not in a quixotic way which romanticizes an invented reality from a fictional text, but in a spiritual discernment of what is most real—an elucidation of the shadows of one’s perceptions of self, of others, and of god in recognition of an ineffable light which can be expressed only in the totality of one’s being in love. confessions challenges the reader’s imagination to reorder the data of the soul’s memory in a new and different pattern. and yet it does so not by enslaving the reader to imitation of the past or of a book, but by freeing the reader to a new and different life, a transformation so eloquently expressed by t.s. eliot in our own age: this is the use of memory: for liberation—not less of love but expanding of love beyond desire, and so liberation from the future as well as the past. see how they vanish, the faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them, to become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern. (eliot 1968, 55) notes 1. this essay is a revision of two public talks and i have opted to retain the conversational immediacy of expression and address; in keeping with the subject matter, these talks were designed to be evocative rather than didactic and i am grateful to the editors for allowing me to keep as much of that evocative char78 on reading st. augustine’s confessions © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 acter as a printed publication can permit. the final version of this essay has benefited greatly from the keen suggestions of peter busch and jonathan yates. a version of parts i and ii of this article was originally given as an invited lecture to the honors program at the university of tulsa (january 2005); i am particularly grateful to the members of the department of philosophy and religion, and especially to russell hittinger, for the opportunity to develop these ideas and to have them refined and extended. part iii was added to a revision of parts i and ii in my capacity as an invited consultant for an neh workshop presentation, “socrates and augustine,” for the core humanities program at villanova university (february 2006); i am particularly grateful to the workshop organizers and participants—especially jack doody, peter busch, and james wetzel—who were, characteristically, lively and provocative interlocutors from whom i learned a great deal. in both instances, the explicit charge was not to lecture on augustine—not to tell others what to think— but to provide tools for students and teachers alike to deepen and extend their own readings of augustine (correspondingly, i have kept historical and scholarly references to a minimum so as to focus on guides to reading and discovery). these opportunities, and the ideas and conversations they spawned, are truly gifts of intellectual and spiritual friendship which augustine himself richly celebrated. 2. references to confessions and other works of augustine will be to book, chapter, and (occasionally) paragraph number rather than page number. except where otherwise noted, quotations from confessions will use warner’s translation (augustine 1963) and the loeb edition (augustine 1912) for augustine’s latin. other works by augustine are listed in the references below. 3. o’donnell (2005, 202–208) plays the role of a mischievous cervantes, using the character don quixote (as distinct from the novel don quixote) to illustrate augustine’s own slavishness to books and, especially, the slavishness of scholars to augustine himself. o’donnell the artful provocateur and i differ only at first glance; both of us are at pains to recreate for the reader augustine’s freshness and the genuine puzzles of the ideas he confronted—and to demand of readers that they think for themselves. 4. i use the term “book” here loosely for its contemporary effect. augustine, of course, read codices and possibly even scrolls and tablets. his collection of pauline (or alleged pauline) texts would not have resembled our complete printed bible or even the christian new testament, which itself was only at the time in the process of being formally agreed upon. augustine gives his own canonical list of scripture at on christian doctrine 2.8.13. on augustine as a reader, see stock 1996. for a classically informed contemporary examination of the material history of texts and its contemporary significance by one of our greatest augustinian scholars, see o’donnell 1998. 5. for augustine’s use of scripture in confessions, both as a literary device and as breyfogle 79 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 a polemical defense against charges of lingering manichaeism, see for example martin 2000. 6. see, e.g., conf. 10.3. for discussions of augustine’s self-consciousness of his literary reputation, see vessey 2005 and brown 2000, 441–481. 7. augustine understands his own impulse toward catholic christianity to be not an escape from reason but a working out of reason, a rational coming to terms with reason’s creator and the ratio of that creator’s self-revelation in the second person of the trinity. for augustine as a philosopher, see o’daly 1987. 8. for examples of this multiple audience, see, respectively, conf. 1.1, conf. 9.1, and conf. 10.3. 9. and in many respects, as i shall remark later, the genre of confessions should be seen as the successor to plato’s philosophical dialogues in the sense that the reader has more intellectual and moral resources at his disposal, but is left largely in a state of inconclusiveness (aporia) with respect to his next steps. 10. consider augustine’s philosophical materialism, for example, or his embrace of manichaeism. 11. nock 1998 remains well worth reading on this subject. see further starnes 1990 and van fleteren 1990. 12. theologically, this grammar is framed by the divine rest that brackets the whole of creation—the restful order in which all things were created according to their measure, number and weight, and the sabbath rest of the eschatological seventh day of god’s creation in which all things are restored to their created natures. in between is the restlessness of the fallen condition never at peace with itself because never able either to fulfill or eradicate its nature created for the love and worship of god. this theological framework is suggested in confessions (book 1 and book 13 especially) and is more fully developed in on the literal meaning of genesis (e.g., 2.1.2, 3.14.22, 6.16.27) begun shortly after confessions but not finished until 415. 13. one sees augustine’s own moderation in the passage just cited and in his modest asceticism; not moderate by the standards of our own day, but certainly moderate with respect to the rigorous asceticism of fourth and fifth century paganism and christianity alike (see further brown 1988). as a matter of comparison, one sees plato’s own moderation in the philosophical movement of symposium, charmides, or lysis, for example, or in the tripartite division of the soul (e.g., in republic), where it is not the passions themselves that are improper but rather the immoderation of their refusal to be ruled by the mind. 14. see, e.g., on the teacher 2.3ff, on christian doctrine 1.2.2; 3.9.13, and on the trinity books 9–11. see also breyfogle 1999 with bibliography. 15. how this opening occurs is fundamentally mysterious to augustine, and for this reason, as we shall see, augustine tries to write in such a way as to maxi80 on reading st. augustine’s confessions © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 mize the possibilities of prompting openness to insight. the deeper structure of this opening to the text—in effect opening to the speaking of the divine in and through the text—would entail examinations of his understanding of intellectual illumination and of grace and free will, which cannot occupy us here. 16. for these and many other insights, i am grateful for the conversation of robert mcmahon and his augustine’s prayerful ascent (1989), which is replete with examples of hidden structures and symmetry in confessions. 17. on tears, see paffenroth 1997. 18. the passage is quoted by josef pieper (1990, 43–44). i have been unable to locate the augustinian source of the quotation. 19. sermon 188.2, translated by john e. rotelle (augustine 1986, 11). 20. augustine remained concerned to explore the function of signs. having abandoned his treatment toward the end of book 3 (3.25.35) of on christian doctrine in 396, he returned to the work late in life (426/7), completing the third and adding a concluding fourth book, and likely revising what he had written previously. references augustine, saint 1912. confessions. tr. william watts. loeb classical library, 2 vols. cambridge: harvard university press. 1963 the confessions of st. augustine. tr. rex warner. new york: signet. 1958 augustine: on christian doctrine. tr. d. w. robertson, jr. new york: prentice hall. 1982 the literal meaning of genesis. tr. and ed. john hammond taylor. ancient christian writers series, vols. 41–42. new york: newman press. 1986 augustine day by day: minute meditations for every day taken from the writings of saint augustine. tr. and ed. john e. rotelle. new york: catholic book publishing co. 1995 augustine: against the academicians and the teacher [also includes excerpt of on dialectic]. tr. peter king. indianapolis, in: hackett. 1998 on the trinity. tr. edmund hill. new york: new city press. breyfogle, todd 1999 imagination. in augustine through the ages: an encyclopedia, ed. allan fitzgerald, 442–443. grand rapids: eerdmans. breyfogle 81 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 brown, peter 1988 the body and society: men, women, and sexual renunciation in early christianity. new york: columbia university press. 2000 augustine of hippo: a biography. berkeley: university of california press. cervantes (saavedra), miguel de 2000 the ingenious hidalgo don quixote de la mancha. tr. john rutherford. new york: penguin. conybeare, catherine 2006 the irrational augustine. oxford: oxford university press. eliot, t.s. 1968 four quartets. san diego, ca: harcourt. 1996 on the metaphysical poetry of the seventeenth century with special reference to donne, crashaw and cowley. in the varieties of metaphysical poetry, ed. ronald schuchard, 41–229. san diego, ca: harcourt. girard, rené 1976 deceit, desire, and the novel: self and other in literary structure. baltimore, md: johns hopkins university press. martin, thomas 2000 augustine’s confessions as pedagogy: exercises in transformation. in augustine and liberal education, ed. kim paffenroth and kevin hughes, 25–51. aldershot, uk: ashgate publishing. mcmahon, robert 1989 augustine’s prayerful ascent: an essay on the literary form of the confessions. athens: university of georgia press. nock, a.d. 1998 conversion: the old and the new in religion from alexander the great to augustine of hippo. baltimore, md: johns hopkins university press. o’connell, robert j., s.j. 1978 art and the christian intelligence in st. augustine. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. 82 on reading st. augustine’s confessions © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 o’daly, gerard 1987 augustine’s philosophy of mind. berkeley: university of california press. o’donnell, james j. 1998 avatars of the word: from papyrus to cyberspace. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. 2005 augustine: a new biography. new york: harpercollins. paffenroth, kim 1997 tears of grief and joy: confessions book 9: chronological sequence and structure. augustinian studies 28: 141–154. pieper, josef 1990 only the lover sings: art and contemplation. san francisco, ca: ignatius press. plato 2003 plato’s phaedrus. focus philosophical library. trans. stephen scully. newburyport, ma: r. pullins company. starnes, colin 1990 augustine’s conversion: a guide to the argument of the “confessions” i-ix. waterloo, on: wilfrid laurier university press. steiner, george 1998 errata: an examined life. new haven, ct: yale university press. stock, brian 1996 augustine the reader: meditation, self-knowledge, and the ethics of interpretation. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. van fleteren, frederick 1990 saint augustine’s theory of conversion. in augustine: biblical exegete, vol. 5 collectanea augustiniana, ed. frederick van fleteren and joseph c. schnaubelt, 65–80. new york: peter lang. vessey, mark 2005 latin christian writers in late antiquity and their texts. aldershot, uk: ashgate publishing. © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 charles taylor and the future of secularism bruce ledewitz duquesne university school of law ledewitz@duq.edu i began to read charles taylor’s acclaimed work, a secular age (2007) just after i had finished writing a manuscript of my own about modern secularism—hallowed secularism (2009). naturally, given professor taylor’s reputation and learning, i studied his book for help, and i learned a great deal from the book about the “main story behind secularity” (taylor 2007, 774). in other words, i learned how we in the west came to be in a secular age. but i did not learn very much about secularism. specifically, i learned nothing at all about how one might be secular in a secular age. in retrospect, the reason for this is obvious. taylor is not a secularist. he is a believing christian. taylor considers “secularity” (his term) a mistake that we would do well to reverse. i know that this characterization of his position directly contradicts the stated thrust of the book, which is to examine how the “conditions of belief ” in the west moved, between the years 1500 and 2000, from a condition where almost everyone believed in god to a condition in which it is problematic to believe in god. a change in understanding that fundamentally changes the kinds of experiences that people can have. thus, it would not seem to be the kind of change that could be reversed. indeed, the impossibility of traditional belief in the old way is part of what it means to live in a secular age. all this is stated in a secular age. nevertheless, at the end of the book, taylor presents the reader with two possible futures for this secular age. in one, religion continues to shrink because it is not plausible, while atheism continues to grow. in the other, “we all have some sense” of the fullness of human life that is a “reflection of transcendent reality” that cannot be completely grasped within the “exclusive humanism” of the immanent frame. this leads to “conversion,” “breaking out into the broader field” (2007, 768–769). mailto:ledewitz@duq.edu academic roundtable 107 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 which future will be our future? taylor is prepared to say only this: where there is only immanence, so that “many people even have trouble understanding how a sane person could believe in god,” subsequent generations will develop “a sense of living in a ‘waste land,’ ” and many young people will begin to explore beyond immanence, perhaps to a state in which they acquire “in some fashion a sense of god.” this is the condition for which taylor had earlier in the book borrowed mikhail epstein’s term: “ ‘minimal religion’ ” (533). so, these are our choices for the future. conversion to what amounts to orthodox biblical or theistic belief or an atheist waste land so bereft of hope for deep human fulfillment that our descendents will be driven by despair to take up the religious quest again. there is no doubt that taylor means religious conversion quite literally since he calls the last chapter of the book “conversions” and describes experiences such as walker percy’s conversion to catholicism. nor is there any reason to doubt taylor’s sincerity when he calls secularity a waste land. he really means it. why are these stark alternatives the only futures that taylor allows? there is a quite specific reason for this. though he puts it as a question, taylor does not believe that an “intermediate position” is viable (606). the intermediate position he is rejecting is one in which the “phenomenology of universalism—the sense of breaking out of an earlier space and acceding to a higher one, the sense of liberation” that many people experience despite the secular age—is ultimately frustrated by an ontology of immanence (609). secularists cannot live deeply because they live immanently. and the only alternative ontology taylor acknowledges is “belief in some transcendent source or power” that “for many people in our western culture” means “the choice…whether to believe in god” (600). it’s god or the waste land. in taylor’s terms, the manuscript i wrote was an attempt to describe a viable intermediate position that seeks to avoid just these unacceptable alternatives of traditional belief in god or empty secularism. my book tries to portray a secularist way of life that remains in the neighborhood of the fulfillment of human possibility promised by traditional religion while rejecting traditional religious dogmas, including the existence of the biblical god. 108 expositions © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 before delineating the two errors i think taylor makes in rejecting the possibility of an intermediate position, it is important to acknowledge the validity of his insistence on the human need for transcendence. a secular society that reduces reality to materialism or exclusive humanism will indeed descend into despair. the anti-religion writings of the group called the new atheists, including christopher hitchens’ bestseller god is not great (2007), demonstrate no appreciation of this truth. those writers are heedless that they are leaving their followers without a path for human flourishing. taylor’s first error is his insistence that belief in god is still a choice in this secular age. taylor (2007, 600) asserts that belief in god is a choice the culture of imminence leaves open. it is not surprising that taylor feels this way. he believes in the god of abraham, which is the way he describes his own religious orientation, and, of course, so do billions of other people. taylor also acknowledges that, for many secularists, belief in god does not seem like a choice. but they are mistaken. belief in god “is not foreclosed by undeniable arguments” in the secular context (600). taylor is confident in the possibility of belief because he does not fully engage the scientific challenge to theism. science does not just rule out miracles in the sense that miracles don’t seem to happen any more. science rules out miracle in principle. that means science rules out the kind of god who could perform miracles. this is no longer even deism, in which god creates the world and then steps back. this is no god at all, in the biblical sense. as a citizen of this secular age, taylor cannot bring himself actually to defend miracle as a category. he says only that “[i]t is perhaps precisely the ordinary operation of things which constitutes the ‘miracle’ ” (548). but as c.s. lewis has written, christianity is “precisely the story of one grand miracle” (1970, 80). to be blunt, the resurrection either happened or it did not. and whatever the resurrection was—and i know that there is no simple answer to that even within christian orthodoxy—it was definitely not “the ordinary operation of things” (1970, 80). to be viable, christianity needs more than that. christianity needs at least the possibility of miracle. i am not criticizing anyone’s faith. i am criticizing taylor’s blithe inacademic roundtable 109 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 sistence that both a closed and an open immanence are equivalent leaps of faith. the openness to the biblical god in a secular age is particularly problematic. faith for the secularist is a leap of its own, but it is one that attempts to accommodate in principle a scientific worldview. this first error suggests that the intermediate position is more necessary than taylor believes, if a destructive secularity is to be avoided. society-wide conversion in taylor’s terms does not seem at all likely in a secular age. but, of course, it does not follow that, just because the intermediate position is necessary, it is also viable. taylor suggests that it is not. i think taylor is wrong about this as well. actually, taylor says so many different things about the immanent frame that it may be unfair to conclude that he ultimately rejects transcendence from within immanence. he writes, for example, of “our sense of wonder that something like ourselves arose out of lower nature. there is a mysterious process here; something deep to understand. we are very drawn to this; we want to explore it” (547). that sounds like transcendence outside theism. but in the very next few pages, taylor describes the open site of william james where “you can feel the winds pulling you, now to belief, now to unbelief ” (549). as i suggested above, that “belief ” for taylor is ultimately a belief in something like a traditional god, because only that belief grounds the ontology necessary for transcendent mystery. once again, it is immanence, with all its ills, or god. this kind of either/or is being challenged today on a number of fronts, particularly in science. in his recent book reinventing the sacred, the theoretical biologist stuart kauffman writes that “one view of god is that god is our chosen name for the ceaseless creativity in the natural universe, biosphere and human cultures” (2008, xi). similarly, the british paleontologist simon conway morris, in life’s solution, is willing to look at the religious tradition directly: [g]iven that evolution has produced sentient species with a sense of purpose, it is reasonable to take the claims of theology seriously. in recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in the connections that might serve to reunify the scientific world-view with the religious instinct. (2003, 328) the challenge of doing this is daunting, writes conway morris, but “it 110 expositions © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 will be our lifeline” (328). these two scientists exemplify taylor’s sense of wonder from the study of the natural world. neither of them, however, is moving in the direction of the supernatural. both seem to feel that the transcendent can be approached from within the immanent. there are various other indicators of a new permeability between religion and secularism. in philosophy, jürgen habermas in between naturalism and religion (2008), susan neiman in moral clarity (2008) and james c. edwards in the plain sense of things (1997) are, in different ways, describing a secularism open to religious insights. in theology, a kind of secularist religion is emerging in the work of michael hampson in god without god (2008) and john shelby spong in jesus for the non-religious (2007). these are all examples of various forms of the intermediate position. austin dacey is a particularly important example of this new tendency. in his book the secular conscience (2008), dacey, though passionately opposed to organized religion, calls on his fellow secularists to reject relativism and accept the place of belief in public political debate. dacey argues this from the position of the objectivity of values, a position that taylor might suggest dacey lacks the proper ontology to hold. even abraham in genesis, whose god taylor invokes, lived in the intermediate position in a sense. the promise to abraham—that his descendants will be a blessing to all humanity—is a promise from within immanence. abraham is not promised that he will survive death, and he does not. he is not promised that the world will be redeemed—a blessing is not a messiah. abraham’s position is not all that different from that of the revolutionary marxist who believes that his work today will one day bring blessing to suffering humanity. taylor seems to be suggesting that ultimate value requires the existence of god. but even the bible is ambiguous about this. in the famous story of abraham’s confrontation with god over the destruction of sodom and gomorrah, abraham confronts god with a species of the universal moral law: “far be it from thee to do such a thing, to slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! … shall not the judge of all the world do right?” (gen. 18:25 academic roundtable 111 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 rsv). god himself is bound by a norm of which the ground is unclear. the requirement of justice seems to be simply built into reality. this is my general response to taylor’s suggestion that the intermediate position is not viable. a god may not be needed in order for the good, the true, and the beautiful to be real. perhaps the promises of the bible, which correspond basically to the liberation of the slaves in the book of exodus, can be true and reliable even though there is no one behind them. these promises can be built into the order of things. they can be transcendent in the midst of immanence. maybe there is no ontological barrier to the intermediate position. at one point, taylor seems to acknowledge the possibility of transcendence outside traditional theism. he quotes with approval steve bruce’s definition of religion: “ ‘actions, beliefs and institutions predicated upon the assumption of the existence of either supernatural entities with powers of agency, or impersonal powers or processes possessed of moral purpose, which have the capacity to set the conditions of, or to intervene in, human affairs’ ” (taylor 2007, 429). the objectivity of values might fit into this definition as an impersonal process. but more representative of taylor’s position is his contrast of ordinary human flourishing with “religious faith in a strong sense,” which he defines as “the belief in transcendent reality, on the one hand, and the connected aspiration to a transformation which goes beyond ordinary human flourishing on the other” (510). he is suggesting here that secularity can never attain the deepest promptings of human life, that it can never get beyond mere bourgeois satisfaction—a kind of feel-good superficiality that is present in much new age spirituality. taylor is doubting whether the secularist can really experience “fullhearted love of some good beyond life” (639). this is the fundamental challenge to the intermediate position. but i think—actually i hope, since i am personally one of these secularists— that the secularist can experience ultimate fullness by living in radical trust in reality despite the absence of a personal god. once again our model can be abraham, or for that matter jesus on the cross. taylor would admit that the traditional religious believer has no guarantee that reality is trustworthy just because he or she believes in god. abraham dies without certainty. jesus cries out that he is forsaken. 112 expositions © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 the secularist is in the same condition, but is no worse off. the secularist can also trust radically, and risk life itself, in pursuit of the truly good. the intermediate position can lead to strong faith. though they pale in importance compared to the question of faith, there are political and legal consequences that follow from the failure or success of the intermediate position. if the only alternatives for the secular age are traditional religious belief, on the one hand, or materialism and exclusive humanism, on the other, then the culture wars and the new atheist attacks on religion will continue. politics will continue to be us-them. the republican party will continue to be the party of faith and the democrats the party of unbelief. political community cannot be built that way, as we can see from the reaction to president barack obama’s graceless comment about guns and religion in american small towns. in law, this divide between religion and atheism will support the attempted continuation of the separation of church and state and government neutrality toward religion. at the same time, religious believers will continue to press for recognition of their beliefs in the public square in opposition to the new atheism. we will continue to fight, for example, over the words, “under god” in the pledge of allegiance. but, if the intermediate position is viable, a new possibility in american public life will emerge. there will finally be nonbelievers who nevertheless share spiritual life to a great extent with traditional religious believers. if secularism were to rediscover the language, symbols, and images of traditional religion, now reinterpreted along naturalistic lines, this cultural divide could be bridged. women and men of good faith could think once again of a broad progressive coalition among religious believers and nonbelievers, which, though it could not agree on all issues, would undoubtedly find a lot of political common ground. indeed, such a coalition might renew the american radical tradition that has languished since marxism was discredited. in american constitutional law, as well, a melding of church and state might become possible. it would still, of course, remain unconstitutional for government to endorse any particular religion, but it would not be seen as unconstitutional for government to endorse transcendence from within immanence, the intermediate position. government academic roundtable 113 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 support for the values of the intermediate position is especially important since, without it, the social demoralization—the waste land—that taylor describes as resulting from secularity will become much more likely. we owe charles taylor a great debt. he has shown how we arrived at our current situation, at the secular age. he believes that we are at something of a dead end and that we should, to the extent we can, retrace our steps. unfortunately, that is not possible. fortunately, the context he describes is not as dire as he suggests. we are not going to be religious in the old way, but we can be religious all the same, seriously and in a meaningful way. references dacey, austin 2008 the secular conscience: why belief belongs in public life. amherst, ny: prometheus books. edwards, james c. 1997 the plain sense of things: the fate of religion in an age of normal nihilism. university park, pa: pennsylvania state university press. jürgen habermas 2008 between naturalism and religion: philosophical essays. translated by ciaran cronin. cambridge: polity press. hampson, michael 2008 god without god: western spirituality without the wrathful king. winchester: o books. hitchens, christopher 2007 god is not great: how religion poisons everything. new york: twelve. kauffman, stuart a. 2008 reinventing the sacred: a new view of science, reason, and religion. new york: basic books. 114 expositions © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 ledewitz, bruce 2009 hallowed secularism: theory, belief, practice. westport, ct: palgrave macmillan. lewis, c.s. 1970 god in the dock: essays on theology and ethics. edited by walter hooper. grand rapids, mi: eerdmans. morris, simon conway 2003 life’s solution: inevitable humans in a lonely universe. cambridge: cambridge university press. neiman, susan 2008 moral clarity: a guide for grown-up idealists. orlando, fl: harcourt. john shelby spong 2007 jesus for the non-religious: recovering the divine at the heart of the human. new york: harper san francisco. taylor, charles 2007 a secular age. cambridge, ma: belknap press of harvard university press. the faith of job and the recovery of christian atheism [expositions 4.1&2 (2010) 105-113] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 the faith of job and the recovery of christian atheism frederiek depoortere katholiecke universiteit leuven (belgium) it would be easy to dismiss slavoj žižek‟s contributions to the monstrosity of christ as coming too late, 45 years too late to be precise. 1 for what žižek defends, namely the hegelian reading of christianity, was itself already developed in all of its radicality by thomas j. j. altizer, the most colorful proponent of the so-called “god is dead” theology, a short-lived theological movement which flowered in the second part of the 1960s. the hegelian reading of christianity which was proposed by altizer (in his 1966 book the gospel of christian atheism) and which is now being re-endorsed by žižek in the monstrosity of christ entails that it was god himself who died when christ died on the cross on calvary and that this death marks the transition from god as transcendent father to the holy spirit as the community of believers, understood by žižek in terms of a collective of revolutionary individuals. 2 this basic scheme, adopted from hegel‟s lectures on the philosophy of religion, has informed the christological reflections offered by žižek in the past ten years, 3 but it has been rejected by a majority of theologians as being heterodox and therefore unacceptable. moreover, “god is dead” theology – albeit somewhat fashionable for a couple of years and sparking many heated debates in the media and among theologians – was never fully able to become mainstream. such comes as little surprise, given the fact that it is actually a theological dead-end: it seems to offer merely a theological justification for the end of theology as god-talk. moreover, žižek‟s dependency on hegel‟s basic scheme seems to suggest that one is forced to an all-or-nothing choice when it comes to accepting or rejecting his christological reflections: either one shares this basic scheme and is able to follow žižek in his ruminations on christ or one does not share the basic scheme and can only reject žižek‟s interpretation of the christ-event. however, the aim of the present article is to show that in approaching žižek, even if one does not follow him in his hegelianism, one can nevertheless enter into a theological dialogue with him. as žižek‟s contributions to the monstrosity of christ are very dense and touch upon a wide variety of issues, in what follows i will focus on one element, namely his interpretation of the biblical character of job and its relation to the issue of atheism. to start our discussion from within the context of contemporary theology, i will begin by taking a look into the reading of the book of job which has been offered by french philosopher paul ricoeur (1913–2005), one of the founding fathers of contemporary hermeneutical theology. paul ricoeur: the faith of job paul ricoeur‟s most extensive discussion of the biblical character of job can be found in his early work the symbolism of evil (1967; french original in 1960). 4 in the first part of this book, ricoeur discusses three “primary symbols” of evil: defilement, sin and guilt. here, the figure of job is introduced as witnessing to a crisis, the crisis caused by what ricoeur the faith of job and the recovery of christian atheism 106 designates as “the hypersubjective reality of sin,” the fact that “my sin [is conceived to be] within the absolute sight (regard) of god” (84). as noted by ricoeur, this “being seen by god” was initially a positive thing: it was a source of self-awareness, the person who is seen by god becomes a self precisely by being seen by god (84–85). in the case of job, however, the sight of god has become “an inimical seeing that pursues him” (85). god‟s sight, ricoeur continues, “suddenly reveals itself as the seeing of the hidden god who delivers man up to unjust suffering” (85–86). the seeing of god, which used to be experienced as salutary, has now become unbearable, an “inquisitorial eye which makes man guilty” (319). the second part of the symbolism of evil deals with four “„myths‟ of the beginning and the end” (“the „ritual‟ vision of the world,” “the „tragic‟ vision of existence,” “the „eschatological‟ vision of history” and the vision that expects “salvation through knowledge”). in this context, further reference is made to the figure of job in the fifth and final chapter of the book (titled “the cycle of the myths”), in a section dealing with “the reaffirmation of the tragic” (310–326). according to ricoeur, the god of the bible is to be understood as “an ethical god” and the hebrew scriptures basically offer “a moral vision of the world”. this entails that “history is a tribunal, pleasure and pains are retribution, god himself is a judge. at the same time, the whole of human experience assumes a penal character” (314). in ricoeur‟s view, the book of job signals the breakdown of this understanding of history. here, the “„ethicization‟ of man and god” collides at its limits. the case of job shows that there is evil in excess of that which can be accounted for by retribution. retribution is not able to explain all of the unhappiness and suffering in the world (314). it should be noted, as ricoeur does so himself, that this problem of unjust suffering – that is, suffering that cannot be justified in terms of “he that mischief hatches, mischief catches” – is inherent to the ethicization present in the hebrew scriptures. indeed, it is only when god is conceived as “ethical” that the problem of unjust suffering can come into existence. outside the context of such an ethical vision, suffering can still be a problem (cf. buddhism), but it cannot be a moral problem, an issue of justice. for, what happens in the case of job is that a tension comes into being between god as creator, who may be excused for moving in a mysterious way, and god as lawgiver, who may reasonably be expected to comply with his own law. it is here of course that theodicy begins, the attempt to justify god in light of unjust suffering. this is the way taken by job‟s pious friends. they do their best to close the gap which opened between the creator-god and the ethical god, “mobili[zing] forgotten sins, unknown sins, ancestral sins, the sins of the people, in order to restore the equation of suffering and punishment” (315). job, in contrast, refuses this option and it is here that ricoeur sees a tragic vision re-emerging in the heart of the biblical ethicization of god. job rediscovers “the tragic god” – that is, “the inscrutable god of terror” (319). in this way, he moves beyond the ethical vision of man and god, world and history, and enters “a new dimension of faith, the dimension of unverifiable faith” (319). moreover, what also makes the book of job a return of tragedy is its outcome: job falls silent and god answers out of the whirlwind, but what he says is in no way an answer to job‟s predicament. all god does is “show him behemoth and leviathan, the hippopotamus and the crocodile, vestiges of the chaos that has been overcome, representing a brutality dominated and measured by the creative act” (321). in this way, ricoeur continues, god “gives [job] to understand that all is 107 depoortere order, measure, and beauty – inscrutable order, measure beyond measure, terrible beauty” and he points to “an order beyond order, a totality full of meaning, within which the individual must lay down his recrimination” (321). when ricoeur returns to the symbolism of evil in his later book the conflict of interpretations (1974; french original in 1969), this renunciation is interpreted in terms of love: “the only thing shown to [job] is the grandeur of the whole, without the finite viewpoint of his own desire receiving a meaning directly from it. a path is thus opened … i renounce my viewpoint; i love the whole as it is. 5 in this regard, richard kearney, following his master ricoeur, sees the book of job ending with “a contemplative wisdom of love:” at the end of the story, kearney writes, job has learned to love god for nothing. 6 the figure of job also plays an important role in ricoeur‟s 1966 bampton lectures, titled “religion, atheism, and faith.” 7 in these lectures, a new direction and contemporary meaning of job is mapped out. during his bampton lectures, ricoeur defended “the religious significance of atheism,” stating “that atheism does not exhaust itself in the negation and destruction of religion” but that it rather “clears the ground for a new faith, a faith for a post-religious age” (59/440). this entails that atheism, and it is the atheism of freud and nietzsche ricoeur has in mind here, takes the intermediary position between religion and faith, it is what links them together and what separates them. or, as ricoeur puts it: atheism destroys religion and liberates us for a faith beyond religion (60/441). the religion that is to be destroyed is summarised here by ricoeur in terms of “two fundamental activities,” “the fear of punishment and the desire for protection” – i.e., “accusation” and “consolation.” this entails that the god that has to pass away is the “moral god who [is] the principle and foundation for an ethics of prohibition and condemnation” (68/447) and “the providential god” – that is, god both as “the ultimate source of accusation” and as “the ultimate source of protection” (82/455). according to ricoeur, this “death” of the ethical god, enables a transition to new kind of faith, a “tragic faith beyond any assurance or protection,” and it is precisely job who is put forward by ricoeur as the model for this new faith (82/455–456, 87– 88/460). this post-religious faith is described by ricoeur as follows: it would be a faith that wanders in the darkness, in a “new night of understanding” – to use the language of the mystics – before a god who has not the attributes of “providence.” this god does not protect me but delivers me up to the dangers of a life worthy of being called human. is not this god the crucified, the dying god, the god whose weakness alone may help me? the new night of the understanding is a night for our desire as much as for our fear, a night for our longing for a protective father. beyond this night, and only beyond it, will be recovered the true meaning of the god of consolation, the god of the resurrection, the pantocrator of byzantine and romanesque imagery. (88/460) this suggests that for ricoeur atheism can play an instrumental role on the way to a purified faith. in his view, atheism should have the same effect for us today as the crisis of the moral god that befell job had for him. in this regard it is important to note that ricoeur emphasises that job, despite his severe criticism of god, always remains in relation with god. 8 his criticisms are precisely formulated as complaints addressed at god. as job passed through a the faith of job and the recovery of christian atheism 108 dark “night of understanding” and rediscovered god, but a god beyond the law of retribution, the modern believer should pass through the darkness of atheism to recover god at the other side of the night. or, as ricoeur put it at the end of his bampton lectures: idols have to die in order to be recovered as symbols (98/467). slavoj žižek: from job to the recovery of christian atheism let us now bring forward slavoj žižek to join the conversation. the figure of job appears in žižek‟s oeuvre on a regular basis. this happens for the first time in the early enjoy your symptom! (1992). 9 here, žižek first endorses rené girard‟s basic claim concerning the book of job as put forward in the latter‟s book on job. 10 girard dismisses the whole set-up in the prologue – with satan seducing god into putting job to the test to check whether he will still be righteous when all is against him – as a mythification which hides the subversive core of the book, namely that job is a sacrificial victim, the scapegoat of his community, subjected to religiously sanctioned violence. the revolutionary character of the book of job, žižek states, while following girard, consists in the fact that we encounter here a victim that speaks, that refuses to undergo his victimization in silence, but protests and rebels instead. moreover, the subversive power of the book of job consists in the fact that the perspective of the sacrificial order (represented by job‟s “pious” friends) and the perspective of the victim are found next to each other. as a result, the “official” perspective is deconstructed by the perspective of job while the presence of the perspective of the perpetrators guarantees the truth of the perspective of the victim (56). although žižek endorses girard‟s basic claim concerning job, he is also critical of him. he reproaches him for turning job into merely a forerunner of christ, “the true paradigm of a victim who speaks out and subjectivizes himself” (57). however, žižek states, insofar as christ‟s death on the cross is “a gesture of love,” something is lost in the transition from job to christ, namely “the anxiety-provoking abyss of the other‟s [i.e., god‟s] inconsistency” (57). in christ, žižek adds, “god himself changes into a lover and reaches back toward man – thereby concealing the abyss of otherness that no sacrifice could appease, i.e., with which no relationship of exchange is possible” (58). this suggests that at the time enjoy your symptom! was written in the early 1990s žižek was still rather critical of christ‟s gesture and seemed to prefer job over christ. almost ten years later, žižek‟s next reference to the book of job appears in on belief (2001). here žižek‟s earlier criticism that christ is a step back in comparison with job is not repeated and the claim will not reappear in future work. in on belief, žižek mentions job in passing when he writes that what happens in christianity is that god himself as christ finds himself in the situation earlier experienced by job, the situation of being god-forsaken. when christ dies on the cross, abandoned by his father, the gap that separates human beings from god, the gap earlier experienced by job, is reflected back into god himself. 11 the next year, in the foreword to the second edition of his for they know not what they do (2002), 12 žižek devotes a couple of pages to the figure of job. žižek begins his discussion of job by repeating the link, already made the year before in on belief, between job and christ. he states that job is the key to understand the christ-event (job prefigures christ) (li), while adding that both are linked by the meaninglessness of their suffering. what distinguishes job from christ is of course that when christ suffers, it is god who is himself 109 depoortere the victim and is abandoned by god (liii). this time, žižek also focuses on the dénouement of the book of job. he dismisses god‟s intervention at the end of the book as “a pure argument of authority grounded in a breathtaking display of power” and as “a kind of cheap hollywood horror show with lots of special effects.” god, žižek notes, behaves here like somebody who is “caught in [a] moment of impotence – weakness, at least – and tries to escape his predicament by empty boasting” (li). žižek further stresses that “the true greatness of job,” which, in his view, consists in his persistent refusal to give in to the “ideology” of his theological friends who want to give some meaning to his suffering (li–lii). žižek even claims job as the first true materialist, someone who is able to accept the contingency of the vicissitudes of life without having to search for a hidden design behind them (lii). but if job, as žižek claims, staunchly refuses to accept that his suffering can have any meaning and resolutely rejects any secret design hidden behind it all, why does he fall silent? why does he even repent? 13 this question does not receive an answer in for they know not what they do, but it does the next year, in the puppet and the dwarf (2003). 14 in the puppet and the dwarf, žižek first repeats his reflections on job already printed in the foreword to the second edition of for they know no what they do. in this repetition (124–126), he further inserts the idea that job is confronted with the impenetrability of god (124). after the material that was repeated, žižek raises the question which remained unanswered the year before: why job‟s silence – especially when the discrepancy between job‟s question (“why do i suffer?”) and god‟s answer (power display, boasting) is so obvious? to this question, žižek now formulates the following answer: what, then, if this was what job perceived, and what kept him silent: he remained silent neither because he was crushed by god‟s overwhelming presence, nor because he wanted thereby to indicate his continuous resistance, that is, the fact that god avoided answering job‟s question, but because in a gesture of silent solidarity, he perceived the divine impotence. god is neither just nor unjust, simply impotent. what job suddenly understood, was that it was not him, but god himself, who was actually on trial in job‟s calamities, and he failed the test miserably. even more pointedly, i am tempted to risk a radical anachronistic reading: job foresaw god‟s own future suffering – “today it‟s me, tomorrow it will be your own son, and there will be no one to intercede for him. what you see in me now is the prefiguration of your own passion!” (126–127) more recently, žižek has elaborated once more on job at the occasion of the paper he contributed to st. paul among the philosophers (2009) 15 , a paper which was almost verbatim reprinted in the monstrosity of christ (43–55, 56–61 and 87–89), or vice-versa (in what follows we refer to the monstrosity of christ). falling back on the remarks on the outcome of the book of job by the english catholic writer chesterton (1874–1936) in his “introduction to the book of job,” žižek notes that what we get there is that god answers job‟s questions about the design of the world by showing that the world is in reality even more incomprehensible than job already thought it was (53). 16 žižek even suggests that the end of the book of job presents us a god who himself does not understand it all, “a god the faith of job and the recovery of christian atheism 110 overwhelmed by his own creation” (244) and maybe a god who is, as žižek had already suggested in on belief, even a mystery for himself: “the enigma of god” is also “the enigma in god himself”, “god is an enigma also in and for himself.” 17 the figure of job, žižek further adds in the monstrosity of christ, shows us how to respond to catastrophes that have befallen us or may befall us in the future: by resisting any attempt to give them meaning, by refusing to integrate them into a larger whole (53). this also entails that we should get rid of “the standard transcendent figure of god as a secret master who knows the meaning of what appears to us to be a meaningless catastrophe” (54). clinging to such a god, žižek contends, is “obscene” in light of the atrocities that have happened and are still going on around the world (54–55). in the monstrosity of christ, žižek also once more links job to christ. he repeats his view that in the crucified jesus, god occupies the place of job: the gap that separated job from god is transposed into god himself. to emphasize the far-reaching and revolutionary character this has in žižek‟s view, we can first refer to his comments on an unfinished drawing of the crucified christ by michelangelo (reproduced on the cover of the monstrosity of christ). žižek draws attention to a number of “unsettling details indicat[ing] an underlying attitude of angry rebellion, of defiance” and in particular to the stretched finger of christ‟s right hand, a gesture which žižek interprets (following quintilian) as a gesture of devilish rebellion (277–278). this can be linked to a fragment from chesterton‟s orthodoxy, quoted by žižek, in which the former states that only christianity has a “god who has himself been in revolt”, a god who has shared the atheists” isolation, a “god [who] seemed for an instant to be an atheist.” 18 thus, what happens when christ is on the cross, is that god the son rebels against god the father. like job before, the son staunchly refuses to accept that his suffering can have any meaning and resolutely rejects any secret design hidden behind it. therefore, žižek concludes (following chesterton), “christianity is „terribly revolutionary‟.” 19 he explains this further as follows: in the standard form of atheism, god dies for men who stop believing in him; in christianity, god dies for himself … christianity … enacts the reflexive reversal of atheist doubt into god himself. in his “father, why have you forsaken me?”, christ himself commits what is for a christian the ultimate sin: he wavers in his faith. while in all other religions, there are people who do not believe in god, only in christianity does god not believe in himself. (48–49) žižek vs. ricoeur: concluding remarks 1. it is obvious that ricoeur‟s job and žižek‟s job stand for two diametrically opposed responses to the phenomenon of (unjust) suffering. ricoeur‟s job opts for resignation and for the hope that his suffering, which appears as senseless from his limited perspective, will somehow turn out to fit in a larger picture (this hope is what job‟s “unverifiable faith” seems to amount to in ricoeur‟s view); žižek‟s job, in contrast, opts for resistance and staunchly refuses to accept that his suffering could have any meaning at all. this shows that žižek rejects ricoeur‟s interpretation of the outcome of the book of job, according to which job is 111 depoortere convinced – and even repents for daring to suppose that the world does not make sense 20 – because god makes him aware of “the possibility of […] an unassignable design, a design which is god‟s secret.” 21 according to žižek, no such design can ever justify unjust suffering. 2. ricoeur and žižek also give completely different answers to the question of what the case of job teaches us about god. according to ricoeur, job learns that god is impenetrable and inscrutable. his motives and the design inspiring his actions are hidden and beyond human comprehension. in other words, ricoeur emphasizes the enigma of god. žižek, in contrast, stresses the enigma in god and underscores that job discovers god‟s secret, namely that he is actually impotent and imperfect. remarkably, there is nevertheless a link between ricoeur and žižek. ricoeur‟s view implies that job has learned to love god for nothing. the love for god also appears in žižek, who defends that it is precisely god‟s imperfection that makes it possible for god to become an object of love. in the monstrosity of christ, žižek explains this as follows: “love is always love for the other insofar as he is lacking – we love the other because of his limitation. the radical conclusion from this is that if god is to be loved, he must be imperfect, inconsistent in himself” (39). this suggests that, if we follow žižek in this understanding of love, the true religious attitude does not consist in worshipping god qua perfect being, but in loving god qua impotent and imperfect. this also entails that the ricoeurian answer to the predicament of job, loving god for nothing, is only possible when god is not an omnipotent actor, not the one who is running the show, and when there is no hidden design behind what befalls us. god is not “a transcendent caretaker who guarantees the happy outcome of our acts” (55). in other words, we should accept the contingency of everything that happens. 3. furthermore, while žižek explicitly links the figure of job with the figure of christ, this link is absent in ricoeur‟s discussions of job. it is possible, however, to introduce this link in the work of ricoeur as well. the starting point for doing so could well perhaps be ricoeur‟s reference to the figure of the suffering servant of the lord from second isaiah, who has traditionally been understood as a prefiguration of christ and in whom ricoeur sees the opposition between suffering as retribution and unjust suffering surpassed in a third form of suffering, suffering as expiation for the sins of others. 22 yet, interpreting christ‟s death in terms of this kind of expiation seems to entangle us in a “perverse” reading of christianity, according to which god is “a perverse subject” playing games with his son and humankind or a cruel, merciless and jealous creature in need of a bloody sacrifice to satisfy his offended honor. 23 according to žižek, a non-perverse reading of the crucifixion entails that one should understand it, not as a higher form of suffering, but precisely as the moment god is himself thrown in the abysmal experience of being subjected to unjust suffering. the crucifixion is, as žižek puts it in the monstrosity of christ, the moment when christ “confronts the father with the meaninglessness of it all” (57). this shows that, next to the ethical god of the hebrew scriptures and the tragic god which re-emerges in the book of job, there is a third “face” of god, namely the suffering god and, žižek explains, it is in the suffering god that the tension between the two other “faces” of god is overcome (52). 4. finally, ricoeur and žižek also conceive the link between the case of job and the issue of atheism in differing ways. for ricoeur, atheism remains something which is instrumental: it occasions a purification of the faith, but it remains something which originates from outside the realm of faith and something which, in the end, needs to be overcome – after the dark the faith of job and the recovery of christian atheism 112 night of atheism, a new daybreak of faith has to follow. according to žižek, atheism is an intrinsic part of christianity because christianity is, as chesterton stated, the religion in which god himself becomes an atheist. it is of course obvious that žižek goes beyond chesterton. for chesterton, god was an atheist only for an instant on the cross. for žižek, in contrast, christ‟s experience of god-forsakenness on the cross is the moment god qua transcendent father actually dies. this view of žižek is of course a result of his hegelianism. but, next to žižek‟s faithfulness to hegel‟s basic scheme, there is no justification for this transition from god the son sharing the atheist‟s experience on the cross to the death of god the father – unless one limits the father of christ to the god qua “secret master who knows the meaning of what appears to us to be a meaningless catastrophe” and the “transcendent caretaker who guarantees the happy outcome of our acts” who is discredited by the case of job. thus, even if we follow chesterton and žižek in considering atheism to be an integral part of christianity, it does not automatically follow that we should also follow žižek in his plea for a hegelian reading of christianity and his defence of altizer‟s god-is-dead theology. but even if we don‟t do this, it remains possible to stick to žižek‟s basic insight, to be found in on belief, that “when i, a human being, experience myself as cut off from god, at that very moment of utmost abjection, i am absolutely close to god, since i find myself in the position of the abandoned christ.” 24 thus, to conclude: the monstrosity of christ is a great opportunity for its readers to (re)discover the suffering and weak god at the heart of christianity. missing this opportunity because one rejects žižek for his endorsement of hegelian-style god-is-dead theology would therefore be a pity. notes 1. slavoj žižek and john milbank, the monstrosity of christ: paradox or dialectic? ed. creston davis (cambridge, ma: the mit press, 2009). 2. thomas j. j. altizer, the gospel of christian atheism (philadelphia: the westminster press, 1966). 3. for further details, see frederiek depoortere, christ in postmodern philosophy: gianni vattimo, rené girard, slavoj žižek (london/new york: t&t clark, 2008), esp. 123– 125. 4. paul ricoeur, the symbolism of evil (boston: beacon press, 1967). 5. paul ricoeur, “the demythization of accusation,” in the conflict of interpretations: essays in hermeneutics, ed. don ihde (evanston, il: northwestern university press, 1974), 335–353, 351. 6. richard kearney, on paul ricoeur: the owl of minerva (aldershot: ashgate, 2004), 92. 7. alasdair macintyre and paul ricoeur, the religious significance of atheism (new york: columbia university press, 1969). paul ricoeur, “religion, atheism, and faith,” in conflict of interpretations, 440–467. 8. see ricoeur, symbolism of evil, 86, 319–20. 9. slavoj žižek, enjoy your symptom! jacques lacan in hollywood and out (new york: routledge, 1992). 10. rené girard, job: the victim of his people (london: the athlone press, 1987). 113 depoortere 11. slavoj žižek, on belief (new york: routledge, 2001), 146. 12. slavoj žižek, for they know not what they do: enjoyment as a political factor (2nd ed.; new york: verso, 2002). 13. see: job 42:6. 14. slavoj žižek, the puppet and the dwarf: the perverse core of christianity (cambridge, ma: the mit press, 2003). 15. slavoj žižek, “from job to christ: a paulinian reading of chesterton,” in st. paul among the philosophers, ed. john d. caputo and linda martín alcoff (bloomington, in: indiana university press, 2009), 39–58. 16. gilbert keith chesterton, “introduction to the book of job,” http://chesterton.org/gkc/ theologian/job.htm. 17. žižek, on belief, 145. 18. quoted in žižek and milbank, the monstrosity of christ?, 48; see: gilbert keith chesterton, orthodoxy (san francisco: ignatius press, 1995), 165. 19. žižek and milbank, the monstrosity of christ?, 48; with reference to chesterton, orthodoxy, 165. 20. compare “toward a hermeneutic of the idea of revelation,” harvard theological review 70/1–2 (1977): 1–37, 12; see also ricoeur, symbolism of evil, 321. 21. ricoeur, “toward a hermeneutic of the idea of revelation,” 13. 22. ricoeur, symbolism of evil, 324–325. 23. slavoj žižek, the fragile absolute: or, why is the christian legacy worth fighting for? (new york: verso, 2000), 157; did somebody say totalitarianism? five interventions in the (mis)use of a notion (new york: verso, 2000), 47. see also depoortere, christ in postmodern philosophy, 98–101. 24. žižek, on belief, 146 (emphasis in original). [expositions 5.1 (2011) 44-54] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 public rhetorics and homeless chic paula mathieu boston college hobolicious: adjective: looking homeless and yummy at the same time. example: robert pattinson was seen in london buying extra large underwear and looking hobolicious. —the urban dictionary it's terrible to say, very often the most exciting outfits are from the poorest people. —christian lacroix 1 as a rhetorician and writing teacher who has spent more than a decade working with homeless writers at street papers in chicago, boston and around the world, i want to admit up front that i know very little about the world of fashion. evaluating the work of designers like christian lacroix, john galliano, or vivienne westwood is far outside my academic, writerly, or personal purview. as a writer with interests in public rhetorics, however, i look at the rise of homeless chic – and more importantly its migration to other media and cultural locations – as an issue worth exploring. rather than asking, ―why do designers create expensive fashions that mimic stereotypical images of homeless people?‖ – a question for which i can offer no real speculation – instead i will ask questions like these: what kinds of publics are being hailed into being under the banner of homeless chic? what gets highlighted and what gets hidden in such depictions? who benefits and who gets hurt from these depictions? why might this be happening now? and does our academic attention to this matter enlighten or merely fuel this spectacle? while i offer no concrete or definitive answers to these questions, i share some speculations as well as ways to think about this issue from the purview of public rhetoric. rather than merely dismissing homeless chic and other homeless depictions as harmful, i would like to see what happens when we consider them as complex, important cultural material that helps shape public culture. what kinds of publics are being hailed into being under the banner of homeless chic? what began from john galliano‘s 2000 boho-meets-hobo-chic haute couture collection and was brilliantly parodied in the derelicte campaign in the 2001 comedy zoolander, quickly spread to hipsters and celebrities dressing in rags, and even further to having contestants on america‘s next top model pose as and with homeless women. all of these actions, whatever the motives, were initiated by celebrities, so i‘m not sure if they‘re representative of much beyond the fact that celebrities continually seek attention through various stunts. these actions become culturally http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hobolicious http://www.street-papers.org/ 45 mathieu important, however, because they take place before a global media that is fascinated by celebrity, allowing these images of homeless chic to break free from their original rhetorical context and circulate widely, especially via the internet. as people in the wider public repeatedly see images of homeless people conflated with fashion objects, some people pick up on and respond to the idea of homeless chic and morph it beyond the runway into other cultural venues. as michael warner argues, publics are formed by nothing more than the circulation of discourse itself: ―a public is self-organized: it exists by virtue of being addressed.‖ 2 in other words, the widespread circulation of homeless-chic images has created public forums and products based upon the aestheticization of real homeless people. a first example is a public-forum website, called homelesschic.com, which encourages visitors to view and ―catalogue images of people living on the street that exhibit a unique sense of personal style.‖ the site claims that this work is in no way ―made with the intention of mockery, but rather as a source of inspiration and social study.‖ and while the site boasts its ―positive intention‖ and ―keen eye,‖ it accompanies photos of purportedly homeless people with captions like this: ―she's telling us it‘s alllll about oversized, plaid, and on the move looks. the legendary cookie never fails to impress, and she‘s the reason we always carry a camera with us downtown! we love the shoelace necklace!! more pictures added regularly of our favorite lil tokyo homeless inspiration. ―i get all my clothes from black people,‖ explains cookie. but of course.‖ the tone of the commentary seems to undercut its claimed intention, by echoing the very mockery it speaks against. plus, it‘s unclear for whom or how the forum is intended to function as a source of inspiration. a second example began in 2007, when three california 20-somethings found their inspiration to start a fashion label in john jermyn, a roller-skating homeless man they dubbed, ―the crazy robertson.‖ the ―crazy robertson‖ clothing offers a range of products, including a $98 hoodie that bears jermyn‘s likeness and the slogan, ―no money, no problem.‖ the entrepreneurs call jermyn ―their friend,‖ and offered him 5% of ―net profit‖ from clothing sales, according to the wall street journal. he signed the contract, without speaking to an attorney or family members. but so far he has refused to accept cash, according to one of the label‘s founders, preferring to be paid in food, liquor and paper for his art projects: ―he tries not to involve money in his daily life,‖ one of the entrepreneurs told the wall street journal. 3 while those involved with the ―crazy robertson‖ see it as a win-win situation, jermyn's sister beverly is less happy with the situation. she told the wall street journal that she believes ―the crazy robertson‖ founders are exploiting her brother's condition to build their brand. she reports that she seeks to manage disability compensation for her brother who suffers from a form of schizophrenia, refuses to take medication, and has slept in an alley near her house since his condition began deteriorating in the late 1970s. 4 http://www.homelesschic.com/ http://online.wsj.com/article/sb119498984049791758.html http://online.wsj.com/article/sb119498984049791758.html public rhetorics and homeless chic 46 the irony of a $98 hoodie proclaiming ―no money, no problem,‖ seems so obvious as to hardly warrant mention. while this direct use of a homeless man as the ―mascot‖ for a fashion label is controversial, to say the least, the owners have, perhaps more curiously, found a public interested in buying its products. the clothing line is sold online and at kitson‘s, a trendy boutique frequented by paris hilton and others. a third example began when a member of the public in ningbo, china, saw a handsomelooking homeless man on the street in march 2010, took a photo of him and posted it online. ―brother sharp‖ as online viewers named him became a web ―meme,‖ a phenomenon of homeless-chic style. as his image circulated virally via the internet and was repurposed into various movie posters and fashion ads, online writers began speculating about him, spinning elaborate tales about a possible breakup with a college girlfriend that might have sent him to the streets, although news reports claimed he appeared mentally disturbed and not verbal when approached. 4 as photos and discussion of him proliferated online, people began roaming the streets of ningbo, hoping to catch a glimpse of ―brother sharp,‖ to talk with him, or get his photo. an online video shows a confused and scared man being chased by people with cameras, while he screams in fear or pain. because of the intense media attention, brother sharp, whose name is chen guorong, became reunited with his family, and has become a bit more accustomed to the public spotlight. but his life remains strikingly public. he has appeared in fashion shows and plans are at work for a movie about his life. 5 whether or not this is a ―happy ending‖ for guorong remains to be seen. what‘s also worth noting about these stories is that each represents public uptake of homeless chic fashion: people who were not celebrities deliberately taking and circulating images of actual homeless people, for their own edification or profit. the intense media attention given to guorong – or similarly to ted williams, the ―homeless man with the golden voice‖ in the united states – is both unexpected and uninvited, and the ethics of such intrusion and its long-term effects remains unclear. additionally each of these images builds its reality merely by looking at homeless people, by what robert desjarlais calls ―spectral means‖: the homeless can also be identified by how they look. to describe someone as ‗homeless‘ announces a lasting identity. . . .homelessness denotes a temporary lack of housing but connotes a lasting moral career. because this ‗identity‘ is deemed sufficient and interchangeable, the ‗homeless‘ usually go unnamed. the identification is typically achieved through spectral means: one knows the homeless not by talking with them but by seeing them. 6 all the information that visitors to homelesschic.com, buyers of the crazy robertson apparel, or internet follows of chen guorong have about their objects of interest is gathered exclusively by visual means, by looking at images that other people created about homeless people. people have become interested in looking at homeless people, as spectacles, of either pity, envy or shame. this visual focus seems to be common in homeless-chic culture in general. john galliano http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/brother-sharp-%e7%8a%80%e5%88%a9%e5%93%a5 47 mathieu claimed that his original inspiration for his boho-meets-hobo-chic collection came to him by looking at homeless people along the banks of the seine river as he embarked on his morning 6mile jog. 7 designer vivienne westwood, who created a 2010 line of homeless-chic clothing featuring men wearing makeup so their faces and hands would appear frost bitten, admits that her closest experience with homelessness was misplacing the keys to her house. 8 many have argued that homelessness is hidden in our culture – that to be homeless is to be rendered invisible in plain sight – and that making the invisible visible is important. to that limited extent, one could argue that homeless chic does useful cultural work by reminding viewers that people are homeless. for example, vivienne westwood argues that circulating images of homeless fashion does ―raise awareness‖ about homelessness. she says, ―i want to involve the privileged people in the fashion world in the homeless scene.‖ 9 within that logic ―looking at‖ homeless fashion constitutes or stands in for actual involvement in the homeless scene. what gets highlighted and hidden in these public images? as images of homeless chic are disseminated in wider circles and media, this visual understanding of homelessness begins to circulate more broadly as societal metaphor, one that highlights and hides aspects of its referent. for example, a woman who writes a blog, ―sunshine cupcakes,‖ uses homelessness to describe how disoriented she feels during a move, titling her entry ―homeless chic:‖ since i moved out of my apartment in may and have been living with ryan ever since, all my stuff has been in three different places. three. different. places. […] i moved a minuscule amount of things into ryan's house where i'd be temporarily homeless. people. do you know how much it sucks to have your things spread out all over the valley of the sun?! i'd go to take off my nail polish only to realize that my polish remover was at the new house. i'd want to wear this super cute yellow flowery top out on mill but would remember that it was at my parents‘. 10 accompanying this writing is a black-and-white photograph of a haggard-looking woman in a hooded sweatshirt, slumped against a concrete wall, sitting next to a shopping cart, filled beyond the brim with knapsacks, a blanket, and bottles of water. there‘s no caption to the photo and no explanation of its use other than, ―i had a lovely idea about how to lay out this post and wow were there going to be pictures. instead, i realized that my camera battery is dead and the charger is in another city. neat.‖ absent pictures of her own, the blogger uses an image of a probablyhomeless woman to illustrate her own ‗homeless‘ predicament. in the picture and the entry‘s title, ―homeless chic,‖ homelessness operates as a metaphor for any kind of displacement or inconvenience. in a similar fashion, the urban dictionary, a sort of wiki for current uses of http://www.sunshine-cupcakes.com/2009/08/homeless-chic.html public rhetorics and homeless chic 48 language, contains several definitions of homeless that show it operating as a metaphor for someone or something troublesome, annoying, or ―amazingly lame beyond belief.‖ 11 in such comparisons, homeless people are both familiar and alien. one can claim, ―i am homeless when i move,‖ and then, in turn, insult another by calling him or her ―so homeless.‖ the concept of being ―hobolicious,‖ homeless and good looking, as in brother sharp, circulates simultaneously. homelessness thus both functions as a metaphor in society and becomes represented by metaphors that highlight a narrow visual stereotype of what homelessness looks like, and as a result hides everything else. and as language scholars lakoff and johnson tell us, metaphors fundamentally structure our conceptual system and deeply shape what we believe and feel: ―a metaphor in a political or economic system, by virtue of what it hides, can lead to human degradation.‖ 12 when one merely looks, one doesn‘t listen, feel, taste or smell the reality that they‘re describing, thus issues of pain, frostbite, or squalor become erased or aestheticized into a visual tableau. what all of these depictions hide is the complexity of actual homelessness: its pain, its causes, who becomes homeless and why, and everything else the individuals are or do in their lives other than being dislocated from housing. also, in these depictions, homelessness functions as an identity or ―look‖ that exists for some – not a social condition that is caused or created by anything. british filmmaker ken loach, who in 1966 made a bbc teleplay about homelessness, told reporters in 1993 that he now feels that any depiction of homelessness is useless – or worse, voyeuristic – if it does not offer clear solutions to the problem. ―people must be shown that homelessness isn't an act of god,‖ he says, ―but a function of the way in which our society is organized.‖ 13 images of homeless chic not only frame the idea of homelessness without a focus on solutions, it gives little hint that it‘s a problem at all. the danger is that such widespread images further normalize homelessness as part of the status quo, not as a problem to be addressed. who benefits? who doesn’t? in 2009 the american girl company introduced a limited-edition homeless doll named gwen thompson. she wears simple-looking clothes and her back-story includes a father who walked out, nights of sleeping in the car with mom, and relocation to a shelter. the doll sells for $95 (not including accessories). the company claimed that the purpose of the doll was to raise awareness about homelessness and to prevent children from bullying or tormenting other kids who might be homeless. how the doll was meant to do that is not specified, but no proceeds from its sale benefited any homeless or any anti-bullying organizations. and while the idea of a $95 dollar homeless doll might seem oxymoronic, if not absurd, it was likely bought by many wellintentioned parents, happy for an easy way to raise awareness of homelessness. on the internet, one can easily buy other items sporting homeless images, both for the benefit of charities and not. calendars, for example, depicting hand-drawn images of homeless people are on sale to benefit a montana shelter, while others featuring photographs of homeless people on venice beach, benefits only the photographer. under this vague banner of ―raising awareness,‖ various 49 mathieu interests sell and profit from homeless chic as an act of or possible replacement for social involvement. 14 more sinister portrayals of homelessness also bring profits to a select few, while directly harming vulnerable others. in 2002, ray leticia, co-created bumfights, a video series that has sold hundreds of thousands of copies on the internet, in which homeless people harm themselves or others on film by, for example, pulling a tooth or breaking a limb, in exchange for small amounts of cash. the first installment of the series grossed more than 6 million dollars in one month. 15 leticia explains the rapid sales of the video this way: ―society has a fascination with homeless people, people living on the streets, almost a perverse fascination.‖ 16 in 2005, a director of a showtime documentary entitled reversal of fortune planted a suitcase filled with $100,000 cash in a dumpster for a homeless man to find, as part of a filmed social experiment to see what he would do with the money. in part because the homeless man feared that the money was discarded by criminals, he quickly spent the money on cars and gifts for family and friends. the documentarian and the homeless man both later appeared on oprah to discuss how and why the man ended up broke a year later – emphasizing the man‘s personal failings, and not the coercive set up of the project. 17 in these instances, homeless people were harmed and their lives interfered with in the name of entertaining others. that such a broad public appetite for this kind of coercive entertainment exists speaks is a troubling and perplexing reality of our culture today. why is this happening now? since i‘m not a psychologist or a sociologist, i can‘t speculate about the complex psychological processes that must be at work in the rise of homeless chic as an object of public fascination. i can say, however, that it‘s not entirely new and it also responds to this specific historical context. while homeless chic and its many manifestations is relatively recent, it is part of a much older and much broader context of public fascination with homelessness that extends well beyond the realm of fashion. since 2001 i‘ve been teaching a course at boston college entitled literature of homelessness, which allows students and me to examine representations of homelessness in a wide variety of public venues, including literature, news sources, pop culture, film, tv, and consumer items. in the class we read academic studies, policy papers, journalism, popular literature, science fiction, memoir, children‘s books, self-help books, etc. the field of ―homeless literature‖ itself is staggeringly big, indicating that lots of people are interested in reading and writing about homeless people; and increasingly homeless people are writing about their own lives. the public appetite for homeless stories is longstanding. as early as 1879, we see examples in popular literature of a now well-worn cliché of homeless literature and film: the idea of a prosperous person ―trying out‖ the homeless lifestyle on a wager, who either becomes lured to evil or learns how to be a better person. one such title itself tells the story: a tight squeeze, or, the adventures of a gentleman : who, on a wager of ten thousand dollars, undertook to go from new york to new orleans in three weeks, without money, as a professional tramp. 18 public rhetorics and homeless chic 50 and while the field of homeless literature is surprisingly broad and does not easily fit into simple generalizations, one can find a recurring theme of fascination with homelessness that walks the line between benign and sinister. for example, in her 2001 nonfiction essay, ―following nancy home,‖ which was nominated for a pushcart prize, linda lawson chronicles the weeks she and her friends spent surreptitiously following a homeless woman around cambridge, ma. in the story, lawson admits to a deep-seated resentment toward ―nancy,‖ whom she believes has a better life than she and must not really be homeless. 19 when teaching this essay, i engage students in sharing stories they have heard about panhandlers driving porsches or other longstanding myths that pair a simultaneous distaste for and envy of homeless people. public images of homeless people are also widely circulated in film. and while this topic is way too broad to engage here, i will make a few passing comments to help inform the context in which homeless-chic fashion arose. us films have played a key role in circulating both stereotypes and archetypes of homeless people for more than a century. film scholar linda fuller has found that nearly every top director has tackled homelessness. early portrayals tended to stereotype homeless people as tramps, capable of villainous actions; later representations painted them as lowlife or streetwise mystics. films both define and circulate powerful cultural stereotypes of homelessness, as seen during the 1991 filming of curly sue. 20 for a scene that called for homeless people, the filmmakers decided to put out a call to hire extras from chicago shelters. ultimately, none of the homeless people were hired, because casting directors thought they looked ―too clean.‖ 21 in more recent years, fuller notes, portrayals have shifted toward having homeless characters painted as intellectually or spiritually superior, mystical, or magical. an example of this archetype is the ―homeless man with a heart of gold,‖ such as joe pesci in with honors, 22 who plays a homeless man who teaches a harvard student important life lessons. fuller argues that both the negative stereotypes and idealized archetypes offer cultural excuses for not dealing with homelessness as a problem and function to maintain the status quo. 23 the status quo of the current moment includes widespread homelessness and economic insecurities. growing up in the 1970s, i didn‘t regularly see homeless people on the streets, not even in urban centers. when i tell students that homelessness was not a ―normal‖ part of my urban landscape growing up, they are usually quite surprised. today‘s youth live in a country where visible homeless can be seen almost anywhere, at the same time that the vast majority of homeless people are not visible to passersby. according to reports published by the national coalition for the homeless (nch), the number of homeless people in the united states is on the rise at the same time that emergency shelter is decreasing, and cities are passing legislation that criminalizes homeless activities. additionally, violent, random crimes against homeless people are at record levels. over the course of a given 12-month period, the national law center on homelessness and poverty estimates that approximately 3.5 million people experience homelessness in the us, and this number is may increase in the future due to the foreclosure crisis, increases in poverty, and a pattern of steady increases in family homelessness. 24 several cities, in their reports to the us 51 mathieu conference of mayors, reported an increase in employed homeless people and homeless families, which according to the survey account for 25% of all homeless people. most homeless people work hard not to be visible. 25 at a time of additional needs for emergency shelter, many cities do not have adequate shelter space, leaving homeless people no choice but to struggle on the streets. the streets, however, are doubly more dangerous than before: cities are increasingly adopting laws that criminalize sleeping, sitting, loitering, or panhandling in order to move poor or homeless people out of a visible downtown areas; and more disturbing, random violence perpetrated against homeless people in public places is an increasing worldwide trend. 26 according to the nch, 2010 was the most violent year in recorded history for hate crimes against the homeless: more than 100 violent attacks against homeless people in public spaces was recorded, and a third of those attacks were fatal – setting people on fire, public beatings, group attacks by young men on people on the street. 27 given that homelessness is more visible at a time when the economy remains shaky, it is not surprising that homeless chic arises now. homeless chic is occurring at a time when many legislators respond with gestures to hide or push homelessness off the main stage. as maureen dowd asked in the new york times, ―so which is worse? a paris fashion designer who wants to look at the homeless as aesthetic objects, or a new york mayor who does not want to look at them at all?‖ 28 we live in a moment of deep cultural contradiction. in many ways, one could see homeless chic as a continuation and expansion of the homeless archetype: homeless are more beautiful and have a better fashion sense than those of us who actually have money to spend on clothes. and perhaps this depiction functions as a kind of cultural pressure valve during a time of increased economic vulnerability of the middle class and increasing homelessness. does academic attention enlighten or further fuel the homeless-chic spectacle? in agreeing to contribute to this discussion, i worried whether my description and analysis would add anything productive, or whether i‘m merely facilitating the broader circulation (and broader public reception) of aestheticized, spectral homeless images. in the economics of attention richard lanham argues that we have transformed from an information economy to an attention economy, and what is valuable in today‘s world is eyeballs. attention to an issue makes it valuable. 29 it doesn‘t matter if the attention is positive or negative, applause or critique. i think his description of our current moment has merit. and while my concerns did not preclude me from writing this article, i think it‘s useful to acknowledge the limits of academic critique within the broader realm of public rhetoric: while i believe that depictions of homelessness that circulate publicly are worthy of critical attention, critique must be the beginning point of an effort to circulate fuller and more humane images, and not an end in itself. many writers, artists and alternative press publications around the world take on the mission to tell different and richer stories about people living in poverty. take, for instance, in 2000, a group of homeless writers and artists in chicago staged not your mama’s bus tour, an public rhetorics and homeless chic 52 alternative public bus tour of chicago, in response to city efforts to hide homeless people. 30 or another example, michèle ohayon‘s 1993 documentary, it was a wonderful life, 31 chronicles the lives of six women who once lived prosperous lives and became homeless. these are women who try hard not to be visible, to blend in, and are homeless because of illness, divorce, and unemployment. it‘s a hidden story of homelessness but it‘s strikingly common today. stories that create greater empathy and more complex understanding of people and situations help us move beyond specters to see more of the picture rather than less. in the years i‘ve worked with homeless people, i have found that fewer and fewer generalizations about homelessness are true, even most of the time. there are so many different images, faces and stories of homelessness. the nigerian writer, chimamanda adichie, speaks about how impressionable people can become in the face of a ―single story,‖ when we see poor people as only poor, or see homelessness only through a visual lens. she calls on us all to move beyond ―the danger of a single story‖ about any place or person toward more complex understandings of the world. 32 homeless chic is a single story, one that can‘t exist without homeless people – who are not merely specters or public spectacles. having homeless people on our streets is a statement about our entire society. they should not be enjoyed or overlooked as fashionable parts of the scenery. notes 1. quoted in katharine viner, ―hand-to-brand-combat,‖ guardian, september 23, 2000, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2000/sep/23/society.politics. 2. michael warner, publics and counterpublics (new york: zone books, 2002), 67. 3. jon weinbach, ―in west l. a., a homeless man inspires new brand,‖ wall street journal, november 14, 2007, http://online.wsj.com/article/sb119498984049791758.html. 4. clifford coonan, ―handsome chinese vagrant draws fans of ‗homeless chic,‘‖ the independent, march 4, 2010, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/handsomechinese-vagrant-draws-fans-of-homeless-chic-1915812.html. for a picture of brother sharp juxtaposed with a real model: http://blog.yaoyuan.org/article/1280.html. 5. see zoe li, ―carl ng to play brother sharp in world‘s first internet meme-inspired movie,‖ cnn international, july 7, 2010, http://www.cnngo.com/hong-kong/carl-ngplay-brother-sharp-worlds-first-internet-meme-inspired-movie-277561. see also http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9j_bmptay-s&feature=player_embedded. 6. robert desjarlais, shelter blues: sanity and selfhood among the homeless (philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, 1997), 2. 7. fashion forum. ―john galliano – biography,‖ http://www.fashion-forum.org/fashiondesigners/john-galliano.html. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2000/sep/23/society.politics http://online.wsj.com/article/sb119498984049791758.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/handsome-chinese-vagrant-draws-fans-of-homeless-chic-1915812.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/handsome-chinese-vagrant-draws-fans-of-homeless-chic-1915812.html http://blog.yaoyuan.org/article/1280.html http://www.cnngo.com/hong-kong/carl-ng-play-brother-sharp-worlds-first-internet-meme-inspired-movie-277561 http://www.cnngo.com/hong-kong/carl-ng-play-brother-sharp-worlds-first-internet-meme-inspired-movie-277561 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9j_bmptay-s&feature=player_embedded http://www.fashion-forum.org/fashion-designers/john-galliano.html http://www.fashion-forum.org/fashion-designers/john-galliano.html 53 mathieu 8. elke swart, ―fashionably homeless,‖ haag straatnieuws, january 17, 2011. street news service, http://www.streetnewsservice.org/news/2011/january/feed-264/fashionablyhomeless-.aspx. 9. ibid. 10. kara, ―homeless chic,‖ sunshine-cupcakes.com, august 10, 2009, http://www.sunshine-cupcakes.com/2009/08/homeless-chic.html. 11. ―homeless,‖ urban dictionary, 1999-2011, http://www.urbandictionary.com/ define.php?term=homeless&page=3. 12. george lakoff and mark johnson. metaphors we live by (chicago: university of chicago press, 1980), 236. 13. julian petley and sheila mckechnie, ―why cathy will never come home again,‖ new statesman & society, april 2, 1993: s23(3). 14. ryan mccarthy, ―american girl homeless doll causes controversy,‖ the huffington post, september 29, 2009, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/29/american-girlshomeless-d_n_302981.html. 15. michael stoops, ―bumfights: an incitement to hate crimes,‖ street spirit, september 2005, http://www.thestreetspirit.org/september2005/bumfights.htm. 16. michael squires and juliet casey, ―film cashes in on street scenes,‖ las vegas reviewjournal, may 05, 2002, http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2002/may-05-sun2002/news/18662641.html. 17. internet movie database, reversal of fortune (tv), 2005, http://www.imdb.com/ title/tt0838195/. 18. william staats, a tight squeeze, or, the adventures of a gentleman : who, on a wager of ten thousand dollars, undertook to go from new york to new orleans in three weeks, without money, as a professional tramp (boston: lee and shepard, 1879). 19. linda lawson, ―following nancy home,‖ fourth genre: explorations in nonfiction, 3.2 (fall 2001): 162–174. 20. curly sue. dir. john hughes. warner bros., 1991. 21. david ellis, ―actors with dirty faces,‖ time, jan 21, 1991: 19. 22. with honors. dir. alek keshishian. warner bros., 1994. 23. linda k. fuller, ―from tramps to truth-seekers: images of the homeless in the motion pictures,‖ in reading the homeless: media’s image of homeless culture, ed. eunjin min (westport, ct: praeger, 1999), 159. 24. national coalition for the homeless, ―how many people experience homelessness,‖ july 2009, http://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/how_many.html. 25. ibid. 26. see paula mathieu and diana george, ―not going it alone: public writing, independent media and the circulation of homeless advocacy,‖ college composition and communication 61.1 (september 2009): 130–149. http://www.streetnewsservice.org/news/2011/january/feed-264/fashionably-homeless-.aspx http://www.streetnewsservice.org/news/2011/january/feed-264/fashionably-homeless-.aspx http://www.sunshine-cupcakes.com/2009/08/homeless-chic.html http://www.urbandictionary.com/%20define.php?term=homeless&page=3 http://www.urbandictionary.com/%20define.php?term=homeless&page=3 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/29/american-girls-homeless-d_n_302981.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/29/american-girls-homeless-d_n_302981.html http://www.thestreetspirit.org/september2005/bumfights.htm http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2002/may-05-sun-2002/news/18662641.html http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2002/may-05-sun-2002/news/18662641.html http://www.imdb.com/%20title/tt0838195/ http://www.imdb.com/%20title/tt0838195/ http://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/how_many.html public rhetorics and homeless chic 54 27. national coalition for the homeless, ―hate crimes against the homeless: america‘s growing tide of violence,‖ august 2010, http://www.nationalhomeless.org/ publications/hatecrimes/hatecrimes2009.pdf. 28. maureen dowd, ―haute homeless,‖ new york times january 23, 2000, http://www.nytimes.com/2000/01/23/opinion/liberties-hautehomeless.html?scp=1&sq=haute+homeless+maureen+dowd&st=nyt. 29. richard lanham, the economics of attention (chicago: university of chicago press, 2007). 30. see paula mathieu, tactics of hope: the public turn in english composition (portsmouth, nh: boynton/cook heinemann, 2005). 31. ridgebury films, 1993. 32. chimamanda adichie, ―the danger of a single story,‖ ted conferences, july 2009, http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story. html. http://www.nationalhomeless.org/%20publications/hatecrimes/hatecrimes2009.pdf http://www.nationalhomeless.org/%20publications/hatecrimes/hatecrimes2009.pdf http://www.nytimes.com/2000/01/23/opinion/liberties-haute-homeless.html?scp=1&sq=haute+homeless+maureen+dowd&st=nyt http://www.nytimes.com/2000/01/23/opinion/liberties-haute-homeless.html?scp=1&sq=haute+homeless+maureen+dowd&st=nyt http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.html http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.html tillman.indd © equinox publishing ltd. 2007, unit 6, th e village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expositions 1.1 (2007) 029–052] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v1i1.29 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 some aspects of human nature as viewed by cardinal john henry newman m. katherine tillman university of notre dame th e three views of human nature presented in this essay, all john henry newman’s, are from the vantage point of natural religion, from that of the liberally educated person, and from that of one imbued with christian faith and love. th ese three views are related not progressively, but analogously, for each viewpoint in itself shows some kind of profound, intrinsic development of what is usually taken to be “mere” human nature. being human, according to john henry newman, is quite distinct from fully fl ourishing as a human being, and the full fl ourishing of a human being is itself quite distinct from the fulfi llment of being human in christ. generally and abstractly viewed, as in this essay, a human being can be externally described in all three of these ways—as human, as fully fl ourishing, as christian. in like manner, viewed generally and in the abstract, human beings can be viewed through the lens of each of the disciplines called “humanities.” only taken all together, however, can the disciplines of the humanities, and all other views of human nature, approximate in as complete a way as possible (and even then not exhaustively) a portrayal of human being as it is. th e lack of complete satisfaction and fi nality in defi ning human being may be because, in the concrete, the human person is individual and unique, like no other except as image of god, ultimately an ineff able mystery. it may also be because, as some would have it, there is no such thing as human nature, in which case, there could be no legitimacy to such undertakings as the humanities. but these rich and abundant studies, like this essay, presume the intelligibility of a defi nite subject matter viewed under one or another or many of its myriad aspects. as an apologist for religion, newman favored analogical argument tillman.indd 29tillman.indd 29 10/06/2007 21:23:3910/06/2007 21:23:39 30 some aspects of human nature © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 as his main instrument of persuasion. analogy is the manner by which the mind reasons from things that are known to be alike in signifi cant respects to previously unknown similarities in other respects. analogical thinking is employed, for example, in the translation of meaning from one language to another, or in the transposition from one tonal scale to a similarly structured scale in a diff erent key, or to an understanding of the lessons of history as they might be applied to our own time. th is mode of reasoning requires a fl exible mind that can situate itself within the frameworks of various views (say, that of the french language and of the german language), while at the same time keeping those views anchored in the “focal reality” to which they refer (the single meaning conveyed in both languages). each aspect by means of which a focal reality is considered newman calls a “view” of that reality. human nature can be viewed in a great variety of its dimensions, under a multitude of aspects or features, as the mind shifts into diff erent registers or keys for the viewing. th e humanities organize and order related aspects according to which each of these disciplines of the mind, by means of its own method, may view human nature. here is how newman says it. let us take, for instance, man himself as our object of contemplation; then at once we shall fi nd we can view him in a variety of relations; and according to those relations are the sciences of which he is the subject-matter, and according to our acquaintance with them is our possession of a true knowledge of him. we may view him in relation to the material elements of his body, or to his mental constitution, or to his household and family, or to the community in which he lives, or to the being who made him; and in consequence we treat of him respectively as physiologists, or as moral philosophers, or as writers of economics, or of politics, or as theologians. (iu 54–55)1 such is the purpose of studying the humanities—not to excel in a single view or method of approach, but for the truth writ large about human nature itself. concludes newman: when we think of [human nature] in all these relations together, or as the subject at once of all the sciences i have named, then we may be said to reach unto and rest in the idea of man as an object or external fact, similar to that which the eye takes of his outward form. (iu 55) tillman.indd 30tillman.indd 30 10/06/2007 21:23:4410/06/2007 21:23:44 tillman 31 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 in this essay, newman’s understanding of human nature writ large is the focal reality, ordering and ordered by the three views of it taken here. th e fi rst part of the essay describes newman’s philosophical view of human nature in itself, that is, essentially. th e second part shifts into newman’s understanding of human nature in its possibilities for development into the most complete way of being human, naturally speaking, that is, human nature in its fl ourishing or full integrity. th e last part of the essay takes the view which newman privileges, namely, that of human nature transformed in christ. it is not three diff erent realities being considered but one only, in ever-incomplete variations of its aspects. as newman writes: we know, not by a direct and simple vision, not at a glance, but as it were, by piecemeal and accumulation, by a mental process, by going round an object, by the comparison, the combination, the mutual correction, the continual adaptation of many partial notions, by the employment, concentration, and joint action of many faculties and exercises of mind. (iu 134) newman repeatedly states his desire to take human nature “as it is” in the concrete actions of daily life. “let us take things as we fi nd them; let us not attempt to distort them into what they are not. true philosophy deals with facts. we cannot make facts” (us 231). john locke, whom newman admires for other reasons, is the one whom he is directly opposing here. locke “takes a view of the human mind,” newman writes, which to me seems theoretical and unreal. reasonings and convictions which i deem natural and legitimate, he apparently would call irrational, enthusiastic, perverse, and immoral; and that, as i think, because he consults his own ideal of how the mind ought to act, instead of interrogating human nature, as an existing thing, as it is found in the world. instead of going by the testimony of psychological facts, and thereby determining our constitutive faculties and our proper condition, and being content with the mind as god has made it, he would form men as he thinks they ought to be formed, into something better and higher, and calls them irrational and indefensible, if (so to speak) they take to the water, instead of remaining under the narrow wings of his own arbitrary theory. (ga 109) tillman.indd 31tillman.indd 31 10/06/2007 21:23:4410/06/2007 21:23:44 32 some aspects of human nature © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 newman’s empiricism in this regard does not preclude, but is rather the basis for his positing the universality of human nature. because of what one discovers within oneself and witnesses in others, directly through lived experience and indirectly through learning, one can conclude that the same fundamental attributes found in oneself are possessed by other beings like oneself. newman reasons analogically: “human nature is in all ages one and the same: as it showed itself in the israelites, so it shows itself in the world at large now” (vm 39). newman’s insistence on the objectivity and universality of human nature is important to stress because for him, “what is not universal has no claim to be considered natural, right, or of divine origin. . .” (ga 260). i. human being qua human to be human, for newman, is to be an integral person of body and soul with a rich interiority that is naturally oriented outward toward the external world, visible and invisible. th e heart of this interiority is conscience, the soul’s inner chamber of connection with its maker. for newman, this is the primary fact of human nature: its always alreadythere relation to god, be that relation less or more fully realized, be it but sporadically perceived or vaguely inchoate, or altogether rejected. human beings then are naturally religious, for by “religion,” newman means “the knowledge of god, of his will, and of our duties towards him” (ga 251). inquiring into the chief doctrines and the grounds of natural religion, both in primitive times and now, newman fi nds “there are three main channels which nature furnishes for our acquiring this knowledge, viz. [a] our own minds, [b] the voice of mankind, and [c] the course of the world, that is, of human life and human aff airs” (ga 251). a. by “our own minds” as a channel for knowing god, newman means conscience, “our great internal teacher of religion” (ga 251). th rough conscience, each human being possesses a connatural awareness of self-in-relation-to-god (“myself and my creator” 2)—an interiorly experienced knowledge possessed in no other way. conscience is a personal guide, and i use it because i must use myself; tillman.indd 32tillman.indd 32 10/06/2007 21:23:4410/06/2007 21:23:44 tillman 33 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 i am as little able to think by any mind but my own as to breathe with another’s lungs. conscience is nearer to me than any other means of knowledge. (ga 251) god as judge is the specifi c content of the knowledge disclosed through the ordinary experience of conscience. th e concomitant selfknowledge attained through conscience is of oneself as naturally possessed of a moral sense, an inner rule of right and wrong, and thus of oneself as obligated by a code of moral duties. i take our natural perception of right and wrong as the standard for determining the characteristics of natural religion, and i use the religious rites and traditions which are actually found in the world, only so far as they agree with our moral sense. (ga 251) th e moral sense that naturally accompanies conscience dictates “no religion is from god which contradicts our sense of right and wrong” (ga 270). a person’s conscience makes application of this general sense of right and wrong to the particular circumstances of everyday life. th e rule of morals is the same for all; and yet, notwithstanding, what is right in one is not necessarily right in another. what would be a crime in a private man to do, is a crime in a magistrate not to have done . . . (ga 270) b. th e second natural conduit of religious knowledge, the “voice of mankind,” is located especially in the humanities, which assist in fi lling out the doctrines of natural religion, as they fi nd expression in the various belief systems and mythologies of human history, in recorded dreams, and in literal and fi ctional narratives of voyages and travels. th e ubiquitous utterances of this voice, heard across all ages and cultures, reinforce and develop the knowledge that comes through conscience. th ey tell of an inherent and unshakable human sense of sin and guilt, of pollution and retribution, of obligations due an angry god, of deserved punishment for unobserved duties, of exacted penalties in this life and in a projected future life, of a corrupt condition that requires expiation, of priesthood and rites, of prayers, off erings and sacrifi ces, and of the possibility of atonement. th ese natural acknowledgements of the divine seem harsh and negative, as newman observes: “wherever religion exists in a popular shape, it has almost invariably worn tillman.indd 33tillman.indd 33 10/06/2007 21:23:4510/06/2007 21:23:45 34 some aspects of human nature © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 its dark side outwards” (ga 252–3). newman insists on the severity of natural religion because, from the circumstances of human nature, though not by the fault of religion, such is the shape in which we fi rst encounter it. its large and deep foundation is the sense of sin and guilt, and without this sense there is for man, as he is, no genuine religion. (ga 258, emphasis added) c. th e third natural informant about religion, which is “the system and the course of the world,” points to an experienced order in the universe together with a strong sense of its maker’s obscurity, withdrawal and even complete absence from human aff airs. starting then with the being of a god, (which, as i have said, is as certain to me as the certainty of my own existence . . .) i look out of myself into the world of men, and there i see a sight which fi lls me with unspeakable distress . . . . if i looked into a mirror, and did not see my face, i should have the sort of feeling, which actually comes upon me, when i look into this living busy world, and see no refl exion of its creator. . . . th e sight of the world is nothing else than the prophet’s scroll, full of “lamentations, and mourning, and woe.” (ap 216–17) with reverberations of hobbes’ dismal portrayal of human life in its natural state as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” and in a manner that recalls the dread and despair in that condition as represented by thoughtful believers from job to pascal and kierkegaard, newman describes the forlorn state of the human race in its sad restlessness throughout the ages. to consider the world in its length and breadth, its various history, the many races of man, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their confl icts; . . . the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race. . . —all this is a vision to dizzy and appall; and infl icts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery, which is absolutely beyond human solution. what shall be said to this heartpiercing, reason-bewildering fact? i can only answer, that either there is no creator, or this living society tillman.indd 34tillman.indd 34 10/06/2007 21:23:4510/06/2007 21:23:45 tillman 35 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 of men is in a true sense discarded from his presence. (ap 217) accordingly, it does not seem unreasonable to newman for people earnestly to inquire in the face of this silence: “why does he not write his moral nature in large letters upon the face of history, and bring the blind, tumultuous rush of its events into a celestial, hierarchical order?” (ga 256). th ese deep-seated acknowledgements and perplexing questions, which stem from the predominantly harsh side of natural religion, already suggest and imply, newman notices, a lighter, if not immediately consoling, side as well: visions of salvation, superstitions about the easy amelioration of wrongs, prophecies of better times to come and hope in a future state of just recompense. without ignoring its dark underside, newman writes, it can also be said that “all religion, so far as it is genuine, is a blessing, natural as well as revealed” (ga 258). some alleviation of the burdens of natural religion are constituent elements of it, as instanced in the realization that “religious beliefs and institutions, of some kind or other, are of such general acceptance in all times and places” (ga 258). some comfort is also found in religion’s benefi ts that are naturally expected, and in the hope for a happier state after death for those who do good and avoid evil. th ey have an earnest of that future in the real and recurring blessings of life, the enjoyment of the gifts of the earth, and of domestic aff ection and social intercourse, which is suffi cient to touch and to subdue even the most guilty of men in his better moments, reminding him that he is not utterly cast off by him whom nevertheless he is not given to know. (ga 258) despite the chaos of physical nature and human aff airs in every age, human beings are able to recognize naturally a good god who is related to humankind providentially. . . . the spontaneous piety of the human mind discerns divine supervision. nay, there is a general feeling, originating directly in the workings of conscience, that similar governance is extended over the persons of individuals, who thereby both fulfi ll the purposes and receive the just recompenses of omnipotent providence. (ga 259) as universal as belief in providence, newman notes, is the pervasive tillman.indd 35tillman.indd 35 10/06/2007 21:23:4510/06/2007 21:23:45 36 some aspects of human nature © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 practice of prayer, experienced as a comfort in times of trouble, for individuals and for whole societies and cultures as well. here again, if, in order to determine what the religion of nature is, we may justly have recourse to the spontaneous acts and proceedings of our race, as viewed on a large fi eld, we may safely say that prayer, as well as hope, is a constituent of man’s religion. (ga 260) together with prayer, which is “the voice of man to god,” an express revelation of some kind, as “the voice of god to man,” is a naturally hoped for, desired and expected solace in natural religion. god’s revelation to the naturally devout can be seen in their religious interpretations of the ordinary and extraordinary events of life, which are taken as coming directly from the hand of god, often in reward or punishment for deeds done or omitted. in treating of revealed religion in the long section of the grammar of assent bearing that name, newman articulates his more ample view of the preparedness for a divine revelation for those who hunger for it that is provided by natural or popular religion. it is a “pre-sentiment” of a revelation from god. one of the most important eff ects of natural religion on the mind, in preparation for revealed, is the anticipation, which it creates, that a revelation will be given. th at earnest desire of it, which religious minds cherish, leads the way to the expectation of it. (ga 272) for newman, this inborn, natural desire, based on the twofold sense of god’s infi nite goodness and human unworthiness, produces the “strong presumption” and the “antecedent probability” of divine revelation. like his favored alexandrian fathers of the church, newman fi nds not only hints and traces of the divine, but a genuine “dispensation” and revelation manifest in preand non-christian sources. clement of alexandria and origen were the fi rst christian humanists and educators of the christian intellect to take greek thought on its own terms, thus “recovering and purifying it,” rather than reversing, condemning or discarding it because it was heathen. in marked contrast with earlier western fathers and apologists whom newman had read, the alexandrians, like newman, embraced the philosophy, literature and tillman.indd 36tillman.indd 36 10/06/2007 21:23:4510/06/2007 21:23:45 tillman 37 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 mythology of the greek sages and poets, striving to see the interconnectedness of all truth in god. properly understood, this “dispensation of paganism” was the divinely ordained preparation of the hellenic mind, indeed of any educated mind, for the good news of the gospel. “th ere had been in some sense a dispensation carried on in favor of the gentiles. he who had taken the seed of jacob for his elect people had not therefore cast the rest of mankind out of his sight” (ap 36). in fact, newman wonders if there ever was a time when reason was unaided by such revelatory divine gifts. it must be recollected that christianity is only the continuation and conclusion of what professes to be an earlier revelation, which may be traced back into prehistoric times, till it is lost in the darkness that hangs over them. as far as we know, there never was a time when that revelation was not. (ga 278) in the poem “heathenism,” newman exquisitely exhibits the voice of god’s spirit within this special dispensation of paganism, be it of yesteryear or of today. ’mid balak’s magic fi res th e spirit spake, clear as in israel; with prayers untrue and covetous desires did god vouchsafe to dwell; who summon’d dreams, his earlier word to bring to patient job’s vex’d friends, and gerar’s guileless king. if such o’erfl owing grace from aaron’s vest e’en on the sibyl ran, why should we fear, the son now lacks his place where roams unchristen’d man? as though, where faith is keen, he cannot make bread of the very stones, or thirst with ashes slake.3 all of this then—from the natural informant of conscience to the histories and stories of our kind that tell of the sophisticated and universal practices of natural religion, even the desire for god’s continuing self-revelation—all of this, newman is asserting, is available by nature to every human being. “such, then, in outline is that system of natural beliefs and sentiments, which, though true and divine, is still possible to us independently of revelation.” (ga 263, emphasis added) tillman.indd 37tillman.indd 37 10/06/2007 21:23:4510/06/2007 21:23:45 38 some aspects of human nature © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 ii. human well-being th e fi rst part of this essay has taken up newman’s view of human nature in its very essence. th is essential nature, pre-eminently religious, is not fully developed in most individuals, in many cases through no fault of their own. th e essay’s second view of human nature now takes its stand beside newman’s view of the “mere” humanity or essence of a person.4 it investigates what is required for that person’s continuing development and full actuality—not as a carpenter, not as a nurse, not as a university student or a professor, but just insofar as that person is a human being. what then, for newman, constitutes the fullness of human fl ourishing and well-being, its integrity, and how is one to go about developing it?5 all of the natural predispositions and potentialities of human nature must be brought out and developed as completely as possible, if an individual’s nature is to be fully actualized. th e full fl ourishing of the individual is not something natural to human beings “as we fi nd them”; rather, their well-being and completeness needs to be achieved by each person, importantly, through training, through education and through habit. “th e bodily eye, the organ for apprehending material objects, is provided by nature; the eye of the mind, of which the object is truth, is the work of discipline and habit” (iu 135). because human nature must be taken “as we fi nd it,” and because human beings are by nature religious, it is insuffi cient, according to newman, to defi ne them as exclusively rational animals. “after all, man is not a reasoning animal; he is a seeing, feeling, contemplating, acting animal” (da 294),6 and is also a believing, worshiping and praying animal, according to the dictates of natural religion. th e development of reasoning, judgment and will are moral and religious obligations, “sacred duties” (ga 225–26), rooted by nature in conscience for the gradual perfecting of human being. liberal education can begin this personal development, although the fully developed human being does not follow with necessity from that education. any study at all can be taken up in a liberal manner, that is, by pursuing it exclusively for its own sake and for no purpose or ulterior motive outside itself. newman favors, however, the study of tillman.indd 38tillman.indd 38 10/06/2007 21:23:4610/06/2007 21:23:46 tillman 39 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 the classics of greece and rome as best able to provide a rigorous education of the intellect. th e question is not what department of study contains the more wonderful facts, or promises the more brilliant discoveries, and which is in the higher and which in an inferior rank; but simply which out of all provides the most robust and invigorating discipline for the unformed mind. (iu 222) he notes the centuries-old preference for classics, and their “lineal descent,” as possessing “the best instruments of mental cultivation, and the best guarantees for intellectual progress” (iu 221). in an address to the school of philosophy and the arts at the catholic university in dublin, he states that western civilization has its common principles, and views, and teaching, and especially its books, which have more or less been given from the earliest times, and are, in fact, in equal esteem and respect, in equal use now, as they were when they were received in the beginning. in a word, the classics, and the subjects of thought and the studies to which they give rise, or, to use the term most to our present purpose, the arts, have ever, on the whole, been the instruments of education which the civilized orbis terrarum has adopted. . . . (iu 216) in western tradition, liberal education in the classics was found to involve four principal disciplines: grammar, rhetoric, logic, and mathematics; and the science of mathematics, again, was divided into four, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music; making in all seven, which are known by the name of the seven liberal arts. (iu 218–19) according to newman’s idea, the goal or end of university education is the cultivation of a lively and disciplined intellect, just for the sake of its own health and well-being. th e very attainment of knowledge is its own fulfi lling and pleasurable end. in holding this, newman pays extraordinary tribute to aristotle: all that i have been now saying is summed up in a few characteristic words of the great philosopher. “of possessions,” he says, “those rather are useful, which bear fruit; those liberal, which tend to enjoyment. by fruitful, i mean, which yield revenue; by enjoyable, where nothing tillman.indd 39tillman.indd 39 10/06/2007 21:23:4610/06/2007 21:23:46 40 some aspects of human nature © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 accrues of consequence beyond the using.” (iu 102, quoting aristotle rhetoric 1.5) th e goal of liberal education is achieved, fi rst, by learning and by practicing the all-important “habit of method” in its many disciplined applications to the verbal arts of the trivium and the mathematical arts of the quadrivium. let [the student] once gain this habit of method, of starting from fi xed points, of making his ground good as he goes, of distinguishing what he knows from what he does not know, and i conceive he will be gradually initiated into the largest and truest philosophical views, and will feel nothing but impatience and disgust at the random theories and imposing sophistries and dashing paradoxes, which carry away half-formed and superfi cial intellects. (iu 13) a healthy intellect is one that is “energized” for the seeking and detection of truth, its sole and proper object. th e mind actively digests, assimilates, compares, corrects, refi nes and relates, and gradually becomes habituated to these complex processes. th e unfortunate alternative is “lingering in the vestibule of knowledge” (iu 134), the mind passive, inert and barely receiving of the facts and information presented to it—its purpose to pass tests, to graduate, to get a good job, and so forth. study for any useful or extrinsic purpose, even in the admirable service of religion, is not liberal, but is study for utility’s sake, for what it can do. newman is not belittling the practical knowledge that is power in the world. he is simply arguing that the perfecting of the intellect for its own sake, the special work of the university, has a living beauty and a fulfi llment entirely its own: [its] enlargement consists, not merely in the passive reception into the mind of a number of ideas unknown to it, but in the mind’s energetic and simultaneous action upon and towards and among those new ideas, which are rushing in upon it. . . . we feel our minds to be growing and expanding then, when we not only learn, but refer what we learn to what we know already. it is not the mere addition to our knowledge that is the illumination; but the locomotion, the movement onwards, of that mental centre, to which both what we know, and what we are learning, the accumulating mass of our acquirements, gravitates. (iu 120–21) tillman.indd 40tillman.indd 40 10/06/2007 21:23:4610/06/2007 21:23:46 tillman 41 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 th e objective is gradually to illuminate one’s knowledge beyond the mere acquisition of information, “to invest it with an idea,” so that knowledge will be “impregnated by reason,” and one’s mind becomes habituated to this larger, philosophical way of viewing things (iu 103). philosophy in this sense is for newman “the architectonic science,” not unlike aristotle’s “science of sciences” or bacon’s “philosophia prima,” enabling one to see the bearing of one discipline, method and subject matter upon another, and their relation to the whole: “to have mapped out the universe is the boast, or at least the ambition, of philosophy” (iu 105). in newman’s idea of the university, the individual disciplines are seen as particular views which approximate, under a variety of aspects, knowledge of the whole of god’s created universe. each discipline is a manageable abstraction from the whole, its subject matter accessed by a method unique to that subject. “th ese various partial views or abstractions, by means of which the mind looks out upon its object, are called sciences” (iu 53). pace descartes’ mathesis universalis, no one can view or comprehend all aspects of the created universe at once. newman writes: with all its capabilities, the human mind cannot take in this whole vast fact at a single glance, or gain possession of it at once. like a shortsighted reader, its eye pores closely, and travels slowly, over the awful volume that lies open for its inspection. or again, as we deal with some huge structure of many parts and sides, the mind goes round about it, noting down, fi rst one thing, then another, as it best may, and viewing it under diff erent aspects, by way of making progress towards mastering the whole. so by degrees and by circuitous advances does it rise aloft and subject to itself a knowledge of that universe into which it has been born. (iu 53) every science or discipline is limited to the excellence of its own method and view of reality, and every discipline needs the others to help limit, balance and make the best sense of itself. i have said that all branches of knowledge are connected together, because the subject-matter of knowledge is intimately united in itself, as being the acts and work of the creator. hence it is that the sciences, into which our knowledge may be said to be cast, have multitillman.indd 41tillman.indd 41 10/06/2007 21:23:4610/06/2007 21:23:46 42 some aspects of human nature © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 plied bearings one on another, and an internal sympathy, and admit, or rather demand, comparison and adjustment. th ey complete, correct, balance each other . . . to give undue prominence to one is to be unjust to another; to neglect or supersede these is to divert those from their proper object. it is to unsettle the boundary lines between science and science, to disturb their action, to destroy the harmony which binds them together. . . th ere is no science but tells a diff erent tale, when viewed as a portion of a whole, from what it is likely to suggest when taken by itself, without the safeguard, as i may call it, of others. (iu 94) what is required is the availability for inquiry into all branches of knowledge, “at least implicitly” (iu 182), and the study of a fair number of the disciplines, where that study is neither superfi cial nor shallow, thus avoiding the educational disaster newman calls “viewiness”(iu 12).7 newman argues that just as the other subjects in the encyclopedia of knowledge, the intellectual discipline of theology is a necessary part of any university curriculum. to start with, theology can help to purify and develop the intellectual aspects of natural religion, preserving devotion and worship, but dismissing any remnants of ignorance and superstition. in developing his reasons for the required study of theology, newman argues that theology is a way of knowing just like other forms of knowledge, so it has its place in a university, which claims as such to teach all knowledge.8 th eology’s absence from the circle of learning would mean that the disciplines upon which it has some bearing would be distorted, unbalanced and incomplete without its signature contribution. how could dante’s divine comedy or the history of music or of philosophy be taught without any theological references? “to blot [theology] out is nothing short, if i may so speak, of unraveling the web of university teaching. it is, according to the greek proverb, to take the spring from out of the year” (iu 71). as would the omission of any other essential discipline, theology’s absence would “put our whole encyclopedia of knowledge out of joint” (iu 63), because each subject infl uences and is infl uenced by other subjects. are we to limit our idea of university knowledge by the evidence of our senses? then we exclude ethics; by intuition? we exclude history; tillman.indd 42tillman.indd 42 10/06/2007 21:23:4710/06/2007 21:23:47 tillman 43 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 by testimony? we exclude metaphysics; by abstract reasoning? we exclude physics. is not the being of a god reported to us by testimony, handed down by history, inferred by an inductive process, brought home to us by metaphysical necessity, urged on us by the suggestions of our conscience? it is a truth in the natural order, as well as in the supernatural. (iu 38) here newman is advocating the inclusion in the curriculum of the intellectual subjects of theology and ethics as proper subjects of any university at all. th eir practical counterparts, the actual practice of religion and morality, newman reserves for his discussion of the residential life of the catholic university.9 th e philosophical habit of mind gradually formed by liberal education is a lasting “master view,” one that is neither complete nor unalterable in its details, but one that contributes to a full human life. th is enlarged way of seeing has rightly surveyed the vast fi eld of knowledge and its objects, thereby understanding in general how things stand in relation to one another and to the whole. th e liberally educated individual, whom newman refers to as “the gentleman,” possesses a wealth comparable to any material advantage, one less tangible, but one more permanent and satisfying. he apprehends the great outlines of knowledge, the principles on which it rests, the scale of its parts, its lights and its shades, its great points and its little, as he otherwise cannot apprehend them. hence it is that his education is called “liberal.” a habit of mind is formed which lasts through life, of which the attributes are, freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom; or what in a former discourse i have ventured to call a philosophical habit. (iu 96) as a kind of by-product of liberal education, the “gentleman” possesses “the connatural qualities of a large knowledge” (iu 110) and is thereby equipped with “fi tness for the world,” that is, with the ability to learn, and to excel, in any fi eld of work or profession. “th at training of the intellect, which is best for the individual himself, best enables him to discharge his duties to society” (iu 154). nonetheless, whether or not an individual ever works at or professes anything, that individual has achieved the intellectual excellence that exquisitely suits human tillman.indd 43tillman.indd 43 10/06/2007 21:23:4710/06/2007 21:23:47 44 some aspects of human nature © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 nature and has risen to the full stature of humanity at its best and most integral. writes newman: th at further advantages accrue to us and redound to others by its possession, over and above what it is in itself, i am very far indeed from denying; but, independent of these, we are satisfying a direct need of our nature in its very acquisition; and, whereas our nature, unlike that of the inferior creation, does not at once reach its perfection, but depends, in order to it, on a number of external aids and appliances, knowledge, as one of the principal of these, is valuable for what its very presence in us does for us after the manner of a habit, even though it be turned to no further account, nor subserve any direct end. (iu 97–98) just so, newman would seem to conclude his idea’s discourses with this highest ideal of university education: it is the education, which gives a man a clear conscious view of his own opinions and judgments, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them. it teaches him to see things as they are, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought, to detect what is sophistical, and to discard what is irrelevant. it prepares him to fi ll any post with credit, and to master any subject with facility. (iu 154) toward the end of the discourses, however, newman begins to shift into a diff erent register, taking on a view that implies and foreshadows his idea of a specifi cally catholic university, up to this point not readily obvious. he shows how the well-educated “gentleman” can nonetheless be led astray by the very liberal learning that has brought about his well-being. just as there is the natural religion of heathenism, humble and devout before god, so in a civilized age there is the “religion of philosophy,” but this religion is proud and arrogant (iu 157–58). th e religion of reason or of philosophy is a counterfeit religion that can readily attach itself to the university-educated individual who possesses that hard won philosophical habit of mind, for it thrives not on submission before god, but on pride of intellect, on faith in only itself and its creations. “it considers itself from fi rst to last independent and supreme; it requires no external authority; it makes a religion for itself ” (iu 157). for newman, alongside the liberal habit of mind into which tillman.indd 44tillman.indd 44 10/06/2007 21:23:4710/06/2007 21:23:47 tillman 45 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 one has been inducted intellectually, there needs to take place a simultaneous development of conscience, not only intellectually through theology and education of “the moral sense,” but more totally in the personally lived experience of religion and morality. he elucidates: knowledge is one thing, virtue is another; good sense is not conscience, refi nement is not humility, nor is largeness and justness of view faith. philosophy, however enlightened, however profound, gives no command over the passions, no infl uential motives, no vivifying principles. . . . quarry the granite rock with razors, or moor the vessel with a thread of silk; then may you hope with such keen and delicate instruments as human knowledge and human reason to contend against those giants, the passion and the pride of man. (iu 110–11) th e life of the liberally educated individual, then, is continually challenged further, for “liberal education makes not the christian, not the catholic, but the gentleman” (iu 110). newman has roundly advocated the liberal education of the “gentleman.” nonetheless, like st. augustine, st. th omas aquinas and dante before him, he also warns of the dangers that accompany such mental excellence. just reading books and cultivating one’s garden would be fi ne, newman says, if one did not have an immortal soul. iii. abundant life th e true, fi nal end of human nature, namely, abundant and eternal life, is off ered by christ and his church. it is a life that neither destroys nor deifi es human nature, but raises it up and far exceeds it. newman writes: “ye must be born again,” is the simple, direct form of words which [the church] uses after her divine master; “your whole nature must be re-born, your passions, and your aff ections, and your aims, and your conscience, and your will, must all be bathed in a new element, and reconsecrated to your maker,—and, the last not the least, your intellect.” (ap 222, emphasis added) because faith is, for newman as for st. th omas aquinas, “the reasoning of the religious mind, or of what scripture calls a right or renewed heart” (us 203, emphasis added), it is important to newman to clarify tillman.indd 45tillman.indd 45 10/06/2007 21:23:4710/06/2007 21:23:47 46 some aspects of human nature © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 exactly what is involved in rightly disposing the mind and heart for faith. from natural conscience comes the desire for more than it itself can fully supply, that is, for authoritative guidance and a divine law, possessed in their fullness, not just in a vague, incomplete and fragmentary way. it creates in them a thirst, an impatience, for the knowledge of that unseen lord, and governor, and judge, who as yet speaks to them only secretly, who whispers in their hearts, who tells them something, but not nearly so much as they wish and as they need. (os 66) a right state of heart, readied by the heart’s longing, hope and love, is necessary not only as a predisposition for faith, but also for maintaining, preserving and keeping that gift. for “what is to be their protection against the aberrations of the intellect, but the deep convictions and eager aspirations of the heart?” (os 74–75). in this sense, “we believe, because we love” (us 236), and we come to understand because we believe. th e safeguard of faith is a right state of heart. th is it is that gives it birth; it also disciplines it. th is is what protects it from bigotry, credulity, and fanaticism. it is holiness, or dutifulness, or the new creation, or the spiritual mind, however we word it, which is the quickening and illuminating principle of true faith, giving it eyes, hands and feet. it is love which forms it out of the rude chaos into an image of christ; or, in scholastic language, justifying faith, whether in pagan, jew, or christian, is fi des formata charitate. (us 234) supernatural faith and love build upon natural religion, whether one is university-educated or not. while liberal education is in no way a necessary cause of or a prerequisite for the reception of revealed religion, a believer who possesses that broad, far-reaching enlargement of mind, which includes the study of theology, can profess an intelligent faith with deeper understanding and consequence. st. paul, newman points out, was learned before and after he “learned christ,” leaving behind only his sins. “we would not be unclothed,” newman quotes paul as saying, but “clothed upon, that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life” (os 95). a man of profound self-knowledge, st. paul was conscious of possessing a nature capable of all the emotions, high tillman.indd 46tillman.indd 46 10/06/2007 21:23:4710/06/2007 21:23:47 tillman 47 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 purposes and sins that human beings could confront. human nature, the common nature of the whole race of adam, spoke in [paul], acted in him, with an energetical presence, with a sort of bodily fullness, always under the sovereign command of divine grace, but losing none of its real freedom and power because of its subordination. and the consequence is, that, having the nature of man so strong within him, he is able to enter into human nature, and to sympathize with it, with a gift peculiarly his own. (os 95–96) just as moses, st. paul’s counterpart in the old covenant, was familiar with the wisdom of the egyptians, so st. paul, fi ttingly called “the apostle of the gentiles,” revealed his close acquaintance with pagan greek writings. newman observes that paul quotes from the greek classics three times: once each to the athenians, to the corinthian converts and to his disciple titus (os 97). newman says of paul: “he was a true lover of souls. he loved poor human nature with a passionate love, and the literature of the greeks was only its expression; and he hung over it tenderly and mournfully, wishing for its regeneration and salvation” (os 98). newman celebrates the tenderness, compassion and amiability of “that glorious apostle.” yet st. paul’s strong words and epistolary admonishments to those who neglected their discipleship of christ demonstrate his real distinction from newman’s celebrated “gentleman” of merely philosophic religion. st. paul cries out about those who, having “rejected a good conscience,” have “made shipwreck of their faith” (os 73). a glance at some of “the lineaments of the ethical character, which the cultivated intellect will form, apart from religious principle” brings out st. paul’s distance and diff erence from the dignifi ed, philosophic and civilized “gentleman,” who, for newman, is mainly occupied in merely removing the obstacles that hinder the free and unembarrassed action of those about him; and he concurs with their movements rather than takes the initiative himself. his benefi ts may be considered as parallel to what are called comforts or conveniences in arrangements of a personal nature: like an easy chair or a good fi re. . . . he carefully avoids whatever may cause a jar or a jolt in the minds of those with whom he is cast. . . ; his great concern being to make every one at their ease and at home. . . . he submits to pain, tillman.indd 47tillman.indd 47 10/06/2007 21:23:4810/06/2007 21:23:48 48 some aspects of human nature © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 because it is inevitable, to bereavement, because it is irreparable, and to death, because it is his destiny. . . . if he be an unbeliever, he will be too profound and large-minded to ridicule religion or to act against it; he is too wise to be a dogmatist or fanatic in his infi delity. . . , [for] he is a friend of religious toleration. (iu 159) because of these cultivated attributes, st. paul though learned was no “gentleman” in newman’s full and secular sense of the term. paul had little time for the “comforts or conveniences” of a sedentary, leisurely life as he traveled the rough ground of the mediterranean preaching christ. in paul there was no “avoidance of whatever may cause a jar or a jolt,” for he was not concerned “to make every one at their ease and at home,” this world being no lasting abode. newman’s christian “gentleman” is obviously meant to be an ideal type to which no single individual likely conforms completely. th e notion is perhaps best realized amidst the rich variety of doctors of the church—among those who were educated institutionally, those self taught, those graced by god with philosophic vision. th ose who have become “gentlemen,” newman says, are seen within the pale of the church and without it, in holy men, and in profl igate; they form the beau-ideal of the world; they partly assist and partly distort the development of the catholic. . . . basil and julian were fellow-students at the schools of athens; and one became the saint and doctor of the church, the other her scoffi ng and relentless foe. (iu 181) in the lives and writings of the celebrated christians who are learned saints and doctors, especially st. athanasius and st. augustine for newman, living examples embody “how sacred learning and profane are dependent on each other, correlative and mutually complementary, how faith operates by means of reason, and reason is directed and corrected by faith” (iu 223). such lofty notions as the full fl ourishing of human nature in the “gentleman,” and the abundant life of grace co-existing with intellectual excellence in a doctor of the church, might leave one wondering about the fate of the ordinary, even the uneducated, masses of people who dominate by sheer numbers the populations of every place tillman.indd 48tillman.indd 48 10/06/2007 21:23:4810/06/2007 21:23:48 tillman 49 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 and time. th ese people have a special and always acknowledged place in newman’s heart and writings, perhaps because of his closeness to his mother and sisters, perhaps because of his pastoral experience as a priest, perhaps because of his studies of the role of the laity, especially in the early centuries of the church. in the fi rst place, he writes: conscience is “adapted for the use of all classes and conditions of men, for high and low, young and old, men and women, independently of books, of educated reasoning, of physical knowledge or of philosophy” (ga 305). furthermore, if conscience is assiduously and devoutly attended to, if the heart is on the lookout for a revelation, one may be assured that the best argument, better than all the books in the world, better than all that astronomy, and geology, and physiology, and all other sciences can supply,—an argument intelligible to those who cannot read as well as to those who can,—an argument which is “within us,”—an argument intellectually conclusive, and practically persuasive, whether for proving the being of a god, or for laying the ground for christianity,—is that which arises out of a careful attention to the teachings of our heart, and a comparison between the claims of conscience and the announcements of the gospel. (os 74) th e reasoning of the religious mind, then, is the deep and earnest thought of a rightly disposed individual; it is the grounds for his or her faith. such grounds, or reasons for faith, can be most personal, simple and implicit, for given one’s pre-disposition to believe, those grounds are suffi cient even for certitude. christianity is addressed, both as regards its evidences and its contents, to minds which are in the normal condition of human nature, as believing in god and in a future judgment. such minds it addresses both through the intellect and through the imagination; creating a certitude of its truth by arguments too various for direct enumeration, too personal and deep for words, too powerful and concurrent for refutation. (ga 379) newman goes out of his way to allow always for the miracle of grace imparted directly from above: th e act of mind, for instance, by which an unlearned person savingly tillman.indd 49tillman.indd 49 10/06/2007 21:23:4810/06/2007 21:23:48 50 some aspects of human nature © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 believes. . . may be analogous to the exercise of sagacity in a great statesman or general, supernatural grace doing for the uncultivated reason what genius does for them. (us 218) in sum, unlettered or educated, factory worker or doctor of the church, “we attain to heaven by using this world well, though it is to pass away; we perfect our nature, not by undoing it, but by adding to it what is more than nature, and directing it towards aims higher than its own” (iu 93). with regard to the three views of human nature related analogously in this essay—that of human being qua human, that of fully fl ourishing human being, and that of the graced person of faith—the catholic church can do no less and no more than take human nature exactly “as it is,” and “as it is found,” in her learned saints, in her faithful people and, indeed, in all people, for “she does not teach that human nature is irreclaimable, else wherefore should she be sent? not, that it is to be shattered and reversed, but to be extricated, purifi ed, and restored; not that it is a mere mass of hopeless evil, but that it has the promise upon it of great things, and even now, in its present state of disorder and excess, has a virtue and a praise proper to itself ” (ap 221–22). his vocation as apologist, philosophical theologian, and teacher for this church requires that newman know this human nature as it is, in its length, breadth and depth, viewed under many aspects, but ultimately as one living focal reality. endnotes 1. abbreviations of the titles of newman’s works are identifi ed in square brackets in the works cited. newman’s main writings may be found in full at http:// www.newmanreader.org. 2. newman describes his experience of conversion at age 15: “. . . making me rest in the thought of two and two only absolute and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my creator. . .” (ap 18). 3. verses on various occasions, no. lxxiv, written at messina, april 21, 1833. see vvo 129. 4. newman employs aristotle’s categories to distinguish the essence and the integrity of a thing in order to diff erentiate the idea of a university in itself (its tillman.indd 50tillman.indd 50 10/06/2007 21:23:4810/06/2007 21:23:48 tillman 51 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 essence) from its entire well-being (its integrity), which is added by colleges, libraries, laboratories, museums and so forth, and, especially, by the church. newman illustrates the distinction by means of an analogy. a human being’s essence is its human form and matter, soul and body. th e air the human being breathes is not part of its essence, but is, newman says, “a sine qua non” for the individual’s well-being or integrity as a living human being. so too, analogically, the church breathes integrity or full life into the university as such, making it a catholic university. for newman’s use of these terms, and for his acknowledged indebtedness to aristotle for them, see the fi rst paragraph of the preface of iu, and also dcd 49. 5. assumed here, as in newman’s educational writings as a whole, are the ordinary, early ways of developing human nature in children, namely, through the family and by schooling. for the early education of young boys, newman emphasizes, above all, “a discipline in accuracy of mind” (iu 273). see also iu 10–13. 6. th is statement may seem to be a rejection of aristotle’s classic defi nition, that “man is a rational animal”; to the contrary, however. it embraces aristotle’s meaning and points to a broadened and more inclusive sense of rationality than that of newman’s own day. newman’s understanding of human nature is much closer to that of aristotle, because of the latter’s rich meaning of the fullness of rationality, than it is to the impoverished and truncated rationality of much of modern thought. for example, descartes defi nes the self as a doubting or thinking thing, for in his hypothetical experiment, he has left behind all moral and religious holdings as if they did not pertain, essentially, to human self-identity. 7. cf. iu 13: “an intellectual man, as the world now conceives of him, is one who is full of ‘views’ on all subjects of philosophy, on all matters of the day. it is almost thought a disgrace not to have a view at a moment’s notice on any question . . .” 8. newman’s many arguments for the necessary inclusion of theology in any university curriculum are found in the fi rst three discourses of the idea. 9. th is discussion is found in the chapters of rise and progress of universities (rpu). not well known is the fact that newman considered his writings on university education to be a “three-volume work.” besides the discourses of the idea, there is the volume of various university subjects presented in essays and lectures which newman eventually published as the second half of the idea, where it is found today. th irdly there is the important volume he ultimately entitled rise and progress of universities, a collection of lead articles fi rst published by newman in the catholic university gazette. see “introduction” to rise and progress by m. katherine tillman. tillman.indd 51tillman.indd 51 10/06/2007 21:23:4810/06/2007 21:23:48 52 some aspects of human nature © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 references newman, john henry 1904 sermons preached on various occasions [os]. new york: longmans, green, and co. 1967 apologia pro vita sua [ap]. ed. and intro. martin j. svaglic. oxford: clarendon press. 1976 th e idea of a university [iu]. ed. and intro. i. t. ker. oxford: clarendon press. 1985 essay in aid of a grammar of assent [ga]. ed. and intro. i. t. ker. oxford: clarendon press. 1989 essay on the development of christian doctrine [dcd]. foreword by ian ker. notre dame, in: university of notre dame press. 1990 th e via media of the anglican church [vm]. ed. and intro. halbert weidner. oxford: clarendon press. 1997 fifteen sermons preached before the university of oxford [us]. intro. m. katherine tillman. notre dame, in: university of notre dame press. 2001 rise and progress of universities and benedictine essays [rpu]. ed. and intro. m. katherine tillman. herefordshire, uk and notre dame, in: gracewing and university of notre dame press. 2004 discussions and arguments on various subjects [da]. ed. and notes by gerard tracey and james tolhurst. herefordshire and notre dame, in: gracewing and university of notre dame press. n.d. verses on various occasions [vvo]. london: burns, oates, & co. tillman, m. katherine 2006 “realizing” the classical authors: newman’s epic journey in the mediterranean. newman studies journal 3: 49–59. tillman.indd 52tillman.indd 52 10/06/2007 21:23:4910/06/2007 21:23:49 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expositions 2.2 (2008) 223–230] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v2i2.223 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 writing bible: robert alter’s david story elsie stern reconstructionist rabbinical college for more than twenty years, robert alter has been making a case for the validity and value of reading the bible as literature. his countless insightful readings have demonstrated the ways in which attention to literary features can enhance our understanding of biblical texts and increase the delight we take in reading them. now, more than two decades after the publication of the groundbreaking art of biblical narrative (1983), the “literary approach” to the bible has become an integral part of scholarly and lay encounters with the biblical texts. in the david story, alter boldly extends his argument regarding the literary nature of the bible. up until the publication of this volume, alter had made his case through the genre of literary criticism. in the david story, he turns to the art of literary composition. he goes beyond arguing that the bible can be read as literature to create a biblical text that is, first and foremost, literature. as its title suggests, it is not just a translation of a canonical sequence of texts. it is a coherent, character driven narrative—the david story. for a scholar like myself, who explores the forms in which jews, especially in antiquity, have encountered and accessed biblical texts, this description of alter’s project is not an accusation, but rather a compliment. in creating the david story, alter participates in a two millennia-long tradition of texts that reproduce the words of the hebrew bible or represent them with a high degree of fidelity, but are nonetheless different from the canonical versions of the hebrew text. these are bibles that are not the hebrew bible, and biblical texts that are not subsets of it. translations are the most obvious examples. the septuagint, the vulgate, the king james version, and their many descendants are all products of the creative and interpretive process of translation. none of these translations is identical to the text from which it is translated. however, all of them are certainly bibles. the phenomenon can also occur without translation; within the jewish tradition, there are many cases where the hebrew words of the biblical text are reproduced verbatim, but the resulting text is still different from that of the canonical hebrew bible. the texts of the lectionary serve as prime examples. the division of the pentateuch into weekly portions and the pairing of each pentateuchal portion with a 224 writing bible © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 reading from the prophets create texts that, though identical in their wording to the canonical biblical texts, often communicate different meanings from the texts in their canonical contexts. one of the best examples of this is the designation of gen. 12:1 as the beginning of a weekly torah portion. this lectionary decision severs the connection between god’s command to abraham to travel to “the land that i will show you” (a.k.a. canaan) in gen 12:1 from the journey of abraham’s family from ur to canaan that began in 11:31. by beginning the torah portion in 12:1 the creators of the lectionary cycle encourage readers to see abraham’s trip as one that originates with the divine command rather than as a continuation of the familial journey. this view of abraham conforms more closely to the rabbinic understanding of the character as the epitome of divine obedience than to the more complex and ambiguous characterization that arises from a reading of the biblical text in its canonical order. translations and lectionary portions are just two examples among many of the creation of new biblical texts. one could also cite the selection and use of verbatim biblical texts as liturgical texts or magic amulets. in the david story, alter uses time-honored processes to add a new and strikingly modern variation to this collection of new biblical texts. what, then, is the david story? how is it different from the hebrew texts of 1 samuel 1 to 1 kings 2 in their canonical context? in his first words to the reader, alter states: the major sequence that runs, according to the conventional book and chapter divisions of later editorial traditions, from i samuel to i kings is one of the most astounding pieces of narrative that has come down to us from the ancient world. the story of david is probably the greatest single narrative representation in antiquity of a human life evolving by slow stages through time, shaped and altered by the pressures of political life, public institutions, family, and the impulses of body and spirit, the eventual sad decay of the flesh. it also provides the most unflinching insight into the cruel processes of history and into human behavior warped by the pursuit of power. and nowhere is the bible’s astringent narrative economy, its ability to define characters and etch revelatory dialogue in a few telling strokes, more brilliantly deployed. (alter 1999, ix) in this opening salvo, alter articulates defining characteristics of the david story. it is literature; it is character-focused and driven, and it is “a story.” the rest of the introduction elaborates on these claims. to assert the literariness of the work, alter identifies the “author” as “someone who manifestly delights in the writerly pleasures of his craft…. he has an ear for dialogue [and] a keen sense of the thematic sense of analogue between one episode and another” stern 225 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 (alter 1999, xxii). in his ability to “transcend the limitations of [his] own ideological points of departure,” he resembles “shakespeare, stendhal, balzac, tolstoy [and] proust” (alter 1999, xxii). alter affirms the narrative coherence of the text sequence that he translates by referring to it as “a narrative” (alter 1999, xvii), an “elaborately wrought literary vehicle” (alter 1999, xviii), and, most frequently, “a story.” according to alter, david’s character is the animating concern of this “story”: david “is, in sum, the first full-length portrait of a machiavellian prince in western literature” (alter 1999, xviii). having read the david story, i am largely in agreement with alter’s description of this work. when reading this book, i was carried along in a dramatic and epic story of politics, intrigue, and conflict. i was seduced by the truly amazing character of david, whose larger-than-life complexities manage to astound, seduce, and horrify without ever overstepping the limits of epic believability. the story was indeed reminiscent of shakespeare, tolstoy, and stendhal. alter’s description of the david story, however, does not as aptly describe the sequence of hebrew texts that comprises 1 samuel 1 to 1 kings 2. in his characterization of the david story, alter intertwines claims of literary artistry with those of narrative coherence. however, these two characteristics are quite distinct. it is certainly possible for a work to be literary and yet lack narrative coherence. a collection of short stories or a post-modern novel can be structured around shifting perspectives rather than around narrative coherence. even the qur’an would be another case in point. similarly, there are certainly narratively coherent stories that are not marked by literary artistry. within the field of biblical scholarship, alter’s claim of narrative coherence is far more controversial than his claim of literary artistry. while the narratives in the books of samuel are recognized by even the most orthodox source critics as being among the best examples of the bible’s literary art, there is no consensus regarding the coherence of the textual sequence. as alter acknowledges in his introduction, most biblical scholars (alter included) understand this text sequence to be made up of pre-existent traditions. however, scholars differ over the nature of the final form of the text. where alter sees a thorough reworking of these pre-existing traditions into a coherent narrative, others see a “stringing together of virtually independent sources” (alter 1999, x). indeed, the canonical sequence provides ample evidence for both sides. there are numerous moments in the text where the disjunction between units is paramount, and numerous others in which the artful weaving together of episodes dominates the text. in creating the david story, alter uses strategies of format, translation, and selection to underscore and aug226 writing bible © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 ment unifying features present in 1 samuel 1 to 1 kings 2. in so doing, he transforms the canonical sequence of texts into a work that can aptly be called the david story. before the reader even opens the book, its format alerts her to its essentially literary character. to my knowledge, the david story is the first time that a translation of a unit of biblical text that is not identical to a traditional canonical division has been given a new, non-canonical title and has been packaged and marketed as literature. unlike alter’s the five books of moses and the book of psalms, which are categorized by their publisher, w.w. norton, as “religion,” the david story is categorized as “religion/literature.” while the other two volumes conform materially to the conventions of scripture publishing—the five books of moses is a large, boxed volume; the book of psalms has an iconic lyre on the cover—the david story conforms to the printing conventions of contemporary fiction. its trim size, cover design, and paper stock make it look and feel like a novel. while the physical appearance of the book is certainly superficial, the material form of scriptural texts has always shaped audiences’ expectations. just as the monumental size and rich adornment of bibles designed for liturgical use shape expectations of authority and gravitas, the format of the david story encourages the reader to expect a work of literary fiction and to read it accordingly. the front matter reinforces these expectations. while alter’s other translations open with an “introduction,” this volume opens with a section entitled “to the reader,” a rubric which playfully invokes eighteenth century novelistic conventions rather than those of the academy or scriptural tradition. while the packaging and framing of the david story signal its literariness, the format, parameters, and translation strategies augment its narrative coherence. many biblical translations use layout to help readers to navigate the biblical text. for example, the oxford annotated bible prints the text of each biblical book continuously; chapter divisions are not marked by corresponding page breaks. at the same time, there are subtitles printed in the headers of each page that identify the topic of the unit of text printed on the page. these topic headings are supplemented by headings in the notes that identify discrete episodes or topics within the text. the continuous layout suggests that the chapter headings are not useful guides to text divisions, while the subtitles in the header and notes suggest that the text is, in terms of meaning, a composite made up of smaller discrete episodes or topics. in contrast, the david story is formatted according to the conventions of contemporary fiction. by laying out the text according to the traditional chapter breaks, which are often formal markers rather than indicators of content stern 227 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 breaks within the text, and by refraining from identifying sub-sections within the text, alter downplays the literary disjunctions within the text. while the notes identify the literary sign-posts that strongly mark the beginnings and ends of discrete episodes, the layout of the text downplays these divisions. alter’s signature translation strategies also lend a high degree of lexical coherence and a strong forward movement to the text itself. alter’s decision to translate repeated hebrew words by a single english equivalent wherever possible creates a sense of lexical unity and coherence that these repetitions do not necessarily effect in the hebrew. readers of the hebrew text of the bible are accustomed to its relatively small vocabulary and do not necessarily experience the repetition of words as signs of literary coherence. readers of english literature, however, are accustomed to greater lexical variety. for these readers, the reproduction of the bible’s small vocabulary creates an unusual sense of lexical coherence that encourages an impression of narrative and compositional coherence as well. alter’s decision to translate the particle vav as “and” wherever possible is one of his most powerful strategies for augmenting the text’s sense of narrative coherence. as any reader of the hebrew bible knows, vav is ubiquitous in hebrew narrative. however, most readers and translators ascribe to it a variety of lexical and semantic functions. sometimes it functions as “and,” sometimes it functions as “but,” and sometimes it is best understood as functioning as punctuation that establishes a relationship between clauses or sentence elements. by translating most vav’s as “and,” alter creates a strong narrative engine that pulls the reader along the sequence of “and’s” from one clause or action to the next. these editorial and translational strategies underscore the elements of coherence and downplay the elements of disjunction experienced by a reader of the hebrew text. alter’s choice of parameters is one of the strongest strategies for creating a coherent david story. as alter notes in his preface, scholars have hypothesized numerous sub-divisions of 1 samuel 1 to 1 kings 2. at the same time, this material is situated canonically in a russian-doll structure of narratives. the parameters of each of these concentric units of text define the themes and narrative center of gravity of the resulting unit. in their entirety, the books of samuel and kings narrate a fictional history of the monarchies of israel and judah. the entire canonical unit of the former prophets, which begins in joshua and stretches through 2 kings, narrates the fictional history of israel from its entrance into the land of canaan. the concatenation of this narrative sequence with the torah situates it in a history extending back to creation itself. each of these canonical units—1 samuel to 2 kings; joshua to 2 kings; genesis to 2 kings—circumscribes a different “story” with a unique narrative 228 writing bible © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 arc and its own set of themes, concerns, and intertextual echoes. alter begins the david story in 1 samuel 1, fifteen chapters before the appearance of david himself. alter provides insight into the decision by noting that “[t]he story of david…cannot be separated from the story of the man he displaces, saul” (alter 1999, xix). while one can argue that this is true, one could make the same claim regarding the relationship between the stories of david and solomon. solomon’s building of the temple marks the complete fulfillment of the dynastic oracle in 2 samuel 7, and the secession of the northern kingdom after solomon’s death is the logical climax of the tenuous attachment of the northern tribes to the davidic dynasty narrated in the books of samuel. despite the strong narrative and thematic continuities that run through 1 samuel 15 to 1 kings 11, alter begins his story in 1 samuel 1 and ends it in 1 kings 2 with solomon’s first consolidation of power and authority. why begin and end here? how do these decisions contribute to the construction of the david story? what are their consequences? by including the story of saul in the david story, alter re-codifies the canonical position that understands saul’s reign as the necessary unsuccessful prequel to david’s. as alter himself notes, this view is transparently partisan. it is more than likely that a resident of the non-davidic kingdom of israel that flourished for more than a century before being conquered by the assyrians would have had a different view of the matter. for this northerner, the sequence of episodes that comprise saul’s rise and fall might have been the story which ended with the davidic usurpation of the throne from saul’s heirs. alter, however, reproduces the political position of the davidic redactors and uses the saul story to buttress the validity of david’s kingship, despite his weaknesses and failings. at the same time, the choice to begin with 1 samuel 1 helps make the david story conform to the genre of epic stories about the rise and fall of powerful men. a mainstay of many of these stories is the agonistic and oedipal relationship between fathers and sons, predecessors and successors. the choice to begin with 1 samuel 1 insures that the david story will deliver the familiar readerly pleasures that such relationships provide. while saul’s story functions as a prequel, solomon’s story is merely an afterword. by ending in 1 kings 2 with solomon’s consolidation of power, alter creates a biblical bildungsroman in which the central concern is the life of its protagonist rather than the larger national history of which david’s reign is a part. as i said above, i found alter’s project to be largely successful. through the strategies discussed above, he creates a david story that offers up many of the pleasures that its title suggest. at the same time, though, elements of stern 229 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 the text complicate and resist alter’s character-driven narrative shaping. as he notes, many of the individual episodes in the text are incredibly artful literary gems. many of these stories (e.g., david and goliath, david and bathsheba) have had long lives as independent stories in folk, literary, and artistic traditions, and are often marked off as discrete stories in the narrative sequence itself. the density and coherence of these episodes encourage the reader to stop and savor them. literary codas like that which concludes david’s anointing in 1 samuel 16 (“and the spirit of the lord gripped david from that day onward. and samuel rose and went to ramah”) are the opposite of cliffhangers. they signal closure to the reader rather than urging her onward. the “doublets” in the story (e.g., the different versions of david’s introduction into the court, the two stories of the defeat of goliath) also challenge the impression of coherence and narrative teleology. alter encourages the reader to approach these episodes as complementary to one another; the different stories of david’s introduction provide double validation for his accession to the throne. however, they can also be read contrastively: one can ask how these doublets critique, revise, or problematize one another. such a reading might enhance the portrait of david, but would disrupt the narrative coherence of the text. finally and paradoxically, alter’s insightful and conscientious commentary introduces a dynamic of atomization into the experience of reading the text. the detailed notes that alert the reader to differences in ancient versions, intertextual allusions, insights from other scholars, and alter’s own observations about the text lead the reader into the sort of atomizing encounter with the text that is the hallmark of midrashic and scholarly reading and lead her away from the coherent novelistic encounter that alter seems to want to foster. this co-existence of unifying and disjunctive literary features is one of the signature features of the hebrew bible in its canonical form. the debate that alter invokes over the literary coherence of the books of samuel plays itself out in nearly every book of the canon. in this volume, alter underscores and augments the elements of coherence and creates a text that he can aptly describe as a “full-length portrait of a machiavellian prince” (alter 1999, xviii). this project made me wonder what would happen if a translator/editor as talented as alter set his mind to carving out a different work of literature, one that foregrounded and augmented the disjunctive, perspectival, and episodic elements, from this same unit of text. such a cubist portrait would be equally literary but dramatically different from the full-length portrait that alter has created. 230 writing bible © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 references alter, robert 1983 the art of biblical narrative. new york: basic books. 1999 the david story: a translation with commentary of 1 and 2 samuel. new york: w.w. norton. missed encounter, missed opportunity [expositions 4.1&2 (2010) 123-127] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 missed encounter, missed opportunity adam kotsko kalamazoo college as the author of a book entitled žižek and theology, i have a special stake in this book. 1 it is somewhat ironic, then, that i found it so difficult to get through. i‘m glad i did, because i found žižek‘s final response very valuable, particularly its concluding section – yet overall i found the monstrosity of christ to be a significant disappointment. i‘ll begin by discussing why i found the first two pieces by žižek and milbank, respectively, to be a chore. i will then spend proportionately more time on žižek‘s response, indicating why i found it so compelling. finally, i will conclude with some remarks about the format of the volume as a whole. 1. žižek‘s opening piece, ―the fear of four words,‖ which he characterizes as ―a modest plea for the hegelian reading of christianity,‖ held few surprises for me. in it, he puts forward the same basic reading of christianity that i point out in my book: a reading in which god the father empties himself irreversibly into the son, whose death on the cross opens up the way for a new social bond called the holy spirit. so far, i was of course relieved that žižek had not radically repudiated his position. yet the political aspects of this theology, which i found most interesting, are muted – most notably in his lack of engagement with judaism, which was one of the truly creative aspects of his reading of paul in particular 2 – and he focuses instead on questions of the doctrine of god, proceeding by way of various discussions of the christian tradition (the doctrine of the trinity, the theology of meister eckhart). while his general point that orthodoxy has tended to attempt to ―contain‖ the radical consequences of the incarnation is well taken, i found his readings of the tradition to be unsatisfying and overlong. even less satisfying was milbank‘s ―response‖ – which is in reality more like a summary of milbank‘s own position, developed in an often very loose dialogue with the broad outlines of what he claims to be žižek‘s position. most telling in this regard is the almost total absence of direct quotations of žižek‘s own words. though footnotes are abundant, the ones that purportedly support his reading of žižek often refer to huge chunks of žižek, lacan, or hegel in one broad sweep, imparting a vague flavor to his arguments that is matched in the main text by his breezy name-dropping (žižek is here quite schellingian, there almost kierkegaardian, etc. – nowhere is it clarified what these various points of proximity concretely mean). quite often, milbank completely misconstrues žižek‘s position, assimilating it to a bizarre reading of the sexual deadlocks of psychoanalysis that serves as little more than a set-up to prove that radical orthodox views on sexuality are somehow superior. one aspect of the radical orthodoxy literature that initially attracted me was their engagement with the latest in missed encounter, missed opportunity 124 continental philosophy, but eventually it became clear that, as is the case here, the philosopher is little more than a ―nihilist‖ punching bag to be dismissed in favor of augustine or aquinas – or in this case, in favor of idiosyncratic readings of kierkegaard and eckhart, opportunistically chosen because žižek refers to them. one‘s reward for getting through this essentially useless misrepresentation of žižek‘s views is a belabored, seemingly endless discussion of the ontological implications of driving on a misty day. if for žižek the universe is inherently incomplete, apparently for milbank reality is intrinsically vague. neither of these pieces is satisfying as an ―opening salvo.‖ each is a virtual book in itself, and both get bogged down in secondary matters (most notably the proper reading of eckhart), such that their main point is obscured. i came away from the two pieces exhausted and frustrated, with no sense of the contours of the supposed ―debate‖ between the two. so when i came to žižek‘s final response, i was prepared for the worst—but i was pleasantly surprised, to the point that the final response essentially redeemed the volume for me. 2. in light of milbank‘s misrepresentation, žižek‘s response is arguably the only authentic response in this volume. as readers of his previous responses to critics might expect, he comes out swinging. quoting milbank repeatedly and at length, he claims that milbank consistently misrepresents žižek‘s own position and harshly critiques milbank, at one point going so far as to claim that milbank has ―a soft-fascist vision‖ (250). to my mind, this aspect of the response is sufficient justification for publishing the volume, as it shatters the illusion, held by many of those sympathetic with radical orthodoxy, that žižek is a natural ally to orthodox theology. more important, though, is that this response is the only thing of žižek‘s i‘ve read since finishing žižek and theology that feels genuinely new. i am thinking particularly of the conclusion, where he attempts to answer the question of what his ethical approach would look like in practice (297–303). he does this through a discussion of agota kristof‘s novel the notebook, which for him is ―the best literary expression‖ of an ethical stance that goes beyond the sentimentality of moralism and instead installs ―a cold, cruel distance toward what one is doing‖ (301). the novel follows two twin brothers who are ―utterly immoral – they lie, blackmail, kill – yet they stand for authentic ethical naivety at its purest.‖ žižek gives two examples. in one, they meet a starving man who asks for help and get him everything he asks for, while claiming that they helped him solely because he needed help, not out of any desire to be kind. in another, they urinate on a german officer with whom they find themselves sharing a bed, at his request. žižek remarks, ―if ever there was a christian ethical stance, this is it: no matter how weird their neighbor‘s demands, the twins naively try to meet them.‖ yet žižek then takes things in a direction that some will likely be uncomfortable with: not only do the boys naively try to help others, they also punish people who maliciously refuse others help. in one example from the novel, a woman not only refuses to give bread to a starving crowd of jews but actually eats the bread in front of them, leading the twins to put ammunition 125 kotsko in her oven; in another, they blackmail a priest who has sexually molested a little girl, so that they can give the money to the girl‘s family. žižek also provides his own hypothetical example: along these lines, it is easy for me to imagine a situation in which i would be ready, without any moral qualms, to murder someone in cold blood, even if i knew that this person had not killed anyone directly. in reading reports about torture in latin american military regimes, i found particularly repulsive the (regular) figure of a doctor who helped the actual torturers conduct their business in the most efficient way: he examined the victim and monitored the process, letting the torturers know how much the victim would be able to endure, what kind of torture would inflict the most unbearable pain, etc. i must admit that if i were to encounter such a person, knowing that there was little chance of bringing him to legal justice, and be given the opportunity to murder him discreetly, i would simply do it, without a vestige of remorse about ―taking the law into my own hands.‖ (302) this is a bold statement, to be sure, but one that i think many would sympathize with on some level. after going through some additional examples, including an assisted suicide, žižek summarizes the ethical core that he takes away from kristof‘s novel as follows: this is where i stand – how i would love to be: an ethical monster without empathy, doing what is to be done in a weird coincidence of blind spontaneity and reflexive distance, helping others while avoiding their disgusting proximity. with more people like this, the world would be a pleasant place in which sentimentality would be replaced by a cold and cruel passion. (303) when i first read this passage, i had the strange sense of being surprised at the same time that i felt it couldn‘t be any other way. his description of these sociopathic twins really does capture the core of his weirdly amoral ethics, which has always been at the core of žižek‘s appeal for me – more than his ontology, his use of theology, or his explanations of some of the most difficult figures in the history of philosophy, i was drawn to his work by the sense that he offered a real alternative to the abstract moralism of the christianity i knew from childhood and to the cloying sentimentalism of the liberals who get such deep satisfaction from nursing their correct opinions. i claim several times in my book that most often the aspect of a philosopher‘s thought that is most helpful for theologians can be found when religion isn‘t the primarily focus, and for me, žižek is no exception. his ethics provided me with a way to talk about what i had always detected at the core of the gospel: a radical amorality, no less joyous for its rigor. missed encounter, missed opportunity 126 3. it seems to me that žižek‘s conclusion accomplishes more in seven pages than either author had done in the hundreds of pages preceding it. though i have often been critical of žižek‘s generous use of cut and paste, i hope that the passage finds its way into some future book, simply because i am skeptical that many readers will have the stamina to reach it in its present context. before concluding with an overall criticism, i should say that i am glad to see this volume appear insofar as it breaks with the general pattern where theologians are enthusiastic about discussing philosophy but philosophers never deign to talk back. furthermore, i believe that žižek and milbank are, at least in theory, two of the best figures one could choose for such an encounter, given their extremely high profile in their respective fields. yet on a variety of levels, no debate actually occurs here. for instance, one could justify the opening pieces as an initial setting of the terms, to be followed by a more extended debate, but in fact only žižek gets a chance to respond. while i realize it can be difficult to deal with two huge egos such as milbank and žižek, i wish the editor, creston davis – who has worked with the two men before and has another edited volume with them forthcoming 3 – had exercised more editorial control in shaping the volume into a genuine dialogue. as it stands, it‘s clear from his introduction that he was envisioning a much different work, as his account of the ways žižek and milbank supersede the modernist presuppositions of the ―new atheists‖ debate has no clear relation to what žižek and milbank actually write. two further responses have appeared in a special issue of political theology, also edited by davis 4 , but that resource remains inaccessible to those without privileges at an academic library (and to many of those with) – much better to have reined in the initial statements, both to leave room for further exchange and to let the stakes of the debate stand out more clearly. in an ideal world, each would have put forward a twenty-page initial statement. žižek would have argued that hegel‘s is the most authentic interpretation of christianity, revealing the radical consequences of christ‘s death on the cross that orthodoxy has consistently sought to cover over and, moreover, opening up an entirely new view of reality. milbank could have then argued that žižek‘s reading is one-sided, leaving out important aspects of experience and reality that orthodoxy includes and, moreover, leading to a nihilistic amorality. (in light of žižek‘s conclusion, it would be hard to deny the latter charge, though i would then ask what‘s so selfevidently wrong about nihilistic amorality.) from there, they could try to substantiate their view and disprove each other – debating the significance of the doctrine of the trinity, sparring over whether thinkers such as meister eckhart represent a kind of prefiguration of hegel, discussing the ontological consequences of the incarnation, and pitting paradox and dialectic against one another in a much more direct way. readers could have come away from such a volume feeling like they had a good grasp on the main points of contention between the latest advocates of orthodoxy and radical theology, between traditional theology and the gospel of christian atheism. and in a sense, readers do actually have all the materials i describe in the actual existing book, but they‘re in an almost 127 kotsko completely unusable format. žižek has often said that philosophical dialogues are ultimately just competing monologues, but in this case, the greatest sin isn‘t that žižek and milbank fail to talk to each other – more seriously, they fail to talk to any discernable audience outside those who have already very closely followed their work. i have chided the editor of the volume for not being more forceful in pushing for the kind of authentic debate he seems to have envisioned, a debate that would be able to engage an educated public and push them beyond the simplifications of the ―new atheists.‖ yet surely the bulk of the responsibility lies with the authors themselves, whose initial pieces aren‘t so much ―difficult‖ as long-winded and rambling. i‘m not asking anyone to dumb down their ideas or give us a pandering popularization of their work – i‘m simply asking for concision and clarity of organization. a genuine debate between žižek and milbank could have been illuminating. it could have set the agenda for a renewed discussion of the relationship between philosophy and theology, atheism and christianity. what we have instead is still a genuine contribution to the literature, one that from my perspective is most valuable insofar as it pushes žižek‘s position forward while simultaneously distancing him from milbank. yet it‘s difficult not to regard the monstrosity of christ as a missed opportunity. notes 1. see: adam kotsko, žižek and theology (new york: t&t clark, 2008). i have already addressed this book in a review in political theology 11.1 (2010): 141–144, and in an article entitled ―the ‗christian experience‘ continues: on žižek‘s work since the parallax view,‖ forthcoming in a special issue of the international journal of žižek studies on žižek‘s engagement with theology. material from both is included here, in altered form. 2. see: adam kotsko, ―politics and perversion: situating žižek‘s paul,‖ journal for cultural and religious theory 9.2 (2008): 43–52, http://www.jcrt.org/archives/09.2/kotsko.pdf, for a detailed discussion of žižek‘s reading of paul. 3. creston davis, john milbank, and slavoj žižek, eds., theology and the political: the new debate (durham: duke, 2005); john milbank, slavoj žižek, and creston davis, paul’s new moment: continental philosophy and the future of christian theology (grand rapids: brazos, forthcoming). 4. creston davis, ed., political theology 11.1 (2010): 121–140. © equinox publishing ltd. 2008, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expositions 2.2 (2008) 131–132] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v2i2.131 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 editors’ introduction john a. doody, kim paffenroth, and peter busch welcome to the second open issue of expositions. this fall we feature articles and interdisciplinary exchanges on a variety of enduring and controversial topics, ranging from rhetoric to tragedy, from the translation of sacred texts to the use of drugs in education. our “overheard in the academy” tackles the issue of cognitive enhancement. it is easy for academics like us to condemn athletes for using performance-enhancing drugs: how terrible to exploit one’s body for the sake of defeating competitors in the arena! does it change anything, however, if the drug enhances the performance of the mind? what if a pill can make us smart enough to finish our ph. d., get tenure, or write the definitive book on plato? the first of our full-length articles, by bryan-paul frost, breaks new ground in the interpretation of aristotle by reading his rhetoric not merely as a philosophic treatise whose subject matter happens to be rhetoric, but as a rhetorical document written for practical purposes. how does aristotle want to move his readers, and why? our second article, by lydia moland, is an ambitious interpretation of the human stain that sees it as more than just another book on race in america; instead, moland places roth’s novel in the wider tradition and shows how its insights into race help readers better understand the nature of tragedy. we conclude with a second interdisciplinary exchange, this one consisting of several reviews of robert alter’s landmark translations of the hebrew bible. it is especially valuable to review these texts from multiple perspectives: as alter’s project is at once theological, literary, and historical, so are our commentators. our next issue the interdisciplinary cauldron is already bubbling, and we are toiling and troubling over the spring 2009 issue of expositions. devoted to the theme of enchantment, issue 3.1 will feature several new “notes, insights, and flashes.” don’t miss it. 01prusak academy.indd © equinox publishing ltd. 2008, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expositions 2.1 (2008) 005–006] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v2i1.005 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 overheard in the academy stanley fish on the humanities bernard g. prusak villanova university “how does one justify funding the arts and humanities?” this is the question put by stanley fish toward the beginning of a characteristically provocative column of his published in january 2008 on the new york times’ online “op extra” page. from this bread and butter question, fish quickly derives the much more speculative question that serves as the column’s title, namely, “will the humanities save us?” his answer is no. for the study of the humanities does not make us “good and wise.” moreover, it is not “the business of the humanities” to save us anyway. in his words, “the humanities are their own good. there is nothing more to say, and anything that is said…diminishes the object of its supposed praise.” (see http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/will-the-humanities-save-us/.) this line of argument is not new from fish, and it will no doubt reach many more readers once fish’s new book on higher education, save the world on your own time, due in 2008, is published and widely reviewed. despite fish’s claim, there does, however, seem to be “more to say” on the value and justification of the humanities; and so expositions has asked several teachers and scholars of the humanities to reply to fish’s argument. fish makes his case through criticism of anthony kronman’s book education’s end: why our colleges and universities have given up on the meaning of life (yale university press, 2007). kronman advocates, in fish’s summary, “[e]ntering into a conversation with the great authors of the western tradition”—western or eastern is irrelevant for what interests fish—in order “to recover the urgency of ‘the question of what living is for’ ” and to escape from “ ‘the corrupting powers of time.’ ” to which fish says: “it is a stirring vision that promises the highest reward to those who respond to it,” but “there is no evidence http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/expo.v2i1.005 http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/will-the-humanities-save-us/ 6 overheard in the academy © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 to support it and a lot of evidence against it.” fish’s evidence against it consists of “the members of literature and philosophy departments” whom he has come to know over his forty-five years in academia. in his experience, “teachers and students of literature and philosophy don’t learn how to be good and wise; they learn how to analyze literary effects and to distinguish between different accounts of the foundations of knowledge.” they have “disciplinary knowledge,” not the virtues, or for that matter competence in what fish calls “ministry.” the conclusion that fish draws is that “[i]t is not the business of the humanities to save us”—for they can’t, or in any event in his experience haven’t—“no more than it is their business to bring revenue to a state or a university,” recalling the question with which his column began, “how does one justify funding the arts and humanities?” according to fish, the humanities “don’t bring about effects in the world,” other than “the pleasure they give to those who enjoy them.” can they then be justified? (should they then be funded?) fish is confusing on this critical point. on the one hand, he claims that “[t]he humanities are their own good,” suggesting that they can be justified internally, in terms of the good of pleasure that people devoted to them discover within them. but, on the other hand, fish also claims that “the only honest answer” to the question, “[o]f what use are the humanities?” is “none whatsoever.” he goes on: “and it is an answer that brings honor to its subject. justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. an activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good.” to which it might be countered: surely justification is not only for “outsiders”! surely there is room, as well as reason, to reflect from within a practice on its value! further, let it be granted that the humanities are not instrumental “to some larger good”; but can they not be justified in terms of intrinsic goods other and perhaps larger than pleasure? just to begin with, can they not teach sensitivity to and appreciation of nuances, complexity, and ambiguity? or perhaps what needs attention is that pleasure is always the pleasure of this or that activity, and that the activity of engaging in the humanities yields pleasures of diverse kinds that human life would be diminished without. one way or the other, it seems clear, to reiterate, that there is “more to say” here. “serf, slave, or savior [expositions 4.1&2 (2010) 28-33] expositions issn: 1747-5376 serf or savior? the struggle for equity on behalf of adjunct faculty jeanne brody program in art history villanova university the status of university faculty variously designated as adjuncts, part-timers, lecturers, or instructors is unquestionably connected to the notion of collegiality on today‟s campus. their position in academia, their involvement (or lack thereof) within the university community, and the benefits and disadvantages that result from their employment all speak to broader issues relating to the future of our higher educational system. no matter what term a particular college or university applies, everyone knows adjuncts as faculty who are hired to teach on a semester to-semester basis with no guarantee of future employment. part-time faculty are today as much a part of american academia as tenured professors. the numbers of adjuncts have increased from about 32 percent of all faculty in 1980 1 to more than 50 percent today. 2 adjuncts are essential for a university to meet its needs and the needs of its students. practically every institution of higher education, from the ivy league to the local community college, employs part-time or temporary faculty. adjuncts enhance colleges‟ flexibility to schedule the appropriate number of courses during times of higher or lower enrollment, and they bring specialized and “real life” skills that full-time faculty may not have to business, law, and other professional classes. the fundamental motivation for hiring adjuncts, however, is the one that causes the most contention and eclipses all other reasons given for their presence on campus: using part-time faculty saves universities a lot of money. the economic benefit of employing part-time teachers is clear. their earnings have always been a fraction of full-time faculty salaries, and adjuncts rarely receive medical and pension benefits. 3 universities can also make ends meet by canceling adjuncts‟ classes if they don‟t fill and by replacing tenured positions with several part-time instructors. the nature of adjunct employment creates workplace stress: the adjunct professor has a job, but it may be withdrawn or not renewed at any time. often, part-timers are not hired until right before the semester begins, forcing them to scramble to put together a syllabus and order textbooks (or to use pre-selected textbooks they may not like). in addition, adjuncts sometimes lack a suitable place to hold office hours for their students. because many teach in the evening, their access to office staff, copy machines, and mailboxes may be limited. adjuncts are further marginalized from academic life when they must teach at several different schools each semester in order to earn at least a minimal living wage. these “road scholars” or “freeway flyers” often drive hundreds of miles each week between schools, spending very little time at each school, and thus may be unable to devote much time and 29 brody attention to students or campus events. their inferior working conditions may also lead to frustration and low morale, a negative in any workplace. yet further, they may feel pressured to give students better grades to ensure that students give them positive ratings on class evaluations and recommend their classes to friends. but low pay and heavy course loads are not the only issues that lead to discontent among adjuncts. part-time faculty members usually do not receive subsidized health coverage through their employer. the availability of health benefits has been a virulent topic of recent political talk shows and newspaper op-ed pages. within and outside the university, healthcare has been gobbling up a greater percentage of families‟ budgets, and thus has increasingly been framed in terms of basic human rights. at some catholic universities, students and faculty are calling for health benefits for part-time employees as a matter of the universities‟ social mission. at marquette, a jesuit university, the theology department has issued a statement that part-time faculty should be fully covered by the university‟s plan, rather than be expected to contribute out of pocket as they have done in the past. professor daniel maguire, who has spearheaded this movement, notes that the presence of adjunct teachers on campus allows full-timers to pursue their research: 4 “how could i teach christian ethics and sit on my privilege as a tenured faculty member and ignore people doing the heavy lifting?” 5 whether marquette or other catholic universities will adopt paid medical plans for adjuncts remains to be seen. adjunct professors thus may find themselves at odds with full-time faculty. 6 part-timers are frustrated by the contention that they are somehow “less” than their tenured colleagues. adjuncts‟ level of education and experience is sometimes identical to that of full-time professors. 7 their perception of working for institutions and departments that do not value or care about them may lead them to feel exploited. 8 they must battle the persistent notion that adjuncts are not as dedicated as full-timers. as one administrator asserted, “the quality of a university rests with the quality of its permanent faculty […] those are the people you count on.” 9 unfortunately, a few studies do suggest that the use of adjuncts has a negative impact on the student bodies they are hired to teach. 10 there is no doubt that students‟ learning experiences may be diminished by professors who have no connection to their university and who are rarely available out of class. other researchers, however, propose that adjuncts who are fully incorporated into their programs can have a positive effect on students. 11 thus, it may not be a faculty member‟s part-time status that is detrimental to students, but the fact that the faculty member is not given an opportunity to be a full participant in his or her department. full-time faculty and higher education advocates have voiced concern about the growing number of adjuncts teaching at universities. their unease does not necessarily reflect misgivings about the quality of adjunct teaching (although these ideas persist among some faculty); rather, these professors note that more adjuncts mean fewer tenured positions. 12 each time a faculty member retires and the university replaces her or him with several part-time instructors (or a non-tenure-track full-timer) in order to avoid the costs associated with a tenured position, it weakens the system upon which the university is built. as the american association of serf or savior? 30 university professors‟ report on the status of non-tenure-track faculty states: “academic programs and a tenure system are not stable when institutions rely heavily on non-tenure-track faculty[.]” 13 the aaup also sees a higher percentage of adjuncts as an opening for universities to restrict free speech in the classroom, in that adjuncts do not have the protection of tenure and their employment may be terminated at any time. 14 with tenured professors fast becoming a minority on campus, the potential exists for universities to ignore the concerns of all faculty. some observers, including, perhaps surprisingly, several full-time faculty members, have called for an overhaul in the university hiring and promotion system. they advocate the elimination or overhaul of the holy grail of academia: the tenure system. some believe it is impossible to sustain a system that does not allow lay-offs as universities are increasingly turning to a business model of management. 15 several schools have abolished tenure; others tried, but failed. 16 but education advocates have condemned the reduction of tenure lines. the aaup, in fact, not only advocates for better pay and benefits for adjuncts, but, in its support of tenure as fundamental to the university, has proposed that universities create a new tenure category consisting of part-time faculty members whose services, after some specified number of years or courses, could make them eligible for this job protection. 17 by depending on low-paid adjuncts to balance their budgets, universities are creating a situation that serves few in the community. the realities of part-time teaching – limited time on campus and access to services, high turnover rates, and appointments at multiple schools – undermine the educational goals of all institutions of higher education. today, adjuncts are increasingly vocal about their significance on campus and are asking for better pay, working conditions, and benefit packages. they have formed faculty organizations within their universities to advocate for their financial and educational needs, and some aim to join unions. adjuncts at temple university in philadelphia, for example, held “adjunct awareness week” to gain support and encourage union membership among the university‟s 1,500 part-time faculty. additionally, several national and international organizations devoted to improving conditions for adjuncts have been founded. in addition to the aaup‟s support of adjunct parity, there are many places for faculty to turn for information and support for equitable pay and benefits. the adjunct advocate, a magazine devoted to part-time faculty issues, has now expanded to become the website “adjunctnation.com,” which provides an on-line community for adjuncts, as well as offering employment information and insight. new faculty majority: the national coalition for adjunct and contingent equity has been founded to achieve “equity and advanc[e] academic freedom for all adjunct and contingent faculty in american colleges and universities through advocacy, education and litigation.” 18 its website provides part-time faculty with links to articles, videos, blogs, and other resources. cocal, the coalition of contingent academic labor, is a north american organization intent on improving conditions for all contingent faculty (including graduate students). cocal sponsors a biennial conference with presentations on unionization, equity in the workplace, and other points of interest for those working part-time in higher education. its ninth conference, “towards a united strategy in north america,” recently took 31 brody place in quebec city, and included workshops such as “mobilizing to improve working conditions” and “recognition of adjunct faculty and the quality of education.” 19 some faculty are also turning to newer media such as blogs, twitter, and youtube to garner support for the plight of adjuncts. individuals and adjunct organizations have posted videos, often infused with humor, to plead their cases. videos, such as “a day in the life of an adjunct,” feature the long hours and commutes that are part of many adjuncts‟ teaching days. marc bousquet‟s youtube clips, the on-line counterpart to his book how the university works: higher education and the low-wage nation, include interviews with faculty and students who are struggling to survive in today‟s academic environment. so if conditions are so horrible for adjuncts at community colleges, four-year institutions, and universities, why do so many of them continue to teach? although some teach part-time as a result of failing to attain a tenured or other full-time position, others prefer teaching part-time to anything else they might do. 20 history professor edward rice-maximin saw the opportunity to teach a variety of courses at many different schools as the real benefit of part-time teaching: “i have […] engaged a broader spectrum of history than i might have had i been ensconced in a specialty. […] i have taught every course i have ever wanted to teach, plus many i am glad i learned to teach. […] i have been exempt from most committee work and academic advising and mostly immune to departmental politics, benefits many full-timers might envy me for.” 21 the question to ask in 2010 is this: should adjunct faculty, many of whom hold terminal degrees, who have a lifetime of experience after having taught semester after semester at the same institution, and who contribute to the strength of the programs in which they teach, be considered primarily as cost-savers for their university? at a time of budget cuts at both state and private schools, the monetary value of adjunct faculty is increasingly important. but wouldn‟t the quality of the education be better if professors‟ salaries were based on experience and education instead of the bottom line? as the aaup states, “hiring faculty on the basis of the lowest labor cost and without professional working conditions „represents a disinvestment in the nation‟s intellectual capital precisely at the time when innovation and insight are most needed.‟” 22 conditions for adjuncts are slowly improving, but for most there is a long way to go. in addition to equitable pay and benefits, part-timers should have the opportunity to participate in university governance. some institutions, such as villanova university, where i work, now have adjunct representatives on their faculty councils. departments should be encouraged to include part-time faculty at meetings and social functions. these measures can go a long way to support university-wide collegiality and allow adjuncts to become a more visible and vital presence in campus life. notes 1. judith m. gappa, citing the national center for education statistics in part-time faculty: higher education at a crossroads, ashe-eric higher education research report no. 3 (washington, dc: association for the study of higher education, 1984), 10. serf or savior? 32 2. “background facts on contingent faculty: trends in faculty status,” www.aaup.org/aaup/issues/ contingent/contingentfacts.htm. the percentage is higher at community colleges. 3. on average, adjuncts‟ salaries are one-quarter of that of a full-time professor. see reversing course: the troubled state of academic staffing and a path forward (washington, dc: american federation of teachers: 2008), 8–9, www.aft.org/pdfs/highered/ reversingcourse1008.pdf. 4. “i have tenure. i have good benefits, and there are people doing as much work as i am. and they don‟t have health insurance. they are covering most of our courses so we can have these leisurely 3–2 schedules.” see scott jaschik, “liberation (of adjuncts) theology,” inside higher education, april 24, 2008, www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/04/24/marquette. 5. tori dykes, “senate hopes to improve adjunct conditions,” the marquette journal online, november 12, 2009, http://marquettetribune.org/2009/11/12/news/senate-hopes-to-improveadjunct-conditions. 6. the relationship between adjuncts and tenured professors is sometimes referred to as “haves vs. have-nots.” see for example, michael fischer, “defending collegiality,” change (may/june 2009), www.changemag.org/may-june%202009/full-defending-collegiality.html. 7. twenty-seven percent of all part-time faculty hold a phd. see james monks, “who are the parttime faculty?” academe on line (july-august 2009), www.aaup.org/aaup/pubsres/academe/ 2009/ja/feat/monk.htm. 8. eric fox, “adjuncts exploited on college campuses,” the atlanta journal-constitution, september 28, 2009, http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1867342521&fmt=3&clientid=3260&rqt= 309&vname=pqd. 9. christoph m. kimmich, interim chancellor at city university of new york, quoted in karen w. arenson, “part-time faculty is an issue now at cuny,” the new york times, february 14, 1998, http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=26229726&fmt=3&clientid=3260&rqt=309&vname=pq d. 10. see, for example, florence kirk and charles a spector, “a comparison of the achievement of students taught by full-time versus adjunct faculty in business courses,” academy of educational leadership journal 13/2 (2009): 73–81, http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did= 1869956301&fmt=3&clientid=3260&rqt=309&vname =pqd. 11. see jeffrey klausman, “not just a matter of fairness: adjunct faculty and writing programs in two-year colleges,” teaching english in the two year college 37/4 (may 2010): 363–371, http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=2021442741&fmt=3&clientid=3260&rqt=309&vname=p qd, or peter schmidt, “use of part-time instructors tied to lower student success,” chronicle of higher education, november 14, 2008, http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1606075411&fmt= 3&clientid=3260&rqt=309&vname=pqd. 12. by 2007, almost 70 percent of faculty members were employed off the tenure track. see “conversion of appointments to the tenure track” (2009), www.aaup.org/aaup/comm/rep/conversion.htm. 13. see “the status of non-tenure-track faculty,” www.aaup.org/aaup/comm/rep/ nontenuretrack.htm. 14. “academic freedom is weakened when a majority of the faculty lack the protections of tenure.” see “background facts on contingent faculty,” www.aaup.org/aaup/issues/contingent/ contingentfacts.htm. mailto:scott.jaschik@insidehighered.com http://marquettetribune.org/author/victoriadykes/ 33 brody 15. mark c. taylor, chair of columbia university‟s department of religion, has been particularly vocal. see, for example, “end the university as we know it,” the new york times, april 26, 2009, www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/opinion/27taylor.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&sq=mark%20c.%20ta ylor&st=nyt&scp=2; “unsustainable and indefensible,” july 29, 2010, www.nytimes.com/ roomfordebate/2010/07/19/what-if-college-tenure-dies/why-tenure-is-unsustainable-andindefensible; and his new book, crisis on campus: a bold plan for reforming our colleges and universities (new york: knopf, 2010). 16. see brent staples, “the end of tenure?” the new york times, june 29, 1997, www.nytimes.com/ 1997/06/29/opinion/the-end-of-tenure.html?scp=19&sq=bennington%20college%20tenure&st=cse. 17. see “tenure and teaching-intensive appointments” (2010), www.aaup.org/aaup/comm/rep/ conversion.htm. 18. see www.newfacultymajority.info/national/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=76& itemid=147. 19. see http://cocalinternational.org/programme_english.pdf. 20. almost half of adjuncts who completed a recent aaup survey said they preferred teaching parttime, some because it accommodated their family life. see robin wilson, “„chronicle‟ survey yields a rare look into adjuncts‟ work lives,” the chronicle of higher education, october 18, 2009, http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1926360701&fmt=3&clientid=3260&rqt=309& vname=pqd. see also american academic: a national survey of part-time/adjunct faculty 2 (american federation of teachers: march 2010), www.aft.org/pdfs/highered/ aa_partimefaculty0310.pdf. 21. edward rice-maximin, “reflections of a part-timer” perspectives on history online 41/4 (april 2003), http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2003/0304/0304vie1.cfm. 22. aaup, quoting its 2009 report on the economic status of the profession, in “tenure and teachingintensive appointments,” n. 17 above. 03jones.indd © equinox publishing ltd. 2008, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expositions 2.1 (2008) 013–017] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v2i1.013 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 is there a donor in this class? christine a. jones department of languages and literature university of utah it is not surprising that stanley fish feels his career’s highest goal was to produce pleasure in him. after all, teaching the beauty of poetry for many years (of no useful purpose by his own argument) afforded him hours of enjoyment and was handsomely rewarded by wealthy institutes of higher education. because of his international reknown, it should also not be surprising that he does not at all find this conclusion odd or embarrassing. it sounds as though he benefited fully from the perks of an academic life, and i have no choice but to admire him for admitting that the person his work most benefited was himself. to his credit, at least he does not pretend to have aspired to more. again not surprisingly, many of the scholars who are angriest at fish are those who do a lot of work for very little money and none of the notoriety fish enjoys. they don’t agree that they do what they do for pleasure because, despite their best intentions and the memory that they chose this career, they are not having fun or becoming famous. rather, they are training america’s young people to care, to think, and to write in grammatical sentences. all they have to justify their hard work to themselves (and their credulous families and friends) is the tenuous belief that what they do matters. fish’s column cuts to the heart of our worst fears about ourselves and our career choice. in a globalizing, technological, capitalist economy, where do the humanities fit? fish say: nowhere but in your own mind. when i was finishing my dissertation at princeton, elaine showalter, then president of the mla, made similar headlines (albeit within the academy) suggesting that, since the market was so bad, phds in literature should look for other careers. having just published an article in vogue, she celebrated this brainstorm as the ideal solution to the plight of young scholars who would never land an academic job. at the summit of her academic career at princeton, she had developed a http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/expo.v2i1.013 14 is there a donor in this class? © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 relatively successful career in journalism. profit from the wisdom of my experience, she said: skip academe and go right to hollywood. graduate students all over the country threw a fit of pique and indignation similar to the one that fish has inspired among humanities scholars. i remember being angry that showalter saw fit to console young scholars who might never practice their trade by telling them simply to go do something else. we were trained, but there were no jobs. today, we have jobs, but there is no funding. to my mind, showalter and fish have several things in common that make their statements mutually illuminating. both seem to have made their names as scholars only to realize that, while they were celebrities in the academy, their careers did not feel very useful (read: important and lucrative) in the world. so, they both switched to a more public venue for their ideas: journalism. similarly, during their tenure at elite institutions training the next generation of academics, both witnessed what amounted to a crisis in their disciplines that threatened the next generation’s welfare: showalter saw universities produce too many doctorates for the number of academic positions available; fish witnessed the evaporation of funds for the softer academic disciplines, such as art and the humanities. instead of contesting these developments, they took them for granted and even turned the crisis into a virtue. it’s a curious thing for important scholars to sit back and watch as their fields implode. we would expect them, perhaps, to come to the rescue—to be saviors. but fish, in particular, is not interested in saving anything or anyone from time or the cultural/social/economic developments that threaten fields whose self-importance we make the mistake of taking for granted. does our work matter and should anyone pay us to do it? is there a donor in our class? fish’s answer (no) is audacious. i can appreciate the fear and anger in the responses to his column, as i can appreciate the reaction to showalter ten years ago. posed by fish, who finished an illustrious career and writes for the new york times, the question seems a purely mental exercise; he will not lose if humanities funding stops. in this sense, the question is just like a beautiful line of poetry he treats in his class: it’s an aesthetic matter with no implications for his world. it might have been better for the field if someone whose livelijones 15 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 hood was at stake in the response had dared to ask the question. but better the question be asked than not, as better a poem be read only for beauty than not at all. and i have to admit that i find myself agreeing with fish’s conclusion that the humanities can be asked neither to save souls, nor to generate revenue. i, for one, am very relieved to know that my mistakes result neither in damnation, nor in capital loss. but i’m also confident that we should keep teaching the humanities and that profit-generating disciplines or outside sources must fund it. so i spent some time wondering how i could explain having fish’s cake and eating it, too. my issues, i concluded, have more to do with his premises than his conclusions. the premises are: 1) that secular humanism and institutional humanities (which i’ll call “humanties”) are the same; and 2) that the humanities are an end in themselves. secular humanism verus the humanities fish opens his column with the questions, “do the humanities ennoble? and, for that matter, is it the business of the humanities, or of any other area of academic study, to save us?” he begins to answer these questions with what he calls the premise of secular humanism: “that the examples of action and thought portrayed in the enduring works of literature, philosophy, and history can create in readers the desire to emulate them.” fish ascribes this premise to us as educators (perhaps because kronman does) and then demonstrates its absurdity by noting that, if reading great ideas inspired greatness and great action, then scholars of the humanities would be saints—and they are not. while “example for emulation” may be the premise of secular humanism as an idea or within its texts, it is not at all clear that this is the premise of the “humanities”: the colleges, universities, and individual professors who teach these texts. curricula are not designed to teach students to be like the heros and intellectuals in their readings, but rather to show students (force them to confront?) the motivations and ideals of these heros and intellectuals. never mind the fact that, as it turns out, there is nary a figure in the literature of human history that exhibits the virtues of goodness and wisdom in great action; or they do, only to end up miserable or dead. the stories of heros with these virtues are sad because the truly 16 is there a donor in this class? © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 good and the truly wise do not follow the rules of society; they make history by getting into trouble. literature, philosophy and history tell the story of what we do wrong. knowledge of these textual exemplars usually points up the absurdity of human endeavor and leads, rather effortlessly, to cynicism and depression. now, cynical and depressed indeed describe the disposition of many of my colleagues, which suggests that, even when readers do imitate the heros of secular humanism, they don’t look like saints. given that secular humanism as a philosophy is not the same thing as the humanities as a course of study, and that the content of humanities texts is anything but “generous, patient, good-hearted and honest,” then we need to articulate the premises and goals of the humanities differently from the premises and goals of humanism itself. the premise of the humanities as a course of study might be articulated this way: that the examples of action and thought portrayed in the enduring works of literature, philosophy, and history can create in readers a better appreciation of humanity in all of its beauty and ugliness. luckily, there is no evidence against this premise being true for scholars and students alike. and while we cannot guarantee that any particular kind of action will follow this understanding, i think we can guarantee that if we stop seeking this understanding, real-world fields such as medical ethics and politics and law will cease to make sense. ends versus means fish also suggests that it brings honor to the profession to say that the humanities are of no use because it means that they are an end in themselves. “justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. an activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental in some way.” while i rather like the idea that the knowledge we teach in our classes refuses to regard itself as purely instrumental, i think it would be wrong to conclude that the classes themselves are an end, not a means. but again, i would distinguish between the ideas of secular humanism as ends in themselves (the humanities) and the institutional classes (the humanities) that teach about how ideas can be valued for their own sake. pleasure in beauty (or pain in shock) is an approprijones 17 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 ate goal for art, but pleasure of the high aesthetic variety that fish describes is not a cultural value in this country transmitted through our music and our media; it must, therefore, be learned in school. in this sense, humanities classes can be highly instrumental beyond their performance. especially if, like fish, we value the aesthetic pleasure of literature, we should fund the institutional research and learning that opens students to it. robert newman, dean of the college of humanities at my university, addressed fish’s column recently in a talk for our humanities center. in closing, he made this statement about what humanities scholars do: “we construct and tell the story of the human condition, in all of its beauty, horror, inspiration, and condemnation. that always has been our mission—in the past, present, and future” (newman 2008). this hypothesizing and conceptual experimentation is why i teach in the humanities. what we’re ultimately talking about funding when we ask if the humanities should be funded are the risk-taking and the lab facilities (the research and the classrooms) that make experiments with this knowledge, this particular form of pleasure and pain, possible. fish ends his column on a strangely victorious note for such a defeatist essay: “the humanities are their own good.” if we in the humanities do our job as the means to understanding ideas as ends in themelves, then maybe there will be a donor in our class. references newman, robert d. 2008 salvation, damnation, or just getting by: the future of the humanities. paper presented at the future of the humanities forum, tanner humanities center, february 25, 2008, in salt lake city, utah. © equinox publishing ltd. 2007, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expositions 1.2 (2007) 173–190] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v1i2.173 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 sincerity and seduction in don giovanni james h. johnson boston university this article considers the nature of seduction in mozart’s ‘don giovanni’ in light of recent musicological scholarship on the title character. using casanova’s memoirs as a point of reference, johnson argues that mozart and da ponte deliberately employ a tone of sincerity that keeps to the surface in conveying giovanni’s words but reveals little about his motivations and withholds ultimate judgment about his character. johnson contends that this tone of sincerity produces a powerfully seductive effect upon listeners as well and is a major factor in the polarized critical reception of the opera that continues to this day. the article combines musical, literary, and dramatic analysis and contains musical examples from ‘don giovanni’ and ‘così fan tutte.’ one point of entry to mozart’s don giovanni is to consider beethoven’s sentiment, expressed late in life, that the sacred art of music “ought never to permit itself to be degraded to the position of being a foil for so scandalous a subject.”1 beethoven’s indignation grew from his own religious view of art. he wrote to the archduke rudolf in 1823: “there can be no loftier mission than to come nearer than other men to the divinity and to disseminate the divine rays among mankind.” despite the opera’s divinely punitive ending—with don giovanni sent to hell for his crimes and the other characters pledging to keep to the straight and narrow—there is much to offend along the way. beethoven was not alone in censuring mozart for depicting the life of a libertine. john ruskin worded his condemnation in superlatives: “no such spectacle of unconscious (and in that unconsciousness all the more fearful) moral degradation of the highest faculty to the lowest purpose can be found in history.”2 the modern version of this view objects not to immorality per se, 174 sincerity and seduction in don giovanni © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 but to sexism. the philosopher daniel herwitz argues that, despite ample proofs of don giovanni’s wickedness, the effect of the opera is to praise and elevate him. this for herwitz implicates its composer. “the don makes the music more sexist because the don is also a rapist, a bastard to women, and a man who beats up other men.” suggesting that the collaboration of da ponte and mozart “betray[s] the sexism of their male fantasy,” herwitz concludes that the opera “identifies the character of the don with the music that characterizes him, which also conflates him with the composer himself ” (herwitz 2006, 133, 134). to appreciate such sentiments, you need go no further than leporello’s “catalogue” aria. here the servant proudly enumerates his master’s conquests: in italy six hundred and forty, in germany two hundred thirty-one, in france one hundred, in turkey ninety-one, “but in spain there are already one thousand and three!” don giovanni conquers country wenches, chambermaids, and city ladies; countesses, baronesses, marchionesses, and princesses; slender ones in summer, plumpish ones in winter, and older ones for the sake of the list. but “sua passion predominante è la giovin principiante,” leporello sings: “his overriding passion is for virgins.” here as elsewhere the librettist lorenzo da ponte skates on the far side of sexual innuendo to approach vulgarity. “provided she wears a skirt, you know what he’s going to do!” (mozart and da ponte 1974, i:v, 62–75).3 the way giovanni speaks of those 2,065 women is at least as startling as their number. “it’s all part of love,” he says. “if a man is faithful only to one, he is cruel to all the others. i, a man of boundless generosity, love every one of them” (mozart and da ponte 1974, ii:i, 233–35). surely the view is a knowing lie, or perhaps self-deceit. either way, it keeps him from thinking twice. but as is well known, søren kierkegaard proposed a third possibility, which in fact explains giovanni’s successes more credibly than either deceit or delusion. namely, that what he says is true: that seduction is a misnomer, that his love is selfless, and that constancy to one would deprive all others. kierkegaard takes this position in either/or: i should rather not call him a deceiver. to be a seducer requires a certain amount of reflection and consciousness, and as soon as this is johnson 175 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 present, then it is proper to speak of cunning and intrigues and crafty plans. this consciousness is lacking in don giovanni. therefore, he does not seduce. he desires, and this desire acts seductively. (kierkegaard 1959, 1:97) penetrating don giovanni’s real motivations is not as simple as it seems. other nineteenth-century commentators in the spirit of kierkegaard found no cause for censure.4 by contrast, more recent commentators have taken a step back from accentuating the heroic in don giovanni. some have pointed to a curious absence at the heart of the opera. in these readings, far from being the embodiment of a heroic ideal, don giovanni is all surface and no substance. so bernard williams writes that don giovanni “seems to have no depth adequate to the work in which he plays the central role.” it is not that there is something hidden in giovanni’s soul, williams observes; instead, he is “virtually characterless” (1981, 82). wye jamison allanbrook calls giovanni no-man. his actions, she writes, do not rise to the level of the grand or tragic: “he is not evil but banal, not noble but punctilious, and without fear where true courage would discern what properly is to be feared” (1983, 218). for the musicologist joseph kerman, giovanni’s blankness explains why nineteenth-century thinkers so readily projected the horrors and ideals of their age onto the opera. it also accounts for what kerman believes are substantial weaknesses in the work. while the music of don giovanni is peerless in mozart’s entire repertoire—it is “mozart’s richest score” and the “dearest of all his operas to the musician”—its dramatic realization is severely flawed (kerman 1988, 99). according to kerman, da ponte faltered by inadequately conveying charm and ingenuity in giovanni, and mozart compounded the weakness by adding very little to his character musically. the result is an altogether underwhelming presence for a mozartian hero. giovanni has a single solo aria that might qualify as genuine selfexpression, the orgasmic “fin ch’han dal vino,” which comes midway through the opera. (he sings his other two arias, “deh vieni alla finestra” and “metà di voi,” disguised as his servant leporello.) “fin ch’han dal vino” is relentless and obsessive, without subtlety, comment, 176 sincerity and seduction in don giovanni © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 or development. for kerman, it is “a jingle that never evolves” (1990, 120). “the singular fact is that until the end almost all of the action and musical expression goes to illuminate the people with whom he is involved, not don giovanni himself,” kerman writes. “this is a dramatic mistake” (1988, 102). in my view, this is not a dramatic mistake. da ponte and mozart knew exactly what they were doing. instead of weakening the opera, the cipher at its center is the key to its particular power. the view derives from the observation that don giovanni employs the secret of all great lovers: sincerity. sincerity is not self-expression. it is as foreign to the principled earnestness of the nineteenth century as it is to our own time’s demand for authenticity. in lionel trilling’s classic definition, sincerity is “a congruence between avowal and actual feeling” (1972, 2; see also johnson 2005). a person who is sincere need not be consistent in his claims. he need only believe what he says—truly and fully—in the moment of utterance. and that might well be at odds with other sincere claims before and after. it is don giovanni’s unfailing sincerity of tone that makes grasping his character so difficult. da ponte’s fellow venetian giacomo casanova maintains this same tone of sincerity for the length of his twelve-volume autobiography as he recounts his own romantic conquests, which occur on average about once every thirty pages. ingenuous and immediate, casanova seems to tell us everything, including his setbacks and humiliations, his illnesses and debilities, each time he is impotent, and the shame he feels when visiting prostitutes. throughout the memoirs casanova repeats a single theme: that he is neither a seducer nor a deceiver. he writes near the end of the work: “i venture to say that i was often virtuous in the act of vice. seduction was never characteristic of me; for i have never seduced except unconsciously, being seduced myself.” the “professional seducer is an abominable creature,” he adds, a “true criminal,” and the “enemy of the object on which he has his designs” (1966–71, 12: 111). the fascination in casanova’s autobiography lies in how little this man’s actions seem to match his declared motivations. he cites with incredulity an enemy who has deemed him a liar, slanderer, counterjohnson 177 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 feiter, and spy. the denunciation that brought his arrest and imprisonment in the venetian leads accused him of sorcery, irreligion, and dissipation. and he gives ample cause in the course of his writing for believing such charges, with straightforward accounts of sleeping with fourteen-year-olds, inventing fanciful stories, spying, counterfeiting, attempting black magic, and using fictitious names. still, he dismisses the accusations as slander. casanova was a chameleon in a society whose colors were largely fixed. over the course of his life, he forged a series of identities consistent only in denying who he really was, the neglected son of a theater-girl. by perpetually believing what he said, casanova insisted that he was honorable and honest, even as his stories changed. consider his defense of inventing the name seingalt: “i assumed it because it is mine….there is nothing more true than my name” (8: 135). how could anyone call him an imposter? assessing whether casanova “really means” what he says is futile. in his memoirs, he is in perpetual control of his rhetoric, and the autobiographical genre means that there is never a second opinion. one need only to consider other genres to see how sincerity of tone, especially among seducers, might mask thoroughly deceitful intentions. one such seducer is the vicomte de valmont in choderlos de laclos’ liaisons dangereuses. through its multiple voices, laclos’ epistolary form reveals what casanova’s autobiography does not. “permit me, madame, to open my heart to you,” valmont writes to his principal victim, the présidente de tourvel. she is taken in and lauds his “honest sincerity” to a companion. but valmont’s letters to the marquise de merteuil show him calculating at every step, driven by vengeance and the sheer will to corrupt. ah! may she surrender, but may she fight; may she have the means to resist without the means to prevail; may she come to savor the sentiment of her own weakness and be obliged to acknowledge her defeat…. this project is sublime, is it not? (laclos 1979, 74, 33, 52) in don giovanni, da ponte and mozart follow the technique of casanova rather than that of laclos. with the thunderous opening chords of the overture, giovanni’s damnation seems sure, and yet in most moments we cannot discern whether his sincerity is honest or a mask. 178 sincerity and seduction in don giovanni © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 nor can the other characters. the peasant-girl zerlina is on the way to her own wedding when don giovanni takes her hand, tells her she is destined for higher things, and promises marriage. only a timely intervention by donna elvira keeps zerlina out of leporello’s catalogue. for her part, donna elvira is already on the list and eager to declare to everyone she sees what a monster don giovanni is. nevertheless, late in the opera, she is still ready to believe that don giovanni truly loves her. for donna anna, assessing giovanni’s sincerity is altogether more urgent. in the opening scene, a cloaked intruder forces his way into her room, either rapes or attempts to rape her, and stabs her father as he rushes to her aid. it is of course don giovanni, though she does not know it at the time. when she encounters him only days later, he asks with affecting concern, “who was the villain that dared to upset the calm of your life?” (mozart and da ponte 1974, i:xi–xii, 101–2). asking whether giovanni’s sincerity is honest or a mask is another way of asking if he genuinely believes what he says when he says it. if he believes his words, then perhaps kierkegaard is right and he is a sheer force of nature: unreflective, true to his desires, and at least in this one respect without censure. if giovanni does not believe his words, then he is a master of deceit and da ponte is in on the game. in either case, giovanni’s apparent sincerity is powerfully convincing. part of the strange spell of mozart’s don giovanni is how easy it is to disregard the fact that its principal character is a would-be rapist and a killer. the libretto possesses a cavalier bluntness, and yet even its brutalities can seem strangely untroubling. “l’ha voluto,” don giovanni says to leporello just after the commandante’s death. “he asked for it” is the way leporello takes it, but the italian might as easily mean, “she asked for it,” with reference to whatever has just happened in donna anna’s bedchamber (i:ii, 34). from start to finish, don giovanni’s actions are on full view, and still he seems more a likeable rogue than a criminal. instead of condemning him we’re amused, fascinated, intrigued. why is this? his sincerity may very well account for his successes within the drama, but it cannot fully explain our own fascination with his exploits. in my view, this effect lies with the music. just as da ponte never reveals what don giovanni is really thinkjohnson 179 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 ing, mozart keeps resolutely to the surface in his musical depictions. the music does not comment upon giovanni’s actions, much less pass judgment or condemn. in fact, it backs him up at every turn. mozart certainly had the ability to offer such comment had he wanted. his così fan tutte, for instance, an opera filled with dissimulation, carries musical clues that comment on the deceit. when guglielmo and ferrando appear in “turkish” disguises to test the fidelity of their lovers, fiordiligi orders them to leave and declares her own steadfast fidelity. at the word “fede” (faith), a small wavering gesture sounds in the violins; at the word “diede” (pledged), two measures later, the half-step fluctuation recurs in thirds (see example 1). in itself, the gesture is perhaps unremarkable, but it reappears during the servant despina’s lusty recommendation of deceit to the two sisters (see examples 2 and 3). and later, as ferrando presses close to fiordiligi and pleads for her affection, the same figure in the violins announces what she cannot bring herself to say. “my god, the way you look at me and sigh!” ferrando responds. “with that look and those dear sighs, a sweet ray shines into my heart.”5 what was first a tiny doubt now signals surrender (see example 4). daniel heartz points to a similar instance in the orchestra when guglielmo promises a feast in honor of venus early in the opera. example 1. from “temerari,” così fan tutte. 180 sincerity and seduction in don giovanni © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 example 2. from “una donna a quinici anni,” così fan tutte. example 3. from “una donna a quinici anni,” così fan tutte. example 4. from “barbara!,” così fan tutte. johnson 181 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 the pattern of sixteenth notes in the first violins recalls the “turkish” music in die entführung aus dem serail, heartz observes, and may be interpreted as “a hint of the disguises to come” (1990, 239). in don giovanni, by contrast, there are no moments when the orchestra conveys the thoughts or reveals the intentions of its principal character. this is the musical version of sincerity. the orchestra gives us no reason to doubt the truth of giovanni’s words. for this reason, it is not enough to say that mozart’s music abets the attempted seductions on the stage. the music reaches beyond the flickering virtue of the drama’s characters to draw us into giovanni’s tainted moral universe. the real seducer in don giovanni is mozart, and the seduction is not a fiction. this is what beethoven must have meant in deploring the work. consider the scene in act two when donna elvira, who until now has spared no occasion to curse her lover as a traitor, appears at a window and, believing herself alone, sings that she still has feelings for him (mozart and da ponte 1974, ii: ii, 235–45). her musical line— hesitant, broken, not properly a melody—conveys the nature of her thoughts (see example 5). don giovanni is below, and he seizes his chance to beg forgiveness and declare that he also still loves her. he does this in the very melody she has sung as the tonality shifts from a to e major (see example 6). the new key is related to a but brighter, which quickens the attention without drawing attention. the musical line is the same, but in giovanni’s hands its silences prompt donna elvira to reply. this is giovanni’s gift: to read another’s heart and reply as a kindred spirit. this happens not just with his words but with his music. like casanova, don giovanni assumes the shades of his surroundings, slipping into buffa when he is with leporello, a virtuosic seria style with elvira, and a folk-like simplicity with zerlina. when giovanni swaps his clothes with leporello the better to woo a servant-girl, mozart offers the musical equivalent by hiding the orchestra behind a whispered pizzicato and giving the accompaniment to a mandolin. in fact, don giovanni is the only character in the opera for whom mozart has not fashioned a characteristic style consistent with social rank.6 for joseph kerman, this is an element of his incomplete depiction, and to claim 182 sincerity and seduction in don giovanni © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 example 5. from “ah, taci, ingiusto core,” don giovanni. example 6. from “ah, taci, ingiusto core,” don giovanni. that is an artistic strength is “to argue ab vacuo”: “in opera we trust what is done most firmly by the music” (1988, 102). on the contrary. this very musical detachment allows mozart to achieve his most convincing effects. when don giovanni comes to the payoff line in the scene with donjohnson 183 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 na elvira—“discendi, o gioia bella,” “come down, my joy!”—the key modulates a second time, now to c major (see example 7). a melody blossoms from the musical material of donna elvira’s thoughts, but now, spoken aloud as it were by don giovanni, it is altogether more sumptuous than in her first halting phrases. the earlier shift from a to e is subtle; this one, from e to c, is bold. the new key, relatively remote from e, is unexpected though not jarring and, while still bright, is considerably warmer. the instrumental modulation that prepares his line enacts giovanni’s command: the strings descend stepwise. the effect is ravishing. all of this happens while don giovanni and leporello continue to talk out of elvira’s hearing, which mozart sets in a rapid buffa style, the speech-like patter of italian comic opera. mozart’s astonishing dramatic control is on full display here. giovanni mimics the musical styles of all whom he encounters with such sincerity that we—not just they—believe him. the opera contains many such instances of mozart’s seduction. “là ci darem la mano,” the aria in which giovanni promises to marry the peasant zerlina, narrates her surrender in a sequence that exercises strong musical persuasion. “there we shall join hands, there you will say yes,” giovanni sings of his country house in a tune of childlike innocence. “look, it is not far, come my sweet, let’s go.” the slow duple meter is soothing and gentle, and giovanni’s simple stanza, just as with donna elvira, creates the musical expectation for a reply, which zerlina readily gives: “i want to and yet i don’t; my heart has misgivings; i should indeed be happy, but he might be bluffing me.” the music example 7. from “ah, taci, ingiusto core,” don giovanni. 184 sincerity and seduction in don giovanni © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 conveys zerlina’s indecision in a series of faltering, downward steps in the next exchange. come, giovanni coos, i will change your life. she stammers, “but i pity masetto…. then quick, i’m not strong” (i: ix, 93–8). now mozart begins to work on us. in the second stanza, he returns to the opening innocent tune, but giovanni has to sing only two lines instead of four to get zerlina to answer. this doubles the pace of the conversation and stirs anticipation. mozart adds a nice dramatic touch by gracing giovanni’s lines with a flute and grounding zerlina’s with a bassoon. we feel them coming together even if we do not consciously register why. and as the meter shifts to a pastoral 6/8, they do come together. the translator avril bardoni has them saying: “then come, then come, my sweetheart, to remedy the torment of an innocent love!”7 zerlina may well be swept away and think her love is pure—and, whatever his true intentions, giovanni echoes that sentiment—but the sexual nature of the scene is intimated in that strange last line: “a ristorar le pene d’un innocente amor.” the cognate “to restore” (or even “to refresh” or “to revitalize”) is much closer to ristorare than “to remedy,” bardoni’s choice. lurking near le pene, pains, is il pene, penis. in its context, ristorare may be meant to carry a rather more pointed physical connotation: not to remedy, but to slake and reawaken. at the words “innocente amor,” the violins trace a brief chromatic descent that is conspicuously out of character with the happy duet (see example 8). is it a warning that giovanni’s intentions are not at all innocent? perhaps. but given what we later learn about zerlina, it might well be an indication that giovanni and zerlina both know, and both embrace, what would have happened in the big country house had donna elvira not come along. daniel heartz links that chromatic descent to moments in “fin ch’han dal vino,” when giovanni orders leporello to bring girls off the streets to his party, and in the sextet “ah non lasciarmi!” late in the opera. in that ensemble, donna elvira believes she is alone in the dark with giovanni, whom she once again calls her husband; she also declares that she is scared to death. “in this opera chromatic lines spell death,” heartz writes, “but also the related johnson 185 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 phenomenon of love death, or the sexual act…. if the censors had only known how suggestive of the erotic mozart’s music could be, they would surely have banned it” (1990, 181). don giovanni’s ability to imitate the natural temperament of others is fully grasped when zerlina begs forgiveness from masetto, but the sequence also reveals what she has learned from giovanni. “batti, batti” is cast in the same reassuring duple meter as “là ci darem,” and it possesses a similarly innocent tune. the lyrics begin, “beat me, masetto, beat your poor zerlina! i shall stand here like a lambkin waiting for your blows.” at the end of the aria, zerlina moves to the same pastoral 6/8 that she and giovanni came to. here she sings, “let’s make up, my dear! we want to pass our days and nights in joy and gaiety!” (mozart and da ponte 1974, i: xvi, 148–56). there’s no reason to doubt her sentiments, judging by the words or the music, but from now on masetto is suspicious. and so am i. “he didn’t even touch my fingertips!” zerlina tells masetto (i: xvi, 147). really? from its opening words, their duet was about joining hands! when she next sings to masetto, who has been roughed up by giovanni, the balm she offers is overtly sexual. “touch me here,” she sings seven times, repeating “here” another five times for good measure. (where is up to the director.) zerlina’s aria illustrates how giovanni’s pleasingly reassuring tone becomes so corrosive. once suspicions arise, you’re either a dupe or a cynic. donna elvira’s determination to resist both helps to explain her vacillation throughout the example 8. from “là ci darem la mano,” don giovanni. 186 sincerity and seduction in don giovanni © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 opera, cursing giovanni as a monster one moment and eager to marry him the next. sadly, one has to wonder whether some version of her suffering awaits masetto.8 mozart remains faithful to giovanni’s unfailing tone of sincerity throughout the opera, but in one extraordinary moment the composer allows the incompatibility of his claims to show. it comes in the tour de force setting of three orchestras playing three dances in three different meters (mozart and da ponte 1974, i: xx, 180–227). when donna anna and donna elvira come disguised to don giovanni’s ball and pair off briefly to dance, an onstage orchestra plays a minuet, the most aristocratic dance of the eighteenth century. when don giovanni seizes zerlina to dance her straight out of the room, a second onstage orchestra plays a contredanse, a form whose roots are in the english country dance. leporello grabs the peasant masetto in clownish parody, and a third orchestra strikes up a sprightly “german” dance. wonderment over mozart’s technical feat and the sheer fun of trying to hear each orchestra may distract from the larger point. until now, don giovanni has kept the different versions of himself distinct in the minds of his companions. this is the instant when he is caught: zerlina screams from offstage; giovanni blames leporello for the attempted assault; and elvira, anna, and ottavio pull off their masks to sing, “deceiver! deceiver!” here the music remains true to giovanni’s separate stories, but the musical clash reveals them to be fundamentally incompatible. wye jamison allanbrook’s designation of giovanni as no-man is relevant. from all we can tell, he doesn’t so much hide a lasting identity behind a series of masks as use the words and styles of others to construct serial selves. true, zerlina has seen with horror what giovanni’s promised marriage really means; and donna anna positively identifies him as her father’s killer. but the deepest question about don giovanni—whether he is an ingenuous lover or calculating liar—remains unanswered. this is due in large part to music that was deliberately crafted to entice and ensnare its listeners. despite don giovanni’s final damnation to hell, the music throughout the opera reserves fundamental judgment about his character. does this make mozart morally comjohnson 187 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 plicit with the offences of his creature? the comparison isn’t exact, but there is something to be learned from the calculating seducer’s mask of sincerity, namely, that one should beware of mistaking surface for substance. in a letter to his father, mozart boasted: “i can imitate and assimilate all kinds and styles of composition” (quoted in heartz 1990, 37). mozart’s facility in this regard was unparalleled, and nowhere is it more effectively deployed than in don giovanni. in a superb instance of form following content, mozart matched the sincerity of the character with music that was every bit as believable and—in the best possible sense—superficial. the music is constitutive of don giovanni’s several selves. to offer commentary or disclaimers would weaken the depiction. mozart surely shared the prejudices of his own time, but in this case faulting him for endorsing objectionable values misses the point. mozart rendered with utmost fidelity a man whose thoughts we never know. using that music to pass judgment on the composer’s inner state is as groundless as locating within it giovanni’s true intentions. despite beethoven’s criticism of the opera, he copied extracts into his sketch books in order to study its powers (see lockwood 2003, 253). one of them, as potent today as it was in the eighteenth century, was the seductive appeal of sincerity. end notes 1. i am grateful to thomas kelly and to my colleagues from boston university’s core curriculum—especially bernard prusak, roger shattuck, and roye wates—for their insights in conversations about teaching don giovanni. 2. beethoven is quoted in cooper 1985, 127, 118; ruskin in allanbrook 1983, 364. 3. the english translations from this opera are my own, although i have also frequently referred to that of avril bardoni, which appears in the booklet accompanying the recording of don giovanni by the drottningholm court theatre orchestra and chorus. 4. for example, théophile gautier wrote: “it is not debauchery that drives him on; he seeks the dream of his heart with the obstinacy of a titan who fears neither thunder nor lightning” (quoted in williams 1981, 84). in the tale “don juan” by e.t.a. hoffmann (1984), the soprano playing donna anna appears in the narrator’s private box during a performance of the opera. their 188 sincerity and seduction in don giovanni © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 brief conversation, experienced by the narrator as though in a dream, reveals the inner truth of giovanni: in him is the divine but misdirected principle of love. her mission is to redeem him. and her failed attempt to do so, coming too late in giovanni’s headlong quest for genuine love, will end in her own death. george bernard shaw viewed giovanni similarly, describing him as a superman who rose above the small-minded world of bourgeois norms. see also grey 2006 and allanbrook 1983, 216. 5. mozart and da ponte 1952, i: xi, 115–16, ii: i, 205–11, ii: vi, 243. another celebrated example that mozart knew comes in gluck’s iphigénie en tauride, when orestes, terrorized by the furies for having killed his mother, at last announces that peace has returned to his heart. but accompanying him in the orchestra is a churning, tumultuous rumble. “he is lying!” gluck called out during a rehearsal in which the orchestra played the passage too softly. “he has just killed his mother!” see for this story la comtesse de genlis, in a footnote to the article “opéra,” in dictionnaire critique et raisonné des étiquettes de la cour (1818, 2: 12–13). 6. wye jamison allanbrook makes this point well: “the vitality and spirit which have caused some to see giovanni as hero, as life force, even as pure intellect itself, are in reality relentless instinct and a talent for mimicry. unlike the god proteus, who, if his captor was patient, would at last assume his proper shape, giovanni cannot, for he does not have one. a master of the forms, he is also radically dependent on them, for without them he would be invisible” (1983, 286). 7. see the booklet accompanying the performance of don giovanni by the drottningholm court theatre orchestra and chorus, 90. 8. an essay by berthold hoeckner (2006) comes to different conclusions in arguing that don giovanni awakened zerlina’s sexuality, but that zerlina quickly matured to transform giovanni’s manipulations and deceit into mutuality with masetto. for hoeckner, the musical similarities between “là ci darem” and “batti, batti” signify maturity, and zerlina’s promises to nurse masetto’s bruises are “peace-giving gestures.” masetto should hope that he is right. references allanbrook, wye jamison 1983 rhythmic gesture in mozart: le nozze di figaro & don giovanni. chicago, il: university of chicago press. casanova, giacomo, chevalier de seingalt 1966–71 history of my life. 12 vols. trans. willard r. trask. new york, ny: harjohnson 189 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 court, brace & world, inc. cooper, martin 1985 beethoven: the last decades, 1817–1827. oxford: oxford university press. genlis, stéphanie félicité, la comtesse de 1818 dictionnaire critique et raisonné des étiquettes de la cour. 2 vols. paris: mongié. grey, thomas s. 2006 the gothic libertine: the shadow of don giovanni in romantic music and culture. in the don giovanni moment, ed. lydia goehr and daniel herwitz, 75–106. new york, ny: columbia university press. heartz, daniel 1990 mozart’s operas. berkeley: university of california press. 2006 kierkegaard writes his opera. in the don giovanni moment, ed. lydia goehr and daniel herwitz, 119–136. new york, ny: columbia university press. hoeckner, berthold 2006 homage to adorno’s “homage to zerlina.” in the don giovanni moment, ed. lydia goehr and daniel herwitz, 211–23. new york, ny: columbia university press. hoffmann, e.t.a. 1984 don juan. in deutsche erzählungen/german stories: a bilingual anthology, ed. harry steinhauer, 112–40. berkeley, ca: university of california press. johnson, james h. 2005 deceit and sincerity in early-modern venice. eighteenth-century studies 38: 399–415. doi:10.1353/ecs.2005.0027 http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/ ecs.2005.0027 kerman, joseph 1988 opera as drama. second edition. berkeley: university of california press. 1990 reading don giovanni. in don giovanni: myths of seduction and betrayal, ed. jonathan miller, 108–25. new york, ny: schocken books. kierkegaard, søren 1959 either/or. 2 vols. trans. david f. swenson and lillian marvin swenson. princeton, nj: princeton university press. 190 sincerity and seduction in don giovanni © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 de laclos, choderlos 1979 les liaisons dangeureuses. paris: gallimard. lockwood, lewis 2003 beethoven: the music and the life. new york, ny and london: w. w. norton. mozart, wolfgang amadeus don giovanni (cd recording). drottningholm court theatre orchestra and chorus, arnold östman, l’oiseau-lyre 425 943-2. mozart, wolfgang amadeus and lorenzo da ponte 1952 così fan tutte. new york, ny: g. schirmer. 1974 don giovanni. ed. georg schünemann and kurt soldan. new york, ny: dover publications. trilling, lionel 1972 sincerity and authenticity. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. williams, bernard 1981 don giovanni as an idea. in w. a. mozart: ‘don giovanni,’ ed. julian rushton, 81–91. cambridge: cambridge university press. review 4 erfani.indd © equinox publishing ltd. 2007, unit 6, th e village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expositions 1.1 (2007) 105–118] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v1i1.105 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 th e people has its political reason, of which political th eory knows nothing farhang erfani, american university ernesto laclau. on populist reason. verso. london, 2005. 276 pp. $26.00 hc. isbn 1-859-84651-3. ernesto laclau has written a timely book on populism, a subject which has been making headlines. hugo chavez, the president of venezuela, is often referred to as a populist and as the leader of the leftward turn in south america. th e republican party’s success in the united states is also attributed to right-wing populism. on january 9, 2007, seven far-right european parties created a coalition at the european union’s parliament in order to further their conservative cause. th is new group, “identity, tradition and sovereignty,” brings together twenty eu parliamentarians who despise europe. each party is committed to undermining europe and is openly antagonistic to foreign interests and foreigners at home, catering to what many refer to as populist sentiments. even more interesting is the composition of these parties’ constituency, usually made up of the poor, the working class, and even immigrants! th e very people who would be harmed by the new coalition’s policies vote them into offi ce. indeed, we fi nd ourselves disarmed, faced with either a leftor rightwing populist movement. both seem irrational, sentimentalist and beyond the understanding of the political establishment. th is bewilderment was very well captured in america by th omas frank in his book what’s the matter with kansas? (2004). th e rise of populism seems like a backlash, an outburst with no rhyme or reason. but as laclau’s book suggests, there is a “populist reason,” but we have failed to understand it. th is is not laclau’s fi rst treatment of the subject. in his 1977 book, politics and ideology in marxist th eory, he already devoted a chapter to populism. but the crux of laclau’s work should be traced back to his 1985 work, co-authored with chantal mouff e, hegemony and socialist review 4 erfani.indd 105review 4 erfani.indd 105 16/06/2007 11:21:3416/06/2007 11:21:34 106 book reviews © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 strategy: towards a radical democratic politics (2nd ed. 2001). in that work, they argued that orthodox marxism is plagued by a real philosophical knot. briefl y put, a puzzle confronted orthodox marxism in the twentieth century. th e october revolution had taken place; capitalism had met signifi cant resistance and was, during the depression era, on the brink of a monumental collapse; but the promised international revolution wasn’t happening. to the contrary, the proletariat was divided; the workers of the world were not about to unite. it seems as though the proletariat was unable to recognize its own true economic interest. for laclau and mouff e, this was not a coincidence, or a mere phase. it was the result of the marxist reductionism and the “ontological privileging” of the working class. th ough laclau and mouff e have never denied the importance of the economic terrain and its struggles, they nonetheless criticized traditional marxism for its neglect of other struggles, such as feminism, environmentalism, anti-racism, and anti-colonialism, all of which played key roles on the political stage of the twentieth century. in short, by reducing everything to economics, marxism failed to appreciate the true nature of the political. instead, in hegemony and socialist strategy, laclau and mouff e turned their attention to antonio gramsci’s notion of hegemony, which was a political construct and not a natural, a priori given site of struggle. to rid gramsci of all remnants of essentialism, they used the best of the post-structuralist theories to argue for a notion of politics that is at home with contingency and anti-foundationalism. anti-foundationalism has been an important current in theoretical humanities over the past forty years or so. but its impact on political thought has been fairly limited. it is one thing to admit that there is no such a thing as a race; it is another to know how to assess racism. it is one thing to de-naturalize human rights; it is another to fi nd a way to reject oppression without falling back on modern essentialist categories. anti-foundationalism has opened up the fi eld of possibilities; it has allowed for a proliferation of complex identities, diff erences and narratives. its translation into politics— a common ground—has been lacking. in on populist reason, laclau provides us his solution for the way forward. “th e main issue addressed in this book,” writes laclau, “is the nareview 4 erfani.indd 106review 4 erfani.indd 106 16/06/2007 11:21:4116/06/2007 11:21:41 on populist reason 107 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 ture and logics of the formation of collective identities” (ix). he also tells us that his “whole approach has grown out of a basic dissatisfaction with sociological perspectives which either considered the group as the basic unit of social analysis, or tried to transcend that unit by locating it within wider functionalist or structuralist paradigms.” his dissatisfaction is readily appreciable. quantitative or rational-choice theorists fail because they assume the “people” as a category, or see it as an aggregation of rational individuals (in the best case scenario). but the “qualitative” theorists have little to off er as well. for laclau, “the impasse that political th eory experiences in relation to populism is far from accidental, for it is rooted in the limitation of the ontological tools currently available to political analysis” (4). before putting forth his own new ontology—and this book is indeed a new political ontology—laclau retraces the history of this failure in the fi rst three chapters of the book. in this interesting survey of the literature on populism, laclau shows that no one has managed to capture what populism really is. in fact, theorists are often frustrated and prefer not to address the topic because it lacks precision; it leads to an impasse. th e few willing theorists usually end up describing the phenomenon of a particular populist movement, refusing to do more with what presents itself as an irrational outburst. despite their best eff orts, classical theorists of populism seem bound to “separating what is rational and conceptually apprehensible in political action from its dichotomic opposite: a populism conceived as irrational and undefi nable” (16). most importantly, this conclusion speaks volumes to the assumptions of most political theorists. for most political theorists, populism “simplifi es the political space, replacing a complex set of diff erences and determinations by a stark dichotomy whose two poles are necessarily imprecise” (18). th is is where we can begin to appreciate laclau’s originality within the current spectrum of post-structuralist theory. he is content neither with the rationalist approach, nor with the postmodern advocacy of proliferation of pluralities. against the rationalists, laclau argues that populism is in fact a challenge to the political establishment which is bound to see it as irrational; against postmoderns (as well as traditional political theorists), review 4 erfani.indd 107review 4 erfani.indd 107 16/06/2007 11:21:4116/06/2007 11:21:41 108 book reviews © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 laclau argues that simplifi cation of the terrain, the coming together of odd political bed-fellows is the very “nature and logic” of the political. in other words, if we were to better understand populism, we would understand the way politics in general works. early “crowd” psychologists, whose work laclau meticulously analyzes, came to this appreciation, though often unintentionally or unsystematically. nineteenth-century psychologists came to the question of the people through a clear interest in its pathology—the crowd’s ability to pressure otherwise “normal” individuals to behave irrationally. to them a crowd was a “group in decline” (34). but this “pathological” approach didn’t pan out. whatever the novelties—even the dangers—that the transition to a mass society involved, it became increasingly clear that they could be addressed with the pathological approach…mass society required a positive characterization (39). later theorists, in search of a positive approach to crowds—one that would understand them but also master them—paid close attention to the role of a leader. th e fi gure of the leader is very important in populist movements. chavez currently occupies such a position. but few have managed to understand the political and ontological role that the leader plays. th at the masses begin to follow the leader is often seen —in a way that is reminiscent of nietzsche, who was a contemporary of these crowd psychologists—as a weakness, or a lack of selfhood. but for laclau, there is more to the role of the leader. it is true that by following a leader, of any kind, plurality and diff erences among the followers disappear to a great extent—though never fully—but this is because the nature of creating a collective identity requires this moment of simplifi cation, or what laclau calls the “logic of equivalence.” in the work of freud, laclau fi nds the best support for this theory of identifi cation with the leader. unlike other theorists, freud saw that the relationship of a community cannot be captured rationally, but is only understandable libidinally. by chapter four, laclau is ready to provide us with his own theory, while again emphasizing the fact that “populism is the royal road to understanding something about the ontological constitution of the review 4 erfani.indd 108review 4 erfani.indd 108 16/06/2007 11:21:4116/06/2007 11:21:41 on populist reason 109 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 political as such” (67). how is that the case? laclau begins with the category of demand, which he points out is ambiguous in english: it can mean a request, but it can also mean a claim (as in ‘demanding an explanation’). th is ambiguity of meaning, however, is useful for our purposes, because it is in the transition from request to claim that we are going to fi nd one of the fi rst defi ning features of populism (73). for laclau, there is no such a thing as a pre-defi ned society. th e very act of this defi nition—who is “in” and who is “out” or what is meant by “we” is the very work of the political. initially, a segment of the population has a request; it lacks something. given its particular position in the world, this group has a particular concern, say anti-racism. but this group is not the only one with a demand. all given fragments of the citizenry have their own requests. if such requests are satisfi ed, if there is a concession by the powers, the demand plays no political role. when the demand is not satisfi ed, then it becomes a claim, something of a real concern. or as laclau puts it: people can start to perceive that their neighbours have other, equally unsatisfi ed demands—problems with water, health, schooling and so on. if the situation remains unchanged for some time, there is an accumulation of unfulfi lled demands and an increasing inability of the institutional system to absorb them in a diff erential way (each in isolation from the others), and an equivalential relation is established between them. (73) th is is the beginning of populism and the beginning of a political movement in general. one particular sector’s demands—even when they go unfulfi lled—cannot amount to a political gesture. it requires the moment of equivalence whereby a multiplicity of demands are integrated into a single front. here, we can begin to see why populism usually seems incoherent and unpredictable. it is indeed its very nature to incorporate heterogeneous interests; but that, according to laclau, is the nature of politics in the fi rst place. given laclau’s post-structuralist sympathies we must remember that for him the logic of equivalence and the logic of diff erence are always already at work, at the same time, in the same place. politics needs review 4 erfani.indd 109review 4 erfani.indd 109 16/06/2007 11:21:4216/06/2007 11:21:42 110 book reviews © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 both. a purely equivalential society—one in which all diff erences have been eliminated—is not only ethically and politically undesirable, but it is, as post-structuralism and psychoanalysis have argued, impossible. perfect coincidence is a dream, one that is in fact grounded in the frustration of unfulfi lled demands and the need for equivalential struggle. th is is indeed the danger of populism, as it is commonly understood. populism may pretend to create a permanent unity where there is only one united people, but that is impossible to achieve. not the least, for laclau, because oneness and unity require a frontier of separation, of diff erence, which is achieved through the contingent construction of an antagonistic front through the chain of equivalence. to concretely illustrate this matter, let me quote at length a brilliant passage from laclau: a society which postulates the welfare state as its ultimate horizon is one in which only the diff erential logic would be accepted as a legitimate way of constructing the social. in this society, conceived as a continuously expanding system, any social need should be met diff erentially; and there would be no basis for creating an internal frontier. since it would be unable to diff erentiate itself from anything else, that society could not totalize itself, could not create ‘a people.’ what actually happens is that the obstacles identifi ed during the establishment of that society—private entrepreneurial greed, entrenched interests, and so on—force their very proponents to identify enemies and to reintroduce a discourse of social division grounded in equivalential logic. in that way, collective subjects constituted around the defense or the welfare state can emerge. th e same can be said about neo-liberalism: it also presents itself as a panacea for a fi ssureless society—with the difference that in this case, the trick is performed by the market and not by the state. th e result is the same: at some point margaret th atcher’s sound ‘obstacles’ started denouncing the parasites of social security and others, and ended up with one of the most aggressive discourses of social division in contemporary british history. (78–79) th is passage illustrates laclau’s ability to navigate through concrete examples, while providing us with a genuine theory that cuts across diff erences that we take for granted—the opposition between the welfare state and neo-liberalism, in this instance. th is is indeed the job of review 4 erfani.indd 110review 4 erfani.indd 110 16/06/2007 11:21:4216/06/2007 11:21:42 on populist reason 111 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 an ontology. having established the duality of equivalence and diff erence, laclau moves to the second tenet of populism: the establishment of antagonistic frontiers between two incommensurable camps. how are these camps established? how are they defi ned? a simplistic approach would defi ne them negatively, i.e., a common enemy would become the common identity. th is is a typical analysis of populist movements. for laclau, there is indeed an external frontier, separating the two sides. but establishing the frontier is itself the great political moment par excellence. pointing to a common enemy is not enough. in a detailed analysis that uses a concept he has developed throughout his career, laclau argues that when a chain of equivalence is established among similar struggles (and here the commonality among the oppressed is made visible; or better yet, a common lack is felt), then one particular agent or only one sector becomes the representative of the entire movement. th is is the construction of a hegemonic front (85). a genuine, powerful populist movement is born when a new dividing line is put in place: th e meaning of such [initially isolated] demands is determined largely by their diff erential positions within the symbolic framework of society, and it is their frustration that presents them in a new light. but if there is a very extensive series of social demands which are not met, it is that very symbolic framework which starts to disintegrate. in that case, however, the popular demands are less and less sustained by a pre-existing diff erential framework: they have, to a large extent, to construct a new one. (86) laclau correctly shows us that right-wing populism, particularly in america, is best understood through this framework. as the left-wing discourse failed to meet the demands of the people, they turned toward another movement, equally outside of the establishment: the extreme right. th is phenomenon is easily observable in europe as well. as each country is clearly governed through a centrist policy that de facto excludes the majority of the people and their demands, a growing number of disillusioned sectors of the population—including immigrants—turn to the right. in these cases, “the ontological need to express social division,” the fact that most people fi nd themselves exreview 4 erfani.indd 111review 4 erfani.indd 111 16/06/2007 11:21:4216/06/2007 11:21:42 112 book reviews © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 cluded from the political process, is “stronger than its ontic attachment to a left-wing discourse” (88). here, we can begin to better understand the frustrations of typical analyses of populism. political theory, we must recall, is often speechless before populism; it fi nds itself at an impasse since the multiplicity of the demands, the “irrationality” of the alliances and of the leader puzzle theorists. but, for laclau, the irrationality and the “vagueness” of populism are no surprise. th e one segment of the population, that actor or that group that becomes representative of the entire movement indeed embodies a multiplicity of demands. th ere is no a priori coherence; solidity and solidarity must be built (99). focusing on this process brings laclau to the very notions of representation and naming. what is involved when a particular actor is named a leader, or a particular cause embodies a much larger set of demands? to begin with, and this is a crucial point for laclau, the moment of hegemony which allows one group to rise to the representational level necessarily means that this group loses part of its own particularity. to give a more concrete example: traditional marxism, from laclau’s perspective, never really understood this political hegemony. when it did, as in the case of lenin, it was not a true hegemony. lenin saw the proletariat as the revolutionary agent that represented all other oppressions—such as sexism or racism—which were brought forth by modern capitalism. but the revolutionary agent represented itself; its identity remained insular and did not incorporate other demands. it did not modify its own platform, but asked other causes to rally behind it. in other words, the process of naming is itself a political move. by breaking with the dominant, analytic model of linguistics, laclau liberates the signifi er from the signifi ed. th e relationship between a name and its content become contingent, historically and structurally unstable. in psychoanalysis, laclau uses lacan’s object petit a, which for lacan is the object of desire. what lacan brings to the discussion is his emphasis on “the identity and unity of the object result from the very operation of naming” (104). a given signifi er—say, freedom or equality—is not a priori defi ned, but through the process of hegemonization, the coming together of the chain of equivalences, the cause gets its review 4 erfani.indd 112review 4 erfani.indd 112 16/06/2007 11:21:4216/06/2007 11:21:42 on populist reason 113 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 own conception. laclau formerly referred to this phenomenon as the “empty signifi er”; yet here, in on populist reason, he pushes his analysis further by replacing his own formula by a new one: “fl oating signifi er.” not only does emptiness suggest that there is a total void, which is untenable, it makes it seem as though there is already an “empty place” of power, to use claude lefort’s phrase. th e fl oating signifi er does justice to the instability of the social division, which itself moves through the process of naming. th ere is no place in the fi rst place. th e last major theoretical movement in the book—in addition to the chain of equivalences and naming—is the importance of the heterogeneous. in a dense discussion, laclau moves farther away from traditional hegelian-marxism by refusing to let the dialectic fully determine the scope of a struggle. in fact, when a struggle is dialectically comprehended, it is within the already established political framework and bears no revolutionary trait. by looking at hegel’s notion of “peoples without history” and marx’s own analysis of “lumpenproletariat,” laclau shows that the presence of this political remainder—the ones that are not even part of the dialectical struggle—is key in breaking away from the status quo. a true populist movement is once again incomprehensible to traditional theory because it seeks to incorporate demands that are so far off the political radar that the claims seem absurd: th is is what happened with the aggregative model of democracy (schumpeter, downs) which reduced the “people” to a pluralism of interests and values; and with the deliberative model (rawls, habermas), which found in either justice as fairness or in dialogical procedures the basis for a rational consensus which eliminated all opacity from the representation process. once that point has been reached, the only relevant question is how to respect the will of those represented, taking it for granted that such a will exists in the fi rst place. (164) th is is why for laclau there is “no political intervention which is not populistic to some extent” (155). by now, it should be clear that the process is not automatic; it requires establishing equivalences, the rise of a representative agent that breaks the given social antagonisms by incorporating the heterogeneous elements of society that have been review 4 erfani.indd 113review 4 erfani.indd 113 16/06/2007 11:21:4216/06/2007 11:21:42 114 book reviews © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 excluded. in chapter eight, laclau focuses on three examples where populism “misfi red” (201). american populism has failed in its goals because it refused to expand the chain of equivalence; institutional segregation prevented the establishment of equivalences, by focusing on diff erences. atatürk failed in his quest to change turkey because he adopted a top-down approach; he tried to “construct” the people in the image that he had in mind. in the case of peron, laclau shows that there was a collapse of identifi cation; all involved causes only identifi ed themselves through the leader (221). th is tour of the world proves, for laclau, that there is a way to analyze populism that does not reduce it to an irrational outburst. but not only do contemporary political theorists neglect the concept of the people (the conclusion of the book is dedicated to showing how laclau diff ers from his principal theoretical rivals: žižek, hardt and negri, and ranciere), the left has equally given up on constructing a hegemonic front, even though capitalism provides the heterogeneous framework for such struggles. in his own words: th e politico-intellectual task as i see it today—and to which i have tried to make a modest contribution here—is to go beyond the horizon drawn by this faintheartedness, in its praises and in its condemnations. th e return of the “people” as a political category can be seen as a contribution to this expansion of horizons, because it helps to present other categories—such as class—for what they are: contingent and particular forms of articulating demands, not an ultimate core from which the nature of the demands themselves could be explained. th is widening of horizons is a precondition for thinking the forms of our political engagement in the era of what i have called globalized capitalism. th e dislocations inherent to social relations in the world in which we live are deeper than in the past, so categories that synthesized past social experience are becoming increasingly obsolete. it is necessary to reconceptualize the autonomy of social demands, the logic of their articulation, and the nature of collective entities resulting from then. th is eff ort—which is necessarily collective—is the real task ahead. let us hope that we will be equal to it (250). all in all, this is an extremely rich book. th e argument put forth is novel, in so far as it sheds light on new and emergent forms of popreview 4 erfani.indd 114review 4 erfani.indd 114 16/06/2007 11:21:4216/06/2007 11:21:42 on populist reason 115 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 ulism, while explaining the very nature of modern social movements, which have puzzled political theorists for a long time. at the end, i fi nd myself asking for even more. how about the dangers of populism? laclau showed that right-wing populism has been extremely successful. despite his descriptive and analytic tone, it is perfectly clear that laclau deplores this development and assumes that left-wing populism is better, that it is more emancipatory. but since the goal is to oppose global capitalism, unless there is a genuine international movement, are populist movements, even those favoring the workers, not doomed to nationalism (and by extension racism)? laclau would argue that we need to establish an equivalential chain between anti-racist and working-class demands. we would have to change the meaning of nationalism (227). i agree, but i remain concerned that right-wing populism would always have an easier appeal. th is brings me to my next point. laclau convincingly argues that populism is not evil, and that it is the very nature of the political. he seems to vacillate a bit here. on the one hand, he insists that populism is the “royal road to understanding something about the ontological constitution of the political as such” (67); on the other, he tells us that populism, “for political analysis, is one of the privileged places of emergence of a new political articulation” (222). is there a non-populist approach that we might adapt, faced with the rise of right-wing populism? finally, as i mentioned before, this is an ontological work. despite its “applied” focus, it is a highly theoretical endeavor, bringing together many diff erent trends in the humanities and social sciences. historical examples throughout the book are immensely helpful but the reader is left in a void when it comes to the future. on the one hand, it is unfair to expect laclau to make predictions, or to give us prescriptions. after all, his very theory is rejecting the full predictability of the political terrain. th e contingency of the political forbid him from dialectically projecting far into the future. nevertheless, he hints—especially by the end of the book, and in the last passage cited above—that we are in an era of global capitalism which is fragmenting the world into heterogeneous segments. th e task, he tells us, is to reconceptualize our framereview 4 erfani.indd 115review 4 erfani.indd 115 16/06/2007 11:21:4216/06/2007 11:21:42 116 book reviews © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 work; we must bring together the diff erent demands and struggles; we must work toward a new solidarity, a postmodern international. but is there a way to use “class” without using the old categories? better yet, can class be used—named again—while it is so historically charged? laclau certainly thinks so. his work rightly emphasizes the need for better understanding discourse, rhetoric and even imagination. is it necessary to mention how this polarization is projected today (june 2004) on the immediate american electoral alternatives? either middle america deserts the populist right-wing camps because it no longer recognizes itself in the aggressive neo-conservative onslaught of the bush regime, with the result that new equivalential chains are formed—that is, we move to a new hegemonic formation—or the republicans will be re-elected. what is pure illusion is to think that their long-term defeat could take place without some kind of drastic rearticulation of the political imaginary (the situation is too polarized for small changes in one direction or the other to be able to make any material diff erence). even if bush marginally loses the election, his successor will fi nd his movements limited by the straitjacket of a hegemonic formation whose parameters remain substantially unchanged. (138) th ough i fully admire laclau’s work, and fi nd myself sympathetic to his goal, i remain concerned that our political imaginary is too weak for this task. in a way, this cited passage best illustrates my concern (and the unfairness of my expectation from laclau, to fi nd the solution to the neo-conservative hegemony). in 2006, the democrats won giving the u.s. the “small changes” that laclau mentioned. we are caught up in the same logic, once more. what’s next? how can we persuade the electorate that is seduced by right-wing populism? th ere is no radical shift in the works in america. worse yet, could middle america, middle europe and the middle world establish a new identity? could it be done without falling prey to the old essentialism of the second international? is there an upcoming radical break, “a creatio ex nihilo” (228)? review 4 erfani.indd 116review 4 erfani.indd 116 16/06/2007 11:21:4216/06/2007 11:21:42 on populist reason 117 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 references frank, th omas 2004 what’s the matter with kansas? new york: metropolitan books. laclau, ernesto and chantal mouff e 2001 hegemony and socialist strategy: towards a radical democratic politics. [1985] 2nd ed. london: verso. review 4 erfani.indd 117review 4 erfani.indd 117 16/06/2007 11:21:4316/06/2007 11:21:43 118 book reviews © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 review 4 erfani.indd 118review 4 erfani.indd 118 16/06/2007 11:21:4316/06/2007 11:21:43 04roochnik.indd © equinox publishing ltd. 2008, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expositions 2.1 (2008) 019–026] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v2i1.019 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 the useful uselessness of the humanities david roochnik boston university stanley fish responds to the question with which he titles his essay, “how will the humanities save us?” by objecting to its implicit assumption. as he puts it, “it is not the business of the humanities to save us.” what, then, do they do? fish answers: they don’t do anything, if by “do” is meant bring about effects in the world. and if they don’t bring about effects in the world they cannot be justified except in relation to the pleasure they give to those who enjoy them. his voice here is not cynical, nor does he counsel despair, for he argues that it is precisely this doing-nothing, this inherent uselessness, of the humanities that brings honor to its subject. justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. an activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. the humanities are their own good. there is nothing more to say, and anything that is said…diminishes the object of its supposed praise. with these remarks fish comes perilously close to being right. but he’s not there yet. this is because he does not quite understand how in “doing” nothing, in failing to be useful or justifiable by reference to some value external to themselves, the humanities are actually useful. their usefulness is indirect, no doubt minimal, and perhaps even paradoxical, but useful they nonetheless are. such, at least, is the thesis i will propose. full disclosure: the view i endorse actually belongs to aristotle. and so, after briefly sketching a few of fish’s arguments, i will devote the bulk of this short paper to some reflections about his metaphysics and his politics. in doing so, i will be forced to employ several aristotelian notions that time will allow me neither to defend nor even to elaborate. i must, therefore, ask for the reader’s willingness to entertain the propohttp://dx.doi.org/10.1558/expo.v2i1.019 20 the useful uselessness of the humanities © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 sition that, despite the formidable differences between the aristotelian worldview and our own, on the issue that fish raises there is sufficient commonality between them such that the comparison i offer will be germane.1 c fish begins his essay by asking the question regularly and properly faced by all of us who are in this business: “how does one justify funding the arts and humanities?” he quickly dismisses three familiar answers. first, “you can’t argue,” fish says, “that a state’s economy will benefit by a new reading of ‘hamlet.’” second, he rejects the assertion that the “well rounded citizen” who can quote shakespeare is a valuable commodity. such an appeal may have had some “cash value” a century ago, but as a cultural ideal it is long gone. finally, fish rejects the position defended by anthony kronman in his book, education’s end: why our colleges and universities have given up on the meaning of life. in the past, it was assumed that “a college was above all a place for the training of character, for the nurturing of those intellectual and moral habits that together form the basis for living the best life one can.” based upon his forty-five years in the profession fish finds this preposterous. humanists are good at analyzing texts, but no better than anyone else at being decent colleagues, citizens, friends, or parents. as mentioned at the outset of this paper, fish concludes that the humanities are useless except for the pleasure they give to their practitioners. this is, he maintains, what brings them “honor”: they are their own good. the humanities, then, are “auto-telic.” they are complete, for they contain their “end” or “purpose” (telos) in themselves. what fish fails to understand, but aristotle does, is that this feature of the humanities not only confers honor upon them, but also makes them useful or practical, albeit in a highly indirect way. to explain, i must first turn to the metaphysics and aristotle’s account of the genesis of knowledge.2 the process of knowing begins with perceptions, and then develops through memory and “experience” until it culminates in the attainment of knowledge. differently stated, it progresses from awareness of particulars to an understanding of the universal: from simply knowing “that” to knowing the cause or the “why.” “knowledge,” aristotle roochnik 21 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 explains, “comes to be whenever from many thoughts that have emerged from experience one universal conception emerges about these similar things” (981a5–7). most relevant here is the distinction aristotle draws between those who have knowledge, and so can offer a “rational account” of the cause, and those who are merely “experienced” and whose purview is thereby limited to “the particulars.” when it comes to “acting,” the latter, precisely because they are fluent in the particulars, may actually “succeed more often”—and thus be more obviously useful—than the former. to explain by updating aristotle’s own example: someone who has experienced the pain of many headaches, and then the relief that came from taking aspirin, may well advise a friend whose head hurts to do the same. and her recommendation may actually work. but she has no explanation for why it worked, and hence no real knowledge. the physician, by contrast, does. nonetheless, even a physician with a firm grasp of the science of anatomy may goof in treating a patient precisely because the patient is particularized and thus only an incidental manifestation of a more general structure. experience may be more useful than universal knowledge when dealing with real people (see 981a5–b1). aristotle concedes this limitation but nonetheless insists that genuine knowledge of the universal is superior to or more “honorable”—a word that he regularly uses—than even the most efficacious and “practical” forms of experience.3 on this point he cites the egyptian priests who were the first to develop pure or theoretical mathematics. they were able to do so because they were allowed “leisure” (981b25). they were “counted as wonderful by others” (981b15) not because they had “done” anything useful, but simply because they were “wiser.” theoretical knowledge is good, is the best, not for any consequence or specific application it may generate, but simply as an end in and of itself. aristotle’s conception of theoretical knowledge is significantly different from what we take to be the humanities, or even from what we take to be theoretical knowledge, for it embraces the natural sciences, mathematics, and theology, as well as philosophy.4 nonetheless, it shares the central feature that fish attributes to the humanities: it is auto-telic; it is its own good and so need not make any reference to an external result in order to justify itself. as aristotle puts it, “it is clear that we 22 the useful uselessness of the humanities © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 do not seek such knowledge for any other need; but just as we say that someone who is for the sake of himself and not for another is free, so of the forms of knowledge this sort alone is free” (982b24–27). c i turn next to book vii of the politics where aristotle sketches what he thinks is the “ideal” city. for the purpose of this essay, its salient feature is this: a single city, the one which governs in manifest fineness, could be happy with respect to itself, if it is possible for a city to live by itself using decent laws. its form of government would not be directed towards war or domination of its enemies. (1325a1–4) aristotle’s ideal city is self-contained and its army is strictly for the purpose of defense. it is not, in other words, expansionist or imperialistic. instead, it is like an organic whole consisting of a set of dynamically interacting and mutually enabling parts. as such, it can be maximally active without needing to extend beyond its borders. aristotle strikingly employs a metaphysical phrase to describe it: it is happy or complete “with respect to itself.”5 in other words, a city can be like a “substance,” namely, a mode of being characterized by the highest degree of ontological independence. a substance does not depend on any other category for its being. by contrast, a quality (such as green) depends on there being a substance (such as a tree) in which it inheres. in an analogous fashion, a substance-like city would attain selfsufficiency and remain content to stay within its political borders and economic limits. by contrast, war-like or expansionist regimes reflect ontological confusion: they wrongly elevate the category of quantity over that of substance. as a consequence they are doomed to failure. what aristotle next develops is the symmetry that obtains between the best life attainable by an individual citizen and the city. both share the same “end” or “goal” (telos) for they are each governed by the same principle: “the telos of war is peace, and of lack-of-leisure leisure” (1334a15–16). an individual requires leisure in order to live well— most important, in order to theorize (or to become a “humanist”). analogously, a good city should aim to maintain the peace so that its best citizens can be free from the least leisurely of all activities, namely, roochnik 23 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 “military and political actions.”6 in order for a city to achieve this goal, its citizens must be law-abiding and show moderation. when the city is attacked, they must be courageous enough to put on their armor and hold their positions in order to defend it. when there is peace they must be sufficiently patient in order to engage in political deliberation, and be well enough disciplined to resist those who urge the city to attack its neighbors or expand beyond its borders. distressingly, however, it is during peace that the trouble begins. in a brief statement that has terribly sobering consequences, aristotle says: for war forces men to be just and moderate, while the enjoyment of good fortune and peaceful leisure makes them more violently arrogant. (1334a25–28) as intrinsically desirable as both may be, peace and leisure are nearly impossible to sustain, for most men simply cannot tolerate them. especially those with strong desires, those who are high-spirited and ambitious, become restless. they lack the ability to amuse themselves and the self-discipline required to use free time well. unconstrained by external commands, they don’t know what to do with themselves and so become ill-at-ease. with too much time on their hands, they get bored. they start pointless fights and do stupid things. that this regularly occurs is yet another expression of the dis-ease that aristotle locates at the heart of ordinary human and political life: most people and cities mistake the source of their own happiness. they devote their best energy to the pursuit of wealth, power, or fame and thereby misconstrue the very meaning of their lives. they are incapable of appreciating the gift of leisure and so they disturb the peace. as a result, most young men are far better behaved when they are in uniform. military discipline forces them to act in a moderate fashion and to take heed of the common good rather than simply indulging their own violent impulses or selfishly seeking their own pleasures. war is for the sake of peace, lack-of-leisure is for the sake of leisure, but most men can tolerate neither peace nor free time. but therapy is available. for when it “comes to leisure” (1334a23), philosophy— in our lingo, one of the humanities—can play an instructive role. this is because it provides a paradigm for how to use leisure well. to reiterate, most people become restless or violent if no one tells them 24 the useful uselessness of the humanities © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 what to do. not the philosopher, not the humanist. she does not need external constraint to keep her in line because the world—whether it is the natural world or the world written in text—is inexhaustible in its invitation to be studied, is always present as a source of wonder and amazement. for it is on account of wondering and being amazed that human beings both now and at first began to philosophize. at first, they were amazed and wondered about those oddities that were staring them in the face, and then little by little they progressed and became puzzled by greater questions; for example, about the changing attributes of the moon and the sun and stars, and about the becoming of the whole. (metaphysics 982b12–17) aristotle’s world is wonder-ful, beautiful, intelligible, nourishing and welcoming. for those who use their intellects, it promises rewards greater than money, power, or fame. thus can philosophy, the theorizing of the world, satisfy even the most restless of souls. perhaps surprisingly, it is here that aristotle locates the practical contribution that philosophers, or for the purpose of this essay “humanists,” make to the well-being of their communities. by engaging in an activity valuable in and of itself, they function as a paradigm of how to use leisure well. as such, they are reminders to ordinary citizens that the too familiar urge to succeed in the city, and thereby to achieve a good whose only value is instrumental, is wrong-headed. humanists thus exhibit a telos of human activity without which there would be nothing for human beings to strive for but more of the same: more power, wealth, or fame, each of which is in principle infinite, that is, without-an-end. to reiterate the caution offered above: there are a host of differences between aristotle’s worldview and our own. there was, after all, a fierce battle waged between the ancients and the moderns, which the former decisively lost. his version of philosophy, for example, is quite unlike our own, and his conception of a moderately-sized city that is resolutely local as it concentrates its energy on the well-being only of its own citizens is outdated in the age of globalization. still, aristotle’s account of how theoretical knowledge (indirectly) benefits a city can be suggestive even at this late date. we live in an age in which work has roochnik 25 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 almost entirely supplanted leisure, in which expansion is the norm, in which (most likely) peace is no longer the telos of war.7 in our universities, “research,” indeed science itself, must be applicable in order to be counted as valuable (and hence worth funding). indeed, all intellectual activity is called upon to produce useful and measurable results. in these frantic times, the useless humanist, reading her books, crafting her essays, teaching her students, is the anomaly. but it is precisely in being anomalous that she illuminates the nature and limitation of all the other putatively more practical and apparently justifiable pursuits. they are for the sake of something other than themselves, while her work alone is for the sake of itself. c stanley fish comes close to being right about the value of the humanities. they “do” nothing and certainly cannot save us. despite the proliferation of “applied ethics” courses in american universities, they are unable to make either their students or their teachers more moral human beings. (in other words, after twenty-five years in this profession, i have come to the same conclusion that fish has in his forty-five: members of literature and philosophy departments are hardly among “the most generous, patient, good-hearted and honest people on earth.”) nonetheless, the humanities are not useless. precisely in being and celebrating their own lack of instrumentality, in defiantly proclaiming their own auto-telic nature, they serve a purpose: exhibiting a paradigm to a community that is preoccupied with more “practical” concerns. doing so hardly leads to immediate or specific benefits. reading shakespeare won’t solve global warming. but without the humanities, without the pursuit of what aristotle called theoretical knowledge, the city would be composed only of citizens who are constantly in pursuit of goods whose attainment leads only to further pursuit of more of the same. aristotle’s justification of theoretical knowledge, or philosophy, or by extension the humanities, is at best thin. still, he identifies the peculiar civic value of a philosopher. even if she wields no applied science and has an audience too small to become politically powerful, she nonetheless displays to her fellow citizens a fundamental human possibility: namely, that one can engage in an activity that is valuable in and of itself. this is a possibility worth taking seriously…and even funding. 26 the useful uselessness of the humanities © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 notes 1. in “aristotle’s defense of the theoretical life: comments on politics vii” (roochnik 2008), i argue in detail for the same position that i present here only in outline. 2. translations of aristotle are my own. the greek texts are the oxford editions of w.d. ross (1942). 3. for a representative example of how aristotle uses the word “honorable,” see metaphysics 981a31. 4. in my estimation theoretical knowledge also includes ethics and politics, but this is a controversial claim. 5. in the metaphysics this phrase is said to refer to “the essence of a being (1022a26). 6. nicomachean ethics 1177b5–6. 7. for an invigorating discussion of the role of leisure in culture, as well a lament for its disappearance, see pieper 1963. references kronman, anthony 2007 education’s end: why our colleges and universities have given up on the meaning of life. new haven, ct: yale university press. pieper, joseph 1963 leisure: the basis of culture. new york: random house. ross, w. d., ed. and trans. 1942 the student’s oxford aristotle. 6 vols. london: oxford university press. roochnik, david 2008 aristotle’s defense of the theoretical life: comments on politics vii. the review of metaphysic 61: 711–735. 09prusak.indd © equinox publishing ltd. 2008, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expositions 2.1 (2008) 103–109] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v2i1.103 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 notes, insights, and flashes arendt and the “banality” of evil: a note on neiman bernard g. prusak center for liberal education villanova university in her book evil in modern thought, susan neiman proposes that we may use the word “theodicy” in two senses. she writes: “theodicy, in the narrow sense, allows the believer to maintain faith in god in the face of the world’s evils. theodicy, in the broad sense, is any way of giving meaning to evil that helps us face despair” (neiman 2002, 239). neiman also writes that hannah arendt’s eichmann in jerusalem “is the best attempt at theodicy [that] postwar philosophy has produced” (neiman 2002, 300). here neiman uses the word “theodicy” in its second, “broad sense.” she proposes, that is, that we see arendt’s book as seeking to give meaning to evil and thus help us face despair. this claim—that eichmann in jerusalem is a work of theodicy—would perhaps have surprised and even displeased arendt, not only because of neiman’s extension of the word’s meaning beyond its etymology, and also not only because of arendt’s own apparent suspicion of theodicies in at least the traditional, etymological sense: arendt characterizes theodicies as “those strange justifications of god or of being which, ever since the seventeenth century, philosophers felt were needed to reconcile man’s mind to the world” (arendt 1978, 21). neiman’s claim that eichmann in jerusalem is a work of theodicy would perhaps have surprised and even displeased arendt because, among the many things that arendt claims her book is not, she lists, “finally and least of all, a theoretical treatise on the nature of evil” (arendt 1964, 285). it is true that she does not say that her book is not a work of theodicy. yet she insists that what she has written is no more and no less than a report on what she learned in observing eichmann’s trial in jerusalem—in her words, “the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/expo.v2i1.103 104 arendt and the “banality” of evil: a note on neiman © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 of evil,” namely, that the “remoteness from reality and...thoughtlessness [exhibited and exemplified by eichmann] can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts” that may be in the human heart (arendt 1964, 252, 285). neiman rejects arendt’s characterization of her book. according to neiman, arendt’s claim that her book is a work of journalism “underestimated the depth and force of her own work”; arendt was “disingenuous” in claiming that her book is “just a long piece of reporting” (neiman 2002, 274, 299). instead, neiman finds there a theory of the nature of evil and, to reiterate, a theodicy. to quote: to call evil banal is to offer not a definition of it but a theodicy. for it implies that the sources of evil are not mysterious or profound but fully within our grasp. if so, they do not infect the world at a depth that could make us despair of the world itself. like a fungus, they may devastate reality by laying waste to its surface. their roots, however, are shallow enough to pull up. (neiman 2002, 303) how, then, is arendt’s book a work of theodicy? on neiman’s reading, arendt seeks to save us from despair that the “sources” or “roots” of evil exceed our grasp. arendt does not seek to make evil appear meaningful by appeal to some vast cosmic plan; she seeks to orient us toward evil in a way that gives us hope. if we cannot simply rip evil out of ourselves and thus end its devastation, we can at least work, diligently and without reason to despair, to uproot it. neiman is surely correct that arendt’s book is of philosophical interest, but it is difficult to agree with neiman, and against arendt, that it is a treatise on evil. arendt acknowledges that there is philosophy in her book or at least behind it in a letter to gershom scholem replying to his criticism that the phrase “the banality of evil” is a mere “catchword” in need of analysis (arendt and scholem 1964, 53). her conception of evil may have shaped her controversial rendering of eichmann’s character.1 evil, arendt writes to scholem, “possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. it can overgrow and lay waste to the world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface.” neiman quotes only these first two sentences in her book, but arendt goes on: “it [evil] is ‘thought-defying’...because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated prusak 105 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 because there is nothing. that is its ‘banality’ ” (arendt and scholem 1964, 56; cited in neiman 2002, 301). neiman draws from this letter in claiming that arendt’s book is a work of theodicy. yet this quote, if taken in full, works against neiman’s interpretation. for arendt says here, not that evil has shallow roots—in neiman’s words, “shallow enough to pull up”—but that it has no roots. this is arendt’s point in likening evil to a fungus. having, like a fungus, no roots, evil defies thought. in gertrude stein’s now banal words, there is no there there: “nothing” for thought to comprehend. so, at least, arendt claims, consistent with the augustinian tradition she knew well.2 neiman supports her interpretation of “arendt’s project” by citing a letter from arendt to mary mccarthy about eichmann in jerusalem. in an article written in defense of arendt’s book, mccarthy had compared reading it to listening to “the final chorus of figaro or the messiah” (mccarthy 1964, 91), “both of which are concerned with redemption” (arendt and mccarthy 1995, 166). arendt replied: “[y]ou were the only reader to understand what otherwise i have never admitted—namely that i wrote this book in a curious state of euphoria.” she goes on to remark that, “ever since i did it, i feel—after twenty years [since the war]—light-hearted about the whole matter” (arendt and mccarthy 1995, 168). neiman considers this euphoria as reason to attribute to arendt the belief that, in neiman’s words, “[w]e may be at home in the world after all” (neiman 2002, 304). neiman seems to mean by this phrase that we do not need to have recourse to “supernatural forces, divine or demonic,” to account for the evil that we do; if we did need to have such recourse, the implication is that we would be alienated from the world. instead, as neiman reads arendt, evil is “naturalized”: it is shown to be the product of no more than “thoughtlessness.” arendt’s book then redeems the world by teaching that, “while natural processes are responsible for [evil], natural processes can be used to prevent it” (neiman 2002, 303). we can thereby believe the world to be basically good. for neiman, arendt’s euphoria can be accounted for only by reading eichmann in jerusalem as teaching that “the sources of evil are…fully within our grasp” because they are no more than “natural.” but this 106 arendt and the “banality” of evil: a note on neiman © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 explanation of arendt’s euphoria has no more basis than that neiman cannot think of any other explanation. it does not follow from the fact that arendt wrote eichmann in jerusalem in “a curious state of euphoria” that neiman’s interpretation of the lesson of this book is correct. admittedly, it is difficult to know what to make of arendt’s euphoria, a term that is used technically in psychology to refer to an exaggerated and by all appearances groundless feeling of well being. but it bears repeating that neiman invokes arendt’s euphoria to support a reading of arendt’s book that is otherwise without support. the passage by mccarthy that led arendt to call her friend “the only reader to understand what otherwise i have never admitted” does not support, moreover, neiman’s interpretation of arendt’s book. mccarthy writes in her article defending arendt: to me, eichmann in jerusalem, despite all the horrors in it, was morally exhilarating. i freely confess that it gave me joy and that i too heard a paean in it…a paean of transcendence, heavenly music, like that of the final chorus of figaro or the messiah. as in these choruses, a pardon or redemption of some sort was taking place. the reader “rose above” the terrible material of the trial or was borne aloft to survey it with his intelligence. no person was pardoned, but the whole experience was bought back, redeemed, as in the harrowing of hell. (mccarthy 1964, 91) like her article as a whole, this passage needs some clarification— mccarthy says here both that a pardon was taking place, and that no person was pardoned—but it does seem clear that she found the book “morally exhilarating” because arendt was able in it to rise above rage and confusion and to seek to make sense of an experience that might have remained senseless. as mccarthy writes in the next sentence after those quoted, “intelligence, mastering the incoherence of violence and suffering, gives it sense, i.e., form....” mccarthy does not write, however, that what made the book redemptive for her was that (as neiman claims) it showed evil to be “fully within our grasp” and “shallow enough to pull up.” instead, mccarthy goes on to write that “the plot and lesson were almost a godsend” to her: she read eichmann in jerusalem as teaching between the lines “that it was possible to behave well even in extreme circumstances,” a lesson that she took from the prusak 107 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 book’s accounts of “the jews who were saved” in denmark, bulgaria, and italy (mccarthy 1964, 91). for mccarthy, in sum, what made the book redemptive was not that it presented a “theodicy,” but that it attested to the resilience of the good. in any event, if it is true that, according to arendt, evil has no roots to be discovered, it is also true that her account of the banality of evil is not all that far from what kant says about radical evil, which neiman summarily dismisses as “extremely disappointing” (neiman 2002, 269). for kant, as henry allison has nicely remarked, “radical evil does not refer...to a particularly great or deeply rooted demonic evil. it refers rather to the root of all moral evil, whatever its extent,” namely, the propensity to subordinate the moral law to our self-love, to reverse the ethical order out of the perversity of the human heart (allison 1996, 170). for kant too, evil is then banal. according to kant, “man (even the most wicked) does not...repudiate the moral law in the manner of a rebel (renouncing obedience to it).” what he does instead is to “make the incentive of self-love and its inclinations the condition of obedience to the moral law,” which is the root of evil, whether he goes on to do evil or not (kant 2003, 44, 45; see also kant 1960, 33, 34). and what could be more commonplace and less original—more banal—than putting self-love before what we ought to do? yet the comparison with arendt can be pressed further. according to kant, “the ultimate subjective ground” for whether or not we subordinate the moral law to our self-love is “inscrutable to us” (kant 2003, 24; see also 1960, 17). for this choice lies in a free act of will, which it may be that only god can search out. before a person makes it his “maxim” to subordinate the moral law to his self-love, he will not be moved—he cannot be moved—by the incentives of self-love. before the person makes it his “maxim” to subordinate the moral law to his self-love, there is nothing to move him to subordinate the moral law— and so nothing can explain why a person chooses to give priority to the incentives of self-love. the incentives of self-love cannot explain it, for the incentives of self-love can operate on a person only after his choosing to give priority to these incentives. as emil fackenheim has put this point: “[i]f man chooses freely, either for or against the moral law, then there can be no higher determining principle. then each decision 108 arendt and the “banality” of evil: a note on neiman © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 of each man is a metaphysical ultimate; and whichever choice is made, it is an ultimate irrationality” (fackenheim 1954, 350). to be sure, we can say, as kant does, that moral evil comes from us and that we are responsible for it; but it seems that for kant we cannot say why we fall into moral evil. when we look, we find nothing there. so again evil is “thought-defying.” and if “[t]hat is its ‘banality,’ ” as arendt wrote to scholem, then arendt’s banality and kant’s seem finally to be importantly similar.3 for kant and arendt, evil is inexplicable not because it is so deep; evil is inexplicable because it is so shallow. notes 1. lionel abel, for example, asks “why [arendt] insists on regarding [eichmann] as merely a mediocre and comical individual” (abel 1963, 228–229). 2. see, for example, de libero arbitrio, book 2, §20 (augustine 1993, 69). 3. it should be noted that arendt also writes to scholem in her 1964 letter that “[i]t is indeed my opinion now that evil is never ‘radical’….” but she explains at the end of this sentence, and as quoted already, that what she means is that evil “possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension” (see arendt and scholem 1964, 56). her conception of evil does not then seem opposed to kant’s concept of “radical evil.” the contrast is rather with how she spoke of evil in the preface and “concluding remarks” of the original edition of the origins of totalitarianism (arendt 1951, ix, 433). arendt replaced the “concluding remarks” in subsequent editions and retained the preface only “in order to indicate the mood of those years” in which she first wrote the book (arendt 1966, viii.) in the first edition, arendt writes in the preface that “an absolute evil (absolute because it can no longer be deduced from humanly comprehensible motives)” appears in the final stages of totalitarianism, thus revealing “the truly radical nature of evil.” she writes in the “concluding remarks” that “[absolute evil] seems to be closely connected with the invention of a system in which all men are equally superfluous,” including even the “manipulators of this system,” who she believed “do not care if they themselves are alive or dead.” unfortunately, arendt does not explain the reasons for her change of mind. references abel, lionel 1963 the aesthetics of evil: hannah arendt, eichmann and the jews. partisan review 30(2): 211–230. prusak 109 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 allison, henry e. 1996 idealism and freedom: essays on kant’s theoretical and practical philosophy. cambridge: cambridge university press. arendt, hannah 1951 the origins of totalitarianism. new york: harcourt brace. 1964 eichmann in jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil. new york: penguin. 1966 the origins of totalitarianism. 3rd ed. new york: harcourt brace. 1978 willing. vol. 2 of the life of the mind. new york: harcourt brace jovanovich. arendt, hannah and mary mccarthy 1995 between friends: the correspondence of hannah arendt and mary mccarthy, 1949–1975. ed. carol brightman. new york: harcourt brace. arendt, hannah and gershom scholem 1964 “eichmann in jerusalem”: an exchange of letters between gershom scholem and hannah arendt. encounter 22: 51–56. augustine 1993 on free choice of the will. trans. thomas williams. indianapolis, in: hackett. fackenheim, emil l. 1954 kant and radical evil. university of toronto quarterly 23(4): 339–353. kant, immanuel 1960 religion within the limits of reason alone. trans. theodore m. greene and hoyt h. hudson. new york: harper and row. 2003 religion innerhalb der grenzen der bloßen vernunft. ed. bettina stangneth. hamburg: felix meiner. mccarthy, mary 1964 the hue and cry. partisan review 31(1): 82–94. neiman, susan 2002 evil in modern thought: an alternative history of philosophy. princeton, nj: princeton university press. © equinox publishing ltd. 2009, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expo. 3.2 (2009) 149–154] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v3i2.149 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 reforming graduate science education: start in the classroom johanna l. gutlerner harvard medical school in his new york times op-ed, mark taylor makes some radical suggestions for reforming graduate education. taylor’s suggestions include a restructuring of the graduate and undergraduate curricula to make it “cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural,” “abolish[ing] permanent departments … and creat[ing] problem-focused programs,” “expand[ing] the range of professional options for graduate students,” and imposing mandatory retirement and abolishing tenure in order to retain researchers and teachers who “continue to evolve and remain productive.” all of these reforms require one key element to make them work: high quality and creative teaching. unfortunately, great teaching is not a top priority in many graduate science programs, where the emphasis is instead on topnotch research and the big grant funding that it brings in. before dismantling departments and completely restructuring curricula, we need to make sure that we have great teachers and mentors who can engage, excite, and inspire students. so i present a different set of proposals from taylor’s. preparing experts in science pedagogy inspired classroom instruction and diligent mentoring equip students with the skills to think critically and design creative solutions to problems. however, university teaching in the sciences is of variable quality. in a study of why undergraduate students switch out of science majors, 90% of students who switched cited poor teaching as a common concern (seymour 1995, 200). this is not because of a lack of effort by researchers, but a lack of preparedness. most faculty members learn to teach on the job. teaching requirements for science graduate students are often minimal and do not afford a real opportunity to learn about pedagogy. other critical skills for future faculty, like mentoring, are also learned on the job. training our graduate students to be competent teachers, mentors, and managers will not only prepare future professors for these demands, but will also prepare graduate students for jobs outside of academia, as these are skills that improve performance in many different professional arenas. 150 overheard in the academy © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 excellence in teaching and mentoring requires faculty members dedicated to science teaching—people who will put as much thought and effort into their classroom as their laboratory. because so many of the current faculty were not trained for these skills and may not enjoy teaching, a solution is to create more positions for full-faculty scientist-teachers. creating such positions would free researchers up to spend more time managing their labs and so would lead to more grant money. these teaching specialists could also team up with science research faculty to create innovative courses that emphasize both cutting-edge research and pedagogy. grants are gradually becoming available for scholars of science education, so teaching faculty could be expected to bring in some of their own funding. these positions need to be developed, and there need to be postdoctoral fellowships where ph.d. bench scientists can gain the necessary skills to fill them. hiring teaching faculty would also bring progress in the use of new pedagogy. we all know that computerized slide presentation programs, like powerpoint, have become the standard format in the science lecture hall. yet educational research shows that students learn best when engaged in active learning and that passive formats like a traditional slide lecture leave most students disengaged after only fifteen minutes (mckeachie and svinicki, 2005). there are responsible ways of introducing new technology into the classroom, but this should always be done with an effort to assess the benefits to teaching and learning. creating courses available for distance learners is a necessity at the modern university, but designing effective curricula for courses where the students and professors are not even in the same classroom presents a whole new set of challenges. taylor suggests that different universities collaborate to teach courses, allowing universities to eliminate staff in a subject area and rely on faculty members from another institution to teach those classes via the internet. however, effective instruction in these cyber-classrooms requires educational specialists who can teach faculty to optimize the use of these educational technologies so that they actually result in a well-educated student. this requires rigorous research into the use and content-specific applications of these technologies and their effects on the quality of teaching and the improvement of student understanding. such rigorous research requires a path for ph.d.s to become further trained as educators and education researchers. whereas taylor suggests tying different universities together, it appears that science graduate students would benefit instead from training from other schools within the university. joint degree programs in science and education reforming graduate science education 151 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 would create a training path for scientist educators. such programs would not only prepare scholars for the demands of thoughtful and well-executed university teaching, but would also prepare ph.d.s to go on to teaching at other levels. the variable quality of science education in k-12 schools has been a pressing issue garnering national attention (committee on prospering in the global economy, 2007). although many science ph.d.s might like to go on to k-12 teaching, the hurdle of pursuing another expensive degree is difficult to overcome. business consulting is a popular career interest for new science ph.d.s, not only because of the salaries, but because the path is obvious. recruiters come to campus and make the opportunities known and clear. becoming an educator in the sciences, especially in k-12, where science and math teachers are in such high need, is a much murkier career path. preparing students for the job market taylor correctly claims that “most graduate students will never hold the kind of job for which they are being trained.” in the sciences, there are too many graduate students and too few academic positions. taylor’s proposal is to help prepare students for work in fields other than higher education. this fix sounds sensible enough, but how do we train graduate students for these other kinds of jobs? opportunities for science ph.d. candidates to seek another degree concurrently, such as an mba or m.a. in public health, would help prepare graduate students for diverse careers. many medical schools offer such joint degrees. these sorts of practical training opportunities should exist for science graduate students as well. many science ph.d.s are going on to diverse jobs, such as industry, biotechnology, engineering, patent law, business consulting, and teaching. these are not alternative careers; by numbers, the academic job is the alternative career. however, often it is a struggle for students to identify non-academic opportunities and figure out how to transition into them. in part, this is because many faculty members of graduate programs still regard careers outside of academic research as second best, the jobs for graduates who can’t hack the academic route of bench science research. it is therefore no wonder that many students feel reluctant to discuss these other options with their advisors. the culture of graduate departments in the sciences needs to change to reflect the reality of the job market. advisors need to be dynamic mentors and recognize their students’ particular strengths that will serve them in any future career. 152 overheard in the academy © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 strengthening interdisciplinary science education preparing scientists for the future also requires training flexible interdisciplinary scientists who will be able to respond not only to the changing marketplace, but to the changing world and the host of known and unknown problems that scientists will encounter in the future. anticipating taylor’s example of a program in water which would bring together scholars from diverse disciplines, graduate programs in the sciences are reforming to be more interdisciplinary. this is necessary because, as modern scientific knowledge is so broad, no one person can be an expert in all of it. programs in the mind and brain bring together neuroscientists, psychologists, computer programmers, and philosophers. programs in cancer biology bring together molecular biologists, virologists, structural biologists, cell biologists, and biophysicists. programs in synthetic biology bring together microbiologists, botanists, molecular biologists, engineers, and physicists. these types of consortia are those likeliest to come up with the solutions to the most pressing problems that we encounter today, and to those problems of the future that we can’t even imagine. what is typically missing from these interdisciplinary science programs, however, is a link to the humanities. with rare exception, these programs do not enlist faculty from political science, religion, or the languages. unfortunately, the sciences are often geographically displaced from the humanities on the university campus. the challenges of the future, like water shortages, climate change, pandemic illnesses, and mass extinctions, will require creative scholars to devise solutions. scientific knowledge alone won’t be enough to deal with the range of ethical, political, and economic issues, and it will take the synergy of people with diverse expertise to create novel solutions. the typical university-sponsored colloquia on these interdisciplinary problems encourage faculty from various departments to come together, yet often for just a day, after which any momentum is lost. yet dismantling traditional departments, as taylor suggests, seems like too radical a solution. instead, universities should first make a genuine effort to develop interdisciplinary courses that bring together faculty from diverse departments to teach approaches to modern problems. such courses would foster longer-term collaborations between faculty with far-ranging specialties and encourage students to broaden their thinking to fields outside of their own. yet effective instruction in these types of cross-disciplinary courses requires dedicated and creative teachers willing to put in the time and energy to learn new material, coordinate with faculty outside of their discipline, and create effective new curricula. reforming graduate science education 153 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 unlike in the european schools that many modern american universities were modeled after, our students are not tracked for science before university. moreover, most undergraduate science majors in the u.s. take a smattering of science classes in biology, chemistry, and physics, in addition to classes in their specific major. the upshot is that incoming science graduate students have diverse backgrounds with very varied knowledge of the basic sciences, and often their prior success in the lab is more important in the admission decision than their undergraduate coursework. nonetheless, the quality and amount of preliminary course work that is required of incoming graduate students in the sciences vary wildly among programs. the nature of the problems that new scientists will face means, however, that they need some fluency in diverse scientific disciplines. therefore, programs should offer core coursework to make sure that all graduate students have some graduate-level interdisciplinary science education before specializing in their small subfield. offering such courses would require bringing together experts in various fields who may not be well versed in pedagogy. it makes sense to think, then, that faculty specializing in the art and research of teaching and learning should be called upon to help facilitate the development of these courses. retaining excellent teachers and mentors taylor suggests abolishing tenure to encourage researchers and teachers to continue to “evolve and remain productive.” whether tenure is retained or replaced by multi-year contracts, retention decisions should seriously take into account the teaching and mentoring contributions of teaching and research faculty members. it is a myth that a course can be perfected and then presented each year without modifications. content and students change, and the instruction and curriculum must adapt with them; this is especially true in the sciences. for faculty members to be consistently excellent teachers requires constant work and attention. although teaching is often critical for tenure decisions at smaller colleges, many big universities do not really consider teaching in science faculty tenure decisions. teaching excellence might be one category in the tenure decisions, but most tenure committee members will readily admit that profitable research trumps bad teaching any day. having faculty lines for scientist-teachers would allow for retention decisions to be made on excellence in teaching or research. universities are centers for the creation of new knowledge, and much of their support comes from grants; therefore the emphasis on high-quality fundable research makes sense. however, universities are not just research 154 overheard in the academy © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 institutes; they are educational institutions. they have a duty to prepare their students with the intellectual and practical skills that will lead to success in research and in their careers. employment in the present and future job market requires more specialized training, and thus the university is not at risk of losing its consumers. for universities to remain competitive requires that they educate well-prepared graduates. this means that exceptional teaching and mentoring need to be as much a priority as high quality research. in sum, taylor suggests that universities restructure by eliminating departments in favor of interdisciplinary programs, increasing collaboration between universities in order to teach more classes with less staff, increasing professional development programming for graduate students to better prepare them for the job market, and eliminating tenure in favor of multi-year contracts to retain productive teachers and researchers. these are undoubtedly a bold collection of structural reforms. yet in graduate science education, it is just as bold to focus on reforming the basics: outstanding teaching and mentoring. references committee on prospering in the global economy of the 21st century: an agenda for american science and technology, national academy of sciences, national academy of engineering, institute of medicine 2007 rising above the gathering storm: energizing and employing america for a brighter economic future. washington, dc: the national academies press. mckeachie, wilbert j. and marilla svinicki 2005 mckeachie’s teaching tips: strategies, research, and theory for college and university teachers, 12th ed. belmont, california: wadsworth publishing. seymour, elaine 1995 guest comment: why undergraduates leave the sciences. american journal of physics 63(3): 199–202. doi:10.1119/1.17954 http://dx.doi.org/10.1119/1.17954 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expositions 1.2 (2007) 141–172] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v1i2.141 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 the piety of socrates and maimonides: doing god’s work on earth roslyn weiss lehigh university socrates and maimonides are paragons of piety. they devote their lives to divine service, notwithstanding their perception that an unbridgeable chasm separates the divine from the human. at great personal cost they take on god’s tasks—that is, the tasks that god would do if only he weren’t god. for socrates, that work is to persuade people of the great value of their souls and consequently of the importance of justice and truth. for maimonides, it is to encourage meticulous observance of jewish law in its ritual and moral aspects, and to banish false and noxious views of god from the beliefs of even ordinary people. neither socrates nor maimonides is content to foster only his own intellectual perfection—and therein lies their piety. what might it mean for a human being to be pious if he does not hold a conventional conception of god—indeed, if he has no firm belief in god at all? the socrates of plato’s dialogues is, for all his god-talk, no ordinary believer. and maimonides, his protestations of orthodoxy notwithstanding, believes in a god who neither hears nor sees, neither rewards nor punishes, neither judges nor forgives. yet, these two men are in their way paragons of piety. for each serves god by serving his fellow man. both socrates and maimonides devote themselves to the care of others, selflessly and at no small cost to themselves. socrates, as he tells us in the apology (31b), goes to each athenian privately, “as a father or an older brother might do,” persuading him to care for virtue, all the while making himself so hated that he is indicted, convicted, and executed.1 maimonides, who longs to be with god, to meditate upon him, to know him, to love him with the full force of his intellect, nevertheless composes voluminous works not for himself but for those 142 the piety of socrates and maimonides © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 who need his guidance: “a man endowed with knowledge,” he says, “does not set anything down for himself in order to teach himself what he already knows” (guide of the perplexed 2.37: 375).2 it would seem that what motivates both socrates and maimonides to care for the souls of others at great personal cost is a kind of piety. for, on the one hand, helping others seems to go beyond the call of justice: what justice ostensibly requires of people is that they refrain from harming others (see ap. 37b–c, 41d–e; crito 49a–e; rep. 1.335a–e).3 yet, on the other hand, it would be difficult to think of a more fruitful way to serve god than by serving man. for if there is a god, what does he need? what could we human beings give him that would be a fair exchange for all the bounties we enjoy? these are questions that occupy the last part of plato’s euthyphro. but is it euthyphro the piety expert, the man who is privy to amazing stories about the gods, who can teach us how to serve them? is it he who can say what kind of service (hupēretikē) to the gods holiness is? is it he who can specify the work that men assist the gods in accomplishing on earth? euthyphro is unable to name that work because it has no place in his narrowly self-centered conception of piety: the only work that is of concern to him is that of pleasing the gods in hopes of securing their favor. it is socrates who can readily identify the work that is holiness, for this work is none other than the divine service that occupies him daily: the admonishment, examination, and exhortation of his fellow men to care for truth, justice, and the condition of their souls. maimonides is no different. he, too, labors for the whole of his life to help others come to embrace correct beliefs about god and to observe the torah’s laws properly. he endures criticisms from all sides even as he persists in serving as advisor on matters of jewish practice. why? what is it that motivates these two men, and how is that motivation to be construed as a pious one? i shall argue that what both socrates and maimonides realize is that there is no god who can do on earth the work that men can do. who but men can encourage other men to live worthy lives? who but men will see and hear, reward and punish, judge and forgive? if god has not “forsaken the earth” (ezek. 9:9), it is only because there are huroslyn weiss 143 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 man beings to do “in the earth” (jer. 9:23) what god cannot do himself. whether there is no god or whether there is a self-contained and therefore unengaged god, his work must be done. in helping others, then, the pious man does not imitate god; on the contrary, the pious man extends god’s reach by becoming his outstretched arm. does socrates believe in gods? two charges are brought against socrates: (1) that he corrupts the young, and (2) that he is impious—specifically, that he does not believe in the gods of the city but in novel daimonic things (ap. 24b9–c1). he can defend himself only indirectly against the second charge, since he cannot (without outright lying) affirm his belief in traditional greek gods. his strategy takes two tacks. one tack, the more evident of the two, involves his provoking his accuser meletus into exaggerating the first part of the impiety charge—that socrates does not believe in the gods of the city—to one of full-blown atheism, and then to use the second part of the charge—that socrates believes in novel daimonic things—to refute the newly inflated first part: if a daimon is a god or a child of a god, then how can socrates believe in daimons yet not in gods? this first argument is largely ad hominem, exposing meletus as someone who has given but scant thought to the grave charges he brings. it no doubt does little to convince the jurors that socrates is innocent. it is the second tack, the more subtle one, that constitutes the positive case socrates makes for his claim of innocence. this second tack is itself a dual one. it consists, first, of socrates’ relentless citing throughout his trial (that is, throughout plato’s fictionalized account of his trial in the apology) of “the god”—the god at delphi who is witness to his “wisdom;” the god whose mission he is carrying out; the god to whom he is so devoted that he lives in dire poverty; the god who stationed him, ordering him to philosophize and to examine himself and others; the god whom he obeys over the men of athens; the god whom he serves and whose orders he follows; the god whose gift to athens he is; the god who set him upon the city as a gadfly upon a horse; the god who ordered him through oracles and dreams to practice philosophy; the gods before whom the judges have sworn an oath; the god behind 144 the piety of socrates and maimonides © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 the daimonion, socrates’ divine sign; the gods who are not without care for a good man’s troubles; the god who alone knows whether it is better to live or die. to be sure, this rhetorical trope was devised to counteract the impression, seared into the athenian consciousness by publicly staged caricature as well as by perniciously pervasive gossip, of socrates as an impious man. at the same time, however, it presents socrates’ devotion to the god as inextricably interwoven with his devotion to his fellow man. second, socrates points to his personal justice. socrates is pious, not because he receives and obeys private communications from a supernatural source but because, even at the cost of his life, he does what is right. he will not be party to an illegal mass trial; he will not arrest leon of salamis and condemn him to death. socrates will not even behave in court as other men do, begging and crying and parading his children before the jurors. his refusal to subvert justice in this way and to involve the jurors in such subversion is his proof that he believes in gods. but he believes, as he says, “as none of my accusers does” (ap. 35d7). socratic piety is far removed from its conventional counterpart. the socratic conception of piety has, then, two components. on the one hand, it requires that one be just or refuse to commit injustice. this is piety’s necessary condition, its sine qua non. it is also its essentially negative aspect. it is because piety has this negative aspect that socrates believes that those judges who would pervert justice by doling out favors to defendants whose emotional pleas they find gratifying cannot be pious, no matter how orthodox their views of the gods or how punctilious their ritual practice. on the other hand, however, piety goes beyond justice by requiring service to the god through helping others: this is its positive aspect. in the euthyphro, where socrates explicitly distinguishes piety from justice, socrates encourages his interlocutor to think of piety in terms of the service human beings might render to the gods, the work with which they might promote the gods’ agenda—on earth. on both counts, socrates qualifies as pious. there can be no doubt that he regards himself as just. when he says, for example, that he roslyn weiss 145 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 never did injustice to anyone and therefore will not do it to himself (ap. 37b), or that if he is brought before a court, “some base man will be my prosecutor—for no worthwhile person would prosecute a human being who does no injustice” (gorg. 521d), it is his justness to which he refers. but he clearly also sees himself as going beyond the strict demands of justice. for when he talks about tending to the souls of others and fighting for the cause of justice (justice being, in his view, the sole guarantor of genuine human happiness), he almost invariably makes reference to his serving the gods.4 what sort of god does socrates believe in? the god of whom socrates speaks in the apology is surely not simply one of the many gods whose existence meletus suspects him of denying. although this god is at first assimilated to the god of the oracle at delphi, apollo is never mentioned by name and, as the dialogue progresses, all association between socrates’ god and a god of known identity dissolves. socrates’ god sends him to athens out of concern for athenian souls; the task to which the god assigns socrates is one of exhorting his fellow citizens to care for virtue and truth, disabusing them of their false conceit of wisdom, and encouraging them to engage in self-examination. socrates’ god is, then, one who promotes—through socrates—justice and philosophy. moreover, if to obey the god is to practice philosophy, then to obey the god is to guide one’s conduct by one’s own reasoned determination of what is most just. a god who commands men to philosophize does not serve as an alternative or even as a supplement to human reason as a guide to moral decision-making; instead, such a god mandates that human reason is to be one’s guide.5 insofar as socrates’ god demands of men that they live philosophically, and insofar as the station at which the god places socrates is philosophy, it follows that to do as the god demands is to think for oneself. one can reasonably say, then, that socrates’ god renders himself superfluous. what kind of god does maimonides believe in? maimonides, nearly all agree, believes in an arabic aristotelian god.6 the agreement, however, ends there. for in the view of many maimonidean scholars, maimonides, at the same time that he embraces an 146 the piety of socrates and maimonides © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 aristotelian god, also acknowledges a god who created the world, who intervenes in the natural order by way of miracles, who bestows prophecy—or at least can on occasion withhold it (see guide 2.32)— and whose providence extends to his human creatures. my strong suspicion, however, is that maimonides’ god did not create the world (although he is the eternal cause of the eternal universe), does not perform miracles, does not bestow or withhold prophecy, and is not providential with respect to individual human beings. in other words, i suspect that maimonides’ views are identical with those he attributes to aristotle in the guide. not surprisingly, maimonides finds it necessary to conceal views that would strike many in the jewish world as heretical—indeed, maimonides labels as heretical several of the opinions he very likely secretly endorses 7—but he provides enough hints to make it known that his true sympathies lie with aristotle. the only significant difference—and it is certainly a most important one—between maimonides’ view and aristotle’s is that maimonides regards the aristotelian god as one supremely worthy of worship and devotion. i begin with several methodological points. first, maimonides makes it clear in the introduction to the guide of the perplexed (11) that the torah is not to be read literally except with respect to its precepts, the affirmative and negative directives that constitute the 613 biblical commandments. second, maimonides disparages arguments that are designed to ensure a desired conclusion; he regards as worthwhile only those arguments that proceed from the way things are observed to be—that is, not from how one might wish they are but from how they are. third, maimonides does not mean everything he says. with regard to the first point, maimonides sees the extra-legal material in the torah as “parables.” the final metaphor he cites (introduction: 11–12) to capture the relationship between the external or literal meaning of the text and its inner, deeper meaning is the one he quotes approvingly from proverbs 11.25: “a word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in settings of silver filigree.” 8 maimonides’ praise of this final metaphor makes it appear as if he values highly the literal meaning of the text, which, as he goes on to roslyn weiss 147 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 say, is as beautiful as silver. moreover, his contention that the torah’s literal sense contains within itself something that “indicates to someone considering it what is to be found in its internal meaning” suggests that he ascribes to the torah’s literal sense not only intrinsic value (its beauty) but instrumental value as well: not only are the settings of silver filigree beautiful in their own right but they point beyond themselves to the golden apples within. as maimonides proceeds, however, he remarks that when one looks at the apple from afar or without devoting to it perfect attention, one thinks it is made of silver; only someone who has a sharp eye and who devotes to the apple his full attention sees what is inside the silver filigree, namely, an apple of gold. the clear implication of maimonides’ words is that the literal text actually deceives those who do not have keen vision, hiding the text’s real meaning. we note, moreover, that the filigree is in fact of no help to anyone in discovering the golden apple within: the only way to see the golden apple is to disregard the filigree, to look not at it but through its apertures. how, then, can it be supposed that the torah’s literal text helps one to penetrate through to the torah’s truths? if the literal meaning of the torah’s text is not after all useful for discerning the torah’s true meaning, why does maimonides assign to it the value of silver? does he not indicate thereby that the literal text has considerable intrinsic value, even if not quite the same value as the inner truth it conceals? indeed, he does. the value the literal text has is, as he says, “political”: it enhances human social and political associations and improves moral character (12). it is these political benefits that make the literal sense of the torah beautiful in its own way, as beautiful as silver.9 with respect to truth, however, the silver casing has no real worth; only the golden apple is beautiful. twice in the introduction (6, 14), maimonides says that it is not necessary to understand the meaning of the torah’s “parables,” that is, of the torah’s literal stories and accounts; all that one need do is recognize that the parables are parables. simply knowing that the literal accounts in the torah are parables is, maimonides says, like having a screen removed between the eye and a visible 148 the piety of socrates and maimonides © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 thing. because the literal meaning hinders the apprehension of truth, it is a screen to be removed. from the point of view of truth, it is not only useless but obstructive.10 the second methodological point, developed by maimonides at considerable length in guide 1.71, suggests that a position should not be adopted simply in order to avoid an awkward or even blasphemous truth. maimonides berates those who “did not conform in their premises to the appearance of that which exists, but considered how being ought to be in order that it should furnish a proof for the correctness of a particular opinion, or at least should not refute it” (178). he also quotes approvingly the following statement by themistius: “that which exists does not conform to the various opinions, but rather the correct opinions conform to that which exists” (179). third, maimonides exercises great caution in determining what to say and what to suppress, apparently taking to heart the sage avtalyon’s admonition to his colleagues: “sages, mind your words!” (mishnah avot 2005 [hereafter avot] 1.3).11 in his commentary to sanhedrin 10 (see maimonides 1981), maimonides identifies the target of this warning as antigonos ish sokho, who famously said: “do not be like servants who serve the master for the sake of reward; rather be like servants who serve the master not for the sake of reward” (avot 1.11). maimonides exhibits here his sensitivity to the ill-advisedness of telling the masses things they are neither intellectually nor spiritually prepared to hear: could it not happen that, as a consequence of their being told that they should worship god not for the sake of reward, they would cease to worship god altogether?12 maimonides emphasizes in his introduction to the guide that not every truth may be taught to everyone. he thus warns the reader that his text will proceed by “revealing and concealing” (6–7, 18): on occasion he will deliberately contradict himself (20); also, his views will not be understood correctly until all the statements he makes on a given topic (often only in what he calls “chapter headings”) are gathered together from all the scattered places where he discusses it (6). moreover, it is clear that maimonides espouses views to which he does not subscribe. these are views that he characterizes much later on in roslyn weiss 149 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 the guide, at 3.28, as necessary though not true.13 it seems safe to say, then, that maimonides does not always mean what he says. for that reason one has to be inordinately cautious and patient before concluding that one has discerned maimonides’ position. let us consider briefly two issues—creation and divine providence—where maimonides denies vociferously that he shares the aristotelian view, but where many have suspected that he is merely concealing his agreement with it. in both cases i shall have recourse to one or more of the methodological points just discussed. in guide 2.25 maimonides proclaims and defends his belief that the world was created (see also: 1.71, 2.6, 2.13, 3.10).14 there are, however, many reasons—two of which strike me as absolutely decisive—to doubt the sincerity of maimonides’ claim. first, maimonides argues that, in the absence of a demonstration to the contrary, the words of the torah are to be taken literally. yet, as we have seen, maimonides supposes that the torah is not to be read literally except with respect to matters of law (introduction: 11; also: 2.17: 298, 2.27: 333); much of the rest of it is, as he says, a parable.15 indeed, he says explicitly that the creation story (which he calls “the account of the beginning”) is a parable (introduction: 7, 9). second—and here, too, only in the absence of a demonstration—he would have us prefer the creation view on the grounds that the aristotelian eternity view threatens the very foundations of the torah. yet, as we have seen, maimonides rails (in 1.71) against those who argue tendentiously, having their conclusion in hand before their argument begins.16 for maimonides no view that is true threatens the foundations of the torah. since the torah, too, is true, its deeper view necessarily concurs with philosophical truth: one has only to interpret the torah correctly—that is, figuratively—in order to disclose that truth. indeed, were it not for philosophical truth, one would hardly know how to begin to interpret scripture correctly, how to discern its hidden truths. for the secrets of the torah, its golden apples, are none other than the truths of philosophy, the truths that aristotle (as maimonides understood him) attained by the light of reason. which “foundation of the torah” does an eternal universe threaten? it threatens the possibility of miracles. and what is so important about 150 the piety of socrates and maimonides © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 miracles? that they sustain our hopes and fears (2.25: 328). without creation there can be no miracles, and without miracles, there can be nothing to hope for or to fear. maimonides believes, of course, that the philosopher, the superior human being, lives beyond hope and fear (see his code, laws concerning repentance, 10.1, 10.3). he believes, too, that abraham, in being prepared to sacrifice his son isaac, acts out of love, “without hope of reward or fear of punishment, and [in the recognition] that love and fear of god is alone the right motivation for action” (guide 3.24).17 it is only the masses who require hope and fear in order to conduct themselves properly—indeed maimonides explicitly permits them to worship god out of hope and fear even though this is hardly ideal (code, laws concerning repentance, 10.5)—and so it is only they who need miracles and only they who need creation. creation is the silver filigree that conceals the golden apple of the universe’s eternity. it is silver because it sustains a belief that enhances the moral, social, and political life of ordinary people; but it is not gold—it is not true.18 if we turn to providence, here, too, we find maimonides distancing himself from the aristotelian position according to which divine providence keeps the world-order as it is, preserving both the permanent heavenly spheres and the permanent individuals in them, as well as the various species on earth, but playing no role in the lives of impermanent individuals within species—whether plant, animal, or human (guide 3.17)—beyond ensuring that they have what they need to thrive. all else, according to maimonides’ reading of aristotle, is left to chance. in this matter, too, there is reason to suspect that maimonides is an aristotelian. first, maimonides credits aristotle with following “what is manifest in the nature of that which exists” (3.17: 468) and, second, as maimonides progresses from guide 3.17 to 3.18 to 3.51, he moves increasingly further from the position he designates “our opinion,” or the opinion of the torah, and increasingly closer to aristotle’s.19 the torah’s position emphasizes desert: god rewards goodness and punishes sin, so that when a human being—though not an animal or plant—prospers or suffers harm it is because he or she has done right or done wrong. the clear implication of the torah’s position is that roslyn weiss 151 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 what sets human beings apart from plants and animals is free will, and for that reason divine providence in the form of reward and punishment devolves only on human beings. as the discussion continues, maimonides preserves the connection between divine providence and desert, but subtly replaces free will with intellect as the distinguishing mark of human beings. what, however, has greater intelligence to do with desert, and hence with divine providence? one begins to suspect that desert has already fallen by the wayside, or will do so imminently. and indeed, by the time maimonides gets to 3.51, divine providence has come to depend completely on the intellect or, more precisely, on the extent to which a human being’s intellect is absorbed in god. remarkably, when a human being ceases to be absorbed in god, even momentarily, he is, maimonides says, subject to chance—anything might befall him (see 3.18: 476, and especially 3.51: 625–26).20 but why is it that the person absorbed in god suffers no ill? is it that god protects him? if god protects the man of superior intellect, why would he neglect the morally righteous? the answer is clear. all people, like all plants and animals, are, on the individual level, subject to chance. it is not as if god “looks after” anyone.21 but, the person who is absorbed in god is nevertheless invulnerable to the “bad” things that befall him, because he is oblivious to them. his intellect is “with god” and so he feels no pain; he suffers neither hunger nor thirst; he experiences no loss. it is not that things of that kind do not happen to him; it is that they do not affect him. he loses awareness of his body and so is not susceptible to the harms that afflict it. as soon as he becomes once again conscious of his body he is no less immune to pain and suffering than anyone else.22 moses could go without food or water for forty days when he ascended mt. sinai to receive the tablets of the law (guide 3.51: 620)—but surely could not do so just before or after. it was his thorough absorption in god that made him not feel the bodily deprivations that he endured.23 this view, let us note, is utterly aristotelian. for one of the two features of the life of moral virtue that, according to aristotle, disqualify it from being the very best life is that the morally virtuous are susceptible to misfortune.24 but isn’t everyone vulnerable to misfortune? for 152 the piety of socrates and maimonides © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 aristotle, the philosopher is not—and for that reason (among many others) the life of contemplation is the best and happiest life. he who lives the contemplative life is, aristotle believes, immune to troubles, not because terrible things cannot happen to their bodies, but because they transcend their composite nature and live as though immortal (en 10.6.8).25 of course, for both aristotle and maimonides the philosopher only intermittently reaches the heights of contemplation. he does not—cannot—absolutely transcend his human condition while alive. it is for that reason that aristotle says that we should live in accordance with the divine element in us only “as much as possible” (en 10.7.8), and maimonides cites approvingly elihu’s interpretation of job’s situation, namely, that any divine providence that human beings enjoy is necessarily short-lived.26 no human being is immune to harm because no human being transcends his humanness indefinitely. interestingly, as socrates sees it, it is moral virtue that acts as a prophylactic against suffering. he asserts in the apology (30c) that “no harm can come to a good man,” that is, to a man who is morally upright.27 he believes that a man can will himself to identify with his soul. so long, then, as a man preserves his soul in pristine condition, all bad things that happen affect his body alone—not him. aristotle, who believes that only intellect raises the human being to the level at which he transcends his body, mocks socrates’ view, saying that no one could profess it save “for the sake of maintaining a paradox.”28 piety as service piety, in socrates’ own conception of it (ap. 30a–b), is the service he provides to the god by examining others, showing them they are not wise, and exhorting them to virtue. in the absence of any firm conviction that such a being as the god exists 29—as we saw, socrates’ god is the prop upon which he hangs his mission to philosophize—what does it mean to socrates to “serve the god”? there are three components to socrates’ pious service: (1) humility (his awareness that he does not now know—and will never know—the most important things [ap. 21b]); (2) his trust that there are, nevertheless, more important things than money, reputation, pleasure, and roslyn weiss 153 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 family (ap. 29d–e, 30b; crito 48c)—the merely human things; and (3) his sense of what the god would want if there were a god, namely, that human beings be just and virtuous (ap. 30a–b). socrates is alarmed by what he sees around him: the corruption in politics and the pervasive competitive spirit leading to the shameless embrace of injustice and a disdain for the just man as a fool. the wild popularity of the sophists and rhetoricians of his day convinces him that the time to “fight for justice” (ap. 32a1) is now. and so, socrates serves the god. neglecting his own needs, incurring hatred as he goes, the prophetic figure socrates ventures out into the marketplace to compel his fellow citizens to confront their ignoble ways. if there were a god, he would surely wish to cultivate justice and righteousness among men. but even if there were a god, the divine work would fall to human beings. maimonides, too, is keenly aware of the great need his people have for religious leadership. the time during which he lived was, on the one hand, one in which jews suffered religious persecution and, on the other, one in which they were exposed to the influence of philosophy and science. whereas maimonides applauds the study of philosophy and science,30 he fears that it might result in the abandonment by the educated of religious observance (guide, introduction: 5). and he was singularly unimpressed by the quality of the jewish religious leadership of his time: he witnessed the unreflective acceptance by the leaders—no less than by the laity—of crude religious views, as well as their widespread trust in the efficacy of vain and foolish superstitious rites. in the introduction to his code maimonides articulates the source of his concern and his response to it as follows: at this time inordinate sufferings befell us and the urgency of the moment pressed upon us all. the wisdom of our wise men and the intelligence of our intelligent men was hidden from us. . . . on these grounds, i, moses the son of maimon the sephardi, put my trust in the rock, may he be blessed, [and compiled] this work to serve as a compendium of the entire oral law. . . . i have entitled this work mishneh torah (“a second torah”), so that a person who reads the written torah first and then reads this work will know the entire oral law and will not find it necessary to read any other of the books in between. 154 the piety of socrates and maimonides © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 and in his introduction to the guide (16) maimonides justifies his writing a book that contains secrets of the torah that one is not permitted to discuss openly or publicly by pointing to the exigency of the times. he quotes ps. 119.126: “it is time to act for the lord; they have made void thy torah.” what motivates maimonides to devote himself to the enlightenment of others? like socrates, maimonides is aware of the desperate situation of his people. yet, does the mere recognition of the wretched state of one’s people necessarily lead one to care for them? maimonides, in seeking to address this question, provides in the guide a remarkable and illuminating analysis of what it is that impels some men to go beyond concern for their own personal perfection to concern for the moral and intellectual perfection of others. in his discussion of prophecy in guide 2.37, maimonides distingishes three classes of men: (1) those in whom the divine intellectual overflow reaches only the rational faculty—these are men of speculation; (2) those in whom it reaches both the rational and the imaginative faculties—these are prophets; and (3) those in whom it reaches only the imaginative faculty—these are legislators, soothsayers, augurs, and dreamers of veridical dreams. maimonides further subdivides each of the first two classes. in each, the quantity of the divine overflow either may be such as to render the individual perfect but to have no further effect, or it may be such that the measure “overflows from rendering him perfect toward rendering others perfect” (375). note that it is not by quantity of divine overflow that prophets are distinguished from men of speculation. among both prophets and men of speculation there are those who receive more than the amount of divine overflow needed for their own perfection and those who receive just enough. even a prophet, then, need not be capable of bringing his prophecy to the people. according to maimonides those men of speculation who do have the surfeit of overflow are “moved of necessity” or “compelled” “to compose works and to teach.” a prophet in this condition will “address a call to the people, teach them, and let his own perfection overflow toward them.” roslyn weiss 155 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 one aspect of this maimonidean account remains puzzling and unsatisfying: why should additional divine intellectual overflow motivate, compel, or create a desire in the one who experiences it to share it with others? to be sure, extra overflow would account for an individual’s ability to do more than perfect himself, but why would he “of necessity” do so? a man might have far more money than he needs for his own sustenance, and so would surely be capable of helping others, but is there anything in the sheer fact of having more than one needs that moves someone to share his bounty? interestingly, in guide 2.11 maimonides compares the overflow that flows from god onto the separate intellects and from them onto the active intellect to the way in which the overabundance of wealth that a very rich man has devolves on a second man and on a third: it is as if you said, by way of example, that there is an individual who has wealth sufficing only for his own necessities, no residue being left over from it from which someone else might receive a benefit; and that there is another individual who has enough wealth for a residue to be left over from it for the enrichment of many people, so that this one may give a measure of it to another individual through which this second would also become rich, while a residue is left over from it that suffices for the enrichment of a third individual. (275) in this analogy, although the man who possesses excess wealth has enough money for it to flow from him to a second and then on to a third, there is no implication that the first man will want to, be moved to, or, a fortiori, feel compelled to, share his wealth with the second and third. indeed, maimonides acknowledges in his code, laws concerning moral conduct 1.1, that there is “one type of individual who is so greedy that all the money in the world would not satisfy him. of him it is said: ‘for one who loves silver, no amount of silver will suffice’ (eccles. 5.9).” just as maimonides surely recognizes that simply having more than one needs does not in itself create the desire to part with the surplus, he clearly must also see that men of speculation who write books and teach, and prophets who address a call to the people and seek to lead them to perfection, are moved by something other than surplus intel156 the piety of socrates and maimonides © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 lect. what is true of god, namely, that his excess intellect simply spills over from him down the chain of intellects to the active intellect, is not true of human beings who must purposefully choose to direct their excess intellect to others. composing works and teaching and addressing a call and leading people to perfection does not just happen by itself. what is it, then, that causes some men of speculation, but not others who are equally able, to compose written works? what is it that inspires some prophets but not others—even if they are equally perfect in intellect and imagination—to reach out to the people? if generosity of spirit is what induces one abundantly wealthy man to share his wealth while another hoards his, is it not piety that motivates one intellectually able man to act on his ability to perfect others while another does nothing? individuals who act make the choice to expend the requisite effort to extend their own perfection to others. at times, their involvement with others even ends up costing them their lives. although maimonides says that it is “this divine overflow” that is responsible for “moving them and by no means letting them be quiet, even if they met with great misfortunes” (375), it is evident that this overflow alone could not so move them. the motivation to help others would have to come from within. maimonides quotes jer. 8.9, where jeremiah confesses that after suffering reproach and derision all day, he made up his mind not to continue to speak in god’s name—but he could not stick to his resolve: “there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and i weary myself to hold it in, but cannot.” this burning fire is not intellectual overflow that of itself spills out of jeremiah and onto others; it is, instead, a passion to serve god that jeremiah discovers within himself and which he cannot quell. socrates and maimonides, too, though perhaps without jeremiah’s burning passion, are not content to perfect themselves. they serve god by seeking to perfect their fellow men. maimonides singles out for special recognition four men who devote their lives to others. in 3.51 he describes the uniqueness of moses and of the patriarchs, abraham, isaac, and jacob. the first distinguishing characteristic of these men is that they have their intellects constantly roslyn weiss 157 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 in god’s presence even as they conduct, “with their limbs only,” their worldly pursuits (624).31 but the second mark that sets these four men apart is that in all these actions their end was to come near to him, may he be exalted; and how near! for the end of their efforts during their life was to bring into being a religious community that would know and worship god . . . to spread the doctrine of the unity of the name in the world and to guide people to love him, may he be exalted. (624)32 the implication of maimonides’ words is that the closeness to god that these men attained prompted them to direct their divine overflow toward others, to bring others to the perfection they enjoyed. although maimonides does not call their activity hasidut, the hebrew term he uses for “piety” (even in those of his works composed in arabic), he does call it “pure worship of great import.” and what he describes by this expression is the very practice to which socrates alludes, as we have seen, in defending himself against the charge of impiety. it is in this passage that maimonides calls attention to the purity of his own divine worship. for, rather strikingly, he uses his discussion of moses and the patriarchs as an opportunity to reflect upon his own situation. he laments not that the guidance that would lead one to the attainment of the rank achieved by these men eludes all others, but rather that it eludes, as he puts it, “someone like myself ” (624).33 the highest rank that one may aspire to attain through training, he says, is the rank that is one step below that of moses and the patriarchs. it is, then, only to this second rank that maimonides thinks “someone like myself ” might aspire. it is evident that maimonides means to reveal in this context one aspect of his self-understanding. for if his aim were only to differentiate the level of closeness to god attained by moses, abraham, isaac, and jacob from that attainable by other men, a general statement would have sufficed; he need not have said, “someone like myself.” he mentions himself because he wishes to convey to his readers that although he is not able to achieve the rank of these four men—the rank at which one is able to tend to worldly affairs “with one’s limbs only”—he is nevertheless in the same business as they. maimonides may not be able, 158 the piety of socrates and maimonides © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 as moses and the patriarchs are, to concentrate his thoughts exclusively on god regardless of what he is doing, instead being able to do so only when he is at leisure. but in those rare and precious moments when he is at leisure, the way in which he worships god, attaches himself to god, and basks in god’s presence is by composing books—for others. imitatio dei toward the close of the guide, at the end of its final chapter, 3.54, maimonides proclaims that once an individual has achieved the apprehension of god and knowledge of “his providence extending over his creatures as manifested in the act of bringing them into being and in their governance as it is,” he “will always have in view loving-kindness, righteousness, and judgment, through assimilation to his actions, may he be exalted” (638). is it true, however, that when men exercise loving-kindness, righteousness, and judgment, they are in fact assimilating their actions to god’s? or are they acting instead as god cannot? indeed, once an individual apprehends god and understands god’s governance “as it is,” will he not recognize not only that god governs as no man can, but also that men govern as god cannot? not only in 3.54 but in 1.54 as well, maimonides appears to encourage men to act as god does: for the utmost virtue of man is to become like unto him, may he be exalted, as far as he is able; which means that we should make our actions like unto his, as the sages made clear when interpreting the verse, ‘ye shall be holy’ (lev. 19:2). they said: ‘as he is gracious, so be you also gracious; as he is merciful, so be you also merciful.’ (sifre on deut. 1969, 10.12; also bt shabbat 133b) yet, in closing this chapter, maimonides states its purpose as follows: “the purpose of all this is to show that the attributes ascribed to him are attributes of his actions, and that they do not mean that he possesses qualities.” (guide i.54) if the purpose of maimonides’ discussion of divine attributes is to teach that god has no attributes—that he is not loving or kind or compassionate or just—what could it possibly mean for us to “make our actions like unto his”? we, after all, do have attributes, attributes roslyn weiss 159 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 that shape and give character to our actions. we act, then, not as god does but as only men do—our actions reflect our attributes. it may well be that a human ruler or judge should be dispassionate in his rulings (126), but being dispassionate is not at all like not being subject to passion. if we consider the matter of god’s governance, we see that maimonides locates god’s kindness in that he provides for the survival and flourishing of embryos, and his graciousness in his act of bringing beings into existence and governing them though they have no claim upon him to existence or governance. yet, we are cautioned that the only sense in which god’s actions are kind, merciful, and gracious, is that actions of the same sort, were we to perform them, would have that character (124). it follows, then, that when we act kindly, mercifully, or graciously we are not imitating god at all, for we, unlike god, do actually exercise kindness, mercy, or graciousness in performing our actions. in this chapter maimonides furthermore urges the governor-prophet to acquire similarity to these attributes, so that these actions may proceed from him according to a determined measure and according to the deserts of the people who are affected by them and not merely because of his following a passion [but] in accordance with what is fitting. (126) how can we, in reading this passage, fail to be reminded that in 3.18 and 3.51 maimonides acknowledges that most of us, most of the time, are governed by chance, such that for as long as we are not concentrating our thoughts wholly on god, the righteous are no less vulnerable to harm than the wicked? if we are expected to treat people in accordance with their deserts, we are, once again, being asked to do what god does not do. in the final analysis, what it means to know god’s governance is to know that human governance cannot be like it at all. at 3.23: 496–97, maimonides says: but the notion of his providence is not the same as the notion of our providence; nor is the notion of his governance of the things created 160 the piety of socrates and maimonides © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 by him the same as the notion of our governance of that which we govern. the two notions are not comprised in one definition, contrary to what is thought by all who are confused, and there is nothing in common between the two except in name alone. in the same way, our act does not resemble his act; and the two are not comprised in one and the same definition. just as natural acts differ from those of craftsmanship, so do the divine governance of, the divine providence for, and the divine purpose with regard to, those natural matters differ from our human governance, providence for, and purpose with regard to, the things we govern, we provide for, and purpose. this passage leaves no doubt that in our actions, in our governance, in our purposes, we in no way imitate god. and the difference is that whereas our actions are the actions of “craftsmen”—that is, they are designed and deliberate—god’s actions are not crafted; they simply proceed from him. we can act as we believe god would act were he not god but man; but we cannot act as god does in fact act. since god’s overflow simply emanates from him to others, since god does not “craft” his actions, since he has no attributes and his actions have only the attributes they would have if they were human actions, it is impossible for human beings to act upon others and upon the world as god does. imitatio dei in political governance and social relations is not only not possible; it also reveals an utter failure to apprehend god and to understand the way in which he governs. to be sure, maimonides nevertheless does not suppose that “the lord hath forsaken the earth” (ezek. 9.19); he believes instead that “the earth is the lord’s” (ex. 9.29).34 but, as maimonides explains, the sense in which the earth is the lord’s is that “his providence also extends over the earth in the way that corresponds to what the latter is, just as his providence extends over the heavens in the way that corresponds to what they are” (3.54: 637). god’s providence over the earth is, then, unlike his providence over the heavens, for the nature of earth and heavens is not the same. god’s providence over the heavens is direct; the heavens require no more than that god be. god’s providence over the earth, however, is indirect, because the earth contains men who require the special attentions that only other men can provide. when jeremiah says that what a man should glory in is “that he understands roslyn weiss 161 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 and knows me, that i am the lord who exercise loving-kindness, justice, and righteousness in the earth,” what he means is that it is my purpose that there should come from you loving-kindness, righteousness, and judgment in the earth in the way we have explained with regard to the thirteen attributes: namely, that the purpose should be assimilation to them and that this should be our way of life. (3.54: 637; emphasis added)35 if god has not forsaken the earth it is because he has human agents who can do “in the earth” (jer. 9.23) what he cannot. the thirteen divine attributes are not god’s;36 they are attributed to him in order to motivate human beings to incorporate them into their interpersonal relations.37 none of this is to say that imitatio dei has no place in maimonides’ thinking. on the contrary, it is one of many forms that divine worship takes. among these various forms are, first, prayer, ritual observance, and the cultivation of moral habits. these, however, maimonides tells us, are but preparatory for the highest form of worship which is the attachment of our thoughts exclusively to god to the extent of our ability. of course, in order that the object of our love be god (and not something that is merely a figment of our imagination), we must come to know him—that is, we must attain intellectual apprehension of him. it is this that maimonides calls “love of god” (3.51: 621).38 for maimonides, to know god is to know (through demonstration) what he is not—that he is unlike anything we can experience or conceive and hence that he certainly has no attributes.39 there is, however, one exception to this rule. for one positive thing we know about god is that his activity is intellection (though here, too, we must be cautious: his intellection is certainly not like ours [1.1: 23]). since intellect is the “bond” between god and human beings (3.51: 620, 621; 3.52: 629; see also 1.1: 23), since it is because of our intellect that we are said to be created “in god’s image” (gen. 1.27; guide 1.1: 23), it follows that it is in activating our intellects and in striving for intellectual perfection that we imitate god, that we practice imitatio dei. for it is in doing something that god himself does—albeit in a very different way—that one imitates god. but insofar as in interacting with 162 the piety of socrates and maimonides © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 individual human beings in fairness and kindness we do something that god himself does not do in any way at all, we cannot be said to be practicing imitatio dei when we act within the political or social or moral context.40 beyond moral conduct, beyond ritual practice, and beyond even knowledge of god and the imitatio dei that is intellection, there is the highest form of divine worship: the total immersion of one’s intellect in god. those who achieved this to the greatest extent—abraham, isaac, jacob, and moses—also sought to improve the condition of others.41 their “pure worship of great import” is what we have been calling “piety.” it is not, nor is it characterized as, imitatio dei. conclusion although socrates and maimonides hold unconventional religious beliefs, each is convinced that he has a divine mission. for socrates it is to persuade people of the value of justice and truth. for maimonides it is to encourage meticulous observance of jewish law in its ritual and moral aspects (that is, to promote the welfare of the body) and to banish false and noxious views of god as much as possible (that is, to promote the welfare of the soul). the devotion of both these men to their fellow men, their willingness, at great personal sacrifice, to work to improve the condition of those less perfect than themselves, is an expression of their devotion to god. it constitutes, in a word, their piety. for they assist god by taking on the tasks that he would perform if only he could. end notes 1. quotations of passages in plato’s apology and crito are from west and west 1984, on occasion modified slightly. all other translations of passages in works of plato and aristotle are my own and based on the oxford (plato 1900–07) and loeb (aristotle 1926) editions. 2. in a letter to his student joseph, written slightly later, in the 1190’s, maimonides, after having been stung by criticism of his legal code, tells joseph that he wrote that work primarily for himself. but that remains most unlikely. see maimonides, epistulae (1946, 50–52). roslyn weiss 163 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 all quotations from the guide of the perplexed (hereafter abbreviated guide) are from the translation by s. pines (1963), slightly modified on occasion. references are to book, chapter, and page numbers of this translation. translations of passages from maimonides’ code as well as from rabbinic texts are my own. references in this essay to the code are to the work he calls the mishneh torah (maimonides 2000). 3. in biblical hebrew the word for charity (zedaqah) and the word for justice (zedeq) are nearly the same. that is because god—though not men—may demand both equally, insofar as all property is ultimately god’s. thus, when the torah requires, as zedaqah, that a poor man’s pledge be returned to him at sunset so that he be able to cover himself with his garment when he sleeps (deut. 24.13), the torah goes beyond what mere human justice (zedeq) demands. the returning of the cloak is, however, required by a kind of justice, zedaqah: the cloak’s rightful owner, god, demands the cloak’s return on behalf of the poor man who needs it. maimonides (guide 3.52: 631) defines charity as “justice unto the rational soul”: “for when you walk in the way of the moral virtues, you do justice unto your rational soul, giving her the due that is her right.” 4. a view that had great currency in socrates’ day was that justice is a matter of helping friends and harming enemies. this is implicitly crito’s view in the crito (it is the view that both motivates him to plan socrates’ jailbreak and makes him feel troubled by socrates’ acquiescence in his plight), and explicitly polemarchus’s view in rep. 1. in responding to both of these interlocutors socrates makes a point of characterizing justice as a matter of not harming anyone. yet he conspicuously avoids including in his characterization of justice any reference to helping others, whether friend or foe. justice is at its core impartial: it does not differentiate friend from foe. piety, however, that is, socrates’ service to his fellow men, permits him to favor those closest to him (“but more so for my fellow-citizens, inasmuch as you are closer to me in kin” —ap. 30a), though, as he says in the very same passage, he will converse with “whomever i happen to meet—younger or older, foreigner or fellow-citizen.” even in rep. 7, where philosophers, whose clear preference is not to rule, are persuaded to rule by considerations of justice, justice is framed as repaying a debt to those who nurtured them (see 520a–e). the implication of this way of framing the obligation is that justice requires that one play fair, that one return good for good. the consideration of “helping others” forms no part of the argument from justice. 5. and so, socrates says at crito 46b: “i, not only now but always, am such as to obey nothing else of what is mine but the argument that appears best to me upon reasoning.” 6. maimonides’ aristotle is filtered through the prism of his greek and arabic commentators—alexander of aphrodisias, themistius, al-farabi, ibn bajja, 164 the piety of socrates and maimonides © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 avicenna, and averroes—and emerges both neoplatonized and otherwise modified. 7. one such heretical view is the denial of the (bodily) resurrection of the dead. see n. 12, below. 8. although there are three other metaphors discussed before this one, the discussion culminates with this final and decisive one. the others, it can be shown, build progressively toward this one. 9. the difference in value between the literal text and the text’s true meaning is not quantitative, but qualitative. see maimonides’ discussion in guide 1.59 of the parable of the king who has millions of gold coins but is praised for having millions of silver ones. maimonides explains that the error involved in saying that the king has millions of silver coins when what he has is millions of gold coins is not the same as the one involved in saying that he has 100 gold coins when he has millions. the first of these instances of underestimating the king’s wealth is qualitative; the second, quantitative. note the metaphorical use here, too, of silver and gold to convey qualitative difference. 10. although maimonides justifies the torah’s use of corporeal language to describe god on the grounds that the masses cannot be persuaded of the existence of anything incorporeal, he nevertheless also blames the literal text for actually causing people to believe in divine corporeality and attributes (guide 1.31: 67; 1.51: 114; 1.53: 119). 11. this mishnaic tractate is commonly known in english as ethics of the fathers. 12. maimonides experienced first hand the danger of not concealing certain views sufficiently well from the masses. he was, it seems, less than convincing in his perfunctory statement in support of the doctrine of bodily resurrection in his commentary to sanhedrin 10 (maimonides 1981) and in his even less expansive remark in his code (laws concerning repentance 3.6), and people suspected (rightly, in my view) that he did not really believe in bodily resurrection but only in the immortality of the intellect. the jews of yemen may have suffered a deterioration of their faith as a result of their suspicions, and maimonides felt compelled to set the record straight, so to speak, by composing the “essay on resurrection” (maimonides 1985, 211–45). 13. the idea, for example, that god becomes violently angry with those who disobey him is one that maimonides regards as necessary—but as literally false. 14. at guide 2.13: 252, maimonides says of creation that it is “a basis of the torah of moses our master, peace be on him. and it is second to the basis that is the belief in the unity [of god].” 15. only when maimonides is at his most defensive—that is, in his “essay on roslyn weiss 165 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 resurrection” (see note 12, above), where he fends off the suspicion that he does not believe in the resurrection of the dead—does he say that he adheres to the torah’s literal sense unless it is utterly impossible to do so (as in the case of the corporeality of god). as he explains, once having admitted creation, he no longer has grounds for rejecting any miracle, including bodily resurrection (1985, 228). it is noteworthy, however, that, even when thus in apologetic mode, maimonides admits the importance to him of interpreting the text in conformity with reason and the natural: “i try to reconcile the law and reason, and wherever possible consider all things as of the natural order. only when something is explicitly identified as a miracle, and reinterpretation of it cannot be accommodated, only then do i feel forced to grant that this is a miracle” (223). maimonides was roundly criticized by a number of eminent medieval jewish biblical exegetes for the liberties he took with the text. alarmed by maimonides’ radically allegorical approach, abarbanel was moved to exclaim: “in truth, it is infidelity and a grave sin to contradict the plain sense of the [biblical] verses; if this is what we do to them this leprosy will spread to all verses and result in interpretations that contradict their [i.e. the verses’] true intent” (commentary on hos. 1, in mikraot gedolot orim gedolim 1992–99). nahmanides chastised maimonides for allowing his philosophical beliefs to supersede the actual meaning of the torah: “these things contradict the text. it is forbidden to listen to them—and certainly to believe them” (commentary on gen. 18. 1, in nahmanides 2004). 16. maimonides’ target is the kalam thinkers, whether muslim or jewish. 17. fear of god is unrelated to fear of punishment. as maimonides defines fear of god in the code, laws concerning the foundations of the torah 2.2, it is man’s shrinking back in recognition “that he is but a small, lowly, dark creature who, with his inferior and meager mind, stands before him who is perfect in his knowledge.” the notion of fear of god is perhaps best captured in king david’s utterance: “when i consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers. . . . what is man that thou art mindful of him?” (ps. 8.4, 5). (maimonides, in his book of commandments, lists fearing god as fourth among the 248 affirmative precepts. it derives from deut. 6.13 and 10.20: “the lord, thy god, shalt thou fear.” the entire list is included at the beginning of maimonides 2000.) 18. at the end of guide 2.25 maimonides poses the following questions that he claims are more difficult to answer on the assumption that the world is eternal than on the assumption that it is created: why did god bestow prophetic revelation on one man rather than on another; why did he give the torah to one particular nation and not to all; why did he choose to legislate at one particular time rather than at another; why did he entrust a particular prophet with one miracle rather than another; what was god’s aim in setting forth the torah; and why did he not implant the observance of the commandments 166 the piety of socrates and maimonides © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 in human nature. maimonides states that on the creation assumption one can simply dispose of these questions by saying: “god wanted it this way” or “this is what god’s wisdom required.” but on the eternity assumption one must have recourse to “unseemly answers in which there would be combined the giving the lie to, and the annulment of, all the external meanings of the law with regard to which no intellectual man has any doubt that they are to be taken in their external meanings” (329–30). maimonides, as we have seen, is not methodologically disposed to interpret the torah as literally as possible. moreover, it is likely that at least to some of the questions on this list he would find the eternity assumption more congenial. for example, to the question, why did god choose a particular prophet rather than another, there is no reason why maimonides could not easily answer: “because prophecy devolves upon one who has perfected himself morally, spiritually, and intellectually.” to the question, why did god not implant in human nature the observance of the commandments, his answer would surely be that free will is itself a feature of human nature. 19. it is striking that maimonides in guide 3.17 seeks to lend credibility to the torah’s view by contrasting it with the far less plausible views of epicurus, the ashariyya, and the mutazila. but he throws his readers off the scent by listing aristotle’s view among those more absurd than that of the torah—indeed, he places it second, right after epicurus’s. 20. despite maimonides’ explicit statements that individual human beings, no matter how righteous, are subject to chance when not intellectually absorbed in god, he nevertheless writes that it is forbidden to believe that anything that happens occurs by chance. see code, laws concerning fast days 1.3; also guide 3.36. maimonides fears that unless people trace their troubles to their actions, they will have no incentive to mend their ways. 21. we note a parallel in aristotle, who in his nicomachean ethics (aristotle 1926; hereafter en) tempers his radical claim that philosophers are happiest because they are most like the gods (10.8.7), by saying, rather improbably, in 10.8.13, that the philosopher is happiest because he is most beloved by the gods—as if gods who are self-sufficient and whose activity and virtue are purely intellectual (10.8.7) might prefer some men to others. 22. one’s very consciousness of suffering is a sign that one is no longer “with god.” 23. another way of understanding divine providence is as follows: once a human being comes to value only his intellectual attachment to god, the things of the body are no longer of consequence. this i take to be maimonides’ interpretation of the book of job. job’s misery abated once he gained understanding. until then he “had imagined that the things thought to be happiness, such roslyn weiss 167 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 as health, wealth, and children, are the ultimate goal” (3.23: 493). maimonides notes that although job is described as morally virtuous and righteous in action, he is not said to be wise or intelligent. “for if he had been wise, his situation would not have been obscure to him” (3.22: 487). 24. the other is that one can possess moral virtue while asleep or without ever exercising it. see en 1.5.6. 25. a fairly widespread, but in my view mistaken, interpretation of the difference between aristotle’s and maimonides’ stance on the matter of chance is the following by d. frank: “maimonides believes that the prophet, paradigmatic in both character and intellectual attainment, is insulated from contingency, a view seemingly opposed to the ineliminability of luck in the aristotelian moral scheme” (2003, 144). 26. in the guide, at 3.23: 495, maimonides interprets elihu’s innovation as the view that an angel intercedes for a man who is deathly ill, but “this does not continue always, there being no intercession that goes on forever, for it only takes place two or three times.” 27. see also gorg. 470e, where socrates declares that, as he sees it, a person’s happiness depends exclusively on “how he stands with respect to education and justice. . . . for i assert that the noble and good man and woman are happy; the unjust and base, wretched.” 28. aristotle does not name socrates as the target of his mockery, and not all scholars agree that it is socrates whom aristotle has in mind—some think he has the cynics in view. i do not think it likely, however, that he intends anyone other than socrates. note that he proceeds next to discuss plato’s views. see en 1.5.6. one might wonder if aristotle’s (maimonides’) position is not itself absurd. can any human being be utterly invulnerable to pain? although surely extreme, the aristotelian-maimonidean view may not be wholly at odds with ordinary experience. people who are thoroughly absorbed in any activity or task lose awareness of their bodies and of their bodies’ needs while they are absorbed. they forget to eat or drink; they can go without sleep; and they delay the execution of other bodily functions. why, then, could not a man absorbed in god or in the eternal verities of the universe be oblivious to bodily and emotional pain? 29. socrates’ awareness of his own ignorance with respect to “the most important things” surely extends to the existence and nature of the gods. 30. in his code, laws concerning the foundations of the torah 4.13, maimonides quotes the talmud (sukkah 28a, in babylonian talmud 1966 [hereafter bt]), where it is said that the account of the chariot (which maimonides equates 168 the piety of socrates and maimonides © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 with metaphysics) is “the great thing,” and the discussions of the sages abaye and rava, “the lesser thing.” according to maimonides, the matter of what is forbidden and permitted, which occupies the debates between abaye and rava, is to precede the deeper and more important topics of metaphysics, the secrets of the torah. maimonides regards the oral tradition as containing the truths of metaphysics. they were not written down, he says, for fear that they would become corrupted and would give rise to confusion. (see guide 1.71: 175–76.) at guide 3.51: 618–19, maimonides contends that those who get closest to god are those who have knowledge of him. those who devote their lives to the study of the practical law and who accept unreflectively the true principles of faith are two levels behind. those who study mathematics and logic are at level 4; those who study physics are at level 5; only those who master metaphysics (“the divine science”) are at level 6, and have entered the “inner chamber” of the king’s residence. 31. cf. code, laws concerning character traits 3.3, where it is said of one who serves the lord that he does so continuously—even as he engages in business, in sexual intercourse, and in sleep—but it is not said of him that his thoughts are occupied with god throughout these activities. the claim is instead that he is seeking through them to perfect his body and fulfill its needs so that he can devote himself fully to god. 32. maimonides twice mentions the efforts of these men. the divine overflow did not in their case produce of itself the religious community these men strove to bring into existence, nor was their achievement automatic or effortless. 33. pines (guide 3.51: 634, n. 32) points out that the arabic here is ambiguous, and may signify either that maimonides could not aspire to be guided toward achieving the rank of moses and the patriarchs, or that he could not aspire to guide others with a view to their achieving this rank. i favor (as pines does) the first reading. as i understand maimonides, the point he seeks to make is that although he cannot achieve the rank of these four men, he can, like them, take steps to bring a religious community into being. 34. the view that “the lord hath forsaken the earth” is ascribed by maimonides to aristotle in the discussion of divine providence in guide 3.17: 466. maimonides, as we noted earlier, seeks to distance himself from the aristotelian view even though it is closest to his own. although aristotle would surely not have said that god provides for the earth through his human agents, there is every reason to think that he would not spurn the idea that it is men’s task to govern the earth justly and fairly (insofar as god does not). 35. cf. code, laws concerning character traits 1.6–7. although maimonides, when he speaks in this passage of the obligation to acquire the proper moral qualities and actions, indeed uses the term lehiddamot, “to imitate” or “to roslyn weiss 169 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 resemble,” he does not expressly say that we are to imitate god. what he actually says is the following: “even as he is called gracious, so you be gracious; even as he is called merciful, so you be merciful . . . . thus did the prophets call the deity by all such characterizations—long-suffering, abounding in kindness, righteous and upright, honest, mighty, powerful, etc.—in order to make known that these are good and proper paths, and that a person is obligated to conduct himself in accordance with them and to resemble [them] to the best of his ability . . . . and since these terms by which the creator is called are the middle path in which we are obligated to go, this path is called god’s path . . .” (emphasis added). the clear implication of this text is that the way we are supposed to be is not as god is but as he is called. as we have seen, the original rabbinic dictum upon which maimonides’ text is based—but from which it quite consciously diverges—reads: “as he is gracious, so be you gracious; as he is merciful, so be you merciful” (bt shabbat 133b). (note: where i have “them” in brackets, traditional versions of maimonides’ code have “him.” but “him” does not appear in the bodleian manuscript containing maimonides’ autograph.) 36. the thirteen divine attributes derive from ex. 34.6–7. 37. h. arendt (2005, 239 and nn. 76 and 77) recounts that jesus took the scribes and pharisees to task for their belief that it is not men but god who has the power to forgive—and that men’s power to forgive derives from god. jesus’ view was that it is men who must forgive—forgiveness, he believed, is a human power—and divine forgiveness will follow. in my view, it is for maimonides because god cannot forgive that human beings must forgive. in doing god’s forgiving for him, we do his work on earth. (i owe the reference to arendt to alan udoff.) 38. maimonides distinguishes between, on the one hand, the correct apprehension of god, which is love, and, on the other, the “turning wholly to god” (3.51: 620) that follows apprehension. he cites 1 chron. 28.9, where david says to his son, solomon, “and thou, solomon my son, know thou the god of thy father and serve him.” as maimonides interprets this verse, to know god is to attain the correct (as opposed to an imagined) conception of god, but to serve him, which follows knowing him, is “total devotion to him and the employment of intellectual thought in constantly serving him.” the love that is knowledge differs from the constant love and devotion that is service. it is this second kind of love that is captured in the following two rabbinic passages: (1) “another explanation of, ‘thou shalt love the lord thy god’ (deut. 6.5): cause him to be beloved by human beings, even as your father abraham did” (sifre on deut. 6:5); (2) “ ‘thou shalt love the lord thy god’ means that because of you the name of heaven will become beloved” (bt yoma 86a). maimonides quotes the former of these rabbinic dicta in his treatment of the 170 the piety of socrates and maimonides © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 commandment to love god (the third in his enumeration of the 248 affirmative commandments in his book of commandments). 39. there are several important scholars who maintain that maimonides was skeptical with respect to knowledge of god, and that he was therefore tentative about such matters as creation and providence. in my view, however, although maimonides surely thought that we can have no positive knowledge of god’s nature or essence, he strongly suggests that we can know what god is not. (according to guide 1.59: 139, with each additional thing that we are able to negate with respect to god, we become more perfect in our knowledge of him.) we can know, for example, by demonstration, that god has no body and is not subject to motion and change or to emotions and passions. although maimonides says that we do not know how god knows (code, laws concerning repentance 5.5), we nevertheless do know that he cannot have knowledge of what changes. both creation, which would require that god be subject to change, and divine providence for individual human beings, which would require that god have knowledge of things that change, are thus precluded. 40. h. davidson (2005, 365, 540) insists that maimonides means to salvage for god some measure of “personality.” it would seem, however, that what maimonides is most at pains to avoid is the ascription to god of anything like “personality.” 41. in his later years, s. pines came to believe that maimonides ranks the political life above the intellectual (see, e.g., pines 1979, 100). w. harvey, however, who is convinced that for maimonides intellectual excellence is the supreme perfection, maintains, against pines, that the political life is a by-product of the achievement of intellectual perfection (harvey 1980, 198–212). in my view, whereas it is true of god that governance is a by-product of intellection, it is not true of man that caring for others is a by-product of intellectual perfection. only the truly pious feel an obligation to serve god by governing others. unlike plato’s philosopher-kings who have to be compelled to rule, the truly pious seek to improve the spiritual and intellectual condition of others as a form of divine worship. whereas those who have tasted “incorporeal immortality” no longer crave the pleasures of earthly life (introduction to commentary to sanhedrin 10), some nevertheless do, according to maimonides, make the deliberate choice to serve god on earth. references arendt, hannah 2005 the human condition. chicago, il: university of chicago press. roslyn weiss 171 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 aristotle 1926 nicomachean ethics (loeb classical library). trans. h. rackham. cambridge: harvard university press. babylonian talmud 1966 20 vols. jerusalem: machon hatam sofer. davidson, herbert 2005 maimonides: the man and his works. oxford: oxford university press. frank, daniel 2003 maimonides and medieval jewish aristotelianism. in the cambridge companion to medieval jewish philosophy, ed. daniel frank and oliver leaman, 136–56. cambridge: cambridge university press. harvey, warren zev 1980 political philosophy and halakhah in maimonides [heb.]. iyyun 29: 198–212. maimonides, moses 1946 epistulae [heb.]. ed. david zvi baneth. jerusalem: mekize nirdamim. 1963 guide of the perplexed. trans. shlomo pines. chicago, il: university of chicago press. 1981 maimonides’ commentary on the mishnah: tractate sanhedrin. trans. fred rosner. (includes hebrew text.) new york, ny: sepher-hermon press. 1985 epistles of maimonides: crisis and leadership. ed. and trans. abraham s. halkin. philadelphia, pa: jewish publication society. 2000 mishneh torah. 12 vols. ed. s. frankel. jerusalem: shabse frankel. mikraot gedolot orim gedolim: prophets and writings 1992–99 16 vols. jerusalem: even israel institute. mishnah. avot. 2005 brooklyn, ny: goldenberg bros. nahmanides, moses 2004 commentary on the torah. brooklyn, ny: mesorah publications. pines, shlomo 1979 the limitations of human knowledge according to al-farabi, ibn-bajja, and maimonides. in studies in medieval jewish history and literature, ed. isadore twersky, 82–109. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. plato 1900–7 platonis opera. vols. 1–5. ed. john burnet. oxford: oxford university press. 172 the piety of socrates and maimonides © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 sifre deuteronomy 1969 ed. eliezer finkelstein. new york, ny: american rabbinical seminary. west, thomas and grace starry west 1984 four texts on socrates. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. fuller.indd © equinox publishing ltd. 2007, unit 6, th e village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expositions 1.1 (2007) 003–014] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v1i1.3 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 th e tension of the perennial, traditional and historical in john stuart mill’s on liberty timothy fuller colorado college refl ection on teaching courses in the western tradition over many years leads the author to identify some unavoidable fundamental questions, among them: what does one mean by “tradition”? are there perennial insights which persist through time? if there are, how are they aff ected by changing historical conditions? are ideas necessarily relative to time and place? is there progressive understanding or wisdom or is there simply change? what sorts of lessons is one to gain from studying the past? john stuart mill’s “on liberty” is examined with respect to such questions to discern the response of one of the acknowledged masters of modern progressive thought. in turn, some concluding questions are posed to mill’s response, seeking to extend dialogue on these matters. th roughout my career at colorado college, i have taught courses in western civilization. th e college does not have a single core course with common readings that all students take, but it does require that all new students take a course surveying the history of the west from some important angle. th e political science department satisfi es this requirement with the entry course into our major, “introduction to the western political tradition.” over the years, i have taken an active role in promoting the importance of the western tradition. i was a co-founder of such courses as “renaissance culture” and the current course on the “western political tradition,” and i have also taught the venerable, trans-disciplinary course in our curriculum, “freedom and authority,” which has been taught at colorado college since the early l950s. th us for the past thirty years, i have committed myself to introducing my students to the monuments of the western tradition such fuller.indd 3fuller.indd 3 16/06/2007 11:11:5616/06/2007 11:11:56 4 th e tension of the perennial, traditional and historical in mill’s on liberty © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 as great books, historic documents, masterpieces of painting, sculpture and architecture, great musical compositions, and classic scientifi c experiments. over the course of that time, i have been moved to inquire not only how to teach courses like these, but why. we need to become more thoughtful about the task of teaching western culture and its role within the humanities. in this essay, i will illustrate my thinking by considering john stuart mill’s classic text on liberty, a book frequently assigned in the “western political tradition” course. on liberty could be, and often is, assigned in courses on topics such as ethics and politics, social and political philosophy, liberty and authority, modern democracy, and so on. but here it allows me to demonstrate how i challenge my students to refl ect on “tradition,” “the perennial,” and the “historical”—terms that we might otherwise use without even knowing what they mean. 1. tradition we enjoy an inheritance of dialogue and refl ection on politics handed down to us in a considerable number of books, both ancient and modern, that have come to be seen as especially full of insights of permanent value to us. th ey are books which, even if occasioned by the particular crises of their authors’ times and places, seek to understand politics philosophically, to see in the present discontents what is revealed about the human condition as such. th ese authors understand themselves to be writing for their contemporaries in part but perhaps even more for the ages. it is thus both useful and necessary to acquaint ourselves with a representative sample of those works, from the time of socrates, plato and aristotle to the american founding and beyond, as a means to make ourselves conversant with the complex range of thinking of the western tradition. a tradition is neither static nor defi ned by a single thought or idea; a tradition is a complex exploration in search of self-understanding; it comprises interminable actions both of preservation and innovation. a tradition is an unsystematic whole in which there is both argument and agreement. one enters into it actively by becoming conversant fuller.indd 4fuller.indd 4 16/06/2007 11:12:0016/06/2007 11:12:00 fuller 5 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 with its range and complexity, with its internal tensions addressed and addressed again through time. one might think of a tradition as a dialogue extended through time. it began long before us and will very likely continue long after us. it is always unfi nished, and there is always more to be said than has been said, while what has been said before remains pertinent as a guide to what is important to discuss. we do not, in short, begin from scratch but from wherever in this extended dialogue we fi nd ourselves. we may like where we are or we may long for a diff erent time and place. th ere will be both affi rmation and criticism, agreement and disagreement, and, perhaps, agreement to disagree. th at we are embedded in traditions is unavoidable. how we choose to think about and make use of them is our responsibility, and that too is unavoidable. we are, one could say, unavoidably constrained, unavoidably free, and unavoidably responsible. in this context, reading does not mean simply going through material effi ciently. rather, it means trying to understand how the world looks in the views of those whose thoughts and arguments we encounter, how they may challenge and disagree with our assumptions, how they may reaffi rm or strengthen them. important books are important because they are the means by which we gain access to the full range of thinking that composes our tradition. careful reading rescues us from, and forces us out of, the temporal parochialism that would confi ne our thinking to the here and now. in refl ection and dialogue, the thoughts of our predecessors become present to us, and recognizable puzzles and predicaments of the human situation cast our immediate concerns into a larger, historical perspective. we can thereby make clearer to ourselves what is novel in our time and place, and what is not, assessing our hopes and aspirations in light of the vast array of hopes and aspirations history records. th us we seek to think carefully about the enduring questions of politics through careful reading and discussion. we seek to clarify the vocabulary of political discourse. we seek to understand how, for example, the american political tradition emerges out of, and adapts, the larger western political tradition of which it is a part. we recognize that, in discussing these matters, we will have both agreements and fuller.indd 5fuller.indd 5 16/06/2007 11:12:0116/06/2007 11:12:01 6 th e tension of the perennial, traditional and historical in mill’s on liberty © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 disagreements of opinion, that some issues necessarily are heartfelt and personal. but we share the common endeavor to understand better than we understood before, to become liberally educated by accepting the longer road of inquiry whereon the inquiry may be as important as the conclusions we hope to reach. so far as we are individuals characterized by freedom and reason, then, we must each make out of our inquiries something for ourselves with the help and support of our common association in inquiry and dialogue. th is is a joint inquiry into fundamental questions about our lives together. 2. th e perennial and the historical considering the perennial and the historical, i off er my students these questions: in teaching the western tradition, is one bringing to sight truths valid in all times and places? is one considering a progressive development in which greater approximations to truth are made over time so that we know more of what is true now than we could have known before? have we departed from past insights such that we have declined rather than advanced? does each era (remembering always the diffi culty of demarcating eras without arbitrariness) present us with what is true in its context, true for it, but not true beyond it, and thus indicative neither of advance nor of decline, but only of transformation? is there only an interminable succession of understandings that human beings have generated in responding to the contingent circumstances in which they have found themselves? if we grant that we must be implicated in, and constrained by, what has gone before us, and that our self-understanding may be greater so far as we are aware of what we have been and where we have come from, does it follow that such comprehensiveness will endow us with meaning or protect us? will it be, as hegel asserted, that the only lesson we learn from history is that we never learn from history? what is the relation of historical understanding to the quest for wisdom? on liberty let us consider mill’s famous essay (mill 1975) for the light it may shed on questions like these.1 few will need reminding of the basic fuller.indd 6fuller.indd 6 16/06/2007 11:12:0116/06/2007 11:12:01 fuller 7 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 arguments of on liberty; mill published the book in 1859, and it quickly emerged as a classic expression of modern liberal thought and individualism. mill explores what it means for us to be associated as free individuals capable both of self-development and of self-governance, who require little governmental control, who are orderly without the need of much coercion, and who are associated in the exchange of ideas through absolute freedom of thought and expression, in the hope of establishing a permanently improving, spontaneously progressing society wherein the disposition to stability and preservation serves not as a brake on progress but as the staging area for continual eff orts at improvement without disruption. mill was a liberal not only because he defended the principle that human beings are free beings, but also because in the necessary balancing of the forces of order with the forces of progress, mill thought the balance should be struck for the sake of progress, understanding that order is instrumental to progress. “order” was for him the preservation of those past accomplishments which are genuine contributions to the advancement of the human condition, keeping the way open for further contributions to “progress.” th is way of balancing order and progress he thought to be the primary safeguard against decadence and decline. he elaborates this more fully in considerations on representative government (mill [1867] 1993) which complements and extends the arguments of on liberty. we have in on liberty the vision of a society of collaborative, mature individuals, governed directly or indirectly by a scientifi c attitude in a procedure of continual dialogue and constructive criticism. in it, mill emphasizes civil or social liberty, and the tension between liberty and authority. mill is seeking to establish the “nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised over the individual” (1975, 3). according to him, the question is so far from being new, that, in a certain sense, it has divided mankind, almost from the remotest ages; but in the stage of progress into which the more civilized portions of the species have now entered, it presents itself under new conditions, and requires a diff erent and more fundamental treatment. (3) refl ections on the questions of the nature and limits of governmental fuller.indd 7fuller.indd 7 16/06/2007 11:12:0116/06/2007 11:12:01 8 th e tension of the perennial, traditional and historical in mill’s on liberty © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 interference arise classically, mill says, in greece, rome and england. england is the inheritor of an ancient inquiry and aspiration; as such it is, according to mill, perhaps the most competent purveyor of its current meaning to the world. mill has put before us a perennial question concerning human liberty. yet he thinks that nineteenth century england has progressed to a new stage of civilization in which there is a need to think more deeply about the relation of liberty and authority, possibly to arrive at a decisive insight into that relationship which will at last complete previous speculations. mill, like virtually all of his contemporaries, recognized that circumstances had dramatically altered in the wake of the reformation, the scientifi c revolution and the american and french revolutions. like tocqueville, he saw that we had entered into a democratizing age, irrevocably separating the spirit of our age from the spirit of every preceding age. like tocqueville again, he saw that there was both possibility and peril in this historic transformation. th erefore, while the question of liberty and authority persisted, its implication requires fresh reexamination. th e old issue of the tyranny of rulers was more or less resolved by the establishment of political liberties or immunities and then by the establishment of constitutional arrangements to constrain the exercise of political power. in the wake of this resolution, a new project appeared inspired by the desire to establish a common interest between rulers and ruled such that the tension between liberty and authority might be transcended. but in america where something like that project had come to be, observation showed that the will of the people is practically speaking the will of the majority. th us, limiting the power of government over individuals “loses none of its importance when the holders of power are regularly accountable to the community, that is, to the strongest part therein” (5). th e problem of tyranny is thus perennial, but the character of tyranny has altered as the danger of the tyranny of the majority has emerged. now we must defend against “the tyranny of prevailing opinion and feeling” by fi nding the limit to the “legitimate interference of collective opinion” (6). does this make the question of what we mean by the perfuller.indd 8fuller.indd 8 16/06/2007 11:12:0116/06/2007 11:12:01 fuller 9 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 ennial more diffi cult to answer? we cannot return to the past for more than inspiration to gain our bearings in the distinctive conditions of our present. mill studied the history of western culture and, like hegel, believed that philosophical issues must be resolved through historical understanding of how they have altered through time, and thus have come to be what they are for us. wisdom is cumulative but yet there may be decisive moments in history which reveal opportunities for dramatic achievement. mill was not alone in thinking that he stood at such a point. man’s permanent interest, he insisted, is as a progressive being (12); it is only in this new age, with its new spirit, that mill believed we could see this fully. what had emerged was the possibility of a society of free individuals who understand themselves to be free and expect to be treated as free. however, emergent with this new age was the threat of majority tyranny or collective opinion. th e prospects of any age’s accomplishments are accompanied by characteristic threats to their fulfi llment. th e fundamental principles of the new age must be articulated if we are to arm ourselves against misunderstanding those principles. th e philosophical examination of liberty and authority requires both that we understand what these concepts have meant in diff erent times and places, and also what they are for us now. we are dealing with continually transforming, if persistent, questions. th e insights of the past are permanently germane to the predicaments for which they are the proper responses. as such, they do not cease to be valid and true, and just so far they are valid and true for us. but to the degree that we must respond to altered conditions, the validity and truth of the latter insights cannot comprehend all that is valid and true. th us it becomes necessary for mill to formulate the basic principle for the new age, that is, the age in which “mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion” (11). th e basic principle is that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. th at the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his fuller.indd 9fuller.indd 9 16/06/2007 11:12:0116/06/2007 11:12:01 10 th e tension of the perennial, traditional and historical in mill’s on liberty © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 will, is to prevent harm to others. his own good, either physical or moral, is not a suffi cient warrant. (10–11) th e rest of on liberty presents the well known and powerful arguments for free thought and discussion as antidotes to the “tendency of all the changes taking place in the world…to strengthen society, and diminish the power of the individual” (15). at the same time, the utility of strengthening the individual and constraining the power of social opinion lies in the fostering of collaborative inquiry into the ways of continual improvement so that stagnation might henceforth be kept at bay. we must defeat collectivization but at the same time enhance collaboration. th e evil of oppressive society will not spontaneously disappear. th e temptation to relax and stagnate cannot be eradicated (15). th e age of democracy, as is true of all ages, carries both possibilities and perils. th e task is to cultivate attitudes and understandings which will keep open the way of improvement against the powerful tendencies to slip back once more into an ossifying age. on the one hand, free thought and discussion will contribute to a growing convergence of understandings on what is true and best for us. on the other hand, the consensus must emerge through voluntary assent to convincing arguments, not through coercion. for the right to such coercion is no less prohibited to the best governments than to the worst (18). indeed, only by preserving the possibility of open skepticism about what is thought to be true can we have confi dence at all in what we believe and in the method by which we arrive at it. truth must be understood as a temporary conclusion always subject to revision, a way station on the path to fi nal insight. moreover, the vibrancy of the truth depends on the felt need to ponder it and defend it, if not to reformulate it, in light of ongoing criticism. mill says that “truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suff er themselves to think” (33). progress promises an ever-expanding knowledge of what is best for human beings in the spontaneously improving society. it is only fuller.indd 10fuller.indd 10 16/06/2007 11:12:0216/06/2007 11:12:02 fuller 11 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 now, according to mill, that we can fully visualize this possibility as something more than utopian aspiration. yet mill does not think this vision originated in the present. on the contrary, he thinks that it was expressed in the past through extraordinary individuals, the “best men and the noblest doctrines” (24). mill especially invokes socrates and jesus who became martyrs in the cause to realize the vision. what separates our age from all preceding ones is the prospect of universal recognition of the open and progressive society such that the need for martyrs to it will be superseded. as mill reminds us, socrates, the “acknowledged master of all the eminent thinkers who have since lived—whose fame... all but outweighs the whole remainder of the names which make his native city illustrious,” was executed by athens for his impiety (25). jesus, “[t]he man who left on the memory of those who witnessed his life and conversation such an impression of his moral grandeur that eighteen subsequent centuries have done homage to him as the almighty in person” was killed as a blasphemer (25). however, in defeat they were victorious insofar as they kept alive for future generations the thought of the good society which they themselves could possess only in their visions of it. mill also believed that, if marcus aurelius, whom he described as “a better christian in all but the dogmatic sense of the word than almost any of the ostensibly christian sovereigns who have since reigned” (26), had pre-empted constantine by adopting instead of persecuting christianity, the day of the good society would have dawned sooner. th at this did not happen, mill calls “one of the most tragical facts in all history” (27). mill’s refl ections inspire him to the thought of that society in which the price of truth will never again be tragedy and martyrdom, in which the martyrdom of the seekers of wisdom will be rendered unnecessary. mill’s liberal vision is of the vindication, fi nally, of socrates and jesus, not by directing us to an encounter with the divine, unchanging things above and beyond our temporal existence, but by gaining for their example public recognition in a spontaneously-improving, progressive society. th eir vision can now be accessible and known as practicable, fuller.indd 11fuller.indd 11 16/06/2007 11:12:0216/06/2007 11:12:02 12 th e tension of the perennial, traditional and historical in mill’s on liberty © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 no longer being reserved to the grasp of the philosophic few or the spiritual virtuosos. considering the platonic socrates, one might ask if plato’s point is rather that there is a tragic confl ict between the philosopher and the city, exemplifi ed in the fact that athens was open to philosophy but also executed the true philosopher because they could not understand socrates or experience him unambiguously. could plato agree with mill as to the insight to be derived from the example of socrates? one might also wonder whether saint augustine, who saw christ to be the pivot of world history, could hope for the earthly fulfi llment that mill articulates. we are struck by the thought that the presence to us of great philosophical and spiritual inspirations of the past. mill did not think that truth always triumphs over persecution; such optimism, he says, is a “pleasant falsehood” (28). “th e real advantage which truth has,” mill argues, consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it, until some one of its reappearances falls on a time when from favorable circumstances it escapes persecution until it has made such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it . (29) in short, fulfi llment may be expected immanently in history. in mill’s time, the practice of executing those of unacceptable opinion had declined dramatically, but other forms of more subtle persecution persist: socrates was put to death, but the socratic philosophy rose like the sun in heaven, and spread its illumination over the whole intellectual fi rmament. christians were cast to the lions, but the christian church grew up a stately and spreading tree, overtopping the older and less vigorous growths, and stifl ing them by its shade. our merely social intolerance kills no one, roots out no opinions, but induces men to disguise them, or to abstain from any active eff ort for their diff usion. it maintains all prevailing opinions outwardly undisturbed, while it does not absolutely interdict the exercise of reason by dissentients affl icted with the malady of thought...the price paid for this sort of intellectual pacifi cation is the sacrifi ce of the entire moral courage of the human mind. (32–3) fuller.indd 12fuller.indd 12 16/06/2007 11:12:0216/06/2007 11:12:02 fuller 13 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 mill’s contemporaries, which include us, are stuck between routinized opinion and the obscure investigations of the isolated experts. to cultivate the fruit that fl ourishes in the atmosphere of a universal commitment to open discussion and inquiry is the prerequisite to the society mill believes possible for us. it is important to stress that, for mill, this is really possible. while we could fail to realize the possibility, we have a special opportunity to achieve it. in one way, mill is far from being a sentimentalist about the course of history, but in another way he transposes ancient experiences of transcendence into an historic project to moralize political and social life. at the dawn of the twenty-fi rst century, we are compelled thoughtfully to ask what we hope for in teaching the classics of the western tradition. with mill we have a triumphal story of what is possible for us. mill stops just short of guaranteeing progress, but there is the assurance of perceiving the broad outlines of what progress must be, what the goal is towards which we are progressing (“convergence on truth”), and what we must do to realize it, together with the confi dence that certain societies, admittedly imperfectly, increasingly instantiate the good and progressive society. but the intervening destructiveness of the twentieth century cannot be contemplated without wondering whether we are entitled to maintain the perspective mill off ers. if we go back to the old question (famously “raised again” by kant) whether the human race is progressing or declining, we might wonder whether kant and later mill posed the right question. mill defends the free society, on the one hand, as intrinsically right for us, but, on the other, as instrumental to a convergence on truth. he did not consider, as nietzsche was to do, that the truth about ourselves might be unbearable. he also did not consider, as plato and augustine would have, the fl imsiness and evanescence of all human structures. might it have been possible for mill to have seen further? mill wished to end the tension of the perennial and the historical by subordinating tradition to contemporary appraisal, such that “order” (past accomplishment) is judged and appropriated by the progressive understanding of the “best minds,” the progressive minds, of the present. yet even for mill, absolute freedom of thought and discussion requires fuller.indd 13fuller.indd 13 16/06/2007 11:12:0216/06/2007 11:12:02 14 th e tension of the perennial, traditional and historical in mill’s on liberty © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 guidance and direction from those best qualifi ed to off er such guidance and direction. some have, after all, seen further along the path of improvement. but this seeing further does not precisely fi t with socratic ignorance or christian humility, both of which looked beyond the sequence of temporal events for their grounding. it is not clear that mill’s absolute freedom of thought and discussion is in real dialogue with the ancient responses to the perennial questions as plato and augustine meant them. furthermore, as we in the twenty-fi rst century refl ect on the past century of total war and holocaust and the prospect of renewed terror and destruction, we must ask what is the status of the “spontaneously improving, continually progressing” society? has the need or unavoidability of martyrdom become less urgent? what we must confront, it would seem, is the need for deeper thoughtfulness about the experience of the twentieth century in clarifying what we intend—what we hope for—in our endeavor to do what is best for ourselves and our students. to do so is to restore consciousness of the tension between the perennial and historical, the pertinence of past voices in the tradition, to reconsider anew what the ancients have to say to us. endnotes 1. all quotations will be from the norton critical edition of on liberty. references mill, john stuart 1975 on liberty [1859]. scranton: w. w. norton and co. 1993 considerations on representative government [1867]. in utilitarianism, on liberty, considerations on representative government, ed. geraint williams. london: everyman. fuller.indd 14fuller.indd 14 16/06/2007 11:12:0216/06/2007 11:12:02 [expositions 4.1&2 (2010) 87-88] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 introduction to the academic roundtable gregory hoskins center for liberal education villanova university at a roundtable discussion closing the third “religion and postmodernism” conference, hosted by villanova university in september of 2001and organized around two confessions – st. augustine‟s confessions and jacques derrida‟s circumfession – john caputo and richard kearney asked jacques derrida to elaborate on his claim that he can “rightly pass for an atheist.” “why don‟t you simply say „i am an atheist‟?” they asked. with an honesty and humility that could sometimes resemble prevarication, derrida offered the following clarification: “if i knew, i would say that i‟m an atheist or i‟m not, but i don‟t know. i don‟t know for reasons i‟ve been trying to explore for years and years.” 1 readers of the recent encounter between the lacanian neo-marxist, slovenian philosopher slavoj žižek and the “radical orthodox,” anglo-catholic theologian john milbank, orchestrated and edited by creston davis and published under the titled the monstrosity of christ: paradox or dialectic? 2 cannot help but feel that a figure like derrida, with his scruples and gentle, civil demeanor would be quite out of place among such robust protagonists. for, as those who prepared the book are eager to proclaim, milbank and žižek are engaged here in a battle between two clearly delineated positions, and it appears neither is willing to take prisoners. on the dust jacket the adversaries are introduced as prize fighters, and creston davis refers to the exchange as “the intellectual equivalent of ultimate fighting” (19). (in this arena we can imagine derrida shoved into the corner to pray and cry while the others duke it out.) however, the points of dispute between milbank and žižek are serious, and they do seem worth fighting for if not about: the nature and significance of the “monstrous compound” (hegel‟s term) of the god-man, jesus christ; the legacy of g.w.f. hegel; the essence of materialism; and resistance to capitalist nihilism. (with so many significant matters at stake and with such masters of intellectual posturing involved, the battle between milbank and žižek resembles perhaps not so much a prize fight as a professional wrestling grudge match, a sort of w.t.o. [world theory organization] smackdown with mental summersaults from the top ropes and chairs to the back of the head. rest assured milbank and žižek walk away unscathed when it is over.) for this academic roundtable we sought scholars, philosophers and theologians, with expertise in the issues over which milbank and žižek wrestle and a willingness to clarify and highlight the stakes of the debate and to introduce other voices and viewpoints to productively open up the debate. introduction to the academic roundtable 88 notes: 1. john d. caputo and michael j. scanlon, eds., augustine and postmodernism: confessions and circumfession (bloomington: indiana university press, 2005), 38. 2. slavoj žižek and john milbank, the monstrosity of christ: paradox or dialectic? ed. creston davis (cambridge, ma: the mit press, 2009). [expositions 4.1&2 (2010) 139] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 correction in her contribution, “living, breathing jewish people and augustine‟s „jews in the head‟” to our last issue‟s academic roundtable on paula fredriksen‟s augustine and the jews: a christian defense of jews and judaism, rebecca winer writes that she “would have expected in [fredriksen‟s] fifty pages of notes and twenty-five pages of bibliography to find [jeremy] cohen‟s living letters of the laws: ideas of the jew in medieval christianity” (expositions 3.2 [2009]: 217). fredriksen lists cohen‟s book in her bibliography on page 440; she cites it on page 377, n. 2, and explains her disagreements with it on pages 417-418, n. 2, and pages 424-425, n. 25. [expositions 4.1&2 (2010) 128-132] expositions (online) 1747-5376 nagel, alexander and christopher s. wood. anachronic renaissance. new york: zone books, 2010. 455 pp, hb $39.95. isbn: 978–1–935–40802–4. “i saw everything but comprehended nothing,” states herman melville’s intrepid voyager observing the religious rituals of polynesian inhabitants. in this story, melville points to the intricacies of religion, travel, colonization, and their relationship to the emergence of print media. 1 thanks to guidebooks, plaques and inscriptions, tourists today have seemingly complete access to see and to comprehend everything. but what was travel like in the world before print, and how did the inhabitants and travelers of western europe comprehend their local and far-flung buildings, paintings, and artifacts before the “standardization” of printed texts and guidebooks? in their recent contribution to renaissance studies, alexander nagel and christopher wood, authors of the book anachronic renaissance, focus on temporalities. yet the issues raised within their twenty-eight chapters have contemporary implications that go beyond questions concerning late-medieval and renaissance periods. the underlying assumptions of their book touch upon issues such as pilgrimage, tourism, travel, and how these have become commodities in the west. preceded by their article “toward a new model of renaissance anachronism” (2005), the title of this new book and its earlier article imply a certain focus: works that construct a sense of temporalities that is neither within the present nor the past. an example here would be a painting of st. augustine in which his study is a fifteenth-century humanist studio. 2 through various late-medieval and renaissance understandings of time, the authors attempt to explore both the beliefs of pilgrims and the incredulity of humanists who believed or doubted that the virgin’s house could fly and position itself as a shrine in the southern italian city of loreto and be worthy of veneration even though constructed of materials obviously not from the historical period of the virgin’s life. one of the pleasures of reading this book is the attention that it brings to objects and buildings often overlooked in surveys of renaissance art. here is a study of works that range from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century but pivot around the 1480s and the 1490s: devotional prints, renaissance mosaic-work, geometric patterning of cosmatesque pavements, the titulus of christ’s cross, medal portraiture and an assortment of idiosyncratic and important reliquaries and relics, from houses to paintings. the authors interweave these “lesser-known” works with canonical netherlandish paintings, such as jan van eyck’s three marys at the tomb of christ (1425-1435), iconic architectural structures from the dome of the rock to bramante’s tempietto (after 1502), and raphael’s wall paintings in the stanza della segnatura (ca. 1510). the renaissance built by nagel and wood is a dynamic world of “global exchange” (receptions of islamic architecture and byzantine icons in the west), competing ideologies found in the philological concerns of renaissance humanists, and the forceful relationship between medieval forms and the developing antique style in italy, exemplified in their readings of alberti’s tempio malatestiano (1450’s) and their refreshing and provocative revisiting of the interplay between romanesque and gothic architecture in netherlandish painting. nagel and wood build their infrastructure with two categories, “substitutional” and “performative.” they compare substitutional works to the “ship of theseus.” in this “thought experiment,” the ship of theseus is constantly rebuilt, so that the original material of the ship is gradually replaced, while the ship maintains the titular inscription 129 of theseus’s ship. the ship’s name identified the ship, not the material of its construction. like the ship of theseus, “substitutional” objects such as devotional icons or religious edifices exist in a chain of substitutions. for example, an icon of the virgin and child might have no material relationship to the icon of the virgin and child mythically painted by st. luke, but like the ship of theseus, the icon maintains its “identity” as a devotional icon of the virgin and child. the authors contextualize material substitution within a famous reading of medieval typology of the figura by erich auerbach, in which a historical event in the present is absorbed and understood in relation to a historical event in the past, both legitimizing each other as events within the christological understanding of time that will only be fulfilled by christ’s parousia. 3 the sacrifice of isaac in the old testament was a figura for the sacrifice of christ, both events figuras for the final resurrection. this understanding of time runs counter to a chronological understanding of time in which events unfold along a linear timeline. against these substitutional works, nagel and wood posit the “performative,” which is a “caesura” on the linear timeline. the works that structure nagel’s and wood’s book embody a play between the “performative” and the “substitutional” strategies of artistic making. this tension creates a series of works that are “anachronic,” or express their temporal instability, caught between the typological thinking in figuras and the march forward of the chronological timeline. so far, this summary of the book conveys almost as much as the article published in art bulletin in 2005, which is in fact only an introduction to nagel’s and wood’s project. like many of the painted architectural structures that trace ruin and rebuilding under discussion in anachronic renaissance, the thrust of nagel’s and wood’s project maps out the disintegration of “substitutional” thinking. the brilliance of this book is its dedication to the careful unfolding of substitutional thinking, and to its eventual erosion as a mode for understanding not only time but also material works. indeed one may be tempted to criticize the authors for having only paid attention to one mode of “temporal” thinking – the figural typology – but that is to miss the strength (and blindspot) of this argument. this book traces the end of substitution and the introduction of terms that are very important for contemporary discussion of art, trace and difference. in the early sixteenth century, substitution was replaced by citation, exemplified in the continual copying and reinsertion of michelangelesque figures in compositions. for the authors, it was the development of print culture that led to the replacement of substitution with citation. the mastery of their own craft allows the authors to present, in a captivating and persuasive argument, a ground plan for understanding an earlier and a later mode of artistic production, substitutional versus citational, and binding these modes to the seismic epochal shift introduced by print culture. it is hard to imagine other modes of early-modern artistic production and another cause, besides print, of the movement away from substitutional thinking in material objects. yet like a palladian plan, the neatness of their schema shows aberrations in execution. interestingly, nagel and wood provide only one version of the theseus myth. in the seventeenth century, thomas hobbes told another version of the story of theseus’s ship. like nagel and wood, hobbes used the myth to explore a crisis in substitution and “identity.” for hobbes, there is no linear progression of substitution. by accident, two forms of the same identity exist at once. while the parts of the ship are gradually 130 replaced, a man collects the discarded materials and stores them away. one day, the man reconstructs another ship from the collected pieces. then, as hobbes states, “there would have been two ships numerically the same, which is absurd.” hobbes reverts to the metaphor of the human body in order to determine which is the actual ship of theseus. his conception of identity relies on ideas of motion which developed in the seventeenth century with the work of galileo and descartes: “also, if the name be given for such a form as is the beginning of motion, then, as long as that motion remains, it will be the same individual thing; as that man will always be the same, whose actions and thoughts proceed all from the same beginning of motion, namely, that which was in his generation.” hobbes concludes, “so that a ship, which signifies matter so figured, will be the same as long as the matter remains the same; but if no part of the matter be the same, then it is numerically another ship: and if part of the matter remain and part be changed, then the ship will be partly the same, and partly not the same.” 4 hobbes’s parable reveals a crisis in substitution; two replicas of the same object with the same name cannot exist at once and maintain the same identity. there can only be one ship of theseus. this crisis in substitution is caused not by hobbes’s relationship to the development of print and artistic developments, but by contemporaneous philosophical debates regarding the question of motion. prior to galileo and descartes, it was thought that bodies inclined to rest and were only put into motion by force. one of the revolutions of the seventeenth century was to understand motion and rest as equal states, and to consider bodies in motion rather than rest. of course, one might very well argue that hobbes’s version is a product of the seventeenth century and not applicable to questions of fifteenth-century substitution. yet as nagel and wood point out, things often existed in twos: “two tombs of david, two temples of solomon, two huts of romulus, two authentic frontal images of christ – the veronica and the mandylion – two sites of the last supper, two sites of the praetorium two houses of caiaphas, two via dolorosas, and two places called emmaus.” 5 for nagel and wood, through the figura typological thinking, these two bodies reinforced each other; they did not cause the crisis in identity experienced by hobbes’s ship owner. and yet can hobbes’s demand to have the authenticated “one,” the determination of which ship is theseus’s, only be traced to the print “revolution”? no doubt, as nagel and wood discuss, developments such as the art market, which in turn raised questions of forgery and authorship, helped to lay the foundation for a crisis that sought to identify the “authentic one” among the many copies. by noting elizabeth eisenstein’s work on print (without taking into consideration its reception and later work on early print cultures) and using the “art market” to explain the disintegration of substitutional thinking, the authors show their blindspot. 6 while print and the art market undoubtedly played a major role that the authors persuasively describe, nevertheless, as hobbes’s parable reveals, there were other profound questions (problems?), both philosophical and theological, that made it impossible to think figurally about material objects, and in turn led to crises in substitutional thinking and material object’s inscriptions. the impact of the reformation and the ensuing revolution in thinking about the eucharist remains glaringly absent for the authors’ discussion of the substitution’s cessation to citation. finally, it is interesting to consider the role of substitution within today’s larger, more politically-weighted monuments, which in turn points towards the politics of substitution 131 in earlier epochs. i would argue that there are contemporary examples of substitution, such as the unesco’s rebuilding of mostar bridge in bosnia or the declaration of the rebuilt central warsaw as a unesco world heritage site. both these monuments retain no material relationship to the prior structures and are authenticated through “inscriptions.” 7 a consideration of the politics at play in these two unesco world heritage sites recalls the greater complications that participated in the circulation of byzantine icons in the west, representations of dome of the rock in western painting, and the figural programs connected with imperial conquests of the new world. the authors point towards these “renaissance” politics in graceful and well-footnoted prose, acknowledging the political motivations of “rediscovering” a certain relic or erecting a certain moment; but the reader feels disappointed that the intelligence of these two authors was not more deeply applied to other ramifications and considerations for thinking substitutionally. indeed the contemporary examples of substitutional monuments that they provide, such as thoreau’s house, remain safely embedded within the humanist realms of art and poetry. one wonders how, like the roots of tourism within pilgrimage, the substitutional paradigm persisted beyond its original religious structures. anachronic renaissance presents an interesting starting point to consider not only the uncomfortable feeling of encountering the unesco-disneyfication of tourism but also the interweaving of secularization and substitution that often, like the preservation of well-visited monuments, may act as a euphemism for nationalism and commodification. when substitution persists in the absence of the figura – i call this a secularized substitution – what understanding of material objects in time does this beget? unfortunately this is not an anachronic, but a present question that remains outside the authors’ own artistichistorical concerns, which (like the temporality of the works under consideration) appear to the reader belated and overly-narrow as they are bound to the renaissance and its artistic-historical receptions. caroline o. fowler princeton university notes 1. herman melville, typee: a peep at polynesian life (stillwell, kansas: digireads.com, 2008), 125. 2. alexander nagel and christopher s. wood, “toward a new model of renaissance anachronism,” art bulletin 87.3 (2005): 403-415. 3. erich auerbach, “figura,” scenes from the drama of european literature (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1984), 11-78. 4. thomas hobbes, “identity and difference,” the english works of thomas hobbes of malmesbury, ed. sir william molesworth, vol. 2 (london, 1839-1845), 136-138. 5. nagel and wood, anachronic renaissance, 266. 6. see, for example: roger chartier, the order of books: readers, authors and libraries in europe between the fourteenth and the eighteenth centuries, trans. 132 lydia g. cochrane (cambridge, u.k.: polity press, 1994); lucien febvre and henri-jean martin, the coming of the book: the impact of printing, 1450-1800, trans. david gerard (london: n.l.b., 1976); brian richardson, printing, writers and readers in renaissance italy (cambridge and new york: cambridge university press, 1999); adrian johns, the nature of the book: print and knowledge in the making (chicago, ill: university of chicago press, 1998). 7. it’s uncanny how the language of the unesco charters resonates with the questions and language among fifteenth-century humanists, in their search for “authenticity.” see, for example: christian cameron, “from warsaw to mostar: the world heritage committee and authenticity,” apt bulletin 39.2/3 (2008): 19-24. © equinox publishing ltd. 2007, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expositions 1.2 (2007) 125–126] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v1i2.125 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 editors’ preface john a. doody, kim paffenroth, and peter busch welcome to the first open issue of expositions. as will be our practice every fall, we are here publishing essays grounded in various disciplines, written on a variety of topics, and submitted independently of one another. an open issue is thus a microcosm of the university: scholars study what they want to study, but their work forms a kind of interdisciplinary whole. the virtue of openness if the whole is to be a genuine one, however, rather than a jumble of disconnected thoughts, it must have something essential in common. “openness” does not mean merely the license to study whatever one wishes; it demands more of our scholarship, not less. truly interdisciplinary studies are “open” in the sense of inviting the serious and thoughtful reader to be curious about them all. when evaluating submissions for an open issue, therefore, we do not only ask whether they somehow combine the topics or methods of multiple disciplines. we are more interested in whether they speak to the living concerns of a wider audience of teachers and scholars. articles that meet this standard give us good reason to be interested in disciplines other than our own. they also become all the more fruitful when read in one another’s company. the current issue in the first of our articles, kathleen roberts skerrett offers a christian account of responsibility for others. responding to the political theorist william connolly, who accuses augustine of spreading a politically manipulative moralism, skerrett finds in augustine an ethic rooted in generous love. our second author, roslyn weiss, also investigates service to others, but her focus is on philosophers rather than saints. socrates and maimonides both educated other people at considerable cost to themselves, and, according to weiss, this activity should be 126 editors’ preface © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 understood as a real, if unorthodox, form of piety. our third article, by james h. johnson, is set on the operatic stage and devoted to vice rather than virtue. for johnson, mozart and da ponte’s don giovanni exemplifies a love that is neither generous nor responsible (to say nothing of philosophic), but which disarms critics and victims alike with its sincerity. finally, dennis m. weiss revisits the theme of our spring 2007 issue by considering a matter of great controversy today. whatever the humanities may reveal about human nature to this point, could that very nature be eradicated by the abuse of modern technology? weiss argues that the best way to reach a balanced view of this debate is to keep it situated within the tradition of philosophical anthropology. upcoming themed issues our articles in spring 2008 will be devoted to “socratic questions.” much is said in praise of socratic method as an approach to teaching the humanities. less is said, however, about how the specific questions that socrates asked can help our study of texts other than platonic dialogues. in our next issue, we will discover what happens when socrates’ questions are taken up by the likes of augustine, virginia woolf, w.e.b. dubois, and walter pater. we are now accepting submissions for the spring 2009 issue, for which our theme will be “enchantment.” what is the power of poetry in the soul? how should we understand such genres as magical realism or medieval romance? what is the place of enchantment in the modern world? how should we discuss the history of magic, alchemy, or astrology? we welcome submissions from scholars in literature, history, philosophy, theology, art, and all other humanities disciplines that can shed light on enchantment in its many senses. © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 a reply to my critic bernard g. prusak villanova university bernard.g.prusak@villanova.edu jonathan yates’s response to my analysis of augustine’s argument is a pleasure to read; i am tickled that my little analysis—composed to make sense for myself of a text that many of us at villanova regularly teach to undergraduates—has elicited a response of such impressive historical and theological learning. yates’s opening sentence, of course, may be read in two ways. either he is saying that my analysis is very thoughtful just as it is very brief, or he is saying that my analysis is as little thoughtful as it is brief. as my colleague is a gentleman as well as a scholar, i suppose that he intends the first reading, though i am happy and grateful for the possibility of the second. i acknowledge: 1) that what is at question is, put precisely, whether evil has independent or metaphysical existence; 2) that augustine’s argument is traditional, with antecedents in platonic thought; 3) that augustine elaborates much the same argument elsewhere in his œuvre; 4) that augustine appeals to revelation in the course of his argument; and 5) that rejecting the privation theory of evil raises big questions. it should be noted, however, that what i reject in my analysis is that augustine’s argument for this theory is logically compelling. my reference to shakespeare’s king lear suggests that there may be other reasons, born of the kind of reflection that literature permits, to make our own some version of the privation theory, or in any event the theses, distinct from this theory, that good has primacy over evil and that evil ultimately tends toward non-being.1 yet i am puzzled that yates does not take issue with my analysis of the logic of augustine’s argument. the weak link in augustine’s argument is his unspoken premise that it is better for things to be incorruptible than to be corruptible. yates does not claim that this link is more defensible than i estimate it to be. yates would prefer to translate the clause “et manifestatum est mihi quoniam bona sunt corrumpuntur” as, mailto:bernard.g.prusak@villanova.edu notes, insights and flashes 95 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 “and it was revealed to me that good [things] are things that could be corrupted.” fine—but what good does this do for augustine’s argument? should we also take it as revealed that to be incorruptible is in all cases better than to be corruptible? yates is surely right that augustine “prioritizes faith and revelation over rationality and logic”—so long as we take this claim aright. as james j. o’donnell nicely puts it (quoted by yates), augustine’s practice is “to cling to what he knows for certain, to attempt to provide explanations for difficulties, and to stand with what he knows by faith even when logical difficulties remain.” surely many thoughtful people of faith, to this day, do the same. yet yates gives this “prioritization” a peculiar twist. he goes on to speak of the “prioritization…of revelation over logic” (the terms “faith” and “rationality” dropping away), seeming to suggest, if i understand correctly, that the believer may at times dispense with logic and its pesky demands of validity and soundness. surely this is not right. instead, to speak with o’donnell again, the person of good faith, so to speak, who “knows by faith” should recognize “logical difficulties” when they remain. otherwise that faith is at risk of decaying into bad faith.2 finally, i must reckon with the possibility, i am told, that my rejection of augustine’s argument might necessitate, almost certainly, that i abandon traditional monotheism and, by extension, traditional christianity. two remarks as i near the abyss: 1) a lot is riding here on what is packed into the adjective “traditional.” does not the tradition—does not augustine himself—bear witness to evil as a problem to which all our answers, if there is an answer other than the cross, must be themselves problematic?3 (is there an obvious answer in job?) further, whether god is omnipotent is ambiguous in the hebrew scriptures (think of j’s god in genesis); are theologians who have speculated that creation puts bounds on god’s power (or, perhaps more precisely, that in creating god freely undertook a limitation of divine power) orthodox/traditional or heterodox/non-traditional? 2) it seems that my colleague would have me agree that the choices come down to augustine’s argument, on the one hand, or atheism, metaphysical dualism, heterodoxy, or metaphysical feats beyond me, on the other. to which i succumb to the temptation to reply: are there not more 96 expositions © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 things in heaven and earth, and in the hebrew-christian tradition, than are dreamt of in augustine’s philosophy, at least as we have it in book 7 of the confessions? notes 1. i take this language from crosby (2007, 505). as crosby nicely explains, the privation theory aligns good with being and evil with non-being. 2. see for a lively discussion of bad faith chapter 4 of keller 2008, “against patriotism” (71–93). compare crosby 2007, 490, on “why it is important to get clear about the mode of being proper to evil.” 3. see lee 2007 and crosby 2007 for a recent disputation of the privation theory by two philosophers claiming to stand in the philosophia perennis. lee replies here to an earlier paper of crosby’s. interestingly, in his reply to lee, crosby adduces “the two evil daughters of king lear, regan and goneril,” as examples of “contentful evil” that cannot be understood in terms of privation. see crosby (2007, 494–495). references crosby, john f. 2007 doubts about the privation theory that will not go away: response to patrick lee. american catholic philosophical quarterly 81(3): 489–505. keller, simon 2007 the limits of loyalty. cambridge: cambridge university press. lee, patrick 2007 evil as such is a privation: a reply to john crosby. american catholic philosophical quarterly 81(3): 469–488. disenchantment: [expositions 4.1&2 (2010) 95-104] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5367 to enchant or disenchant? a plea for ambiguity in the contrasting musical ontologies of slavoj žižek and john milbank brian d. robinette saint louis university if jean-françois lyotard famously described the postmodern condition as incredulity towards metanarratives, the projects of slavoj žižek and john milbank might well be described as metanarrative‟s revenge. the monstrosity of christ: paradox or dialectic? is nothing if not a shootout between dueling genealogists. 1 indeed, the pairing of žižek and milbank in this co-authored volume seems wholly fitting, almost inevitable, if at times insufferable. granted the intellectually intoxicating quality of the contest, one cannot help but sense that what most unites them in their densely elaborate exegeses of eckhart, kant, hegel, kierkegaard, chesterton, lacan, deleuze, and badiou – among many others – is their relentless determination to exhaust and finally dominate the opponent. it is perhaps not a fit of histrionics that compels creston davis to declare in his introduction that the encounter staged here is “the intellectual equivalent of ultimate fighting” (19). the satisfaction derived from such blood sport will in some measure depend upon the reader‟s appetite. it may be, however, that a reader less moved by such “titanic” styles of thought will look for ways to bring mediating finesse to coarse opposition, or at the very least seek out ambiguity and permeability between positions that in the thick of battle seems all too fleeting. in his spirited response to milbank‟s only (though quite lengthy) essay, žižek attempts to clarify and sharpen the nature of their debate – a debate which, žižek confesses, looks more like a sequence of monologues than a genuine point-counterpoint (235). 2 the principle issue at stake, declares the slovenian philosopher, is not merely that one believes in a transcendent, creator god while the other takes the “death of god” with unflinching, metaphysical seriousness. nor is it that one advocates an analogical mode of thought as superior to a dialectical mode in the task of theology. (žižek fully embraces the work of theology precisely as a radical materialist-atheist and is far more willing to take on its doctrinal content than many postmodern theologians, whom he routinely accuses of cynical obfuscation.) push come to shove, the difference between them can be expressed in this way: whether we can, or should, declare that life has transcendent meaning, i.e., whether life in this “out-of-joint” universe can be considered “whole,” whether it makes some ultimate, even if hidden, “sense.” it is a matter of ontology as much as it is question about the “modern disenchantment of the world.” appealing to jacques lacan‟s view of religion as drowning the world in sense, and thus congenitally prone to domesticating “the real” – lacan viewed psychoanalysis as to enchant or disenchant? 96 squarely opposed to the all-too-human tendency to mask the constitutive void at the heart of desire – žižek declares that we must renounce the effort to re-enchant the world and instead follow the modern forces of disenchantment all the way down, follow them to their bitterest end, and accept with honesty (and not a little humor) that our symptoms admit of no final cure. to follow such a path is, žižek argues, to opt for a direction diametrically opposed from the one milbank would lead us on. it is a path that, rather than yearning with nostalgia for a harmonious order of being, a world dripping with “juicy sense,” to borrow again from lacan, chooses to accept the desert of the real as the first step towards discovering the truth about ourselves. such a path represents the true legacy of christianity, a legacy whose founding moment is and remains jesus‟ cry of dereliction from the cross, “my god, my god, why have you forsaken me?” against milbank‟s “neo-pagan” effort to re-enchant the universe with a quaint ontology, which only serves to frame his genealogy of modernity as the story of a “fall,” žižek proposes a more radically christian enterprise that can be named so, not despite his atheistic materialism, but precisely because of it. the de-sacralizing impact of modernity is not a “fall” but a moment we must pass through and radicalize. “so while milbank advocates a post-secular re-enchantment of reality,” writes žižek, “i claim that we should learn to „live in a disenchanted world without wanting to re-enchant it‟” (247). milbank, for his part, thinks his opponent‟s hegel-fueled materialism is not just a piece of heterodoxy; it‟s hopelessly drab. whereas a catholic metaphysics “achieves a materialism in a joyful, positive sense,” žižek‟s atheism “achieves only a sad, resigned materialism which appears to suppose that matter is quite as boring as the most extreme of idealists might suppose” (125). milbank wonders how genuine love, whether agapeic or erotic, is possible in a “disenchanted cosmos” (123). indeed, once we imagine human desire as hollowed out by an infinitely yawning void that promises nothing but the hell of interminable dissatisfaction; or once we replace a “catholic” metaphysics of participation with the “protestant” metaphysics of dialectic, which only devalues the sacramental-aesthetic character of being; or once we affirm modernity as a necessary moment in the historical itinerary of world spirit that only comes to itself through selfalienation, which would give priority to ontological violence over eschatological peace (didn‟t heraclitus declare war as the “father of all,” and didn‟t hegel boast that not a single fragment of this pagan master was left out of his system?): once we‟ve entertained and embraced all this, can we finally say that life is worth bearing, much less a gift, or worthy of social and political redemption? “must we be confined within this protestant, jansenist, and totalitarian gloom?” milbank asks. “or can an alternative catholic metanarrative be sustained by both the metaphysical plausibility of the catholic outlook and its fidelity to the core of christian doctrine” (131)? as both žižek and milbank are only too willing to acknowledge, their views about the origins, history, and legacy of “disenchantment” (entzauberung) – a term first made prominent by max weber to describe the way modernity progressively purges the pre97 robinette modern cosmos of “sacrality” – are thoroughly shaped by their ontological commitments. perhaps without too much distortion those commitments can be summarized as follows: whereas milbank envisions being in terms of “original peace,” as freely imparted by a triune god in whose infinite, and infinitely pacific, relations creation “participates,” žižek argues for what he describes as the “ontological incompleteness of reality,” a view of being in terms of rupture and instability, a “being thrown” (in an expanded heideggerian sense to include the whole universe), a sprawling multiplicity that can neither lay claim to an anterior peace nor expect some eschatological dénouement in which all discordant pieces will be made to fit, i.e., “make sense.” this is why lacan saw a “life-and-death struggle” between religion and psychoanalysis (241): the former posits some “big other” that can guarantee meaning through the promise of human desire‟s fulfillment, whereas the latter, while recognizing that such desire cannot finally be extirpated, resists and critiques the fantasy of wholeness and allows the trauma of our primal alienation to remain uncovered. understood thusly, the difference between religion and psychoanalysis cannot be reduced simply to whether one believes in god; for it is quite possible to operate with an implicit ontology that valorizes “harmony” and “balance,” yet without making any explicit theistic or atheistic claim. žižek regularly cites in his writings the modern ecological movement, new age movements, and western appropriations of buddhism as illustrations of late modern nostalgia. in their different ways, whether by romancing the “balance of nature” or through meditative techniques of “letting go,” aspirants can soften the trauma of the real – and meanwhile inure themselves from the disorienting effects of modern technological society and global capitalism. to say more about ontological commitments, and their role in shaping assessments of modern disenchantment, it might be useful to invoke a few musical references. to do so is hardly beside the point, despite the fact that music is not much discussed in the monstrosity of christ. (žižek dedicates a section of his first essay to richard wagner, but it is the composer‟s plays and librettos that preoccupy him.) žižek drops a musical allusion early on in his first essay that is especially suggestive. it is in reference to the socalled “pittsburgh hegelians,” a recent north american retrieval of hegel‟s philosophy that engages his dialectical logic to elaborate theories about discourse and argumentation. žižek complains that such a movement would slay the “scarecrow image” of hegel as thinker of the absolute by separating his ontological commitments from his logic. it is hegel‟s procedure, not the content of his metaphysics, that interests them – and which might render him “safe.” the problem with this sanitizing effort is that it dismisses outright the epochal character of his work, which, willy-nilly, casts everything in a different light after him. to be a hegelian, without undergoing along with him the “breakthrough into a unique dimension of thought,” is to feign innocence. the effort would be like writing tonal music after arnold schoenberg‟s atonal revolution (26). 3 to enchant or disenchant? 98 žižek‟s throwaway reference to early twentieth century atonal music – as the end of musical innocence – might seem unworthy of lingering over were it not for the fact that milbank‟s ontology is so characteristically baroque. those familiar with milbank‟s work will likely recall the role augustine‟s de musica plays in his theology and social theory, as well as his early programmatic essay, “postmodern critical augustinianism: a short summa in forty-two responses to unasked questions.” 4 in the latter piece milbank sketches an ontology that accounts for the “differential flux” of creation in terms of harmony. the doctrine of creation ex nihilo means that being is suspended between nothing and infinity – “a reality without substance, composed of only relational differences and ceaseless alterations” (267). it is just this “being suspended” that milbank elaborates quite at length in the monstrosity of christ, and in conversation with william desmond‟s philosophy of the “between” (or metaxu) of being. (more on desmond later.) on its face this differential flux of creation seems rambling and cacophonous, perhaps indistinguishable (musically speaking) from atonal serialism, which organizes sound by working through all twelve tones in the chromatic scale before one tone is repeated – a compositional process that effectively dismantles all “classical” canons of tonality and harmony. but this is not to milbank‟s tastes, nor is it consistent with a christian ontology that embraces the serializing differences of creation as a dynamic openness to polyphonic reciprocity, i.e., the “body of christ” (268). to say as much does not imply that creation is a closed system. milbank very much wishes to affirm an open ontology, even to the point of coming near to some postmodern accounts of differential flux. and yet a christian ontology would internalize and redeem postmodern equivocity by showing how the differences in creation, no less than the difference of creation from god (ex nihilo), participate and share in god‟s own pacific relationality. such an ontology is redemptive since it affirms “difference” as originally given in peace, as gift, and as open to an eschatological reconciliation yet to come. it is difference, after all, that allows for harmonic relationships to take shape. though created differences may (and frequently do) produce conflict and violence, such amounts to a diminution or privation of being, which is how milbank, in augustinian fashion, characterizes evil: as a “fall” from the primordial peace of a triune god who at once is infinite relationship and perfect unity. violence, on such a view, might be thought of as “an unnecessarily jarring note, a note wrong because „out of place‟, or else the premature ending of a development” (268). by saying “unnecessary” milbank means that conflict is not constitutive of being (as žižek‟s ontologizing of the negative would have it) but instead a contingent happening that is parasitical upon a prior good. that violence and conflict exist, there can be no doubt. that violence and conflict must be; this is what a christian ontology denies by describing it as “fallen.” in the conclusion of his theology and social theory, milbank puts the matter this way: “the harmony of the trinity is not the harmony of a finished totality but a „musical‟ harmony of infinity” (424). there is, he declares, “something „baroque‟” about such a 99 robinette view, aesthetically speaking, and “in contradistinction to both the antique-classical and the modern avant-garde. in baroque music, the individual lines become increasingly distinct and individually ornamented; there is an increasing „delay‟ of resolutions, and an increasing generation of new developments out of temporary resolutions.” such temporal delays and spatial differences entail a fluidity and openness that allow for the surprise of contrapuntal interplay; and though it may seem that the interplay is on the verge of careening out of control as the possibilities of consonance are stretched to their outermost limits, “yet the path of dissonance is not embarked upon” (428). 5 of course, it is the “path of dissonance” that is the very stuff of schoenberg‟s atonal revolution, which is why žižek‟s reference to it as a loss of musical innocence is so suggestive when characterizing the legacy of thought after hegel. his point is obviously not to compare schoenberg to hegel, as though the latter‟s philosophy in some way “sounds like” the early twentieth century composer‟s music, but to describe the gamechanging significance of situating dialectical difference (rather than harmonic coincidence) at the heart of the philosophical enterprise. neither is this to say, incidentally, that žižek slavishly follows hegel, any more than he mindlessly parrots lacan or marx; for how else could we explain the sometimes-ferocious opposition to žižek from those who lay claim to greater interpretive fidelity? 6 in any case, žižek‟s ontology is very far from the baroque sensibilities of milbank. it is not as though žižek is unwilling to grant something of the “spiritual authenticity” of milbank‟s vision, which has as its premise “the beauty of an order mysteriously emanating from its unknowable center” (248). this is indeed one of the most basic insights of positive religion – that our “commonsense reality is not the true one,” that there is a “higher order” that casts into question mundane appearances (240). but if positive religion would make the world of common sense problematic in some way, it finally undermines the insight by promising a final reconciliation for all the world‟s loose ends. it covers over the traumatic gap at the heart of fidgety human desire, i.e., our non-self-coincidence, by assuring us of a wholeness (or pleroma) yet to come. religion is fabulously effective in the effort to enchant because it identifies while repressing the symptom. it detects the disturbing nonsense that resists our best efforts at present harmonization only to re-contextualize it by some hidden, transcendental sphere of meaning. “religion is made to do this,” says lacan, “to cure people, that is to say, to make it sure that they do not note what doesn‟t go smoothly.” 7 it is just the “smoothness” of milbank‟s ontology (despite the hardness of his opposition) that žižek finds so objectionable, and indeed un-christian. never mind that christianity is typically regarded as a species of religion. žižek thinks of genuine christianity less as a religion in this sense and more as “the religion of the end of religion,” to borrow a phrase from marcel gauchet. 8 christianity is the religion of “the death of god,” and as such must be thought of as leading to the (apocalyptic) undoing of religion itself (260–8). by identifying god precisely where alienation from god is at its to enchant or disenchant? 100 most extreme – the dialectical logic of jesus‟ cry of abandonment implies that god is where god most is not, or that god is alienated from god‟s self – christian faith exposes a rupture in the fabric of being that not even the most elastic application of the analogia entis can hope to repair. whereas milbank would take safe harbor in the chalcedonian formula that affirms christ as god and human in paradoxical unity, which he believes underwrites the medieval catholic “synthesis” of matter and spirit (as well as reason and faith), žižek opts instead for a hegelian (or “radical protestant”) trajectory that situates these terms in dialectical opposition, with the effect that christ is seen, not as the earthly “manifestation” of an absolute, invisible transcendence that remains self-subsistently in reserve, but as the absolute kenosis of god in which divinity is at last emptied of all content. the death of jesus does not mean that once there was a transcendent god and now there isn‟t; it means that there never was a transcendent god who might rescue this “miserable individual, this ridiculous and derided clown-king” from the horror of the cross – and now we have no way to avoid this monstrous truth (80). “a truly logical materialism accepts the basic insight of religion,” writes žižek, “its premise that our commonsense reality is not the true one; what it rejects is the conclusion that, therefore, there must be another, „higher‟, suprasensible reality. commonsense realism, positive religion, and materialism thus form a hegelian triad” (240). put with such economy, it is not difficult to see why milbank accuses žižek of reading the history of thought as a “series of ineluctable advances” leading finally to the “voluntarist disenchantment of the cosmos” (115). though žižek vigorously denies the charge that he reads history as in any way a “necessary” process, milbank is quite right to urge a reading of nascent modernity with far greater sensitivity to historical contingency than žižek seems to allow. of course, such urging also applies to milbank‟s own genealogical effort, which at times appears equally reductive. one thinks especially in this regard of the detailed and remarkably nuanced account of modern disenchantment provided by charles taylor in his a secular age. 9 what makes taylor‟s presentation a helpful intervention here, at least potentially, is its success in demonstrating that any attempt to comprehend the relationship between late-medieval reform movements and modern secularization will not easily yield to a narrative of decline or ascent. only with a painstaking “zig-zag” account, as taylor puts it, will we be able to make much sense of the many passages to modernity and postmodernity; and even then only the most tentative conclusions can be reached, given the emergent complexity and frequently ironic mutations that inflate the “expanding universe of disbelief,” which taylor also describes as a historical “nova effect” (299-419). the effort to discern the connective tissues between the pre-modern “cosmos” and the modern (and postmodern) “universe” requires a patient eye for granularity that big-picture accounts too often simplify or distort. there are the many proximate factors that contribute to this shift, naturally, including a growing “this-worldly” orientation in popular devotional practices, increased emphasis on interiority, the “democratizing” instincts of late-medieval 101 robinette mysticism, the flourishing of courtly love traditions, renewed interests in classical literature and rhetoric, the growing influence of nominalist realism and technical reason, and the hardening conflicts between ecclesial and temporal power that set the stage for dramatic realignments. but there are the more tectonic forces of a de-sacralizing sort that run very deep in jewish and christian self-understanding, and which therefore require us to assess modern disenchantment as an ambiguous achievement of that selfunderstanding. taylor points for example to the deep “abrahamic unease” with sacral kingship (to borrow a phrase from francis oakley 10 ), the legacy of creation ex nihilo (which views the world as “wholly other” to god, yet sustained by divine will), the anthropological significance of the imago dei traditions, the incarnational imagination that gave earthly “grip” to spiritual aspiration, the extension of ascetical regimes to society, and the universalizing impulses of apostolic mission: in these and many other ways we can identify structural patterns that, while not leading ineluctably to the modern sense of worldly “immanence,” are unmistakably involved in its formation. although taylor is certainly willing to risk generalized assessments, the overall impression when reading his account, especially in light of the encounter between žižek and milbank, is that, while a debate may genuinely be had over the nature and ongoing significance of modern disenchantment, adequate comprehension of the complexity involved is not best served by viewing it through the scopes of polemically-shaped metanarratives, especially those as narrow as a “catholic” versus “protestant.” it is not as though žižek and milbank provide no historical insight, of course; and surely the sort of detail and shade offered by taylor is not news to them. (milbank cites taylor, in fact, and taylor himself acknowledges a debt to milbank.) yet their readings of the history of theology, governed as they are by their sharply contrasting ontologies, do not often permit them to offer the tentative and conciliatory gestures that a more dialogicallyshaped engagement is likelier to produce. and so a plea: is it possible to acknowledge greater ambiguity in historical assessment where excessive clarity dominates? or, to put it in the terms frequently used in the monstrosity of christ, is there more room for equivocity where interpretive univocity tends to crowd? which brings me to my second and final plea for mediation. it is a great strength of milbank‟s essay that he enlists the philosophical work of william desmond 11 in support of his claim that “metaxalogical” thinking provides a richer and more generous account of being than does univocal thought (which we might associate with nominalism), equivocal thought (which we might associate with many postmodern modern accounts of difference), and dialectical thought (which obviously aligns with hegel and žižek, [131– 60]). though milbank has long championed a “metaphysics of participation” as the appropriate philosophical-theological response to modern univocity and postmodern equivocity, with the monstrosity of christ serving now as his most extended engagement with žižek‟s self-described “postmetaphysical idealism” (91), desmond‟s work allows him the opportunity to clarify and flesh out how the “between” (or metaxu) of being is to enchant or disenchant? 102 most richly accounted for through analogical thinking because, among other things, it accords a legitimate place for univocal, equivocal, and dialectical aspects of reality without reducing to the sum of them (166). the generosity of such a view (as well as its rigor) is on open display throughout the whole of desmond‟s stunning work, and not least in his handling of hegel, on whose thought he is a widely acknowledged authority. it is precisely the subtlety of desmond‟s work, however, that may lead those familiar with and appreciative of it to be disappointed in milbank‟s comparative lack of subtlety when treating of those very aspects. by so thoroughly opposing paradox to dialectic as an either/or proposition, which the mimetic doubling of the debate seems to require, the capaciousness and “finesse” of analogical thinking (as desmond frequently puts it) becomes constrained and unnecessarily defensive, at times overly systematized and selfconfident in ways that make it vulnerable to žižek‟s charges of nostalgic insularity. this is perhaps nowhere more evident than in milbank‟s tone deafness to the trauma of the cross. when žižek accuses milbank of a “regression to paganism,” what he means is that his musical ontology sounds strangely innocent of the shocking dissonance of jesus‟ crucifixion (248). “in hegelese, milbank‟s vision remains that of a substantial immediate harmony of being; there is no place in it for the outburst of radical negativity, for the full impact of the shattering news that „god is dead‟” (249). what ontological whole, žižek asks, could possibly justify the historical disasters that jesus‟ crucifixion so horrifically typifies? what invisible harmony, what teleological outcome could make “juicy sense” of, or finally redeem, the holocaust, the recent slaughters in congo, the aids epidemic, or ecological devastation (53–55)? “christ‟s death on the cross thus means that we should immediately ditch the notion of god as a transcendent caretaker who guarantees the happy outcome of our acts, the guarantee of historical teleology – christ‟s death on the cross is the death of this god, it repeats job‟s stance, it refuses any „deeper meaning‟ that obfuscates the brutal reality of historical catastrophes” (55). it is with statements like these that the reader is made to understand that when žižek declares the universe as “ontologically incomplete” and “originally out-of-joint,” it is not just the heady brew of hegelian dialectic, quantum mechanics, and alain badiou‟s use of cantorian set theory that is talking (90–101); it is also a protest to the scandal of evil, and the greater scandal of its domestication through enchantment. it may well be that readers who do not find žižek‟s manner of ontologizing the negative especially convincing will nevertheless find his commentary on job and the crucified christ among the most gripping and challenging pages of the entire volume. if those same readers are, like myself, far more inclined towards to the sort of analogical thinking that funds milbank‟s incarnational materialism, and which looks to the paradox of christ as the “infinite particular” or the “concrete universal” (187), they will likely have hoped for a more thorough and humble engagement with the disturbing reality of evil and suffering than milbank provides. readers may justifiably be troubled with 103 robinette žižek‟s own approach to evil, which, as milbank points out, incorporates several gnostic motifs. (witness žižek‟s reading of the void and desire‟s tragic lack through what cyril o‟regan calls the “haunted narrative” of jacob boehme 13 , which hegel also incorporated [41–2; 111–12; 194–6].) and yet those same readers may be disappointed that milbank‟s basic reply is to declare theodicy only “a modern project, mostly unknown to the middle ages […] for that epoch, as for the earlier patristic one, evil was the „impossible‟ denial of one‟s loyalty to the all, to being as such. it was an act of privation and of selfdeprivation – a matter of trying absurdly to be less than one really is. evil therefore had no ontological status, and in consequence did not need to be explained” (196). to declare evil of “privation” of the good may not be inappropriate when properly understood; and, indeed, it may itself reflect a hopeful protest against (and not merely a rationalization of) its reality in a way that stimulates ardent action for its overcoming, to the extent this is possible for us here in “the between.” but the sort of response milbank offers here, namely, to summarily declare it without ontological status on account of the plenitudinous goodness of being, neither does justice to the lived reality of evil in its disturbing equivocity nor to the scandal of the crucified christ that the very incarnational materialism of milbank demands. it will not due to turn up the volume on a bach cantata to drown out the wails of penderecki‟s threnody, or to characterize the gravelly, dolorous growls of blind willie johnson as the privation of claudio monteverdi‟s vespers. “an outcry from the stricken soul,” writes desmond, “a rasping plea: we do not know what evil means at all, what it all means – this is what the stutter says, and perhaps the sleek argument too.” 14 as desmond is careful to show, a more comprehensive and finessed account of the “betweenness” of being will expose itself to the equivocity of evil, its many meanings, its baffling resistance to meaning, and the “primordial strain” its power places on “any naïve faith in the goodness of being itself” (79). such exposure in the passio essendi need not render faith in the created goodness of being a matter of willful ignorance, much less the “soft-fascist” ideology that žižek attributes to it (250). but it will give added poignancy to jesus‟ apocalyptic cry of dereliction that invites us to imagine how precisely in our suffering and exposure to evil we “participate” in the trinitarian life of god. notes 1. slavoj žižek and john milbank, the monstrosity of christ: paradox or dialectic? ed. creston davis (cambridge, ma: the mit press, 2009). 2. an assessment only confirmed by their post-publication responses (see milbank, “without heaven there is only hell on earth: 15 verdicts on žižek‟s response,” political theology 11.1 (2010): 126–35; žižek, “the atheist wager,” political theology 11.1 (2010): 136– 40.). 3. žižek makes clear that the “breakthrough” achieved by hegel cannot itself simply be accounted for in hegelian terms. hegel is “the last of the idealist metaphysicians and the to enchant or disenchant? 104 first of the postmetaphysical historicists,” which means that hegel‟s thought is more properly fulfilled when passed through (26–7). 4. john milbank, theology and social theory: beyond secular reason (oxford: blackwell publishers, 1990); “postmodern critical augustinianism: a short summa in forty-two responses to unasked questions,” in the postmodern god: a theological reader, ed. graham ward, (oxford: blackwell publishers, 1997), 265–78. 5. compare to the striking assessment given by david bentley hart, milbank‟s best known student: “bach is the greatest of christian theologians, the most inspired witness to the ordo amoris in the fabric of being; not only is no other composer capable of more freely developing lines or of more elaborate structures of tonal mediation (wheresoever the line goes, bach is also there), but no one as compellingly demonstrates that the infinite is beauty and that beauty is infinite. […] bach‟s is the ultimate christian music; it reflects as no other human artifact ever has or could the christian vision of creation” (the beauty of the infinite: the aesthetics of christian truth (grand rapids, mi: eerdmans, 2003), 282–3). 6. it is worth noting that for as much as milbank and žižek dispute each other‟s readings of chesterton, kierkegaard, and eckhart, with milbank dedicating an inordinate amount of space in his essay to reclaim the “hyperbolic orthodoxy” of the meister – and with somewhat uneven results – milbank declares žižek to be a “relentlessly accurate interpreter” of hegel, who, he hastens to add, was “already a christian nihilist and „atheist‟” (112). one wonders whether milbank‟s eagerness to push hegel into žižek‟s corner too readily serves the tactical purpose of treating them with minimal discrimination. might there be greater space between hegel and žižek than is here supposed? without venturing a reply here, the effort to determine the suitability of this nihilist-atheist reading of hegel might profitably be served by interacting with the kind of assessment characteristic of, say, rowan williams, perhaps all the more so given the theological proximity of williams and milbank (see especially, rowan williams, “logic and spirit in hegel,” in wrestling with angels: conversations in modern theology, ed. mike higton (grand rapids, mi: william b. eerdmans publishing company, 2007]: 35–52). 7. quoted in žižek and milbank, monstrosity of christ, 242. 8. marcel gauchet, the disenchantment of the world: a political history of religion, trans. oscar burge (princeton: princeton university press, 1997). 9. charles taylor, a secular age (cambridge, ma: belknap/harvard, 2007). 10. francis oakley, kingship: the politics of enchantment (oxford: blackwell publishing, 2006). 11. william desmond, god and the between (oxford: blackwell publishers, 2008). 12. cyril o‟regan, gnostic apocalypse: jacob boehme’s haunted narrative (albany, ny: suny press, 2002). 13. desmond, god and the between, 78. © equinox publishing ltd. 2009, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expo. 3.2 (2009) 155–158] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v3i2.155 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 the rage for originality and the curse of prestige mark shiffman department of humanities, villanova university as a scholar, i am the product of an alternative academic universe to the one described by mark taylor. formed under a steady regimen of great books at st. john’s college, and serving my apprenticeship in the scholarly guild through the university of chicago’s committee on social thought (designed explicitly as an antidote to excessive specialization), i now teach in a department devoted (according to its mission statement) to “an integrated, interdisciplinary approach to human questions.” i am the exception to the rule in my department, however. most of my colleagues (like most of my best teachers) have been thoroughly trained in a discipline, but bring to bear on their practice of that discipline a broader range of interests, and a passion for a deeper learning than can be contained within conventional disciplinary limits. as i look from this vantage point, taylor’s vision of the interdisciplinary academy strikes me as pure folly. taylor quotes kant’s prescription for division of labor in the academy, that “for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee.” he rightly notes that, as the german research model has become dominant in the u.s. and large parts of the world, this prescription has led, over time, to utter fragmentation. but taylor fails to reflect on what is implicit and indispensable in the notion of trusteeship evoked by kant. the trustee is entrusted with a tradition of achievement; he or she is responsible for the past, and it is through this responsibility for the past that he or she has something to offer the future. kant’s prescription is based, it should be noted, upon an unstated cultural premise, namely that universitytrained scholars will have already come to their specialized studies (as they typically would in the europe of his day) with a rigorous classical education. they would thus understand that their trusteeship for a disciplinary tradition has its place within a larger shared trusteeship for an entire civilizational tradition. the failure to take the notion of trusteeship seriously is evident in the incoherence of taylor’s proposals. he would do away with discipline-specific departments, and group scholars together into “problem-focused programs.” he then imagines the exciting synergy that would result when such a pro156 overheard in the academy © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 gram “would bring together people in the humanities, arts, social and natural sciences with representatives from professional schools like medicine, law, business, engineering, social work, theology and architecture.” (what does it tell us about taylor’s assumptions or his experience that he groups theology among the professional schools?). the obvious problem is that this arrangement would last only for one or two generations. then the thread of the disciplinary traditions would be broken. this would be utterly disastrous for the humanities: they would become superficially appropriated adjuncts to business and engineering. in this sense, taylor is simply calling for the completion of a trend that is already visible at many smaller colleges and universities. if the trustees of the disciplines are to serve as trustees for a larger civilizational heritage, then the cure for narrowness is not subjecting scholars to a merry-go-round career of task forces, but rather requiring research projects to demonstrate that their focussed attention to detail also opens onto broader perspectives and deeper questions that link the project to the foundations of the broader discipline, and the discipline to the larger family of disciplines. from this point of view, taylor’s example of narrow research, though no doubt rhetorically effective for most readers of the new york times, seems to show a lack of imagination on his part. he remarks: “a colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian duns scotus used citations.” as a student of postmodernism, taylor ought to know that scotus plays a central role in the critique of modern reason developed by scholars of the radical orthodoxy school, like john milbank and katherine pickstock. he is a figure around whom deep questions of philosophy, theology and political theory cohere. while i do not know the colleague, the student, or the project referred to by taylor, i can well imagine that an investigation of scotus’ use of citations could shed light on his relationship to the whole philosophical and theological tradition as a tradition, and could give some insight into how radical his intentions were as a “founder” of modern thought. such a project could also, if rightly guided, provide the budding scholar with a profound direct encounter with a great thinker, which might lay foundations for an independent position from which to engage significant contemporary thinkers both sympathetically and critically. the more valuable suggestion taylor makes toward restoring wholeness is that the undergraduate curriculum be restructured to be more cross-disciplinary. graduate students should expect to have to teach more than the intro courses and narrow topics of their discipline. broader education, and the rage for originality and the curse of prestige 157 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 correspondingly broad research, would then have the support of professional expectations and market incentives. this would be a small but significant corrective to over-specialization, one that would not require the short-sighted abolition of the disciplines, but would rather enrich disciplinary education. in taylor’s woolly futurism, untethered from disciplinary guilds and infected with the catchwords of management theory, this reform takes the shape of “a web or complex adaptive network.” such adaptation would probably be guided by whatever is fashionable and catches the passions of the moment. a cross-disciplinary curriculum needs some steadier guiding principles. these are, in fact, not hard to find. educational critics as different as cardinal newman, allan bloom and jacques derrida all recognize that philosophy and theology are the fundamental and integrating disciplines. unfortunately, these studies are generally too deeply infected by the professionalized specialization that reigns in the academy to understand themselves in this role with regard to the other disciplines. even catholic universities that still require students to study philosophy and theology usually undermine the most compelling rationale for such a requirement by failing to charge them with this integrating role within the curriculum. most institutions simply have no compelling or thoughtful understanding of what constitutes a real undergraduate education. part of the reason for this is that most institutions have ceased to care. taylor does not mention at all the thing universities do care about, the priority that drives much of their decisions and shapes the pressures they put on faculty. universities and colleges usually care most about prestige. why do they want scholars to pour so much time and energy into publishing in “journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues”? generally, it is enough if such work is read by two colleagues, the ones involved in the blind review process that is the guarantor of respectable research and high professional standards. by opening with his industry-metaphors, and unveiling the economic motives that inflate the numbers of graduate students universities admit, taylor gives the appearance of offering a hard-headed analysis. but any proposal for reforming colleges and universities that does not address head-on their obsession with prestige can hardly be taken seriously as a practical program. for a scholar, prestige is bound up with the rage for originality. this seems to be the hidden engine by which kant’s still slightly old-fashioned notion of trusteeship has been driven into increasingly narrow avenues. in kant’s dispassionate enlightenment vision, research is progressive and cumulative, and the scholar makes his or her contribution to the progress of this vast hu158 overheard in the academy © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 man enterprise. in human terms, however, the demand for novelty harnesses and feeds the motive of vanity. the gratification of a vanity that bases itself on claims to originality is best served by ignorance of the tradition; it is easier to overlook how derivative and unoriginal almost all our thoughts are if we never encounter the originals from which they derive. thus the rage for originality undermines the responsibility and satisfaction of trusteeship. taylor himself seems uncritically enamored of this rage for originality; it is the only mark of successful teaching that he acknowledges in his editorial. the rhetoric taylor uses to make his “vision” inspiring is antithetical to the notion of trusteeship. he hopes that proposals such as his will “open academia to a future we cannot conceive.” insofar as it opens traditional disciplines to a future of chaos, it is true that we can have no clear conception of what it will look like. but in broader terms, this future is not hard to conceive at all. it is barbarism. any reader of tocqueville will recognize it, moreover, as a provincially american program of barbarism: dominated by pragmatist exigencies, absorbed in the present and enamored of a vague (but undoubtedly better) future, with no regard for the past. roundtable.indd © equinox publishing ltd. 2007, unit 6, th e village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expositions 1.1 (2007) 071–088] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v1i1.71 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 academic roundtable each spring issue of expositions will feature an academic roundtable, in which three scholars from diff erent fi elds review a contemporary work of criticism or scholarship. harold bloom. jesus and yahweh: th e names divine. new york: riverhead, 2005. 238 pp. $24.95. isbn 1-57322-322-0. i. jacques d. berlinerblau, georgetown university harold bloom’s jesus and yahweh: th e names divine is so whimsically argued that it makes his oft-criticized 1990 study, th e book of j, read like a heidelberg dissertation. with his most recent foray into biblical scholarship the popular—though not necessarily popularizing—yale professor has produced a disheveled work. it abounds in booming proclamations, dramatic conclusions and autobiographical asides. as usual, he shuns the specialists. instead, he chooses to rely mostly on the writings of a few dear friends and, to use kafka’s term, “ale-house cronies.” in a new twist, bloom appears to have become possessed by that evil spirit that has possessed so many humanists of late: the demon of political engagement. he comments so caustically (and unoriginally) on the war in iraq, the current president, and the religious right that one almost expects him to fl ash a “free mumia abu-jamal” sign halfway through his tome. in other instances, he seems to have set for himself the peculiar goal of making negative generalizations about islam while engaging in as little substantive analysis as possible. th is having been said, i was often charmed and captivated by jesus and yahweh. by way of full disclosure, i confess that i have always had a bit of a soft spot for its author. i am forever indebted to bloom for one devious aside in th e book of j. th e remark in question, so consonant with what i have elsewhere termed “secular hermeneutics,” reads as follows: “since i am aware that my vision of j will be condemned as a fancy or a fi ction, i will begin by pointing out that all our accounts of the bible are scholarly fi ctions or religious fantasies, and generally serve roundtable.indd 71roundtable.indd 71 04/06/2007 12:29:5004/06/2007 12:29:50 72 academic roundtable © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 rather tendentious purposes” (bloom 1990, 9; cf. berlinerblau 2005). th e audacity of this observation continues to astound me. bloom understood that god has left us no empirical tools that can objectively validate our interpretations of his perplexing writ. permit me to extrapolate: hermeneutics is no hard science. we could even say that it is an art form. and if this is the case then interpretations of sacred scripture should be judged not on their verisimilitude but on their ability to entertain. in fi elds of inquiry where little can be decisively proven it is better to be interesting than to be absolutely correct. and interesting bloom is! for all of its fl aws jesus and yahweh dares to ponder the broader civilizational relevance and ramifi cations of the jewish and christian scriptures. th is is a task that professional biblicists have all but forsaken. while one can—and should—disagree with virtually every claim bloom makes, his imagination and erudition can never be denied. again and again, he gives us the intellectual razzle dazzle—and given the monastery-like demeanor of our fi eld we could use a few sequins in our eyes. nor should we overlook his penchant for making mischief. here he is comparing american jewry to post-exilic babylon (jesus and yahweh 191). here is speaking of not the “new,” but the “belated” testament (14). here he is dubbing allah “a suicide bomber” (237). how this conforms to his disclaimer in the introduction that he hopes “only to clarify … and not to give off ense” (237) is anybody’s guess. th is reviewer, then, professes to both like and dislike the work under consideration. leaving a discussion of bloom’s treatment of christianity and literature for the two distinguished scholars who are participating in this roundtable, i will concentrate mostly on his remarks on the hebrew bible and judaism in general. th e aforementioned book of j, published fi fteen years ago, is actually the theoretical preface to jesus and yahweh. th e title of that muchdiscussed work portended nothing new or controversial. for centuries scholars have posited the existence in the pentateuch of a distinct j document. various exegetes had already attempted to tease out this source and read it in isolation from the rest of the bible. nor was the hypothesis that the author of j was a woman, writing in the “postroundtable.indd 72roundtable.indd 72 04/06/2007 12:30:0904/06/2007 12:30:09 jesus and yahweh: th e names divine 73 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 solomonic enlightenment,” original (though bloom seemed to have thought it was).1 fortuitously, these conjectures are not frequently rehearsed in jesus and yahweh. yet bloom’s admiration for the artistry and insight of j has, if anything, grown over the intervening fi fteen years. like so many professors of literature and poetics who have written about the bible, bloom is awed and mesmerized by the aesthetic merits of scripture.2 th e writer j, he argues, has vexed posterity with a literary character named yahweh, the “uncanniest personifi cation of god ever ventured by humankind” (5). “if yahweh is a fi ction,” writes bloom, he is “the most disturbing fi ction the west ever has encountered” (117). th e deity is depicted as freighted with “human, all-too-human traits of personality and of character” (2). no open book, j’s yahweh is “paradoxical” (7), “a character . . . rich in contraries” (130), “jealous” (138), “turbulent” and “unpredictable” (143). in a memorable turn of the phrase, he is described as “bad news incarnate” (170). railing against the idea of yahweh’s anthropomorphism, bloom lingers on j’s descriptions of a “human god” (195), a man, adorned with a big, brutalizing body (197–99). having established the spectacularity of j’s fi ctional creation, bloom is positioned to engage in a compare-and-contrast operation of epic scale. j’s impish deity serves as a baseline against which a series of comparisons will be drawn. to the best of my knowledge few have even thought of making such contrasts and this is what makes jesus and yahweh, when all is said and done, a bold and intriguing work. first and foremost, bloom wishes to identify diff erences between yahweh of the tanakh and god the father of the christian bible. th e latter, he insists, “has only the slightest resemblance” to the former (232). (a sub-theme in this work focuses on the lack of similarity between jesus christ and jesus of nazareth who bloom calls a “more or less historical person” (1)). th is leads naturally to a second analytical gesture, the juxtaposition of the hebrew bible and the new testament. finally, the preceding two lines of analysis unfold into broader comparisons of judaism and christianity. roundtable.indd 73roundtable.indd 73 04/06/2007 12:30:0904/06/2007 12:30:09 74 academic roundtable © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 what bloom fi nds is not continuity between the abrahamic faiths and their foundational texts, but bitter, radical irreconcilability. th e idea of a shared judeo-christian heritage is dispensed with swiftly as the two religions are described as “enemy brothers” (166). such a verdict befi ts an author who repeatedly refers to the hebrew bible as “the captive prize” of christianity (113). but while judaism is shown to have been victimized by christianity’s appropriations and misreadings, a pronounced jewish triumphalism characterizes this work. one can’t help but notice that yahweh and judaism (and to a lesser extent “the more-or-less historical jesus”) keep coming up aces. th e christian father, by contrast, emerges as something of a bore—white bread, to yahweh’s crusty focaccia. yahweh is fearsomely dynamic, his christian counterpart is static (234). yahweh cannot be loved, cannot be known, cannot be counted on. yahweh is interesting. th e father is a bland theological abstraction. th e same boosterism can be seen in bloom’s remarks on scripture. th e new testament (with the exception of mark’s gospel) is consistently held to be inferior to its predecessor. its historical veracity is often questioned. (th ough, for some reason, bloom concludes that the apocryphal report of jesus’ sojourn in india is trustworthy.) but what is historical accuracy to an aesthete anyway? th e real defect of the belated testament lies in its defi cient artistry. like nietzsche, but unlike the patriarchs, bloom clearly prefers the older brother: “in the aesthetic warfare between the hebrew bible and the new testament, there is just no contest, and if you think otherwise, then bless you” (86). be that as it may, he insists “the christian bible has defeated and refashioned the tanakh” (156). th e victory of the new testament was a hollow one indeed. its misreading of the hebrew bible has given birth to christology, unceremoniously described as “weird science” (154). christianity, as evidenced by its historical treatment of jews, has betrayed the message of the historical jesus. christians, for their part, do not come off much better. th ey search for their jesus christ but invariably fail; what they fi nd at the end of their quest is themselves. rounding out these un-ecumenical sentiments is bloom’s contention that christians are unaware that roundtable.indd 74roundtable.indd 74 04/06/2007 12:30:1004/06/2007 12:30:10 jesus and yahweh: th e names divine 75 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 the jesus christ they worship is irreconcilable with the more-or-less historical jesus. before unleashing further provocations, it must be noted that there is one glaringly manifest diffi culty with this line of analysis. th is concerns bloom’s isolation of the j source at the expense of all other scriptural materials. assuming that the j source exists, it must be recognized that j’s yahweh is not synonymous with the hebrew bible’s conception of god. in classic documentary hypothesis j is but one document in the pentateuch. it was recombined, repositioned, refracted and often drowned out by three other sources (i.e., e, d and p) as well as large swaths of the prophets and the writings. j’s yahweh is not necessarily the god that jews have venerated any more than the e source’s elohim is. th e image of god in hebrew scriptures is an unruly, multifaceted, multivalent thing. his overall portrait is a hodge-podge of varying conceptions of the divine scattered across twenty-four scrolls, each written and redacted across centuries. th us, to draw inferences about the differences between christianity and judaism on the basis of the j source alone seems a specious endeavor. yet by confl ating the god of the jews with the god of the j source bloom wanders into a variety of intriguing existential and theological dilemmas. he confronts them in starkly personal terms and these encounters comprise some of the most poignant sections of the book. scholarly writing rarely features anything that could be labeled as narrative. but this appears to be precisely what we have in jesus and yahweh—a narrative with full-blown character development. th e central character: professor harold bloom. th e development: the protagonist’s coming to yahweh. at the beginning of jesus and yahweh the god of the hebrew bible is referred to as a fi ction. yet as the plot advances, we begin to wonder. picking up clues from the genesis legends, bloom identifi es those fl aws in yahweh’s character that have caused undue suff ering for his subjects. j off ers us a portrait of a deity with no allegiance to his handiwork, one who retains a “highly ambivalent attitude toward his own creation” (213). bloom lashes out at the god of the jews for staying true to biblical form in his later dealings with his people. here is a deroundtable.indd 75roundtable.indd 75 04/06/2007 12:30:1004/06/2007 12:30:10 76 academic roundtable © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 ity that has exiled himself and thus permitted the catastrophes of jewish history. fleshing out the rudiments of (a gnostic) post-holocaust theology bloom asks about yahweh’s abandonment of the children of israel. th e world, he observes ruefully, is a place from which yahweh has withdrawn. th e deity, it is suggested, should be convicted on the charge of desertion. mindful of his approaching seventy-fi fth birthday, bloom seems to have resigned himself not only to yahweh’s character fl aws, but to his non-fi ctional nature. halfway through the work he declares: “whether you regard him as ‘a literary character’ or as your creator scarcely matters in this struggle to reach the unreachable” (131). but does the following candle-lit passage sound like the musings of someone who sees yahweh as a mere literary character? i very much want to dismiss yahweh as the ancient gnostics did, fi nding in him a mere demiurge who had botched the creation so that it was simultaneously a fall. but i wake up these days, sometime between midnight and two a.m., because of nightmares in which yahweh sardonically appears as various beings, ranging from a havana-smoking, edwardian-attired dr. sigmund freud to the book of daniel’s silently reproachful ancient of days (236). increasingly haunted by the deity, he confesses to an “uneasy waning of skepticism in regard to yahweh” (234). elsewhere, bloom argues, with no discernible wink or nod, that the jewish god returned to israel in 1948. th e narrative ends with bloom wondering aloud if he will make a covenant with humanity that he both can and will keep. “where shall transcendence be found?” is the question posed in the fi nal stanzas of jesus and yahweh (235). bloom’s answer, “the arts,” strikes me as eminently plausible. even more plausible is his recognition that this form of transcendence only appeals to elites. th e majority is not about to experience the divine (or something approximating it) upon reading hamlet or listening to the jazz pianist eric reed. it is more likely that they will submerge themselves in what bloom refers to as “the blood-dimmed tide” of scripture. and for these reasons secularists who ignore sacred texts do so at the risk of completely misreading their own societies. roundtable.indd 76roundtable.indd 76 04/06/2007 12:30:1004/06/2007 12:30:10 jesus and yahweh: th e names divine 77 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 in its own strange way, jesus and yahweh attempts to off er secular transcendence to the select few. for this work aspires to be beautiful, a work of art in and of itself. although it often fails in this regard, and although the ideas it advances are not always convincing, it does sometimes succeed in provoking and entertaining with a luminous originality. looking at the big picture is no small feat and for this we should laud professor bloom in his seventy-fi fth year. endnotes 1. for a discussion of the lack of originality in bloom’s writings on j see the impassioned critique of richard elliot friedman (1991). 2. “bible as literature” scholars are the intelligent design theorists of modern old and new testament research: while they posit a preternaturally gifted author as the source of the text, they cannot rationally prove that this author actually existed. see berlinerblau 2004. references berlinerblau, jacques 2004 th e bible as literature? hebrew studies 45: 9–26. 2005 th e secular bible: why nonbelievers must take religion seriously. cambridge: cambridge university press. bloom, harold 1990 th e book of j. new york: grove weidenfeld. friedman, richard elliot 1991 is everybody a bible expert? not the authors of the book of j. bible review 7: 16–18, 50–51. ii. john gager, princeton university is it really true that all scholarship is a form of projection, of autobiography; that we are all caught in a tangled web of narcissistic self-refl ection? in the early 20th century, albert schweitzer, in his monumental work on the history of lives of jesus, wrote that no task so reveals an era’s, or one might just as well say in individual’s, self-understanding as the attempt to write a life of jesus. he was surely right in this obserroundtable.indd 77roundtable.indd 77 04/06/2007 12:30:1104/06/2007 12:30:11 78 academic roundtable © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 vation but never paused to consider whether his fundamental insight (we might also call it an iron law) applied to his own work as well. did he believe, as i suspect must be true, that the german myth of wissenschaft, of history as the domain of objective, unbiased, presuppositionless inquiry, enabled him to transcend the theological trap that had ensnared all of his predecessors? harold bloom’s “quirky, unforgivable, but deliciously provocative book” (berlinerblau 2006, b12) embodies schweitzer’s law, but much more as well. it comes full circle from bloom’s hugely infl uential th e anxiety of infl uence, fi rst published in 1973, but does so in a way that fi nally lets the cat out of the bag. as one insightful critic, indeed a former student of bloom at yale, has put it, who really cares … that stevens “misread” shelley … ? but the battle between the new testament and the hebrew bible is a struggle over religious truth that goes to the core crisis in western civilization, and in bloom himself. it helps explain why, in bloom’s agonistic literary universe, literature, despite his genius for explaining it, can seem oddly irrelevant. it is religious truth that matters.” (rosen 2005) my one complaint about this otherwise brilliant insight into bloom’s own anxiety of infl uence—of a passionate jew living in, or at least at the end of a christian civilization—is that for bloom there is fi nally no distinction between literature and religion. for the most part, the fi gure of yahweh has no existence apart from its embodiment in the j material of the hebrew bible. likewise, and again for the most part, the fi gure of jesus has no embodiment apart from the gospels of the christian scriptures. indeed, the parallels go well beyond this simple observation. for bloom, there are unmistakable similarities between the yahweh of j and the jesus of mark. bloom’s characterization of his yahweh would do just as well for his jesus: ambivalent creator and destroyer (the fi g tree episode in mark 13); uncanniness; trickster; enigmatic; a personality without a sexual component; and so on. moreover, the subsequent traditions of ancient israel and early christianity found yahweh and jesus to be completely unacceptable and thus subjected them to radical revision, making their rough places plain. th e underlying issue of roundtable.indd 78roundtable.indd 78 04/06/2007 12:30:1104/06/2007 12:30:11 jesus and yahweh: th e names divine 79 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 infl uence becomes clear in bloom’s remark that “jews have a negative relationship to christ, but not necessarily to jesus, who is scarcely responsible for what supposed christianity has done in his name” (27). in short, jesus belongs not to christianity but to judaism, more precisely to authentic, yahweh-inspired judaism. th e christianity that has dominated western civilization, and not so coincidentally the jews, for 20 centuries is thus an inauthentic version not just of authentic israel (the yahweh variety) but of its own supposed founder. of course, much the same can be said of later, post-yahweh judaism, but that is largely beside the point inasmuch as it is christianity and not judaism that has been the primary cultural infl uence on all of us. but for bloom it remains fundamentally true that “christianity (and judaism) no longer are biblical religions” (172). much of what bloom says along these lines is familiar stuff . jewish scholars, among whom one may cite martin buber (in his two types of faith, [1951] 2003) as one example among many others, have long argued that jesus was a jew, pure and simple; his followers misunderstood and misrepresented him from the very beginning. much of recent christian scholarship on jesus follows a similar line, but with one important diff erence. whereas jewish scholars tend to see in jesus a jew who remained faithful to his tradition from start to fi nish, with no hint of reform or rebellion, christian scholars, including those who emphasize jesus’ jewishness, seem unable to resist the temptation to fi nd some point in jesus’ life where he departs from or undermines judaism in some fundamental fashion. in these cases, the underlying motivation is surely to reclaim jesus, at whatever price, for christianity, and to proclaim him as the true founder of the new faith. for me, the desire to fi nd a point of departure from judaism in the life of jesus rests on a fundamental misuse and misreading of the early gospels, some of which (luke in particular) are heavily invested in making jesus the founder of christianity, while others (here matthew is the parade example; see anthony saldarini’s remarkable matthew’s christian-jewish community (1994)) are read as christian only with the aid of a profound ignorance of ancient judaism. but there is another tendency in bloom’s work on jesus that betrays roundtable.indd 79roundtable.indd 79 04/06/2007 12:30:1104/06/2007 12:30:11 80 academic roundtable © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 both his status as an amateur in the fi eld and at the same time his reliance on an unfortunate trend in all forms of jesus scholarship—the tendency to slip from gospel stories to ‘facts’ about the real jesus. th e tendency is understandable enough in a broad sense. we all want to know something reliable about the fi gure of jesus. we are all susceptible to horror vacui. true enough. both professionals and amateurs in any fi eld are open to gaff es of many kinds. yet in this case, bloom’s is all the more surprising in that his take on the gospels, and especially the gospel of mark, is shaped by the work of another amateur, frank kermode in his magisterial norton lectures on mark, th e genesis of secrecy (2006). “rereading kermode’s book, after a quarter century, i am stimulated to augment his pioneer analysis by swerving into surmise as to the psychology of jesus” (bloom 31). what surprises in this swerve is that kermode insists throughout his lectures that we need to concentrate on what is written, i.e., the gospel stories and how they are told, and turn aside from what is written about, i.e., the real story of the historical jesus. th us when bloom asks, “did jesus believe in the originality of his message?” (32), he slips back, if only momentarily, into a mode of inquiry that is curiously out of place, not just in professional jesus-scholarship but in his own literary domain. what we have is stories, versions and nothing more. following his denial that jesus intended to establish a new religion, bloom locates the true founder of christianity in the fi gure of paul (27). today this seems like an odd claim. while it is certainly true that paul dominates the new testament, the conclusion to be drawn from this is not that paul was the founder of christianity but rather that the makers of the new testament, centuries after his death, made him the founder of their religion. th ey were christians. if jesus was not, as bloom rightly avers, neither was paul. he became a christian only through the new testament. if jesus somehow appeals to him, perhaps as a distant echo of yahweh, paul puzzles. on the one hand, bloom can hold that “for paul, the resurrection, or christ-event, proclaimed the death of torah” (42). yet only a few pages later, he comes to strikingly diff erent conclusions: “th e vehemence and violence of the apostle’s personality are revealed roundtable.indd 80roundtable.indd 80 04/06/2007 12:30:1104/06/2007 12:30:11 jesus and yahweh: th e names divine 81 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 through his letters, which are mostly argued against jewish christians, rather than against jews and judaism … pharisees, the hated opponents of matthew, are not a target for paul” (53). strike the phrase “jewish christians,” substitute for it something like “other jewish believers in jesus,” and recall the earlier statement that paul “devoted the remainder of his life to the conversion of gentiles” (52)—with these modifi cations, the words about “the death of torah” simply could not have been written or at the very least would have to be modifi ed to read that “paul proclaimed the death of the torah in the sense that its regulations, most notably circumcision, were not incumbent on gentile believers in these last days of history.” something new had happened. but to gentiles. and that new thing can certainly not to be summed up as “the death of the torah.” it is true that paul is a diffi cult fi gure, perhaps even an unlikable one, but this is no reason to give up trying to make sense of his thinking. we may not like him, but we should not rush to judge him as one who “confuses anyone attempting a dispassionate stance toward him.” here bloom has taken the easy way out, perhaps under the infl uence of his yale colleague, wayne meeks, who appears to have convinced him of paul’s protean, i.e., essentially unstable and contradictory, character. we may well be “left baffl ed by him,” but it is surely not because “we know too much about him” (57). i suspect that much of our puzzlement about paul is due to our inability to wash away the centuries of sludge that christianity has piled upon him. as the apostle of christianity, he has been hailed as the founder of every conceivable orthodoxy and heresy, including notably christian anti-judaism and anti-semitism. bloom is well aware of this but like many modern readers of paul he fails to break completely free of these traditions. at the same time, bloom is an extraordinary reader. he comes remarkably close to a complete break with the hundreds of post-pauline pauls. as noted earlier, the chief stumbling block remains his use of the term “christian” with reference to the apostle. th is term, which never occurs in any of paul’s letters, is increasingly out of place today. what is now taken for granted of jesus (he was not a christian in roundtable.indd 81roundtable.indd 81 04/06/2007 12:30:1104/06/2007 12:30:11 82 academic roundtable © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 any sense of the term) is now widely held to be true of the apostle as well. on the other side, bloom has no truck with the old, and sadly still prevalent view that paul preached the divine rejection of israel. “yahweh and israel, paul implies, will work out the chosen people’s redemption” (56). nor will he accept the notion that israel’s fi nal redemption will take the form of accepting christ or, in bloom’s terms, becoming christians like paul. “did paul … really believe that israel would accept christ at that moment?” (56). characterizing his basic disposition, he comments that “his ways of thinking and feeling essentially remained pharisaic.” and fi nally, of the pharisees, he “does not regard them as particularly prone to sin, nor, as their student, does he think of himself that way” (53). here i wish that bloom had paused to draw out the consequences of these penetrating insights, for they contain the seeds of a truly radical reassessment of the apostle. but the last step is frequently the most diffi cult one to take. of course, with bloom, one gets much more than the title promises: bits of shakespeare, the gospel of john (a lot here), kierkegaard, milton, maimonides, gnostics (no surprise), kabbalah and jewish-christian dialogue (not a good thing). but in the end this is a book, as the title announces, about jesus and yahweh. or rather about books about jesus (gospels) and yahweh (torah). or better yet, whether these books create these two fi gures, bring them into being by naming them, or whether in some way they refl ect a prior existence in some realm other than the purely literary. references berlinerblau, jacques 2006 what’s wrong with the society of biblical literature? th e chronicle of higher education, nov. 10. buber, martin 2003 two types of faith. [1951] trans. norman p. goldhawk. syracuse: syracuse university press. kermode, frank 2006 th e genesis of secrecy: on the interpretation of narrative (th e charles eliot norton lectures). new edition. cambridge: harvard university press. roundtable.indd 82roundtable.indd 82 04/06/2007 12:30:1204/06/2007 12:30:12 jesus and yahweh: th e names divine 83 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 rosen, jonathan 2005 so who is the king of the jews? rev. of jesus and yahweh, by harold bloom. th e new york times, nov. 27. <http://www.nytimes. com/2005/11/27/books/review/27rosen.html> saldarini, anthony j. 1994 matthew’s christian-jewish community. chicago: university of chicago press. iii. milton l. welch, north carolina state university in his 1939 lectures “idea of a christian society,” t.s. eliot argues that a christian state is the sole alternative to totalitarianism when democratic majorities become tyrannical and liberalism declines in free societies. he opens by remarking, i am not writing for scholars, but for people like myself; some defects may be compensated by some advantages; and what one must be judged by, scholar or no, is not particularized knowledge but one’s total harvest of thinking, feeling, living and observing human beings (eliot 1940, 5). th at eliot’s “total harvest” is uncritical of bland racial generality—“the anglo-saxons display a capacity for diluting their religion, probably in excess of that of any other race” (20, my emphasis)—indicates a source of the agonistic spirit with which harold bloom has approached eliot’s critical work until quite recently. in his more than fi fty years of writing, bloom has helped to overturn eliot’s judgments on the romantics, to argue for alternate traditions of modernism, and has developed a controversial theory of infl uence that undercuts eliot’s basic premise in “tradition and the individual talent” that literary works contribute to literary tradition as monuments. bloom’s work in religious criticism vies, fi nally, to displace the traces of eliotic social thinking, and has from the start addressed how religious value and political value infl uence one another in the present day. for instance, the fi rst sentence of th e american religion (1992) reads: “freedom, in the context of the american religion, means being alone with god or with jesus, the american god or the american roundtable.indd 83roundtable.indd 83 04/06/2007 12:30:1204/06/2007 12:30:12 84 academic roundtable © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 christ” (15). in bloom’s contemporary america, spirit and culture are tangled in a gordian knot that becomes a noose when capacities for critical appreciation vanish, leaving behind political and religious myopia. for this reason, bloom’s latest book, jesus and yahweh, belongs to his continuing challenge to the conservative mode of criticism and social thought that eliot helped to entrench in twentieth-century literary criticism. one unfortunate consequence of the culture wars may be that harold bloom’s work on behalf of undermining eliot’s cultural geneticism is lost (see also gates 1992). th is geneticism sees culture as racial genetics—for the eliot of four quartets, racial ancestry even drums the rhythms of poetry with ghostly “[f ]eet rising and falling” in “east coker” (eliot 1991, 56). bloom’s trajectory from map of misreading to his infamous essay, “ ‘th ey have the numbers; we the heights,’ ” charts a rising tide of polemics: other scholars, and, subsequently, prominent literary fi gures objected to bloom’s stinging—and as critic roy sellars has pointed out, allusive—attacks against trendiness in critical and academic reading. and yet bloom’s attacks were issued in an era that unknowingly witnessed the gradual collapse of university publishing (see mla 2002) and the erosion of buying power in u.s. academic libraries, two major scholarly crises of today (greenblatt 2006). even in the public, if reading is indeed at risk as an nea study (reading at risk) announced in 2004, the conditions of that risk emerged during the culture wars, as bloom’s writing coursed into fever pitch. culture wars threw the humanities into a still acknowledged crisis (cohen 2005), and perhaps only by ignoring academic history do bloom’s polemics on the unique disciplinary grounding of literary study read as reactionary politics to students of literature. bloom’s unfortunate (and inaccurate) caricature as a reactionary also ignores the force of bloom’s pun on andrew marvell’s phrase “ruin the sacred truths,” which becomes a nietzschean imperative for literary criticism to expose what francis bacon—and after him melvin b. tolson—called the idols of the tribe (see the poem by that name in tolson 1999). such ruining is the phobia of eliotic conservatism. bloom is, however, one to be thanked if criticism has become less accommodating to, among other things, the roundtable.indd 84roundtable.indd 84 04/06/2007 12:30:1204/06/2007 12:30:12 jesus and yahweh: th e names divine 85 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 casual anti-semitism of eliot’s droll chauvinism in after strange gods, his 1933 paige-barbour lectures at the university of virginia. if th e anxiety of infl uence is right, jesus and yahweh may be bloom’s phase of apophrades with eliot—what bloom once called the return of the dead, a writer’s late reckonings during which she will fail or fl ourish. bloom’s new book is his most vigorously daring criticism in years, but his readers will recognize one of the book’s central claims as one that has appeared throughout his religious criticism—jesus christ in the new testament and yahweh in the old testament and tanakh, whatever else they may be, are literary characters. as a work of criticism, one of the questions jesus and yahweh raises is, however, what “literary character” may mean, and whether the term must devalue spiritual matters. in a recent interview (2005), bloom claimed among others things that yahweh “haunts” him, and at a point in the book bloom makes an extravagant cultural prophecy that yahweh has already returned to earth (233). if literary character means a branded personality, then we should be puzzled—puzzled enough to consider assumptions about the roles literature and its characters may play in our lives. bloom defi nes “literary character” as “the vital protagonist, the principle of apotheosis, the hope for transcendence” (13), and concludes his study asserting “god’s unknowability” (219), a literary judgment that is also a spiritual position, albeit a rare position in the u.s., where according to a gallup poll oft-cited by bloom, almost nine in ten believe in god’s personal love for them. “i remember composing a section,” bloom discloses about th e anxiety of infl uence in the current book, “on the new testament’s anxiety of infl uence in regard to the hebrew bible, which is the subject of this chapter” (46). jesus and yahweh’s claim that the judeo-christian tradition is misnamed is a topic that shaped his theory of infl uence, and is also rejoinder to eliot’s conservatism. bloom’s antithetical mode of criticism here applied to the idea of a judeo-christian tradition is iconoclastic and at odds in every way with eliot’s avowed spiritual and political stances. in eliot’s vision of tradition as race, the greatness of the individual talent’s monument—which is to say of literature—is its honoring both whiteness and the judeo-christian tradition. th e roundtable.indd 85roundtable.indd 85 04/06/2007 12:30:1204/06/2007 12:30:12 86 academic roundtable © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 shocking challenges bloom puts to his reader are the historical and textual grounds for such a tradition, and subsequently, the further challenge of considering “who was, who is yahweh?” (131). bloom off ers that yahweh is “a planter of gardens, and is happy to picnic in the shade of a terebinth tree” (150). th is description recalls wallace stevens’ portrait of the artist as an anthologist (stevens 2003, 252–3), in that word’s etymological sense of studying fl owers: clear water in a brilliant bowl, pink and white carnations. th e light in the room more like a snowy air, refl ecting snow. a newly-fallen snow at the end of winter when afternoons return. pink and white carnations—one desires so much more than that. (“th e poems of our climate” 1.1–7) is stevens writing about god as well here? is this poem or its image of arranging fl owers a spiritual experience? can we learn about god from reading literature? in reading the tanakh or the bible, have we already done so? jesus and yahweh can be admired for its thought-provoking take on religion and literature. it will certainly provoke theological discussion in academic and public circles, but only coteries of literary academics will talk about it. th e latter situation is unlucky because this book is also a remarkable meditation on the uses of literary experience. references mla (ad hoc committee on the future of scholarly publishing) 2002 th e future of scholarly publishing. in profession 2002, 172–86. new york: mla. bloom, harold 1992 th e american religion. new york: simon & schuster. 2005 interviewed by debbie elliott. all th ings considered. national public radio. december 11. npr: archives. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/ story.php?storyid=5048309 cohen, ralph, ed. 2005 essays on the humanities. spec. issue of new literary history 36.1: 1–139. roundtable.indd 86roundtable.indd 86 04/06/2007 12:30:1204/06/2007 12:30:12 jesus and yahweh: th e names divine 87 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 eliot, t.s. 1991 collected poems, 1909–1962. new york: harcourt, brace, jovanovich. 1940 th e idea of a christian society. in christianity and culture, 1–78. new york: harcourt, brace and company. gates jr., henry louis 1992 integrating the american mind. in loose cannons: notes on the culture wars, 105–20. new york: oxford university press. greenblatt, stephen 2006 special letter from stephen greenblatt. mla, nov. 16. http://www.mla. org/resources/documents/rep_scholarly_pub/ scholarly_pub perloff , marjorie, et al. 1998 on harold bloom’s ‘“th ey have the numbers, we the heights.”’ poetry forum. boston review, summer 1998. http://bostonreview.net/br23.3/ contents.html sellars, roy 2006 harold bloom (comic) critic. in figures of bloom: th e salt companion to harold bloom, ed. roy sellars and graham allen, 255–89. cambridge: salt publishing. stevens, wallace 2003 th e poems of our climate. in modern poetry, vol. 1 of th e norton anthology of modern and contemporary poetry, 3rd ed., ed. jahan ramazani, richard ellmann, and robert o’clair, 252–53. new york: w.w. norton & company. tolson, melvin b. 1999 “harlem gallery” and other poems. ed. raymond nelson. charlottesville: university of virginia press. u. s. national endowment for the arts. 2004 reading at risk: a survey of literary reading in america. washington: research division, national endowment for the arts. roundtable.indd 87roundtable.indd 87 04/06/2007 12:30:1304/06/2007 12:30:13 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expo. 3.2 (2009) 173–184] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v3i2.173 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 what is the good of the “examined life”? some thoughts on the apology and liberal education brian satterfield villanova university advocates of liberal education often hold up the apology of socrates as a model for how to understand its aims and practice. but what, really, is the good of the “examined life” that socrates preaches? in the brief essay that follows i offer some reflections about how we might understand the value of knowledge of ignorance. …of all things it is just this that is most difficult to persuade you … that the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being. the apology of socrates 37e4-a6 thoughtfulness can be paralyzing—so much so that it can bring life to a stop. in his confessions, tolstoy describes the experience of crippling perplexity that came to him more and more frequently as he grew older, making it all but impossible to complete even the most ordinary tasks: …five years ago (1874) a strange state of mind-torpor began at times to grow upon me. i had moments of perplexity, of a stoppage, as it were, of life, as if i did not know how i was to live, what i was to do. i began to wander, and was a victim to low spirits. this, however, passed, and i continued to live as before. later, these periods of perplexity grew more and more frequent, and invariably took the same form. during their continuance the same questions always presented themselves to me: “why?” and “what after?” … i became aware that this was not a mere passing phase of mental ill-health, but that the symptoms were of the utmost importance, and that if these questions continued to recur i must find an answer to them. (tolstoy 1901, 73) “my life,” tolstoy goes on, “had come to a sudden stop. i was able to breathe, to eat, to drink, to sleep. i could not, indeed, help doing so; 174 what is the good of the “examined life”? © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 but there was no real life in me.” despite his wealth, his consciousness of literary success, and a life in other respects comfortable and pleasant, he began to think of suicide. “why?” and “what after?” the author of war and peace and anna kerenina found himself wondering. in low spirits, it was as if he did not know how to live, he wrote, the experience, one of stoppage. is it perverse to wonder whether the goal of liberal education is to inflict such stoppage on our students? parents and administrators, surely, would feel unease at any handling of the young that aims to induce “low spirits” and “wandering” (let alone thoughts of suicide). and yet the questions that the older tolstoy describes himself as paralyzed by are patently socratic—questions that lie at the center of almost any description of liberal education. their effect on tolstoy, indeed, reminds us of meno’s description of socrates. socrates, says meno, is like a “torpedo fish” (meno 80 a-b), a kind of electric eel that shocks those it comes into contact with, temporarily leaving them paralyzed, torpid regarding matters that they had previously believed they knew with certainty. to be questioned by socrates, meno suggests, is to be made to feel one’s own ignorance regarding the most important questions; and it stings. what value could there possibly be in being brought to a stop in this way, one wonders? especially if reflection turns out to be—as tolstoy’s words seem to forebode—antithetical to life? as described by tolstoy, socratic stoppage is the experience of pain and paralysis, of a loss of mental health and even the will to live. and yet, strangely, both he and socrates considered the experience invaluable, in some sense central to a fully human life. speaking in the apology, socrates claims that a life lacking in such self-examination is “not worth living for a human being,” while to “examine oneself and others,” re-raising on a daily basis the question of how one ought to live, is the “greatest good for a human being” (apology 37e3-a8). the characterization is stark, redolent with uncomfortable implications: most human beings, socrates implies, live lives in which self-examination plays little or no role— and to that extent are “not worth living for a human being.” placed on trial for his life’s activity, indeed, socrates identifies the jury’s refusal to accept this claim as the greatest obstacle he faces in winning acquittal, satterfield 175 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 and a fortiori the real reason for his having been convicted. in truth, parents and administrators need hardly worry: if the chief objection to liberal education were that it induces “wandering” and “low spirits,” we could defend it beautifully by pointing out how seldom it succeeds. the inherent difficulty of breaking through is simply too great, and though made worse by the distractions of technology, the problem is not a new one. throughout the platonic dialogues socrates continually bumps into characters who in one way or another are temporarily struck by him—but ultimately bounce off as though he were a species of slippery rock, unharmed (largely—socrates had at least two spectacular failures), but also unchanged in any fundamental way. on the other hand, the fact that students are seldom really harmed by it is not a defense for it either. the defensibility of liberal education looks even worse when one considers that it has no obvious products: where technical education can point to skills or information successfully transmitted and acquired, the effects of liberal education are largely invisible, difficult to measure. one can usually tell from essays whether a student can think, or write; and from conversations whether someone is familiar with good books. but the bare utility of these skills is doubtful. and if the goal were simply to prepare students to win employment, the passing on of minimal communications skills could probably be accomplished adequately in other ways. what, then, does one respond to a student who asks, perhaps not even closed-mindedly, but with real failure to understand, “why would i want to do that?” the very question bespeaks a set of attitudes, of course, a confidence, bordering on certitude, that the basic suppositions by which they live are adequate. not infrequently, this certainty is accompanied by an unarticulated mistrust of reason, a deep reluctance to believe that it could interrogate or even evaluate conflicting teachings about how to live well. even more fundamentally, such students tend not to see themselves as products of any particular teaching or tradition which might have shaped them in ways that are not easy to see, but instead regard their choices as wholly their own. and yet, the question deserves an answer: what good does one get from the “examined life”? the phrase itself is suggestive—if problem176 what is the good of the “examined life”? © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 atic. it suggests that the primary task of philosophy, or at least socratic philosophy, is to examine or interrogate the fundamental standards by which one lives. in that sense, socratic philosophy differs from preand much postsocratic philosophy in that it aims, not to give an account of the whole, but of how men ought to live. even so, “examination” could mean a number of things. as one of my students pointed out last semester, the catholic practice of confession is one kind of examining one’s life. at regular intervals it requires one to hold up one’s actions to scrutiny, acknowledge one’s failures, repent sincerely, receive forgiveness, and then resolve to “go and sin no more.” a morally serious life, the church fathers concluded, is impossible without regular and unflinching self-assessment. it is likely that socrates would have concurred in the importance of such self-examination. time and again, in both plato and xenophon, he is depicted as calling people to account for their failures to abide by standards that they themselves recognize as authoritative. an alcibiades, a critias, or even socrates’ own sons, if we are to believe plato and xenophon, were the frequent targets of stinging rebukes in which he exhorted them to live up to their own notions of virtuous behavior. and yet, in the end, it does not seem that this is what socrates meant by “examination.” rather, he seems to have meant, not only that one should assess how one is doing in relation to standards that are recognized as authoritative, but that these standards themselves should be interrogated. “has one, under a given set of circumstances, behaved justly?” is a question incumbent upon a morally serious person. “what, for that matter, is justice?” is a question for the philosopher. the two do not obviously go together. one can be morally serious, one might think, without being philosophical. a man who has never reflected systematically can nevertheless perform actions of heroism, justice, or self-sacrifice. even simple—which is to say unreflective— decency properly compels respect. equally, one can be inquisitive, even a brilliant inquirer, without evincing any particular concern for the morality of one’s own behavior. and yet, perhaps the two are not as separable as they first appear. the morally serious man can, at times, be guilty of horrors, all the worse for being principled. zealots and fanatics are, in one sense, serious people satterfield 177 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 in that they can be prepared to sacrifice their lives in the service of goals larger than themselves. and yet, the goodness of the goals actually matters; in that sense, it is essential for moral seriousness, if it is even to be what it is, that it be joined to a degree of reflectiveness. skepticism, doubt—stoppage—may, in that sense, be no more than proof of sanity or humanity. indeed, in one place in the apology socrates says plainly that those politicians he encountered who were not disposed to believe that they knew were “more decent” (apology 22a). conversely, it seems that inquiry that is not morally serious is unlikely to be genuinely inquisitive. one must, in effect, have some sense that the questions that we are asking have real import for how we are to live before we are likely to take them seriously. “what is truth?” asks pilate; it is doubtful whether any character in the history of literature can have been sketched so completely in three words. even if one is prepared to accept the proposition that moral seriousness and authentic philosophical inquisitiveness are not even what they are apart from one another, however, their union is a problem, both theoretically and practically. the point is demonstrated, as hegel pointed out, in socrates’ efforts to transmit philosophy: having set his students the example of morally serious inquisitiveness, he was unable to transmit their conjoined-ness. it was, thus, no accident that socrates became the father of the stoics on the one hand, and the skeptics on the other. the stoics, seeing only his ethical side, interpreted his legacy as one of ethical and moral practice—of philosophy as therapeia, meaning tendence of the soul in the light of criteria not themselves subjected to doubt. most of the time, the stoics appear to have concluded, we already know what needs to be done; the problem is that we fail to do it. the academic skeptics, on the other hand, lost sight of socrates’ essential concern with moral questions, setting aside moral seriousness in favor of suspensions and doubt, “ephexis.” when we use the phrase “it’s academic,” we pay them tribute. and yet, is it so clear that the moral standards by which we live and call for, even require philosophic reflection? in a recent article in the new york times entitled “the end of philosophy,” david brooks argued that everything we really need to know—about right, wrong, good and bad, we learned in infancy. 178 what is the good of the “examined life”? © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 moral judgments are like that. they are rapid intuitive decisions and involve the emotion-processing parts of the brain. most of us make snap moral judgments about what feels fair or not, or what feels good or not. we start doing this when we are babies, before we have language. and even as adults, we often can’t explain to ourselves why something feels wrong. (brooks 2009, a29) the moral standards by which we judge, researchers are concluding (claims brooks), are probably innate, the product of evolution. we do not reflect rationally when we make decisions; we judge, acting on the basis of beliefs that we have internalized since infancy. moral vision, to that extent, is largely intuitive; and philosophy, brooks claims, is thereby rendered unnecessary. brooks’s main point is silly, of course. even if what he is saying about evolution were true, it would not remove the phenomenon of the ethical dilemma, nor would it account for the fact that in making big decisions people actually do sit down and think hard. though he is loathe to admit it, even the most thoughtless life has a role for rationality. and yet brooks does make one worthwhile point: that most of what we do is guided by internalized ethical assumptions. it is, however, a point that was known to aristotle before it was “discovered” by “evolutionary researchers”; for as aristotle understood, ethical dispositions (hexeis) are not rote habituations; they are seeing and judging dispositions.1 to be morally virtuous requires not only habituation through action; rather, through familiarity with ethical actions one’s vision for the ethical—especially the noble (to kalon)—is sharpened. the question, thus, is not whether our actions are largely guided by implicit accounts—of course they are—but rather how good, or bad, those accounts may be taken to be. the fundamental assumption of students who do not want to reflect (or brooks) is that their starting assumptions are good enough. there is, they seem to feel, little danger that they could waste their lives, or again, be guilty of really catastrophic missteps. this position—that conventional wisdom is sufficient for the recognizing of good and bad—deserves, i suspect, more respect than socrates gives it in his mid-apology exchange with meletus. for socrates’ villainous characterizations of meletus aside, it is not clear whether we satterfield 179 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 know enough about meletus to dismiss him as a trivial human being, as does socrates; or again, that socrates’ “demonstration” that meletus “doesn’t care” succeeds. put on the spot by socrates, he claims, first, that the laws of athens improve the youth, and subsequently, that ordinary athenians do. and what meletus seems to mean is that average athenians know enough about just and unjust, good and bad. these are not fundamentally matters of expertise, but learned in childhood (perhaps in much the same way that children learn to speak a language). is this such a bad view, then? or is it rather the view behind our own penal laws, as well as the moral censure that we deal out so freely? when someone has murdered, stolen, or cheated, we are prepared to say of the guilty person, not that he was insufficiently philosophical, but that he ought to have known better. the difficulty is similar with socrates’ “demonstration” that meletus has not reflected on the question of who improves the youth; is it at all self-evident that someone who has not reflected on precisely this question does not care? to suggest—as socrates does in his reply—that such questions are fundamentally a matter of expertise, on the other hand, raises disquieting, seemingly absurd possibilities. for if questions of just and unjust, good and bad, are subjects for experts, then most of us, not being experts, are likely to get it wrong. while we are perfectly prepared to recognize expertise in other fields, however, something in us strongly resists doing so in questions of this kind—not least because of the scope of the consequences. could it really be the case that most human beings lack the knowledge necessary to live well? and—as the necessary corollary seems to demand—that to take one’s bearings by the conventional opinions on such a question would be to make of one’s life a disaster? students have a hard time with this proposition. it takes a certain amount of effort, for instance, to wrest from them any acknowledgement that it is possible to waste one’s life. “how can you ever judge another person’s life wasted?” is a typical response. “well, stop thinking about others for a moment,” is my own. “would you agree that you could waste your own life, say, by becoming a drug addict, squandering your talents, never loving another human being, and in one way or another, destroying yourself, slowly or quickly?” for most, this is a possibility they can envision; and once they can acknowledge it in their 180 what is the good of the “examined life”? © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 own case, they are at least sometimes willing to pay others the courtesy of setting aside blind tolerance. such possibilities are, however, nowhere near as terrifying as the ones that socrates seems to have in mind. for while utter dissipation— through drug addiction or whatever—is an obvious path to self destruction, the paths he has in mind are more horrifying, because they are more insidious. the most horrifying possibility of all, for instance, is that one could live out an entire life without sensing that something is wrong—only to discover on one’s deathbed that one had gotten it completely wrong, that one had thought one was living well, but in fact doing everything backwards. could this ever really happen? students, being young, have a hard time believing it, tending to think that one knows immediately and infallibly whether one is happy. to combat that mistake i have found the tolstoy novella, the death of ivan ilych, helpful. short, but remarkably powerful, the novella was written after tolstoy had his crisis, and has all the hallmarks of a man who has been asking himself “why?” and “what after?” it tells the story of an unreflective man, a judge, who has lived a life that is in all outward respects solidly successful. married, the father of children, he has had an impressive career, and built a home both elegant and comfortable. had he been asked, he would have said—and without hesitation—that he was happy, having achieved everything that a successful life should aim at. climbing a ladder one day, he stumbles and bumps his hip. and—as my nursing students have told me can happen—the bruise develops into a cancer. from the peak of health, ivan ilych begins to waste slowly, dying before his own eyes. the result, as tolstoy tells us, was that something in him—his soul—began urging questions on him: “what is it you want?” was the first clear conception capable of expression in words, that he heard “what do you want? what do you want?” he repeated to himself. “what do i want? to live and not to suffer,” he answered. and again he listened with such concentrated attention that even his pain did not distract him. “to live? how?” asked his inner voice. satterfield 181 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 “why, to live as i used to—well and pleasantly.” “as you lived before, well and pleasantly?” the voice repeated. and in imagination he began to recall the best moments of his pleasant life. but strange to say none of those best moments of his pleasant life now seemed at all what they had then seemed—none of them except the first recollections of childhood. there, in childhood, there had been something really pleasant with which it would be possible to live if it could return. but the child who had experienced that happiness existed no longer, it was like a reminiscence of somebody else. as soon as the period began which had produced the present ivan ilych, all that had then seemed joys now melted before his sight and turned into something trivial and often nasty. (tolstoy 2004, 294) the voice of ivan ilych’s soul is horrifying because it speaks truth— not propositional truth that elicits premises and deductions, but the truth of the mirror. it does not argue; it refutes by sounding ivan’s own words back to him, making their full emptiness evident. even alone, sick, and armored by a lifetime’s habits of evasion and self-protection, ivan cannot fail—once he has been pushed to articulate what he really wants—to hear the hollowness in it, and rethink. for us, thinking about the question of whether it is possible, even easy, to waste one’s life, ivan ilych offers one powerful illustration. just taking the conventional views of things at face value, tolstoy suggests, will all but guarantee a wasted life, because the conventional opinions necessarily arise out of falseness and inauthenticity—out of a host of social hypocrisies, and especially what tolstoy characterizes as the innate human desire for comfort, the desire not to be shaken up, bothered, embarrassed, or hurt. to strive for success, to live for what the world considers good and names “correct,” is the surest way to shut down the authentic voice of the soul—and we get better at it with time. for tolstoy, adulthood is one long education in hypocrisy. the further ivan ilych departed from childhood, tolstoy writes, the more and more he now realized how worthless and doubtful were the things he had believed to be joys. “it is as if i had been going downhill while i imagined i was going up. and that is really what it was. i was going up in public opinion, but to the same extent life was ebbing away from me. and now it is all done and there is only death.” what might he 182 what is the good of the “examined life”? © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 have done differently? a thought occurs to him: “maybe i did not live as i ought to have done,” it suddenly occurred to him. “but how could that be, when i did everything properly?” he replied, and immediately dismissed from his mind this, the sole solution of all the riddles of life and death, as something quite impossible. (tolstoy 2004, 295) it is hard, of course, to know what such an amended life might have looked like. perhaps, given a second chance, ivan might have pursued a more genuine love with his wife and children, greater seriousness in religion, work that would allow him to live more humanly. but one thing is certain: such a life could never have come into being as long as the habits of complacency and self-protection, the love of comfort, both physical and psychological, had governed his soul. in some ways, the worst tragedy of ivan ilych’s life was that he never experienced the kind of life-changing tragedy—stoppage—that might have led him to assess his life anew. a life without such suffering might be the worst deprivation of all. key to such a reassessment, tolstoy seems to be suggesting, is the awareness of death. and again, the sentiment is hardly a new one. “teach us to number our days,” says the psalmist (psalms 90:12)—the point being that to live a worthwhile life requires keeping before the mind’s eye an acute consciousness of its brevity and finitude. to be aware of its shortness is to invest our living with new demands for meaningfulness, an impatience of the trivial, the distracting. these demands are potentially manifested in everything that we do. “whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest” (ecclesiastes 9:10). paradoxically, and as all of the great teachers appear to have concluded, living well is the practice of learning to die. that it is possible, even easy, to misspend one’s life is a sobering proposition; and if tolstoy—or the bible, or indeed, almost any of the books in the western canon—is right, it is not only easy, it is the natural way of things. left to themselves, denied the experience of being brought to a halt, human beings seek the way of least resistance. man may be born to trouble as the sparks fly upward; but left to himself he would generally prefer to roll downhill. if liberal education provided satterfield 183 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 the context for rethinking when it comes, it would have done much. if it provided the experience of being brought to a halt—of stoppage— early and hard, it would have done more. and yet, in the end the overlap between socrates and tolstoy is only partial; for to say that the reason for examining one’s life is not to misspend it is to miss the more problematic dimension of socrates’ claim; it is to transform socrates’ practice into an essentially utilitarian activity, good because of its possible benefits or outcomes. it is to trivialize socratic philosophy by turning it into a species of self-help. having reflected and come to better views of what one ought to aim at, it implies, we should set aside reflection and examination, and get on with leading our new, more meaningful lives. so seen, reflection may be a necessary preliminary—especially in corrupt places and times—but it is ultimately only preparation for life, not life itself. socrates’ own words are more challenging, and for two reasons. the first is that thinking things over seems to be, for socrates, not a means to an end, but an end itself. it is, he says—astonishingly—not the practice of virtue that is the greatest good for a human being, but talking about virtue in the course of every day. this proposition is only defensible, i suggest, if talking about virtue is virtue. virtue, socrates seems to be suggesting, is necessarily actively self-reflective, the eye seeing itself seeing. something about this tends to stick in the craw of students. for not only do many of them not see themselves as especially interested in thinking, but the demands that socrates seems to place on them—that they suspend concerns for advancement, family, and personal lives while they enter upon a course of questioning that will ultimately prove inconclusive—seem extreme, even perverse. the natural tendency is to dismiss by becoming “reasonable,” temporizing. sure, some reflection is good; but socrates takes it too far. “shouldn’t he be supporting his children?” is a common question. reinforcing this objection is a second: if socrates himself is a model of the kind of examination that he urges on others, his lifetime of inquiry appears remarkably unsuccessful. having constantly engaged in discussions about virtue, he seems by the time of his trial to have learned nothing. all he has achieved, on his own account, is knowledge of his ignorance. the prospect of spending one’s life in unpleasant (as 184 what is the good of the “examined life”? © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 students think) and fruitless inquiry—inquiry which does not even pretend to hold out the possibility of answers—is disheartening. and some, understandably enough, lose interest as soon as it becomes clear that there is no concrete prize or reward at the end. the natural question of the student—“what am i going to get out of this?”—has no answer that the soul disposed to ask it in the first place is going to recognize as satisfactory; reflection and self-knowledge are not products, but processes, or rather activities. one does not, in thinking about socratic questions, typically get a final answer; one gets—at best— understanding of possibilities. is there, then, no way to communicate the goodness of the “examined life” to someone who does not already understand? at bottom, i doubt whether any better answer can be given than that thoughtfulness, awareness, and understanding—even where these are of unsettled questions or problems—are choiceworthy for their own sake. however unpleasant, even antithetical, to easy, comfortable living such consciousness may be, it is the fullest expression of our human being. to persuade every student that that consciousness is not some aberration is not going to happen; the forces of self-love, complacency, and simple laziness are too human. what one can do is show them the stake—and hope they respond. notes 1. my colleague, dr. jonathan yates, points out to me the remarkable similarity with hebrews 5:14. references brooks, david 2009 the end of philosophy. new york times april 7. tolstoy, leo 1904 confessions. in the life and teaching of leo tolstoy: a book of extracts. tr. with an intro. london: g.h. perris. 2004 the death of ivan ilych. in great short works of leo tolstoy. tr. louise shanks maude, aylmer maude. new york: harpercollins. 05tromanhauser.indd © equinox publishing ltd. 2008, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expositions 2.1 (2008) 027–034] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v2i1.027 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 the “reflexive humanities” vicki tromanhauser department of english suny new paltz a recent article in the new york review of books about affluence in america offered sobering news for today’s college students and the parents funding their education. its assessment of the value of higher education featured two tables, one documenting skyrocketing tuitions over the last thirty years and another estimating what college degrees are worth in terms of yearly income (hacker 2007, 32, 33). the news does not look good, and in particular for the humanities. so it is no surprise that rising costs of higher education have pressed the humanities into an increasingly defensive posture and prompted concerns about their ability to earn their keep among neighboring disciplines with more immediately practical applications to advertise. such trends bespeak a cultural preoccupation with the economic bottom line and the growing perception of education as a saleable commodity whose investors have every right to expect a material return. when value is conceived in purely financial terms, the humanities are destined to fare rather poorly. it is in this defensive climate that stanley fish in his recent new york times piece interjects his deliberately provocative claim: “to the question ‘of what use are the humanities?’, the only honest answer is none whatsoever.” fish’s small concession of the intrinsic pleasures the humanities bring to those who practice them is a slim peg on which to hang an entire tradition of intellectual inquiry and at the same time appears suspiciously cozy with the pressures of the very market forces from which he seeks to protect humanities departments. measuring the value of the humanities solely in terms of the pleasure they yield those who study them can prove a limiting proposition that, as mark edmundson warns, educators in the classroom have been inclined to take all too literally (edmundson 1997). the culture of consumption has http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/expo.v2i1.027 28 the “reflexive humanities” © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 penetrated the american university, turning instruction into a service industry intent on satisfying the student as savvy customer. fish tellingly employs commercial language when he argues in a follow-up column that justification for humanistic study “requires more than evidence that a consumer can get a desirable commodity in your shop, too; it requires a demonstration that you have the exclusive franchise” (fish 2008). rather than challenging the students, the classroom as “shop” becomes an extension of the marketplace, delivering up its intellectual wares in a form designed to amuse and entertain, and comprises a deferential environment that is unwilling to risk offense. fish’s baiting questions about the value of the humanities opportunistically tap into internal anxieties about a crisis of identity as scholars engage in ever more defensive accounts of their disciplines’ objectives and substantive contributions.1 fears of the steady erosion of disciplinary integrity have fueled efforts to rediscover specialization and to recognize that humanistic study possesses its own particular techne or skill set. the cultural turn in the humanities has led members of fish’s and my native discipline of english studies to trespass on some unexpected terrain, from anthropology and political science to technology and ecology. scholars in search of fresh pastures thus graze in other disciplines outside of the traditional humanities, drawn to fields that appear exotic but in which they have no real expertise. this kind of approach is, as marjorie perloff contends, not so much interdisciplinary as it is “otherdisciplinary” (perloff 2007, 655). perloff sounds a more pervasive concern that interdisciplinary offerings have substantially weakened the position of the humanities within the academy, compromising the disciplines’ integrity as autonomous fields. both fish and perloff independently speak to growing fears about an academic climate in which literary matters appear secondary, and take on a merely instrumental value in relation to other more practically useful, and hence financially justifiable, kinds of research. such scholarly eclecticism, syncretizing disparate areas of knowledge, has led historian roger griffin, in his recent investigation of the relationship between fascism and modernism, to identify the need for “reflexive humanities” that can take stock of their own activities and tromanhauser 29 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 methods (griffin 2007, 36). in disabling outsiders from determining the value of humanistic study, fish refuses to grant its practitioners an ability to achieve sufficient analytic distance to assess their own disciplinary undertakings. and by doing so, he overlooks one of the greatest strengths of the humanities, effectively neutering the disciplines rather than shoring up their potency against the assaults of the uninitiated. in his presumption that justification “confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance,” fish too hastily dismisses the possibility that humanists might provide a sustained inquiry into the value of their own endeavors. the interpretive framework griffin proposes, at once panoramic and self-conscious, presents a necessary correction to the underexamined and hubristic practices of an earlier generation of humanism. the poststructuralist epistemology of the late twentieth century has, fish implies, settled into the humanities like gangrene, forcing researchers “into the reaches of incomprehensible and often corrosive theory” (fish 2008). but instead of signaling the imminent demise of the humanities, this kind of theoretically informed reflexivity offers an encouraging sign of their general health. it is the humane sensitivity with which the humanities reflect upon their own undertaking and the neighborliness with which they reach out to other disciplines that constitute their particular, and indispensable, contribution to the academy. and perhaps it is by opening up the questions of justification, which fish’s deceptively transparent pronouncements seek to foreclose, that we might renew the humanities’ relevance and clarify their distinctive merits, without pressing for an autonomy that spurns the judgments of outsiders. when fish concludes that the humanities “don’t do anything, if by ‘do’ is meant bring about effects in the world,” he echoes w.h. auden who, in an elegy for w.b. yeats, wrote that “poetry makes nothing happen” (auden 1977, 241–243). the elegy itself is a kind of exercise in literary interpretation, an evaluation of the deceased poet for posterity, which might restore some wanted subtlety to fish’s polarized extremes and offer a different assessment of humanistic study. “in memory of w.b. yeats” (february 1939) provides a reflection on the poetry of statement, on art as manifesto or primer for action. if the poem’s central axiom that poetry makes nothing happen smacks of the slogan, 30 the “reflexive humanities” © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 auden thwarts such interpretive reduction, and when read in relation to its various contexts—stanzaic, literary-biographical, historical— the line gathers disparate and even contrary meanings. auden’s elegy meditates on the legacy of the poet to a world in which what virginia woolf called the infernal bray of the dictator’s megaphone threatened to drown out the whispered revelations of the poet. his ambivalent tribute places yeats at the heart of a modernist debate in the interwar period over the degree to which art should speak directly to the political and social concerns of the moment and the extent to which the poet was morally obligated to intervene in political reality, whether broadcasting propaganda or driving an ambulance in civil war spain. auden’s public meditation on yeats’s poetic legacy took place at a pivotal moment in his own career. the elegy was composed months before the outbreak of the second world war and shortly after he had emigrated to the united states, a culture he hoped would foster an unconstrained voice.2 written between auden’s expression of political zeal in “spain” (1937) and his renunciation of partisan allegiances during the war, the poem presents two opposed conceptions of the dead poet as maker (from poiein, to make): that of the mystical visionary aloof in the tower on lady gregory’s estate and that of the revolutionary activist whose verse turns in the gyres of epochal history. the elegy’s middle portion was a later addition, forming a bridge between the first section’s sober assessment of yeats’ impact on the world and the third section’s celebration of the power of verse to transcend the person who wrote it and the immediate political circumstances that occasioned it. in the middle section auden addresses yeats directly in a tone that is chummily familiar—“you were silly like us”—casually chiding him for the more egregious aspects of his political views, the eugenical and stridently nationalistic (even fascistic) strands of this thinking. the words of the dead man appear to have left the world fundamentally unchanged, more altered by it than altering of it, “modified in the guts of the living.” in the wake of his death, as the living poet can attest, now ireland has her madness and her weather still, for poetry makes nothing happen: it survives in the valley of its saying where executives would never want to tamper; it flows south tromanhauser 31 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 from ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, a way of happening, a mouth. approximating the “memorable speech” that auden considered the best definition of poetry, the aphoristic statement that poetry makes nothing happen subverts the imperative claims of yeats’ revolutionary verse.3 poetry ensures its survival by resisting the tampering of “executives” who remain riveted to the bottom line and the calculation of measurable profits and losses. auden carries out his argument with yeats about the political potency of their art in the grammar of his poem. poetic making, as the verbs in the middle portion suggest, exists in the intransitive mode, acting without an immediate object or practical agenda: it “survives / in the valley of its saying” and “flows south.” one way of understanding the subtle qualifications of auden’s oblique imagery is to see the passage as enacting a distinction between authorship and writing, which allows us to envision a way of happening that is not torn between the binary opposition of what we might describe as fish’s and yeats’ attitudes towards humanism. distinguishing between two modes of writing, roland barthes argues that, in the case of the author, “to write is an intransitive verb,” whereas the writer, by contrast, is a “‘transitive’ man”: “he posits a goal (to give evidence, to explain, to instruct), of which language is merely a means; for him language supports a praxis, it does not constitute one” (barthes 1988, 187, 189). the central section of the poem accordingly shows the author in auden contending against the writer in yeats. auden jettisons the “transitive” properties of yeats’ poetry in order to inaugurate an “intransitive” poetry. but to deny that poetry has a material impact upon the “weather,” the “sufferings” of the poor, or the “roaring” of brokers “on the floor of the bourse” is not to say it is of no use. if “poetry makes nothing happen,” in the sense of compelling action in the outside world, it nevertheless provides a “way of happening.” auden’s organic metaphor implies a different scale of time, where poetry is a river that alters the landscape, as it might transform the psychic geography of readers, gradually and undramatically, but with the most profound consequences. 32 the “reflexive humanities” © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 again, attentive reading, as auden demonstrates in his confrontation with his predecessor, possesses its own ethical dimension. once he has purged yeats “himself,” or at least his exaggerated persona, from the verse that survives him, auden turns in the final section to argue the opposite case—that poetry is a force that exceeds the social causes of the moment, at once metapolitical and suprahistorical. in its celebration of a language that can transcend the man and pardon “his views,” poetry regains a transitive force that can move an object, without necessarily compelling its object into passivity: the “unconstraining voice” of the poet can “persuade us to rejoice,” “let the healing fountain start,” and “teach the free man how to praise.” this final section of the poem mingles the two perspectives of poetry making nothing happen and poetry affecting reality more deeply than simpler forms of action. auden exhorts poetry itself to “persuade,” “let…start,” and “teach,” without, for example, telling us what to “praise” or “rejoice” in. poetry thus gives us the means to praise, “a way of happening,” without commanding a specific outcome. in fact, poetry, and by extension the humanities, warn against too readily reducing the range of human choice to an expedient program for action. if auden ultimately is not prepared to say of poetry what fish says of the humanities— that they do not “bring about effects in the world”—he nonetheless renounces the extravagant claims of many of his fellow modernists that poetry could remake the world in its own perfected image, a form of supreme arrogance in which the artist becomes indistinguishable from the authoritarian. “in memory of w. b. yeats” displays the reflexivity that is the special contribution of the humanities, as the poem juxtaposes two competing theories of the poet’s power: whether art is immune or directly answerable to social causes; what i have called, following barthes, the “intransitive” and “transitive” properties of art. if the latter theory appears to gain the upper hand in the end, it does so only after auden has expressed his reservations by letting the other argument have its say. the poem carries greater force for leaving the argument in play, giving voice to both possibilities without seeking forcibly to resolve them. in the polarized climate of the academy, shaped by the competitive forces of consumer capitalism, auden helpfully reminds us of the softer shades of value that exist between the lofty peaks of our culture’s tromanhauser 33 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 spiritual salvation and the obscure depths of institutional budgets. as a renewed expression of the vitality of the humanities, auden’s poem also preserves a place for rhetorical, ethical, and political engagement, which fish would banish from the university. in a new york times column last september, for example, fish rebuked columbia university president lee bollinger for attacking mahmoud ahmadinejad on political grounds during the iranian president’s visit to the campus. arguing that bollinger’s public challenge constituted an unwarranted provocation, where both university president and classroom instructor ought to be bound by “academic protocols” of political and ideological neutrality, fish expressed his convictions that the goal of the liberal arts is to impart analytic skills devoid of any unseemly taint of partisanship and that the university should not “stand anywhere on the vexed issues of the day” (fish 2007). it makes a great deal of sense to challenge the value of the humanities, as fish does; but even his reductive attitude is one that was, ironically, fostered in the self-conscious environment of humanistic study. auden’s poem shows that, even when history presses with most alarming circumstances on the moment of writing, cynicism and polarization need not constitute our response. notes 1. terry eagleton offers a witty critique of fish’s sophistical argumentative tactics in “the estate agent,” london review of books, march 2, 2000, reprinted in eagleton (2003, 171–179). 2. for an illuminating reading of the poem and the personal and social circumstances from which it emerged, see mendelson (1999, 3–17). 3. from auden’s introduction to the anthology the poet’s tongue (1935), in auden (1996, 105). references auden, w.h. 1977 the english auden: poems, essays and dramatic writings, 1927–1939. ed. edward mendelson. london: faber and faber. 1996 the complete works of w.h. auden: prose and travel books in prose and verse, volume i: 1926–1938. ed. edward mendelson. princeton: princeton university press. 34 the “reflexive humanities” © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 barthes, roland 1988 authors and writers. a barthes reader. ed. susan sontag. new york: noonday press. eagleton, terry 2003 figures of dissent: critical essays on fish, spivak, žižek and others. new york: verso. edmundson, mark 1997 on the uses of a liberal education as lite entertainment for bored college students. harper’s, september. fish, stanley 2007 the administrative imperative: always lower the stakes. new york times, september 30, online edition. 2008 the uses of the humanities, part two. new york times, january 13, online edition. griffin, roger 2007 modernism and fascism: the sense of a beginning under mussolini and hitler. new york: palgrave. hacker, andrew 2007 they’d much rather be rich. new york review of books, october 11. mendelson, edward 1999 later auden. new york: farrar, strauss and giroux. perloff, marjorie 2007 presidential address 2006: it must change.” pmla 122/3: 652–662. doi:10.1632/pmla.2007.122.3.652 http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2007.122.3.652 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expo. 3.1 (2009) 97–114] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v3i1.97 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 academic roundtable on charles taylor, a secular age taylor, charles. a secular age. cambridge: bellknap press, 2007. hb. $39.95, isbn 9780674026766. secularism’s fragile buffered selves micah watson union university mwatson@uu.edu this is an extraordinary book. it is extraordinary because it is authored by a profound thinker, addresses and attempts to answer a defining question of our era, and does so with a breadth and depth that are rare in contemporary political theory. it is the sort of book that will engender conversations for years to come and create ripples in literatures across several disciplines. it is an unhurried work that does not shy away from delving into exquisite detail while steadily working toward an overarching argument. it will be one of those landmark books that scholars and students will feel compelled to acquaint themselves with even if they do not read it cover to cover. what is the defining question that taylor addresses, and what is his overarching argument? the question is rather simple. almost everyone in western society in the beginning of the sixteenth century believed in god, and society was ordered with this in mind. not believing in god was hardly a plausible option. over five hundred years later, it seems that belief in god is one option among many, and an increasingly unnecessary option at that. how has this come to be the case? it is helpful to think about taylor’s answer to this question on two levels. the first level is taylor’s basic approach to the subject. one hallmark of taylor’s approach and argument is that the story of how western culture moved from a god-soaked society in early modernity to a secular contemporary society is a dizzyingly complex narrative. he is mailto:mwatson@uu.edu 98 expositions © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 interested not merely in what we might take to be the obvious criteria whereby we measure the loss of religious influence—religious presence in the public square, church attendance, survey results, etc.—but in the underlying “conditions of belief ” that lie beneath the surface. taylor takes issue with the standard enlightenment account of the rise of secularity, what he calls the “subtraction thesis” (26). this is the simple notion that religion and its influence retreated with the rise of science and its newtonian, mechanistic account of the world. subtract religion, and rational modernity fills the void. a major theme of the work is taylor’s insistence that this is a self-congratulatory and simplistic account that obscures much and reveals little. what, then, does account for the shift? here we move to the second level of taylor’s argument. given his criticism of the enlightenment’s subtraction thesis as overly simple, we can expect taylor’s retelling to be complex, and so it is. indeed, his account defies a quick summary, but the following three aspects of his argument will have to do. the first component is taylor’s description of how certain cultural realities shifted such that elites and then the common people viewed religion less and less as the necessary framework holding society together. in short, society became disenchanted, undergoing massive programs of “reform,” and people came to understand religion as personal and not first and foremost corporate. disenchantment was a process whereby people became what taylor calls “buffered selves.” they no longer believed that spiritual beings or magical objects, like relics of saints, could affect them directly. they began to see such beliefs as superstitious. “reform” is what taylor calls the attempts of religious elites to standardize the high demands of religious faith. no longer would the lofty moral life demanded of believers be expected only of priests and monks, but the laity must be made moral as well. finally, the reformation was the culmination of an ongoing process whereby faith was seen as something that “i” have as an individual. in addition to these factors, christians began to emphasize the dignity of the natural world as opposed to a purely “otherworldly” approach that denigrated creation. what is so welcome in taylor’s account, in contrast with the subtracacademic roundtable 99 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 tion thesis, is that such developments did not lead to a loss of faith in a straightforward linear fashion. the mistake of the simple enlightenment account is to equate disenchantment with irreligion. taylor convincingly argues that disenchantment, “reform,” the personalization of faith, and an appreciation of the natural world were all motivated by religious reasons and had some very positive consequences for believers. at the same time, these developments made possible an “immanent” view of the world in which god became decreasingly necessary. the second aspect of taylor’s thesis is that god’s diminishing role in society creates more and more possibilities for how we account for morality, meaning, and humanity’s place in the world. taylor notes that the fracturing of the pre-reformation understanding led to a “nova effect” (299). going well beyond a matter of belief or unbelief, christian or atheist, a spectrum of possibilities emerged, which has only expanded into modern times in what taylor aptly coins a “supernova.” perhaps the chief thread that unites the at-times remarkably eclectic meanderings in taylor’s book is the tracing of how the various possibilities exploded from a more-or-less accepted and common pre-reformation framework. finally, the third helpful aspect in taylor’s account is his delightful problematizing of the standard transcendent-religion contra immanent-enlightenment narrative. the standard story, perhaps best expressed by rousseau, is that enlightenment humanism rescues the earthy goodness of human life from christianity’s denigration of human nature given its doctrine of original sin and its therefore unfair and impossibly lofty moral demands. the people must be saved from their erstwhile ecclesial saviors, and the voltaires, spinozas, and rousseaus are employed in the delicate task of dismantling the christian edifice for the sake of the equality, freedom, and elevation of the masses. but here the plot thickens. for just when it appears that a this-worldly enlightenment has a transcendent christianity up against the ropes, a third figure enters the ring and complicates matters. this third figure is nietzsche and those who have followed in his wake. taylor refers to their position as the immanent counter-enlightenment. disposing of god is not enough. god’s morality and the consequent commitments to equality and the precious “masses” must also be jettisoned (636). there are 100 expositions © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 echoes of alasdair macintyre’s after virtue in taylor’s account here. in this new situation, any two may gang up on a third. both enlightenment humanism and transcendent religion reject nietzsche’s celebration of destruction and disdain for humanity. christians and nietzscheans alike find the enlightenment project unsatisfactory, tepid, and small-minded. and nietzscheans and enlightenment humanists reject the claims of faith as sad, outdated relics of humanity’s childish past. the jostling of these three perspectives makes up an important part of our current situation. of course, these three aspects leave out a great deal in taylor’s story. yet they offer some idea of the sort of thesis taylor defends, and the manner in which he goes about making his case. things are not as easy as we might think, taylor insists over and over, and we would do well to delve more deeply into not only what beliefs changed, but what cultural shifts made those beliefs and the changes possible in the first place. a project this ambitious and far-reaching cannot help but provoke disagreement. atheists and agnostics will likely find taylor’s unique claims for a reconsidered christian faith unpersuasive. orthodox christians, and conservative catholics in particular, will balk at some of taylor’s descriptive and prescriptive claims about christianity’s future. one virtue of the work is that taylor’s sympathetic reading of all sorts of positions requires one to reject what he describes as a naïve view of faith or atheism. we ought not view our position—whatever it may be—as simply axiomatic. epistemic humility requires us carefully to consider other positions in the emerging supernova. nevertheless, there are two related criticisms i want to raise briefly with regard to taylor’s book. first, i question whether taylor is right in his description of the extent to which secularism has taken hold of western culture; second, i question his assertion that a non-transcendent ethic can sustain a society over generations. it is undeniably the case that there has been a massive shift from 1500 to the present day, and the orthodox believer owes taylor a great debt for debunking the simple myth about the rise of reason at the expense of religion. but how to measure the extent of the shift? taylor is nothing if not careful and circumspect in his observations, and he is surely correct to note that many believers recognize their faith as one option academic roundtable 101 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 among many, and recognize this in a way that seems entirely anachronistic to ascribe to believers in the sixteenth century (31). modern believers, taylor argues, no longer understand themselves as open to external spiritual forces or seek objects which impart divine favor. i’m not so sure. because taylor is interpreting underlying conditions of belief, he cannot rely on surveys or social science to support his claims. this is both a strength and a weakness. the strength is that taylor can investigate those elements of our culture not amenable to statistical measurement; the weakness is that he seems often to resort to his own sense of things. one wonders how ubiquitous the “we” is that he employs when describing the modern mindset. my own sense of things is that where one stands makes a great deal of difference. buffered selves living in an immanent world probably make up the vast majority of people living in western europe, canada, and the academy. this is less the case in the “bellicose, hegemony-loving parts of u.s. society” that voted for george w. bush (283). leaving aside taylor’s (rare) partisan jab here, there are tens of millions of people who understand themselves to be open to spiritual realities outside their autonomous selves: catholics who take in the real presence of christ in communion, calvinists who believe god chooses them before they respond to god, mormons who perform baptisms for their deceased loved ones, and particularly the pentecostals that taylor frequently mentions. pentecostals, after all, are distinguished from other christians by their belief that the spirit of god speaks through them in an angelic language. this understanding of the self is hardly closed off to outside spiritual forces. another characteristic common to pentecostals, mormons, and many catholics introduces my second criticism of taylor’s project. unlike the mainline denominations in the u.s. and elsewhere, pentecostals, mormons, and many catholics churches are bursting at the seams. this is due in large part to their emphasis on missions and evangelism, but also because these believers are simply having more children than their mainline, and secular, fellow citizens. while i am loathe to criticize taylor for leaving anything out of such a robust book, it is remarkable that he does not address the capacity for nontranscendent societies to pass on their way of life to future generations. 102 expositions © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 with one exception in which he endorses the world-changing power of raising children (700), taylor does not address this rather key element of any sustainable way of life. certainly it is the case that any individual, indeed millions of individuals, may live what seems to be a satisfactory life without transcendence or a belief in god or the afterlife. but taylor too easily assumes that societies that have abandoned transcendence can inculcate the social goods necessary to maintain themselves. we see this in his rejection of the christian claim that civilization needs religion to ward off immorality and disorder (471, 638). but it is not only the christian claim. while christians may claim religion is necessary because it is true, taylor ignores the august company of philosophers who claim religion is necessary because it is useful. hobbes dedicates the second half of leviathan to the quixotic task of reconciling his system with the bible. spinoza avers that religion is a crucial tool in the hand of the enlightened sovereign in his theologico-political treatise. locke claims that belief in an afterlife is essential and so denies civil standing to atheists. rousseau creates a civil religion because no society has been founded without religion as its base. even nietzsche at times seems grateful for religion’s role in keeping the deluded occupied.1 alexis de tocqueville perhaps makes the strongest claim on this matter.2 taylor may very well be correct that tocqueville and the rest are unfair to individuals, but how does he counter the wider societal claim? he could very well point to the democratic states of western europe and canada, but, to borrow a phrase from chinese premiere zhou enlai when asked about the french revolution, “it’s too soon to tell.” one need not be an alarmist to note that western europe’s demographic reality does not bode well for the future of a secular europe. barring a tremendous reversal of cultural mores and birthrates, the secular phase of europe’s history will be sandwiched between her christian past and her islamic future. perhaps there is a connection after all between religion and the societal cohesion. taylor does address the religious “exception” of america given its modernity and resilient religious identity, though he acknowledges that europe may very well be the exception (522–529). taylor follows tocqueville in part by attributing america’s religious flourishing to the separation of church and state and robust religious freedom. while this academic roundtable 103 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 is true so far as it goes, there is another complementary explanation latent in his work. taylor persuasively argues that the “buffered self ” previously mentioned is now the norm for some western societies. the buffered self is autonomous; the self chooses what goods, spiritual or otherwise, it will make part of its life, and denies the power of external forces to violate its autonomy by impacting its life without its consent. while i have questioned just how widespread this self-understanding is, at least in the united states, there does seem to be something to it with regard to more secular citizens. but what does this have to do with religion and childbearing? if i might take a page from taylor’s own approach, it seems to me that childrearing is one modern exception to the secularist’s buffered understanding. for as stephen macedo has noted, the modern democratic citizen does not spring up from the ground fully grown, liberal, and secular. raising children means, almost by definition, inculcating beliefs, virtues, character, and an appreciation of human goods in the children under one’s care. children are not autonomous (yet) and cannot choose the goods that will give their life meaning. they are vulnerable to the imposition of external values from actors other than themselves. but if the buffered self living in a disenchanted world is the norm for secular western societies, then raising the next generation creates a tension in that the secularist must engage in the sort of external imposition of value that she rejects as a possibility for her (adult) self. the secularist buffered self does not believe that angels and demons, or the holy spirit, can intervene in her life without her permission; indeed, such a possibility is demeaning to the dignity of human choice, and those who still cling to such a view are misguided. perhaps it is not surprising, then, that secular societies populated by buffered selves will hold rather ambiguous views about childrearing. this is admittedly speculative, and there are undoubtedly other factors involved.3 regardless of the underlying reason, the traumatic decline in birthrates among industrialized western welfare states should give us pause about taylor’s too easy dismissal of the necessity of religious transcendence for the health and continued survival of western nation-states. 104 expositions © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 charles taylor has done us all an inestimable service by working through this project. he invites us to join him as he considers one of the most interesting and important questions of our time. his manner is learned, but inviting and conversational. whether agreeing or disagreeing—perhaps especially in disagreeing—one cannot help but come away from his book better informed about the various beliefs that animate our lives together and the underlying conditions that make those beliefs possible. notes 1. he has kind things to say about hinduism in particular as it provides a pyramid structure for society. it’s hard to appreciate those strong spirits who can breathe the mountain air unless one has the deluded masses for comparison. 2. alexis de tocqueville, democracy in america (2000), volume ii, part 1, chapter 5: when religion is destroyed in a people, doubt takes hold of the highest portions of the intellect and half paralyzes all the others. each becomes accustomed to having only confused and changing notions about matters that most interest those like him and himself; one defends one’s opinions badly or abandons them, and as one despairs of being able to resolve by oneself that greatest problems that human destiny presents, one is reduced, like a coward, to not thinking about them at all. such a state cannot fail to enervate souls; it slackens the springs of the will and prepares citizens for servitude. 3. almost by definition, a secularist is not going to put much stock in an afterlife. given this, one understandable read is that one must make as much of this life as possible. while children can be seen by religious believer and secularist alike as an integral component to a flourishing life, taking care of children properly also requires an incredible amount of work and closes off many other life possibilities. references hobbes, thomas 1994 leviathan. edited by edwin curley. indianapolis, in: hackett. locke, john 1983 a letter concerning toleration. indianapolis, in: hackett. academic roundtable 105 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 macintyre, alasdair 1984 after virtue. 2nd ed. notre dame, in: university of notre dame press. macedo, stephen 2000 diversity and distrust. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2000. rousseau, jean-jacques 2003 the social contract and other later political writings. edited by victor gourevitch. cambridge: cambridge university press. spinoza, benedict de 2004 a theologico-political treatise and a political treatise. translated by r.h.m. elwes. mineola, ny: dover publications. tocqueville, alexis de 2000 democracy in america. translated by harvey c. mansfield and delba winthrop. chicago, il: university of chicago press. © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 b.g. prusak’s “an analysis of augustine’s argument in confessions that evil does not exist”: a response jonathan p. yates villanova university jonathan.yates@villanova.edu [the son] is the image of the invisible god, the firstborn of all creation. for by him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities--all things have been created through him and for him. he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. col. 1:15-17 (nasb) prusak’s analysis of and commentary upon augustine’s argument regarding the non-existence of evil is as thoughtful as it is brief. indeed, prusak is to be lauded for the skill and acumen he employs in boiling down the dominant issue of book vii of the confessions to a nine-pointed analysis and, still more impressively, in calling augustine’s argument into question in such an abbreviated space. in what follows, however, i will attempt to show that, despite his skill and acumen, neither prusak’s analysis nor his conclusion is thorough enough to compel us to follow him in what i take to be his major assertion, viz. that augustine’s conceptions regarding the nature of creation and the nature of evil are both something less than fully compelling. after a brief introductory section which comments on prusak’s paragraph of prolegomena, my formal response to his sections of analysis and observations will be presented. that response will be comprised of four disparate but nevertheless connected summary points, each of which, in turn, will be accompanied by a brief explanation. prusak’s five-sentence prolegomena is clear and concise. indeed, if it has a flaw it is that it is too concise. that is, while none of these sentences can be said to be inaccurate in se, several of them could use further qualification. first and foremost of these is the idea that the “bedrock belief ” that “creation is good” is “[p]erhaps … the augusmailto:jonathan.yates@villanova.edu 78 expositions © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 tinian belief.” while i am more than comfortable with any view that asserts that this is a fundamental “augustinian” or, more accurately, a fundamental judeo-christian belief, it would be more accurate and, in fact, more helpful for the issue at hand, to say that the existence of a single, immutable, incorruptible, and good god is the augustinian belief.1 pushing the discussion back this one step—since it obviously remains an essential, if only secondary, “augustinian” belief that the one god who possesses the aforementioned attributes is the one who is solely and uniquely responsible for the good creation—is necessary because it more accurately frames the discussion in its proper theological and metaphysical terms.2 along these same lines, allow me to note at the outset that any reader of the confessions or, indeed, of (most of ) what posterity has preserved from augustine, does well to keep “on the table” at all times the impact that the manichaeans and their (largely) gnostic and thoroughly dualist creation mythology had upon augustine. prusak’s next sentence needs no such alteration. on the contrary, the sentiment it contains can only be supplemented by noting that not a few contemporary scholars of augustine’s thought have drawn very similar conclusions. easily one of the best of these is john rist who writes: “‘unde malum?’ … and its more fearsome associate ‘whence did moral evil arise?’ … was the most important and more enduring challenge to augustine throughout his life” (1994, 261).3 the prolegomena’s fourth sentence would also benefit from the insertion of a qualifying phrase: strictly speaking, augustine does not deny that “evil exists”; on the contrary, he clearly and frequently recognizes that many things include evil within themselves as part of what they truly are in this post-lapsarian world and, just as importantly, as we encounter and experience them in our daily lives. augustine’s actual claim is that evil has no independent or metaphysical existence in our universe precisely because it was created by the god who possesses all of the attributes mentioned above.4 in other words, augustine is keenly aware that evil or, more precisely still, partially evil things do exist. his broader claim is that evil can only exist by latching onto and embedding itself within something else; indeed, like any common parasite, in his view evil can only subsist if and when it is “hosted” by the already notes, insights and flashes 79 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 corrupted nature of an otherwise and originally wholly good thing.5 for augustine, it can be said to follow logically from this that it is actually evil itself which is absurd precisely because it is fundamentally self-defeating: for the bishop of hippo, “[e]vil is … absurd … for to the extent that it succeeds it can only destroy that upon which it lives” (hick 1966, 54).6 having offered these brief comments and qualifications to prusak’s framing of the issue, i will now move on to my response proper. as mentioned above, that response will be confined to four major points. 1. augustine’s argument is thoroughly traditional. while it is demonstrably true that augustine augmented and otherwise refined what he inherited from his predecessors, the fact remains that he was neither the first late antique thinker nor the first christian to respond to these questions as he did. in fact, much of his viewpoint and argumentation surrounding the problem had been firmly established in both neoplatonic and christian circles for at least a century and a half before he began to compose his confessions.7 such a position was especially commonplace in christian milieus that were consciously attempting to harmonize the jewish revelation of omnipotent monotheism and (broadly conceived) platonic metaphysics and ontology.8 and, so far as we know, augustine’s first profound encounter with such a milieu came in milan and during the period in which he was sitting under bishop ambrose’s teaching.9 to cite just one example of a non-“augustinian” text that pre-dates augustine’s conversion, notice the numerous ways in which both the categories and the terminology of athanasius, the fourth-century pronicene bishop of alexandria, parallel those employed decades later by augustine. especially noteworthy is the degree to which the following excerpt from athanasius’s de incarnatione includes the ideas for which prusak takes augustine to task—including presuppositions about the goodness of creation, humanity’s creation ex nihilo, the linkage between corruption and existence, and, most importantly, the idea that “evil” is, in some sense,10 connected to “non-being”: [w]e know that, because there is mind behind the universe, it did not originate itself; because god is infinite, not finite, it was not made 80 expositions © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 from pre-existent matter, but out of nothing and out of non-existence absolute and utter god brought it into being through the word. he says as much in genesis: “in the beginning god created the heavens and the earth …” (gen. 1:1) for god is good—or rather, of all goodness he is fountainhead […] but since the will of man could turn either way, god secured this grace that he had given by making it conditional from the first upon two things—namely, a law and a place. he set them in his own paradise, and laid upon them a single prohibition [… however,] having turned from the contemplation of god to evil of their own devising, [they] had come inevitably under the law of death. instead of remaining in the state in which god had created them, they were in process of becoming corrupted entirely, and death had them completely under its dominion. for the transgression of the commandment was making them turn back again according to their nature; and as they had at the beginning come into being out of non-existence, so were they now on the way to returning, through corruption, to non-existence again. the presence and love of the word had called them into being; inevitably, therefore, when they lost the knowledge of god, they lost existence with it; for it is god alone who exists, evil is non-being, the negation and antithesis of good. by nature, of course, man is mortal, since he was made from nothing; but he bears also the likeness of him who is, and if he preserves that likeness through constant contemplation, then his nature is deprived of its power and he remains incorrupt. so is it affirmed in wisdom: “the keeping of his laws is the assurance of incorruption.” (wisd. of sol. 6:18)11 as important as the tradition or, more specifically, what he understood to be the catholic tradition was to augustine, it is just as easily shown that, with respect to this question, scripture was at least as central to his thought. that is to say that, while it is all but impossible to divorce augustine’s attitude toward and reading of scripture from the community and the tradition which he joined when he committed himself to catholic christianity, it remains true that in arguing for the source and nature of evil as he did, augustine was also consciously defending both the letter and the spirit of (significant parts of ) the hebrew bible and the christian new testament as he now understood them. in addition to genesis 1, the import of which prusak clearly notes, insights and flashes 81 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 acknowledges in his critique, augustine, once he came to fully accept the authority of the jewish scriptural tradition, would have recognized the need to incorporate the claims and implications of passages from the psalms and the prophets such as psalm 24:1-2; 74:12-17; 89:6-19; 90:1-6; 95:1-5; isaiah 40:1-31 and 44:24-25—just to name a few of the more prominent. texts germane to this issue are still more numerous and more prominent in the later and, hence, significantly more hellenized new testament. in addition to the text from colossians used as this article’s epigraph, relevant passages include: matthew 7:15-20; john 1:1-3; romans 1:19-21; 8:18-39; 11:36; 1 corinthians 8:5-6; ephesians 1:10; 1 timothy 4:1-5; hebrews 1:2-4; james 1:17; and revelation 4:11. this list could be easily extended.[12] while augustine nowhere betrays any hesitancy with respect to these necessary presuppositions, it remains true that they did markedly restrict the number of “moves” or “ways forward” that were open to him as a committed catholic christian. 2. augustine’s argument as found in book vii of the confessions is neither the first nor the most detailed locus within his oeuvre which makes this argument. while it certainly is an important and interesting passage with respect to augustine’s views on the source, nature, and effects of evil, confessions vii is by no means the only portion of augustine’s extant works that merits study and reflection when assessing the coherence and the validity of his arguments. chronologically speaking, there are at least four significant portions of his oeuvre that predate the confessions; likewise, there are numerous germane passages in compositions from the last two decades of his life that emerged as he battled the implications that he understood to be latent within the pelagians’ teachings.13 these “anti-pelagian” texts should in no wise be regarded as accidental or as texts augustine included in these works “in passing.” on the contrary, it was the pelagians in general and julian of aeclanum in particular who resurrected and reformulated the charge that augustine had in thought—if not in actual allegiance—remained a manichaean all along. what is truly remarkable about all of these passages is the degree of consistency that they exhibit. that is, even if one compares a 82 expositions © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 pre-confessions text in which augustine discusses his views on evil with one composed in response to julian of aeclanum in the 420s, one is immediately struck by their profound degree of overlap and similarity—especially in the language that is used. given this, the reflective reader of augustine might well conclude that for more than forty-five years neither augustine nor his contemporary readers (including both supporters and opponents) were able to detect significant flaws in or substantial problems with his original argument’s power and coherence. this, of course, is another way of saying that, if augustine’s presuppositions are granted, it must be significant that the closest any of augustine’s contemporaries could come to indicting his argument regarding the nature of evil is when julian, who so adamantly opposed augustine’s theology and vision of the world, had to resort to accusing augustine of remaining a “closet manichaean,” the very position which augustine’s argument about the nature of evil was specifically adopted to overcome and refute. 3. augustine’s argument, while firmly committed to both plausibility and rationality, is first and foremost a christian argument that, when necessary, prioritizes faith and revelation over rationality and logic. although the comment comes in a context in which dilemmas related to the nature of grace are being discussed, james o’donnell’s characterization of augustine’s methodology is at least as applicable to the questions that surround the nature and source(s) of evil: augustine does not have a simple, comprehensive solution acceptable to all for these dilemmas. his principle, as in the question of original sin, is to cling to what he knows for certain, to attempt to provide explanations for difficulties, but then to stand with what he knows by faith even when logical difficulties remain. here, as always, revelation and experience are everything for augustine; the arguments of the dialecticians have no authority. (o’donnell 1985, 76) an exceedingly clear illustration of this principle of prioritization in general and of revelation over logic can be highlighted if one makes reference to the latin text of confessions vii, xii, 18, the very passage upon which prusak’s critique of augustine would have us focus. in notes, insights and flashes 83 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 latin, that paragraph’s first clause runs: et manifestatum est mihi quoniam bona sunt quae corrumpuntur, … this clause might literally be rendered: “and it was revealed to me that good (things) are things that could be corrupted.”14 in rex warner’s translation, i.e., the version that prusak references, this clause runs: “and it became clear to me that things which are subject to corruption are good” (augustine 1963, 140).15 as prusak recognizes, this clause begins a sentence that contains several elements—both explicit and implicit—that are crucial to augustine’s argument and general orientation. however, prusak’s comments do not extend to what is clearly a crucial term of the aforementioned clause and, indeed, the one that, in my view, sets the tone for much, if not for all, of what immediately follows: manifestatum est. this term, which is a passive form of the verb manifesto, may, depending upon the context in which it is used, be legitimately translated as “to manifest,” “to show clearly,” “to make clear,” or “to reveal”—to list just a few of the most obvious possibilities. given both the term’s typical usage in the confessions, which o’donnell correctly observes to be “always of truth and usually of divine indication” (1992, 448),16 and the immediately preceding context, i.e., vii, xi, 17, which is a brief meditation on the necessary contingency of all created things upon the god who alone “unchangeably abides [incommutabiliter manet]” and which contains a four-link catena of passages from both the hebrew bible and the new testament that is clearly designed to highlight their common assertion that it is necessary for the believer to “abide” in god, it seems easy to justify a translation that makes explicit a claim that is only implicit in augustine. also notable here is the fact that precisely this same phrase, albeit coupled together with the past tense of the verb “to see” [uidi], occurs again some fifteen lines later in this same paragraph. this time the “revelatory” nuance of the verb is yet more obvious in that: (1) it is part of sentence that addressed god directly; and (2) it is immediately followed by an expansionist gloss on gen 1 and that chapter’s claims regarding god’s activity: itaque uidi et manifestatum est mihi quia omnia boni tu fecisti et prorsus nullae substantiae sunt quas tu non fecisiti. 84 expositions © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 warner renders this as, “so i saw plainly and clearly that you have made all things good, nor are there any substances at all which you have not made” (augustine 1963, 141).17 given the immediate context, however, something along these lines seems significantly better: “and thus i saw, and it was revealed to me that you have made all good things and there are absolutely no substances (in existence) which you have not made.”18 now, if it is granted that augustine’s prioritization of revelation over rationality is an acceptable and legitimate way for a christian theologian to proceed, then it also becomes necessary to inquire as to whether or not augustine’s theologizing is, in this particular case, sensible or, at least, not irrational. this very question has been asked by more than a few contemporary philosophers and logicians, not all of whom are in sympathy with either augustine’s presuppositions or his conclusions. nevertheless, at least one has concluded that: whether or not we can share augustine’s faith that it will be revealed to us some day that the distribution of good and evil in this life reflects wholly just judgments on god’s part, this does provide a possible answer to the problem of evil. that is, although one might not believe it, or one might rebel against it, there is nothing necessarily self-contradictory in the answer. (griffin 1976, 199; italics added) like paul and many of the christians who had preceded him, augustine was or, at least, had become, content with the hope that the full uindicatio of both his god, his god’s attributes, and his faith in that god could only fully and finally be made manifest at a still-future time that he himself would bring about, that is, in god’s own eschaton. 4. to reject augustine’s argument places one under the onus of several significant theological and philosophical implications. critique tout court is easy; “constructive” critique is among the most difficult of all intellectual endeavors—especially if by “constructive” one means critique that is required to (a) be fair; (b) replace faulty axioms and assumptions; (c) correct the errors that it highlights; and (d) move the discussion forward. and, if constructive critique is almost always a challenge, it is infinitely more so when the views under scrunotes, insights and flashes 85 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 tiny are derivative from a mind as powerful as was augustine’s. for the sake of space, i will not endeavor to discuss each of the above requirements in detail. however, space does permit me to observe that, in connection with “b” above, if prusak in fact rejects augustine’s thoroughly traditional argument, such a rejection behooves prusak to explain how and with what he will replace it. more explicitly, it would seem that prusak must reckon with the possibility that his rejection almost certainly necessitates that he abandon traditional monotheism and, by extension, traditional christianity. this is due to the aforementioned fact that traditional christianity has always declared its god to be eternally existent, eternally self-generating, wholly good, and wholly immutable. broadly considered, it would seem that anyone who rejects a generally “augustinian” answer to this question is left with just four options: (a) atheism; (b) metaphysical dualism; (c) heterodox/non-traditional christianity; or (d) coherently explaining how evil can metaphysically exist in a universe created and sustained by an all-powerful, wholly good, and wholly immutable god by means other than those employed by the “augustinian” argument and the broader tradition that it was so frequently employed to defend. incidentally, “d” is, at least to my knowledge, de facto “off the table” given the fact that, thus far, it is a goal that no one, anywhere, at any time has been able to achieve. epilogue: king lear’s “augustinianism.” finally, if i may, i would like to offer the briefest of responses to prusak’s question “is shakespeare augustinian [in king lear]?” given the foregoing pages, it should be obvious that i believe that the plot and the action of king lear both assume and are set in a universe that is very “augustinian.” however, the foregoing should also make it plain that, as a man whose christianity was formed in the late sixteenthcentury and whose tradition was both rooted in biblical language and conversant—if something less than completely comfortable—with the classical greek philosophical tradition, shakespeare, like augustine, could hardly be expected to have done otherwise. 86 expositions © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 notes 1. for more on the significance of this and other assumptions for augustine’s view, see below. consider also conf. vii, vii, 11 where augustine confesses his reliance upon several presuppositions that god allowed him to hold onto—despite the fact that he could find “no solution” to the problem of evil and, indeed, had yet to (re-)convert to catholic christianity. these presuppositions included: (1) that god exists; (2) that god is immutable; (3) that god cares for humanity. finally, note the pithy remarks of o’donnell in his commentary on conf. iii,vii,12 regarding why this question emerged with such particular acuity in late antiquity: “it is insistence on the goodness of god that makes the question a pressing one” (o’donnell 1992, 186). 2. although a full exposition of its significance would take us too far afield from the purpose of this essay, it is more than noteworthy that the chapters and paragraphs that precede augustine’s detailed discussion of the nature of evil in book vii are laden with assertions—both scriptural and non-scriptural—about god’s nature and attributes. see, e.g., ii, 3; iii, 4; iii, 5; iv, 6; and v, 7 on god’s incorruptibility, immutability, supreme goodness, omniscience, and omnipotence. also crucial is the placement of a catena of scripture—including exodos 3:14 and its all important claim, stemming from god himself, that “i am who i am”—in the two paragraphs immediately prior to augustine’s discussion of the nature of evil that begins at vii, xii, 18. cf. also griffin 1976, 201: “for augustine, the evil will is the one thing in the universe that god did not create. […] the will as such is … created. but god does not create its evil volitions; in fact, these evil volitions have no efficient cause at all, but only a deficient cause. only upon this basis could augustine simultaneously reject manichaean dualism and yet avoid suggesting that his own monotheistic god was responsible for the world’s evil.” 3. also important here are the facts that augustine made reference to this problem consistently throughout the years 386–430 and that, by augustine’s own admission, this complex of problems was something that had preoccupied him even in the years before he converted to “orthodox” christianity. see, e.g., conf. iii, vii, 12. 4. see also cress 1989, 112–113: “augustine knew perfectly well that evil is indeed lively, vivid, obscenely powerful.” and “in declaring evil to be non-being, augustine is neither metaphysically obtuse nor morally perverse about his account of the nature of evil.” notes, insights and flashes 87 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 5. this important and necessary distinction is made quite eloquently by g.r. evans in augustine on evil (1982, 75), where she notes that, for augustine, although “[n]o body is simultaneously black and white, … something may be simultaneously good and evil; indeed, since evil cannot exist except by borrowing the existence of the good in which it inheres, there can be no evil unless there is simultaneously good and evil. if there is no good for evil to diminish, it is not there at all.” 6. see also note 7, below. moreover, given that (one of ) the primary attribute(s) of evil is that of destruction, it also follows that it could neither have always existed nor exist forever—either in eternity past or in eternity future: like a “consumerist” economy, if the resources which evil consumes for its own sustenance are finite, it must eventually “consume” itself out of existence. 7. this statement should not be taken as a claim that it is within neoplatonism that positions similar to augustine’s can first be detected. on the contrary, related ideas, claims, and concepts can also be found in plato, epicurus, and aristotle. for aristotle’s important but very brief and somewhat cryptic remarks, see the nicomachean ethics iv, 5, where he notes that “evil destroys even itself, and if it is complete, becomes unbearable.” for this translation, see aristotle 1998, 97; for the greek text, see ne 1126a12 (aristotle 1894, 81). in context, aristotle’s chief concern in this passage is anger and, specifically, explaining how patience (praotēs) is the mean between irascibility (orgilotēs) and excessive passivity or lack of spirit (aogēsia). for an interesting and explicit incorporation of this passage into an highly “augustinian” argument about the source and nature of evil, see aquinas, st ia,49,3 where he writes: “[t]he philosopher says that ‘if the wholly evil could be, it would destroy itself ’; because all good being destroyed (which it need be for something to be wholly evil), evil itself would be taken away (subtrahitur), since its subject is good.” thomas’s latin version of the aforementioned line from the ethics reads: “si malum integrum sit, seipsum destruet.” for this english translation see aquinas 1992, 36; for the latin, see aquinas 1967, 142. 8. this trend is most easily seen in authors, like origen and athanasius, who either originated in alexandria, egypt or were especially appreciative of alexandrian theological methodology, like the cappadocian fathers. for clear precursors to augustine’s arguments, see, e.g., origen, de principiis ii, 9, 2; basil the great, hexameron, hom. 2, par. 4; gregory of nyssa, catechism, 7; and athanasius’s contra gentes, 7. see references (below) for editions of these works. for still more 88 expositions © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 references, see cress 1989, 123 and n.4. 9. for the details of this relationship as seen from augustine’s point of view, see esp. confessiones v, xiii, 23 ff. and the early chapters of book vi. an equally impressive but much later passage that is germane to the question of augustine’s intellectual debt to ambrose on this and similar questions—albeit again one that is wholly from augustine’s perspective—is contra iulianum i, 8, 36–39, 46 where, in a discussion with julian about augustine’s relationship to the manichaeans, augustine specifically and repeatedly notes that it is “the catholic faith (catholica fides)” (as opposed to reason tout court) in general and the catholic faith as taught by ambrose of milan, whom augustine specifically refers to here as “that teacher of mine (ille doctor meus),” in particular that provided him with both the incentive and the means to break with the manichaeans once and for all. for an argument in favour of the idea that augustine would have heard the ideas contained within ambrose’s “book (liber)” entitled isaac and the soul, which discusses in some detail ambrose’s defense of the idea that evil is merely a deprivation of the good, as he listened to ambrose preach in milan in 386, see sertillanges 1948, 124–125. for the claim that, in turn, it was basil the great who served as ambrose’s primary source for his articulation, see journet 1963, 33–34 (cited in cress 1989, 123 and n.4). 10. athanasius’s precise language here is potentially important for the discussion at hand. though too complex to pursue in great depth here, note that, as he makes the all-important equation between “evil” and “non-being,” he says that “evil [ta kaka]” is “non-being [ouk onta].” this choice of phrase may take on another level of significance when one realizes that, in some modern philosophers’ ontological discussions (e.g., paul tillich), the two ways of negating in greek, mē (mh\) and ouk (ou0k), are deemed significant precisely because they help distinguish between “absolute non-being”—in the case of ouk—and, in the case of mē—“to the parasitic sort of non-being that is said to inhere in being.” obviously, if one regards this distinction as valid, it becomes significant insofar as the “augustinian” position would seem to require that athanasius use mē here, something that he clearly does not do. how precisely to account for athanasius’s use of ouk, at least in this context, is a question that might benefit from further study. what seems beyond question is that this distinction would not have been grammatically necessary in this case in either classical or koiné greek. for the aforementioned quotation from cress, see 1989, 124 and n.15; cf. also 112–113 as well as hick 1966, 46–49, esp. 48. notes, insights and flashes 89 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 11. this work’s formal english title is the incarnation of the word of god. i have quoted an english translation (athanasius 1944) by an anonymous member of the c.s.m.v. s.th. religious order. for the greek text, as well as an alternate english translastion see athanasius 1971, 140–145. 12. for an interesting formal response to the claim that crucial aspects of the “augustinian” privation theory of evil is without biblical precedent, see cress 1989, 120–121. 13. see note 9 (above). augustinian compositions that address the problem of evil and that pre-date the confessions include: de ordine i, 1–3, ii, 23–24, and ii, 46–47 (386); soliloquia i, 2, 2 (386/387); de moribus ecclesiae catholicae et de moribus manichaeorum ii, v, 7 (387/389); de libero arbitrio uoluntatis i, i, 1–i, iv, 10 and iii, xii–xiii, 36–iii, xxi, 59 (388–395). texts that are roughly contemporary include: de natura boni (399), which offers an excellent example of a text in which augustine offers a significantly more detailed argument than he does in the confessions. germane texts that were composed in the so-called “anti-pelagian” period of 411–430 include: de natura et gratia 19, 21–20, 22 (415); contra aduersarium legis et prophetarum i, 5, 7 (421); contra iulianum i, 8, 36–39, 46 (421/422); enchiridion 10–12 (423–424); contra iulianum opus imperfectum iii, 206 (428–430) and, perhaps most famously, de ciuitate dei xi, 17–23 and xiv, 5–11 (book xi was not completed before 417; book xiv probably did not appear before 420). 14. a published example of a similarly literal translation is readily available from philip burton, who renders the phrase in question as, “it was revealed to me also that it is good things that are corrupted” (augustine 2001, 149). 15. h. chadwick translates the passage as follows: “it was obvious to me that things which are liable to corruption are good” (augustine 1991, 124). while by no means inaccurate, in my view, this rendering, much like warner’s, obscures both the potential significance and the probable source of the insight that, for augustine, clearly made such a profound difference in his ability to find rest and peace in the face of these obviously difficult problems. 16. though i clearly concur with o’donnell’s etymological insight, i just as clearly depart from (and am puzzled by) his claim that “[h]ere the development that follows the first ‘manifestatum’ is purely plotinian, with no scriptural overtones.” this is particularly true in light of the observations made already in my text and in o’donnell’s own comments on the immediately subsequent paragraph, i.e., 90 expositions © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 vii, xiii, 19, that “the context is now (?) made as scriptural as possible.” to raise just one objection: why should we assume that, here, augustine would even want to toggle so neatly between his reliance upon scripture and the assistance he and the broader christian tradition have received from neoplatonism? surely the real point throughout these paragraphs is to demonstrate, as so much of the previous judeo-christian tradition had attempted to do, that the two streams were compatible. in other words, to me, it seems better to recognize that this entire section’s neoplatonism is only exceeded by its reliance upon the bible and the catholic tradition. 17. interestingly, chadwick (see also note 15, above) slightly modifies his translation of “manifestatum est” from “it was obvious to me” to “and it was made clear to me” (augustine 1991, 124). 18. it is again helpful to compare this to burton’s published translation: “thus i saw and thus it was revealed to me that it is you who have made all good things, and that there are no substances at all that you have not made” (2001, 150). recommended reading the following secondary materials, most of which are cited in the text of this article, are useful for beginning to study augustine’s account of evil. the list is highly selective, both in respect to the sheer amount of material that has been published on the topic and in that it only includes works published in english. burns 1988 cress 1989 evans 1982 griffin 1976 hick 1966, especially 43-95 mann 1982 rist 1994, especially 97–112, 129–135, 256–266, and 321–327. tilley 1991, especially 113–140. torchia 2006 notes, insights and flashes 91 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 references aquinas, thomas, saint 1992 no evil comes from god. in the problem of evil: selected readings, ed. michael l. peterson, 31–38. notre dame, in: university of notre dame press. 1967 summa theologiae, volume 8: creation, variety and evil, ed. thomas gilby, op. london: eyre and spottiswoode / new york: mcgraw-hill book company. aristotle 1894 aristotelis ethica nicomachea, scriptorum classicorum bibliotheca oxoniensis. ed. i. bywater. oxford: oxford university press. 1998 the nichomachean ethics. trans. david ross, updated by j.l. ackrill and j.o. urmson. oxford world’s classics. athanasius, saint 1944 the incarnation of the word of god. (translated by an anonymous member of the community of saint mary the virgin.) new york: macmillan. http://www.worldinvisible.com/library/athanasius/incarnation/ incarnation.c.htm 1971 athanasius contra gentes and de incarnatione. trans. r. thomson. oxford: the clarendon press. augustine, saint a. confessions 1963 confessions. trans. rex warner. new york: signet. 1991 confessions. trans. h. chadwick. oxford: oxford university press. 1992 confessions i (latin text). ed. james j. o’donnell. oxford: clarendon press. 2001 the confessions (everyman’s library 128). trans. philip burton. new york: alfred a. knopf. b. other works with the exception of contra iulianum, all of the following works of augustine can be found in one of the following series: ccl = corpus christianorum. series latina. turnhout: brepols, 1953–. csel = corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum latinorum. vienna: tempsky, 1865. de ordine = csel 63, 121–185 soliloquia = csel 89, 3–98 92 expositions © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 de moribus ecclesiae catholicae et de moribus manichaeorum = csel 90, 3–156 de libero arbitrio uoluntatis = csel 74, 3–154 de natura boni = csel 25/2, 855–889 de natura et gratia = csel 60, 233–299 contra aduersarium legis et prophetarum = ccsl 49, 35–131 contra iulianum = patrologiae cursus completus, series latina, vol. 44. ed. j.p. migne, cols. 641–874. paris: j.p. migne, 1904. enchiridion = ccsl 46, 49–114 contra iulianum opus imperfectum (books i-iii only) = csel 85/1, 3–506 de ciuitate dei = ccsl 47, 1–314 and ccsl 48, 321–866 basil the great 1968. hexameron, hom.2. in vol. 26 of sources chrétiennes. ed. s. giet, 138–187. paris: les éditions du cerf. burns, j. patout 1988 augustine on the origin and progress of evil. journal of religious ethics 16: 9–27. cress, donald a. 1989 augustine’s privation account of evil: a defense. augustinian studies 20: 109–128. evans, g.r. 1982 augustine on evil. cambridge: cambridge university press. gregory of nyssa 2000 discours catéchétique (catechism). vol. 453 of sources chrétiennes, edited by r. winling. paris: les éditions du cerf. griffin, david r. 1976 augustine and the denial of genuine evil. in god, power, and evil: a process theodicy. philadelphia: westminster press. reprinted in m.l. peterson, ed., the problem of evil: selected readings. library of religious philosophy, 8. notre dame, in: university of notre dame press. hick, john 1966 evil and the god of love. london: macmillan. notes, insights and flashes 93 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 journet, c. 1963 the meaning of evil, trans. michael barry. new york: p.j. kennedy. mann, william e. 1982 augustine on evil and original sin. in the cambridge companion to augustine, edited by eleonore stump and norman kretzmann, 40–48. cambridge: cambridge university press. o’donnell, james j. 1985 augustine (twayne’s world authors series 759). edited by philip levine. boston: g.k. hall. 1992 confessions ii: commentary on books 1–7. oxford: the clarendon press. origen 1978 de principiis, books i and ii. vol. 252 of sources chrétiennes, ed. h. crouzel and m. simonetti. paris: les éditions du cerf. rist, john 1994 augustine, ancient thought baptized. cambridge: cambridge university press. sertillanges, a.d. 1948 le problème du mal, vol. 1: l’histoire. paris: aubier. tilley, terrence w. 1991 the evils of theodicy. washington, dc: georgetown university press. torchia, joseph 2006 creation, finitude, and the mutable will: augustine on the origin of moral evil. irish theological quarterly 71: 47–66. doi:10.1177/0021140006072563 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0021140006072563 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expo. 3.2 (2009) 159–164] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v3i2.159 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 what’s the matter with footnotes? john-paul spiro center for liberal education, villanova university should graduate studentsand even many professorsreally be trying to solve the world’s problems before they know enough about their own discipline? mark c. taylor disparages academic specialization as “more and more about less and less,” as if specialization requires small-mindedness and lack of intellectual ambition. but specialization is not always-already narrowness; if it were, then the academic collaboration that taylor extols would entail locking several blinkered professors in a room and hoping they come up with answers to global problems. could they even communicate with one another in mutually comprehensible terms? if they could, then they would not be what taylor says they are. if scholars are to band together and use their various forms of expertise to fight, for example, climate change and international conflict, those individual scholars need expertise in their fields in the first place. it is the very nature of “expertise in their fields” that requires further attention. disciplinary boundaries are problematic and, perhaps increasingly, restricting, but they also serve purposes. disciplinary norms exist for reasons: they tell us what questions to ask, what methods to use, and what counts as evidence. in stanley fish’s characterization, “i am professionally correct, not out of a sense of moral obligation or choice of values … but out of a sense that the structure of a fully articulated profession, be it negligence law or literary criticism, is such that those who enter its precincts will find that the basic decisions, about where to look, what to do, and how to do it, have already been made” (fish 1995, 44). the average academic professional is not—and should not be—interested in revolutionizing the profession but in simply practicing it, doing what thomas kuhn called “normal science,” which “does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none” (kuhn 1996, 52). scholars within disciplines apply the latest techniques and theories to the extant data. but it is not clear what will constitute “normal science” under taylor’s new academic regime. taylor’s own work is innovative and multidisciplinary in the best ways. his work is distinguished by its range, depth, and its embrace of past, present, and future. he knows this of himself: “as i move from theology to philoso160 overheard in the academy © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 phy, to literary criticism, to art, to architecture, to technology, to economic systems, and now to biological systems, it is all interconnected. but the very structure of education in america—not only in america, but america is where i live—people don’t know enough about enough to be able to put the pieces together. it is a culture of expertise, which is,” as he says again in his new york times op-ed, “more and more about less and less” (taylor 2008). he cites the example of “a meeting of political scientists who had gathered to discuss why international relations theory had never considered the role of religion in society. given the state of the world today, this is a significant oversight” (taylor 2009). he is too kind; such an “oversight” could only be willful, an expression of preference; there is nothing inherent to the study of political science that precludes the study of religion. for all too long, many social scientists avoided religion with the same intensity that, for example, many humanities scholars avoid mathematics and many scientists avoid politics. not everybody can be good at everything, and most of us thrive by playing to our strengths, but our disciplinary boundaries represent the world as we want to see it: departmentalized, supposedly guaranteeing we will all leave one another alone. taylor is right to want to rock this boat. at the same time, the existence of blind spots in a discipline’s practitioners is not an argument for the abolition of the discipline itself. in order to do good work in one’s own field, as taylor does, one must have some knowledge of other fields—one must have, in short, a good liberal arts education, in the full sense of that education continuing throughout one’s life and career. a scholar of religion who only studies religion (and not philosophy or art or economics or sociology) will produce very limited work. but this is not the narrowness of which taylor complains. “in my own religion department,” he writes, “for example, we have 10 faculty members, working in eight subfields, with little overlap” (taylor 2009). however, a quick perusal of the faculty directory for columbia university department of religion reveals several excellent scholars, many of whom write popular works as well as scholarly tomes, all of whom have the necessary familiarity with various disciplines that enables them to do quality academic research. what makes them different from their chair, mark c. taylor? they each study a specific religion, not “religion” itself. therefore, they also incorporate history into their research, a field curiously absent from taylor’s description of his own multidisciplinary work. taylor’s work is, increasingly, preoccupied with the future; the past, it seems cannot justify itself on its own terms. this may be why taylor bemoans the gifted graduate student who studies duns scotus’ use of footnotes. admittedly, if our best scholars are studying the history of scholarship, what’s the matter with footnotes? 161 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 then perhaps higher education has entered its decadent phase. but the study of footnotes can also be a form of useful self-consciousness and reflexivity, just the kind taylor calls for when he invites us “to examine the conditions necessary for [religions’] formation and to consider the many functions they serve,” in order to “develop responsible analyses of religion’s diversity and complexity” (taylor 2008). the traditions of commentary are a crucial part of the world’s religions, and if someone has brilliant insight into duns scotus’ habits of citation, then what is taylor’s problem, exactly? i do not know if taylor would express the same derision for, say, a study of footnotes in u.s. supreme court opinions or u.n. statements on climate change.1 taylor’s dismissal of such research places him a bit closer to the religion-phobic political scientists he himself criticizes. he implies that there is nothing about religion in itself worth studying on its own terms. if good disciplinary work is, by definition, multidisciplinary— if a good historian also knows political science and/or literature and/or psychology, just as a good sociologist knows economics and/or architecture and/or mathematics—then each scholar working in a particular discipline is going to need other scholars to be working in other disciplines. for undergraduates in the humanities and social sciences, we can encourage more breadth: just as every young chemist is required to study mathematics, biology, and physics as well as chemistry, we can require every young aspirant to the humanities and social studies to study a broad curriculum, not just as distribution requirements but as a necessary qualification for the more specialized studies that lie ahead. at the graduate and professional level, instead of abolishing departments, it might be better advised to create and maintain more crossdisciplinary forums, and to encourage departments to reward their members for stretching themselves and their fields. taylor has a fine idea when he calls for academic collaboration for the purpose of engaging pressing global concerns. but we already have foundations, conferences and committees wherein major academics make recommendations to policymakers.2 american higher education is already given to fads and trends of fashion, and, i fear, taylor’s suggestion that we create “problem-focused programs” would mean even more wild swings of attention to whatever grabs our—or our sponsors’—passing fancies. who decides what is or is not a “problem”? what if a particular field—such as art history, literary criticism, or philosophy—does not demonstrate its usefulness when academe becomes a source of public-advice-giving and little else? if academic study must be useful, then to what and for whom? taylor’s suggestion that we abolish traditional academic departments and 162 overheard in the academy © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 form ad-hoc committees on big issues could lead to the same problems that accompanied the emergence of cultural studies: professors with some knowledge of literature, history, philosophy, sociology, etc., started to write about billboards and television shows and supermarkets, and their students followed suit, but many of those students did not first learn much about literature, history, philosophy, or sociology in the first place. cultural studies offers, in place of knowledge or expertise, a set of methodological tools and political preferences. the same fate could befall the interdisciplinary ad hoc renewable program on water or the conditionally temporary committee for the study of time. if we are to abolish traditional academic departments and replace them with multiand inter-disciplinary committees, and those committees consist of scholars from various disciplines, we must be clear then about what kinds of students such committees will produce. perhaps a few polymaths may emerge, but probably also a few dilettantes and factotums. the work of historians, biologists, economists, and so on, can be helpful for any number of world-repairing projects, but, as fish writes, “we become interested in something […] and it is usually later, under the pressure of anxieties created by the demand for justification, that we tell ourselves a story in which the pursuit of our interest is crucial for the improvement of the human condition” (fish 1995, 59). one can imagine taylor telling himself such a story, after he had been studying religion professionally for several years. but now that he has come to a later stage of his life, he would deny the rest of us such personal and professional development. there are career-tracks for those who wish to “make a difference,” and academe is probably not one of the bestsuited for such goals. when fish refers to “the pursuit of our interest,” he does not use it (strictly) in the political sense of “what we think is best for ourselves” but rather as “what draws us in, what intrigues us, what demands our study and contemplation.” when taylor beseeches us to use our knowledge for the good of mankind, and nothing else, he places the useful over the interesting. it may dishearten some people to hear that “some humanists rank what promises to be ‘fascinating’ above what may turn out to be ‘true’” (lamont 2009, 61), but i would not hesitate to add “and beneficial” as well. as for taylor’s recommendation for the abolishment of tenure, he has my sympathy. tenure is, too often, a license for mediocrity and atrophy, and tenured faculty too often act like a privileged aristocracy, assembling their privileges while cheap graduate students and adjuncts teach with no benefits and little hope for a real academic career. it did not have to be like this, but it is. but universities will not change until they have to; tenure will not be reformed for the same reasons that the electoral college will not be what’s the matter with footnotes? 163 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 reformed: everyone in a position to fix the system is the protected beneficiary of that very system. but that will not matter in the coming years; as banks and businesses fail, universities will follow, and charitable giving to higher education will only decrease with the expiration of the estate tax in 2010. tenure itself may remain, but many tenured lines will fall, not due to taylor’s calls for reform, but to “financial exigency.” elite institutions will continue as they have, perhaps combining a few departments but not abolishing them all. less prominent colleges and universities, however, will very well see themselves replaced by online courses and professional-skills institutions like strayer university, kaplan university, and the university of phoenix. pedagogical priorities will follow technology and economics, not the other way around. taylor, ever mindful of the future, is already prepared.3 notes 1. i was once instructedin graduate schoolto get the 2-volume dover edition of john locke’s essay concerning human understanding because it included alexander c. fraser’s brilliant commentary, which retained its interest and usefulness despite being from the 19th century. furthermore, anthony grafton’s excellent the footnote: a curious history (1997) presents a fascinating cultural history via this much-maligned academic tool. 2. these policy recommendations are generally ignored, if not ridiculed. richard posner notes, among many other cases, “the ‘philosophers’ brief ’ submitted by ronald dworkin, john rawls, thomas nagel, and other philosophers in the supreme court’s assisted-suicide cases is not mentioned in any of the opinions in those cases” (posner 2003, 361). posner elsewhere notes that it would be “unprofessional” (posner 2003, 363) for judges and other government officials to accept recommendations from professional academics. 3. taylor, along with coca-cola executive herbert a. allen, is the founder of the global education network. “since 1999, global education network has been creating and developing cutting-edge multimedia courses for students to take on their computers” (http://www.gen.com/aboutus/). this for-profit company will be in an excellent market position once universities realize that paying professors (or gradute students) to give standard-issue lectures is unnecessary when dvdroms provide the same conent at a fraction of the cost. references fish, stanley 1995 professional correctness: literary studies and political change. oxford: clarendon press. http://www.gen.com/aboutus/ http://www.gen.com/aboutus/ 164 overheard in the academy © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 grafton, anthony 1997 the footnote: a curious history. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. kuhn, thomas s. 1996 the structure of scientific revolutions. 3rd ed. chicago, il: university of chicago press. lamont, michèle 2009 how professors think: inside the curious world of academic judgment. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. posner, richard 2003 public intellectuals: a study of decline. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. taylor, mark c. 2008 rd book: apocalypse without god. interview by nathan schneider. religion dispatches, may 8. http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/rdbook/225/rdbook%3a_apocalypse_without_god 2009 end the university as we know it. the new york times, april 26. http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/rdbook/225/rdbook%3a_apocalypse_without_god http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/rdbook/225/rdbook%3a_apocalypse_without_god © equinox publishing ltd. 2009, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expo. 3.2 (2009) 223–228] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v3i2.223 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 notes, insights and flashes aquinas’s sheep: a note on anscombe on freedom bernard g. prusak center for liberal education, villanova university at the beginning of his paper “anscombe on freedom, animals, and the ability to do otherwise,” denis f. sullivan differentiates elizabeth anscombe’s position on freedom from that of both aquinas and the cartesian tradition. for both aquinas and the cartesian tradition, sullivan says, freedom understood as the ability to do otherwise is possible only for creatures who have minds: more precisely, for aquinas, for creatures who act from judgment informed not merely by instinct, but by reason (st i, q. 83, a. 1); for the cartesian tradition, for creatures who, by virtue of being immaterial minds, somehow escape the determinism that rules matter. for these thinkers, since among creatures only human beings have minds, it follows that human beings are the only creatures who enjoy freedom. sullivan claims that anscombe’s position is different as she holds “that not only human beings, but also at least some thoughtless brutes are free in the sense that they have the ability to do otherwise” (sullivan 2007, 231). according to him, her reasoning is that “freedom in the sense of having the ability to do otherwise is a necessary condition for intentional action. but animals, other than human beings, also perform intentional actions. so these animals are also free.” there are a number of interesting things to discuss here. first, i propose that we consider the meaning of freedom. in her paper “causality and determination,” anscombe asserts, against the thesis that freedom and determinism are compatible, that [t]he truth of physical indeterminism is…indispensable if we are to make anything of the claim to freedom. but certainly it [that is, the truth of physical indeterminism] is insufficient. the physically undetermined is not thereby “free.” for freedom at least involves the power of acting according to an idea…. (anscombe 1981, 146) 224 notes, insights and flashes © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 (by the way, elsewhere she writes that “where [a] thing wanted is not even supposed to exist, as when it is a future state of affairs, we have to speak of an idea…” [anscombe 1963, 70].) sullivan claims that we have “good grounds…for believing that non-human animals can be free” (sullivan 2007, 239), and that the reason that philosophers have failed to recognize these grounds is that they have confounded freedom with moral responsibility. according to sullivan, non-human animals are not morally responsible since they lack reason; but “freedom is not a consequence of the use of reason but is a condition for its use,” and so the fact that non-human animals do not enjoy ethical freedom is no reason to deny that they enjoy with us “a broader and more basic form of freedom” (sullivan 2007, 239). i am not so sure, however, and i am also not sure that anscombe would agree with this interpretation of her work. to put my question in brief, what is this “broader and more basic form of freedom”? we might also wonder whether it would be more accurate to say that freedom is neither a consequence nor a condition of the use of reason, but rather is realized in the use of reason. if i understand correctly, sullivan holds that a “thoughtless brute” like a sheep, aquinas’s example, may rightly be called free even if we agree with aquinas that, “seeing the wolf, [the sheep] judges it a thing to be shunned, from a natural and not a free judgment,” where free means informed by reason, which aquinas says “may follow opposite courses” (aquinas 1922, 148 [st i, q. 83, a. 1]). in other words, on my understanding, sullivan agrees with aquinas that the sheep does not act from free judgment informed by reason, but claims nevertheless that the sheep acts freely. my problem is that i do not see what the sheep’s freedom could be here for sullivan, other than freedom from the causal chains that deterministic physics envisions as binding all movements. this “freedom from,” however, “certainly…is insufficient,” to use anscombe’s words, to ground the claim that the sheep itself enjoys freedom or is free in any meaningful sense, narrow or broad. in other words, that an animal’s actions are free from physical determination does not warrant the claim that the animal itself is free or acts freely. other things too, like bombs connected to geiger counters placed near radioactive material (anscombe’s example taken from richard feynman), are free from the causal chains envisioned by determinaquinas’s sheep: a note on anscombe on freedom 225 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 istic physics (anscombe 1981, 144-145); but we are not tempted to attribute freedom to such things as a power that they themselves enjoy. more is needed to warrant attributing freedom to something than freedom from physical determination. the upshot is that it strikes me that anscombe’s position on freedom is in fact difficult to differentiate from aquinas’s; and i doubt whether sullivan’s distinction between “the form of freedom that involves the notion of moral responsibility” and “a broader and more basic form of freedom” can be sustained, at least in the way that he draws it (sullivan 2007, 239). the core claim of sullivan’s paper is that “freedom in the sense of having the ability to do otherwise is a necessary condition for intentional action” (sullivan 2007, 231). putting this claim in different words, he also says that, “if determinism turns out to be true, then all our talk about human actions and human agents…would be ‘just a highly convenient, nay indispensable, façon de parler’” (sullivan 2007, 236, quoting anscombe 2005, 103); and “if one were to hold that a given movement were necessitated by prior perceptions, beliefs, desires, and intentions, then…there would be nothing for the intention embodied in that action to explain” and it would make no sense to count that movement as an intentional action (sullivan 2007, 237). the conclusion that he draws from this last statement is that “if an action is intentional…, it is necessary that what happened in the action could have been otherwise,” which is to say it must be the case that the agent is free. to recall the overarching argument of his paper, the next premise is that there are non-human animals that act intentionally (which i do not dispute); and the final conclusion is that these animals are free. there are two questions to consider here, though they are difficult to answer apart from one another: first, whether sullivan has anscombe’s position right on the relevance of intentional action to freedom; and second, whether he has anscombe right or not, whether we ought to agree with him that intention is in fact relevant to the question of free will (anscombe reports that wittgenstein, for what it’s worth, appeared to think it isn’t [anscombe 1963, 7]). again to reiterate, sullivan claims that, “if one were to hold that a given movement were necessitated by prior perceptions, beliefs, desires, and intentions, then…there would be nothing for the intention embodied in that action to explain” and 226 notes, insights and flashes © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 it would make no sense to count that movement as an intentional action (sullivan 2007, 237). this is an interesting claim, but i do not find warrant for it in anscombe’s writings, and it is not obvious to me that it is true. freedom and determinism may not be compatible; but are ascriptions of intention, say to aquinas’s poor sheep fleeing a wolf so as to live another day, incompatible with our saying that the sheep could not do otherwise? anscombe writes in intention that “the term ‘intentional’ has reference to a form of description of events” and that “[w]hat is essential to this form” is displayed by the application that we give to the question “why?” (anscombe 1963, 84). if we answer “in order to” or “because” in a sense that, in her words, “go[es] beyond physics,” then typically we are dealing with this form of description (anscombe 1963, 85–86). the question to ask is whether using this “form of description” in a way that is more than just a façon de parler commits us to denying that the events could be explained, at least in principle, precisely in the terms of physics, which is to say in the terms of some reductive form of explanation that makes no room for freedom. this strikes me as a worthwhile question for further consideration. to make an initial contribution, anscombe’s remark that it is a “mistake to think that the relation of being done in execution of a certain intention, or being done intentionally, is a causal relation” suggests that describing an action as intentional does not rule out giving a causal explanation of it in different terms (anscombe 2005, 95).1 to close, i want to consider briefly anscombe’s oft-cited remark that there is nothing unacceptable about the idea that [the] “physical haphazard” should be the only physical correlate of human freedom of action; and perhaps also of the voluntariness and intentionalness in the conduct of other animals which we do not call “free.” (anscombe 1981, 146) this remark strikes me as opaque, and at the very least in need of elaboration. if i understand correctly, sullivan takes her point to be that free actions may be understood as the effects of so-called non-necessitating causes: namely, the kind of cause, in anscombe’s words, “that can fail of its effect without the intervention of anything to frustrate it” (anscombe 1981, 144). sullivan also claims that, aquinas’s sheep: a note on anscombe on freedom 227 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 if one accepts the notion of non-necessitating causes, and [if ] one recognizes the immensely complicated nature of the processes that go on in the brain, [then] it is reasonable to assume that in anything like the causal processes leading from the light striking the eye to the contraction of muscles in pushing [a] button [in an experiment], there are non-necessitating causes. (sullivan 2007, 235) the upshot is that an action such as pushing a button upon seeing a particular color may be free for the reason that it didn’t need to happen, though it was not causeless: after all, some agent did it (compare sullivan 2007, 233–234). my final question is whether this way of trying to make sense of freedom does not extend the cartesian tradition of conceiving of human beings as, in john dupré’s words, “putative exceptions to an otherwise seamless web of causal connection” (dupré 2001, 157). perhaps what we need to do instead, and here i follow dupré, who himself draws from anscombe, is to think out the consequences of the fact that “indeterminism anywhere, by virtue of the variety of causal chains that might be initiated by an indeterministic event, is liable to infect putatively deterministic phenomena anywhere” (dupré 2001, 168–169).2 one consequence is that “[c]ausal regularity is a much rarer feature of the world than is generally supposed.” another might be that the “solution to the problem of freedom of the will” lies not in finding ways that human beings escape the so-called “web of causal connection,” but in realizing that human beings, and other animals as well, “are in fact dense concentrations of causal power in a world where this is in short supply” (dupré 2001, 157). notes 1. anscombe explains: “[a]n intention does not have to be a distinct psychological state which exists either prior to or even contemporaneously with the intentional action whose intention it is.” in a given action, it may be the case that “there was…no prior formation of intention, nor is the intention a mental state that accompanies the action…. the teleology of conscious action is not to be explained as efficient causality by a condition, or state, or desire. remembering that that was ‘what i did … for,’ does not have to involve remembering such a state” (anscombe 2005, 95–96). 2. see also dupré’s earlier and more technical account in the disorder of things: metaphysical foundations of the disunity of science (dupré 1993, 187–193). 228 notes, insights and flashes © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 compare anscombe in “causality and determination”: “it has often been supposed that [indeterministic physics] makes little difference to the assumption of macroscopic determinism: as if underdeterminedness were always encapsulated in systems whose internal workings could be described only by statistical laws, but where the total upshot, and in particular the outward effect, was as near as makes no difference always the same…. feynman’s example of the bomb and geiger counter smashes this conception…” (anscombe 1981, 146–147). references anscombe, elizabeth 1963 intention. 2nd edn. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. 1981 causality and determination. in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, 133–147. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. 2005 the causation of action. in human life, action and ethics, ed. mary geach and luke gormally, 89–108. exeter: imprint academic. aquinas, saint thomas 1922 summa theologica. tr. fathers of the english dominican province. 2nd edn., vol. 4. london: burns oates and washbourne. dupré, john 1993 the disorder of things: metaphysical foundations of the disunity of science. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. 2001 human nature and the limits of science. oxford: oxford university press. sullivan, dennis 2007 anscombe on freedom, animals, and the ability to do otherwise. proceedings of the american catholic philosophical association 81 (2007): 231–240. review 1 wittman.indd © equinox publishing ltd. 2007, unit 6, th e village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expositions 1.1 (2007) 089–104] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v1i1.89 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 book reviews an award heard around the world? ismail kadare and the inaugural man booker international prize emily o. wittman, university of alabama books under review: casanova, pascale. th e world republic of letters. trans. malcolm debevoise. harvard university press. cambridge, ma, 2005. 440 pp. $35.00 hc. isbn 0-674-01345-x. english, james f. th e economy of prestige: prizes, awards, and the circulation of cultural value. harvard university press. cambridge, ma, 2004. 432 pp. $29.95 hc. isbn 0-674-01884-2. kadare, ismael. agamemnon’s daughter: a novella and stories. trans. david bellos. arcade publishing. new york, 2006. 240 pp. $24.00 hc. isbn 1-559-70788-7. kadare, ismael. broken april. ivan r. dee. chicago, 1998. 248 pp. $12.95 pb. isbn 1-561-31065-4. kadare, ismael. th e file on h. trans. david bellos and jusuf vrioni. arcade publishing. new york, 2002. 202 pp. $12.95 pb. isbn 1559-70627-9. kadare, ismael. th e palace of dreams. trans. barbara bray and jusuf vrioni. arcade publishing. new york, 1998. 204 pp. $12.95 pb. isbn 1-559-70416-0. kadare, ismael. th e successor. trans. david bellos. arcade publishing. new york, 2006. 216 pp. $24.00 hc. isbn 1-559-70773-9. th e new, london-based biennial man booker international prize, like the nobel prize in literature, is awarded to a living author—a stipulation that excluded betting favorite saul bellow—of any nationality, for the global impact of his or her entire body of work. th e international review 1 wittman.indd 89review 1 wittman.indd 89 16/06/2007 11:10:3116/06/2007 11:10:31 90 book reviews © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 prize is an answer to criticism of the parent award, the annual booker prize, which is awarded only to citizens of the united kingdom and the commonwealth. judged by a rotating international jury of three, the prize is open to any fi ction writer whose work appears either in english or in “generally available translation,” a restriction that eliminated several possible candidates. on june 2, 2005, the albanian author ismail kadare won the inaugural prize. kadare, the author of more than thirty books since the early sixties, has been translated into more than forty languages. kadare himself does not speak english. he writes almost exclusively in albanian, a structurally rich, independent branch of the indo-european family spoken by approximately six million people. th e vast majority of his audience reads him in translation, typically out of chronological sequence, and with a time lag of years and sometimes decades. most english-language translators work with authorized french versions, not the albanian originals. kadare’s most recent u.s. publications include agamemnon’s daughter: a novella and stories (2006) and th e successor (2005). th e successor, written in 2002, is a fi ctional rendering of the circumstances and aftermath of the murderous or suicidal shot that killed long-time albanian dictator enver hoxha’s chosen heir mehmet shehu in 1981. th e preface to the novel alerts us that “any resemblance between the characters and circumstances of this tale and real people and events is inevitable.” th e successor does not solve the mystery yet no rumor is left unspoken as kadare deftly mixes the insider views of family members and coworkers with the contents of foreign espionage dossiers, ambassadors’ reports and the mysterious musings of an icelandic medium. albanian confusion about the successor’s death is intertwined with non-albanian confusion about albania, highlighting foreign interest in the country whose paranoid leadership progressively isolated it from every bloc and nation in the world. who lives in albania? what are albanians like? non-albanians ponder these questions in th e successor and in other kadare novels, often without much insight: “what was known about albania was mostly obsolete and some of it was distinctly romanticized” (5). th e successor off ers a smattering of tongue-in-cheek review 1 wittman.indd 90review 1 wittman.indd 90 16/06/2007 11:10:5116/06/2007 11:10:51 an award heard around the world? 91 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 beginner’s introductions to albania that read like wikipedia entries. self-conscious asides, such as “as we say here,” pepper the novel, but the pedagogy is self-aware, often funny and strangely hospitable. as the citizens of albania read their morning papers, they ponder the ramifi cations of the successor’s death, wondering “which of the two alternatives—self-infl icted death, or death infl icted by the hand of another—would aff ect them less harshly” (3). a similar concern haunts the novella agamemnon’s daughter, written ten years before th e successor, and smuggled piecemeal to france. th e novella is situated in tirhana at the time when the successor is promoted, and it delves deep into the private ramifi cations of political events. it details the emotional plight of the successor’s daughter’s fi rst lover, as he realizes that her father’s position and promotion will require her to break with him, and make a politically strategic marriage. mehmet shehu did not have a daughter, but enver hoxha did, and many speculate that suzana is based on her. she appears in th e successor as well, as one of the rotating narrators who contemplate her father’s death. th e narrators of th e successor patiently explain the details and context of the case. th is is necessary in order for the novel to make sense to non-albanian readers (and even some albanian speakers living outside of albania as well). yet th e successor’s ambiguous ending hints that this is an impossible enterprise for everyone involved, including those at the epicenter. in a nod to albania’s epic tradition, the dead successor, speaking from an underworld of shades, is the novel’s fi nal narrator. he taunts readers by recalling a missed underworld opportunity to meet with mao tse-tung’s equally ill-fated one-time heir lin biao: “to him, a man of my own kind, i could have told the story of what happened to me; but no way can i tell you. for unlike the language that serves for us to talk to one another, a language allowing our kind to communicate with yours has not yet been invented on earth, and never will be” (197). perhaps a bit out of character, the successor cautions readers not to resuscitate future successors. “don’t try to work out where we went wrong,” he warns (206). by invoking lin biao, he suggests that his own story is neither unique nor geographically specifi c. th e successor is a member of a global clan of assassins; the harrowing review 1 wittman.indd 91review 1 wittman.indd 91 16/06/2007 11:10:5116/06/2007 11:10:51 92 book reviews © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 allegory of power is rooted in the balkans but relevant to all readers. in th e successor, the self-doubting architect who designed the successor’s house poses questions about internal and external evaluation of artistic integrity. th e architect, who might die for his fl oor plans, is spurred to conduct a frank assessment of his own talent and the artistic constraints posed by the dictatorship. i was probably one of the few who asked themselves the fateful question: do i or do i not possess any talent? was it the age that had turned my hands into clay, or was i so clumsy that i would have vegetated no matter what period i lived in . . . would i not have exclaimed and lamented in all and any age that i would have been a great artist but for pharaoh th utmose blocking my gifts, but for caligula, but for mccarthy, but for zhdanov. . . (189) th e architect directs his self-critique at the bad faith implicit in his excuses and lamentations. but can aesthetic evaluation dispense with a look into the circumstances that may have stifl ed or inhibited creative work? and how can the author’s relationship to these circumstances be judged? two recent books published by harvard university press off er new angles and vocabulary with which to examine both kadare’s writing and the man booker international prize and perhaps answer the architect’s questions. pascale casanova’s th e world republic of letters (2005) and james english’s th e economy of prestige (2005) complement each other and read well in tandem, in part because each sidesteps the overt subject matter of the other—international literary competition for casanova, and cultural prizes for english. although neither book mentions kadare (the prize was awarded following the publication of both books, and both authors miss a great case study), their concerns are both mirrored and complicated in th e successor and in kadare’s larger corpus. in th e economy of prestige, james english notes the astonishing proliferation of prizes in the arts, doubting, with an implied sigh, that “any of the business of culture can be conducted without recourse to them, not even the business of resisting their putative eff ects” (106). if you tire of laments that philip roth has been passed over too many times, review 1 wittman.indd 92review 1 wittman.indd 92 16/06/2007 11:10:5116/06/2007 11:10:51 an award heard around the world? 93 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 take heart at english’s claim that “the most ambitious prizes are more and more obliged to reach beyond national boundaries both for object of esteem and for (other) sources of legitimacy” (261). th is is true of judging committees as well, who grant awards legitimacy by providing “symbolic support from extranational sources” (260). building on foucault and bourdieu’s conceptual vocabulary for aesthetic judgment, english demonstrates that symbolic capital has gone international but warns that this is not necessarily a gain for writers from smaller countries or literatures insofar as the awards typically favor exiled authors. th e “international economy of prestige” is a mixed blessing (262). english reasons that exiled writers are often privileged in the prize game because they straddle worlds and are therefore more palatable to foreign judges who are often exiles themselves. unlike casanova, english bemoans the loss of attention to the “symbolic importance of the local,” to writers who do not resemble critically acclaimed american or european writers and are included only to the extent that they can be “recontextualized for mainstream consumption” (291, 282). like casanova, english points out the strange temporality of consecration. often, he notes, national recognition paradoxically follows international consecration and thereby implicitly diminishes the importance of “indigenous cultural prestige” (272). overall, “the recent frenzy of prizes and awards” has led not just to “denationalization,” but also to a “more radical deterritorialization of prestige, an uncoupling of cultural prizes . . . from particular cities, nations, even clearly defi ned regions.” (282). th ese prizes reward “global” literature, “a literature whose fi elds of production and of reception could be mapped—and whose individual works could be valued—only on a world scale” (304). prizes reach beyond national boundaries, but they are in search of “world literature,” a category as much stylistic as geographic. th e consecration of this category worsens the very situation the global prizes purport to correct. although english does not address the important role of translation in the world of international literary prizes, his book is a valuable supplement to prize committee member azar nafi si’s refl ection that the prize itself is ultimately less important than “the debate and controversy it generates” (nafi si 2005). review 1 wittman.indd 93review 1 wittman.indd 93 16/06/2007 11:10:5116/06/2007 11:10:51 94 book reviews © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 in th e world republic of letters, pascale casanova calls for literary critics to do more than contextualize writing within national history or evaluate it with purely aesthetic criteria. although these kinds of literary criticism have been unearthed and reburied for decades, casanova proposes new reasons to torch the crops. she coins the term “literary temporality” to indicate the temporal history specifi c to literature and the term “world literary space” to indicate the geography specifi c to literature. literature is an international experience for writers as well as readers, she argues, and this experience is more temporal then geographical or political, although it is necessarily infl uenced by both geography and politics (351). literary scholars, critics and judges miss the point when they isolate texts from one another and ignore “the totality of texts and literary and aesthetic debates with which a particular work of literature enters into relation and resonance, and which forms the true basis for its singularity, its real originality” (3). th e optic of “world literary space” and the temporality specifi c to it alone can illuminate individual texts and explode tired categories of infl uence and genius. in casanova’s account, paris is the “literary greenwich meridian,” the reference point for this literary temporality. th e world republic of letters describes the way in which paris has traditionally maintained political and economical autonomy in the literary sphere, with french publishing houses nobly funding foreign translations based on merit, not marketability. yet casanova is also attuned to the dangers in the center of consecration. most relevant to the case of kadare is her attention to the struggles of writers who work at the literary “periphery.” outsiders, she claims, are much more aware of what success in the center means, as well as the available strategies to obtain it. th is power dynamic is often invisible to those who wield literary power even if— like the parisian publishers—they model themselves as a disinterested court of appeals. casanova details how international literary space sprang out of sixteenth-century debates over the merits of latin and vernacular french for contemporary literature and drama. french became the international vernacular language of conversation and literature, casanova arreview 1 wittman.indd 94review 1 wittman.indd 94 16/06/2007 11:10:5116/06/2007 11:10:51 an award heard around the world? 95 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 gues, for non-coercive reasons; rather, “the exceptional concentration of literary resources that occurred in paris over the course of several centuries gradually led to its recognition as the center of the literary world” (68, 47). paris reinforced its literary capital in the form of publications, translations and prizes. other countries sought to establish rival centers of consecration but failed because their methods were nationalistic and coercive. quick on the heels of the french, germanlanguage writers, inspired by johann gottfried herder’s eighteenthcentury writing, sought cultural legitimacy by revisiting (or creating) national folk traditions. in casanova’s account, this attempt to establish national literary independence led to anachronism and nationalistic stagnation, precisely because it favored nationalistic appropriation over a universal approach. th e ends spoiled the means as german-language writers unwisely battled the invincible power of literary paris, world republic of letters. like english, casanova builds on pierre bourdieu’s concepts of consecration and symbolic capital, proposing that we investigate the cases of peripheral writers in view of two questions: where does the writer in question stand in relation to his native literary space? what is the place of this native literary space on the larger map of world literature? (41). she has questions for readers from the center as well. how do critics from the centers of the literary world—paris, as well as other countries in which literature is relatively free from political restraints and economic woes—perceive writing from the periphery? does the very criterion of universality that their central position presumably encourages critics to adopt, also blind them to the specifi city of the work in question or, conversely, push them to identify and privilege perceived diff erences? born and raised in a small and isolated country, kadare clearly stands in a diffi cult relationship to world literary space. when reading kadare, it quickly becomes clear that he is acutely aware of the politics of literary recognition and threads this knowledge throughout his literary corpus. kadare’s 1997 novel th e file on h. explicitly foregrounds the perils involved in identifying cultural authority and symbolic capital. in th e file on h., two harvard-educated irish-american scholars learn review 1 wittman.indd 95review 1 wittman.indd 95 16/06/2007 11:10:5216/06/2007 11:10:52 96 book reviews © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 albanian to conduct research into the contemporary oral narratives that they believe will provide insight into homeric composition. th e novel is based on a real series of visits by harvard classicist milman parry and his doctoral student, albert lord, to the balkans to study the oral epic tradition. parry and lord recorded and analyzed oral epics in order to gain insight into the structure and delivery of the homeric epics. in 1979, a fortuitous meeting occurred between lord and kadare in ankara, turkey. kadare completed th e file on h. the following year. arriving in albania in the 1930s, the homeric scholars ignore the present day country they encounter. th e albanians they meet fathom neither the foreigners’ dogged search for illiteracy nor their antiquated notions about albania; even the scholars’ albanian is hopelessly outdated. th e local soap merchant marvels that the duo has journeyed, “all the way to the end of the world to stay in a pigsty of an inn and try to fi nd out about a blind guy who lived a million years ago!” (33). when the scholars land in a remote town in search of traces of the bard, a gypsy readies himself to greet them with “an impressively long sequence of farts.” th e local provincial governor mistakes them for spies, thereby launching an elaborate investigation that studies the visitors as carefully as the visitors study albania. th e ministry of the interior hopes to gather enough damning evidence to blackmail the scholars into writing a biography of the king. th e scholars discover traces of homer in modern albania, but not in any foreseeable fashion. th ey neither see nor hear the obvious; one scholar literally follows homer into blindness. ultimately, it is the lonely governor’s wife who best understands the mutual misperceptions and situational farce, and prepares herself to “suff er the changes that were needed to make her just as receptive to the reality of the irishmen as she had been to her imagination of them” (22). th e practice of resuscitating folk traditions is modifi ed and mocked in th e file on h. as albanians, eager to modernize, overlook the very illyrian traditions that would interest those abroad. th e push to discover national folk traditions and establish literary history and linguistic heritage comes from without, in the fi gure of foreign scholars. yet review 1 wittman.indd 96review 1 wittman.indd 96 16/06/2007 11:10:5216/06/2007 11:10:52 an award heard around the world? 97 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 the contests over antiquity, initiated by foreigners interested in professional gain, overshadow the potential consequences of their research, including the recrudescence of ethnic strife. th e scholars bank on the immunity of scholarship, yet fi nd themselves caught inside a bloodier contest. a disturbing parallel appears in the story “th e blinding order,” from agamemnon’s daughter. in that story an austrian consul remarks, in a brutally callous identifi cation of the proverbial silver lining, that the ottoman practice of blinding has led albanians to rediscover their lahutas and give birth to a “ ‘fl owering of oral poetry’ ” (198). in both cases, culture hunters ignore human costs. on the boat that takes them away from albania, the scholars read a poem about themselves in an albanian newspaper. th e oral epics thus demonstrate variations that include accounts of their own arrival and strange behavior, much like the “th e song of milman parry,” allegedly penned by a croat bard. th ese recitations indicate that the past is not static, that legends and rituals still have functional signifi cance. it is precisely by means of such misunderstandings that kadare subtly affi rms the richness of the albanian epic tradition, foregrounds its contested legacy and points out the widespread misunderstanding of its function, transmission and signifi cance. in the press release for the award, john carey, chair of the judging committee for the man booker international prize, described kadare as “a universal writer in a tradition of storytelling that goes back to homer” (man booker prize 2005). yet the epic and classical traditions that kadare channels in his novels are often fi ltered through what casanova calls “centers of consecration.” th e heart-broken journalist in the story “agamemnon’s daughter,” as the title suggests, likens his girlfriend’s sacrifi ce to agamemnon’s murder of iphigenia at the beginning of the trojan war. iphigenia’s death, which the narrator has just been reading about in robert graves, fi ts the narrator’s situation better than the albanian folk legend that fi rst comes to his mind. th e reference to robert graves is as much an exposition of the complicated and non-linear nature of kadare’s relationship with classical literature as it is a commentary on censorship during the hoxha years. set in the 1920s, broken april (new amsterdam books 1990), dereview 1 wittman.indd 97review 1 wittman.indd 97 16/06/2007 11:10:5216/06/2007 11:10:52 98 book reviews © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 tails a bourgeois tirhana couple’s honeymoon to the mountains of the northern plateau (labeled “the accursed mountains”) to holiday amongst highlanders who still observe the kanun, the thousand year old set of laws once dominant in the entire region. th e couple’s cultural tourism in the “other albania,” the project of the unsuspecting journalist husband, turns sinister when the young wife locks eyes with gjorj, a young highlander bearing the black ribbon that identifi es the target in a blood feud. th e honeymoon quickly evolves into a frenzied—yet unspoken—search for the ill-fated young man. th e mutual fascination of bride and highlander ends in her madness and his death, leaving april “broken.” broken april presents an albania with its own center and mysterious and misunderstood periphery; the tensions between modernity and tradition are tensions within the country itself. critics of kadare who accuse non-albanian kadare fans of cultural tourism overlook kadare’s own commentary on the phenomenon. high in the hills of the northern plateau, the debt manager of the blood feuds keeps a library of books and articles about the kanun by outsiders. th e file on h. and broken april remind us that the people we stare at also look back, some with reverence and desire, some with knowledge and some with revulsion. kadare himself has spent little time in the northern plateau—a couple of weeks as a student in the 1950s and a couple more as a journalist in the 1960s. his geographical and cultural sources are themselves partially literary, partially imagined. kadare’s albania— “kadaria” for enthusiasts—is colder than the actual adriatic country and often shrouded in a geographically incorrect fog. th e tension between center and periphery resurfaces again in spring flowers, spring frost (2000). set in the post-communist era, the narrator watches a group of youngsters cruelly unearth a hibernating snake. later the narrator watches the similarly unearthed kanun devour his girlfriend’s family and end their relationship as some families in the small town begin to settle age-old blood debts from the pre-communist era. alongside new curiosities like bank heists and shaved armpits, long-dead attachments fi ll the post-communist void. on one side beckons tradition, on the other, the ambiguous call of europe. review 1 wittman.indd 98review 1 wittman.indd 98 16/06/2007 11:10:5216/06/2007 11:10:52 an award heard around the world? 99 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 young albanian men disappear at the vengeful hands of long-forgotten enemies just as they declare themselves dead to facilitate emigration. ghosts generate ghosts. th roughout th e world republic of letters, casanova both criticizes and affi rms literary norms, occasionally using the term “anachronism” to designate writing that diff ers from the reigning style at the center of consecration. in th e world republic of letters she belittles realism as a nationalistic practice, a quaint but conservative and retrograde technique to which “deprived writers” are particularly, but not exclusively, prone. she labels realist techniques “commonplace” and “ordinary,” but tempers her criticism with an optimistic outlook: “th e relative backwardness and poverty of such regions are not permanent conditions,” she concedes; “not all writers on the periphery are inevitably ‘condemned’ to backwardness, any more than writers from the center are necessarily modern” (101). casanova attributes revolutionary potential to th e world republic of letters, which she off ers as a corrective to the inequities of literary recognition, a “critical weapon in the service of all deprived and dominated writers on the periphery of the literary world” (354–355). she identifi es stylistic and thematic similarities between writers from diff erent countries and diff erent historical periods, arguing that the strategies of peripheral writers are both limited and shared. th ese impressively wide-ranging comparisons, so essential to her argument, are seductive but thin; due to the encyclopedic scope of her work, authorial statements and plot summaries are often substituted for close readings. despite her anti-elitist claims, casanova frames success in terms of offi cial acknowledgment, fi nancial gain and sales. she cedes judgment of universal worth to prize-giving institutions, in particular the nobel prize committee, whose yearly literature award she affi rms as an undisputed confi rmation of literary merit: “today writers everywhere are agreed in recognizing it as the highest honor of the world of letters. yet there is no better measure of the unifi cation of the international literary fi eld than the eff ectively universal respect commanded by this prize” (147). casanova devotes less analysis to the function and meaning of prizes or the culture of awards that, english notes, make the obituaries review 1 wittman.indd 99review 1 wittman.indd 99 16/06/2007 11:10:5216/06/2007 11:10:52 100 book reviews © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 of notable writers resemble the sports page. english has done much to dispel the misperception that these large-scale awards are greeted without cynicism, even by the recipients themselves; “historically, it is diffi cult to fi nd anyone of any stature in the world of arts and letters who speaks with unalloyed respect for prizes” (187). it is precisely this “scandalous currency” that keeps the culture of prizes afl oat; even if people don’t think recipients are worthy of prizes, they believe they should be (196). casanova often complicates her compulsory nods to anti-nationalism. for instance, she suggests (perhaps tongue-in-cheek?) that both faulkner and hemingway should be included on the list of french nobel laureates because of the early respect for their work in france. what would she make of english’s claim in th e economy of prestige that prizes act in the interest of prizes, not of artists? english explores the famous case of tolstoy, who lost the nobel prize to the french poet rené f.a. sully-prudhomme. he details how the stockholm committee attempted to save face by making sure that they never awarded him one and argues that this apparent perversity served only to enhance the prize’s prestige, by confi rming the nobel committee’s status as a frustrating, yet autonomous and mysterious entity, “possessed of special power, special capacity to make distinctions where others cannot” (147). both english and casanova discuss the case of the nigerian nobel laureate wole soyinka. th e choice of the experimentalist, english-language writer wole soyinka for the 1986 nobel prize helps casanova’s theory about the boons of consecration from the center. yet, english points out, the prize diminished his domestic legitimacy, particularly among other nigerian writers: “to embrace the award, to view it as a great honor, was, in this view, a way of rejecting indigenous and vernacular culture in favor of global european hegemony” (299). casanova contrasts soyinka with fellow nigerian writer chinua achebe, whom she dubs a “national writer” and situates at a distance from literary mean time, in association with which the “great heroes of literature invariably emerge” (109). because achebe’s work revisits national traditions, casanova takes him, like many other national writers, to review 1 wittman.indd 100review 1 wittman.indd 100 16/06/2007 11:10:5216/06/2007 11:10:52 an award heard around the world? 101 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 task for a variety of breaches of literary conduct, including “essentializing diff erences, reproducing outmoded models, and nationalizing and commercializing literary life” (109). a moment in literary history that could problematize casanova’s dichotomy between nationalist and universal writers is conrad’s favorable reception in interwar france—reception granted, to a large extent, due to the work of andré gide. th e nouvelle revue française coterie who translated and reviewed conrad’s work often saw him as a french writer lurking beneath the english language. insolvent and canny about cash, conrad certainly benefi ted from the prestige and distinction that accompanied his formal introduction in france. but to what extent did he take aesthetic direction from paris? conrad was aggrieved that his earlier sea-oriented works won favor and not the later intrigues which he deemed superior. he loathed the designation of maritime writer as much as kadare appears to loathe being called an “historical writer.” casanova does blame translators for the ethnocentrism that so often characterizes writing published in the center. but did conrad write in english, rather than polish (his mother tongue) or french (his second language) because of international pressure? or, are we to take him at his own word and believe, as he claimed, that the genius of the english language made him write, that if he hadn’t heard english (which he fi rst heard as an adult), he would not have written a word? casanova typically accepts writers’ own assessment of their work and choices, but would she accept conrad’s claim of disinterested aesthetic inspiration and artistic autonomy? just months before awarding the inaugural man booker international prize, the committee announced a related prize of £15,000 for the english-language translator of the award winner’s choice. th e prize indicates a watershed moment in the history of literary awards by recognizing the signifi cance of traditionally invisible translators. th e award was created after the judges became aware, during the preliminary stages of their work, of the crucial role of translation. at the award’s ceremony, john carey called for british publishers to support translation, opining that translators do more than politicians to ease the world’s tensions. review 1 wittman.indd 101review 1 wittman.indd 101 16/06/2007 11:10:5216/06/2007 11:10:52 102 book reviews © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 kadare chose princeton professor david bellos, who has translated seven of kadare’s novels from the french thus far. kadare knows no english and bellos just the rudiments of albanian, yet both are optimistic about the enterprise of translation. kadare has repeatedly expressed a preference for these double translations that bypass the frequently expurgated and mutilated albanian originals in favor of the french editions revised and approved by kadare himself. it seems quite plausible that kadare is also thankful for bellos’ recognition that he is not, in bellos’ own words, “in any ordinary sense, a contemporary writer,” or, as english puts it, “repackaged” (292). bellos also honors the complex intertexuality of kadare’s prose, bringing out its rich allusions to dante, kafka and shakespeare, among others. prizes are driven by politics and awarded for heroic personal behavior, sometimes even for marginality. th e current günter grass controversy demonstrates the extent to which literary prizes are widely perceived as awards for comportment. writers from the balkans are particularly subject to scrutiny; writers from that region are expected to be more than writers. at times, consecration is not, in the fi nal count, quite the kind of literary recognition a writer hopes for. just as some of kadare’s novels hint that albania and albanians fascinate the outside world precisely because of their tragic past, the multifaceted nature of approbation is acknowledged even in his initial public response to winning the prize. in the response, quoted on the man booker website, kadare expresses hope that that the prize will open the doors for other kinds of literary capital and “other kinds of achievement” (“albanian novelist wins”). he voices a call for understanding: “my fi rm hope is that the european and world opinion may henceforth realize that this region, to which my country, albania, belongs, can also give rise to other kinds of news and be the home of other kinds of achievement, in the fi eld of the arts, literature and civilization.” th e awarding of the man booker international prize has entailed some criticism of kadare’s perceived complicity with the hoxha regime. david bellos has pointed out that kadare was the only writer on the award’s shortlist to be singled out for criticism from his own countrymen on the international man booker website. yet kadare’s writreview 1 wittman.indd 102review 1 wittman.indd 102 16/06/2007 11:10:5316/06/2007 11:10:53 an award heard around the world? 103 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 ings incorporate this eventuality as well and, in many ways, turn the spotlight back on his readers. th e dream interpreters in kadare’s novel th e palace of dreams (1998) recognize the self-refl ectivity of interpretation. set in nineteenth-century constantinople, mark-alem quprili, a young man of albanian heritage, is selected to join a group who sorts and shifts through the dreams of dreamers from the far reaches of the ottoman empire, in order to detect conspiracy and dissent. th e titular palace of dreams, the tabir sarrail, is an odd blend of an imaginary ottoman institution and the communist central committee building of tirhana. it bears suspicious resemblance to the workings of a literary prize committee; one group registers the countless dreams, another group sifts out the important ones, yet another reads the important ones closely and a select few judges them. selection is a mysterious and dangerous process; those who control the dreams also possess “the keys of the state” (124). a sinister process is at work that will make interpretation into an act of repression and violence for which the selected dreamer receives imprisonment and death, not £60,000. kadare’s acceptance speech at the award’s ceremony in scotland affi rms his citizenship in “another realm, the realm of literature.” like the architect in th e successor , he acknowledges the grim challenges of writing under a “ghastly regime,” but he fi rmly situates himself as an inheritor of the “great writers,” detailing his early fascination with homer, shakespeare, dante and kafka, all of whom “became his true masters.” towards the end of his speech he recalls the circuitous route his writing took to be read aloud by the jury. . . . one day, passing through the night of dictatorship, our prison bread ended up by accident on your table. in your free cities—paris, london, new york, madrid, vienna, rome. . .—you picked up the prison loaf and inspected it with curiosity. you took a bit and found it good, and reckoned it was just as edible by you who live in the free world. mixed in with this deep gratitude is an implicit injunction to his foreign readers not to condescend. kadare came to read and write in a diffi cult and circuitous manner, but it seems unlikely that he would accept casanova’s thesis that each writer is situated “not spatially but review 1 wittman.indd 103review 1 wittman.indd 103 16/06/2007 11:10:5316/06/2007 11:10:53 104 book reviews © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 temporally,” or her suggestion that we read according to this schema and concentrate on “inequality” (351). kadare draws attention to the horrifi c circumstances under which he wrote in “the back end of a tiny country crushed under the heel of communism.” but the “miracle of biblical proportions” that he notes is that the “prison loaf” does not taste like prison loaf. let’s take him at his word. english and casanova both note how “consecrating” nations assimilate foreign works to their own aesthetic preferences, political agendas and literary categories. economic realities inform the literary temporality casanova outlines, as well as the system of prestige explored by english. literary awards clearly honor more than merit. yet kadare does not “yield,” as casanova suggests dominated writers must; his writing off ers very specifi c insights into questions about the forms that “modernity” takes and their perceived status as a goal (156). kadare’s win was not heard loudly in the united states, despite the colorful prize stickers that now adorn his books. th e award will secure him neither fi scal gains nor media frenzy. but translations of his work will continue, and those of us bound to english are lucky for that. his consecration is our gain. and james english’s observation that prizes breed prizes has been confi rmed: th e man booker group has just introduced a yearly man asian literary prize. references nafi si, azar 2005 spoilt for choice. th e guardian, 4 june, guardian saturday pages. man booker international prize 2005 albanian novelist wins inaugural man booker international prize 2005 (press release). http://www.manbookerinternational.com/media/release review 1 wittman.indd 104review 1 wittman.indd 104 16/06/2007 11:10:5316/06/2007 11:10:53 homeless chic as domestic poverty tourism: street retreats, urban plunges, and north american subjectivity [expositions 5.1 (2011) 55-61] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 “homeless chic” as domestic poverty tourism: street retreats, urban plunges, and north american class boundaries amanda grzyb university of western ontario in january 2010, a toronto yoga studio advertised a 48-hour “street retreat” led by “psychotherapist, yoga teacher, author and activist,” michael stone. 1 the description of the program reads: this intensive three day street retreat involves going into the streets with no money and just the clothes on our back. the streets are our main teacher and the focus of the retreat is examining interdependence and looking deeply into who and what we are and our place in the vast web of beings. we eat in soup kitchens. we sleep outdoors together. most meditation retreat exist [sic] in quiet, protected settings. here, we use the myriad activities and forms of life in our streets as a means of paying attention and waking up. we don‟t call ourselves homeless; we're simply living on the streets for several days, relying on the generosity of the streets to take care of us. while at times we break up into smaller groups, we come together several times a day to share our experiences in a council practice with kosu, sitting meditation with michael, encouraged by dharma talks and chanting. 2 stone recommends that participants “not shave, nor wash [their] hair for 1 week to 10 days prior to the retreat,” “wear old clothes,” and “bring only an empty bag (shopping, plastic) for collecting food from shelters.” 3 he seeks to “wake up” the consciousness of his middle-class yoga students by encouraging them to dress up in street costumes, eschew their material possessions, sleep rough, and consume the scant resources of soup kitchens and shelters. 4 while there is a long north american tradition of similar “downclassing experiments” 5 – from late nineteenth-century literary and photographic forays by middle-class men into impoverished american neighborhoods to more formalized “urban plunge” group programs made popular over the last two decades by national coalition for the homeless (washington, d.c.), religiously affiliated street retreats, and alternative spring break programs for university students – stone‟s version adds a new twist to an old practice. unlike other urban plunges, the ad describing stone‟s street retreat makes no mention of “raising awareness about” or “bearing witness to” the social consequences of our affordable housing crisis, lack of supportive and transitional housing, and overflowing emergency shelters. instead, it is “homeless chic” writ large. the participants wear homelessness like an outfit, engaging in a form of domestic poverty tourism that relentlessly reinforces the privilege and mobility of the north american neoliberal subject. “homeless chic” as domestic poverty tourism 56 john urry defines tourism as the objectification of members of another culture through a “tourist gaze,” 6 a process that usually entails accumulating superficial signs (mass produced kitsch in the form of souvenirs, for example) that represent a stylized version of the host country or community. 7 he emphasizes the importance of tourism as a means for acquiring the capital of cultural knowledge that is mediated by the tourist‟s position within a protected resort district. urry explains that the tourist‟s journey is “to, and in, sites which are outside the normal places of residence and work. periods of residence elsewhere are of a short-term and temporary nature. there is a clear intention to return „home‟ within a relatively short period of time.” 8 the return home is particularly significant when we consider that while some tourists engage in the sort of tourism that simply re-creates the everyday amenities to which they are accustomed, there is another kind of tourism – what cultural critics such as greg ringer, stephen britton, and anita pleumaron refer to as “poverty tourism” – that facilitates a deliberate expedition into the poorer districts of a host community in an effort to obtain a more “authentic” cultural experience. while we usually think of poverty tourism as something people from the global north do in the global south, there are also instances, like the urban plunge, when the middle-class citizens participate in a similar practice on the domestic front. in this context, the gaze that urry identifies is a portal that permits the middle-class tourist to cross over the threshold between classes and bear witness to the spectacle of the poor and homeless other. at the same time, this temporary transgression simultaneously serves to reinforce class boundaries because the tourist traffic only flows in one direction. there are certainly no reciprocal “suburban plunge” programs that might, for example, allow homeless people from the inner city to spend a weekend in a well-appointed four-bedroom house in the suburbs where they rely on the “generosity” of the crescents and cul-de-sacs to take care of them. like any fashion, the urban plunge has had its historical ebbs and flows, modifications, and adaptations. in north america, the practice has its roots in late nineteenthand early twentiethcentury american socialist literature, muckraking journalism, and social advocacy, when writers like jacob riis (how the other half lives, 1890), jack london (“a tramp diary,” 1894; the road, 1907), stephen crane (“an experiment in misery,” 1894), josiah flynt (tramping with tramps, 1901), and hutchins hapgood (the spirit of the ghetto, 1902) sought to tell the middle classes about the harsh realities of urban slums, poverty, and homelessness. these early incarnations of the urban plunge usually took one of two forms: third party documentation of social ills and human suffering, such as riis‟s powerful photographs of the impoverished living conditions in the lower east side tenements; or, first-person accounts of temporary, clandestine downclassing experiments that mark the day-to-day challenges of homeless life. while both approaches transport the middle-class reader into a lower-class milieu vis-à-vis a form of literary poverty tourism that rely on the construction of a homeless other (one that, i would argue, ultimately re-inscribes the american self), the urban plungers usually did so in support of tangible social, economic, and architectural reforms. in how the other half lives (1890), for example, jacob riis approaches the representation of poverty with deep contradiction. on the one hand, he offers middle-class americans a 57 grzyb spectacular glimpse at another world: a rag picker holding her baby, a sweatshop filled with jewish immigrants, police lodging houses full of homeless women, a man sleeping on a bare mattress atop two barrels in a dirty coal cellar, a family laboring together on a loom, a woman fighting tuberculosis in a tent atop a snowy tenement roof, and homeless children sleeping in groups on the street. riis is a passionate tour guide, taking his reader deep into the darkness, the lack of ventilation, and the chronic overcrowding. he writes: “a flight of stairs. you can feel your way, if you cannot see it. close? yes! what would you have? all the fresh air that ever enters these stairs comes from the hall-door that is forever slamming, and from the windows of dark bedrooms that in turn receive from the stairs their sole supply of the elements god meant to be free, but man deals out with such a niggardly hand.” 9 on the other hand, riis‟s primary trope for homelessness is a surge of water that threatens to overwhelm the barriers raised by middleclass members of a “civil” democratic society, barriers that ultimately separate americans based on class, ethnicity, and cultural difference. he writes, “not all the barriers erected by society against its nether life, not the labor of unnumbered societies for the rescue and relief of its outcast waifs, can dam the stream of homelessness that issues from a source where the very name of home is a mockery.” 10 later, he re-inscribes the same metaphor: “the sea of a mighty population, held in galling fetters, heaves uneasily in the tenements. once already in our city, to which have come the duties and responsibilities of a metropolitan greatness before it was able to fairly measure its task, has felt the swell of its resistless flood. if it rise once more, no human power may avail to check it.” 11 the social and architectural reforms for which riis advocates will not only improve the conditions for the inhabitants of the lower east side tenements, they will also quell the coming flood that imperils the existing social order. most of riis‟s contemporaries did not employ photographs or produce third party accounts of poverty, but, instead, chose to write about poverty via undercover urban plunge experiences. while their stories – journalistic, biographical or fictionalized – often provided sympathetic points-of-view, they did not advocate for tangible legislative changes in the same way as riis. jack london, for example, saw homelessness as a means of representing american energy, idealism, liberty and chauvinism. london‟s stories romanticize homeless life by suggesting that tramping offers a liberating alternative to the mundane oppression of a capitalist society. when he participates in his own urban plunge, london‟s tramp alter ego exudes the fortitude, freedom and mobility of the ideal american white male subject. in “the tramp diary,” for instance, london chronicles his homeless journey across america with his friend, frank davis. on the fifth day, london reveals that his companion can no longer tolerate the hardships of an unhoused life: “this afternoon frank & i had an understanding. the road has no more charms for him. the romance & adventure is gone & nothing remains but the stern reality of the hardships to be endured. though he has dicided [sic] to turn west again i am sure the expearience [sic] has done him good, broadened his thoughts, given a better understanding of the low strata of society & surely will have him more charitable to the tramps he will meet hereafter when he is in better circumstances.” 12 davis‟s departure receives only a passing note in london‟s diary, but his account of the incident reveals that, in london‟s opinion, the single most important element of “homeless chic” as domestic poverty tourism 58 any downclassing experiment is an education about the plight of the impoverished. and like riis, he uses narrative to maintain a significant boundary between the middle class urban plunger and the members of the lower classes he has infiltrated. after a second peak of sympathetic poverty tourist writing during the great depression of the 1930s (most notably the work of tom kromer, a journalist who wrote an urban plunge exposé that was critical of panhandlers, followed by a much more nuanced autobiographical novella, waiting for nothing, that chronicled his own struggles with unemployment and homelessness), the urban plunge practice enjoyed a renaissance in the 1980s as the “new homeless” population exploded onto the streets. like the writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the contemporary generation of plungers generally use two methods: sensational third party accounts of homelessness, like jennifer toth‟s mole people and margaret morton‟s photographs in the tunnel and fragile dwellings; and formalized urban plunge programs, such as national coalition for the homeless‟s alternative spring break program for university students. as a recently graduated journalism student interning at the los angeles times new york city bureau in 1990, jennifer toth was one of the first writers to profile the lives of homeless tunnel dwellers in the mass media. toth published an account of the tunnel people on the front page of the los angeles times and followed it up with the mole people, a book-length account of the homeless netherworld that examines the infrastructure of tunnel communities, police outreach programs, tunnel art, and toth‟s own “adventures” underground. the original article, published september 2, 1990, begins with a physical description of the tunnel that evokes riis‟s descriptions of the tenements: “on a dark ledge under the grand central station terminal, just five feet directly above the irt train‟s deadly electrified third rail, a fine stream of sunlight filters down through 20 feet of stagnant air onto a makeshift table.” 13 the conflicting visual ideas in toth‟s opening sentence reveal her divergent assessments of the tunnel as both utopia and dystopia. for toth, the underground is simultaneously stale and sunlit, a space that includes a “deadly” electrified rail and the ingenuity of a “makeshift table.” toth describes the tunnel dwellers with similar incongruity in the mole people; they are fearsome, animalistic, rat-eating “mole people” and they are, at the same time, progressive, community-oriented survivalists who forge a new frontier, squat in abandoned subway stations, and develop “private” shanties on public land. although toth‟s stated goal in the mole people is to “bring a better understanding of the underground people” and “dismiss the myth of animal-like underground dwellers,” 14 her repeated use of abject images – corpses, dismemberment, vomit, rats, blood, feces, birth, and wounds – creates a much more dubious and sensational depiction of homelessness. scholar kim hopper, calls toth‟s los angeles times article a “preposterous concoction [that] […] may be read as part of an enduring theme in the history of homelessness in new york: an affirmation of the „otherness‟ of the homeless poor, even to the point of casting them in the mold of the grotesque.” 15 unlike toth, who entered the tunnels as a journalist, the myriad versions of organized and formalized urban plunge and street retreat programs that emerged in force in the 1980s and 1990s generally encourage their participants to enter streets and shelters in disguise. while the 59 grzyb urban plunge is becoming increasingly fashionable, the most prominent of these programs is national coalition for the homeless (nch)‟s “urban plunge 101.” 16 nch plungers, who are usually middle class university students, spend anywhere from one day to one week living on the streets in small groups, led by a homeless or formerly homeless guide. the nch plunge manual traces the phenomenon to the 1960s and “the advent of the war on poverty.” 17 nch suggests that the purpose of the plunge is to “familiarize and sensitize middle class people with the realities and hardships of inner city life;” “to see a different side of the city;” “to gain firsthand knowledge of the growing crisis of homelessness;” “to bring homelessness to a very personal level;” and “to see the world through the eyes of a homeless person.” 18 the manual insists that the plunge is “more of an educational experience for yourself than helpful to homeless people,” but that it is “not a chance for you to masquerade as a homeless person or be a „tourist‟ looking at poor folks.” 19 yet the list of elaborate preparations contradicts these statements by clearly directing participants to embody a homeless stereotype. the manual suggests that plunge participants refrain from bathing and shaving prior to the plunge, “rub unscented baby oil in your hair to make it look like your hair hasn‟t been washing for sometime” [sic], “rub your scalp, face, neck, arms and hands with wet coffee grounds” to imitate dirt, and “bring along a paper bag and a bottle (empty beer or wine)” 20 and a shopping cart. the manual also strongly encourages plunge participants to document the spectacle by securing an “empathetic reporter/photographer to cover your plunge experience from beginning to end” in an effort to “educate others.” 21 the ideal urban plunge, then, has all the elements of an inverted fashion shoot: a professional photographer; a university student model dressed in coffee grounds, grease, and old clothes; and a runway of streets, alleys, and park benches. like the early twentieth century urban plunges by jack london and stephen crane, the nch plunge in washington d.c. – and other programs like it (including alternative spring break programs and spiritual street retreats) in seattle, 22 toronto, 23 austin, 24 ottawa 25 and many other urban centers – are organized around a stated desire to increase the middle class understanding of poverty and encourage advocacy for homeless people. however, no matter how convincing their homeless costumes are, the plungers can not simulate the most defining requisites of chronic homelessness: the grinding hopelessness and desperation, the unique sense of community and the “street family,” the long-term struggles with addictions and mental illnesses, the monotony of standing in lines day after day, and the relentless bureaucratic violence of the shelter system, social assistance, disability, medicaid, and unemployment insurance. as urry suggests, the single most important moment of a tourist‟s experience is the return home. regardless of the temporary hardships – both real and dramatized – the poverty tourists who participate in urban plunges and street retreats know that they will soon return to comforts, houses, safety nets, families, jobs. in the context of the incongruities between the stated purpose (raising awareness about homelessness) and the likely experiential outcome (personal growth) of the urban plunge, michael stone‟s trendy adaptation of the street retreat and his extraction of the socialist and reformist goals of the early twentieth century urban plungers is not that much of a stretch. domestic poverty tourism may or may not involve varying degrees of social conscience, “homeless chic” as domestic poverty tourism 60 advocacy, and calls for reform, but it is, first and foremost, a commodification of experience that reinforces class boundaries. notes 1. “michael stone,” centre of gravity, http://www.centreofgravity.org/teachers/. 2. “toronto street retreat,” centre of gravity email newsletter, january 22, 2010. 3. ibid. 4. stone‟s street retreat (and virtually all of the text i‟ve quoted from his ad) is borrowed from a street retreat program offered by bernie glassman at zen peacemakers in urban us centers since 1991. “street retreat” zen peacemaker‟s website: http://www.zenpeacemakers.com/mi/ programs/street_retreat.htm. glassman is very active in homeless advocacy, resource development, and philanthropy. 5. patrick chura, “„vital contact‟: eugene o‟neill and the working class,” twentieth century literature 49.4 (2003): 522. 6. john urry, the tourist gaze: leisure and travel and contemporary societies (london: sage, 1990). 7. ibid, 3. 8. ibid. 9. jacob riis, how the other half lives: studies among the tenements of new york (new york: dover publications, 1971), 38. 10. ibid, 147. 11. ibid, 218. 12. jack london, “the tramp diary,” jack london on the road: the tramp diary and other hobo writings, ed. richard w. etulain (logan, ut: utah state university press, 1979), 34. 13. jennifer toth, “n.y.‟s „mole people‟ shun society in transit tunnels,” los angeles times, september 2, 1990, http://articles.latimes.com/1990-09-02/news/mn-2047_1_mole-people. 14. jennifer toth, the mole people (chicago: chicago review press, 1990), x. 15. kim hopper, “a poor apart: the distancing of homeless men in new york‟s history,” home: a place in the world, ed. adrien mack (new york: new york university press, 1993), 108. 16. in addition to “urban plunge 101,” nch also offers advanced courses in homeless experience, such as freight train 102, hobology 103, shelter plunge 104, rural plunge 105, and honorary doctorate of hobology (ph.d). 17. national coalition for the homeless, “urban plunge 101”: http://www.docstoc.com/ docs/65091051/manual-07. 18. ibid. 19. ibid. 20. ibid. 21. ibid. 22. nick perry, “seattle pacific students spend 5 days on streets to feel pain of homeless,” the seattle times, march 26, 2009, http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/education/ 2008925900_spuhomeless26m0.html. http://www.centreofgravity.org/teachers/ http://www.zenpeacemakers.com/mi/%20programs/street_retreat.htm http://www.zenpeacemakers.com/mi/%20programs/street_retreat.htm http://articles.latimes.com/1990-09-02/news/mn-2047_1_mole-people http://www.docstoc.com/%20docs/65091051/manual-07 http://www.docstoc.com/%20docs/65091051/manual-07 http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/education/%202008925900_spuhomeless26m0.html http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/education/%202008925900_spuhomeless26m0.html 61 grzyb 23. “students humbled by toronto street retreat,” kingston this week, november 17, 2010, http://www.kingstonthisweek.com/articledisplay.aspx?e=2251099&archive=true. 24. “cnn features homeless students,” st. edwards university media centre, april 4, 2007, http://www.stedwards.edu/market/newsmedia_center/news_center_archives/04_07_04.html. 25. paula richardson, “facts and arguments: lessons learned on a street retreat,” the globe and mail, july 25, 2007, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/lessons-learned-on-a-streetretreat/article104665/. http://www.kingstonthisweek.com/articledisplay.aspx?e=2251099&archive=true http://www.stedwards.edu/market/newsmedia_center/news_center_archives/04_07_04.html http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/lessons-learned-on-a-street-retreat/article104665/ http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/lessons-learned-on-a-street-retreat/article104665/ [expositions 6.1 (2012) 1-8] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 interview: jonathan lear, the university of chicago alan d. pichanick villanova university jonathan lear’s latest book, a case for irony (harvard university press), explores the idea that irony, understood rightly, is essential to our lives as human beings. drawing on his studies of socrates, kierkegaard, and psychoanalysis, lear provides a compelling account for us to rethink irony today and commit ourselves to a different understanding of it. lear is currently the john u. nef distinguished service professor at the committee on social thought and the department of philosophy at the university of chicago, where he teaches and writes about questions at the intersection of psychoanalysis and philosophy. i had the chance to talk with him about a case for irony in april 2012. what follows below is a transcript of that discussion. pichanick: what led you to write a book about irony? how did your interests in the subject grow out of previous interests and questions about the themes at the intersections of psychoanalysis and philosophy? lear: well, you know as well as i do that at the university of chicago we tend to teach single books as a course. certainly i have done that and i spent a period of time teaching texts by kierkegaard, really to learn him better than i thought i understood him. i wanted to come to grips with kierkegaard’s thinking, and in particular that grows from a long-standing work i have been doing on plato, aristotle, and socrates. i knew that kierkegaard was engaged significantly with plato and socrates. the figure of socrates loomed very large for kierkegaard and i wanted to get a deeper understanding of what that engagement was in particular because he was a modern figure, living in nineteenth-century europe and reflecting, drawing upon the ancient world for a kind of moral sustenance. i wanted to have a better understanding of how he understood the legacy of the ancient world for his contemporary world. so that is how i started, as an openended inquiry into his thought and engagement with the figure of socrates. so i would teach a text in a term and the years went by. i mean i would work my way through a lot of material in the classroom and the more i got into the text the more i realized that what he was saying about irony didn’t really fit all the dictionary definitions. i had been sort of taught about what irony meant and it’s not they had nothing to do with it, but it seemed like a poor fit. and as i read some of the later work, especially pseudonymous works by johannes climacus, i realized that climacus was very critical of his own work on irony, the original book, the concept of irony,1 so i also realized that if you read contemporary lit on socrates and irony they would all refer to passages in [the concept of] irony and there were no references to the thought interview: jonathan lear 2 that kierkegaard had gone on to reject in significant ways that early work of his. then i read these late diary entries, things he wrote just before his death about irony, and i realized that there had been a development of his thought. there was a puzzling and hard-to-understand … and yet it was the hard-to-understand part of it that seemed to be the part that made it the most significant for kierkegaard. so that was all in my mind. i mean it just sort of arose in the process that happens at the university of chicago of reading books together in a seminar. then i just happened to get an invitation from harvard university to give the tanner lectures on human values and i just at that point thought, “well, this would be an occasion to try to pull my thoughts together.” i mean i had a lot of notes and thought on it but i hadn’t really pulled them together and so the occasion came up and it was really sort of how it happened. it’s not like i knew where i was going from the beginning. but the more i got into it, the more intriguing i saw that it was. and also it came more and more … i mean, i began to feel that i more and more understood why kierkegaard thought this was so important to living a human life and i also thought that the standard reception of irony either as a kind of deception or as a kind of witty detachment is really missing the central issues about why irony matters for us as humans. so i thought i had a great topic to work with. pichanick: so, can i jump in? lear: the more i thought about it the more i came to see irony as a kind of anxious, uncanny disruption. i began to wonder how much of this is possible because my freudian interests kicked in and i began to wonder how much more of this is possible for us because we are creatures with a sort of percolating unconscious. pichanick: so, could i ask about this misunderstanding of irony as deception, or as being detached? what is it about that that makes it a misunderstanding and how do you think we should correct that misunderstanding? lear: well, i think that that’s a really good question, because i mean in some sense it’s not a misunderstanding. i think it is very important to grasp the sense in which it is not a misunderstanding before you grasp the sense in which it is. i mean, it is certainly right that if you go back to the ancient greek, to the idea of eirōneía when thrasymachus and callicles and gorgias and alcibiades accuse socrates of deploying his typical eirōneía i think that there is no doubt that they are accusing him of a kind of masking or deceptiveness or deviousness, so you know that that’s not a mistake. it’s certainly not a mistake to make the accusation [of deceptiveness] and i also think that if the english word “irony” is used by speakers to mean that then that is one of the things irony means. pichanick: right, right. lear: you know, a billion english speakers can’t be wrong about what the english word means. 3 pichanick what i talk about is really something that i think is being poorly understood if that’s what you think it all amounts to. what i think kierkegaard did and i think this is a really interesting issue: how ironic are you going to be about irony itself? or, how are you going to use the occasion of the discussion of irony to actually be ironic? or, are you just going to be didactic about irony? as kierkegaard matured, he became more and more ironic about irony and what he, i think, did was he sort of used the term for what he took socrates to be doing at the moment that he was being accused of deploying his typical eirōneía, so that’s what made it so important for him to explore the issue of socrates. these very unreliable characters, i mean, each of these figures of alcibiades, thrasymachus, gorgias, and callicles, they’re very brilliant people, all of them with very flawed characters, and so i think that kierkegaard’s thought was, well, at the moment it is true they are accusing him of being deceptive but what is socrates actually doing? in that moment, what illustrated that kind of criticism? from these kinds of people? i mean, basically kierkegaard is treating them as unreliable – very smart, very brilliant very insightful – but ultimately unreliable narrators and with distorted visions of things. and so he then becomes quite playful with the concept of irony and says, “what is socrates actually doing in these moments?” and what kierkegaard sees, i think correctly, is that these are moments of intense earnestness; they are not deceptive at all although they appear like deception to people who can’t really see what socrates is doing. so that’s what you miss if you just stick with [the thought that] irony must be deception and that’s the mistake there. the mistake is to think that it must be deception because that’s what eirōneía means and that’s what callicles meant. i mean, that’s all true, but to think that’s the whole story, that’s the place where the mistake comes. because it’s not the whole story and what’s in addition to that part of it is kierkegaard’s point of view, why he took irony to be so important to the human condition. pichanick: right. could you say more about what we are being earnest about? in the book you analyze kierkegaard’s question, “among all christians, is there a christian?” that seems to be the important ironic question, the question that generates an ironic experience. so why is that question the question for us to understand? lear: that’s another really good question. i think firstly you can get a lot out of it if you really spend some time thinking with it. i think that lots of things can be occasions for irony and it doesn’t have to look like that. and then you know the other point i make in the book is that a sentence like that is neither necessary nor, and this is the really important part, nor is it sufficient for irony. i think that the not sufficient part is really crucial to get because i think that a sentence like that can and for the most part is used totally un-ironically. this is a place where there is an occasion for irony; the structure of irony is especially clearly displayed. so the sentence “among all christians, is there a christian?” can be used in an extremely straightforward way where we immediately hear it as what i would say as sort of superego terms, raising the question, “do interview: jonathan lear 4 people who put themselves forward as christians, do they really live up to christian ideals or do they fall short?” and just as such, i want to say there is no irony there at all, but what i want to say is that there are occasions where the issue has to be – it’s got to be – in the first person. it could be either in the first person singular or first person plural. in this case i think the first person singular is the appropriate category. so you have to imagine that you yourself are that christian asking the question. so that’s step one: you have to assume the first personal engagement with it, although the personal pronoun doesn’t occur there. i am asking that question, and i am asking that question qua christian, and i start to experience it. at first one of the features of it has got to be just the content of the question, the what of the question. but the how of the question, as i experienced it first personally as addressed to me or confronting me, has got to be an occasion for shaking me up, via my own sense of christian engagement. now the nature of the being shaken up when it’s working, which i am happy to say is rare, but when it is working ironically, the nature of the shaking up takes the form of uncanny anxiousness. it’s anxious longing and what’s so great about the question is that it shows the uncanniness is in the formal structure of the sentence. the first occurrence of “christian” is like picking me out in my self-understanding in general, an understanding of myself living a christian life. but the second occurrence of “christian,” when the sentence is working ironically, is you might say the return of the familiar as unfamiliar and is disruptive in its familiar unfamiliarity. so its uncanniness is right there in the structure of the sentence. pichanick: so in the book you use the phrase – when this happens it’s like you’ve lost the ground beneath your feet. lear: that’s right. i think this is the experience of irony and the experience of irony is a particular species of anxiety. and that’s what i am trying to capture, this particularity, the species nature of the genus anxiety is irony. pichanick: right. so, why would i ever want this to happen to me? somebody might say, “it sounds like you’re falling into the abyss.” is somebody missing something when they ask that? lear: i think that’s a moment of it. but, i think, “why would i want this?” there are two different reasons. i think the experience of irony in itself is neither good nor bad. it’s an occasion that could have a deleterious effect on life. i mean, it doesn’t have to be good. it might be neutral, but it does provide an answer to your question. i think it does provide an occasion you might say of calling oneself back to one’s own best self. calling oneself, shaking oneself up in the name of oneself. because in so far as the category kierkegaard was working with – christian, i mean – you don’t have to be working with that one but we have been talking about it so we can go on with it, but whatever the categories are, [they are] the important ones in life. i focused on practical identity 5 pichanick because that’s what christine korsgaard was talking about,2 and others who i was engaging with. but it doesn’t have to be your identity. it can be whatever central values there are to your life that you are already committed to as being what really matters to who you are and what you are going to be. and yet you are called back to them. maybe you haven’t been living quite as well with respect to them as you could. so it’s a kind of – when it’s working well, it’s a kind of call of your own best self back to you, without it being a superego-voice just falling short of a wellestablished ideal. it’s shaking up your sense of ideals as well as your sense of yourself. pichanick: interesting. you mentioned your colleague – well, not your colleague but your dialog partner – chris korsgaard. so i wanted to ask you why you chose to write the book the way you did, where the first half is a presentation of your tanner lectures and the second half is presented as several dialogues between you and colleagues. is that connected to the content of the book? lear: yes. i thought there’s always a question in writing philosophy of form and content and how they fit together. when i went up to give the lectures i was very impressed with the discussions. on the one hand they didn’t agree with me and on the other hand i didn’t agree with them but i really thought that this was… i knew philosophy becomes alive in living conversation and then i felt, “this is a living conversation,” so it struck me that this might be a really good form for the book. just as dialogues are really a good form in plato for what he is doing, the places where chris korsgaard and i disagree are places where the reader can make up his or her own mind about where they stand and give me more of a chance to elaborate what i was thinking and also show how people can understand each other. so for me, it was the hope of presenting a living conversation to a reader as a way of engaging the reader and his or her own philosophical thinking about the subject. it is very much in my mind that this might be a very nice way to present an account of irony. pichanick: so would learning to read a platonic dialogue the way plato wanted or a pseudonymous work by kierkegaard the way kierkegaard wanted help us to understand irony better? lear: i think so but i think the issue – you used the word “understanding” and i want to make clear that the relevant understanding at issue is practical understanding, which is also taken by academic philosophers to be theoretical understanding. and i think that what plato was trying to do and i think kierkegaard’s pseudonymous author was trying to do it in different ways was to shake us up as readers. it’s not just about coming to a theoretical understanding of what irony – the concept of irony – is. but [it’s also about] putting ourselves in a position where we can grasp in terms of living why there is something to be said for irony in the human experience. pichanick: that makes me want to ask, is irony something you hope both your students experience in the classroom and your patients in psychoanalysis? do those two experiences compare? interview: jonathan lear 6 lear: i think it comes up in different ways, but yes. i think that in the philosophical case of students studying plato or socrates in class, i take it that coming to an understanding of, for instance, socratic ignorance: what does socratic ignorance amount to? i think there’s a huge difference between grasping intellectually that socrates was the guy who said he knew he didn’t know and internally developing a sense of what that kind of ignorance consists in, why it’s important to human life and how to integrate it into a human life. i am not saying that students should succeed in that, but if there’s no practical understanding and no practical engagement – how does this kind of ignorance arise in my life? then i think something has gone missing in the process, the engagement. pichanick: as a professor myself, i feel we teach under external pressures to show that students must acquire quantitatively measurable skills as a result of their education and one could wonder about patients in psycho-therapy here as well. so i want to ask what you think the prospects are for something like the ironic experience you’re talking about as being a real goal of education. what do you think it would take for that kind of idea to sink in? lear: i don’t think i can talk a lot about social movements but we have noticed that the humanities are under some kind of critique and attack and questioning why should there be humanities at all in a university setting. and i think people in the humanities ought to have some answers. from my point of view, you can’t really come up with an answer that is going to satisfy unless you bring in an essential aspect of the humanities, whether it’s literature or philosophy, that the humanities have value because when it’s working, they are experienced as… they are addressed to us in the first person. there is a first-personal confrontation with the words of another, whether it be shakespeare, tolstoy, homer, or plato. it’s not just that these writers were great writers; their greatness consists in an ability to strike you, the reader, and leave haunting words to which you are called upon somehow to react. and i see that kind of personal engagement is a constituent of the humanities when the humanities are working well. and from that point of view, irony is a specific example of this kind of first-personal address and confrontation. pichanick: that’s interesting. next week, you continue your dialogue with alasdair macintyre. how do you compare his views to yours? lear: i’ll know a lot better after… i guess we will have to find out. alasdair macintyre is someone i very much admire and i have long admired him. i’ve been reading his work since i was a very young man and learning from him. i’m curious to hear what he has to say but i don’t yet know. from my point of view, i use the example of being a christian as an example because kierkegaard used it, and just as an attempt to explicate kierkegaard. i stuck with his own example for a while. i also talk about other things but the issue of the religious commitment and/or christianity in particular is not my central interest. my central interest is the phenomena of irony and i think irony can occur in perfectly secular or atheist contexts as well and i deal with that in the book. but kierkegaard was a protestant and macintyre is a committed catholic so i 7 pichanick would expect there to be some difference there between kierkegaard and macintyre on the engagement and that might come up in his discussion of my book. i can’t tell you what will happen but i’m looking forward to it. pichanick: some people might label both you and alasdair macintyre “public intellectuals.” what do you think about that label? lear: i’m not sure why. i don’t think i’ve done as much of that as i used to do. not that i’m against it, just that i have been busy with my own academic writing and research. and though i very much like my own book, i don’t think of it as a best-seller. i knew in making the decision that the book should have the form it has – where i would receive responses by commentators and then my responses to their responses – i knew that it would sell many fewer books than if i had written a different kind of book, but i wanted it to have this form. i actually feel i have been so busy with my academic work i have not written as many [non-academic pieces]. i used to write more op-ed pieces and pieces for the new republic and i haven’t been doing that just because i have been so busy. so, what i try to do is write on topics that i hope are broad and deep philosophical interests and i try to write in a way that is clear as can be. i try to make my writing as open as possible to a readership. the previous book on radical hope3 which was about the crow indians – there are a lot of non-philosophers who have read that book. it’s been read by anthropologists and christians as well, indians, native americans… it’s been pretty widely read and i’m pretty glad about that but i’m not sure that would make me a public intellectual. it’s just that i'm writing books of wider interest. about the specific question you asked about public intellectuals, i don’t know what i think about the term but i do think that, i wish i was writing more, taking more of a stance. i do think i’m in favor of philosophers taking a role of a citizen in the polis, taking a stand on the important issues of the day. i haven’t been doing it much but i am in favor of people doing it more than i am doing it. pichanick: i feel like there is a final question that must be asked. our whole conversation between you and me about irony – a professor talking to his former student about irony, education, the soul – i think in your sense might not have been an experience of irony for either of us. so what would it be for us to have spoken ironically? i guess you talked about this in the beginning – to speak ironically about irony in your sense. lear: what do you think? pichanick: you’re asking me? what do i think? well, my response is now i feel like we have to start over and maybe that’s the ironic part. lear: i’m going to leave that as an exercise for the listener. pichanick: very good. interview: jonathan lear 8 notes 1. kierkegaard, søren. 1992. the concept of irony with continual reference to socrates. trans. howard v. hong and edna h. hong. princeton, nj: princeton university press. 2. korsgaard, christine. 2011. “self-constitution and irony.” in jonathan lear, the case for irony (tanner lectures on human values). cambridge, ma: harvard university press. 75–83. 3. lear, jonathan. 2008. radical hope: ethics in the face of cultural devastation. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. © equinox publishing ltd. 2009, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expo. 3.1 (2009) 123–135] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v3i1.123 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 shakespeare’s “philosophy”: looking or thinking? david schalkwyk university of cape town david.schalkwyk@uct.ac.za colin mcginn. shakespeare’s philosophy: discovering the meaning behind the plays. new york: harper collins, 2006. 230 pp, hb $24.95, isbn 9780060856151; pb $13.95, isbn 9780060856168. a.d. nuttall. shakespeare the thinker. new haven, ct and london: yale university press, 2007. 428 pp, hb $30.00, isbn 9780300119282; pb $19.00, isbn 9780300136296. shakespeare’s philosophy is a popular book, intended for the non-academic reader acquainted with shakespeare who may also be intrigued by the thought that the playwright was also a philosopher. everything about the book—its subtitle, layout, tone, and choice of plays—signals this appeal. the subtitle, for example, “discovering the meaning behind the plays,” does a perfectly good marketing job in piquing the ordinary reader’s interest. but to anyone seriously concerned with the question of “meaning,” it is a howler. meaning doesn’t lie “behind” things, whether they are gestures, words, utterances, or plays. furthermore, colin mcginn knows this, since he is a significant contributor to recent debates in the philosophy of language that has put paid to the idea that meaning lies in a domain separate from what is said or done. how, then, should we judge the philosophy of language or meaning implied by the subtitle, and therefore attributed to shakespeare? do we ignore it as so much marketing puff, or do we read it as a symptom of a refusal to think seriously about literary scholarship because, well, it’s just literary, and literary scholars don’t know much about philosophy anyway? the “depth” of shakespeare’s plays, mcginn tells us, lies in their “underlying philosophical concerns …we feel large themes at work in the plays, shaping the poetry and the drama” (emphasis added). 124 expositions © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 until mcginn turned his attention to shakespeare in an idle moment at the end of a sabbatical, however, no one had been able to account for this depth. “little attempt has been made to identify and articulate these philosophical themes in any systematic way … the philosophical ideas suffusing them receive only passing mention.” literary critics have not felt brave enough to move beyond “issues of character, plot, and diction [and] social and political context” because “philosophy, perhaps, makes them nervous” (1). anyone who has read even a smattering of the shakespeare scholarship and criticism from the past three decades would find these claims as outrageous as they are ignorant. the last thirty years of shakespearean scholarship has been obsessed with issues that, though deeply philosophical, have, however, been engaged by the name “theory.” they may, however, not seem philosophical to mcginn, because analytical philosophers tend not to count marx, hegel, nietzsche, heidegger, foucault, derrida, bakhtin, and lacan as philosophers at all. mcginn’s account makes shakespeare an epistemologist, deeply embroiled in the disputes at the center of skepticism concerning the difference between dream and real worlds, the inscrutability of other minds, and the stability and continuity of personal identity. if descartes and hume may be used to illuminate shakespeare’s philosophical preoccupations it, is their sixteenth-century precursor, michel de montaigne, who is shakespeare’s guiding light. there is nothing essentially wrong with these claims in the broadest sense. but mcginn seems not to have noticed that shakespeareans have embraced montaigne with no hint of nerves, although they have been circumspect about the precise historical relation between the two writers. it is uncertain exactly when shakespeare may have had access to montaigne’s essais, although the matter is complicated by the theoretical (or philosophical) difference between the intertextual circulation of ideas and direct influence as a necessarily antecedent source. mcginn doesn’t address these problems central to literary debates about influence. he merely juxtaposes passages from montaigne with a philosophical idea or theme culled from each of five plays (a midsummer night’s dream, hamlet, othello, king lear, and the tempest), in the assumption that the statement of a philosophical idea in an essay book reviews 125 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 corresponds to, or is caused by, the “deep” thesis that lies “behind” the play’s dramatic dialogue and action. that mcginn ignores the large body of scholarship within shakespeare studies for which the relationship between montaigne and shakespeare is as complex and uncertain as it is compelling should not be of serious concern. scholarship is not his aim: he is, after all, not a literary scholar by training. but literary criticism should perhaps have made him just a little nervous. for the readings of the plays that he does offer are not so much wrong, or misguided, as banal: he tells us little that has not been the stock-in-trade of literary criticism at some point in the past fifty years or been subjected to trenchant critique in the past twenty. it is hardly illuminating to be told by a professional philosopher that “appearance and reality” is a major theme in shakespeare (4, 22, 24–25, 42, 62–64, 67–71, 72–75, 92, 102–104, 162–164); or that shakespeare “excels at giving us a portrait of human vices and failings” (174); that “his genius lies in flawless imitations of imaginary characters” (202); or that the effect of his art is “to upset the apple cart, to shake us up” (200). more seriously debilitating than a penchant for cliché1 is mcginn’s unwillingness to engage with the theatrical or dialogical quality of shakespeare’s work, despite his lipservice to the fact that we should not make assumptions about what shakespeare thought from what individual characters say. a.d. nuttall’s contemporaneous book, shakespeare the thinker, engages in a different way with shakespeare’s philosophy. far more wide-ranging than mcginn’s (nuttall includes a discussion of almost all the plays, by and large in chronological order), nuttall also addresses an informed popular audience, and many of his philosophical concerns overlap with mcginn’s. nuttall and mcginn share a similar anglo-saxon tradition, in which the key philosophical questions concern the certainty of our knowledge of reality, the self, and the power of language either to represent or shape each of these supposed entities. but that makes the difference between shakespeare’s philosophy and shakespeare the thinker all the more striking. mcginn is a philosopher who regards the big philosophical questions as templates that give shakespeare’s more local, theatrical concerns their real depth. since the philosopher claims that no one before him has given these questions 126 expositions © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 in shakespeare any systematic attention, he is implying that his book reveals the true depth of shakespeare’s work for the first time. as a literary scholar by profession, nuttall has a wide-ranging interest in philosophy, but he regards the dialogism of theatrical interaction in shakespeare as the chief vehicle for the representation, not of the meaning behind the plays, but rather of conflicting conceptions of self and the world in the plays. whatever philosophy is embedded in them speaks through the formal arrangement of the plays as an essentially dramatic medium. for nuttall, shakespeare thinks through the embodied interaction of his characters; for mcginn, shakespeare shapes play and character in order to express an underlying philosophical theme. even if they recognise similar philosophical preoccupations in the plays, their respective approaches to philosophy or thinking yield different results. the construction of character character is the driving force of shakespeare’s philosophy, but its treatment is beset by a curious contradiction between mcginn’s conception of shakespeare’s philosophy of character and selfhood as an essentially unfixed kind of performance, and his own tendency to write as if the way into the plays were via the “intrinsic nature” of particular characters. the former position is derived from the passage in montaigne’s essay, “on the inconstancy of our actions,” that there is no fixed self, but rather an ever-changing series of self-perspectives. for mcginn, hamlet is the classic exemplum of the notion that, beneath the display of “outward show,” the mystery of the real self (which “knows not seems”) is a void. following william empson on hamlet’s “self ” (although he makes no reference to empson), mcginn claims that “to speak of hamlet’s ‘character’ is already to misrepresent him. hamlet is not so much a human being as a universe” (41). empson’s argument is that—in relation to the peculiar literary representation that we call hamlet—it makes no sense to search for any motives for his action or inaction. mcginn, however, goes on to generalize hamlet’s inscrutability into a philosophical statement about the essence of human selfhood: it prompts us to ask “whether we are all mysteries … a gap where the simple self ought to be—a kind of throbbing nothingness” (43). this however contradicts mcginn’s general, and much more interestbook reviews 127 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 ing claim that to talk of human beings or their mimetic counterparts is necessarily to talk of “traits that have a moral dimension … virtues and vices are qualities that people intrinsically have” (179). in the same breath as he proposes the overriding shakespearean philosophy of the emptiness of personal identity, mcginn talks of character as if it does have a hard, intrinsic, core or nature. “as with many shakespearean characters, hamlet’s first words in the play are revealing of his nature” (41, emphasis added), he states, writing elsewhere that edmund is a “hard-headed realist” (119), iago “an adventurer, an enthusiast of extreme sports, and a risk taker—as well as being intrinsically nasty” (85, emphasis added), and of “lear’s true, intrinsic nature” (117, emphasis added). mcginn’s instinctive recourse to the language of intrinsic selfhood stems from a compelling but undeveloped argument in the chapter “shakespeare and ethics” that to speak of human beings or their representations is to talk of moral qualities: “in witnessing a shakespeare play our consciousness is engaged morally in an intense and unavoidable way” (178). human character is defined by moral concepts: asked to describe a friend or colleague, politician or family member we will “list traits that have a moral dimension”; an account of a person which used no moral terms would be “thin and uninformative.” the evaluative description of moral qualities is intrinsic to the concept of a human being—part of its nature, not above or behind it (179). this goes some way towards explaining why neither character nor ethics can be abandoned or displaced if we are to do justice to shakespeare’s mimetic art, although it would be good to see this argument developed in a more philosophically rigorous context. if mcginn is all too ready to see a postmodern notion of subjective flux in shakespeare’s representation, nuttall retains a sense, itself relatively well-established within historicist criticism, that shakespeare’s great discovery or creation is precisely the notion of incorrigible interiority that subtends the actions that a man might play. mcginn believes that shakespeare has a single, philosophical position on selfhood, that we all forge our selves through play. nuttall offers a more nuanced reading of shakespeare’s developing notion of self and action. he suggests that shakespeare begins with a notion of human causality as something sociologically conceived in his early history plays, but 128 expositions © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 that in richard iii, richard ii and hamlet, he produces a notion of “core identity” that contradicts both his contemporary montaigne and the postmodern conviction that selfhood is a fluctuating construct. there is no final answer to these questions. the self-reflexivity of shakespeare’s theatrical practice represents character as something invented and enacted, but the same theatrical technology enables shakespeare to suggest an interior self with nothing more than the trappings of “outward show.” nuttall’s approach to shakespeare’s thinking differs most radically from mcginn’s insofar as he refuses to attribute to shakespeare any single, identifiable philosophical position: [shakespeare] never falls into that easy universalization of the idea that rendered so much of late twentieth-century “constructionism” so vulnerable, philosophically. he never says “all is externally constituted; there is no ‘core self ’ ” … the truth is that when shakespeare wrote the notion of a publicly constituted identity was readily available. the new, exciting thing was the inner, truly originative self. (298) shakespeare’s theatrical situation rendered him alive to the fact that the uses and effects of language are not reduced or limited by the fact that they are spoken by an actor. the monstrosity of the player’s passion before a character who has declared that he has “that within that passes show” applies to hamlet himself, who as actor has nothing within to sustain his earlier claim to an inscrutable interiority. but the practical circumstances of shakespeare’s profession led him to recognize that language can operate without any essentially informing core being.2 this does not, however, destroy the need for a retrospective conception of interiority as the sustaining ground for concepts like personal integrity, truthfulness, and ethical reliability: the very things that for mcginn are an integral or natural aspect of our very notion of humanity, and which hamlet tries to sustain in the face of society in which such integrity has been dissolved by the corrosive transformation of all private life into the glare of controlling publicity. mcginn’s attribution of performative existentialism to shakespeare comes from his taking shakespeare’s medium for this message. he confuses the theatrical nature of shakespeare’s representation of character for his personal philosophy of the nature of human selfhood. moreover, book reviews 129 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 a literary scholar who has grappled with the theoretical and historical problem of influence and intertextuality would know that citing isolated passages from montaigne as a signal of what shakespeare thought is misleading. montaigne may indeed reflect on the flux of the self when he subjects it to introspection, but at other times he assumes a stable self as the basis of ethical action. had mcginn asked more nuanced philosophical questions about how utterances interact in shakespeare, he may have noticed the shakespearean insight that for speech acts fundamental to the negotiation of love and political allegiance—such as oaths, vows and promises—a unitary self is indispensable. the practice of these language-games depends upon the fact that people’s core identities do not change from moment to moment. cosmic tragedy shakespeareans of the past two decades have allowed overly reductive accounts of the relationship between text and history and a virulently anti-humanist elevation of ideological structure over local agency to skew our sense within academia of shakespeare’s richness. nonetheless, there is something peculiarly bloodless about an account of king lear or othello that focuses so completely on the “big” or “deep” problems of cosmology, causality and other minds that it ignores the fact that these plays are about people struggling over power and love in concrete, material circumstances: that they are concerned with actions for which human beings, not some inscrutable, blind force, are ultimately accountable. king lear may well “reflect the irrational, random, unjust nature of causation,” but to claim that therein lies the “deeper meaning of the play” (121) is to rob it of its concern with the ways in which people construct the possibilities of personal and social relations. mcginn conforms to an orthodox position in literary criticism in his claim that “shakespeare is inclined to a non-teleological view of causation” (15). it is one thing to argue that such a position implies a secular, nonrationalist rejection of the idea of “cosmic justice,” but unless one spells out the human consequences of that perspective, it threatens to mystify relations of power between human agents by turning them into the effects of an overarching, random cosmic force. mcginn may have learned something (if only as the object of focused critique) from the 130 expositions © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 philosophical analysis of marx and adorno, althusser and raymond williams about human agency in its relation to transformable material conditions. neither mcginn nor nuttall show that philosophy has much to add to our sense of the distinctively human horror and mystery of the great tragedies. knowingly or not, mcginn recycles stanley cavell’s analysis of the terrors of skepticism in othello and lear, but without the latter’s insights into the local failures of the paradoxical human need for and peculiar revulsion from love and acknowledgement. mcginn offers no more than a single, glancing reference to this philosopher, who has engaged consistently and deeply, over a long period, with shakespeare’s relation to the very issue that mcginn regards as central to philosophy and shakespeare alike: skepticism or the problem of other minds. stanley cavell has made this terrain his own, in disowning knowledge in seven plays by shakespeare (2007) and a lengthy disquisition on othello in the claim of reason (1999). the latter is primarily a work of critical philosophy rather than literary criticism, so it is surprising that mcginn ignores it. instead he blithely writes, the self-deprecation barely hiding the claim to originality: “in my view, then, othello is predicated upon the problem of other minds, with all its ramifications—moral, personal, and metaphysical” (67, emphasis added). looking, thinking and saying the tempest, mcginn claims, is essentially “about the power of language” (135). this is again no news to shakespeareans and literary scholars, who may be said to have been obsessed over the last thirty years with the constructive capacity of language to shape self and world. but mcginn represents that power in such broad—indeed, after saussure, barthes, lacan, foucault, wittgenstein, austin and derrida, banal—terms as to empty his general claim of real critical significance. it needs no philosopher come from across the corridor to tell literary critics that language is able to “create its own world” and “human nature as we experience it” (137), or that shakespeare may have had a sense of such power. indeed, claims to the power of language have become such a debilitating, thoughtless shibboleth of contemporary literary theory that mcginn would have done us a service if he had apbook reviews 131 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 plied some sharp critical analysis to the limits and limitations of linguistic constructivism. mcginn offers a word of caution when he writes, “i don’t think shakespeare is offering us any very definite thesis about language in this play,” but his conception of its representation of our burdened, conflicted relation to words offers neither genuinely illuminating analysis nor coherent philosophy: “we are trapped in language, formed by it, slaves to it; we feel a desire to break its bounds and distance ourselves from it. it is both marvellous and corrupting, sublime and base (and at its most ostensibly sublime it can be basest)” (142). nuttall is more precise and careful. his method of finding (often contradictory) philosophical positions in the utterances of individual characters is both more faithful to the theatrical nature of shakespeare’s genre and more circumspect about attributing monolithic philosophical doctrines to the mind behind the plays. he is also more attentive to shifting philosophical positions between plays, as they occupy various positions in theater history, inhabit different genres, and embrace or distance themselves from various forms of social, political and cultural history. i have mentioned his analysis of the move from social causality in political action in the early history plays (a brilliant piece of analysis) to the forging of core interiority in some of the later work. shakespeare the thinker is more true to shakespeare’s dialogue with history and understanding of human interaction when nuttall suggests, for example, that hippolyta and theseus engage in an argument about coherence and correspondence theories of truth in a midsummer night’s dream (in contrast to mcginn’s argument that the play as a whole questions the distinction between dream and real worlds); that shakespeare can simultaneously consider brutus to be an honorable man and a representative of the pathological withdrawal of stoicism from “an over-rich and hurtful universe” (184), and, in another especially illuminating analysis, that the “feast of language” in love’s labour’s lost represents the playwright’s ambivalence about his own seductively dazzling linguistic facility. despite the fact that nuttall declares, against current literary fashion, that “there is a human being behind these plays, but the man himself is elusive, endlessly mobile … not a systematic philosopher … a dramatist” (387), he takes no refuge in the notion that shakespeare perfected 132 expositions © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 the philosopher’s art of asking questions to which he knew there are no final answers. if he claims that “we do not know what he thought —finally—about anything” (380), nuttall nevertheless argues that the substantial outcome of shakespeare’s dialogical engagement with the questions of philosophy lies in his capacity, as “the philosopher of human possibility” (381), to “join verisimilitude to wonder” (383). that’s nicely put. it indicates the precise difference between nuttall and mcginn’s sometimes overlapping conceptions of shakespeare’s engagement with or anticipation of the modes of philosophy. compare mcginn: part of my aim in this book is to work out exactly what [shakespeare’s] view was, insofar as it is represented in the plays. if i were to award him a single label, it would be “naturalist,” in somewhat the sense that one speaks of a student of natural history: he is a clear-eyed observer and recorder, sensitive to the facts before his eyes, not swayed by dogma or tradition … he is simply saying, this is the way things are, like it or not. he is a detached, supremely sane student of human beings and their world, intent on descriptive accuracy. (15) the lack of philosophical self-consciousness in mcginn’s bardolatry is especially surprising. absent from this formulation of shakespeare’s philosophy are any of the complicated difficulties that philosophy itself has always strewn in the path of claims to purely descriptive knowledge. these are in fact the central preoccupations of shakespeare’s philosophy itself: the corrosive doubts of skepticism; the struggle between coherence and correspondence theories of truth; the uncertainty of causality; the place of language in constructing the human world; and the fluctuating nature of the observing and representing self. to these we might add problems from the so-called “continental” tradition, systematically ignored by mcginn, but which have been central to shakespeare critics’ interrogation of the possibility of value-free knowledge: the historical situatedness of the observer; his or her formation by ideological and social forces; and the hermeneutic problems of matching the reader’s “horizon of expectation” with the “past significance” of a literary text, on the one hand, and the impossibility of fixing a context absolutely, on the other. mcginn argues that shakespeare encompasses and even endorses forms of skepticism that blur the disbook reviews 133 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 tinction between dreaming and waking, call into question the stability of personal identity, and the very possibility of disinterested observation. yet shakespeare nevertheless stands above them as the impartial, objective, and stable recorder of human nature: the genius who transcends the messy flux not merely of human ideology and presupposition but also of the vagaries of our epistemological instruments. the limits of philosophy no matter how subtle or brilliant the identification of a philosophical position in shakespeare’s work or an organizing metaphysical preoccupation in his mind, it is in danger of missing the distinctiveness of his theatrical situation and practice. brilliant and path-breaking as cavell is in his analysis of the lived costs of skepticism in shakespeare’s texts, he also signals the dangers of a philosophical approach to shakespeare that, for all its caveats about avoiding generalization and encompassing variety, tends to miss more local questions that may in their own way be called philosophical. thus, in his pursuit of the social and personal costs of skepticism, cavell fails to investigate the relations among and differences between the similar but not identical concepts of “skepticism,” “doubt,” “suspicion,” and “uncertainty.” mcginn likewise shows no interest in this kind of conceptual discrimination. this is strange, because wittgenstein does, and both cavell and mcginn have written extensively and perceptively on precisely this aspect of wittgenstein’s philosophy. shakespeare, on the other hand, is fully alive to such conceptual differences, and the relations among the concepts clustered around doubt and uncertainty could be traced simply by attending to the way in which they are embodied and put to work in the various worlds of his plays. nuttall hints at the root of the conceptual differences that cavell misses when he writes that much ado about nothing is “innocent of epistemological implications”: that in this play, “shakespeare had chosen not to think hard” (226). despite its apparent concern with “knowing the mind’s construction in the face” the play is in fact not troubled with the “deep” metaphysical problem of skepticism about other minds, but rather with what mcginn would presumably consider the “shallow” ideological and personal problems of local suspicion and uncertainty. 134 expositions © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 but if much ado about nothing “looks hard at social practice” (225), does that mean that in focusing on such “looking” shakespeare had given up “thinking”? looking hard at social practice is a subtly elusive kind of hard thinking. it’s something shakespeare does especially well. he is uncannily good at showing how concepts at the center of social life work their way through the determining conditions—gender, class and personal education and experience—from which the forms of life that give them their meanings are constituted. this kind of conceptual analysis, which pays close attention to the embodied place of words in social practice, is as philosophical as any of the grander queries about the causes of the universe or the certainty that i can know only what is in my own mind. this is the philosophy that shakespeare does best. not because he was an avid reader of the philosophical investigations or how to do things with words, or failed to take an interest in historical doctrines of stoicism or pyrrhonism, but because his mimetic practice as a man of the theater enabled him to represent fully the interaction through which language engages with and is resisted by the social and material world. this is the philosophy at the heart of all creative mimesis. in this sense, then, mcginn is correct to declare shakespeare a superb observer—not as someone untouched by dogma, tradition or the insanities of social tensions and affection, but rather as a dramatist deeply rooted in and creatively attentive to the hurly-burly of activities from which concepts are shaped. despite the depth and wisdom of his engagement with shakespeare as thinking dramatist, nuttall goes too far in separating thinking hard from looking hard at social practice. mcginn, on the other hand, is too uncritical about both the philosophical and historically specific, ideological complexities that inform shakespeare’s observation. he might have written a better book, even for popular consumption, if he had allowed himself an attack of philosophical nerves about the very philosophizing that he attributes to shakespeare. that is to say, if he had considered more carefully, before he watched the dvds or picked up the text of a play, what exactly it means to attribute philosophy to a dramatist. book reviews 135 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 notes 1. a few examples: hamlet is a “born performer” (46); he “suffers from weakness of the will” (49); the idea that we may be dead but only dreaming that we are alive is “a vertiginous thought” (55); hamlet is not a “model of discretion” but he is a “master of irony” (56); iago “lies through his teeth” (66); othello cannot see the “distinction between appearance and reality” (74); iago is a “creative genius, in his own depraved way” (86); macbeth is “an absolute bastard” (92) but he is human, “tragically so” (93); he is “all too ready to be taken in by his imagination” (99) and a “victim of his own mystery” (103); regan is a “beady-eyed realist” (131)—a quality she shares with shakespeare, “who had a remarkably beady eye” (166); king lear is “in need of a complete cognitive overhaul,” but “by the end he has shaped up, epistemologically” (131); and at the end of othello emilia “gives [iago] a mouthful” (177). 2. compare wittgenstein 1982, 38: “[t]he best example for a sentence with a particular meaning is a quotation in a play. and whoever asks a person in a play what he’s experiencing when he’s speaking?” (1982, §38). references cavell, stanley 1999 the claim of reason: wittgenstein, skepticism, morality, and tragedy. 2nd ed. oxford: oxford university press. 2007 disowning knowledge in seven plays of shakespeare. updated ed. cambridge: cambridge university press. wittgenstein, ludwig 1982 last writings on the philosophy of psychology: preliminary studies for part ii of the philosophical investigations. vol. 1. ed. g.h. von wright and heikki nyman, trans. c.g. luckhardt and maximilian a.e. aue. chicago, il: university of chicago press. © equinox publishing ltd. 2008, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expositions 2.2 (2008) 147–151] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v2i2.147 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 adjusting the body-clock: archaic aspirations and contemporary chemicals1 william r. lafleur department of east asian languages and civilizations university of pennsylvania one of the attractions of contemporary biotechnology is that it holds out the promise to individuals, even if not yet to all of mankind, of a new level of time-management. rapid and even accelerated development of a panoply of biological or medical interventions has given extended longevity—at least to those portions of humanity with access to such technologies and the wealth required to purchase them. it is through ever more effective medicine that we gain growing control over the time of the life-span, and the result is that some of us can expect to live far longer than we otherwise would. we have not yet made ourselves capable of living forever, but being able to live quantifiably longer lives is, at least in the popular imagination, a way in which we temporarily stave off the menacing hand of death. to this method must now be added the promise of another. it lies in the possibility that, through enabling pharmaceuticals, we may be able to greatly reduce the amount of our life-times spent in sleep. a better and more volitional control of our sleep is assumed to be another way in which we, aided by biochemistry, will be better able to control time—at least, the time of our lives. this is especially so if it is assumed that we are most alive, at least as humans, when we are conscious. if this is assumed, then it can logically follow that any reduction of the time we spend in a state of unconsciousness will give us more living-as-human time. and, since sleep is that state in which we are periodically unconscious (even if capable of easily regained consciousness), any significant reduction in sleep-time, if that can be achieved without bodily harm or other kinds of unintended consequence, will be a great boon. it will be another way of gaining time. just as death robs us of life ultimately, so sleep steals our life-time virtually on a daily basis and from within. this is a domain in which emerging biochemistry has great interest and has begun to make intriguing promises. a new chemical breakthrough has come in the development of modafinil, marketed in the united states as “provigil.” modafinil is only the first of what is assumed to be a line of ever better sleep 148 adjusting the body-clock © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 management pharmaceuticals. as is usually the case, the legalized manufacture and sale of something as new as modafinil is for a specific medical treatment. in this case, its first use will be as therapy for persons suffering from narcolepsy. but, as indicated by news reports of the u.s. military’s interest and now of “professor’s little helper,” the uses of modafinil appear to extend well “beyond therapy.” my intention here is to raise some questions about what kind of value, either positive or negative, we have tended to place on time spent asleep. i am greatly assisted by the fact that the encyclopedia of religion includes an superb entry on “sleep” by jonathan z. smith. one of the conclusions that can be drawn from smith’s impressive array of data is that, although countered by a scattering of positive statements about sleep, persons writing from within the perspectives of most of the world’s religious traditions have described it in largely negative terms. shakespeare, of course, could refer to sleep as “sweet” and to being able through it to “ravel up the tangled sleeve of care.” and coleridge called sleep “a gentle thing, beloved from pole to pole.” such statements would readily echo the sentiments of persons suffering from delayed sleep phase syndrome, commonly known as insomnia. but they fall within the minority of claims about it. far more numerous are the references—and across a wide variety of cultures—to sleep as comparable to dying and, correspondingly, to awakening as having been given “time” or even “life” once again. smith notes the following: in the iliad, sleep and death are twin brothers. sleep is something necessary for human beings and lesser gods, but superior or supreme deities, by contrast, are in a state of constant wakefulness. psalm 121:4 tells the ancient jews to trust the fact that their deity, yhwh, “will neither slumber nor sleep”—surely an indication of a being far superior to deities who, by being weaker, have the undesirable habit of falling asleep. it is only the ambiguous or lesser gods that require and yield to sleep. smith notes that elijah taunts the priests of baal as worshipping a god who “perhaps is asleep and needs to be awakened” (i kings 18:27; smith 1987, 361–364). inasmuch as sleep appears so often to have been associated with death, with night, with being unconscious, and with weakness found in lesser beings, we probably should not be surprised to find among ourselves a certain eagerness to bring it under greater control and rational management. moreover, the desire to “conquer” the need for sleep fully some day, while probably only a utopian dream, may be connected to this long human history of associating sleep with night, with death, and with negativity. in buddhism, we find a similar kind of valorization: the buddhist engaged lafleur 149 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 in deep meditation is said to be more, not less, fully awake. “awakened one” becomes the most fundamental way of referring to the buddha and, by extension, to anyone who is self-mastered to the point of being “awakened.” language about “being awakened” is probably as central to buddhism as is that about “being saved” to christianity. many of the epistemological demonstrations carried out within the major buddhist texts of asia—whether in sankrit, pali, tibetan, or chinese—attempt to show that ordinary daily wakefulness is really only another mode of being asleep, but usually unrecognized as such. there is, however, one major figure who enables us to think against the stream. dôgen (1200–1253) is a zen teacher of medieval japan who, in the twentieth century, was re-discovered and declared to have produced writings that easily rank alongside those of some of the world’s most honored philosophical minds. one of his essays, “uji” (有時), can be translated “being/time” and has proven particularly fascinating, in part though not only because its title and theme seem to have anticipated a famous european work of philosophy, sein und zeit, by seven hundred years. what, then, is time to an “awakened” philosopher? what does dôgen say in “being/time”? the core section is probably what follows in my translation: people say “time flies,” but it is a mistake to focus your thoughts on time flying away. do not conceive of time as something which, by being something that flies, gets away from you. when you do that, you have opened up a gap between yourself and time. as long as you fail to understand the complete identity of being and time, you will be reduced to thinking of time merely as something separate from you and always getting away from you. the crucially important thing is to see the entire universe and all its entity/beings as a sequence: timebeing followed by time-being…on and on. (dôgen 1970, 258) where does this take our discussion? dôgen, i propose, rejects the trans-cultural but clichéd metaphor “time flies” (時は飛去) because it introduces an unfortunate gap (間隙), the exact content of which is not specified in the text but would appear from the larger context to be between the self and time. that is, he is trying to undo the notion, apparently as common to his time and culture as it is to ours, that the “being” of a human or anything comes and goes within a separate something which can be designated “time.” for dôgen to be “awakened” involves a recognition of what is faulty and illusory in common, but bad, metaphors and concepts. 150 adjusting the body-clock © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 this, i suggest, is why dôgen turns his philosophical understanding of time into personal advice: “it is a mistake to focus your thoughts on time flying away. do not conceive of time as something which, by being something that flies, gets away from you.” time conceived of as flying away from me is time portrayed as separate from and even indifferent to me. it is time objectified so fully that its basic relationship to me becomes one of confrontation, antagonism. time, in a word, is my enemy. this point of view, dôgen implies, is that of a diurnal consciousness that, upon analysis, is only really a different and easily concealed way of being existentially asleep. his is a wakeup call of a different order altogether. how might it be possible to go from these considerations back to the discussion of modafinil? it seems like itself a huge leap in materials, disciplines, and time. but a few observations can probably be drawn. in yoga and other works, mircea eliade wrote so approvingly of projects through which humans can taste immortality, “overcome” time, and undertake religious regimens that aim at transcending “the natural,” that it is easy to overlook something far more cautionary in his autobiography. there, reflecting in later years on the sleep deprivations of his youth and on the yogic quest of his early maturity, he wrote: “but it is quite probable that my interest in yoga…stemmed from my faith in the unlimited possibilities of man. i did not realize at the time the consequences of this faustian ambition” (eliade 1981, 110). faustian? this term so used may have been largely irrelevant until now. that is, during human history until now the capacity to transcend sleep and time was primarily a dream or something attainable only in an afterlife beyond this world. and, even when translated into a religious regimen within this world, it remained limited to a relatively small number of individuals, those whom eliade referred to as the “religious virtuosi,” within the mass of humankind. in such contexts it was statistically almost irrelevant. but all that can change when, through the means of relatively available chemicals, being relatively “free” of sleep becomes not only physiologically possible but something as ready-to-hand as any other approved pharmaceutical. how far do we wish to alter our brain chemistry in order to realize our dreams of having more life-time by not wasting so much of it in sleep? dôgen’s reflections suggest that, by realizing such dreams, we might make our lives nightmares: we might only exacerbate our “confrontation” with time. lafleur 151 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 note 1. the author and the editors of expositions are grateful for permission to republish this essay in an abridged version. the original appeared in walter schweidler, ed., zeit: anfang und ende (sankt augustin, germany: academia verlag, 2004) and was presented at a conference sponsored by the hermann und marianne straniak stiftung. references dôgen 1970 nihon shisô taikei: dôgen. ed. terada tôru, vol. 1. tokyo: iwanami shoten. eliade, mircea 1981 autobiography: journey east, journey west. new york: harper and row. smith, jonathan z. 1987 sleep. in the encyclopedia of religion, ed. mircea eliade, vol. 13, 361–364. new york: macmillan. brann.indd © equinox publishing ltd. 2007, unit 6, th e village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expositions 1.1 (2007) 053–070] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v1i1.53 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 question: are human beings ultimately aff ective? eva brann st. john’s college, annapolis th is paper considers arguments for fi nding human beings to be centrally rational or basically aff ective. th e former view, initiated by the predominant philosophers of antiquity, prevailed in the west until spinoza and (among those after him) heidegger made aff ectivity primary. th e thesis is that this choice is not primarily psychological but ontological and that the question must be pursued metaphysically. i. th e psychic hierarchy th e question of the title is asked, in various ways, over and over in the philosophical and psychological tradition of the west. or better, it is answered in various ways, often without being asked. it is inherent in the dominant model of the human soul of the platonic-aristotelian mainstream, a soul that has two chief parts, one of which is a-rational [alogon] while the other has reason [logon echon], as aristotle says in the nicomachean ethics (1102 a 29).1 both parts are subdivided in various ways that i will return to later, but the aff ects, or the passions, are always located in the a-rational part. “a-rational,” reasonless, does not mean “irrational,” unreasonable; only reasonable beings can be unreasonable, for only they can contravene their reason. moreover, the a-rational part of the soul is regarded as having, in turn, parts amenable to reason, though not actively rational. hence arises the question whether the passions are ultimately obedient, recalcitrant, or just indiff erent to reason. and if they are in some mode or degree fi nally ungovernable by reason, then the question is whether they are so as mere, brute, indefeasible facts of our psychic constitution regarded as insuperably and ultimately nonor a-rational, or as evidence of a defi cient or perverted rationality, or perhaps even as testimony to our ultimate, healthily inbrann.indd 53brann.indd 53 15/06/2007 11:09:1715/06/2007 11:09:17 54 question: are human beings ultimately aff ective? © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 suppressible aff ectivity. th e western tradition is quite routinely termed “rationalist.” if, however, the question proposed, “are human beings ultimately aff ective?” is sometimes answered positively from within that tradition, we should perhaps reconsider that label. i will begin with three preliminary observations about the early classical psychology, where by psychology, a word apparently not used by the greeks and rare in english before the nineteenth century, i mean the theoretical soul-framework of human beings, the “account” [logos] of their psychic economy. first, the account that assigns to the human soul two—subdividable —major parts is very persistent. it extends into modern theory; for instance, it appears in freud’s elaborately worked out “topography” of the soul, which has broadly two locations, or systems, the unconscious and the conscious. very interesting questions, to be considered a little later, arise in modernity—as in antiquity—about a third middle division, its subordination and function. so also in contemporary neurophysiology a division between the feelings, including emotion, and “higher order” cognition is an assumed working hypothesis, to be confi rmed or modifi ed. th ese variously elaborated theories seem to rest on our ever-repeated experiences of an original opposition of psychic events. th ere is the physical sense that feelings take place in the heart or at the skin; thinking seems to exercise the head or brain. th ere is the experience that what my reason commands, another self resists: “for what i would, that do i not; but what i hate, that do i” (rom. 7.15). and, more particularly, there is the sense that it is the body which is the locus of a passive opposition: “th e spirit indeed is willing, but the fl esh is weak” (matt. 26.41). indeed, and this is the second observation, the lower part of the soul is usually thought of as more involved in the body. th e body in time, as the receptor and conduit of the senses, is thought of as itself passive and as a source of passions in the soul, as well as a recalcitrant resister —resistant not by reason of activity but of passivity—to the legitimate commands of the soul’s reasoning part. th e soul’s vulnerability to brann.indd 54brann.indd 54 15/06/2007 11:09:4415/06/2007 11:09:44 brann 55 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 passion, its capacity for suff ering, is expressed in the root meaning of pa/qoj, the greek word for “passion.” its aff ectivity is, in this scheme, thought of as proportionate to its nearness to the body, its never quite perspicuous involvement with the fl esh and its aff ections. and third, this mainstream psychology represents the appropriation of the soul by the philosophers in this respect, that the part in which the passions are located is named as a privative of the rational part: without reason [a-logon] versus having reason [logon echon]. th ere are various ways to account for the priority of lo/goj (reason and its articulate speech) in the traditional psychologies: 1. whatever is refl ected upon and expressed is ipso facto in the medium of rational speech, which is therefore inevitably the dominant capacity; whoever thinks about anything is, willy-nilly, fi rst and last, in the apprehensive rather than the aff ective mode —doing rather than done to. th us the primacy of reason in a psychology is simply inherent in the fact that it is a lo/goj, an account. th ose who like to give verbal accounts will think that reason is to be in charge just by reason of their métier. it will be a professional preference—or deformation. 2. another cause for according reason a higher position might be a judgment that disciplined action, which is to say vigorous fulfi llment of one’s capacities, is superior to supine receptivity, to being mere formable material, the subject of infl uences, be they of the external or internal senses—that to be moved is less fi ne that to move oneself. 3. again, it might be that, just as experience at any age shows that the soul or consciousness is often at odds with itself, so experience in maturity teaches that if the eff ortfully analytic—i am tempted to use the term “digestive”—rational part is at work and ultimately in charge, the passions are transubstantiated into fuel for human activity and well-being. here this psychology becomes an ethics—the ethics of reason as the guide to human good and goodness. brann.indd 55brann.indd 55 15/06/2007 11:09:4515/06/2007 11:09:45 56 question: are human beings ultimately aff ective? © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 th e chief proponent of this identity known to us and the fi rst fullfl edged psychologist in the sense given above is plato’s socrates, speaking in the dialogue republic, where he gives the psycho-ontological rationale for his notorious claim that to know and to be good are the same. th is position can fairly be said to establish a tradition, already expressed more aphoristically among the presocratics, of aggression by reason toward the aff ects and their poetic expression. when socrates introduces his no-quarter-given critique of emotive poetry by referring to “that ancient diff erence between philosophy and poetry” (republic 607b), he must surely have puzzled homer in hades sorely, for the bard had sung of no such battle; moreover, he must have driven aristophanes in athens to a sarcastic pursing of the month, since the comic poet thought—witness the clouds—that philosophers, a tribe to him indistinguishable from sophists, were a nasty novelty. however, when socrates says “ancient” [palaia], he probably means it fi guratively for “fundamental,” “close to the human roots.” th us, ever since, in the main tradition, reason has been prosecutorial toward the passions in life and in literature, while they have been mutely persistent. but, of course, the tradition being essentially dialectical, the privation of rationality, the “a-rational” part of the soul, is upheld from time to time in a positive mode—a fancy way of saying that the opposition mounts a deliberate defense of the passions as more basic to human nature than reason. i know of no such explicit initiative in antiquity. homer and the tragedians, socrates’ antagonists (albeit well-loved and well-known by him), don’t argue back; they simply, as i said, exist and persist. but in modern times such reaction sometimes takes the form of dry realism, as when hume says, famously, in the treatise of human nature, “reason is, and ought to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other offi ce than to serve and obey them” (hume 1960, 2.3.3). at other times it appears as romanticism, the philosophically knowledgeable revolt of the poets in behalf of the emotion-infused imagination. th us shelley, in his “defense of poetry,” which ends with the announcement that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” claims in the beginning that “reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow brann.indd 56brann.indd 56 15/06/2007 11:09:4515/06/2007 11:09:45 brann 57 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 to the substance,” and that “poetry is connate with the origin of man.” as “romantic reaction” is a descriptive term for the particular romantic movement (c. 1780–1850) that followed the enlightenment of the philosophes and the formalism of classical artists, so, in general the vindication of emotion seems to be a reactive in the life of ideas—while in the life of people the reverse takes place: th e aff ective life is given; rationality is imposed. finally the reestablishment of the emotions is a more recent initiative in “emotion studies.” it appears as a “new romanticism,” an attempt “to return the passions to their central and defi ning role in our lives that they have so long and persistently been denied, to limit the pretensions of ‘objectivity’ and self-demeaning reason which have exclusively ruled western philosophy, religion, and science since the days of socrates,” and to do this, curiously enough, by showing that the emotions “have a ‘logic’ of their own.” th ese quotations are taken from the preface to robert c. solomon’s infl uential book, th e passions (1976, xvi, 14). since then, neuroscience in particular has turned to the longneglected study of emotions. th e brain mechanisms subserving the emotions are apparently all subcortical, which means they are evolutionarily older than the “higher,” that is, more recent, brain functions and correspondingly more basic to survival. some of these fi ndings are set out for lay readers in antonio damasio’s th e feeling of what happens (1999). ii. th e terms of the question to shape a question about the siting of aff ects in the psychic economy is curiously diffi cult. i have chosen to ask whether they are ultimate, from a sense that something about their primacy or fi nality is worth fi nding out, but without quite knowing what i am looking for. for example, an answer that is not satisfying is the evolutionary one: ultimately, that is to say, fi rst in our species’ development, long before we became animals having reason, our ancestors were animals having emotions. th e emotionality of animals, particularly of the primates that do not have fully developed verbal rationality is currently undoubted by evolutionists and animal ethnologists; it was certainly darwin’s necbrann.indd 57brann.indd 57 15/06/2007 11:09:4515/06/2007 11:09:45 58 question: are human beings ultimately aff ective? © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 essary central assumption in his recently revived book th e expression of the emotions in man and animals (1998 [1872], ch. 1). yet temporal priority cannot simply determine present hierarchy; how a species evolved cannot defi nitively tell what an individual really is. th us, in the case of the emotions, to say that they are subserved by a primitive brain structure does not necessarily imply that they are primary in our psychic constitution or that they ought to be given primacy in our conduct of life. in fact, it might be taken to mean the opposite: “primitive” is not necessarily an honorifi c. if biological primitiveness, that is, our evolutionary past, doesn’t fi ll the bill, perhaps the inquiry should turn to the possible primacy of the passions in the present human condition. should we rehabilitate the passions from being the privation, the a-logical aspect of our human being, and accord them the honor of fi rstness in our evolved humanity? th at seems to be something we would want to think out, since it aff ects fi rst our self-management and then, as an immediate consequence, our conduct toward others. but even attention to the stoic preoccupation with that issue as well as a lot of reading of the romantic rebels convinces me that it is a question satisfactorily answerable only on the basis of an even prior problem. is our aff ectivity ultimate in the sense of being irreducible—irreducible to, that is radically independent of, our rational being? should readers think this is a curiously unlikely perplexity, i must remind them that what was the most widespread, inclusive, long-lasting and modernity-anticipating movement of antiquity, stoicism, held just the opposite opinion: that the passions in fact ultimately come under lo/goj, that they are le/kta (utterances), as they said, namely propositions. th us they held that the passions were judgments, albeit mistaken ones: the appraisal of an event or circumstance as mattering when it doesn’t. th is view turns out to be extremely sophisticated, although it is reductively physicalist. to reduce a complex story to a few words, the mainstream stoics think that some external incidents cause a kind of upset or upheaval, a blip of turbulence in the wave-like medium [pneuma] that organizes and animates bodies and is the network of rationality carrying information to and decisions from a command brann.indd 58brann.indd 58 15/06/2007 11:09:4515/06/2007 11:09:45 brann 59 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 center [hegemonikon] located in the heart.2 if this upset is accepted, that is, allowed to resonate undamped, a passion state takes place. neostoicism, the claim that emotions are ultimately rational appraisals of our particular condition, is a current movement; its chief proponent is martha nussbaum in upheavals of th ought (2001). stoic theory then gives a clear answer to the question of the ultimacy of aff ectivity. it is not basic: propositional rationality is. it is not clear to me that either the old or the new stoics succeed in this rationalist reduction. somewhere a moment of pure disturbance, what the old stoics themselves called a pre-passion [propatheia], steps in. but even if, or especially if, this diffi culty is set aside, there remains something counterintuitive in the stoic position. it seems to reduce to one side, that of a fi nal rationality, our (or at least my) sense that human feeling is indeed indefeasibly suff used by thought—and the converse. an opposite alternative is the claim that human beings are ultimately aff ective. th e great—and somewhat abstruse—proponent of this position is spinoza. th e diff erence between him and the “romantics” is that, in the ethics (1843 [1675]), he sites the ultimacy of the aff ective human mind in a daring metaphysics. again, abbreviating unconscionably: god and nature are identical, and human beings are one of god’s ways of being, his “modes.” human beings are desire; “desire [an aff ect] is the very essence of man…” (part iii, “defi nitions of the aff ects,” no. 1). it is the conscious appetite for remaining in being, for active, productive persistence, and in this it is indeed a way of being god, who is nature in all its drive toward self-maintenance. th erefore, aff ect (spinoza’s term: aff ectus) is absolutely ultimate. but it is not passive; the aff ects turn into passions when inadequately comprehended. for spinoza “inadequate” means “unclear and non-comprehensive.” th us passions are turned into actions through being adequately, that is clearly and comprehensively understood. th erefore, virtue is knowledge, and the ethics is a guide to adequate knowledge. yet even passions comprehended and so turned into virtues are fi rst and last aff ects. it is no wonder that spinoza was highly regarded by the romantics. my opening question was about the standing of aff ect in the human constitution. so, then, what is meant by “aff ect”? brann.indd 59brann.indd 59 15/06/2007 11:09:4615/06/2007 11:09:46 60 question: are human beings ultimately aff ective? © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 aff ectus for spinzoa (usually rendered “emotion”) is an aff ectio (usually rendered “modifi cation”) of the body as it is represented in the mind (ethics, part iii, defi nition 3). it is the idea of an impingement, external or internal, that increases or diminishes the body’s power. th us the aff ections are “doings to” [ad-facere] the body and the aff ects are “done to” us. so they are in the fi rst instance, that is, until mastered by the mind, passivities or passions. eventually, in the eighteenth century, the aff ects came to be generally called “emotions,” “out-movings” or displacements of the soul. th e term recognizes the fact that aff ects are experienced as—or rather that they are the experience of—some sort of turbulence, which usually, though not exclusively, originates in an external aff ection of the senses and resonates in an internal sensibility. moreover, though spinoza’s metaphysical theory of the fundamental aff ectivity of all being can scarcely be mainstreamed, there is something that rings very true to human experience in the basic notion of emotion as being defi nable as a sense of expansion or contraction, of the well-being or dis-ease of consciousness. to me the deepest diffi culty in getting hold of aff ect, feeling, passion, emotion, sentiment—the heap of terms gathering together the whole gamut of connotations —is to understand how being in the passive mode can be experienced as vigorously animating us and as being the voucher for our being alive. i believe that spinoza was preoccupied with this very problem in looking for a way to turn passive aff ect active and thereby passion into virtue, in the primary latin sense of virtus: effi cacy, power. so now, with some meaning accrued, are we ultimately aff ective? stoics defi ne us as animals having reason who assent to propositions evaluating their physical turbulences; spinoza understands us as beings whose essence is desire, the longing to persist productively. th e mainstream opinion is that we are animals with ultimately split natures. we are schizophrenic at root: passionate and thoughtful, emotional and rational, passively aff ected, actively controlling. it is within this dual nature that my question arises most clearly and that the answer is of the greatest consequence. iii. th e psychic constitution th e thought that of the two roots of our nature neither one is ultibrann.indd 60brann.indd 60 15/06/2007 11:09:4615/06/2007 11:09:46 brann 61 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 mately reducible to the other is not the same as the notion of their mutual interaction or suff usion. no single word displays this truth better than the name of reason’s—as the germans say—“ownmost” activity: philosophy. for that word combines a passion term and a thought term: philos, “loving friend” and sophia, “skilled wisdom.” so from its fi rst use by heracleitus, who together with his accomplice-adversary parmenides, co-founded the enterprise so named and started it on its dialectical way, philosophy was understood as passionate to the core: the longing for genuine being and the desire to capture it in words. as thought is moved by aff ect so, conversely, human feeling, the passive yet vital movement of the soul, is shot through with reason, at least in human beings. th at fact shows itself above all in the most apparent structure of the emotions, their “intentionality.” in its modern use this term refers to the directedness or “aboutness” of acts of consciousness: we think this or that and of or about this and that. emotions too seem to be intentional: we love or hate this and that, are in fear of or feel bold about this and that. it is this feature of emotions that we express quite easily. getting the “feel” of the feeling is much harder. moreover, the stoics say that every emotion is a proposition misguidedly assented to. we claim, wrongly: “i am afraid of losing my child—and so i ought to be.” th e stoics, in contrast, actually argue that grief for a lost child is a mistake. whether or not that is really all such an emotion is—a very counterintuitive claim—it surely is part of most feeling that we are positively or negatively inclined to it. for example, goethe’s faust makes his salvation or damnation depend on his ability to reject present contentment. may i perish, he says, “were i to say to just one moment / oh, stay awhile, thou art so fair” (goethe 1949, part 1, 1702). and so it is with all emotions. we receive or reject them by a mental motion of assent which appears to be separable from the pleasure or pain attendant on the emotion. furthermore, the emotions have a taxonomy, an ordered interrelation, about which there is, to be sure, no agreement, for writers about the emotions are fertile in personal schemes. nevertheless, such ordering would not be feasible if the aff ects were not amenable to rational analysis. brann.indd 61brann.indd 61 15/06/2007 11:09:4615/06/2007 11:09:46 62 question: are human beings ultimately aff ective? © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 but the most interesting application of reason to emotion, the thorniest theoretically and most consequence-laden practically, is that of control and rectifi cation. both plato and aristotle think that parts of the a-rational soul are amenable to reason, though not as actively reasoning but rather as accepting reason’s rule. aristotle says in the nicomachean ethics: but perhaps nonetheless there is in the soul something that must be regarded as besides reason that opposes and goes counter to it…but this also seems to have a part in reason…for it obeys the rule of reason… (1102 b). how it is possible that what is not-reason should hear reason is a perplexity. th is much is clear, however: that though there is perhaps some mutuality, the relation is conceived asymmetrically, since it is reason that is to rule, and passion, of course located in the a-rational [alogon] part of the soul, that is to be ruled. passion may blind-side, blank out, deform reason, but reason informs the feelings, which are after all, conceived as aff ects, passivities. moreover, it isn’t clear that the aff ect that suff uses, as i said, the higher power is not perhaps specifi c to, even located within, that power, a conception that complicates the understanding of the nature of lo/goj but maintains its immunity to lower emotional contagion. in the platonic symposium, for example, pausanias distinguishes between a heavenly and a popular aphrodite (180 d), and in the phaedrus, socrates assigns to the soul, in the fi gure of a chariot whose charioteer represents reason, two horses, which represent the impulsive parts of the soul. one of these is by nature close to reason while the other can be subdued but only by reason becoming forcible (246 b). and, of course, the ancients knew all about spoiled reason, the quibbling tricks of a logical cunning that is in the service of gain and power. th e practitioners of this manipulative reason appear in the platonic dialogues as socrates’ opponents and in aristophantic comedy as socrates himself. th ey are the “wisdom-mongers,” the sophists, as opposed to the “wisdom-seekers,” the philosophers. neither the interaction nor the subordination of the parts of the soul gives a determinate answer to the question of the ultimacy of one element or to the prior question, whether the parts are indeed fi nally in brann.indd 62brann.indd 62 15/06/2007 11:09:4615/06/2007 11:09:46 brann 63 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 some sense autonomous. before the passage quoted above, aristotle says that it scarcely matters whether the parts [moria] of the soul are real and the soul is “partable” [meriston] in the way that a body or any whole is, or whether these distinctions exist only in thought, as convexity is distinguishable from concavity. according to him, all this is of no importance for distinguishing the thoughtful from the thought-less part of the soul. indeed, introspective experience is the guide here; a fi rst phenomenological description of our psychic economy has to be, and is even for contemporary neuroscience, experiential. for how would the brain scientist know what physical structure or event to look for without soul-like terms to guide the investigation? th at said, however, it does turn out that the diff erent “parts” of the soul, above all the emotive and the reasonable parts, are locally, structurally, and functionally distinct: very grossly, the limbic system on the border between the brain stem and forebrain (containing among other structures the hypothalamus and amygdala) is associated with emotional life, and the forebrain, in particular the cerebral cortex, with rational functions (see raius 2002, 202–38). brain science thus appears to give a physical warrant to talk about the “parts” (or later, the “faculties”) of the soul, be they taken an emergent epiphenomena of the brain or non-physical entities subserved by neurophysicological structures. it seems to me, therefore, that the grand fi gure which underlies plato’s republic, assigning to the soul a constitution which, when writ large resembles a polity, has plausibility and usefulness. it suggests that we may appropriately ask: who or what rules, serves, provides, and is what we ultimately are? but those questions require that the two main parts of the soul be somewhat more diff erentiated. iv. th e psychic parts from plato to freud the soul or psyche has been conceived, recall, as double in the basic sense of having two parts, a-rational [alogon] and having reason [logon echon], but, on closer inspection, as having three, and thence, in later authors, through division or addition on to many. th us a count of the sub-parts of the soul used by th omas aquinas in brann.indd 63brann.indd 63 15/06/2007 11:09:4615/06/2007 11:09:46 64 question: are human beings ultimately aff ective? © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 his summa th eologiae3 yields a dozen, even leaving out the lowest rung of distinctions, although even this multiplicity is fundamentally tripartite. freud, at least in his “topography” of the psyche, laid out in the essay “th e unconscious” (1915), distinguishes the unconscious (ucs), the preconscious (pcs), and the conscious (cs), again a triple. th us the schema that seems to underlie all psychology, whether by way of adoption, adaptation, or counterproposals, are the triple partitions of plato and aristotle. th e parts of the platonic soul-structure, its “forms or dispositions” [eide kai ethe], are set out in the republic (435 d). th ey comprise the rational part [logistikon] and the non-rational part, which is divided in two, the spirited [thymos] and the appetitive [epithymetikon, 439 d-e]. of these the lowest, desirous part is specifi cally called a-rational; the middle part, which includes feelings of shame and pride, is shown to be particularly responsive to reason, but is not itself reason. one might say it is reasonable but not rational. th ere is, in the tradition, some argument whether desire and appetite, the low-grade aff ects comprising the lowest part, are to be counted among the passions proper. but the motions of the soul belonging to the middle part are surely emotions; in fact one translator, raymond larson, renders thymoumetha, “we show spirit,” forthrightly as “we feel emotions”: “we learn with one, feel emotions with another and desire the pleasures of nourishment, procreation, and so forth with a third part” (436 b). i cite this—i believe acceptable—translation because it points up what will become the mainstream view: th e passions or emotions occupy the central location in the constitution of the soul. th ey do so even more unequivocally when aristotle adds a lowest part, the “vegetative” or “natural” [physikon] part which is common to all living things. to it he assigns life functions like nourishment and procreation (nicomachean ethics 1102 b). th e middle part is the aforementioned—still a-rational—part capable of being obedient to reason; here the virtues are to be found together with the passions. it is no accident that the fi rst pathos aristotle takes up in his treatment of the passions in the rhetoric (book ii) is anger, aroused by a slight to honor, which is certainly a “thymotic” passion. th omas aquinas amalgamates these schemata into one enormous brann.indd 64brann.indd 64 15/06/2007 11:09:4715/06/2007 11:09:47 brann 65 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 plan, in which, once again, the passions have a topographically central place in a tripartite soul consisting of an “intellectual,” a “sensitive” and a “vegetative” part. th e middle, the sensitive, soul includes, toward the bodily side, the senses, divided into the internal senses such as imagination, and the external senses such as sight. toward the intellectual side we fi nd the passions, divided into the desirously receptive ones such as love and the strenuously aggressive ones such as pride. th ese subdivisions are, of course, adaptations of socrates’ epithymotic and thymotic parts. note that in all psychic “topographies” (the word is freud’s) location has signifi cance, one end being higher in dignity and dominance. what, however, does it mean to be central? for central is what the passions are by position. th is is true even in freud’s schema. for, although emotions are at home in the infernal unconscious (freud’s epigraph for th e interpretation of dreams is a line from the aeneid: “if i can’t bend the gods above i will move the gods below,” 7.312), they come close to consciousness and dominate the fantasy life of the preconscious. so in what sense are the aff ects in general and the passions in particular central? just insofar, one might say, as they are crucial to human being but not ultimate. th e human center is passionate; the passions are what we gladly suff er, with gladness and suff ering in about equal proportion, and the passions are what we strenuously battle, with victory and defeat about equally the issue. in the ancient formula for a human being as a “living thing having reason” [zoon logon echon], the passions belong to the living, the animal or animated side. th ose who think that a part of the soul is separable from the embodied living being and is capable of separate survival, as socrates, perhaps speaking mythically, intimates in the phaedo and aristotle surmises in on the soul (408 b), mean the rational part. its dignity is for this, along with other reasons, greater even in its incarnate phase. of the mainstream ancients one must therefore say: th e human being is centrally but not ultimately aff ective. but that is not the end of it, for the ancients or the moderns. both plato and aristotle subdivide the rational soul into a part that discursively “thinks things through” [dia-noia] and a higher part that sees brann.indd 65brann.indd 65 15/06/2007 11:09:4715/06/2007 11:09:47 66 question: are human beings ultimately aff ective? © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 directly, intuitively [noesis]. th is latter part is understood, very explicitly by aristotle in on the soul (429 a), to be in one aspect receptive. indeed, its peculiar passivity is analogous to that of sense-perception, though, on the other hand, it is also nothing like it, for it is bodiless. th us its faculty, the intellect [nous], is passive insofar as in receiving the knowable forms of all things it is said to become them, though its passive receptivity is also an active fulfi llment. th is analogy of intuition to feeling is what pascal means when he says that “the heart has its reasons that the reason does not know”—not that the heart is a-rational, but that it gets things directly, receptively. so now we might be allowed to say that in this understanding of a two-tier rationality (still maintained by th omas but denied by kant),4 we are ultimately aff ective, meaning receptively open to being touched and entered by intelligible being. but that aff ectivity is a far cry from passionate aff ectivity, from the bodily feelings, the sensory aff ections, and the intentional feelings called passions or emotions. yet this high aff ectivity, the receptivity to being, is a human capacity that must be considered in this context since it is, at one point at least, transmuted back into what is ordinarily called a feeling. moreover, the claim is made that it is in fact only that feeling which opens us to meta-physical intimations. th is function of the metaphysical aff ect is set out most explicitly by heidegger in the essay “what is metaphysics?” (1998). he means to reclaim aff ectivity as ultimate in human existence. th e aff ect he turns to is not an emotion but a mood. “mood,” in its narrow signifi cation, is distinguished from emotion by its non-intentional character. love and hate, bold confi dence and fear, pride and shame are “about” something, that is, about the objects of love or fear or the reasons for confi dence and shame. a mood, on the other hand, is about nothing. it is a diff use, unfocused feeling. who could doubt that human beings have been moody through the ages? yet the curious fact is that the ancients, at least until late in antiquity, made no great point of being subject to such intentionless aff ects or of analyzing them. th eir interest, particularly that of the stoics, the most purposeful students of the passions, lay precisely in the “intentional object” of an aff ect, for it was brann.indd 66brann.indd 66 15/06/2007 11:09:4715/06/2007 11:09:47 brann 67 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 through its appraisal that they sought relief. to be sure, there was the long-lasting humoral theory which included in its four states melancholia, a depressive mood, but it was recorded as a medical category. in medieval theology acedia, a slothful disgust with the spiritual life, was only one of several moodlike conditions of the religious life. it was, however, regarded not primarily as an aff ect but as one of the seven capital theological sins. in modern times the romantics were certainly preoccupied with diff use feelings of searching longing and pleasurable reminiscence. but it was only in 1844, when kierkegaard published th e concept of anxiety, that the intentionlessness of mood was made explicit and put to philosophical use. th is anxiety would in the twentieth century become what might be called its paradigm mood. kierkegaard, observing that the concept of anxiety is ignored in psychology, says that “it is altogether diff erent from fear and similar concepts that referred to something defi nite, whereas anxiety is freedom’s actuality as the possibility of a possibility” (1980 [1844] 1.15). “freedom’s actuality” describes a presentiment of a capability—an as yet unfi xed sense of a freedom to be free. th is was adam’s condition before the fall, a “dreaming” state of innocence, before he knew the diff erence between good and evil. in that dream state of uneasy repose, adam has “indeed nothing against which to strive.” at this point kierkegaard has recourse to the verbal trick that will have great consequences in existential philosophy: th e “nothing” which adam has to strive against in the mood of dreaming anxiety turns into an intentional object. “but what eff ect does nothing have?” kierkegaard asks. “it begets anxiety.” th us the inherited sinfulness of the human race originating in adam’s fall is conditioned not, as in the tradition, on the perversion of the will, the rational faculty of desire, but on a mood, an aff ective sense of the freedom to be possibly bad (41–46). heidegger adapts for his essay this kierkegaardian transmutation of the nothing that anxiety “is about” into a meta-physical nothing. th e mood (in german stimmung, “attunement”) of anxiety opens the human being to nothing. in their uncanny alienated indiff erence to existence, beings as a whole distance themselves from us. th e human brann.indd 67brann.indd 67 15/06/2007 11:09:4815/06/2007 11:09:48 68 question: are human beings ultimately aff ective? © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 foothold in existence is gone. anxiety is revealingly about the nothing that environs existence. th us anxiety becomes our access to the wonder of beings. we realize, we feel, that they are something and not nothing: anxiety is the fundamental metaphysical feeling (heidegger 1998, 102). th at heidegger is, in this perennial duality of the western tradition, on the side of ultimate aff ectivity, is confi rmed by comparing being and time (1927) with the somewhat later “what is metaphysics?” (originally published 1929, postscript added in 1943, introduction in 1949). in the book anxiety had functioned almost oppositely to its role in the essay: instead of taking dasein, a human existence, beyond the beings that constitute its world, it arose from dasein’s sense of having been cast into its world (heidegger 1927, 134 ff ., 184 ff .). what seems to me remarkable is that in this vacillation about the role of anxiety, one factor remains fi rm: that a mood—anxiety in particular and attunement, mood, in general—is ontologically fundamental to human existence. for not only do all the features that characterize human existence in ordinary terms—emotions and understanding —eventuate from this aff ectivity as ground, but it itself is the defi ning mode of existence: openness to the world. i know of no more unsentimentally positive answer to the question, “are human beings ultimately aff ective?” is that the last word? has the question been answered once and for all? of course not. each hierarchical placement, topographical setting, human valuation of the passions depends not only on a psychology but on an ontology. hence to accept one or another view of the ultimacy of the passionate part of human nature is to accept—explicitly or implicitly—a view of the world and of being itself. to realize that is the fi rst fi rm outcome of an inquiry such as this. endnotes 1. references to classical texts are to the standard paginations. most translations are by the author. 2. zeno of citium (b. 334) and chrysippus (280–207) were the founders of stoicism whose doctrines dominated all later discussions. th e stoic system, brann.indd 68brann.indd 68 15/06/2007 11:09:4815/06/2007 11:09:48 brann 69 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 gleaned from their fragments, is set out by julia e. annas in hellenistic philosophy of mind (1992), part iii. 3. for the parts involved in the passions, see summa th eologiae, first part of the second part, qu. 22, art. 2. 4. see kant, critique of pure reason (1963 [1781], b 170). references th e holy bible 1917 ed. rev. c. i. scofi eld. new york: oxford university press. annas, julia e. 1992 hellenistic philosophy of mind. berkeley: university of california press. aquinas, th omas, saint. 1967 summa th eologiae. translated by eric d’arcy. vol. 19, th e emotions. new york: mcgraw-hill. aristotle 1957 on the soul. trans. w. s. hett. cambridge: harvard university press. 1962 nicomachean ethics. trans. martin ostwald. new york: macmillan publishing company. 1991 on rhetoric. trans. george a. kennedy. oxford: oxford university press. brann, eva in press feeling our feelings: what philosophers th ink and people know. philadelphia: paul dry press. damasio, antonio 1999 th e feeling of what happens: body and emotion in the making of consciousness. new york: harcourt. darwin, charles 1998 th e expression of emotions in man and animals. commentary by paul ekman. oxford: oxford university press. freud, sigmund 1963 th e unconscious. in general psychological th eory: papers on metapsychology, ed. philip rieff , 116–150. new york: macmillan publishing company. 1965 th e interpretation of dreams. trans. james strachey. new york: avon books. goethe, johann wolfgang 1949 faust. stuttgart: alfred kröner verlag. brann.indd 69brann.indd 69 15/06/2007 11:09:4815/06/2007 11:09:48 70 question: are human beings ultimately aff ective? © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 heidegger, martin 1927 sein und zeit. vol. 8 of jahrbuch für philosophie und phänomenologische forschung. halle: max niemeyer. 1998 what is metaphysics? in pathmarks, ed. william mcneill, 82 –96. cambridge: cambridge university press. hume, david 1960 a treatise on human nature. ed. l. a. selby-bigge. oxford: clarendon press. kant, immanuel 1963 critique of pure reason. trans. norman kemp smith. london: macmillan and co. kierkegaard, søren 1980 th e concept of anxiety: a simple psychologically orienting deliberation on the dogmatic issue of hereditary sin. trans. reidar th omte. princeton: princeton university press. nussbaum, martha 2001 upheavals of th ought: th e intelligence of emotions. cambridge: cambridge university press. plato 1979 th e republic. trans. raymond larson. wheeling, il: harlan davidson. 1980 th e symposium and the phaedrus. trans. raymond larson. arlington heights, il: harlan davidson. raius, g. dennis 2002 principles of human neuropsychology. boston: mcgraw hill. shelley, percy bysshe 1962 a defense of poetry. in literary criticism: pope to croce, ed. gay wilson allen and harry hayden clark, 296–317. detroit: wayne state university press. solomon, robert c. 1983 th e passions: th e myth and nature of human emotions. notre dame: th e university of notre dame press. spinoza, benedict 1843 ethica. in opera quae supersunt omnia. ed. karl herman bruder. leipsig: tauchnitz. brann.indd 70brann.indd 70 15/06/2007 11:09:4915/06/2007 11:09:49 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expo. 3.2 (2009) 197–208] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v3i2.197 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 the presence of the past: the scholarly afterlife of adversus judaeos rhetoric peter spitaler villanova university i learned a great deal from fredriksen’s book, and i assume other readers will equally benefit from studying her analysis of augustine’s defense of jews and judaism. of particular interest to me are the book’s early chapters. they describe the changing cultural and religious environment for the equally evolving social and literary interaction between jews and other ethno-religious groups in the centuries leading up to augustine’s time. these descriptions, in turn, prepare the stage for fredriksen’s presentation of augustine’s own dealings with jews, rhetorical or real, in his many writings. as fredriksen unfolds, before the reader’s eyes, the reception history of the adversus judaeos rhetoric that augustine both inherited and transformed, she shows that this particular genre is embedded in, and retrievable from, literature, like artifacts strewn across the pages of the educated among christian authors and church leaders who dominated the literary and ecclesio-political landscape of the first four centuries. with their prolific literary productions and reproductions, the ancients liberally disseminated adversus judaeos rhetoric. at times, they simply repeated the ever more readily accessible rhetorical arguments of predecessors and contemporaries. other times, they tweaked these arguments to such a degree that subsequent generations of christian writers were able (deliberately or not) to misinterpret the prototypical, intra-judean arguments of first century (new testament) authors and broadcast them—amplified and virtually unchecked until augustine raised his pen—as stereotypical contra-judean diatribes. reconstructing the origins and reception history of adversus judaeos rhetoric necessitates interpreting the literary evidence. in this regard, contemporary scholars face the same epistemological questions as the ancients did: what can we know, and with what degree of certainty? in part, fredriksen bases her reconstruction on a traditional presuppo198 academic roundtable © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 sition or hypothesis, shared by many scholars, concerning the ethno religious identities of the recipients of paul’s letters: namely, non israelite audiences residing in various cities (rome, corinth, philippi, thessalonia) and provinces (galatia) of the roman empire. in my opinion, this particular hypothesis is in serious need of revision. if it were accurate, because paul published attacks on his contemporary, fellow israelites in letters to non-israelite audiences, we would have to assume that he intentionally aired in-group problems where they could be heard by outsiders, possibly to convince them of the accuracy of his positions and the superiority of his own rhetoric. to be sure, paul included only those debates with fellow judeans that portrayed him as a winner, and his personal authority vouched for the precision of his claims. still, paul himself would have provided the literary matrix for constructing literary—rhetorical or symbolic—judean lives and identities and deconstructing them before non-israelite ears. these straightforward observations have far-reaching implications for our understanding of the past. first, if paul indeed wrote to non-israelites about his quarrels with israelites, he would, in a moment, cease being a bystander innocent (as he is often portrayed to be) of setting in motion the wirkungsgeschichte of adversus judaeos rhetoric. rather, he would emerge as the earliest culprit of this kind of polemic popularized later on a much larger scale. thus, if our basic assumptions about the circumstances of paul’s literary creativity are correct, distortions of judean identities likely began sooner than fredriksen admits. second, next generation authors could no longer be conceived of as guilty of a dual offense: misreading paul’s argumentation and transforming it into condemnations of judaism. if the ancients reconstructed the historical setting of paul’s letters in the same way we do today (that is, in accordance with the above stated hypothesis), it would follow that they simply continued a rhetorical tradition legitimized and authorized by paul: that it was rhetorically justifiable and politically opportune to attack judeans in absentia for the purpose of strengthening nascent christian identities and theology. consequently, on this account, we would have to say that they neither misrepresented paul’s argumentation nor transformed intra-judean rhetoric into contra the presence of the past 199 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 judean polemic—for it was not intra-judean to begin with. by definition, an intra-judean debate is a debate among judeans. if paul sent his letters to non-israelite jesus group members, he did not debate with judeans but wrote to fellow jesus group members about judean life and identity. more precisely, he crafted and used judean characters in his letters to debate with them rhetorically. but the real purpose would have been pedagogical: to teach non-israelites by attacking judeans who had no voice but paul’s own. is such a strategy not at the heart of adversus judaeos rhetoric? for some time, i have been convinced that paul did not write to non-israelites, and fredriksen’s book reinforces this opinion despite her taking for granted the traditional, contrary position. the present roundtable is not the place to discuss alternatives, but her reconstruction, or any scholarly work on israelite religion for that matter, can benefit from the findings of malina and pilch (2006) that paul might have attempted to preach his gospel in person and letter to fellow israelites, hellenized judeans living far away from the homeland, that is, judeans dispersed throughout the roman empire, and not nonisraelites (“gentiles”). according to that scenario, paul’s letters provide evidence that he deconstructed the opinion of fellow israelites who interfered with, or rejected, his gospel. however, his at times heated literary riposte to israelites was not publicized for non-israelite audiences; paul actually engaged in intra-judean debates—with israelites before israelites. of course, the problem of reconstructing the beginnings of adversus judaeos rhetoric is more complex than identifying possible audiences for paul’s letters. there is strong consensus among scholars (stowers 1981; thorsteinsson 2003) that bultmann (1910) and others after him (cranfield 1977; fitzmyer 1993) got it right: paul’s argumentation, in particular in his letter to the romans, exhibits the characteristic features of a literary genre known as diatribe. using rhetorical characters for the sake of a literary debate, paul frequently writes in the style of a “lively pedagogical discourse” or as if engaged in a “loose style of conversation with an interlocutor, spiced up with exclamations, idioms and maxims, rhetorical questions, paradoxes, short statements, parodies, fictitious questions, antitheses and parallel phrases” (fitzmyer 1993). 200 academic roundtable © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 in other words, second person addresses are essential elements of his letters (see, for example, “you are inexcusable, human.” rom. 2:1; “you are called judean,” rom. 2:17). whereas the genre of diatribe requires the presence of a rhetorical character in the text, diatribe makes no assumption about the historical accuracy of this character’s words or actions. after all, a rhetorical character is a literary construct and may or may not exist in reality. which raises the question: if paul communicated with rhetorical characters about their conduct and the conduct of other (rhetorical or real) characters, how did and does the reader or hearer of his letters identify as factual or fictional the conduct that these characters exemplify? put differently, diatribal characters undoubtedly are real in the text and act in the text; but to what extent are their identities and actions fictional beyond the text? the answer to these questions is less historical in nature than epistemological or, more accurately, steeped in interpretive choices. the literature of the first few centuries shows that its authors over and over again chose to animate rhetorical characters (mostly fashioned to be judeans) to claim they were real factually. presumably, early christian writers assumed paul accurately portrayed judeans in his letters; they extrapolated general characteristics of judean life from his literary portrayals. they literally “realized” them, that is, breathed life into them and gave the characters “real” identities and historical credibility. all of a sudden, literary creations became clear mirrors of historical realities. the problem was, of course, that most ancients exploited paul’s literary critique of fellow judeans for constructing the kind of negative moral and religious biographies, individual and corporate, that sustained adversus judaeos argumentation. we may ascribe to the ancients theological arrogance and social ignorance—but what excuses do we find for adversus judaeos interpretation bubbling to the surface of contemporary scholarly articles and commentaries on new testament texts? seemingly ignorant of the past, exegesis too often produces readings that echo the anti-israelite statements of the past. why? william campbell (2006) suggests that “a negative image of judaism and a corresponding antithesis with emergent christianity” continues to constitute “the framework of modern critical pauline interpretation”; douglas campbell (2005) diagnoses a the presence of the past 201 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 “latent insensitivity to judaism.” be that as it may, fredriksen’s book shows that situating judaism within its historical settings remains as much a challenge as assessing paul’s view of judaism. how easy it remains to transform a perceived pauline critique of judaism into factual negative portrayals of israelites and israelite religion! it does not come as a surprise then that contemporary scholarship continues to deconstruct israelite religion, assuming this is what paul himself did. for example: carras (1992) holds that romans 2:1–29 contains “perhaps the most extensive and direct critique of jews and judaism in the letters of paul.” the rhetorical questions in romans 2:21–22 are a concrete demonstration of the moral failure of “jews” (tobin 2004). being called a “jew” (rom. 2:17), “jewish” self-awareness (2:19), and pride in the law (2:23) are the hallmarks of a self-righteous identity (gager 1983). even the positive statements of romans 2:14, 27 concerning non-israelites keeping the law reveal the failure of “jews” (others did what “jews” failed to do; boers 1994; pesch 1983). lists of “jewish” shortcomings frequently contain “jewish” disobedience (gager 1983); presumption about “jewish” privilege (lincoln 1995); proud claims of “jewish” superiority (seifrid 1992); the misguided religion of “the jews” (dunn 1998); lack of repentance (stuhlmacher 1989); typically “jewish” status confidence (dunn 1998); typically “jewish” assertions about moral superiority and national privileges (watson 1986); boasting in the law (theobald 2000); complacency based on covenantal nomism (chae 1997). of particular concern is the lack of recognition of positive judean identities. in addition to calling fellow israelites his brothers (rom. 9:3) and chosen people (rom. 11:5) who historically trust god’s love (rom. 11:28; 15:7) and whose relationship with god is defined by sonship, glory, covenant, law, cult, ancestry, and promises (9:4–5), paul portrays his people to be entrusted with “god’s oracles” (rom. 3:2)—a law to be upheld (3:31). in contrast with non-israelites (rom. 2:14), judeans have a name and are proud of god (2:17). they grow up in the law, find truth and knowledge in the law, teach others (2:18–19), and are heart-circumcised; god appreciates them (2:29). however, theses descriptions are absent from fitzmyer’s (1993) list of positive judean qualities. they are also not ranked among mayordomo’s (2005) 202 academic roundtable © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 descriptions of just conduct in romans 2; and chae (1997) argues for the necessity of a negative interpretation of these verses. when all is said and done (that is, when we panoptically read contemporary literature on paul’s letter to the romans), we discover in his text the portrayal of a self righteously judging (rom. 2:1.3), paradigmatically law-breaking (2:17–24) “jewish” partner in a literary dialogue who embodies the “real” or factual problem of first-century israelite religion. contemporary forms of adversus judaeos thought are driven, not by the need to define religious and theological boundaries, but, i surmise, by longstanding theological presuppositions. i wonder if this was the case also in antiquity. for example, the theological dictum that humankind is sinful guides many a scholar (boers 1997) to unearth from paul’s text hints that judeans “also” or “especially” belonged to sinful humanity. one commonly discovers the conclusion (fitzmyer 1993; watson 1986) that “universality of human sinfulness” can be established, with the help of paul’s text, by (1) setting the perceived sinfulness of non-israelites (rom. 1:18–32) against perceived judean sinfulness (2:1–3:8); and (2) demonstrating that among non-jesus group members upright people living moral lives simply did not exist, despite paul’s assertions to the contrary (rom. 2:13,14, 25–27). his use of diatribe supposedly trivialized positive expressions of judean conduct (“doing the good” and “doing the law” [rom. 2:7, 10, 13]) and neutralized positive judean identities (“being law” and “having the gestalt of truth in the law” [2:14, 20]). put differently, scholars frequently ascribe different stages of realness to literary descriptions of immoral and moral conduct: the former are anthropologically real or factual, the latter hypothetical or rhetorical. no wonder that positive judean characters disappear from the text (and from history) in the interpretation processes: to comply with the above mentioned theological dictum, judeans who “do the good” and “do the law” (rom. 2:7, 10, 13) and “have the gestalt of truth in the law” (2:20) become “unreal” characters. in contrast, it remains legitimate to identify a “real” judean behind the allegedly negative portrayal of a “rhetorical” judean (2:17). evaluating the socio-religious realities of first-century judaism with the help of a perceived “pauline critique” of judaism is problematic. the presence of the past 203 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 from an epistemological perspective, this mainstream approach is most unsatisfactory because it takes paul’s own constructions of israelite identities at face value. apparently, paul’s use of “literary” dialogue partners (characters in the text like the judean of rom. 2:17) is thought to convey a universal truth about “real” people (persons in the world beyond the text). granted, paul argues his case with the help of diatribe; and in diatribe, the distance between real audience and fictitious dialogue partner is often minimal (thorsteinsson 2003). however, even if one were to conclude that the diatribal figure of the judean (rom. 2:17) was a literary figure with negative moral characteristics, literary data are lacking to support the universalization of immoral judean conduct beyond the text (spitaler 2008). here, the theological dictum of universal sinfulness appears to guide attributions of factional or fictional realness to characters and their conduct in the text and people in the world beyond the text. the time has come to assess paul’s characterizations with the same kind of suspicion that the portrayals of, for example, pharisees in the gospel literature receive. today, no serious scholar argues that the gospel authors’ presentation accurately reflects historical pharisees. presumably, contemporary scholars attempt reconstructions of the past from the vantage point of knowing that previous efforts simply were wrong, such as the ones that provided the socio-political and theological rationale, disguised as “historical,” for adversus judaeos rhetoric. that is to say, in post-adversus judaeos and post-holocaust times, one’s assessment of paul’s portrayal of judeans and judaism is never scholarly neutral. this is especially true when it comes to choosing labels for identifying the ancients, like the jesus group members with their diverse ethno-religious and cultural biographies (paul lists, among others, “barbarians,” “judeans,” “israelites,” “hellenists” [phil. 3:5, rom.1:14, 2:9, 10, 3:9; 1 cor. 1:18–31]). at some point, even historical analysis is vulnerable to succumbing to the seductive power of tradition. fredriksen’s choice—albeit informed by alternatives and therefore reluctant—of calling the earliest participants in the jesus group (israelites and non-israelites) “christians” and israelites “jews” is, in my opinion, evidence of the influence that tradition in general, and terminological convention in particular, has on interpretation. 204 academic roundtable © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 if the above cocktail of summary statements from contemporary literature fails to reveal that first century israelites are far too frequently labeled collectively “the jews,” consider the following statements. a. “rom. 2:1–5 most likely refers to the jews because it is the jews who would consider themselves morally superior due to possession of the law.… 2:1–4 make it clear that the works of the jews are evil” (schreiner 1993). b. “if the structure and context of the argument of romans 2 are considered, the argument itself requires that he who sits in judgment above others [2:1] is the ‘jew’” (carras 1992). c. in romans 2, the “entire race of jews” is addressed as law-breakers (burnett 2001). d. “the jews attempt to fill shoes that are much too large for them, and they fail lamentably” (blumenfeld 2001). e. “paul is here treating a fault which was common among jews, as a human problem” (seifrid 2004). f. “the covenant people have become part of the problem, not the agents of the solution” (wright 2005). g. romans 2:17–24 reveal the “inclination of jews” to do what is wrong in spite of circumcision (fitzmyer 1993). admittedly, there is little consensus about nomenclature. however, one of the important insights i gained from studying fredriksen’s book is that, with respect to adversus judaeos rhetoric, one’s choice of vocabulary indeed matters. in a work that analyzes the wirkungsgeschichte of this particular polemic, even an ever so cautious embrace of a labeling tradition that already many call anachronistic and inherently flawed appears to be counterintuitive and contrary to the evidence; it is, in fredriksen’s (2008) words, just another way of endorsing the “language of the winners.” in this case, however, the winners are those who succeeded in establishing a hermeneutics of historicity that embraces misnomers as irrefutable facts. siding with the “winners” is not inherently problematic, but attempting to reconstruct the past with terminology that reinforces the reception history of adversus judaeos rhetoric is. after all, it was the repetition of adversus judaeos rhetoric, its concepts the presence of the past 205 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 and argumentation, that kept it alive throughout the centuries. arguably, applying anachronistic terminology to the ancients results in precisely a subtle perpetuation of aspects of the adversus judaeos tradition. when applied to people living in the first century, the label “jews” reduces historical “judeans” or “israelites” to merely rhetorical characters, and the labels “christians,” “christian jews,” and “pagan christian” (fredriksen 2008) classify as historical characters that, from the perspective of the first decades of the first century, are purely rhetorical. in works on historical phenomena, any label other than “christian” and “jew” for the earliest jesus group members is historically more accurate and therefore hermeneutically more desirable. for quite some time now, social scientists and others (see malina and pilch 2006; esler 2003; elliott 2007) have worked hard at dispelling the language ghosts of the past and present and developed alternative vocabulary: judeans, israelites, non-israelites, hellenists, jesus group members, etc. not that i think it necessary that historians pursue “activist” strategies in their writings. however, the reception history of adversus judaeos rhetoric has shown one thing to be true: the written word is never neutral. because adversus judaeos rhetoric is an ugly beast waiting to be unleashed and devour again, repeating the misnomers of the past is rhetorically as powerful as substituting for them historically more accurate (a factual judgment), and therefore better (a value judgment), terminology. references blumenfeld, bruno 2001 the political paul. justice, democracy and kingship in a hellenistic framework. ed. s.e. porter. vol. 210, journal for the study of the new testament supplement series. london: sheffield academic press. boers, hendrikus w. 1994 the justification of the gentiles. paul’s letters to the galatians and romans. peabody: hendrikson. 1997 agápê and xáris in paul’s thought. cbq 59: 693–713. bultmann, r. 1910 der stil der paulinschen predigt und die kynisch-stoische diatribe. göttingen: vandenhoeck und ruprecht. 206 academic roundtable © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 burnett, gary w. 2001 paul and the salvation of the individual. vol. 57, biblical interpretation series. leiden: brill. campbell, douglas a. 2005 the quest for paul’s gospel. a suggested strategy. vol. 274, journal for the study of the new testament supplement series. london: t&t clark. campbell, william s. 2006 paul and the creation of christian identity, library of new testament studies 322. london: clark. carras, george p. 1992. romans 2: 1–29: a dialogue on jewish ideals. biblica 73: 183–207. chae, daniel jong-sang. 1997 paul as apostle to the gentiles. his apostolic self-awareness and its influence on the soteriological argument in romans, pater noster biblical and theological monographs. carlisle: pater noster. cranfield, c.e.b. 1977. a critical and exegetical commentary on the epistle to the romans 1, the international critical commentary on the holy scriptures of the old and new testament. edinburgh: t. & t. clark. dunn, james d.g. 1998 the theology of paul the apostle. grand rapids, mi: eerdmans. elliott, john h. 2007 jesus the israelite was neither a “jew” nor a “christian”: on correcting misleading nomenclature. journal for the study of the historical jesus 5(2): 119–154. doi:10.1177/1476869007079741 esler, philip f. 2003 conflict and identity in romans: the social setting of paul’s letter. minneapolis, mn: fortress. fitzmyer, joseph a. 1993 romans: a new translation with introduction and commentary. vol. 33, the anchor bible. new york: doubleday. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1476869007079741 the presence of the past 207 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 fredriksen, paula 2008 augustine and the jews. a christian defense of jews and judaism. new york: doubleday. gager, john g. 1983 the origins of anti-semitism. attitudes toward judaism in pagan and christian antiquity. oxford: oxford university press. haacker, klaus 1990 der römerbrief als friedensmemorandum. new testament studies 36: 25–41. doi:10.1017/s0028688500010845 lincoln, andrew t. 1995 from wrath to justification. tradition, gospel, and audience in the theology of romans 1:18–4:25. in pauline theology 3: romans, ed. d.m. hay and e.e. johnson. minneapolis, mn: fortress. malina, bruce j. and john j. pilch 2006 social-science commentary on the letters of paul. minneapolis: fortress. mayordomo, moisés 2005 argumentiert paulus logisch? eine analyse vor dem hintergrund antiker logik. vol. 188, wissenschaftliche untersuchungen zum neuen testament. tübingen: mohr siebeck. pesch, rudolf 1983 römerbrief. vol. 6, neue echter bibel nt. würzburg: echter. schreiner, thomas r. 1993 did paul believe in justification by works? another look at romans 2. bulletin for biblical research 3: 131–158. seifrid, mark a. 1992. justification by faith: the origin and development of a central pauline theme. vol. 68, novum testamentum supplements. leiden: brill. 2004 unrighteous by faith: apostolic proclamation in romans 1:18–3:20. in justification and variegated nomism 2: the paradoxes of paul, ed. d.a. carson, p.t. o’brien and m.a. seifrid. tübingen, grand rapids: mohr, baker. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0028688500010845 208 academic roundtable © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 spitaler, peter 2008. diatribe and the construction of a negative pauline anthropology. ephemerides theologicae lovanienses 84(4): 445–475. doi:10.2143/ etl.84.4.2033454 stowers, stanley kent 1981 the diatribe and paul’s letter to the romans. vol. 57, society of biblical literature dissertation series. chico, ca: scholars. stuhlmacher, robert 1989 der brief an die römer. 14 ed. vol. 6, das neue testament deutsch. göttingen, zürich: vandenhoeck & ruprecht. theobald, michael 2000 der römerbrief. vol. 294, beiträge zur forschung. darmstadt: wissenschaftliche buchgesellschaft. thorsteinsson, runar m. 2003. paul’s interlocutor in romans 2. function and identity in the context of ancient epistolography. vol. 40, coniectanea biblica new testament series. stockholm: almqvist & wiksell. tobin, thomas h. 2004 paul’s rhetoric in context. the argument of romans. peabody: hendrickson. watson, f.w. 1986 paul, judaism and the gentiles: a sociological approach. vol. 56, society for new testament studies monograph series. cambridge: cambridge university press. wright, n.t. 2005 paul. fresh perspectives. london: spck. http://dx.doi.org/10.2143/etl.84.4.2033454 http://dx.doi.org/10.2143/etl.84.4.2033454 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expo. 3.1 (2009) 5–21] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v3i1.5 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 if the good were god: platonic meditations on theism james wetzel villanova university james.wetzel@villanova.edu abstract the usual way to relate platonism to theism is to contrast an impersonal conception of the good with a god of absolutely benevolent will. i call into question the usefulness of that contrast and argue for a reading of plato that takes centrally into account socratic service to the god. my overall aim is to suggest that a genuinely philosophical faith tends to defy the distinction between an ethics of will and an ethics of vision. keywords: plato; socrates; theism; ethics; will; murdoch; korsgaard augustine assumed that plato was a monotheist or at least that plato’s philosophy required monotheism as its working presupposition. the most apparent conclusion to draw from plato’s dialogues, however, is that he, like his teacher socrates, believed in many gods and never singled out a particular one of them to be the sum and substance of all goodness. in the euthyphro, plato’s dialogue about the proper object of piety, socrates encounters a self-styled seer by the name of euthyphro, who is about the odd business of prosecuting his own father for impiety. since socrates himself is on his way to trial, to face a charge of impiety, he is naturally anxious to profit from a supposed visionary’s insight into what piety is. as all readers of the dialogue know, euthyphro never delivers on the goods, and the dialogue founders on an unresolved choice: “for consider,” says socrates to euthyphro, “is the holy loved by the gods because it is holy? or is it holy because it is loved by the gods?”1 long after philosophers have ceased to care about gods and the way that gods may be said to love, the choice, in altered form, still beckons us. it could be put this way: do we create the values that shape and mailto;james.wetzel@villanova.edu 6 if the good were god: platonic meditations on theism © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 regulate the life we call human, or do we, as human beings, come to discover these values? this is a choice, seemingly stark and inescapable, between will and vision. most modern readers of plato place him squarely on the visionary side of things, and that is largely the reason why plato has become, in modern times, a distant, if sometimes fond, memory of a more innocent age in the history of philosophy. the mark of the modern in philosophy is a skeptical disposition, directed especially towards alleged revelations of what is good or right. whenever it is possible to question and thereby to discredit knowledge of value, it is a peculiarly modern fixation to want to do so. harvard philosopher christine korsgaard situates the modern in philosophy at the end of what she calls “a very concise history of western metaphysics.”2 i recount here a very concise synopsis of her very concise history. western metaphysics begins with plato, who inherits from his teacher socrates a fundamental puzzlement about value: it is the question of how we arrive at the notion that there is an ideal way for things to be. plato’s framing of this question is what makes him into a metaphysician. he assumes that the ideal world is identical to the real one and that a failure to perceive the convergence of reality and the ultimate good is a curable human blindness. it falls to philosophy to offer that cure. korsgaard attributes to plato a doctrine of the fall, or some accounting of why anyone would have needed that cure in the first place, but she reserves for augustine and the christian era a new focus on human resistance to goodness, styled by augustine and his like as defiance of the will of god. in the turn from plato’s form of the good to augustine’s god, we begin to see, claims korsgaard, the beginnings of a revolution in the history of western metaphysics, though one that has to wait to the modern period, and more particularly to the inspiration of immanuel kant, for its completion. the revolution, in essence, is this: philosophers cease to think of ethics as a task of discerning what the good is and come to the unambiguous realization that values are wholly an expression of human will. “the real,” writes korsgaard, “is no longer the good. for us, reality is something hard, something which resists reason and value, something which is recalcitrant to form” (korsgaard 1996, 4). her name for this something is matter. we live by her reckoning in a material world, not in a james wetzel 7 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 world of ideal forms and not in a providential universe. korsgaard goes on to detail the peculiar form that will must take in order to be expressive of someone’s values, and here she develops kant’s insight into the legislative character of moral freedom. i am free in the kantian sense of freedom only if i can conform my desires to a law of my own making—a law that not only obligates me to act in certain ways, but also obligates any other free being likewise situated to act in those same ways. the alternative is to be so tyrannized by my own desires that my desires fail to express who i am and so, in effect, cease to be desires that are mine. i set out this much of korsgaard’s kantianism just to indicate that she has no fear of the usual complaint against an ethics of will: that it always ends up being an ethics of coercion. she insists, on the contrary, that her interests define an ethics of autonomy and that an ethics of autonomy is the only kind of ethics that makes modern sense. i am not going to pursue korsgaard’s ethics much further. i happen to think that any attempt to resolve the tension between will and vision in ethics in the direction of will is bound to fail. more fundamentally, i believe that this resolution uncritically preserves a bad or at least misleading way of casting the problem. the tension between vision and will in ethics is not as stark as it seems to be, or so i will argue, and without the starkness of that tension, the modern turn in ethics away from reflection upon the religious life is no longer an obvious advance. much of what i have to offer in this essay is a reading of plato that makes it hard to resolve plato’s platonism into a purely philosophical mode of thought, if “purely philosophical” is taken to mean “not religiously invested.” in this regard, i set myself against a platonist i much admire, the novelist and philosopher iris murdoch, who spent a good bit of her career at oxford trying to convince moral philosophers that they needed to reorient ethical reflection to a sovereign conception of the good, something like the traditional notion of god, but more impersonal. in her famous essay, “on god and good,” she defines her ideal good as “a single perfect transcendent non-representable and necessarily real object of attention.”3 her definition is her presumptive answer to the question that socrates poses to euthyphro: it is the holi8 if the good were god: platonic meditations on theism © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 ness of the holy that the gods love, and that holiness is goodness itself. murdoch pitches her cathartic platonism against an unholy modern fascination with sovereign conceptions of will, and she includes kant in her indictment. “his enquiry,” she writes, “led him back again to the self, now pictured as angelic, and inside his angel-self his followers have tended to remain” (murdoch 1998, 368).4 korsgaard’s kantianism and murdoch’s platonism represent the two modern ways of resolving euthyphro’s dilemma. korsgaard opts for will over vision, murdoch vision over will, and both trade in the gods for free and human agents. neither of the two encourages us to imagine that philosophical piety is itself a cross-roads. but what if the sense of holiness that they are each trying to distill is a sense that emerges only when the question of what the gods love becomes inseparable from the question of how they love what they love. any leave-taking of the gods in ethics would first have to take in the force and significance of that conjunction. for all the differences in their theoretical orientations, murdoch and korsgaard share a remarkably similar sense of ethical practice. for both the enemy in ethics is egoism, and for both, the ironic result of surrendering to that enemy is debasement of personality, dissipation of agency, and ultimately an irredeemable loss of self. the governing assumption here is that ego is not true self, but a parody of that self. soul is the traditional name for true self, and as long as soul is not defined against body, murdoch and korsgaard could associate their respective interests in moral philosophy and practical reason with soulcraft. they would resist a dualism of soul and body not because they are materialists and believe that only matter exists, but because the idea of a bodily self—or a self defined solely in terms of a desire to perpetuate indefinitely one particular body—is not a coherent idea of self, and so there is, strictly speaking, no self to be pitted against soul. egoism is self-defeating. one important implication of all this is that death is not the worst thing that can happen to a self. “sometimes doing the wrong thing,” observes korsgaard, “is as bad or worse than death. and for most human beings on most occasions,” she continues, “the only thing that could be as bad as death is something that for us amounts to death—not being ourselves any more” (korsgaard 1996, 17). james wetzel 9 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 in the apology, socrates makes sure that his accusers know of his willingness to suffer death if his alternative is to commit what his guardian spirit—his daimonion—suggests to him is unjust. he likens a socrates who would do otherwise to a soldier-citizen who would desert his post during a pitched battle, preferring his city’s defeat to his own death. he draws the moral of his analogy as follows: “i should indeed have wrought a fearful thing, gentlemen of athens, if then, when the god stationed me, as i thought and believed, obliging me to live in the pursuit of wisdom, examining myself and others—if then, at that point through fear of death or any other thing, i left my post” (apology 28e– 29a; allen 1984, 91–92). the limitation of this kind of piety, if i may for a moment affect the side of the greeks who distrusted socrates, is that service to the god seems defined only in terms of what it is not: it is not, for instance, service to the city, or the body politic. in that light, the analogy that socrates holds between courage in battle and perseverance in philosophy is apt to be misleading, for it seems to mask the fact that philosophy and politics aim at very different ends. to the lover of the body politic—of the nation, the city, the tribe—there is no higher goal than the perpetuation of this body; to the philosopher, however, there are worse things to suffer than the death of one’s polis. it is the job of the philosopher to help others not to confuse soul with the various forms that a body takes: political and otherwise. socrates deems himself to be divinely commissioned to perpetuate only the philosophical life, and this life, as he construes it, is neither one of politics nor of private ambition. the chief accuser of socrates in the apology is meletus, who speaks on behalf of the poets, the supposed visionaries of athenian society. meletus has an inconsistent sense of the impiety that he hopes to pin on socrates. he speaks of socrates as an atheist, or one who acknowledges no god, and as a heretic, or one who acknowledges gods that are unfamiliar to the traditions of the city. it doesn’t take a dialectical giant to poke holes in his indictment. when socrates pays his respects to the god who launched him upon his philosophical vocation, he presumably refers to the god of the delphic oracle, the olympian who is traditionally associated with the art of prophecy. apollo is not new to athens by any stretch of the imagination. and a man who invokes this 10 if the good were god: platonic meditations on theism © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 god’s authority and stakes his life upon it can hardly be considered an atheist. but there is a logic behind the apparent confusion of meletus, and the real poverty of his indictment lies other than in its inconsistency. suppose that you lived in a society where personal ambition had come to supplant the rule of law, and a minority of powerful individuals used violence and the threat of violence to tyrannize everyone else. what would it take to transform the politics of such a society? perhaps a start would be to remove the tyrants forcibly, either by way of internal revolution or by way of external intervention. such a start, however, would be only a start. if the vision of the people liberated remained limited to the happiness of personal ambition, a game where someone has to lose in order for someone to win, then the forcible removal of tyrants would simply pave the way for new tyrants. a likely first transformation of this hypothetical society’s political vision would be a collective move from personal egoism, where soul and body get conflated, to political egoism, where soul and body politic get conflated. in the move from personal to political egoism, individuals begin to identify their individual happiness with the prosperity of their polis, and it is this identification that gives them their sense of a higher self or soul. political egoists can envision something worse than their own physical deaths, but nothing worse than the defeat of their collective. athens is fabled in the narrative of the western civilization for its democratic politics; the darker side of its story, more rarely underscored, is the imperialism that led athens to exercise and eventually overtax its military might against its neighbors, most famously the spartans. the athens that condemned socrates to death in 399 bce was a fragile democracy, exhausted from its long years of conflict with sparta and her allies, barely recovered from the indignities of a military coup— the reign of the so-called thirty tyrants, and no longer buttressed by its once heady sense of imperialistic adventurism. in the abstraction that i am calling “political egoism,” there is an essential connection between the transcendence of personal egoism within the polis and its re-emergence, on a larger scale, in the relationship of one people or polis to another. the athenian male citizen who identifies with athens out of political egoism is going to view the citizens of other city-states james wetzel 11 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 as rivals to be exploited or conquered. political egoism is the rule of every polis for itself; preemptive conquest is its ideal. i will leave it to historians of ancient greece to determine the actual degree of intimacy between athenian democracy and imperialism. for my purposes, it is enough to note that plato’s character meletus, who represents the athens who feared and hated socrates, seems to be a political egoist. of course it makes no difference to meletus whether socrates is an atheist or a heretic. if socrates does not endorse the civic theology of athens, or some notion of powerful gods who favor the city’s interests, he will seem to the likes of a meletus to be reverting to personal egoism and therefore failing as a citizen. to a political egoist, the essence of impiety is not disbelief or wrong belief but a privatization of belief. in that regard, socrates clearly didn’t do much to help his case when he invoked the authority of his daimonion, his guardian spirit, at his trial. to the political egoists in the jury, his daimonion would seem a dangerously private source of religious authority. despite the rich anecdote that socrates recounts about his experience with the delphic oracle and his subsequent service to the god, the apology tells us relatively little about the substance of socrates’ theological convictions. plato gives us there a socrates who believes in the existence of gods and purports to serve one god in particular, but we don’t know what kind of being socrates takes a god to be. all we know is that a majority of the citizens in athens come to be convinced that the socratic notion of what a god is must be dangerously different from what their notion is. in other dialogues, notably the symposium and the republic, socrates does appear to have clear and definitive theological convictions, and most students of plato—both ancient and modern—have tended to assume that these convictions must have been plato’s as well, if not plato’s alone, and put by him into the mouth of his departed teacher. in books ii and iii of the republic, plato depicts socrates as wanting to discredit the educational value of stories that make gods out to be lusty and competitive beings who vie with one another and with mortals for sex, power, and glory. those who listen to homer and the other great poets of greek society would hear stories like that, and this worries socrates. we know from the conversation he reports having had with the priestess diotima, a shadowy 12 if the good were god: platonic meditations on theism © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 figure in the symposium, what socrates himself is apt to teach about the gods: that they are perfect beings, content and complete in their beauty and goodness, and beyond all prospect of loss. such beings would be constitutionally incapable of competitiveness and envy, in that they lack the motive that is essential to all competitive beings: the desire to be the one and only. for most of the years i have been reading plato, i have passed over his critique of olympian fundamentalism with something of a yawn. i took it to be self-evident that abstractly perfect beings would be better representatives of hypothetical divinity than the colorful characters who populate the greek myths, and that the greeks who read their myths as history were, to put it charitably, naïve. more recently i have come to believe that my own presumption of philosophical sophistication here—which betrays a very conventional intellectual prejudice against anthropomorphic theology—is itself naïve. it is in fact not selfevident at all that perfect-being theology is always educationally or even intellectually superior to anthropomorphic alternatives. consider that what’s behind plato’s strictures against, so to speak, the use of homer in the classroom is a worry about too uncritical a reliance on mimetic or imitative strategies of education. one plausible way to make citizens into better citizens is to offer them exemplars of the most desirable behavior, heroes for them to emulate. mimetic strategies of education dramatize the ethical life and reward aspiring actors—or citizens in the making—for playing their parts well. the surface problem with using homer or the greek tragedians for dramatizing the ethical life is that the dramatization will be inconsistent. homeric or tragic heroes seek to be like gods who are driven by conflicting forces. the gods don’t get along with one another, and at times they seem not even to get along with themselves. perfect-being theology seeks to remedy the problem by cleaning up the way the gods are represented: perfect gods will inspire perfect heroes, and perfect heroes will inspire model citizens. a little reflection, however, will betray the limits of this solution. you can train people from an early age to act in ways that are deemed by the community at large to be noble and generous and self-disregarding, but you cannot expect that all the teachers of the people will have themselves learned about what is noble and generous and self-disregarding james wetzel 13 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 through imitation. at some point someone in the polis must have simply seen and recognized goodness for what it is and been transformed by the recognition. the poor soul in plato’s cave analogy who is forcibly dragged from the familiarity of a shadow world of values and into a harsh and unfamiliar light is perhaps plato’s representation of just such a person: this is not someone who sees because of having suffered but someone who has not let his suffering eclipse his desire to see. maybe socrates is this kind of person, but bear in mind that it is socrates who reminds us in book x of the republic, the book on the nature of mimesis, that the best kind of life is both hard to imitate and hard to recognize when imitated. the characters in the platonic dialogues who look to socrates to mimic their connection to the good come off either as faintly ridiculous (if they are young and naïve) or as dangerously needy (if they are young and clever). plato’s socrates appears to be a different kind of hero. you do not become a better person by imitating how he acts; you become a better person by coming to love what he loves, and that is not a matter of imitation. although plato was clearly alive to the dangers that bad examples posed to education by example, he was more concerned, i think, to expose the confusion between education and acculturation. meletus is right to suspect that socrates does not share the conventional piety of the city, but not because socrates is some wild-eyed iconoclast in search of new gods. piety that is philosophical cannot be conventional, for conventions are conveyed by habit and philosophy is a selfreflective art. piety that is other than philosophical is a veiled form of egoism. it is not surprising that meletus cannot give the right name to the way that socrates worships. meletus has no conception of what it would mean to serve gods bigger than his city’s ambitions for selfpromotion. if you stick your nose into a culture that has sanctified some form of political egoism, the egoism of the tribe, you are likely to see semblances of courage and self-restraint, but little that resembles justice, and you won’t get even a whiff of wisdom. socrates makes himself unpopular in athens by pressing his fellow citizens—the politicians, the entertainers, the technicians—for the whole of wisdom, or some accounting of the good of goods. they offer him the sort of accounts 14 if the good were god: platonic meditations on theism © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 that one might expect from politicians, entertainers, and technicians who presume to know what the whole of wisdom is, and he leaves them resisting the knowledge of their own ignorance. philosophy is risky as a vocation, and plato tries to take some measure of that risk in the philosophical dramas we call his dialogues. the risk to socrates in the apology is partly to his own life, as he is on trial for a capital offense, but more fundamentally it is to his sense of his life’s worth, his commitment to philosophy. one striking aspect of the platonic dialogues is plato’s willingness to dramatize the failure of socrates to convert the hearts of those who are overtly hostile to the philosophical life or even to move very much the hearts of those who profess an interest. from a philosophical point of view, the apology of socrates before the athenian assembly seems to fail; he does not dissuade the city he loves from unjustly condemning him. socrates believes that it is injustice, and not the physical separation of the soul from the body, that is truly harmful to the soul, and yet he lacks the words to prevent many of his peers from acting wrongly and inflicting the harm of injustice upon themselves. if his commitment to philosophy is to be other than an exotic form a personal egotism, a private quest for wisdom, he has to care about this lack. plato does depict him as caring. when socrates reappears in the phaedo, the dialogue that recounts his execution-day discussion with a small group of his more devoted students, we are met at first with a socrates who is uncharacteristically unsure of himself. he wonders whether he had understood the god correctly. perhaps he should have been devoting his life to a more popular form of art, such as the setting of aesop’s fables to verse— the ancient equivalent of composing nursery rhymes. he pulls himself together as his friends and followers engage him in a reflection on the soul’s immortality, and by the dialogue’s end, he departs his mortal life with some assurance that he leaves behind a few people who have yet to despair of philosophy’s promise. but the cautiously hopeful ending of the phaedo does nothing to diminish the sense i have from many of the dialogues, the phaedo included, that philosophical faith is a rare and fragile beauty. i use the word “faith” deliberately here, and for now i take knowledge or illumination to be faith’s contrast. the students of philosophy who visit james wetzel 15 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 socrates on the day of his death want his final words to them to conquer their own respective fears of death. he cannot do as they want, however, in that fear of death is conquered only in the knowledge of what is supremely alive, some vision of soul; words can redirect the attention, but they cannot be its object. all so-called arguments for the immortality of the soul, as most every reader of the phaedo comes to recognize, are bound to be inconclusive. if some of the characters in the phaedo manage not to be discouraged by this inconclusiveness and the lack of vision it exposes, it is because they have let their love of socrates make up for some of what their vision lacks. modern readers of the dialogue, or the least the ones who wish to live a philosophical life, will have to find their own analogue to this love. in iris murdoch’s platonism, the real object of philosophical love is not a person or a thing but the good that is necessarily beyond representation. she is prepared to call this good god, but only on the proviso that god not be understood in personal terms or as any kind of agent of purpose. the recognition that “all is vanity” is, in her words, “the beginning and end of ethics” (murdoch 1998, 358). her understanding of god is far enough from the more traditional notion of a creator who gives order and purpose to creation that she is quite prepared to concede that she has given up on god. “we are,” she writes, “what we seem to be, transient mortal creatures subject to necessity and chance. this is to say,” she goes on to explain, “that there is, in my view, no god in the traditional sense of that term; and the traditional sense is perhaps the only sense” (murdoch 1998, 365). i recall murdoch to your attention for two reasons principally. first, she has been illustrating a peculiarly modern theological turn: belief in sin, disbelief in grace. murdoch is ready to presuppose the ethical disfigurement of the human psyche, or the universal human disposition to confuse ego with soul, but she is loathe to credit the redemptive side of the religious mythology: the part that invokes divine aid and intervention. second, because she herself represents this theological turn as an exclusively philosophical maneuver and does so at least partly under plato’s authority, she reinforces the prejudice, common among philosophers, that more modern and more philosophical readings of plato will down-play all talk of gods in the dialogues. i have 16 if the good were god: platonic meditations on theism © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 been giving you a reading of plato, the apology especially, that does not down-play philosophy’s connection to religious service—service to the god, as socrates puts it. i now want to consider more carefully whether this service to the god is finally, upon analysis, a way to keep a god from becoming the love-object of philosophy. socrates does not, after all, equate apollo or any of the olympians with wisdom. wisdom is what a god has, not what some god is. the possibility may still exist, however, that plato himself is not ultimately opposed to the deification of wisdom. first let’s pause to consider the virtues of what i have been calling “olympian fundamentalism.” suppose that you live in a culture that venerates homer as an educator, that you yourself take his epic works, the iliad and the odyssey, as your bible, with some hesiod thrown in for good measure, and that you tend to revere your bible more than you struggle to interpret its narrative possibilities. what sort of theology are you likely to think of as biblical? i suspect that you wouldn’t be able to help but notice that your gods are a factious and spirited lot of beings whose desires for sex and conquest can be sources of heavenly as well as earthly chaos. one of those gods, the olympian zeus, will seem to you mostly more clever and powerful than the other gods of his generation; zeus imposes his own order of patriarchal law upon olympian diversity and then shapes the interactions of gods with mortals to suit his own, often inscrutable, ends. you wouldn’t have to be a terribly astute reader, however, to notice that zeus’s power is limited by the very forces he hopes to control. the desires of both gods and mortals for an ever greater share of love and beauty, desires that are mythically associated with the goddess aphrodite and her son eros, make for a less-than-secure olympian order and in fact ensure its mortality. the theology i have just sketched, which pits the patriarchal law of zeus against the chaotic but also generative powers of aphrodite, is a particularly good theology for you to take to heart, if you happen to be a political egoist. your temptation as a political egoist will be to strive for the unqualified dominance of your tribe’s way of life over whatever is felt to rival it, but your theology will remind you that unqualified dominance escapes the rule of even the most powerful of gods and so is not a human possibility. if you were a deep reader of your myths, james wetzel 17 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 you would realize that a unified, undisturbed, eternal rule of a willful god or coalition of gods would not even be an ideal possibility. if zeus were to be able to regulate the lives of gods and mortals perfectly, so as to rule out both good and bad surprises, he will have deprived all beings, himself included, of visions of the beautiful. it does zeus no good to, in effect, kill off aphrodite, for then he rules over a stagnant and lifeless world and becomes a parody of his brother hades. but if you were able to think about zeus this way, you wouldn’t be much of a political egoist. assuming that olympian fundamentalism has the modest virtue i am attributing to it—some ability, that is, to set an imaginative limit to egoistic fantasies about power—it is all the more remarkable that plato’s socrates would have offered to his fellow athenians a theology of perfectly compatible beings, all of whom love the same good. plato must have assumed that the political egoism of his potential readers would not be native to their souls, but would instead represent a partially remembered knowledge of the good, taken prematurely by them to be complete; otherwise his dialogues offer no hope of an expanded political vision, and plato risks corrupting his readers in the way that many athenians thought socrates was corrupting their city. the doctrine of a mysterious good, known only to someone intimately familiar with divine psychology, supports theocracy or rule by a tyrannous priesthood. i say “tyrannous” because here the power of the priesthood rests on priests claiming an exclusive knowledge of what the gods want and on everyone else buying into their claim. being subject to wisdom that is alien to your knowledge is the classically greek conception of being tyrannized. the athenians who fear socrates fear that he either possesses such an alien wisdom or that he is able to convince others, especially young, ambitious men, that he does. readers who distrust plato generally distrust what they read as his priestly devotion to a single, unifying form of the good, vision of which is given only to the rarest of philosophers. murdoch tries to disencumber her platonism from its traditional burden of suspicion by being prepared to insist on the difference between loving the one good and loving the one god, but more fundamentally by distancing philosophical love of the one good from claims to special 18 if the good were god: platonic meditations on theism © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 or privileged information. if the love-object of philosophy really is, in her language, “a single perfect transcendent non-representable and necessarily real object of attention,” then either this object altogether falls outside the categories of knowledge, and no one can ever be said to know what the good is, or the knowledge is so highly idiosyncratic and personal that it fails to suggest possibilities for the common good. neither possibility gives much aid or comfort to theocratic ambitions. still it seems odd for murdoch to claim that an object that is both transcendent and non-representable is also necessarily real and an object of attention. objects that offer themselves to human attention can hardly be said to transcend human attention, and her designation of one singular object of attention as “necessarily real” sounds very much like an attempt at representation. but i don’t think that murdoch is really being inconsistent. i take her description of the good, or her impersonal god, to be an educational directive and not some report of an extraordinary, apparently mystical, discovery. let it be stipulated that there is a good beyond all corruption and that this good is eternally other to any good that any one of us seems to possess or is able to manipulate to serve private or political ends. the force of this stipulation is to depersonalize goodness and direct the ethical life away from ego-interests. the actual object of attention here is the ugly partiality and imperfection of ego-interests; the beauty of goodness itself is assumed to be beyond representation. it is, in fact, the stipulation of the good’s transcendence that makes sustained attention to the partiality of ego-interests possible. i have already alluded to murdoch’s sense of her own distance from a traditional theism. it should be clearer now why she wants to keep her distance. personified notions of the good, such as that of an exalted father or a beloved son, cater to the ego’s need to be singled out and adored. let’s say that i resolve to debase myself in order to serve a being i consider uniquely worthy of adoration; i am not psychologically too far from turning my debasement into a uniquely worthy and meritorious kind of service—a form of indirect, yet potent, ego-gratification. the psychological irony i am referring to here is, i suspect, familiar to most anyone who has reflected on the virtue of humility. it may seem obvious at first that the depersonalization of god into the good would james wetzel 19 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 circumvent the irony and help humility’s cause. we do not expect, after all, to be praised or rewarded by an impersonal object of attention. seen from a different angle, however, service to an impersonal good hands the work of ego-reform over to the ego. i work at seeking the good, but since i cannot expect the good to aid me in my work, it is easy enough for me to slip into the idea that my seeking is the real good. the best part about the impersonal good will then be its absence. it seems to me that if the main question in ethics is, how are egointerests to be kept at bay?, then the choice between fidelity to a sublimely impersonal good and submission to a sovereignly divine will isn’t finally much of a choice. the options are equally good and equally bad at answering the question. it is nevertheless a peculiarly modern fascination to be fascinated with this kind of choice and to pit an ethics of vision against an ethics of will. part of what drives this fascination is a failure, or perhaps a refusal, to recognize that the ethical difference between vision and will can’t really a difference between vision and will. if we find ourselves having to choose between seeing the good and willing it, we are left, in effect, with a choice between paralysis and blindness. my own inclination, when faced with this crossroads, is not to choose a direction, but to turn around and retrace my steps. how far would i have to go back before the stark choice between vision and will would begin to seem other than inevitable? the longstanding preoccupation i have had with history of philosophy has been sustained by my hope that there is such a point, a period in time, to be recollected, and that its recollection might ease the iron grip on the mind of some modern dichotomies: particularly the ones that have made modernity such an impoverished time for thinking philosophically about religion. i have returned to plato, as i have many times before, hoping to remember something different about the difference between vision and will, something different about the crossroads between the good and god. it may seem to you that i have gone too far back, that i should have stopped with someone like augustine, for whom plato’s good is god’s idea—an idea that incarnates perfectly in christ and so confirms humanity as a human ideal. i have in fact pondered augustine’s christian platonism a great deal, and i have come to two fundamental conclusions about it, both quite controversial: one is that his christianity 20 if the good were god: platonic meditations on theism © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 is unintelligible apart from his platonism, and the other is that his platonism is less a doctrine than an expression of philosophical piety. so while i tend to think that augustine was wrong to think that plato was a monotheist, i nevertheless believe that augustine’s theistic plato is better than the modern alternative. iris murdoch has been my representative modern platonist. she takes as plato’s cardinal virtue what many others have considered his worst vice: his near obsession with visual metaphors for ethical transformation. to become better is for plato always to see more fully, more soulfully; to grow worse is to become narrow-sighted, dazzled, or blind. i happen to share murdoch’s enthusiasm for the visual register of ethics, but not her sense of how this register is to be delimited. in plato you won’t find a contrast between vision and will; instead you will be invited into the drama that a difference in ambition makes: there is, ideally, the education that seeks the good in beauty and looks to the redemption of pleasure, and there is, alternatively, the use of visions of ugliness to curb intemperate and undisciplined human desire. what if the will is not, after all, an autonomous realm of the psyche, overlooked by plato and discovered by modern moralists, but a strategy of human betterment that privileges negative self-imaging? offer people the prospect of a self that repels them, and the assumption is that they will strive to become something else. the problem with this unrelenting war against the ego is that the war heroes, the pure altruists, who live to make an offering of self, can make it only to the war criminals, the pure egoists, who would be corrupted by the offering. in between fall the rest of us, who must find some utilitarian bromide for dulling the pain of this contradiction. i am fairly certain that shame, suffering, and want will continue to be fixtures along the route to human self-knowledge and wisdom, but i am equally skeptical of a wisdom that would give us confident use of these devices in the cause of education or redemption. in plato’s cave analogy, the necessity that forces a soul’s ascent to better light differs in kind from the necessity that compels a soul to bring a torch of philosophical desire into the underworld of human politics and personal ambition. the latter necessity, if i understand it at all, has something to do with the need to spare others or perhaps a forgotten part of onejames wetzel 21 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 self from a painful education, or put more positively, the necessity is a reminder that some kinds of desire have to be drawn out rather than forced—a question of beauty. we can speak of this drawing out either as the seduction of goodness or as the work of god. these ways of speaking make different kinds of sense, good and bad, depending on what kind of necessity is most driving our sense of ethical urgency. but if we take a page out of plato, we will always try to keep in mind that no one ever leaves a cave of ignorance friendless. notes 1. euthyphro 10a. the translation is allen 1984, 50. 2. this is the preface to her tanner lectures, published as korsgaard 1996. the volume includes responses from g.a. cohen, raymond geuss, thomas nagel, and bernard williams. 3. her essay can be found reprinted in murdoch 1998. for her definition of the sovereign good, see page 344. 4. from her essay “the sovereignty of good over other concepts”, also reprinted in murdoch 1998. references allen, r.e., trans. 1984 the dialogues of plato: volume i. new haven, ct: yale university press. korsgaard, christine 1996 the sources of normativity. cambridge: cambridge university press. murdoch, iris 1998 existenialists and mystics: writings on philosophy and literature. ed. peter conradi. new york: penguin. © equinox publishing ltd. 2009, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expo. 3.2 (2009) 229–237] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v3i2.229 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 book reviews bound to remember gregory hoskins villanova university jeffrey blustein. the moral demands of memory. new york: cambridge university press, 2008. $24.99 pb. isbn-13: 9780521709729. the scope of jeffrey blustein’s the moral demands of memory is immense. his overall project in the book is to examine [h]ow and why memory should be preserved and transmitted, … the reciprocal relationship between memory and [individual and collective] identity and the moral significance of this relationship, and … the moral responsibilities associated with memory. (2) however, in the course of his investigations he takes up such substantive sub-issues as: the necessity and obligation for individuals and for groups to actively take responsibility for the past; the links between historical injustice and collective identity and the role of memory in doing justice to the past; the relations between myth, collective memory, and historical inquiry; the responsibility to remember the dead and especially those closest to us; and the obligation to bear witness to the past. in what follows i do not attempt to survey the entire book; rather, i limit myself to highlighting what i take to be three distinctive, significant features of his analysis: the necessity and obligation to actively take responsibility for one’s individual, particular past; the obligation to remember the dead, and especially those to whom blustein refers as the “dear departed”; and, finally, the possible role of shame in the context of attempts to do justice for past collective injustice. to underscore the timely relevance of blustein’s book, i will organize my review around two events reported in the general media during the spring of 2009. c 230 book reviews © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 in february 2009 the new york times reported in the “city” section of the paper on the strange case of hannah upp. upp can remember going out for a jog along riverside drive on august 28, 2008, but she remembers nothing again until waking up in an ambulance on september 16, three weeks later, after having been fished out of the hudson river. her doctors informed her that she suffered from a rare condition called “dissociative fugue,” a form of amnesia in which a person forgets her personal identity from anywhere between a few minutes to several years. about the experience of which she has no memory, upp commented, “it’s weird. how do you feel guilty for something you didn’t even know you did? it’s not your fault, but it’s still somehow you. so it’s definitely made me reconsider everything. who was i before? who was i then—is that part of me? who am i now?” upp’s question, “who am i?” captures the stakes of the link between memory and personal identity that blustein explicates in the first and the second chapters of his book. since john locke, philosophers have recognized that memory constitutes a key component in the unity and continuity of the “biographical self,” of personal identity in the sense of “the characteristics, actions, and experiences that make someone the person she is” (41). a loss of memory would thus “confound our sense of who we are,” as evidenced in upp’s questions (43). not only is memory a necessary component of personal identity, but being responsible and taking responsibility for our past are essential features of the ethical life, of self-knowledge and of self-respect and esteem. to quote blustein at length: [t]aking responsibility for one’s past is morally important and desirable for the individual to do … for it is also a way of taking oneself seriously and is necessary if one is to have a realistic, responsible conception of oneself. its importance is to be explained, therefore, partly in terms of what is essentially to leading a good human life, because these are plausibly regarded as constitutive ingredients of it. a person who does not come to terms with and take responsibility for important aspects of his past, or who selectively and defensively takes responsibility for only certain portions of it, will likely have only a superficial understanding of his abilities, inclinations, and attitudes. (40) it is a curious feature of upp’s experience that she feel ethically implibook reviews 231 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 cated for presumably the difficulties she caused for her family, friends, and the authorities: “it’s textbook that you feel shame, you feel embarrassed, you feel guilt—all things i’ve definitely felt.” we can make sense of her feelings of responsibility to some extent if we attend to the process of taking responsibility for one’s past. in chapter two, titled indeed “taking responsibility for one’s own past,” blustein explicates key features of this process. unlike merely accepting, however willingly or grudgingly, one’s responsibility for the past, taking responsibility for the past is an action implicating one’s agency that has “forward-looking” dimensions. he explains, “as a forward task, it involves two stages: a voluntary undertaking and a commitment to follow through, and it entails a readiness to answer for or give an accounting of our failures to do so” (65). there are, for primarily analytic purposes, three elements of taking responsibility for the past. first, taking responsibility for the past involves the “retrospective construction of meaning” (66–69). the specific details of the past are not changed—this is not an aspiration towards affecting an impossible backward causality—but the significance, the point or lesson, of the past is altered in light of “one’s present choices and actions.” for instance, the lesson a person derives from a particularly uncomfortable memory of a failed venture may change from “never try that again” to something like, “try that again, but be careful not to make the same mistakes.” the second element of taking responsibility for the past involves “appropriating” it (69–74). this process of appropriation involves “actively taking up the past and annexing it to and integrating it with the present.” a person can appropriate past events in which one’s agency is directly or indirectly implicated. to mitigate the undeniable voluntaristic character of taking responsibility for one’s past blustein points out that we can take responsibility for past events in which one suffered some event or the actions of another or others, and he associates this entire process with having a proper sense of “humility,” with recognizing that “one’s agency is impure and that one’s control is limited, not only by one’s physical characteristics and the things that befall one but also by one’s prior exercises of agency” (90–91). although it would be morally perverse to claim, for example, that upp is directly responsi232 book reviews © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 ble for her actions during the lost time, she seems to be compelled to become, in blustein’s words, “active with respect to it by what [she] does now, by including it within the ambit of [her] agency.” finally, the process of taking responsibility for the past involves “thematization” (74–76). to thematize one’s past is to narrate it; it is to organize the events in one’s life into meaningful patterns, to identify “motifs and patterns” in one’s past and to draw connections between them. we “make sense of the present in the light of some aspect of one’s past,” he explains. that upp is appropriating and thematizing her past is evidenced in part by her claims that in the weeks following her return, i’ve gotten a time to really appreciate what normal life is like. i’ve never had a moment in my life where i’ve just stopped and said, hold on, let’s re-evaluate everything … if you work through it, you can usually go on to live a normal life. it is not a coincidence that blustein’s explication of the process of taking responsibility for one’s past primarily concerned taking responsibility for what we might call the difficult past. people are much more likely to embrace their past achievements and moments of joy and to attempt to evade, elide, or otherwise ignore past suffering or failure. therefore, the most original, i believe, and provocative component of blustein’s project is a sustained analysis of our obligations of remembrance in relation to those with whom the language of “obligations of remembrance” loses whatever negative connotations it might carry: our friends and especially the “dear departed, person we have loved, cherished, and/or esteemed, and who have no just been significant in our lives but have mattered to us, and who have no passed away” (245; blustein’s italics). citing kierkegaard, blustein argues that the efforts to remember the dear departed are a work of love in which we value the person now dead as she was when alive (253–257). blustein divides the arguments for our obligations to remember the dead into two categories: consequentialist and expressivist arguments. with the first category of arguments, the possible benefits fo fulfilling the obligation are decisive. there are, for example, political and/ or therapeutic reasons to remember the dead because “doing so can be expected to promote or embody a better state of affairs [now and in the future] than available alternatives.” with the second category of book reviews 233 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 arguments, the character or quality of our various relationships to the living and the dead are significant. according to blustein, “we ought to remember the dead not (or not only) because we ought to bring about certain consequences … but because certain attitudes are called for toward the dead and we express them in how we remember” (266). blustein offers three expressivist arguments for the obligation to remember the dear departed (261–266). the first argument is the “rescue from insignificance view.” we remember the dead in order to express respect for the dignity of that person having existed and thereby to affirm “that their lives had a point not even death can reduce to insignificance” (272–273). the second argument is the “enduring duties view.” we have, he argues, “duties appropriate to the dear departed flow [that] from or instantiate duties of love and honor, among others” (273). finally, blustein argues for the “reciprocity view.” we remember the dead because we too hope to be remembered. although the reciprocity view resembles a consequentialist argument, it is not (simply) one because in desiring to be remembered as well a person expresses a “fidelity to the tradition of remembering” itself (280). c in the same month that blustein finished writing the preface of his book—february 2007—the international committee of the red cross submitted a confidential report to the american central intelligence agency on the treatment of fourteen “high value detainees” in cia custody. that report was leaked to mark danner, a professor of journalism at berkeley and of foreign affairs, politics, and the humanities at bard, who then made the findings public in the spring of 2009. the descriptions of detainee treatment in that report, along with descriptions of treatment included in the us senate armed services committee’s investigation titled “inquiry into the treatment of detainees in us custody” released in april of 2009, include, in the words of the icrc report, “descriptions of treatment and interrogation techniques—singly, or in combination—that amounted to torture and/or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” although the practice of torture was officially ended by president barack obama on his first day in office in january 2009, the issue, 234 book reviews © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 explains danner, “could not be more important, for it cuts to the basic question of who we are as americans.” the issue also goes to the heart of blustein’s analysis contained primarily in chapter three, “doing justice to the past.” in this chapter he is concerned with understanding the relationship between collective identity, past injustice, and the processes of taking responsibility for, of doing justice to, that past. to his credit, blustein does not uncritically draw an analogy between individuals and groups, but he does argue that the processes by which individuals take responsibility for their past can “illuminate” the processes by which groups do justice to their past: collective appropriation of the wrongs of the past is similar in the following (limited) respect: it opens up possibilities for managing the influence of the past and enables the construction of a future that is not merely an uncritical recapitulation of the past. furthermore, although it may be unfair to blame a group for wrongs done in the past, we may be justified in blaming a group for failing to collectively exercise its capacity to determine what its influence and significance will be and for failing to fulfill its duties of response. (148) it is not possible to summarize all of the issues raised and arguments offered by blustein in this chapter and in the fourth, “ethics, truth and collective memory,” and so in what follows i offer an outline of what i take to be one of the most significant and under-theorized issues that he analyses: the possible role of collective shame in motivating the process of doing justice for past injustice. the notion of collective shame, according to blustein, does not entail a commitment to some mysterious “collective consciousness that exists independently of human minds.” rather, it is “a function of the understanding, psychological resources, and common knowledge of members of a group” (151). following bernard williams, blustein explains that shame concerns what a group is—it implicates the identity of the group, and it follows upon the recognition of a debt and responsibility that we receive—whereas guilt concerns what a group has done—it implicates collective agency. blustein’s analysis of collective shame is nicely nuanced. he elucidates the genuine notion of collective shame by distinguishing it from other, inadequate characterizations of group shame. collective shame is not book reviews 235 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 “aggregated individual shame,” the shame “experienced by people who happen to be members of the same group” (152). what is missing from aggregated individual shame is mention about what specifically the individuals are ashamed and how this shame specifically concerns being a member of that group. however, collective shame is also not “aggregated membership shame,” shame “experienced by members of a group in relation to some (the same) action or practice of it” (154). the intensity of identification with a group can vary, and members who do not feel a strong allegiance to the group may not be disposed to feel anything in relation to it. more importantly, aggregated membership shame can occur even if only a few members of the group know or are aware of that about which they are ashamed. genuine collective shame, in contrast, is “openly communicated and communally shared” (155). consequently, blustein defines genuine collective shame in the following manner: shared membership shame: group shame is truly collective when and only when there is shame over something the group has done that is widespread among the members of the group, the shame is publicly expressed and socially unifying, and it is aroused by actions or practices that call into question the group’s fidelity to its collective normative self-conception. (156) the question of the guilt of those who authorized, carried out, or who had the power to try to prevent (doctors, lawyers) the torture of detainees in american custody to one side, it is of course very much an open question whether the majority of americans have or will experience a shared membership shame that motivates them—that motivates us—to do justice to those we tortured. it is to blustein’s credit that he has emphasized the vital importance of these issues and has provided us the conceptual tools to think through them. c in the opening pages of the moral demands of memory, blustein identifies his target readership: philosophers working in the analytic, or the anglo-american, tradition. although, as he acknowledges, the subject of memory has a long history in certain branches of philosophy, such as in metaphysics and epistemology, “evaluative inquiry about memory 236 book reviews © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 has been curiously neglected” by these philosophers (1). philosophers trained in traditions that have not, for the most part, neglected evaluative inquiry about memory—for example, existential phenomenology, hermeneutics, or critical theory—will likely find many of the rudimentary moves, and especially the work in the first chapter, “memory as a subject of evaluative inquiry,” unremarkable though competent. further, philosophers not accustomed to confining their thinking within strict disciplinary boundaries will likely be surprised by the absence of references to important thinkers of memory and identity who blur the distinctions between philosophy and theology. blustein credits john locke with linking identity to memory, but augustine of hippo also raised these issues, over a thousand years earlier, in book x of his confessions, as he wandered through the vast fields of his memory in search of himself and his god. furthermore, along with nietzsche, walter benjamin deserves credit for insisting that we late/post-moderns should attend to the demand for rectifying justice. benjamin’s famous observation on the moral-political call for justice that comes out of the past—“our coming was expected on earth. then, like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak messianic power, a power on which the past has a claim. such a claim cannot be settled cheaply”—could have served as an apt header for blustein’s third and fourth chapter. despite these limitations, blustein’s book could productively be read alongside paul ricoeur’s similarly concerned but simultaneously more comprehensive and more detailed study memory, history, forgetting (2004). given his range of concerns, it is perhaps inevitable that blustein’s analyses are frequently schematic. however, this lack of detailed argumentation is mitigated to a large extent by a clear, accessible exposition supplemented with copious, detailed endnotes. large sections of the moral demands of memory, and particularly those outlined above above, are thought provoking and insightful. blustein’s book deserves a readership greater than the one he intended. references danner, mark 2009 the red cross torture report: what it means. the new york review of book reviews 237 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 books, vol. 56, no. 7, april 30. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22614. international committee for the red cross 2007 report on the treatment of fourteen “high value detainees” in cia custody. http://www.nybooks.com/icrc-report.pdf. marx, rebecca and vytenis dibziulis 2009 a life, interrupted. new york times, march 1, city section. http://www. nytimes.com/2009/03/01/nyregion/thecity/01miss.html?emc=eta1 ricoeur, paul 2004 memory, history, forgetting. tr. by kathleen blamey and david pellauer. chicago, il: the university of chicago press. https://webaccess.villanova.edu/owa/redir.aspx?c=1880e513a8824ab69c25603b45261dd4&url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.nybooks.com%2farticles%2f22614 https://webaccess.villanova.edu/owa/redir.aspx?c=1880e513a8824ab69c25603b45261dd4&url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.nybooks.com%2ficrc-report.pdf http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/nyregion/thecity/01miss.html?emc=eta1 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/nyregion/thecity/01miss.html?emc=eta1 10wolfe.indd © equinox publishing ltd. 2008, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expositions 2.1 (2008) 111–128] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v2i1.111 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 review article the evolution of evolution theory and its controversies andrea d. wolfe the ohio state university keith thomas. before darwin: reconciling god and nature. new haven, ct: yale university press, 2005. 314 pp, $27.00 hc, isbn 9780300107937. michael ruse. darwinism and its discontents. new york: cambridge university press, 2006. 316 pp, $30.00 hc, isbn 9780521829472. marc w. kirschner and john c. gerhart. the plausibility of life: resolving darwin’s dilemma. new haven, ct: yale university press, 2005. 314pp., $18.00 pb, isbn 9780300119770. charles darwin’s on the origin of species was published in 1859. in the nearly 150 years since that landmark publication, evolution theory has been under attack from conservative religionists all over the world, particularly in the united states. since the scopes trial in 1925, antievolution movements in the form of “creation science” and “intelligent design theory” have made their way into classrooms and courtrooms across america (numbers 1998; pennock 2001; humes 2007). in 2007 a “museum” dedicated to young earth creationism opened in kentucky, complete with exhibits featuring dinosaurs and humans “living in harmony.” clearly, there is a huge disconnect between science and contemporary american society for this kind of scenario to continue to thrive in the twenty-first century. three recent books (kirschner and gerhart 2005; thomas 2005; ruse 2006) take different approaches to explain why evolution theory has been so hard for some to accept, or to expand on “classical” evolution theory to put forward a new explanation for the diversity of life http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/expo.v2i1.111 112 the evolution of evolution theory and its controversies © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 on earth. the context of these three tomes is set in an historical overview of the development of evolution theory, discussions on perceived conflicts between religion and science, and contemporary research that builds on existing ideas and pushes evolution theory forward to a more comprehensive explanation for the morphological variation separating genera, families and phyla, or, what some would call, “macroevolution.” a parallel theme of the three authors is that the conflict between science and religion, as it relates to evolution theory, is very old and the arguments do not seem to change from one generation to another. thomas has written a perspective on the history of science with regard to the development of darwin’s ideas on natural selection as a driving force for speciation. biographical sketches and the significance of their contributions are provided for, in order of appearance, charles darwin, william paley, nicolas copernicus, galileo galilei, isaac newton, robert hooke, rené descartes, robert boyle, erasmus darwin, john locke, david hume, john toland, john ray, robert plot, edward lhwyd, william smith, thomas burnet, john woodward, william whiston, nicolas steno, james hutton, charles lyell, william buckland, jean baptiste de lamarck, philip henry gosse, thomas huxley, thomas malthus, and samuel wilberforce. some of these men were proponents of natural explanations for observed phenomena, others were firmly in the theological camp, and some were torn between the two. before darwin begins with a section placing the conflict between religion and science in the context of the paradigm of darwin’s time, namely natural theology a la william paley. at the time of writing on the origin of species, darwin had lost his faith as a christian and thought himself a deist; he died an agnostic and, while we cannot be sure exactly when darwin first faced the challenges presented to conventional faith by contemporary science, we know that he was well aware of the issues in 1831, because we know what books he read (thomas 2005, 4). darwin, as a student at cambridge, would have been required to read paley’s natural theology (1803), and we’re informed in the first chapter that darwin enthusiastically endorsed the ideas presented therein. darwin’s transition from paley’s paradigm occurred slowly, but surely, over the years. to be sure, he was exposed to the idea of mutawolfe 113 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 ble species through the writings of his grandfather, erasmus darwin, and he was influenced by contemporary thinkers of the era, including charles lyell, thomas malthus, and a host of others who posed questions about species and diversity of life a century or more before darwin’s first inquiries into the nature of species. thomas places darwin’s contributions in the context of prior ideas, especially those trying to reconcile fact with christian dogma. in addition, thomas discusses the conflicts between science and religion as they relate to the development of evolution theory and the problems of moving away from theological explanations for nature’s diversity of pattern and process. the dilemma created by the new scientific philosophies was therefore the potential relegation of god from all-powerful to first power only, and the acknowledgement that other scientific (second) causes drove the world day by day, year by year. the consequent and even greater dilemma was that, once one admitted second causes, it was only a simple extrapolation to all the processes of life being definable in terms of such causes. in the process, the need for a first cause would simply fade away. there would be no room—no need—for god at all. (41) a main theme is that natural explanations inevitably lead to atheism, one of the accusations often made in the contemporary criticism of evolution theory by creationists. thomas weaves a narrative that builds on the successive steps required to move from theological to scientific explanations for natural phenomena, and then poses the real dilemma of reconciling observations with explanations. by the mid-nineteenth century, there were really only three ways in which natural theologians could deal with the growing evidence that the earth was very old, that it was recycling inexorably beneath their feet, and that life on earth had constantly changed over millions of years. they could ignore it, they could accommodate it to the biblical accounts of history by more or less denying the literal truth of genesis, or they could explain it all away. (223) on the origin of species was a turning point for removing religion from the equation to explain biological diversity. as thomas also shows, however, it has also been the focus of controversy, beginning with the famous encounter between thomas huxley and “soapy” samuel wilberforce at the british association for the advancement of sci114 the evolution of evolution theory and its controversies © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 ence meeting in 1860 (269–279). in the years after 1859, the watershed date in evolution’s respectability, adherents to natural theology increasingly came from more fundamentalist groups, such as the staunchly calvinist palaeontologist hugh miller in scotland, whose books reached a huge audience. the argument from design, in its elemental version of “irreducible complexity,” is today principally favoured by various groups of anti-evolutionists and modern creationists, offshoots of fundamentalist protestantism in the usa (261–262). the societal impact of darwinism in america in the late 1800s through the twentieth century has been documented by ronald numbers (1998). after a lag phase of modest acceptance of darwin’s ideas, a body of work that became modern evolution theory started to build at the turn of the twentieth century with the discovery of gregor mendel’s studies on inheritance. adding the mathematical framework provided by ronald fisher and sewell wright and the collective studies of theodosius dobzhansky, j.b.s. haldane, g. ledyard stebbins, george gaylord simpson, bernhard rensch, julian huxley, and ernst mayr generated the neo-darwinian synthesis. contributions to the theory from the 1940s onward include the discovery of dna as the currency of inheritance, the structure of dna, the genetic code, restriction enzymes and the birth of genetic engineering, plate tectonics, advances in systematics methods and analysis, the polymerase chain reaction, and developments in biotechnology. all these advances in modern science spawned growing fields of studies, a key feature of the scientific term “theory” in the robust sense of the word. science is a heuristic process; queries and answers should lead to additional questions and studies. unfortunately, the word “theory” is often misused and misconstrued in the criticism of evolution theory. “it’s only a theory” is the common degradation one hears in critiques of evolution. this equates “theory” with “wild guess,” rather than a body of knowledge that is so robust that it is accepted as the best possible explanation of a phenomenon. michael ruse addresses the misperceptions of evolution theory in darwinism and its discontents (2006). ruse is a philosopher and approaches the defense of evolution theory from this perspective. he begins with an overview of darwin’s contributions to the scientific wolfe 115 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 revolution that shaped modern biology. at the risk of damning myself in the eyes both of sound scholarship and of god, let me be categorical. all of the critics of darwinism are deeply mistaken. charles darwin was a good scientist, the biological revolution of the nineteenth century led to genuine understanding, and today’s version of the theory is good quality science… finally, although, like all good science, darwinism challenges religion, christianity specifically, it can and should provide a positive and creative stimulus for religious people to think about their faith and move forward in a richer and deeper way. (4) as in thomson, ruse’s theme revolves around the conflict between science and religion as it relates to evolution. evolution theory is perceived as a threat to christian ideals on creation and biblical dogma, especially where a literal interpretation is a key component to a denomination’s beliefs. conflicts arise with the interpretation of origins— origin of life, origin of species, and origin of humans. ruse sets the stage in chapter two (“the fact of evolution”) with a summary of darwin’s arguments in on the origin of species. he builds on that foundation by bringing in examples from modern biology ranging from classical genetics studies to what molecular studies can tell us about evolution. however, the key question on origins is about the origin of life. as we set out to look at the origin of life, at once we encounter a paradox. no self-respecting evolution textbook today avoids the topic, but the truth is that evolutionists are really not at all qualified to talk on the subject—one needs masses of biochemistry and like knowledge really to get involved, far more than that possessed by the average student of life’s history. (53) origin of life, of course, is not a simple topic, and ruse begins his discussion by asking the key question, “what is this life that we want to explain?” (53). after a history of science overview from aristotle to ideas about hypotheses of an rna world, the discussion turns to the philosophical aspects of the origin of life. ruse states that the problem is neither insoluble nor a “threat”: “it is rather inspiring and exciting. there are nobel prizes to be won” (71). a book such as this isn’t able to address origin of life issues, but ruse uses the next six chapters to defend evolution theory against criticisms by bringing in examples 116 the evolution of evolution theory and its controversies © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 from morphology through molecules, beginning with the fossil record (chapter four) and a discussion of the historical record of evolution preserved therein. he addresses the patterns observed using examples and then expands on the usual discussion of fossil evidence to include cladistics and molecular methods. ruse then moves from observed patterns of evolution to discuss “the cause of evolution” in chapter five. he begins with an overview of basic genetics and the role genes play in selection as compared to the unit of selection, the organism. ruse discusses the definition of natural selection in a tongue-in-cheek fashion using biologists and philosophers as examples of organisms that may have different reproductive success rates. at least part of the problem (if that is what it is) seems to stem from the fact that so simple a mechanism supposedly does so much. people cannot believe that mere differential reproduction can create the incredibly complex living world that we have around us. it is just not plausible that the hand and the eye—let alone the brain—are the end result of something like selection. at the very least, the feeling is, the cause should be as complex as the result, and that means that whatever it was that made the brain should be on a par with advanced quantum mechanics, totally opaque to those without a doctoral degree in the subject, and preferably rather more. so the sense is that selection must be simply redescribing what is going on, rather than providing genuine empirical insight. (110–111) ruse then describes numerous examples of selection, starting with convergences among marine animals with regard to body shape and appendages and then examples from artificial selection. this latter strategy was used to good effect by darwin in origin of species when he described examples from the domestication of animals, but ruse adds new information from genetic research studies on the common fruit fly to illustrate how much farther our knowledge base has grown since darwin’s time. a discussion on speciation and adaptation and the role selection plays in these processes comes back to the fossil record with an example of reverse engineering a fossil to determine the function of a structure found in a skeleton. the reader, up to this point, of ruse’s book would assume that the entire volume is a celebration of natural selection as the primary driving force in evolutionary change. it has always been recognized by evolutionists—certainly from the wolfe 117 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 origin of species on—that however common or ubiquitous adaptation may be, it is only part of the story. the living world is not—cannot be—totally and completely adaptive. in fact, this is one of the strongest points against paley’s god. there is far too much wrong with the world—too many instances of malfunction—to think that a designer has been directly involved with making organisms. (135) evolution theory has gone through several periods of growth as our body of knowledge expands with each scientific advance. some of the growth phases have been contentious as scientists argue amongst themselves as to mechanisms, pattern and process, and analytical methodology. the role of natural selection in evolution has also been a focal point within the field of biology, and the tempo and mode of evolution arguments are discussed in chapter six, “limitations and restrictions.” it is interesting that critics of evolution theory spend so much time focusing on the arguments biologists make against this or that aspect of evolutionary mechanism (e.g., selection, genetic drift, mutation), but miss the whole picture that although the minute details may differ among phyla, the overall pattern of evolutionary change remains the same. in addition, evolution theory is blamed for many societal ills that have nothing to do with biology. in recent years, darwinism has become the whipping boy of every disgruntled member of society—the root cause of problems from fascism to sexism, from anti-semitism to capitalism, from cross dressing (i kid you not) to the breakdown of the traditional family. it is argued that darwinism is no true scientific theory by a mere reflection of the more offensive elements of the society within which it finds itself, at best a social construction—an epiphenomenon of the culture within which it resides—and at worst a secular-religious rival to christianity—a world picture complete with moral directives and eschatology. (194) perhaps it was the setting in which on the origin of species was published that set up many of the conflicts we’ve seen in the past 150 years. darwin’s era was during the industrial revolution and the rise of capitalism. whereas the controversies of scientific advances vs. natural theology were the main themes prior to darwin (as thomson shows), after publication of on the origin of species, the differences among economic classes could be put into the context of the phrase “survival 118 the evolution of evolution theory and its controversies © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 of the fittest,” which was coined by herbert spencer. modern critics of evolution focus on aspects of social darwinism, accusations of atheism, secular humanism, and their perceived dangers to human society (ruse 2006, 194–196). however, it’s important to remember that evolution theory isn’t about any of these topics. under the umbrella of evolution through natural selection, darwin brought in just about every area of biology—instinct, paleontology, biogeographical distribution, anatomy, embryology, classification—and showed how they are illuminated by the mechanism and in turn support the mechanism (208). since darwin’s time, evolution theory has expanded to include genetics, mathematics, molecular biology, genomics, and bioinformatics. the number of scientific journals dedicated to evolutionary pattern and process studies have increased each decade since the early 1900s. the contributions of evolution theory in the applied sciences with direct benefit to humans (e.g., medicine, agriculture, biotechnology) have also increased each decade since publication of on the origin of species. thus, it is puzzling as to why evolution theory is continually under attack from conservative religionists. one is tempted to let christians—believers of any kind—fend for themselves. if they want to accept darwinism, then it is there to be accepted. if they want to reject it on religious grounds, then that is their option. but many are genuinely puzzled and concerned, and would like an answer that is not just based on the prejudice and ignorance of one side or the other. (276) is it possible to accommodate science and religion given the deep divide that has kept the attack on evolution theory in the news headlines? it appears as if paley’s argument from design is still the preferred option for those that cannot accept a scientific explanation for origins. ruse summarizes the modern “argument from design” here: organisms show design-like features: the hand, the eye, the leaf, the fin, the funny plates on the back of stegosaurus. these “adaptations” function, they work, for the benefit of their possessors. they seem far too complex to have come about by chance. in the real world, things break down and go wrong, rather than build up into working units. so there must be an explanation. and the only reasonable explanation is that there is a designer, an intelligence behind adaptations. (281) wolfe 119 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 one wonders if the proponents of this view prefer it because they perceive science as being too hard to understand. given the complexity of modern research involving biochemistry and molecular biology together with mathematics and physics, it’s no wonder that many people prefer an easier explanation for the diversity of life and how it came to be. marc w. kirschner and john c. gerhart tackle this subject from a scientific perspective in the plausibility of life (2005). this book begins with paley’s argument for design based on the complexity of a pocket watch, a common tactic for modern day creationists. paley compared the complexity of the watch, which he could understand, with the complexity of life, which in 1802 he could not, as a measure of their creators. however, such comparisons look different today. where he would have seen an earthworm and a skylark each as a unique and complex design, we now see underlying similarities; they have the same system of heredity, the same genetic code, the same cellular makeup, the same subcellular components, largely the same metabolism, and many of the same processes of embryonic development. (2) kirschner and gerhart present a new explanation for the diversity of life by expanding evolution theory to include “facilitated variation,” which deals with evolutionary development and the timing and location of gene expression in organisms. thus, the problem of novelty’s origin in evolution becomes, how could the eye be created in the first place, or the brain, or wing, or lungs, or limbs? could they have been plausibly assembled, small piece by small piece, each presupposing a selective advantage? it is this feature of darwin’s theory, the uncertain accounting for novelty, that creationists seize on; meanwhile, evolutionary biologists assert that variation must be sufficient, though they lack a general explanation for the origin of complex novel structures. answers to these questions affect the plausibility of life’s arising by way of evolution (4). contemporary arguments for design as presented in “intelligent design theory” a la “irreducible complexity” (behe 1996) use the vocabulary of molecular biology, but ignore or reject hypotheses from that field of research to explain the origin of biological structures. kirschner and gerhart begin with an overview of evolution theory from darwin through the neo-darwinian synthesis and then bring the read120 the evolution of evolution theory and its controversies © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 er up-to-date on recent developments in embryology and evolutionary development (evo-devo). the cardinal issue in evolution is the origin of complex and heritable variation from a limited reservoir of components. although selection has preoccupied evolutionary biologists, the study of the origin of variation and novelty has idled. is the organism’s capacity to generate heritable variation great enough to supply the succession of variants needed for natural selection to bring forth a circadian clock, or—more challenging—a human being from a singlecelled ancestor, all within the time span of the earth? heritable variation requires mutational change of the genome, but that is only the start of the story. what else is required to get an adequate frequency of selectable variants? mutation only changes what already exists. it does not create new anatomy, physiology, and behavior from nothing, so we need to know how readily one structure can be transmuted into another, particularly when we consider structures of intricate design and interdependent activities. with an understanding of how random genetic change is converted into useful innovation, a theory of novelty can be devised. darwin’s general theory of evolution can then be established at the most fundamental level. (kirschner and gerhart 2005, 8–9) the major point made in the early chapters of the plausibility of life is that we are only now beginning to understand the big picture of how life on earth diversified from unicellular organisms to the complex multicellular ones represented by animals, plants, and fungi. the emphasis, until recently, has been on attempts to explain the origin of lineages and morphological diversification (i.e., the ill-defined “macroevolution” of the creationist lexicon). a big surprise of modern biology has been conservation—that even distantly related organisms use similar processes for cellular function, development, and metabolism. when a process is conserved, most of its protein components are conserved. details of metabolism are the same in bacteria and humans; basic cell organization and function are similar between yeast and humans; and developmental strategies in fruit flies are strikingly similar to those in humans. the conservation of key processes in diverse organisms today implies, as we shall see, that we can deduce the basic physiological and developmental processes of organisms in the past (34). wolfe 121 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 “facilitated phenotypic variation” expands on classical evolution theory by including the development of organisms in the equation. in addition to the requirement of genetic variation and natural selection, kirschner and gerhart argue that novelty in organisms arise “by the use of conserved processes in new combinations, at different times, and in different places and amounts rather than by the invention of new processes” (35). novelty usually comes about by the deployment of existing cell behaviors in new combinations and to new extents, rather than in their drastic modification or the invention of completely new ones. true novelty in the invention of cellular processes is rare. once such novelty occurs, it may be carried through stably in many lineages. hence, evolution is divided into epochs of invention of cellular behaviors, interspersed with long periods without invention. (39) this statement is an interesting twist on the idea of punctuated equilibrium (eldredge and gould 1972) where species are stable and relatively unchanged in the fossil record for long periods of time followed by a rapid change and burst of speciation and lineage diversification. kirschner and gerhart explain that although all organisms share a large percentage of dna sequences and genes, morphological and physiological differences arise when cellular changes occurring during development are fixed in lineages. rather than go through the fossil record to explain evolutionary divergence, the authors discuss “the history of the world according to genes” (45–70). “core processes have been introduced at rare intervals during evolution (the punctuated part), then are largely unchanged until the present (an equilibrium or stasis)” (45). diversification is placed in the context of adaptive cell behaviors rather than morphological changes. this historical account of diversification is biased toward the animal kingdom and involves: 1) novel chemical reactions, 2) cell organization and regulation, 3) evolution of multicellularity, 4) origin of body plans, 5) and origin of appendages. kirschner and gerhart drive home the point that cellular processes, dna sequences, gene content, and physiologies are highly conserved from bacteria to animals and yet diversification happens through cellular processes common to all lineages. 122 the evolution of evolution theory and its controversies © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 if we follow the path from the bacterium-like ancestor toward humans, we find repeated episodes of great innovation. new genes and proteins arose in each episode. afterward, the components and processes settled into prolonged conservation. the existence of “deep conservation” is a surprise. to some biologists it is a contradiction of their expectations about the organism’s capacity to generate random phenotypic variation from random mutation. to some, it borders on paradox when held against the rampant diversification of anatomy and physiology in the evolutionary history of animals. (67–68) in chapter three (“physiological adaptability and evolution”), the authors discuss this paradox in terms of previous research on adaptation and phenotypic plasticity (changes in morphology or physiology in response to environmental conditions). such physical changes in response to environmental stimuli do not contribute to evolutionary change unless the changes are heritable. the authors introduce this concept by giving examples of developmental plasticity where organisms have different morphological outcomes depending on environmental cues. examples include animals that have very different larval morphologies compared to adult morphologies that go through a series of metamorphoses (insects, ascidians, amphibians), which represent sequential alternative phenotypes. when timing of development is affected, speciation may occur where one species resembles an alternate morphological stage of another species. alternate adult phenotypes may also occur as a result of environmental cues. for example, the different castes of social insects and alternate sex determination of some reptiles come from temperature differences in egg incubation. kirschner and gerhart finish the chapter with a discussion of the evolution of hemoglobins and their role in adaptation of animals to their environments. it may seem counterintuitive that mechanisms such as oxygen regulation, which function to maintain the existing phenotype by buffering the effects of variation in the environment, should simultaneously serve as vehicles for creating variation in evolution. this pseudoparadox of stability versus change stands juxtaposed to another of conservation and diversity. how do highly conserved processes like oxygen transport in hemoglobin or determination of sex in mammals lower the barrier for generation of diversity? (107) wolfe 123 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 in chapter four (“weak regulatory linkage”), kirschner and gerhart begin their explanation of facilitated phenotypic variation. “let us now delve directly into the conserved core processes that are responsible for generating most of the anatomy, physiology, and behavior of the organism” (109). variation arises through the multiple use of conserved core processes. new combinations of the core processes also occur and “individual core processes are constructed so that new linkages can easily be forged and broken” (110). timing and regulation of gene expression is a key concept in terms of the evolution of variation. understanding embryonic development is central for explaining phenotypic novelty in animals. it is in the embryo that much of the phenotype is established with all its anatomical and physiological complexity… the implications for evolution are powerful, for if complex development is elicited by simple signals, then changes in complex development may be achieved by changing the amount or the location of these simple signals, rather than by changing a highly integrated and complex process. (111–112) kirschner and gerhart then explain the details of gene expression and regulation in bacteria, eukaryotes and multicellular organisms. this is a precursor to a later discussion on gene expression in embryos and its role in evolution of novel traits. first, however, they come back to one of the criticisms of evolution theory, the difficulty of explaining mechanisms for macroevolution. much of the skepticism over the years about the capacity of random mutation or genetic reassortment to generate phenotypic change has arisen from the assumption that genetic changes must create very specific, multiple, complex phenotypic changes. our view is that specificity and complexity are already built into the conserved processes, as is the propensity for regulatory coupling. it is not necessary for genetic change to create those characteristics, though they are still needed for heritable change. (142) chapter five (“exploratory behavior”) describes a biological phenomenon common to the development of a cell’s cytoskeleton to the organization of the vascular system of mammals and to the behavioral ecology of foraging social insects. exploratory behavior is described as a critical process in the evolution of novelty, especially with regard to anatomical 124 the evolution of evolution theory and its controversies © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 changes that are perceived as difficult to explain if they originated by a slow stepwise accumulation of mutations (e.g., the eye or different limb anatomies of vertebrates). at each stage an exploratory process could, even without genetic modification, adapt to changes in anatomy. such highly adaptive processes facilitate the production of significant viable and novel variation on which selection can act (147). the general effect of exploratory behavior at a cellular level appears to be a buffering one that allows for changes in anatomy without causing lethality. there is a lot of tolerance for variation in getting from point a to point b in the development of an organism as long as the critical functions of metabolic pathways, organs, and structures are intact. exploratory mechanisms have a dual role in facilitating evolutionary change—which on the surface seems paradoxical. by being globally responsive and adaptive they blunt the effects of mutation and reduce its effect and lethality. in this way they make possible the persistence of novel changes by reducing collateral damage, thus increasing the amount of heritable variation (176). the first five chapters of kirschner and gerhart set the stage for the big explanation of the importance of evolutionary development studies for expanding on classical evolution theory to include a new paradigm of facilitated variation. chapter six (“invisible anatomy”) specifically deals with how the conserved core processes of cellular biology relate to embryology and the anatomical differences among animals. the invisible anatomy referred to throughout the chapter is the anatomy of the embryo in terms of specific gene expression patterns and zones of activity. when a trait of anatomy changes in evolution, it is really the development of that trait that has changed. anatomy itself is not inherited, but rather the means to generate the anatomy. the real target of heritable genetic change is the development by which the trait is produced… therefore, in seeking to explain anatomical change in evolution, biologists have come to understand that what they must explain is the changes in developmental processes. (178) this, then, is the heart of the subject—how evolutionary development studies contribute to a better understanding of evolutionary pattern and process. an explanation of modern embryology in terms of the “compartment plan” of a young embryo is given: wolfe 125 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 once organized in an advanced multicellular stage, but well before the cells have differentiated into their final cell types, the compartment plan gives each cell its address, its identity, and its location relative to the cells in the rest of the body… we call the compartment plan an “invisible anatomy” because the compartments are only identifiable if one can establish which genes are expressed there. at these early stages, compartments cannot be distinguished by anatomical features. the actual differentiation of the organism will depend not only on the compartments but also on the interactions of cells of one compartment with signals from other compartments. the compartment map is an extensible map: individual compartments can expand and shrink independently while overall neighbor relations are retained. this flexibility occurs not only in development, when certain regions grow relative to others, but also in evolution where there is disproportionate growth—for example the neck of the giraffe relative to the neck of the whale. (183) the discovery of the compartment plan and the importance of this discovery for understanding evolution make up the bulk of this chapter. the discussion emphasizes the importance of genes conserved across phyla (e.g., hox, transcription factors, selector genes) and their role in embryological development and anatomy. by comparing the invisible anatomy of animals from invertebrates to vertebrates it is possible to understand the differentiation of tissues into structures and organs. by small changes in timing, location, and signaling of gene expression during the early stages of embryo development, the mechanisms for all animal body plans and anatomy are explained. a significant implication of the comparison is that compartments are much more stable across evolutionary history than are the anatomical structures developed upon them. compartments, it seems, are unconstrained in the anatomical structures and differentiated cell types they can support. … the molecular information is so precise and detailed that the interpolations are nearly unassailable. between insects and vertebrates the sequence of hox genes is conserved, the order of hox genes on the chromosome is conserved, and correspondence of the chromosome order to the anatomical order is conserved. these similarities cannot be accidental or convergent from separate starting points. in combination with an increasingly detailed fossil record that shows maintenance 126 the evolution of evolution theory and its controversies © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 of the body plans of almost all phyla for the last 535 million years, the commonality of the basic anterior-posterior patterning is proven far beyond any demonstration possible from fossils and comparative anatomy alone. (197–198) the authors pull all the information from chapters one to six together in chapter seven to state their theory of facilitated variation. the outline takes five pages of their book, but it can be summarized in their point number six: most evolutionary change in the metazoa since the cambrian has come not from changes of the core processes themselves or from new processes, but from regulatory changes affecting the deployment of the core processes. these regulatory changes alter the time, place, circumstance and amount of gene expression, rna availability, or protein synthesis of components of the core processes, or alter the activity and interaction of proteins of the processes by modifying them or by changing their stability. because of these regulatory changes, the core processes are used in new combinations and amounts at new times and places. also because of the regulatory changes, different parts of the adaptive ranges of performance of the processes are used in new circumstances. (221–222) the final chapter of the plausibility of life focuses on the topic of evolution and its impact on society. first there is a discussion on how their theory of facilitated variation dovetails with existing evolution theory, namely by expanding on the framework of selection, genetics, and the neo-darwinian synthesis to include a mechanism that explains phenotypic changes in organisms. kirschner and gerhart admit that the origins of the core processes remain unresolved currently. the theory of facilitated variation opens up a new set of questions about the origins of the conserved core processes that, as we have argued, facilitate the generation of all kinds of anatomical, physiological, and behavioral diversity. there is really no alternative but to think that new core processes, such as those that first arose in eukaryotic cells, were cobbled together from the existing process in prokaryotic cells. the transformations from prokaryotes to eukaryotes or from single-celled to multicellular organisms are profound, and evidence is spare. however, as methods for identifying weakly related dna sequences have improved, and as more organisms have been sequenced, we can glean hints about these major transitions. wolfe 127 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 core processes may have emerged together as a suite, for we know of no organism today that lacks any part of the suite. (253) kirschner and gerhart express confidence that remaining and new questions will be resolved as research progresses. scientists, in general, agree that the heuristic process of research is an important hallmark of what makes science a robust endeavor and differentiates it from alternative approaches such as those believed by creationists. though modern scientists may have questioned the completeness of the theory of evolution, few believed that the fundamental principles of variation and selection would not in the end explain the diversity of life. certain groups, however, particularly active in the united states, have exaggerated and fabricated weaknesses in evolution theory in order to discredit it. from its beginning, the theory of evolution has caused problems for some traditional religious groups. by depicting human beings as derived from simpler animals, evolutionary theory not only undermined the biblical account of creation, but also seemed to debase human beings by suggesting that they were not of divine origin (264). and so, we are back to my opening paragraph for this review. it is perfectly clear that evolution theory will continue to be controversial in the united states for many years to come, despite the scientific advances that reinforce the robustness of evolutionary biology. thomson describes the history of the conflict between science and religion as it relates to origins and evolution theory, ruse discusses the societal impact and disagreements among segments of society with regard to evolution theory, and kirschner and gerhart expand on evolution theory to add some explanation for the diversification of animal lineages. one wonders what scientific research, if any, would be sufficient to convince the masses that evolution has occurred. references behe, michael j. 1996 darwin’s black box: the biochemical challenge to evolution. new york: the free press. 128 the evolution of evolution theory and its controversies © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 darwin, charles 1859 on the origin of the species by means of natural selection: or, the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. london: john murray. eldredge, n. and s.j. gould 1972 punctuated equilibria: an alternative to phyletic gradualism. in models in paleobiology, ed. t.j.m. schopf, 82–115. san francisco, ca: freeman, cooper. humes, edward 2007 monkey girl: evolution, education, religion, and the battle for america’s soul. new york: harper collins. numbers, ronald l. 1998 darwinism comes to america. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. paley, william 1803 natural theology; or, evidences of the existence and attributes of the deity, collected from the appearances of nature. london: wilks and taylor (for r. faulder). pennock, robert t., ed. 2001 intelligent design creationism and its critics: philosophical, theological, and scientific perspectives. cambridge, ma: mit press. [expositions 4.1&2 (2010) 89-94] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 the monstrosity of protestantism jeffrey w. robbins lebanon valley college john milbank was introduced to a broad american academic audience in a high-profile article in the chronicle of higher education written by jeff sharlet in june 2000. 1 introduced as the ―earthly creator of radical orthodoxy,‖ it was here in this article where it was speculated that milbank‘s movement ―may well become the biggest development in theology since martin luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door.‖ it was a year later that time magazine declared milbank a bona fide ―academic star‖ and identified him as one of its seven innovative thinkers for the new millennium, crediting him especially with clearing ―a way for theologians to reclaim their place at the academic table, ending decades, if not centuries, of marginalization.‖ 2 of course, those who know milbank and his work should not be surprised at these exalted claims for his place in the history of christian theology. for instance, in a formal session of the annual meeting of the american academy of religion, i once heard him declare, ―martin luther says unto you, justification by faith. but i say unto you, there is no justice without authority.‖ with this sudden adoption of king james‘ english and an evocation of the familiar rhetorical structuring of jesus‘ own sermon on the mount, it seems milbank has taken the mantle of martin luther to heart. i begin with this not to traffic in academic gossip, but because i believe this linking of milbank with luther goes to the heart of milbank‘s – and by extension, radical orthodoxy‘s – evolving theological project as revealed in this impressive, and at times (as is always the case with milbank and less so with žižek) imperious dialogue on the ―monstrosity of christ,‖ a genuinely theological dialogue that hinges on two differing christological interpretations which give way to two opposing versions of materialism. put briefly, i might sum up what i mean by this link between milbank and luther with the reference points of ―history‖ and the ―protestant reformation.‖ and my thesis is as follows: by his counter-narrative trope of constructing an alternative history to modernity, milbank has defined the school of radical orthodoxy according to the principle task of undoing the protestant reformation. so, if in fact radical orthodoxy proves to be the biggest development in theology since martin luther (a proposition of which i am highly skeptical, by the way), and if in fact milbank has his way, we might pretend as if the social, cultural, political, and religious torment that was the protestant reformation never happened at all, and by extension, the christian church might once again revel in the glory of christendom. if this thesis strikes some as exaggerated, at the very least i must cite milbank‘s own stated goal of converting žižek from the ―whiggish protestant‖ that milbank reads him to be into the catholic that he might become. as the subtitle to this book indicates, the debate between the monstrosity of protestantism 90 milbank and žižek is on whether a paradoxical or dialectical perspective is best. 3 as milbank tells it, it is žižek‘s endorsement of a hegelian dialectic that makes him all-too-protestant; and further, ―it is the dialectical perspective itself which engenders the nihilistic version of christian universalism‖ (112). so, if by milbank‘s telling, dialectics are a ―symptom‖ of an essentially modern, protestant metanarrative, and if dialectics engender nihilism, then wouldn‘t we be correct to conclude that protestantism is a form of nihilism? we might read milbank‘s rejoinder to žižek, therefore, not only as an ironic reading of žižek – an effort to out-žižek žižek, if you will – but also an effort to save žižek from himself, to cure him of his ill-informed and superficial appropriation of protestantism. as milbank announces, ―my case is that there is a different, latent žižek: a žižek who does not see chesterton as sub-hegel, but hegel as subchesterton. a žižek therefore who has remained with paradox, or rather moved back into paradox from dialectics. and this remaining would be sufficient to engender a catholic žižek, a žižek able fully to endorse a transcendent god, in whom creatures analogically participate‖ (113). milbank‘s repudiation of protestantism is part and parcel of his rejection of history. as milbank explains: the defense of paradox has to be conjoined with a refusal of the protestant metanarrative in which žižek is in thrall. in fact, at both the theoretical and the historical level the issue of catholic versus protestant is far more fundamental than the question of theism versus atheism – the latter is merely a subplot of the former conflict, which is today notably resurfacing. the key illusion of the protestant metanarrative is that the mode in which modernity has occurred, and the stages that it has gone through, are the necessary and only possible modes and stages. (114) this extended quote needs considerable unpacking. first, note how milbank speaks of the intrareligious relations between catholic and protestant as a conflict in which catholics are pitted against protestants. second, note the sly association of modern history with an illusion, as if our history is something from which we can pick and choose, or repudiate and reverse. i will take each one of these observations up in turn. first, concerning the intimation of violence suggested by this quote, this has long been a source of concern for critics of radical orthodoxy. going back to sharlet‘s article from the chronicle of higher education that introduced milbank to the american academic world, he was correct to point out that ―of the various strains of postliberal theology, radical orthodoxy is by far the most political.‖ 4 this is partly due to the christian socialist background in britain, but even more radical orthodoxy could be seen as a harbinger of the recent political turn in philosophical and theological circles. certainly since the september 11 attacks on new york city and washington, d.c., there has been a consuming interest in the relation between religion and politics and the specter of religious violence. this geopolitical reality reinforces electioneering strategies on the u.s. domestic front as george w. bush was twice elected as 91 robbins president in great part due to the effective political mobilization of the religious right. also, this so-called political turn reflects a generational change within the world of continental philosophy as leading french post-structuralist thinkers whose post-political identities were forged during the student protests of may 1968 have given way to outspoken critics who have been willing to venture forth with their own explicit political programs. this new generation of continental philosophical thinkers led by alain badiou, giorgio agamben, and antonio negri have been most critical of how easily classical modern liberalism mutates, or can be conflated with, globalizing neo-liberalism; and in a related fashion, how difficultly postmodern deconstruction can translate itself into a politics of collective action. as one scholar puts it, ―the tragedy of the politics of subjectivity (at least the derridean version therof) is that it has no way of inserting the subject into the domain of the actually political.‖ 5 thus, this new generation of thinkers is offering up an alternative postmodernism that is deliberately post-liberal more so than poststructural, and as such, a repoliticization of cultural theory. both žižek and milbank belong within this general trajectory of the political turn, a point made at the very outset of this volume in creston davis‘s masterful introduction that sets the stage for the respective debate between these two towering figures: ―in the pages that follow,‖ davis writes, ―the orthodox christian theologian john milbank and the militant marxist slavoj žižek engage one another around this revolutionary political problematic: how can the theological and the material unite to fund resistance to capitalist nihilism‖ (4). but if it is a revolutionary political problematic that milbank shares in common with žižek and which distinguishes radical orthodoxy from the other variants of post-liberal theology, then it is incumbent to ask, as sharlet did in his article for the chronicle a decade ago, what exactly does milbank believe – or more precisely, of what precisely would a radical orthodox politics consist? in addressing this question, sharlet speculated then that ―maybe orthodoxy sounds like theocracy [. . .] more to the point, then, one wonders whether a radical orthodox world might resemble a premodern one, in which the church ruled, and heretics, instead of waxing philosophical in endowed chairs, were burned alive at the stake.‖ 6 to be sure, to be political does not mean to be violent, or to sanction political violence, but there is this nagging sense articulated by sharlet and repeated many times over that milbank and the school of radical orthodox theology he represents are unapologetic christian triumphalists. the question is whether this specter of violence is an inevitable consequence of its metaphysical predilection. this would certainly be the argument of a contemporary such as gianni vattimo, a post-metaphysical hermeneutic philosopher who has made the direct link between the history of metaphysics and violence. indeed, vattimo has argued that the very idea of metaphysics is a violent imposition. 7 likewise with john caputo, who in an earlier published review of this debate between milbank and žižek asks, ―why not adopt the post-metaphysical idea that gives up searching for all such primordial underlying somethings or other?‖ the reason this postmetaphysical idea might be preferable, caputo suggests, is that it would avoid the violence that is apparent throughout the book, both from žižek, who, as caputo writes, does not have ―the slightest compunction about invoking violence‖ and from milbank, who ―batters our ears with a the monstrosity of protestantism 92 barrage of rhetorical violence, with the vintage violence of theological imperialism.‖ 8 like vattimo, caputo harbors a suspicion about metaphysics and concludes his review with the observation of how ―this polemic about the metaphysics of christ‖ somehow squeezes out entirely the peaceful and peace-loving jesus of the sermon on the mount. before turning to the issue of milbank‘s rejection of history as evidenced in this volume, more must be said about this post-metaphysical theological challenge. but incidentally, it is žižek, not milbank, who directly takes up this challenge, and he does so by referencing vattimo and caputo specifically by way of a rebuttal of their respective post-metaphysical and deconstructive variants of postmodern theology – variants that žižek labels as ―soft‖ postmodern theology (260). žižek begins this rebuttal with a pronouncement of a changing of the guard from derrida and habermas to agamben and badiou, or put otherwise, from ethico-politico philosophies of otherness to ―its theologico-political turn: a decidedly materialist focus on [a] theological topic [. . .] ; a radical political stance inclusive of a critical attitude toward democracy – to put it in a vicious way, democracy is not to come, but to go‖ (255). this is to be ―the first true taste of ‗thought of the twenty-first century‘‖ (255). then after summarizing the common features in both caputo‘s and vattimo‘s narration of the so-called postmodern return of religion, žižek goes on to insist on a familiar theme to his previous work on religion – namely, the subversive and perverse core of christianity. 9 for žižek, caputo and vattimo pass from the trauma of the death of god to the death of the death of god in the postmodern return of religion too quickly and easily. by this (soft) reading, the death of god is rendered a happy event – a shedding of the moral-metaphysical god of ontotheology and a reawakening of genuinely biblical faith and a more authentic form of religiosity. but on the contrary, ―what dies on the cross,‖ žižek insists, ―is indeed god himself, not just his ‗finite container,‘ a historically contingent name or form of god‖ (257). žižek continues, ―the only way to redeem the subversive core of christianity is therefore to return to death-of-god theology‖ (260). and finally, žižek concludes: it is thus not that death-of-god theology is a middle-of-the-road phenomenon, partially negating the classical onto-theology while remaining within its horizon, which is truly left behind only with postmodern deconstructive religion; it is rather that something traumatic erupts in death-of-god theology, something that is covered up by postmodern theology. we should go even further here: what if the entire history of christianity, inclusive of (and especially) its orthodox versions, is structured as a series of defenses against the traumatic apocalyptic core of incarnation/death/resurrection? (260) by this exchange žižek shows himself as an adept theological thinker, which gives credence to his attempt at the revitalization of death-of-god theology through his seemingly oxymoronic atheistic theological materialism. his contribution to this debate is more theological than it is philosophical, anthropological, or even religious in that it is concerned with the being and nature of god by asking the core question of christology. indeed, along the way he even takes his 93 robbins materialists forerunners, feuerbach and marx, to task by identifying ―the limit of the feuerbaching-marxian logic of dis-alienation‖ (75). in this way, žižek not only rises to the postmetaphysical theological challenge, but also provides the contours of what might be termed a new materialism. there is nothing in this that should lead one to think that žižek is merely a johnny-comelately playing in the field of theologians, or that his engagement with religion is merely an ironic strategy – or in the words of caputo, a ―trojan-horse theology.‖ 10 perhaps it is the case that žižek can come to his conclusions just as easily by lacan or hitchcock as by christ, but there is no denying that when it comes to his analysis of the meaning of christ‘s death on the cross he has the power to evoke the original scandal of the gospel as well, if not better, than any other contemporary thinker. and further, this reminder of the scandal of the gospel is an important and timely corrective to the triumphalistic tendencies of christianity, as well as to the facile, selfhelp, or fundamentalist tendencies of contemporary religion. as žižek writes, ―christ‘s death on the cross thus means that we should immediately ditch the notion of god as a transcendent caretaker who guarantees the happy outcome of our acts, the guarantee of historical teleology— christ‘s death on the cross is the death of this god, it repeats job‘s stance, it refuses any ‗deeper meaning‘ that obfuscates the brutal reality of historical catastrophes‖ (55). and on this point at least, žižek stands together with caputo and vattimo and against milbank in fully sharing the idea ―of christ as a weak god, a god reduced to a compassionate observer of human misery, unable to intervene or help‖ (55). which brings me back to the issue of history, and milbank‘s counter-narrative trope: where žižek‘s atheistic theological materialism leads him to an embrace of the void and to the conclusion of the essential meaninglessness of human history, milbank‘s orthodox theological materialism leads him to a position he terms a ―more catholic historiography‖ that reads modern history as a ―distortion‖ (116). while this modern history is ―full of authentically christian developments,‖ milbank admits, it has led to ―horrendous distortions‖ because it has been allowed to occur ―outside a proper catholic aegis‖ (117). along the way, while defending a paternalism modified ―with a greater humility and attentiveness to populist feedback‖ (127), milbank links protestantism with atheism (117), calls capitalism ―a mode of protestant religion‖ (127) that provides ―theological legitimation of a new sort of ‗amoral‘ economic practice‖ (129), and ultimately finds in protestant christianity nothing but ―totalitarian gloom‖ (131). correlatively, it is the ―pre-cartesian catholic metaphysical vision‖ that truly makes possible the joy of sex and universal love. further, ―whereas žižek‘s atheism achieves only a sad, resigned materialism,‖ milbank claims that it is his catholic perspective that ―achieves a materialism in a joyful, positive sense‖ (125). it is hard to know whether to take this unrelenting denigration of protestantism seriously or not. my main contention is that what it truly reveals is that milbank does not take history seriously. he repeatedly accuses žižek of buying into a protestant narrative of progress and treating history as a series of inevitable advances. meanwhile he makes much of his own version of an ―alternative trinitarian modernity‖ (192, 209) and a ―more humanist reformation‖ (115) as the monstrosity of protestantism 94 the road not taken. admittedly, his vision of a world in which post-reformation dogmatics and interreligious violence would not have dominated early modern european life, of ―less dualism of nature and grace in theory and of secular and sacred in practice — with the upshot that economic and political institutions might have remained more ecclesiastically shaped, even though now more lay-directed‖ (115), is a beautiful and enticing one. but wishing it so does not make it so. whether pretending that we could have a more humble paternalism that is now attentive to populist feedback or a return to a church monopoly under a proper catholic aegis that is now more lay-directed, it is vision predicated on such a complete flight of fancy that it requires more than a leap of faith; it is a willful denial and denigration of history. our history may very well be a misbegotten path, but there is a great distance between the notion that the modern world is the historical triumph of the necessary outworking of a material logic and the notion that we may reverse or repudiate our history at our whim. it is true that our history is full of latent possibilities and of roads not taken, but the way to build a different and better future does not come by way of denial. beware of the return of the repressed. notes 1. jeff sharlet, ―theologians seek to claim the world with god and postmodernism.‖ the chronicle of higher education 46, issue 42 (june 23, 2000): a.20. 2. david van biema, ―thinkers: god as postmodern.‖ time magazine (december 17, 2001), http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1001474,00.html#ixzz0y7of5c76. 3. slavoj žižek and john milbank, the monstrosity of christ: paradox or dialectic? ed. creston davis (cambridge, ma: the mit press, 2009). 4. sharlet, ―theologians seek to claim the world with god and postmodernism.‖ 5. kenneth surin, ―rewriting the ontological script of liberation: on the question of finding a new kind of political subject,‖ in theology and the political: the new debate. ed. davis, creston et al. (durham: duke university press, 2005): 240–266, 255. 6. sharlet, ―theologians seek to claim the world with god and postmodernism.‖ 7. gianni vattimo and john d. caputo, after the death of god, ed. jeffrey w. robbins (new york: columbia university press, 2007), 93. 8. john d. caputo, review of the monstrosity of christ: paradox or dialectic? by slavoj žižek and john milbank, ed. creston davis, notre dame philosophical reviews, http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=17605. 9. for instance, see: slavoj žižek, the puppet and the dwarf: the perverse core of christianity (cambridge: the mit press, 2003). 10. caputo, review of monstrosity of christ. this is an important part of caputo‘s critique of žižek. for instance, towards the conclusion of his review of this volume in notre dame philosophical reviews, caputo writes, ―we all know that žižek can very well make his main case with no mention of christ at all, that he can use the seminars of lacan, the films of alfred hitchcock or the novels of stephen king just as well. his whole point, as he says elsewhere, is subversive: to build a trojan-horse theology, to slip the nose of a more radical materialism under the pauline tent of theology in order to announce the death of god.‖ [expositions 4.1&2 (2010) 38-46] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 interview: john lukacs nancy kelley villanova university in september, 1967, i first walked into the history classroom of john lukacs, the prominent historian, public intellectual, and soon-to-be chair of the history department at chestnut hill college. on july 19 of this year, i shared a unique moment with lukacs as i sat down, both as former student and now professional colleague, in lukacs’s historic home and discussed his perspectives on the generations he has taught, especially the sixties, as well on his thoughts on the teaching and writing of history, and what lukacs sees as the current appetite for history. when i entered his voluminous library, i had prepared a four-page protocol of the questions i intended to discuss with lukacs. within fifteen minutes of our conversation, i had the same feeling that i had so many years ago when i sat in his classroom. that was, no matter what i had studiously outlined, lukacs would take my prompts in new directions. lukacs is living history, his reflections and fine-edge, pithy insights stir me still. even though lukacs has written over thirty books, no one has been able to neatly tuck him into any defined category. almost a modern prophet, lukacs was one of the first to publically condemn the views of joseph of mccarthy, was quick to observe that the u. s. s. r. was a feeble power and would eventually fall, and most recently, stated early on his opposition to the war in iraq. a european dissident who immigrated to this country from hungary, lukacs has taught and written about history for most of his long and full life. this past july, lukacs was in the new york times book review for the recent publication of his exchange of letters with george kennan. 1 to me, however, lukacs is personal – both forty years ago and today, he is a real presence. dr. lukacs, this is quite a special moment for me as it has been over 40 years since i first sat in your history classroom at chestnut hill. as we begin this interview, i would first like to ask you to reflect on your distinguished years as a college professor and the students to whom you taught history. lukacs: when i talked about this with other professors i know in all kinds of institutions, institutions very different from chestnut hill, and they all had the same experience really? lukacs: the best students were approximately from the late ‟50s to about ‟77. 39 lukacs and kelley when i started at chestnut hill in ’67, we had to wear skirts to classes; i always sat in the front row of your classes, where we took copious notes, listening to every word you said, revering your words – truly – where we were not allowed to cut classes, where the idea of what our career was, was not our first consideration. lukacs: well, that‟s the way it should be. and that‟s the way it was for a long time. where did it go? when i left chestnut hill in ’71, we were wearing jeans and t-shirts, we could cut, our voice mattered as much as yours, we thought – mistakenly… lukacs: i don‟t know if you‟re interested in this, but chestnut hill, as all catholic girls‟ colleges, in other words, all girls‟ colleges, had a great crisis beginning in ‟68. you see, chestnut hill, i would say, with all respect to rosemont and immaculata, was intellectually surely the best of the catholic girls‟ colleges. a lot of this was due to the nuns, and also chestnut hill had two extraordinary good presidents, wise presidents. sister katherine pence retired and died in ‟68 and in ‟68, the college was hit by a number of blows, some of them were particular for chestnut hill, some of them were general. the general blow was, that affected all girls‟ colleges, was that the men‟s colleges were taking girls. so the first time since the college was founded, the college had an enrollment problem. the college had never had an enrollment problem. you see, chestnut hill could be, not very, but fairly selective. let‟s go inside it, with a broader development, sociological, that involved not only chestnut hill, but a lot of the catholic girls‟ colleges. you see, i don‟t know about your family and you probably don‟t fit in here, but a vast majority of girls who came to chestnut hill were first-generation college [students]; in other words, they were very lucky and very pleased that their parents could send them to college. this also coincided with the idea of getting a general education. you see, by ‟68, their parents had been college graduates, so together with what‟s going on in the ‟60s, you see the wave of ‟60s rebelliousness hit chestnut hill about five years later. this was a general development. young girls by that time were not willing and did not have to follow where their parents were going to send them. this was a big problem from which the college only partially recovered. in addition to this was something that, even before vatican ii – beginning about 1960, and there are statistics about this which i haven‟t studied – there was a precipitous drop in the number of catholic girls who wanted to have a religious career. you see, both novices and male seminarians – the drop was seventy, eighty percent, and you see [what had been] the strength of the college of chestnut hill. this was also a financial asset, that there were intelligent nuns who could run the college. when i came to chestnut hill, i was impressed by the general intellectual acumen of some of the nuns, who were administrators of the college, and since they were nuns, this didn‟t cost the college anything. interview: john lukacs 40 don’t you think that’s been compounded through the decades across all catholic education institutions? lukacs: but in chestnut hill it was particularly bad because the next president, whom i got along with very well, mary xavier, she was pretty good, but she was not the same caliber [as her predecessor]. the college had to totter on, and there were some people, especially ‟71, ‟72, when enrollment dropped and dropped, some people, colleagues of mine, who thought the college was over, was going to fold. i did not think so, and it was one of the few things where i‟ve been right, because i said, “this is true, but on the other hand, we live in a society where now, everyone has to go to college.” but there was a certain homogeneity of catholic middle class, not all of them, [but] a great majority of the students in the ‟40s, ‟50s, ‟60s, and now [in the] ‟70s it was gone. how did that affect you as a teacher, professor in the classroom? lukacs: my last memorable class was the class of ‟74. after ‟74, i had occasionally good students, but only occasionally. you see, my situation, my very career, my way of life, my aim of life, is unorthodox, not typical. i wanted to make my career by writing, so i was never much interested in the academic step-ladder. to go to other institutions... we always wondered what kept you. lukacs: i had a chance, but i did not have a very big chance, because then the other institutions, other people, want to know that this person is interested. now, the other element was that i lost my native country and my family when i came to this country, and i didn‟t want to move. in ‟71, „72, out of the blue, i was offered a big job. usually, you must understand, it‟s like marriage, like sex, it takes two of them. usually you‟re offered something when people know you‟re available. i was never available, but i still had a big offer to teach, from tufts university in boston, where i would teach half of what i taught at chestnut hill, instead of twelve hours a week, six hours a week, with more than double the salary. i did not give it a thought, you know? or rather, there was only so much that i did not exactly tell them that, “i don‟t want to stay,” but they offered me such a fair amount of money, and this was after my wife had died. so i commuted for two days every week to boston, simply because in those days it was a lot of money, $30,000 and all of my expenses. but from the first moment, i had no intention of going there. then i wrote and wrote, and made my career writing, and then, in the middle ‟80s, came another change. the change was that publishers were interested in me, well, more than they are now, and i was earning some money through my writing. you know they pay you in advance on royalties, because if you work on royalties and somebody works on a book for three years, he doesn‟t get money until the fourth year. the advance of royalties is against royalties earned, and it‟s not repayable. it only happens to maybe two, maybe three books of mine, where i earned past the 41 lukacs and kelley advance. by the ‟80s for writers, everything was advance. i was surprisingly getting – i never got big advances – but enough advances, so i made a deal with the then president of the college that, “alright, i will teach full time the first semester, but for half of my salary,” and then i could travel and write from christmas to labor day. this is what i did from ‟86 to the ‟90s and it worked out well. my pension and social security were not and are not enough to cover my expenses, but i easily earned the rest through my writing… but not any longer. the industry is in very bad shape. but it lasted a long time. after leaving chestnut hill college in 1997, i taught a little for three or four more years at penn, but there because i wanted to keep on teaching. i only had to drive down once a week and i could teach whatever i wanted to advanced students. tell me about the students you encountered at penn. were they as bright as the students you encountered at chestnut hill college from ’68–’74? lukacs: i must say yes… i don‟t know what you mean by bright. but you see, what happened was that i really had my pick of a group of honors students, and i taught whatever i liked, and i taught some odd courses, whatever interested me. i know this was the best group of students i had ever taught and there were only seven of them. one was a faker, you know. but the other six were wonderful. and they liked my course so much, that without me knowing, they found out that my son, who is a professor, is also a wine expert... you are a wine expert! lukacs: no, i never was a wine expert. my son is way ahead on this. they found out behind my back which is my favorite french champagne, and i‟m not really – i like champagne, but i‟m not a champagne addict – and they gave it to me as a present on the last day of class. i was very touched by that. that was one of the things i wanted to talk to you about. i read several of your interviews online with bruce cole 2 about the writing of history today, and you remark about tocqueville’s comment, “what will be the characteristics of historians in democratic times,” and you rail against the... lukacs: there‟s a tremendous chapter of 48 sentences, and hardly any historian has read this. he (tocqueville) is prophetic, you know, and i want to tell you that i have just, you see, i have to write, have written a book about this… i‟ll tell you what happened. i have been blessed with pretty good health. my wife has intestinal flu, which is pretty bad. but i hardly ever have been to a hospital in my life, but last year, yes. i had to have a very severe operation. this was predicted by my cardiologist for thirty years, that, eventually i would have to have that operation, and last interview: john lukacs 42 year i had to have it. the operation was quite successful, but it had some postoperative complications, which in that operation happens in almost half the cases, so i was, i didn‟t suffer, but i was house bound, wired up, miserable, and i had to do something. so you wrote a book? lukacs: yes. so i started a book. again, it was a coincidence in the... i hope you‟re not going to put all this in the interview i won’t, go ahead. lukacs: you see, it was either ‟96 or ‟97, that i was stopped at penn. that was the last time i taught anywhere. at that time, i did not even have a publisher, because this is also happens at the same time as the publisher who published three or four books of mine, went out of business. then, the editor-in-chief of yale university [press] discovered me in ‟98. he published a number of books of mine. but again, the publishing business went down again, and this man, who was the chief, left yale two years ago. for example, yale did not want to publish my correspondence with kennan, which was stupid… i had the correspondence, well, i had to put it together and all that. but i was thinking about history writing and i offered this to the substitute woman at yale, and she was interested. so i wrote a book, a very small book, and titled the future of history and this will be published by yale next spring. can you give me some kernels from it? because it seems to me, as someone who had responsibility for the curriculum of a high school, when howard zinn’s people‟s history of the united states came into fashion, and all the american history teachers added the people‟s history, even on the ap us history list of books, and now we have the patriot‟s history of the united states, written by michael allen and larry schweikart. so you’ve got the people’s history and the patriot’s history. and what would you would to history teachers, “include both of them”? lukacs: eh, alright. this new book has six chapters and, as is so often in history, and in individual life too, there are contradictory developments. you always taught us that in our classes with you. lukacs: the contradictory development is that the general, while on one hand or the one side, the crisis in literature, painting, arts, music, did not touch professional history until about 1960. i‟m not speaking of myself, but in 1960, history was taught, researched, published, everything, pretty much as it was fifty or sixty years before that. not since. and, what is also regrettable, this is not unlike what happened in colleges, but in 1970, as you know, required history courses 43 lukacs and kelley disappeared in colleges, universities, even high schools. there were not enough teaching jobs, and the historical professionals, especially historians who were well-situated, were ignorant about this. so you know, there was a great decrease in interest in history about this time, and it never recovered. at the same time, however, there was another development, an unpredictable development, that most professional historians are not aware of. again, beginning about 1960, there began a great appetite for history. “appetite,” and i‟m not speaking of the nutrition. you see, this exists in every country. you see an interest in history affecting portions of a population who previously were not interested. you can see evidences of this in the good and bad history books that sell better than novels. in this country, there are three times as many local historical societies as there were fifty years ago; the same with history programs on television, you know. yes, such as the popularity of the history channel. lukacs: so, in my new book, i‟m dealing with this dual development. do you think it’s more than just cultural entertainment? do you think it’s a genuine appetite, or is the nutrition missing? lukacs: the nutrition can be bad, but, by and large, appetite is a sign of some health. it‟s not well fed, but there it is. this is what the book is about. in the end, some speculation they won‟t entirely like but i speculate on what will happen when books disappear. in the form they are... lukacs: yes, in the form they are. it‟s a short book; it‟s not going to be more than two hundred pages. as someone who teaches history – sections of my villanova university course are historical – i struggle with this. you mention this in democracy and populism, that when you assigned a research paper to us in 1970, there was a bound authority to turn to. today, however, there is, as you called it, a “fantastic proliferation,” papers, documents, blogs. where does the record of history go? lukacs: i‟ve noticed this only second hand, because i‟m still in touch with history teachers, and they all complain that they cannot control where the students get this stuff from the internet. right, and the students can’t gauge the quality, as well as the quantity, of their research. lukacs: and this, you see, is in an age where i have no experience with this. interview: john lukacs 44 although i think i remember reading one of your comments that when you write a book, you get rid of all your papers, that you don’t save everything the way that a churchill... lukacs: well, that depends. right now i‟m writing an article and – it‟s interesting, i don‟t always do this – i‟m writing the main draft pretty much the way it exists in my mind, and then i go through the books and see what else i can add for the sake of illustrating the argument. but i don‟t always work that way. it struck me, having been both taught by you and subsequently reading nearly all your books, that as i sit in your library today, i can easily see from where the extraordinary breadth and the depth of your references came from. lukacs: well, the library... this is interesting, a very short article about a meeting between churchill and stalin, and you know i did books on churchill and stalin, but i‟m working on this right now, right before you came, and i‟m much slower than i used to be... and i don‟t have to go to the libraries. i can no longer do serious research because i‟m too old to get to the libraries. it is a great pity because you go to libraries, you go to archives, you know what you‟re looking for, but you always find some odd things. one of the things you write about in your histories about people is that we too often ignore the existence of free will. lukacs: oh very important, which goes against the modern scientific view. how firmly do you hold onto that despite the advances of neurosciences and psychology? lukacs: absolutely. this is something to do with whatever i believe in religiously, too. every human being is responsible, and here a catholic element enters, for what he does, or what he says, and even for what he thinks. i love your statement that, “people don’t have ideas, they choose them.” lukacs: i always believed in the importance of ideas. it is the ideas, you know, what people think and believe that makes history, not material conditions. but it took me sixty, seventy years to suddenly realize that these ideas don‟t exist in the abstract. ideas only matter when they connect with people, and people choose ideas. can people change their beliefs? lukacs: with difficulty, but they do. 45 lukacs and kelley you write very compellingly about this in democracy and populism – almost prophetically as it was written in 2004 and published in 2005 – and if you read this now in 2010, you look like jeremiah. when you look now at the unity around hatred in this country, and the fear, and those two emotions going back and forth and the tea party movement... lukacs: this is by and large, you see, the difficulty as the two emotions overlap, but they are not the same; the difference is between ideas and beliefs. people believe what they want to believe, what is comfortable to them, and this has bad signs, because it is comfortable for you to believe that the reason you are not advancing in your job because others are intriguing against you. this may be true, or this may be not true. people choose ideas. at my funeral some may call me an idealist, but it took me a long time to realize this. it‟s not like german idealism during the zeitgeist; this is a principle idea: it‟s true, but it‟s not true enough. that was also a famous quote of yours, “true, but not true enough.” you ingrained that in me. lukacs: this is… i think it comes from even before i taught you at chestnut hill when i read a wonderful statement by an old irish woman. her neighbors came to gossip, saying, “is this true about the young widow in the street?” and she said, “it‟s not true, but it‟s true enough.” i say that the historian has to proceed in reverse, that these things may be true, but they‟re not true enough. i get exactly what you mean, and puncturing what was the consensus, about what happened, or what is happening is always what i took from your teaching. you left me with a healthy skepticism that the easy interpretation is not necessarily the true one... lukacs: sometimes yes, sometimes no. the only direct quote i take from you – and it took me years to figure out what you meant and why you were correct – was, one day i came to your class in the spring of 1970 – and, again, we would never have missed your class – so i had left the sit-in in sister mary xavier’s office, which i was co-leading with another history major, jane o’donnell – a brilliant history major – and the both of us left the sit-in to come to your class. when we walked in, very smug about “our student revolution,” which – you admit, was five years later than most – you looked at us and said, “scratch any liberal and one day i will find a conservative.” meaning, what you think you're seeing is not necessarily what will be. this leads me to the principle you’ve also established, and i hope it is in the future of history, that history is about the words the historian uses. lukacs: exactly. facts are inseparable from the words in which we state them. realize that history consists of words. interview: john lukacs 46 with this tool, the words of a historian, what obligations does the historian have? lukacs: and it‟s not only stylistic. suppose i talk to my wife... of course we‟re going to have dinner tonight, and i try to be very cooperative as she is ill. you see, the choice of every word is not merely stylistic, it is a moral choice. and therefore a moral responsibility for the historian. lukacs: yes, as it is in everyday life. it seems to me, even with the popularity of history, that historians are using their words to describe facts to a particular political advantage. lukacs: well many of them do, yes. how does one avoid that? what would be your caution to the historians, or even the professors in the classroom, who are under siege? lukacs: how to avoid one‟s political ideological beliefs from influencing? it‟s difficult. i‟m sure i have one too; i prefer some people and some things. that's difficult. notes 1. mark atwood lawrence, “the heart of a realist,” review of through the history of the cold war, ed. john lukacs, new york times book review, july 23, 2010, br22 http://www.nytimes.com/ 2010/07/25/books/review/lawrence-t.html 2. bruce cole, “history in a democratic age,” humanities, january/february 2003 http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2003-01/democraticage.html © equinox publishing ltd. 2007, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expositions 1.2 (2007) 191–222] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v1i2.191 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 humanity at the turning point: philosophical anthropology and the posthuman dennis m. weiss york college of pennsylvania this essay aims to demonstrate that the philosophical anthropology of michael landmann provides important critical tools and resources for intervening in the debate over the posthuman and the turning point that humanity faces due to the advancing powers of technologies such as genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and cybernetics. landmann’s view of the human being, which emphasizes the correlative conditions of creativity and culturality, freedom and determinacy, and malleability and fixity, provides the grounds on which to critique the current structure of the debate over the posthuman and resituate it in terms of our historicity and self-images. the rhetorically charged trope of the posthuman, with its emphasis on a break or turning point, risks cutting us off from significant resources for understanding human nature, including the resources of philosophical anthropology, and does not advance our understanding of our current situation and the current dilemmas human beings face in light of our advancing technological powers. the february, 2000 issue of wired magazine, the magazine of and for the digerati, features on its cover a photo of “cybernetics pioneer” kevin warwick, his shirt sleeve rolled up, as if ready for a fix. but in this case “the fix” is a superimposed x-ray image that discloses a glass-enclosed microchip surgically implanted in warwick’s left arm. warwick, the cover announces, is upgrading the human body—starting with himself. “cyborg 1.0,” the accompanying article penned by warwick, outlines his plan to become one with his computer. writes warwick: “i was born human. but this was an accident of fate—a condition merely of time and place. i believe it’s something we have the power to change. i will tell you why” (2000, 145). warwick intends to implant a chip in 192 humanity at the turning point © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 his arm that will send signals back and forth between his nervous system and a computer. for warwick, being human is merely an accident of time and place, an accident that given the right computing power and the right cybernetics, we might well be able to fix. two months later, wired has had a change of heart—speaking only figuratively at this point in time. the cover of the april, 2000 edition features a crumpled page torn perhaps from a dictionary, maybe webster’s twenty-first century unabridged. on this discarded page we read: “human adj. 1. of, belonging to, or typical of the extinct species homo sapiens <the human race> 2. what consisted of or was produced by homo sapiens <human society> n. an extinct biped, homo sapiens, characterized by carbon-based anatomy; also human being.” bill joy, cofounder and chief scientist of sun microsystems, has been having second thoughts about the computer revolution and in his article “why the future doesn’t need us” explores how it is that “our most powerful twenty-first-century technologies—robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech—are threatening to make humans an endangered species” (2000, 238). it’s time, joy thinks, to wake up and smell the terminator. warwick versus joy. human versus post-human. it would seem from this battle being played out on the cover of wired that humanity has indeed arrived at a turning point. we have reached a point where we are poised to take control of our evolutionary future, transforming ourselves and our progeny from the accident of our humanity into well-designed posthumanity. or, in our hubris, we have reached the point where we are poised to eliminate the human being once and for all. this narrative, of the end of the human and the coming of the posthuman, is a fairly common one today, played out not only on the covers of magazines such as wired but in movies, television talk shows, and academic tomes. it is this narrative regarding the turning point at which humanity has arrived that i wish to interrogate in this essay. for all the attention that our posthuman future receives today, much of the narrative surrounding this currently popular trope is ill-conceived. the claim that we have arrived at a turning point, represented either by the promise or the threat of the posthuman, is mistaken. furthermore, it dennis m. weiss 193 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 is a mistake premised upon an inadequate understanding of what we human beings are in the first place. before we embrace the posthuman or run in fear from it, it would be worthwhile for us to think a little more clearly about what it means to be human. there is a long tradition of anthropological thought in western philosophy that provides the grounding for such a task. for the purposes of this essay, i will draw on the work of the twentieth-century german philosophical anthropologist michael landmann and his discussion of the fundamental characteristics of the human being in order to lay the groundwork for a rethinking of the posthuman and humanity’s turning point. i begin by briefly mapping the terms in which debates over humanity’s turning point occur, discussing the popularity of the trope of the posthuman and the widespread assumption that humanity has indeed arrived at a turning point. i catalog the two typical responses to this notion of a turning point, an optimistic embrace of the posthuman and a pessimistic dread of its coming. following this, i turn to landmann’s philosophical anthropology, a rich and holistic account of the human being that draws on some of the best elements of the tradition of philosophical anthropology. from this more complete account of the human being, i will suggest that the posthuman is still-born: humanity is not facing a turning point represented by the loss of our humanity. we do, though, face some difficult choices and decisions in the coming years, made especially urgent by the rapid development and spread of bioand cybernetic-technologies. but the image of the posthuman, with its attendant dread or delirium, is not going to help us make those decisions. proponents and opponents of the posthuman alike have it wrong in that respect. landmann’s philosophical anthropology provides us with the critical tools and insights for resituating the debate away from the rhetorically charged figure of the posthuman, and paying closer attention to the historical, cultural, and social context of the human being. while landmann’s philosophical anthropology is largely silent on normative issues, his framework provides a better context in which to debate the future of humanity than one driven by concerns over the apparent coming of the posthuman. 194 humanity at the turning point © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 i in setting out to describe our current situation, it is clear that there is a widespread presumption that humanity is indeed at a turning point. issuing from a variety of perspectives and motivated by a cross-section of theoretical concerns, comes the claim that especially owing to technological developments human beings are on the cusp of profound change. consider, for instance, two diametrically opposed figures in the current debate regarding the future of humanity, gregory stock and francis fukuyama. stock begins his largely approving discussion of human germline engineering, redesigning humans: our inevitable genetic future, by noting, we know that homo sapiens is not the final word in primate evolution, but few have yet grasped that we are on the cusp of profound biological change, poised to transcend our current form and character on a journey to destinations of new imagination. (2002, 1) while fukuyama is best known for his critique of the posthuman, he agrees with stock that we are on the cusp of profound change: “we appear to be poised at the cusp of one of the most momentous periods of technological advance in history” (2002a, 5). the president’s council on bioethics voices a similar claim, quoting the national science foundation: “at this unique moment in the history of technical achievement, improvement of human performance becomes possible,” and such improvement, if pursued with vigor, “could achieve a golden age that would be a turning point for human productivity and quality of life” (2003, 6–7). leon kass, chairman of the president’s council, has often taken the lead in articulating similar claims that we are the verge of a profound transformation. as he writes in life, liberty and the defense of dignity, human nature itself lies on the operating table, ready for alteration, for eugenic and psychic “enhancement,” for wholesale re-design. in leading laboratories, academic and industrial, new creators are confidently amassing their powers and quietly honing their skills, while on the street their evangelists are zealously prophesying a posthuman future. (2002, 4) in his foreword to beyond therapy, kass suggests that what is at stake dennis m. weiss 195 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 in these discussions of our posthuman future is “the kind of human being and the sort of society we will be creating in the coming age of biotechnology” (2003, xvi). indeed, this claim has now become quite commonplace, even more so if we take into consideration the many ways in which technology seems to be impacting our understanding of human nature, from biotechnology to digital technologies such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, cybernetics, and robotics. in radical evolution: the promise and peril of enhancing our minds, our bodies— and what it means to be human, joel garreau focuses on “the future of human nature” and explores the “biggest change in tens of thousands of years in what it means to be human” (2005, 3). garreau’s discussion focuses on robotics, information science, nanotechnology, and genetics and ponders the question “will human nature itself change? will we soon pass some point where we are so altered by our imaginations and inventions as to be unrecognizable to shakespeare or the writers of the ancient greek plays?” (2005, 21). as with many of these accounts of the coming turning point, garreau’s work draws on the notion of a coming singularity, first popularized by vernor vinge and most recently the focus of raymond kurzweil’s book the singularity is near: when humans transcend biology (2005). in “the coming technological singularity: how to survive in the post-human era,” (1993), vinge argues that “we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on earth. the precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence.” his claim has been taken up by technoenthusiasts such as kurzweil, hans moravec (1988, 1998), and the transhumanists. indeed, the increasing integration of digital technologies in our lives has led many to argue that the once clear boundaries separating human beings from machines are disappearing and we are on the verge of a fundamental transformation in our understanding of what it means to be human. in the mode of information, mark poster suggests that “[a] symbiotic merger between human and machine might literally be occurring, one that threatens the stability of our sense of the boundary of the human body in the world. what may be happening is that human beings create computers and then com196 humanity at the turning point © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 puters create a new species of humans” (1990, 4). in the war of desire and technology at the close of the mechanical age, allucquere rosanne stone suggests that we are in the midst of a paradigm shift from the mechanical age to the virtual age and we now inhabit the cyborg habitat of the technosocial, in which technology is viewed as natural and human nature becomes a cultural construct. the ubiquity of technology, stone suggests, rearranges our thinking apparatus and calls into question “the structure of meaning production by which we recognize each other as human” (1995, 173). in the age of spiritual machines, ray kurzweil argues, “the primary political and philosophical issue of the next century will be the definition of who we are” (1999, 2). ed regis explores our “transhuman, postbiological” future in great mambo chicken and the transhuman condition, suggesting that perhaps the human condition is a condition “to be gotten out of” (1990, 175). o.b. hardison too suggests that the human being is flawed and that the relation between carbon “man” and our silicon devices is “like the relation between the caterpillar and the iridescent, winged creature that the caterpillar unconsciously prepares to become” (1989, 335). there is widespread agreement, then, on the idea that human beings are fast approaching a turning point where we may cease to exist owing to the impact of technology on human nature. there is less agreement, however, regarding how we ought to respond to these technological developments. returning briefly to our opening contrast between warwick and joy, we can read them as fairly paradigmatic of two contrasting, diametric responses to these issues raised by technology and the posthuman. warwick approaches these issues with a sense of optimism and willing involvement. as he notes: since childhood i’ve been captivated by the study of robots and cyborgs. now i’m in a position where i can actually become one. each morning, i wake up champing at the bit, eager to set alight the 21st century—to change what it means to be human. (2000, 151) warwick argues that it is completely natural for human beings to explore and change, that cybernetic technologies represent a natural development in our co-evolution with machines, and that our failure to advance along with our machines risks our survival. dennis m. weiss 197 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 linking people via chip implants directly to those machines seems a natural progression, a potential way of harnessing machine intelligence by essentially creating superhumans. otherwise, we’re doomed to a future in which intelligent machines rule and humans become second-class citizens. my project explores a middle ground that gives humans a chance to hang in there a bit longer. right now, we’re moving toward a world where machines and humans remain distinct, but instead of just handing everything over to them, i offer a more gradual coevolution with computers. (2000, 151) the australian performance artist stelarc, whose creations have long questioned the nature and limits of the human body, argues that we must adopt a posthuman philosophy of erasure in which we reconfigure notions of the body, evolution, and gender distinction as hybridities of human-machine. the body, selarc writes, is obsolete in the current technological environment. stelarc envisions a future in which technology “invades” the body, giving us the freedom to transcend the limitations of our dna. it’s time to question whether a bipedal, breathing body with binocular vision and a 1,400 cc brain is an adequate biological form. it cannot cope with the quantity, complexity, and quality of information it has accumulated; it is intimidated by the precision, speed, and power of technology and it is biologically ill-equipped to cope with its new extraterrestrial environment. (1998, 117) similar claims embracing and promoting the turning point made possible by technology are made by a number of enthusiasts for the posthuman, including stock, the roboticist hans moravec, new age techno-enthusiasts such as the extropians, and many others. lest we get caught up in this wave of posthuman euphoria, however, we need only recall the (paradoxical?) sight of proto-cyborgs, their cell phones, palm pilots, pagers and other personal internet devices strapped to their sides, queuing up to see the matrix, one in a long line of hollywood films that pit humans against machines and imagine a future in which human beings become little more than battery packs for computers, who hold us hostage by generating a virtual reality twentieth century to preoccupy us and keep us busy while they feed off of our bodies’ electromagnetic energy. this is the concern given voice by bill 198 humanity at the turning point © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 joy, who worries that “our most powerful 21st-century technologies— robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech—are threatening to make humans an endangered species” (2000, 238). joy worries about the dehumanizing influences of this advancing technology. but if we are downloaded into our technology, what are the chances that we will thereafter be ourselves or even human? it seems to me far more likely that a robotic existence would not be like a human one in any sense that we understand, that the robots would in no sense be our children, that on this path our humanity may well be lost. (2000, 244) joy’s perspective is shared by joseph weizenbaum who, in computer power and human reason, labels obscene any projects that propose to substitute a computer system for a human function that involves interpersonal respect, understanding, and love (1976, 269). weizenbaum argues that there are important differences between humans and computers and we dehumanize human beings by adopting computers as a metaphor for understanding ourselves. sven birkerts agrees that we may be on the verge of species mutation but argues that this mutation pits technology against soul. my use of soul is secular. i mean it to stand for inwardness, for that awareness we carry of ourselves as mysterious creatures at large in the universe. the soul is that part of us that smelts meaning and tries to derive a sense of purpose from experience. (1994, 212) others, such as stephen talbott in the future does not compute, alan wolfe in the human difference, bill mckibben in enough: staying human in an engineered age, and hubert and stuart dreyfus in mind over machine, agree with birkerts and weizenbaum that the computer threatens what is most distinctive about humanity. reflecting on genetic technology, leon kass similarly declares: here in consequence is the most pernicious result of our technological progress—more dehumanizing than any actual manipulation or technique, present or future: the erosion, perhaps the final erosion, of the idea of man as noble, dignified, precious, or godlike, and its replacement with a view of man, no less than of nature, as mere raw material for manipulation and homogenization. (2000, 86–87) dennis m. weiss 199 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 technologies from genetic engineering to artificial intelligence have wrought fundamental changes in our understanding of human nature. indeed, technological developments have challenged much of our taken-for-granted knowledge about human nature and the future of the human species. at the close of the twentieth century, there is, as scott bukatman notes, “an uneasy but consistent sense of human obsolescence, and at stake is the very definition of the human.…[o]ur ontology is adrift” (1993, 20). ii we have seen that there is widespread agreement that owing to the developments of modern technology, humanity appears to be at a turning point. there is less agreement, though, on responses to that supposed turning point. the reflections in the previous section raise a number of important questions. is the human being soon to be obsolete? are we entering a posthuman or postbiological age? if so, ought we to be fearful of these developments or should we embrace them as the next logical step in human evolution? the challenge of addressing these questions today is complicated by the fact that for the past several decades at least, it is precisely discussions of human nature that have been most absent from the contemporary scene. while technological developments have been such that our very humanity is seemingly placed in the balance, scholars and theoreticians have been dismissive of accounts of human nature. as charles taylor notes, we’ve become very nervous and squeamish about “human nature.” “the very words ring bells. we fear that we may be setting up some reified image, in face of the changing forms of human life in history, that we may be prisoners of some insidious ethnocentrism” (1985, vii). calvin schrag concurs, noting, “even a casual observer of the current state of the arts and sciences is able to discern that humanism, both as a philosophical position and as a cultural attitude, is under suspicion. the project and language of humanism alike have fallen into disfavor and have become fashionable targets of critique” (1986, 197). but failing to reflect on human nature at precisely this point in time seems especially paradoxical. as ronald cole observes: 200 humanity at the turning point © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 to me, at least, it is distressing that precisely at the moment in human history when we are poised on the threshold of the possibility of the technological manipulation of human nature, we have very little consensus on what we mean by human nature. in fact, we have very few candidate theories of human nature, philosophical or theological, and so it is quite likely we will proceed to alter what we do not even pretend to understand. (1998, 156) indeed, it is perhaps owing to these technological developments that more recently there has been a growing recognition of the need for more comprehensive accounts of human nature. the important work of the british philosopher mary midgley (1995) has been attracting increasing attention for similar reasons. even in the anglo-analytic tradition, owen flanagan (2002), in his recent work on a naturalized ethics, characterizes his account of ethics as human ecology as a variety of philosophical anthropology. feminist theory, where for very legitimate reasons theories of human nature have been dismissed, has recently seen the reemergence of human nature as a viable concept, as in the work of martha nussbaum (2000) and her aristotelian capabilities approach to human nature. this recent work is suggestive of the need to address more squarely questions about our nature as human beings. we fail to adequately address the question of humanity’s turning point if we cannot address the more fundamental issue of humanity’s nature. in order to do that, i turn to the tradition of philosophical anthropology. philosophical anthropology has been most closely associated with a series of german philosophers writing between the two world wars. it is generally thought to have begun with max scheler’s man’s place in nature. in that book, which was first published in 1928, scheler begins by recognizing the human being’s problematic nature. scheler writes, “man is more of a problem to himself at the present time than ever before in all recorded history” (1961, 4). it is the precariousness revealed by the human being’s self-reflection that leads scheler to address the twin questions, “what is man?” and “what is man’s place in the nature of things?” these two questions set the tone for the development of philosophical anthropology over the next several decades, in works by such leading figures as helmuth plessner (1981), arnold gehlen dennis m. weiss 201 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 (1988), ernst cassirer (1944), martin buber (1965), and erich rothacker (1965), among others. a rather diverse lot, these thinkers were in agreement that one of the fundamental questions facing human beings was the matter of their nature and place in the cosmos. while mostly forgotten today, the philosophical anthropologists produced some of the most perceptive analyses of human nature in the history of philosophy, reason enough perhaps to warrant a second look. additionally, philosophical anthropology emerged at a time analogous to our own in which there was a widespread recognition of our crisis of self-knowledge. as paul pfeutze voiced it, “modern man has become a problem to himself, and all over the world men are inquiring with fresh zeal into the nature of man. what is man? what is the meaning of human existence?” similar points were made by gehlen (1988), cassirer (1944), and others. this sense of crisis was driven in part, both then and now, by the rapidly developing sciences and the growing power of technology. as pfeutze continues, on all sides one finds moral disaster, political confusion, spiritual discontent, mental breakdown, and a growing suspicion, now amounting to a certainty, that during the last few centuries man has so far misinterpreted his own nature as to make tragic and catastrophic use of his powers and technics. (1954, 19) a number of philosophical anthropologists, including gehlen, buber, and plessner, wrote explicitly about technology and its relation to human nature. a strength of philosophical anthropology was its insistence that reflections on human nature must be equally informed by the scientific, technical, and empirical as well as the cultural and philosophical. as plessner notes, “there can be no philosophy of man without study of nature” (quoted in dallmayr 1974, 72). indeed, the most interesting discussions of human nature found in philosophical anthropology draw on and illuminate diverse disciplines and perspectives, a still further warrant for looking to this tradition. for the purposes of this essay, and in order to push further this examination of humanity’s turning point, i shall focus on the philosophical anthropology of michael landmann. there are several reasons why landmann specifically is worthwhile in this context. first, landmann 202 humanity at the turning point © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 was as much a commentator on the tradition of philosophical anthropology as he was a practitioner of the discipline. his philosophical anthropology is one of the most developed and comprehensive, incorporating his own reflections on the western historical tradition from the greeks and hebrews to the very best insights of his fellow philosophical anthropologists. secondly, landmann’s work remains widely available today, since it has been translated into english and is still available in print, while the same is unfortunately not true for many of the key works in philosophical anthropology, many of which have yet to be translated into english and many of those that have, have been allowed to fall out of print. while landmann’s work remains available, however, it is less well known than that of some of the other philosophical anthropologists and remains a neglected resource. jos de mul’s work (see references in de mul 2003) on digitally mediated embodiment has brought renewed and deserved attention to plessner’s philosophical anthropology and its implications for a better understanding of information and communication technologies. much of the oeuvre of this philosophical discipline remains unknown, however, and a third reason for turning specifically to the work of landmann is to make some small effort towards bringing his philosophical anthropology some of the attention it deserves. in his key texts, philosophical anthropology (1974) and fundamental anthropology (1985), landmann seeks to develop a view of human nature that is adequate to our complete being and understands the human being as an original totality (1974, 178). landmann argues that philosophical anthropology ought to examine the underlying human structure while remaining cognizant of the contextual anthropology of particular images of man. as man is forming culture, he makes history. philosophical anthropology can, therefore, be only a formal anthropology: it, so-to-speak, draws the geometric curve on which cultures lie, but their content of concrete particularity results not from binding universal ideas but from life, which institutes them. (1985, 118) philosophical anthropology studies the permanent preconditions and forces that underlie all images of man (1985, 57). dennis m. weiss 203 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 landmann organizes his account of human nature around what he refers to as the “anthropine gap” and what he identifies as “anthropina,” unchanging fixed, timeless basic structures of human existence (1985, 125). by the anthropine gap, landmann means the lack of specialization of the human being in comparison to animals. a key insight in many philosophical anthropologies is the world openness of the human being, which is meant to capture the peculiarly human characteristic of being existentially liberated from the vital and instinctual sphere of animals. this characteristic has been widely remarked on in the history of philosophy and has been the bedrock of every major philosophical anthropology. as landmann points out, a recognition of the human being’s openness to the world extends from protagoras to the renaissance and the goethe period (1974, 177). according to landmann, the “anthropine gap” is filled by two fundamental “anthropina”—culture and creativity—and his discussion of this point provides clues into the primary features of his philosophical anthropology: creativity and culturality, shaping the future and depending on the past, being open to the new and shaped by tradition, freedom and determinacy: these are the two fundamental anthropina. all others are just specifications or derivatives.… they not only coexist, they cooperate. their relation is not just aporetic, but dialectical. … man is the mediation of this thesis and antithesis .… but man’s mediation is not given once and for all but must constantly be reproduced. (1985, 129) human beings are such that they come into the world unfinished, so to speak, and they are completed in a cultural context. human beings are cultural, social, and traditional beings completed by their participation in specific cultures. but human beings are also creative beings, the very same beings who create the culture that completes them. landmann sees creativity and culturality, freedom and determinacy, malleability and fixity as correlative conditions of the human being. we cannot understand either in isolation from the others. man, he argues, lives from these polar forces and “faces the task of mastering their interplay and interrelating them in each respective situation” (1985, 120). significantly, landmann warns us against seeing these forces as du204 humanity at the turning point © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 alistic. “receptivity corresponds to productivity. the productive being is also the receptive one. that is no contradiction. the two things are mutually conditioned” (1985, 132). landmann draws on the work of adolf portmann (1990) and clifford geertz (1973) in support of his claim that biological and cultural development go hand in hand, in what he often refers to as a “mighty system of circular causality” (1985, 60). “no sharp distinction can be made in man between the natural creature and the cultural being, nor between the cultural and the historical being” (1985, 92). more precisely, as man creates culture, it floods back to him and in turn creates him. he is both cause and effect, retro-shaped product of his own product. the human mind is not a transcendental point, which itself standing outside becoming, constitutes everything else and therefore has a comparatively higher, pre-mundane, more original existential dignity. man and culture … form a bipolar system in constant flux caused by dynamic feedback. (1985, 94) while this brief sketch of landmann’s philosophical anthropology only hints at the outlines of his approach to human nature, it does suggest several important insights relevant to our discussion. first landmann recognizes that inquiring about existence is a fundamental feature of the human condition: the concept of man implies anthropology. this is not mere optional, theoretical speculation; it springs from the deepest necessity of a being that must shape itself and therefore needs an orientational model or leitbild to go by. (1974, 23) given that the human being is unfinished, unspecialized, and must be completed by culture, we face the perennial task of our self-creation. this characteristic of the human condition was often remarked upon by philosophical anthropologists. as cassirer pointed out in an essay on man, man “is that creature who is constantly in search of himself—a creature who in every moment of his existence must examine and scrutinize the conditions of his existence” (1944, 6). in addressing this anthropological question, however, landmann is clear that there are avenues not open to the human being. landmann is critical, for instance, of both ahistorical views of human nature and dennis m. weiss 205 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 naturalistic views. indeed, landmann rejects any kind of essentialism in accounts of human nature. references to an unchanging and timeless core of human being or to a natural state ignore one of the fundamental “anthropina” of human nature, our malleability and plasticity, our very historicity. every appearance of naturalness is deceptive….what is innate in man and could be called our a priori is not a preexistent norm of culture, but a functional energy: only the undifferentiated capacity to design culture and to work toward it. but in content we remain unbound. (1974, 222) landmann repeatedly refers to the insights of goethe and herder that the human being is an historical being and as such has no timeless or unchanging essence. a timeless unchanging core of man is an illusion which historical consciousness must destroy. this illusion is shared by naturalism, which seeks to interpret this specific core-reality of man from below, from the bio-pyschological substratum, and by supernaturalism, which seeks to interpret it from above, from reason or the god-given soul. it is the current conviction, however, that the influence of the changing cultures extends down into the innermost being of self-changing man. (1985, 57) a third point worth remarking upon is landmann’s recognition that our historicity extends to the issue of norms as well. there is no single cultural norm desired by nature or reason, he suggests (1985, 58). if our creativity is a genuine creativity, it cannot be limited by preexisting norms. again and again attempts have been made to find cultural norms that result necessarily out of man’s nature … in reality this idea of a natural culture is self-contradictory. in man’s nature, only the fact of culture and not its modality is predesignated. “artificiality is man’s nature.”…the only thing mapped out for us in advance is the necessary tendency to completion in general. (1985, 56) finally, landmann suggests that we not read the previous points to suggest that individual human beings are capable of radical acts of freedom in relation to their own culturality and historicity. 206 humanity at the turning point © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 the man whom we encounter physically as an individual is nonetheless not self-sufficient as an individual and cannot be understood just in his singularity… man’s placement in a community is a constitutive anthropinon. (1985, 48) human beings, landmann suggests, are embedded in culture somewhat like a fish in water (1985, 53). indeed, landmann is explicitly critical of existentialism for over-emphasizing creativity as a radical, free act of the individual. while pointing out that tradition’s compulsion is not absolute, landmann also argues that we become complete only by growing up in tradition-carrying groups (1985, 62). iii how does landmann’s philosophical anthropology help us to make some progress towards addressing humanity’s turning point? it is my contention that philosophical anthropology does indeed provide important critical tools and resources for addressing those questions raised by the posthuman and posed at the opening of section two. it is to this claim that i turn in this section. on the surface, one might be forgiven for thinking that landmann’s philosophical anthropology is not adequate to the task of discussing our current situation and the dilemma of humanity at the turning point. here is an account of human nature whose origins predate many of the technological and scientific developments forcing these questions upon us. it is a view of human nature that is largely silent on the role of technology, though landmann does take note of the cybernetic revolution in fundamental anthropology. and yet it is here precisely that landmann might insist that we begin not from an account of the technology and its impact on the human condition but with the fact that we are inevitably led to raise once again the question of what it means to be human. landmann’s philosophical anthropology begins with the recognition that the human being “inquisitively asks about and interprets himself ” (1974, 3) and that our self-interpretations or self-images are not static but have a “formative effect” (1974, 20). philosophical anthropology is, for landmann, not simply an academic discourse, but a universally felt need. we are problematic and we need a self-image. dennis m. weiss 207 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 “our human self-knowledge is … of the most drastic significance for us; work at self-knowledge is our greatest responsibility” (1985, 27). indeed, most philosophical anthropologists, including landmann, recognize that philosophical anthropology becomes most insistent in times of crisis and change. so it is the essence of our humanity that we remain an open question, that we seek self-interpretations, and that in especially difficult times of crisis and transition, these questions become most insistent. recognizing this as an aspect of the human condition and in light of such technological developments as the human genome project, artificial intelligence, and the growing interface between human and machine, we are bound to renew these questions about what it means to be human. it would be in some sense in-human not to raise these questions at precisely this time. but that suggests that rather than seeking some discontinuity or break between the human and the posthuman, rather than suggesting that we are entering some posthuman condition, the questions and issues that human beings are now facing are continuous with the ones that they have always faced. the posthuman does not represent the emergence of some radically new state of humanity but rather highlights one ineluctable fact of our very humanity: we face openly its question. as landmann suggests, “to be human includes a constant tension and caution” (1985, 152). furthermore, the recognition of this continuity suggests that we find and draw on critical resources in our cultural and historical traditions for addressing our current situation. the call to embrace the posthuman as a rupture or break from the past risks cutting us off from significant resources for understanding human nature. if in fact we have made a turning point, if we are now posthuman, this might lead us to think that resources available in the past are no longer worth consulting. landmann’s insistence that as a cultural being the human being is a historical and traditional being underscores the importance of these traditional resources as part of a full understanding of our humanity. the notion of a turning point undermines critical reflection on how we arrived at this point and what the elements of tradition and history are that may help us understand where we are, how we got here, and how 208 humanity at the turning point © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 we might move forward. and the question of how we got here is not an insignificant question to raise given our current situation. in further re-examining accounts of the posthuman through the lens of philosophical anthropology, it is apparent that these accounts are premised upon rather thin and under-developed accounts of human nature, especially in light of the more robust and thick descriptions typically offered in philosophical anthropology. in fact, while opponents and proponents alike agree that the fundamental issue in these debates is what it means to be human (stock, for instance, suggests that at a fundamental level, the current discussion about human enhancement is about philosophy and religion: “it is about what it means to be human, about our vision of the human future” [2002, 155]), there is surprisingly little attention paid to this issue in discussions of humanity’s turning point and our posthuman future. this is remarkable in light of the fact that in key respects, the posthuman is parasitic upon our notion of the human. our attitudes towards our posthuman future are going to be conditioned by our attitudes towards our human present. is humanity something to be preserved, or enhanced, or a condition to be gotten over? how we answer that question depends heavily on what we take humanity to be. and what we take humanity to be, who we are and what we are to become, is precisely what is seldom fully addressed in these discussions. consider, for instance, two paradigmatic responses to this debate. the first can be seen in the work of critics of posthuman biotechnology such as francis fukuyama and leon kass. in our posthuman future, fukuyama argues that human beings have deeply rooted instincts and a human nature which ought to have a special role in defining for us what is right and wrong (2002, 7). nature, fukuyama suggests, imposes limits (2002b, 38) and can serve as a ground for morality (2002b, 115). his account of human nature draws on a sociobiological framework which locates human nature in specific genes. by human nature he means the “sum of the behavior and characteristics that are typical of the human species, arising from genetic rather than environmental factors” (2002b, 130). fukuyama is in essence a sociobiologist but one who wants to preserve the human genome. while his argument is dedennis m. weiss 209 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 tailed and spelled out over several chapters of our posthuman future, the basic outlines of fukuyama’s position do not differ substantially from rather standardized notions of human nature in liberal political thought. stripping away the historically and culturally contingent, we are left with some human essence, the basic meaning of what it means to be human, which is unique, distinctive, and universal to all human beings, gives us a dignity and moral status higher than any other living creature, and defines a set of characteristics and behaviors, including emotions and feelings, fundamental to our humanness and which serve as a foundation for human values. central to this account of the posthuman is a fixed, trans-historical human nature that serves as the foundation for modern humanist values. embracing the posthuman risks that foundation. in life, liberty, and the defense of dignity, kass offers a similar though more nuanced view. avoiding fukuyama’s sociobiological framework, kass argues that we need a new approach to biology, indeed a new philosophical anthropology, premised upon the psycho-physical unity of the embodied human person. as kass notes, “i believe that one cannot give a true account even of animals without notions of forms, wholeness, awareness, appetite, and goal-directed action—none of them reducible to matter-in-motion or even to dna” (2002, 138). kass argues that “the dignity of real life” (2002, 18) demands that we respect the full human being, including those sentiments, aversions, and intuitions that “belong intimately to the human experience of our own humanity” (2002, 198). respect demands that we approach human nature with awe and reverence and a sense of mystery, things threatened by the technological project. as kass writes: “enchanted and enslaved by the glamour of technology, we have lost our awe and wonder before the deep mysteries of nature and of life” (2002, 144). intent upon denying our rootedness to nature and tradition, we pursue our narcissistic projects of self-re-creation in a vain attempt to control our futures and transcend our biology. our repugnance in response to these projects is, as kass puts it, “the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason’s power fully to articulate it” (2002, 150). kass suggests that we intuit and feel, immediately and without argument, 210 humanity at the turning point © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 the violation of things that we rightfully hold dear. like fukuyama, kass ultimately has recourse to a fixed notion of human nature that serves as a moral standard on which to reject the posthuman: “if… we can no longer look to our previously unalterable human nature for a standard or norm of what is good or better, how will anyone know what constitutes an improvement?” (2002, 132). this fixed, ahistorical view of human nature is at odds with the typical account of human nature found in those that embrace and celebrate the posthuman, the second paradigmatic response in the debate over humanity’s turning point. this is the approach taken by stock in redesigning humans; indeed, stock elevates it to the very essence of human nature. as he notes, a key aspect of human nature is our ability to manipulate the world .… we are now reaching the point at which we may be able to transform ourselves into something “other.” to turn away from germline selection and modification without even exploring them would be to deny our essential nature and perhaps our destiny. (2002, 170) while stock doesn’t address how precisely we could have a destiny given that malleability is our essential nature, the important point he fixes on, if not fixates on, is our capacity to remake ourselves. “remaking ourselves is the ultimate expression and realization of our humanity” (2002, 197). biology, stock argues, is malleable and bio-technology, more specifically germinal choice technology, is ultimately continuous with all the other forms of human self-modification we have pursued; it’s a short step, he reasons, from popping expensive vitamin boosters to undergoing cosmetic surgery to opting for germinal choice technology. as he notes: “if biological manipulation is indeed a slippery slope, then we are already sliding down that slope now and may as well enjoy the ride” (2002, 151). furthermore, stock suggests that in the face of this human malleability, philosophy and ethics are largely impotent. our projects of self-fashioning, he suggests, are completely self-directed: “we and our children increasingly will be reflections of our personal philosophies and values” (2002, 195). but what goes into one’s personal philosophies and values? what few guidelines stock offers revolve solely around cost, risk, and other market-driven factors: dennis m. weiss 211 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 “whatever people’s philosophies of human enhancement, their decisions about using specific procedures often hinge on cost, safety, and efficacy rather than political or social consequences” (2002, 159). stock’s acceptance of and kass and fukuyama’s rejection of the posthuman are premised upon and conditioned by accounts of human nature that are little more than mirror images of one another. for kass and fukuyama and other critics of the posthuman, there is a substantive human nature which exists independently of its cultural manifestations and is the source of a uniquely human dignity that serves as a limit to technological development. for the proponents of the posthuman, such as stock, stelarc, the extropians and transhumanists and their like, there is no stable, constant human nature. rather the human being is fundamentally malleable, with a flawed and obsolete biology that we are now in a better position to control, manipulate, and reengineer. both camps portray nature/culture, biology/technology as at odds with one another. either the human being is completely collapsed into the technological which becomes itself synonymous with nature, or the human being is preserved as something completely apart from the technological/cultural. embracing the posthuman is often defined as negating materiality in the name of technology, while resisting the posthuman is portrayed as negating the technological in the name of the natural. the debate over the posthuman, as it is represented here, remains mired in a series of false dichotomies over nature versus culture, freedom versus determinism, self versus society, that are not productive, don’t help in addressing the difficult issues we face, and dramatically misrepresent human nature. landmann’s philosophical anthropology helps us appreciate the limits of these discussions of human nature. drawing on the work of anthropologists such as samuel washburn (1959) and clifford geertz (1973), on the ethology of adolf portmann (1990), and previous philosophical anthropologies, landmann articulates a view of the human being in which no sharp distinction can be made between the natural creature and the cultural being (1985, 92). we are, he writes, the already-formed and the yet-to-be-formed, the at once determined and determining form (1985, 78). landmann rejects any form of natural212 humanity at the turning point © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 ism or essentialism that fails to adequately attend to the cultural creativity of the human being but he equally rejects attempts to collapse the human being into mere malleability and plasticity. these are two correlative basic conditions in human life. they define the possibility of human existence, cannot be addressed independently of each other, and landmann warns that any attempt to separate these two intermeshing parts from this unity must necessarily be artificial (1974, 218–29). we see clearly then that landmann would reject the ahistorical naturalism of kass and fukuyama, arguing that it fails to consider the role of culture and history in defining human nature. and indeed the kind of universal and ahistorical view of human nature underlying kass’ and fukuyama’s frameworks has come under what from some quarters is withering critique for embodying an implicit and illegitimate normative dimension, often reflective of a particular time and locale. we see this clearly in fukuyama’s defense of liberal capitalist democracies, whose success he attributes to grounding in “assumptions about human nature that are far more realistic than those of their competitors” (2002, 106). while aspiring to strip away the contingent and focus on the essential, these views of human nature often reflect instead the cultural and political biases of their proponents. while kass recognizes the role that institutions, education, and habitual practice play in shaping character, and ultimately moral life, he too has recourse to a realm of human nature which remains untouched by culture and so serves as an ahistorical and essentialized foundation for our moral intuitions. kass’ many references to the deep mysteries of human nature or the deep truths of the human condition, the manner in which the silent body speaks, the natural and proper and unambiguous and ontological meaning of sexuality, his references to our given, traditional self-understanding and to our natural desires and passions, all seem to point to a realm of human nature that lies beyond culture and historicity. his references to our common conception of our own humanity (2002, 85), the central core of our humanity (2002, 150), and the core of our culture’s wisdom, raise troubling questions about just whose culture, whose humanity he is referencing. kass’ notion of dennis m. weiss 213 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 the “dignified journey of a truly human life” (2002, 18) ultimately stands for something essential beyond the realm of culture and history. the philosophical anthropologist rejects these references to a realm of human nature set apart from culture. as landmann notes, “nature itself forces us to have culture. it is our nature that even on the animal level we freely acquire the forms our life will take by cultural creativity. even this level is in man a cultural level” (1974, 215). from a similar perspective, marjorie grene notes: even our perception, our direct way of being with things and events around us, is always already mediated by the pervasive nexus of human contrivance into which at birth we are cast and within which we develop. (1976, 192) from the perspective of landmann’s philosophical anthropology, we might also question the manner in which kass and fukuyama and conservative critics of bio-technology foreclose upon human creativity and innovation. self-fashioning, landmann might observe, is central to what it means to be human. after all, we’ve been making ourselves over for centuries, from renaissance self-fashioning to nietzsche’s übermensch (1954, 124–6) to foucault’s more recent celebration of baudelaire’s dandy (foucault 1984, 41–2). recall pico della mirandola’s oration on the dignity of man, in which he imagines god speaking to man, that creature of indeterminate image: “we have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer” (1956, 7). now it’s true that god suggests we might descend to the lower, brutish forms of life, just as easily as we might rise to the superior orders whose life is divine. nonetheless, it’s human nature to fashion one’s nature and this is a point kass and fukuyama remain oblivious to. somewhat inconsistently, kass himself recognizes that technologies are not neutral and bring out changes in our norms, beliefs, and self-conceptions (2002, 121–22). but he characterizes these changes as challenges to our humanity and our given self-conception, rather than recognizing that our “given” self-conception(s) are no doubt the product of still earlier influences and are a reflection of our cultural and historical location. 214 humanity at the turning point © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 we shouldn’t read this, however, as an endorsement of our absolute protean nature, as many proponents of technological change do. landmann would be equally critical of stock’s emphasis on malleability in the absence of any discussion of culture and tradition. by focusing on this one dimension of human nature, our plasticity and malleability, stock denies us any basis on which to make decisions regarding how we ought to change. indeed, having described the human being as little more than pure potentiality, the individual agent is left with little to fall back on other than popular stereotypes and cultural norms. landmann is critical of views of the human being that carry the idea of creativity to the extreme of mere creative arbitrariness. while recognizing that creativity is “rooted as a necessity in the existential structure of man as such” (1974, 204), landmann also warns us against carrying the idea of creativity to the extreme of mere creative arbitrariness. he is critical of sartre’s existentialism for precisely this reason: “sartre’s promethean creationism runs into error by its very exaggeration” (1974, 213). as robert bellah (et al.) notes in a slightly different context, views of the human being such as stock’s leave us with a completely unencumbered self with no basis on which to act other than what it is popular. “values” turn out to be the incomprehensible, rationally indefensible thing that the individual chooses when he or she has thrown off the last vestige of external influence and reached pure, contentless freedom. the ideal self in its absolute freedom is completely “unencumbered ”. . . (1985, 80) but the human being, landmann argues, is never unencumbered. creativity always goes hand-in-hand with history: “history is the storehouse of man’s former creativity; it shows how he always chiseled away at himself formatively” (1985, 23). human creativity does not happen in a vacuum and the individual human being does not begin from a blank slate from which values are created out of whole cloth. “we must first internalize prior culture: even the greatest genius is to a far greater extent caused by his culture than its causer” (1985, 50). drawing together these points, it seems clear that the rhetoric of the turning point and the posthuman is not significantly advancing our understanding of our current situation and the current dilemmas dennis m. weiss 215 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 that the human being faces. discussions of humanity’s turning point and the posthuman seem to function most as a call to arms. they are “fighting words,” so to speak, motivating us perhaps to take action and embrace a posthuman existence that moves beyond tired and oldfashioned ways of being human or act as a rallying cry to safeguard and preserve the dignity and value of what it means to be human. implied by either route is the belief that we have an adequate account of human nature. and yet, as i have suggested, this is precisely what is most lacking in discussions of the posthuman. if we are to accept claims that humanity is facing a turning point and that we are witnessing the emergence (for good or for ill) of the posthuman, we ought to insist on a clear and persuasive account of that human nature we will soon be leaving behind. accounts of the posthuman foreclose upon such reflection by suggesting that we already know what human nature is and that we need not trouble with it any further. the debate is structured around ideal images of the human being that never existed and that function to impel us to take a particular stance on the posthuman, but there is no defense of these ideal images of the human being. discussions of the posthuman take place as if we have already decided what it means to be human and yet, as landmann suggests, that is a question that always remains open. these discussions displace onto the question of the posthuman the difficult question of what it means to be human and, in so doing, they attempt to make that discussion seem easy and straightforward. the response to the posthuman is made obvious by reliance on simplistic but ultimately inadequate accounts of the human that only serve to obscure the more important issue we ought to be concerned with namely, what is the human being. ultimately, then, the notions of a turning point and of our posthuman future are being used primarily as rhetorical devices to motivate the troops. what is needed, though, is not motivation but careful critical attention to the choices that humanity faces. we get little out of the notion of a turning point or the posthuman when it comes to making these difficult choices. here too it might seem that landmann’s philosophical anthropology offers little or no guidance. after all, he explicitly rejects any connection between philosophical anthropology and 216 humanity at the turning point © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 ethics and disavows reaching normative conclusions on the basis of descriptive accounts of human nature. philosophical anthropology, he writes, “is not interested in making metaphysical or ethical statements” (1974, 19). as we have seen, he emphasizes our creative and malleable nature, suggests that artificiality is our nature, and rejects any essential or natural or ideal model of human nature. “if our creativity is a genuine creativity, it cannot be limited by pre-existing norms” (1985, 56). he recognizes that our freedom to shape our form historically contains a danger but notes as great a danger from the imposition of norms. man can cling to poor and base forms; he can strike upon false and destructive forms. ethics fears that he could violate the norms; philosophical anthropology has the deeper fear that the norm itself could be disastrous. (1985, 118) landmann is, moreover, explicitly critical of philosophical and political systems that limit human freedom out of fear that human beings will misuse freedom. to avoid risk, these systems try to bring the historical process to a halt. but the loss of freedom is a deadly handicap. for man learns by trial and error from his sufferings. his mistakes can lead antithetically to improvement. (1985, 119) this apparently suggests that we will find few resources in philosophical anthropology for coming to terms with the difficult choices that humanity faces in light of developments with bio-technology and cyber-technology. and yet i think so sweeping a generalization as this is unwarranted. while it is true that landmann warns against drawing normative conclusions on the basis of a formal and descriptive philosophical anthropology, his account of human nature better structures the debate we ought to have than does a discussion of the posthuman. there are several reasons for thinking so. first, landmann’s philosophical anthropology discloses precisely why these debates are so fraught. at their core, they are debates over our self-image. we must already understand that our self-image is an open question, that our self-images are not static, and that they have a formative effect (in landmann’s terms, “man’s knowledge of man is not without effect on man’s being” [1974, 20] ), in order to fully appreciate the dilemmas we curdennis m. weiss 217 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 rently face. the conflicting responses we have to the potential impacts of technology on human nature remind us most directly and urgently that our self-image is an open question. landmann’s philosophical anthropology serves to remind us that these questions are as unavoidable as they are risky. we are always in process, so to speak, and cannot foreclose upon that question. “we can always give only a temporary clarification for the ‘open question’ that we always remain for ourself at the heart of our being” (1974, 226). landmann argues that the human being “may and must again and again give himself his features from his ultimate amorphousness, this intermixture of unstructuredness, plasticity, and the mission of selfeducation” (1974, 226). but that of course is not the whole story. for the human being is also a historical and social and traditional being. while our self-image is always an open question, it is a question that is answered in particular concrete historical situations. as we have seen, culture is correlative to creativity and landmann reminds us: there is no such thing as a general man with timelessly permanent structures or an invariable human nature. theory must therefore begin with society and history. these are primary; man must be understood in terms of them, and not vice versa. (1974, 269) that we are an open question means that we can find no final, definitive, and fixed answer to the questions that technology currently poses. it also means that the answers that we might give can only come from our cultural, social, and historical traditions. rather than cut us off from these traditions by emphasizing the coming turning point and the transformation of the human into the posthuman, landmann’s philosophical anthropology suggests that the only resources we have for addressing these questions is in those traditions. from such a social and historical perspective on human nature, one cannot characterize the human being in terms of some single, isolable property which serves to define our essence or our dignity. rather, one must have a recourse to what midgley refers to as a “rich and complex arrangement of powers and qualities” (1995, 207). this of course means that there can be no easy answer to the questions posed by the development of new technologies. but why should we ever expect otherwise? we human beings 218 humanity at the turning point © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 are a complex lot. it is only from false and simplifying perspectives that these choices would ever seem easy. and while norms and values cannot be read off our nature directly and transparently, it doesn’t mean that our nature cannot provide some indirect and practical guidance. it suggests that we should be wary of claims such as kass’s or fukuyama’s that a previously unalterable human nature can supply a standard or norm for human self-improvement. it suggests as well, contra stock, that human beings are not simply malleable stuff to be engineered and remade at will. it further suggests that as social and historical beings, we must remain sensitive to the ways we are multiply constructed in and by culture and cognizant of the concrete social and political context of our schemes for self-fashioning. it suggests, too, that we reject an overly instrumentalist and atomistic approach to these questions. as landmann observes, we become human only in the context of other humans. our choices, our plans for self-modification, our ways of responding to technology, only make sense in a broader cultural and social context. landmann suggests that there is no paradigmatic norm hovering over the human being, no germ that he need merely develop. “his mission,” he writes, “is to design and form himself responsibly” (1985, 267). that of course is not an easy task. nor is it a posthuman task. it is the task of human beings facing directly each day the difficult task of determining the meaning of what it is to be human. references bellah, robert, richard madsen, william m. sullivan, ann swidler and steven m. tipton 1985 habits of the heart: individualism and commitment in american life. berkeley, ca: university of california press. president’s council on bioethics 2003 beyond therapy: biotechnology and the pursuit of happiness. new york, ny: regan books. birkerts, sven 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the problem of the soul. new york, ny: basic books. fukuyama, francis 2002a biotechnology and the threat of a posthuman future. chronicle of higher education: the review, march 22, 5–7. 2002b our posthuman future. new york, ny: farrar, straus, and giroux. garreau, joel 2005 radical evolution: the promise and peril of enhancing our minds, our bodies—and what it means to be human. new york, ny: doubleday. geertz, clifford 1973 the interpretation of cultures. new york, ny: basic books. gehlen, arnold 1988 man. trans. clare mcmillan and karl pillemer. new york, ny: columbia university press. 220 humanity at the turning point © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 grene, marjorie 1976 to have a mind… the journal of medicine and philosophy 1(2): 177–99. hardison, o.b. 1989 disappearing through the skylight. new york, ny: viking. joy, bill 2000 why the future doesn’t need us. wired, april. kass, leon 1997 the wisdom of repugnance. the human life review 23(3): 63–88. 2000 the moral meaning of genetic 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ed. joan broadhurst dixon and eric j. cassidy, 116–23. london: routledge. stock, gregory 2002 redesigning humans: our inevitable genetic future. new york, ny: houghton mifflin. stone, allucquere rosanne 1995 the war of desire and technology at the close of the mechanical age. cambridge, ma: the mit press. talbott, stephen 1995 the future does not compute. sebastopol, ca: o’reilly and assoicates, inc. 222 humanity at the turning point © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 taylor, charles 1985 foreward. social action and human nature. by axel honneth and hans joas. trans. raymond meyer. cambridge: cambridge university press. vinge, vernor the coming technological singularity: how to survive in the post-human era. http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.html warwick, kevin 2000 cyborg 1.0. wired 8.02: 145–51. washburn, s. l. 1959 speculations on the interrelations of the history of tools and biological evolution. in the evolution of man’s capacity for culture, ed. j. n. spuhler, 21–31. detroit, mi: wayne state university press. weizenbaum, joseph 1976 computer power and human reason. new york, ny: w. h. freeman and co. wolfe, alan 1993 the human difference. berkeley, ca: university of california press. © equinox publishing ltd. 2008, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expositions 2.2 (2008) 231–238] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v2i2.231 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 robert alter and the art of bible translation everett fox jewish studies program clark university the success of a translation, in my view, is defined by the extent to which it is able to move an audience closer to its source text. the integrity of a translation, on the other hand, lies in the faithfulness with which the translator adheres to his or her particular principles. since these principles—especially in the case of english translations of the bible—are usually spelled out, serious readers are able to gauge just what a translator has accomplished. in robert alter’s case, he has made his goal clear in the articulate introductions to his bible translations. in one passage, he characterizes his work as “an experiment in re-presenting the bible—and, above all, biblical narrative prose—in a language that conveys with some precision the semantic nuances and the lively orchestration of literary effects of the hebrew and at the same time has stylistic and rhythmic integrity as literary english” (alter 2004, xvi). alter has long demonstrated that he is a perceptive reader of the hebrew text, and his explanatory notes are often illuminating in their discussion of the text’s rhetoric, style, and tone. but literary criticism is not the same as translation. to put it another way, being a perceptive reader is not the same as being an accomplished performer in print. i have tried on numerous occasions to sit down with alter’s translations and read them aloud, and to date i rarely experience them as echoes of the hebrew text. my specific objections fall into several related categories. i will begin by examining narrative, focusing on the five books of moses and the david story. alter frequently speaks of “cadence” in both languages, which raises the question of how he hears the text. from the layout in these books, he appears to perceive it in fairly long blocs of material, occasionally broken up into paragraphs, not unlike narrative texts in english. here is an example from the opening pages of genesis (1:7-10), within the creation story: and god made the vault and it divided the water beneath the vault from the water above the vault, and so it was. and god called the vault heavens, and it was evening and it was morning, second day. and god said, “let the waters under the heavens be gathered in one place so that the dry land will appear,” and so it was. and god called the dry land earth and the gathering of waters 232 robert alter and the art of bible translation © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 he called seas, and god saw that it was good. (alter 2004, 17–18) in contrast to what alter has done here, the hebrew text of genesis 1 is aurally quite dramatic. the “days” of creation divide up both logically and sonically, and reinforce a central point in this chapter, namely, that the creative activity of god brings order out of chaos. some kind of break scheme that permits the hearer to perceive the embedded orderliness (here it should occur after “second day”) is therefore imperative, which alter’s run-on english text ignores. in addition, the periodic refrains—alter’s “and god said,” “and so it was,” “and god saw that it was good,” “and it was evening and it was morning”—punctuate the heard text, and should ideally be indicated in a printed form that facilitates reading aloud, as below: god made the dome and separated the waters that were below the dome from the waters that were above the dome. god called the dome the heavens. there was setting, there was dawning: second day. god said: let the waters under the heavens be gathered to one place, and let the dry land be seen! it was so. god called the dry land earth, and the gathering of the waters he called seas. god saw that it was good. (fox 1995, revised]) a second feature of alter’s translational style is his constant use of “and” (hebrew waw) to reflect the paratactic, co-ordinate style of biblical hebrew. this was introduced into english by the first great bible translator in the language, william tyndale, who used it judiciously, but was fully expanded in the famous rhythms of the king james version. as alter notes, virtually all modern english translations opt for a more hypotactic paradigm, making use of subordinate clauses to provide a more congenial english style. alter’s decision to restore parataxis in a contemporary translation rests on two arguments, which he develops at length especially in the “introduction” to the five books of moses (2004): first, that this style reflects biblical thinking, where it is left to the hearer/reader to establish the precise relationship between actions; and second, that one hears the “ands” in the text as they are read. excising them in translation, he observes, “produces—certainly to my ear—an abrupt, awkward effect in the sound pattern of the language, or to put it more strictly, a kind of narrative arrhythmia” (alter 2004, xxvii). although i agree that parataxis is an important feature of biblical narrative fox 233 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 style,1 i do question how it may best be put into practice in translation. as alter is well aware, and occasionally demonstrates in these books, the hebrew particle waw frequently carries other, subtler meanings beyond “and,” including “but,” “then,” “while,” and “now” (the latter in the sense of introducing a new fact or background into the narrative). it can also be an element in the construction known as hendiadys, where two nouns are joined to produce a meaning equivalent to adjective + noun. (alter acknowledges this, for instance, in gen. 23:4, where he renders a key phrase as “a sojourning settler,” and points out in a note that the literal hebrew is “sojourner and settler” [alter 2004, 113]). additionally, one may question whether, in fact, an audience always hears the waw, which is typically the first element of consecutive verbs in biblical hebrew. is the common wayyomer (which begins virtually all biblical conversations) to be rendered every time as, “and he said,” often implying an afterthought or something added, or rather simply as, “he said”? given these considerations, retaining “and” in the majority of cases is often to misconstrue the text. while alter’s usage succeeds in conveying a sense of forward movement and hurriedness in a number of places (e.g., his citation of gen. 24:16-20 in his introduction to that book2), in other places, indeed, in many others, it internally connects passages in ways that sound muddled and even reminiscent of a small child’s way of telling a story—surely not what the biblical writers had in mind. here are two examples from the david story: and israel went out in battle against the philistines, and they encamped by eben-ezer, while the philistines were encamped at aphek. and the philistines drew up their lines against israel, and the battle forces were deployed, and israel was routed by the philistines, and they struck down in the lines about four thousand men. (1 sam. 4:1-2; see alter 1999, 21) in alter’s reading, the second sentence’s four “ands” tie the action together, but they hardly qualify as any kind of narrative style in english, however wellmeant may be the intention to reflect the “consecutive” nature of the hebrew. the second example: and david’s time to die drew near, and he charged solomon his son, saying: “i am going on the way of all the earth. and you must be strong, and be a man....you yourself know what joab son of zeruiah did to me.... and you must act in your wisdom, and do not let his gray head go down in peace to sheol.” (i kings 2:2, 5-6; see alter 1999, 374–376) here the translation has the effect of distorting the emotional content of david’s final advice to solomon. the hebrew which it represents by “and you must be strong” and “and you must act” would be better served by the 234 robert alter and the art of bible translation © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 use of “so,” since hebrew waw often signifies consequence and not merely sequence. a general approach to addressing this dilemma will thus involve the careful use of punctuation and of substitute words such as “then” or “but,” to preserve both the rhythmic balance and the connective aspect of the text.3 but passages such as the ones i have brought here appear constantly throughout alter’s work and, to my ear, produce a flattened english text that often lacks the cadence he seeks to produce. for a body of work that claims to produce readable english, i find lapses in alter’s diction that are frequent enough to be jarring. here is a sampling: “i am about to bring tomorrow locust in all your territory” (ex. 10:5 [alter 2004, 366]); “should a person offend errantly” (lev. 4:2 [alter 2004, 556]); “you shall not lie, no man to his fellow” (lev. 19:11 [alter 2004, 626]); “you shall put upon your garment an indigo twist” (num. 15:38 [alter 2004, 759–760]); “he should lift up the fire-pans from the midst of the burnt-out zone” (num. 17:1 [alter 2004, 768]); “all the house of israel keened for aaron thirty days” (num. 20:29 [alter 2004, 786]); and lastly, describing moses at his death, “his eye had not grown bleary and his sap had not fled” (deut. 34:7 [alter 2004, 1058–1059]). while one can justify some of these choices on philological grounds, english usage and style are casualties in most of them. there are periodic inconsistencies in alter’s usage, despite his desire to point out how the repeation of certain hebrew terms is almost always significant in the text. for example, ex. 13:21-22 uses a single hebrew word, ‘ammud, which alter inexplicably renders as “pillar...pillar... column...pillar” (alter 2004, 389). more serious are some of his structural inconsistencies relating to word order, in cases such as ex. 4:10, where moses rejects god’s call to lead the people out of egypt. alter’s “no man of words am i, not at any time in the past nor now since you have spoken to your servant, for i am heavymouthed and heavy-tongued” (alter 2004, 327) does not echo the hebrew, in which anokhi, “i” or “i myself,” ends both clauses. i would suggest instead a rendering which also speaks to the text’s strong rhythms: no man of words am i, not from yesterday, not from day-before, not (even) from when you first spoke to your servant; rather, heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue am i! (fox 1995, 277, revised) similarly, in a shorter phrase, alter represents the egyptian magicians’ expression of wonder at the plagues in ex. 8:15, etzba’ elohim hu, with the yoda-like “god’s finger it is” (alter 2004, 354), despite the fact that biblical hebrew really has no regular way to say, “it is god’s finger” other than this fox 235 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 somewhat emphatic construction. perhaps a simple exclamation point would do better than an awkward inversion. these types of translation practices, which are repeated throughout alter’s translations of biblical narratives, produce a text which, despite its rootedness in an often sensitive understanding of the hebrew, does not adequately follow through as performance. with the psalms, all translators enter a different realm. not only is the book of psalms weighty in its length and variety, and not only does it contain difficult and often obscure language, but it also illuminates the human situation in ways that are unforgettably rich and profound. the translator therefore has a double task: to reflect the character and conceptual world of the hebrew, and at the same time to create sonorities that speak directly to human emotions. no book in the bible has been part of people’s lives as much as psalms, whether in congregational life or private devotion. a translation must reflect this personal tone, or else it cannot be deemed a success. for a book aimed at a general audience, alter’s psalms volume is certainly impressive in its sheer scope. as with his previous translation work, his commentary is detailed and helpful. he has done us a service in emphasizing the concreteness of the psalms’ language, eliminating such well-known but textually misguided terms as “soul” and “salvation.”4 in the light of these and other contributions, and given his skills as a close reader of the bible’s poetry, alter might have been expected to produce something new and striking in the translation itself. yet, as in the case of narrative, i find the results disappointing. some of the same shortcomings that i noted above—over-reliance on “and” and inconsistencies, odd turns of phrase, and lapses in rhythm— also make their appearance in his version of psalms. questions arise from the very beginning. alter renders 1:6 with, “for the lord embraces the way of the righteous, / and the way of the wicked is lost” (alter 2007, 4). here “and,” once again, does not convey the force of the hebrew, which would be better echoed by the more commonly-used “but” or even “while.” the entire poem, after all, is built on contrasting the behavior and fate of the righteous and the wicked (the same exact situation and structure are found in psalm 145:20). similarly, when psalm 78:67-68 describes how god treats the northern and southern kingdoms of israel, alter translates “yet he rejected the tent of joseph, / and the tribe of ephraim he did not choose. / and he chose the tribe of judah…” (alter 2007, 279–280). i am at a loss to discern his reason for eschewing “but” in the last sentence, which appears in the climactic lines of one of the bible’s longest self-contained poems about the lessons to be learned from the past. the illustrations 236 robert alter and the art of bible translation © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 given here are symptomatic of the entire book. i also find that inelegancies crop up far too frequently. a walk through the book reveals such phrases as “lord, my god, in you i sheltered” (7:2 [alter 2007, 18]); “let me hymn the lord’s name, most high” (7:18 [alter 2007, 21]); “i am impassioned of you” (18:2 [alter 2007, 52]); “my tongue was annealed to my jaw” (22:16 [alter 2007, 73]); “and now, what i expect, o master, / my hope is in you” (39:8 [alter 2007, 139]); and “our crimes but you atone” (65:4 [alter 2007, 221]). if alter had set out to stretch english to unusual limits in order to mimic the hebrew, these might be understandable, or at least justifiable. but his choices of wording at times contradict his goal of being english-friendly; instead what we find is vocabulary that is strained and unnecessarily refined. for example, do we really need “anneal” for a common hebrew verb that means “cling, stick to”? surely a better solution could have been found. in the process, the all-important emotive power of the psalms, which does surface at points in his translation, is measurably reduced. could this version be used devotionally? i’m not quite sure. a final area for consideration is the bible’s use of syntactical inversion as a rhetorical device of emphasis, which alter discusses in his introduction to genesis. now it is one thing to note a language’s rhetoric, but what happens when the attempt to reproduce it runs aground? for example, when the writer in psalm 93:2 praises god by putting the descriptor before the subject (hebrew mei-‘olam attah), we are left with three choices: “from forever are you,” alter’s awkward “from forever you are” (alter 2007, 328), or simply and seemingly in defeat, but clearly, “you are from forever.” this last is conventionally done in translation, and parallel to the “god’s finger” passage cited above. in the case of biblical poetry, it may not always be possible or even necessary to reproduce every feature of the original language in order to convey its force, and attempting to do so may lead in directions that are less than mellifluous. any careful reader of such massive volumes, especially another translator such as myself, can nit-pick. my purpose in choosing a few examples from alter’s biblical translations has been to suggest that he has not realized his admittedly elusive goal. the kind of miraculous hieros gamos5 he advocates, where the unique flavor of the original is wedded to the strengths of english, has not yet been attained in our time. for me, alter’s skills as a literary critic are far superior to his skills as a translator. fox 237 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 notes 1. see the discussion in (zevit 1998); on page 1, he endorses alter’s way of representing biblical narrative through parataxis in english. 2. see alter 2004, xxvi: and she came down to the spring and filled her jug and came back up. and the servant ran toward her and said, “pray, let me sip a bit of water from your jug.” and she said, “drink, my lord,” and she hurried and tipped down her jug on one hand and let him drink. and she let him drink his fill and said, “for your camels, too, i shall draw water until they drink their fill.” and she hurried and emptied her jug into the trough, and she ran again to the well to draw water and drew water for all his camels. 3. this is the approach taken by alviero niccacci (1990 and 1997). 4. the following essay by taylor discusses this identical point on page 242. 5. the term was applied to bible translation by franz rosenzweig (1994, 53). references alter, robert 1999 the david story. new york: w. w. norton. 2004 the five books of moses. new york: w. w. norton. 2007. the book of psalms. new york: w. w. norton. fox, everett 1995 the five books of moses. new york: schocken books. niccacci, alviero 1990 the syntax of the verb in classical hebrew prose. jsot supplement 86. sheffield: sheffield academic press. 1997 basic facts and theory of the biblical hebrew verb system, and workshop: narrative syntax of exodus 19-24. in narrative syntax and the hebrew bible, ed. ellen van wolde, 162–202 and 203–228. leiden: brill. rosenzweig, franz 1994 scripture and luther. in martin buber and franz rosenzweig, scripture and translation, ed. laurence rosenwald and everett fox, 47–72. bloomington: indiana university press. zevit, ziony 1998 the anterior construction in classical hebrew. sbl monograph series 50. atlanta, ga: scholars press. © equinox publishing ltd. 2009, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expo. 3.2 (2009) 143–148] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v3i2.143 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 needed: some (any!) philosophy of higher education dennis o’brien president emeritus, bucknell university and university of rochester mark taylor calls for “an end to the university as we know it.” before searching for a new model—taylor’s or anyone else’s vision of tomorrow’s higher learning—it is worth looking at “the beginning of the university as we know it.” the “university as we know it” is actually a rather recent invention—in america about 150 years old. historians are likely to date the current american university model from the founding of the cornell university in 1868, charles eliot’s reforms at harvard in the latter half of the nineteenth century, or the opening of the john hopkins university in 1876. whoever takes pride of invention—and there are other claimants—the emergent and reigning model is the research university. it is that model that taylor seeks to jettison. the research university’s prime “product” is the ph.d. degree, an attainment not granted in the united states until 1861 at yale. as a research degree, the ph.d. was not just a more advanced form of the bachelor’s degrees awarded up until then by american colleges, but rather expressed a fundamentally different view of what was higher in higher education. taylor characterizes the ph.d. mentality accurately: specialization and sub-specialization, which leads to advance in knowledge in the chosen area. it would be bizarre to argue against the gains which the research model has brought to education and society. because of research and research universities, we enjoy extraordinary advances in science, medicine, technology, the understanding of history, society, and even literary texts. the problem with the research model according to taylor is, to begin with, that it produces more ph.d.s than the market can absorb. bad enough that the market isn’t buying the product, taylor claims further that ph.d. research has become so refined and arcane that it may not be worth selling at all. if a sub-sub-specialist does gain a faculty berth, he or she will probably continue on a narrow path producing minimal good for society and maybe no good at all for hapless freshmen. for financial and philosophic reasons, then, the research university model needs to be “rigorously regulated and radically restructured.” (the weakest part of taylor’s argument, by the way, is that he largely ignores the natural sciences and allied fields like engineering and medicine. in those areas, specialization into seeming arcana continues to produce spectacular 144 overheard in the academy © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 results in basic understanding and practical application, and ph.d.s still find jobs in academia, industry, and government.) given this sketch of the modern university, i want to examine what the research revolution rejected. the standard american college and university before the rise of the modern university was a christian denominational college committed to the “classical curriculum.” the typical course of study consisted of a heavy dose of greek and latin, paley’s view of the evidences of christianity, lectures to the seniors by the president on ethics, and maybe some natural history if one had a collection of stuffed birds. a modern commentator notes the utter inadequacy but paradox of the classical curriculum: the first college curriculum introduced into british america was already obsolescent, yet it became the standard one for 250 years.... in almost all official aspects the system was a failure, yet it produced a high proportion of the intellectual and political leaders of the nation. (earnest 1953, 1) for a restless people forging across a continent, cicero and demosthenes seemed inappropriate guides. the morrill act of 1862, promoting the agricultural and mechanical arts, was seized upon by ezra cornell and andrew dickson white to found “ a university where any person can find instruction in any subject.” the practical arts and sciences entered higher education and soon eclipsed the classical curriculum and the educational philosophy of the older colleges. to the modern academic, the classical curriculum seems “dry as dust,” taught badly, with a premium put on memorization and oral recitation. no wonder the history of student life in the nineteenth century is marked by riots and destruction. the students were bored. it bears emphasizing, however, that the critic who notes the “failure” of the classical curriculum points out that these obsolete colleges “produced a high proportion of the intellectual and political leaders of the nation.” why? the classical curriculum incorporated, albeit in a particularly tedious form, the dominant philosophy of higher education for some 2000 years: the liberal arts. (professional schools like medicine and law, which began before the rise of the universities in the thirteenth century, are another story.) in his brilliant book four cultures of the west, john w. o’malley, s.j., distinguishes two cultures that have vied for dominance in higher education: a philosophical culture and a humanistic culture. both cultures originate in greece, the philosophers represented by plato and aristotle, the humanistic culture by, for example, isocrates, who in 390 bce opened a school for needed: some (any!) philosophy of higher education 145 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 rhetoric. o’malley characterizes the philosophic culture as “logical, rigorous, argumentative,” which is the precursor of the university’s scholarly style. but the longer history of higher education was in the humanistic rhetorical culture. that culture, based as it was in persuasion, supported the art of the statesman, not the scholar. that the classical curriculum produced the political leaders of the american revolution was, then, no mere accident. humanistic education was, as o’malley suggests, “classical” in two senses: it depended on a classic literature which provided models of both conduct and persuasive speech, and it was “classical” in a sense that is still with us: characterized by “balance, harmony, proportion, moderation, and rationality” (o’malley 2004, 131). plutarch’s lives and ciceronian rhetoric with its balanced cadences and moral passion fit the educational goals. the aim was the formation of character, a “classical” character with the traits of the literature in the curriculum: “balance, harmony, proportion, moderation, and rationality.” the “rationality” alluded to is not, it should be noted, the insistent, probing “rationality” of the philosopher, but the rationality of the statesman who knows the arts of balance and harmony in his person and in political life. when emerson in his famous phi beta kappa address at harvard in 1837 stated that “character” was the proper aim of higher education, he was asserting the essential claim of the classical curriculum. the older classical colleges and the modern research universities differ about the ultimate purpose of higher education: formation of character versus advancement of knowledge. (a more precise description might be that character formation is a “recessive” gene in the modern university’s dna. it gets expressed in the president’s speeches and all those slogans: “for god, for country, and for yale,” “princeton in the nation’s service,” etc. whether these rhetorical outbursts are more than nostalgia for former days, i leave to the reader.) mark taylor’s restructuring is toward neither character nor knowledge as such. he suggests, instead, studying notions that cross current disciplinary silos (mind, body) and practical problems (water). there are, of course, problems with both suggestions. cross disciplinary studies are not that easy because the key term is often so broad that one can’t be certain that the various scholars are even talking about the same thing. take taylor’s own principal field, religion. one of the first issues that comes up in the cross disciplinary study of religion is what constitutes a “religion.” is confucianism a religion? communism? as for the practical subjects, who will decide the ranking of practical issues? which leads back to taylor’s claim that universities need to be “rigorously regulated.” maybe—but by whom? we can gain some sense of what regulation and restructuring might look 146 overheard in the academy © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 like by considering regulation and structure in earlier colleges. rigorous regulation was exercised by the religious concerns of the sponsoring denomination. the universal acceptance of certain classic texts solidified the curriculum. emulation of ancient republican heroes and religious saints served the ultimate aim of forming character. after the american revolution, the classical curriculum, aimed at forming the classical virtues of moderation and balance, was regarded as a necessary support for the american experiment in democracy. moral restraint would prevent factionalism and the enthusiasm of the mob, both of which could destroy the new republic. the classical curriculum directed at moral instruction was expressed in structural assumptions for administration and faculty that are radically different from those in the present university. in administration, the minister college president was plenipotentiary. he hired and fired faculty and defended the curriculum. faculty were “hired hands” and, by contemporary standards, amateurs in their special fields. like the president himself, faculty were almost exclusively ordained ministers. if the aim of classical education was training in character, the dominance of religion and its teachers fit this aim. it was hard to imagine in those days that christian ethics colored by classical restraint was not the perfection of moral tutelage. then, of course, a large majority of the students were training for ministerial careers—one of the few “learned” professions of the day. there was a commonality of vocation between the faculty and the life that they expected their students would lead personally and professionally. regulation and structure changed radically with the advent of the research university. the principle change that affected almost everything was the rise of the faculty. in the nineteenth century, the administration in the figure of the authoritative ministerial president governed all. when the aim of education became not character but the advancement of knowledge, the faculty specialist became dominant. tenure, a twentieth century invention, only substantiated the authority of the faculty in the research university. in the classical college, faculty were employees of the college; in the modern university faculty substantially manage the institution, though to be sure in tension with administrative “business” concerns like budgets and raising money. in brief, if the nineteenth century was the century of “management” by the authoritative president, the twentieth century became the century of faculty. a final important change involves the relation of faculty and students. we can no longer speak of ministers training ministers; no commonality of vocation can be assumed between faculty and students. taylor suggests, however, that in one sense current assumptions are more like the older model than one needed: some (any!) philosophy of higher education 147 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 might think. no longer do we have ministers training ministers, but specialists cloning themselves. unhappily, most undergraduates follow careers only tangentially related to their departmental majors, and the few who go on for ph.d.s in some specialty often won’t find academic positions commensurate with their training. if there is to be “rigorous regulation” and “radical restructuring” ahead, we are obviously not going to return to the aims, regulation, and structures of the denominational college and the classical curriculum the old style college was, however, clear about who regulated, for what end, and how that affected faculty and curriculum. the most important lesson of the classical college for the present day is its clear sense of an educational mission that goes beyond the excellences of the specific subjects taught. you taught greek not to perfect the pluperfect but to offer moral guidance. if the research model based on the advancement of knowledge is to be sharply altered, what will be the nonspecialist educational goal that regulates and restructures? taylor’s proposal to create “problem-centered programs” presents a non-specialist goal for the university enterprise, and it may suffice. but a critical problem is whether the research university, given its current managerial and faculty assumptions, can formulate any overall educational goal beyond specialization. lacking an educational goal, the university will inevitably be regulated and restructured by economics. the small classical college with its lofty but limited aim and its “amateur” faculty who could slip from pulpit to professorship and back again was relatively inexpensive. the modern “multiversity” with its collection of specialties and specialists needing sophisticated and costly equipment and staff support is inherently expansive and expensive. great discoveries may lie ahead, but funding sources may well not be forthcoming to match such hopes and ambitions. the current recession only underlines the long-term reality. if economics dominates, the twenty-first century will be like the nineteenth: a century of management—but monetary, not ministerial. in a recent set of short commentaries in the chronicle of higher education (july 19, 2009), various faculty members were asked to predict what the university would be like in twenty years. the headline caught the spirit of the comments: “the future of the faculty: leaner, meaner, more innovative, less secure.” with varying degrees of dismay, the faculty commentators bewailed the increasing power of administration at the price of faculty prerogative. faculty griping about administration is old hat, but faculty need to do more than gripe. if economics is not to conquer education, modern faculties, separated as they are in terms of interests and needs, will have to agree 148 overheard in the academy © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 on some overall educational vision for the university that goes beyond disciplinary specialization. if they do not create such a unitary vision, money will manage. taylor’s “rigorous regulation” and “radical restructuring” will occur, but it will not be “innovative,” and instead only “leaner and meaner.” references earnest, ernest 1953. the academic procession. indianapolis: bobbs-merrill. o’malley, s.j., john w. 2004. four cultures of the west. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. [expositions 5.2 (2011) 28-37] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 interview: susan d. collins, university of houston john-paul spiro aristotle’s greek is notoriously arduous and any translator of aristotle faces difficult interpretive work as well as navigating through various controversies about the meanings of his most basic, fundamental terms. the university of chicago press has just published a new translation of aristotle’s nicomachean ethics by robert c. bartlett and susan d. collins which documents this struggle in their notes and critical apparatus while still providing a faithful and readable rendering of the text. in october 2011 i spoke with susan d. collins, associate professor of political science at the university of houston, about the intricacies of her translation and the larger questions that emerge about aristotle and our reading of him. below is a transcript of that conversation. spiro: why do a new translation of the nicomachean ethics? collins: i think there’s at least eleven [in print]. you can check our bibliography – we did list them. we looked very carefully over the terrain before we decided to do this, and we talked about what we were trying to do with a new translation. there have been recent translations as well. the sachs1 was the closest to ours in its aims, its literalness. i reviewed several translations a few years before and i liked sachs but it wasn’t as consistent or as literal as it claimed to be and was also quite awkward in places because it seemed to be influenced by a heideggerian and kantian perspective rolled into one. there were some choices, like energeia as “being-at-work,” that drew our attention to the meaning of the greek, trying to get away from the overly-laden, latinate words. this isn’t a bad idea, but it made for difficulty in reading, so one couldn’t be consistent; sachs will use both “being-at-work” and “activity” for energeia. we decided to go with “activity” for energeia. we wanted a translation with the closest access possible for nongreek readers. we were as literal and as consistent [as possible] with the terms while still being readable. aristotle’s greek is very terse. over the number of years we translated, i felt my english was getting worse! i would have the greek before me and i worked on being literal before trying to be readable. those were our aims: fidelity, literalness, consistency, and readability. we also felt we had a lot to offer. we had both worked on the ethics. we thought our background helped with interpretive matters. we didn’t expect people to agree with us, but we thought we could help beginning students and scholars with the apparatus we could provide. 29 spiro one of the things i like about our translation is our notes where we show readers that there are disputed passages. we used the commentaries for that, other works to supplement the readers’ understanding with controversial passages. we knew that [the university of] chicago [press] had a translation of the politics 2 but not the nicomachean ethics, and would be sympathetic to a translation faithful to the greek. we thought that would be a nice home for it. chicago was great with helping the project along. they just came out with a kindle version. we insisted that the kindle version have the becker numbers, though i haven’t checked yet about that. kindle versions don’t have page numbers or becker numbers, and that’s necessary. the paperback will be out in april. you mentioned that you read it in a reading group. spiro: yes, some of my colleagues and friends met weekly this past summer to discuss it, covering about a book a week. i saw that your translation had come out and i realized i hadn’t read the ethics start-to-finish in a long time, since i usually just teach parts of it. we liked the translation very much, particularly how your notes teach the reader a bit about the greek. it shows that you can’t just translate his important terms – the meanings of his words can’t be conveyed directly in english. in particular i liked your translation of enkratia as “self-restraint,” while many other translators use “continence,” a cumbersome, dated word. though, as you say in your notes, “self-restraint” doesn’t fully render enkratia, and it’s somewhat telling that there is no real english word for it. collins: enkratia – we went back and forth on that term. “continence” doesn’t capture it as well as “inner mastery” or “inner strength,” and the lack thereof, and we went with “self-restraint,” but autos, “self,” isn’t there in the greek. it’s not exactly literal. i’ve noticed with my students, that they become more attentive readers, seeing that these words are carefully chosen, there are nuances in the terms. they slow down and think about the terms, which then leads them to think about the arguments and the ideas. i’ve had a couple of students who have, on the basis of reading not just ours but other translations, started to learn greek. that’s great in itself. spiro: what are the unique challenges to translating and understanding the nicomachean ethics? collins: some of the things i’ve mentioned already. it’s such a complex text that i still don’t have confidence in my understanding of it, even though i’ve published on it. i approach it with trepidation because i’m not on solid ground in my understanding of the text. i have a more mature understanding now than ten years ago or ten years before that, but i hope i will still be kicking and can have an even greater understanding in ten years. to translate it is a big presumption. as a translator i’m an interpretive screen for other readers, but somebody has to do it. the perfect is enemy of the good in this case. it’s such a well-known text, especially among scholars of ancient thought, so you’re on well-trod ground and you’re always seeing challenges interview: susan d. collins 30 with your translation and interpretation and the apparatus where we make interpretive moves. it’s a familiar text and i’ve worked with it for many years, but then i have to be careful to keep it fresh, not slide over things i think i know. it’s a text that speaks to so many different audiences. you have to keep in mind its complexity in that regard. that’s hard to capture in translation. you work in greek and for me the greek texts i know well, i enter them like they’re a house and they have many rooms. it’s hard to capture all of that. so it’s a great book! there’s a kind of presumption in translating it! but i think even readers who disagree with our “interpretive essay” can still like our translation. we also wanted to speak to young readers. the “introduction” is meant for beginning students, to try to say to them that some of the assumptions of our days – the prevailing relativism of our time – are just assumptions – that they need to approach the ethics with the expectation that it speaks to the most serious question, the highest good for a human being. we wanted to bring that out. what’s your experience with teaching the ethics? i have courses where it goes extremely well and others where it can be difficult. spiro: i mostly teach books 8 and 9 (on friendship), though i have also taught book 5 (on justice). i find that students respond to aristotle’s ideas about the various kinds of friends. it gets good conversations going, especially since now they have hundreds of “facebook friends.” the parts about virtue and justice and courage are harder to teach, though i find that rotc students are often very receptive to aristotle. collins: i have found the friendship books to be the most accessible. they have friends, and they’ve had friends who betray them, so they know how important a good friendship is in our lives. i have rotc students as well, but i haven’t noticed that ... i too see that military students have more open minds on some questions, such as honor. spiro: what was your process of translation? collins: [robert bartlett and i] divided the books up at the beginning. we each did a rough draft of the five we were assigned. but by the end of the process, the two of us had worked on every single book, because we switched them. we live in different cities so we did it long-distance. we went over the other person’s work and made our changes. then we had debates and disagreements we had to resolve about terms – how to translate them. then we got together when we could to read through each book again, reading a line, one person looking at the greek, one person reading the english. the person who had done the original translation would read the translation while the other was looking at the greek, but then we stopped that because we both had worked on it so much. we did that over a period of years. the final go-throughs were for readability. each of us had a grad student who would read it out loud to us, and we would note if somebody stumbled while reading. and we would read it to each other out loud. but it was most 31 spiro effective having a student read it. we also used it in classes and got feedback from students and other faculty. and we just kept going over and over it, a very slow and painstaking process. spiro: how did you write the “interpretive essay”? collins: as for the “essay,” we both had written on parts in previous work, which we revised and then we had to write new pieces – as on friendship – and fill in gaps. and it was the same process, passing it back and forth. i hope it’s relatively seamless. in the “essay” we thought it would be important to give a sense of the main themes and questions that inform the text without resolving them. in the sections on friendship, we raise the questions at stake in the books, how they fit in with the rest of the book as a whole. but there’s a lot of room to move in that “essay.” its intent is to give readers some guidance, and even something against which they can argue. all of the other apparatus and notes we worked on while translating, and we used the commentaries while we were reading and translating. the glossary was something we worked on in parts, assigning words to each other. at a point near the end we sent the translation to people we knew who were teaching the ethics or who offered to read it for us. now that i’m talking about it, i’m getting tired! how much work it involved! spiro: how long did it take? collins: it was on our radar screen, working on it, about seven years. but a lot of work we had done before that, on our own. we had material from before, and we had both published on the ethics, so that’s another five-to-ten years of work. in some ways i think of translations as benefiting the good of others, because there’s so much tedious work that goes into it. but it got us close to the text and there were things i hadn’t seen before. so it benefited my own inquiry. at first i said i didn’t want to do it, because i approach the text with such trepidation still. i knew how much work it would be to even be satisfied. you’re never fully satisfied with a translation. you always get complaints … invariably when i’m talking to people, they say, “why didn’t you translate this term this way? it would be better,” and i’ll say, “i remember we discussed that, but i don’t remember what we said!” for example, there’s a number of terms [aristotle] uses for “vice” or “wickedness” or “baseness,” and you pick one and you think it looks good in one context but it doesn’t work in another. so you’re always struggling with these things. in that regard it’s not entirely satisfying work. on the other hand, i think it turned out pretty well. if it’s of use then it does what we want it to do. it’s also, interestingly enough, brought attention to the ethics. a review in the new york times 3 helped. but even locally it drew attention. i’ve interview: susan d. collins 32 been asked to give talks at places, like at the local unitarian congregation, so it’s brought attention to a seminal work. spiro: what force or appeal do aristotle’s ethics have now? collins: start with our students. they begin to see how important this question of “the good” or “the human good” or “the best life” or “the good life for human beings” is, and they’re at a point in their lives where they’re open to thinking through that question, and they need to. it’s a rare time in their lives when they have openness and leisure, insofar as anyone has leisure nowadays. (a lot of our students work, and i’m always trying to find money for them.) i tell them “you can stay up nights!” it’s wonderful to bring that inquiry to them in a careful and nuanced – i don’t want to say systematic – but a precise way. but also in the community. i used to work for liberty fund and we set up conferences, largely on a particular text or question, and we did these mostly for academics but we ran them also for professionals. i was heartened to hear often that these professionals – doctors and lawyers and businesspeople – have reading groups. these kinds of conversations are going on. many were reading classic texts. the ethics would invariably fall into the set of possible texts; they had read it as undergrads, or heard about it, and they decided to read it with others. former students had emailed to say they have started groups to read these texts. that’s the way it should be. four years is artificial – it’s not like you get all the aristotle you need in four years of college and you don’t need to study him anymore. as you age, your thoughts evolve, and every time you come to a new stage of your life, you realize that you understand life more fully as you have more experiences. in this regard, the ethics is good for the mature reader who brings experience to it. i think it’s a text that works very well in the world, speaking to readers across age groups. so i gave a talk at a unitarian universalist congregation, and i focused on friendship in the good life, and i sketched aristotle’s view, and it really sparked conversation among these older people, made them think again about their friends, why they pick them, how they’re important to them. that’s another reason this book is so important, why it stayed alive. it’s remarkable that these texts from classic times still speak to us – who knew? a possession for time everlasting! these civilizations rise and fall and texts are lost, but human beings through the ages have found these works so valuable that they’ve done all they can to protect them and transmit them. that’s the staying power of these works and their worth to us as human beings. and students, too, respect that, seeing that the ethics isn’t just a book on the university curriculum. they realize this book has survived centuries, and people have spent years of their lives translating it yet again. spiro: how is aristotle misunderstood? collins: i have a certain understanding of aristotle. i hope it’s an understanding which issues from a careful reading. i have also, i hope, humility about my understanding since there’s a 33 spiro distinct possibility that i’m wrong. a way aristotle has been kept alive through the ages is in the catholic church and the reading of thomas, the schools of thomism. i respect that tradition and i have learned from thomas and my friends who are thomists, and his re-translation of aristotle for the christian world, but some of the positions i take are a friendly argument with thomist readings. and there’s the aristotle of the virtue-ethics world, the theorizing in departments of philosophy. people, scholars like [alasdair] macintyre, going back to [g. e. m] anscombe and that school of thought – [philippa] foot, [rosalind] hursthouse – and there are differences among them. they take inspiration from aristotle and the centrality of virtue, of character in moral action, and this is an important revival of aristotle. but part of my difficulty is, how does one institutionalize such an understanding in political terms? what are the political implications of virtue-ethics, especially in our liberal democratic world that emphasizes individual freedom? the libertarian aristotle emphasizes reason and choice, and says you can incorporate a form of aristotelianism into a libertarian framework. you can choose a way of life, a good, but this claim involves a whole other set of considerations that i find problematic though i’m interested in them. is this view a way to incorporate aristotle into a liberal-democratic framework? each school of thought or way of approaching aristotle is understandable as an effort to respond to the kinds of questions we have today in our modern circumstances. we see there’s an openness to aristotle because of the critiques of the modern project which, it is argued, leaves people, leaves individuals without the foundation to even ask the question, “what is my good as a human being?” you can just ask, “what do i want? what’s in my interest?” but you should also ask, “is there ground for my understanding, for what it is to live a good life as a human being?” aristotelianism today attempts to answer that question in a context where the possibility of asking that question is at least partially cut off. spiro: as you note, aristotle’s ethics were brought into the judeo-christian tradition by thomas and others. but you also begin your “interpretive essay” with the concern that this book is not judeo-christian as such. would you call aristotle’s ethics “secular”? or perhaps “greek” or “classical”? collins: i’d call aristotle’s ethics “rational.” most of this is a huge matter once you begin to think it through: aristotle’s thought is not grounded in revelation. this is a problem for thomas, trying to bring aristotle into the christian world. this is a problem with making aristotle consistent with the revealed word of god, so some virtues get jettisoned. for me, this is still a big question: how to understand aristotle in light of revelation. so that’s the main thing that we meant, and therefore, other things following from this – for example, we don’t see piety in his list of virtues. we see the centrality of magnanimity or greatness of soul, which is more easily identified in the christian tradition with a kind of pride that doesn’t fit with humility. there’s this great question in terms of the relationship of the virtues in aristotle’s ethics grounded as interview: susan d. collins 34 they are in reason – i think that’s how they’re presented – and the biblical understanding of revelation. not that you couldn’t, as with the example of thomas, or other writers and thinkers in the judeo-christian or even islamic tradition, not that you can’t incorporate an understanding of aristotle’s view into another tradition, but it’s necessarily transformed when you do that. this is a large question for some of our students. many of my students come from the evangelical world, and they’re great students because they want to think about this matter, so they become serious interlocutors when reading the ethics. it’s a challenge and they’re intrigued by it. the potential independence the book can give you when thinking through the question of the good. it’s problematic but not a challenge they’re afraid of. spiro: you suggest in the “interpretive essay” that god may not be necessary for the virtuous person, or perhaps the virtuous person should ask questions about god. does that mean religion is unnecessary, or that established religion does not settle religious questions? collins: i would say this is a tough one. as far as i can see, the questions you raise are not entirely settled by the end of the ethics. at least – i think there’s more than one way they remain questions. the first is that the life of moral virtue for the reasons that we lay down, or the interpretation we give, requires, it seems, to be supplemented by – “providence” is too strong a term, the fullness of that term is understood in the biblical tradition – by the care that god would give to a human being, and the assurance of happiness for that human being. one of the reasons we think this is connected with the discussion of self-sufficiency – and i was asked this years ago at a talk at st. john’s [college]. the aim of happiness is bound up with self-sufficiency, yet for a human being, perfect self-sufficiency is not possible, not only because we’re mortal but also we’re vulnerable to chance. part of what constitutes our happiness – our children, for example – may come to harm. but also we’re mortal, and bad things can happen to us. so part of what we do is show that self-sufficiency as an aim so much informs what we call our “hopes” for happiness that we have to come to terms with it in its connection with the life of moral virtue. we have a kind of dependence on the divine if we want to make the equation of “moral virtue = happiness.” the same thing is said of the contemplative life. it’s superior because it’s more self-sufficient, the most self-sufficient life, and so the contemplative life also must include a reflection on this problem, a thinking-through of the theological claims, the place of the divine and our hopes for happiness. those who are philosophic in nature seek to live the contemplative life also for the sake of happiness. i think that’s part of the way that the question is left open at the end. we begin to reflect anew from the point of view of the question which informs the ethics: “what is the best life?” so in certain respects, we leave the question of god’s care or providence open as a question for readers. we try to also give the passages so people could have an interpretive route, but it wouldn’t surprise me if people gave alternative interpretations to these passages and come to a different conclusion. 35 spiro spiro: aristotle’s ethics are grounded in community, not in the individual or even in the family. is this a challenge for us? collins: it is a challenge. it’s a challenge just to entertain sympathetically the view that the polis, the political community rightly-ordered, is best since it isn’t the political organization we currently live in! as the world has become more mobile and globalized, this view is even further from us. when i grew up you had strong neighborhoods or church communities which can give you a sense of what aristotle had in mind. these things are further from our experience of the world [now]. so that’s a challenge. but aristotle presented a challenge even in his own day. his was a world of flux, the rise and fall of empires, but he made a choice, and he thought of the “city” as the unit of political life. why does aristotle end with the polis as the political community par excellence in the politics? if he’s right about this matter, then we confront a problem! the community in which we live does not support the best life for a human being, insofar as that life is bound up with political communities. but it’s the same problem as the end of book 9 of the republic. nonetheless you have to make your way through obstacles and your perspective is going to be affected by what you come to understand. but this is what aristotle wants us to do and what he wanted from his own students; even in the midst of the obstacles presented by actual political life, we can nonetheless think through the question of the human good and what the political community would look like if you properly ordered it, and remember even his best regime is one you would pray for! but this regime can inform our life, so we can understand what it is to act well. it’s difficult but important, even more so, a challenge to us, not taking for granted the authoritativeness of our own time. we can still see now, in churches, community organizations, and the like, how human beings seek the good together. i’ve sat through enough civic meetings in my own life to see how hard it is for a community to work through the problems of what is best for us and our neighbors. but this is how people come to know one another, know their neighbors, help the old, help the young. spiro: to what extent is the nicomachean ethics an argument with socrates (or plato)? collins: ronna burger’s book is all about this, aristotle’s dialogue with socrates.4 there are seven explicit mentions of socrates in the work, and she collates them in the back. i certainly think that she makes a powerful case in her book that reading the ethics as a kind of conversation is very fruitful exercise. i’m in agreement with her that you can read the work in that framework. i even wrote a review of her book that was glowing.5 but i haven’t spent as much time as she has with that framework at the forefront. so when i read the ethics i pay attention when socrates comes up, especially in the book on prudence, where he figures prominently at the end. aristotle concedes the socratic position in a way without wholly acknowledging what might be the implications of this concession. i think the ethics as an inquiry into the question of the human interview: susan d. collins 36 good approaches it in a manner different from, say, the platonic dialogues or plato’s portrayal of socrates, the socratic confrontation with prevailing opinions, the confrontation that got him killed. aristotle is more careful, sober, respectful of the phenomena; he wants to describe rather than disturb the phenomena. but he still makes us aware of the difficulties of certain claims. spiro: in our reading group on the ethics, we had difficulty thinking of “great-souled” men or women. can you think of examples, historical or fictional, of such people? collins: [harry] jaffa mentioned churchill in his review.6 i often think of lincoln, but i can’t tell my friends in the south that! the description aristotle gives is a bit of a caricature, a fiction, intended to help us think about this peak of virtue. what would this human being be like? churchill, lincoln, washington … so possessed of the virtues, and then they recognize that fact in themselves and act appropriately. these are rare types. most of us stumble through life, hoping we say and do the right things. when i teach the peloponnesian war, and we reach the battle of salamis, i ask, what would happen if themistocles hadn’t been there? someone so capable and able to act on that capability … it boggles the mind, that history is so contingent, and that individuals can be that way. something unforeseen happens to me, i’m confused about what to do, and it takes a while to settle down and think about it, compared to other people who are so capable and in control of themselves that they are able to act in accord with the virtue that they possess. when i think of someone like this, it’s a churchill or a george washington or an abraham lincoln. i think someone like general george marshall is another example of such a person, though i need to read more about him. i don’t know who else. spiro: we thought of mr. darcy in pride and prejudice. but what about real people? collins: a fictional character! there are people i’ve encountered in my life, people raised with a certain set of virtues, who had a sense of honor as human beings; they knew what it meant to be decent and they understood themselves to be that and they acted accordingly. they were graceful in that way; they didn’t make mistakes. aristotle says certain things about great-souled people that we can still see and admire today, how they act towards their friends and their enemies, they don’t abide gossip or personal conversation, they don’t act in haughty ways toward those who are inferior. i can think of people in my life who are like that. spiro: so there are more homely examples than historical examples. collins: right, even if greatness of soul is a caricature or fiction, you go out in the world and you notice people who have these qualities in some fashion. this aspect of it we’re not unacquainted with in our age: these people have to know themselves to be virtuous. i thought as a kid that a man of honor worried too much about what other people think of him, but now i think that a man of honor thinks of the reputation he must have in terms of the good. it’s contingent on your own prizing of what’s good and what’s virtuous. and that’s hard. if you think of other examples, email me! 37 spiro notes 1. aristotle. 2008. nicomachean ethics. trans. joe sachs. newburyport, ma: focus. 2. aristotle. 1985. politics. trans. carnes lord. chicago: the university of chicago press. 3. jaffa, harry v. 2011. “aristotle and the higher good,” review of nicomachean ethics, by aristotle. new york times, 1 july, sunday book review. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/03/ books/review/book-review-aristotles-nicomacheanethics.html. 4. burger, ronna. 2009. aristotle’s dialogue with socrates: on the nicomachean ethics. chicago: university of chicago press. 5. collins, susan d. 2009. “the beautiful and the good,” review of aristotle’s dialogue with socrates: on the nicomachean ethics, by ronna burger. claremont review of books 9.3. http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1635/article_detail.asp. 6. jaffa 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/03/books/review/book-review-aristotles-nicomachean-ethics.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/03/books/review/book-review-aristotles-nicomachean-ethics.html http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1635/article_detail.asp [expositions 6.2 (2012) 41-47] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 gregory, brad s. the unintended reformation: how a religious revolution secularized society. cambridge, massachusetts and london: the belknap press of harvard university press, 2012. 574 pp, hb $39.95. isbn: 978-0-674-04563-7. in recent years, scholars from a range of disciplines – chiefly philosophy, theology, and history, but also literary criticism – have produced a surprising number of ambitious volumes asserting that seemingly arcane theological and ecclesial debates within christendom were so foundational to early modernity in the west that their impact continues to exercise decisive influence upon our own era. of course, the notion that inner-christian theological debates have had implications for more secular realities such as law, politics, economics, etc. is nothing new; however, what is striking about this recent spate of texts is their drive towards comprehensiveness in demonstrating that theological debates – including controversies concerning the institutionalization of authority – can function as a sort of collective rosetta stone, a means by which to untangle most if not all of the strands constituting the hotly contested territory of how best to diagnose the “condition” of modernity (not to mention “late” or “post-” modernity). given both the scope and the subsequent impact of such works as mark c. taylor’s after god1 and charles taylor’s a secular age2 upon interdisciplinary conversations, it seems that we might be entering a time in which the term “magisterial” functions less as an adjective and more like a genre in its own right. a recent intervention into this genre is brad s. gregory’s the unintended reformation, which bears its thesis in its subtitle: “how a religious revolution secularized society.” the “revolution” in question is the trajectory inaugurated by the european reformation of the sixteenth century, and the “society” in question is precisely our own – the twenty-first century west (and, to the extent that other parts of the globe have adopted the characteristic features of western modernity, the planet as a whole). gregory, a professor of early modern european history at notre dame, has written a volume that bears all the hallmarks of an agenda-setting text. first, it ranges widely both historically (covering trajectories from later medieval centuries through the enlightenment, and occasionally beyond) and conceptually (encompassing discussions of metaphysics, the politics of emerging nation-states, economics, transitions in university curricula, etc.); at the same time, however, it filters these diffuse topics through one focused inquiry, namely the ways in which these different aspects of modernity owe their peculiar character to the legacy of the reformation. second, it reflects the well-established scholarly belief that intellectual genealogy – tracing the contingent developments of ideas across time, with special attention to the “roads not taken” at key moments – is a necessary step in combating the various philosophical and political maladies of the modern age (which itself assumes that modernity is characterized chiefly by its defects, perhaps even to the point of being a “failed experiment”). and third, as early reactions to the text in both academic and popular journals have already shown, it is controversial: anyone working in my field (historical and systematic theology) has by this time almost certainly read at least one of the numerous highthe unintended reformation 42 profile reviews of gregory’s work, and has noted the varying levels of ire that it has raised in various quarters of the academy. what this means is that most readers picking up this book for the first time likely will have failed to sequester themselves from being influenced by the debate around the book that is already happening. to be sure, gregory demonstrates throughout the text that he is not afraid to pick a fight. in his methodological introduction to the text, he explicitly denies that historians should hold back from applying insights gained from their study of the past to cultural commentary on the present; thus, nearly a third of the total text of his book consists of discussion of the state of the twentyfirst century west. the notes that he strikes concerning virtually every major discourse of contemporary western society – including politics, moral philosophy, economics, ecology, religion, science, and academia – are consistently pessimistic and polemical. indeed, across this wide survey gregory’s core complaint remains the same: western society no longer has any agreed-upon first principles, no fixed points of axiomatic agreement, by which to adjudicate what gregory terms the “hyperplurality” of contending viewpoints that characterize the modern marketplace of ideas. this lack of consensus undermines the ability of every facet of western experience to shape life into a meaningful whole. throughout the book’s chapters, one by one, potential unifying achievements are assessed and found wanting. politics? even as our world faces unprecedented economic and environmental challenges, no single vision of the good life funds any point of agreement or compromise among world leaders. economics? a vision of the good life as moderation and self-discipline has given way to what gregory continually calls “the goods life,” the belief that accumulation of material goods is the be-all and end-all of life and that any classical virtues that might temper that acquisitiveness will be derided as archaic (in no small part because they threaten the ideology of unfettered economic growth). science? the fact that, on gregory’s account, the natural sciences have capitulated to the belief that specifically religious assertions are out of bounds as postulates for answering what gregory calls “life questions” (broad, existential matters of ultimate importance to human life as such) means that sciences are now incapable of addressing reality as it is actually lived by the majority of the earth’s population. ethics and morals? with a nod to the work of alasdair macintyre3, gregory contends that the lack of any shared societal vision as to what an “ethical” life might look like has fragmented the guild of professional moral philosophers to the point where their work is utterly incapable of addressing any serious word to what gregory calls the regnant and relativistic “culture of whatever.” the corrosive effects of hyperpluralism upon these discourses are, on gregory’s account, rooted in more fundamental failures at the level of religion: “scientific inquiry, economists’ claims, philosophical reflection, and the study of human cultures and traditions augment further the open-ended religious and secular pluralism that prevails in western society at large with respect to the life questions” (81). in order to link hyperpluralism (what reinhard hütter, channeling jürgen habermas, has called “unintelligible profusion”4) with western cultural decay, gregory asserts a more fundamental connection between hyperpluralism and secularization, with the latter construed as the loss of religion as both a metaphysical orientation 43 saler and as a unified, pervasive broker of culture and intellectual discourse. in other words, the engine that drives the most pernicious effects of hyperpluralism into western society is secularization. that is the essence of the story that the unintended reformation wishes to tell. according to this narrative, the onset of the reformation was not simply an inter-ecclesial dispute with implications for the practice of the faith; rather, it was a fundamental rupture of a previous state of cultural equilibrium as transmitted through the western catholic church. at various points throughout his book, gregory insists that this relative harmony saturated virtually every aspect of medieval culture in the west: “western christianity on the eve of the reformation comprised an institutionalized worldview, a many-layered combination of beliefs, practices, and institutions […] deeply embedded in social life, political relationships, and the wider culture, christianity has as its ostensible, principle raison d’être the sanctification of the baptized through the practice of the christian faith, such that they might be saved when judged eternally by god after death” (83). to his credit, gregory acknowledges and describes the ways in which the actual behavior of medieval christians – particularly those in the upper echelons of political and ecclesial hierarchy – often fell far short of christendom’s professed theological ideals, to the point where the reformers had ample reason to lose faith in the moral and teaching authority of the roman church. he also gives some attention (although less than one might hope for a historian of his caliber) to the numerous disputes and contestations within medieval catholic theology and practice. indeed, the fact that the reformation was to a certain degree justified is central to gregory’s argument. it is apparent to even the most casual reader of nascent protestant texts that the reformers shared their roman interlocutors’ assumptions concerning the centrality of faith to life and of the church to faith; the dispute was centered on whether medieval catholicism embodied or betrayed that ideal. there can be little doubt the late medieval church suffered from what gregory calls “failures of charity” (on fronts both political and theological). gregory’s relatively sympathetic treatment of the intentions of luther, calvin, et al. distinguishes his account from the trope employed by catholic opponents in the first few centuries following the reformation break, namely, that of ascribing intellectual or moral defects to the reformers.5 however, the overarching narrative of the book does fit into another well-established, if more generous and modern, category of counter-reformation critique: the notion that protestant valorization of private judgment (as regards matters of scriptural interpretation and church doctrine) and predilection towards schism would extend past the inner-ecclesial intentions (however noble) of the reformers, and would in fact come to undermine the common structures of society as a whole. for gregory, the cumulative effect of this divisiveness is nothing less than the single most important factor linking hyperpluralism to secularity; thus, he insists that our modern inability to handle the life questions with any sustained clarity is the unintended but inevitable outcome of the reformation legacy. thus, “the most important, distant historical source of western hyperpluralism pertaining to the life questions is the reformation insistence on scripture as the sole source for christian faith and life, combined with the vast range of countervailing ways in which the bible was interpreted and applied” because “the sort of the unintended reformation 44 disagreements about answers to the life questions characteristic of the early reformation have never gone away – they have only been transformed, modified, and expanded in terms of content even as efforts have been made to contain and manage their unintended and undeniably enormous effects” (92-3). prima facie, such a domino-effect view of ecclesial schism is nothing new. from the outset of the reformation controversies, catholic opponents of the so-called “magisterial” reformers argued that belief in the clarity of scripture to the individual reader and the ability of individual believers to rightly interpret the gospel that luther and his contemporaries were espousing was naïve, and would open a pandora’s box of divisiveness via a host of incompatible interpretations. those warnings were quickly validated by luther’s vexation at how quickly the relative stability of the initial reformation settlements fragmented into a host of spiritual and political contestations, from the so-called “enthusiasts” or “radical refomers” whom luther derided as schwärmerei to the provocation of the peasant uprising. in the centuries following the reformation, the accusation that ecclesial fissiparity and reliance on private judgment breeds social decline would be taken up in more a more sophisticated fashion by such thinkers as jaime balmes and john henry newman (and in less sophisticated fashion by others, including massimo salani, who recently made headlines for claiming that the global growth of fast food reflects a degradation of communal sensibilities – and thus is traceable to protestantism). while, as stated above, gregory is sympathetic to the reformers’ religious impulses in their loss of confidence in the medieval church, he also accuses them of naiveté for thinking that their principles of sola scriptura and the ability of individual believers to rightly interpret scripture would be enough to allow the protestant communions to adjudicate religious truth. because the reformation dissolved into a host of irreconcilable religious options (many of them augmented by a spiritualist turn away from the text of the bible itself and towards a kind of neo-gnostic reliance upon direct dispensations from the holy spirit), and because those religious disputes quickly became violent, various engines of “toleration” through secularization became increasingly attractive (most prominently in the enlightenment’s confidence in rationality as a tool for moderating religious passions). where religion failed, reason, scientism, and (especially) the market stepped in. this last piece of the puzzle – the analysis of how secularization through hyperpluralism mapped historically onto the emergence of modern capitalism – is where gregory’s book improves upon previous influential accounts of “secularization via toleration” (most notably, stephen toulmin’s cosmopolis6). as a historian, gregory is at his best when detailing how ecclesial and market discourses converged at crucial points to advance the “management” of toleration and pluralism in ways that would facilitate the emergence of modern habits of production and consumption (e.g., the retooling of avarice as material success). theologians and sociologists who today cast hyperpluralism as a symptom of the dominance of the late capitalist “market” – and there are many – will find gregory’s narrative a useful ally on that front. unfortunately, such application of grittier historical data on gregory’s part is inconsistent throughout the book; indeed, at times, his overarching narrative (once more: protestantism leads 45 saler to pluralism, which leads to secularization, which leads to hyperpluralism, which leads to the decline of the west) depends upon significant oversimplification, if not outright cliché. at moments where it would be crucial for gregory to trace evidence of ideas manifesting themselves “on the ground” rather than solely in the space of theological discourse, he resorts instead to bare assertion (for instance, his reliance on the faddish notion that the “disenchantment” of the world characteristic of secularism is traceable to the advent of nominalism and “univocal” metaphysics7). these tenuous maneuvers coincide with his strange lack of engagement with art and cultural production during and after the reformation, which is all the more odd given that there is ample evidence to suggest that, for many christians in europe and england, the site of the reformation’s most disruptive effects were aesthetic (related to art and liturgy) rather than doctrinal.8 more egregious are the distortions brought about by gregory’s stubbornly pessimistic reductions of modernity to a condition of thoroughgoing and degenerate relativism. while he acknowledges at several points that modernity’s relocation of ethical discourse away from ecclesial traditions and towards more abstract language of human rights has brought about advancements in the latter that are “incomparably preferable to the appalling brutalization of men, women, and children in modern dictatorships” (233), his drive to show that such appeals to human rights no longer rest upon an agreed-upon metaphysical foundation leads him away from any substantive analysis as to how passion for social justice has in fact sustained many moderns, secular and religious alike. meanwhile, given his fascination with how the medieval church was able to balance the catholicity of orthodoxy with a generous variety of local traditions, his silence about the vitality of the global christian church and its increasing influence upon western christians casts his pessimism about the fate of religion in the west in a rather parochial light. if we are to believe that the experiment of modernity is a failure, then more of its variegated facets (cultural and religious) than what gregory allows to surface must be given their day in court. but even if the forest of the unintended reformation’s broad narrative ultimately proves unconvincing, nevertheless the book does provide some valuable data for rethinking our perspective on certain historical trees. like james simpson’s recent (and equally polemical) burning to read9, gregory makes a strong case for how the waning of protestant confidence in scriptural perspicuity (as well as the failure of protestant supplements to scripture, such as prefaces and commentaries, to ward off the onset of individualized spiritualism in subsequent hermeneutics) rendered many of the reformation’s signal achievements unstable, and he demonstrates in vivid detail how that instability resulted in situations in which many europeans experienced the reformation chiefly through its “radical” offshoots – and through violence. similarly, historians of the reformation will benefit from wrestling with gregory’s criticism of the contemporary tendency to marginalize study of the radical reformation in favor of the “magisterial” reformers, despite the disproportionally higher impact of the former upon the lives of christians in the sixteenth century. the definitive text relating the reformation to modernity in its various permutations has yet to appear. when it does, it will tell a nuanced, diffuse story that does not lift up the (unquestionably the unintended reformation 46 significant) impact of late medieval events upon our era at the expense of downgrading those aspects of the modern experience that do not conform neatly to a linear script. that said, whoever writes that book will benefit from the genuine flashes of insight available from gregory’s work, both where it convinces and where it does not. robert saler christian theological seminary in indianapolis notes 1. taylor, mark. after god (chicago: university of chicago press, 2007). 2. taylor, charles. a secular age (cambridge, ma and london: the belknap press of harvard university press, 2007). 3. cf. especially macintyre’s seminal discussion in after virtue: a study in moral theory, 2nd ed. (south bend, in: university of notre dame press, 1984). at several points throughout his book gregory indicates his debt to macintyre’s discussion; indeed, it’s probably no exaggeration to say that how one ultimately feels about the narrative put forth by the unintended reformation may depend a great deal on how one feels about the foundation established by macintyre’s work. put simply, both macintyre and gregory offer historical narratives by which an original synthetic harmony (aristotelianism/thomism for macintyre, medieval catholicism for gregory) undergoes rupture, either by the disaggregation of philosophy from teleology and tradition (macintyre) or a period of theological and political turmoil that corrodes the ability of the institutional church to shape common visions of the good and shared answers to life questions (gregory). while such disruption initially feels like liberation and enlightenment, it eventuates in a sort of sort of emotivism that masquerades as relativistic freedom when in fact it enforces the interests of an increasingly dominant “marketplace” of ideas – pluralism as a material and ideological shopping mall. 4. hütter, reinhard. suffering divine things: theology as church practice (grand rapids, mi: eerdmans, 1999). 5. cf. david steinmetz, “the catholic luther: a critical reappraisal” theology today july 2004, 187-201: 61. 6. toulmin, stephen. cosmopolis: the hidden agenda of modernity (chicago: university of chicago press, 1992). 47 saler 7. the notion that many of the ailments of modernity can be traced back to the rise of scotus and metaphysical univocity is characteristic of such theological currents as “radical orthodoxy,” particularly in its various attempts at cultural analysis. cf. especially daniel m. bell jr., liberation theology after the end of history: the refusal to cease suffering (oxford: routledge, 2001). 8. cf. inter alia eamon duffy, the stripping of the altars: traditional religion in england, 1400-1580, 2nd ed. (new haven and london: yale university press, 2005). 9. simpson, james. burning to read: english fundamentalism and its reformation opponents (cambridge, ma and london: the belknap press of harvard university press, 2010). abstract [expositions 5.1 (2011) 70] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 the chic homeless: a vogue special the following photo-essay is a visual answer to the paradoxes of “homeless chic” that was eventually published in stütze, one of berlin’s homeless street newspapers, in 2003. three students of universität der künste, berlin (berlin university of the arts) – victoria kirjuchina, caroline scotto and dominik schumacher – reenacted two vogue fashion editorials with actors of a homeless theater group, die ratten 07. while stütze dressed up as vogue (this had quite a surprising effect on the regular readers of the paper), the homeless dressed up as fashion models, lending their “imperfect” bodies to poses of carefree perfection. actors, designers, make-up artists and photographers alike tried to stay as close as possible to the vogue originals, using their original captions, and recreating their poses, colors and light effects. the students’ assignment had been to capture polarities in society. their critical subversion of “homeless chic” is not only a parody of the language of fashion, but turns out to be a surprisingly effective homage to the actors of die ratten 07. dorothea löbbermann humboldt-universität zu berlin to visit dominik schumacher’s webpage devoted to the photo-essay, please follow this link: http://www.dominikschumacher.net/en/archiv/photographie/vogue-special.html. *the images may not be reproduced without the express written consent of dominik schumacher. disclaimer: expositions is not responsible for the content of the linked material. https://webaccess.villanova.edu/owa/redir.aspx?c=677388b37b2c4ac2a66abcda30a1cffb&url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.dominikschumacher.net%2fen%2farchiv%2fphotographie%2fvogue-special.html voguespecial im partyrausch brillanten: mehr ist mehr bunte steine: ihre charakter-farben trend: blüten, tiere, herzen, sterne karatsignale die tage werden kürzer, nächte unendlich lang: clubbing und cocktails der sound ist supersexy, und die mode feiert mit im party rausch herb, lieblich, supersüß den zuckergehalt ihres stils dosie ren sie selbst. ob dancing queen oder lounging lolita ihr perfekter mix ist das geheimnis. diese seite: zartblaues, kurzärmliges minikleid aus chiffon mit filigranen blütenstickereien aus pailletten und stabperlen, um 1760 ¤, von blumarine. linke seite: besticktes schulterfreies seidentop, um 3775 ¤, von ralph lauren collection. enge bootcut-jeans, um 240 ¤, von lagerfeldgallery by diesel. im party-rausch nicht ganz durchschaubar: networking mit rafinierter masche. auf dieser und der linken seite: zwei ansichten eines outfits. schwarzes kleid mit gehäkeltem top und weit schwingendem chiffonrock, gesäumt von stickereien, von trend les copains. strassarmbänder: thomas sabo. champagnerlaune: sinnlich und prickelnd mit einem schuss selbsbewusstem sexappeal. . diese seite: silbern glitzerndes minikleid, reich verziert mit perlen, pailletten, glassteinen und schmuckschüren, um 7000 ¤ , von roberto cavalli. weiße satinstilettos von jimmi choo. . linke seite: schwarzer pulli aus feinem strick, um 290 ¤,darunter ein satin-bh, um 150 ¤. der hüftmini aus stretch ist mit farbenprächt igen glassteinen besetzt, um 3670 ¤; alles von genny. im party-rausch cocktail der stile: cremig bis gerad linig verwegen. was reizt sie mehr: ein “swimming pool” oder ein “long island iced tea”? diese seite: pailletten und perlan zieren das kapuzen-kleid mit sehr tiefem rückenausschnitt, um 6660 ¤, von georgio armani. gewebte schwarze tasche aus samt: bottega veneta. linke seite: bustierkleid mit . opulent schwingendem chiffonrock und kostbarbesticktem bolero, zusammen um 3600 ¤; beide teile von dice kayek. auf diesen und den vorigen sechs seiten: frisuren und make-up von der natur so gewachsen, von claudia kunzmann nachgeholfen. lichttechnik von dominik schumacher. moderedakteure: caroline scotto und viktoria kirjuchina. “wo zu kaufen?”:seite 406. im party-rausch brillanten: mehr ist mehr bunte steine: ihre charakter-farben trend: blüten, tiere, herzen, sterne karatsignale juwelen emotions on the rocks beauty aus dem meer ein sanftes geschöpf wird zur diva: die perle kann so überschwänglich wie nobel sein traumbilder in diamantischer sinnlichkeit und kühner perfektion. diese seite: schmetterlingsbrosche aus gelbund weißgold mit vier diamantenrosen von zusammen 9,8 ct, 119 smaragden und zwei diamantentropfen auf den fühlern, um 88 000 ¤, von fochtmann. augenornament mit kristalsteinen von swarowski. . © equinox publishing ltd. 2009, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expo. 3.1 (2009) 57–71] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v3i1.57 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 what has mozart to do with coltrane?: the dynamism and built-in flexibility of music cynthia r. nielsen university of dallas cynthia.nielsen@gmail.com abstract although contemporary western culture and criticism has usually valued composition over improvisation and placed the authority of a musical work with the written text rather than the performer, this essay posits these divisions as too facile to articulate the complex dynamics of making music in any genre or form. rather it insists that music should be understood as pieces that are created with specific intentions by composers but which possess possibilities of interpretation that can only be brought out through performance. keywords: improvisation, hermeneutics, music as bruce ellis benson explains in chapter two of his book, the improvisation of musical dialogue, we tend to think that a musical composition is finished once it is written down in its “final” version. however, there are a number of assumptions that we should question in connection with such a conclusion. first, why assume that a process of revision always leads to a better version, much less to the perfect version? beethoven, for example, was known for ceaselessly revising and offering a number of variants for musical passages and even entire sections of his symphonies. even if we grant that his revisions generally improved his work, why should we necessarily conclude that they always did? second, is it not the case that pressing deadlines, familial responsibilities, and creative inertia likewise co-determine when a work is, so to speak, “completed”? that is, the artist may not in fact be satisfied with his or her final version, and yet the work must be brought to a close. if this is the case, then we might say that in some instances the composer mailto:cynthia.nielsen@gmail.com 58 what has mozart to do with coltrane? © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 is aware of the incomplete aspects in his or her work—the places that at some later time, he or she, if given the time, would want to change or develop. third, is there a sense in which a composition becomes “fixed” and rigidly definite when written down, or is it the case that a certain “indefiniteness” and indeterminacy remains even after the composition is “finished”? arguing for the latter, benson states that although composers have “reasonably” definite intentions, “it would be impossible for their intentions to encompass all of the details of any given piece” (2003, 69). in other words, often or perhaps even most of the time, the composer is unsure exactly how every aspect and detail of the work should sound until the piece is actually played by a specific group of musicians and with very particular instrumentation. in fact, it is not uncommon for a composer to present his or her music to a group of musicians, asking for critical input on various aspects of the piece. having performed in several jazz orchestras and dabbled in jazz composition myself, i find this claim rather convincing. it was often the case that our director, an accomplished composer and arranger, presented us with his scores, only to make numerous changes during the rehearsal time—changes he could not foresee until the actual music appeared. clearly, he had a definite intention of how he wanted the piece to sound, yet the specific intricacies of tempo, dynamics, and so forth were realized only when the music was performed. in this essay, i hope to make manifest a number of interconnected themes, all of which challenge us to rethink the nature of music and the roles of composers and performers. as we shall see, what benson calls “musical places of indeterminacy,” and what i call, “built-in flexibility,” are present not only in jazz, where one might expect it, but in all musical genres, including classical music. if this is the case, and i argue that it is, then the lines between composition and improvisation are fluid rather than fixed. recognition of this fluidity allows a new paradigm for understanding what music is. instead of a static product completed by one composer, a musical piece is dynamic, being continually composed by many performers. consequently, the sharp boundaries between composer and performer likewise collapse, and we come to acknowledge that music possesses a pre-, present-, and futurehistory. music is communal; it emerges from and continues an evercynthia r. nielsen 59 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 developing tradition; it is energeia rather than ergon; yet, its dynamism does not destroy its identity. one may ask, and legitimately so, when a composer finally works out the particular instrumentation, dynamic markings, tempo variations, and submits the final score, can we then say that work finished? in contrast to a culture or tradition of music in which a musical work is both perceived and passed on via aural memory, our modern understanding of music, particularly classical music, emphasizes the written musical score as authoritative.1 the contemporary music theorist edward cone, however, raises a number of interesting questions about the degree and range of this supposedly all-encompassing authority of the written score. according to cone, it is not the case that the composition is identical with the score (2005, 244). in other words, cone suggests that it is impossible for the written score to capture everything that the composition is. although cone is quick to acknowledge the importance of the written score in classical music for the purposes of the musical performance, as well as the obligation that the performer has to the score, he is also cognizant of 1) the difficulties of establishing an accurate score, and 2) the fact that performance always involves interpretation. commenting on the difficulties of establishing a “canonic text” of the music of chopin, cone writes, the performer’s first obligation, then, is to the score—but to what score? the autograph or the first printed edition? the composer’s hasty manuscript or the presumably more careful copy by a trusted amanuensis? the composer’s initial version or his later emendation? the first german edition or the first french edition? an original edition or one supposedly incorporating the composer’s instructions to his pupils? those involved in the attempt to establish a canonic text of chopin’s works face all those decisions. (cone 2005, 244) even after these sorts of interpretive decisions have been made, we still have to deal with the issue of the conductor’s, as well as the performer’s, interpretation of the score. here we see that accurate and excessive notation does not in itself remove the difficulties in view. the written notation is only an approximation of what actually occurs in a musical performance. “in fact, it is exactly the space cleared by that approximation, an area 60 what has mozart to do with coltrane? © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 of indeterminacy, that is the locus of the performer’s prime interpretative activity.… the realization of any score thus requires decisions at every point” (cone 2005, 245). cone’s observations press us to grapple with the various roles manuscript editors, conductors, and performers play in the actualization of the music as it appears to us. stated slightly differently, if it is the case that performers, conductors and arrangers in some genuine sense continue to compose a work through their various additions, deletions, and interpretations, then can we really say that a work is ever “finished”?2 as stated earlier, the “original” composers certainly have some definite intentions with regard to their compositions, but how extensive those intentions are is another issue. also, though some composers may be cognizant of places of indeterminacy in their works, others become aware of these indeterminacies only after the music is actually performed. furthermore, in light of the co-creating involved in every performance, there are future possibilities that will forever remain unknown to the original composer. all of this suggests that a determinate intention, though having some definiteness to it, also exhibits what we might call built-in flexibility that allows for different manifestations and fresh articulations of a piece, while nonetheless preserving its identity. having at least touched upon some of the ways in which this flexibility or indeterminacy surfaces in classical music, i now turn to an example in the genre of jazz in order to further explore this built-in flexibility that maintains identity. large jazz ensembles and orchestras perform scores that are very similar to those found in classical music in which all the parts are extensively notated: bass line, the chords or harmonic structure, and more or less every note is written in full musical notation. in contrast, jazz small groups (trios and quartets) typically base their performances on what is called, in jazz parlance, a “lead sheet” where only the melody line is written out in standard musical notation, allowing for significantly more flexibility. above the melody line, one finds chord symbols. so while a fully notated orchestral score instructs a musician exactly with specific chordal voicings, a lead sheet simply tells the musician what chord to play, leaving the voicings open for interpretation. for example, on a jazz lead sheet, one might find the label “c major 7” written above the melody line, instead of the actual musical notation for a c major seventh chord (the notes c, e, g, b) or cynthia r. nielsen 61 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 the various specific voicings in which these harmonic structures may be expressed (for example, e, g, c, b or c, g, b, e, and other possible variations for a c major seventh chord). writing the chord symbols in this manner affords the pianist or guitarist, as well as the bassist, a significant amount of creative freedom in performing the piece. however, this freedom does not destroy the identity of the piece, since a musician must choose harmonies and bass lines that fall within a certain range of the specified chord symbol, and these harmonic arrangements and variations must support the melody and make manifest the larger harmonic structure of the piece. thus, with a jazz lead sheet, players are in a genuine sense “tied to” the “score”—that is, they must agree to submit to the “givens” of the piece and respond accordingly. here the communal aspect of jazz performance must be considered. for example, if the pianist simply decides to play chords that have no relation whatsoever to the prescribed chord symbols, the rest of the group or ensemble will be affected (not to mention thoroughly frustrated), as their parts will not correspond to the pianist’s random harmonic superimpositions. in such a situation, the identity of the piece is destroyed because it is no longer recognizable by either the musicians themselves or the audience listening. although a certain fixity exists (a given melody, harmonic framework, and a mutual submission to these givens by the community of musicians), nonetheless, the personalities, skill levels, and creative sensibilities of each individual performer also come through, making each performance something unique. one might even say that the flexibility that lead sheets afford, coupled with the harmonic and melodic interpretations of these givens, brings about new intelligibilities of the piece that up to this point had not existed. this built-in-flexibility, when held in check by submission to the aforementioned givens, actually helps rather than hinders the preservation of the piece through the passage of time because it not only allows but expects various re-articulations and new insights to be brought forth by new generations. in contrast to a rigid, staticized view of a finished work, in which proper preservation is equated with an attempt to reproduce that work in all of its historical, cultural, and individual particularities, understanding musical pieces (and texts) as possessing a built-in flexibility that is 62 what has mozart to do with coltrane? © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 not destructive of identity allows for expansions that inevitably come with temporal progression and the development of tradition, musical or otherwise. thus, this dynamic conception of works is able to overcome a potentially devastating feature of the staticized view, namely, the possibility of the work becoming completely closed off to future generations who cannot find a way to bring a past ossification to bear on their present cultural and historical situation. here i imagine a possible objection: am i not overstating my case? after all, isn’t improvisation an essential feature of jazz; and if so, even if there are inescapable places of indeterminacy connected with classical compositions and performances, isn’t the flexibility described in my lead sheet example so significantly different that the comparison becomes overly strained? before attempting to address this objection, perhaps we should take a closer look at some of the assumptions upon which such an objection is based. first, there is the idea that jazz is akin to a free-for-all in which musicians play random melodic lines, whereas classical music, in contrast, eliminates all improvisatory elements. second, we have the notion that a strict division exists between the work, conceived as a suprahistorical, untouchable essence, and its historical, in-time performance, which allows for variations and supplementations. i turn first to address the issues and questions surrounding a proper understanding of improvisation. regarding the history of the term “improvisation” and the negative attachments that have come to be associated with it, jeremy begbie writes: at first it [improvisation] carried the relatively neutral sense of extemporization.… by the 1850s it appears to have acquired pejorative connotations – off-hand, lacking sufficient preparation (as in “improvised shelter,” “improvised solution”). many musicians and musicologists continue to view it with considerable suspicion, if not disdain. for some it is synonymous with the absence of intellectual rigour. there are educationalists who see it as a distraction from authentic musicmaking. (2005, 180) contra this pessimistic construal, jazz improvisation requires just as much skill, creativity, and rigor as the art of composing a classical symphony. moreover, strictly speaking, composing is not withcynthia r. nielsen 63 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 out improvisatory elements; and depending upon one’s definition of improvisation, one could reasonably argue that improvisation pervades music in general. however, before going further, i should pause to acknowledge the well-known difficulty among music specialists in arriving at a satisfactory definition of improvisation. given this difficulty, we shall move through a number of possibilities, noting various aspects of improvisation broadly construed with the hope of finally obtaining a working definition of the term as related to our present purposes. if improvisation is understood as a simultaneous occurrence of composing and performance, then improvisation cannot be limited to jazz. in fact, what we find is that improvisation characterized in this manner has been prevalent in a wide variety of cultures and musical genres—from gregorian chant to baroque music, as well as most non-western expressions of music which are by and large not notated. however, even subsequent to the development of music notation, we find composers such as j.s. bach, handel, and mozart highly skilled in the art of improvisation and who also expected those performing their pieces to possess this skill (begbie 2005, 180–181). nonetheless, as concerts in the 18th and 19th centuries gained in popularity, the growing sophistication of musical notation did play a role in contributing to a more diminished view of improvisation (begbie 2005, 181–182). although the increase in notation severely limited opportunities for improvising in classical music, the improvisatory elements even in meticulously notated music cannot be totally removed so long as human beings are the performers. avid music listeners can attest that whether speaking of an individual soloist or an orchestral unit, the personalities, stylistic particularities, and interpretative nuances manifested in the actual performance of a musical work all contribute a degree of creative liberty that falls within the sphere of improvisation broadly construed. for example, how do we explain why we prefer one wellknown cellist playing bach’s solo concertos over another renowned and equally proficient cellist? the notes on the page are exactly the same, yet we are aware of differences in the ways in which one performer interprets the piece or articulates a musical passage. in addition, it is common for a soloist to engage in what is called “ornamentation.” that is, rather than simply play the melodic line as written, the per64 what has mozart to do with coltrane? © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 former adds neighboring tones and trills3 that dress up or “ornament” the melody line. (these ornamental notes of course are not written on the page, and no two musicians ornament in exactly the same way). a second consideration contributing to a negative view of improvisation as somehow intellectually substandard is perhaps due to an overly rigid distinction that we in the western musical tradition tend to make between improvisation and composition. as i have indicated, improvisation is often understood as non-calculated, free-flowing, and lacking in intellectual and musical rigor. composition, by contrast, is thought to be more or less inflexible, rule-governed, and—given its high degree of musical notation—by nature purposely without spontaneity. however, as we shall see, both views are misleading and set up sharp distinctions that do not correspond to what takes place in actual music making and performance. contrary to the negative characterization thus far discussed, improvisation as expressed in jazz involves a high degree of prepared and calculated musical ideas. all too frequently we hear the rather pejorative comment that in jazz it matters not what note one plays given the dissonance prevalent in jazz and its penchant for non-resolution. though perhaps in some expressions of jazz such a remark might ring true, on the whole it tends to paint a rather misleading picture. a more accurate account is that professional jazz improvisers are intensely aware of what notes they play, when to play them, and for what reason this note or that scale should be played as opposed to others. for example, consider the common harmonic structures in which one finds purposely altered harmonies—that is, dissonances that are deliberately applied to certain chord structures. one of the first skills that a beginning improviser learns is that most traditional jazz pieces consist of what is called the ii-v-i harmonic progression. for example, in the key of c major, the ii-v-i progression is: d minor 7 – g7 – c major 7. the v 7 or dominant 7th chord has multiple functions. for example, it is the chord that typically leads us directly to a resolution back to the tonic key, or it acts as a transition chord to take us to a new key which will then serve as a temporary resolution of sorts. in light of these functions, as opposed to being a “place of rest” (such as the tonic chord) or even a “temporary rest stop,” altering or extending its choral components heightens the tension by adding new cynthia r. nielsen 65 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 tonal colors into the mix. jazz musicians are deeply aware of these possibilities, and maximize the tension-release motif in their solos. in fact, it is a common practice among jazz musicians to have numerous altered patterns prepared in advance—patterns which they have practiced for hours upon end in all twelve keys so that when performance time comes, the music has become such a part of them that it flows effortlessly from them. thus, it is in no way the case that jazz musicians simply fumble around, pulling notes out of thin air, rebelliously disregarding the harmonic structure of the piece because they have some kind of perverse attraction to dissonance for its own sake. while this might de-mystify jazz improvisation to a certain extent, it does not eradicate that side of jazz that involves a strong degree of spontaneity and communal interplay. in other words, an aspect of mystery is still alive and well in the art of jazz improvisation because no matter how many patterns one has prepared in advance, the dynamism and community of jazz makes it such that, in heraclitean fashion, no pattern is ever played exactly same way twice; nonetheless, the patterns are quite identifiable, as is the piece itself. if, in fact, jazz is not a free-for-all and involves a number of previously prepared musical ideas, one might be led to believe that notation is the crucial difference between composition and improvisation. however, as begbie astutely observes, “it seems odd to claim that composition only happens when musicians write music down” (2005, 183). if this were the case, the act of transcribing an improvised solo would be what makes the solo a composition, which seems intuitively wrong. in light of this apparent impasse, begbie offers the following as a possible way to differentiate composition and improvisation: a more promising way forward is to take composition to refer to all the activity which precedes the sounding of the entire piece of music, everything which is involved in conceiving and organising the parts or elements which make up the pattern or design or the musical whole; and improvisation to mean the concurrent conception and performance of a piece of music, which is complete when the sound finishes. (2005, 183) according to the above conception, composition entails all the musical activity that takes places prior to the performance of the piece as a whole, whereas improvisation consists in a musical idea conceived and 66 what has mozart to do with coltrane? © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 performed simultaneously. in other words, the act of improvisation emphasizes the present activity of music making; that is, rather than highlighting product or result, the accent is on process and performance, as “conception and performance are interwoven to a very high degree” (begbie 2005, 184). although begbie’s stress on dynamism and present activity is no doubt on the mark, his view still presupposes an overly rigid separation between composition and improvisation. with what begbie has just said in mind, perhaps we could say the type of improvisation that emerges in the musical genre of jazz is present, semi-spontaneous, music-making activity that purposely and re-creatively utilizes prepared and hence thoroughly familiar musical ideas. however, if we accept my working definition and begbie’s description, we have problem. according to begbie’s definition of composition, the prepared patterns employed in jazz improvisation become mini-compositions. if we opt for a more fluid relationship between composition and improvisation (as benson suggests below), our problem takes care of itself. after all, the prepared jazz patterns consist largely of musical ideas taken from actual live, improvised performances. so if they count as compositions, then they are also improvised compositions based past improvisations. here we should turn to benson, whose account highlights the improvisational activity of classical composers. despite the fact that a kind of mythology, which portrays composition as principally a flash of instantaneous inspiration, coupled with the kantian idea of a creative genius tends to dominate our conception of the way in which a musical composition comes into existence, benson contends that composers across the musical spectrum actually engage in a great deal of improvisation. “composers are more accurately described as improvisers, for composition essentially involves a kind of improvisation on the already existing rules and limits in such a way that what emerges is the result of both respecting those rules and altering them” (benson 2003, 133). in the end, given the mutual interplay between composition and improvisation, perhaps it is better to think of both as manifesting themselves in all music to greater or lesser degrees along a continuum, wherein the degree of manifestation depends a host of contingencies (for example, the expertise level of the musicians present, the performance setting, the purpose of the cynthia r. nielsen 67 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 particular performance, whether or not the conductor has an aversion to improvisation etc.). having examined the calculated aspects of jazz improvisation, as well as highlighting some of the ways in which improvisation and places of indeterminacy emerge and exist in classical music, i now turn to discuss the idea that a sharp dichotomy exists between the work and its performance. in chapter four of his book, the improvisation of musical dialogue, benson discusses the ways in which a musical ergon or product emerges from musical energeia or activity, and yet this ergon “still remains within the play of musical energeia” and cannot be separated from it (2003, 125). in other words, if it is the case that the boundaries between composition and improvisation are fluid, then every performance is an interpretation, and musical traditions themselves adapt and evolve over time. from this perspective, musical works are more properly understood as dynamic rather than static, finished products. benson, stressing the interdependence between musical works and musical energeia, outlines three implications of such a view. first, the telos of music making cannot be defined simply in terms of the creation of musical works, or even primarily so. instead the work becomes a means to the end of making music, not an end in itself. second, if the work exists within the play of musical energeia, then it cannot be seen as autonomous or detached. like a living organism, it is ever in motion and constantly in need of care and infusions of new life to keep it alive. third, if performers are essentially improvisers, then authorship becomes more complex. (benson 2003, 126) here we have an inversion of the common view of a musical work as the goal or telos of musicmaking. rather, musical activity itself is the telos, and a musical work functions as a vehicle to that end. thus, the telos in view is not static and even requires on-going, creative “infusions” of musical life “to keep it alive.” such a view is exceedingly tradition-friendly, as it recognizes not only a post-history, but a pre-history embedded in every musical work. beethoven, for example, did not exist in a historical vacuum but drew upon the musical ideas of haydn and mozart, who in turn were themselves influenced by bach and other earlier composers. to use hans-georg gadamer’s term, what we have is a multi-level, continual “fusion of horizons” (2004, 306). beethoven’s 68 what has mozart to do with coltrane? © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 piano sonatas are in part the result of his engagement with earlier composers and traditions; hence, we have, so to speak, a past fusion of horizons with respect to the composition itself. to speak of a past fusion, however, detracts from the dynamic nature of musical activity. here we should emphasize that an ongoing, polyphonic fusion of horizons occurs with every musical performance. for example, when a twenty-first century russian pianist performs beethoven’s piano sonata no. 14 in c-sharp minor, she enters into the ever-unfolding lifeworld of the piece—a lifeworld that both precedes and goes beyond beethoven. a different but related re-shaping takes place with respect to the performer, who, like the musical piece, also belongs to a tradition. perhaps our russian pianist has been influenced by french impressionism and other twentieth century compositional styles. if so, these components are part of her musical lifeworld and at some level influence her interpretation of beethoven’s sonata. even so, her performance of this particular piece must be recognizable as beethoven’s piano sonata no. 14 in c-sharp minor. in addition to a past fusion, we have a present fusing of horizons which affects not only the composition but again the performer as well. so long as the alterity of the composition is respected and its identity (notwithstanding the difficulty of stating exactly what that identity is) is made manifest rather than marred or destroyed, the performer herself is changed by allowing the piece to become, as it were, a part of who she is. authorship indeed “becomes more complex” since the performer not only participates as co-author of the piece, but the piece itself and the traditions from which it came re-author and hence change the performer.4 here, it is not difficult to see parallels between musical pieces and written texts and musical performers and textual interpreters. the intelligibility and coherence of this aforementioned identity, which somehow allows for change and yet remains intact, is a legitimate concern that has provoked a great deal of discussion. in order to secure the identity of a musical work, some musicologists and philosophers of music have posited an essential division between the suprahistorical work itself and its written and aural historical embodiments. benson identifies roman ingarden as one who holds such a position.5 regardless of whether ingarden’s position might be parsed differently, the view presented articulates a plausible alternative and cynthia r. nielsen 69 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 is helpful for our present discussion; thus, i shall refer to this view as “the essential division position.” with this strict separation between the work itself and its material expressions, we are brought back to the question of the relation between the work and the score. the essential division position claims that the score preserves the work and helps to maintain its identity. yet, as cone’s insights suggest, the score cannot exhaust the work and instead merely relates aspects of the work. therefore, the score functions as a kind of “schema.” if we acknowledge both that the score in some sense maintains the identity of the work without circumscribing the work, then we are pressed to ask: what then is the “something more” that the score fails to capture? to this question, benson adds, “is there something that guarantees the identity of this surplus that goes beyond the score? moreover, what connection is there— if any—between this more and musical energeia?” (2003, 127). a person holding the essential division position might suggest that rather than creating new additions, performers over time are simply realizing the inherent potentialities possessed by the work from the beginning. thus, the work itself does not actually change over time but merely appears to change. however, as benson observes, “the problem with this view is that—practically—these possibilities seem not to come merely from within but also from without: for they arise—at least partly—by way of performance traditions, which are themselves developing” (2003, 128). to claim that all the future potentialities of a musical piece come only from within reduces the performer to a purely passive re-producer. here the other-ness of the work is retained but at the expense of the performer’s alterity. in place of this dichotomous conception wherein the relation between the work itself and its embodiments are forever estranged, benson argues for a mediating way which, on the one hand acknowledges that a work possesses latent potentialities yet, on the other hand, stresses that those potentialities are supplemented by additional possibilities that come into being over the course of time via the performances themselves and as a result of evolving musical traditions. elaborating his view, benson explains: a composer may indeed have a complex conception of the work (and so potentially a relatively complex set of “intentions”), but those intentions are supplemented by actual performances and the develop70 what has mozart to do with coltrane? © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 ment of performance traditions. thus, we could say that bach had intentions for the st. matthew passion that were complex and specific. but the [later] performance by mendelssohn did not merely bring out those possibilities (even though it did that too). rather, it also created certain possibilities—possibilities that truly did not exist before (benson 2003, 129). though benson’s via media may still leave us with important questions as to the nature and maintenance of the identity of a piece over time, it does justice to the phenomena by affirming the alterity (and humanity) of the performer and refusing to consign developments in tradition and the creative contributions of performer to mere appearances. with these things in mind, benson’s suggestion to replace the denomination “work,” which connotes a finished product, with the designation “piece” is compelling. “piece” implies both that which is “connected to a contextual whole” from which it cannot be completely severed, as well as the sense of a more fragmentary and on-going character—something “inherently incomplete, for the musical context in which it exists is in flux.” (benson 2003, 132–133) in conclusion, although my essay likely raises more questions than it answers, hopefully some of the topics we have considered—identity and difference, musical places of indeterminacy, and the various ways that music presents itself to us—have provoked us to broaden our thinking, not only about music but also about textual interpretation and authorship. it is also perhaps worth considering that my approach to the subject matter of this essay itself exhibits many of the themes i have attempted to bring to light here. for example, following benson, cone, begbie, and others—all recognized “players” within a certain tradition who submit to various givens of that tradition—i have not only identified and re-articulated their insights but also improvised on and expanded their themes. the result is both a realization of places of indeterminacy consistent with their original intentions and a bringing forth of new possibilities which, up to this point, did not exist within the original set of intentions. notes 1. i use the word “classical” in this essay in the colloquial, generic sense. i am not referring to the specific style of music that falls historically between the baroque cynthia r. nielsen 71 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 and romantic periods. 2. this idea of on-going composition exhibits striking similarities with gadamer’s hermeneutical insight that texts always exhibit an “excess of meaning” upon which tradition builds. see, for example, gadamer 2004, 296. 3. a trill consists typically in the rapid alteration between two musical notes adjacent on the musical scale; however, there is no fixed or single way of executing a trill. whether or not one has “correctly” executed a trill is largely dependent upon the context in which it is found and the musical genre in which one is performing. 4. see, for example, wright 2004, 237. 5. see the discussion of ingarden in benson 2003, 126–133. references begbie, jeremy 2005 theology, music and time. cambridge: cambridge university press. benson, bruce ellis 2003 the improvisation of musical dialogue: a phenomenology of music. cambridge: cambridge university press. cone, edward t. 2005 the pianist as critic. in the practice of performance: studies in musical interpretation, edited by john rink, 241–254. cambridge: cambridge university press. gadamer, hans-georg 2004 truth and method, 2nd ed. translated and revised by joel weinsheimer and donald g. marshall. new york: continuum. wright, kathleen 2004 on what we have in common: the universality of philosophical hermeneutics. renascence: essays on values in literature 56(4): 234–255. 06hibbs.indd © equinox publishing ltd. 2008, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expositions 2.1 (2008) 035–058] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v2i1.035 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 w.e.b. dubois and socratic questioning 1 thomas hibbs baylor university taking its cue from w.e.b. dubois’s reference to socrates in the souls of black folk, the essay investigates points of contact and contrast between dubois and socrates on the relationship of philosophy to politics and particularly on the nature of liberal education. the hope is that the comparison will contribute in some small measure to a re-assessment of these two thinkers and of the nature of education. “good sir, you are an athenian, a citizen of the greatest city with the greatest reputation for both wisdom and power; are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation, and honors as possible, while you do not care nor give thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of your soul?” (plato, apology of socrates 29e)2 in the midst of his apology, socrates engages in a critique of the corrupt customs and practices of the athenians, customs that subvert the natural hierarchy of body and soul, base and noble, vice and virtue. as socrates sees it, athenian culture embodies a systematic subversion of the true aims of human life. this of course is one of the lessons of the allegory of the cave, according to which individuals in the city are trapped, with their attention fixated on immediate appearances that, in their ignorance, they take for real things. if one were to substitute “american” for “athenian,” then these words could have been spoken by the african-american author, w.e.b. dubois, who appeals to socrates in his greatest work, the souls of black folk (dubois 1989). one of the arguments running through souls is that post-slavery, reconstruction america is increasingly falling prey to mammon, to the deification of money, at the expense of higher aims. northern capitalism risks a new kind of slavery, a new physiognomy of servitude, to borrow tocqueville’s arresting phrase, a servitude in which http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/expo.v2i1.035 36 w.e.b. dubois and socratic questioning © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 humanity is reduced to the functional status of producer and consumer. dubois’s great conflict with booker t. washington is in part a dispute over the extent to which such a social, economic and political state ought to be accommodated by african-americans.3 at least in souls, dubois focuses on what he takes to be washington’s willingness to accommodate the exclusion of blacks from higher, liberal education, the sort of education whose goal is “not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes” (1989, 58). moreover, the theme of images, concerning the nature and capacities of blacks as well as the true aim of human life, parading as objective truths pervades souls. these are the “shades of the prison-house” (2). comparisons, even of thinkers from the same period and who write in response to one another, are always difficult and risky. when the thinkers are of entirely different epochs, have quite divergent goals in mind, adopt different genres, and address distinct audiences, the risks are even greater. of course, there are many obvious differences between socrates and dubois. the latter is preoccupied with an issue that never surfaces as a distinct theme in socrates or plato, the issue of race. as dubois famously and prophetically put it, the “problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line” (1989, 29). one might be inclined to see socrates and plato, along with much of classical civilization, as favoring what dubois sees as the greatest evil of his time, slavery. yet, dubois himself invites such comparisons with numerous classical authors and figures, as he refers directly and favorably to socrates, st. francis, shakespeare and others. dubois’s souls has near masterpiece status in part because he so successfully interweaves the contemporary, american dilemma of race with many of the great debates of western civilization. dubois appeals to socrates and francis early in souls, in his first discussion and critique of booker t. washington, a critique that takes aim at washington’s willingness to endure the exclusion of black youth from higher education. accusing washington of succumbing to “triumphant commercialism” (31), dubois argues that washington’s exclusive emphasis on practical education only reinforces the prejudices of the white culture against the intellects of young blacks. it also reinforces a corrupt self-understanding in black americans. hibbs 37 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 in much of the dispute between washington and dubois, the two men simply argue past one another. so, as we shall see, dubois never argues against the importance of practical education in a trade for blacks, nor does washington deny the importance of liberal education, in its proper place. in up from slavery, washington observes that offering a literary training in greek and latin letters to those who must live in a world for which they do not have the practical skills for a trade or homemaking or even cleanliness risks rendering blacks ill-equipped to meet the demands of freedom. whatever his reservations about liberal education, he not at all interested in promoting a “triumphant commercialism.” instead, he wishes to foster a love of “labour, not alone for its financial value, but labour’s own sake and for the independence and self-reliance which the ability to do something which the world wants done brings” (washington 1996, 38). continuing his critique of washington, dubois writes that, from washington’s perspective, “the picture of a lone black boy pouring over a french grammar amid the weeds and dirt of a neglected home soon seemed to him the acme of absurdities.” to this attitude, dubois proposes the query, “one wonders what socrates and st. francis of assisi would say to this” (1989, 31). the appeal to socrates and francis is a bit jarring; it seems unlikely that these are authorities shared by those in washington’s camp; nor, given the sad state of black education, would these be authorities readily recognized by the great masses in his race; finally, among the white races, at least among the most educated, these are names known but systematically excluded from any practical impact on social or economic life in america.4 the last point—the way in which america has failed to live up to the ideals animating western civilization—is one that dubois seems intent on driving home. thus, dubois’s citations of traditional western authors is not a strategy aimed at ingratiating himself with white america; much less it is a matter of a vain display of his own erudition. instead, it functions, initially at least, as an accusation against white america for having fallen short of, and for existing in a state contradictory to, the ideals of western civilization. thus does dubois revive the socratic tension between philosophy and contemporary mores. but socrates and francis have more than a polemical function in 38 w.e.b. dubois and socratic questioning © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 dubois’s souls. they exemplify a sense of humanity that is increasingly in danger of being forgotten in modernity, by white and black alike. just as socrates reproaches the athenian citizen “because he attaches little importance to the most important things and greater importance to inferior things” (apology 30a) so too dubois contrasts the “quest of goodness, and beauty, and truth” (1989, 56) with the deification of bread in america. the “gospel of work and money… overshadows the higher aims of life” (36). sounding a good bit like socrates in his description of the deceptions of life within the cave or the city, dubois curtly states, “the price of culture is a lie” (144). in what follows we will examine a series of socratic themes in the writings of w.e.b. dubois: the paradoxical status of images, potentially enslaving and liberating, and the nature of liberal education; the appeal to nature as a basis for a critique of corrupt customs; and dubois’s response to the charge of elitism, a charge often leveled against socrates as well. such comparisons are commonly thought to be useful for the way they mutually illumine distinct authors; in this case, the comparison requires a re-thinking of common assumptions about each thinker and about the issues that connect and divide them.5 as charles taylor has noted in his discussion of multiculturalism and the expansion of the canon in university curricula, the attempt to judge what is of value in an encounter with the “strange and unfamiliar” will likely entail openness to “strange and unfamiliar” criteria of value. the task is to develop “new vocabularies of comparison” that enable us to reach “judgments through transforming our standards” (taylor 1994, 67). but of course any serious study of the so-called western canon of authors must begin with the assumption that these authors are also in crucial respects “strange and unfamiliar” to us. the current exploration, merely a beginning in an important conversation between socrates and dubois, should aid us in seeing both authors anew. the tyranny of images and the nature of liberal education dubois’s peculiar version of the alienation and ignorance of the cave is connected to the central thesis of souls, concerning the doubleness of the black soul. the world of white america “yields” the black man “no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the eyes hibbs 39 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (dubois 1989, 3).6 in plato’s cave, the puppeteers (poets and politicians) carry their constructs back and forth in front of the fire in order to cast images before the eyes of bound citizens. in souls, the images are formed within the minds and passions of black souls, inserted by the legacy of slavery and the continued practice of prejudice through a variety of legal and social customs. the images of racial inferiority instill in members of both the white and the black race the sub-human character of the black race. thus, blacks are, as socrates describes the occupants of the cave, “compelled to hold their heads unmoved through life” (plato republic 515b). america takes as an unimpeachable reality the constructed image of a slavish black race. as is the case in the republic, so too in souls, the first step in education, the first movement toward freedom from the enslavement of the cave, is to recognize an image as an image, or at least to recognize the conflict within the images. this is what dubois calls “double-consciousness” or “twoness.” dubois observes: “an american, a negro; two souls, two thoughts; two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (1989, 3). the very notion of doubleness or twoness suggests that human nature itself resists reduction to a sub-human uniformity, to a unity indicative of poverty of spirit rather than a higher integration of complex parts. the experience of internal conflict in the phenomenon of twoness is the basis of dubois’s suggestion that the true philosopher or prophet of the human condition in america is not the purportedly free and superior white but the subordinate and allegedly inferior black. the latter has a better chance of recognizing the doubleness and the deception involved in the public ideology. born within the veil, the negro is “gifted with second sight in this american world” (1989, 3). as socrates insists in a number of places, the athenians give no thought to true education, to the state of the soul, to the consideration of what dubois calls the “riddle of existence” (1989, 58). in response to the statement of the god at delphi, socrates asks, “whatever does the god mean? what is his riddle?” (apology 21b). this is precisely the language dubois uses in his eloquent description of the nature of true education. 40 w.e.b. dubois and socratic questioning © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 the riddle of existence is the college curriculum that was laid before the pharoahs, that was taught in groves by plato, that formed the trivium and quadrivium, and is to-day laid before the freedman’s sons by atlanta university. and this course of study will not change; its methods will grow more deft and effectual, its content richer by toil of scholar and sight of seer; but the true college will ever have one goal— not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes. (1989, 58) calling to mind socrates’ persistent comparison of the true educator to the experts who train individuals in crafts, dubois writes, the final product of our training must be neither a psychologist nor a brickmason, but a man. and to make men, we must have ideals, broad, pure, and inspiring ends of living, not sordid money getting, not apples of gold (61). just as for plato, so too for dubois, socratic questioning of the proper ends of human life puts the inquirer at odds with conventional assumptions, particularly with customary religious practice.7 dubois contrasts directly the south’s desperate need for an institution of higher education with its current possession of religion, which he describes as “earnest, bigoted: religion that on both sides of the veil often omits the sixth, seventh, and eighth commandments but substitutes a dozen supplementary ones” (59). contradictions in the inherited stories and practices of the culture are, for dubois just as for socrates, the starting point in a dialectic aimed at liberating the intellect to formulate the questions concerning the riddle of existence.8 it is important to see that dubois is not indifferent to pragmatic needs and concerns. the goal of education, he insists, is “not to inspire human hearts with a vision of the true, the good, and beautiful without pointing the practical way of realizing some of these dreams here and now in their own lives.” education, he argues, must balance ideals with the “greater need of specialization and technique” (1971, 301). the vast majority of black as of white americans will devote themselves to technical education, not liberal education. for all of his emphasis on the intrinsic desirability of liberal education, he does not hesitate to speak of its practical, political and social, ramifications. one of his chief arguments against washington’s willingness to limit education to the rudihibbs 41 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 ments of knowledge followed by specialized training in a trade is that it leaves out of account the question who will teach the teachers, who will teach them how to understand their own work in relation to the whole of learning. another argument concerns education as preparation for virtuous citizenship. “no secure civilization can be built in the south with the negro as an ignorant, turbulent proletariat” (1989, 73). for all his willingness to promote the practical ends of education, dubois insists that we not lose sight of the one true aim of education, the end it alone can fulfill, the formulation of questions about the highest things, the ultimate mysteries of human life. thus, he is adamantly opposed to treating education merely as a means, to an instrumental conception of the human intellect. indeed, he stands in a long tradition of defenders of liberal education. the pursuit of knowledge is proper to human beings as human beings. knowledge is intrinsically desirable; the anti-instrumental conception of knowledge and education does not mean that the knowledge is useless in the pejorative sense. indeed, dubois’s statement that education investigates the “end and aim of that life which meat nourishes” indicates that it is eminently practical. it informs how we ought to live; it is, in platonic language, an inquiry into the good. or, in the language dubois himself uses to describe st. francis’s account of education, it helps to satisfy the greater wants of the human soul, for “human service and sympathy,” for “knowledge and inspiration,” for “hope and truth and beauty” (dubois 1971, 295). when dubois describes education as a “breadth and broadening of human reason, by catholicity of taste and culture” or as the “organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization” (1989, 59) he calls to mind john henry newman’s idea of a university: we know, not by a direct and simple vision, not at a glance, but, as it were, by piecemeal and accumulation, by a mental process, by going round an object, by the comparison, the combination, the mutual correction, the continual adaptation, of many partial notions, by the employment, concentration, and joint action of many faculties and exercises of mind. such a union and concert of the intellectual powers, such an enlargement and development, such a comprehen42 w.e.b. dubois and socratic questioning © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 siveness, is necessarily a matter of training….of discipline and habit. (newman 1982, 114–115) enlargement, development, adaptation and the habituation of the intellect in the discernment of the integrated complexity of the objects of knowledge—all this is proper to the human intellect and the proper object of a truly liberal education. indeed, the examination of education in dubois’s works may well constitute the most eloquent and most probing statement on liberal education ever written by an american. dubois’s insistence that liberal education be open to members of the black race involves a claim about the universality of human nature and the irrepressible humanity of the black race. the attempt at suppression of humanity through the denial of opportunity for true education will not have its desired effect. you can, he writes, “make just laborers” but “they will not cease to think, will not cease attempting to read the riddle of the world” (1989, 73). there is a paradox here worthy of socrates. questioning the riddle of existence is an impulse, or better a natural propensity, that is at once latent within and obscured by ordinary experience and what passes for common sense. embarking on the task of philosophical questioning is, in one respect, continuous with the questions that arise within ordinary discourse about human life; yet, in another respect, it marks a sharp departure from the unreflective way of proceeding characteristic of ordinary life. ordinary language and conventional mores thus exhibit the same paradoxical structure as does the image in plato; if uncritically taken for what is real and true, they are enslaving, but if seen as pointing beyond themselves, they can be liberating. the natural orientation toward knowledge and the good needs cultivation and training for its realization. the accusing question from the apology, cited at the outset, the question socrates levels against his fellow citizens is not merely meant to be dismissive or negative. his appeal to their sense of grandeur or honor, their reputation for wisdom, and especially to their sense of shame, presupposes that they have the ability to recognize their departure from the natural order and that they are able, at least potentially, to distinguish higher from lower, noble from base. for socrates’ questions and interrogations to be anything more than ironic mockery, they must hibbs 43 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 assume that the principles of the good life are at least implicitly operative in the practices already pursued by the athenians. similarly, dubois is careful not to demonize white america. his goal is for both races to achieve a “generous acknowledgment of a common humanity.”9 many of his strongest arguments appeal to the founding principles of american democracy. his program is in “large conformity to the greater ideals of the american republic….there are today no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the declaration of independence than the american negroes” (1989, 8). but of course that embrace of the ideals of america also contains an implicit accusation, perhaps even a threat. for, if those who founded america had grounds for revolution on the basis of unjust treatment by the english government, how much more legitimate the cause of violent upheaval would the slaves have against the american government? the possibility of irrational resistance renders the attempt to reach consensus or agreement through reasoning problematic. it is an advantage of socratic questioning, as practiced in the dialogues, and the dialectic of dubois that both acknowledge the reality of volitional resistance. socrates and dubois think that the sort of education they promote will be painful for most citizens; the removing of the shackles that bind individuals and communities to irrational opinions is not pleasant and will be resisted to the point of violence against those who deliver an unwelcome message. both thinkers encountered the remarkable human capacity for what stanley cavell calls “disowning knowledge” (cavell 2003). the task is to bring these conflicts and inconsistencies into the light of the day through discourse in the hope of engendering a kind of intellectual and moral conversion. nature, convention, and socratic dialectic that sort of discourse, the turning of souls that socrates describes in the republic as the focus of education, presupposes both a distinction between nature and convention and a complex relationship between the two. these themes were, not surprisingly, often part of the critique of the practice of slavery among african-american authors. dubois would have been familiar with the dialectical relationship between nature and convention from narrative of a life of a slave by frederick 44 w.e.b. dubois and socratic questioning © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 douglass, whom dubois calls in souls the “greatest of american negro leaders” (1989, 35). as henry louis gates, jr. notes in his introduction to douglass’s book, the pervasive themes of the autobiography are: the tensions between nature and nurture, the unnaturalness of slavery, and especially its incompatibility with education (douglass 1971, xiv–xv). for frederick douglass as for his pupil in this matter, dubois, the desire for knowledge can aid in the subversion of corrupt practices. we might read dubois’s comments about education as a gloss on douglass’s autobiography. throughout his narrative of a life of a slave, douglass turns repeatedly to the issue of education, access to which is systematically denied to slaves. when douglass is moved from the eastern shore of maryland to baltimore, he encounters a woman of the “kindest heart and finest feelings,” the mistress of the house, who begins teaching him to read. but the husband abruptly terminates his education with the blunt statement: a nigger should know nothing but to obey his master—to do as he is told to do. learning would spoil the best nigger in the world…. it would forever unfit him to be a slave. he would at once become unmanageable…. as to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. it would make him discontented and unhappy. (douglass 1971, 33) douglass receives the harsh commentary as a “special revelation” concerning the “white man’s power to enslave the black man.” douglass concludes, “education and slavery were incompatible with one another” (38). as tocqueville observed in anticipation of douglass, a defining feature of slavery in the modern american south, and in striking contrast to slavery as practiced in the ancient world, is the refusal, on pain of grave penalty, to allow slaves “to be taught to read and write” (tocqueville 1969, 361). so contrary to nature is slavery, douglass holds, that to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. it is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason. he must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceases to be a man. (1971, 95) hibbs 45 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 in this case, a divided will, the anguish of seemingly insoluble conflict, is to be preferred to a simple unity that would result from the hollowing out of human desire and self-understanding. neither douglass nor dubois falls prey to the temptation to transform the white race into a demonic other, a temptation to which many whites and blacks have succumbed in their envisioning of the other race. their refusal involves an implicit affirmation of a distinctively pre-modern understanding of virtue and vice. douglass notes that the woman who had abetted his education reversed course only after being cajoled and threatened by her husband. what inference is to be drawn from this? she at first lacked the depravity indispensable to shutting me up in mental darkness. it was at least necessary for her to have some training in the exercise of irresponsible power, to make her equal to the task of treating me as though i were a brute. (1971, 37) the practice of slavery frustrates the natural telos not just of the slave but also of the master; in this, douglass implicitly affirms a teaching central to the classical ethical tradition stretching back to plato and socrates: vice harms the perpetrator, darkening his intellect, corrupting his experience of happiness, and blocking his access to the good. this thesis is central to the apology, where socrates tells his audience: “if you kill the sort of man i say i am, you will not harm me more than yourselves” (31d). socrates makes an even stronger claim toward the end of the apology, that a “good man cannot be harmed either in this life or in the next” (41d). neither douglass nor dubois is committed to the extreme socratic thesis that equates virtue with invulnerability to harm; they had too great an experience of tragedy and human deprivation to adopt that thesis. but they are committed to the weaker claim that vice harms the perpetrator, that it is in some way and to some extent its own punishment, and that the chief form the punishment may take is a kind of moral blindness that leaves the vicious trapped in their corruption. the great temptation for white america is not just its continued oppression of blacks but its resistance to seeing the fissure in its own soul, the way in which all of america has been transformed by the presence of africans. twoness is also characteristic of white souls.10 46 w.e.b. dubois and socratic questioning © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 at various junctures in his book, dubois describes the veil separating black from white america. the color line is not a neat division between the white and black worlds; especially for black america, the attempt, coerced or voluntary, to live in the white world creates a fissure in the soul, the twoness underscored in the use of the plural “souls” in the title, the souls of black folk. “such a double life, with double thoughts, double duties, and double social classes, must give rise to double words and double ideals, and tempt the mind to pretense or revolt, to hypocrisy or radicalism” (1989, 142). an incessant source of pain and of the temptation to violent destruction, directed either inward or outward, internal division is preferable to a peremptory and premature oneness achieved through either pretense or revolt, hypocrisy or radicalism. a subjugated people can take one of three potential paths: revolt and revenge, conformity, or a determined effort at self-realization (34). in comparison with acquiescent conformity, revolt appears to be actively self-affirming. certainly, dubois thinks that in some cases revolt is justified and necessary (as is palpable in frederick douglass’s own autobiography), but never should it be an end in itself. for all its instrumental utility as an aid in liberation, it can also be a trap since it fails to transcend the terms of debate established by its opponent. in opposition to these two self-defeating extremes, dubois proposes a third path, a determined effort at self-realization. dubois’s third way calls to mind alasdair macintyre’s conception of the resolution of a conflict of traditions. for macintyre, a healthy tradition is not a site of stagnant repetition, but rather of ongoing conflict and debate, of argument triggered by unresolved problems within one’s own tradition and by objections voiced by members of rival traditions. every working tradition is engaged in attempting to resolve a set of questions. in so doing, it will produce a “set of reformulations, re-evaluations, and new formulations and evaluations, designed to remedy inadequacies and overcome limitations” (macintyre 1988, 354).11 according to macintyre, the platonic dialogue inaugurates this form of inquiry as exemplary for philosophy. as we have observed, dubois strives in souls of black folk to appropriate segments of the western canon. at least one of his purposes is to resolve what he takes to be the chief contemporary conflict in the tradition, the battle over the color line. hibbs 47 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 dubois attempts to resolve a conflict of tradition not simply by exhibiting his mastery of the authoritative texts and voices of the western tradition, but also by establishing his own voice within and against that tradition, a voice that extends the tradition in unanticipated ways. if he is successful, the result would be that the tradition is, as macintyre puts it, “less vulnerable to dialectical questioning and objection” (1988, 359).12 indeed, on many counts, for example, his understanding of liberal education, dubois displays a superior understanding to that of his contemporary americans. through his engagement of classical and american texts and themes, dubois argues that contemporary america is deeply at odds with the great animating truths taught by socrates and that the west can be saved from its own current self-destructive tendencies only by learning from what macintyre calls “an alien tradition.” in this case, the alien tradition “both explains why...the crisis had to happen as it did and does not itself suffer from the same defects of incoherence or resourcelessness” (1988, 365). in contrast to those who see dubois as engaging in a regrettable act of self-assimilation, by conforming his intellect to the great white tradition of learning, dubois is arguing, against such critics as against the naïve self-understanding of white america, that much of that great tradition is at odds with contemporary assumptions about human nature and the good life. what dubois proposes is a way of overcoming these internal conflicts, a path that involves a fresh encounter of authors with whom we have become far too familiar. in so doing, he revives and continues a practice of rational inquiry initiated by socrates. elitism, alien traditions, and dubois’s apologia that alien tradition is most evident in the culminating chapter of souls, “the sorrow songs,” dubois’s commentary on “the negro folk-song— the rhythmic cry of the slave.” in an irony lost on those who accuse dubois of a parochial elitism, the culminating chapter of souls is not a meditation on western philosophers or poets, but on the tragic, spiritual artistry of the songs of the slaves, “a message naturally veiled and half articulate” (1989, 182). in this irony, there is both paradox and indictment. america’s highest longings, indeed the most noble aspi48 w.e.b. dubois and socratic questioning © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 rations of human nature itself, can be detected in an art form that “has been neglected, …has been, and is, half despised, and above all… persistently mistaken and misunderstood” (178). the paradox and the indictment, as david levering lewis notes, are woven into the entire structure of souls. the pairing throughout of negro spirituals with european verse advances the “then-unprecedented notion of creative parity and complementarity” of whites and blacks. dubois’s point is that “until his readers appreciated the message of the songs sung in bondage by black people…the words written in freedom by white people would remain hollow and counterfeit” (lewis 1993, 278). dubois is not arguing for inclusion of an alien voice merely on the basis of its having been neglected and oppressed. the sorrowful songs embody the deepest longings of the human creature: through all the sorrow of the sorrow songs there breathes a hope—a faith in the ultimate justice of things. the minor cadences of despair change often to triumph and calm confidence. sometimes it is faith in life, sometimes a faith in death, sometimes assurance of boundless justice in some fair world beyond. but whichever it is, the meaning is always clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins. is such a hope justified? do the sorrow songs sing true? (1989, 186)13 if the songs sing truly, they sing for all of us, although admittedly not in the same way. for them to do this, distances between ourselves and the singers of the songs must be acknowledged. but for the songs to communicate at all, distance must to some extent be bridged even as it is remembered. what we need is what alasdair macintyre calls translation, the appropriation of an alien discourse as other and yet as becoming one’s own. the goal is to possess a second first language. commenting on the pairing throughout the work of epigraphs from negro spirituals and from european verse, lewis writes, “the cultural symbolism of these double epigraphs” is “profoundly subversive of the cultural hierarchy of the time” (1993, 278). in this language, we find, according to dubois, a strange confirmation of the universality of human nature and of the link between the highest and the least longings of the human heart. the confirmation serves as much to unsettle as to buttress contemporary assumptions. as shamoon zamir notes, hibbs 49 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 the “historical knowledge” embodied in the spirituals “reverses the flow of knowledge and power” from any kind of elite to “the black masses” (1995, 171). what then are we to make of dubois’s insistence upon a distinction between the few and the many and his aspiration to transcending contingency through education? his notion of the black race being rescued by its talented tenth, a phrase that appears just one time in souls, has seemed offensive to many. in his essay of that title, he wrote, “was there ever a nation on god’s fair earth civilized from the bottom upward? never; it is, ever was, and ever will be from the top downward that culture filters” (1903, 45). dubois’s attention to the few resembles socrates’ approach in yet another way. socrates attracted ambitious, intelligent young men, who, if they were to be saved from the cynical quest for power, were in need of a more stringent and ennobling pedagogy than that on offer to the majority of young people. socrates’ attempt to offer such a pedagogy, which might ultimately serve the public good, puts him in opposition to conventional society and its standards of educating youth, which merely inculcates uncritical acceptance of received opinion. thus, he is accused of corrupting the youth. at one point in souls, dubois responds to a similar accusation. mediocrity and uniformity are, many think, preferable to the dangerous and potentially politically destabilizing attempt to educate for excellence. like socrates, dubois is also able to recognize something to which our sometimes dogmatic egalitarianism can blind us, namely, that certain types of souls will of necessity seek grandeur and excellence. to neglect the peculiar needs of these souls, to omit consideration of their types from education, is to invite them to seek a radically individualist, even destructive, path to greatness. how ought we to rightly order such souls in their quest for greatness? that is the educational question to which both socrates and dubois would have us return. for all his emphasis on the color line, he often treats education as dwelling in a transcendent realm that appears free of the contingencies of class, race, or gender. recall the following famous passage from souls: i sit with shakespeare and he winces not. across the color line i move arm in arm with balzac and dumas, where smiling men and welcom50 w.e.b. dubois and socratic questioning © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 ing women glide in gilded halls. from out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, i summon aristotle and aurelius and what soul i will, and they come all graciously with no scorn or condescension. so, wed with truth, i dwell above the veil. is this the life you grudge us, o knightly america? (1989, 76) one of the ironies here is that dubois is more at home with famous western authors than are contemporary educated white americans. if there is an elitism in dubois, it seems quite similar to that of socrates, who insists repeatedly that, as is true of the various crafts, such as horse breeding, only the few are truly capable of producing excellent specimens. moreover, socrates also sees education at its peak moments as transcending cultural limitations. dubois’s experience of reading beyond the veil calls to mind socrates’ suggestion that the afterlife would be quite pleasant indeed, were it to afford us the opportunity of questioning the great heroes and artists who have preceded us. in both socrates and dubois, alignment with cultural heroes and great authors is a way of driving a wedge between these authorities and the comfortable, self-serving assumptions of contemporary society. these authors cannot be held captive by the dominant culture of the time. this is a point little noticed in the contemporary debates between defenders of the canon and advocates of multiculturalism—socrates and st. francis can be just as alien to contemporary readers as are douglass and dubois.14 thus education and critique themselves involve at least a limited transcendence of antecedent conditions. the overcoming of parochial oppositions based on race is part both of dubois’s political project and of any serious project of liberal education. dubois, it must be admitted, does not supply or share much interest in an account of knowledge or metaphysics to undergird a complex hierarchy of images and exemplars. he does, however, have a conception of the range, suppleness, complexity, and mystery of the human person, in light of which he criticizes various sorts of reductionism. it is precisely in the sorrow songs, sung by the most alienated portion of humanity in america, that dubois detects the promise that “sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skin” (1989, 186). hibbs 51 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 instead of an unbridgeable gap between few and many, low and high, we should rather see in dubois a socratic argument for the mysterious interconnection between the lowest and the highest. for dubois, socrates is a paradoxical and instructive figure. he is at once a cultural icon and philosophical authority and someone whose life and teachings have been persistently marginalized in america. “attached to the city as a kind of gadfly” (apology 30e), socrates opposes the city’s insouciant injustice, its hollow materialism, and its unreflective complacency; although scorned by his own community, he pricks the conscience of fellow citizens by his very presence. dubois himself adopts a similar stance in relation to modern america. of course, there are tensions in plato’s depiction of socrates, tensions between his divine calling, his role as gadfly, which is a sort of social vocation, and his vocation as a philosopher whose telos is to transcend the cave and its murky, oppressive discourse to arrive at a transcendent vision of the good. the philosopher, as we learn in the republic, must be compelled or forced to return to the cave, to take on his role in the city (519b–521b). yet, the apology has a different accent, on socrates’ selfunderstanding as involving an ineradicable connection to athens.15 in the republic itself, for example, in the very sequence in which we learn that the philosopher will only return to the city if compelled, the order of discussion in the dialogue suggests something else. plato gives us first the divided line (510d–511e) and then the cave (514a– 518b); the abstract followed by the concrete. does this suggest that full understanding will necessitate that the ascent be followed by a descent, that the path beyond the cave is at least in part motivated by a desire to discriminate better the things and activities within the cave? this is certainly true for dubois, whose ascent beyond the veil is but one moment within a more comprehensive social and political calling. for all their attention to the cultivation of the few, dubois and socrates share a decidedly anti-elitist trait: their refusal to adopt exclusively technical and professional language or methods of inquiry. socrates begins the apology by asking the forbearance of his hearers for his inability to speak the technical language of the courts. he will speak as he has always spoken, in a popular language befitting the marketplace, just as he had earlier given up the pursuit of technical, scientific inquir52 w.e.b. dubois and socratic questioning © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 ies in favor of the investigation of human things (17a–18a). similarly, dubois admonishes us that it is easy to lose ourselves in details in endeavoring to grasp and comprehend the real condition of a mass of human beings. we often forget that each unit in the mass is a throbbing human soul. ignorant it may be, and poverty stricken, black and curious in limb and ways and thought: and yet it loves and hates, it toils and tires, it laughs and weeps its bitter tears, and looks in vague and awful longing at the grim horizons of human life,—all this, even as you and i. (1989, 100) there is some similarity here to socrates’ practice of philosophical discourse in the midst of the daily life of the citizens of athens. socrates’ adoption of ordinary language and his willingness to engage his interlocutors on their own terms contains an implicit critique of those who, in adopting a theoretical stance toward ordinary agents, treat the motivations of those they study differently from the way they conceive of themselves and their intentions. under socratic questioning, ordinary language and conventional practice can be shown to contain the seeds of philosophical exploration. even more than socrates, who is given less credit than he should for appreciating poetry and myth, dubois exhibits the breadth of such sources. in its admixture of prose and poetry, as in many other ways, the souls of black folk is a book that resists classification in terms of traditional genres. it contains history, autobiography, sociology, philosophy, poetry, and lamentation. it is unified by a singular voice pursuing a unified goal. purity of heart, as kierkegaard put it, is to will one thing. dubois wills the recognition of the full humanity of the black race, a recognition that cannot occur without mutual recognition of a common humanity across the color line. the book is an eloquent and cogent case for the full humanity of the black race, exemplified not just in the capacious erudition of its author, who here represents his race, but also in that author’s ability to capture the full humanity of that portion of the black race that has been most reviled and mockingly dismissed as less than human. yet, dubois is after more than mere egalitarianism; his writings evince a range of human capacities and callings and give testimony to the mysterious links between the lowest and the highest. philosophy hibbs 53 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 and liberal education have the same end in view: the pondering of the riddle of human existence. philosophy is not one isolated discourse among many but an aspiration that permeates all human discourse. as much as it may desire knowledge of the highest things and of the connections between all things, it remains a discourse at the margins of the dominant culture, both in athens and in america, a discourse most often forgotten or oppressed. in the face of that forgetfulness, both socrates and dubois urge upon their contemporaries the task of remembering what it is they at some level already know. that task, the philosophical task, is the vocation exemplified and defended in both plato’s apology and dubois’s souls. and this is perhaps the final way in which we can detect echoes of socrates in the writings of w.e.b. dubois: his finest book is perhaps best understood as an apologia. notes 1. this essay was originally read as part of a faculty development workshop (“socratic questions”) at villanova university, a workshop funded jointly by the national endowment for the humanities and the villanova institute for teaching and learning. the final version profited enormously from extensive discussion with the villanova faculty involved in the workshop, as well as from a conversation with members of the philosophy department at depauw university. also helpful have been the comments of my colleague at baylor, david corey, and my graduate student assistant, julianne romanello. 2. references to plato are to dialogue and stephanus page number; see the reference list for the editions used in this article. 3. for a recent, revisionist examination of the new deal that sees washington as a brave voice for self-help and free markets, see shales 2007. 4. although we will not focus on st. francis in this essay, his influence on dubois is palpable, not just in souls, but even more so in the text of a commencement address he delivered at a public school in washington, d.c. in 1907, not long after a devastating earthquake leveled san francisco (dubois 1971). dubois uses that event as an occasion for considering st. francis as a model for civilization. why, dubois asks, should we ponder the life of a medieval saint? why go so far back in time to understand where we are today? by fixing in our memories the life of francis, we will come to appreciate a certain “attitude toward wealth and distinction and the need and place of human training to emphasize this attitude.” what was francis’s attitude? francis understood that there were material and bodily needs and that satisfying these 54 w.e.b. dubois and socratic questioning © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 needs was a good. but he was also convinced that there were “greater wants,” for “human service and sympathy,” for “knowledge and inspiration,” for “hope and truth and beauty.” and francis also understood the tension between the great and the greater wants. to satisfy spiritual starvation requires some degree of renunciation of material goods. education certainly involves the cultivation of a sense of relative importance of these different wants and goods. but education is principally about what francis’s life was about at its core: a quest to “read life’s riddle and tell the world its true unraveling.” francis faced the same human condition we face, and he posed the questions each of us must ask: “what am i? what is this world about me? and the word and i—how shall we work and laugh together?” 5. the comparison of the founder of western philosophy and an african-american author may help put in question certain tired assumptions in the debate between those amy gutman identifies, somewhat crudely, as essentialists and deconstructions (gutmann 1994, 16–19). in making the case for expanding the canon to include african-american authors, gutmann asks, “is aristotle’s understanding of slavery more enlightening than frederick douglass’s? is aquinas’s argument about civil disobedience more defensible than martin luther king’s…?” (15). 6. as david levering lewis notes, an important source for twoness and internal division in dubois is hegel, particularly his famous treatment of master and slave. see lewis 1993, 139–140. 7. on this, see particularly plato, euthydemus, 278e–282b. i am grateful to david corey for this reference. 8. a very different sort of american appropriation of socrates can be seen in the life and writings of benjamin franklin, who read plutarch and xenophon and practiced what he called “my socratic method,” that of the “humble inquirer and doubter” (1982, 16). of course, franklin’s conception of the virtues is entirely instrumental and he exhibits no abiding interest in the great questions or in liberal education as existing in a kind of paradoxical tension with conventional life and ordinary language. his diffidence towards religion and his circumspect public expression of his own views are the foci of jerry weinberger’s benjamin franklin unmasked (2005), a book that offers a straussian interpretation of franklin as an american socrates. for a comparison of franklin’s autobiography with washington’s up from slavery, see sidonis smith 1974, 30–44. smith notes that for all the ways in which washington uses franklin’s story as a model, his rhetoric is void of franklin’s irony. 9. dubois’s generous appeal to generosity would not last. not many years after he penned the souls of black folk, he wrote an angry, denunciatory tract called “the souls of white folk” (dubois 1990, 180–184). in that piece, he accused hibbs 55 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 the white race of asserting and pursuing a colonial project of claiming the entire earth forever. white “colonial aggrandizement,” as evidence for which he cites the first word war, is not an accidental feature of the modern, white west but its very essence. the “using of men for the benefit of a master” is not new, but the “imperial width—the heaven-defying audacity” with which it is now pursued is indeed a novelty. the “promethean” project of white domination is, for dubois, a peculiar invention and vice of the modern world, unknown in antiquity and the middle ages. this leaves open to the question, to which dubois, so far as i can discern, never returns, namely, whether premodern western sources and practices might provide a stance from which to appraise the corruption of modern thought and practice. 10. dubois’s belief, evident in his essay “the souls of white folk,” that whiteness had become a policy of elimination of the rights of any colored people, involves a re-appraisal of this claim or at least a re-appraisal of whether the white race can be engaged rationally. 11. compare taylor’s discussion, in gadamer’s language, of a fusion of horizons (taylor 1994, 67). 12. there is at least one common influence here: hegel. 13. as julianne romanello pointed out to me, a further comparison may be fruitful between dubois’s sorrow songs and socrates’ decision to “make music” in the phaedo. in how many ways would the received views of socrates and plato be altered if we were attentive to what nietzsche calls the socrates who practices music? 14. for an unusual example of the power of canonical literary texts to provide a space for the imaginative exploration of human life in the face of totalitarianism, see azar nafisi’s reading lolita in tehran (2003). 15. on this, see corey 2005. for a reading of plato as insisting upon the primacy of ordinary language and its latent conception of the good, see the chapters on plato in rosen 2002. i set aside for now the question of plato’s final views of socrates, even of whether all the dialogues give us a consistent picture of socrates. references cavell, stanley 2003 disowning knowledge in seven plays of shakespeare. cambridge: cambridge university press. 56 w.e.b. dubois and socratic questioning © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 corey, david 2005 socratic citizenship: delphic oracle and divine sign. the review of politics 67: 201–228. douglass, frederick 1971 narrative of the life of frederick douglass, an american slave. introduction by henry louis gates, jr. new york: dell publishing. dubois, w.e.b. 1903 the talented tenth. in the negro problem: a series of articles by representative american negroes of today, 33–75. new york: james pott and co. 1971 st. francis of assisi. in a w.e.b. dubois reader, ed. andrew paschal, 290–302. new york: macmillan publishing. 1989 the souls of black folk. introduction by henry louis gates, jr. new york: bantam classic. 1990 the souls of white folk. in afro-american writing, ed. richard a. long and eugenia w. collier, 180–184. university park: pennsylvania state university press. franklin, benjamin 1982 the autobiography and other writings. ed. peter shaw. new york: bantam books. gutmann, amy 1994 introduction. in multiculturalism: examining the politics of recognition, ed. amy gutmann, 3–24. princeton, nj: princeton university press. lewis, david levering 1993 w.e.b. dubois 1868–1919: biography of a race. new york: henry holt and co. macintyre, alasdair 1988 whose justice? which rationality? notre dame, in: university of notre dame press. nafisi, azar 2003 reading lolita in tehran. new york: random house. hibbs 57 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 newman, john henry 1982 the idea of a university. ed. martin j. svaglic. notre dame, in: university of notre dame press. plato 1961a republic. tr. paul shorey. in plato: collected dialogues, ed. edith hamilton and huntington cairns, 575–844. princeton, nj: princeton university press. 1961b euthydemus. tr. w. h. d. rouse. in plato: collected dialogues, ed. edith hamilton and huntington cairns, 385–420. princeton, nj: princeton university press. 1981 apology of socrates. in five dialogues: euthyphro, apology, crito, meno, phaedo, tr. g.m.a. grube, 23–44. indianapolis, in: hackett publishing. rosen, stanley 2002 the question of being: a reversal of heidegger. south bend, in: st. augustine’s press. shales, amity 2007 the forgotten man: a new history of the great depression. new york: harper collins. smith, sidonis 1974 where i’m bound: patterns of slavery and freedom in black american autobiography. westport, ct: greenwood. taylor, charles 1994 the politics of recognition. in multiculturalism: examining the politics of recognition, ed. amy gutmann, 25–74. princeton, nj: princeton university press. tocqueville, alexis de 1969 democracy in america. tr. george lawrence. new york: doubleday. washington, booker t. 1996 up from slavery. ed. william l. andrews. new york: w.w. norton. 58 w.e.b. dubois and socratic questioning © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 weinberger, jerry 2005 benjamin franklin unmasked: on the unity of his moral, religious, and political thought. lawrence: university of kansas press. zamir, shamoon 1995 dark voices: w.e.b. dubois and american thought, 1888–1903. chicago, il: university of chicago press. © equinox publishing ltd. 2009, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expo. 3.2 (2009) 185–195] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v3i2.185 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 academic roundtable paul, faustus, and augustine’s evolution toward anti-antisemitism jonathan p. yates villanova university most new testament scholars, historians of late antiquity, and historical theologians know the work of paula fredriksen. for more than thirty years, by weaving together the (often) much too disparate and disconnected world of biblical studies on the one hand and the scholarly world of late antiquity on the other, she has published some of the english-speaking academy’s finest work on early christians’—with special emphasis on paul’s and jesus’—relationship to judaism, on augustine, and, most particularly, on augustine’s reading and understanding of paul. notwithstanding her well-deserved plaudits for her two most recent books jesus of nazareth, king of the jews and from jesus to christ, it seems safe to say that with the appropriately revisionist augustine and the jews she has managed to place a clear and much needed milestone on the road that is the study of judaism and christianity in the late antique period. this book, which is as readable as it is learned, is certain to change both popular and scholarly conceptions of both the history and the evolution of anti-semitism in the christian west. briefly put, fredriksen’s thesis is that, despite the sweepingly negative way in which most history textbooks, to say nothing whatsoever about prevailing popular assumptions, treat christian-jewish relations— especially following the legalization and eventual mainstreaming of christianity in western society by the end of the fourth-century—we misunderstand both augustine and the complex history of these relations if we fail to recognize that the bishop of hippo was far from being anti-semitic tout court. on the contrary, while fredriksen does make it clear both that augustine was no pluralist and that augustine’s 186 academic roundtable © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 employment of certain features of late antique rhetoric were often misconstrued by later readers, she is at pains to show how augustine, for a whole host of ideological and contextual reasons, was both “projewish” and deeply respectful of the jews’ history, their traditions, and what he understood to be their present and future roles in god’s salvific plan for humanity. her explanation of the phenomenon is as eloquent as it is accurate. page 98 sums up both her position—in its broadest form—and the presuppositions she wishes to help counter: we are unprepared to look at the evidence [in favor of close and harmonious interaction between jews and non-jews] positively because, first of all, good relations are not what we expect to see. we approach antiquity through the cultural memory of a millennium of violent christian anti-jewish hostility, from the massacres of the crusades to the death camps of the last century. our retrospect can prompt us to perceive jews as segregated, perhaps even self-segregated outsiders in their ancient societies, and perhaps to presuppose that the traditions of anti-judaism so characteristic of late roman christian rhetoric translated, as it did in the later medieval and modern periods, into active and generalized anti-semitism. with respect to augustine’s role within this much broader tradition, fredriksen’s argument, which is most clearly expressed in her “part three,” proceeds in the following four steps. first (cf. pp. 227 and 261), she explains how any reader who fails to give the proper weight to late antique rhetorical conventions cannot but misunderstand much that is said about jews and judaism by late antique christians. she notes that, for the writers of what became the new testament as well as more than a few of the most important christian voices of the second and third centuries, the labeling of various groups as “jews … [is] first of all a rhetorical strategy. they are conjured in order to assist their authors in positioning themselves advantageously within the agon of intra-christian theological dispute….” her second step (cf. p. 235), with which she turns exclusively to the thought of augustine, is to show how the late 390’s marked a key turn for the bishop of hippo with respect to his thinking about the role the nation of israel plays in god’s all-important program of paul, faustus, and augustine’s evolution toward anti-anti-semitism 187 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 heilsgeschichte. according to fredriksen, “impelled by all his hard thinking in the 390’s—on the figure and the theology of the apostle paul, on tyconius and his views of the positive correspondence of law and gospel, on divine justice and human freedom, on understanding the bible ad litteram as well as secundam spiritum—augustine had begun to think about god, time, and scripture in new ways. and these new ideas, in turn, spurred him to rethink received ideas about christianity’s relationship with judaism, and about judaism itself, both past and present.” the third step in fredriksen’s argument is even more specific and even more context dependent. in a word, she contends that augustine was driven to new thinking as well as to new conclusions about both the jews and judaism as he divorced himself from his past involvement with manichaeism. in fredriksen’s reconstruction, the pivotal moment came ca. 399 when augustine responded in writing to the theological views of the manichaean leader faustus (cf. pp. 240, 350 and 365). this response is augustine’s longest anti-manichaean work and was intended, at least in part, as a reply to a work of faustus known as the capitula. the capitula were apparently written a few years prior to this; that they survive even in part is due to the fact that augustine quoted from them in his against faustus. fredriksen interestingly points out that faustus’s impact on augustine—at least with respect to the latter’s thinking about the jews and their role in god’s plan— was directly proportional to faustus’s own mastery of the by then conventional north african adversus iudaeos tradition that was prevalent within many north african christian communities. she writes that, “[t]hanks to faustus’s ingenuity, these familiar, biblically based critiques ricocheted off their original rhetorical targets back onto the church that had launched them.… [a]nd it was augustine’s defensive confrontation with faustus and, via faustus, with traditional catholic anti-judaism, that combined with the new directions in [augustine’s] own thought to propel the vigorous originality of his lengthy riposte, against faustus.” in other words, because augustine knew that he had to distance himself from faustus, it followed that he had to distance himself from many of the positions that faustus claimed were integral to faustus’s theological vision—even if some of those positions had 188 academic roundtable © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 their roots in the non-manichaean christian tradition. the fourth and climactic step in this argument is taken most decisively on pages 288 and 289. here, fredriksen observes that augustine—in terms that were quite antithetical to those used by many of his christian predecessors and contemporaries—asserted that, when viewed from god’s perspective, the jews who remained jews after the resurrection of jesus of nazareth and the subsequent proclamation of him as god’s long awaited messiah were actually no worse off than were those who had never heard the christian gospel. indeed, like all non-believers, any and every jew could establish a salvific relationship with god if she or he would believe and confess christ’s claims about himself and, on the basis of that faith, begin to live the life of a true disciple. after quoting a longish section of against faustus 22.78, a passage that, according to fredriksen, “provides the larger theological context for augustine’s…defense of judaism…and for his…defense of the jewish praxis of judaism,” she goes on to observe that, for augustine, “no other nation was like israel. only israel had received god’s revelation. only israel had worshipped god alone, utterly without images. only israel had safeguarded, both in word and deed, those divine mysteries that had pointed ahead to the incarnation and resurrection of god’s son, and that pointed ahead still to his redemption of humanity. by crucifying christ, israel had helped to bring salvation to the nations.” in a word, augustine’s new view was that “israel, all unknowing, was the servant of the church.… israel, secundum carnem witnessed to god’s redemptive acts in history.” in much of the explanation of this fourth step, any reader familiar with the new testament will recognize much that has been borrowed “chapter and verse” from paul—and especially from his letter to the romans. fredriksen acknowledges this throughout this section, often referencing romans 9 and 11. however, conspicuous by its absence is any reference to romans 1–3, the chapters that serve to set up paul’s argument about the significance for humanity of christ’s advent, ministry, death, and resurrection. paul’s ineluctable logic as found in rom 1–3, and especially in its crescendo (cf. 3:21–31), remains difficult to appreciate in full even after two millennia: “[i]s god the god of jews only? is he not the god of gentiles also? yes, of gentiles also, since inpaul, faustus, and augustine’s evolution toward anti-anti-semitism 189 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 deed god who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith is one” (3:29–30, nasb). despite its difficulty, it seems certain that one of the conclusions paul wanted to compel here is that, while jews are no worse off than christians, they are no better either. again, as fredriksen points out, augustine follows paul closely. the bishop of hippo gives the jews much credit for their collective “chosenness” and for their sporadic and occasional obedience, before noting that they are ultimately in the same boat as everyone else. indeed, at the very end of this chapter, fredriksen summarizes a sentiment of augustine’s that makes the link between paul and augustine abundantly clear: “as regards salvation, jews were no better and no worse off than was the rest of humanity’s massa damnata. jews too were trapped in the penal condition of ignorance and difficulty that marked all human experience after the fall. jews too languished sub lege, not wanting to sin but not able, of their own will, not to sin. whether god chose to leave them there or to bring some from among them sub gratia, to himself, he would do so, for them as for anyone, for inscrutable reasons, but justly.” a major question that arises from this final “step” in augustine’s thinking is: if this new position is only a slightly modified version of what had been argued by paul in romans, why is it that it took christians in general, latin-speaking christians in particular, and augustine most particularly of all, so long to “connect these dots”? in other words, is not this the same as arguing that augustine’s revolutionary and thoroughly minority position on the jews is really a direct result of a close and careful reading and clear understanding and acceptance of (much of ) paul’s argumentation as found in romans? if so, then it follows that fredriksen’s book should have explicitly attempted a plausible explanation of how paul’s direct and overt claim was overlooked by multiple generations of highly-educated and rhetorically-trained latin christians. it is true that the fourth-century “rediscovery” of paul in several quarters of the christian world has long occupied scholars, but, at least to my knowledge, it is also true that this particular aspect, namely, the degree to which this “rediscovery” spawned a newfound respect for the jews and their place in god’s historic and salvific plan for humanity in the writings of those “rediscoverers,” has not been 190 academic roundtable © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 directly addressed, much less adequately documented. how, to mention just one of many interesting questions, can we account for augustine’s new take on the jews in the midst of a rediscovery of paul that apparently did little or nothing to change the attitudes of others toward the jews? how could it be that augustine, like so many others, went back to paul but emerged with not only a deeper appreciation of pauline theology, but, unlike so many others, also a deeper, if less than perfectly pauline, sense that the adversus iudaeos tradition had gotten it all so wrong? fredriksen’s work also exhibits—at least passim—a few signs of inconsistency. while it nowhere leaves the reader with the impression that she or he cannot trust what the text is imparting, one is left with the vague and indefinite sense that the book’s latter chapters rest on a foundation that is less firm than that of the initial chapters. two specific aspects of this reduced rigor of the second half are (1) the propensity toward overstatement or oversimplification with regard to the conclusions of biblical and historical scholarship and (2) the frequency with which chronological claims with respect to certain works of augustine are accepted and included but not supported. in other words, the second half of the book would have been improved by the inclusion of details, argumentation, and/or footnotes that would help convince both the wary reader and the reader unfamiliar with the state of scholarship on augustine that this particular reconstruction is as reliable as it seems to be. an example of fredriksen’s propensity to oversimplify issues of biblical scholarship can be found in her not infrequent references to the attitudes of early christians toward the jewish sacrificial system generally and the role that this system assigned to blood in particular. on page 73, and in support of the claim that “the fourth-century church” and “fourth-century imperial christianity” had continued earlier theological traditions that emulated both the “high god” and the “divine son” by “utterly [renouncing] jews and judaism,” fredriksen writes: “in this ecclesiastical understanding, jesus…, moses…, and all of the prophets in the period before the incarnation…had denounced the temple and its blood sacrifices, had condemned fleshly circumcision, had criticized the jewish observance of the sabbath, and had censured paul, faustus, and augustine’s evolution toward anti-anti-semitism 191 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 jewish practices generally. so too had paul, and so too had the other apostles of the first generation.” comments on pages 249 and 250 elaborate this theme with respect to augustine. in fredriksen’s reconstruction, the catholic augustine was not slow to offer an answer to the questions of “why blood sacrifices in particular? indeed, why blood sacrifices at all?” (p. 249; emphasis in original) then, on page 250, she notes that augustine’s answer was simultaneously historical and typological. “all the old testament, but particularly the laws regarding offerings, [augustine] asserts, are typological references to christ’s redemptive death. ‘these [jewish] sacrifices typified what we now rejoice in, for we can be purified only by blood, and we can be reconciled with god only by blood’ (against faustus 18.6).” it seems that this tension between the views of fourth-century christians who (a) rejected the jews’ blood sacrifices altogether and (b) claimed that the first generation of christians had set this precedent for them, and augustine’s new conviction that the jews’ blood sacrifices, while real and worthy of respect in their own day, were no longer necessary since their true typological significance had finally become clear, is little more than the debate about the authority and the canonicity of the epistle to the hebrews. it is true that in the first half of the book (cf. p.159) fredriksen includes references to hebrews 8:5 and 9:11–28 and the letter’s profound appreciation for “typological allegories,” but it is also true that this one paragraph is the only place in which her text explicitly references hebrews. of the debate and discussion that took place in the fourth-century over the book’s value—to say nothing whatsoever of the debates about its authorship—and, hence, its authority, fredriksen says nothing. particularly conspicuous is the absence from her book’s second half of any references to chapters 9–13 and to the insistence those chapters repeatedly make that it was in fact blood that had made god’s program of reconciliation possible. an example of included but unsupported chronological claims is the book’s treatment of the evolution of augustine’s exegesis of psalm 59:12. in augustine’s version of the psalter as provided by fredriksen this verse reads: “slay them not, lest they forget your law; scatter them by your might.” psalm 59 is discussed in more than twenty locations in this book; indeed, it is discussed with greater frequency than is any 192 academic roundtable © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 other biblical passage (cf. the index pp. 471–476). fredriksen claims that a close study of the appearances of verse twelve in augustine’s works will help us document the evolution of his thought regarding the verse’s meaning and application. she also claims that this knowledge about the changes in the verse’s interpretation will, by extension, provide us with helpful evidence regarding exactly where and when augustine’s thinking about the jews and judaism changed. in this particular case, one of the primary shifts in augustine’s exegesis appears to be rooted in whether or not a given text couples psalm 59—and especially 59:12—with genesis 4—and especially the “mark” that the lord put on cain in order to protect him (cf. gen. 4:15). while, in general, such assumptions are logical enough and while, in general, such assumptions can provide us with more or less reliable results, reconstructions of this sort must be carefully conducted and, indeed, must carefully and accurately qualify any conclusions that they produce. in this regard, fredriksen’s reconstruction suffers on at least two levels. first, it suffers from loose and imprecise prose. consider the following lines from page 347, just five pages prior to the book’s “epilogue”: “cain drops out when augustine quotes psalm 59:12 only in his two later, undated sermons; and i think that this is so because augustine delivered them only after he had conceived and become committed to his vision in city of god (italics added).” (see also page 349 where these same two sermons are again labeled as “late” and, without explanation, as “within augustine’s own lifetime, relatively unimportant….”) upon reading these claims, the question that springs immediately to mind is: how exactly can a work be both “later” and “undated”? surely the reader deserves some further explanation at this point. second, her reconstruction suffers from faulty or, at least, incomplete reasoning. even if one acknowledges that fredriksen has here qualified her conclusion with the words “i think,” does not this sentence, at least as it is written, draw a thoroughly unwarranted, if not also illogical, conclusion? does not fredriksen seem to be claiming that these two sermons must be later because, if they are later, then they fit the reconstruction she has already made of augustine’s exegesis of psalm 59:12? the vague, if not muddled, chronological reconstruction of augustine’s thought as presented by fredriksen is continued when one paul, faustus, and augustine’s evolution toward anti-anti-semitism 193 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 investigates her claims with respect to the way particular books of city of god used psalm 59. fredriksen rightly notes that city of god was written over the course of thirteen or fourteen years, i.e., in fits and starts between 413 and 426. however, elsewhere she notes that two sermons on psalm 59, which were penned at some vague point between the years 410 and 415 as part of augustine’s monumental enarrationes in psalmos project, linked genesis 4:15 and psalm 59 together just as augustine had been doing for the previous ten or fifteen years. from here, she goes on to discuss letter 121 and letter 149. both of these letters revolve around the meaning of psalm 59 and/or psalm 59:12. however, according to fredriksen, these two missives can only be dated to between “410–415?” and “414–420?” respectively. the whole discussion leaves the reader a bit unsure about the exact nature of fredriksen’s chronological claim(s) and about how the various pieces fit together. then, from this already unsure standpoint and without a clearer qualification than “[a]t some point after this exchange with paulinus,” the man who wrote letter 121 and who received letter 149, fredriksen goes on to discuss a small handful of works that are “undated” but that are presumably late because of something that they lack: they nowhere mention cain or genesis 4. “cain, augustine’s premier biblical figure for the jews, is suddenly and strangely absent” (cf. p.331). this crucial difference, according to fredriksen, is all because of a change that augustine’s thinking underwent as he composed the latter books of city of god (cf. the quote from p.347 supra). interestingly, with a bit more care, fredriksen’s reconstruction can be shown to be more specific than her discussion ever lets on. elsewhere, she claims that this key exegetical turn took place sometime between the composition of book xv, which she does not venture to date, and book xviii, which she very tentatively, but without argumentation, places “sometime around 425?” (cf. p.339). fredriksen says nothing else about the chronology of the individual books, a chronology that, it would seem, holds within it much that might be of value for undergirding her claims about this crucial component of her overall thesis. in the end, fredriksen has (most likely) convinced the reader that something important shifted in augustine’s exegetical thinking at some point between ca.410 and ca. 427. however, if the reader re194 academic roundtable © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 lies only on fredriksen’s text and is unwilling (or unable) to do some extra reconstructive work on her or his own, she or he would not know anything more precise about this important shift. (in fact, assuming the accuracy of fredriksen’s textual data, a little extra chronological work reveals that this shift in augustine’s thinking probably occurred between 420 and 425.) less central, but still not insignificant, is the claim found on page 349 with respect to augustine’s relationship to proverbs 8:35, a verse that in the septuagint or lxx version known to augustine contains the provocative claim that “[t]he will is prepared by the lord.” fredriksen makes mention of this verse, which, incidentally, appears only here in her book and which is not labeled either here or in the volume’s index as hailing from the lxx, in support of the sweeping (not to mention not easily proven) claim that augustine’s “… identifying of proof texts … often came considerably after he conceived and developed the ideas that they served to sum up.” the support for this claim takes the form of a brief summary of what many scholars acknowledge as a key turn in augustine’s thinking about grace, the human will, and god’s salvific activity that occurred in the late 390’s as augustine wrote his to simplicianus. this is followed by the comment that “only later, after 411, did [augustine] discover proverbs 8:35. ‘the will is prepared by the lord.’ he used it repeatedly thereafter” (cf. p. 349). while the available scholarship does back up fredriksen’s claim about the date of the first appearance of this verse in augustine’s extant oeuvre, none of that scholarship—to say nothing of that scholarship’s nuances—is discussed or made available to the reader. in fact, there are at least two easily accessible publications that deal with the role this verse played in augustine’s theology: an article published by sage in 1964 and a monograph-length study published by la bonnardière in 1975. neither finds its way into fredriksen’s endnotes to this section, just as both are absent from the book’s bibliography. also noteworthy is the fact that sage’s article hypothesizes that it was ambrose, the bishop of milan who died in 397 and who played a crucial role in augustine’s return to catholic christianity, who, “semble-t-il, … a fixé l’attention de saint augustin sur prov. 8:35.” interestingly, if sage is correct, his hypothesis would seem to paul, faustus, and augustine’s evolution toward anti-anti-semitism 195 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 undermine fredriksen’s claim that, for augustine, the ideas often came first and the prooftexts second. however, if sage is incorrect, those inclined to accept fredriksen’s aforementioned claim would be reassured were they offered a plausible explanation as to why sage’s hypothesis is wrong. either way, this omission, which cannot be chalked up to having overlooked either very recent or very obscure secondary studies, demonstrates the tendency of the book’s second half to move forward with what sometimes amounts to less than fully convincing argumentation or comprehensive support. once all the claims, arguments, and data have been sifted, the reader of this book will doubtless be left with questions—some general and many specific. and this same reader may well be left wondering if she or he has been presented with all of the facts and details that are necessary to support every claim or to comprehend every point of argumentation fully. however, it is highly likely that the attentive reader will come away convinced of (at least) two things: augustine of hippo did not substantially contribute to the christian west’s frequently sad and sometimes thoroughly slanderous conduct vis-à-vis judaism, nor did augustine of hippo encourage hostility toward jews, either individually or collectively, as enemies of christ or of christ’s church. and, of course, those are the convictions that professor fredriksen’s book has attempted to cultivate among its readers from the very beginning. references labonnardiére, a-m. 1975 le livre du proberbes. biblia augustiniana (a.t.) 7. paris: études augustiniennes. sage, a. 1964 “praeparatur voluntas a deo.” revue des études augustiniennes x.1, 1–20. [expositions 4.1&2 (2010) 34-37] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 is yeshiva relevant? marc bousquet department of english santa clara university yeshiva might easily never have happened. with the foolish vote of a single justice, swayed by the judicial activism of a former law-school administrator, an absurd law came into being. today he’s known for a more recent liberal voting record, but it was his moderate conservatism that led gerald ford to appoint john paul stevens a justice of the supreme court in 1975. it seems fitting that stevens featured the theme of “learning on the job” in appearances leading up to his retirement in 2010. during the first few years of his appointment, stevens voted to reinstate the death penalty, to restrict first amendment rights, and to oppose affirmative action in university admissions. in later decisions, however, he joined in decisions opposing or chipping away at all of these positions. the same can be said for his service as the fifth vote in the yeshiva decision, which packed a last-ditch legal fiction by an intransigent, lawbreaking employer into a poison pill still spreading through u. s. labor law. since denying yeshiva’s tenured faculty bargaining rights explicitly delineated for “professional employees” by the national labor relations act (nlra) with the fiction that participating in shared governance made them essentially “managerial” (thus excluded from nlra protections), the majority opinion swiftly metastasized beyond the academy into hundreds of other workplaces, especially health care, with hundreds of thousands of nurses with modest “supervisory” duties losing long-established bargaining rights. (not incidentally, the majority opinion also crushed several nascent efforts to organize physicians’ unions in the managed-care industry.) by 2001, justice stevens had flip-flopped on the managerial exclusion and composed a dissent in the key health-care case aiming – and failing – to contain the spreading influence of his earlier assent in yeshiva. a one-time graduate student in english, stevens’s own vote, together with the views of his colleagues in the yeshiva majority, may well have been informed by hazy, fatuous old-boys’ club recollections of university life, as justice brennan’s blistering dissent alleges: “the court’s perception of the yeshiva faculty’s status is distorted by the rose-colored lens through which it views the governance structure of the modern-day university.” 1 but the real judicial activist behind yeshiva was operating on more than hazy liberal-arts experiences; he was projecting views developed as a long-serving member of campus administration. thomas hughes mulligan graduated from fordham, stayed there for his j. d., and then served in counter-intelligence, before returning to his alma mater as a law professor. from 1956 to 1971, mulligan served as dean of fordham law school, until he was appointed to the second circuit court of appeals by richard nixon. as some of his speeches on the subject of his 1960s term as dean make clear, he 35 bousquet preferred power concentrated in the administration, and viewed with contempt most of the values expressed by the rising power of faculty and students. as a long-serving administrator at an institution much like yeshiva who had spoken out about the need to contain the rising influence of faculty, mulligan might reasonably have recused himself from the yeshiva case when it came before the second circuit. instead, he took the lead among his colleagues and wrote the opinion, an astonishingly creative misconstruction of the faculty role in shared governance. engaging in the most blatant form of judicial activism, the second circuit substituted its idiosyncratic judgment for the judgment of the agency assigned to interpret the national labor relations act, and refused to order enforcement of the board’s decision. before dean mulligan got hold of the case, the law governing faculty bargaining rights approached crystal clarity, with the national labor relations act clearly delineating those rights for “professional employees.” through the late 1960s and the ’70s, faculty at institutions of all types bargained successfully, and, in public non-research institutions, unionization had swiftly become simply the norm (as was already the case for public schoolteachers, who had joined with other public-sector employees to win sweeping new legal protections for bargaining rights). when the faculty at yeshiva organized, as at dozens of other private institutions, the national labor relations board quickly certified the union and swept aside the administration's claim that faculty input over hiring and evaluation, and control over curricula and grading, turned them into “managerial employees” excluded from the act’s protections. when yeshiva subsequently refused to bargain, the nlrb ordered them to the table. today, faculty at over 1,000 public college and university campuses bargain collectively. the only reason hundreds of private campuses aren’t likewise organized is the specious reasoning embodied in the transparently union-hostile opinion of dean mulligan’s second circuit, followed by the foggy vote of john paul stevens. as a matter of law, yeshiva is a travesty and should be overturned. as a matter of practice, however, yeshiva is losing relevance. since three-quarters of all faculty are now graduate students or lecturers on casual appointment, they can hardly be described as managerial, and can’t be denied bargaining rights on that basis. instead, today, private institutions with a religious affiliation rely on defenses based in the claim that faculty employees at “religious institutions” are excluded from nlra protections. while the nlrb has consistently distinguished between institutions with a substantial religious character and those with a religious affiliation, a 2002 d. c. circuit court opinion involving the university of great falls, a small montana institution, radically undermined the board’s authority. under great falls, courts may compel the nlrb to accept at face value the claims to a religious exemption of any institution that “presents itself to the public” as a religious institution. denying nlrb the power to distinguish between real and false claims to the exemption is a transparent assault on long-established employee rights and protections – until this bad law is overturned, under the ruling, essentially, any employer that claims the exemption is yeshiva relevant? 36 may have it. unlike yeshiva, the ruling applies comprehensively – to part-time faculty, students, and non-teaching staff. 2 sadly, this sweeping, radical new barrier to organizing came into being in much the same way that yeshiva did, with the determination of a conservative activist circuit court judge. backed by jesse helms and appointed by ronald reagan to fill the seat vacated by antonin scalia’s elevation to the supreme court, and at this writing the chief justice of the d. c. circuit, david sentelle has been described by the new york times as “one of the federal judiciary’s most extreme conservatives.” 3 sentelle’s vote was instrumental in overturning the convictions of oliver north and john poindexter. he replaced the moderate robert fiske with the right-wing ideologue kenneth starr as independent counsel in the whitewater investigation. a long-term republican party operative, even four years after his appointment to the federal bench, sentelle was still publishing right-wing screeds against “leftist heretics” who he claimed sought to establish “a collectivist, egalitarian, materialistic, race-conscious, hyper-secular, and socially permissive state.” 4 sentelle’s transparently activist opinion in the 2002 great falls decision gutted the nlrb’s authority so far beyond reason that several attempts were mounted as a test of the ruling. the best of these came forward in march 2009, during the first year of the obama administration. fully supported by the nlrb’s ruling that the school’s ties to the presbyterian church were too insubstantial to justify a religious exemption, the uaw-affiliated faculty of carroll college, like the faculty of yeshiva, simply came to federal court seeking enforcement of the board’s ruling in its case. but who did the nlrb and the faculty union find waiting for them? a fellow named thomas griffith, who arrived at the d. c. circuit court directly from a five-year stint as general counsel and assistant to the president of brigham young university. unsurprisingly for the recent former general counsel of a religiously-affiliated university, griffith’s 2009 opinion in the carroll case bluntly applies the 2002 ruling advanced by his sitting chief: “under great falls, carroll is exempt from the nlrb’s jurisdiction. we thus need not address carroll’s argument that its faculty members are managerial employees who fall outside the protection of the nlra. we grant carroll’s petition for review, vacate the decision and order of the nlrb, and deny the board’s cross-petition for enforcement.” 5 so now what? when we face these shabby rulings, does it make sense for us to assume that the decision proceeded from ultimately reasonable arguments advanced by truth-seekers? are they arguments put forward in an adversarial system but refereed with a reasonable degree of impartiality and with the prospect of eventual accountability in higher courts? of course not. we need to see clearly that these are specious, intellectually dishonest arguments by activist reactionaries abusing the power of the bench to deny fundamental human rights. we need to see clearly that these rulings are the product of a flawed, inherently political process that is likely to disadvantage both truth and justice for decades to come. few observers would say, for instance, that the current supreme court is the place to test david sentelle’s opinion in great falls. 37 bousquet but if the supreme court can’t help us, what should we do? if the united auto workers and american federation of teachers aren’t willing to spend any more of their resources fighting a corrupt judiciary, what should we do? ultimately what yeshiva (1980), great falls (2002) and carroll (2009) teach us is simple: what matters more than the law is the movement. the individuals who used (or abused) their power in these decisions were part of a social reaction to liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s, including workplace democracy, feminism, and civil rights. they aren’t lone wolves; they’re conservative activists bound in a net of common culture, values, and mutual support. they didn’t have law, precedent, or reason on their side; they simply imposed their will and made new law out of the power represented by their movement. it would be tremendously foolish if we permitted any of these rulings to constrain us. we can build a movement with the students, nurses, young lawyers, schoolteachers, and countless others affected by exploitative and super-exploitative patterns of employment. we can overcome this dense lattice of hostile law. we can and must imitate the 1960s movement of public employees whose self-organization was illegal and yet also an unstoppable force for writing new law reflecting truth, justice, fairness, and democracy. is yeshiva relevant? are great falls and carroll? not to a movement, no – no more so than any of the thousands of municipal statutes once theoretically constraining the movement of schoolteachers and sanitation workers. the tightest straps on those schoolteachers and sanitation workers were never the law; they were emotional and intellectual and habitual – habits of deference to, and trust in, authority. they burst free. we can too. notes 1. 444 u. s. 672, 702 (1980). 2. see university of great falls v. nlrb, 278 f.3d 1335 (d. c. cir. 2002). 3. new york times, august 17, 1994, quoted in joe conason and gene lyons, the hunting of the president (new york: macmillan, 2000), 131 (cited 387). 4. see sentelle’s review of robert h. bork’s the tempting of america: the political seduction of the law, “the clerisy of power,” harvard journal of law and public policy 14/1 (1991): 228. 5. see carroll college, inc., v. nlrb, 558 f.3d 568, 575 (d. c. cir. 2009). [expositions 7.1 (2013) 1–15] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 noble characters, hard truths, and invincible whining in the opening parts of portis’ true grit peter augustine lawler berry college i started out with the purpose of writing on the coens’ movie true grit. i discovered quickly, through a comparison of the movie and the early scenes of the portis book, that they just are not the same story; the book is much better. i will get around to doing a little comparison as a sort of appendix to this film. otherwise, all i have done is think about mattie’s trip to fort smith with yarnell poindexter to recover her father’s body and to see to it that his murderer is brought to justice. i ended up lingering for a long time on a hanging scene involving three men. this was the big (and the only) event in fort smith on the day they arrived. i could not help, of course, but often think about what i discovered about these early scenes in light of the book as a whole. i have reached no big conclusion, but a lot of little ones. the first thing we learn is that a black man, yarnell poindexter, is accompanying mattie to pick up her father’s body. ordinarily, this job would have been done by the lawyer j. noble daggett, who was away on one of his “steamboat suits” (19). mattie acts as the lawyer in his absence, taking $100, then writing and signing the lawyer daggett’s name to a letter of identification. even in the lawyer’s absence, mattie needs his authority, that of a full-grown man with the ability to sue effectively, to act under the law. her business success selling her father’s ponies depended on her threats that her lawyer would sue. without the authority of daggett, her cleverness would have gotten her nowhere. to mess with her, mattie threatened, was to mess with a lawyer that had forced railroads into receivership and was on familiar terms with important people. acting, as do all the book’s heroes, as a good southern democrat, lawyer daggett is for the people against the northern oligarchic interests, i.e., the corporations. so mattie’s unnatural manliness (in terms of being highly unusual for a child and especially for a girl) is underwritten by conventional authority. she is a little girl playing an adult man, thinking she has a “grown man” (35) back-up for when things get tough. the lawyer daggett, we learn, really is a noble man, a “gentleman.” he cares for mattie, especially after papa’s death, as almost a father. he calls her his “pearl of great price” (79). he is with her mother during the time she almost died and her arm was amputated. he was ferociously angry with rooster for putting her life in danger, although the ways he wanted to bring him to justice were all within the law. he was not about to go after him (or go get her) in the lawless indian nation, where the authority of the law (including property rights) and lawyers (as mattie finds out to her surprise) mean nothing. being a gentleman, lawyer daggett shamefully changed his judgment when he found out the whole truth about rooster’s grit, about his saving mattie’s life. and so he apologized and gave him a sizeable monetary reward in person. noble characters, hard truths, and invincible whining 2 daggett was frank’s good friend, apparently loved mattie almost as a daughter, was personally protective of her mother, but was no warrior. unlike the other heroic white men we encounter, he did not fight for the confederacy, and his thoughts never turn to shooting or hiring guns to get personal revenge. he reminds us that contract law, to be a force for good, has to be deployed by gentlemen protective of particular persons. he also reminds us of both the nobility and the limits of the law. the law is not always enough to protect particular persons or property; mattie was on her own and much more vulnerable than she imagined so long as she was in the indian territory. the law did not protect her father when he meddled with drink nor did it protect her property-owning and law-abiding (and so unarmed) father when he paternalistically meddled in the affairs of his armed drunk tenant. displays of magnanimity, in truth, have to be armed, as rooster shows us. a free man and friend replacing daggett as mattie’s temporary guardian is the black man with the unique name yarnell poindexter. the first thing mattie tells us is that he, like the gentleman-lawyer, is a “good man” (13). we also learn, quite insistently, that he is in almost every respect a free man. he was born a free man in illinois and was kidnapped into slavery. he is also “thrifty and industrious.” he lives on land he rents from the bank-or not from any white man in particular. renting is somewhere in between slavery and self-ownership, but renting from the bank is, in this case, much closer to the latter. unlike the trusty tom chaney, he is no tenant. what he earns is his own, but he is not a property owner, and so he must work for others. he was hired by frank to look after his place and his family because chaney whined his way out of that tenant duty. mattie clearly regards him as a friend to whom she is readily grateful and acknowledges him as her equal. she even goes to the extent of traveling with him in the colored section of the train. when the conductor calls him a “nigger,” she boldly tells him not to be so “hateful” (19). she observes that the conductor’s inability to respond to her was evidence of how “little” she had made him look to the other occupants of the car. “little” means, of course, petty and contemptible, which is the way mattie (we can assume like her father) regarded trashy racism in general. it also means the conductor could easily have been overwhelmed by the occupants of the car; fear silenced his racist arrogance. we see that the admonitions of a child can be disarming, and little girls can get away with a lot more sass than grown men can. later, however, we see that mattie can drive a grown man (the texas ranger) to spank her, and then only a grown man (rooster) can save her. we also learn that yarnell later went on to be a successful housepainter, a man who worked for himself. mattie, her brother, and his family also went to his funeral as friends. yarnell was close enough to the family to go coon hunting with frank and mattie. he was a good man who looked out for mattie not for money but out of friendship and because her father, his friend, had been good to him. so we learn that her father frank was a good man who earned the friendship of other good men. “people would use him” (12), but not lawyer daggett and yarnell. he, in fact, could reliably depend on both of them to help him far beyond the constraints of their 3 lawler contractual relationship. friends, in each case, served each other quite voluntarily as free men. southerners characteristically notice that “classical liberal” accounts of who we are have little to nothing to say about friendship, and that’s one reason they have such an impoverished view of who free men are. we learn something like liberty and equality, to be human goods, have to depend some on fraternity. this does not translate into civic friendship or sharing the public burdens of citizenship, but rather it’s showing the friendship of one good man with another in the context of a particular place. we learn that frank was both a cumberland presbyterian and a mason, a member of the danville lodge. a cumberland presbyterian, from the view of an american or southern presbyterian, is soft on the doctrine of election because its harsh truth conflicts too radically with ordinary ideas of fairness, the ideas that govern the relational life of any decent, civilized man. (and, in this case, the category “decent” includes rooster, who never steals from or kills those who either don’t deserve it or who aren’t out to kill him and who knows he owes burial, whenever possible, to the outlaws he kills.) a cumberland presbyterian also does not demand that a preacher be educated, that a preacher know the bible as well as the older narrator mattie. obsessing too much on the hard truth is at the expense of the relational pleasures that make life worth living. frank prided himself in his gallantry (or how he looked on a pony), his responsibility for his own, being a good friend, and his rather silly business “schemes,” which did not distract him too much from being a solid property owner and successful farmer. frank was decent and friendly enough that he could be both a presbyterian and a mason, and, in fact, more a mason than a presbyterian. frank was buried, mattie reports, in his masonic apron by the danville lodge. he was buried by his friends, by the members of his fraternal organization that were, apparently, more dear to him than his church. mattie complains that the preacher at his father’s funeral did not do so well. had she been there the preaching would have been better. but it’s not like she failed her father, in this case, in a way he would have cared about at all. she took care of her father’s burial as a matter of business, but his friends put him into his final burial place. here’s one reason why frank is more a mason than a presbyterian: the bible has a lot more to say about a family than friendship, especially the friendship of man for man. adam’s loneliness was cured by eve; he did not seem to have any other buddies. the triple hanging and “amazing grace” the train on the way to fort smith is overflowing because there’s a “triple hanging” (19). those going to the hanging are on an “excursion trip,” to a circus-like event complete with concessions. before we get too morbid about this, we must remember that hangings really were public, and events like the one described here really did happen. mattie and yarnell, of course, aren’t about going to the hanging. they do, however, find out that they can’t get any of their business done with the sheriff or anyone else until the hanging is over. everyone had gone to the hanging. yarnell, we find out, wants to go to the hanging. it’s something most men would want to do. mattie did not care about it. she was focused on the work she had to do, and we find out eventually that she had never had any interests in circuses noble characters, hard truths, and invincible whining 4 and such. amusements, in general, she regarded as frivolous or silly, not to mention nasty. mattie quickly grew impatient with entertainment, like shooting up corndodgers, that had “nothing educational about it” (170). here’s her impatient question for which she had no answer from personal experience: “why do people wish to be silly?” (171). mattie is never silly in her own eyes. a child who does not know how to play, of course, ought to appear to us as rather shockingly wounded or disfigured by nature. children, by nature, view the world through the lens of play. yarnell, not thinking it appropriate that a girl should go to a hanging, proposed that they should wait in the sheriff’s office until it was over. mattie, seeing that her friend wanted to go, agreed that they both should go. she knew yarnell would never leave her by herself, although she could have taken care of herself. yarnell was really worried that mattie’s mother would find out that he had let her go, and so mattie, to make her friend happy, assured him she would not be told. we learn a lot here about what mattie cares about: not about public spectacles or seeing men die or justice in general being done, but about her friend and, of course, her father. we find out that two white men and an indian were to be hanged. we also find out that the hangman is a yankee who would not hang his own, i.e., members of the gar. mattie’s view, in general, is, as a southern democrat, that yankees are all about killing her people. they’re her enemies, and the country they rule is not her own. they are ruthless aliens, and she is much more psychologically distant from them than she is from the indians. the war, for her, was not about some abstract principle of justice, but about invaders threatening her people and place, and she thinks not in terms of the nation, but in states and states’ rights. mattie’s understanding of justice is shaped by love of her own, as was her father’s. it’s also following, it seems, his lead, strikingly free from racism and sexism, even by today’s standards. when it comes to judging southerners, including indians, she is a meritocrat of character and competence. the marshall reads the sentences, but mattie can’t hear him. so whatever we find out about the crimes that are to be punished we find out from the criminals themselves. a man with a bible leads the condemned “in singing ‘amazing grace, how sweet the sound’” (21). some—but not all—of the people in the crowd join in. some believe, and some don’t, in what grace can do for the men soon to be hanged. the song, of course, is about a wretch who was once lost but now is found. only one of the three condemned had that experience of once being blind but now being able to see. he is joyful and confident about being saved from his sins and the biological death that would otherwise be his fate. the other two condemned men remain, from this view, blind without knowing it. and so they see themselves as neither sinners nor saved, as neither lost nor found. they certainly aren’t full of joy. apart from the hymn there is only one other mention of grace in the book. mattie comments, “there is nothing free except the grace of god. you cannot earn it or deserve it” (40). that means you have to pay for everything else, everything from goods and services to murders. mattie learns you have to pay if you want justice done to your father’s murderer. this justice could maybe even mean paying with both cash and your arm. we certainly have reason to believe this, this voice of the southern presbyterian narrator woman and not the cumberland 5 lawler presbyterian girl. even the woman remembering the girl certainly did not regard her relationship with her father and his and her friends as merely transactional or reciprocal or free from acting generously or out of love. friends, she clearly says, don’t “use” each other. friends only owe friends gratitude, and that is, in fact, what she gave yarnell and nothing more. maybe she paid lawyer daggett some, but not nearly what he was worth to her. and surely she did not regard the gritty chivalry of rooster that saved her life as being properly compensated for by lawyer daggett’s $200 reward. it was not, she said, worthy of praise, and it’s the lawyer who interpreted that to mean worthy of money. mattie acted—by reburying him in her family plot—as if his was an act of love by a foster-father. (and not a husband: there’s no evidence of any erotic attraction in either direction in that relationship. rooster was done with women, and the question of mattie’s sexuality is not addressed. mattie’s lack of eroticism—she can’t imagine anyone in her bed for the right reasons—is evidence that in one respect she remained a child her whole life.) the experience that everything has to be paid for does conform better to the life of the adult mattie. she assumes, for example, that any man who would want to marry her would be after her money. that’s because any woman without an arm and who is stuck with a disabled mother and a “frank tongue” (224) is too disadvantaged to be lovable. the experience that everything has to be paid for is that of a self-sufficient, lonely woman of means. (mattie says nothing about her relationship with her disabled mother that would suggest that it is anything but an unfulfilling burden. and, she does not say anything good or affectionate about her brother and sister. she is told them she does not mind bearing the whole burden of their mother, but that’s the only evidence we have that she does not mind being saddled by her mother.) certainly, mattie’s view of grace is that of a woman who loves her bank and loves her uncompromisingly presbyterian church. that grace is free means, of course, you don’t have to pay for it, and maybe that’s good news, but not being able to earn it or deserve it might be bad news. it does not necessarily come to those who have worked hard to get it, the way money usually does. god’s free or sovereign granting of grace to whomever he pleases for reasons hidden to us is the only exception to a cause-and-effect world. the granting of grace, as far as we can tell, does not remedy what seem to be the deficiencies of this world from the point of view of justice. grace is not meant to correct what seems to us to be pointless randomness: that, to begin with, bad things seem to happen to good people. from one view, grace is the invincible source of randomness in a world otherwise governed by impersonal necessity. actually, we know grace is not random, but we don’t know why in particular cases. mattie later pointedly says about her view of grace, the uncompromising affirmation of the doctrine of election: “i confess that it is hard doctrine” (115). she confesses that it’s tough for someone like her to accept. she can’t help but see it as “running contrary to our earthly ideas of fair play.” a world governed by contract and personal responsibility, a meritocracy of competence and character, is the world mattie describes and understands. this is a world in which she can reasonably struggle to find a place. it’s both amazing and hard—and so far, for mattie, from being a source of comfort and joy—that god, from our view, does not play fair. she accepts that conclusion only because “i can see no way around it,” after reading the bible with noble characters, hard truths, and invincible whining 6 care and reflecting on her own experiences. far from seeing grace as explaining why she once was lost but now is found, she seems to see it as another reason why she is anxious and troubled in this world. the phrase “amazing grace” does not have a sweet sound to her, and so neither does the beautiful hymn. she reports that the hymn “beulah land” is one of her favorites, a hymn about the longing of those homeless in this world. mattie is a somewhat displaced person who does not seem to have much real faith that she’ll find her true home somewhere else. there’s some connection between overemphasizing or obsessing on the doctrine of election, after all, and the anxiety of existentialism. mattie does not talk about her own grace or lack thereof. she does not seem to wonder whether she is saved or not, presumably because such speculation would be idly presumptuous. she does talk about her gifts and lack thereof. she means natural gifts, but surely she understands that they too are given or withheld by god. she says she “do[es] not boast” (15) about her gift for numbers and words. she does not make it clear that in those two areas she is superior to her parents. her dad has a “common school” education, but is not as adept in figuring out the bottom line and is honorably inclined to have little interest in that direction. her mother “could hardly spell cat” and did no better at “sums.” so, as a girl, she did her father’s books, or, in other words, pretty much ran his business. she was stuck being about her father’s business, including, she thought, seeing to his burial and bringing his murderer to justice. mary, martha, and mattie “figures and letters are not everything” (15), mattie knew. she did take pride in not flinching or being resolute or facing up to unpleasant duties and hard truths, but even that is not everything or the most important thing, the one thing needful. she compared herself to her mother by thinking of herself and mother as two sisters found in the bible: martha and mary. her mother, like mary, “had chosen that good part.” she had “a serene and loving heart,” whereas mattie, like martha, was “always agitated and troubled by the cares of the day.” in the bible, of course, martha whined to jesus that she was left to do all the work, while mary sat and listened as jesus talked. the lord, in fact, did not seem to care about that injustice, and did not order mary to help her. instead, he criticized martha for her obsessively zealous service at the expense of companionship and reflection. martha, it turns out, was careful and troubled by everything but the one thing needful: that mary had chosen, “that good part, which shall not be taken away from her” (lk 10:42 kjv). the one thing needful, it seems, is to attentively listen to jesus, and the resulting wisdom is the foundation of the loving serenity that should, most of all, characterize every human life. mattie’s memories here and elsewhere border on whiny. she did all the unpleasant and dangerous work while her mother took to her bed. her disabled mother was totally dependent on her, but she also saw the truth: she excelled in “doing” and her mother in “being.” her heart was not, in fact, serene and loving, and maybe we can say that serenity must be the gift of grace. without that gift, maybe it’s impossible to listen to jesus. but that way of looking at things excludes the possibility that the way to grace is asking for it, and the wisdom comes through 7 lawler being attentive to jesus’ most loving and personal words. we see mattie’s serenity-free and remarkably love-free life in her observation/complaint near the end of the book that time gets away from us. time especially flees from those who live in the past and the future, who can’t be in love in the present and trust in others and the lord more than mattie ever seems to have done. mattie is aware, of course, that she did not choose the best part, but she also sort of whines that both her circumstances and her nature make that choice either difficult or impossible for her. mattie distinguishes herself from her father by a “mean streak” (12), a quality that keeps her from being used. she was capable of appreciating gentlemen, but only to a point. her father’s chivalric indulgences were literally fatal for him, and they caused him to, in effect, stick his daughter with the details of his business both before and after his wasteful death. there was something of the gentleman in rooster, but he was a terrible businessman—having, to begin with, none of the skills associated with literacy—and was too uncivilized to be fit for decent society. gentlemen, she reminds us, “are only human and their memories can sometimes fail them” (166). so it’s always better to have a contract. “business,” gentlemen often forget, “is business.” gentlemen think the mean streak is a lack of generosity, but it’s really one basic way of holding people accountable. while in the cave with the bats, the snakes, and the dead bodies, mattie remembers “i told numbers to measure the time. it gave me a sense of purpose and method” (206). it fended off anxiety and panic. it allowed her to keep her head and not surrender her will and let the snake’s bite. so this purposeful method, as much as rooster, saved her life. the striking use of “method” suggests that mattie even ordinarily was unusually unguided by personal purpose: love. but that’s not completely true, because her method was, for most of the story, in the service of her father’s business: in the service, despite the commercial language, of love. so, it’s fairer to say that her confidence in her method and her belief that it could be the source of purpose keeps her from critically examining her real purpose, giving her that unjustified confidence that her knowledge of numbers was evidence that she was right about justice. even in the cave, her method was subordinate to her fear, and so too to her rather stunningly willful determination not to surrender her life. but it turns out that nobody can methodically save themselves all by themselves. if, as philosopher-pope benedict xvi reminds us, sin flows from a failure to gratefully acknowledge and do the duties that flow from our deeply relational being (44), then mattie was, in a way, sort of a sinner by nature (as are we all, due to original sin), who added to her natural brokenness through her proud willfulness. the loss of her arm may or may not have been grace or punishment for sin (we can easily become guilty of over discerning the visible sign), but it does correspond to the mutilation of her soul. she surely did not learn enough about grace from either her gracious, chivalric savior or her dismemberment. despite all her theology, surely we’re allowed to pity her for having no discernible sign of grace. but, we also question whether she is as good as she might have been discerning. to return to martha and mary: those two sisters are extreme cases. both display part of the virtue of a woman, at the expense of another part. not only did mary not work, she did not noble characters, hard truths, and invincible whining 8 gratefully acknowledge her dependence on the competent service of her sister. but martha could not lighten up to gratefully acknowledge her dependence on the word of the lord. a perfect woman would be a perfect balance of the excellences in working and listening, in doing and being, in taking care of the future and being in love in the present. but the bible, we can say, differs from modern, technological thought in giving the preferential option to trusting in the lord, in grace, given the hopelessness of a wholly chance-and-necessity or cause-and-effect world. the fundamental question is whether, deep down, the world can be described best by numbers or best by love. in this sense, mattie lived as if she were an atheist, despite her uncanny knowledge of the bible. in her view, we’re stuck with living as if grace did not exist, because there’s no discernible way we can rely on it. that’s why mattie, in a decisive sense, lacks faith: god does not provide justice; we have to achieve that for ourselves. that’s also why we see in the sort of subtext of mattie’s narrative more than a bit of whining, although she knows perfectly well that whiners are contemptible and far inferior to lovers and gentlemen, as well as to the resolute manliness of true grit. we can also see that the future belongs to neither martha nor mary. mattie (martha) does not reproduce. mama (mary) can’t take care of herself. she needs someone like mattie (martha) just to survive. she is no self-reliant american woman. mattie, of course, is overly self-reliant, much more self-reliant than she was made to be. fair play, election, and manliness those to be hanged pronounce three theories about exceptions to our fair play, cause-and-effect world. at first glance, the hangings should satisfy our desire that the unjust be punished. murderers have been sentenced to death; we see the cause followed by a morally satisfying effect. the worldly standard of fair play is triply affirmed. but one of the men offers us the proposition that the truth about cause-and-effect make such moral judgment impossible. the cause of the murder is not the free, conscious choice of the murderer; it is, instead, his deficient socialization, which was beyond his choice. who he is and what he does can’t be considered within his power. we also hear the proposition that what seems to be reasonable or “caused” is really random; everything human is accidental. we, finally, hear the proposition that someone who has repented can be saved from the annihilating consequences of biological death, although not in a way that suggests that god arbitrarily negates the rules of fair play. the effect of salvation has a human cause; grace can be, in a way, earned. none of the condemned had affirmed the hard doctrine of election, but nothing mattie sees contradicts it. quite the contrary! each of the three to be hanged is allowed to speak a few last words. these words, of course, are the most significant part of the spectacle of hanging, as were, say, the last words of jesus’ or thomas more’s were the most significant parts of their public executions. the words, which can properly be free of self-serving calculation, can be the measure of the man. the white men speak first and third, and the indian speaks in the middle. in terms of character and competence, we might want to say that only the indian knows who he is and what he should say and do at this final point in his life. it’s his death that we might want to rank with socrates’ or jesus’ or 9 lawler thomas more’s. there is, of course, one big difference: he knows he deserves to die. that’s why it occurs immediately to mattie to compare the indian to the bible’s good thief on the cross. but by putting him in the center, we’re still tempted to compare him in some way to jesus too. all such comparisons are no more than imperfectly suggested. the other two men to be hanged were not thieves but murderers, and neither of them died in any obvious way mocking the lord. (arguably they do mock all he stands for in subtle ways.) but it’s also true that neither die well, or in a way worthy of a man. mattie remembers that the first white man did not seem to be “nearly as upset as you’d might expect from someone in his desperate situation” (21‒22). he was not acting like a man whose very being was to be extinguished in a few moments, or as a man who finds hope in being delivered by god from death. his statement is about all of life being chance, and his luck being bad. he did not kill the right man. had he done so, he would not have been convicted. this man makes it clear that he does not deserve to die. there are men in the crowd worse than he who still get to keep living. he is apparently taking refuge in the thought that all of life is random, and so even the distinction between living and dying is weightless. the least we can say is that he has diverted himself from having to think about who he is or what is really about to happen to him. if all of life is chance, then even death, somehow, is not a necessity. nihilism of a certain kind is working for him, but we can’t admire him, of course, for it. the indian says that he is ready to die. we don’t find out what he did to be condemned because he does not offer any explanations or excuses. he has repented, and so he knows he will soon be in heaven with his savior. like the good thief in the bible, he knows that he has been condemned with justice, and he has faith in the person christ can remember him as—and so save him for—in his kingdom. the indian, like the good thief, has done all that’s required for salvation according to most of the christian tradition. he has acknowledged or confessed his sins, repented or asked for forgiveness, and has had faith in his personal savior. he can have confidence, he thinks, that biological death is only a prelude to paradise. he has not been abandoned to his natural and legal fate. as a sinner, death is what he deserves. but his faith (which is not chosen) and his repentance (which is chosen) causes him to confidently expect more than justice. he can’t help but suggest that those who repent, those who follow the word of the lord, deserve to be saved. the indian adds that he “must die like a man” (22). this noble assertion, of course, is hardly specifically christian. indians were admired for the courage with which they faced death, with their unwillingness to display any fear or trembling. the courage, of course, in this case is mitigated by the confidence that death does not end all. but this indian actually seems to have acquired his christian faith without surrendering the virtue that distinguishes his people. neither mattie nor anyone else is moved to tears by the indian’s speech. a good death, like a good life, is not at all about the public shedding of tears. the christian problem here, of course, is that the indian is taking pride in the way of which he is dying. he confuses his noble ability to virtuously control himself during the act of dying, it seems, with evidence of grace or it at least distracts him some from his invincible dependence on god. noble characters, hard truths, and invincible whining 10 mattie’s reflection on the indian’s speech is strange: “if you are like me you think of indians as heathens” (22). she does not go on to say that this indian, in fact, is an exception to that stereotype. he is a christian indian. she says, instead: “but i will ask you to recall the thief on the cross. he was never baptized and never heard of a catechism but christ himself promised him a place in heaven.” she might have said that that thief was, in fact, a christian, because he had faith in christ and knew he was a sinner. but, for her, the bigger point is that he was “never baptized,” and so was technically not a christian, although the indian surely was. the indian “never heard of a catechism,” that is, so she assumed he was unaware of christian doctrine, although the indian surely was aware. so, in her eyes, the thief on the cross is more of a heathen than the indian and is not distinguished by his faith or repentance. he is distinguished by his lack of baptism, by what’s required, from a kind of legal view, to be a christian. (st. augustine wonders, in fact, whether the thief might have been baptized at some point (oso 3.12).) for her, the point of the biblical account of the thief on the cross is that christ can save whomever he pleases. he does not have to save the baptized, or not save the unbaptized. that means, of course, he does not have to save those who have faith and repent. he did not give any reason for saving the thief. we seem to have no right to believe that heathen indians (whether or not they die like men) are not saved. the christian, baptized indian’s good death, based on his truthful self-awareness, is no discernible sign of his salvation. drunkenness, repentance, and tom chaney the third man to be hanged—the second white man—had prepared a longer speech of which he memorized. it was more formal, beginning with “ladies and gentleman,” and written to have a particular effect on the audience. he says that his “last thoughts” are of his wife and children “far away” (22), or who are not present and whom he has not seen lately. we can guess he had already abandoned them. his fear is that they will be “slighted” and be “compelled” to fall into “low company on account of the disgrace i have brought them.” what may happen to them is not just; they weren’t the cause of their being abandoned by and isolated from decent society. the truth is they’ve been abandoned and abandoned again by their irresponsible husband and father. but this man does not say that. it’s unjust that his family is blamed for his disgrace. but that’s nowhere near his last thought. he explains, quite movingly, why he should not be held accountable either. the cause of what he has become is “drink.” while drunk, he killed a friend over nothing, a trifle, and he might have killed anyone—even his brother or, we can assume, even his wife and children. can a man really be held responsible for what he does while drunk? only if he can be blamed for being drunk, if he is in that respect the cause of his action. why is he a drunk, the man goes on? the cause is not having being raised well, in not having “good instruction.” had he been raised well, he claimed, he would now be with his family and “at peace with his neighbors.” his nature is peaceful and loving, and all he needed was to be taught how to be a good man. he, of course, can’t be blamed for being raised badly. and so he 11 lawler can’t be blamed for abandoning his family and killing his friend. in that way, he fully agrees with the first white man that what distinguishes the man who walks freely and the man condemned to death, from a personal view, is chance. nobody can be praised or blamed for how they are raised, and so the anger anyone would feel for this man is misdirected. he deserves our pity. his last words are the admonition he gives to the crowd: “train up your children” (22). if you don’t raise them well, they will turn out to be murderous, out-of-control drunks like me. and it will be your fault, not theirs. a reasonable response would be, of course, that you have already explained why it’s almost inconceivable that your own sons won’t be raised well; you know what to do to make them free, loving, and peaceful men. but you did not do it. the white man’s response: i can’t do it for them, because it was not done for me. so, we can say that this white man is no closer than the first one in taking responsibility for his sins and repenting. he is not dying like a man in full awareness of who he is. from the indian’s noble view, he dies neither as a christian nor as a man. but his eloquent, carefully prepared speech of self-pity had its intended effect on him. he moved himself to tears. it had the same effect on mattie, and she is not ashamed to remember that fact. she was moved to pity by his at least somewhat undeserved plight. who can deny that there’s some truth in his words? and the law has to exaggerate personal responsibility in condemning men to death. the exaggeration of american individualism—or the exaggeration of almost any legal system—is that anyone is completely responsible for anything he or she does. we are all shaped by who we are by nature and how we are raised, and we did not choose either. mattie’s tears might be called christian in some way or some particularly feminine weakness, but she does not say either. she is moved by beautiful words that express part of the truth about the life of a man about to die. but only part of the truth: she does not end up thinking his sentence is unjust. this white man turns out to be a lot like tom chaney, the man who murdered mattie’s father. chaney killed his father while drunk, and, in the book, he regretted it later. he too was a restless wanderer far away from his family, and a man wounded by nature and upbringing who could not ever experience himself as being at home with his family or at peace with his neighbors. chaney, like the second white man to be hanged, is quite the “whining baby.” he never thinks his misfortune is his own fault. as mattie says, he never takes his losses “like a man” (16). and so he imagines himself suffering injustice and being the victim of circumstances when what happened to him is largely his fault. “everything is against me” and “nothing has gone right for me” are pretty much is constant beliefs. still, we might say, in truth, chaney is never completely wrong: frank arguably should not have meddled in the affairs of a drunk and maybe he should have left him to his own devices. maybe he should not—at least unarmed—have “felt responsibility” for a tenant who did nothing but “use” him. in any case, it’s not entirely chaney’s fault that he spent almost his whole life as an outlaw and without any real friends. (in his restless wandering as a murderer and in many other ways, he is compared to the bible’s cain, but that’s for another time.) noble characters, hard truths, and invincible whining 12 the pity mattie feels for the man to be hanged is not felt for chaney. almost no one could be that truthful when it comes to the man who murdered your father. she hopes not only to bring him to legal justice but that god will add eternal suffering in hell, that god will justly deny this horribly evil man grace. her pity for the condemned man is rather detached; she does not really know him. her hatred for chaney is personal and somewhat unreasonable. she wants the federal marshall and the law that holds chaney accountable to be pitiless. she knows that it’s natural for her to hate beyond reason anyone, even the ponies, who took her father away from her. it was easy for her to remember that ponies, by nature, are innocent, but it was impossible for her to remember that chaney’s guilt is incomplete and that she has no way of reading his heart. again, mattie’s view of justice was conditioned by her partisanship, her natural love or at least deep attachment to her own. it’s not christian justice; she is not trying to do the work of god, but just the work of law in doing justice to particular persons. probably because he saw mattie’s tears, yarnell tried to cover mattie’s face with his hand when the actual executions occurred. she pushed the hand aside; she remembered that she was determined to “see it all” (23). initially she did not care about the hangings because she thought of them as a trivial excursion. but, like most people there, she was drawn in by the human drama of men facing death in different ways. the hangings turned out to be quite educational. she was not strongly repulsed, at least, by watching men actually die, but neither were the others present. the men deserved to hang; justice was being done. mattie’s situation was not the character described by socrates who struggled to face up to the fact that in the long run we’re all dead bodies and nothing more. the crowd, after all, was not united by some common understanding of who man is and so what death is. some believed in amazing grace, and some did not. mattie did in her own way, which is not to say she was not experiencing some of the wonder of the philosopher: wonder fairly commonly shared, after all, but hardly ever by men knowing they’re about to die. among the many things worthy of wonder: the man who died well, i.e., like a man, was both an indian and a christian. he had, we can say, two cultural resources or personal selfunderstandings on which to rely. the white men who died badly by using chance to deny the reality of human agency were neither christian nor indian. we did not get to see an indian dying well who’s not a christian, or a christian dying well who’s not an indian. we can remember, of course, that tocqueville, among others, established the close connection between the proud indian warrior and the proud southern warrior. and we get the southern impression that modern americans, those not distinguished by courageous nobility or faithful repentance, don’t have what it takes to die well. outward signs, injustice, and election we get another piece of evidence right away in that mattie is not insensitive to suffering or incapable of experiencing revulsion. she does not really want to see it all. the two white men died immediately from hanging. the indian’s neck did not break, and so he strangled very slowly and painfully‒jerking all around “in spasms.” mattie remembers that that—and nothing 13 lawler else—“was the bad part” (23). she and yarnell followed many in the crowd by turning away in revulsion and hurrying away in haste. there are so many reasons why the indian’s hanging should inspire revulsion, and any decent person would have looked away. it goes without saying that they all did not occur to the girl mattie, but the woman mattie had decades to think through what she saw and could not help but remember. first off, of course, his punishment was unintentionally (but really) cruel and unusual. to be sentenced to death by hanging is roughly the same as being sentenced to death by beheading. it’s to be sentenced to a dignified death that comes almost immediately after giving a speech. that, in fact, is not all that hard to watch. it might even be right to say that it puts death under the control of the condemned more than death usually is. we all have to go sometime, and many or most of us will have little warning of the moment. certainly frank did not, not to mention various outlaws. neither did the men killed (one by mistake and the other over a trifle) by the two white men. but heart attacks and train wrecks come about as quickly as being shot by or as an outlaw. then, there is the seeming injustice of the horrible death given to the man who has prepared himself as well as he could to die well. nobody can “die like a man” under those circumstances. it is true that the painfully uncontrollable spasms and writhing were the result of bad luck. but that reminds us that dying well seems to depend, to some extent, on good luck. the white men, who sort of said that life and death are governed by chance, got the good roll of the dice. it’s easy to argue that hanging is better than the white men deserved (although they would never admit it), and exactly what the indian thought he deserved (without grace, which does not, of course, come from the law). the white men were given the opportunity to die well—or as dignified and truthful men—and they did not take advantage of it. they did not take advantage of their good luck, of the gifts of both life and death. it would have, of course, been edifying for the crowd to have a discernible sign—beyond the indian’s confident words—that the indian was saved. the good thief heard the promise of jesus, and that was meant to be enough for him. the word of jesus, as he understood it in the bible, was enough for the indian. the good thief, in fact, had no other sign. he saw his savior die a painful, natural death, but we have no evidence that the biological death shook his faith, that both he and jesus could be more than biological beings. surely, some in the crowd were reassured by the manly serenity of the indian’s readiness to die. and so they must have been more than shaken to see that serenity evaporate. for those who look for signs of grace in nature, what happened to the indian could only be interpreted as god showing him the opposite of favor. but for the southern presbyterian, of course, there is no discernible sign. surely even the indian’s confident words are misplaced; even those who repent don’t deserve to be saved. the indian’s confidence, someone might actually say, was more the product of his heathen pride than a genuinely christian awareness of his sinful depravity. for mattie, we have no idea whether the indian was actually saved, just as we can’t be sure whether or not tom chaney was saved. someone might say that fact so offends ordinary ideas of fairness as to be repulsive. maybe it took years for mattie not to be repulsed from what she really learned at the hanging. the white noble characters, hard truths, and invincible whining 14 men might say, of course, that she came to see that amazing grace, like everything else, is completely subject to chance, and the willful god contributes to rather than corrects the huge place of chance—a force that always threatens to undermine honor and virtue, praise and blame beyond belief—in human affairs. mattie concludes her recollection of the hanging by saying she learned later that the judge who condemned the men watched the hangings in their entirety. mattie gives him the benefit of the doubt by supposing he did so out of “a sense of duty” (23). her suspicion, it seems, is that he might have been depraved enough to have enjoyed them, even the bad part. the benefit of doubt came only from the christian fact that “there is no knowing what is in a man’s heart.” st. augustine explains that that fact should take all proud pleasure out of being even a conscientious judge (cg 19.6). finally, decisions have to be made for the sake of law and order, but no man knows who’s really guilty or innocent. so, a christian judge would be more repulsed than most people by the likely injustice of many or most hangings under the law. it was or should be harder for him to watch the hanging—especially, of course, the bad part—than it was for the people in the crowd. flinching and true grit mattie recalled the hanging, in part, to make us “imagine how painful it was to go directly from that appalling scene to the undertaker’s where my father lay dead” (23). the “appalling scene,” of course, was not the deaths, but the bad part and all it suggests about who we are. the timing, for mattie, was terrible, but she is “never been one to flinch or crawfish” from unpleasant duties, which is why, of course, she could imagine the judge was doing an extremely unpleasant duty. the virtue of not flinching seems to rank with and be very similar to the high virtue of showing grit or manliness or being resolute for mattie. she explains that she would not flinch from doing her “christian duty” in bringing justice to her father’s murderer, for the same reason she did not flinch from burying him (92). (when challenged, she can’t explain, in fact, why the former is a particularly christian duty; that’s because it was not.) she was about “her father’s business” (27); if she is comparing herself to jesus here, it’s in her capacity to get unpleasant jobs done. she took care of all her father’s business, which included vindicating his confidence in the law. mattie finally admired her mother, who otherwise she had seen fleeing from unpleasant duties, when she did not flinch from sitting with her during her amputation. mattie did not let any of this existential or theological stuff, or the whole human drama that the hangings displayed, affect at all the way she took care of her father’s burial. she does not say or do or apparently think anything religious all, but she shows the proper respect. the same with yarnell, who did nothing more than remove his hat. she thinks the coffin the undertaker had given her father was too cheap and carelessly prepared. so she tells yarnell to make sure he gets a better one when he gets home. when yarnell tells her the undertaker is taking advantage of her on the costs, she refuses to “haggle” (24). it’s the undertaker who’s “counting” at that moment, not mattie. she sends yarnell home with the coffin, although he clearly does not want to get into trouble for or be irresponsible by leaving her alone. she does not order him like a slave or 15 lawler servant; again she leads him to what he is really inclined to as a friend. mattie admits that she is open to criticism for not attending the funeral, but that’s only because she had the rest of his business “to attend to.” she knew his friends—yarnell and the members of the danville lodge— would get him properly buried. the big point here is that the girl mattie does not seem to be moved by any christian duty at all; she is not concerned with her father’s soul. insofar as she is concerned with justice, she is moved by anger, but, like the lawyer and her father, she assumes that lawmen and contract law can get her father’s business done. and, it’s her anger and her confidence in numbers that cause her to be so sure she is in the right. when challenged from a christian view, she has no answer. but she does not let that moment cause her real doubt or slow her down. mattie as modern woman we have to think hard about mattie as a modern woman: she is all about lawfulness, mathematical order/calculative reason, and “spirited” partisanship. we don’t usually connect math with anger, measure with indignation. mattie has, to a remarkable extent, the “platonic” control of her desires, but obviously in a mutilated form. she is unplayful, unerotic, unserene, unfriendly, unloving, anxious, and worried. her interior life is too tough to bear with serenity or even acceptance. that’s why does not really have her anger under control. but there’s something wonderful in her living her meritocratic judgmentalism, in mostly not holding others to a higher standard than she holds herself. mattie displays one version of what it means to live as a free person in a free country. but she knows well enough—and whines more than a little—that she was not given what she needs to have chosen the better part, the part displayed by her mother in being in love in the present and unobsessive about the future. works cited saint augustine. 1887. city of god. trans. marcus dods. nicene and post-nicene fathers, ser. 1, vol. 2. ed. philip schaff. buffalo, ny: christian literature. rev. and ed. kevin knight. <http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/120119.htm>. ___. 1887. on the soul and its origin. trans. peter holmes and robert ernest wallace, rev. benjamin b. warfield. nicene and post-nicene fathers, ser.1, vol. 5. ed. philip schaff. buffalo, ny: christian literature publishing. rev. and ed. kevin knight. <http://www.newadvent.org/ fathers/15083.htm>. benedict xvi. 2012. jesus of nazareth: the infancy narratives. trans. adrian j. walker. colorado springs: image. portis, charles. 1968. true grit. new york: simon and schuster. reprint, new york: overlook, 2010. © equinox publishing ltd. 2009, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expo. 3.1 (2009) 23–40] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v3i1.23 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 pater’s portraits: the aesthetic hero in 1890 (part ii) gerald monsman university of arizona monsman@email.arizona.edu abstract in conjunction with walter pater’s unfinished manuscript, “gaudioso, the second,” recently published in expositions (monsman 2008), a second manuscript fragment from among pater’s papers is now also printed here for the first time: “tibalt the albigense” (circa 1890). not long after pater began research for his never-finished second novel, gaston de latour (1888/1995), he simultaneously began reading for his imaginary portrait of “tibalt,” dealing with the prelude to the bloody albigensian crusade. like gaston, “tibalt” was to be set in france against the turbulent background of religious warfare. but in contrast to the brutality of sectarian slaughter in gaston, pater elevates aesthetic experience to a mystical and platonically mythic level of enchantment. from his first aesthetic portrait, “the child in the house” (1878)—a defense of his aestheticism in studies in the history of the renaissance (1873)—to “tibalt the albigense,” pater’s fascination with the transformative power of beauty at the turningpoints of religious/cultural history is the major thrust of all his writings. keywords: albigensian heresy, aesthetic hero, walter pater, aestheticism, medieval france walter pater, essayist and critic, began publishing fiction belatedly in his career, in his thirty-eighth year, when he wrote the poetically evocative allegory of “the child in the house” (1878). it is a covert self-portrait of his fascination with beauty and pain that developed as he grew up in a quintessentially victorian home. prompted in large measure by the earlier outcry against the hedonistic aestheticism of his studies in the renaissance (1873), pater felt it was incumbent to defend “the depth of the charm or spell” he felt for “beautiful physical things, 24 pater’s portraits: the aesthetic hero in 1890 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 a kind of tyranny of the senses over him” (1895, 189, 186). from this first “imaginary portrait” (his generic characterization of the fiction he wrote) until one of his last, “tibalt the albigense,” pater’s program was to describe the mystical rapport of a sensuous beauty with a hieratic purity of spirit expressed within the transitions of western higher culture. the protagonists of these two portraits are constructed from pater’s own autobiographical circumstances: florian is pater the child at his enfield home whereas tibalt, who is about to become a physician, prefigures the occupation of both pater’s early deceased father, a medical doctor, and his recently deceased brother, licentiate and fellow of edinburgh’s royal college of surgeons–and to whom pater, at about the time he commenced “tibalt,” dedicated his appreciations, with an essay on style (1889). it has been a commonplace in pater criticism that his aesthetic heroes all have a strong sense of home, perceiving it as a refuge both physical and psychic. in the child’s developmental psychology, home represents the consubstantiality of the sensuous with the spiritual, elevating aesthetic experience to an almost mystical and certainly mythic level. both in “the child in the house” and in “tibalt,” there is a magical moment of enchantment with beauty. pater’s persona, florian, comes upon: a great red hawthorn in full flower, embossing heavily the bleached and twisted trunk and branches, so aged that there were but few green leaves thereon—a plumage of tender, crimson fire out of the heart of the dry wood.... [i]n dreams all night he loitered along a magic roadway of crimson flowers, which seemed to open ruddily in thick, fresh masses about his feet, and fill softly all the little hollows in the banks on either side.... also, then, for the first time, he seemed to experience a passionateness in his relation to fair outward objects, an inexplicable excitement in their presence, which disturbed him, and from which he half longed to be free. (pater 1895, 185–86) this pivotal moment of aesthetic puberty also has its echo in tibalt’s gathering florets of curative herbs: and one spot there was—he detected it by its ring of molten snow— where those old volcanic fires lay not yet quite extinct amid the cinders. here, like the relics of a warmer, more florid and genial world, gerald monsman 25 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 certain odd, exotic, miraculously fresh flowers were begotten as by natural magic, erect in the dark clefts, their roots deep down in the medicinable salts. florian and tibalt both encounter sensuous physical beauty fraught with a great power of fertility and renewal—“magic” in both passages. the covert aesthetic eroticism in these passages—that “inexplicable excitement” in “child” of the gnarled hawthorn’s tender fire filling surreal crevices and in “tibalt” the image of the flowers “erect in the dark clefts” within the “ring” of old fires—points toward a confused or repressed desire for beauty that recalls plato’s distinction in the phaedrus between eroticism (eros) and its contrasting virtuous love (anterota), the latter inspired by beauty standing on a pedestal of chastity (1871a, 254b). plato personifies this theory of beauty in the phaedrus as an amorous relationship in which the devotee finds in beauty a reminiscence of the primordial loveliness of the divine; he reflects this loveimage back to the beautiful one as in a mirror and, ideally, should come to be loved in return by beauty’s awakened soul (1871a, 255c–e). plato’s ideal of a sensuous/spiritual beauty and love had been ignored by greek and roman poets but was embraced in medieval-renaissance philosophy and art by the neoplatonists of florence and north italy; however, many of the more-conventional neoplatonists feared the contamination of the spiritual by its reflection in an erotic love, a carnal beauty (panofsky 1939, 100; plato 1871b, 201d et seq). when pater in plato and platonism (1893) characterized neoplatonism as “a kind of prosaic and cold-blooded transcendentalism” (1893, 149), he would have been thinking of a similar victorian opposition of sense to spirit. but as postulated by pater, j.j. winckelmann was among the first in modern times to replace this conventional neoplatonic antithesis with the more ancient ideal of a platonic mutuality (1873, 194–196), a blending of sensuous physical beauty with soul. this humanistic ideal would have been foreshadowed by tibalt the albigense, an avatar both of the reformation and of the spirit of the renaissance. almost as if pater had anticipated his later figure of tibalt in “the child in the house,” he defined how florian, like tibalt, stood outside the narrow puritan oppositions of his cultural environment, “inward and outward being woven through and through each other into one 26 pater’s portraits: the aesthetic hero in 1890 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 inextricable texture—half, tint and trace and accident of homely colour and form, from the wood and the bricks; half, mere soul-stuff, floated thither from who knows how far” (1895, 172–173). after the climatic description of florian’s hawthorn, pater continued: in later years he came upon philosophies which occupied him much in the estimate of the proportion of the sensuous and the ideal elements in human knowledge, the relative parts they bear in it; and, in his intellectual scheme, was led to assign very little to the abstract thought, and much to its sensible vehicle or occasion.... [h]e remembered gratefully how the christian religion, hardly less than the religion of the ancient greeks, translating so much of its spiritual verity into things that may be seen, condescends in part to sanction this infirmity, if so it be, of our human existence, wherein the world of sense is so much with us. (1895, 186–187) in the beguiling impressionism of his so very paterian prose, what pater gives us in “tibalt” are historical facts, landscape descriptions, and a theo-philosophical background that cast light on his continuing preoccupation in the 1890s with the medieval foreshadowing of the reformation and the renaissance. from “two early french stories” in his 1873 studies in the history of the renaissance to his unfinished gaston de latour, the emergence of the “modern” perspective engrossed him. the proto-reformation albigensians were so named from albiga, the capital city of the albigenses in the gallo-roman period; later, at the time of this story, the city was called albi and had become a fiefdom of the counts of toulouse. however, the name “albigensian” is a quirk of history because toulouse, not albi, was the movement’s center. contemptuous of a corrupt and ignorant clergy and with nationalistic aspirations strengthened by their ancient regional language, the albigensians grew rapidly under the protection of the nobility. they believed there were two gods, an evil satan, who is lord of the eternal world of material things, including mankind’s sinful body, and christ whose spiritual kingdom includes the souls of believers inspired day by day by the holy spirit. they rejected entirely the institutional organization and authority of the roman church. on election to the papacy, innocent iii unsuccessfully attempted a peaceful conversion of the “heretics.” then in 1204 he launched an implacable crusade against gerald monsman 27 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 much of the south of france and starved, mutilated, hanged, disemboweled, and burned the “heretics” (at the stake or without stakes). if not in the mountains, most certainly in the cities this crusade decimated a brilliant provençal culture of wealth, leisure, and imagination. in marius the epicurean (1885) pater acknowledged “the fatality which seems to haunt any signal beauty, whether moral or physical, ... the suspicion and hatred it so often excites in the vulgar” (1885, 1: 100). the monastic mind feared the ancient life of the senses and had set itself against those ambiguities of what would become a transformative modernity. jakob burckhardt, like winckelmann, considered the renaissance a return from an intense medieval otherworldliness to the earlier classical life of the senses. thus when dominico “stumbled on the buried venus” in pater’s “gaudioso, the second” (monsman 2008, 91), he enacted this discovery of antiquity’s latent potency, thereby allegorizing the advent of modern civilization. but for pater this new paradigm of modernity was not truly antithetical to the cloister but blossomed into an artistic perfection in which “catholicism and the renaissance, religion and culture, holiness and beauty, might seem reconciled” (pater 1895, 103). after the death of pater in 1894, both c.l. shadwell and edmund gosse prepared a number of his important remaining manuscripts for posthumous publication; but when macmillan suggested publishing still other manuscripts, clara pater, her brother’s administrator, declined because she felt the remainder not sufficiently finished and did not wish “that any work of his should appear in a form less complete than he would himself have approved” (1896, vii). but we now have a much greater tolerance for the unfinished; indeed, “the fragment” is a major aesthetic category. further, pater always revised even after publication, edition after edition, never really finishing absolutely any text. and finally, in the light of his growing reputation as “the strongest as well as the subtlest literary-critical intelligence” of the high-victorian period in england (rossetti 2003, xxii), pater’s later thoughts on the enchantment of beauty and love cannot be dismissed as unworthy of notice or study. as a fragment, “tibalt” is only nineteen manuscript pages long, perhaps slightly more than 2,500 words. and as with nearly all pater’s fiction, it is more essay than action. although the manuscript 28 pater’s portraits: the aesthetic hero in 1890 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 of “tibalt” can be deciphered by those familiar with pater’s penmanship, my sense is that this draft, with its numerous abbreviations and hasty illegibilities, is in an earlier, more cursory state than even that of “gaudioso.” pater said he never published anything until he had “written it out seven times” (more likely he reviewed and revised it from end to end seven times); this fragment of “tibalt” surely had been awaiting more revisions-cum-writings-out, not to mention its completion. as to uncareted interlineations, ordinarily i would not interpolate them into the reading text unless they were above either an authorial cancellation or lacuna on the primary line; however, at this stage of the draft sensible editing suggests pater’s last (even though still tentative) alternative should be privileged: “last is best.” bracketing in the text below indicates simple gaps in the primary line of composition that pater had left both unfilled and without any tentative choices above the line but for which the editor has suggested words to fill these voids, often from pater’s published work elsewhere. indeed, the sir thomas browne quotation is precisely the one pater intended to use.1 tibalt the albigense the close of the twelfth century witnessed in the flowery yet sombre regions of the south of france the first movement of the reformation in its utmost harshness of mood and, side by side with that, the first growth of the renaissance already sensuous and gay. oddly enough, they appear amid all their contrasts as not unfriendly powers. the fierce “crusade,” which in the course of years swept both alike away, made common cause against them as albigensian; and the closer student of the period cannot help asking himself whether there may not have been some deeper basis of union than a common danger between those two, at first sight so incongruous, companions—in some tenet of that “manichean”2 doctrine, perhaps, with which the very soil of languedoc was held to be tainted. what is a natural query with the modern student seems to have been felt by the ecclesiastical authorities of the middle age as a deep suspicion, as if they divined already in those uncertain movements the bolder scope, the more powerful drift, of each at a later time, the connexion of both with that all-solving critical philosophy which is of the texture gerald monsman 29 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 of the modern mind.3 what united two natural enemies, it was dimly felt, in common and concerted promotion of antichrist must be some conviction of a perverted intellect common to both, animating by the fancied light of better doctrine the constant tendency of human nature to revolt against authority. the alliance of the pious “little people,” in the suburbs of the great towns or in the distant mountain villages, with the gay court of the count of toulouse was no merely temporary union, at an exceptional and trying moment, in opposition to the ancient hierarchy, nor the count’s patronage of the avowed heretics merely the easy generosity or indifference of a liberal sovereign.4 there must be some seed of poisonous thought afloat in the general atmosphere, lighting, to take root, here in sour protest against holy church, there in a luxurious furtherance of the pleasant things of life. the student of thought at the end of the twelfth century has to content himself with a result as uncertain as the suspicion which would seem to have envenomed the religious bigotry of the court of innocent iii.5 no proof of the intellectual pravity supposed is forthcoming behind either the scanty notices of those early sectaries which present them merely as theological purists or behind the provençal literature, in effect the sole extant monument of that early renaissance in its frank and easily intelligible service to poetic culture. yet the query remains, remains in the suggestion of a mental possibility, a possible phase6 of thought evolved just then in this or that curiously pondering mind, which may have determined one or many lives in that perplexed age with the tragedy, the terrible series of events, in which it terminated. it is doubtless a part of the world’s real wisdom to make small account of metaphysical doctrines in the analysis of the forces which determine its movements. there are epochs, notwithstanding, as well as individual characters which from age to age reproduce the mood of particular epochs, not to be understood without large allowance for the influence of abstract theory. if metaphysical doctrines afford but a thin and sketchy version of our rich and complex actual experience, yet on the other hand they express this or that strong natural tendency of the mind which reflects on that experience, compelling all in this direction to the exclusion of that. like morbid physical tendencies (if you will), such doctrines, the doctrine of [xenophanes’ impersonal god30 pater’s portraits: the aesthetic hero in 1890 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 force] or [the negation of finite entities in baruch spinoza’s theology] or [giordano bruno’s materialistic pantheism], reappear at intervals, and are constitutional in certain minds. imperfections, obliquities, [the motes and beams] of vision (it may be), since they are constitutional and we cannot put them from us, they come to rank with those affected by them as no less than laws of light.7 in this way such sterilities of doctrine as [a wholly rational deity] or [a wholly naturalistic one]—sterilities to the healthy—help largely to shape the history, as well of [communities] as of individuals, by bringing special tendencies of character into exclusive action, by making conscious and effective a mere tendency of mind in antagonism to its other tendencies. as the pronounced metaphysical formula reflects a general direction of the mind; so, given those mental directions, the formula, even if it comes from without, stamps them as current coin, or (to use another image) handicaps them in the competition for survival. the common ground, if such there was, between the children of the renaissance and the children of reform at the close of the twelfth century in languedoc, would be found in the inherent, the characteristic shiftiness of one of those [ambiguously] abstract metaphysical formulæ—a metaphysical notion preoccupying men’s minds at that place and time, but taking quite different issues on the plane of practice by its passage through two opposed types of character and conditions of life. it would be an instance of the versatility, the consequent uselessness after all some might urge, of metaphysical doctrine. —abstract principles! applied to the complex world of the various forces of men’s characters, they do but lend themselves, like the old leaden rule, to the twists and angles pre-existent there, or like the larvæ of the naturalist take deceptive colour from the matter they feed on or pass across. whence had come that fantastic opinion of the eternity of matter— the eternity of matter and its implacable hostility to spirit, which at the close of the twelfth century8 lit up the fanaticism of multitudes in the south of france—has puzzled historians. was it perhaps—manicheism? as alleged by some, startled or bent on startling others by a strange name. had it come like infectious disease in the baggage of returning crusaders from some old cobwebbed brain long since turned to dust in the distant east? was it a rag of old pagan philosophy still gerald monsman 31 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 lingering like the monuments, the law, the very speech of old rome on the soil of languedoc, or a loan perhaps from saracen unbelievers in spain grown all too neighbourly, or had it actually been secreted afresh in the perverse mind of that late day? at any rate it was an established force there: it was in the air, seed from the hand of the bad sower thought some, of course.9 the matter and spirit of which metaphysicians talk are, as we know, but creations of the metaphysicians themselves, rude abstract terms for the denomination of two series of phenomena only roughly distinguishable from each other in our actual experience, where the material and the spiritual, soul and body, are ever inextricably playing upon and fusing into each other, with a closeness which is nothing less than the unity of oneself. the eternity of matter! —could anything seem more barren than a belief about that? but see it at its work on the cranky brains, the fierce hearts of a handful of wild people, vassals of that gay count raymond of toulouse, half barons half shepherds within the high narrow walls of castel la crête, a fortified feudal village built of black lava clinging to one of the highest ledges in the crest of the volcanic mountains of lodève.10 at these levels a country of the chestnut and the vine becomes a country of much rain and darkness. to these harsh people without leisure, without knowledge, without art, the old manichean [heresy], if such it was, came plausibly enough—identifying the rough and graceless world around their own rough and graceless bodies marred by labour or battle, unutterably heavy when the labour and the fight were over or else breaking into wild sin—with matter as the creation of satan or as satan himself, the indestructible element of darkness and evil in things in eternal hostility to the spirit. the metaphysical “strife” gave trenchancy to, while it explained the opposition of, good and evil in themselves and in the world about them. could they limit its reign by fasting from their rude or scanty store, by [penance and prayer], even by the proscription of marriage, by becoming rougher and ruder still in habit and person. or did it matter at all what became of the irredeemable body, what it did with itself, they might ask themselves in hours of [fasting], the puritan becoming [purer still]. allying itself to their rude taste for a purer or at least more colourless form of christianity than was known to the catholic church, it gave theoretic interest to their 32 pater’s portraits: the aesthetic hero in 1890 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 revolt against a hierarchy so closely identified with material splendour and had kept the crest for [a hundred] years without a sacred taper, without the waters of baptism. to minds thus strangely scrupulous it was a relief to think that the flesh of christ himself had been but an unreal phantom. no priest lifted the body of the lord or blessed a marriage. if one came that way by chance, tongues perhaps false averred that he went back with a mutilated person. the chanted psalms soothed, no longer, irritated or weary souls, for the old testament was a wicked book. there were no holy oils for the dying in the bare unlighted chamber which had taken the place of the castle chapel fallen to ruin. only down there below, sunk among the black cliffs, was the particular burial place of “the perfect,”11 where the bodies of their dead might go without a blessing to mingle with matter even grosser still. with a touch of grotesque pride, revealing their kinship to those far-off scotch descendants,12 far off both in time and place, these odd vassals of the [count of toulouse] might think of themselves as the pure, the perfect, the people of the spirit amid a world immersed in matter. yes! the body, the natural world, the whole material order, was plainly a vile prison-house of the soul. that “matter was eternal”—its obscure rival godhead, its eternal war with spirit throughout the ages, did but make its power in the world mightier and one’s own battle against it more desperate. with these [folk] the metaphysical dogma had given coherence and [fixed direction] and a kind of fanatical lucidity of mind to the crude instincts of a premature puritanism. on dark [lowering] days, amid those [cliffs and ravines], it might easily seem that the souls so imprisoned were apostate spirits, damned already or with but a single chance more. that was what was offered by way of p[oetry]13 to a softly dreaming lad, at home among those gloomy chieftains. unbaptised thibalt!14—here was the sort of boldly pondering soul to which the suspected theoretic link, between the barons of castel la crête, men gloomy and turbulent as the tempests they looked out upon, and their gay insouciant sovereign at toulouse, might become apparent by the sifting out of the remoter possibilities in an ambiguous doctrine. what if the doctrine of the eternity of matter, the reign, the satanic godhead of that should disclose itself as the gerald monsman 33 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 motive of some quite other mode of taking the world to this speculative lad, gifted so unmistakably with the intellectual ingenuousness which detects instinctively sincerity of conviction anywhere and will always stay to listen, always with fine equity allow its due weight to doctrine in the conduct of life? the doctrine of two principles—duteously he disciplines his thoughts upon the track of that, stimulating the early strength of a fine intelligence to discover the reason of this supreme trust, which though but a challenge to endless thinking within himself, was like a drawn sword all around in the protecting people about him. “there is an edge [in all firm belief, and with an easy metaphor we may say, the sword of faith”], says quaint [sir thomas browne, “but in these obscurities i rather use it in the adjunct the apostle gives it, a buckler; under which i conceive a wary combatant may lie invulnerable”] (1643, 1: 10).15 albi, the sacred city, the new rome of this fantastic doctrine might be just discerned sometimes in rare luminous weather from this or that outstanding hill-side, far off on the long bad winding roads which had not yet carried tibalt beyond the limits of his birthplace. for him eternal matter identified itself with that girdle of cracked and calcined hill-tops, the barren precipices, the starveling bitter-scented herbage of those hollows where the volcanic fires had gone out, after some old satanic conflict, leaving ugly dust and ruin behind. in those lowlands whence the black sheep mounted in immense flocks, bleating over the solitude as the heat of summer increased, there he divined already a richer land of corn and the vine, with the white bread which was rich cake at home and the wine, tasted here only by the sick or the very old, spreading west and south and east to the pope, to paynim spain, to the sea and the ships. but here at the crest winter came early, when behind the thick clouds battling together for months above the winding ravines satan himself might be thought to sit enthroned. and with the first rains began that other battle of the rivers, parting to this land or that down their black gashes. o! to be rid of that noise of howling sheep-dogs, of blind cruel water! then on a sudden, a frost, like swords in the air, had hushed it as he wandered like some highly intelligent wild animal, healthy still, furtive, bright-eyed beneath his sheep-skin, across the snow before a bleak sun under which a world of grey balloons 34 pater’s portraits: the aesthetic hero in 1890 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 or domes with wild basaltic columns, range upon range, was presented for a while: a passionate if sombre scenery for passionate people. and amid this world of rigid people and things, in which childhood and age and natural weakness generally seemed doubly susceptible of pain, an immense tenderness grew up in him. what a refuge for a sensitive youth, stimulated to rude manliness by those men of iron, bruised sometimes by contact with them, and, turning away, for childish solace was the soft if ignorant womanhood in this nest among the rocks, the rock-like towns! side by side with those dark, terrible, terribly sincere men whose view of [carnal relations] was summed up in the rule “that married persons must not come together but with the hope of having children,” the women and children, [simple-heart]ed, [unsulli]ed, [unaffect]ed, became more than usually tame, sweet, soft, almost animal in their winsomeness. —yes! they were like so many delightful, contemptible pet animals. a catholic, the boy would have become a priest: as it was, with the visages of these women and children, so often suffering, deep at his heart, he already had determined to be a healer of the body and went his way betimes, a self-taught botanist, searching for such [leaf or berry] as might lurk in those arid regions, finding them at last rich therein for the diligent seeker. surely one old churchyard, long disused by “the perfect,” must have its secret treasures. its carved memorial stones and shattered crosses above the old catholic bones seemed like works of nature in their immemorial age. pitiful, indulgent—he felt towards them who lay thus as one feels towards very old people, older and weaker than ever they seemed, by those long years under the moss-covered loam just above the precipice whence the unseen water roared so harshly. reverently he plucked up from among them his white or purple treasures. and one spot there was—he detected it by its ring of molten snow—where those old volcanic fires lay not yet quite extinct amid the cinders. here like the relics of a warmer, more florid and genial world, certain odd, exotic, miraculously fresh flowers were begotten as by natural magic, erect in the dark clefts, their roots deep down in the medicinable salts. only on less lightsome days this presented itself as but another humour of cruelty in things—tender things cast out upon the scathing cold in the bad reign of “matter”—the cruelty it would be his vocation to countergerald monsman 35 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 act. and it was after all a fruit of duteousness, of real humanity in those grim people that they did not discourage, that they found a way to the realisation of the lad’s purpose to become a physician.... in 1887, pater published four fictional studies under the title, imaginary portraits; then only two years later he had considered the idea of bringing out a second volume of uncollected stories, including several at that time either unwritten or only just begun, one of which pater said would have been “set in the time of the albigensian persecutions” (1970, xxx and n.1).16 we do not know if even as late as 1892, at the time its inclusion was seemingly dropped from this projected collection, whether pater had even begun “tibalt.” this second collection afterwards was indefinitely postponed or cancelled, and pater died with several published but uncollected portraits and four fragmentary portraits, “gaudioso” and “tibalt” being the most coherent among the latter. what we do know with a fair degree of certainly is that pater began work on his ultimately abandoned gaston de latour toward the end of 1886 and that a year later he simultaneously was researching “tibalt,” having borrowed in 1887 both claude fauriel’s edition of a versified account of the crusade against the “albigeois” by a provençal poet from the 1200s and also paul meyer’s translations (1875–1879) of the same topic (inman 1990, 471). in pater’s first published essay, “coleridge’s writings” (1866), he asserted, “it is at the court of frederick ii [in sicily] that the renaissance first becomes discernible as an actual power in european society” (inman 1990, 25). later in 1874 he read claude fauriel’s dante (1854); and “according to fauriel, the troubadours at the court of frederic ii had fled there for refuge from the crusade against the albigenses, which destroyed an elegant civilization and dispersed its poets” (inman 1990, 25). was this, as b.a. inman has suggested, a possible thread of plot for pater’s portrait of tibalt? “if he had finished this story, perhaps he would have had the gentle tibalt flee with the troubadours from the violence of his homeland to the court of frederick in sicily” (1990, 25). or more likely he dies a martyr. the meaning of tibalt’s name, “brave or bold people,” may have been intended to be no less a characternym than that of gaudioso’s name, signifying “joy.” in this era of st. francis of assisi, healer and herbalist, it may be that tibalt, who 36 pater’s portraits: the aesthetic hero in 1890 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 will become a physician, was intended by means of the practice of his profession to bridge the gap between, as he writes in the manuscript, “the people of the spirit amid a world immersed in matter” and the “the gay court of the count of toulouse”—whose lives of wealth and pleasure are reminiscent of the youth of st. francis. pater wrote of the temple of aesculapius in marius the epicurean: the apparatus of the medical art, the salutary mineral or herb, diet or abstinence, and all the varieties of the bath, came to have a kind of sacramental character; so deep was the feeling, in more serious minds, of a moral or spiritual profit in physical health, beyond the obvious bodily advantages one had of it; the body becoming truly, in that case, but a quiet handmaid of the soul. (1885, 1: 30) within the precincts of this temple, the young marius is shown a vision of rome as a holy city—to which he goes and at which, ultimately, he dies “with plenary grace.” here in “tibalt” the city glimpsed in the distance is “albi, the sacred city, the new rome,” a hieratic vision of the human community in contrast to its impending catastrophe— no mere theological horror of pleasure then, of fountains running with wine, but of streets running with blood. the temple of aesculapius offered a healing connection for the darker side of physical reality with the vitality of the spirit. it may be no coincidence that in pater’s essay on “style,” one of his most important aesthetic manifestos, he cited flaubert’s conjunction of the physician with the painter and the writer: “‘those who write in good style are sometimes accused of a neglect of ideas, and of the moral end, as if the end of the physician were something else than healing, of the painter than painting–as if the end of art were not, before all else, the beautiful’” (1889, 26). notes 1. permission to publish this material from among the papers of walter pater comes from the residual legatees of his literary and scholarly estate, ms. catherine jones and her sisters, whom i warmly thank. i would also like to thank for editorial support over the years: the late professor ian fletcher, reading university; emeritus professor lawrence evans, northwestern university; emeritus professor billie andrew inman, university of arizona; and the late dr. rodney g. dennis, gerald monsman 37 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 houghton library, harvard university. 2. an ancient persian doctrine of religious dualism teaching that matter, personified by the devil, is evil and that spirit, embodied in god, is good; through asceticism, one’s spirit may escape from matter. 3. the famous conclusion to his studies in the history of the renaissance describes “modern” consciousness as a product of scientific theory (1873, 207–213). pater’s use of the word “solving” in its root sense of “loosening, dissolving” (from sed-, se-, apart + luere, to release) is owing to a literary aestheticism that he shared with french advocates of art-for-art’s sake and that paralleled the earlier latin writers of the anonine age. in marius the epicurean (1885) pater gives extended attention to cornelius fronto’s style because fronto aimed to revitalize latin by capturing the rich and varied vocabulary of the old republican days before literary classicists such as caesar and cicero stimulated an artificial latin disconnected from daily life. purists such as caesar shunned unusual words as if they were “rocks” (gellius 1946, i: 10); but fronto, like the fictitious poet flavian in marius, urged his pupils to seek out “the unexpected and unlooked-for word” (1962–1963, i: 6). 4. raymond vi, count of toulouse (1156–1222). a contemporary cistercian monk described him in historia albigensium as “a limb of the devil, a son of perdition, the first born of satan, an enemy of the cross and persecutor of the church, defender of heretics...”—and the appellatives continue (warner 1922, i: 50). one suspects this reflects raymond’s success as a warrior for the albigensian cause. 5. innocent iii (1161–1216, pope 1198–1216). he asserted papal rights, spiritual and secular, and opposed heresy, notably for twenty blood-stained years against the albigensians. in 1215 he convoked the fourth lateran council, the major doctrinal assemblage of the middle ages. 6. each of pater’s pages consists of twelve primary lines with room for interlineations; the word “phase” on the primary line is cancelled and “condition” is inserted on the half-line above it; “phase” is then rewritten on the quarter-line between the cancellation and “condition” on the half-line. since pater’s last choice is the editor’s best choice, here and elsewhere, the top-most alternative is rejected in favor of the word on the quarter-line. 7. the “laws of light” is a covert nod toward professor john tyndall (1820–1893) and his lectures on light as a mode of motion, like heat, and his explanations of 38 pater’s portraits: the aesthetic hero in 1890 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 diffusion (“tyndall effect”) for why the sky is blue. the foregoing brackets are filled with: first, a reference from pater’s plato and platonism (1893, 25–29) to the ideas of the eleatic school; second, to baruch spinoza’s “nihilism,” presented in pater’s “sebastian van storck” (1887, 89–133); third, to the “lower pantheism” of giordano bruno in pater’s gaston de latour ([1896] 1995, 68–83). alternatively one might have cited john calvin, who propounded the savage doctrine of god’s “unconditional election”; pater in marius the epicurean (1885, 2: 115) alludes to calvin’s statement that “there are babies but a span long in hell.” the final bracket employs the familiar (for pater’s generation) biblical imagery of matthew 7:3, luke 6:42. 8. pater, rapidly interlining, simply neglected to write “century” here, as in another place he writes “him” for “them”; his ms housekeeping is not as meticulous as usual. but, as the editor of pierre l’estoile’s journal remarked with fine gallic dismissal, “one is not obligated to respect certain vagaries of the pen.” 9. matthew 13:3-39; galatians 6:7-8. the good sower is christ or the christ-like; the bad sower is the devil. 10. lodève, as pater knew it, was a bustling market town in the southern massif central. in the countryside, among weird rock formations, hillsides of chestnut and pine trees, mountain streams, and vineyards, are quaint medieval stonebuilt villages hidden or clinging to the steep hills, dominated here and there by a ruined chateau. castel la crête seems to be an invention of pater, suggestive of the mediterranean as a cultural crossroads in the medieval period. 11. pater here did not use quotation marks and capitalization for this phrase; later he does. albigensians belonged to one of two groups: either “the perfect,” the men and women of the ordained priesthood, who had received the gift of the holy spirit, or the unbaptized laity, called “believers.” in the next sentence the nouns in the phrase, “the pure, the perfect,” i consider less an effort to single out a specific group than to denote a general class of religious behaviors and ideas. nevertheless, “the pure” is an alternate characterization of the albigensians who were also called cathars, a name that likely derives from the greek katharoi, “the pure.” 12. the old scotch covenanters (presbyterians) in the seventeenth century revolted against the established church that they felt to be irreligious and oppressive; in two covenants they laid the groundwork for independence of religious thought and conduct, thereby introducing as well ideals of civil liberty. gerald monsman 39 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 13. pater’s abbreviation for this word is simply “p.”; either “poetry” or “philosophy.” 14. pater here is using a spelling of the name that has a host of variants in france— thibaud, thibaut, tibert, tybert, tybalt, tybalt, all derivations from thibault that originally came from a germanic surname theudbald. the thirteenth-century saint thibault of marly (1235–1247) was a knight who became a cistercian abbot. 15. browne’s reference is to paul, apostle to the gentiles, ephesians 6:14-17. religio medici translates as “the religion of a physician”; pater’s choice of this quotation is undoubtedly relevant to tibalt’s chosen profession. 16. in 1891 pater had read proofs of douglas ainslie’s blank verse play, escarlamonde, published in escarlamonde and other poems (1893). lawrence evans reports: “the story is set in languedoc at the time of the albigensian persecutions, and the eponymous heroine is sister to count raymond of toulouse, about whom, according to ainslie (in benson, [walter pater, 1906] p. 123; cf. symons, [a study of walter pater, 1932] p. 105), pater was planning an imaginary portrait” (pater 1970, 121 and n.1; xxx). references browne, thomas. 1643 religio medici. london: andrew crook. fronto, marcus cornelius. 1962–63 correspondence of marcus cornelius fronto. loeb classical library. cambridge: harvard university press. gellius, aulus. 1946. attic nights. loeb classical library. cambridge: harvard university press. inman, billie andrew. 1990 walter pater and his reading 1847–1877. new york: garland. monsman, gerald. 2008 pater’s portraits: the aesthetic hero in 1890. expositions 2(1): 83–101. panofsky, erwin. 1939 studies in iconology: humanistic themes in the art of the renaissance. new york: oxford university press. 40 pater’s portraits: the aesthetic hero in 1890 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 pater, walter. 1873 studies in the history of the renaissance. london: macmillan. 1885 marius the epicurean. 2 vols. london: macmillan. 1887 imaginary portraits. london: macmillan. 1889 appreciations with an essay on style. london: macmillan. 1893 plato and platonism. london: macmillan. 1895 miscellaneous studies. ed. c.l. shadwell. london: macmillan. 1896 gaston de latour. ed. c.l. shadwell. london: macmillan. 1970 letters of walter pater. ed. lawrence evans. oxford: clarendon. 1995 gaston de latour: the revised text. ed. gerald monsman. greensboro, nc: elt press. plato 1871a phaedrus. vol. 1 of the dialogues of plato. translated by b. jowett. oxford: clarendon. 1871b symposium. vol. 1 of the dialogues of plato. translated by b. jowett. oxford: clarendon. rossetti, d. g. 2003 collected poetry and prose. ed. jerome mcgann. new haven, ct: yale university press. warner, h.j. 1922 the albigensian heresy. new york: macmillan. [expositions 6.1 (2012) 11-18] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 comments on a new environmental ethics: the next millennium for life on earth marion hourdequin colorado college as a subfield of philosophy, environmental ethics has been marginalized, labeled as a branch of “applied ethics” offering nothing profoundly new or deep. environmental philosophers, from the perspective of the discipline more generally, are often thought to be mired in messy contingency, too burdened by empirical details to identify fundamental truths about the world. on the other hand, when environmental philosophers speak to a broad audience about intrinsic value or nonanthropocentrism, they are frequently seen as utopian and disconnected from real-world problems. environmental philosophy thus seems caught in the middle: too applied to conform to the taste of traditional theoretical philosophers and too abstract to connect with policy and practical environmental issues. wanting to make a difference, many environmental philosophers have in recent decades turned away from theoretical questions of intrinsic value and associated critiques of anthropocentrism to more pragmatic approaches to particular environmental issues and questions. pragmatists like bryan norton (1991) offer the “convergence hypothesis,” where anthropocentrists and non-anthropocentrists come to agree in the policy arena: disagreements at the level of theory need not obstruct consensus at the level of action. the sort of convergence norton describes, however, is not merely the natural result of various disparate ethical perspectives coming together in the political realm. rather, convergence requires compromise: it can happen only if some are willing to give up or at least temporarily relinquish their commitment to certain values they hold. environmental philosophers who want to be taken seriously in the realm of climate ethics, for example, tend to focus on injustice: not injustice to other species, but to humans who will be unfairly harmed as a result of past, current, and future practices of burning fossil fuels and emitting excessive greenhouse gases. yet for a nonanthropocentrist, global climate change puts at stake not only justice among human beings, but the fate of species, ecosystems, and evolutionary processes on earth more broadly. similarly, those who believe that planetary-scale geoengineering is fundamentally hubristic and overreaching can only converge with non-anthropocentrists by working to hammer out a “just” governance regime for a kind of planetary management that violates some of their deepest convictions. in a new environmental ethics (2012), holmes rolston, iii shows that environmental ethics must be at once theoretical and practical, ambitious in the breadth and depth of its critique of traditional ways of thinking yet grounded and connected to practical questions about animal welfare, wilderness protection, ecological restoration, and climate change. unlike norton, rolston resists convergence and the compromise that accompanies it. there is a substantial difference between anthropocentrism and non-anthropocentrism, he argues, championing the comment 12 latter. rolston unapologetically defends the value of non-human animals, as well as plants and other non-sentient life forms, species, ecosystems, and the earth as a whole. he is frank about his method and about the predicament of environmental philosophy more generally: in the effort to generate a paradigm shift – as is needed – one cannot proceed from pre-existing assumptions. we ought not, therefore, expect a straightforward, logical argument for the “environmental turn” (rolston 2012, 25). he notes, “often in the real world argument is not so much like the links of a chain as like the legs of a table, where support comes from multiple considerations,” which themselves are the product of “interpretive seeing,” value-laden observations and interactions with the natural world. rolston goes on to explain: in evaluating natural and world history, and our part in it, one must join earlier and later significances in ways more qualitative than quantitative, more dramatic than linear. one needs a sense of scenic scope. (rolston 2012, 26) rolston attempts to facilitate this sense of scenic scope by laying out in detail, and with rich use of cases and examples, the relevant considerations. drawing on ecology and environmental science, law, policy, and economics, rolston shows us the possibility of valuing nature much more broadly and thoroughly than we do today. this is a worldly environmental ethics, very much grounded in observations of nature and its workings along with an astute critique of where our own beliefs and institutions fail to acknowledge sources of value outside of ourselves. the book does not purport to offer an argument from first principles, and, true to its word, it instead narrates the world so as to reveal to us the possibility of a coherent alternative to our entrenched and narrow modes of valuing and the anthropocentric institutions that instantiate and further reinforce them. throughout the book, rolston engages and rejects many fashionable ways of thinking about the environment. critiques of wilderness, the idea of restoration as “faking nature,” adaptive management, and environmental pragmatism all come in for critique. for example, in response to the idea of “adaptive management,” an ecologically informed and experimental approach to ecosystem management, rolston offers the following observation: no one wishes to oppose intelligent management. everyone wants to be ‘adaptive’ [...] but ought humans to place themselves at the center, claiming management of the whole in their human self-interest? […] perhaps what is as much to be managed is the human earth-eating, managerial mentality that has caused the environmental crisis in the first place. (rolston 2012, 45) “enlightened” and politically-correct environmentalism earn no special exemption from rolston’s critical gaze. adaptive management may be better than what preceded it, but that doesn’t ensure its adequacy. similarly, rolston resists the contemporary move to collapse nature and culture, and on that basis to question the coherence of the wilderness idea and ideal. while 13 hourdequin acknowledging that many north american landscapes were historically shaped by human beings and, in that sense, were not pristine prior to european colonization, he insists that we acknowledge differences of degree between the kinds of manipulations that characterized native american use of the land and those typical of contemporary civilization. on this basis, we can distinguish wild lands from those dominated by human beings. relatedly, rolston finds confused the conceptual critique of wilderness, which appeals to the idea that wilderness is merely a social construct erected by westerners in the grip of a romantic idealization. as he notes, [i]t cannot count against ‘wilderness’ having a successful reference that some earlier peoples did not have the word. yes, ‘wilderness’ is, in one sense, a twentieth-century construct, as also is ‘the krebs cycle,’ and ‘dna,’ and the ‘permian/cretaceous extinction’ [...] nevertheless, these constructs of the mind enable us to detect what is not in the human mind. (rolston 2012, 177) on this view, there really are some parts of the natural world that are wild, and some that are significantly less so, and this distinction matters. not all the world needs to be wild, but wild nature is of distinct value, and something that should be protected and preserved. david schmidtz (on the book’s back cover) describes a new environmental ethics as “old and new” at the same time – and the description is apt. this book is up-to-date with current examples and engagement with contemporary interlocutors, yet it also reflects a point of view that rolston has been developing over many decades. it is thoughtful and considerate of other perspectives, but also direct and uncompromising. rolston is not just laying out possibilities for the reader to consider; he is making an argument, and neither the popularity nor the power of his opponents deters him. even the white house christmas tree comes in for criticism, as “teaching the wrong thing about trees” (rolston 2012, 101). rather than chop down a large tree “in the prime of its life,” rolston suggests that the president designate a standing live tree as the national christmas tree each year (rolston 2012, 101). such trees could be marked with plaques, and people could go to visit these national trees, still standing, years later. this last example provides just one illustration of rolston’s engagement with environmental ethics at many levels. he is concerned with theoretical questions of what has value, but also with the ways in which our practices reflect various value presuppositions. rolston is an engaged and attentive social critic. for example, he distinguishes between environmental economics and ecological economics, both of which attempt to ameliorate the inability of classical economics to account adequately for the environment, and he identifies ecological economics as the approach worth pursuing. environmental economics is simply “classical economics applied to natural systems” (rolston 2012, 168). ecological economics, in contrast, seriously challenges the basic presuppositions of classical economics, such as commitments to profit maximization and endless growth. rolston’s book as a whole covers an expansive territory, but the argument is set up to move the reader sequentially from familiar realms of value (humans and sentient animals) to the less comment 14 familiar (plants, species, ecosystems, and the earth). at each stage, rolston shows us that we need to recognize that value takes diverse forms – there is no single characteristic, whether rationality, sentience, or being alive, that all valuable things share in common. in the case of plants and other non-sentient beings, we find value in their teleological organization; they are entities that “defend value” (rolston 2012, 100). in species, we find “dynamic life forms preserved in historical lines that persist genetically over millions of years” (rolston 2012, 129). to kill a species is to “[shut] down the generative process, a kind of superkilling. [t]o superkill a particular species is to shut down a story of many millennia, and leave no future possibilities” (rolston 2012, 135). it is in this latter half of the book, where rolston clearly strikes out on his own, defending the value of species, ecosystems, and the earth, that the arguments are most interesting. the argument as a whole recapitulates ideas rolston has been defending for many years, but the development of these arguments and the treatment of particular issues and examples in the context of the overall argument is often provocative and new. i want to discuss just two examples to illustrate the many-stranded nature of the book as a whole: the discussion of ecological restoration and the theme of character and virtue that runs throughout. while one might think that environmental philosophers would embrace ecological restoration as an exemplar of a healthy and caring relationship between humans and the land, the relationship between the two fields has been complex. aldo leopold, who holds a place of high esteem among environmental ethicists, was of course not only the author of “the land ethic,” but also a pioneering figure in ecological restoration. his work in this field, however, has been little discussed and written about by environmental philosophers. because the possibility of restoration depends on the existence of ecological damage, some have worried that restoration has an insidious side. perhaps the most well-known and widely cited essay on restoration by an environmental philosopher is robert elliot’s “faking nature” (1982), which views restoration with suspicion. this essay, later expanded into a book, argues that restoration fakes nature by passing off human-created nature as authentic or real. restoration obscures the disruption of natural processes that occurred at a site, failing to reveal the way in which a disturbed site’s genealogy diverges from that of an undisturbed landscape. elliot highlights the free play of natural processes as a source of natural value, and argues that restored sites lack that value: they are inevitably diminished in relation to their undisturbed counterparts. what’s more, restored sites are deceptive, because they trick us into thinking they are natural, when in fact they are not. one of elliot’s central worries is that restoration will be used as an excuse for degradation: if we mistakenly believe that restored sites are just as good as natural landscapes prior to disturbance, we may be less wary of mining, logging, and other activities, which in fact destroy natural value, even if followed by restoration. rolston, while sharing the concern that we not use restoration as an excuse to engage in ecologically destructive behavior, contests the claim that restored nature is inevitably inauthentic and unnatural. “the naturalness returns,” argues rolston (rolston 2012, 184). if we put the pieces back, nature will eventually take over, and a site can be transformed from an artifact into a 15 hourdequin place where natural processes reign. for rolston, the term “restoration” is misleading insofar as it suggests that we are putting things back or resetting the clock – restoration is “forward looking,” it is about “rehabilitation for the future” (rolston 2012, 185). so while he acknowledges that a disturbed site has experienced a disruption or discontinuity that cannot be undone, rolston wants us to recognize that there are other aspects of natural value that can return: a restored site can again be natural and wild, in the sense that natural processes can return as can significant freedom from human control. this discussion raises the question of how we should consider other forms of restoration, particularly those that do not fully restore naturalness or wildness. rolston does recognize that there are kinds and degrees of restoration (rolston 2012, 183) and that sometimes we will restore to make restitution for past damage, and other times for pragmatic reasons, to benefit people. this seems consistent with a contextual approach to restoration (hourdequin and havlick 2011) and with the recognition of cultural values associated with particular landscapes and the possibility of restoration that integrates the cultural and the natural. this approach allows that “historical fidelity” – understood narrowly as loyalty to pre-disturbance ecological conditions – is not the only relevant value in restoration. while historical fidelity understood in this way may be an appropriate and central guiding value in certain places such as large natural areas, elsewhere other social and cultural values legitimately come into play. the field of ecological restoration has developed significant divisions over the role of history, with some insisting that restoration should always strive to replicate the structure, composition, and function of pre-disturbance reference ecosystems, and others arguing for “forward-looking restoration” (choi 2004, 2007) that takes little account of the past, instead focusing on developing new ecosystems that will function effectively under changing conditions and that respond to human needs and values. traditionalists worry that this latter vision will fail to value what came before and collapse into a hubristic and promethean remaking of the natural world. this worry is legitimate, but one can acknowledge diverse possibilities and roles for restoration without accepting a vision of restoration as a mere servant of narrow human interests. rolston, in recognizing the dynamism and diversity of nature and value, seems to allow space for many forms of restoration – some restorations might be large scale and guided by the goals of bringing back naturalness and wildness; others might be smaller and serve primarily to heal our relationship with the natural world by encouraging us to engage positively rather than negatively with nature (cf. jordan 2003; light 2002); still other restorations might serve as exemplars of how the human and the natural can productively blend in spaces that people regularly use and inhabit. agroecology projects, ranchland restoration, and the development of urban natural areas might be instances of these latter kinds of restoration. rolston’s willingness to acknowledge various forms of restoration reflects a more general acknowledgement of the complexity of our relationship with nature and the values we find there. we face, inevitably, difficult choices as we navigate relationships with other living beings, and with entities at higher levels of organization: species, ecosystems, and the planet. the poignancy of these relationships is underscored throughout the book, as rolston guides our thinking through comment 16 decisions in which multiple values are at stake. for example, he raises numerous questions about whether and when we ought to intervene to alleviate pain in the natural world. should we rescue a grizzly bear and her cubs stranded on an island in the middle of yellowstone lake (rolston 2012, 134–135)? should we rescue starving bighorn sheep (rolston 2012, 71)? drowning bison (rolston 2012, 71)? these are not easy questions. pain is often a bad thing that we should seek to reduce, but again, we need to consider context. pain and suffering are part of the natural world and attempting to eliminate them entirely would not only be sisyphean but unwise, on rolston’s view. though predation involves pain, predation is essential to ecological systems. there is a tragic element to life, but we can see also how tragedy is entwined with larger processes and cycles which themselves have significant value (rolston 2012, 74). the emphasis on context, complexity, and the diversity of values pervades rolston’s work, and the recognition of this complexity seems to call for the cultivation of particular traits of character in us, traits that enable us to grapple with complexity and motivate us to respond in appropriate ways. rolston is clear that he is not a virtue ethicist if what virtue ethics entails is the rejection of rules as important guides for behavior. rules, argues rolston “channel caring and discipline virtuous intentions,” and are crucial in moving people along the path toward virtue and in regulating individual and institutional behavior in the public realm (rolston 2012, 136). despite these caveats, rolston does offer us a picture of the kind of people we must be if we are to embrace an earth ethics. like aldo leopold, he encourages us not only to be “good citizens” in the traditional sense, but ecological citizens (rolston 2012, 221). we must learn how to reside on earth and to do so with “respect, reverence, and care” (rolston 2012, 222). we need hope (rolston 2012, 216) and solidarity on a global scale (rolston 2012, 222). we need to know our home place – not just the highways and shopping malls, but the plants, the animals, the geology, the climate, and the interconnections among these things and their relation to us. “threedimensional persons” are those that appreciate the urban, the rural, and the wild: they understand how human civilization is nested within broader ecological contexts. as gary snyder explains in “the place, the region, and the commons,” living in place involves having a sense of home centered around the hearth – or in the town or city where one resides – but extending outward from there to farms and ranches to “woodlot, forest, desert or mountain” (snyder 1990, 28). on this view, the concerns that occupy rolston in a new environmental ethics are not only about values or character; they are existential: but how could we be were it not for this planet that provided our very shape? two conditions – gravity and a livable temperature range between freezing and boiling – have given us fluids and flesh. the trees we climb and the ground we walk on have given us five fingers and toes […] the land gave us a stride, and the lake a dive. the amazement gave us our kind of mind. we should be thankful for that, and take nature’s stricter lessons with some grace. (snyder 1990, 29) 17 hourdequin or as rolston puts it, “earth is not something we outgrow or rebuild and manage to our liking, it is the ground of our being” (rolston 2012, 222). in a new environmental ethics, rolston gives us a map to guide us in revaluing nature and reconfiguring our relationship with the natural world. in many places, it is a sketch map, awaiting new ways of thinking, new values, and new institutions to populate and fill it out in a way that enables rather than truncates life on earth. more will need to be said to convince us that we should abandon our self-centeredness and follow rolston’s lead. our cynicism is so deep that when social scientists tell us that money doesn’t buy happiness once we’ve met our basic needs (kesebir and diener, 2008), but that relationships, community engagement, and meaningful work do, we are skeptical. isn’t this just what the 1% wants us to think? is this not a ploy to keep us in our place? to truly compel change, others will need to take the map as a guide and begin to fill out, on the ground, the landscape envisioned there. there are times when one might also wish that rolston offered more in the way of traditional arguments for his position, the comforting deductions from premises to conclusions that philosophers so deeply prize. instead we find rolston prodding us to see the world differently, gently insisting that in effect, our value schemes have got it all (or almost all) wrong. how presumptuous, one might respond: where are the arguments? but then we are provoked to ask, with respect to our anthropocentrism, our conviction that the world is here for us to manage according to our will, our commitment to infinite growth: where are the arguments, and can they withstand critical scrutiny? works cited choi, young d. 2004. “theories for ecological restoration in changing environment: toward ‘futuristic’ restoration.” ecological research 19.1: 75–81. choi, young d. 2007. “restoration ecology to the future: a call for new paradigm.” restoration ecology 15.2: 351–353. hourdequin, marion, and david g. havlick. 2011. “ecological restoration in context: ethics and the naturalization of former military lands.” ethics, policy, and environment 14.1: 69–89. jordan, william r., iii. 2003. the sunflower forest: ecological restoration and the new communion with nature. berkeley, ca: university of california press. kesebir, pelin, and ed diener. 2008. “in pursuit of happiness: empirical answers to philosophical questions.” perspectives on psychological science 3: 117–125. comment 18 light, andrew. 2002. “restoring ecological citizenship.” in democracy and the claims of nature: critical perspectives for a new century, edited by ben a. minteer and bob p. taylor, 153–172. ny: rowman and littlefield. norton, bryan. 1991. toward unity among environmentalists. new york: oxford university press. rolston, holmes, iii. 2012. a new environmental ethics: the next millennium for life on earth. new york: routledge. snyder, gary. 1990. the practice of the wild. new york: north point press. [expositions 4.1&2 (2010) 47-62] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 avignon vs. rome: dante, petrarch, catherine of siena thomas renna saginaw valley state university abstract in the fourteenth century the image of ancient rome as babylon was transformed into the positive idea of rome as both a christian and a classical ideal. whereas dante disassociated augustine‟s babylon from imperial rome, petrarch turned avignon into babylon, a symbol of an avaricious papacy. for catherine of siena avignon was not evil, but a distraction which prevented the pope from reforming the italian clergy, bringing peace to italy, and launching the crusade. “there is only one hope of salvation in this place! here, christ is sold for gold!” 1 and so francesco petrarch denounced the avignon of the popes as the most evil place on earth since the days of ancient babylon. this view of the holy see should have disappeared when the papacy returned to rome in 1377, but it did not. on the contrary, the castigation of the sins of pontiffs intensified, as subsequent ages used this profile to vilify the papacy, the clergy, the french monarchy, and the french nation. 2 not to be outdone, some french historians in the twentieth century sought to correct this received tradition by examining the popes‟ worthy qualities. 3 it is curious that this depiction of avignon as the babylon captivity has enjoyed such longevity, even in college textbooks. 4 “corruption” is of course a value judgment as much as a description of actual behavior. doubtless pope clement vi did not think of his curia as “corrupt.” contemporary citizens of mongolia do not see genghis khan as the monster of the medieval christian chronicles. it serves little purpose to take petrarch‟s “babylonian captivity” literally in the search to understand the avignon era of european history. the more relevant question is why some contemporaries preferred to think of avignon as the place where christ was sold for gold. the de facto goings-on at the curia notwithstanding, what do these criticisms tell us about the critics themselves? how did the historical period shape the image? were dante, petrarch, and st. catherine of siena – the best-known opponents of the avignon papacy – in some sense products of their times, whatever their influence on later perceptions of the popes? in the main, the historiography of the avignon papacy operates on three planes: (1) the actual functioning of the curia and its ties with the rest of europe, (2) the theories of the critics, especially petrarch, and (3) the theoretical controversies of the era, such as poverty, pope and empire, papal primacy, and the responses to marsilius of padua, not to mention william of ockham. the historical context of the designation of papal avignon as the new babylon is the fourteenth-century emphasis on the positive aspects of rome, both classical and christian, and the roman people. the image of rome prior to 1300 was, after all, never completely negative. there avignon vs. rome 48 were plenty of literary reminders of the past glories of rome, not to mention the extensive physical remains and inscriptions. and even augustine‟s famous portrayal of rome as the (implied) city of man was partially offset by his acknowledgment of the roman empire 5 as the creator of peace and concord, preconditions for a just society. augustine‟s notion of political authority as the result of the primordial fall had many dissenters in the high middle ages. then too, the accelerated discussions of the donation of constantine (such as the origin of imperial power, the basis of papal authority over temporals, the pope and the transfer of empire, the pope‟s claims to rome and the patrimony) since the eleventh century kept alive the issue of the place of rome in providential history, even if only symbolic, since the empire was now german (or greek, depending on how one viewed the emperor in constantinople). however one interpreted the meaning of the donation and the transfer of empire, the pivotal role of rome seemed assured. speaking of the donation, we should not forget that the ideal of world empire – always linked conceptually in some sense to the roman empire – continued to be debated in the early fourteenth century. witness the treatments of world monarchy (read: empire) in engelbert of admont, dante, and william of ockham. if the idea of rome could be so elevated, it would be convenient, if need be, to think of an opposite, such as avignon. the increase in anti-clericalism and anti-papalism after 1300, moreover, would represent a paradigm shift from rome (if one chose a positive view of the eternal city) to another place. the popes unwittingly provided these critics with a target, the curia at avignon. it would not take much imagination to transfer babylon, with its memories of the two destructions of jerusalem, to avignon. given the heavy emphasis on the primitive church at the time of the avignon papacy, it was perhaps evitable that some literary genius, such as petrarch, would seize upon the biblical babylon as the new antichrist. petrarch‟s anti-clerical sentiments and devotion to ancient rome completed the identification of rhone and euphrates. it is argued here that petrarch‟s rhetoric of babylon was to some extent the outcome of: (1) dante‟s vision of a restored roman empire, and (2) an apocalyptic anticipation of a new age, taken unsystematically from dante and some spiritual franciscans, such as ubertino of casale and peter olivi. catherine of siena, at the close of the avignon era, restored the christian side of the rome vs. babylon polarity, while diminishing the imperial dimension (dante) and the classical/humanist conception (petrarch) of rome. in the writings of dante the notion of avignon as babylon is barely noticeable. the poet was of course familiar with the patristic, especially augustinian, 6 exegesis of babylon as a symbol of the world (and “worldliness”), confusion, the flesh, the transient, the material, and the ancient roman empire. it was the antithesis of jerusalem, the heavenly city of peace. 7 the usual meaning of rome was pagan rome, less often as the post-constantinian christian city and empire. but in the centuries after jerome and augustine, the idea of christian rome had acquired several designations, both positive and negative. as petrine primacy gained acceptance in the west, the roman church increased in jurisdiction as well as sanctity, being the resting place of saints peter and paul. the fisherman‟s city was gradually subsumed into the imperial and universal traditions of the church. following the investiture controversy, however, the less attractive side of christian rome became more evident, as critics accused the popes of excessive involvement in worldly affairs. bernard of clairvaux, who was often cited by fourteenth-century antagonists of avignon, advised pope eugene iii to concentrate on matters of the spirit. 8 the most severe criticisms came from the cathars, waldensians, and, later, spiritual franciscans. 9 the fraticelli were to have a 49 renna major influence on the depiction of popes as agents of the antichrist. thus when dante, who seems to have been familiar with the ideas of ubertino of casale and peter olivi, 10 began searching for a literary image which would express his desire for a renewed roman empire, there were several traditions of the idea of rome available to choose from. dante had his own reasons for attributing the sins of simony and nepotism to popes nicholas iii, boniface viii, and clement v, whom scholars generally recognize as the villain-popes in inferno 19, purgatorio 32, and paradiso 27. 11 recent scholars – c. t. davis, 12 n. havely, 13 g. holmes, 14 m. reeves, 15 a. vasina 16 – have emphasized the apocalyptic elements in dante‟s view of papal rome. the poet‟s array of images about christian rome seems consistent with his vision of a revived roman empire, which in some sense is integrated into a renewed christian rome. in his monarchia, now often seen as a later work (1316–18) 17 there is at least the implication that the return of a pax romana will coincide with a reformed church, to be centered in rome, not avignon. the inconsistencies in the monarchia on these ideas of rome may be due to the possibility that he wrote parts of the work in 1311–12, when henry vii was in italy. what is significant for our purposes is that dante‟s babylon-rome contrast is never without ambiguity. rome in dante‟s time is a figure of speech for babylon insofar as some recent popes (clement v and john xxii) have dishonored the roman church by their avarice. but then the notion of avignon the fallen never attains prominence in dante‟s writings. 18 the poet‟s babylon does not become the great whore who fornicates with the kings of the earth, as some later papal enemies would have it. to be sure, dante has little good to say about avignon, where clement v had lived since 1309. but dante seems uninterested in pursuing the figure of babylon in terms of the books of revelation and daniel. the reason for this reticence may simply be that the residence of the holy see on the rhone was too recent to have had sufficient time to develop as a defined symbol, one that was suitable for invective. (it might be added parenthetically that the prolonged stays at viterbo in the thirteenth century never conjured up images of babylon.) the tuscan poet‟s complaints about avignon are less about what goes on in the place, or even what it represents, but rather more about what it prevents, namely, the return of the emperor to rome and the beginning of a new age for italy and christendom. perhaps avignon for dante was a potential babylon, but for the present was relatively innocuous. while he was furious with clement v for abandoning henry vii, he refused to give up hope in the appearance of a more accommodating occupant of the chair of peter. the point is that dante‟s concept of babylon – whether christian rome or avignon – was conditioned by then current notions of the normative primitive church and its companion, apostolic poverty. the patristic babylon-jerusalem archetype was not widely used in the early fourteenth-century polemics. given his commitment to a revived roman empire and, to some extent, a form of franciscan apocalypticism, it should not be surprising that dante adapted the augustinian jerusalem-rome model to a new prototype: rome and avignon. in the end, historians should be careful not to exaggerate dante‟s identification of avignon with babylon. in the decades following the monarchia a fairly new genre flourished: panegyrics to francia and italia. should the holy pontiffs reside in france or italy? in the heat of these polemic exchanges, the notion of babylon often got lost in the praises of the motherland. the intensity of these debates, which might seem quaint and effusive to modern readers, served to promote national sentiments in both france and italy. doubtless petrarch‟s eulogies to italia and the italians avignon vs. rome 50 or the romans were influenced by these barbarian (i.e., french) insults. 19 it is hard to tell if the praises for the wonders of the land of the french in writers such as jean de hesdin 20 were really aimed at the curia in avignon, or were rhetorical flourishes intended to idealize the splendors of the patria. were the french writers assailing the actual papal avignon or using it as a convenient literary device to celebrate their own nation? certainly petrarch took their barbs seriously. how dare these descendants of the gauls denigrate the city of the caesar who conquered them! it might be added that the image of babylon need not be restricted to rome or avignon. the metaphor was also extended to other cities, such as florence 21 and naples. 22 in the biblical culture of medieval europe, scriptural allusions came easily. if avignon as babylon is implicit in dante, it is explicit in petrarch. one must be cautious, however, in attributing a single view of avignon in petrarch, since he, like his tuscan predecessor, expressed different opinions over time. much more than dante, moreover, petrarch‟s demonization of avignon 23 had a considerable impact on attitudes toward the papacy in later centuries. 24 later censors of the papacy, from the hussites to the lutherans, from the italian humanists to the zwinglians, often cited petrarch in support of their denunciations of the roman church. the appeal of petrarch‟s babylonian captivity extended down to the twentieth century. avignon became a metaphor for the corruption of the catholic church. somehow the figure of avignon had merged into that of rome. surely petrarch would have been dismayed to have seen the foibles of the “avignon church” – as he was wont to label the curia in avignon – extended to his beloved city on the tiber. one presumes that petrarch believed that once the papacy had returned to rome and reformed itself, the use of avignon as a symbol would be forgotten. as with dante there is both a positive and a negative side to petrarch‟s avignon as babylon. the negative is much the same, if more virulent, as in dante: the presence of the holy see in france (technically in the angevin empire of naples; clement vi purchased it in 1348) prevents the german emperor – louis of bavaria, then charles iv 25 – from restoring the roman empire and the historic mission of the citizens of rome. the unnatural residence of the pontiffs in avignon, however temporary, remains an obstacle to the establishment of peace in italy, and the restoration of spiritual values to the roman church. although petrarch places more emphasis on temporal peace and concord, the recovery of the ideals of the evangelical church is never forgotten. it might be noted parenthetically that neither dante nor petrarch could accurately be described as church reformers, in the sense of proponents of well-defined institutional changes in the church militant. neither questioned the validity of the institution of the see of peter or the hierarchical structure of the ecclesia. they are moralists who exhort the church‟s leaders to a change of heart, without giving much thought to how to go about reforming the organizational church. their common assumption is that christendom needs a transformation of behavior, particularly in that of the higher clergy, who are consumed with wealth and position. finally, dante‟s apocalyptic-like critique of the recent popes finds no counterpart in petrarch, who seems to have had no interest in joachimite ages of history or cosmic battles. during the period of cola di rienzo, 1343–54, petrarch is angry with the popes (clement vi and innocent vi) for asserting their episcopal rights in rome at the expense of the tribunes and senators of the roman republic. 26 the popes, petrarch believes, could have done more to restrain the roman nobility, while permitting cola a freer hand in reforming rome. so too, petrarch is upset with clement vi for allowing the french to guide his foreign affairs, not to mention curial and clerical appointments. no french petitioner leaves avignon empty-handed. by remaining 51 renna outside italy, romans and italians are prey to unruly barons and foreigners. petrarch was not impressed with the efforts of gil alvarez carillo albornoz to recover the papal states, since this intervention is yet another example of papal over-involvement in temporal affairs. it seems strange that petrarch the humanist seems oblivious to the cultural activity at the curia in avignon. 27 he sees in the papal absence the impairment of literary progress in rome and italy. as is well known, dante showed little interest in the ancient buildings and inscriptions in rome. more positively, petrarch‟s portrayal of avignon as a babylon on the rhone is considerably more hostile than that of dante. petrarch‟s avignon is a dreadful place, inhabited by despicable folks and putrid back alleys. even the food is terrible. his most trenchant criticisms of the curia and the city can be found in his familiar letters and especially his book without a name, which became a set piece for anti-papal diatribes down to the eighteenth century. although the principal failings of the avignonese clergy have to do with avarice, petrarch manages to include all the deadly sins. avignon is, quite simply, an inferno empty of faith, charity, honesty, and justice. 28 while historians have suggested various explanations for petrarch‟s distaste for this not unpleasant town, such as his perceived lack of sufficient recognition for his talents, 29 it remains true that petrarch‟s avignon is, at least in his book without a name, a place utterly without merit, virtually separated from its rhetorical twin, rome, the quasi-jerusalem. petrarch, who knew some of the writings of augustine, was aware that his beloved rome was the patristic archetype of perdition. he transformed augustine‟s rome as the implicit roman empire – transient, godless, arrogant, worldly – into the decadent avignon, a latecomer in the pantheon of demiurges. he set up new foci of good and evil, while changing one of the focal points, rome, into an ideal. dante would be a reliable guide at the start of the journey, but, like virgil, could not accompany petrarch the entire way to paradise. but the axis of babylon and rome could serve as a useful beginning for petrarch‟s paradigm. but how seriously are we to take petrarch‟s fulminations, which can sometimes sound self-righteous (and self-serving?), against the brothel on the rhone? are we naively being taken in by a later quasi-hagiographical idealization of the great poet? can we take his supposed refusal to accept a bishopric or a papal secretariatship as proof of the purity of his intentions? 30 in terms of the history of ideas, does it really matter if petrarch was genuinely sincere or that his descriptions of the curia were in fact accurate? it has been said that petrarch‟s distaste for avignon was “due to its being the home of the papacy.” 31 it is even claimed that the papacy would have been cleansed of its nepotism and simony if only the pontiffs had listened to the criticisms of dante, petrarch, and catherine of siena. 32 now, assessing the intentions of someone who lived long ago is always a risky business. at any rate, the historical significance of petrarch‟s designation of avignon as babylon lies not in its alleged accuracy, but in its use as a rhetorical topos. babylon as a figure of speech is, after all, a counterpoise to rome, itself a kind of inverted jerusalem; one is the opposite of the other, like the two faces of janus. in a letter to cola as the “prince of the romans” petrarch personifies avignon as an arrogant, ungrateful servant who snubs her “mistress.” 33 the implication is that avignon is a recent upstart, who will soon be put in her place, once mighty rome recovers her former power. (clearly for petrarch rome is a [universal] concept in addition to being a place and the city of the ancient romans.) avignon is a symbol and a metaphor for the world, which will soon return to its senses by “returning” to rome, now on the verge of recovering its lost glory; rome will lead humankind to a new age. (such is petrarch‟s plan for cola.) petrarch avignon vs. rome 52 seems to take for granted that the supreme pontiff and the curia will return to their place of origin, and that this temporary home-away-from-home will quickly be forgotten. what drives petrarch‟s hatred of the “new” babylon is his utopian vision of a revived roman empire, centered in the rome of old and the new (the present), and in a purified roman church. 34 avignon is the fifth labyrinth, and the worst of the five. 35 the current presence of the pope in avignon, furthermore, is an obstacle to this desired restoration of humankind. certainly petrarch, whatever his formal status as a franciscan friar, was no reformer with a program for a reconstructed holy see as the instrument for saving souls, his love of the poor christ notwithstanding. but perhaps it is artificial and unhistorical to separate his beloved rome from its christian heritage. while he seems not to have given much thought to what a post-avignon roman church would look like, petrarch views the two cities – classical rome and christian rome – as symbiotic and complementary. when rome will be restored to its rightful place, babylon, or rather the latest one, will fade away, its historical mission finished. it must be emphasized that petrarch‟s avignon-babylon prototype was shaped by his visions of classical rome, as well as his understanding of franciscan poverty. his antichrist, avignon, is the reverse of his christ, rome; similarly the antichrist in the book of revelation is a parody of jesus. modern scholars have perhaps overstated petrarch‟s emotional response to the physical city in the comtat-venaissin. for augustine, babylon was as much a concept as it was a place or a community; it was also historical in that babylon had a beginning (fall of the bad angels) and an end (second coming of christ). for petrarch the evil city is – in addition to being a symbol of the decadent curia – a real place, here and now; as a conceptual construct, it will presumably disappear once the vicar of christ returns to the eternal city. although the town on the rhone is the latest babylon, the papacy itself is not evil; it is the hapless victim of recent circumstances, beginning with the transfer (actually not a transfer, since clement v never got to rome) of the papacy to avignon. it is possible that petrarch, although it cannot be proven, believed that the cardinals at the curia were in some sense “products” of their absence from rome; their avarice is a manifestation of their “unnatural” residence. to a point petrarch considers the avignon popes “captives” of the french monarchy, although perhaps not to the extent of the modern stereotype of the babylonian captivity. 36 to be sure, petrarch professes to have little admiration for the french people and all things french. 37 the relevant issue is the way he often refers to the past and current “slavery” of rome, now about to be “freed” by either cola or the german emperor. 38 but what about those critics of the avignon popes who aimed their rebukes less at the curia than against individual popes and their specific actions or non-actions? the most famous of these is st. catherine of siena (1347–80), who appears at the end of the avignon era. in modern historiography she is sometimes portrayed as a dreamer who proposed “spiritual” solutions to every problem. 39 recent studies, however, reveal that the daughter of the benincasa, with its popolo minuto associations, was in fact deeply immersed in italian political life. catherine‟s views of rome and avignon were expressions of her political objectives, particularly with the salimbini. 40 as f. t. luongo puts it: “there was no catherine of siena without the war of eight saints.” 41 in her fervent letters to pope gregory xi she urges him to hurry to rome in order to reform the church, end the wars in central italy, and launch the crusade against the turks. 42 her idea of “reform” is the improvement of the moral behavior of the clergy everywhere. with regard to avignon, she actually had little to say about the curia or the city. 43 during her visit to avignon she had every chance to confirm the unspeakable corruption which petrarch sees in babylon. 44 for 53 renna catherine, avignon is, for the most part, a detour, a wrong turn on the way to rome – where all roads lead – which desperately requires the holy father‟s presence. one result of the pope‟s triple mission – reform, pacification, crusade – will be the unification of christendom, and a return to its spiritual foundations. 45 too often the catherine of hagiographical lore – based mainly on her dialogues, letters of advice, and raymond of capua‟s biography – pays too little attention to her letters to popes, prelates, and princes. while many of her proposals were, to be sure, not always realistic, they reveal a strong leader well connected to the salimbeni and various sienese factions. catherine was uninterested in catchy rhetorical paradigms, such as the petrarchian rome-babylonian, which might have appeared to her bookish and abstract. 46 significantly she cared nothing for the rome of classical antiquity. she stands within the tradition of christian rome, where the rock of peter belongs. the bishop of rome‟s first responsibility is to the people of rome and italy. 47 he can be an effective reformer and peacemaker only in the city of peter and paul. another link with dante and petrarch is her implicit love of italy, and of course her native siena. not for nothing did the church later declare catherine the (third) patron saint of italy. catherine‟s use or non-use of avignon as babylon should caution historians in attributing too much to the petrarchian prototype. while catherine had lots of motives to exploit the image for her own purposes, she chose to emphasize rome as the proper place of the papal residence. and even then, not for any theological or theoretical reasons, but simply because rome is the only place where the pope could carry out the pressing need to improve the clergy in rome (and become a beacon for reform elsewhere), bring peace to central italy, and expel the turks from christendom. catherine exemplifies the enduring legacy of christian rome and the slow pace of the integration of virgil‟s rome with that of peter. conclusion the textbook cliché of papal avignon as a hellhole which merited the criticisms of dante, petrarch, and catherine of siena, and countless others, should be left under the st. bénézet bridge. the extraordinary duration of the image of avignon as a babylonian captivity has persisted down to the twentieth century, when some french scholars, such as mollat, guillemain, fayard, and renouard, felt obligated to “defend” the avignon papacy, as if any historical phenomenon needs defending. while bad popes always make good press, it might be more constructive to think of the literary typus of avignon as babylon as, to some extent, an outcome of three historical phases of the avignon era: beginning, middle, end. while the big three – dante, petrarch, catherine – have some things in common in their views of rome and avignon, they differ in their perception of the “new” rome (or anti-rome), avignon. their views of avignon were conditioned by what they expected from the popes and rome. dante and petrarch wanted a savior to rescue rome from the ills of christendom. this liberator was the emperor for dante; cola and later the emperor for petrarch, who would look to a revived roman empire to cure the distress of christendom. all three writers (catherine claimed to have dictated her letters) envision a church revitalized on the basis of the primitive church. whereas dante set up the babylon/avignon – rome/jerusalem dichotomy as a prod to entice the german king or emperor (henry vii, louis of bavaria) to go to rome and impose a pax ghibellina in italy, petrarch emphasized the choice between avignon as babylon and rome as the vehicle of the return of the roman empire, to the benefit of the christian west and avignon vs. rome 54 indeed the world. it might be asked why other contemporary papal critics, such as william of ockham and marsilius of padua, did not revile avignon as did petrarch. for his part, ockham did not, rhetorically speaking, “need” an avignon, since the issue for him was not the papal residence, but the pope‟s heresy and what to do with a heretical pope. for marsilius, the pope‟s sin was his interference in the temporal affairs of the empire and italy. the clergy in general and the pontiff in particular should limit their actions to spiritual matters, in the manner of the apostolic community. what the cardinals did at avignon was of little concern to the paduan. interestingly many of the papal defenders during the early avignon period do not dwell on the evangelical poverty of the first bishop of rome. indeed some of the augustinian and carmelite papalists prefer to stress historical development and the usefulness of church possessions in the clergy‟s salvific work. it is possible that petrarch, who knew many augustinians, was familiar, at least indirectly, with the treatises of giles of rome, james of viterbo, and augustinus triumphus. 48 we would do well not to accept literally the dual image of the babylonian captivity as the epitome of avarice and the captive of the french monarchy. for by focusing on the alleged accuracy of the critics of the curia we are apt to miss the historical significance of their complaints: the criticism was the projection of contemporary ideas of what the papacy and the clerical church should be, namely, a near-replica of the primitive church, with its concentration on poverty and spiritual matters, especially in matters of pastoral care. the then-current discussions about the ideal nature of the church served to mold the notion of the alter-rome: avignon. the turmoil of the times influenced the depiction of the church‟s mirror-opposite. the early fourteenth century was an age of intense discussion of ecclesiology, authority of the pope vis-à-vis prelates, polemics about poverty, primitive church, wars in italy, the hundred years war, the ottoman threat, and the imperial-papal disputes. what exactly should popes and princes do? avignon was an accessible target for those who required a negative image with which to contrast their ideal society. thus in the wider sense the denigration of papal avignon as babylon should be assessed in two ways. negatively, this symbolic use of avignon epitomizes the contemporary, particularly italian, hostility toward the clergy, especially prelates, curial clergy, and popes; the hostility toward the hierocratic writings which extend papal rights over temporals; the hostility to the pope‟s interference in ecclesiastical affairs everywhere, particularly italy and france. the papacy intervenes in imperial elections, with their repercussions in italy. it should be noted that this resentment is directed at the clergy and not at the institutional church or christian doctrine. positively, the choice of avignon as the alter-rome served to raise the importance of the city of rome as the focus of an interest in antiquity. indirectly the image of a counter-image elevated the imperial ideal, in the sense of practical policy (to make the german emperor an arbiter of disputes in italy) and a philosophical paradigm. the babylon myth helped to solidify the current enthusiasm for the apostolic community as a model for church renewal. to demonize another place, babylon, was indirectly a pointer to the failures of papal leadership and, at the same time, was a reminder to the supreme pontiff of his responsibility to provide such guidance. avignon was not a permanent or near-permanent symbol, unlike augustine‟s city of man, but a transient abode of sin, soon to be rendered obsolete by a regenerated vicar of christ in the city of peter. petrarch‟s choice of a set of opposites – rome and babylon – suited his search for ways to idealize ancient rome. avignon proved a convenient foil with which to elevate his true concern, a revived roman empire. his new typology replaced the former model of rome and jerusalem, then 55 renna an exegetical, homiletic, and liturgical commonplace. the italian trinity – dante, petrarch, catherine – should be seen in the context of the wider “crisis” 49 of the church and papacy in the fourteenth century. the conceptual frames of their criticisms of the avignon curia are firmly within the contemporary disposition to make the gospel community a reality. the received patristic paradigm (rome and jerusalem) needed some reworking to adjust to the times. if there were no avignon, the papal foes would have had to invent one. endnotes 1. petrarch, letter 10, in francesco petrarca, sine nomine, lettera polemiche e politiche (bari: laterza, 1973), 113; norman p. zacour, trans., petrarch‟s book without a name (toronto: pontifical institute of medieval studies 1973), 73. 2. see robert coogan, “petrarch‟s liber sine nomine and a vision of rome in the reformation,” renaissance and reformation, n.s. 7.1 (1983): 1–12; “the nature, artistry and influence of petrarch‟s „epistolae sine nomine,‟” acta conventus neo-latini turonensis 1 (1980): 109–23. 3. in particular, the works of guillaume mollat, such as les papes d‟avignon (1305–1378). 10th ed. (paris: latouzey et ané, 1965); 9th ed. translated by janet love as the popes at avignon 1305–1378 (london: thomas nelson, 1965); bernard guillemain, la cour pontificale d‟avignon, 1309–1376 (paris: de boccard, 1962); “il papato ad avignon,” in la crisi del trecento e il papato avignonese (1274–1378), ed. diego quaglioni, storia della chiesa 11 (turin: san paolo 1994), 233–80; jean favier, les papes d‟avignon (paris: a. fayard, 2006); yves renouard, la papauté à avignon (paris: presses universitaires de france, 1954); translated by denis bethell as the avignon papacy 1305–1403 (hamden, ct: archon, 1970). see daniel waley, “opinions of the avignon papacy: a historiographical sketch,” storiografia e storia: studi in onore di eugenio dupré theseider (rome: bulzoni 1974), 175–88. 4. see, e.g., john p. mckay et al., a history of western society, vol. 1 (2nd ed.; boston: houghton mifflin, 1983), 407; the popes, controlled by french kings, excluded “spiritual objectives.” philip iv persuaded clement v to “rule from avignon”; the popes were concerned only with secular matters: dennis sherman and joyce salisbury, the west in the world, vol. 1 (boston: mcgraw hill 2006), 307. the wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/avignon_papacy; modified 9/10/09) for “avignon papacy,” known everywhere of course as the babylonian captivity, repeats the same clichés about the near-universal outcry about the degradation of the new capital. one wonders if petrarch would have been flattered by the lasting effect of his typology, or dismayed by this emphasis on the “secular” concerns of the curia. the babylon metaphor never seems to lose its appeal. it is often used today to castigate the greed and secular character of american society. see richard j. neuhaus, american babylon: notes of a christian exile (philadelphia: basic books, 2009); and peter fearon, hamptons babylon: life among the super-rich in america‟s riviera (secaucus: citadel, 1998). american evangelical christians are fond of using the image to condemn the pursuit of mammon. examples: alexander hislop, the two babylons (1903; repr. ontario: chick, 1998): the catholic church (or “papal worship”) is a cover for a revived paganism; r. a. coombes, america, the babylon: america‟s destiny foretold in biblical prophecy (overland park: leathers, 1998) sees biblical prophecy fulfilled; steve gallagher, intoxicated with babylon: the seduction of god‟s people in the last days (dry ridge: pure life, 2007); the popular series by tim lahaye et al., babylon rising. 4 vols. (new york: bantam, 2003–08). avignon vs. rome 56 5. see book 4 of de civitate dei. ed. bernard dombart and alphonse kalb. corpus christianorum series latina 47–48 (brepols: turnhout, 1955). 6. see frederick van fleteren, “babylon,” in augustine through the ages, ed. allan d. fitzgerald et al. (grand rapids: w. b. eerdmans 1999), 83–84; johannes van oort, jerusalem and babylon: a study into augustine‟s “city of god” and the sources of his doctrine of the two cities (leiden: brill 1991); e. lamirande, “babylon,” in augustinus-lexikon, vol 1., ed. cornelius mayer (basil: schwabe 1986), 566–69. 7. frederick van fleteren, “jerusalem,” in augustine through the ages, ed. allan d. fitzgerald et al. (grand rapids: w. b. eerdmans 1999), 462–63. 8. john d. anderson and elizabeth t. kennan, trans., five books on consideration: advice to a pope. bernard of clairvaux, vol. 13. cistercian fathers 37 (kalamazoo: cistercian, 1976); j. leclercq and h. rochais, ed., sancti bernardi opera 3 (rome: ed. cisterciensis, 1957), 379–494. 9. for the spirituals, see david burr, the spiritual franciscans (university park: pennsylvania state university press, 2001), chaps. 1–3. also nicolò mineo, profetismo e apocalittica in dante (catania: università di catania, 1968), and “gli spirituali francescani e l‟apocalisse di dante,” la rassegna della letteratura italiana 102 (1998): 26–46 at 36–44; paul amargier, “pétrarque et la polémique contre la curia,” in franciscains d‟oc: les spirituels ca. 1280–1324. cahiers de fanjeaux 10 (toulouse: edouard privat, 1975), 355–69. 10. see nick havely, dante and the franciscans: poverty and the papacy in the „commedia‟ (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2004); maria grazia blasio, “petrarca e il dibattito religioso fra due e trecento,” archivio storico italiano 166.616 (2008): 183–214. 11. see charles t. davis, “rome and babylon in dante,” in rome in the renaissance: the city and the myth, ed. paul a. ramsey. papers of the thirteenth annual conference of the center for medieval and early renaissance studies (binghamton, ny: center for medieval and early renaissance studies, 1982), 19–40. the cowardly soul who made the great denial (inferno 3: 57) is usually taken to mean celestine v. 12. charles t. davis, dante and the idea of rome (oxford: clarendon, 1957), easily the most comprehensive study of the topic. davis stresses the multilayered use of rome in dante. for a study of the earliest precedents in dante, see raffaello morghen, “la lettera di dante ai cardinali italiani e il conclave di perugia del 1305,” in cività medioevale al tramonto. saggi e studi nella crisi di un, età (bari: laterza 1971), 119–44; arsenio frugoni, “dante tra due conclavi la lettera ai cardinali italiani,” letture classensi 2 (1969): 71–91. for the replies of guido vernani, dante‟s first respondent, see anthony k. cassell, the monarchia controversy (washington, dc: catholic university of america press, 2004), 242–48 and passim. 13. in addition to n. 10, see “the blood of the apostles: dante, the franciscans and pope john xxii,” italian studies 52 (1997): 38–50; “poverty in purgatory: from commercium to commedia,” dante studies 104 (1996): 229–43; “from assisi to avignon: dante, the franciscans, and the papal inquiry of 1309–12,” journal of the institute of romance studies 3 (1994–95): 43–52; paola nasti, “the amorous bride and her lovers: images of the church in the heaven of the sun,” in dante and the church, ed. paolo acquaviva and jennifer petrie. wcd foundation for italian studies (portland/dublin: four courts press, 2007), 93–125. 14. george a. holmes, “dante and the popes,” in the world of dante: essays on dante and his times, ed. cecil grayson (oxford: clarendon, 1980), 18–43; “monarchia and dante‟s attitude to the popes,” in dante and governance, ed. j. r. woodhouse (oxford: clarendon, 1997), 46–57. satires on 57 renna rome were commonplace. see john a. yunck, “economic conservatism, papal finance, and the medieval satires on rome,” in changes in medieval society, ed. sylvia lettice thrupp (new york: appleton century-crofts, 1964), 72–85. 15. marjorie reeves, “dante and the prophetic view of history,” in grayson, 44–60. see also kalikst morawski, “le mythe de l‟empereur chez dante,” révue des études italiennes 12 (1965): 280–301. james of viterbo, one of the best-known papal hierocrats, makes jerusalem the regnum christi, and babylon the regnum diaboli, citing augustine and isidore; r. w. dyson, ed., james of viterbo: de regimine christiano (leiden-boston: brill, 2009), 20. significantly for james only the church is the kingdom of christ. thus all other kingdoms are in some sense “babylons.” 16. augusto vasina, “dante di fronte ad avignone (1 marzo 1980),” letture classensi 9–10 (1982): 173–89; “il papato avignonese nella storiografia degli ultimi decenni,” in aspetti culturali della società italiana nel periodo del papato avignonese, 15–18 ott. 1978. centro di studi sulla spiritualità medievale (todi, 1981), 11–48. see also paolo brezzi, “chiesa,” in enciclopedia dantesca 1 (1970): 960–68; and “dante e la chiesa del suo tempo,” in dante e roma. atti del convegno di studi di roma, 8–10 aprile 1965. comitato nazionale per le celebrazioni del vii centenario della nascita di dante (florence, 1965), 97–113; and brezzi‟s excellent introduction to dante and the idea of rome and the simoniac popes, “l‟idea e la realtà di roma nel medioevo,” in roma constantinopoli mosca. da roma alla terza roma, studi 1, aprile 1981 (naples: ed. scientifiche italiane, 1983), 87–134. also matthew s. kempshall, “accidental perfection: ecclesiology and political thought in monarchia,” in acquaviva and petrie, 127–71; nicola longo, i papi, roma e dante: l‟idea e le immagini di roma nella commedia dantesca (rome: bulzoni 2004), with biblio. 17. see richard kay, introduction to dante‟s monarchia. studies and texts 131 (toronto: pontifical institute of medieval studies, 1998), xv-xliii. 18. see charles t. davis, “rome and babylon in dante,” in rome in the renaissance (n. 11 above). dante‟s avignon as babylon derives in part from lamentations. see ronald i. martinez, “lament and lamentations in the purgatorio and the case of dante‟s statius,” dante studies 115 (1997): 45–8. for dante and augustine see davis, dante and the idea of rome, 4–73. dante specialists generally agree that the flight of the giant and the harlot into the woods (inferno 32) signifies clement v‟s move to avignon. indeed all the references to the sins of the popes, including canto 19 on the damned popes, are implicit allusions to avignon. dante‟s most severe criticisms of the pontiffs are reserved for clement v, whose way of life was at least as bad as his betrayal of henry vii. see kenelm foster, “the canto of the damned popes,” dante studies 87 (1969): 47–88. dante‟s letter 11 is in effect an indictment of avignon, where pope and cardinals live in sin; they have abandoned their true home, rome; c. e. honess, trans., dante alighieri: four political letters (london: modern humanities research association, 2007), 83–97. i might add that dante often uses images of himself as opposed to the pilgrim in the commedia. danteans often distinguish between dante the poet and “dante-character” in the poem. see, e. g., stephen bemrose, a new life of dante (exeter: university of exeter press, 2000), 122 and passim. 19. see, e.g., petrarch‟s letter to charles iv: aldo s. bernardo, trans., francesco petrarch: letters on familiar matters, vol. 3 (books 17–24) (ny: italica press, 2005), fam. 18.1, 36–43. see also vol. 1, fam. 23.2, 257–65. also vol. 2 (books 9–16), fam. 11.16, 120–27; fam. 15.9, 275–79 (cf. rome as “another babylon,” 277); vol. 1 (books 1–8) fam. 6.2, 290–95. see angelo mazzocco, “un‟idea politica italiana in petrarca?” in petrarca politico. atti del convegno, roma-arezzo, 19–20 marzo 2004. nuovi studi storici 70 (rome: nella sede dell‟istituto storico italiano, 2006), 9–25. see also letter 4 to the roman people on behalf of cola in dotti, ed., sine nomine, ep. 4, 37–65. cf. dante‟s avignon vs. rome 58 letter to the princes and peoples of italy: paget toynbee, ed., dantis alagherii epistolae, (2nd ed.; oxford: clarendon, 1966), ep. 5, 42–62. 20. see jean de hesdin, jean de roquetaillande. henry cochin, “la grande controverse de rome et avignon au xive siècle,” etudes italiennes 3 (1921): 85–94. j. e. wrigley is not convinced that the papacy‟s return to rome was a cause of the schism: “pétrarque, avignon et rome: une interprétation,” in genèse et débuts du grand schisme d‟occident, avignon, 25–8 sept. 1978. colloques internationaux du centre national de la recherche scientifique (paris: éditions du centre national de la recherche scientifique 1980), 233–38. dante‟s view of the french was generally, although not always, negative. see richard cooper, “the french dimension in dante‟s politics,” in dante and governance, ed. john woodhouse (oxford: clarendon, 1997), 58–84. also: grover c. furr, “france vs italy: french literary nationalism in petrarch‟s last controversy and a humanist dispute of ca. 1395,” in proceedings of the patristic, medieval and renaissance conference 4 (1979): 115–25. 21. see joan m. ferrante, “florence and rome: the two cities of man in the divine comedy,” early renaissance. acta 5 (1978): 1–18. paris too was a babylon. constantinople likewise did not escape criticism. while the medieval itineraria to the holy land contain many hostile remarks about jerusalem – bad food, unsafe streets, dishonest innkeepers, hucksters – none, as far as i know, refer to the city of david as babylon. 22. see roberto mercuri, “avignone e napoli in dante, petrarca e boccaccio,” in avignon and naples: italy in france-france in italy in the fourteenth century, ed. marianne pade et al, analecta romana istututi danici (rome: l‟erma di bretschneider, 1997), 117–29. it was unusual to designate a surrogate the actual city being satirized. boccaccio often uses cities other than florence to heighten the humor of the satire. in decameron, day 1, story 2, abraham of paris converts to christianity upon experiencing the wickedness of the clergy of rome. doubtless boccaccio‟s readers would have thought of both rome and avignon with this reference. 23. see, e. g., zacour, trans., petrarch‟s book without a name, letters 5, 8, 9, 10, 14, 16, 18, 19. 24. in addition to n. 2 above, see franco suitner, “l‟invettiva antiavignonese di petrarca e la poesia infamante medievale,” studi petrarcheschi 2 (1985): 201–10. 25. see letters on familiar matters, vol. 2, book 10, letter 1, and book 12, letter 1; vol. 3, book 18, letter 1. 26. see in particular letters 2 and 4 to cola: dotti, ed., sine nomine, 17–18, 37–65, and dotti‟s introduction, vii-xlviii. some of the petrarch-cola letters are in mario e. cosenza, ed., petrarch: the revolution of cola di rienzo (new york: italica press, 1986); ronald g. musto, ed. (2nd ed.). for petrarch and the idea of rome see innocente toppani, “petrarca, cola di rienzo e il mito di roma,” atti dell‟istituto veneto di scienza, lettere ed arti (1976–77) 85 (1977): 155–72; giuliana crevatin, “roma aeterna,” in petrarca e agostino, ed. roberto cardini and donatella coppini (arezzo: bulzoni, 2004), 131–51; and “l‟idea di rome,” in motivi e forme delle familiari di francesco petrarca, gargnano del garda, 2–5 ott. 2002 (milan: cisalpino, 2003), 229–47 (analysis of the familiar letters and precedents in augustine); roberto weiss, the renaissance discovery of classical antiquity (oxford: blackwell 1969). 27. see jacqueline hamesse, ed., la vie culturelle, intellectuelle et scientifique a la cour des papes d‟avignon. textes et études du moyen âge 28 (turnhout: brepols, 2006); birger munk olsen, “l‟étude des classiques à avignon au xive siècle,” in pade et al., 13–25 (n. 22 above). 28. ep. 14 in liber sine nomine, 86. 59 renna 29. see ernest h. wilkins, “petrarch‟s ecclesiastical career,” in studies in the life and works of petrarch (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1955), 3–32; georges barthouil, “petrarca a avignone,” in francesco petrarca. atti del convegno internazionale, roma-arezzo-padova-arquà petrarca, 24–7 aprile 1974, atti dei convegni lincei (rome: accademia nazionale dei lincei, 1976), 205–31; angelo mazzocco, “the antiquarianism of francesco petrarca,” journal of medieval and renaissance studies 7 (1977): 203–24. the book on avignon that petrarch promised to write for francesco nelli apparently never got written; book without a name, letters 6 and 17). 30. so argues robert coogan in babylon on the rhone: a translation of letters by dante, petrarch, and catherine of siena on the avignon papacy (potomac md-madrid: studia humanitas, 1983), 7f. 31. coogan, babylon on the rhone, 113. i assume this means that petrarch‟s indignation was the result of actual conditions he claims to have experienced at avignon. coogan assumes that this anger was directed at the “papacy.” but petrarch, it seems to me, in his book without a name and his familiar letters aims his tirades more at the way of life in the curia, and by extension the city of avignon. clearly petrarch does not believe that this life-style at avignon would suddenly improve and the church universal would be rejuvenated if only clement vi would change his ways. petrarch often refers to the city of avignon as the “foulest of cities” (letter 18, book without a name, 111). it would be simplistic to reduce petrarch‟s use of avignon as babylon to just the person of the pope. 32. coogan, babylon on the rhone, 10. perhaps this kind of moralizing could lead to injecting modern values into the fourteenth century, and “presentizing” the past. further, is it realistic to assume that individual popes could fundamentally change the way of life petrarch is attacking? should we take petrarch‟s “sermons,” for that is what they are, no more literally than we would the sweeping generalizations of ubertino of casale? it is easy to confuse the reality with the city as a topos. 33. letter 2, book without a name, 38; liber sine nomine, 21: “o rodano che rodi tutto intorno! cosi riconoscete il tevere? cosi onorate il signore? o avignone, la cui vigne, se qualche fiducia meritano gli interpreti, produrrà grappoli amarissimi e cruenta vendemmia, cosi porgi ornaggio alla signoria di roma […]” “rome” does not condemn “avignon” for her corruption, but for her hesitation to recognize her as “signora,” who is planning great things for the world. 34. avignon is the “western” babylon, following in time the babylons of assyria and of egypt; letter 8 (to ildebrandino), book without a name, 67. this latest babylon is nimrod (see also letter 10, book without a name, 71). the two previous babylons were on the nile and the euphrates. the third babylon is on the rhone; letter 10, book without a name, 72. this last babylon (avignon) is the worst of the three, because it is obsessed with gold; letter 10, book without a name, 73. avignon is the newest of the three babylons, which surpasses its predecessors in faithlessness, fraud, shamelessness, pride, lust, greed, ambition, impiety; letter 17, book without a name, 97f. petrarch would probably have known that the book of revelation refers to rome as the babylon which destroyed jerusalem in 70 ce, the first time the city of seven hills was designated as babylon, a reference to the first destruction in 586 bce. avignon, then, by this count, would be the third babylon. 35. letter 8, book without a name, 67; letter 9, book without a name, 69; letter 10, book without a name, 72 (“the labyrinth of the rhone, the most confusing and by far the worst of all.”); “[…] con l‟oro si tesse il filo della salvezza. [...] con l‟oro si fa mercato di cristo”; ep. 10, liber sine nomine, 113. note that babylon, petrarch assures us, is not rome, as “some of our authors” (augustine?) would have it; letter 10, book without a name, 71. indeed, rome is our “holy mother, queen of cities”: letter 10, book without a name, 71. avignon vs. rome 60 36. the modern cliché about the popes being puppets of the french kings persists, despite the work of g. mollat, b. guillemain, and others. petrarch‟s residence at avignon was by no means unusual. while it was normal for friars to live at a nearby friary when traveling or studying outside their house, itinerant mendicants were common. it is possible that petrarch had permission to stay at avignon, but his precise status as a friar minor remains uncertain. 37. in addition to n. 20 above, see letter 2, book without a name, 38 (avignon and provence produce only bitter grapes and bloody vintage). the french in avignon are barbarians who mock their queen, rome (letter 9, book without, 71). the barbarian french are soft and effeminate (letter 17, book without a name, 107.) 38. the notion of slavery comes easily to petrarch, who freely applies it to both avignon/babylon and rome. he exhorts the roman people, cola, and charles iv to liberate rome, albeit it is not always clear what rome is supposed to be liberated from. the idea of libertas was of course often used in republican rome. see chaim wirszubski, libertas as a political idea during the late republic and early principate. cambridge classical studies (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1950; repr. 2008). petrarch the humanist seems at times to conceive of this “slavery” more in symbolic terms, and less in a literal sense, as if some tyrant were oppressing rome. sometimes these tyrants are the nobles of the great families. all of his letters to cola touch on this theme of rome‟s slavery, as well as many letters in the book without a name. 39. doubtless this historiographical – often hard to separate from the hagiographical – tradition stems from her biographer, raymond of capua. one would never know of catherine‟s missions to avignon and her involvement in sienese and florentine politics from his work, which dwells on her piety and zeal for souls, which greatly impressed gregory xi; george lamb, trans., raymond of capua, the life of st. catherine of siena (rockford, ill.: tan, 2003), 217. in the preface to the translation of her dialogues we are told that she was motivated by truth fostering love, a typical imaging of catherine in modern biographies; see giuliana cavallini‟s preface to suzanne noffke, trans., catherine of siena: the dialogue (new york-mahwah: paulist, 1980), xiii-xvi. in a standard biography, catherine is presented as a hard-driving saint among the less spiritually-minded during the war of eight saints; johannes jorgensen, saint catherine of siena. trans. ingeborg lund (london: longmans, 1944). in the widely known anthology of the three main avignon critics (dante, petrarch, catherine), the editor, robert coogan, portrays catherine as the righteous outsider who advances “spiritual” proposals to gregory and the decadent curia; see babylon on the rhone. another persistent stereotype is the catherine who single-handedly persuaded gregory xi to return to rome for the salvation of his soul. we are expected to believe that this dominican mantellata exhorted, nay threatened, the pope to flee the cesspool of depravity at avignon and return to rome to try to bring the church back to apostolic perfection. that her letters do not support his pious convention is ignored. fortunately, in the past half-century there has been a revolution in catherine studies, which attempt to place her and the benincasa firmly in the political context of central italy in the 1370s. we should not be surprised that modern writings about famous saints often follow two tracks–one devotional, one scholarly–as if the protagonist were two persons. witness the historiography of francis of assisi. 40. as forcibly argued by f. thomas luongo in his the saintly politics of catherine of siena (ithaca-london: cornell university press, 2006). 41. saintly politics, 207. 42. these three pleas occur repeatedly in her letters to gregory xi. see suzanne noffke, trans., the letters of catherine of siena, vol. 2. (tempe: arizona center for medieval and renaissance studies, 2001), letters t196 (18), t206 (61), t229 (189), t255 (192), t218 (198), t233 (212), t231 (215), 61 renna t238 (233), t239 (243). this is vol. 2 of a projected 4-volume series. also the edition by antonio volpato in santa caterina da siena: opera omnia, ed. fausto sbaffoni (pistoia: provincia romana dei frati predicatori, 2002). as far as i know, the critical italian edition of the letters has not yet been published. recent scholarship on catherine is summarized in luongo‟s introduction to saintly politics. the most up-to-date bibliography will soon appear in luongo, “catherine of siena,” in dictionary of literary biography. italian literature of the fourteenth century, ed. zygmunt b. baranski and theodore j. cachey, jr. (columbia sc: bruccoli clark layman, forthcoming). 43. catherine cautions gregory xi about always following the advice of his cardinals, who are the “enemies of all good.” if gregory deems it right to return to rome, he should do so, whatever their advice; letter t231, in letters, vol. 2, 216. when catherine assails the clergy for their vices, she speaks in general terms, and not about the avignon clergy in particular. see, e.g., letter t218 (to gregory xi), letters, vol. 2, 198–202. 44. for a reconstruction of catherine‟s avignon itinerary, see suzanne noffke, trans., letters, vol. 2, 2–4. interestingly raymond of capua does not discuss catherine‟s role in getting the pope to return to rome. 45. the vicar of christ belongs in his “proper place,” rome; letter t196, letters, vol. 2, 21. the question of rome as the correct residence of the papacy is discussed in eugenio dupré theseider‟s masterful i papi di avignone e la questione romana (florence: felice le mounier, 1939). for catherine‟s idea of rome see giuliana cavallini, “l‟idea di roma in caterina da siena,” in la roma di santa caterina da siena, ed. maria grazia bianco (rome: ed. studium, 2001), 1–12. 46. nor indeed was catherine much interested in eschatological or apocalyptic views of the papacy. angelic popes and last world emperors would have seemed a bit esoteric. see eugenio dupré theseider, “l‟attesa escatologica,” in i papi di avignone. 47. see pietro palazzini, “s. caterina corrispondente e consigliere dei papi,” in s. caterina da siena. creatura dello spirit, ed. giacinto d'urso (florence: rivista de ascetica e mistica, 1980), 57–101; ada alessandrini, “il ritorno dei papi da avignone e s. caterina da siena,” archivio deputazione romana storia patria (rome, 1933–34), 1–132; paul rousset, “l‟idée de croisade chez sainte catherine de sienne et chez les théoriciens du xive siècle,” congresso internazionale di studi cateriniani, siena/roma, 24–29 aprile 1980 (rome: cura generalizia o.p., 1981), 362–72; franco cardini,“l‟idea di crociata in santa caterina da siena,” in atti del simposio internazionale cateriniano-bernardiniano, siena, 17–20 aprile 1980, ed. domenico maffei and paolo nardi (siena: accademia senese degli intronati, 1982), 57–87; anthony t. luttrell, “gregory xi and the turks: 1370–1378,” orientalia christiana periodica 46 (1980): 391–417; chap. 3 of paul r. thibault, pope gregory xi: the failure of tradition (lanham: university press of america, 1986). 48. strictly speaking, the papalist tracts of giles of rome (de ecclesiastica potestate) and james of viterbo (de regimine cristiano) appeared before 1309, and so could not classified as “avignon” writings. but these two authors had quickly achieved quasi-official status within the hermits of st. augustine. my sense is that petrarch would have been familiar with these two works, at least in a general way, while at avignon, where augustinians were prominent. so too, the monumental de potestate ecclesiastica of augustinus triumphus (written c. 1320–26) was certainly available at the curia. i suspect that petrarch‟s concept of babylon was influenced by the claims of all three authors – although very different in their arguments – who would have the pope supreme in temporals, at least in emergency jurisdiction. petrarch would have considered james of viterbo‟s notion of the kingship of christ as too “unitary;” equally objectionable would have been the arrangement of the church in offices according to states of perfection (augustinus). he would have read these theories of the avignon vs. rome 62 church as a summons to the clergy to live up to a higher state of perfection. babylon becomes, in effect, the opposite of the clergy living in a state of perfection. given petrarch‟s close relationship with augustinian clergy, perhaps he thought it prudent and charitable not to cite from the works of the three foremost augustinian papalists. 49. the title of the volume on this period is the “crisis” in the storia della chiesa series (n. 3 above). _ [expositions 7.1 (2013) 72–87] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 educating for ethical engagement: teaching ethics to graduate and professional students toby schonfeld emory university i teach at an institution whose vision statement includes the term “ethically engaged.” indeed, the goal is to engage in discourse in a way that fosters “openness and diversity of thought, experience, and culture”; to have scholars and students who “actively debate principles” with a commitment to “integrity and honor”; and to enhance the environment “through innovative stewardship” (emory university). the commitment demonstrated by the administration to these principles should not be understated; without support at the top of an institution’s hierarchy, any effort to enforce policies or standards at the lower levels will inevitably fail. in addition, the culture of an organization is at least partly shaped by its leadership, and as a result having an administration dedicated to ethical action among its scholars and students helps generate a sense of positive energy toward “doing the right thing,” as it were. yet it is at the level of direct interaction where ethical engagement is both developed and tested. we want graduate student researchers to use proper scientific methods, to respect individuals and populations who are partners with them in their research, and to craft research products that are both intellectually rigorous and useful to others. we want professional students to learn to conduct business transactions fairly; to honor the dignity and integrity of patients, clients, and colleagues; and to embrace diversity of cultures, traditions, and perspectives. and as these students become teachers themselves, we want them not only to model appropriate interaction and research processes, but also to learn to assess students’ progress with an eye towards justice and equality. in order to produce the professionals who embody these characteristics, faculty must teach by example, but not only this, for the skills, habits, and dispositions towards ethical action can be— and must be—taught explicitly (bird 1996, 783–86). just as we would not expect a physician to know all that she needed about nephrology by inferring form and function from the surrounding systems, so too is it that we cannot anticipate graduate and professional students will be able to infer ethical engagement simply through “reading between the lines.” (in fact, explicit instruction in ethics is often required to combat precisely what the students do receive “between the lines”!) the job of graduate and professional educators includes preparing students to participate in an active citizenry, where scholars and professionals can both articulate and implement the foundations of ethical behavior both in their areas of specialty and in society more broadly. in this essay, i will describe the goals of ethics education for two main categories of postbaccalaureate students: graduate students and professional students. i will then discuss how the goals of each educational endeavor ideally shape the curriculum that is developed. next i will turn to discuss common content areas for ethics instruction (what one should teach), as well as to issues of ethics pedagogy (how one should teach). i conclude with a discussion of evaluation and 73 schonfeld assessment of ethics education for graduate and professional students, and demonstrate how these essential features ultimately cycle back to goal development and curricular design. goals of ethics education as ralph tyler comments in his classic work on curriculum design, “[i]f an educational program is to be planned and if efforts for continued improvement are to be made, it is very necessary to have some conception of the goals that are being aimed at” (tyler 1970, 3). that is, while it is true that some instructors can craft an effective course without first considering the goals of the curriculum, it is difficult to sustain such efforts without a more comprehensive view of learning outcomes. and while, broadly speaking, the goal of ethics education is to teach students to “act ethically,” more specific learning objectives will better ensure that the curriculum will enable students to achieve the desired outcome. graduate education most graduate education in ethics revolves around what is known as the responsible conduct of research (rcr), which refers to “overlapping concepts related to the discovery and dissemination of new knowledge: research, responsible science, scientific integrity, and responsible researchers” (horner and minifie 2011, s304). given that the overall goal of graduate education is to produce the next generation of researchers, scholars, and teachers, effective rcr training lays a foundation from which these students can become effective purveyors of all aspects of their craft. most rcr instruction aims at instilling a particular set of values in students from which ethical action should emerge. what are those values? scholars have proposed a series of foundational principles, ranging from those specifically related to research involving human participants and codified in the belmont report (respect for persons, beneficence, and justice) to those seen as “fundamental to the scientific enterprise as a whole…: truthfulness, trust, …best interests, …carefulness, openness, freedom, credit, education, social responsibility, legality, opportunity, and mutual respect” (horner and minifie 2011, s305). while this work has gained prominence in the past few years in the stem disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and math), the goal of producing scholars committed to the principles of ethical research transcends disciplinary lines. indeed, some programs specifically aim at teaching skills that transfer beyond the discipline (see weisblat and sell 2012). yet, consider the following definition: “rcr refers to the commitment and integrity of researchers— and all who participate in the research enterprise—to the norms of science, who—by engaging in systematic, responsible practices while proposing, performing, evaluating, and reporting research—contribute to an accurate, worthwhile, and enduring scientific record” (horner and minifie 2011, s304). whether that “scientific record” is in chemistry, sociology, or art history, the goal of instilling core values within graduate education is relevant for all students. educating for ethical engagement 74 professional education there are several reasons why training programs for professionals, especially health professionals, include ethics education. first, many hope that ethics education will enable the professional to recognize and effectively address ethical issues in clinical practice (smith et al. 2004; eckles et al. 2005; smith et al. 1994; opel and olson 2012), in policy development (agee and gimbel 2009), or in the clinical environment (lin et al. 2013). students will change both their behaviors and attitudes as a result of the ethics education in which they participate (gross 1999). some programs aim at the moral development of students, most often measured in relation to kohlberg’s schema (dieruf 2004; gross 1999; self, wolinsky, and baldwin 1989; bebeau and thoma 1994; quinn, kinnison, and may 2012). others aim at the “correction” of negative influences by powerful role models, sometimes referred to as the “hidden curriculum” (wester, willse, and davis 2010; lynoe, lofmark, and thulesius 2008; kittmer et al. 2013). for both professional and graduate students, opportunities to participate in the global community create another set of educational goals. students who are inadequately trained in ethics may in fact help to perpetuate some of the inequities that they hope to address (lahey 2012). therefore, students must be prepared for the ethical complexities of research and professional practice in an international context. there is some evidence that explicitly teaching ethics to students is correlated with positive ethical behavior (wester, willse, and davis 2010). this is true largely because ethics is “relational in nature,” and therefore attitudinal and behavioral shifts are particularly relevant (milligan and woodley 2009). for some, the goals of ethics education in the health professions is to enable “students to see ethics as a transformative, relational, and engaged endeavor in which their role is not to be an ethical ‘expert’ but rather to be informed and sensitive interlocutors within the multiple relationships of the health care setting” (milligan and woodley 2009, 133). how the goals shape curriculum design despite a set of common goals, there is a variety of approaches to achieving successful ethics education for graduate and professional education (lewin et al. 2004; goldie 2000). many curricula are practically focused, in the belief that attending to “real-world dilemmas” produces professionals who are equipped to address the ethical intricacies of clinical practice, scientific research, and a changing global environment (roberts et al. 2005). yet this may not be sufficient: one study comments that “embracing values and acquiring reasoning skills are not in fact sufficient to ensure ethical practice,” since organizational pressures for efficiency, among other pressures, may result in trainees’ inability to implement what they know is the right thing to do (mcdougall 2009, 203–206). therefore, good curriculum design must include not just the transfer of relevant knowledge, skills, and attitudes, but rather must also include practical strategies for the implementation of students’ new competencies given the reality of their future environments (mcdougall 2009, 203–206). 75 schonfeld this is especially true if the goal of the curriculum is value inculcation and implementation. integrity can only be demonstrated through ethical action, so if there are institutional, hierarchical, social, or economic challenges to the implementation of core values, they must be included as part of the curriculum. systemic pressures are not ancillary to educational design— they are essential to it. professional ethical education has often been communicated largely through the apprenticeship or mentoring model, but critics have attacked this methodology for both its lack of theoretical grounding and the impact of poor role models (satterwhite, satterwhite iii, and enarson 2000). explicit education in ethics and professionalism provides students with the skill set necessary to apply fundamental value constructs in practice in a more comprehensive way than implicit modeling does. students can learn about styles of implementation of core concepts from an apprenticeship model, but direct, longitudinal, and well-designed education in ethics and professionalism will make trainees more comfortable with and confident in topics in ethics. one important partner in curriculum design is often overlooked: the admissions committee. since admissions committees assess fitness for success in a particular curriculum, they must work closely with the faculty responsible for curriculum to ensure a good match between curriculum design and student characteristics. to see what kind of impact this might have, consider that one scholar suggests that because effective teaching of ethics requires students be comfortable with fundamental concepts of ambiguity, admissions committees consider assessing “tolerance for ambiguity” as a criterion of selection (geller 2013, 581–584). regardless of the appropriate criteria, there is a necessary connection between goals, curriculum design, and student admissions. integration of curriculum within larger framework some argue that the best way to ensure that students are prepared to identify and address ethical issues as they arise is to establish “a curriculum that situates…ethical experiences to trainees in a more systematic fashion and within a structured format, thus allowing them to more explicitly build ethical reasoning skills” (silverman et al. 2013, 58). yet such a curriculum design could take many forms: discrete ethics courses as both required and elective elements of a training program, carefully-planned (and transparently communicated to students) integration of ethics topics throughout an overall curriculum, or a series of informal workshops and sessions that are interdisciplinary and broad-based. it is often the structure of the overall curriculum that constrains the design of the ethics piece: there is often a trade-off between devoting explicit time to professionalism topics and communicating “core” knowledge of the field. the variability of structures at institutions—and within programs at those institutions—makes it difficult to recommend a “one size fits all” structure for ethics instruction to graduate and professional students. yet note that the organizational structure provides both opportunities and limitations for ethics instruction. educating for ethical engagement 76 decisions about content: what to teach content dictates form; that is, what one teaches ought to dictate how one teaches. yet there is no consensus about either of these features in the ethics community. in what follows, i will describe some broad considerations that may assist designing ethics curricula for graduate and professional students, although i do not present these considerations as exhaustive. professional and accrediting organizations many professional organizations have either required ethics education as part of their accreditation requirements for curricula, or added licensing and continuing education requirements in ethics. the office of research integrity (ori) of the department of health and human services has identified nine core areas that are essential components of rcr education (steneck 2007). since the ori is the oversight body responsible for public health service research integrity activities, its broad purview adds influence and authority to its recommendations (steneck 2007 p. v). both the national institutes of health (nih) and the national science foundation (nsf) have long required ethics training for those participating in grants that they fund. in addition to identifying general principles supporting ethics instruction, the nih suggests a list of topics on which there is common agreement (national institutes of health 2011). additionally, the council of graduate schools (cgs) has pioneered several initiatives to encourage and facilitate instruction in these areas.[1] for health professions students, ethics and professionalism standards are essential components of medical education and training programs, as recognized by the two major accrediting bodies of schools of medicine: the liaison committee on medical education (lcme) and the accreditation council for graduate medical education (acgme). programs in nursing and allied health professions also have accrediting and licensing agencies that specify ethics training. finally, the national bioethics association, the american society for bioethics and humanities (asbh), has developed a document that outlines the core competencies necessary for bioethics clinical consultants, as well as a companion piece that serves as an education guide for achieving the objectives outlined in the core competencies document. general content considerations because ethics education is multi-faceted, considerations of content are not limited to simply a list of subjects worth discussing, but instead must also include processes of skill development and mastery of appropriate attitudes. much of curriculum design in ethics, then, involves identifying relevant knowledge, skills, and attitudes (ksas). one group at georgetown university has identified the central topics for rcr training that reflects not just the mastery of content knowledge, but also skill and attitude development (tractenberg and fitzgerald 2012). in addition, health care educators are increasingly expected to instruct students not only on clinical competencies, but also critical thinking and professional partnering skills, technological 77 schonfeld aptitude, computer competence, and informatics (litchfield et al. 2000, and hayward and cairns, 2001). yet even knowing that “content” is a broad consideration in ethics does not guarantee consensus in instruction. two surveys revealed the breadth of methods and topics used in ethics education at u.s. and canadian medical schools (dubois and burkemper 2002, 432–437; lehmann et al. 2004, 682–689). authors of both studies agree that a “common core curriculum” does not exist, and that a significant gap remains between ideal and real curricula. similar findings have been confirmed in parts of europe (mijaljica 2013). a recent paper describes a novel, alternative approach to ethics education. rather than listing specific topics, mccammon and brody argue for teaching virtue ethics as a methodology to medical professionals. they claim that this approach provides at least three advantages: (1) deliberately teaching medical virtues can produce trainees who exhibit professional behavior regardless of the aptitude with which they entered the profession; (2) viewing virtue formation as a life-long process emphasizes the continual development of professional identity rather than presenting it as something whose competency can be mastered; and (3) recognizing moral distress as an inevitable byproduct of the virtuous professional’s actions promotes an open, transparent discussion of morally troubling features of professional life (mccammon and brody 2012, 257–272). decisions about pedagogy: how to teach ethics instruction, especially to an audience of professionals or soon-to-be professionals, carries with it its own set of challenges and opportunities. a good review of what makes ethics education different, and difficult, to teach was produced by felicia cohn (cohn 2012, 164–171). the overall goal is to view students as partners in education, not as passive recipients of knowledge (milligan and woodley 2009, 131–139). this means detailing a structure that enables students to engage meaningfully with the work, which can be time consuming and intensive for both students and faculty alike. using cases well in ethics, cases are often seen as the primary pedagogical vehicle for delivering relevant knowledge, developing skills, and effecting change in attitude, at least partly by recognizing the value of narrative medicine (charon 2012, 342–347; foreman, hark, and delisser 2012, 29–37; garrison et al. 2011, 85–89; jawaid et al. 2011, 66–70; stephens et al. 2012, 26–30). one study investigated the type of case that is likely to be most effective in promoting learning and found that cases that include social context details are more effective (bagdasarov et al. 2012b), as well as those cases with a simple causal structure (johnson et al. 2012, 63–77). another study that compared the effectiveness of case-based instruction on learning, retention, and ethical decisionmaking found that well-structured cases and assignments led to greater effectiveness in instruction (bagdasarov et al. 2012a, 79–86). in addition, “reflection” as an exercise is neither educating for ethical engagement 78 one clearly defined process nor easy to teach to novice learners; as a result, faculty incorporating reflective writing into a curriculum must consider carefully the meaning, structure, and desired outcomes for the exercise (wald and reis 2010, 746–749; cohn et al. 2009, 587–596; wear et al. 2012, 603–609). building on the successes of incorporating reflective writing into medical education generally, one study compared two teaching methods—written case analyses and written case analyses with group discussion—to determine the effectiveness of each method on enhancing students’ ability to identify and assess ethical issues (smith et al. 2004, 265–271). not surprisingly, the investigators concluded that group discussion of the cases added educational value; students’ ability to identify and assess ethical issues improved after a structured, facilitated discussion session (smith et al. 2004, 265–271). not all case-based pedagogy is equal. some scholars criticize the “distilling” of cases down to their essential features on the grounds that critically important contextual details get lost in translation; as a result, students end up with an impoverished array of possible resolutions to a case (milligan and woodley 2009, 131–139). in order to address this fear, some programs use “creative expressive” exercises to teach students how to recognize and capture important contextual features of situations (milligan and woodley 2009, 131–139). relevant case scenarios may be effective in graduate education (wester 2007, 199–211). yet whether for graduate or professional education, it may not be ideal to present only cases that result in moral distress or that highlight systematic failures. indeed, the “tragic” case method of teaching ethics may not be sufficient because it fails to prepare trainees both for the more common, mundane ethical issues and for their likely role in the identification and resolution of an ethical issue (opel and olson 2012, 370–373). rather, a more effective method may be to have students generate their own cases based on ethical quandaries they have experienced in their own research or practice (opel and olson 2012, 370–373; fard, asghari, and mirzazadeh 2010, 723–730). assessment and evaluation regardless of the approach to teaching ethics, assessment of learning remains a challenge. the goal of higher education is no longer simply the acquisition of knowledge in a particular area, but also the creation of a community of learners who have developed “problem-solving skills, professional skills, and authentic learning, i.e. learning in real-life contexts” (dochy, segers, and sluijsmans 1999, 332). as a result, assessment must go beyond simply measuring the “reproduction of knowledge” (dochy, segers, and sluijsmans 1999, 331–350) and attend to these additional skill sets as well. however, the measurement of such skill sets remains a challenge. one study compared three approaches to ethics education in graduate social work programs: a discrete course in ethics, an integrated ethics model, and a mixed-model approach. investigators found that students in the discrete ethics course (which focused on principles of common morality) demonstrated a greater improvement in moral judgment and ethical sensitivity than did 79 schonfeld students in either of the other two groups (sanders and hoffman 2010, 7–22). another study demonstrated evidence that even a short lecture focused on an area of research misconduct can be helpful in raising students’ awareness of the problem and how to avoid it (brkic et al. 2012, 570–574). whatever the method of instruction chosen, assessment areas must be dictated by the goals of ethics education. therefore, part of the early stages of curriculum design must include considerations of the measurement of goals when students complete the training program. as tyler states: “many variables make it impossible to guarantee that the actual learning experiences provided are precisely those that are outlined in the learning units. hence, it is important to make a more inclusive check as to whether these plans for learning experiences actually function to guide the teacher in producing the sort of outcomes desired” (tyler 1970, 104). in addition to evaluating the specific coursework, well-designed assessments will “check the validity of the basic hypotheses upon which the instructional program has been designed and developed” (tyler 1970, 105). quantitative vs. qualitative measures there are efforts to measure students’ ethics mastery via quantitative measures. one study describes a multiple choice pre-test/post-test design, where students’ scores increased significantly after a 15-week pre-clinical bioethics course (fernandes, borges, and rodabaugh 2012, 92–97). others have devised a quantitative instrument to measure “dimensions of ethicality” among graduate students that has validity across the four dimensions of data management, study conduct, professional practices, and business practices (mumford et al. 2006, 319–345). qualitative measures are often seen as a better way of capturing ethical mastery, as it is only through the application of knowledge and skills that competence is apparent. yet it is often difficult to achieve inter-rater reliability on these measures in ethics, which compromises the validity of the findings of a study (lohfeld et al. 2012, 635–642). however, given that ethics is fundamentally relational, it can be difficult to assess students’ skills and attitudes effectively by using quantitative measures alone. qualitative or mixed method techniques facilitate the evaluation of a question involving many (and sometimes unknown) variables and enables the researcher to consider both emergent themes and the role and influence of the investigator on the subject studied (creswell 2003). this is particularly valuable in ethics education, where the perspectives of the teacher may have significant influence on the development of the learner. trainees quickly learn which approaches to an ethics problem the teacher prefers and may quickly shape their habits based on the approach of the instructor. similarly, listening to a trusted teacher or mentor offer a perspective on an issue is likely to have a significant impact on the way a trainee approaches the problem. and yet we rarely account for these features in curricular assessment; rather, we simply concentrate on whether or not the students seemed to perform adequately according to our objectives. qualitative measures, however, enable us to probe for these additional features, and to recognize and address them educating for ethical engagement 80 when they emerge unexpectedly from analysis. common techniques for eliciting such information come from focus groups or interviews, but even a careful analysis of a case study (whether in a pre-test/post-test format or individually) can provide insight into the intended and unintended influences on students’ learning. qualitative assessments of ethics teaching abound in the literature. one approach builds on general work on the utility of reflective writing in medicine as a way of enhancing insight into personal and professional values, connecting to and processing cases that are emotionally engaging for practitioners, and managing moral conflicts that may arise in clinical practice (abildsnes, flottorp, and stensland 2012; cohn et al. 2009; cayley, schilling, and suechting 2007; chretien, goldman, and faselis 2008,; devlin et al. 2010,; plack et al. 2007; song and stewart 2012; thiel et al. 2011). studies have demonstrated the utility of reflective writing in ethics for specific institutions and curricula (fischer et al. 2011, 166–175), but may not be generalizable (cohn et al. 2009, 587–596; chretien et al. 2012, 42–48). other studies compare written case analysis with and without group discussion (smith et al. 2004, 265–271), while yet others use a pre-test/post-test model to identify success in achieving learning outcomes (schonfeld, dahlke, and longo 2011, 273–290). regardless, the assessment method must be dictated by the research questions asked. evaluation of curriculum many of the aforementioned instruments are designed to measure the effectiveness of a particular course or educational intervention. yet entire curricula must also be assessed for adequacy of achieving objectives, and such assessment cannot simply consist in aggregating the data from individual courses. to be done well, program-level assessments often require significant investment of faculty, student, and administrator time, and a variety of dimensions of the content, process, and logistics of the curriculum must be considered (goldman et al. 2012, 300–307). the most successful approaches consider assessment as part of the initial curriculum design, and therefore any instruments (surveys, vignettes, reflections) or processes (focus groups, structured interviews, pre-tests/post-tests) are prepared and planned well ahead of the time for assessment. conclusion as students transition to the professional workforce, they will encounter emergent ethical issues not covered by their training. indeed, such issues may arise from a myriad of sources, including from engagement with social media and public perceptions of the professional enterprise based on journalistic accounts of misdeeds (farnan et al. 2013, 620–627; anderson and giordano 2013, 58) . the only realistic way to prepare students to anticipate and address emergent issues is by providing them with the tools to reason through issues as they develop. 81 schonfeld notes 1. full disclosure: emory university has 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"a survey of medical ethics education at u.s. and canadian medical schools." academic medicine : journal of the association of american medical colleges 79.7: 682–689. lin, y. k., w. c. lee, l. c. kuo, y. c. cheng, c. j. lin, h. l. lin, c. w. chen, and t. y. lin. 2013. "building an ethical environment improves patient privacy and satisfaction in the crowded emergency department: a quasi-experimental study." bmc medical ethics 14: 8–6939–14–8. doi:10.1186/1472–6939–14–8; 10.1186/1472–6939–14–8. lohfeld, l., j. goldie, l. schwartz, k. eva, p. cotton, j. morrison, k. kulamakan, g. norman, and t. wood. 2012. "testing the validity of a scenario-based questionnaire to assess the ethical sensitivity of undergraduate medical students." medical teacher 34.8: 635–642. doi:10.3109/0142159x.2012.687845; 10.3109/0142159x.2012.687845. lynoe, n., r. lofmark, and h. o. thulesius. 2008. "teaching medical ethics: what is the impact of role models? some experiences from swedish medical schools." journal of medical ethics 34.4: 315–316. doi:10.1136/jme.2007.021147; 10.1136/jme.2007.021147. mccammon, s. d. and h. brody. 2012. "how virtue ethics informs medical professionalism." hec forum : an interdisciplinary journal on hospitals' ethical and legal issues 24.4: 257–272. doi:10.1007/s10730–012–9202–0; 10.1007/s10730–012– 9202–0. 85 schonfeld mcdougall, r. 2009. "combating junior doctors' "4am logic": a challenge for medical ethics education." journal of medical ethics 35.3: 203–206. doi:10.1136/jme.2008.026609; 10.1136/jme.2008.026609. mijaljica, g. 2013. "medical ethics, bioethics and research ethics education perspectives in south east europe in graduate medical education." science and engineering ethics. doi:10.1007/s11948–013–9432–9. milligan, e. and e. woodley. 2009. "creative expressive encounters in health ethics education: teaching ethics as relational engagement." teaching and learning in medicine 21.2: 131–139. doi:10.1080/10401330902791248; 10.1080/10401330902791248. mumford, michael d., lynn d. devenport, ryan p. brown, shane connelly, stephen t. murphy, jason h. hill, and alison l. antes. 2006. "articles: validation of ethical decision making measures: evidence for a new set of measures." ethics & behavior 16.4: 319–345. doi:10.1207/s15327019eb1604_4. <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&an=23590283&site=eho st-live> national institutes of health. "update on the requirement for instruction in the responsible conduct of research." department of health and human services, last modified april 19, <http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/not-od–10–019.html> opel, d. j. and m. e. olson. 2012. "bioethics education and resources." pediatrics in review / american academy of pediatrics 33.8: 370–373. doi:10.1542/pir.33–8–370; 10.1542/pir.33–8–370. plack, m. m., m. driscoll, m. marquez, l. cuppernull, j. maring, and l. greenberg. 2007. "assessing reflective writing on a pediatric clerkship by using a modified bloom's taxonomy." ambulatory pediatrics : the official journal of the ambulatory pediatric association 7.4: 285–291. doi:10.1016/j.ambp.2007.04.006. quinn, c., t. kinnison, and s. a. may. 2012. "care and justice orientations to moral decision making in veterinary students." the veterinary record 171.18: 446. doi:10.1136/vr.101003; 10.1136/vr.101003. sanders, scott and kay hoffman. 2010. "ethics education in social work: comparing outcomes of graduate social work students." journal of social work education 46.1: 7–22. <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eric&an=ej882326 &site=ehost-live>; <http://www.cswe.org/publications/journalofsocialworkeducation/ mostrecentissue.aspx> http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/not-od-10-019.html educating for ethical engagement 86 satterwhite, robert c., william m. satterwhite iii, and cam enarson. 2000. "an ethical paradox: the effect of unethical conduct on medical students' values." journal of medical ethics 26: 462–465. schonfeld, toby, erin l. dahlke, and john m. longo. 2011. "pre-test/post-test results from an online ethics course: qualitative assessment of student learning." teaching philosophy 34.3: 273–290. silverman, h. j., j. dagenais, e. gordon-lipkin, l. caputo, m. w. christian, b. w. maidment 3rd, a. binstock, a. oyalowo, and m. moni. 2013. "perceived comfort level of medical students and residents in handling clinical ethics issues." journal of medical ethics 39.1: 55–58. doi:10.1136/medethics–2011–100300; 10.1136/medethics– 2011–100300. smith, sherilyn, kelly fryer-edwards, douglas s. diekema, and clarence h. braddock. 2004. "finding effective strategies for teaching ethics: a comparison trial of two interventions." academic medicine 79.3: 265–271. song, p. and r. stewart. 2012. "reflective writing in medical education." medical teacher 34.11: 955–956. doi:10.3109/0142159x.2012.716552; 10.3109/0142159x.2012.716552. steneck, nicholas h. 2007. introduction to the responsible conduct of research. updated edition ed. washington, dc: office of research integrity. stephens, m. b., b. v. reamy, d. anderson, c. olsen, p. a. hemmer, s. j. durning, and s. auster. 2012. 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"a mastery rubric for the design and evaluation of an institutional curriculum in the responsible conduct of research." assessment & evaluation in higher education 37.8: 1003–1021. <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eric&an=ej990412&site=eho st-live; http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2011.596923> tyler, ralph w. 1970. basic principles of curriculum and instruction. chicago: the university of chicago press. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eric&an=ej990412&site=ehost-live http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eric&an=ej990412&site=ehost-live http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2011.596923 87 schonfeld wald, h. s. and s. p. reis. 2010. "beyond the margins: reflective writing and development of reflective capacity in medical education." journal of general internal medicine 25.7: 746–749. doi:10.1007/s11606–010–1347–4; 10.1007/s11606–010–1347–4. wear, d., j. zarconi, r. garden, and t. jones. 2012. "reflection in/and writing: pedagogy and practice in medical education." academic medicine : journal of the association of american medical colleges 87.5: 603–609. doi:10.1097/acm.0b013e31824d22e9; 10.1097/acm.0b013e31824d22e9. weisblat, gina and christine sell. 2012. "an exemplar in mentoring and professional development: teaching graduate students transferable skills beyond the discipline." journal of research administration 43.1: 60–84. <http://search.ebscohost.com/ login.aspx?direct=true&db=eric&an=ej976742&site=ehost-live; http://www.srainternational.org/sra03/template/tntbjour.cfm?id=3010> wester, kelly l. 2007. "teaching research integrity in the field of counseling." counselor education and supervision 46.3: 199–211. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx ?direct=true&db=eric&an=ej756140&site=ehost-live>; <http://aca.metapress.com/app/ home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&backto=issue,4,6;journal,12,42;linkingpublicatio nresults,1:112972,1> ___. 2010. "psychological climate, stress, and research integrity among research counselor educators: a preliminary study." counselor education and supervision 50.1: 39–55. <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=erican=ej900491&site=ehostlive>; <http://aca.metapress.com/openurl.asp?genre=article&issn=0011–0035&volume= 50&issue=1&spage=39> http://www.srainternational.org/sra03/template/tntbjour.cfm?id=3010 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expositions 2.2 (2008) 189–211] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v2i2.189 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 grasping the “raw i”: race and tragedy in philip roth’s the human stain1 lydia moland department of philosophy colby college “practical identity” in philosophical literature signifies the set of commitments that define a person’s ethical life: commitments to family, to country, to a profession, or to a cause that a person must fulfill in order to have integrity and act ethically. it is a commonplace that some roles that generate commitments are inherited: we do not, for example, choose many of our family roles, our national identity, or our race. whether we are responsible to norms within these unchosen roles is already a vexed question as we contemplate practical identity. within this subgroup of inherited roles, we find an additional complication. a society’s conventions determine to a large extent whether an inherited role subjects the individual who inhabits it to injustice. being a daughter, for instance, does not necessarily subject one to injustice. but it can if the norms around being a daughter involve less education, less freedom, and more responsibility than the norms involved in being a son. the situation is even more complex with race: while the status “daughter” exists independently of social norms, “race,” depending on whom you ask, may be a complete social construct to begin with. regardless, race is certainly something we in our culture inherit. we do not just inherit it the way we inherit hair color; we often inherit it as a role, as coming with its own set of expectations and norms. the same thing applies, then, to race as does to “daughter”: depending on the society in which you live, your racial identity can subject you to injustice. unfortunately, in american society, being of a racial category other than white has frequently entailed deep, wrenching injustice. it seems intuitively unfair, then, to imagine that an unchosen, perhaps completely constructed and unjust role could generate ethical obligations. to put it another way: it would seem impossible that violating norms generated by such a role could itself be unethical. how could refusing to participate in an unethical scheme be unethical? 190 grasping the “raw i” © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 in this paper, i will use philip roth’s novel the human stain to probe this question and others. what claim, if any, can an unjust social convention such as racism make on an individual’s practical identity? can unjust institutions make loyalty to disadvantage ethically obligatory? thinking of race in this context, i will claim, challenges assumptions about autonomy and ethics that are at the crux of our experience of ethical life. i will also argue that the human stain is a tragedy. roth’s language and plot themselves suggest this; more important for my purposes, roth’s novel can also be parsed according to philosophical theories of tragedy. in arguing for its philosophical significance, i will primarily refer to the hegelian tradition of tragic analysis, a tradition that frequently associates tragedy with attitudes towards social roles and with social upheaval.2 hegelian analyses of tragedy also characteristically highlight questions of agency and freedom: roth’s portrayal of his protagonist ultimately challenges, i will argue, contemporary conceptions of freedom, specifically those entailed by the american dream. roth’s novel highlights this conception of freedom as particularly self-deceptive and as having enormous tragic potential. in challenging us to recognize the tragic potential at the heart of our society, roth warns us, i think, that we ignore this potential at our own risk. the “raw i” the human stain features coleman silk, described as a precocious teenager growing up in 1930s new jersey who discovers an early passion and aptitude for the classics. overcoming disadvantaged origins, he becomes a successful college professor, scholar, and dean at prestigious athena college. but coleman’s success is at the price of a betrayal of self and family: coleman is black, but light-skinned enough to “pass” and so to take advantage of the upward mobility offered to white men of his generation. coleman grows up in a predominantly white neighborhood and excels at school, following his father’s example of how to live a dignified life as a black american. but his father dies during coleman’s first year at howard university. coleman’s first year had not gone well: in a washington, d.c. woolworths, coleman has been called a nigger for the first time; at howard itself, he has seen himself as a negro for the first time, and he finds that he wants neither. roth’s narrator, the novelist nathan zuckerman, reports: then he went off to washington and, in the first month, he was a nigger and nothing else and he was a negro and nothing else, and he wasn’t having it. no. no. he saw the fate awaiting him, and he wasn’t having it.…you can’t let the moland 191 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 big they impose its bigotry on you any more than you can let the little they become a we and impose its ethics on you. (roth 2000, 108) with the vertiginous realization that, if he does not say he is black, strangers do not generally assume he is black, coleman resolves to grasp “the raw i with all its agility.” he decides to choose to be white, to shed his burdensome identity as a black man once and for all. he “was coleman, the greatest of the great pioneers of the i.” he is now free on the big stage “to go ahead and be stupendous. free to enact the boundless, self-defining drama of the pronouns we, they, and i” (roth 2000, 109). tellingly, coleman sees the deception he is about to practice as part of his new, powerful self: “self-knowledge but concealed,” he says. “what is as powerful as that?” (roth 2000, 108). coleman’s body has betrayed him in placing an obstacle between him and the life he wants to lead; but its betrayal has not been thorough enough, allowing coleman to practice betrayal in return. i think that we can absolutely endorse coleman’s refusal to allow the “big they to impose its bigotry” on him. part of the vice-like grip of racial identity is that one usually cannot simply walk away from it the way one can (theoretically) walk away from or hide a religious, political or sexual identity that might limit one’s life chances. coleman’s luck in being able to walk away from the injustices of racism and realize his potential should, theoretically, be cause for celebration. his refusal to let the “little they become a we and impose its ethics on [him]” might make us flinch a bit: a struggling black community needing his talents does not in itself generate obligation, but his callous dismissal of this community seems intemperate. and what are we to make of someone who wants to be a pioneer of the i? our discomfort intensifies as coleman embarks on a lifetime of deception and betrayal necessitated by his decision to be white. he approaches the afternoon in which he tells his mother he is abandoning her for the white world the same way that he approaches the boxing matches he wins with such ease and style. his break with her is complete: he is not about to replicate his body’s half-hearted betrayal and so never sees her again. when strangers guess his ethnic identity, they tend to guess jewish; he allows this mistake to take root, then marries iris gittelman, a jew whose “sinuous thicket” of curly hair has a chance of accounting for his children’s probable hair type. in the moment in which he announces to his mother his intention to abandon her, “there floated through coleman the eerie, crazy fear that all he ever wanted from iris gittelman was the explanation her appearance could provide for the texture of their children’s hair” (roth 2000, 136). 192 grasping the “raw i” © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 as he and his wife begin their family, coleman prays that his children’s bodies not betray his betrayal of his own family. two sons and then twins, a boy and a girl, are born. all four look convincingly jewish, and coleman’s relief is explicit: “the family was now complete. they’d done it–he’d made it. with not a sign of his secret on any of his kids, it was as though he had been delivered from his secret.” elated at this deliverance, he almost confesses his secret to iris, resolving to “present his wife with the greatest gift he possessed: he would tell the mother of his four children who their father really was. he would tell iris the truth” (roth 2000, 177). but he is saved, or at least prevented, from making this confession by watching iris react to the crisis of a friend whose husband had secretly fathered another family. iris’s description of the betrayal elicits one of coleman’s many analogies to greek tragedy. her friend, iris reports, compares learning of the other family to finding corpses buried under the floor. “yes,” coleman responds, “it’s like something out of the greeks. out of the bacchae.” “worse,” iris says, simultaneously cutting his aggrandizement down to real-life size and intensifying it, “because it’s not out of the bacchae. it’s out of claudia’s life” (roth 2000, 179). warned off by iris’s fury on behalf of her friend, coleman considers himself saved “from the most childishly sentimental stunt he could ever have perpetrated” (roth 2000, 179). years later, iris dies never knowing that her husband was black—this despite, as zuckerman tells us, the fact that this information would not have bothered her in the slightest. not, anyway, at the outset of their courtship. one of coleman’s children, mark, obsesses about family history and resents coleman’s lack of information about where exactly in russia coleman’s grandparents immigrated from. years later, coleman rehearses the recurrent conversation with his son in his mind: “‘where did our greatgrandparents come from?’ russia. ‘but what city?’ i asked my father and mother, but they never seemed to know for sure. one time it was one place, one time another. there was a whole generation of jews like that. they never really knew” (roth 2000, 176). mark rebels against coleman’s nominal (or actually, though mark does not know this, fake) jewishness by becoming orthodox. one of the most unforgiving moments of the book depicts mark saying kaddish over coleman’s grave, the ancient words conveying, as zuckerman puts it, “the sobering message” that “a jew is dead” (roth 2000, 314). but coleman was no jew, and mark is rendered pathetic in his observant grief. we are reminded at the book’s end that it is still possible that one of coleman’s children will conceive a child whose appearance will expose coleman’s secret. but with coleman’s death in the book’s final chapter, there will moland 193 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 be no one to offer an explanation for an unusually dark skin tone. there will only be astonishment, bafflement, and, perhaps, misdirected accusations. in the figure of coleman’s older brother, walt, roth gives us a parallel life against which to assess the ethics of coleman’s decision. walt returns to east orange after finishing college on the gi bill. in the decades preceding the civil rights movement, he fights segregation locally, becoming the first black teacher in a white district, then the first black principal, then the first black superintendent of schools (roth 2000, 322–323). we are given coleman’s list of accomplishments in a warped comparison: the first jewish classics professor in the country, among the first jewish faculty at athena college, and, by the 1990s, its first jewish dean of faculty.3 the irony reaches an almost unbearable pitch when coleman, late in his career, is accused of using a racist remark to describe black students. it is the sixth week of the semester and the students in question have yet to attend a single seminar. in class, coleman speculates aloud that these absentee students must be “spooks”; he wonders, in other words, if they exist. but “spooks” has also a nastier, racial meaning, and, unbeknownst to coleman, the students in question are black. when the students, tipped off by their dutifully attending classmates, lodge a complaint, coleman is called upon to apologize. coleman points out that he could not have meant his comment as a racial insult since he did not know they were black precisely because they’d never been to class. ever the professor, he produces etymologies and linguistic records to prove that “spook” indicating a ghost and “spook” as a derogatory term for black people are unrelated (roth 2000, 84). when his explanation is not accepted and he is asked again to apologize, coleman rails against the black anti-semitism that he asserts is to blame. the irony intensifies: coleman is not a jew, so his students could not successfully be black anti-semites in this case even if they wanted to be. coleman did not know his students were black; they in turn do not know he is not only not jewish but black. both their accusation that he is racist and his accusation that they are anti-semites thus strangely misfire.4 but however ludicrous the accusations against coleman may be, his charging these students with black anti-semitism is yet more ludicrous since he at least, we assume, still knows that he is not a jew. as a result of the “spooks incident,” coleman resigns from athena college in disgrace. iris dies shortly thereafter of heart failure, and coleman blames the college for her death. “creating their false image of him …they had killed his wife of over forty years. killed her as if they’d taken aim and fired a bullet into her heart” (roth 2000, 11). although we might want to celebrate coleman’s escape from the injustices of his inherited role, we are left with no ambiguity about the havoc coleman’s 194 grasping the “raw i” © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 bid for independence has wreaked. his mother dies still broken-hearted at her son’s renunciation of her; his sister and brother suffer in different but agonized ways (roth 2000, 321). there is also the less tangible but no less glaring harm done to coleman’s wife and descendents. perhaps it is true that what you don’t know can’t hurt you. nevertheless, we cannot escape the sense that a grave harm has been done to each of them. ironically, it is a harm concerning who they are: in his determination to be who he is defined independently of his race, coleman has denied his descendants important information regarding who they are. they are condemned to be unknowingly self-created even if they think, as in mark’s case, that they are upholding heritage by embracing inherited roles. the damage is not only to coleman’s family but also to himself. his adherence to the “raw i” develops character traits in coleman that reverberate through his life, causing estrangement from his children and a disgraced ending to a distinguished career. his refusal to allow his body to betray who he believes he is continues in his refusal to accept the decline of sexual capacity that comes with his seventy-one years. viagra enables him to initiate a torrid affair with an apparently illiterate college janitor.5 it is his lover’s ex-husband, himself suffering from vietnam-induced post traumatic stress syndrome, who kills them both. coleman’s refusal to accept the role his physical body gives him complicates our sympathy with him. coleman seems to feel that his body is once again betraying him, this time by aging, by refusing him the sexual prowess that he once enjoyed. but it is harder to excuse coleman’s behavior on this front. aging is an “injustice” we all face, should we be fortunate to live long enough; but, as a universal disrespecter of persons, it is hard to think of it as an injustice at all. both of coleman’s rebellions—against his race and against his body—seem to stem from his insistence on the “raw i.” in neither case is he willing to be defined by something that limits his idea of who he is. but in the case of his body, his defiance seems less heroic and more attributable to pride, stubbornness, or intemperance. i will have more to say about character later; first it is worth confronting some of the moral questions that coleman’s story raises. for all the harm coleman causes to himself and others, with what justification could we say that he should have stayed with the black community and experienced all of the disadvantages that doing so would have entailed? we might try to imagine a middle position: that coleman stay in the black community—thus not betraying his birth family—but, unlike walt, decline to dedicate his life to ending segregation, preferring to pursue a career of his choice. it was part moland 195 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 of the evil of institutionalized racism, however, that there could have been no such middle position. if coleman had stayed in the black community, his life trajectory would not have entailed becoming a college professor and administrator, only minus the activism. his life would have been completely different: no graduate school, no professorship, no deanship, no opportunities to pursue the literature he loved so deeply. by the middle of coleman’s career, what was unimaginable at its beginning happened: coleman himself, as dean, is responsible for hiring athena college’s first (let us say) openly black professor. but that does not change the fact that the wheels of justice were turning too slowly for coleman himself. justice is individual; justice delayed is justice denied. but what to say about an action that, although itself a justified rebellion against radical injustice, generates such betrayal and deception? i don’t see any way out of finding coleman’s actions ethically problematic. but, given that his wrongs are driven by resistance to an unjust system, how do we pinpoint the wrong? we might say: his renunciation of this unjust role was not problematic; only the callousness with which he carried it out deserves our censure. but would one have been possible without the other? the deception and betrayal he practices on his family were arguably necessary to the success of the enterprise: likely anyone with less of a strong sense of his or her “raw i” would not have pulled it off. when coleman announces to his mother his intention to betray her, she responds by tracing his sense of his “i” to infancy: “i don’t know why i’m not better prepared for this, coleman. i should be…. you’ve been giving fair warning from almost the day you got here. you were seriously disinclined even to take the breast. yes, you were” (roth 2000, 139). comparing coleman’s intolerance of the “big they” and the “little we” to walt’s willingness to fight one in the name of the other, roth’s narrator zuckerman offers only their respective identities as explanation: “walt was walt, vigorously walt, and coleman was vigorously not” (roth 2000, 105). there seems, then, to be no explanation for behavior other than character. coleman was born with a sense of the “raw i”: only so can he engage in this betrayal successfully. in recounting coleman’s justificatory conversations with himself, the narrator puts the point another way: “don’t most people want to walk out of the…lives they’ve been handed? but they don’t, and that’s what makes them them, and this was what was making him him” (roth 2000, 139). we might instead decide that the wrong of coleman’s actions is in the fact that his deception affects people—family members—to whom he owes honesty. let us imagine for a moment a black man light-skinned enough to pass as a white man who has no living family and makes the same decision cole196 grasping the “raw i” © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 man did. let us further imagine that, conscious of not wanting to extend the deception to those with whom he has intimate relationships, he does not marry and begets no children. perhaps, as coleman’s sister herself suggests, not having children should have been the price coleman paid for his lifelong deception. but this again seems desperately unfair: why should an appallingly unjust social convention determine whether those it oppresses can ethically choose to have children or not? why should one be dependent on the luck, if one wants to call it that, of having no living relatives before one can escape the institution to begin with? indeed, such stories force us to consider the role of moral luck. most of us will not be faced with this kind of oppression; those of us who are will not usually also be given an opt-out solution that generates the same kind of deception as coleman’s. in other words, coleman’s luck in being light-skinned enough to pass was the cause of his moral unluck: his being faced with a choice very few others would face, and a choice with significant moral ramifications. the human stain as tragedy tragedy and social roles i suggested above that the human stain is a tragedy. why should this matter? one answer is that roth himself invites this analysis. the book’s epigraph is from oedipus rex, and sophoclean themes of fate and destiny recur throughout the book. the ageing coleman finds a letter written to him by a white girlfriend of his youth. this girlfriend, upon meeting his family, left him with the simple declaration, “i can’t do it,” and with no doubt as to what the “it” referred. coleman reflects that, had she agreed to marry him and raise biracial children (knowingly, as opposed to iris, who unknowingly rears biracial children), “he would have lived another life.” zuckerman continues: he thought the same useless thoughts—useless to a man of no great talent like himself, if not to sophocles: how accidentally a fate is made…or how accidental it may all seem when it is inescapable. (roth 2000, 127) resolving at another point to terminate his relationship with the janitor and live a more humble life, coleman the classics professor determines “[t]o live in a way that does not bring philoctetes to mind. he does not have to live like a tragic character in his course” (roth 2000, 170). but minutes later, infuriated by his son’s moral condescension, coleman abandons his resolve. the affair continues until it ends with bloodshed and disorder on a scale that would have made sophocles proud.6 moland 197 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 still: why should whether the human stain is a tragedy be a matter for philosophers, rather than a matter for literary theorists? i have three answers to this question. first, from its earliest instantiations, tragedy has often involved reflection on roles, the collision of roles, and the relationship of individuality to roles. hegel’s assessment of the difference between ancient and modern tragedy, for instance, is that the ancient greeks had a limited sense of self behind their roles as compared to moderns.7 ancient greeks, according to this analysis, primarily thought of themselves as instantiations of roles. tragedy resulted when equally justified roles collided and individuals instantiating those roles were destroyed in the conflict, the collision between antigone and creon being the locus classicus for this theory. coleman as much as acknowledges that this is the version of tragedy he is resisting when he says that he “saw the fate” of the “big they” and “little we” “awaiting him, and… wasn’t having it” (roth 2000, 108). coleman refuses to be reduced to a role by either the white or the black community: he insists on being a modern protagonist with a sense of individuality beyond his roles. this refusal seems all the more justified since racism traps in a way more modern and more pernicious than the way oedipus, for instance, was trapped by fate. the gods may be unjust, but they are gods; their ways are not our ways. racism is humans trapping humans, and in ways all too human. modern tragedy, again according to hegel, does not focus on the clash of distinct individuals who represent roles; instead it depicts the individual as the ground on which different passions, roles, or beliefs themselves vie for prominence. in hegel’s lectures on aesthetics, we read that, in modern drama, the “principal topic is provided by an individual’s passion, which is satisfied in the pursuit of a purely subjective end, and, in general, by the fate of a single individual and his character in special circumstances” (hegel 1975, 1206). so, for example, hamlet is both the son of a murdered father and heir to the throne, but the focal point of drama in shakespeare’s play is hamlet’s inner life, his agonizing indecision and tortured self-accusations. in coleman’s destruction, we again see the roles clash within coleman himself: his roles as his mother’s son and as a black man are incompatible with his desired role as a budding intellectual. the last is a role he cannot pursue while keeping faith with the first two roles. in the human stain as in hamlet, the individual’s struggle with an inherited role is central to the drama’s tension. in coleman’s case, as again in hamlet’s, the attempt to define the self in the face of conflicting roles drives him to undertake actions that eventually destroy him. in its focus on an individual’s struggle with roles, then, coleman’s is a modern tragedy. but coleman takes the individual’s struggle with roles to a new level. yes, 198 grasping the “raw i” © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 coleman is a member of a family, a black man, and a classicist; but he is above all else coleman. ironically, it is the deceitful polonius in whose mouth shakespeare coins the phrase, “to thine own self be true”—a dictum that coleman takes as defining a role to trump all other roles. we cannot imagine hamlet, much less antigone, resolving to act on “the raw i with all its agility.” but coleman does, signaling another modern revision in the relationship of individual to roles. coming from coleman, this new individuality sounds natural. perhaps it sounds natural because coleman is so thoroughly an american. in a sense, the human stain is a particularly american tragedy. for all coleman is doing is taking the american dream, the idea that you can be whoever you want to be, seriously.8 this radical privileging of individuality, i suggest, is our contemporary world’s contribution to hegel’s theory of tragedy. the trajectory of tragedy’s evolution, then, would be: ancient tragedy presents the clash of roles in the external world; modern tragedy highlights the clash of roles within the individual; contemporary american tragedies of a certain kind showcase individuals who believe that they can exist independently of roles, then find that this belief is in fact unsustainable. in coleman’s case, his belief that he can remain true to his “raw i” by rejecting one of society’s most unjust roles causes him to violate basic ethical principles regarding deceit and betrayal.9 america itself, by coupling a dream about the “raw i” with institutionalized racism, made for him the fulfillment of its dream impossible except at a high ethical price. and american society threatens also to destroy those who are willing and able to pay that price. the first thing looking at the human stain as a tragedy does, then, is expose this newer attitude towards individuality and its ethical ramifications. tragedy and freedom the second reason that thinking of the human stain as a tragedy matters philosophically is that tragedy often turns on conceptions of freedom.10 oedipus tries to work free of the prediction that he will kill his father; romeo and juliet try to break free of their familial constraints; schiller’s karl moor thinks he can construct a new moral order free of traditional norms. tragedies often portray, in other words, flawed conceptions of freedom that inspire the agent to fling himself against constraints he cannot, in fact, escape. looking at coleman’s case as a tragedy invites us then to ask: what faulty or incomplete idea of freedom is coleman pursuing? the answer, i think, is again in the “raw i” that coleman embraces with such conviction. for coleman, to be free is to be essentially unencumbered, moland 199 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 to be fully undefined by the surrounding world. freedom is defined by acting only on those desires that one actively chooses and that conform to one’s independent conception of oneself. it involves resistance to any kind of unchosen influence and the belief that a betrayal of the “raw i” is more terrible than a betrayal of any particular people, norms, or cultures. this vision of freedom is in fact suggested by liberal theories that emphasize choice as the essence of autonomy. it is also often implicit, i think, in kantian views that describe paradigmatic freedom as freedom from all commitments. as one such theorist, christine korsgaard, puts it, freedom is dependent on the rational self being able to shed roles that cannot be reflectively endorsed. for her, the real self is the free, unencumbered self, the self defined only by itself. it is this free self that i must live up to, to whom i am above all beholden, and whom i must not fail.11 i am not the first to suggest that the philosophical idea of the unencumbered self as the paradigmatically free self badly serves those who live under oppression. when we focus on autonomous choice as the defining factor of human agency, we discount the fact that the range of choices open to an individual may itself be a product of warped social institutions. we also neglect the fact that social conditions can corrupt one’s ability to choose well at all. when we predicate the idea of autonomy on an individual’s ability to be a self above her desires, evaluating and “shedding” components of her identity from a universal point of view, we de-emphasize the interconnectedness of roles and the fact that shedding one role might enmesh one in actions that one no more wants to endorse than one wanted to endorse the original role. as roth’s novel painfully illustrates, those unwanted consequences can be all the more agonizing when the roles themselves are based on an injustice. if it is true that injustice can harm its victims in this way, one moral to take from roth’s novel is trivial: racism is a deep evil. it is systematically, poisonously evil because it makes doing things that should be ethically defensible— for instance, choosing a career that tracks what one loves or choosing to live a life free of prejudice—ethically problematic. it traps people into roles that are bad for them and stunt them but that they nevertheless cannot shed without perpetrating deception and hurt. of course, this kind of conflict is not unique to racism. we often find ourselves forced to compromise our most cherished desires for the sake of other roles. but racism intensifies the conflict involved in such compromise. i think many of coleman’s actions are unethical: he practices callous deceit, shows little regret, continues to deceive long after it is unnecessary, and carries the egoism of the “raw i” into situations where it is not needed to combat injustice, for instance in his bedroom.12 but 200 grasping the “raw i” © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 much of his unethical action is in response to very bad moral luck: the bad luck of living in a society with prejudices against a role he did not choose; the ostensibly good luck of being able to escape that role; the bad luck of having his rejection require deception and betrayal.13 we must blame coleman, i think, but blame him with the humility that comes with the recognition of moral luck. we can blame him but must add: there but for the grace of god, perhaps, go we. on this reading, part of coleman’s bad moral luck is that his light skin invites him to assert a kind of freedom that ultimately destroys him. but the agony of bad moral luck is sometimes combined in tragedies with what would seem to be the opposite of luck, namely, necessity. it is one of tragedy’s standard operations to challenge our faith in our own freedom by exhibiting a kind of necessity that appears to crush the individual. this necessity is often expressed in the form of irony. arriving as thebes’ savior, oedipus is also the source of its corroding illness. attempting to evade a divine prophecy, he runs straight into the prophecy’s fulfillment. blind to the actual identity of the man he kills and the woman he marries, oedipus appears at the end of sophocles’ tragedy blind.14 roth’s plot, as we have seen, trades heavily in ironies.15 coleman deceives his children about their true ethnic identity; one son embraces the identity he in fact does not share with his father with a ferociousness that dooms their relationship. having escaped the injustice of one role, coleman dies caught in the conflict between two victims of injustice: a sexually abused women and a traumatized veteran. in perhaps the book’s most damning ironic twist, his own refusal to be defined by words consumes him: having escaped a role that made him the target of racial slurs, coleman’s career ends when he is accused of using a racial slur. the unjust, singular constraints of the words “nigger” and “negro” propelled coleman out of his first community; the multiple meanings of the word “spook” do not save him from being expelled from his second. the irony continues: having escaped his society’s earlier racial injustice, he falls victim to society’s nascent consciousness of these injustices. convicted finally of the evils of racism (though no thanks to coleman; rather thanks to walt and others like him), american society in roth’s portrayal has followed the pendulum to its other extreme: despite coleman’s essentially irrefutable evidence that he could not have meant “spooks” as a racial slur, he is pronounced guilty by his community and effectively ostracized.16 another way tragedies depict necessity is in portraying punishments that fit their crime: the metaphorically blind oedipus blinds himself; antigone’s throwing earth on her brother’s body sentences her to burial under the earth; moland 201 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 claudius is poisoned by his own poison. coleman’s crime is to want to be only himself, the self without the constrictions of either the “big they” or the “little we.” but the character he develops in the process of being only himself leads him to do things that ultimately destroy that self.17 his cultivation of the “raw i” makes his career and his family possible, but it also both takes away from him and contributes to the violence and the ignobility of his death.18 coleman dares to evade the prophecy, not divine but just as intractable, that he would, as a black man, live a life of disadvantage. he pays by losing both the family and the good reputation his attempted evasion allowed him to acquire. the punishment indeed fits the crime. but in coleman’s case, even the punishment leaves us again painfully aware of the original injustice that motivated the crime. the motive for his action was not objectionable the way that claudius’ ambition or iago’s jealousy, for instance, are. coleman’s determination to embrace the “raw i” was, at base, a response to racial injustice he had every right to try to escape.19 be that as it may, the book’s ample ironies and the fitting nature of its punishments seem to mock coleman’s bid for freedom. they show it up as naïve, self-deceptive, delusional. try as he might, he will not evade the social web in which he is caught; he will not become unencumbered, and any attempts to act as the “raw i” will be punished. roth’s depiction of coleman’s fateful struggle to become a free, unencumbered self suggests, i think, that freedom is more dependent on institutions and conventions than we—often wooed ourselves by the american dream and liberal, autonomous visions of the self—like to think. unjust social conventions, in addition to being simply unjust, can produce a false sense of choice, a distorted sense of self, and can foster character traits that intensify the ethical dilemmas that face those already oppressed. roth in a sense makes this point over and over again as the human stain depicts the havoc wreaked in individual lives by social injustice: coleman’s lover’s chances at happiness are doomed, roth makes clear, because of a lifetime of abuse by men; coleman’s murderer cannot escape what he did in vietnam while fighting for his country, a country that mocked and abandoned him upon his return. we are less free, roth seems to be saying, than we like to think we are. acting with too absolute a sense of the “raw i” is a denial of this fact, and is a denial, to repeat, we undertake at our own risk. tragedy and social conflict there is one final way i will consider in which we can analyze the human stain as a tragedy. tragedies, again under a hegelian description, describe 202 grasping the “raw i” © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 what happens when central beliefs within a society collide. to return to antigone and creon: both family and state were, in creon’s thebes, foundational ethical powers. it was then inevitable that, when they collided, individuals would be destroyed. in hegel’s parlance, such crisis can cause the inadequacy of one articulation of ethical life to give way to a new, more complete articulation: in the case of the ancient greeks, the unreflective beauty of greek communal ethical life is ultimately interrupted by individual reflection. this reflectivity eventually replaces the original, unreflective ethical life as a source of ethical legitimacy. it is this strain within the hegelian tradition that inspired much of raymond williams’ modern tragedy. according to williams: important tragedies seem to occur, neither in periods of real stability, nor in periods of open and decisive conflict. its most common historical setting is the period preceding the substantial breakdown and transformation of an important culture. its condition is the real tension between old and new: between received beliefs, embodied in institutions and responses, and newly and vividly experienced contradictions and possibilities. (williams 1966, 54) in focusing on historical, cultural paradigm shifts as the most fecund ground for tragedy, williams’ book is a sustained response to george steiner’s 1961 claim that tragedy in the modern world is no longer possible: that the reconciling, redemptive narratives of (for instance) christianity and marxism have eliminated the raw, irresolvable conflict that is central to tragedy (see steiner 1996). williams diagnoses this willingness to abandon tragedy as dangerously self-deceptive, as an invitation to deny the social struggle in our midst. to say that tragedy is no longer possible is to say that tragedy is “about something else,” not about us and the “deep social crisis, war, and revolution, through which we have all been living” (williams 1966, 62). in hewing so close to tragic themes, roth accepts, i think, williams’ challenge to see tragedy not as “about something else” but very much about us. tragedy on this reading exposes fault lines in a society’s self-conception that will ultimately convulse it. roth chooses for his backdrop a moment we could describe in williams’ terms: a moment in american history when racial stereotypes are still deeply “embodied in institutions and responses,” but these embodied prejudices are contrasted with “newly and vividly experienced contradictions and possibilities.” surely one description of the violence and assassinations of the 1960s is that they reflected the “substantial breakdown and transformation of an important culture.”20 and surely one point of a novel like roth’s is to prevent us from believing that tragedy is impossible in contemporary american society. moland 203 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 but we can put a finer point on it. the human stain shows us, i think, two incompatible facts about american society: first, that america asks us to believe that we are free to be whoever we want to be; second, that america, like most societies, is riddled with injustice that can systematically warp any attempts to realize that dream. this injustice also threatens to warp individuals’ moral character, facilitating character traits like coleman’s egomaniacal clinging to the “raw i” or other destructive characteristics such as apathy, defeatism, vengefulness or bitterness. to formulate this point in terms used by terry eagleton: tragedy marks “the limits of an existent regime of knowledge.” it “shows up what is necessary for a certain social or legal order to exist, and thus, in sketching its outer horizon of meaning, the points where it trembles into silence.”21 the social fact that the human stain “shows up” is the way black americans were made the silent exception to the claim that “all men are created equal.” it was indeed a silence that “marked the limits of an existent regime of knowledge”: the denial of african-americans’ basic rights exposed the failure to keep faith with the “self-evident” truth at the heart of the american political system. and the silence was indeed “necessary for a certain social or legal order”—namely, segregation and institutionalized racism—“to exist.” if tragedy in fact articulates the basic tensions and silences that underlie a social order, one reaction is to work to alleviate that tension. an obvious step to ease the tension at the heart of the human stain is to work to eradicate society’s injustices. we must do this, to put it again in williams’ terms, “because there can be no acceptable human order while the full humanity of any class of men is in practice denied.”22 but to connect tragedy’s articulation of society’s tensions to tragedy as isolating faulty conceptions of freedom: a second step in easing this tension is to be clear about the kind of freedom our society is actually capable of sustaining without doing violence to fundamental principles of ethical life. this step would involve de-romanticizing and amending the idea of the unencumbered self and its less philosophical counterpart, the american dream. it would require acknowledging the fallacy of the “raw i” and recognizing the harm such a fallacy can cause. both steps are daunting; the second may be as difficult as the first. the human stain, it seems to me, offers an indictment of america’s reluctance to take either step. conclusion coleman dies when his lover’s ex-husband, mad with (again, misfiring) antisemitic jealousy and p.t.s.d., runs the car in which coleman and his lover are driving off the road. (the killer’s confession is at [roth 2000, 257].) the car careens over an embankment and into a river; both occupants are killed 204 grasping the “raw i” © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 instantly. since there are no witnesses, the crash is ruled an accident. but vicious and sordid rumors are spread about the accident’s cause. the worst of these, posted anonymously on athena’s faculty discussion board, claims that the crash was a murder-suicide, coleman’s final act of brutality against a woman he had regularly abused (roth 2000, 291–293).23 at his funeral, coleman’s children engage in aggressive damage control, determined to salvage scraps of their father’s reputation. coleman dies with his secret still a secret; only his sister ernestine, anonymously attending the funeral, knows it and then shares it with zuckerman. within ernestine’s confiding in zuckerman, we finally find evidence of something otherwise missing from the novel: we find a brief moment of recognition on coleman’s part of the harm he has done.24 coleman had in fact remained in touch with his sister throughout his life, calling to inform her of his marriage, the births of his children, his wife’s death. ernestine reports that, speaking again of his estranged son mark, coleman had once said to her: “i got there what i produced…even if for the wrong reason. markie doesn’t even have the luxury of hating his father for the real thing. i robbed him…of that part of his birthright, too….[h]e would have hated me for never telling him and because he had a right to know.” coleman’s acknowledgement that he has robbed his children of their “right to know” is given to us at a distance, as it were: only through someone else’s account and only after his death. it is also the most cursory of admissions: it leaves unmentioned other harms coleman’s deception caused, leaving us to speculate on how deep or wide his acknowledgement actually was. ernestine herself says that, after this brief discussion, “because there was so much there to be misunderstood, we just let the subject drop” (roth 2000, 231–232). nevertheless, coleman’s acknowledgement of his children’s rights goes some way to alleviating our fear that coleman’s grasping of the “raw i” had made him entirely oblivious to the harm he has caused others. but coleman’s acknowledgement remains, like so much in the novel, a secret from the greater community. this fact means that the human stain denies us two other moments that often typify tragedy. first, coleman’s abrupt death means that he is given no opportunity to repent, to articulate humility, to recognize publicly how he has wronged his family and ask forgiveness. there is no culminating scene in which, like oedipus or creon, coleman appears—bloody, bruised, but enlightened—acknowledging publicly the error of his ways. the silent nature of coleman’s rebellion also prevents us from gleaning the comfort that sometimes comes at tragedy’s end: the comfort that, despite our horror at the hero’s destruction, at least progress has been made in articulating the tensions of a society and their possible solution. this is the moland 205 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 comfort we feel when witnessing oedipus’s humility, creon’s repentance, or fortinbras’s dignified honoring of hamlet. there is no such comfort at the end of the human stain. coleman’s tragedy is a silent one: no one except his surviving siblings and zuckerman know the truth about coleman’s life. since the community is not allowed to witness the truth of his life, coleman’s death proves nothing, clarifies nothing, uncovers nothing. there is no communal catharsis within the novel.25 any communal catharsis will have to be experienced solely by the novel’s audience.26 the lack of such a moment at the end of the human stain is particularly cruel since american society is so clearly implicated in the injustice at the heart of coleman’s life. our desire for acknowledgement on coleman’s part of his wrongdoing is likely to be—and should be—ambivalent. what do we want him to acknowledge? that he should have succumbed to the “big they” and “little we” and lived a life of disadvantage, all because of human bigotry? that we are indeed obligated by inherited roles, however unjust? surely not. surely what would bring more relief and a sense of justice at the novel’s end would be his society’s acknowledgement of the impossible choices that a human evil like racism generates. it would be an acknowledgement that american society had a part in coleman’s cultivation of a character trait that leads to his untimely death; that american society is partly to blame for his estrangement from his children and the death of his wife; that coleman, in short, is not a “raw i,” but a person deeply, tragically implicated in a web of social injustice. perhaps, believing as he did in the “raw i,” coleman would have resisted such a moment. perhaps he would have preferred to die maligned and vilified than surrender to the “big they”’s communal narrative, no matter how redemptive. perhaps it is for this reason that roth assigns him a death that cuts him off so brutally, so ignobly, from his community—a death, in effect, so raw. notes 1. i would like to thank the anonymous referees of expositions for their suggestions on an earlier draft of this paper; i would especially like to thank bernard prusak for his detailed help in thinking through the intricacies of the novel’s plot and its philosophical implications. 2. there is a wealth of substantial scholarship on tragedy in hegel: christoph menke, in tragödie im sittlichen: gerechtigkeit und freiheit nach hegel (menke 1996), gives a comprehensive account of hegel’s complex theory of tragedy and its relevance for moral political theory, highlighting especially the tension between autonomy and authenticity typical of modernity. allen speight argues for the centrality of tragedy to hegel’s conception of agency in his hegel, lit206 grasping the “raw i” © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 erature, and the problem of agency (speight 2001). other scholarship of note includes michelle gellrich, tragedy and theory: the problem of conflict since aristotle (gellrich 1988); stephen houlgate, “hegel’s theory of tragedy,” in hegel and the arts (houlgate 2007); and mark william roche, tragedy and comedy: a systematic study and a critique of hegel (roche 1998). 3. roth’s narrator reports that, as its first jewish dean,“[coleman] made the place competitive, which, as an early enemy noted, ‘is what jews do’” (roth 2000, 9). 4. it is, in another sense, possible that his students are black anti-semites and that coleman, despite not being a jew, suffers here from anti-semitism. as noted earlier, there certainly was anti-semitism among the college faculty, and coleman likely suffered from it despite the fact that his colleagues were wrong in thinking he was jewish. but i want here to highlight the sense that the alleged anti-semitism misfires epistemologically: in order for a racial attack to be executed successfully, the person attacked should not only be believed to be a member of the targeted group, but actually be a member of that group. let us assume for a moment that these students are targeting coleman because they think he is jewish and that, in addition, they dislike jews. in this case, their motivations would be anti-semitic, and they would, from a character or intention point of view, be anti-semites. but on another level, epistemological accuracy is necessary for a specific act of antisemitism to be successful. to parse the point according to the conventional epistemological criteria of justified true belief, coleman’s students are justified in their belief that he is jewish, but their belief is not true. on this level, the act misfires. there is, incidentally, no evidence that the students are anti-semites. there is not even evidence that they thought coleman was jewish, much less that this belief motivated or intensified their accusations against him. 5. the plot is in fact yet more complicated: she is only “passing” as illiterate, for reasons of her own, and is actually keeping a detailed journal of the events. 6. roth employs tragic vocabulary in other instances as well. in his last conversation with his mother, coleman reflects that “he was murdering her. you don’t have to murder your father. the world will do that for you” (roth 2000, 138). he also refers to a group of young faculty members commenting on the monica lewinsky affair as “the chorus” (roth 2000, 151). a malicious and anonymous posting about coleman’s death is sent from the account “clytemnestra@houseofatreus. com”; the book’s final chapter is entitled “the purifying ritual.” 7. hegel suggests, for instance, that “what principally counts in greek drama, whether tragedy or comedy, is the universal and essential element in the aim which the characters are realizing” (hegel 1975, 1206). in another passage, he claims that “modern tragedy adopts into its own sphere from the start the principle of subjectivity. therefore it takes for its proper subject matter and contents the subjective inner life of the character who is not, as in classical tragedy, a purely individual embodiment of ethical powers” (hegel 1975, 1223). for a challenge moland 207 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 both to this claim about ancient greeks’ sense of agency and to hegel’s reading of this claim into antigone, see (gellrich 1988, 57–78). 8. roth’s narrator zuckerman suggests as much: “was [coleman] merely being another american and, in the great frontier tradition, accepting the democratic invitation to throw your origins overboard if to do so contributes to the pursuit of happiness? or was it more than that? or was it less?” (roth 2000, 334). 9. i think of edna in kate chopin’s the awakening and bigger in richard wright’s native son as two other examples of individuals who assert a raw individuality against social norms and are destroyed in the process. both edna and bigger violate fundamental ethical norms in the pursuit of individuality—edna by committing adultery, bigger by murdering mary—and pay for this violation with their lives. passing, a 1929 novel by nella larsen, also ends with the violent death of one of the main characters, a woman who is passing. 10. hegel for instance says that dramas depicting tragedy are only possible in cultures that explicitly recognize human freedom: “truly tragic action necessarily presupposes either a live conception of individual freedom and independence or at least an individual’s determination and a willingness to accept freely and on his own account the responsibility for his own act and its consequences” (hegel 1975, 1205). 11. see korsgaard (1996, 102). john rawls’ theory of the original position, which places individuals who do not know their particular commitments in the defining moment of justice, is sometimes criticized along these same lines, fairly or not. for a classic articulation of this kind of criticism, see michael j. sandel, “the procedural republic and the unencumbered self,” in sandel (2005, chap. 23). 12. coleman’s intemperance could, i suppose, be understood in terms of another standard feature of tragedy, namely, as a character flaw. i use this phrase while conscious that translating hamartia as “flaw,” rather than as “error,” has caused a good deal of misinterpretation of aristotle’s point. but, as amélie rorty points out, error is not quite right either. she writes: “though a protagonist’s hamartia might sometimes just involve his making a factual error, it is the sort of error that a person of his character would be typically prone to make. in combination with his character, it misleads his action” (rorty 1992, 10).this, i think, is a description that could be applied to coleman’s intemperate reactions to his children and friends. see also (sherman 1992). for the source of aristotle’s use of hamartia, see aristotle, poetics, 53a10. 13. allen speight discusses the role of regret in moral luck: see speight (2001, 56). coleman’s lack of regret means that speight’s analysis here, however, cannot apply: coleman neither wishes he had acted differently nor suggests he could not have acted differently. 14. both menke and speight discuss the importance of irony in hegel’s conception of tragedy and agency more generally. their focus, however, is primarily on the ironic subject, the subject who says the opposite of what he means or, as menke 208 grasping the “raw i” © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 puts it, “buries his meaning by saying its opposite.” see menke (1996, 97) and speight (2001, 110–111). hegel famously describes this kind of irony as evil in philosophy of right, §140. 15. because of its almost mechanistic connecting of a plot’s components, this level of irony skates dangerously close to the comic. in fact, while giving an earlier version of this paper at a conference, i had the uncanny experience of hearing people laugh as i recounted the plot summary of the human stain. but roth’s plot is anything but comic except in the most cringe-inducing, heartless way. what prevents the many ironies from becoming comic in the novel is the sympathy engendered for the protagonists by the details of the plot. stripped essentially of these details, the ironies indeed risk being comic. eagleton quotes the irish poet patrick kavanagh as claiming that tragedy just is “underdeveloped comedy”; see eagleton (2003, 188). 16. roth’s lampooning of coleman’s academic colleagues makes their self-righteousness in the face of coleman’s alleged misdeed almost unbearable. when zuckerman describes the incident to coleman’s sister after his death, she responds, “i don’t believe i’ve ever heard of anything more foolish being perpetrated by an institution of higher learning. it sounds to me more like a hotbed of ignorance” (roth 2000, 328). 17. we could perhaps describe the very development of these character traits as another instance of bad moral luck. coleman indeed has objectionable character traits, but they are all too familiar: he is judgmental, condescending, and impatient; he terrorizes junior faculty and is by all accounts a domineering father. (coleman’s own description of his parenting style is a sad and very human example of good intentions gone unappreciated: see roth [2000, 174].) but we know such people, and usually their character traits, although problematic, do not end in bloodshed. the fact that they do in coleman’s case has again to do with the thoroughness with which he must cultivate his “raw i” in order to evade racial injustice successfully. by saying this i do not (as should become clear) excuse him. coleman is not forced by his circumstances to continue to develop these character traits. it is at least conceivable that he could have perpetrated this major deception and gone on within his lie-based life to cultivate gentle, compassionate character traits. but the fact that he does not is, i think, not unrelated to his particular situation either. 18. another way of putting this is that, from the moral standpoint of the novel, coleman dies fighting for the wrong thing. our sympathy for his deception is based on the fact that coleman originally asserts “the raw i” against a deep injustice. had he died as a direct consequence of this assertion of the “raw i”— had someone discovered his secret and killed him for it, for instance—the plot would follow a more standard tragic trajectory. instead, coleman dies having asserted the “raw i” against the community in ways that are made to seem petty moland 209 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 and even pathetic. roth depicts coleman’s clinging to his love affair, especially after a particular argument with his son, as a direct rebellion against society in general and his children in particular: see roth (2000, 174). coleman is asserting the “raw i” once again, but in a cause much less noble. his death at the hands of his lover’s ex-husband instead appears caused by an aging man’s adolescent defiance of both his body and of social norms. 19. the difficulty of assigning responsibility to tragic action is another common theme in the literature on tragedy. terry eagleton, for instance, writes that “[t]here is no unswerving trajectory between intention and effect….[t]he question ‘am i responsible for my actions?’ thus cannot be answered in the terms in which it is commonly proposed, since it betrays too thin a conception of what it is to act…. our free actions are inherently alienable, lodging obstructively in the lives of others and ourselves, merging with the stray shards and fragments of others’ estranged actions to redound on our own heads in alien form. indeed, they would not be free actions at all without this perpetual possibility of going astray.” (eagleton 2003, 110) 20. another of the book’s ironies is that the silent nature of coleman’s betrayal allows him to live through the 1960s without participating in the movement for social change himself. by the late 1960s, he in fact cannot participate in it as a black man without admitting to a lifetime of deception and very likely ending both his marriage and career. for this reason, coleman’s fate does not bear witness to the social paradigm shift that tragedies, again according to williams, showcase. in fact, that paradigm shift passes him by, locked as he is into his assumed role as a white man. 21. eagleton is summarizing timothy reiss’s position in tragedy and truth. reiss’s analysis rests on a foucauldian analysis of the “absence of significance” to which i will not try to do justice to here. see reiss (1980, 3 ff.) and eagleton (2003, 19). 22. for this reason, in williams’ view, revolution remains necessary: i leave williams’ nuanced discussion of tragedy’s tie to revolution undiscussed here. see williams (1966, 77). 23. in the interest of space, i leave undiscussed the subplot involving delphine roux, a subplot whose consequences significantly increase the scandal surrounding coleman’s death. 24. recognition is of course one of the characteristics of tragic plots articulated by aristotle: see aristotle, poetics, 52a30. aristotle primarily talks about recognition in oedipus’ sense, that is, of recognizing a previously unknown fact about oneself; recognition in tragedy can also encompass, however, an agent’s recognition of guilt or responsibility. 25. roth does leave open the possibility that coleman’s story will indeed reach the community in the form of a novel by zuckerman. 26. again i think of richard wright’s depiction of bigger thomas, who acciden210 grasping the “raw i” © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 tally murders a white woman but later comes to take responsibility for his crime and even embrace it. wright is careful to give bigger character traits throughout that bar the reader from sympathizing with him entirely. but bigger is allowed a moment of recognition and regret before his electrocution, and the path is then open for the audience to sympathize with him at the end. references aristotle 1987 poetics. tr. richard janko. indianapolis, in: hackett. eagleton, terry 2003 sweet violence: the idea of the tragic. london: blackwell. gellrich, michelle 1988 tragedy and theory: the problem of conflict since aristotle. princeton, nj: princeton university press. hegel, g.w.f. 1975 hegel’s aesthetics: lectures on fine art. trans. t. m. knox. oxford: oxford university press. houlgate, stephen 2007 hegel’s theory of tragedy. in hegel and the arts, ed. stephen houlgate, 146–178. chicago, il: northwestern university press. korsgaard, christine m. 1996 the sources of normativity. ed. onora o’neill. cambridge: cambridge university press. menke, christoph 1996 tragödie im sittlichen: gerechtigkeit und freiheit nach hegel. frankfurt: suhrkamp. reiss, timothy 1980 tragedy and truth: studies in the development of a renaissance and neoclassical discourse. new haven, ct: yale university press. roche, mark william 1998 tragedy and comedy: a systematic study and a critique of hegel. albany: state university of new york press. rorty, amélie oskenberg 1992 the psychology of aristotelian tragedy. in aristotle’s poetics, ed. amélie oskenberg rorty, 1–22. princeton, nj: princeton university press. moland 211 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 roth, philip 2000 the human stain. new york: vintage international. sandel, michael 2005 the procedural republic and the unencumbered self. in public philosophy: essays on morality in politics. cambridge: university press. sherman, nancy 1992 hamartia and virtue. in aristotle’s poetics, ed. amélie oskenberg rorty, 177–196. princeton, nj: princeton university press. speight, allen 2001 hegel, literature, and the problem of agency. cambridge: cambridge university press. steiner, george 1996 the death of tragedy. new haven, ct: yale university press. williams, raymond 1966 modern tragedy. london: chatto and windus. [expositions 5.2 (2011) 71-72] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 introduction to the academic roundtable: nicholas d. kristof and sheryl wudunn’s half the sky: turning oppression into opportunity for women worldwide gregory hoskins villanova university “women hold up half the sky.” – chinese proverb the topic of discussion for this academic roundtable is nicholas d. kristof and sheryl wudunn’s 2009 work of what is perhaps best described as “advocacy journalism:” half the sky: turning oppression into opportunity for women worldwide. in this work, kristof (currently an op-ed columnist for the new york times) and wudunn (a former foreign affairs correspondent for the new york times and currently an investment advisor with a focus on philanthropy) leverage their cultural authority to the “incipient movement to emancipate women and fight global poverty by unlocking women’s power as economic catalysts” (kristof and wudunn 2009, xxii). the book is only one part of their efforts, which also include a website (www.halftheskymovement.org) that contains additional success stories, links to groups that support women in developing countries, and an active forum for information sharing. the four participants in the roundtable – christina morus (the richard stockton college of new jersey), sally scholz (villanova university), maurice hamington (metropolitan state college of denver), and amy ross (university of georgia) – have at least two things in common. first, they share with each other, and with kristof and wudunn, a commitment to improving the lives of women and girls worldwide. but, second, they are each not a part of the target audience of kristof and wudunn’s book. as scholz notes in her contribution, the authors are writing for an audience for whom these issues are new, and who thus need to be both informed about the violence, oppression, demoralization and degradation that many women and girls face daily and encouraged to make some first step, however small, towards solving these problems (scholz 2011, x-x). for the participants, there is nothing “incipient” about this movement; it has been going on for centuries and they each have been working at it for years both inside and outside of the academy. nonetheless, the participants do not dismiss kristof and wudunn’s work. rather, by discussing kristof and wudunn’s book in relation to their own expertise and experience – in relation to the rhetoric of persuasion in an individualistic culture (morus), to the need for solidarities and an awareness of the achievements of feminism (scholz), to the nature of an ethics of care (hamington), and to a critique of humanitarianism in an age of neo-liberalism (ross) – they each in effect expand the potential audience and the range of useful and needed actions in the worldwide movement to turn oppression into opportunity for women. introduction to the academic roundtable 72 works cited kristof, nicholas d. and sheryl wudunn. 2009. half the sky: turning oppression into opportunity for women worldwide. new york: alfred a. knopf. [expositions 5.2 (2011) 84-93] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 half the sky: only part of the story sally scholz villanova university in his endorsement of the book, tom brokaw said, “half the sky is a passionate and persuasive plea to all of us to rise up and say ‘no more!’ to the 17th-century abuses to girls and women in the 21st-century world.” brokaw captures the book well as a plea, addressed to all of us, and against abuses that have been around for centuries. half the sky does offer a compelling presentation of stories of abuse matched by astounding accomplishment. privileged, wealthy, secure, first-world readers will likely be humbled with the realization that the problems we face appear so insignificant when seen alongside the violence, oppression, demoralization, and degradation some women face in their daily efforts to survive. but even while we acknowledge the book’s potential for bringing certain issues faced by women to greater light, it is worth pausing to check some of the assumptions that undergird the book’s central argument. the book has a compelling structure that obviates the otherwise inevitable sense that the problems presented are intractable or impossible to solve. kristof and wudunn use their journalistic skills to “lay out an agenda for the world’s women focusing on three particular abuses: sex trafficking and forced prostitution; gender-based violence, including honor killings and mass rape; and maternal mortality, which still needlessly claims one woman a minute” (kristof and wudunn 2009, xxi). each problem begins with a personal story. often, but not always, those personal stories start with hardship, tragedy, or violence but result in triumphant empowerment of the courageous individual woman. sometimes, however, the triumph is somewhat measured as the reality of a woman’s situation or cultural condition asserts its oppressive force. always, the authors then situate the individual woman’s story in the global problem – revealing how vast some of the issues facing women worldwide really are. one example from the book is the story of saima muhammad in pakistan. saima was “desperately poor, and her deadbeat husband was unemployed and not particularly employable” (kristof and wudunn 2009, 185). he beat her daily, and saima was forced to send her daughter to live with a relative because she was unable to feed her properly. saima’s situation was clearly dire. to make matters worse, her mother-in-law shamed her for not bearing a son. kristof and wudunn describe saima as “dissolv[ing] into tears every evening” and “walk[ing] around in a daze” (kristof and wudunn 2009, 185). “it was at that point,” according to the authors, “that saima joined a women’s solidarity group affiliated with a pakistani microfinance organization called kashf foundation” (kristof and wudunn 2009, 186). with a mere us$65 loan, saima transformed her life. she became the entrepreneur of a thriving embroidery business, employing neighbors, providing for her family, and inspiring her daughter. saima moved from hardship and 85 scholz violence to personal triumph on the basis of what many americans spend at the hair salon. saima’s story is just one personal example of how microcredit can make a difference. the authors then discuss the role of microfinance more broadly in development. by providing a variety of financial services – such as savings, small loans (microcredit), and insurance – to the poor in local communities, microfinance appears to have tremendous potential for empowering individuals and addressing poverty. kristof and wudunn are realistic in their presentation, however. they note that social and cultural expectations of women may constrain the growth of some women’s-owned businesses. they also note that microfinance is affected by the economies of the countries and may not be the panacea some development activists make it out to be. moreover, other problems of poverty, such as health status and lack of education, at times force loan recipients to default on even very small loans. microcredit often comes with unbelievably high interest rates (over 20% in many cases) leading some critics to suggest it is unethical. indeed, there have also been studies linking microcredit debt default with the suicide of some loan recipients. kristof and wudunn mention some of these criticisms, thereby moderating a bit of the enthusiasm over the potential of microcredit to relieve poverty single-handedly, but they also unabashedly endorse the involvement of “absolutely anybody” in “arranging microloans to needy women like saima” – by going to a web site, which they provide (kristof and wudunn 2009, 191). it is worth noting, however, that making a commitment to aid others does require more than simply going to a web site to make a donation. not all microfinance organizations are created equal. some might impinge unnecessarily on cultural customs, some might be coercive or otherwise unethical, and some might be admirable, locally based opportunities to involve distant, wealthy others. after the personal stories and measured reality, the authors offer a second section in each chapter which chronicles a relief or service effort. importantly, most of the examples portray everyday people who do extraordinary things against seemingly impossible odds. each chapter, in other words, ends with the message that this problem can be solved and can be solved in creative ways that are often remarkably simple. the chapter on microfinance thus includes a discussion of care, an aid ngo that has met with some success facilitating short-term credit and savings associations among women. what is required is a commitment. indeed, the authors present their book as a moral argument. they hope to convince readers of the value in acting. the argument is based in moral psychology rather than moral philosophy. that is, the moral argument is an attempt to persuade rather than a reasoned account of the right thing to do. nevertheless, the authors do appeal to humanitarianism and human rights in framing the issues. the aim, as brokaw indicated, is to get people to respond and the authors hold that personal stories have a more reliable power to move others to action than statistics. this is not to say that statistics are not employed in the effort, however. as they explain, “frankly, we hesitate to pile on the data, since even when numbers are persuasive, they are not galvanizing. a growing collection of psychological studies show that statistics have a dulling effect, while it is individual stories that move people to act” (kristof and wudunn 2009, 99). statistics about abuse and only part of the story 86 effective efforts to overcome it bolster personal stories and help to respond to the potential objection that one woman’s story does not an issue make. half the sky addresses the moral argument not to governments, regional governance structures, or even the international community. the authors appeal to individual readers – and in particular, individual readers with money – but it seems clear they hope to inspire even those of us with more modest resources to find ways to help those who have even less. it is easy to become overwhelmed when one comes to understand the extent of violence and abuse against women. in spite of this, the authors point out that the difference one person can make in the life of a single woman is an important difference. turning away from acting at all simply because the problem is so extensive is shirking one’s moral obligation. this point is explicit in response to the vast problem of human trafficking: “even when a social problem is so vast as to be insoluble in its entirety, it’s still worth mitigating” (kristof and wudunn 2009, 45). efforts to mitigate injustice ought to be built on careful study and testing of results, according to the authors, though research predictions also ought not to be oversold (kristof and wudunn 2009, 244). the book provides a powerful message and while i do not want to undermine it, i do want to suggest that there is more to creating a movement than convincing discrete individuals in wealthy regions of the world to give money through web sites or to become more informed. movements also require transnational and global solidarities and international agreements. the authors’ solutions do not quite reduce fighting maternal mortality, human trafficking, honor killing, and rape in war to issues solvable by individuals, but potential for global solidarities or transnational coalition are not as readily apparent as are the actual solidarities and coalitions around the world. saima’s case illustrates this. it was because of a women’s solidarity group that she was somehow able to transform her life from tearful abusive misery to empowered family and community leadership. that solidarity is mentioned but perhaps the long-time collective efforts might also merit the media’s attention. the authors offer four “principles,” with the caution that these principles ought not to be taken too seriously, to guide their movement and do include some element of coalition even if it is not about coalitional groups: (1) “strive to build broad coalitions across liberal and conservative lines”; (2) “resist the temptation to oversell” research predictions; (3) “helping women doesn’t mean ignoring men”; (4) “american feminism must become less parochial, so that it is every bit as concerned with sex slavery in asia as with title ix sports programs in illinois” (kristof and wudunn 2009, 244). (more on this last point below.) whether as individuals or as part of solidarities, those who seek to help women in need ought to involve themselves in the movement from an attitude of humility. the oppressed have an experience and knowledge that ought to be respected. those of us in positions of privilege who act out of good will to help others need to be careful not to presume that we have all the answers. we come from dominant, privileged groups, and often former colonizers in the areas of the world we now serve. we are also sometimes implicated in the current situation of oppression through our investments and consumer practices. acknowledging that privilege and seeking the 87 scholz knowledge that privilege has kept hidden are important steps in efforts to resist oppression. we ought also to confront our own contributions to oppressive systems and change our own “local” habits even while we seek to make an impact globally. one of the greatest virtues of the book is the candor with which the authors confront some social problems. without the least hesitation, they take on the power of religion. this power, however, is ambiguous. on the one hand, religion is the motive or justification for some of the violence perpetrated against women. on the other hand, religiously motivated individuals have been among the most effective actors for social change within communities. the authors acknowledge a good bit of these ambiguous relations, though more, perhaps, might be said about the effects of christianity as well as islam on women’s status. christianity has, after all, contributed a great deal to create and sustain the systematic subordination of women and disdain for the female body. given the power of faith communities in shaping at least some peoples’ lives, efforts to curb violence against women and gender-based oppression have to confront the influence of religion. as the authors declare, “if there is to be a successful movement on behalf of women in poor countries, it will have to bridge the god gulf. secular bleeding hearts and religious bleeding hearts will have to forge a common cause [. . .] it’s the only way to muster the political will to get now-invisible women onto the international agenda” (kristof and wudunn 2009, 143). notice that the implication here is great: for a movement of this sort to take firm hold it must not only not be afraid to criticize the role institutional religion plays in maintaining unjust systems, it must also seek to engage actors or agents from within institutional religious organizations. the alliance will likely be quite thin as there is much about which fellow actors will disagree, but working together in spite of those differences is a step toward liberation. the book ends with “four steps you can take in the next ten minutes” that are different than the four principles guiding the movement. these four steps – set up an account at a peopleto-people giving or lending website, sponsor a girl through one of the many organizations for that purpose, sign up for emails to stay updated, and join an advocacy network on-line – are concrete ways to “break the ice” (kristof and wudunn 2009, 252). in other words, kristof and wudunn intentionally set low expectations for us but they are expectations they hope everyone with at least a modest income can meet. throughout my reading of the book, i wondered about its intended audience. it is clear that in framing the issues discussed as humanitarian issues, they hope to appeal to a wide audience. they “hope to recruit you to join an incipient movement to emancipate women and fight global poverty by unlocking women’s power as economic catalysts” (kristof and wudunn 2009, xxii). although seemingly casting the net wide in order to ensure the largest possible recruitment class, there are a number of assumptions built into such a project. one of the most obvious is the presumption that we are not already involved. another assumption, somewhat more disquieting, is that the movement is “incipient,” just beginning or in its earliest stages. each of these is worth further scrutiny. the first assumption, that the book is appealing to those of us not already involved, could be proven or disproven through a study of the responses to the book. the web site and the advance only part of the story 88 press for the book flag it as momentous. indeed, to have two noted journalists lend their weight to addressing some issues that have plagued women for centuries is momentous. though, of course, there have been other very successful efforts – movements – to combat these very issues. i would like to suggest the authors have addressed their book to a fairly specific audience: wealthy western women. the authors likely know that those of us who participate in some way in challenging abuses against women around the globe will see in this book many comrades in the struggle. the tales in the book were not unfamiliar to those of us who contribute to global women’s causes, receive updates from organizations that pay attention to gender and human rights, and/or have traveled to some of the poorest countries in the world. those readers might even experience a sense of separation from the book, a vague sense that this book was not meant for them. not to put too fine a point on the matter, but the reason for that unease may be that the intended audience is somewhat narrower. as the authors suggest, “wealthy american women haven’t been particularly generous toward international women’s causes, but there are signs that that may be beginning to change. american women are now playing an increasingly important role in the philanthropic world, and ‘women’s funds’ that support women and girls are booming” (kristof and wudunn 2009, 243). it seems, then, that the authors mean to target leisure-class women, to encourage a new involvement by a group that has traditionally directed its attention and resources elsewhere. the second assumption, the assumption that may cause some of us to grit our teeth as we read and hear praise for what is admittedly important journalistic coverage of a variety of abuses women suffer, is that the movement is “new.” if one supposes that the three categories of abuses – forced prostitution and sex trafficking, violence, and injury and death in childbirth (xxi) – have existed for eons, and, well, they have, then i suppose it is accurate to call the public acknowledgement of the movement to end them “new.” let’s be clear, though. women have fought these abuses individually and collectively for as long as they have existed. it truly is wonderful that the press has awakened to both the facts of the abuse and at least some of the efforts to curb that abuse. what should not be overlooked is the history of consistent, heroic efforts by women (and many men) to fight these and many other abuses of women. as i read, i often felt like i was both watching the unfolding of consciousness and witnessing the exuberant effects of that new-found awareness. but to assume that kristof and wudunn are on to something new troublingly overlooks what women have done and continue to do. this sense is compounded by their disparagement of the “women’s movement” and their inconsistent rejection of calling the issues discussed “women’s issues.” to take one small example, the four united nations’ world conferences on women beginning in 1975 in mexico city and drawing tens of thousands of women to copenhagen (1980), nairobi (1985), and finally beijing (1995) demonstrate the global scope of women’s movements. these thriving movements – coalitions of women from every corner of the globe – emphasized women’s human rights, empowerment, development, and brought global awareness to the violence against women. kristof and wudunn mean the book to appeal to all of humanity, even if i also argue that the book is primarily aimed only at the wealthy, hitherto apolitical women of the united states, but it 89 scholz is also clear that the book quite boldly does not want to be connected to women’s movements or to feminism. kristof and wudunn don’t just attempt a moral argument for human rights causes; they also explicitly claim that we ought not to call the issues that make up that cause “women’s issues” (although this is done inconsistently) and blatantly refuse connections to women’s movements. i find this problematic for a number of reasons, some of which i will lay out here. first, many of the advances they report and even some of the specific examples they cite are the result of women’s movements. again, saima’s cause is a good illustration of this (and by no means unique in the book or in the world). it was a women’s solidarity group that gave her power and support to resist. the book has this uneasy sense that any of the good that is currently being done on behalf of women is a result of the kindness of single individuals far away who found some sort of purpose. this may be a function of the nature of the moral argument the authors try to make as well as their sense that at least some potential readers will be turned off by anything modified by the word “women’s”. but women (self-identified as feminists or not) have worked collectively to transform not just a few bad situations but society as a whole. what feminism does, and has arguably always done, is to see and reveal the connections between beliefs, language, social structure, and violence. more might be said to bridge the work kristof and wudunn call for and the work women’s movements have already accomplished. second, the authors also endorse the claim that we do not need another conference, by which they mean that we do not need another world conference on women. while we should always be critical about how our development dollars are spent, those conferences not only set the stage for a book like half the sky, they were incredibly powerful tools to advance the global awareness and address the global problems of violence and abuse against women, the need for the empowerment and education of women, and the problems of sexual slavery and trafficking. moreover, through coming together at the initiative of the world conferences on women, women’s movements established networks to advance their ongoing struggles and join forces. for something like trafficking, these sorts of coalitions are crucial. it is not enough to fight trafficking in countries where girls are collected for transport across borders. it is also important that women’s movements in receiving countries address the societal, structural, and sexist problems that facilitate the demand for trafficked women. coalitions or solidarities among women’s groups formed at those conferences and nurtured through transnational politics and activism have radically transformed the lives of individual women as well as the global perception of human trafficking. to disparage these movements in the name of creating a new movement is folly at best, and might be criticized as yet another form of sexist devaluing of women’s work. the u.n. fourth world conference on women in beijing in 1995 concentrated efforts on violence against women and created the beijing platform for action. only a year earlier, the un had appointed a special rapporteur on violence against women. the conference participants and leaders detailed the numerous ways women are affected by violence throughout their lives and around the globe. the beijing conference thus directly confronted issues previously obscured by seemingly more pressing global concerns. the platform stated in no uncertain terms that rape only part of the story 90 violates the “fundamental principles of international human rights” thereby affirming that women have human rights, that rape violates those human rights, and that rape is a gender issue. the platform demands that national and international tribunals “address gender issues properly by providing appropriate training to prosecutors, judges and other officials in handling cases involving rape, forced pregnancy in situations of armed conflict, indecent assault and other forms of violence against women in armed conflicts, including terrorism, and integrate a gender perspective into their work” 1 because, let’s face it, some of these officials do not exactly have model records for treating women with justice and human rights either. the beijing platform for action prescribed strategies for the prevention and prosecution of violence, many of which have since been adopted. for instance, rape and torture were added to the list of “crimes against humanity” for the war crimes tribunal in the former yugoslavia and rwanda. the rwanda tribunal also added “forced pregnancy” and “rape as a means of genocide” in 1997. these are huge changes in our international community, which had for so long accepted rape as a part of all armed conflict. conferences, even women’s conferences, have a role to play. third, the authors reduce women’s movements in the united states to a single movement for title ix. it is disturbing that a movement as rich and dynamic as women’s movements, a movement as important to the twentieth century, and a movement that no doubt played an important role in the authors’ own coming to consciousness about violence against women is disparagingly reduced to a single cause. while there is no question that title ix, that element of the civil rights act that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in education in the united states, is of interest to feminists, it is also grossly incorrect to pejoratively reduce the movement to that. domestic violence, sexual harassment, rape, and exclusion from education (all topics addressed by the authors for women outside the us) are part of our common vocabulary and present in public discussion forums only because of women’s movements in the united states. the authors might have chosen to see the important historical legacy of women’s movements rather than play into the tired stereotype that feminism is only about equality for some relatively privileged women to seemingly enlightened men. further, claiming problems like those described in the book are only problems for women “over there” or in distant places implies two falsehoods: (1) it appears to claim that women in the global north do not still die of domestic abuse (in spite of the fact that approximately one third of the women murdered in the us each year are victims of domestic violence 2 ); and, (2) it “exoticizes” or “sensationalizes” problems at a distance thereby obscuring both the connection to similar problems in one’s own neighborhood and the causal relation between our state’s policies and the harm to women abroad. the authors do not acknowledge the legacy of women’s movements in the united states, nor do they acknowledge the enduring need to fight violence and dehumanization of women in the united states. this leads to the fourth point i will make on this issue. the authors are not content simply not to see the possibilities of joining in solidarity with women’s movements; they explicitly though inconsistently exclude women’s movements. consider their comment in searching for an analogous movement on which to model theirs: 91 scholz [w]e’re wary of taking the american women’s movement as a model, because if the international effort is dubbed a “women’s issue,” then it will already have failed. the unfortunate reality is that women’s issues are marginalized, and in any case, sex trafficking and mass rape should no more be seen as women’s issues than slavery was a black issue or the holocaust was a jewish issue. these are all humanitarian concerns, transcending any one race, gender, or creed. (kristof and wudunn 2009, 233–34) true, the issues discussed in the book are humanitarian issues but they are also intensely gendered. the authors are correct that some care must be taken to attend to the potential cultural receptivity of efforts to challenge the subordination, abuse, or violence against women. indeed, many women’s movements around the globe have learned not to use the term “feminism” or to modify their efforts with the term “women” in certain contexts. on that point, i agree with the authors’ caution. but it is also clear that they mean something more. theirs is not just a caution about terminology in cultural contexts; theirs is an explicit attempt to disparage “women’s movements” and in doing so appear to want to erase the gendered nature of the violations they discuss. the women are abused, oppressed, violated, and killed because they are women. that ought not to be obscured in the efforts to avoid terminology that would be unwelcome in certain cultural contexts. the authors would be well advised to distinguish the women’s movement from what they describe as the dismissal of issues labeled “women’s.” the issues are our responsibility to address; they cannot be written off as someone else’s (as women’s) issues. they affect women as women. the women’s movement has been the leading movement to argue for the humanity, and subsequent human rights, of all women. but there are many facets to that movement. some facets do direct service to women in need, but some also work to chip away at the social structures that legitimate the subordination and docility of women and the dominance of men. feminism and women’s movements, in short, see the issues that affect women as connected, not discrete instances of inhumane violence, patterned attacks on the personhood of women. kristof and wudunn do at times recognize the interconnections between issues, even if they resist calling these issues “women’s issues” or the causes that address them feminist-motivated. consider the following passage: in much of the world, women die because they aren’t thought to matter. there’s a strong correlation between countries where women are marginalized and countries with high maternal mortality. indeed, in the united states, maternal mortality remained very high throughout the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century, even as incomes rose and access to doctors increased. as late as 1920, america had a maternal mortality rate equivalent to poor parts in africa today. but then deaths from pregnancy began to plunge. one reason was antibiotics and blood transfusions, but another was women’s suffrage. a society that gave women the right to vote also gave their lives more weight and directed more resources to women’s health. when women could vote, only part of the story 92 suddenly their lives became more important, and enfranchising women ended up providing a huge and unanticipated boost to women’s health. (kristof and wudunn 2009, 115-116) notice the unacknowledged role of american feminism and women’s movements in this passage. women’s movements fought for suffrage (it didn’t just happen) and, it should be added, women’s movements fought for safer conditions in childbirth (even before suffrage). to so explicitly distance a cause aimed at addressing the abuses women face from women’s movements (including it even within the four principles) is misguided. it is worth noting that the authors do not seem to have the same scorn for non-american feminists or feminism. in describing some advocacy networks in the regions they discuss, they even use the term “feminism.” perhaps it might have been more productive for the authors to deepen the reprimand against the media. various forms of entertainment media continue to profit from the portrayal of women as objects for abuse and domination. meanwhile, mainstream news media has done little to respond to the human rights crisis kristof and wudunn chronicle. turning the journalist’s critical gaze on how women are portrayed, especially women from the global south, might prove eye-opening. it is widely known that the televised soap operas had a tremendous positive impact on women’s status in brazil by lowering birth rates and encouraging empowerment, for instance. it is worth asking, then, how us media portrayals of veiled women as victims might be disempowering for women and fosters a biased or incorrect understanding of cultural issues facing women. i have tried to walk a rather fine line in this roundtable discussion of the book. kristof and wudunn have thrown their considerable cultural influence behind some incredibly important issues. that ought to be appreciated and shared; i sincerely hope their book inspires a wide variety of people to become more aware and get involved. but i am also disappointed that they felt the need to belittle women’s movements whose members have fought these issues (and so many more related issues) at home and abroad for so very long. notes 1. “platform for action,” united nations fourth conference on women, strategic objective e.1., http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/beijing/platform/armed.htm#object1. 2. “violence against women in the united states: statistics,” national organization for women, http://www.now.org/issues/violence/stats.html. http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/beijing/platform/armed.htm%23object1 http://www.now.org/issues/violence/stats.html 93 scholz works cited kristof, nicholas d. and sheryl wudunn. 2009. half the sky: turning oppression into opportunity for women worldwide. new york: alfred a. knopf. “platform for action,” united nations fourth conference on women, strategic objective e.1., http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/beijing/platform/armed.htm#object1. “violence against women in the united states: statistics,” national organization for women, http://www.now.org/issues/violence/stats.html. http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/beijing/platform/armed.htm%23object1 http://www.now.org/issues/violence/stats.html © equinox publishing ltd. 2009, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expo. 3.2 (2009) 139] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v3i2.139 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 editors’ preface john a. doody and peter busch this fall marks an end as well as a beginning for us. expositions has always been an unusual addition to the ranks of academic journals. with features like academic roundtables, overheard in the academy, and notes, insights, and flashes, we let our authors be more experimental, conversational, and timely than is possible when writing the typical scholarly article. we remain convinced of the need for such a forum in the academy today. we have also found, however, that a print publication may not be the best way to offer it. even as expositions hearkens back to a time when most serious publications were broadly interdisciplinary, we also have much in common with the new electronic media. next year, therefore, expositions will return as an all-electronic journal published by villanova university. our new website will offer more of the features that distinguish us from other academic journals as well as free access to archives of our first three volumes. please stop by in the coming months for calls for papers and other announcements. we expect to begin reviewing manuscripts in summer 2010. our heartfelt thanks go to equinox publications for investing a great deal of time, money, and expertise in an uncertain venture. we are especially grateful to janet joyce, our managing editor, and russell adams, our production editor, for maintaining such high standards and for helping us learn to do the same. © equinox publishing ltd. 2008, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expositions 2.2 (2008) 153–156] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v2i2.153 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 enhancement and cheating rebecca roache future of humanity institute oxford university a common worry expressed about the use of pharmacological cognitive enhancements such as modafinil and ritalin is that using them constitutes cheating (fukuyama 2002; henderson 2008). those who enhance in this way are better placed to beat their unenhanced peers to the top educational qualifications and jobs; accordingly, enhancing is unfair. is this worry justified? the worry about cheating is often bound up with other worries about enhancement. these include concerns about safety, addictiveness, and accessibility. these concerns can be addressed independently of the concern about cheating, and so, to avoid complicating matters, let us assume that cognitive enhancement is safe to use, that it is non-addictive, and that it is accessible to everyone, not just the rich. ought we still to be worried about the fairness of cognitive enhancement? well, in the absence of these ancillary concerns, one of the issues that remain is that those who choose not to enhance will be at a disadvantage, left behind in the race for the best qualifications and jobs by their enhanced peers. is this fair? should people be free to use drugs like modafinil and ritalin to get ahead, or should education authorities and employers ban such enhancement, perhaps introducing urine tests to ensure that this ban is enforced, as cambridge neuroscientist sir gabriel horn has recently been quoted to suggest (henderson 2008)? we can start with a terminological point. whether or not the use of cognitive enhancement drugs constitutes cheating depends on whether the use of such drugs is forbidden in the rules of the game. currently, the rules to which students and employees must adhere typically forbid activities like plagiarism, forging references, and lying about one’s educational and employment history—and those students and employees who break these rules can expect to be punished. rules against the use of cognitive enhancement drugs are not currently widespread. ought they to be? the answer to this question depends on what we think is more important: a level playing field on which students and employees can compete equally for 154 enhancement and cheating © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 qualifications and jobs, or the value of the achievements made through such competition. in some areas of life, the main purpose is to advance knowledge, and so maximizing the achievements made is plausibly more important than having a level playing field. as anders sandberg has commented, “that many of the theorems of the mathematician paul erdös were proven under the influence of amphetamines does not diminish their intellectual brilliance or importance” (sandberg 2008). and, in the quest for a cure for cancer, if it turns out that cognitively enhanced scientists would be able to discover a cure more quickly than unenhanced scientists, then using cognitive enhancement could result in millions of lives being saved. in other areas of life, it is extremely important to remain alert and focused. for those working as airline pilots or surgeons, the consequences of a lapse in concentration could be dire. cognitive enhancement could help prevent such lapses. these examples demonstrate that, while fairness is important, avoidably slowing the advancement of scientific knowledge or reducing the alertness of airline pilots and surgeons is too high a price to pay to ensure that those who do not wish to enhance are able to compete on a level playing field. in other areas of life, however, competition is more important. a key purpose of education in schools and universities is to enable students to compete for the best qualifications. should cognitive enhancement be banned in such contexts? there are at least two good reasons to answer “no” to this question. first, even if competition for qualifications is a valuable aspect of education, it is not the only valuable aspect. as well as enabling one to gain educational qualifications, studying also enables students to understand more about the world and the people in it, and to enrich themselves intellectually and culturally. if it turns out that cognitive enhancement enables students to increase the extent to which they understand the world and enrich themselves, then banning it in the interest of ensuring fairer competition for qualifications would be too hasty. in order to decide whether or not to ban it, we would first need to assess whether the value to be gained from banning it and thereby ensuring a fair competition would outweigh the value to be gained from allowing students to enjoy the non-competitive aspects of education more intensely with the aid of cognitive enhancement. however, banning cognitive enhancement in education would not ensure that students are able to compete on a level playing field. this is the second reason to answer “no” to the question posed above. consider that, even without access to drugs like modafinil and ritalin, most students have to compete with other students who are naturally more intelligent, disciplined, alert, and focused. as such, most students are already at a disadvantage. roache 155 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 it may be objected that, in aiming at a level playing field, we should ignore such “natural” advantages, and concentrate only on ensuring that students have equal opportunities to achieve the best grades given their existing abilities. however, even this does not leave us with a level playing field. some students are able and willing to employ personal tutors; others are not. some students spend most of their time out of school studying; others spend their time out of school relaxing or working to earn money. some students use caffeine or computer software to aid their studying—both of which are types of cognitive enhancement—others do not. such practices ensure that, even without novel methods of cognitive enhancement, students do not compete on a level playing field. and, that schools and universities do not currently outlaw the use of personal tutors, caffeine, and studying outside of school suggests that maximizing the extent to which students compete on a level playing field is not as important as some opponents of enhancement suggest. an uneven playing field may even be seen as advantageous, in that it can drive students to work harder as they attempt to beat their peers. as such, it is far from obvious that we should aim to create a level playing field by limiting the ways in which students can compete. at the very least, opponents of enhancement need to demonstrate exactly why using drugs like modafinil and ritalin is relevantly different from employing a personal tutor or drinking coffee to remain alert. there is something important to learn from the worry about unfair competition, however. as far as possible, it is desirable to discourage the pursuit of what the economist fred hirsch has called “positional goods”: those goods whose value to those who have them depends on others not having them. this is because the collective pursuit of positional goods is a waste of time and resources: as hirsch remarked, “if everyone stands on tiptoe, no one sees better” (hirsch 1977, 5). if the value of cognitive enhancement rests solely on its ability to enable one to compete better than others for things like educational qualifications, then its use should be discouraged. however, it is unlikely that the value of cognitive enhancement is exhausted by the positional goods it confers. we have seen that it may have value in enabling people like scientists, airline pilots, and surgeons to do their jobs more effectively. and, even in education, where competition for qualifications plays a central role, cognitive enhancement could add value by enabling students to make the most of the non-competitive elements. there is a clear case for banning cognitive enhancement in education only if the value of education is exhausted by the competition for qualifications, because only in such a case is cognitive enhancement a purely positional good when used in the context of 156 enhancement and cheating © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 education. there may be some who wish to argue that the value of education is indeed exhausted by the competition for qualifications, and that anyone who believes otherwise is an academic fantasist. however, if this is the case, then the qualifications for which students compete are themselves purely positional goods, and so the argument to ban cognitive enhancement also works to ban educational qualifications. the worry about cheating is not, as a result, sufficient justification for banning the use of cognitive enhancement drugs. arguably, the worry about enhancement and cheating is usually overblown. the most important concerns about such enhancement are perhaps those that i initially disregarded: safety, addictiveness, and accessibility. since these concerns are also among the most philosophically uninteresting, it should not be surprising that philosophical debate about enhancement gravitates instead towards issues like cheating. as in many debates in applied philosophy, however, we must take care not to allow what is most interesting to distract us from what is most important. references fukuyama, f. 2002 our posthuman future. new york: farrar, straus and giroux. henderson, m. 2008 academy of medical sciences suggests urine tests to detect smart drugs. the times, 22 may 2008. sandberg, a. 2008 brain boosting and cheating in exams: four responses. practical ethics: ethical perspectives on the news blog (www.practicalethicsnews.com/practicalethics/2008/05/brain-boosting.html). hirsch, f. 1977 social limits to growth. london: routledge and kegal paul. [expositions 6.2 (2012) 10-14] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 shaping worldviews: contextualizing roman science elizabeth a. hamm saint mary’s college of california daryn lehoux’s comprehensive and thoughtful work, what did the romans know? an inquiry into science and worldmaking (2012) emphasizes just how difficult the task of studying a world so foreign to our own can be for the historian. in addressing the question raised in his title, lehoux describes the social, political, and religious context in which scientific ideas were developed in the roman world between the first century bce and the second century ce. with a sound understanding of roman natural philosophy and a touch of humor, lehoux’s work investigates ideas fundamental to the history and philosophy of science. while the romans are at the heart of this study, the questions examined by lehoux extend beyond the geographical and chronological parameters of the book, making it a welcome contribution to the history of science. it is only by stepping out of our modern way of seeing the world, lehoux argues, that we can begin to understand how the ancients approached, comprehended, and rationalized the world around them. roman science – complete with divination, astrology, and numerology – appears strange, but lehoux contends that while these concepts are foreign, “their difficulty lies not in their weirdness but in the ancient claims as to how good the evidence for them is” (lehoux 2012, 14). the importance of understanding the context in which scientific ideas flourish is imperative for all historians of science, and lehoux demonstrates that ideas about the physical world around us, which modern readers might take for granted, cannot be assumed about the ancient scientist. lehoux’s work is marked by judicious use of evidence and a careful analysis of his subject. organizing his ideas thematically, he begins by addressing the relationship between nature and laws in chapters two and three. lehoux explores the romans’ understanding of the role of gods in the physical world and the interrelation between judicial laws and nature. taking cicero as a case study, lehoux demonstrates how cicero’s view of the natural world influenced his understanding of law: cicero argues that just social interactions between people are natural and that these types of interactions form the basis for civil law (lehoux 2012, 31). alternatively, the romans’ understanding of law influenced the way they viewed the natural world. lehoux uses as another example ptolemy’s findings on planetary stations – the point at which a planet, beginning or ending a retrograde pass, appears to stop in the sky – to illustrate a law ascribed to the natural world. this demonstrates that laws of nature do not make their first appearance in early modern science as is often assumed, but that they can be found in ancient science. in chapter four, “epistemology and judicial rhetoric,” lehoux explores the concept of the observer as a judicial witness. viewing the scientific observer in this light raised questions for roman natural philosophers about the credibility of the witness, who counts as a witness, and the use of the reader as a witness. 11 hamm while the first three chapters, all of which feature the relationship between nature and law, are closely linked, in chapter five, “the embeddedness of seeing,” the author turns his attention to the visual theories proposed by galen and ptolemy. lehoux explores how both authors – ptolemy from a mathematical perspective and galen from a medical perspective – used the same principle in their visual theories: namely, that things similar to each other are able to influence each other, a concept that lehoux refers to as the law of “like affects like.” this principle is assumed by both authors, but never justified. lehoux argues that this law, “like affects like,” is an example of a preconceived idea about the world that did not require explanation. in formulating ideas about the natural world, the romans wove together observations and assumptions about how the natural world works, but what they saw when they looked at the world and what they understood about the world are not the same as what the modern reader sees and understands. lehoux’s most poignant ideas come through in his discussion of garlic and magnets in chapter six, “the trouble with taxa,” which he states was the kernel for this project. it is in this chapter that the claim that the romans had different facts than what we have today, an idea that he alludes to in the introduction, resonates most clearly for the reader. according to plutarch, ptolemy, and others, rubbing a magnet with garlic neutralized its power of magnetism. lehoux explains that this idea, completely baffling to modern readers, was treated as a fact in the roman world. neither plutarch nor pliny needed to test such a theory, in the same way that most modern readers will not feel the need to test whether garlic will have any impact on magnets. we take for granted that garlic has no effect on a magnet, in the same way that many romans took for granted that garlic does have a disabling effect on a magnet. (as an aside, in the midst of reading chapter six, i found myself in my kitchen rubbing garlic on refrigerator magnets – for the record, i observed the magnets to behave the same before and after their garlic encounter.) while there are several examples that buttress lehoux’s argument that roman science developed in a distant world, complete with its own governing rules, underlying truths, and facts, this example is the most effective at demonstrating the strangeness of roman science to the modern reader. models and theories not only offer explanations, but they also influence the way we view the world. in chapters seven and eight lehoux explores how allowing different entities – a divine being, astrology, or sympathy – into an explanation changes how the world works, what we observe, and how we understand it. additionally, he examines the belief that a working theory that adequately explains observed phenomenon can also explain confounding observations in an unrelated branch of science. these symmetrical explanations, as lehoux calls them, illustrate the ancients’ view of a world that worked according to underlying principles that transcended specific fields. while lehoux’s thematic approach is effective, the nuances of the different theories and the processes of constructing theories are sometimes lost. the principles, observations, and modes of explanation are unique to each historical actor; moreover they are not stagnant but regularly changing. consequently the historian must understand the subtle details of the individual theories and how they change. a single example might serve to illustrate the point: one of ptolemy’s shaping worldviews 12 arguments in the almagest for the circular motion of the heavens is that the sizes and distances of the stars do not appear to vary over the course of a revolution of the celestial sphere. he argues that the distances of the stars from the earth must therefore be constant.1 ptolemy says: for the apparent increase in their sizes at the horizons is caused, not by a decrease in their distances, but by the exhalations of moisture surrounding the earth being interposed between the place from which we observe and the heavenly bodies, just as objects placed in water appear bigger than they are, and the lower they sink, the bigger they appear. (ptolemy 1998, 39) ptolemy is referring to the occurrence of the sun and moon appearing larger when viewed at the horizon. he contends that this phenomenon, which is often referred to as the moon illusion, is due to the median through which we view the sun or moon: namely, the air and the moisture in it. it is clear that he does not think the moon is closer to the earth when we view it near the horizon and further from the earth when we view it near the zenith. instead, he says that the moon appears to increase in size when viewed near the horizon due to (what seems to be) refraction. while this explanation at first seems sensible to ptolemy, he later provides a different account of the observation: that the angular diameter of the moon is same when measured at the horizon and zenith. in the optics, ptolemy attributes this phenomenon to a psychological effect. in book iii of the optics, he accounts for the moon illusion: generally speaking, in fact, when a visual ray falls upon visible objects in a way other than is inherent to it by nature and custom, it perceives less clearly all the characteristics belonging to them. so too, its perception of the distances it apprehends will be diminished. this seems to be the reason why, among celestial objects that subtend equal visual angles, those that lie near the zenith appear smaller, whereas those that lie near the horizon are seen in another way that accords with custom. things that are high up seem smaller than usual and are seen with difficulty. (ptolemy 1996, 151) ptolemy explains that celestial bodies that subtend equal angles, and are consequently the same size, appear bigger when viewed near the horizon due to the way the visual rays from the eye fall on the object. the moon would be the same size when viewed near the zenith or the horizon; however, the observer would think the moon appears to be larger nearer to the horizon. ptolemy argues that the eye must gaze up to see the object, and the visual ray falls upon the object in a way to which it is not accustomed. when the same celestial object is viewed near the horizon then the visual ray makes contact with the object in a way that is “inherent to it by nature and custom” (ptolemy 1996, 151). the different explanations of the moon illusion in the almagest and the optics demonstrate ptolemy’s evolving theories on optics as applied to astronomy. at first he explains an 13 hamm inexplicable phenomenon, that the moon appears larger when viewed near the horizon, using refraction. later he revised his account, presumably after observing that the moon in fact appears to be the same size when viewed near the horizon or zenith, and he replaced his theories this time relying on a different theory to explain the phenomena, or in this case, the lack thereof. consequently, both what the observer saw and how those observations were explained were shifting for ptolemy. we can see from this example that there was not one roman mindset to understand. rather, each author had a different approach to explaining the world, and these approaches were often evolving. lehoux acknowledges this and he does not endeavor to explain the scientific theories of all of the characters he examines; in fact he says that he will only examine the most significant of the interconnections, so in some ways this critique may be unfair (lehoux 2012, 2). nevertheless, the reader needs to be attuned to the fact that there is not a single web of knowledge, but many webs of knowledge, and that historical actors make sense of the world in very different, and constantly shifting, ways. in the final chapters of the book lehoux changes the lens he uses to examine the ancient world by situating roman science within philosophy of science debates on realism. he raises two main questions: (1) can a historian be a realist and offer a fair portrayal of ancient science? and, (2) how does the criteria for realism hold up against ancient scientific theories? concerning the first question, lehoux analyzes how the historian can offer a fair consideration of ancient science, but at the same time believe that our modern scientific theories are approximately true. this idea is closely tied to the second question, which asks how the philosopher of science should approach ancient science. lehoux examines a hippocratric work, on ancient medicine, in which the author states that the accuracy of current medical theories demonstrates that they are “rightly and truly uncovered, and not the product of accident” (lehoux 2012, 205).2 this idea is similar to hillary putnam’s famous miracle argument: “the positive argument for realism is that it is the only philosophy that doesn’t make the success of science a miracle” (putnam 1975, 73; see lehoux 2012, 204). the similarity of these ideas, one an observation by a roman author and the other a weighty argument in the philosophy of science, leads lehoux into an exploration of what separates modern views that our science is approximately true from the romans’ confidence in the truth of their own theories. he shows that some of the theories proposed by authors such as galen and ptolemy fare surprisingly well against criteria of what constitutes a scientific theory that is viable, mature, and approximately true. in the end, lehoux sketches out a broad strategy for the historian/realist where modern scientific models are viewed with a pragmatic theory of truth and a coherence-based epistemology. that is to say that only the parts of our theories that are verifiable, testable, and cohere should be considered to be true, or approximately true. while lehoux’s discussion of the place of roman science in modern philosophical debates represents a departure from the themes covered in the rest of the book, the last two chapters nevertheless offer much food for thought for historians and philosophers alike. science does not take place in a vacuum. underlying ideas, many of which may be so deeply rooted that they are unknown to the scientists, play an essential role in the development of shaping worldviews 14 theories. the historian’s role is not to condemn ancient ideas as silly or naïve, but to make sense of those ideas with the larger social, political, and religious context in mind. lehoux examines the title question, “what did the romans know?” from almost every angle, revealing a roman world more intricate and intellectually complex than is often assumed. his fresh writing style holds the reader’s attention and his peppering of modern references keeps the reader on her toes. this is a thought-provoking work and one that explores many critical questions for the historian and philosopher of ancient science. notes 1. according to ptolemy: “to sum up, if one assumes any motion whatever, except spherical, for the heavenly bodies, it necessarily follows that their distances, measured from the earth upwards, must vary, wherever and however one supposes the earth itself to be situated. hence the sizes and mutual distances of the stars must appear to vary for the same observers during the course of each revolution, since at one time they must be at greater distance, at another at a lesser. yet we see that no such variation occurs” (ptolemy 1998, 39). 2. lehoux includes both the original greek text and an english translation. works cited lehoux, daryn. 2012. what did the romans know? an inquiry into science and worldmaking. chicago: university of chicago press. ptolemy. 1996. ptolemy’s theory of visual perception: an english translation of the optics with introduction and commentary. trans. and commentary by mark a smith. philadelphia: american philosophical society. –––. 1998. ptolemy’s almagest. trans. by g. j. toomer. foreword by owen gingerich. princeton, nj: princeton university press. putnam, hilary. 1975. mathematics, matter, and method. cambridge: cambridge university press. gods and friends: c [expositions 4.1&2 (2010) 63-79] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 gods and friends: c. s. lewis on divinization francis j. caponi, o. s. a. villanova university abstract “when asked to identify who is talking about deification in western theological circles, my initial response is „who isn‟t?‟ it seems that almost every protestant and catholic theologian writing creatively and constructively in the last two to three decades has found it necessary to address the subject.” 1 the explosion of theological interest olson draws attention to is undoubted, but the time period he fixes needs lengthening. well in advance of the work on divinization done by hans urs von balthasar and the finnish school of luther research, c. s. lewis (1898–1963) staged a “mini-restoration” of the theme to the center of christian theology in the west. the claim of this essay is two-fold. first, when lewis speaks of salvation and heaven, as he so often does, not only does he figure it as redemption, perfect happiness, “union with god,” 2 and many other oft-used images, but also as divinization, 3 being made a god, the “blessed participation in [god‟s] life by a created spirit,” 4 and other traditional though far less common metaphors. these images represent a crucial part of a real doctrine in lewis‟s works, rather than stray bursts of poetic enthusiasm. second, lewis presents friendship as an important means to becoming “those gods that we are described as being in scripture.” 5 i. “high like the heavens and bright like the sun” speech is incorrigibly metaphorical. we speak abstractly about what is concrete, and concretely about what is abstract, and so our invocations, conversations, addresses and descriptions are large with metaphor. it is not lovers, poets, and philosophers alone who mid-wife metaphor, but all who mean, and want their meaning understood. “it is of the very nature of thought and language to represent what is immaterial in picturable terms. what is good or happy has always been high like the heavens and bright like the sun. evil and misery were deep and dark from the first.” 6 christian speech is pervasively metaphorical; if not more so than some other kinds of speech, at least more obviously so. consider one example: the language of salvation. christian faith has brought forth a rich collection of vivid images to describe the saving work of christ. st. paul alone, drawing from the realms of commerce, agriculture, law, family, and religion, produces so many metaphors that both novice and seasoned exegete must experience a touch of vertigo when surveying the apostle‟s landscape. the pauline range includes: justification (rom. 3:28, gal. gods and friends 64 3:24), redemption (rom. 3:24, tit. 2:14, heb. 9:12), reconciliation (rom. 5:10–11, 1 cor. 5:18), liberation/freedom (rom. 8:21, 2 cor. 3:17, gal. 2:4, 5:1), life in christ (rom. 8:1, 1 cor. 15:22), citizenship/community membership (phil. 3:20), transferral into another kingdom (col. 1:13), salvation (rom. 1:16, 2 cor. 1:6, phil. 1:9, 1 thess. 5:8), inheritance (gal. 3:18, col. 3:24, eph. 1:14), new creation (2 cor. 5:17, gal. 6:15), engagement with christ (2 cor. 11:12), marriage to christ (1 cor. 6:17), sanctification (rom. 6:19–22), death (rom. 6:3–6, 7:4, 6; gal. 2:19; col. 2:20, 3:3), resurrection (rom. 6:5, 1 cor. 15:20–23), and eternal life (rom. 6:22–23, 1 tim. 6:12, 19). 7 in these and the many other images of salvation offered by the new testament, the patristic imagination found nourishment, but also sought coherence. in the homiletics, catechetics, and apologetics of the first christian centuries, the scriptural images and narratives were interrogated, their implications developed and their connections explored, giving rise both to fresh images and to more technical expositions. the savior was figured as giver of the true law, bringer of knowledge, sacrifice, recapitulator, doctor, victor over satan, bestower of incorruptibility, and intercessor, to name only a few. 8 along with these, under the influence of classical learning, hellenistic culture, heretical ideas, and changing pastoral situations, there arose the “learned theology” of logos and trinity, of modalism and adoptionism, of ousia, hypokeimenon, hypostasis, physis, and perichoresis. 9 within this wellspring, the promise of the second letter of peter, that through christ believers “may come to share in the divine nature” (1:4) – a promise augured in other passages as well (e.g., john 17:21, gal. 2:20, 1 john 3:2) – was given intense consideration in the patristic period, 10 in images like marriage, the mingling of water and wine, the consumption of green wood in fire, and the ascent of the soul; and in more abstract vocabulary like methexis, theosis, and theopoiesis. the images of salvation are not the temporary husks of some inner, literal seeds waiting to be plucked forth and scattered by the less poetic hand of the systematic theologian or philosopher of religion. we are invited to restate our belief in a form free from metaphor and symbol. the reason why we don‟t is that we can‟t. we can, if you like, say “god entered history” instead of saying “god came down to earth.” but, of course, “entered” is just as metaphorical as “came down.” you have only substituted horizontal or undefined movement for vertical movement. we can make our language duller; we cannot make it less metaphorical. we can make the pictures more prosaic; we cannot be less pictorial. 11 still, the image gives rise to reflection as the symbol gives rise to thought, and their relationship is integral. as karl rahner, s. j., observes, even the most abstract metaphysical concept includes an imagistic element, as even the most concrete description involves abstract concept. 12 metaphor is no more of a concession to the truth of faith than air is to the working of the lung. but the mind that craves images also wants integration. in an academic setting besotted with scientific materialism and generally supine before the advance of logical positivism, c. s. lewis upheld the inviolate place of metaphors in the christian life; and especially in all talk of heaven, which demands “an enormous wealth of 65 caponi imagery […] a dozen changing images correcting and relieving each other.” 13 but he also restlessly sought doctrine, and his letters, essays, theological expositions, fiction, literary criticism, poetry, and autobiographical writings, give eloquent witness to his conviction that there is no hard line between image and thought, metaphor and doctrine. his most famous doctrinal works – mere christianity, miracles, and the problem of pain – are mother lodes of image. and his much-loved fiction – especially the chronicles of narnia – are filled with teachers and teaching. lewis‟s work is especially fecund on the question of salvation. his writings burst with imaginative renderings of the scriptural figures of incorporation into christ, regeneration, transformation into a new creature, dying to self and rising with christ, etc. 14 to these, lewis adds the figures of a statue come to life, reunion with a first love, a naked body before the noonday sun, a mold into which bright metal is poured, dance, game, union with beauty, far mountains, “deep heaven,” becoming “little christs,” and many more. along with these, there is the constant quest for sense, part of the express purpose of interpreting christian hope to an audience raised in the belief that one cannot accept the biblical pictures of eternal life while also making daily use of the electric light and the radio. so far as i have been able to determine, lewis never uses the terms “deification” or “divinization.” when he speaks of “demi-gods,” he has in mind only the most recent descant on the ancient, dreary promise: “eugenics have made certain that only demi-gods will now be born: psycho-analysis that none of them shall lose or smirch his divinity: economics that they shall have to hand all that demi-gods require. man has ascended his throne. man has become god. all is a blaze of glory.” 15 and when he writes of “gods,” it is almost always to his beloved classical, irish, germanic, and norse myths that he refers. almost, but not always. like the kitchen of heraclitus, true gods are also found in lewis‟s works. before reading lewis, a few words of caution are in order. divinization is receiving sustained and ecumenical attention from christian theology today, 16 and the results to date are far from homogenous the results thus far are from homogenous. are certain metaphors indispensable? is there a normative version of the doctrine? where can it be found, and what are its core elements? does it possess a proprietary vocabulary? these are some of the questions generating debate among the contemporary theologians of theosis, 17 and their canvassing would demand a much lengthier essay than this. for clarity‟s sake, by “divinization” i mean the following: 1. divinization is conformation to christ through the power of the holy spirit 2. divinization is a process, beginning in this world and stretching to completion in heaven, in which the cooperation of human freedom has a proper role 3. divinization is always god‟s gracious work; autonomous divinization is a contradiction in terms 4. divinization is the fulfillment of creation: it is not the overcoming of human nature (e.g., through absorption into god or escape from the body), but the destruction of sin and the perfection of the person 5. divinization means creaturely participation in the divine goodness, power, joy, knowledge, and eternity gods and friends 66 this understanding of divinization contains no doctrinal innovation. lewis finds it in “mere christianity,” that “great level viaduct which crosses the ages,” 18 running through augustine, aquinas, dante, spenser, pascal, bunyan, and hooker. 19 lewis presents this teaching with remarkable directness, clarity, and imagination. one would need to read much more deeply in some expert theologians before sifting out a nugget‟s worth of the treasure with which lewis is so prodigal. 20 doubtless, precisely as the amateur theologian he always claimed to be, lewis could not have competently compared western and eastern fathers regarding theopoiesis or deificare. in just those places where one might expect him to cite the biblical locus classicus of 2 peter 1:4, wherein christians are promised to become “sharers of the divine nature,” he does not. one finds none of the cosmic sweep of maximus the confessor, 21 nor the eye for detail of thomas aquinas. 22 he does not rehearse the debates on christ, prayer, and the divine simplicity which characterized the lengthy formative period of the idea. yet, one finds a real doctrine in lewis. 23 amateur he may have been, but lewis displays an uncanny grasp of the chief arteries of the christian map (if not every access road and country lane), resulting in an exposition which is theologically basic, but not at all vague. 24 ii. “the same kind of life as god” divinization is not hinted at in lewis‟s works, but presented frequently and vividly. in a grief observed, written following the death of his wife, joy, lewis calls divinization god‟s “grand enterprise.” his description of it suggests that his own suffering and sadness made the prima facie absurdity of the idea very clear to him: “to make an organism which is also a spirit; to make that terrible oxymoron, a „spiritual animal.‟ to take a poor primate, a beast with nerve endings all over it, a creature with a stomach that wants to be filled, a breeding animal that wants its mate, and say, „now get on with it. become a god.‟” 25 but lewis had long since recognized that there is no substitute for “becoming a god,” no possible consolation prize for the restless heart that was made for this end alone. we may say truly, if somewhat anachronistically, that lewis‟s anthropology and eschatology are properly integrated: god made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. a car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. now god designed the human machine to run on himself. he himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. there is no other. that is why it is just no good asking god to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. god cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from himself, because it is not there. there is no such thing. 26 one of the most famous passages from lewis‟s writings adds further color to this picture, making it clear that the human car must indeed “run” – divinization is a process – and that christians have been drafted to serve as one another‟s mechanics: 67 caponi it is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. all day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. it is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves[.] 27 letters to malcolm: chiefly on prayer, completed about six months before lewis‟s death, stresses that such a destiny is not from us, but is the gift of god in christ: in the incarnation, god the son takes the body and human soul of jesus, and, through that, the whole environment of nature, all the creaturely predicament, into his own being. so that “he came down from heaven” can almost be transposed into “heaven drew earth up into it,” and locality, limitation, sleep, sweat, footsore weariness, frustration, pain, doubt, and death, are, from before all worlds, known by god from within. the pure light walks the earth; the darkness, received into the heart of deity, is there swallowed up. where, except in uncreated light, can the darkness be drowned? 28 even uncle screwtape, in a weak moment, concedes that “the enemy” really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of himself – creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like his own, not because he has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to his. we want cattle who can finally become food; he wants servants who can finally become sons. we want to suck in, he wants to give out. we are empty and would be filled; he is full and flows over. our war aim is a world in which our father below has drawn all other beings into himself; the enemy wants a world full of beings united to him, but still distinct. 29 but screwtape and his colleagues pride themselves on their ability to sabotage the enemy‟s plan. cars get lost, lights dim, replicas melt, mirrors break: [god] said (in the bible) that we were „gods‟ and he is going to make good his words. if we let him – for we can prevent him, if we choose – he will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine, a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to god perfectly (though, of course, on a smaller scale) his own boundless power and delight and goodness. 30 gods and friends 68 lewis is uncompromising on the capacity of human freedom to defeat the grand enterprise: “century by century god has guided nature up to the point of producing creatures which can (if they will) be taken right out of nature, turned into „gods.‟” 31 lewis does not, however, simply use the images and language of divinization. any reasonably comprehensive account of christian faith can be expected to make some mention of it. rather, lewis provides a doctrinal framework in which divinization make sense. this framework is christian, and so his thinking has no truck with the idea of human ascension into divinity, akin to the pagan heroes and eastern potentates of old. further, his thoughts on the trinity, christology and grace, and creation and sin, demonstrate that lewis does not seize on the idea of persons being “received into the heart of deity” simply because the metaphor appeals to his literary sensibilities. he is convinced that the promise is true, the possibility real. lewis rejects that brand of soteriology that treats divinization as poetic hyperbole, 32 and reduces its images to figurative exhortations for moral imitation of christ, without any supernatural content. determined to make as much sense of “becoming god” as can be made, lewis tackles head-on the question which most obviously arises in response to the promise of sharing in god‟s life: how? “how is it possible for us to be taken into the three-personal life?” 33 this question has two levels, both of which must be addressed by a doctrine of divinization. first, how is it possible for a creature to receive such a gift? “but my face you cannot see, for no man sees me and still lives” (ex. 33:20). second, how does one receive this gift? “sirs, what must i do to be saved?” (acts 16:30). lewis‟s answer to both is the same: jesus christ. first to last, lewis sees becoming divine as receiving “the kind of self [christ] has.” faith in christ is faith “that christ will make the man more like himself. […] he will share his „sonship‟ with us, will make us, like himself, „sons of god.‟” 34 thus conformed to christ, believers are taken into the triune life: “we shall love the father as he does and the holy ghost will arise in us […] every christian is to become a little christ. the whole purpose of becoming a christian is simply nothing else.” 35 the incarnation is the grand miracle which begins god‟s grand enterprise: in the christian story god descends to re-ascend. he comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity; down further still, if embryologists are right, to recapitulate in the womb ancient and pre-human phases of life; down to the very roots and sea-bed of the nature he has created. but he goes down to come up again and bring the whole ruined world up with him. one has the picture of a strong man stooping lower and lower to get himself underneath some great complicated burden. he must stoop in order to lift, he must almost disappear under the load before he incredibly straightens his back and marches off with the whole mass swaying on his shoulders. 36 what are human beings, that they can be conformed to christ? 37 without the specifically christian doctrine of creation, the process of becoming “little christs” will be completely misunderstood, figured as absorption, escape, or the development of an intrinsic potential to become divine, such that “jesus is simply an elder brother who is further along the path of divine 69 caponi development.” 38 lewis champions the real, limited goodness and independence of creation. he rejects gnosticism: “there is no good trying to be more spiritual than god. god never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. that is why he uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. we may think this rather crude and unspiritual. god does not: he invented eating. he likes matter. he invented it.” 39 and whereas in pantheism god is all, “the whole point of creation surely is that he was not content to be all. he intends to be „all in all.‟” 40 the existence of a realm of things which are not god, yet are not independent (and certainly not equal), is the precondition for divinization. god is under no necessity to bring anything which he is not into himself, but if he wishes to divinize, if he desires “union instead of mere sameness,” 41 he must create. indeed, it is no overstatement to say that lewis regards divinization as the goal of creation: “to what end was creation except to separate us in order that we may be reunited to him in that unity of love wh. is utterly different from mere numerical unity and indeed presupposes that lover & beloved be distinct?” 42 so, too, divinization in the christian sense cannot be thought of apart from the real freedom which human beings have been given. following in the tradition begun by st. irenaeus, lewis presents an anthropological dynamism focused on the imago dei. he distinguishes between two sorts of nearness to god: by likeness, and by approach. nearness by likeness is the image of god spoken of in genesis 1:26–27, the likeness to god that is part of human nature and which expresses itself as freedom, rationality, and power. nearness by approach is when a person is moving towards union with god. likeness by nature makes humans “divinizable,” but is not itself the process of divinization. this process is initiated and supported by grace, but it is also something human beings must do. for [god] seems to do nothing of himself which he can possibly delegate to his creatures. he commands us to do slowly and blunderingly what he could do perfectly and in the twinkling of an eye. he allows us to neglect what he would have us do, or to fail. perhaps we do not fully realize the problem, so to call it, of enabling finite free wills to coexist with omnipotence. it seems to involve at every moment almost a sort of divine abdication. we are not mere recipients or spectators. we are either privileged to share in the game or compelled to collaborate in the work […] this is how (no light matter) god makes something – indeed, makes gods – out of nothing. 43 echoing st. augustine, lewis writes, “creatures are made in their varying images of god without their own collaboration or even consent. it is not so that they become sons of god.” 44 progress from likeness to approach is a matter of free, intelligent response to divine grace, and lewis calls the result “transposition.” transposition is neither the transformation of human beings into angels, nor their absorption into god. rather, “by transposition our humanity, senses and all, can be made the vehicle of beatitude […] [h]umanity, still remaining itself, is not merely counted as, but veritably drawn into, deity.” 45 human persons can be so assumed because they are already diminished versions of those higher levels: “divine sonship is, so to speak, the solid of which biological sonship is merely a diagrammatic representation on the flat.” 46 human intellect and will are unimaginably simple reproductions of the knowledge and love which are gods and friends 70 the trinity; human flesh and bone are nearly insubstantial yet still real sketches of the glorified body christ possesses. in body and soul, freedom and intellect, humans have the equipment to respond to the divine summons; through the incarnate grace of jesus christ, human beings receive the power to do so. 47 further, any christian account of how “human souls can be taken into the life of god and yet remain themselves – in fact, be much more themselves than they were before” 48 must take into consideration the possibility of defection from god‟s plan. the process of becoming “little christs” will be misinterpreted unless it is seen as the divinization of fallen creatures, beings who in their bones feel the force of human sinfulness, the temptation to parody grotesquely the divine gift by hearkening to the offer, “you shall be like gods.” 49 no one familiar with lewis‟s works could fault him for glossing over the desperate state of the exsules filii evae. the transposition which god desires to enact has its counterfeit in the divinization humanity seeks to grasp. the “christianity-and-water” view, which upholds a good creator but dismisses “all the difficult and terrible doctrines about sin and hell and the devil, and the redemption,” is dismissed by lewis as “boys‟ philosophies.” 50 reflecting his oft-repeated concern that christianity not sound like “piein-the-sky,” his talk of transposition is always carried out with eyes firmly set upon the situation of humanity as fallen and sinful. there is nothing affected about this, nothing of the self-apology of an embarrassed academic who does not want his audience to think that the college cloister has left him out of touch with the gritty “real world.” instead, lewis owes this pattern to scripture and tradition; in addition, it is an undeniably autobiographical theme, well-represented in one of his first published works, the pilgrim‟s regress. the pilgrim, john, laments having “to walk warily and on sufferance all his days, never to be alone; never the master of his own soul, to have no privacy, no corner whereof you could say to the whole universe: this is my own, here i can do as i please.” 51 later, john hears his own words set to a croaking tune by pride: “so i, borrowing nothing and repaying / nothing, neither growing nor decaying, / myself am to myself, a mortal god, a self-contained / unwindowed monad, unindebted and unstained.” 52 in light of this deep-seated resistance, lewis always underscores the progressive and demanding character of transposition: “the process will be long and in parts very painful, but that is what we are in for.” 53 pilgrim john‟s final song touches upon the arduous course: “that we, though small, may quiver with fire‟s same / substantial form as thou – nor reflect merely, / as lunar angel, back to thee, cold flame. / gods we are, thou has said: and we pay dearly.” 54 all of these dimensions – creation, incarnation, grace, free will, sin, and process – are evident in one of lewis‟s favorite examples of transposition: prayer. a christian praying alone in his bedroom prays to the father, through the spirit, with christ alongside him: “so that the whole threefold life of the three-personal being is actually going on in that ordinary little bedroom where an ordinary man is saying his prayers. the man is being caught up into the higher kinds of life […] he is being pulled into god, by god, while still remaining himself.” 55 this entrance into the divine life is not a matter of mystical moods, but a thoroughly concrete encounter with jesus christ. when a christian prays, [t]he real son of god is at your side. he is beginning to turn you into the same kind of thing as himself. […] [a] real person, christ, here and now, in that very room where 71 caponi you are saying your prayers, is doing things to you. it is not a question of a good man who died two thousand years ago. it is a living man, still as much a man as you, and still as much god as he was when he created the world, really coming and interfering with your very self; killing the old natural self in you and replacing it with the kind of self he has. at first, only for moments. then for longer periods. finally, if all goes well, turning you permanently into a different sort of thing; into a new little christ, a being which, in its own small way, has the same kind of life as god; which shares his power, joy, knowledge and eternity. 56 to be fully divinized is not to be god: lewis‟s treatment of creation and grace make it clear that the perfected believer does not create, does not save, is not eternal in the same way as god is, does not know in the same way god knows. rather, when we put on christ, we become like god, and we “share his goodness in creaturely response.” 57 the divinized believer shares in “the same kind of life as god,” becomes a miniature, a mirror, a self-portrait 58 of the triune god. iii. “hunters of some immaterial quarry” adolf harnack‟s snarky jab about divinization, that it meant a “pharmacological” transformation of human nature, one to which the moral transformation of the believer was only an appendage, 59 is a prodigious misreading of the greek fathers. 60 when divinization is conceived as requiring the gracious and free cooperation of the person in a lifelong process, moral transformation is necessarily central to becoming a little christ. 61 the means of this cooperation are well known and often raised by lewis: sacrament, belief, prayer, ascetical practice, almsgiving, and many others. however, it is the divinizing capacity of friendship that i wish to examine here. lewis does not range friendship with the necessary means of conversion and sanctification. it is not on a par with baptism or eucharist, not a replacement for penance and charity, and certainly never to be regarded as an end in itself. 62 still, in a manner familiar to the christian tradition, 63 lewis depicts friendship as a most gracious, and especially delightful, assistance to transposition. in lewis‟s take on divinization, the friends of earth make us fit for the society of god. lewis offers an unqualified estimate of the value of friends: “[f]riendship is the greatest of worldly goods. certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. if i had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, i think i shd. say, „sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.‟” 64 much has been written about lewis‟s own circle of intimates. 65 he is as famous as st. augustine for the role played by friendship in his coming to christ, and gives frequent thanks for his own alypius, nebridius, and navigius; for example, “dyson and tolkien were the immediate human causes of my own conversion. is any pleasure on earth as great as a circle of christian friends by a good fire?” 66 the importance of philia to lewis is reflected in the four loves, wherein he gives friendship a “rehabilitation,” one made necessary by modernity‟s emphasis on the romantic and emotional aspects of love and its distaste for the blatantly undemocratic nature of groups of friends, as well as by the depredations visited upon non-erotic loves by the illimitable sway of psychoanalysis. 67 what is friendship? lewis holds it to be the least natural love, one which, unlike affection gods and friends 72 (storge) or erotic love (eros), is not necessary to our biological existence: “without eros none of us would have been begotten and without affection none of us would have been reared; but we can live and breed without friendship.” 68 friendship centers on the shared quest for truth. lewis insists that friendship must be about something, something beyond the individuals and their relationship. at the heart of friendship is a question: “‟do you see the same truth? – or at least, do you care about the same truth?‟ the man who agrees with us that some question, little regarded by others, is of great importance can be our friend. he need not agree with us about the answer […] hence we picture lovers face to face but friends side to side; their eyes look ahead.” 69 lewis is not restrictive about the object of this shared truth. it may be religion, recreation, study, or profession. it may be stamp collecting, golf, mathematics, or dominoes. the prosaic quality of these examples of “shared truth” is instructive. lewis is very familiar with the tradition of great friendships: pylades and orestes, jonathan and david, amis et amiles, roland and oliver. yet he does not rank friendships on the basis of dangers overcome, sacrifices endured, or fame earned. roland and oliver may make for better poetry, but their friendship is not truer because of the grand background on which it is played out. what is important is not the activity in itself – the sharing of common tasks and duties is not friendship as such, but “companionship” – but the common vision which supervenes upon the activity. two hunters sharing their conviction that a deer is not only delicious, but beautiful; two votaries bound by the desire that their gods be powerful, but also holy; two companions in golf who discover a shared sense that the broad, green fairways of full spring insistently suggest some other, better place: what these have in common is a shared activity which is also the pursuit of shared meaning. friends are “still hunters, but of some immaterial quarry […] still traveling companions, but on a different kind of journey.” 70 a chivalric vision of justice and loyalty may generate grander deeds of greater social value and historical note, but in itself it is no better a bond among friends than the conviction that the inadequate taxonomy and confusing nomenclature of medically useful fungi demands study and redress, or that an evening spent in the discussion of baseball statistics or royal genealogies contains its own happy justification. of special interest is lewis‟s contention that friendship promotes “secession,” a partial deafness to the larger community: in each knot of friends there is a sectional “public opinion” which fortifies its members against the public opinion of the community in general. each therefore is a pocket of potential resistance. men who have real friends are less easy to manage or “get at”; harder for good authorities to correct or for bad authorities to corrupt. hence if our masters, by force or by propaganda […] ever succeed in producing a world where all are companions and none are friends, they will have removed certain dangers, and will also have taken from us what is almost our strongest safeguard against complete servitude. 71 all the natural loves – friendship, affection, and eros – are incomplete: “the natural loves are summoned to become modes of charity while also remaining the natural loves they were.” 72 73 caponi storge, eros, and philia are all raised by agape, yet not razed by it. however, lewis‟s own experience suggests that the external focus and secession which characterize friendship have a particular power to aid in conversion. friends united in following christ, and deaf to the fashions of sin which surround them, are a means of, and consolation for, the painful process of transposition, as well as a foretaste of its heavenly fulfillment. friendship was a crucial element of the medicinal grace by which the “celestial surgeon” 73 removed the necrotic tissue of lewis‟s intellectual and moral vices – an indispensable and unavoidably painful aspect of every sinner‟s progress from likeness to approach. lewis makes reference to this in the problem of pain, when he uses the image of entrance into a group of friends, as when the man of inferior moral standards enters the society of those who are better and wiser than he and gradually learns to accept their standards a process which, as it happens, i can describe fairly accurately, since i have undergone it […] by the mercy of god i fell among a set of young men (none of them, by the way, christians) who were sufficiently close to me in intellect and imagination to secure immediate intimacy, but who knew, and tried to obey, the moral law. 74 lewis‟s existing distaste for cruelty and stinginess was transformed by his friends‟ hatred of cruelty and generosity of spirit; and his moral repertoire was expanded by their honesty, chastity, and self-sacrifice. this enlargement was not painless: “but the great test is that the recognition of the new standards is accompanied with the sense of shame and guilt: one is conscious of having blundered into society that one is unfit for.” 75 in this circle lewis found support for his growing philosophical misgivings about scientific materialism, and for the cultivation of virtue. this “high” view of friendship provides lewis with an explanation for why scripture speaks of god affectionately, as father, and erotically, as when christ is figured as the bridegroom of the church, but not in terms of friendship: it is already, in actual fact, too spiritual to be a good symbol of spiritual things. the highest does not stand without the lowest. god can safely represent himself to us as father and husband because only a lunatic would think that he is physically our sire or that his marriage with the church is other than mystical. but if friendship were used for this purpose we might mistake the symbol for the thing symbolised. the danger inherent in it would be aggravated. 76 lewis points out that the spiritual quality of friendship is neither good nor bad in itself: just as there are good and bad spirits, so friends may “see the same truth” in falsehood and wickedness. but when philia is true, then the christian friends gathered around a set of dominoes or an ancient text or a golf tee are part of god‟s plan for one another‟s divinization. thus it is no accident that the screwtape letters consistently returns to the subject of friendship as a part of the life of the “patient” which must be given sedulous care, for it has powerful potential to save or to damn. screwtape applauds the absence in modern christian gods and friends 74 writings of any concern for “the choice of friends,” and advises wormwood on ways to make good use of a pair of new, very worldly friends, as well as how to deal with the patient‟s inevitable realization “that his own faith is in direct opposition to the assumptions on which all the conversation of his new friends is based.” 77 screwtape is especially glad to hear that the two new friends have acquainted him with their whole set. “all these, as i find from the record office, are thoroughly reliable people; steady, consistent scoffers and worldlings who without any spectacular crimes are progressing quietly and comfortably towards our father‟s house.” 78 indeed, so powerful is the influence wielded by such groups, that when the patient escapes these worldly friends, falls in love with a good christian woman, and is accepted into the circle of her family and friends, screwtape frets that the enemy, by means of “some very agreeable people far advanced in his service, is drawing the young barbarian up to levels he could never otherwise have reached.” he insists that some way must be found to blunt their influence; not surprisingly, this is through pride: the new circle in which he finds himself is one of which he is tempted to be proud for many reasons other than its christianity. it is a better educated, more intelligent, more agreeable society than any he has yet encountered. he is also under some degree of illusion as to his own place in it. under the influence of “love” he may still think himself unworthy of the girl, but he is rapidly ceasing to think himself unworthy of the others. he has no notion how much in him is forgiven because they are charitable and made the best of because he is now one of the family. he does not dream how much of his conversation, how many of his opinions, are recognized by them all as mere echoes of their own. still less does he suspect how much of the delight he takes in these people is due to the erotic enchantment which the girl, for him, spreads over all her surroundings. he thinks that he likes their talk and way of life because of some congruity between their spiritual state and his, when in fact they are so far beyond him that if he were not in love he would be merely puzzled and repelled by much which he now accepts. he is like a dog which should imagine it understood fire-arms because its hunting instinct and love for its master enable it to enjoy a day‟s shooting! 79 the seriousness with which screwtape takes this threat reflects the capacity of the patient‟s friends to insulate him from the clamor of vice, and train him in virtue. in friends we find more than the often harsh means of transposition. we find that our deepest longing, our “desire which no natural happiness will satisfy,” 80 becomes a shared longing: “are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain at best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for?” and more than this: these friends are the means whereby we become little christs, our aids in becoming gods and goddesses: [f]or a christian, there are, strictly speaking, no chances. a secret master of the 75 caponi ceremonies has been at work. christ, who said to the disciples, “ye have not chosen me, but i have chosen you,” can truly say to every group of christian friends, “you have not chosen one another but i have chosen you for one another.” the friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. it is the instrument by which god reveals to each the beauties of all the others. they are no greater than the beauties of a thousand other men; by friendship god opens our eyes to them. they are, like all beauties, derived from him, and then, in a good friendship, increased by him through the friendship itself, so that it is his instrument for creating as well as revealing. at this feast it is he who has spread the board and it is he who has chosen the guests. it is he, we may dare to hope who sometimes does, and always should, preside. let us not reckon without our host. 81 iv. “society that one is unfit for” “our problem today is not the deification but the humanization of man.” 82 the implied rivalry between the two would likely have tickled lewis. his love of scripture, his grasp of the christian tradition, and his voluptuous imagination combined – almost inevitably, one is tempted to say – to pick out, endorse, and develop the image and idea of divinization. he knew too much about the demi-gods of troy and latium to think his monotheistic forebears contemplated any such transformation. he knew too much about the scriptural promises of eternal glory, joy, and wisdom to water down the metaphor until it was no more than the thin gruel of hyperbole or ornamentation. he knew too much about human sinfulness, his own and others, to pretend that our promised fulfillment was inevitable or logical. “society that one is unfit for”: although he never does so, lewis would cordially approve this as a worthy gloss upon the trinity. “[t]he divine life, which gives itself to us and which calls us to be gods, intends for us something in which morality will be swallowed up. we are to be remade [...] [into] a thing we have never imagined: a real man, an ageless god, a son of god, strong, radiant, wise, beautiful, and drenched in joy.” 83 yet, we are fallen, and if we would enter into the triune life, god must take the matter in hand: “we are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a divine work of art, something that god is making, and therefore something with which he will not be satisfied until it has a certain character,” that is, “a reflection of the divine life, a creaturely participation in the divine attributes which is far beyond our present desires.” 84 god has purposed us for entrance into his society, and gives his grace that he might see and love in us what he sees and loves in christ. in this grand enterprise, christians are meant to receive more than a little help from their friends. endnotes 1. roger e. olson, “deification in contemporary theology,” theology today 64 (2007), 188. 2. c. s. lewis, reflections on the psalms (san diego: harcourt, 1958), 41. 3. “divinization” is the term i will use in this essay, which for all but the most detailed historical gods and friends 76 investigations is synonymous with “deification.” 4. lewis, miracles: a preliminary study (san francisco: harper, 2001), 256. 5. lewis, the great divorce: a dream (san francisco: harper, 2001), 9. 6. lewis, the allegory of love: a study in medieval tradition (oxford: oxford university press, 1938), 44. 7. james d. g. dunn, the theology of paul the apostle (grand rapids: eerdmans, 1998), 328–333. 8. j. n. d. kelly, early christian doctrines (rev. ed.; san francisco: harper and row, 1978), 163– 188, 375–400; h. e. turner, the patristic doctrine of redemption: a study of the development of doctrine during the first five centuries (london: a. r. mowbray, 1952). 9. manlio simonetti, “a theology without learning,” in the history of theology, vol. i: the patristic period, ed. angelo di berardino, o. s. a., and basil studer, o. s. b., trans. matthew o‟connell (collegeville: liturgical press, 1997), 186–187. 10. norman russell, the doctrine of deification in the greek patristic tradition (oxford: oxford university press, 2004). 11. lewis, “is theology poetry?” in essay collection and other short pieces, ed. lesley walmsy (london: harpercollins, 2000), 18. 12. karl rahner, s. j., “auferstehung des fleisches,” in schriften zur theologie (einsiedeln: benziger, 1955), bd. 2, 211–225. 13. lewis, “the weight of glory,” in essay collection, 100, 101. 14. this is especially true of the ransom trilogy and the narnia saga; for example, the “un-dragoning” of eustace by aslan in the voyage of the dawn treader (new york: harpercollins, 1994), 114– 117. the richness of soteriological metaphor in lewis‟s fiction is prohibitive, and so i have chosen to draw on his “theological fantasies” but not his novels. for the latter, see clyde s. kilby, images of salvation in the fiction of c. s. lewis (wheaton, illinois: harold shaw publishers, 1978). 15. lewis, “the funeral of a great myth,” in essay collection, 27. 16. paul gavrilyuk, “the retrieval of deification: how a once-despised archaism became an ecumenical desideratum,” modern theology 25.4 (2009): 647–659. 17. see olson (n. 1 above). 18. lewis, introduction to st. athanasius, on the incarnation, trans. and ed. a religious of c. s. m. v. (crestwood, ny: st. vladimir‟s seminary press, 1993), 7. 19. lewis also may have been influenced by his spiritual director, fr. walter adams, a member of the “cowley fathers” (society of st. john the evangelist), and a keen student of the writings of the founder, fr. richard benson, who stressed the theme of divine participation. see martin smith, s. s. j. e., benson of cowley (oxford: cowley publications, 1980), 30–35, 53. on the influence of hooker on lewis, see a. m. allchin, participation in god: a forgotten strand in anglican theology (wilton, ct: morehouse-barlow, 1998), 8–12. 20. see tuomo mannermaa, “justification and theosis in lutheran-orthodox perspective,” in union with christ: the new finnish interpretation of luther, ed. carl braaten and robert jenson (grand rapids: eerdmans, 1998), 25–41; j. todd billings, “john calvin: united to god through christ,” in 77 caponi partakers of the divine nature, ed. michael christensen and jeffrey wittung (madison: farleigh dickinson, 2007), 200–218. 21. hans urs von balthasar, cosmic liturgy: the universe according to maximus the confessor, trans. brian daley, s. j. (san francisco: ignatius press, 2003). 22. daniel a. keating, “justification, sanctification and divinization in thomas aquinas,” in aquinas on doctrine: a critical introduction, ed. thomas weinandy et al. (london: t & t clark, 2004), 139–158. 23. pace nick mamatas, “greek delight: what if c. s. lewis had been greek orthodox?” in revisiting narnia: fantasy, myth, and religion in c. s. lewis‟ chronicles, ed. shanna caughey (dallas: benbella books, 2005), 178–179, who argues (unconvincingly) that theosis is precisely what one does not find in the narnia books. 24. lewis, “god in the dock,” in essay collection, 34. 25. lewis, a grief observed (san francisco: harper, 2001), 72. 26. lewis, mere christianity (san francisco: harper, 2001), 50. 27. lewis, essay collection, 105. 28. lewis, letters to malcolm: chiefly on prayer (san diego: harcourt, 1964), 70–71. 29. lewis, the screwtape letters (san francisco: harper, 2001), 38–39, 94. 30. lewis, mere christianity, 205–206. 31. lewis, mere christianity, 222. 32. lewis, collected letters. volume 2: books, broadcasts, and the war, 1931–1949, ed. walter hooper (san francisco: harper, 2004), 1013. 33. lewis, mere christianity, 177) 34. lewis, miracles, 147. 35. lewis, miracles, 177. 36. lewis, miracles, 179. 37. although space does not admit its consideration here, the divinization of non-human nature is an occasional topic in lewis‟s works, and always considered as dependent upon human fulfillment. see miracles, 102–105; the problem of pain (san francisco: harper, 2001), 140–147; great divorce, passim, especially 113, 119–120. 38. douglas j. davies, an introduction to mormonism (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2002), 80. 39. lewis, mere christianity, 64. 40. lewis, letters to malcolm, 70. 41. lewis, problem of pain, 156. 42. lewis, collected letters, vol. 2, 880. 43. lewis, “the efficacy of prayer,” in essay collection, 230–241. gods and friends 78 44. lewis, the four loves (san diego: harcourt, 1960), 6. cf. st. augustine, sermon 169.13. see lewis, collected letters, volume 3: narnia, cambridge, and joy: 1950–1963, ed. walter hooper (san francisco: harper, 2007), 1013–1014. 45. lewis, “transposition,” in essay collection, 276–277. 46. lewis, miracles, 146. 47. lewis, letters to malcolm, 129; collected letters, vol. 3, 354–355, 1432; “answers to questions on christianity,” in essay collection, 322; letters to malcolm, 49–50. 48. lewis, mere christianity, 161. 49. on this score, william luther white takes exception to lewis‟s language: “it is not customary for theologians in the west to refer to human beings as gods. it is particularly surprising that lewis used this term so often since he clearly names as the original sin the persistent human temptation to „be like gods‟ […] lewis‟s reflections on life after death are in several ways more dependent upon greek categories of thought than they are upon biblical thought. but to refer to people as gods, i think, is bound to prove more confusing than helpful.” white, the image of man in c .s. lewis (nashville: abingdon, 1969), 200. 50. lewis, mere christianity, 40. 51. lewis, the pilgrim‟s regress (grand rapids: eerdmans, 1992), 8.6. 52. lewis, pilgrim‟s regress, 10.5. 53. lewis, mere christianity, 176. 54. lewis, pilgrim‟s regress, 10.10. 55. lewis, mere christianity, 163. 56. lewis, mere christianity, 163. though simply stated, without benefit of scriptural citation or technical analysis, this assessment concurs with the detailed study of james m. starr on the meaning of 2 peter 1:4: “briefly, our internal analysis revealed the following sequence: christ calls an individual, who responds by faith and receives knowledge of christ as savior and lord. this knowledge of christ and the promise of christ‟s return equip the christ believer to live a life that is appropriate to a christian, the goal of which is to share in christ‟s nature, viz. his moral excellence in the present, and his eternity and glory in the future.” starr, sharers in divine nature: 2 peter 1:4 in its hellenistic context (stockholm: almqvist & wiksell, 2000), 227. 57. lewis, problem of pain, 46–47. 58. lewis, mere christianity, 192. 59. adolf harnack, das wesen des christentums (leipzig: j. c. hinrichs, 1900), 146. 60. jules gross, the divinization of the christian according to the greek fathers, trans. paul a. onica (anaheim, california: a & c press, 2002), 171–172. 61. lewis, mere christianity, 148–149. 62. lewis, collected letters, vol. 2, 748. 63. “[f]riendship is a stage bordering upon that perfection which consists in that love and knowledge of god, so that man from a friend of his fellow man becomes a friend of god, according to the words 79 caponi of the savior in the gospel: „i will not now call you servants, but my friends.‟” aelred of rievaulx, spiritual friendship, trans. mary eugenia laker, s. s. n. d. (kalamazoo: cistercian publications, 1974), 2.14. 64. lewis, collected letters, vol. 2, 174. 65. e.g., colin duriez, tolkien and c. s. lewis: the gift of friendship. new york: paulist press, 2003. 66. lewis, collected letters, vol. 2, 501. 67. lewis, the four loves (san diego: harcourt, 1960), 61; armand nicholi, the question of god: c. s. lewis and sigmund freud debate god, love, sex, and the meaning of life (new york: free press, 2002), 169–172. 68. lewis, four loves, 58. 69. lewis, four loves, 66. 70. lewis, four loves, 66. 71. lewis, four loves, 80. 72. lewis, four loves, 133. 73. lewis, collected letters, vol. 3, 1432. 74. lewis, problem of pain, 29. 75. lewis, problem of pain, 30. 76. lewis, four loves, 87–88. 77. lewis, screwtape letters, 50–51. 78. lewis, screwtape letters, 53. 79. lewis, screwtape letters, 130–131. 80. lewis, “weight of glory,” 99. 81. lewis, four loves, 89–90. 82. hans küng, on being a christian, trans. edward quinn (new york: doubleday, 1976), 442. 83. lewis, “man or rabbit?” in essay collection, 355. 84. lewis, problem of pain, 34; see also 46. [expositions 6.1 (2012) 41–42] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 introduction to the symposium: the search for the spiritual in saul bellow lee trepanier saginaw valley state university one of the great american writers of the latter-half of the twentieth century, if not the greatest american writer of that era, is saul bellow. winner of the nobel prize for literature in 1976 and other numerous awards, bellow’s place in both popular and academic cultures is secured, with nearly over thirty volumes and fifteen hundred essays written about his work. his appeal resides in his precise diagnosis of the malaise that afflicts modernity – rationalism, existentialism, modernism – and his affirmation of religious and social values in a secular world. rather than deriding the modern world or celebrating its fragmentation and disorder, bellow writes about the comedy inherent in life and the possible paths of spiritual fulfillment. for bellow, life is not a wasteland or a trial to be endured but a journey to be enjoyed with the hope of being able to make sense of it. this roundtable explores this theme of faith and spiritual fulfillment in bellow’s own life and works. the first essay, gloria l. cronin’s “bellow’s spiritual quest,” is a review of bellow’s own attempts to find spiritual enlightenment. at various points in his life, bellow became a disciple of the works of wilhelm reich, rudolph steiner, and owen barfield in his search to find meaning in the world. what is confirmed to him intellectually by these thinkers is his own belief in the spiritual capacity of language that places him in opposition to the modernist tradition of joyce, eliot, and hemingway. this opposition stems from a continual love of british romanticism, american transcendentalism, eastern philosophy, and, most importantly, his biblical judaism. it is from this source, as a jew, where he could literally dream and imagine himself out of his european ghetto ancestors to find dignity and meaning in a hostile world. the second essay, “the search to be human in dangling man,” is my continuation of a theme raised by joseph baim that the protagonist, joseph, is seeking spiritual fulfillment – to find what it means to be “human” in the present age. however, unlike baim, i argue that joseph remains trapped in his “ideal construction” of reason and therefore is not able to accept reality’s life-affirming nature even when he experientially encounters it at the end of the novel. in fact, the various archetypes offered to joseph – reason, romanticism, stoicism – all fail to provide a path towards spiritual fulfillment. but it is the very failure of his reason that preserves joseph, for reality is too diffuse and complicated to be conceptualized entirely. bellow therefore suggests to us that the meaning of life is to be experienced and not conceptualized whatever form it may take. in the third essay, “society, self, and spirituality in herzog,” elyse zucker explores how herzog overcome a reductive and utilitarian culture to find spiritual meaning. what bellow concludes is that human nature is too mysterious and complex to become exhausted by empirical methods to find existential meaning. instead of finding refuge in the works of heidegger or symposium: introduction 42 kierkegaard, one should find meaning within one’s own soul and its encounter with god. the paradox is that such meaning cannot be conveyed in language: it cannot be directly spoken on but only spoken about. once herzog recognizes this, he becomes liberated from the constraints of language and begins his search for spiritual enlightenment. the fourth essay, “bellow, kierkegaard, and american estheticism,” is julianne romanello’s adoption of kierkegaard’s philosophy of the esthetic, ethical, and religious life to interpret mr. sammler’s planet. according to romanello, bellow, like kierkegaard, did not think the task of discovering an authentic self was neither inevitable nor impossible in modernity, and that such a self is to care for others which require knowledge of the divine and one’s relations to it. we see the characters margotte, shula, and elya show sammler to recognize that knowledge is not the end of life itself; rather, it is to act with compassion and love in order to find one’s true meaning. the final essay, “immortality in ravelstein,” is stephen block’s straussian exploration about the theme of immortality in the novel and how this theme is drawn from the platonic dialogue, the symposium. interestingly, the question of immortality for ravelstein is not a serious one as a philosopher. but for chick it is a continual and viable one, forcing us to choose between faith and philosophy. the question of the “return” that is raised at the beginning of the essay is therefore a return to immortality whether in the form of philosophy and its study of great texts or faith with its rituals and mysticism. of course, this roundtable is not comprehensive in its treatment of the theme of religion and faith in bellow’s works. certain non-fictional works, like to jerusalem and back, as well as seminal novels like the adventures of augie march and humboldt’s gift, are absent from this roundtable and could have further contributed to our understanding of religion and faith in bellow’s thought. perhaps this could be a project for the future. in the meantime, we invite the readers to reflect what we hope to be a starting point in a conversation about religion and faith in bellow’s own works. © equinox publishing ltd. 2009, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expo. 3.2 (2009) 165–171] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v3i2.165 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 the good news (and who’s listening) in tim o’brien’s the things they carried john ruff valparaiso university in reading the things they carried, by tim o’brien, one is likely to notice that the book’s stories of the vietnam war often allude to the new testament. what exactly is the author hoping to accomplish with these connections? this essay proposes that in creating characters reminiscent of jesus, martha, mary, and lazarus, o’brien means to illustrate the power of stories to save those who are open to receiving their truth. i will not attempt here to claim fiction writer tim o’brien as a christian writer, or make of his great collection of stories about the vietnam war, the things they carried (1990), a christian allegory. he and his work are much more complicated than that. i will argue, though, that if you read the stories closely you will hear o’brien invite us to think about the relation of his stories about alpha company in vietnam in 1969 to certain new testament stories, and i hope to demonstrate how such thinking reveals a number of interesting and meaningful connections. further, i want to take seriously the claim his narrator makes in the first sentence of the last story of the collection that “stories can save us” (255). i begin with that old question, what’s in a name? or two names, jimmy cross and martha. or three: let us add mary. in the title story for this collection of connected short stories, we meet, in the first sentence in the first story of the book, “first lieutenant jimmy cross,” who “carried letters from a girl named martha, a junior at mount sebastian college in new jersey. they were not love letters exactly, but lieutenant cross was hoping…”(3). whatever o’brien’s intention, it strikes me as nearly impossible for a reader not to wonder if there is a connection between a character 166 the good news (and who’s listening) in o’brien’s the things they carried © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 named jimmy cross in a story called “the things they carried” and jesus, who in each of the four gospels carried and died on a cross. (yes, we might also ask ourselves what’s in a pair of initials, j.c.). jesus, according to the gospels of luke and john, knew, and in john’s gospel it says he knew and “loved” a woman named martha, who figures prominently in two new testament stories about love, one of them about love, death, and resurrection. in luke’s gospel the story of martha and mary comes at the conclusion of chapter 10, which begins, eerily enough, if you are tracking o’brien back into the new testament as i am, with jesus sending a group of his followers out “as sheep among wolves” carrying “no purse, no bag, no sandals” on a healing and evangelizing mission, from which they all return amazed at their success (luke 10:1–20 nrsv). this stands in stark contrast to the story of alpha company, who set out more in the guise of wolves than sheep, grossly overloaded and largely doomed to failure. though they too are evangelists of a sort, and ultimately they too are on a mission of healing. the narrative of luke 10 circles back from the story of jesus’ disciples to jesus himself engaging in dialogue with a young lawyer about eternal life and love, which jesus concludes by narrating the story of the good samaritan to explain to the lawyer who his neighbor is. indeed, this is rich territory in luke’s gospel, where in the chapter just previous christ admonishes his followers to “take up their crosses daily and follow me” (luke 9:23). having concluded the story of the good samaritan, jesus is described as arriving at a village where a woman named martha receives him into her house. martha has a sister named mary, “who sat at jesus’ feet and listened to what he was saying.” martha is described as being “distracted by her many tasks,” and when she admonishes jesus to scold her sister mary for not helping her, jesus defends mary and upbraids martha. “martha, martha,” he says, “you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. mary has chosen that better part, which will not be taken away from her” (luke 10:38–42). the “better part” mary chooses is to be present to her guest, to attend to him, to listen to him. there is, in fact, a mary in tim o’brien’s book, besides martha the only other prominent adult female character in any of the stories. mary ann bell, the sweetheart referred to in the ruff 167 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 title of the story about her, “the sweetheart of song tra bong,” is in many ways martha’s polar opposite. mary’s situation is tragic and richly complicated, and i don’t intend to explore it in detail here. i bring her up because like the mary in luke’s gospel, mary ann bell listens. she attends. like a bell, she reverberates when she is struck, by what she sees and hears and experiences. after the medic rat kiley tells her incredible story, he discloses to his skeptical auditors that he loved her, that they all did at the remote medical base where she unexpectedly arrived one day to be with her boyfriend from cleveland, with whom she stayed until the incubus that was vietnam swallowed her up—rat loved her and says they all loved her because “she was there” (123). physically, intellectually, and emotionally, she was there. but back to martha: is the biblical martha and her story or stories connected to the martha that jimmy cross would love? we meet jimmy cross and martha in the first story, “the things they carried.” the story is technically, formally an ingenious work of short fiction that introduces most of the characters of alpha company and many of the most important conflicts to afflict them through the sometimes hypnotic recitation of a long catalog of everything they packed in their rucksacks, everything they carried, physically, emotionally, spiritually, into, across, and out of vietnam. into this catalog or litany o’brien weaves fragments of the story of jimmy cross and martha with the story of the death of ted lavender, the first member of alpha company to die in the book, from a sniper wound on an afternoon when the company is exploring and exploding vietcong tunnels. as will become typical in these stories, the death comes without warning, it happens without drama, there is nothing heroic or picturesque about it, and it seems to serve no larger military or moral purpose. it couldn’t be more banal, more pointless, more pathetic. what connects these two story strands is the fact that jimmy cross, the platoon leader, will blame himself for lavender’s death, in large part because he was thinking about martha rather than attending to his men. the problem with jimmy cross’s martha, like luke’s martha, is that she is too “worried or distracted,” or as another earlier translation of luke puts it, too “careful.” she signs her letters “love,” but jimmy cross concedes to himself that it is just a way of signing letters. sitting in his 168 the good news (and who’s listening) in o’brien’s the things they carried © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 foxhole rereading his letters from martha, jimmy recalls how once in a movie theatre when he touched her knee through her skirt, she recoiled and looked at him sadly. jimmy cross fantasized about throwing martha over his shoulder, carrying her to her dorm room, tying her in her bed, and touching her knee all night, but he never did it, which fills him with regret. he’s too careful, she’s too careful, and his need to be brave, to love and to be loved, to be taken in and attended to, is frustrated. in the episode that leads to the death of ted lavender, while lee strunk, the man who drew the short straw, is still underground exploring and preparing to blow up a vietcong tunnel, jimmy cross fantasizes about being buried alive with or even in martha: kneeling, watching the hole, he tried to concentrate on lee strunk and the war, all the dangers, but his love was too much for him, he felt paralyzed, he wanted to sleep inside [martha’s] lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered. he wanted her to be a virgin and not a virgin, all at once. he wanted to know her. intimate secrets. why poetry? why so sad? why that grayness in her eyes? why so alone? not lonely, just alone . . . it was the aloneness that filled him with love. he remembered telling her that one evening. how she nodded and looked away. and how, after, when he kissed her, she received the kiss without returning it, her eyes wide open, not afraid, not a virgin’s eyes, just flat and uninvolved. (12) in the things they carried we meet this sort of failure to connect, this failure to risk love, this failure to touch or be touched, this failure to be penetrated by another’s love and life and story and suffering, over and over again. one failure of attention breeds another; and men die, physically, emotionally, spiritually. lee strunk does actually crawl out of that tunnel, “grinning, filthy, and alive,” and for a moment a reader may feel relieved. in the margins of my dog-eared text i’ve written the word “lazarus” next to the passage that follows. lazarus was martha and mary’s brother, who in the gospel according to john had died while jesus was away, whom jesus would miraculously raise from the dead. the reader can judge for herself if there is a connection between the two stories or if i’m just overreaching: lieutenant cross nodded and closed his eyes while the others clapped strunk on the back and made jokes about rising from the dead. ruff 169 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 worms, rat kiley said. right out of the grave. fucking zombie. the men laughed. they all felt great relief. spook city, said mitchell sanders. lee strunk made a funny ghost sound, a kind of moaning, yet very happy, and right then ted lavender was shot in the head on his way back from peeing. he lay with his mouth open. the teeth were broken. there was a swollen black bruise under his left eye. the cheekbone was gone. oh shit, rat kiley said, the guy’s dead. the guy’s dead, he kept saying, which seemed profound—the guy’s dead. i mean really. (13) in the story of lazarus in chapter 11 of john’s gospel, jesus gets a message from martha and mary that their brother lazarus is sick, but instead of going immediately to bethany to attend to him, jesus delays two days. when he finally arrives lazarus has been dead and buried for four days, and when martha hears he is coming she goes out to meet him. her first words to jesus are “lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” what sounds like a profession of faith also has the ring of accusation to it. they go back and forth, and it sounds more like theology than grief and love to me. jesus keeps talking like lazarus is not really dead, and then he talks as if he is. it is confusing. jimmy cross, in the episode under consideration, also stands accused of not being there; he accuses himself, actually, of not really being fully present for his men. “lieutenant cross gazed at the tunnel. but he was not there. he was buried with martha under the white sand at the jersey shore. they were pressed together, and the pebble in his mouth was her tongue” (12). let us turn from martha to mary for a moment, who is identified in john’s gospel as the mary who anointed jesus with oil and bathed his feet with her hair. in john’s gospel mary comes to jesus after martha returns home, to tell mary jesus has sent for her. mary rushes out to meet jesus, falls at his feet, and tells him, “lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” the passage continues: when jesus saw her weeping, and the jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. he said, “where have you laid him?” they said to him, “lord, come and see.” jesus began to weep. so the jews said, “see how he loved him.” (john 11:1–37) 170 the good news (and who’s listening) in o’brien’s the things they carried © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 so what does it all add up to, if we take this excursion out of o’brien’s text to the gospels of luke and john? what if lee strunk is reborn again? ted lavender still dies: ted lavender isn’t asleep, as jesus says about lazarus. ted lavender is “really” dead. from kiowa, the only overtly christian character in the book and the most sympathetic but not for that reason, we learn how deeply affected jimmy cross is by the death of ted lavender. that night while using the new testament he keeps packed in his rucksack for a pillow, kiowa reflects on jimmy cross’s “capacity for grief ” and confesses that he “wanted to care as jimmy cross cared” (18). ironically, jimmy cross will the next day burn his love letters and photos from martha in an attempt to steel himself: the narrator reports how “he would not tolerate laxity. he would show strength, distancing himself ” (24). he would “dispense with love” (25). the contrast with jesus in the story of lazarus couldn’t be starker.1 but this irony leads back to the way in which o’brien’s claim in the first sentence of the last story can and ought to be taken seriously: that is, “that stories can save us.” and i need to get to “the good news” i promised in my title. first, the sentence states that stories “can” save us. it doesn’t say they do save us, have saved us, or will save us. but there is hope that they can. ted lavender is not, as rat kiley says, “really dead.” he seems so, but that’s what o’brien calls elsewhere a “storytruth” (203–204). ted lavender is words on a page. so is rat kiley. so is the narrator tim o’brien. but the story truth of ted lavender’s absurd death in vietnam has the capacity to put us there and to make us feel something: loss, the terrible absurdity of war, the awful things that men do to other men. in the gospel passage from john, jesus is troubled when he goes to see where lazarus is buried; mary’s weeping troubles his soul. it puts him there. lazarus rises again on the tide of jesus’s tears. over and over, the problem o’brien creates for himself and for his whole platoon of storytellers is how to make something present to the auditor, or to a whole group of auditors, sometimes a character or group of characters within a story, sometimes the reader whom o’brien as narrator-in-chief will occasionally address directly. the task is to get that auditor to listen, to pay attention, to feel something, to open themselves up to the experience of another person’s storuff 171 © equinox publishing ltd. 2009 ry, to open themselves up to another loss and pain, or to the possibility of love: all this through the salvific agency of a story. in luke’s gospel, jesus attempts to save a lawyer’s soul with the story of the good samaritan. that’s what o’brien is about. he is the major evangelist in this collection, and the creator of other minor evangelists—they all tell and listen to and critique the telling and receiving and failure to tell and receive the truth of stories. all of them, in league with o’brien, are trying to save our souls, not just our bodies, our lives, our souls, with stories. i find that good news, even with the promise now unfinished, unrealized, and often repudiated. note 1. even more ironically, ted lavender’s death and jimmy’s failure to love or be loved by martha, are only two of the crosses jimmy cross will carry in the things they carried; an even greater cross will involve his responsibility for the death of kiowa, the most important death in the book, not on a cross but in a shit field, a brilliant recasting of golgotha if there ever was one. it is a death that haunts not just jimmy cross, but the whole platoon, especially a soldier named norman bowker, who died by his own hand believing he could have saved kiowa, and the narrator tim o’brien, whose incautious action may have inadvertently killed him. in another paper i hope to explore what invitations o’brien issues to us to think of that death alongside the death of jesus as recorded in the gospels, both deaths recorded through a variety of accounts, and how o’brien makes that death and other deaths recorded in the things they carried redemptive. references o’brien, tim 1990 the things they carried. boston: houghton mifflin/seymour lawrence. attridge, harold w., ed. 2006 harpercollins study bible. rev. ed. san francisco: harpercollins. microsoft word teimouri said-final [expositions 7.2 (2013) 55–61] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376   edward said: a remembrance and a tribute mahdi teimouri university of malaya i want to begin this paper on a personal note and in an intimately confessional mode. i want to make a confession about the superficial way i was attracted to edward said. i first stumbled upon the name “edward said” rather indirectly during my m.a. studies while i was reading about post-colonialism in what i think was raman selden’s succinct yet profoundly informative a reader’s guide to contemporary literary theory.1 the first thing that arrested my attention was the anomalous juxtaposition of a western name (edward) with an arabic one (said). the exquisite combination intrigued me to know more about him and his ideas. said and his masterpiece orientalism2 dominated my early reading in post-colonialism and to some extent formed the backbone of my master’s dissertation where i compared the postcolonial with the postmodern theories in a crude and naive comparative study. said and orientalism part of my dissertation was devoted to a postmodern look at said’s orientalism, which revolved around the use of the concept of “simulation” by said to describe the representational mode of textual re-presentation of the east by the west. said’s attribution of simulative quality to the construction of the east by western scholars resonated alluringly with the idea of “simulation” introduced by jean baudrillard. by attempting to demonstrate the link between reality and representation, said in orientalism, to my mind, follows a postmodern strategy. a holistic view of his work displays an analogy between the theory of orientalism and baudrillard’s theory of simulacrum. just as baudrillard3 believes that the involvement of images in cyclic representational processes leads first to the reflection of reality, secondly to perversion, then to the concealment of the absence of reality, and, finally, to the creation of a simulation of that, said implies that the same procedure is working in a textual way – the image that is produced in a text is of an abstract (mental) nature. baudrillard proposes that a simulacrum is not unreal or false representation but it “never again exchang[es] for what is real, but exchang[es] in itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.”4 the referent of representation is the real but the referent of a simulacrum is another image. simulations are the product of a successive layering of images which becomes so convoluted that telling the real from the image is hardly possible. the death of the real (the orient) in orientalism constitutes the core of said’s argument. said maintains that to overcome the orient, it should be first “possessed, then re-created by scholars, soldiers and judges” who embarked upon the excavation of “forgotten languages, histories, races and cultures in order to posit them [...] as the true classical orient that could be used to judge and edward said: a remembrance and a tribute 56 rule the modern orient.”5 there are two noteworthy points here: (a) the re-creation of the orient through the biased and subjective point of view of particular groups, and (b) the re-creation based on an old, trite and fixed image inherited from the predecessors in the respective field. the current and real orient once for all is put aside. in its place an image is mounted which itself is an image produced at second hand while being passed down to scholars, writers, etc., who instead of referring to the real orient are generally content with the representational legacy of the past or are too complacent to double-check their inferred findings. sacy's case (a french orientalist) is a good case in point: [a]s a european he ransacked the oriental archives, and he could do so without leaving france. what texts he isolated, he then brought back; he doctored them; then he annotated, codified, arranged, and commented on them. in time, the orient as such became less important than what the orientalist made of it; thus, drawn by sacy into the scaled discursive place of a pedagogical tableau, the orientalist's orient was thereafter reluctant to emerge into reality.6 there is a parallel paradigm here which is comparable to baudrillard’s conception of simulation. it implies that the superimposition of textual layers ends in a simulation of the real. apart from this general impression, said explicitly points to the generation of simulacrum in the representational process of scholarly undertakings of the orientalists: [o]n the one hand, orientalism acquired the orient as literally and as widely as possible; on the other, it domesticated this knowledge to the west, filtering it through regulatory codes, classifications, specimen cases [...] all of each together formed a simulacrum of the orient and reproduced it materially in the west, for the west.7 said gives us an insight into the modus operandi of the orientalists’ epistemological efforts involved in the construction of the orient in the mind of the west. if said was a major influence in shaping part of my academic studies, emmanuel levinas should definitely take the credit for the rest. orientalism, with its reverse-engineering performative function, is marked with ethical considerations. by ethics here i do not mean roles of proper private or public conduct but what is defined as the relationship between the self and the other, and the person who among other scholars investigated and theorized this relationship and gave it an extreme form is no one but the jewish french philosopher emmanuel levinas. if we take ethics as an avoidance of a kind reductivism in dealing with the other, then said’s achievement in orientalism is an ethical statement as it has been referred to in his own 2003 preface to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of orientalism: “the point i want to conclude with now is to insist that the terrible reductive conflicts that herd people under falsely unifying rubrics like ‘america,’ ‘the west’ or ‘islam’ and invent collective identities for large numbers of individuals who are actually quite diverse, cannot remain as potent as they are, and must be 57 teimouri   57    opposed.”8 i do not want to explore ethics in orientalism but my purpose is to compare said’s ethical politics with levinas’s political ethics. levinas and alterity levinas explores and mulls over the history of western philosophy to substantiate his claim that philosophy as the love of wisdom is inherently totalitarian. the entire project of philosophy from its start in plato’s parmenides through to heidegger is awash with the desire to reduce the other into the same. the manifestations of this reductive approach are evidenced by war, particularly the second world war, which inflicted tremendous pain and suffering on the jews. levinas, who lost his family members to the plight of anti-semitism, spent some time as a prisoner of the war at a nazi camp where he drafted his early groundbreaking ethical writings. in recent decades levinas’s scholarship has surged in popularity after his two magnum opuses were translated into english. totality and infinity9 and otherwise than being10 present the main principles of his ethics which he calls “first philosophy.” i do not intend to go into details about his complicated philosophy here. but, in short, what he means by ethics is based on an intersubjective relationship. as it was mentioned above, levinas strives to outline a new relation between the self and the other, refusing to follow the trajectory of the western philosophy which in his opinion betrays a tendency toward reduction and totalitarianism. levinas envisions a relation between the same and the other in which the other is always one step ahead of the self. thus he argues that tools employed by the mind to comprehend the other in fact reduce it to certain limited categories. to escape this reductive approach, levinas has no choice but to place the other far beyond the self’s comprehension, describing it in terms of infinity and attributing to it an excess which is never comprehended by the mind. it is because of this incomprehensibility that the self should hold itself responsible for the other to the point of death and annihilation. reading levinas, one is struck with the vigor and passion with which he describes one’s irrecusable responsibility towards a transcendent other. the relation between the self and the other is illustrated by levinas in terms of proximity, emphasizing the simultaneous separation and connection of them. levinas argues fervently about the existence of an asymmetrical relation between the self and the other. he tries to deconstruct our conception of the truth, history, justice, language, subjectivity, etc., through a series of arguments which locate the origin of all these notions in one’s being addressed by the other and thus summoned to justify his presence and place. in short, we are already accused of failing to fulfill our commitments toward the other even before we encounter or perceive it. said and levinas in perspective said and levinas are interesting cases of comparison from different points of view. said and levinas led a life in exile. they both experienced displacement. levinas was subject to persecution on account of being a jew before and during the second world war. he derived his edward said: a remembrance and a tribute 58 philosophy from talmudic teachings. he managed to incorporate his religious background with his intellectual career. after the war, he endorsed the formation of israel and came to be known as a towering figure in ethics. said was a palestinian-born christian whose downright opposition to the state of israel was loud and clear from the beginning. he was an active supporter of the rights of palestinians. now the interesting part about said and levinas is that in the realm of theory they tend to argue in favor of recognizing the right of the other. they draw attentions to the inadequacy of representational tools and their biased reductivism. as a philosopher, levinas’s ethics sound much too other-worldly and esoteric. no matter how promising and humanitarian and at the same time implausibly, impractically, and inconceivably demanding and strenuous levinasian ethics appears on paper, it only takes one important yet tragic event to put his lofty ideas to the test. throughout his writings levinas does not specify who “the other” is for him. having survived and witnessed the horrendous ordeal of the shoah, levinas’s “other” looms as an uncanny entity whose face serves as an ethical command on its own. contrary to his writings, levinas employs double standards when it comes to applying his ethical injunctions in real-life situations. as such “the other” for levinas, in order to be “the other” of the face-to-face encounter, requires certain qualifications. levinas’s worldview, unlike the idealism of his philosophy, suffers from myopia if not selfinflicted blindness, as it seems to be tainted with hesitation and abstention. he doesn’t sound as vocal as one who has read his grandiose words on the superiority of “the other” expects him to be. let me cite an example. in an interview on radio communaute on 28 september 1982, which was conducted in the wake of sabra and chatila massacre, alain finkielkraut, using the phrase “the temptation of innocence,”11 questions the grounds on which the state of israel justifies its acts of brutality by referring to its history of victimhood. levinas seems to prevaricate on the matter and never condescends to explicitly condemn the massacre at the camps, failing to speak “of the direct guilt.” later in the interview, shlomo malka, the program’s presenter, puts the following question to levinas: “emmanuel levinas, you are the philosopher of the ‘other.’ isn’t history, isn’t politics the very site of the encounter with the ‘other,’ and for the israeli, isn’t the ‘other’ above all the palestinian?”12 levinas’s answer doesn’t touch the right chord: my definition of the other is completely different. the other is the neighbor, who is not necessarily kin, but who can be. and in that sense, if you’re for the other, you’re for the neighbor. but if your neighbor attacks another neighbor or treats him unjustly, what can you do? then alterity takes on another character, in alterity we can find an enemy, or at least then we are faced with the problem of knowing who is right and who is wrong, who is just and who is unjust. there are people who are wrong.13 levinas’s non-committal reply alerts us to be cautious about an unquestioned endorsement of a public intellectual. obviously there is a disparity between grandiloquent pontification and 59 teimouri   59    practicing what one has preached. in the case of levinas, his “reactions seem to fail the test of his own rigorous ethics.”14 now let me get back to said by changing the scene. it is the year 2003 and the venue is the university of washington. it is the walker-ames lecture series and said is answering dr. hollerun’s questions about the historical claim of zionists to the land of israel. said’s answer is a reiteration and affirmation of an ethically informed solution. he simply argues that the jewish claim is “a claim among many others.”15 said explains that there are many who rightfully have claims to the ownership of the land on the grounds of their historical residence. said adds that choosing one claim and backing it up by professing that god has approved of it is preposterous. religion can never be used to buttress such claims. said’s argument is rooted in his belief that no claim overrides others. the equality and equity of said’s solution is a poignant reminder of the inefficiency of approaches that are grounded on the insistence on the separability of arabs and jews, stemming from a disposition to dichotomization of the self/same and the other. my point here is that said is more politically ethical than levinas, who is noted for promoting an ethics of alterity. said jeopardizes his academic and intellectual fame by principally taking a position of non-positionality which establishes continuity between politics and ethics about which levinas seems to be reluctant or doubtful of. as hochberg has emphatically maintained in his article exploring the “ethical implications of said’s investment in memory as a means for political intervention,”16 said is wedded to a conviction that neutralizes enmity through the occurrence of a mutual comprehension, recognition, and identification between the arabs and the jews. hochberg quotes important lines from said which embody said’s opinion: [n]o arab today has an identity that can be unconscious of the jew, that can rule out the jew as a psychic factor in the arab identity; conversely, i think, no jew can ignore the arab in general, nor can he immerse himself in his ancient tradition and lose the palestinian arab and what zionism has done to him. the more intense the modern struggles for identity, the more attention is paid by the arab or the jew to his chosen opponent, or partner. each is the other.17 the last line is highly important as it is charged with ethical significance. unlike levinas, whose conception of the other in the political realm is subject to variation and arbitrary adjudication, said’s stance skips the entanglement of the abstraction of theory and offers a practical ethical solution. i think said owes this particular worldview to his life in exile, which enables him to disentangle himself from allegiance to any sides of disputes. john barbour argues that according to said exile creates “a scrupulous subjectivity, independence of mind, critical perspective and originality of vision. being attuned to more than one culture can give the exile ‘contrapuntal’ awareness of simultaneous dimensions of reality.”18 ashcroft explains that as an exiled intellectual said is concerned with his location in the world: edward said: a remembrance and a tribute 60 this is the core of worldliness, which itself is the driving energy of all said’s work. both text and critic have a location from which and within which they speak. worldliness demands a secular criticism, not bound to the priestly rites of high theory […] no matter how strongly intellectuals may believe that their interests are of “higher things or ultimate values,” he contends, the morality of the intellectual’s practice begins with its location in the secular world and is affected by “where it takes place, whose interests it serves, how it jibes with a consistent and universalist ethic, how it discriminates between power and justice, what it reveals of one’s choices and priorities.”19 although levinas, inspired by the talmudic teachings, imputed divine positionality to the other by transcendentalizing it, in practice he falls short of acknowledging their worldly existence and as a result presents a lopsided argument. whereas said rejects the abstraction of theory, or reliance on any “high theory” which could sanctify one’s position, and thus demonstrates a deeper and more practical ethical responsibility than levinas as the most prominent jewish philosopher and theoretician of ethics of the previous century. to conclude this paper, let me get back to the beginning and the appeal of the names “edward” and “said.” just as his first name and last name counterpoint each other, said has been able to project a contrapuntal look on world affairs. in an interview with an israeli daily in 2000, said scandalized the reader by concluding that “i am the last jewish intellectual […] the only true follower of adorno. […] let me put it this way: i am a jewish-palestinian.”20 notes 1. selden, ramon. 1989. a reader’s guide to contemporary literary theory. lexington: university press of kentucky. 2. said, edward. 1978. orientalism. new york: vintage. 3. baudrillard, jean. 1983. simulations. trans. phil beitchman, paul foss, and paul patton. los angeles: semiotext(e). 4. baudrillard 1983, 11. 5. said 1978, 92. 6. said 1978, 127–128. 7. said 1978, 166 (my emphasis). 8. said, edward. 2003. orientalism: 25th anniversary edition. new york: vintage, xxii. 9. levinas, emmanuel. 1961. totalité et infini. essai sur l’extériorité. the hague: martinus nijhoff. 10. levinas, emmanuel. 1974. autrement qu'être ou au-delà de l'essence. the hague: martinus nijhoff. 11. levinas, emmanuel. 1989. “ethics and politics.” trans. jonathan romney. the levinas reader. ed. seán hand. cambridge, ma: blackwell, 290. 12. levinas 1989, 294. 13. levinas 1989, 294. 61 teimouri   61    14. hand, seán. 2009. emmanuel levinas. new york: routledge. 107. 15. said, edward. 2003. “imperial continuity – palestine, iraq, and u.s. policy.” the walker-ames lecture series, university of washington. <www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgteoj1lihu> (accessed oct 10, 2012). 16. hochberg, gil. 2006. “edward said: ‘the last jewish intellectual’: on identity, alterity, and the politics of memory.” social text 24.2, 48. 17. hochberg 2006, 59. 18. barbour, john. 2007. “edward said and the space of exile.” literature & theology 21.3, 295. 19. ashcroft, bill. 2007. “exile and representation: edward said as public intellectual.” edward said: the legacy of a public intellectual. melbourne: melbourne university press, 79. 20. said qtd. in hochberg 2006, 47. © equinox publishing ltd. 2007, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expositions 1.2 (2007) 127–140] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v1i2.127 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 practice and improvise: a christian response to the politics of morality1 kathleen roberts skerrett grinnell college over many years, american political theorist william e. connolly has offered a sustained critique of the “politics of morality.” connolly made his case initially by attacking themes in the theological writings of augustine of hippo. in response to connolly’s initial challenge, this essay promotes a conception of christian ethics that reflects other augustinian themes than those connolly resisted. drawing on the work of h. richard niebuhr and sam wells, i show how christian ethicists have developed accounts of improvised responsibility. the essay concludes that such accounts are congruent with connolly’s vision of politics as critical pluralism based on agonistic respect. for richard r. niebuhr i the pictures of responsibility that organize legal, ethical, and political theories are themselves of political consequence. christian theology is a reservoir of such pictures, and augustinian theology is of particular importance in this regard. to the extent that contemporary ethical and political theories envision citizens who are responsible to ideals of autonomy and free choice, they throw off conceptual shadows that cast into darkness those persons who cannot rise to the occasions that such responsibility demands. christian theologians have opposed modern conceptions of responsibility that disavow the imponderability of human involvement in sin. a political theory of democracy, for example, that emphasizes interests, liberties, reasonableness, and free choice glides smoothly over various kinds of human indigence. deliberative 128 practice and improvise © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 democratic theory—which has gripped american political and legal theorists, in some version or other, for more than four decades—appears, at least from an augustinian view, to misapprehend the beings it describes. american political theorist william e. connolly has sustained a constant critique of deliberative conceptions of responsibility. connolly made his case initially by attacking themes in the theological writings of augustine of hippo. for those of us who find in augustine a searing image of the obsessions and lapses of an evidently unstable will, connolly’s attack may seem ironic. augustine was uneasy with an account of free will as the bright lever of choice, and his uneasiness grew with maturity. his doctrine of original sin postulated an innate defect in the will, so that, while it operates as a chooser, it seems to be deprived of its original compass in god. perhaps we can stipulate that “the politics of morality”—to use connolly’s phrase—are indigenous to augustinian terrain. whenever we ponder the obscurity of motives, the moronic compulsiveness of desire, or the singe of remorse, we are on terrain that augustine in some ways delimited for us. connolly organized his thinking by attacking augustinian rigor. yet, in response to connolly’s challenges, in the second part of my paper, i will promote a picture of improvised responsibility that draws on other augustinian themes. ii in 1969, connolly aimed his “critical temper” at contemporary theories of pluralist democracy that described american politics as sustained competition among coherent groups, with government serving as the arena and/or umpire of contest and adjudication (connolly 1969). this pluralist theory tended to assume or assert that citizens’ involvement in competing groups enabled them to develop the personal capabilities to engage in public deliberative processes. citizens would then bring these capabilities into the public political forum in order to negotiate reasonable basic institutions and laws. theorists recommended this picture of pluralist democracy as being more stable and less violent than its predominant contrast-model, which was authoritarian or totalitarian government. skerrett 129 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 john rawls’s a theory of justice was published in 1971. its huge influence would cement the terms that connolly had adumbrated in 1969 as the putative orthodox hermeneutics for interpreting american democracy. yet connolly had already found it imperative to disrupt them. in the terms of political discourse, he analyzed pluralist accounts of “power,” “responsibility,” and “the idea of freedom” (connolly 1974). his purpose there was to politicize these key terms in order to loosen the authority of liberal contract theory over their proper use. connolly has never aimed to undercut democratic pluralism, but rather to deepen it, to theorize it in ways that are more fitting to the kind of ambiguous beings we are and to the complex contingencies in which we live. in identity/difference (1991), connolly’s critical temper found a new “contrast-model,” which he came to call “the augustinian imperative.” in writing identity/difference, connolly was spurred by a thinker he intensely disliked, but whose intellectual and rhetorical abilities nonetheless commanded his respect. rather than mask the intensity of his dislike, he explored its sources in his “letter to augustine,” the final chapter of identity/difference. the epistolary form allowed connolly to make a direct attack. to augustine, he wrote: i admire your willingness to interpret the other openly from your own vantage point. it relieves you from the modern tendency to insinuate one’s deepest prejudices into charitable interpretations of the other. (connolly 1991, 124) connolly’s interpretation of augustine was not charitable; instead, it dramatized the difficulties of agonistic respect through connolly’s selfconscious indulgence in the temptations of enmity. connolly put some fierce charges to augustine. but, in doing so, he wanted to expose shadow-concepts that fall alongside every theory of free will. in identity/difference, he argued that there is a persistent instability in the conceptions of responsibility that western political and legal theories espouse. these theories require supplementary concepts to catch the disturbing energies that would otherwise compromise our picture of ethics as fidelity to principle. so, we may observe, the freedom of the will must stand out against the background of original sin; 130 practice and improvise © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 the categorical imperative must stand out against the opacity of passions; virtuous character must stand out against psychic abnormality; free choice stands out against our manipulated appetites. we cannot think too far in the direction of a deliberative theory of responsibility without coming across the need for these shadow-concepts. or rather, there is something inhumane about any theory that tries to eschew them. for example, however much we respect legal definitions of sanity, there is something horrible about the incarceration of the mentally ill, who are competent to stand trial, but whose deterioration in prison is often extreme. a woman convict, in iowa, while serving her sentence, has on two separate occasions gouged out each of her eyes. a male prisoner in ohio opens slits in his arms and then pushes tooth-brushes up under the skin. these reports alone chasten one’s feeling of the adequacy of our criteria of responsibility. yet the same unease can be raised in relation to many convicts whose choices were drowning in addictions, intolerable frustrations, or lifelong grief when they formed an intention to do a criminal act. the most unsettling criminal cases occur where the seam between the choices of the accused and demonic energies that surround them cannot be made out with any clarity.2 it is perhaps not so very different in the cases of those of us who manage to stay out of jail. we require some shadow-concept to mitigate the idea of mens rea as the source of our actions—to contain the baffling energies that crystallize around it. connolly attacked augustine because he considered that augustine’s account of human responsibility for evil called forth the shadow-concept of original sin. connolly charged further that augustine’s belief that the perversion of free will must be commensurable with the brokenness of the world masked augustine’s bitterness at the real state of things. augustine imagined a world responsive to human intention and choice. it was, in connolly’s perspective, a fantastic denial of the insecure connection between our principled actions and their ultimate effects. yet because augustine believed that god is omnipotent and perfectly good, he could not acknowledge such insecure connections to be part of the fabric of creation. so, in connolly’s view, augustine skerrett 131 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 loaded responsibility for evil onto human choices. the question of atonement for evil, then, became acute. a human victim was required, a scapegoat who could bear the unbearable incommensurability between human responsibility and the extent of evil in the world. from connolly’s perspective, there is no historical evidence to support the christian claim that only one victim was required. it must be said that connolly’s critique of augustine was primarily addressed to contemporary political theorists. connolly wanted to show how the picture of deliberative responsibility invites citizens to project shadow-concepts onto others so that the responsible citizen who is capable of sustaining inalienable rights can be distinguished from minorities, addicts, aliens, prisoners, poor mothers, children, debtors, demoniacs, homeless, mentally ill, mentally anguished, unemployed, uninsured, and those who have been maimed one way or another. these others fail to reach the requirements of citizenship of pluralist democracies because they cannot participate in its deliberative processes. connolly argued that it is our conceptions of responsibility that work to disenfranchise these others. in identity/difference, he urged, therefore, that we conceptualize politics as the means to contest against deliberative pictures of responsibility. in the augustinian imperative: reflections on the politics of morality, connolly established augustine as the rival to connolly’s own “critical pluralism” or “politics of generosity” (connolly 2002a). connolly conceived of agonistic generosity as “a social relation of respect for the opponent against whom you define yourself ” (connolly 2002a, 155). he envisioned agonistic respect as a relation both more generous and more perilous than liberal tolerance. such respect “cuts” deeper, connolly wrote, because it avows the “interdependence and strife” through which rival identities reciprocally inform and transform each other. connolly construed augustine’s strategies for consolidating orthodox identity as the prototype of negative political differentiation. heresies, he argued, are options that emerge within communities of shared faith; but the pursuit of these options by some of the faithful become politically threatening when they disturb “the highest hope the authoritative doctrine is designed to sustain” (connolly 2002a, 78). threatening op132 practice and improvise © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 tions within the shared faith must then be defeated. if they cannot be defeated, the persons who propose them must be made aversive: that is, they must be heaped with invective that makes their ideas seem not just implausible but also shameful. connolly used augustine’s thought in order to delineate the process of negative differentiation that produces identities that are rigorously responsible to truth and goodness. orthodox identities that are so rigorously responsible require defenses against those energies that persistently harass and disturb them. paradoxically, then, a rigorously responsible identity becomes fissured with habits of cruelty, incuriosity, animosity, and vindictiveness. it is an identity that must cope with challenges to its integrity through overt or covert violence. yet, we can observe, this picture of orthodox identities is overdrawn. on the contrary, there are uneven intensities to orthodox identities that may complicate the process of negative differentiation. the intensity of a belief for orthodox identities does not depend upon its coherence with other beliefs, but rather on its indispensability to life. the beliefs that seem indispensable to one generation may be mouthed as enchanting formulae in another. some beliefs are enchanting; some are incorporated into our practical capabilities. indispensable beliefs are those that organize actual priorities one day at a time. connolly identified the doctrine of salvation as augustine’s highest hope. but what if augustine’s most intense beliefs were expressed in his practical capabilities for leadership, spiritual direction, political activism, and the demands of living in a religious community? what if his belief in love animated the demeanor of his body with more intensity than his belief in the eternal damnation of sinners? what if his belief in the doctrine of grace, expressed through looks and gestures, were more legible to his contemporaries than the doctrine of original sin? we would have to reconstruct the differential intensities of augustine’s beliefs by inference from the daily practices he sustained, with great diligence and tact, of friendship, of worship, of pastoral care, of prayer and confession, of prodigious correspondence with others. such differential intensities make an orthodox identity dynamic, animating the irony and perception, for example, that informed augustine’s own skerrett 133 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 political interventions in cases of capital punishment. to attend to the uneven intensities of belief makes conceptual room for the dynamism of orthodox identities, their differentiation from and responsiveness to the excluded others. belief and action are never mechanically related: their connection is expressed more often as a form of tact than fidelity to principle. thus, in responding to connolly’s account of the augustinian imperative, i want to hold open the visceral plenitude of orthodoxy that is never exhausted by negative political differentiation. so below i will advance a picture of improvised responsibility that draws on other augustinian themes, in particular, ascesis (training), faith, and grace. i organize my constructive remarks under the rubric: practice and improvise. iii as we move our thinking about responsibility towards practice and improvisation, the texture of agency thickens and expands. it thickens into what connolly has called the “visceral register”—those somatic markers of perception and feeling that guide and support our choices. it expands into a community that conscientiously shares its life together. the term practice resonates, of course, with currents in christian ethics, but also with connolly’s own most recent work in neuropolitics (2002b) and pluralism (2005). the shift to practice not only highlights the significance of the visceral register for ethics; it allows that that register can be trained through exercise. practice involves our tacit avowal that freedom gathers in us, if at all, as “time in the incarnation of habit,” to use james wetzel’s phrase (wetzel 1992, 138). practice takes time; or rather, practice gathers time into the visceral register of our being. to avow this suggests how intensities of belief can be unevenly energized and realized in various social or historical contexts. some beliefs become the capabilities we draw upon in ordinary or extraordinary circumstances, whereas other beliefs release only the mild illumination of a fantasy, what iris murdoch called a “dream-like facility” (murdoch 1983, 44). practice is the way we incorporate beliefs into our total style of being. a picture of improvised responsibility can draw on christian tradi134 practice and improvise © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 tions of ascesis—without necessarily taking over invective against the flesh as the ubiquitous shadow-concept to spirit. the tradition of the desert ascetics, for example, is remarkably unruffled by the indigence of the will. monks made alarming deviations from their path, but were restored to it with guidance that fostered more resilience than reproach. responsibility in the ascetic tradition is understood to express no more and no less than the daily reprieve that enables a selfish man to rise to receive his small portion with gratitude. the ascetic tradition reduces the operatic complexities of the will to mundane situations of hunger, lust, anger, boredom, anxiety, envy, or exhaustion. it teaches ascetics to meet these unspectacular situations with a tender but hourly resolve. such practice allows us to become acquainted with the energies that surround our choices—greed, grief, anger, attraction, envy, empathy—to befriend some of these as sources of new insight and possibility, to resist others gently and rhythmically so that we do not inadvertently strengthen them through fierce struggle. practice allows these energies to become familiar, to give them direction where possible, or at least to exorcise their fascination through the banal means of getting used to them. the point is to develop capabilities that we want to take on a life of their own at those times when we are overwhelmed by uncertainty or anguish. to participate in liturgies of worship was a crucial practice for augustine. liturgical traditions structure and enrich imagination; they create an oscillation between the practices of our personal embodiment and our social incorporation into the body of christ. our participation in worship is a mode of submission. there is a kind of powerlessness that is the foundation of worship, a surrender of the self-centered noise of inquiry and deliberation. in liturgy, we enter into a temporally and viscerally saturated space and ask god to recreate life in us. we are immersed with others in sensory experiences, in choreographed movements, in stories that are told again and again, and all of these things are synchronized with rhythmic turns through spaces and seasons. liturgical practice layers belief in us through exercise in different moods and weather. our beliefs are apprehended in the dimensions of space and time, known better, with less alarm at their maverick intensities and enlightenments. liturgical discipline disabuses us of the idea that freeskerrett 135 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 dom is about spontaneous choice. liturgy rather promotes a picture of freedom that entails duration and endurance. both of these entailments can help us bear with humility but without reactive self-loathing the unforeseen consequences of our responsible actions in the world. let me give two examples of christian ethicists who have systematically developed pictures of improvised responsibility. in his 1960 robertson lectures, h. richard niebuhr developed what he called a christian ethics of responsiveness (niebuhr 1963). niebuhr set aside the predominant teleological and deontological pictures of moral man, urging that christian life must have its own ethical “style.” that style could not be assimilated to the picture of “man-the-maker” fostered by teleological concepts or by “man-the-citizen” fostered by deontological concepts. rather, niebuhr pictured “man-the-answerer” fostered by christian faith in the sovereign and gracious god. niebuhr offered a picture of improvised responsibility, where individuals must respond to actions upon them in anticipation of a response to their responses. responsibility is therefore exercised in the imaginative task of interpreting the actions of others, and in the practical task of acting so as to welcome others’ responses to an action. situations of social emergency and personal tragedy have particular weight in niebuhr’s account. our tact is tested most severely where our deliberations are most uncertain. the finest contemporary exemplification of christian “response ethics,” however, is sam wells’ improvisation (wells 2004). wells argues for a picture of improvised responsibility through an extended exploration of the methods of improvisational theatre companies. the picture he develops is always fundamentally social and ecclesial. it demands the imaginative responsiveness that becomes possible among individuals who have trained with each other to improvise on a shared narrative whose outcome no one controls. in an improvised drama, players make offers to each other in order to develop the plot that unfolds among them. players can either “accept” or “block” other players’ offers. accepting means responding to the others’ initiative in ways that enliven the premise of the offer and allow the story to move forward. blocking means refusing the premise of the offer, and preventing that particular unfolding. christians, wells avows, must strive to create communities 136 practice and improvise © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 that enable people to accept all offers. to be faithful means that the principle that imbues our responsiveness should be, to use augustine’s famous phrase, “whatever is, is good.” to be church means forming ourselves into communities whose practices and liturgies enable us to respond to all offers with creative faith. but what then of evil offers? what about dangerous offers? in christian communities, wells observes, there are usually three kinds of reasons that people give for “blocking” an offer: “they tend to see saying ‘yes’ as impossible, improper, or dangerous” (wells 2004, 103). in such cases, wells recommends a strategy of “overaccepting,” which is to say of allowing gracious imagination and response to defeat the premise of the evil offer. consider an example. after the attacks on new york and washington in september 2001, archbishop of canterbury rowan williams wrote a little book called writing in the dust (williams 2002). williams personally experienced the bravery and care that ordinary people offered one another on that terrifying morning in manhattan. he later read the accounts of phone calls that people made from the towers and planes to say good-bye to loved ones. he holds up for reverence these simple, practiced responses of love and courage that doomed people made in the face of anguish. williams makes no excuse for the attacks, but in his response he defeats the premise of the terrorist’s offer by finding the gifts that were offered in abundance in the midst of it. he “overaccepts,” so that the ordinary responsiveness of the victims becomes the meaningful offer in the story. practice is the rigor that gives improvisers the resilience to sustain pliant moves. as williams observes, “the hardest thing in the world is to know how to act so as to make the difference that can be made” (2002, 47). such practical knowledge is a kind of discretion that appears in the moment of dread. as williams puts it: we can cling harder and harder to the rock of our threatened identity—a choice, finally, for self-delusion over truth; or we can accept that we shall have no ultimate choice but to let go, and in that letting go, give room to what’s there around us—the sheer impression of the moment, the need of the person next to you. (2002, 59) skerrett 137 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 we practice in order to sustain the moments of “letting go.” thus, in the aftermath of the terrorist attack, the dust that blanketed wall street recalled to williams a “stray story” of christ: imagine a circle of righteous, angry men, with a convicted sinner at bay, and god on their side. “what do you say?” they ask the young rabbi, and jesus responds: “let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her” (john 8.3–11). for a moment, those of us whose imaginations are trained to these words will picture jesus crouching down in the silence that follows, writing in the dust. then one by one, the righteous men put down their stones and walk away (williams 2002, 77–78). iv following his earliest contest with augustine, connolly advocated an ethical-political spirituality that could challenge “the politics of morality” (connolly 2002a, 151–58). in particular, he looked towards a politics that would be responsive, daring, and based in practices of generosity and agonistic respect. if his own engagement in such politics was initially contra-augustinian, that should not determine the terms in which we infra-augustinians engage connolly (skerrett 2004). rather, we turn to augustine and the augustinian tradition with a sense of the plenitude that sustains the great theologian’s interest for us. connolly’s initial “harsh” reading of him can offer provocation to readings that energize efficacious beliefs around other strands of augustine’s theology and discipline. but the efficacy of such beliefs comes, not from a more authoritative exposition, but from our whole style of ethical being. the rubric of practice and improvise draws on augustinian themes: the priority of grace, the perversity of the will, the inscrutable depths of scripture, and the church as the body of christ. these themes move us away from a fundamentalist morality towards an ethical sensibility that responds rather than decides. in that responsiveness, there is room for christians to engage a politics of critical pluralism that joins generosity with agonistic respect. in a pluralist democracy, christians can buttress pictures of deliberative responsibility, or we can model practices of improvised responsibility. the deliberative pictures lead frequently, if not inexorably, to the 138 practice and improvise © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 failures connolly has exposed—the need for a shadow-concept, the temptation to project that shadow-concept onto others, hypocrisy and pandering within the moral community, invective and violence against its outsiders, and, finally, the subliminal doubt that god is neither sovereign nor gracious. further, such a picture tends to buttress those reactions we make to strife that merely demonstrate to ourselves our power in the world. they are aimed at making a righteous response, rather than a response that makes the difference that can be made. yet, insofar as the ethos of practice and improvise is properly an ecclesial ethics, as wells insists, it is not perforce universal. it is not supposed to be. but that does not make it any less pertinent to the politics of pluralist democracies. for, as h. richard niebuhr argued, the judgment that guides our responsiveness is not, to what principle or purpose are we accountable, but rather, to what community? and, for niebuhr, as for wells, christian responsiveness must be accountable to “the universal society of being” encompassed in time by the promise of everlasting life (niebuhr 1963, 107). so, if this style of ethics is not meant to be universal, it is nonetheless radically catholic. in that regard, wells commends the improvisational technique of reincorporating elements that have been let down or left behind. he urges that this technique is especially important to christians. the technique of reincorporation incites us to envision the practical redress of negative political differentiation. for whatever has been disavowed, abandoned, or rejected as unclean must be finally reincorporated in the kingdom of god. thus, a community that works to accept all offers is one that will be attuned to the rejected and the outcast. it will look into the shadow-concepts of its pictures of responsibility in order to reincorporate and remake whatever rejected elements have been sequestered there. and it will do this modestly, without extraordinary power, as it becomes the obvious thing to do. to contest a rival demands that one practice and improvise the picture of responsibility one affirms. others have pointed out to me the dangers of “over-acceptance” in my engagement with connolly’s attack on augustine. yet improvisation demands that we learn to discern the gift in the offer another makes, even in a rival offer, and so respond. skerrett 139 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 to act responsibly in this way means to act towards the difference that can be made; it is an open-ended and vulnerable pursuit. in so doing, though, we hope to align our responsiveness with the generosity enfolded in augustine’s maxim: “love, and do what you will.” end notes 1. i presented an early version of this paper at the augustine and politics conference, february 24, 2006, at villanova university. my thanks to peter busch for inviting me to speak there, to greg hoskins for helping me to get there, and to other participants in the conference for inspiring conversations, especially peter busch, todd breyfogle, catherine conybeare, eric gregory, chuck mathewes, fr. tom martin, joseph prud’homme and jim wetzel. fundamentally, though, this paper reflects so much that i learned from richard r. niebuhr many years ago at harvard divinity school. i dedicate it to him with love. 2. in a 2005 frontline program, “the new asylums,” it is estimated that there are a half million people in american prisons who have been diagnosed with serious mental illnesses. often these people end up in maximum-security institutions as a result of their disciplinary infractions within the penal system. one of the most terrible images for me in the documentary is of “group therapy” in which imprisoned men, each in his own individual cage, respond to their earnest psychiatrist. documentary broadcast march 21, 2006 on iowa public television. see www.pbs.org. 3. for an account of augustine’s political activism against capital punishment, see dodaro 2005. 4. the context of this maxim is augustine’s reflection on the proper disposition required to admonish others in the rule of st. augustine, translated in g. lawless, augustine of hippo and his monastic rule, cited in martin 2005, 182. thomas f. martin, o.s.a., argues that augustine’s ideal vision of political community was set out in his monastic writings. see martin 2005, 165–86. references connolly, william e. 1969 the challenge to pluralist theory. in the bias of pluralism, ed. william e. connolly, 3–34. new york, ny: atherton press. 1974 the terms of political discourse. lexington, ma: d.c. heath and company. 1991 identity/difference: democratic negotiations of political paradox. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. 140 practice and improvise © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 2002a the augustinian imperative: reflections on the politics of morality. 2nd ed. new york, ny: roman and littlefield. 2002b neuropolitics: thinking, culture, speed. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. 2005 pluralism. durham, nc: duke university press. dodaro, robert, o.s.a. 2005 between the two cities: political action in augustine of hippo. in augustine and politics, ed. john doody, kevin l. hughes and kim paffenroth, 99–116. lanham, md: lexington books. martin, thomas f. 2005 augustine and the politics of monasticism. in augustine and politics, ed. john doody, kevin l. hughes and kim paffenroth, 165–86. lanham, md: lexington books. murdoch, iris 1983 against dryness. in revisions: changing perspectives in moral philosophy, ed. stanley hauerwas and alasdair macintyre, 43–50. south bend, in: notre dame university press. niebuhr, h. richard 1963 the responsible self. san francisco, ca: harper and row. rawls, john 1971 a theory of justice. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. skerrett, k. roberts 2004 the indispensable rival: william e. connolly’s engagement with augustine of hippo. journal of the american academy of religion 72: 487–506. doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfh038 http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfh038 wells, sam 2004 improvisation: the drama of christian ethics. grand rapids, mi: bravos press. wetzel, james 1992 augustine and the limits of virtue. cambridge: cambridge university press. williams, rowan 2002 writing in the dust: after september 11. grand rapids, mi: wm. b. eerdman’s publishing company. [expositions 5.2 (2011) 142-146] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 classics and digital humanities allen j. romano florida state university “digital humanities” is the current umbrella term, one which is gaining wide currency, despite its relatively recent popularization, for a variety of activities at the intersection of humanities and computing.1 though the field itself is well over fifty years old, digital humanities seems to have recently caught the attention of the popular press. the new york times’ series, entitled “humanities 2.0,” explores “how digital tools are changing scholarship in history, literature and the arts.”2 one such piece earlier this year highlighted work like that of stanford’s dan edelstein on the intellectual networks of enlightenment thinkers.3 (in classical circles, the hestia project is doing analogous work on spatial networks in herodotus.4) a more recent piece shows off the use of second life and the 3–d models of the theatron project for teaching and research.5 the attention is great, but there is of course a certain blindness in these reports. one report in the new york times seems astounded that humanities scholars – they’re the pale ones hanging out near the library, right? – even know how to use computers.6 (the piece is framed with an appraisal of the whole digital project by anthony grafton which misleadingly makes grafton’s sober assessment sound like partial condemnation.) the popular press’s rhetoric of “cutting edge” distorts the situation, illustrated easily enough within our own discipline. classics boasts some of the longest-running projects in the digital realm, many of which are now so familiar that it is difficult to think of them as “digital humanities.”7 the bryn mawr classical review, for example, is the second-oldest online academic journal.8 the perseus digital library started up in 1985 and the thesaurus linguae graecae some forty years ago, in 1972.9 computer analysis of classical texts extends back to the earliest days of humanities computing.10 it is worth recalling that the very first project in digital humanities was the work of father roberto busa, beginning in 1949, to construct a concordance to the works of thomas aquinas with the aid of early computers, a project which, if not strictly “classical,” has at least linguistic kinship.11 so even if the grey lady is oblivious to the history of digital humanities, this most recent percolation into the popular press captures something essential and distinctive about digital humanities at this particular moment (and in distinction to the modes of doing humanities computing over the past decades). matthew kirschenbaum, in a recent genre piece on the perennial digital humanities question, “what is digital humanities,” ends with this public dimension: whatever else it might be then, the digital humanities today is about a scholarship (and a pedagogy) that is publicly visible in ways to which we are generally unaccustomed, a scholarship and pedagogy that are bound up with infrastructure in ways that are deeper 143 romano and more explicit than we are generally accustomed to, a scholarship and pedagogy that are collaborative and depend on networks of people that live an active 24/7 life online.12 i would take exception at that last point, as this seems as unhealthy a prerequisite as living a 24/7 life inside a library; but kirshenbaum emphasizes well the way that the best digital humanities work is not the property of just a small set of scholars. computing tools and resources must be shared and digital humanities work necessarily involves building things online which can be made accessible to a potentially broader audience than the standard circulation of a scholarly monograph. we can see in this characterization a profound shift where the computer as statistical heavy-lifter and concordance generator – the promise of early humanities computing – has not disappeared, but has become so obvious as to be unmarked; in its place the current ideology of the web, that is, a world that is social, plugged in, public, and collaborative, rises to prominence. that digital humanities should matter in a discussion of the future of classics is, in a very practical sense, a matter of money. funding for digital initiatives, many with a classroom component or orientation, seem to be going up at a time when many other spending areas trend towards zero. at the national level, there are currently 11 different funding programs for digital humanities sponsored by neh and administered under a permanent “office of digital humanities” formed in 2008.13 acls funds digital innovation fellowships separate from its regular acls fellowships.14 the andrew mellon foundation has devoted big money to support digital humanities centers like hamilton college’s digital humanities initiative and the crossinstitution project bamboo.15 and google has thrown its weight behind digital humanities with its digital humanities research awards.16 of interest to the classics scholar, google has already made available 500 digitized books and out-of-copyright works of scholarship.17 and their ngram viewer of word frequency for their digital book archive is not a trivial tool for surgical slices across intellectual history.18 classics is perhaps more fortunate than other disciplines in having major repositories of digital texts, including epigraphic and papyrological texts, online for some time now. even a cursory romp through the listings on the digital classicist site or the stoa consortium reveals a wide variety of endeavors occupying distinct digitization niches.19 whichever of these tools any individual scholar might claim to use or be familiar with, most of these have the common purpose of making available or collecting for search and study our particular data, the data of texts, sites, and scholarship. we are at a turning point in this regard. tim berners-lee sees the next iteration of the web in terms of linked data.20 where the existing web consists of data dumped or lumped in various packets, each semantically isolated from others, the next leap forward will be in creating structural links between publically available datasets.21 that this is a concept of the open web which requires that data not hide behind subscription walls is an important point, but also gives some vision as to where we might go. there is still much work to be done in digitization to be sure. on this front, greg crane’s call for more editors is a prerequisite of particular importance in our field.22 our data (of the textual persuasion at least) needs much attention with the expertise classics and digital humanities 144 native to our discipline. but the endpoint of such work is not solely or even primarily in the publication of that data, but in what one can do once that data becomes linked to other types of information. the neh is on to this trend – their recent “digging into data” program is aimed precisely at finding new ways to manipulate and connect data in the humanities.23 imagine the analogue for classics and its data sets. what can be done when we can link chronologies and timelines to geographic data which is in turn linked to texts, texts which are in turn coordinated with their context in a meaningful way? one can, of course, map or trace any single component through those other domains with relative ease and speed, but imagine the greater context of a linked web of other public data, where our ancient data is coordinated with wholly different sorts of information – weather data, health data, geologic data. imagine what we can do if we can take our data and feed it analysis tools developed for wholly different data sets? what sorts of data analysis can we then bring to bear? the promise of digital humanities is not as panacea which answers old questions with a new technologically-driven period; rather, linking all this data generates new questions or new perspective on old questions. that is perhaps high-minded technological evangelicalism and so we would do well to mix a healthy dose of doubt with our expectations. harsh realities do loom on the horizon. all humanities disciplines have struggled with basic problems of how to evaluate and support work in the digital humanities. is an online project equivalent to other forms of scholarly production? is it something more? something less? institutionally, technologically, how do we get these projects moving? how do we ensure long-term stability? these are problems we share with all humanities disciplines, but classics also has a more specific and acute problem which is, i think, the biggest challenge going forward. our discipline has a particularly heavy burden of training, both because of the long history of scholarship which stubbornly refuses to be irrelevant and because of the non-trivial period of immersion required for ancient languages. (we feel this pinch already when we must balance the conservatism of the discipline against the evolving methods or discourse outside of any particular classical sub-field.) how do we train classicists equipped to do digital work? joint degrees in computer science and classics? can ph.d. curricula accommodate coursework or the autodidactic time necessary to maintain competence in computing? the future of classics, as far as digital humanities is concerned, is only partly in the projects that are, with increasing frequency, populating the internet landscape. and though there are many other areas which may be more important, like funding or institutional reorganizations, classicists are not always in a position of direct control over such things. but we are able to more quickly and deeply affect graduate training of classicists. the promise of digital classics, let me suggest or at least provoke, ultimately depends upon how we adapt that training. and that is a project to which, whether or not you know how to code or want to build things on the web, everyone can contribute. 145 romano notes 1. for the history of humanities and computing, see especially a companion to digital humanities, eds. susan schreibman, ray siemens, and john unsworth (oxford: oxford university press, 2004), available online at http://digitalhumanities.org/companion/; and, more recently, patrik svensson, “the landscape of digital humanities,” digital humanities quarterly 4.1 (2010), available online at http://www.digitalhumanities.org/ dhq/vol/4/1/000080/000080.html with further bibliography. for the term “digital humanities,” see matthew kirschenbaum, “what is digital humanities and what's it doing in english departments?” ade bulletin 150 (2010): 55–61, especially 56–57. particularly helpful for exploring current work in digital humanities is the cuny digital humanities resource guide: http://commons.gc.cuny.edu/wiki/index.php/the_ cuny_digital_humanities_resource_guide. 2. http://topics.nytimes.com/top/features/books/series/humanities_20/index.html 3. http://republicofletters.stanford.edu 4. http://www.open.ac.uk/arts/hestia/ 5. http://www.kvl.cch.kcl.ac.uk/theatron.html 6. patricia cohen, “digital keys for unlocking the humanities’ riches,” new york times november 16, 2020, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/arts/17digital.html. 7. gregory crane surveys the history of “classics and the computer: an end of the history” in part i, section 4 of schreibman, siemens, and unsworth 2004. see also theodore f. brunner, “classics and the computer: the history,” accessing antiquity: the computerization of classical databases, ed. jon solomon (tucson, az: university of arizona press, 1993), 10–33. 8. http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/ 9. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu and http://www.tlg.uci.edu/ 10. in 1959, james mcdonough wrote of computers and classics, hailing the dawning of “a new era in scholarship, a golden age in which machines perform the servile secretarial tasks, and so leave the scholar free for his proper function, interpretive scholarly research” (james t. mcdonough, “computers and classics,” the classical world 53.2 (1959): 44–50, especially 49–50). it is not until the late 1960s that we see a significant uptick in computer-aided research, particularly for statistical analyses of various features of ancient literature (e.g., formula, sound, meter). the journal computers and the humanities (since 2005 called language resources and evaluation) started up in 1966 and one can read regular annual reports on “computers and the classics” into the early 1970s. 11. roberto busa, sancti thomae aquinatis hymnorum ritualium varia specimina concordantiarum ... a first example of word index automatically compiled and printed by ibm punched card machines (milan: fratelli bocca, 1951); see also “the annals of http://digitalhumanities.org/companion/ http://commons.gc.cuny.edu/wiki/index.php/the_cuny_digital_humanities_resource_guide http://commons.gc.cuny.edu/wiki/index.php/the_cuny_digital_humanities_resource_guide http://topics.nytimes.com/top/features/books/series/humanities_20/index.html http://republicofletters.stanford.edu/ http://www.open.ac.uk/arts/hestia/ http://www.kvl.cch.kcl.ac.uk/theatron.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/arts/17digital.html http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/ http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/ http://www.tlg.uci.edu/ classics and digital humanities 146 humanities computing: the index thomisticus,” computers and the humanities 14.2 (1980): 83–90. 12. kirschenbaum 2010. 13. http://www.neh.gov/odh/ 14. http://www.acls.org/grants/default.aspx?id=508 15. http://www.dhinitiative.org and http://www.projectbamboo.org 16. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/our-commitment-to-digital-humanities.html. some of this funding has gone to classical endeavors, including greg crane at tufts for classics in google books and to the team of elton barker, eric c. kansa, and leif isaksen for google ancient places (gap): discovering historic geographical entities in the google books corpus. the fate of some work with the google corpus remains to be determined however as there are copyright issues still in the courts (see, e.g., http://books.google.com/googlebooks/agreement/ and miguel helft, “judge rejects google’s deal to digitize books,” new york times march 22, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/23/technology/23google.html). 17. http://www.google.com/googlebooks/ancient-greek-and-latin.html 18. http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/ 19. http://www.stoa.org/ and http://www.digitalclassicist.org/ 20. for an easy to digest presentation on the topic, see berners-lee’s 2009 ted talk at http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web.html 21. see http://linkeddatabook.com/editions/1.0/ and christian bizer, tom heath, and tim berners-lee, “linked data – the story so far,” international journal on semantic web and information systems 5.3 (2009): 1–22. 22. gregory crane, “give us editors! re-inventing the edition and re-thinking the humanities,” connexions 14 (may 2010), available online at http://cnx.org/content/ m34316/latest/2010. 23. http://www.diggingintodata.org/ http://www.neh.gov/odh/ http://www.acls.org/grants/default.aspx?id=508 http://www.dhinitiative.org/ http://www.projectbamboo.org/ http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/our-commitment-to-digital-humanities.html http://books.google.com/googlebooks/agreement/ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/23/technology/23google.html http://www.google.com/googlebooks/ancient-greek-and-latin.html http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/ http://www.stoa.org/ http://www.digitalclassicist.org/ http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web.html http://linkeddatabook.com/editions/1.0/ http://cnx.org/content/m34316/latest/ http://cnx.org/content/m34316/latest/ http://www.diggingintodata.org/ book reviews 233 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 karen armstrong, the great transformation: the beginning of our religious tradition. alfred a. knopf. new york/toronto, 2006. pp. 469. $30.00 hc. isbn 0-375-41317-0. thomas cattoi, jesuit school of theology at berkeley readers of george eliot’s middlemarch might recall how dorothea’s first husband, the rev. casaubon, devotes his entire life to a search for a comprehensive explanation of all beliefs of humankind. his magnum opus, a treatise called the key to all mythologies, is meant to show that all extant religions and philosophies are mere fragments of a coherent body of knowledge, a lost wisdom which ordinary mortals grasp only in speculo et enigmate. dorothea is initially awed by her husband’s erudition, but eventually discovers, after casaubon’s demise, that the project had collapsed. all she is left with are fragments, which no amount of intellectual effort can marshal into a coherent whole. george eliot’s indirect critique of all-encompassing belief systems reflected her personal disillusion with the claims of christian theology and ethics, and indeed, casaubon’s failure might also be read as a warning to those intellectuals who in eliot’s time were becoming too easily enamored of the sweeping generalizations of continental (mainly hegelian) philosophy. a century later, lyotard’s postmodern condition voices concerns that are not too dissimilar from those of the victorian novelist: at the deathbed of modernity, we inherit the ruins of earlier meta-narratives, relics of a shattered hybris which offer no guidance or consolation. beginning with the publication of her history of god, karen armstrong has gained an unparalleled position as an independent scholar of religion. armstrong’s undisputed erudition has not prevented her works from topping numerous bestseller lists, and in the wake of september 11 her intellectual impartiality has lent even greater weight to her calls for mutual understanding and tolerance. reading the second installment of her autobiography, the spiral staircase, it is clear that armstrong herself is the first to be surprised by such extraordinary success, which followed many years marked by illness and depression. 234 book reviews © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 her negative experiences as a member of a religious order and later as an aspiring academic have left her with a deep mistrust of religious and intellectual authoritarianism, which comes through in her self-definition as a “free-lance monotheist.” reading armstrong’s latest work, which carries the title the great transformation, one starts wondering, however, whether her penchant for synthesis and her search for an impartial point of view have not made her vulnerable to casaubon’s temptation. is armstrong’s “great transformation” the “key to all mythologies” for a postmodern world? in her introduction, armstrong resorts to jaspers’ notion of an “axial age” to denote the period between 900 bce and 200 bce, when “the great world traditions that have continued to nourish humanity” (xii) came into being. on the same page, armstrong calls the axial age “one of the most seminal periods of intellectual, psychological, philosophical and religious change in recorded history,” noting that it was “the period of the buddha, socrates, confucius, and jeremiah, the mystics of the upanishads, mencius, and euripides.” indeed, even “rabbinic judaism, christianity, and islam” are categorized as “latter day flowerings of the axial age,” even if their beginning came centuries after the creative heyday that has given us the pali canon, the greek tragedies, or the tao. later on, we are told how “the consensus of the axial age is an eloquent testimony to the unanimity of the spiritual quest of the human race” (xiv), although we are reminded that “the axial age was not perfect,” mainly because of its “indifference to women” (xvi). wherever a particular tradition stops emphasizing the importance of ethical norms and begins stressing the acceptance of obligatory doctrines, armstrong views the shift as a sign that “the axial age [has] lost its momentum” (xiii). armstrong envisages the gradual discovery of interiority and the move away from tribalism and ritualism as the “great transformation” marking the axial age, though she is ready to admit that “the axial peoples did not evolve in a uniform way” (xvii). indeed, we are told that certain traditions “achieved an insight that was truly worthy of the axial age,” but eventually “retreated from it.” the people of india are said to have always been “on the vanguard of axial progress”; in israel, book reviews 235 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 the axial ideal was achieved “by fits and starts”; in china, we see the traces of “incremental progress”; and the greeks, from the very beginning, “went in an entirely different direction” from the other peoples. virtually everything can be made to fit into the purview of the “axial vision”; and indeed, when a definition is too broad, its usefulness sooner or later comes into question. armstrong’s goal is to underscore the enduring relevance of many of the teachings that the great traditions have handed down to us; at the same time, to retrieve their authentic import, we must “bring the best insights of modernity to the table.” we are told that the outcome of our efforts will be a “recreation” of the “axial vision,” but we are left in the dark as to what the latter will entail. one could actually argue that every major religious figure over the past twenty-five centuries tried to do exactly that, retrieving themes from his or her tradition to apply them to the issues of the day. who are we to claim that “our” recreation will be more faithful to the “axial spirit” than the previous re-appropriations and re-elaborations? the readers of this work are invited to join armstrong on a long intellectual cruise that takes them from the steppes of northern india to the desert of judea, and from the princely courts of ancient china to the acropolis in athens. the text goes back and forth from one of the four “axial peoples” to the next, seeking to underscore the points of contact between their religious experience and the ensuing theological speculation. the result, however, is only moderately satisfying. admittedly, armstrong wears her learning lightly; even those readers already familiar with the evolution of the greek and the hebrew mind will find much food for thought in her discussion of the indian and especially the chinese traditions, which probes behind the customary vague labels of “hinduism,” “buddhism,” or “confucianism.” some will argue that armstrong’s readers enjoy a notable advantage over casaubon’s long-suffering wife: the fragments of the puzzle are already pieced together for them. the question, however, is whether the resulting coherent narrative is an adequate portrayal of reality, or instead—and this appears increasingly likely as we read on—armstrong’s axial age is a sort of a theological procrustean bed, where the limbs of different traditions are broken by willful overstretching. 236 book reviews © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 the first chapter explores the nature of religious practice before the onset of the “axial age”; this is then followed by eight chapters, which chart in a chronological fashion the parallel development of the four different traditions. the second section, for instance, is devoted to “ritual,” and charts the development of the four axial people in the ninth century bce, highlighting the extent to which later periods responded to this early emphasis on violent sacrifices. armstrong explains the development of greek myth and ritual sacrifices as a reaction to the violent collapse of minoan or mycenaean society, which might account for the widespread cult of “chthonian powers” (56) during the ensuing “dark age” (58); she contends however that during this early period of greek civilization “there was no introspection” and “no attempt to analyze the hidden drama” that “haunted the greek psyche” (61). the centrality of ritual in the development of the hebrews’ religious consciousness is similarly underscored, and armstrong presents the emergence of monotheism as the long-term consequence of the decision to worship one deity alone (69), thereby marking a rupture with earlier polytheistic practices. in india, the reform of vedic ceremonial is associated with the discovery of interiority, as well as the gradual erasure of “agonistic practices” and violence from the religious arena (68–69). in china, ritual is closely associated with the running of the state; the correct performance of traditional rites by the legitimate monarch is seen as the guarantee of the smooth functioning of the natural order, as well as the long-term stability of the state. the title of each section of the book indicates a common theme which supposedly characterizes every segment of the book; and indeed it often appears that the “casaubon search” for a “theory of everything” affects not only the whole work, but also its individual sections. the third section, for instance, is titled “kenosis,” and sets out to explore how, in the eighth century bce, “some were beginning to be critical of ritual and wanted a more ethically based religion.” the term used in philippians 2.7 to describe christ’s self-emptying is deployed here to indicate the growing emphasis on interiority and ethics that characterized the “axial peoples” at this time. one may wonder whether such use of the term is legitimate, since armstrong detaches “kenosis” book reviews 237 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 entirely from its christological context; in a later section, for instance, she is ready to tell us that oedipus had to undergo “kenosis” in order to attain “true knowledge” (257). here, the hebrews undergo “kenosis” as the prophets urge them to examine their inner lives and abandon egotism (90), though “patriotic pride and chauvinistic theology” suppresses the prophetic call for conversion and leads the nation to self-destruction. similarly, the decision of indian renouncers (samnyasins) to forego the comforts of structured family life is implicitly construed as “kenotic.” but how is “kenosis” supposed to describe the chinese situation of the time, where the constant infighting between different states resulted in a greater, rather than a lesser, focus on ritual? similarly, while armstrong finds an instance of “self-emptying sympathy” in achilles’ dialogue with priam (110–11), she has to admit that “the greeks felt no need to develop new forms of religion but remained satisfied by the ancient cult.” the difference between the “greek path” and that of the remaining “axial peoples” is emphasized so often that one starts wondering whether their inclusion in this group is entirely justified. often, the way definite time periods are identified with a specific theme appears rather arbitrary. armstrong views the seventh century bce as a time characterized by a search for “knowledge,” though this was certainly not absent in the previous periods. the spirituality of the upanishads, however, could have also been characterized as “kenotic”; and no rupture appears evident between the earlier chinese tradition and the intricate family ceremonials emerging in china at the time. at the same time, the move to put religious law in writing and the ensuing composition of what would become the five books of moses appears moved by different motives than the shift from mythos to logos which armstrong reads behind the military reorganization of greek city states. are josiah’s cultic reform and sparta’s political ascendancy really indicative of a common shift in religious sensitivity? similar objections could be raised against every section of the book. in the sixth century bce, the chosen common denominator is “suffering.” the exiled people of israel begin to question the “neat, rationalistic god of the deuteronomists” (172), and this “trauma of dislocation” 238 book reviews © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 results in a new form of prophecy typified by ezekiel. in greece, this “suffering” is ascribed to the social crisis that gradually enveloped the different city states; as a result, some greeks felt it necessary “to follow the promptings of logos to the bitter end” (189), and to develop an “entirely new rationalism” (188–89), which certainly would not have been out of place in the chapter on “knowledge.” indeed, it is to fight “ignorance” (193) that new meditation techniques are developed in india at the same time as ezekiel has his vision of the holy of holies. one also wonders in what way “empathy” can be distinguished from “concern for everybody.” armstrong’s reflections on greek tragedy (226–32) are poignant and insightful, but one wonders whether sophocles and aeschylus were truly responding to the same “spiritual vacuum” (232) behind the indian schools of gosala and mahavira. in israel, we are told, the axial age came to a close at an earlier stage than among the other axial peoples, but armstrong insists that “rabbinic judaism, christianity and islam” (248) are effectively a “second flowering” of the axial “concern for everybody.” in greece, it was left to socrates to enlighten the youth as to the nature of goodness. chapter seven goes on to discuss the emergence of buddhism, rehearsing themes and arguments which were also developed in armstrong’s earlier biography of the buddha. this is one of the most interesting sections of the work, and it is quite enlightening to read about gautama’s experience in the context of similar quests in india and china. the discussion of plato and aristotle in the following section, however, is more problematic. armstrong tells us that at the beginning of his career, plato’s actions had been characterized by tolerance and an unflinching devotion to the truth, whereas later, his vision “had soured” and had become “coercive, intolerant, and punitive,” making his religion “wholly intellectual” (325). this is at best an overstatement and at worst a distortion of plato’s views, and armstrong fails to support it with adequate textual evidence. we are then told that the axial age in greece would make “marvelous contributions to mathematics, dialectics, medicine and science,” but it was already “moving away from spirituality.” hellenistic philosophy, or neo-platonic mysticism, are apparently beyond the pale. but this section abounds with surprises. book reviews 239 © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 we are told that aristotle saw god as the unmoved mover (328)—a statement which needs a far more careful contextualization than the one armstrong gives. her sympathies are, however, often unfathomable. on one hand we are told that aristotle had “a better understanding of traditional spirituality than plato” (329) and was “more comfortable with emotions” than his master. a few lines below, however, armstrong laments that “unfortunately,” aristotle “made an indelible impression on western christianity” (330). value-judgments of this sort abound throughout the work, and of course readers are expected to concur, though counterarguments are never considered. by the time we reach the last section, we are so inured to generalizations as to be no longer surprised by such statements as, “the spiritual revolution of the axial age had occurred against a backcloth of turmoil, migration, and conquest” (366). given that the age in question lasted for seven hundred years, one wonders which historical period of the same length could not be characterized by an identical statement. we are also introduced to rabbinic judaism (which also includes christianity), as well as islam, whose founder, the prophet muhammad, “had never heard of the axial age,” though “he would have probably understood the concept” (385). indeed, it is rather doubtful that lao tzu, socrates, or any of the other thinkers reviewed in this book were closely acquainted with karl jaspers either. armstrong’s marathon closes with an appeal to mutual understanding and tolerance “in a tragic world, where, as the greeks knew, there can be no simple answers” (399). at the end of this work, i found myself wondering, what is the intended audience of this book? scholars of religion are unlikely to turn to armstrong to deepen their understanding of history and theology, and her penchant for emphasizing what often are rather tenuous points of contact between different traditions will alienate the more academically-minded. on the other hand, readers with little previous exposure to the history of religion might find themselves utterly lost in this labyrinth of names and teachings, and, as we saw, the ariadne’s woof of “axial age spirituality” is all too easily cut. armstrong’s project suffers from its excessive scope. she seemed to fare much better in her earlier history of god: her grasp of the material was stronger, and the 240 book reviews © equinox publishing ltd. 2007 overarching methodological template did not force her into intellectual sleights of hand. this is not to say that there is not much of value in this work, but perhaps, as george eliot seemed to say over a hundred years ago, all we can truly know are fragments. anything beyond that is hybris. kathryn hughes. the short life and long times of mrs. beeton. karen armstrong, the great transformation: the beginning of our religious tradition seyyed hossein nasr. islamic philosophy from its origin to the present. microsoft word kaita said-final [expositions 7.2 (2013) 62–75] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 re-‘art’-iculating orientalism: musings on said and gérôme1 maghan keita villanova university figure 1: jean‐léon gérôme, the snake charmer (1880)  the black man is lord of the people of the east. –al-baladhuri2 yet the desert is full of zanj married to arab wives, and they have been princes and kings and have safeguarded your rights and sheltered you against your enemies. –al-jahiz3 what does critical discourse do? [...] direct critics’ attention to [...] function. [...] much as it may seem to be an impoverishing view [...] this particular kind of functionalism has had, on the whole, a salutary effect. it has done away with empty rhetorical testimonials proclaiming a work’s greatness or humanistic worth. [...] it has made it possible for critics to talk seriously.4 63 keita it is an irony of sorts, to begin an essay on edward said with a reference cited by bernard lewis, but the world of the “orient” and “orientalists” and their critics is replete with irony, contradiction, and oxymorons. this is further compounded by an evocation of gérôme, and in particular the gérôme piece that is used to draw attention to, and then to focus said’s argument. gérôme’s provocative and seductive image of muslim decadence and dissolution becomes the gateway to understanding a critique of orientalism – the rationalization of empire based on the degeneration of once powerful peoples. i want to draw attention to this thesis – not to refute it, but to refine it. i want to point to its nuances and allow them to speak to and of the peoples inherent to the construction of the orient by scholars that said claimed to admire, and those who are his and their putative acolytes. peoples who, marx would have argued, are “without history.” i should admit here, that like many, i had misread said. this appears to be a feature for both those who love and who loathe him. my angst was somewhere in between, occasioned by the “company” said kept. as an africanist, i was driven by the perceived slight of africa and africans in his construction of the “orient.” in that, i am still not assured that his vision was broad enough for such inclusion. yet, it is clear that those he admired, and many who wrote after him, neither offered nor fathomed african participation in this “orient.” to that point, said’s embrace of the works of fernand braudel and janet abu-lughod, and their fundamental absenting of africa from the discourses that their particular analyses spurred, is a serious slight in a community dedicated to notions of progressive historicism. this is further complicated by those who follow, and seemingly lionize, the annalystes without critiques of their adherence to enlightment theses of difference; the seeming inability of some to detach themselves from the privileges and legacy of empire, and their distortions; and the problems inherent in not speaking to the processes of constructing histories in a world dominated by race and the racialization of knowledge. this is, in large part, ann ducille’s critique of colleagues who are the main proponents of the “subaltern” school, yet have managed to skirt africa and africans as well.5 to his credit, said recognizes the power of discourses such as those lodged in afrocentrism to disrupt and then reconstruct critiques of modernity and its devices. however, even his treatment of this is in passing. they are not significant to his argument. as such, said, those he praises, and those who follow, fail to recognize the historically “abiding presence” – to paraphrase morrison – of africa, africans, and their diasporas. i want to talk seriously here. of course, the “orient” i conceptualize begins centuries – even millennia – before said’s preoccupation with modern imperialism. it is, however, a concept of the “orient” that undergirds all attempts to separate “east” from “west.” it is at least as old, in western eyes, as homer and herodotus. but even there, africa and africans are part of this space that is about to become “orientalized.”6 it is an orient inclusive of africa that runs counter to the elisions of braudel, abu-lughod, and company. closer to said’s starting point – the medieval and renaissance – was a conceptualization that saw africa as the “closest” of all “oriental” space – “middle india.”7 with this among the re-“art”-iculating orientalism 64 documents of christian and muslim chroniclers was an “oriental” africa made so by interlocking political economic relations with the indian ocean well before the rise of islam, and with the mediterranean basin through islam’s high point and beyond its demise in the west.8 at the moment that said begins his critique – the late eighteenth, early nineteenth centuries – the “orient” seems infused with “africa,” though many historians and cultural critics of the era seem to be unable to bring themselves to this realization. in his critique of the cultural and sociopolitical economic representational power of aida, said speaks to africa, if only obliquely. cairo has a “massive centrality to africa”; the pasha ismail is the “emperor of africa”; by implication, egypt, as the trope of orientalism, is africanized.9 the essential storyline of the opera – the conflict between the egyptian and nubian states – is both complicated and understood in the “racialized” love affair between an egyptian prince and an ethiopian princess. that rhadames finds aida beautiful lends itself to one of the paradoxes of orientalism that extends all the way back to medieval european anxieties. that an egyptian pasha and verdi choose a “black” woman as the protagonist in an “arab”/european celebration of nation-state and empire provides more complication in the direction which i choose to explore. these are in line with jeffrey cohen’s observations on the perils of “saracen enjoyment.”10 conceptually, this is also where said’s reading of orientalism becomes more complex if we are to refer to sibel bozdoğan’s essay, “journey to the east: ways of looking at the orient and the question of representation.” bozdoğan suggests there are other ways of “reading” the “orient” – even through the “cataloguing” of orientalists themselves. her evocation of schumacher and foucault, and through them by extension lyotard, barthes, and morrison, speak to issues of representation, reading, and the agency of the subject in relation to the artist/author that question – in schumacher’s language – the differences between “point of view” on one hand, and “standpoint” on the other.11 orientalists found the orient both beautiful and dangerous. that artists, such as gérôme, found the african type in the orient posed another dangerous beauty that has been elided by modern scholars of all persuasions, and that now, as cohen has argued, challenges “epistemological paradigms,” particularly those which are racially constructed. these epistemological paradigms are the “stereotypical opposition[s]” that linda nochlin suggests we need to avoid. for her, this involves serious engagement with the “unconscious political presuppositions” that rest alongside of conscious and overt assertions of the political aesthetic – “those consciously formulated political programs or commissions.” by implication, nochlin’s assertion leads to the possibilities that even the pre-ordained “conscious inscription of the political in the work of art” is flanked, and sometimes countered by “unconscious” sociopolitical economic dynamics that often elude and/or “escape” the artist/author; that complicate the responses of the audience; and, that focus on the subjects’ abilities to empower. what nochlin’s brief indicates is another way of identifying and interrogating the power of the subaltern in the very works intended to define, categorize, and delimit that power, and of course, the individuals who wield it. she also points, again, to the limitations of many progressive historians in their failure to recognize and to analyze these subjects. 65 keita mark ledbury’s review of todd porterfield’s the allure of empire: art in the service of french imperialism 1798–1836 and darcy grimaldo grigsby’s extremities: painting empire in post-revolutionary france point to edward said’s legacy in helping to shape and redirect discourses. their work, in particular grimaldo grigsby’s, speak to the possibilities of refining said’s thesis and providing it with more nuance, greater complexity – if that is at all possible, given edward said – and far greater inclusivity. take, for a moment, ledbury’s assertion that the deep analyses in both these works are made possible by a path made feasible by the profound influence of edward said’s discussion of how the physical expansion of empires and colonization of peoples in the latter half of the nineteenth century was foreshadowed and prepared by a cultural creation of the oriental “other.” this should be coupled with grimaldo grigsby’s reconceptualization of that “orient” as encompassing spaces as far afield as greece, egypt, senegal, and haiti; and specifically adding the “black” – the african – into an explicit demography she defines as “oriental.” grimaldo grigsby’s attention to race in this quite bold way seems a game-changer in regards to how one might define – or re-define, and re-discover – the “orient,” and re-articulate orientalism.13 the new historiography epitomized in grimaldo grigsby’s work – an historiography characterized by close readings in material culture – offer what ledbury calls the possibility to “complicate the discourse of the ‘colonizer and colonized.’”14 would that it prompted the “colonized” to speak; or that their speech was recognized, given that they do “speak,” in spite of the imaging of others. however, their own prodigious efforts notwithstanding, this is not what either porterfield or grimaldo grigsby achieve. theirs is not an interrogation of the subject; it is the artist/author that is central to their inquiries. yet they – in particular, grimaldo grigsby – broaden the context of the orient; diversify its demography; literally, provide more color; and imply greater agency for the subjects of empire. here, the stage is set for another type of interrogation of gérôme. it is here that ledbury evokes walter friedlaender in his own observations of the “nature and complexities” of “orientalisms,” plural.15 in that, ledbury urges us to “countenance [the] extremities of interpretation.” for the critics of “orientalism” this could mean the inclusion of africa and africans as “oriental” – even “arab,” “turk,” “persian,” “mughal.”16 this might be the “wedge” that prompts all sides to let these “subjects” speak. it allows for the question of “what does the act of ‘posing’ – the ‘pose’ – say? what is the ‘agency’ inherent in the poser/subject? what are the powers inherent in self-representation; what do demeanor, dress, armament, accoutrement, say of presence and power?” in other words – those explicitly of ledbury, and implicitly of grimaldo grigsby – when does the subject “transgress”? does the subject, through pose and depiction, suggest a potential threat to empire? does the subject resist the “unabashedly propagandistic” assumptions conventionally attributed to these works from all quarters? does the subject and the pose – imagined or not – re-“art”-iculating orientalism 66 constitute an unconscious manifestation of “propaganda” in its own right – not on the part of the author/artist, but on that of the poser/subject? has the image – in that cultural cliché – taken on “a life of its own”? is it displaying a life that it possessed prior to its “orientalization”? these questions take us back to the gérôme piece that fronts this essay, the snake charmer (1880) (see figure 1, page 61). the dissemination of the snake charmer probably reached its widest possible audience as the cover for said’s orientalism. there, i believe it helped to convey the message inherent in said’s critique, the construction of the “orient.” this “orient” was a political economic device intended to justify empire, its excesses, its definitions, and its structures through its imaging of the “other.” in this space, it might be argued that the conventional readings of this piece achieve just that across the political spectrum. conventionally, we are treated to an imaging of this “oriental” world that is dissolute, decadent, debauched, and in decline. if one were to explore the psycho-sexual along the lines of grimaldo grigsby, homosexuality and pedophilia are inscripted as well. however, in the vein of said’s appeal that we talk seriously, yet without conjuring interpretations that ledbury might label “extreme,” there is at least one other reading in this decrepit band of men that lends itself to grimaldo grigsby’s expanded definition of the “orient.” the composition the group – its demography – challenges the conventions of traditional definitions of the “orient” and “orientals,” center, left and right. some of the men in this painting are quite dark – black, even. phenotypically, they might be racialized as “african”; yet, “culturally,” they are “oriental,” even “arab.” gérôme presents this possibility over and over. a street scene in cairo (see figure 2 below), dispute d’[sic]arabes (see figure 3 below), old clothing merchant (see figure 4, page 66), the dance of the almeh (see figure 5, page 66) all illustrate this – they complicate the notions of the “orient,” the “oriental,” and the “arab.” the complication occurs in ways that are mundane, commonplace, “ordinary.” they are there; mostly men. men being entertained; men in commerce; men in dispute. their ordinary, commonplace comings and goings actually strengthen their organic presence in these compositions, and undergird my argument about the ubiquity that presence. they are there because this is their world; they are there because this is their “orient.” figure 2: jean‐léon gérôme, street scene in cairo (1871)  figure 3: jean‐léon gérôme,    dispute d’arabes (1871)  67 keita                 figure 5: jean‐léon gérôme, dance of the almeh (1863)    figure 4: jean‐léon gérôme, old clothing merchant (1866)  yet, this particular reading of gérôme does nothing to nuance the post-discursive critique of said other than to argue that the subjects of empire are diverse, and that they interact; they engage one another. one needs to get closer to gérôme. i wonder about gérôme’s critics and what they saw. i wonder if they and i see the same things, yet read them differently, but similarly; if they see images that disturb the possible order of empire, while i marvel in the political economic aesthetics of its disruption? clearly, while i see the precision and technical genius of these pieces, i am not given to disposition of a rather clinical “coldness” that many have ascribed to them. on the contrary, in spite of my own rather radical persuasion, i find myself seduced by gérôme’s work – taken by their warmth, their vibrancy, by the fact that some of his subjects cannot be contained or restrained. again, they are “dangerous.” writing in 1904, in commemoration of gérôme’s passing, r. w. glessner spoke of the critical reduction of gérôme and his work to that of a “second-rate master,” in spite of the fact that his work was “the quintessence of refinement as regards execution,” and yet, possibly because – and this in my speculation – he was also regarded as a populist painter. “[h]e was always preeminently a painter for the multitude.”17 what was it that a “multitude,” in the context of imperial france – or empire anywhere – might walk away with having encountered the work of gérôme? clearly, not all of it, but enough of it might reveal the tensions between the conscious and unconsciously “formulated political programs”? might an audience muse – in part – on the power arrayed against empire, rather than simply the right to it? consider, for a moment his subjects – in particular, the males; and then, specifically, the black males. many of them are men-at-arms. in spite of the snake charmer (or possibly in subtle concert with it, given the array of weapons in this motley crew’s possession), these subjects are confident and self-possessed. re-“art”-iculating orientalism 68 black men-at-arms. presented by an “orientalist.” how should the “orient,” the “oriental,” and the “orientalized” space be reconsidered from this starting point – from this “standpoint,” to evoke schumacher? if we thought of lyotard, here, the “standpoint” of the subject – his (or her) “posting” – a “post” in lyoyard’s “postmodernity,” is the position from which the critique of one’s circumstances begins. that critique is the break with those circumstances – a challenge to them.18 do the gazes of gérôme’s subjects challenge? do they resist colonial imposition? do they defy the propaganda of imperial subservience – and, in a black face, no less? how is the “subaltern” known, and re-known? here, i want to play on the notion of the subaltern in military parlance – a person of power and significant force – as much a possible detriment to the fortunes of empire, as an expeditor of them. take the implications of lt. colonel edward money, imperial ottoman army, late captain bashi-bazouks’ tale of twelve months among such menat-arms. figure 6: ottoman postcard, bachibozouks (date unknown)  [w]ild animals [...] their insanity [...] every man, besides being booted and spurred wore a sword, pistols, dagger or knife as the case might be [...] a murderous looking carbine about seven feet long [...] and his steed awaiting him outside [...] their remarkable skill in horsemanship [...] this power [...]19 69 keita lt. colonel edward money notwithstanding. sharp and long blades aside; pistols sashed; rifles slung; dogs [?] leashed; the real power – the real “danger” – in gérôme’s work lay in the subjects’ gaze – rather than that of the artist/author. what if the subjects “engage” the author/artist, and in so doing, engage the empire – in fact, confront it? what if their gaze is not one of submission or docility, but pride; even fierceness, determination? what if they stare back, eyes unlowered? is this the subtle, yet not so subtle, razored-edge of resistance? here, glessner celebrates the realism inherent to many of gérôme’s pieces; their “savoring [...] of [...] the power of man."20 which “man”? which “men”? glessner goes on to quote delacroix to illustrate the perception of gérôme’s power: the ability to “transform an odious thing to a thing of art.”21 this is the ability to “transform” the black body into a thing of power (of course, it already was/is, yet for the conscious political project of imaging empire, and the public it was to “serve,” this could not be the convention). this was the placement of black bodies, and all they imply, within the purview of the “orient.” and then, unwittingly – or so it would seem – to bid these bodies to “speak”; to acknowledge their gaze. and in that gaze, their power. figure 7: jean‐léon gérôme, the bashi bozouk (1869)  re-“art”-iculating orientalism 70 the bashi bazouk (1868, see figure 7, page 68) – sometimes, more pointedly, the black bashi bazouk – both the image, and its more phenotypically directed eponym, tell a story. the painting aside, what does some critic’s titling of this work as “black” tell us of a certain class of military personnel in the “orient”? does it suggest a variegated demography which has simply not been adequately analyzed within the context of the given conceptual space? does the bashi bazouk evoke power in his own right? the “bashi-bazouk!” “captain haddock.” tintin – sourced in popular culture, but not quite sufficiently “racially” othered? what might that mean? how might such a racial awareness – an awareness of difference in this “orient” – alter our terms of engagement, and the kinds of analyses and critiques that might flow from such adjustments? if gérôme has “captured” his subjects, what is it he has “caught”? and are he and his audiences aware of the “catch” – its powers, its dangers? as in lt. colonel money’s description, this man is armed to the teeth. the carbine off the left shoulder; pommels of pistols and knives protruding from his cummerbund. money’s allusions are bound up in turn-of-the-nineteenth century depictions that helped to shape not only the “orient” but the medieval and chivalry as well. here, sir walter scott’s “orientals” are also black men of considerable force and malevolence. in part, their dangerousness is known through their elegance; the ease of their luxuriant posture. their “silver” and “silks”; their dangerous and exotic weapons; their exquisite and extraordinary mounts – the very things that a renaissance europe would covet and that a modern europe would seek through expropriation – were forces of their definition.22 gérôme’s bashi-bazouk is of the same type; he is in pedigree. there are his weapons. there is the opulence of his silks; the flash of his headgear. then, there is his gaze. his demeanor, what a french public might ascribe to as his “hauteur” – the disregard – the arrogance, as it were – of a subject person. the “posture” (again, with lyotard in the background) of a “subservient” who either had not recognized his subservience or had chosen to resist it. here is the “oriental” subverting the “orient” and a host of accompanying racial presumptions. this gaze might be charged as a “postmodern” statement – a resistance to colonialism and its structures. * * * * * the point here is not complicated. if while sitting in oxford, paris, or new york you tell arabs or africans that they belong to a basically sick or unregenerate culture, you are unlikely to convince them, they are not going to concede to you your essential superiority or your right to rule them despite your evident wealth and power.23 full circle. in the call for serious discussion, said is quite right here. and while i recognize that i may have posed more questions than answers to what said and others propose as critique of our situation, as a refinement – if i might be so bold – i offer that the critique – the resistance to 71 keita domination, imperialism, empire – is not as “contemporary” as it might seem. it is historical. it is caught up in the gaze of those assumed to be dominated by the mechanisms of empire. these “images of the past – pure and impure” – as said puts it, are contiguous with the first acts of empire. resistance is an act of simultaneity. this is one reading that djebar provides for us.24 figure 8: jean‐léon gérôme, the master of the hounds (1871)  the master of the hounds (see figure 8 above) – or the black master of the hounds, as some would have it (again, another set of readings for another time and space), closes this piece. to some degree, gérôme’s subject might be separated from the other figures discussed here. he is re-“art”-iculating orientalism 72 not a bashi-bazouk. he seems to have no association with the mercenary; useful fellows when led by european officers to achieve european ends. ostensibly, he is no brigand, though one might imagine him moving easily “outside” the law. his presence in regard to the legitimacies of the imperial state is liminal. he resides at an “edge” not because he lacks status, or is anonymous; even though, gérôme has given him no name. we know him. he is “liminal” because within the conscious political propaganda of empire he is neither obedient nor humble. look at him. what “prescribed” “codes of conduct” might he follow? we might even argue that his “dress” is outside the “decorum” of empire even as it emphasizes the “exoticism” of imperial space. it subverts it. look at him. where is the subservience in this figure? what has he allowed gérôme to say to us of his condition – his “status”? in another age, his posture, his gait, his gaze, would suggest that he had “commissioned” gérôme – that gérôme was in his service – not the other way round. what does this black man – his demeanor, even that of his dogs – say to us of an “orient” that those like gérôme sought to construct, even “capture,” yet could not completely control? how does this black man, turbaned, in his silks, elegantly armed, and accoutered by his hounds, complicate all notions of the “orient” and “orientals”? the answer to these questions will never exonerate gérôme and his fellow orientalists. but, the questions themselves serve as a caution for those of us who seek to interrogate and refine our own conceptual space. engagement with said’s thesis through gérôme may force sightings of what is “hidden in plain sight.” men and women who defy convention, who stare back and make their presence known. notes 1. the author requests that his words are not to be cited without his permission. 2. al-baladhuri (ed. muhammad hamidulla), cited in bernard lewis, “the african diaspora and civilization of islam,” in the african diaspora: interpretive essays, eds. martin l. kilson and robert i. rotberg (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1976), 44. 3. al-jahiz (abu uthman amr ibn bahr al-kinani al-fuqaimi al-basri), “the superiority of blacks over whites,” in the life and works of jahiz: translations of selected texts, translated by charles pellat, translated from the french by d. m. hawke (berkeley and los angeles: university of california press, 1969), 196. 4. edward said, “roads taken and not taken in contemporary criticism", contemporary literature 17.3, directions for criticism: structuralism and its alternatives (summer 1976), 332. 5. fernand braudel, civilization and capitalism, 15th–18th century: the structures of everyday life, the limits of the possible, volume i (new york and cambridge: harper and row, 1979). fernand braudel, civilization and capitalism, 15th–18th century: the perspective of the world, volume iii (new york and cambridge: harper and row, 1979), 387, 430–441. aside from an early dismissal of africa in her much heralded work, abu-lughod’s following references to the continent and, presumably its peoples, are the obstacles that they pose to an emergent european 73 keita political economy. like braudel, for her, the transsaharan trade is of no importance, and the commercial city-states of east africa are only peripheral nodes of indian ocean commerce that have little bearing on a narrative that purports to focus on the period “before european hegemony.” janet abu-lughod, before european hegemony: the world system a.d. 1250–1350 (oxford and new york: oxford university press, 1989), 36, 121, 169, 188, 208, 243. ann ducille, “discourse and dat-course: postcoloniality and afrocentricity,” in skin trade (cambridge, massachusetts and london, england: harvard university press, 1996), 120–135. 6. frank m. snowden, jr., blacks in antiquity: ethiopians in the greco-roman experience (cambridge, massachusetts and london, england: the belknap press of harvard university press, 1970). frank m. snowden, jr., before color prejudice: the ancient view of blacks (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1983). martin bernal, black athena: the afroasiatic roots of classical civilization, volume i (new brunswick: rutgers university press, 1987). maghan keita, race and the writing of history: riddling the sphinx (oxford and new york: oxford university press, 2000). 7. jeremy lawrence, “the middle indies: damião de góis on prester john and the ethiopians,” renaissance studies, 6 (1992), 3–4. chandra richard de silva, “indian ocean but not african sea: the erasure of east african commerce from history,” journal of black studies 29.5 (may 1999). 8. ahmad b. abi ya'qub b.ja'far b. wadih, tarikh, in corpus of early arabic sources for west african history [hereafter simply referred to as “corpus”], eds. nehemiah levtzion and j. f. p. hopkins (princeton: markus wiener publishers, 2000), 21. abu bakr ahmad b. muhammad alhamadhani (called ibn al-faqih), mukhtasar kitab al-buldan, in corpus, 27. abu 'l-qasim muhammad al-nusaybi (also known as ibn hawqal), kitab surat al-ard, in corpus, 45–52. abu 'ubayd 'abd allah b. 'abd al-'aziz al-bakri, kitab al-masalik wa'l-mamalik , in corpus, 77. leo africanus, a geographical historie of africa (1600: amsterdam; new york: da capo press; theatrum orbis terrarum, ltd., 1969). one of the most famous passages of leo africanus on the intellectual life and market of timbuktu both underscores and highlights the point: “here are great store of doctors, judges, priests, and other learned men, that are bountifully maintained at the kings [sic] cost and charges. and hither are brought divers manuscripts or written books out of barbarie, which are sold for more money then [sic] any other merchandize [sic]” in corpus 288 (italics added). said hamdun and noel king, ibn battuta in black africa (princeton: markus wiener publishers, 2005). abu zayd 'abd al-rahman ibn khaldun, muqaddima in corpus, 319– 322. ibn khaldun, kitab al-'ibarra aw-diwan al-mubtada' wa-'l-khabarovsk fi ayyam al-'arab wa-'l-'adam wa-'l-barbar in corpus, 322–342. nehemiah levtzion, “ibn hawqal, the cheque and awdaghost,” journal of african history 9 (1968), 223–233. e. ann mcdougall, “the view from awdaghost: war, trade, and social change for the eighth thought the fifteenth century,” journal of african history 26 (1985), 8– 13, 26. michael brett, “islam and trade in bilad al sudan, tenth and eleventh century a. d., journal of african history 24 (1983). umar al-naqar, “takrur, the history of a name,” journal of african history 10.3 (1969), 367. jere l. bacharach, “african military slaves in the medieval middle east,” international journal of middle east studies 13.4 (nov. 1981), 471–495. daniel pipes, slave soldiers and islam: re-“art”-iculating orientalism 74 genesis of a military system (new haven and london: yale university press, 1981). daniel pipes, “black soldiers in early muslim armies,” international journal of african historical studies 13.1 (1980), 87–94. here, we also need to keep in mind africans who were part of islam’s eastward expansion as well. these would include the zanj of iraq and the habshis and siddis of india. see al-tabari, revolt of the zanj. alexandre popovic, the revolt of the african slaves in the 3rd/9th century (princeton: markus wiener publishers, 1999). shanti sadiq ali, the african dispersal in the deccan from medieval to modern times (hyderabad: orient longman limited, 1996). shihan de. s. jayasuriya and richard pankhurst, eds., the african diaspora in the indian ocean (trenton: africa world press, inc., 2003). also john hunwick, “the same but different: africans in slavery in the mediterranean muslim world,” in john hunwick and eve trout powell, the african diaspora in the mediterranean lands of islam (princeton: markus wiener publishers, 2002), xiii. the compartmentalization of africa into zones that are treated as “middle east” and “africa” is a legacy of orientalism and colonialism. north africa, including egypt, is usually seen as forming part of the middle east, though middle east experts are not generally keen to venture farther west than the confines of egypt. northwestern africa — the maghreb — is generally regarded as peripheral to middle eastern studies and extraneous to african studies. . . . northwestern africa (from morocco to libya), despite the area’s close and enduring relationship with west africa, has been excluded from the concerns of most africanists. 9. edward said, “the imperial spectacle,” grand street 6.2 (winter 1987), 90, 92, 97, 100–101. 10. jeffrey jerome cohen, “on saracen enjoyment: some fantasies of race in late medieval france and england,” journal of medieval and early modern studies 31:1 (winter 2001), 113–46. 11. sibel bozdoğan, “journey to the east: ways of looking at the orient and the question of representation,” journal of architectural education (1984-) 41.4 (summer 1988), 38–39. bozdoğan’s inquiries, through schumacher and his use of “standpoint,” bring to bear at least one interpretation of “post-discourse,” and lyotard’s treatment of the “postmodern” and then the possible consequent rendering of subaltern conceptualizations. lyotard’s use of “post” has multiple meanings and implications, among which are the notions of “posting” or “positioning” – the acquisition – even the commandeering of “space” from which “critique” is realized and enacted. schumacher’s “standpoint” seems to suggest just that. jean-françois lyotard, the postmodern condition: a report on knowledge (minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press, 1977). jean-françois lyotard, the postmodern explained: correspondence 1982–1985 (minneapolis and london: university of minnesota press, 1992), 3, 6, 15. 12. linda nochlin, “the imaginary orient,” in the politics of vision: essays on nineteenth-century art and society (new york: harper and row, 1989), 33–59. 13. mark ledbury, review of todd porterfield, the allure of empire: art in the service of french imperialism 1798–1836 and darcy grimaldo grigsby, extremities: painting empire in postrevolutionary france, the art bulletin, 86.3 (sep. 2004), 603–608. 14. ledbury 2004, 606, 607. 15. ledbury 2004, 603. 75 keita 16. this observation is in keeping with the most recent work of eve troutt powell, but it is supported by an extensive historical record that places african “bodies” and culture in all of these cultural and socio-political economic domains. see eve troutt powell, this is my memory: stories of enslavement from egypt, sudan, and the ottoman empire (stanford, ca: stanford university press, 2012). see also hunwick and powell 2002. maghan keita, “africans and asians: historiography and the long view of global interaction,” the journal of world history 16.1 (2005). 17. r. w. glessner, "the passing of jean léon gérôme," brush and pencil 14.1 (apr. 1904), 54–56. 18. lyotard 1992, 3, 6, 15. 19. edward money, twelve months with the bashi-bazouks (1857; london: newman and company, 1880), 10–11, 27–29. this citation is a pastiche of colonel money’s colorful descriptions of his bashi-bazouk troopers. 20. glessner 1904, 58. 21. glessner 1904, 63. 22. sir walter scott, ivanhoe (london: thomas nelson and sons, 1832), 39, 40–41. maghan keita, “missing chapters in afro-medievalism, or what the bookstore hid,” in why the middle ages matter, ed. simon doubleday (london: routledge, 2011), 137–138. 23. edward said, culture and imperialism (new york: vintage books, 1993), 19. 24. said 1993, 15. assia djebar, fantasia, an algerian cavalcade (portsmouth, nh: heinemann, 1993). [expositions 6.2 (2012) 33-40] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 going global: cervantes’ don quixote rides into the future marsha s. collins the university of north carolina at chapel hill in the dedication to don quixote, part 2, published in 1615, miguel de cervantes writes to his patron the count of lemos that his now famous knight finally has donned his spurs and is en route to serve him, and of course, all readers, present and future.1 cervantes also confides that the emperor of china in particular has been eagerly awaiting part 2 of the novel, and that in a letter written to him by this august personage, naturally in chinese, and delivered to him personally by a special emissary, the emperor wishes to establish a college in china in which students will study spanish as exemplified in the novel don quixote with cervantes as the president of the college. when our author inquires if the emperor has provided any funds to defray the cost of the voyage, the emissary replies with some surprise that, no, frankly they had not really given it any thought, thus anticipating by nearly 400 years the current crisis regarding travel funds for academics. i mention this amusing, and typically cervantine, anecdote for two reasons. first, while the story reveals the gentle pride of the author, who at the age of fifty-eight found himself an over night success in 1605 when part 1 of the “great book” don quixote came into being and rapidly became an influential, international bestseller, this passage also demonstrates that in the west the concept of globalization was already part of the collective imaginary. in academic circles, we now acknowledge that spain created the first truly global empire, and although we frequently speak of the columbian or transatlantic exchange of ideas, peoples, plants, animals, objects, cultures, and so forth, as my colleague carmen hsu and others have rightly argued, we would be more accurate to refer to this dynamic flow as a transoceanic or global exchange.2 this concept, by the way, is now expanding beyond academia and into the public mainstream, as we can see in charles c. mann’s 1493: uncovering the new world columbus created (2011). second, this anecdote has provided the imaginative spark for my rethinking of don quixote for this essay, that is, for my view that the awareness of globalization evinced by and within cervantes’ masterpiece, and present in our contemporary global community, is sufficiently acute and similar to generate new or at least refocused analogies particularly relevant to teaching the work in a 21st century great books course, and at the same time, adds even more compelling impetus – as if one needed it – for don quixote’s inclusion in a great books course or core course in a humanities curriculum. first things first. i am not arguing for throwing out the baby with the bathwater. don quixote epitomizes what great books are and do, and while that is not new, in this century i think presenting don quixote as an exemplar of the “great book” is more important than ever. i believe that great books constitute a sort of global patrimony, a universal human heritage, and just as we have certain, special locales and monuments designated world heritage sites, we have going global 34 special books and artworks that we designate global, cultural sites of human consciousness and the imagination, cultural artifacts that are artful monuments of exceptional aesthetic quality, and also repositories of enduring human concerns and values. great books like don quixote are very much of their time and culture, and yet also timeless, universal, and transcendent. while this is a cliché, it is still an essential truth we must continue to impress on our students in a world in which communication is so rapid and so little seems permanent. this observation also is significant given that we are members of a global community in which individuals and cultural and / or sociopolitical entities struggle to maintain a unique identity even while they seek to form part of a world collective. that being said, we can actually trace much of the invaluable, critical insight into don quixote that remains crucial and relevant for teaching cervantes’ great book today, back to the german romantics: the study of don quixote as the first modern novel, with part 1 offering a summa of major fictional forms and part 2 breaking new ground; as a model par excellence of humanist and bakhtinian dialogism and polyphony; as a breakthrough work in metafiction and romantic irony that foregrounds fictional self-reflexivity, but simultaneously creates an illusion of fictional autonomy that generates a reality effect; as a gallery of innovation in characterization with sancho as embodiment of both the carnivalesque lord of misrule and the renaissance celebration of the dignity of the common man; and so on. courses that focus more closely on the quixote could discuss the reception of the novel across cultures and time periods, for that study reveals much about the audience and circulation of bestsellers, the growth of print technology, translation on a global scale, and the history of ideas, as don quixote has garnered new interpretations with the passage of time. another commonplace with a basis in fact is that every novel composed since don quixote engages consciously or unconsciously with cervantes’ masterpiece in one way or another, and so some professors may choose to address the huge topic of the quixote’s influence, in courses which might include such varied works as austen’s northanger abbey (1818), flaubert’s madame bovary (1856), dostoyevsky’s the idiot (1868-69), soseki’s grass pillow (1906), or more contemporary works like paul auster’s city of glass (1985). the 21st-century has begun and will likely continue as a period of increased awareness of diversity or multiculturalism as an inherent and desirable quality in our global community, even while in a wide variety of places around the globe stereotypes regarding race, class, religion and gender are in conflict or being challenged. looking back, spain was arguably the first nation in the west to confront the challenges of cultural pluralism both within its own geopolitical space, as américo castro contended in the 20th century with his concept of three cultures “living together” [la convivencia] – a view contested if not rejected by many now – and abroad as an imperial power confronting alterity, dealing with the “others” on several continents.3 these contested issues of alterity embedded in don quixote’s fictional world are not identical to those in the forefront in our contentious era in search of unity with differences and mutual respect intact, nevertheless the situation is analogous, and a fruitful one for intense, meaningful discussions that will create among students a new appreciation for what great literature across time and cultures can teach us about ourselves and the world in which we live. 35 collins in regards to diversity, since 9/11, after a period of tremendous interest in cervantes and gender issues, the critical lens in the us has shifted to cervantes’ engagement with islam, both in his life, as a proud member of the christian forces who triumphed over the ottoman turks at the battle of lepanto in 1571, and who was subsequently enslaved by barbary pirates and imprisoned in algiers; and in works like don quixote, where the author’s treatment of the moriscos is both complex and highly ambiguous. a largely unassimilated population of muslims forced to convert to christianity and live under christian rule, the moriscos, after over forty years of debate, politicking, and military incursions, were eventually expelled by philip iii in 1609. islam and the morisco question arise in various places in the quixote, and a number of fine cervantes scholars have dealt with this issue – frederick dearmas (2011), barbara fuchs (2001, 2003), william childers (2006), and maría antonia garcés (2002), among others. my own opinion is that cervantes’ true feelings about the matter are impossible to discern in the dialogic, multivoiced space of don quixote, and what is probably closest to the truth is that his own thoughts about the cultural/religious struggle and eventual expulsion were likely conflicted and fraught with ambiguity. in a great books course, and in studying the quixote in general, i would suggest a more lively and meaningful pedagogical and interpretive strategy than trying to argue that cervantes wishes to advance a specific sociopolitical agenda in this regard. what would that strategy be? how about studying issues, qualities, and characteristics that tend to divide, distinguish, and separate humans – race, class, religion, gender, culture, and other bases for identifying someone else as “the other” – in dynamic relation to the cervantine ideal of the community, which unites people of diverse backgrounds and divergent beliefs across boundaries, and renaissance notions of utopias and ideal governments, which can be compared with our current ideal of a united global community linked by common goals and interests beyond economic ones? benedict anderson stresses that all communities are imagined, the distinctions residing in the ways in which they are imagined (anderson 1991, 6-24). and imagine them cervantes does, as do don quixote and sancho panza. communities unite around the tomb of the scholar-shepherd grisóstomo, scene of a debate over freedom, women’s rights, and the obligation to community, over the story of the “recklessly curious man” [el curioso impertinente], which launches a discussion about morals and interpretation; and at the inn, towards the conclusion of part 1, in which for one night, held spellbound by cervantes’ quill, muleteers and nobles, a judge bound for america and a soldier recently held captive in algiers, a moorish christian lady, a farmer’s daughter, the innkeeper and his family, assorted servants, and sancho and don quixote, among others, constitute against all odds – differences of class, gender, culture, and so forth – a community linked by storytelling, that is, the imagination, and a common sense of humanity and good will. in part 2, communities emerge at the cave of montesinos, at the palace of the duke and duchess, in barcelona, and even in the scene at don quixote’s deathbed. cervantes champions freedom and diversity thematically and stylistically in don quixote, and yet he always underscores as an ideal the quest for community and for the ties that bind humans together. in one memorable scene in part 2, chapter 54, sancho, who has just voluntarily renounced the governorship of his island kingdom, an episode that simultaneously going global 36 parodies paradigms of utopias and “mirrors of princes” and suggests serious, ideal models of good government, presides over a utopian picnic community in which he, his former neighbor the morisco ricote, who has returned to spain illegally, and a nearly incomprehensible german traveler merrily share wine and food together, linked by a common bond of thirst, hunger, and a desire for laughter and good will. while scenes such as this one certainly provide a springboard for discussions about early modern utopias and notions of the ideal monarch, they might also spark classroom discussions regarding ideals of global governance and global citizenship in the 21st century. near the end of the novel, in part 2, chapter 62, sancho and don quixote’s hosts in barcelona take them on a tour of this very modern, progressive city. at one point, the knight, whose adopted identity is among other things an anachronism writ large as he seeks to reinstitute a chivalric code and lifestyle linked to feudalism, medieval times, and also to a mythical, arthurian illo tempore, spots a modern publishing shop. fascinated, don quixote steps in and marvels at the wonders of the new publishing industry and gazes in amazement at the printing press, representative of revolutionary technology, marker of the shift from oral to print culture, harbinger of sea changes in society as well, and symbol of a pre-industrial society transformed by innovative ideas and inventions that will usher in the modern, industrial age. encounters of this sort, in which world views and changing values confront each other across traditional barriers of time and culture, occur throughout cervantes’ novel. such encounters provide analogues to experiences with which we can all identify as the digital revolution continues to unfold, and as our world changes in rapid and dramatic fashion. the pace may be different, but the paradoxical mix of anxiety and excitement about a future indelibly marked by technological advancement is a sentiment shared across over 400 years of time. in the prologue of don quixote part 1, the authorial voice tells us that we do not owe him much for the creation of the knight errant, “but i do want you to thank me for allowing you to make the acquaintance of the famous sancho panza, his squire, in whom, in my opinion, i have summarized for you all the squirely wit and charm scattered throughout the great mass of inane books of chivalry” (grossman 2003, 9). at the time in which we consider the myriad implications for the average citizen of a movement like “occupy wall street” and contemplate what the results may be for the rebels who claim their voice in an “arab spring” that has continued on into summer and winter, we may in fact wish to thank cervantes for the invention of sancho panza, the complex sidekick who bursts through the doors of don quixote’s house at the beginning of part 2 asserting his fame and importance as a major character in part 1 even as he effectively steals part 2 from don quixote. sancho can trace his roots to such bakhtinian, carnivalesque figures as the clown, trickster, and lord of misrule. nevertheless, his voice and presence function powerfully in the development of the entwined central, cervantine themes of freedom and the dignity of the common man, calling to mind the famous oration on this topic by pico della mirandola as well as the writings of a number of christian humanists, among them erasmus of rotterdam, a major influence on cervantes’ thought and works. sancho, clown prince of don quixote’s fictional world, literally and figuratively embodies the role of walking 37 collins belly – panza – comic protagonist and complement to his tall, skinny master, but over the course of the novel, he also comes to represent the ennobled human individual exercising moral, enlightened choices in resolving difficult decisions. through this process, sancho achieves a higher level of self-understanding and moral ennoblement. those pithy, often witty maxims and popular sayings that pour effortlessly from his lips – much to the irritation of don quixote – encapsulate the distilled wisdom of the common people and their experiences, and at the same time, are reminiscent of the collections of apothegms and sententiae produced by the great humanists of the epoch, like erasmus. sancho’s particular gift of the gab thus suggests that cervantes places faith in the innate dignity of all individuals, and their capacity for moral betterment. as a result, the lowly peasant sancho grows in dignity and importance so much as the novel progresses, that by part 2, he has completely broken the mold of the stereotypical lord of misrule and expanded way beyond the character limits of his two-dimensional counterparts trodding the boards in the popular farces of the day. in part 2, the duke and duchess pretend to make sancho governor of an island to entertain themselves by transforming him into an unwitting buffoon, but cervantes turns the tables on sancho’s social “betters” as his common man employs wit, experience, common sense, and a profound sense of christian morality to execute his duties in a wise, just, and compassionate manner. the erstwhile simple, walking belly reaches the high point of his ennoblement in renouncing his governorship and his former desire for power and riches to embrace his essential humility and common humanity by embracing and giving a kiss of peace to his beloved donkey, and then by extending friendship to the outcast ricote and the german stranger who accompanies him. the values embedded in these episodes, and embodied in the complex character sancho, are perhaps even more relevant today than in 1615, if possible, as so many people in so many parts of the globe struggle to be recognized as individuals with inherent dignity who are entitled to certain fundamental rights, justice, and freedom. don quixote, as great books usually do, also celebrates certain innately and perhaps uniquely human qualities that are at least as needful in 2012 and in years to come as they were when cervantes first composed his masterpiece so many years ago. in the prologue to his exemplary stories, published in 1613 – between parts 1 and 2 of the quixote – the authorial voice reminds us that “[t]here is a time and place for recreation, when the weary spirit may rest” and that “for this reason poplar groves are planted, fountains created, slopes levelled, and gardens neatly laid out” (lipson 1998, 4). in the cervantine garden that is don quixote, laughter and imagination reign supreme. cervantes remains one of the greatest comic geniuses this globe has ever produced, and the spanish author unleashes his full arsenal of humor-inducing strategies in don quixote, in which comedy ranges from puns and slapstick to ambiguous irony and sophisticated wordplay. remarkably, even though as don quixote observes, “translating from one language to another, … is like looking at flemish tapestries from the wrong side” (grossman 2003, 873) much of cervantes’ humor translates very well so that audiences all over the world, generation after generation, will long continue to read and laugh as they walk through cervantes’ garden. after many years of teaching this great book, there is still nothing quite so satisfying as seeing going global 38 the anxiety on the face of students on that first day of class as they gaze at a 1,000-page tome, dissolve into smiles and laughter after they plunge into the novel – a phenomenon that never fails to happen. finally, the course i teach on don quixote often bears the subtitle “the birth of the imagination” – and once again we owe a huge debt to the german romantics for recognizing the pivotal role of cervantes’ novel in defending and advancing the human imagination as a divine gift worthy of cultivation and meriting the expressive vehicle of fictional literature. we do well to remember that don quixote emerged during what has been called the age of criticism, when imaginative literature was under attack by many authorities, and hotly contested and debated in terms of its potential merits. i cannot imagine a more convincing advocate for the power of the human imagination and the notion of poetic truth, for the importance of literary studies, great books, and the humanities, than cervantes’ novel. as another great author, fyodor dostoevsky, has stated: “there is nothing deeper and more powerful in the whole world than this piece of fiction. it is still the final and greatest expression of human thought [. . . ] and if the world came to an end and people were asked somewhere there: ‘well, did you understand anything from your life on earth and draw any conclusion from it?’ a person could silently hand over don quixote” (lantz 1993, 1: 411). in 2010, the royal spanish academy and youtube collaborated to make a group reading of don quixote in spanish available to viewers all over the planet. people of all ages and backgrounds read a short snippet of the novel, and these snippets are assembled, like a wonderful collage, to provide a collective, truly global reading of this book that is part of the universal, human patrimony. cervantes would have loved it – a virtual community. a concept beyond his wildest dreams? perhaps, but certainly not beyond his imagination. don quixote rides into the future.* *i wish to express my thanks to professor joseph flora and the other members of the great books panel at the 2011 south atlantic modern languages association in atlanta, where i presented an earlier version of this paper. notes 1. the more recent english translation by edith grossman and the older english translation by walter starkie are excellent and readily accessible. 2. see hsu (forthcoming); phillips 2007, 2009 as examples of approaching the spanish empire as transoceanic. 3. for more on the much contested concept of convivencia see castro 1948, 206-31, 493560, 596-604; and in english, 1954, 221-52, 466-550, 607-15. it is important to keep in mind that castro’s thought on this subject was complex, and neither static nor monolithic. 39 collins works cited anderson, benedict. 1991. imagined communities: reflections on the origins and spread of nationalism. rev. ed. london: verso. castro, américo. 1948. españa en su historia; cristianos, moros y judíos. buenos aires: losada. –––. the structure of spanish history. 1954. trans. edmund l. king. princeton: princeton university press. childers, william. transnational cervantes. 2006. toronto: university of toronto press. de armas, frederick a. 2011. don quixote among the saracens: a clash of civilizations and literary genres. toronto: university of toronto press. de cervantes, miguel. 2005. don quixote. trans. edith grossman. new york: ecco. –––. don quixote. 2001. trans. walter starkie. new york: signet classic. –––. exemplary stories. 1998. trans. lesley lipson. oxford: oxford university press. dostoevsky, fyodor. 1992. a writer’s diary. 2 vols. trans. kenneth lantz. evanston, il: northwestern university press. fuchs, barbara. 2001. mimesis and empire: the new world, islam, and european identities. cambridge: cambridge university press. –––. passing for spain: cervantes and the fictions of identity. urbana: university of illinois press, 2003. garcés, maría antonia. 2002. cervantes in algiers: a captive’s tale. nashville: vanderbilt university press. hsu, carmen y. forthcoming. kingdoms, peoples, and manners of distant lands: chronicles of asia in early modern spain. mann, charles c. 2011. 1493: uncovering the new world columbus created. new york: alfred a. knopf. going global 40 phillips, carla rahn. 2007. “the organization of oceanic empires: the iberian world in the habsburg period.” seascapes: maritime histories, littoral cultures and transoceanic exchanges. ed. jerry h. bentley, renate bridenthal, and karen wigen. honolulu: university of hawaii press: 71-86. –––. 2009. “twenty million people united by an ocean: spain and the atlantic world beyond the renaissance.” renaissance quarterly 62:1: 27-40. [expositions 6.2 (2012) 15-22] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 getting “wrong” right courtney roby cornell university daryn lehoux begins what did the romans know? an inquiry into science and worldmaking (2012) with the broadest of questions: “what’s in a world?” in the chapters that follow he examines the spectrum of answers constructed by a selection of roman authors, analyzing how the differences between their answers (and between theirs and ours) might be predicated on different ways of seeing the world in front of us and different systems of “facts” constructed from what we see. he devotes particular attention to roman accounts of the natural world which have typically been ignored or quickly dismissed as “wrong” (including astrology, divination, and the devastating effects of garlic on magnets), making these “errors” yield up broader epistemological truths. the reader is immediately warned against taking for granted too much uniformity between “scientific” cultures, and particularly against assuming a one-to-one correspondence between an observer’s truth and things that are actually present in the world. this search for difference, for lehoux, lies at the heart of the enterprise of history of science: “we could have done it differently. indeed, on one way of looking at it, the history of the sciences is virtually a catalogue of different ways of doing it…” (lehoux 2012, 1) estrangement of roman thought, and of ancient science more generally, is a crucial part of lehoux’s strategy for allowing his reader to see roman scientific thought through new eyes. each chapter is structured around a particular problem and an exemplary text or two: seneca’s natural questions informs a discussion of the extent to which a judicial system which relied on rhetoric influenced the exploration of nature in the early empire; ptolemy’s tetrabiblos and manilius’s astronomica yield a spectrum of possible models underlying roman beliefs in astrology; and so on. the final two chapters are completely dedicated to the problems a “realist” standpoint creates for the history of science, and to alternative theories of truth and their explanatory power for both modern problems in scientific epistemology and the now-familiar roman problems explored elsewhere in the book. where possible, lehoux links the discourse in the ancient texts to persistent puzzles in epistemology and philosophy of science: the importance of witnessing, the validity of analogical models, the requirements for “laws” in nature, and so forth. what did the romans know? is not exactly a book about the history of roman science, not even if this history is defined broadly in sociological and material terms as well as those of more traditional intellectual history. it is rather about the philosophical, linguistic, and rhetorical terms of the discourse of epistemology as it evolved around a series of particular problems. the book is grounded not so much in roman social realia or scientific or textual practices, as in a set of philosophical “worldviews” which differ more or less radically from our own, though they operate on familiar objects (which lehoux exemplifies at the book’s end as “walls and eyeballs, getting “wrong” right 16 stars, nerves, paintings, and perfume” (lehoux 2012, 232)). in this sense it is a very different work from, for example, serafina cuomo’s technology and culture in greek and roman antiquity (2007), though the two books bear a superficial resemblance in their organization into chapters treating a series of disparate scientific or technological topics from the ancient world using a series of disparate analytical frameworks. multiple-parameter variation of this kind allows more ground to be covered than could ever be managed through a more methodical approach. the danger, of course, is that the reader will fill in the blanks incorrectly, left without guidance as to how applicable the historical or philosophical conclusions of one chapter are to the different social or intellectual contexts of the others. lehoux’s treatment sidesteps this danger for the most part through cross-references in the chapters that establish continuity between their various problems and methodologies. for example, he returns several times to examine why the curious belief that garlic inhibits the power of magnets turned out to have such longevity. the later chapters also devote progressively more space to methodological and broad-based epistemological considerations, picking up threads from earlier chapters to illustrate the breadth of conclusions where possible. particularly eloquent on these matters is the fifth chapter, on “the embeddedness of seeing.” in this chapter lehoux addresses the familiar and deceptively tricky mirror-reversal problem: why does a mirror reverse left and right, but not up and down? the chapter’s aim is not to provide an explanation for this problem (though lehoux does this as well), but to address something more interesting: the apparent behavior of objects in a mirror simply does not comprise a problem for ptolemy in the same way as it does for us. lehoux accounts for this by saying that the mirror-reversal “paradox” can be viewed as a product of a modern division of the study of sight into its physical-optical, physiological, and psychological components. ptolemy’s optics was a different kind of science, in which these components were more unified, and as a result “ptolemy does not have the same blind spots as i do” (lehoux 2012, 108). discussion of ptolemy’s account of seeing (and later of galen’s) gives way to a broader problem on different “epistemologies of seeing” (lehoux 2012, 125). lehoux observes claims by skeptical philosophers, especially pyrrhonians, on the dubious nature of many seen things, particularly given the idea that different people (of different constitutions, etc.) may see things differently, just as humans and dogs may. in the course of this discussion the elegant efficiency of the book’s argument becomes particularly clear. this problem mirrors the challenge of the book as a whole: we and the romans may see things differently, so we ought not to read our own experiences too much into these debates, striving instead to understand these debates on their own terms. while each of the problems starring in the individual chapters drive this point home to some extent, here the value of the exemplary ancient problems in motivating a coherent, generalized epistemological investigation becomes especially plain. in particular, lehoux argues that the view that “people believed things – nay, even saw things – because they were true, because they were really out there in the world to be seen” (lehoux 2012, 14) is itself problematic. taxonomy is very important to lehoux’s answer to what turns out to be the book’s central question (which he draws from bas van fraassen): “is there any 17 roby rational way i could come to entertain, seriously, the belief that things are some way that i now classify as absurd?” (in lehoux 2012, 152; van fraassen 2002, 73). the shift in plausibility of the garlic-magnet hypothesis, for example, is fundamentally predicated on a shift in categorization: “magnets used to be the kind of thing that was sympathetic, as was garlic. now magnets are the kind of thing that are magnetic, and garlic in our experience is not” (lehoux 2012, 151). these categories are not simply labeled drawers for the things the world is made of; taxonomy brings with it a whole theoretical infrastructure explaining how the things in a given category are related to each other. this infrastructure, in turn, is generally the product of induction, and this has typically been enough reason for modern philosophers of science committed to the “realism” of laws and theories to reject these approaches to understanding the world as quaintly wrong-headed. in turn, this frequently results in the disqualification of ancient investigations into nature from membership in the class of “scientific” practices in the proper sense of the word (on this, see the excellent discussion of “laws of nature” in the third chapter). the alternative has traditionally been a cultural relativism which makes room for such beliefs at the cost of intelligibility: scrupulously avoiding interpreting roman “scientific” thought according to the rules of modern scientific practice is good as far as it goes, but what means does it give us for understanding the practices of a culture so remote from our own? lehoux takes a third path, which he labels “coherence”: he asks not how well roman science conforms to science as it happens to be practiced generally today, but how well roman descriptions of objects in the world and the relationships between them cohere with one another. the criterion of truth that goes along with this approach is that “we count as true any propositions that have passed the best tests we can think of to throw at them” (lehoux 2012, 243); lehoux identifies this as a “pragmatic” theory of truth. pragmatic it certainly is: the tests of truth can (and do) change with time and practitioners, and the focus on what “we believe” is true allows for a greater breadth of discourse than the realist “what is true.” is the pragmatic theory satisfying, as a structure that might be generally applied to ancient scientific practices other than those described here? lehoux makes a very good account of it, and of the need to “read” theories into the world (lehoux 2012, 239) rather than reading them “back” to axiomatic foundational claims. at the same time, the scope of the book quite reasonably does not allow for a full discussion of the justifications for such a theory, which is always at risk of slipping back toward relativism if the criteria for testing and believing are not moored quite tightly. in rejecting the received wisdom of a 20th-century philosophy of science which strives at all costs to fit scientific theories into a deductive model, lehoux’s approach can be constructively juxtaposed with that of rom harré’s the principles of scientific thinking (1970). this work critiques the “deductivist” view of philosophy of science, in which logical order is taken to match up with the natural order of phenomena being studied, and mathematics to be an approachable ideal for scientific knowledge of all kinds. harré identifies several problems with this approach, beginning with the assertion that modern scientific theories truly have the degree of deductive rigor attributed to them by those who subscribe to the deductivist view. he begins getting “wrong” right 18 his critique with a question strikingly similar to lehoux’s motivating query: “of what nature is the world scientists attempt to describe and understand?” (harré 1970, 10). while harré would later be associated with a kind of scientific realism, and might therefore appear at first glance to be at odds with lehoux, he went on to distinguish a variety of types of realism, arguing in an essay in derksen’s the scientific realism of rom harré (1994) for a realism that depends on inductive arguments working over type-hierarchies in order to create models. the seeds of this version of realism are already present in the principles of scientific thinking (1970), and it is those aspects which can be most usefully compared with lehoux’s approach. theories tell us why patterns of phenomena are the way they are. in order to do so, a theory often has to provide us knowledge we do not previously have; it does so by providing a model for the unknown. this model is patterned after objects and processes that are already known, and at a rough approximation is hypothesized to work as an analogue for the real, unknown, mechanism. the model is absolutely central to harré’s epistemology, while a system of deductive laws is what he refers to as “a desirable heuristic device” (harré 1970, 2). this is an inversion of the “deductivist” view, in which models are at best secondary to a system of formal logic which is taken to reflect the rules governing the phenomena themselves. in practice, harré argues, constructing such a model requires tools other than the logic of statements: “if this logic is used as the exclusive tool of analysis, it imposes an unnatural structure upon theory” (harré 1970, 42). the sentential explanans cannot stand on its own, as the deductivist view suggests: it requires additional information in order to refer to new objects (or processes) rather than familiar givens, and so analogy is required to make the statement meaningful. harré’s rich descriptions of these analogical processes provides useful background to lehoux’s appeal to building categories based on perceived likenesses as a tool for generating theories about the natural world, and in particular the questions lehoux raises about the degree of difference between ancient and modern scientific practices and standards. taxonomy is extremely important to the criteria of truth harré develops, particularly in his articulation of the “transforms” that link the expression of a model with that of the phenomena it represents. for example, harré describes the discovery that salt crystals are lattices of sodium and chlorine ions as a “modal transform” between the shape of the crystal and its internal lattice structure, a description likely to prompt classification of salt crystals with other crystals of a similar lattice structure. he contrasts this description of salt, labeled as “sodium chloride,” with one that might arise in a domestic context, where it might be classified alongside peppercorns, bay leaves, and parsley. depending on the disciplinary context, harré argues, "the taxonomic weight cannot so easily or so plausibly be placed upon the technically most advanced concepts" (harré 1970, 54). even in the practice of modern science, then, taxonomy is not a simple matter. harré opposes the “positivist myth of infinite arbitrariness of classification” to the “realist” stance (further specified in harré 1994 as “entity realism”) in which things and substances have real differences in their constitutions which are manifested in external characteristics, and works to find ground between these two extreme stances which seems to correspond to the realities of scientific practice and discourse. 19 roby ultimately harré subsumes the criteria of truth that fall under the categories of correspondence, coherence, and pragmatic success under a single larger criterion which he argues is met by all of them. this overarching criterion requires that the sentence used to make a true statement “is constructed in such a way and of such elements as are conventionally used to locate and individuate something where the subject of the statement actually is, and to ascribe to it a property which it actually has” (harré 1970, 189). it is not my purpose here to address the validity of this claim with regard to lehoux’s definition of “coherence” and “pragmatic truth,” but rather to note that the interested reader might use harré as a guide in order to put them in a more detailed context. harré later “type-based inductive argument for scientific realism” (harré 1994, 8) invokes a form of “realism” which explicitly recognizes the model-building value of observations made within a certain hierarchy of types. harré also challenges the view that the “vehicles of thought” must necessarily be sentential statements, or indeed any kind of linguistic structures, and the concomitant belief that statements expressed this way have a particular logical validity in explaining phenomena in the world. he proposes instead that scientists in fact work with a “complex” of vehicles of thought which include linguistic formulations as well as visualizations, in all cases focusing on these vehicles as thought processes rather than reflections of outward phenomena, and on their outward manifestations, such as pictures or speech (uttered or written), as manifestations of internal thought processes and not of the phenomena themselves. the model, again, is central here: the model stands in for the natural mechanism (known or unknown); it may be expressed in logically linked sentences, but those sentences are themselves neither the model nor a direct reflection of the rules underlying the phenomena the model describes. the flexibility harré’s system allows in defining the tools of scientific thought harmonizes productively with lehoux’s call for a broader range of patterns of thought and speech to be classified as tools seen by their practitioners as appropriate for investigation of the natural world. the complementarity of these two approaches is made particularly clear in their treatments of “laws of nature.” lehoux’s approach rejects the stipulation that using a word that can be translated into english as “law” to refer to the mechanism behind some natural phenomenon is either necessary or sufficient for “laws of nature” in a particular worldview to be acknowledged. instead, the criterion ought to be that “lawlike statements” (lehoux 2012, 74) are made about a given natural phenomenon. lehoux quite rightly calls attention to the importance and difficulty of defining “lawlike” in this context. ultimately, the examples that he cites as successful in this vein are “intelligible, measurable, and predictable” (lehoux 2012, 70), thus far matching the requirements stipulated by jane ruby (ruby 1986, 350). lehoux suggest that a “lawlike” statement may further be portrayed as operating on mathematically-framed objects (e.g. “circular epicyclic and circular deferential” (lehoux 2012, 72)) and generating mathematical relationships (e.g. the apparent planetary station that occurs at a given point), without incurring any objection from lehoux that it interferes with its explanatory power for real objects in the natural world. however, his conception of the “lawlike” also allows the mechanism to be divine, thus permitting discussion of the “laws” perceived to govern getting “wrong” right 20 practices like astrology and divination. lehoux makes a strong argument for linking discourse about these practices with that about practices which correspond more closely to those currently classified as scientific. this argument is predicated at least in part on the acknowledgement that even among the disciplines now uncontroversially counted as sciences there are significant differences in what it means to say phenomena obey “laws of nature.” lehoux uses biology and physics to stake out this spectrum, motivating this problematization with the famous dismissal (possibly rutherford’s) of sciences other than physics as “stamp collecting” (lehoux 2012, 75). these disagreements suggest more than anything else that there is work to be done on the modern side as well in defining what “laws of nature” mean for different scientific practices, and here too harré’s analysis may prove useful. he emphasizes the importance of understanding the mechanism behind a process in valorizing induction-based “laws of nature” behind it. laws, in this view, are causal laws, defined by their “universality,” “necessity” (which emerges from the generative mechanism), and “assent” (that is, generative power must be justified by reference to a generative mechanism). we recognize patterns in nature (like cubical salt crystals) and explain them in terms of what harré calls the “powers” of the objects involved (like those of the sodium and chloride ions which make them bond in certain shapes). “laws of nature” are then the statements that describe these patterns; at some level they involve the “generative mechanisms” (harré 1970, 125) which result in phenomena in a particular state. such a law (which may or may not be strictly verbal) must provide an account of a causal mechanism, or be demoted to a “protolaw.” these criteria, like those lehoux proposes, are more inclusive than restrictive, and hence allow for discourse both about the exact sciences and other possibly scientific activities (e.g., evolutionary biology, psychology, astrology). harré makes no requirement of mathematical expression, or even of exclusively symbolic representation; the focus is on accounting for some causal mechanism, whose nature is not precisely stipulated. like harré, lehoux focuses on continuities of content rather than terminological coincidence. his approach to the question of whether “laws of nature” predate the early modern period, for example, rejects as invalid the grounds for ruby’s assertion that nothing equivalent to a “law of nature” existed for medieval islamic science. ruby bases this claim on the fact that “arabists tell me there is no word corresponding to ‘law’ in arabic” (ruby 1986, 344 n. 19). lehoux eloquently refutes this by arguing that “if the history of the frisbee cannot be pushed any farther back than the changing of its name from pluto platter, then we are talking about the history of a word, not of a thing” (lehoux 2012, 68 n. 57). neither lehoux nor harré denies the importance of linguistic structures for formalizing and propagating scientific knowledge, but both are insistent on the need to drill beneath the surface of such structures in search of the conceptual frameworks which underlie them. both authors find problematic the requirement that in order to qualify as “science,” investigations into phenomena must be expressible as sentences which conform to deductive logic. lehoux objects because this view disqualifies a great deal of ancient investigation into nature which seems otherwise to map fairly well onto activities we usually think of as “scientific,” while harré argues that if one is scrupulously attentive to scientific practice, it disqualifies a fair amount of what is labeled “science” today as well. 21 roby both views likewise call into question what is meant by a scientific explanation. lehoux’s approach is modeled on philip kitcher’s definition of an explanation as a member of a set of sentences which “collectively provide the best systematization of our beliefs” (lehoux 2012, 180; kitcher and salmon 1989, 430). harré (1994) attaches a comparable measure of “ontological plausibility” to the success of a process of induction over theories or models, only then judging a theory’s degree of empirical success. harré (1970) claims in a more detailed argument that an explanation is just part of the way a theory explains phenomena; the theory is based on a model and consists of sentences linked to the model by “transforms,” as in the case of sodium chloride above. he emphasizes in particular that the deductivist view claims a symmetry between explanation and prediction which simply is not there. in neither case is a successful explanation defined as the end product of a chain of deductive reasoning performed on sentences, which happens to mirror a causal system present in the phenomena under investigation. indeed, both authors problematize the equation of predictive success and explanatory power – harré on the grounds that there are cases in modern or recent science in which one but not both is found, lehoux on the grounds that any theory succeeds at prediction until it doesn’t, and that the predictive successes of modern science are measured on the order of decades at best, which looks rather paltry by the standards of ancient science. the eclectic approach of lehoux’s project is justified, at least in part, by his assertion that “the romans were of course not looking for a comprehensive theory of explanation itself – that question is very much a product of twentieth-century philosophical concerns” (lehoux 2012, 180). lehoux does not insist that the diverse scientific problems and intellectual contexts he invokes throughout the book add up to a comprehensive and uniform entity called “roman science,” whose players all follow the same rules – seeking to discover and describe those rules would be a quixotic enterprise, to say the least. instead, he provides a series of well-chosen examples – the very stuff of which philosophy is made, as he observes (lehoux 2012, 87) – and uses them to carve out a space dedicated to the consideration of complex questions about the complex enterprise of scientific thinking in the roman world. the resulting work is not (and does not claim to be) the last word on the questions it raises; it is rather an incitement to further work on them and the new questions they raise in turn. this epistemologically sophisticated interrogation of roman “scientific” activities represents an exciting opportunity for a new beginning in the dialogue between philosophy of science and the history of scientific practices in the ancient world. works like harré’s, which foreground the role of taxonomy in scientific model-building practices, provide some useful auxiliary tools for investigating the fascinating question of what “wrong” can tell us. works cited cuomo, serafina. 2007. technology and culture in greek and roman antiquity. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. getting “wrong” right 22 harré, rom. 1970. the principles of scientific thinking. chicago: university of chicago press. –––. 1994. “three varieties of realism.” in the scientific realism of rom harré. ed. derksen, anthony a. tilburg, the netherlands: tilburg university press. kitcher, philip, and wesley c. salmon. 1989. scientific explanation. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. lehoux, daryn. 2012. what did the romans know?: an inquiry into science and worldmaking. chicago: university of chicago press. ruby, jane e. 1986. “the origins of scientific “law”.” journal of the history of ideas. 47.3: 341-359. van fraassen, bas. c. 2002. the empirical stance. new haven, ct: yale university press, 2002. [expositions 5.1 (2011)] expositions (online) isnn: 1747-5376 editors’ preface john a. doody, gregory hoskins, john-paul spiro with the publication of the previous volume we celebrated the successful transition of expositions: interdisciplinary studies in the humanities to an on-line only publication. however, it is only with this new volume that we begin to exploit the opportunities that our new form provides us. for the first time in expositions’s history, several of our authors include live links to websites, blogs, and youtube videos in their contributions – links simply impossible to incorporate into a print publication – that literally offer you, the reader, a chance to go beyond the text to explore the material in greater detail. (although expositions is not responsible for the content of the material linked to, we are pleased to make these links available to you.) as well as being excited about the technological features of this volume, we are also particularly proud of the genuinely interdisciplinary sweep and depth of the articles in this issue. in our lead-off article, an interview, physicist sean carroll discusses topics concerning the reciprocal relation of the “arts” and the “sciences.” this is followed by lee trepanier’s article “the problem of stupidity in chekhov’s three sisters,” in which he applies robert musil’s useful clarification of the nature of self-imposed human limitations to chekhov’s seemingly paralyzed characters, giving us insight into the humanistic – not merely historical or dramaturgical – concerns of a frequently-performed but oft-misunderstood play. in our next section, we are honored to inaugurate a new regular feature of the journal, teaching the great books, with the publication of “why we read the analects of confucius” by wm. theodore de bary. scholars and artists from the us, canada and germany take up the topic of our academic roundtable: the cultural contradictions of representations of the homeless and of homelessness concentrated in the highly problematic notion of “homeless chic.” then, in his reflection “visions of history: simon schama, mark noll, and paul ricoeur,” in notes & insights, kenneth sheppard examines the uses of history for a public education. lastly, our book review is an extended discussion of the theological and philosophical features of a major new anthology of contemporary dante scholarship. several individuals have worked with expositions since its founding, but one of the most diligent and dedicated has been dr. bernard g. prusak. as he moves on to other projects, we gratefully acknowledge his contribution to the success of the journal. [expositions 5.1 (2011) 75-79] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 visions of history: simon schama, mark noll, and paul ricoeur kenneth sheppard johns hopkins university the noted british historian simon schama has recently made a popular case for the power, utility and inspiration that history can provide britain through its school system. 1 schama carefully insists that history is not a placebo for the arguments and ills that any given community may be plagued by, but neither will critical history allow a genealogy of self-congratulation. history is by definition a contested subject, he says, due to the nature of the practice in which historians participate. schama lists several skills and benefits of this practice, which include: scrutinizing evidence and assessing credibility; analyzing the nature of power; understanding how societies acquire and loose wealth; and studying the nature of war, leadership, and authority. citizens thus equipped are more likely to construct capacious histories where the narrow interests of any particular group will be dissolved in the larger, conflicted stories of the past. this is not some sentimental tale of political correctness, however, but a brutally practical education in tolerance. nor will this kind of history be dead weight, schama insists, but a source of inspiration over which participants can engage in lively and vital debate. and while this critical conversation will seldom be easy or smooth, it will preserve the fund of a “common memory”; in schama‟s case this fund consists of six central events in britain‟s past meant to give reflective pause in the face of the strong tensions that threaten to tear communities apart. several years ago mark noll provided a somewhat similar account for evangelical christians in his turning points: decisive moments in the history of christianity. 2 like schama, noll uses a set of central events that he thinks shaped christianity as a means of teaching christians about their past. these short essays and the accompanying discussion questions emerged from teaching a course at church. what is the relationship that noll sees between the teaching of history and the christian community? according to noll studying the history of christianity “provides repeated, concrete demonstration concerning the irreducibly historical character of christian faith.” it also provides a perspective on the interpretation of christian scripture, a useful “laboratory for examining christian interactions with surrounding culture”, confirming in a fairly clear way that “god sustains the church despite the church‟s own frequent efforts to betray its saviour and its own high calling.” 3 to this picture we should probably add that sketched by noll in his more famous book, the scandal of the evangelical mind, where he identifies the anti-intellectual bias within evangelicalism as a historical aberration. 4 indeed, a significant part of noll‟s attempt to recover a conception of faithful christian life as one informed by and embodied in intellectual pursuit, is to recover and re-present a history of evangelicalism in which this becomes evident – as in the person of jonathan edwards, for example. visions of history 76 for schama, then, history constitutes a critical practice through which it strives to continually produce better histories, a practice that informs and embodies good citizenship. and while this history will always be contested, continually open to revision, the very act of critical scholarship will preserve the means by which better histories can be made. this activity not only helps communities persevere, it helps them thrive – it promotes critical thinking, the construction of better arguments, and the cultivation of political virtues like tolerance without any attendant sanctimony. for noll, christians who understand their shared history will be more aware of its historical character, more aware of the context of scriptural interpretation and its relation to a particular culture and context, and, ultimately, more aware of the fallibility of a community‟s ability to live faithfully in light of its sacred texts. at the same time, noll insists that intellectual inquiry as practiced in christian history has been and should remain a vital component of the faithful christian life, collectively and individually. both historians, then, seem to think that history does in fact have some important lessons to teach, broadly construed; and both historians suggest that there is a connection between the historian‟s practice and specific kinds of virtues, be they political or religious. it might be useful to take a step back here and consider how it is that we learn about history. when history is taught in a school – on a sunday at church or on a monday at public school – how is it taught? what happens when we pick up a book and read about the past? or when we participate in a community in which a story of some kind – at a historical monument, say, or ceremony – is told? what we encounter are representations of the past in spoken or written discourse – be they analytical or narrative, fictional or historical, governed by standard discursive techniques and tropes. insofar as both schama and noll fail to address the substance of history as representation, focusing as they do on practice, they fail to consider the relationship between the practice of history, the mediated representations fashioned by historians, and the more general historical condition of various communities, be they religious, political, or something else. in order to understand this relationship we can turn to the work of paul ricoeur, who has explored this at great length. according to ricoeur historiography is a representation in that historical narrative is a species of symbolic discourse. in being a kind of discourse whose (narrative) form is wedded to its content (narrativization of events), historical narratives say more than what they say simply as narratives. as mediations they transmit a meaningful force that exceeds content and form alone. one of ricoeur‟s central insights in time and narrative is that the “grasping together” of characters and events as actions performed in time is represented through a similar grasping together in narrative, which he called “emplotment,” following aristotle‟s poetics. 5 in being figurative symbols historical narratives are more or less successful in revealing the meaning, coherence, or significance of events, while they simultaneously attest to the realism of events through their narration. and while historical narratives as representations differ from other narrative discourses in referring to a “real” human past, as opposed to an “imaginary” referent in the case of fiction, historiography is nonetheless governed by the same structured human imagination, which does not mean that historical narrative is any more or less 77 sheppard “true.” as hayden white has asked in this context: “how else can any „past,‟ which is by definition comprised of events, processes, structures, and so forth that are considered to be no longer perceivable, be represented in either consciousness or discourse except in an „imaginary‟ way?” 6 white‟s question brings us back to the seemingly more practical concerns of schama and noll. if historical narrative is a symbolic discourse that “says more than it says”, who is it that perceives the surplus of meaning so generated? in memory, history, forgetting ricoeur proposes that the reception of such meaning is given to the citizen, placed between the figures of the historian and the judge, without for a minute suggesting that any kind of absolute objectivity or infallible impartially is somehow possible. rather the citizen emerges as a third partner between the historian who constructs and produces representations, and the judge who interprets and applies law in rendering a verdict. the citizen‟s “gaze” differs from these two figures in being “structured on the basis of personal experience, variously instructed by penal judgment and by published historical inquiry.” placed between the historian and the judge, the citizen‟s interventions are never completed because continually contested, yet these interventions are based on the search for a quasi-final “assured judgment.” 7 a similar imaginative setup can be easily enough constructed for the christian believer, as a member of the religious community or ekklesia, who also intervenes, in this instance between the historian or exegete and the “judge” or religious practitioner (priest, pastor). in constructing representations of the past, ricoeur argues that historians generate symbolic discourses that express an intention to metaphorically “stand for” the past. a historian thus creates a kind of discursive monument, like those historical monuments that come down to us from the past, as a “true” account. ultimately it is up to the communities in which these representations are generated to determine the force of their meaning. and it is here that ricoeur locates the interaction between the historian and the citizen – and we may again insert the believer (or a member of another community). for history not only expands the collective memory of a given community, it corrects, criticizes, and even refutes the memory of that community when “it folds back upon itself and encloses itself within its own sufferings to the point of rendering itself blind and deaf to the suffering of other communities. it is along the path of critical history that memory encounters the sense of justice.” 8 behind the historian‟s intention to truth is the attempt to uncover “the face of those who formerly existed, who acted and suffered, and who were keeping the promises they left unfulfilled.” 9 the realization of this attempt to understand and explain the past will of course be continually deferred, for no one will ever write the final historical account of anything. rather, the realization of the historian‟s intent can only be taken up, ricoeur suggests, in the community of readers in which the narrative has been fashioned. here the community‟s intention to remain faithful to memory, be it national or religious or something else, comes up against the historian‟s intention to remain true to history and the judge‟s intention to render a just verdict. at this crossroad between history and memory and law, the citizen and the believer can actively reposition his or herself in the attempt to achieve a better vision or “gaze”, pursuing a sense of visions of history 78 justice. it is this power of repositioning, of achieving a new vision, a changed perspective or an enriched horizon, that riceour most forcefully highlights by relating how historical narratives and common memory can remain in constructive dialogue. this power of repositioning is akin to the process of hermeneutic appropriation which aims at understanding. when we approach a text as readers we aim to understand it, we do not aim to project ourselves into the text but to receive an “enlarged self from the apprehension of proposed worlds” in the text itself. we “take up” the proposed world of meaning in a text just as we abide by the rule of a game we participate in; yet as in any played game, during the act of playing/reading a new experience emerges that is not coextensive with the subject playing the game or reading the text. in order to “take up” this experience we must simultaneously “let go”, submitting ourselves to the game and to the text. 10 if we transfer the work of appropriation in texts to that of historical representations, we can see that the stories generated by criticism can be appropriated by citizens and believers, expanding memory‟s horizon of meaning and thus resisting the “enclosure” to which it is sometimes prone. to schama‟s account we can say with ricoeur that critical history continues to generate the call of justice from other citizens and other communities by refusing the citizens of liberal democracies to allow memory to close itself off in an insular fashion. to noll‟s account we can say with ricoeur that critical history continues to elucidate the kerygma or proclamation of the word in the “new testament” by refusing the believers and listeners of the christian message to block up their ears with the voice of memory alone. 11 while there is much more to be gleaned from ricoeur‟s philosophy of history as a philosophy of both historicity (geschichte) and history (historie), we can at least look to his work here in order to better formulate the promise and the power of how critical history and common memory can work together for good. endnotes 1. simon schama, “my vision for history,” guardian, november 9, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/nov/09/future-history-schools. 2. mark noll, turning points: decisive moments in the history of christianity (2nd ed.; grand rapids: baker, 2001). 3. noll, turning points, 15–8. 4. mark noll, the scandal of the evangelical mind (grand rapids: eerdmans, 1994), 35–49. 5. paul ricoeur, time and narrative, trans. kathleen mclaughlin and david pellauer (3 vols.; chicago: university of chicago press, 1984, 1985). see vol. 1 for “grasping together” and “emplotment.” 6. hayden white, the content of the form: narrative discourse and historical representation (baltimore: the johns hopkins university press, 1987), 57. 7. paul ricoeur, memory, history, forgetting, trans. kathleen blamey and david pellauer (chicago: university of chicago press, 2006), 333. 8. ricoeur, memory, history, forgetting, 500. 9. ricoeur, memory, history, forgetting, 499. 79 sheppard 10. cf. paul ricoeur, “appropriation,” hermeneutics and the human sciences: essays on language, action, and interpretation, trans. and ed. john b. thompson (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1981), 182–83, 191. 11. cf. paul ricoeur, “introduction to bultmann,” trans. peter mccormick, the conflict of interpretations: essays in hermeneutics (chicago: university of chicago press, 1974), 381–401. [expositions 5.2 (2011) 103-110] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 neo-missionaries and the polemics of helping amy ross university of georgia despite the existence of extreme wealth on our planet, billions of persons remain desperately poor. almost half of humanity – over 3 billion people – lives on less than us$2.50 a day. nearly half of the world’s 2.2 billion children live in poverty. according to the united nations children’s fund (unicef), 22,000 children under the age of five die each day due to poverty-related conditions. one-quarter of the world’s population lacks electricity, and water problems affect half of the people on earth. 1 women suffer a disproportionate share of the burdens of poverty. hundreds of millions of women are living in peril. women lack access to healthcare. the united nations estimates that providing reproductive healthcare globally would cost about us$12 billion (less than the amount spent on pet food in the us and europe), yet funding is lacking, and women continue to die from preventable diseases and circumstances associated with pregnancy and childbirth. widespread and systematic discrimination against women contributes to the occurrence of domestic violence and its associated damages. the fate of humanity and the protection of the environment are intimately linked to the health and strength of women, and yet hundreds of millions of women live in embattled circumstances. that so many women are in trouble means we all are. nicholas kristof and sheryl wudunn’s half the sky: turning oppression into opportunity for women worldwide focuses on the plight of women and calls for action “to battle gender inequity around the world and to push for education and opportunities for girls around the world” (kristof and wudunn 2009, 233). while their missive on the struggles women face is informative and important, the prescriptions kristof and wudunn preach are counter-productive. in short, kristof and wudunn get the problem right but the solution wrong. the strength of this work is its careful attention to the (largely preventable) harsh and often lethal conditions women face. its crucial weakness is the call for individual, charitable cash contributions. this is a significant error. examining the ways in which kristof and wudunn succeed in discussing the problem, but ultimately proscribe the wrong solution, is a useful strategy to interrogate the broader polemics of humanitarianism in the era of neoliberalism. kristof and wudunn have ample empirical evidence to discuss suffering. in chapter after chapter, each rich in anecdotes of specific women and their problems, the authors illuminate the struggles women face to survive. kristof and wudunn’s narratives offer a useful education on the hardships women face. inadequate healthcare means women die from otherwise preventable diseases. as they note, it is important to know that “mmr” neo-missionaries and the polemics of helping 104 means maternal mortality ratio, which in turn refers “to the number of maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births” and that, globally, one maternal death occurs every minute (kristof and wudunn 2009, 98). the authors argue, convincingly, that “maternal morality is an injustice that is tolerated only because its victims are poor, rural women” (kristof and wudunn 2009, 122). the stories of young girls forced into prostitution appropriately shock and horrify. kristof and wudunn relate powerful stories of women who are beaten, raped, and suffer other forms of physical abuse, in many cases from the hands of intimates and/or family members. failure to see the problem is part of the problem; therefore this intervention is important in raising awareness and provoking consciousness. admirably, kristof and wudunn do more than merely complain about the status of women. the authors want this knowledge to morph into outrage, which in turn will generate the desire to act to correct the situation. the authors suggest to the readers that the way to combat global gender inequity is through individual charitable contributions. the organizations the authors promote are, almost entirely, explicitly faith-based, and usually christian. 2 this is disturbing, because while the authors appear to be widely traveled, sophisticated, and well-educated, there is a startling absence of any deeper awareness of the way christian missionaries have created at least as many problems as they have solved. if one is going to be a neo-missionary, perhaps it would be useful to rethink why missionaries historically have been the agents of oppression rather than the instigators of equal opportunity. charity, past and present, has often failed to accomplish its putative purposes of alleviating suffering. humanitarian action, despite explicit good intentions, often produces contradictory results. as marianne gronemeyer has shrewdly observed, “helping” has a history (gronemeyer 1992, 53–60). individual acts of charity, particularly those funneled through religious organizations, have a record of serving the giver more than the recipient of aid. the medieval system of alms, gronemeyer explains, was explicitly connected to biblical proscriptions and eternal consequences. rich men believed that their only chance of passing through the pearly gates (“a rich man has less of a chance of entering heaven than a camel passes through the eye of a needle”) was to take care of the poor, who were, after all, like jesus. the next phase of the development of charity, in our modern times, saw “helping” move away from saving the (individual and particular) soul and towards controlling the population. 3 the desperate had to be managed in order to avoid disturbing the broader body politic and to mitigate the possibilities of revolt. helping the poor helped the rich and powerful maintain control. gronemeyer argues that current forms of domination deliberately assume a mantel of “helping” in order to function in their otherwise extractive purposes, and that “despite manifold historical instances to the contrary, the welcome ring of the idea of helping has survived in the consciousness of ordinary people. help thus appears to them as innocent as ever” (gronemeyer 1992, 54). contemporary forms of charitable support to poor 105 ross populations in the form of “development” constitute “the metamorphosis from a colonialism that ‘takes’ to one that supposedly ‘gives’ (and is) [. . .] an instrument of the perfect – that is, elegant exercise of power” (gronemeyer 1992, 55). social theorists use the term “neocolonialism” to describe the persistence of uneven power-relations between ostentatiously independent decolonized nations and their former colonial overseers. scholars in colonial studies, especially those sympathetic to world systems theory and the dependency school, have observed that the power-relations, terms of trade, and plague of debt combine to make “aid” a feature of continuing dependence. we should all be suspicious of “development” and “humanitarian aid” schemes, because many such efforts have been shown to empower the lender rather than the “underdeveloped community” being modernized and “helped.” arundhati roy makes the point that local peoples can rightly be wary of the alleged benevolent intentions of international humanitarian organization: [i]n areas of heightened conflict – in kashmir and in iraq for example – human rights professionals are regarded with a degree of suspicion. many resistance movements in poor countries which are fighting huge injustice and questioning the underlying principles of what constitutes “liberation” and “development,” view human rights ngos as modern day missionaries who've come to take the ugly edge off imperialism. to defuse political anger and to maintain the status quo. (roy 2004) the perverse dynamics of altruism get even worse with religion in the mix. philanthropy and righteousness combine, under the cover of charitable contributions, to further force tithing to the forefront of social activism at the expense of more substantive activities. the effect is to enhance the alibi of the rich (as the solution rather than the problem) as a counterweight to the substantial evidence that wrongs have been committed and retributions must be made. that’s why religious charity fails to alleviate unequal socio-economic relations; its true purposes are elsewhere. in his hostile biography of mother teresa, the missionary position: mother teresa in theory and practice (1995), christopher hitchens demonstrates how this icon of “helping” was deeply invested in the persistence of poverty. far from trying to eliminate poverty, mother teresa strove to convince people to make the best of it and think of their suffering as godly and, at the very least, inevitable – a cross to be borne rather than chains to be broken, resisted and denounced. hitchens’s invokes george orwell’s warning that “saints should be judged guilty until proven innocent” 4 – perhaps this advice should have been followed before kristof and wudunn choose to celebrate so prominently the discredited and disgraced greg mortenson. 5 yet kristof and wudunn appear befuddled when confronted with such critiques from locals in the course of their ventures into third world suffering. the authors note their neo-missionaries and the polemics of helping 106 admiration for bono (who can “talk poverty policy as well as he sings”), and express astonishment at the fact that he “was heckled by some africans who insisted that aid wasn’t what africa needs and that he should back off.” “andrew mwenda, a ugandan,” they continue, “complained about the calamitous consequences of the ‘international cocktail of good intentions.’ james shikwati of kenya has pleaded with western donors: ‘for god’s sake, please just stop’” (kristof and wudunn 2009, 176). kristof and wudunn also seem curiously untouched by the problematic powerrelations of the wealthy white world saving the poor peoples of color. they write, “we in the west can best help by playing supportive roles to local people” (kristof and wudunn 2009, 66). among other problematic aspects, such a position precludes a more sophisticated analysis that examines violence against women as a persistent problem in the (so-called) developed world. indeed, the authors invariably locate the problem of women’s oppression as inherent to other “cultures.” “why is it,” they ask, “that in many cultures, old men are respected as patriarchs, while old women are taken outside the village to die of thirst or to be eaten by wild animals?” (kristof and wudunn 2009, 67). reference to “testosterone-laden values” in certain cultures is, frankly, odd and confusing (kristof and wudunn 2009, 238). kristof and wudunn fail to demonstrate an awareness of the problems of “helping” and particularly the ways that aid has historically served the interest of the helper more than the recipients. but, at least the authors are trying to offer solutions. certainly this is a necessary challenge, as cynicism might inform but rarely motivates. for example, david rieff in a bed for the night; humanitarianism in crisis (2002) offers a devastating critic of the current state of humanitarian activism and its associated failures. rieff’s narrative is compelling and informative, but leaves the reader in a cul-de-sac of frustration. rieff can point out everything that is wrong, but offers very little sense of how to do things right. it is important to do more than critique attempts to help. alternatives should be offered, and this is precisely why it is important to avoid pushing the wrong actions. individual charity might make the individual feel better (as hitchens observes, “the rich world has a poor conscience” [hitchens 2003]), but it is a bad strategy to develop the collective action necessary to transform society and politics. yet individual action is all the rage under neoliberalism, the hegemonic ideology of our times. neoliberalism elevates the market place to a central position in society, insists that “free” markets are the best way to satisfy human needs and organize society, and promotes the role of the individual consumer as the chief protagonist in social relations. the intersection of international humanitarianism and the cult of individualism combine to present individual acts of charity as the solution to global problems. it is seductive and appealing to think that we can act, and act well, with a meager contribution of cash. but this neoliberal tithing is unlikely to address structural social change, because it has invariably failed to do so. 107 ross in this respect, kristof and wudunn overlap with other well-intended but ultimately ineffective neoliberal approaches to reform that rely on the sovereign consumer. for example, vice president al gore does a terrific job in an inconvenient truth explaining the impacts of climate change on the planet and the detrimental effects on human populations. yet he concludes with a rather feeble call for the viewer to purchase better light bulbs. rather than addressing the need for widespread and extensive changes in lifestyles and consumption, gore instead asks consumers to choose a better product. likewise, the creators of the documentary food, inc. startle the viewers with graphic visual footage of the horrors and health consequences of industrial agriculture and livestock production. but instead of a call for social and political organization to pressure for better regulations, the directors ask the (newly educated and therefore theoretically motivated) audience members to convince walmart to offer organic products. for the record, i am in favor of action, and i recognize that all collective action must start with individual agency. “think global and act local” – indeed, for most of us, how else can we act? but confining one’s ability to influence the world to an occasional us$20.00 donation funneled through charity is part of the problem rather than the solution. the belief that we can “purchase” our way out of these problems by being better consumers fails to address the need for social organization and political change. we’ve been watching too much television and become convinced by marketing that we can solve our problems by buying the “right” product. approaching the global problem of oppression against women as a problem to be solved through neo liberal tithing is counter-productive because it is a form of power posing as “helping” which is more likely to contribute to the replication of the uneven power-relations that are the source of the conditions of oppression in the first instance. the call for modern day neo-missionaries will likely fail to help the needy, as it did in the nineteenth century. or worse, such tactics could work as well as they did in the nineteenth century, to establish colonial, extractive relationships that create power and wealth in the core but fail to promote human welfare for the bulk of the periphery. kristof and wudunn would rather be identified as abolitionists than as missionaries (although, inexplicably, the authors resist the term “women’s movement,” stating that “if the international effort is dubbed a ‘women’s issue’ then it will already have failed” [kristof and wudunn 2009, 233-4]). but the abolitionists took risks. it is difficult to see what kristof and wudunn are asking in the form of sacrifice; for a wealthy person to spend a bit of money is the easy way out. the audience for half the sky is most likely those readers who can afford the us$15.99 cost of the book (80% of the world population lives on less than us$10.00 per day) but who might be more hesitant to take on the hard work of sustained political commitment to social change. the absence of a call for political interventions is disappointing: giving cash is a substitute for political participation. the central lacuna in half the sky is the curious absence of government as a player in supporting women’s welfare. individual acts of neo-missionaries and the polemics of helping 108 charity actually seem to replace the need for effective government action. for example, kristof and wudunn relate the story of edna adan, from an “exceptional” family in somaliland that broke with tradition and sent her to school. edna, educated and working as a teacher, becomes “her country’s first qualified nurse-wife, the first somali woman to drive, and then somalia’s first lady” before being “recruited by the world health organization” (kristof and wudunn 2009, 124). yet, despite government connections and experience with the preeminent global health organization, edna’s contribution to her society is an individual act of charity: “[w]hen edna retired from the world health organization in1997, she announced to the somaliland government [. . .] that she was going to sell her mercedes and take the proceeds, as well as her savings and pension, to build a hospital” (kristof and wudunn 2009, 125). where is the call for government action? even when the authors acknowledge collective action by women, it is somehow sidelined from government. in another bizarre episode, the authors recount how a group of women in a slum outside of the central indian city of nagpur organize for collective action – but as a vigilante posse that lynches a rapist. kristof and wudunn celebrate this violence as an example of women “standing up for themselves” (kristof and wudunn 2009, 47-52). kristof and wudunn have made a strong argument in favor of investing in women, particularly in the form of education. the authors also recognize that “this is not a tidy world of tyrannical men and victimized women, but a messier realm of oppressive social customs adhered to be men and women alike” (kristof and wudunn 2009, 69). the crisis women face is as systematic as it is serious. kristof and wudunn recognize that the oppression of women is widespread but fail to go beyond the individual stories of suffering to identify and address the root causes. women are abused on purpose, rather than as an unfortunate aberration in an otherwise just and functional system. women are abused in an attempt to control social reproduction and wealth, and so that some men, and some other women, can benefit. women are abused in the twenty-first century because accumulation often occurs through dispossession. the stakes are high. the universal oppression of women is as grave a threat to human welfare, and the environment, as poverty and climate change. indeed, these problems are interwoven in terms of both the casual factors and the material consequences. these problems and oppressions are interlinked, where the disempowerment of women serves to enrich others. in conclusion, the chief contribution of half the sky is the information it provides about the status of women. the main problem is the authors’ directive to donate money to charity. this is hardly an innocent mistake; it is neoliberalism in high gear. neoliberalism has made us consumers rather than citizens. it has made us believe that a us$20 donation is adequate social action – but it’s not. strategies that ask the rich to “help” the poor generally fail. rather, the social body should insist on reparations and redistribution. the 109 ross populace should demand social justice rather than beg for crumbs of “help,” or, worse still, massive public debt in order to finance loan-payments that go back to wealthy nations. why are we afraid to demand, organize, and implement redistribution? women will need to be at the forefront of the social and political struggles for equity, sustainability and more just social relations. kristof and wudunn agree with former un secretary general kofi annan that women are central for effective development (kristof and wudunn 2009, 185). as arundhati roy insists “a political struggle that does not have women at the heart of it, above it, below it and within it is no struggle at all” (roy 2004). notes 1. “poverty stats and facts,” global issues, http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/ poverty-facts-and-stats. see also the united national development program, human development report, http://hdr.undp.org/en/. 2. christian charities highlighted include world vision and the international justice mission. about such groups, kristof and wudunn write: “if there is to be a successful movement on behalf of women in poor countries, it will have to bridge the god gulf. secular bleeding hearts and religious bleeding hearts will have to forge a common cause” (kristof and wudunn 2009, 143). 3. michel foucault has termed this suite of ideologies and material practices “biopolitics,” and described “the conduct of conduct” – the ways in which laws, norms, and other forms of regulations modified social behavior. see michel foucault, “governmentality” in the foucault effect: studies in governmentality (chicago: the university of chicago press, 1991); michel foucault, “part five: right of death and power over life” from history of sexuality, vol. 1 (new york: vintage, 1990); and, michel foucault, “society must be defended”: lectures at the college de france, 1975-76 (london: picador, 2003). 4. orwell’s remark appears in “reflections on gandhi,” first published in partisan review, january 1949. 5. greg mortenson is the author, with d. o. relin, of three cups of tea; one man’s mission to promote peace…once school at a time (new york: viking, 2006) and of stones into schools; promoting peace with books, not bombs, in afghanistan and pakistan (new york: viking, 2009), both of which were celebrated as examples of successful humanitarian narratives until mortenson was exposed as a fraud. kristof and wudunn refer to mortenson’s philanthropy as “the kind of grassroots, rural program with local buy-in that has often been the most successful in the developing world” (kristof and wudunn 2009, 161), and use mortenson’s endorsement on the back cover of half the sky. investigations by 60 minutes and other news sources revealed that mortenson had benefited from http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-stats http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-stats http://hdr.undp.org/en/ neo-missionaries and the polemics of helping 110 personal enrichment in the name of “helping” afghani and pakistani school girls. works cited gronemeyer, marianne. 1992. “helping,” in the development dictionary: a guide to knowledge as power, ed. w. sachs. london: zed books. hitchens, christopher. 1995. the missionary position: mother teresa in theory and practice. new york: verso. ---. 2003. “mommie dearest; the pope beatifies mother teresa, a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud,” slate, october 20 th ,2003, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2003/10/ mommie_dearest.html kristof, nicholas d. and sheryl wudunn. 2009. half the sky: turning oppression into opportunity for women worldwide. new york: alfred a. knopf. rieff, david. 2002. a bed for the night: humanitarianism in crisis. new york: simon and schuster. roy, arundhati. 2004. “peace and the new corporate liberation theology.” the 2004 sydney peace prize lecture at the seymour theatre centre, university of sydney, http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/roys-fullspeech/2004/11/04/ 1099362264349.html. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2003/10/%20mommie_dearest.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2003/10/%20mommie_dearest.html http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/roys-full-speech/2004/11/04/1099362264349.html http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/roys-full-speech/2004/11/04/1099362264349.html bryant, levi r [expositions 6.1 (2012) 41–44] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 bryant, levi r. the democracy of objects. ann arbor: open humanities press, 2011. 326 pp, pb $23.99. isbn: 978–1–60785–204–9. the last few years of continental philosophy have witnessed the emergence of a movement loosely organized around the idea that we humans have for some time now been too focused on ourselves – so much so that it seems we cannot think past our own heads. whether under the banner of “speculative realism” or “object-oriented ontology,” philosophers such as ray brassier, quentin meillassoux, and graham harman have begun to challenge what they take to be the dominant assumption in continental thought since as far back as kant: that our world can only ever be understood as a world for us, full of objects – “fixed, stable and unchanging” things (13) – that only appear as such to a subject. levi bryant has been an active voice in this movement, most notably co-editing a volume that brings together several of its most prominent figures.1 in the democracy of objects, bryant systematically lays out his own position – what he calls “onticology,” drawing on martin heidegger’s distinction between “ontical” inquiries that are concerned with facts about beings and “ontological” inquiry which concerns being as such. onticology aims generally to reintroduce objects into ontological inquiry, focusing on the ontological status of the production of differences among beings.2 the democracy of objects pursues this aim by weaving together resources that stretch from aristotelian metaphysics to contemporary systems theory. the breadth of scope evident throughout the book is truly remarkable, as is bryant’s ability to lead the reader smoothly along from one concept to the next despite the diversity of ideas discussed. what makes this book so engrossing, however, is its bold attempt (an attempt that is, for the most part, successful) to construct a fresh, comprehensive ontology that does justice to all kinds of beings – atoms, rocks, frogs, and planets no less and no more than humans, governments, and gods – in all the ways they exist and coexist. in order to construct a sketch of the metaphysical system that bryant proposes, perhaps it is best to begin where the book concludes. its last chapter presents what bryant calls “flat ontology” in four interrelated theses: first, no entity (or type of entity) is to be accorded special status as an origin or basic element of all other entities; second, the world does not exist (i.e., there is not a “single, harmonious unity” of all objects that is simply given, but rather there is a multiplicity of objects in a multiplicity of relations); third, no sort of relation between objects is to be privileged over other sorts of relation – and here bryant has in mind specifically the human/world or subject/object relation that has traditionally been taken as fundamental in one or another sense; and finally, entities either exist or they do not, so that all beings are “on equal ontological footing” (246). this ontology is thus “flat” by virtue of the fact that it does not admit of any given hierarchy among entities, in terms of neither their causes nor their relations nor their manners of being. a being is a being, and at the most basic level of ontology what pertains for one pertains for all. one could sum up what is at stake in this argument by calling it a retrieval of the aristotelian notion of “substance” after the criticisms leveled against it by the likes of locke, hume, and the democracy of objects 42 kant – a retrieval that includes several modifications, of course. what bryant primarily wants to retrieve from aristotle’s metaphysics is the idea of an object as a unique individual that, firstly, is distinct from any and all of its attributes, and, secondly, remains the same as its attributes undergo changes. in order to reformulate this notion of what (and how) objects are, bryant draws on the work of roy bhaskar, who argues that objects must exist independently of their relations with other objects if they are able to produce the effects that scientific inquiry does, in fact, observe (68). bryant calls this independence of the object (qua substance) from its relations (i.e., its attributes) “withdrawal”: objects relate to other objects insofar as they have attributes or qualities, but at the same time they always withdraw from their relations. no object – whether a water molecule, a human, a skyscraper, or a corporation – is reducible to its qualities or relations. what is it, then, that withdraws? what can we say of it? bryant offers an explanation in which he substitutes the phrase “virtual proper being” for the term “substance.” an object’s virtual proper being is that from which it derives the capacity to have attributes at all, and to undergo a change in these attributes while remaining the same object. to go along with virtual proper being, bryant offers the phrase “local manifestations” as a reinterpretation of an object’s qualities, and local manifestations are to be understood actively, as something an object does. in perhaps the clearest example of the many throughout the book, bryant reflects on the color of a blue mug. he explains that when he looks at the mug under light, it appears blue, but when its surroundings are dark it naturally appears black. in each case, the mug is manifesting itself according to different local conditions (what bryant later calls “regimes of attraction”): in the light it is “bluing,” but in the darkness it is “blacking.” yet there is of course no alteration in the substance of the mug. it retains its virtual proper being under a variety of conditions – though importantly not all conditions; it would not be able to remain a mug after being thrown into a river of lava, for instance. all objects are thus split between their virtual proper being, which withdraws from external relations but constitutes the internal structure of objects, and their local manifestations, the ways in which objects enter into external relations with other objects. yet it is not only the latter that bryant understands in terms of activity. objects, in order to be what they are, must continue to be what they are, and this continuity in being is itself an active process. to put it simply, an object must continually reproduce itself over time in order not to fall apart (232). different objects can perform their own self-reproductions in a variety of ways: government offices change hands without fundamental changes in the institutions these offices make up; our bodies are continually producing new cells to replace ones that have ceased to function; even the atoms of an inanimate object such as a rock must undergo dynamic changes from moment to moment for the rock not to dissipate. virtual proper being can thus be understood as the “endo-consistency” resulting from this ongoing process of renewal, and it is within the consideration of this endo-consistency that the scope of bryant’s account widens from tardigrades and mugs to social systems. we may be used to thinking of something like the united states not as an object itself but as made up of objects (places, buildings, citizens, etc.), but one of the claims of onticology is that all objects are made up of other objects without being reducible to those objects. thus, the cells 43 norton in my body are as much objects as i am, and large social structures made up of millions of smaller objects existing at various scales (from atoms to human beings to cities) are also objects themselves. we can thus understand the ways in which the united states, for instance, relates both to the objects that form parts of it and to those outside of it as manifestations of the virtual proper being of the state as it works to maintain its endo-consistency. this allows for the development of a political onticology that bryant hints at in a few examples but, unfortunately, does not develop in detail in this book. we may still heed this astute observation, though: “social and political thought needs to expand its domain of inquiry, diminish its obsessive focus on content, and increase attention to regimes of attraction and problems of resonance between objects” (227). despite a perhaps too facile dismissal of structuralist and post-structuralist critique, bryant’s point that social and political thought must widen its scope to include the ways in which objects of all kinds relate within and contribute to social systems is hard to dispute. to take one example, references to the work of jared diamond show how certain major events in world history are more adequately explained in terms not solely of human socio-political attitudes and decisions but also of conditions involving many different kinds of non-human materials (203, 241). considerations of non-human objects have indeed been lacking in many structuralist approaches to critique, whether that of lévi-strauss or that of althusser, and bryant offers a convincing argument for giving such objects equal attention. within the explication of flat ontology with which the book closes, bryant offers what appears to be the foundation of an onticological ethics that, i would argue, is richer than the political considerations put forward in the previous chapter. this account emerges as a distinction between what bryant calls ontologies of transcendence and ontologies of immanence (onticology being an example of the latter). these two ontological approaches are explained largely in terms of the lacanian graphs of sexuation, according to which different possible relations between subject and other can be mapped with respect to the subject’s desire. bryant’s ontological interpretation of lacan’s graph of “masculine” sexuation provides an account of the way that ontologies of transcendence – bryant’s general name for the kind of metaphysics dominant throughout the history of western philosophy, which privileges presence and relies on an epistemology of adequation – tend to obscure both the withdrawal of an object and its necessary relations to other objects. his account of the “feminine” side of lacan’s graph, however, explains the way in which, according to onticology, the proper being of the object and its openness to other objects belong together. according to this scheme, all objects (and, again, this includes human beings and social systems as much as it does rocks and neutrinos) are what they are only by at the same time being open to other objects. the ethical considerations that emerge from onticology would thus have at their core a recognition of otherness – manifest not only between humans but also between humans and various kinds of non-humans, as well as between non-humans without the involvement of humans. furthermore, this openness to the truly other (to the “strange stranger” as bryant writes, adopting a phrase from timothy morton2) would not simply be an ethical rule to be followed or broken; it is (according to an argument surprisingly the democracy of objects 44 reminiscent of derrida’s meditations on hospitality) an inescapable, ontological feature of the proper being of beings. to be, one might say, is both to be withdrawn and to be open to others. the stated goal of the book series of which the democracy of objects is a part is to encourage “original speculative metaphysics” as opposed to “reverence for dusty textual monuments” (ii). in keeping with this sentiment, bryant posits his onticology as a version of ontological realism in opposition to an attitude dominant in various strains of contemporary philosophy that he characterizes as essentially epistemological and anthropocentric. the fact that a certain dismissiveness sometimes emerges toward positions bryant does not explore further, as well as a tendency to make vague generalizations about them rather than to refer to specific ideas or figures, is one regrettable minor weakness of the book. fortunately, these passages are short, rare, and fairly tangential to the main argument. furthermore, the rigor and insight of bryant’s treatment of the several figures whose work he does explore in detail evinces an attention to detail and complexity that puts any charge of oversimplification out of the question. indeed, one of the book’s greatest strengths is that it is able to incorporate a variety of perspectives, each with its own intricate arguments, into one larger system – all while keeping the overarching account of this system clear and persuasive. in the book’s introduction, bryant refers to himself as “a bricoleur, freely drawing from a variety of disciplines and thinkers whose works are not necessarily consistent with one another” (27). there are indeed significant distinctions to be made among the ideas discussed in the book, but bryant is successful in constructing a consistent and compelling position of his own with the aid of these diverse tools. he states that his aim is “to synthesize divergent trends within contemporary continental social, political, cultural, and philosophical thought and broaden the field of inquiry available to these discourses and debates” (247), and the democracy of objects achieves this goal with the kind of inventiveness that demands considerable attention. michael barnes norton university of arkansas at little rock notes 1. bryant, levi, nick srnicek, and graham harman, eds. the speculative turn. melbourne: re.press, 2011. 2. cf. bryant. “the ontic principle: outline of an object-oriented ontology.” the speculative turn, levi bryant et al. eds. the speculative turn (melbourne: re.press, 2011). 261–278. 3. morton, timothy. the ecological thought. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2010. © equinox publishing ltd. 2008, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expositions 2.2 (2008) 163–188] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v2i2.163 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 preliminary reflections on the rhetoric of aristotle’s rhetoric1 bryan-paul frost department of political science university of louisiana at lafayette perhaps the first question anyone would ask when reading a book whose theme is rhetoric is the following: what sort of rhetoric is the author going to employ in this work? to rephrase this in somewhat more cynical terms: where, when, and how is the author going to attempt to pull the wool over my eyes? no serious author can be unaware that his readers will likely raise this question, especially when the author under consideration is universally acknowledged to have written the foundational work on the subject: aristotle’s rhetoric. in the words of alan g. gross and arthur e. walzer (2000, ix), “whitehead’s observation that the history of philosophy is one long footnote to plato can for us be transferred to the rhetoric: all subsequent rhetorical theory is but a series of responses to issues raised by that central work.”2 given the obviousness of this question, one would expect that the scholar who wished to investigate this topic would have to wade through a veritable sea of secondary literature in order to set one’s bearings. but this is surprisingly not the case, at least in political science. although there has been a sort of “minirenaissance” of the rhetoric in the last decade or so,3 the book—let alone this question—has largely been ignored by contemporary political theorists.4 before beginning to answer this question, however, it may be worthwhile to take a moment and reflect upon why it is even important to address this subject matter at all: is there any vital reason today to turn to aristotle’s rhetoric for guidance on pressing social or political issues, on everything from participatory democracy to civic education? or should conclusions from a serious study of the rhetoric be justly confined to the musty halls of academia? after all, it is really beyond question that “rhetoric” has a terrible reputation today: the word is hardly ever used except in a pejorative sense, and most students who are enrolled in debate or public speech courses would consider it an insult to be called rhetoricians. most persons think that there is something dubious or even sinister about someone who is a clever speaker; we are suspicious of someone who can speak persuasively on both sides of an issue. 164 preliminary reflections on the rhetoric of aristotle’s rhetoric © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 and such a suspicion is not at all unfounded, nor is it unique to this century. to say nothing of the reputation many lawyers and politicians have today, one need only recall that one of the reasons socrates was tried and executed was because he could make “the weaker speech [appear] the stronger” (apology 18b).5 but while rhetoric has always been considered with a certain amount of unease or caution, it was clearly more highly venerated in antiquity than it is today—and this precisely because of antiquity’s rich understanding of politics. for classical republicanism, citizenship meant active and direct participation in the life of a small, self-sufficient community. the entire citizen body had the awesome responsibility of self-government, and this meant that they had to articulate their own political goals and aspirations, and to develop policies and institutions that would best attain them. it is no wonder, then, that at the core of civic education according to the classics was a training in rhetoric—in how to communicate effectively with other citizens in the political arena. citizens not only had to be able to persuade others of the nobility, advantages, or justice of one course of action over another, but they also had to be ready to unmask those corrupt and rapacious individuals who only masqueraded as selfless servants of the city. in sum, it would not be an exaggeration to say that rhetoric was the civic art.6 it might immediately be objected, however, that regardless of how theoretically rich aristotle’s treatment of rhetoric is, he was writing primarily for an audience that was wholly different from our own: unlike the citizens of the greek polis, we do not participate directly in national government but through our elected representatives; our citizen class is open and inclusive while theirs was closed and restrictive; and our state is large, liberal, and focused primarily on economics. all of this is undeniable—but to claim that we therefore have very little to learn from aristotle is simply fallacious. while it is true that very few of us participate directly in national government, local and state associations afford us a multitudinous array of such opportunities; and these associations, from the local pta to a state-wide ballot initiative or campaign, often have a much more immediate and personal impact upon our lives than what occurs at the national level. moreover, we must keep in mind that an understanding of rhetoric is not only useful for persuading others (whether at the national, state, or local level), but it also helps us to see when others are trying to deceive us and advance their own special interests. at a time when citizens are bombarded by literally thousands of sound bites and advertisements, it is all the more imperative to understand the character of political discourse—both how to communicate effectively with others as frost 165 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 well as how to recognize and unmask potential demagogues and flatterers. indeed, given the destructive ways modern communications, propaganda, and technology have been manipulated in the twentieth century, one could very easily make the case that we need theoretical clarity about rhetoric more than the greeks ever did. let us restate the above ideas in the following way. if democratic politics is to consist of more than force and fraud—if it is to be a genuinely ennobling activity—then it will have to be based, at least in part, on reasoned discourse between and among the electorate and their representatives. the citizens of a democracy, therefore, must be instructed in the nature or character of public discourse if they are ever to distinguish between being manipulated by propaganda and listening to thoughtful arguments on opposing sides of an issue. but as is clear from the past success of such bankrupt ideologies as stalinism, maoism, and fascism, such instruction is not at all easily taught or acquired. now one of the best ways to gain theoretical clarity on this subject is to be willing to step outside our own liberal and democratic framework in order to see how these ideas were addressed and debated in other times and places; and it can hardly be doubted that aristotle engaged in one of the most rigorous, insightful, and compelling investigations into the nature of rhetoric. a return to aristotle, in particular, and classical antiquity, in general, for guidance on these questions is not an attempt to satisfy some conservative nostalgia for times of old; rather, aristotle is the very one who may be able to teach us modern liberal democrats the most. as aristotle is a critic of both liberalism and democracy, he is more likely to ask questions and make arguments that we would likely overlook, disregard, or even find offensive. as we take our political bearings from the enlightenment, such questions and arguments are particularly important for us to raise and seriously address; for we often have unrealistic expectations about what politics can accomplish, and we tend to overestimate what even the most well-crafted civic education can achieve. in sum, by returning to aristotle’s rhetoric, we will begin to attain greater clarity about the theoretical and practical nature of civic discourse, as well as to see what role instruction in rhetoric should have in current debates surrounding the revamping of civic education. we are certainly not obliged to copy everything the classics recommend and to place rhetoric at the center of civic education; but by returning to a time when debates about the character and power of rhetoric were of vital public concern, we might profitably listen to and learn from aristotle’s sober discussion. it is hoped that the aforementioned arguments and the following set of reflections might contribute in some small way to the modest but apparently 166 preliminary reflections on the rhetoric of aristotle’s rhetoric © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 growing interest in the rhetoric. at all events, let us now turn to aristotle’s treatise itself and address what might be considered the natural starting point for any political or philosophical study of the work: what is the rhetoric of the rhetoric? in other words, to whom is it addressed and what did aristotle hope to convey or teach by composing this book?7 the anti-rhetorical opening of the rhetoric if one turns to the rhetoric in order to learn how to outwit a clever opponent, or to acquit a dubious client, or to learn how to promote self-interested policies while simultaneously appearing to be a selfless servant of the regime, the opening chapter of the work is likely to disappoint. aristotle begins the treatise with what can only be described as a blistering attack against rhetoric as it is generally taught and practiced. aristotle complains that previous authors of “arts of speech” have completely ignored enthymemes (which are initially described as the “body of persuasion”) and have concentrated on only a “small part” of rhetoric, namely appealing to the emotions of judges. but arousing the anger or pity or envy of a jury is hardly germane to the proceedings in a courtroom, and in well-governed cities, such appeals are (or would be) forbidden by the law: arousing the passions of a jury in this way is like making a “straightedge rule crooked before using it.” well-governed cities require speakers to stick to proving the facts of the case (e.g., did something happen or not, or is something true or not), and aristotle exhorts the would-be rhetorician to do nothing but support truth and justice (1.1.3–6,12).8 the rhetoric that aristotle describes in book 1, chapter 1 is clearly not the rhetoric with which we are familiar, and it is certainly not the rhetoric that many politically ambitious students would want to study. in other words, the rhetoric that is here described is purged of almost all of its “rhetorical” elements, and surely many prospective students, after hearing or reading how aristotle purifies both the means and ends of rhetoric in the introduction, might look elsewhere for such advice. at this early point in the work, aristotle seems in close agreement with socrates in the gorgias (463b–66a): rhetoric as it is normally taught and practiced resembles flattery, and it would seem to have very little that is noble or endearing about it. but does all of this mean that aristotle believes that those judging the case are any wiser or better than those arguing it, and that they should have the authority to determine whether something is “important or unimportant, or just or unjust”? this is exceedingly doubtful. immediately after making the above remarks, aristotle launches into a discussion as to why well-crafted laws leave as little as possible to the discretion of the jury: regardless of frost 167 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 whether speakers make emotional appeals, the judges themselves are simply too likely to be partial to one side or another. only in those cases when the law cannot or does not specify certain things should the jury decide on these matters; otherwise, they should confine themselves to determining whether or not the event or action did or did not occur (1.1.1–8). it would seem that neither the people nor the speakers should have much latitude when judging cases: the latter are prone to distort the facts of a case by appealing to the jury’s emotions unless prevented from doing so by the law; and the former, even in the absence of such appeals, are still liable to be partial to either the plaintiff or defendant.9 what does aristotle hope to achieve or convey through this two-fold depreciation of both the rhetorician and his audience in the opening chapter—in other words, what is aristotle’s rhetorical strategy here at the outset? three possible answers present themselves when we look at the effect this might have on aristotle’s most likely or obvious audience: potential or practicing statesmen. in the first place, aristotle seems intent on appealing to the high-mindedness or nobility of his readers. by planting firmly and immediately in a statesman’s mind what might be called an “idealized” version of rhetoric, and the political order that would support it, aristotle discourages any attempt to use rhetoric to manipulate others: the persuasive power of rhetoric must be limited to supporting what is true and just, and not to advancing one’s own selfish interests (1.1.12–13). of course, there will inevitably be some individuals who will not heed aristotle’s advice, and this is why he shows his readers, in the second place, that well-crafted laws should regulate or control rhetoric. unless the city asserts its supremacy over rhetoric—unless rhetoricians are kept on a “tight leash”—clever speakers will have the opportunity to create enormous havoc politically; for if human beings are susceptible to making biased decisions in even the best of circumstances, how much more erroneous and harmful will their decisions be once they are whipped up into a frenzy by an artful rhetorician. one might say that the relative health of a regime can be gauged by the character of the rhetoric in vogue in the courts: the better the regime, the less it will tolerate rhetoric as it is ordinarily understood and practiced. and finally, in the third place, even in the very best of regimes, aristotle never says that a statesman can do away with rhetoric. an uncorrupted multitude is still a multitude, and as aristotle maintains, even if a statesman had the most exact knowledge, it is not always possible to instruct or teach a crowd (1.1.11): persuasion will always be necessary. aristotle offers a sober reminder that although politics involves rational discourse, citizens are not always amenable to reason.10 by 168 preliminary reflections on the rhetoric of aristotle’s rhetoric © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 learning how, or what it means, to communicate with a crowd, the future statesman will also begin to understand the disposition or character of most political multitudes. in sum, the opening chapter not only encourages the reader to pursue and promote what is true and just, but it also indicates how rhetoric should be regulated, and why it is necessary, even in the very best regime. aristotle promotes the civically responsible use of rhetoric, but a rhetoric that is as rational or deliberative as possible. clever but decent: the subordination of rhetoric to political science given the rather high-minded or moral tone of the opening chapter, it comes as quite a surprise that aristotle very quickly changes his own rhetoric in the chapters that follow—so much so that many scholars see irreconcilable tensions between chapter 1 and the rest of the book.11 and one cannot explain away these discrepancies by claiming that chapter 1 is an early (or late) addition to the book, and that aristotle changed his mind as to the nature of rhetoric while composing the treatise.12 to say nothing of the fact that aristotle could easily have “deleted” what he wrote, a very similar set of remarks are made at the beginning of book 3, almost as if aristotle wants to remind his readers of what was said in book 1, chapter 1.13 after the opening chapter, aristotle now begins to treat and discuss rhetoric as it is more commonly understood and practiced; and the practical advice he gives his readers on how to be persuasive can at best be described as “amoral.” for example, aristotle instructs his students on how to stretch the truth when it comes to claiming that a person actually has a particular virtue or not (1.9.28–32); he tells them that they should urge a judge to follow the written law when the facts of a case are in their favor, but dissuade him from doing so when the facts are against them (1.15.3–12 and the chapter as a whole); he states that they should use maxims that conform to and even flatter the opinions and assumptions of their audience in order to enhance their own moral character (2.21.15–16); and finally, aristotle articulates a long list of apparent or fallacious enthymemes, and there is no suggestion in the chapter that students must avoid using them in order to win their case (2.24). notwithstanding this advice, aristotle never openly encourages his readers to act wickedly or viciously, or to win a case at any and all costs: in fact, he sometimes states the reverse, as when he claims that the true and the just are by nature stronger than their opposites . . . [and that] … one should be able to argue persuasively as to opposites, just as in the use frost 169 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 of syllogisms, not that we may actually do both (for one should not persuade what is debased), but in order that it may not escape our notice what the real state of the case is, and that we may be able to refute if another person uses speeches unjustly. (1.1.12) nevertheless, the “moral” remarks are far less numerous than those that seem “amoral,” and it is hard not to come away with the conclusion that aristotle is more interested in teaching his students how to be successful (rather than strictly just) rhetoricians, even if they have to use an occasional underhanded technique in order to win their case.14 in order to defend aristotle against the charge that his advice arms the wicked with the weapons needed to cause great mischief in politics, one could say (as aristotle explicitly states above [1.1.12]) that the virtuous must know how the wicked will argue and act if they are to defeat them. larry arnhart (1981, 27), who uses this argument to defend aristotle, offers the following quote from richard whately’s elements of rhetoric (1963, xxxix) to back up his claim. whately writes: with respect to what are commonly called rhetorical artifices—contrivances for “making the worse appear the better reason,”—it would have savoured of pedantic morality to give solemn admonitions against employing them, or to enter a formal disclaimer of dishonest intention; since, after all, the generality will, according to their respective characters, make what use of a book they think fit, without waiting for the author’s permission. but what i have endeavored to do, is clearly to set forth, as far as i could, (as bacon does in his essay on cunning,) these sophistical tricks of the art; and as far as i may have succeeded in this, i shall have been providing the only effectual check to the employment of them. the adulterators of food or of drugs, and the coiners of base money, keep their processes a secret, and dread no one so much as him who detects, describes, and proclaims their contrivances, and thus puts men on their guard. without doubt, arnhart and whately bring up a weighty reason why aristotle’s practical advice has such an “amoral” character—but there could be another reason as well. aristotle may refuse to pepper his audience with moral admonitions against using rhetoric in a wicked manner because such admonitions, when read by the virtuous, might have the unintended consequence of disarming the virtuous with the very weapons they need to succeed in politics. in other words, the problem with the virtuous is not that they will resort to such clever rhetorical devices, but rather that they will fail to resort to them often enough in order to defeat the political machinations of others. repeated moral admonitions of the kind arnhart and whately speak about might prevent, or make more difficult, the virtuous from seeing all 170 preliminary reflections on the rhetoric of aristotle’s rhetoric © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 those rhetorical ruses they might have to employ in order to convince others to adopt policies that are truly just, and reject those that are in reality unjust. the particular problem with the high-minded is that they are prone to imagine that other persons are similar to themselves—that they act from and respond to the same motivations—and that persons would therefore be unlikely to resort to such underhanded techniques. to borrow a line from machiavelli, the problem with the virtuous is that they are liable to be “too good” in a world of bad men; realizing this, aristotle very quickly drops the high moral tone he had adopted in the opening chapter, candidly showing his serious reader all the devices that will have to be used in the rough-andtumble world of politics. politics is simply too unpredictable and violent to rely solely upon decent and just tactics; statesmen must employ what seem to be “vicious” or “immoral” means in order to secure just and reasonable ends (see also 1.15.26). if the above idea is correct, then it also helps us make better sense of another prominent feature of the rhetoric once one moves beyond the opening chapter: the clear subordination of rhetoric to politics and political science. now the subordinate status of rhetoric to political science is already adumbrated in the opening chapter. aristotle diminishes the attractiveness of rhetoric as a career or way of life by claiming that the rhetoric used in the courts is inferior to—or less “noble” than—deliberative rhetoric. previous teachers of rhetoric concentrate almost exclusively on judicial rhetoric, which aristotle argues deals solely with “private transactions”; these same authors have very little to say about deliberative rhetoric, which is far more important to the political community as a whole (1.1.9–10).15 the depreciation of judicial rhetoric prepares the reader for what aristotle says at the beginning and end of his discussion of deliberative rhetoric. here, aristotle is unambiguous: the knowledge a speaker most needs is that concerning the regime. deliberation concerns what is advantageous and/or harmful to a political community, and what is advantageous and/or harmful is always defined in respect to the regime (1.4.4–7,12–13; 1.8.1–7). and it is not just deliberative rhetoric that requires this knowledge: epideictic and judicial rhetoric would seem to require it as well. not only is epideictic rhetoric discussed in terms of deliberative rhetoric (1.9.35–37), but to know what to praise and blame one must understand what is honored and dishonored in the regime (compare 1.9.26,30); similarly, to know about crime and punishment, and justice and injustice, one must know the laws of that regime (see also 1.10.3; 1.13.1–8). unfortunately, it is precisely this specific knowledge of politics that rhetoric does not and cannot provide to an ambitious student of the rhetoric (compare frost 171 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 1.4.13). to the extent that such an individual wishes to become a genuinely fine statesman, he will necessarily have to study a “more profound and true” subject (1.4.4), namely political science, and therefore turn to such works as the nicomachean ethics and politics (see 1.8.7). knowledge of rhetoric is clearly important for political leaders; but a future statesman must not think that by becoming a consummate rhetorician he has thereby mastered the architectonic science of politics. aristotle would here seem to agree in large measure with socrates’ conclusion in the phaedrus (plato phaedrus 271d– 72b): the genuine rhetorician needs to study the science of the soul—political science. let us conclude this section by restating what aristotle is trying to accomplishment rhetorically in the movement from chapter 1 to the center of the book. after appealing to the nobility and justice of his readers, and after showing them what rhetoric would look like in a well-constituted political order, aristotle adopts a sober, hard-headed attitude about rhetoric and politics. and he needs to make this change in attitude or approach precisely because the very persons who would be attracted to his initial appeal are also those who might be hesitant about using “underhanded” rhetorical methods in order to plead their cause and win their case. the virtuous are liable to think that the praise and blame which moves them (i.e., their concern for genuine honor) is also what motivates others, and that just as they would not demean themselves by using rhetorical ruses on a crowd, neither would their opponents. but the problem is more complex than this: not only are people susceptible to the wiles of rhetoric, but speech itself can only accomplish so much in politics. aristotle’s repeated insistence in the rhetoric that rhetoricians should turn to political science is the obverse of his statement at the end of the nicomachean ethics that politics cannot be reduced to rhetoric (as the sophists maintain). politics requires more than reasoned or persuasive or even clever (and perhaps deceptive) speech—it requires knowledge of regimes as well as what goes into making a regime work, and this inevitably means the use of force. the potential statesman who turns to rhetoric might be susceptible to the same sort of error of which aristotle accuses the sophists, an error which aristotle alerts his readers to in both books. we might say that part of aristotle’s rhetoric in the rhetoric is to make his readers see that rhetoric must be understood as a prolegomena to political science, and the ambitious student must be pointed to the politics in order to receive the fullest and most complete training in statesmanship.16 172 preliminary reflections on the rhetoric of aristotle’s rhetoric © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 rhetoric and philosophy, endoxa and truth we have suggested that the rhetoric of the rhetoric is intended, at the very least, to discourage and defeat the efforts of manipulative speakers, and at the very most, to indicate to the potential statesman that the study of rhetoric must be understood as a prolegomena to political science. but is this all aristotle intended? to rephrase the question using the language of leo strauss (1952, 36), does the rhetoric contain any teaching from the mature philosopher aristotle to the “puppies of his race,” i.e., the young potential philosopher? to see that there is such a teaching, we can begin by making the following observation. throughout the rhetoric, aristotle repeatedly makes what can only be described as disparaging (but perhaps true) remarks concerning the audience for whom rhetorical speeches are composed. most people, aristotle states, cannot follow a long train of arguments and have rather simple or even weak minds (1.2.12–13; 2.21.15; 3.18.4), and this is why rhetorical enthymemes should not be elaborate and drawn out (2.22.3; 3.17.6–7). even though the delivery of rhetorical speeches is fundamentally a “vulgar matter when rightly understood,” it must nevertheless be learned due to the moral corruption of the audience: sadly, most people are moved by the “outward show” of a speech rather than by its internal substance (3.1.5–7; 3.14.8). and if this were not enough, aristotle seems to lay it all on the line when he states that “the many are rather bad, slaves of profitmaking, and cowardly in danger” and that “human beings usually do wrong when they can” (2.5.7–8).17 the question these passages raise is the following: if this is the character of most audiences, and if the telos of a speech relates to the audience (1.3.1, see also 2.1.2; 2.18.1), then what is the philosopher aristotle getting out of teaching this subject? if philosophy is the highest way of life, and if rhetoric is about persuasion and not about learning or instruction (1.1.12; compare 3.1.5), then how is aristotle as a thinker being satisfied through such an extended study of this subject? to put this question in platonic language: why would aristotle want to descend into the cave and teach people how to be persuasive and successful? therefore, if rhetoric is important to aristotle—as it clearly is—then aristotle himself must be getting something out of this study beyond correcting his predecessors and teaching the ambitious how to move a crowd. to see the possible philosophical value or teaching of the rhetoric, we must once again return to the opening chapter, and in particular the very first line. aristotle opens the rhetoric with what is probably the most famous—as well as most puzzling—line in the entire book: “rhetoric is a counterpart frost 173 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 [antistrophos] of dialectic.”18 what aristotle intended precisely by using the word antistrophos in this context is not at all apparent, although several possibilities suggest themselves. first, aristotle could be throwing down the “gauntlet” (mccabe 1994, 139) at the feet of both socrates and isocrates, the former who claimed that rhetoric was the antistrophos of cookery (plato gorgias 465c–466a) and the latter who said it was the counterpart in the soul of gymnastics in the body (isocrates antidosis 181–182).19 or again, second, aristotle could be thinking of the strophe and antistrophe of a greek chorus, the idea being that rhetoric is similar to dialectic, although it moves in the opposite direction (arnhart 1981, 13–21). third and finally, aristotle may be using the word the way it is used in the analytics and topics: in these works, something is the antistrophos of something else if it can be converted into that very thing, i.e., if the relationship between the two terms is one of “reciprocity and reversibility.”20 these last two suggestions—and in particular the third—are intriguing; for if rhetoric resembles or can even somehow be “converted” into dialectic, and if dialectic is the philosophical method par excellence, then this might reveal at least one reason why aristotle is interested in the subject. throughout the opening pages, aristotle highlights the numerous ways in which rhetoric and dialectic are similar. for example, both are concerned with things which can be known by most everyone and belong to no separate science (1.1.1,14; 1.2.7); both reason about opposite things (1.1.12), supply words or arguments (1.2.7), and use inductive and deductive methods of reasoning (1.2.8; see also 2.22.14); both use topics applicable or common to many different subjects (1.2.21), and both are a mental faculty rather than a specific science (1.4.6); and finally, both use endoxa (or reputable common opinions) (1.1.11–12; 1.2.11,13; compare 1.1.1) and deal with what seems true to certain kinds of people (1.2.11).21 the differences between rhetoric and dialectic, however, are no less important, and these too are also emphasized by aristotle in the opening chapters. although rhetoric is supposed to be universally applicable to any subject, it tends to deal with particular or given situations, most of which are ethical-political in nature (1.2.1,7,12,22; 1.4.3–7). rhetoric aims at persuasion, not instruction (1.1.12,14; 1.2.1,8–13), and the audience is a simple-minded one that cannot follow a long train of arguments (1.1.12; 1.2.12–13). and finally, rhetoric uses enthymemes and paradigms (rather than syllogisms and induction), and generally the premises of enthymemes are not universally true (1.1.11; 1.2.8–9,13–14,20). given the above similarities and differences, i would suggest that rhetoric is a counterpart of dialectic in the sense that a rhetorician can become a dialectician once he moves from a desire 174 preliminary reflections on the rhetoric of aristotle’s rhetoric © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 to persuade the audience to a desire to instruct or teach his interlocutor(s) (and perhaps himself ). in other words, rhetoric can be “converted” to dialectic once the ends of rhetoric change from persuasion to instruction. in order to support this contention, it is important to note the following broad points. in the first place, the means that rhetoric and dialectic use to achieve their respective ends of persuasion and instruction are largely (or formally) one and the same. both use, or start from, endoxa in order to construct their arguments; and while it is true that rhetoric concentrates almost exclusively on ethical-political endoxa, it is not the case that the dialectician is uninterested in these sorts of opinions: the difference would seem to be that the dialectician deals with a much wider array of such opinions (e.g., those concerning nature or the cosmos), which rarely form the material or content of rhetorical persuasion (see 1.2.11–12,21). furthermore, although rhetorical demonstration is called enthymeme and paradigm, and dialectical proof syllogism and induction, aristotle repeatedly points out the syllogistic nature of enthymemes throughout the treatise. enthymemes are said to be a “kind of syllogism,”22 and just as a dialectician should be able to discern a true from an apparent syllogism so too must a rhetorician be able to see the difference between a true and an apparent enthymeme (1.1.11,14; 1.2.6,8–9). in fact, to the extent that dialectical syllogisms also employ endoxa, it would seem that their conclusions (like the conclusions of enthymemes) would be probabilistic in character as well (see also 1.2.13–22).23 in the second place, once a rhetorician turned from persuasion to instruction, several other differences between the two faculties would seem to collapse. if someone were primarily interested in instruction, then it is doubtful that he would address himself to a crowd, but more likely to a smaller and more serious audience. this is not to say that a dialectician would converse solely with other dialecticians; but it does suggest that his interlocutors would frequently be capable of instruction, something which does not seem to be the case with the typical audience of the rhetorician. moreover, once the rhetorician turned to instruction, the importance of such things as appealing to the emotions of a crowd, trying to appear to be a certain type of person, and concentrating on delivery, would rapidly decrease as they add little or nothing to the content of a serious conversation (compare 3.1.5–7; 3.14.7–8). indeed, a rhetorician turned dialectician would not be interested in the difference between a true and an apparent enthymeme for the sake of defeating an opponent or gaining the audience to his side but to make certain that the syllogisms being examined were in fact true, and that an error had not inadvertently made its way into the conversation. frost 175 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 and finally, in the third place, aristotle states in the topics (100a18–101b5; kennedy 1991, 290–292) that the only way to reach the first principles of all sciences or methods is by working through, or dialectically transcending, the endoxa of “all people or most people or the wise—and in the latter case all the wise or most of them or those best known and generally accepted.” the art of dialectics, aristotle avers, is useful in the “philosophical sciences” because if we are able to raise difficulties on both sides of an issue, we shall more easily see in each case what is true and what false. it [dialectics] has a further use in relation to the first premises in each science; for it is impossible to say anything about them on the basis of the specific first principles of each proposed science, since the principles are primary in all cases, and it is necessary to discuss them on the basis of generally accepted opinions in each case. this is specific or most proper to dialectic; for since it is investigative, it leads the way to the first principles of all methods. aristotle does not elaborate upon this stupendous claim, and it is not immediately clear how dialectical inquiry can ultimately provide the ground for all the sciences. nevertheless, we can suggest that if aristotelian dialectics resembles socratic dialectics, then one prominent theme of this method of investigation will be the “ethical virtues,” or the “whatness” of justice and nobility (aristotle metaphysics 1078b18–30); and it is precisely the articulation of these ethical-political endoxa that form the bulk of books 1 and 2 of the rhetoric. of course, the most obvious reason why such a large part of the rhetoric is dedicated to articulating ethical-political endoxa is so that a rhetorician will know the opinions and premises he might use or appeal to when speaking before various audiences. but it could equally be the case that aristotle is presenting a sort of dialectical raw material for potential philosophers— i.e., the ethical-political endoxa that students must confront and dialectically transcend in order to see the tensions and contradictions that lie at the heart of our common opinions about the just and noble things. in sum, what emerges from this comparison is that rhetoric, because it too deals with ethical-political endoxa, may be a sort of prolegomena to genuine philosophical dialectic, and that the treatise could be intended, in part, to attract such potential philosophers. as aristotle states in the opening chapter of the rhetoric (1.1.11): [f]or it belongs to the same capacity both to see the true and what resembles the true, and at the same time human beings have a natural disposition for the true and to a large extent hit on the truth; thus an ability to aim at endoxa is a characteristic of one who also has a similar ability in regard to the truth.24 although it is beyond the scope of this essay to engage in a detailed comparison of the endoxa of the rhetoric with those of aristotle’s other writings, 176 preliminary reflections on the rhetoric of aristotle’s rhetoric © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 let us conclude this section with the following observation. almost everyone who has studied the rhetoric has wondered if, or to what extent, aristotle’s discussions of happiness, virtue, the good, the passions, and so on, differ from his other works.25 needless to say, conclusions vary widely; but where there is at least some measure of agreement is that the various endoxa articulated in the rhetoric seem to be more preliminary, or less developed, than the endoxa in aristotle’s other works—in other words, the endoxa in the rhetoric have not been dialectically compared with one another in order to see the extent to which they are true. to offer a single (and all-too-brief ) example, one can compare the way aristotle describes the relationship between happiness, self-sacrifice, and virtue in the rhetoric and nicomachean ethics. in book 1, chapter 9 of the rhetoric, the virtues are objects of praise precisely because they are directed towards the good of others and involve self-sacrifice: in fact, the praiseworthiness of an action seems proportional to the self-sacrifice involved, and actions that benefit no one or the actor himself are much less praiseworthy, if at all (1.9; compare 1.3.6). but aristotle also says four chapters earlier (1.5) that everyone acts for the sake of happiness. if this is true, then it is hard to see how the virtues can be examples of genuine self-sacrifice, and therefore objects of praise. in the ethics, however, these difficulties are not immediately apparent. happiness is defined in terms of virtue, and the virtuous person does not sacrifice his happiness by acting virtuously: virtue may indeed confer benefits upon others, but this is not the sake for which the virtuous person acts.26 it appears that the puzzles or tensions in the relationship between happiness, self-sacrifice, and virtue articulated in the rhetoric have been worked out or perhaps even resolved in the ethics. this is not to say that some of the endoxa articulated in the rhetoric should be dismissed as irrelevant, puerile, or ridiculous: we often say that people act for the sake of their happiness and that virtue involves genuine self-sacrifice.27 rather, it would seem that aristotle has dialectically compared and transcended the various contradictions within and between these common opinions in the ethics and his other works. if this is true, then we might say that what aristotle presents in the rhetoric is a sort of raw material for the potential philosopher—the endoxa that the rhetorician might use to persuade a crowd one way or another are also the endoxa that the dialectician must first study and work through if he is going to aim at the truth of ethical-political things. thus, rhetoric becomes more like dialectic—is its “counterpart”—when the rhetorician uses the endoxa not to persuade but to instruct and seek the truth: both dialectic and rhetoric have access to ethical-political endoxa, but they employ them for different purposes. in sum, the endoxa expressed in everyday frost 177 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 life and which the rhetorician utilizes as the material for persuasion—this is where a potential philosopher should begin his study of the “human things,” perhaps moving from rhetoric to ethics and then to the architectonic science of politics (ethics 1094a18–b12; 1179b1–81b23).28 the independent status of rhetoric to the extent that aristotle’s rhetoric is a prolegomena of sorts to both philosophy and politics, one can certainly wonder what the status of rhetoric is on its own—is the rhetorician himself caught in a sort of halfway house between the more ennobling ways of life of politics and philosophy? or does rhetoric enjoy an independent—and therefore fulfilling and satisfying—status of its own? now aristotle defines rhetoric as the “ability, in each particular case, of seeing the available means of persuasion. this is the function of no other art; for each of the others is instructive and persuasive about its own subject” (1.2.1). rhetoric does not aim at the truth or the good or even virtue but at the persuasive—but what is so attractive about persuasion per se? aristotle himself seems to rank rhetoric lower than the other arts in the above definition; for while the other arts are “instructive and persuasive” about their subject matter, aristotle does not say that rhetoric is instructive about anything.29 aristotle repeatedly mentions that rhetoric does not give the rhetorician knowledge about any particular subject, and those rhetoricians who claim to possess knowledge about politics are either boastful or ignorant (1.2.7,21; 1.4.4–7; see also 3.1.5). this is not to deny that rhetoric may be useful and indeed necessary politically; but simply because something is useful and necessary does not mean that it is therefore a choiceworthy way of life. of course, we could also mention here the themes that were discussed above (e.g., that the rhetorician’s audience is generally simple, ignorant, and/or morally corrupt, and that so many things normally associated with rhetoric—such as delivery—are fundamentally vulgar or irrelevant), but the point seems clear: aristotle has very little positive to say about rhetoric as a way of life on its own in the opening chapters, and aristotle’s most serious and attentive readers would likely be dissuaded from becoming rhetoricians. but it is not only in aristotle’s definition of rhetoric that the art of speaking is quietly downgraded in importance: it is also suggested that rhetoric will always have something sophistical about it. near the end of chapter 1, aristotle states that the difference between a dialectician and a sophist is that the former has knowledge about how to distinguish syllogisms and apparent syllogisms, while the latter deliberately chooses to employ fallacious arguments. in the case of rhetoric, however, the same word is used for the person with knowledge of true 178 preliminary reflections on the rhetoric of aristotle’s rhetoric © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 and apparent enthymemes and the one who deliberately chooses to employ fallacious enthymemes (1.1.14). what is puzzling about this statement is that aristotle does not thereafter distinguish between what we might call a “true” rhetorician (the counterpart of the dialectician) from a “sham” rhetorician (the counterpart of the sophist), and then continue the treatise with this distinction in mind. perhaps aristotle is trying to indicate that at the end of the day, it is really not possible to distinguish between a “sophistical” and “dialectical” rhetorician: to the extent that the rhetorician aims at persuasion and not the truth, there will always be something suspicious, and therefore “sophistical,” about him (see also 1.4.5; 2.24.11). the life of the rhetorician—of an itinerant teacher and speaker like gorgias or protagoras or thrasymachus—simply may not be choice-worthy in and of itself. rhetoric would then remain a prolegomena to two different activities: it is a prolegomena to dialectics in that it is able to deal with any subject matter, but above all ethical-political endoxa; and it is a prolegomena to politics in that it instructs the future statesman on the character of, and how to communicate with, political multitudes. conclusion: rhetoric and civic education this essay has attempted to limn aristotle’s apparent rhetorical strategy in the rhetoric, that is, to whom the book is addressed and what he hoped to convey or teach. we may conclude by saying a few words concerning how this discussion might contribute to a deeper and more thoroughgoing reflection on contemporary public policy issues ranging from participatory democracy to civic education—and in particular the latter. we must never forget that the audience that aristotle has called simple, ignorant, and often morally corrupt is the audience of which we liberal democrats are a part: we are part of an the audience that is susceptible to the artful but unjust speeches of clever rhetoricians (see 3.15.10). but to the extent that we lack knowledge about the nature of pubic discourse, we are both the people who need that instruction the most and, unfortunately, those who are the most difficult to instruct. now aristotle was keenly aware of the vital importance of civic education for all regimes. as he states in the politics (1310a12–14; see also 1337a7–31): but the greatest of all things that have been mentioned with a view to making regimes lasting—though it is now slighted by all—is education relative to the regimes. for there is no benefit in the most beneficial laws, even when these have been approved by all those engaging in politics, if they are not going to be habituated and educated in the regime—if the laws are popular, in a popular spirit, if oligarchic, in an oligarchic spirit. frost 179 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 although the proper place of public discourse in civic education must be tailored to the sort of regime we believe we have, or hope to have, both conservatives and liberals would certainly agree that all citizens need some sort of instruction in this subject. now the rhetoric is not written with any particular regime in mind, and the general instruction offered therein seems just as applicable to democracies as it does to oligarchies. similar to the politics, which tries to mediate between various regimes—and especially between the extreme forms (and vices) of democracy and oligarchy—the rhetoric teaches citizens of any and all regimes in what persuasive speaking consists, and consequently how to distinguish between a good speech and a bad one. perhaps aristotle’s rhetoric might also have a third audience in mind above and beyond potential philosophers and statesmen, namely the multitude of us citizens; and if this is the case, then this treatise will make manifest the genuine public spiritedness of aristotelian political philosophy. notes 1. the author wishes to thank the spencer foundation for supporting this research as well as the constructive comments of the anonymous reviewers. it should go without saying that the views expressed herein are solely the responsibility of the author. 2. see also the representative examples cited by kennedy (1991, x) in the “prooemion” to his translation of aristotle’s on rhetoric. 3. for example, there have been two new translations of the rhetoric, the one by kennedy (1991) cited above and another by lawson-tancred (1991); at least four recent studies on the origins and history of rhetoric, by cole (1991), conley (1990), kennedy (1994), and schiappa (1999); several collections of essays, including furley and nehamas (1994), fortenbaugh and mirhady (1994), rorty (1996), and the collection edited by gross and walzer (2000) cited above; and at least two book length studies, by garver (1994) and wörner (1990). for a concise statement of the reasons for the past neglect of, and recent interest in, the rhetoric, see nehamas (1994a, xi–xv). for a review of some of the recent literature, see moss (1997, 635–646). erickson (1975) provides a comprehensive bibliography until the date of publication. 4. notable exceptions include arnhart (1981), lord (1981), nichols (1987), triadafilopoulos (1999). 5. wardy (1996, 56) puts the matter this way: “nowadays the term ‘rhetoric’ and its etymological kin in the romance languages tend to suggest, in ordinary parlance, no more than the dissembling, manipulative abuse of linguistic resources for selfserving ends; outside certain antiquarian and literary critical coteries, the word is 180 preliminary reflections on the rhetoric of aristotle’s rhetoric © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 unfailingly pejorative.” wardy then goes on to note: “not that the mere mention of ‘rhetoric’ in fourth-century b.c. athens would have failed to evoke a host of similar, and similarly sinister, associations; rather, aristotle was the immediate inheritor of the violent controversy over the nature and power of persuasion initiated by gorgias and given enduring form by plato in his gorgias.” 6. it is perhaps for this reason that kennedy (1991) subtitled his translation of the rhetoric, a theory of civic discourse. see also garver (1994, 21, 39, 51–52, 76, 104, 108, 128). 7. lord (1981, 327, 336–338) rightly draws attention to the importance of these latter questions: “why did aristotle write a rhetoric? this question is so elementary that it is rarely asked; yet the answer is by no means self-evident. it is not sufficient to say that the subject interested him. aristotle was not in the habit of producing technical treatises or handbooks.” lord’s own answer is that aristotle’s “ultimate intention” is “not so much to transform the practice of rhetoric as to transform the theoretical or conceptual understanding of rhetoric by political men. aristotle is concerned above all to show rhetoric can become an instrument of political prudence or of a political science which educates to prudence.” while aristotle does not ignore those elements of rhetoric that are “low and potentially dangerous,” he does highlight the “logical or intellectual component of rhetoric,” conferring upon it “a dignity capable of engaging the attention of men of intellectual and moral seriousness.” rhetoric then becomes subordinate to political science, and not vice-versa, thereby enabling rhetoric to become “an instrument of responsible and prudent statesmanship.” while i do not disagree with lord’s overall assessment, i focus much more on the possible philosophical reasons why aristotle was interested in rhetoric. 8. all references to aristotle’s rhetoric are to the edition translated by kennedy (1991). in general i have followed this translation, although i have sometimes altered it to make it more strictly literal. the most recent critical edition of the text is that of kassel (1976). grimaldi (1980–1988) has provided an invaluable commentary on the text as whole, the first such commentary to appear since cope’s (1970 [originally 1877]) three volume effort over one hundred years ago. 9. it would seem that the only thing that escapes censure in this opening section is well-crafted law—but a moment’s reflection indicates that rule by law is emphatically not a perfect or complete solution to the difficulties aristotle has just outlined. although aristotle suggests some inherent limitations to lawmaking in the rhetoric (e.g., that law cannot foresee all possibilities or outcomes in the future), in the final chapters of book 3 of the politics, aristotle gives a much more comprehensive appraisal of the strengths and weaknesses of rule by law (especially when it is compared to rule by a single virtuous individual [1286a6–9]). aristotle does praise certain aspects of law (e.g., that it is not swayed by passion, and that rulers should have available to them written rules [1286a16–19, 1287a28–40]), and he does recommend the rule of law (especially in a democracy [1282b1–6, frost 181 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 1286a35–37]); but he also shows the reader that law is neither a panacea nor is it even the best possible solution to the question of “who should rule?” as laws are made by and with a view to a particular regime, the goodness or badness of law decisively depends on the goodness or badness of the regime and the lawmakers (1282b6–13). moreover, when someone arises in a regime who eclipses everyone else in virtue, aristotle’s final word on the matter is that this person should be obeyed and have authority over all matters simply (1288a26–29). we might say that law is a sort of compromise solution: when great virtue is lacking in a political order, well-crafted law might restrain our worst proclivities were we to govern ourselves in the absence of fixed legal rules. of course, the problem still remains who is to interpret the law in those instances when the law does not seem to apply to a particular case or is not set down correctly (see also 1286a20–b7). 10. aristotle quietly emphasizes this fact at the beginning of book 2, where the first passion treated is anger. aristotle may be suggesting that anger is the most common or frequent passion of the multitude; at all events, only anger and pity are twice mentioned in the opening chapter of book 1 as passions to which rhetoricians appeal. the extent to which the multitude is reasonable might depend upon the extent to which anger is reasonable. 11. even a scholar as sympathetic to aristotle as kennedy (1991, 27–28), remarks that “[c]hapter 1 creates acute problems for the unity of the treatise,” and that in the final analysis “it is probably better to acknowledge frankly that chapter 1 is inconsistent with what follows.” arnhart (1981, 13–53), cooper (1994, 194–196), and grimaldi (1972, 18–52), all try to demonstrate, by contrast, that any inconsistencies between chapter 1 and the rest of the treatise are only superficial and can be resolved. 12. see, for example, solmsen (1929) and fortenbaugh (1986, 247–248), who also makes the same claim about the introductory chapter to book 3. 13. the above claim would be even stronger if we accept the testimony of diogenes laertius (lives of eminent philosophers 5.24), whose catalogue of aristotle’s works includes an art of rhetoric in two books (presumably the first two books of the treatise we now have) and another work, on lexis, also in two books (perhaps book 3 of the treatise). both of these works were presumably joined together by the grammarian tyrannio or andronicus of rhodes. if this were the case, then aristotle would have unmistakably wanted to begin both works with a purged or purified version of rhetoric before going on to treat the subject as it was normally understood and practiced. on conjectures and speculations when and where the rhetoric was written, as well as how it was preserved, see kennedy (1991, 299–312), erickson (1975, 1–18), and brandes (1989, 1–7). 14. for a sampling of the various perspectives on the morality, amorality, or even immorality of the rhetoric, see olian (1968), ryan (1972), johnstone (1980), hill (1981), sprute (1994), engberg-pedersen (1996), and wardy (1996). 182 preliminary reflections on the rhetoric of aristotle’s rhetoric © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 15. as to whether this is aristotle’s final judgment concerning the nature of judicial rhetoric and the courts, see politics, 1300b18–1301a15. 16. in the anabasis (ii.vi.16–27), xenophon gives a vivid illustration of these ideas in the persons of proxenus and meno. proxenus (who was a student of gorgias) could command gentlemen through the use of praise and blame because they were motivated (as he was) by a keen sense of justice and honor; he could not command the common soldiers. meno, on the other hand, thought that a person who was not corrupted was also uneducated, and he ridiculed and plotted against individuals who were pious or virtuous. we might say that aristotle is trying to show the likes of proxenus all of the tools they will need to succeed against the likes of meno: in other words, aristotle is trying to educate clever but decent statesmen, those who see that politics necessarily involves a certain degree of deception and coercive violence. see strauss (1964, 22–23). 17. rowell (1932, 226) makes the following telling remark: aristotle “even appears to suggest that rhetoric is needed in the world only because people are not all adequately rational beings.” indeed! 18. for a discussion of the early history of the translation of the word antistrophos— and how the translation of this word both shapes and is shaped by a commentator’s understanding of the text and aristotle as a whole—see green (1990). 19. see also schütrumpf (1994), who not only points out similarities between the rhetoric and the gorgias, but also the phaedrus, the republic, and the laws. this article also contains a number of helpful insights concerning the opening chapter. 20. green (1990, 9–10), suggests this very idea, and it is worth quoting him at length: “antistrophos appears in the analytics and in the topics more than 150 times. in every instance the word indicates a transformation which is reciprocal and reversible, and in which one part of a two-part relationship necessarily implies the second part by virtue of such reciprocity and reversibility. these transformations can be performed on elements such as sentences, propositions, terms, relations, and even on arguments. in general, the transformation either follows aristotle’s principles of logical conversion detailed in the prior analytics, or the transformation negates the original element. in the former case, if certain logical operations can be performed on element x to yield element y, or on element y to yield element x, then x and y are convertible with one another. in the latter case, either element can always be converted to its opposite. in one of aristotle’s illustrations of conversion (antistrophein, a.pr. 1.25a6), the statement ‘no man is an animal’ transforms into the statement ‘no animal is a man,’ while ‘every man is an animal’ transforms into ‘some animal is a man.’ thus x and y always imply one another, and can be transformed into one another, without actually being one another…. if this reading from the analytics and topics were at all permissible in the context of the rhetoric, then the problematic use of the word in the declaration ‘rhetoric is the antistrophos of dialectic’ would indicate that rhetoric frost 183 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 and dialectic could somehow be converted so that they could be understood as one another (reciprocally and reversibly), and that they do not merely resemble one another in a vague manner.” green’s reading seems all the more permissible if we recall that the alexandrian and arabic philosophers included the rhetoric (and poetics) in aristotle’s organon (black 1990, 1–16). green goes on to state that he explores this possible reading in another study, but i have been unable to locate it. for other interpretations, see brunschwig (1996). 21. see gaines (1986, 198). aristotle also states that rhetoric is a “sort of offshoot” of dialectic as well as “a sort of part and likeness” of it (1.2.7; see also 1.4.5). although it is unclear whether these remarks are intended to correct or supplement the claim that rhetoric is a counterpart of dialectic, they obviously highlight the similarity between the two faculties. 22. or “a sullogismos of a kind” according to burnyeat (1996, 105). 23. arnhart (1981) makes perhaps the strongest case for the rational, or syllogistic, nature of enthymemes. for further discussions of what the enthymeme is (and is not), see seaton (1914), madden (1952), conley (1984), and burnyeat (1994). conley and burnyeat give historical overviews of what others have claimed the enthymeme is. 24. for general discussions of the relation between rhetoric and dialectic, and the endoxa and ethical-political concerns, see cooper (1994), engberg-pedersen (1996), and halliwell (1994). 25. see, for example, arnhart (1981), most (1994), nehamas (1994b), and irwin (1996). 26. burks (1966) claims that both the rhetoric and ethics have an essentially egoistic understanding of human motivation, by which he means that human beings act for the sake of their own self-actualization. but burks glosses over book 1, chapter 9 of the rhetoric far too quickly (see especially 406), and therefore does not see how the work exposes (without resolving) the genuine tensions mentioned above. 27. nor is this to say that the tensions mentioned above are in fact solved in the ethics. by privileging and developing one side of this puzzle over the other (i.e., by claiming that the core of happiness consists in acting virtuously), aristotle may actually be magnifying and deepening the problem of the relationship between virtue, happiness, and self-sacrifice for the serious reader (a problem that is only suggested or hinted at in the rhetoric). 28. see also miller (1977, 303–9, 312–4, and especially 330) as well as irwin (1996, 168–169). 29. indeed, chroust (1973, 2: 29–42) suggests that aristotle’s (now lost) dialogue gryllus (or on rhetoric) may have argued that rhetoric was not an art after all. 184 preliminary reflections on the rhetoric of aristotle’s rhetoric © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 references aristotle 1984 politics. trans. carnes lord. chicago, il: 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illinois university press. wörner, markus h. 1990 das ethische in der rhetorik des aristoteles. munich: verlag karl alber freiburg. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2647826 [expositions 5.2 (2011) i-ii] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 editors’ preface john a. doody, gregory hoskins, john-paul spiro the fall 2011 issue of expositions: interdisciplinary studies in the humanities could be subtitled, “past, present, and future.” much of this issue’s content focuses on the world of ancient greece, while other pieces explore such topics as the origins of islam and nineteenthcentury german aesthetics. alongside these contributions are provocative meditations on the personality of adolf hitler and the present-day struggles of women in what are called “developing countries.” some readers of expositions may be inclined to read only those pieces which fall into their own fields of interest; something is here for almost anybody. but it is the juxtaposition of such works that makes expositions what it is: a journal that, in its insistent interest in our common humanity, refuses to privilege any particular discipline, discourse, or ideology. we have published numerous pieces on art and music – both of which require interdisciplinary approaches and are thus perfect for expositions’s mission. in this issue, we are proud to present our feature article, joseph e. morgan’s “reference, autonomy, and nationalism in early german romantic art,” which considers the interplay of ideas, history, and aesthetics. in a different key, edward green’s daring and original essay, “the mind of adolf hitler: a study in the unconscious appeal of contempt,” applies aesthetic ideas back into history and psychology. few books could be as timely as half the sky: turning oppression into opportunity for women worldwide by nicholas kristof and sheryl wudunn. in our academic roundtable, our varied interlocutors, in light of their own expertise and experience, commend the book’s intentions and overall mission while considering its omissions, prejudices, and evasions. meanwhile, jack tannous’s review of fred m. donner’s muhammad and the believers: at the origins of islam considers the historical and theological blind-spots in a controversial work of recent scholarship (again, while still finding much to praise). these contributions cannot help but have contemporary resonance. as one reads through this issue’s interviews or overheard in the academy, one finds that the central concern throughout is not in conserving or preserving or resurrecting the works of the ancients but in keeping them available and continuing their conversations. classics, as a discipline, has been pronounced dead many times over, just as now all the humanities are said to be dying (or are in the process of being murdered), and yet students continue to respond to good teaching, scholars continue to produce good work, and new technologies present us with new ways of reading and thinking about classical texts. aristotle – simultaneously one of the greatest and most difficult of ancient thinkers – is perennially the center of scholarly debates (and an editor’s preface ii unacknowledged participant in many political debates) and in this issue we present interviews with susan d. collins and mark shiffman, two scholars who have labored intensely to bring his work to greek-less readers. meanwhile, in our overheard in the academy on “the future of the classics,” fellows from the harvard university center for hellenic studies in washington, dc reflect on their discipline – yes, its past, present, and future – with freshness, insight, and a diversity of approaches. (go to http://vimeo.com/channels/chsfellows for original versions of these pieces, presented at the center for hellenic studies on april 2, 2011.) special thanks must be given to sally scholz for her initiative on the academic roundtable and to don lavigne for doing all the real organizational work on the overheard in the academy. http://vimeo.com/channels/chsfellows i wrote some questions, and i talked to some people from expositions, which is the journal that we are running here in the humanities, to get a feel for the things that are of interest to us in talking across disciplines interview: sean carroll noël falco dolan villanova university on january 23, 2011, expositions‟s noël falco dolan interviewed dr. sean carroll, senior research associate in physics at the california institute of technology, on the occasion of his lecture “the origin of the universe and the arrow of time.” carroll’s lecture expounded on ideas he put forth in his 2010 book from eternity to here: the quest for the ultimate theory of time. 1 both dolan and carroll attended villanova university as undergraduates in the late 1980s, one studying the arts and the other the sciences, and both (separately) took the interdisciplinary core humanities sequence, an honors seminar that was team-taught by members of different departments to offer multiple perspectives on the great questions of the human experience. it was in this spirit that dolan and carroll discussed the connection of science to the humanities, using as a touchstone carroll’s own work and the collected writings in science is culture 2 (a collection of discussions on how science drives today’s culture organized by adam bly, editor of seed). dolan: looking at science is culture, the first [discussion] … was between edward o. wilson (biologist) and daniel c. dennett (philosopher), and they were talking about evolutionary philosophy. they agreed on the importance of knowing the history of philosophy. dennett felt that that helps you to avoid “falling into the same old traps,” and wilson felt that it was better to give you a sense of examining the great questions and the creative process. so, i was wondering, in what ways is such a connection important to you in your field, and is it important to have a sense of historical connection, is it important to consider the humanities in your field or sciences more broadly? did the humanities in some way play a role in your training? carroll: i think that if you were to ask many different scientists, you would get many different answers to that question. i don‟t think that there is any right answer to that question. some scientists are really extremely successful staying in their offices or laboratories and focusing on nothing but what they do, and paying no attention to the philosophy of science, the history of science, the sociology of science, or any other field whatsoever. but, from my personal perspective … number one: i enjoy it, reading and thinking about issues in philosophy of science or history of science and humanities more generally; and number two: i do think that it does affect, hopefully improve, the kinds of science that i do, but then i do the kinds of science where that‟s possible, where i‟m thinking about foundational issues in cosmology, and statistical physics, and quantum mechanics, and things like that. these are some of the issues where philosophers of science in particular have done some of the clearest work. because physicists are in a sense a very practical and pragmatic people, and sometimes when they get the right answer, they don‟t want to think too hard about how they got there [because] if you get the right answer that‟s what you‟re there for. so, for example, i was just at a conference in princeton, a very tiny workshop with 14 people, spending five days talking about nothing but the foundational questions of the early universe, the beginning of the universe, and part of our mission was to plan for a bigger conference to be held this summer. and one of the things we decided was we needed outside expertise, we needed either a philosopher or statistician or someone who thought about theory choice and probabilities and things like that. it was my suggestion, and people liked the idea, and so i think that personally, i get a lot of perspective as well as specific help from thinking about the bigger context, but i don‟t think that it is necessary that everybody think that way. i think that works for some people, but not for others. dolan: wilson and dennett go on to talk about the gap between the sciences and the humanities, what they call “the unbridgeable chasm” between their fields in their approach to understanding the human mind. wilson says that there is “anxiety” in the humanities, that scholars feel that the funding and the prestige really are enjoyed more by those in the sciences. because you had quoted arcadia [twice in your book] 3 , it stood out to me this time in reading it that bernard says to valentine [here quotes], “quarks, quasars – big bangs, black holes – who gives a shit? how did you people con us out of all that status? all that money?” carroll: that‟s a great line, yes! dolan: so, do you think there is such a chasm? is it real? is it perceived? should we bridge it, and if so, how do we begin to do so? carroll: i think there is a chasm; i think it is real. it‟s not absolute. i don‟t think it‟s as simple as saying that scientists are high status and humanities people are low status, or anything like that. i think that the territory evolves through time, and questions that you might have thought were the domain of a certain discipline become the domain of another discipline as time goes on. nevertheless, science has always had some sort of impact on foundational questions that matter to human life as well, what we now call quarks and the big bang. did you know that aristotle wrote on physics as well as metaphysics and ethics, and i don‟t think that those are just completely disconnected ideas in his mind? how you think the world works, and where you think the world comes from might matter to what you think is right or wrong, and the good life, and so forth. but what science has that the humanities don’t have is this very tangible material effect on how we live our lives, you know, tvs and the internet and so forth and military applications and technological applications. and so, in terms of money, there will never be any contest. science will always get a lot more money than the humanities. even if the statuses were completely equal, i still think that the money distribution makes sense because science is expensive. we need equipment that the humanities don‟t need. on the other hand, i think that when we‟re honest about it, my particular subfield of science, and certain other ones, are valuable for and only for the same reasons that the humanities are valuable. my kind of science, you know, where the universe came from, has no technological, military, industrial applications whatsoever and never will. we‟re interested because we want to know the answers to these questions. wanting to know where did the universe come from, and what happened in the big bang, to me is the same kind of question as asking about the good life or all sorts of questions in the humanities. so, what i do is more expensive because we need to build a satellite that looks at the early universe, but i think the justification is ultimately the same, so in that case i think that the status should be equal. dolan: one of my colleagues pointed out that hannah arendt, in the human condition, claimed that one problem facing the contemporary west is that science has seemingly de-linked itself from the realm of social-political concerns and controls, writing, “the trouble concerns the fact that the „truths‟ of the modern scientific worldview, though they can be demonstrated in mathematical formulas and proved technologically, will no longer lend themselves to normal expression in speech and thought.” yet, it seems to me that within the last decade, perhaps in part responding to the rise of fundamentalist beliefs or influences, scientists have become more aware of the importance of effectively communicating their ideas beyond the bounds of their own communities. do you think there is such an awareness and corresponding attempt, and what do you see as the motivation? carroll: i find it very hard to be too definitive about historical changes because i don‟t really know what it was like to be, in the 1920s, just the sort of equivalent of what we would now call the scientific american reader, nova-watcher kind of person, the kind of person who was not a scientist but liked science, follows it, reads books like mine. i don‟t know if there was such a class of person in the 1920s, maybe there was, i have no idea, or the 1820s. so i don‟t know about that, but i do know that within, so that i can say things with more confidence, my little subfield of physics, in the 1940s or ‟50s, physics ruled, and it‟s because we made the atom bomb, roughly speaking, and presidents would have physicists to talk to. it was good for physics; they had money, and they had power and prestige. it also, at least a little bit, caused some selfreflection: what are we doing? what was a very clear patriotic effort in 1942 fractured by the 1950s. you had oppenheimer going up before congress and being stripped of his [top secret security] clearance, and edward teller pushing as much as possible the biggest bomb you could imagine building. whereas now, 50–60 years later, it‟s biology where the action is in terms of changing human life, in some ways, and physicists find themselves needing to respond to claims that the twentieth century was the century of physics, and the twenty-first century the century of biology. if you‟re a twenty-first century physicist, that‟s not what you want to hear. so i think that there is more of an attempt to justify what we do, and part of that is to talk to a general public. again, i can‟t speak to history that much, but i think that personally, it is just important. if what i said before is true, and the justification for doing what i do is not to build a better tv set, but because it‟s a fundamentally human question, then doing the research i do and not telling anybody the answer is completely beside the point, right? i just think it is absolutely part of our mandate as a discipline to explain to the most general audience we possibly can what it is we‟re thinking about and what kind of answers we are getting, and even to connect it to broader questions of human life, which is harder [to do], and is often done badly. scientists are not necessarily the people to go to if you want to know how to live a good life, but i think that scientists should be part of the conversation with a certain amount of humility about those questions. dolan: pbs was doing something the other day; they have a series called “pioneers of television,” and they were doing the one on science fiction, and star trek and twilight zone, and these kinds of leading tv shows that bought into the public imagination and put ideas out there that then inspired other people to go and perhaps pursue. some of the actors from star trek talked about meeting nasa scientists who said, “i do what i do because of you.” i don‟t know how many of them went that route, but for me, i see literature as being one of the ways, really before television, opened up this kind of communication [between science and the general audience], particularly science fiction then, obviously. again, in science is culture, stephen pinker, who‟s a psychologist, is complimenting science fiction writer rebecca goldstein as being at the forefront of bringing these scientific themes in fiction … carroll: you do know they‟re married? dolan: yes. carroll: okay. [laughs.] dolan: [laughing.] nice that he‟s complimenting her, right? well, again, these conversations that we have [between disciplines] … carroll: good, yes. dolan: … he says that that collaboration is natural. you were saying, a lot of these ideas, these great questions that we have, are natural for both scientists and philosophers to worry about. i know in thumbing through the index at the back of your book, you‟ve got a lot of literary references. what for you are the themes that resonate particularly across the two disciplines? carroll: yeah, i think that‟s a fantastic question. science fiction, number one, absolutely is a key driver of getting young people interested in science. a huge number of professional scientists grew up, you know, watching star trek or whatever. dolan: yeah, so that wasn‟t overstated in that [pbs episode]? carroll: [emphatically.] not at all. i don‟t think [so]. so, let me digress a little bit. i will compliment my own wife, jennifer ouellette, who has served for a couple of years as the director of a new program for the national academy of sciences, called the science/entertainment exchange, whose job it was to connect scientists with people in hollywood, to help recruit scientific representation in movies. it‟s been an amazing, fantastic success, and on both sides, like both sides are already … dolan: are benefitting … carroll: learning, that‟s right, are benefitting from it. and uh, i‟ve lost the precise point i was going to make; there‟re too many good points to make here. but, it‟s just amazing how many movies and tv shows have some sort of scientific component to them, whether it‟s genetics, ethics, flying faster than the speed of light, you know, building new machines, new energy sources – inception – psychology in the neuroscience, things like that. almost everything does in some way. and the nice thing is that i think that science can help make those movies better, not just . . . scientists are often just scolds, and they‟re like, “no, you can‟t do that, that‟s just bad.” but when they relax a little bit and open themselves to the possibilities, they can provide ideas, because that‟s what scientists do, they come up with imaginative scenarios and so forth. and i don‟t necessarily think that job is to make the movie a sales pitch for science. i think that‟s actually a very, very counterproductive strategy. star trek isn‟t good science, right? dolan: [laughing.] no! carroll: not accurate in any possible way, but it was still inspirational to a certain generation. i think that – i believe, i don‟t have the data – that the x files served the same purpose. the x files certainly had no scientific credibility whatsoever, but it fires up that part of your imagination, and the dana scully character was inspirational for some people, and so forth. so i think that in the inspiring young people part of the story, it‟s perfectly clear what a wonderful place there is for science. there‟s also the question of [how] – now that we‟re all grown up and we‟re having this discussion about our lives, the discussion we have in the humanities, and in the sciences, and in fiction, and the movies and so forth – [of] how tightly coupled can that discussion be. are there deep issues that scientists are able to speak to that can appear in fiction, movies, whatever? i believe the answer is yes. i actually don‟t know how much it really happens. i expect that we‟re still, from my experience – as part of jennifer‟s program, i know that in hollywood anyway, a lot of people are just afraid of scientists, because they‟ve gotten the hectoring about how wrong they were about this episode, where the dna evidence came back in a day and it normally takes weeks, right? and that‟s not helpful in any way to be hectored by that stuff. i think there‟s plenty of room for improvement in the open discussion between people on the science side of things and people on the arts and literature side of things. i think it is productive. i‟m not sure that it‟s as anywhere near as active as it could be. dolan: and i, being a packrat, was fortunate enough to find this short story … carroll: mm-hmm. dolan: … called “lucid dreaming” by … carroll: oh no! dolan: … sean carroll from the fall of, i think, 1986. carroll: that‟s bad! dolan: well, it‟s funny to me because i just, i happened to have these [issues of the undergraduate honors magazine polis] on hand, and to see that you had actually written … carroll: [laughs.] dolan: … some science fiction, with alan [the main character] here … carroll: right. dolan: … looking at the milky way and falling into a dream that was perhaps not a dream but an alternate reality … caroll: [laughs.] dolan: do you actually then tinker [with writing]? i mean, you were saying that you have helped jennifer with her project. do you do creative writing still? carroll: the honest answer is no. i certainly had aspirations. i would love to be involved. i have close friends who are tv and movies writers, and we talk, so that might happen. i think that would be fantastic if that would happen. you know, i get to meet very, very big names in hollywood, at the level of, sort of, ridley scott (gladiator, black hawk down, numb3rs), michael mann (the jericho mile, public enemies), and sort of talk about ideas for things. so, yeah, i would love to do that, but you know, the question of “are you a writer or not?” is “well, what have you written?” dolan: right, right. carroll: well, i have not written anything like that [short story] so i not could possibly claim to be doing that. dolan: i was also reading [in a chapter of science is culture called simply “time”] that alan lightman was in a conversation with richard colton [about the relationship between time and art]. alan lightman wrote einstein’s dreams (1992); i remember reading it maybe five years ago – it‟s hard for me to remember exactly when – and just being blown away with what he could do with the theoretical background and yet bring it into story form. carroll: right. dolan: and so, he‟s talking to richard colton, who choreographed, then, that book. now, i haven‟t seen the dance 4 that resulted, but the two of them are talking about the idea of this connection of science and arts, and lightman says that “the arts offer a respite or an escape from the sort of time-driven world that we live in,” so i‟m thinking of that too in asking you this creative question. and when he speaks of “time-driven,” he‟s really talking about how rapidly we live our days, from one event to the next. we‟ve got to go here, we‟ve got to go there. the point made me wonder how you define time, and i know that you spend the entire book on time … carroll: right! dolan: … and the first chapter really defining time, but if you could briefly, then, for expositions, define time, and do you allow then, or could conceive of, experiential variations of time from theoretical time? carroll: i mean, one of the things i try to make clear in the first chapter is that one of the reasons we think time is confusing is because we use the same word to mean very different things, and many of the specific things we mean are actually pretty clear, it‟s not that mysterious. when we said – so the simplest thing that time is, is just a label on different moments in history of the universe. so that sounds very grandiose, but what it means is that i know what it meant to say we‟re meeting here at 12:45. that was not some mysterious thing that i need to figure out what that was supposed to be, but that‟s a kind of sterile notion of time, of what time is. it‟s useful, but the experience of time is a whole other thing, and i‟m not an expert in it, and i know that there is expertise there, and amazing experiments have been done recently by psychologists and neuroscientists. like, this one guy wanted to know, do we experience time differently when we are afraid? and as an experimental psychologist, that‟s a very difficult question to answer. you have to scare people, right? you have to scare people in a controlled way. well, he figured out a way to throw them out of buildings. people would drop several stories onto a big, puffy trampoline thing, and while they were falling, they‟d be answering little questions on their little, you know, handheld computer. and he wanted to know, are their reaction times changed in any way by the adrenaline that necessarily floods you when you jump out of buildings like that? and there is some superficial connection in that our bodies, as i‟ll say in the talk [later] today, our bodies are full of clocks. clocks are just things that do the same thing over and over again in a repetitive, predictable way. we have things in our bodies that do that. they‟re not very accurate, so they can be sped up or slowed down by our conditions, our local environment. so we tell time in that way through the clocks in our bodies, but we also accumulate things, and this is part of the mystery of the arrow of time, which is much less clear. telling time is something we understand at the level of physics and we‟re getting there in psychology. experiencing the flow of time, experiencing the aging process, or the development of time, the simple question of why do we remember the past and not the future, is not so simple, not very easy to [answer], either as an active neuroscientist, what happens in the brain when we do that, or as a theoretical physicist, what is it about record-keeping in bits and bytes that lets you say, this particular record is a reflection of something that happened in the past. that‟s a really deep and difficult question to answer, it turns out. so, all i can say is a very vague thing, that yes, [there are] all sorts of connections here. [there are] also sorts of interesting questions that we‟re nowhere near solving yet. they‟re not independent questions. they‟re the questions that artists would have; they‟re closely related to the questions physicists would have. dolan: lightman says, in thinking about time and talking about this time of relaxation – and obviously he reads for pleasure – he says that virginia woolf‟s mrs. dalloway is one of his favorite books because, he says, “there‟s this wonderful counterpoint between mechanical time and body time.” so, i was just curious, when you read for pleasure, when you read fiction, do you have that mindset all the time [of] your discipline? do you enjoy things that relate? are you analyzing things from that background? relatedly, what would you say are your favorite books? carroll: i think i do more now that i‟ve written this book and i‟ve had to sort of relate my physicist notions of time to other sorts of notions of time. and, i mean, mrs. dalloway is a very highbrow example, but there are plenty of lowbrow examples that are fascinating. you know, the tv show lost does all of these things with time: flashbacks, and the flashforwards, the time travel … dolan: sideways … carroll: yeah, exactly, and … i got to meet them. dolan: did you? carroll: i got to meet the creators of the show, and we talked about that a little bit. they‟re not scientists at all. they love the science, but it‟s a wikipedia-level science, you know. they would just sort of come up with some ideas, like what scientists think about. it‟s not like they were being inspired by science. they were trying to tell interesting stories with interesting structures. that‟s why i decided to have a chapter in the book about time travel, because it raises both interesting physics points and interesting narrative points. stories told backwards in time – martin amis‟s time’s arrow is certainly the definitive statement of the story with time‟s arrow going backward, and it got very, very difficult to pull off. the fact that he did it for an entire book is an amazing accomplishment. there are stories that are told sort of episodically, so that every episode, the arrow of time goes forward, but the set of episodes is arranged backwards. there was a play … jeremy irons was in the movie version of it. 5 it was like that, the first scene you saw was the last scene that happened. and then of course, you have memento. dolan: i was going to say, that jumped right into my thoughts. carroll: it‟s not a book, but that‟s probably my favorite playing-with-time piece of fiction, because there‟re two things going on. one is a series of scenes shot to you backwards; one is a series of scenes shot to you forwards that meet up at the end. i think it‟s brilliant; i think it‟s fantastic. the one thing that has never been done successfully is two arrows of time that point in different directions. so, martin amis tells you the story of a world experienced from the future to the past, from the present to the past. but it‟s not in conversation with the ordinary people moving forward, and it‟s almost impossible to imagine that conversation; that‟s why it‟s so difficult. i mean, if i remember yesterday, and you remember tomorrow, what do we have to talk about? how even would it happen? that‟s one of my prospective screenplay ideas. if i could imagine a way to do that in a compelling fictional way, that would be a lot of fun. the lesson of all this, i think, is that our notion of how time works is ingrained so deeply in how we get through our everyday lives that there‟s this incredible space for narrative trickery that is not only formally interesting but can illuminate how we experience time because it‟s different. time travel, moving things backwards, moving things sideways, telling the story backwards, simple tricks where you begin the story in the middle and you flashback and fill in some of the background. all of these things are interesting because they play with our notion that the past informs the present. the past happened, and you can‟t change it; we can change the future, it‟s up for grabs. but how we perceive things that happen in the present is highly dependent upon what we think happened in the past. i think that‟s what they‟re really taking advantage of. dolan: so what would you say your favorite work of fiction would be? carroll: well, memento would be my first. dolan: i know you [also] mentioned benjamin button a few times [in your book], but i think you were prompted by others on that. carroll: benjamin button, you know, both the story and the movie were interesting, but they didn‟t quite hit the intellectual home run that martin amis‟s book time’s arrow or arcadia or memento [hit]. i‟ll take those three. dolan: okay, [they‟re] going to the “desert island” with you. colton, in response to lightman, was noting that einstein – not only because of his youth, but because of being “outside” of academia, not having to do conferences and such – at the time that he was doing his best work, or what colton was finding as his best work, said that that helped einstein be open to new possibilities. so i was curious, what‟s your view on the links between university science programs and needing to get funding – corporation, government [sponsorship], as you said before – needing the research, which is so expensive, to be funded? carroll: it‟s a tricky thing. i think that on the one hand, we‟re really lucky. i mean i can‟t complain. on a cosmic scale, compared to, for instance, english professors, physicists get a lot of money, right? and part of it is because physics is expensive and we need to build experiments and so forth, but we also get money to fund our graduate students or to travel in ways that humanities people don‟t. that‟s sort of just a tiny little perturbation on the larger funding we really do actually require. the flip side of that is that we spend an awful lot of time begging for money. most of the money for people like me comes right from the government, either the department of energy or the national science foundation. so, every year there‟s a report: you have to write up what you‟ve done and you have to meet with the people, and every three years there‟s a big to-do about whether or not you‟re going to be funded at all. for me, it‟s not too bad, but for the principal investigator on the grant, it‟s a tremendous waste of time. it‟s because they want to do oversight; the money agencies don‟t want to give out money to people who aren‟t doing anything. but, if they really did just give a lot of money to people who did good things over the last five years, and cut their work by 90%, the results would be just as good. [laughs.] and i think this is just a feature of bureaucracies; there‟s probably something in there about entropy and dissolution and something like that. because we get a lot of money out of it, i don‟t think there‟s any real legitimate gripe. dolan: do you have a view on how the result of twentieth century sciences, especially quantum mechanics, have – or actually have not – moved into the general culture? and the question really is, if the sciences are still thought of as objective – as compared to the humanities, which are supposedly subjective – does quantum mechanics undermine that dichotomy, because you can‟t take the experimenter out of the experiment? carroll: i think that quantum mechanics is not very well understood, and that‟s a statement that applies almost as well to physicists as to non-physicists. i think it is understandable. i don‟t think [there‟s] any insuperable barrier to make sense of it, but it‟s a perfect example of something that you can use and get the right answers without really knowing the deep meaning of it. that‟s why i think philosophers of science understand quantum mechanics better than most physicists. if that‟s true, then the chance of the person on the street understanding quantum mechanics is vanishingly small. there are a lot of untrue lessons that one could be tempted to think that one has learned from this casual introduction to the field. but, quantum mechanics does have absolutely earth-shatteringly profound ramifications for how we think the universe works. i think that quantum mechanics is the single most impressive intellectual feat in human history, the fact that we figured it out. aristotle had ideas about physics, and the ancient greeks did; newton and galileo changed those ideas a lot, and really brought them into focus. but, it was so powerful, that set-up that they gave us, that it was almost inconceivable that that set-up would ever be wrong: the idea that there‟s a clockwork universe that just ticks along and obeys laws and everything is deterministic if only you had all the information there was to have. it just fit so well, all the data, and it was just so clean and pretty, [that] it just seemed inevitable. and to realize that the world just doesn‟t work that way at a fundamental level … i really give incredible credit to my predecessors, because in the 1920s, there was some argument and some angst and so forth, that einstein went to his grave not really buying into it, but as a field, they bought into quantum mechanics really quickly because that‟s what the data more or less demanded. that‟s when science is at its best, when they‟re confronted with something you don‟t want to believe, but someone says, “look, i can understand this if you grant me this crazy idea.” people will go, “yeah, i guess the crazy idea must be right because that‟s what fits the data.” we‟re still struggling with the consequences; we accepted it as true. we don‟t even know what it means. we don‟t have a consensus for what happens at the deepest level to explain quantum mechanics. i wish that more people in the world understood quantum mechanics very well, including myself … there‟s a metaphorical role for ideas in science. people can be inspired by crazy ideas that they hear from relativity or quantum mechanics, biology or cosmology or whatever. but to take darwinism as justification for social darwinism, or to take quantum mechanics as saying, “aha, you know, the buddhists were always right all along,” or to take a certain cosmological theory as evidence that “oh yes, god created the universe then,” or there‟s a different cosmological theory, “oh yes, there‟s an infinite number of cycles,” right? this is all cheesy. i don‟t think there‟s any justification for doing that. people who already have decided what they think is right and they‟re waiting for some respectable sounding thing [so] they can say, “aha, you see, it was like that all along.” so, i don‟t think that uncertainty or imprecision or anything like that helps. i mean, it might help inspire a good idea. i don‟t think it‟s actually sensible to use that as an argument in favor of your preexisting ideas about the general decline of society or the difficulty in predicting the financial markets. [laughs.] dolan: my last question comes from adam bly‟s introduction to science is culture. he says, “the trouble with commonly practiced organized religion is not god. it is that it offers truth without a way of questioning it. worse, it punishes you for questioning it.” and so he suggests that children be taught to embrace the scientific method. not just taught it, but taught to embrace it … carroll: right. dolan: … before they‟re taught about god. meanwhile, dennett says he‟s at work on a book about religion and science in which he hopes to study religion as a natural phenomenon with the tools of science. so, i‟d ask, which approach means more to you in your work: bringing science to the masses to counteract that kind of dogmatic acceptance, or understanding the need some feel for things like religion to explain the world. carroll: well, i would say, yeah, if that‟s the choice … dolan: you can give me a third choice, it‟s not always two! carroll: i mean, i think both of those are important. if we‟re going to prioritize them … i don‟t think adam bly‟s formulation is right. i think that it‟s a little naïve because we live in a world where some people have religious beliefs and some don‟t, and this idea of “what we will teach the children” is not a real-world belief. dolan: and can i say, having four children … carroll: [laughs.] dolan: … children are experimenters already. carroll: every six year old is a great scientist, right? they‟re empiricists: they do things, they touch things, and see what happens to things. dolan: and taste a lot of things that they probably should not. carroll: and they push around and so forth. along those lines i think that if i could pick something that i wish could be widely spread, it would be an appreciation of the humility that underlies science. i read a great blog post from a woman who actually was a major light in the new age movement. you know, auras, and tarot cards, and the whole bit. you know, this is a sub-economy as well as an intellectual state to be in. some people write books, and they give seminars, and she was a major fixture in that. she always felt, that you know, that some of that stuff is good, some of it‟s bad, some of it‟s right, some of it‟s wrong. we need to distinguish between the right and the wrong. we need to have a way of telling whether a certain thing is right or wrong. ultimately, she has moved out of it entirely into the skeptical movement. the lynchpin for her was when she realized that she was always bombarded with this thought that the scientific establishment is kind of arrogant and they think they have it all figured out and they have all the answers and science is everything, whereas we are open to possibility in the new age movement, which she eventually realizes that it‟s the new agers who actually have an answer for everything. there‟s no phenomenon that they think they can‟t explain. where scientists are quite confident in some things, but it‟s easy to ask them a question, [to] which they will say, “i don‟t know the answer to that.” they‟re comfortable living in the uncertainty, that they haven‟t figured everything out yet, and also comfortable that they have figured some things out. i just encounter this among a lot of people. they can‟t seem to simultaneously accept that there are things we don‟t know and there are things we know, and we even have a pretty good idea of what the difference is. so when i say something is true, that doesn‟t mean i think i know everything, but i actually do know this little, particular thing well enough to get on with my life and not take that as an open question … scientists, as a group of human beings, are not the most humble people in the world. that‟s undoubtedly true, but as a discipline, there‟s an inherent humility in the fact that the universe is bigger than we are, and we don‟t know all its secrets. we‟re trying to learn as much as we can, and everything we do is contention. we put forward hypotheses and we test them. it‟s not a deductive method overall. we make guesses. we sort out which ones work and which ones don‟t, and there‟re certain phenomena which we can‟t yet explain. i figure that sort of hypothesis-testing, guessing, and using empirical data to make choices methodology that science uses is the one thing i would like to be more widespread. and instead we teach this terrible baconian scientific method in high schools, where you need to write down your hypothesis and test it; no scientist actually works that way. the spirit of science is what i would like to be more widespread. dolan: thank you very much for your time. carroll: sure, my pleasure. notes 1. sean carroll, from eternity to here: the quest for the ultimate theory of time (new york: plume, 2010). 2. adam bly, ed., science is culture: conversations at the new intersection of science & society (new york: harper perennial, 2010). 3. on page 29, carroll comments on stoppard‟s discussion of “the arrow of time as a central organizing metaphor,” quoting from scene one in which thomasina comments on how one “cannot stir things apart.” on pages 120–121, in explaining laplace‟s demon, he quotes stoppard again as valentine and chloë discuss determinism. 4. colton‟s dance adaptation was one of more than two dozen performance adaptations of the book since its publication. 5. betrayal. dir. david hugh jones. horizon, 1983. microsoft word haglund-finalrevised.docx [expositions 8.1 (2014) 168–175] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376   was erasmus’s christian politics too uncompromising? timothy haglund university of north texas abstract political theorists typically laud machiavelli as the first thinker to decisively cast the restrictions of religion and ethics off of politics and to thereby initiate modernity. consequently, scholars neglect other political thinkers of the renaissance, whose works receive short shrift either as problematic fusions of the classical and biblical traditions or as failed ventures in utopianism. but one prominent figure of the sixteenth century, desiderius erasmus, understood and took seriously the reconciliation of practical life’s demands with the requirements of justice and wisdom. in his education of a christian prince, erasmus sought to squelch political tyranny by advocating a model of just rule based on that of jesus christ; but in so doing, he fended against the charges of naiveté and conceit that would inevitably attend his philosophia christi by demonstrating a certain moral flexibility embedded in his standard of political rule.   introduction desiderius erasmus of rotterdam (1466–1536) contributed to advances in theology and religious life, defended a pacific politics, and insisted on a practical system of ethics in an age plagued by harsh kingships. his vast corpus of writings displays considerable humor, wit, and erudition. yet political theorists typically pass over this figure in their survey of the history of political thought, and those who do study erasmus characterize him as a foil to machiavelli1 or define him within a limited historical context that tends to disregard his enduring importance.2 only recently have scholars recognized a realist element consistent with modern political thought in erasmus’s writings.3 once highly reputed by authors such as françois rabelais and guillaume budé, erasmus’s fortunes have waned with the occurrence of several events. as an advocate of sensible, minor reforms within the catholic church, erasmus withdrew from participation in the religious reformation prompted by martin luther and john calvin. the daring of these twin giants who stood for schism and for a nostalgic return to the origins of christianity charms today’s even more schismatic and nostalgic religious scholars, some of whom have deepened the reformation critique and now debate the authority of church communities and sacred texts as such.4 judged by current tastes, erasmus looks a docile sheep or, worse, a sycophant. his legacy suffers in the area of political philosophy for similar reasons, as the imbalance of scholarly focus between him and the florentine philosopher niccolò machiavelli suggests.5 whereas machiavelli praises assertiveness and preaches the dominion of the intransigent “effectual truth” over human affairs,6 erasmus’s education of a christian prince supports a starry-eyed, now 169 haglund outmoded antiwar policy7 and holds christian political rulers to a higher moral standard than that of the non-christians (see ecp 1.24, 1.29, 1.32, 1.40). in fact, erasmus insists that true rulers should model themselves after no less than christ himself (ecp 1.13, 1.18, 1.29, 1.32, 1.40, 1.46, 2.60). these facets of erasmus may lead scholars to place him among those “others” from whom machiavelli “departs” in his novel way of studying politics as discussed in chapter 15 of the prince (15.61); but this would be a premature conclusion about erasmus, who does not appear such a naïf after a review of his philosophia christi and all it entails. rulers who abide by erasmus’s christian political ethics in fact encounter fewer moral restrictions than frequently supposed precisely because they take jesus christ as their model ruler. advice-to-princes: some problems in the genre erasmus’s education of a christian prince falls within the short-lived and peculiar genre of literature of “advice-to-princes” or “mirrors-of-princes.” the book faces certain issues unique to this type of work. advice-to-princes writings typically serve the double-function of advertising the competencies of the author as a political advisor and of teaching the ruler the art of governance.8 problematically, however, the political knowledge a writer presumes in offering such a book to the ruler may be understood as a competing claim to rule rightfully. by proposing to educate the rulers and showing their need for knowledge, tutors bring into question whether royals are simply a superfluous linkage institution between the governed and those who truly possess the political art. erasmus confirms his low estimation of the prince relative to that of the tutor when he accepts the opinion of plutarch, who “has good reason for thinking that no man does the state a greater service than he who equips a prince’s mind” (ecp dl.2, italics mine). and neither thinks princes equip their own minds. yet the tutors’ relatively insecure and undesirable station in life makes them appear less wise, for who would not put wisdom to use? a prince may not see, for instance, machiavelli’s vulnerability as one who suffers the “malignity of fortune” (prince dl.4) as anything other than a personal failing or short-sightedness. rulers are likewise prone to consider their own good fortune a product of virtue, not luck. from this vantage, princes approached with a book that promises to endow them with practical knowledge must feel wary of disenfranchised authors who could not help but have an undisclosed agenda. recognizing these obstacles, erasmus writes his book not only as advice to princes, but also and chiefly as advice to other potential tutors (ecp 1.9). because he equates the problem of rule with the problem of education, his intended audience is not princes but those who will groom them.9 given the foregoing considerations, that princes will refuse the advice offered from a source thought unreliable in both understanding and motive, erasmus instructs tutors to win the prince’s confidence and clear their names of foul play through a strictly indirect teaching method. generally, erasmus insists that tutors should turn their regal students toward examples of the best rulers whose authority over an aspiring prince can be easily demonstrated. specifically, he insists that tutors should teach princes to fashion themselves after that king of was erasmus’ christian politics too uncompromising? 170 kings, jesus christ. christ’s perfections not only deserve imitation but demand it. tutors will not gain the princes’ respect by demonstrating their own competencies; but by appealing to christ, the tutor points the prince to a figure he must heed and can be made to learn from. christ is not only the most appropriate example for the prince, but also the most effective. erasmus recognizes, however, that most rulers in the history of humanity have been tyrants who vainly “wanted to be called ‘god’ and ‘lord’” (ecp 1.26). in light of the tyrants’ ultimate conceit, it is difficult to see why erasmus would apparently encourage or contribute to their wrongheaded aspiration to the divine by insisting on christ as the ruler’s standard. yet reflecting on the ruler’s occupation as one that imitates godliness is precisely what erasmus recommends: “let the teacher therefore depict a sort of celestial creature, more like a divinity than a mortal […] as the picture of a true prince” (ecp 1.26–27). asserting the divine model of rule simultaneously acknowledges and corrects the tyrants’ mistake of identifying themselves as gods. erasmus does not attempt to extinguish this tyrannical impulse; he instead redirects it by showing the ruler exactly what it means to take the title of lord. he teaches rulers not to think of the deity as that rapscallion zeus, whose dangerously capricious use of power they associate with divine rule, but as the perfect image of justice and mercy drawn by the gospels. the moral freedom of christ as princely example   without recognizing these major pedagogical functions, interpreters tend to characterize erasmus as an idealist thinker grounded in the humanist tradition and committed to the moral example set by christ as a constraint on political action.10 but in pushing the ruler to think through what godliness actually entails, erasmus does not intend to hamstring rulers with questions of right and wrong. in the discussion surrounding his assertion that “what christ teaches applies to no one more than to the prince” (ecp 1.13), erasmus denies that the application of christ’s teachings only constrains rulers. immediately before examining those teachings, erasmus warns that “[w]here the material seems rather harsh, the tutor should smooth and soften it with an agreeable style of speech” (ecp 1.13). this prefatory remark forebodes that what erasmus imparts may be unsettling if left unvarnished. the tutor must wonder what could be so sensitive: erasmus begins his exposition safely enough, by recommending that tutors affirm the importance of virtue “as the most beautiful thing of all.” next, he directs tutors to thwart the prince’s regard for wealth and bodily pleasures. finally, he asks them to arm princes against ignoble fear of death through attachment to a “cause” (ecp 1.14). he ends the discussion with a summary statement: all those things the common people hold fast to as a source of pleasure, or respect as excellent, or adopt as useful are to be evaluated by the single criterion of their moral worth. on the other hand, whatever things the common people shrink from as being disagreeable, or despise as lowly, or avoid as pernicious should not be avoided unless they really do have shameful implications. (ecp 1.14) 171 haglund so far from simply prohibiting, the moral advice of erasmus brings “whatever things the common people shrink from” into the realm of legitimate political action. to determine whether this statement violates erasmus’s distinction between mere tyranny and truly divine rule, interpreters must ask whether and how it applies to christ. in many ways, after all, the jesus of the new testament places something of a moral straitjacket around his disciples and, indeed, himself. throughout his treatise, erasmus seems to follow christ’s lead when he refuses to accept the low standards of decency prescribed by nonchristian culture. erasmus even brushes aside the provisions of the mosaic law as mere “sketches and images of justice,” incomplete without the example of the savior (ecp 1.31). for jesus, the non-christians’ virtue at its apex functions as little more than the floor of virtue for his holy church. tax collectors loves those who love them; christians must therefore love those who hate them (mt 5:44–46).11 jesus radicalizes the law by redefining and heightening concepts like adultery (mt 5:27–28) and murder (mt 5:21–22) so that not only external actions but internal feelings come under intense scrutiny: for him, these sinful crimes are not committed at random, but spring from underlying emotions of lust and anger. if these teachings of christ “appl[y] to no one more than to the prince,” then the task before the christian ruler seems nigh impossible: “love your enemy” dictates an idealistic and likely disastrous foreign policy indeed. on the other hand, the jesus who set such lofty moral standards also violates established practices within both judaic tradition and his contemporary secular community. jesus communes with the lowliest of sinners (mt 9:11), touches the dead (mk 5:39), defends an adulteress (jn 8:2– 11), arouses the jewish scribes’ indignation by working miracles, as they say, “in the name of demons” (mt 9:34; lk 6:2), and dismisses the jewish dietary laws as he contests the old understanding of “what defiles a man” (mt 15:10). in what seems even today a stretch of the moral imagination, jesus redefines family along lines that potentially preclude biological relations (lk 8:19–21). all the while, jesus consistently and forthrightly embraces “whatever things the common people shrink from as being disagreeable, or despise as lowly, or avoid as pernicious,” but only because these things lack what erasmus calls “shameful implications”: jesus justifies his apparent transgressions by showing that those customs and laws he ignores or reinterprets are merely human precepts wrongfully adorned as sacred doctrines (mk 7:6). so too, erasmus does not simply flout moral considerations. only, he refuses to equate popular standards of right and wrong with authentically christian standards. making his most general observation about humanity, erasmus notes that “the nature of man inclines toward evil” (ecp 1.8). he worries that princes will be “contaminated by popular opinions” (ecp 1.10) and hopes that they will disregard “the opinion of the mob” (ecp 6.79). erasmus teaches that the perversion of popular opinion affects not only notions of the right and good, but also, and just as importantly, of the wrong and bad. just as the gospels abound in examples of jesus contesting popular ideas of lowliness and perniciousness, erasmus provides cases where the prince might “get into the habit of taking pleasure” of those things that most people find unpleasant (ecp 1.47). because the people’s moral scruples do not differ from the tyrannical rulers’, inverting the popular pleasures means was erasmus’ christian politics too uncompromising? 172 attending to the well-being of the state. nevertheless, the christian ruler’s pleasures retain a surprising root in a selfishness that is legitimized by the divine model of rule. erasmus encourages the prince, for instance, to think of the country as his personal possession so that he realizes damages done to it are indirectly done to him (ecp 1.34, 1.44). considered greedy from a worldly perspective, subsuming the world as one’s own and possessively guarding it matches jesus’s insistence that “inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it to me” (mt 25:40) and, conversely, that “inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me” (mt 25:45). the christian prince, erasmus provocatively suggests, “has [his subjects] so devoted and dedicated to himself that they do not shrink from anything, even from laying down their lives” (ecp 1.35). this may well be one of those thoughts a common person shrinks from as lowly and pernicious; but once again, it entails precisely what christ demands of his followers when he praises “whoever will lose his life for my sake” (lk 9:24). erasmus does not shy from teaching the prince to take beneficent possession of his domain in the way a true god would. he also aims to overturn widely held attitudes regarding other aspects of morality, among them industriousness. the ancient philosophers and medieval monastics lived lives of contemplation; erasmus denigrates these occupations as “idle” (ecp 6.83). with that word, he casts aspersions on the two occupations held theretofore in highest esteem. erasmus teaches that “thrift is a great source of revenue” for the prince (ecp 4.76). he thus validates some of those occupations theretofore held in lowest esteem, like farming (ecp 10.101). this teaching may sound anything but scandalous to modern ears, but only because those ears are modern. the nobility of old considered leisure indispensable to learning and the cultivation of excellence. even in early america, this opinion persisted in the ideology of southern mud-sill theory.12 by recasting leisure as sheer indolence, erasmus attacks what was typically thought of as the very seat of virtue. he restores the biblical views of solomon13 and paul the apostle,14 both of whom saw idleness as an invitation to sinfulness. by dismissing “whatever things the common people shrink from,” erasmus carves out of a new sphere of appropriate activity for christian princes. tyrants, he suggests, cannot conceive of any task outside of military affairs and foreign policy. by contrast, erasmus refocuses politics on domestic affairs much as the ancient philosophers had focused it (ecp 10.99). according to erasmus, this sphere had been abandoned in the meantime because it was thought below princely dignity (ecp 10.100), but he presents public works projects as exciting enterprises “increasing the prosperity of the realm” (ecp 10.101). in his list of feasible projects, erasmus encourages rulers to “divert rivers whose course is inconvenient.” the locution echoes machiavelli’s famous discussion of fortuna in chapter 25 of the prince, where he advises communities to provide for the weather ahead by building dams and dikes (25.98–99). we might believe that erasmus’s eagerness to side with machiavelli in having his ruler account for and mitigate the vicissitudes of life renders his trust in providence uncertain. but that is because we think of biblical teaching from the perspective of the believer who passively trusts. erasmus shows that exerting control over the world is not only what the machiavellian schemer does, but also describes the work of 173 haglund the lord who is providence incarnate. this prospect proves itself but another thing we common people shrink from. endnotes 1. burke 1984; gilbert 1938/1968. 2. gwatkin 1965; tracy 1978. 3. drysdall 2010. 4. see scroggs 1995; soares 1925; wood 1996. 5. scholars still vigorously debate aspects of machiavelli’s thought, as a recent special issue of the review of politics demonstrated in its roundtable of the prince (vol. 75, no. 04). see zuckert (2013) for an overview of the issue’s articles. 6. see machiavelli 1532/1998, 61. hereafter referenced in-text as ‘prince.’ subsequent citations will be given in parentheses in-text and formatted by chapter number and page number. 7. see erasmus 1516/1997, 102–110. hereafter referenced in-text as “ecp.” subsequent citations will be given in parentheses in-text and formatted by chapter number and page number. 8. jardine 1997, xix, xxiv. 9. burke 1984, 85. 10. see burke 1984, 90. 11. i consulted the king james version of the bible for this study. 12. see miller 2001, 508. 13. “by much slothfulness the building decayeth; and through idleness of the hands the house droppeth through” (ecclesiastes 10:18). 14. “for we hear that there are some which walk among you disorderly, working not at all, but are busybodies” (2 thessalonians 3:11). was erasmus’ christian politics too uncompromising? 174 works cited burke, harry r. 1984. “audience and intention in machiavelli’s the prince and erasmus’ education of a christian prince.” erasmus of rotterdam society yearbook 4: 84–93. carroll, robert, and stephen prickett, eds. 2008. the bible: authorized king james version. oxford: oxford university press. drysdall, denis l. 2010. “erasmus on tyranny and terrorism: ‘scarabaeus aquilam quaerit’ and the ‘institutio principis christiani.’” erasmus of rotterdam society yearbook 29: 89– 102. erasmus, desiderius. 1516/1997. education of a christian prince. trans. neil m. cheshire and michael j. heath. ed. lisa jardine. cambridge: cambridge university press. gilbert, allan h. 1938/1968. machiavelli’s prince and its forerunners: the prince as a typical book de regimine principum. 2nd edition. new york: barnes & noble, inc. gwatkin, jean bower. 1965. “the counsels of erasmus.” new blackfriars 46: 584–588. jardine, lisa. introduction. in erasmus, 1516/1997, vi–xxiv. machiavelli, niccolò. 1532/1998. the prince. trans. harvey c. mansfield. 2nd edition. chicago and london: university of chicago press. miller, eugene. 2001. “democratic statecraft and technological advance: lincoln’s reflections on ‘discoveries and inventions.’” the review of politics 63: 485–515. scroggs, robin. 1995. “the bible as foundational document.” interpretation 49: 17–30. soares, theodore gerald. 1925. “is the church necessary for religious education?” the journal of religion 5: 623–631. tracy, james d. 1978. the politics of erasmus: a pacifist intellectual and his political milieu. toronto: university of toronto press. wood, charles m. 1996. “scripture, authenticity, and truth.” the journal of religion 76: 189–205. 175 haglund zuckert, catherine h. 2013. “machiavelli’s prince—five hundred years later.” the review of politics 75: 493–496. microsoft word gower-final.docx [expositions 8.1 (2014) 29–37] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 madness defamiliarized: the value of poetic description of mental illness nathan gower campbellsville university in his memoir darkness visible, william styron argues that a cultural overuse and dampening of words like “depression” or “melancholy” can—prevent people who do not suffer from mood disorders from fully understanding the madness these words should truly connote. as someone who has dealt with severe clinical depression first hand, styron is unapologetic in his claim that our language is grossly deficient in providing a true context for mental illness: [depression is a] noun with a bland tonality and lacks any magisterial presence, used indifferently to describe an economic decline or a rut in the ground, a true wimp of a word for such a major illness. […] nonetheless, for over seventy-five years the word has slithered innocuously through the language like a slug, leaving little trace of its intrinsic malevolence and preventing, by its very insipidity, a general awareness of the horrible intensity of the disease when out of control. (37) a similar claim might be made about any number of words used to describe variants of mood or schizotypal disorders. consider the word “madness” itself, which is used as a sort of slippery catch-all to describe mental illness in academic and popular discussions alike. a very simplistic question, then, is why don’t we have more sufficient words at our disposal? the problem with answering this question lies primarily in the fact that our words to describe madness have, indeed, changed over time; yet we are still left with the same deficiencies. it seems likely, then, that the problem is not with individual words themselves, but with what virginia woolf calls the “poverty of language” in describing illness: “english, which can express the thoughts of hamlet and the tragedy of lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. it has all grown one way. the merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has shakespeare or keats to speak her mind for her; but let the sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and the language at once runs dry” (7). importantly, in preventing an accurate portrayal of mental illness, this poverty of language serves to promote a sort of cultural pseudo-familiarity with madness that leaves most of us—to manipulate a well-worn proverb—with just enough knowledge of mental illness to be dangerous. this seems particularly true considering daniel nettle’s well-argued claim that many of the traits of the “madman” are characteristics that are present, though attenuated, in “normal” people, that madness is in fact a gradation at the extremes of normal human experience. he even claims that “the symptoms of madness are related to the proper functioning of the human mind. they differ from health in that they are terribly exaggerated” (9). it seems reasonable, then, that most people madness defamiliarized 30 who are free from the extremes of mental illness might overestimate their ability to understand madness or sympathize with those who are suffering in its grip. if this is indeed the case, and if language is a primary barrier in conveying the experience of the mentally ill, where do those of us who do not suffer from madness turn to better understand it? paradoxically, i would argue that rather than looking away from language, we might confront its challenges head on to exploit what it does well: clarify through metaphor and other poetic devices. for this, we might turn to an important concept in the art of fiction writing that was first introduced during modernism. defamiliarization in context in his 1917 essay “art as device,” russian writer and critic viktor shklovsky coined the term “defamiliarization” to help define a literary device that was widely used, but not discussed in scholarship. defamiliarization (or “estrangement,” as it is sometimes translated) is the literary device of using poetic language to make familiar concepts strange. i will argue that overlaying this literary device on the concepts of madness will prove to be useful; but first one needs a better understanding of why defamiliarizing concepts is desirable in its own context: creative writing. shklovsky argues that the idea that “art is thinking in images,” first propounded by potebnya, is misguided because the paradigm “has failed to notice that there exist two types of imagery: imagery as a practical way of thinking, that is, as a means of uniting objects in groups, and secondly, imagery as a way of intensifying the impressions of the senses” (3). the former type is the imagery of prose (used very strictly by shklovsky to mean practical writing without any poetic leanings) while the latter is the imagery of poetry (used broadly to include fiction and other creative forms). this distinction is crucial to shklovsky’s argument because he is working toward a dismissal of veselovsky’s idea that “the merit of a style consists precisely in this: that it delivers the greatest number of ideas in the fewest number of words” (qtd. in shklovsky 4). while shklovsky readily accepts that economy of language by the writer equals an economy of effort by the reader, and therefore it should govern the practical domain of language, he makes clear that “we have to consider the question of energy expenditure and economy in poetry, not by analogy with prose, but on its own terms” (4); and it is in this assertion where defamiliarization becomes crucial. since poetic imagery, as explained by shklovsky, is to intensify the impressions of the senses, sometimes there is reason to be purposefully uneconomical; that is to say, there is value in allowing the language of poetry and creative prose to levy a mental and emotional tax on readers, to create a sort of hard-work reading experience: “by estranging [defamiliarizing] objects and complicating form, the device of art makes perception long and laborious” (6); and unlike the reading of “practical” prose, this laboriousness is what gives poetic heft and value to the reading of creative works: “and so, in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art” (6). 31 gower examining the concepts of defamiliarization through example is perhaps the best way to see its value, and we will do just that in a later discussion of defamiliarizing the language of madness. for now, examining shklovsky’s own analysis of defamiliarization in tolstoy’s writing will suffice to illustrate its importance in the poetic purposes of creative work: the devices by which tolstoy estranges [defamiliarizes] his material may be boiled down to the following: he does not call a thing by its name, that is, he describes it as if it were perceived for the first time. […] in addition, he foregoes the conventional names of the various parts of a thing, replacing them instead with the names of corresponding parts in other things. let me demonstrate this with an example. in “shame” tolstoy estranges the idea of flogging by describing people who, as punishment for violating the law, had been stripped, thrown down on the floor, and beaten with switches. […][this] is typical of the way tolstoy reaches our conscience. the usual method of flogging is estranged by a description that changes its form without changing its essence. (6) and it is here, in changing a concept’s form but not its essence, where we might find incredible value in the use of defamiliarization in our discussion of mental illness. the intent of describing madness in poetic, even bizarre language is not to undermine its severity or trivialize the very unpoetic pain of the sufferer; rather, poetic language can help us see madness where we have overlooked it before; and this goal finds a direct link with shklovsky’s assertion that “after being perceived several times, objects acquire the status of ‘recognition.’ an object appears before us. we know it’s there but we do not see it, and for that reason, we can say nothing about it. the removal of this object from the sphere of automatized perception is accomplished in art” (6). for the remainder of this paper, the “object” in question is our understanding of madness. criteria for defamiliarizing madness importantly, if there is value in using poetic language to defamiliarize our collective framework for the many offshoots of madness, we must establish some criteria for which creative works can be relied upon to help further this purpose. the first criterion builds from a claim argued in the introduction of this paper: if one accepts the position that those who do not suffer at the extremes of mental illness will likely lack proper perspective (and language) to describe it, one must conclude that those who have first-hand experience of madness are the prime candidates to defamiliarize the language which governs it. however, it is important to recognize that first-hand knowledge is only half of the equation. an equally important criterion in establishing authorities for defamiliarizing the language revolves around a mastery of poetic language itself. one cannot reasonably equate personal experience of madness with an ability to poetically articulate what that experience is like. madness defamiliarized 32 incidentally, there is an ever-growing consensus in medical and psychological scholarship that there exists a correlation between creativity and madness, and this link exists whether one is discussing affective or schizotypal disorders. in discussing mood disorders, jamison writes, “recent research strongly suggests that, compared with the general population, writers and artists show a vastly disproportionate rate of manic-depressive or depressive illness” (5). similarly, arguing a link with schizotypal disorders, nettle writes, “the evidence for a link between schizotypal traits and creative thinking is quite strong” (135). the research by jamison and nettle, which is extremely helpful but much too involved for the purposes of this paper, indicate that finding people who have (1) first-hand experience with mental illness, and (2) the creative capacity to articulate that experience poetically, might not prove difficult. importantly, though, just as mental illness does not presuppose creativity, a creative disposition does not presuppose mental illness. one must seek both of these criteria independently when searching to find poetic language that is helpful to defamiliarize madness. once these criteria have been established, we might turn our attention to the pragmatic work of digging through the literature itself to see what we can learn. the remainder of the paper will suggest three ways poetic language can work to defamiliarize madness. defamiliarization through imagery perhaps the most direct application to consider is the use of poetic imagery—the kind of imagery that shklovsky says should “intensify the impressions of the senses”—in narrative passages describing madness. a wonderful example of such a passage can be found in the fiction of breece d’j pancake’s most celebrated short story, “trilobites.” certainly no stranger to madness, pancake was described anecdotally as a “lonely and melancholy man” (mcpherson 9). while he was never formally diagnosed, literary accounts of his life strongly suggest he suffered somewhere on the broad spectrum of affective disorders, and there is some speculation that his suicide at the age of 26 was partially the result of a psychotic break (mcpherson 17–18). consider the imagistic portrayal of madness in this very brief passage from “trilobites,” just after the depressed protagonist colly is asked what killed his father: “little shell fragment. been in him since the war. got in his blood . . .” i snap my fingers. i want to talk, but the picture won’t become words. i see myself scattered, every cell miles from the others. i pull them back and kneel in the dark grass. i roll the body face-up, and look in the eyes a long time before i shut them.” (34; emphasis added) what pancake creates here is a series of images, almost cinematic in presentation, that conveys a depth of depressed experience. we see (and hear) the snap of the fingers, the mouth trying to form words that cannot escape. we see colly being ripped apart at a cellular level (however it is that we subjectively experience that image), and then him collapsing to the darkness below his 33 gower feet. importantly, pancake never gives us slippery abstractions like “depression” or “confusion” to deal with; but instead, he allows the poetry of his language to defamiliarize these abstractions. in this way, even the reader who has never experienced the polar ends of depression can, at least for the moment, feel what it is to live in that dark place. the use of metaphor can also wield the power of poetic imagery to help defamiliarize madness. for an example of this, we might look at a passage from marya hornbacher’s memoir madness: a bipolar life. as the title suggests, hornbacher has been clinically diagnosed with manic-depressive disorder. in the following passage, she illustrates a scene of madness she once shared with a short-term companion she ironically calls “crazy sean”: how long have we been gone? it doesn’t even occur to us. we scream to be heard over the wind. colorado. we are paranoid, afraid of the crowded bar. we are afraid in the grocery store, trying desperately to find booze. we are coming in and out. we are a radio station. we are a short wave. we are the news. the fluorescent lights are threatening and burn my eyes. we recoil, run out of the store, lock ourselves in a motel room, all orange shag carpet, one of those horrible seventies globe lamps dangling from a chain. the chain concerns us. we discuss which of us should hang ourselves first. (120) hornbacher’s language is strange, indeed, and the metaphors she uses are a sort of puzzle the reader is forced to work through. unlike the example from pancake, hornbacher does choose to use some abstractions, explicitly stating that they were “paranoid” and “afraid”; and these words might provide a sense of familiarity for the reader, a sort of way in to the discussion. if hornbacher had left the description dangling on these abstractions, though, she would have been expressly inviting the unaffected reader to rely completely on his or her own limited understanding of these words based on a worldview outside of madness. instead, she defamiliarizes what these words mean to two people swept away in a flurry of mania. poetic imagery, then, is one way to consider the defamiliarization of madness through creative writing; but what can one learn by looking past the images and into the form and style of the writing itself? defamiliarization through form and style building on shklovsky’s original assertion that there is a clear distinction between the language of creative writing and that of practical prose, i have employed “poetic language” very broadly across creative genres. while this is appropriate, one should not dismiss the value of poetic form and the way it might be used to defamiliarize madness in ways that creative prose might not. consider emily dickinson’s poem “pain – has an element of blank”: pain – has an element of blank – madness defamiliarized 34 it cannot recollect when it begun – or if there were a time when it was not – it has not future – but itself – its infinite realms contain its past – enlightened to perceive new periods – of pain. it is well documented that dickinson suffered frequently from both physical and mental illness, so one cannot be certain here of the specific nature of the “pain” dickinson had in mind. nonetheless, this poem can be very instructive if we apply it to pain associated with mental illness. its imagery is very effective, but we will leave that aside for now to focus on the form. consider, first, all those dashes, the prevalence of which is always a good indication one is experiencing a dickinson poem. many publications of the poem omit the dashes, as early publishers of dickinson adjusted her unusual punctuation and idiosyncratic capitalization to meet the conventions of the day; but i argue that the dashes are a crucial element here, and to omit them is to undermine one of the more helpful aspects of the poem. the dashes force readers to slow down, to challenge the assumptions they may already have about the very familiar word “pain.” notice, too, how the dashes set off “pain” on either end of the poem, which serves to reinforce the idea that pain is an altogether set-apart experience, one that has an “element of blank,” one that cannot recognize itself unless it is in the very moment when the pain occurs. aside from the dashes, there is value in beginning and concluding the poem with the word “pain,” as it invites the reader to end where he or she began, commenting on the cyclical nature of pain, echoing the idea that pain “cannot recollect / when it began – or if there was / a time when it was not” (2–4). in the same way that poetic form can serve as an important tool in defamiliarization, stylistic choices in creative prose can achieve a similar result. for an example, we can return back hornbacher’s memoir, madness: a bipolar life: i run. time stops. thoughts stop. the never-ending pounding of my blood, the energy that surges through me all the time these days, it never runs out, i feel as if i will explode with it, i run. up and down the long hall, compulsively touching the cold metal door on each end, must touch it or it doesn’t count, one mile, five miles, ten miles, chanting thinner, thinner, thinner, i am killing myself with the running, the starving, but i am alive. (36–7) as with the previous hornbacher passage, the language here is strange, almost threatening; but behind the language is a style and structure that is instructive on its own terms. the first three sentences are only two words, producing a jarring staccato rhythm that lets the reader in on a 35 gower secret: this world is different than yours. then, without warning, hornbacher unleashes a series of run-on sentences, which creates a breathless reading experience. on several occasions, one might even feel a bit anxious in the pacing of hornbacher’s writing; and one should not dismiss this feeling as a coincidence. to say nothing of the subject matter—which jumps from one loosely connected idea to the next—the style and structure of the passage gives the reader a way to approach a manic experience in a way that is unavailable in practical prose. we have seen, then, that poetic imagery coupled with intentional form and style can serve as an important method of defamiliarizing madness. still, there may be an even more direct approach: to explicitly contrast our limited concepts of mental illness to the real world of madness. defamiliarization through poetic rhetoric sometimes the best method of breaking preconceived notions about any subject is to tackle them head on, treating them as rhetorical counter-claims to a more appropriate thesis. to be sure, poetic language and rhetoric are not mutually exclusive; in fact, a poignant passage from styron’s memoir darkness visible demonstrates how the two can be combined to help defamiliarize madness. in response to the popular belief that unaffected people can readily sympathize with those who suffer from clinical depression, styron writes: what i had begun to discover is that, mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from normal experience, the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain. but it is not an immediately identifiable pain, like that of a broken limb. it may be more accurate to say that despair, owing to some evil trick played upon the sick brain by the inhabiting psyche, comes to resemble the diabolical discomfort of being imprisoned in a fiercely overheated room. and because no breeze stirs this caldron […] it is entirely natural that the victim begins to think ceaselessly of oblivion. (50) from the first sentence, styron fights against the misinformed notion that severe depression is somehow knowable through normal experience, and he is building on an idea he introduced earlier in the memoir that depression is “so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self—to the mediating intellect—as to verge close to being beyond description” (7). the best way to attempt a description, styron seems to be saying, is to counter what most people think depression is. the passage suggests that depression is not merely sadness, but it closer to physical pain; yet experience of physical pain is not quite enough to sympathize either because depression is “not an immediately identifiable pain, like that of a broken limb” (50) but something outside of the realm of normal existence. once his counter claim has been made, he sets in to defamiliarizing the sensation of depression by placing the madness defamiliarized 36 reader in a stifling hot room with no circulation, which is no doubt something most everyone can relate to, but had probably not considered in terms of depression. later in the memoir, styron employs the same pattern of rhetorical defamiliarization in addressing the misconception that mental illness, like familiar types of sadness or pain within the normal human experience, should simply be absorbed on the short term, as things will return to equilibrium soon enough: there is a region in the experience of pain where the certainty of alleviation often permits superhuman endurance. we learn to live with pain in varying degrees daily, or over longer periods of time, and we are more often than not mercifully free of it. […] in depression this faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. the pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come—not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. […] it is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. so the decision-making of daily life involves not, as in normal affairs, shifting from one annoying situation to another less annoying […] but moving from pain to pain. one does not abandon, even briefly, one’s bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes. (61–2) here again, in language that is accessible but beautiful, styron presents his counter claim: one cannot simply “wait out” this type of madness like forms of minor illnesses because when one is at the center of the depression, one genuinely feels the end will simply not come. this, styron argues, is one reason we see so many suicides as a result of mood disorders. conclusion: the limits of defamiliarization mental illness, in all its forms both known and unknown today, is much too complicated to reduce to a simple formula for understanding; and studying the defamiliarization of madness through poetic language certainly does not intend to attempt such a reduction. still, it is important to recognize the wealth of first-hand knowledge of madness that is accessible in our most celebrated creative writing, only a miniscule fraction of which has been discussed in this paper. while individual words may fail in our attempts to peel back the complexities of mad experience, creative writing can serve as a reminder that our language is more than the sum of its parts. 37 gower works cited hornbacher, marya. 2008. madness: a bipolar life. boston: mariner books. print. dickinson, emily. 1960. complete poems. ed. thomas h. johnson. boston: little, brown. print. jamison, kay redfield. 1994. touched with fire: manic-depressive illness and the artistic temperament. new york: simon & schuster. print. mcpherson, james alan. 2002. “forward.” the stories of breece d’j pancake. new york: back bay books. 3–19. print. nettle, daniel. 2001. strong imagination: madness, creativity and human nature. oxford: oxford university press. print. pancake, breece d’j. 2002. “trilobites.” the stories of breece d’j pancake. new york: backbay books: 21–37. print. shklovsky, viktor. 1998. theory of prose. trans. benjamin sher. normal, il: dalkey archive press. print styron, william. 1992. darkness visible: a memoir of madness. new york: vintage books. print woolf, virginia. 2012. on being ill. ashfield: paris press, print. [expositions 6.1 (2012) i–ii] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 editors’ preface john a. doody, gregory hoskins, john-paul spiro in its first few years, expositions had one subscriber. a few of us at the center for liberal education at villanova university decided to launch a print journal just as academic publishing was making the transition to online-preferred (if not online-only). libraries informed us that they were not accepting any more print journals and were digitizing their archives. our colleagues at the association for core texts and courses were happy to take a complimentary copy but were less interested in subscribing (or convincing their home institutions to subscribe). sometimes we felt we were producing the journal just for ourselves. and for our one lonely reader. our fall 2010-spring 2011 double-issue was our first to be online-only, and we quickly noticed the difference. or rather, the world quickly noticed: we were able to track how many times our articles were opened (a better indicator than mere site visits) and we were happy to see numbers in the 50,000 range. that may not be much compared to the daily visits of popular newspapers and magazines, but it’s a fine number for an academic journal that publishes twice a year. we were happy to put our past issues online as well, so now all that content can be downloaded by anyone with the means and interest to do so. for our spring 2012 issue, we are happy to simply live up to our mission and provide interdisciplinary studies in the humanities. in several of our past issues, we offered conversations about the academic profession, versions of the conversations we have in the hallways and at conferences with our colleagues. what is a humanities education good for? should scholarship focus more on contemporary problems than on antiquated questions? are professors managers or laborers, and what does that mean for their relationships to administrators, as well as for contingent and continuing faculty? what’s in store for classical studies? posing and answering such questions was always part of expositions. we hope that our current issue, however, presents the work of scholars without being about the jobs of scholars. what is our relationship to the world around us? this perennial question runs throughout our issue. david r. sweet explores the origins of creation in his explication of hesiod’s theogony, while our academic roundtable addresses the moral, political, and methodological implications of holmes rolston, iii’s a new environmental ethics. meanwhile, michael barnes norton’s review of levi r. bryant’s the democracy of objects shows that the hard metaphysical questions – with their political dimensions – are alive and well. these pieces demonstrate the many and varied sites of contention and modes of inquiry open to any who pose the question. http://expositions.journals.villanova.edu/issue/view/19 http://expositions.journals.villanova.edu/issue/view/30 http://expositions.journals.villanova.edu/issue/view/46 http://expositions.journals.villanova.edu/issue/view/46 http://expositions.journals.villanova.edu/issue/view/46 http://expositions.journals.villanova.edu/issue/view/67 http://expositions.journals.villanova.edu/issue/view/67 editor’s preface ii the relationship between abstract ideas and everyday human experience animates our rolston roundtable no less than it does our other features in this issue. alan pichanick’s interview with jonathan lear covers this very question on the occasion of lear’s recent work on irony. our symposium on “the search for the spiritual in saul bellow” examines an intensely profound and wide-reaching (and underappreciated) element of the work of one of the great novelists of the twentieth century. bellow’s work is generally interpreted in the context of his jewish background, but our contributors attend to the myriad strains and traditions from which bellow drew inspiration, from kierkegaard’s existential christianity to wilhelm reich’s psychology of sexual liberation. likewise, julian barnes’ recent the sense of an ending borrows its title and preoccupations from literary theory, and we are delighted that our colleague mary beth simmons could review the novel and catalogue its pleasures for us. many hands assisted in the production of this volume. christian diehm organized the academic roundtable and lee trepanier oversaw the symposium and to them we owe our deepest gratitude. jonathan lear was gracious to speak to us despite a busy schedule and alan pichanick somehow found a way to have a serious conversation about irony. eliza serocki transcribed the interview and provided other editorial support. and lastly, craig b. carpenter provided some crucial assistance with the hesiod essay. tomasi, john [expositions 7.1 (2013) 88–96] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 tomasi, john. free market fairness. princeton: princeton university press, 2012. xxvii + 348 $35.00 (cloth). isbn: 9780691144467. john tomasi’s book is valuable and important not because it concludes an academic conversation about justice in the liberal tradition but because it starts one. this conversation should be of interest to a wide readership, not only specialists in political philosophy. in an academic but extremely accessible way, tomasi discusses justice in contemporary western society: what principles should organize society’s political, economic, and cultural institutions so as to secure and preserve its citizens’ individual rights while simultaneously working for the social good? every reader who lives in a liberal democracy such as the united states, and who has witnessed the tug of war between apparently polar ideologies, between one major political party and the other, between tea party and occupy wall street, will find this of interest. the brown university professor is drawn to aspects of both classical liberalism (including libertarianism) and high, or left, liberalism. tomasi intends for his monograph to inaugurate a broader research program into a genuine hybrid framework for conceiving and then ultimately practicing liberal justice. his primary concern is with political philosophy (identifying the moral standard for evaluating society’s institutions and the range of permissible regime types) and political theory (advocating a regime type among all candidates that may best satisfy the moral standard). public policy is much less extensively discussed. tomasi hopes that the ensuing conversation will help to chart a path through the ideological impasse that currently characterizes u.s. politics, something in which everyone has a stake. this research program may also facilitate more open, regular, and robust teaching and writing about liberalism in all its pluriformity than typically occurs on college campuses. i. tomasi’s book is well-written, well-organized, and well-argued. following an introduction are chapters on the two major branches of liberalism to which tomasi regularly refers: classical liberalism (chapter 1) and high, or left, liberalism (chapter 2). this survey is helpful for its conceptual descriptions, historical profiles, and terminological clarifications, particularly for those readers less familiar than others with political philosophy. more important, however, is the historical arc that tomasi maps: “how the currently dominant left-liberal paradigm displaced the earlier classical liberal one” (xxv), an unbalanced situation with which tomasi is dissatisfied and that occasions this book. chapter 3 offers some reasons why the present cultural moment in the united states may be ripe for a reconsideration of liberalism as a whole. in chapter 4 (87–122), tomasi explains how market democracy and free market fairness as its guiding moral standard meet this challenge. the remainder of the book anticipates and responds to potential objections by classical liberals and libertarians, on the one hand (chapters 5–6), and by high liberals, on the other (chapters 7–8). these chapters crystallize the justification that tomasi adduces in offering 89 carpenter free market fairness as a morally superior political theory to schemes of justice in both major liberal branches. that, ultimately, is the heart of tomasi’s argument. for all of his learned and necessary theoretical nuance, he defends a simple normative claim: the genuine, liberal hybrid of market democracy is morally superior as a political philosophy to both classical liberalism and libertarianism, on the one side, and to high liberalism, on the other. it is not a forced harmonization or compromise. he offers a self-contained and distinctive conception of liberal justice that blends the chief strengths of these two major alternatives. specifically, tomasi gravitates to four key philosophical ideas, two from each major branch of liberalism: “(1) capitalistic economic freedoms as vital aspects of liberty, (2) society as a spontaneous order, (3) just and legitimate political institutions as acceptable to all who make their lives among them, (4) social justice as the ultimate standard of political evaluation” (xv). the first two are from the classical liberal and libertarian branch; the third and fourth are key to the high liberal tradition. demonstrating how these elements, often perceived as irreconcilable, may cooperate in a viable, standalone system is the aim of this initial study. market democracy is the result: “a deliberative form of liberalism that is sensitive to the moral insights of libertarianism” (xv; my emphasis). tomasi’s concision in this summary may conceal the significant and controversial nature of his two-part thesis. some unpacking is needed. by “deliberative,” tomasi means democratic, and this in the sense that the legitimacy of the institutions and their actions is based on principles that can be endorsed by all citizens in that social regime (see: 74, 88, 102, 173–74, 267). society, he affirms, is “a fair system of social cooperation” (xv). the deliberative or democratic characteristic is foundational to forms of liberalism that are committed foremost to the idea that “each person has an equal claim to a fully adequate scheme of basic rights and liberties” (180). high liberals in particular view justice as requiring more than formal equality. society properly ordered according to this liberty principle, in other words, will therefore be based also on some kind of reciprocity among citizens who initially occupy different (i.e., unequal) positions. reciprocity, on the common high liberal understanding, leads to distributional exchanges to secure various outcomes fairer than would otherwise obtain. the reciprocity principle and the exchange process are commonly referred to as social justice. social justice provides each citizen an equal and actual, not merely formal, claim to the basket of basic rights that form the fundamental structure of society. these basic rights are prerequisite for a well-ordered society to function as a fair system of cooperation. the basic liberties combine with the reciprocity principle to shape what john rawls, for instance, refers to as the “basic structure of society”: “the basic structure is the way in which the main political and social institutions of society fit together into one system of social cooperation, and the way they assign basic rights and duties and regulate the division of advantages that arise from social cooperation over time” (rawls 2001, 10). with the reciprocity principle operating in the context of this institutional background justice, citizens may thereby enjoy a fair, not just formal, equality of opportunity to realize fully their capacity as moral, self-governing persons across generations. rawls advances one such review of free market fairness 90 powerful left liberal theory. there are others. for the most part, the family of high liberalism – represented by rawls in tomasi’s account―holds to an egalitarian view of social justice. “we benefit the poor,” as tomasi fairly summarizes egalitarianism, “by working toward institutions that make the holdings, opportunities, and statuses across society more equal [. . .] equality itself [is seen] as a value” (xviii; see: 226–37). such an approach that emphasizes this sort of reciprocity-based fairness, and particularly status, typically subordinates private economic liberty to other liberties deemed more basic or more important for the achievement of moral self-agency. private economic liberty, a central concept for tomasi, refers to the range of freedoms that involve human working and owning. in explaining what he means by the recurring phrase “thick conception of economic liberty,” tomasi borrows four categories from james nickel: labor (employing one’s body and time in accepted arrangements), transacting (managing one’s household and professional economic activity), holding (acquiring, owning, developing, and transacting personal and commercial productive property), and using (decision-making about consuming and producing) (see: 22–23, 89). left liberal regime systems such as those that rawls endorses may permit degrees of these sorts of economic liberty. property-owning democracy, for example, allows but limits personal economic liberty; however, it permits more economic liberty than liberal socialism, which greatly restricts private ownership of productive property. these high liberal, or specifically social democratic, systems, however, do not protect a thick view of economic liberty in the way tomasi thinks of it, because they tend to view the differences that ensue from the real-life exercise of such wide liberties as justice-destroying, not justice-enabling. for instance, wouldn’t protected economic freedoms as basic liberties support price collusion in business, or prevent democratic control of the workplace, and so create unjust hierarchies? for high liberals, either robust economic liberty does not hold the same place and weight as other basic rights (like freedoms of conscience, association, and expression) within the basic structure of society, or a thick view of personal economic liberty is not deemed necessary to the effective exercise of all citizens’ moral powers and the realization of the aims of justice in a fair system of cooperation. tomasi disagrees. we are now positioned to see clearly the innovative and controversial aspect of tomasi’s argument: social justice and a thick conception of private economic liberty. “the distinctive characteristic of market democracy, in all its variations,” tomasi insists, “is that it affirms a thick conception of private economic liberty while being committed to a distributive ideal of social justice” (264). how can this be? an answer emerges by understanding tomasi’s view of social justice. tomasi follows theorists who wish to benefit all members of society, and benefit the least advantaged to the largest degree. these theorists also recognize that greater equality in people’s holdings may result in everyone’s having cumulatively less than each might otherwise have had. “we benefit the poor,” he writes, “by choosing social institutions that generate the largest possible bundle of goods under their personal control (even if, in doing so, some other citizens 91 carpenter may personally control still larger bundles of goods” (xviii; see: 8, 234–36). this view of social justice is humanitarian (or prioritarian), not egalitarian. just the same, this humanitarian approach envisions a society’s institutions as oriented to reciprocity, as working for the greatest benefit of the least advantaged: “the basic rights of all citizens in place, social institutions should be designed so that the members of the poorest class personally control the largest possible bundle of goods (say, wealth and income)” (xviii). envisioned is a form of pareto superiority. most basically, and broadly, however, social justice for tomasi “is not a property of particular distributions, but of social institutions taken as a whole” (xvii). like rawls, tomasi views a primary aim of political justice as promoting the free and fair exercise of people’s capacities as moral self-authors: “in seeking the most appropriate specification of the basic rights and liberties, we seek the specification that most fully allows citizens to develop themselves as responsible self-authors and that also displays the respect that they have for their fellow citizens as responsible self-authors” (82). therefore, market democracy condemns (and would harshly punish) price collusion and fraud as unconscionably disrespectful of fellow citizens as responsible self-authors. democratic control of the workplace is one way to experience economic liberty, but so is determining other terms of willing employment. tomasi’s argument is that “private economic liberties have a special role in protecting citizens as they develop and exercise these moral capacities. the platform of economic exceptionalism [i.e., subordinating private economic liberties to other liberties deemed more basic] renders high liberalism a morally impoverished view” (82). why? because personal agency―whether exercised as a partner in the solution to the problem of poverty (236), or as a social participant with equal political autonomy (183), or as freely having this independent capacity to exercise responsibly along with one’s fellows (232–33)―is basic to the flowering and fulfillment of individual self-authorship which high liberalism affirms. agency, and not merely status, is a good in a just society. the economy is a domain of agency. full personal economic agency is required as one of the social bases for the self-respect that institutions in a just, liberal society are supposed to organize. private economic liberty is therefore an essential ingredient in the basic structure of society for the attainment of justice: “[m]arket democracy affirms capitalistic economic liberties as firstorder requirements of social justice” (xv). indeed, for tomasi market democracy occupies the highest moral position as a genus of liberalism because it enlarges and protects private economic freedom, properly understood, as a first-order, basic liberty that, along and on par with other basic rights, promotes personal self-authorship, and it does so in conjunction with something like rawls’s reciprocity, or difference, principle (see: 121, 184–92). private economic liberty for tomasi is not (simply) instrumental to economic efficiency or distributional ideals, as in classical liberalism. no adam smith. neither does market democracy privilege or exalt as supreme economic liberty above other basic rights, as in orthodox libertarianism. no robert nozick. “instead, market democracy affirms the moral importance of private economic liberty primarily on deliberative grounds: market democracy sees the affirmation of private economic liberty as a requirement of democratic legitimacy itself” (xv). review of free market fairness 92 without private economic liberty, the basic basket of rights in a political system is deficient; this liberty therefore is equally a requirement of real social justice (172). free market fairness―an intentional riff on john rawls’s justice as fairness program―is, tomasi contends, the morally best theory of justice that should guide all market democratic regimes (174–76). ii. although the foregoing accurately represents the main lines of tomasi’s well-researched, boldly conceived, and clearly presented argument, it does not replicate the richness of it. tomasi’s broad and deep working knowledge of classical liberal, libertarian, and high liberal figures is impressive. his novel reading of friedrich hayek on the place of social justice within the spontaneous order not only grounds market democracy’s institutional rather than legislative approach to the basic structure; it will also challenge specialists and non-specialists who read hayek’s explicit (and popularly reproduced) denials of social justice per se out of their conceptual context. readers of tomasi’s monograph will be treated both to a comprehensible discussion of political philosophy’s liberal contours and to a book-side seat of a first-rate theorist’s honestly and civilly practicing the trade. free market fairness invites critical evaluation. indeed, a number of questions arise. most basically, a reader should ask: is market democracy a legitimate hybrid theory of justice? to answer this, one must explore at least two objections: from one side, that market democracy and free market fairness are internally inconsistent; and from the other, that they are, unlike left liberal schemes such as rawls’s, unrealistic. i want to discuss briefly these two objections before introducing a few others and returning to the question of hybridity. along the way i believe we will see why this book will be of interest to diverse groups of readers. first, is it the case, as classical liberals might object, that “social justice, as a concept, is incompatible with the ideal of a society of free individuals” because it “corrodes the spontaneous order upon which a free society depends” (141)? tomasi labels this inflamed reaction to, or disease with, the concept of social justice “social justicitis.” his antidote is to point out the “distributional adequacy condition” for any version of liberalism. the condition is that “the institutions being endorsed are deemed likely to bring about some desired distribution of material and social goods” (126). many classical liberal and libertarian writers, he convincingly demonstrates, have included not an egalitarian version of this condition but a sufficientarian version of it in their theories: every citizen or class of citizen must come to hold some target bundle of real goods regardless of the proportion of that bundle of goods to another’s. much of chapter 5 is devoted to cataloguing this idea in prominent figures from locke to epstein. the rest of the chapter defends the concept of social justice by showing readers how hayek advocates an indirect method of securing a social order that is still “cosmoic” (a spontaneous order that forms independently of human intentionality about achieving a unified goal) rather than “taxitic” (humans organized within a structure, typically centrally planned, to realize an identifiable, unified goal [146]). hayek embraced cosmoic social orders and 93 carpenter energetically rejected taxitic ones. tomasi, in other words, shows by a close reading of many historical texts how one (read: tomasi) can maintain one’s classical liberal credentials―as solid as hayek’s―while supporting what goes by the name social justice in a sufficientarian sense. tomasi explains the indirect method of shaping the social order that hayek approved by quoting him at length: “‘a spontaneous order may rest in part on regularities which are not spontaneous but imposed. [. . .] for policy purposes, there results thus the alternative whether it is preferable to secure the formation of an order by a strategy of indirect approach, or by directly assigning a place for each element and describing its function in detail’” (in tomasi 2012,155; my emphasis). the path to providing social justice while still being taxitic is, for tomasi, by putting in place the right institutional framework that will “support a society that is both distributively fair and economically free” (226; see: 159–60). for example, to reduce or remove the “corrupting influence of money in politics” and to provide fair political equality, market democracies would constitutionally “restrict the range of economic issues that are allowed on the political agenda,” rather than “seeking to equalize political influence by constructing elaborate [legislative] programs that seek to equalize wealth across society” (252–53). tomasi’s well-documented reading of hayek is undisputedly a minority report, but there is something to it, something that rings true. for political theorists, it is worth pursuing and revisiting hayek himself, who so greatly influenced margaret thatcher and serves as a gateway for many libertarians to the austrian economic school. if fully appreciated, this insight about regularities imposed indirectly on a spontaneous order will also be a helpful corrective to the oversimplified everyday political caricatures that frequently occur in debates about classical liberalism and free market society. teachers and students of locke, smith, madison, and others, moreover, may read them with increased sensitivity to their socio-political complexity, and to the readers’ presuppositions in approaching them. second, is a market democratic interpretation of justice as fairness―what tomasi calls free market fairness―realistic? is it able to realize justice as fairness? throughout the book, john rawls is tomasi’s major conversation partner. this is because tomasi himself believes that rawls’s theory of justice as fairness is, once corrected along market democratic lines, the most compelling liberal scheme on offer (175). i might add that rawls’s is perhaps both the most tightly argued and the most pervasively assumed, and pursued, high liberal theory of justice in at least the united states. this does not mean that people with similar political and moral views explicitly credit them to rawls. it is, rather, that his theory is in the air that u.s. citizens breathe both on campuses of higher education and in much mainstream media. persuasively arguing that market democracy meets rawls’s core criteria of justice as fairness and exceeds it in granting moral self-agency to citizens would be a philosophical coup (see: 227–28). does tomasi succeed? in chapters 7–8 (especially, 203–15), he explains what ideal theory is and meticulously shows how both rawls’s and his respective proposals realize justice as fairness―on their own preferred social democratic and market democratic interpretations. by and large tomasi argues his case convincingly. review of free market fairness 94 this section on ideal theory, or feasible aspirational standards, is the most conceptually abstract in the book and will test the patience of the non-specialist. it is also the most important for understanding how free market fairness, like rawls’s influential justice as fairness view, is realistically utopian. what does it mean to be realistically utopian? “for a candidate regime type to achieve this, it must aim to satisfy [its] standard of justice by means of institutional arrangements that even if unlikely to fully achieve justice if adopted by an actual society are not utterly utopian with respect to that aspiration” (264–65). rawls used ideal theory to help him identify the desired goal of justice in society, which might not be fully instantiated now but which might under more favorable conditions later be secured. that is, in ideal theory a regime type realizes justice as fairness (or free market fairness) if it pursues that moral standard with arrangements that are sociologically realistic under the most auspicious historical, cultural, and economic conditions (see especially: 222–25). here tomasi is compelling. he does not appear to commit any fallacies in his analogical modus ponens reasoning: if rawls’s justice as fairness theory is sociologically realistic on the most favorable conditions (ideal theory), then it realizes justice; rawls’s justice as fairness theory is sociologically realistic; therefore, it realizes justice. the same is true, mutatis mutandis, of market democracy and free market fairness. this is logically valid. where readers may object most is to the further moral superiority conclusion that tomasi draws. this is the inference that free market fairness is morally better as an ideal regime―it offers a “more inspiring [moral] ideal” (265)―than justice as fairness because free market fairness (a) equally realizes social justice within the institutional arrangements of ideal theory and also (b) provides a fuller basket of, and greater protection to, basic rights and liberties (including a thick conception of personal economic liberty). (tomasi makes a similar argument that high liberalism’s reasons for affirming thin property rights should lead to affirmation of market democracy’s thick view [76–79].) readers may demur because they dispute practical feasibility. these doubts should be raised but must be considered in terms of (and then may be much alleviated by) ideal theory (see especially: 227–47). readers may also affirm the ultimate value of securing self-authorship for citizens but protest the empirical claim (see: 182–84) that increased control of goods and wealth augments the value that individuals place on agency, in addition to status, in a justice-realizing regime. or they may question whether thick economic liberties can or should be basic liberties. the challenge for high liberals would be to provide “a moral explanation of how any such narrowing of private economic liberty enhances the status of persons as responsible self-authors” (82). tomasi suggests that readers who are attracted to the rawlsian vision of justice as fairness but who resist his vision of free market fairness bear the burden of proof: if both systems realize social justice, why is rawls’s ideal, with fewer constitutional guarantees of basic liberties, morally better than tomasi’s ideal, which provides them? this is a powerful a fortiori argument. it invites responses. that is precisely the conversation that tomasi desires. one line of critical reply is that tomasi understands social justice differently 95 carpenter than do left liberals, but he seems to claim that because he uses the same criterion for evaluating just institutions as left liberals his view is morally superior to theirs. he would be guilty of equivocation, using polyvalence to his argumentative advantage. is the difference between tomasi’s humanitarian (or sufficientarian) and rawls’s egalitarian conceptions of social justice sufficiently minor as to admit of this type of reasoning? i think the differences do admit this reasoning for tomasi’s stated purposes. he is unequivocal in applying to market democracy rawls’s difference principle: that differences in goods among social members must work to the greatest benefit to the least advantaged. this is a sufficient point of contact for the common pursuit of social justice on rawls’s and his preferred interpretation of it. the divergence lies in the primary paths taken to achieve social justice: legislative (for social democratic regime types) vs. constitutional (for market democratic ones [see: 252]). tomasi acknowledges that someone who affirms an egalitarian view of social justice will be unhappy with market democracy. his aim, however, is to carve out a legitimate place for the pursuit of social justice in a way that does not require the institutions and procedures of left liberalism (see: 271; also: 269, 85). not all will be convinced that this is legitimate. not all readers will concede that it will be publicly valuable to improve conditions for the least advantaged by “a strategy of wide private economic liberty, limited government, rapid economic growth, and by guarding the space within which a vibrant civil society might develop and grow” (230). nor will they agree that “the system that most benefits the poor is the one that best encourages the production of goods, opportunities and experiences that those citizens find valuable,” including enlarged economic agency for moral self-authorship (231). nor still will they grant the deliberative point that “the public affirmation of a system of commercial exchange that aims at raising the [personally controlled] income of the least well-off is a profoundly democratic expression of reciprocity” (231). tomasi is undeterred. anticipating this reaction, he clarifies that market democracy is not a trickle-down theory and that it does not claim that “market distributions define social justice” (231). ultimately, his argument, and hope, is that many readers will reconsider the value of moral self-authorship as a social goal, the fullest ability “to conceive of and carry out their distinctive life plans” within a fair system of equal opportunity―not for the poor or least advantaged only but for everyone generally, whether in wealth, education, health care, or the like. this is a fair system that secures social justice through institutional arrangements which maximize the bundle of goods under each person’s personal control and “protects every citizen from domination in the formulation of the rules and policies that are to govern cooperative life” (249; see: 251–52, 267). so then, is market democracy a true hybrid theory of liberalism that respects (i) society as a spontaneous order, (ii) private economic liberty, (iii) deliberative legitimacy, and (iv) social justice as the institutional evaluative standard? probably the best answer is itself a hybrid: yes, if you grant ideal theory; no, if you don’t. answering “yes” does not entail acceptance of tomasi’s central thesis. it merely acknowledges that his thesis cannot be easily dismissed. in seeking to make room for free market review of free market fairness 96 fairness at the table of liberal theories of justice, tomasi has given citizens and scholars alike much to consider. he has produced an incisive account of a genuine hybrid form of liberalism that deserves a wide readership and equally wide discussion. craig b. carpenter havertown, pennsylvania work cited rawls, john. 2001. justice as fairness: a restatement. edited by erin kelly. cambridge: belknap/harvard university press. © equinox publishing ltd. 2008, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expositions 2.2 (2008) 139–146] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v2i2.139 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 framing pains, pills, and professors anjan chatterjee department of neurology and the center for cognitive neuroscience university of pennsylvania introduction we are accustomed to anabolic athletes, medicated musicians and souped-up students. now it appears that we can add pill-popping professors to this list (sahakian and morein-zamir 2007). “cosmetic neurology” is the term i used to describe the practice of using neurologic interventions to improve movement, mood, and mentation in healthy individuals. the specific kinds of enhancements that might be possible and the ethical concerns (safety, distributive justice, coercion, and the erosion of character) they raise are detailed elsewhere (chatterjee 2004, 2006). despite ethical concerns, i have argued that the practice of cosmetic neurology is likely to become widespread (chatterjee 2007). this point is predictive, not prescriptive. it means, though, that it is likely less useful to discuss whether this practice should occur than to consider what form this practice should take. sorting this out will prove to be quite difficult itself, because translating principle into practice runs up against the problem of conflicting reference frames that can alter one’s view of the practice. these multiple reference frames determine what it means to be a good person or to construct a good society. i hope to illustrate the problem of conflicting reference frames by examining a special case, before returning to the issue that triggered this commentary—that of pill-popping professors. the specific case, modulations of emotional systems to treat psychological pain, is of particular concern. there is an urgent need to ease the psychological burdens imposed by significantly traumatic events. thousands of young men and women will experience posttraumatic stress following our military adventures. few would argue against treating such individuals. but what about less severe traumas? beta-blockers may prevent minor post-traumatic stress symptoms when given in emergency rooms to individuals after car accidents. in addition to the use of medications to dampen the emotional effects of memories retrospectively, presumably medications might be used to dampen the effects of emotions prospectively 140 framing pains, pills, and professors © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 by affecting the encoding of memories. assuming that such medications will be effective and others will be available in the near future, how widely would they be used? presumably they might be used in all sorts of “normal” traumas such as break-ups in relationships and other disappointments that seem integral to our humanity. what would the long-term consequences be of flattening these bumps in the road with medications? do we need pain to develop character? beyond individual development, what is the role of pain in binding us communally? empathy for the experience of pain in others may be mediated through the observer’s own neural pain circuits. if pain circuits are chronically dampened, then would an individual still be capable of empathy? communally, would we be even more inclined to sanitize inflicting pain on others as damage collateral to the service of a greater cause? in thinking through concerns around treating psychological pain, it is useful to review how medical developments historically dealt with the treatment of physical pain. uncertainties about how to treat physical pain appropriately are similar to uncertainties about how to treat psychological pain. the historic trajectory of thinking about physical pain may anticipate the thinking about psychological pain (chatterjee 2008). anesthesia for pain in the nineteenth century, significant medical advances made it possible to use anesthesia to ease the pain of surgery and of childbirth (caton 1999). the pain of childbirth is particularly relevant in so far as this pain is “natural.” at the heart of objections to using anesthesia for childbirth pain was the social construction of the meaning of pain. treatment of pain was objectionable on three grounds: don’t mess with mother nature; spare the rod, spoil the child; and no pain, no gain. pain as natural from the very beginning, some obstetricians objected to the use of anesthesia for childbirth pain because this pain was natural and interventions invited medical disaster (caton 1999). the general worry was that we are not wise enough to anticipate the unintended consequences of these actions. ether had significant dangers. concerns surfaced that anesthesia might interfere with uterine contractions or directly impair the infant’s well-being when it became clear that anesthetics crossed the placenta into the infant’s circulation. however, the popularity of anesthesia continued to rise with support from the media and advocacy groups. further medical developments making safety less of a concern also contributed to an increased use of anesthesia for childbirth. chatterjee 141 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 the appeal of things natural remained and resurfaced with force in the mid twentieth century. grant dick read promoted the natural childbirth movement. he suggested that women were better off being conscious through the process and were emotionally fulfilled by seeing and welcoming the child as it emerged into the world. around the same time, lamaze published “painless childbirth” promoting his own techniques of natural childbirth. in 1956 pope pius xxii gave a special address on the moral value of natural childbirth, giving these approaches spiritual weight. this address coincided with a period in which the public was less optimistic about medicine’s ability to alleviate illness and pain. pain as punishment within religious traditions, pain is sometimes understood as a vehicle for atonement. in the judeo-christian tradition, the link between the pain of childbirth and punishment is made explicitly in genesis (3:16). the puritan minister cotton mather, who wrote a textbook of medicine and was an advocate of inoculations for smallpox, declared that “[t]he sin of our first parents was the first parent of all our sickness.” the notion of pain and suffering as deserved is evident in other traditions. in the oresteia, aeschylus had the furies declare that “every mortal who outraged gods or guest or loving parent: each receives the pain his pains exact” (aeschylus 1977, 268). self-infliction of pain as an act of atonement remains prominent in christian, muslim, and hindu traditions. while the view of pain as deserved punishment has its adherents in religion, similar views appear in secular writings. in colonial america, brutal public punishments were sanctioned to serve as both public entertainment and education. relieving deserved pain was considered an invitation to social chaos. pain as progress pain is also considered a vehicle for development. this development can be thought of in both individual and communal terms. in spiritual contexts, pain serves as a vehicle for transcendence. in secular contexts, pain builds character. writers explored the experience of pain and suffering as integral to larger than life characters in literature, such as prometheus, hamlet, and faustus. hemingway claimed “[y]ou especially have to hurt like hell before you can write seriously” (quoted in caton 1999, 211), a sentiment echoed by many others linking pain to creativity. pain also serves to strengthen social bonds. religious views that a god that punishes also heals give reason for communities to rejoice together in that 142 framing pains, pills, and professors © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 healing. in the context of childbirth, the traditional ways of delivery served to solidify social bonds. the pain of childbirth and the real possibility of death meant that neighbors and family and friends supported the event in a way that often formed life-long bonds. countervailing reference frames despite the various ways in which the treatment of physical pain was (and sometimes continues to be) viewed with mistrust, the use of pharmacology for pain management is now widespread. two ways of reframing the meaning of pain facilitated this change. the first was framing pain treatment as a mechanical rather than a metaphysical manipulation. the second was framing pain treatment as one element of the humanitarian goal of relieving suffering. the classification of pain as a biologic phenomenon diluted the impact of religious interpretations of pain. very early in the use of anesthesia, simpson divested the pain of childbirth of its religious interpretations. he emphasized that pain was a consequence of anatomy and not divine wrath. in the early twentieth century, sherrington observed that complex behavior could be analyzed as a set of reflexes co-ordinated to carry out goals, and pain and our response to it could be viewed as a complex reflex arc. the discovery of different sensory receptors and the mediation of pain by specific pathways made explicit the possibility of manipulating that pain. this mapping of pain onto its biology helped frame its treatment as one more mechanical manipulation. humanitarianism also contributed to reframing the meaning of pain. the goal of alleviating pain fell naturally into reform movements like women’s suffrage, abolitionism, prison reform, and child labor reform. along with these movements, in the late nineteenth century, the public attitude towards pain shifted. as william james wrote, a strange moral transformation has, within the past century, swept over our western world. we no longer think that we are called on to face physical pain with equanimity…. the way our ancestors looked upon pain as an eternal ingredient of the world order, and both caused and suffered it as a matter-of-course portion of their day’s work, fills us with amazement. (quoted in caton 1999, 93) the problem of pain physical pain produces neural responses that sort into different components (price 2000). first is the sensory experience itself. parts of somatosensory chatterjee 143 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 cortex and sensory relays of the thalamus mediate the sensory aspects of pain. second is the subjective sense of “unpleasantness,” which is mediated by the insula and the anterior cingulate. the insula controls our autonomic nervous system. the anterior cingulate integrates attentional and cognitive experiences of pain with their emotional valence and establishes priorities for possible responses. finally, pain produces emotional feelings directed at the long-term implications of having pain. the amygdala, anterior cingulate, insula, and prefrontal cortex are all part of the distributed network that mediates emotional distress and its interactions with our cognitive systems, providing the neural underpinning where physical and emotional pain converge. as the understanding of the neurobiology of emotional systems deepens, treatment of psychological pain becomes more easily viewed as a mechanical rather than a metaphysical manipulation. similarly, it is hard not to see such intervention in humanitarian terms. some estimate that up to a quarter of the u.s. population suffer from affective or addictive disorders (kessler et al. 2005). how could anybody seriously object to the alleviation of this suffering, even if it means that some might pop pills for less compelling reasons? the fundamental problem in using first principles to establish a coherent position on ameliorating psychological pain is that any general unease around widespread treatment of pain does not cohere when specific instances are considered. at issue is whether we view pain as important to living a good life or whether we frame pain as an impediment to living a good life. attitudes towards psychological pain and its treatment fragment into competing and conflicting frames that are held simultaneously (chatterjee 2008; see parens 2005 for a similar discussion about ambivalences around enhancement and authenticity). we can worry about loss of character individually and communally, yet at the same time we frame psychological pain in biological or broad humanitarian terms. we might share the general sense that some things are best left alone, but we are unlikely to agree about which specific things are best left alone. we might share the view that pain serves a purpose in establishing order, but we are unlikely to concur which pains can be justified and for whose version of order. we might share the general sense that pain can be a vehicle for development, but we are unlikely to share opinions of which specific pains are worth enduring for which specific gains. pill-popping professors what about academics using brain boosters? while there was relatively little new information in the article in nature, it attracted considerable attention. perhaps this attention was fueled by the fact that the practice was not about 144 framing pains, pills, and professors © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 “those people” (athletes, students, soldiers), but about us—academics. professional narcissism aside, how might we view the possibility that the practice of academics taking cognitive enhancers could become widespread? analogous to the way that treatment of pain can be viewed as important to living a good life or not, enhancing professors can be viewed as important to constructing a good society or not. as in the case of psychological pain, the evaluation of the practice of cosmetic neurology depends on which frame of reference is brought to bear on this question. here, a “greater good” frame conflicts with a “fairness in competition” frame. the greater good frame is as follows. some workers have a disproportionate impact on the greater good of our society. their functioning well bears directly on societal health and protection. it is no surprise that considerable research and use of cognitive enhancers occur in the armed forces. there is little public outrage at this practice. the logic is that our military serves a vital public role, and it is in our interest that military personnel perform at their peak. a variant of this greater good frame is a revelatory one. on this view, cognitive enhancers clear the way for one’s natural talents to be revealed. the prime example of a practice framed this way is the widespread use of betablockers by musicians to dampen tremors and reduce performance anxiety. again, there is little public outrage at this practice. a line seems to be drawn between the intrinsic talent to perform music and the ways this talent could be hampered by the performer’s messy affective state. the fairness in competition frame is as follows. we want a level playing field so that, when individuals compete with each other, we observe their intrinsic talents on display, the consequences of their hard work and discipline, such that the best person wins. this sensibility pervades the public view of sport. consequently, there is considerable public outcry at each story of baseball players or track athletes taking anabolic steroids or amphetamines to enhance their performance. here the enhancers are seen as compromising something essential to the performance. the sense of fair play, intrinsic to the joy of competition, is violated. and individual achievement, which we admire, is sullied. how do these reference frames, admittedly drawn coarsely, map onto academia? the greater good frame seems obvious. academics are in the business of uncovering new knowledge, making discoveries and generally enhancing the quality of our lives. the public would want academics at the peak of their potential, because their product serves a greater good. the revelatory variation might also apply to academics. talented academics have a gift. they serve as vehicles for discovery, insight, and creativity—and the medications chatterjee 145 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 used to facilitate the delivery of these gifts are desirable. on these grounds, one might think there is no problem with academics using enhancers. pillpopping professors would be desirable insofar as they more effectively contribute to the construction of a good society. the fairness frame also applies to academics. one might imagine academics as pure altruists dedicated to the sole purpose of advancing knowledge. on this view, no such thing as professional rivalry would exist. academics would not compete with each other, and everybody would co-operate in the grand program of advancing society. would that it were so. academics, like others, compete for professional promotions and accolades, wish to be first in their discoveries, and hustle in the marketplace of ideas. we are subject to winner-take-all environments in which incremental advantages can result in disproportionate rewards. these competitive aspects of academia are on the rise. in academic medicine, “publish or perish” seems a quaint anachronism of a kinder and gentler time. “cash or crash” seems more appropriate as many tenured academics in medicine lack guaranteed salaries and are only as valuable as their last grant. medicine might seem more like a dingy dungeon than an ivory tower, but these financial pressures on medical academics arose out of desires to contain medical costs. given the continuously rising cost of higher education, similar pressures might also apply to other academic settings. in this frame, the use of cognitive enhancers is problematic on two grounds: first, it violates our notions of fairness; and, second, as competition rises, it could be deeply coercive. pill-popping professors reify the uglier aspects of competition. by endorsing a system in which the benefits of “progress” outweigh almost any cost, they contribute to the breakdown of a good society. in summary, the nature article alludes to a trend in the use of cognitive enhancers among academics that, in my view, is likely to continue. this use is yet another example, albeit closer to home for those reading this journal, of the increasing practice of cosmetic neurology. whether one views this practice with anticipation or with alarm depends on which conflicting reference frame one brings to bear upon the issue. acknowledgment i would like to thank lisa santer, erik parens and barry schwartz for their helpful comments and critical insights that enhanced this piece, hopefully for the greater good. 146 framing pains, pills, and professors © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 references aeschylus 1977 the oresteia. trans. r.t. fagles. new york: bantam books. caton, d. 1999 what a blessing she had chloroform: the medical and social response to the pain of childbirth from 1800 to the present. new haven, ct: yale university press. chatterjee, a. 2004 cosmetic neurology: the controversy over enhancing movement, mentation and mood. neurology 63: 968–974. 2006 the promise and predicament of cosmetic neurology. the journal of medical ethics 32: 110–113. doi:10.1136/jme.2005.013599 2007 cosmetic neurology and cosmetic surgery: parallels, predictions and challenges. cambridge quarterly of healthcare ethics 16: 129–137. doi:10.1017/s0963180107070156 2008 “cosmetic neurology” and the problem of pain. in cerebrum 2008: emerging ideas in brain science, ed. c. read. new york: dana press. kessler, r.c., w.t. chui, o. demler, and e.e. walters 2005 prevalence, severity, and comorbidity of 12-month dsm iv disorders in the national comorbidity survey replication. archives of general psychiatry 62: 617–627. doi:10.1001/archpsyc.62.6.617 parens, e. 2005 authenticity and ambivalence. hastings center report 35(3): 34–41. price, d.d. 2000 psychological and neural mechanisms of the affective dimension of pain. science 288: 1769–1772. sahakian, b., and s. morein-zamir 2007 professor’s little helper. nature 450: 1157–1159. doi:10.1038/4501157a http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/jme.2005.013599 http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0963180107070156 http://dx.doi.org/10.1001/archpsyc.62.6.617 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/4501157a [expositions 6.2 (2012) 48-51] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 making the case for what matters: the future of the english department janine utell widener university almost a year ago, i was standing in the hallway outside the office of congressman glenn thompson, representative for the fifth congressional district of pennsylvania (the one that includes penn state). i’d never been in the cannon building — i’d never been in any legislative building of any kind — and i had an odd sense of gratitude. i felt grateful that i could walk into that building as an informed, concerned citizen, and make an argument for — advocate for — something i know is important. i was there as part of humanities advocacy day, an annual event devoted to lobbying members of congress for increased (or at least maintained) support for the humanities: the national endowment for the humanities, local humanities councils, and fellowship programs such as the fulbright. the national humanities alliance gathers representatives from organizations devoted to the humanities, from universities, museums and libraries, for its yearly meeting. it offers panels and roundtables on current issues and research in the humanities, and then trains participants to lobby using portfolios of data, up-to-the-minute status of legislation before congress, and budget priorities. i traveled to this meeting as an individual, a faculty member, and as chair of the english department at a small-to-mid-sized regional comprehensive metropolitan university that tries to integrate the liberal arts with work in professional fields like nursing. i did so because i believe the future of the english department rests in the hands of those willing to advocate for its work and values, those ready to make the argument for its necessity, those equipped to be vocal both on campus and beyond. the writers participating in this roundtable all come from fairly traditional academic backgrounds and training, but all are intensely cognizant of the ways the field is changing. all are paying close attention — at conferences, in conversations facilitated by social media, on the tenure track and off — and all are thinking about how to expand and redefine the role of the english department and their own place in it (or outside of it). academics who identify as members of the discipline of english are active in the open access movement, the alternative academic (or alt-ac) movement, the digital humanities movement. all of these are transforming how we think about doing english, and these currents can be felt in the rarefied air of the modern language association as well as in community colleges, four-year schools, research libraries, centers and institutes and councils devoted to the study and proliferation of the humanities. 49 utell this brief capsule actually makes it sound as though the field of english studies is dynamic, exciting, innovative. we are, and have always been, in a sense, the original disruptors. the ideas to be gleaned from the texts we study and teach still have the power to transform. in the 1920s and 30s we made the radical case that students should have the opportunity to study poetry published in their lifetime, and that the study thereof was even worth doing in college. in the 1970s and 80s we cracked open the edifice of the ivory tower to let in new ideas about race, class, gender, and ideology. even today, as higher education professionals appropriate language from the harvard business review blog and talk about “innovative disruption,” “flipping” their classrooms by having students actually prepare material outside of class (i.e., do homework) and come in ready to discuss and problem-solve, we scratch our heads and say: well, we’ve been doing that. we create a space for the enthusiastic exchange of ideas, and we bring students into it. so, then why all the talk about decline? why all the concern about relevance? a number of factors have been cited as causing the “decline” of the humanities, and of english in particular. commentators have suggested the corporatization of the university is to blame; frank donoghue in the last professors: the corporate university and the fate of the humanities (2008) describes the current academic workplace as exploitative and competitive, not the hothouse of ideas scholars in the humanities had been somehow led to believe they would find upon completing a ph.d. faculty are preoccupied with chasing publications and grants, administrators are obsessed with outcomes and productivity, and everyone is serving on too many committees. donoghue also notes a fundamental tension between teaching and research that pulls at humanities scholars; more so than other fields, the humanities, especially english, is defined in large part by labor-intensive teaching, usually in writing. while many teacher-scholars of english imagined themselves reading and discussing the texts they love, writing and doing research, what a large number of english faculty wind up doing is teaching, and teaching writing — often in a perilous state of contingency, and often with great commitment to excellence. those numbers are growing, and are being held increasingly accountable, even with no power and few resources, for data that shows students cannot read, write, or think (as demonstrated in arum and roksa’s recent academically adrift: limited learning on college campuses (2011)). calls for data, for evidence-based assessment, stem from a need, whether perceived or actual, to make claims for the value of higher education, particularly in the face of everrising tuition. this leads directly into asking explicitly whether a degree in english is “worth” what a student might pay in tuition, and whether such a degree might lead to gainful employment that will offset student loan debt sufficiently to allow a graduate to survive. media outlets ranging from npr to the wall street journal to the new york daily news interrogate the worth of a liberal arts degree on an almost weekly basis, and members of english departments everywhere have wrung their hands in desperation at having to answer for it as they watch the numbers of majors and the size of enrollments making the case for what matters 50 dwindle. in an article for the american scholar, william m. chace outlines the issues raised above, and then turns on the discipline itself with a withering critique: we have destroyed ourselves by neglecting the tradition we have been charged with sustaining. he writes: i have long wanted to believe that i am a member of a profession, a discipline to which i could, if fortunate, add my knowledge and skill. i have wanted to believe that this discipline had certain borders and limitations and that there were essential things to know, to preserve, and to pass on. but it turns out that everything now is porous, hazy, and open to never-ending improvisation, cancellation, and rupture. while it is true that the discipline has been fractured — the culture wars are a favorite scapegoat for this, but louis menand in the marketplace of ideas (2010) has a more reasoned exploration of the role of the move towards interdisciplinarity as well — it does not necessarily follow that the preserving of tradition is all an english department in the twenty-first century is good for. i read much of what i’ve outlined here as a resistance to making a case for our own relevance and for what we can and should do in the twenty-first century. much of the discourse around “the crisis in the humanities” hearkens back to a time when the relevance, even necessity, of the english department was taken for granted as foundational to the liberal arts education. we must be in decline, these voices say, if we have to convince people we matter, especially as the numbers of majors appear to be falling and english courses are being cut from general education curricula. i do not consider having to make a case for the importance of what i do a “crisis”; i consider it an opportunity to share what i do and the value it brings to my students, my school, and my society. when i attend the annual meeting of the national humanities alliance and hear what is being done in archives, in digital humanities, in public history, i cannot fathom why anyone would say the humanities are moribund. some of the most exciting work — and some of the best investments in public monies — are happening in the humanities. when i walk into the office of an elected representative and am given the opportunity to speak on behalf of my discipline, and on behalf of my students who are investing time and money in the study of that discipline, i am doing my job as a member of that discipline. and when i present data to my colleagues and administrators that show our students have made gains in writing and critical thinking as a result of their study of literature, i am doing my job as a faculty member and a department chair. i may believe that the study of literature provides, as kenneth burke wrote, “equipment for living,” and i communicate that position to my students in my teaching, but as an advocate for my students, my faculty, and my discipline, i work to provide hard evidence for that idea as well. 51 utell the future of the english department does not have to involve online courses and forprofit universities; such things may very well lead to the “death of the humanities,” as was suggested by aurelien mondon and gerhard hoffstaedter in a recent piece for the guardian. but we should not be considering this gloomy prediction from a position of fear for our own status. rather we should be mindful of how trends in higher education compromise the very things we believe the humanities, and study of english should do: engage the mind, demand the asking of big questions, foster the ability to craft an argument with nuance and complexity, sharpen the eye for details and their significance. and if we believe in these things, then they are worth our attempts to argue for them, and we should. the nimbleness of mind we seek in our own interpretive work, and that we encourage in our students, might be brought to bear on these shifts in our professional lives. in order to convince students to join our departments, colleagues to save a place (preferably the cornerstone) for us in general education curricula, and administrators to see that we bring value to our campus, we must model that nimbleness, and cultivate an investment so deep in what we do that we are willing to take to the hustings to defend it — in a way that makes sense to multiple constituencies and takes into account their multiple perspectives. because it matters. works cited arum, richard, and josipa roksa. 2011. academically adrift: limited learning on college campuses. chicago: university of chicago press. burke, kenneth. 1938. “literature as equipment for living.” direction 1: 10-13. chace, william m. 2013. “the decline of the english department.” the american scholar. web. accessed 14 january 2013. donoghue, frank. 2008. the last professors: the corporate university and the fate of the humanities. new york: fordham university press. menand, louis. 2010. the marketplace of ideas: reform and resistance in the american university. new york: norton. mondon, aurelien, and gerhard hoffstaedter. 2012. “could online courses be the death of the humanities?” the guardian 7 december. web. accessed 14 january 2013. microsoft word bassham review of metz.docx [expositions 9.1 (2015) 142–148] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376   metz, thaddeus. meaning in life: an analytic study. oxford: oxford university press, 2014. 288pp. $45.00 (cloth). isbn: 978–0–199–59931–8 questions about the meaning of life are among the deepest and most important questions humans can ask. such questions include:  does the universe have any meaning or purpose? (the question of cosmic meaning.)  does my life have any meaning or purpose? (the question of individual meaning.)  if my life does have some meaning or purpose, is that entirely up to me? partially up to me? or not up to me at all?  could it be—as existential nihilists claim—that life has no meaning whatsoever? if so, how should we respond to that complete lack of meaning?  if life can have meaning, what forms do such meanings take, which modes of meaningfulness are most important, and how can i make my own life as meaningful as possible? these are deep questions because they force us to think about ultimate issues about the nature of reality and what our highest priorities in life should be. they are also important questions because the quest for meaning is one of the most fundamental and persistent drives in human nature. how we answer such questions may determine whether we live lives of happiness and purpose, or instead struggle with feelings of apathy, anomie, and despair. over the past three decades, an extensive body of high-quality literature has developed in anglo-american philosophy on the cluster of related issues collectively known as “the meaning of life.” one of the most significant participants in that discussion has been the south african philosopher, thaddeus metz. metz’s meaning in life is an important contribution to the growing academic literature on the meaning of life. over the past fifteen years, metz has published prolifically in the field and is the author of a superb stanford encyclopedia of philosophy article on the topic. meaning in life is mostly cobbled together from previously published articles, and shows it in places with certain oddities of emphasis and focus. whatever one thinks about the particular conclusions metz defends, the book unquestionably provides a helpful framework and vocabulary for thinking about the relevant issues. 143 bassham       like most contemporary philosophers who write on the meaning of life, metz focuses almost entirely on questions of individual meaning. issues of “cosmic” or “holistic” meaning are addressed only to the extent that they directly impinge on questions of individual meaning. metz’s book has three main parts. the first part seeks to clarify what we mean when we ask about the “meaning” of an individual human life. in part ii, he considers a number of supernaturalist theories of meaning, and in part iii he discusses two prominent naturalistic accounts of meaning: what he calls subjective naturalism and objective naturalism. he concludes with a critique of existential nihilism. metz begins by unpacking the general concept of meaning and setting forth what he believes a theory of meaning must include. in his view, meaning is something that comes in degrees, varies from person to person, can be manifested in both the parts and in the whole of an individual’s life, is intrinsically desirable as an end in itself, is roughly synonymous with terms such as “significance” or “importance,” and is exemplified most saliently by certain kinds of intellectual excellence (think: albert einstein), moral achievement (think: mother teresa), and artistic creation (think: pablo picasso). meaning should not be confused, he argues, with absurdity, which consists in a kind of conspicuous or ludicrous incongruity. nor should meaning be confused with futility, which is roughly the idea of persistent failure to achieve one’s ends (6). more debatably, metz argues that a meaningful life should not be identified with a happy life. metz rightly notes that that there is nothing contradictory in speaking of a “happy but meaningless life,” or, conversely, of a “meaningful but unhappy life.” as examples of meaningless but happy lives, he cites (a) nozick’s example of an intensely pleasure-filled life lived inside an experience machine1 and (b) richard taylor’s example of a drug-fueled sisyphus joyously (but futilely) rolling a rock up a hill for all eternity.2 plausibly, he takes such examples to show that meaning does not consist simply in pleasure or happiness. but metz also argues for a stronger conclusion—that pleasure or happiness as such cannot even contribute to a meaningful life (27). as he sees it, a life of sisyphean rock-rolling, however pleasurable or joyous, is a paradigm of absolute meaninglessness. it follows, therefore, that pleasure or happiness per se can contribute nothing to a meaningful life. this claim is implausible. as richard taylor famously argues (but later retracted (metz 174– 75)), a joyous sisyphean life of endlessly pointless rock-rolling would not, in fact, be a paradigm of complete meaninglessness. rather, it would possess a kind of “subjective meaning” in virtue of the fact that sisyphus finds it to be deeply meaningful, enjoyable, and fulfilling. moreover, such a life may also possess a kind of objective meaning inasmuch as it involves at least two objective and intrinsic goods (happiness and pleasure). if, as many theorists claim, whatever has intrinsic value has at least some degree of meaningfulness, then (pace metz) sisyphus’s life does have at least some meaning, however minimal. review of meaning in life 144   as metz acknowledges, his view of the connection between meaning and happiness seems to commit him to the highly implausible claim that taylor’s classic discussion of the meaning of life isn’t about “meaning” at all. those theorists who speak of empty, objectively insignificant pleasures as contributing to meaningfulness are “conceptually confused,” metz argues (30). in his view, nothing that belongs merely to our “animal self” can confer any meaning whatsoever (29– 30). what has gone wrong here? the fatal mistake, i suggest, is metz’s virtual identification of “meaning” with the notions of “significance” or “importance” (see, e.g., 79). as tom morris argues, meaning has to do not only with significance or importance, but also, crucially, with the notions of purpose and value.3 metz focuses unduly on one element of this triad, forcing him to draw counterintuitive conclusions at many points in his analysis. having clarified what he takes to be the generic concept of individual (human) life-meaning, metz turns next to consider the leading theories of meaningfulness in the academic literature. his principal focus is on the conditions that contribute to what we might term a highly or richly meaningful life. he says relatively little—directly at least—about such important issues as: a) are there any human beings that lead (or could lead) completely meaningless lives? if so, why? what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for a life to have any meaning at all? b) given that some activities (e.g., twiddling your thumbs) can be meaning-neutral, and other activities (cf. 64) can be meaning-subtractors (e.g., blowing up the sphinx just for the fun of it), what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for a human life to “meaningful” on balance? metz focuses on three main (families of) theories of what gives meaning to individual human lives: supernaturalism (roughly, the view that god, or something spiritual, gives meaning to life), subjective naturalism (roughly, the idea that individuals give their own lives meaning through their own freely-chosen values and commitments), and objective naturalism (the view that lives have meaning to the extent that they connect with important objective values, such as truth , goodness, beauty, etc.). (confusingly, metz classifies any naturalistic theory that allows for both subjective and objective modes of meaningfulness as an “objective” theory. it would be preferable to call these “mixed” theories.) metz ultimately defends a version of objective naturalism. briefly, metz argues that subjective naturalism is untenable because it implies that utterly pointless and insignificant activities like joyous sisyphean rock-rolling or nozickian experiencemachine pleasure-surfing would be meaningful, when in fact they are completely devoid of meaning. we have seen how this analysis might be challenged. metz turns next to supernaturalist theories of meaning. his rich and complex eighty-page discussion of various supernaturalist theories of meaning cannot be summarized adequately here. one form of supernaturalism he scrutinizes in detail is what he calls “purpose theory.” according to purpose theory, god is absolutely necessary for any form of meaning, and the closer a person 145 bassham       comes to fulfilling the (collective or individualized) purpose god has assigned to her, the more meaningful her life is. metz offers a mixed bag of objections against supernaturalist accounts of meaning. one plausible objection he gives is that, intuitively, some things can be meaningful even if nothing supernatural exists (144). for example, feeding a hungry child seems to have significance—and therefore meaning—even if we decide that there is no god or spiritual realm. metz’s primary argument against supernaturalism is more questionable. essentially, he argues that supernatural accounts of meaning depend on a conception of god that is ultimately incoherent. he argues that meaning can be wholly dependent on god only if god is an absolutely perfect being, and god can be an absolutely perfect being only if he is outside of time and completely unchangeable. but if god is wholly atemporal and immutable he presumably cannot do things like “choose” to create a universe or to “assign” individual life-purposes. such activities, metz argues, are possible only if god exists in time and can change (106–14). here four things should be noted: 1. many contemporary philosophers of religion do not accept the kind of classical “perfect being theology” metz’s argument presupposes. traditional notions of god as immutable, atemporal, and perfectly simple have been widely challenged.4 2. there are familiar and plausible responses to the sorts of incoherence-arguments metz offers. for example, thomists would deny that we can speak of god “acting” or “choosing” in the same univocal sense that we employ when speaking of human agency. likewise, might not god be wholly immutable and outside time and yet able to express his eternal will in ways that have temporal effects? 3. it is far from clear that the most defensible account of how meaning could be entirely dependent on god must presume that god is absolutely perfect. 4. nor is it clear that the most defensible supernaturalist account of meaning must claim that all possible meaning is totally dependent on god. why not adopt a mixed theory, which claims that some kinds of meanings (e.g., certain kinds of “deep” or “ultimate” meanings) are dependent on god, but other sorts of meanings (e.g., feeding a hungry child or finding a cure for aids) are not (except perhaps in the sense that all things are dependent upon god for their existence)? in general, metz’s entire discussion of how meaning(s) might depend upon god could benefit from a closer engagement with the (vast) theological literature on notions such as the divine “will” or “purpose.” to take but one example: suppose god’s individualized “purpose” for smith is that he write ten world-class religious novels and save 1,000 lives from a burning building. smith, alas, writes only nine world-class novels and saves only 999 people from the fire (unhappily, one victim review of meaning in life 146   jumped to her death). jones, on the other hand, has a much more limited “purpose” or “assignment” from god—namely to produce a single crayon drawing of an angel before tragically dying at age three. as metz describes it, purpose theory seems to imply that jones led a more meaningful life than smith did, because jones perfectly fulfilled god’s purpose for his life and smith did not. a brief glance into the theological writings of (say) aquinas, molina, or suarez, would have steered metz into much more plausible waters. having rejected supernaturalist and subjectivist theories of meaning, metz next turns to consider a variety of leading objectivist naturalistic theories. after arguing that all of the most widely discussed objectivist theories have fatal weaknesses, metz lays out and defends what he takes to be the correct theory, a view that he calls the “fundamentality view.” the final, heavily qualified version of this view (labelled “ft3” in the absurd fashion all-too-common in hyperanalytic philosophy) is stated as follows: a human person’s life is more meaningful, the more that she, without violating certain moral constraints against degrading sacrifice, employs her reason and in ways that either positively orient rationality towards fundamental conditions of human existence, or negatively orient it towards what threatens them, such that the worse parts of her life cause better parts towards its end by a process that makes for a compelling and ideally original life-story; in addition, the meaning in a human person’s life is reduced, the more it is negatively oriented towards fundamental conditions of human existence or exhibits narrative disvalue. (235) or, in a simplified nutshell: individual lives have meaning to the extent that they positively engage, through active uses of reason, with fundamental values such as truth, goodness, and beauty. on such an account, a deeply and paradigmatically meaningful life would be one of outstanding moral achievement, high-flying intellectual excellence, and significant artistic creation. this is a not altogether implausible conception if you accept the network of naturalistic and objectivist presuppositions on which it rests. from a theistic view, of course, it is wildly off the mark. metz’s view seems to imply (for example) that babies, the severely mentally challenged, and people with alzheimer’s do not live meaningful lives (or live only minimally meaningful lives) because they cannot actively use their reason to perform acts of moral, intellectual, or artistic significance. it is true, of course, that they cannot perform such acts in this life. but according to classical theism, this life is tiny, infinitesimal fraction of the actual lives of such persons, all of whom may be destined to lives of eternal significance, value, and purpose in the hereafter. moreover, according to one widely held version of theism, every human life has meaning—and in fact transcendent meaning and value—because all human persons are created in the image of god and thereby possess equal inherent worth and dignity. furthermore, on a theistic view the value or 147 bassham       meaning of a human life cannot be measured by actual achievement or worldly “significance” or “importance,” for these are all partly matters of luck and all human achievements are smoke and “vanity” from what sidgwick called “the point of view of the universe.”5 the christian view, rather, is that of milton: “they also serve who only stand and wait.”6 and the christian view is also that of mother teresa: some are called merely “to be faithful.”7 gregory bassham king’s college (pa) notes 1. nozick 1974, 42–45. 2. taylor 2000. 3. morris 1999, 284–85. 4. see generally morris 1991. 5. sidgwick 1907, 382. 6. milton 1963, line 14. 7. chawla 2008, xxv. works cited chawla, navin. 2008. mother teresa: the centenary edition. new york: penguin. milton, john. 1963. “sonnet 19.” in the complete poetry. ed. john t. shawcross. new york: anchor doubleday. 242–243. morris, thomas v. 1991. our idea of god: an introduction to philosophical theology. downers grove, il: intervarsity press. _____. 1999. philosophy for dummies. foster city, ca: idg books. nozick, robert. 1974. anarchy, state, and utopia. new york: basic books. review of meaning in life 148   sidgwick, henry. 1907. the methods of ethics. 7th ed. new york: macmillan. taylor, richard. 2000. “the meaning of life.” in good and evil. amherst, ny: prometheus books. 319–334. homeless chic in us american novels [expositions 5.1 (2011) 62-69] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 fashion/ing statements: reading homeless bodies in contemporary fiction dorothea löbbermann humboldt-universität zu berlin alex shakar‟s satiric novel the savage girl, 1 published in 2001, addresses the ironies of “homeless chic.” the title character of the novel is a nameless homeless woman whose adventurous outfit inspires trend spotters to create a “savage” trend. while the marketing experts observe, sketch and exploit her style, the homeless woman‟s identity remains mysterious. at one point in the novel she is seen lying asleep in the street, her body “curled up like a question mark” (53). while her clothes signal the message – the fashion statement, as it were – of an “authentic,” anti-consumerist lifestyle, her body is fashioned as a sign that challenges this very readability. what is the question that the homeless body poses, and to whom is it addressed? what is the answer, if there is any? and, more abstractly, what are the functions of the homeless body and its dress in this novel and in others? how is the discrepancy between social concern about and cultural fascination with homelessness negotiated in fictional texts? these questions gain relevance given the large number of homeless characters in contemporary north american novels. 2 the following exemplary readings of their bodies search for answers to these questions through a focus on the relationship between bodies and clothes. this relationship tends to be constructed as an opposition between a material body that to a certain extent remains outside of representation and a readable message that is located within the homeless person‟s attire. in locating the homeless both inside and outside of representation, literary texts, i claim, explore the political practice of inclusive exclusion. at the beginning of the savage girl aspiring trend spotter ursula van urden watches the homeless woman whom she has nicknamed “the savage girl” stitch together pieces of pelt; her gear consists of clothing and accessories made from fur and bone. it is not only self-made but also self-hunted, combined with second-hand clothes and found objects. her initial description of the outfit shows that it is filtered through ursula‟s consciousness, through the lens of a fashion or lifestyle scout: the sleeves and sides of her olive-drab t-shirt are cut out, exposing her flanks and opposed semicircles of sunburned back […]. her pants are from some defunct eastern european army, laden with pockets, cut off at the knees. her shins are wrapped in bands of pelt, a short brown fur. her feet are shod in moccasins. 3 ursula reads the woman‟s dress as a message of primitivism and anti-consumerism and starts the successful marketing campaign of a “savage” trend. her pitch of the savage girl as an advertising image contains powerful keywords that explain the cultural fascination for homelessness: she is “sick of modernity,” she “tries to live authentically,” she “may be deeper than the rest of us. she may be superior.” 4 in shakar‟s novel, then, this is how the marketing industry answers the question that the homeless woman‟s body poses. 63 löbbermann the list of clichés with which ursula explains the symbolic power of the homeless woman reverberates in contemporary representations of homelessness. a popular parallel for the savage girl‟s superiority, authenticity and flight from modernity is, for instance, robin williams‟s character parry in terry gilliam‟s 1991 film the fisher king, 5 who invites his middle-class friend jack (jeff bridges) to lie naked in central park, to feel the air on his body, free from the constraints of civilization. this metaphorization, idealization, and romanticization is part of a larger cultural ambivalence about homelessness, the other extreme of which is the violent exclusion of homeless persons from the public and political realm, which is enacted not only through political and juridical, but also through cultural practices like the bum fights series that construct the homeless as the ultimate abject. 6 the savage girl‟s “sick[ness] of modernity” circumscribes the prominent yet paradoxical position of contemporary homeless characters. as a sign of a critique of modernity, the homeless embody modernist discontent itself; 7 they thus simultaneously symbolize and critique the culture that has turned them into a symbol. if, as an emblem of alienation, the homeless are inherently modernist figures, as an emblem of paradox, fragmentation, displacement 8 and the postmodern “lack of „home,‟” the homeless are simultaneously recognized as the “soul of postmodernity.” 9 the “other” to the system, they are its symbolic embodiment; a socially peripheral figure that becomes symbolically central. 10 shakar is obviously aware of this discourse and the cultural significations of homelessness. his satire uses the homeless woman to reveal the absurdities of postmodern consumer culture. what is interesting, however, is how shakar dramatizes the difference between the homeless woman and the image she becomes, as this difference indicates the powers and the limits of representation itself. from the start, the homeless woman is represented as the savage girl. “the savage girl kneels on the paving stones of bannister park,” are the first words of the novel. however, this identity is entirely the creation of trend scout ursula. the woman is always already part of ursula‟s concept of her: there is no person prior to the savage girl in the novel. as a savage girl, she “naturally” cannot speak. ursula is so convinced of her own invention that she has never tried to talk to her. the homeless woman disappears behind the idea of the savage girl, that is, behind a particular representation of herself. in pointing to the powers of representation, shakar‟s fiction parallels the procedure by which unhoused persons lose their individuality behind the moniker “the homeless.” 11 but shakar carries the idea even further. in the course of the novel, the homeless woman is not only figuratively replaced, but literally so. while she disappears from the text (she is arrested for killing a pet dog), the savage trend has become omnipresent: images of a professional model in savage girl gear adorn the buses city-wide. sprawled out in a tenement entranceway, and dressed in a one-shouldered hide minidress that exposes much dirt-streaked flesh, the model promotes a new brand – “litewater,” a mineral water that is advertised as fatfree. 12 the homeless woman thus becomes the (absent) center of a satire on consumption that promotes “useless product[s]” 13 that – irony of ironies – promise to boycott consumerism in the act of consumption. shakar thus situates homelessness at the intersection of a social and a cultural agenda, wherein the social satire attacks postmodern capitalism and consumption and the cultural satire lashes out at the nostalgia for primitivism. but shakar does not stop at the observation that these two agendas are connected. in a further, more abstract, move, he demonstrates the removal of the fashion/ing statements 64 ground on which the whole operation is founded: the homeless woman is excluded from the operation, she disappears – figuratively behind her representation, and literally behind the image of that representation. the power of the homeless sign is accompanied by, if not conditioned on, the removal of the homeless body. the question mark that the savage girl forms thus also asks about the difference between the homeless and their representation. it asks about the relationship between body and discourse: is there such a thing as a body outside of discourse? a body prior to representation? the question signals a longing for the freedom expressed in an autonomous body, an authentic body, a body free of representation. when the clothes can be read as signs (of authenticity, of freedom), does the “material” body stay free of signification? representations of the homeless body amplify a tendency inherent in the representation of all bodies, namely the implied reference to that which is outside of discourse, to the body‟s prediscursive materiality or “naturality.” the fantasy of the homeless body‟s hyper-materiality not only ignores the harsh physical realities of homelessness, it also participates in the exclusion of the homeless body from the body politic. english scholar samira kawash analyzes this practice with the example of an everyday subway scene. a body “is folded up” in the limited space of a subway seat: “i can tell very little about this person,” she writes, “i see what the others on the train see, a body folded impossibly small, a body marked by its position and its effects as a homeless body.” 14 the question that this body poses for kawash concerns the powerful effect it has on the other subway riders, who, “as a body,” “studiously avoid” looking at it. 15 in her scene, kawash describes the formation of a public that is sketched out as a body politic (“as a body,” the other passengers close ranks against the homeless person). but since the public is always an idea, and always in negotiation, kawash argues, it is in constant need of expression, visualization, materialization. the homeless body is one such materialization. through its denial of societal wholeness, it makes visible, ex negativo, what is generally invisible: the concept of a public sphere. kawash‟s observation explains both the body‟s “necessary” materiality and the exclusion or abjection it is subjected to. the romantic notion of the freedom, authenticity, and prediscursiveness of the homeless body perpetuates the exclusion of the homeless from the public realm for the sake of the construction of a public (a community – of citizens and readers). in this move, homelessness connotes the “bare life” outside of the public through which the public constitutes itself, as leonard c. feldman argues in his reading of the homeless person as a homo sacer. 16 the homeless body – turned into bare life – is politically excluded yet symbolically included. this practice of inclusive exclusion is exemplified and, to some extent, analyzed in alex shakar‟s novel. the marketing success of the “savage trend” demonstrates that a postmodern consumer culture constitutes its identity through the simultaneous appropriation and exclusion of the homeless body. in looking at homeless “chic,” fictional texts have repeatedly explored the tension between the notion of the supposedly prediscursive body and the semantics of its clothing. if the savage girl connotes the wish for the return to a “primitive” and “authentic” lifestyle within postmodernity, the homeless parade in paul auster‟s city of glass connotes the absurdity of the american dream: 65 löbbermann there is the man wrapped in the american flag. there is the woman with a hallowe‟en mask on her face. there is the man in a ravaged overcoat, his shoes wrapped in rags, carrying a perfectly pressed white sheet on a hanger – still sheathed in the dry-cleaner‟s plastic. there is the man in the business suit with bare feet and a football helmet on his head. there is a woman whose clothes are covered from head to toe with presidential campaign buttons […]. 17 auster‟s text performs the ambivalence of representation: the repetition of the phrase “there is” signals the inability to see the homeless in context; 18 yet the focus on the homeless‟ colorful accessories shows that the observer – auster‟s protagonist quinn who “discovers” the homeless in a moment of crisis – has become a skillful master of the objects of his observation, whom he contains in a text that focuses on the spectacular. his catwalk parade of homeless “freaks” plays with the strong visual effects that the street persons‟ accessories create – flags, masks, football helmet, campaign buttons – and that make them visible at the same time as they hide them from sight, which the halloween mask implies in particular. the insignia of american society, “abused” (or appropriated in a subversive manner) by the homeless, become a grotesque caricature of american cultural values. significantly, this description is the culmination of a longer scene in which quinn attempts to make sense of the homeless, who “seem to be everywhere the moment you look for them,” 19 recording his observations in his notebook. it is as if one of his prospective literary objects stages a last revolt against his act of capturing her reality into prose, when – directly before the paragraph quoted above – a homeless woman shouts (the reader does not know at whom, about what): “what if i just fucking don‟t want to!” 20 her protest signals an outside of representation that invites comparison to the savage girl‟s questioning posture: when the savage girl questions the semantics of her own body, auster‟s homeless woman refuses to be turned into text. her protest anticipates that of another novel character, namely the homeless protagonist of george dawes green‟s novel the caveman’s valentine, romulus ledbetter. he protests against being read by a social worker who tries to remove him from his cave in a new york city park to a shelter: you figure now you got me in your clutches, you going to read me, like a book, right? – going to look right into my brain and you going to read it page by page, like i was some cheap-jack midnight entertainment to make you forget the mess you’re in – right? get you chuckling, get your greasy thumbprints all over my thoughts, get you through another miserably lonely night, right […]? 21 this beginning paragraph of the novel introduces what will soon be revealed as the speaker‟s clinical paranoia, but of course it also self-reflexively catches the book‟s readers in their act of reading and puts up for discussion the novel‟s contribution to the cultural fascination for homelessness (signaling that the caveman’s valentine intends to be more than a mere escape fantasy). green describes reading as an act of control that he contrasts to the visual spectacle of the homeless man‟s bodily presence at the end of the opening scene, which announces the social worker‟s defeat: fashion/ing statements 66 romulus ledbetter glared at his visitor. then he slouched off his blankets and came out of his cave and rose up to his full height. rose up before the social worker the way in a nightmare a grizzly will rise on its hind legs and it‟s too late to run. his hat was a teflon saucepan lined with the furs of squirrels killed on the henry hudson parkway. his stink was enormous. for a scarf he wore the “week in review” section of the sunday new york times. […] he stood there and simply loomed. until at last the social worker shrugged and went away. 22 romulus refuses to be read/controlled and – uncovering his body, stepping into view and rising to his full height in a strong dramaturgy – offers the spectacle of his body as a sign of freedom from social coercion. however, the opposition between reading and the spectacular body does not hold very long: his body is immediately turned into text; the comparison to a grizzly bear reminds the reader of adventure novels, which are also suggested in the image of the hat lined with squirrel furs, parodying a trapper‟s outfit. while the savage girl is compared to a native american (viz. her “moccasins” 23 ), romulus rather connotes their european counterparts, as the references to trappers and the allusion to henry hudson suggest. but like her, he also is a savage, an animal. this is the effect the body has on the social worker: its “enormous stink” and menacing posture affect him immediately. thus this opening passage oscillates between a reading of the homeless body and its suggested unreadability, its hermeneutic freedom. and indeed, this latter quality is what romulus claims for himself at the end of the scene: “i‟m still a free man.” 24 this freedom, however, is deeply ambiguous as it is also a sign of the inclusive exclusion of the political abject. what these examples suggest is that fictional representation, although clearly an integral part of cultural representation and an agent of cultural discourse, negotiates the discursiveness of homelessness and thus makes it visible. at the same time as shakar, auster and green connote homelessness with freedom, individuality, and originality, they also make visible the processes of inclusive exclusion involved in this romanticization. even if the homeless body becomes unreadable and unspeakable – hidden behind its representations, under its clothing – it is still discursively produced: as an unnamable materiality that embodies cultural signification. what then, if the discursive parameters are changed? samuel r. delany suggests a change in the parameters of genre in what at first sight looks like a very provocative take on the subject of homelessness. for genres, shakar had chosen satire, green and auster variations of detective fiction (if we agree to call the latter‟s novel a “metaphysical detective fiction” 25 ). delany, however, opts for the genre of pornography (or rather, he uses a similar cocktail of genres as auster does, one important element of which is pornography). the homeless bodies in his novel the mad man (2002) 26 are significant not for their symbolic meanings, but because the novel‟s protagonist, a young philosopher, desires them sexually. in contrast to green‟s social worker who is driven away by the homeless man‟s smell, delany‟s protagonist is attracted by stinking, dirty, leaky bodies. on the one hand, the fetishization of the homeless body can be interpreted as just another act of romanticization and appropriation. but on the other hand, a different frame – that of physical desire – inverts the received notion of the abject and of exclusion. in the novel, sexual attraction is part of a larger social interaction: the protagonist and the homeless men share not only bodies and beer, but stories, feelings and relationships. in its representation, therefore, 67 löbbermann the homeless body is neither abjected nor symbolically elevated or appropriated. here‟s an example: a refuse drum […] stood on broadway‟s island. with his curly hair, curly beard – both gray-shot brown – in a blue sweatshirt, the bottom of which hung high above the stretchedout waist of his brown woolen pants, too tight and too hot for summer, a thick and hirsute giant gazed down into it. […] the beltless pants were low on a broad gut, pelt thickening to pubic density below his waist – low enough on his hips so that if i‟d been behind him, i would have seen inches of fur clamped in his buttock‟s bevel. he bent over the drum‟s rim and swept a hand with a dessert plate-sized palm through what was inside. […] 27 the precision with which physical details are described here is owed to the refusal to differentiate between the significant and the banal. 28 there is no metaphor in the description above, rather a somewhat stubborn realism mixed with hyperbole (“giant”) likely to be found in pornography. in contrast to the other excerpts analyzed here, the homeless man‟s clothes signal no message other than that they cover up and – luckily – also reveal the desired body. furthermore, a first-person narrator directs the reader‟s gaze to the sexually stimulating parts of this body (in fact, the narrator operates with knowledge gained from subsequent physical contact with his future lover, whose behind he can describe although he cannot see it at this moment). the materiality of the homeless body is acknowledged but not metaphorically appropriated. no additional signification diverts the reader from its presence: this body may be on the lowest rank of the social scale, but it does not carry the meaning of bare life. to the contrary, as potentially sexual object, it is not excluded from the social/political but part of it. delany is well aware of processes of abjection and representation. his close description of the body does not lead to the conclusion that there is nothing abjected from discourse, nothing unspeakable. to the contrary, in delany‟s work the unspeakable is the explicit precondition for the speakable; 29 but in his case it is not the homeless body that is abjected from representation but the contents of the refuse drum: “what was inside” indicates the unspeakable. the strategy of circling an abject (note the mentioning of the drum‟s rim) is the trademark of this novel that rescues the homeless body from abjection. delany‟s decision to change the representational parameter sheds light on the reading of the excerpts from shakar, auster and green in that it makes visible the exclusion that is produced through metaphor and symbolization. as long as the homeless body is covered in semantically significant gear that turns it into a sign for something else (savagery, primitivism, the absurdity of civilization or the freedom thereof), as long as the homeless body is supposed to convey a meaning outside of itself, it is at the same time abjected, pushed outside of representation and the public. to some extent, then, narrative containment of homeless bodies in fictional representation parallels the policing of homeless bodies as well as their exclusion from the public and the political. it is important to recognize the act of violence committed in these representational acts, which is sometimes implicit, as in the sarcasm of shakar‟s novel, and sometimes made explicit, as in the examples that dramatize the futile refusal against representation in auster‟s and in green‟s novels. the paradox of representation – the fact that it acknowledges presence at the fashion/ing statements 68 same time as it contains it – becomes particularly apparent in these texts. “homeless chic,” it turns out, is the epitome of homeless representation, a practice that rarely operates without inclusive exclusion. notes 1. alex shakar, the savage girl (new york: harpercollins, 2001). 2. the lists of novels, memoirs and films on homelessness fill as much as eight pages of the encyclopedia of homelessness, ed. david levinson, vol. 2 (thousand oaks: sage, 2004), 627– 634). some important contemporary novels are: william kennedy, ironweed; column mccann, this side of brightness; paul auster, in the country of last things, moon palace and timbuktu; don delillo, mao ii; robert majzels, city of forgetting; and, karen tei yamashita, tropic of orange. detective fiction is rich in homeless characters; see the works of sara paretsky, andrew vacchs, john grisham and many others. 3. shakar, 3. 4. shakar, 97. 5. the fisher king. dir. terry gilliam. columbia, 1991. 6. see amanda f. grzyb‟s argument about “contradictory images” of homelessness in “images of homelessness in nineteenthand twentieth-century american literature” in levinson, 296. many other scholars have commented on the conflicting images (kenneth kusmer, down and out, on the road: the homeless in american history (oxford: oxford university press, 2001)) and polarities (leonard c. feldman, citizens without shelter: homelessness, democracy, and political exclusion (ithaca: cornell university press, 2004)) of homeless representation. see also john allen, homelessness in american literature: romanticism, realism, and testimony (ny: routledge, 2004). the bumfights video series (2002–2006) was a highly controversial reality show in which (mostly intoxicated) homeless men were asked to fight each other, to hurt themselves, or to do reckless stunts. 7. see chaplin‟s tramp figure or the homeless figures in samuel beckett‟s work. paul auster, although clearly a postmodern author, has inherited much from these characters, particularly in his early work. 8. grzyb, “images of homelessness,” 300. 9. dean maccannell, “postmodern community planning: notes on the homeless and other nomads,” in empty meeting grounds: the tourist papers (london: routledge, 1992), 111. 10. cf. peter stallybrass and allon white, the politics and poetics of transgression (london: methuen, 1986), 5. 11. see, e.g., anthony marcus, where have all the homeless gone? the making and unmaking of a crisis (new york: berghahn books, 2006), 51. 12. cf. shakar, 145. 13. shakar, 95. 14. samira kawash, “the homeless body,” public culture 10.2, 319. 15. ibid. 16. feldman, citizens without shelter, 14–24; cf. giorgio agamben, homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life (stanford: stanford university press, 1998). 17. paul auster, city of glass (1985), in the new york trilogy (london: faber & faber, 1992), 110. 18. cf. ross chambers, loiterature (lincoln: university of nebraska press, 1999), 109. 19. auster, 109. 69 löbbermann 20. auster, 110. 21. george dawes green, the caveman’s valentine (new york: warner books, 2001), 3. 22. green, 4. 23. “a true redskin, more so than any indian ever was, her skin more red than brown,” is a further element from the homeless woman‟s initial description commenting on her sunburn (shakar, 3). 24. green, 4. 25. patricia merivale and susan elizabeth sweeney, eds., detecting texts: the metaphysical detective story from poe to postmodernism (philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, 1999), 1–2. 26. samuel r. delany, the mad man (rutherford: voyant publishing, 2002). 27. delany, 277. 28. see mary catherine foltz, “the excremental ethics of samuel r. delany,” substance #116 37.2 (2008), 47. 29. see samuel r. delany, “on the unspeakable,” in shorter views: queer thoughts and the politics of the paraliterary (hanover, n.h.: wesleyan up/up of new england, 1999), 58–66. [expositions 6.2 (2012) 52-54] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 multiple choice questions: career opportunities versus career tracks liana m. silva ford university of kansas my name is liana. i was an english major and i am not in a tenure track job. i know what comes to mind when you think “non-tenure track”: i’m probably an adjunct or a lecturer or a visiting assistant professor. i’m probably living paycheck to paycheck. i’m probably planning my way into a tenure track position. after all, my english department trained me for that. that’s what we go to graduate school for, right? to become professors, researchers, to write and publish in our fields. actually, i’m not. i’m a graduate writing specialist at a writing center at a researchintensive, doctoral-granting university. i provide support for graduate student writers as well as faculty and staff who work with graduate student writers to help these students succeed in their writing projects. my job description puts me at an interesting crossroads of outreach, teaching, coaching, and programming: i reach out to faculty, i research academic writing, and i work closely with other departments to organize programs for graduate student writers. i do not consider myself an administrator but “staff” also feels limiting. it’s a rather unique position; i only know of one other school that has a similarly-titled position with a similar set of obligations. i’m what some call an “alternative academic,” someone with a postbaccalaureate degree who works in academia but who is not on the tenure track or not necessarily teaching exclusively. (bethany nowviskie has storified the tweets from where the term initially originated and has written more extensively on the subject in a post titled “#alt-ac: alternative academic careers for humanities scholars.”) when i tell people about my job, they sometimes ask me what i do and how someone goes about getting a job like mine. i used to think it was just dumb luck (“i happened to be looking in the right place at the right time”) but sarah werner’s recent mla 2013 presentation “make your own luck” on how the hard work we put into our academic lives makes more of a difference than luck has made me reevaluate that position. in fact, it was my graduate school experience — particularly the opportunities i took advantage of — that made a difference in my current job. “i’m the last person who should be teaching writing,” i remember telling my coinstructor the summer i first taught writing. i didn’t trust my ability to teach writing, but i also felt this way because what i really wanted to teach was literature. this is not uncommon among english majors; we go to graduate school because we love books and we want to teach those books, write about those books, live in those books. teaching writing, for many of us, becomes not just a teaching rite of passage, but the toll you have http://storify.com/nowviskie/altac-origin-stories http://nowviskie.org/2010/alt-ac/ http://nowviskie.org/2010/alt-ac/ file:///c:/users/jspiro/appdata/local/microsoft/windows/temporary%20internet%20files/content.outlook/u4s4nmyn/but%20being%20in%20the%20position%20i%20am,%20i%20think%20a%20lot%20about%20graduate%20education, 53 ford to pay in order to get to the literature classes you want to teach. i know for a fact that a lot of students feel like teaching writing is something they have to do. it is ironic, then, that my current job, graduate writing specialist, is almost exclusively writing. i am not ashamed to point out how i used to feel about teaching writing. but i would be remiss to ignore that it was teaching writing which landed me in an alternative academic position; i had the chance to not just teach writing extensively, but i also had the opportunity to work as the coordinator of the writing component of a summer program for incoming first-year students. although i taught writing because it was part of my obligations as a teaching assistant, that afforded me other chances to grow as a professional. teaching was not the only opportunity that helped me get one step closer to my current alternative academic position. for example, for the past few years i have been working for an academic blog called sounding out!, which came out of a class i took as a graduate student. that class introduced me to a new, exciting field of inquiry called sound studies, and when the chance came to put together a blog with my professor and some fellow graduate students from the course, i jumped. i knew little about managing a blog or how to put this kind of project together; i didn’t have the foresight to see how big the blog would become. more than three years later, i am the managing editor and work on the visual layout of the blog, thinking about how the appearance and the online presence of the blog can stay true to the blog’s intention and mission statement. i edit guest-bloggers regularly and oftentimes put together the visuals for their posts. the blog gives me a venue to continue thinking critically and share my works in progress with readers. the blog keeps me sharp intellectually and makes me stand out in the academic community because of how we make knowledge and the field accessible to others. what about my training enabled me to get to where i am today? for me, the close reading skills that are the tool of the trade in literature departments. as a graduate writing specialist, i use my capacity to read closely, deduce information, and draw conclusions with a myriad of texts. i work with students from all sorts of disciplines to help them navigate big projects such as the dissertation, literature reviews, journal articles, etc. i help them figure out what they need to do and how to say it, and i do not take this job lightly because as a ph.d. i know how important writing is to your success as a graduate student. in terms of the blog, editing forces me to think about what their main ideas are and how images and videos can help get that message across. it is a multimedia platform, and i am certain that my training as an english major helps me every day understand how to negotiate words with images and sound. going to graduate school for english is a decision i do not regret. i became an english major because i enjoyed reading and wanted to immerse myself in that world fully, and the thought that i could be a part of that experience with others sounded fascinating. yes, i decided to do a ph.d. thinking i would teach. even though i went to graduate school thinking i would be a tenure track professor, the turns my life has taken are exciting and http://soundstudiesblog.com/ career opportunities versus career tracks 54 worthwhile and i feel great about the position i am in. although i don’t think the english department could have trained me specifically to do either of the things i currently do, the opportunities that i found in the english department made it possible for me to branch out from the tenure track to other career options. i think english departments should offer opportunities for students to broaden their scope not just in terms of areas of study or literary genres but also in terms of opportunities to explore writing and literature in other contexts. encourage them to get involved in digital humanities research. set up a chance to work at the writing center. create internships at academic journals where they can be a part of the editing and peer review process. even if they continue to read, write, and ask questions in class, they deserve to be shown how far an english degree can go. the future of the english department lies not in career tracks but in career opportunities. classics and comparative study [expositions 5.2 (2011) 3-8] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 classics and comparative study johannes haubold durham university the center for hellenic studies is a good place to think about classics and comparative study. its current director gregory nagy has done much for the comparative study of greek epic. 1 thanks to him, and other scholars such as john foley and richard martin, that branch of comparative study is very much flourishing today. 2 other branches have perhaps fared less well. classicists are only just beginning to engage with burkert’s and west’s work on greek and near eastern literature; 3 and the arab golden age, so important for the transmission and transformation of greek philosophy, barely features in our curricula. the facts of the matter are of course well known, at least to the experts, but those facts do not always translate into scholarly or educational practice. few classicists currently read arabic, in any sense of the word “reading.” even fewer, i suspect, read aramaic or akkadian. 4 what we have, today, is an opportunity to establish contact through our own expertise in the greek and roman classics. as walter burkert points out, in his characteristically blunt fashion, “european tradition, especially the scholarly tradition, used to see the greeks […] as unique and isolated, classical.” 5 if that is broadly true of the history of our subject, as i believe it is, the question arises of how we might overcome that inherited isolation. the current focus on reception is crucial here, because it helps, for example, to insert classics into the mainstream of postcolonial world literature. 6 but the work of recontextualisation does not stop with reception. roughly speaking, there have been two ways of broadening out the study of the ancient world itself. first, there is what we might call the long-distance approach, which looks at societies that are geographically and culturally remote. geoffrey lloyd on greek and chinese philosophy and science springs to mind; 7 or walter scheidel’s more recent work on ancient empires. 8 there is a lot to be said for longdistance comparison, not least because there is a real appetite for it in the far east as well as in europe and the us. what worries me about it is that it can become rather cosily self-affirming: there is not much creative friction between china and greece – as there might be, say, between china and japan. there is not much of a sense either that the comparison might make us rethink the boundaries of classics, let alone those of the “western” tradition as a whole. rather, such comparision may assert that ancient empires, mutatis mutandis, continue to rule. by contrast, what we might call the neighborly approach to comparative study confronts us very directly with the questions of what classics is and where we draw the line. look at greece in its mediterranean context, and you will end up wondering not just about greece but about classics as a discipline. martin west famously calls greek literature “a near eastern literature.” 9 others have concluded that “the days of an exclusively ‘classical’ scholarship are over.” 10 if that seems extreme, we need only recall the debates over black athena to appreciate how problematic classics and comparative study 4 the idea of a self-contained classical world has become. 11 let me be clear, i do not think bernal’s intervention was ultimately helpful. what is called for, it seems to me, are not new myths but a constructive dialogue about how we might open out the field of classical literature. in thinking through this issue i take inspiration from marie-louise pratt’s work in comparative literature. pratt has recently called on her colleagues to set aside attitudes “of wariness, fear, border patrolling” and to discover “new forms of cultural citizenship in a globalised world.” 12 in comparative literature itself, there has been much excellent work along these lines. 13 unfortunately, many classicists do not seem quite ready to follow suit. thus, bernard knox wrote about the study of ancient greek literature: “the primacy of the greeks in the canon of western literature is neither an accident nor the result of a decision imposed by higher authority; it is simply a reflection of the intrinsic worth of the material, its sheer originality and brilliance.” 14 no prizes here for spotting the signs of “wariness, fear, and border-patrolling:” knox sees the privileged position of greek literature precisely not as a matter of a european cultural perspective which we might wish to challenge. rather, he insists that its supremacy is due to its innate brilliance, which sets it apart from other literatures of the ancient and modern world. others have gone even further. sergei averintsev, for example, argues that ancient nonclassical literatures were not “literature” at all. 15 averintsev reminds us – if a reminder was needed – that “literature” implies a value judgment. we need not subscribe to terry eagleton’s strong claim that “literature, in the meaning of the word we have inherited, is an ideology,” 16 to see here another attempt at fencing off the classical world of greece and rome from all other ancient cultures. equally pointed is barry powell’s suggestion that ancient near eastern civilisations were incapable of formulating “novel thoughts” on account of their obscure and cumbersome writing systems. 17 powell invokes the tools of cutting-edge linguistic scholarship, but ultimately succumbs to the old prejudice that eastern civilisations are incapable of change. 18 to cite knox again: “in startling contrast to the magnificent but static civilizations of the great river valleys – tigris, euphrates, and nile – [the greeks] created in the restless turbulence of their tiny city-states that impatient rhythm of competition and innovation that has been the distinguishing characteristic of western civilization ever since.” 19 knox’s claim does not stand up to scrutiny. even a cursory glance at the evidence suggests just how innovative mesopotamian thought, for example, could be: how else do we explain the daring literary experiment of the babylonian theodicy, or the dialogue of pessimism with its irreverent take on traditional wisdom literature? 20 not to mention the revolution in babylonian astronomy at a time when greek astronomy had little to show for its efforts. 21 in truth, babylon in the first millennium bce was a city in intellectual ferment. rather than regarding this as a sign of its destabilisation and decline, as has often been the case, why not turn our attention to the exciting achievements of “late” ancient mesopotamia – and indeed egypt? for intellectual endeavour, like love, is where you find it (to paraphrase martin west): 22 as modern cultures continue to clash along ancient faultlines, there is a need for classicists to become less detached, more culturally intelligent, and frankly more humane in their appreciation of non-classical ancient worlds. “we are,” in the words of edward said, “mixed in with one another in ways that most 5 haubold national systems of education have not dreamed of.” and further: “to match knowledge in the arts and sciences with these integrative realities is […] the intellectual and cultural challenge of the moment.” 23 this is an insight that merits attention. but how do we move said’s agenda forward in practical terms? a lot of excellent work is being done in other disciplines such as archaeology and comparative literature, so we are not talking about inventing the wheel. 24 what is needed, it seems to me, are quite simply a few more acts of neighborly border-crossing in our teaching of classical languages and literature. for that, some structural adjustments can, and need to be, made. there are, of course, places like oxford and chicago, where students take fully-fledged interdisciplinary degrees in the ancient world. those are enviable programs, but they will only ever be viable in a few well-endowed institutions. others need to find different solutions. at durham university, we did not have a school of oriental studies, but we had helpful colleagues in theology and archaeology, as well as a pro-vice-chancellor in arts and humanities who was willing to invest the equivalent of $5,000 per year to help us explore the connections between greece, rome, and other ancient cultures of the mediterranean and the near east. $5,000 was all it took to set up an interdepartmental research center. the result, i think it is fair to say, was well worth the investment. quite apart from the intellectual buzz, we are now in a position to offer our students language teaching in akkadian, middle egyptian, hebrew, aramaic, and syriac, as well as greek and latin. the results are already showing: we now have doctoral students taking up comparative work in all these fields. the department too has been transformed. i still recall the bemused looks when i first proposed a course in akkadian language and literature as part of durham’s classics program: it had never been done before, and it certainly wasn’t classics. that was a time when we used to see our subject as threatened and felt embattled also within the university. there was talk of slipping standards, of other disciplines encroaching on our turf. now, we are excited and energised by the prospect of dialogue and border-crossing. and we have one of the largest akkadian classes in the world: we recruit to the language some fifteen-to-twenty students every year. so here is my pitch for a meaningful future for classics: as well as expanding our horizons through the study of the classical tradition in all its manifestations, let us take down the border patrols also within the ancient world itself, and get travelling. notes 1. e.g., comparative studies in greek and indic meter (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1974); greek mythology and poetics (ithaca, ny: cornell university press, 1990); “the epic hero,” a companion to ancient epic, ed. john miles foley (malden, ma and oxford: blackwell, 2005), 71–89. classics and comparative study 6 2. e.g., john miles foley, how to read an oral poem (champaign, il: university of illinois press, 2002); richard p. martin, “epic as genre,” a companion to ancient epic, ed. john miles foley (malden, ma and oxford: blackwell, 2005), 9–19. 3. e.g., m. l. west, the east face of helicon: west asiatic elements in greek poetry and myth (oxford: oxford university press, 1997); walter burkert, the orientalizing revolution: near eastern influence on greek culture in the early archaic age, trans. margaret pinder and walter burkert (cambrdge, ma: harvard university press, 1992); babylon, memphis, persepolis: eastern contexts of greek culture (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2004). 4. precise figures are hard to come by, but anecdotal evidence suggests that not only are numbers small but also that there is widespread ignorance concerning the non-classical languages of the ancient world. in the absence of first-hand experience, unhelpful urban myths abound: indo-european languages are branded “difficult,” non-alphabetic scripts “obscure,” etc. for an attempt to put these prejudices on a more scientific footing see below. 5. burkert 2004, 1. 6. important recent work includes, homer in the twentieth century: between world literature and the western canon, eds. barbara graziosi and emily greenwood (oxford: oxford university press, 2007); emily greenwood, afro-greeks: dialogues between anglophone caribbean literature and classics in the twentieth century (oxford: oxford university press, 2010); classics in postcolonial worlds, eds. lorna hardwick and carol gillespie (oxford: oxford university press, 2010). 7. e.g., g. e. r. lloyd, adversaries and authorities: investigations into ancient greek and chinese science (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1996); the ambitions of curiosity: understanding the world in ancient greece and china (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2002); ancient worlds, modern reflections: philosophical perspectives on greek and chinese science and culture (oxford: oxford university press, 2004); the delusions of invulnerability: wisdom and morality in ancient greece, china and today (london: duckworth, 2005); principles and practices in ancient greek and chinese science (aldershot: ashgate, 2006); geoffrey lloyd and nathan sivin, the way and the word. science and medicine in early china and greece (new haven, ct: yale university press, 2002); see also hyun jin kim, ethnicity and foreigners in ancient greece and china (london: duckworth, 2009). 8. walter scheidel, rome and china: comparative perspectives on ancient world empires (oxford: oxford university press, 2009). 9. m. l. west, hesiod: theogony (oxford: oxford university press, 1966), 31. 10. hellmuth petriconi, “das gilgamesh-epos als vorbild der ilias,” in linguistic and literary studies in honor of helmut a. hatzfeld, ed. alessandro s. crisafulli (washington, dc: catholic university of america press, 1964), 338 n18, quoted in west 1997. 7 haubold 11. e.g., martin bernal, black athena: the afroasiatic roots of classical civilization. vol. 1: the fabrication of greece 1785–1985 (new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press, 1987), mary lefkowitz, not out of africa: how afrocentrism became an excuse to teach myth as history (new york: basic books, 1996); black athena revisited, eds. mary lefkowitz and guy maclean rogers (chapel hill, nc: university of north carolina press, 1996). 12. mary louise pratt, “comparative literature and global citizenship,” in comparative literature in the age of multiculturalism, ed. charles bernheimer (baltimore: the johns hopkins university press, 1995), 52. 13. e.g., david damrosch, what is world literature? (princeton: princeton university press, 2003) and how to read world literature (malden, ma and oxford: wiley-blackwell, 2009); gayatri chakravorty spivak, death of a discipline (new york: columbia university press, 2003); emily apter, the translation zone: a new comparative literature (princeton: princeton university press, 2006); haun saussy, comparative literature in an age of globalization (baltimore: the johns hopkins university press, 2006). 14. bernard knox, the oldest dead white european males and other reflections on the classics (new york: norton, 1993), 21. 15. sergei averintsev, “ancient greek ‘literature’ and near eastern ‘writings’: the opposition and encounter of two creative principles. part one: the opposition,” trans. richard pevear and larissa volokhonsky, arion (3 rd series) 7.1 (1999): 2–3. 16. terry eagleton, literary theory: an introduction (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1983), 22. 17. barry b. powell, “homer and writing,” in a new companion to homer, eds. ian morris and barry b. powell (leiden: brill, 1997), 6–7 and 12. 18. edward w. said, orientalism (london: vintage, 1978). 19. knox 1993, 67. 20. for the babylonian theodicy and dialogue of pessimism see w. g. lambert, babylonian wisdom literature (oxford: clarendon, 1960) and sara j. denning-bolle, wisdom in akkadian literature: expression, instruction, dialogue. (leiden: ex oriente lux, 1992). 21. for mathematical astronomy, see o. neugebauer, a history of mathematical astronomy. 3 vols. (berlin and heidelberg: springer-verlag, 1975); for astrology, see francesca rochberg, the heavenly writing: divination, horoscopy and astronomy in mesopotamian culture. (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2004). 22. west 1997, viii. 23. said 1993, 331. 24. among the wealth of inspiring work on material culture one might single out sarah p. morris, daidalos and the origins of greek art (princeton: princeton university press, 1992) and margaret christina miller, athens and persia in the fifth century bc: a study classics and comparative study 8 in cultural receptivity (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1997). for comparative literature see above n. 13. 08monsman.indd © equinox publishing ltd. 2008, unit 6, the village, 101 amies street, london sw11 2jw [expositions 2.1 (2008) 083–102] expositions (print) issn 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v2i1.083 expositions (online) issn 1747-5376 pater’s portraits: the aesthetic hero in 1890 gerald monsman university of arizona walter pater’s unfinished manuscript, “gaudioso, the second,” is published here for the first time. opening as it does with a reflection on a painting of gaudioso, pater’s literary portrait parallels oscar wilde’s use of a fictional painting within a literary portrait in the picture of dorian gray and provides another piece of the apparent dialogue between pater and wilde. this essay positions “gaudioso” as working in concert with the other works produced by pater during his final years to create a platonic vision of beauty. by insisting upon physical beauty as an external reflection of inner, spiritual beauty, pater refutes the victorian dichotomy of spirit and flesh that allows wilde to dissociate the beauty of his characters from a “moral sense.” in the last decade of the nineteenth century, walter pater’s various projects included both the writing of gaston de latour (1988, 1890–1893), a novel set in renaissance france, and “gaudioso, the second,” a story of renaissance italy—neither of which were ever brought to completion. as does pater’s gaston, so this hitherto unpublished manuscript of “gaudioso” highlights the ways in which pater responded to oscar wilde by insisting upon a platonic vision of beauty. in 1890 a new note of urgency clearly was injected into walter pater’s literary schedule in response to the publication that year of wilde’s the picture of dorian gray and “the critic as artist.” lord henry wotton in dorian gray incessantly misquoted both pater’s renaissance (1873) and his marius the epicurean (1885) while in “the critic as artist” gilbert praised pater and declared that “art is out of the reach of morals.”1 reviewing dorian gray, a nettled pater remarked that wilde’s novel “fails” to set forth a “true epicureanism” (i.e., the paterian theory of life defined six years before in marius the epicurean) because—if indeed life imitates art—art must be understood to contain the “moral sense,... http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/expo.v2i1.083 84 pater’s portraits: the aesthetic hero in 1890 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 the sense of sin and righteousness,” something that wilde’s heroes are bent on losing “as speedily, as completely as they can” (1891, 59–60). wilde’s novel is essentially an embellished platonic dialogue on beauty and love set in the luxuriant social milieu of the 1880s. in responding to this work, this dialogue of aesthetes, pater picked up the thrown gauntlet. if wilde’s novel had a moral, it was not thereby in pater’s opinion a moral book, since its author clearly had an inclination for the atmosphere of exotic depravity in which his characters moved. insisting that moral values must inform intellectual ideas, pater sought in the ongoing composition of gaston to correct what he saw as wilde’s misinterpretation of his criticism and fiction. the fragmentary “gaudioso” casts a further, interesting light on pater’s reaction to wilde’s portrayal of beauty; and it would have, if printed, publicly extended the “reciprocity,” or socratic dialogue, between the two writers on art, love, and beauty. art, love, and beauty had been for pater, during the first 1880s phase of writing gaston de latour, a particular preoccupation but one that had grown so much after the publication of dorian that by his 1890 august–september long vacation period pater felt compelled, after a two-year hiatus in the novel’s serialization, to resume composition with an intention to finish. the run-up to this 1890 contretemps is important, though less than spectacular reading. not long after the publication of marius the epicurean, probably about january of 1886 when he borrowed several memoirs from the library for historical background, pater began research on gaston, the second of his proposed trilogy or triplet of novels on art and religion. his visit in august and september (during the so-called oxford “long vacation”) to france in 1887 was undoubtedly a research trip for this new novel. from june to october of 1888, chapters one through five of that novel began appearing in macmillan’s magazine, while for his vacation that year he traveled to switzerland.2 then, after five installments, the serialization was aborted before a sixth chapter, a non-fiction essay, could appear. this “giordano bruno” study, afterwards “fictionalized” and retitled as the seventh chapter of gaston, had appeared originally in the fortnightly review in 1889. in august and september of 1889 pater visited northern italy—milan, bergamo, and brescia. but sometime during august monsman 85 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 of the following year, 1890, he abruptly canceled a second trip to italy: “pater is going to foreswear holiday and finish gaston de la tour”[sic] (quoted in evans 1970, 113, n3). and in a letter of 18 october 1890 pater tells arthur symons: “i never got to italy after all, this summer; instead, finished a paper of art-notes in north italy, by way of prologue to an imaginary portrait with brescia for background” (quoted in evans 1970, 114). clearly pater’s other project for 1890 was to wrap up his “art notes” essay and to begin “gaudioso, the second” to which his brescian study was a “prologue.” both pater’s “gaudioso,” a manuscript fragment which breaks off after only twenty-one ms pages, and his gaston de latour, just thirteen chapters long, remained incomplete at his death in 1894. although the connections of the 1890s “gaudioso” to wilde have not been at hand for analysis, the reciprocal influences of gaston and dorian gray have been ascertainable. after pater broke off serialization of gaston, he still had some research material on giordano bruno for the novel that he published instead as an essay in the fortnightly only a month before wilde began writing dorian. wilde in chapter four echoes pater’s bruno essay. then when pater resumed writing gaston, he indirectly commented on lord henry’s reflections in his novelized version of the bruno essay, citing the too enticing dissociation of intellectual positions from moral values—doctrines unintentionally can produce treacherous advice and words may have indirectly fatal consequences. even the exaggerated sexuality of wilde’s salomé, just then on the horizon, may have been foreshadowed in gaston in pater’s character of queen margot, the royal femme fatale of her day (pater 1995, 81–82; 104–105).3 this reciprocal connection becomes a socratic dialogue of sorts. socrates’ pedagogical method, as exemplified by plato, attempted to sort out incomplete or incorrect ideas and beliefs, educating (from ex duco, “lead out”) by leading the learner through rigorously disciplined dialogue to a higher truth and accuracy. “gaudioso, the second” would have participated in that dialogue had pater finished and published it. his portrait of gaudioso, set only a few decades earlier in the same century as his portrait of gaston, seems a parallel effort to reconcile fictionally the victorian tendency to oppose spirit and flesh. both the picture of dorian gray and “gaudioso” turn around an 86 pater’s portraits: the aesthetic hero in 1890 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 aesthetic rendering of a fictionally-supposed living figure. domenico averoldi, the fanciful sitter for romanino’s portrait (about 1524), who represents his predecessor, saint gaudioso, is thus a counterpoint to the picture of dorian gray. and romanino is a parallel to basil hallward since, for pater as for wilde, these portraits are the artists’ masterfigure 1 panel of girolamo romanino’s “the nativity with saints alessandro of brescia, jerome, gaudioso and filippo benizzi,” in the collection of national gallery, london. oil and egg tempera on wood, 1524–1525. illustration courtesy of the author. monsman 87 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 pieces. pater’s unsuccessful and rather nervously roving “art notes in north italy,” published in the new review in november 1890, prefaces his appreciably more lucid “gaudioso, the second” with these words: it is one of those old saints, gaudioso (at home in every church in brescia), who looks out with full face from the opposite corner of the altar-piece, from a background which, though it might be the new heaven over a new earth, is in truth only the proper, breathable air of italy. as we see him here, saint gaudioso is one of the more exquisite treasures of our national gallery. it was thus that at the magic touch of romanino’s art the dim, early, hunted-down brescian church of the primitive centuries, crushed into the dust, it might seem, was “brought to her king,” out of those old dark crypts, “in raiment of needle-work”–the delicate, richly folded, pontifical white vestments, the mitre and staff and gloves, and rich jewelled cope, blue or green. the face, of remarkable beauty after a type which all feel, though it is actually rare in art, is probably a portrait of some distinguished churchman of romanino’s own day; a second gaudioso, perhaps, setting that later brescian church to rights after the terrible french occupation in the painter’s own time, as his saintly predecessor, the gaudioso of the earlier century here commemorated, had done after the invasion of the goths. the eloquent eyes are open upon some glorious vision. “he hath made us kings and priests!”4 they seem to say for him, as the clean, sensitive lips might do so eloquently. beauty and holiness had “kissed each other,” as in borgognone’s imperial deacons at the certosa. at the renaissance the world might seem to have parted them again. but here certainly, once more, catholicism and the renaissance, religion and culture, holiness and beauty, might seem reconciled, by one who had conceived neither after any feeble way, in a gifted person. here at least, by the skill of romanino’s hand, the obscure martyr of the crypts shines as a saint of the later renaissance, with a sanctity of which the elegant world itself would hardly escape the fascination, and which reminds one how the great apostle saint paul has made courtesy part of the content of the divine charity itself. (1895a, 102–104) in wilde’s novel the sitter’s beauty suggests a personality that has eluded moral constraints. lord henry’s willingness to leave morality out of this equation is exactly what pater cannot accept. in both pater’s novel, already begun, and in this developing imaginary portrait, 88 pater’s portraits: the aesthetic hero in 1890 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 the victorian dichotomy of spirit and flesh, soul and body, is shown as platonically harmonized—they are intertwined rather than dichotomized. certainly the common renovation of churches in gaston and “gaudioso” is a clue to pater’s understanding of the harmony of old roman religious beauty, the beauty of those old gods, with the sanctifying of every kind of physical beauty by the incarnation of christ. in “gaudioso,” the portrait breaks off with “the new cathedral, the new brescia he designed, meant to build, was building already in earthly stones of price.” in gaston: many years after, gaston de latour, an enemy of all gothic darkness or heaviness, returning to his home full of a later taste, changed all that. a thicket of airy spires rose above the sanctuary; the blind triforium broke into one continuous window; the heavy masses of stone were pared down with wonderful dexterity, till not a handsbreadth remained uncovered by delicate traceries, as from the fair white roof touched sparingly with gold, down to the subterranean chapel of saint taurin, where the peasants of la beauce came to pray for rain, not a space was left unsearched by cheerful daylight, refined, but hardly dimmed at all, by painted glass mimicking the clearness of the open sky. (1995, 3) one suspects these architectural reconstructions, under the “true light” of renaissance influences, prompts these two champions of physical beauty to end with this more-creative achievement than many others among pater’s aesthetic heroes. gaston and gaudioso, both having taken holy orders, are a special religious category, perhaps. this is how his imaginary portrait of gaudioso begins: 5 c gaudioso, the second “a happy soul, that all the way to heaven hath a summer day.”6 the good looks of domenico averoldi, under the title of gaudioso the second, bishop of brescia, who in romanino’s picture represents, with so deep an impress of sanctity, gaudioso the first, bishop and saint, were in truth hereditary in his family:—a gift of which, like shrewd monsman 89 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 italians, the averoldi had ever been well aware,—of their masculine charm; duly estimating,—well! its pecuniary value: all it had helped them to in a world less exclusively practical in its application of the gift of sight than it is apt to suppose. since the days of an earlier domenico who three centuries before had brought an infatuated empress to her ruin, onwards, the family portrait gallery bore witness to the wonderful uniformity, from age to age, of that masculine charm, as the family records might have illustrated almost every variety of the use, and the misuse of it. only, always, amid whatever moral obliquities, it had brought with it a certain æsthetic fineness of habit: was a thing to live up to,7 and to make life a kind of chivalrous service, as to a trust. yet perhaps the masterful eyes of the averoldi had never before looked out on the world quite like those of the domenico in whom, towards the end of the sixteenth century, good looks and all, that family came to an end, whose youthful portrait as gaudioso the second remained not among the people at home, but in the sacristy of the cathedral, in its place among the bishops of brescia. eloquent eyes, of the poetic rather than the philosophic temper, they are not searching for anything:— have something to tell rather. and one could hardly conceive a frown between them. the expression of high birth and breeding is due chiefly to an air of harmonious composure in the lines. it is as if the facial apparatus for any painful or mean irritation were non-existent there. ambitious relations, scrutinising his face seriously, and pushing him on, by help of it, to make good betimes his place in the world, the lad of eighteen, already, seemingly, in some respects, its creature, had felt something rise in his throat, as certain words, the like of which he had never taken heed of before, floated all at once into his memory: manus tuæ fecerunt me!—“my maker, thy hands have made me and fashioned me”: and again, “’tis thou, hast fashioned me behind and before, most excellent artist! and laid thine hand upon me!”8 a quaint story he never denied was sometimes told in his presence:— how, like athanasius, as a child, with a naive delight in holiness, he had blessed his comrades en pontife.9 but that was early in life; and a youth, apparently worldly enough, had intervened. his friends indeed had destined him not to the ecclesiastical, but to a diplomatic career. had he made himself a diplomatist he might certainly have prospered well in a profession, which requires hardly less than the higher cleri90 pater’s portraits: the aesthetic hero in 1890 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 cal profession, the appliance of fine manners such as those by which the youthful domenico won a high reputation in the select society of brescia, where, between the ending of his secular education and his entrance into orders, he figured as a brilliant young man of the world, associated, by serious persons,—say! with tuberose and ballroom perfumes, appraising already, as an expert, not his good pictures only, but his good wines from the old country villa in the val camonica, with a sufficiently mundane taste, of which a traceable fulness of the mouth gave hint: not that voluptuousness which mars, sometimes, priestly lip (as another type of the priest has no lips at all) but a certain touch of the bon viveur such as makes one elegantly hospitable. would the face lapse into obesity? interested observers asked themselves. it never did. when age came at last, it was like a return to the delicacy of childhood, over eighty years.10 somewhere in that round of gaieties, of elegant comfort, he met a young lady of great fortune, then much admired among the youth of brescia; and as he conversed with her almost daily, what lingering sense he may have had of native religious vocation forsook him and he became her openly affianced lover. only, when certain difficulties about money settlements arose between his guardians and hers, the young lady herself being of no very ardent or tenacious temper, he made no effort to retain his advantage by holding her to her promise. the whole matter had occupied scarcely two months.11 so far as bystanders could estimate it, the disappointment had hardly been sufficient to produce a distaste for the world, and determine a preference for one career in life over another. yet summarily bidding adieu to his hopes in that direction, with a depth of serenity on his brow the significance of which was measured only by intimate friends, he turned once for all to the clerical profession. the white soul he would have given to his bride he brought now to the service of the altar with a facility, a decisive alacrity of heart, which presented itself to his new ecclesiastical superiors as a striking proof of the reality of his call. yet the austere old bishop who ordained him, at a somewhat earlier age than usual, seemed to reserve a doubt in the matter, and prescribed him, apparently for the mortification of surviving carnal or worldly tastes, an ecclesiastical function sufficiently opposed to his previous habits; adding to the intimation of the duties required (not unkindly) monsman 91 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 “if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee. it were better for thee to enter into life,—”: and the rest.12 as if in irony, the high-bred young priest was appointed working local member of the venerable congregation of relics.13 behold him, then, submissively at work, day by day, in mouldering ossuaries, charnel-houses, and such places, in those many dark crypts of the old brescian churches, crypt below crypt, where the “saints’ tragedy”14 of the first christian centuries played out, and where, amid the buried or misused relics of voluptuous pagan brixia (dear to catullus),15 the precious bodies of the martyrs still lay, sleeping!—“sacramental dust”—he was ordered to think, “preserved to immortal life,” as being fed, at so great hazard in those cruel times, with the “bread of angels.”16—witness the [martyrs of the crypts] as commemorated by r[omanino]’s picture of [saint gaudioso] in the [national gallery].17 did they think it was the resurrection morn,18 come at last, after so long a night, thus exposed again to the old earthly daylight, by the hand of domenico? the dainty fingers grew used to the touch of those rotting discoloured bones, the tardy process of corruption through prolonged centuries quickened now in the quicker air, and achieved in an hour. it was like a penance, thinly disguised,—his enforced sojourn in dark subterranean regions, so distastefully in contrast to the gaiety of the world above; its frescoed house-fronts; the flower-gardens amid the houses; the wholesome sweetness of his home from boyhood. in the grimy purgatorio, you might come, in truth, sometimes upon some polished templecorner of the wicked buried city, lowest layer of all, which had once had, and misused, its daylight, yet perhaps not past praying for after all. pledges they seemed, in any case,—those dainty fragments,—the promise, of a whole world of, at least visible, grace, which more laborious scholars than himself might recover. for himself, he must re-cover them in another sense, bury them once more: set the inscriptions only, according to a municipal regulation, a [precedent] of the [former] century, in the walls above-ground. could he but have stumbled on the buried venus, now one of the central treasures of a place so rich in various art?—aye! venus victrix,19 though couched there, upside down in the dust, for fifteen centuries. he was spared such temptation to relieve the ashen tenour of the thoughts prescribed him: and set up, all about, another sort of inscriptions also: “my flesh shall rest in hope!”20 [“in carne mea videbo deum 92 pater’s portraits: the aesthetic hero in 1890 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 quem visurus sum ego ipse et oculi mei conspecturi sunt.”]21 — “oh! that these words were written,” job had continued, “graven with an iron pen in the rock for ever.”22 in letters, shapely as those of pope damasus in the old roman catacombs, domenico so inscribed them on the dripping walls again and again. in fact, what had been meant to root out a suspected element of the old adam in him had but re-instated it the more profoundly, and with the strength now of a religious sanction. the protest of inspired job, thus repeated by him three hundred years since, suggested to him by the very ashes, these repulsive ashes of humanity, re-fortified, more stoutly than ever, his old just pride in the material world, that world in which he must perforce live, and, if he might, prosecute his salvation. in his secret heart he had required of his religion, and duly found there, the justification, it might be, also the correction of a manner of taking things instinctive with him, which was, and must remain, after all, a part of himself. a soul might find its way into the entire circle of religious belief through a single religious truth, and the very humblest christian, surely, have his favourite doctrine. well!—his should be a doctrine, certainly, quite orthodox, though pious people seemed almost to ignore its place in their creed perhaps because as it happens they had never quarreled about it—the doctrine of the resurrection of the body of our carnal being taken au pied de la lettre. credo in [carnis resurrectionem]: it became to domenico the essence, the revealing doctrine of revelation itself: the very soul of inspiration. “grant that all carnal [affections may die in them, and that all things belonging to the spirit may live and grow in them. amen”]23—he had never been about to say a sincere amen! to that austerely beautiful prayer, hoped he might pray now instead [the words of saint athanasius, that at the coming of our lord jesus christ “all men with their bodies”] may “rise again” in him.24 a friend, not his confessor, asked only would he turn the doctrine into a heresy by wilful and one-sided preoccupation with it. that stern person his confessor with a head like a well-preserved skull or a good carving thereof 25 became chaplain, when, in part through family interest, domenico averoldi still in early life himself became bishop of brescia, gaudioso the second, taking that saintly name of gaudioso “clerically” as his episcopal surname.—devout people of that age would sometimes procure themselves as a memento mori a death’s head of ivory or giallo antico26 or of crystal—(as if you peeped into monsman 93 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 heaven warily through the eyeless thing): you may still see such in this or that cabinet of the curious among the gentlemen’s shoe-buckles and the fine ladies’ fans. it was on a similar principle in great measure that domenico had selected his chaplain to be still abundant in duteous rebukes, to be ever at hand as the one check through a long delightful course of years in which the world of art, the pictorial world especially by the mastery of moretto, of romanino, little by little approached, identified itself with, his gradually enlarging comprehension of the spiritual order. with that sweet thought of the carnal resurrection ever in his mind, he might frankly accept the world of sight; it would be almost a piety to “immerse” onself in the matter [our lord] himself had redeemed—this lovely realm of perfected colour and form. aye! there was the point of union between catholicism and the renaissance of which he became, so to speak, one of the saints. and in an age which so industriously refined the body and all that attaches itself thereto, this dogma of its resurrection was a principle not wholly cognisable by others, was the secret of a decided course of action. yes! from the first, and as by anticipation long before, with those old greek craftsmen, for instance, the fact of the incarnation [en sarki genomenos theos]27— had involved implicitly the sanctifying of all visible beauty.28 and now this delightful italian art, whose ministry to errant eyes others had sometimes feared, for him was but one of the welcome after-fruits of the assumption of the flesh of our fine human clay by the son of god. surely the most heavenly-minded might wish to defer death, defer it for ever, that it might gaze thereon with the bodily eye. domenico was become, might one say, a spiritual, a religious, materialist; and by consequence a warmer lover than ever, as wealthy also an effective patron, of the living art of his day. feeling as always that for his part he could never be moved at all by a wholly unsensuous world, he was glad to assure himself now that he need never again endeavour to detach religious considerations from the things which are seen. to know and love the visible world one need not go out of his presence. and then, how reassuring to remember that amid all his sufferings the lord himself in his perfect flesh had apparently ever remained untouched by bodily sickness, sane as those old greeks he had made so well, for his own pleasure surely, whose “delight” had been from the first “with the sons of men.”29 the thoughts of domenico would still be persistently occupied with them. in truth, all the outward seemli94 pater’s portraits: the aesthetic hero in 1890 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 ness of the manner of life circumstance had provided for him connected itself with his favourite doctrine. what the old italian artists and others for the most part had conceived as a motive of physical horror, the [open grave],30 was to him eminently gracious and pleasant, sanctifying every kind of physical beauty, putting to flight every kind of coarseness, a motive of fine discretion and dignity among the luxurious rich, of hope among the poor stricken here, sometimes stricken so hideously–—lazarus! the beggar! called forth like the butter-fly by the sun from its horny shard out of the dishonour of the grave. it was as if venus victrix, lying there so near his fresh morning walks to san pietro in oliveto, beset him, or in those forced subterranean researches had actually set a finger in contact with him, claimed that he should restore her, too, to the light of day. his predecessors doubtless had suspected, discredited, unhesitatingly excommunicated, the victorious beauty of those old gods and their worshippers. but were they perhaps not quite past praying for after all, after some form not prescribed, certainly, in missal or breviary? buried along with those old brescian martyrs, they might well arise together now in the new cathedral, the new brescia he designed, meant to build, was building already in earthly stones of price, with the relics of [old saints/maryrs] enshrined in glory, of [faustinus/nazarus] and [jovita/celsus], while the hands of [romanino] and [moretti] recorded their heroic sanctity on the walls, the [sacred personages/bishops], the last [reminiscence] of [the old religion/worship of visible beauty], glorious in pontifical attire: so he chose to think of them and their doings. it was about this time.... c and here the portrait breaks off, with only the five words of the new paragraph on its twenty-first and last sheet. it seems inescapable that “gaudioso” and gaston de latour were caught up in a platonic “dialectic process” with wilde’s novel (pater 1893a, 111). whereas wilde’s heroes yield to temptation and daydreams, pater’s aesthetic heroes seek and (perhaps) attain a beatific vision: “the eloquent eyes are open upon some glorious vision,” pater had written of gaudioso in “art notes” (1895a, 89). marius likewise had monsman 95 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 refined his intuition “till one’s whole nature should become a complex medium of reception, towards the vision—the beatific vision, if one really cared to make it such—of our actual experience in the world” (1885, 154). plato’s theory is solidly paralleled to pater’s. a passage of mythological fantasy in the phaedrus (255c–e) develops this platonic theory of vision, based on plato’s prior allusion to beauty’s effluence. here the “stream” of beauty “called ‘desire’ ” flows from its source in the beautiful one (ganymede) toward the lover (zeus), filling him, overflowing and rebounding back to the beloved. from the beautiful one, the lover’s soul catches and reflects back a glimpse of primordial beauty, to which the beloved conforms himself. because the proper object of love is always the primordial beauty within and behind earthly beauty, the true lover becomes a mirror in which the merely physical is reflected as spiritual, inspiring the beautiful one’s idealizing counter-love (“love for love”).31 thus this platonic theory of vision connects to pater’s insistence on the harmony of the spiritual and physical worlds. as early as the renaissance pater invoked plato’s specular ideal: “giorgione ... becomes a sort of impersonation of venice itself, its projected reflex or ideal, all that was intense or desirable in it crystallising about the memory of this wonderful young man” (1893, 155). this reflexiveness between the real and the ideal also had been central to pater’s most distinctly autobiographical work, “the child in the house.” through pictures in religious books, his alter ego florian gains the vision of “sacred personalities, which are at once the reflex and the pattern of our nobler phases of life...—a mirror towards which men might turn away their eyes from vanity and dullness, and see themselves therein as angels” (1895b, 194). and thus also in the empty house of a friend, gaston ponders his image: gaston became aware, surprised by a certain fineness new to himself in his own reflexion from a venetian mirror, of lustrous depth and hardness, presumably faithful.... if according to the platonic doctrine people become like what they see, surely the omnipresence of fine art around one must re-touch, at least in the case of the sensitive, what is still mobile in a human countenance.... did portraiture not merely reflect life but in part also determine it? the image might react on the original, refining it one degree further. (1995, 90) 96 pater’s portraits: the aesthetic hero in 1890 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 however, in marius the epicurean there are scenes that marius must not gaze upon, as well as visions that he must pursue. pater had described an oval chamber of “ancestral masks” in marius’ villa which contained a bronze head of medusa. given that the medusa head is in an oval pinocateca, the likelihood arises that the viewer and the gorgon stand at interchangeable foci. is this vision such that it will petrify the viewer or can he resist? the key is that “those who have once begun the heavenward pilgrimage may not go down again to darkness and the journey beneath the earth” (1871, i: 590);32 for such, anteros is always, as jowett wonderfully translated plato’s phrase, “love returned.” but in the chapter of gaston entitled “anteros,” pater refers to this child of venus and mars as profoundly ambiguous. created to stimulate his brother eros, anteros may represent either love’s complementary fulfillment (love in return) or, as the beginning of pater’s fourth paragraph remarks, an “unkindly or cruel love,” an anti-eros. the philosophical lover of the phaedrus is motivated by intellectual beauty, an enduring but half-forgotten vision of a preincarnate divine beauty; the non-lover is one whose sensual desires have nothing to do with intellectual beauty and instead create the “living death” of dorian’s narcissistic soul. during the time that pater labored to complete plato, wilde resolved to write salomé. within a few months of each other, pater published plato and platonism (1893), and wilde published his play.33 wilde’s characters in salomé are “always looking” to their detriment. when the narcissist falls in love, as the young syrian who “much loved to gaze at himself in the river,” he sees not an idealized reflection but an image of himself as merely mortal. this key trope of visual desire, turning morality into carnality and chastity into necrophilia, is not an eros of love in return but the destructive eros of self-worship. one reason for pater’s failure to finish either fictional work may be simply that he ran out of mortal time, dying of a heart attack following rheumatic fever and pleurisy. but why, then, did he choose to carry through the difficult project of writing plato and platonism rather than finishing his fiction? although pater had lectured frequently on plato and aristotle in earlier years, he seems to have returned to plato at this time, not only as lecture material, but also as a timely subject for publication. what was it about his fictional compositions that proved monsman 97 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 more difficult to write than the philosophical variety? pater had moved into fiction belatedly in his career, in his thirty-eighth year, so perhaps scholarly explication, like art criticism, came more naturally, and plato was another sort of necessary “prologue” to the eventual completion of his narratives. in 1891 when pater identified the loss of “moral sense” in dorian gray, that ethical motive was precisely the element in beauty and love that he for many years had identified in plato’s dialogues and expounded upon to the oxford undergraduates. moreover, since wilde’s aesthetics found expression on the stage and in fiction, did pater perhaps ultimately wish to side-step too direct a comparison, either in terms of popular attention or of a simplistic identification of his doctrine of love and beauty with that of dorian—or, even, of salomé? plato, certainly no victorian in temperament or practice, nevertheless would be a safer aesthetic hero to offer initially, given benjamin jowett’s successful translations of the dialogues. and, indeed, jowett and pater (who in earlier years had studied plato with the illustrious master of balliol) made out of plato a very different greek hero of love and beauty than any of wilde’s aesthetic characters in nymph-haunted meadows, in ateliers filled with the rich odor of roses, or on moon-lit palace terraces. notes 1. the first version of the picture of dorian gray appeared in lippincott’s monthly magazine in july of 1890. “the critic as artist” was initially published in two installments as “the true function and value of criticism” in the nineteenth century in july/september 1890. 2. with whimsical perversity pater “used to pretend that he shut his eyes in crossing switzerland, on his journeys to and from italy, so as not to see the ‘horrid pots of blue paint,’ as he called the swiss lakes” (benson 1906, 191). perhaps like lionel tollemache, who presented his wife a copy of marius at engelberg in june of 1885, he later enjoyed that high valley not far from lucerne (afterwards to become a great ski venue). 3. pater and wilde were in touch during this period, pater pointing out to wilde before dorian first appeared in lippincott’s monthly magazine (june 20, 1890) that a “certain passage” was liable to misconstruction and wilde made “an addition” (hyde 1956, 124). 98 pater’s portraits: the aesthetic hero in 1890 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 4. revelation 1.6, 5.10. 5. permission to publish this material from among the papers of walter pater, so thematically imbricated in the circumstances of gaston de latour, comes from the residual legatees of his literary and scholarly estate, ms. catherine jones and her sisters, whom i warmly thank. i use approximately the same editorial guidelines as described in the introduction to my edition of gaston de latour: the revised text. thus, bracketing in this fair copy or reading text indicates lacunae that pater had not yet filled, but for which i have chosen approximate equivalents (in pater’s last paragraph, i include alternative possibilities). 6. the epigraph is from richard crashaw’s “in praise of lessius” (1957, 157–158) 7. pater saw an important distinction between wilde’s flippant aphorism to “live up to your blue china” and his own theories of beauty and holiness. he selected wilde’s witticism as a chapter epigraph for “an empty house” to inaugurate his 1890 continuation of gaston—at least until he canceled it as a too direct attack upon his admirer (1895a, 232, fig. 5). 8. psalm 119 (vulgate 118) and psalm 139, as found in the book of common prayer, with an added echo of st. john chrysostom’s homilies on the gospel of john. the catholic poet g. m. hopkins opens “the wreck of the deutschland” with just this poetically transformed image also. 9. “as a pontiff.” rufinus of aquileia (c. 345–410) gives this account of athanasius in the vitæ patrum or historia eremitica (i,14); see also the greek fathers by adrian fortescue (1908, 10). 10. derisive mots from dorian are echoed here by pater. wilde had lord henry exclaim: “but beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. intellect is in itself an exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. the moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. how perfectly hideous they are! except, of course, in the church. but then in the church they don’t think. a bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and consequently he always looks absolutely delightful” (1890, 4). 11. a somewhat similar momentary liaison is noted in gaston’s history (1995, 65-66). 12. matthew 18.9. 13. the congregation identifies the bones of the ancient martyrs, separating them from pagans also buried anonymously in catacombs and other subterranean places, testifying to their validity as relics and distributing them to appointed resting places. monsman 99 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 14. this is an allusion to charles kingsley’s poetic drama, “the saint’s tragedy” (1848), concerning st. elizabeth of hungary, a topic of pater’s poetic juvenalia also. 15. brescia is the ancient brixia; catullus writes, “brixia veronæ mater amata meæ,” “brixia the well-loved mother city of my own verona” or, with a conjectured emendation, “brixia that mother-city which i love as i love verona” (carmina: poem 67). 16. psalm 78.23–25. 17. the reader may wonder why pater’s manuscript contained such crashingly unnecessary lacunae; perhaps because he intended an immediate revision and blanks required no ink or effort; or maybe he hoped some inspiration might occur a bit less barefaced than the obvious. not only does the opening sentence of this manuscript contain the phrase “romanino’s picture,” but the “art notes” essay provides all the other needed material—supported by such close parallel words in both essay and portrait as “dust” and “commemorated.” 18. compare gaston de latour: “as if mistaking the jubilant sunshine of this first summer day for the resurrection morning, the occupant of a nameless old stone coffin had tumbled forth” (1995, 129). 19. a bronze statue from the roman imperial age known as the venus victrix of brescia, in much the same pose as the marble venus de milo, was discovered during archeological excavations of the capitolium di brescia in 1826; she is called victrix, having won the golden apple from paris of troy. the louvre’s statue from milos is a canting pun on the island’s name, which means “apple” in greek. 20. acts 2.26. 21. job 26–27: “in my flesh i shall see my god, whom i myself shall see, and my eyes shall behold.” pater’s manuscript instruction here for his fragmentary english words and lacunae is “lat. only.” 22. job 19.23–24. is it perhaps too pedantic to point out that these verses preface, not continue, the previous latin quotation? 23. rendered here as pater undoubtedly remembered the passage from the baptismal service in the book of common prayer. 24. the quicunque vult or athanasian creed; matthew 27.63. 25. pater struck out the phrase “in ivory or yellow marble” here for the sake of euphony—a nice touch, but he wanted to use “ivory” again in the next sentence. 26. marble, a warm yellow (“numidian yellow”) tinged or streaked with pink and brown. 100 pater’s portraits: the aesthetic hero in 1890 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 27. “god existing in flesh.” pater here carets a dash above his primary line in such a way as to suggest a lacuna that needs to be filled. i’ve taken the phrase from st. ignatius of antioch’s (a.d. ca. 35–107) “letter to the ephesians” (chapter seven). 28. in marius the epicurean, the young marius is told by a priest at the temple of aesculapius that “he was of the number of those who, in the words of a poet who came long after, must be ‘made perfect by the love of visible beauty.’ it was a discourse conceived from the point of view of a theory which marius afterwards found in plato’s phaedrus, the theory of the aporro/h tou~ kallou~j [effluence of beauty]” (1885, i:34). 29. proverbs 8.31, spoken by the voice of “wisdom.” on the bottom of sheet eighteen, the four lines of this sentence were crossed out with dizzying pencil swirls; at the top of the next page, nineteen, this excised portion is rewritten. 30. pater’s lacuna is filled by the description in “the child in the house” of an “open grave” associated there with the “physical horror of death” (1895b, 191). 31. “then does fountain of that stream, which zeus when he was in love with ganymede called desire, overflow upon the lover; and some enters into his soul, and some when he is filled flows out again; and as a breeze or an echo leaps from the smooth rocks and rebounds to them again, so does the stream of beauty, passing the eyes which are the natural doors and windows of the soul, return again to the beautiful one ... and filling the soul of the beloved also with love.... the lover is his mirror in whom he is beholding himself, but he is not aware of this. when he is with the lover, both cease from their pain, but when he is away then he longs and he is longed for, and has love’s [reflected] image, love for love (anteros) [love returned], lodging in his breast” (jowett 1871, i:589). 32. compare to the symposium (201 et seq). 33. wilde composed most of it in paris in 1891 and by january 1892 had finished it in england. in june 1892 rehearsals began in london with sarah bernhardt in the lead role; but the play was banned owing to an outdated ordinance prohibiting the portrayal of biblical characters on stage. it was published in february 1893 and its world premiere took place in paris three years later. (ellmann 1987, 341, 363, 371). references benson, a.c. 1906 walter pater. london: macmillan. crawshaw, richard 1957 the poems of richard crawshaw. ed. l.c. martin. oxford: clarendon. monsman 101 © equinox publishing ltd. 2008 ellmann, richard 1987 oscar wilde. new york: knopf. evans, l. 1970 letters of walter pater. oxford: clarendon. fortescue, adrian 1908 the greek fathers. london: catholic truth society. hyde, h. montgomery 1956 the trials of oscar wilde. new york: new york univesity press. jowett, benjamin 1871 phaedrus, the dialogues of plato. oxford: clarendon. pater, walter 1873 the renaissance: studies in art and poetry. london: macmillan. 1885 marius the epicurean. london: macmillan. 1891 a novel by mr. oscar wilde. review of the picture of doran gray. the bookman 1: 59–60. 1893a plato and platonism. london: macmillan. 1893b studies in the history of the renaissance. london: macmillan. 1895a art notes in north italy. in miscellaneous studies, ed. c. shadwell, 85–104. london: macmillan. 1895b the child in the house. in miscellaneous studies, ed. c. shadwell, 171–197. london: macmillan. 1995 gaston de latour: the revised text, ed. gerald monsman. university of north carolina at greensboro: elt press. wilde, oscar 1890 the picture of dorian gray. lippincott’s monthly magazine, 46: 3–100. 1891 the critic as artist. intentions. london: james osgood. [expositions 6.2 (2012) i–ii] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 editors’ preface john a. doody, gregory hoskins, john-paul spiro this journal is called expositions: interdisciplinary studies in the humanities. the first part of the title (chosen by our founding editor, peter busch) derives from st. augustine’s expositions of the psalms. the name seemed appropriate as the journal is published by an augustinian university and would be based on the interpretation of classic texts. the second part of the title, “interdisciplinary studies in the humanities,” has meanings both obvious and elusive – in particular, that buzzword, interdisciplinary. attempting to define this term can be like going down a rabbit-hole. when a historian discusses literary and philosophical texts while describing the spirit of an era, and a theologian considers the social and political context of a sacred book while employing literary techniques of interpretation, and a literary critic deploys terms borrowed from anthropology and evolutionary biology, this is all happily interdisciplinary and, by now, commonplace. if an academic discipline is a system or collection of methods and practices, then we all have plenty to learn from one another. so long as there are more approaches ready to hand, there is more work to be done. a discipline can be like a martial art or a form of yoga, a series of moves. however, interdisciplinarity can all too often mean “going on a holiday,” becoming a dilettante, losing all scholarly rigor. too often this involves a well-trained scholar in a particular academic field choosing to write a light piece about a favorite novel or film or television show, or making a strong claim about a historical period or political institution or social movement without doing the necessary spadework. we do our best at expositions to avoid publishing such work, provocative though it may be. the real question is, what is good interdisciplinary work? we hope that the varied contributions of this, our fall 2012 issue, provide some answers. here, in a stimulating and refreshingly direct interview with alasdair macintyre, one can learn that “[i]t is the task of any worthwhile university not just to educate in particular disciplines, but to enable its students to understand how each discipline contributes to an overall understanding of the human condition and so to become reflective.” one can contrast the various responses to daryn lehoux’s daring new book on roman science, seeing not only how it may transform our understanding of the romans but of the scientific enterprise itself and the epistemological assumptions of it. one can gain fresh insights into cervantes’ don quixote and consider the objections to brad gregory’s sweeping claims about the origins of contemporary secularism in the protestant reformation. finally, following up on our well-received “overheard in the academy” about the future of classical http://expositions.journals.villanova.edu/article/view/1452/1314 http://expositions.journals.villanova.edu/article/view/1452/1314 http://expositions.journals.villanova.edu/article/view/1454/1316 http://expositions.journals.villanova.edu/article/view/1455/1317 http://expositions.journals.villanova.edu/article/view/1456/1318 http://expositions.journals.villanova.edu/article/view/1457/1319 http://expositions.journals.villanova.edu/article/view/1457/1319 http://expositions.journals.villanova.edu/article/view/1458/1320 http://expositions.journals.villanova.edu/article/view/1458/1320 http://expositions.journals.villanova.edu/issue/view/67 editor’s preface ii studies, we now offer a new “overheard” on the future of the english department, where one can discover how the study of english literature and the teaching of writing have been profoundly affected by technology, political advocacy, the diversification and corporatization of the university, and inherent paradoxes within its own conceptual framework. needless to say, we are deeply indebted to alasdair macintyre for granting us an interview, and special thanks must be given to liam kavanagh for conducting it. jacqueline feke was the principal organizer of the “academic roundtable” on lehoux’s book on roman science. janine utell assembled and coordinated the “overheard in the academy” on the future of the english department. natalie zullinger provided sustained editorial assistance. we are fortunate to have such people associated with our journal. http://expositions.journals.villanova.edu/issue/view/67 [expositions 5.2 (2011) 38-44] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 interview: mark shiffman, villanova university john-paul spiro villanova university aristotle’s de anima (on the soul) is a forbidding work. unlike the nicomachean ethics, which is popular in undergraduate philosophy courses and even with general readers, the de anima is a formidable work of metaphysical biology that relies on extensive knowledge of the aristotelian corpus. but our frustration with the text is also fruitful, as aristotle forces us to think in ways to which we are not accustomed. the recent (2009) edition of de anima published by focus press and translated by mark shiffman, associate professor of humanities and augustinian traditions at villanova university, preserves the text’s complexity while making it available for the curious (and diligent) reader. i interviewed prof. shiffman in october 2011. below is a transcript of our conversation. spiro: what are the unique challenges to translating and understanding the de anima? shiffman: the hardest thing specifically about de anima is that in a way it’s the least independent text of aristotle’s. it’s at the juncture of physics and biology and metaphysics and the psychological dimension of ethics. so with his other texts, there’s a sense in which they can stand on their own as starting points. but with de anima you have to start out with some understanding at least of the physics and of the language in which he discusses things in the physics. so for the kind of translation that i want to do, it’s much more challenging if you’re not committing yourself to translating the whole corpus – which i have no intention of doing! i don’t think you can improve much on joe sachs’ [translations of] physics 1 or metaphysics 2 . spiro: what was your process of translation? how long did this take? shiffman: basically, i tried to spend some time with one sentence at a time and make sure i’ve thought about the different possible meanings of all the words and the different ways of construing all the grammar, and then spend some time letting the whole thing sink in. then i tried – once i had a sense of what the sentence means or what several things it could mean – then i tried to come out with something in english that captures as much of that as i can. so one of the things that i tried to make room for was the ambiguities that are present in much of the text. spiro: how long did it take? shiffman: from the time that i agreed to do the translation to when i finished, it was something like ten years. partly what i did in the meantime was write a dissertation that was largely about 39 spiro aristotle, so i got a deeper understanding of aristotle’s thought in general. and then really i did the bulk of the translation in about two years. for the last year or so, it meant getting up at four in the morning and taking a few hours to translate a paragraph. spiro: i’ve noticed that too – aristotle makes more sense in the early morning. shiffman: you allow your mind to adapt itself to the greek first thing in the morning so there’s no clutter yet! it is very much a contemplative process, especially with aristotle. that’s what characterizes his writing style in distinction from just about anyone else: it’s the contemplative intensity of his way of putting things. spiro: reading your translation, i found myself going back to “on the movement of animals” and “on the parts of animals.” shiffman: sachs has “memory and recollection” in his appendix. you could have a translation of de anima with about eight other works as appendices! in my original proposal i had wanted to do big chunks of “on the parts of animals” and a little of “on the generation of animals,” but the de anima turned out to be plenty of work. spiro: your translation has a heideggerian feel. you translate energeia as “being-at-work” and entelechia as “being-fully-itself.” shiffman: well, joe sachs was a big inspiration to me. i’m a big fan of his translations. and i agreed to do this translation before he had done one. spiro: is this aristotle-via-heidegger? shiffman: i don’t think so. i think heidegger’s attempt to dig back into the thought that greek philosophers are trying to express is extremely valuable, especially for a translator. if what you want to do is try to bring the thinker intellectually back to life in a way that’s as immediately engaging with the things that they’re thinking about, as well as you can possibly manage, then i think you have to confront the challenge that heidegger is so good at showing: what’s present in recovering an understanding of the greek that you can’t just get from a lexicon. i suppose it would be fair to say, more generally, that my translation and my sense of the translator’s task are very much influenced by phenomenology. so not only by heidegger, but partly by husserl and partly by students of theirs. spiro: you cite hans jonas favorably in your introduction. shiffman: in my dissertation, one of the things i was dealing with was the legacy of gadamer, strauss, and klein as influenced by heidegger in the hermeneutics of ancient philosophy. they were all engaging critically with the way that he read – especially – plato. in that earlier work of mine i was extending by analogy their criticism of heidegger’s interpretation of plato into the reading the aristotle. in one way there’s a very deep influence of heidegger, but it’s not a interview: mark shiffman 40 “heideggerian reading” or through the lens of heidegger per se. rather i was taking heidegger seriously but in a critical dialogue with his interpretations. the translation of energeia is something i shamelessly stole from sachs! but i wasn’t entirely satisfied with his translation of entelechia so i worked out something that was more literal and etymologically correct, and less forcefully interpretive. even though i don’t much disagree with his interpretation of what it means. spiro: you read aristotle’s account of the human soul such that we are made to be contemplative, as if in order to be (fully) human one must wonder about what it means to be human. this also recalls heidegger’s notion of dasein, and it’s central to the question of aristotle’s relationship to plato. shiffman: possibly in comparison to plato, aristotle thinks we’re more contemplative than we know. that is, as i was saying before, already in apprehending anything we have some purchase on the intelligible content of it, even if only implicitly. intellect is what distinguishes us from other animals, and aristotle does have a sense – a stronger sense than you find in plato – of the way in which natural beings are oriented toward the fulfillment of their powers. in that sense we are implicitly always contemplative beings and always on the way to achieving that nature. but, again, to really carry that through requires learning to contemplate. and a lot of attention is given, in chapters four and five of book three, to the intellect per se: the receptive intellect, the active intellect. what struck me in working through the translation – and especially it struck me because it was a very difficult part to translate – was the discussion of analogy that follows those chapters. i think that’s where aristotle is really trying to show very palpably what this intellectual capacity is. because in recognizing an analogy between things, we’re recognizing something that’s purely intelligible. it’s not in either of the things, but requires recognizing something important about them. but what we apprehend is not strictly… what we apprehend is the relation, and the relation is nowhere other than in intelligibility. unless, of course, one of the places where that recognition takes us deeper into understanding the structure of being, is precisely in the analogies in the parts of animals and parts of living things more generally, something responsible for them having analogous parts that helps you make sense of all of them. so although i’m not a huge fan of iq tests, i can see why they put a huge stress on questions of analogy. there’s something proper about that. spiro: in your introduction, it sounds as if you think that contemporary thinking about soul – to the extent that there is any such thinking at all – is too influenced by descartes. how does the de anima give us an alternative? how does aristotle challenge our assumptions? shiffman: [long pause.] it seems to me that there was not the same kind of methodologically explicit dualism in aristotle’s time – not even in plato do we find that – nonetheless the problem seems to exist at least implicitly for aristotle. certainly [aristotle considers] the problem of how the earlier natural philosophers tried to deal with the question of whether we actually know 41 spiro things outside ourselves and how they tried to generally bridge that gap with materialistic solutions of some kind. so in de anima, that’s one thing aristotle is trying to come to grips with. that is, concerning the faculties of soul that are critical or apprehending faculties, how we can understand what exactly they do apprehend in the world. and what we find, or what the helpful alternative he provides to something like cartesian dualism, is … i’m tempted to lean on jonas 3 more than i really want to, because i’ve taught that piece and thought about it a lot in relation to de anima, but that’s not really what was driving my approach to the question, which goes further back than that. the important thing to understand about aristotle’s philosophical approach is that it’s not methodological in any modern sense. which is to say that it’s trying to keep alive the problems as problems, in a way that descartes doesn’t really seem concerned to do. it’s easy for descartes to start with a kind of pure doubt that we do apprehend anything, and then figure out how to overcome that position, and i think he’s not very successful. that is to say descartes’ solution is something that’s very much open, or something that really demands criticism of the kind that we find in kant and nietzsche. whereas aristotle, in keeping a number of problems in play and moving back and forth between them, arrives at a plausible understanding of how the forms that we apprehend in our senses are the sign, the indicator, of the form that’s the principle of being of the thing we’re apprehending. so there’s no chasm; there’s a continuity through which we progress by examining and thinking about things that start out as given to us and our senses but already implicitly have a kind of intelligible content to them that by aristotle’s account is the beginning of apprehending the intelligible content of the very being of the thing. so as opposed to descartes, for whom there are two fundamentally different kinds of being that you have to find some way of connecting, for aristotle they’re not fundamentally different; but the process of establishing the union of the two is the laborious one. spiro: laborious but necessary. shiffman: laborious but necessary. and can’t be accomplished by starting from universal doubt, but can only be accomplished by this gradual process by which we recognize some of our errors and the sources of those errors that skew our interpretations of things. so there’s a kind of self-knowledge that the aristotelian process demands and engenders that the cartesian process simply tries to leap over. spiro: there are cognitive scientists who think of consciousness not as a spirit or an illusion but as a process. are they being aristotelian? shiffman: i think they’re trying. as aristotle would say, they’re being “led on by the truth itself,” but there are two impediments that are really one impediment: they don’t raise metaphysical questions because they don’t see that those are fundamentally within their purview and at issue in their endeavors. even if they do want to negate a cartesian metaphysical formulation, they’re substituting another dogmatic one in its place, which is largely from ignorance, i think, of the possibility of a more robust, classical understanding of metaphysics. and, i think, the very methodological demands from which they’re beginning are already a interview: mark shiffman 42 compromise with descartes (or the cartesian spirit), which is not simply a matter of dualism but has to do with the question of whether you can apprehend what’s real and intelligible with something other than a kind of conceptual construct. so, in a sense, you could say they’re more hobbesian, and the parting of ways between descartes and hobbes is really not so much one of method but of in what interests the methods are being applied. descartes is a minimalist in the assumptions that he will allow himself, in the interest of clear representation of the phenomena; hobbes is a methodological minimalist in the interest of the coherence of an explanatory system. if that’s your priority then materialism makes a lot of sense. but both of those methodological approaches are united in abandoning the kind of dialectical – and what you might call phenomenological – approach that aristotle takes. spiro: if the student of nature must consider metaphysics, does this mean contemporary scientists should expand the scope of their inquiry? or is this more a matter for the curriculum: students should be required to study philosophy – and metaphysical philosophy – along with biology and physics? shiffman: that’s a good question, a difficult question to address. on the one hand i want to say that scientists ought to have a better understanding of the ways in which their sciences open on to philosophical questions and are not really, can’t really be hermetically insulated from them. and ideally that they would be able to understand the philosophical alternatives that open up as areas. but on the other hand i don’t have a lot of, i think what generally passes as “philosophy of science” or “philosophy of biology” is typically too narrow and not always that helpful. so it would be great if everyone educated in science also had to be educated in the philosophy of several traditions and understand its bearing on the questions that they’re not asking. otherwise what tends to happen is what john henry newman said would happen when you’re missing disciplines in your education, which is that other disciplines start encroaching on their territory and thinking they can address the questions that don’t really belong in their discipline. you can see this in for example the conversations surrounding intelligent design in america, and the question of whether it’s a scientific idea or a religious idea, when really it’s a philosophical idea, but philosophy is not a part of the cultural conversation in a way that lets people recognize that. spiro: does the de anima help us understand, say, the nicomachean ethics or the politics? some people just read those two books and slight or even ignore aristotle’s other works. are they missing something? shiffman: yes. i guess partly the question is, assuming aristotle’s metaphysics and biology are entirely wrong, would his practical philosophy be essentially right? i think in order to maintain that, you would have to explain how you can convincingly ground his thinking about the human person, about the household, about the tensions between household and city (and individual and city), without a strong understanding of the good and natural goods. the only way you really could do that is by treating the practical arguments as dialectical in the aristotelian sense: that is, dialectical in the sense of articulating the most persuasive view of what would make a human life 43 spiro satisfying, without what i think is the stronger and on the whole valid foundation for that view in aristotle’s understanding of nature. one of the places that i found this most crucial is in the discussion of the household and of economics in book 1 of the politics, where aristotle offers what is really a critique of, in our terms, a critique of an economy that’s centered so nearly exclusively on money. i don’t find that most of the people who favor focusing exclusively on the practical philosophy tend to take that as seriously as i think aristotle does, but they treat it more historically. whereas i think what he’s providing there is a powerful critique of how life becomes deformed as “wealth” is considered more and more in terms of money, fungible wealth, rather than what he calls “natural forms” of wealth. spiro: who is aristotle’s audience? is he just speaking to athenians or is he speaking beyond (or past) them? does he identify himself and his work against or outside of athens? shiffman: i do think, and this is very much what my dissertation was about, i think that he’s taking the starting points of the athenian audience – mostly an aristocratic, youngish audience – and gradually showing the limitations of that and moving their understanding towards something more true to the phenomena. and also something toward a more accurate understanding of what the philosophical life or philosophical engagement means as a way of life, as a spiritual condition. so in that way my reading is to a certain extent influenced by pierre hadot. 4 however, i think that in the case of aristotle, first of all hadot’s understanding of what aristotle’s up to is not very good, not quite adequate, partly because in his interpretations of the ancient schools, he is privileging the stoic and epicurean models. that doesn’t work so well for people like plato and aristotle, for whom the question of how we arrive at the truth and what sort of spiritual condition that itself requires is really central. spiro: how is aristotle misunderstood? shiffman: there are lots of ways. to start with, some marginal observations, he’s thought not to have a sense of humor! and i think he does. and probably more importantly from the interpretive point of view, most interpreters i think don’t appreciate how the movement of his thought in the different writings is never a linear movement. it’s always dialectical in two senses: there’s the platonic sense of dialectic, in which, among other things, in order to understand something you follow out different possibilities of how to account for it, and then that process gets you deeper into the principles that you need to recognize in order to understand it, and you come back on that basis and reconsider it; but also there’s the sense in which aristotle himself tends to use “dialectic” which more has to do with the common opinions about things. and there’s a way in which aristotle … here’s a good example: in de anima, there’s a question that he spends quite a bit of time on: whether our thoughts are best understood as images, as imagination, as “concepts” as we would say, as constructs of our own process of trying to grasp things, or whether our intellect is able to pass beyond the confines of our mental apparatus to apprehend something intelligible in itself. and i think that interpreters want to find an answer to that question in de anima, and i think aristotle develops the question to the point at which he’s interview: mark shiffman 44 clarified what’s at issue as much as he possibly can, but to go any further in trying to resolve the question would require claiming a perspective on ourselves that we can’t have: an external perspective on the process of thinking, which we can’t attain. that’s one of the things that people often fail to appreciate, that he’s really leaving some very important problems at the point where the problem itself is clearest, where he doesn’t see any way of progressing further. this essentially, if you take that question and put it into medieval terms, turns into the realist/nominalist debate, and then questions persist to this day, should we understand aristotle as a nominalist or a realist; and i think the answer is “no.” notes 1. aristotle. 1995. aristotle’s physics: a guided study. trans. joe sachs. new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press. 2. aristotle. 2002. aristotle’s metaphysics. trans. joe sachs. santa fe: green lion press. 3. jonas, hans. 2001. the phenomenon of life: toward a philosophical biology. evanston, il: northwestern university press. 4. hadot, pierre. 1995. philosophy as a way of life: spiritual exercises from socrates to foucault. trans. michael chase. new york: wiley-blackwell. microsoft word butler-final.docx [expositions 8.1 (2014) 176–181] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 cantor, paul a. the invisible hand in popular culture: liberty vs. authority in american film and tv. lexington, ky: university press of kentucky, 2012. 488 pp. $35.00 (cloth). isbn: 978-0-813-14082-7. in the introduction to paul a. cantor’s the invisible hand in popular culture: liberty vs. authority in american film and tv, cantor, a professor of english at the university of virginia, makes a startling admission, although it is not clear that he sees it as such. despite his book’s thematic organization, title, cover image of a. m. willard’s the spirit of ’76 with crudely superimposed faces of cartman, captain kirk and john wayne, and frequent disquisitions on the subject of freedom, the invisible hand is not actually about the interplay of liberty and authority in u.s. popular culture. instead, his main goal “has been to identify and try to overcome the prejudices we have inherited from the tradition of romanic aesthetics” (22). this tradition, which “has been anticommercial since its inception […] set[s] up the autonomous creative genius in opposition to the vulgarity of the marketplace.” his tactic in breaking down this false dichotomy between so-called high and low cultures, then, is to examine artifacts of popular culture—the searchers, the x-files, star trek, mars attacks! and south park among them—for the ways they examine serious themes, which thus proves their artistic worth. by proving this artistic worth, cantor hopes to redeem capitalism as a creative force for good from the descendants of the frankfurt school who would seek to denigrate it. those descendants are seldom named, and almost never quoted. the citation-free strawmanning comes early and often in the invisible hand. it first arises in the book’s preface, in which cantor speaks out against (and red-baits) a cabal of unnamed cultural critics who “even when they are not strictly speaking marxists […] adopt a marxist position: that american pop culture serves the cause of capitalism,” and is thus “debased entertainment to numb the american people into submission” (xvi). two hundred pages later, cantor is still at it, accusing “the academic world, much of the media, and a large part of the entertainment business— especially the hollywood elite,” of harboring “anticapitalist views” (201). he provides as his sole evidence ludwig von mises’ the anti-capitalistic mentality, an essay from the era of black and white television that is itself long on assertion and short on evidence. never made clear is who, outside of the most eldritch depths of tenured academe, still believes any of this. the wall between so-called high and low culture, dynamited by the postmodernists, has never fully been rebuilt. research universities regularly host humanities conferences on science fiction, television, and video games. the cultural studies departments that cantor lambasts are more likely to teach courses on “the cyborg in the american imagination” or “vampirism as metaphor” as anything else, and a quick glance through such bastions of high and middlebrow culture as the paris review, the new yorker, or the new york times magazine will yield few articles about abstract dance, but plenty of pieces about orange is the new black and getting high at disneyland. marxism is dead. poetry is dead. captain america, on the other 177 butler hand, is very much alive, thawed out of his iceberg just in time to rule the box office with a gentlemanly, democratizing fist. cantor’s war for freedom, capitalism and the marketplace has already been won—one of the odder aspects of the invisible hand is that most of its cited works of criticism and theory are forty to fifty years old—yet the book seethes with grievance towards liberals, cultural critics, and oppressive entertainment gatekeepers. in his chapter on south park, cantor is so inspired by trey parker’s and matt stone’s mockery of the hollywood left that he writes that the left “does not want people to have fun in any form, whether laughing at ethnic jokes or indulging in fast food.” but cantor then uses rob reiner, the director of such fun-destroying works as this is spinal tap, when harry met sally, and the princess bride as his one example. reiner’s crime, for the record, is his advocacy on behalf of increased cigarette taxes in the state of california.1 this seeming contradiction—a deeply-held feeling of oppression coupled with a reality of triumph—underpins the two communities whose interests intersect in the invisible hand: fandom (especially geek fandom) and the george w. bush-era american right. both communities possess a historic grievance that was once based on reality. the obsessions of fandom—marvel and dc comics, star wars and trek, heroic fantasy in general, various animated television shows, etc.—were once widely derided by our culture. similarly, during the johnson presidency—a time, not coincidentally, when many bush-era conservatives came of age—people self-identifying as conservatives were reviled, particularly in academia. as rick perlstein points out in nixonland, his social history of the 1960s, even melvin laird, who wrote barry goldwater’s convention platform, thought that refusing to tack left on many issues would be “suicidal” to the republican party in 1965.2 this feeling of oppression has persisted, however, even after both groups have proven triumphant. hollywood studios would not survive today without superhero films, and game of thrones remains the most culturally important show on television. meanwhile, the walking dead is so popular, a talk show about it that airs after each episode has higher ratings than most of nbc’s “must see tv” line-up. in politics, our consensus has drifted so far to the right that supposed liberal lion president obama enacted the heritage foundation’s plan for universal health care, resisted heavier regulation of banks, and escalated bush-era domestic espionage. cantor, of course, is not exactly a conservative; he is a libertarian. but the libertarianism espoused in the invisible hand is indistinguishable from the socially liberal zones of the republican party in the 21st century. the book treats “political correctness” as a serious threat to liberty,3 but relegates its one brief mention of the patriot act to an endnote. the republican party is almost never criticized, and its anti-libertarian stances are treated with equivocation (“whatever one’s attitude may be regarding the rights and wrongs of immigration, it is a simple fact that the american people are deeply troubled by the issue” (304)), when they’re mentioned at all. al gore’s career-long advocacy on behalf of the environment is depicted as his “seiz[ing] on alarmist issues as a way of clinging desperately to [his] celebrity and feeding [his] vanity,” (134) while the book remains virtually silent about the bush regime’s sanctioning of indefinite detention, extrajudicial assassination, and torture. review of the invisible hand in popular culture 178 an author’s politics is his or her business and none of this would matter were it not for the invisible hand’s pesky habit of slipping into libertarian polemic. for cantor often seeks reification within the foci of his obsessions. these fictive thought experiments are held up as qualitatively good when he believes they prove the hypotheses of doctrinaire libertarianism. thus, the aviator, martin scorsese’s biopic of early career howard hughes, “becomes one of the great american motion pictures because it celebrates the freedom and the entrepreneurial spirit that made america great” (188). meanwhile, south park is to be lauded for its favorable depictions of wal-mart and starbucks (205). this strain within the invisible hand actually places it well in line with a contemporary trend on the online left: the abandonment of consideration of aesthetics and form in order to focus almost exclusively on plot and political content. in this kind of writing—found most frequently online—what matters about a work of narrative art is whether we agree with what we perceive it as saying. the process of viewing a television show or reading a book thus can devolve into a kind of checklist exercise wherein a work is to be judged according to its, well, political correctness.4 with the exception of deliberate agitprop, art isn’t an argument, however, and in treating it solely on argumentative terms, criticism runs two risks. the first is stripping away everything of artistic value from art, shrinking it until it is roughly the size and scope of a college freshman composition essay. the second is misreading the work in question because its artistic power must be explained in ways that are comforting to the critic’s politics. discovering and unpacking the politics of a work of art is an important endeavor, but it is most valuable when it expands our understanding rather than contracts it, complicating rather than simplifying. hiding within the invisible hand is a much better book that seeks to plumb the contradictions, internal tensions, inconsistencies and impossibilities of art grappling with political issues. this better book is most clearly on display in cantor’s masterful reading of john ford’s the searchers through the oresteia, looking at how both examine the tension between lawlessness and order without ever comfortably settling on either solution for societal organization. within aeschylus’ nightmarish transition from familial structures, filial duty, and revenge to an organized society in which our furies must be sublimated, cantor finds a fascinating lens through which to view ford’s classic western. cantor convincingly shows the tragedy and complexity of ford’s vision, recognizing the necessity of civilization while remaining “troubled by what is lost in the civilizing process, as shown by the painful image he creates of [protagonist] ethan [edwards]’s exclusion from the very world he has labored so hard to protect” (56). this critical eye for complexity, this search for the illuminating tension, surfaces again in cantor’s discussion of gene roddenberry’s work as a staff writer on have gun will travel and creator of star trek. in covering both of these television shows, cantor accurately diagnoses a central tension of well-meaning, aristocratic liberalism, namely that it seeks to safeguard freedom and equality, but can only envision doing so through top-down management and authority. cantor demonstrates how star trek in particular appears to be a celebration of liberal 179 butler un-style internationalism, but rests on a protagonist whose actions are indistinguishable from imperialism. and while cantor and i are unlikely to agree on much beyond our taste in television, his detailed analysis of how the x-files reflects, embodies and performs late twentieth and post-9/11 american anxieties about globalism, immigration, and the loss of an essential american self is a must-read for anyone who seriously watches or would want to teach the show. perhaps most emblematic of the ways the book’s three agendas—libertarian polemic, popculture elevation, and incisive thematic critique—compete with and ultimately undermine each other in cantor’s free market of ideas are the two essays on the work of austrian director edgar g. ulmer. both are chock-full of trenchant observations, cultural context, and fascinating finds. in particular, his look at the black cat—a horror-film-cum-meditation-on-post-great-wareurope starring bela lugosi and boris karloff—wonderfully takes the reader through freud, heidegger, adorno, mark twain, percy bysshe shelley, incest, war, american-abroad tropes, and goethe without ever going off the rails. here, for example, is his fascinating look at how the protagonists of the film (a honeymooning american couple who wind up spending much of the film unconscious) and the europeans whose web they are drawn into are portrayed: the contrasts ulmer develops between europeans and americans are not all to the advantage of the latter. to be sure, the europeans in the black cat are deeply neurotic, obsessive-compulsive, and self-destructive, not to mention downright evil and even satanic, while the americans are free, open, good-natured and optimistic. but at the same time the europeans are clearly more interesting that the americans. the europeans are intelligent, cultured, and artistic, while the americans are bland, prosaic, and more than a little obtuse. […] we are not convinced that the europeans are better off for all their insights into the depths of human evil. they seem to have been corrupted by their encounter with evil, perhaps even driven insane. the americans might be healthier for turning their backs on this glimpse into the heart of darkness. (235–7) later on in the same essay, he turns to how the black cat enacts aristocratic continental european anxieties about american culture, and the way that “the decay of the aristocratic culture of europe” is seen by ulmer’s film (and heidegger) as the inevitable result of democratization. the blandness of the americans, then, is both their saving graces and “ominous […] on a meta-level in the movie, american pop culture is obliterating european elite culture— the mass-produced mystery novel is taking the place of the european gothic tale” (241). moving on to ulmer’s seminal noir detour, cantor notes how the film is a deconstructive assault on the american dream. reading it as a dark nightmare of manifest destiny, cantor shows how ulmer takes the tropes of hollywood fable (boy goes west in search of love and happiness, meeting strangers, acquiring material goods, and having adventures along the way) and upends them, thus showing how “the hero’s quest for happiness […] leads only to corruption review of the invisible hand in popular culture 180 and eventually to his destruction” (244). using the work of the frankfurt school as his flashlight, cantor spies how “the characters in detour seem incapable of generating authentic desires. they are always setting their goals on the basis of the models that american society offers them” (250) and how these manufactured desires come to undo them. unfortunately, this second essay about ulmer is soon overwhelmed by tendentious assumptions about art, detour, and the relationship between europe and america. for example, cantor wants to critique “ulmer’s vision of america in detour,” and the genre of noir in general by asking whether they provide a “truthful” and realistic portrait of american society (259). but he is unable to show that the goal of noir was ever to do so. noir—a genre filled with stylized camerawork and lighting, larger than life characters, and pulpy, melodramatic plots—is not concerned with verisimilitude. like the x-files, noir is largely concerned with enacting our anxieties of what lies beneath american society, rather than a realistic portrayal of what american society is actually like. cantor proceeds from there to question the genre’s validity because it was largely made by foreigners. “one must also wonder whether [many important noir directors’] status as aliens did not also work to color, cloud, and even distort their view of the united states” (260), he writes. a page later, he insinuates that noir is un-american because “many of the great noir films were directed by europeans […] however american the subject matter of film noir may seem to be, it was often presented through european eyes behind the camera,” and thus that noir “may be one more example of a long tradition of european anti-americanism, or at least a tendency to fault the united states for failing to measure up to european standards of civilization” (261). oddly, given that the invisible hand wants to argue the marketplace’s validity as an arbiter of substance and quality, the book never stops to consider that hundreds of film noirs were made because the genre was popular with the very american people supposedly disliked by its directors, or the complexity of ulmer using a pulpy genre picture to critique american mass culture. the ulmer section of the invisible hand in popular culture also reveals a final irony, one that points back to the book’s overall project. cantor argues that capitalism is necessarily a force for good. it creates the abundant splendors of american mass culture, and allows individual artists to achieve fulfillment and greatness, no matter how trying their struggles with the system might be. he praises the widely derided second half of tim burton’s career for its financial successes, and writes of ulmer’s career: [t]he fact that the hollywood ulmer came to despise nevertheless made it possible for him to make two films by which he is remembered today as an artist suggests that america does not break all its promises to it immigrants […] ulmer’s career illustrates just about every obstacle that can stand in the way of artistic achievement in commercial culture, and yet ultimately it is a tribute to the ability of a talented and determined individual to be creative in any system of production. in the end, the aesthete from the alps managed to fulfill himself as the king of the b-movies. (222) 181 butler what, then, are we to make of the invisible hand’s existence? for the marketplace has no use for this book. its existence is only possible because of a network of government-supported nonprofit universities have forgone the principles of the free market in order to support important scholarship for the benefit of society. perhaps cantor, then, is right. universities are hotbeds of anti-capitalist sentiment. the invisible hand in popular culture’s very existence is living proof. isaac butler parabasis notes 1. south park is indeed a satirical work of libertarian agitprop—and a hilarious and frequently brilliant one at that—but this is noteworthy in light of cantor’s jeremiad against humorless liberals because american comedy is dominated by liberals and often comes from a generally progressive point of view. during the time that south park has been on the air, comedy central has also aired chappelle’s show, key & peele, the colbert report, the daily show with jon stewart and inside amy schumer, among others, all of which have a solidly left-of-center point of view. 2. rick perlstein, nixonland: the rise of a president and the fracturing of america (new york: scribner, 2008), 7. 3. like the libertarianism it advocates for, the invisible hand has a serious blind spot when it comes to race. beyond cantor expressing that not being able to tell ethnic jokes in polite company is an assault on freedom, the book is often silent when it comes to racial matters, except for a brief ode to how the free market will make all races able to get along in its chapter on deadwood. 4. for an incisive jeremiad against this kind of writing, new york magazine and rogerebert.com’s matt zoller seitz issues a plea for discussion of form here: http://www.rogerebert.com/mzs/please-critics-write-about-the-filmmaking while my own short take on this issue can be found here: http://parabasis.typepad.com/ blog/2014/02/the-incredible-shrinking-artist.html. jennifer joyce kissko [expositions 5.1 (2011) 71-74] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 “homeless chic” in the classroom jennifer joyce kissko center for liberal education and the center for peace and justice education villanova university i teach a course at villanova university entitled “homeless chic? u.s. poverty & privilege.” in it, we examine poverty in its most extreme form – through the experience of homelessness. though some americans may wish to ignore the problem of domestic homelessness, the exploration of these particular underprivileged persons and their unique experience is crucial to the education of our students not only because the gap between rich and poor in this neo-liberal economy continues to widen, but because what it reflects about “being american” must be acknowledged: that we care and do not care about this issue, that we want to help and yet desire to maintain distance, and that we empathize with but still marginalize those who are different from us. the class is essentially a cultural studies course, an advanced english and sociology elective through the center for peace and justice education. in the few semesters that it has been offered, the high enrollment suggests a real appetite among college students to deeply consider what it means for fellow u.s. citizens to live day to day without adequate, stable shelter. interestingly, this course attracts a wide-ranging student population – including servicelearning sophomores, various student-athletes, and senior honors majors. the first assignment asks students to write a “coming to class consciousness” piece in which they are asked to produce an analysis of an individual experience that led to a more profound awareness of a contemporary social issue. or, they may simply reflect on their own personal class background. another option is to recount a moment that urged them to think about class in this country and why. from the intimate responses, it is clear that these young people, from privileged class backgrounds, from disadvantaged inner city upbringings, and from spaces in between, are eager to enter into dialogue about our nation’s poorest citizens. thus, our discussions about the juxtaposition of poverty and privilege offer tremendous occasion for critical thinking about the intersections of marginalized identity and exclusionary citizenship in america, and this intellectual discourse sometimes even gives way to practical application (an example of which i will mention below). the term “homeless chic” was inspired by a current trend in the world of couture where the images of stereotypical homelessness become defined as high fashion. after viewing images of trends in style, reality television, and even toy industry advertisements, 1 my students are perplexed by contradictions between these cultural representations and current demographics on the realities and causes of homelessness. although these manifestations of “homeless chic” in popular culture demonstrate the fact that homelessness is, in many ways, being “honored,” “homeless chic” in the classroom 72 celebrated, and aligned with american identity, the ambivalence first illuminated in the 1980s towards homelessness continues to sprout, especially in legal decisions 2 based on fear and the desire to separate the rich from the poor. in class we ask if this fashion trend reflects something deeper than an aesthetic choice. what might be at stake for the face of an american culture that fetishizes mass media images that reflect the very identity the legal system works to hide? why are we both fascinated and repulsed by homelessness? how does one negotiate and maintain an individual, elevated social status while helping someone with considerable “throwaway” status? how can one empathize and reach out, yet desire to maintain a protective distance without marginalizing the “other”? the inconsistencies posed here strike a moral and political chord with students that, like the oxymoronic fashion term “homeless chic,” ultimately serve as a metaphor for u.s. culture’s conflicted approach to homelessness. using this term as an overarching guide, we explore and respond to certain problems and ethical questions with regards to the ways in which homelessness gets represented in literature and in the media. students consider the challenges united states culture faces in its attempts to think differently about homelessness – at the ways it appropriates or makes use of figures of homelessness, and the ways literature markets, thematizes, racializes, and symbolizes homelessness. through engagement with contemporary american literature, film, politics, cultural geography, psychology, music, sociology, and journalism, we examine how u.s. culture actually likes certain narratives that block the ability to think differently about homelessness. the readings model how conflicted american readers are on this social problem, illustrating that these contradictions are so deeply ingrained culturally that they then arise in cultural products. from critically reading works by steve lopez, 3 sherman alexie, 4 and ron hall and denver moore, 5 to analytically viewing hbo’s television series the wire and films like the blind side, for example, we unpack some of the unexpected ethical challenges that tropes about homelessness pose. moving beyond the paradigm of a romanticized or objectified experience of poverty as put forth by john allen, 6 we begin challenging definitions of literal and metaphorical homelessness and critiquing narratives that perpetuate the problem of homelessness. for instance, the film the pursuit of happyness 7 – the story of a struggling man played by will smith who works his way out of homelessness to form his own a multi-million dollar brokerage firm – sends the message that all persons experiencing homelessness can rise out of poverty and become extremely wealthy if they merely persevere. yet students are quick to point out that not all people living without homes in this country are born with above-average intelligence, and that chris gardner’s situation represents an anomaly in the experience of homelessness. a movie like this makes housed audiences feel good – by watching it, we are caring about an important social problem – but we can maintain our distance of comfort because the solution lies with the will of the homeless protagonist. in alexie’s novel indian killer, however, homelessness gets re-imagined as a source of community and agency through its unending slew of characters with hybrid identities – racial, ethnic, schizophrenic, and religious, to name a few. depicting all types of “homeless” figures marginalized by their identity, alexie’s text demonstrates that the definition of “home” extends 73 kissko beyond a dwelling place, and can function as a sense of belonging to a particular family, population, or group, or even to a peaceful understanding of one’s own history and identity. this resonates deeply with students’ own understanding of “home.” alexie’s indian killer expands on a traditional understanding of homelessness in contemporary culture, offering readers an experience of identifying with marginalized identities as they are forced to deal with the uncomfortable ethical quandary of how to respond to the cultural ambivalence toward contemporary forms and tropes of homelessness. for although the novel makes inroads in creating productive, participatory literal homeless citizens as characters, it also offers representations of metaphorically homeless figures as victims, as angry and threatening, and as invisible. therefore, students arrive at the conclusion in class that these cultural products (books, films, etc.), are ultimately complicit in offering narratives that perpetuate common myths and stereotypes about homelessness yet are also committed to challenging or changing them, indicative of our own cultural ambivalence to homelessness. by the end of each semester, my “homeless chic” students wonder whether the exploitative use of images of homelessness, along with the problem of homelessness itself, will ever be solved. they question why such an extreme form of poverty exists in our own backyard, particularly in contrast to the extreme wealth present in the u.s. as we come to understand the structures and systems in our society that enable homelessness, we discuss how one can educate, volunteer, contribute, or advocate as a means for creating change. the difficulty in this, we decide, is how to effectively proceed without marginalizing or making a spectacle of homelessness, or without augmenting our own position of power in the process. i worry that even the dynamics of the course itself reinforce class boundaries. nonetheless, seeing students voluntarily transform what they have gained intellectually into serviceable action and participatory citizenship reconfirms how the results of education often extend far beyond the classroom and gives hope that as a culture, perhaps we can begin to think in new ways about ending homelessness. recently, one former “homeless chic” student emailed to share that she now works in the bronx at a homeless shelter for women and children. speaking with great enthusiasm, she noted, “already it is so wonderful to see all that [we learned] in action and in real life right in our backyard. so many of the stereotypes out there about homelessness do not ring true.” so although homelessness is not at all “chic,” it seems learning about it is. notes 1. in 2009, mattel introduced a homeless doll, gwen, to its american girl collection. see american girl, “gwen doll and paperback book,” 2010, http://store.americangirl.com/agshop/html/item/id/142095. 2. here i am referring to city ordinances regarding public space and homelessness. 3. steve lopez, the soloist: a lost dream, an unlikely friendship, and the redemptive power of music (new york: berkley books, 2008). http://store.americangirl.com/agshop/html/item/id/142095 “homeless chic” in the classroom 74 4. sherman alexie, indian killer (new york: warner books, 1996). 5. ron hall and denver moore; with lynn vincent, same kind of different as me: a modern-day slave, an international art dealer, and the unlikely woman who bound them together (nashville, tn: w publishing group, 2006). 6. see allen’s book, homelessness in american literature: romanticism, realism, and testimony (new york: routledge, 2003). 7. the pursuit of happyness. dir. gabriele muccino. columbia, 2006. [expositions 7.1 (2013) 33–41] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 mearsheimer’s mistakes: why colleges should (and inevitably do) provide moral guidance gregory bassham king’s college should colleges be in the business of moral education? may college professors―including those who teach ethics courses―openly endorse and defend particular moral theories and values in class? in a much-discussed address and subsequent follow-up paper, john j. mearsheimer, a distinguished political scientist at the university of chicago, has answered both of these questions with an emphatic “no” (mearsheimer 1998a). in this paper i shall argue against mearsheimer’s view. in particular, i shall defend three claims: (1) colleges unavoidably provide certain forms of moral guidance to their students. (2) colleges may and should seek to positively influence the moral characters and values of their students. (3) college professors may, and sometimes should, engage in classroom ethical advocacy, that is, expressly endorse and defend contestable ethical views. why does mearsheimer think that colleges should refrain from ethical guidance and advocacy? 1 his central argument can be summarized as follows. today, elite universities like the university of chicago, measheimer argues, are “remarkably amoral” institutions. by this he doesn’t mean that such institutions actively teach their students to be unethical. they are “amoral” (as opposed to “immoral) in the sense that they have no “moral agenda” (mearsheimer 1998b, 195), make little effort to provide moral guidance, and are “largely mum on ethical issues” (mearshiemer 1998a, 150). there are three ways, he says, that colleges could engage in the task of moral education. first, they could provide students with explicit moral guidance both in the classroom and in university publications that spell out acceptable and unacceptable forms of behavior. second, they could offer a wide array of classes where moral issues are discussed in detail and students are encouraged to make up their own minds about which views are most defensible. third, professors can promote virtuous behavior in their students by serving as good ethical role models. none of these three forms of moral education is viable, mearsheimer argues. explicit moral guidance in classroom teaching or in university publications is unacceptable because it involves “preaching about values” (mearsheimer 1998b, 194) and violates the most important mission of modern universities: to teach critical thinking. in fields such as ethics where there are no “approved solutions” (mearsheimer, 1998a, 148), the role of faculty is not to tell students “what to think, but how to think” (mearsheimer, 1998b, 196). the second option, offering classes in which students are invited to think critically and in depth about ethical issues would be great if a “scientific morality” were possible, but unfortunately efforts to develop such a rigorous, knowledge-based morality have “failed almost completely” (mearsheimer 1998a, 150). as a result, present-day universities “operate on the belief that there is a clear separation between mearsheimer’s mistakes 34 intellectual and moral purpose, and they pursue the former while largely ignoring the latter” (mearsheimer 1998a, 150). finally, college professors should not seek to be ethical role models for their students, because professors are no more ethical than any other class of professionals, nor can they claim any special moral expertise or authority. for these reasons, colleges should not provide moral guidance or engage in moral education. such a task “is no longer in their job description” (mearsheimer 1998b, 194). instead, they should focus, as mearsheimer’s own university of chicago does, on “fundamentally amoral” tasks such as teaching critical thinking, broadening intellectual horizons, and promoting self-awareness (mearsheimer 1998a, 140). there are multiple confusions in this argument. let’s begin with mearsheimer’s false opposition between teaching critical thinking or teaching values. why colleges necessarily teach values mearsheimer acknowledges one legitimate exception to his ban on values education in college: rules prohibiting plagiarism and other forms of academic misconduct (mearsheimer 1998a, 150). such conduct, he says, is inconsistent with the university’s mission to promote truth and independent thinking. he fails to see that a slew of other bona fide educational values can be justified by a similar logic. all colleges are committed to the pursuit of academic and intellectual excellence. this, of course, involves a great deal more than simply avoiding cheating and plagiarism. intellectual virtues such as diligence, accuracy, rigor, exactness, persistence, time-management, curiosity, fair-mindedness, and open-mindedness are implicit in the pursuit of academic excellence. if colleges, in virtue of their missions, can rightly “preach” against plagiarism and other forms of academic misconduct, they can, by the same token, “preach” for a great many other virtues of intellectual excellence. a quick sampling of college mission statements shows that universities nearly always aspire to do more than simply promote academic achievement and intellectual excellence. they also seek to produce graduates who are “well-prepared for the workforce,” “responsible and active participants in civic life,” “environmentally conscious,” and “dedicated to the pursuit of justice and the common good.” if these are a university’s explicit and overarching goals, it’s hard to see why it may not consciously seek to advance them in ways that respect other mission-based goals (including mearsheimer’s “critical thinking”). as student handbooks make clear, all colleges make and enforce rules governing students’ moral behavior. typical student handbooks include rules governing responsible use of information technology, hazing, hate crimes, unwanted sexual advances, disruptive classroom behavior, employee-student fraternization, excessive noise, and residence hall visitation hours. reasonable and even necessary rules of this sort surely constitute an acceptable form of “moral guidance.” all colleges (and other organizations and institutions) must “teach values” in this minimal sense of making and enforcing rules that promote institutional objectives and positive human interactions. 35 bassham mearsheimer overlooks the many ways that colleges unavoidably teach values because he equates “moral guidance” with academic “preaching,” which he rightly condemns. by “preaching,” he seems to means offering explicit moral advice to students in ways that amount to “moral value infusion” (mearsheimer 1998b, 195) and aren’t open to challenge or reasoned debate. mearsheimer is right that “preaching” in this sense is inappropriate in a college classroom and inconsistent with critical thinking. however, he is wrong to suppose that all moral guidance is a form of preaching in this sense. moral guidance, in fact, can take many forms, and need not be inconsistent with critical thinking (on this theme, see paul 1993, 303–318). socrates is a prime example of a skilled moral teacher who never sought to impose his own views and always respected the intellectual autonomy of his interlocutors by means of his eponymous “socratic method.” indeed, any form of ethical advocacy that appeals solely to reason, eschews sophistries and cheap propaganda tricks, and is manifestly open to debate is fully consistent with critical thinking―unless, that is, one thinks that ethics itself is incompatible with critical thinking, which may in fact be mearsheimer’s view. some of what he says about the failed quest for a “scientific morality” suggests that mearsheimer is a late-blooming logical positivist or emotivist who thinks that only “facts,” not “values,” can be subject to rational argumentation and critical inquiry. if so, mearsheimer would do well to browse through an introductory ethics text or two, for as wayne booth notes in his reply to mearsheimer, crude fact/value dichotomies of this sort have long since been exploded (booth 1998, 174). the idea of a fact/value gap goes back to hume, who correctly pointed out that no logically valid argument may move from purely factual or descriptive premises to a normative conclusion. this follows from simple logic. in a valid argument, the conclusion must be implicitly contained in the premises, and no normative conclusion is contained in any set of purely factual premises. a normative conclusion always adds something, or goes beyond, what is asserted by a group of factual statements. 2 confusion results when hume’s purely logical point is confused with much stronger and more controversial claims. nothing in hume’s argument implies that “there are no moral truths or moral facts” or that “moral claims aren’t cognitive or rationally justifiable.” mearsheimer appears to fall into this confusion. despite obvious differences between ethics and science, there are no sound reasons for denying the existence of moral truths. nor, a fortiori, are there adequate grounds for denying the objectivity of moral judgments. patently, some reasons for moral conclusions are better than other. (“it hurts” is a better reason to believe that “punching people in the nose just for the fun of it is wrong” than “grass is green.”) as ethicist james rachels argues, this simple fact about good and bad reasons is sufficient to establish the objectivity of ethics. in rachels’ view, “the right thing to do is whatever there are the best reasons for doing” (rachels and rachels 2009, 162). as long as we can distinguish (as we clearly can) between better and worse reasons for ethical conclusions, no hard-and-fact distinction can be drawn between what mearsheimer calls “intellectual” and “moral” purposes. mearsheimer’s mistakes 36 why some forms of moral education are legitimate if colleges, as i have argued, unavoidably teach values, it follows (assuming that higher education is a worthwhile endeavor) that they may teach values. at a minimum, as we have seen, such values include (a) academic success virtues such as accuracy, hard work, and honesty and (b) student handbook values such as respect for privacy and responsible use of information technology. might other values also be legitimately taught? i believe that they can. mission-based values of the sort previously mentioned might be legitimately promoted. a college that seeks to prepare its graduates “to succeed in an increasingly diverse global economy” can properly seek to develop in its students qualities of mind and character that are conducive to such success. the same is true of mission-based values such as “active and responsible civic participation” and “commitment to justice and the common good.” the case for teaching mission-values is strongest, of course, at sectarian colleges, which are usually up-front about the centrality of such values in their educational vision. but non-sectarian universities can also properly highlight and advance their mission-based values. at no university is “critical thinking” the be-all and end-all of educational mission. improving students’ moral reasoning skills is another legitimate form of collegiate moral education. sharpening students’ abilities to analyze ethical arguments, understand ethical concepts, make sound moral decisions, and offer cogent and well-formulated ethical arguments is clearly a worthwhile and appropriate task at colleges that offer ethics classes and value such abilities in their students. as wayne booth shows, mearsheimer significantly understates the number of ethics-related courses offered at elite liberal arts and research universities such as the university of chicago (booth 1993, 174–76). and as we’ve seen, mearsheimer’s claim that colleges such focus exclusively on “intellectual” purposes, not “moral” ones such as improving students moral reasoning abilities, is based on a long-discredited fact/value dichotomy. advocates of “character education” have made a strong case for teaching consensus values such as honesty, respect, responsibility, hard work, fairness, kindness, cooperation, and selfdiscipline in public schools. supporters note that such core values are recognized as desirable character traits in virtually all ethical and religious traditions; that they are widely seen as essential for individual fulfillment and social harmony; and that teaching them in public schools can make up for ethical deficits in our culture and prevent the formation of “ethical illiterates” (lickona 1992, 37–47). the case for teaching consensus values in colleges is weaker than it is at the pre-collegiate level. college students are older and have less plastic characters; there is more emphasis in college on intellectual and career training and less on social adjustment; and as mearsheimer notes, there is a greater stress on teaching students “how to think,” as opposed to “what to think.” nevertheless, it is a mistake to say, as mearsheimer does, that teaching values is no longer in colleges’ “job description[s].” universities don’t exist simply to promote critical thinking and the discovery and dissemination of knowledge. they have a valid interest in promoting both their students’ individual fulfillment and the collective good of society, and for this reason should promote values and character traits that are necessary for these ends. they should not, of course, do this in ways that conflict with independent thinking or amount to 37 bassham indoctrination or bully-pulpit preaching. the risk of such excesses is inherent in any program of moral education. but the greater risk is that amoral universities will produce amoral graduates. when professors, in the interests of “critical thinking,” refuse to endorse even consensus values like honesty and fairness, many students will naturally conclude that these values are relative or subjective or otherwise empty or cognitively suspect. this was the very concern that led socrates and plato to oppose the sophists. 3 given the fashionableness of attacks on the objectivity of ethics in academia and the many headwinds confronting moral education in our time, these concerns are arguably even greater today. a plea for ethical advocacy until the last few decades, nearly all ethics textbooks openly took partisan stands for and against various ethical views. for example, william paley’s principles of moral and political philosophy defended a kind of utilitarian divine command theory, john dewey and james tufts’s ethics argued for a kind of pragmatic ethical naturalism, and vernon bourke’s ethics: a textbook in moral philosophy defended a thomistic approach to moral issues. nowadays, it is relatively rare to encounter such texts 4 ; most leading ethics textbooks today are anthologies that present a variety of competing approaches and leave it to readers to make up their own minds about the merits of these views. this is the sort of non-advocative “critical thinking” approach mearsheimer evidently favors. 5 i want to suggest, on the contrary, that it is often appropriate and pedagogically effective for ethics instructors to defend in class their own views on controversial issues. mearsheimer offers no reason why ethics instructors shouldn’t engage in classroom advocacy other than his claim that this amounts to illicit “preaching,” which we’ve already considered and rejected. so let’s look at another much-discussed argument for the same conclusion: that presented in stanley fish’s 2008 book, save the world on your own time. fish argues for what he calls a “purified academic enterprise” in which college professors are prohibited from consciously aiming to shape students’ moral, political, or civic values, or taking partisan stands, endorsing contestable ideas, or advocating any values other than those that are immanent in the academic enterprise itself (honesty, thoroughness, rigor, and so forth). most of fish’s arguments don’t apply to ethics instructors taking stands on issues discussed in class, but there are two that do: “the responsibility argument” and “the culture-wars argument.” fish’s responsibility argument is this: instructors, he says, have a “fighting chance” of imparting disciplinary knowledge and analytical skills to their students, but they have “no chance at all [. . .] of determining what their behavior and values will be” outside the classroom or after graduation (fish 2008, 58–59. the next few paragraphs draw freely from bassham 2009). people are responsible only for things in their power. it is not in instructors’ power to determine students’ non-academic values or behaviors. moreover, instructors should only aim to achieve what they are responsible for, not things that are unforeseen and contingent. thus, instructors should not aim to influence students’ moral, political, civic, or other non-academic values and behaviors. mearsheimer’s mistakes 38 this argument fails for two reasons. first, fish’s claim that people are responsible only for things in their power is an oversimplification. responsibility is not an all-or-nothing thing; it comes in degrees and can be shared. college professors can bear partial responsibility for their students’ nonacademic values and behavior, even though, of course, it is not in professors’ “power” (i.e., full or even substantial control) how students will react to their teaching. if i’m a business professor and i spend the whole semester dissing ethics and praising the most callous forms of amoral capitalism, i bear at least some responsibility if one of my students takes me at my word and get caught up in an enron-like scandal. it is true, as fish argues, that college professors have very limited ability to influence their students’ behavior and values, for either good or ill. but that is not the issue. limited influence is not the same as no influence. the question is whether there are things professors can do that will positively impact their students’ values and their moral and civic behavior, and whether these are things that professors should be doing in light of their other responsibilities. second, fish’s claim that people should aim to achieve only what they are responsible for is an overgeneralization. imagine if parents or church leaders adopted this principle. parents clearly can’t “determine” whether their kids will respect their prohibitions on underage drinking or risky sexual behavior. should they, therefore, “aim low” and avoid such topics altogether? should pastors stop exhorting their flocks to live righteous lives because they cannot “determine” how their congregations will react to such teaching? fish’s responsibility argument would prohibit far too much legitimate guidance and exhortation. fish’s main argument for “purifying” higher education of all partisan or normative advocacy is the culture-wars argument. fish claims that putting the lid on all forms of classroom advocacy would neutralize the powerful and increasingly effective argument from the right that america’s universities have been commandeered by “tenured radicals” who trash patriotism and religion, preach moral relativism, and seek to indoctrinate students with their left-wing politics (fish 2008, 114), the issue, fish thinks, isn’t whether this indictment is sound―he thinks it’s overblown but not wholly off-base―but what must be done to counter it in state legislatures and in the forum of public opinion. fish believes that conservatives are winning the public relations war, and that as a result public universities are likely to face further cuts in state funding as well as intensified efforts by political conservatives to interfere with university hiring, retention, and curricular decisions in the name of “ideological balance” and “intellectual diversity” (fish 2008, 117–24). by insisting that all professors―liberal or conservative―avoid ideological politics in the classroom, fish believes that this potent conservative public relations campaign can be neutralized and the autonomy of america’s universities be preserved (fish 2008, 150–152). this argument fails for two reasons. first, it ignores several very negative effects of fish’s purification proposal that outweigh any likely advantages. and second, it exaggerates the threat of crippling, ideologically-driven crippling state funding cuts and a right-wing intrusion into university staffing and curricula. what negative effects would fish’s purification proposal have on college teaching? recall that fish doesn’t just impose a moratorium on overt political or ideological advocacy. he rejects 39 bassham any endorsement of a contestable idea, policy, or value. professors on his view should transmit knowledge, impart analytical skills, teach debates, dissect and weigh arguments―but never draw conclusions. they should be rigorously neutral and non-committal on all issues that are open to debate or imply a commitment to action. even in an ethics class, he says, students “shouldn’t be arguing about whether stem cell research is a good or bad idea. they should be studying the arguments various parties have made about stem cell research [. . . ] analyzing ethical issues is one thing; deciding them is another, and only the first is an appropriate academic activity” (fish 2008, 26–27). as someone who regularly teaches ethics, i find this view unreal. the kind of neat separation fish calls for between weighing arguments and drawing conclusions is impossible. if, in classroom discussion, it becomes clear that view a is true and view b is false, it would be wholly artificial to perform an argumentum interruptus and refuse to draw the conclusion that a is true and b is false. by refusing to draw this obvious conclusion, the only lesson you would be teaching your students is the bad one that well-supported conclusions need not be drawn from compelling arguments. moreover, how would fish’s ban on classroom advocacy be enforced? would department chairs and deans conduct classroom observations to monitor the ideological and normative neutrality of professors’ classes? the very idea flouts any concept of academic freedom. one must also consider how fish’s proposal would affect the attractiveness of college teaching as a career choice. a great many college professors―myself included―chose teaching as a profession because we hoped to have a positive impact on young peoples’ lives. america’s colleges and universities have been very successful in attracting highly qualified faculty. would they still be as successful if it were known that college professors are barred from making value judgments or attempting to influence their students’ values and ideals? pace mearsheimer, fish is right that many college professors do go beyond merely “studying the arguments” and do argue forcefully for their own views. and this, i suggest, is often a more effective way of teaching than purely noncommittal socratic discussion or sophist-style devil’sadvocate argumentation. many of the best classes i took in college were those in which professors boldly set forth their own views and invited critical responses from their students. often, this lent energy and passion to the discussions, and students appreciated the compliment of being treated as worthy interlocutors. such classes allowed professors to test out their ideas, and often better and more sophisticated ideas emerged for discussion than would have been elicited by purely socratic dialogue. there was no conflict between telling students “what to think” and teaching them “how to think.” we learned how to think by critically engaging with views that were powerfully defended. but what of fish’s fears about the effectiveness of the right’s public relations campaign against radical left-wing professors? if the very existence and autonomy of america’s colleges and universities are imperiled, shouldn’t we bite the bullet and “purify” our campuses as fish recommends? mearsheimer’s mistakes 40 fish is here crying wolf. for all the complaints about rising costs and tenured radicals, americans are justly proud of their institutions of higher education and understand their value in keeping america strong, safe, and prosperous. to suggest that either we make our campuses ideologically pure or we put our world-class system of higher education at risk is to pose a false choice. the right-wingers may be scoring points, but they are a long way from winning. conclusion mearsheimer’s claim that elite colleges and universities like the university of chicago don’t and shouldn’t teach values is false both descriptively and prescriptively. as fish notes, many college professors do engage in ideological and normative advocacy in their teaching―arguably, sometimes, to a fault. mearsheimer’s claim is thus false as a description of what actually takes place in college classrooms. it is also false, i have argued, as a statement of what college instructors should be doing in their classes. there is no clear separation between teaching students “what to think” and teaching them “how to think.” the educational aims mearsheimer endorses―“critical thinking,” “academic success,” “intellectual excellence, “self-awareness,” “broadened intellectual horizons”―are thoroughly value-laden. moreover, a strict embargo on classroom value advocacy would weaken america’s colleges, lead to less effective teaching, and ultimately result in less critical thinking by faculty and students alike. every college does and should have a “moral agenda.” notes 1. mearsheimer claims that he is “mainly trying to describe how chicago and other like-minded schools deal with ethics,” not “laying out my own thinking on whether and how universities should teach morality” (mearsheimer 1998b, 193). however, it is clear from his discussion that mearsheimer doesn’t think that any robust or self-conscious form of moral education is desirable at universities such as his own. 2. an apparent counterexample: “whatever bassham says is true; bassham has said that he is the most virtuous―not to say, best-looking―person alive; therefore, bassham is the most virtuous (and best-looking) person alive.” this obviously valid argument apparently moves from purely descriptive premises to a normative conclusion. to avoid such counterexamples, hume’s fact/value argument needs to be careful in its definition of what counts as a “factual” or “descriptive” statement. no value terms can be included. 3. see, for example, plato’s protagoras 1956, and republic 1992, book i. for a more recent statement of the concern, see bloom 1987, 25–43. 4. notable exceptions include rachels and rachels 2011, which critiques a number of notable ethical theories and defends a kind of good-reasons approach, and thiroux and kasemann, 2011, which defends a “humanitarian ethics” and critiques competing approaches. 41 bassham 5. significantly, mearsheimer doesn’t claim that instructors must never engage in personal advocacy in class. he says, “the key point […] is that we will not attempt to impose our theories on you. we will certainly tell you what we think, and we will try to convince you that our perspectives are the correct ones, but we will also present you with the alternative views and then leave it up to you to decide what you think” (mearsheimer 1998a, 149). given his blanket embargo on “moral guidance” and “not telling students what to think,” however, strict limits on such advocacy would need to be observed. works cited bassham, gregory. 2009. “fish’s purified ivory tower: a review of stanley fish’s save the world on your own time,” the journal of college and university law 36.1: 287–93. bloom, allan. 1987. the closing of the american mind. new york: simon & schuster. booth, wayne c. 1998. “introducing professor mearsheimer to his own university.” philosophy and literature 22.1: 174–78. fish, stanley. 2008. save the world on your own time. new york: oxford university press. lickona, thomas. 1992. educating for character: how our schools can teach respect and responsibility. new york: bantam. mearsheimer, john j. 1998a. “the aims of education.” philosophy and literature 22.1: 137–55. ___. 1998b. “teaching morality at the margins.” philosophy and literature 22.1: 193–98. paul, richard. 1993. critical thinking: what every person needs to survive in a rapidly changing world. santa rosa, calif.: foundation for critical thinking. plato. 1956. protagoras. in plato, protagoras and meno. translated by w. k.c. guthrie. harmondsworth: penguin. ___. 1992. the republic. translated by g.m.a. grube. indianapolis: hackett. rachels, james and stuart rachels. 2011. the elements of moral philosophy, 7 th ed. new york: mcgraw-hill. ___. 2009. problems from philosophy, 2 nd ed. new york: oxford university press. thiroux, jacques p. and keith w. kasemann. ethics: theory and practice, 11 th ed. upper saddle river, nj: pearson, 2011. [expositions 5.2 (2011) 73-83] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 half the sky: considering the audience-conscious persuasive genius of nicholas kristof and sheryl wudunn christina m. morus the richard stockton college of new jersey a confession nicholas d. kristof and sheryl wudunn’s half the sky: turning oppression into opportunity for women worldwide considers the entrenched causes and brutal effects of gender oppression throughout the developing world. employing elegantly simple, audience-conscious strategies, the authors implore readers to act toward emancipating women from sexual slavery, gender-based violence, and maternal mortality “by unlocking women’s power as economic catalysts” (kristof and wudunn 2009, xxii). i attend to their persuasive strategies, but first, to contextualize my response to this text, i must make a confession . . . i did not expect to like this book. perhaps this is not a conventional foundation for such an essay, but it is important to note my skepticism for popular accounts of intricate, globally entrenched problems. to appeal to popular audiences, presumably unfamiliar with the issues at hand, authors must relate problems in a way simple enough to hold audience attention, recognizable enough to invoke empathy, and exciting enough to motivate action. through simplified narratives, authors selectively emphasize that which resonates with an intended audience, while downplaying elements that might challenge that audience’s moral universe. although these watered-down accounts may raise public awareness to important global concerns, this attention comes at a cost. reducing complex injustices to easily-grasped causes and uncomplicated solutions means sacrificing contextual and cultural nuance for explanations that neither challenge audiences’ naturalized assumptions about the current world-order, nor question the implications of their place within this status quo. as a result, well-intended aid programs often fail to consider the norms, needs, and realities of affected populations on their own cultural terms. i confess my pre-existing skepticism for two reasons. first, as a critical scholar with a decade of field xperience within post-conflict grass-roots women’s organizations, i have come to understand that working toward global gender justice necessitates a range of complex considerations. more poignantly humbling, i have witnessed the erosion of good-will resulting from development/aid projects that fail to appropriately consider the needs of the populations they seek to serve. hence, before even opening kristof and wudunn’s book, my distaste for the standard conventions of such accounts already biased my reading. the book’s ancillary promotional materials – a torrent of exalted praise from journalists and “causey” celebs like george clooney, angelina jolie and oprah winfrey – only intensified my cynicism. hence, audience-conscious persuasive genius 74 kristof and wudunn had to overcome a somewhat unfair a priori credibility deficit in this reader. yet, surprisingly, their book did just that. although i am wary of the ways their discourse privileges a western “development” paradigm (with all of the elements of american-capitalist mythos that this implies), in consciously appealing to their intended audience while maintaining focus on multifaceted elements of their subject, kristof and wudunn demonstrate rhetorically astute political agency. while, to some extent, the text exhibits the selective attention concerns mentioned above, the authors’ treatment is largely nuanced, yet intelligible and inspirational to popular audiences. kristof and wudunn’s intricate strategic packaging deserves attention. a critical consideration of their persuasive strategies and rhetorical choices can offer insight into the worldview of their intended audience, and may reflect something deeper about american public thought. moreover, in positing the deliberate nature of their choices, i speculate kristof and wudunn’s cognizance of the ways their own cultural assumptions influence their interpretations of the problems addressed. the extent to which their choices are part of a conscious audience-centered strategy ultimately suggests the degree to which they are skilled (even genius) political agents of social change. to this end, though a thorough rhetorical analysis is beyond the scope of this essay, i illuminate the authors’ persuasive strategies, and consider their more striking rhetorical choices. a skillfully persuasive consideration of audience to motivate readers to act toward alleviating global gender oppression’s most egregious brutalities, kristof and wudunn make use of classic elements of persuasion. exhibiting the three aristotelian proofs ethos, pathos, and logos – their argument structure adheres to monroe’s motivated sequence (attention–need–satisfaction–visualization–action). deriving initial credibility from their status as pulitzer prize-winning international journalists (ethos), kristof and wudunn grab audience attention with the story of a cambodian girl’s cruel sexual enslavement. they then demonstrate this story’s emblematic relationship to the book’s broader subject, elaborating gender oppression’s brutal consequences for those women most affected. after illustrating a web of causes, they illuminate the benefits of a range of solutions, and conclude with an expedient call to action that provides immediate ways to get involved. throughout the text, they use empirical data and rational appeals (logos), as well as an array of personal narratives from affected women and inspired “outsiders” working on their behalf (pathos), to employ all the available means of persuasion, as aristotle advocates. yet, even as classic persuasive strategies provide kristof and wudunn’s foundation, this alone does not explain the effectiveness of their appeals. audiences are not blank slates, nor do rhetors formulate arguments in a vacuum. individuals enter into a given rhetorical situation with established values, beliefs, and assumptions – some of which they are aware of, while others are uninterrogated. bringing an audience to a point of communion, and ultimately inspiring action, requires a rhetor to mindfully mold assertions and evidence to the worldview of the target audience – choosing from all possibilities those elements 75 morus most likely to move that audience. while meticulous arguments diligently supported by unimpeachable data may be most persuasive to an elite/expert audience, broader popular appeals must be carefully swathed in apparent and uninterrogated assumptions common to the largest potential audience base. as rhetorician and literary theorist kenneth burke suggests, persuasion relies upon (and is even synonymous with) identification – a sense of shared substance (“consubstantiality”) between rhetor and audience. burke notes, “you persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his” (burke 1969, 55). hence, to move an audience to action, appeals should be rooted in experiences, beliefs and values that the audience recognizes as consistent with their own. an audience should both see itself reflected in the rhetor, and its interests reflected in the argument. this implies not so much a top-down model of persuasion, but instead more of a collaborative relationship between rhetor and audience. keeping this in mind helps illuminate kristof and wudunn’s strategic efficacy in employing aristotle’s three proofs, beginning with ethos. ethos speaks to the persuasive force that comes from the extent to which an audience deems a speaker to be credible, trustworthy, and to have the audience’s best interest in mind. given that kristof and wudunn are pulitzer prize-winning international journalists, they bring an initial air of trustworthiness to this rhetorical situation. boosting their credibility, they are recognized contributors to mainstream public discourse, and they are american. that is to say, their status as, at once, impressive public figures with left-centrist views (clearly within the hegemonic confines of acceptable discourse), and constitutive members of “the american people” (one of “us”), innately enhances their ethos. to establish their credibility to speak to this particular subject, kristof and wudunn bring their extensive fieldwork to bear upon many of the book’s supporting testimonies. yet, the authors do not stop there. in a particularly astute move, as they elaborate the abject harm that global gender oppression writes on the bodies of women and girls, kristof and wudunn indicate that neither the problems they address nor the solutions they advocate are the domain of one pole of american political ideology. perhaps anticipating critiques both from the political left and right, the authors judiciously note the contributions and shortcomings of development/aid programs rooted in each side’s ideologies. they further elaborate the (often unforeseen) ways that american political discourse, and its ensuing domestic and international policies, impact international development. moreover, the authors admonish, early and often, the pedantic bickering and polemic politics that obfuscate common goals and obstruct the emergence of effective comprehensive programs. in explaining how the polarizing agendas of political elites impede efforts to alleviate (and even exacerbate) the suffering of so many of the world’s women, the authors at once assuage the guilt of individual americans and create a common base of operation for a politically diverse audience. in this way, the authors speak to a larger potential audience, demonstrate good-will toward that audience, and create a broad field of consubstantiality from which they advance their arguments. from there, another persuasive method that kristof and wudunn employ relies upon rational appeals reinforced with empirical data. audience-conscious persuasive genius 76 from early in the text, as they elaborate the problem of sexual enslavement, its root causes, and the many factors that keep human trafficking a thriving global industry, kristof and wudunn offer a host of empirical evidence gleaned from ngos, international aid organizations, the un, and occasionally from scholarly studies. yet, in a somewhat revealing move, the authors do not explicitly cite these studies. in fact, the actual source is often referenced only vaguely – “an obscure but meticulous study” or “social psychologists argue,” for example (kristof and wudunn 2009, xiv, 100). while a “notes” appendix citing the referenced studies follows the final chapter, within the text itself there is no indication of where these citations are located. as a scholar, this strategy frustrated me. i wanted to be able consider the source and year of a study, its methodology, its funders, etc., as i was reading about it – in its context. and yet, for a “lay” audience, this was an excellent choice. the mere allusion to empirical data carries an air of scientific authority, lending gravitas without the mental clutter of citation details. had the authors left out this kind of data, audiences may have been less apt buy-into their arguments. at the same time, as bell hooks (hooks 1981) suggests, the use of research-oriented footnotes can intimidate a lay audience who may perceive such a book as being too academic – “not for common folks.” hence, the choice to include such data without explicit source citations affords audience-appropriate legitimacy to their claims. even so, without the narratives in which kristof and wudunn embed this data, their claims would be meaningless, even to their target audience. narratives provide an interpretive frame through which an audience can make sense of facts and data. within kristof and wudunn’s narrative frames lie their most strategic emotional appeals. though aristotle privileges appeals to logos, no act of persuasion is complete without pathos. burke’s ideas also find traction here, as, in its potential to foster consubstantiality by stirring audience sympathies and imagination, narrative is the most effective vehicle for pathos. emotions are far more malleable than reason or credibility. invoke your audience’s emotions – get them to care about something by getting them to care about someone. kristof and wudunn masterfully employ this principle by highlighting intensely personal stories. some of these introduce the audience to women who have “risen above” unimaginable hardship, while others feature women irretrievably enveloped by their circumstances. there are also stories about westerners – mostly american – who have taken it upon themselves to foster change. throughout the text, narrative is an explicit medium for identification. hence, i give most attention to kristof and wudunn’s rhetorical appeals to pathos. kristof and wudunn’s explicit incorporation of individual stories to interpret “faceless” facts and data indicates their cognizance of the power an individualist focus in persuading americans to act. in fact, the authors claim that “social psychologists” (though they do not say who, when, or in what context) have found that we are far more likely to be moved on behalf of an individual in peril than on behalf of an imperiled group – even if there is overwhelming evidence of atrocities against that group, and even if an individual is far away and unfamiliar (kristof and wudunn 2009, 100). we are even more moved to empathy by the plight of an individual that is somehow “like us.” hence, in each narrative, kristof and wudunn create opportunities for consubstantiality between the narrative subject and the reader – “a typical bubbly teenager” who 77 morus flirts and gossips, a “middle-class woman” who wears blue jeans, or a mother’s devotion to her child. at the same time, each narrative subject embodies characteristics and values that are revered within american culture. while perhaps suggestive of some aspects of the authors’ worldview, these choices certainly provide a revealing glimpse into the worldview of their audience. burke suggests that “every way of seeing is also a way of not seeing” (burke 1945, 70). in his discussion of “terministic screens” he elaborates on this, stating that ‘‘any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature as a terminology it must be a selection of reality, and to this extent it must function also as a deflection of reality’’ (burke 1966, 45). in essence, the way a story is told – its narrative arc, the heroes, victims and villains, even its descriptive adjectives – suggest both that narrative’s reflective and productive potential. these choices act as interpretive screens that filter facts to shape audience perceptions. at the same time, the most successful narratives – overtly fictional or otherwise – resonate with an audience because they reflect commonly held values, assumptions, and cultural truths. as a highly individualistic culture that reveres determination, perseverance against great odds, self-reliance and the pursuit of progress, narratives reflecting these qualities resonate particularly strongly with american audiences. similarly, audiences feel less connected to characters with unfamiliar customs, and culturally unrecognizable values. attention to a narrative’s terministic screens can hint at both a target audience’s pre-existing assumptions and a rhetor’s persuasive motives. part 3: looking through terministic screens kristof and wudunn’s recurring narrative choices indicate certain embedded assumptions. their terministic screens inherently privilege western superiority, unquestioningly glorify competitive capitalism, and continue the american myth of progress as a supreme force for global good. perhaps this also explains the authors’ repeated frustrating emphasis upon an individual’s “primitive” life of “squalor,” and the “shack” or “hovel” in which she lives. in stressing an individual’s determination to persevere against all odds – to overcome adversity in the pursuit of progress – the authors invoke audience identification. yet, these descriptive adjectives also indicate the audience’s (and perhaps the authors’) assumption of the cultural superiority of the “civilized” west. kristof and wudunn do not challenge this assumption, abstaining from a corresponding consideration of the mechanisms by which the unjust distribution of global wealth was accomplished and maintained, thereby forgoing the opportunity to invite their audience to consider that it is precisely that wealth – and the subsequent lack of competition for lifesustaining resources – that affords western cultures such “civilization.” i daresay we do not have to look far to see the thin line separating our western “civilization” from lord of the flies. moreover, in what may be a hint to their own views as much to their strategic persuasive choices, kristof and wudunn stress that the west, specifically americans, are not to blame for the proliferation of gendered brutalities like human trafficking. and yet, they stress that these problems cannot be overcome without our contributions. i am conflicted as to how to interpret audience-conscious persuasive genius 78 these assertions. in some ways it is a keen choice. it trades discussions of western complicity and culpability for appeals to the professed american dedication to the value of each individual human life, essentially assuming both western moral superiority and, by extension, an obligation to live up to these ostensible american values by acting to save “less civilized” peoples from themselves. at the same time, it seems crucial to their cause to consider the ways that naturalized normative western (and particularly american) excess contributes to global economic inequities. this omission borders particularly dangerous territory when, in speaking of curbing birthrates in the developing world, the authors cite “some evidence” (kristof and wudunn 2009, 135) suggesting the male biological imperative to hyper-reproduce. though compellingly argued, this may also imply that the “less civilized them” are closer to their animal selves then the “more civilized us.” still, these (limited and limiting) narratives, and the american myths to which they nod, remain effective rhetorical choices. by imbuing these narratives with allusions to american values, beliefs, and assumptions, even at the expense of complex views of the cultural “other” on their own terms, audiences can identify with the characters without having to interrogate western cultural complicity in global injustice at large, or vis-à-vis their own standpoint. further, in repeatedly highlighting elements of individual narratives that reflect consubstantiality between the reader and the body in peril, the authors create a climate for reader empathy and action, even if it is rooted in a disingenuous field of consubstantiality. these strategies are not only evident in the narratives of effected women, but are also crucial to the narratives of those individuals who have taken action on behalf of affected women. take the story of twelve-year-old zach from georgia (kristof and wudunn 2009, 54). upon learning about modern human trafficking, zach began a campaign to raise awareness and collect donations on behalf of affected women. zach is a “social entrepreneur” (a term that itself resonates with american capitalist values) who used good ol’ american determination to make a difference – and by extension, so can you! zach’s story is entrenched in the recurring theme of the ultimate universal correctness of american capitalist values. it also demonstrates another narrative strategy tailored to the book’s intended audience – associating the struggle to end global gender oppression with the american struggle for racial equality. this connection implies a transhistoric imperative to act toward ending the brutalities of gender oppression by creating a seamless teleological narrative that extends from the early abolitionist movement to the us civil rights movement. the authors link this modern struggle to a past that, while contentious in its day, is now sanitized in popular discourse to appear as the inevitable result of western civilization’s eternal march toward progress. zach, as his story suggests, was moved to action precisely because he connected modern human trafficking with the trans-atlantic slave trade. the chapter where we find zach’s story, aptly called “the new abolitionists,” is neither the first nor last time this connection appears. parallels between american progress toward racial equality and the imperative to act against gender oppression resurface repeatedly. early on, to demonstrate why the reader should care about something that, while certainly regrettable, is happening far away to someone else, and in any event seems beyond our control, the authors 79 morus highlight the activism of early british abolitionists. the authors then link the imperative to act toward progress with american self-reliant perseverance, suggesting that this book “is not a drama of victimization, but of empowerment” (kristof and wudunn 2009, xxii). adding weight to the book’s dominant themes, some significant sub-currents undulate throughout, one of which manifests as a bias against intellectualism and academic thought. kristof and wudunn frequently question the usefulness and applicability of the scholarly studies they reference, which, as previously mentioned, they do not cite in an intellectually useful way. further, the authors dismiss academic contributions to understanding global gender injustice as an “ivory tower” waste of time, and criticize scholarly debates about human rights issues and academic attention to gender-sensitive legal reforms for their limited impacts. also exemplified in narrative form, this sub-current manifests in the authors’ telling of sunitha’s story – a “middle class” activist from india with a graduate degree in social work. the authors describe with astonishment sunitha’s “polished upper-class [. . .] english” which sounds “more like a university professor than an activist” (kristof and wudunn 2009, 57). what exactly does this mean? given that english is the language of instruction in india – from primary school to the university – why is it shocking that an indian would speak polished english, let alone an indian woman with a graduate degree? and more to the point, why do they assume that scholars and activists are mutually exclusive categories? while both the dismissal of academic contributions and descriptions of sunitha clearly serve the wider purpose of solidifying identification with popular audiences, this strategy is disquieting, particularly given the broad, multi-level education projects that form the backbone of their solution. this anti-intellectual undercurrent is further apparent in kristof and wudunn’s dismissive attitude and homogenized treatment of “feminism.” while their critique of the short-comings of the american “second wave” is spot-on in many regards, in failing to also account for second wave feminists’ contributions to western gender consciousness and to gender equality under the law, their critique seems to equate to little more than pandering to the negative connotations of “feminism” lingering in the common american lexicon. while western feminist consciousness is their main target, they also diminish global feminist contributions. their flippant homogenization of feminism is made even more unsettling by the frequency with which the authors misappropriate the term “patriarchal societies” to refer to places where violent gender oppression is the normative default. what society on earth is not literally patriarchal, though admittedly each to a different extent and degree? this fallacious characterization of patriarchy further ingrains the “civilized us” versus “uncivilized them” paradigm. in fact, the two go handin-hand, in some ways also reflecting similarities with their characterization of the american struggle for racial equality. essentially, “we” are gender-sensitive (and racially sensitive), not because feminists fought for gender equity, social consciousness and legal inclusion, sometimes at great peril and dear cost to themselves, but because “we” are civilized, and gender equity (like racial equity) was the natural progression of civilization. it follows, then, that gender (and racial) oppression is no longer an issue for the civilized “us.” by extension, gender oppression still exists in places where “they” are “less civilized,” precisely because “they” are “less civilized.” audience-conscious persuasive genius 80 more urgently, with this sweeping dismissal kristof and wudunn miss an opportunity to highlight how entrenched attitudes worldwide contribute to the specific gendered violence that the authors seek to mitigate. this is exemplified through zoya’s narrative – a 21 year-old “middle-class” afghani woman, who, in “wearing blue-jeans [. . .] looked more like an american than an afghan” (kristof and wudunn 2009, 68). the authors call attention to zoya’s assertion that it is appropriate to beat one’s wife when she is disobedient (kristof and wudunn 2009, 69). their image of zoya at once allows the audience to identify with her (middle-class, in jeans), while stressing that in “less civilized,” “patriarchal cultures,” women are often complicit in their own subjugation. yet, this ignores ways that the global condition of womanhood manifests through the gender-disproportionate violence women continue to endure in our own country and throughout the western world – where, incidentally, women are also still frequently complicit in their own subjugation. kristof and wudunn forego another golden opportunity to complicate overly-simplified “us” versus “them” paradigms by all-but-ignoring the treatment of women during the 1990s wars in the former yugoslavia, a fully developed, relatively wealthy, highly gender-conscious society prior to the wars. the vicious use of war rape in bosnia, which arguably received extensive attention precisely because it took place in “civilized” europe, raised global awareness of the prevalence of sexual violence against women in war, and helped birth the legal precedent for prosecuting war rape as a crime against the violated woman. although military codes have prohibited war rape since the late twelfth century, war rape has most frequently been treated as a shameful but unavoidable consequence (the body of woman as a victor’s spoil). on the rare occasions war rape was prosecuted, it was treated as a property crime against the man to whom the violated woman “belonged,” or a crime against the honor of her family or community. kristof and wudunn could have elaborated the bosnian case as an example of how, even in “civilized societies,” the vilest face of gender inequity can come to bear on the bodies of women. they could have challenged the myth of inevitable progress toward gender equity in “civilized” societies, and elaborated the globally entrenched nature of gender oppression by demonstrating that even under international law, the conception of women as fully human is less than a decade old. unfortunately, kristof and wudunn’s lack of attention to the latent potential the bosnian case presents for more sophisticated understandings of the truly global nature of gender oppression also represents a missed opportunity to reverse the noble “us” versus the savage “them” paradigm that is overrepresented in this text. still, even given that their rhetorical choices rely on artificial notions of western gender equity, and advance unquestioned assumptions of western cultural superiority, i cannot conclude that this is actually suggestive of kristof and wudunn’s worldview. in fact, several factors are more indicative of a conscious rhetorical choice to identify with a broader popular audience amidst the current american climate of intellectual demonization. it would be easy to dismiss kristof and wudunn as unconscious henchmen of the status quo were it not for their careful elaboration of these elements. their nuanced advocacy of a multi-layered education solution, their attention to the importance of empowering people to engage locally resonant programs and 81 morus projects that respond to local needs, and their clear admonishment of a “silver bullet” solution – a reality-check that real change is slow, riddled with set-backs, and requires hard work and sustained dedication – all suggest something more complicated at work. these elements represent the strongest evidence that some of their more critically questionable rhetorical choices are, in fact, part of a larger, audience-centered strategy. i conclude this essay by treating each of these briefly. conclusions? kristof and wudunn see education as of primary importance at every level. they do not advocate a homogeneous approach with “enlightened” westerners building schools to educate the “less civilized.” in fact, the authors note serious drawbacks to a top-down approach to education, which fails to consider the most immediate needs of local populations. (building new schools is useless if those they seek to empower cannot access them.) the authors stress that to alleviate gender brutalities, it is essential to change the entrenched systems and cultural realities that continue to drive them. in this sense, kristof and wudunn stress that while working toward legal reform is relevant, it does not affect the attitudinal changes necessary to shift local realities. people’s life choices are limited by the options they recognize as available. working with local organizations to develop locally viable educational opportunities for girls (and women) is key to affecting change upon oppressive realities. kristof and wudunn offer ample evidence to suggest that, for many of those most brutally oppressed, education can translate into empowerment and choice. but, international aid/development projects must take a comprehensive, micro-level, heterogeneous approach, attending to local material needs and cultural realities. as such, another key to increasingly effective educational opportunities is balancing the western drive to “help” or “save” these women with a nuanced understanding of their cultural norms, needs, and constraints. kristof and wudunn also advocate greater attention to international education/awareness in the united states, suggesting less ethnocentric american curricula and increased study abroadopportunities for students. american students need to develop greater global consciousness. this begins with curricular reform. further, the kind of selfand global awareness that living abroad affords is crucial to helping american students (who will later become the nation’s decision makers) understand the global impacts of their individual consumptive and broader political choices. this kind of “hands-on” field experience is more effective in the long term than throwing money at a problem from the safety of our living rooms. the authors illustrate this through the story of harper, an american girl from the mid-west volunteering in eastern congo. certainly, elements of harper’s narrative pander to the materialistic sensibilities of kristof and wudunn’s target audience. we are told that harper misses shopping at the mall and having a fast internet connection. she bemoans eastern congo’s paltry dating scene and extols being exalted as “queen” to the locals. yet, the consubstantiality these narrative elements create is important. like zach, harper is a “typical” american teen whose individual efforts have affected audience-conscious persuasive genius 82 change in individual lives, and through this, her own life has been transformed. the underlying message: if she can do it, so can you! in fact, kristof and wudunn suggest that without the individual participation of “normal” americans, the necessary changes will never be realized, as existing aid organizations suffer themselves from a host of entrenched problems impeding their effectiveness. this is another point where kristof and wudunn are exceptionally strong. while not denigrating the efforts and intentions of aid organizations, they offer several important critiques of dominant development/aid models. one issue is that aid organizations often do not conduct rigorous research on the effectiveness of their own programs for fear that calling their practices into question may jeopardize funding (kristof and wudunn 2009, 17). another concern is that an old-fashioned paternalistic paradigm underscores many international aid projects, a “we know what is best for you” model for which kristof and wudunn offer excellent examples. a third concern is that many of the most financially secure aid organizations (as well as cause-driven celebrities) prefer high-profile projects in urban areas where they will receive maximum exposure. in fact, the most intense need is far away from urban centers, and high-visibility often comes at the expense of smaller projects that can empower a greater number of people, often among the most impoverished and needy. a significant portion of aid money is misspent, even wasted, on flashy projects, while more pressing, less expensive, but less glamorous needs go unmet. further, kristof and wudunn stress that big funders ignore some of the most critical problems because their complicated solutions are neither cheap nor sexy. for example, the infinitely pressing need to attend to maternal health is a project which is neither cost-effective nor at the top of anyone’s agenda (kristof and wudunn 2009, 121). yet, the simplest maternal health standards that we take for granted are not even an option for many of the world’s women. as they conclude, kristof and wudunn offer a sobering reality-check, asking audiences to bear in mind that there is no “silver bullet” solution to gender oppression. change is slow, and even with assistance, individuals sometimes fail. after predicating the bulk of their appeal on narratives that invoke a sense of individual obligation to each individual human life, kristof and wudunn offer a quiet reminder. the issues they seek to mitigate are not really about the success or failure of one person, nor do they hinge on the inevitable march toward progress, one person at a time. instead, real change is more a process than an event, a societal dance of sorts – two steps forward, one step back – requiring complex, multi-pronged approaches and heterogeneous projects over a sustained period of time. further, just as the societies in need are made up of collections of individuals, so too are the audiences to which our authors appeal. as such, kristof and wudunn conclude with a simple call to action that offers four ways that every individual can take part in the solution in the next ten minutes, providing the audience with the kind of hope characteristic of conclusions to classic american stories. in all, while i am clearly not half the sky’s target audience, kristof and wudunn’s skillful audience-centered approach to this complicated problem is praiseworthy. their employment of classic persuasive strategies and adroit rhetorical choices reflect a keen consideration of audience. the extent to which their choices are fully conscious is a matter of speculation, and a 83 morus thorough analysis to this end is outside the scope of this essay. instead, i have posited the extent to which kristof and wudunn are astute persuasive agents – consciously crafting consubstantiality with their intended audience versus the extent to which their rhetorical choices reveal something about their own uninterrogated assumptions. i do not presume to have these answers – though i would suggest that the extent to which their choices are conscious indicates where these authors (and others like them) fall on the continuum between persuasive strategists and all-out political geniuses. works cited aristotle. 1991. on rhetoric: a theory of public discourse. trans., g.a. kennedy. new york: oxford university press. burke, kenneth. 1945. a grammar of motives. berkeley: university of california press. ---. 1966. language as symbolic action: essays on life, literature and method. berkeley: university of california press. ---. 1969. a rhetoric of motives. berkeley: university of california press. hooks, bell. 1981. ain’t i a woman : black women and feminism. boston, ma: south end press. kristof, nicholas d. and sheryl wudunn. 2009. half the sky: turning oppression into opportunity for women worldwide. new york: alfred a. knopf. [expositions 5.2 (2011) 23-27] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 classics as cost center? donald e. lavigne texas tech university when i sat down to formulate my ideas on the future of classics, as luck would have it, the political pundits were littering the national discourse with an old catch phrase that has obviously gained new popularity these days: “it’s the economy, stupid!” as we debate the fate of national economies here and abroad, this rallying cry has found a new audience as another financially bleak election season begins. classics (in fact, the international education system as a whole and especially its universities) has not been immune to the effects of this downturn, 1 but the penny pinching and budget-tightening started long before the current financial problems surfaced. universities the world over have been dealing with trying financial times (real and imagined) by optimizing their management structures and aligning all their varying divisions more closely with their corporate goals. these changes have resulted in mission statements and assessment strategies, but, also, cost and profit centers. normally, no self-respecting classicist would be caught dead reading a paper that had “cost center” in the title – the phrase smacks of the fabled boredom of the insurance seminar. unfortunately, the times, they are a-changing – many of us have already been visited by our deans and/or chairs with just such terms prominently featured in their powerpoint slides. it has happened at my university – luckily, i was hard at work at the center for hellenic studies when the dean showed up at my department this semester. being a good corporate citizen, i decided to try to understand this system (even while on leave!) and these investigations, in turn, have led me to ponder the significance of such restructuring to the future of classics and, indeed, the whole of the humanities. what exactly is a cost center? according to my source for all financial information, wikipedia, a cost center is a unit that “adds to the cost of an organization, but only indirectly adds to its profit.” 2 but it can be construed in another way, as it is at my university, as a discrete unit within a business that is responsible for its own budget – it pays out what it owes and keeps what it earns. the key, within either model, is that the unit has a manager who is directly responsible for the budget of that center, and each center is in direct competition for resources with other such centers. this market is regulated, at least at my university, to protect underperforming centers, provided they further the mission of the university – it can also be regulated, say, to pay more per credit hour to science classes than to an equivalent level classics course. this model is moralistically termed responsibility center management, or rcm, for those in the know, and this is the road most large, public universities are traveling as the fetishization of accountability in the crudest of quantitative terms sweeps throughout this country and the halls of the academy. 3 classics as cost center? 24 obviously, my fairly negative rhetoric suggests that i think this is a woeful misstep that could have ill effect on the future of the classics. i’m not sure that i believe that. but i’m also not sure that i don’t. when one looks at the raw numbers, it seems that classics will be fine, and could even excel within such a paradigm, provided we keep offering large, popular lecture courses (profit) to offset the small, under-enrolled language courses (cost). hopefully, within this framework, our programs can survive without becoming intolerably watered down. after all, we tend to be far ahead of our colleagues in the foreign languages in terms of culture courses, and even if we can’t hope to rival them (especially spanish) in language course enrollments, the numbers of students studying greek and latin are not discouraging on the national level. 4 the potential problem as i see it is two-fold. 5 first, the blatantly market-based approach offers little reassurance that smaller programs will remain aligned with the mission of a university. for instance, at my university, the higher value assigned to a science class is disconcerting not so much because it is unfair, as because it shows how the mission of the university is subject to the pressures of the times, e.g., the stem (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) initiative and other similar federal and state pushes to encourage the study of (literally) profitable subjects. what i fear is that in this climate of tea party-style rugged individualism, which equates the free movement of capital with a certain conception of the freedom of democracy, and disregards people and institutions that “cost,” it might not be so prudent to integrate further the academy, especially public universities, into such a brazenly market-based system. we run the risk of endorsing the primacy of the market as a legitimate means of assessing academic success or failure. moreover, as a recent article in inside higher ed suggests, what the market sees as profitable at present may not be so conceived in the near future; thus, there is a greater probability that education will be determined by ephemeral and marketable trends rather than the costly and “useless” curricula that have formed the backbone of the american university since its inception. 6 the market sees perfecting technical communication as a profit, but the reading of homer (or orwell) as a cost. if left unregulated (or poorly regulated), the university will sever the connection between the two pursuits. 7 how can classicists be sure that the study of ancient latin and greek will stay in the black within such a system, especially as faculty lose more and more managerial say, and the managers become less and less akin to faculty in their career trajectories and day-to-day responsibilities? to say the least, this marriage to the market should give those of us in the humanities pause and lead us to be vigilant of the regulatory commissions at our universities. secondly, i fear that such an overt endorsement of the current, dominant western ideology, a further alignment with the inexorable advance of consumer capitalism, can only be problematic, even if classics can remain in the black. and here is where the immediate problem arises – the more like mcdonald’s the academy becomes, the more we seek to maximize profits and minimize costs, the more we have to compromise on quality, then the cheaper and faster we have to sling our sophocles and cicero, the more time we have to spend on brand management and customer relations. in a recent piece in the chronicle of higher education, brian hall did his rendition of what has become a cliché rant, detailing his experiences with students who approach 25 lavigne the college classroom as if it were a drive-thru window. 8 if classics – really, any humanities program – is to survive under such conditions, we’ll have to convince the customers that what they want is not the intellectual equivalent of a big, greasy cheeseburger and fries, but a giant bowl of broccoli over quinoa. and that will take some serious customer relations, which, of course, is the classic example of a cost center in the literal sense, that is, the division within a business that is nothing but cost and only indirectly, but essentially, contributes to profit. now, we don’t have to like it, but, we do have to live with it – and, for the record, i think we will. as settis has recently argued in his the future of the ‘classical’, it is precisely classics’ propensity to renewal that has characterized the discipline (and should continue to do so). from the discipline’s origins as the study of greece and rome, three interrelated concepts lay at its center: continuity and transformation as well as the hybridity that interaction between the two entails. 9 the study of classics requires a recursive interpretive bridge, one between ancient and modern, but also one between self and other. the intellectual curiosity fostered by the impulse to compare, to bridge “us” and “them,” is a real strength of the study of classical antiquity; but, especially as focus shifts toward the literally profitable, we must be ever more careful to ensure a real engagement with ancient civilization grounds our comparative efforts. unfortunately, the adaptive hybridity settis sees as a property of classics, and as a central feature of classics’ contribution to western culture more generally, is already at risk in the current intellectual environment. the connections that once bound the west into an intellectual whole have been trumped by the connectivity monster that is the modern web. no longer are major works of literature, philosophy and history read as a means of fostering intellectual connectivity; according to sloterdijk, the demise of these “thick letters to friends” has destabilized the multi-temporal and -spatial dialogue that it is the duty of the humanities to foster. 10 instead of engendering a true multi-cultural dialogue, we scholars of the humanities have been reduced to caretakers of our archives, a format much better suited to the functionality of the internet. if classics and the humanities in general are to be more useful than as subject matter for effete pub quizzes, we must be more than archivists; we have to keep our thick letters in the minds of our students, and we have to foster the dialogue in ways that both honor its complexity and show how it contributes to the conversations of the moment within the academy and society at large. actively resisting our own reduction to archivists by sending our students into the stacks seems to me that the only way to fight the false equation (engendered by consumer capitalist mentality as well as ease of access) between information and knowledge (information is, in fact, superabundant and easily obtained online; knowledge is not). in the current academic environment, we have to destabilize the consumer capitalist mentality and show that the trove of information that every student has in the palm of his/her hand is not knowledge. i am hopeful we can temper the current changes with some of our stubborn dedication to time-honored ideas and practices. but we have to be careful not to give in totally to market demands. if we abandon the costly, difficult, long-standing aspects of the study of greco-roman civilization in favor of the profitable, easy, and novel, classics is liable to become merely a dressing for the emerging “real” classics as cost center? 26 goals of a college education, an increase in student profitability. so, classics (indeed, all of the humanities) needs to ensure we provide our students with a balanced diet, one consisting of intensive, serious critical engagement with ancient culture and a systematic analysis of the relationship between then and now, us and them. notes 1. see papazarkadas for remarks on greece, and graziosi on britain and italy, both in this volume. 2. wikipedia, s. v. “cost centre (business),” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/cost_center_ %28business%29. 3. many of the nation’s finest public universities have adopted this system, e.g., indiana, ohio state and minnesota. private universities have adopted the model as well, e.g., harvard. 4. according to the most recent mla language enrollment survey (nelly furman, david goldberg, and natalia lusin, enrollments in languages other than english in united states institutions of higher education, fall 2006 (modern language association, 2007), http://www.mla.org/pdf/06enrollmentsurvey_final.pdf.), ancient greek and latin enrollments are up 12.1% and 7.9% since 2002, respectively. but, see gephardt’s discussion in this volume for a possible indication of lower enrollments in the future. 5. there is a third problem associated with the model, namely, the fact that rcm and other such de-centralized management structures offer little incentive for broad institutional collaboration (e.g., between colleges and other larger divisions within a university). i don’t discuss this issue here because it is operative on a larger level than that which is of immediate concern here. 6. russell a. berman, “foreign language or foreign policy?” inside higher ed, november 2010, http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/11/23/berman. 7. in a related vein, texas’ public universities are currently embroiled in a debate with gov. rick perry, over his new accountability program, the “seven breakthrough solutions,” which basically assess faculty performance according to raw enrollment numbers and research dollars in an effort to quantify the most profitable educators. texas a&m used this system to formulate and publish a ranking of its faculty, printing, in order of profitability, the names of those who make money in black and the names of those who cost in red. this gross accounting seems nearly farcical, nonetheless, it has spawned a huge debate in texas and is suggestive of the extent to which market forces can enter the management of the university. for an overview of the issues, see paul burka, “the old college try,” texas monthly, april 2011, http://www.texasmonthly.com/2011–04– 01/btl.php#. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/cost_center_%28business%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/cost_center_%28business%29 http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/11/23/berman http://www.texasmonthly.com/2011-04-01/btl.php http://www.texasmonthly.com/2011-04-01/btl.php 27 lavigne 8. brian p. hall, “educating our ‘customers.’” the chronicle of higher education, march 30, 2011, http://chronicle.com/article/article-content/126916/. 9. salvatore settis, the future of the ‘classical’, trans. allen cameron (malden, ma: polity, 2006), passim, esp. 109–11. 10. peter sloterdijk, “rules for the human zoo: a response to the letter on humanism,” trans. mary varney rorty, environment and planning d: society and space 27.1 (2009): 12–28. http://chronicle.com/article/article-content/126916/ [expositions 6.1 (2012) 90–97] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 some principles at work in hesiod’s theogony david r. sweet university of dallas this essay was originally given as a talk at the annual conference of the association of core texts and courses (actc) in april of 2010. under those circumstances i made some prefatory remarks recommending the use of hesiod’s theogony as a possible core text to prepare the way for courses not only in greek poetry, in epic poetry especially to be sure, but also in greek philosophy, and for that matter also in the bible. in the university where i teach, all our freshmen start the fall semester by reading the iliad, the odyssey, and the aeneid. they also take a course either in the republic and the ethics, or in the bible, or in both. for all of these courses one might ask, “where better to begin than with creation, the coming into being of the cosmos?” here is how i argued the case for beginning with hesiod on the occasion of the actc conference. in attempting to understand the creation of the universe, as scientists we have the account that we call the big bang, but another recourse we have to the understanding of this event is the imagination, wherewith we can envision the coming into being and growth of the cosmos. the imagination might shrink before this task, but an exemplary man of imagination did some of our work for us 2,700 years ago: hesiod. this is a talk about how hesiod understood the coming into being of such entities as earth, sky, and sea, and their role in a naturally generated, as opposed to an artistically constructed, cosmos. the difference is that between poiesis and genesis. poiesis is of course exemplified for us by the hebrew account – though paradoxically we know it by the name of the book of genesis, but hesiod’s account more properly deserves the title, for it is governed by various principles that are deeply genetic. the focus of this talk will be a consideration of some of these principles. let me begin by referring to the accompanying illustration (see fig. 1), which diagrams the generations of the gods as described in the theogony. starting at the top of this chart with chaos and gaia, the first principle one might discern is that which leads from what could be called “nothing” to “something” to “everything.” but perhaps one shouldn’t call the origin “nothing.” prior to the coming into being of chaos and gaia there “was” some original, apparently static condition. in later terms, instead of thinking of it as nothing, we might call it a condition of pure potentiality, even a state of pure being, a state however, whatever it was, that could not be known until its constituent elements emerged into a state of becoming, 1 until they became actualized. there is then some initial coincidence between the knowable and the actual, while the potential remains wholly conjectural. but once actualized, chaos and gaia have an enormous amount of potentiality still in them – all things in fact are therein, and the subsequent process of generation is an actualization of the entities that are potential within each 91 sweet figure 1 “generation.” in modern terms the big bang is an event wherein the conjectural one becomes the evident many. that is to say, the present material cosmos with all its atomic and sub-atomic multiplicity has come from an original and undifferentiated something whose “being,” whose “nature,” we cannot know until it expresses itself as the constituent elements that resided within some principles at work in hesiod’s theogony 92 it in potentia, and this attempt to know we call natural science or physics, but whether the account we examine is that of science or of myth, in both cases, cosmogony and theogony are equally an emergence into a condition of perishability, which is knowable, of a presumed original condition of imperishability, which is unknowable. so, this is a paradox – that the whole, the one, must give up its virtue, its simplicity, its unchangeability, in order to be known. in order to be known it must have parts; it must become complex and variable. so, tangentially, the question might be, why would the one wish to be known, especially if its being known has to be at the expense of the perfection of its unity. why would the permanent, the divine, wish to reveal itself in the impermanent, the mortal? so there we have what we might call the cosmotheological problem. why would the unknown wish to make itself known, at the cost, as it were, of its own eventual death? in christian terms the question might be phrased as, “why did god become christ?” in hesiod’s terms, the answer seems to be that being has a yearning for becoming. eros [ἔis the cause of this yearning. 2 the yearning is that of pure potency for complete actualization, such that the end of the process is the fully articulated cosmos down to all the ultimate particulars, which, as hesiod describes them, are in a way us. the poem ends apparently with a catalogue of children born of mortal men and immortal goddesses, but scholars debate just where that end occurs, because in the manuscripts there is an immediate continuation with a catalogue of the tribe born of mortal women (at line 1021). there is no end in other words. the poem is still being written as, generation after generation, we replace ourselves with our own progeny. so that is one principle, from the one to the infinitude of ultimate particulars. another principle also emerges right at the start of the theogony when the separation is made between chaos and earth. these two entities generate separate lines of progeny, the members of which never intermarry. their separation from each other is represented on the diagram by the left-hand set of vertical dashes. the contrast between them has been called that between unform and form. 3 on the one hand, chaos, which is without substance and without form, produces entities that exist but are intangible and invisible: ἐό[darkness] and ύ [night], and they in turn produce brilliance [ἰή] and day [ἡέ], that is to say, something like spaces in which creatures with substance can be seen and grasped. and night then without eros produces states which can exist within substantial living beings but which have no separate identity or existence apart from what they can achieve by coming to be in other living things. then follow the children of eris [ἔ], conflict, conditions of pain that again exist only in other creatures, especially human beings, concluding with horkos [ὅ], oath, the bulwark past which nothing can proceed and which represents the symbolic end of this line of progeny. there is an etymological connection between ὅ = oath, and ἕ = barrier; in this case horkos is the barrier through which no further descendants of chaos are allowed to pass. 4 form, on the other hand, in its initial emergence out of pure potentiality, is present within earth, but she herself is the principal of substance – the stuff out of which everything else that is substantial comes to be. she contains within herself, however, principles of form, ouranos [ὐᾶό], sky; ourea [ὔ], mountains; and pontos [ό], sea. along with earth, all these together may be considered the first order of deities, the order of elemental gods that 93 sweet become the elements of classical materialism, but here in hesiod they are still animate. among these three principles of form, which are derivative from earth, the mountains are nongenerative. they seem to be a manifestation of earth herself as the horizon that separates sky from sea. sky and sea in turn, in union with earth, generate beings that have both substance and form. from earth and sky are born the titans (see figure 2), the second order of deities, i.e., intelligible entities that have the power to generate but are more like attributes of fully developed creatures than creatures themselves. from their names, with the exception of okeanos [ὠᾶό], ocean, we understand them to be abstract powers rather than creatures with identifiable shapes that can be represented in art as having “bodies.” 5 and from these “powers” or “attributes” the third generation is born. but when the third generation is born, it becomes apparent that there are two kinds of form, represented by ouranos and pontos, and a third principle emerges, a paradoxical one, that there is a distinction figure 2 between well-articulated form and “amorphous” form, having to do symbolically perhaps with the difference between sky and sea and the quality of visibility within them – that is to say, how things appear in each medium, whether they are clear or confusing in outline, and finally whether they are shapely or monstrous, beautiful or ugly. the difference may be called that between the ouranids and the pontids. the separation between them is indicated by the right-hand set of vertical dashes on figure 1. the culmination some principles at work in hesiod’s theogony 94 of ouranian visibility is the olympian pantheon, the gods whose beauty and clarity are perhaps the cause of their being worshipped, who embody the complete coincidence of form and substance in such distinctive ways that each is a peculiar entity, an individual divine power with special epithets, and these epithets enable us to know each of them as a person. yet, strangely, the names of most of the olympians themselves are not perspicuous, as opposed to the names of the two generations of gods that preceded them. 6 in the olympians a name is just that, a marker of their individualized being. another principle of genealogy is therefore that of definition, according to which there is a progression from the initial order of substances, or elements, whose names are what they are, earth, sky, and sea, to the titanian order of divinities whose names are attributes that float free of the bodies within which by implication they lie, to the order of olympians, who combine substance and attribute, whose names are pure names marking each as a distinctive divine entity, and whose epithets make it clear that they have beautiful bodies. on the other side of the dichotomy of form, the pontid tendency towards multiformity is most clearly represented in the only marriage of two pontids with each other, that of phorkys and keto. their marriage produces the graiai, the gorgons, echidna and ophis, and their descendants such as orthos, cerberus, the hydra, the chimaera, the sphinx, the nemean lion and other grotesque creatures who are eventually slain by various heroes, that is, by the mortal descendants of the olympians, by heracles and other heroes, who ultimately are all ouranids, such as oedipus, perseus, and bellerophon. the cosmos therefore is driven by principles of order and disorder, of the beautiful and the ugly, and there is strife between them. heroic action is the conclusion of the process. the two tendencies of theogony are in conflict with each other, both are in earth, and the tendency in her towards articulate form, beauty and intelligibility prevails. theogony is the struggle of what “is” or pure potency – not only to become, but also to become known. it culminates in knowing beings who can satisfy the need of being to be intelligible. we might say it culminates in hesiod, the heroic poet. but the heroes and the poets are not gods. somehow the divine apparently declines into the heroic and then into the mortal. so a fourth principle emerges, one that is visible very early – the principle that generation implies degeneration, that is, it implies the process of growing old and being replaced by succeeding generations, one’s own children in fact. the solution to this threat first employed by ouranos was not to permit his children to be born but to keep them confined in the earth, and kronos in his turn allowed them to be born but then swallowed them, and even zeus used this method to prevent a son stronger than himself from being born. he swallowed his first wife, metis. these events represent, in mythical form, the attempt of each generation to solve the problem of succession, of being potent, that is, of having children, but not being succeeded by them. (here, one might think of donald hall’s poem, my son, my executioner.) the attempts of ouranos and cronos fail, thanks in part to the efforts of earth to prevent them from, as it were, swallowing up the future, the very promise of generation, whereas zeus’ attempt seems to have succeeded for the time being (if we are still in his stage of cosmic history). a possible explanation of why zeus succeeds in conquering generation, where his father and grandfather failed, is that when he swallows metis [ῆ], she is a substance, so to speak, a 95 sweet separate divine entity, but in him she becomes metis [ῆ], 7 the prudent power of the mind to solve problems, that is to say, not a substance but an attribute; as such he exercises her continuously when he formulates his many plans, and in doing so, he continuously gives birth to her. she has not simply disappeared into him. there are, however, other stories about a possible future son greater than zeus, such as that of thetis, stories which continue to point towards the fact that generated beings decay and die. as the universe develops, paradoxically, it develops in stages towards its own death. teleologically, therefore, something must be said for each later stage as it emerges. the development may be from a static elemental world that is inert, while waiting for the impress of form, to the dynamic world of the titans, whose dynamism is represented as willfulness, or pure power, to that of the olympians, who represent the combination of power and intelligence, and thence perhaps to the stage of intelligence without any power other than that of intelligence itself, and this would be our world, the world of humans. hence the notion is sometimes implicit in the accounts of the poets that humans are superior to gods on the grounds of their weakness; they are vulnerable to the assaults of nature, and they die. to ward off both, they need to exercise their intelligence in the form of the arts, and this is the story of prometheus, but at the same time their weakness and mortality give them an advantage over the gods. humans have a greater ability to love and to prize the value of articulate form and of beauty, precisely because they know what it is to lose their beauty and perish. perhaps we might conjecture that this is also why the gods fall in love with humans. how poignant, how worthy of eros, can beauty be that never diminishes? leaving this possibility aside, however, let us conclude by returning to the degenerative tendency of the theogony as illustrated by earth’s history, that is, by the stages that mark the differences between the children to whom she gives birth, from sky and sea to typhoeus. in her prime she bears the ouranids and the pontids, but then her fecundity exceeds the ability of ouranos’ principle of form to control it. she produces the cyclopes, monsters with one eye, then the creatures with a hundred hands and fifty heads, and finally in a paroxysm of fertility, through the power of aphrodite and the seed of tartarus, she produces her last child, typhoeus, and is barren thereafter. briefly, to look for a moment at the consequence, the loss of the fertility of the earth results in the next poem of hesiod, the works and days. through work, through the tilling of her as soil, she becomes fruitful again, but not abundantly so. she only produces enough so that humans, by learning to share, can survive, and by surviving and sharing, can learn to be just. while earth’s power, as the principle of substance, declines over the course of the poem, ouranos, as the principle of beautiful form, loses his power suddenly. the essence of ouranos, however, is perhaps best represented by his last child, aphrodite, who is his alone. she is born from his severed genitalia and brought to term in the sea. we might think of her as replacing the power of her father. she figures repeatedly towards the end of the poem as generative in herself and as the cause of generation in others. 8 as eros was present at the start of the process of generation, aphrodite becomes the symbolic culmination of this process, which issues in the ever self-renewing, sometimes articulate, sometimes beautiful, sometimes intelligent, carriers of the future of the power of genesis, human beings. some principles at work in hesiod’s theogony 96 there is more to be said about arresting the power of genesis among the gods, for this is the power that will subject them to the same fate confronting humans – some form either of death or of diminution into insignificance. zeus halts the process of divine generation by swallowing metis, his first wife, by using her power within him to organize the cosmos, to order it through various dispensations, by assigning prerogatives to the deities under his sway, but he preserves the generative principle by continuing to engage in a series of dynastic “marriages,” which in various ways produce either deities that do not generate or humans that do but are not a threat to him because they are mortal. by looking at these dynastic marriages one can see that he replaces physis with nomos, nature with law, genesis with poiesis. but perhaps this is a matter for a talk at another conference of the actc. notes 1. see the various forms of ί (gignomai) at lines 106, 108, 111, 115, 116, 123, 124, 126, etc. 2. eros, the fourth entity to appear out of the pre-existent state, is the non-generative principal that can be considered the co-cause of what is to come, in conjunction with a generative urge within the phenomena themselves. such an account, if accurate, would be in accord with the pre-philosophic greek notion of dual causation, both internal within, and external to, the things themselves, a notion that is present in both epic and tragic poetry. the third entity is tartarus, apparently necessary as the repository of immortal beings who are to be replaced by a later generation, e.g., the titans, who lose their title to rule but who by definition cannot die. they reside in a place between chaos and earth. 3. phillipson, paula. 1966. “genealogie als mythische form.” in hesiod, ed. ernst heitsch. wege der forschung, v. 44. darmstadt: wissenschaftliche buchgesellschaft , 661. 4. see the homeric phrase referring to teeth as the barrier through which ill-spoken words should not be allowed to pass. 5. the greeks conceived the ocean to be the river that delimits the earth that is known to us. it was a substance like the sea, with elemental content, but at the periphery of our knowledge. it confined within its circumference the cosmos that was to come. the other titans were different, if we can judge them by their names: koios (= 97 sweet poios), “of what sort?”; kreios (= kreion), “he who rules”; hyperion, “he who goes on high”; iapetos, “he who hurls”; theia, “she who is divine”; rhea, “she who flows abundantly”; themis, “she who is fixed in position”; mnemosyne, “she who remembers”; phoibe, “she who shines brightly”; tethys, “she who nurses”; kronos, “he who accomplishes.” for the most part, grammatically, these are adjectives made into nouns. they represent attributes rather than substances. 6. the meaning of the names of most of the olympians is not known. the names may derive from non-greek sources, some from a pre-greek language, spoken by the people in the peninsula before the greeks arrived, others from the religion of the mycenaean greeks themselves, whose meaning the greeks lost in the destruction of their civilization at the end of the bronze age. linguists debate about the meaning of the names of the deities of the olympian pantheon, with the notable exceptions of hestia (hearth), demeter (earth mother), and zeus (god of the day sky). but there is continuing debate about the meanings of hera, athena, poseidon, hades, apollo, artemis, ares, and hephaestus. the ancient greeks themselves wondered about the names of their gods and sometimes assigned meanings to them, but they did not debate about the meaning of the names of the elemental gods and the titans. the meaning of these names lay clearly on the surface. 7. there is of course no difference between “m” and “m” in classical greek, but for us the orthographic distinction is useful in enabling us to mark the differentiation, which a greek was aware of, between a substance and an attribute. 8. note the profusion of references to aphrodite at the end of the poem, wherein she is both generative herself and the cause of generation in others, at this point most particularly in humans, where the future of generation may safely lie without threat to the gods. [expositions 7.1 (2013) 16–21] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 ethics education: more than a good idea? bernard g. prusak king’s college reporter: what do you think of western civilization? mahatma gandhi: i think it would be a good idea. 1 the question more than likely predates the ancient greeks, but it finds its classic expression in plato’s dialogue meno: “can you tell me, socrates, whether virtue is something teachable?” 2 socrates, as was his wont, does not answer directly, but asks in turn just what virtue is, claiming not to know himself. plato’s student aristotle was more forthcoming. he famously tells us, in the nicomachean ethics, that virtue (take courage) lies in the mean between the extremes of excess (rashness) and deficiency (cowardice), and that what is virtuous is relative to the capacities of the person in question (so, in a given set of circumstances, what would be courageous for achilles to do might well be different from what it would be courageous for, say, a hobbit to do). we also learn that virtue is a state of character disposing one to choose the mean relative to oneself, and that virtue develops, not simply naturally, but secundum naturam, in accordance with nature through the cultivation of natural powers, much as a child learns to speak not simply naturally, without any cultivation whatsoever, but through being raised within a linguistic community. as a language then becomes “second nature” to a child—for example, he or she cannot but hear a well-formed utterance in that language as expressive of meaning—so too, if all goes well, may acting virtuously (courageously, temperately, generously, magnanimously, etc.). and we can push the comparison further: not only do language and virtue not develop simply naturally; they are also not picked up first and foremost through formal instruction, which is to say in the classroom. instead, they develop through what we, in english, somewhat infelicitously call habit—repeated doings, in give-and-take with others of our kind, that call on and give shape to our natural powers and interests. 3 strange though it sounds, a child develops the habit of understanding and speaking a language. this habit (from the latin habitus and greek hexis) carries the child into the world and enables the child actively to carry him or herself in it. 4 the moral virtues do likewise, with this important specification: they both make a human being a good human being and enable him or her to do good deeds. in brief, then, aristotle teaches us a lot about virtue—but in the end we might well want to ask again meno’s question of whether virtue is something teachable. on first consideration, aristotle’s answer to this question appears to be both yes and no: yes, by example; no, by formal instruction. but the nicomachean ethics itself must then puzzle us. for aristotle says explicitly that its aim is not theoretical but practical: “we are investigating not in order that we might know what virtue is, but in order that we might become good.” 5 the problem here is, if virtue does not 17 prusak develop through formal instruction, how are lectures supposed to help us become good? crudely put, what good are lectures, and what good is aristotle’s book as it has come down to us? from one question we have moved then to two: is virtue something teachable? and, what is the purpose of formal instruction in ethics of the kind that aristotle—and, in the typical college classroom of today, plato and hobbes and hume and kant and mill and macintyre and nussbaum and parfit and a host of others—have to offer? neither question is merely academic in the pejorative sense of mattering little to “real world” decision-making. instead, how we think about these questions bears concretely on the business of colleges and universities in our world today: more precisely, on what ethics courses at these levels should look like and aim for; on whether they have any place at all in college or core curricula; and on whether it is legitimate or even sensible for colleges to include character formation or, more modestly, increased facility in “moral reasoning” among the aims of liberal education. we might also wonder about the aims and status of the growing number and variety of more focused, pre-professional courses in business ethics, computing ethics, engineering ethics, and medical and nursing ethics, among others. the aim of this forum is to pick out and pursue the question of what the aims of ethics courses at the college and university levels should be. the literature on this question is remarkably small given the great stakes and the great number of ethics courses nowadays at our many, many institutions of higher education. it is also remarkably small given the push toward assessment in these institutions. how can courses in ethics be assessed if it is not clear what aims these courses ought to have and can realistically achieve?—apart from the further question of whether it is possible to measure the achievement of these aims. one, somewhat notorious position in the literature is that “providing moral guidance is no longer in [the] job description” of at least “elite universities.” 6 so claims john mearsheimer of the university of chicago in a reflection (though disputed) on his own institution. 7 according to mearsheimer, “universities do not have a moral agenda and do not give students moral guidance, because that would involve preaching about values, and that is an enterprise that holds hardly any attraction for modern universities,” which he presents instead as devoted entirely to the mission of “teaching critical thinking” so that students might “figure out the truth for themselves.” 8 of course, if there is truth to be known, it seems strange not to teach it to students, so it is not surprising to find mearsheimer state as well that, “[o]ver the course of the twentieth century, the effort to develop a scientific morality failed almost completely”—about which there is surely more to say. 9 mearsheimer is surely right, however, to warn us of indoctrination, where this is understood as “clos[ing] off rather than facilitat[ing] open conversation among autonomous moral agents concerning appropriate value choices and moral decisions.” 10 but, to quote a critic of mearsheimer’s, “intellectual freedom is not synonymous with being value free,” 11 and it is doubtful, in the words of a professor down the street from mearsheimer at depaul, whether a value-free study of ethics is “either possible or desirable.” 12 another position in the literature is that ethics education at the college level should aim, not at shaping character, inculcating principles, or communicating a vision of the good life—all ethics education: more than a good idea? 18 controversial propositions, the effectiveness of which can also be questioned—but at fostering students’ moral development toward more adequate forms of reasoning. this position is associated with the psychologist lawrence kohlberg and his students, including carol gilligan. gilligan famously dissented from kohlberg’s account of the terminus of moral development on the grounds that it reflected predominantly male modes of thought, but she subscribed with him to the thesis that, for women and men alike, moral development occurs over three basic levels, “from an egocentric through a societal to a universal perspective,” differentiated into five or six stages. 13 for kohlberg and his students, “morality...is neither ‘taught’ nor ‘caught’ but is inexorably developed out of each individual’s personal struggle to make sense of the world” 14 — more technically, the personal struggle to come to terms with “problematic situations of conflict” in which one or other previously settled mode of structuring our relationships with others is found no longer to fit with, or quite literally to “do justice to,” new elements of our experience that we find ourselves deeply interested in maintaining. 15 in light of this conception of morality as developing out of our “structuring tendencies,” the aim of moral education, kohlberg claims, “should be to stimulate people’s thinking ability over time in ways which will enable them to use more adequate and complex reasoning patterns to solve moral problems” 16 : reduced to a catchphrase, “stimulation of movement to the next stage of moral reasoning.” 17 kohlberg presents some evidence that students at higher stages of moral judgment cheat much less than do students at lower stages, 18 but it is important to understand that, for him, “[s]tructures of moral judgment must be distinguished from the content of moral judgment,” which is to say both that how persons formulate a judgment does not issue in an invariant judgment about what ought to be done (or all the more that they will do it) and that, again in kohlberg’s words, “the mere fact that a stage is later does not make it morally better.” 19 another way to put this point is to say that, even as a person grows able “to use more adequate and complex reasoning patterns to solve moral problems,” whether he or she will in fact come to the correct solution of a problem is a further question. here psychology must pass over into philosophy, as kohlberg himself acknowledges. 20 the upshot is that whether the aim of moral education in fact should be “stimulation of movement to the next stage of moral reasoning” depends on whether there is reason to hold that the later stages correspond to progressively more defensible philosophical theories of what we owe to each other—for kohlberg, the core of morality. 21 kohlberg was at one point willing to make this claim: in a paper dating from 1975, he sought to justify the claim that “the latest or principled stages of moral reasoning are morally better stages” by appeal to “the liberal or rational tradition, in particular the ‘formalistic’ or ‘deontological’ tradition running from immanuel kant to john rawls.” 22 it is interesting that kohlberg never considered, at least in print, whether the natural law tradition represented by a thinker like aquinas might better support what a fellow psychologist called his “faith in nature” that, under “properly nurturant [...] conditions, not only the form of moral reasoning but its content and ensuing behavior will develop” in ways that moral theorists could hope for. 23 there is one last important question to note by way of introduction. this is whether, as kenneth goodpaster nicely asked some years ago, the activity of teaching ethics “leans more 19 prusak toward poiesis”—that is, a making the good of which is a product external to the activity—”or more toward praxis”—that is, a practice at least some goods of which lie internal to the practice itself. 24 to use goodpaster’s examples, “making a musical instrument, like a flute, would be poiesis. [...] playing the flute would be praxis.” 25 to the point for present purposes, when we teach ethics at the college level, do we aim to make students more ethical—or, in any event, more skilled at moral reasoning—or to involve and interest students in a practice of inquiry and reflection that has an integrity and purpose of its own, which we do not properly appreciate when we focus only on how it leaves students after the course is done? another possibility is that the contrast here is overdrawn. the contributors to this forum represent a variety of theoretical perspectives and bring diverse teaching experience. gregory bassham is professor of philosophy at king’s college with interests in the philosophy of law, virtue theory, and virtue education. ronald duska is a widelypublished business ethicist who, after fifteen years as the charles lamont post chair of ethics and the professions at the american college, now runs the firm business ethics zone consulting. in 1975, he published, with mariellen whelan, the book moral development: a guide to piaget and kohlberg. abigail gosselin is assistant professor of philosophy, karen adkins associate professor of philosophy and associate dean for advising and the first year experience, both at regis university. they share interests in social and political philosophy and feminist theory. daniel issing, c.s.c, is assistant professor of theology at king’s college; he teaches moral theology and social ethics. kay johnston is professor of educational studies and women’s studies at colgate university, specializing in adolescent development, women’s development, and moral development. she studied under and has collaborated with carol gilligan. finally, toby schonfeld is associate professor of medicine in the school of medicine, director of the master of arts in bioethics in the ethics center, and co-director of the program for scholarly integrity in the laney graduate school, all at emory university. her current research projects include assessment of online and traditional ethics education. notes 1. this quotation, oft repeated and attributed to gandhi, appears to be apocryphal. 2. plato 2004, 91 (70a). for the prehistory of ancient greece, see burkert 2004. 3. compare book 1, chapter 14 of augustine’s confessions on how he learned his native latin from nurses and through childish games, as opposed to greek in school. 4. see joe sachs’s introduction to aristotle 2002, xi–xvii. 5. aristotle 2002, 23 (1103b). 6. mearsheimer 1998b, 194. 7. see booth 1998. ethics education: more than a good idea? 20 8. mearsheimer 1998b, 195. see also mearsheimer 1998a, 151: “collectively we are silent on the issue of morality, and instead we concentrate on teaching you to think critically.” 9. mearsheimer 1998a, 149. 10. camenisch 1986, 503. 11. hayes 2007. 12. camenisch 1986, 503. 13. see gilligan 1977, 483; see also 515. toward the end of his life, kohlberg qualified “our sixth stage [as] a theoretical hypothesis” which he was not ready to consider “empirically confirmed.” see kohlberg 1982, 523. 14. bereiter 1978, 20. 15. see kohlberg and boyd 1973, 371. 16. kohlberg and hersch 1977, 56. 17. kohlberg 1975, 673. 18. ibid., 672. 19. ibid., 671. compare kohlberg 1982, 525. 20. ibid., 672. 21. ibid., 673: “moral principles are ultimately principles of justice.” see further 674: “it is not clear that the whole realm of personal, political, and religious values is a realm which is nonrelative, i.e., in which there are universals and a direction of development.” 22. ibid., 672, but see again kohlberg 1982, 525. 23. bereiter 1978, 21. 24. goodpaster 1982, 37. 25. ibid. works cited aristotle. 2002. nicomachean ethics. trans. joe sachs. newburyport, mass.: focus publishing. bereiter, carl. 1978. “the morality of moral education.” hastings center report 8.2, 20–25. booth, wayne c. “introducing professor mearsheimer to his own university.” philosophy and literature 22, 174–178. 21 prusak burkert, walter. babylon, memphis, persepolis: eastern contexts of greek culture. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press, 2004. camenisch, paul f. 1986. “goals of applied ethics courses.” journal of higher education 57, 493– 509. gilligan, carol. 1977. “in a different voice: women’s conceptions of self and morality.” harvard educational review 47, 481–517. goodpaster, kenneth e. 1982. “is teaching ethics ‘making’ or ‘doing’?” hastings center report 12.1, 37–39. hayes, alice b. 2007. “trends in catholic higher education.” unpublished address at jesuit advancement officers meeting. <http://www.slu.edu/jaa/conference_2007/presentations_2007/ trends_in_catholic_higher_education_hayes.doc (accessed november 21, 2012).> kohlberg, lawrence. 1975. “the cognitive-developmental approach to moral education.” phi delta kappan 56, 670–677. kohlberg, lawrence. 1982. “a reply to owen flanagan and some comments on the pukagoodpaster exchange.” ethics 92, 513–528. kohlberg, lawrence, and dwight boyd. 1973. “the is-ought problem: a developmental perspective.” zygon 8, 358–372. kohlberg, lawrence, and richard h. hersch. 1977. “moral development: a review of the theory,” theory into practice 16, 53–59. mearsheimer, john j. 1998a. “the aims of education.” philosophy and literature 22, 137–155. ___. 1998b. “teaching morality at the margins.” philosophy and literature 22, 193–198. plato, 2004. meno. in “protagoras” and “meno.” trans. robert c. bartlett. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. [expositions 6.1 (2012) 29–40] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 unnaturally cruel: rolston on animals, ethics, and the factory farm christian diehm university of wisconsin, stevens point in 2010, over nine billion animals were killed in the united states for human consumption. this included nearly 1 million calves, 2.5 million sheep and lambs, 34 million cattle, 110 million hogs, 242 million turkeys, and well over 8.7 billion chickens (usda 2011a; 2011b). though hundreds of slaughterhouses actively contributed to these totals, more than half of the cattle just mentioned were killed at just fourteen plants. a slightly greater percentage of hogs was killed at only twelve (usda 2011a). chickens were processed in a total of three hundred and ten federally inspected facilities (usda 2011b), which means that if every facility operated at the same capacity, each would have slaughtered over fifty-three birds per minute (nearly one per second) in every minute of every day, adding up to more than twenty-eight million apiece over the course of twelve months.1 incredible as these figures may seem, 2010 was an average year for agricultural animals. indeed, for nearly a decade now the total number of birds and mammals killed annually in the us has come in at or above the nine billion mark, and such enormous totals are possible only by virtue of the existence of an equally enormous network of industrialized agricultural suppliers. these high-volume farming operations – dubbed “factory farms” by the general public, or “concentrated animal feeding operations (cafos)” by state and federal agencies – are defined by the ways in which they restrict animals’ movements and behaviors, locate more and more bodies in less and less space, and increasingly mechanize many aspects of traditional husbandry. as a recent report of the united states department of agriculture put it, this form of animal agriculture “concentrates large numbers of animals in relatively small and confined spaces, and […] substitutes structures and equipment (for feeding, temperature controls, and manure management) for land and labor” (usda 2009, 3). although notions of what is “humane” surely vary, few people who confront these facts live under the illusion that nine billion animals can be bred, housed, raised, fed, transported and killed humanely. until recently, though, those who have brought such ethical concerns about the treatment of agricultural animals to the writings of holmes rolston, iii are likely to have been somewhat dissatisfied, mostly because his now-classic environmental ethics: values in and duties to the natural world mentions “modern industrial farming” only once, and only in a parenthetical reference that promises to treat the subject elsewhere (rolston 1988, 79). rolston’s a new environmental ethics, however, pays considerably more attention to questions about the ethical treatment of captive and domesticated animals, and even devotes several pages specifically to a discussion of factory farming. but while this text clearly identifies industrialized animal agriculture as a pressing moral problem, its approach to this problem is primarily descriptive: it conveys important data and highlights potential controversies, but never explicitly unnaturally cruel 30 condones or condemns the phenomenon that it documents. in this way rolston’s latest work takes long-standing questions about his assessment of contemporary animal agri-business and, rather than answering them, raises them anew. the appearance of a new environmental ethics thus presents us with an opportunity: the occasion to ask again about rolston’s views on animals and the ethics of industrialized animal agriculture. where does rolston ultimately stand on this timely issue? perhaps more importantly, is there room within the philosophical framework that he articulates for a robust critique of factory farming, one that is rooted not only in environmental concerns, but also in concern for the welfare of animals? the goals of this essay are, quite simply, to try to offer some further insight into these questions, to take another look at what rolston says and why he says it, and to assess whether or not his texts provide us with the resources to say anything else. given the general orientation of rolston’s writing, though, this investigation does not begin close to home with domesticated animals in agriculture, but farther afield with his views on animal suffering in wild nature. rolston on animals, predation, and eating rolston’s views on animals and ethics are the product of an interesting array of premises, among which is a thoroughly evolutionary outlook that emphasizes the importance of predation in the wild. “environmental ethics accepts predation as good in wild nature” (rolston 1988, 56), he says straightforwardly, and in both environmental ethics and a new environmental ethics he mentions two closely-related reasons why this is the case. the first, perhaps more obvious reason is that while predation undoubtedly involves suffering for prey animals, it also secures the wellbeing of predatory ones. “in the trophic pyramid the omnivores and carnivores regularly and necessarily capture values by imposing pain on others,” he explains, and hence to object to the suffering that predation entails would be to overlook the fact that, in nature, food chains link the painful sacrifice of one organism’s good to another organism’s gain (rolston 1988, 57). the second and arguably more important reason that rolston cites for embracing wild predation has to do with the pivotal role that predators play in larger ecosystemic and evolutionary processes. on the one hand, predators eliminate weak, sickly, and otherwise less fit individuals from populations of prey organisms, thereby contributing to the overall integrity of those species.2 on the other hand, the routine culling of unfit organisms by predators is one of the primary mechanisms of natural selection, making predation vital to an evolutionary processes that rolston believes trends towards more diverse and complex life forms. rolston thus views predation as an integral part of the way in which nature “yields a flourishing of species” (rolston 1988, 58), a biological force that has helped make possible some of the most significant achievements in natural history. without predation, and the pain and suffering that comes with it, life on earth would be greatly impoverished. against this background, rolston argues that when humans encounter wild nature, we are under no obligation to try to alleviate the suffering found there. in fact, he contends that we 31 diehm ought actively to refrain from doing so in a variety of circumstances, including many in which exercising such restraint may seem callous or cruel. he also argues that, since animals in the wild have no special claim to a pleasant life free of pain, humans have no special duty to provide them with one, even when we come to make instrumental use of them. this moral rule holds true, moreover, not only in the case of wild animals, but also in regards to animals that have been taken out of their natural environments and placed under conditions of domestication. rolston discerns no particularly forceful obligation, then, to advance the welfare of domesticated animals, and this is because, as clare palmer has pointed out, though he recognizes that they have been brought under the care of humans in culture, he still situates their origins in wild nature, such that the appropriate comparison class for assessing our conduct towards them is not other human beings, but other animals (palmer 2007, 190). therefore domesticated agricultural animals, like their wild cousins, have “no right or welfare claim to have from humans a kinder treatment than in nonhuman nature” (rolston 1988, 59). consequently, rather than advocating that animal agriculture be made to adhere to some ostensibly more humane ethical standard, rolston believes that it should be made to “fit […] into the natural givens, where pain is inseparable from the transfer of values between sentient lives.” he thus rejects the idea that we are required to promote to the greatest extent possible the psychological welfare of agricultural animals, and suggests instead that our moral reflections in this area be guided by a “homologous principle” (rolston 1988, 61). this principle, which he refers to as a rule of “nonaddition” as opposed to subtraction of suffering (rolston 1988, 60), urges us to tolerate the pain inflicted upon agricultural animals while being careful not to cause them to suffer in excess of what might have been their lot in the wild. the homologous principle asserts, in other words, that although we should not make agricultural animals suffer excessively, we have no strong duty to ensure that they suffer only minimally. an important part of rolston’s thinking on this issue, and one that has attracted the attention of many commentators, is that meat-eating is a basically “natural” human activity, something roughly analogous to predation in the wild that, as such, ought to be viewed in a comparable ethical light. this is, to be sure, a contentious claim, but rolston’s logic here seems understandable enough: if one adopts an accepting attitude towards the animal suffering caused by predation in the wild, then one ought to adopt a similar attitude toward that which occurs in agricultural contexts, since eating animals is a typical feature of trophic webs and this basic pattern of interaction is still evident in the human use of domesticated animals for food. “human predation on nature,” we are told, “more or less within the natural patterns, cannot be condemned simply because humans are moral agents, not if nonhuman predation has been accepted as good in the system” (rolston 1988, 59). of course, rolston is well aware that, of the reasons he advances for accepting the suffering of wild animals, one has little if any relevance to a discussion of agricultural animals. the latter, he observes, “have been removed from the environment of natural selection” (rolston 1988, 60), and thus while their suffering still occurs “in the context of the transfer of ecological goods, inherited from the wilds,” it is nevertheless no longer situated in the larger context of the unnaturally cruel 32 evolutionary development of a species (rolston 2012, 77). because of this, he suggests that in agricultural settings there may indeed be some need to employ a “hedonist principle” of minimizing pain (rolston 1988, 79). “[w]here pain in agricultural or industrial animals has become pointless,” he writes, “because they too have been removed from the environment of natural selection, humans have a duty to remove that pain, as far as they can” (rolston 1988, 60). this expression of heightened concern for the welfare of agricultural animals is noteworthy, and it certainly could be taken to suggest that rolston’s position ultimately stands opposed to some of the more intensive types of animal agriculture that currently exist. yet the actual import of the hedonist principle in rolston’s thinking about animals in agriculture, while not entirely clear, appears somewhat minimal. he says, for example, that the principle is “significant,” but refers to it as a “weak ethical rule” (rolston 1988, 61, 79). he also claims that efforts to minimize pain are a matter of “benevolence” rather than “justice” (rolston 1988, 61) and that reducing animal suffering below natural, ecosystemic levels “can be commended, but not required” (rolston 2012, 77). such statements surely restrict the practical role of the hedonist principle in rolston’s philosophy, and indicate the priority he typically accords to the homologous principle when assessing the uses to which domesticated and agricultural animals are commonly put. it seems, therefore, that if the hedonist principle adds to a condemnation of any of these practices, its contribution is not very great. but why, we might ask, is this so, and does rolston’s work really foreclose the possibility of a more substantial critique of animal agriculture’s increasingly mechanized and industrialized forms? animal welfare in the wild? we can begin to work towards answers to these questions by examining briefly the relation between rolston’s views on animals and ethics and those espoused by peter singer in his wellknown book animal liberation. first published in 1975, singer’s text had been in circulation for over a decade before the appearance of rolston’s environmental ethics, and although rolston references singer somewhat sparingly in the course of his writing, it is clear that his position is developed in large part as a response to the one that singer helped to popularize. as it is elaborated in animal liberation, singer’s argument rests on two main points. the first, drawn directly from utilitarian moral theory, is that pleasure is a good that ought to be promoted, and pain, as the negation of pleasure, ought to be minimized. the second is that many animals are, like most humans, sentient beings capable of experiencing pleasure and pain. since most of us readily accept that we should keep to a minimum the pain that we might cause other people, singer believes that once we recognize that animals too can suffer, it is only logical to include them in our moral calculations. an egalitarian “principle of equal consideration of interests” (singer 1993, 21) tells us that if animals have welfare-interests, then there is no excuse not to take those interests into account when deciding what to do. “if a being suffers,” he says, “there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration. no 33 diehm matter what the nature of the being, the principle of equality requires that its suffering be counted equally with the like suffering […] of any other being” (singer 1990, 8). in keeping with the stress that utilitarians typically place on the need for moral agents to weigh alternatives, singer adds to this broad moral outline a number of premises relevant to an analysis of animal agriculture, including that humans do not need to eat animals to be healthy, that animals often suffer significantly when we do, and that becoming a vegetarian helps to disconnect us from the vast agricultural system that all too often leads back to the factory farm. taking these factors into account, singer argues that we ought to cease supporting animal agribusinesses with our dietary choices. he argues, that is, that a commitment to reducing suffering obliges us to abandon the heavily meat-based diets that, in the modern industrial context, give every indication of bringing us much closer to maximizing pain than to minimizing it.3 as one might expect, among rolston’s leading criticisms of this approach to animal ethics is that it applies the principle of minimizing pain too indiscriminately, and that those who embrace it are therefore likely to object not only to the pain endured by domesticated and agricultural animals, but also to that undergone by animals in the wild. in environmental ethics, for example, he says that “if all suffering introduces rights or welfare claims when moral agents come on the scene, a really consistent animal ethics will dislike predation and seek to eliminate it,” and to illustrate this point he cites steve sapontzis, who claims that “[w]here we can prevent predation without occasioning as much or more suffering than we would prevent, we are obligated to do so” (in rolston 1988, 56; sapontzis 1984, 36). similarly, in a new environmental ethics rolston questions animal activists who condemn hunting on the grounds that it is neither necessary nor humane, asserting that environmentalists will rightly worry that “these activists, though they may love animals, also hate real nature, the wild, raw world in which these animals live” (rolston 2012, 69). remarks like these underscore the connections rolston regularly draws between a lack of appreciation for natural predation, an inclination to interfere in the fates of wild animals, and the sort of philosophical emphasis on minimizing pain that animates singer’s work. with these connections in place, it is understandable that he would conclude that the “obligation to universal benevolence is too strong” because it “fails to incorporate any moral tolerance of the processes of wild nature” (rolston 1988, 54).4 but while there is no doubt that rolston is sharply critical of animal ethicists who over-emphasize, and consequently over-extend, the moral ideal of minimizing suffering, it is not the case that he censures all efforts to safeguard the welfare of animals in the wild. in fact, he provides several notable examples in which he does just the opposite. in a new environmental ethics, for instance, he cites the case of a grizzly bear that had been struck and mortally wounded by a truck in glacier national park. fearing that the bear was suffering excessively, park officials elected to mercy-kill it, a decision that rolston praises on the grounds that “encounter with a truck (an artifact) is no part of the forces of natural selection that have operated historically on bears.” “where humans cause the pain,” he explains, “they are under obligation to minimize it” (rolston 2012, 75). elsewhere he references a case in which unnaturally cruel 34 bighorn sheep in colorado had contracted lungworm and were subsequently dying of pneumonia. most people believed that the lungworm species in question had come into the area by way of domesticated sheep; others held that it was a native species, but that the bighorns had become more susceptible to it because their winter range had been compromised by human development (rolston 1988, 53–4; rolston 2012, 72, 74–5). but since by all accounts the driving force behind the bighorns’ plight was human interference rather than natural selection, rolston commends the actions of wildlife veterinarians to provide them with medical treatment. “letting the lungworm run its course really was not letting nature take its course,” he observes, and thus “both in concern for the species and in concern for suffering individuals, treatment was required” (rolston 2012, 74–5). in addition to reinforcing several themes we have already touched upon, what makes these examples especially noteworthy here is that they neither marginalize nor downplay concerns about reducing unnecessary animal suffering. quite the opposite, they bring such concerns to the fore, thereby providing us with relatively forceful expressions of the idea encapsulated in rolston’s hedonist principle, namely that there is a moral obligation to minimize pain that has lost its ecological or evolutionary functionality. indeed, these commentaries depict the hedonist principle as obligatory rather than supererogatory, and promote its consistent application even in circumstances involving wild animals in natural settings. of course, to point this out is not to suggest that rolston’s writing advocates reducing pain to the same extent that a really thoroughgoing animal welfarism arguably would. it is, rather, to indicate that his position is capable of placing more stress on minimizing human-inflicted animal suffering than his discussions of animal agriculture tend to do – enough stress, in fact, that one might very well surmise that a fairly sharp critique of animal agriculture is not only possible within the confines of his eco-philosophy, but actually necessitated by it. unnaturally kind, unnaturally cruel still, it is not true that one could simply transfer rolston’s prescriptions for the bighorns or the grizzly bear to animals in agriculture, the reason being that the suffering in the former cases was not just human-caused, but also “unnatural.” now, this brings us to one of the more complicated dimensions of rolston’s views on animals and ethics – his reliance on conceptions of what is or is not natural – the full consideration of which falls outside the scope of this essay.5 for present purposes, however, it suffices to say that rolston believes that animal suffering can be unnatural in at least two ways: either by exceeding ecological norms, or by occurring for ecologically atypical reasons, and it is clear from the remarks above that what he finds morally objectionable in the examples cited is not that animals were experiencing pain in unusual amounts, but that their pain was caused by forces foreign to their ecological niches. the suffering of agricultural animals, by contrast, remains “quasi-ecosystemic” (rolston 1988, 80), meaning that although it is no longer situated in an evolutionary context, it does occur for a reason commonplace in wild nature: the predation of one organism upon another. rolston 35 diehm sees an important difference, then, between the suffering of animals in agriculture and that of bears hit by trucks or bighorns plagued by introduced parasites, a difference that leads him to judge that the suffering of wild animals in such circumstances is less justified than that of domesticated cows and chickens slaughtered for food. against thinkers like singer, therefore, who place little moral stock in such considerations, rolston finds that because the human consumption of agricultural animals represents an ecologically ordinary way in which organisms interact, and is in that regard “natural,” our obligation to minimize the pain that it causes is significantly weakened, if indeed we have any obligation of this sort at all. not surprisingly, in opening up the question of what constitutes a natural human use of animals, rolston’s thinking on this issue has sparked much dialogue and debate, and commentators have found his line of reasoning problematic for a number of reasons. prominent among these is that, as thinkers like victoria davion (2007), john mizzoni (2002), and peter wenz (1989) have all pointed out, human dietary practices have pronounced socio-cultural components, yet if our consumption of animal foods is as much a cultural as it is a biological or ecological phenomenon, then it may be that rolston’s justification for the suffering it causes fails on its own terms. more immediately pertinent to the topic of this essay, though, is that rolston’s contention that eating animals is natural often seems to be the result of looking narrowly at the act of eating itself, rather than at the means by which animal products are made available for human consumption.6 that is, rolston usually focuses more on the fact that humans eat animals than on how we make them available to be eaten, and this not only leads him to write as if establishing the naturalness of eating animals settles the matter of how one justifies their suffering in agriculture, but also causes him to miss what is arguably the most important dimension of this issue in the eyes of many critics of factory farming – critics who, as a general rule, focus less on the practice of consuming animals than on the increasingly industrialized means employed to mass-produce the billions of animals actually consumed. if we concentrate on how agricultural animals are produced, however, and not just how they are used, what we find is that there are a number of key differences between natural predation and the eating of factory-farmed agricultural animals that, if taken seriously, would require us to temper rolston’s moral ruling in this case rather substantially. perhaps the most notable of these is that, while there is a plausible sense in which the use of animals in agriculture parallels predation, there is no doubt that the specific sorts of interactions between humans and otherthan-human animals that occur in factory farming bear little resemblance to the trophic interactions between predators and prey in the wild.7 hence, even if the consumption of factoryfarmed animals is, in some extremely broad sense, “natural,” the process by which it occurs is, to borrow rolston’s phrasing, decidedly culturally novel. closely connected to this is the further issue that, in contradistinction to what occurs in spontaneous nature, high-volume animal agri-businesses create a number of unique problems for, and usher in an array of maladaptive strategies among, the animals that are subjected to them. these problems, which are well-documented in the literature on factory farming and reviewed in both singer’s animal liberation and rolston’s a new environmental ethics, stem from the fact unnaturally cruel 36 that the husbandry and manufacturing techniques of factory farms elevate animals’ levels of stress, decrease their resistance to disease, and increase their aggressive and self-destructive behaviors. all of this, in turn, prompts farm and facility operators to try to mitigate the negative impacts of such things through a variety of preventative measures, including “de-beaking” chickens, docking the tails of pigs, and greatly increasing the use of antibiotics – practices that are, without question, artificial solutions to equally artificial problems.8 finally, we might consider that factory farming, unlike predation in the wild, involves domesticated agricultural animals that are deliberately bred for dependence on humans, something that many would argue generates duties to them beyond those that we might have to animals in the wild. indeed, that we have heightened obligations to domesticated animals is an idea with which even rolston apparently concurs: in the essay “living on earth,” for instance, he replies with a simple “amen” to palmer’s claim that the domestication of animals “can be seen as a process such that, in creating relationships that close down domestic animals’ abilities to live independent lives, creates special human responsibilities to provide for them” (rolston 2007, 241; palmer 2007, 199). taken in conjunction with the various dimensions of rolston’s philosophy that we have been examining, the conclusion towards which these reflections are leading is not terribly difficult to see. what we have said to this point does not go so far as to support the more sweeping claim that eating animals is absolutely morally prohibited because it is absolutely unnatural; it indicates, rather, that despite whatever parallels rolston might want to draw between them, what goes on in factory farming is dissimilar enough from predation in the wild that our obligation to eliminate the suffering it causes would have to be far greater than he ever really admits, and for reasons that are essentially his own. expressed in terms closer to rolston’s, we could just say that our commentary thus far shows that even if wild animals ought only to be spared unnatural suffering, we still have every reason to posit that domesticated agricultural animals ought to be spared highly artificial forms of suffering that only very loosely conform to some presumably natural or ecological pattern. while there may indeed be no need for us to be “unnaturally kind” to wild animals, neither ought we to be unnaturally cruel to domesticated ones, and nowhere is such cruelty more apparent than in factory farming. eating in place as is often the case in philosophical treatments of morally complex issues, we have had to follow a somewhat circuitous path to arrive at the conclusion just stated. but given that this conclusion has been drawn in large part from resources in rolston’s own writings, one might wonder why he himself never formally drew it, particularly after taking such explicit care in a new environmental ethics to chronicle what happens down on the modern factory farm. to be sure, this is not meant to imply that rolston has ever claimed that factory farming is morally laudable or humane, and in fact he says quite frankly in at least one place that he believes it is not (rolston 2007, 240). as we bring our analysis to a close, though, it may be worthwhile to 37 diehm consider why he appears not to have integrated this insight more fully into his thinking about animals and ethics, despite the fact that his writings seem to contain most of the elements necessary to do so. although this query is admittedly somewhat speculative, there are several things that we might initially suggest in response to it. there is, for example, rolston’s own candid admission that his view of factory farming may have been skewed by his experiences with agricultural animals growing up in rural west virginia (rolston 2007, 240). we might also point to his apparent acceptance of the idea that, since domesticated agricultural animals are bred and raised for human consumption, we are somehow justified in compromising their individual welfare when using them to this end.9 additionally, there is the marked preference that he displays for wild animals, and his corresponding tendency to view domesticated animals as inferior or “degraded.”10 as the line of argument taken in this essay already indicates, however, it seems likely that more important than any of the explanations just offered is that rolston’s work has always sought to affirm the value of both natural processes and our human participation in them, and he clearly views eating meat as a primary way in which we do both: to eat animals is, in rolston’s estimation, at one and the same time to embrace the role of predation in nature, and to accept our own place in the ecological order that includes it. but while rolston is absolutely right to stress the need to affirm our human belonging to nature, including our places in the trophic webs that are such a vital part of the way in which the world works, the more one studies this particular issue the less clear it becomes why the eating of domesticated animals that have been born and raised under conditions of confinement agriculture would be regarded as a way of doing so. of course, one need not reject all meat-eating in order to condemn factory farming. but by the same token, one surely need not accept all meat-eating in order to accept one’s standing in a world in which suffering plays its part. in fact, it would seem more accurate to say that to embrace the ecological realities in which we are always implicated would be, at the same time, to reject any ecologically naïve vision of ourselves as indiscriminate consumers of sentient beings, or a morally empty and dominionistic commodification of some of our closest biological kin. indeed, surveying rolston’s many invaluable contributions to the field of environmental ethics, it could easily be argued that, on the whole, his works not only convey these very messages quite powerfully, but that they are among the leading intellectual and cultural forces that have helped us to understand their true significance. one can only hope, therefore, that his reply to our expression of them would be another “amen.” notes 1. us slaughter statistics for the year 2011 appeared only days before this essay was submitted for publication, and are consistent with the data for 2010. they can be found on-line at the usda web addresses provided for the 2010 figures. unnaturally cruel 38 2. see, e.g., rolston 1988, 58; rolston 2012, 73. 3. chapters 3 and 4 of singer 1990 – titled “down on the factory farm” and “becoming a vegetarian,” respectively – cover these points in detail. 4. rolston’s ecologically-oriented attitude towards predation and the suffering it causes does diverge from the attitudes of some animal ethicists, yet we should make clear that the latter are not wholly ecologically un-informed in the way that rolston’s comments sometimes seem to suggest. jennifer everett, for example, says that it is reasonable to believe that there are “indirect, instrumental benefits of predation to aggregate animal welfare,” and hence the trophic asymmetries we have been discussing “will be valued by animal welfarists because they conduce ultimately, albeit indirectly and via complex causal chains, to the well-being of individual animals” (rolston 2001, 48). steve sapontzis, too, is unambiguous in his claim that interference with predation often would produce more suffering than predation itself, and he argues that because of this animal activists would do more good by concentrating on “alleviating the unjustified suffering humans cause animals than by attempting to prevent predation among animals” (sapontzis 1987, 247). in his essay “sentientism,” gary varner notes this aspect of sapontzis’s argument, and suggests that it points to something of a reconciliation between animal ethicists and other environmental philosophers. “to the extent that it is factually correct,” says varner, “that prey species ‘need’ their predators to stabilize the ecosystem on which they depend, even predator reintroduction can look good from a sentientist perspective” (varner 2003, 200). 5. for more extensive discussions of rolston’s conception of “natural” human uses of animals, see: rolston 1989; palmer, 2007. 6. this focus is evident in many of rolston’s remarks, ranging from his assertion in the early essay “treating animals naturally?” that humans are “naturally omnivores” (ralson 1989, 134), to his claim in a new environmental ethics that “[m]eat eating in culture exploits animals but this also fits into the natural givens” (rolston 2012, 77). marti kheel (2008), as well as paul veatch moriarity and mark woods (1997), has also noted this feature of rolston’s arguments in favor of eating animals. 7. that is, while factory farming may function to serve some human ends comparable to the ends served by the actions of predatory animals, it diverges quite sharply from the behaviors in which other-than-human animals engage in order to do so. 8. these problems and practices are discussed in rolston 2012, 77–81, and more extensively in singer 1990, chapters 3 and 4. 39 diehm 9. as evidence of this, we might cite rolston’s claim that a “main problem with that concern about causing domesticated food animals pain is that all these food animals would cease to exist if they did not live to be eaten” (rolston 2007, 241). see also: rolston 1988, 78. 10. this tendency can be seen in much of rolston’s writing about domesticated animals, though the specific reference here is to rolston 2007, 240. palmer claims that since rolston is “[p]rimarily interested in the context of the wild, concern for the context of domestication is slight and engagement with it minimal (and there is a persistent sense that the domesticated and rural, tainted by human contact, are inferior contexts to the wild, as are the animals within them” (rolston 2007, 193). works cited davion, victoria. 2007. “caring for nature: an ecofeminist’s view of rolston on eating, hunting, and genetics.” in nature, value, duty: life on earth with holmes rolston, iii, ed. christopher j. preston and wayne ouderkirk, 167–81. dordrecht: springer. everett, jennifer. 2001. “environmental ethics, animal welfarism, and the problem of predation: a bambi lover’s respect for nature.” ethics and the environment 6.1: 42– 67. kheel, marti. 2008. nature ethics: an ecofeminist perspective. lanham: rowman and littlefield. mizzoni, john. 2002. “against rolston's defense of eating animals: reckoning with the nutritional factor in the argument for vegetarianism.” international journal of applied philosophy 16.1: 125–131. moriarity, paul veatch and mark woods. 1997. “hunting ≠ predation.” environmental ethics 18.4: 391–404. palmer, clare. 2007. “rethinking animal ethics in appropriate context: how rolston’s work can help.” in nature, value, duty: life on earth with holmes rolston, iii, eds. christopher j. preston and wayne ouderkirk, 183–201. dordrecht: springer. rolston, holmes, iii. 1988. environmental ethics: values in and duties to the natural world. philadelphia: temple university press. unnaturally cruel 40 rolston, holmes, iii. 1989. “treating animals naturally?” between the species 5.3: 131–7. rolston, holmes, iii. 2007. “living on earth: dialogue and dialectic with my critics.” in nature, value, duty: life on earth with holmes rolston, iii, eds. christopher j. preston and wayne ouderkirk, 237–68. dordrecht: springer. rolston, holmes, iii. 2012. a new environmental ethics: the next millennium for life on earth. new york: routledge. sapontzis, steve. 1984. “predation.” ethics and animals 5.2: 27–38. sapontzis, steve. 1987. morals, reason, and animals. philadelphia: temple university press. singer, peter. 1990. animal liberation. new york: harper collins. singer, peter. 1993. practical ethics. cambridge: cambridge university press. us department of agriculture (usda). economic research service. 2009. the transformation of u.s. livestock agriculture: scale, efficiency, and risks, economic information bulletin no. 43. report prepared by james macdonald and william d. mcbride. us department of agriculture (usda). national agricultural statistics service. 2011a. livestock slaughter: 2010 summary. available on-line at “http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/mannusda/viewdocumentinfo.do?documentid=1096” us department of agriculture (usda). national agricultural statistics service. 2011b. poultry slaughter: 2010 summary. available on-line at “http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/mannusda/viewdocumentinfo.do?documentid=1131” varner, gary. 2003. sentientism. in a companion to environmental philosophy, ed. dale jamieson, 192–203. malden: blackwell publishing. wenz, peter. 1989. “treating animals naturally.” between the species 5.1: 1–10. [expositions 5.2 (2011) 126-141] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 donner, fred m. muhammad and the believers: at the origins of islam. cambridge, massachusetts and london: the belknap press of harvard university press, 2010. 280 pp, hb $25.95, isbn: 978–0–674–05097–6. the field of early islamic history has been dominated – some would say held back – by contentious debates about authenticity, reliability and origins: the authenticity of the massive number of oral traditions attributed to the prophet (called ḥadīth), the reliability of relatively late islamic sources for providing us information about the seventh century, and the precise nature of islamic origins – what was muḥammad “really” up to? in the late 1970s, michael cook and patricia crone’s brilliantly provocative hagarism 1 rejected tout court the islamic tradition’s account of its own origins and attempted to write a history of early islam based on non-islamic sources. they sought to step outside the tradition and see what resulted when the religious movement started by muḥammad was viewed as others saw it. the upshot was a flight of scholarly fancy that suggested islam had its origins as a jewish messianic movement, with early muslims (or “hagarenes,” as cook and crone called them, following the naming practices of early medieval christian sources) eventually breaking with judaism and striking out in a separate direction, in due course giving us what we call “islam” today. apart from internet enthusiasts and religiously-motivated polemicists, nobody today, not even cook and crone themselves, believes that the picture of early islam put forth in hagarism is an accurate one. but the legacy of hagarism has endured, for in one thin little volume, cook and crone put their fingers on a nagging problem in an electric way. it was a problem that islamicists had been aware of for some time: the sources we rely upon to narrate about islamic origins are late – sometimes written centuries after the events they claim to describe, they contradict one another, and they show signs of sectarian coloring and religiously-motivated redaction and omission. if the same stringent and skeptical standards as have been applied to early christian history were applied to the sources of early islamic history, much of the traditional account of islamic origins would be turned to sawdust. john wansbrough, an american scholar who taught crone when she was an undergraduate at soas, attempted to apply the techniques of biblical and literary criticism to the early islamic tradition, but the recondite opacity and (apparently intentionally) delphic nature of his work has bequeathed it the status of being cited much more often than it is actually understood.. 2 as a book making a specific argument, hagarism was ultimately a failure, 3 but in its stimulus of further research, writing, debate, and especially by challenging islamicists to look beyond the confines of arabic sources to the rich literatures of the middle east that existed before, during, and after the rise of islam, hagarism was one of those rare books that changed a field. a skeptical approach to the historical reliability of the islamic tradition went back well before wansbrough, cook and crone. most notable among their predecessors were joseph schacht (d. 1969), a towering figure in the history and study of islamic law; and before schacht, to ignaz goldziher (d. 1921), a man who in many way stands as the godfather of modern islamic studies 127 tannous in the west. 4 both goldziher and schacht showed that many of the oral traditions which had been attributed to muḥammad and regarded with canonical authority by muslims were actually late fabrications which reflected the cultural and political situation in the middle east long after the prophet had died. cook and crone merely took the skepticism that schacht and goldziher had applied to oral traditions in islamic sources, especially legal sources, and directed it towards history; schacht and goldziher laid the egg that cook, and especially crone, hatched. 5 fred donner teaches in the department of near eastern languages and civilizations at the university of chicago and is one of the leading historians of the early islamic period in the english-speaking world. donner made his name with his first book, the early islamic conquests, 6 a study which, though now-dated, is still the standard work on this topic, thirty years after its publication. if the field of early islamic history can be roughly laid out into opposing camps of revisionists (who view our arabic source material’s historical reliability with distrust on account of its manifold difficulties), and traditionalists or anti-revisionists (who take a more positive view of these sources’ reliability), donner would fall in with the anti-revisionists. indeed, he might possibly be their doyen. donner has expended a good deal of energy articulating an approach to early islamic history which takes a via media between the stark burndown-the-house skepticism of crone and an uncritical embrace of the traditional narrative. 7 if you want to think critically about islamic origins, acknowledge the problems that are there in the sources, and yet still be able to use those sources to say something, donner is the historian for you. and, in the generation of english-speaking scholars born after the second world war, donner and crone stand out as antitypes representing two contrasting and conflicting approaches and attitudes towards the early islamic tradition and its usefulness for historical reconstruction. it is in this scholarly context of debates about the reliability of the early islamic tradition that donner’s most recent book, muhammad and the believers: at the origins of islam (hereafter mb), should be read. mb has no footnotes, only a “notes and guide to further reading” at its end, and is written in an easy-going and highly-accessible style. donner’s audience is the interested non-specialist and over the course of 224 pages, donner re-tells the story of early islam, into the early eighth century, mixing standard views of what took place with his own revisionist interventions into the traditional narrative. 8 many parts of the book – especially donner’s descriptions of the early islamic conquests, one of his areas of expertise – are the clearest, easiest-to-understand accounts i know of for different aspects of early islamic history. donner starts mb with a preface in which he announces his intention in writing such a book: western scholars have traditionally tried to explain the origins and rise of islam through reference to a variety of factors – economic, sociological, nationalist – none of them religious. what sets donner’s approach apart, however, is that early islam was a religious phenomenon and that the actors who made early islamic history were driven by religious motivations: “it is my conviction that islam began as a religious movement – not as a social, economic, or ‘national’ one; in particular, it embodied an intense concern for attaining personal salvation through righteous behavior. the early believers were concerned with social and political issues but only insofar as they related to concepts of piety and proper behavior needed to ensure salvation” (xii). muhammad and the believers 128 this conviction that religion, and not something else, lies at the heart of early islamic history is a constant factor throughout mb. at one level, the work can be seen as an act of systematic redescription: at every point, even where other explanations of behavior seem to be equally if not more plausible, donner opts to read things as having been motivated by religious and pious factors. like many books and college courses about the origins of islam, we are given in the first chapter a discussion of the political and cultural situation of the middle east and arabia just before the start of the prophet’s mission. it is a familiar cast of characters – there are dyophysites and monophysites, byzantines and sasanians, and an arabia sandwiched between two great powers and organized along tribal lines. it is in donner’s second chapter, “muhammad and the believers’ movement,” that his own unique take on early islam becomes increasingly apparent. there is a skillful summary of the islamic tradition’s received understanding of the life and career of the prophet, followed by a very frank discussion of the problems that attach to such an account (e.g., “the vast ocean of traditional accounts from which the preceding brief sketch of muhammad’s life is distilled contains so many contradictions and so much dubious storytelling that many historians have become reluctant to accept any of it at face value” (51)). but donner is not willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater: there are problems with the islamic sources, but amidst all the chaff, there is some wheat which, he suggests, goes back quite early and can be used in historical reconstruction. near-contemporary non-islamic sources provide comforting confirmation of the most rudimentary elements of the muslim story – that muhammad in fact existed and led a movement – but for donner, the most important source for history is the most important religious source as well: the quran. views that even the quran has a late(r) origin, well after the death of the prophet, are rejected and it is upon the rock of islam’s scripture that donner constructs his profile of what the earliest beliefs of muhammad and his religious movement were: here is the key lying behind all other moves donner makes in the book. adhering closely to the quran, the story donner wants to tell is of an islam which, initially, was not self-consciously “islam” at all. it was, rather, an ecumenical, monotheistic, religious reform movement which had an emphasis on piety and a strong belief in an imminent last day. it was only decades after the prophet’s death that something corresponding more closely to what we call “islam” today began to peak its face out from behind the covers of history as the islamic tradition, as it attempted to separate itself out from other middle eastern religious groups. if muhammad and his followers did not see themselves as “muslims” in our sense of the word, what exactly were they? they would have identified themselves as “believers,” not “muslims,” donner contends: in the quran itself, the word “muslim” occurs less than seventy five times, while “believer” shows up in nearly a thousand places. monotheism was the key and foundational belief in muhammad’s movement: “above all else, believers were enjoined to recognize the oneness of god. […] the qur’an tirelessly preaches the message of strict monotheism, exhorting its hearers to be ever mindful of god and obedient to his will” (58). the 129 tannous quran gives us other insights as well into the worldview of these earliest believers: they believed in prophets and prophecy, they believed in written revelation from god, they believed in angels, too. but there was more than a set of doctrines or ideas that animated this movement – there was also a demand for particular kinds of behavior: believers had to live a righteous life; they were expected to be humble, to help the poor, be diligent in prayer, to fast during ramadan, to make pilgrimage. donner also cites quranic injunctions to dress in modest ways and abstain from eating pork or drinking alcohol, among other things, as evidence to suggest that believers adhered to a strict code of personal morality which put them at tension with the iniquity they saw everywhere around them: “the believers,” as he puts it, “were concerned with what they saw as the rampant sinfulness of the world around them and wished to live by a higher standard in their own behavior” (66). there was a certain moderation to the rigorous piety of the early believers, however: although they held to high moral standards, they were also careful to avoid the worlddenying ascetic withdrawal that characterized prominent strains of late antique near eastern christianity. believers were very much meant to be in the world. one of the most important features of the early believers’ movement was that it was “ecumenical,” according to donner. believers may have seen themselves as different from the sinful people around them – polytheists, christians, or jews – but, donner claims, a jew or a christian who had the correct standard of behavior could be part of the movement because they, too, were monotheists. “the reason for this ‘confessionally open’ or ecumenical quality was simply that the basic ideas of the believers and their insistence on observance of strict piety were in no way antithetical to the beliefs and practices of some christians and jews” (69). one could be a believer and be a christian and one could be a christian, yet not a believer. one could be a jew and a believer and, in the same way, one could be a jew and yet not a believer. and, too, one could be a believer, yet not a christian or a jew. the badge of belonging was belief in one god and adherence to a strict standard of morality. and at this very early stage, the label “muslim” referred to only a subset of the believers’ movement. a “muslim” was a “quranic monotheist” who came from neither a jewish nor a christian background. it was only subsequently that the word would evolve to refer to a person who belonged to a religion distinct from christianity or judaism. donner picks out several other characteristics of the early believers’ movement: muhammad was its leader and seen as a divinely-inspired prophet; it was also a strongly apocalyptic movement, with believers apparently thinking that the end was near. this intense sense of apocalypticism and an imminent last judgment was fundamental in the believers’ movement’s ability to mobilize its adherents to action: “convinced that the world around them was mired in sin and corruption, they felt and urgent need to ensure their own salvation by living in strict accordance with the revealed law, as the judgment could dawn at any moment” (79). if we accept, donner points out, the traditional division of quranic verses into meccan and medinan, it becomes evident that most of the strongly apocalyptic passages in the quran are to be found in the meccan period. this leads him to suggest that “by establishing their community in medina, muhammad and the believers 130 [the early believers] were ushering in the beginning of a new era of righteousness, and hence that they were actually witnessing the first events of the end itself” (81). a final characteristic of the believers’ movement was militancy: believers were expected to do more than cultivate virtue and pious behavior in their own lives. they were to be actively promoting god’s law in the world around them, even through force: “this sounds like a program aimed at establishing ‘god’s kingdom on earth,’ that is, a political order (or at least a society) informed by the pious precepts enjoined in the qur’an and one that should supplant the sinful political order of the byzantines and the sasanians” (85). once donner has outlined the lineaments of the believers’ worldview, the rest of mb is spent tracing the community of believers as they gradually turn into muslims. telling the story of this transformation takes donner through the first decades of what is traditionally seen as “islamic” history – conquests, disputes over succession, civil wars – but his telling takes something of a twist: he is careful to speak of the actors as “believers,” not “muslims,” and at every turn, he explains their actions with reference to the profile of the “believers’ movement” he has laid out earlier in the book. viewing the earliest muslims as belonging to a “believers’ movement” has, for donner, some useful consequences. it can, he suggests, explain how muhammad’s followers managed to conquer large amounts of territory very rapidly and do so with apparently very little violence. on donner’s view, this is because the believers themselves came as monotheists and were encountering monotheistic populations, asking them only to pay taxes, believe in one god, and adhere to pious standards of behavior that they themselves would have also held up as ideals. what is more, as an ecumenical phenomenon, the believers’ movement was open to be joined by christians and jews in the conquered populations. speaking of these early believers as “muslims” and calling their movement “islam” before the late seventh or early eighth century would actually be, donner contends, “historically inaccurate” (195). it was not until this late period that a subtle redefinition of terms began to take place and a narrowing of the believers’ movement to exclude jews and christians happened. donner places this restriction and redefinition during the reign of ‘abd al-malik (685–705); it was during ‘abd al-malik’s rule that the second civil war came to an end and, after more than a decade of brutal fighting within the community of believers, the leader of the community was able to at last return his focus to pursuing the original goals and ideals of the believers’ movement. so, for example, ‘abd al-malik began to again send out military expeditions whose aim was to conquer territory and expand the amount of territory under the authority of god’s law. but, donner suggests, in the wake of years of civil war in the believers’ community, merely going back to the basics of the believers’ movement was not enough for ‘abd al-malik: he needed to find a way to reunite, reenergize, and refocus the fractured community and also prop up the legitimacy of his rule and that of his family, the umayyads. it was this need that led ‘abd al-malik to initiate a series of measures and shifts in emphasis that would lead to the emergence of islam. “believer” was redefined to make it synonymous with “muslim” and exclude christians and jews in a way that it had not previously done; there was a concomitant increase in emphasis for believers/muslims on the importance of muhammad and the quran in their 131 tannous worldview, evidenced very clearly, for instance, in a redesign of coinage that witnessed the jettisoning of byzantine and sasanian imagery, which believers/muslims had previously used, and its replacement by slogans from the quran which were often anti-trinitarian in their implication; also part of this policy of emphasizing the quran, donner suggests, was ‘abd almalik’s taking of a title with quranic resonance, khalīfat allāh (“deputy of god”), to refer to himself. there were other movements which indicated that the circle of inclusion in the believers’ movement was being drawn more closely: certain distinctive christian doctrines, especially the trinity, were rejected, most conspicuously in the construction of the dome of the rock, which prominently featured anti-trinitarian passages from the quran. practices such as prayer, fasting, and the pilgrimage, which had their origin in the life of muhammad, were elaborated and fixed in this period, and other practices, such as friday prayer, may have even had their origin in this time. the umayyads also encouraged the composition and elaboration of a distinctively islamic salvation history which set up for the community a story of its own origins which emphasized its muslim character, not its believer one; conquest narratives similarly told their stories from the perspective of muslims, not believers. where there had once been a monotheistic reform movement that was open to anyone who believed in one god and was committed to righteous behavior, there was now a new religion, islam, which was a rival and competitor to christianity and judaism. “there is no historical task,” albert schweitzer wrote, “which so reveals a man’s true self as the writing of a life of jesus.” 9 perhaps something similar might be said of the life of muhammad. donner’s endgame in writing a work such as mb is not difficult to divine: apart making moves in the context of specialized debates carried out among islamicists, it is evident that his hope is to help create and legitimate a space for an inclusive, tolerant islam in today’s world by finding such an islam in the seventh century, when it all began. if the earliest islam was ecumenical and open to anyone who believed in one god and supported the idea of pious and good behavior – if it bore an uncanny resemblance in certain respects to a contemporary mainline protestant church – then such a discovery would be an enormous boon to liberals in the west and would make today’s muslim reformers the true salafis, for they, not wahhabis or the muslim brotherhood, would be seeking to return the islamic community to its true beginnings. nevertheless, good politics and good history are not always easy bedfellows, and however laudable donner’s goal might be, mb unfortunately suffers from a number of serious defects. the first and perhaps most serious problem is the lack of evidence for many of the claims that donner makes; 10 the brittleness and shallowness of the evidentiary basis of much of donner’s picture is obscured to the non-specialist by the text’s lack of footnotes, but at times it is even apparent from a plain reading of mb. for instance, a major assertion – that the words “believer” and “muslim” were redefined under ‘abd al-malik to exclude jews and christians (203–204) – is backed up by only passing references to the naming practices of unspecified non-arabic sources and by what is essentially a discussion of the logic behind the use of the words “believers” (mu’uminun), “emigrants” (muhajirun) and “muslim” without clear reference to any particular texts, apart from the quran itself. “in the present state of our knowledge,” donner muhammad and the believers 132 writes, “we can only speculate about why this shift in the identity of the believers occurred” (204). in other words, a major claim is made, little in the way of evidence is offered to support it, and then it is followed by self-confessed speculation as to why the shift in self-identification – never proven in the first place – actually occurred. 11 such guess work is not an isolated incident, either: mb is populated by speculative “may haves” 12 which have little, if any, supporting evidence and which give the reader little confidence in the verisimilitude of the picture donner attempts to paint. in other cases, claims donner makes seem to be actually contradicted by what evidence we do possess: islam, according to donner, is supposed to have emerged from the believers’ movement in the late seventh and early eighth century and it was at this point that the movement began to exclude christians and evince an attitude that was more hostile towards christian doctrines. but the maronite chronicle, a syriac document dating from the 660s, reports that already by the year 660, the caliph mu῾āwiya attempted to issue a coinage on which the christian cross had been removed, an omission which meant that people refused to use them. 13 could it have been the case that early islam was not more explicit in its outward manifestations of sectarian identity because as a small, fragile minority beginning rule over a much, much larger majority, it had to be mindful of how overtly triumphalist and provocative sectarian acts – such as de-christianizing coins – might have been received by the mass of its non-muslim population? the main piece of evidence driving mb is donner’s close reading of the quran and the image of a believers’ movement which he teases out of it. but patricia crone has engaged in a similar close reading of the quran of her own – undertaken, like donner’s, without reference to other primary sources. in crone’s instance, she used her close reading to suggest that the quran itself was actually composed, at least in part, outside the arabian peninsula, 14 a view which donner would no doubt be unsympathetic towards. 15 close readings of the quran, therefore, can produce quite radically divergent results. what is more, donner’s close reading suffers from a problem of context: there is absolutely none whatsoever for any of the verses he picks out as illustrative of the early community’s beliefs, and yet the verses of the quran are supposed to have been revealed to muhammad in a number of different contexts over the course of decades and the quran can evince different attitudes towards the same subject. 16 what is more, the muslim tradition has recognized tensions between verses in the quran and sought to deal with these by specifying that some verses abrogate, or cancel out, others. “one should not,” one important manual of quranic study states, “interpret the book of god until after one knows what is abrogating and abrogated from it.” 17 a text without a context, the old saying goes, is a pretext and this is a clear and present danger throughout donner’s use of the quran in mb. apart from issues of (missing) context, what is even more fundamentally problematic with donner’s reading of the quran is his reliance on moving from an “ought” to an “is” in his argumentation: he takes a normative document and uses its prescriptions and proscriptions to make statements about real peoples’ actual beliefs and behaviors. but it is not clear just how many people actually believed and acted on the things which the quran made pronouncements 133 tannous about: for all we know, the community of believers who form the basis of almost all of mb could have been only a handful of people, or perhaps only muhammad himself. 18 donner’s argument about this shadowy, undefined (and undefinable) community becomes even more problematic when he begins introducing into it ideological divisions in order to deal with passages that do not sit well with his vision of the nature of the believers’ movement; these divisions serve the function of epicycles intended to preserve the integrity of his theory. the believers’ movement which donner envisions was initially supposed to have been ecumenical and open to both christians and jews. one immediate problem with such a view is that the quran contains verses which criticize the doctrine of the trinity – precisely those verses which were placed prominently on the dome of the rock and which donner even reproduces in an appendix to mb. such verses suggest that, from a very early period, the “believers’ movement” cannot have been nearly as ecumenical as donner holds it to have been. the importance of such sectarian verses is initially downplayed in mb, 19 but later on, we find out that “for those believers who were inclined to be sticklers on the question of god’s oneness, the christian doctrine of the trinity must have always been a problem” (213). 20 so, it seems, there were some believers who were open to christians joining the movement and there were others who were not; there was, apparently, an anti-ecumenical wing of the believers’ movement which somehow managed to get its views represented in the text of the quran. but there is no evidence to support any of this apart from realities created by donner’s exegesis of the quran. and again, with no way of knowing how many believers there actually were, it is impossible to get a sense of what any of mb’s references to the makeup of their community mean precisely: we have some sort of tension or schism created solely by means of exegetical construct. 21 this problem becomes even more acute when we look to the traditional sources to try to get an idea of how many people there may have been in the community of believers. when muhammad and his community emigrated to medina in 622, the community would not have numbered more than one hundred persons; when he returned to mecca eight years later, in 630, to conquer it, by contrast, he led an army of some 10,000 men. 22 most of the new believers entered the community closer to 630 than they did to 622; as it became clear that muhammad had gained hegemony in western arabia, entire tribes started converting, in groups, to islam. indeed, the year 630 is known in the islamic tradition as the “year of the delegations” for all the conversions of tribes which took place then. if these sources are to be trusted in any way, it is hard to see how donner’s idealized community of rigorously pious believers is to map onto a large group of people who converted en masse. donner does acknowledge that most early believers were probably illiterate and knew actually very little about the content of the movement they had recently joined (77), but the implications of such an important admission are never fully drawn out in mb. indeed, the phenomena of mass conversion, illiteracy, and ignorance of much of the actual content of the quran and muhammad’s teaching can explain many of the same issues that donner’s more complex theory of an ecumenical, monotheist reform movement which silently drops off the historical radar screen and has its tracks effaced muhammad and the believers 134 by the subsequent tradition does, in a much simpler and elegant (though perhaps less politically useful) and better documented fashion. throughout mb, donner uses the term “monotheist” and “monotheism” as one of the bases for what the believers’ movement was all about: christians and jews could join in the movement because they, too, were monotheists. but it is not clear that muhammad himself was even a monotheist at the beginning of his prophetic mission: in the famous “incident of the satanic verses,” muhammad recited as part of the quran a piece of revelation which sanctioned intercessory prayer to three local meccan deities; that muhammad did not realize that such prayer was inappropriate until he was later corrected by the angel gabriel suggests that he believed in the existence of more than one god at that point in his career. the verses were abrogated from the quran and we only know about them from the islamic tradition itself, which would have hardly invented such an embarrassing story. 23 what this means for mb is that the believers’ movement could not have been monotheistic, at least initially, in the way that donner wants it to have been. but there is a deeper problem with donner’s very use of the categories “monotheist” and “monotheism:” they are early modern inventions and their use in a late antique context is anachronistic. “monotheism” was first used by the cambridge platonist henry more in 1660 and “monotheist” was first used by the platonist ralph cudworth in 1678. 24 there is no word for “monotheist” or “monotheism” in syriac 25 and the greek words for “monotheism” (μονοθεϊα), “monotheist” (μονοθεϊτης), and “monotheistic” (μονόθεος) do not occur at all in the standard greek-english dictionary of liddell, scott and jones. 26 “μονοθεϊα,” which today means “monotheism,” is attested one time in lampe’s patristic greek lexicon, where it is understood to mean “single divinity;” 27 searching for these three terms in the monumental thesaurus linguae graecae – which contains over 100 million words and seeks to be comprehensive in its coverage of greek authors from homer to the fall of constantinople – has μονοθεϊτης (“monotheist”) and μονοθεϊα (“monotheism”) occurring only once each, both times in the fourteenth-century historia romana of nikephoros gregoras. it is not clear that christians, jews and belivers/muslims in the seventh century would have proleptically viewed themselves as belonging to certain categories found in early modern typologies of religion and as a result felt a certain kinship with one another. the opposite is actually more often the case: the more similar people and groups are, the more acrimonious their small differences can become. 28 when donner refers to “monotheism,” he presumably has the arabic term ‘tawḥīd’ in mind, but the term does not occur in the quran, nor does the verb it derives from, waḥḥada (“to unify,” “to make one”). 29 rather than translate tawḥīd as “monotheism,” it would be more proper to translate it “unitarianism,” a rendering which brings out its contrast with another, related word, associated with christianity – tathlīth (“trinitarianism”) – and which makes the sectarian coloring and sharp edge of the term immediately more apparent. tawḥīd is related to the word for “one,” “wāḥid,” and tathlīth is related to the word for three, “thalātha.” one can see the contrast in these two in such verses of the quran as 5:73: “those who say that god is the third of three (thālith thalātha) have disbelieved; there is no god but the one god (ilāh wāḥid).” if one 135 tannous were to replace the words “monotheist” and “monotheism” with the words “unitarian” and “unitarianism” throughout mb, the ecumenism of the unitarian reform movement might not look so ecumenical and open to christians any more. it is clear that belief in one god is something which christians, jews, and believers all shared; what it is not clear and something which donner does not show is that christians, jews, and believers all had a shared unitarianism, ever. to prove his ecumenical hypothesis, donner needs to make a case for widespread unitarian sympathies among late antique near eastern christians, which he fails to do. 30 donner does attempt to speak of monophysite and nestorian “formulations of trinitarian doctrine” which may have made them more amenable to believer/muslim unitarianism, but he does not seem to realize that nestorianism and monophysitism – both unhelpful terms 31 – were christological positions and disputes between nestorians, monophysites and chalcedonians centered on the issue of christ, not the trinity. 32 and there are additional serious issues. the believers, according to donner, are motivated to expand territorially because they want to spread god’s law to the sinful world around them, but sin, sinfulness, and holiness do not seem to be major themes of the quran, 33 nor is there much law to be had there, either. of the more than 6,200 verses in the quran, it has been traditionally held that some 500 of them actually deal with legal topics, but scholars differ as to the precise number of legal verses: 350 has also been suggested, as has 600. 34 of these verses, most deal with islamic cultic issues and perhaps only 80 deal with actual legal topics. 35 what is more, the quran’s legal pronouncements are not set out in the manner of a code which attempts to cover all aspects of human life, but rather, as coulson has put it, “they often have the appearance of ad hoc solutions for particular problems rather than attempts to deal with any general topic comprehensively.” 36 donner’s repeated references to the believers’ need to spread god’s law should to be read in light of these numbers; they should also be read in light of other numbers as well – the large numbers of late, mass converts to the believers’ movement, which i mentioned above, converts who, by donner’s own admission probably had only a very rudimentary knowledge of islam/the believers’ message and the 80 or so verses of god’s law that might have been relevant to the large non-muslim populations who were conquered by armies of believers. indeed, one wonders at times whether donner is writing about early muslims or whether he is writing about essenes who were zealous for the jewish law, living apart, and seeking holiness: “the fact that believers were sometimes required to make such purification payments, however, underscores how the community was, in principle, focused on maintaining its inner purity, on being as much as possible a community that lived strictly in righteousness, so as to set themselves apart from the sinful world around them and thus to attain salvation in the afterlife” (64). “but on the whole,” writes one prominent scholar of islamic jurisprudence, “the qur’ān confirmed and upheld the existing customs and institutions of arab society and only introduced the changes that were deemed necessary.” 37 another prominent authority on islamic law has pointed to the widespread consumption of alcohol documented among muslims, even among experts in quranic legal matters, as indicative of the fact in the early period, “one can safely assume that, apart from certain highly regulated areas in the quran (marriage, divorce, muhammad and the believers 136 inheritance, etc.), there was little concern at the time for an islamic system of legal morality.” 38 all of this brings us back to an earlier question: just who were these believers that donner speaks so much about? how many were there? where were they located? where were they to be found among the mass of mass converts, of people who knew little about the actual content of the quran? what was the precise content of the quranic law they were trying to spread and how did that law set them so starkly apart from the “sinful” byzantine and sasanian regimes 39 which donner refers to on more than one occasion? fred donner has written a clear and lucid book and has skillfully told a compelling, even feelgood story which will be easy to understand for any non-specialist and which will be met with gladness by those sharing his political ideals. it is a story, however, which is as radically revisionist as hagarism and equally as fanciful. but lacking proper documentation, bereft of the impressively learned footnotes that the authors of hagarism deployed, and indulging deeply in historical speculation, in muhammad and the believers donner, who has devoted much energy to combating revisionism, has ironically told a tale which is in many respects less historically plausible than the book by cook and crone which has in some ways symbolized a scholarly impulse that has served as a foil for much of his career. jack tannous george washington university/ dumbarton oaks research library notes 1. crone, patricia, and michael cook. hagarism: the making of the islamic world (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1977). 2. see john wansbrough, quranic studies: sources and methods of scriptural interpretation (oxford: oxford university press, 1977; repr. amherst, ny: prometheus books, 2004) and the sectarian milieu: content and composition of islamic salvation history (oxford and new york: oxford university press, 1978; repr. amherst, ny: prometheus books, 2006). see andrew rippin’s anecdote (2004, xiii) about wansbrough being unapologetic for having written a “difficult” book with quranic studies. 3. wansbrough himself gave the book a critical review; see “patricia crone and michael cook: hagarism: the making of the islamic world,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 41 (1978), 155–156. 137 tannous 4. other scholars, like the massively erudite belgian jesuit, henri lammens (d. 1937), might also be mentioned, but it is the skeptical work of goldziher and schacht on ḥadīth that has cast the longest shadow in the field. 5. crone, more so than cook, vigorously applied a skeptical approach to islamic origins in subsequent publications. see, e.g., her slaves on horses: the evolution of the islamic polity (cambridge and new york: cambridge university press, 1980) and meccan trade and the rise of islam (princeton: princeton university press, 1987). her article, “how did the quranic pagans make a living?” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 68 (2005), 387–399, is a more recent example of her skeptical and subversive orientation towards the traditional narrative of islamic origins. cook also continued his skeptical approach to early islamic history in his early muslim dogma: a source-critical study (cambridge and new york: cambridge university press, 1981). 6. fred mcgraw donner, the early islamic conquests (princeton: princeton university press, 1981). 7. see his narratives of islamic origins: the beginnings of islamic historical writing (princeton: princeton university press, 1998). 8. a more scholarly presentation of some of the key ideas in muhammad and the believers can be found in donner’s “from believers to muslims: confessional self-identity in the early islamic community,” al-abhath 50–51 (2002–2003), 9–53. 9. albert schweitzer, the quest of the historical jesus: a critical study of its progress from reimarus to wrede, trans. w. montgomery (london: a. & c. black, 1910), 4. 10. at times, the undocumented historical speculation reads a bit like historical fiction, e.g., “῾ali ibn abi talib, who perhaps had more influence than anyone with the population of medina, must have been torn, as he believed himself to be more entitled to the office ῾uthman held” (157). 11. a shift in how outsiders label a movement does not necessarily correlate to a shift in selfidentification and self-labeling by that movement. 12. for instance: “one source of muhammad’s difficulties with jews, who controlled one of medina’s main markets, may have been his desire to establish a new market in median to assist the new meccan emigrants” (45); “for a short while, muhammad may have called his movement ‘hanafism’ (hanifiyya), presumably in reference to a vague pre-islamic monotheism, but this usage does not seem to have become widespread” (58); “some jews may have balked at the idea that muhammad, whom they knew and could see and hear, was to be put on the same plane as their revered patriarchs of old” (77); “indeed, hijra in muhammad and the believers 138 this larger sense may have served as the decisive marker of full membership into the community of believers, much as baptism does for christians” (86); “some believers may have felt an urgent need to try to secure control of the city of jerusalem. […] the believers may have felt that, because they were in the process of constructing the righteous ‘community of the saved,’ they should establish their presence in jerusalem as soon as possible” (97); “we have also considered the character of the expansion, arguing that the sources’ emphasis on the military dimension of the expansion has obscured its nature as a monotheistic reform movement that many local communities may have seen little reason to oppose, because it was doctrinally not obnoxious to them” (142); “such apocalyptic convictions may have been the force that impelled some believers to abandon their usual day-to-day concerns and enlist in the distant and arduous campaigns to spread the writ of god’s word that are usually called the ‘islamic conquests’” (197); “he may even have wanted to advance for himself the claim to being that final, just ruler in whose day the judgment would begin and who would deliver to god sovereignty over the world. […] his desire to honor this scenario may have been what led him to order the construction of one of the most magnificent works of early islamic architecture, the sumptuous building in jerusalem usually called the ‘dome of the rock’ […] it therefore seems plausible to suggest that the dome of the rock and attendant buildings may have been constructed to provide a suitably magnificent setting for the events of the judgment” (199). 13. see andrew palmer, et al., the seventh century in the west-syrian chronicles (liverpool: liverpool university press, 1993), 32. donner makes a possible allusion to this passage (213), but does not dwell on it, presumably because it poses difficulties for his attempted reconstruction of the history of the believers’ movement. 14. see her “how did the quranic pagans make a living,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 68.3 (2005), 387–389. crone’s focus in this article is only on the question of how muhammad’s pagan opponents made a living. their apparent cultivation of olives and the inability of olive cultivation to take place in western arabia lead her to intimate that parts of the quran must therefore have their origins outside of western arabia. 15. see his comments on the “late origins” hypothesis with respect to the quran, 54–56. 16. for example, in 4:43, it seems that muslims are not to pray while intoxicated; 2:219 has a mixed attitude towards wine, saying that it has both great sin but also profit for people, with the sin outweighing the profit, and 5:90–91 calls wine the work of satan which is to be shunned. at the same time, 47:15 places “delicious wine” in paradise. 17. see jalāl al-dīn al-suyūṭī, al-itqān fī ‘ulūm al-qur’ān, vol. 2 (damascus/beirut: dar alkutub al-‘ilmiyyah, 2000/1460), 700 (quoting unnamed imāms approvingly). 139 tannous 18. see the evidence that goldziher amassed for there being widespread ignorance of the actual contents of islam among many early muslims in his muslim studies (muhammedanische studien), vol. 2, trans. c.r. barber and s.m. stern (london: george allen and unwin, 1971), 39–40. such evidence can be easily multiplied. 19. there is a reference to “the small number of qur’anic verses that explicitly attack the idea of the trinity” (77). 20. note the “must have.” there is no evidence for such a claim. 21. references to jews as turning into pigs (e.g., 2:65, 5:60 and 7:166) might presumably reflect the views of another wing of the believers’ movement which was uncomfortable with the inclusion of jews in the community? 22. see w. montgomery watt’s article, ‘hidjra’ in the encyclopedia of islam (2 nd ed.), where watt puts the number of emigrants – not counting muḥammad, abū bakr, ‘alī and their wives – at about seventy. for the size of muhammad’s army, see a. guillaume, trans., the life of muhammad: a translation of isḥāq’s sīrat rasūl allāh (oxford: oxford university press, 1955), 545. 23. for the satanic verses and muhammad as a henotheist, see maxime rodinson, mohammed, trans. anne carter (new york: pantheon, 1971), 96–97, 106–107. also see w. montgomery watt’s discussion of this incident and whether it shows that muhammad was a species of polytheist at this point in idem., muhammad: prophet and statesmen (london: clarendon, 1961), 60–65. on the incident of the satanic verses in general, see mohammed shahab ahmed, the satanic verses incident in the memory of the early muslim community. an analysis of the early riwāyahs and their isnāds, (phd diss., princeton university, 1997). 24. see nathan macdonald, “the origin of ‘monotheism,’” early jewish and christian monotheism, eds. loren t. stuckenbruck and wendy e.s. north (london/new york: t&t clark international, 2004), 204–205. 25. for example, it only occurs one time in jessie payne smith’s a compendious syriac dictionary (oxford: oxford university press, 1903), not as a definition, but as a translation in the sentence: men ḥad alāhā masṭe’ lan, “he turns us aside from monotheism” (372, s.v., sṭā). but ḥad alāhā is more properly and literally translated, “one god.” “monotheism” does not occur in the latin index to k. brockelmann’s lexicon syriacum, 2 nd ed. (halle: niemeyer, 1928), either. 26. see h. g. liddell, r. scott, and h. s. jones, greek-english lexicon with a revised supplement, 9 th ed. (oxford: oxford university press, 1996). muhammad and the believers 140 27. see g. w. h. lampe, a patristic greek lexicon (oxford: oxford university press, 1961), 882, s.v. μονοθεϊα 28. see anton blok, “the narcissism of minor differences,” 115–135 in idem., honour and violence (cambridge: polity, 2001). 29. see d. gimaret’s article “tawḥīd” in the encyclopedia of islam, 2 nd ed. he may also have in mind the word ḥanīfiyya, though as he recognizes (71), it is a word whose meaning is not entirely clear (see w. montomgery watt’s article, “ḥanīf” in the encyclopedia of islam, 2 nd ed.). 30. he could have attempted to look for jewish christians in the seventh century, as did, e.g., shlomo pines in “notes on islam and on arabic christianity and judaeo-christianity,” jerusalem studies in arabic and islam 4 (1984), 135–152. donner does make a reference to “(non-trinitarian) christians” (70), but this point is never pursued or elaborated. 31. see, e.g., sebastian p. brock, “the ‘nestorian’ church: a lamentable misnomer,” bulletin of the john rylands library 78 (1996 [1997]), 53–66. 32. the “trisagion” controversy is perhaps an exception to this statement and provides an instance where trinitarian and christological controversies overlapped. nevertheless, it has been a standard (and, to my mind, equally misguided) argument to make that nestorian or monophysite christologies in some way made the middle east’s christian population more willing to accept the diminished christology of the quran, but no one i am aware of and certainly no theologian i am aware of has ever made this argument about nestorian or monophysite trinitarianism. 33. the arabic words for sin, ithm and khaṭī῾a, and their derivatives, occur less than 50 times in the entire quran. words and verbs related to the notion of holiness (q.d.s) occur only ten times in the quran. 34. for 350, see mohammad hashim kamali, principles of islamic jurisprudence, 3 rd ed. (cambridge: islamic texts society, 2003), 26. for 600, see n. j. coulson, a history of islamic law (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 1964), 12. for a view that the quran contains, proportionally, as much legal material as the pentateuch, see s. d. goitein, “the birth hour of muslim law? an essay in exegesis,” the muslim world 50 (1960), 24. though, however, it should be pointed out that in absolute terms, the quran, being shorter than the torah, still contains far less legal material than the mosaic law. 35. see coulson, history of islamic law 12. 36. coulson 13. 141 tannous 37. see kamali, principles of islamic jurisprudence 26. 38. see wael b. hallaq, the origins and evolution of islamic law (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2005), 40. 39. see, e.g., 85, 88. [expositions 5.1 (2011) 80-87] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 dante’s commedia: theology as poetry. edited by vittorio montemaggi and matthew treherne. the william and katherine devers series in dante studies. notre dame, in: university of notre dame press, 2010. 388 + xii pp. isbn-13: 978-0-268-03519-8 (pbk.: alk. paper). isbn-10: 0-268-03519-9 (pbk.: alk. paper). late in the commedia, dante refers to his masterwork as “the sacred poem to which heaven and earth have put their hand” (paradiso xxv.1–2). lately this has often been read as the most scandalous of several bold claims the poem offers of its own inspired authority and veracity; it is also a convenient indicator of how montemaggi and treherne‟s volume of eleven essays can be a welcome and well-needed contribution to dante studies, despite the vertiginous quantity of preceding material produced by seven centuries. how can the publication of yet another book on the commedia – and not even a monograph or collection of published articles, but the proceedings of a conference (albeit with more polish and substantive notes than most of that genre) – possibly be justified, to humanity and to the trees? because the work of the last halfcentury has quite unsettled the question of what exactly dante was claiming for his poem at such moments, and thus of how il poema sacro should be read with regard to sacra doctrina. as the answer to this question must be of great concern to any serious reader of the poem, there is nothing to do but push on (with apologies to the trees); these essays provide a good impetus, and illustrate both the promise and peril of reading the commedia as theology. the promise rests on the merit of the principle of interpretation which editors inscribe in the volume‟s title and describe in their introduction: “dante‟s theology is not what underlies his narrative poem, nor what is contained within it: it is instead fully integrated with its poetic and narrative texture” (4). dante‟s evident comfort with scholastic terminology and theological debates, and his extraordinary ability to weave such language seamlessly into vernacular hendecasyllables, may tempt the reader to treat the many evidently doctrinal passages 1 of the commedia as intellectual material more or less separable from its poetic form and narrative context. this alleged separability may be regarded positively, as establishing a layman‟s theological credentials in spite of his role as poet, or negatively, as revealing a medieval mind‟s prosaic hair-splitting in spite of great poetic skill; these might be called the scholastic and romantic extremes of past interpretation. between them lies the third way which the editors and most of the other authors represented here seek to reinforce and extend: reading dante‟s theology as intimately and ineluctably poetic. one aspect of that reading – the less groundbreaking, but also the less debatable – is engagement with themes and images which make no discursive claims but are nonetheless theological loci. so treherne‟s essay, “liturgical personhood: creation, penitence, and praise in the commedia,” provides a reminder of how indispensible for dantists is knowledge of the medieval liturgy, which dante regularly weaves into his poem, including quasi-liturgical performances of doxologies and the sanctus, and plentiful sacramental imagery. commentators have long recognized such elements, but typically as ornamentation adding little to the 81 gardner theological substance of the poem – especially in the latter two canticles. 2 treherne‟s thesis that “the movement of souls to god is suggested […] through a shift in liturgical performance towards praise, a shift that takes place throughout purgatory and is fulfilled in paradise” (132) 3 helps to explain the real difference between completed purgation – the correction of disordered inclinations towards finite goods, accompanied and effected by penitential prayer – and the ascent to blessedness, i.e., unmediated vision of the source of all good, anticipated and reflected by self-forgetful prayers of praise, extolling the good for its own sake. likewise, theresa federici (“dante‟s davidic journey: from sinner to god‟s scribe”) observes that dante‟s combined roles as poet and penitential pilgrim of the commedia are uniquely correspondent to the medieval view of david, who is at once “exemplary model of repentance” (181), poet (as author of the psalms), and prophet. 4 this correspondence is borne out in manifold ways throughout the commedia: e.g., the pilgrim‟s first spoken words are the introit of psalm 50, miserere mei, 5 which recurs five other times in the poem; and the psalms in general are accorded a special role in giving the pilgrim the virtue of hope (paradiso xxv). that much is certain and valuable; but federici goes on to argue that such references do not just assimilate dante‟s roles to a superior model, but undergird his claim to a poema sacro: to some extent “dante presents himself as a divinely inspired poet following the davidic model” (182). to what extent, exactly? “dante does not claim superiority over the psalms on a level of content” (a wise move); he “does suggest, however […] that his message is also in some way divinely inspired, and that his poetic talent is, on a strictly human level, in a sense superior to that of biblical authors” (201). the phrases “in some way” and “in a sense” bear rather an inordinate burden here; and the notion that scriptural inspiration is limited to formless intellectual content, the human author being responsible for the choice of words, seems inadequate to dante‟s era. again, david‟s son solomon (regarded as the author of the song of songs) has been convincingly established as an important model for the distinctive poetics of paradiso, and paola nasti (“caritas and ecclesiology in dante‟s heaven of the sun”) extends this work by associating the long-standing christian referral of the song‟s bride to the church with dante‟s ecclesiology, and that with the sphere of the sun wherein dante encounters those blessed souls marked especially by wisdom (including solomon himself). three times in that sphere the church is referred to as the „spouse of god‟, and these along with other wedding-metaphors support the claim that “for the poet, both the church of the perfect and true wisdom could not exist unless marked by the seal of caritas” (217). the former point is perhaps too universallyattested to present anything distinctive about dante; the latter – that the virtue of wisdom cannot exist without charity – could be a sharper entry into debates over the distinctions and connections among acquired, infused, and theological virtues, but here it is left rather inchoate. still, the relevance of the song here is well-observed, even if, like federici, nasti is merely adding a new facet to recent work. 6 most of the volume‟s essays, however, concern the other aspect of reading dante‟s poetry as theology: addressing how the poetic expression of theology may differ fundamentally from, and challenge, those discursive modes of exegesis or systematic exposition often identified with dante‟s commedia 82 theology tout court. hence these essays take up more directly the editors‟ stated purpose, and have the potential to make more groundbreaking claims for the commedia – but also to fall into the peril of this sort of reading. what was called above the scholastic mode of reading the poem, despite its well-observed flaws, has had at least an incidental advantage: it happens to have provided a great deal of philosophical and theological context for the terms dante uses and the debates into which he enters, allowing modern readers to navigate foreign intellectual waters more surely. a third way which takes the poetry more seriously ought to be no less conversant with that prosaic context, lest through the cross-cultural affective appeal of the poetry it fall into theological anachronism or overgeneralization. here the volume has its flaws as well as its successes. so, for example, the editors claim that central to the jewish, christian, and islamic intellectual traditions, and especially potent for understanding dante‟s theology, is the claim that “full comprehension of god lies beyond the grasp of human intellect and language, since the origin of all that is lies „beyond‟ being itself” (5). now the first clause will certainly find wide assent; but the second is quite partisan and disputed, especially for dante‟s theological patrimony and contemporaries. the pseudo-dionysius, maimonides, and eckhart might well agree, though perhaps in different ways; thomas and scotus would certainly disagree, and certainly in different ways. 7 since the question at hand – viz., whether predicating existence of the “ground of all existence” (6) is univocal, analogical, or equivocal with predicating existence of sensible being – is a major point of divergence among medieval accounts of divine naming, to take equivocity as a point of common accord not only flattens the theological landscape but begs the proximate question of dante‟s position, which must be determined on the evidence he provides, not assumed from a common denominator. montemaggi engages this evidence – dante‟s various indications that god is beyond human comprehension and language – to powerful effect in his own essay, “in unknowability as love: the theology of dante‟s commedia.” yet this more focused discussion still lacks some of the distinctions missing from his and treherne‟s introduction; 8 and while dante‟s text is the startingpoint, arguments take flight beyond textual justification, belatedly adding upon landing a phrase like “according to dante” as a sort of dante ex machina: “one gets one‟s theology wrong, according to dante, unless one‟s sense of what it means to talk about god is grounded in the recognition of what it would mean for human communication to be seen merely as useful or instrumental” (90). 9 finally, in his main thesis – that dante privileges the will over the intellect in his account of human beatification, 10 with the consequence that earthly reasoning and speaking of god must be somehow redefined by love of god and one‟s neighbor – montemaggi does not mention the most explicit (and unfortunately quite contrary) datum on this topic, beatrice‟s observation that “blessedness is founded on the act of vision, not on the act of love, which follows it” (paradiso xxviii.109–11). perhaps this could be accounted for; at any rate it must be dealt with. certainly dante denies that the beatific vision grants human intellects the same comprehension that god has of himself; but this is no reason to elide earthly and heavenly uncomprehension of god, and hence the respective earthly and heavenly orderings of will and 83 gardner intellect. still, these are criticisms of inexact phrasing more than substance; montemaggi‟s essay remains a profound reflection on the intimate association between human nature and the capacity and need for language, and how this association evidently shaped dante‟s thought on human fulfillment. the application of de vulgari eloquentia to purgatorio xxv‟s description of the newly-rational embryo as “fante” (speaking) is golden, as is the contrast between ulysses‟ doomed voyage of willfulness and the pilgrim‟s submission to god‟s will, an association clearly marked by the same cryptic phrase, “come‟ altrui piacque” (as pleased another). a lack of crucial distinctions also mars christian moevs‟s “„il punto che mi vinse‟: incarnation, revelation, and self-knowledge in dante‟s commedia.” 11 moevs focuses on dante‟s vision of the punto or point of light from the primum mobile, which is heretofore the pilgrim‟s closest vision of god; in sum (although moevs might dispute this account), his thesis elides dante with plotinus, by way of eliding plotinian neoplatonism with the aristotelianism to which dante ostensibly cleaves. e.g.: “pure awareness or intellect (consciousness) in itself is nothing at all: it is the power to be everything and nothing. this is because for aristotle, and for the whole aristotelian-thomistic tradition following him, awareness or consciousness (intellect) is nothing (not a thing) until it thinks, and when it thinks, it is what it thinks.” there is truth to this – endnotes point the reader to de anima iii.4 and metaphysics xii.7 – but it is a truth about the possible intellect, not intellect tout court, and thus it applies only secundum quid to human intellect and not at all to divine intellect. 12 moreover, even as regards the possible intellect, moevs‟s elision of potentiality or privation with utter non-being tosses aside the foundational work of physics i and thereby any authentically aristotelian physics and metaphysics altogether. 13 by way of this aristotle-cum-parmenides, moevs pins on dante‟s christian aristotelism claims of the radical unreality of all save the one being, and thence of a plotinian monism: “dante will pass over from the primo mobile, from the limit of the world, into the empyrean itself. this is to know all things as „not other‟ than oneself, that is, as a projection or reflection of being itself” (270). 14 obviously this is a critique beyond the choice of words; still, as in montemaggi‟s essay, there is much to learn here in spite of dubious accounts of aristotle. that the outset of paradiso xxix, describing beatrice‟s momentary silence by way of an elaborate cosmological comparison, in fact describes no time at all, and represents the moment of creation, seems undeniable; it also fits the metaphor perfectly into the explicit consideration of creation which follows – yet another instance in which dante‟s universally-attested poetic craftsmanship ought to be more universally-regarded as intimate to his philosophical theology. piero boitani, in “the poetry and poetics of creation,” also deals with paradiso xxix, arguing that dante in a way reenters the role of the earliest presocratic philosophers as theologizing poets, in whom the wonder at and thirst for understanding the universe and the love of myth were united: “dante thus emerges as a poeta theologizans, who treats de principiis rerum poetice et fabulariter” (124) – except that for dante it is a deliberate choice of mode, in tension with scholasticism, because even a well-developed and systematic philosophy must not eradicate wonder. this point (drawing upon the work of patrick boyde, who called dante philomythes), is well made; and likewise it is true that dante is eclectic in his choice of dante‟s commedia 84 authorities, not a strict disciple of thomas or any other theologian. 15 on the other hand, boitani overreaches; he claims that the points on which dante rejects theological authorities include: “thomas aquinas, on the number of substances first created; jerome and aquinas, on the time elapsing between the creation of the angels and the creation of […] the rest of the universe; augustine and aquinas again on the memory of the angels […]; and aquinas again, among others, on the presumed eclipse during christ‟s passion” (123). four swings at st. thomas, four misses; 16 the last is perhaps the most unfortunate. here indeed is a provoking consideration for one of dante‟s alleged authorities – but not thomas. for if dante knew of the thomistic text, as that text is totally transparent to the pseudo-dionysius‟s alleged eyewitness acount, 17 the poet could only be saying (presciently enough!) that the witness lied – and this shortly after trumpeting the same witness‟s quasi-apostolic authority (on the angelic hierarchies). perhaps it is more likely that dante knew nothing of the dionysian epistle in question, and perforce of the thomistic text reporting it; in any case, in boitani‟s account (shared by other dantists) the true problem is eclipsed. contrariwise, denys turner‟s essay, “how to do things with words: poetry as sacrament in dante‟s commedia,” convincingly attacks another common assumption of dante‟s divergence from thomas, by way of mutual comparison with eckhart: thomas calls poetry “least of all the sciences [doctrinas]” (summa theologica i q. 1 a. 8), 18 but while commentators have usually focused on the adjective “least,” it is significant that in fact he calls it a doctrina, and speaks positively of poetry‟s mimetic role as naturally pleasing to man. this stands in some contrast to his earlier treatment in his commentary on the sentences, and to those of many contemporaries. in short, while scholastic theology in general may have had a certain suspicion of poetry, here too there is not a uniform field of opinion, and oddly enough thomas could have reinforced dante‟s regard for the theological potential of christian poetry – potential drawing strength from its lowliness as a doctrine (its use of metaphor and often dissimilar symbols). while here too, an explicit discussion of analogy is curiously lacking, 19 turner makes an extremely valuable point – and not just for dantists – about the complexity of medieval theological regard for poetic language. let this suffice to indicate with any detail the kind of range, insight, and difficulties the volume‟s essays present. those not already mentioned are no less valuable: robin kirkpatrick‟s “polemics of praise: theology as text, narrative, and rhetoric in dante‟s commedia” makes the provocative point that poetic theology especially resists the “second-order discourse” in which academics typically rest secure, 20 and that perhaps the greatest virtue of the theology of the commedia is that an adequate response to it, positive or negative, demands the risk of firstorder claims about god (such vitality, the sense of living theological questions provoked by the poem, suffuses the whole volume); 21 peter hawkins‟s “all smiles: poetry and theology in dante‟s commedia” highlights (like boitani‟s essay) dante‟s insistence that “personal experience, face-to-face vision, trumps everything else” (40), and relates this to the fact that beatrice‟s smile (along with her eyes) is the very means by which the pilgrim ascends through the heavenly spheres, preparing him for the vision of christ which (hawkins suggests), even if 85 gardner dante does not say so, the reader should understand as a smiling face, allowing participation in the “inner smile” of the trinity; oliver davies‟s “dante‟s commedia and the body of christ” gives perhaps the volume‟s clearest statement of the tension involves in reading poetry as theology, and argues crucially that the poem should be compared less to a mystical excessus than to the transfiguration, given its insistence on the exaltation and not dissolution of human embodiment in blessedness: “dante‟s cosmic journey remains grounded in the „transfiguration‟ of his own body in the presence of the living, transformative body of beatrice, thus giving a full christian expression to the platonic vision of his earlier years” (175); by contrast, douglas hedley‟s “neoplatonic metaphysics and imagination in dante‟s commedia” emphasizes the persistence of “platonic vision” in the poet‟s mature thought, and while falling into some false dichotomies 22 and making some rather tenuous links to platonism, 23 ends strongly: “if, on the basis of [dante‟s] christianized neoplatonic metaphysics […] there is an ontological bond between the „images‟ of the mind‟s imagination and „being‟ in the most exalted sense of that word, then the poet can indeed be a vehicle of truth” (263). patrick m. gardner university of texas – austin notes 1. i.e., those lengthy digressions from the narrative action which provide a technical explanation of some feature of the afterlife or of the cosmos in general, rare in inferno but increasing in purgatorio and dominant in paradiso – it is no coincidence that many an engrossed reader of the first canticle has balked at the latter two. 2. such elements may be found in inferno as well – e.g., the distorted introit to the hymn vexilla regis which introduces satan, or the inverted echoes of baptism among the simonists – but in a parodic mode, which has been better accounted for in modern scholarship, perhaps as more congenial to an overweening taste for irony; it is the straightforward and heartfelt use of prayer and praise among the saved which is more often relegated to window-dressing. 3. this thesis is somewhat undercut by an uncongenial datum, the presence of the gloria in excelsis in purgatorio xx; treherne attempts to explain it away, in part by contrasting it with what he calls another “version of the greater doxology” (150) in paradiso xxvii. but the latter – which reads precisely, “glory be to the father, and to the son, and to holy spirit” [vv. 1–2] – seems to be rather a different prayer, the lesser doxology. the other elements of treherne‟s explanation are more convincing. 4. it is worth noting that on the latter two points the view is not so much medieval as simply scriptural: cf., e.g., acts 2:25–31. 5. inferno 1.65, where the first term is latin, ensuring the intended reference. 6. the only significant typographical problems in the volume appear in this essay: there are nearly a dozen minor mistakes in the latin texts quoted. dante‟s commedia 86 7. as punctuated, the second clause remains ambiguous; thomas might agree if the quotation marks around the word „beyond‟ are supposed to supply “…beyond being, according to the human mode of signifying being, whereas the thing signified is the same.” but that is a heavy conceptual burden to put upon inverted commas. shortly thereafter the editors quote david burrell to the effect that for thomas, “this one is indeed „beyond being‟ as we know beings” (7, emphasis added), which in its added phrase suffices to convey the thomistic distinction contra maimonides et al.; but the editors themselves leave no such room. 8. e.g.: “to be human is to be an embodied, rational, linguistic, and social being. it is impossible, on dantean terms, to think of any one of these aspects of human existence in any other way than in conjunction with the others” (68). the (presumably) intended point – that „linguistic‟ and „social‟ are proper accidents of the species „rational animal‟ – does come through, and it is well-grounded in and well-observed of dante‟s reflection on human language in de vulgari eloquentia; but as stated the claim entails that, e.g., thinking of the aspect „embodied‟ necessarily entails thinking of the aspect „rational‟ – better to observe a distinction between real and notional separability. cf. also 60: “for dante […] to be human, to speak, to love, and to be related to god are, if properly conceived, one and the same thing.” 9. i.e., one could argue that this claim about right theologizing illumines dante; but nothing like sufficient evidence has been given for stating that dante himself makes this claim, however implicitly. 10. e.g., “the very form and essence of heavenly being is defined by the coming together of the individual will of the blessed and the will of god, as one will” (66). 11. this essay distills the central thesis of moevs‟s 2005 monograph, the metaphysics of dante’s comedy. 12. de anima iii.5 makes clear that the „mind‟ of the previous section‟s discussion was mind-aspotential, possible intellect; and metaphysics xii.7 explicitly rejects mind-as-potential as the aspect of the human mind analogous to divine thinking: “therefore the possession rather than the receptivity is the divine element which thought seems to contain.” 13. note that even in de anima iii.4, aristotle makes the same claim for “the sensitive part” as for the intellectual, viz., that it “can have no nature of its own, other than that of having a certain capacity” – clearly this lack of a nature is potency in a principle, not non-being. 14. incidentally, it seems that the really crucial punti of moevs‟s essay are typographical, the punctuation marks by which he repeatedly essays a sort of glissade between christianity and monism – inverted commas in the case above, but more often parentheses: the human intellect must “come to know itself as (one with) pure intellect or being, the reality that contains, sustains, and creates all things” (269), and again “to know itself as (one with) the ground of all things” (273). the closed circle of parenthesis seems to be moevs‟s recreation of his view of the sphere of the primum mobile: what it contains is the difference between monism and christianity, but what it contains can be dropped without change in meaning (since nothing therein really subsists), and hence there is no difference. 15. however, boitani‟s substantial section on elements of origen he finds parallel to dantean themes gives no indication of by just what means the poet might have known of these texts. 16. as to the first three: (1) the doctrine of „four coevals‟ (simultaneous first creations: angels, empyrean, time, matter) was traditional by thomas‟s time, and he quite explicitly treats it as such, having a mild auctoritas to be saved as possible; he saves it in such a way as to agree with 87 gardner dante (who does not mention time): thomas is willing to accept time only in a highly qualified way, since it is an accident and thus logically posterior to substance (leaving only three proper kinds of objects of creation, like dante: summa theologica i q. 66 a. 4). (2) on the second point thomas records jerome‟s position as not necessarily erroneous, but explicitly favors the position which dante adopts, that of simultaneous creation (ibid. q. 61 a. 3); dante simply rejects jerome more forcefully. (3) to the claim that angels have memory (ibid. q. 64 a. 5 arg. 2), thomas first responds that, simply speaking, they do not (precisely dante‟s position); then he again saves the auctoritates in question (especially augustine) as well as he can, by positing that either (a) they were speaking on the tentative hypothesis that angels are naturally united to bodies, or (b) they were speaking through a certain similitude to real memory (again, simply speaking thomas denies even intellectual memory to angels, for they have no possible intellect: ibid. q. 67 aa. 6–7). 17. thomas does favor the account of the moon miraculously retracing half its orbit to cover the sun during the crucifixion, and dante calls this account a lie; but thomas favors it only and explicitly on the basis of the pseudo-dionysius‟s claim to have seen the eclipse himself while living in egypt at the time – he grants it no theoretical or exegetical advantage (to that extent he reports favorably the position dante adopts, that the sun‟s own light was hidden without an intervening body), but because he thinks it an eyewitness account, it trumps indecisive theoretical considerations (summa theologica iii q. 44 a. 2 ad 2). 18. in fact the phrase occurs in an objection; it should be noted that this is not clearly in voce thomae. 19. such a discussion might better have specified the claim that thomas‟s “confidence in the theological worth of ordinary speech” is “subordinated to a governing apophaticism” (297). 20. kirkpatrick also brings a certain poetry to his own prose: “our characteristic existence […] lies in time and language, themselves both modes of exile. so much to say, so little time to say it, and so much, anyway, that is unsay-able. the cross confirms all that and gives it, quite undeservedly, some meaning.” 21. this is brought out by the two afterwords, in which john took (“dante, conversion, and homecoming”) and david ford (“dante as inspiration for twenty-first-century theology”) comment upon the overall themes of the volume and their relevance for contemporary existentialism and theology, respectively. 22. “religion is not, for dante, a set of facts extra nos but rather is inextricably linked to the inner life” (249). 23. “the commedia thus presents us with the idea that prophecy and poetry are intimately linked, an idea that, especially in the light of texts such as the phaedrus, we can once again characterize, at least in one of its aspects, as platonic” (252). by his heavy qualification it seems hedley feels the problem of finding a plausible source by which this phaedrus-doctrine came to dante; perhaps the difficulty would be removed by federici‟s reminder (see above) that “prophecy and poetry are intimately linked” in scripture, in david‟s psalter, and whether or not the platonic tradition may have confirmed this for dante is rather secondary. [expositions 6.2 (2012) 1-8] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 interview: alasdair macintyre, university of notre dame liam kavanagh villanova university alasdair macintyre is senior research fellow at the centre for contemporary aristotelian studies in ethics and politics (casep) at london metropolitan university and an emeritus professor of philosophy at the university of notre dame. one of the most influential thinkers in contemporary ethical and political philosophy, his works include after virtue (1981), whose justice? which rationality? (1988), three rival versions of moral enquiry (1990), and dependent rational animals (1999). his most recent book god, philosophy, universities (2009) is a selective history of the catholic intellectual tradition. this interview took place on the occasion of professor macintyre being awarded the civitas dei medal at villanova university in september 2012. kavanagh: recently villanova university was honored to welcome you as the recipient of the civitas dei medal, which is awarded to individuals who have made exemplary contributions to the catholic intellectual tradition. the contemporary catholic university faces many challenges and expectations. in particular, many people claim that it is a primary responsibility of the university to provide students with the skills and resources they need to pursue their chosen career paths. you have written that, on the contrary, “[i]t is a primary responsibility of a university to be unresponsive, to give its students what they need, not what they want, and to do so in such a way that what they want becomes what they need and what they choose is choiceworthy.” 1 how might the contemporary catholic university retrieve this self-understanding? macintyre: of course students need to be well prepared for the world of work, but for this they need not only the relevant sets of skills, but also an ability to make reflective choices. there are the skills that everyone needs, whatever their career path, some of them mathematical – everyone should have a course in probability and statistics – as well as others that enable us to understand difficult texts or to disentangle complex arguments. those skills are put to use in learning what the different disciplines have to teach us about nature and human nature, about what it is to choose and act as a rational agent in our particular time and place. it is the task of any worthwhile university not just to educate in particular disciplines, but to enable its students to understand how each discipline contributes to an overall understanding of the human condition and so to become reflective. it is the peculiar task of catholic universities to show how that understanding will remain inadequate and incomplete without a recognition of the dependence of the created world on god and an acknowledgment of god’s self-revelation to israel, in christ, and through the teaching of the catholic church. it is therefore not difficult to say what catholic universities have to do, if they are to fulfill their mission. why then is it so very difficult to do what needs to be done? three kinds of obstacles http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyzvd3d4lv4 interview: alasdair macintyre 2 are posed, some by faculty, some by students, some by administrators. faculty have generally been educated to become specialists not just in this or that discipline, but in this or that subdiscipline or sub-sub-discipline. they are generally under pressure to publish in journals that are read only by other specialists. and the more intellectually distinguished they are, the more likely this is to be so. they are therefore generally badly prepared for and often averse to performing the tasks that i have identified as central to the life of the university. in catholic universities theologians too are now generally specialists, lacking the kind of understanding of the secular disciplines that they need in order to identify the inadequacies of a purely secular understanding of the human condition. students, through no fault of their own, provide a second set of obstacles. they want to do well and to please their parents by doing well. but this leads them to choose courses in which they predict that they will do well and not to be adventurous or risk-taking. they are insufficiently open to the possibility that it would be good for them to break out in some new direction and they often make their fundamental decisions too early, before they have become sufficiently reflective. too often they do not want an education which is both rigorous and demanding and unsettling and disturbing, that gives them reason to be less than entirely happy with themselves and with the world. administrators find themselves under pressure to compete with other universities for students, for faculty, and for endowment and are therefore apt to take as models those universities that are placed above them in the rankings. so they tend to emulate the great secular research universities and by so doing to move away from rather than towards the goals that a catholic university should have. in fact the more a catholic university becomes what it should be the less likely it is to rise in the rankings. kavanagh: do you believe the church could play a more active role in cultivating this selfunderstanding? could it play a role in determining certain curricular core requirements, for example? macintyre: what the church can and must do, indeed what it has already done, is to state clearly the minimum requirements that must be satisfied for a university to claim the title “catholic.” those requirements are to be found in john paul ii’s 1991 apostolic constitution ex corde ecclesiae, a copy of which should be on every faculty member’s and every university administrator’s desk. it does indeed, as you suggest, have important things to say about the curriculum, about, for example, the place of theology in the university and the need to bring out the relationships between the disciplines. and it rightly leaves universities free to decide how they are going to implement these requirements. what it did not leave them free to do was to ignore it, as so many american catholic universities have in fact successfully done. kavanagh: you have followed john henry newman and pope john paul ii in arguing that both philosophy and theology are necessary and constitutive elements of a catholic education. but http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/apost_constitutions/documents/hf_jp-ii_apc_15081990_ex-corde-ecclesiae_en.html http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/apost_constitutions/documents/hf_jp-ii_apc_15081990_ex-corde-ecclesiae_en.html 3 kavanagh some of your most sympathetic readers have questioned your understanding of the relationship between theology and philosophy. stanley hauerwas, for example, has suggested that you draw too sharp a distinction between the two. 2 similarly, john milbank has argued that, without determinate theological commitments, philosophy risks remaining bound to the conceptual frameworks of secular modernity. 3 how might you respond to these readers that, perhaps, you are not theological enough? macintyre: philosophy, like carpentry and accountancy, is a secular trade. the standards by which its arguments and its enquiries are evaluated are those of natural reason. the questions from which its enquiries begin are, as john paul ii pointed out in the introduction to fides et ratio, developed from the existential questions posed by human beings in every culture: “who am i?” “where do i come from?” “where am i going?” “why do evils appear?” “what remains to us after this life?” philosophical enquiry proceeds by reformulating such questions, by considering alternative and rival answers to them, and by identifying what is presupposed in asking them. in so doing philosophy makes issues of meaning and truth central to its enquiries. so it is of some importance that philosophical theses emerge from argumentative disputation and are always open to further questioning. in philosophy no one ever has the last word, but only at best the last word so far. there are of course philosophical positions that exclude the possibility that the truths of the catholic faith could be affirmed by any rational person. it matters that such positions should be put in question, that their conclusions should be shown to derive, as they do, from what are always at best question-begging premises. but, if we are to do this in a way that will carry the debate forward, our own premises must not be similarly question-begging, as they would be if our philosophical stances involved prior theological commitments. it is in fact theology that presupposes commitment to certain philosophical positions, something recognized by the first vatican council in its teaching that god’s existence and the natural law that he ordains for human beings, independently of his self-revelation, can be known by the light of reason. kavanagh: you have described your philosophy as “theistic, but as secular in its content as any other.” 4 do you understand “theistic” here in purely formal terms, as the affirmation of the interminability of philosophical enquiry, for example? or is there a determinate content to your theistic commitments? macintyre: theistic philosophers are of a number of different kinds, partly because of their different religious and cultural affiliations, partly because of their varying philosophical stances. what they share is a twofold conviction: first, that there arises in and from the natural world that which cannot be adequately understood in the terms – physical, chemical, biological – in which we rightly understand nature; and, secondly, that we can only make intelligible the relationship between nature and that which cannot be understood in naturalistic terms by taking there to be just such a god as the god of abraham, the god worshipped by jews, christians, and moslems. in the middle ages some islamic, jewish, and catholic christian philosophers arrived at this http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_15101998_fides-et-ratio_en.html http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_15101998_fides-et-ratio_en.html interview: alasdair macintyre 4 conclusion by reflecting on some of aristotle’s theses and arguments and for the last hundred and thirty years thomists have continued to work in this tradition. but there have also, of course, in the same period been theistic phenomenologists, most notably perhaps adolf reinach. and there have also been remarkable theistic philosophers who were neither thomists nor phenomenologists, a catalogue that includes scotists and occamists, anselm and abelard, thomas hobbes and john locke, pascal and kierkegaard. what many, if not quite all, of this strange and diverse group share as philosophers is a conception of god and a judgment that god exists that is prior to and independent of their commitment to this or that particular theistic faith. the task that all contemporary theistic philosophers have is that of keeping open the question of god’s existence in a culture that is often less secularized than its intelligentsias take it to be, so that modernity becomes selfquestioning and self-doubting. to achieve this they have to engage in the contemporary philosophical conversation on its own terms, something insufficiently recognized by such theologians as hauerwas and milbank. kavanagh: have you any interest in writing a more overtly confessional text: a spiritual autobiography, for example? macintyre: autobiographies should only be undertaken by those with the appropriate literary gifts. otherwise what their authors write are among the most tiresome of narratives. i do not have those gifts. kavanagh: do you think there is a role for prayer in the life of a philosopher? macintyre: if one is a theistic philosopher, one cannot but speak about god. but god is omnipresent. there is no way of speaking about god that god does not hear. so one finds oneself at once speaking not only about, but also to and with god, and therefore no longer in the accents of philosophical debate, but in fear and trembling and supplication. someone who thinks that he can speak about god without being drawn into speaking to and with him must have misunderstood who and what god is. kavanagh: in after virtue, you argue that, “where the notion of engagement in a practice was once socially central, the notion of aesthetic consumption now is, at least for the majority.” 5 you illustrate this point in whose justice? which rationality? when you compare great books and humanities programs to art museums. 6 in both cases, artworks and texts are presented as contextless commodities to aesthetic consumers. do you think that contemporary liberal arts and humanities programs actively contribute to our spectatorial, consumerist culture? and are they unwittingly contributing to their own demise? macintyre: my use of the word “aesthetic” is strongly influenced by kierkegaard’s use of it and may be misleading. when i speak of aesthetic attitudes in after virtue and elsewhere, i am not speaking of the attitudes that we should take to great or even minor works of art and i am 5 kavanagh speaking of a type of attitude that is often taken to objects that are not works of art. what those with an aesthetic attitude, as i define it, demand of whatever is presented to them is that, so far as possible, it should entertain them, that it should hold their interest, it should rescue them from the threat of boredom, and it should distract them from the harsher realities of life. aesthetes, thus understood, are spectators and consumers and a culture in which the aesthetic attitude is taken for granted is one in which education confronts difficulties. for almost all worthwhile learning requires patience with what must at first appear tedious and boring and a willingness to engage in activities the point of which will only be grasped later on. if you do not learn to conjugate greek irregular verbs now, you will not be able to read sophocles later. if you do not recognize how painfully inadequate some of your work is, you will never remedy what is amiss. so the teacher who sets her or himself to be entertaining does students a disservice, but is likely to receive highly favorable teaching evaluations. this is, as your question suggests, most often a problem with the teaching of the humanities and, when economic pressures direct students away from the humanities, because of their or their parents’ false belief that a degree in philosophy is less likely to lead to an interesting career than, say, a degree in business studies, that problem becomes more acute. for humanities teachers are not mistaken in supposing that, by being entertaining they are at the present day more likely to attract students to their classes. moreover the impact of information technology has created another not unrelated problem. contemporary students often feel that something has gone wrong if they are not throughout the day in touch with others by cell phone or otherwise. they no longer understand how important it is to be silent, to be patient in silence. they no longer understand that knowing how to be and act in the company of others involves also knowing how to be and act when alone. kavanagh: in god, philosophy, universities, you follow newman in diagnosing the “moral limitations of a university education and the tendency of university communities to disguise those limitations from themselves.” 7 what precisely are the moral limits of a university education, and how do university communities disguise this from themselves? macintyre: every profession trains its practitioners to view the world from its own idiosyncratic perspective and the academic profession is no different from any other. every profession therefore has its own peculiar vices, the vices that arise from lack of awareness of the limitations fostered by that perspective and here once again the academic profession is no different from any other. what are those limitations? let me restrict myself to two. anyone who has had to sit through both meetings of their department in universities on the one hand and meetings of, say, trade union branches and local neighborhood associations on the other knows that faculty members are, compared with others, extraordinarily bad at collective decision making aimed at the common good under constraints of time. they have developed habits of mind and speech which too often disable them as participants in shared deliberation. interview: alasdair macintyre 6 moreover, as i noted earlier, they have been trained as specialists in work areas of ever increasing specialization. this, as newman already noted, makes for a one-sidedness and narrowness of outlook that too often puts them at a disadvantage in situations where it is important to understand how matters appear from a variety of standpoints. these traits too often combine to make faculty members disappointingly ineffective in areas where they have an important contribution to make. the most obvious of those areas is the university itself. over the past fifty years the ways in which universities have developed have been largely determined by administrators, donors, and grant-givers, not by faculty members, and this failure on the part of faculty to resist the resulting transformation of the university resulted in key part from the two sets of traits that i have just identified. we may note that the more successful a university is in transforming itself into a replica of the major research universities the more it will be the case that faculty members will fit easily and unresistingly into roles designed for them by administrators, donors, and other sources of money. success in the academic life as it is now commonly understood is one more kind of failure. kavanagh: in three rival versions of moral enquiry, you argue that, contrary to the claims of the secular university, all creative rational enquiry presupposes some shared background of moral and intellectual beliefs. you suggest that this might best be achieved through a series of rival universities, “each advancing its own enquiries in its own terms and each securing the type of agreement necessary to ensure the progress and flourishing of its enquiries by its own set of exclusions and prohibitions, formal and informal.” 8 you have also argued that it is crucial that catholic universities have non-catholic faculty, “not only because of the excellence of what such faculty can contribute, but also in order to prevent catholics from forgetting that the secular calling of the university qua university is shared with non-catholics.” 9 but does this present us with a dilemma? if the basic shared beliefs of a catholic university are theological, how can a jewish, a muslim, or an atheist scholar contribute to a catholic university? if the basic shared beliefs are not theological, then how can a community of shared enquiry claim to be catholic? macintyre: my basic thesis is that all constructive disagreement, the kind of disagreement that issues in worthwhile enquiry, presupposes some large measure of agreement. so it is in physics or in history or in political science. so it is too with enquiry into what we should teach our students and how the curriculum should be organized. so in any university in good order there will be a large measure of agreement among both faculty and administrators – who in such matters should be the servants of the faculty – both about teaching and research in each particular discipline and about how and why the teaching and research of each particular discipline contribute to the educational tasks of the university, as i characterized them in my answer to your first question. note that i spoke of a large measure of agreement, allowing for a variety of disagreements, some of them disagreements that we need to make explicit if we are to understand what our commitments are. it is often only through discussion with jews and moslems of their grounds for rejecting catholic christianity, for example, that we become fully aware of what it is to which we, unlike them, are 7 kavanagh committed, as well as of what as theists we share with them. and what is true of jews and moslems is also true of atheists. so a catholic university may be less authentically catholic, as well as less of a university, if it does not allow for the expression of a wide range of disagreements. but even those disagreements must presuppose strong underlying agreements about the nature and tasks of any university. it is these latter agreements that are too often lacking among faculty in the contemporary liberal university, where characteristically and generally a ragbag of disciplines are taught, but there is too often little or no shared rationale as to why it is this rather than that set of disciplines or as to what the bearing of the findings of each discipline might be on the findings of each of the others. so the overall curriculum tends to evolve through a series of chances: what attracts funding in this period, but fails to attract it in that, what is fashionable with parents or students here or there, what will lead to a job whose remuneration will enable the young graduate to repay her or his student loans. we therefore need alternatives to the liberal university and my suggestion in three rival versions was that these could be of more than one kind, depending on what agreements were crucial in constituting them as universities. kavanagh: you have previously argued that “it is only where an educated public exists, and where introduction into the membership of that educated public is the goal of education, that both the overall purposes presupposed in modern education systems can be realized.” 10 how might a catholic university help to foster an educated public? macintyre: the task of bringing into being an educated public is the task of every university, not especially of catholic universities. an educated public shares at least four things. it acknowledges common standards of argument. it recognizes a shared cultural inheritance that gives expression to some measure of agreement on what is required if human beings are to flourish. it agrees further to some significant extent on what the difficulties and problems that it confronts are. and it is able to view its informal discussions of great issues, over dinner tables, in coffee houses, in debating clubs, in magazines, newspapers, and now the internet as contributing to the making of decisions in the decision-making organs of that particular society, whatever they are. in modern societies the first three of these will only be adequately achieved when a sufficient number of citizens receive a good higher education. yet, even when this is so, it may not be enough. why not? the debates of an educated public require a willingness to listen to a variety of conflicting voices and to allow the argument to carry one forward to what are sometimes quite unexpected conclusions. such debate is frustrated when significant voices go unheard. it is the peculiar task of the catholic university to educate its students so that later on they are able to make distinctively catholic voices heard and to sustain those dialogues to which it is important that catholics should contribute. yet they will only do this well if they care about the dialogue and interview: alasdair macintyre 8 know how to listen and to learn as well as how to speak. this is more important than ever in the united states now, when among the political elites the capacity to listen to and learn from their antagonists and to sustain genuine dialogue has been increasingly lost. and this loss is one more symptom of educational failure. notes 1. macintyre, alasdair. 2001. “catholic universities: dangers, hopes, choices.” higher learning and catholic traditions. ed. robert e. sullivan. notre dame, in: university of notre dame press: 15. 2. hauerwas, stanley. 2007. the state of the university: academic knowledges and the knowledge of god. malden, ma: blackwell: 26–27. 3. milbank, john. 2006. theology and social theory: beyond secular reason. second edition. malden, ma: blackwell: 327–381. 4. macintyre, alasdair. 1998. “an interview with giovanna borradori.” the macintyre reader. ed. kelvin knight. cambridge: blackwell: 265–66. 5. macintyre, alasdair. 2007. after virtue. third edition. notre dame, in: university of notre dame press: 228. 6. macintyre, alasdair. 1988. whose justice? which rationality? notre dame, in: university of notre dame press: 385–386. 7. macintyre, alasdair. 2009. god, philosophy, universities: a selective history of the catholic philosophical tradition. plymouth, uk: rowman & littlefield: 148. 8. macintyre, alasdair. 1990. three rival versions of moral enquiry: encylopaedia, genealogy and tradition. notre dame, in: university of notre dame press: 234. 9. macintyre, alasdair. 2001. 10–11. 10. macintyre, alasdair. 1987. “the idea of an educated public.” education and values: the richard peters lectures. ed. graham haydon. london: university of london institute of education: 17. [expositions 6.2 (2012) 58-60] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 searching for authority richard hertz western university the discourse around english departments stresses critical thinking and interpretation, new media, inter-disciplinarity and innovative pedagogies. but the future of the english department is, in a very real way, the men and women english departments around the country will hire over the next few months. candidates are asked to specialize in a time period, a geographical location, and specific kinds of texts. just as importantly, they share an approach to intellectual activity. we specialize in geographical regions because english literature is, still, mostly identified as british and american literature. this makes sense inasmuch as nobody can read everything. but we have to remember, too, that the study of literature has often been tied to nationalist or patriotic ends: consider the european search for national epics in the nineteenth century and america’s search for the great american novel in the twentieth. and we specialize in time periods for the same reason: nobody can read everything, and english departments should be able to teach their students, at a minimum, the history of english language literature from chaucer to toni morrison. but in both time period and geographical location, the specialization seems to be without end rather than without cause. we do need to focus on one time period for the purposes of teaching graduate students; on the other hand, teachers of contemporary literature should have the skill set needed to teach all literature to undergraduates, and to notice interesting and research-worthy details in all texts. the specialization we see now — where, for instance, a candidate for twentieth-century american jobs can apply for early modernist, mid-century, post-war, and post-1969 positions — distorts both our reading and our teaching. the literature of the eighteenth century, in particular, suffers from this: although its poets, novelists, and essayists have much to teach us about our world and our literature, rigid specialization means that it is rarely taught, trapped between the popular fields of renaissance and romantic literature, to which it provides a genuine, fascinating, and border-line unknown alternative. similarly, geographical restriction distorts our understanding of english and american authors: faulkner is the most american of writers, but even he claimed joyce, mann, cervantes, dostoevsky, and tolstoy as his most important influences. the focus on texts written by minorities is far more justifiable. the expansion of the canon is one of recent english scholarship’s most important achievements; rare indeed is the syllabus without texts by previously under-represented groups. but the method we seem to have chosen for this reformation is puzzling. scholars are now asked to specialize in literatures by minorities, which leads to new forms of exclusion. 59 hertz ghettoization can be a progressive moment: if a group has had no space, providing a space specifically for that group is important. but it is a step. as an end point, it encourages us to compartmentalize literature even more. we can keep the differently colored or differently gendered separate in our minds and studies, save for a token latina on the 101 syllabus. a stranger version of the specific kind of text specialization comes in the proliferation of jobs for specialists in poetry and drama. sociologically, this makes sense, because poetry and drama have lost so much of their influence over the last forty years. but it is simply not possible to study literature before about 1980 — and in most languages other than english, not possible at all — without reading a range of poetry and drama alongside prose. to return to the eighteenth century, swift’s greatest achievements straddle the almost-but-not-quite novel, lyric, and satirical prose and poetry. more recently, it’s hard to understand pound or beckett without joyce; hard to understand much postmodern prose without the modernist poets. many professors of ‘fiction’ are simply unaware of the state of poetry in america, and the professors of poetry — often, of course, poets — are shut off from much of the most important research and teaching in prose. but the most worrying aspect of the department’s future comes in our common understanding of intellectual activity. in short, our theoretical approaches are chosen not due to their practical results (i.e., they do not help us better to understand texts or world). they are fuelled by a crisis of confidence. like all institutions, the english department needs authority and legitimacy in order to fulfill its tasks. in the past, particularly thanks to the gi bill, critics took on the mantle of cultural arbiter or defenders of the literary tradition. this was tied in with the parochialism discussed above, and, in the sixties and seventies, critics and theorists quite rightly started to question this authority. one welcome outcome was the expansion of the canon. one side-effect was that the old authority and legitimacy of the english department was, bit by bit, demolished. in its place we set the authority of critique, and ran through structuralism, post-structuralism, neo-marxism, feminism, gay rights, antiracism, and new historicism all in the space of one structuralist’s lifetime. the study of english, which had previously been seen as one of the valuable privileges of a liberal democratic society, was revealed, too often accurately, to be an ideological prop for a soidisant liberal democratic society. the study of theory, on the other hand, became a weapon in the fight against society. but why should an english department be dedicated to the study of one very small sub-field of philosophy? and can we justify the existence of such a department? clearly not. hence a crisis of confidence: how to legitimize the existence of the english department? from what authority do we speak? now consider the most recent boom industries in literary study. evolutionary criticism accepts the claim that scientific method — an explicitly non-hermeneutic approach to study — can inform us about things that, we previously thought, require hermeneutic approaches. area studies has exploded, expanding and splintering, to continue the searching for authority 60 compartmentalization of literature, without any sense that that process itself might be harmful. digital humanities, when used as a battle-cry, should give anyone who’s read the benjamin/adorno debate on film a heart attack. why are these three trends — all much desired specializations, and not only in english departments — so prominent in the humanities? because they are all ways to claim authority as scholars. the intersection between science and literature makes it possible for us to claim that we are producing socially valuable knowledge: science is, as we all know, the source of all knowledge. area studies allows us to claim authority as liberal democrats, continuing the fight for canon expansion, albeit with ever diminishing returns (and ever greater ghettoization: not only is literature in spanish cut off from literature in english, literature in spanish by chicanos is cut off from literature in english by puertorican-americans and so on). transatlantic studies gives the appearance of interdisciplinarity and historical importance, but doesn’t require any genuine challenge to the department’s parochialism. digital humanities can be easily explained to boosters, politicians and administrators — it prepares students for life in a digital age. by definition it requires innovative (for which read, far too often, ‘cheaper’) teaching methods and a focus on new media, which are both fiscally rewarding buzzwords. thus we can legitimize our highly privileged positions in society: students are helped by english departments to become scientifically informed, high-functioning global digital citizens in our ever-increasingly diverse and media saturated world. what we do not do, it appears, is read widely or with depth. literature as an object of value fell between the cracks of critique and self-preservation. i like to think that what professors really want, really will be doing in the future, is reading sappho or césaire aloud to freshman. i like to think that, perhaps, all this isn’t our fault: isn’t the university to blame, with its bureaucracy requiring more and more money and time from its students, and, therefore, more and more utilitarianism from its faculty? isn’t the government little better, politicians having newly defined ‘citizen’ and ‘successful graduate’ both as ‘productive employee’? certainly. but for all that, the future of the english department looks grim indeed if not even we are willing to say, simply, that the department’s function is the teaching and reading of literature from around the world, in all its genres and modes, from ancient prayer to youtube, and that we do this in order to preserve what is worth preserving, and, crucially, to criticize that which is not. microsoft word cornell interview-final [expositions 7.2 (2013) 41–51] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376   interview: drucilla cornell, rutgers university heather coletti immaculata university drucilla cornell is a professor of political science, women’s studies, and comparative literature at rutgers university. she has taught previously at the benjamin n. cardozo school of law in new york city and the rutgers school of law in newark. a major voice in the world of feminist legal and ethical theory, she is perhaps best known as one of the organizers of the conference on deconstruction and the law at cardozo, resulting in the landmark collection deconstruction and the possibility of justice (1992)1. as this interview indicates, her work has taken a new direction with her discovery of ubuntu, a system of relational ethics practiced in south africa. i spoke with dr. cornell about ubuntu and other matters in may of 2013. below is a transcript of that conversation. coletti: the question i would just start with – and you can go in any direction you want with this – is, why south africa? cornell: i think that’s a really good question. i’m not sure that i can answer it except by being rather personal. i went to south africa in 2001. i had been getting invitations as an academic since the election of nelson mandela. people were interested in the imaginary domain, and how to think about gay and lesbian rights, and “multicultural rights,” to use a commonplace phrase. i was invited to give some named lectures at the university of stellenbosch, and to give some lectures in the western cape of south africa, and at the witwatersrand university in johannesburg. it’s after 1989, the berlin wall has fallen, the mood which affects the academy in the united states – which continues – is post-revolutionary, post-marxism, and i am neither a postrevolutionary nor a post-marxist, because i don’t think there’s any way to be post-marxist, or post-revolutionary. and why don’t i? because i think that the devastation of the problems that the species is facing are primarily the result of living under a capitalist system. and that would go for all of what we call nature. that we are destroying the earth and have the capacity to do it is unquestionable. nor am i someone who says, “well, we’re just a bad parasite; let the earth correct itself and throw us off.” i think the death of billions of people and most of the animals with us would be not the solution to this problem. the end of capitalism, however, is, and we have to try to figure out how to end it. interview: drucilla cornell 42   so i went to south africa at a time when mandela was released from prison and stated he was still committed to socialism. and of course he moved way away from that position, and there are a number of wonderful books on this. for example by patrick bond, called elite transition,2 and sampie terreblanche’s inequality in south africa.3 but there was something in south africa, and it’s still there, and that is revolutionary hope. people in south africa have lived through one revolution and they are still alive. so the idea that we’re post-revolutionary, the la-dee-dah, sophisticated cynicism of the united states – although you certainly have it, particularly among white academics – it is not, if you want to use the more heidegger and philosophical concept, the “mood” [of south africa]. and i was swept up, if you will, in being in a place where everybody talked about socialism: what it was, what it might mean, and we’re going to need a second revolution. they were leading these incredible campaigns, like the treatment action campaign and the shack-dwellers’ movements. so i decided that i wanted to come back, but differently, and at the time i was making this decision, the university of stellenbosch set up the stellenbosch institute for advanced study, and they asked me if i wanted to be one of the founding fellows. i said, “great, but i want to do something about south africa.” and so i went up to khayamandi to attend some high school classes, and decided i would do something on ubuntu. you might look at a book by jean genet called prisoner of love.4 he spent years of his life living in palestine. it’s the closest i can describe is to how i was completely drawn in to the struggle to try to think through what the substantive revolution in south africa. it was not a conventional, procedural revolution. it was what’s called a substantive revolution. that doesn’t mean there wasn’t an armed struggle; there was. it just means that, basically, the ruling party voted itself legally out of power; and, secondly, that at the time of the negotiations, the laws that were in existence were not wiped off the books. everybody who was in the government wasn’t fired, so it was a different form of transition. [south africa is] probably the only country in the world that’s had this kind of transition. so in a certain way i think i felt drawn to do what i could for the south african revolution. that’s the honest answer. coletti: did you go with a particular research agenda or a set of interests for the work that you knew you wanted to do there? and did you end up following an expected path with that research or with that work, or did it end up morphing into something that took on its own life that surprised you when you look back? cornell: at the time i began the work i didn’t know anything about ubuntu, except from what i learned from attending a high school class. it was very controversial; i knew that. and it was used all the time by the different political groups in south africa, both on the right and on the left. i didn’t speak xhosa; later, i would spend years trying to learn it. so i just came up with a proposal, and stellenbosch gave me a very small stipend for myself and my daughter. i decided that we would do research into the role of indigenous values, ideals, and rituals in the struggle 43 colletti   itself and for the transformation of the new dispensation, though i had none of the tools really to do any of that. so i went to south africa in the summer of 2003 and there frankly wasn’t much interest, if any, in this project amongst the white academics who i approached. there was great cynicism. now the project is very high profile and supported, so it’s in a whole different world in 2013 than it was in 2003. but it was very controversial then. i was traveling with my daughter and a young black man who was my daughter’s math tutor at the time – a family friend, basically. we went to the mug and bean, a coffee chain in south africa; i was feeling pretty discouraged because i couldn’t generate any interest. and these three young women who lived in khayamandi, which is the township right outside of stellenbosch, came up and said they know a lot about ubuntu. and they could set me up in khayamandi to do interviews about ubuntu. so i went with it. coletti: can you describe for people who might not be familiar with the term, what is ubuntu? does it have a special meaning? why did you pick it as the title of your project? cornell: ubuntu is hard to define. it’s a relational ethic of obligation which begins at birth, through the ritual of the burial of the umbilical cord. so indigenous values and indigenous rituals are completely integrated. and why does it begin there? because the burial of the umbilical cord is when you technically, ritually, begin your own process of individuation from the mother. so it’s both a ceremony to celebrate the mother’s labor and to recognize that you are now separated from her, in a different way than you were in her womb. it’s a worldview, almost. it’s an ethical worldview which understands human beings to be completely connected to one another. and there are ethical obligations that we inherit at birth that are not what you would call reciprocal-to-rights obligations. these obligations go way beyond what we think of as the obligations in rights. so, for instance, if you wanted to give a legal example: in living customary law, there’s a very hefty duty to rescue another person. in anglo-american law, and roman-dutch law, there is no duty to rescue, unless it’s an immediate family member. but to walk by somebody who’s drowning and not save them would be to condemn yourself to complete marginalization in the community under ubuntu. so the idea of individualism is completely rejected by ubuntu, but not individuation. and individuation is always a relational project. there’s no individual who becomes him or herself without community support, and the rituals are both a reminder of and a provision for a support system so that the people can make the transitions from one stage to another in their lives. coletti: this sounds very similar to care ethics, but the word that i feel might be keeping these two theories separate is the word “obligation.” cornell: care ethics is an anglo-american concept. i think we need to be wary of making those kinds of comparisons because the parameters of anglo-american political philosophy are care versus justice, with the other side of the care argument are people like john rawls who supposedly defends justice over care. so your question is very much within a particular anglointerview: drucilla cornell 44   american context. since ubuntu is all about justice, it’s all about what justice demands, which is why ubuntu underwrites dignity for a lot of the people who appeal to it. so ubuntu should not be framed as care versus justice; instead, ubuntu is a way in which justice is conceived. what you owe to the community and what you are owed back is constantly thought through but it’s not really captured by the care-justice debate. one thing i learned immediately in this work is, don’t translate into a very particularized debate because the terms may be so different. in fact, ubuntu ethics captures justice and care in a way that would be important for people in that debate because it might be a richer way to think about what they’re trying to get at. coletti: that’s why this sounds so interesting to me because it always frustrated me when i was in graduate school how in conversations about care ethics i felt that if i tried to put one foot in each camp, care and justice, i would immediately be shot down because, “oh, you can’t do that, this is an either-or discussion.” cornell: i think the posing of either-ors in this way blocks thinking. i have spent my entire life avoiding either-ors. it’s foundational for the way i think. so i also would have had one foot in both camps. to a certain extent, somebody like seyla benhabib tried to do that in a lot of her work about the particular and generalized other. but even there, it doesn’t capture what ubuntu is about because it’s not like there’s a particular other that you owe something to. [in ubuntu,] you are obligated to every human being to rescue them, end of discussion. so in a certain sense, there are obligations based on something like the recognition of human being-ness that goes way beyond whether you’re zulu or you’re xhosa. so it’s seen at the level of the human in a particular way. it’s universalizable in a sense, but it’s also very particular. that’s one thing that i’ve thing that i’ve always found frustrating in the u.s. academy: the debates are so narrow. it’s among a hundred people who keep debating each other and attacking each other and changing their minds and saying, “he did this,” or “he did that,” and, as you said, how can you say, “it’s either care or it’s justice.” already that has to be a mistake. coletti: if you are in a professional academic setting, say, if you go to a conference and you have a conversation with other academics and you’re talking about this ethical worldview – what, typically, when you’re talking to people who aren’t familiar with this, what is the reaction that they tend to give you? “wait a minute, obligated to every human being? that’s ridiculous! that’s impossible!” is that a reaction that you get very often, because when i talk about care ethics with other people, that’s the reaction that i get from them. so i wonder if you face a similar problem. cornell: well, yes and no, because i work a lot in south africa. so certainly the project has undergone both research into and advocacy for respect for indigenous ideals and rituals. so in a sense the whole point of the project is to not just talk to academics, but also to talk to people who are in parliament, or in the courts, and also talk to counter-hegemonic movements like the shackdwellers. in the shack-dwellers movement, a concept of revolutionary ubuntu is used, which has 45 colletti   now spread through the whole umbrella organization of mass movements which they helped to form. when i talk to people in the shack-dwellers movement, they don’t ask, “well, what is this obligation?” since they’re part of the struggle for the meaning and significance of indigenous ideas in a revolutionary context. in this way it’s a contextualized universal. there’s a xhosa word, and there’s a similar word in zulu, “serati,” which means that people actually have an energy force between them. this is actually very accepted in neuroscience. i hate to use these machine words, but the brain is actually viewed like an electric factory: it’s sending electronic impulses throughout your body all the time. chinese acupuncture understood this 5,000 years ago, so it’s nothing new. those electric impulses that go through your spine basically are the commands that are constantly being given out, such as, “raise your hand.” all the things we do are basically energy impulses. if that’s the case – and einstein said telepathy is clearly possible – you don’t read somebody’s mind; you’re reading somebody but the mind is not something separate from the body or embodied in one individual. you’re in a field with others and you are sensing that field. and african philosophy has understood that. we didn’t need neuroscience to teach them that, but it’s good for those who are looking at the science now. serati gets at that. it’s about this idea that we’re actually in a force field. so if you and i were sitting in a restaurant, and somebody hit somebody else in the back of the restaurant and everybody just sat there, the entire energy field that connects us would be affected. there was a murder right outside my apartment the other night and most people ran towards the victim which is a sign of understanding that at the level of what i’m calling the “electrical energy” that exists between people. and what’s interesting is that now that’s what neuroscience is coming to. neuroscience isn’t against agency; it doesn’t say that the brain is the soul or the mind because of all of this electrical nerve processing that’s going on constantly. so, for example, my daughter was buying a cookie around the block [during the murder] and she said, “everything changed.” and she didn’t even know what had happened, because people are sending out electrical impulses, a panic, an “oh my god, i have to do something,” all that is being signaled before a word gets spoken. this means that when someone says, “so what is this obligation to every human being? you’re not in physical contact with every human being!” they are not noticing their daily contact with all sorts of human beings, and that is the point, you have to notice. so if you walk by someone who is begging and you don’t give money, and you don’t say anything, then you have not noticed that there is another human being who is suffering and that this will affect every other relationship around you, not just the person who didn’t get the money. there’s a wonderful book coming out in fordham press by a very good friend of mine, carrol clarkson, which describes this notion of serati.5 in south africa, second by second you are asked to give money or buy this magazine called the big issue, and you’re constantly bombarded with “can you help? can you help? can you help? can you help?” and every time you don’t help, that’s a decision that you’ve made but it’s also part of what i’m calling this electrical field which is captured in african xhosa philosophy with the word “serati.” interview: drucilla cornell 46   coletti: listening to you talk about this, i’m reminded of the work of dr. jill bolte taylor. she wrote a book called my stroke of insight6 and she describes in deep detail what it was like to go through a major, debilitating stroke. for many weeks, perhaps many months, the only functioning portion of her brain, i believe, was the right side of her brain because the left side of her brain had been severely traumatized. she found that as she recovered and could do more for herself, she had to inform people who were spending time around her that they were responsible for the energy they brought to her room. because when people came and went – and i’m trying to think of a way to connect it very directly with what you were just offering me – that the energy that they came and went with, it would either replenish her or it would suck her dry. and she couldn’t figure out a way to convey to people that this mattered and it was real. cornell: i would love to read this because that is very much to the point. what you do is always part of the environment you’re in. i was just at an academic conference where somebody was speaking about how everything is hopeless and revolution is impossible, and you could just see the crowd sinking. many just got up and left, and it wasn’t just [because of] the words. see, that’s the whole serati point. it’s about the whole energy that’s being put out into the world. coletti: this is fascinating to me and i’ve done a lot of reading – not with ubuntu ethics, but very much aligned with everything that you’re discussing right now – and many times i’ve wanted to talk about this with people or just see what they think, and i just know based on certain professional experiences that i’ve had that i think i might get laughed out of a room if i try to show how philosophy is relevant to, for example, jill bolte taylor’s work. and thus i’ve been very quiet about it. i guess this is a question about courage. how do you just go out there and describe these things to people and not care if their reaction happens to be, “i don’t know, i think that sounds ridiculous.” what do you do? cornell: ubuntu is seen as completely ridiculous by white academics in south africa. my ubuntu project was laughed out of the room both in the united states and in south africa. what you do is persist. if you think that you are on to something that is important, you persist and you re-educate yourself. i have an example of a famous academic in the united states saying to a constitutional judge in south africa, “well, i really admire the work of the ubuntu project, but ubuntu can never be a constitutional principle.” and the judge said, “the project already won its battle. ubuntu has been re-constitutionalized. it’s now used constantly.” so the question of whether or not ubuntu can be a constitutional principle is moot, obviously, because it has become one. and most of the justices on the constitutional court have taken it as such. i think one organization you should look into is the caribbean philosophical association. jane gordon is now the president, and there is a woman as the vice-president as well. and these ideas can actually be discussed there. coletti: yes, that’s been my experience, too. 47 colletti   cornell: i am hoping that we will build a truly comparative perspective that doesn’t just begin with the european canon and then move to include others. coletti: thinking of this discussion we’ve been having about how you very deeply perceive how people can change, for better or worse, the connection, the energy that exists between people… do you enjoy teaching, when you do teach, and if so, why? cornell: yes, i enjoy teaching because i think mentoring young people reflects our obligations to pass on the mantle of critical theory. coletti: how does this impact how you choose to lead a classroom? cornell: i’m sure my idea of mentoring has a huge impact on it, as does my commitment to alternative, democratic, pedagogical ways of approaching students in the classroom. the ubuntu project is a research project, but it is not only that, at least in a conventional sense. i’ve organized something called the ubuntu township project. it took up where we did interviews in the townships. the people from the project who lived in the township took responsibility for all the interviews. if you view things this way, from the perspective of serati, then the most important thing you can do in a classroom is create a positive energy, if you want to put it [that way], and a support system that allows people to do their best work, which goes exactly against the cynical idea that the way people learn to work in this world is they have to get the shit kicked out of them. coletti: yes, i’ve never understood that either. i think it’s so disturbing, to some extent. cornell: i think it’s very disturbing, too. it was very present at the time when i was a law professor. i just ignored it. i ignored it and i got a lot of shit for it! so when i tell you to just ignore things, i’m not doing it lightly, because you’re going to take a lot of knocks because we’re supposed to do things a certain way and march to a certain drum. being an academic is a very confining lifestyle unless you find homes like the caribbean philosophical association which allow you to be much, much more daring than in other arenas of academic life. coletti: do you find that you very often feel yourself gravitating toward that home on some days? i like how you used the word “home.” that idea of – you’re out there, you’re getting your work done, you’re encountering people who are open to your ideas, people who are not open to your ideas – how often do you find yourself thinking, “i have to gravitate towards my academic home, so to speak, for an escape”? cornell: not very often. coletti: well, that’s good. cornell: i have lived a very independent life. now, i’ve also taken a lot of knocks for it. on the other hand, i’m the most senior woman professor in my department, and i’m the highest paid interview: drucilla cornell 48   woman in my department by far, so i’ve taken a lot of knocks but i’ve gotten up again. i think the biggest price that i’ve probably paid, to be honest, is that i do feel isolated a lot of the time. but over the years i have developed some former students, and have met some mentors, people like john and jean comaroff, so i have developed a kind of academic community that i rely on very much to guide me when i do something like move to south africa and start doing something completely new. because i know that i need that community to stay grounded. the other thing is that i’ve also had a life as a playwright. i was a law professor so i could work as a lawyer. i’ve never been a hundred percent in the academy at any time in my life. in the ubuntu project i’ve produced a documentary film and i’m now working on a fiction film project. so the other way i’ve kept everything going is i’ve kind of kept a lot of different projects going at once, and i found that necessary for me. coletti: can you tell me a little bit about your plays? how did you become interested in writing plays? if someone charged me with that task, i can’t imagine accomplishing it let alone doing it in a way that i’d be pleased with. how did you come to have this interest? does it cross over with your academic work or do you use it as an escape to take a break from your academic work? cornell: i think it’s kind of the reverse. i never intended to be an academic. i intended to be a playwright or a poet, which is what i first published in. and perhaps after that, if i needed a day job and i went to law school, i would do labor law or something like that. i was a union organizer. i was a hardcore activist in my teens and twenties. i joined marxist-leninist groups and i thought that my life was going to be a life as a communist, which is a different life than the life of an academic. even if there wasn’t going to be a revolution in my lifetime, i would find a way to live a kind of revolutionary life by being in some kind of organization and continuing to work in factories and be a union organizer. i lost a huge battle with the teamsters union. i was organizing for united electrical workers. when i lost that battle i had to do a re-evaluation of where i was in a lot of aspects of my life. so i took some classes in advanced math and almost pursued a ph.d. in mathematics. i’ve always had this interest in math and science. i got into a great program – this was in 1977 – and i just chickened out. and then i went to law school but i didn’t intend to be an academic. i intended to be some kind of left-wing playwright and i was dreaming dreams of bertolt brecht and i continue to see my work as, mainly, that of transforming the world. so then i went to law school at a time when critical legal studies was really happening and i ended up getting a job as a professor. it was kind of happenstance if you want to put it that way. coletti: did you like it? cornell: i’m asked that question a lot by younger people. “like” is, maybe, too strong a word. i love teaching and i love reading and i love ideas, let’s put it that way. it has been an incredible day job. i’m a single mother; i have a daughter. i don’t think i could have raised her on my own 49 colletti   with my initial idea of being a part-time labor lawyer and a poet or a playwright, because, though i’ve had a number of produced plays, i certainly never made any money off them. so it has provided me with a very decent day job. are there things i don’t like about it? yes. i don’t like the way things seem to turn in on each other constantly, in a way that i find very unproductive. coletti: what do you mean by “turning in”? cornell: the way that debates get defined. like, you gave the example of the care-justice debate. so it’s turning in on itself, without really questioning, “why are we using these terms, exactly? what do these terms tell us? how do they help us? are there ways that they don’t help us? do we need to think in different terms?” coletti: this is a very selfish question but i’m going to ask it anyway. my sister just graduated from law school last friday. what advice – if you could give advice to anybody graduating from law school in 2013 – what would you hope that they would listen to if you gave them one message? cornell: my god-daughter just graduated from law school. coletti: congratulations! cornell: so i’ve been obsessing on this question. she wants to do work with refugees. very important, very far-reaching work, and it’s very difficult to get a job, and she’ll always be very poorly paid. in my time, when i graduated from law school, we had all these ford foundation public interest law firms which paid fairly well and there’s still one or two left, but very few left, so it’s very, very, very competitive to get in a public interest job. not impossible. i really want my god-daughter to land on her feet and get a good job. the other problem, of course, as you know, is the problem with loans. and people come out of law school heavily indebted. there’s still loan forgiveness for people who go into a certain kind of work, and that’s all for the good. if you’re a political activist and you’ve graduated from law school, it’s going to be difficult but don’t give up on the idea that there’s something that can be done, for you to get a job that furthers the politics that you want to practice. coletti: i can’t even imagine the road that all of these graduates have ahead of them. well, i guess in other fields it’s just as challenging, too. i know you have a special affinity for the law since you also have a j.d. cornell: yeah, absolutely. and there were more opportunities when i got out of law school. like i said, i kind of fell into being a law professor because critical legal studies had opened up a space to do critical theory. i’m not sure i would ever be hired as a law professor now. academic politics shift and change; there’s more space sometimes and less space other times. interview: drucilla cornell 50   coletti: we can wrap up with this. one of the other things i’m wondering is: where do you hope to go next? you described your current research and what you’re working on. is there a certain trajectory or a certain direction you want to move in with your current research? cornell: i’m wrapping up my work in south africa with a number of books: the dignity jurisprudence of the constitutional court of south africa, which is appearing in two volumes; my own book, law and revolution: ubuntu dignity and constitutional transformation; and, a third book entitled albie sachs and the transformation of south africa: from revolutionary activist to constitutional justice which is coming out from myself, albie sachs, and karin vanmarle. so now i’m going to undertake a very big book on law – understood in a very broad way – and revolution. ideas of law and revolution got de-coupled under notions of the dictatorship of the proletariat; i am interested in what this de-coupling meant for islamic revolutionary thought, for example. i taught a class on islam in africa and spent the last ten months trying to educate myself about islam in the 20th century. i am teaching some of that work at birkbeck for the critical theory summer school. so that’s my next big project. i’m also probably going to write a review of lee smolin’s book on time reborn, which is a book about physics and time, and some of this work i’ve been doing on reading neuroscience to challenge, again, some of the negative, quote-unquote, thinking that comes out of some of that work. because it’s not coming out of neuroscience; it’s coming out of other places. i’m actually going to write something i’ve been working for a couple of years on challenging alain badiou’s math in set theory and i want to take that up now through some of lee’s work in physics to talk about the physical universe. if anything, my work takes us away from some of the kinds of pessimism that dominate certain members in the u.s. academy. my work is consistently about revolution and transformation. coletti: you’re saying all this to a girl who cried her way through calculus and physics many years ago, so all of this is very impressive to me because i can’t imagine revisiting those topics after my personal track record with them. cornell: this is probably a kind of important return for me personally because i was in a group on philosophy and science and i absolutely love math, and i felt that there was something really the matter with badiou’s whole notion in being and event, his mathematicized platonic notion of the multiplicity of being. so i went back and really sat down again with cantor, and then worked with some great mathematicians and physicists like lee. again, having intellectual comrades i trust is how i’ve avoided isolation. i have great comrades and friends in the academy, in many different fields, who don’t ask the easy questions and go against hegemonic trends. coletti: very helpful alliances and friendships. cornell: yes, it keeps my energy up. coletti: i think it’s so interesting how you described how you have your hands in several things at once. for someone like me it’s fascinating and amazing to see how you tie them all together in 51 colletti   a way that is not just relevant for you personally but because of the connection you draw between these various projects. it can speak to more people on a more influential level. cornell: it’s very interesting. in 1995 when i wrote the imaginary domain,7 i began this practice of reading everything i wrote out loud. i had a great editor named maureen macgrogan who always did that with me and she’s certainly part of my intellectual community. i tried as hard as i could to get away from jargon or this internal language that is being generated by a narrow academic debate. not easy to do, by the way. coletti: i would think so. i’m so glad to hear you say that, that you insist on reading your own work out loud, because i am constantly telling my students to do that and i don’t think that many of them do, despite my insistence. but it makes such a difference in how you end up putting your words on the page. many people don’t believe me when i tell them that. cornell: it does, it makes a huge difference. it’s very, very important. coletti: i can’t thank you enough for talking with me today. cornell: it’s great to talk to you, too. and i also go to the cpa and i really think organizations like that are so important to keeping your spirits up and your mind open. notes 1. cornell, drucilla, michel rosenfeld, and david gray carlson, eds. 1992. deconstruction and the possibility of justice. new york: routledge. 2. bond, patrick. 2000. the elite transition: from apartheid to neoliberalism in south africa. london: pluto press. 3. terreblanche, sampie. 2002. a history of inequality in south africa, 1652–2002. scottsville: university of kwazulu-natal press. 4. genet, jean. 2003. prisoner of love. trans. barbara bray. new york: new york review books. 5. clarkson, carrol. 2013. drawing the line: toward an aesthetics of transitional justice. new york: fordham university press. 6. taylor, jill bolte. 2008. my stroke of insight: a brain scientist’s personal journey. new york: viking. 7. cornell, drucilla. 1995. the imaginary domain: abortion, pornography, and sexual harassment. new york: routledge. [expositions 7.1 (2013) 64–71] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 why teach moral development? d. kay johnston colgate university i will first say that i do not teach philosophy or ethics as defined by philosophers. i work with students in the interdisciplinary area of educational studies. it is a major at colgate and, while we offer a very small number of students certification in elementary or secondary education, our faculty also look at education with a broad view and our majors study education from foundational areas of psychology, philosophy, history, policy, and cultural studies. it is in this department that i offer a course titled moral development and education, and it is in this context that i respond to the question guiding this forum. in the introduction to this forum, bernard prusak asks, is virtue teachable? he thinks about that and compares learning virtue to learning language. “[n]ot only do language and virtue not develop simply naturally; they are also not picked up first and foremost through formal instruction, which is to say in the classroom. instead, they develop through what we, in english, somewhat infelicitously call habit – repeated doings, in give-and-take with others of our kind, that call on and give shape to our natural powers and interest.” he then goes on to ask: “crudely put, what good are lectures and what good is aristotle’s book as it has come down to us?” (prusak 2013, 16). that is a useful question, but i want to distinguish two aspects of classroom instruction and argue that reasoning about moral issues can be taught in a classroom, although perhaps not in lectures. the two aspects of a classroom that i want to distinguish are curriculum and pedagogy. curriculum is the material that we teach in our classrooms. if it is delivered to students in a lecture format, it cannot teach virtue or moral reasoning. but the way we teach – our pedagogy – can provide instruction in this area. before discussing why this distinction is important, i want to be clear on what i mean by “moral.” we must understand what is meant by the word in order to decide whether teaching it at the college level is worth doing; it does not have only one meaning. i often ask my students to define moral, and they provide multiple definitions. while the answers are varied, they do cluster around certain themes. students say that morality consists of rules that help us know how to make decisions, or ideas about fairness, or how to be a good person. when i use the word “morality,” i mean to call into question ways in which we make decisions about how to treat one another. by moral, i mean treating others with care – being responsible for the consequences of how we deal with others. i attempt to make my class a laboratory for thinking about this. i began to become interested in how we think of each other in relationships when i was confronted with a cheating incident in a class (see johnston 1991). the details of this have been written elsewhere, but the lesson i learned was that students in a class need to learn to think of themselves in relationship to one another. they need to learn to pay 65 johnston what iris murdoch, borrowing from simone weil, calls “just attention” (murdoch 1970). students need to learn to think about this in addition to thinking about the content of what is taught and about their relationship with their professors. this means that students have multiple responsibilities in their classes. i also want to call into question who is considered an “other.” i have been influenced by maxine greene’s ideas about unknown others (greene 1988), and have written about her ideas elsewhere (johnston 1996). for the purposes of this paper, however, i summarize her ideas by saying that she wants us to think about people in the world who are not personally known to us. in other words, we are responsible morally not only for how we treat just those we know, but we must think about the consequences of our actions as those consequences ripple out into the world beyond our known world. making these responsibilities explicit is crucial to teach in classes called ethics or in classes called moral development. we must learn that we are not educated merely in order to do better than everyone else in a class, although that is what education can look like in this age of highstakes testing. we need to learn that education is as much a collective as an individual endeavor, and we need to learn how to engage in the collective endeavor in classes designed to teach that. thus, when i teach moral development and education, i want my students to examine their behavior as they think about what is at stake for themselves and those with whom they are in relationship, as well as for those whose lives are not familiar to them. i want them to question what they mean by relationship and by being responsible in relationship. this is what i attempt to do in my pedagogy. i agree with kohlberg that we cannot expect our students to think as we do and that we should not set ourselves up as role models (kohlberg 1981, 406–407). he calls these false expectations for educators, and i think they are. i, however, believe that development of both the intellect and the person should be the aim of education (see for example kohlberg and mayer 1972, and johnston and ross 2007). what, then, do i mean when i ask my students to examine how they think of themselves in relationships? how does that connect to pedagogy, and what does it all finally have to do with the question, “is virtue teachable?” the class before i attempt to answer those questions, i want to describe briefly how i teach moral development and why i teach the class in that way. i will also connect my ideas about this single class to ideas about why teaching a class like this is important – why, in fact, teaching students to think of themselves as moral actors is an important responsibility of colleges. when i began to teach moral development, i had recently worked with carol gilligan in graduate school. i was hired at colgate university, and one of the courses i was charged with teaching was moral development and education. i first taught this course as a kind of contest between competing claims about what morality was. in the mid–1980s when i began teaching this way, the literature in moral development was structured in this way also. was kohlberg why teach moral development? 66 right? were there really gender differences? can care be a moral orientation? were gilligan’s ideas essentialist? in graduate school, i did a fable study with adolescents in which i demonstrated that the ideas of a justice orientation and a care orientation were known to and evaluated by both males and females. this was not the only research to demonstrate this (see for example gilligan and attanucci 1988 and ward 1988), but in my study i asked an important question: is there another way to see the problem? i asked this question after presenting each interviewee with a moral dilemma embedded in a fable which the interviewee initially solved. after the initial solution, i asked the interviewees for other solutions. all but one person interviewed were able to think about these moral dilemmas using both the care and justice orientation. thus, it became clear that moral reasoners had at least two ways to think about moral dilemmas. kohlberg’s initial sample consisted only of men, and he used these data to develop his stage theory about how moral reasoning becomes more complex and more adequate. gilligan did not set out to interview women (see for example gilligan 2000), but because she interviewed women and took their moral considerations seriously, she identified what she called a different voice. following her work, others continued to develop the theory by talking with people whose experiences and life history were different from those who had been previously interviewed. interviews were conducted with african americans (see for example ward 2000 and siddlewalker and snarey 2004), and these findings expanded our understanding of moral reasoning in the context of specific moral dilemmas. the process of the research is detailed elsewhere and is not the focus of this paper (see gilligan, ward, and taylor 1988 and johnston 2006). what i want to emphasize here is that i changed the structure of my course to focus on how researchers learn from the past and consciously or not work together with those who have worked before them. in the process of writing this paper, i have come to understand that i began to change the emphasis of my course to thinking about how researchers are in relationship. the relationship that researchers have with each other is not only a relationship of seeking more complete answers to research questions, but is also a relationship of collaboration. rather than structure the course as an argument between two opposing views, i structured my course as a demonstration of how research builds on the past and how the research becomes more complex and complete as different people are included in the work that builds the theory. the pedagogy in addition to changing the way i present the curriculum in the course, i also began to be deliberate in my attempts to give everyone in class the opportunity and the responsibility to think aloud. i had always thought of myself as a teacher who wants to facilitate discussion in class, but now i began to think that this discussion had the potential to change behavior outside of class. thus thinking aloud about the material under consideration and listening to the ideas of other students began to become the dual focus of my teaching. it is not that i ignore or give less value and time to theory – in fact, we spend our class time discussing the theory described above. but i also insist that students build upon what they each say and not simply wait to talk or to make 67 johnston their point. this kind of teaching can be called feminist pedagogy or constructivist teaching, but the focus of it is to make the students articulate their understanding of content and of each other’s comments upon that content. why is that worth teaching? i have been teaching a long time, and i am struck by the fast pace with which we live our lives and with which my students grapple daily. one of the changes that have occurred in the time since i began teaching is the use of technology in everyone’s lives. much has been written about how technology affects us (see for example turkle 2011), and again technology is not the focus of this paper. it does, however, connect in an important way to my point about pedagogy that attempts to develop habits of reflection and listening in students. in a graduation address, eric schmidt of google told boston university graduates about how important technology is in their lives: “you’re connected to each other in ways those who came before you could never have dreamed of.” however, he also said to “turn the thing off [thing being technology] at least one hour a day to have real conversations with friends and family, to experience the world around you through your senses and not just a screen” (schmidt 2012). i was struck by schmidt’s idea. one of the ways that i think technology affects students is that instant information is always available. it is only a matter of typing in a name, an idea, or 140 characters, and we can learn a lot. we cannot, however, use these amazing tools to develop morality; this, as piaget said, is developed in relationship (piaget 1965 [1932], 136). thus it is in the context of the relationships developed in a classroom that we teach morality. we have the opportunity to insist that students take the time to be present not in a virtual moment, but in the moment in class and to listen to each other – to pay “just attention,” as murdoch put it – and try to understand others’ points of view and the reasons that they hold those points of view. this takes time and patience, which is something that my students have commented on as “different” from their daily habits. returning to the idea of habits that prusak discusses in the introduction to this forum, what i am trying to do in the classroom is to foster a habit of reflection in my students. why? in a world that is as fast paced as our world is, the time for reflection, for listening, for, in schmidt’s words “experiencing the world around us” is limited if not sometimes obliterated. yet that time to think and work through ideas is so important in even beginning to attempt to solve the problems that we face in this world. if we, like dewey, see education as life and not as mere preparation for life, then we should be educating for reflective interaction, for the habit of being reflective, and for the habit of experiencing the world around us. robert kegan has observed that modern life is so complicated that many of us are “in over our heads” when we try to deal with the experiences of our world. he is mainly concerned about the world that adults face as we try to parent, partner, work, and negotiate all the competing demands in adult life (kegan 1994, 5). i believe, however, that kegan’s analysis can be extrapolated to a suggestion that both adults and adolescents are expected to meet expectations and obligations that they are not prepared to meet. his analysis dates from almost 20 years ago, so i would suggest that, if it was true in 1994, it is even more true today. this makes it why teach moral development? 68 imperative that we work to help young people evaluate the competing demands they face and to develop a habit of thinking through those demands. as i said, i try to enact pedagogy that makes my class a laboratory for developing these habits of reflection and of listening, of learning to think through ideas from multiple perspectives, and taking responsibility for doing just that. i was curious about how my current students thought about this laboratory and how they would answer the question, what difference has this class made in the way you live your life? so recently, at the end of a class, i asked them if some of them would be willing to take a minute and write the answer to that question. their answers were illuminating to read. here are some examples quoted verbatim: this class has made me more cognizant of moral decisions in all areas of my life – from in the classroom to my personal life – to thinking about moral dilemmas in my future professional life. it has helped me when thinking about others and understanding where they might be coming from or how they are thinking about things. i think moral education helps us to realize our power and be aware of how what we do really does matter to a grander scale. it makes me think about morals in everyday life – college is where i am going [in order] to become the adult after graduation. i want to constantly be thinking morally and be a good person. classes on moral development address the notion that we, as people, are not all the same. we are able to hear and understand other’s experiences and perspectives. it teaches you to role-take peers and teachers. since this class i have been able to see that a lot of my decisions are selfish. i am also learning skills that help me reach others. this class has gotten me to actively think about being a bystander and ways to be an upstander. i believe that the way to not be a bystander is to just be more cognizant (in most cases). i became aware of how my actions, good or bad, have a moral implication on my relationship and my being/humanity. i began to reflect on moral decisions that i make on a regular day-to-day situation and see how others around me deal with dilemmas. 69 johnston i think this class has made me think about my own agency in the multiple relationships i have in life, both with myself and with others. i certainly thought about these relationships before, but i don’t think that i thought much about my own responsibility in making decisions. i found these ideas illuminating. i may not be getting my students to think through ideas about reflection and responsibility to unknown others, but they are thinking about their own agency as moral actors and their responsibility in relationships. dawn schrader wrote that students often do not see that they have a moral point of view (schrader 1999). carol gilligan wrote that talking with young people in an interview situation can help adolescents discover that they do in fact have a point of view (gilligan 1988). i believe that teaching moral reasoning and teaching students how different theorists have thought about moral reasoning connects students in these kinds of classes to not only the theorists’ ideas, but also how these theories make sense in their own lives. this connection of text to self is the connection that may allow a student to think about his or her work outside the boundary of a classroom and take ideas from the classroom into the world outside (see for example vacca et al. 2009). beyond the classroom john dewey taught us that school is connected intimately to society. at the present time, we are in danger of not seeing that schools have the potential to transform society. one might believe that achieving higher test scores will transform society, but i see absolutely no evidence for that. the potential to change society is located in the way that we behave in the world around us. teaching moral reasoning illuminates that potential for students. note that the students above see that their actions and ideas have consequences in their real life. this ability to take theory into action – praxis – is the reason to teach topics like moral reasoning or ethics. certainly it matters that students are exposed to ideas that interrogate what is moral or ethical, but it matters more that they see their own perspectives on these ideas and the perspectives that others bring to the discussion. in a recent article in academe, chad hanson argues that “[e]ducation is a social institution.” if i understand his argument, he would like us to develop a “social and cultural conception of colleges and universities” (hanson 2013, 16). he writes that “spending time in class is one of the more important elements of becoming an educated person” (hanson 2013, 17). i completely agree, but i would argue that how we spend our time in a class is important. students need to learn as the students quoted above are learning that people have different ways to think – that “difference is a marker of the human condition rather than a problem to be solved” (gilligan 1993, xviii). they learn that by listening, by paying “just attention” to the ideas of their classmates. if students can learn these habits in a class, then i think they might take this learning into the fast-moving world in which they live. in schooling america, patricia a. graham writes that schools need to develop character and wit. she writes that “wit is a more inclusive term for why teach moral development? 70 knowledge than academic achievement. character includes the secular traits of integrity, ingenuity, and hard work, both individually and collectively, that our democracy needs” (graham 2005, 253). our democracy needs the hard work that is involved in listening, in reflecting, and in taking responsibility for others. teaching ethics education and/or moral development and reasoning is therefore more than “a good idea;” it is a necessity. works cited gilligan, carol. 1982. in a different voice: psychological theory and women’s development. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. ___. 1993. “adolescent development reconsidered.” in c. gilligan, j. v. ward, and j. taylor, eds., mapping the moral domain: a contribution of women’s thinking to psychology and research, vii–xxxix. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. ___. 2000. “in a different voice―18 years later.” paper presented at colgate university, hamilton, ny. ___, and jane attanucci. 1988. “two moral orientations.” merrill palmer quarterly 34: 223–237. ___, jane v. ward and jill taylor, eds. 1988. mapping the moral domain: a contribution of women’s thinking to psychology and research. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. graham, patricia a. 2005. schooling america. oxford: oxford university press. greene, maxine. 1988. the dialectic of freedom. new york: teachers college press. hanson, chad. 2013. “the art of becoming yourself.” academe 99.1: 14–18. johnston, d. kay. 1988. “adolescents solutions to dilemmas in fables: two moral orientations – two problem solving strategies.” in c. gilligan, j. v. ward, and j. taylor, eds., mapping the moral domain: a contribution of women’s thinking to psychology and research, 49–71. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. –––. “a story of cheating: reflections on a moral dilemma.” journal of moral education 20.3: 159–171. –––. 2006. education for a caring society. new york: teachers college press. ___, and heidi ross. 2007. “teaching to higher standards: from managing to imagining the purposes of education.” in c. bjork, h. ross, and d. k. johnston, eds., taking teaching seriously, 7–10. boulder, colo.: paradigm publishers. kegan, robert. 1994. in over our heads: the mental demands of modern life. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. 71 johnston kohlberg, lawrence. 1981. “education for justice: the vocation of janusk korczak.” in l. kohlberg, ed., the philosophy of moral development, vol.1: 401–408. san francisco: harper and row. ___, with rochelle mayer. 1981. “development as the aim of education: the dewey view.” in l. kohlberg, ed., the philosophy of moral development, vol.1: 49–97. san francisco: harper and row. murdoch, iris. 1970. the sovereignty of good. boston: routledge & kegan paul. piaget, jean. 1965 [1932]. the moral judgment of the child. tr. m. gabain. new york: free press. prusak, bernard g. 2013. “ethics education: more than a good idea?” expositions: interdisciplinary studies in the humanities 7.1: 16–21. schmidt, eric. 2012. “commencement 2012 at boston university.” <http://www.bu.edu/buniverse/view/?v=bxel8120> schrader, dawn. 1999. “justice and caring: process in college students’ moral reasoning development.” in m. katz, n. noddings, and k. a. strike, eds., justice and caring: the search for common ground: 37–59. new york: teachers college press. siddle-walker, vanessa, and john snarey, eds. 2004. race-ing moral formation: african american perspectives on care and justice. new york: teachers college press. turkle, sherry. 2011. alone together. why we expect more from technology and less from each other. new york: basic books. vacca, jo anne l., et al eds. 2009. reading and learning to read. 7 th ed. boston: allyn and bacon. ward, jane v. 1988. “urban adolescents’ conceptions of violence.” in c. gilligan, j. v. ward, and j. taylor, eds. mapping the moral domain: a contribution of women’s thinking to psychology and research: 175–200. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. ___. 2000. the skin we’re in. new york: the free press. [expositions 6.1 (2012) 43–51] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 bellow’s spiritual quest gloria l. cronin brigham young university “the truth, whatever it is, is strange” –saul bellow all of his life bellow sought the “strange truth” of what might lie behind the appearances of life. his immersions in such thinking began with his mother, lescha bellow, who carefully chose hebrew teachers and charged him with memorizing the torah in the original language. by age of four he had already committed large portions of it to memory. however, the new testament was originally given to him by a missionary who visited him during a long lonely childhood stay in a montreal hospital. he was instantly enchanted by it and described himself as having fallen in love with the figure of jesus. feeling guilty about this he studied it secretly, fearing discovery by the family. this began bellow’s lifelong study of the bible. james wood, bellow’s teaching companion at boston university, reported that shortly before bellow died in april 2005, there was a very worn-out copy of the new testament on his bedside table. 1 however, the full depth of saul bellow’s lifelong immersion in hebrew and judeo-christian sacred texts has come to light with ruth wisse’s and james wood’s accounting of biblical, yiddish, jewish, and other religious references throughout his works. both have provided a careful critical testimony of bellow’s singular contribution of religion to the language of the late twentieth-century novel. wood describes bellow’s his prose as “dickensian, tolstoyan, lawrentian, conradian,” but ultimately “biblically english.” 2 he points out bellow’s run-on sentences, loose melodic compounds, repetitions, semantic parallelisms, obtrusive overflowing lyricism, vaguely antique ring, and amassing of adjectives, all of which he calls “a perfumed overflowing antique prose, all faithfully carried over from hebrew into the king james version, and down into bellow’s yiddishly inflected american works.” 3 bellow therefore wrote his works literally out of the roots of this judeo-christian tradition and brought it into deliberate comic collision with the secular world of late twentieth-century america. the zany american street language that has become his literary hallmark is not only compounded of yiddishisms, polyglot immigrant languages, and wasp speech, but also with the deliberately nuanced voice of the bible. hence bellow’s masterwork spiritual comedies read more like spiritual autobiographies in the tradition of job, st. augustine, and cervantes. out of this mix jewish scripture, yiddish culture, and the twentieth-century crisis of faith, we find threaded throughout bellow’s works his seemingly quixotic spiritual quest. this quest was motivated in part from the historical events of his time. for bellow, the human soul was trapped in a condition of nihilism and lived in an age of ideology which made events such as the holocaust possible. the projects of the enlightenment, liberalism, and humanism had bellow’s spiritual quest 44 failed to stop the mass slaughter of wars and exterminations. 4 understanding the meaning of death therefore became the key to all the puzzles posed by the various religious and philosophical systems for bellow. he lamented to ignatieff in an interview that “ignorance of death is destroying us.” 5 modernism had left metaphysics and religion, not to mention secular society, without a viable understanding of death. this attempt to understand death was also personal for bellow, as he was traumatized by the dying children he had befriended during his childhood hospitalizations. these experienced were compounded by watching, as a four-year-old, the endless black-clad funeral processions of victims of the 1919 influenza epidemic that moved beneath the bellow family’s upstairs window. finally, the death of his mother left seventeen-year-old saul to the mercy of his verbally-abusive father and unsympathetic brothers. the emotional consequences of the break-up of his family during his childhood echoes throughout his novels as his protagonists desire to recover their families and fail to do so. describing this period in “the old system” found in mosby’s memoirs, bellow writes: one after another you gave over your dying. one by one they went. you went. childhood, family, friendship, love were stifled in the grave. and these tears! when you wept them from the heart, you felt you justified something, understood something. but what did you understand? again, nothing. it was only an imitation of understanding. a promise that mankind might – might mind you – be a divine gift, comprehend why it lived. why life, why death. 6 how to understand death was the question for bellow and sparked his spiritual and imaginative convictions. as his son, adam, recalls: my father believed strongly in the soul – in its powers, its eternity, and above all its connection with loved ones. he believed that parents and children were parts of the same soul, and that we are reunited with our family after death. when he talked about this i used to listen respectfully and inwardly roll my eyes. now that he is gone, however, i finally begin to understand what he was talking about. 7 bellow’s surrogate son, the british writer martin amis, reported similar conversations to a sunday telegraph interviewer. on the subject of the afterlife he reports bellow saying: [i]t’s impossible to believe in it because there is no rational ground. but i have a persistent intuition […] call it love impulses. what i think is how agreeable it would be to see my mother and my father and my brothers again, to see my dead. […] in death we might become god’s apprentices and have the real secrets of the universe revealed to us. 8 45 cronin this habit of personal and philosophical speculation about the afterlife was a constant with bellow, who had no qualms about initiating metaphysical conversations with strangers. leon wieseltier encountered bellow at the height of his theosophical period and recalls his initial amazement that he had finally encountered a “lawrentian jew”: “the truth, whatever it is, is strange.” i can still hear saul’s voice, for a few moments absent its gaiety and wickedness, gently pronouncing those emancipating words. it was a summer afternoon in 1977. we were sunk in adirondack chairs on the grass behind the shed of a house that he was renting in vermont, and sunk also in a sympathetic discussion of owen barfield’s theories of consciousness. chopped wood was piled nearby like old folios, dry and combustible. when i met bellow he was in his theosophical enthusiasm. the legend of his worldliness went before him, obviously, not least in his all-observing, wised-up books, which proclaimed the profane charisma of common experience. since i have a happy weakness of metaphysical speculation, a cellular certainty that what we see is not all there is, i thought i detected in some of his writings signs of the old hunt for a knowledge beyond knowingness, for an understanding that is more than merely brilliant. i was not altogether surprised when our first meeting moved swiftly toward an unembarrassed conversation about spirituality. […] i had never before encountered a jewish intellectual of his generation who could say “spirituality” without choking. and as saul discoursed on the lawn, in an engineer’s cap, about “living significantly,” i celebrated my friend’s unlikely interest with incredulity. saul’s particular combination of intellectuality and vitality was not paradoxical, it was category-shattering. he was a lawrentian jew, an impossible creature. energy was, in a way, his very theme. 9 part of saul’s “cellular certainty” was that he was “god’s apprentice,” appointed to write and perform appointed spiritual tasks. to gray, white, and nemanic, bellow openly revealed his sense of karmic fate: i was brought here by my parents at the age of nine. accident? i am reluctant to speak of “my karma.” yet i do sometimes feel that i was stuck here, assigned to the place, shackled to it by one of those phantom intelligences that thomas hardy invokes his “spirits sinister and ironic.” mine would be a spirit comedic. in my late sixties i am able to share the joke with my tutelary spirit. 10 clearly at this point he had begun to better manage the problem of death and its larger metaphysical ramifications. but how did he get there? bellow’s spiritual quest 46 *** bellow’s career as a writer existed during a period which historians of philosophy refer to as the “post-positivist era” where radical skepticism was the dominant school of thought. richard rorty explains that the 1950s were marked by philosophical skepticism and a distrust of language. 11 according to these philosophers, language was socially contingent and therefore incapable of transmitting anything transcendent or universal. writers consequently would have to forgo looking for a morally responsible self or authority from the beyond. 12 to bellow’s mind, this philosophical climate undermined epistemological, linguistic, religious, and metaphysical certainty, as illustrated in his novels, dangling man (1947), the victim (1947), and seize the day (1956). however, bellow found such skepticism intolerable. rejecting these philosopher’s claims, bellow argued that literature can provide the “true impressions” of reality. as he puts it: this is the best we can do just now. it is a sort of latter-day lean-to, a hovel in which the spirit takes shelter. a novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life. it tells us that for every human being there is a diversity of existences, that the single existence is itself an illusion in part, that these many existences signify something, tend to something, fulfill something; it promises us meaning, harmony, and even justice. what conrad said was true: art attempts to find in the universe, in matter as well as in the facts of life, what is fundamental, enduring, essential. 13 ultimately, these post-positivist skeptics impelled bellow to seek other thinkers who would admit the spiritual viability of language, the existence of the human soul, and worlds beyond mere appearances. inevitably they would not be mainstream philosophical thinkers: wilhelm reich, rudolph steiner, and owen barfield. bellow deeply invested himself in the systems developed by these thinkers and their spiritual exercises, only to emerge after each phase passed as chastened, but a free agent beholden once more to no-one’s system, and eager to try other avenues. in the 1940s bellow read reich’s book, the function of orgasm, which argued that bourgeois society was so repressed that it needed to be liberated by embracing our erotic and orgiastic nature. sexual intercourse was the mystical portal towards transcendence. but after reich was arrested for fraud by the us government in 1954 and found guilty in a highly-publicized trial, bellow and others quickly distanced themselves from reich’s ideas. however, bellow was able to convert these experiences into comic material for the cynical dr. tamkin and the romantic tommy wilhelm in seize the day, and king dahfu and eugene henderson in henderson the rain king (1956). bellow’s next transcendental guru was rudolf steiner, a philosopher and head of the german theosophical society. 14 seeing steiner as a true polymath and fascinated by the fact that steiner 47 cronin had become deeply interested in the occult, bellow was influenced by steiner’s ideas as revealed in humboldt’s gift (1975) and the dean’s december (1981) where the protagonists pursue steinerian ideas until they reach an impasse. at the end of bellow’s steinerian period, his acquaintances and family all marveled how he could have tolerated for so long such odd ritual proceedings and formal liturgy, e.g., the socratic sessions, séances, and ouija boards. bellow seemed far too yiddishly pragmatic for such esoterica, and yet family members report that during this period there were steiner reading materials left open all over saul’s apartment, as if he has just gotten up from reading one of them. he also kept a portrait of steiner on his campus desk for many years. once the lengthy steinerian phase was over, bellow was still on the old hunt and this time he found owen barfield, another anthroposophist. in interviews with clemons and kroll in 1975, bellow confessed that he had spent the previous winter reading barfield’s saving appearances (1965), and that he had even taken a special trip to england to meet barfield himself. 15 for barfield, humanity had lost its connection with its inner nature, devalued romantic poetry, and no longer could understand the meaning of words: “the full meanings of words are flashing, iridescent shapes like flames – ever flickering vestiges of the slowly evolving consciousness beneath them.” 16 for bellow, he “was impressed by the idea that there were forms of understanding, discredited now, which had long been the agreed-upon basis of human knowledge.” 17 he had another intellectual’s confirmation about the spiritual capabilities of language. bellow’s belief in the spiritual and imaginative capability of language can be placed in opposition to the modernist tradition of eliot, conrad, lawrence, joyce, and hemingway, as well as modern philosophical rationalism. this opposition came from his continual love of british romanticism, american transcendentalism, biblical judaism, eastern philosophy, and nineteenthand twentieth-century anthroposophy. nor does he reject his jewish roots. few have credited him with a historically and personally rooted telos in his anti-modernist intellectual methodology in transcending his terror of death. he engaged jewish covenantal issues, such as being our brother’s keepers, and clung to the tarnished traditions of judeo-christian liberal humanism, wrestled in theodical thinking, and employed philosophical tools to engage the philosophical and religious challenge of modernity. perhaps his entrance into wisdom and the seriousness of what would be his last phase of spiritual pursuit is best accounted in 1994 in sanford pinsker’s classroom when bellow spoke openly of the nineteenthand twentieth-century intellectual tradition of metaphysical skepticism: i think a person finally emerges from all this nonsense when he becomes aware that his life has a much larger meaning he has been ignoring – a transcendent meaning. and that his life is, at its most serious, some kind of religious enterprise, not one to do with the hurly-burly of existence. 18 bellow’s spiritual quest 48 it is in this last phase of his life that bellow the mandarin writer and intellectual’s intellectual provides a very surprising revelation as a new self-identification as a religious thinker. by now he has long since reclaimed some of the customary and moral world view of the traditional orthodox judaism of his childhood, if not its belief system and ritual practices. but having finally come to terms with the holocaust as well he finds his passage out of the tyranny of modern history: my jewish history gives me an entirely different orientation. the heavens in all their glory can open up above a ghetto sidewalk, and one doesn’t need gothic or renaissance churches, harvard university, or any of these places, in order to condemn the nihilism of the modern age from a viewpoint sufficiently elevated. 19 this is no longer the speaking position of a cultural historian, nobel laureate, and student of metaphysics, but the speaking position of a ghetto jew, perhaps even a pre-holocaust figure. in this lies his final spiritual statement of triumph over the skeptical twentieth century, as a man with a lineage of two thousand years of jewish persecution who nevertheless manages to maintain the spiritual power of the imagination over the exigencies of a life. now he is dreamer and ghetto dweller. skeptical of the seriousness of any of these commitments, roger shattuck labeled these bouts of spiritual inquiry as intermittent “fits of noticing […] just that – fits.” 20 but he sells bellow short. they were not “fits” but lifelong endeavors pursued with great hope. similarly, biographer james atlas suggests that by this time in life bellow’s skepticism was overshadowed by his yearning to believe and that it was really the emersonian soul residing within of which bellow he was speaking. 21 but in bellow’s own words, and those of his family members and friends, do not bear this out. when melvin bragg asked him if he believed in god he got a prompt and firm “yes.” 22 as for his prayer habits, bellow told interviewer jack miles that his was a “casual checking in at universe headquarters, at night, as i pull up the covers.” 23 bellow remained a biblical theist for whom his dead were not truly dead, and positioned himself finally as a ghetto jew whose imagination could triumph in any ghetto. the net result of bellow’s lifelong quest through western philosophy, literary romanticism, and the american carnivalesque was his remarkable body of fiction, essays, and numerous awards culminating with the nobel prize. capturing the essence of bellow’s yiddish and romantic inclinations toward the transcendent, leon wieseltier wrote: saul liked his profundities vernacular. […] he never lost the freethinker’s delight in a good blasphemy. but saul blasphemes equitably, and all around: he was a recreational savager of pieties. there is the view that finally he was a comic writer, the quarrelsome master only of the american urban carnivalesque […] [capable always of] an operatic bellovian laugh. […] his laughter was the sound of a snatched victory. 24 49 cronin this “snatched victory” literally re-inscribed the transcendental quest in contemporary fiction. upon the occasion of bellow’s death in 2005, the writer of the australian obituary reminds us that bellow, who was not a conventionally religious individual, had once described himself as “a religious man in a retarded condition.” retarded condition or not, perhaps only fellow writer marilynne robinson truly recognized just what bellow’s spiritual contribution was: “he was a writer of the highest seriousness. […] the scale of his interests, of his meditations, were in the highest traditions.” 25 but it was high seriousness easily missed. at the end we have neither a biblical job nor t.s. eliot’s fisher king: just the tearful metaphysical lamentations of his classic jewish eine kliene mensches or jewish little persons. it was a profane metaphysical comedy that was literally seized from the twentieth-century intellectual wilderness, and, in the end, bellow placed himself with his european ghetto ancestors who could literally dream and imagine themselves out of degradation. notes 1. wisse 1996, 129–30; wood 2005, 12–13. 2. wood 2005, 32. 3. ibid. 4. for more about the historical, philosophical, and literary influences on bellow, please refer to chavkin 1984; cronin 1989 and 2007. 5. ignatieff 1994, 228. 6. bellow 1968, 82–83. 7. bellow 2005, 21. 8. qtd. in sanderson 2005, 12. 9. wieseltier 2005, 38. 10. gray, white, and nemanic 1994, 205. 11. rorty 1997, 1–3. representative works of the post-positivist period are wittgenstein 1953 and quine 1953. 12. bellow encountered some of these philosophers, like van orman quine, who argued about the indeterminacy of translation because language is so contingent on social context and social contract (quine 1953, 97). wittgenstein asserted that human linguistic agreements derive principally from what human beings say in socially contingent and agreed-upon social practices, therefore there is no certain system of transcendent referentiality behind language itself (1953, 96–7). 13. bellow 1994, 97. 14. see steiner 1972. bellow also knew steiner’s the philosophy of spiritual activity (1894), occult science: an outline (1913), investigations in occultism (1920), how to know higher worlds (1904), and the ahrimanic deception (1919). bellow’s spiritual quest 50 15. barfield’s poetic diction was especially influential to bellow’s thought (barfield 1928). 16. barfield 1928, 43. 17. clemons and kroll 1994, 130. 18. pinsker 1994, 96. 19. gray, white, and nemanic 1994, 220–21. 20. shattuck 1975, 21–25. 21. atlas 2000. 22. bragg 1975, 675–76. 23. miles 1989, 8–9. 24. wieseltier 2005, 38. 25. qtd. in sanderson 2005, 12. works cited atlas, james. 2000. saul bellow: a biography. new york: random house. barfield, owen. 1928. poetic diction: a study in meaning. middletown, ct.: wesleyan university press. bellow, adam. 2005. “missing: my father.” new york times june 10, late edition, a21. bellow, saul. 1968. mosby’s memoirs and other stories. new york: viking. ---. 1975. humboldt’s gift. new york: viking. ---. 1994. it all adds up: from the dim past to the uncertain future: a nonfiction collection. new york: viking. bragg, melvin. 1975. “off the couch by christmas: saul bellow on his new novel.” the listener november 20, 675–6. chavkin, allan. 1984. “bellow and english romanticism.” studies in the literary imagination 17:2, 7–18. clemons, walter, and jack kroll. 1994. “america’s master novelist: an interview with saul bellow.” in conversations with saul bellow, ed. gloria cronin and ben siegel. jackson: university press of mississippi, 122–131. cronin, gloria l. 1989. “holy war against the moderns: saul bellow’s antimodernist critique of contemporary american society.” studies in american jewish literature 8:1, 77–94. 51 cronin ---. 2007. “saul bellow and the holocaust moment.” saul bellow journal 23:1–2 (winter), 95–116. gray, rockwell, harry white, and gerald nemanic. 1994. “interview with saul bellow.” in conversations with saul bellow, ed. gloria l. cronin and ben siegel jackson: university press of mississippi, 199–222. ignatieff, michael. 1994. “our valuation of human life has become thinner.” in conversations with saul bellow, ed. gloria l. cronin and ben siegel. jackson: university press of mississippi, 223–29. miles, jack. 1989. “saul bellow’s life is an open book.” los angeles times march 30, sec. v, 1, 8–9. pinsker, sanford. 1994. “saul bellow in the classroom.” in conversations with saul bellow, ed. gloria l. cronin and ben siegel. jackson: university press of mississippi, 93–103. quine, willard van orman. 1953. “two dogmas of empiricism.” in from a logical point of view: 9 logico-philosophical essays. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. reich, wilhelm. 1972. the function of orgasm. london: panther books. rorty, richard. 1997. “introduction.” in wilfrid sellars, empiricism and the philosophy of mind. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1–3. sanderson, mark. 2005. “the literary life bestsellers of the week.” sunday telegraph april 10, 12. shattuck, roger. 1975. review of humboldt’s gift, by saul bellow. new york review of books september 18, 21–25. wieseltier, leon. 2005. “saul.” new republic april 25, 38. wisse, ruth. 1996. “language as fate: reflections on jewish literature in america.” literary strategies: jewish texts and contexts, ed. ezra mendelsohn. oxford: oxford university press, 129–147. wittgenstein, ludwig. 1953. philosophical investigations. trans. g. e. m. anscombe. englewood cliffs, nj: prentice hall. wood, james. 2005. “the jewish king james version: saul bellow: not exactly english but biblically english commentary.” times literary supplement august 5, 12–32. microsoft word introduction to roundtable on big history-final-revised.docx [expositions 8.1 (2014) 38] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376  introduction to the academic roundtable for an intellectual project that aims to investigate the oldest records of existence, big history— the “integrated history of cosmos, earth, life and humanity” (http://www.ibhanet.org)—is very “right now.” in the past five years, the topic has become a contemporary buzzword fueled by digital media and mass audience platforms. big historian david christian launched the big history project (http://www.bighistoryproject.com) with a ted talk (http://www.ted.com/talks/ david_christian_big_history) and big historians kathy schick and nicholas toth opened a longterm museum exhibit entitled “from the big bang to the world wide web” along with an accompanying website (www.bigbangtowww.org). in fall 2013, the history channel ran a 10part series entitled big history, narrated by bryan cranston (aka, walter white of breaking bad). an international big history association (www.ibhnet.org) founded in 2010 regularly publishes an electronic newsletter of all things bh. individual natural scientists and people working in the humanities have been teaching versions of big history for decades, but within the past few years big historians have begun churning out primary, secondary, and post-secondary big history curricula. the above-mentioned big history project is aimed at developing big history programs for high school students. as mojgan behmand explains in her contribution to the academic roundtable, the first year experience program at dominican university of california is organized around big history. and, in late 2013, mcgraw-hill put out a volume on big history aimed at university students. that textbook, big history: between everything and nothing, written by david christian, cynthia stokes brown, and craig benjamin, is the inspiration for the present academic roundtable. the contributors to the academic roundtable reflect the genuinely multidisciplinary nature of the project: there is a political scientist (lowell gustafson), a historian (bruce mazlish), a literary scholar (mojgan behmand), a geologist (walter alvarez), and an astrophysicist (eric chaisson). microsoft word higgins-final.docx [expositions 9.2 (2015) 1–15] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 shame on you: the virtuous use of shame in aristotle’s nicomachean ethics nicholas higgins regent university abstract aristotle presents shame as a non-virtue, but through a careful analysis of his definition and discussion of shame the reader can conclude that there is an appropriate type of shame; a prospective as opposed to retrospective feeling of shame. this prospective shame one of the best ways a well-bred youth can be led to the acquisition of virtuous character. this paper will explore aristotle’s understanding of shame as explained in both the nicomachean ethics and in his broader corpus, and will examine who can possess shame, how it can be used to teach virtue, and the impact of polis upon this process. “whilst shame keeps its watch, virtue is not wholly extinguished in the heart[.]” edmund burke, reflections on the revolution in france “where there is yet shame, there may in time be virtue.” samuel johnson, journey to the western islands of scotland introduction as the above epigraphs note, there is a direct and long recognized connection between virtue and shame.1 while the paradoxical nature of these concepts have led to an increasing de-emphasis of this connection, eighteenth-century english moral writers recognize that an individual’s possession of a sense of shame presupposes that there is a standard of acceptable action that the community holds to be honorable and consequently a standard of dishonorable action. these epigraphs indicate that the existence of shame presupposes that there is a standard of noble action and that shame is a means by which virtue can be cultivated in the community. these views are rightly reminiscent of teaching in nicomachean ethics. the aristotelian presentation of shame is complex; for aristotle clearly presents shame (aidos) as similar to a virtue, but closer to a feeling the virtuous use of shame in aristotle’s nicomachean ethics 2 than an active state, and thus it is a non-virtue (ne 1108a25). despite the modern de-emphasis of the relation of shame and virtue, this clear label, scholars have argued that the ancient greeks generally,2 and aristotle specifically3 present a link between this non-virtue and the moral virtues. central to understanding the particular aristotelian moral virtues is the question of how an individual obtains them. burnyeat correctly notes that the path to moral virtue is not merely an individualistic path, but where habituation in virtuous action is provided by external guidance, either family or community, to establish a “good upbringing.”4 for aristotle the external guidance must be by a specific type of man, the spudios or prudent man, who is able to determine the mean in relation to the individual (1107a1). it is only through the applied pressure from external guidance that someone can walk the path to internalize the virtues as an active condition. the process by which external guidance leads to internalization has been widely discussed among various scholars. some interpreters argue that the appropriate use of pleasure is the primary means for guidance down the path of virtue.5 aristotle notes that the life which defines happiness as pleasure is a life “that belongs to fatted cattle” (1095b20). and while aristotle shows that the life of virtue is “concerned with pleasures and pains” (1104b15) it appear that virtue’s connection with pleasure may only be tenuous and given to provide the audience a reason to listen to the whole treatise. while it is true that aristotle recognizes that something which may not be pleasant of itself or by its nature, but through habituation, becomes performed with pleasure (rhetoric 1369b15–19 and 1179b35), such position seemingly indicates that the item becoming habit is what makes it pleasurable, not that seeking pleasure established the habit. further, the utilization of this position is exacerbated because, as aristotle notes, “in most people, a distortion seems to come about by the action of pleasure” (1113b1).6 it is critical to realize that those who have not yet obtained virtue have faulty views of pleasure (1099a6) which is immensely difficult to overcome (1105a8). for aristotle pleasure seems more likely to lead those who do not yet have virtue astray than to assist them in discovering and becoming virtuous (1109a14–17; see also 1104b9–11). it would be unwise to utilize a method to purportedly produce virtue which when practically applied will lead most people away from, rather than towards, virtue. the difficulty in this interpretation has led other scholars to argue that the path to virtue is not guided by pleasure, but pain.7 yet, it is not any type of pain that leads to virtue; rather, it is a pain which is directly connected with a moral component. for aristotle, the non-virtue of shame is precisely this painful guide, for “let shame be understood as a certain pain or agitation over bad deeds” (1383b15). shame is a critical passion in aristotelian rhetoric, for it is tied directly to the individual and social conception of the kalon or noble. this paper, through a careful analysis of aristotle’s discussion of shame, argues that the best method to guide well-bred youths, or gentlemen, to the point where they acquire a virtuous character is through the appropriate use of prospective shame. this paper will explore aristotle’s 3 higgins   understanding of shame as explained in both the nicomachean ethics and in his broader corpus, and will examine who can possess shame, how it can be used to teach virtue, and the impact of polis upon this process. 1. shame as a semi-virtue aristotle’s first mention of shame in nicomachean ethics arises in the concluding remarks of his brief introduction of the moral virtues. he states that individuals who possesses a sense of shame are praised because shame is a “mean condition […] involving the feelings” (1108a32). while this introduction is brief, it is indicative of the paradoxical nature of shame. in establishing shame as a feeling (pathos), aristotle removes it from the realm of active condition (hexis) (1105b20) and places it in the lower part of the soul, distinct from true virtue (1107a1). later, aristotle explicates that “it is not appropriate to speak about a sense of shame as if it were a virtue, for it seems more like a feeling than an active condition” (1128b10). it is important to notice that the subsequent discussion hedges, for shame “seems” to be “more” like a feeling. aristotle recognizes that while shame is a feeling, it plays a crucial role as a bridge between pathos and hexis, and thus there is an ambiguity to its precise role. shame appears ambiguous because it shares a critical characteristic with virtue because it is a “mean condition” (1108b32). it is in this subtle similarity that the reader can see aristotle’s foreshadowing a more complete understanding of the connection between shame and virtue presented later in nicomachean ethics. presenting shame as a mean not only indicates it has an excess and deficiency, but primarily it is indicative that there is an appropriate feeling of shame. subsequent statements help recognize precisely what that mean state of shame is, for it arises in “a certain kind of fear of a bad reputation” (1128b12). while this definition does provide some new information, i.e., that shame is related to fear and one’s reputation which is derived from the opinion of others, this definition is still not aristotle’s fullest explanation of shame. for the most complete definition, the reader must turn to aristotle’s rhetoric, where in a discussion of the emotions he devotes a chapter to shame. in the rhetoric aristotle defines shame as “a certain pain or agitation over bad deeds, present, past, or future that appear to bring one into disrepute” (1383b15). this description of shame is both consistent with and more complete than his discussion in nicomachean ethics. this definition exhibits three major components which are important to highlight in order to understand aristotelian shame. the first is that shame is a pain or disturbance. while the definition given in nicomachean ethics (1128b12) presents shame as a fear, the rhetoric definition emphasizes that that fear is related to pain. shame is a mean (1108a32) of the appropriate feeling of pain.8 second, aristotle notes precisely what type of pain shame deals with: “evils that appear to pertain to disrepute” (1383b20). in this sense, shame is very much a socio-psychological feeling, for the pain happens not to one’s physical body, but to one’s standing in the eyes of others. shame the virtuous use of shame in aristotle’s nicomachean ethics 4 is a feeling derived from man’s political nature (1253a2) and affects his standing in the eyes of others. this change in others’ opinion of the actor arises from two sources: either by engaging in evil acts of commission or by failing to do the virtuous acts through omission. but, the actual change in opinion can only happen after the ignoble act is done. this then presents the third, and perhaps oddest component of the definition, the time in which shame is felt. shame is not exclusively an emotion arising after the fact; rather, aristotle clearly notes that someone can feel shame immediately, retrospectively, or prospectively. given that the previous part of the definition would seem to indicate merely a post-hoc feeling of shame, it is necessary to realize that the prospective component of feeling shame that is most crucial to a moral education. this is perhaps the most critical point in understanding aristotle’s view of shame, for the path to virtue is one in which the individual is guided through external constraints to internalize the appropriate active states of virtue. shame itself moves through these steps. retrospective shame is purely derived from external constraints; it is imposed upon the individual by other members of the polis (1383b16; see also 1128b12). in this case the individual had no hesitation in committing the ignoble act or omitting the virtuous one. yet, the feeling of shame now teaches the individual that the future situations which involve the same action will lead to the same form of disrepute. perhaps the individual does not keep that at the forefront of his mind, and in a similar situation again does a similar act, but now, even before the event is made aware publically, the individual feels shame. this is derived from previous experience and knowledge of societal norms.9 yet, the most effective type of shame for the guiding of action is the type that occurs before the action rather than after. it is this prospective characteristic of shame that is perhaps the most important because it is rooted in knowledge of what is honorable and dishonorable, as well as the saliency of that knowledge to an as yet undone act. it is, if not prudence, the application of wise foresight. the individual knows what is right, knows that what is right is important to an upcoming action, and can rightly judge the wider impact of the action upon members of society. this distinction between post-hoc feelings of shame and prospective feelings of shame are central to understanding aristotle’s use of, and distinction between, the two greek words translated as “shame” in the nicomachean ethics: aidos and aischune. 2. aidos and aischune in his most lengthy discussion of shame in nicomachean ethics, aristotle uses both terms, though the dominant word throughout the whole work is aidos. in the rhetoric he uses the more prosaic word aischune.10 in order to understand these words, it is worthwhile to examine aristotle’s discussion in 1128b10–35 with the transliteration of the greek distinction between his use of the 5 higgins   two terms. cairns’s translation, which preserves the distinction between the greek words, is most helpful:11 it is wrong to speak of aidos as virtue; it is more like a feeling than an active condition. it is defined, at any rate, as a sort of fear of ill-repute, and its effects are similar to those who fear danger; for those who are hoi aischunomenoi [ashamed] go red, and those who fear death turn pale. both, then, appear to be in a way somatic, which seems to be a feature of a feeling rather than of an active condition. the feeling, moreover, is not suitable for every age-group, but for youth. for we think that people of that age should be aidemon [sense of shame], because, since they live by their emotions, they often err, but are prevented by aidos [shame]. and we praise young men who are aidemon [display shame], but no one would say appreciatively of an older man that he is aischuntelos [full of shame]; for we think that he should do nothing that is attended by aischune [shame]. for aischune [shame] is not a mark of a decent man, since it occurs at base actions—such things are not to be done. whether some actions are really aischra [shameful] and others only in belief does not matter; neither sort should be done, so that one should not feel aischune [shame]. it is the mark of a base person to be such as to do something aischron [shameful]—to be so disposed as to be aischunesthai [shameful] were one to do some such thing, and to consider oneself decent on this account, would be absurd; for aidos [shame] occurs at voluntary actions, but the decent man will never willingly commit base acts. aidos [shame] would be a decent thing on a hypothesis: if he were to do it, he would be aischunesthai [shameful]; but this does not apply to the virtues. for if anaishuntia [shamelessness] and not feeling aidos [shame] at the prospect of doing what is aischron [shameful] are base, this does not mean that to feel aischune [shame] when one does such things is decent.12 as this passage elucidates, and as scholars have noted, the words aidos and aischune “are by no means entirely synonymous.”13 yet, if one is to understand the role of shame in the scheme of aristotle’s ethics, one must closely disentangle the meaning between these terms. aristotle states that “shame [aishcune] does not belong to decent people, if it comes about for base acts” (1128b23), yet later writes that “a sense of shame [aidos] could be something decent only hypothetically” (1128b30). if one were to read those statements in english, seeing no difference in the term “shame,” one might think aristotle presents a contradiction in his work. however, through a careful reading one can glean insight into the distinction between aischune and aidos, and can more precisely understand what aristotle teaches about shame. the difference in these terms is perhaps made most clear when aristotle says “aidos could be something decent the virtuous use of shame in aristotle’s nicomachean ethics 6 only hypothetically, since if one were to do those things, one would be aischunesthai” (1128b29). since both words are used in one sentence, an examination of their meanings is necessary. while some readers may assume that aristotle uses these words synonymously, and exchanges the use of one for the other in this discussion, a careful examination will show that aristotle clearly attempts to distinguish them in the reader’s understanding. in this sentence aristotle uses a conditional “if/then” clause. if someone were to engage in an action that is base, that actor would feel aischunesthai, or shameful. such linguistic construction indicates that the word aischune is related to the consequence of acting in a base way, or specifically the retrospective feeling of shame within the nicomachean ethics. it must be remembered that the definition of shame provided in the rhetoric, which uses the term aischune, encompasses the feeling of shame both before and after the commission or omission of human action which would be deemed base. thus, it would seem that in aristotle’s corpus the term aischune refers to the full and broadest category of shame, representing any and all forms of shame. within the nicomachean ethics particularly, aristotle uses this broad form to indicate the retrospective feeling of shame which arises after the action. such interpretation is echoed by others, for cairns notes that “in the present passage (1158b10–35) aischune is used in an exclusively retrospective sense.”14 aristotle later states that “for shamelessness and not feeling shame [aidos] at the prospect of doing what is shameful [aischron] are base” (1128b33). this indicates that the deficiency of shame has two forms. the first is not feeling aidos at the prospect of doing a shameful act. the second is not feeling shame as a consequence of that act. this distinction also plays into the important understanding of aidos, for here aristotle states clearly that aidos is related to “the prospect of doing what is shameful.”15 since we know that aristotle links aidos to decency in thought or theory, one should realize that the emphasis on feeling aidos is in its future understanding of action. this indicates that aidos arises in the mind as one contemplates the consequences of future action, and if that future action is deemed to be shameful, i.e, aischune, and therefore someone feels shame at that outcome, he expresses aidos.16 thus, aidos is most closely associated with the appropriate mean feeling of dishonor, which is why when discussing the mean of shame, aristotle uses the word aidos (1108a33 and1221a1). 3. who feels shame in addressing the issue of who feels shame, aristotle argues that the feeling of aidos is “not fitting for every time of life, but only in the young” and aischune is never praised when it is felt among the old (1128b18–21). it is important to note that the creation of a distinction between the age groups of those who feel shame also distinguishes between the types of shame. the aged should never feel aischune, the consequence of committing base actions, because they are less likely to follow their feelings and are expected to know what is shameful and thus avoid it. on the other 7 higgins   hand, it is appropriate for the youth to feel prospective shame, because they are, or should be, in the process of learning and developing the virtues.17 similarly, training wheels are appropriate for a child’s bike, but if an adult were to ride a bike with training wheels, it would be inappropriate. the dominance of shame in the action of a youth arises because “they live by feeling, they err in many ways, but are held back by shame [aidos]” (1128b20). it is important to note that aristotle recognizes that while in the youth the feelings rule, they are prevented from acting basely, or failing to act honorably, through shame. aristotle indicates that youth do feel shame (aidos) and this is good, because it will train them in the habits that lead to virtue. aristotle’s discussion of shame recognizes that shame must become a habituated action, for he distinguishes it from “self-restraint [which] is not a virtue either” (1128b35). self-restraint, or incontinence, is that “each temptation requires a new effort of resistance.”18 by creating this distinction, aristotle exhibits that shame is not a feeling that needs to arise on each individual action and necessitates that each action be reassessed as to whether it should be done; rather, a sense of aidos infects one’s outlook and begins the habituation towards virtue. it causes one to cease to be tempted to do the base act, and provides the guide to assess a type of action as shameful. thus, as long as the youth have aidos and assess actions as base, they will not act ignobly. 4. how shame guides this understanding of aidos plays a critical component in understanding the role of shame in teaching and molding citizens. the ability to mold citizens, particularly the youth, towards virtue is only possible if a sense of shame prevents a base action from occurring. in aristotle’s discussion in the rhetoric, he notes that the proper type of shame is “an imagination connected with disrepute, and felt for its own sake and not for its consequences” (1384a14). by denoting the proper sense of shame as an imagination, aristotle argues that it is something that someone foresees in his or her mind to be in the future and is the result of a possible, but not yet occurring action. thus, the proper feeling of shame exists before the occurrence of the shameful action ever becomes a physical reality. yet one must also understand that shame does not teach him or her that an action is wrong; it must already be recognized that the act is wrong in order to feel shame. as aristotle states, “so it is necessary for a character to be present in advance that is in some way appropriate for virtue, loving what is beautiful and scorning what is shameful” (1179b30). it is important to understand that aristotle intends the audience of this discourse to be those gentlemen who, as tessitore states, are “characterized by an attraction to goodness.”19 as aristotle indicates, once someone knows and loves what is beautiful, he will have the desire to follow it. thus, through seeing the beautiful, he will scorn what is shameful and it is this person who will be more likely to develop the habits of virtue through appropriately knowing the prospective feeling of shame and seek to act as the the virtuous use of shame in aristotle’s nicomachean ethics 8 prudent man would. shame, then, is the guide to actions of virtue to those who know and desire the beautiful but are not yet possessing the character to be truly virtuous. however, for shame to actually produce virtue, it must guide individual actions so that it will produce a truly virtuous character. while it is possible for someone who obeys a proper sense of shame to act as a virtuous man would, this does not mean that that person is truly virtuous. sachs notes “a mere habit of acting contrary to our inclinations cannot be a virtue.”20 aristotle argues that for someone to act truly virtuously, he must do the proper action through a virtuous character. knowing that shame is not a virtue, the reader can see how shame, in guiding individual acts, ensures that each action is done as a prudent man, or a man of virtue, would. this develops the character necessary for that person to become truly virtuous not only in appearance. as aristotle states: in a word, active states [(hexis)] come into being from being at work [(energia)] in similar ways. hence it is necessary to make our ways of being at work be of certain sorts, for our active states [(hexis)] follow in accordance with […] these. it makes no small difference, then, to be habituated in this way or in that straight from childhood, but an enormous difference, or rather all the difference. (1103b20–25) aristotle indicates that true virtue can only be found in those who possess proper virtuous character, and such character can only arise through the habituation of constantly acting in the way a virtuous man would (1111b6). what is stunning about this prescription for virtue is that one must act virtuously before ever having a virtuous character. the proper virtuous education finds a way to habituate people in the proper action even before their character is formed. further, it makes “all the difference” that this is begun in childhood (1103b25). it is from this description of the means to attain virtue that aristotle presents one method to achieve such prescription. since shame “is not fitting at every time of life, but only in the young,” one must teach them through establishing the “imagination connected with disrepute [making sure shame is] felt for its own sake and not for its consequences” (1128b12; 1384a20). this is why aristotle notes that society “praises those among the young who display shame” because they are being moderate, temperate, and finding the mean in their actions (1128b20). though the individual youth’s actions are not true virtue because they do not possesses the character of virtue, they are engaging in the habituation which is a necessary practice for them if they will possesses the character. as sachs states, “the characteristic human way of being-at-work [(habit)] is the three fold activity of seeing an end, thinking about means to it, and choosing an action.”21 shame directs and guides each of these three steps, and thus is fundamental to shaping habit. it is important to understand that though shame “seems more like a feeling than an active condition” (1128b10) it is closer to virtue than pure feelings. aristotle places it and its excesses in 9 higgins   his list of virtues in the eudemian ethics (1220b37–1221a15). further, when aristotle is first introducing the virtues he notes that “while the sense of shame is not a virtue, the person with a sense of shame is also praised” (1108a32). though shame is a feeling, it is an appropriate feeling, not one which is by definition excessive. shame, like the virtues, is a mean between excesses (1108b32 and 1221a1). also, just as virtues are “chosen for their own sake” (1105a35) so “shame […] is felt for its own sake and not for its consequences” (1384a14). in light of these similarities, one cannot view shame as just any other feeling, but rather it should be raised to the level of demivirtue. the characteristics it possesses resemble key characteristics of true virtue, and shame is also used to achieve true virtue. “therefore, good judgment goes along with the way each one is educated” (1095a) and “some people think one becomes good by nature, others think it is by habit, and still others think it is by teaching” (1179b24). aristotle notes that virtue cannot arise from nature (1103a20). this means only habit and teaching are able to guide people to become good, but as aristotle notes teaching alone is not strong enough to teach virtue because it is “not powerful in all people” (1179b23–6). thus, for teaching and arguments to actually educate the populace, “it is necessary for the soul of the listener to have been worked on beforehand by the means of habits” and through this necessary precondition virtue may arise (1179b26). shame is one way that the habits can be instilled. this necessary presupposition leads aristotle to recognize in his ethical discourse that the teaching of the role of shame as a guide or encourager of virtue cannot be for everyone because “discourses […] are unable to encourage most people toward what is beautiful and good” (1179b10). the reason most people cannot learn through discourses is that the impact of discourses requires the agreement upon the telos of the good and beautiful. in light of this, only those who begin with such an understanding of what is truly good and beautiful are able to be properly habituated through shame. as aristotle says, “most people […] are naturally obedient not to respect but to fear, and refrain from base actions not on account of shame but on account of penalties” (1179b13). while the education through shame may not be able to be applied to the majority of citizens, it nonetheless can be taught publicly to all whose soul is furrowed. some may argue whether virtue, which is supposed to be inherently linked to the pleasant, can be taught by shame, which is allied with feeling pain. in understanding this it is important to note that aristotle does not seem to fully agree that all virtuous actions are always pleasant, for the height of a courage is death. aristotle states, “hence courage too is painful, and justly praised, since it is more difficult to endure painful things than to refrain from pleasant ones” (1117a35). this is evidenced in other virtues, for temperate people feel pain “moderately” in avoiding certain pleasures of the body (1119a14), great-souled men are pained to hear of their debts (1124b13), and even in “the certain kind of virtue” (1155a1) of friendship, pain is involved when “seeing the friend pained at one’s own misfortunes is something painful” (1171b5). thus, aristotle states, “so being at work pleasantly is not present within all the virtues, except to the extent that one fixes one’s the virtuous use of shame in aristotle’s nicomachean ethics 10 attention upon the end” (1117b15). this important admission provides two key points in understanding how shame can promote the virtues. since not all virtuous action is pleasant, actions which are the result of shame are not contradictory with virtue. further, aristotle clearly notes that education can be done through the proper setting of what is pleasant or painful before men. for “people educate the young steering them by means of pleasure and pain; and it seems that what is most conducive to virtue of character is to enjoy what one ought and hate what one ought” (1172a21). most people choose things that are pleasant and avoid the painful. thus it is the feelings which encourage people to enjoy what they should and hate what they should which have “in them a weight and a power that tend toward virtue and toward a happy life” (1172a22). the role of shame is the feeling which directs people to act, habitually, in a way that has them find pleasure in what they ought and pain in what they ought. 5. the polis as guiding shame it is important to remember that aristotle argues that shame only arises “before those whom one holds in regard” (1384a35). those whom one should hold in regard include the prudent, older, educated men of society, and those who are constantly before one’s eyes (1384a29–35). also, since man is a political animal who lives in society, and those societies are generally governed by the prudent, educated, and older citizens, one can conclude that the laws of society reflect the opinions of these men (1252a2; 1277b25; 1282b10). while the laws of a society are proclaimed and affect all, shame specifically and with better success will guide those whose souls are primed by a love of the beautiful. just as the majority of the public can view beautiful pieces of art, it is those who know beauty and skill who can learn by studying the masters. this group of gentleman, through obedience to the laws, is able to cease to care for punishments because of penalties, and rather desires to be viewed honorably by the community. thus, they are guided by shame and cease to live “in accord with feeling and following every impulse” (1095a8). therefore, shame is capable of promoting and teaching men to act truly virtuously since “virtue is an active condition [(hexis)] that makes one apt at choosing […] [as] a person with practical judgment would determine it” (1107a3). it is this education towards virtue that lays the necessary foundation for the political. as aristotle states at the conclusion of the nicomachean ethics, “so having made a beginning, let us discuss […] what sorts of things preserve and destroy cities” (1181b25 and 19). specifically, aristotle argues that since cities exist, not for the sake of mere living but for living well, “it is thus evident that virtue must be the care of every city” (1280b7). this statement argues that the political regime has not only the desire, but the necessity, of fomenting virtue through the appropriate enactment of laws. clearly this is done through the laws of a city, for “what happens in cities gives evidence of this for lawmakers make the citizens good by habituating them, and since this is the 11 higgins   intention of every lawmaker […] one regime differs from another in this respect as a good one from a worthless one” (1103b6–8). thus, the political systems which succeed in habituating their citizens by establishing laws which will have the gentlemen of society refrain from base acts through the appropriate prospective shame, are to be recognized as better regimes than those who fail or do not try. yet, if political regimes are judged through their success or failure in properly habituating and teaching their citizens virtue, one must recognize that the political community has the ability to impact virtue through deeming what actions are punished and shameful within that community. this indicates that the training necessary to produce virtue requires laws which guide people toward true virtue, for “it is difficult to hit upon a right training toward virtue from youth when one has not been brought up under laws of that sort” (1179b32). aristotle indicates that variations in citizens’ virtue can arise because of the type of laws in these regimes: “the city’s being excellent is no longer the work of fortune but of knowledge and intentional choice” (1332a33). further, “a city is excellent, at any rate, by its citizens’—those sharing in the regime—being excellent” (1332a34). this, then, is the role of the laws. the laws are the result of the intentional choice of the rulers and educate towards the regime’s understanding of the beautiful and ignoble (1287a25). one major way to do this is through the institution of punishments, which teach the citizenry which actions are to be regarded as shameful, and thus encourage the citizens towards virtue. the connection between shame and politics is also made clear in aristotle’s rhetoric, as he notes “the object of rhetoric is judgment” and “men give judgment on political issues” and “emotion[s] are those things by the alteration of which men differ with regard to those judgments which pain and pleasure accompany”(1378a25). one must remember the definition of shame given in the rhetoric, that it is “a kind of pain or disturbance in connection with those evils that appear to pertain to disrepute, whether present, past, or future” (1383b20) the significance of this is that shame, though it is a mean condition of feelings (1108a32) is not about the feeling of pleasure, but is about the appropriate level of feeling pain. since both politics and virtue deal with pleasures and pains (1105a10), the reader can see that shame is somehow related to both the political structure and to attaining virtue. secondly, aristotle notes precisely what type of pain shame deals with, namely, “evils that appear to pertain to disrepute.” this indicates that shame is felt when someone does not appear honorable. importantly, this attaches shame to both virtue and the political, for aristotle argues that “refined and active people choose honor, for this is pretty much the goal of political life” (1095b22). the feeling of shame is closely related to the ends that each political regime establishes as fundamental for its existence.22 yet, the proper form of shame is further qualified, for it is not merely a result of public dishonor of anyone, or the hoi polloi, rather the honor one seeks, and consequently the group whose opinion of ill-repute will cause shame, “honor[] by the wise and by those who know them, and for virtue; it is clear then […] one might perhaps assume that this, rather than honor, is the end of the political life” (1095b29–32). the virtuous use of shame in aristotle’s nicomachean ethics 12 aristotle recognizes that since shame is connected to reputation (1384a20), the individual who feels shame feels it in regards to the opinions of others, but one should not judge actions by just anyone’s opinions; rather, it should be “prudent people as truth-tellers, and such are those who are older and educated. and things more before men’s eyes and in the open […] for this reason men feel more shame before those who will always be present and those who pay heed to them” (1384a30–33). since shame is derived from the external source of the opinions of others, and these opinions are codified in society through laws, the laws of society are also “before men’s eyes” and therefore “one needs to feel shame before those whom one holds in regard,” i.e., the laws (1384a20 and 35). further, as aristotle states, “we assert that the excellent ruler is good and prudent” (1277a15). shame is externally imposed, which is why it cannot be a virtue. though it is externally imposed by law, the laws in a good regime, are like the spudious man and therefore control action.23 while the laws can impose shame, one must recognize that the laws and rulers are only images of virtue; as such, there may be flaws in the way that they teach virtue based upon the accuracy that they reflect true virtue. additionally, perhaps aristotle recognizes that such images will never show true virtue, and as such it is only a non-virtuous feeling, which as a semi-virtue is the best that that these images can establish. finally, it is important to understand that shame requires a form of like-mindedness that can arise either through the laws or through friendship. aristotle notes that “like-mindedness seems to be friendship in a political sense” (1167b4) and further that “such like-mindedness is present among decent people […] [who aim at] things that are just and advantageous, and aim at these in common” (1167b5). lawmakers are able to establish the standard because they “aim at [likemindedness] most of all and banish faction most of all for being hostile to it” (1155a25). through creating a like-minded regime, the political system can establish the standard by which people may prospectively determine which actions are shameful. through constant habituation in these actions, then, the good regime can guide those citizens who are capable to virtue. thus, as burnyeat summarizes well, “shame is the semi-virtue of the learner.”24 endnotes 1. for an introduction to the concept of shame in a variety of psychological and educational literature, see kristjánsson 2014. 2. williams 1993. 3. burnyeat 1980; curzer 2012; cairns 1993; kristjánsson 2014. 4. burnyeat 1980, 73. 13 higgins   5. burnyeat 1980; reeve 1992, 51–54. 6. emphasis added. 7. curzer 2002; curzer 2012, 336–339. 8. while aristotle presents the connection between pain, pleasure, and virtue, we find that the spudious man (the standard of determining the virtuous mean (1107a2)) is not interested in pleasure at all; rather, “a person with practical judgment pursues the absence of pain, not what is pleasant” (1152b17). this indicates that the spudious man will avoid shame and, as this paper argues, use such an experience to teach others how to become prudent. 9. it is not necessary for an individual to proceed through each of these steps of shame; rather, it is only necessary for a non-virtuous person to have prospective shame. if, in rare occurrences, someone is so well-versed in the laws and values of a society that he never commits a shameful act, but does so to prospectively prevent shame, that individual is closer to attaining virtue than the individual who commits shameful acts or omissions. 10. as cairns, the author of perhaps the most definitive work on aidos, states, “aidos is the older and more poetic term […]. aischune, on the other hand, is the regular prosaic word of aristotle’s own day” (1993, 415). in the rhetoric, aristotle primarily uses aischune, with only two uses of aidos. in the nicomachean ethics both terms are incorporated, but, as this paper argues, he does not use them interchangeably; rather, each term has a distinct meaning. 11. cairns also transliterates other key greek words (arête, pathos, hexis); however, for my purposes here, they have been replaced with sachs’s translation, so that the emphasis will be solely upon the greek words for shame. 12. cairns 1993, 414. 13. konstan 2003, 1034. 14. while cairns notes the distinction in this passage between aischune as retrospective and aidos as prospective, he still seems to be unwilling to argue that aristotle’s distinction in these terms is indicative of one being the proper form of the other (415). it would seem that cairns’s conclusion, which is opposed to the one presented in this paper, arises from not examining aristotle’s use, but in seeking to understand aristotle’s usage in light of the historical development and usage of aidos and aischune. this is why his examination of aristotle provides keen insights, yet he reaches a different conclusion because he appeals to the linguistic roots and poetic use of these terms, not to aristotle’s specific use. the virtuous use of shame in aristotle’s nicomachean ethics 14 15. emphasis added. 16. this position is echoed by cairns, who states, “thus the aidos that is disparaged as appropriate for youth but not for adults is prospective” (1993, 416). 17. it is true that aristotle does not forbid the aged to feel aidos and it is possible that they may feel it. however, it seems that aristotle would not condone the feeling of aidos among the aged, not because it is an inappropriate feeling in itself, but because it is inappropriate for that stage of life. aidos is for the time of training and growth, but by the time one is older, one should have already received that appropriate training. however, because this training should have already taken place, the error of aischune is even more blatant, for it shows not only base action but also bad habituation and a continuation of living by feelings (1128b20). 18. sachs 2002, 79n97. 19. tessitore 1996, 15. 20. sachs 2002, xv. 21. sachs 2002, xvii. 22. bernard williams’s work shame and necessity fully recognizes that the individual feeling of shame is reflective of “real social expectation” rooted in the community’s norms (84). 23. see note 3 for an examination of the spudious man. 24. burnyeat 1980, 78. works cited aristotle. 2002. nicomachean ethics. trans. joe sachs. newburyport, ma: focus publishing, r. pullins company. _____. 2009. rhetoric. in plato gorgias and aristotle rhetoric. trans. joe sachs. newburyport, ma: focus publishing, r. pullins company. burnyeat, m. f. 1980. “aristotle on learning to be good.” in essay's on aristotle's ethics, ed. amélie oksenberg rorty. berkeley: university of california press. 69–92. 15 higgins   cairns, d. l. 1993. aidos: the psychology and ethics of honour and shame in ancient greek literature. oxford: clarendon press. cua, antonio s. 2003. “the ethical significance of shame: insights of aristotle and xunzi.” philosophy east and west 53.2 (april), 147–202. curzer, howard j. 2002. “aristotle’s painful path to virtue.” journal of the history of philosophy 40.2, 141–162. _____. 2012. aristotle and the virtues. oxford: oxford university press. konstan, david. 2003. “shame in ancient greece.” social research 70.4 (winter), 1031– 1060. kristjánsson, kristján. 2014. “is shame an ugly emotion? four discourses—two contrasting interpretations for moral education.” studies in philosophy and education 33.5 (september), 495–511. reeve, c. d. c. 1992. practices of reason: aristotle’s nicomachean ethics. oxford: oxford university press. tessitore, aristede. 1996. reading aristotle’s ethics: virtue, rhetoric, and political philosophy. albany: state university of new york press. ward, lee. 2001. “nobility and necessity: the problem of courage in aristotle's nicomachean ethics.” the american political science review 95.1 (march), 71–83. williams, bernard. 1993. shame and necessity. berkeley: university of california press. microsoft word behmand final.docx [expositions 8.1 (2014) 64–69] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376  slimmer, brighter, and nearly perfect: the new big history textbook is here mojgan behmand dominican university of california rarely has the appearance of a new textbook been the cause of such delight as broke out amongst the first year experience faculty at dominican university of california in august 2013. the book that triggered such reaction is a seemingly unassuming volume, big history: between nothing and everything (2013), written by historians david christian, cynthia stokes brown, and craig benjamin, and published by mcgraw-hill. why was the book greeted with such enthusiasm, you might ask? was it that the world needed another textbook on history? that the dominican faculty felt a special bond with one of the authors, dominican professor emerita cynthia brown? that a first year experience is more appealing when it uses an actual textbook with color and attractive images? the answer to all of those questions is “yes,” and yet, there was more to it than that. it is true that we were thrilled with the aesthetics of the textbook. the looks of the volume are deceiving in that it seems slim because mcgraw-hill took the bold step of publishing a 352-page textbook as a paperback while keeping to the dimensions of a hard-cover textbook. this unusual choice keeps the cost down and the weight low, both of which are laudable in an age where textbook prices have skyrocketed and students’ willingness to lug heavy books has plummeted. the layout and the font are exceptionally clear, the chapters—or rather the “thresholds”—are color-coded, and the book contains over 85 vibrant images that range in size from full-page to quarter-page. every chapter begins and ends with questions, and contains a threshold(s) summary, key terms and a glossary, and a list of works for further reading. it is also true that we were excited finally to have a real textbook on this unusual content. big history is definitely not mere history. the name of this emerging discipline, coined by historian david christian, is slightly misleading to the uninitiated learner in that history generally refers to human history, especially the ages that offer extant records of one kind or other. big history brings together the whole of natural and human history, all 13.8 billion years of it. it is history in that it is a recounting of past events in chronological order, but it is more than history as it draws on numerous other disciplines such as cosmology, astronomy, chemistry, geology, biology, archeology anthropology, art history, sociology, political science, literature, and much more to create and convey this transdisciplinary narrative that ends by looking to the future. and the narrative, recounted in a manner that draws on all disciplines, becomes more than the sum of its parts and is powerful and perspective-altering. one might ask why the publication of this new textbook was such a momentous event specifically for the dominican faculty, and in answering that question we move from the story of the book to the story of a faculty, the dominican big history faculty. in 2008–2010, our 65 behmand university undertook a reform of the general education curriculum and the greatest change resulting from that process was an innovative first-year program, a six-unit first-year sequence. our new program was quite ambitious in design and implementation: we had opted for a triple high-impact practice that was a first-year seminar, a common intellectual experience, and a writing-intensive sequence. in choosing big history we had selected a truly foundational content and in delivering it as a first-year experience, we had selected to use it to teach competencies such as writing and information literacy. the faculty gathered to formulate the goals of the program and saw them as promoting: (1) recognition of the personal, communal, and political implications of the big history story, including insight into the interdependence of humans and their environment; (2) critical and creative thinking in a manner that awakens curiosity, enhances openness to multiple perspectives, and increases willingness to challenge one’s own assumptions; (3) development of reading, thinking, and research skills to enhance one’s ability to evaluate and articulate understanding of one’s place in the unfolding universe. we had also searched for a way to counteract the increasing specialization and fragmentation of knowledge at educational institutions and in the workplace, and the narrative arc of big history promised to provide learners with a vast framework for the scaffolding of knowledge. thus the concept of big history seemed uniquely suited to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. admittedly, this curricular revision was ambitious, even radical; and, the key to the ultimate success of this adoption of big history was the inclusive and collaborative nature of the process. it is also noteworthy that big history need not replace other disciplines, but rather can be viewed as an exploration of a vast range of ideas and disciplines which complement in-depth courses in the sciences, world history, and the arts and humanities. in our case, incorporating big history into the dominican curriculum was relatively easy as there is a place within general education that is not traditionally owned by a department: the first year programming. in creating our first year experience, we increasingly employed the principles of backward design. a faculty collective articulated the desired learning outcomes, determined the appropriate evidence to demonstrate achievement of the outcomes, and set out to design instruction and activities to produce the outcomes. unbeknownst to us, the last step, the design of instruction, which included the choice of classroom texts, would occupy us for years to come. big history can be taught in a rotational lecture format where the main lecturer invites expert guests to give talks in their area of expertise; or, it can be taught in a seminar format with one faculty member leading students through the course. we opted of the latter but knew that independent of the format, faculty needed to be trained in big history as no single faculty member is an expert in all the thematic areas the course covers. building a learning community became our primary objective in the summer of 2010 prior to the fall launch of the program. what principles guided the creation of our big history faculty learning community? the makeup of the faculty was as diverse as possible since big history is in no way limited to being taught by scientists or historians; rather, instructors of all disciplines with an avid interest in this content were welcomed. those included faculty in art, art history, biology, business, creative the new big history textbook is here 66 writing, english, history, humanities, literature, mathematics, music, occupational therapy, philosophy, political science, psychology, religion, social and cultural studies, and women and gender studies. members of the learning community were not required to teach in the program; rather, the multidisciplinary group provided rich input. the ensuing learning community, our annual “big history summer institute,” has become a living example of collective learning, a central concept in big history, as the faculty formulated course descriptions and learning outcomes, taught each other big history content, and shared pedagogical best practices. ultimately, the cultural gain of this approach was immense: it built rapport among colleagues, enhanced big history’s reputation across the institution, and created widespread support for the program. during our first big history summer institute, we drew most heavily on two texts, david christian’s magnum opus, maps of time: an introduction to big history (from 2005) and cynthia brown’s big history: from the big bang to the present (from 2008). both were books on big history, yet they were so vastly different from each other—the first heavily scientific and analytical and the latter written in a somewhat general manner for lay persons—that by the end of the summer institute, the faculty could not settle on using only one or the other for class. rather, we assigned both, hoping that our students would find the books to complement one another. that proved to be a miscalculation as our young students did not warm to the idea of reading the same material presented in two different ways in two different books. the first year of the big history program at dominican made two things clear to us: first, that one must distinguish between big history content and big history pedagogy. the faculty needs to be proficient in big history, but beyond that they must master means of successfully conveying that content. second, that in order for the course to succeed, we needed a textbook. the former issue proved easier to resolve. we knew that big history was at times too abstract to be tangible for a young student. our 2011 summer institute focused on the sharing of pedagogies and activities that had proven successful the prior year. we collaboratively refined them and embedded them into the course. this approach, continued over the course of the following years, has propelled us forward remarkably fast, putting us in the unique position of having notable pedagogical insight in big history. the issue of the textbook proved to be a more difficult matter. we reexamined the books we had used and considered new ones such as fred spier’s big history and the future of humanity from 2011 and brian thomas swimme and mary evelyn tucker’s journey of the universe from the same year. these books proved quite valuable in shaping our thinking but not necessarily suited to our intended audience of students. in the meantime, we had learned that christian, brown and benjamin had signed on with mcgraw-hill to write a big history textbook and, after some negotiation, the publisher declared its willingness to provide us with a preliminary edition. our problem seemed to have been resolved. that is until the books actually arrived at our bookstore. imagine almost 400 pages of unedited, unproofed text devoid of images, thorough threads, and glossaries. we still felt that this book was the best solution but spent the next two years counter balancing its deficiencies. 67 behmand where the text lacked images, we assembled dozens of powerpoint files of images linked to specific chapters and paragraphs that we could make available to students; where the text lacked reflection questions, we compiled our own series of threshold-specific questions and prompts that students could answer at home or free-write to in class; and where the narrative got buried in the copious details of some of the chapters we brought in short and long videos like journey of the universe (2011) and history of the world in two hours (2011) to emphasize the larger picture through visual texts. in the meantime, we realized that the success of the program was directly tied to our big history pedagogy and redoubled our efforts in that area. this, in turn, endowed us with a renewed drive and commitment and resulted in our signing a contract with university of california press for a 2014 publication of our forthcoming book teaching big history (forthcoming). simultaneously, as we were refining our pedagogy and attempting to resolve our textbook issue—hoping that mcgraw-hill would set a publication date for the christian, brown, and benjamin textbook—we began reflecting on the assessment of our first year experience. consistent quality improvement had been a characteristic of our collaboration, but were we meeting our ambitious goals? our assessment soon became multi-instrumental and divided into two types: 1) assessment using student-generated work; and 2) assessment soliciting students’ opinions and perceptions. the assessment of exams and essays demonstrated that students were understanding big history and its major concepts and applying them. in addition, they were learning skills such as writing and information literacy. big history specific surveys and student focus groups helped us measure motivation and engagement and specifically the value of big history as a transformative experience (as defined by kevin pugh [2011, 107] based on dewey).1 in 2012, with 89 respondents we had a 37% participation rate and learned the following:  80% of students thought or talked about the content of the course outside of class;  72% of the students indicated that their big history experience had changed the way they saw or understood aspects of the world;  48% expressed that big history had changed the way they saw their role in the world.2 in analyzing survey and focus group data, we learned that the big history program was successful where students saw their own self reflected in the course through content that was interconnected, prompted them to examine values and beliefs, and foregrounded links to the future. we also learned that the preliminary textbook still presented a problem and was a pet peeve of the students. imagine our joy as we learned in the spring of 2013 that mcgraw-hill planned to move at full speed and have the textbook available to students by august 2013. and that was indeed the case: a week before semester begin hundreds of copies arrived in our bookstore ready to be purchased by our incoming freshmen. is the textbook perfect? not quite. it still shows some inconsistency in its discussion of the features of complexity, but let us face it: complexity is indeed complex and worthy of larger discussion. the interested readers were perhaps better served perusing the the new big history textbook is here 68 works of eric chaisson and fred spier. another weakness is the seventh threshold’s retention of a world history approach (a traditional history approach that focuses primarily on the achievement of civilizations instead of applying a big history lens via focusing on collective learning or the human impact on biosphere) instead of applying a big history lens which renders it unduly long and allows it to take up five chapters.3 as big history gains momentum in education, it is perhaps best served by consistently holding to its own distinct historiographical approach rather combining two approaches in one textbook. however, the current length is indeed a notable improvement from the preliminary edition and clearly signals movement in the right direction. so ask me again: is the book perfect? well, it’s near perfect. it’s a science-based global history, a big history narrative greater than the sum of its parts, presented in an appealing package. through big history we have a unique platform for the integration of disciplines and collaboration across campus. and in doing so, we embrace a twenty-first century model of liberal education that acknowledges and incorporates the complexities of this century. so, let us rejoice! the new big history textbook is here. endnotes 1. our thanks are due to richard blundell, phd candidate with david christian at macquarie university, australia, for sharing his big history-specific survey with us and allowing us to modify it according to our needs. 2. mojgan behmand and jennifer lucko, big history survey, dec. 2012. presented at dominican university, january 31, 2013. 3. for a more expansive discussion see: anderson 2013. works cited a&e home video, producers. 2011. the history of the world in two hours. a&e home video. dvd. anderson, martin. 2013. “agrarian age: teaching threshold seven.” thresholds 1.1: 52–68. brown, cynthia stokes. 2008. big history: from the big bang to the present. new york: the new press. 69 behmand christian, david. 2005. maps of time: an introduction to big history. berkeley: university of california press. christian, david, cynthia stokes brown, and craig benjamin. 2013. big history: between nothing and everything. princeton: mcgraw-hill. pugh, kevin j. 2011. “transformative experience: an integrative construct in the spirit of deweyan pragmatism.” educational psychologist 46.2: 107–121. simon, richard b, mojgan behmand, and thomas burke, eds. forthcoming. teaching big history. berkeley: university of california press. spier, fred. 2011. big history and the future of humanity. chichester, west sussex, uk: wiley-blackwell. swimme, brian thomas, and mary evelyn tucker. 2011. journey of the universe. new haven: yale university press. tucker, mary evelyn, and john grim, producers. 2011. journey of the universe: an epic story of cosmic, earth and human transformation. hosted by brian swimme. inca and northcutt productions. dvd. microsoft word 1 trepanier final.docx [expositions 8.1 (2014) 96–99] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376  symposium: civic education in the ancients and america* lee trepanier saginaw valley state university *editor’s note: this is part one of a two-part symposium. part two, which includes the contributions by jividen, hess, and baraklow, will be published in vol. 8, no. 2 (2014). when the conversation turns to civic education today, several questions are immediately raised: what are the conditions for civic education? what role should the state and civil society play? to whom should such an education aim: leaders, ordinary citizens, both? what should be the content of civic education? should classical learning be incorporated or entirely left out? and who should teach this education? can political leaders, like presidents, act as civic teachers for the whole political community? what about those who are marginalized in society, like africanamericans, or inaccessible, like intellectuals? what contributions can they make to civic education, if any?1 in this symposium, “civic education in the ancients and america,” the contributors address these questions from the disciplinary perspectives of history, philosophy, political science, and classics. the answers they provide both complement and dissent with one another, offering us a rich and nuanced account of civic education both among the ancients and the americans and the relationship between these two. what we discover is that not only do different regimes provide different accounts of civic education but the nature of civic education itself evolves as the political community does. furthermore, even during the same period of a regime, different visions of civic education can be proposed and compete among themselves, whether by political leaders, social reformers, or public intellectuals. at the same time, we may be able to detect some commonalities among these distinct accounts of civic education. there might be something that both the ancients and the americans share. the contributors in this symposium adopt a broad definition of civic education to include the institutions and processes that affect citizens’ beliefs, commitments, capabilities, and actions as members of a political community. the source of civic education is diverse: it can come from the state, civil society, or the individual. however, the outcome of civic education is the same: the common good of the political community, whether it is aristotelian virtue, roman republican values, the founding principles of the american regime, or a criticism and replacement of those ideals. although the conceptualization of the common good may vary from regime to regime and from thinker to thinker, it is the notion that public interests predominate over private ones that is the ultimate aim of all civic education. i start the symposium with my contribution, “aristotelian pluralism and diversity: the conditions for civic education and the common good,” an examination of the conditions that make a meaningful civic education possible for aristotle. unlike the spartan and socratic 97 trepanier regimes, the aristotelian political community protects a plurality of institutions and a diversity of goods because civic education and the common depend upon them. rather than encouraging discord and anarchy, these conditions promote unity and concord among citizens. it is the preservation of this plurality and diversity that enables citizens to become part of the commonality of the regime. it is this paradox that makes possible a genuine civic education dedicated to the common good. from greece we next turn to rome in joseph a. diluzio’s “the civic education of cicero’s ideal orator.” in his article diluzio investigates cicero’s program for civic renewal in the final years of the roman republic. for cicero, the most disturbing event in rome is the rise of factionalism where self-interest triumphs over the common good. to remedy this situation, cicero calls for a civic education of oration in combination with law, custom, and the experience of distinguished leaders. the hope is that this education would yield political leaders who are eloquent, wise, and care for the common good. how this classical understanding about civic education was transmitted to the american founders is explored in tim w. caspar’s “cicero and america.” caspar’s focuses on cicero’s de officiis because of its influence on the american founders’ understanding of natural law and the common good. in cicero’s work, the founders discover a model of the best and most practical republic possible with institutions conducive to political moderation and the rule of law. and also like cicero, the founders believe that individual virtue must be inextricably tied up with the common good. thus, the civic education which cicero devised for rome is located in the american experiment of constitutional governance. jason jividen adopts the principles of the american founding as the criteria to evaluate presidents as civic educators for the united states. in “presidential statesmanship as civic education,” jividen examines the political rhetoric of abraham lincoln, woodrow wilson, and franklin roosevelt as a form of civic education. according to jividen, american civic education evolves from the natural rights tradition of lincoln to the progressive visions of wilson and roosevelt. this evolution prompts us to consider not only alternative answers about presidential leadership and rhetoric but also about the nature of civic education and democracy itself. the last two contributions are from emily hess and jordon barkalow, who explore how excluded individuals can contribute to american civic education. in “‘it must develop men’: frederick douglass and education in nineteenth-century america,” hess looks at douglass’ account of civic education as a means not only to improve the fate of blacks but also to provide an intelligent, virtuous, and moral citizenry upon which freedom itself depends. believing that education was indispensable for social reform after the civil war, douglass calls for a practical and racially integrated education for african-americans. douglass recognizes that the country had to adopt a new type of civic education in order for it to fulfill its promises of freedom and equality that were made at its founding. the final article of the symposium, baraklow’s “american paideia: public and private leadership and the cultivation of civic virtue,” focuses on emerson’s understanding of civic education as a remedy to the problems of alienation, conformity, and skepticism in modern civic education 98 american life. like plato, emerson wants to improve the condition of the individual soul. by studying nature, the individual eventually sees that virtue is connected with the common good. emerson’s self-reliant, democratic scholar therefore engages the public in the hope that they, too, will discover their own virtue that resides in them. the aim of civic education therefore is the cultivation of individual virtue and the common good of the regime. in this symposium, the contributors offer different models of civic education: aristotle’s preservation of plurality and diversity; cicero’s program of rhetoric and practical experience; the american founders’ education in cicero; the civic rhetoric of lincoln, wilson, and roosevelt; douglass’ proposal to improve and integrate blacks into the american regime; and the emersonian scholar as type of public intellectual. from these different accounts, we see that the division between the classical world and the modern one, between the ancients and america, is not as deep as we may have originally thought. before concluding, i want to thank personally all the authors for their contributions as well as gary l. gregg and kelly hanlon of the mitch mcconnell center at the university of louisville. this institution sponsored a panel on this topic at the 2013 american political science conference, and this symposium includes some of the papers presented there. i also want to acknowledge my appreciation of tim simpson and emily sullivan who served as discussants at that conference and offered important critiques of the papers. finally, i want to thank the editorial team of expositions, especially gregory hoskins and john-paul spiro, for all their assistance and support in this endeavor. endnotes 1. for some of the issues concerning civic education today, refer to gutmann 1987; macedo 2000; galston 2001, 2005; finkle 2002; nussbaum and cohen 2002; torney-putra 2002; hess 2009. works cited finkle, steven f. 2002. “civic education and the mobilization of political participation in developing democracies.” journal of politics 64.4: 994–1020. galston, william. 2001. “political knowledge, political engagement, and civic education.” annual review of political science 4: 217–234. –––. 2005. “civic education and political participation.” in community matters: challenges to civic engagement in the 21st century. edited by verna v. gehring, 23–34. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield. 99 trepanier gutmann, amy. 1987. democratic education. princeton: princeton university press. hess, diana. 2009. controversy in the classroom: the democratic power of discussion. new york: routledge macedo, stephen. 2000. diversity and distrust: civic education in a multicultural society. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. nussbaum, martha c., and joshua cohen. 2002. for love of country. boston: beacon press. torney-purta, judith. 2002. “the school's role in developing civic engagement: a study of adolescents in twenty-eight countries.” applied developmental science 6.4: 203– 212. [expositions 6.1 (2012) 59-67] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 society, the self, and spirituality in herzog elyse zucker hostos community college in saul bellow’s epistolary novel, herzog, the eponymous protagonist is on a quest for spiritual fulfillment. the intellectual, writer, and professor moses e. herzog commences his journey in a demoralized state that was triggered by his wife madeleine’s rejection of him. withdrawn, he communicates by writing, to both the living and the dead, letters he never sends. an articulate, moral, and dynamic man, herzog seeks to not only heal but to gain a vision that will enable him to find cohesion in his life and transcendent meaning. hungering, by his own account, for “good sense, clarity, truth – even an atom of it,” and to identify “the meaning of life,” he believes, initially, that finding linguistic constructs that explain human experience or putting his thoughts into “high-minded categories” will fulfill these pursuits. 1 paradoxically, rather than offer him the answers he seeks, these language-based approaches to obtaining meaning perpetuate herzog’s obfuscations: “he was thinking continually but nothing clear resulted” (147); he “was […] a man who […] lacked clear ideas” (118). they also leave him reflecting upon the limitations of language: “can thought wake you from the dream of existence? not if it becomes a second realm of confusion, another more complicated dream, the dream of intellect, the delusion of total explanations” (206). herzog gradually discovers that a linguistic approach for obtaining spiritual fulfillment is an ineffective course, because words alone cannot definitively identify for us who we are or what we need: “man has a nature, but what is it? those who have confidently described it, hobbes, freud, et cetera, by telling us who we are ‘intrinsically’, are not our ‘greatest benefactors’” (161). language, ultimately, cannot capture the elusive being of man which is elevated beyond its reach, and so proves reductive and fragmented in this pursuit. herzog is well aware that the culture in which he resides is not structured to readily help people get in touch with their true selves, noting that “the multiplied power of numbers […] made the self negligible” (248) and that “modern character is inconstant, divided, vacillating, lacking the stone like certitude of archaic man, also deprived of the firm ideas of the seventeenth century, clear, hard theorems” (134). struggling himself to find a way to be whole, herzog resorts to a number of linguistic strategies for achieving this end; however, these strategies paradoxically are fragmented and in turn reflect the fragmentation of his society, which modern technology has accelerated. for instance, television reveals an endless array of fleeting, often disconnected images, giving its viewers little time to contemplate or assimilate what goes whirling by them. reflective of the mercurial workings of television is herzog’s own style of approaching topics, which is to flit from one to another, causing herzog to “abandon […] theme(s) with characteristic abruptness” (161) rather than potentially bring his understanding of them to a level of greater depth or society, the self, and spirituality in herzog 60 breadth by staying with his thoughts long enough to do so. resonating with the fleeting images of television and thoughts in herzog’s mind are myriads, in panoramic view, of disparate products for sale that have quick turnover life, and are linked with purchasable, ephemeral lifestyle choices made available to consumers through mass media means. these lifestyles, often justified with rhetorical discourse, tend to reduce more rarefied qualities to commodities, something herzog criticizes in a letter he writes to a mcsiggins regarding equating goodness with a thing, and one people feel is of little consequence: “[…] in populist philosophy, goodness has become a free commodity like air, or nearly free, like a subway ride. best of everything for everybody – help yourself” (199). 2 thus, the choices predominantly available in herzog’s society for offering satisfaction at the core level are essentially empty shells, leading herzog to note that: “people can be free now but the freedom doesn’t have any content. it’s like a howling emptiness” (53). as such, the atomistic linguistic constructs herzog contemplates reflect his own fractured self as well as the mid-twentieth-century culture of which he is partially a product. this is a culture that pervasively reduces phenomena and people to their most material and literal aspects, thereby creating obstacles to spiritual fulfillment. 3 thus, as herzog notes, “[his] generation thinks – and this is its thought of thoughts – that nothing faithful, vulnerable, fragile can be durable or have any true power” (353). herzog himself uses fragmentation as a defense against examining his own feelings by dispersing those feelings into generalizations rather than both looking at the impact they have on his life and how he contributes to situations that trigger them. for example, in a letter to general eisenhower in which herzog critiques the former united states president about his professional handling of the topic of “spiritual values” (200), he digresses with the thought that “[i]ntelligent people without influence feel a certain self-contempt” (200). this point holds particular relevance for herzog, whose own sense of powerlessness has been brought about by madeleine’s rejection of him. for all his intelligence, he could not influence her to stay with him, and he unwittingly turns the resulting rage against himself. yet rather than think in greater complexity about how the statement of his digression relates to his own life, herzog characteristically dissociates himself from the generalization he makes. herzog is taking refuge in a big, historical perspective, something that he, ironically, warns in a letter to one dr. bhave – relative to dealing with the wealth distribution in india – not to hide behind: “you must start with injustices that are obvious to everybody, not with big historical perspectives” (38). herzog externalizes the topic, makes statements such as “what this country needs is a good five-cent synthesis” (255) but does not examine his own need to synthesize information. finally, referring to himself as “moses” or “him” as if he were someone other than the narrator of his thoughts is another way that keeps herzog fractured, removed from the immediacy of what he is experiencing. herzog’s society both creates and validates those who embody its reductive, utilitarian ways, such as those whom herzog refers to as “reality instructors” (157): people who “[…] want to teach you – to punish you with – the lessons of the real” (157). often skilled professionals, such 61 zucker as simkin, or the syllogistic and jaded lawyer, sandor himmelstein, they try with their “strange, minimal ideas of truth” (281) to frighten herzog into facing what they perceive to be the essential elements of his existence by laying bare the most literal, degenerative level of his predicaments. for instance, knowing herzog is in a vulnerable state after separating from madeleine, sandor further eradicates herzog’s fragile sense of self by telling him he is old and gray and madeleine is in her prime and might have someone on the side. sandor is thus reducing the relationship herzog has with madeleine to its basest level: the level at which people’s worth depends on where they are situated in their biological life cycles. aware that he subjects himself to these punitive realists, herzog makes excuses for sandor’s unnecessarily brutal approach, giving sandor the benefit of the doubt that his intention is not to deliver more damage: "he must have been convinced he was cutting the dead weight of deception from herzog’s soul" (107). herzog’s access, however, to that very soul – an access the indoctrinated reality instructors lack to their own – is what differentiates herzog from them. being a “specialist in spiritual selfawareness” (12), herzog’s desire to live a life of elevated consciousness is one, in fact, inspired by his soul: the loving and humane locus of his true being, the source that will enable his recovery, and the place in which he encounters god. herzog’s soul renders its owner one who experiences “much heavy love” (148) and for whom “grief [does] not pass quickly” (148). although porous, so necessary for receptivity, “the soul requires intensity” (379) as it must be strong enough to handle the barrage of thoughts and feelings it registers without becoming overburdened by them to the point of closing up. yet even if weighed down, the soul, putting its recipients in touch with the pain that can accompany consciousness, offers the experience of pleasurable feelings as well, such as the feeling of emancipation. it is an opulent container that keeps us human by keeping us feeling and experiencing who we are. it is what revitalizes people, keeping them aware, connected, sensitive, and sane. yet it must constantly assert itself in a struggle against the dehumanizing forces of contemporary life that threaten to annihilate it. paradoxically, the soul must seek nourishment from that same contemporary culture, as it is embodied by inhabitants of that milieu. aware of this reality, the spiritual awakening that herzog undergoes – an awakening he inadvertently finds while in the process of trying to locate himself with words – leads him to desire to return to his culture renewed and ready to embrace the humanity which resides there. this desire represents the loftiest expression of herzog’s soul, the godly desire to “love thy neighbor”: “luckily for me, i did not have the means to get too far away from our common life. […] i mean to share with other human beings as far as possible and not destroy my remaining years in the same way” (392). this calling is what accounts for herzog’s telling his friend, luke, while well along the way of his spiritual journey: “i really believe that brotherhood is what makes a man human” (333). in contrast to herzog, his brother, shura, an exemplar of one who has achieved the american ideal of becoming financially successful and powerful in society, is severed from the emotional depths and connections to the past that concern his mystical brother. as an illustration of this society, the self, and spirituality in herzog 62 point, shura tells herzog, when the latter wept at their father’s funeral, “don’t carry on like a goddamn immigrant” (342), a comment that prompts herzog to reflect: i embarrassed him with his golfing friends, the corporation president. […] here he was the good american. i still carry european pollution, am infected by the old world with feelings of love – filial emotion. old stuporous dreams. (342) herzog’s soulful feelings are rooted in the immigrant culture that pervaded his home life, feelings he does not perceive as defunct: “to [the environment of his youth] moses’ heart was attached with great power” (174). the nuclear family in which herzog grew up showed respect for the past and the power of the soul. his mother, for instance, did not reductively package up why she could never come to terms with her sister-in-law, zipporah. as herzog notes, “the antagonism [between them], as mama felt it, was mystical – a matter of souls” (182): a thought conveying that souls, unlike corporation presidents, are not products of contemporary culture but given us by a power greater than our own, and therefore not malleable. herzog’s respect for the mystical realm is akin to his mother’s, as made apparent from his belief that man, by his very nature, is too mysterious and complex to become exhausted by empirical procedures that aim to excavate him: “a man is somehow more than his ‘characteristics’, all the emotions, strivings, tastes, and constructions which it pleases him to call ‘my life’” (325). his mystical and emotional propensities have been influenced as well by the religious upbringing he has had: an upbringing in the orthodox jewish tradition, one numerously reiterating to herzog and his siblings his family’s personally and collectively painful history, one that is ancient: […] we had a great schooling in grief. i still know these cries of the soul. they lie in the breast, and in the throat. the mouth wants to open wide and let them out. but all these are antiquities – yes, jewish antiquities originating in the bible, in a biblical sense of personal history and destiny. (184) if herzog’s spiritual orientation has been instilled in him by his religious upbringing, and dovetails with his soulfully effusive and sensitive nature, it is enhanced as well by his intellectual consciousness, which propels him to both examine what various thinkers and philosophers have to say about the nature of mankind, and discover, in the process, how both they and he himself can hold unrealistic expectations of language. exploring, polemically, texts of various philosophical thinkers, herzog crystallizes and articulates his belief that as human beings, which are mystical beings, there is much that is indecipherable about our natures. in fact, discerning our deepest being would not even imbue us with what we need in order to find fulfillment. what would accomplish that feat would be celebrating our spiritual selves by lovingly embracing humanity in the context of daily life: an 63 zucker act that transforms what is mundane into that which is meaningful. this belief is one herzog finds validated by the works of, among other thinkers, michel de montaigne and blaise pascal, which relay that “[t]he strength of a man’s virtue or spiritual capacity [is] measured by his ordinary life” (133). ordinary existence, herzog observes, is something that the philosopher martin heidegger perceives as a denigration of the loftier state within which man once dwelled. it is a perception that herzog, who himself had been elitist, adding to his malaise, now takes issue with: very tired of the modern form of historicism which sees in this civilization the defeat of the best hopes of western religion and thought, what heidegger calls the second fall of man into the quotidian or ordinary. no philosopher knows what the ordinary is, has not fallen into it deeply enough. (133) according to herzog, heidegger uses language defensively, to barricade the in-depth experiencing of contemporary human existence by labeling that existence a fallen one. heidegger’s reference to man as being in his “second fall […] into the quotidian or ordinary” (133) is a categorization that has the effect of truncating any further exploration of it, just as herzog’s linguistic categorizations have the effect of curtailing his own growth. thus, for example, to avoid exploring the feeling of “potato love” (327) he is feeling towards luke, he thinks: “to advert to his temperament, call things by their proper name, restored his control” (327). challenging heidegger’s phenomenological semantics, herzog does not interpret man’s “fall” (133) to mean that we have become morally lowered by living in a manner that is commonplace. to herzog, having "fallen into [the ordinary]" (133) translates into a type of lapsing – forfeiting a dominant, authoritative position for one in which we can know daily life beyond its stereotypes. this is a realm in which new growth can be accrued, and something “no philosopher” (133), protected and separated by the language constructs inherent to his or her occupation, has “fallen into […] deeply enough” (133) to experience and thus understand from a holistic perspective. rather than finalizing ordinary life, herzog’s approach to it opens it up as uncharted terrain. his portrayal of his own relatives, “the would-be forgotten” (167), as well as the descriptions he relays of the milieu of his childhood, reveal his ability to perceive what is extraordinary in that which is ordinary. for instance, napoleon street, the block where herzog lived during his youth, was decadent and squalid: “rotten, toy-like, crazy and filthy” (174). there, however, he had found “a wider range of human feelings than he had ever again been able to find” (174). it is the unseen, inner workings of one’s existence rather than the strata of one’s life which supply that life with essential meaning. herzog thinks, in retrospection, “what was wrong with napoleon street? […] all he ever wanted was there” (174). although his family was comprised of socalled ordinary people, herzog’s poignant descriptions of them reveal the value that they held for him, a value born of love: “moses loved them all, notwithstanding” (401). society, the self, and spirituality in herzog 64 in addition to heidegger’s devaluing of human life, herzog reads the philosopher as reducing the phenomenon of death to something that can be objectively confronted. this reduction becomes revealed in a scene in which luke tells herzog of some exercises he read about designed to help one face his or her death. herzog proceeds to criticize the notion implicit to heidegger’s premise that god’s mysteries – life and death – can be caught, as if static, for our comprehension: “a man may say ‘from now on i’m going to speak the truth.’ but the truth hears him and runs away and hides before he’s even done speaking” (331). heidegger’s glorification of death is merely a projection of man’s own dark vision: it is “our own murdering imagination [that] turns out to be the great power, our human imagination which starts by accusing god of murder” (354). herzog’s burgeoning spiritual vision is one in which he critiques theorists and thinkers whose writings convey reductive and fragmented notions that, in varying ways, mirror those characterizing contemporary culture, often making its inhabitants hostile or, if backfiring as they did with herzog, seized by malaise. this vision has been initiated by both herzog’s proliferating access to his soul, and the opportunity his textual readings create for him to articulate how and why he wants to live in ways that are enlarging and enlightening. herzog then, having internalized what he needed, moves to closing the texts and opening himself to the world around him, which in his self-absorption he had previously blocked out: “as he stretched out, he took a long breath, and then he lay, looking at the mesh of the screen, pulled loose by vines, and listening to the steady scratching of mrs. tuttle’s broom” (415–416). at the culmination of herzog, ready to reunite as a renewed man with the world, “herzog felt a deep, dizzy eagerness to begin” (392). what herzog comes to embrace is that loving one’s brethren and celebrating life amongst them is an expression of god’s will for mankind and where we will be able to find fulfillment: “the silence sustained him, and the brilliant weather, the feeling that he was easily contained by everything about him within the hollowness of god” (396). this plan is one that promotes wholeness and transcendence: an antidote to contemporary life which can rather than encourage us to love and expand, become hostile and reduced. it is a premise that will allow herzog to both heal himself and help heal the world to which he will return. as herzog believes that human beings can best flourish by learning through affirmative channels, he is critical, too, of kierkegaard’s propagation of suffering as a way to achieve an understanding of truth: “kierkegaard meant that truth has lost its force with us and horrible pain and evil must teach it to us again” (385). kierkegaard glorifies suffering much as heidegger glorifies dread, which likewise has dangerous repercussions: “the advocacy and praise of suffering take us in the wrong direction and those of us who remain loyal to civilization must not go for it” (386). being an expert in using language constructs to create a feigned reality, herzog recognizes the seductive nature of kierkegaard’s language. in his discussion of kierkegaard he notes that nihilistic philosophers use words as a sophisticated way to make destruction sound exciting enough to embrace: “we love apocalypses too much, and crisis ethics and florid extremism with its thrilling language” (386–387). 65 zucker yet, as herzog makes clear, philosophers such as heidegger are not the only thinkers who use language for manipulative purposes. he also takes issue with “the wastelanders” (97) in how they manipulate words: they use the choicest ones to try to recreate people into becoming more valuable beings. living merely in the lexical realm, they believe that “the deterioration of language and its debasement was tantamount to dehumanization [in the industrialized class of europe], which led straight to cultural fascism” (97). finally, herzog condemns nietzsche’s vision of aesthetic nihilism. although he sympathizes with nietzsche for wanting mankind to “live with the void” (389) by acknowledging its existence, herzog recognizes that no one can survive in a vacuum. these “immoralists” (389) that face up to life’s meaninglessness are themselves dependent on the very cultural comforts that they vehemently attack: “they ride the bus. they are only the most bus-sick travelers” (389). nietzsche’s guidelines for living truthfully are, ironically, as problematic as the spurious living of which he is critical. herzog inadvertently is talking about the limitations of language. given that language functions subjectively, any statement can be revealed to be true or false and any notion can rest on its laurels of a self-contained logic. but neither point of view, or of other views, necessarily means that an ultimate truth has been obtained. what gives one a sense that a truth has been uncovered, herzog realizes, often comes, ironically, from that which is ineffable: “go through what is comprehensible and you conclude that only the incomprehensible gives any light” (325). that which is life-affirming, herzog learns, comes from the piece of god within us, and being of god is larger than our capacity to fully comprehend and translate into language. to attempt to understand man in a complete vein would be to whittle him down to less than what he is. nihilism, as presented in herzog, is testimony to the dangers of ceaseless categorizing: something herzog himself engaged in doing, exacerbating his spiritual vacuity. herzog does not interpret his belief in man’s munificence to be “a false hope that makes a man feel the illusion of worth” (254). to him, “good is no phony” (254). this goodness is an outgrowth of the self (and the self, inversely, flourishes under the auspices of ‘goodness’ born of love) and has atavistic roots. this point becomes apparent when moses reflects one day upon his image in the mirror. he thinks, “the primitive self-attachment of the human creature, that sweet instinct for the self, [is] so deep, so old it may have a cellular origin” (197). yet to revere the self by sacrificing it as a way of saving it from the world’s corruption is to exaggerate its importance – taking it out of the cosmic context in which it resides – and overestimate its function: a perspective as destructive as that of negating the self. this idea becomes apparent in light of the behavior of the narcissistic nachman, herzog’s childhood crony, and his wife, laura. nachman glorifies the self to the point at which he perceives the world as being its absolute enemy rather than a participant in a symbiotic relationship with it. as a consequence of this polarized view, “gaunt” (163) nachman and his “thin” (165) wife choose to live in abject poverty, wanting, as does kafka’s hunger artist, no sustenance from the fruits of the world’s labor, and trying instead to derive their nourishment from reading “van gogh’s letters aloud to each other – rilke’s poems” (163). the more realistic perception herzog holds of society, the self, and spirituality in herzog 66 man in relation to his soul accounts for his telling nachman, whose aesthetic vision, ironically, will prevent him from living a rich, prismatic life: “it isn’t as bad as you make out […] most people are unpoetical, and you consider this a betrayal” (166). herzog’s perspective will enable him to bring redeeming qualities to his environment and work within rather than above it. although america is filled with narcissists and nihilists whose orientations are confirmed by the tenets of formidable thinkers, there are also thinkers and theorists that herzog approves of who celebrate the spiritual vision of embracing humanity and its individuals. one such thinker is the american transcendentalist ralph waldo emerson, from whose work herzog quotes when the class orator of his high school: “the main enterprise of the world, for splendor . . . is the upbuilding of a man. the private life of one man shall be a more illustrious monarchy . . . than any kingdom in history” (198). as with emerson, the russian writer vasily rozanov exalts the life of the individual, as borne out by what herzog writes to him in response to his notions about the value of individual lives: “a stupendous truth you say, heard from none of the prophets, is that private life is above everything. more universal than religion. truth is higher than the sun. the soul is passion” (391). still another thinker whose views affirm the beauty of mankind is jean-jacques rousseau. although herzog calls him a “degenerate” (161), he adds, “but i do not see what we can answer when he says ‘je sens mon cœur et je connais les hommes’” (161). 4 no longer seeking pithy meaning in linguistic constructs and categories, herzog has found meaning in the spiritual realm of existence. finding meaning, herzog realizes, comes from finding his place in god’s plan, which inherently supplies that meaning: a man doesn’t need happiness for himself […] provided there is something great, something into which his being, and all beings, can go. he does not need meaning as long as such intensity has scope. because then it is self-evident; it is meaning. (353) meaning exists; it needn’t be created with words. herzog learns it cannot be directly spoken: it can only be spoken about. he understands that expecting language to capture and convey definitive truth is an endeavor that cannot come to fruition. the evidence of this realization is demonstrated in a story herzog tells his daughter that satirizes the absurd attempt to know in absolute terms the difference between things: “there’s this association that people belong to. they’re the most of every type. there’s the hairiest bald man, and the baldest hairy man” (360). what herzog belongs to now is the association between humanity and his self and the spiritual vision which gave both back to him. notes 1. bellow 1976, 39, 229, 76. all subsequent in-text citations will be from this reference. 2. adorno 2001, 100. adorno refers to this type of condition as culture industry which is to turn everything “into public relations, the manufacturing of ‘good will.’” 67 zucker 3. the type of culture is representative of the culture industry, where capitalist mass production commodifies and replicates people’s identities so that their less perceptible aspects are neglected (see adorno 2001; also horkheimer and adorno 1972). 4. “i feel my heart and i know mankind.” works cited adorno, theodor w. 2001. the culture industry: selected essays on mass culture. london: routledge classics. bellow, saul. 1976. herzog. new york: avon books. horkheimer, max, and theodor w. adorno. 1972. dialectic of enlightenment. trans. john cumming. new york: the seabury press. zucker, elyse. language and the self: a psychoanalytic reading of saul bellow’s herzog and james baldwin’s go tell it on the mountain. doctoral dissertation. new york university. michigan: umi dissertation services, 2006. [expositions 6.2 (2012): 9] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 introduction to the roundtable: daryn lehoux’s “what did the romans know? an inquiry into science and worldmaking.” daryn lehoux’s “what did the romans know? an inquiry into science and worldmaking” (2012) is a slim volume, but it is in no way thin. a work in the history and philosophy of science, lehoux offers a set of historical studies of select roman scientific problems and texts (by such figures as cicero, lucretius, ptolemy, and galen) from the first century bce to the second century ce with the aim of illuminating “the historical, intellectual, and experiential context of fact-making.” this focus on fact-making, on the “domains in which observation is [. . .] situated, understood, and processed,” is important because “that is where the world we perceive gets put together as a coherent whole” (lehoux 2012, 2). lehoux’s wager is that by studying ancient roman scientific texts and even or rather especially those claims and observations that seem the most strange and foreign to us today – “how do we take seriously all those silly monsters, the dog-headed people, the spontaneous generation, the three-foot-long grasshoppers, the astrology, the divination?” he asks (lehoux 2012, 14) – we can productively examine anew foundational questions in the history and philosophy of sciences. each of the three academic roundtable participants – elizabeth hamm (saint mary’s college of california), courtney roby (cornell university), and jacqueline feke (university of chicago) – hone in on some significant feature or features of the dense terrain lehoux maps. hamm offers a critical survey of lehoux’s various studies and the major philosophical themes that weave through them. among other observations, roby introduces the voice of rom harré into the discussion lehoux opens in order to foreground the role of taxonomy in scientific model-building practices. feke, with her own interests and expertise in the work of the mathematician ptolemy in mind, examines three elements of lehoux’s argument: his proof of the existence of the concept of natural law in the roman period (centuries before its hypothesized genesis); his discussion of the way ptolemy’s epistemology responds to skeptical challenges; and, his own response to skeptical challenges (his advocacy of a pragmatic theory of truth and a coherence-based epistemology). work cited lehoux, daryn. 2012. what did the romans know? an inquiry into science and worldmaking. chicago: university of chicago press. microsoft word prusak-final.docx [expositions 10.1 (2016) 1–7] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 ethics after kohlberg: catholic social teaching as example and test bernard g. prusak king’s college (pa) the first iteration of “ethics in focus,” published two years ago, concerned the aims of ethics education at the college level.1 my introduction began with the socratic question of whether virtue can be taught.2 aristotle’s answer to this question, i noted, appears to be both yes and no: yes, by example; no, by formal instruction. but his nicomachean ethics must then puzzle us, for aristotle says explicitly that its aim is not theoretical but practical: “we are investigating not in order that we might know what virtue is, but in order that we might become good.”3 the puzzle here is, if virtue does not develop through formal instruction, how are lectures like those collected in the nicomachean ethics supposed to help us become good? in brief, what good in this regard is the sort of education that college ethics courses typically provide? the introduction went on to review various positions in the literature. for example, the political scientist john mearsheimer notoriously denies that “elite universities,” at least, have any business “providing moral guidance.”4 similarly, though on different grounds, stanley fish calls for a “purified academic enterprise” wherein instructors abjure any intention to shape students’ morals or politics.5 gregory bassham’s contribution to the forum, “mearsheimer’s mistakes: why colleges should (and inevitably do) provide moral guidance,” indicates reasons to wonder about the coherence of both these positions.6 a more promising position in the literature is associated with lawrence kohlberg and his students, including carol gilligan. according to this school, “morality […] is neither ‘taught’ nor ‘caught’ but is inexorably developed out of each individual’s personal struggle to make sense of the world”7—more technically, the personal struggle to come to terms with “problematic situations of conflict” in which a previously settled mode of structuring our relationships with others is found no longer to fit with, or quite literally to “do justice to,” new elements of our experience that we are invested in maintaining.8 in light of this conception of morality as developing out of our “structuring tendencies,” the aim of moral education, kohlberg claims, “should be to stimulate people’s thinking ability over time in ways which will enable them to use more adequate and complex reasoning patterns to solve moral problems”9: reduced to a ethics after kohlberg 2 catchphrase, “stimulation of movement to the next stage of moral reasoning.”10 as its title suggests, the aim of this third iteration of “ethics in focus” is to consider what comes “after kohlberg.” this question is pressing in light of research finding that, in the words of a onetime representative of kohlberg’s school, “there is only a weak link between moral reasoning and moral action.”11 as a result of this research, “the centrality of deliberative reasoning in moral behavior” has been called into doubt.12 greater appreciation of the so-called intuitive mind, which is “comprised of multiple nonconscious, parallel-processing systems that learn implicitly from environmental patterns and behave automatically, often without awareness,” has led instead to renewed focus on the importance of moral sensitivity, motivation, dispositions, and character—in a word, the virtues, for which sophistication in reasoning is necessary but not sufficient.13 this change in focus has generated a lot of excitement and discussion,14 but two challenges need to be recognized. first, part of the attraction of kohlberg’s theory is that it holds moral development can in fact be assessed. after all, “verbally expressed rational skills are […] accessible to measurement” through well-validated instruments like the defining issues test (dit).15 moral sensitivity, motivation, dispositions, and character, by contrast, appear much more elusive.16 granted, assessment instruments like the dit may not scrutinize all that educators seek to accomplish in an ethics curriculum—for example, formation in a particular moral tradition with a distinctive account of the virtues seeks more than development from one stage of reasoning to the next—but the dit and the like do measure phenomena that otherwise might seem to resist objective measurement.17 anyone who does not appreciate this advantage has not recently had to satisfy an accrediting agency! the second challenge is to the very possibility of character formation. so-called situationists point to experiments in social psychology suggesting that situational factors, not character traits, function as the primary determinants of people’s actions. for example, it has been found that “the greater the number of bystanders present at an emergency, the lower [the] probability that any one of them will offer assistance.”18 at best, according to the situationists, character traits appear all too vulnerable to “moral ambush.”19 at worst, either they just don’t exist at all—a claim based on the observation that they don’t appear to make any difference in situations where they would be expected to give evidence of themselves—or they exist only in quite specific circumstances, socalled local situations. perhaps, for example, they exist within the context of particular professions like the military or medicine, where there are limits to the types of situations people tend to 3 prusak experience qua soldier or qua physician.20 the situationist challenge to ethics education is profound. if situational factors matter more than both character and reasoning capacities, why teach ethics other than to introduce students to the history of ideas? or, why teach more than professional ethics, where instruction might make some practical difference?21 both the situationist challenge and that of measuring moral formation have occupied the collaborators of the catholic social teaching (cst) learning and research initiative, organized in 2012.22 hence this forum’s subtitle. this initiative means to be an answer to a problem. as roger bergman, one of the initiative’s collaborators, has noted, in the standard cst canon of magisterial pronouncements, “there is almost no mention of how this teaching is to be taught. or rather, a default pedagogy is implicit: promulgate the documents, teach the principles, exhort the faithful to put these principles into practice.”23 but this pedagogy is little better than none. as bergman asks, “how do we stimulate the hunger and thirst?”24 more fully, how to present cst to students critically, without preaching, and in such a way that they could desire to be formed by it?25 further—and here the situationist challenge rears its head—how to present cst in such a way that it could make a difference for students’ lives beyond the limited circumstances of the college experience, with its many pre-fabricated opportunities for putting theory into practice? and then, how to measure that students’ formation in cst has made a difference? in other words, how are educators to know that the learning of cst has taken place? “you will know them by their fruits,” jesus says in the sermon on the mount in a pericope that could make an accrediting agency’s heart skip (mt 7:16). what, though, are the fruits for which cst is the seed? the contributors to this forum represent several disciplines. jennifer reed-bouley is professor of theology and director of the theology program at the college of saint mary in omaha, nebraska. jerome zurek is professor of communication and chair of the communication department at cabrini college in radnor, pennsylvania. margarita rose is professor of economics and chair of the economics department at king’s college in wilkes-barre, pennsylvania. finally, heather mack is director of heather mack consulting llc in new orleans, louisiana. she was formerly community engagement research and assessment director at loyola university new orleans. reed-bouley, rose, and mack are, further, all collaborators in the cst learning and research initiative. ethics after kohlberg 4 notes 1. note that i do not distinguish here between “ethics” and “morality,” as some philosophers do. for purposes of this discussion, ethics is the greek for which morality is the latin. 2. prusak 2013, 16. 3. aristotle 2002, 23 (1103b). 4. mearsheimer 1998, 194. 5. fish 2008, 153. 6. bassham 2013. 7. bereiter 1978, 20. 8. see kohlberg and boyd 1973, 371. 9. kohlberg and hersch 1977, 56. 10. kohlberg 1975, 673. 11. narvaez 2008, 311. 12. ibid. 13. ibid. see also, for criticism of kohlberg’s theory in precisely this regard, spohn 2000, 131– 133. 14. one example is the 2014 interdisciplinary conference “virtue and its development” hosted by darcia narvaez at the university of notre dame: see http://www3.nd.edu/~dnarvaez/ virtue_development_symposium.htm. 15. see http://ethicaldevelopment.ua.edu/dit-and-dit–2/. 16. spohn 2000, 131. 17. compare wieseltier 2015, 1, alleging that “[t]he discussion of culture is being steadily 5 prusak absorbed into the discussion of business. there are now ‘metrics’ for phenomena that cannot be metrically measured. numerical values are assigned to things that cannot be captured by numbers. economic concepts go rampaging through non-economic realms […]. where wisdom once was, quantification now will be.” 18. mayer 2012, 60. in addition to the “bystander effect,” mayer refers to the “urban overload hypothesis,” “pluralistic ignorance,” and deference to authority. 19. ibid., 61. 20. ibid., 64. 21. readers will not be surprised that the situationist challenge has hardly gone unanswered. one answer is simply that students should be made aware of the factors that prevent people from recognizing the moral stakes of a given situation. research suggests that people can be prepared to overcome “moral ambushes” precisely though learning about the obstacles to moral sensitivity. see mayer, 61–62. ronald duska’s contribution to this forum two years ago, “what’s the purpose of ethics education?”, insightfully compares the work of ethics education to that of art appreciation: what is needed in both cases is to learn to “see as,” to overcome “aspect blindness,” to develop an eye not only for the dimensions of what is before us, but for what it is about ourselves that occludes our vision. see duska 2013, 46–48. in the course of criticizing the top-down approach to teaching ethics, beginning with theories and moving to idealized cases, karen adkins and abigail gosselin’s contribution, “learning from the labs: reimagining ethics instruction,” emphasizes the importance of complicating moral reasoning. adkins and gosselin urge in particular drawing attention to “relations of domination and oppression” that code “the moral reasoning and perspectives of those in positions of privilege as neutral and normal standards against which other forms of reasoning and other perspectives are judged.” see adkins and gosselin 2013, 26. from this perspective, “situationism” names not an insuperable challenge to ethics education, but one of its principal concerns. 22. see http://blogs.nd.edu/cstresearch/. 23. bergman 2011, 14. ethics after kohlberg 6 24. ibid., 9. 25. compare issing 2013, 53, proposing that “teaching christian ethics is ultimately all about” transporting “the student beyond a narrow view of self and world to become amazed by the mystery of human existence.” issing beautifully discusses in this regard the film of gods and men (2010), which he describes as having “the potential to carry the viewer inside the discernment of the monks” and thereby to appreciate “the coming of christian faith” even if the student does not share it (55–60). works cited adkins, karen, and abigal gosselin. 2013. “learning from the labs: reimagining ethics education.” expositions 7.1: 22–32. aristotle. 2002. nicomachean ethics. trans. joe sachs. newburyport, ma: focus publishing. bassham, gregory. 2013. “mearsheimer’s mistakes: why colleges should (and inevitably do) provide moral guidance.” expositions 7.1: 33–41. bereiter, carl. 1978. “the morality of moral education.” hastings center report 8.2: 20–25. bergman, roger. 2011. catholic social learning: educating the faith that does justice. new york: fordham university press. duska, ronald. 2013. “what’s the purpose of ethics education?” expositions 7.1: 42–52. fish, stanley. 2008. save the world on your own time. new york: oxford university press. issing, daniel j., c.s.c. 2013. “the virtue of teaching christian ethics.” expositions 7.1: 53– 63. kohlberg, lawrence. 1975. “the cognitive-developmental approach to moral education.” phi delta kappan 56: 670–677. 7 prusak _____, and dwight boyd. 1973. “the is-ought problem: a developmental perspective.” zygon 8: 358–372. _____, and richard h. hersh. 1977. “moral development: a review of the theory.” theory into practice 16: 53–59. mayer, christopher. 2012. “the possibility of character development.” teaching ethics 13: 55–69. mearsheimer, john. 1998. “teaching morality at the margins.” philosophy and literature 22: 193–198. narvaez, darcia. 2008. “human flourishing and moral development: cognitive and neurobiological perspectives of virtue development.” in handbook of moral and character education, eds. larry p. nucci and darcia narvaez. new york: routledge. 310–327. prusak, bernard g. 2013. “ethics education: more than a good idea?” expositions 7.1: 16– 21. spohn, william c. 2000. “conscience and moral development.” theological studies 61: 122– 138. wieseltier, leon. 2015. “among the disrupted.” new york times book review january 18. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/18/books/review/among-the-disrupted.html. microsoft word editors preface 10.2-revised.docx [expositions 10.2 (2016) i–ii] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 editor’s preface john-paul spiro villanova university this is a special issue of expositions: interdisciplinary studies in the humanities. we have chosen to devote an entire issue to a series of interviews with shakespeare scholars that i conducted at the university of oxford in the summer of 2016. we hope you find them as interesting and as enlightening as i did. we always intended for expositions to be more than a standard academic journal. we have our commitment to interdisciplinary work and to liberal education (particularly catholic education) itself. we also strive to provide content including – but going far beyond – the standard articles and book reviews. we often feature in-depth interviews with major scholars, as well as roundtable conversations on a single texts and topics, symposia on concerns in higher education, and reflections on the current and future states of various fields and disciplines. the interviews in this issue combine all of the above. the scholars all address their own field of shakespeare studies, but they are also alert to the ways that other disciplines (particularly history and philosophy) affect their work. they also consider higher education itself, notably the ways it will be affected in the united kingdom after the recent vote to leave the european union. why talk to four people who study the same subject at the same university? as you will see in the interviews, oxford has become the best place in the world to study shakespeare. this is a relatively new phenomenon. shakespeare studies is generally more popular in the united states than in the united kingdom, and for many years the major shakespeare scholars in the united states could be found at the university of california at berkeley, harvard university, and a few other major research universities. at berkeley, the “new historicism” of stephen greenblatt and his associates dominated the field. in the united kingdom, the “cultural materialism” approach to shakespeare had its center at the university of sussex, while other important scholars could be found at the university of liverpool and scattered elsewhere. then, over the past ten years or so, several shakespeare scholars were brought to the university of oxford: tiffany stern, simon palfrey, jonathan bate, bart van es, emma smith, laurie editor’s preface ii maguire, colin burrow, lorna hutson, among others. as i learned in my conversations with the first four, this seems to have been entirely unplanned, and the nature of oxford itself is such that these scholars do not necessarily see themselves as members of the same faculty and do not think of themselves as part of a “movement” or “school.” they do sometimes collaborate, as in tiffany stern’s and simon palfrey’s seminal book shakespeare in parts (2007), and overall many of them share an interest in the original dramatic conditions of shakespeare’s plays in performance as well as an interest in the intellectual currents of shakespeare’s time. much of their work is still essentially historicist but less explicitly ideological than their predecessors; they write about players and printing houses, less so about power and discourses of marginality. this is not to say that their work is disengaged; another common theme in their work is its humanity and ethical concern. they read shakespeare (and his contemporaries) with great attentiveness to his capacity to move audiences and remain meaningful through the centuries. a common thread in contemporary shakespeare is an “ethics of recognition,” wherein we acknowledge the power of his plays to reveal humanity, particular facets of humanity that have been hitherto ignored, and even to step beyond an ethics that depends upon recognition to confer humanity. much of the recent work on shakespeare is both unapologetic and public. shakespeare remains the most canonical of writers, and for a time it became common to criticize shakespeare for not having our politics (whatever those politics may be), not being as enlightened or progressive as we are, or to embed his work in “discourses of power” and “social energies.” one can still find this attitude – in newspapers and blogs as well as academic journals – and shakespeare’s inclusion in university and high school curricula remains controversial. at the same time, shakespeare is the most performed playwright in the english-speaking world (by far), and many shakespeare scholars write with the awareness that their work will be studied not just by students and scholars but by theater professionals and common readers. one of the scholars interviewed in this issue, sir jonathan bate, has written extensively for the general public (as well as for the theater) and he speaks about how and why he embraced that role. it was a happenstance of timing that the interviews were conducted in the aftermath of the brexit vote, and the consensus view among all the interviewees was that the vote to leave the european union would be terrible for the united kingdom in general and for oxford in particular. we now can see the brexit vote in the greater context of political upheaval in 2016, but these interviews can stand as a document of how some people responded at the moment. perhaps the most eloquent point in the interviews came when bart van es said of brexit, “i’m not sure i can talk dispassionately about that.” he then remained silent for a while, as if to suggest through his silence that if one cannot speak dispassionately, perhaps one should wait until one can speak dispassionately. microsoft word stolar and sacchetti final [expositions 7.2 (2013) 28–40] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 representations of multicultural dance in photographic images batia stolar and clara sacchetti lakehead university, thunder bay, ontario, canada abstract this paper explores the tensions embedded in the photographic images of multicultural dance in the city of thunder bay (ontario, canada) in the 1980s. informed by nicholas mirzoeff’s (2002) work on the transversal glance, we showcase the interrelationships between conflicting notions of ethnicity, gender, and race within the locally constituted discourse of multiculturalism. we explore these themes through an analysis of the compositional framing and subject matter of “ethnic,” “folk,” and “national” dance photographs appearing in northern mosaic, a free, widely available, and local multicultural magazine. multicultural dance has long been a staple of thunder bay’s cultural make-up, although it is often ignored in scholarly studies that represent the small, northwestern ontario city as a predominantly white, working-class, masculine space (sullivan 2009; dunk 1994). in our work on the photographic representation of multicultural dance in the city, we trace the intersections between dance and its associations with identity constructs (namely, race, class, gender, nationality, and culture), and, in turn, with federal and local discourses of multiculturalism. focusing on the subject matter and compositional elements of dance photographs, we tease out some of the unexpected meanings that surround multiculturalism (see mirzoeff 2002). we critically look at such photographs, especially the ones that appear in northern mosaic, a local tabloid/newspaper published from 1975–1997 by the thunder bay multicultural association (tbma), an organization started up by a group of local university students in 1972 in response to canada’s 1971 policy of multiculturalism. the photographic images of multicultural dance in northern mosaic comprise mostly representations of local, amateur dance troupes performing at the city’s annual folklore festival, although a few images of professional dancers, most often visiting on tour or giving lessons, occasionally grace its pages. in our paper, we concentrate on the intersections between multicultural dance, race, and ethnicity as narratively constructed and visually represented in northern mosaic between 1980 and 1985. although we have reviewed over forty volumes of northern mosaic to date, our focus herein is on three cover images which signal a departure from the 1970s when only one dance photograph appeared on the tabloid’s cover (northern mosaic, 1975 1[2]; see figure 1, page 29). that cover is, however, emblematic of the then commonsensical association between ethnicity and whiteness in thunder bay and across canada (see mackay 1999; henry et al. 1995). 29 stolar and sacchetti figure 1: northern mosaic's cover, vol. 1, no. 2 (1975). representations of multicultural dance in photographic images 30 a careful comparative look at northern mosaic’s textual renderings of multiculturalism and its photographic representations of dance in the 1970s draws attention to the issues of gender, ethnic, and racial representation which were brought into public debate. in keeping with these nation-wide scholarly and popular discussions, northern mosaic began to give a greater voice to visible minorities. several of articles featuring chinese, japanese, and filipino communities emerged, accompanied by a significant number of photographic images (see northern mosaic 1981 4 [6]: 8–9; 1983 7 [4]: 10; 1983 7 [3]: 8–9, 5; 1985 9 [2]: 14). south asian ethnicity, although already represented in the tabloid in the 1970s, was brought increasingly to the fore. this is not to say that these groups did not exist in thunder bay in the 1970s; on the contrary, it means they were either excluded from northern mosaic or included in a way that underlined their exotic difference from the white ethnic groups in the city (see potestio and pucci 1987; tbma 1982). in contrast to the 1970s, whereby we see the lithuanian, latvian, hungarian, and slovakian dance troupes featured prominently in northern mosaic, the 1980s editions include photographs of recreational chinese lion and ribbon dance, east indian dandia and bhangra dances, and many different types of belly dancers (which, interestingly enough, remain unspecified as to ethnic or national origin, as well as to particular dances) (see northern mosaic 1984, 8 [1–2]: 14; 1983, 7 [1]: 12; and 1983, 7 [2]:8). paradoxically, just as northern mosaic begins to engage more seriously with visible minorities in the early 1980s, attention is drawn simultaneously to the importance of preserving and celebrating ethnocultural difference – a term denoting, according to a tbma position paper on multiculturalism, not solely immigrant culture but aboriginal culture as well (northern mosaic 1985, 10 [4]: 5, 16). multiculturalism was to transcend its categorization as a marker of ethnic immigrant groups and expand to include a more generalized diversity of cultures and traditions regardless of whether they were home-grown or imported; in particular, french, aboriginal, and celtic dancers are recognized within the umbrella of the mosaic, thereby glazing over the colonial past and its discontents (e.g., see northern mosaic 1981 5 [2–3]: 13). as shifts within understandings of multiculturalism evolve, articles in northern mosaic take issue with the idea that multiculturalism is too focused on folklore and, as such, downplay the problems visible minorities face. articles call for racism to be tackled separately from the social inequalities of ethnocultural recognition. from this perspective, multiculturalism has a place for visible minorities who want to engage in cultural preservation, but issues with regard to social inequalities are directed elsewhere, to another unspecified arena of public policy. however, the problems white ethic groups faced historically with anglo-celtic hegemony in the city were often dealt with within the pages of northern mosaic in the 1970s. highlighting the ethnocultural specificity of visible minorities in northern mosaic in the early 1980s was, therefore, not so straightforward. this is evident in how multicultural dance images appear in the tabloid. for starters, european ethnicities continue to dominate, and complimentary commentaries about the increasingly professionalization of white folk dance appear. for instance, there are articles with photographs about the local hungarians dancers performing out 31 stolar and sacchetti of town, ukrainian dancers garnering high honors at dance festivals, and finns travelling abroad to australia to showcase their folk dances (see: northern mosaic 1983–84, 7 [4]: 13; 1983, 7 [1]: 13; 1985, 9 [3]: 11). the stress on whiteness is most forcefully expressed through the overt attention paid to scottish ethnicity in the city, even though it was previously cast as non-ethnic and largely invisible in the 1970s editions of northern mosaic (although it was documented in many, many photographic images which are housed in the tbma archives). photographic images of highland dancers begin to make a more noticeable appearance in the tabloid alongside articles about the long history of scottish performing arts (such as bagpiping) in thunder bay (see northern mosaic, 1980, 6 [3]: 6; 1983 7 [3]: 9; see 1980, 4 [2]: 12 for irish ethnicity as well). the question arises: why does scottish highland dance, and scottishness as an ethnic marker, become visible and more prominently featured at a time when visible minorities challenge the direction and discourses of multiculturalism? the emphasis on white ethnic dance is, perhaps, most telling with the 1981 cover of northern mosaic (5 [2–3]). featuring a photograph of laura pascolo, a professional cecchetti-trained dancer of self-identified italian ancestry who is also the founder of and 15-year artistic director for the currently-existing le stelle alpine italian performing arts association dancers (see figure 2, page 32). pascolo also worked with the promysk polish dance troupe, the vesnyanka ukrainian dancers, and the thunder bay folklore festival, where she was the first to stage a cross-cultural dance production (internationaldanceacademy.com). this photograph, which was also used for the cover of two thunder bay guest magazines (email correspondence, spring 2011), features pascolo performing, according to page 2 of the northern mosaic edition, “a lively dance.” in actuality, she is performing a neapolitan tarantella, a dance pascolo delineates as different from the peasant-like, social dances currently staged by the italian dancers in thunder bay. hers is, by implication, more attentive to technique, more polished, more demanding, and requiring classical ballet training to perform properly (email correspondence, spring 2009 and 2011). the framing of italian dance as “professional” iterates the emerging discourse of a “higher order” italian culture in thunder bay, which signals the move away from the immigrant peasant culture of the past. in doing so, it also marks the shift between higher-order culture and peasant or folk culture. the former becomes more closely associated with white ethnic groups which, if not assimilated into the dominant anglo culture, are nevertheless distanced from their immigrant past and stereotypes as unwanted, rabble-rousing foreigners; meanwhile, the latter becomes more closely associated with visible minorities which, regardless of how long they have actually been in the city and in canada more generally, are deemed newcomers (or “new canadians,” the term used in the 1980s to refer to visible minority immigrant groups in canada). representations of multicultural dance in photographic images 32 figure 2: northern mosaic's cover, vol. 5, no. 2–3 (1981). 33 stolar and sacchetti visible minorities are in turn more closely associated with aboriginal culture by implication, as visual representations of first nations peoples, termed “indians” or “natives” in northern mosaic, become more prominent, especially through representations of aboriginal dance. the 1980 cover, for instance, provides a close-up, profile headshot of richard lyons, the founder and artistic director of the “renowned lyons dance troupe” (northern mosaic, 4 [1]: 4). in this issue, we are informed that the troupe received multicultural grant money to purchase a van to enable the troupe to travel around northwestern ontario to perform. the article also stresses that “the director, richard lyons manages a core group of three professional dancers around which an ensemble of as many as forty dancers have been organized” (northern mosaic, 4 [1]: 4; emphasis ours). there is little other information provided, such as the names of the professional dancers, the dances they perform, and the significance of bodily movement. images of aboriginal dancers appear several other times between 1980 and 1985. for instance, one lyons dancer is described as a “colorful” dancer who “performs a dance of tracking a partridge” (northern mosaic, 1981, 5 [2–3]: 13). what is odd, however, is the choice of image of aboriginal dance used as the 1983 cover of the tabloid (7 [2]; see figure 3, page 34). our research at the archives yielded many photographic images of aboriginal dance, and the image chosen to grace the cover is, aesthetically, not a good shot leading us to question why it was used (instead of other better shots) and how to interpret the image. the position of the dancer’s body with the head and torso inclined into the circle (which is not visible in this shot) connote the movement of the dance, but the emphasis appears to be more on the dress than the dance: the dancer in the foreground wears the full regalia of a feathered-headdress, fur moccasins, and sweetgrass hanging from his belt. there is an oddness or awkwardness to this photograph, which, upon closer analysis, lies in its composition, in the spatial relationship between the two dancers. the difference in size, position, and light between the two dancers is easily explained by the photographer’s standing too close to one of the dancers and the use of a flash. however, the visual effects of the figures demands that the viewer focus on one at the expense of the other. by shifting the visual focus in this manner, the compositional elements of the photograph emphasize a kind of duality at play. this duality is further emphasized when we consider that the frontal figure is male and the one obscured in the background is female. the frontal male dancer is framed by the light-colored feathers of the headdress. the figure itself is gargantuan, making him appear distorted as he plastically takes on the rectangular shape of the frame that literally and metaphorically contains and restricts him. following the incline of his head, a line points to the obscured figure in the background, a female dancer in the shadows who seems to be slightly out of focus. unlike other photographs of other dances, the composition of this photograph does not give the viewer the illusion of picturing the relationship between the two dancers, or of the dance as a whole. instead, it seems to take the dancers out of the context of the dance. representations of multicultural dance in photographic images 34 figure 3: northern mosaic's cover, vol. 7, no.2 (1983). 35 stolar and sacchetti these compositional elements visually stress the thematic representation of aboriginal dance in northern mosaic. most often it is the male dancers who are featured, often in close-ups that, as we argue above, emphasize their dress rather than the dance. while the inclusion of photographs of aboriginal dance visually marks the inclusion of first nations peoples within the tabloid, the photographs included challenge the visibility and inclusion of first nations peoples within the mosaic of the city. the paradox of visibility-invisibility is further revealed in the textual narrative of the tabloid, as most of the articles in northern mosaic in the early 1980s ignore the plight of first nations peoples and celebrate, instead, aboriginal arts and crafts. the slant is thus culture-focused multiculturalism at the expense of postcolonial conditions and a history of exploitation (think here of land and treaty rights), and abuse (recall residential schools issues and ensuing problems with unemployment, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma). this erasure feeds the production of racism in thunder bay as it appears to promote canadian-aboriginal relations by marketing aboriginality as a safe commodity for consumption to viewers who relish the image of a first nations person donning full regalia. the image works to affirm the contested “natural” image of first nations persons in a pre-colonial world performing, as it were, for a non-aboriginal audience contemporarily divorced from its settler-invader past. as the photographs of aboriginal dancers suggest, visible minorities are often highlighted as exotic additions to the canadian multicultural mosaic. such exoticization is similarly repeated in the northern mosaic 1985, volume 9, number 2 cover featuring a close-up headshot of a south asian dancer (see figure 4, next page). however, unlike the aboriginal dancer and dance, both of which remain unnamed, this performer is named and the pose she holds disclosed as part of the “bharata natyam, the most popular classical dance in india” (northern mosaic, 1985, 9 [2]: 2). the featured dancer is now the famous anuradha naimpally, the only south asian selfidentified “classical dancer” to receive the le mieux prize by canada council in 1989. the daughter of a mathematics professor at lakehead university, from where she also graduated prior to pursuing her m.f.a. at york, she regularly performed at the folklore festival during her time in thunder bay and her performances in the late 1970s are documented in photographs found in the tbma archives (email correspondence, spring 2011). it is not until 1983, however, that she is featured in an article in northern mosaic (7 [4]: 14; see figure 5, page 38). returning to the cover photograph of anuradha naimpally, one of the most striking qualities of this photograph is the use of light: it showcases the beauty of photography, highlighting the contrast between the dark background, the white flowers and accents on the dancer’s dress and facial decorations, delineating the nuances the light carves alongside her hands and face. unlike the images of pascolo and the aboriginal dancers, this dancer is still, posing for the photographer rather than dancing in the folklore festival. half-exposed and half-hidden, her face commands the audience’s attention; as we look at her, she looks right at the camera, through it, and gazes right back at the viewer, a trait often remarked on in postcolonial studies. representations of multicultural dance in photographic images 36 figure 4: northern mosaic's cover, vol. 9, no. 2 (1985). 37 stolar and sacchetti an audience familiar with dance and well-versed in the language of the bharata natyam would be able to read and interpret the nuances of this photograph in a way that the presumed audience of northern mosaic would not. for instance, the position of the right hand above the head is positioned in the alapadma mudra, or “flower blossom,” in which all fingers are arranged as petals. the left hand near the chin is positioned in the tamrachuda mudra, or “cock bird,” which resembles a bird if placed in front of the face with the crooked finger facing front and a thrusting movement forward. however, as anuradha naimpally notes, “the mudras are a sign language, [and] specific usage within a context defines their meaning. the mudra, placement near the body, and the facial expression will all have a role here” (email correspondence, december 2013). naimpally further states: “in this image, i am using the alapadma mudra to indicate the holding of an earthen pot on top of my head. this denotes that i am playing the character of a milk maid carrying a pot of buttermilk to the market. the tamrachuda near the chin is used as a gesture […] to indicate coyness, hesitation, shyness. these two hands along with the sideways look, present a maiden coyly glancing at someone – possibly krishna – without drawing attention to herself” (email correspondence, december 2013). to the lay reader, in contrast, this photographic image tells a different story than that which the dancer, particularly her narrating hands, manifests. her hands appear to be framing her face, perfectly positioned to mark a straight line from her outstretched finger through her nose and down below her chin. the dividing line, as it were, further accentuates the duality we allude to earlier, and which is further implied by her closed lips, suggesting silence and passivity, in contrast to her speaking hands, which connote agency. the play between binaries here, between light and shadow, voice and silence, agency and passivity, highlight the tensions faced by visual minorities within multiculturalism, which simultaneously emphasizes racial difference as exotic, and therefore desirable, at the same time that it marks a kind of foreignness, which is tinged (at the very least) with abject fear – in here portrayed by the seductive dancer who gazes back at the audience with a bold, defiant look. like the cover featuring the aboriginal dance, there is little information provided in this issue about the meaning of the bharata natyam, its relevance to multiculturalism in the 1980s, and the section of “east indian” usually featured in the tabloid is missing in this volume. our review of naimpally’s website, combined with our recent email correspondence with her, however, yields additional details which could have easily been incorporated in northern mosaic. she is a dancer who “learned her first steps with dr. menaka thakkar” (anudance.com/bio), another professional female dancer who performed and taught south asian dance in thunder bay, and who was featured in an article in northern mosaic in 1975 (3 [3]: 9). naimpally recalls that the photograph was taken “by some male photographer” who said it would be specifically used for the cover of northern mosaic; and that it highlights the importance of hand gestures, a topic of long-time interest in her dance practice (email correspondence, spring 2011). she recalls: “the photo is a studio shot, taken in an old building with bricks and tall windows because [the photographer] wanted the background to be dark and mysterious. i remember the people who representations of multicultural dance in photographic images 38 commissioned the shot (perhaps the northern mosaic editors?) wanting the shot to have mystique and specifically asked for a black background” (email correspondence, spring 2011). the pose, which was part of a public performance, “captures a moment when her character, who is separated from her beloved, is telling a confidant how much she misses him. the hand symbols are meant to express her rather tentative frame of mind” (email correspondence, spring 2011, paraphrased). out of context, however, what the photograph conveys is not the dance or the emotion of the character but an image of an exotic other who one might see in magazines like national geographic. comparing this image, which is, granted, a beautiful shot, with the image provided in the 1983 article (northern mosaic, 1983 7 [4]: 14; see figure 5) makes this point clearer. rather than a professional dancer holding a pose in the midst of a dance, the adherence to conventions of ethnographic portraiture represents here an exotic south asian subject. figure 5: northern mosaic, vol. 7, no. 4: 14. 39 stolar and sacchetti what, then, do these three featured cover photographs of multicultural dance tell us about the discourse of multiculturalism in thunder bay during the early 1980s, a time when the notion of cultural difference was both upheld and torn apart for its lack of attention to matters of race? northern mosaic responds, on one level, by featuring photographs of many visible minority dancers to suggest their inclusion and visibility within the mosaic of the city. it is troubling, however, that these photographs exoticize rather than normalize visible minorities in the city, thereby repeating the very problem with multiculturalism expressed by its critiques. missing from the pages of the newspaper is any attention to the plight of visible minorities. taken outside of the social, political, economic, historical and religious contexts, these visual representations of multicultural dance are used to celebrate, and thus naturalize, visible minorities as members of just another ethnic group that is now absorbed into the mosaic. these visual images, paired with worrisome captions and omissions thus challenge the notion of inclusion and showcase instead the very tenuous acceptance of visible minorities as part of the city and as part of the canadian mosaic more generally. acknowledgements we are grateful to the tbma for allowing us to reproduce their photographs, the aig+c, lakehead university for research grants, and lakehead university senate research committee for monies to defray conference travel costs. works cited dunk, thomas. 1994. it’s a working man’s town: male working-class culture. montreal and kingston: mcgill-queen’s university press. henry, frances and carol tator, winston mattis, tim rees, eds. 1995. the colour of democracy: racism in canadian society. toronto, canada: harcourt brace. mackay, eva. 1999. the house of difference: cultural politics and national identity in canada. london: routledge. mirzoeff, nicholas. 2002. “the subject of visual culture.” in the visual culture reader, 2nd edition, ed. nicholas mirzoeff, 3–23. new york: routledge. potestio, john and antonio pucci, eds. 1987. “thunder bay’s people.” polyphony: the bulletin of the multicultural history society of ontario: thunder bay’s people 9.2. sullivan, rachel. 2009. “the (mis)translation of masculine femininity in rural space: (re)reading ‘queer’ women in northern ontario, canada.” thirdspace 8.2: np. representations of multicultural dance in photographic images 40 tbma. 1982. t.b.m.a 1972–82: a ten year history of the thunder bay multicultural association. thunder bay, canada. microsoft word prusak 9.1 intro.docx [expositions 9.1 (2015) 31–32] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 editor’s introduction: seven papers from the king’s college conference “the idea of a catholic college” bernard g. prusak king’s college (pa) the complementarity of faith and reason; a commitment to philosophy and theology as “sapiential” and “architectonic” disciplines; the belief that all reality is suffused with the presence of god such that god may be found in all things; an understanding of education as a work of sanctification if not even resurrection; and an ambition to educate hearts as well as to instruct minds—these are, among others, the ideas that have animated and animate yet today catholic colleges and universities in the united states. but how do these ideas fare, and how can they best be expressed, in today’s undergraduate colleges? are philosophy and theology up to the charge? how should courses in these disciplines be conceived and structured in general education curricula? further, how do the other disciplines in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences serve and express the basic mission of catholic higher education? do professional programs in business, education, engineering, or nursing have distinctive vocations within the context of catholic higher education? and just what is the warrant for an institution of higher learning to seek to transform students’ hearts? the conference “the idea of a catholic college: charism, curricula, and community,” hosted by king’s college in fall 2014, examined questions of just this kind. proceedings of the conference have been split between the journal of catholic higher education and expositions. here expositions publishes seven papers concerning curriculum, academic life more generally, and pedagogy. alexander eodice, professor of philosophy at iona college and dean of the college’s school of arts and sciences from 2001 to 2008, considers the relevance to present-day catholic institutions of john tracy ellis’s “scathing critique of catholic intellectual life in america” published in 1955. jonathan sanford, professor of philosophy and associate vice president of academic affairs at franciscan university of steubenville, makes a case for the relevance of a critique of higher education published a century earlier, namely, john henry newman’s reflections on the idea of the university. ilia delio, o.s.f., director of the catholic studies program at georgetown university, argues for breaking new ground: according to her, the curricula at catholic institutions ought to reflect a distinctive “epistemology,” rooted at once in the ancient catholic aspiration to “wholemaking” and insights from the contemporary natural philosophy of teilhard de chardin, among others. editor’s introduction 32 the papers by karen eifler and charles gordon, c.s.c., co-directors of the garaventa center for catholic intellectual life and american culture at the university of portland, and cornelius plantinga, jr., senior research fellow at the calvin institute of christian worship, change the focus from curriculum to collegiality and student life, respectively. plantinga asks what is involved in educating for shalom—“universal flourishing and delight, each created thing a wonder, each created person a source of joy”—and comes to focus on practices within the so-called cocurriculum, the non-academic side of student life. eifler and gordon focus, instead, on faculty life. using the work of the garaventa center as a case study, they discuss methods of engaging faculty more deeply in the mission of the institution. finally, kim paffenroth, professor of religious studies at iona college, presents some personal reflections on how best to think about teaching the pre-christian classics within the setting of a catholic institution. stephen laumakis, professor of philosophy at the university of saint thomas, minnesota, discusses how philosophy and theology courses may serve as “‘bridge’ or linking courses unifying the students’ experience of the core curriculum at a catholic university.” his proposal is that linking these courses may help to overcome what he takes to be “two of the major obstacles in a typical undergraduate experience: namely, prematurely focused specialization and an inability to see the ‘big picture.’” microsoft word reed-bouley-revised proof.docx [expositions 10.1 (2016) 8–16] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 catholic social teaching: transforming students, transforming society jennifer reed-bouley college of saint mary (ne) much innovation has occurred in u.s. catholic higher education in response to the u.s. catholic bishops’ 1998 document sharing catholic social teaching: challenges and directions.1 this document and the “summary report of the task force on catholic social teaching and catholic education” agreed both that catholic social teaching (cst) has not met its intended goal of informing catholics’ moral action, and that catholic higher education inadequately integrates cst into the curriculum and co-curriculum. the task force on catholic social teaching and catholic education identified opportunities for catholic universities to incorporate cst more thoroughly into existing offerings and to create new cst programs. although many universities have adopted these strategies in creative and exemplary ways, a fundamental and pressing challenge is to identify the resources within cst that both inform and transform students. this challenge raises questions related to how students engage with cst, including the following: how does cst inform and transform students’ knowledge, values, and actions? how can faculty and staff at catholic universities most effectively facilitate the processes of students’ transformation in light of cst’s own content? this short paper analyzes only catholic social teaching (i.e., official documents written by popes and bishops), not wider catholic traditions. one potential barrier to including cst in the curriculum and co-curriculum is that the official documents themselves do not suggest a particular pedagogy or include plans for how the lessons of cst could be disseminated or implemented.2 the documents constituting official cst seem to assume that familiarity with the corpus of catholic social teaching necessarily leads to engagement, integration, and application of principles to particular situations, yielding right social action.3 although the shortcomings of this approach have been well-documented,4 one potential benefit is that catholic higher education can exhibit a myriad of creative approaches to sharing cst that align with a particular college or university’s mission, heritage, context, sponsoring order’s charism, and other factors. 9 reed-bouley as the structure and content of introductory texts in cst indicate, instruction in cst is best accomplished within the broader contexts of the catholic intellectual and social traditions— studying the lives of holy women and men; being immersed in the church’s rich liturgy, sacraments, and prayer; practicing social action for justice; learning about (historical) and contributing to (contemporary) catholic social movements; and participating in other facets of the church’s life.5 though we can assume faculty teaching university-level courses in cst base their course designs on an implicit sense of how cst functions (in order to present cst in ways that are most effective with university students), currently no empirical research exists on how and to what extent university students learn, appropriate, and engage with cst. however, existing rich descriptions and analyses of courses and programs could serve as a foundation for designing empirical studies of best practices in facilitating educational processes through which cst transforms students.6 for university students (mirroring contemporary society at large), arguments from religious authority hold little sway; students are not convinced of the moral rightness or wrongness of particular attitudes and actions solely because these views are promulgated by those who occupy positions of religious authority in the catholic church.7 moreover, the long history of formation work in christianity makes clear that telling people what to value, believe, and do is not sufficient to bring about sustainable transformation of people’s lives.8 we cannot expect students to promote particular social policies on immigration, labor, the environment, racism and white privilege, or other issues because they are cst’s official recommendations. a further complicating factor for educating students regarding cst is that data on the catholic church’s influence on 18–24 yearolds (so-called “traditional-age” college students) are discouraging.9 recent pew research center polling data document the decline in the number of catholic (as well as other religious) adherents in the united states. as of 2014, thirty-six percent of 18–24 year-olds in the u.s. describe themselves as unaffiliated with any religion.10 this compares with nearly twenty-four percent of u.s. adults overall who identify themselves as religiously unaffiliated. catholics lost the largest share of adherents from 2007–2014, with nearly thirteen percent of american adults reporting that they are former catholics.11 these demographic data provide an important context for the challenges catholic higher education faces.12 moreover, catholic higher education’s landscape has changed considerably in the last fifty years in light of ecclesial, cultural, social, and educational factors, leading to a renewed need to consider the ways in which students learn about cst.13 transforming students, transforming society 10 for those who do participate in catholic higher education and remain receptive to learning about cst, what are some possible ways that cst actually transforms students? to answer this question, it is important to recognize the common understanding that cst includes two levels of teaching: (1) general principles (or themes)14 to which all catholics are expected to assent, and (2) application of the principles to specific issues, where catholics in good conscience may disagree. the documents that comprise cst generally employ social analysis (analyzing “the signs of the times”) in order to make a case for the policy prescriptions bishops and popes offer for particular issues. given that the magisterium offers both principles central to the catholic tradition (such as human dignity, solidarity, and common good) and prudential judgments about policies, how can college students be formed by, appropriate, question, apply, and contribute to developing cst in creative ways? i sketch in the following the contours of three possible hypotheses regarding the resources within cst that may inform and transform students’ lives. these hypotheses are not intended to be exhaustive, and none of them is mutually exclusive. first, cst’s principles may teach students by complicating their habits of moral reasoning. the principles call into question the common sensibilities most students hold by turning contemporary american values on their heads. for example, the principles of option for the poor, common good, human dignity, and solidarity appeal to persons’ highest aspirations, noblest visions of the good, and most elevated sensibilities regarding human responsibilities. but these principles contrast with the highly individualistic ethos that assumes all people in the u.s. have equal life chances and that individual effort yields fair outcomes in individuals’ lives. to be sure, the principles of cst significantly differ from the prevailing view of traditional-age university students. christian smith and others’ studies of 18–23 year-olds indicate that their dominant faith orientation, “moralistic therapeutic deism,” mirrors that of the majority of u.s. adults. this view deemphasizes religious doctrine and values each individual’s autonomy in acting according to a personal sense of what is right.15 by contrast, the principles of cst provide standards for judgment and affirm that a different and better world—and a different way of viewing the world—are possible. the first hypothesis about how the principles of cst function differs from cst’s “default pedagogy”16 (to borrow roger bergman’s apt term) that the faithful should simply apply principles to particular situations. rather, the first hypothesis suggests that prior to students’ (or anyone’s) application of 11 reed-bouley principles, it must be the case that the principles offer an attractive way of viewing oneself, society, and communal responsibilities. second, after complicating students’ moral reasoning and proposing a more adequate set of values or principles than the highly individualistic view that most students hold, cst incorporates social analysis, which it terms “reading the signs of the times,” that can help to extend students’ thinking in systematic ways. cst assumes that social structures are not immutable. they can be transformed, so that they become less sinful and more reflective of god’s grace. students can learn to use social analysis to examine both social problems and the policy prescriptions that flow from the general principles of cst. these policy prescriptions are often at odds with what students have been previously taught, and may prima facie seem at odds with narrow understandings of selfinterest. bryan massingale and others note that cst’s social analysis of economic issues is more comprehensive than its social analysis of some other issues cst takes up, particularly the issue of u.s. racism. without adequate social analysis, cst can slip into “pious exhortations that do not persuade critical readers.”17 conversely, however, when cst provides adequate social analysis, students can learn both from its method of social analysis and its conclusions. for example, “strangers no longer: together on the journey of hope,” the 2003 pastoral letter written by the bishops of mexico and the u.s. on immigration, includes analyses of immigration from historical, economic, political, and religious perspectives. students who read this document learn multiple dimensions of what is often portrayed in public discourse as a simple issue. the rich social analysis of immigration provides a strong foundation for the policy prescriptions the bishops offer, and provides a model for how students can approach other complex social issues.18 why is the social analysis in cst distinctive from other methods of social analysis that students may learn in a standard sociology course or other courses? while courses in the social sciences provide excellent complements to the study of cst, the third resource in cst that may potentially transform students is its catholic sacramental worldview. students may adopt (or have already been informed by) this lens for seeing and interpreting reality. the sacramental worldview that suffuses and underlies all of cst—both principles and policies—provides a frame of reference that influences the way students interpret contemporary society and relationships. “sacramental worldview” refers to the understanding that the sacred and profane are linked, with the upshot that we have sacred obligations to improve the world and contribute to the kingdom of god. all creation is suffused with the holy, by god the creator and sustainer of all life, with the implication transforming students, transforming society 12 that we may experience god’s love through ordinary and extraordinary events, persons, and the natural world.19 a sacramental worldview implies that all is interconnected, and that humanity really is one family. the holy is accessible through all creation, and we must transform social structures marked by sin into graced, just social structures. the sacramental worldview affirms a positive engagement with society and public life, which encourages students to engage in action for transforming the world. cst has much to recommend it for informing students’ moral imaginations and decisionmaking: its attractive principles for judgment, social analysis, and sacramental worldview. identifying the elements within cst that inform and transform students’ knowledge, values, and actions related to social justice represents one facet of a larger process. the ultimate goal for catholic higher education with regard to cst is not only for students to appropriate it (though this is a challenging and worthy goal in itself), but for students to be so formed by cst that they can question its adequacy to particular social challenges, participate in the church’s and other groups’ efforts for social transformation, and suggest how the church could more robustly respond to injustice and participate more fully in healing itself and society. notes 1. see the association of catholic colleges and universities, “catholic higher education and catholic social teaching: a vision statement,” appendix 1, in sullivan and pagnucco 2014. the book offers reflections on catholic social teaching as well as examples of how faculty and staff integrate it into particular programs and courses at various universities. 2. united states catholic conference of catholic bishops 1998, 3. 3. bergman 2011, 14. a significant and recent exception to this general rule is the 2015 website we are salt and light developed by the united states conference of catholic bishops’ department of justice, peace, and human development based upon the usccb document “communities of salt and light.” under the four-fold rubric “act together,” “reach out together,” “pray together,” and “learn together,” the website offers not only the principles of cst but also prayers, resources, success stories from parishes, schools, and 13 reed-bouley catholic relief services, and other information about catholic social teaching. see http://www.wearesaltandlight.org/. 4. see bergman 2011 and also massingale 2010, 74. 5. for examples of these approaches in chronological order of publication, see texts frequently used in university courses on cst, including kammer 2004, kelley and weigert 2005, mich 2008, massaro 2012, and brigham 2013. 6. see, for example, sullivan and pagnucco 2014 and eifler and landy 2015. 7. in fact, students may resist cst on the basis of religious authority if they sense that its authors are not informed by dialogue with others. 8. see kyle 2014. 9. see, for example, smith et al. 2011, 19. for analysis of the extent to which 18–23 year old catholics identify with catholicism more generally, see smith et al. 2014, 68 on “beliefs about the relevance and authority of religious institutions.” this book includes a fascinating and sobering study of university of notre dame (arguably the “most catholic” institution of higher education in the us) undergraduates’ religious knowledge and perceptions of the value of catholicism; see 255–263. thomas massaro briefly addresses several challenges to cst’s public credibility with lay catholics of all ages in massaro 2012, 218–225. 10. see “millennials increasingly are driving growth of ‘nones,’” may 12, 2015, available at http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/05/12/millennials-increasingly-aredriving-growth-of-nones/. 11. see “new pew research center study examines america’s changing religious landscape,” may 12, 2015, available at http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/new-pewresearch-center-study-examines-americas-changing-religious-landscape/. 12. catholic theologians and sociologists have hypothesized various reasons the institutional catholic church has lost adherents as well as why the magisterium’s credibility has declined among catholics and the public at large. according to a 2010 pew research center study, more than 25 percent of former catholics who were religiously unaffiliated transforming students, transforming society 14 (i.e., did not join another church after leaving catholicism) cited the clergy sexual abuse scandals as a reason for leaving the church. see “clergy sexual abuse and the catholic church,” march 29, 2010, available at http://www.pewresearch.org/daily-number/clergysexual-abuse-and-the-catholic-church/. 13. for an analysis of these factors, see killen 2015, 80–82. 14. united states conference of catholic bishops, “seven themes of catholic social teaching,” available at http://www.usccb.org/beliefs-and-teachings/what-webelieve/catholic-social-teaching/seven-themes-of-catholic-social-teaching.cfm. 15. smith and denton 2005, 171–172. 16. bergman 2011, 15. 17. massingale 2010, 74. in particular, massingale contrasts the more thorough social analysis found in “the challenge of peace” on war and nonviolence and “economic justice for all” on the u.s. economy with the inadequate social analysis in “brothers and sisters to us” on racism. 18. see “strangers no longer: together on the journey of hope,” available at http://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/human-life-and-dignity/immigration/strangersno-longer-together-on-the-journey-of-hope.cfm. 19. see, for example, himes 1995, chapter 7 and his article “finding god in all things: a sacramental worldview and its effects” in eifler and landy 2015, 3–17. works cited bergman, roger. 2011. catholic social learning: educating the faith that does justice. new york: fordham university press. brigham, erin m. 2013. see, judge, act: catholic social teaching and service learning. winona, mn: anselm academic. 15 reed-bouley eifler, karen e., and thomas m. landy, eds. 2015. becoming beholders: cultivating sacramental imagination and actions in college classrooms. collegeville, mn: liturgical press. himes, michael. 1995. doing the truth in love: conversations about god, relationships and seevice. new york and mahwah, nj: paulist press. _____. 2015. “finding god in all things: a sacramental worldview and its effects.” in becoming beholders: cultivating sacramental imagination and actions in college classrooms, eds. karen e. eifler and thomas m. landy, 3–17. collegeville, mn: liturgical press. kammer, fred. 2004. doing faithjustice: an introduction to catholic social thought. new york and mahwah, nj: paulist press. kelley, alexia k., and kathleen maas weigert, eds. 2005. living the catholic social tradition: cases and commentary. lanham, md: rowman and littlefield. killen, patricia o’connell. “reflections on core curriculum, mission, and catholic identity in our time,” journal of catholic higher education (2015) 34.1: 77–90. kyle, eric j. 2014. sacred systems: exploring personal transformation in the western christian tradition. eugene, or: pickwick. massaro, thomas. 2012. living justice: catholic social teaching in action. lanham, md: rowman and littlefield. massingale, bryan m. 2010. racial justice in the catholic church. maryknoll, ny: orbis. mich, marvin l. krier. 2008. catholic social teaching and movements. mystic, ct: twentythird publications. smith, christian, and melinda lundquist denton. 2005. soul searching: the religious and spiritual lives of american teenagers. new york: oxford university press. _____, kari christoffersen, hilary davidson, and patricia snell herzog. 2011. lost in transition: the dark side of emerging adulthood. new york: oxford university press. transforming students, transforming society 16 _____, kyle longest, jonathan hill, and kari christoffersen. 2014. young catholic america: emerging adults in, out of, and gone from the church. new york: oxford university press. sullivan, susan crawford, and ron pagnucco, eds. 2014. a vision of justice: engaging catholic social teaching on the college campus. collegeville, mn: liturgical press. united states conference of catholic bishops. 1998. sharing catholic social teaching: challenges and directions, reflections of the united states catholic bishops. washington, d.c.: united states conference of catholic bishops. microsoft word baily-final [expositions 7.2 (2013) 1–27] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376     ousia aphanes: justice and the market in light of plato’s republic, i and ii alan i. baily stephen f. austin state university scholars often distinguish book i of the republic from the rest of plato’s dialogue. without arguing against this view, i suggest that books i and ii can be read together fruitfully, as a preliminary discussion of the relationship between money and political authority. indeed, the first book offers a window into a socio-political “crisis of reciprocity,” concomitant with the rise of coinage in the greek world, that formed part of the social context of platonic political philosophy. along with the emergence of the polis (city-state), the rise of coinage displaced the pre-political order of gift-exchange. gift-exchange provided a symbolic mediation for social order, but the polis displaced this function, effectively “privatizing” gift-exchanges. meanwhile, the spread of coinage brought the realm of individualistic, utilitarian exchange – formerly marginalized – into the heart of the city. seen in this context, establishing a new mediation between the market and the polis is a central challenge of the republic. book ii introduces the abstract idea of “the market” into western thought. however, we should not read plato’s theorization of this, “civic,” market alone, but against the “revolutionary” face of money on display in book i’s quarrel about justice – which is also a quarrel about money and its relationship to human and divine debts, friendship, and individual gain. as i argue, a crucial goal of plato’s republic is to persuade athenians to adopt a new understanding of money as an instrument of positive or constructive reciprocity, and thus, as a part – but not the whole – of political justice.1 this goal requires plato to formulate a theory of the market and to circumscribe the market and its logic within the boundaries of the republic’s paradigm of justice, the kallipolis. underpinning this theoretical move is the analogical relationship plato posits between the soul and the city. just as the healthy soul comprises three hierarchically ordered parts – reason, “spiritedness,” and appetite – the city is composed of three classes – philosopher-rulers, guardians, and “moneymakers.”2 the republic calls for a subordination of market norms to the imperatives of justice in the polis. accordingly, plato advocates a philosophical renovation in athenians’ understanding of money3 as an instrument of both distributive and corrective justice. but in the first place, in order to subordinate the logic of markets to that of political justice, plato had to separate the two spheres – market and polis – analytically. thus, plato should be recognized as the first significant theorist of the market in western political thought, not only as its first great critic. in other words, the radical, platonic distinction between the market sphere and the political sphere is a presupposition of what counts as “market logic” in western discourse. if nothing else, then, to return to platonic origins on this point is to remind ourselves of the inherited and contingent aspects of notions such as “market logic.” returning to the origins of concepts is both an occasion to break the spell of reification and an opportunity to understand better the intentions of justice and the market in light of plato’s republic, i and ii 2   the theorists who bequeathed them. in our age of “market triumphalism,” revisiting the seminal distinction between the market and political community is as relevant a task as ever.4 a crisis of reciprocity in classical greece like most of his political thought, plato’s theorization of the market was a reply to the crisis of athenian society. among other things, this crisis was related to the rise and rapid spread of coined money in the greek world. following richard seaford (2004), i shall refer to this as a “crisis of reciprocity.”5 this crisis has a twofold aspect. first, the ascendance of the polis implied a new notion of justice (dike) centered on public institutions exercising a monopoly on arbitration in the name of the whole community. this represented a departure from the old forms of reciprocity centered on ritualized exchanges of gifts (or vendettas) between prominent persons or clans. second, the rise of a monetized, “market” economy portended a shift from the “communalistic” practices of generalized exchange, characteristic of palatial economies – and in greece, of the communal practice of temple sacrifice – toward the individualistic and impersonal norms of commodity-exchange. the new public authority manifested by the polis and maintained through the ritual practice of sacrifice was both a foundation for the generalized acceptance of market institutions and a condition of the spread of coinage (seaford 2004). ideally, the polis’ institutional monopoly on arbitrational justice could also serve as a counterbalance against the utilitarian and impersonal, competitive and “individuating” tendency of monetization. but a persistent theme of epic and tragedy is that money often perverted the relationship between public and private order, veiling tyrannical power in the garb of public authority.6 plato’s heuristic vision of the just polis entailed an emphatic distinction between the market order, governed by individual desire, and the orders of honor and justice, governed by the imperatives of political community. in brief, the benevolent tyranny of reason in plato’s kallipolis necessitated that money and commerce in the city be defined as the social analogs of desire and appetite in the soul. like the appetitive soul, platonic money is the manifestation of need and desire in the city. as such, platonic money represents protean and indiscriminate urges with an inherent tendency to outstrip the judicious, boundary-setting authority of platonic moral reasoning. accordingly socrates and his interlocutors prescribe strict limits on the circulation of money in the republic’s city-in-speech. in the concrete context of athenian society, money (coinage) constituted ousia aphanes, or “invisible substance.” by using the medium of coinage, one could not only satisfy virtually any desire, but one could do so “invisibly,” just as the tyrant gyges satisfies his lust and usurps rule by exploiting the power of invisibility granted by deioces’ ring. like appetite or desire, money represented a visionless potency for generation and growth, but one always in danger of corruption through excess. just as appetite must be disciplined on behalf of higher imperatives of just honor and right reason, the “invisible substance” represented by money, and the boundless 3 baily       desire it manifests, had to be made visible – or unavailable – insofar as it threatened to corrupt the just polis.7 thus, in terms of distributive justice, plato allows broad freedom for commercial activity among the appetitive “moneymaking” class; and in this context, plato’s socrates formulates, for the first time, the idea of the “market” as an autonomous realm of human activity capable of providing for both needs and desires in the city. however, socrates strictly denies participation in this realm to the auxiliaries and guardians, whose lifestyles will be communalistic in every imaginable way. just as with poetry, then, socrates does not abolish money from the city. rather, as philosopher-legislator, he dictates exacting terms according to which commerce and money may enter the polis. also, with regard to corrective justice, plato likens punishment (often assessed by fines) to the horticultural technique of kolasis, which resembles pruning: cutting the limbs of a tree in order to improve its growth. the metaphor of kolasis is apt, since plato identifies money and “moneymaking” with the appetitive faculty of the soul. in contrast to irrational appetite, the thumotic, or “spirited,” part of the soul is passively rational, making it amenable to education and discipline. accordingly, the spirited part of the soul is in a position to constrain the overgrowth of the appetitive part by the dictates of philosophic reason. in the city, kolasis plays a parallel role by deploying the thumotic forces of public approbation in service of the rehabilitative project of philosophical justice.8 in this context, plato emphasizes that the use of money (fines) as a means of punishment communicates a rational and rehabilitative relationship between the city and the criminal, rather than a passionate and antagonistic relationship (of “compensation”) between victim and offender. again, plato’s theoretic account of money and markets is preliminary to these characterizations of money as an instrument of justice. two portrayals of money appear in the republic. i begin with book ii because it is the site of plato’s effort to construct an idea of “civic” money as an instrument of positive reciprocity, radically subordinate to the ideal of public justice as institutionalized in the polis.9 yet the republic begins by portraying another, “revolutionary” face of money. this revolutionary aspect would have been the more familiar to athenian readers. plato’s deduction of civic money in book ii is set up against book i’s portrait of revolutionary money. the close relation between revolutionary money and tyrannical power is drawn by socrates’ interlocutors in book i and culminates with the story of gyges’ ring at the beginning of book ii. what follows is an elaboration on this reading of platonic money. i focus on the alternative accounts of money in the first two books, with an eye to their overall place in plato’s philosophical project. i conclude with a brief discussion of the limits of platonic money. throughout, i adopt anthropological, sociological and textual approaches alternately, in an effort to draw as thorough an account as is possible in this brief space. justice and the market in light of plato’s republic, i and ii 4   distributive justice: “from communalism to the market” plato was grappling with the consequences of new modes of reciprocity manifested institutionally by the polis, on the one hand, and the “retail” market on the other. these changes must be understood in relation to practices that preceded them. the most significant of these earlier forms of reciprocity were sacrifice and gift-exchange (henaff 2010).10 sacrifice and giftexchange are both like and unlike their counterparts – political justice and commercial exchange. the former are ritualized practices of reciprocity, while the latter institutionalize reciprocity. also, in pre-political society, both ritualized gift-exchange and sacrifice manifested the longterm social and cosmological order of the community by governing the relationships among men, and between men and gods, respectively. through the process of institutionalization, the functions of these rituals were assumed by codified law and doctrine. both gift-exchange and sacrifice aimed to maintain the long-term transactional order of the community, but the “invisibility” of coined money11 soon implicated it in the short-term order of commercial exchange. short-term exchanges do not presuppose any bond (either of amity or enmity) between the participants, and aim at individual satisfaction rather than long-term maintenance of the social bond or the cosmic order. sacrifice, by contrast, sustained the cosmic order through “communalistic” ritual offerings to the god, performed in the temple, and affirmed the isonomic order of the polis through the division of sacrificial meat into equal shares.12 like coinage, sacrifice could manifest the whole community’s identity, and authority, but unlike retail trade, the distribution of sacrificial shares affirmed the unity of the polis as a community and its citizens’ equality. with regard to the specific phenomenon of monetization, then, the shift from ritualized to institutionalized reciprocity corresponded with a process of individuation, an ideology that stressed formal, rather than substantive equality, and greater autonomy for the short-term transactional order. by analyzing this process, plato radicalizes the terms of this shift. insofar as this was the case, plato’s theoretical association of markets with short-term selfinterest is not arbitrary, though it may be overdrawn owing to his heuristic purpose. unlike sacrifice, gift-exchange mediated long-term relationships among aristocratic families. coinage was the material condition for the spread of markets and thus for the rise of a commercial class. the ascendency of commerce posed a threat to the presumptive authority of aristocratic families, but it also depended on the emerging, political, order in which both new and old classes had a stake. for, the authority of the polis ultimately guaranteed the (future) value of coins: while the greeks certainly did not have “fiat” money, they were unique in accepting that coins of the same denomination carried a uniform value in spite of minor differences in the quantity or purity of bullion. this is what makes greek coinage “fiduciary money” (seaford 2004, 136–146; kurke 1999, 300).13 in terms of modern monetary theory, “fiduciarity” represents a mixture of the “chartalist” view that money is the creature of the state and thus that the value of money is “token” value, and the “metallist” view that the value of money derives from the intrinsic value of precious metals, or “commodity” value.14 5 baily       money did not arise for the first time in the ancient mediterranean, as regimes of debt and credit maintained through various systems of accounting dependent on literacy and numeracy already were functioning much earlier in places like sumer. what makes the greek experience unique is the rapidity of the spread of coinage and the peculiar association between greek money and greek civic religion. “the greeks were the first people to use coinage on a large scale, and throughout the archaic and classical periods such use remained largely confined to the greeks […] fiduciarity (even the relatively limited amount achieved) was in this period even more exclusively greek” (seaford 2004, 146). though the evidence necessarily is circumstantial, there are good reasons to consider seriously the claim that greek monetization depended on the distributive practices of polis and temple institutions. in the first place, it offers a persuasive explanation for the historical genesis of fiduciary money, which is significant because it is quite clear by now that money did not arise from barter to facilitate more efficient trade. after all, the very language of money derived from sacrificial practice: the word obol referred to a sacrificial spit; a drachma was a bundle of obeloi (typically, six (seaford 2004, 126–127)).15 second, the practice of symbolic substitution in sacrificial offerings, where for example a gold or silver ox might be substituted for a live ox, gave rise to mass production, which was an important precondition of the rise of coinage. third, there is evidence that money payments were made by the polis to purchase sacrificial victims, suggesting that the principle that unlike things may be rendered equivalent by means of quantitative comparison was in practice before the spread of coinage (seaford 2004, 80–81; semenova 2011, 377).16 finally, there are strongly suggestive continuities between the titles of sacrificial offices and the titles of offices in the polis. for example, “the regular word for treasurer in the classical period, tamias, originally meant carver. the name kolakretai of early athenian financial officials seems to derive from the gathering of sacrificed thigh-bones. the word danos, ‘loan,’ might originally have meant the part of the sacrifice given to the priest. the meaning of eranos passes from communal meal to cash loan” (seaford 2004, 79). to claim that monetization emerged historically from polis and temple practices does not imply that this was a frictionless development: communal practices of reciprocity can have radically different purposes from the institutionalized reciprocity of market exchange, and coinage facilitated market autonomy in an unprecedented manner. as extant texts indicate, social changes wrought by the expansion of commerce and the rapid spread of coinage throughout the greek world beginning around the eighth century gave rise to a new discourse regarding the moral status of money and its relation to political justice. the combination of these two developments – political centralization and widespread monetization – was a unique convergence, which helps to account for plato’s unique concern with the place of money in the order of justice. justice and the market in light of plato’s republic, i and ii 6   the market in book ii: civic money and plato’s deduction of the market the value of money depends in some degree on a social relation (generalized trust) and money may even serve as an instrument of positive reciprocity. yet at the same time, the anonymous and impersonal – “individuating” – character of market exchange threatens to undermine the ideals of transparency and accountability to which public justice aspires. in the republic plato faced, and attempted to resolve this paradox, by circumscribing the jurisdiction of money in such a way that it could only serve public justice. plato’s theorization of “civic money”17 occurs in republic, book ii. there, socrates18 offers a “likely story” in which money comes into being for purely functional reasons, as a universally accepted measure to facilitate the exchange of diverse goods in a complex marketplace. in telling this, now familiar story, socrates was not trying to demonstrate the impersonal determinism of market forces. rather, the story serves plato’s heuristic, normative effort to locate justice in the city by giving a philosophical account of the polis’ development based on plato’s analysis of the tripartite soul. thus, while socrates assumes the principle of individual specialization as the origin of his deduction of the market, the principle of specialization itself depends on a prior anthropological assumption that humans are communal by nature insofar as they lack self-sufficiency. socrates’ spare, utilitarian account of the genesis of cities invites his interlocutors to consider the possibility that justice is “located” in the need each citizen has for (the service provided by) others. in this way, the two apparently contradictory principles of justice – the individualistic principle of “minding one’s business” and the communalistic principle of “harmony of the parts” in the city as a whole – are reconciled on the plane of abstraction. but more significantly, socrates’ account of the emergence of the polis points, ironically, to the shortcomings of a strictly utilitarian view of political community as merely a function of appetitive interdependence. the irony of book ii becomes clear when seen in the broader context of greek literature and in the crisis of reciprocity described above. to begin, socrates uses the language of citizenship to describe his hypothetical “economy.” both sophisticated and unsophisticated readers would have been struck by the philosopher’s failure to mention temple rituals, military fortifications, and governmental institutions in his hypothetical history of the polis (schofield 1999, 61–71). in greek experience, every polis included these features. it is likely that readers took it as “common sense” that market institutions depended upon such arrangements, rather than the reverse. readers probably were also familiar with stories of legendary tyrants that warned of how the infinite convertibility of money enables tyrannical men to subvert piety and usurp public authority.19 these stories carry more disturbing implications of money’s potential to undermine the very institutions on which it depends. if anything, then, popular wisdom presented money as a simultaneously liberating and subversive, “revolutionary,” force. revolutionary money belongs at the margins of “political” life proper, not as the foundation of the community of interests on which the polis depends. 7 baily       in socrates’ hypothetical history of cities, the aspiration to autarky and the anonymity of market transactors are the logical presuppositions of money’s genesis. in this utilitarian perspective, money solves the problem of “double coincidence of wants” which is insurmountable in a barter system. although socrates does not speak in such modern terms, this section of the republic does seem to constitute the first theoretical articulation of the “myth” that barter is the origin of markets. for, according to socrates’ hypothesis, coinage and the market arise for purely functional reasons, facilitating a logically and pragmatically frictionless transition from a small and simple community of interests to a large and complex “political economy.” most significantly, there is no crisis of reciprocity in book ii. the revolutionary face of money has been erased; only its civic face remains in view. price and value strictly speaking, socrates’ deduction of the market hangs on the necessity of merchants (or the merchant’s techne), not of money.20 yet the implicit need for the merchant’s art depends more deeply on an epistemic “need that is unnamed in the text but seems implicitly understood: a lack, not merely of goods but of what may be termed knowledge” (weinstein 2009, 449). the market solves the problem of the double coincidence of knowledge. in other words, knowledge of others’ needs and desires is necessary to bridge the gap between autarky and anonymity in a community of specialized producers. the merchant’s role is to supply this knowledge-gap, and market institutions are required if the merchant is to perform this function effectively.21 but what sort of knowledge is the proper province of the merchant? the answer implied in book ii is that the merchant’s art involves knowledge of price, not value. according to modern economic thought, the function of price is to adjust supply and demand. properly understood, this is just what the merchant’s art achieves. markets and currency provide the institutional context and the means for this adjustment. the knowledge-adjusting function of the market as plato conceives it allows for greater flexibility and “a more realistic approach to quantities” than the “communalistic” pre-market economy (weinstein 2009, 453). plato’s effort to subordinate the logic of commerce to that of political justice turns on this distinction between price and value. it is this distinction that makes the merchant’s art both a permissible and legitimate one in the polis, but also a restricted one. for, unlike other arts which depend upon specialized knowledge of particular things, commerce depends on a kind of knowing that is both general and arbitrary with respect to the value of what is exchanged. this logic of price severed from value has corrosive consequences when applied to matters of civic virtue or philosophical wisdom. plato is at pains to extricate such inestimable “things” from the jurisdiction of commerce. this includes, for example, both honor (time: “value”) and wisdom (sophia) – in the kallipolis, the guardian-auxiliaries and philosopher kings will be enjoined from participating in commercial life. also, plato’s theory of the market establishes a legitimate place for merchants in the city, but it disqualifies the practice of sophistry. the reason is that sophists justice and the market in light of plato’s republic, i and ii 8   trade in virtue and wisdom, which is “priceless” in the sense that its value is inestimable (henaff 2010, 10–11). revolutionary money socrates’ deduction of the market is a just-so story. it seems likely that money emerged historically from something other than barter. candidates for the historical antecedents of money include official tokens of credit, publicly fixed penalties, prizes awarded in athletic competitions, royal seals, and – in the greek case especially – religious (sacrificial) paraphernalia. in most cases these antecedents belonged to economies of generalized exchange, not proto-market economies that simply lacked currency. the myth of barter envisions synchronous exchange between two individuals as the pre-history of market exchange. but generalized exchange is asynchronous and communalistic. accordingly, the historical phenomenon of monetization seems to involve a renegotiation of social relations, marked by crises, that is veiled over by the familiar story that money solved the epistemic problem of double coincidence of wants that made barter exchange inefficient. socrates’ story is quite similar to the myth of barter. the chief similarities involve the functionalism of socrates’ account and the absence of a crisis of reciprocity, the latter of which is directly related to the point that book ii theorizes the autonomy of market relations from other spheres of human activity. in light of the whole dialogue, however, book ii’s hypothesis clearly serves plato’s broader heuristic and normative aims. first, as we have seen, socrates’ deduction is explicitly a hypothetical history of market exchange. second, socrates’ characterization of the art and knowledge appropriate to markets depends on a crucial epistemic distinction between price and value. third, it becomes clear as the republic unfolds that plato’s erasure of the question of value from the idealized jurisdiction of market relationships establishes a foundation for his separation of the “moneymaking” classes from the guardians and rulers, whose provinces – time and sophia – are the priceless things. so, while it can be said that plato drives a wedge between the “two sides of the coin,” this gesture is inseparable from the process of (analytically) decomposing the parts of the city/soul, in order to reconfigure them in terms of the republic’s philosophical paradigm of justice. republic ii indicates, by conspicuous absences, plato’s sensitivity to the moral context of market relationships. conversely, book i portrays a different side of money – one much closer to athenians’ experience of its revolutionary influence. book ii’s barter-hypothesis serves the heuristic purposes of the kallipolis rather than subtending an empirical account of the genesis of cities.22 this becomes clear once we realize that the various discussions of justice in book i, along with the story of gyges’ ring in book ii, are preoccupied with distinguishing justice and the art of rule from commerce and the art of gain. these earlier passages imply a genealogy of money that differs from the hypothetical history socrates goes on to tell. in short, book i is marked by the crisis of reciprocity that the theory of exchange in book ii erases. 9 baily       book i presupposes a history of money that is far less familiar to modern readers than it would have been to plato’s original audience. that audience would have been aware of relatively recent transformations in the social bases of power and related challenges to conventional understandings of justice and reciprocity, brought about by the rapid spread of coinage and commerce.23 well before plato, greek culture was grappling with these changes; indeed, this theme is already evident in the complaint of achilles, the homeric hero who serves as a foil for socrates’ own claim to heroism. at stake in achilles’ complaint is the question of (priceless) honor: “for the homeric achilles, the time […] that should bind the warrior to the community no longer means anything because it goes equally to good and bad fighters” (seaford 2004, 301– 302). achilles’ complaint signals a crisis in the heroic order of reciprocity which is staked on personal honor and communal recognition of worth. but, as socrates remarks, the enraged achilles is “so full of confusion as to contain within himself two diseases that are opposite to one another – illiberality accompanying love of money, on the one hand, and arrogant disdain for gods and human beings, on the other” (rep. 391c). is achilles’ time priced disproportionally, or is it intrinsically inestimable? the homeric achilles claims that his worth lies beyond the realm of commercial exchange, but the gist of his complaint is that his reward was below market price. by implying “that there should be impersonal equivalence between worth (in battle) and material reward,” and withdrawing from the community on account of his sense that he has been inadequately rewarded, achilles’ complaint “[combines] the logic of money with aristocratic superiority to it” (seaford 2004, 301–302).24 achilles’ dissonance illustrates how the spread of coined money contributed to a crisis in the heroic order of value. the pricelessness of heroic time depends in part on the warrior’s willingness to pledge his honor with his life, which is why heroic time transcends the realm of mere desire (appetite). no amount of money can adequately represent heroic time because the value of life itself is inestimable. the market embodies precisely the opposite principle. monetary tokens give concrete form to abstract desire, but only as long as they merely represent desire. paradoxically, then, money is a lifeless, and deathless, thing that serves as a pledge for the fleeting and multifarious desires of the living. the classic figure of this paradox is not the homeric achilles, but the legendary phrygian tyrant midas. midas’ misguided identification of moneyed wealth and satiety issues in a wish that “he subsequently [regrets] on finding even his food as gold. we may add a psychological dimension [to midas’ error]: all things are seen in terms of money; absorption in happiness in the abstract (money) is incapacity for happiness in the concrete” (seaford 2004, 305). midas’ mistake illustrates the paradoxical relationship between money and mortality. this paradox gives a clue to midas’ seduction: “what makes money attractive [to midas] is not so much the yearning to accumulate as it is the idea that it could be converted into all sorts of things, depending on desire or need, occasion or urgency” (henaff 2010, 13). money – coinage – thus appears as the material manifestation of the idea of satiety. its efficacy as such depends on at least two conditions, each of which involves a paradox. the first condition is that money must be useless in itself. midas’ wish reflects a psychological confusion justice and the market in light of plato’s republic, i and ii 10   arising from this first condition, that in order to be an effective medium of exchange, money (gold) ideally should lack any intrinsic usefulness. the second condition, answering to the requirement of universality, is that money must be generally accepted by and in the community for innumerable types of commercial exchange. this paradox, the political face of the coin, illuminates the classical association between money and tyranny: as common currency (nomisma), money facilitates distributive justice within a community, but as “invisible substance,” money is capable of subverting public authority with private wealth. this subversive relation was essential to classical tyranny. tyranny was a relatively novel form of rule that depended, like “political” rule, on the centralization of public authority and administrative institutions. herodotus tells us of deioces the mede, an exemplary tyrant who began his political career as an ordinary judge. by seeming to judge well, he made himself respected among the medes. when he refused to judge any longer, the people, who had become dependent on his judgments, begged him to be king. once king, deioces wished to conceal his unjust motives from the people, and accordingly he built the seven-walled city of ecbatana. the walls were concentric circles, the innermost of which was made of gold, the medium of exchange (hdt. 1.98). inside this wall, deioces lived and reigned. (shell 1978, 18)25 in tyranny there is a paradoxical reversal in the order of public and private realms, with the visible, public authority of the polis dependent on the invisible, private power of the (oligarchical) oikos, or the capricious whims of the tyrant. in brief, invisible power infiltrates and finally, eclipses, visible authority. on the one hand, the early deioces – the judge – resembles heroic leaders we encounter in homer, whose authority is linked to their highly visible status in the community and dependent on their good counsel. on the other hand, the latter, tyrannical, deioces prefigures the legendary tyrant gyges, whose power depends on being able to see his subjects but remaining invisible to them. revolutionary money in book i book i’s debate over justice enacts a literary “crisis of reciprocity,” instigated by cephalus’ confusion over the relationship between money and debt. the discussion of the various definitions of justice opens with cephalus’ boast that, by rehabilitating his father’s fortune, he has acquired enough money to repay his debts both to gods and to men. it is socrates, of course, who transforms cephalus’ boast into the universal and abstract proposition that justice is “telling the truth and paying one’s debts.” and socrates goes on to debunk this categorical “definition” of justice with a hypothetical example, that of returning a weapon to a madman. regardless of socrates’ tactics, cephalus does open the way to socrates’ proposition because he posits, implicitly, that the commercial order represented by money comprehends both the cosmological 11 baily       order represented by the temple and the communal order represented by the polis. for cephalus, justice is, and only is, fair dealing in the market; without hesitance, he characterizes relations with both gods and men in commercial terms. cephalus’ clarity is the opposite of achilles’ confusion, yet it is still a form of error. what is harmful about cephalus’ error is not its anachronism, but its moral obtuseness: the possession of money [says cephalus] contributes a great deal to not cheating or lying to any man against one’s will, and, moreover, to not departing for that other place frightened because one owes some sacrifices to a god or money to a human being. it also has many other uses. but, still, one thing reckoned against another, i wouldn’t count this as the least thing, socrates, for which wealth is very useful to an intelligent man. (331a-c) cephalus asserts that no debt, divine or human, is too great to be repaid – so long as one possesses the money to repay it. for cephalus, debt is finite, but the potency of money is infinite. money not only is infinitely potent; it also possesses boundless authority. it is inconsequential whether one owes a debt to the gods or to a man. equally inconsequential are the circumstances under which any given debt is contracted, since money can make all debts commensurable.26 finally, cephalus’ putting money before debt reveals the power of money to de-personalize the relationship of reciprocity with the gods and with other men. this last point is reinforced in the dramatic action of the dialogue when cephalus abruptly abandons the argument to his son polemarchus, its “inheritor,” and exits “to look after the sacrifices.” polemarchus’ effort to rehabilitate the argument involves a significant modification: for polemarchus, justice means “paying back” one’s friends by helping them, and likewise one’s enemies, by harming them. insofar as he admits that personal ties of loyalty and enmity seem to be at stake in relations of justice (and injustice), polemarchus’ introduction of the friend-enemy distinction is an improvement on cephalus’ impersonal notion of justice. however, it founders on two obstacles. the first is that this factionalized notion of justice appears to be useful only in conditions of war; in peacetime it is little more than the virtue of a good banker, business associate, or thief.27 the second obstacle turns on the distinction between seeming and being: the true friend is one “who seems to be, and is, good” (335a). but our judgment of others’ moral character is liable to error or to deception. polemarchus’ definition of justice as personal reciprocity hearkens back to ritualized forms of reciprocity such as guest-friendship (xenia) and gift-exchange, which are central to maintaining the bonds of community in societies that lack a centralized political authority. in such rituals, relations of both alliance and enmity are governed by a similar logic of reciprocity. the difficulty with polemarchus’ revision of the argument arises from the fact that the functions formerly served by these ritualized relationships have been subsumed by polis-institutions. under the new circumstances of political life, polemarchean justice elevates matters of private loyalty and private vengeance above those of public, “political” justice. justice and the market in light of plato’s republic, i and ii 12   in the absence of centralized political institutions ritualized relationships of reciprocity serve “to create or restore bonds of recognition between groups or individuals” (henaff 2010, 309). gift-exchanges are “decisive moments of the collective life of traditional societies, which is to say [societies] in which the essence of social relationships and statutory positions is determined by kinship systems” (henaff 2010, 108). market exchanges, by contrast, presuppose centralized political institutions with authority over both statutory positions within the polis and inter-polis relations. it is significant, then, that socrates disarms polemarchus by drawing attention to perverse consequences of interpolating simonides’ dictum in a commercial idiom. considering the two sides of the coin – revolutionary and civic – it seems fitting that socrates reduces polemarchean justice to a schizophrenic hybrid of warrior-virtue and banker-virtue. socrates’ second objection, turning on the difficulty of distinguishing true friends from merely apparent friends, is more closely related to the specific problem of coinage as “invisible substance.” the abstract and impersonal agency of coinage is closely linked with both centralized bureaucratic administration28 and “invisible” tyrannical power. accordingly, socrates’ second objection to polemarchus anticipates the connection between money as ousia aphanes and “invisible” tyrannical power. according to socrates, [true] justice […] must […] inform us about who are friends and who (if any) are enemies and about what is the meaning of benefiting friends. socrates’ argument focuses not only on (the friendliness of) the transactors but also on the nature of what is owed. he suggests throughout that simonides “meant that the owed is the fitting” […] and that the deposition itself is finally unimportant. polemarchus, however, maintains his definition of justice as loyalty to friends and taking advantage of enemies. in order to show his mistake, or at least mock his position, socrates takes this definition to an extreme by extending polemarchus’ argument to the individual who believes that he has no friends and is loyal only to himself. such an individual is or would be a tyrant. (shell 1978, 23) polemarchus’ definition of justice paves the way for thrasymachus’ more explicit identification of justice with tyrannical power. still, thrasymachus’ claim that justice is the “advantage of the stronger” remains one step short of tyranny. thrasymachus’ position is that of the sophist, not the tyrant. for the sophist, even virtue can be assimilated to the logic of commerce, and so be bought and sold in the marketplace, but the tyrant stands outside of the marketplace; as we have seen, his power depends on reversing the order of public and private realms. for the philosopher, of course, the sophistic position implies the unacceptable conclusion that wisdom and virtue are as arbitrary as market price. the sophist, like the philosopher, is ostensibly “wise.” only, fully embracing the idiom of the marketplace, the sophist equates virtue with what sells, just as the merchant’s techné identifies the value of a thing with its price. 13 baily       to equate justice with profit in thrasymachus’ sophistic manner entails the confusion of public and private spheres, just as polemarchus’ definition confused private loyalty with public authority. yet, where polemarchus’ confusion represents a threat to the new order, thrasymachus “conservatively” registers anger at socrates for bringing into question aspects of the new order that the sophist celebrates and from which he benefits. as the discussion unfolds, thrasymachus compares the relationship between rulers and subjects to that between shepherd and sheep. thrasymachus’ claim that the final aim of shepherding is to slaughter and reap a profit from the sheep reflects the commercial logic of the profiteer, treating the good of the sheep as an arbitrary matter. to the contrary, socrates insists on the particular nature of the shepherd’s techné which involves knowing and doing what is good for the sheep. ultimately, this exchange conforms to socrates’ ubiquitous indictment of the sophist as a mere psychemporos, a retailer in spiritual things (henaff 2010, 32). the road to tyranny ends with gyges. again, the symbolic negotiation of the relationship between the long-term order of the polis and the short term order of commerce is central. gyges is an archetypal tyrant. gyges’ ring resembles a royal seal as well as a coin, and the ring’s power of invisibility signifies the potential of money to subvert the relation between public and private orders. “the story” of gyges’ ring “expresses features […] of the [royal] seal in the near east – its embodiment of the identity of its owner (when it is invisible so is gyges), its consignment to the tomb, its magical power and its importance in the transmission of royal power” (seaford 2004, 118). glaucon’s story of gyges’ usurping power with his invisibility-granting signet ring (modified by plato from earlier sources) reflects the transferal of authority from the personal seal-mark to the impersonal coin-mark. “whereas seal-marks seem to embody the power of the owner of the seal, coin-marks create no imagined attachment between the coins and their source” (seaford 2004, 119). gyges’ power depends in no way on personal value or virtue; it is an invisible power, in the manner of deioces’ tyranny, described above. the story of gyges stands at the intersection of books i and ii. gyges’ tyranny marks the terminus of the various definitions of justice discussed in book i, but it itself is not another definition. glaucon introduces the story of gyges after socrates has announced the interlocutors’ failure to find a definition of justice, but before socrates introduces the city/soul analogy which forms the basis of the platonic paradigms that follow.29 the reason for this, i suggest, is that as a figure of tyranny gyges stands outside the visible realm of public space. even thrasymachus was compelled to offer a definition of justice. but, like cephalus, gyges marks the boundary of philosophical discourse about justice. just as it is invisible, gyges’ “justice” is speechless. plato uses the story of gyges to introduce socrates’ challenge in the republic: socrates must show that it is more profitable to be a just person with a reputation for injustice than to be an unjust person with a reputation for justice. this challenge marks the beginning of socrates’ tyranny over the discussion and the instauration of the republic’s project of philosophical tyranny. as we have seen, one of socrates’ first tyrannical gestures will be to put commerce in its place. justice and the market in light of plato’s republic, i and ii 14   corrective justice: the order of honor (time) and market order so far this discussion has focused on distributive justice, but the rise of the polis and the market also affected notions of corrective justice. to understand plato’s revision of corrective justice in context requires a preliminary account of the “pre-political” order of gift and vendetta, which can only be sketched here. to wit, one finds a close parallelism between the logic of ceremonial gift exchange, which builds relationships among kinship groups, and vindicatory justice (vendetta), which aims to restore “equilibrium” in response to acts that destabilize those relationships. however, plato introduces a categorical distinction between relationships defined by giftexchange (and vendetta) and market relationships. market relationships presuppose a private intention to possess goods or satisfy desires, whereas the function of gift-exchange is social and its goal is to create or maintain interpersonal bonds. “ceremonial gift exchange is not a relationship between humans mediated by things (this defines the economy) but a relationship among humans mediated by symbols, which may be [valuable] physical goods [symbolic of persons] […] but also persons (as in matrimonial alliance), gestures, words, dances, music, celebration, songs or feasts” (henaff 2010, 153). market exchange is utilitarian and presupposes the equality and independence of the transactors. this equality is formal, not substantive, while the independence of the transactors, a substantive notion, is merely aspirational (otherwise no exchange would be necessary). the telos of utilitarian exchange is autarkia, or self-sufficiency. to be sure, utilitarian exchange may occur in (pre-political) kinship-based societies, but in these societies the public space is made manifest by the constant circulation of gifts, material and immaterial, chiefly among persons of notable status.30 “the sphere of public recognition – ensured through ceremonial gift exchange – relativizes and prevails on the sphere of subsistence ensured by the production and exchange of consumer goods” (henaff 2010, 153). moreover, there is no relationship between the two spheres of gift exchange and commerce, such that the former might be said to yield to the latter. “the two spheres are different and must be so; their functions are radically alien to one another” (henaff 2010, 153). what transforms the meaning and function of gift exchange, and its relationship to utilitarian exchange, is the introduction of “political” rule. the eclipse of ceremonial gift exchange by formal political rule has the twofold consequence of loosening commercial relationships from their subordinate position relative to the public sphere (manifested by the activity of gift exchange), and relegating gift exchange to the private sphere, where it might appear as an alternative to commercial exchange or even as a rival paradigm of the social bond.31 societies with centralized political institutions do not eradicate gift/countergift relationships, but they do subsume the “total” social function of such relationships. commercial or utilitarian exchanges may occur in “pre-political” societies but they are assigned to a distinct sphere, one that is peripheral to the interpersonal bonds of the community.32 by the same token, giftexchange relationships persist in societies with centralized institutions, only they are “privatized.” more importantly, with respect to corrective justice, the kinship-based practice of 15 baily       vendetta is eclipsed by the paradigm of public arbitrational justice. a political society “institute[s] an authority situated above the kinship system.” hence, what was a “trinomial – constituted by (1) solidarity within one’s own group, (2) alliance or antagonism with the partner group, and (3) war or peace with the enemy group – is […] reduced to a binomial: solidarity inside and antagonism outside” (henaff 2010, 221). in the athenian context, cleisthenes’ reforms offer striking examples of the construction of political society. the transformations wrought by cleisthenes included eradicating kinship-based clans and replacing them with territory-based demes as the basic constituent of the polis, substituting deme-names for family-names33 and instituting the selection of officials by lot. each of these reforms was intended to further solon’s project of pacifying and unifying athens vis-àvis its rival poleis (and the persians, barbarians, etc.). while he is often called the “father of democracy,” it is significant that cleisthenes expressed his aims in the language of isonomia, or equality under law. cleisthenes’ broader aim, then, was to secure a “political” form of rule – publicly recognized institutions representing an authority that stands above the kinship structure – with democracy being a means to this end. most significantly, cleisthenes reckoned that solon’s political reform was incomplete because he failed to put an end to the autonomy of the clans. inter-clan antagonisms (and alliances) persisted through the classical age, but the rise of the polis wrought a fundamental change in their status with regard to justice. in particular, the reconfiguration of the social structure and accompanying transition toward institutionalized public arbitration opens up a new problematic of punitive or corrective justice. once the “binomial” structure of political authority has eclipsed the “trinomial” of kinship affiliations, “vengeance is no longer the application of justice. it becomes the pursuit of personal compensation […] it releases individual violence instead of expressing the action of the group vis-à-vis another group. it becomes the greatest threat within the community” (henaff 2010, 221). from this point on, then, the central public power is compelled to assume responsibility for rectifying injuries that transpire within its orbit. as forms of corrective justice, the goal of both ceremonial vendetta and institutionalized public arbitration is to erase the debt engendered by an act of injustice. however, each procedure reflects a different logic of recompense. the historical record is replete with examples of the persistence of vindicatory norms in fifthand sixth-century athenian political practice. at the same time, tragedy and philosophy reflect a robust cultural renegotiation of the meaning of corrective justice as “compensation.” the development of athenian political culture is based upon a shift from “revenge” to “punishment.” “punishment is about [public] authority in the first instance and about law, dispassion, and disinterestedness only in certain contexts.” on the other hand, “acts of revenge […] are carried out by actors without final authority” (allen 2003, 24). for this reason, revenge is destabilizing of the polis’ institutionalized order. the establishment of arbitrational justice is, in the first place, “‘a practice of constructing authority’ and not […] ‘the practice of applying laws disinterestedly’” (allen 2003, 24). philosophers only subsequently identified the exercise of public authority with the disinterested justice and the market in light of plato’s republic, i and ii 16   application of reasonable norms.34 thus, it is important to emphasize that the practice of arbitrational justice in democratic athens was dominated by appeals to emotions – anger and pity – not reason. also, rather than seeking public sanction, the act of prosecution more commonly intended “the pursuit of private compensation.” athenian legal conventions reflected these norms. in the first place, all prosecution was undertaken privately in athens; while arbitration was a public process, there was nothing resembling a public prosecutor. second, in many cases there was no legally established penalty for an offense, with the result that in such cases “penalties had to be assessed by the jurors in a procedure called timesis […] in […] timesis both the prosecutor and the defendant would, after the vote of conviction, make new speeches proposing alternative penalties,” after which the jury would vote on the penalties (allen 2003, 47).35 third, often there was no distinction between legislators and judges in athens’ democracy, so that the act of judgment in a particular instance was not separate from the deliberative process of crafting general laws. in practice, athenian arbitrational justice combined the new public authority of the demos, institutionalized by the polis, with the old and now “private” norms of vindicatory justice. athenian courtroom rhetoric offers striking illustrations of the pursuit of private vengeance through public arbitration. it was typical to speak of punishment in personal rather than public or institutional terms; also, the language of private compensation informed the discourse of (public) arbitrational justice. today, to the extent that we use the language of compensation at all, the object of compensation (in criminal cases) is not a person but an institution or “society.” but much of the language used to describe punishment in classical athens “did not focus on institutional distinctions and instead had to do with what was happening to the people (punished, punisher, and polis community) involved in any given situation of punishment” (allen, 2003, 69).36 the language of timoria, which emphasizes personal relationships of status, bears an especially strong association with the logic of vendetta. “[timoria] and its verbal cognates […] stress the reassessment of honor and status in punishment: the phrases didonai and lambanein dikein […] highlight the exchange of justice between the punisher and the punished […] all of these words stress the importance of social relationships and relationality to the process of punishing” (allen 2003, 69). yet there is also another word for punishment, zemia, which indicates the close fit between the logics of debt and punishment (allen 2003, 69). also, unlike timesis, zemia seems closer to the impersonal logic of isonomia in the polis than the personal logic of status. yet, like timesis, zemia allows speakers to conceive of punishment as the pursuit of private compensation through the public institutions and processes of arbitrational justice. as allen emphasizes, plato can be thought to have wrought the greatest transformation in the language of punishment. plato consistently speaks of punishment in the language of kolasis. kolasis emphasizes the relationship between the wrongdoer and the polis and attaches a reformative signification to punishment rather than a retributive one. zemia occupies an intermediate position between the principle of private (or personal) compensation and that of 17 baily       public (or political) justice. but the logic of arbitrational justice demands a radical erasure of personal reciprocity from the public sphere. the republic is the central site of plato’s revision of the language of punishment. plato’s political-philosophical project reflects his ambition “to turn the whole process of punishment into a matter of educating the wrongdoer.” in service to this aim, plato wholly “rejected the language that described punishment as a reassessment of honor, chose instead to focus on punishment as education, and developed the first comprehensive theory of reformative punishment” (allen 2003, 71). to achieve his reform it was imperative that plato redirect the focus of punishment, away from the personal relationship between the prosecutor and wrongdoer – motivated by reciprocal anger and characterized by competitive assessments of honor or status – toward an exclusive focus on the (unhealthy) soul of the wrongdoer, which may be remedied by the removal of ignorance, the ultimate cause of offense.37 with plato, corrective justice becomes a matter of restoring equilibrium within the soul, and inside the polis, but not between the persons directly involved in the offense. accordingly, it was necessary for plato to isolate the wrongdoer as the exclusive subject of punishment, and to insist that receiving punishment, or “suffering justice,” is in fact therapeutic. in this connection, plato counter-intuitively “redefines ‘giving justice’ [to dikein didonai] in such a way as to do away with a key athenian idea – the idea that being punished is the reciprocal act of ‘suffering badly’ at the hands of someone whom one has treated badly” (allen 2003, 249). in accordance with the new logic of arbitrational justice, plato suggests that punishments administered by the polis must restore equilibrium by erasing the (cause of) offense, putting an end to the “unending back-and-forth movement” which was appropriate to ceremonial gift-exchange and vindicatory justice, but disruptive to the order of the polis. in terms of the ends of justice, plato’s reform can be summarized as substituting the twofold principle of limit (or measure) without, and harmony within both the soul and the polis, for the threefold principle of domestic peace, reciprocity among kin (or potential allies) and bellicosity toward enemies.38 fines as an instrument of justice the athenian court was also a site where the invisible substance of moneyed wealth could be made publicly visible. public spectacle was an essential means of punishment. manifesting public authority through spectacular punishments was an essential tool for constructing that authority. “references to the public display and public memorialization of the condemned, to the abuse of the body, and to the problem of burial appear regularly in athenian descriptions of punishment” (allen 2003, 199).39 as allen suggests, money could serve as an instrument of spectacular punishment. “money was the most tangible marker of exchange, and payment was the easiest way to show that the wrongdoer was giving up something or losing. moreover, money and writing were linked to one another.” like visible punishments, publicly inscribed verdicts, or the imprisonment of justice and the market in light of plato’s republic, i and ii 18   criminals’ bodies in the agora, money penalties “served as a tool for assessing value and desert and [money] was a suitable language with which to inscribe stories of punishment into social memory” (allen 2003, 225).40 however, the republic’s revision of the goals of corrective justice entails a revision of the meaning of punishment as “compensation.” the predominant motive for prosecution in classical athens was personal anger indistinguishable from the desire to enjoy the offender’s suffering. as allen emphasizes, fifth-century athenians considered anger and desire as two facets of the same emotional faculty: orge. orge – the word most commonly used to express anger in athens’ courts – “referred not just to anger but also to sexual passions. thus orge was characterized both by [what allen calls] its iretic aspect – and by an erotic aspect. the iretic and erotic aspects of orge [combined] to generate a passion that informed the athenian understandings of self and body in the context of both the family and the polis” (allen 2003, 52). strikingly, the two sides of orge are associated with two functions of justice as reciprocity – rectifying offenses and generating the bonds of community. “as anger, orge concerned penal prosecution and the breakdown of human relationships; in its relation to fertility, orge concerned the creation of human relationships” (allen 2003, 59). ultimately, this popular understanding of orge as a single emotion confirms that vindicatory justice and ceremonial gift exchange obey a singular logic. throughout the republic, plato deploys the tripartite model of the soul in order to break the link in the popular mind between anger and desire (allen 2003, 251–257). by doing so, plato transforms the emotion of anger (but not desire) into a serviceable instrument of public justice. plato-socrates takes pains to demonstrate that the desiring (or appetitive) part of the soul and the (thumotic) capacity for anger actually are separate emotional faculties. what is more, the appetitive-erotic and thumotic-iretic faculties stand in a hierarchical relationship to one another. accordingly, anger may be deployed in the service of reason to chastise unruly appetites. in terms of the city-soul analogy, this censure of the appetites by the “spirited” faculty of thumos defines the process of kolasis. again, this process involves the city as agent and the offender as patient; and the end of kolasis is to erase the root cause of offense for the good of the city and the offender. as far as this is so, fines should be understood as signifying a debt to the public, rather than compensation for the victim. kolasis before we conclude it is worth pausing briefly to consider the etymology of kolasis. the reason is that kolasis and its cognates confirm the close relations among the practice of sacrifice, the idea of debt (and punishment), the arbitrational institutions of the athenian polis, and plato’s idea of reformative justice. plato borrowed the word kolasis from sacrificial practices and polisoffices: kola means “limbs.” the kolakretai were financial officers whose responsibilities involved domestic taxation in the athenian polis. the word for this office originally “seems to derive from the gathering of sacrificed thigh-bones” (seaford 2004, 79).41 allen also mentions a 19 baily       class of officials named kolastai. “public fines were inscribed and posted in public view by the kolastai, and these inscriptions were, like contracts, markers of the realignment of status in the community” (allen 2003, 225).42 the platonic sense of kolasis, as a therapeutic process of punishment resembling “pruning,” also bears a striking onto-theological significance. a tree undergoing kolasis “was being cured of hubris […] it is because the horticulturalist needs to improve a tree that is out of order or hubristic that the process can be described as kolasis or a form of punishment” (allen 2003, 70).43 this theological sense of kolasis recurs in the new testament as “divine punishment.” the new testament variously refers to “chastisement” and “divine retribution,” as well as “pruning,” as kolasis. since kolasis, as “punishment,” involved the constraint of hubris, and, as “debt,” referred to sacral duties owed to the goddess,44 it seems likely that this theological sense long precedes new testament usage. however, kolasis in the new testament often refers to “eternal punishment,” which seems to remove the process of therapeutic suffering from the jurisdiction of worldly politics. in any case, it seems reasonable to conclude that plato consciously chose the language of kolasis to represent a notion of punishment that implied at once a debt to the god, the good of the city and rehabilitation of the offender’s soul.45 conclusion: the boundaries of platonic money – (in)visibility and (in)commensurability the first limit of platonic money can be described in terms of invisibility or transparency. whether the extreme political reforms that socrates proposes in the republic are serious proposals is a question we need not address. what matters is that plato could solve the problem posed by the “invisible” power of wealth only by ensuring the radical visibility of the ruling guardian classes. socrates’ proposals effect this visibility or transparency in at least three ways. first, socrates denies the auxiliaries and rulers access to money, defusing potential harms arising from the invisible power of money by keeping it strictly circumscribed within the “moneymaking” class, and rendering the guardian class dependent upon this “lower” class for subsistence. second, socrates insists on communism of the family and property among guardians. the connection between communism and transparency is typified by the image of guardians exercising together naked.46 finally, socrates makes clear that it will be necessary to educate the citizens by telling lies such as the “myth of the metals.” this “noble lie” reverses the order of visibility by proffering a fabricated image (pseudos) as the representative of an invisible truth (the truth of philosophy, the truth of the tripartite soul), couched in the “language of metals” that had already developed alongside the rise of coinage (shell, 42–45; kurke 1999).47 moreover, the imagery obviously reverses the logic of tyranny by which the imprimatur of public authority – the seal, the coin – is exploited for private gain. “indeed, it is no exaggeration to see the whole guardian apparatus – military auxiliaries, philosopher kings, and their education – as guarding, more than anything else, against the excesses that arise from the unbounded quest for money possessions and the pleasures they can buy” (weinstein 2009, 456). justice and the market in light of plato’s republic, i and ii 20   the myth of metals also points to the second limit of platonic money, which we may describe in terms of the logical problem of incommensurability. the incommensurable value of unique persons (or things) raises the issue of “pricelessness.” this idea of “pricelessness” was fundamental to the old logic of reciprocity; and in a different way, it is also central to the logic of socrates’ philosophical tyranny. in both schemes, this problem of incommensurability is deeply implicated in the problem of justice and resistant to being assimilated to the logic of commensurability at the heart of both commercial and legal-rational order. achilles’ complaint that his honor (time) is beyond (market) price highlights the problem of incommensurability but so does socrates’ farcical performance in the timesis phase of plato’s apology.48 both gift-exchange and vindicatory justice seem to depend on a notion that life is priceless. honor, too, is priceless insofar as one stakes one’s life on it. a priceless debt can never be repaid, which is why punishment aims to “erase” offense rather than remove, or correct it, once and for all. as we saw above, in pre-political society the procedure of erasure “is an unending back-and-forth movement in which something is sent out and returned. it is a return to equilibrium through this very movement.” but the new authority of the polis is figured by the (ideal) judge as representative of “the community as a whole and as a global entity in charge of assessing, deciding, and sanctioning” (henaff 2010, 225). the myth of the metals reconciles the superior office of the judge with the global authority of the whole community. the myth of metals exemplifies plato’s effort to reconcile the old status-based practices of reciprocity with the new principles of public arbitrational justice and athenian isonomia. one purpose of the myth is to justify the hierarchical division of the various classes in the kallipolis; but its other, more innovative purpose is to square those differences in status with the isonomic logic of legal-political justice and market equality. thus, according to the myth, those who lack gold and silver souls are compensated by the possession of earthly gold and silver. finally, the myth embodies the idea that justice has the whole polis for its object. thus, socrates answers glaucon’s objection that communism makes for unhappy guardians by reminding him that what is at stake is the happiness of the whole city, not a single class. again, the procedure of erasure that comprised “punishment” in pre-political society was “an unending back-and-forth movement.” in contrast, the platonic procedure of kolasis focuses exclusively on reforming the wrongdoer, achieving erasure and restoring equilibrium through removing the cause of offense from the wrongdoer’s soul. in this way, the principle of kolasis identifies punishment with intervention, under the authority of the polis, in the “back-and-forth movement” between persons characteristic of pre-political reciprocity. as “private” vengeance, the back-and-forth movement of interpersonal reciprocity threatens to disrupt, not heal, the body politic. the goal of kolasis as corrective justice remains the same – “erasure,” not compensation – but the procedure of erasure involves the city as agent and the offender as patient, displacing justice from the “back and forth” of interpersonal reciprocity. sometimes it is said that plato believed money was the root of all evil. if plato invented the notion of “civic” money, then this is quite false. but it is equally important to recognize that civic money is the fruit of platonic moral theorizing, and the operation of abstraction in which it 21 baily       arises effaces the “revolutionary” consequences of the rise of coinage in the greek world. i hope to have shown that a crucial part of plato’s project in the republic is to re-signify money and its place in the polis in such a way as to isolate its positive potentialities as an instrument of distributive justice (money facilitates the community of interest) and corrective justice (as “a tool for assessing value and desert and [a] suitable language with which to inscribe stories of punishment into social memory” (allen 2003, 225)). platonized money only introduces evil into the polis when it is abused (e.g., by the stinging drones in book viii who practice predatory lending); with the result that it is not money itself, but corrupt uses of its generative potential which that introduce injustices into the city. to be sure, the apparently intrinsic power of money to translate “all things” makes such abuses particularly tempting, and this is precisely why socrates imposed such strict boundaries on its circulation in the kallipolis. however, the key point is that plato-socrates does not suggest that such unjust abuses can be avoided merely by abolishing money; rather, he tries to establish the proper terms according to which money may be admitted into the city. endnotes 1. i assume that reciprocity is central to the theory and practice of justice, though, importantly, reciprocity can take different forms. 2. plato’s first critic, aristotle, was also the first to expose the deficiencies of plato’s theoretical solution by striking at the weak points of the city-soul analogy upon which it rests. nevertheless, plato’s “utopian” vision of the market, tamed for civic purposes, is preserved in aristotle’s discussion of money as an instrument of justice (n. ethics v). as a result of aristotle’s domestication of it, this platonized conception of money continues to exert an (often unrecognized) influence over western social thought. indeed, even in our disillusioned age there is a residual utopianism in the notion that economic globalization, seemingly inevitable, might be tamed to serve the purposes of social justice through the rational agency of a global civil society. 3. for the present, i follow the standard definition of money as a unit of account, medium of exchange, and store of value. i will discuss the distinction between money and debt-credit, and some specific features of coinage, as a form of money, below. 4. for a provocative and learned discussion of contemporary “market triumphalism” see sandel (2012). as bloch and parry (1989) observe: “western ideology has so emphasized the distinctiveness of the two cycles [of exchange]” – the short-term, individualistic and impersonal cycle of the market and the long-term, social and personal cycle of political community – “that it is then unable to imagine the mechanisms by which they are linked.” far from being a universal logic, they suggest, it is conceivable that western capitalism (and its dialectical counterpart, communism) is the result of “a remarkable conceptual revolution [in which] the values of the short-term order have become elaborated into a theory of long-term reproduction.” as the ostensibly anti-utopian logic of global markets sweeps the planet, we would do well to revisit the historical social crisis, and the utopian philosophical context, in which market logic received its first, shadowy, articulation. justice and the market in light of plato’s republic, i and ii 22   5. i borrow this phrase from seaford (2004). 6. although plato was the first philosopher to introduce a strict distinction between the market and the polis, many poets and thinkers before him had been preoccupied with the effects of monetization on greek society. see seaford (2004) on homer, the tragedians and pre-socratic philosophers. 7. to understand plato’s motivation in this way is to gain a uniquely pragmatic perspective on the other, more famous “invisible substances” that appear in the republic: the platonic forms. 8. kolasis bears other significations; strikingly, these other meanings are related to sacrificial offices, and domestic offices in the polis. kolasis also refers to the theological concept of divine recompense. i shall return to the various meanings of kolasis near the conclusion of this essay. 9. one might call this the “platonic idea” of money, in a narrow sense. 10. sacrifice, being an activity undertaken on behalf of the whole community, may be regarded as proto-political, while gift-exchange is more typical of pre-political, kinship-based society. henaff (2010, 156–201) discusses at length the relationship between gift-exchange and sacrifice. 11. perhaps the contemporary term, “liquidity,” captures something of the sense of “invisibility” in ousia aphanes. 12. something like sacrifice survives in the christian ritual of communion. see henaff (2010, 156–161, 198). 13. seaford (2004, 136–146 esp.). cf. kurke (1999, 300): “what a strange sort of thing a greek coin is—both material and symbol, both matter and trope. this is true to some extent of all coinage, but we should remember that the greeks never invented paper money and only very reluctantly and occasionally resorted to the expedient of [wholly] fiduciary coinage. that is to say, in classical greece the dominant idea of coinage is the merging of precious metal and civic stamp.” 14. chartalism supports the view that markets are creatures of the state, while metallism suggests that state intervention can only confound the normal functioning of markets. if it is true that the fiduciary authority of greek coinage depended on the communal institutions and practices of polis and temple, but that the spread of coinage also facilitated an autonomous, anonymous, order of short-term relations that could subvert communalistic norms; and if it is also true that plato’s philosophy of money is at once a normative effort to circumscribe the place of money in the just polis, and a critical effort to contain the subversive potential of “revolutionary” money; then, in spite of the vast differences between ancient and modern economies, the present inquiry can help to dissolve the “manichean medieval impulse…deeply embedded in modern economic thought,” pitting chartalism against metallism (hart 1986). for, in the practical experience of the greeks coined money was both a creature of the state and a commodity with intrinsic value. it is in the philosophy of plato that we first encounter a radical division between the two sides of the coin, and this division serves the philosopher’s moral and political aims. 15. the mna was a cereal measure that originated in mesopotamia. such quantitative measures were the norm in near eastern palatial economies but the mna is a borrowed measure in the greek context: “greeks derived their large weights (mnas and talents) from the semites, and used them also as units of account. but their words for coins, which were of relatively low value and had no neareastern equivalent, are mainly greek words for things. with the equivalence of a hundred drachmas 23 baily       to one mna, the two systems – greek coinage and semetic weights – coalesce” (seaford 2004, 126– 127). 16. semenova argues that the “ox-unit” of value and account “by specifying the precise quality, type and quantity of oxen to be sacrificed […] provided the first instance of a unit of value established and guaranteed by the ‘state.’” in turn, “the ox-unit […] gave rise to the first form of money embodied in sacrificial bull’s flesh that was centrally (re)distributed among the ritual participants. next […] temple-issued coinage emerged as a symbolic representation of roasted bull’s flesh, thus making the latter ‘currency’ obsolete.” in contrast to “the traditional chartalist perspective” according to which the state introduced money to “[extinguish] a population’s debt to the state,” semenova advances a “‘state’-religious approach [that …] views money as a token via which the state extinguishes its ‘debt’ to the underlying population” (377). 17. the phrase “civic money” is borrowed from henaff (2010, 326–331). 18. throughout this essay, “socrates” refers to plato’s literary rendition of socrates. 19. for example, the stories of midas and gyges, discussed below. 20. as keynes once pointed out, money is never neutral, though in principle, the market may be so. 21. “by contrast, the minimal city of four specialists devotes the same amount of man-hours to each of its four tasks without regard to which need is greater or more difficult to fulfill. this means that, depending on circumstances, the city could suffer from a shortage of food and an overabundance of shoes, or vice versa; in either case, self-sufficiency is impossible, even if all the relevant crafts are represented. the problem is one of quantity and proportion, which somehow must be addressed. but in a city of natural specialists, who is there to specialize in the art of accurately trading off against one another the difficulty of the various tasks and their degree of urgency?” (weinstein 2009, 452). 22. among other things this heuristic aim is evident from plato’s analogy between money and appetite, the restricted role ultimately allowed for money and “moneymakers” in the city-in-speech, and the symbolic role of money in plato’s “noble lies” (the myth of metals in book iii, and the fable of the usurious stinging-drones in book viii). 23. godbout and caille (2000, 115) offer a succinct, if hyperbolic, account: “modern money only made its appearance once the value of things broke free from that of individuals: when greek tyrants, brought to power by the first failures of democracy, had the possessions of aristocratic families melted down to make stamped coins whose value, guaranteed by the city, was unaffected by the status of the former owners. before it embodied freedom, modern money represented equality, which derived from the state. in the beginning it guaranteed that in principle one equaled one and that everyone, whatever their social standing, had the right of equal access to goods, even if many concrete inequalities eventually arose from this abstract egalitarian principle enshrined by the invention of money.” 24. achilles’ complaint also expresses the notion that the soul is beyond price: “not even the wealth of troy or delphi, says achilles’ is equal in value to my psuche […] there is an implicit contrast here between the heroic modes of appropriation (plunder, tripods as gifts) and the kind of ‘exchange’ that by virtue of meaning total and irrevocable alienation (death) resembles trade […] here too achilles seems to react against the encroachment of trade. the idea of death as commercial exchange justice and the market in light of plato’s republic, i and ii 24   reappears, notably, in aeschylus’ image of ares as a gold-exchanger and holder of the scales in battle. in the monetized society of fifth-century athens this hideous exchange of incommensurables – living bodies for (gold) dust that s ‘heavy’ (as gold, as grief) – brings monetary gain for the atreidae” (seaford 2004, 303). 25. kurke’s (1999) chief focus is on the symbolism of money in herodotus. 26. it is probably significant in this connection that cephalus was a retailer, allegedly an arms-dealer. 27. as shell (1978, 22) observes, socrates’ tactic here is the opposite of the one he uses to puncture cephalus’ argument. “in disagreeing with cephalus, socrates had used the example of the deposit of a weapon. disagreeing with polemarchus, he uses the more abstract example of monetary deposits.” 28. as opposed to personal rule. 29. beginning with socrates’ deduction of the market. 30. as mauss (2000, 39–43) notes, ceremonial gift exchange is characterized by a threefold obligation “to give, to receive, to reciprocate.” 31. but the complete privatization of gift exchange also portends a loss. in henaff’s words, this loss remains with us as “a symbolic deficit that constitutes the major problem for modern democracies [which] rely on the law for ensuring mutual public recognition, on the market for organizing subsistence, and on private gift relationships for generating a social bond.” for, there can be no community in the absence of “this […] founding relationship […] in which everyone ventures something that is part of oneself into the space of the other” (2010, 154). as this passage suggests, henaff (2010, 135–136) is critical of the hobbesian appeal to fear as the foundation of the civic bond; in this way he joins in an anthropological critique of contract theory that dates to rousseau. also, henaff emphasizes the difference between the agonistic generosity of ceremonial gift exchange and hegel’s famous dialectic of “lordship and bondage” in the phenomenology of spirit. to offer a gift is at the same time to challenge the recipient to accept and reciprocate what is given. “ceremonial generosity is not moral (or it is only so as a supplement); it is the proof that while venturing into the alien space, one is prepared to establish an alliance […] there is pleasure to be found in bonding with others and in experiencing what lies elsewhere, there is also the danger of being rejected or attacked. gift-giving solves this dilemma. as a challenge it makes it possible to risk making a move toward the other while obligating the other to risk making a move in return […] to achieve this purpose, it is important for the act of giving to be known and seen by all and to be spectacular if possible. this makes it easier to understand that what is at stake is not charitable generosity but public liberality. to offer this challenge and uphold it in front of all is what brings prestige and glory in the relationship of recognition (which is clearly something entirely different from the struggle for recognition as hegel presents it).” 32. cf. godbout and caille (2000, 208): “the market enables us to pursue exchange under conditions where the gift is neither possible nor desirable, and where the alternative is violence or the complete absence of a relationship.” 33. as in “socrates of alopeke,” rather than “socrates, son of sophroniscus.” 34. such norms are exemplified by figures like the philosopher-king, the ideal judge, or the rule of law. 25 baily       35. as allen points out, this was the procedure used in socrates’ trial. 36. the present discussion relies heavily on allen (2003), pages 68–72. 37. “the famous socratic paradox that no one knowingly or voluntarily does wrong is at the heart of plato’s argument for reformative punishment. all acts of wrongdoing are the result of ignorance” (allen 2003, 247). 38. “the athenian ‘principle of the public’ […] according to which political life was organized was the communal commitment to the spectacle of angry honor-sensitive citizens competing with one another on a regular basis (and within the bounds set by standards of public utility), with women excluded from the realm of anger (speaking ideally) so that the family unit would be free of angry conflicts. athenian political life to this degree valorized anger and granted it a place in politics, but anger also had to be constrained with a view to its close connection with eros. when socrates redefines the role of anger in human action, he revises not only the place of anger in the political order but also the nature of the political order in general. socrates argues for a politics that keeps anger outside the walls of the city [emphasis mine]. the entirety of the republic is largely structured around a rejection and replacement of the political concepts that were connected to the valorization of anger in athenian politics.” at the same time, the republic “provides the context within which socrates makes a whole slew of arguments about justice that are meant to apply to athens but also to other cities” (allen 2003, 257–258). 39. allen (2003) discusses plato’s critique of spectacular punishment on pages 245–246. 40. allen (2003, 225) rejects the thesis that “monetary penalties originated in the practice of demanding blood money, or poine for murder. […] if fines did originate in blood money […] one would expect to see murder punished by fine. but murder was punishable by death from the seventh century to the end of the democracy.” this question touches on the broader thesis that money itself (not only fines) emerged from gift-exchange/vendetta, and sacrifice. if the rise of arbitrational justice demanded the marginalization of vendetta, then it is possible that the discontinuity between the demand for poine and the polis’ practice of punishing murder by death conforms to the transition from vindicatory to arbitrational justice. 41. see also, allen (2003, 69). another class of officials, the hellenotamiai, was responsible for managing tribute from other poleis, though under the athenian empire they seemed to displace the kolakretai. see samons (2000, 241): “now, in fact, we do not know precisely when the hellenotamiai took over the public treasury and the kolakretai disappeared. the latter make their last certain appearance in a document of 418/17.” 42. in this connection allen (2003) remarks on the mixed quality of fines as a means of punishment: “financial penalties were useful in that they confirmed the valorization of reciprocity in the city. they were, however, a danger insofar as they threatened equality.” this is because the strict equality with which athenians assessed fines resulted in financial penalties that “did not fall with the same weight on the rich and the poor.” 43. allen (2003, 70) adds: “similarly, the word for pruning, diakatharsis, comes from a word that connotes cleansing (katharsis) in the context of wrongdoing and pollution.” justice and the market in light of plato’s republic, i and ii 26   44. e.g., the kolakretai collected what was due to athena, while the hellenotamiai collected tribute from the other cities’ gods. 45. while this essay focuses on the republic, there is a similar discussion of punishment in the gorgias. see allen (2003, 249). 46. for a discussion of the political significance of nakedness in relation to the gyges story, see shell (1978, 26–27). 47. shell (1978, 42–45) offers a rich discussion plato’s reversal of the order of visibility in the context of the cave and divided line. the phrase “language of metals” is from kurke (1999). 48. it is ironic that socrates’ proposes to accept a fine as punishment in spite of his protestations of innocence. this raises the question of whether there are limits to the suitability of fines as punishment. that socrates proposes a small fine, only as much as he can afford, also points to the gap between citizens’ formal equality (isonomia) and the inequalities among citizens with regard to “substance” (ousia). works cited allen, danielle. 2003. the world of prometheus. princeton: princeton university press. bloch, maurice and jonathan parry. 1989. money and the morality of exchange. cambridge: cambridge university press. godbout, jacques and alain caille. 2000. the world of the gift. montreal: mcgill-queens university press. hart, keith. 1986. “heads or tails? two sides of the coin.” man 21.4: 637–656. henaff, marcel. 2010. the price of truth. stanford: stanford university press. kurke, leslie. 1999. coins, bodies, games, and gold. princeton: princeton university press. mauss, marcel. 2000. the gift. new york: norton. plato. 1991. republic. trans. allan bloom. new york: basic books. samons, loren j. 2000. empire of the owl: athenian imperial finance. stuttgart: steiner. sandel, michael. 2012. what money can’t buy. new york: farrar, straus and giroux. schofield, malcolm. 1999. “plato on the economy.” in saving the city, 61–71. london: routledge. seaford, richard. 2004. money and the early greek mind. cambridge: cambridge university press. 27 baily       semenova, alla. 2011. “would you barter with god?” american journal of economics and sociology 70.2: 376–400. shell, marc. 1978. “the ring of gyges.” in the economy of literature. baltimore: johns hopkins university press. weinstein, joshua i. 2009. “the market in plato’s republic.” classical philology 104.4: 439–458. [expositions 6.1 (2012) 81–89] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 immortality in ravelstein stephen block baylor university this essay takes up the issue of “return” in saul bellow’s ravelstein, a theme related to the alternatives of faith and philosophy or jerusalem and athens. although the “return” is usually associated with faith, bellow portrays abe ravelstein as initiating a return to the great texts of philosophy. thus, the great question at the end of the novel which bellow asks us is, which provides a path towards immortality: faith or philosophy, jerusalem or athens? in the novel, chick, who is the narrator, provides an absurd picture of ravelstein as a moseslike lawgiver creating a religion for his students and friends based on the platonic dialogues. on ravelstein’s account, modernity has perverted the human soul, making it neither faithful nor philosophic. and yet this same critique undercuts the idea that the question of philosophy or faith is a permanent question, as on his account moderns evade these alternatives. ravelstein’s return to the ancients is thus paradoxical: it accepts the impermanence of the question of philosophy or faith, such that a call to return to these alternatives cannot be understood as philosophic. while ravelstein is certainly about the relationship between faith and reason, it is also about whether we should understand human choices either as modern versus ancient or as philosophy versus faith. it is chick’s less critical stance towards modern life that preserves athens and jerusalem as fundamentally human alternatives. chick’s, and ultimately bellow’s, manner of “seeing” and writing is aimed at showing the persistence and continuance of the old in the new, of the ancient in the modern, and thus of the persistence of the alternatives between faith and philosophy. the first word of ravelstein is “odd.” when dealing with a character as unconventional as abe ravelstein, it seems appropriate to address what is odd. ravelstein himself is oddest in his near obsession with the oddities of his companions. his insatiable passion for gossip and stories about the scandalous deeds, the “minor crimes” 1 and “venial sin[s]” of his associates fills the novel. much of the conversation between chick and ravelstein is devoted to the discovery and discussion of chick’s “paradoxical oddities” (109), “absurdities,” and his “unaccountable” tastes, whether these are his strange marriages (to both rosamund and vela), his proprietary interest in his solitary vacation home, or his “weaknesses, [his] corrupt shameful secrets” and “thoughtmurders” (95). ravelstein’s preoccupation with irregular behavior, chick tells us, is associated with his belief that such behavior is a manifestation of human longing (23). longing for wholeness as ravelstein sees it is incompatible with politics and the conventions of the community. to devote oneself to longing, one cannot be limited by the community and its opinions: one needs to forget about them or perhaps even rebel against and destroy them. as ravelstein understands it, “the great passions are antinomian” (52). immortality in ravelstein 82 self-understanding for ravelstein is therefore an understanding of one’s ugly and mutilated nature desiring its original wholeness. in ravelstein’s mind “self-knowledge called for severity,” and for this reason the friendship of chick and ravelstein consists in a back and forth mocking of each other and the noting of each other’s faults. chick even compares ravelstein to a doctor needing to strip his patients naked to make his diagnosis (115). the truth of human nature cannot be understood through its surface, through the conventions and appearances. his understanding of the esoteric significance of the great texts, which in ravelstein’s mind consist of surface political or conventional teachings and deeper serious, but “dangerous,” teachings, underscores ravelstein’s approach. but ravelstein is no simple debunker: his incessant curiosity for the personal and private secrets of others is only half of what makes him so odd a character. although ravelstein loves secrets, chick also notes that “[ravelstein] didn’t care a damn about secrets,” and his teaching consists in an almost opposite move in his continual doing away with the private and particular and seemingly resolving and explaining (rationalizing) the “paradoxical oddities” of his associates. as much as ravelstein loves discovering secret perversities or eccentricities, he loves revealing these secrets even more. his discovery of the esoteric teachings of the “great texts” is accompanied by the publication, the “popularization,” of these secrets in his education of the youths and even more so in his very public book. even as ravelstein presents longing as a private and anti-political phenomenon, the privacy needed for longing to flourish is also something ravelstein disdains. according to chick, ravelstein thought “idiosyncrasies were in the public domain, to be enjoyed like the air and other free commodities” (65). ravelstein turns what is inward outward; the private is publicized by ravelstein. ravelstein’s distaste for the private, for inwardness, is manifested not only in this failure to keep secrets and to respect confidences, but also in his continual attempts to turn people away from romantic solitude in nature. indeed, he commissions chick to write his memoir because “he thought [chick] was stuck in privacy and should be restored to community” (9) and should “go more public” (4). we find, furthermore, that he admires the spirited men and women who love their cities and willingly sacrifice their lives for them. to the spirited, he contrasts the bourgeois personalities like his neighbors, who are wholly devoted to themselves and their privacy and who complain that ravelstein invades their privacy by blasting rossini through the apartment walls. he respects the willingness to understand oneself as part of a whole, and ravelstein objects both to bourgeois and romantic life for its lack of public-spiritedness. 2 ravelstein’s relations to those he cares about, with whom he practices his teaching, reflect a specific understanding of the human condition, one derived from the aristophanic teaching on eros in plato’s symposium, a dialogue central to the novel’s plot and meaning. although longing for the other half of oneself is the highest human desire in ravelstein’s mind, he sets out to divert his friends and students from this longing. in aristophanes’ symposium account, the longing for wholeness drives the mutilated half-beings to cling to each other with the hope of growing back together and becoming complete again, and they end up starving to death as a result of this longing. to prevent their extinction and preserve his honors and sacrifices, zeus gives them sex, 83 block which allows for “temporary self-forgetting” (24) of the painful knowledge of one’s permanent incompleteness and allows them to attend to the rest of life and to politics. erotic longing undermines life and is destructive of the necessary. the cynicism of ravelstein and aristophanes is made clear not only by the fact that longing is wholly painful but also that this desire is totally insatiable, as the wholeness of the original is “lost forever.” even as aristophanes points to the possibility of being sewn together by hephaestus into a happy unity, it is also clear that this is not the state of original freedom and wholeness. it provides more permanence to the sexual embrace, but it is no more the original whole than is the self-forgetting of the sexual embrace. ravelstein’s own attempts at marriagemaking, at “the binding of souls,” are revealed as such to be artificial creations for the sake of life. ravelstein was “continually on watch for [longing], and with such a preoccupation he was only a step away from arranging matches […] a good palliative for the not-always-conscious pain of longing had a significant importance of its own. we have to keep life going, one way or another. marriages must be made” (82–83). the opposite movements in his art of teaching – his continual turning of others to their failings and limits and then to models of perfection – highlight the ultimate tension of human life that ravelstein makes the “foundational assumptions of his teacher’s vocation”: the choice between athens and jerusalem, between reason and faith. ravelstein thus becomes a somewhat divine figure in the eyes of his students. they copy him and become his “clones,” quite funnily, in all his quirks and oddities, in the way he dresses, the way he spends his money, his chain-smoking. in an ironic twist, his students copy his luxurious style, just as some of socrates’ fanatical followers copied his ascetic habits, his shoeless-ness and penury; and just as there is a nearly religious atmosphere around socrates, there is a religious atmosphere surrounding ravelstein as well. the theme of return is associated more with faith than with philosophy, but ravelstein’s concern with the great texts, and with plato in particular, concerns the issue of return. as chick says of the symposium, “i was sent back to it. not literally sent. but if you were continually in [ravelstein’s] company you had to go back to the symposium repeatedly” (24). ravelstein returns those around him back to the origins, to the perfect wholes that the great texts provide, just as aristophanes points back to the perfection of the self-sufficient wholeness of our “ancient nature.” even as he alienates them from their own times and places, he gives them new, or rather old, horizons within which to live. his students were “more familiar with nicias and alcibiades than with the milk train or the ten-cent store” (25). even chick himself, who attempts to resist ravelstein’s authority and refuses to become ravelstein’s pupil, claims that, because of his friendship with ravelstein, he was “as much at home with plato as with elmore leonard” (117). philosophy as the subversion of the conventional to reveal the ugly nature of the self and its alienation is accompanied by putting back together, however artificially, what he has taken apart. ravelstein’s turn to jerusalem at the end of his life, therefore, is not presented as a turn to the faith. according to chick, he was thinking through the problems of judaism, not for himself, but immortality in ravelstein 84 “for the people under his care, for his pupils” (180). chick even characterizes ravelstein’s command to chick to take rosamund to synagogue in this manner: “not every problem could be solved. and what could ravelstein do? but anyway he wouldn’t be here to do it. in that case what was the most significant suggestion he could make to his friends? he began to talk to me about the high holidays and directed me to take rosamund to the synagogue” (179). traditional religion is a second-best substitute for ravelstein himself and his “divine” powers to know and explain others, to teach, and to provide diversions from their longings. chick of course reveals the limits of ravelstein’s attempts to make things whole and complete. ravelstein’s accounts miss integral parts and phenomena in order to explain and account for the whole, and his “popular book” (4) is the clearest and funniest example of this. on the deepest level, the “absurdity” of ravelstein’s luxurious celebration in paris at the opening of the novel is the popular approval of his “most serious ideas” contained in his book. although chick claims that ravelstein “explained modernity in all its complexity,” the phenomenon of his own “popular book” does not fit into his explanation at all; it seems to undermine it. we find later that “‘souls without longing’ had been the working title of his famous book” (83). that millions buy his book and make him a millionaire demonstrates that this judgment about modern life is far too sweeping; the demos, which ravelstein denigrates for their lack of longing, must be longing for something if they buy his book and make him the popular, democratic hero he becomes. his account of the whole of modern life fails to explain the phenomenon of his own celebrity. as important as ravelstein is to the novel, and in spite of the title, he is not quite the novel’s protagonist. he is neither the narrator nor is the central conflict with himself. ultimately, it is the difficulty chick encounters in writing about ravelstein that is the problem, and ravelstein’s way of life is not the only one presented by bellow. on one level chick and ravelstein are opposite: ravelstein is a man consumed by ideas, thoughts, and opinions, while chick is concerned with the appearances and the particulars – the “phenomena.” ravelstein “lived by his ideas,” and chick attempts to avoid ideas altogether in order to preserve the unmediated relation of human beings to the visible world. ravelstein digs underneath the visible surface to debunk the surface, while chick holds, in contrast, that “in the surface of things you saw the heart of things” (156). the visible world of experience has an importance and truthfulness for chick that ravelstein does not fully accept. chick, however, does not present his art and his approach to life in general as that of an especially serious person, and the unserious nature of chick’s art gets to the heart of why he claims to be presenting ravelstein without his ideas. chick’s repeated claims not to understand ravelstein’s ideas and the texts that he takes so seriously is derived, not from a lack of intelligence, but from his attempts to remain child-like and playful. bringing up davarr, ravelstein’s teacher, whose followers claim is a philosopher in the classical sense, he states, “philosophy is hard work. my interests lie in a different direction” (101). it is in fact chick’s unwillingness to throw off his “childish impressions” and “take up trades and tasks,” i.e., to be 85 block serious and work, that ravelstein attempts to cure chick of by trying to make him a student and by making chick his biographer. on the surface, chick’s self-presentation is more play than work, more that of a child than a man. in concentrating only on ravelstein’s often-times ridiculous surface and ignoring his “most serious ideas,” chick points to the levity and childishness in his approach to ravelstein and to his playfulness. chick is nevertheless unable to avoid the great texts and ravelstein’s interpretations of them, but even in these accounts he seems to reveal just how unserious a student of plato and ravelstein he is – that he “didn’t study [the] great texts closely” (117). his accounts of the texts are filled with errors, especially with the platonic dialogues. he misquotes, misremembers, and misrepresents so much about the speeches, teachings, and deeds of plato and his characters that it begins to approach absurdity. 3 he almost rewrites plato’s dialogues in the process. chick’s self-presentation, however, indicates an awareness of his errors and that his art consists in making errors, in reordering the facts, in changing and transforming the original accounts. with his first practice sketch with keynes that he discusses with ravelstein, for example, he critiques himself on the grounds that “too much emphasis on the literal facts narrowed the wider interest of the enterprise” (6). later in the novel, his looseness with the facts is made explicit when he shows himself transforming a text by rewriting of frost’s poem, “stopping by the woods on a snowy evening,” a rewriting he calls a “joke” on himself (114). chick is aware of his “mistakes.” his relationship with plato and with ravelstein’s ideas may go deeper than simple forgetting, lack of understanding, or laziness. the centrality of plato’s symposium in the novel is clear: not only does ravelstein’s teaching on love come directly from aristophanes’ speech on eros, but ravelstein begins, in a way, where the symposium ends. the symposium is set at a drinking-party put on by the tragedian agathon, who is celebrating his popular success in winning his first tragedy contest. the dialogue ends with a conversation between socrates, aristophanes, and agathon on the relation between tragedy and comedy. ravelstein begins with a discussion of jokes and the first scene in the novel is in paris, the morning-after after the “symposium – dining, drinking, conversation athenianstyle” (40) that ravelstein himself puts on to celebrate the popular success of his book. ravelstein replays the symposium, but it also continues where the dialogue ends. chick provides several sketches of aristophanes’ speech for his readers. in his first sketch, chick tells us that its speaker “was not aristophanes at all, but plato in a speech attributed to aristophanes.” on the next page, however, chick tells us that aristophanes’ speech was “attributed by socrates to aristophanes” (25). this is not true to plato’s text, however, as socrates is not the narrator of the dialogue, nor is he in the complicated line of narration that plato makes for the dialogue. the only speech socrates attributes to another person in this dialogue is his own, which he says he learned from the prophetess diotima. insofar as this is a recounting of the plato’s symposium, chick makes plato say things he does not say by making socrates say things he does not say – that the speech was aristophanes’. chick’s question of the authorship and attribution of aristophanes’ speech makes evident a resemblance between chick and plato. plato provides new speeches for old characters, and chick provides new speeches for immortality in ravelstein 86 plato, an old author – an author who becomes a character in chick’s writing. chick makes the historical author a character in his poetry. the symposium is not the only platonic dialogue that makes an appearance in the novel. like the replaying of the symposium in the first part of the novel, there is a replaying of the phaedrus in the second part with chick’s recounting of ravelstein’s trip to visit him in the country. just as phaedrus does of socrates in that dialogue, chick notes the oddity of ravelstein’s departure from the city and his strange presence in the country. it is here, moreover, that chick tells us, “[ravelstein] was repeating the opinion of socrates in the phaedrus, that a tree, so beautiful to look at, never spoke a word and that conversation was only possible in the city, between men” (100). but just as he mischaracterizes the speeches of the symposium, chick mischaracterizes socrates’ opinion from the phaedrus. socrates’ critique of the country is: “i am a lover of learning. now then, the country places and the trees aren’t willing to teach me anything, but human beings in town are.” 4 socrates does not mention anything about speeches, as important as they are to socratic philosophizing. he thus leaves open the possibility that he learns from the deeds of human beings as well as speeches and their relation to one another, but ravelstein’s restatement drops the visible world and the deeds completely. he collapses all of what is human into speeches. what chick presents as socrates’ criticism of the concern with the natural world sounds oddly similar to socrates’ criticism of writing at the end of the phaedrus. socrates’ criticism of writing is that it, like the tree in ravelstein’s “repetition” of socrates’ opinion, cannot engage in conversation. socrates says: indeed writing, phaedrus, doubtless has this feature that is terribly clever, and truly resembles painting. for the offspring of that art stand there as living beings, but if you ask them about something, they altogether keep a solemn silence. […] for you would think that they speak with some understanding, but if you ask something about the things said, wishing to learn, it indicates the same one thing only, and always the same. and when it’s been once written, every speech rolls around everywhere, alike by those who understand as in the same way by those for whom it is in no way fitting, and it does not know to whom it ought to speak and to whom not. and when it suffers offense and is reviled without justice it always needs its father’s assistance. for it cannot defend or assist itself. 5 writings repeat themselves to everyone, and this static form suggests that the writer who takes his writings seriously does not understand that individual souls need different speeches appropriate to them. it also suggests that the writer does not know his arguments and ideas will have to be corrected or defended in different ways for different people in order to continue their existence. a writer fools himself into believing he is self-sufficient and forgets the limits of his knowledge. 6 87 block for chick to put in the mouth of ravelstein a critique of privacy that is in fact also a critique of writing points to the problem with ravelstein’s approach to teaching. his returning others to the old forms, the conventions, the books, suggests that the old can simply be repeated. in so doing, he not only fails to recognize his own limitations, he also does not recognize that the old books and writers had limits and may have left their accounts incomplete and in need of being continued, just as plato leaves the final conversation in the symposium unfinished. plato might be leaving things for the young who will come after him, like chick, who begins ravelstein where plato leaves off. although ravelstein loves conversation and despises romantic “returns to nature” because they limit conversations, his own teaching does the same. his “conversational” teaching resembles writing as socrates presented it. his doing away with “due process” in making his “hard-edged judgments” makes the mistakes of writing as socrates critiqued it. he fits individuals into speeches rather than speeches to individuals. chick has ravelstein ironically “repeating” the argument in favor of conversation that criticizes repetition further underscores this problem with ravelstein’s conversations. it is chick’s irony to make ravelstein’s repetition no repetition at all, and chick’s playfulness prevents ravelstein from simply repeating socrates. chick’s allusions to socrates’ views on love and writing both concern the issue of death and immortality, the issue that divides ravelstein and chick. bellow shows chick’s art, and his own art by consequence, doing for writings, the products of the great writers and plato in particular, what socrates says writings cannot do for themselves – generate new versions of them to complement and continue the old versions. what chick provides for the old texts imitates the deeds of rosamund, who provides him, an old man, with a different kind of rebirth and redemption. chick tells us at the beginning of the third part of the novel that “with rosamund’s help, [he] kept [his] promise to ravelstein” (160). the fact that chick is still writing about this after the completion of the memoir and that he needed rosamund’s help is significant given the problem he tells us he had with beginning the memoir. it is death, his own death, that chick tells rosamund is the obstacle preventing him from beginning. he says, “if i were to write this memoir there would be no barrier between death and me” (163). as chick understood it, ravelstein thought of himself as “the subject of subjects” and suggested that “[chick] may have nothing left to do in this life than to commemorate him” (164). the obstacle to beginning is that it would destroy the obstacle to his own end, and chick expands this notion to call the promise to ravelstein his “protection” from the grave, and that, when in the midst of dying, he thought he would survive because it was unfulfilled. at the end of the novel chick says: i am a great believer in the power of unfinished work to keep you alive. but your survival can’t be explained by this simple one-to-one abstract equivalence. rosamund kept me from dying. i can’t represent this without taking it on frontally and i can’t take it on frontally while my interests remain centered on ravelstein. rosamund studied love immortality in ravelstein 88 – rousseauan romantic love and the platonic eros as well, with ravelstein – but she knew far more about it than either her teacher or her husband. (231) rosamund must remain on the margins, which means chick’s work is unfinished. he cannot give a complete account of her and cannot, given that she knows more about love than he, fully account for the love that chick credits with saving his life and saving the memoir. there is something outside of the “one-to-one” relation of artist and his work. while this limits the artist and makes it necessary to rely on others, it also provides for his continuance because his work can never be finished. the fact that rosamund keeps him from dying and makes it possible for him to begin also keeps him from dying by making it impossible for him to completely end. rosamund’s love and devotion to him connects him to eternity, but in such a way as to make him aware of his own ignorance of this love. in order to begin, he has to understand that he is leaving something undone to be continued by someone else. his writing responds to the limits of plato by providing him with new forms and new manifestations through a playfulness that uses plato to reflect on ravelstein and responds to his own limits by leaving his work undone. what ravelstein is ultimately about is the question of immortality, of how to see the permanence of things amidst the constant change of human life, of how the human is related to the divine. chick thus explicitly compares ravelstein to socrates only once in the novel, where he contrasts the conversations of their last days. socrates engaged in “solemn” discussions on immortality, while ravelstein tells dirty jokes with his friends (151). 7 thus, for ravelstein, the question of immortality and which path to adopt, faith or philosophy, is neither an immortal nor serious one for a philosopher. but for chick and bellow, the question is a viable one, as demonstrated in their account in the novel of showing the persistence and continuance of the old in the new, of the ancient in the modern, and the alternatives between faith and philosophy. notes 1. bellow 2000, 23. all subsequent in-text citations will be from this reference. 2. on the issue of spiritedness and eros in the novel, see nichols 2003, 17. i would only add to nichols’s observations that in ravelstein’s thought, there is a conflation of love and spiritedness, whether it is his attributing chick’s “risky marriages” (116– 117) to his spiritedness rather than his eroticism or ravelstein’s view that “spirited men and women […] are devoted to the pursuit of love” (25). 3. chick’s misremembering is not limited to plato, as he also confuses his account of the tragic hero in aristotle’s poetics with the physical bigness that aristotle attributes to the magnanimous man of the nicomachean ethics. for this point, see also davis 2003. 4. plato 1998, 230d. 5. ibid., 275d–e. 89 block 6. for a more thorough analysis of socrates’ argument against writing in the phaedrus, see nichols 2009. 7. allan bloom’s characterization of socrates’ last day is quite different from chick’s. bloom writes of the relation between aristophanes’ the clouds and the death of socrates: “socrates’ death and aristophanes’ possible contribution to it trouble many who care little for socrates but think serious matters are not laughing matters. but socrates was probably not of their persuasion. he laughed and joked on the day of his death. he and aristophanes share a certain levity” (1987, 268). works cited bellow, saul. 2000. ravelstein: a novel. new york: viking. bloom, allan. 1987. the closing of the american mind. new york: simon & schuster. davis, michael. 2003. “unraveling ravelstein: bellow’s comic tragedy.” perspectives on political science 32:1, 26–31. nichols, david k. 2003. “on bellow’s ravelstein.” perspectives on political science 32:1, 14–21. nichols, mary p. 2009. socrates on friendship and community: reflections on plato’s symposium, phaedrus, and lysis. cambridge: cambridge university press. plato. 1998. symposium. trans. james h. nichols, jr. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. [expositions 6.1 (2012) 45–47] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 barnes, julian. the sense of an ending. new york: alfred a. knopf, 2011. 163 pp, e-book, $11.99, eisbn: 978–0–307–95733–7. my ladies’ book club has been together for twelve years and i believe we can probably count on one hand how many of those books we have all completed. life is busy. some of us have children, terminally ill parents, and demanding careers. and some months the pick is such a tedious read or the plot so circuitous that we can’t properly follow it when we get those twenty minutes to read before bedtime, so we close the book. julian barnes’ the sense of an ending was the first book we all finished in a very long time. when we met to discuss the book we did not linger over the wine and cheese selection, filling the room with our usual (and oftentimes quite entertaining) “catch up” time. we grabbed a glass and a plate and made our way to our host’s living room. our talk began, naturally, with the ending. but that’s never a good place to start a book review. i once studied with an english professor who said one should never pose the question: what is this book about? her theory was that it diminished the work’s complexity and multiple meanings; it was an insult to author and reader to reduce a work of art to a bullet list. the joy of barnes’ brief novel (163 pages – no doubt an incentive to finish; it’s novella-like), if i might contradict my dear and wise former professor, is that one is urged to return to enduring universal themes of school days, family, the search for love, the sting of loss, the quest for answers, and the recognition that our memories are really fiction, no matter how hard we try to convince ourselves otherwise. tony webster is our narrator, a likable and unreliable narrator, a british man who came of age in the 1960s, read history at bristol, married, had a child, divorced, and now finds himself in his later years reflecting on where and who he has been. “average, that’s what i’d been, ever since i left school. average at university and work; average in friendship, loyalty, love; average, no doubt at sex . . . average at life; average at truth; morally average” (110). this late-in-life assessment has been prompted by an unexpected piece of mail from a former girlfriend’s mother. the woman has left tony with a check for five hundred pounds and the diary of an old school friend who committed suicide in his early 20s. but the diary promised from the solicitor’s letter is not part of the package. the novel is nearly evenly divided into parts “one” and “two.” one might be tempted while reading to think “then” and “now” though barnes’ narrator is playing with memory, the way memory plays with us all. tony is past middle age from the very first page, then young, then older, young again . . . the trick of memory and its fluidity. we are a sixty-five-year-old retiree at the shops getting butter and milk and then we are a young schoolboy scraping our knees from a fall on the way home from school, all in a blink. when reflecting on a letter sent as a youth to his ex-girlfriend’s new suitor, tony says, “i must stress that this is my reading now of what happened then. or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time” (45). (right. all clear.) tony has told us that he sent the letter and kept no copy. this letter, of course, appears in full near the end of the novel and while i wouldn’t say it sheds the sense of an ending 46 extraordinary new insights into tony’s character, for a moment he might be considered a notch below his own “average” assessment. the new boyfriend of his old flame veronica is none other than one of his best mates at school, adrian. adrian is the author of the diary that was promised to tony from veronica’s mother in her will, but never arrived in the package along with the check for five hundred pounds. (following?) while i was intrigued by figuring out the twists and turns of this novel, i must say i kept underlining barnes’ wonderful and dear moments he gave his character tony, who laments the dying art of letter writing as he types another email to veronica in hopes to convince her to turn over adrian’s diary and is slightly pained when his one child, susie, tells him it would be so much easier to communicate if he just learned how to text. here is a man who misses conversation, even at its most banal. in a pub, with the bartender while ordering food: “do you think you could do me thin chips for a change?” “how do you mean?” “you know, like in france – the thin ones.” “no, we don’t do them.” “but it says on the menu your chips are hand-cut.” “yes.” “well, can’t you cut them thinner?” “hand-cut chips means fat chips.” “but if you hand cut chips, couldn’t you cut them thinner?” “we don’t cut them. that’s how they arrive.” “you don’t cut them on the premises?” “that’s what i said.” (158) from the lost art of communication to the lost art of culinary care, our narrator longs for the past, but also quite clearly is wrestling with his own romanticized version of parts of that past. barnes’ the sense of an ending is a clear tip of the hat to frank kermode’s 1966 literary theory text of the same name. while kermode’s work attempts a connection between fictions and a focus on apocalyptic thought, barnes’ novel is not concerned with the end of all time, but the end of tony webster’s time and whether he will or won’t get the diary to solve a life-long nagging concern (why did adrian commit suicide?) and an ever-pressing current matter. (i won’t give this part away, as it really is the “ah ha” of the ending.) tony’s words resonate with any reader of a certain age. “i remember a period in late adolescence when my mind would make itself drunk with images of adventurousness. this is how it will be when i grow up. i shall go there, do this, discover that, love her, and then her and her and her. i shall live as people in novels live and have lived” (102). life is always going to be grander that it actually is and we think of these things the same way tony does while he takes out the recycling or mows the lawn. 47 simmons i kept thinking of the education of henry adams as i read the sense of an ending. i loathed the adams text as an undergraduate and have remembered very little from it except that he skips the twenty years after his wife commits suicide. as a nineteen-year-old reader i was incredulous – how does one erase such a chapter in life? tony webster experiences his own memory erasures, most notably when courting his wife. (veronica from his school days is conveniently left out of his narrative.) barnes employs a time compression that also was reminiscent of the education of henry adams. in the course of two pages, tony reports he met and married margaret, welcomed daughter susie, bought a house, got a divorce, became a grandfather, and is now retired. he doesn’t waste time on the traditional domestic concerns of his life because that’s not what this story is about. and this story is about solving a mystery and coming to terms with life’s disappointments and unanswerable questions. tony webster is an early twenty-first century everyman. he’s average and law-abiding, just like most of his readers. kermode reminded his readers, “we hunger for ends and for crises” (kermode 2000, 55). by this novel’s end the crises have indeed mounted, some of which are simply not surmountable. mary beth simmons villanova university work cited 1. kermode, frank. 2000. the sense of an ending: studies in the theory of fiction with a new epilogue. oxford: oxford university press. [expositions 6.1 (2012) 19-28] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 interpretive skills for environmental ethics nicole klenk university of new brunswick introduction storytelling is central to the formation and reproduction of identities, cultures, and traditions (ochs and capps 1996; bruchac 2003). whether from a religious or secular perspective, the stories we are told as infants and those we tell ourselves as adults are a means of contextualizing our origin, our place, and our purpose while envisioning our individual and collective futures (nelson 2003; fagundes and blayer 2007). narratives also serve the important role of moral education: how to live a good life, how to be a good person, and how to engage in moral reasoning. for example, in the christian tradition, biblical parables such as “the good samaritan” and “the prodigal son” convey important moral lessons and principles. a nonreligious and remarkable example is the western apache’s place-names, which mark geographical locations and past events as well as provide moral guidance (basso 1996). that is, geographic features remind the western apache of “the moral teachings of their history” by recalling to mind events that occurred there in important moral narratives. the anthropologist keith basso describes these place-linked historical tales as having “the capacity to thrust socially delinquent persons into periods of intense critical self-examination from which (ideally, at least) they emerge chastened, repentant, and determined to ‘live right’” (basso 1996, 60). such narratives can be strongly compelling because they make sense of lived experience: they integrate facts and values in a way that enable us to find and make our place in the world. the narratives that structure identities, cultures, and traditions are not simply given, but constantly reenacted and reinterpreted, thus changing in relation to life events and historical contexts. the continual interpretation of these narratives can radically change received views, and skillful storytelling can create new cultural and moral identities, and structure different modes of moral reasoning and behavior. indeed, gifted storytellers can create new stories out of new facts and values, giving us a different sense of time, place, and purpose and inviting us to integrate our life experience into its unfolding storyline. the environmental ethicist holmes rolston is a master storyteller in this sense. rolston’s environmental ethics (1988) integrates ecological knowledge (e.g., darwinian evolution, ecosystem science) with particular values (e.g., “natural value”) to provide a universal ethics to guide human behavior towards nature in all its diversity. his narrative is evident in his interpretation of the evolution of biodiversity as earth’s storied achievement. in rolston’s own words: “nature is a fountain of life, and the whole fountain – not just the life that issues from it – is of value. nature is genesis, genesis” (rolston 1988, 197). a pioneer in the field of environmental ethics, rolston’s evolutionary tale not only provides a sense of our species’ past interpretive skills for environmental ethics 20 and future trajectory on earth, it provides a scientific context for the development of a new kind of ethics within moral philosophy, one that provides guidance to humanity for acting in a way that “fits” in nature. in his most recent work, a new environmental ethics: the next millennium for life on earth (2012), he remains consistent with his prior elaboration of “natural value.” however, rolston does more than just present a philosophical argument for a new environmental ethics; he packs his narrative with an overwhelming number of facts, applying his environmental ethics to a vast array of current environmental policy issues, demonstrating to the reader how to apply his environmental ethics to deal with the complexity of environmental decision-making in our time. what is striking in this volume is how rolston uses his narrative of “natural value” to rhetorically reveal to readers their proper identity, place and purpose: i am seeking, in this book you have in hand, to put you in your place. you will be finding out who you are, where you are and what you ought to do. you will be seeking to learn what you most need to know about nature: how to value it. (rolston 2012, preface) convincing people to adopt a new set of ethical values is a difficult thing to do. one way to make a new environmental ethics compelling is to make it seem necessary and legitimate by grounding it in science. but the choice of which ecological narrative to use to structure a new environmental ethics remains an outstanding issue. for example, one could use a declensionist ecological narrative which interprets natural history as the deterioration of nature due to humanity’s destructive activities, drawing the moral lessons from the “fall of humanity” out of its golden age of the past, when humans were “in harmony” with nature. or, one could use a progressivist ecological narrative in which the evolution of life on earth is interpreted as the emergence of more advanced lifeforms, of which humanity is the apex. in this storyline, humans are interpreted as “rational animals” that have a special responsibility towards nature due to their ability to reason. of course, not all interpretations of the evolution of life on earth are scientifically accepted; nevertheless, there is a plurality of scientific interpretations of nature that are deemed scientifically plausible and could be used to construct a moral ecological narrative. the fact that there is a plurality of actual, plausible, and useful ecological narratives has important implications for rolston’s project and for environmental ethics more generally. in this paper i make a number of observations which are part of a larger argument on interpretation, science, and environmental ethics i have made elsewhere (klenk 2008). i identify two plausible evolutionary narratives that could structure an environmental ethics differently than the evolutionary narrative sketched by rolston. i then discuss the implications of this pluralism for environmental ethics, in particular, the need for interpretive skills in ethical environmental reasoning. in the first section i begin by providing a summary of holmes rolston’s moral ecological narrative. 21 klenk the tree of life story rolston’s evolutionary narrative evokes the metaphor of the tree of life: its foundational trunk arising out of earth’s natural history, shooting forth like the arrow of time and branching out in the diversity of life unfolding, expanding, and flourishing. the tree of life and its scientific representation is arguably the root metaphor of rolston’s narrative of evolution and “natural value.” rolston interprets the evolution of different elements of diversity (e.g., humans, organisms, species, ecosystems) as the natural history of “intrinsic value” in it diverse manifestations. rolston emphasizes the “pro-life” direction of “evolution’s arrow,” that is the emergence of an increasing number of species over evolutionary time (rolston 1988, 197). in rolston’s environmental ethics, moral concern should be focused on evolution’s “unit of development and survival,” referring to species, but also to their environment: in a holistic ethic, this ecosystemic level in which all organisms are embedded also counts morally – in some respects more than any of the component organisms, because the systemic processes have generated, continue to support, and integrate tens of thousands of member organisms. the appropriate unit of moral concern is the fundamental unit of development and survival. that is the species line. but a species is what it is where it is, encircled by an ecology. (rolston 2003, 524) morally good behavior consistent with this moral ecological narrative requires “following nature.” in rolston’s words: what i call larger moral virtue, excellence of character comes in large part, although by no means in the whole, from this natural attunement; and here i find a natural ethic in the somewhat old-fashioned sense of a way of life – a life style that should “follow nature,” that is, be properly sensitive to its flow through us and its bearing on our habits of life. a very significant portion of the meaning of life consists in our finding, expressing, and endorsing its naturalness. otherwise, life lacks propriety. (rolston 1979, 26). in his most recent book, rolston enhances his moral ecological narrative by contextualizing it within a whole range of current social-ecological policy issues (sustainable development, environmental justice, climate change, pollution, and urban planning, among others). rolston’s masterful storytelling is exhibited in the comprehensive and systematic way he integrates current and emerging events (i.e., what he call environmental crises) into his narrative, building upon readers’ current historical context to provide them with a sense of “who they are, what their place is, and what they ought to do.” however, there are counter-narratives to the tree of life story. i present two narratives that suggest differing roles of humans in nature and modes of ethical environmental reasoning. these interpretive skills for environmental ethics 22 ecological narratives could structure alternative environmental ethics, which are not necessarily consistent with rolston’s environmental ethics. the hypersea story dianna and mark mcmenamin present an explanation for both the emergence of land animals and the origin of the plant kingdom, virtually all of which lives on land (mcmenamin and mcmenamin 1994, 3). the authors argue that the success of life on land, in comparison to marine life, is due to the vast number of direct, physical connections through which fluid is directed, creating in effect a new sea within the sum of its tissue: land organisms have, by necessity, evolved together as part of a greater interconnected mass of living cells. in moving out of marine waters, complex life has taken the sea beyond the sea and folded it back inside of itself to form hypersea. (mcmenamin and mcmenamin 1994, 5) hypersea provides life with the same sustenance that ocean currents do; however, in hypersea, organisms control the flow of nutrients, unlike in the sea where marine organisms must actively search for opportunities to access essential nutrients. hypersea is the unifying story of life on earth, directing nutrients and speeding up the evolution of biological diversity. this is made possible by cellular system of nutrient transport and distribution, facilitating more complex trophic webs of predation and parasitism, which in turn facilitates the evolution of more biological diversity. in their own words: hypersea unifies what might at first hand appear to be opposites. plants and land animals are shown in our new view to belong to the same collective, and geologically speaking, plants and land animals ought to be considered as part of a unified whole. cases of parasitism and disease are related by hypersea perspective to examples of mutualistic symbioses where the hosts and symbionts both benefit by living together. natural selection, generally considered as a force of discrimination acting on separated individuals, evokes curious happenings on the insides of organisms. (mcmenamin and mcmenamin 1994, 5) how could the hypersea narrative inform a new environmental ethics? in this unified ecological perspective, individual species and ecosystems would not be the focus of moral concern; rather, it would be the flow of fluids through interconnected cells. the focus of this new environmental ethics would be the morality of manipulating hypersea’s currents. we have spread pollutants, diseases and parasites from one reservoir of hypersea to another (e.g., the theory that hiv was spread to humans from primates), in some cases facilitating the evolution of biodiversity and in other cases transforming hypersea reservoirs into toxic waste sites. by interpreting the evolution 23 klenk of land organisms as connected aquatic environments, and the role of humans as catalytic and mobile reservoirs of hypersea, we would take a fluid-centered perspective on environmental ethical reasoning. a new environmental ethics might argue that hypersea has intrinsic value as the sustainer of life on earth and that its intrinsic value gives rise to ethical obligations and principles to facilitate its continued flow and expansion on land. for instance, if it were applied to the ethical dilemma of lake vostok, the hypersea perspective would suggest that rather than viewing humans as a threat to the largest pristine sub-glacial body of water in antarctica, we should not hesitate to study its extremophile inhabitants to better understand their role in facilitating the evolution of life on land.1 moreover, in the narrative of hypersea land organisms form a unified whole that transcends the boundaries erected between common ecological taxonomies (organisms, species, ecosystems). interpreting land organisms as this unified whole would allow environmental ethicists to sidesteps the thorny issue of how to distribute intrinsic value – do animals have more intrinsic value than plants? for rolston, animals have a higher “intrinsic value magnitude” than plants and microorganisms (rolston 1988, 120), but from the hypersea perspective such a “gradient” of intrinsic value is nonsensical since in hypersea land plants and animals are connected in radically intimate ways. lastly, for those concerned about global biological diversity, the mcmenamins suggest focusing on unique hypersea organisms. for example, they suggest protecting the southeast asian plant genus rafflesia which forms the world’s largest flower (over a meter in diameter) and is an exemplary reservoir of hypersea. in their own words: the plant has become so specialized for its hypermarine habitat that it lacks leaves, stems or roots. the only vegetative part of the plant, directly connect to the flower, are the fine filamentous hairs that penetrate and parasitize tropical vines – vines which are themselves parasitic on other vascular plants. the host vines are not badly injured by this parasitism. sadly, though its range includes borneo, sumatra, java, and peninsular malaysia, rafflesia is one of the rarest of vascular plant genera, and redoubled efforts to protect this flower ought to be undertaken in light of its importance for hypermarine studies. (mcmenamin and mcmenamin 1994, 255) in the next section i discuss another narrative of the evolution of life on earth, but this one takes a plant-centered perspective. its implications for the role of humans on earth present a striking contrast to rolston’s moral ecological narrative. the emerald planet story in the emerald planet: how plants changed earth’s history (2007), david beerling starts his ecological narrative by describing how cyanobacteria changed the atmosphere’s chemical constitution, starting at least 3.5 billion years ago, which had the effect of undoing their worldly interpretive skills for environmental ethics 24 dominance. cyanobacteria thrived in an oxygen-impoverished atmosphere, but due to their large numbers and their photosynthesis they increased the proportion of oxygen in the atmosphere to a level that rendered their habitats inhospitable – cyanobacteria had to retreat to oxygen deficient environments such as mud flats and other fetid localities (mackenzie 1998, 194). the main gist of the emerald planet narrative is that plants have had a massive impact on the earth’s atmosphere through photosynthesis and their acceleration of the weathering of silicate rocks, which also consume carbon dioxide. these two processes help explain the plummeting of carbon dioxide levels in the middle to late paleozoic era, 400 to 350 million years ago: plants, and their fungal partners below ground, are evidently engaged in a conspiracy of silence as they gradually consume the rocks beneath our feet over the ages. careful investigations have shown them to dissolve rocks five times faster than normal, irrespective of whether they are tropical rainforests in hawaii or conifer forests in the swiss alps. through these processes plants have been imperceptibly removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and regulating climate as the millennia ticked away. […] interestingly, plant evolution generated changes in the global environment that persisted in a legacy to modify subsequent generations. falling carbon dioxide levels saw the evolution of leafy plants, which in turn accelerated the diversification of terrestrial animals and insects. (beerling 2007, 33–34) in a recent study, botanists have suggested that the impact of non-vascular plants such as mosses may have triggered the growth of ice sheets even earlier, that is in the late ordovician period, ending 444 million years ago (lenton et al. 2012). apparently plants facilitated the evolution of non-plant life but they also precipitated an ice age, thereby putting themselves at risk of global extinction had the earth’s “thermostat” not kicked in: rock weathering slowed in the cooling climate which decreased carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere, which in turn helped return the climate to a more hospitable range for land organisms. in a nutshell, plants have been transforming the earth by spreading across continents and in the process threatening the extinction of countless species due to their contribution to global ice ages, but at the same time acting as catalysts in the diversification of life on land. if we were to construct a moral ecological narrative out of the emerald planet story, how would we interpret the role of humans on earth and its implications for environmental ethics? beerling’s narrative suggests that earth’s most successful land organisms actively change their environment, which sometimes leads to their flourishing and sometimes to the destruction of the very conditions they need to survive. beerling’s evolutionary history is replete with episodes of radical change, extremes in climate, extinctions, and bursts of species diversification all in some way connected to the activities of plants. an environmental ethics founded on this interpretation of the evolution of life on earth could argue for the continued spread of the human species on all habitable lands and support the increased human appropriation of natural resources, since this is 25 klenk precisely what other species have done in earth’s history. however, the lesson learned from the emerald planet story is that the consequences of the flourishing of the human species might lead to the destruction of the conditions necessary for human life, but may also, in time, facilitate the diversification of life on earth. in sum, the moral of this story is that we would not be the first nor the last living organisms on earth to cause large-scale ecological changes and rather than view such changes as morally questionable, we should acknowledge our duty to take responsibility and care for the consequences of our actions. furthermore, to paraphrase bruno latour in it’s development, stupid! or: how to modernize modernization (2008), now is not the time to stop intervening, acting, and wanting at an ever increasing scale because of the unforeseen risks and impacts of human activities on earth’s ecosystem, but to learn to follow through with our actions and care for the unwanted consequences along the way. this means coming to terms with and taking care of the myriad imbroglios in which humans, non-humans, and technology have become intimately entangled. hence, the emerald planet story enables us to interpret evolution as the active transformation by species of the conditions of life on earth. rather than valuing units of evolution (e.g., organisms/species/ecosystems) or the unifying fluid of hypersea, a new environmental ethics could focus on convincing people that humanity is pervasively and intimately connected to nonhuman nature through the use of technology and that rather than reject these imbroglios, they should give rise to ethical obligations and principles that guide how to look after, or take care of, the consequences of our actions. in the context of this third moral ecological narrative, both the loss of species and ecosystems and the creation of conditions for new species or ecosystems to evolve appear to be as it should be. interpretive skills for environmental ethics which of these ecological narratives should structure a new environmental ethics? the decision cannot be answered by science, since these narratives are all scientific, plausible, and useful (e.g., they can be used to generate hypotheses). with no final arbiter on this question, readers might wonder if it makes sense to use ecological narratives to structure a new environmental ethics. given the conflicting ethical values and principles that can be drawn from these three ecological narratives, the idea of having to accept only one of them to contextualize our origin, place, purpose, and environmental ethics seems arbitrary and unnecessary. moreover, the question of whether there should be a plurality of ecological narratives (i.e., that the purpose of scientists and/or ethicists is not to convince us of a single unified narrative of nature) is mute, since this plurality is a phenomenon that appears throughout our history (glacken 1976). in other words, pluralism in ecological narratives is a fact of existence with which we must contend. indeed, this plurality represents a fundamental challenge for constructing universal moral ecological narratives in order to change people’s environmental values and behavior, not to mention their identities, cultures, and traditions. interpretive skills for environmental ethics 26 that is not to say that using ecological narratives is not useful or appropriate in environmental ethics, but rather that it should be supplemented by the development of interpretive skills in environmental ethical reasoning. for individual environmental decision-making in everyday life as well as for complex, large-scale environmental decision-making involving multi-cultural stakeholders, there is a need to interpret facts, values, principles, actions, and their consequences in relation to a particular dilemma. the application of environmental ethics to environmental decision-making requires at least the following three interpretive skills: • discerning which facts (i.e., ecological and other) and values (i.e., ethical and other) are relevant to the particular individual or collective environmental decisionmaking dilemma; • interpreting relevant ethical principles for the situation at hand; • evaluating the results of the action given the relation between means and ends structuring the decision-making situation. these interpretive skills should remind readers of early american pragmatism of john dewey’s theory of valuation. for dewey the process of valuation is an inquiry: it requires considering what should be done to resolve a particular conflict of interests by using both factual information and ethical guidelines (dewey 1939). but dewey was not solely interested in finding better and more efficient means to achieve ends (resolution of problems), but in inquiring about the ends themselves in relation to factual conditions and values (putnam 2002, 97). in addition, the interpretive skills i suggest are pragmatic in the sense that they sidestep intractable problems in moral philosophy and applied ethics: which moral theory is right and how can we be sure that the application of a chosen moral theory (i.e., its associated ethical values or principles) consistently results in good and right actions? indeed, the three interpretive skills i suggest imply that ethical values and principles do not provide self-evident rules for action, but require interpretation to be appropriately applied in particular contexts. in summary, holmes rolston has done a tremendous job of constructing a grand moral ecological narrative and demonstrating how to apply his environmental ethics to contemporary environmental issues. it does not follow that in actual decision-making situations individuals would interpret his environmental ethics or the ethics of “following nature” in the same way he would (klenk 2008). they would almost certainly have to contend with a plurality of competing environmental ethics and ecological narratives. pluralism requires us, therefore, to acknowledge the need for and develop practical skills in interpretive ethical reasoning to learn how and when to apply relevant and compelling environmental ethics to actual environmental dilemma. 27 klenk acknowledgements i am thankful to james maclellan for suggesting the example of lake vostok and the recent study on the historical impacts of mosses on the earth climate. i would also like to thank vince zelazny and tom beckley for their comments and suggestions on an earlier version of the manuscript. note 1. “lake vostok: russian scientists drilling into 'alien' antarctic lake buried for 20m years.” mail online. dailymail.co.uk. retrieved 5 april 2012. works cited basso, keith. 1996. wisdom sits in places: landscape and language among the western apache. albuquerque, nm: university of new mexico press. beerling, david. 2007. the emerald planet: how plants changed earth’s history. oxford: oxford university press. bruchac, joseph. 2003. our stories remember. american indian history, culture, and values through storytelling. golden, colorado: fulcrum. dewey, john. 1939. theory of valuation. chicago: the university of chicago press. fagundes, francisco cota and blayer, irene maria. eds. 2007. oral and written narratives and cultural identity: interdisciplinary approaches. new york: peter lang. glacken, clarence j. 1967. traces on the rhodian shore. nature and culture in western thought from ancient times to the end of the eighteenth century. berkeley: university of california press. klenk, nicole l. 2008. the ethics and values underlying the “emulation of natural disturbance” forest management approach in canada: an interdisciplinary and interpretive study. doctoral dissertation. university of british columbia, canada. https://circle.ubc.ca/bitstream/handle/2429/1591/ubc_2008_fall_klenk_nicole.pdf?sequen ce=1 interpretive skills for environmental ethics 28 latour, bruno. 2008. it’s development, stupid! or: how to modernize modernization. http://www.bruno-latour.fr. accessed april 2012. lenton, timothy m., michael crouch, martin johnson, nuno pires, and liam dolan. 2012. “first plants cooled the ordovician.” nature geoscience 5: 86–89. mackenzie, fred t. 1998. our changing planet: an introduction to earth system science and global environmental change. 2nd ed. upper saddle river: prentice hall. mcmenamin, mark and mcmenamin dianna.1994. hypersea: life on land. new york: columbia university press. nelson, k. 2003. “self and social functions: individual autobiographical memory and collective narrative.” memory 11.2: 125–136. doi: 10.1080/09658210244000315 ochs, elinor and capps, lisa. 1996. “narrating the self.” annual review of anthropology 25: 19–43. doi: 10.1146/annurev.anthro.25.1.19 putnam, hilary. 2002. the collapse of the fact/value dichotomy and other essays. cambridge, massachusetts: harvard university press. rolston, holmes, iii. 1979. “can and ought we to follow nature?” environnemental ethics 1:7–30. doi: http://lamar.colostate.edu/~hrolston/can-ought-follow-nature.pdf rolston holmes, iii. 1988. environmental ethics. philadelphia: temple university press. rolston holmes, iii. 2012. a new environmental ethics: the next millennium for life on earth. new york: routledge. rolston, holmes, iii. 2003. “environmental ethics.” in the blackwell companion to philosophy, eds. n. bunnin and e. p. tsui-james, 517–530. oxford: blackwell publishing. http://www.bruno-latour.fr/ interpretive skills for environmental ethics nicole klenk introduction the tree of life story the hypersea story the emerald planet story interpretive skills for environmental ethics acknowledgements i am thankful to james maclellan for suggesting the example of lake vostok and the recent study on the historical impacts of mosses on the earth climate. i would also like to thank vince zelazny and tom beckley for their comments and suggestions on an... note works cited dewey, john. 1939. theory of valuation. chicago: the university of chicago press. rolston holmes, iii. 1988. environmental ethics. philadelphia: temple university press. bellow, kierkegaard, and american estheticism [expositions 6.1 (2012) 68–80] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 bellow, kierkegaard, and american estheticism julianne romanello baylor university and tulsa community college a key theme of saul bellow’s 1970 novel mr. sammler’s planet is humanity’s quest for selfunderstanding. several approaches to that quest circulate in the dramatic world that bellow crafts. among the most prominent approaches are those guided by theories purporting to have comprehensive explanatory power – physics, psychoanalysis, and marxist economics, for example – and popular “culture,” which, as a whole, seems to celebrate arbitrariness and the ability to defy explanation. both approaches, the “scientific” and the “artistic,” respectively are distinctively modern in the sense that they abdicate on the question of whether or not human beings are characterized by having a proper end, or telos, let alone the question of what such an end might be. in bellow’s modern america, the human quest for self-understanding is either reduced to an intellectual exercise in description (that is often materialistic) or rendered obsolete by an emphasis on complete self-fashioning. in the case of the former, understanding seems to imply a deterministic destruction of the self; in the latter, radical freedom preserves individuality at the price of understanding. in this article, i examine bellow’s dramatic critique of these approaches to the quest for self understanding and his portrayal of an alternative existential approach that is more humane even as it is grounded in faith and accepts mystery as a permanent feature of the human condition. bellow’s existentialism follows kierkegaard, whose concepts i use in my examination because sammler refers to them explicitly, in suggesting that the defining task of human life was to become a “true” or “authentic” self: a self that is passionately oriented toward and formed in light of an encounter with the source of existence and truth. this task often leads individuals through the three “spheres” of life kierkegaard described: the ethical, the esthetic, and the religious. bellow’s novel depicts characters moving through these spheres and suggests that while individuals who seriously embark on the quest for authentic selfhood cannot achieve perfection, they may gain self-understanding and find themselves prepared to assess and to confront the realities of finite or temporal existence in a way that avoids the pitfalls of the scientific and artistic approaches. for bellow, self-understanding emerges as requiring a certain ethical-religious outlook consisting in a genuine concern for others that is grounded in openness to divine being and the obligations that knowledge of the divine imposes on human passion, action, and thought. kierkegaard’s three spheres before discussing bellow’s employment of kierkegaard’s concepts, it will be helpful to mention some key features of kierkegaard’s thought and authorship. first, many of his writings are 69 romanello penned pseudonymously. kierkegaard wanted to distance himself from the views presented by his pseudonyms for several reasons, including to avoid and to incriminate what he took to be hegel’s prideful location of the source of philosophic truth in his own mind. more importantly, kierkegaard thought that the endeavor to become an authentic self required individuals to appropriate the objective truth subjectively, that is, in a manner that goes beyond intellectual mastery of propositions toward a life-determinative passion for moral and intellectual knowledge. the indirect teaching might induce individuals to become active participants in the process of discovering and realizing their natural calling and purpose. in the sickness unto death, the pseudonym anti-climacus begins by stating that “a human being is spirit,” and then asking, “but what is spirit?” 1 in a formulation that is more lucid than it first appears, anti-climacus goes on to state: spirit is the self. but what is the self? the self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself. a human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis. […] such a relation that relates itself to itself, a self, must either have established itself or have been established by another. 2 if human beings are “established by another” – which kierkegaard (and mr. sammler) believed to be the case – another relation, viz. to the “establisher” or creator, enters into the constitution of the self: a relation that “relates itself to that which established the entire relation” (13). 3 put simply, kierkegaard thought that a self (or soul) is an entity that relates to god. the relation between the self and god is a necessary one and the fulfillment of man’s essential humanity depends upon that relation being constituted properly. from the perspective of man qua man, the self has both an eternal and a temporal orientation that are in tension with each other. man participates in and longs for eternal, infinite being as the source of his being, order, and purpose. the universal yearning for fulfillment through communion with god testifies to the common condition of humanity. 4 but because the self finds its existence in the finite realm, it also suffers a natural concern for the concrete particulars of spatio-temporal existence, or the features that make an individual’s life unique. the relational tension between these two longings constitutes one of the partners of the relation that exists with the self considered as a whole. concern for the particulars of finite, spatio-temporal existence is not of itself detrimental to a proper order of the self because genuine communion with god requires the realization that there is an infinite difference between human being and divine being. grasping the particularities of his existence better equips the individual to perceive the ontological gulf between human and divine being. what does impede authentic selfhood is when an individual’s concern for the particulars of temporal existence becomes radical and overshadows his concern for communion with god. focusing on the immanent features of existence more than the transcendent ones, compromises the balance of relations that is crucial to living well. bellow, kierkegaard, and american estheticism 70 another way an individual may become unbalanced is by accepting conventional standards of order as the necessary and sufficient conditions for living well. although the focus on community standards represents a shift toward something beyond the particular self, an individual’s orientation is still aimed at immanent reality rather than the genuine source of order that is eternal and transcendent. kierkegaard thought these immanent, communal standards of order, or “universals,” often distract individuals from their existential task just as much as radical individualism does. 5 often individuals dispassionately presume that the “universals” are fully rational and, consequently, that living well means acting according to society’s conception of the ethical. the esthetic life the esthetic life is portrayed in either/or i in the papers of a young man, known simply as “a.” the esthetic life aims at restoring to life the immediacy and passion which all but evaporate under the sterile rationality of hegelian esthetics and social theory. 6 while it presents a critique of hegelianism that is basically coherent, the esthetic life presented in either/or i lacks substantive internal consistency. it is a life driven by revolt against a dominant way of thinking (the “universals”) and is essentially reactionary. esthetes have no overarching passion that unifies life; they live for the moment, for possibilities, and for an “interesting” succession of sensations. they crave distinction and diverse experiences in order to preclude others from arriving at explanations of their lives. in their reaction against rationalism, esthetes try to retain the maximum level of freedom by refusing either to make moral commitments or to accept responsibility for the constitution of their personality. esthetes are characterized by their immediacy or reflectiveness: immediate esthetes are driven to act by carnal and spiritual passion, not thought; reflective esthetes try to create an “artistic” or unique life experience by using thought to activate and deactivate various passionate responses. the reflective esthete develops his powers of recollecting and forgetting, for these help him to manipulate his experiences infinitely, to create new and interesting experiences of old experiences, or to “play shuttlecock with all existence.” 7 whereas the immediate esthete enjoys the excitement of the opera in which he is carried away by the music, the reflective esthete prefers ancient tragedy, in which there seems no way to pinpoint accurately the responsibility for the dramatic conflict. the ethical life in either/or ii, judge william presents an ethical critique of the esthetic life that demonstrates the aimlessness of the esthete’s passion. the judge argues that selfhood requires coherent passions anchored in some guiding principle. the ethical life does not rehabilitate hegelian social ethics; rather, it demands passionately choosing to take responsibility for the development of one’s self. the judge argues that a’s refusal to take responsibility for fashioning his life is 71 romanello still a choice to live a certain way; through such “choices,” selves inevitably acquire a certain momentum or habit. therefore, the judge tries to shake a from his existential paralysis, arguing that passion, distinction, and individuality are not obliterated by decisions that happen to be in line with accepted social conventions; instead, they are intensified by the formation of one’s emotions and personality around a consistent set of commitments. in the judge’s presentation, the ethical man observes socially-accepted religious practices and has a general idea that human beings need to be devoted to god. 8 again, kierkegaard explores both positive and negative aspects of the ethical life. the positive side is the infusion of passion into choices that uphold social order rather than compromising it by radical individuality. the ethical individual takes seriously his duties to others which derive from the roles (such as husband, father, employee, citizen, etc.) he has chosen to assume and to execute passionately. the negative side is that his concern for fulfilling such duties can obscure the conflicts that inevitably arise between the various roles he holds and the limitations spatio-temporal existence places on human agency. in either/or ii, the ethical man seems to be unaware of the magnitude of such conflicts at times presuming that “ought” really does imply “can.” in this way, the ethical man often overlooks the particular features of existence which must factor into any genuinely good moral choice. the religious life in fear and trembling, johannes de silentio explores the religious life: the life of faith in which the individual self relates to god properly because his passion is correctly ordered with regard to both its temporal and eternal objects. silentio claims not to understand personally the religious life. he nevertheless recognizes the biblical abraham as an exemplar of the faith and endeavors to understand how abraham’s faith manifests itself in the particulars of his life. silentio is concerned especially with how abraham’s willingness to follow god’s command to sacrifice his son demonstrates that faith, whatever it may be, simply cannot be reducible to an ethical decision because in no ethical system would a father’s decision to murder his son be permitted. in particular, silentio is baffled that abraham could, upon being commanded by god not to continue with the sacrifice of isaac, resume the relationship with isaac that preceded his decision to follow the divine command to kill. silentio cannot fathom how abraham could “receive isaac back,” concluding that it follows from the absurdity that accompanies faith. silentio thinks it more comprehensible that abraham would find himself unable to participate fully in one’s concrete, temporal existence because of his concentrated focus on eternal being. being unable to identify with abraham, whom he calls “the knight of faith,” silentio finds his analysis of abraham insufficient to unravel the mystery he witnesses: how a single individual before god can cope with both the temporal and eternal orientations of his soul. silentio remains the “knight of infinite resignation,” the individual who is prepared to give up and cannot conceive of regaining that which wholly constitutes his temporal identity in the hopes of communing with the eternal. bellow, kierkegaard, and american estheticism 72 kierkegaard in bellow bellow draws on kierkegaard’s spheres of existence for the novel mr. sammler’s planet. not only does he explicitly mention kierkegaard, the esthetic standard, the knight of infinite resignation, and the knight of faith, but also his characters exhibit the key qualities of each of the spheres. in the messy world of modern america, the characters often oscillate among the spheres. but generally speaking, most of them live, so sammler thinks, the esthetic life. moreover, society as a whole seems esthetic, having lost its sense of self, its dignity, and its sense of duty. brief sketches of walter bruch and angela gruner will show sammler’s sense that in modern america, the spirit and self are diseased, suffering under the malady of infatuation with the finite, particular features of human existence. walter bruch is an acquaintance of sammler who is introduced just as sammler has been thinking about dr. lal’s conception of moon-life and the incident on the riverside bus. for sammler, both lal’s technical plan of escape and the pickpocket’s demonstration of carnal force exhibit the deification of nature. “make nature your god, elevate creatureliness, and you can count on gross results,” sammler thinks. 9 at that moment, walter arrives at sammler’s apartment in order to confess one of his dark, carnal secrets: his obsession with the climaxinducing stimulus of heavy, dark, puerto rican arms. this disclosure is not an isolated incident: walter has confessed to playing with children’s toys, sending rude letters to other musicians, and acting the corpse at mock-funerals. like the esthete, walter relishes sharing these indicators of his unique pathology. he acts as if the arm obsession is a burden and revels in the particularity it bestows upon him. sammler reassures walter’s that his fetish is common nowadays, but then realizes the effect his reassurance will have: “walter, when his crying stopped, would be hurt by the krafft-ebing reference, by the assertion that his deviation was not too unusual. nothing seemed to hurt quite so much as being ravaged by a vice that was not a top vice” (50). walter exhibits, in sammler’s mind, the esthetic characteristics of seeking particularity in perverse physical deeds, which are assumed to be the overt symptoms of a deeper, spiritual disease that is meted out by fate. for the esthete, acting according to “nature” means resigning to and reveling in the oddities that one cannot help but exhibit – oddities, which are not, as the drama of the novel shows, actually unique. elya gruner’s daughter angela also lives esthetically according to sammler. she engages in taboo sexual activities and enjoys endlessly rehashing the original experiences. she discloses her secrets in psychoanalytic sessions and then again to sammler, omitting not even the most intimate detail. angela is “educated” and “cultured”; an alumna of sarah lawrence college, she attends the opera, visits museums, and supports whichever causes are in vogue at the time (defense funds for young black men accused of rape, for example). both walter and angela try to distance themselves from the ordinary majority, but wind up engaging only in a snobbier, more self-deluded bourgeois conformism. 73 romanello angela and walter are simultaneously obsessed with existentialism and psychoanalysis: the former an assertion of radical freedom and individuality (the “artistic” viewpoint), the latter a deterministic reduction of everything to material forces (the “scientific” viewpoint). in these two trends, the contradicting forces of freedom and necessity, of particularity and universality, wed in the paradoxical manner that esthetes relish. this also accounts for walter’s and angela’s fixations on physical as well as spiritual abnormalities. the sexual activities mimic the immediate esthete’s carnal passions; the endless confessions (which “communicate chaos”) and explanations mimic the reflective esthete’s love of interesting psychic twists and turns. these esthetes live in the moment for a time and then move into the role of observer trying time and again to create an interesting and unique self for themselves. their selves lack coherence. sammler thinks walter and angela are accurate reflections of the american psyche. at one point he reflects: what one sees on broadway while bound for the bus. all human types reproduced, the barbarian, redskin, or fiji, the dandy, the buffalo hunter, the desperado, the queer, the sexual fantasist, the squaw; bluestocking, princess, poet, painter, prospector, troubadour, guerrilla, che guevara, the new thomas à becket. not imitated are the businessman, the soldier, the priest and the square. the standard is aesthetic. (120) sammler thinks that the modern world has slid into the spiritual despair of estheticism. in this milieu, sammler sees himself as “not quite human” and largely alienated from those around him. in general, modern individuals remind sammler of: kierkegaard’s comical account of people traveling around the world to see rivers and mountains, new stars, birds of rare plumage, queerly deformed fishes, ridiculous breeds of men – tourists abandoning themselves to the bestial stupor which gazes at existence and thinks it has seen something […] [people] wished to be what was gaped at. they themselves wanted to be the birds of rare plumage, the queerly deformed fishes, the ridiculous breeds of men. (50) 10 sammler’s critique of the surrounding estheticism seems to place him in the ethical sphere. he is concerned about duties, he longs for a return to the order that had made america’s beginnings worthy ones, and tries to be devoted to god and family. he tries to “declare for normalcy” (96). in a world obsessed with throwing off duty altogether, sammler takes all the weight of it onto his own shoulders. the knight of infinite resignation despite the similarities, sammler differs from the judge of either/or ii, for the latter is passionately concerned for temporal affairs. 11 sammler, by contrast, “wanted, with god, to be bellow, kierkegaard, and american estheticism 74 free from the bondage of the ordinary and the finite. a soul released from nature, from impressions, and from everyday life. […] he should be perfectly disinterested” (96). while sammler is deeply nostalgic for older times and their definitive conception of order, he concentrates on the metaphorical escape to the moon and its solitude and peace: “sammler did feel somewhat separated from the rest of his species, if not in some fashion severed – severed not so much by age as by preoccupations too different and remote, disproportionate on the side of the spiritual, platonic, augustinian, thirteenth-century” (34). 12 sammler’s experiences with the extent of human cruelty illuminate the deep incoherence of the human condition; because human nature tends toward evil, it is not worth trying to redeem. sammler reflects upon when he killed the unarmed german, an act which could be justified in the name of self-preservation. yet sammler’s immediate response to his deed belied its reasonableness. at the moment, killing gave sammler “pleasure” and “joy”: his heart felt lined with brilliant, rapturous satin. to kill the man and to kill him without pity, for he was dispensed from pity. there was a flash, a blot of fiery white. when he shot again it was less to make sure of the man than to try again for that bliss. to drink more flames. he would have thanked god for that opportunity. if he had had any god. at that time, he did not. for many years, in his own mind, there was no judge but himself. (115) confronted with his own dark action and passion, sammler begins to seek the meaning of human existence in a transcendent source. resigning himself from happiness and fulfillment in this world, sammler longs for escape to another world that is free from the temptations of viciousness. this recalls kierkegaard’s treatment of the religious life, for post-war sammler resembles silentio, or the knight of infinite resignation. in trying to comprehend the faith of abraham, silentio posits several alternate scenarios as foils for understanding how the anxiety wrought by the command to sacrifice isaac must have worked upon abraham. silentio’s description of what he himself would have done if faced with the command to kill isaac nicely illuminates sammler’s existential outlook: the moment i mounted the horse i would have said to myself: “now all is lost; god demands isaac, i sacrifice him and with him all my joy – yet god is love and continues to be that for me, for in temporality god and i cannot converse, we have no language in common.” […] i could not make more than the infinite movement in order to find myself and once again be in equilibrium. nor could i have loved isaac as abraham loved him. that i was determined to make the movement could prove my courage, humanly speaking; that i loved him with my whole heart is a precondition without which the whole thing becomes a misdeed. but i still did not love as abraham did […] what came easiest for abraham would have been difficult for me – once again to be 75 romanello joyful with isaac! – for whoever has made the infinite movement with all the infinity of his soul, of his own accord and on his own responsibility, and cannot do more only keeps isaac with pain. 13 the knight of infinite resignation gives up that which has given coherence to his entire life, and in the case of sammler, what he has given up is his place in the finite world and his belief in the general goodness of humanity. he has given up his previous self – the optimistic, anglophile intellectual who thought that temporal existence could be made to conform to the rationality of a philosophic system – and has become, like the esthete, something of a detached observer. sammler’s ethical religiosity (he prays, he longs for the infinite, he tries to live well by treating others according to moral standards that are beyond those of culture and society) may be an improvement upon the rampant estheticism of his day, but it brings him no closer to true friendship, love, or “receiving isaac back”: “his onetime human, onetime precious, life had been burnt away” (185). thus, sammler’s criticism of other characters’ inconsistency and lack of genuine self-awareness masks his own tendency to treat others with “dignity” without treating them as “human.” towards transcendence bellow reveals his own thought about what it means to live well through sammler’s experiences with three characters: margotte, shula, and elya. all are united in their genuine concern for others, their sense of duty, and willingness to make the best of the absurd situations in which they find themselves. their graciousness is a foil for sammler’s reticence through which sammler’s reconciliation with god, humanity, and himself begins. through sammler’s eyes margotte, shula, and elya are sympathetic, yet overly simplistic creatures. they seem too unaware of themselves and the world around them for sammler’s taste: margotte is cheerfully careless and german; shula is wacky and compulsively devoted to her father and the intellectual enterprise; and elya is overly affectionate, boastful, and concerned with superficial appearances. he craves public displays of affection, attempts to be the ideal patient, and is obsessed with ancestors. sammler eventually discovers that each of these characters is motivated by a sensitivity to a higher standard of order that guides their thought and action about themselves and others. they are, each in their own way, oriented simultaneously toward the absolute duties that derive from the existential perception of god and toward the particular duties that derive from their situation within temporal existence. in contrast to sammler’s other-worldly detachment, margotte attends to the mundane things: during the chaotic events of the novel, she fixes dinner for the company, makes transportation arrangements, and pays attention to small details of concern so that the larger concerns may be resolved. “margotte was prompt to help when difficulties were real. […] margotte was a good soul. no persisting mechanically in her ways when the signal was given. as others did, jumping into their routines” (108). margotte is an example of human freedom, and bellow shows that she bellow, kierkegaard, and american estheticism 76 is still capable of love. despite the loss of her husband (a relationship which appears to have been more loving than sammler’s), she has not given up on life or companionship, and she and dr. lal look forward to courting. margotte’s comportment shows that happiness in this world is possible and desirable. bellow’s portrayal of shula functions similarly. through most of the novel, shula seems merely to be a complication for sammler. though he loves her, it seems to be based primarily on her role in relation to him rather than any specific characteristics of her personhood; he does not understand her. her antics confuse and burden sammler, and he thinks that she too represents the chaos that animates american society and the failure to heed what is proper or real in life. however, shula proves that her father’s detached, objective views seldom result in a truthful evaluation of others. for after shula actually finds money hidden in elya’s home (which sammler thought not to exist), she tells sammler she would like to buy some nicer clothes: “if i was dressed at lord and taylor, maybe i’d be less of an eccentric type, and i’d have a chance with somebody” (257). during this discussion, sammler finally realizes that shula is aware of herself, that she acts “deliberately,” that “there was a degree of choice” (257). shula, like margotte, wants to find love and has not given up on the idea that one can be happy in the temporal world. this is why shula broke “ethical” norms by stealing the manuscript. nutty as her plan was, it was marked by a genuine concern for her father: she thought that reading the manuscript would inspire him to participate in this world again. shula shows one striving in the world to live, and while “eccentric” she does not exhibit angela’s or walter’s self-centered estheticism; rather, she is devoted, believes in love, and is able (though perhaps unintentionally) to show sammler that the particulars must oftentimes correct the universals. 14 finally, bellow uses elya gruner to educate sammler. in some ways elya resembles kierkegaard’s judge william: he is deferential to family and traditions, through his life one can see that he has conformed to rather than to try to set himself apart from certain societal norms, he seems to be the epitome of american success. born in a “hoodlum neighborhood,” he became wealthy through the medical practice and then made a fortune in real-estate and other business dealings. he sent his children to the top schools, supports distant relatives financially, and tries to be affectionate to everyone. if he has some character flaws – being overly gregarious, proud, perhaps having had some corrupt dealings – they are overshadowed in the end by his generosity and sincerity. elya is not exactly like kierkegaard’s knight of faith, since we see little devotion to god or spirituality in him, but the two share the belief that living well requires “meeting the terms of one’s contract with god,” which obliges one to treat others with compassion and dignity (260). elya acts out of a passionate sense of personal responsibility for his own moral goodness and exemplifies in practice what sammler thinks is the substance of the “contract”: […] knowing that present arrangements were not, sub specie aeternitatis, the truth, but that one should be satisfied with such truth as one could get by approximation. trying to live with a civil heart. with disinterested charity. with a sense of the mystic potency 77 romanello of humankind. with an inclination to believe in archetypes of goodness. a desire for virtue was no accident. (111) faced with his own death, elya’s concern is for the good of those around him and for the strength of “human bonds.” we learn that despite all of the “failures” of elya’s life – the coldness of his wife, the esthetic excesses of his children, other unrequited affections – he never gives up on the idea of “receiving isaac back.” sammler notes in elya a longing, a demand from the “singular human creature […] when the sum of human facts could not yield more” (68). he faces his death and the eternal without giving up on the temporal world. he complies with tests that will not prolong his life and tries not to burden those whom he will leave behind: “he was the sort of individual from whom help emanated. there were no arrangements for return” (235). sammler describes this as elya’s “moment of honor […] that moment at which the individual could call upon all his best qualities” (66). throughout the novel, sammler goes to check in on elya at the hospital and tries to make sure that he is comfortable. from sammler’s other-worldly perspective, the best course is to make the transition to non-being or eternal-being as painless as possible. but sammler discovers that his retreat from humanity is not what was desired by elya or required of himself. what elya needed was to communicate, to be alive even at the end, to have the chance to put things in order. sammler realizes that by his retreat, he wronged elya, though elya would never say so, and probably would not even think so. sammler is confronted with a duty on this earth that cannot be set aside even if he does not feel at home here. elya’s example teaches sammler that he must come back, a second time, to the land of the living. bellow thus shows that he does not despair of the human capacity for goodness, happiness, and virtue. not by reading or thinking more, not by better explanations or unique art, but rather through humane encounters with other human beings sammler learns what his moral and spiritual duties are. bellow shows that genuine ties to friends and family, grounded in the recognition of a common human condition, can provide the corrective to radical individualism, ethical passivity, and other-worldly orientations. after elya dies, sammler utters a prayer that indicates sammler’s movements toward reconciliation with god, humanity, and himself: remember, god, the soul of elya gruner, who, as willingly as possible and as well as he was able, and even to an intolerable point, and even in suffocation and even as death was coming was eager, even childishly perhaps (may i be forgiven for this), even with a certain servility, to do what was required of him. at his best this man was much kinder than at my very best i have ever been or could ever be. he was aware that he must meet, and he did meet – through all the confusion and degraded clowning of this life through which we are speeding – he did meet the terms of his contract. the terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows. as i know mine. as all know. for that is the truth of it – that we all know, god, that we know, that we know, we know, we know. (260) bellow, kierkegaard, and american estheticism 78 bellow shows that the sacredness and dignity of human life will shine through and scatter even the darkest estheticism. sammler learns that even angela and wallace are not as spiritually bankrupt as he first thought. all human beings are naturally oriented toward the transcendent source of order, meaning, and purpose; and from this orientation, goodness flows into humanity making it possible to receive the finite back – just like abraham received isaac back. there is an uncertainty in all of this (call it faith), but that is precisely wherein the dignity of humanity lies – it cannot be explained away through a system. if bellow does not resolve the tensions in the lives of all of the characters, he surely points to some who have not turned their backs on themselves or on others. and he shows us that even someone as “self-contained” as sammler can still learn from those around him. bellow, like kierkegaard, did not think that the task of becoming a true self was either inevitable or impossible, even in modernity. instead, he shows that what appears to be “bourgeois philistinism” can mask the truly religious individual, while all of the reflective flirtations with the eternal can cover up a soul that still needs much improvement. bellow’s work shows that part of being an authentic self is to care for others, a task that cannot be done adequately without knowing who one is in relation to the divine, and who one is in relation to the others. but simply knowing cannot be the end of the truest life, for compassion and love must come through in one’s actions and passions, which can change individuals and entire nations. notes 1. kierkegaard 1980, 13. 2. ibid. 3. ibid. anti-climacus also states that “every human existence that is not conscious of itself as spirit or conscious of itself before god as spirit, every human existence that does not rest transparently in god but vaguely rests in and merges in some abstract universality (state, nation, etc.) or, in the dark about his self, regards his capacities merely as powers to produce without becoming deeply aware of their source, regards his self, if it is to have intrinsic meaning, as an indefinable something – every such existence whatever it achieves, be it most amazing, whatever it explains, be it the whole of existence, however intensively it enjoys life esthetically – every such existence is nevertheless despair” (46). sammler makes a similar reflection: “you have been summoned to be. summoned out of matter […] whether originating in a god or in an indeterminate source [obliges man] to wait, painfully, anxiously, heartachingly, in this yellow despair” (bellow 2004, 72). 4. i equate kierkegaard’s own thought on this point with the view presented by anticlimacus. 5. when kierkegaard or his pseudonyms use the term “universal,” he intends to designate the predominant ethical norms that a society passes on to its youth as the 79 romanello correct ways of living, not eternal or necessary truths in the kantian sense (evans 2006, xx–xxii). 6. kierkegaard 1987, 50ff. 7. kierkegaard 1987, 294. 8. the religiosity of the ethical life is far from the genuine faith of the religious life. in the former, suffering and guilt are far from the individual’s consciousness, whereas in the latter, they factor prominently into the constitution of the individual’s personality. 9. bellow 2004, 44. all subsequent in-text citations will be from this reference. 10. sammler criticizes and analyzes most of the other characters in a similar fashion. he comments on shula’s erratic dress and behavior, her oscillations between catholicism and judaism, and her wild insistence that sammler should write his memoire of wells. he notes how wallace, gruner’s son, has amassed myriad strange experiences but has failed to settle into a profession or a relationship. even sammler’s evaluation of margotte, whom he describes as a “good soul” (108), includes several descriptions of the seeming lack of order in her life: her house is filled with dead plants and useless appliances, she sees no ethical dilemma in accepting reparation money from the german government, and she prattles off intellectual arguments ad infinitum. 11. during his “bloomsbury days,” sammler shared more fully the judge’s optimism. during those pre-war years, sammler thought that enlightened planning could generate remedies to humanity’s problems and that social progress was possible. 12. see bellow 2004, 36, 43, 46, 73, 75, 88, 94, 96, 98, and 105 for only a few of the other references to sammler’s “longing for the eternal.” 13. kierkegaard 2006, 29. 14. see bellow 2004, 163: “and of course in shula’s view [sammler] had been getting too delicate for earthly life, too absorbed in unshared universals, excluding her […] she wished to implicate him and bring him back, to bind him and keep him in the world beside her.” works cited bellow, saul. 2004. mr. sammler’s planet. new york: penguin. evans, c. stephen. 2000. “introduction.” in søren kierkegaard, fear and trembling, ed. c. stephen evans and sylvia walsh. cambridge: cambridge university press, vi–xxx. kierkegaard, søren. 1980. the sickness unto death. ed. and trans. howard v. hong and edna h. hong. princeton, nj: princeton university press. ---. 1987. either/or, part i. ed. and trans. howard v. hong and edna h. hong. princeton, nj: princeton university press. bellow, kierkegaard, and american estheticism 80 ---. 2006. fear and trembling. ed. c. stephen evans and sylvia walsh. trans. sylvia walsh. cambridge: cambridge university press. microsoft word alvarez final.docx [expositions 8.1 (2014) 70–84] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376   we are stardust … concentrated by earth! walter alvarez university of california, berkeley the audacious aim of the emerging field of big history is to see all of the past as a unified field of study, combining insights from cosmology, astronomy, geology, paleontology, molecular evolution, paleoanthropology, archaeology, and all the fields of humanistic history, in order to achieve a whole new level of understanding of the human situation. big history: between nothing and everything, by david christian, cynthia stokes brown, and craig benjamin (2013), is the first textbook for this new academic field. having taught big history at berkeley and seen the enormous enthusiasm it engenders in students who crave to see the world in broad perspective, i am pleased that we now have a book suitable for big history courses, but as a geologist, my (predictable!) complaint is that it could have told more about the fascinating history of earth. although big history includes the regimes of cosmos, earth, life, and humanity, it is inherently anthropocentric, because we humans are doing the writing and because we know nothing about the histories that have unfolded on planets around other stars in this and other galaxies. the centrality of humans is clear from the christian-brown-benjamin book, where human beings are the focus of three quarters of the book. as a result, the history of earth, the only possible home for humans far into the foreseeable future, gets only a few pages. the information presented about our earth—especially about the evolution of the atmosphere and about plate tectonics—is relevant and important to know, but it is just the beginning of the fascinating history of the earth that geologists have dug up. a short time spent perusing the recent geological literature would probably convince you that geology is currently by far the greatest source of new historical information coming from any branch of big history, and it seems a shame for big historians not to be familiar with and excited about this treasure house of growing understanding. in this essay, to convey the flavor of earth history and its relevance to humanity, let me pick up on a point made strongly and correctly by christian, brown, and benjamin—that almost all of the chemical elements important to humans were made in stars. and then let me show that this important point is incomplete, because it omits the role of earth in concentrating those elements and making them useful. we are stardust … the astronomer carl sagan brought science to life for large numbers of people in his 1980 television series cosmos, which now looks like an early and very effective presentation of big history. sagan was fond of saying that we are made of stardust. his point was that with the 71 alvarez   exception of the three lightest—hydrogen, helium, and traces of lithium—all the chemical elements were cooked up inside stars, either slowly as by-products of the nuclear reactions that make the stars shine, or suddenly during supernovas, the great stellar explosions that scatter all the new elements into space. these chemical elements are the basis of the material world that is central to the human situation. humanistic big historians have picked up on this critical feature in the history of everything, stressing the great importance to us of the synthesis of elements inside stars. christian, brown and benjamin select the synthesis of elements in stars as one of their eight thresholds in big history. but to a big historian like me, coming from a background in geology, sagan’s formulation is incomplete. the story does not end there, because chemical elements dispersed through interstellar space would be useless for building the world we know. imagine a long-range spaceship on its way to a distant solar system, and having an emergency need for silicon to fabricate computer chips. although the ship is passing through the diffuse gas derived from old supernova explosions and that gas includes atoms of silicon, there would be no way for the astronauts to harvest and use the silicon.1 the atoms are just too far apart. … made useful by earth but here on earth it is easy. we have no trouble finding flint nodules, or sand on a beach, or crystals of quartz in a vein, all of them made of silicon bonded to oxygen—sio2. clearly the role of earth has been essential in making silicon useful to human beings. the point of this contribution is to explore how earth does it, in the hope that big historians will amend carl sagan’s idea that we are stardust, and recognize that, we are stardust, made useful by earth. we should start by recognizing that there have been two main phases in earth’s history of sorting chemical elements into useful concentrations. the first phase took place at the very beginning, as earth was accreting. this phase gave us earth’s bulk composition, dominated by four elements—oxygen, magnesium, silicon and iron—with only small amounts of the other elements, but with all of them mixed up together. the second phase has been going on ever since, with the progressive sorting out and concentrating of elements. earth has many, many mechanisms for doing this work, so perhaps it is not surprising that big historians have focused on the conceptually simpler nucleosynthesis— the synthesis of elements—in the big bang and in stars. the present essay explores a few of earth’s sorting mechanisms, to give an idea of how earth works its magic. the focus is on the element silicon, and on uses of silicon that are important in human history, so we might think of this as a “little big history” of silicon.2 a focus on silicon the production of new elements inside stars that big historians appreciate so well is called stellar nucleosynthesis, and it lies in the domain of nuclear physics. the protons and neutrons in the we are stardust … concentrated by earth! 72     nuclei of atoms are bound so tightly by the strong nuclear force that wholesale changes can take place only at the extremely high temperatures and pressures in the cores of stars. on the other hand, the concentrating of elements inside earth and at its surface takes place under much lower pressures and temperatures, which have no effect on the nuclei of atoms but allow all kinds of changes in how the atoms are bonded together, so this is in the realm of geochemistry. if one had to identify the single most important discovery of geochemistry, it might be this: the solar system as a whole (like the universe as a whole) is fundamentally composed of a great deal of hydrogen, a moderate amount of helium, and only traces of all other elements, and this of course is the result of nucleosynthesis during the big bang and, later on, inside stars. but earth, on the other hand, is dominantly composed of just four elements—oxygen, magnesium, silicon and iron (o, mg, si, fe)—with traces of many other elements, among which the great components of the solar system, hydrogen and helium, are very minor. somehow, earth has selectively accumulated some of the rarer elements of the solar system. let us see how this great geochemical discovery can be explained and how it affects our understanding of big history. of those four dominant elements, let’s focus on silicon, first because it is the basis of most of the rocks that make up our planet and carry the record of earth’s history, and second because it has been critical to human activities for a very long time, as the raw material for crucial technologies like stone tools, glass, and computer chips. regarding the first point, it at first seems surprising that silicon is the basis of rocks while carbon is the basis of life. carbon lies just above silicon in the periodic table, both make four chemical bonds with adjoining atoms, and this similarity has led science fiction writers to envision life based on silicon3, but that is not what happens. it turns out that carbon is a versatile element, bonding to hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, and other carbon atoms, with both single and double bonds, easily changing the atoms to which it bonds, and this versatility makes it the perfect basis for the complex structures and dynamic processes of life. in contrast, silicon greatly prefers bonding to oxygen, making strong single bonds but no double bonds, and this is what is needed to make long-lasting minerals like the quartz (sio2) that is abundant in continental crust, and the olivine (mg2sio4) that dominates in the deep-earth mantle. the minerals quartz and olivine, each with its characteristic formula, occur as grains that go together to make up rocks. a good analogy is that a rock is like a fruitcake, and minerals are like the fruit and nuts within the cake. since solid minerals are quite resistant to change, so are the rocks made of minerals. rocks generally record and remember aspects of the conditions under which they were deposited. igneous rocks remember the temperature and pressure and chemistry of the molten magma from which they crystallized. sedimentary rocks remember the processes that deposited them—rivers, wind, or glaciers. metamorphic rocks remember the stresses that deformed them and the temperature and pressure under which they recrystallized into new minerals. geologists have invented many ways of extracting this historical information from rocks and compiling it into an ever more sophisticated understanding of our planet’s past. so we have a motto: ex libro lapidum historia mundi—“out of the book of rocks comes the history of the earth.” 73 alvarez   the second reason to focus on silicon is the critical role it has played in the rise of humanity to enormous technical prowess. the earliest human tools may have been made of wood, of which nothing remains, but the first tools of which we have a good record are made of silicon-based rocks. moving from just the materials nature gave us to artificial materials, a critical one has been glass, which basically comes from melting quartz. finally, our modern, high-tech civilization is dependent on computer chips, which are made in sophisticated ways from silicon. interestingly, earth has concentrated the silicon used in each of these human artifacts in a different way. to see how earth has concentrated silicon and made it useful, let us first look at the original accretion of the earth into a planet dominated by o, mg, si, and fe, and then see how concentrations of si have been formed on and within the earth. how to build an o-mg-si-fe planet returning to that major geochemical discovery—that the solar system is mostly made of hydrogen and helium while earth is dominated by oxygen, magnesium, silicon, and iron—how can this be explained? what processes could account for this wholesale geochemical alteration?4 evidently we are looking for processes that acted very early in the history of the solar system, because today there aren’t any large amounts of material entering or leaving earth, nor is there any sign of this happening in the four billion years for which we have a rock record. the occasional impact of an asteroid or comet, even a large one, is much too minor to change earth’s composition, and leakage off the top of the atmosphere to space affects only a few gaseous elements. at the beginning of the solar system, however, 4.567 billion years ago, earth was growing rapidly, as objects from dust size to planet size accreted and stuck together. there were certainly opportunities during the formation of the earth for selecting some elements to accumulate in the earth, and excluding others. in their textbook christian, brown, and benjamin show a periodic table of the elements, marked up to indicate how and when the various elements were created, in the big bang and in stars. to supplement that figure, here is a partial periodic table that shows the fates of elements in the earth, singling out the big four:  we are s   a par our pl   why we (lithium, were sim constitue molecule others sh to accum sweeping out by th the outf condition the very which were mas where ea has four oxygen, w grow, ea smaller a these earth, ex always s stardust … co rtial periodic lanet is mostly ere so many beryllium, b mply too rar ents of earth es made up hown in yello mulate in the g-out was do he enormous flow is calle n. the prese early sun. h ones were ssive enough arth was for places whe which can m ach silicon s amounts of o networks a cept for the ilicon and o oncentrated by table showing ly composed o y elements boron, those re in the sol h. other elem of just a fe ow in the fig e giant gas p one by powe energy rele ed the t-tau ent solar win e not elimin h to resist th rming. silico re it can bo make two bo surrounded other elemen are called sil iron core. n oxygen atom y earth! g the fates of of oxygen, ma largely elim e with odd a lar system e ments occur ew atoms. t gure) were s planets farth erful outflow eased as all t uri wind, na nd of our sun nated? only he pressure o on is what m ond to anoth onds, thus lin by four oxy nts joining in licate minera no matter ho ms at the edg f the elements agnesium, sili minated from atomic numb ever to hav r primarily a these gaseou swept out of her out—jup ws of particl the material amed after a n is but a fa mineral gra of the t-taur makes possib her atom. ea nking two si ygens, and e n—mostly m als, and they ow big a sil ge, waiting t during forma icon and iron m earth as bers, and alm e had a cha as gases—th us elements f earth’s hab piter, saturn les, mostly p that would b a very youn aint memory ains, each c ri wind and ble these larg ach of those ilicon atoms each oxygen magnesium an y are the ba licate minera to grab onto ation of the ea . (christian et it formed? most all the ance of bec hat is, as sin (hydrogen, bitat in the in n, uranus an protons and become the ng star whic y of the viol containing tr stay in the in ge mineral g e bonds pref s together. s n linking tw nd iron. asis of pretty al grain has o more oxyg arth, stressing t al. 2013, 25 some elem heavy elem oming impo ngle atoms, helium, an nner solar sy nd neptune electrons, d sun fell toge ch is now in ent outflow rillions of at nner solar sy grains, becau fers to link so giant netw wo silicons, y much all o grown, ther gens and sili 74   g that ). ments ments) ortant or as nd the ystem . the driven ether. n that from toms, ystem use it to an works with of the re are icons. 75 alvarez   silicate grains can thus become arbitrarily large, unless they are in an aggregate of grains—a rock—and run into another growing grain. so the big-four elements—silicon, oxygen, magnesium, and iron—were all incorporated in the silicate minerals that make up the rocky part of earth, with the leftover iron forming the metallic core. and thus it is silicon, whose four bonds make those minerals possible, that we can think of as earth’s favorite element. now let’s go on and see how silicon, which was initially mixed up in our planet with oxygen, magnesium, iron, and some minor components, was sorted and concentrated by earth into forms humans can use. that usage is quite amazing! a number of characteristics distinguish humans from all other animals, and among those features are complex tools, artificial materials, and computers. tools let us do things our natural hands and bodies cannot do, artificial materials let us do things impossible with natural materials, and computers let us do things our natural brains cannot do. in the rest of this contribution we will look at one example from each of those three categories—stone tools, glass, and computer chips. each is based on silicon, which is not just one of earth’s favorite elements, but one of ours as well. conveniently, each of those technologies uses silicon that was concentrated in a different way, so we can get some feeling for the variety of remarkable processes through which earth has produced the mineral deposits we depend on. silicon and stone tools think of the variety of tools we use! from simple knives, hammers, saws and screwdrivers, to more complicated tools like violins and pianos, drill presses, agricultural harvesting machines, and industrial looms, to really sophisticated, high-tech tools like interplanetary spacecraft, laser ranging devices, global-positioning-system receivers, and computer-controlled three-dimensional printers—the list is almost endless and portrays a species with a technological virtuosity that would have been inconceivable even a million years ago. primates have been seen to use and sometimes make very simple tools, and some birds and invertebrates may use found objects as primitive tools, but the complexity of tool manufacture and use by human beings is quite unique. how and when did this virtuosity begin? we are unlikely ever to find examples of objects at the transition from found objects to purposely-constructed tools, because wood, the most likely material, is so perishable. but the record for stone tools is abundant. archaeologists, who like to divide history into three parts, have long divided the human past into three ages—stone age, bronze age, and iron age—based on the kinds of tools found in excavations. the earliest recognized stone tools are found in east africa, dating from about 2.5 million years ago, and seem to have been made by homo habilis, whose species name reflects this toolmaking ability. these are simply pebbles with random chips knocked off, giving sharp edges that could be used for cutting. they have been called the oldowan industry, after olduvai gorge in tanzania. subsequent stone-tool industries, like the acheulean hand axes, display increasing we are s   sophistic that they brains an million y what ma which ha cutting ab nick t stone ag skilled m produce about 1.5 early hum naturally carnivore   stardust … co ation on the y qualify as w nd tool-maki years.  ade all of th as allowed u bilities of th toth and ka ge institute makers and u an acheulea 5 and half a mans to star y. stone tool es who were oncentrated by e part of the works of art ing abilities his possible s humans, w e animals w athy shick, p at indiana users of ston an hand axe a million yea rt eating ene ls gave us th interested in y earth! tool makers t as well as p increased to is that some with our blun ith the sharp paleoanthrop university, ne tools, and e, for examp ars ago. the ergy-rich me he ability to n eating us. s, with some practical obj ogether in a     an a origi (imag http:/ silex.       e rocks, whe nt teeth and pest teeth and pologists wh are among d it is a rema ple—the ma ey point out eat when we hunt anima e tools so sk jects. it seem a kind of fee acheulean han inal locality of ge from wikim //commons.w .png) en broken, g soft fingerna d claws. ho study ston the pioneer arkable expe ain tool used t that stone did not hav als larger tha killfully and ms very prob edback loop nd axe made o of saint-acheu media comm wikimedia.org/ give very ha ails, to matc ne tools and rs of big hi erience to w d by homo tools allowe ve the teeth an we are, a beautifully m bable that hu over the las of flint, from ul, in france. mons: g/wiki/file:bif ard, sharp e ch and excee who founde istory.5 they watch one of erectus, bet ed the veget or claws to and to keep 76   made uman st 2.5 the . face_ edges, ed the ed the y are them tween tarian do it away 77   nick t   most roc never ma materials chert, or perfectly special c sio2 in c chert origin. l quartz (s gypsum, make bet most few extr freshly d pore wat or nodule toth consider cks do not b ake a useful s for tool ma flint. obsidi y pure sio2 composition? chert? commonly limestone is sio2). it is c calcite, fluo tter tools tha marine orga ract sio2—s deposited lim er and then c es of chert, w rs where to st break with sh tool from sa aking are the ian is rich in and is not s ? or—to pic occurs as n made of the lear from th orite, apatite an limestone. anisms make sponges and mestone conta concentrated which were g trike off the ne harp edges, andstone, lim e volcanic gl n sio2, but is so rare. wha ck up the th nodules in li e mineral ca he mineral ha e, orthoclase . e their shells d the single ains a small d and precipi greatly prize   ext flake whil or are too s mestone, gra lass called o s rare, so let at is chert, a heme of this imestone. b alcite (caco ardness scal , quartz, top s from caco e-celled radi amount of d itated in che ed by our anc le making a h soft to hold anite, gypsum obsidian, and t us concentr and how do s essay—ho oth are sedi o3), while ch le, arranged paz, corundu o3 extracted iolarians are dispersed sio emically favo cestors who and axe. (pho a cutting ed m, or rock s d the sedime rate on chert es it come t ow did earth imentary roc hert is extrem from softest um, diamond d from seaw e the most o2, but it can orable levels made stone al oto by the aut dge, so one c salt. the two entary rock c t, which is al to have this h concentrat cks of biolo mely fine-gr t to hardest d), that cher water, while j important. n be dissolve s, producing tools. lvarez thor.) could o best called lmost very te the ogical ained (talc, rt will just a most ed by g beds we are stardust … concentrated by earth! 78     the famous stone age monument of stonehenge, in southern england, was built and improved over about 800 years in a place where high-quality chert nodules were particularly abundant. stonehenge helps us realize that silicon was as critical an element in stone age times as it is today, and perhaps we could think of stonehenge as the first silicon valley. all of this history of manufacture and use of stone tools made from chert, and its probable role in our expanding brains and growing intelligence, was made possible because earth has biological and then chemical mechanisms for separating silica from the other major elements— iron and magnesium—and from all the other minor elements in our planet, and forming beautiful chert nodules of pure sio2 from which tools can be made. silicon and the manufacture of glass chert is not the only material for making stone tools with sharp, hard edges—they have also been made from obsidian, a natural glass of volcanic origin. obsidian forms when molten rock cools so rapidly that there is no time for crystals to grow. although humans have long used naturally occurring glass, eventually they learned to make artificial glass themselves. glass technology seems to have begun around 3500 bce in mesopotamia or egypt, about the same time and place people learned to make bronze by mixing copper and tin. so glass and bronze appear to mark the beginning of a history in which humans have learned to make and use an ever more varied array of remarkable artificial materials. think for a moment about what glass does for us. glass windows allow us to have light inside our houses, cars, and airplanes during the day, and light bulbs illuminate them at night. glass gives us waterproof pitchers, bottles and drinking glasses, and it allows us to see in mirrors and through corrective lenses. in telescopes, microscopes and myriad other scientific devices it has allowed us to understand our world. it insulates high-voltage power lines, provides fiber-optic cables, and gives us monitors and touch screens for computers. in mosaics and stained-glass windows it has been a medium for great art. almost all glass made today is based on melting and then rapidly cooling silica, sio2, with smaller amounts of other elements added to give it desirable properties. the point here is not the details of how glass is made, but rather the question how earth has concentrated the silica we use for glass manufacture. this will lead us deeper into understanding earth’s virtuosic ability to separate and concentrate chemical elements, because the silica used in glass making was concentrated in a completely different way from the silica used for making stone tools. fortunately we are not dependent on chert nodules to make glass, for chert is not so abundant. on the contrary, there are enormous supplies of silica in that most common of geological deposits—plain old sand. most sand is composed largely or almost entirely of little grains of quartz, and is familiar to anyone who ever walks on a beach or through the dunes. but it is surprising at first, when you think about how earth concentrates elements, because during the original accretion of earth there was no mechanism to produce quartz. as we have seen, there were mechanisms to eliminate 79   most of t with abu not the c with fe a is made mg2sio4 here w billion ye quartz fro steps ear a sim nearly   first, the partially with no q the ocean secon dense, su third, causes pa melt. the the elements undant si and ase. instead, and mg to m of (1) an i 4. so where d we meet one ears it has ac om rocks tha rth uses to w mplified carto y pure quartz e hot olivine melts as the quartz, form n basin expa nd, after tens ubducts—sin , in a proces artial meltin e molten roc in the newly d o, you mig , there was s make silicate iron core an did all the pr e of the mos cted as a gian at contained work this chem oon showing z sand we use e-rich mantle e pressure d ms the basalt nds. s or hundred nks back dow ss that is still g in the sub ck rises and e y-formed ea ght think tha so much fe minerals oth nd (2) a ma resent-day qu st fascinating nt chemical silica but no mical magic the steps by to make glas e rock called decreases. th of the ocean ds of million wn into the m l not fully u ducting slab either erupts arth except f at lots of qua and mg arou her than qua antle with t uartz sand co g features of processing p o quartz. he c:   which earth s. d peridotite he lower-den n crust, whi ns of years, mantle. understood, w b or above it s in great cha for iron, mag artz, sio2, w und that all artz. in fact, the composi ome from? f earth’s geo plant that ha ere, in a very h converts qu rises beneat nsity portion ch spreads l , the basaltic water carried t, and silica ains of volca gnesium, sili would have fo the si and o to first appr ition of the ochemical e as slowly, gr y simplified uartz-free ma th the mid-o n, richer in laterally in b c ocean cru d down alon is further co anoes like th al icon, and oxy formed, but t o were comb roximation, mineral oli evolution. fo radually extr summary, ar   antle rock int ocean ridges sio2 though both directio st, now cold ng with the b oncentrated i hose of japan lvarez ygen. that is bined earth ivine, or 4.5 racted re the to the s, and h still ons as d and basalt in the n, the we are s   andes, a grained g contain s fourth finished feldspar.   yosem at en.w   up to thi through behind. t surface— minerals are not s are easily extremely and beac around th stardust … co and the casc granitic rock some crystals h, uplift and the job, but it is time to mite: a sea of wikipedia). is point, all o magmatic p the fifth and —the same m in granite d stable chemi y carried aw y stable and ches, that ma he world the oncentrated by cades of wa ks as we se s of quartz, a erosion eve t the quartz purify the q f granitic rock of the silica processes tha d final step i mechanism decay and are cally at the way by water d endure pre ay be nearly se great sand y earth! ashington an e in the sie and the gran entually brin in the gran quartz.  ks, uplifted an enrichment at concentra s completely that produc e converted earth’s surf r and wind, etty much fo y pure quartz d deposits ar nd oregon, o erra nevada nitic rocks ar ng the granit nitic rocks is nd eroding, g has taken pl ate silica in y different, i es soil. dur to clay, espe face. clay m leaving the orever, accu z. earth has re quarried f or cools slow a of californ re rich in coa tic rocks to t s mixed wit giving quartzlace at high the melt an involving ch ring weathe ecially in ho minerals occu quartz behi umulating in s completed for the quartz wly at depth nia. the vol arse grains o the surface. th other min   rich sand (ph temperature nd leave sili hemical weat ering, the fe ot, wet clima ur as very ti ind. the gra n sand dunes the job, and z used to ma h to form co lcanic rocks of quartz. earth has al nerals, espec hoto by starli es inside the ica-poor res thering at ea eldspar and ates, because iny grains, w ains of quart s, river chan d in many p ake glass.6 80   oarse may lmost cially ingjon earth sidues arth’s other e they which tz are nnels, places 81 alvarez   a sand grain’s story the accumulation of quartz sand on the earth’s surface can involve intricate and fascinating stories. one example is a remarkable discovery by william dickinson and george gehrels of the university of arizona (dickinson and gehrels 2009). anyone who has visited the colorado plateau of southeastern utah will remember the great cliffs of arches and canyonlands national parks, marking thick sheets of ancient sand that was deposited as dunes, in a former landscape much like the modern sahara desert. sloping layers in the sandstone mark ancient faces of dunes, telling the wind direction when they were deposited, so geologists have long known that the ancient wind was blowing dominantly from the north and that the sand grains in these dunes were blown from wyoming south to utah. almost all of the sand grains in these ancient dune deposits are quartz, but a very small fraction of the grains are the mineral zircon. like quartz, zircon is very resistant to chemical alteration, so it lasts indefinitely, but unlike quartz, zircon can be dated, because it contains a little uranium which decays radioactively to lead. this in turn gives the age of the granitic source rocks from which the zircon grains, as well as the quartz, were derived. dickinson and gehrels dated more than 1600 zircon grains from sandstones of the colorado plateau, and to their surprise the ages did not correspond to any source rocks in wyoming, or to any known rocks in western north america. the only source rocks of the right age are in the eastern united states, in the appalachian mountains! but how could quartz from the appalachians get into sand dunes on the colorado plateau? it could not happen today, because sand carried westward from the appalachians by rivers would end up in the mississippi and then be carried to the gulf of mexico. prior to that, in the cretaceous, the interior of north america was submerged by a wide, shallow sea, and sand grains reaching that sea would stay there, on the sea floor. but in the jurassic, about 150–200 million years ago, the situation was different, as dickinson and gehrels pointed out. rather than the present geography, with the low appalachian mountains in the east, the mississippi river, in the middle, and the high rocky mountains in the west, jurassic north america had a long, gradual, gentle slope from high topography in the east, uplifted because africa was rifting away from north america, gradually descending to sea level where the rocky mountains are now. before there ever was a mississippi, a great west-flowing river, whose exact route we can only guess, must have carried vast numbers of appalachian sand grains all the way to the shoreline in wyoming, and from there they were blown by the wind to their final resting place in utah. who would have imagined, while gazing at a sandstone cliff in utah, that they were seeing the appalachian mountains, disassembled and carried 2,000 miles across the continent by a longvanished river? the ability to reconstruct a great river of long ago, of which every trace has been removed by erosion, is an example of the wonderful historical discoveries that geologists are contributing to big history. and it gives a hint of the array of remarkable processes and surprising episodes by we are stardust … concentrated by earth! 82     which earth has concentrated the kinds of valuable materials that has made human civilization and technology possible. silicon and computers in the early twenty-first century we live in a new silicon age, in which this element, the critical ingredient for our earth itself and once the basis for stone age tools, is now again of critical importance, as the foundation for the computer chips that pervade almost every aspect of our lives, our technology, and our civilization. the ancient silicon valley of stonehenge has been replaced by the new silicon valley in california, and similar centers of high technology elsewhere. how has earth concentrated the silicon used for computer chips? curiously, this has happened by a process completely different from those that have concentrated the silicon used in stone tools and in glass, and this helps us appreciate the range of earth’s geochemical skills. at the earth’s surface, sio2 is extremely insoluble in water, which is why those grains of quartz sand last indefinitely. but that is not the case deep in the earth, where water chemistry is different and the temperatures are much higher. under those conditions, sio2 can be dissolved out of the abundant silicate minerals of the crust, carried upward by the hot, silica-rich waters as they rise, and deposited in open fractures near the surface when conditions have reached the point where silica is no longer soluble. fractures filled with sio2 are called quartz veins, and they are very abundant in areas that once had hot rocks at depth, resulting in hydrothermal, or hot-water, circulation. the exquisite quartz crystals and the beautiful clusters of purple amethyst crystals, also quartz, on display in rock shops were deposited by hot water in open fractures that became quartz veins, with the perfect pyramidal crystal terminations formed as the crystal grew into an open cavity filled with silica-rich water that came up from depth. quartz veins have long been of extreme economic importance, because gold, if present at depth, gets carried along with sio2 in hydrothermal systems and deposited in veins near the surface. many of the world’s great gold-producing regions have this origin, including the deposits of northwestern spain that supplied the gold of the roman empire, and the sierra nevada foothills of california, where the richest gold concentrations are in a great system of quartz veins called the mother lode. now, however, because of the great purity of sio2 in quartz veins, these have become the preferred source of silicon metal, refined from the quartz, which is the basis for making computer chips. of course the process of converting quartz crystals into silicon metal and adding just the right impurities is extremely complex and difficult, but again the point here is that earth has concentrated the silica in a most interesting way. perhaps we should conclude that technology is the result of human ingenuity, building on earth’s ingenuity. 83 alvarez   the lesson for big historians recognizing earth’s three different ways of accumulating the silica we use for making stone tools, glass, and computer chips barely scratches the surface of the rich array of mechanisms by which our planet has produced the concentrations of the elements we use. almost every chemical element gets enriched by earth in one or more ways. hydrogen and oxygen end up in the ocean water; oxygen and nitrogen in the atmosphere; sodium, potassium and chlorine in evaporated salt deposits; iron in the deposits of ancient seas whose geochemistry was unlike those of today: copper in hydrothermal vent chimneys on the mid-ocean spreading ridges; uranium in ancient river channels; calcium in limestones; carbon in limestone, coal, and hydrocarbons. perhaps it is the enormous variety of these different mechanisms and the subtle geochemistry some of them involve that has kept them unfamiliar to most people. but surely big historians need to recognize that carl sagan’s wonderful insight—that we are made of stardust—is incomplete without also understanding that our planet has done the complicated, sophisticated job of separating that stardust into its constituent elements, which makes them useful for constructing rocks, animals, plants, human beings, and our technological world.      endnotes 1. three terms used in this essay may at first be confusing: “silicon” means element 14, si. “silica” is the combination sio2, which is the formula of the mineral quartz. “silicate” refers to a mineral containing silicon and oxygen, such as olivine (mg2sio4), with a structure based on the “silicate tetrahedron”—a single small silicon atom surrounded by four large oxygen atoms in a tetrahedral arrangement. in addition, “silicone” is a synthetic material made of silicon, oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen; it is not an earth material and does not enter our story. 2. big history is a vast topic, so fred spier has suggested the writing of “little big histories,” exploring all the history that lies behind some feature of our world. so there could be little big histories of cats, of a language, or of silicon, as in this essay. 3. an example of the silicon-based-life concept is the star trek episode, “the devil in the dark.” 4. this question is answered in detail in an excellent little book: broecker 1988, 291. 5. nick and kathy’s remarkable big history museum exhibit, from the big bang to the world wide web, is available online at http://www.bigbangtowww.org/ we are stardust … concentrated by earth! 84     6. a huge quarry in illinois that extracts ordovician sand, for use in glass making, from deposits about 455–460 million years old, can be seen on bing maps or google earth at 41° 20.529' n, 88° 52.636' w. works cited broecker, wallace. 1988. how to build a habitable planet. new york: eldigio press. christian, david, cynthia stokes brown, and craig benjamin. 2013. big history: between nothing and everything. princeton: mcgraw-hill. dickinson, william r., and george e. gehrels. 2009. “u-pb ages of detrital zircons in jurassic eolian and associated sandstones of the colorado plateau: evidence for transcontinental dispersal and intraregional recycling of sediment.” geological society of america bulletin 121.3–4: 408–433. [expositions 5.1 (2011) 14-29] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 the problem of stupidity in chekhov’s three sisters lee trepanier saginaw valley state university one of the continual challenges that confront critics of chekhov‟s three sisters is to locate a theme that unites the various elements in the play. the initial reaction to its first performances was one of puzzlement as to why the sisters did not go to moscow: they were wealthy, privileged, and had no familial obstacles to prevent them from the journey. 1 it also was interpreted by early reviewers as either allegorical, since the play seemed to lack action, or as a satire of weak-willed characters. later, other critics, like a. v. lunacharskky, found it unbearably morose in that chekhov had failed to present a positive forceful hero who could “show us the seeds of a new life.” 2 by contrast, kornei chukovsky believed that chekhov‟s attempt to find beauty in the ordinariness of life demonstrated the value of the christian virtues, for “it not only evokes sympathy for the downtrodden and suffering but make them an image of beauty.” 3 finally, these were russian commentators like vladimir mayakovsky who wrote that there were two chekhovs in the play: the first was about the twilight of russian aristocratic society; the second was a call to the future for a spiritual renewal of russian civilization. 4 in the west the criticism of three sisters has run the gamut of admiration of chekhov‟s realist portrayal of life, psychological insights of its characters, and anticipation of theater of the absurd to a dismissal of the play as being outdated, dull, and pointless. 5 most western critics also have reiterated mayakovsky‟s idea of the “two chekhovs” – chekhov‟s hope for the future and despair of the present – as the theme that unites the play. for example, howard taubman praised one production of three sisters as “a chorus affirmation the promise of the future and the regenerative powers of work.” 6 however, other reviewers have been more suspicious about that claim. michael frayn rejected this notion, stating that “the whole structure of the play is designed to undercut vershinin[‟s vision of a better future].” 7 another commonly-held interpretation of the play is that three sisters is a form of catharsis for the audience – a “cleansing baptism of irony” – where the audience‟s desires for the sisters to succeed are frustrated and thereby leads the audience into a process of self-examination. 8 in short, there is no consensus in either the east or the west about what constitutes the overarching theme in the play. in this article i will argue that the theme of stupidity, as understood by robert musil, is the idea that unites the various elements in three sisters together. all the characters manifest some form of stupidity in their words and actions, with the result of vulgarity, selfishness, and ultimately dispossession that pervades and destroys the sisters‟ aristocratic world. the fate of all the characters, except for natasha, is one of despair and misfortune that stupidity had bestowed 15 trepanier upon them because they were unable to recognize or resist it. simply put, stupidity is the cause that leads the sisters to fail in their aspirations and preserve their world. honorable and intelligent stupidity the state of spiritual and material decay that characterized the sisters – and more generally late nineteenth-century russian aristocratic society – can be better understood by looking at robert musil‟s lecture, “on stupidity.” 9 an early twentieth-century austrian novelist, musil‟s work on stupidity provides an account of how civilized societies fail to regenerate themselves as moral and spiritual entities. according to musil, when the leaders of society have become stupid, they are unable or unwilling to resist the forces that will destroy that civilization. although musil‟s lecture was directed at 1930s germanic society, it provides a general explanation as to why cultured societies collapse when they faced by the forces of bourgeoisie self-interest, fascist conquest, or communist revolution. the material and spiritual dispossession of the prozorov household in three sisters likewise can be understood as a result of the sisters being stupid. because of their condition, they are unable to defend and to preserve the aristocratic values of beauty, shared sacrifice, and leisure. for musil, stupidity – the cause of societal decay and its eventual collapse – is more than a deficiency of understanding; rather, there are two types: in life one usually means by a stupid person one who is a “little weak in the head.” but beyond this there are the most varied kinds of intellectual and spiritual deviations, which can so hinder and frustrate and lead astray even an undamaged innate intelligence that it leads, by and large, to something for which the only word language has at its disposal is stupidity. thus this word embraces two fundamentally quite different types: an honorable and straightforward type of stupidity, and a second that, somewhat paradoxically is even a sign of intelligence. the first is based rather on a weakness of understanding, the second more on an understanding that is weak only with regard to some particular, and this latter kind is by far more dangerous. 10 the first types of stupidity – honorable stupidity – is commonly recognized and therefore not always threatening, while the second type – intelligent stupidity – is not commonly recognized and consequently is always dangerous. honorable stupidity is illustrated by its poverty of words and ideas, its slow comprehension of facts, and its stubborn preference for the familiar, while intelligent stupidity is distinguished by its claims to insights beyond its ability, the privileging of emotions over reason, and the ability to produce convincing rationalizations to justify its viewpoints: the higher, pretentious form of stupidity stands only too often in crass opposition to [its] honorable form. it is not so much lack of intelligence as failure of intelligence, for the problem of stupidity in chekhov‟s three sisters 16 the reason that it presumes to accomplishments to which it has no right[.] […] this higher stupidity is the real disease of culture […] and to describe it is an almost infinite task. it reaches into the highest intellectual sphere. 11 this distorted use of a genuine and energetic intelligence that makes unwarranted claims from unchecked emotions is fundamentally a condition of spiritual corruption for musil: “intelligent stupidity has as its adversary not so much the understanding as the spirit [geist], and if one is willing to imagine as „spirit‟ not merely a little heap of emotions, the sensibility [gemüt] as well.” 12 intelligent stupidity consequently is not merely an intellectual problem but one that encompasses all the elements that are operative in one‟s consciousness: the physical, the intellectual, and the spiritual. although intelligent stupidity can become a social and political problem, such as when leaders of totalitarian ideologies are able to persuade people to follow them, it is primary a spiritual disorientation where one is blinded in both sense and sensibility to the order of reality. 13 in other words, intelligent stupidity is a type of spiritual arrogance that rejects reason and a recognition of reality as it truly exists. unlike honorable stupidity, intelligent stupidity consists not of an inability to understand reality but a refusal to understand it. intelligent stupidity therefore is ultimately reductive in its content: vulgarity, selfishness, and emotionalism that push aside notions of beauty, shared sacrifice, and reason. it is not as if these aristocratic values do not exist; rather, they are not acknowledged by the intelligently stupid and instead are reduced to explanations of self-interest and power. by refusing to recognize the objective existence of civilized values, the intelligently stupid is able to paint a world where everything is a rationalization and nothing is a reason. it is to those who are not stupid to defend a cultured society and the values which it cherishes. whether chekhov himself believed intelligent stupidity could be eradicated or cured is unclear, but he did suggested a potential remedy to this condition in the experience of pathos: the ability to empathize and identify experientially with the suffering of another person or even with nature itself. the characters we admire the most in three sisters are those capable of experiencing pathos; and the characters we like the least lack this capacity. unfortunately, it is not clear from chekhov how pathos can be translated into effective social and political action, as evident by the fate of sisters. nevertheless, chekhov‟s three sisters is about hope for the future and despair of the present, as mayakovsky had suggested, but with stupidity and, to a lesser extent, pathos, as the themes that tie the play together. material and spiritual dispossession in three sisters both types of stupidity – honorable and intelligent – are manifested in the various characters with the result of the dispossession of the sisters‟ material and spiritual wealth. the sisters had left moscow eleven years ago and now live a provincial town because their father was commissioned to be head of a brigade there. since their father‟s death, all three 17 trepanier of them long to return back to moscow. olga is the eldest sister who teaches at a local high school; masha is the middle sister and is married to kuligin, whom she once thought was the cleverest of men but rather has turned out to be an ineffectual local teacher; and irinia who is the youngest sister with aspirations to work and marriage. all three sisters have pinned their hopes on their brother, andrey, who is studying to become a university professor in moscow. however, andrey is engaged to a poor local girl, natasha, whom the sisters ridicule in the first act because she is shy, socially awkward, and inappropriately dressed for the celebration of irina‟s name day. but over the course of the play, natasha not only marries andrey but slowly begins to dominate the household. she forces irina to give up her room in order to have a place for the baby and later pushes olga and anfisa, a loyal but elderly servant, out of the house altogether. natasha even takes on a lover, as andrey spends his time gambling in order to forget how vulgar, rude, and selfish his wife truly is. at the end of the play, natasha criticizes irina‟s attire as “an error of taste” and orders to cut down all the fir and maples trees on their street because “they are so ugly at night.” 14 the other set of characters that are significant to the sisters‟ lives are lieutenant colonel vershinin, lieutenant tusenbach, and captain solyony. in spite of being married and having a family, vershinin begins an affair with masha, who has fallen in love with him. but vershinin is unwilling to leave his family and the affair concludes when the brigade leaves at the end of the play. the other soldiers, tusenbach and solyony, both vie for the affections of the youngest sister, irina. tusenbach eventually wins over irina and becomes engaged to her. unfortunately, at the end of the play, solyony challenges him to a duel, where tusenbach is killed. but it is the revelation that andrey has mortgaged the prozorov house in order to support natasha‟s expensive tastes that destroy any possibility that all the sisters could be happy together. at the conclusion of three sisters, each sister is left alone in her misery, with masha observing that “we must being our lives all over again.” to this, irina remarks that “some day we will know all the answers. now we must work.” the last words of the play are olga‟s reply to both sisters: “we shall soon be gone forever, but our suffering will turn into joy for those who live after us. happiness and peace will come on earth … in a little while, we shall know why we are living, why we are suffering … if we could only know, if we could only know!” the slow dispossession of sisters‟ material and spiritual wealth is a consequence of their own honorable stupidity: the slow comprehension of recognizing and resisting the intelligent stupidity of natasha, andrey, and solyony. throughout the play the once prosperous house of the prozorov declines and disintegrates, with the expectations and aspirations of olga, masha, and irina being continually frustrated and ultimately dashed. ironically and perhaps comically, the prozorov are conscious that their own hopes and ideals are being obstructed but they are not conscious that they have lost control over their own property. when they do come to this realization, they acknowledge that their future is destroyed: andrey abandons his plans to become a professor, olga accepts permanent exile of life at the local high school, masha nobly relinquishes her love for vershinin, and irina weeps for her slain fiancé. the family has been doubly dispossessed of their material and spiritual wealth. the problem of stupidity in chekhov‟s three sisters 18 the collapse of the prozorov‟s household also symbolizes the end to the aristocratic world. the various philosophical discussions throughout the play between the sisters and the soldiers about how life will be on earth two hundred years from now, the importance and need of nature for humanity‟s existence, and the desire to sacrifice and work for the betterment of all are expressions of the values of the aristocratic world in which the sisters occupy. moscow, and talk of moscow, becomes the ultimate symbol of this civilized society for the sisters: a place where culture, wit, and good taste are commonplace and people are conversant about philosophy, beauty, and sacrifice. these values are practiced by the sisters throughout the play. for example, the sisters open their house to the local townspeople who have lost their homes in the city fire. olga even donates most of her clothes to those who no longer possess any. by contrast, natasha resents the refugees in the house and takes her frustrations out on anfisa, the elderly family nurse. olga attempts to stand up to natasha but fails. nevertheless, olga takes anfisa with her to live in the school‟s apartment because anfisa has been a loyal servant to the family and deserves to be treated as such. the problem for olga, and the other sisters, is their inability to engage in effective action against natasha‟s machinations, not to mention over their own lives. the outcome of their honorable stupidity is that the values of the aristocratic world – beauty, sacrifice, leisure – become replaced by the values of self-interest, vulgarity, and sensual gratification. these values are representative of the intelligent stupidity of natasha, who takes over the financial wealth and physical space of the prozorov house. at the end of the first act, natasha is embarrassed by her garish dress and awkward manners but is protected by andrey who finds her sexually irresistible in spite of her lack of social sophistication. at the opening of the next act, natasha prowls around the house possessively and interrupts andrey‟s study with her worries about their baby‟s need for his own room. in the third act, natasha openly asserts her authority. with a second child in the nursery and the house crowded with refugees, natasha berates and eventually dismisses anfisa. when olga protests, natasha has a tantrum that results in olga deciding to live at the school with anfisa. by the time of the last act, natasha reprimands andrey, who is consoling masha over vershinin‟s departure, for the noise that they are creating because it is disturbing the children. as she surveys her newly conquered realm from a window, natasha decides to cut down the fir and maple trees in the avenue and criticizes irina for her poor taste in clothes. as representative of this new era of change, natasha rejects the prozorov‟s sensibility about life‟s larger purposes in her pursuit of the immediate concerns of the self, sexuality, and status. the discussion of the impractical ideas has been replaced by a philosophy of pragmatism and calculation. on the one hand, this new attitude towards life is successful, for natasha does achieve all that she had wanted at the end of the play, but, on the other hand, the values of beauty, sacrifice, and leisure has become lost in this new world and there is a sense of sorrow for this. but how does one account for natasha‟s success? and what does this suggest about intelligent and honorable stupidities? is there any way to counteract intelligent stupidity, or are we doomed to ask, as does olga at the end of the play, “if we could only know!” 19 trepanier natasha: the intelligent stupid most critical accounts of natasha have been negative that emphasize her vulgarity and selfishness. for example, styan wrote about natasha as “symptomatic of those little pressures of destructive self-interest present everywhere, part of the cruel nature of life which fragile people like the sisters are unable to withstand.” 15 however, other reviewers have found natasha‟s vulgarity so familiar that it makes her laughable as opposed to cruel. moravcevich argued that natasha‟s “raw vitality and assertiveness behind her vulgar manners and selfish schemes are not artificial at all; they are the wellspring of superior strength.” 16 what commentators have failed to provide is an explanation of how natasha succeeds over the sisters. a close examination of the play reveals two features that distinguish natasha from the sisters: her conception of subjectivity and her comprehensive understanding of time. subjectivity enables natasha to perceive reality in a cartesian dichotomy of subject and object, thereby allowing her to manipulate people as means for her own goals. this sense of subjectivity emerges out of natasha‟s intelligent stupidity where she refuses to recognize reality as it genuinely exists. the assumption here is that reality not only contains the values of beauty, leisure, and sacrifice, but one can only recognize the importance of these values if one identifies rather than objectifies them. this in turn requires a participatory mode of existence where reality is to be understood rather than dominated and controlled. 17 in spite of their honorable stupidity, the sisters are able to recognize these civilized values because they see themselves as part of reality, a reality of which they will never be able to understand entirely. by contrast, natasha not only wants to know everything about reality, as exhibited by her constant nosiness into other people‟s businesses, but she wants to be able to control it to serve her own self-interest. her inability to recognize the worth of beauty or sacrifice permits her to detach herself from reality and approach it as an object to be manipulated. this cartesian subjectivity, understanding reality as a dichotomy of subject and object, enables her to be successful at the expense of the sisters‟ participatory approach to reality. an example of these two different approaches to reality is demonstrated in the respective treatment of anfisa by natasha and olga. in the beginning of the third act, natasha wants anfisa, who is old, feeble, and therefore no longer useful, to be banished from the household because “she can‟t do any work now. … she‟s no good for work, she only sleep or sit about.” olga‟s responses, “she has been with us for thirty years,” and “and let her sit about” is greeted with surprise by natasha: what do you mean? she‟s only a servant. [crying.] i don‟t understand you, olga. i‟ve got a nurse, a wet-nurse, we‟ve a cook, a housemaid … what do we want that old woman for as well? what good is she? she continues: the problem of stupidity in chekhov‟s three sisters 20 we must come to an agreement, olga. your place is the school, mine – the home. you devote yourself to teaching, i, to the household. and if i talk about servants, then i do know what i talking about; i do know what i am talking about … and tomorrow there‟s to be no more of that old thief, that old hag. … [stamping.] that witch! and don‟t you dare to annoy me! don‟t you dare! [stopping short.] really, if you don‟t move downstairs, we shall always be quarrelling. this is awful. the root cause of the conflict between olga and natasha over anfisa is the latter‟s inability to see people as ends rather than as means to support her own self-interest. when presented about the value of loyalty by olga (“she has been with us for thirty years”) and the lack of inconvenience caused by anfisa‟s presence (“and let her sit about”), natasha no longer engages in a rational conversation but instead has a temper tantrum. afterwards, she presents several rationalizations of her feelings – anfisa is no longer useful, the household is my domain, i have superior knowledge of servants, the fear of future quarrels – in order to get rid of anfisa. the underlying and true reason is never stated – anfisa is a reminder that the household was once of the prozorov‟s and not of natasha‟s – because such a statement would be too naked about natasha‟s intentions and insecurities. other examples of natasha‟s subjective approach to life where reality is an object to be manipulated to serve her self-interests are the moving of irina into olga‟s room to make space for her baby, her love affair, her complaints about her own children when they interfere with her lifestyle, the mortgaging of the house in order to support her expensive tastes, and her decision to cut down the trees on their street. natasha does not value any of these relationships for themselves: they are only valued if they are useful to her. although she claims insights that are beyond her, e.g., the comment to irina about her attire towards the end of the play: “it‟s an error in taste,” and substitutes rationalizations rather than reasons for her emotional desires, natasha is successful and is the only happy character in the play. the capacity to view life as an object to be bended towards one‟s will is the first factor that accounts for her success. the second reason for natasha‟s triumph over the sisters is her understanding of time as a comprehensive unit. unlike olga, who is preoccupied with the past (whether it is about her father‟s death or her youth); masha, who cares only for the present (her passionate affair with vershinin); or irina, who looks towards the future (of marriage, work, and moscow); natasha is able to connect these slices of time together and thereby strategize throughout the whole play to achieve her objective of controlling the prozorov household. thus, this comprehension of time as a single unit complements natasha‟s subjective approach to reality. like people, time itself can be perceived as an object to be manipulated to serve one‟s ends; and those who are able to connect the past, present, and future together will be able to create a strategy of success. the best examples of natasha‟s comprehensive perception of time are how her children physically push the sisters out of the house and how the debt from mortgaging the house supports her lavish lifestyle. 21 trepanier in the second act, natasha expresses her concern about their son‟s health to andrey because the child‟s room is drafty whereas irina‟s room has “sun all day” and would be better suited to their son‟s health. with irina working most of the day, natasha argues, there is no reason why irina should not share the room with olga, since the two sisters only use the house as a place to sleep. uncomfortable with this arrangement but unable to protest, andrey silently consents. when she has her second child, sophia, natasha is able to move anfisa and olga from the house. however, she proceeds in a delicate manner because olga will be headmistress of the school which her children will attend school one day and therefore “i shall be so afraid of you.” but once olga reveals that she does not want the position, natasha unleashes her emotions into another temper tantrum when olga defends anfisa. the conflict is resolved with both olga and anfisa leaving to live in the school‟s apartment. while her children physically push out the sisters from the house, natasha‟s expensive tastes and extramarital affairs lead her to control its finances when andrey signs the papers to mortgage the house without the sisters‟ permission. the income from the mortgage debt in order to pay for one‟s current expenses is the perfect metaphor of comprehending time as a single unit: natasha‟s present income is derived from a future debt that is rooted in the past accumulation of wealth. the wealth of the house that has accumulated in the past can now be mortgaged in the future to support present desires. only someone who is able to understand the relationship among the past, present, and future would be able to calculate and manipulate people for one‟s own self-interest. unlike the other characters in the play, natasha is able to rationalize her emotive selfishness by seeing people as objects rather than subjects and by stitching together a strategy based on the elements of time to control the prozorov house. as intelligently stupid, natasha is able to present rationalizations, which hides her emotive selfishness, so that what she desires appears to be for the good of the family (specifically for her children). the result is that she is the only the only successful and happy character in the family. however, this success comes at the price of vulgarity triumphing over taste, bourgeoisie self-interest over aristocratic sacrifice, and material wealth over spiritual idealism. the inability of the sisters and andrey to resist natasha creates a condition where evil – the absence of any moral direction for individuals and society – can flourish and have damaging consequences. the consequences of the intelligently stupid the loss of material wealth is a clear result not only of natasha‟s intelligent stupidity but also because of andrey‟s. as the play progresses, andrey relinquishes his dream of becoming a university professor in moscow but he still remains attached to his wife to the point of mortgaging the house without his sisters‟ permissions, as masha points out “but the house doesn‟t belong to him alone, but to the four of us! he ought to know that, if he‟s an honorable man.” whether to support one‟s wife over one‟s sisters is debatable, but it is how andrey justifies himself that reveals his stupidity as intelligent: the problem of stupidity in chekhov‟s three sisters 22 i‟ll only say this and go. just now. … in the first place, you‟ve got something against natasha, my wife; i‟ve noticed it since the very day of my marriage. natasha is a beautiful and honest creature, straight and honorable – that‟s my opinion. i love and respect my wife; understand it, i respect her, and i insist that others should respect her too. i repeat, she‟s honest and honorable person, and all your disapproval is simply silly … [pause.] in the second place, you seem to be annoyed because i am not a professor, and am not engaged in study. but i work for the zemstvo, i am a member of the district council, and i consider my service as worthy and as high as the service of science. i am a member of the district council, and i am proud of it, if you want to know. [pause.] in the third place, i have still this to say … that i have mortgaged the house without permission. … for that i am to blame, and ask to be forgiven. my debts led me into doing it … thirty-five thousand … i do not play cards any more, i stopped long ago, but the chief thing i have to say in my defense is that you girls receive a pension, and i don‟t … my wages, so to speak. … [pause.] it is clear that andrey is ashamed of what he has become in spite of his protests of respecting his wife and being proud of his profession. but rather than admitting this shame and general disappointment in life, andrey instead attacks his sisters for their prejudices against natasha and his unfulfilled dream of becoming a professor. more importantly he rationalizes his emotive selfishness of mortgaging the house because the sisters will have a state pension, whereas his family will not. the emotive state of shame, disappointment, and humiliation are the motives of andrey‟s actions – whether it is drinking, gambling, or unable to stand up to his wife – which triumphs not only over his reason but become the basis of the rationalizations he presents to others when defending his choices. if the consequences of natasha‟s stupidity are vulgarity and self-interest, and the consequences of andrey‟s stupidity are the relinquishments of one‟s wealth and dreams, then the consequences of solyony‟s stupidity are evil: the loss of life itself. vying for irina‟s affections, solyony is in competition with tusenbach and eventually loses when tusenbach and irina become engaged. he spends most his time in the play spouting out nonsense which offends everyone and self-destructively mocks tusenbach, the closest person he has as a friend. the only time he seems to make any sense is when he is alone with irina in the third act and confesses his love for her. although he is rejected, he promises: “i can‟t make you love me by force, of course … but i don‟t intend to have any more-favored rivals … no … i swear to you by all the saints, i shall kill my rival. … oh beautiful one!” towards the end of the play, tusenbach and solyony fight in a duel with tusenbach being killed. the duel itself started as “a silly little affair” where solyony‟s irritations finally paid off with tusenbach losing his temper and insulting him. to protect his honor, solyony challenged tusenbach, which he had to accept. although there is some concern about tusenbach‟s fate – the doctor chebutykin notes that this is solyony‟s third duel – most people think the duel will be 23 trepanier resolved with little injury. unfortunately, tusenbach is killed, leaving irina without a husband and a journey to moscow. solyony‟s nonsensical and crude comments serve their purpose to provoke tusenbach into a duel, a practice in which solyony had plenty of experience. on the surface, solyony appeared to be a stupid person who was socially awkward and intellectually vacuous, but underneath this appearance he was actually intelligently stupid in that he knew what he was doing. if his objective was to kill any rival for irina‟s affections, which he stated in the play and was the only time where he spoke lucidly, then he succeeded by not only provoking tusenbach into a duel but by presenting the appearance of a harmless fool when in actuality he had experience in dueling. the nonsense he spouted was a way to make people not take him seriously and therefore not to think of him as dangerous. it also was a way to cover his emotive possessiveness over irina. 18 natasha, andrey, and solyony manifest the worst type of stupidity about which musil wrote. all three of these characters claim insights beyond their capacities, have their emotions rather than their reason guide their actions, and present rationalizations rather than reasons to justify their actions. natasha is motivated by self-interest and selfishness with her goal of controlling the prozorov household; andrey is motivated by shame, disappointment, and humiliation with his hope to regain some self-respect; and solyony is motivated by jealously and possessiveness. perhaps most terrifying is that all three characters succeed in their objectives. they are the only successful characters in the play. but this success comes at the price of vulgarity, a disappointment in one‟s dreams, and the taking of life itself. intelligent stupidity therefore is dangerous because it can be successful; and by being successful, it sets down the foundation for conditions for evil to flourish. unfortunately, this threat of the intelligently stupid is not perceived until it is too late: the honorably stupid have failed to recognize and resist them until the intelligently stupid have achieved their success. the sisters: the honorably stupid the honorably stupid is characterized by musil as a poverty of words and ideas, slowness in comprehension of facts, and a stubborn preference for the familiar to the unknown. this last feature particularly describes the three sisters who, in spite of their proclaimed love of moscow, remain in the provincial town in which they feel comfortable. the sisters also choose the familiar over the unknown in their specific lives: olga accepts the position of headmistress, a post she does not want; masha returns to her husband she does not respect; and irina agrees to marry tusenbach, a man she does not truly love. each of these sisters has selected what was familiar to them rather than the unknown and consequently are unable to adapt to the new circumstances that life presents to them, e.g., andrey‟s marriage to natasha, vershinin leaving, purchasing a train ticket to moscow. unlike natasha, each sister is able to comprehend time as a single unit. for the sisters, each slice of time provides a benchmark for their hopes and memories: olga is preoccupied with the past (anfisa), masha with the present (affair with vershinin), and irina with the future the problem of stupidity in chekhov‟s three sisters 24 (engagement to tusenbach). their inability to stitch together these elements of time comprehensively accounts for their slowness in the perception of natasha‟s desire to dominate the household. for example, olga‟s primary defense of anfisa‟s residency in the household is one based on the past (“she has been with us for thirty years”) but ultimately is not persuasive to natasha since anfisa serves no purpose at present or will in the future. olga‟s incapacity to see what natasha wants leads her and anfisa to be moved from the house to the school‟s apartment. she was not able to resist natasha‟s selfishness because she was unable to recognize it. olga‟s inability to provide an adequate defense of anfisa is also emblematic of the first characteristic of honorable stupidity: a poverty of words and ideas. the inability of all the sisters to provide a rational defense, which would require a comprehensive understanding of time, is symptomatic of their honorable stupidity and thereby makes them vulnerable to the intelligent stupid. we also see this with masha and irina who become involved with men whom they do not love: the inability of masha to see that she will not be together with vershinin in the future and the inability of irina to understand that she is not presently happy with tusenbach leads both sisters into relationships which has little value for themselves. furthermore, the poverty of words and ideas in masha and irina make them unable to articulate their true desires so that they can become aware of them. the result is that all the sisters lead a life of wishful thinking but they do not know what they truly want. besides lacking a comprehensive account of time, the sisters also lack the subjectivity of natasha in their approach to life. the sisters view life in a participatory mode where reality is not considered an object to be dominated and manipulated to fulfill one‟s desires but instead to be contemplated and enjoyed. this philosophical approach to life is best articulated by tusenbach towards the end of the play, to which the sisters agree: it is as if for the first time in my life i see these firs, maples, beeches, and they all look at me inquisitively and wait. what beautiful trees and how beautiful, when one comes to think of it, life must be near them! also in third act, tusenbach speaks to masha about the meaning of life: not only after two or three centuries, but in a million years, life will still be as it was; life does not change, it remains forever, following its own laws which do not concern us, or which, at any rate, you never find out. migrant birds, cranes, for example, fly and fly, and whatever thoughts, high or low, enter their heads, they will still fly and not know why or where. they fly and will continue to fly, whatever philosophers come to life among them; they may philosophizes as much as they like, only they will fly … this approach is one where humans participate rather than objectively observe life (the subjective approach) and thereby can appreciate what reality reveals to us while recognizing that it will continue to exist without us. this philosophy contrasts with natasha‟s subjective approach 25 trepanier which is reality is to be controlled for our own desires. thus the paradox is that the participatory mode is unable to defend itself against subjective encroachment. for all their discussion about beauty, sacrifice, and leisure, the sisters are unable to defend themselves when someone approaches reality in a subject-object dichotomy. the only alternatives for the sisters is to become what they abhor (subjectivity) or remain true to their principles but become dispossessed. three sisters therefore is an example of how the honorably stupid allow the intelligently stupid to seize power and destroy the values that society cherishes. although they may be less culpable than the intelligently stupid for the destruction of their society, they are nonetheless culpable. the sisters‟ inability to defend themselves enables natasha to control the house. even when they knew about andrey‟s mortgaging the house, the sisters did nothing. the pleasures of the participatory approach to life overwhelm any primal desire to defend themselves. the consequence is that the household is no longer theirs. other characters are also responsible for the destruction of their society: vershinin‟s unwillingness to leave his suicidal wife causes damage to masha; tusenbach‟s willingness to duel solyony leads to his death; and chebutykin‟s forgetfulness leads to the death of a patient. all these characters, with whom we sympathize, still contribute and therefore are responsible for evil to flourish in their societies. in some sense, as leaders of their society, these people are more responsible than the intelligently stupid because their responsibility is greater. rather than being lenin‟s “useful idiots,” these leaders should be able to recognize and resist the evil that threatens them and their world. to answer olga‟s question at the end of the play, if leaders only would have known this, then evil may not have occurred. the potential remedy: pathos and work interestingly, chekhov does provide a path for leaders to emerge from their condition of honorable stupidity: work, and more specifically, work in the service of others. the theme of work is constant one throughout the play, with irina praising the virtues of work in the beginning of the play: when i woke up today and got up and dressed myself, i suddenly began to feel as if everything in this life was open to me, and that i knew how i must live. dear ivan romanovitch, i know everything. a man must work, toil in the sweat of his brow, whoever he may be, for that is the meaning and object of his life, his happiness, his enthusiasm. how fine it is to be a workman who gets up at daybreak and breaks stones in the street, or a shepherd, or a schoolmaster, who teaches children, or an engine-driver on the railway. … and in her last lines of the play, irina reiterates the importance of work: the problem of stupidity in chekhov‟s three sisters 26 there will come a time when everybody will know why, for what purpose, there is all this suffering, and there will be no more mysteries. but now we must live … we must work, just work! tomorrow, i‟ll go away alone, and i‟ll teach and give my whole life to those who, perhaps, need it. it‟s autumn now, soon it will be winter, the snow will cover everything, and i shall be working, working. … the importance of work is twofold for the aristocrats: it provides them not only a source of new income but it also provides them a sense of purpose to live. however, work for simply oneself is not what irina advocates; instead, work in the service of others provides a possibility to resist evil. if one were to work simply out of self-interest, the result would be natasha‟s. what irina proposes is work for the betterment of society. it is an attempt to translate the participatory mode of reality from leisure to work, thereby preserving oneself and one‟s society from a subjective approach to life that allows evil to flourish. but to work in the service of other requires pathos: the capacity to identify with another person‟s suffering that enables the recognition that all humans are fundamentally equal. although people may differ widely in the manner in which they come to grip with it and build the experience into their lives, every person suffers. olga‟s identification with anfisa, masha‟s empathy of vershinin‟s familial situation, and irina‟s with the needy after news of her slain fiancé are all examples of pathos. by contrast, the intelligently stupid, such as natasha or solyony, exhibit no capacity to experience pathos and remain isolated from the community. it is the shared suffering that makes community possible. for late nineteenth-century aristocratic russian society, this community needs to be re-founded on notion of work in the service of others as a remedy against the emerging class of vulgarity and self-interest. 19 although pathos is a possible path to remedy the honorable stupidity and to reform society, it does have its limitation in that it is difficult to provide a rational defense of it. because the experience of pathos itself cannot be articulated perfectly, such a defense can be misconstrued or dismissed. this also may account why the sisters are unable to defend themselves against natasha. whereas self-interest can be articulated and even rationalized, the experience of pathos cannot be without sounding trite. in other words, the experience of pathos requires another person to be open to it. if the person is unable or unwilling, then the hope of building a community based on work in the service of others is in danger. nonetheless, these two remedies – pathos and work – can be part of the new age that the characters predict, as vershinin proclaims at irina‟s name-day celebration: “in two or three hundred years‟ time on this earth will be unimaginably beautiful and wonderful. mankind needs such a life, and if it not ours today then we must look ahead for it, wait, think, prepare for it.” he repeats similar sentiments in the second act: “how can i put it? it seems to me that everything on earth must change, little by little, and is already changing under our very eyes. after two or three hundred years, after a thousand – the actual time doesn‟t matter – a new and happy age will 27 trepanier being.” after he reiterates the same point in the third act, he concludes at the end of the play “if only education could be added to industry, and industry to education.” this future is also predicted by tusenbach, who also proclaims on irina‟s name-day celebration: “a new age is dawning, the people marching on us all, a powerful, health-giving storm is gathering, it is drawing near, soon it will be upon us and it will drive away laziness, indifference, prejudice against labor, and rotten dullness from our society.” the hope for a future age is one when labor is not scorned but embraced by the aristocracy and combined with intelligence (“education”) for the betterment of society. the dual remedy of work and pathos is required to realize this vision of curing the honorable stupid of their poverty of words and ideas, slow comprehension of facts, and preference for the familiar. chekhov points out this path as a way for society to renew itself both morally and spiritually. conclusion although chekhov does propose another possibility to reform the individual and society from their stupidities, it is not realized in the play. this does not mean this possibility remains only a theoretical one, for it exists as an ideal for other to emulate. in this sense, chekhov does have a double vision of the present despair of stupidity and the hope of a future of moral and spiritual renewal. however, i would argue that both of these possibilities are underscored with a deeper insight into the nature of reality: the continuity of life regardless of one‟s attempts to eradicate or embrace stupidity. this perspective is best represented by the physician chebutykin. throughout the play, chebutykin retains a balanced view of the world and comments of the insignificance of human impact upon the world. in response to vershinin‟s speech about his utopian vision in the first act, chebutykin simply replies: “you said just now, baron, that they may call our life noble; but we are very petty. … [stands up.] see how little i am.” however, later when masha complains how life has become unbearable, chebutykin responses: “it‟s not so bad.” neither succumbing to the idealism of vershinin nor resigning to the pessimism of masha, chebutykin views life as something in the middle between these two extremes. what accounts for this balanced perspective is that the physician is the only character in the play that actually works and exhibits pathos: he is a person of action that is able to recognize and resist evil, such as the disease that has been plaguing the countryside. of course, chebutykin himself is not perfect, as he himself attests when in the third act he berates himself for the death of one of his patients. in the fourth act, he becomes tired and wornout from his job and looks forward to retirement in a year‟s time. in spite of his broken spirit, life continues on regardless of a person‟s individual drama. this is acknowledged in the last lines he speaks in the play: “it‟s all the same! it‟s all the same!” the death of tusenbach, the loss of the house, and the shattered dreams of moscow in a larger sense makes little difference upon the flow of events. the juxtaposition of the tragedy befalling the sisters with the lively band music in the background underscores this point that our human lives may have less of an impact upon the world than we had originally thought. the problem of stupidity in chekhov‟s three sisters 28 chekhov‟s acknowledgement that life flows on uninterrupted precludes him from being a utopian ideologue of the sort like vershinin and tusenbach and from being a cynic who operates out of self-interest like natasha and solyony. the fact that natasha is victorious certainly prevents chekhov from being categorized as a political ideologue; and the audience‟s dislike of her victory does not make chekhov a cynic. the possibility of pathos and work is most fully realized in chebutykin despite his missteps. when compared to vershinin, tusenbach, and the sisters, chebutykin is not honorably stupid but one who serves other in work and pathos. the others may recognize the path out of their condition, but he is the only one that has undertaken it. the problem of stupidity therefore is one that is not insurmountable but perhaps it is continual. we will always have stupidity, whether honorable or intelligible, and must be able to confront it in an effective manner; otherwise, the natashas and solyonys will rule the world. chekhov‟s remedy of pathos and work is one to consider in spite of its limitations. whether we will wind up in moscow or remains in our provincial town remain to be seen. endnotes 1. for a comprehensive account of the critical reception of chekhov‟s three sisters, refer to charles w. meister, chekhov criticism (jefferson, nc: mcfarland, 1988) and trevor nunn, “notes from a director: three sisters,” in the cambridge companion to chekhov, eds. vera gottlieb and paul allain (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2000), 101–10. 2. meister, 247. 3. in kenneth a. lantz, anton chekhov: a reference guide to literature (boston: hall, 1945), 20. cf. kornei chukovsky, chekhov the man, trans. pauline rose (london: hutchinson, 1985). 4. meister, 247–48. 5. meister, 248–64. 6. howard taubman, “chekhov‟s truth; revival catches spirit of three sisters,” new york times, july 5, 1964, 2:1. 7. mel gussow, “stage view; echoes of chekhov haunt frayn‟s benefactors,” new york times, january 5, 1986, 2:3. 8. meister, 260–64. 9. in precision and soul: essays and addresses, eds. and trans. burton pike and david s. luft (chicago: university of chicago press, 1990), 268–86. 10. musil, 282. 11. musil, 283–84. 12. musil, 285. 13. in his novel, the man without qualities, musil analyzes how stupidity becomes manifested in pre-world war i viennese society. for example, the protagonist ulrich is a “man without qualities”: he lacks any profound essence, is socially disconnected, and possesses an ambiguous attitude towards life that makes him resigned and passive in the world. 14. all citations from the play are from a. n. chekhov, three sisters, in the complete works of chekhov, vol. 7 (moscow: moscow library classics, 1970), 246–312. translations are mine own. 29 trepanier 15. meister, 261; cf. j. l. styan, chekhov in performance: a commentary on the major plays (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1971). 16. meister, 262. 17. for more about the differences between the subjective and participatory mode of existence, refer to eric voegelin, anamnesis, on the theory of history and politics, vol. 6, ed. david walsh (columbia, mo: university of missouri press, 2002). 18. this account runs contrary to the criticism that solyony is a fool or an absurd hero, such as argued by charles t. rzepka, “chekhov‟s „the three sisters,‟ lear‟s daughters, and the world of the weird sisters: the arcana of archetypal influence,” modern language studies 14.4 (1984): 18–27. 19. the audience‟s identification with the honorably stupid characters also creates a sense of pathos between them. by experiencing pathos themselves, the audience can reform their own lives and society. [expositions 7.1 (2013) 53–63] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 the virtue of teaching theological ethics daniel j. issing, c.s.c. king’s college, pa this essay discusses the pedagogical aims of college courses in theological ethics. is historical representation of the ideas, debates, and ecclesial controversies that found christian thought satisfactory in teaching moral theology or social ethics, or does there need to be a more practical focus, such as making an authentically christian decision? the pragmatism of my students leans me to the latter, while my own love for the controversy and power of an idea motivates the former. in this essay, i propose that there is a certain “doing” of christian ethics—a praxis—that is essential to grasping the substance of christian ethics. indeed, i will argue that the theological good that grounds christian ethics necessarily transports the student beyond a narrow view of self and world to become amazed by the mystery of human existence. while knowledge of church teaching (i.e., its historical rationale and ethical import), good moral reasoning, and moral development might well increase through a course in moral theology, the heart of christian ethics lies in the encounter of conscience that comes by engaging the gospel, creed, and liturgies of the church, what dennis o’brien calls the “christian icons of salvation.” 1 this is what teaching christian ethics is ultimately all about. my inquiry is in relation to the core curriculum at catholic institutions of higher education. the core enjoys a distinctive pride of place at the catholic school. 2 since vatican ii, the aspiration of catholic educational institutions has been “to envision, anticipate, and assist in bringing about a new human family”—not, however, by making the world the church, but by striving “to be a budding forth of the future wholeness that god intends for all peoples.” 3 i view the teaching of theological ethics against the background of this aspiration, which itself is a direct consequence of “the light and love that come from faith [that] constitute[s] the originating value of the church’s institutions.” 4 the aim of teaching theological ethics in the core curriculum of a catholic institution of higher learning is not to “make catholics” or strengthen the faith lives of christians, though such may well happen and, if it does, reflects the activity of grace. the aim is rather to examine human agency in view of god, i.e., the theological good, which calls students to engage the struggle of authentic belief and freedom. what this kind of teaching requires of a teacher is to moderate this encounter with self through the christian icons of salvation in a way that respects the freedom and intellectual pilgrimage of the individual learner. teaching christian ethics in the economy of love and truth in fides et ratio, pope john paul ii observes that the human person is not only “one who seeks the truth [but] is also the one who lives by belief.” 5 what john paul is ultimately asking us to consider with this observation is the centrality of conscience in the moral life. in catholic moral 53 issing theology, conscience is that integrative capacity of the soul to grasp the good. the quest for the good that is to be performed, which is the subject of ethics, is properly understood as a quest for “a free and rightly tuned will,” whereby one’s desire is rightly ordered to truth and one’s choices and actions conform to this truth. for this reason, the study of catholic ethics is closer to learning the violin or playing baseball— i.e., being rightly tuned and practiced to play well as though it were second nature—than it is to the memorization and direct application of doctrine. it aims at being true to self, a most excellent moral self, “not by turning in on oneself” in subjective autonomy, “but by opening oneself to apprehend that truth even at levels which transcend the person.” 6 moral excellence lies in opening to the truth of god. crucial to christian ethics, then, is understanding the relationship of the good to be performed and the good who is god. faith summons the christian to ask how an action complies with the will of god, who is the truth of things and the mystery at the center of all things. john paul in fides et ratio indicates that this relationship (and thus the christian’s moral question) reflects a fundamental human experience, specifically “reason’s capacity to rise beyond what is contingent and set out toward the infinite.” 7 the very desire to know and “discover for ourselves, beyond mere opinions, how things really are,” he says, indicates how natural the quest for truth is for the human person. 8 as the questions of life’s meaning and of purposeful action show, it is both natural and reasonable to want to link the good to be performed with the truth of things, even “a supreme value, which refers to nothing beyond itself and which puts an end to all questioning.” 9 philosophers like plato and aristotle said as much. this is, of course, no easy or direct link because “the search for truth…is not always so transparent nor does it always produce such results.” 10 and sometimes, the search for truth can be displaced “in a welter of other concerns,” which can seem more pressing in their immediacy. it is also true that in coming to know the good to be performed “people can even run from the truth as soon as they glimpse it because they are afraid of its demands.” 11 there is a social and even domestic reality to the quest for practical truth that implicates the knowing and doing of the good. reason’s capacity to rise out of itself, consider how things really are, and seek “a final explanation” of things 12 —despite the messiness—is what leads john paul to note a dimension of the quest for the good to be performed typically overlooked or undervalued by empirical and philosophical modes of truth, i.e., the dynamism of belief in the quest for truth that begins with the way one learns to speak and understand the world as a child. we enter life being given “a language and a cultural formation but also a range of truths in which [we] believe almost instinctively.” 13 adulthood, of course, is typified by awareness of this entrusting, questioning and evaluating these instinctive beliefs, and determining what one will hold as true based upon “the experience of life or by dint of further reasoning.” 14 still, despite this important selfexamination, there is for every human being, even the most self-reflective of persons, “many more truths which are simply believed than truths which are acquired by way of personal verification.” 15 it is impossible for any one of us to validate for ourselves every finding of science or the flow of information in the cyber world. the human is “the one who lives by belief,” who entrusts. 16 the virtue of teaching theological ethics 54 implicit, then, in the pursuit of the good to be performed is “not only a person’s capacity to know,” i.e., one’s effective use of reason, “but also the deeper capacity to entrust oneself to others,” i.e., one’s effective determination of whom or what to believe. 17 the pope’s language here is no doubt intentional: the act of believing, implicit in the act of knowing, is interpersonal and thus a matter of entrusting; it thereby reflects, to greater and lesser degrees, the activity of love. we humans tend to trust more the people we love. nonetheless, what one is seeking here— i.e., whether to trust the beliefs of one’s parent, a lover’s admission of love, a researcher’s theory, or a teacher’s lecture—is “the truth of the person,” whether i should put my trust in this person, given that i cannot wholly verify what he or she says. is this person’s testimony, whether of religion or science or politics or media, credible? the act of believing in each of these examples is to entrust oneself “to the truth which the other declares,” and this might very well be the truth of christian faith that a parent or priest declares. thus, the pope remarks that “human perfection” for every person, i.e., moral goodness, “consists not simply in acquiring an abstract knowledge of the truth” that comes from the important habits of critical thinking. it also comes “in a dynamic relationship of faithful self-giving with others.” 18 there is a trusting of the other, whether it be another’s presentation of the facts or interpretation of the situation or understanding of the truth of life, that is always happening in the effort at practical truth. in making this point, the pope reiterates an ancient idea that friendship is “one of the most appropriate contexts for sound philosophical inquiry.” 19 the way to truth is made better when done in the context of trust. truth and trust are two sides of the same coin. one should not, then, neglect the interpersonal reality of truth-seeking. we need to have an ethic of belief to accompany the pursuit of abstract truth, an ethic rooted in “faithful self-giving” that authentically assures “a fullness of certainty and security,” or authentic trust. 20 put directly, a pursuit of the good to be performed that ignores the dynamics of relationship and belief does so at great peril of ignoring the truth of existence. christian ethics is accordingly a matter of faith and reason. the good decision is never simply a matter of gut-instinct, overpowering feeling, confidence of doctrine, or application of abstract principle. it is rather the fruit of a rightly formed (faith) and informed (reason) conscience. conscience is this integrative capacity of the soul that unites intellect and feeling to will, and seeks a free and rightly tuned will, a will attuned to the mystery of god present in all things. the pursuit of the good to be performed through the well-formed conscience thus requires a distinctive learning context or economy of love and truth. pope benedict xvi puts the point as follows: “truth needs to be sought, found and expressed within the ‘economy’ of charity, but charity in its turn needs to be understood, confirmed and practiced in the light of truth.” 21 if the substance of moral theology is the free and rightly-tuned will in the economy of love and truth, what does this mean for the teaching of christian ethics in the college classroom? when i first started teaching theological ethics, i presented and led students in evaluating interesting christian ideas about the moral life as a disinterested dispenser of the tradition. much in the way i was taught, we compared ideas, showing strengths and weaknesses, and, in a good semester, i even required students to demonstrate the meaning and power of an idea with an assignment rooted in moral application. but i stayed on the level of ideas and did not challenge 55 issing their “experiential timidity before the good” or the ethics of their belief. 22 i was reluctant, outside the presentation of ideas, to get too involved, not wanting to show or force my own religious enthusiasm and belief. but i was also naïve about the workings of the human intellect, thinking that the solid presentation of a good idea was not only all that was due in the teaching of christian ethics, but also all that is needed to act well. once convinced of the idea, one simply changes one’s mind and, as it were, acts rightly. but such an approach altogether misses the dynamic of conscience in catholic moral theology. i was not being just or true to the economy of truth and love intrinsic to catholic ethics. there is an alternative to positivism (as i will call such an approach), on the one hand, and evangelization, on the other. properly understood, theological ethics focuses on “the truth of the human world of life and desire, passion and pride, good and evil.” it shares this focus with artistic truth, but proceeds through what dennis o’brien calls “iconic knowing.” 23 it goes beyond the individual experience of the artist and takes the student-participant through the christian icons of salvation into the mystery of human experience. to this “doing of christian ethics” in the college classroom i now turn, with an eye to the critical encounter of conscience with the truth of god that defines moral excellence in the christian life. christian ethics as icon when christians are discerning right action and look toward the good, they obviously look for god. and according to the christian revelation, they should expect to meet god. the quest “for the truth and…a person to whom [human beings] might entrust themselves” is “a search which can reach its end only in reaching the absolute.” 24 christians come to believe that the interior restlessness of the human soul, that “unquenchable fire that renders us incapable in this life of ever coming to full peace,” 25 is the “desire and nostalgia for god.” 26 this is christian faith, which comes to meet them (a helpful expression by pope john paul ii) amidst the discernment of right thinking and acting. “moving beyond the stage of simple believing,” pope john paul ii says in fides et ratio, “christian faith immerses human beings in the order of grace, which enables them to share in the mystery of christ, which in turn offers them a true and coherent knowledge of the triune god.” 27 it is helpful to consider how one might teach this aspect of christian ethics, i.e., the silent and hidden reality of grace, how christian faith (i.e., god) “comes to meet” the believer in the activity of conscience. there is a gorgeous last supper scene in the film of gods and men (2010) whose symbolic reference to the gospel is hard to miss. it is a scene that well characterizes the coming of christian faith. it also helps to represent what i mean by christian ethics as icon. the movie is based upon a true story about cistercian monks from the monastery of atlas in tibhirine, algeria over the years 1993–1996. there is civil war in the country, and the small community of eight monks is caught in the politics of the region. christians are a small minority in the predominantly muslim country, and these monks are affectionate friends with the muslims of their neighborhood. the monks provide health care and some jobs for the neighbors, and go to the market and trade and buy like any other. but these good relations and common life are upset the virtue of teaching theological ethics 56 in 1993 when a group of foreign workers is massacred by an islamic fundamentalist group. fear enters the land, and foreigners are warned to leave, as are these monks of french nationality, but the monks, after much conscientious discernment, determine to stay. the film beautifully portrays the human fear and terror that faced these holy men: the shameful hiding of one monk in the bowels of the monastery upon a night visit from rebels, doubt about the monastic vocation in the midst of war. it shows the gentle, nonviolent love of christian faith. it also demonstrates the monks’ discernment amidst the christian icons of salvation. led by a wise abbot, the monks resolutely refuse to take a side in the civil war, boldly standing alongside their neighbors, and reject the offers of protection from both the government and the rebel group, which would have put them on a side. the film powerfully portrays the human, moral, and theological drama, even if it only loosely narrates the actual story. by story’s end, six of these monks, and one visiting monk, are captured and led to a tragic death. spiritual writer henri nouwen says that “icons try to give us a glimpse of heaven.” “icons are painted to lead us into the inner room of prayer and bring us close the heart of god.” “an icon is like a window looking out upon eternity.” 28 the scene i wish to describe from of gods and men does just this. it evokes encounter with the “mystery of existence” and involves the viewer inside the pain and suffering of the monks’ dilemma in algeria, the implications of their decision to remain, and the christian narrative, creed, and liturgy that brought them to this moment of direct confrontation with “the splendid waste of life” brought on by hatred and civil war. the scene begins with the monks gathered at a u-shaped table with father christian, the abbot, routinely blessing the meal. in walks the elderly brother luc carrying in each hand a bottle of wine. an obviously-confused abbot slows the pace of his prayer, staccato and almost to a halt, and as the monks’ “amen” resounds, luc puts on the tape recorder an exquisite piece of music that plays throughout the scene, artfully reflecting the changing emotion of the monks, from fraternal smile to distant and fearful look, from laughter to tears, to faithful, confident joy. luc slowly brings the bottles to the table and proceeds to shuffle to his place. no other words are spoken in this scene as the camera pans from face to face and back again, several times; the rugged and wrinkled faces of devout and hardworking men, furry eye-brows and all; as each sips wine or hold backs, recalling the “cup that i shall drink you shall drink” of the gospel; as each monk (at least to my mind) recalls the life given and chosen and given up, as though knowing, like christ in the gospels, that the betrayer’s work had been done. the scene is iconic. it invites involvement and empathy, even tears, as the word of faith is about to become flesh. the very next scene comes on suddenly and with cacophonous sound, and shows the caravan procession of the enemy to the monastery in the dark of night, at which time seven monks will be captured. in describing iconic truth, dennis o’brien says that “reading a depiction,” like this last supper scene, “iconically is not something that occurs automatically…. one can always retreat to an aesthetic distance.” 29 we can opt out, as it were, and treat an icon, both in this form or in the traditional form of painting, simply as art, i.e., a pleasing, indifferent, or even repulsive experience. there is an element of choice here as to how one will engage. but an icon aims, to recall nouwen, to take us outside or beyond ourselves to the “really real” whom christians know 57 issing to be god. every icon depicts an aspect of god and summons both meditation and participation. o’brien refers to this phenomenon as “the truth of presence that is present in iconic art, which goes beyond the shaping hand of the artist toward the very presence of the thing depicted,” i.e., the mystery of existence who is god. 30 christians like o’brien will call this “really real” god, but of course not all people experience the mystery of existence as god, and this represents a second moment of freedom, the choice as to how to name mystery. put directly, in the encounter with the truth of presence, the participant must measure commitment to engagement and determine categories of understanding. iconic knowing is then both a matter of intellect and will. to engage something as icon, “one must come to the ‘depiction’ as a possible participant in the history made present.” 31 again nouwen is helpful to explain the dynamic of encounter and helps to draw out the free choice that is involved: icons are not easy to “see.” they do not immediately speak to our senses. they do not excite, fascinate, stir our emotions, or stimulate our imagination. at first, they even seem somewhat rigid, lifeless, schematic and dull. they do not reveal themselves to us at first sight. it is only gradually, after a patient, prayerful presence that they start speaking to us. and as they speak, they speak more to our inner than to our outer senses. they speak to the heart that searches for god. it has taken me a long time to see…. 32 the condition to see iconically is a free will characterized by “patient, prayerful presence.” authentic participation is a matter of spiritual exercise. i will return to the idea of participation below, but i first want to show why christian ethics is well served by iconic knowing. for an icon to work, “there must be some realization of a still ‘present’ reality and possibility that i might be a victim (or perpetrator) of [the] events” evoked by the icon. 33 it must throw the viewer into the truth of his or her own struggle with the mystery of existence. what makes of gods and men work, or even john kiser’s book the monks of tibhirine upon which the movie is based, is that the situation is only too real, for all of us have our “creeds, liturgies, and meditations” by which we try “to transcend, face up to, or evade the ‘splendid waste’ of life.” 34 the reality that the film exposes is the human struggle to live truly and meaningfully, the implications of our intellectual commitments, the hopes and dreams manifest in these commitments, the potential loss and abandonment of these beliefs, and how human wickedness can force itself on us and ask for further commitment and integrity. sometimes, our big-picture beliefs, as with the incarnation for the monks of atlas, summon us to give our very lives. iconic knowing taps self-awareness. what makes of gods and men particularly relevant to christian ethics is that, amidst conscientious contemplation of self and world, it also demonstrates how the theological virtue of christian faith “comes to meet” the believer and transforms the already-virtuous living of these eight monks. one sees their hope in the promises of god. one experiences their love of god and neighbor. one can also see prudence, justice, temperance, and courage reaffirmed, transformed, and reformed by grace. one witnesses how the central christian belief (fides quae), i.e., the incarnation, perfects the way the monks search for truth and for one in whom to entrust their the virtue of teaching theological ethics 58 lives (fides qua). they reveal jesus as the way and the truth of how they love to the end. one sees how gospel verses and psalm chants become real and then manifest in the way the monks stay, love to the end, and die. one can nearly participate in the displacement of the son of god, in love and through love, from heavenly bliss to human suffering, revealed at the last supper. iconic knowing has room to explain hidden human things like grace. the book and especially the film represent the contemplation and discernment of conscience explored by catholic moral theology. of gods and men is an effective icon of conscience. it has the potential to carry the viewer inside the discernment of the monks and involve the viewer in a personal question of conscience. it has the capacity to take away both distance from the situation of the monks and a naïve attitude towards one’s own life. but, more critically to my argument here, it represents the truth of presence, i.e., the awakening to a more expansive sense of self and world, that a college course in christian ethics must facilitate to be true to the catholic understanding of conscience as an encounter with the truth of god and the discernment of the law of love written on the human heart. christian ethics necessarily engages the idea that “all people are born into the existential dilemmas and religious responses of humankind.” 35 in turn, the duty of the human being is to discern, for the sake of the personal and common good, both the mystery of existence and how best to name it. a course in christian ethics true to the catholic moral tradition must invite student-apprentices to face “the real,” to come to terms with their own beliefs and struggle for the good, to seek the truth, to understand the religious concerns of the human race, to consider the doctrines, liturgies, and mediations of christianity, and to recognize themselves as conscientious participants in the tragic history of the human race and the struggle for goodness. as dennis o’brien says, “if one faces directly the mystery of existence, one can still question whether the gospel or eucharist is iconic of that mystery.” 36 indeed one can and should, as a matter of personal freedom, and a course in christian ethics must attend to the freedom of the student-apprentice to choose well. for the teaching of christian ethics cannot ignore the interpersonal and integrative nature of authentic belief. personal freedom in teaching christian ethics the abbot of atlas, father christian, said that “contemplation is either a form of continual searching or it is nothing at all. here on this earth, it is a journey, a tension, a permanent exodus, the invitation to abraham, ‘come, follow me.’” 37 he was speaking of monastic contemplation. his point captures well the dynamic of catholic conscience, which is more a waiting for and a welcoming of something altogether new, i.e., the action of god called grace. in this way, christian ethics is always spiritual exercise. christian identity, father christian also said, is “always in the process of being born” as christians face new, modern horizons. of course, father christian was speaking about monastic identity in the islamic context of algeria. “with this perspective in mind,” he said, “it is becoming obvious that a monastic community cannot be established with prefabricated beliefs, because the contemplative life requires engaging the customs, history, and religious traditions, and real-life conditions in those lands of which we 59 issing seek to be a part.” 38 the abbot is depicting the interface of the big-picture beliefs of christian faith and real circumstance, the critical nexus of christian ethics. he also indicates the ongoing and developmental nature of christian identity, being grounded in tradition yet open to otherness. i want to use this insight into contemplative identity—perhaps a radical vocation but a nonetheless normative posturing of the christian in relation to the world—to explain a final point about participating freely inside iconic encounter. christian ethics always examines the moral teaching of jesus. to teach christian ethics as icon is to invite the student “to be a participant in some way in the story of jesus.” 39 there are different ways and levels of participation. for the practicing christian, this participation is built on the claim that “jesus is lord and messiah.” others might encounter jesus as a great prophet, or an important historical figure. what christians come to know and believe through their moral existence, by virtue of reason and revelation, is that the human good sought in ethical inquiry is not something abstract or impersonal, but homecoming. the good which we desire and at which we aim our actions is a father of love, who sent his son into the world who suffered, died, and rose from the dead. this father of love gives of his own spirit, and chiefly as faith, hope, and love amidst authentic moral choosing. the fullness of christian moral living is to be in the world as jesus: that is, to possess a spirit of love and cooperation, and to give oneself freely to others in hiddenness and compassion. 40 the christian moral life is in this way being led by the good who is god, who is making all things new. to encounter oneself through the christian icons of salvation in the study of christian ethics is to be invited into the mystery of existence but also to encounter the viability and vibrancy of this theological good. the question that must finally be asked, then, concerns professorial duty to the personal freedom of the student, whether believer, muslim, atheist, or one altogether unsure of any big-picture belief. how should “participation” be conceived in a course built on iconic knowing? the answer, i think, lies in father christian’s definition of contemplation as “a permanent exodus.” my point is a simple one. one need not be a believer to participate in the jesus story. nor is the believer always the best participant in iconic participation. believers can be dogmatic and refuse the economy of love and truth. but shouldn’t the student at a college built on his teachings at least meet jesus? shouldn’t believers find their religious beliefs challenged and honed? the key is how to introduce jesus in a way that is true to christian ethics and fair to authentic belief, which must be freely chosen. iconic knowing is this way as it summons an encounter of self with the truth of presence through christian icons. the duty of the professor is to teach these icons well, facilitate encounter beyond self, and assure the self-awareness and free choice of the student at every stage of the academic journey. the professor cannot be evangelical or dispassionate but must be virtuously involved, as one “further ahead,” in the way of socrates. the classroom must be “a form of apprenticeship in which teacher and learner are being called forth by the good they are pursuing.” 41 christian ethics, taught in the economy of love and truth, is an ongoing “dialogic encounter in response to the good.” 42 there must be some experience of real discernment, or conscientious contemplation, in the teaching of catholic moral theology. the virtue of teaching theological ethics 60 but it is also true, and important to note, that the good that christians pursue is defined as god, simply, the theological good. in view of this, david burrell has argued that christian liturgy and prayer, such as the monastic practice of lectio divina, represent an “intensified” form of socratic dialogue. these icons reflect the vertical (self and god) and horizontal relationship (self and others) to the good of socratic encounter. 43 “the rules of engagement” are intensified, however, because christians are being “called to a radical ‘unknowing’ in the face of the offer of divine friendship extended to us” by jesus. 44 one is being invited to encounter god, who is by definition beyond reason. this encounter with the theological good grounds christian ethics. jesus has revealed, however, that the theological good comes to us, is personal, and responds to human longing. the encounter then feels like homecoming, to use again my earlier term. it is the surprise of something new that has always been there, god’s outreach, in the thick of human existence. every student arrives in the classroom with some prefabricated set of beliefs. it could be the animal house narrative, a prejudice against religion, timidity before the good, even religious certainty. narratives abound. christian ethics in the core of the catholic institution aims here, summoning an encounter with the presence of truth and the truth of presence. if grace is the heart of conscientious contemplation, and grace is god’s action, the course in christian ethics cannot and ought not demand belief in christ, for faith is a gift. but it should make clear what the tradition means by the theological good. in so doing, by being a dialogic encounter in response to the good, christian ethics invites to a permanent exodus, always asking students to leave a secure homeland and be led by the good into the “unknown more.” but, as the tradition of the theological good makes clear, this experience might well be, as it was for abraham, the voice of the god of love, saying, “come, follow me.” this, however, is for the apprentice to determine according to the promptings of the heart induced by free participation in the christian icons of salvation. in fairness to authentic belief and christian ethics, the professor must always encourage religious and moral self-awareness in the student, and be true to the economy of love and truth: that is, the dialogic pursuit of the good as friends. notes 1. o’brien 2002. see chapter four. he refers specifically to the gospel, creed, and liturgies of the church. o’brien’s book is critical to my argument. 2. the catholic university has a unique approach grounded in philosophy and theology. by saying that the core has a “pride of place” at catholic colleges and universities, i refer to how catholic higher education privileges the core curriculum as a way to express its distinctive academic heritage, i.e., the catholic intellectual tradition. the core at catholic colleges and universities also aims for “catholicity.” by catholicity, i mean the aim of the core curriculum to reflect fundamental habits of learning and knowledge that everyone at the institution should have—that is, that should be had universally. 61 issing 3. haughey 2009, 14–15. haughey, like dennis o’brien, is responding to a discussion in catholic higher education about the mission and identity of the catholic university as initiated by pope john paul ii in ex corde ecclesiae (1990). 4. haughey 2009, 14. 5. john paul ii 1998, #31. 6. john paul ii 1998, #25. 7. john paul ii 1998, #24. 8. john paul ii 1998, #25. 9. john paul ii 1998, #27. 10. john paul ii 1998, #28. 11. john paul ii 1998, #28. 12. john paul ii 1998, #27. 13. john paul ii 1998, #31. 14. john paul ii 1998, #31. 15. john paul ii 1998, #31. 16. john paul ii 1998, #31. 17. john paul ii 1998, #32. 18. john paul ii 1998, #32. 19. john paul ii 1998, #33. i return to this idea below. 20. john paul ii 1998, #32. 21. benedict xvi 2009, #2. 22. benedict xvi 2008. 23. see o’brien 2002, 46. o’brien distinguishes between scientific, artistic, and iconic truth, noting how scientific truth is the dominant view of knowledge in the academy. it makes room for art. iconic truth, however, is ignored. he provides a strong argument as to why it is both fitting and necessary for a catholic university to attend to this nonscientific knowledge. 24. john paul ii 1998, #33. 25. rolheiser 1999, 3. the virtue of teaching theological ethics 62 26. john paul ii 1998, #24. 27. john paul ii 1998, #33. 28. nouwen 1987, 14–15. 29. o’brien 2002, 82. italics are mine. 30. o’brien 2002, 80. 31. o’brien 2002, 82. 32. nouwen 1987, 14–15. 33. o’brien 2002, 83. 34. o’brien 2002, 84. 35. o’brien 2002, 84. 36. o’brien 2002, 86. 37. kiser 2002, 132. 38. kiser 2002, 134. 39. o’brien 2002, 83. in view of what i have already said, about the aspiration of catholic higher education in modernity and o’brien’s argument as to the duty of the modern catholic university to iconic knowing, it seems only fitting that every student at a catholic institution should meet jesus. i offer the idea of “participate in the jesus story” as a way to clarify what this encounter should mean in terms of curriculum. there are many ways to meet jesus, and the critical point is not to force faith but facilitate encounter. 40. see nouwen 1983. nouwen et al. define discipleship as voluntary displacement understood as hiddenness and compassion. 41. burrell 2000, 29–30. 42. burrell 2000, 30. 43. burrell 2000, chapter two. 44. burrell 2000, 33. works cited benedict xvi. 2009. caritas in veritate. encyclical letter. available online at <www.vatican.va> http://www.vatican.va/ 63 issing ___. 2008. “meeting with catholic educators at the conference hall of the catholic university of america in washington.” available online at <www.vatican.va> burrell, david b., c. s. c. 2000. friendship and ways to truth. notre dame: university of notre dame press. haughey, john. 2009. where is knowing going? the horizons of the knowing subject. washington, d.c.: georgetown university press. john paul ii. 1998. fides et ratio. encyclical letter. available online at <www.vatican.va> kiser, john w. 2002. the monks of tibhirine: faith, love, and terror in algeria. new york: st. martin’s press. nouwen, henri. 1987. behold the beauty of the lord: praying with icons. notre dame: ave maria press. ___, donald p. mcneill, and douglas morrison. 1983. compassion: a reflection on the christian life. new york: image books. o’brien, george dennis. 2002. the idea of a catholic university. chicago: university of chicago press. pinckaers, servias, o. p. 1995. the sources of christian ethics. translated from the third edition by sr. mary thomas noble, o.p. washington: d.c.: catholic university of america. rolheiser, ronald. 1999. the holy longing: the search for a christian spirituality. new york: doubleday. http://www.vatican.va/ http://www.vatican.va/ microsoft word renna-final.docx [expositions 8.1 (2014) 1–28] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 lorenzo valla and the donation of constantine in historical context, 1439–40 thomas renna saginaw valley state university, emeritus abstract lorenzo valla’s refutation (1440) of the forgery the donation of constantine (ca. 757-800) has been variously interpreted as a rhetorical and philological exercise, an attack on papal temporal power in general or the papal states in particular, an invective against pope eugenius iv, an apology for alfonso v, a proposal for clerical reform, a satire on the clergy, a defense of the council of basel. but little attention has been given to the role of emperor frederick iii in valla’s implied suggestions for the improvement of circumstances in warring italy. it is argued here that valla wrote the declaration in part to encourage greater imperial involvement in the papal schism and especially in the affairs of italy and the city of rome. the donation of constantine is the most influential forgery in western history. lorenzo valla’s refutation of the document is the most famous debunking of any literary fraud. the renown of the humanist’s discourse1 stems from the historical fact that it was the first systematic refutation of the donation of constantine, itself widely cited in 1200–1400.2 although the donation was probably composed in the second half of the eighth century,3 it did not become the subject of intense discussion until the twelfth century, when it was cited by the defenders of the pope’s claim to crown german kings (after being elected kings of the romans) with the title of emperor of the romans and retain some degree of control of the emperor and the empire. by the time of popes innocent iii and iv, the donation’s claims were extended to the papal states and the pope’s temporal authority in general, particularly in the right to intervene indirectly in imperial elections and jurisdiction.4 according to some modern scholars,5 by the time of lorenzo valla, the donation was not taken very seriously, although valla thought—or pretended to think—otherwise.6 in general, the past century of scholarly investigation of valla’s discourse has concentrated more on his literary technique—his use of rhetoric and philology7—than on his attempt to make his rebuttals relevant to his own day. (he seems to have written the bulk of the discourse in april-may 1440,8 although he may have started the work in late 1439.) much less attention has been given to the historical context of the writing of the discourse, except to note valla’s apparent support of the council of basel, pope felix v,9 and, above all, his antagonism to pope eugenius iv. in particular, valla’s defense, often unstated in the discourse, for king alfonso v of aragon, the nemesis of eugenius iv, is emphasized.10 at times the references in modern lorenzo valla and the donation of constantine 2 studies to contemporary events are merely recited, as if the connections with valla’s comments are self-evident. modern historians often praise the donation as a compelling work which definitively demolished the counterfeit document.11 in fact, the piece is sometimes a rambling collage of disparate arguments only loosely connected. the odd choice of formula—a quasicourtroom dialogue held at royal courts—seems to support those modern critics who emphasize the discourse as largely a rhetorical exercise, albeit replete with contemporary allusions. perhaps the reason for the unwieldy, composite character of the work is that valla wrote it for several reasons and for several audiences. in the opinion of the present author, some of the misunderstandings of the treatise are the result of focusing too narrowly on the antipapal rhetoric and not enough on the german emperor. by neglecting the latter, the reader may be misled by valla’s use of the literary device of the “straw man,” especially pope eugenius iv,12 who must be assessed within the context of the time valla was writing. this concentration on eugenius is understandable, since valla himself virtually ignores contemporary emperors (frederick iii is not even mentioned) or near contemporaries (albert ii is missing; sigismund iii is mentioned just once13) this is not, of course, to suggest that the discourse is a tract on empire or that it is primarily a reform proposal for the ills of society. the work is, after all, about an event (or non-event, since constantine, valla assures us, never made such a donatio) and its subsequent evil effects. hence constantine and pope sylvester14 get more attention, with allusions to later emperors and pontiffs, only to show how naively uncritical they could be in accepting the donation’s genuineness. strangely, valla does not speculate on the circumstances of the forgery itself, except to imply that it was made some centuries after the time of the first christian emperor.15 the role of the western emperor in 1440, however, was of great concern to valla, who, it is argued here, placed more hope in the new emperor than in his patron, alfonso v of aragon, to restore sanity to christendom. the discourse is not, to be sure, a reform program or a speculum principum for frederick iii. the discourse is a difficult work to assess as a historical source not only because of the relative paucity of references to external events, but also because of valla’s too few allusions to contemporary circumstances in his other writings, including his letters.16 holy roman empire and italy, 1436–39 valla in fact wrote the discourse in part, we contend, to induce frederick iii and his supporters to intervene in italy. our humanist—never the optimist—did not envision imperial troops marching over the alps. those days were gone. rather, he sought to convince frederick—who seemed to be content with the neutrality of his electors—and italian leaders that a greater role for the emperor (as yet uncrowned)17 was required to resolve the conflicts in italy. for valla the settlement of the basel-vatican standoff was but a means to an end. he envisioned frederick and eugenius working together to achieve peace south of the alps. valla wrote the discourse partially to promote the short-term gain of restraining the expansionist impulses of filippo maria 3 renna visconti, eugenius iv, venice, genoa, florence, and, indeed, even alfonso v. his long-term objective was to achieve a balance of power in italy, end the schism between the two popes, buttress the union between byzantine east and west, and get pope and emperor to organize a pre-emptive attack on the turks. the political situation in italy and the holy roman empire in 1438–40 was chaotic. the turmoil, confusion, broken promises, complexity, shifting alliances, profusion of unreliable condottierri, and uncertainty must have been almost unbearable. there seemed no end to the series of crises. the candidates for european-wide leadership—council of basel, frederick iii, charles vii of france, eugenius iv—appeared anything but ecumenical.18 the hope of a reconciliation between council and pope was dashed when basel suspended eugenius iv from office in january 1438, and elected felix v (so named in november 1439), who reigned until april 1449.19 as the council had increased its claims to be superior to the papacy during 1436– 37, eugenius responded by rejecting the proposal to transfer the council to avignon and proposed ferrara instead. the more hard-line conciliarists voted to declare eugenius, who frantically searched for supporters in france, italy, and the empire, deposed.20 the situation was complicated by the delicate negotiations which were then occurring between the byzantine john viii and the western powers as to the location of the council where the union between latin and greek churches was to occur.21 john viii himself demanded the site to be on the dalmatian coast or at least in italy. the kings of france and germany pressed for a northern site, as did many conciliarists. while eugenius had supporters in the holy roman empire, some electors, universities, and religious orders sided with basel. for his part, eugenius thought he could fend off the baseleans better from an italian base, such as bologna or ferrara. rome remained hostile to the pope. when the council was later moved to florence the tensions in italy actually increased. eugenius’ alliance with venice was uncertain, as were his relations with the visconti nemesis, francesco sforza in the romagna.22 when the council of florence did in fact achieve union with constantinople, few believed it was permanent or that it would lead to a successful crusade against the infidels in the balkans. neither did anyone in the german empire feel complacent with the doctrinal concessions made to the hussites in poland in may 1439. the threat of a renewed turkish assault on hungary was always present to the emperor sigismund iii and his successor, albert ii of luxemburg (march 1438–october 1439). both sigismund and albert attempted to remain neutral in the basel-eugenius conflict, lest the catholic church fall into schism and the division in the german empire worsen.23 charles vii of france remained neutral as well, perhaps as a counter to his papalist bishops and the baselean universities. just as the two popes, felix v and eugenius iv, were maneuvering to obtain adherents throughout europe, sigismund died (9 december 1437), introducing another element of uncertainty. for the new emperor, albert ii, this basel-eugenius business complicated his more pressing concerns: get the bohemians and hungarians to accept his election as king of the romans; lorenzo valla and the donation of constantine 4 establish a uniform policy of church reform; solidify the union with the greeks; muster a defense against the ottomans; adopt a more equitable policy in germany loosely based on the french pragmatic sanction of bourges; maintain good relations with eugenius; establish a semblance of authority over his electors; enforce the mainz council decrees; maintain free elections and prohibit annates.24 yet, despite the discussions at mainz, both the council of basel and eugenius in the end rejected many of these mainz proposals. all hopes were left to a new universal council, still to be determined. by april 1439 albert ii seemed unable to choose among the neutrality of the electors, the acceptation of mainz, the legitimacy of the council of basel and its decrees, and the recognition of eugenius as pope without conditions. basel’s deposition of eugenius in effect rebuffed albert’s attempts at a reconciliation of the baselean reforms and the papal schism. after more months of proposals and counter proposals, albert ii tried to reach an agreement with his electors at frankfurt in november 1439. to the horror of the electors, news arrived that the council of basel had just elected felix v on 5 november 1439. then another distressing report arrived: albert ii had passed away on october 27. the electors responded by renewing the protection of neutrality, which would be adopted by the next king, frederick of habsburg. to add to the confusion, the emperor after albert ii, frederick iii of habsburg, refused to take sides in the papal schism, since he was engaged in numerous struggles: against the ottomans in 1439, matthius corvinus of hungary, the swiss confederation which sought independence, the bohemians who opposed albert ii’s son ladislaus, and the electors who chose different sides in the basel vs eugenius (who deposed two archbishop-electors) dispute. the unintended result of frederick’s declaration of neutrality was to encourage both the baseleans and the eugenians to step up their efforts to get the germans—and frederick—to their side. the big question was: who would frederick support, council or pope? where would the next council be held? what would frederick’s attitude be toward italy? his attitude toward alfonso v of aragon? so uncertain was frederick’s position that he was not to be crowned king of the romans until 1442 (although he had been elected february 1440), and emperor of the romans until 1452—the last emperor to be crowned in rome. while modern historians often characterize frederick iii as a habsburg who put his house ahead of imperial concerns, he was certainly active on many fronts during the years 1439–40. frederick was stymied as to how to respond to the (uncompromising) demands of both basel and eugenius, who effectively required the clergy of the holy roman empire to attend the synod at ferrara. the mood among the electors and the bishops was to seek a compromise between council and pontiff. the elector-archbishops of mainz and trier proposed a moderate solution which protected both eugenius and the council decrees. as each mediation failed in 1438, the new emperor-elect, frederick (iii), was caught between scylla (the protestation of neutrality) and charybdis (accept eugenius as true pope and move the council to ferrara). albert ii had summoned imperial diets to attempt to find a formula acceptable to both basel and eugenius. pressure now mounted on frederick to agree to a third city—other than basel or ferrara—for the 5 renna council. the german delegation argued strenuously at basel during december 1438–january 1439 in favor of the general council, a third city, and common imperial policies for the church in the empire. eugenius responded by unilaterally transferring his council from ferrara to florence (10 january 1439)! the german princes meeting at mainz (march–april 1439) were convinced that they had found a winning formula; they even accepted many of the baselean reforms for the church in the empire. but to their consternation, the council of basel rejected them and deposed eugenius (june 1439). the result was an impasse. these disappointments notwithstanding, however, frederick never gave up on his efforts to conciliate basel, pope, and the german church. in 1441 he issued a surprise series of reform proposals to establish more imperial authority over his principalities, intending to rule in the manner of the legendary emperor charles iv on the model of the golden bull of 1356. alfonso v and lorenzo valla where was alfonso v of aragon during these bewildering developments of 1438–39? alfonso’s actions indicate that he was neither a baselean nor a eugenean. he seems to have had no ideological leaning in any direction. his priority was his new kingdom in naples, while keeping contact with events back in spain. alfonso spent much of his time in 1436–40 engaging in military and diplomatic activity designed to expand his sicilian empire and tighten the blockade around the city of naples, which he would finally capture in 1442.25 his alliance with filippo maria visconti was opportunistic, as were his ties with venice, francesco sforza in ancona, and, it might be added, felix v and basel. alfonso’s later dramatic shift to eugenius—when this pope discarded rené of anjou, son of louis ii of anjou and rightful king of sicily—is but one example of alfonso’s realpolitik. it is unlikely that alfonso considered eugenius the source of all his difficulties in italy, as valla appears to think. perhaps valla magnifies his case against this pope because he deems that this is what his patron wants to hear. how did these rapid movements of alfonso v influence valla’s political thinking? it is probable that lorenzo valla as alfonso’s secretary—an undefined position—accompanied him on military campaigns during 1437–39, and may have participated in minor diplomatic forays. (valla’s extensive amount of writing during his stay at court, gaeta then naples, suggests, however, that he had ample time to research and write. alfonso’s famous library was a boon.) valla was kept well informed about the events in europe, and may have been an advisor of sorts to the monarch.26 it is possible that valla’s discourse on the donation of constantine was influenced by his involvement—either as a factor in alfonso’s formation of policy, or as an observer of events as a man about court—in high politics. was the discourse really the academic exercise that some modern historians take it to be? as valla observed the fast pace of events in italy from the vantage point of the aragonese court, whether at gaeta or in via, he must have been amazed at the inconstancy of fate. if he had lorenzo valla and the donation of constantine 6 a perverse sense of humor he would have enjoyed the topsy-turvy course of events of 1436–40, which were often the result of chance. alfonso v’s fortuna often depended on unreliable mercenary captains on all sides. the uncertain flow of cash from aragon and the sicilian areas endangered the financing of his campaigns; the alliances (often casual, often broken) with towns and regions throughout italy made his friends of today the enemies of tomorrow. the position of florence and venice was never clear. alfonso’s steadfast “ally,” filippo maria, was one of convenience; the visconti constantly complained of the king’s half-hearted offenses against genoa, venice, and francesco sforza. typical of italian potentates was the count of caserta, who switched sides no fewer than five times in two years! alfonso’s on-again off-again marriage proposals with filippo maria’s relatives infuriated the visconti. many rulers attempted to use alfonso in their attempts to snatch a piece of the papal states; eugenius was usually out of town. alfonso had no long-range policy—except to seize naples—as he reacted to the initiative of his enemies, such as giovanni vitelleschi’s incursion into the abruzzi.27 this papal condottiere, the butcher of rome, embodied valla’s notion of the misuse of papal authority. the vicissitudes of vitelleschi’s career—he had to retreat from the abruzzi because he ran out of money to pay his soldiers!—may have convinced valla of the need for outside—that is, imperial—military or diplomatic intervention. it would be inaccurate, moreover, to view the battle for the regno as simply a war between rené of anjou and alfonso v. the weak support for rené can be seen in the hasty withdrawal of many of his partisans in 1439–40 as the position of alfonso improved with the death of jacobo caldora in november 1439—and the welcome landing of provisions from spain. the situation in the kingdom of naples fluctuated with some unexpected deaths (such as alfonso’s brother pedro) and the arrival of family members (such as his natural son, ferdinand, in august 1438). alfonso was actually not a baselean or an ally of felix v. basel and the antipope were for alfonso simply expedients to blackmail eugenius into granting him legitimacy in naples. one has to wonder if valla in early 1440, when he was writing his discourse, was getting worried about what would happen to his beloved rome once the city of naples finally fell to alfonso. would the king then attempt to conquer the papal states? what would happen to the equilibrium of italy? and the union with the eastern church? and to the byzantine empire, under permanent siege? was valla feeling guilty about encouraging his king to pursue his territorial designs? above all, what would become of rome and italy after the settlement between the council of basel and eugenius? but where was frederick iii? if valla had dreams of making gaeta, and later naples, a center and model of humanist studies, he would have been dismayed at the growing instability in italia, where all true learning began. far from being a lackey of alfonso v, valla may have been troubled by the rapid turn in the king’s favor in late 1439. but how can valla send a message to alfonso, eugenius (who seemed stronger every day), basel, other humanists, and frederick iii? surely a polemical blast against eugenius or some other scapegoat would simply inflame the followers of both council and pontiff. why not something more scholarly and objective, a calm wind above the fray which would speak to a 7 renna fundamental problem that bedeviled italy? who, if anyone, gave the scholar at gaeta the idea to write an attack on the renowned donation of constantine which would at the same time intimate, however circuitously, how to rescue italy from the morass of division and competition? sometime after 1433, valla came upon a version of nicholas of cusa’s catholic concordance, which referred to the donation of constantine. cusa deemed it fraudulent and implausible as a historical document. given valla’s temperament for exposing fakes and his receptiveness for anything hostile to popes and especially eugenius, he was impressed and wished he had written the piece. the cantankerous valla found it hard to resist a confrontation. the insertion of the questioning of the veracity of the donation in the treatise of cusa was a refutation and no more, although he makes a link to the translation of empire. valla gave the passages no more thought at the time. years later (1438?) he considered the implications of the forgery as they applied to his own day. cusa, valla realized, missed the staggering implications for immediate political relevance. but, if valla were to pick up on cusa’s insights, he would have to be careful not to appear to be simply repeating what the master had said, and not to appear to criticize the great theologian/philosopher. and cusa wrote in an academic style not suited to valla’s flair for high-flown rhetoric and dramatic bombast. not that valla ever hesitated to challenge anybody, but one must keep one’s employment opportunities open. alfonso was not immortal, and could fire valla on a whim. the humanist’s enemies at court needed little encouragement to attack him. what did valla make of these stupendous events? the simple answer is that he wrote as a publicist for his royal paymaster. although valla does not mention alfonso in his discourse, there are plenty of indirect allusions,28 as modern scholars have noted. eugenius iv is the bête noire of the treatise because this prelate more than anyone obstructed alfonso’s designs in italy, especially in the areas that were part of the papal states. such an approach to valla’s intention does not, runs this argument, negate the fondness for the humanist’s use of rhetoric and philology. lorenzo’s five straw men yet this pro-alfonso interpretation of the discourse is simplistic. it makes valla a petty cynic and court sycophant, driven by hatred of the pope. valla’s portrayal of papal prerogatives is, admittedly, not always consistent. pope sylvester, the model pontiff, is introduced as denying all possessions; yet later popes in the discourse seem to be legitimate owners of the papal states. the “franciscan” pope sylvester does not always match what valla considers the rightful duties and possessions of later popes, such as eugenius. yet modern historians may have taken valla’s diatribe against eugenius too literally, without realizing, in the opinion of the present author, that this pope was to some extent a “straw man” in the discourse set up to leave room for imperial action from the north. valla’s fulminations against eugenius notwithstanding, it is unlikely that lorenzo valla and the donation of constantine 8 valla judged eugenius the primary cause of all the problems in the church and society. but these violent outbursts against eugenius are in fact rhetorical devices to deflect from valla’s larger goals of promoting concord and justice in italy, with the help of the new emperor. this is not to say that valla’s negative portrayal of the venetian pope was entirely insincere, but only that the latter is also a literary construct which the humanist builds only to demolish. strictly, valla’s straw men are not usually entirely fictitious. “straw man” is here taken to mean an informal fallacy in which the polemicist pretends that the argument he is refuting is in fact the one proposed by his opponent. thus the writer somewhat dishonestly disproves a proposal other than the one he alleges his adversary set forth. in valla’s case it might be more accurate to say that the errors he purports to destroy are only half-straw men, in the sense that valla implies that at least in some way the proposition is valid. but valla exaggerates what he claims the donation of constantine is supposed to be alleging. this use of exaggeration of the detractor’s case is a technique he employs throughout the discourse. accordingly, many of his arguments against the forgery are irrelevant, even trivial, and often strain a point. valla’s heavy resort to sarcasm makes some of his “arguments” appear more like witty remarks than as serious objections to the donation.29 actually there is not one straw man in the discourse but five, all interrelated. the modern reader should be wary of taking valla’s outbursts at face value. 1) pope eugenius iv loudly proclaims the truth of the donation of constantine, and frequently threatens “certain kings and princes as if you [eugenius] were exacting vengeance for a purloined empire.”30 eugenius demands subjection from the emperor, when he has to be crowned, “as well as some other rulers, such as the king of naples and sicily [alfonso v].”31 really? did eugenius—or nicholas v or felix v for that matter— ever make such a demand? indeed, did any supreme pontiff assert such a right during the great schism? is valla misinformed or is he maintaining this papal claim to make eugenius the arch-villain and thus more vulnerable to attack? why does valla overstate eugenius’ policies toward the holy roman emperor and “some”—why “some”?— secular princes? it is amusing to hear valla declare his courage in standing up to eugenius for daring to expose the donation as a forgery!32 he boasts of his fearlessness before the certain punishment which the holy see will impose upon him! but valla was actually very aware that his invective would not threaten his comfortable stay at gaeta and alfonso’s well-guarded entourage on the march. eugenius had plenty of critics at the time, least of which was this italian pen-pusher. there was little risk in lampooning this pope’s ambition and avarice. 2) pope sylvester refused the donation—if such a thing were in fact offered—because he wanted to live the life of the poor christ. thus it was unlikely that so holy a pope would have acceded to such an extraordinary honor.33 valla might have seen the irony of his acceptance of the description of sylvester in the later vita of this pope, a document valla ridicules. the donation, of course, adds that sylvester did in fact refuse the honor, and 9 renna subsequently permitted others to rule in his stead. it is a non sequitur, however, to contend that constantine’s offer of the western empire to the pontiff was somehow invalid because the latter would never have accepted. valla’s praise of this pope’s love of poverty is a not-so-subtle criticism of the prelates in the italy of the 1430s. the prototypical disciple of mammon is eugenius iv, who could never measure up to a francis-like vicar of christ.34 we should not be fooled by valla’s arguments in favor of the poverty of monks and friars in his the profession of the religious, which was written shortly before the discourse.35 this eulogy to the ascetic way of life of the genuine religious (members of religious orders) seems prima facie incompatible with his earlier on pleasure, a work which was widely criticized—probably exactly what he wanted and expected! the profession of the religious reads more like a diatribe on pretentious religious—and religious at alfonso’s court who think of themselves as humanists?—than an apology for mendicant poverty. any reader of the discourse could have inserted eugenius iv as the anti-sylvester, who behaves as if he were an “emperor.”36 but, in point of fact, eugenius never claimed— valla is not consistent here in describing this pope’s temporal assertions—extensive power over the empire or all of italy as the discourse declares.37 the literary-eugenius— more of a topos than a historical figure—is a caricature of the historical pope, who would be quite content just to maintain control of the papal states while keeping at bay the dogs of milan, venice, and naples. valla implies that eugenius wants to abolish the council of basel so he can become the de facto “emperor”38 of the west, or at least have the princes of europe recognize his de iure rights of universal sovereignty. valla misrepresents the nature of eugenius’ disagreements with basel and the major states of italy. (of course, a supporter of eugenius could plausibly argue that it was alfonso v who was the aggressor in the papal states and elsewhere!) he implies that the pope claims the de iure rights of the holy roman emperor. somewhat anachronistically, valla refers to the oath the emperor takes to become emperor of the romans, an oath “by which today’s caesars are bound.”39 perhaps valla borrowed this theme of the pope as the cause of all wars in italy from dante’s de monarchia or, more likely, from marsilius of padua’s defensor pacis. valla simply injected eugenius as the prototype bogus-pontiff, in the manner of the vatican painter who depicted the face of pope sylvester as the contemporary clement vii in the fresco of the donation of constantine.40 valla’s appeal to a primitive church model for the papacy and the clerical church is somewhat incongruous for the 1430s. criticisms of clerical wealth and even calls for clerical dispossession were, to be sure, not unheard-of.41 indeed there were several proposals at the council of basel to conquer and divide the papal states!42 but these plans fall more into the category of territorial greed and political ambition than of wistful dreams of an ecclesia primitiva. such visions of clerics living within their means were lorenzo valla and the donation of constantine 10 much more common in the early fourteenth century.43 many baseleans and eugeneans had more mundane issues to debate, such as the papal annates and reservations of benefices. they were more concerned with fundamental questions of the relative power of pope and general council. although conciliarists sometimes bandied around the idea of the primitive church, they were referring to communal sovereignty and rarely to usus pauper.44 zarabella, panormitanus, john of sevogia, and escobar promoted the pope as rector of the universitas, and not as a francis-like ascetic. the prelates at basel had little interest in such esoteric ideals; the stripping of eugenius of his annates was more of a power-play than a demand that he live the apostolic life. throughout the voluminous debates of the council of basel, german reforms, and papal responses, such idealistic fantasies in the tradition of the spiritual franciscans were less heard. ockham or wyclif would have felt out of place in these learned discussions. the italian powers who distrusted the imperialistic schemes of alfonso and filippo maria would prefer a balance of power to an expanded milan or naples. certainly the borders of the papal states were in flux, and indeed within the papal states there were autonomous lords who lacked farreaching policies. thus valla’s portrayal of eugenius as a tyrant45 who subverted italy makes clever rhetoric but questionable validity as a realistic assessment of actual political arrangements. antipapal readers of valla’s discourse would have found much to smirk about. historians may have made too much of valla’s criticism of eugenius for oppressing rome, bologna, and other places in italy. while valla’s readers might sympathize with his attack on the pope, they would likely not have approved of his ouster from his patrimony. it was not a matter of legal rights, but of practical politics. if alfonso and filippo maria could cut a cynical deal to grab the papal states, then who was safe? for the italian powers the papal states were a useful buffer zone squeezed in by milan, venice, florence, and the regno. certainly many signori grumbled about eugenius’ interference in areas outside his sphere of influence, and his willingness to make foreign entanglements in his search for allies against basel. it was always disconcerting, moreover, to see the vicar of christ acting like a secular prince. at any rate, valla’s fulminations notwithstanding, it is doubtful that many in 1440 would have seen eugenius as the sole or even the principal cause of the disruptions in italy. valla drastically oversimplifies the complexity that was italia. doubtless many saw eugenius as the victim of aggression and not vice versa. the humanist’s satire on papal possessions—that is, the papal states—was good for a laugh, but of little concern to the baseleans. while it is probable that valla was familiar with marsilius of padua’s defensor pacis,46 he knew or should have known that the paduan’s radical assault on papal dominium had little place in the boardrooms of policymakers in 1440. our renaissance humanist perhaps did not realize that the defensor pacis was written at a time (early 1320s) when the franciscan poverty controversy was at its height. critics of pope john xxii exploited the views of both the fraticelli and the 11 renna conventuals to undermine the pope’s position on user pauper and the papal right to abrogate previous papal bulls. 3) popes have always used the donation to prop up their temporal authority. they have always depended on the donation to affirm their rights to the papal states and temporal prerogatives, at least de iure, over all christian princes. clearly not true. innocent iv, expanding upon innocent iii, was in fact the first pope to explicitly claim the fullness of power on the basis of the donation. most fourteenth-century pontiffs gave little attention to the donation, although many papalist and imperialist writers debated its merits. even innocent iv refers to the donation simply as a confirmation of the temporal authority the supreme priest already possesses from peter and christ. james of viterbo, the most extreme of the papal hierocrats, insists that the papal plenitudo potestatis was already held by the successors of peter.47 4) the pontiffs have always compelled emperors to accept the validity of the donation in exchange for crowning the kings of the romans as emperors of the romans.48 popes demanded the donation so they could subjugate rome and italy. with these claims allegedly made by previous popes, valla seems to be only vaguely acquainted with the tradition of canonist-imperialist exchanges concerning the donation since at least the twelfth century. either he is deliberately distorting the literary heritage of the donation disputes, or, more likely, he simply does not know much about the history of how the famous forgery was used by all sides. in fairness to valla it must be acknowledged that there were of course no writings on just such a history. he probably relied on a few canonist and chronicle sources in alfonso’s library and other collections. one suspects that valla’s reading of marsilius’ defensor pacis convinced him that all prior popes had made the outlandish claims mocked by the paduan. valla doubtless realized that a polemical work is not “history” as such, but facts selected to argue a point. but he probably did not care how much of marsilius’ treatise was historically accurate. he resorts to hyperbole because it allows him at a stroke to demolish virtually all papal pretensions to temporal ownership. as a result, his discourse becomes an important document—as valla sees it—since it refutes the donation. the crowning of the german emperors becomes the defining constitutional act of the emperor’s authority. this puts the pope in the enviable position of bestowing authority upon the emperor. valla seems only dimly aware that many imperialist writers for well over a century had maintained that the elected king of the romans possessed full imperial power before the pope crowned him emperor of the romans.49 5) the emperor cannot be a true emperor unless he rules from rome. valla’s portrayal of the city of rome in the discourse is uncharacteristically idealistic. he states repeatedly that the roman emperor must rule from rome.50 thus, it is absurd to think that constantine would have abandoned his capital to the pope, a transferal which would, in lorenzo valla and the donation of constantine 12 effect, make the latter the emperor of the western empire. if the donation were in fact never made, as valla insists, the pontiff has title neither to the western imperium51 nor to the city of rome. rhetorically speaking, the donation deprived the pope of the city, which passes to him only by virtue of the fictitious donatio. and, of course, a good humanist like valla would never miss an opportunity to exalt the glory days of the eternal city. but what can these references to rome mean in the context of the italy of 1440? it is here in his allusions to the city of rome that valla’s own strongly-held views are most clearly revealed. it is here that his language becomes the most virulent. valla, a native of rome, is agitated at rome’s recent misfortunes, which, he concludes, can be reduced to a single cause: pope eugenius iv’s attempts to rule it like a despot. the romans were justified in opposing his return to the city. the citizens of rome should choose the emperor, not the pope.52 the city should be a republic, not the capital of the papal states. in some sense the republic should have a connection with the holy roman empire, which continues to possess de iure authority in italy.53 but it is unlikely that valla had any hope of an imperial army swooping down the alps in pursuit of peace-breakers. yet there is something of the romantic in valla’s eulogy to the republic and his implied appeal to the emperor. valla cannot let go of the “roman” in the holy roman empire. certainly the current pope cannot make such a claim; not even the romans want him in town! surely he cannot fancy himself to be universal, being the fomenter of factions that he is. according to valla’s straw man—the pope’s temporal authority rests entirely on the donation of constantine—papal claims to the fullness of power are founded on a fiction. although valla was hardly an optimist, he had a small hope that if he succeeds in exposing the donation as a fake, there is, at least, a chance that the new emperor, working with the self-interests of the major italian states, can restore some stability in italy. valla, then, utilizes his scholarly endeavor proving the donation a forgery to advance certain themes: the centrality of the city of rome in the holy roman empire and indeed christendom; the false claim of pope eugenius iv to be the universal caretaker of the church militant; the emperor does not derive his power from the pope (this is the theme emphasized by the early critics of valla’s discourse, and also by modern critics, who might sometimes be too little cognizant of the historical context of 1439–40); the pope misuses his temporal power by asserting it beyond the papal states; if the donation falls, so does the pope’s claim to universal temporal potestas; peace in italy is the first priority in europe today, a concern which many baseleans and eugeneans seem to have forgotten; the new emperor in germany has an obligation to look to the troubles in italy. a historic opportunity is here! who but frederick iii is better positioned to ensure the permanence of the union of the two churches? who but frederick is best suited to pacify the bohemians, resolve the papal schism, and harmonize basel and eugenius? the fraudulent donation is an obstacle to achieve these urgent goals. the world is out of whack today because a basic principle of christian history has been forgotten: christian 13 renna society has two universal heads, one spiritual (vicar of christ), one temporal (western emperor). the excessive power of the former and the weakness of the latter must be rectified. lorenzo valla may have reflected: if the donation can be shown to be counterfeit, there is a reasonable chance that the new constantine of the north can bring unity of purpose and common cause to christendom and above all to italia. he will lead a dual crusade: against the infidel and for universal church reform. the pen, not the sword, will cure italy. with this brilliant treatise, my fame as the foremost humanist will surpass that of nicholas of cusa or aeneas sylvius piccolomini! now that i have shown the falsity upon which the holy father bases his claim to rome, the papal states, and elsewhere, he has no moral or legal foundation to expand his “empire” of the patrimony of st peter and meddle in other princes’ affairs. i see that my enemies are trying to reduce my refutation to a single dimension: the papacy’s rights in temporals. they are blind—or pretend to be, since their simplistic interpretation allows them to take the high moral ground by defending the holy see—to my larger aim: persuade the new emperor-elect, frederick, to become more involved in italian affairs, while working to end the papal schism and constrain the enthusiasts at basel. he must forthwith organize the great crusade and reform the church in the german empire. the habsburg should pay less attention to the so-called reformers at basel and pay more attention to us humanists, who are better trained to provide effective moral leadership in these dark days. we, the new elite, know the ancient wisdom best and how to make it relevant right now. the old elite, the “scholastics,” are stuck in outmoded methods and authorities. prudence prohibits me from making pope eugenius the antichrist, and my patron, alfonso v, the savior of italy. but any alert reader will catch my subtext: at this moment in history europe needs a strong emperor who will restrain the wicked and encourage the peacemakers. and to you, frederick: remember, you are more than a habsburg. you are the heir to constantine and charlemagne! with the permission of my king i will gladly come to vienna and offer my humble services as your advisor. now that i have cleared away the main legal obstacle to universal concord and imperial might—the despicable donation of constantine, the last refuge of grasping popes—you, the new caesar, are liberated to pursue your providential role in the land of the imperatores! valla was not so naive as to think of frederick iii as a deus ex machina who would descend into the po valley in the tradition of frederick barbarossa, henry vii, and charles iv, and impose a new ordo. our humanist’s more modest goal was to propose a sort of clearing-house for conflict resolution. the supporters of eugenius and the major powers in italy would come to realize the usefulness of an imperial umbrella which did not threaten the concerns of individual principalities. anything was an improvement on the current free-for-all of competing interests. valla warns the new king of the romans not to become immersed in the issues of ecclesiastical reform in central europe, and in the disputes among the electors. he should seek a balance between the objectives of council and pope. valla intended his discourse to be put to immediate lorenzo valla and the donation of constantine 14 use. this practical motive explains why the work contains asides to contemporary events, including recent or living persons. these mentions are, after all, extraneous to the thesis of the treatise. the only logical person who could stand apart from the political fires burning all over europe and trim the temporal sails of popes and princes would be the roman emperor, who is in some sense still the caput mundi. the expansionist and parochial alfonso would not qualify for anything so grandiose. valla’s discourse is a skillful balance between a defense, if lukewarm, of his royal patron and a summons—almost a program or, better, “general guidelines”—for the untested emperor-elect. can we reconstruct valla’s thought-process prior to writing his attack on the donation? his thinking progressed through six stages: 1) sometime after 1433, valla read a version of nicholas of cusa’s catholic concordance, or at least book 3, chapters 1–4, which deals with the donation and the respective powers of pope and emperor. valla was jealous that he himself had not written a similar deconstruction, since it coincided with his own views of papal temporal power. but valla believed that nicholas put too much emphasis on the pope’s role in choosing and confirming an emperor, and not enough on the pope’s secular authority. valla preferred, however, cusa’s gelasian separation of ultimate spiritual and temporal power for pope and emperor. and he was likewise drawn to the basel-informed parallels between the internal structures of papal and imperial governmental authority. but valla thought cusa was not antipapal enough. 2) valla was disappointed by the apparent powerlessness of contemporary emperors. following his coronation by the pope in rome, sigismund seemed unable to reconcile the baseleans and the eugeneans, or even his electors at home. where was sigismund when the turks were advancing into hungary? why cannot sigismund bring the warring princes and cities in italy to the peace table? albert ii seemed even more helpless. what would it take to entice albert to assert his prerogatives more forcibly? (perhaps valla had a simplistic view of how much political leeway sigismund and albert actually had in responding to the papal schism, the independence of the electors, the impudence of the bohemians, and the turmoil in northern italy.) 3) valla occasionally came across accounts of the debates between the baseleans and the eugeneans. indeed, at alfonso’s court at gaeta, valla may well have participated in these exchanges, which were the talk of europe. valla was attracted to ideas which propounded an effective universal authority. ideas of monarchy were widely circulated, long before the works of antonio roselli.54 perhaps valla came across some of the earlier works of john torquemada or pierre de versailles and was intrigued about the possibilities of how ideas of monarchy could be applied to the empire. there is no reason to think valla’s interest in monarchy was confined only to the immediately practical. 4) valla heard only bad news about his homeland, the city of rome.55 the current pope, 15 renna who was expelled by the romans, is surely the main obstacle to the restoration of the republic in rome. the humanist was not, to be sure, a latter-day cola di rienzo, with visions of the return of yesteryear. valla would be satisfied with good government of the city, with the pontiff’s role reduced to a minimum. the dismissal of the donation, with its claims of papal control of rome, would be a useful first step in this direction. 5) as valla traveled with alfonso during 1437–39, he would have seen the effects of the harmful alliances with and within the papal states. the implications of cusa’s disproving of the donation were apparent: the pope’s hold on the papal states contributed mightily to the woes of italy. voltaire would say that the destruction of the veracity of the old testament would undermine the new testament. valla became convinced that the liquidation of the donation would remove or at least subvert the pope’s possession of the papal states. 6) the incredibly rapid pace of events and turns of fortuna throughout 1439 made valla wonder if the provocations of the wily alfonso v were in the interests of the common good of rome and the peninsula. an effective weapon against the scheming pope and the selfish factions in italy would be a rebuttal of the donation of constantine cast in some persuasive rhetorical frame. the point of the exercise was, after all, to persuade and prod to action, not to engage in classroom dialectic. a lengthy tome with copious footnotes pointing to venerable authorities would not do. much better would be a literary form nicely suited to the tastes of a humanist: a classically-inspired oration presented in the guise of a dramatic courtroom exchange, supercharged with sarcasm and invective. voltaire once said that the most effective kind of polemic is one that makes the reader laugh at your opponent. valla’s choice of literary vehicle could serve a dual purpose: (a) undercut the pope’s temporal authority (read: eugenius iv), while (b) bolstering the universal auctoritas of the one, true lord of temporals, the roman emperor (holy roman emperor, frederick iii, soon to be crowned). what is the basic cause of the runaway potestas of the supreme pontiff, and the lack of power of the emperor? clearly it was the donation of constantine. did valla really believe in such a reductionist view, almost comical in its simplicity? did he exaggerate the importance of a relatively small arrow in the legal quiver of the popes? this is not the right question to ask. more to the point is a literary query: how to compose a refutation of the donation around a commanding central theme? this theme must be negative, eye-catching, relevant, and point to a web of images which appear to be logical spinoffs from the core idea. if the discourse seems at times simplistic, even naive, it is because the two sides of the treatise—the scholarly debunking of a forgery and a polemic intended for the here and now, with intimations for practical action—do not always mesh smoothly. it is too easy to overstate the role of valla’s patron, alfonso, while underestimating another intended audience: other humanists in naples and elsewhere. and the donation was in fact known at the time, if lorenzo valla and the donation of constantine 16 relatively neglected.56 valla got a response to his attack on the document, if not as much as he would have wanted. but after his passing, the discourse attracted more notice, if not for all the reasons he sought. his detractors later in the century tended to single out his assault on the pope’s temporal claims to the neglect of his other strands, such as the proper role of the emperor, as we have seen. the historical context of valla’s discourse was quickly forgotten as each generation utilized it to suit its own purposes—exactly what had happened to the donation for the four centuries before valla! unfortunately, modern historians have too often fallen into the trap of reading the later critics as the voice of valla’s contemporaries. somehow the holy roman emperor got lost in the thrust and parry of valla’s oration. conclusion if lorenzo valla intended to become rich and famous with the circulation of his refutation of the donation of constantine, he would have been disappointed. although renowned as a humanist, more fame was to come. the relative neglect of the treatise at the time may simply have been a lack of interest in the main topic (how pontiffs had originally obtained their temporal power), although snide remarks on pope eugenius would have been popular in some circles. neither was the venerable issue of the translation of empire exactly a lively topic of the day. perhaps valla’s readers took his discourse in the narrowest sense: a proof of the fraudulent nature of the donation and little more. certainly contemporaries were concerned about eugenius’ determination not to loosen his hold on his possessions in italy, but few questioned the right of a pope to his patrimony. valla would have been discouraged if his readers saw in his discourse only a criticism of eugenius in particular and of papal possessions in general. he had other designs, as has been argued in this study. modern scholars, for their part, have not been content to restrict their investigations of the discourse to the literal point-by-point refutation of the donation. they have explored valla’s use of classical citations, rhetoric, philology, classical latin, and literary forms. they have examined his polemic against eugenius iv and recent popes; his attack on papal (and also the clerical church at large) temporals in general (which valla purportedly claims to be founded in the donation); his defense of alfonso v of aragon; his support (at least indirectly) of the council of basel and pope felix v; his implied criticism of scholastic philosophers and theologians (and fellow humanists); his use of late roman legal and historical sources; his knowledge of canon law collections; and his apparent adherence to a notion of a normative primitive church. but in this extensive range of research the place of the frederick iii and the contemporary holy roman empire gets less attention. the current article suggests that valla wrote the discourse in part as a proposal (or recommendation) to the new emperor-elect to be more aggressive in ending the papal schism, finding a compromise between the supporters of eugenius iv and the council of basel, upholding the union with constantinople, mobilizing the west for a crusade against the 17 renna ottomans, restoring the city of rome as a republic (albeit the bishop of rome may stay, if he behaves), and, above all, working to alleviate the out-of-control conflicts in italy. certainly valla was neither reformer (the baseleans were also a means to other ends) nor idealist (except perhaps in his vision of a republican city). he intended the discourse to be, among other things, a sort of open letter to the court at vienna, where the imperial advisors might take note. he did not write the discourse as a mirror of princes for frederick iii. the pope is not (in valla’s belief or, one could argue, in reality) the reprobate he has depicted in the declaration. valla’s larger goal—and here he is in harmony with much of the political thought of the time—was to encourage pope and emperor to cooperate in pursuing common objectives. he cautions the habsburg king not to become overly concerned with the high-sounding theories advanced by baseleans and eugeneans. the intensity of these debates during the 1430s—not just at basel, but in virtually every curia and university in europe!—must have been disconcerting; those who were getting weary of these discussions would have sympathized with valla’s tendency to simplify and close the debates. while the christian princes of europe faced off with each other, the infidels marched, the heretics won converts, and clerical discipline languished. hopes for a grand reconciliation between council and vatican were fading. only the emperor could provide the leadership christendom required in this end of days. valla’s tearing down of the troublemaking forgery is the way out. now is the time to build and to plant.57 in the larger scheme of things, valla’s refutation should be evaluated as a product of the time. it was a response to the peculiar conditions in the west of 1431–40, an era of almost intolerable tension and loss of direction. valla’s discourse should be assessed not simply as a disclaimer of a forged document, or as an exercise of the crafts of the humanists, but as a legacy of the historical tendency to envision italy as an integral part of the holy roman empire. the donation of constantine was still an ingredient, although it had been diminished in papal-imperial controversies since the late fourteenth century. the period 1430–50 was unusually fruitful in the history of political theory. ironically, when the first systematic rebuttal of the donation arrived in 1440, it came as both a denial of papal temporal power and as an affirmation of the potestas of the holy roman emperor. in the absence of effective leadership from basel or rome, it was time to look to vienna. valla’s oration on the donation of constantine was an encomium to the latter-day roman empire, currently under siege. endnotes 1. i will refer to valla’s treatise as the discourse, although it is referred to by various names: “oration” (valla’s own word), “treatise,” “declamatio” (never used in valla’s lifetime; first used by ulrich von hutten), “refutation,” “opusculum.” lorenzo valla and the donation of constantine 18 2. the bibliography is vast. some standard surveys: giovanni maria vian, la donazione di costantino (bologna: il mulino, 2004; new ed. 2010); gerhard laehr, die konstantinische schenkung in der abendländischen literatur des ausgehenden mittelalters in quellen und forschungen aus italienischen archiven und bibliotheken 23 (rome: loescher, 1931–32), 120–81; gerhard laehr, die konstantinische schenkung in der abendländischen literatur des mittelalters bis zum mitte des 14. jahrhunderts, historische studien 166 (berlin: matthiesen verlag, 1926; vaduz: kraus reprint, 1965); mario conetti, l’origine del potere legittimo: spunti polemici contro la donazione di costantino da graziano a lorenzo valla (parma: salvadé, 2004), chaps. 1–4, 5 (council of basel), 6 (valla). 3. a near-consensus points to the time of pope paul i (757–67), although several versions may have circulated. the inclusion of the forgery in the pseudo-isidorian decretals assured its notoriety. a strong case for the 820s has been advanced by johannes fried, donation of constantine and constitutum constantini: the misinterpretation of a fiction and its original meaning (berlin: walter de gruyter, 2007). while many reviewers remain unconvinced by the new dating, the debate continues. see horst fuhrmann, ed., das constitutum constantini, monumenta germaniae historica fontes iuris 10 (hanover: hahnsche buchhandlung, 1968), introduction; fuhrmann, “konstantinische schenkung und abendländische kaisertum. ein beitrag zur überlieferungsgeschichte des constitutum constantini,” deutsches archive für erforschung des mittelalters 22 (1966), 63–178. 4. see domenico maffei, la donazione di costantino nei giuristi medievali (milan: giuffrè, 1969), chap. 1. 5. in general wolfram setz, in his masterful study and edition of valla’s treatise, seems to assume that valla’s contemporaries gave little importance to the donation’s legal and historical significance. setz does not believe valla had much if any political motive in writing his discourse. see lorenzo vallas schrift gegen die konstantinische schenkung: de falso credita et ementita constantini donatione: zur interpretation und wirkungsgeschichte (tübingen: max niemeyer, 1975), chaps. 1 and 3, especially 13–17, 43–75. laehr believes the donation had little relevance at the time of valla; die konstantinische schenkung in der abendlänischen literatur in quellen und forschungen aus italienischen archiven und bibliotheken 23 (rome: loescher, 1932), 120–81, here 166. in the present article i use four editions: wolfram setz, ed., lorenzo valla, de falso credita et ementita constantini donation; mgh: quellen zur geistesgeschichte des mittelalters 10 (weimar: böhlau, 1976); christopher b. coleman, ed. and trans., the treatise of lorenzo valla on the donation of constantine (new haven: yale university 19 renna press, 1922; repr. toronto: university of toronto press, 1993) [unfortunately this edition lacks paragraph numbers]; g. w. bowersock, ed. and trans., lorenzo valla: on the donation of constantine (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2007), facing latin and english; “contra donationis, quae constantini dicitur, privilegium, ut falso creditum declamatio,” eugenio garin, ed., valla: opera omnia (turin: bottega d’erasmo, 1962 repr.), vol. 1, 761–95. 6. according to valla, the donation is the “sole authority those people have” for their claims: g. w. bowersock, trans., lorenzo valla: on the donation of constantine (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2008), 4 (§5); this edition is english only. the pope can depose the emperor on the basis of the donation: 68 (§82). popes use the donation to extort the emperor to grant him lands in the west: 68 (§83). popes rely on the donation because they have no other legal authority: 69 (§84). the crimes of popes ruin italy; their claims stem from this one source: 77 (§96). throughout the discourse valla assumes that the popes rest their claims to italy and the empire on the donation. for convenience, i cite from this bowersock translation. does valla know better, or does he exaggerate the importance of the donation for the pontiffs in order to score rhetorical points? more on this later. 7. some studies: carlo ginzburg, preface, in jean-baptiste giard, trans., lorenzo valla: la donation de constantin (paris: les belles lettres, 1993), x–xxi; vanna gazzola stacchini, “lorenzo valla: la falsa donazione di costantino,” nemla italian studies 17 (1993), 17–26; imre boba, “la ‘donatio constantini’ e l’‘oratio’ del valla a confronto,”angelicum 67 (1990), 215–39; salvatore i. camporeale, lorenzo valla: umanesimo, riforma e controriforma: studi e testi (rome: storia e letteratura, 2002), chap. 4, 465–604; and “lorenzo valla e il de falso credita donatione. retorica, libertà ed ecclesiologia nell ‘400’,” memorie domenicane n.s. 19 (1988), 191–293 [a summary of sorts in journal of the history of ideas 57 (1996), 9–26 in english]; camporeale, lorenzo valla: umanesimo e teologia (florence: istituto nazionale di studi sul rinascimento, 1972), 31–208; franco gaeta, lorenzo valla: filologia e storia nell’umanesimo italiano (naples: istituto italiano per gli studi storici, 1955); joseph a. barber, “lorenzo valla e la critica attributiva: analisi della ‘declamatio’ umanistica contro la ‘donazione di costantino,’” italienisch 16 (1986), 56–66; olga z. pugliese, “the power of the text in humanist culture: valla and the donation of constantine,” scripta mediterranea 12–13 (1991), 157–68; vincenzo de caprio, “retorica e ideologia nella declamatio di lorenzo valla sulla donazione di costantino,” paragone 29 (1978), 36–56. lorenzo valla and the donation of constantine 20 8. setz, lorenzo vallas schrift gegen die konstantinische schenkung, 13; bowersock, donation of constantine, vii. 9. see in particular the valuable studies of riccardo fubini, such as “contestazioni quattrocentesche della donazione di costantino: niccolò cusano, lorenzo valla,” in giorgio bonamente and franca fusco, ed., costantino il grande: dall’antichità all’ umanesimo, 2 vols. (macerata: università degli studi di macerata, 1992), 1: 385–431; also in medioevo e rinascimento 5, n. s. 2 (1991), 19–61; “humanism and truth: valla writes against the donation of constantine,” journal of the history of ideas 57 (1996), 79–86. fubini analyzes the declaration in the context of the conflict between the council of basel and pope eugenius iv. 10. analyses of valla and alfonso v in giovanni antonazzi, lorenzo valla e la polemica sulla donazione di costantino (rome: storia e letteratura, 1985), 49–69, 107–8, 169; mario fois, il pensiero cristiano di lorenzo valla nel quadro storico-culturale del suo ambiente (rome: libreria editrice dell’università gregoriana, 1969), chaps. 4 and 7 (declamatio in the context of alfonso’s policies toward basel and eugenius); conetti, l’origine del potere legittimo, 249–57; setz, lorenzo vallas schrift gegen die konstantinische schenkung, 59–80; alan ryder, alfonso the magnanimous: king of aragon, naples and sicily, 1396–1458 (oxford: oxford university press, 1990), 321–25. valla, who seems to have been out of place at the aragonese court, must have been embarrassed by alfonso v’s abandonment of felix v and subsequent reconciliation with eugenius iv. as the king moved toward peace with eugenius in 1442, his humanist decoration (valla) at the curia must have become a liability. valla, too, may have been disconcerted by alfonso’s unwillingness to reach out to frederick iii. 11. sometimes the descriptions of valla’s discourse seem almost like panegyrics, with little heed to his exaggerations, overstatements, petty asides, sarcasms, ad hominem barbs, irrelevancies, superficial digressions, overblown rhetorical speeches, facile witticisms, meandering arguments, a priori judgments, anticlericism, and hostile tone. my sense is that it was left unrevised. an example of this idealization of valla’s critique is olga z. pugliese, trans., introduction, lorenzo valla: the profession of the religious and selections from the falsely believed and forged donation of constantine, 3rd ed. (toronto: centre for reformation and renaissance studies, 1998), 23–31. online sources for valla and the discourse often idolize the author. see, e.g., “lorenzo valla, discourse on the forgery of the alleged donation of constantine.” 12. valla portrays eugenius iv as the most despicable of popes, akin to dante’s boniface viii. eugenius is a tyrant who despoils cities of their liberty: bowersock, donation, 76 (§94). valla shows his hand—that is, reveals that another purpose is to go beyond the 21 renna academic exercise of exposing a fraud, and comment on his own time in 1440—by targeting the living pope, whose way of life is irrelevant to the subject of the refutation of a text. valla sarcastically appeals to eugenius to behave like his predecessor, sylvester. (ironically, some of the sources valla cites in support of sylvester’s sanctity are those he considers fakes.) by virtue of the donation, eugenius threatens kings and princes: 26 (§33). from a rhetorical point of view, valla’s selection of a single pope, and a living one at that, gives his attack on the donation a center-point and an immediacy. but did valla in 1440 really have such a negative attitude toward eugenius? was valla still nursing this pope’s slight when he denied valla’s request for a curial position in 1434–35? certainly valla had plenty of reasons to dislike eugenius during 1435–40 (in particular his “oppression” of rome), but i think the humanist deliberately overstates his diatribe against this pope. valla was a baselean by default, not by firm conviction. see setz, lorenzo vallas schrift, 70–73; antonazzi, lorenzo valla, 52–53. 13. bowersock, donation, 68 (§83). it is possible that valla was present at the coronation of sigismund in rome on 31 may 1433. valla was then teaching at the university of pavia (1431–33). it is, of course, ridiculous to assert—as does valla—that eugenius compelled sigismund to come to rome and confirm the donation. see roger pearse, “the donation of constantine and the critique of lorenzo valla.” as pearse puts it: “valla’s text is not a modern scholarly study, but a declamation—a piece of rhetoric.” as pearse notes, many of valla’s criticisms are invalid or irrelevant. 14. on sylvester, see donation, 15–26 (§§20–32), 60–62 (§§74–75), 77–79 (§96). on constantine: 7–9 (§§10–12), 11–14 (§§15–18), 27–28 (§34), 65 (§79), 15–21 (§20–27). valla stresses the lack of references to the donation in the later roman empire, including the fictitious acts of sylvester. rhetorically, valla’s quasi-dialogues between constantine and sylvester are the most effective part of his discourse. a critic of valla might object that this lengthy introduction, which focuses on the motives of the two protagonists, is only marginally related to the refutation itself, and “loads the dice” against constantine and the pope (or rather, the popes after sylvester). but that is another matter. why did valla not make constantine a model for alfonso v or frederick iii? one could interpret valla’s qualified praise for imperial expansion under constantine as a curtsey to alfonso, who in 1440 had not as yet captured naples and indeed was mostly on the defensive. constantine’s “expansion” was for valla an oblique message to frederick to assert his imperial rights in his non-habsburg territories and contribute to the stability of italy, once the basel-eugenius conflict was resolved. lorenzo valla and the donation of constantine 22 15. valla seems to think that the counterfeit document was composed sometime between the acts of sylvester and the carolingian kings. for sure, a pope is the culprit; donation, 66 (§81), etc. valla has a vague notion of the history of the earliest decretals of gratian: donation, 88 (§35). but he is unwilling to speculate on a carolingian origin, even though he could have suspected this, given his chronicle sources. like dante, valla confuses leo iii with stephen: 66 (§82). perhaps valla’s hesitancy to assign a late eighth-century date is because (a) he did not want to imply that this pope was corrupt (sylvester the incorruptible in the discourse acts as a foil to the bad popes, especially eugenius), and (b) he did want to get the forgery mixed up with the transfer of empire: 66 (§82). valla does not seem informed as to the nature of the papal-byzantine-frankish entanglements following the coronation of pepin in 751. of course, modern scholars have documents, including canonist, which were not available to valla. see fried, donation of constantine, chaps. 1–3; maffei, donazione, chap. 1; laehr, konstantinische, chap. 1; vian, donazione, chaps. 1 and 2. 16. valla’s letters: ottavio besomi and mariangela regoliosi, eds., laurentii valle epistole (padua: in aedibus antenoreis, 1984); eugenio garin, ed., valla epistole: opera omnia (turin: bottega d’erasmo, 1962) vol. 2, chaps. 6 (353–454) and 7 (455–64). new english translation: brendan cook, trans., lorenzo valla: correspondence (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2013). unfortunately, valla seems to have made few copies of his letters (some 56 extant). his letters at alfonso’s court reveal little of his political views. for his correspondence during 1435–47, see besomi and regoliosi, epistole, 151– 314. for references to alfonso v in valla’s anecdotes on bartolomeo facio, see mariangela regoliosi, ed., laurentii valle antidotum in facium (pavia: in aedibus antenoreis, 1981), xiv–xxviii, xxxv–xxxviii, xlviii–l, 14–26, 54–57, 260–62, 310, 311, and 316–17. valla’s account of ferdinand of antequera (composed 1445–46) discloses little of his broader notions of history, the holy roman empire, or circumstances in italy. the work is valuable for its narration of alfonso in aragon and pre-1435. see jerry h. bentley, politics and culture in renaissance naples (princeton: princeton university press, 1987), 233–41. 17. frederick v, duke of austria since 1424, was elected king of the romans on 2 february 1440 to become frederick iv of germany. pope nicholas v crowned him as frederick iii, emperor of the romans, on 17 june 1442. kept off balance by wars with the swiss and the hussites, as well as his own electors and some baseleans, he contracted an advantageous marriage with the infanta eleanor of portugal. it is hard to know how much valla knew of frederick’s difficulties during 1438–42. i suspect he encouraged alfonso v to think of frederick as a potential ally in italy. 23 renna 18. see the excellent survey by alan ryder, alfonso the magnanimous: king of aragon, naples and sicily, 1396–1458 (oxford: oxford university press, 1990), chap. 6 (1436– 1442). 19. the best synthesis is joachim w. stieber, pope eugenius iv, the council of basel and the secular and ecclesiastical authorities in the empire: the conflict over supreme authority and power in the church (leiden: brill, 1978), part 1, chaps. 4–6. 20. stieber, pope eugenius iv, part 6, 190–202. 21. see joseph gill, the council of florence (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1959), chaps. 3–8. extensive discussion of the theological debates. 22. see stieber, pope eugenius iv, part 5, chaps. 1–3; part 7, chaps. 1–4. alfonso v’s lukewarm support of felix v was a way to pressure filippo maria to oppose genoa and rené of anjou, and to move eugenius to back his claims on naples (in exchange for alfonso’s recognition of eugenius as true pope). alfonso, moreover, would have liked eugenius to recognize his son, ferdinand, as heir to the throne of naples. see ryder, alfonso, 238–42. 23. see brigitte hailer, kaiser friedrich iii. im urteil der zeitgenossen (vienna: verlag des wissenschaftlichen antiquariats h. geyer, 1965); bernd rill, friedrich iii: habsburg europäischer durchbruch (graz: verlag styria, 1987); brian a. pavlac, “frederick iii,” in john m. jeep, ed., medieval germany: an encyclopedia (new york: taylor and francis, 2001), 245–47; s. a. garretson, “frederick iii,” in jonathan w. zophy, ed., the holy roman empire: a dictionary handbook (westport: greenwood, 1980), 149–53; paul j. heinig, kaiser friedrich iii. (1440–1493): hof, regierung and politik (cologne: böhlau, 1997); heinrich h. koller, kaiser friedrich iii (darmstadt: wissenschaftliche buchgesellschaft, 2005); wikipedia articles: “frederick iii” (english) is 6 pages, and “friedrich iii (hrr)” (german) is 28 pages with 8 pages of bibliography. 24. see stieber, pope eugenius iv, part 5, chaps. 1–3. 25. see ryder, alfonso, 241–51. 26. in addition to n. 10 above, see jerry h. bentley, politics and culture in renaissance naples (n. 16 above), 108–22, 233–38, passim. stimulating treatment of the interplay of humanist culture at court and of political thought and policy. as was his penchant, valla got into many angry disputes with other scholars at the royal curia, e.g., with bartolomeo lorenzo valla and the donation of constantine 24 facio (bentley, 100–8). alfonso may have had several quasi-official historiographers, one of whom was valla, who wrote about the early career of his patron. 27. valla calls vitelleschi a “depraved monster”: donation, 70 (§86). no doubt this is a reference to his treatment of the romans. see ryder, alfonso, 215–27. vitelleschi, the commander of the papal forces, was notorious for the atrocities he committed after he entered rome. after massacring the troops of the prince of taranto, pope eugenius rewarded him with a cardinal’s hat! when his co-captain refused to send aid, vitelleschi, the patriarch of alexandria, jumped in a small boat and ignominiously sailed off to venice. surely these events contributed to valla’s declining faith in “local” saviors to restore freedom and peace to rome and italy. what happened to the great vitelleschi could happen to the king of aragon. 28. the only direct reference is to the “king of naples and sicily”: donation, 26 (§33). the two acceptable reasons for making war could be an oblique reference to alfonso: 71 (§88). the coming of new nations to rome could be a roundabout way of justifying the newcomer alfonso: 72–73 (§89). alfonso seems to restore the lands tyrannized by eugenius: 78–79 (§96). the many references to the oppressive pope could be interpreted as justifying the presence of the liberator alfonso in italy. see n. 10 above, particularly the analyses of antonazzi and fois. my problem with this valla-wrote-for-alfonso argument is that valla passes up many opportunities for promoting his patron. the wikipedia article on valla (modified 9/10/2013) declares categorically that “valla was motivated to reveal the donation of constantine as a fraud by his patron of the time, alfonso of aragon, who was involved in a territorial conflict with the papal states, then under eugene iv.” indeed we are told that alfonso asked valla to write the discourse! this wiki article contains many nonsensical simplifications. 29. see the studies of boba, gaita, barber, de caprio, and camporeale in n. 7 above. 30. donation, 26 (§33). 31. ibid. 32. donation, 1–4 (§§1–4), 77–78 (§96). 33. see especially sylvester’s speech to constantine: donation, 15–21 (§§21–26). 34. maria c. pastore passaro argues that valla introduced a sort of “playful theology” in his view of nature: “lorenzo valla’s franciscan vision,” forum italicum: a journal of italian studies 46 (2012), 164–68. i suspect that at the time readers saw valla’s de 25 renna voluptate (1433 and 1445) as blatantly epicurean: valla, on pleasure, trans. a. kent hieatt and marstella lorch (new york: abaris, 1977). 35. valla, the profession of the religious and selections from the falsely-believed and forged donation of constantine, trans. and intro. by olga z. pugliese, 3rd ed. (toronto: centre for reformation and renaissance studies, 1998), especially chaps. 4 and 10. text: mariarosa cortesi, ed., laurentii valle de professione religiosorum (pavia: in aedibus antenoreis, 1986), 17–22, 50–55; garin, ed., opera omnia 2, chap. 4. valla’s praise of the “true” religious is hardly an endorsement of franciscan poverty and ascetic life. he is more interested in deriding the friar’s claim to the title of religious than in defending the way of poverty. see fois, il pensiero cristiano di lorenzo valla, chap. 6; louis b. pascoe, “gerson and the donation of constantine: growth and development within the church,” viator 5 (1974), 469–85. 36. sylvester loudly proclaims that he could never be a temporal king or ruler of any kind: donation, 15–21 (§§21–26). the pope claims to be an emperor: 68–69 (§84). recent popes act as if they were emperors: 76–80 (§§94–97). 37. modern scholars seem not to have noticed the absurdity of valla’s charge that all the wars and destruction in italy are due solely to eugenius iv. and indeed these wars of papal aggression can all be traced to the donation: 76–80 (§§94–97). 38. the pope is the vicar of christ, not the emperor: 80 (§97). 39. donation, 69 (§84). 40. it is an indication of the longevity of the donation of constantine at the papal curia that a painting of the event was commissioned for the vatican. perhaps leo x’s motive was to counter luther or the incursions on the papal states. the work was begun in 1520 but after raphael’s death one his students (penni or romano) painted the face of the new pope, clement vii (1523–34), following adrian vi, on the head of sylvester. the fresco is in the stanze di raffaello in the apostolic palace in the hall of constantine, and can be seen on the vatican website. such substitutions were not uncommon. in 1514 raphael replaced the head of julius ii with that of leo x (1513–21) for the image of leo i at the meeting of the latter and attila the hun. 41. see a. j. black, monarchy and community: political ideas in the later conciliar controversy 1430–1450 (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1970), chap. 3, and lorenzo valla and the donation of constantine 26 council and commune: the conciliar movement and the fifteenth-century heritage (london: burns and oates, 1979), chaps. 2–7; stieber, pope eugenius iv, part 1. 42. in a backroom deal, alfonso and filippo maria conspired to partition the papal states between aragon and milan! rome and all lands south of the apennines were to go to alfonso; the visconti would occupy rome, bologna, and the romagna. see ryder, alfonso the magnanimous, 215. it was no secret that the aragonese and milanese delegations met frequently at the council of basel—adding to eugenius’ distrust of the council. while pontedora’s entry into rome in 1436 might have been welcomed by valla, he surely realized that the proposed partition would lead to unending war over the boundaries of the papal states. the proposal came to nothing when vitelleschi made a pre-emptive foray into the abruzzi and defeated the aragonese forces. this and other aborted arrangements to divide the papal states must have convinced valla that aragonese victories were mixed blessings for italy and rome. only an outsider with a fresh perspective like the emperor frederick iii had any hope of restoring glory or, at least, a semblance of order to italy. 43. the poverty controversy evolved from the mendicant disputes in the universities to the “poor use” of the 1280s to the council of vienne to the intense exchanges in 1323–28. the bibliography is immense. a good introduction is malcolm d. lambert, franciscan poverty: the doctrine of absolute poverty of christ and the apostles in the franciscan order, 1210–1323, rev. ed. (st. bonaventure: franciscan institute, 1998), chaps. 6–10. the general council was never an issue—until marsilius. 44. see a. j. black, monarchy and community, chap. 1; black, council and commune, chaps. 2–7. 45. valla often calls eugenius a tyrant, e. g., donation, 73 (§89). recent popes are tyrants, such as boniface ix and innocent vii: 75 (§94). 46. see antonazzi, lorenzo valla, 39–40, 77–78, 107–8; setz, lorenzo vallas schrift, 64, 182 [n. 5 above]; robert black, “the donation of constantine: a new source for the concept of the renaissance?” in alison brown, ed., language and images of renaissance italy (oxford: oxford university press, 1995), 51–85, here 71; paul e. sigmund, “the influence of marsilius on fifteenth-century conciliarism,” political studies 23 (1962), 392–402. 47. see r. w. dyson, ed. and trans., james of viterbo: de regimine christiano (leidenboston: brill, 2009), part 2, chaps. 8 and 10. 27 renna 48. donation, 68 (§83). this theme continues throughout §§84–97. 49. a prominent and influential exponent of this view was lupold von bebenburg. see jürgen miethke, ed., alexander sauter, trans., lupold von bebenburg: de iuribus regno et imperii/über die rechte von kaiser und reich (munich: beck, 2005), chaps. 2, 3, 9, 18, and 19. it is possible that valla had a vague idea of the king of the romans having imperial power from his acquaintance with nicholas of cusa’s catholic concordance, part 3. 50. donation, 5 (§6), 15 (§21), 67 (§82), 68 (§83), 73 (§89). 51. valla seems to be aware of the multiple meanings of imperium during the late republic and early empire. see john richardson, the language of empire: rome and the idea of empire from the third century bc to the second century ad (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2008), chaps. 3 and 4. i prefer to translate valla’s imperium as “empire” as does coleman: treatise of lorenzo valla on the donation of constantine, 107. bowersock renders imperator as “commander,” which is technically accurate in this context, but may obscure valla’s intent: on the donation of constantine, 43 (§50); 87 (§50) in bowersock’s latin/english edition (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2007). 52. donation, 11 (§16), 68–69 (§§83–84). 53. in cusa’s catholic concordance, which valla read, the empire has a close connection with the church in italy. see paul e. sigmund, nicholas of cusa and medieval political thought (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1963), chap. 8. although valla got into trouble for criticizing bartolus of sassoferrato, he would have concurred with the great jurist’s adherence to the de iure rights of the emperor in italy. see also joseph canning, the political thought of baldus de ubaldis (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1987), 64–68. 54. see works cited in n. 41 above. for john torquemada and the donation see thomas m. izbicki, protector of the faith: cardinal johannes de turrecremata and the defense of the institutional church (washington: catholic university of america press, 1981), 113 and 117. 55. see n. 50 above. 56. see r. black, “the donation of constantine,” 70–85 (n. 46 above); antonazzi, lorenzo valla e la polemica sulla donazione di costantino, 121–310 (n. 10 above); fois, il lorenzo valla and the donation of constantine 28 pensiero cristiano di lorenzo valla, 324–45 (n. 10 above); vian, donazione di costantino, chaps. 4 and 5 (n. 2 above). 57. jeremiah 1: 10, one of pope innocent iii’s favorite biblical passages. microsoft word mazlish final.docx [expositions 8.1 (2014) 61–63] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 big history bruce mazlish massachusetts institute of technology, emeritus many years ago, when i first started teaching, one of my courses was the “history of western civilization” (this was before “eurocentrism” became a pejorative term). i began by going to the far left of the long blackboard and drawing a line to the far right. i then informed the class that western civilization occupied the dot at the end of the line, which represented the 13.8 million years since the big bang. perhaps unknowingly i was practicing big history avant la lettre. at about this time, i was also engaged in reading some of the books by sir james jeans and by arthur eddington, outstanding astrophysicists at the time. they speculated on the history of the universe since the big bang. thus the practitioners of big history seemed to be cosmologists rather than historians. recently this situation has changed. led by david christian, a cohort of historians has taken up the idea. a sign of their significance is the appearance of a textbook, big history: between nothing and everything (2013), by david christian, cynthia stokes brown, and craig benjamin. when a subfield of history creates a textbook, academics know that the subject has arrived. it is a beautiful volume, filled with attractive illustrations, charts, and graphs. my intent, however, is not to review the book but to engage in reflections on the general subject. perhaps it has been the step out into space, and a landing on the moon, that has fueled the interest in big history. we see ourselves now as one with the universe. historians must now tell us about that past—our past. to help do so, another book can usefully be placed alongside of christian’s. it is called deep history: the architecture of past and present (2011), and is the work of many authors, though andrew shryock and daniel lord smail are the leading figures (2011). a critical chapter in their book is the last one, on scale. both big history and deep history seek to answer “the big questions of what it means to be human” (shryock and smail 2011, x). their starting point is in interstellar space. the point at the end of the blackboard is when the j-shaped curve of humanity suddenly leaps upward. it is the period most historians label as “modernity.” christian breaks it into two parts. he remarks, “the period from 1350 to 1700 ce witnessed the most momentous expansion in exchange networks in the entire history of humanity. this is when humans became, for the first time, a truly global species, as societies in all the world zones were stitched into a single network of exchange” (christian et al. 2013, 229). and here, i believe, is where the deficiencies of big and deep history arise. having spoken eloquently of the roughly 13.8 billion years before the modern period, they stop asking questions about the present. for it is in this period that the rise to dominance of the scientific method begins, and displaces the religious attitude. this fact also points to their neglect of religions in their accounts. 35,000–40,000 years ago, when cro-magnon man emerges, the attempt to big history 62 understand the cosmos gives rise to various religions. in the process priesthoods were created. big history puts forth two major hypotheses: that homo sapiens is the species that not only adapts to its environment, but changes that environment drastically and increasingly; and, that evolutionary change tends toward complexity. the first hypothesis is supported by the history of technology, and the second by prolonged observation. christian et al. know this, but fail to think through its implications. after all, it is this development that allows them to “think scientifically” about big history. for it is in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, mainly in western europe, that the so-called scientific revolution occurs. it is this revolution that allows christian to think and work as he does. what is neglected is the increasing consciousness, self-consciousness, and historical consciousness that begins to surround humanity. for this, one does well to turn to hegel. responding to aristotle’s imperative, to “know thyself,” hegel deepens our understanding of self. it is worth quoting him at length. in his philosophy of history (1837), he states that, now this is freedom, exactly. for if i am dependent, my being is referred to something else which i am not; i cannot exist independently of something external. i am free, on the contrary, when my existence depends upon myself. this self-contained existence of spirit is none other than self-consciousness— consciousness of one’s own being. two things must be distinguished in consciousness; first, the fact that i know; secondly, what i know. in self consciousness these are merged in one. (hegel 1900 [1837], 12) thus, it is a new self that is able to go on and do big and deep history, a development that tends to be overlooked by their practitioners. i make my arguments at greater length in a chapter of my recently published book, reflections on the modern and the global (2013). it is the tiny dot at the end of the blackboard. it assumes the theories of evolution put forth by charles darwin. it also allows for the emerging globalization now being experienced by the human species. globalization involves increased interconnection along with a compression of space and time. this, in turn, promotes a sense of one humanity, even though existing in diverse cultures. the arguments as to why this must continue are made at great length by martha c. e. van der bly in her article, “pananthropoi—towards a society of all humanity” (2013). it is this human self that combines with its technological expression and is behind the discovery and use of the telescope and the microscope, which fosters a vision of the near and the far, the small and the large. (i have gone into great length on the role of technology in my book, the fourth discontinuity: the co-evolution of man and machines (1993)). it is the telescope that has opened up the heavens and allows for big history. christian’s is a big book. with the structure of big history: from the big bang until today (1996), fred spier tried to deal with the same subject in 113 pages (1996). like christian’s, his is an attempt to transcend eurocentrism and to encourage what has come to be known as world history. (christian had published at least two articles in jerry bentley’s journal, the journal of 63 mazlish world history.) it is, of course, quite a feat to cover over 3.8 billion years in just over 100 pages. i must refer the reader to my review of spier’s book, along with that of jared diamond’s guns, germs, and steel: the fates of human societies (1997) (mazlish 1999). can we come to any conclusions on the subject? i will attempt to do so in the form of a few questions. has the reaction to eurocentrism gone too far? after all, it was in the west that the modern scientific method was most strongly promulgated and propelled (this does not mean we should neglect other areas and times when science flourished, such as in china and the middle east). does the embrace of big history mean the rejection of “little history”? surely, this is a rhetorical question. would it not be well to end our discussion with an invocation of mao’s “let a hundred flowers bloom”? only we mean it. there is no reason why numerous sub-fields of history cannot co-exist. big history can be big enough to recognize other approaches, and small history ecumenical enough to welcome it. history, following herodotus, literally means “inquiry.” such inquiry arose in fifth-century athens as part of the initiative to understand both natural and human phenomena. it is a notable way of thinking, united today in the pursuit of both big and little history. works cited christian, david, cynthia stokes brown, and craig benjamin. 2013. big history: between nothing and everything. princeton: mcgraw-hill. hegel, georg wilhelm friedrich. 1900 [1837]. the philosophy of history, revised edition. translated by j. sibree. new york: the colonial press. mazlish, bruce. 1993. the fourth discontinuity: the co-evolution of man and machines. new haven: yale university press. –––. 2013. reflections on the modern and the global. piscataway, nj: transaction publishers. –––. 1999. “big questions? big history?” history and theory 38.2: 232–248. shryock, andrew and daniel lord smail. 2011. deep history: the architecture of past and present. berkeley: university of california press. spier, fred. 1996. the structure of big history: from the big bang until today. amsterdam, netherlands: amsterdam university press. van der bly, martha c. e. 2013. “pananthropoi—towards a society of all humanity.” globality studies journal 37 (september 8). microsoft word forbes final.docx [expositions 9.2 (2015) 16–34] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 sovereign poetics: from exception to apocrypha erin forbes university of wyoming abstract this essay suggests an aesthetic solution to the problem of foundation in carl schmitt’s political theology by reading that work in relation to the old english poem judith. this is an essay that analyzes the dynamics of beginnings (those that are overt and locatable together with those that are concealed and irrecoverable). i myself begin by asking what might be gained by reading the old english poem judith, whose own beginning has gone missing, as a prelude to political philosopher carl schmitt’s political theology: four chapters on the concept of sovereignty. political theology is a text whose famous opening hovers suggestively between gnomic aphorism and clear definition: “sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”1 unlikely as the pairing of judith and political theology might at first seem, i argue that this juxtaposition helps us think through the problem of what kathleen davis, following schmitt, has described as the “absent foundation of sovereignty.”2 ultimately, i propose that the philosophical problem that schmitt’s theorization of the sovereign exception poses has an aesthetic solution in the fragmentary judith. although his theories of political life have been influential to both conservative and radical thinkers in recent decades, it remains the case that schmitt is most often remembered for his association with hitler’s totalitarian regime. yet schmitt objected to constitutional politics throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries because of their pretense to organic totality, not because of their failures of authority. specifically, schmitt critiqued liberalism’s failure to acknowledge any “outside” to itself. as richard wolin explains, throughout his career schmitt “is concerned with demonstrating the impossibility of understanding the legal order in exclusively rationalist terms.”3 or, as seyla benhabib, puts it, schmitt “drove home the rationalist fallacies of liberalism until its ‘limit concepts’—die grenzbegriffe—were uncovered. these limit concepts, in schmitt’s view, constituted the secret and unthought foundations on which the structure of the modern state rested.”4 sovereignty is one of liberalism’s “limit concepts,” to which there can, and indeed must, always be an “exception.” “modern” politics, schmitt argued, has a structural and historical connection to its theological past, hence “political theology.”5 17 forbes a complex and disquieting tension between the concrete and the abstract is therefore essential to the functioning of sovereignty: the foundation of this authority is necessarily tenuous, even otherworldly. the opening line of political theology calls immediate attention to this aporia. political theology helped establish schmitt as “as one of the most trenchant critics of the liberal democratic project,” and throughout schmitt repudiates the vagueness and abstraction that characterize liberalism.6 against his predecessors, he insists on discussing sovereignty in its “concrete application”—that is, in terms of “who decides in a situation of conflict what constitutes the public interest or interest of the state.”7 as antonio negri explains, for schmitt the decision stands as “the maximum of factuality.”8 at the same time, however, both the definition of sovereignty, as well as specific examples of sovereignty or particular instances of decision or exception, are markedly absent from his analysis. matter-of-fact as political theology is, concerned as it is with “actual interests,” the only way that schmitt attempts to represent sovereignty, exception, or decision is via his own distinctive mode of descriptive analysis. schmitt’s rhetoric manages to be at once methodical, dry, phlegmatic, and, at the same time, provocative, ambiguous, disquieting. utterly nonrepresentational, political theology offers few examples, no anecdotes, and no stories—it offers, in short, no particularity. the question of how a sovereign decision on the exception might be represented or particularized proves a tantalizing challenge. though it is itself ungrounded and unbounded, sovereignty, via a decision on the exception, enables all foundations and boundaries. schmitt explains, “there exists no norm that is applicable to chaos. for a legal order to make sense, a normal situation must exist, and he is sovereign who definitely decides whether this normal situation actually exists.”9 the only thing “applicable” to chaos, capable of reining it in and providing workable norms, is the sovereign decision. schmitt moreover makes it clear that he does not restrict his discussion to legal order, but insists that it is applicable to any order: “like every other order, the legal order rests on a decision and not on a norm.”10 how would one produce a sufficient representation of that which, by definition, exceeds (and indeed precedes) any norm, code, or expectation? historical “examples” of sovereign decision(s) on exception are unsound as representations of the concepts and processes schmitt describes, because their essentially normalizing effect instantaneously disallows the possibility of access to the radical ground from which they arose. it may be that any adequate representation of sovereignty, exception, and/or decision must, in fact, be the thing itself, and hence not a representation at all. nevertheless, i want to press the question, and challenge this seeming-impossibility of representing sovereignty, exception and decision by juxtaposing an archaic and religious poetic mode to schmitt’s mode of descriptive analysis.11 the unknown old english poet’s judith—a figure who, taking action as an individual, saves her city and its inhabitants from almost certain destruction by acting out of accord with all precedent and convention—in certain ways fulfills schmitt’s definition of the sovereign. at the sovereign poetics: from exception to apocrypha 18 same time, reading judith in relation to schmitt helps resolve some problems with his theorization of sovereignty, problems that have been explored by a range of thinkers, including walter benjamin, karl löwith, hannah arendt, and, more recently, antonio negri. as davis explains, benjamin’s work “returns us to the paradox of the sovereign decision, which must be made—and can only be made—in the face of its own undecidability: technically, representation is impossible.”12 therefore rather than reading judith as a narrative representation of schmitt’s sovereign decision, i argue instead that reading judith next to, or, rather, reading judith before schmitt—as a poetic epigraph or preamble to political theology—offers one way of responding to the challenges presented by schmitt’s presentation of sovereignty as the ungrounded means by which authority grounds itself. both rhetorically and from a theoretical perspective, the problem of sovereignty writ large is a problem of foundation, of beginnings. from a conceptual standpoint, the question of how authority is grounded—of where authority comes from—is the essential question of sovereignty. looked at as a challenge to representation, the rhetorical question becomes how to proceed in the task of representing the inherently unexpected (and, indeed, unexpectable) triad of exception, decision, and sovereign power. how, in short, might such a representation successfully begin—what would be the first steps toward building such a representation? and how might it introduce itself, or make its approach to its audience? in addressing the rhetorical side of this problem, it is useful to pause over the interpretive question of how beginnings influence or compel certain interpretations of what follows from them. consider, for instance, the quintessential beginning in the western tradition: genesis. in his modern translation, robert alter renders its initial line as “when god began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste;” whereas than the more familiar king james begins, “in the beginning god created the heaven and the earth.”13 the king james translation brings god and creation out of nowhere, and so offers a concrete, definitive sense of beginning—a perfect beginning, complete in itself. alter’s translation, on the other hand, situates creation within an existing course of events. “when god began to create” suggests not only that god may well have been doing something else just before, but also that creation itself was a process, a process that started at a certain point, and proceeded along temporal lines. alter’s opening sentence further disturbs the idea of a truly decisive beginning by immediately suggesting the existence of something prior to creation: “the earth was then welter and waste” (my emphasis). king james conveys something similar with “and the earth was without form, and void,” but subordinates this information in a second sentence, and without the temporally ambiguous “then.” from these two beginnings, then, we can plausibly infer that alter’s version sets up a text that concerns itself with the worldly, the temporal, and perhaps even the everyday, while the king james translation asks for a reading that focuses on ethereal matters—perfection, and finality. and indeed these varying 19 forbes emphases are precisely what distinguish these two translations. in both translations, genesis grapples with how to begin from nowhere—with a sovereign beginning. king james occludes the unknown antecedent that alter’s translation gestures at, though it gestures at it precisely as something that is hidden. neither opening offers any suggestion as to what might have come before and enabled the beginning. but where king james marks beginning with the definite article: “in the beginning,” alter’s version welcomes the prospect of hazy origin, embracing it with a construction that suggests a progression from an unknown to the time “when god began to create.” addressing the theoretical side of the problem—the question of how authority establishes itself—negri posits a distinction between a radical “constituent power” and an institutionalized “constituted power.” he praises schmitt for articulating the profoundly unstable nature of constituent power in his theorization of sovereignty, but argues that schmitt ultimately “gets entrapped in the irrational overdetermination of the conception of sovereignty.”14 schmitt negotiates the paradox of the ungroundedness of established authority “by predisposing the sovereign decision to the state.”15 as davis explains, “negri grapples with schmitt as he attempts to theorize the possibility of a radically democratic ‘constituent power’ that is never closed down by, or recuperated as, ‘constituted power.’ he wishes, in other words, to develop an understanding of power that suspends law without turning into yet another foundation for law.”16 for schmitt, sovereign power is the route via which the state grounds and re-grounds itself, and this link to the state renders a decision on the exception “not a ‘decision’ at all in his own terms, and this is the most potent critique of schmitt.” constituent power, by contrast, is: an act of choice, the precise determination that opens a horizon, the radical apparatus of something that does not yet exist, and whose conditions of existence imply that the creative act does not lose its characteristics in the act of creating. when constituent power sets in motion the constituent process, every determination is free and remains free. on the contrary, sovereignty presents itself as a fixing of constituent power, and therefore as its termination, as the exhaustion of the freedom that constituent power carries[.]17 in contrast to schmitt’s desire for definitiveness, negri embraces the hazy conception of beginning and the radical possibilities that it enables. in political theology, schmitt identifies this notion of origin conceptually, even as he resists it rhetorically. by working through these approaches to beginning as differences between what i will term an ungrounded poetics of apocrypha—hidden and in some ways suspect writing that nevertheless remains a cultural force—and a poetics of exception, which actively seeks a solid foundation, i argue that the fluid content of political theology ultimately unravels schmitt’s apparent intransigence. despite the apparent rigidity of schmitt’s rhetoric, his thought opens onto a politics sovereign poetics: from exception to apocrypha 20 (and, finally, a theology) that is more supple and capacious than it is than autocratic and exclusionary. the rhetoric of schmitt’s opening salvo thus has important implications for the theory he outlines, while the lacuna with which the old english judith begins enables a more successful confrontation with the material ground of authority than does schmitt’s foundationlaying beginning. throughout political theology, schmitt attempts nothing other (and nothing less) than an explication of this initial pronouncement: “sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” on the one hand, this mode of beginning succeeds in proffering an incisive and pithy “definition of the sovereign,” as the chapter heading promises. at the same time, however, this beginning does little more than set up the three questions that schmitt will address in the rest of the chapter, and build on in the remainder of the book. (who is sovereign? what is a decision? and what constitutes an exception?) this initial statement, then, stands as a cornerstone to the work as a whole. at the same time, however, the definition is self-referential and consequently fails to, in itself and by itself, actually say anything. it proves a troubled foundation precisely because of its apparent precision. this tension in schmitt’s beginning, between a desire for a solid foundation and a persistent vacuity, has implications for the work of political theology as a whole. the entirety of political theology demonstrates the same careful rhetorical choices that characterize its opening line. schmitt builds systematically toward his central claim that the category of the political functions according to the logic of theology, and that we must recognize an indissoluble structural link between the two. the eponymous third chapter of political theology begins with the most urgent foundational assertion of the book: “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent god became the omnipotent lawgiver—but also because of their systematic structure.”18 despite his emphasis on the enduring nature of this connection, schmitt’s method is nonetheless more etiological than transcendent, focusing on the growth and development of politics out of theology. working backwards from twentieth-century germany, via history and philosophy, schmitt endeavors to theorize the origins of the modern state in the workings of theology. rather than drawing out and extrapolating interpretations from a particular beginning (as with the textual example of genesis), schmitt instead works backwards to infer and argue for a particular beginning on the basis of what has, on his view, culminated in the present moment—on the basis, in other words, of the conclusion. what motivates schmitt to work from within what is arguably a formal, textual, even literary rubric in order to reconstruct and locate what are essentially lost beginnings? and how does he proceed in this endeavor: what rhetorical tools are needed to narrate this kind of conclusion-driven “beginning,” and what are the implications of such a method for schmitt’s larger project? 21 forbes a more diffuse form of foundationalism undergirds political theology and edges the work toward paradox. as schmitt works through the pivotal “political theology” chapter, he continually stresses that “the ‘omnipotence’ of the lawgiver, of which one reads in every textbook on public law, is not only linguistically derived from theology,” but also shares the same logical structure as theology.19 schmitt implicitly concedes that politics and theology do indeed appear different, but argues that every one of the “significant” concepts of the juridical, modern democratic state operates according to this theological logic. the metamorphosis schmitt describes is therefore superficial, and theology’s new political incarnation would seem entirely immaterial to its content. the clothes have changed but the body remains the same. like god in genesis, giving form to chaos, schmitt asserts that theology has from the very beginning given shape and structure to what modern society calls “politics” (shape and structure that is for schmitt not “only” linguistic but also metaphysical and ontological). given schmitt’s sense of the superficiality of the shift from theology to politics, and the abiding fact of politics’ deep connection to theology, it comes as no surprise when schmitt asserts in no uncertain terms that: whoever takes the trouble of examining the public law literature of positive jurisprudence for its basic concepts and arguments will see that the state intervenes everywhere […] there always exists the same inexplicable identity: lawgiver, executive power, police, pardoner, welfare institution. thus to an observer who takes the trouble to look at the total picture of contemporary jurisprudence, there appears a huge cloak-and-dagger drama, in which the state acts in many disguises but always as the same invisible person. this situation is inescapable. theology’s structural influence inevitably overcomes what schmitt sees as modern jurisprudence’s pretension to self-sufficiency. yet schmitt’s insistence that the modern state is powerless to change the fundamental operations of political life (/theology) does not diminish the urgency of his description. his choice of the figure of the “cloak-and-dagger drama,” and repeated descriptions of spatial ubiquity and temporal persistence (“intervenes everywhere,” “always exists,” “acts […] always as the same”) all work toward the sense of exigency that political theology cultivates. so too does his all-encompassing list, “lawgiver, executive power, police, pardoner, welfare institution,” raise the alarm. while the pressing nature of schmitt’s concern may be apparent, it is less far less clear what schmitt hopes to effect by uncovering the submerged originary link between modern politics and theology.20 as we can see in the quotation above, the rhetoric of political theology implies and assumes that the intimate relation between politics and theology needs to be brought out into the open rather than “cloaked” and “disguised.” if the same engine inevitably drives modern politics sovereign poetics: from exception to apocrypha 22 and theology, what does schmitt hope to effect by unmasking the theological underpinnings of the modern state? a brief look at the concept of the political (1932) helps answer this question. here, schmitt offers another gnomic opening: “the concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political.”21 in his response to this text, “notes on the concept of the political,” leo strauss asks: “against what opponent does the political emerge as the basis of the state?”22 where my reading of political theology wonders what is at stake in uncovering the relationship between politics and theology, strauss’s reading of the concept of the political raises the related question of why schmitt feels compelled to argue for politics as the basis of the state. what is at stake in arguing that the political is the state’s necessary ontological precursor? who or what does schmitt feel is challenging this conception of the state? strauss goes on to explicate schmitt’s text as a polemic against liberalism, defined here as the failed attempt to “bring about the foundation of the state or, more accurately, the establishment social relations” through a neutralization and negation of the political.23 strauss goes on: the circumstances of this failure are as follows: liberalism negated the political; yet liberalism has not thereby eliminated the political from the face of the earth but only has hidden it; liberalism has led to politics’ being engaged in by means of an antipolitical mode of discourse. liberalism has thus killed not the political but only understanding of the political, sincerity regarding the political (65 ff.). in order to remove the smokescreen over reality that liberalism produces, the political must be made apparent as such and as simply undeniable. the political must first be brought out of the concealment into which liberalism has cast it, so that the question of the state can be seriously put.24 thus strauss suggests that schmitt’s project is a ground-clearing one that aims to precede and enable a “serious” posing of the question of the state. put this way, the aim of schmitt’s project begins to sound like the logic of sovereignty itself: a determination that a crisis point has been reached, and a decision to begin again. in much the same way, political theology’s attempt to enable a “sincere,” serious posing of the question of sovereignty relies on recognition that the concept of the political presupposes the theological, rather than allowing theology to continue working “undercover.” thus, for schmitt, the problem of sovereignty folds back upon itself with the realization that there is finally no “significant” difference between the posing of the question of theology and the posing of the question of sovereignty. a clear vision of politics facilitates a greater proximity to (because fuller understanding of) god. brought to its logical conclusion, however, the vision of theology that this 23 forbes unmasking uncovers is one in which order is enabled by an individual decision on a collective situation of crisis, a universal disorder. the individual is paramount here, but so too is the tenuousness of foundation upon which, for schmitt, even theology itself rests. on the one hand, schmitt wants to emphasize that the sovereign decision is made on the basis of some state of affairs: it does not emerge from nowhere. at the same time, however, he wants a beginning that is definitive, unquestionable, and solid—a “true” beginning on the order of king james. this tension remains unresolved, manifesting itself as what we might think of as a poetics of exception, a rhetorical mode that insists on (and manifests itself via) that which is definitive and concrete, even as it reveals the ineluctability of tenuousness and abstraction. a reading of schmitt therefore benefits from a shift of focus: from exception to what we might think of as a poetics of apocrypha. the word “apocrypha” derives the late latin adjective apocryphus, used to describe those writings that were “hidden,” “of unknown authorship” and therefore potentially “spurious.”25 such writing could be said to haunt its descendants, since it retains its cultural significance in part because of its indeterminacy. though genesis is of course not itself an apocryphal book of the bible, the hazy origins that mark alter’s translation of its opening lines stand as an example of such a poetics. like political theology, the old english poem judith embodies the tensions between the abstract and the concrete that come into play in the attempt to represent exception. but in contrast to schmitt’s sharp and decisive—if troubled—beginning, the judith we have inherited lacks any beginning at all. what we have of the poem are three hundred and forty-nine lines, and there has been some disagreement regarding its original length.26 parts ten through twelve are extant in their entirety; hence our poem “begins” with the last fourteen lines, of (what may be) part nine of its original.27 some critics have argued that in fact very few lines are missing, but for reasons i outline below i am more persuaded by david chamberlain’s argument that number of missing lines is significant—and that indeed the political efficacy of the poem relies on an absent, hidden, or lost beginning.28 ultimately, however, i am less interested in how the poem was originally composed, or its historical fate, than i am in what we can say about the extant version. like other iterations of the judith story, its significance lies largely in the fact that the poem remains cloaked in some degree of uncertainty. when schmitt identifies sovereignty as a “borderline concept,” he stresses once again that he does not mean a “vague” concept, but rather one pertaining “to the outermost sphere,” a concept that is at once general and fundamental. sovereignty is not artificial, but inherent to the theory of the state; yet it is defined by its association with the exception, rather than the routine.29 like this conception of sovereignty, judith’s story often occupies a liminal position, included through its exclusions. the biblical book of judith has never been canonical for jews, and has been consigned sovereign poetics: from exception to apocrypha 24 to the apocrypha by protestants; the old english fragment survives in the nowell codex, the socalled “book of monsters” that comprises works which are in some way marked by the miraculous and supernatural, such as beowulf and the wonders of the east. modern retellings of the judith story include the epic poem “judith” by maria gowen brooks, or maria del occidente, a nineteenth-century american poet whose frankly sensual verse and focus on strong, even paternal heroines placed her outside the traditional sphere of nineteenth-century women poets. through judith’s appearance in works by poets as disparate as brooks, catherine jemmat, john greenleaf whittier, adah menken, hart crane, john crowe ransom, and adrienne rich, she has endured as a figure whose place has more often than not been borderline, apocryphal—included as an exclusion—in canons both sacred and secular.30 the old english judith is remarkable for its powerful and lively verse form, for its sheer exuberance of its style,31 and its “strategic” use of hypermetric meter.32 the poem situates itself in the hazy space between the ethereal and the material by figuring the tension between the characters of judith and holofernes as a tension between the abstract and concrete. thus, like political theology, judith attempts to represent the exceptional by means of an unsettling apposition of the concrete with the abstract. holofernes’s absorption in the material world is emphasized repeatedly in the remaining bit of section ix, and throughout section x, the first full section of this fragmented poem. whereas the first stanza of the fragment indicates that judith is clearly focused on god and heaven, “she kept ever steady her faith in the almighty lord” (lines 6–7), holofernes eagerly commands his men to attend a lavish feast.33 the poet describes the entrance of the warriors into the feast hall, and dwells on descriptions of the physical objects there: “deep bowls” and “pitchers and cups […]/full for the revelers” (18–19). holofernes, “the gold-friend of men” (23) is loud, his voice projecting such that “the sons of men for miles could hear” (24). drunk himself, he orders that his guests keep drinking: “he drowned his attendants all, as if dropped in death they were/ emptied of any lingering good” (31–2). they wind up looking like what holofernes is about to become, a corpse, stripped of all but their most material being. again emphasizing the degree to which he “remained in this world/ here under the roof of heaven” (66–67, my emphasis), holofernes commands that judith, adorned with jewelry, be brought to his bed. in one sense, we might say that holofernes, “so drunk with wine that he had lost all wisdom/ in the chamber of his mind” (68–69), is already a dead man when judith kills him and leaves his soul “bound for the abysmal cliff” (113). in sharp contrast, judith, far from being holofernes’s whore, is in fact “the lord’s/ glorious servant” (73–4). her voice, raised in prayer rather than intoxication, is said to reach the savior, rather than the “sons of men.” her strengths are “glorious,” not of this earth. yet even as the poem stresses holofernes’s materiality against judith’s ethereality, it makes the strange move of verbally aligning holofernes—not judith—with god. the language of the poem tends to confuse and conflate god and holofernes by rendering the referents of nouns and pronouns unclear in the old 25 forbes english text. this confusion evokes a struggle between holofernes and god, a struggle that god wins via his true ally, the ethereal judith. the conflation of divinity with a character that asserts himself through definitive, concrete language speaks to tensions i’ve noted in schmitt’s theorization of sovereignty, namely his desire for an unmistakable, solid grounding for authority. schmitt’s rhetorical rigidity requires that this stand simply as the paradoxical result of the impossible attempt to represent the unrepresentable. but the task of representing sovereignty requires a negotiation between fluidity and fixity. juxtaposing these texts brings to the fore judith’s warning to be wary of invitations to conflate solidity with power: it is her feminized ethereal action that eviscerates her opponent’s material, masculine strength. judith retains political theology’s emphasis on the importance of the individual, although judith’s individual act is important insofar as it enables collective triumph of the hebrews and reflects the glory of god. thus i disagree in certain ways with edna purdie, a german literature scholar and schmitt’s contemporary, who argues that a traditional emphasis on heroic assertion of individuality is downplayed in judith: the heroic activity of the epic commonly implies the assertion of individuality— as in beowulf, or in the heroes of homer. in judith we find this activity made powerful by the surrender of the personal, individual will to the will of god. it becomes in this way superhuman; the courage derived from religious conviction plays the role of the legendary supernatural strength attributed to beowulf and other heroes.34 purdie’s suggestion—that rather than asserting individuality as such judith surrenders her personal will to god’s will—downplays judith’s actual course of action. judith responds actively—as a sovereign individual—to the material situation at hand. while purdie is no doubt correct in seeing a connection between judith’s courage and her religious conviction, it is important to remember that rather than waiting for and trusting in god, passively hoping for salvation (a course of action that the biblical judith argues would be an irreverent testing of god), judith makes a decision and acts on it. god may be said to set the scene for judith’s action, but she is quite explicitly “sorely mindful/ of how she might take the monster’s life most effectively” (74–76). the poet’s visceral description of her act solidifies the sense that judith is the hero of this story. after she “took hold of the sword […] and drew it from the sheath with her right hand” (79–80), judith (though as clearly a jew in this version as in its predecessors) offers a prophetic invocation of the trinity, then “took the heathen man/ firmly then by the hair, and with her hands drew him near” (98–99) and finally “struck/ the fiendish enemy full of menace/ with hostile sword and hacked his neck/ straight to the middle so that he lay in a stupor/ drunk and wounded” (103–107) and then again sovereign poetics: from exception to apocrypha 26 “struck terribly a second time/ the heathen houng so that his head rolled/ along the floor” (109– 111). this series of active verbs and careful description leaves no doubt that the victory is judith’s. the opening of section xi brings the message home: “though victory given to her by god […] judith in hard/ battle had won abounding glory” (122–123). the fact that judith as an individual attained mastery is of course granted by god, but nonetheless judith herself “won abounding glory” with her bloody decapitation of holofernes and by the way she uses her remains as a “sign of her success in battle” (175), and an inspiration for the warriors’ own imminent triumph. “the prudent maiden then hastily pressed/ the bloody head of the battle hunter/ into the pouch […] and gave it gory with blood […] to carry home” (125–132). in writing about the judith story in its nineteenthand early twentiethcentury permutations, purdie suggests: “to say that there has been a progressive disbelief in miracle is to touch on one aspect of the transformation of the story. that the explanation was formerly so easy has also perhaps conduced to the preoccupation of modern writers with the subject; the minds lured to destructive criticism have also been stimulated to creative effort.”35 here again i would suggest that purdie misses some of the texture of the old english judith. in this poem the miraculous is only conspicuous in its absence. judith’s act, as i have argued here, is very much her own. yet purdie’s position aligns with schmitt’s contemporary philosophy, and puts critic and theorist very much on the same page. in political theology, schmitt notes that the modern constitutional state was born alongside deism, a system of religious thought that eschewed what it saw as non-rational belief in direct, divine intervention in favor of an understanding of god as “watchmaker,” a now-distant creator who designed, set in motion, and subsequently absented himself from the world. most importantly for schmitt, deism “banished” the miracle. at pains to distinguish his own “systematic analogy” from a mere “playing with ideas,” schmitt posits that the exception in western political life is analogous to the miracle of the pre-enlightenment era.36 the exception in modern politics, the sovereign’s ability to intervene directly without invalidating an existing legal order is analogous to the miracle in theology, in which the divine transgresses without overturning the laws of nature. both the miracle and the exception can suspend, albeit briefly, the normal course of things. both schmitt and purdie narrate a historical shift from miracle to reason. although schmitt’s analogy brings miracle and exception into a relation of similarity, it also inevitably suggests a difference. a decision is a source of authority, where the miracle produces faith. the line between power and wonder is indeed a thin one, but there remains some distinction. although judith in many ways sets up the expectation of a miracle, judith’s violent act bears a greater resemblance to a decision on the exception. the miraculous suggests passivity among human participants or onlookers—a type of passivity that it is judith’s role, indeed the role played by her particular brand of faith, to shun. as i have shown, however much judith’s act might be girded by her belief in giving herself over to the savior, it is nevertheless expressly an act. the sword does not move of 27 forbes its own accord, with judith as witness. instead in the poem the act is described in all its tangible detail—in all its gory realism. in the pre-enlightenment world of the old english poet, judith’s action is more exceptional than it is miraculous. yet the approach to the line between terror and awe, decision and exception that we see in judith is more nuanced than what we find in either schmitt or purdie. the decision on the exception that we see in judith is also miraculous insofar as it makes possible a subsequent victory in battle. as judith herself recedes into the background, the hebrews overcome the assyrians. the victory is not judith’s own; it belongs to the community of which she forms a part, her sigefolce (“victory-folk”) (150). the hebrew army triumphs, and returns bearing treasures and weaponry for judith, including “the gory helmet of holofernes/ and his sword […] all the riches […] belonging to him alone […] they gave to the radiant and most judicious lady” (336–341).37 the final stanza of poem concludes with a series thanksgivings. richly rewarded in material possessions, judith likewise no longer doubts her “reward in heaven,” as she had doubted of “gifts in this wide earth” in the fragment’s opening line. “because she kept true faith/ ever in the almighty lord, indeed at the end she lacked not/ the reward she had long desired” (344–346). but, just as the emphasis of the dénouement of the poem had been on the community’s collective triumph rather than judith’s individual success, so too the poem’s final line belongs not to judith but to god: for this to the dear lord who through his favoring grace fashioned wind and sky the firmament and the wide lands, as also the wild seas and the glad joys of heaven may glory be forever. (346–349) as chickering explains, judith “gives thanks to them [the hebrew warriors] and to god to whom her success is due. the poet gives thanks to god in similar language.”38 by the end of the poem, the world of the possible has been deepened and broadened through judith’s decisive action. but at the same time the ending echoes back to the fragment’s beginning. the way this ending navigates between ideas of opening up new possibility and language that circles back invites us now to return, by way of conclusion, to judith’s unrecoverable beginning. david chamberlain argues that judith is a highly political poem, an interpretation that rests on an understanding of a substantial portion of the poem’s beginning as lost. critics including rosemary woolf, stanley b. greenfield, bernard huppé, and c. enzenberger have argued that in fact only a small portion of the beginning is missing. this is despite the fact that it begins in the middle of a sentence, in a section numbered “x,” and lacks the details of the narrative found in the first eleven chapters of the vulgate “judith.” those who argue for a short poem do so on aesthetic grounds: they want to see the extant poem as formally complete; for them, the poem works as allegory rather sovereign poetics: from exception to apocrypha 28 than political commentary. they attempt to emphasize “unrealistic, unnationalistic qualities of the diction,” but chamberlain’s argument for judith as nationalistic and political relies on its being fragmentary, on missing its beginning.39 for chamberlin, judith “glorifies a noble woman, emphasizes her faith, prudence, and courage, while offering a religious and political example to the whole audience […] and the same, i am sure, was true of the long, almost epic, poem that originally existed” (158). judith is not short heroic poem, secular and historical like maldon, but belongs instead with tradition of longer religious or epic narratives.40 the poem’s emphasis is simultaneously religious and political; as in schmitt’s analysis of the theological origins of the modern conception of the political, the two are not distinct. hence judith keeps the spoils of war, rather than giving them up as in the vulgate. the language of politics and nation offers a general sense of the poem’s realism, as does the verisimilitude of the battle scene.41 chamberlain points to the focus on battle as giving a “national” (rather than personal) emphasis to the events of poem, but notes that this focus does not in any way obscure the fact that judith enabled this victory.42 he offers myriad instances of nationalistic phraseology in the poem, including: “the realistic haeden is often applied to the assyrians […], as it often is to the danes in the chronicle.” as further examples, chamberlain offers “landbuend [natives], folcstede [dwelling place] and edelweardas [guardians of the homeland].”43 along these lines, my analysis of the common conceptual origins of political theology and judith suggests that a crisis of leadership, of political foundation, may have inspired judith, just as we know such a crisis inspired political theology. thus for chamberlain, internal evidence suggests that we should interpret the poem as political. for this reason, we are required to understand it as part of a much longer work, as an epic rather than an allegory. chamberlain’s political poem requires a lost beginning. similarly, the lack of a beginning in the extant judith—and its consequent insistence that we begin from the unstable vantage point of what we have left and where we are now—accords with the poem’s nuanced negotiation of the impossible possibility of representing decision, exception, and sovereignty. positioning judith before political theology calls attention to schmitt’s grasping fixation with foundation. paradoxically, such a shift actually enables schmitt’s own project by resolving the tensions that negri has identified. judith’s authority is not exceptional, but apocryphal. the important role of the poem and related retellings of the judith story in western culture originates from a place of questionable legitimacy, but enduring significance. it does not achieve its importance by means of an act of founding, and incontrovertible legitimation. for schmitt, the erecting and assertion of foundations is ultimately a destructive act, a razing rather than a buildingup. as i have argued, the question of just what schmitt wants to do (in terms of positive action) on this newly razed ground is not as clear as his rhetoric and position would seem to imply. indeed we might consider whether the longevity of his reputation as simply the nazi’s state theorist is in 29 forbes some part due to a failure of schmitt’s rhetoric to convey the nuanced sophistication of his understanding of the simultaneous precariousness and necessity of authority.44 theorists inspired by schmitt, including benjamin, werner hamacher, and, more recently, samuel weber, have to varying degrees opposed a philosophical orientation toward “ends.”45 in his discussion of “targeting” and its role in what he understands as the “militarization of thinking” (any kind of thinking that defines its aim in cognitive terms, and is therefore inseparable from targeting), weber calls to mind benjamin’s “critique of violence” and hamacher’s exploration of that essay. the question these related works explore is that of what “pure mediacy”—in itself meaningless—might have to offer in terms of concrete political change. one of the aims of my essay has been to put such thinking about ends and ending in relation to certain ways of thinking about origins. taken to its logical (if counterintuitive) conclusion, the insight of political theology does not compel a struggle against a perceived crisis of foundation via an autocratic politics. rather, by radically engaging with the transcendentally unsolvable problem of foundation, schmitt undermines the very idea of this kind of crisis, and consequently enables a move toward a politics that could embrace rather than disguise the tenuousness of foundation. as negri argues, “strength takes shape as constituent power: not to seek institutionality but to construct more being—ethical being, social being, community.”46 reading judith alongside political theology suggests an approach to the problem of sovereignty that looks toward the apocryphal rather than the exceptional and resolves some of the problems in schmitt’s thinking. if “a web of a thousand threads defines the originary radicalness of constituent power,”47 then a commitment to tracing those threads broadly across time and space might, finally, allow for a fundamental rethinking of politics as always potentially emergent within the material conditions of everyday life. endnotes 1. schmitt 1985, 5. 2. davis 2012, 88. davis critiques the nearly ubiquitous concept of a decisive “break between a medieval and a modern (or an early modern) period” (5). relying on this periodizing narrative of a sharp “break” between the modern and the medieval, theorizations of sovereignty and subjection emerged “at crucial moments of empire, slavery, and colonialism” to ground “arguments regarding the ‘free’ political subject” (7, 8). periodization, davis argues, “facilitated the transference of the problem of slavery from the contemporary slave trade to a brutal past” (8). she admires schmitt’s work insofar as it critiques conceits of “the modern.” inspired by davis’s call for scholars to resist reifying “a european category to a global category of time” (5), i explore alternative conceptions of the political and put a pre-modern text in relation to a modern one. sovereign poetics: from exception to apocrypha 30 3. wolin 1992, 431. 4. benhabib 2012, 689. 5. see chantal mouffe’s important analysis of schmitt’s provocation of radical democratic politics. for example, in the “introduction” to the challenge of carl schmitt, she calls for a “conflictual pluralism” in which the “tension between the democratic logic of popular sovereignty and the liberal logic of individual rights” would be, first, acknowledged, and then “negotiated in a way that does not destroy the basis of political association” (5). 6. benhabib 2012, 689. 7. schmitt 1985, 6. 8. negri 1999, 8. 9. schmitt 1985, 13. 10. schmitt 1985, 10. 11. in schmitt’s later years, he explores the interrelation of aesthetics and politics in an extended work of literary criticism entitled hamlet and hecuba (1956). 12. davis 2012, 82. 13. alter is translating hebrew, while king james’s translation committee was working with vulgate latin. both versions preserve “the distinctive literary experience of the bible in its original language,” but alter brings a nuanced precision enabled by twentieth century scholarship on ancient hebrew (xvii). while differences in translation do not reflect divergent “choices” on the part of the translators, they are highly significant in terms of their literary and theological implications. 14. negri 1999, 8. 15. davis 2012, 82. 16. davis 2012, 96. 17. negri 1999, 21–22. 18. schmitt 1985, 36. 19. schmitt 1985, 38. 20. for agamben, schmitt’s observation is a call to think the world without this logic, whether by thinking past it, or by evoking what human life might have been like before its advent. 21. schmitt 1996, 19. 22. schmitt 1996, 83. 23. schmitt 1996, 84. 24. schmitt 1996, 84; my emphasis. 25. “apocrypha” 2013. 26. critics who have discussed this question include woolf 1955, calder and greenfield 1986, and chamberlain 1975. 27. see also mark griffith, “introduction” to judith 1997, 4. 31 forbes 28. chamberlain 1975, 137. 29. schmitt 1985, 5. 30. see stocker 1998. 31. see chickering 2009. 32. see hieatt 1980; hartman 2011, 422. 33. all citations are from the modern english translation of “judith” by bernard f. huppé in “judith” 1970. 34. purdie 1927, 28. 35. purdie 1927, 137. 36. schmitt 1985, 37. 37. for a discussion of the gendered significance of this scene, see mullally 2005. 38. chickering 2009, 124. 39. chamberlain 1975, 157. 40. chamberlain 1975, 141, 154. 41. chamberlain 1975, 155. 42. chamberlain 1975, 154. 43. chamberlain 1975, 157. based on parallels to the political situation detailed in the chronicle for those years, chamberlain argues for a date from about 900–1000: “the intensity of ravaging and the collapse of leadership, with actual flight by leaders just before battle, is strikingly reported in the chronicle (ms c) from 980 to 994, intensifying greatly between 990 and 994, followed by a lull until 997, but four years were enough to have inspired a poem” (158–9). 44. see the concluding pages of political theology, in which schmitt laments modernity’s inability to confront the political as such (rather than as “organizational-technical and economic-sociological”). schmitt fears that in such a climate, anarchy (which is nothing but a “decision against the decision”) and dictatorship coalesce as decisionism is delegitimated (65–66). it is this aspect of schmitt’s thinking, which seeks to define “the specificity of the political” as distinct from ethics and economics, which chantal mouffe and others have sought to bring into focus (1999, 5). for an opposing view, holding that schmitt’s theorizing is inextricably entangled with his “own political entanglements with the nazi regime” and therefore “disempowers citizens,” see benhabib 2012, 705–6. 45. benjamin wanted to dedicate his doctoral dissertation to schmitt; as horst bredekamp opines: “walter benjamin’s esteem for carl schmitt is one of the most irritating incidents in the intellectual history of the weimar republic” (247). for more on benjamin’s relationship to schmitt, see wolin 2006. 46. negri 1999, 23. 47. negri 1999, 23. sovereign poetics: from exception to apocrypha 32 works cited agamben, giorgio. 1998. homo sacer. trans. daniel heller-roazen. stanford, ca: stanford university press. print. “apocrypha, adj. and n.” 2013. oed online. oxford university press. <http://www.oed.com/ view/entry/9256?rskey=8ghx7u&result=1>. accessed august 2, 2013. benhabib, seyla. 2012. “carl schmitt’s critique of kant: sovereignty and international law.” political theory 40.6: 688–713. print. benjamin, walter. 1978. reflections. ed. peter demetz. new york: schocken books. print. bredekamp, horst. 1999. “from walter benjamin to carl schmitt, via thomas hobbes.” trans. melissa thorson hause and jackson bond. critical inquiry 25.2: 247–266. print. calder, daniel g., and stanley b. greenfield. 1986. a new critical history of old english literature. new york: new york university press. print. chamberlain, david. 1975. “judith: a fragmentary and political poem.” in anglo-saxon poetry: essays in appreciation for john c. mcgalliard, eds. l. e. nicholson and d. warwick frese. notre dame, in: university of notre dame press. 135–159. print. chickering, howell. 2009. “poetic exuberance in the old english judith.” studies in philology 106.2: 119–136. print. davis, kathleen. 2012. periodization and sovereignty: how ideas of feudalism and secularization govern the politics of time. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press. print. the five books of moses: a translation with commentary. 2004. trans. robert alter. new york: norton. print. hamacher, werner. 1993. “afformative, strike: benjamin’s ‘critique of violence.’” trans. dana hollander. in walter benjamin’s philosophy: destruction and experience, eds. andrew benjamin and peter osborne. new york: routledge. print. hartman, megan e. 2011. “a drawn-out beheading: style, theme and hypermetricity in the old english judith.” jegp 110.4 (october): 421–440. 33 forbes hieatt, constance b. 1980. “judith and the literary function of old english hypermetric lines.” studia neophilologica 52: 251–7. print. the holy bible, king james version. 2008. new york: oxford edition: 1769; king james bible online. http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/. accessed august 2, 2013. judith. 1997. ed. mark griffith. exeter, uk: university of exeter press. print. “judith.” 1970. the web of words. trans. bernard f. huppé. albany, ny: state university of new york press. print mouffe, chantal. 1997. “carl schmitt and the paradox of liberal democracy.” canadian journal of law and jurisprudence 10.1: 21–33. print. _____, ed. 1999. the challenge of carl schmitt. london: verso. print. mullally, erin. 2005. “the cross-gendered gift: weaponry in the old english judith.” exemplaria 17: 255–84. print. negri, antonio. 1999. insurgencies: constituent power and the modern state. trans. maurizia boscagli. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. print. purdie, edna. 1927. the story of judith in german and english literature. paris: librairie ancienne honoré champion. print. schmitt, carl. 1996. the concept of the political. trans. george schwab. chicago, il: university of chicago press. print. _____. 1985. political theology: four chapters on the concept of sovereignty. trans. george schwab. cambridge, ma: mit press. print. stocker, margarita. 1998. judith, sexual warrior: women and power in western culture. new haven, ct: yale university press. print. weber, samuel. 2005. targets of opportunity: on the militarization of thinking. new york: fordham university press. print. wolin, richard. 1992. “carl schmitt: the conservative revolutionary habitus and the aesthetics of horror.” political theory 20: 424–447. print. _____. 2006. “between proust and zohar: walter benjamin’s arcades project.” in the frankfurt school revisited and other essays on politics and society. london: routledge, 21–45. print. sovereign poetics: from exception to apocrypha 34 woolf, r. e. 1955. “the lost opening to the judith.” mlr 50: 168–172. print. microsoft word eif-1-final.docx [expositions 8.2 (2014) 1–10] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 the ethics of metaethics: on thomas nagel’s mind and cosmos bernard g. prusak king’s college, pa one way to characterize the condition of the prisoners in plato’s allegory of the cave is that they are bound to appearances. that is, they cannot escape taking what appears to be the case in fact to be the case. it seems, even, that they are so far beholden to appearances that they lack a conception of the distinction between appearances and reality and accordingly the very concepts. it stands to reason that they would be blinkered, then, at talk of what is in fact the case as opposed to what is not. prisoners of appearances, they are likewise prisoners of themselves. they are not free to think otherwise. readers will know that socrates asks his interlocutors to imagine that one of the prisoners was freed from his bonds, forcibly removed from the cave, and exposed, painfully at first, to the light of day. in brief, he is illumined. science is now possible, and the shadow play of the case is revealed to him for what it is. were he to return to the cave with this knowledge, however, he would be greeted with what thomas nagel calls an “untutored reaction of incredulity.”1 socrates predicts even violence should any would-be liberator draw near the prisoners. for who wants to be told that his or her most basic beliefs are mistaken? who wants to learn that the life he or she has led is founded in error? as he predicted2, thomas nagel’s 2012 book, mind and cosmos: why the materialist neodarwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false, has provoked reactions of incredulity. steven pinker infamously tweeted, with a link to a critical review in the nation by brian leiter and michael weisberg, “what has gotten into thomas nagel? two philosophers expose the shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker.”3 “fuck him, he explained,” leon wieseltier delicately restated pinker’s tweet.4 yet it would badly miss the mark to call all the reactions to nagel’s book “untutored.” instead, critics have appealed precisely to the distinction between appearances and reality in order to cast doubt on nagel’s project. as leiter and weisberg noted in the nation, and the biologist h. allen orr noted in the new york review of books, it is nagel who presents himself as the defender of “common sense,” and it is nagel who comes to the defense of “the untutored reaction of credulity to the reductionist neo-darwinian account of the origin and evolution of life.”5 orr comments: his intuition recoils from the claimed plausibility of neo-darwinism and that, it seems, is that. (richard dawkins has called this sort of move the argument from personal incredulity.) but plenty of scientific truths are counterintuitive (does anyone find it intuitive that we’re hurtling around the sun at 67,000 miles per hour?) and a scientific education is, to a considerable extent, an exercise in taming the authority of one’s intuition.6 leiter and weisberg comment at greater length: the ethics of metaethics 2 [w]hat could be more common-sensical, obvious or evident than the notion that the earth is flat and the sun revolves around the earth? all ordinary evidence supports that verdict: we know from experience that people fall off things that are spherical, especially when trying to hang upside down from them, and we know that the sun rises in the sky in one direction and sets in the other as it revolves around the seemingly flat earth. happily, nagel does not attempt to repudiate the copernican revolution in astronomy, despite its hostility to common sense. but he displays none of the same humility when it comes to his preferred claims of common sense—the kind of humility that nearly 400 years of nonevident yet true scientific discoveries should engender. are we really supposed to abandon a massively successful scientific research program because nagel finds some scientific claims hard to square with what he thinks is obvious and “undeniable,” such as his confidence that his “clearest moral…reasonings are objectively valid”?7 an irony, however, should not go unnoticed.8 nagel finds materialist naturalism problematic because, among other reasons, he thinks it undermines the distinction between appearances and reality in matters of value: in brief, moral realism. in other words, one reason why nagel defends “common sense” and “the untutored reaction of credulity” against materialist naturalism (and, pace leiter and weisberg, not “scientific claims” without further ado) is that, in his judgment, it would thrust us back into the cave with respect to judgments about morality. in his words, it would “almost certainly require us to give up […] the natural conviction that our moral judgments [more precisely: at least certain of these judgments, those that we cannot even imagine abjuring] are true or false independent of our beliefs.”9 only appearances would remain. to the objection that this “natural conviction” is no better founded than the natural convictions of the prisoners in plato’s cave, nagel’s reply in turn is that the highly speculative nature of evolutionary explanations of our mental faculties makes such explanations too weak a ground for putting into question our most basic forms of thought. our confidence in the truth of propositions that seem evident on reflection should not be shaken so easily (and, i would add, cannot be shaken on these sorts of grounds without a kind of false consciousness).10 readers will likely know that nagel’s case against materialist naturalism does not rest on his account of its implications for moral realism, which of course has long been contested. nagel’s argument begins by calling into doubt the reducibility of the mental to the physical: “consciousness,” he writes, “is the most conspicuous obstacle to a comprehensive naturalism that relies only on the resources of the physical sciences.”11 he goes on to argue that, like consciousness, cognition—our faculties of thought and reasoning—cannot be accounted for in the terms of materialist naturalism.12 and then finally, he claims that “value presents a further problem for scientific naturalism.”13 (readers unfamiliar with nagel’s book might see the synopsis that he published in the new york times.14) 3 prusak as gary gutting has observed, discussion of nagel’s book has tended to focus on his philosophy of mind and philosophy of science.15 some commentators, like gutting, have focused as well on the book’s implications for the dialogue between science and religion.16 but nagel’s argument about morality has gotten much less attention.17 the purpose of this iteration of ethics in focus is to determine what can be learned by engaging with this argument. nagel’s principal interlocutor here is his colleague at new york university, the moral philosopher sharon street. in her paper “a darwinian dilemma for realist theories of value,” which nagel cites multiple times, street claims that it is impossible to reconcile the view that there are “evaluative facts which hold independently of all our evaluative attitudes”—in brief, moral realism—with “recognition of the role that darwinian forces have played in shaping the content of our values.”18 the opening premise of her argument for this claim is that “our system of evaluative judgments is saturated with evolutionary influence.”19 this premise granted, street puts to the moral realist the question of what relation there is between “the selective forces that have influenced the content of our evaluative judgments, on the one hand, and the independent evaluative truths that realism posits, on the other.”20 this, street seeks to show at length, the moral realist (whether “non-naturalist” or “naturalist”21) cannot plausibly explain in terms that do not undermine moral realism. by contrast, according to her the antirealist has no trouble accounting for the “significant overlap between evaluative truths and the kinds of evaluative judgments that natural selection would have pushed us” toward.22 the antirealist, on street’s account, understands evolutionary causes to have given us “our starting fund of evaluative attitudes.”23 evaluative truth—on which street takes a constructivist view24—is understood as “a function of the evaluative attitudes we have”: more fully, a function of these attitudes brought into reflective equilibrium by evaluative judgments drawing on precisely our fund of attitudes shaped by selective pressures.25 nagel summarizes: “street holds that a darwinian account is strongly supported by contemporary science, so she concludes that moral realism is false.”26 as he states later, “[f]rom a darwinian perspective, the hypothesis of value realism is superfluous— a wheel that spins without being attached to anything.”27 but then: i follow the same inference in the opposite direction: since moral realism is true, a darwinian account of the motives underlying moral judgment must be false, in spite of the scientific consensus in its favor.28 several lines of inquiry might be pursued. first, is nagel right to think that there is a conflict between moral realism and evolutionary theory (at least in its materialist, naturalist interpretation)? in other words, is he right to agree with street? (to indicate one possible question: is evolution a threat to moral realism or to our confidence in our ability to cognize moral reality?) reviewing nagel’s book for the boston review, elliott sober agreed that [y]ou don’t need to postulate moral truths to have an evolutionary explanation for why we have the moral beliefs we do. but that doesn’t mean that evolutionary theory justifies denying that there are such truths. nagel is assuming that if moral the ethics of metaethics 4 realism is true, then the truth of moral propositions must be part of the explanation for why we believe those propositions. i disagree; the point of ethics is to guide our behavior, not to explain it, a thesis that nagel defended in the view from nowhere (1989 [sic]) but has now apparently abandoned.29 is sober’s criticism on the mark, or has he misunderstood nagel and street in turn? (has nagel reversed himself? if so, was it with reason or without?) attention might also be directed to nagel’s non-metaphysical, non-naturalist realism, which he discusses briefly in mind and cosmos, after elaborating it at greater length in the view from nowhere.30 in that earlier book, nagel writes, normative realism is the view that propositions about what gives us reasons for action can be true or false independently of how things appear to us, and that we can hope to discover the truth by transcending the appearances and subjecting them to critical assessment.31 he is emphatic, however, that his conception of realism “is not a form of platonism”: for him, “ethical thought is the process of bringing objectivity to bear on the will,” not the discovery of “a new aspect of the external world, called value,” or the “bringing [of] our thoughts into accord with an external reality.”32 his realism might then be called an “objectivism.” in mind and cosmos, a new wrinkle enters: nagel now emphasizes, following street, that “value is tied to life,” such that “its content will depend on particular forms of life.”33 accordingly, “human good and bad depend in the first instance on our natural appetites, emotions, capacities, and interpersonal bonds.”34 but nagel sees no reason here to abandon or modify his realism, which after all countenances, in his terminology, both agent-neutral and agent-relative reasons.35 instead, it appears that all reasons become relative, namely, to the diverse forms of life.36 one upshot of this value pluralism is that “the recognition of what is objectively valuable in the life of one creature does not automatically settle the question of what reasons it implies for the actions of another.”37 perhaps this is perfectly right. further, perhaps we must simply acknowledge that what is objectively valuable for one form of life might conflict with what is objectively valuable for another. but, if so, how to adjudicate such conflicts? is there some way to reconcile, objectively, objective conflicts? or does value pluralism devolve into value chaos? can nagel speak still of a view from nowhere that is not, in fact, a view from somewhere, namely, that of a particular form of life? or does human life enjoy some privilege here, given the capacity of human persons to take an objective view of themselves (that is, to transcend or to stand outside themselves)? if so, it seems that much elaboration is needed. finally, it might be considered on what grounds to choose between nagel and street. to recall, nagel writes that he follows the same inference as street, but “in the opposite direction.”38 that is, for her modus ponens—“if the evolutionary facts are roughly as i speculate, here is what might be said philosophically…”39—he substitutes a modus tollens to the effect that the evolutionary facts must not be as materialist naturalists hold, because philosophically they cannot be right. instead, he tentatively develops an alternative cosmology with the goal of 5 prusak making “mind, meaning, and value as fundamental as matter and space-time in an account of what there is.”40 this cosmology takes the form of a naturalistic, non-reductionistic (yet nontheistic) teleology, which revises the darwinian picture by postulating that “the existence of the genetic material and the possible forms it makes available for selection…may be determined not merely by value-free chemistry and physics, but also by […] a cosmic predisposition to the formation of life, consciousness, and the value that is inseparable from them.”41 in brief: are there reasons to choose one of these cosmologies over the other that would appear decisive to someone not already committed one way or the other? are there reasons sufficient to lead someone to abandon one cosmology for the other? if so, what is the nature of these reasons? (are they theoretical, practical, or both?) further, has nagel adequately articulated any such reasons, or at least pointed his readers in promising directions? this line of inquiry can be extended a bit further. nagel states that he finds “the confidence among the scientific establishment” that the appearance of life, and all the more conscious life, “will yield to a purely chemical explanation hard to understand, except as a manifestation of an axiomatic commitment to reductive materialism.”42 he then quotes in a note from richard lewontin’s 1997 review of carl sagan’s the demon-haunted world: “materialism is absolute,” lewontin writes, “for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door.”43 nagel’s suggestion here is that it is aversion to theism, if not a more general “fear of religion,”44 that explains what he calls, earlier in the book, the “priority given to evolutionary naturalism.”45 yet it might be asked— alvin plantinga has asked—whether nagel’s own rejection of a theistic alternative to materialist naturalism is better grounded.46 in the last word, nagel notoriously wrote, acknowledging his own “fear of religion,” it isn’t just that i don’t believe in god and, naturally, hope that i’m right in my belief. it’s that i hope there is no god! i don’t want there to be a god; i don’t want the universe to be like that47 —though he did not explain like what, which is what made these lines notorious. in brief then, one last time: are there reasons to choose nagel’s naturalistic teleology over a theistic cosmology, or the other way around, that would appear decisive to someone who, unlike nagel and plantinga, was not already committed one way or the other? (for example, is nagel right that the appeal to god lacks explanatory power?48 or is his understanding of explanation too demanding, even arbitrary?—a complex topic itself.49) are there reasons sufficient to lead someone to abandon one of these cosmologies for the other? if there are any such reasons, are they theoretical, practical, or both? an interesting possibility is that the case for or against moral realism may need to be made, at least in part, on moral grounds—hence this introduction’s title. whether we can find moral grounds unbiased toward realism or antirealism, however, seems doubtful. francisco j. ayala is university professor and donald bren professor of biological sciences and concurrent professor of philosophy at the university of california, irvine. his distinctions include a 2001 national medal of science and a 2010 templeton prize. terence cuneo is the ethics of metaethics 6 professor of philosophy at the university of vermont and the author of the normative web: an argument for moral realism (oxford, 2007). his interests include metaethics, modern philosophy, and the philosophy of religion. micah lott is assistant professor of philosophy at boston college. likewise interested in metaethics, he has sought to articulate and defend a version of aristotelian naturalism. finally, regan reitsma is associate professor of philosophy at king’s college, pennsylvania. he has written widely in moral philosophy and the philosophy of religion. notes 1. nagel 2012, 6. 2. ibid., 7. 3. pinker 2012. 4. wieseltier 2013, 65. 5. nagel 2012, 5–6. 6. orr 2013, 27. 7. leiter and weisberg 2013, 28. 8. the deliberateness of nagel’s provocation also appears lost on some of critics. his book’s subtitle alludes to chapter 4 of richard dawkins’ the god delusion, “why there almost certainly is no god,” which nagel reviewed in the new republic (see nagel 2006), and his intention “to defend the untutored reaction of credulity” is surely meant to call to mind—and tweak—dawkins’ “argument from personal incredulity.” 9. nagel 2012, 28. 10. ibid., 28–29. cf. dworkin 1996, 117 and 128. 11. ibid., 35. 12. see ibid., 74. 13. ibid., 98. 14. nagel 2013. 15. gutting 2013, 15. see, for example: dupré 2012 and kitcher 2013. 16. ibid. see also: haught 2013. 7 prusak 17. but, see sober 2012. 18. street 2006, 141. contrast dworkin 1996, 123, who rejects “the widespread but plainly mistaken assumption that a successful darwinian explanation of moral concern […] would have skeptical implications” as “a lingering viral residue of the defeat of crude anthropomorphic religion.” 19. ibid., 121. see also: 113–114. 20. ibid. 21. in street’s terminology, non-naturalist versions of realism hold that “evaluative facts or truth are not reducible to any kind of natural fact,” are not the kinds of things that play a role in causal explanations, and are instead irreducibly normative. by contrast, naturalist versions of realism hold that “evaluative facts are identical with or constituted by (certain) natural facts” and are the kinds of things that play a role in causal explanations. see street 2006, 111–112. 22. see ibid., 129, for the three respects in which she takes the so-called adaptive link account to be superior to the so-called tracking account: in terms of parsimony, clarity, and explanatory power. see 154 for the claim that “[t]he difference [between these accounts] is that the antirealist [adaptive link] account […] is consistent with science.” compare: street 2008, 220–221, n. 30—“one attractive feature of metaethical constructivism—indeed, an important part of what i think ultimately forces us to the view—is its compatibility with a naturalistic worldview.” 23. ibid., 154. 24. see street 2008. interestingly, she rejects the quasi-realism about normativity associated with simon blackburn and allan gibbard. see street 2011, 9: “we cannot prevent our naturalistic understanding of the nature and origins of normative judgment from interacting with and ultimately helping to undermine the view that there are independent normative truths—even if we understand this latter view as an internal normative claim,” as quasi-realists propose to do [emphasis in original]. 25. street 2006, 154. 26. nagel 2012, 105. 27. ibid., 109. 28. ibid., 105. the ethics of metaethics 8 29. sober 2012, 53. 30. see nagel 2012, 101–105; nagel 1986, 138–163 (chapter 8). 31. nagel 1986, 139. 32. ibid. 33. nagel 2012, 119. 34. ibid. 35. see for this distinction: nagel 1986, 152–153—“if a reason can be given in a general form which does not include an essential reference to the person who has it, it is an agent-neutral reason. for example, if it is a reason for anyone to do or want something that it would reduce the amount of wretchedness in the world, then that is a neutral reason. if on the other hand the general form of a reason does include an essential reference to the person who has it, it is an agent-relative reason. for example, if it is a reason for anyone to do or to want something that would be in his interest, then that is a relative reason [. . .] (both agent-relative and agent-neutral reasons are objective, if they can be understood and affirmed from outside the viewpoint of the individual who has them.)” 36. nagel 2012, 119: “[v]alue must be seen as pluralistic: the domain of real value, if there is such a thing, is as rich and complex as the variety of forms of life, or at least of conscious life.” it would be interesting to hear more about this last qualification. 37. ibid., 120. 38. ibid., 105: “street holds that a darwinian account is strongly supported by contemporary science, so she concludes that moral realism is false. i follow the same inference in the opposite direction: since moral realism is true, a darwinian account of the motives underlying moral judgment must be false, in spite of the scientific consensus in its favor.” 39. street 2006, 112. 40. nagel 2012, 20. nagel writes further here: “if we want to try to understand the world as a whole, we must start with an adequate range of data, and those data must include the evident facts about ourselves.” 41. nagel 2012, 123. 42. ibid., 49. 43. ibid., n. 11. 9 prusak 44. see nagel 2006; nagel 1997, 127–143 (chapter 7). 45. nagel 2012, 29: “the priority given to evolutionary naturalism in the face of its implausible conclusions about other subjects is due, i think, to the secular consensus that this is the only form of external understanding of ourselves that provides an alternative to theism—which is to be rejected as a mere projection of our internal self-conception onto the universe, without evidence.” 46. see plantinga 2012, 39–40. 47. nagel 1997, 130. 48. see ibid., 132–133; nagel 2012, 26. 49. compare gutting 2013, 15. see nagel 2012, 45 (on “significant explanation”), 46, 47 (on “illuminating explanation”), 48, 50 (on “satisfactory explanation”), 53. it is worth considering that nagel presents himself as “an objective idealist in the tradition of plato and perhaps also of certain post-kantians, such as schelling and hegel.” as such, for him, “pure empiricism is not enough. the intelligibility of the world is no accident” (17). works cited dupré, john. 2012. review of mind and cosmos: why the materialist neo-darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false, by thomas nagel. notre dame philosophical reviews, october 29. http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/35163-mind-and-cosmoswhy-the-materialist-neo-darwinian-conception-of-nature-is-almost-certainly-false/ (accessed january 22, 2014). dworkin, ronald. 1996. “objectivity and truth: you’d better believe it.” philosophy and public affairs 25: 87–139. gutting, gary. 2013. “nagel’s untimely idea: is there more to nature than matter?” commonweal, may 17: 15–16. haught, john f. 2013. “darwin’s nagging doubt: what thomas nagel could learn from theology.” commonweal, october 11: 9–11. kitcher, philip. 2013. “things fall apart.” the new york times, september 8. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/08/things-fall-apart/?_r=0 (accessed january 8, 2014). leiter, brian, and michael weisberg. 2012. “do you only have a brain? on thomas nagel.” review of mind and cosmos: why the materialist neo-darwinian conception of the ethics of metaethics 10 nature is almost certainly false, by thomas nagel. the nation, october 22: 27–31. nagel, thomas. 1986. the view from nowhere. new york: oxford university press. _____. 1997. the last word. new york: oxford university press. _____. 2006. “the fear of religion.” the new republic, october 23: 25–29. _____. 2012. mind and cosmos: why the materialist neo-darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false. new york: oxford university press. _____. 2013. “the core of ‘mind and cosmos.” the new york times, august 18. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/the-core-of-mind-and-cosmos/?_r=0 (accessed january 8, 2014). orr, h. allen. 2013. “awaiting a new darwin.” review of mind and cosmos: why the materialist neo-darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false, by thomas nagel. new york review of books, february 7: 26–28. pinker, steven. 2012. https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/258350644979695616 (accessed january 8, 2014). plantinga, alvin. 2012. “a secular heresy.” review of mind and cosmos: why the materialist neo-darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false, by thomas nagel. the new republic, december 6: 36–40. sober, elliott. 2012. “remarkable facts: ending science as we know it.” review of mind and cosmos: why the materialist neo-darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false, by thomas nagel. boston review, november/december: 50–55. street, sharon. 2006. “a darwinian dilemma for realist theories of value.” philosophical studies 127: 109–166. _____. 2008. “constructivism about reasons.” in oxford studies in metaethics, vol. 3, edited by russ shafer-landau, 207–245. oxford: clarendon press. _____. 2011. “mind-independence without the mystery: why quasi-realists can’t have it both ways.” in oxford studies in metaethics, vol. 6, edited by russ shafer-landau, 1– 32. oxford: clarendon press. wieseltier, leon. 2013. “the heretic.” the new republic, march 11: 65. [expositions 5.2 (2011) 45-70] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 reference, autonomy and nationalism in early german romantic art joseph e. morgan new england conservatory in the early nineteenth century the enlightenment’s ideal of the autonomous artwork still held sway over mainstream artistic expression, and it was particularly influential in the aesthetics of nineteenth century music (dalhaus 1989a, 6; chua 1999). this ideal of autonomy was perhaps first formulated by immanuel kant in his critique of judgment (2005 [1790]), in which the artwork was characterized by its separation and independence from other pursuits: it is the idea that “what is essential to art is its radical separation from other kinds of truth, by virtue of its irreducibility to being judged in terms of anything but itself” (bowie 1996). this trait, which has since been most commonly cited in discussions of “absolute” instrumental music, also applied to dramatic music of the era. indeed, just as the texted works of the other arts (poetry, literature, drama etc.) were expected to be autonomous, so were many of those musical genres which included sung text. further, this expectation included an ideal for nested autonomy in which the individual numbers of a work were also expected to maintain their own independence. the number opera from the eighteenth century, for example, with its requirement that each individual number have the ability to be “readily be detached from the whole,” is a manifestation of this ideal (tyrrell and sadie 2001). this requirement had several direct effects on the music and its performance including the tendency for each number to begin and end in the same key as well as the frequent performance of individual numbers in concert and recital. 1 however, in the same period, german artists also began to incorporate extrinsic meaning into their works. that is, they began to incorporate meaning of a historical or symbolic nature that dealt with issues extending beyond the borders of the individual work. 2 proponents of the use of extrinsic meaning looked to art to communicate solutions to the important philosophical and theological questions of the era. this, obviously, created a tension with the ideal of the autonomous work. as andrew bowie has described the tension, [it rested] between the desire for a “new mythology” and the idea of the autonomy of the aesthetic work. the “new mythology” […] would sensuously present ideas of reason in order to communicate the advances brought about by autonomous subjectivity to all levels of society. in contrast, the idea of superiority of the autonomous work of art over science and philosophy relies upon the conviction that the highest principle of philosophy is unrepresentable and must therefore be preserved from being used as a means for scientific and political ends. (bowie 2003, 28) reference, autonomy and nationalism 46 the primary topic of this paper is an investigation into how early nineteenth century german artists and aestheticians reconciled this new expectation of symbolic expression with the ideal of autonomy that they inherited from the enlightenment. the discussion begins with the aestheticians, focusing primarily on friedrich wilhelm joseph schelling, but also briefly mentioning johann wolfgang von goethe and immanuel kant, and their prescription for the use of a multivalent symbol to resolve this tension. then the discussion turns to the analysis of works from different artistic mediums of the era, investigating how this tension between the work’s autonomy and its history were handled in the works and criticism of different disciplines, including the religious imagery of the nazarenes, the interdisciplinary expression of e.t.a. hoffmann, and the referential motive as used in the dramatic works of carl maria von weber and richard wagner. overall, the artworks discussed in this article are also unified by their shared meta-discourse on the emerging nationalist german identity. contrary to the modern perception of german nationalism as inherited from late nineteenth and early twentieth century, for german artists of the early nineteenth century the german national identity was based on a cosmopolitan ability to assimilate foreign practice. 3 indeed, in several of the works discussed below, it is this cosmopolitan facet of the german identity that obtains the primary expression of the work. the aesthetes in the early nineteenth century, aesthetes were concerned with the avenues of expression; the way in which meaning is presented to the audience. kant divided artistic expression into two types, the schematic and the symbolic. in his terms, the schematic is a non-specific expression that leads to the particular subject of the representation; it is “a direct presentation of the concept.” the symbolic, alternatively, depends on analogy. it begins with a specific expression that requires the audience to construe a general concept and apply that concept to the subject of the representation (kant 2005, § 59, 252). goethe focuses on kant’s symbolic and divides it into two types, the allegoric and the symbolic. for goethe the allegoric is a representation that leads through the general, whereas the symbolic is in itself already a representation of the general (todorov 1982, 198-221). this symbol is privileged because it effectively merges (or synthesizes) the allegory and schema into one, representing the general and the specific simultaneously. while kant’s opposition is descriptive, revealing how representations work, goethe’s is prescriptive, designating his “symbolic” as “the approach which is properly the nature of poetry,” an approach that becomes the goal of the expression (in todorov 1982, 204; see also: berefelt 1969). 47 morgan table 1: aesthetic categories of kant, goethe, and schelling as tzvetan todorov has pointed out, f. w. j. v. schelling in his philosophy of art (1989 [1802]) created a triad of expression that merged kant’s opposition between the schematic and the symbolic with goethe’s famous distinction between the symbolic and the allegorical (todorov 1982, 199). schelling describes this triad as: that representation in which the universal means the particular or in which the particular is intuited through the universal is schematism. that representation, however, in which the particular means the universal or in which the universal is intuited through the particular is allegory. the synthesis of these two, where neither the universal means the particular nor the particular the universal, but rather where both are absolutely one, is the symbolic. (schelling 1989, § 39, 46) schelling’s systematic organization of these three concepts even goes so far as to apply them to the general aspects of several arts, including music, painting, and the plastic arts, with an emphasis on whether they convey meaning through unity, multiplicity or both. for example, schelling’s three characteristics of music are rhythm, melody and harmony. rhythm is to be understood as the element that synthesizes the dialectical properties of melody (“unity within multiplicity”) and harmony (“multiplicity within unity”) (schelling 1989, 114). 4 it is for this attribute that schelling describes music as the symbol: reference, autonomy and nationalism 48 music as the form in which the real unity becomes its own symbol, encompassing necessarily all other unities within itself, for the real unity takes itself (within art) as potence merely in order to represent itself, through itself, absolutely as form. each unity in its own absoluteness, however, encompasses all others as well; hence, music also encompasses all others. (schelling 1989, 109) in this perspective, music is a specific representation that is also in itself a representation of the general – on the level of the three arts, it is the symbol. similarly, schelling places painting within this triadic division of the universe: “the reason painting is allegorical inheres in its very nature itself, since it is not yet the genuinely symbolic art from; if it does not raise itself to this level, as is the case in the highest art genre, it can signify the universal only through the particular” (schelling 1989, 148). he then subdivides the art of painting into three parts and folds them into the tripartite hierarchy by equating drawing, chiaroscuro, and color, respectively to allegory, schema, and the symbol. schelling also attributes the characteristics of the allegory, schema and symbol to particular genres of painting. “landscapes,” for example, “are merely schematic, for here it is not the truly formed and limited element that is portrayed, and not the unlimited by means of it, but rather vice versa: the limited element here is alluded to by the unlimited and formless” (schelling 1989, 159). however, the historical painting is primarily, indeed if it is without error, completely allegorical: “allegory is either used as an addition to an otherwise historical painting, or the entire conception and composition is itself allegorical. the first is always in error unless the allegorical beings themselves that are mixed in can possess historical significance in the painting” (schelling 1989, 159). the error that schelling is alluding to is actually an application of the enlightenment’s requirement that an artwork be autonomous and unified towards a singular expression. he continues: “the painting is to fulfill only the inner requirements of being true, beautiful, expressive, and universally significant such that in any case it can do without that accidental attractiveness resulting from the knowledge of the particular empirical event portrayed. it is equally erroneous for the art to flatter either learnedness or the lack of it” (schelling 1989, 157). finally, for schelling, “the most perfect symbolic representation is offered by the enduring and independent poetic figures of a specific mythology” (schelling 1989, 151). as an example he includes several saints whose specific legends represent the allegorical half of the synthesis, but the fact that over time these legends came to represent a general ideal leads to their ascendancy to the symbolic: thus, the picture of saint cecelia, the patron saint of music, is not an allegorical but rather a symbolic picture, since it possesses an existence independent of the meaning without losing that meaning [. . .] the symbolic image presupposes that an idea precedes it, an idea that becomes symbolic by becoming historico-objectively and 49 morgan independently visible. just as the idea becomes symbolic by acquiring historical significance, so in a reverse fashion does the historical element become symbolic only by being combined with the idea and becoming the expression of the idea…according to our explanation, the historical is itself merely one particular mode of the symbolic. (schelling 1989, 151) under these terms then, the extrinsic meaning expressed in the artwork should neither contradict nor remain disjunctive, but instead the meaning should complement a reading of the elements of the artwork itself; in schelling’s terms the expression should be both “historico-objectively and independently visible.” schelling’s ideas were relatively widespread throughout europe in the early nineteenth century. first presented as a series of lectures given by the philosopher in jena and würzburg in 1802, the lectures were circulated throughout europe in the notes of many of his former students, and ultimately entered into the period’s mainstream aesthetic conceptions of art (schelling 1989, x-xiii). even though different artists expressed this idea in different ways, carl maria von weber described it as a janus-like image while e. t. a. hoffmann described it as “caricature in the higher sense of the term,” as we shall see, they shared the goal of an expression that was “historic-objectively and independently visible” (hoffmann 1946, 296). the nazarenes in 1810 a group of artists known as the nazarenes traveled to italy to master and revive the italian style of painting which was then seen as the only viable future for german art (andrews 1964). the group’s leader, franz pforr, was likened to albrecht dürer as “passionate, direct, and full of character,” and took to calling himself albrecht. another member, the group’s “priest” friedrich overbeck, was likened to raphael “on account of his piety and tranquil idealism” (vaughan 1980, 172). overall, the nazarene’s program emphasized “the strengthening of a nation through a christian and moral art that was to be schooled by the example of the middle ages” (hartley 1994, 289). in october of 1811, pforr and overbeck exchanged sketches that expressed this romantic ideal by addressing the relationship between modern german art and the traditions of renaissance italy. the finished paintings were both to be titled sulamith und maria, but overbeck overtly retitled his italia und germania in 1828. read autonomously, and without concern for extrinsic meaning, both paintings depict germany’s return to the italian school of the middle ages as important for the future of german art, but the relationship between the two cultures, as expressed by each artist, is quite different. reference, autonomy and nationalism 50 plate one: franz pforr, sulamith und maria (1811). 5 pforr’s work, given on plate one above, separates the two women, treating them as independent subjects, complementary but separate. sulamith (on the left) is focusing on providing for her child as overbeck looks on. she is in a bucolic garden with a lamb at her feet and birds hovering nearby, all of which emphasize her primitive mediterranean setting. maria, (on the right) is still in her youth, reading and brushing her hair. the open book on the windowsill reveals her interest in education while the dark background and closed window is reminiscent of the colder, german climate. the two women are treated in parallel, but the frame of the diptych emphasizes their separate development. 51 morgan plate two: friedrich overbeck, italia und germania (1828). 6 overbeck’s work, given in plate two, was only sketched in 1811. it places the sisters in a familial setting and maria is comforting a forlorn sulamith. instead of placing the sisters in a parallel (but clearly separate) depiction, overbeck has them facing each other. in 1828, when he completed it, overbeck added to the background the architectural contrasts of the sister’s respective regions. while both artists clearly see the way forward for german art was through the study of the “primitive, italian style,” the function of their nationalism is distinctly different. pforr’s maria has no interest in sulamith, and there is no indicated role for her in sulamith’s (italy’s) life. overbeck’s maria however, reveals a cosmopolitan function. her comforting of the forlorn sulamith is an expression of overbeck’s ideal for german art’s role as the rejuvenator of italian art. reference, autonomy and nationalism 52 this analysis of the nazarene’s work has been conducted without regard for each painting’s symbolic content and historical evidence. if the paintings are to rise to the level of schelling’s symbol, the historical evidence (any expression that results from pre-existent or extrinisic meaning) is “merely one mode of the symbolic.” thus, “if without error,” the historical evidence will support the reading conducted solely from the paintings themselves. turning merely to the background provided by the original title of both paintings, the meaning is accentuated but not changed. the names sulamith and maria were based on two biblical characters that pforr had included in a short fable that he presented to overbeck entitled das buch sulamith und maria (pforr 1927). in the book, the two characters eventually marry two painters who are literary representations of pforr and overbeck. maria, the betrothed of pforr, is an incarnation of the madonna. sulamith, overbeck’s betrothed, is an old testament character who is described in the “song of solomon” as “my dove, my perfect one, is the only one, the darling of her mother.” 7 clearly, these are depictions of the ideal woman from different religious traditions, and by placing them side by side, the artists are able to employ the binary and polemical relationship between the old and new testaments. the comparison of these two ideal women is only one way in which the two traditions as may be compared. particularly with pforr’s work, an investigation of the historical meanings of the secondary objects in his work will reveal the depths of his metaphor. maria, the idealization of german art, is placed in an annunciation scene, in fact, a pre-annunciation scene. she is in an interior setting, with a book, and by a window, all of which were common symbols in renaissance annunciations, whether painted in the north or south. 8 the white cloth on maria’s table seems to accentuate the absence of the symbolic white lilies that would normally appear in an annunciation, indicating that the depiction is perhaps just moments before the annunciation. further, lilies actually do appear, but planted on sulamith’s side of the diptych. as such, with the understanding that maria is a personification of german art, the fact that she is awaiting the annunciation is a powerful metaphor for pforr’s belief that german art is awaiting its own revival. similarly, on sulamith’s side, the appearance of a child in his mother’s arms immediately seems to reference a madonna and child, with the planted lilies indicating that her (italy’s) annunciation has already happened. all the while the lamb looks on – a symbol of sacrifice and rebirth. pforr places the christ child in an old testament character’s arms, and perhaps even more alarmingly, he has her feeding the child an apple (with a worm) – the standard symbol for the forbidden fruit. underlying this metaphor is an assumption that would become common in the nineteenth century – german artists should study medieval italian art, and that italian art of the nineteenth century was stagnant in that each generation of italian artists are raised from the same corrupting fruit. ultimately, as our analysis of these paintings has shown, both painting fulfill schelling’s requirement that they be “true, beautiful, expressive, and universally significant such that in any case [they] can do without that accidental attractiveness resulting from the knowledge of the 53 morgan particular empirical event portrayed” (schelling 1989, 157). or, put another way, the autonomy of each painting is maintained despite the incorporation of extrinsic meaning. e.t.a. hoffmann in 1816, five years after overbeck and pforr exchanged their sketches, e. t. a. hoffmann published his fictional story die fermate, which also uses two symbolic women to communicate a conception of the relationship between german and italian art (hoffmann 1946, 295-318). the story is told by the main (semi-autobiographical) character, a german named theodore, to his friend eduard after seeing johann erdmann hummel’s gathering at an italian inn, at a berlin exhibition in 1814 (mcglathery 1997, 69; see plate three below). in the story, theodore explains to his friend that the painting depicts one of his own personal experiences and begins the narrative that will lead to the situation depicted in the painting. plate three: johann erdmann hummel, die gesellschaft in einer italienischen lokanda (1814). 9 in the narrative, theodore relates that in his youth, while he was studying composition by learning “obscure and unmelodious toccatas and fugues” in the old german style, two italian singers named teresina and lauretta came to town (hoffmann 1946, 297). from the beginning, the two singers are presented as “caricature[s] in the higher sense of the term” (hoffmann 1946, reference, autonomy and nationalism 54 296). they are symbols for specific operatic genres – teresina represents the romanza, and lauretta the arioso (hoffmann 1946, 178). as the story progresses, hoffmann provides descriptions that reveal more specific characteristics of lauretta (and the arioso style). in these descriptions hoffmann locates his conception of the italian style as a vocally dominated style and criticized it for lacking any “expressive harmony.” as an example of the style hoffmann is criticizing, we turn to his italian canzonettas (1812), one of which lauretta actually sings in the story. as the character theordore states: “lauretta began to sing very softly; but soon she held a note to fortissimo, and then quickly broke into a crisp and complicated run through an octave and a half. i can still remember the words with which her song began: ‘sento l”amica speme’” (hoffmann 1946, 179). the aria in question is the third of hoffmann’s tre canzonette italiane a.v. 64 (1812). it is in ternary form, written for keyboard, men’s chorus and soprano. the melodic figuration of the soprano line in the a section’s return provides an excellent example of hoffmann’s characterization. example one: e.t.a. hoffmann, tre canzonette italiane iii. “sento l’amica speme.” mm.5254, 57-59 and 63-65. as illustrated in example one, taken from the return of the a section, hoffmann first returns to the theme in its original form at “costatnte ognor sará” in order to signal the recapitulation. he then increasingly ornaments the phrase until its final treatment at the fermata. there is very little subtlety in the settings; their purpose is to emphasize the “primitive”characteristic of their italian, vocal-centered expression. as a performing singer, lauretta has become a specific representation of the italian style, but as a caricature, she also represents the style from a general perspective. in the story, theodore first swoons over lauretta and her sister’s passionate style, and runs off with them to compose arias that complement their ornamented singing. one day, while conducting a particularly ornamented cadenza, he interrupts the fermata by cadencing early. the accident incurs the women’s wrath and leads to his separation from them. years later, theodore happens upon the two singers in the exact same situation arguing with a conductor who had 55 morgan mistakenly interrupted their fermata – this is the situation depicted in hummel’s painting (theodore is on horseback in the background). the sister’s singing no longer has the effect that it originally did on theodore, although their voices “had not appreciably lost anything in power or range.” the story ends: happy is the composer who never again, as long as he lives, sets eyes upon the woman who by some mysterious power kindled the flame of music within him! even though the young artist’s heart may be rent by anguish and despair when he must part from his lovely enchantress, nevertheless it is precisely so that she will continue to exist for him [. . .] for what is she, now, but the highest ideal, which, working its way from within outward, is at last reflected in external form? (hoffmann 1946, 317) the moral of the story is that theodore, by internalizing the italian style, has merged it into the “highest ideal,” which is no longer reflected in the performance. in his youth, theodore was the embodiment of the older german style and the two sisters embodied the clichéd italian style. it is only through his internalization and mastery of their style then his separation from it that theodore can reach the “highest ideal”– german romanticism. for hoffmann, the fermata as both a pause and a display element (i.e., cadenza), as well as the painting, itself a pause in time, symbolizes the stagnation of the italian style. hoffmann’s “caricature,” and the nazarene’s characters sulamith and maria, are very similar to schelling’s symbolic in that they both simultaneously represent specific characters and general concepts. the method by which hoffmann and the nazarenes created their symbols, anthropomorphized as an ideal woman, was a very common trope of the period. in nationalist paintings and political comics it was common to find national movements anthropomorphized as ideal women (zamoyski 2000). however, as we shall see, the symbolic expression need not take human form; it could take the abstract shape of a musical motive. carl maria von weber in one of his autobiographical sketches, weber described the aesthetic challenge of opera: in most cases individual numbers decide the fate of an opera. it is only rarely that such attractive individual features, which strike the listener immediately, disappear in the final impression of the work as a whole, as should ideally occur. for ideally the listener should fall in love with the whole work and only later pick out the details of which it is composed. the very nature and inner constitution of opera – as a whole containing other wholes – has this essential drawback which only a few heroes of the art have managed to surmount. every musical number has its own proper architecture which makes it an reference, autonomy and nationalism 56 independent and organic unity; yet this should be absorbed in any study of the work as a whole. ensembles, in particular, can and should show a number of different aspects simultaneously, a janus-like image, whose different faces are visible at a single glance. (weber 1981, 336) it is important to note that, for weber, the autonomous number and its relationship to the broader organization is the defining characteristic of opera, “a whole containing other wholes.” thus the challenge of this genre is to create a unified relationship amongst the numbers without undermining the autonomy of each. like schelling’s symbol and hoffmann’s caricature, the different faces of weber’s janus mediate between the autonomy of the work (the number) and extrinsic meaning that connects it to the opera as a whole. an excellent example of this relationship can be located in weber’s last opera oberon (1826). as a document of german nationalism, at first glance the plot of oberon might appear to be an odd choice. the story, adapted from christoph martin wieland’s epic poem oberon: ein gedicht in zwölf gesängen (1780), overtly combines elements of several pre-existing narratives into one plot, including shakespeare’s a midsummer night’s dream, geoffrey chaucer’s the merchant’s tale, and the medieval french romance huon de bordeaux. yet, as claire baldwin has noted, for many german readers and critics, wieland was the german answer to the literary movements abroad precisely because of his cosmopolitan narrative borrowing: for his [wieland’s] contemporaries, anxiously concerned with promulgating a bona fide ‘original german novel’ equal to the fictions already well established and flourishing in england and france, the young wieland represented an author capable of achieving international stature by incorporating elements of other european novel styles in texts with their own unique signature. (baldwin 2002, 4) wieland also encountered strong resistance from authors of the contemporary storm and stress school in germany who tended to espouse an insularist conception of germany. one such author, heinrich wilhelm von gerstenberg (1737-1823) attacked wieland precisely for his cosmopolitan use of different styles: “who did wieland not try to be? now shaftesbury, now milton, then young, rowe, richardson: now crébillion, then hamilton, at other times fielding, cervantes, helvetius, york, and in passing even something of rousseau, montaigne, [and] voltaire” (quoted in hinderer 2004, 382). in response to these criticisms, wieland would direct “rather blunt” essays at his critics, denouncing the “excessive german nationalism that had taken hold since klopstock and the storm and stress period” (quoted in hinderer 2004, 382). one such essay, published in his journal teutscher merkur ridiculed those who maintained an insularist perception of germany for “wandering about, lost in the woods of the old germans, affecting in bardic songs a national character that has long since ceased to be ours” (in hinderer 2004, 382). even goethe is said to have read the entire epic in one sitting, and is known to have commented: “as long as poetry remains poetry, gold remains gold, and crystal remains crystal, oberon will 57 morgan be loved and admired as a masterpiece of poetic art” (quoted in mccarthy 1979, 127). by 1824, when weber chose oberon as a subject for his next opera, he was making a statement concerning his own cosmopolitan german identity, and the resultant work contains expressions of both weber’s cosmopolitan approach and his ideal of the symbol. there are several methods by which musical material can reveal different aspects simultaneously and perhaps the most efficient place for characterization is, as weber notes, during an ensemble when musical style alone can show different aspects simultaneously. for example, in the second act of weber’s oberon, the socio-economic class of the two leading characters (sir huon and lady reiza) is musically set apart from that of their servants by the style of their vocal lines. example two: carl maria von weber, oberon act ii no. 11 “on board then!” mm. 68-70. specifically, the running sixteenth notes of the aristocratic sir huon and his lady reiza are set against the held lines of their servants sherasmin and fatima. of course, this contrast is employing a convention that was inherited from eighteenth century italian opera buffa in which the comic characters with common sense and simple vocal lines would provide a musical and dramatic foil to the actions, foibles, and more virtuosic lines of their aristocratic masters. this is perhaps the most obvious example of weber adopting the italian style to his needs, as the character theodore had in hoffmann’s short story. however, weber’s employment of the french opera comique’s reminiscence motive for the motivic reference and formal organization of oberon was a much more innovative aspect of his operatic style. 10 indeed, it is in the motivic organization that weber mediates between the individual number and larger form, creating individual themes whose meanings are altered depending on the context from which they are viewed. from the perspective of the individual number, they serve as conventional formal markers, articulating the organization of the number. however, from a broader perspective the very same theme contributes to the broader dramatic meaning. for example, the brief 19 th number from weber’s oberon, “mourn thou poor heart” is a simple ternary form “cavatine” with the a and a’ sections set in f minor and the contrasting b reference, autonomy and nationalism 58 section in the flat submediant d-flat major. (the text and harmonic outline is given in table two, the entire number is given below) table two: carl maria von weber, oberon act iii, no. 19, “mourn thou poor heart.” the primary formal markers are the introductory gesture which prepares the dominant area and a ritornello (a dotted three note ascent of a third) that marks the beginning of the b section at measure 33 and returns at the end in measure 72. the close of both a sections in tonic minor is unrelentingly plaintive. even the contrasting middle section fails to break up the dreariness in the way it climaxes to diminished harmony at measures 49 and 50. taken out of the opera’s context, although it is simple, the piece is a beautiful expression of a woman who has lost hope. however, if the analytical view is broadened to incorporate the extrinsic meaning and locate the number within the broader opera, the interpretation reveals a separate but not contradictory meaning, “a janus-like image, whose different faces are visible at a single glance” (weber 1981, 336). cavatina. reiza harmony-f minor a (mm.136) mourn thou poor heart for the joys that are dead, i – v flow ye sad tears for the hopes that are fled, i – v – i sorrow is now the sole treasure i prize; v as paris on perfume, i feed on its sighs v – i and bitter to some as its fountain may be o7 – v7/iv – iv – o7 “tis sweet as the waters of gelum to me! i – bii6 – v7 – i b (3752) ye that are basking in pleasure’s gay beam. vi – v7/vi – vi ye that are sailing on hope’s golden stream vi – v7/vi – vi a cloud may come o’ver ye – a wave sweep the deck vi – v/nvi – nvi – iv and picture a future of darkness and wreck o7 – v a” (5375) but the scourge of the desert o’ver my heart hath past i – ii7 – v – i and the tree that is blighted, fears no second blast! i – v7/iv – iv – o7 i – v – i 59 morgan reference, autonomy and nationalism 60 61 morgan indeed, the musical historical context does support this reading, revealing that the number is built into a network of referential motives and harmony. first, (and most obviously) the ritornello figure in measure 33, its inversion in measure 35, and at the end (mm. 72-73) are direct references to the opera’s opening horn theme. example three: carl maria von weber, oberon overture, mm.1-2 taking the basic identity of the first three notes, spanning a third in a long—short – longer rhythmic pattern, one will notice the vocal line is nearly saturated with latent references to this horn theme (see the approach to the downbeat of measures 8, 10, 12, 13, 16, and so on). 11 in the opera, oberon’s magic horn (as announced by its accompanying theme) is the source of reiza’s repeated rescues, and perhaps here weber is expressing her latent wish for the magic horn to save her now (in this scene she is being held in the court of the evil emir almasor and the magic horn is lost). from a harmonic standpoint, the opening of the number also refers to the horn theme with a shared harmonic progression that passes from the tonic to the minor subdominant (in second inversion) and then a diminished seventh harmony before it arrives at a dominant seventh to open the piece. 12 the climax of the b section, similarly, can be understood as a direct reference to a storm scene that had shipwrecked reiza earlier in the opera. specifically, in this previous scene, the power of the storm was depicted with an intensely chromatic diminished seventh harmony, in contrast to the diatonicism of the calm beach. even here the three note motive is referenced in the bass (double dotted quarter note followed by a sixteenth note) in mm. 45-47. finally, the instrumentation, with the clarinet and bassoon in the outer voices, parallels the instrumentation of the horn theme as it first appeared in reiza’s act one vision. however, it is not the sheer number of thematic references that make the number great – particularly by weber’s standards. it is their subtlety, and the way the references are constructed so that instead of interrupting the musical development and form, they help to articulate it. these themes are multivalent. they help to articulate the formal organization of the music, even as they refer to earlier dramatic events. richard wagner the cosmopolitan perspective and aesthetic ideal under discussion also found expression in the early works of richard wagner. indeed, from a very early age wagner was influenced by the writings of e. t. a. hoffmann. as linda siegal describes it, wagner’s “idolatry of hoffmann reference, autonomy and nationalism 62 began in his youth with a thorough introduction to the author’s tales by his uncle, adolph, who knew hoffmann quite intimately and greatly admired his music and literary achievements” (siegel 1965, 597). in his autobiography wagner describes hoffmann as a “romantic visionary,” whose influence extended “even to the point of infatuation, and gave me [wagner] very peculiar ideas of the world” (wagner 1911, 20). of these “peculiar ideas of the world,” hoffmann’s expression of a german identity built on the synthesis of foreign practice is most evident in wagner’s early writings and music. particularly in his essay “on german music” written in paris in 1840 wagner emphasized the german adoption of french styled music: “small wonder, if the impressionable and impartial german did not delay to recognize the excellence of these products of his neighbours with unassumed enthusiasm [. . .] moreover these foreign imports met a genuine need; for it is not to be denied that the grander genre of dramatic music does not flourish in germany of itself” (wagner 1994b, 101). the impact that these foreign imports had on german “dramatic music” was clear, “we may take it that the germans and the french at present have but one [dramatic music], though their works be first produced in one land, this is more a local than a vital difference” (wagner 1994b, 101). further, in his description of gioachino rossini, wagner attributes much of the composer’s success to his adoption of french dramatic techniques, particularly when rossini revised maometto ii (1826) and mosé in egitto (1827) for paris. wagner lauded rossini for singlehandedly reinvigorating italian opera: [w]ith that brilliant audacity which alone could compass such a thing, he [rossini] tore down all the remnants of the old italian school, already withered to a meager skeleton of empty forms. his lustful-jovial song went floating round the world, and its advantages—of freshness, ease and luxury of form—were given consistence by the french. among them the rossinian line gained character and a worthier look, through national stability; on their own feet, and sympathizing with the nation, their masters now turned out the finest work that any folk’s art-history can show. (wagner 1994b, 101) this cosmopolitan perspective also appears in the form and content of wagner’s operas from the period. for example, in his das liebesverbot (1836) wagner contrasted a convention-bound german man with his liberated italian lover. basing his libretto on shakespeare’s measure for measure, wagner moved the drama to sicily, where, in the king’s absence, a minister “simply called friedrich, to mark him for a german,” is tasked with “radically reform[ing] the manners of his capital, which had become an abomination to the strait-laced minister” (wagner 1994a, 10). friedrich’s efforts become complicated when he realizes that he has fallen in love with isabella, the sister of a man whom he has sentenced to death for “lustful living.” this complication is expressed by wagner through the contrast of national operatic styles. 63 morgan friedrich’s two movement italian aria from the second act, (no. 10 “so spat und noch kein brief von isabella?”) provides an excellent example. in the aria, friedrich’s description of his love for isabella is set in an 8 bar periodic phrase whose ending is extended with a small cadenza, given in example . example four: richard wagner, das liebesverbot act ii, no. 10 “so spat und noch kein brief von isabella?” mm. 80-82. the uptight german, despite himself, sings in a remarkably italian style. the moment is not meant as mockery; it is a sincere expression of friedrich’s love and hypocrisy for the fact that he is experiencing a love that he has lawfully forbidden. after the cadenza, in an even more stereotypically italian dramatic moment, a letter from isabella arrives and initiates a tempo d’mezzo. when friedrich reads the letter and realizes that he must execute isabella’s brother claudio, (despite her love and his promise that he wouldn’t), the style of his vocal line changes to express the fact that “the law must be obeyed.” in stark contrast to his previous cadenza, friedrich’s realization, which appears at the end of the tempo d’mezzo, is marked by a half cadence to a distant gs major triad, followed by a return of the opera’s primary leitmotiv – a descending leap of a sixth followed by a chromatic ascent as in measure 173. in the section break, friedrich’s voice is not ornamental, and the only aspect of his vocal line that marks the moment is its arrival onto his highest note in the section. reference, autonomy and nationalism 64 example five: richard wagner, das liebesverbot act ii, no. 10 “so spat und noch kein brief von isabella?” mm. 168-174. the return of the leitmotiv here assists in the articulation of the end of the section, supporting the form of this individual number, even as it connects the number (through its reference to the ban on love) to the broader dramatic narrative. notably, wagner is still working towards weber’s aesthetic goal of nested autonomy – opera as a “whole containing other wholes.” the opera reaches its comic dénouement when, at isabella’s request, friedrich breaks his own law by wearing a mask to meet her in public. in the penultimate section of the multi-movement grand finale, his mask is taken away and his hypocrisy revealed. at this moment wagner brings the leitmotiv to a resolution by extending the ending ascent so that it fills in the initial leap of the sixth (see example six). example six: richard wagner, das liebesverbot act ii finale “so recht, ihr wackern, jungen leute!” mm. 265-270. 65 morgan the positive light by which wagner paints italian culture, a striking contrast from his later depictions of italian opera, is further emphasized in his description of the grand finale: friedrich moodily asks to be led before the judgment-seat of the king on his return, to receive the capital sentence; claudio, set free from prison by the jubilant mob, instructs him that death is not always the penalty for a love-offence. fresh messengers announce the unexpected arrival of the king in the harbor; everyone decides to go in full carnivalattire to greet the beloved prince, who surely will be pleased to see how ill the sour puritanism of the germans becomes the heat of sicily. (wagner 1994a, 16) das liebesverbot, wagner’s second opera, already shows a mastery of weber’s most advanced dramatic language. and for most of wagner’s early career it must be noted that by continuing with weber’s aesthetics, wagner could be considered artistically conservative. further, weber’s aesthetics and particularly his ideal of the symbol are clearly articulated in other major operatic works of the day, including heinrich marschner’s hans heilig (1833), and robert schumann’s genoveva (1848). 13 however, the mainstream german acceptance of a cosmopolitan nationalist identity, and the acceptance of the aesthetic of the symbol, did not last far beyond the century’s midpoint. those works that were overtly conceived under these aesthetic ideals quickly fell from grace. weber’s oberon is again an excellent example. oberon was commissioned for performance in london, where weber travelled against his doctor’s orders in order to direct the premiere in 1826; it killed him. 14 by this time, of course, weber was already a well known symbol of the nationalist movement in germany, and perhaps partially because of his death, his swan song quickly became quite popular in germany. 15 the opera made its continental premiere in leipzig on christmas eve, 1826 where it ran for over 40 performances. in the next year and a half, the opera had opened in at least seven places, including vienna, cassel, frankfort, bremen, dresden, mannheim, and weimar (kinsky and strunk 1933). in berlin, where “during the winter semester of 1826 and 1827 all berlin seemed intoxicated by oberon’s melodies,” the opera was not reference, autonomy and nationalism 66 premiered until july 2, 1828 in the publisher schlesinger’s home. of the notable participants, felix mendelssohn was engaged as accompanist and coach (kinsky and strunk 1933). in 1829 it was brought to paris with an all german cast and revived three times in london by 1841. in this way, weber’s oberon quickly became one of the central works of the german operatic repertory of the first half of the nineteenth century. after 1850 however, the opera suffered a swiftly diminishing popularity and the few productions that were held were marked by accompanying revisions that sought to enhance the stylistic unity of the opera. 16 this is certainly related to the fact that the ideal of schelling’s symbol and the nested autonomy of an opera’s individual numbers were cast aside by artists of the era so that the autonomy and coherence of the entire opera could be enhanced. 17 ironically, this movement was pioneered by the “music dramas” of richard wagner who had replaced schelling with a new philosopher for inspiration – arthur schopenhaur. 18 finally, in the twentieth century, critics tended to interpret the nested autonomy of oberon as a weakness instead of a characteristic of the era’s aesthetic ideals, and this once quite popular opera now barely maintains “a toe-hold in the repertory” (brown 1992). 19 certainly the effects that the aesthetic shift at the middle of the nineteenth century had on weber’s reception and wagner’s career are only two narratives of the tumultuous changes that occurred during the long nineteenth century; the work of e.t.a. hoffmann and the nazarene movement faced similar challenges that are beyond the scope of this article. each one of these artists, masters in their own way, confronted the aesthetic expectations of their day. it is our loss if we neglect those expectations in an evaluation of their work. 20 notes 1. for a discussion of the performance of opera arias and duets at the leipzig gewandhaus for just one example see: pieper 2008, 60-68. 2. since the nineteenth century there has been great debate concerning the viability of the autonomous artwork. a couple of my favorite discussions include: adorno 1984, and langer 1942. however, this article is not concerned with debating the ideal of the autonomous work, but instead with investigating how this concept was realized in artistic works in the nineteenth century. 3. there has been a growing recognition of this fact among literary scholars and a bit among musicologists, most notably among scholars of carl maria von weber. see, specifically, tusa 2006. 4. the schematic, allegory, and symbolic representations will be covered more thoroughly below. 5. this painting located in museum georg schäfer, schweinfurt and used with permission. nevertheless, the work of art depicted in this image and the reproduction thereof are in the public domain worldwide. this reproduction is part of a collection 67 morgan of reproductions compiled by the yorck project and distributed freely through wikimedia commons, see http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/commons:10,000_ paintings_from_directmedia. 6. this painting is located in the neue pinakothek and permission was granted by bayerische staatsgemäldesammlungen. nevertheless, the work of art depicted in this image and the reproduction thereof are in the public domain worldwide. this reproduction is part of a collection of reproductions compiled by the yorck project and distributed freely through wikimedia commons, see http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/commons:10,000_ paintings_from_directmedia. 7. the critical commentary to the new revised standard version describes the shulamite: “a]ctually the shulammite; the word is not a proper name but an epithet that probably means ‘the perfect one’” (attridge et al. 2006, “song of solomon,” note 6.13a). 8. for example, from germany, albrecht dürer, “annunciation” from the life of the virgin see jan van eyck’s verkündigung, and from italy raphael’s annunciation from the predella of the coronation of the virgin. 9. used with permission from the bayerische staatsgemaldesammlungen. 10. for a general discussion of the reminiscence motive as used by weber and its relationship to the opera comique, see: dahlhaus 1989b,70-71. 11. for a discussion of weber’s latent thematic coherence see: morgan 2010. 12. for a comprehensive discussion of the thematic organization of this opera see, morgan 2010. 13. for a discussion of this influence on schumann, see: morgan 2010. 14. the opera premiered at covent garden on april 12, 1826, and weber died in london on june 5, 1826. 15. weber became an icon of the nationalist movement when he set theodor körner’s cycle of poems leyer und schwerdt (1814) and der kampf und sieg cantata (1815), see: warrack 1968, 144-171. 16. two of these infamous productions include franz wüllner’s production in vienna in 1881, and arthur bodansky’s production in new york in 1918. 17. for an interesting discussion of the effect that this shift had on the motivic organization of an opera, see: grey 1996, 187-211. 18. for a discussion of wagner’s shift from an aesthetic inspired by schelling to one inspired by schopenhaur, see: chafe 2007, 16-32. 19. john warrack, for one, describes the opera as “maimed” and “fragmented” (warrack 2001, 312). 20. i am very grateful to the numerous people who have dedicated their time, knowledge and expertise to assisting me in the preparation of this article. thanks in particular are due to eric chafe and lewis lockwood for their generous insights and constructive criticism of earlier drafts of this article. an early version of this article was presented reference, autonomy and nationalism 68 at the allegheny chapter meeting of the american musicological society at the university of pittsburgh on april 18, 2009. works cited adorno, theodor. 1984. aesthetic theory. trans. c. lenhard. london: routledge & keegan paul. andrews, keith. 1964. the nazarenes: a brotherhood of german painters in rome. oxford: clarendon press. attridge, harold et al, eds. 2006. the harpercollins study bible. san francisco, ca: harperone. baldwin, claire. 2002. the emergence of the modern german novel: christoph martin wieland, sophie von la roche, and maria anna sagar.rochester, ny: camden house. berefelt, gunnar. 1969. “on symbol and allegory.” the journal of aesthetics and art criticism 28, no. 2: 201-213. bowie, andrew. 1996. “aesthetic autonomy.” a companion to aesthetics: the blackwell companion to philosophy. ed. david cooper. oxford: blackwell publishers: 33-37. –––. 2003. aesthetics and subjectivity: from kant to nietzsche. 2 nd ed. new york: manchester university press. brown, clive. 1992. “oberon.” the new grove dictionary of opera, volume 3. eds. john tyrrell and stanley sadie. london: macmillan press: 642. chafe, eric. 2007. the tragic and the ecstatic: the musical revolution of wagner’s tristan und isolde. cambridge: oxford university press. chua, daniel k. l. 1999. absolute music and the construction of meaning. cambridge, cambridge university press. dahlhaus, carl. 1989a. the idea of absolute music. chicago: university of chicago press. –––. 1989b. nineteenth-century music. trans. j. bradford robinson. los angeles: university of california press. grey, thomas. 1996. “…wie ein rother faden: on the origins of “leitmotif” as critical construct and musical practice.” music theory in the age of romanticism. ed. ian bent. cambridge: cambridge university press: 187-210. 69 morgan hartley, keith. 1994. the romantic spirit in german art 1790-1990. london: thames & hudson. hinderer, walter. 2004. “wieland's cosmopolitan classicism.” a new history of german literature. eds. david e. wellbery et al. cambridge, ma: belknap press of harvard university press:381-385. hoffmann, e. t. a. 1946. tales of hoffmann. ed. christopher lazare. trans. richard lindner. new york, ny: a.a. wyn. kant, immanuel. 2005. critique of judgment. trans. j. h. bernard. mineola, ny: dover publications. kinsky, georg and w. oliver strunk. 1933. “was mendelssohn indebted to weber? an attempted solution of an old controversy.” the musical quarterly 19, no. 2: 178-186. langer, susan. 1942. philosophy in a new key. cambridge: harvard university press. mccarthy, john a. 1979. christoph martin wieland. boston: twayne publishers. mcglathery, james m. 1997. e.t.a. hoffmann. new york: prentice hall international. morgan, joseph e. 2010. “weber, schumann and the latent motive.” indiana theory review vol. 28: 111-142. pforr, franz. 1927. „das buch sulamith und maria.“ der wagen: ein lübeckisches jahrbuch: 51-58. pieper, antje. 2008. music and the making of middle-class culture. new york: palgrave macmillan press. schelling, friedrich wilhelm joseph. 1989. the philosophy of art. trans. and ed. douglas stott. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. siegel, linda. 1965. “wagner and the romanticism of e. t. a. hoffmann.” the musical quarterly 51, no. 4: 597-613. todorov, tzvetan. 1982. theories of the symbol. trans. catherine porter. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. tusa, michael. 2006. “cosmopolitanism and the national opera: weber’s der freischütz.” journal of interdisciplinary history 36/3 (winter): 483-506. tyrrell, john and stanley sadie, eds. 1992. “number opera.” the new grove dictionary of music and musicians, 2nd ed. london: macmillan press: 636. reference, autonomy and nationalism 70 vaughan, william. 1980. german romantic painting. new haven, ct: yale university press. wagner, richard. 1911. my life. new york: dodd, mead and co. –––. 1994a. “das liebesverbot.” pilgrimage to beethoven and other essays. trans. william ashton ellis. lincoln: university of nebraska press: 5-18. –––. 1994b. “on german music.” pilgrimage to beethoven and other essays. trans. william ashton ellis. lincoln: university of nebraska press: 83-101. warrack, john. 1968. carl maria von weber. london: hamish hamilton. –––. 2001. german opera: from the beginnings to wagner. cambridge: cambridge university press. weber, carl maria. 1981. carl maria von weber: writings on music. trans. martin cooper. cambridge: cambridge university press. zamoyski, adam. 2000. holy madness: romantics, patriots, and revolutionaries, 17761871. new york: viking. microsoft word varisco said-final [expositions 7.2 (2013) 52–54] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 edward said and the culture behind orientalism daniel martin varisco hofstra university a decade after the passing of edward said, his legacy lives on. as an intellectual committed to secular humanism and at the same time a relentless critic of the western colonial enterprise that perpetuated the notion that western culture was the only vehicle for that humanism, said wrote with passion about the discourse he labeled “orientalism.” said’s much debated orientalism was published in 19781 on the cusp of a growing “islamic” opposition to both the soviets in afghanistan and the americans in iran. his timely text was a polemic necessary for speaking a variety of truths to both the intellectual and political currents of the day. whether one idealizes his text or recognizes its manifest faults, the force of his polemic sparked a debate that successfully challenged the rigid binary of east/west and inspired a wide range of critical scholarship across disciplines. in 2007 i published reading orientalism: said and the unsaid,2 a critical survey of orientalism, the text, and the extensive debate pro-and-con over both it and its author. as i stated in the “to the reader” of my book, my intent was “to show why i think said is at time prone to error, but i categorically reject the politically motivated ad hominem diatribe that ridicules said because of where he was born, how he chooses to align himself politically, and how many pebbles he once tossed unphotogenetically at a border fence inside lebanese territory.”3 because my survey documented the historical errors and theoretical problems with his use of foucault’s “discourse” and gramsci’s “egemonia” in his text,4 some critics have assumed i am following in the curmudgeon mold of old-school historian bernard lewis. but my purpose in writing the book was to move beyond the personal jousting and crescendo of posturing in order to nudge forward serious scholarship on the middle east and islam. the crucial point is not the importance of orientalism as a catalyst to improving scholarship and inspiring young scholars, which is undeniable, but to the issue of what to do with a polemic that has served its purpose well but does not itself hold up well to critical scrutiny in the long run. those who think said’s scholarship in orientalism is beyond criticism are welcome to read my analysis of the extensive debate over the text. i have since moved on to write about two genres of travel literature that said did not examine: the holy land narratives5 and bible customs texts of the 19th century.6 i have also rewritten the entry for “orientalism” in the international encyclopedia of the social sciences7 and edited a set of reflections by several of the original reviewers of said’s text in an online journal of the middle east institute.8 in 2004 i published a critical assessment of said’s view of culture as a literary theorist from my perspective as both an anthropologist with fieldwork experience in yemen and the arab gulf and as a historian. this article is currently being revised as a chapter in a book i am preparing called writ[h]ing against culture, which argues for the value of culture concepts in anthropology and the continuing importance of ethnographic fieldwork as the major contribution 53 varisco cultural anthropologists make to the study of humanity. in orientalism, said barely mentions anthropology, apart from a brief nod of praise to clifford geertz, who was later attacked for daring to be critical in a review of said’s work. no major ethnographic work on the middle east or islam is cited as evidence for his critique of orientalist discourse, apart from 19th century travelers like sir richard burton. in his 1987 presentation at the annual meeting of the american anthropological association said compounded his ignorance of what anthropologists do by assuming that they are perhaps destined to remain on the wrong side of the colonial divide, a partner in domination and hegemony.9 in fact, franz boas, who founded the department of anthropology at columbia, was one of the most ardent critics of racism in the early 20th century. in my 2004 article i contrast said’s view of culture, resurrected from matthew arnold’s “best of the best” sense, to the modern anthropological view of culture proposed by fellow victorian edward tylor of culture as a complex whole of all people and not just a so-called “civilized” few. in said’s culture and imperialism,10 a title which resonates with arnold’s culture and anarchy,11 the paragon of the anthropologist is the fictitious colonel creighton of kipling’s kim rather than real life anthropologists like bronislaw malinowski, a vocal critic of british colonial policy. my article analyzes said’s view of culture as articulated in the world, the text, and the critic12 and culture and imperialism, explaining why few anthropologists have been able to travel with said’s theory and methods. despite the attraction of the metaphor “culture” as conceptualized by anthropologists, is not a “text” but a heuristic tool for understanding observable human behavior and the justification provided for it. the idea of “cultures” as distinct, bounded entities has long been abandoned by the majority of anthropologists; even some of the earliest 20th century anthropologists were aware of the problems in trying to define artificial limits of cultural groupings. there is room for intellectual exchange between those of us who practice ethnography and colleagues who analyze texts, but this requires an appreciation for the sophistication of the methods each of us use.13 i close this brief essay with a quote from the conclusion of my article on said’s literary view of culture: in critiquing the discourse of orientalism, said makes a powerful case for how discursive norms operate through a specific genealogy of texts. yet, one of the historical strengths of modern anthropology, stemming back to tylor, is the argument that, because humans all have the biological and social potential to be rational and to cooperate, the alleged differences based on religious texts and racial theories are arbitrary. anthropological critiques of racism and ethnocentrism have, at times, transcended the categorization of distinct cultures, precisely because what evolving humans share is something species wide called culture. in theory even the most “exotic” edward said and the culture behind orientalism 54 cultures in western eyes can be approached as essentially human rather than categorically dismissed as inferior and uncivilized. the overriding anthropological view of culture allows for a brand of humanism, informed by scientific exploration of human evolution, quite distinct from the overt ethnocentrism of specifically western classification schemes and textual renderings. this is what separates humans from the beasts rather than the best-of-the-best humans from their cultural inferiors.14 notes 1. said, edward. 1978. orientalism. new york: vintage. 2. varisco, daniel martin. 2007. reading orientalism: said and the unsaid. seattle: university of washington press. 3. varisco 2007, xvi. 4. varisco 2007, 237–266. 5. varisco, daniel martin. 2011. “when did the holy land stop being holy? surveying the middle east as sacred geography.” in is there a middle east? the evolution of a geopolitical concept, ed. michael bonine et al. stanford: stanford university press, 119–138. 6. varisco, daniel martin. 2013. ‘orientalism and bibliolatry: framing the holy land in 19th century protestant bible customs texts.” in orientalism revisited: land, art and voyage, ed. richard netton. london: routledge, 187–204. 7. varisco, daniel martin. in press. “orientalism.” international encyclopedia of the social sciences, 3rd ed. independence, ky: gale/cengage. 8. varisco, daniel martin. 2009. “orientalism's wake: the ongoing politics of a polemic.” viewpoints 12, the middle east institute. http://mei.edu/portals/0/publications/orientalism.pdf 9. said, edward. 1989. “representing the colonized: anthropology's interlocutors.” critical inquiry 15.2, 225. 10. said, edward. 1993. culture and imperialism. new york: knopf. 11. arnold, matthew. 1882. culture and anarchy. new york: macmillan. 12. said, edward. 1983. the world, the text, and the critic. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. 13. varisco, daniel martin. 2004. “reading against culture in edward said’s culture and imperialism.” culture, theory and critique 45.2, 93–112. 14. varisco 2004, 109–110. microsoft word 6 latiff 12.1.docx [expositions 12.1 (2018) 72–79] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376   jumping into combat without a parachute—on purpose? robert h. latiff george mason university, university of notre dame, and u.s. military (retired) there is a movement within the catholic church to eliminate the church’s support of just war theory and to adopt a strongly pacifist approach, citing jesus’ repeated admonitions against violence and his consistent message of peace. at the april 2016 “nonviolence and just peace conference” sponsored by the pontifical council for justice and peace and pax christi international, conference participants appealed to pope francis to declare that the traditional just war theory is obsolete and that christians should dedicate their efforts to nonviolent peacemaking. while i very much agree that resort to legitimizing a conflict by citing just war principles should come after all attempts at peacemaking, i cannot state too strongly that officially abandoning just war teaching would be a terrible outcome for the catholic church and the militaries of civilized countries. it would be especially damaging to the individual soldier’s view of his profession and his proper role within it. i served a three-decade career in the u.s. military, first in the army, training for conventional combat and then to fight wars with nuclear weapons. in over two decades in the u.s. air force, i participated in planning for, simulating, and exercising for many forms of strategic conflict. in all cases, the military members with whom i served and the soldiers and airmen under my command both detested the idea of war and understood the need to limit its destructiveness. it is critical that those who fight the nation’s wars have a set of rules that govern their behavior. for millennia, thoughtful leaders have concerned themselves with the existence of evil and violence and with ways to mitigate it. today’s warrior ethic includes a mode of thought that incorporates the tenets of just war theory, the so-called laws of armed conflict, and international humanitarian laws, embodied in such agreements as the conventions of hague and geneva. gaudium et spes, the 1965 pastoral constitution on the church in the modern world, was one of the four constitutions resulting from the second vatican council. in discussing relations between nations, the document states that “the achievement of peace requires a constant mastering of passions and the vigilance of lawful authority.” it goes on: “we cannot fail to praise those who 73 latiff renounce the use of violence in the vindication of their rights and who resort to methods of defense which are otherwise available to weaker parties too, provided this can be done without injury to the rights and duties of others or of the community itself.”1 there is much to note in this short passage. first, it is primarily the leaders of nations and groups—not the military—which must be controlled in their thirst for violent solutions to issues. at least in advanced societies, the military is the last to want to resort to war. second, the text praises those who would eschew violence, but it also recognizes that such an approach should not preclude a resort to the means necessary to protect people who need protection. finally, concerning the avoidance of war, the document says further that “as long as the danger of war remains and there is no competent and sufficiently powerful authority at the international level, governments cannot be denied the right to legitimate defense once every means of peaceful settlement has been exhausted.”2 critically, it concludes that “[t]hose […] who devote themselves to the military service of their country should regard themselves as the agents of security and freedom of peoples. as long as they fulfill this role properly, they are making a genuine contribution to the establishment of peace.”3 why are these just war concepts so important? because they serve, first, to place boundaries on the permissible behavior of soldiers in war. second, they recognize that, in war, soldiers see things most of us will never see and do things we hope never to have to do. just war concepts provide soldiers with a framework to understand the basis of the violence with which they are tasked. my argument against those who would have the church abandon its support of just war principles is based, first, on the importance of those teachings to the proper behavior of soldiers and, second, on what i believe are well-intentioned, but terribly misguided, notions about the workability of pacifism in the modern, increasingly brutal world. retired naval postgraduate school professor george lucas has written that it is an important point of professional principle and professional pride for warriors that at the heart of their practice is not death and destruction and the wreaking of havoc, vengeance, evil, and suffering. rather it is […] defending their comrades and fellow citizens against such evils already wrought by others that gives this vocation or calling its moral justification.4 jumping into combat without a parachute—on purpose? 74 he concludes that, “in virtually all cultures and religious traditions, the willingness to risk one’s life and even sacrifice it for the sake of saving others is considered the highest, noblest, most morally worthy intention upon which any individual can act.”5 i have spoken with soldiers who served multiple combat tours in iraq and afghanistan and with the military chaplains whose job it is to provide pastoral support and care for the soldiers’ souls. not long ago, one of those army chaplains discussed with me the difficulties he faced in caring for the soldiers in his unit, which had experienced an unusually large number of its soldiers killed or wounded. the unit commander had never discussed or emphasized the laws of armed conflict or tried to explain any rationale for what the unit was tasked to do and the importance of such concepts as protecting the innocent or using only the minimum necessary amount of force. many of the soldiers had engaged in horrific battles in which numerous civilians were killed and their comrades died for seemingly no reason. the chaplain described his daily challenges of offering hope and pastoral care to scores of soldiers, in his words, “anguishing from the effects of war and the wounded soul.” it was his strongly held belief that the teaching of the concepts of just war theory in advance, with its recognition of the legitimacy of war and its emphasis on proper behavior and its moral basis, would have provided his soldiers with an emotional structure that would serve, first, as a governor on unrestrained violence so often generated in combat and, second, to soften or mitigate the damage war does to their souls. he also believed that morally neutral modes of being that ignore ethics and couch combat operations in more utilitarian terms exacerbate improper behavior and cause more moral injuries as well as frustrate their treatment. the images of war are grotesque and sad beyond belief. photographs of the dead in the civil war or in world war i attest to the carnage and make us contemplate all the young lives cut short by differences in ideology. descriptions of the crusades and the inquisition and recent videos posted by isis show us brutal and reprehensible behavior by supposedly religious people in the name of god. images and descriptions of the heinous mass murder of the jews by hitler in world war ii cause us to question man’s capacity for inhumanity to man. retired marine corps general john allen has noted that the ethical standards of the military profession create an imperative—a moral redoubt and spiritual shock absorber—and that we must inculcate our young military personnel with our own moral and professional principles. these principles and standards of behavior contribute to the so-called “warrior code.”6 australian ethicist robert sparrow has written that “while war remains a ghastly business, when the standards are 75 latiff maintained, warrior codes function to reduce the horror of war and tame the worst excesses of young men sent out to kill strangers in foreign lands with weapons of terrifying power.”7 the concepts of just war theory developed by early theologians and the related concepts of chivalry extant in the medieval period explain much of the warrior ethos as it exists today. the medieval code of chivalry included traditions involving bravery, warrior professionalism, and service to others. while these may seem quaint today, oxford university law professor theodor meron has observed that “the idea that chivalry requires soldiers to act in a civilized manner is one of its most enduring legacies.”8 the ability of soldiers on battlefields of the future to understand, and much more to apply, such notions will be an important challenge. violence, while not on as large a scale as past world-encompassing conflicts or major military deployments, is becoming more frequent on a smaller scale and far more brutal. and, advanced weapons will create new styles of war and dramatically change the relationships of soldiers to the enemy and to other soldiers. to be fair, there are some, like retired military officer and conservative commentator ralph peters, who claim that just war theory and laws of armed conflict are nothing more than something for soldiers to use to justify their actions and to make us feel better about killing. peters claims they exist merely to give us a false sense of comfort. with them, he claims, we can hide from our evil natures.9 while there is a shred of truth to his argument (an argument similar to those pacifists who wish to abandon catholic support for just war theory), i feel it does a great disservice to those soldiers who attempt to follow those rules, sometimes to their own detriment. aside from the notion that just war concepts are important to the individual soldier, my second argument is that it is essential to understand that the resort to violence is not always evil and that it is often—when, in fact, it is a last resort—the ethical thing to do. the protestant theologian reinhold niebuhr wrote forcefully about pacifism and nonviolence. he begins his argument by noting that individuals cede their power to the state, which far too frequently abuses it in the form of resort to force and coercion against other states.10 while it may be restating the obvious, in our constitutional system the military does not make decisions to go to war. that is reserved for civilian leadership with—theoretically at least—advice, consent, and funding from the legislature. unfortunately, far too frequently civilian leaders use the military for spurious and ill-explained adventures, like the 2003 invasion of iraq. and, just as frequently, the legislature abdicates its responsibility to act as a restraint on the executive. a congressional research service report shows jumping into combat without a parachute—on purpose? 76 that the u.s. alone deployed military forces for one reason or another over sixty times in the approximately seventy years since world war ii.11 add in the behavior of other nations, in particular those governed by tyrants, and the use of military force in the world is outrageously common. niebuhr is, however, unwilling—as am i—to condemn the use of force when it is necessary for a legitimate, good purpose, saying that “a political policy cannot be intrinsically evil if it can be proved to be an efficacious instrument for the achievement of a morally approved end. neither can it be said to be wholly good merely because it seems to make for ultimately good consequences.”12 niebuhr points out that the differences between violent and nonviolent methods of coercion and resistance are not so absolute that violence should be regarded as morally prohibited. in discussing one of the most well-known adherents of nonviolent methods, he notes that even mahatma gandhi allowed that violence may on occasion be the servant of goodwill. in niebuhr’s words, “the implication is that violence could be used as the instrument of moral goodwill if there was any possibility of a triumph quick enough to obviate the dangers of incessant wars.”13 sadly, however, we have many examples in modern history of wars that are started presumably to free an oppressed people, but end up lasting for years with enormous death and suffering of innocent people. a further problem i have with the movement to eliminate just war theory from catholic teaching is that, while it is based on theological grounds and is obviously well-intentioned, it is extraordinarily naïve and potentially dangerous. matthew shadle has observed that, while warfare has changed and weapons are more terrible, it must still be right “first to counter genocide, to protect the innocent, and to strive for a better world—and sometimes armed resistance is the only way to do this.”14 it is merely naïve, wishful thinking that we can always bring about peace through diplo-macy. certainly, peace through diplomacy should come first, but there should be options to use force when diplomacy does actually fail. popes have often cited a need for the church, while hewing to its core values, to adapt to living in the present. the present is, and the future will be, very dangerous and violent. this is not merely a belief, but a fact of life. syria, yemen, boko haram, yazdis, rohingyas, isis, al qaida, the slaughter of christians in the middle east, and others elsewhere for their religious beliefs, and scores of horrifically brutal groups and activities attest to the dangerous world in which millions live. as peter steinfels has said: 77 latiff [i]n the face of such brutal realities, one can heartily endorse every scrap of nonviolent peacemaking that can be summoned—and urge that the church summon more. but did the participants in the rome conference really imagine that nonviolence alone would stop all this bleeding? is this really the moment to call for the enfeebling of one of the few recognized moral traditions of restraint?15 the pacifists argue that throughout history the just-war “concept” has primarily functioned to legitimate and perpetuate war. it seems highly unlikely to me that leaders and rulers, either past or present, based any of their war-making decisions on a just war argument, or even gave it any consideration. far more likely, they based their decisions on international law, politics, and the demands of their constituents. in 1982, pope john paul ii reiterated the principle that, “in the name of an elementary requirement of justice, peoples have a right and even a duty to protect their existence and freedom by proportionate means against an unjust aggressor.”16 as bryan hehir notes, “just war theorists could hardly have asked for a clearer statement of the premise of the ethic. the pope asserted that he was not a pacifist, that he believed in a just peace, not peace at any price.”17 the current pope may be taken to be different. francis certainly is a strong proponent of nonviolence and diplomacy. and he has said we should no longer damn nonviolence with faint praise by recognizing it only as a heroic witness for saints. instead, as the pope implies, nonviolence must become normal and natural to us—must become our very “style of politics.”18 we must recognize its potential and indeed its power not just in private life, but for civil society movements and governance itself. yet even francis’s commitment to nonviolence is not without exception. in an article on the current pope’s thinking on the subject, lazar berman reminds us that pope francis says that it remains a “complex and violent world,” and so the right to legitimate selfdefense, of countries and their peoples, remains unchanged.19 in fact, in august 2014, francis gave his blessing to the use of military force to halt attacks by isis militants on iraqi and syrian minorities.20 pope francis and the proponents of nonviolence are largely correct on the point that leaders, countries, and groups around the world resort too easily to violence. undoubtedly, the holy father jumping into combat without a parachute—on purpose? 78 would like catholics around the world to emphasize other, nonviolent avenues; to pursue negotiation wherever possible; and to address the underlying roots of conflicts, rather than merely resort to coercion. it seems that, while he probably would prefer more concerted, well-supported, just-peace initiatives, he would like to see the just war arguments de-emphasized, but not entirely abandoned. well-intentioned, thoughtful catholics (and others) make valid points about the far-toofrequent use of force in the world. i wholeheartedly agree that far more should be done with diplomacy, negotiation, and active measures to eliminate the underlying reasons for war. but for the catholic church, which in practice and in history is the source of just war principles, to abandon just war theory would be a tragedy, not only for those suffering oppression, but for those called on to protect them. notes 1. pope paul vi, gaudium et spes, december 7, 1965, §78, http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vatii_cons_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en. html. 2. ibid., §79. 3. ibid. 4. george lucas, military ethics: what everyone needs to know (new york: oxford university press, 2016), 85. 5. ibid., 85. 6. ibid., xvi. 7. robert sparrow, “war without virtue?” in killing by remote control: the ethics of an unmanned military, ed. bradley jay strawser (new york: oxford university press, 2013), 105. 79 latiff 8. theodor meron, bloody constraint: war and chivalry in shakespeare (new york: oxford university press, 1998), 118. 9. see ralph peters, “a revolution in military ethics?” parameters 26/2 (1996): 102. 10. reinhold niebuhr, moral man and immoral society: a study in ethics and politics (louisville, ky: westminster john knox press, 1932), 91. 11. see barbara salazar torreon, instances of use of united states armed forces abroad, 1798–2016 (washington, dc: congressional research service, 2016). 12. niebuhr, moral man and immoral society, 171. 13. ibid., 251. 14. see matthew shadle, “why we still need just war theory,” catholic herald, april 28, 2016, http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/issues/april-29th-2016/why-we-still-need-justwar-theory/. 15. see peter steinfels, “the war against just war,” commonweal, june 5, 2017, https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/war-against-just-war. 16. bryan j. hehir, “just war theory in a post-cold war world,” journal of religious ethics 20/2 (1992): 237–257, at 250. 17. ibid. 18. see gerald schlabach, “just war?” commonweal, june 16, 2017, https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/just-war-0. 19. see lazar berman, “just war, just peace: catholic teachings on violence in an age of terror,” the times of israel, august 11, 2016, http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/just-war-justpeace-catholic-teachings-on-violence-in-an-age-of-terror/. 20. see thomas reese, “why pope francis supports limited action against islamic state,” national catholic reporter, august 22, 2014, https://www.ncronline.org/blogs/faith-andjustice/why-pope-francis-supports-limited-action-against-islamic-state. microsoft word 1 prusak 11.1.docx [expositions 11.1 (2017) 1–14] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 the ethics of cooperation and the contraceptive mandate: legal, political, and moral dimensions bernard g. prusak king’s college (pa) before the death of justice antonin scalia on february 13, 2016, it appeared relatively easy to predict the outcome of the high-profile religious liberty case before the supreme court that term: zubik v. burwell, which consolidated seven cases involving thirty-six religious non-profit petitioners, including, most notoriously, the little sisters of the poor, various other faith-based social services organizations, and a collection of colleges and universities. what was at issue in those cases, as in hobby lobby two years prior, is the affordable care act (aca)’s so-called contraceptive mandate. the aca stipulated that employers’ health insurance plans offer women “preventive care and screenings” without cost-sharing requirements. the aca also authorized the department of health and human services (hhs) to specify what preventive care would be covered. hhs subsequently required that employers’ health insurance plans make available all contraceptives approved by the food and drug administration. these contraceptives include four that allegedly act as abortifacients: two forms of the morning-after pill, plan b and ella; and two types of intrauterine devices, mirena and paragard. (research indicates, however, that only paragard, which is a copper iud, may on occasion prevent implantation; normally it works by impairing sperm, for which copper is toxic. plan b and ella inhibit ovulation, whereas mirena prevents sperm from making it to the egg by changing the composition of the cervical mucus. at the same time, it should be noted that, when iuds fail to prevent pregnancy, miscarriage rates double to about forty to fifty percent unless the iud is removed early in the pregnancy.1) what was at issue in zubik can be put more precisely: whether the “accommodations” established by the obama administration for religious non-profit employers (as opposed to houses of worship) satisfied the terms of the religious freedom restoration act of 1993 (rfra), or instead violated the petitioners’ religious liberty under rfra. (hobby lobby was different in that there the petitioners were closely-held for-profit corporations whose owners had religious objections to the contraceptive mandate.) initially, in order to be exempt from having to provide the ethics of cooperation and the contraceptive mandate 2 contraceptive coverage, religious non-profit employers were required to register their opposition with their contracting insurance companies or third-party administrators, at which point the insurance companies or tpa issued separate contraceptive policies at no cost to the employers. following litigation by the little sisters of the poor, the accommodation took a second form: beginning in january 2014, in order to be exempt, religious non-profit employers were allowed to notify hhs of their opposition; hhs then had the responsibility to contact the insurance companies or tpa. this alternative introduced another step, and so a bit more distance, between the employers and the provision of the coverage to which they objected on religious grounds. the petitioners in zubik claimed, however, that the accommodation in this form was likewise inadequate. for it nonetheless required that they cooperate in the provision of contraceptives, in particular by providing contact information for hhs to work with. as readers of the news know, the supreme court decided, effectively, not to decide zubik, in any event for now. in a may 16, 2016 per curiam order, the court vacated “the judgments below” and remanded the various cases to the respective courts of appeals. “given the gravity of the dispute and the substantial clarification and refinement in the positions of the parties” in supplemental briefings submitted after oral argument, “the parties on remand,” the court declared, “should be afforded an opportunity to arrive at an approach going forward that accommodates petitioners’ religious exercise while at the same time ensuring that women covered by petitioners’ health plans ‘receive full and equal health coverage, including contraceptive coverage’” (578 u.s. [2106], slip op. at 3–4). the court also acknowledged, however, the possibility of remaining “areas of disagreement,” but deemed “the importance of those areas of potential concern […] uncertain, as is the necessity of this court’s involvement at this point to resolve them” (578 u.s. [2106], slip op. at 4). time will tell.2 this iteration of the forum “ethics in focus” concerns the ethics of cooperation as it applies to religious liberty cases like zubik, hobby lobby, and no doubt others that will come before the supreme court. zubik raised complex legal, political, and moral questions.3 the legal questions, to begin with, concern the interpretation of rfra, which was passed by congress in response to the supreme court’s 1990 decision in employment division v. smith. before smith, the supreme court generally used a balancing test in its first amendment, free exercise cases. this balancing test, called the sherbert test for the 1963 decision from which it derived, “took into account,” justice samuel alito explained in the hobby lobby decision, “whether the [government’s action 3 prusak in question] imposed a substantial burden on the practice of religion, and if it did, whether it was needed to serve a compelling government interest” (573 u.s. [2014], slip op. at 4). by contrast, justice scalia’s 5–4 majority opinion in smith argued to the “conclusion that generally applicable, religion-neutral laws that have the effect of burdening a particular religious practice need not be justified by a compelling governmental interest” (494 u.s. 872, 886 n. 3 [1990]). in his colorful language, in view of our society’s diversity of religious belief, “we cannot afford the luxury of deeming presumptively invalid, as applied to the religious objector, every regulation of conduct that does not protect an interest of the highest order” (494 u.s. 872, 888 [1990]). three years after smith was decided, congress made clear its disagreement. rfra prescribes that “government shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability” not directed against this or that religious practice or interest. notwithstanding, lest every citizen become a law unto him or herself—justice scalia’s fear if every law had to jibe with citizens’ religious practice and interests—congress also allowed for exceptions. burdens resulting from rules of general applicability are legally permitted when the government can demonstrate that the burden “(1) is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest; and (2) is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.”4 a point of dispute in zubik was whether rfra simply restores the pre-smith compelling interest test, or departs from and goes beyond the pre-smith cases through its least-restrictivemeans test. another legal question was what constitutes a substantial burden of a person’s exercise of religion—that is, what are the criteria to make a burden “substantial”?—and further whether it is even the business of judges to determine if a burden really is substantial, rather than taking petitioners’ sincere word for it. no less contested, legally, is what weight to give employees’ liberty interests. dissenting in hobby lobby, justice ruth ginsburg quoted from planned parenthood v. casey: “the ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives” (505 u. s. 833, 856 [1992]). in her own words, “accommodations to religious beliefs or observances […] must not significantly impinge on the interests of third parties,” whose beliefs may well differ from their employers’ (573 u. s. [2014], slip op. at 7). it is noteworthy in this regard that, according to the pew research center, seventy-six percent of catholics believe that the church should change its teaching and permit the use of contraceptives; among catholics who attend mass weekly, the percentage with this view is sixty-two. moreover, the guttmacher institute reports that sixty-eight the ethics of cooperation and the contraceptive mandate 4 percent of sexually active catholic women have used the pill, iuds, or sterilization in order to avoid pregnancy.5 these legal questions lead into political questions. religious liberty is popularly called “america’s first freedom,” not merely because it is enshrined in the first amendment of the constitution, but because it is a fundamental freedom, the recognition of which ensures the recognition of further rights to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and privacy, among others.6 by contrast, a government that does not recognize religious liberty is sure to limit other freedoms. arguably, then, protecting religious liberty ought to be a priority of every liberal people. along these lines, the amicus brief filed by the united states conference of catholic bishops in zubik proposes that [a] government that places […] pressure on religious charitable organizations [as the obama administration allegedly did with the contraceptive mandate] engages in a kind of soft tyranny, for it means that they must think and act as the government commands on sensitive issues surrounding human life and reproduction, issues on which the religious community has a distinctive and prophetic voice.7 it is also arguable, however, that the charge of tyranny can be turned around. though religious liberty is fundamental, when it is wielded to limit what others can do—for example, “control their reproductive lives”—prioritizing it may be seen as ceding all too much power to religiouslymotivated objectors. despite authoring the decision in smith, justice scalia joined justice alito’s majority opinion in hobby lobby, which interprets rfra as going beyond the court’s pre-smith jurisprudence and holds that judges should defer to petitioners’ sincere belief that a governmental action constitutes a substantial burden on the exercise of religion. along similar lines, justice alito also wrote that “the federal courts have no business addressing […] whether [a] religious belief asserted in a rfra case is reasonable” (573 u. s. [2014], slip op. at 36). there were two key beliefs in hobby lobby: first, that “the four contraceptive methods at issue are abortifacients” (the two forms of the morning-after pill and two types of intrauterine devices); second, that complying with hhs regulations was connected to the provision of the contraceptives “in a way that is sufficient to make it immoral” for the petitioners to do so (573 u. s. [2014], slip op. at 2, 36). 5 prusak the reason why it appeared relatively easy to predict the outcome of zubik before justice scalia’s death is that the petitioners in zubik believed, first, that the use of contraceptives is immoral and, second, that complying with hhs regulations—here, having to notify insurers, tpas, or hhs of their opposition—was connected to the provision of contraceptives “in a way that is sufficient to make it immoral” to do so. if “the federal courts have no business addressing […] whether [a] religious belief asserted in a rfra case is reasonable,” zubik would have been decided 5–4 just the same as hobby lobby. but is it reasonable to believe that complying with hhs regulations—in particular, notifying hhs of opposition to coverage of contraceptives—is connected to the provision of contraceptives in a way that is sufficient to make it immoral to do so? with justice scalia’s death, and notwithstanding the court’s may 16, 2016 order, it appears that what justice alito called, in hobby lobby, “a difficult and important question of religion and moral philosophy”—namely, the question of the right understanding of the ethics of cooperation in wrongdoing—can no longer be set aside. in justice alito’s terms, this question concerns “the circumstances under which it is wrong for a person to perform an act that is innocent in itself but has the effect of enabling or facilitating the commission of an immoral act by another” (573 u. s. [2014], slip op. at 36). the majority decision in hobby lobby castigated hhs for “[a]rrogating [to itself] the authority to provide a binding national answer to this religious and philosophical question” and declined to judge whether the petitioners’ own answer was right or wrong (573 u. s. [2014], slip op. at 36– 37). neither the dissenting justices in hobby lobby, however, nor all the lower courts in the cases leading to zubik showed this same reluctance. the court’s may 16, 2016 order hangs, accordingly, on the question of whether this point of disagreement between the petitioners and government can be resolved. here’s background toward understanding the moral question in dispute. in hobby lobby, justice alito cites, in a footnote, three discussions of the ethics of cooperation: one relatively recent discussion by the philosopher david oderberg, and two older discussions by the jesuit moralists thomas j. higgins and henry davis. justice alito quotes both higgins and davis (573 u. s. [2014], slip op. at 36 n. 34). from higgins we hear that “‘[t]he general principles governing cooperation’ in wrongdoing—i.e., ‘physical activity (or its omission) by which a person assists in the evil act of another who is the principal agent’—‘present troublesome difficulties in the ethics of cooperation and the contraceptive mandate 6 application.’”8 from davis we hear that “[c]o-operation occurs when a helps b to accomplish an external act by an act that is not sinful, and without approving of what b does.’”9 justice alito’s quotation from davis’s text is in fact somewhat misleading. in the quotation in question, davis is specifying so-called material cooperation as opposed to formal cooperation. in the sentence preceding what justice alito quotes, davis writes, “co-operation is formal when a helps b in an external sinful act, and intends the sinfulness of it.”10 in any event, davis agrees with higgins that, in higgins’ words quoted in part by justice alito, “the general principles governing co-operation […] present troublesome difficulties in application.”11 davis makes an even stronger claim in this regard: in view of how “many factors enter into all questions of material co-operation […], there is no more difficult question than this in the whole range of moral theology.”12 in context, justice alito’s quotation of higgins supports the point that neither judges, nor all the more hhs administrators have any business mucking around with the ethics of cooperation. for surely they lack the competence to go where theologians fear to tread! justice alito goes on to quote from smith that “courts must not determine […] the plausibility of a religious claim” (573 u. s. [2014], slip op. at 37; see 494 u. s. 872, 887 [1990]). it might be wondered, however, just where the “religious claim” is here. the right understanding of the ethics of cooperation is indeed pertinent for moral theology, but in pursuing it moral theologians turn philosophical, which is to say, for present purposes, take up questions that human wisdom is charged with figuring out and to which divine revelation has not spoken. it’s true that much of the terminology used in discussing the ethics of cooperation is derived from the roman catholic tradition, but the distinction between formal and material cooperation, for example, has its roots not only in the work of the eighteenthcentury moral theologian alphonsus liguori, but in that of the thirteenth-century philosopher and theologian thomas aquinas, and many centuries before him in that of the thinker aquinas called simply the philosopher, namely, aristotle. here is how the philosopher david oderberg, cited but not quoted by justice alito, distinguishes between formal and material cooperation: the formal co-operator intends the wrong committed by the principal […]. material co-operation does not involve such an intent.13 7 prusak what informs the cooperator’s will in facilitating the principal’s action—in a word, the cooperator’s intention in acting—is the crucial consideration. likewise, the amicus brief submitted by “50 catholic theologians and ethicists in support of petitioners” states: “formal” cooperation in wrongdoing occurs when one commits an action that contributes to or assists another’s wrongful act, in such a way that the cooperator shares in the wrongful intention of the other actor.14 by contrast, the brief goes on: material cooperation occurs when the cooperator facilitates or assists in the performance of the forbidden action without sharing in the wrongful intention.15 what constitutes, however, “sharing in the wrongful intention”? the literature on cooperation in wrongdoing is full of colorful, sometimes fanciful cases. say that you are being held at gunpoint. the aggressor wants to know from you the details of your business partner’s bank account so that he can steal from it.16 if you tell the would-be thief the details (which it is stipulated you know), would your cooperation in wrongdoing be “formal” or “material”? that is, would you share in the wrongful intention or not? this question is sometimes answered by another question in turn: do you approve of the action in which you’re cooperating? if not, it is suggested that your cooperation is material and not formal. so oderberg writes: “formal co-operation involves approval of the wrong and willing participation in its guilt.”17 and according to another author: “whereas formal cooperation involves intended approval of [the principal’s] action, material cooperation is first and foremost helping [the principal] to accomplish an external action […] without approving of the external action.”18 but now it has to be asked what “approving” amounts to. to begin with, as oderberg observes in his contribution to this forum, “one can approve of a wrongful act without thinking that it is wrong. one might think it’s just fine to rape someone, as an act of revenge, say, and so approve it, even though one does not see it as a heinous act.”19 but is approval a distinct mental act or disposition of an agent known only to him or her? further, is an agent’s claim to approve or the ethics of cooperation and the contraceptive mandate 8 disapprove of an action in which she has cooperated incorrigible, in the way that a sincere claim to have dreamt this or that, or to have felt sleepy, or anxious, or angry isn’t open to rebuttal, so long as the agent knows the meaning of the concepts she’s invoked? otherwise put, can an agent say of any and every action in which she has cooperated that she did not approve of it? do all such actions admit of this disclaimer? the drift of these questions is clearly toward no. as the philosopher elizabeth anscombe remarked, “circumstances, and the immediate facts about the means you are choosing to your ends, dictate what descriptions of your intention you must admit.”20 or again, “a man’s intention in acting is not so private and interior a thing that he has absolute authority in saying what it is— as he has absolute authority in saying what he dreamt.”21 to claim otherwise is practically to invite the ridicule that blaise pascal, in the seventh of his provincial letters, heaped on his fictional jesuit’s grande méthode de diriger l’intention permitting one to do otherwise prohibited actions on the condition that one is able to find for these same actions a licit “object.”22 oderberg, well aware of this point, acknowledges it with the statement that “intent to assist may be implied by the circumstances”: it may be, that is, implicit or explicit.23 more fully, an action may count as formal cooperation when the claim of not having intended some particular end just can’t be admitted in view of the fact that one’s action was directly ordered to that end.24 an example in the literature is willingly participating in the sacred rites of a pagan cult. saying, after the fact, that you did not intend to cooperate in the worship of dionysus or mithras makes no sense; your willing participation does not admit of any other intention, even if you didn’t “approve” of the rites. the distinction between formal and material cooperation is not, however, quite so simple as that example might suggest. what if your participation was not fully “willing”? what if you participated under duress, maybe even severe duress? recall here our case involving the details of your business partner’s bank account. let it be stipulated that you do not approve of the theft. (oderberg writes: “presumably your will is directed against that of the thief.”25) nonetheless, it might be claimed that you do intend to facilitate the theft of your partner’s money. yes, what’s driving your action is that you intend to save your own life, but can it be denied that you intend to facilitate the theft as a means toward saving your life? can it be denied, that is, that you “share in the wrongful intention”? 9 prusak in brief, it might be argued, though controversially, that your cooperation here is formal. you intend to facilitate what the principal intends (namely, stealing from your partner) under the description, “doing what he intends for me to do.” more fully, you intend “doing what he intends for me to do so that he can do what he intends.”26 yet it boggles the mind that it would be morally impermissible for you to cooperate.27 in other words, such a conclusion would clearly be wrong— who but a philosopher in the grip of an argument would claim you should die rather than reveal the bank account details?—with the upshot either that it must not be the case that all formal cooperation in wrongdoing is wrong, or that this instance of formal cooperation should not be categorized as formal cooperation in wrongdoing, or that what we have here is not formal cooperation after all (as oderberg contends). one way or the other, it appears that formal cooperation is wrong only when two conditions are met: you intend not only “doing what he intends for me to do so that he can do what he intends” (necessary condition #1), but you share the principal’s intention that the intended wrong come to pass (necessary condition #2 and, with the first condition, jointly sufficient). in other words, perhaps more precisely, it is your intention that an evil be done with your help. you lend your hand, so to speak, to this intention; in theological language, you intend the sinfulness of the action in question, not simply the action under an arbitrary description, but under the description whereby it is wrong.28 against this background, it is understandable why the question of “approval” entered the literature on cooperation. if you don’t intend that an evil be done with your help, as presumably you wouldn’t in the case involving your partner’s banking account, it might be claimed that you cooperated formally in the thief’s action, but your cooperation in wrongdoing or in evil was merely material. for what you did was but matter—but building blocks, we might say—toward the evil that came to pass. you intended, it might be claimed, “doing what he intends for me to do so that he can do what he intends,” but you didn’t share the principal’s evil intention that evil be done. that evil be done didn’t inform your will—it was contrary to your will—and thus cannot be ascribed to you as your intention.29 there is much still to say about material cooperation, which may be morally permissible or not depending on whether it is immediate or mediate (that is, depending on how “near” the cooperator’s action is to that of the principal: “the degree to which the physical extension of the action of the cooperator overlaps with the wrongful action of the principal”30); proximate or remote (depending on whether the cooperator’s action “provides a probable instrument of wrongful the ethics of cooperation and the contraceptive mandate 10 use”31); and indispensable or dispensable, among other considerations. it should be stressed, however, that these are precisely considerations, not make-or-break factors in a decision calculus. for example, the more indispensable, or necessary, the cooperator’s action is toward the wrong in question, the graver the consequences of not cooperating must be in order to permit the cooperation. but here practical wisdom—prudentia or phronesis—can’t be dispensed with; it is needed to come to terms with the particularities of the case. to illustrate this point further, the graver the consequences of cooperating are—toward others as well as the agent him or herself— the greater the reason must be in order to permit it, with the implication that in some cases that reason will not be great enough. again practical wisdom is indispensable. by way of example, say that a gun-wielding aggressor wants, not the details of your partner’s bank account, but the launch codes for your country’s nuclear weapons. cooperation in the evil would be material, but, as the practically wise person would quickly see, morally impermissible for more reasons than one. how does all this bear, finally, on cases like zubik v. burwell? would compliance with the administration’s “accommodations” constitute impermissible formal or material cooperation, as fifty catholic theologians and ethicists claimed in an amicus brief submitted in support of the petitioners?32 should judges—can judges?—avoid taking a stand on this question? is the judgment that cooperation would be impermissible a “religious claim” warranting deference? or is the appeal to religious liberty here misguided, in particular in a constitutional democracy like the united states, characterized by pervasive pluralism?33 the contributors to this iteration of “ethics in focus” speak richly to these questions and multiple others. charles f. capps is pursuing a j.d. and a ph.d. in philosophy at the university of chicago; t.a. cavanaugh is professor of philosophy at the university of san francisco; david s. oderberg is professor of philosophy at the university of reading (u.k.); and kate ward is visiting assistant professor of theology at marquette university. notes 1. see for discussion jen gunter, “the medical facts about birth control and hobby lobby—from an ob/gyn,” the new republic, july 6, 2014, https://newrepublic.com/ 11 prusak article/118547/facts-about-birth-control-and-hobby-lobby-ob-gyn; and olga khazan, “here’s why hobby lobby thinks iuds are like abortions,” the atlantic, march 12, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/03/heres-why-hobby-lobby-thinksiuds-are-like-abortions/284382/. 2. see, for one assessment of what’s likely to come, linda greenhouse, “the supreme court’s wishful thinking about compromise,” new york times, may 26, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/26/opinion/the-supreme-courts-wishful-thinking-aboutcompromise.html?_r=0. 3. i use the terms “ethics” and “morals” interchangeably for present purposes. 4. see for the text of rfra (42 u.s. code chapter 21b) https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/ text/42/chapter-21b. 5. see the pew research center’s report “u.s. catholics happy with selection of pope francis,” march 18, 2013, http://www.pewforum.org/2013/03/18/us-catholics-happywith-selection-of-pope-francis/; and the guttmacher institute’s “guttmacher statistic on catholic women’s contraceptive use,” february 15, 2012, http://www.guttmacher.org/ media/inthenews/2012/02/15/. see further, for discussion, peter steinfels, “why the catholic church should talk about contraception,” washington post, september 11, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-the-catholic-church-should-talkabout-condoms/2015/09/11/94e45458-5313-11e5-933e-7d06c647a395_story.html. 6. compare rick garnett’s contribution to the scotusblog symposium on zubik, “integrity, mission, and the little sisters of the poor,” december 17, 2015, http://www.scotusblog.com/2015/12/symposium-integrity-mission-and-the-little-sistersof-the-poor/. 7. brief amicus curiae of united states conference of catholic bishops et al., 26–27, http://www.scotusblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/zubik-usccb-brief.pdf. 8. thomas j. higgins, s.j., man as man: the science and art of ethics, revised ed. (rockford, il: tan books and publishers, 1958), 341, 343. justice alito quotes from the 1949 edition, citing pages 353 and 355. higgins’ definition of cooperation is more or less standard. the ethics of cooperation and the contraceptive mandate 12 compare james f. keenan, s.j., “prophylactics, toleration, and cooperation: contemporary problems and traditional principles,” international philosophical quarterly 29 (1989): 205–220, at 207: “cooperation asks whether a can help b to act in light of an unconditional intent by b to act illicitly.” see also m. cathleen kaveny, “appropriation of evil: cooperation’s mirror image,” theological studies 61 (2000): 280– 313, at 293: “the category of cooperation […] applies to situations in which the cooperator’s act and/or its fruits or byproducts are used to facilitate the wrongdoing of the principal agent.” more fully, 282: “one agent (the ‘cooperator’) faces a situation in which his or her act will somehow contribute, in a subordinate way, to a morally unacceptable action plan designed and controlled by someone else (the ‘principal agent’).” 9. henry davis, s.j., moral and pastoral theology, vol. 1, human acts, law, sin, virtue, ed. l.w. geddes, s.j., 7th ed. (new york: sheed & ward, 1958), 341. 10. ibid. 11. higgins, man as man, 343. 12. davis, human acts, law, sin, virtue, 342. compare david s. oderberg, “the ethics of co-operation in wrongdoing,” in modern moral philosophy, ed. anthony o’hear (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2004), 203–227, at 226: “the ethics of cooperation is a complex and subtle area of moral theory.” 13. oderberg, “the ethics of co-operation in wrongdoing,” 205. 14. brief of 50 catholic theologians and ethicists as amici curiae in support of petitioners, 2, http://www.scotusblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/50-catholic-theologians-and -ethicists1.pdf. 15. ibid., 4. 16. see oderberg, “the ethics of co-operation in wrongdoing,” 213. compare charles f. capps, “formal and material cooperation with evil,” american catholic philosophical quarterly 89 (2015): 681–698, at 689, n. 21. 17. oderberg, “the ethics of co-operation in wrongdoing,” 209. 13 prusak 18. keenan, “prophylactics, toleration, and cooperation,” 215. 19. oderberg, “co-operation in the age of hobby lobby: when sincerity is not enough,” infra. 20. elizabeth anscombe, “action, intention and ‘double effect,’” proceedings of the american catholic philosophical association 56 (1982): 12–25, at 23. 21. anscombe, intention, 2nd ed. (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1963), 36. 22. blaise pascal, les provinciales, in œuvres complètes, ed. michel le guern (paris: gallimard, 1998), vol. 1, 648–649. 23. oberberg, “the ethics of co-operation in wrongdoing,” 206. 24. see keenan, “prophylactics, toleration, and cooperation,” 214. 25. oberberg, “the ethics of co-operation in wrongdoing,” 213. 26. i follow here capps, “formal and material cooperation with evil,” 686. 27. ibid., 689–690, n. 21. 28. this terminology follows oderberg. 29. oderberg at one point invokes “the plausible presumption that a person intends the freely chosen (i.e. duress-free) natural and probable consequences of his acts,” with the implication that a person does not intend the consequences of acts chosen under duress. see “the ethics of co-operation in wrongdoing,” 214. 30. kaveny, “appropriation of evil,” 285, n. 9. 31. oderberg, “the ethics of co-operation in wrongdoing,” 224. 32. see further margaret monahan hogan, “catholic institutions within a democratic polity: a potential procrustean bed,” forthcoming in contemporary controversies in catholic bioethics, ed. jason eberl, a volume in the springer series catholic studies in bioethics, edited by christopher tollefsen. contrast nicholas p. cafardi, “cul-de-sac catholicism,” the ethics of cooperation and the contraceptive mandate 14 america, april 12, 2010, http://americamagazine.org/issue/733/100/cul-de-saccatholicism, and “hhs revision update ii,” america, february 5, 2013, http:// americamagazine.org/content/all-things/hhs-revision-update-ii. 33. compare the commonweal editorial, “lights, camera, contraception? the usccb’s dubious take on religious liberty,” may 17, 2016, https://www.commonwealmagazine. org/lights-camera-contraception. microsoft word 6 article hess-final.docx [expositions 8.2 (2014) 113–130] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 “it must develop men”: frederick douglass and education in nineteenth-century america emily hess ashland university twenty-three years before the united states encountered the bloodiest and most divisive event in its history, abraham lincoln spoke to the springfield, illinois lyceum on “the perpetuation of our political institutions.” as a young illinois congressman, lincoln firmly asserted that while the founding generation’s passion may have sustained the american revolution and created the united states, cold, calculating reason provided the necessary foundation for its preservation.1 reason furnished “general intelligence,” “sound morality,” and “in particular, a reverence for the constitution and laws” to support and defend our country.2 passion, on the other hand, threatened society with disorder and instability as mobs disregarded the law. lincoln had cause for concern: divisive party politics and ethnic, religious, and racial animosities manifested early in the 1830s with “wild and furious passions” of “savage mobs” in the streets. “the most common targets of mob violence,” historian daniel walker howe writes, “were the abolitionists and the free black communities that supported them.”3 two months earlier and less than one hundred miles away from springfield, the abolitionist elijah p. lovejoy was murdered at the hands of a pro-slavery mob in his alton, illinois print shop. the emergence of organized abolitionism “explains much of the dramatic rise in the number of riots.”4 while lincoln’s lyceum address alluded to this incident (“throwing printing presses into rivers, shooting editors”), he was not taking sides on the matter of abolitionism but, rather, indicting mob rule. in this time of massive immigration, internal improvements, westward migration, urban instability, growing sectionalism, and discord over the institution of slavery, lincoln urged “reverence for the laws be breathed by every american mother, “let it be taught in schools,” and “let it be written in primers, spelling books and in almanacs.”5 again, over twenty years later and a month before the civil war, lincoln explained why reverence for the constitution and the laws was “the only guide to safety in the present crisis.”6 although lincoln did not live to see reconstruction, there is nothing to suggest that he would have departed from this belief that the fruits of reason provided the surest defense and successful reconstruction of the republic. we also know, from his last public address, that lincoln found the black man capable of such civic participation and responsibility, too.7 but in a time as racially tumultuous and divisive as the abolitionist age of the 1830s, what type of education should be provided to this newly emancipated race?8 frederick douglass and education 114 the following paper will discuss how frederick douglass fostered a clear vision of education that would not only improve his race but also provide an intelligent, virtuous, and moral citizenry that “the proud fabric of freedom” could rest “as the rock of its basis.”9 he considered this both a necessity and act of justice. from his own experience, douglass found education a vital component for full emancipation. enlightenment made man “fit to be free” and capable of selfgovernment.10 ultimately, douglass sponsored an integrated education that resurrected the materials of reason from lincoln’s lyceum address. such education would elevate the black man to disprove stereotypes, overcome prejudice, and demonstrate his capacity for citizenship. this article examines frederick douglass’s education while enslaved, his road to enlightenment, what he considered an appropriate education for the emancipated race, and why the federal government should provide a universal and integrated education. “slavery is the deadly foe of education.”11 in 1896, booker t. washington told a brooklyn audience that his race “whether in slavery or in freedom” had always “been loyal to the stars and stripes” and no schoolhouse was opened that had not been filled.12 indeed, in the three decades following the civil war, freedmen responded to educational opportunities afforded them in such a manner that almost shocked white southerners.13 blacks moved from rural areas to towns, sacrificed to afford an education for their children, and established mock schoolhouses in churches, stables, basements, billiard rooms, plantation cotton houses, warehouses, and homes before missionary societies set up formal schooling. even while negotiating labor contracts, some black men and women asked that the planter financially support the local black schoolhouse.14 their desire for education was undoubtedly cultivated in the antebellum years as masters vehemently prohibited such activity. educating slaves was highly discouraged and in most places unlawful. on one particular plantation, for example, if the master discovered a slave learned how to write, he cut off the slave’s fingers as punishment.15 as a child, little was available to the young, enslaved frederick douglass: he possessed no accurate knowledge of his age or parentage and he did not benefit from the appropriate lessons a family structure might afford. for his first eight years, the slave boy, douglass recalled, “seldom has to listen to lectures on propriety of behavior, or on anything else. he is never chided for handling his knife or fork improperly or awkwardly, for he uses none. [. . .] he is never expected to act like a nice little gentleman, for he is only a rude little slave”; instead, “he literally runs wild; has no pretty little verses to learn in the nursery; no nice little speeches to make for aunts, uncles or cousins, to show how smart he is.”16 the barbarity and violence douglass soon 115 hess encountered on the plantation coupled with his limited knowledge comprised a slave’s education. he was reduced, along with other slaves, to a level with brutes and animals.17 in march of 1826, douglass was sent to baltimore to live with and serve hugh and sophia auld. the following year, after mr. auld forbade his benevolent wife from helping young frederick learn the alphabet (because it was “unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read”), douglass understood “the white man’s power to enslave the black man” and “the direct pathway from slavery to freedom” was education.18 thus, “the argument which he so warmly urged, against my learning to read, only served to inspire me with a desire and determination to learn more. in learning to read, i owe almost as much to the bitter opposition of my master, as to the kindly aid of my mistress.”19 at a young age douglass understood that “education and slavery were incompatible with each other.”20 once his lessons with mrs. auld ceased, douglass sought out young white schoolchildren in town to learn more of the alphabet. few helped however, because, as douglass knew, providing education was promoting freedom. it was “almost an unpardonable offense to do anything, directly or indirectly, to promote a slave’s freedom in a slave state.”21 after learning how to read, douglass bought a schoolbook entitled the columbian orator. a dialogue douglass read— between a slave and his master—struck him deeply. with a “spirited defense” the slave successfully argued against the institution of slavery and his master “seeing himself to be thus vanquished at every turn in the argument; he generously and meekly emancipates the slave, with his best wishes for his prosperity.”22 an intelligent dialogue, for this slave, brought him freedom by “penetrating even the heart of the slaveholder, compelling him to yield up his earthly interests to the claims of eternal justice.”23 slavery, douglass realized, was not the black man’s inherent state. the more douglass read, the more he detested slavery as knowledge opened his eyes “to the horrible pit.”24 he studied in the evenings and learned about the abolitionist movement through antislavery petitions in the newspaper. his education became a type of gospel he needed to share and imbue fellow slaves with “the desire to learn.”25 while hired out to mr. freedman in the early 1830s, douglass established a sabbath school and taught many slaves. it was understood, however, “there must be as little display about it as possible.” slaves could wrestle, box, drink whiskey and do “other unseemly things” but “to meet for the purpose of improving the mind and heart […] was esteemed a most dangerous nuisance.”26 the last thing slaveholders wanted to see in their slaves, according to douglass, were the lincolnian traits of the 1838 lyceum address. “for they had much rather see us engaged in those degrading sports,” wrote douglass, “than to see us behaving like intellectual, moral, and accountable beings.”27 in september of 1838 douglass successfully escaped his enslavement at mr. hugh’s plantation. in freedom, he became a nationally recognized abolitionist, known for his fiery and eloquent speeches. in a letter to fellow abolitionist harriet beecher stowe, douglass affirmed the frederick douglass and education 116 redemptive qualities of education and believed it could rescue the free black population from their social disease of “poverty, ignorance and degradation.” this “disease” affirmed whites’ perception that “blacks equated freedom with irresponsibility”; they characterized this group as “unruly” and “lacking in self-restraint” with a culture that advocated “license” and “permissiveness.”28 an industrial education addressed this immediate concern and prepared the black youth for future employment. “we needed more to learn how to make a good living,” he wrote stowe, “than to learn latin and greek.”29 douglass later favored classical education but black education in antebellum america needed to serve immediate financial ends and prove the black man could flourish in freedom, develop a sound work ethic, and become a productive citizen in society. this type of education extended a powerful argument for the abolition of slavery. “the most telling, the most killing refutation of slavery,” douglass wrote, “is the presentation of an industrious, enterprising, thrifty and intelligent free black population.”30 in other words, the free black population of the north held the heavy responsibility of proving their race capable and worthy of freedom. furthermore, the black race had not reached a point where they could benefit from high schools and college. douglass contended, “we cannot, and we ought not to hope that, in a single leap from our low condition, we can reach that of ministers, lawyers, doctors, editors, and merchants.” while capable of such occupations, the “intermediate gradations of agriculture and the mechanic arts” must first be mastered. in order to “properly live or be respected by our fellow men,” the black man “must build as well as live in houses; must make as well as use furniture; we must construct bridges as well as pass over them.”31 free black men should be “instructed to use their hands, as well as their heads.”32 moreover, unlike some of his contemporaries, douglass envisioned an integrated education for the black youth, “let the colored children be educated and grow up side by side with white children, come up friends unsophisticated and generous childhood together, and it will require a powerful agent to convert them into enemies, and lead them to prey upon each other’s rights and liberties.”33 education should not be alienating or divisive but integrative. engagement in white society and white institutions provided “many opportunities for removing prejudices and establishing the rights of all men.”34 “douglass hoped that a forced interaction might lay the groundwork for a strong culture of personal and social responsibility,” political theorist nicholas buccola writes, “if individuals from diverse backgrounds are educated together they will gain an appreciation for their common humanity” and nationality instead of cultivating a race pride.35 douglass understood that individuals needed to be conditioned for the institution of slavery, both as slaves and masters. “nature has done almost nothing,” he wrote, “to prepare men and women to be either slaves or slaveholders.”36 one needed to be taught to be a master and this always, as seen in his discussion of mrs. auld, had “brutalizing effects” on both slave and 117 hess slaveholder.37 douglass recalled never having met a young boy who defended the institution of slavery, “but i have often had boys console me, with the hope that something would yet occur, by which i might be made free.”38 for full emancipation, to reverse the conditioned slave and master, both races—all of society—needed new educations.39 douglass worked as an itinerant abolitionist speaker for william lloyd garrison’s american anti-slavery society for a number of years after his escape. as he recalled in one of his autobiographies, “all that the american people needed, i thought, was light. could they know slavery as i knew it, they would hasten to the work of its extinction.”40 like the articulate slave in the columbian orator, douglass believed the united states simply needed an exposition of the horrors of slavery from an articulate, intelligent black man. he soon realized, however, a grander education would be necessary. the civil war, according to douglass, served the purpose as an “apocalyptic education” for the united states.41 historian david blight notes, “only small numbers of americans would have willed emancipation in 1861; none could stop it in 1864–1865.”42 douglass considered president lincoln one of the war’s best students.43 he continued to recruit black soldiers for the union cause, in part, because he was “so well satisfied” with lincoln and “the educating tendency of the conflict.”44 moreover, douglass urged black men to enlist for the union during the civil war to demonstrate to all of society their capacity to reason: “you are a man [. . .] if you were only a horse or an ox, incapable of deciding whether the rebels are right or wrong, you would have no responsibility, and might like the ox go on eating your corn.”45 but, instead, “manhood requires you to take sides.”46 in january of 1864, a year after lincoln issued the emancipation proclamation, douglass addressed the women’s loyal league at the cooper institute in new york city and spoke on the meaning of the civil war. if the union continued to fight, struggle, and sacrifice, this “abolition war” would produce a different country. with nothing “analogous to the old union” and “great moral changes in the fundamental condition of the people,” this new country would not “brand the declaration of independence a lie.”47 however, this “new order” would not come by union victory or emancipation alone. as douglass wrote in douglass’ monthly, “the work does not end with the abolition of slavery but only begins.”48 education needed to be an integral part of the postwar process. douglass hoped the new england schoolhouse would replace every southern whipping-post: “schools for the education of dusky millions will be required, and all the elevating and civilizing institutions of the country must be extended to these people” since slavery has “stood athwart the pathway of knowledge and progress” and “kept the nation from fully becoming what it was meant to be.”49 the institution of slavery inhibited americans—both slave and master—from bettering themselves for their republic. frederick douglass and education 118 he dreamt this new country would be a place where general intelligence would flourish— where “no man shall be fined for reading a book”, “imprisoned for selling a book” or “flogged or sold for learning to read.”50 drawing from his own experience in the auld home and teaching sabbath school, “nothing had given more meaning to his life than the freedom, selfunderstanding, and power he had attained through language and learning.” thus, education “was indispensable to his social reform policy, as well as to his vision of reconstruction.”51 legal emancipation meant nothing without educating both races. moreover, the emancipated race needed to be an educated race for the stability of the nation. this was not a matter of preference or prejudice but national importance: “we must (provide education) or give up the country.”52 only southern blacks provided the necessary stability for this new order that emerged after the civil war. a country “based upon loyalty, liberty and equality” and “delivered from all contradictions” could only be maintained with “a profounder wisdom” and “holier zeal” than anything witnessed during the civil war. the most courageous and patriotic americans were needed to support the republic.53 ex-confederates, while defeated, were not reformed. “it would be absurd and ridiculous,” douglass wrote, “to expect that the conquered traitors will at once cordially cooperate with the federal government.” instead, a “new class of men, men who have hitherto exercised but little influence on the state” would be needed in the south.54 massachusetts senator charles sumner agreed. in a letter to john bright in march of 1865, sumner stated that without black southerners and their vote, “the old enemy will reappear.”55 because this emancipated race neutralized the potential passion of ex-confederates, douglass argued, “we shall have to educate the (emancipated) people.”56 as he told readers of the new national era in september of 1870 (seven months after the ratification of the 15th amendment), “we are henceforth to fall or flourish together” as “the safety and prosperity of the republic depends upon the intelligence of colored voters” standing together “in the maintenance of those great rights and liberties.”57 this process would not happen overnight, however, as “there is no such thing as immediate emancipation either for the master or for the slave.” the slow work of reconstruction needed to be a “radical revolution in all modes of thought” and only “time, experience, and culture” can “gradually bring society back to the normal condition from which long years of slavery have carried all under its iron sway.”58 until then, douglass wrote, “no colored voter shall either forget or forgive the men who have enslaved him until they have repented.” “how can you organize reconstruction except on the everlasting foundation of education?”59 119 hess the freedman’s bureau provided one of the first educational opportunities for freedmen postwar and attempted to create that safeguard for the republic.60 established by the federal government in march of 1865, the bureau (officially known as the bureau of refugees, freedmen, and abandoned lands) aided ex-slaves transition from enslavement to freedom. in addition to helping locate family members, providing rations, and negotiating labor contracts, the bureau coordinated the schooling, activities, and institution building by northern aid, abolitionist and missionary societies for freed people’s education. for abolitionists, their work remained unfinished until the black man held equal rights in postwar society. indeed, many northern white women who ventured south to teach in freedmen’s schools considered themselves “soldiers,” continuing the union campaign their father, husband, brothers, and cousins started during wartime—that is, total emancipation of the black man.61 not surprisingly, abolitionists’ post-bellum activities evoked similar violent responses as their antebellum emancipation efforts. using frederick douglass’s life as example, james mccune smith wrote in the introductory notes of douglass’s autobiography my bondage and my freedom that education provided douglass “first as a means of attaining liberty; then as an end in itself most desirable; a will; an unfaltering energy and determination to obtain what his soul pronounced desirable; a majestic self-hood” and “determined courage.”62 as discussed earlier, southerners knew the potential knowledge possessed to liberate the body and mind and many engaged in racial violence and mob rule in hopes of maintaining black illiteracy and inferiority. one georgian recorded, “it is well known that the sight of a negro school house stirs up the rabid feelings of the ku-klux-klan gang, as the sight of water is said to disturb a mad dog.”63 in spite of this, by 1870, thousands of schools housed 3,300 teachers and almost 150,000 students.64 while this was a relatively small portion of the freed population, the bureau’s educational advancements in the postwar south are considered their greatest success. unlike the bureau’s other efforts, education was the only activity that left permanent institutions in the south as bureau leaders were “convinced that blacks would benefit more by recognition as equal citizens than from being treated as a special class permanently dependent upon federal assistance and protection.”65 in his approach as commissioner of the freedman’s bureau, general oliver o. howard understood, like douglass, that access to education was “central to the meaning of freedom” and served as the foundation “upon which all efforts to assist the freedmen rested.”66 besides acquiring land, blacks looked to education to free them from mental and physical dependency on the southern white population. a “mental appetite” needed to be awakened to “lift the freedman ‘to the proper position of manhood and equality.’”67 as one mississippi freedman remarked, “if i nebber does do nothing more while i live, i shall give my children a chance to go to school, for i considers education next best thing to liberty.”68 frederick douglass and education 120 furthermore, freedman schools provided an education that attempted to equip the emancipated race to become reasoned, responsible citizens as well. general oliver o. howard stated, freedmen “already exert a powerful political influence [. . .] they must be educated, or they will become tools of demagogues and a power for evil rather than good.”69 therefore, in addition to basic instruction of reading, writing, and arithmetic, bureau education aimed to “equip the freedmen to take full advantage of citizenship,” “obedience to law and respect for the rights and property of others,” and “plant a genuine republicanism in the southern states.”70 even before the founding of the freedman’s bureau, northern nonsectarian and evangelical societies sent teachers to areas of the union-occupied south to teach black men and women “the ways of ‘civilization’ and freedom.”71 of these societies, the prominent american missionary association centered their teaching on guiding, counseling, instructing, protecting and directing freed people’s energies “to make them useful to themselves, their families and their country.”72 black teachers held a prominent place in the black community as the schoolhouse, second only to the church, became the “institutional and emotional anchor of black life.”73 considered the “community leaders” and “interracial diplomats” of the black community, teaching oftentimes served as a springboard into politics.74 black teachers invested in the success of the republican party for they knew that ensured southern black education. after successfully ratifying the 13th amendment, many republicans wondered what could replace antislavery “as the leading republican idealistic issue.”75 the republican party decided to promote public schools, especially for emancipated blacks, so they would be “worthy of the responsibilities of citizenship and suffrage.”76 while the first years of reconstruction (1865–1870) centered on amending the constitution, in the years following 1870 the focus shifted to make “these new constitutionally proclaimed abstractions real” and “one important aspect of this” was “promoting, expanding and protecting the public school.”77 in other words, the emancipation of slaves (13th amendment) held little significance without education.78 the republican party considered universal education so important to the reconstruction of the south that it became an integral condition for admittance back into the union.79 schoolteachers shared douglass’s belief that education liberated the masses from ignorance and insisted that, “the colored race would sink or swim according to the education they received.”80 intellectually impoverished and “benighted by ignorance,” these ex-slaves urgently needed “required lessons in freedom.”81 unlike ministers, who catered their sermons and language to the level of an uneducated, illiterate congregation, black school teachers spoke to elevate and encourage their pupils to adopt different habits, language, and perspective.82 douglass revered schoolteachers and considered their profession one of the highest callings. “to properly teach is to induce man’s potential and latent greatness, to discover and develop the noblest, highest, and best that is in him” and unfold and strengthen “the powers of the human 121 hess soul.”83 what is the proper way to teach and induce potential greatness? there was no consensus among black or white southern schoolteachers concerning curriculum. some offered greek lessons and had their students recite the infamous john c. calhoun before they began, “show me a negro who knows greek syntax and i will then believe that he is a human being and should be treated like a man.” thus many missionaries “meant to train men who would be treated like men.”84 for the most part however, post-emancipation education was grounded in the three r’s, geography, and american history. for the latter, black leader and reverend henry m. turner emphasized the necessary duty of teachers to instruct on “patriotism and an appreciation of how they [freed slaves] came to be freed.”85 teachers combined reading and writing instruction with “positive moral and patriotic images” and “in teaching the alphabet, each letter might introduce a couplet conveying some moral or value.”86 douglass advocated an industrial education for free blacks in antebellum america to secure financial security and disprove “the infamous opinion of our natural inferiority.” in the years following the civil war he further explained how this type of education developed lincoln’s second characteristic of reason: sound morality. while dedicating the douglass institute in maryland (a black industrial school dedicated to frederick douglass), he recognized this training also promoted “manly character” and taught “the true idea of manly independence and selfrespect.”87 the douglass institute promoted “virtue, temperance, knowledge, truth, liberty, and justice.”88 similar to lincoln, douglass wanted the black man’s mind enlightened to the “whole circle of social, moral, political and educational duties” and “true politeness and refinements.”89 although the bureau was officially dismantled by 1872, freedmen “took control of the educational system and transformed federal schools into local free schools.”90 freedman’s bureau schools provided the necessary foundation for a movement towards general southern public education.91 republicans, with black legislators trailblazing the path, established “the principle of state responsibility for public education” with the reconstruction constitutions requiring tax-supported school systems for children of both races.92 historian michael perman notes, “this was a reform of great significance” as “only a rudimentary system of public education had existed before the war and only a fraction of the black school-age population—as little as five percent in georgia—had been reached by the schools established by the missionary societies and the freedman’s bureau after emancipation.”93 again, blacks showed their zeal for education by outnumbering white students in both mississippi and south carolina.94 one black preacher observed, “the ignorant whites had every chance to learn, but didn’t. we had every chance to remain ignorant, and many of us learned in spite of them.”95 in addition to formal institutions, statesmen, such as douglass provided a civic education to the people, “nurturing a just and virtuous political community” as well as “a sense of community by talking about the values that unite us.”96 douglass believed statesmen could “impact the attitudes of citizens through legislation and by articulating moral and political messages about frederick douglass and education 122 the fundamental values of the community.”97 in his speeches, douglass emphasized the third lincolnian pillar for a stable republic, “reverence for the constitution and laws.” political theorist nicholas buccola writes on this very subject, highlighting civic ceremonies where douglass spoke and provided a “moral education” for americans. “these occasions,” buccola writes, “he hoped, would provide citizens with opportunities to think about and discuss the meaning of political lives.”98 from his most famous “what to the slave is the fourth of july”— explaining the gap “between the moral ideals of the declaration [. . .] and the realities of american life”—to decoration day speeches—this ritual served as a “celebration of the rights that are promised in the american founding documents and it is a reminder of the duties of citizenship.”99 douglass also revered the country’s leaders, particularly lincoln, in various speeches. he pointed to lincoln’s humble beginnings when, with his “fortitude and industry which could split rails by day, and learn grammar at night at the hearthstone of a log hut . . . prepared this man for a service to his country to mankind.”100 when douglass called for equal rights and education for the black man after the war, he did so believing this would complete their mental and physical emancipation and provide a more stable republic that lived up to the founding creeds in the declaration of independence and the constitution. he never entertained the idea of colonization and “the love of the country,” he believed, would check the black man upon all schemes of such. “we are here, and here we are likely to remain,” douglass declared, “we have grown up in this republic, and i see nothing in her character, or even in the character of the american people as yet, which compels the belief that we must leave the united states.”101 however, in order to keep this republic, the youth—all youth—must be educated, “it is everywhere an accepted truth,” he told the colored convention of louisville: in a country governed by the people, like education of the youth of all classes is vital to its welfare, prosperity, and to its existence . . . the fact remains that the whole country is directly interested in the education of every child that lives within its borders. the ignorance of any part of the american people so deeply concerns al the rest that there can be no doubt of the right to pass laws compelling the attendance of every child at school.102 he urged congress to “enter vigorously upon the work of universal education,” instead of waiting on the states, because “to withhold this boon is to neglect the greatest assurance it has of its own perpetuity.”103 for douglass, an integrated and universal education encouraged “forms of moral responsibility that are essential to civic life,” “responsible behavior because educated people [. . .] are less likely to behave immorally,” and “the development of stronger bonds of civic 123 hess education by bringing (or forcing) citizens together into a public space where they must interact with one another.”104 providing universal education to the black man was a necessary act of justice and preservation.105 douglass urged a manly education, with lincolnian characteristics as the foundation of such education. this year marks the 150th anniversary of the 13th amendment. while congressional debates have changed since reconstruction, douglass’s thoughts on education retain their currency today. education provides moral and intellectual benefits to the individual, his/her community, and country. douglass “believed education was crucial for the development of free and responsible citizens.”106 thus, for douglass, a thriving republic requires public schools to place civic education at the forefront of instruction. such education should emphasize students’ common nationality as opposed to “any measure that authorizes or deepens one’s selfidentification in predominantly racial terms.”107 as douglass addressed the manassas industrial school’s first attendees in 1894, he reminded them, “god and nature speak to our manhood and manhood alone.”108 endnotes 1. jaffa 2004, 345. 2. basler 2001, 84. 3. howe 2007, 432; also see 430–35. 4. ibid. 5. basler 2001, 81. 6. jaffa 2004, 259. 7. basler 2001, 799. 8. for more on racial violence and political terrorism during reconstruction, see litwack 1980 and 1997. 9. basler 2001, 85. 10. buccola 2012, 148. 11. foner 1999, 188. 12. brotz 1991, 364. frederick douglass and education 124 13. for more on freedmen and women seeking and funding education in the postwar south, see butchart 1980, 169–76. 14. litwack 1980, 475–76. 15. litwack 1997, 53. 16. gates 1994, 15, 144–45. 17. ibid., 142. 18. ibid., 37, 218. 19. ibid., 38. 20. ibid., 40. 21. ibid., 224. 22. ibid., 225. 23. ibid., 226. 24. ibid., 227. 25. ibid,, 298. 26. ibid., 299. 27. ibid., 71. 28. mcafee 1998, 81. 29. gates 1994, 727. 30. ibid., 731–32. 31. ibid., 215. 32. foner 1999, 215. 33. buccola 2012, 152. 34. foner 1999, 119–20. 35. buccola 2012, 155; also see buchart 1980, 174. black nationalist martin delany, for example, warned black students to be skeptical of and not trust their white schoolteachers 125 hess in freedman’s bureau schools. he preferred, as with many other black schoolteachers and leaders, a segregated education. 36. gates 1994, 222, 224. 37. ibid., 46. 38. ibid., 224. 39. when douglass called for the abolishment of slavery he always followed with a call for “education of colored americans” as well. see, for example, douglass 1847. 40. gates 1994, 671. 41. blight 1994, 187. 42. ibid. 43. basler 2001, 691; also see 734, 796. 44. foner 1999, 547; also see 528. 45. ibid., 528. 46. ibid. 47. ibid., 554. 48. ibid., 523. 49. ibid., 523. 50. ibid., 562. 51. blight 1991, 198. 52. foner 1999, 562. 53. ibid., 521. 54. ibid., 522. 55. palmer 1990, 273. 56. foner 1999, 522. 57. ibid., 605. frederick douglass and education 126 58. ibid., 522. 59. mcafee 1998, 89. 60. gutman 1999, 260–98. 61. foner 2007, 144. 62. gates 1994, 126. 63. mcafee 1998, 96. 64. perman 2003, 26. 65. foner 1999, 148. 66. foner 2002, 96, 144. 67. butchart 1980, 16. 68. litwack 1980, 472. 69. howard 1869, 12–13. 70. foner 2002, 146–47. 71. litwack 1980, 477. 72. ibid., (italics mine). 73. fairclough 2007, 5. 74. ibid., 5, 48. 75. mcafee, 1998, 6. 76. ibid., 5–6. this was not limited to the black man. the republican party pushed for universal education to americanize immigrants as well (especially catholics, “keeping america safe from feared papal domination”). republicans “attempted to persuade the electorate that reconstruction’s goal was to remodel a nation divided and devastated by civil war and handicapped by the human degradation and ignorance spawned by slavery” and “the nation’s need was for social unity and expanding educational opportunity for the common person.” 77. ibid. 127 hess 78. ibid., 85. charles sumner, like douglass, pushed further and demanded integrated education as racial segregation in education creates a “caste, and, on this account, a violation of equality.” 79. ibid., 86. 80. fairclough 2007, 7. 81. ibid. 82. ibid., 17; buchart 1980, 169. douglass hoped education would not only provide the tools for self-elevation but disprove stereotypes and prejudice. his initial criticism of the freedman’s bureau was that it would exclude the black race “from the general schemes of civilization [. . .] that they will be an injury to the colored race. they will serve to keep up the very prejudices which it is so desirable to banish from the country.” 83. douglass 1894. 84. mcpherson 1975, 204–5. 85. litwack 1980, 85. 86. ibid. 87. foner 1999, 585. 88. ibid. 89. ibid., 586. 90. anderson 1988, 10. 91. foner 2002, 144. 92. litwack 1997, 61. 93. foner 2002, 365; perman 2003, 90. 94. ibid. 95. litwack 1997, 53. 96. buccola 2012, 137. 97. ibid., 137–38. frederick douglass and education 128 98. ibid., 144. 99. ibid., 144, 146. 100. foner 1999, 615–24. 101. ibid., 216–17. 102. ibid., 680. douglass marked a state’s potential for success upon its public education program. michigan, for example, established such a program and douglass deemed this state to have “a great future.” an entire editorial, “a progressive state,” was dedicated to the subject: buccola 2012, 154. 103. ibid., 680. 104. buccola 2012, 155. 105. douglass 1849. 106. buccola 2012, 155. 107. myers 2013. 108. douglass 1894. works cited anderson, james d. 1988. the education of blacks in the south, 1860–1935. chapel hill: university of north carolina press. basler, roy p. 2001. abraham lincoln: his speeches and writings. cambridge, ma: da capo press. blight, david. 1991. frederick douglass’s civil war: keeping faith in the jubilee. baton rouge: louisiana state university press. brotz, howard. 1991. african-american social and political thought, 1850–1920. new york: transaction publishers. buccola, nicholas. 2012. the political thought of frederick douglass: in pursuit of american liberty. new york: new york university press. 129 hess butchart, ronald e. 1980. northern schools, southern blacks, and reconstruction: freedman’s education, 1862–1875. westport, ct: greenwood press. douglass, frederick. 1847. “the right to criticize american institutions.” may 11, 1847. http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/the-right-to-criticize-americaninstitutions/. accessed july 10, 2013. _____. 1849. “the destiny of the colored americans.” november 16, 1849. http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/the-destiny-of-colored-americans/. accessed july 10, 2013. _____. 1894. “blessings of liberty and education.” september 3, 1894. http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/blessings-of-liberty-and-education/. accessed july 10, 2013. fairclough, adam. 2007. a class of their own: black teachers in the segregated south. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. foner, eric. 2002. reconstruction: america’s unfinished revolution, 1863–1877. new york: first perennial classics. foner, philip. 1999. frederick douglass: selected speeches and writings. new york: lawrence hill books. gates, henry louis, jr. 1994. frederick douglass autobiographies. new york: the library of america. gutman, herbert. 1987. “the post-emancipation origins of afro-american education.” in power and culture: essays on the american working class. edited by herbert gutman, 260–297. new york: pantheon. howard, brevet general oliver o. 1869. report of commissioner bureau of refugees, freedman and abandoned lands, to the secretary of war, october 20, 1869. washington, dc: u.s. government printing office. howe, daniel walker. 2007. what hath god wrought: the transformation of america, 1815–1848. new york: oxford university press. jaffa, harry v. 2004. a new birth of freedom: abraham lincoln and the coming of the civil war. new york: rowman and littlefield. frederick douglass and education 130 litwack, leon. 1980. been in the storm so long: the aftermath of slavery. new york: vintage books. _____. 1997. trouble in mind: black southerners in the age of jim crow. new york: vintage books. mcafee, ward m. 1998. religion, race and reconstruction: the public school in the politics of the 1870s. albany: state university of new york press. mcpherson, james. 1975. the abolitionist legacy: from reconstruction to the naacp. princeton: princeton university press. myers, peter c. 2013. “frederick douglass’s america: race, justice, and the promise of the founding.” january 11, 2011. http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/01/ frederick-douglass-s-america-race-justice-and-the-promise-of-the-founding#_ftnref57. accessed on july 10, 2013. palmer, beverly wilson. 1990. selected letters of charles sumner: volume 2. boston: northeastern press. perman, michael. 2003. emancipation and reconstruction. 2nd ed. wheeling, il: harlan davidson, inc. microsoft word 2 oderberg 11.1.docx [expositions 11.1 (2017) 15–30] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 co-operation in the age of hobby lobby: when sincerity is not enough david s. oderberg university of reading (u.k.) at the time of writing, it has just been announced that the federal office for civil rights has upheld the california department of managed health care’s instruction to health insurers covering employees of churches, religiously-affiliated schools and universities, and other religious organizations, that they must cover abortion in their plans under the affordable care act (aca)—irrespective of any objections by the plan purchasers.1 this californian problem has been rumbling on for several years, and the latest ruling reaffirms the state government’s attitude: conscientious objection has no force against the provision of abortion via obamacare. needless to say, the complaint will run its course through the courts, but it seems, given previous judicial rulings, that only the supreme court can save conscientious objection in california. in such a blatant case as this, it is clear that the plan purchasers would be compelled to cooperate in wrongdoing. (i leave aside the substantive question of the morality of abortion, which is another topic. the objectors sincerely believe that abortion is wrong, so let us assume it to be wrong for the purpose of analysis.) but what does co-operation in wrongdoing amount to, and how to do we judge what kinds of co-operation are themselves morally objectionable? the primary distinction is between formal and material co-operation.2 in formal co-operation, the co-operator intends the wrong committed by the principal agent, even if he does not intend to perform it himself and even if he does not believe the principal act is wrong.3 in other words, he shares the guilt of the principal. the californian case is clear: the plan purchasers do not intend either for the insurer to cover abortion or for any abortion to be performed. so they count as material co-operators. here, the relevant principles are those governing the doctrine of double effect in general (dde).4 why so? because the agential structure is the same as in double-effect cases: the agent intentionally performs an act with both good and bad effects, something that may well be permitted if the right conditions apply even though doing good and avoiding evil is the fundamental principle of morality. first, what the agent does must itself be at least morally permissible. secondly, the agent must not intend the bad effect itself. third, the bad effect must not itself be a means to the good one, for otherwise the agent would co-operation in the age of hobby lobby 16   be using a bad means to a good end. finally, there must be some kind of proportionality between the good and bad effects, sufficient to permit the causation of the latter for the sake of5 the former. proportionality is not essentially a balancing of outcomes as per consequentialism, but rather an answer to the question: are there good enough reasons for permitting the bringing about of the bad effect, in terms of what is achieved by production of the good effect? here, it seems fairly clear that the first condition is violated because the act of the plan purchaser is to purchase health insurance for employees that covers abortion. as an act, it is no more morally permissible than a doctor’s signing a certificate authorizing someone else to perform an abortion. but even if the co-operative act (purchasing the insurance) were considered permissible, there would be a question over the fourth condition. the bad effect is co-operation in the provision of abortion. the good effect is the avoidance of the severe penalties of non-compliance with the affordable care act and related state laws and regulations. the penalties might be sufficient (let us suppose) to put the plan purchaser out of business or stop its effective functioning (a church, say). this is a great evil, but it is not a threat to life or limb; abortion, on the other hand, is a direct attack upon life. (again, we are supposing this for the purpose of analysis.) so there seems to be a clear disproportionality between the good and bad effects. yet condition 4 is not merely about weighing effects, however this is done. the good effect of avoiding the severe penalties for non-compliance is substantial, though not as substantial as the evil effect of taking a life. this does not of itself rule out or in the co-operative act. what it means is that the co-operator needs a greater reason for assisting the principal than he would were the good and bad effects comparable. environmentalists like to tell us that taking the car needs greater justification when the good effect does not significantly exceed the bad effect of the extra pollution than when the good effect is substantially greater.6 compare taking the car on a walkable trip to buy milk versus taking your child on a long journey to the hospital. it is, of course, easy to imagine cases where the disproportionality is so great that nothing can justify co-operation: if i threaten not to be your friend unless you help me beat up an old lady, it is hard to see what reason could compensate for the massive lack of balance between effects. when it comes to working out what sort of reason can justify certain behavior in a given situation, the question in co-operation cases is how the effects relate to the co-operator’s action: the more the co-operator is implicated in the principal act, the graver the reason they need for co-operating. someone who edits pornography movies prior to sale, for instance, needs greater reason for co-operation than someone who sells the cameras. the former is a more proximate co-operator than the latter. proximity is a factor in implication: it is not only, and sometimes 17 oderberg   not at all, about spatio-temporal distance between the principal agent and the co-operator. it is about the executive character of the co-operative act—in other words whether, morally speaking, the co-operator is more like the principal in what they do than someone else actually or hypothetically situated in the same chain of events. proximity is not an absolute matter; one is more or less proximate relative to others, or to how oneself or another might have been situated. now entering into a contract to provide insurance coverage for abortion, although not as proximate as assisting the abortionist in the clinic, is more proximate than, say, typing up the contract and posting it to the insurer. indeed, in activities where insurable risk is present, providing the insurance is one of the key factors that supports the risky activity itself, allowing it to be carried out in confidence of protection. one of the motivating ideas behind the aca is that “reproductive rights,” as they are called, be given “seamless coverage.”7 insurance provides the backstop whereby abortion can be carried out without fear of cost or administrative burden. therefore, as well as protecting the act in general, the insurance protects particular acts at particular times. this gives the insurance, as with most insurance, an executive character putting it very close to the activity itself. moreover, the co-operation looks to be indispensable, in the following way. it is not that indispensable co-operation has to be an absolute sine qua non of the principal act, in the sense that without it the act simply cannot be performed short of a miracle. it is, rather, that the principal act, practically speaking, cannot be performed, or would be performed with great difficulty, or would have its probability significantly lowered without the co-operation. providing the burglar with the code to a safe that only you know is as indispensable as can be, assuming no other means of access. handing the burglar the keys to your car is dispensable, assuming the burglar could threaten anyone else to do the same. again, there is a spectrum of cases: we are not dealing with mathematics but with ethics, and as we cannot repeat too often, aristotle taught us not to expect more precision that the subject matter allows. now, though, we have a problem: what is it that a hypothetical employee of the plan purchaser might want? is it abortion? is it abortion without cost-sharing? is it abortion without cost-sharing while remaining an employee of the purchaser? we have to look at all the circumstances and ask ourselves what exactly the plan purchaser would be helping the employee to do. two important questions to ask here are: what does the employee want help with, and what does the employer think they are helping with? it seems pretty clear that, given the purpose of the aca and of employee health plans generally and given the situation of the parties, by purchasing the coverage the employer is helping the employee get trouble-free and cost-free abortion coverage as an employee. as such, the employer’s co-operation is well-nigh co-operation in the age of hobby lobby 18   indispensable, practically speaking, even though in the current situation the employee could make alternative arrangements with difficulty. there is a lot more that could be said about the california case and its specifics. my purpose has been to show that there is a principled way of looking at co-operation cases that does not involve appeal to religious doctrine or expression per se and that is not wholly subjective. here, the employer looks to be a proximate and indispensable material co-operator in wrongdoing by providing the coverage, assuming for the sake of argument that the initial act of purchasing the coverage is itself permissible (an assumption i in fact deny). as such, it would be morally wrong to purchase the coverage, and the state would be compelling the objector to engage in immoral behavior. as in u.k. cases, where catholic adoption agencies have all but ceased functioning as such due to government compulsion to pair children with homosexual couples,8 it would be incumbent on the californian objectors to submit to the penalties even if it meant going out of business or radically changing the nature of their operation. the situation is similar to that in burwell v. hobby lobby, where a “closely-held for-profit corporation” was granted an exemption from purchasing employee coverage under the “contraceptive mandate,” particularly with reference to abortifacient drugs. as is well known, the supreme court held that the mandate substantially burdened the freedom of religion of the employers under the religious freedom restoration act of 1993 (rfra). unfortunately, though, matters start to get even thornier than many observers of the current state of play think they already are. for whilst i agree with the decision in hobby lobby, i do not think the case was decided for the right reasons. yes, the plaintiffs were compelled by the mandate to become illicit co-operators in wrongdoing; and perhaps, given the rfra jurisprudence, the case was correctly interpreted. if it was, though, then that jurisprudence is in my view wrong, as i go on to explain. in any case, the reasoning in hobby lobby has led to the impasse over zubik v. burwell, in which scotus reversed the previous decisions per curiam and sent the case back to the lower courts where, at the time of writing, it lies.9 the problem centres on the question of how a conscientious objector’s belief about cooperation is to be understood. is it a religious/conscientious belief,10 or is it a belief that we might call ancillary to a religious belief, perhaps one that is derived from a mixture of religious and non-religious beliefs? we need to get clear about the structure of a standard case of hobby lobby-style conscientious objection. there is a principal act that the objector sincerely believes contravenes his/her religious beliefs. abortion is the most common case post-aca (including abortifacient “contraception”). in other words, taking the christian context—for it seems to be christians litigating the most frequently—it is an accepted christian doctrine that abortion is 19 oderberg   immoral. the objector believes that doctrine. clearly, then, the belief is a belief that is essentially religious in nature, one derived from religious teaching.11 call this the primary belief—the one involving disapproval of the principal act. in addition, there is the objector’s belief—call it secondary—that co-operating with the primary act is itself immoral. is this secondary belief itself a religious belief? well, if the objector can show that the belief is somehow embodied in religious teaching, then it too will be a religious belief. for example, certain kinds of co-operation in wrongdoing are condemned by old-style moral theology manuals of the catholic church.12 the condemnation is not idiosyncratic, but was (and perhaps is) accepted as standard moral theological teaching across the texts used in seminaries, schools, and universities. we can presume that something roughly similar applies in many christian churches; indeed, plaintiffs in the recent cases have been either catholic or of various protestant denominations. not every kind of co-operation is wrong, however, whether by religious or non-religious lights. so it is not as though a plaintiff can simply say, for example: “co-operation in abortion is wrong, as taught by my church. by purchasing employee health coverage for abortion i would be co-operating in abortion. therefore my religious freedom is being violated.” to repeat, not every kind of co-operation in wrongdoing is itself wrong. hence there must be an implied tertiary belief involved, e.g., purchasing health insurance for abortion is a wrongful form of co-operation. what should we say about this sort of belief? the specific example is relatively uncontentious, as i have already claimed: purchasing such coverage (at least as i have assumed it to be in the californian scenario) is proximate, indispensable co-operation and, as such, wrong. now, the theological textbooks agree on the principles, and usually on their application, albeit the purchase of health insurance is not exactly a staple of books from the 1950s and 1960s, where co-operation is discussed extensively. but even if they all said, or if some approved religious authority said, that purchasing health coverage for abortion was illicit co-operation, in my view this would not itself be a religious belief and protected as such by rfra and the associated jurisprudence. why not? the reason is that the application of religious principles to particular facts is not itself a matter of religious belief or teaching, even if all religious authorities make the same application in the same way and say so in their texts. more specifically, applying principles of co-operation—even ones that are a matter of religious teaching—to the facts of a particular case is a matter of logic, prudence, and common sense, not a matter of religious belief. when theologians, or religious authorities, apply the principles of co-operation to particular cases, they are neither explaining existing religious teaching, nor amplifying it. they are using logic, co-operation in the age of hobby lobby 20   prudence, and common sense to derive particular conclusions about particular cases. now, maybe a trained theologian can do this better than the man in the street, but something is not ipso facto a theological matter because it is done by a theologian. to see this more clearly, we have to recognize that the principles of co-operation, minus questions of wrongdoing, apply just as well to cases of perfectly acceptable behavior. for instance, i co-operate formally with your mowing the lawn when i plug the brand new mower in for you and show you how to use it. you co-operate materially with my buying a six-pack of beer by lending me the money because you are my friend, knowing that beer is what i am going to buy, but not intending for me to buy it—say due to worries that i might not be sober enough for work the next morning. if you have forgotten the password to your computer and i alone know it, i co-operate indispensably with you by reminding you what it is. you co-operate proximately with my driving to the shop by filling up my car with petrol for me. my cooperation with your going for a jog is remote when i merely offer to pick up your children from school for you. and so on. in other words, the application of general principles of co-operation to particular cases straddles both wrong and permissible behavior. the application itself is morally neutral, nor is it a matter of religious doctrine. one can apply the principles without knowing or caring about religion, and without knowing that the principles themselves are theological in nature. in fact, although my argument does not hang on this, i doubt that even the principles themselves—e.g., that formal co-operation in wrongdoing is itself wrong—are essentially theological. rather, theologians have codified what seems to be part of common-sense moral reasoning, just as the doctrine of double effect, despite its codification in religious textbooks, is itself a piece of common-sense moral reasoning. in any case, recognizing that the application of the principles of co-operation is not itself a religious matter is essential to seeing what went wrong with hobby lobby and now bedevils the theory of co-operation in the wake of that important case. for it is settled law that no court can look behind the sincerity of a person’s religious beliefs when the person objects to an infringement of their freedom of religion, whether under rfra or under the constitution more generally. as the majority point out in hobby lobby, in respect of the sincere belief of the owners of the relevant corporations that providing coverage under the contraceptive mandate violated their religious beliefs, “it is not for us to say that their religious beliefs are mistaken or insubstantial,” only to determine that the objectors have an “honest conviction” that this is so.13 this has long been the legal position as far as religious beliefs are concerned.14 21 oderberg   if, then, the belief of an objector that by doing x they are co-operating illicitly in some other act y is itself a religious belief, no court is allowed to look behind the sincerity with which it is held. in other words, no court is allowed to assess the reasonableness of the belief. now in the case of hobby lobby this did not present a problem, which is why the outcome was in my view correct. the greens and the hahns, owners of the relevant corporations, sincerely believed they would be illicitly co-operating with abortion by providing employee coverage under the contraceptive mandate. my analysis of the recent california case above would lead to the same result: purchasing health insurance to cover employees engaged in wrongful activity would not itself be a morally indifferent act. even if it was, the employers would be material but proximate co-operators in serious wrongdoing, without a reason sufficient to outweigh the gravity of what they would be involved in. the financial penalties for noncompliance would be severe, perhaps threatening the survival of the corporations themselves and the livelihoods of many people. yet it is hard to see how proximate co-operation in the taking of life can be justified by a pecuniary penalty for refusing. what about indispensability? i have assumed in the california case that co-operation is indispensable.15 in hobby lobby, the court noted that alternative arrangements for coverage could be made for employees using federal exchanges and independent action by health insurers or third-party administrators, without employer involvement.16 against this background, the co-operation in hobby lobby looks more to be dispensable. still, the proximity of the cooperation and the nature of the evil involved arguably outweigh dispensability. consider the imaginary albeit slightly fanciful case of a large landowner renting his property to slave owners. suppose the government considered slavery to be so important to the economy that it required such landowners to provide slavery insurance covering some or all of the tenant slave owners’ cost of acquisition and/or maintenance of their slaves. would we not find the purchasing of such insurance to implicate the landowner in so grave a wrong that he would be justified in objecting, even if the government were to step in with coverage should the landowner refuse to provide it? moreover, wouldn’t the prospect of the landowner going out of business altogether be seen as a price worth paying for resisting complicity in such a wrong? whatever one thinks of the outcome in hobby lobby, however, the point is that it was decided on the sole ground that the objectors sincerely believed they would be illicit cooperators. that is, the judgment was that purchasing the insurance “substantially burdened” the objectors’ exercise of religion under rfra, not because they would be illicit co-operators in what they sincerely believed, according to religious teaching, to be an immoral act, but because they sincerely believed that, according to religious teaching, they would be guilty of such coco-operation in the age of hobby lobby 22   operation. deciding the case on that ground, however, seems to me a grave mistake, whether or not it is the right way of interpreting the jurisprudence on religious freedom. why, though, does it matter, given that the outcome was correct? precisely because of what has just happened in zubik v. burwell, where scotus vacated the previous judgments and sent the parties back to the negotiating table to work out an arrangement that would be judicially acceptable. zubik was the consolidation of a number of lower-court cases, including most famously little sisters of the poor v. burwell,17 in which a religious non-profit organization also objected to the contraceptive mandate as substantially burdensome to freedom of religion under rfra. the difference from hobby lobby, however, is crucial: whereas in hobby lobby the supreme court held that the objectors (owners of closely-held, for-profit corporations) were entitled to the same accommodation granted to religious non-profits, allowing them to opt out of providing the relevant insurance coverage, the objectors in little sisters of the poor and then in zubik objected to the very accommodation itself. now, without going into the technical details of how the accommodation—or “opt-out”— operates, and although it is fair to say that a good chunk of the argument revolved around these minutiae, when it is distilled to its essence the objection was against the very idea of opting out. in other words, the objectors argued that by having to give notice, either to the department of health and human services or to their insurer or third-party administrator (tpa), of the fact that they objected on religious grounds to purchasing the coverage, they were illicit cooperators in wrongdoing. they claimed that “submitting this notice substantially burdens the exercise of their religion, in violation of the religious freedom restoration act.”18 now the supreme court declined to decide the case on the merits, no doubt under the influence of the recent death of justice scalia, leaving scotus at a four-four split in terms of liberals versus conservatives, broadly speaking. be that as it may, and despite the “spin” that somehow zubik was a “victory” for the objectors,19 the fact remains that at the time of writing all prior decisions have been vacated and the parties are required by scotus to reach some sort of arrangement. yet the tenth circuit court of appeals judgment in little sisters, which effectively no longer stands, is remarkable for the insight it delivers on the case. the federal court decided by a majority that the opt-out was a “de minimis administrative task” that did not substantially burden the objectors’ exercise of religion under rfra or the constitution.20 unlike the purchasing of coverage, which constitutes compliance with the aca obligation, opting out by giving notice constitutes a way of avoiding compliance with that obligation: it “relieves objectors of their coverage responsibility, at which point federal law shifts that responsibility to a different actor.”21 as a de minimis task—filling in a form or sending an 23 oderberg   email—the opt-out was not substantially burdensome either in terms of the complexity of the task or, more important, in terms of making the objectors co-operators in what they sincerely believed to be wrongdoing. as the tenth circuit put it: “opting out would eliminate their complicity with the mandate and require only routine and minimal administrative paperwork, and they are not substantially burdened by the government’s subsequent efforts to deliver contraceptive coverage in their stead.”22 yet didn’t the objectors sincerely believe they would “trigger” the coverage simply by opting out? indeed they did, and the district court in reaching souls international v. sebelius emphasised this point,23 which is why it granted an injunction against the government. the tenth circuit, however, declined to follow this reasoning, but it seems that, given the reasoning in hobby lobby, they should have! for recall, the objectors’ belief that they would be an illicit co-operator was treated by scotus as a sincerely held religious belief that it was not for the court to second-guess. the district court in reaching souls was applying just that reasoning. in little sisters, however, the tenth circuit court insisted that opting out had the exact opposite effect to implicating the objectors: it relieved them of implication in provision of coverage under the mandate. the objectors in little sisters specifically raised the point that their sincere belief they would be implicated by the opt-out had to be accepted as amounting to a substantial burden since that belief would be violated by opting out. yet the tenth circuit court explicitly rejected that argument. it was entitled, the tenth circuit held, to assess objectively whether a law or regulation amounted to a substantial burden,24 which is precisely what it did by judging the opt-out to be an eliminator of complicity rather than a facilitator. the essence of the judgment comes out well in the way the court in little sisters handled the causation question. the objectors argued that opting out of coverage by giving notice, whereupon the insurer, tpa, or government stepped in, would “trigger” the coverage itself.25 as such, the objectors were painting themselves as having a causal role in the provision of objectionable coverage under the mandate. well, if they sincerely believed they had such a role, who is the court to disagree, given hobby lobby? it looks, on the face of it, that the circuit court gets itself into knots on precisely this issue. it affirms that “opting out is necessarily a but-for cause of someone else” providing the coverage—whether the insurer, the tpa, or the government.26 but the court then goes on to say that the objectors “do not ‘cause’ contraceptive coverage by exercising their ability to opt out.”27 so which is it, and why the scare quotes around ‘cause’? it seems to me the tenth circuit court is wrestling with the problem of giving an objective analysis of co-operation in this case while respecting the objectors’ honest beliefs about what co-operation in the age of hobby lobby 24   they are doing. the term “but-for cause” is not defined, but presumably the court means that on a simple counterfactual test the objectors, by opting out, do cause the coverage: if they were not to opt out, coverage would not be provided by an independent agent, viz., the tpa, the insurer, the government, or some combination thereof. but even that is not quite right. if the employer were to resist and do nothing, you can be sure that one of the other independent agents, i.e., not paid by the employer and not objecting to the coverage, would provide it. if the employer were to opt out by giving notice, the same would apply. if the employer were simply to go ahead and waive their objection, it is true that no independent agent would step in, since it would be the employer themselves footing the bill, with the other agents working with or on behalf of the employer to facilitate the process. in the latter scenario, then, the employer would be a cause in the counterfactual sense. but comparison with that scenario is not the right one to make. by analogy, consider the case of a conscientious objector to serving in the military— the comparison often made by the courts in these recent cases. suppose he protested that by notifying the government of his objection to serving, he would be a counterfactual cause of someone else’s serving, and so would be somehow “triggering” a third party’s participation in the military, a form of illicit “but-for” causality. is this really plausible? what ground could the conscientious objector give for this reading of his situation? it seems the only available one is that the remaining alternative course of action was for the objector himself to waive his objection and be the one to take up arms instead! in other words, if an objector is to be taken seriously in their claim of being a counterfactual cause of x, the comparison has to be with an alternative scenario in which they are not a cause of x at all, not an alternative in which the objector himself would be a direct, personal cause of x. returning to little sisters, then, the problem is that the relevant alternative scenarios would not prevent coverage being provided, as the federal court itself recognized.28 if the objectors resist altogether, i.e., do not opt out but sit on their hands instead, a third party will still intervene. if the objectors opt in, they will be the cause themselves. so, from the counterfactual causation point of view, if there is any co-operation by the objectors it is highly dispensable and hence easier to justify than if the opt-out were absolutely necessary for any coverage to be provided.29 so what could the tenth circuit court have meant by initially saying that optingout was a “but-for” cause of the coverage? perhaps it had in mind the implicit comparison by the objectors to the case where they footed the bill instead. as we have just seen, however, such a comparison is of no avail. or perhaps the court was merely giving a nod to the objectors’ sincere belief that they were a “but-for” cause of the coverage. in the end, however, the court simply could not hold back from giving a dispassionate analysis of the causal situation, nor 25 oderberg   should it have done otherwise. i think we should interpret the court as saying something like the following: “if the objectors sincerely believe they are in some way causally responsible for the coverage should they opt out, they can have their belief. in some bare sense, a ‘but-for’ sense involving a comparison on some dimension or other, opting out is a cause. but causation is not complicity. you do not become a co-operator, let alone a co-operator in wrongdoing, merely by being a bare cause.” if that is what the tenth circuit meant, they grasped the situation correctly. opting out is no more a form of co-operation than walking away when there is no duty to act, even though by walking away someone else will do something to which you object. of course the devil can be in the detail, which was the subject of much analysis both by the tenth circuit and in oral argument before the supreme court. there is no room to discuss all of that here. suffice it to say that in no way was any form of opt-out available to the objectors an authorization, explicit or implicit, for anyone else to go ahead and provide coverage. there was no “permission slip,” as the objectors complained; on the contrary, as the tenth circuit court observed, “the government is not compelling the plaintiffs to endorse or license something they consider objectionable; instead, the government is allowing them to decline a legal responsibility while requiring another party to perform it in their stead.”30 the distinction seems to me impeccable. an opt-out, by its very nature, does not meet the definition of a co-operative deed, one that assists a principal agent in carrying out a primary act. it is certainly not formal co-operation, but neither is it material. the objector cannot say: “i am a material co-operator by opting out, since i know that by doing so the principal agent will provide that to which i object.” one might as well say that, by running away from a riot in order to protect oneself, one is assisting the rioters. now there might be a good reason not to run away, just as there might be a good reason not to opt out: one might be able to help stop the riot in the former case, and in the latter one might be able to stop the objectionable primary act by not opting out (although, as already noted, this was highly unlikely in the case under discussion, except perhaps for tpas if justice baldock’s partial dissent is correct). but that is different from saying that by opting out one is a co-operator. merely being knowingly involved, in some bare causal sense, perhaps merely counterfactual, in the occurrence of some state of affairs does not make one a co-operator. to be a material co-operator, one has knowingly to assist the primary agent; when one opts out, one does not do this. in such a case, questions of proximity and the like do not even arise. so the tenth circuit in little sisters accurately assessed the situation and implicitly resiled from the reasoning in hobby lobby without saying as much. in his partial dissent, however, co-operation in the age of hobby lobby 26   justice baldock clearly and explicitly recognizes the problem, albeit he does not see it as a problem. so we have him citing lower-court judges who held that even if “religious organizations are misguided in thinking that this scheme […] makes them complicit in facilitating contraception or abortion,”31 that is not for the courts to second-guess. justice baldock adds: “hobby lobby supports this position well.”32 nevertheless, he does not pursue this issue and goes on instead to focus on a possible technical distinction between insured plaintiffs, where he agrees with the majority, and self-insured plaintiffs using tpas, where he argues the plaintiffs’ sincere beliefs align with reality. for my purposes, the point is that some judges do think that mere sincerity is enough when it comes to rfra cases, and as a matter of fact hobby lobby supports this view. i submit that this is an absurd position to be in. one might salvage the situation by arguing that, just as justice baldock did with sincerity and reality in the case of self-insured plaintiffs, so in hobby lobby what was really going on was that purchasing coverage, to which the owners objected, was clearly not morally neutral, as i suggested earlier in discussing the situation in california. on this line of reasoning, the sincere belief of the owners that they would be illicit (material) cooperators was grounded in reality, and so no deep analysis was needed of what the conditions for illicit co-operation actually were. yet this is mere speculation. on the face of it, hobby lobby does support the “mere sincerity” view, which is troubling because it strictly does allow that rfra applies to a sincere belief that an opt-out can be a means of illicit co-operation.33 if sincerity is enough, then by the reasoning in hobby lobby a court might allow a rfra claim by an employee of a nonobjecting corporation, who was required on pain of dismissal to take the company mail to the post office—including health insurance contracts the employee found objectionable. although the employee’s co-operation would be both remote and dispensable, her sincere belief that she was an illicit co-operator could not be gainsaid on the most obvious interpretation of hobby lobby. the courts should not allow sincerity to be enough. what they have to do, and what the supreme court, for reasons one can understand, ducked in hobby lobby, is to articulate some general, reasonable, and objective principles of co-operation that would enable a dispassionate analysis of where a conscientious objector might stand, whatever their sincerely held beliefs. justice alito was quite right to assert in hobby lobby that the ethics of co-operation represent “a difficult and important question of religion and moral philosophy, namely, the circumstances under which it is wrong for a person to perform an act that is innocent in itself but that has the effect of enabling or facilitating the commission of an immoral act by another.”34 difficulties 27 oderberg   notwithstanding, courts need to take notice of what both philosophers and theologians have said about this very question. taking notice of moral theology does not entail assessment of the merits of a distinctively religious belief, nor does it entail adopting any particular religious position. rather, it means recognizing the philosophical merits of the hard work put in by some very clever moral theologians over the decades, and using the fruits of that labor to bring some order into what currently threatens to be judicial chaos. with freedom of religion and of conscience on the line as never before, the least the courts can do is to give objectors a clear pathway through the legal thickets. those asserting their rfra rights and who are not, objectively, illicit co-operators in wrongdoing still have many other avenues to make their protests heard, such as the time-honored ones of pressure on congress, media publicity, and civil disobedience to unjust laws. notes 1. see http://www.adfmedia.org/files/cdmhcinvestigationclosureletter.pdf. 2. my original paper on the topic is “the ethics of co-operation in wrongdoing,” in modern moral philosophy, ed. anthony o’hear (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2004), 203–27. this paper was cited in the majority judgment of the u.s. supreme court in burwell v. hobby lobby (573 u. s. [2014], slip op. at 36, n. 34). 3. hence a formal co-operator does approve the wrongful act, but can do so even if they don’t see it as wrong. a person might think it just fine to rape someone as an act of revenge, say, and so approve the act, without thinking the act wrongful. in other words, approval of the wrongful act does not entail thinking of it as wrong, and in fact usually occurs in conjunction with the belief that it is somehow justified. 4. for an outline and defence of pde, see my moral theory (oxford: blackwell, 2000), ch. 3, as well as my “the doctrine of double effect,” in a companion to the philosophy of action, ed. t. o'connor and c. sandis (oxford: wiley-blackwell, 2010): 324–330. 5. to repeat, not as a means to. 6. a classic double-effect case. one can think of similar cases if this sort of example does not convince. co-operation in the age of hobby lobby 28   7. the term “seamless coverage” is used in connection with the “contraceptive mandate,” but obviously applies equally to abortion, as far as the government is concerned (and note that objectors to the contraceptive mandate have sometimes focused on the abortifacient contraceptives in particular, as in hobby lobby). see oral argument in zubik v. burwell, http://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/ 14-1418_1bn2.pdf, at pp. 19, 20, 32, 42, 48, 60, 83. accessed july 4, 2016. 8. some have closed while others have disaffiliated from the church in order to continue providing gay adoption and hence maintain charitable status under the law. see http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/commentandblogs/2013/07/04/how-many-catholicadoption-societies-have-actually-closed-down-and-how-many-are-now-quietlyhanding-children-over-to-gay-adoptive-parents/. accessed july 4, 2016. 9. see http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/15pdf/14-1418_8758.pdf. accessed july 4, 2016. 10. i will usually refer only to “religious” belief since the bulk of the jurisprudence in the area concerns religious freedom, and after all the key legislation is the religious freedom restoration act. nevertheless, the same issues apply to conscientious objection in general, where the grounds are generically ethical rather than specifically religious. i will, however, continue to speak of “conscientious objection” as well as “religious objection” since the former is standard terminology even in the religious context. 11. whether or not the objector also believes abortion is wrong for non-religious reasons. 12. an excellent overview of the teaching can be found in j.a. mchugh and c.j. callan, moral theology: a complete course, vol. 1 (new york: joseph f. wagner, inc., 1958), 615–641. the references by justice alito in hobby lobby (slip op. at 36, n. 34) are also pertinent sources. 13. hobby lobby, slip op. at 37–38. 14. thomas v. review board of the indiana employment security division (450 u.s. 707 [1981]); hernandez v. commissioner of internal revenue (490 u.s. 680 [1989]). 29 oderberg   15. whether it really is does not matter for present purposes; in any case, the availability of coverage without employer co-operation is hard to work out given the changing circumstances in which the aca is being implemented. 16. hobby lobby, slip op. at 9–10, and n.8. 17. see http://www.becketfund.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/lsp-op.pdf (2015). accessed july 6, 2016. 18. zubik, slip op. at 3. 19. see, e.g., http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2016/05/supreme-court-decision-ahuge-victory-for-little-sisters. 20. little sisters, slip op. at 42, 45, 50, 51, 78, 79, 84 (header pagination). 21. ibid., 60. 22. ibid., 82. 23. 2013 wl 6804259, at http://www.clearinghouse.net/chdocs/public/fa-ok-00020001.pdf, pp. 13–14, quoted in little sisters, slip op. at 36. 24. little sisters, slip op. at 48, n. 23. 25. ibid., 55. 26. ibid., 66. 27. ibid., 68. both quotations occur specifically in the context of self-insured employers and their tpas, since justice baldock’s partial dissent (pages 109–133), whilst agreeing with most of what the majority held, distinguished the case of tpas. i will not get into the details of that issue; the point is that the court is quite clear that what it says in these quotations applies a fortiori to employers who are not self-insured via tpas. 28. ibid., 68. 29. as justice baldock, partially dissenting, thought was the case with self-insured plaintiffs and their tpas. 30. little sisters, slip op. at 66, n. 36. co-operation in the age of hobby lobby 30   31. justice baldock, in little sisters, slip op. at 111, citing dissent of justice kavanaugh in priests for life v. hhs, no. 13–5368 (2015), slip op. at 35, available at http://cases.justia.com/federal/appellate-courts/cadc/13-5368/13-5368-2015-0520.pdf?ts=1432159255. accessed july 7, 2016. 32. little sisters, slip op. at 111. 33. assuming that it is a genuine opt-out, i.e. that it is not something else in disguise. and we must add the usual “all things being equal” rider. 34. hobby lobby, slip op. at 36, n. 34. microsoft word gustafson final.docx [expositions 8.1 (2014) 39–60] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376   an introduction to big history lowell gustafson villanova university big historians place the written record of the human past within the natural record of the entire past, beginning with the big bang almost 14 billion years ago. by drawing on the natural sciences, they have revolutionized the field of history that in academia has normally been placed within the humanities or social sciences. they have studied light, rocks, bones, and blood as well as written texts, and then rethought the narrative of time and the place of humans in it. they study nature to tell a story of the entire past from which humanity has emerged and remains embedded. this provides a context for understanding the present and options for exerting constructive influence in the future. historians often argue that we cannot understand where we are in the present without understanding where we came from in the past. big historians have pushed back the traditional point for when the past is thought to have begun. the story of humanity does not begin with writing, it starts with the components that gradually, in fits and starts over a long time, gradually combine to form a good deal many things, including humans and our relationships. by integrating the evidence discovered by the natural sciences, they present a series of time periods that lead us from the first origins of matter immediately after the big bang, to stars and galaxies about half a billion years later, the combination of atoms within molecules, minerals, and rocks in space, the formation of a second generation star like our sun just under 5 billion years ago, the accretion of earth 4.5672 billion years ago, the first emergence of life about 3.8 billion years ago, increasingly complex life starting about a half billion years ago, the evolution of hominins just under 8 million years ago, the appearance of homo sapiens about 200,000 years ago, and then key cultural developments such as collective learning, agriculture, industrialization and urbanization, and the digital age. the big history approach challenges traditional history in content and method. traditional historians have often labored in archives to read primary written sources, as well as in libraries to compare historiographical secondary sources. with this research, they have analyzed past centuries and millennia. big historians add to that their study of the results from the natural scientists to include all that which eventually was combined within human society. humanity did not emerge fully blown, but evolved out of very long complex processes that continue to influence who humans are today. we cannot understand humanity without understanding humanity’s past and the pre-human past. not only does the work of big historians challenge their own discipline to redefine itself, it does the same for other disciplines in the liberal arts, including ethics, theology and religious studies, literature, political science, and others. the physical sciences and big history, sometimes also called “cosmic evolution,” offer much to those who focus not only on time, but also culture, an introduction to big history 40   art, politics, and other human endeavors. in one way, this is nothing new. the famous ancient greek philosopher aristotle wrote books such as one on physics, another on politics, a third of ethics, and many others. in the politics, he wrote that “man is by nature a political animal.” in the european medieval period, thomas aquinas developed aristotelian thought on natural law; he argued that humans were created within a politically constituted community. by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such state of nature political philosophers as thomas hobbes, john locke, and jean-jacques rousseau postulated human politics before or without such institutions as the state. they wanted to determine how to construct states so that they helped resolve the basic problems of human nature. for all of their differences, they all saw humans as rooted in nature. none of them had the same understanding of nature as has developed since darwin, einstein, hubble, and others in the past couple centuries. big history and contemporary physical sciences lead us to new understandings of human nature within the rest of nature. the emergent complexity of sustained, structured relationships that incorporate earlier ones in new combinations and with new properties is possible due to access within pockets to high quality energy. the second law of thermodynamics would lead us to expect entropy, or transitions from greater to lesser order rather than emergent complexity. however, from the big bang to our current period of partial globalization, we can observe in certain places a process of increased complexity. if we can resolve our current energy crisis in a sustainable way, and if we have the imagination, this process may continue. however, there was no uniformity in emergent complexity in the past and there is no guarantee it will continue in the near future. baryonic matter big history begins at the beginning of time with the first appearance of the elementary particles from which humans and all else are formed. if the big bang theory is correct, nothing turned into something 13.82 billion years ago, and began expanding from an infinitely hot and dense point without mass into our universe. it may be that nothing is always pulsating and is regularly turning into a variety of forms of something. perhaps we live in a popcorn multiverse with an infinite number of big bangs going off all the time in ways we cannot not detect or fully imagine. other universes may be sharing our space or off in other locales. we used to think there was only one galaxy: the milky way. then we wondered if there were other inhabitable planets. we now know there are great numbers of both. why should ours be the only universe? or maybe our own yo-yo universe has an infinite set of cycles of trillions of years. however, for now we will prosaically restrict our attention to our own universe, or at least this most recent cycle of it. our current universe did not emerge immediately after the big bang full blown, only in miniature. not only were there no humans then, there was no earth. no milky way. no stars. there was just plasma, rather like the interior of our sun today. the infinitely hot and dense radiation immediately after the big bang was dramatic, but largely as uniform a situation as has existed in our universe’s history. incredible variation would emerge after the radiation period immediately after the big bang. 41 gustafson all but immediately after our own universe’s big bang, when energy first congealed into normal or baryonic matter, six types of quarks appeared. they can appear again if protons and neutrons are smashed into each other at sufficient energy levels. four of them led extraordinarily brief lives before returning to energy; they did not go on to form more complex forms of matter. however, two of them—the up and down quarks—did form relationships as they appeared. this will be a pattern. some things go on to participate in emergent complexity. many things do not. at least those quarks that survived formed relationships. for a billion and one bits of matter that appeared, a billion bits of anti-matter with opposite spin did as well. rather than playing well together, matter and anti-matter annihilate each other. this mayhem is a rather good thing from our point of view, since if all the matter that appeared survived, the universe would have been just too crowded to ever have developed into us. and plenty remained. enough matter to eventually make a hundred billion galaxies each with an average of a hundred billion stars all have been formed by the leftovers of the great annihilation. destruction can be very creative. the lucky surviving quarks do not exist in isolation; they always exist in threesomes. their relationship is structured by the strong force that is mediated by the exchange of the charmingly named gluons. two up quarks and a down one form a positively charged proton; two downs and an up form a neutron. why is the strong force exactly as strong as it is and not weaker or stronger? is it different in other universes?—who knows? it is just the way we do things in our universe. but if it differed at all, we would not be here and neither would anything else that we know of. the quarks do not merge into one undifferentiated blob. each proton and neutron is constituted by two different types of quarks. they relate to each other through the strong force, but they keep their distance as well. relative to their own size, quarks have a rather pronounced need for personal space. each of these three move in a constant dance around the others. they are always related, always moving, always distinct. nature at rest is hard to find. nature is spinning, moving, and restless. the protons and neutrons that were formed quickly after the big bang are with us still after almost 14 billion years. in fact, they are us, and everything else that we can see or feel. the structured relationships among individual quarks have been remarkably sustained. as inventive and creative as nature is, it also keeps certain things around for a long time. if liberalism is about change and conservatism about keeping things the way they are, we can answer an interesting question. something came from nothing at the big bang. that is change. quarks can maintain their relationships for tens of billions of years. you can’t get much more of a status quo than that. so is the universe liberal or conservative? every inquiring person wants to know. and the answer is—yes. about 300,000 years after the big bang, when the universe had expanded enough to cool sufficiently, the electromagnetic force mediated by the exchange of photons could structure a sustained relationship between positively charged protons and negatively charged electrons. atoms appeared. hydrogen, with one proton and one electron, appeared in the greatest numbers. if you add up their mass, about three quarters of all atoms in the universe are still hydrogen. if an introduction to big history 42   you count atoms by number, they constitute about 90% of all atoms. they also constitute 63% of the number of atoms in your body (10% by mass). as has been said, hydrogen is an odorless, colorless gas that, given enough time, becomes you. and me. and congress; it’s not the quarks’ fault. helium, with two protons and two electrons each, formed about a quarter of all atoms’ mass that then existed (9% by number). there was also a dash of deuterium, or heavy hydrogen (one proton, one neutron, and an electron), helium isotopes, and lithium (three protons and electrons). vast primal clouds of hydrogen and helium atoms, millions of light years across, still majestically float in certain areas of space nearly 14 billion years later. some have gone on to form greater complexity; many have not. sometimes complexity emerges; more often it doesn’t. once formed, and left on their own, these atoms tended to keep their distance. while the strong force bound quarks together and protons and neutrons together within atoms, these atoms left to themselves generally liked their own company. they might approach each other as they moved about, but usually swerved off, avoiding connections with each other. helium had virtually no interest in other atoms. a hydrogen atom might hookup with another one, but that is as far as it went. we sometimes hear about an “atomistic society.” this usually refers to a rather asocial condition in which individuals have little to do with each other. the analogy might be a billiard table, with hard billiard balls usually sitting by themselves, but occasionally knocking into each other, sending each other off in various directions. atoms may be the basic building blocks; in our experience, blocks usually just sit there by themselves. we are each made of about 6.7*1027 atoms. what are we, then, like at our most constitutive level? are we like the individuals discussed by hobbes in the leviathan (1651)? do we live lives largely isolated from others? by nature, are we as asocial as atoms? should libertarians seek out new sympathizers among the universe’s vast majority of unaffiliated atoms? if we seek to form relationships, do we need to find ways to overcome our natural proclivity for individualism? are atoms the ultimate existentialists, destined to live lives of lonely desperation and then die alone, on a dark, rainy night? and since we are built from atoms, is that what we are really like, all niceties aside? but what if the story is one of emergent relationship rather than individualism? recall that even the simplest of atoms—those that have only one or two protons and are still the most abundant in the universe—are each a set of sustained, structured relationships. quarks which just moments before had not existed, started to be related through the exchange of gluons mediating the strong force. atoms, which had not existed before the big bang plus 300,000 years, added a relationship between protons and electrons. atoms are sets of sustained, structured relationships. at our most constitutive core, we are built more from relationships than from building blocks. quarks and electrons are more fuzzy than blocky. and there is relatively a great deal of space between quarks within protons, and between protons and their electrons within atoms. the “hardness” of matter comes from forces defining the relationships between things that are far apart. what exists between things is as real as the things themselves. 43 gustafson stars but what about atoms naturally avoiding each other? positively charged protons avoid each other. helium has little interest in any combinations, and hydrogen by itself doesn’t go beyond becoming h2. clouds of these atoms millions or light years across would not have led one 13.7 billion years ago to be very optimistic about the eventual emergence of anything much more complex. relationships within atoms of one or two protons are fine, but beyond that, nothing much happens by these two types of atoms by themselves. happily for us, these hydrogen and helium atoms were not left to their own devices. they existed within a larger framework that acted upon them. when they did form, atoms were not perfectly distributed, if by “perfect” you mean “absolutely equally.” they were a little more densely distributed here, a little less there. this asymmetry, unequal distribution, or imperfection was another very fortunate occurrence. gravity has no force at the incredibly small distances between quarks. however, the space between atoms can be just enough to let it start operating. a clump of atoms here can exert gravitational attraction on a smaller clump there. if all atoms had been equally distributed, their gravitational attraction on each other would have canceled it all out, and they would never have been drawn to each other. however, with the asymmetry, the denser regions could start drawing in the slightly less densely packed atoms. gravity kept pulling them together, increasing their density and heat. as they were pulled closer together, they began to spin faster like a figure skater drawing in her arms. once sufficient density and heat developed, with atoms moving about more and more quickly, the protons within atoms overcame their preference to stay away from each other. hydrogen nuclei began fusing. they not only ran into each other; hydrogen nuclei could stick to each other, forming helium, with its two protons and two neutrons, all held together by the strong force. gravity was the great matchmaker for atoms that on their own would have stayed standing awkwardly along the wall at the middle school dance. but the newly joined atoms were less than the sum of their parts. each new helium atom weighed slightly less than the hydrogen atoms which had combined to form it. the missing matter had turned into energy. the fusion caused energy to burst out. gravity kept trying to draw the atoms in. the equilibrium between these two forces resulted in the formation of stars. the black sky began twinkling. not only can there be new things under the stars, the stars themselves were something new. as the helium was formed, gravity drew it in more, until it heated up enough for it to start, within a couple hundred million years of the big bang, fusing into heavier elements, such as nitrogen. this released energy and permitted gravity to draw the newly formed elements further in, until they too began to fuse, forming carbon and neon. this was repeated as oxygen, magnesium, silicon, and sulfur were each fused. the largest stars with enough mass to permit gravity to keep drawing the newly fused elements further in developed an onion-like structure, with the lighter elements on the periphery; the heavier ones successively formed layers closer to the core. each layer required higher temperatures to fuse even heavier elements. the strong an introduction to big history 44   force, electromagnetism, gravity, and fusion formed relationships between increasingly heavier atoms within the structure of a star. gravitational attraction between stars and perhaps dark matter formed galaxies or groupings of stars in distinct patterns. galaxies formed relationships due to gravity in local groups and even larger patterns. the theoretical work of fr. georges lemaître, confirmed by the evidence collected by edwin hubble, demonstrated that not only were there more galaxies than our own milky way, but that once they got to be further away from each other than those in the local group, they are racing away from each other. it may be that dark energy or anti-gravity is causing the galaxies to keep falling out, with space and the universe expanding at ever faster speeds the further from each other they are. when the largest of the stars began to make iron with its twenty six protons, energy was consumed rather than released. the equilibrium between gravity and fusion was broken. almost immediately, the star exploded in a supernova. the sudden increase in temperatures during the explosion permitted the almost instantaneous formation of all of the elements with more than twenty-six protons per atom, all sent streaming into space at incredible speeds, often mixing with pre-existing clouds of hydrogen and helium that had been floating since the big bang. minerals and molecules some atoms organize themselves in structured patterns. a couple examples of this in early space came from carbon atoms. fitted together in one way at certain temperatures, they formed diamonds. fit together in a different way at another temperature determined by distance from heat sources of stars, they form graphite like in our pencils. these are among the first minerals that existed space early in universal history. there can also be bonds between different types of atoms. atoms form in such a way that electrons orbit protons in shells. the innermost shell is full with two electrons, the second with eight, the third with eighteen, the fourth with thirty-two, the fifth with fifty. hydrogen, with its one electron, has a vacancy sign out in its only electron shell. that shell seems to want one more electron to form a full house. oxygen, with its eight electrons, has two in its first shell and six in its second. this leaves two vacancies in its second shell. this is a match made in the heavens. if two hydrogen atoms hook up with an oxygen atom, each sharing their electrons, each hydrogen atom can have two electrons in its only shell and oxygen can have eight in its second shell. everybody is happy because a new relationship between atoms is formed: h2o—water. this molecule has a new property. at the right temperature, it has the property of wetness, which did not exist before. water, which is abundant throughout space, is not the only molecule that forms. dozens of molecules with two, three, four, five, or more atoms evolve naturally. many atoms due to the way electron shells work lead to the formation of these new relationships called molecules. not all atoms are anxious to form molecules. helium has two electrons in its only shell and has a no vacancy sign well lit. it is called a noble gas. having all they need, nobility does not require additional relationships with the lesser types that are needy. relationship added to 45 gustafson relationship is not much part of helium’s story. while hydrogen becomes us, helium often just goes floating off into space. not everything is social. not everything forms polity, or sustained, ordered relationships. we saw that same aloofness with four of the six quarks. a subatomic particle formed in nuclear fusion, neutrinos, are much the same. like photons, they go shooting from stars off into space, but almost never interact with anything. they can sail through twenty miles of lead and never hit anything. it has taken extraordinary measures to detect them at all. history and polity are not built on the backs of two-thirds of quarks, neutrinos, helium, or other asocial phenomena. they are indeed the rugged individualists of the universe. the story of emergent complexity is not uniform. earth and the emergence of life after a nearby supernova shot its star dust out into neighboring space, disturbing pre-existing clouds of hydrogen and helium, gravity again began pulling together the mixture of elements and molecules. a second generation star with mostly hydrogen and helium but also with traces of heavier elements in it—including oxygen, carbon, neon and iron—eventually began shining as our sun 4.6 billion years ago. it is not big enough to permit gravity to create densities high enough to fuse elements heavier than helium. this is good for us, since huge stars live fast and die young. our sun goes along at a nice leisurely pace of fusing 600 million tons of hydrogen each second, turning it into 596 million tons of helium and more energy than mankind has ever produced in our species’ entire history. it is because of all their mass that stars like our sun produce so much heat and light. the sun’s rate of consuming its stock of hydrogen will permit it to continue shining for a total of about 10 billion years, meaning it is at mid-life now. its 5 billion year history has provided energy and the time for earth to develop. we’ve got billions more years before the sun turns into a red giant, evaporates the oceans and engulfs the earth. there is plenty of time before anyone needs to get tickets for a trip to another solar system. while gravity drew together 99.86% of the total mass of the solar system to make the sun, the leftover debris went to good use. on the outskirts of the spinning disk that eventually ignited as the sun, these leftovers from part of the supernova started accreting through the power of gravity. chunks of iron, nickel, silicon, and bits or gold, silver, uranium, and other elements and molecules bumped into each other and stuck together. all this knocking together that created kinetic energy, not to mention the radioactive decay of uranium and other such elements, made for a molten, hot planet that formed its own structure from thousands of molecules and the minerals they produced. heavier iron and nickel sunk into a dense core that is still as hot as the surface of the sun. silicon and other lighter elements rose to the top. eventually, a thin layer made of the frothy basalt and granite could cool enough to permit the ocean floor and land to form. lighter, cooler outer layers spinning around denser iron and nickel produced a magnetic shield around the planet that protected it from solar winds that would otherwise blow away earth’s atmosphere. an introduction to big history 46   the process of chemical evolution that had begun in space continued on earth. the most common elements on the surface of the earth continued to combine in many ways. hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, sodium, magnesium, phosphorus, sulfur, chlorine, potassium, calcium, iron, and other elements on earth interacted to form over 4,700 minerals. around black smokers at the bottom of the oceans where tectonic plates separated and mineral-rich, heated waters bellowed up, or on sun-soaked pools of water on rocky beaches, the process of chemical evolution continued. lipids that created films formed, eventually forming membranes. carbon, with its four electrons in its second orbit and a total of six overall, was able to combine with many other elements, and was central to the krebs cycle which spins off amino acids. these molecules continued to combine until they integrated membranes, metabolism or access to energy, and rna and dna that permitted reproduction with variation in response to environmental changes. the last common universal ancestor—luca—was combined in the most complex relationship in universal history to date, that we know of. the first prokaryote cells were earthlings, formed of the commonly available chemicals and elements on earth’s surface. they were also children of the universe, with elements forged in stars that had died long before. biological evolution it has been said that the dream of every bacterium, the simplest of cells, is to become two bacteria. reproduction has to be important for any species that plans on surviving, since the death of any given individual is part of the way life works. sustained relationship is not eternal relationship. the nice thing about being a bacterium is that your dreams can come true about every twenty minutes. reproduction with variation in response to environmental changes is a skill perfected by prokaryote cells. you just can’t argue with success. they live in virtually any setting, however extreme the condition on earth can be. from deep underground to thermal waters, prokaryotes are there. there are more bacterial cells in and on your body than there are cells that constitute your body. they help you digest food. and when you die, they will digest you. these types of cells have survived for almost 4 billion years. they will be on earth long after humans have vanished. many prokaryote cells follow a plan that isn’t broken and doesn’t need fixing, although they do keep adjusting to new conditions such as antibiotics. they evolve quickly, but as a group, they have not become fundamentally more complex. however, after a couple billion years of happily reproducing at their same level of complexity, some did become more complex. about 2 billion years ago, eukaryote cells developed with a membrane covered kernel in which more complex dna was kept. it also began hosting a mitochondrial cell, which provided an ability to burn carbohydrates and permits us to enjoy eating donuts. a more complex set of relationships within the cell led to more complex relationships among cells. films of bacteria on the surface of the ocean or accretions of them in rock like formations of stromatolites in tidal pools were steps towards multicellular life forms. another step in multicellular cooperation came with creatures like the sponges. these are formed by the same 47 gustafson type of cells that could still specialize in serving different functions. some cells drew in nutrientrich water; others expelled nutrient drained water. same type of cells; different tasks. push these cells through a sieve so that they are separated as they fall to the bottom of a tank, and they scoot back together to form another new sponge. these are cooperative cells, not hardy individualists. relationships among increasingly complex body structures formed by different types of cells are seen in such examples as cnidarians, or jellyfish, first seen about 800 million years ago. they have little harpoons that can inject prey with poison, have such structures as a mouth/anus, and have two layers of tissue. their nervous system is pretty uniformly spread out throughout the animal. jellyfish are still around and doing fine. the scarecrow in the wizard of oz seemed to get along pretty well without a brain, and so have the cnidarians. they have existed 4,000 times longer than homo sapiens have. they see no reason to develop more complexity. still, there were additional mutations that worked out in the environment of the time. flatworms introduced a body plan about 590 million years ago with a right and a left side, an up and down, and a front and a back. sense organs were put up front, along with a ganglia of nerve cells to interpret the incoming data. chordates like the currently existing hagfish put a cord along its back to protect the flow of information from the ganglia to the rest of the body, as well as putting the mouth up front and an anus in the rear. about 525 million years ago, vertebrates started breaking that cord into bony segments, offering better protection and definition. the first animals to venture out from the seas onto land, such as tiktaalik, had wrists to help scoot on land and a neck to help look around. about 360 million years ago, the first amniotes could recreate the watery world in which reproduction had originally taken place, and start producing eggs with a protective shell and watery interior. about 360 million years ago, mammals first appeared, which had, among other things, a more complex auditory system with more parts that helped them hear better. the story of evolution is in part a story of increasing complexity of body structures, with more complex relationships among greater numbers of parts. it is worth recalling a few things: first, part of the reason for this development was in response to the bitter competition between and among species. an arms race of those seeking to eat others and those seeking not to be eaten was good to select which individuals would survive to reproduce the next generation. increasingly complex relationship was spurred in part by harsh competition. secondly, there was no steady rise from simplicity to complexity. five major extinction periods between 450 million years ago [mya] and 65 mya caused huge interruptions. this is only part of the reason why over 99% of the species that have ever existed are now extinct. we may be going through a sixth (self-induced) extinction period that we hope does not conclude with our own species’ disappearance. it would be a shame to be a mere 200,000 yearlong flash in a pan. relations among animals and plants relationships among quarks, protons and electrons, atoms, molecules, cells, and body parts were followed by increasingly complex relations among and between species. edward o. wilson’s the social conquest of the earth (2012) offers a fascinating discussion of this phenomenon. an introduction to big history 48   from quorum sensing of bacteria to schools of fish, bee hives, ant colonies, flocks of birds, herds of bison, troops of chimpanzees, and many other examples, animals often live in groups and groups often form ecosystems. not all animals live in groups. many seem to exist in splendid isolation for most of their lives, coming together just long enough for reproduction without any care for offspring after birth. mother guppies and sharks would just as soon eat their babies. sea turtles lay their eggs on the beach, return to the sea, and may hope for the best for their offspring, but likely don’t think about them. crocodiles help their offspring out of their eggshell and out of the nest; after that, the kids are on their own. childcare is of course more of an issue for various lengths of time for many species. from weeks of care to a couple years is common. mothers, fathers, and others are involved in different ways, depending on the species. by the time we get to hominins, our ancestors’ survival strategy and increasing sociability went hand in hand. australopithicus and its ancestors were likely more often the hunted than the hunters. they may have scavenged, eating bone marrow of leftover carcasses, but gathering fruits, nuts, tubers, and leaves likely provided a mainstay of their diet. other than that, they tried to stay out of the way of predators. they had few natural weapons. their teeth were no match for those of lions. their speed was no match for cheetahs. they had neither shells for defense nor wings for flight. no wonder that there do not seem to have been huge numbers of hominids, that most species went extinct, and that our own ancestors came close to extinction. they just did not have that much going for them. bipedalism, for whatever reason it was adopted, did permit more use of the arms, hands, and opposable thumbs. a parent could hold a child and pick fruit all at once. but it also altered the skeleton, restricting the birth canal, making childbirth that much more dangerous. this became a greater problem once the hominids’ greatest weapon did finally start to develop. brain size from australopithicus to homo sapiens tripled, with neanderthals winning the brain-size competition. (brain size for australopithicus averaged between 375 and 550 cm3, homo habilis from 500 to 800, homo erectus 750 to 1225, homo sapiens 1200 to 1750, and neanderthals 900 to 1880 [sawyer et al. 2007, 18, 58, 65, 79, 87, 96, 107, 117, 124, 133, 141, 151, 158, 168, 176, 185, 194, 201, 210, 222].) hominids couldn’t outfight competing species, but they could start to outthink them. brains rather than brawn would eventually win the day. even with only partial brain development and soft skulls at birth, delivering children had become highly risky. to permit time for the brain to develop to maturity, grow a bony skull, and learn all that they required to survive, childhood for hominids took years. breastfeeding and childcare-giving mothers developed close relations with offspring over long childhoods. child mortality was still likely high. for a handful of children to reach sexual maturity, birth would need to be given to a number more. especially with life-spans in the 30s or so for adults who got through childhood, this meant that most or all of a female’s adult life was involved with pregnancy and childcare. working mothers were the norm. they likely provided the bulk of the calories through gathering and carried out many other important tasks. still, they would have needed support as they did the primarily important work of getting children to adulthood so the 49 gustafson species could survive. long-term relations between mothers and children and between child care-taking females and males were necessary for the fat-headed hominids to survive. it is one thing to get together briefly to copulate. that is all sharks need to do since child care is not a problem. it is a wholly other set of problems to stay together for many years to raise children, a problem that hominids did have to figure out if they were to survive. resolving the issues of food, shelter, and other necessities for a kinship group over years takes problem-solving and relationships to a whole different level. the increased demands of a long childhood and the long-term adult relations it required selected for an increased ability to figure out how to live together for many years at a time. the gender relations made necessary by being a big brained bipedal species is a root of hominid polity. sexual politics has changed markedly recently with longer life spans and lower mortality rates. mothers no longer spend their entire adult lives dealing with pregnancy and childcare, and have the time and energy to do much else. many species have long developed their own ways of developing and maintaining relationships. baboons groom each other, checking for parasites in the fur. frans de waal (2006) discusses how bonobos use sex for much the same purposes. social primates, who were not genetically identical like ants within a colony are, developed a “theory of mind”; they could understand each other’s reactions. they could even sometimes “feel for each other,” or empathize. the law of the jungle, as de waal argues, includes the social practices and understandings that would later be self-consciously developed into ethics (2006, 1–3, 182–87, 197–8, 225, 247–8; 2009, 6–7, 20–21, 25–29, 122–24, 138–39). picking lice out of children’s hair and having sexual relations has forever been part of hominid mothers’ lives as well. hominids’ survival strategy led to developed abilities to relate to each other. for their relations to develop, they would need to exchange a lot more than just gluons and photons. if you thought physics was hard to grasp, just try politics. memory, imagination, symbolic thinking, and exchange virtually all species remember, although in very different ways. the long childhoods in which each person remembers their period of dependency creates long-term memories of caretakers. hominid adults still remember their own childhoods and their caretakers. they remember how these important experiences were carried out by those who are now old or dead. what was so important is now gone, but remains important in memory. memories of what is no longer may be pondered while going about present tasks. child-bearing for hominids also entails the expectation of repeating a long-term set of relationships. i am going to have to do for my children what was done for me. this baby will require years of nurture to get it to sexual maturity. what is a baby now will in a number of years become an adult if i do what i need to do to help it survive. i can imagine a long-term future which does not yet exist, but which i can help create. memory, imagination, planning, and execution go hand in hand. being able to remember what no longer is—and imagine what is not yet—is facilitated by symbolic thinking and language. vervet monkeys will make one call for threats from above such an introduction to big history 50   as an eagle, another for threats in trees such as snakes, or those on the ground such as big cats. when one monkey makes such a call, others in the troop look in the right direction. one screech signifying eagle causes other monkeys to look up. a sound and an expressed/perceived meaning are linked correctly, helping the group’s survival. however, the monkey does not make the sound in the absence of the threat. they do not discuss how to better prepare for a future threat. vervet monkeys do not sit around at night discussing that day’s eagle attack. they do not draw pictures of eagles. they do not intellectually manipulate or exchange symbols. the development of syntax or grammar and vocabulary went along with that of symbolic thought. being able to consider words and meaning in the absence of immediately present referents, adjust them, move them around and think of alternative arrangements, was facilitated by language. being able to communicate these ideas in novel yet understandable ways meant that new meanings could be created. remembering and imagining in the absence of the referent is a source of symbolic thinking, planning, and eventually realizing possibilities. the road from the communication of monkeys to the symbolic thinking of hominids is long, complex, and still not exactly understood. but that it took place seems clear. by over two and a half million years ago at the gona river in ethiopia, australopithecus or homo habilis was making stone tools. other species use tools as well. crows, wolves, chimps, and others will use stones and sticks to achieve various purposes. however, the gona river chipped tools were fashioned by toolmakers. they had to first select which type of rock they wanted to alter. some types of rock are too soft to make good tools. then they had to be able to imagine the tool that was in the right kind of rock, to imagine how it could be made into a cutting, scraping, or digging tool. then they had to carry out a series of steps to create the tool. this was probably done with others looking on and learning how to do this as well. and remember, all of this was going on over two million years before homo sapiens appeared. tool-making was added to older tool-using skills when symbolic thinking and imagination was possible due to eye-hand and brain development, relative to earlier species. those who had emerged from nature now began to adjust what they found in nature. nature in these complex pockets called hominids could begin to select what helped them survive and live better. evolution could begin to be not only in response to environment, but determinative of it. nature became partially self-selecting in hominids. nature had long exhibited how creative it is. there was nothing and then there was something. there were not protons and then there were. same with atoms, molecules, stars, terrestrial planets, and life. the transition from one to the next is a time of change and natural creativity, but there were long periods of stasis in between each one. relative to these periods, the time it took for hominids to develop their tool-making was rather quick, even if it seems to be agonizingly slow to us. by the oldowan period from about 2.6 to 1.7 million years ago, australopithicus and/or homo habilis had developed more sophisticated tools. by the acheulean period about 1,650,000 to 100,000 years ago, tools had become bifacial, larger, and more varied. the oval or pear shaped tools are not only functional; they also have shapes that are pleasing to 51 gustafson us and perhaps to their makers. natural emergence had become hominids’ creativity. the road from physics to art was being paved. adjusting nature was done in various ways. eating meat and tough tubers was hard on the digestive tract of early hominids. cooking them made them easier to digest and taste better. exactly when this began is not certain, although it seems to have started between 1,500,000 and 790,000 years ago with the fire-altered stones at gesherbenot-ya’aqov in israel. the transition from scavenging to hunting had been made at least by half a million years ago, as indicated by spear points and skeletal wounds in prey found at boxgrove, england and kathu pan 1 in south africa. burials indicate a new level of relationship. other species such as elephants will clearly mourn dead members of the group. but the careful burial of the dead is a human activity. again, exactly when this began is not clear, but there are burials from 80,000 to 120,000 years ago in qafzeh, israel. here, we have living members of the group remembering the people who had died and imagining they have an obligation to them even after they die. burial is a relationship with the dead, requiring memory of who is no longer. what is real in the present is only part of what matters. memories of the past—kept in the electrical/chemical relationships among neurons—can be more important than the hard stuff that one can feel now in the present. hunters had long understood the difference between life and death. causing an animal to bleed from wounds transformed the beast from one running through the woods to one lying on the ground. did the hunters begin to think symbolically about the “life” being in the blood that sank into the ground? does the life of the body go into the earth looking for a new form to inhabit? is the spirit of the dead animal believed to be angry at the hunter, planning to return to the surface world to make trouble if proper steps of propitiation are not taken by the hunter? once grave goods become included in the burials, we seem to also have imagination of the future added to memory of the past. burial goods suggest that people thought they could indeed take it with them. everything had a spirit: people, mountains, rivers, pots, weapons, etc. the life or spirit of the dead person will need the spirits of various tools or weapons in the next life. members of the group were socially close to those now dead. they remembered them and valued these memories. they wanted to imagine that their beloved would live on, and that proper actions by the living could help the dead live well. ancestor worship may be one origin of religion. this seems to indicate the powerful social attachments our ancestors had with each other. the discoveries at blombos cave in south africa from about 75,000 years ago include an etched, rectangular rock. a net or diamond like design is scratched, with diagonal and parallel sets of lines. this is not just aimless doodling. this is done by a person interested in perceiving and creating patterns. what other patterns were being perceived and analyzed? seasons? plant growth? movements of animals? behaviors of fellow members of the group? did the patterned lines have symbolic meaning of some sort in a way that etched crosses, six pointed stars, or crescents often have for us? an introduction to big history 52   shells with drilled holes were also found at blombos. the cave is near the coast, and a diet of sea food sustained them. did they wear the shells as a way to offer the spirits of the dead animals a place to live after their bodies had been ingested? did they wear necklaces of shells out of a sense of beauty made possible by using or improving on what nature offers? what do these artifacts indicate about their symbolic thinking? migration from africa about the time that people at blombos were etching patterns in a rock and drilling holes in shells, others in northern africa were beginning to leave africa, where it seems now that they had all evolved. this had happened again over a million years earlier with homo erectus, who made their way all the way from africa to east asia before eventually dying out much later. about 80,000 years ago, homo sapiens were unknowingly retracing many of the routes from africa, across modern day sinai, israel, along the coast of india, east asia, up to central asia, and by about 50,000 years ago by boat to australia. it would take tens of thousands of more years to figure out how to survive siberia before by about 20,000 years ago people made their way across beringia (the land bridge before about 10,000 years ago between russia and alaska) to what truly was then a new world for hominins in the americas. it may well be that our kind existed in extraordinarily small numbers 80,000 years ago and that there was a common ancestor for all currently living people who lived at that point. it is almost certain that we were all africans originally, and our subsequent differences in appearance evolved since the great migration from africa. it was only after asia had been populated that homo sapiens made their way to europe. they brought with them the symbolic thought that they had been developing in other areas. by perhaps 48,000 years ago, at the el castillo cave in spain, an artist painted animals and designs from dots and lines on the walls. this was the case later as well at chauvet, lascaux, and elsewhere. the animals that were painted were not modeling for them. the artists worked from memory. what purposes did they have in painting these animals and designs underground? what were the artists thinking about the animals and designs they painted? it is hard not to speculate. was the cave where the spirits of dead animals went to live after their blood drained from their bodies? were these spirits looking for new bodies to inhabit? what was the meaning of the paintings for those who drew or first viewed them? the artists also spit-painted the outline of their hands multiple times. were they leaving their signature, wanting those who would view the painting in the future to know who painted them? were they touching the rock behind which the spirits of the animals they painted lived? the importance of reproduction and fertility is made explicit by the so-called venus figures found at hohle fels in germany from the upper paleolithic period, the woman of willendorf from about 24,000 years ago, the woman of laussel from about 20,000 years ago, and many others. these palm-size statuettes of women with exaggerated breasts and hips may have offered comfort to mothers going through pregnancy or delivery, or had any number of other possible 53 gustafson meanings. whoever made the statues did so while thinking about fertility and sexuality rather than engaging in sex. these statues demonstrate symbolic thinking about sex in the immediate absence of sexual behavior. the big history of music is also noteworthy. the hardware necessary to transforming the waves through a medium such as air into perceived sounds in the brain began with early land dwellers feeling vibrations in their bones. sight is great, but you can’t see around the bend or over the hill. sound provides crucially important information. the patterns and tones of sound provide important information about the environment. many species produce sounds as well as perceive them. some birds will sing to announce territorial claims or attract mates. whales and others too will sing to communicate over long distances. sounds can convey information to others. with the malleus, incus, and stapes as part of their auditory system, mammals became able to hear in ways that reptiles cannot. listening to the sound waves caused by ocean waves, lion roars, chirping crickets, and howling winds all had important meanings for hominids. hearing and responding to a dependent babies cry, parting the lips and calling “ma” with various inflections of tone elicited powerful responses among caretakers. different sounds would have elicited other profound emotional responses, such as fear or sexual desire. rhythmic music and drumming would have enhanced group identity during kinship groups’ dances. eventually, fife and drums communicated information and bolstered courage during battle. campaign theme songs would identify candidates. national anthems would stir patriotism. perceiving and making music has a long history of the relationships between animals and their environments, and animals such as humans with each other. symbolic thinking and imagination made combination beyond natural referents possible. a wonderful example of this is the löwenmensch, or lion man, from germany from about 30,000 years ago. a bipedal man’s body with a lion’s head was not something the artist had ever seen. this was work not from memory alone but from imagination and combination. this indicates the ability to manipulate symbols separate from natural perception. it also indicates a crucially important political ability of combining what had not yet been combined in nature. nature had combined much in the past through increasingly complex relationships. quarks, atoms, molecules, minerals, cells, body parts, animal groups, and ecosystems all kept putting things together in larger and novel combinations. now, humans could do this at a faster pace and self-consciously. placing value on symbols for their own sake was exhibited by early artists as well. for example, there is a beautiful ivory horse sculpture from vogelherd, germany from about 32,000 years ago. the artist did not try to include all the musculature of a real horse. instead, it is an idealized shape with a series of flowing curves. this is not so much a representation of a physical horse as an ideal one expressing a sense of beauty. the artist took delight in abstraction. plato was a bit of a johnny-come-lately with his theory of the forms. relationships through the exchange of words, music, and symbols developed human relationships. exchange of goods did, too. this too has a long history, going back to sharing food to enhance group relations. an introduction to big history 54   specialized tool production homo habilis sites relatively far from sources of rock that were used indicate trade as much as two million years ago. trading routes become increasingly extensive and established until by 14,000 years ago the obsidian trade in the near east and then the famous silk road established what some see as a central core political system. political and social development kinship the growth of symbolic thinking and exchange of goods, words, glances, gestures, musical sounds, and artistic images facilitated political development. we have discussed the importance of kinship groups. long-term bonding of childcare givers required sophisticated relationships demanding lots of exchanges. kinship groups within a scavenger/gatherer and then hunter/gatherer economy likely became complex, but were still limited in size to perhaps fifty or a hundred persons. larger trading routes would have permitted development of complexity of relationship. family groups needed to exchange offspring for mating in the next generation. this led over generations to complex sets of inter-kinship relations. terms such as “second cousin once removed” start to indicate such complexity. in kinship relationships, lineage is important. loyalties are to caretakers and common ancestors. family and kinship remains important in our own day. the powerful resonances are indicated by larger groups attempting to appropriate kinship relations. nationalists sometimes have referred to their country as a motherland. in the united states, george washington is referred to as the “father of the country.” members of the roman catholic church call their priests “father.” larger, non-lineage groups often seek to call upon the powerful forces of kinship. one of the values of big history is its scientific story of the real lineage of all persons, going back to a small group in africa about 200,000 years ago; of all life to luca, and the universe to a single point. it turns out that we really do all have a common background. big history is the scientific story for a period of human politics. agriculture and villages one of the major thresholds of big history is the agricultural revolution. the transition from hunting and gathering to growing crops and raising certain animals is of crucial importance. it also entails a stage of political development. hunting/gathering went along with kinship polities. with agriculture came settled villages of increasing size, beginning to include different kinship lines. this presented the village with an enormous political problem: how to establish a sustained, structured set of relationships beyond kinship. one way to do this was to create dynasties; village lineages that all could be persuaded or forced to adopt. lineage now became a symbolic political category rather than a biological one. in many regions of the world, mounds and other monumental burial sites enshrined the lineage of 55 gustafson the village. those within one lineage might still have the right to rule, but all needed to exchange the symbols that helped nurture loyalty to it. the political leaders of these settlements or villages during the early agricultural era were sometimes those who had access and control over the best growing areas. we start to see increased social stratification and inequalities in wealth as the agricultural era proceeded. some residences and some graves are noticeably grander than others. hierarchy in the hunter/gatherer era was more likely based on strength, size, or cunning. in each period, leadership could also be exercised by those we call shamans, or those who could impress their fellows with their special insights and relationships. when some went through fasting, whether by choice or necessity, carried out rhythmic dancing while listening to repetitive rhythmic music, added various hallucinogens, and perhaps inflicted self-flagellation, they likely could report any number of special insights and experiences. shapes would have shifted, experienced as traveling in other realms. these were similar to dream-like states. dreams while sleeping and trances while awake offered symbolic connections with what was beyond normal referents. imagined relationships with abstract designs, ancestors, and the supernormal by some could have impressed others and established a claim to leadership. village identity could be developed and expressed through styles of clothing, certain verbal expressions, or other identifiers. stories about the village could be told at gatherings. it took enormous effort and creativity to incorporate loyalty to the family within loyalty to the village. cities and empires monumental, ceremonial architecture reinforced the claim by some of symbolic leadership that legitimized claims to political leadership. standing in awe not directly of the universe, but of some people’s special connections with it, was impressive. from watson brake in ouachita parish in louisiana from about 5,400 years ago to imhotep’s saqarra in egypt about 4,700 years ago, grand burial sites began to announce the emergence of full-time leading families. large, stylized burial mounds called attention if not of the gods, at least of the humbled onlookers who stood before them during ceremonies. equivalents in modern america are the tall, stiff obelisk in honor to the father of the country, or the jefferson or lincoln memorials in which political pilgrims can stand reverently in front of larger-than-life leaders who have mythical meaning and personify the presidential succession that leads to the current national leader. large, monumental architecture also announces the emergence of new political units of cities with larger populations and relations of cities within regional associations and nations or empires. eridu, uruk, ur, çatalhöyük, jericho, damascus, mohenjo-daro, tenochtitlán, teotihuacan, xi’an and other great cities represent a transition to larger, more complex political units. sometimes these became the hubs of empires; sometimes they were combined with other cities within empires such as the akkadian empire of sargon the great from 2,400 bce, the fifteenth century bce new kingdom of ancient egypt ruled by thutmose iii, the assyrian empire of 2000–612 bce, the median empire in persia by the sixth century bce, the an introduction to big history 56   achaemenid empire from 550–330 bce, the mauryan empire from 321 to 185 bce, the roman, han, byzantine, qing, mongol, arabian, ottoman, ashanti, and mughal empires. the modern european empires were transformative through their incorporation of the industrial revolution. the british, french, dutch, german, and japanese empires were built from steel, oil-powered ships, railroads, and gasoline-powered vehicles. the russian and american empires combined these in the information age with nuclear power and nuclear weapons. the struggles for power within empires and between some of them are the stuff of traditional history. the endless lists of battles and army flanks can make for a depressing account of the human past. homer’s account of the trojan war is heroic enough, but it is also just another deadly battle scene. and things don’t seem to have improved much. we started the twentieth century with a war to end all wars, followed by a horrific second world war twenty years later. since the end of wwii, there have been about 250 wars with over 50 million people killed, tens of millions more wounded, and countless made homeless. where are we going? what can we conclude from our 13.82 billion year journey so far in this universe? the access to high quality energy in certain pockets has permitted increased complexity in relationships between quarks, atoms, molecules, cells, animals, and humans within families, cities, nations, empires, and the world. each of the earlier relationships continues to be part of our current ones, although often in transformed ways. you and i are the beneficiaries of the relationships that have been developed. we are made from the relationships among quarks, atoms, molecules, cells, and many intricately related body parts. we live within kinship groups, nations, and empires. many of us are connected with others around the world through the almost instantaneous exchange of digital information. we have evidence for a common origin of all of us and indeed everything it the universe. all of us on earth have a common origin and ultimately a common destiny. big history is ultimately not only about the past. it helps us understand what brought us to the present and how we may participate in the future through long-developed processes. will we continue to have access to high quality energy and remain as the pockets which continue to develop the most complex relationships of which we are aware in the universe? can we use this energy without polluting our world and making it uninhabitable? even if the energy crisis is resolved in a sustainable way, do we have the imagination to combine national, ethnic, and other types of groups within new and meaningful relationships? can we be as creative as nature was earlier when it first combined protons and electrons, atoms in molecules, molecules in cells, cells in plants and animals, and animals in various groupings? can we be as imaginative as the artist who carved the löwenmensch, imagining the combination of lions and people? or the shaman who imagined how to combine kinship groups in the village? can the study of big history be formative enough to teach us how to combine families, ethnic groups, cities, nations, empires, humans, and our environment in ways that protect all of them? can this be done even while there are many in less complex relationships who show little or no interest in participating in big 57 gustafson politics, who are satisfied with staying at their level of complexity? can enough people make the transition to the next level of complexity? can we fashion a more complex, sustainable, structured set of relationships? can we experience politics as sustained, creative, structured relationship rather than a struggle for dominance? can we understand ethics as developed from the empathy and sense of fair play that makes sustained relationships possible? can we experience religion as the sense of awe of the forces that have bound us together and the creativity that leads to new and more complex, structured, and sustained relationships? or will entropy overtake us before it needs to? works cited aristotle. 1885. politics. translated by benjamin jowett. oxford: clarendon. accessed may 24, 2014, http://classics.mit.edu/aristotle/politics.html. sawyer, g. j., victor deak, estaban sarmiento, et al. 2007. the last human: a guide to twenty-two species of extinct humans. new haven: yale university press. de waal, frans. 2006. our inner ape: a leading primatologist explains why we are who we are. new york: riverhead books. –––. 2009. primates and philosophers: how morality evolved. ed. stephen macedo and josiah ober. princeton: princeton university press. wilson, edmund o. 2012. the social conquest of earth. new york: liveright. to learn more: bahn, paul g. 1998. the cambridge illustrated history of prehistoric art. new york: cambridge university press. bernstein, leonard. “origin of music.” accessed february 7, 2013, http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2mfb_qvyeq. bickerton, derek. 2009. adam’s tongue: how humans made language, how language made humans. new york: hill and wang. brown, cynthia s. 2007. big history: from the big bang to the present. new york: new press. an introduction to big history 58   carroll, sean m. 2012. the particle at the end of the universe: how the hunt for the higgs boson leads us to the edge of a new world. new york: dutton. chaisson, eric. 2006. epic of evolution: seven ages of the cosmos. new york: columbia university press. christian, david. 2004. maps of time: an introduction to big history. berkeley: university of california press. christian, david, cynthia stokes brown, and craig benjamin. 2013. big history: between nothing and everything. princeton: mcgraw-hill. clottes, jean. 2003. chauvet cave: the art of earliest times. salt lake city: university of utah press. –––. 2008. cave art. new york: phaidon press. curtis, gregory. 2007. the cave painters: probing the mysteries of the world’s first artists. new york: anchor 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university press. wade, nicholas. 2006. before the dawn: recovering the lost history of our ancestors. new york: penguin. wenke, robert j., and deborah olszewski. 2007. patterns in prehistory: humankind's first three million years. new york: oxford university press. white, randall. 2003. prehistoric art: the symbolic journey of humankind. new york: harry n. abrams. whitley, david s. 2009. cave paintings and the human spirit: the origin of creativity and belief. amherst, ny: prometheus books. the mind of adolf hitler: [expositions 5.2 (2011) 111-125] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 the mind of adolf hitler: a study in the unconscious appeal of contempt edward green manhattan school of music how did the mind of adolf hitler come to be so evil? this is a question which has been asked for decades – a question which millions of people have thought had no clear answer. this has been the case equally with persons who dedicated their lives to scholarship in the field. for example, alan bullock, author of hitler: a study in tyranny, and perhaps the most famous of the biographers of the nazi leader, is cited in ron rosenbaum’s 1998 book, explaining hitler, as saying: “the more i learn about hitler, the harder i find it to explain” (in rosenbaum 1998, vii). in the same text, philosopher emil fackenheim agrees: “the closer one gets to explicability the more one realizes nothing can make hitler explicable” (in rosenbaum 1998, vii). 1 even an author as keenly perceptive and ethically bold as the swiss philosopher max picard confesses in his 1947 book, hitler in ourselves, that ultimately he is faced with a mystery. 2 the very premise of his book is that somehow the mind of hitler must be like that of ourselves. but just where the kinship lies, precisely how hitler’s unparalleled evil and the everyday workings of our own minds explain each other – in terms of a central principle – the author does not make clear. our deepest debate i say carefully, as a dispassionate scholar but also as a person of jewish heritage who certainly would not be alive today had hitler succeeded in his plan for world conquest, that the answer bullock, fackenheim, and picard were searching for can be found in the work of the great american philosopher eli siegel. 3 first famed as a poet, siegel is best known now for his pioneering work in the field of the philosophy of mind. 4 he was the founder of aesthetic realism. 5 in keeping with its name, this philosophy begins with a consideration of strict ontology. it presents reality as having an enduring aesthetic structure: the oneness of opposites. the core concept of aesthetic realism is this statement by siegel: “the world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites” (quoted in kranz, 1969, 1). on first sight, my essay has a very different focus: not ontology, but ethics; not the nature of reality as a whole, but the psychology of a single and very notorious instance of humanity. yet – and this is an insight of the aesthetic realism method – these matters are interdependent. it is how the world is in our minds, siegel explained, which determines who we are: our very selves. in every person, he stated, there is on-going debate: do reality and the people in it deserve my respect or my contempt? as aesthetic realism sees it, our deepest desire is to find authentic and enduring grounds for respect. for that reason, the “greatest danger or temptation of man is to get the mind of adolf hitler 112 a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not himself; which lessening is contempt” (quoted in reiss, 1997, 7). his classic text in the field of philosophic psychology is self and world, written largely in the early 1940s – precisely when hitler was close to succeeding in his desire to impose his will upon the rest of humanity. in this ground-breaking book, siegel explains that every human being relies on two sources of pleasure and power (siegel 1981). 6 the first comes from finding meaning, value, and beauty in the world different from oneself. this is the pleasure of respect, and the power arising from it is completely healthy. it is an emotion earned through perception and in keeping with the facts of the world. it is honest. the other source of pleasure is contempt. when we are after contempt, we hope to see the world and other people as beneath us, whatever the facts truly are. people become things to manipulate; they exist nearly as “inanimate” objects we have a right to use for our own advantage, with hardly a thought about what is just to them. if, to “convince” ourselves of our superiority, we need to change the facts, well then, too bad for the facts! “contempt,” siegel wrote in self and world, “is not interested in knowledge as knowledge, only in knowledge making ego the one thing” (siegel 1981, 7). this second source of pleasure likewise gives a person a sense of importance and power. if one is only focusing on the immediate experience of pleasure, importance, and power it will be difficult to realize the difference between the two. yet ethically there is all the difference in the world. when contempt is driving us, the power and self-importance we gain, and the pleasure we enjoy, are at the expense of outside reality. contempt – or, put even more precisely, the hope for the victory of contempt over a world seen as different from oneself – is the source of all human evil. 7 it is just here that we can see our relation to hitler and to the nazi period. contempt is a quantitative phenomenon. just as a thin dime and a thick wad of thousand dollar bills are, each, money; and a large tank of water and a thimbleful identical in terms of chemistry, differing only in terms of quantity – so it is with contempt. there is a continuity; contempt can be, and most often is, seemingly trivial, so everyday and familiar we hardly notice it. contempt can also be monumental in scope, and historically earth-shaking. the magnitude differs, not the fundamental ethics. hitler, germany, and the evocation of contempt “hitler,” wrote siegel, “was perhaps the greatest evoker of human contempt in history” (siegel 1976c, 2). and he explained: the first victory of contempt is the feeling in people that they have the right to see other people and things pretty much as they please. for this reason, the viewpoint of aesthetic realism that we have an obligation to see everything as well as we can, is a critical matter. 113 green the fact that most people have felt there is no such obligation, that they had the right to see other people and other objects in a way that seemed to go with comfort—this fact is the beginning of the injustice and pain of the world. it is contempt in its first universal, hideous form. (siegel 1981, 3) to understand the evil of the nazi era, we need to see the powerful unconscious appeal of contempt. it was not incidental to hitler’s way of seeing reality; it was its bedrock. we see a hint of this in rosenbaum’s observation that “blackmail [was] an aspect of his primary nature, his defining relationship to the world” (rosenbaum 1998, 49). rosenbaum never says, directly, what this “primary” nature is – but certainly a self which relies on blackmail has a deep stake in seeing others as weak; it is a self which enjoys others cowering in fear before it. the german author sebastian haffner offers further evidence. in his 1978 historical study, anmerkungen zu hitler, a book which stayed on the best-seller list in his country for 43 weeks, we are told that hitler’s “positive characteristics – resolution, boldness, courage, perseverance – lie all on the ‘hard’ side. the negative ones even more so: ruthlessness, vindictiveness, faithlessness and cruelty.” further, haffner notes: “‘icily-cold’ and ‘lightning-quick’ were favorite expressions of his” (haffner 1997, 7,118). what would make in a human self for such aesthetic and ethical disproportion? – such a onesided preference for hardness, coldness, and speed? would it be the hope for respect, or its contrary? and as ernst hanfstaengl, who in the early years of the nazi movement was its foreign press secretary, notes in hitler: the missing years: “he simply could not bear not to dominate any situation in which he found himself” (hanfstaengl 1994, 60). 8 what does that indicate? what attitude towards the world? what i am getting at, is that without the hope for contempt nazism would never have come to be – first in the mind of hitler himself and then in the millions who followed him. as siegel wrote in a 1974 essay, entitled “disliking the world, continued,” one of a series on the subject “contempt causes insanity:” we all have the unlimited possibility of seeing the world around us as an enemy; of despising it; of putting it aside…for the purpose of liking yourself exclusively, it is prudent to find the world only a welter, only an antagonistic mess. hitler’s broodings in vienna apparently made for the discovery which ever so many people have made: the world has no beautiful clue in it. therefore, we are more sensible than it. therefore, we don’t have to go by anything in the world. we are our own law. (siegel 1974,1) it is worth noting that in recent years some aspects of what siegel was explaining decades back have found resonance in fictional attempts to comprehend the nazi phenomenon. the sense of the world as a “welter,” as “an antagonistic mess,” is crucial in norman mailer’s study of hitler’s childhood and family life, the castle in the forest (2007). in jonathan littell’s recent the mind of adolf hitler 114 and much celebrated novel, the kindly ones, we see how the führer’s abundant dislike of the world set off sympathetic echoes in the minds of millions of others. that novel’s main character, dr. max auer, is an ex-nazi official, and for nearly 1000 pages, he reminisces about the war and the party which he loyally served – reminisces, and defends himself. it takes only a few pages for the reader to see that this fictional nazi had also made the “discovery… [that] the world has no beautiful clue:” for a long time we crawl on this earth like caterpillars, waiting for the splendid, diaphanous butterfly we bear within ourselves. and then that time passes and the nymph stage never comes, we remain larvae – what do we do with such an appalling realization? (littell 2010, 3) historical circumstances, as well as painful events in an individual’s life, certainly make it easier for someone to rely on contempt. a world with injustice and disorder in it will likely fuel that preference. nevertheless, contempt – the belief that reality is fundamentally ugly and inherently unjust – is a choice, if nearly always a sub-conscious one. to understand nazism, we need to acknowledge the impact of the vengeful versailles treaty, the ugly history of anti-semitism and militarism in german culture, and the fear in german capitalists of bolshevism. yet without the desire for contemptuous victories over people seen as different from oneself, none of the factors just mentioned would have provided adequate reason for millions of germans to become active nazis. hitler’s words would have fallen on unwilling ears. the world would have had no auschwitz, no buchenwald, no siege of leningrad to remember with horror. hitler’s relish of contempt that hitler personally relished contempt is something well-testified to in the scholarly literature. i have already given some instances, and i will give more later. yet i know of no one other than eli siegel who saw and asserted its central importance. instead, the overwhelming tendency in hitlerian scholarship has been to write of his contempt as an epiphenomenon, resulting from something supposedly more primal in hitler’s mind – something deeper and more central. this is a mistake. the notion of aryan supremacy, for example, did not cause hitler’s contempt for people, it was its result. just as certainly, his anti-semitism didn’t precede his general relish of contempt for humanity, but was a manifestation of it: a ferocious, almost unimaginably brutal manifestation – but still a manifestation of something deeper, and more inclusive. that hitler by no means left the “aryan populace” out of his general scorn of his fellow-man was felt by biographer helmut heiber, who noted: 115 green [i]n the last resort the german masses served merely as a vehicle for hitler’s thirst for power, as the basis of a pyramid whose purpose consisted in its topmost stone; and in moments of excitement during the second half of the war made no attempt to conceal the fact. as a rule, however, he took good care not to parade his contempt. (heiber 1961; quoted in stein, 1968, 160) give hitler at least this much credit: he knew it wouldn’t be popular! what heiber describes, once when gets past the extraordinary historical circumstances, is in fact a very ordinary and familiar thing. as anyone can verify from their experience of life, people tend to enjoy joining in “the fun” as contempt is had for a third party (preferably absent from the conversation). everyday gossip depends on it; a good deal of contemporary politics (and media) do also. when hitler pointed toward the jews, the russians, the gypsies, western parliamentarians, and . . . well, add your pick, the german people generally were happy to participate in the “contempt festival.” but no one likes being himself the object of contempt! so hitler hid one aspect of his universal contempt for humanity, until – as the soviet armies approached germany – he knew his fate was sealed, and had nothing more to lose. at last, he felt free to show what he had always felt: disdain for the german people who so easily had yielded to his mastery. contempt and the youthful hitler one way of seeing the beginning appeal of contempt to hitler, preceding any particular set of political considerations, is to spend some time with him as a young man. let us start with an observation of august kubizek, the one close friend he had as a teenager. kubizek writes in the young hitler i knew, “all he wanted from me was one thing – agreement” (kubizek 2006, 33). how ordinary this sounds: the association of friendship with approval; of great friendship with great approval. but to expect another person, as hitler does, simply to adopt your point of view on all matters, is to turn that person into a mere appendage. later, of course, hitler would expect all of germany to give up its independence of thought, and serve his will. it is important to keep in mind that kubizek, who published the german original in 1953, had no desire to speak ill of hitler. instead, his book is shocking in its positive bias. not a word about the millions who died in the war, or about the death camps. by contrast, we encounter many passages praising hitler’s “overflowing” heart. as ian kershaw, the noted british historian, observed in his introduction to the book, we can see in how kubizek writes that “an unmistakable current of admiration remains” (kubizek 2006, 11). consider: kubizek tells us that he first met hitler when both teenage boys were at the linz opera, watching performances from the standing-room section. noticing each other, they struck up a conversation, and, as kubizek notes, “we… rejoiced in our common adverse criticism” of the casting (kubizek 2006, 28). “rejoice” is the telling word. others might regret finding weakness in an operatic performance. not kubizek and hitler. the mind of adolf hitler 116 to those interested in the mind of the young hitler, one of the most difficult issues is how to the place the fact that we do see – on occasion – that he appears to be going after kindness. as alan bullock once said, “let’s have the rawness of it, which is that he was a person like you and me in many respects” (quoted in rosenbaum, 1998, 85). we cannot paint an entirely evil picture of adolf hitler and be honest. yet what emerges from a close study of these acts of kindness, and also those moments when he truly seems moved by beauty in nature and in the arts, is that invariably another motive shadows it – indicating that the pleasure hitler got through respectful thought about others, and respectful emotion about the world, was not enough to satisfy him. thus, when kubizek’s viola teacher died (and kubizek was later to be a graduate of the vienna conservatory and a serious professional musician) hitler went to the funeral, “which,” says kubizek, “rather surprised me as he did not know professor dessauer at all. when i expressed my surprise, he said, ‘i can’t bear it that you should mix with other young people and talk to them’” (kubizek 2006, 34). the brutality of owning a person, and a desire to accompany that person in his private grief, are here co-mingled. hitler in vienna some years later, sharing an apartment in vienna, kubizek observed the intensity with which hitler thought through various architectural problems in order to improve the living conditions of the poor of that city. (hitler was then imagining his professional future as having to do with architecture). “there was here a strange contradiction,” kubizek wrote, “which always struck me: all his thoughts and ambitions were directed towards the problem of how to help the masses, the simple, decent but under-privileged people with whom he identified himself – they were ever-present in his thoughts – but in actual fact he always avoided any contact with people. the motley crowd in the prater was practically repugnant to him” (kubizek 2006, 164). the essence of respect, i learned from eli siegel, is the belief that other things, other people, deserve our precise thought: they have rights, the most important of which is the right to be seen accurately. hitler plainly had unconscious scorn for this basic ethical principle. then again, so do many people – perhaps even most people. we can, and often do, invent a person in our minds rather than try to see who that man or woman really is. a rather absurd instance of doing just this can be found in kubizek’s book, as hitler talks to his friend for years about his great passion for a girl from linz named stefanie, and about how they see eye to eye on everything. there’s only one problem: hitler has never once spoken to her! this matter of whether reality has independence from our ego, including the reality of other people, is a pivotal matter – because the contemptuous mind will not allow it. max picard is at his best here, writing, “the nazi…feels no responsibility towards reality because he feels no ties to it; that is why he does with it as it pleases him” (picard 1947, 115). thus, it is not surprising that the young hitler, though a voracious reader, used books not so much to get an accurate picture of reality in his mind, as to glorify himself. “his attitude to books,” writes kubizek, “was the same as his attitude to the world in general. he absorbed with fervour everything he could lay 117 green his hands on, but he took great care to keep at a safe distance from anything that might put him to the test” (kubizek 2006, 182). it is also revelatory that despite his wide reading, hitler kept away from the strict sciences; in particular, mathematics. these are fields, after all, that will not bend easily to one’s ego. to my knowledge, the only time hitler ever admitted in print to being “at variance with himself” is when, in mein kampf, he tells of why he was unable to pursue an architectural career in vienna. it was because earlier he had failed mathematics, and so lacked a diploma: …what i missed out of obstinacy at the realschule now took its bitter revenge. admission to the school of architecture was dependent on attending a technical school for building, and entrance to the latter required one to have matriculated from a secondary school. i did not meet any of these conditions and, as far as could be foreseen therefore, the fulfillment of my dream to become an artist was impossible. (quoted in kubizek, 2006, 130) note that in the word “obstinacy” there is even a flicker of self-criticism – the rarest of hitlerian items. even so, this self-criticism is the decorous version – smoothed-over-for-publicconsumption. this seems the moment to mention that there is a degree of scholarly debate as to just how much of kubizek’s book is directly by him and how much by editors. there is also a question of how much kubizek altered his memories to suit his imagined audience of readers. for the sake of argument, let us stipulate that one (or both) of these possibilities is so. yet what would that indicate? if he (or his pro-nazi editors) changed the facts to make hitler “more acceptable” to readers, it only supports my point: that contempt was so pervasive in hitler’s life that even with whitewash liberally applied, the evil intent still comes through. in kubizek’s book, it is clear that hitler found the situation vis-à-vis the school of architecture tormenting. the entire structure of his self was built on the notion that reality had no rights he was obliged to acknowledge. and so, as kubizek witnesses, “it only needed the lightest touch…for his self-accusation to become an accusation against the times, against the whole world” (kubizek 2006, 158–9). the desire to blame others rather than honestly criticize oneself is clearly a sign of a preference in a self for contempt. again, we must ask: how universal is this temptation? is it only a hitlerian weakness? only a fault in the german character? only a lifestyle choice of the 1930s and 1940s? or is it present in everyone? it is; and let us have the courage to explore what that means. as siegel has explained: “contempt, it seems to us, is the foundation we need for our desire to be somebody; to matter [. . . fascism] is the ego made metallic. it is the unwillingness to understand, as power” (siegel 1976b, 1; siegel 1982, 2; siegel 1993, 2). in support of this view of the nazi era, let me once again quote max picard: “the shouters – hitler, goebbels, and all the rest – wanted to prove by their shouts that they existed. the dictator [. . . ] felt his existence only by shouting some command” (picard 1947, 36). daniel jonah goldhagen and the mind of adolf hitler 118 berel lang have also documented richly the contemptuous relish with which the nazis went about their work degrading other human beings (goldhagen 1996; lang 1992). hitler’s “table-talk” i turn now to another remarkable book: hitler's secret conversations: 1941–1945 (1953). it consists of transcripts of conversations hitler had with his associates at his command center on the eastern front, the “wolf’s lair.” late night conversations, over pastry and tea; conversations like those many people have: to relax, to unwind after the day's work. only this work was the attempt, literally, to conquer the world. let’s begin with a striking fact: the ruler of germany feels impelled to tell, again and again, about schoolboy victories over teachers. it seems he loved to humiliate teachers in front of their classes: for example, herr koenig, who, in an earlier job, had endured an explosion from a nearby steam boiler that left him with a speech defect: the inability to pronounce the letter ‘h.’ “when he read out the names of the class,” said hitler: “i pretended not to hear, although i was sitting right in front of him. he repeated it several times [. . .] when he had [finally] identified me, he asked me why i didn't answer. “my name’s not itler, sir. my name is hitler” (1953, 158). this is so ordinary. something like it – one person trying to make another look ridiculous – happens hundreds of times today in philadelphia, new york, berlin. and that is what the child adolf is doing: exploiting his teacher’s troubles for a cheap laugh. in “the mind of hitler,” a searching essay which also serves as the introduction to this volume of transcripts, the historian h. r. trevor-roper quotes hitler as saying something whose very wording is a mocking paraphrase of christ: “i have not come into this world to make men better, but to make use of their weaknesses” (1953, xxviii–xxix ). now, truth to be told, everyone has played around – to a greater or lesser degree – with the terrible equation central to hitler’s mind: that weakness in another means strength for ourselves. not just nazi dictators, but people generally like to imagine that we are superior: superior in cleverness, family background, intellect, etc. throughout the book hitler constantly pats himself on the back for all of these things. simply being aryan – his “family background” if you will – makes him, he tells himself, far above most other people. he praises himself for his clever ability to outsmart opponents: his deftness at lying. and he fancies himself as having more intellectual courage than anyone else: the only person unafraid of the utter cruelty of nature. “one couldn’t imagine a better activity on nature’s part,” he tells those present, “than that which consists in deciding the supremacy of one creature over another” (1953, 321). the continuity of hitler’s mind on the last point, concerning the cruelty of reality, can be seen in the fact that twenty years earlier, in a speech which john lukacs cites in the hitler of history, the nazi leader says: “there is only defiance and hate, hate and again hate.” only two things matter: “to hate and to be hard [. . .] a lesson devoid of love.” “this brutal [. . .] view of the world,” comments lukacs, is “by no means rare” (1998, 71). 119 green true enough; yet it was felt by hitler and his ardent nazi followers with a rare intensity: an intensity perhaps unmatched in human history. wrote siegel in a 1976 essay, “the suppression of good will”: the nazis around hitler in l932 and later possessed strongly the feeling that kindness would be in their way [. . .] how much we can do in the field of annulling some consideration of another has not been measured yet. there is no limit to how rigid, fixed [. . .] merciless we can be. there is no limit, this means, to the suppression of good will. (1976a, 1–2) returning to the 1940s, it is important to see that for nearly 600 pages of conversation transcript, hitler never asks a single question other than rhetorical ones which he intends to answer himself. and he hardly ever acknowledges learning anything. moreover, he says he can’t read novels. “that kind of reading annoys me,” says hitler (1953, 292). as siegel once observed, to read a novel is to spend hours deeply affected by the inner lives of other people; and this is something the ego sees as a threat. hitler is incapable of reading a novel because he doesn't want to give full reality to anyone. one segment of the human race which hitler sees as very different from himself – and, of course, inferior – is women. “intelligence, in a woman,” he says, “is not an essential thing.” and he continues: “my mother, for example, would have cut a poor figure in the society of our cultivated women. she lived strictly for her husband and children. they were her entire universe. but she gave a son to germany” (quoted in trevor-roper 1953, 292). this is grandiose conceit; but how many children see their parents this way? more specifically: how many young boys see their mothers in that light? – and then go on later to view all women that way: as existing, not in their own right, but to serve us, to make us important? an aside: one form contempt for women can take, a form having in it at once the desire to blank her inner life out of existence as well as the desire to have her passively in one’s service, is pornography. so it is not at all surprising to be told by ernst hanfstaengl that hitler had an interest in such publications. not only did he own (among other such books) a “well-thumbed” edition of eduard fuch’s history of erotic art, but apparently hitler himself sketched a series of pornographic drawings of his niece, geli raubal – “the sort of thing,” hanfstaengl comments, “only a perverted voyeur would commit to paper, much less oblige a woman to model for” (hanfstaengl 1994, 48, 163). 9 returning to the main point: it is plain that hitler judged people not by who they were, but by how important they made him. he was ruthless with anyone who questioned his importance. all through the 1920s in bavaria, he had his political enemies murdered while the right-wing judiciary and the local police looked the other way; and once he became chancellor of germany in l933 – not through a clear election victory, but through a backroom deal brokered by wealthy people convinced he would defend their economic superiority – he continued to murder. 10 the mind of adolf hitler 120 contempt and an economic viewpoint hitler’s anti-semitism was an important aspect of his politics. but there was a second element: from the very start hitler took a key idea in leftist politics – that the land and resources of the world should be owned equitably – as a personal insult. some scholars, notably arno mayer, have argued that his anti-bolshevism was the more primal of the two hatreds (1988). the philosophy behind this new economics hitler described in mein kampf as: “[a] doctrine [which] denies the aristocratic principle of nature, and sets mass and dead weight of numbers in place of the eternal privilege of strength and power” (hitler 2001, 60). this is raw contempt for people: seeing millions of other men and women as nothing but “dead weights.” yet hitler was hardly alone; contempt for “the masses” was arguably a key feature of industry at that time – not only in germany, but in england, france, and the united states. there was a feeling among the defenders of profit economics that people exist, from a “business-point-of-view,” simply to make money for you. stripped of pretence, the cruelty and ill will of this way of economics leaps out at one in sharp relief. it denies people their full reality, reducing them to the status of ready-at-hand tools whose function in life is to augment your private financial position; and if they can’t do that for you, well then, discard them, and search for greater profit elsewhere. “fascism,” siegel observed in a 1970 lecture, “is an attempt to see that capitalism functions, by getting rid of its enemies. fascism is the desire to kill good will if it is a fight between good will and our ego” (quoted in defilippis and kestenbaum, 1984, 2). 11 *** as i worked on this article, i had a chilling memory. as a teenager, growing up on long island, in a town that was perhaps 80% jewish, the board-game i loved most was “stalingrad” – a detailed reconstruction of the war between hitler and the russian people. either side could win. i remember with shame that i preferred to play the nazi side. certainly, i knew what hitler had done. i knew about the gas chambers, the ovens; i knew about auschwitz. but hitler also fascinated me, and for a terrible yet logical reason: he embodied, in a near-ultimate degree, a desire i also had – to have the world and other people bend to my will. it is not accidental that at this same time, though i was young, i was also a fervent supporter of the vietnam war – in my opinion the most terrible instance of international ill will america has ever had. it was a war which in which thousands upon thousands of innocent people died; a war which arose not from a need in america to defend itself, but from a desire to impose our economic system on people who didn’t want it. this essay was written to shed light on the evolution of hitler’s mind, and why that mind, and the political ideas which emerged from it, had the powerful appeal it, and they, did for millions of ordinary, representative people. though what i write about took place three-quarters of a century ago, it matters enormously to our world today. for two reasons: first, because in terms 121 green of everyday life we all need to examine our personal reliance on contempt – question it, criticize it, lessen it, simply in order to like ourselves on an honest basis, and be thoughtful about, and kind to, other people. but there is a second reason: the world, once again, is deeply turbulent. hitler came to power during a period of much financial unrest; a period, too, in which faith in democracy was weak. once more, we are hearing fascist-like appeals from some politicians. as robert o. paxton noted in the anatomy of fascism: fascism [. . .] is still visible today. fascism exists at the level of stage one [the creation of political movements] within all democratic countries—not excluding the united states. “giving up free institutions,” especially the freedoms of unpopular groups, is recurrently attractive to citizens of western democracies, including some americans. we know from tracing its path that fascism does not require a spectacular “march” on some capital to take root; seemingly anodyne decisions to tolerate lawless treatment of national “enemies” is enough. and he adds: “determining the appropriate responses to fascist gains is not easy, since its cycle is not likely to repeat itself blindly. we stand a much better chance of responding wisely, however, if we understand how fascism succeeded in the past” (paxton 2005, 220). paxton is right. the world needs an education which can enable it to be in the clear, ethically. the key to achieving that clarity is studying what eli siegel explained: the hope for contempt is the beginning point, the precondition, of all human evil; fascism, included. notes 1. fackenheim was a german-born rabbi, imprisoned for a year in the sachsenhausen concentration camp before fleeing to england just before the outbreak of the war. 2. see, in particular, “the face of hitler” (picard 1947, 78–85) where picard speaks about hitler and “nullity.” 3. for a compact biography, see this google knol which i authored: http://knol.google.com/k/eli-siegel#. 4. siegel won the nation’s poetry prize in 1925 for his poem “hot afternoons have been in montana,” a work about which william carlos williams wrote in 1951, “i say definitely that that single poem, out of a thousand others written in the past quarter century, secures our place in the cultural world” (quoted in siegel, 1958, xvi; see also: breslin, 1985, 229–252). 5. for a short presentation of the fundamental concepts of his philosophy, and how they are to be differentiated from other, and more recent uses of the term “aesthetic realism,” see: green, 2005. http://knol.google.com/k/eli-siegel the mind of adolf hitler 122 6. though first published as a whole in 1981, various chapters were in print separately as early as 1946. see, in particular, the “preface: contempt causes insanity” (siegel 1981, 1–20) and the chapter “the world, guilt and self-conflict” (siegel 1981, 81– 122). 7. perhaps the closest max picard comes to a definition of evil is on page 16 of his 1947 text. there he equates “the germ of evil” with “selfish isolation” and “the disease of fragmentation.” that the ground upon which we justify our isolation is the belief that we are superior to other people is not said. and that belief arises from the hope for contempt. 8. by 1937, hanfstaegel, having gotten on hitler’s bad side, and in fear for his life, fled germany. during wwii, he lived and worked in washington d.c., and was useful to the war effort in providing “inside information” about the nazi leadership. 9. that hanfstaengl is outraged at these drawings, which he says have “every anatomical detail,” is clear from his calling them “depraved.” he knew something of the ethical and aesthetic difference between art and pornography; one of the most prestigious fine art publishing houses in the world was owned by hanfstaengl’s family, and for several years he worked in it. the difference, often forgotten now-adays, is that art exists to satisfy humanity’s desire to have more respectful for reality; pornography, the reverse. it is not a matter of the degree of nudity; it is a matter of ethical purpose – in the artist, and in the viewer. 10. early in the 1930s, the nazi party allied itself with the german national people’s party. as george stein notes: “this party of the far right represented germany’s conservative establishment: the aristocracy, the east-elbian landowners, the officer corps, the great industrialists, and the high-ranking civil servants” (stein 1968, 10). 11. in support of this perspective, note the following by helmut heiber: “[t]o the very end, hitler indeed succeeded in maintaining a stable level of prices through his pricestop policy, but the wage-level also remained unchanged and what organized body of workers would have accepted that at a time when profits were rising continually!” (heiber 1968, 163). works cited breslin, james e. b., ed. 1985. something to say: william carlos williams on younger poets. new york: new directions publishing. 123 green defilippis, ernest and barbara kestenbaum. 1984. “pride, regret, fascism.” the right of aesthetic realism to be known, no. 595 (august 29). [this is a report of eli siegel’s lecture “how did mr. roosevelt see?” given on august 14, 1970.] goldhagen, daniel jonah. 1996. hitler’s willing executioners: ordinary germans and the holocaust. new york: alfred a. knopf. green, edward. 2005. “a note on two conceptions of aesthetic realism.” british journal of aesthetics, vol. 45:4 (october): 438–440. haffner, sebastian. 1979. the meaning of hitler. trans. ewald osers. cambridge: harvard university press. hanfstaengl, ernst. 1994. hitler: the missing years. new york: arcade publishing. heiber, helmut. 1961. adolf hitler: a short biography. trans. l. wilson: london: oswald wolff ltd. hitler, adolf. 2001. mein kampf. trans. ralph manheim. intro., d. cameron watt. london: pimlico, 2001. kranz, sheldon, ed. 1969. aesthetic realism: we have been there – six artists on the siegel theory of opposites. new york: definition press. kubizek, august. 2006. the young hitler i knew. trans. geoffrey brooks. london: greenhill books, 2006. lang, berel. 1990. act and idea in the nazi genocide. chicago: university of chicago press. littell, jonathan. 2010. the kindly ones. trans. charlotte mandel. new york: random house. the mind of adolf hitler 124 lukacs, john. 1998. the hitler of history. new york: alfred a. knopf. mailer, norman. 2007. the castle in the forest. new york: random house. mayer, arno. 1988. why did the heavens not darken? the “final solution” in history. new york: pantheon books. paxton, robert o. 2005. the anatomy of fascism. new york: vintage books. picard, max. 1947. hitler in ourselves. trans. heinrich hauser. hinsdale, ill: henry regnery company. rosenbaum, ron. 1998. explaining hitler: the search for the origins of his evil. new york: random house. riess, ellen, ed. 1997. the modern quarterly beginnings of aesthetic realism: 1922–1923. new york: definition press. siegel, eli. 1974. “disliking the world, continued.” the right of aesthetic realism to be known, no. 70 (july 31). ---. 1958. hot afternoons have been in montana: poems. new york: definition press. ---. 1981. self and world: an explanation of aesthetic realism.new york: definition press. --. 1976a. “the suppression of goodwill.” the right of aesthetic realism to be known, no.160 (april 21). --. 1976b. “the two pleasures.” the right of aesthetic realism to be known, no. 162, (may 5) 125 green --.1982. “toward stalingrad day.” the right of aesthetic realism to be known, no. 500 (november 3). --. 1976c. “what caused the wars?” the right of aesthetic realism to be known, no. 165, may 26. --. 1993. “what we do with sameness and difference.” the right of aesthetic realism to be known, no. 1047 (april 28). stein, george h., ed. 1968. hitler. great lives observed series. englewood cliffs: prenticehall. trevor-roper, h. r., ed. 1953. hitler’s secret conversations: 1941–1945. trans. norman cameron and r.h. stevens. new york: farrar, straus and young. [expositions 7.1 (2013) 22–32] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 learning from the labs: reimagining ethics instruction karen adkins and abigail gosselin regis university it is a truism to describe philosophy as a theoretical field. but while all fields of study have theories that ground their work, philosophy as a discipline has theory as its subject. in other words, the focus in philosophy is so deeply on theory that applications of theory can be treated as afterthoughts. this is evident both in how philosophers approach the field of ethics in their research, and in how philosophers typically teach ethics courses. the effect on students is that what they learn in the classroom is disconnected from how they actually experience and react to moral conflicts they face. as feminists, we think it important that ethical engagement accounts for our situatedness as moral agents and for the complexity of lived, embodied experience. in this paper, we explain how traditional methods of teaching ethics, as theory that is to be applied, fail to give students useful tools that allow them to address actual ethical problems that they will face. we criticize these traditional methods from a feminist perspective which demands that moral reasoning be grounded in lived experience rather than reflect abstract reasoning about idealized situations. we examine the shift in teaching science—from a formalistic approach that emphasizes getting the answer right, by applying scientific theory correctly to laboratory work, to an experimental approach in which students practice “thinking like a scientist”—as a model for thinking about how we should shift the ways that we teach ethics. finally, we propose several suggestions for how we can reimagine teaching ethics in ways that give students practical tools for moral reasoning that they can use in actual, real-life moral conflicts. 1. the limits of theory: problems with traditional approaches to teaching ethics most american philosophers teach introductory ethics courses in a similar, standard way. this approach is how most of us encountered ethics as undergraduates, and it is how most of us were taught, in graduate school, to teach ethics. the standard approach starts with theory and moves toward application. for the past several decades, the field of ethics has typically been viewed as comprising three major theories: deontology, consequentialism, and virtue theory. these theories are presented to students as alternative ways of understanding and resolving moral dilemmas, where ethical conflicts are typically evaluated according to intentions, consequences, or character, usually not in combination. the historical giants of aristotle, kant, and mill are often taught; contemporary versions of these approaches usually accompany the historical texts. while egoism and relativism are sometimes added to an ethics syllabus, they are typically straw-people arguments (in other words, presented as examples of a very limited ethical theory). it is the rare ethics textbook that treats feminist ethics, and even then it is considered entirely as ethics of care. once the theories are laid out, an ethics class typically proceeds to “apply” the theories to specific topics and cases. often these are hypothetical or idealized cases used to test the limits of 23 adkins and gosselin an ethical rule or generalization. applications are usually to topics that are part of contemporary public discourse—such as abortion, poverty, and vegetarianism—but the applications are very formulaic. discussions usually assume a universal moral subject that is abstracted from particulars: disembodied, unsituated, with no history or context. margaret urban walker calls this approach a theoretical-juridical model, which she describes in this way: “the regnant type of moral theory in contemporary ethics is a codifiable (and usually compact) set of moral formulas (or procedures for selecting formulas) that can be applied by any agent to a situation to yield a justified and determinate action-guiding judgment.” 1 in this model, ethical formulas (given by each of the three major theories) comprise very general rules or principles that are applied through deduction or instantiation, producing the same results for all agents regardless of their particular identities or circumstances. these formulas are actionguiding in the sense that they instruct “the” (universal, disembodied, unsituated) agent what to do in a given—albeit idealized—situation and those relevantly similar. 2 ethical conflicts are more complicated than idealized situations and bizarre thought experiments would suggest, however. the kind of moral reasoning that is useful for addressing actual conflicts requires accounting for complexities and specific details, and it may involve making nuanced judgments that are particular to the agent and to the situation. idealized cases strip particular details in order to try to get at the “essence” of a situation, with the goal of generalizing it as much as possible in order for it to apply to as many particular situations as possible. usually, however, a wide range of specific details are morally relevant, and the goal of generality for the sake of applicability often prevents the recognition of just what is morally salient. eliminating morally salient information produces incomplete moral knowledge, resulting in less accurate and less useful moral judgment. accounting for specific details is important for developing as complete moral knowledge as possible, in order to make more accurate and more useful moral judgments. as theresa tobin points out, this problem becomes magnified when moral examples cross cultures, for the contextual details that get removed for simplicity’s sake can eliminate crucial information that can distort conclusions. 3 moreover, the person doing moral reasoning is not an abstract, universal agent. as iris young explains, moral reasoning is never an impartial endeavor, even if that is its ideal. 4 an individual is always a particular: embodied and situated in specific ways with respect to what she is reasoning about. accounting for this situatedness requires reflexivity about one’s position as a moral reasoner and moral agent. such reflexivity involves critically examining practices of moral reasoning as well as the structural conditions that enable and constrain how one is able to engage in these practices. 5 ethics courses rarely challenge students to do this reflexive meta-analysis, yet a deep understanding and assessment of ethical situations requires it. this reflexivity both enables and requires an analysis of the social power and authority relevant to a given case and to the position of the moral reasoner/agent with respect to that case. 6 in examining a moral conflict, it is important to recognize that power and privilege condition the nature and goals of moral inquiry, including how we select what ethical factors and facts about a learning from the labs 24 situation are morally relevant. our social location helps determine what values, relationships, and responsibilities we find relevant and important. 7 as a consequence of the abstract, idealized, theoretical approach to ethics, ethical analysis in the classroom tends to take a formulaic approach that has little to do with the kinds of ethical dilemmas we want students to contemplate as they move through a reflective life. philosophy’s long tradition of the thought experiment, which should be least necessary in ethics (the discipline dealing with the applications of theory to one’s everyday life), ends up limiting and rendering artificial the value of ethical thinking, simply because the cases students analyze are so often artificial in nature. it is quite unlikely, for instance, that students will find themselves in lifeboats overloaded with artistic masterpieces, selfless doctors, and innocent babies; helming the switch of an out-of-control trolley heading towards two groups of innocent potential victims, trying to decide which harmful track to choose; or indeed, any sort of remotely comparable situation. we suspect that the result of this kind of teaching is students’ coming to see formal instruction in ethics as academic only, and of little use in forming their own beliefs about how they ought to behave. one of us has had anecdotal reinforcement of that belief, having by far the most academic dishonesty of her 20-year career (nearly one-fifth of the class) occur in an applied ethics course she was teaching. this anecdotal experience is backed up by a recent study demonstrating that mba graduates left graduate school, with its instruction in business ethics, with diminished, rather than enhanced, ethical standards. 8 2. challenging the “cookbook” model: analogy to natural science perhaps surprisingly, the natural sciences are a good model for the possibilities that can occur when we question assumptions about how a course must proceed (assumptions which we have made based on how such a course typically has proceeded, and how we learned this field). basic lab science courses used to be called “cookbook” classes, in which students would learn fundamental formulas, theories, and concepts in lectures and then perform basic, standard experiments in labs. the emphasis in natural science lab courses was always on the lecture, where the theoretical material was presented; the laboratory was a mere application of the theory. the idea was always simply to understand the techniques, and the emphasis was on getting the right result. this had a spillover effect into the construction of lab write-ups (students’ accounts of their lab work); the emphasis here was always on writing as a scientist does (learning the professional prose of science). the ongoing revolution in natural science education began in the 1970s. educators realized that students, while achieving technical competence, in fact were learning nothing about how scientists think about information that’s not already explained in a textbook—and, therefore, were not learning how to think like scientists themselves. undergraduate science education was in fact poor preparation for graduate specialization in science. in other words, while students were learning to follow very specific instructions, they were limited to those instructions only. to use margaret urban walker’s words, they were thinking in formulas only, which actually limited their ability to understand lab work that didn’t perfectly fit their models. they did not 25 adkins and gosselin have the cognitive tools to apply what they were learning in their basic lab courses to any independent science work. this is why the “cookbook” pejorative is so apt. in the old model, students could follow a specific scientific recipe competently, but they could not think about what to do with a bench of ingredients; they could not formulate a question and figure out how to answer it independently. this, we fear, is what too many of our students experience in ethics classes. they know how to jerk their kantian and millian knees in response to some standard dilemmas, but they do not know how to respond as an ethically reflective person to actual choices that they confront in their own lives. (e.g., what to do when a student in another class asks to copy their case-study paper?) science educators responded to the “cookbook” problem by reorganizing their labs around principles of active learning. to be specific, innovations included designing experiments that were open-ended (students could select their own variables); 9 having students develop their own hypotheses (instead of testing predesigned experiments given to them by the instructor); 10 and changing the task of the lab write-up from a technical regurgitation of procedure to an audiencespecific persuasive activity. 11 the theme here is common: instead of treating the theory as the focus in the course, and the laboratory as the predictable application of the theory, scientific practice was elevated to an ongoing, recursive, and reflexive activity. assessment has been ongoing (but has generally documented improved student learning), and changes continue to develop in natural science, but the overall theme here is illuminating for thinking about ethics. the old model of teaching science focused on ensuring that students understood the big principles of scientific theories and could apply them correctly; it had limited effects on how students actually thought about and practiced science. we propose that there is a similar “cookbook” paradigm in teaching ethics that is equally limiting. students learn the big three theories of ethics (deontology, utilitarianism, and virtue ethics) and then apply them to case studies so that they can understand basic differences in the theories. but this approach does not teach students how to generate their own questions about how they ought to behave, or how to analyze the kinds of ethical dilemmas they might actually encounter. more particularly, the “cookbook” approach to ethics does not help reveal or illuminate the kinds of ethical challenges that are not simply a result of clashing interests or values, but of deep structural injustices (such as racism, sexism, or class inequality). finally, “cookbook” ethics classes do not have a place for considering questions of context or culture. it is surely relevant to note that the major articles to date discussing the effectiveness of teaching ethics, and comparing different strategies, are mostly in applied ethics fields (medical, nursing, accounting, business ethics). 12 obviously, one reason for this is that students have a sustained self-interest in acting ethically (or at least in compliance with current law). but it is just as striking to observe the paucity of studies and assessment done of traditional ethics courses and their outcomes, including not only student knowledge of ethical theories, but also, more important, how students think about actual choices they encounter. learning from the labs 26 3. reimagining ethics: new approaches to teaching reimagining our approaches to teaching ethics requires intentionally thinking about goals for student learning, a process that involves some of the reflexive analysis that students should be doing. if the typical approach to teaching is producing problematic “cookbook” results, it is necessary to clarify and articulate the goals we teachers want to achieve, so that we can determine what methods will enable us to do so. we (the authors of this paper) propose the following goals. students should be able to recognize what are ethical conflicts and to be able to discern what information they need to know in order to address specific conflicts. students should be able to identify and describe a variety of ethical factors, often occurring concurrently and in relation to each other, that may be relevant to understanding and assessing a situation. when students assess a moral conflict, they should be able to explain the tensions and difficulties inherent to the problem, in depth, to demonstrate what makes it a conflict; and they should be able to explain how the various relevant ethical factors make the conflict a concern of ethics. additionally, they should be able to reflect upon the relationship between these factors sufficiently to be able to develop their own approaches and solutions to the conflict, and to support their ideas with strong reasons by incorporating into their approaches or solutions as much relevant information as possible. with these goals in mind, we propose the following ways to reimagine how an ethics course can foster the moral development of our students: complicate moral reasoning: there are a variety of ethical factors that we as moral agents can look at when examining a moral conflict, including intentions, consequences, virtues, and structural conditions. the traditional approach of applying ethical theory to a case has us isolate a particular factor as the most morally relevant one and cast aside the others (and which factor we select depends on which ethical theory we are applying). in fact, a variety of factors exist in any given situation, and many are relevant to thinking about the nature of the conflict and the ways in which it is an ethical issue. good moral reasoning identifies and accounts for as many morally relevant facts as possible, based on as many ethical factors as seem relevant to the case. good moral reasoning does not involve choosing between one factor or another, nor does it require weighing factors (or facts) as if they were quantifiable and measurable against a single standard. such a unifying approach is falsely reductive, leading to incomplete moral knowledge and inaccurate (and therefore not useful) moral judgment. additionally, such an approach may perpetuate relations of domination and oppression by obscuring the nature of existing power relations, coding the moral reasoning and perspectives of those in positions of privilege as neutral and normal standards against which other forms of reasoning and other perspectives are judged. 13 applying the major ethical theories to specific cases in a formulaic way typically produces such narrow judgments as to be unhelpful and is not actually as action-guiding as the method is intended to be. recognizing and accounting for the vast range of factors and their complicated relationships to each other produces more nuanced, more complicated, but also more accurate and realistically action-guiding judgments. 27 adkins and gosselin reconsider texts: a radical approach to teaching ethics would require us as teachers to rethink what readings we assign. one justification for teaching canonical texts by aristotle, kant, and mill in an ethics class is our strong obligation to bring historical texts to bear on contemporary approaches. as the authors of this paper, we find this obligation very important, especially since we teach at a jesuit institution that values situating contemporary problems and approaches within a historical context and especially within the liberal arts tradition. however, philosophers often use these canonical texts in such a formulaic way as to make their theories what mill calls “dead dogmas,” 14 rather than dynamic participants in a living dialogue about how we ought to live. transforming our teaching requires us to approach these canonical texts in radically different ways and/or to incorporate alternative texts to which we may bring a fresh approach. alternative texts may include different historical texts and/or contemporary readings that approach moral conflict in more nuanced ways than the traditional “three major theories” generally do. focus on actual moral conflicts rather than abstract theory: we philosophers need to broaden our understanding of what constitutes an ethical problem. ethics courses (and scholarship) should examine actual problems experienced by particular individuals, under specific circumstances. while testing the limits of a theory through abstract thought experiments may be an enjoyable mental exercise, it does not have real-world application: it is not useful for enabling students to develop the reflective tools to approach moral conflicts that they will actually encounter throughout their lives. ethics courses should be structured around the examination of real moral conflicts rather than around the rote learning (and application) of the mechanics of three theories. address the structural conditions of ethical conflicts: we generally approach ethical conflicts as problems that an individual faces and has to resolve, leaving social problems of justice to the realm of political philosophy. this strict division of labor between ethics and political philosophy is somewhat arbitrary, however, since many ethical problems have both individual and social dimensions; and it is problematic insofar as it construes what constitutes an ethical versus a political problem too narrowly. many ethical conflicts have structural conditions that determine who (which particular individuals) experiences the conflict and under what circumstances. structural conditions—such as existing political and economic systems and social relations (e.g., gender, race, class)—are usually in the background, unrecognized and therefore unaccounted for and unaddressed. however, they ought to be in the foreground of our moral consideration, as they provide essential context for the particular moral conflicts we encounter. 15 ignoring specific details of actual cases prevents us from developing a deeper understanding of the contexts which give rise to ethical conflicts and thus gives us incomplete information for making ethical analyses. identifying relevant structural conditions, on the other hand, allows specific details of the conflict to be recognized as morally salient and thus enables them to be accounted for when addressing the conflict. take advantage of peers in an ethics class. if the general emphasis in ethics classes should be less on whether or not students can apply specifics of theories “correctly,” and more on whether learning from the labs 28 or not they can recognize a live ethical issue and work out some of the complexities in its analysis, group discussion becomes crucial to achieving this result. having students sort out the various issues relevant to a particular ethical question, as well as generate some of the relevant structural or contextual questions that may affect their answers, requires examining multiple perspectives. this has been demonstrated in medical ethics: a recent study of medical students’ case study discussions of an ethical question established that students who participated in smallgroup discussions of the case were more capable of identifying ethical issues, “seeing multiple viewpoints, and justifying their actions.” 16 while class discussion is often incorporated into philosophy classes, we are suggesting here that it should be worked more intentionally into classes. for instance, it is common for professors to use discussion as a way of revealing many arguments, but (ultimately) to have the grades in a course based on individual written assignments, designed to argue for a single solution to the case. discussions often happen after the individual assignments are completed. this tends to minimize the learning that can happen from thinking about other students’ perspectives, and to maximize the need for a student to reproduce particular details of a theory. there are a variety of ways in which student perspectives could be more thoroughly explored in a class. moving from the easiest to most difficult: scheduling discussions before writing assignments occur; requiring individual writing assignments to incorporate (not merely as a straw person) an alternative viewpoint from a peer; and developing peer assignments (such as team-based-learning models) that are actually structured into the syllabus for part of the grade. each or all of these would encourage, and concretely value, the exploration of multiple perspectives on any one particular issue. experiment with alternative models of writing assignments. case study analyses are by far the most common writing assignment for ethics courses, and they have some of the same weaknesses that “cookbook” lab write-ups do. the emphasis is on getting the technical details right (can the students recognize when a hypothetical imperative can be rendered in categorical terms without contradicting itself?), as opposed to exploring the difficulties of the question itself. some of the models with which science has experimented—in particular, persuading a specific, and skeptical, audience 17 —could easily translate to an ethics class. for instance, asking students to write a position paper, or a memo for a policy organization or cabinet officer, could be framed so as to incorporate ethical reasoning while requiring that students apply this reasoning in a more complicated way than simply considering individuals abstractly. develop examples and cases with students carefully. felicia ackerman offers up a cautionary note about the dangers of some of the kinds of approaches suggested here. one of her rules for her philosophy classes, even her ethics courses, is counterintuitive: “we never discuss our personal lives.” 18 while she recognizes the merit of applying theory to one’s personal life, she reminds readers that students may be more tentative to think creatively about a difficult example if they know it is one that a student is struggling with or has done so (such as rape, illness, disability). this is a fair warning, but one that would not rule out our approach, just some ways in which it might be conducted. professors experimenting with this approach to ethics teaching 29 adkins and gosselin should probably lay out some ground rules as they develop case studies with students. for example, ethical cases should be varied, students should not be expected to volunteer their direct personal experiences, and, most crucially, cases should span cultures or structural differences through the course of a semester. trolley problems, surgically attached violinists, and overstuffed lifeboats are equally problematic (or not) in any culture—their genericness strips them of interest. but questions about consumption, allotment of medical resources, and limitations on free speech (just to name a few) could be radically different depending on the specifics of the culture and the audience. we think it is exactly that sort of variety that can generate a productive, applicable, and provocative ethics classroom. as an illustration of our proposal, one of us recently taught rebecca skloot’s the immortal life of henrietta lacks in an introductory class. 19 skloot explains that ms. lacks’ cells have been consistently used for many important medical breakthroughs in the sixty years since they were first taken from her; a central ethical issue examined in the book, however, is the fact that doctors used ms. lacks’ cells without her or her family’s consent, or even knowledge. the book’s exploration of consent in medical ethics ended up being rich material for class discussion, precisely because there were basic ethical issues present, and because there are so many structural injustices explored in the book. students raised and compared their own experiences with the health care system, as well as their own institutional experiences of racism or sexism, and how these structural injustices materially changed how they thought about the core ethical issues. students also recognized that their weighting of the value of consent, as well as the practical and life-giving results of the research based on henrietta lacks’ cells, was complicated once they started thinking more seriously about some of these institutional barriers. in another example, one of us had a particularly profound discussion about the use of stigmatizing language. not only did students share their observations about the use of terms such as “retarded” among their peers, but a couple of male athletes also shared their experiences with being called by their teammates—and, they admitted, calling their teammates—derogatory sexist and homophobic terms. from this, the class moved into a discussion about gendered power relations and the norms of masculinity that such language represented. this concrete example of stigmatizing language—an example which came from students who themselves used the language without thinking about its significance—allowed us to examine gender norms and relations in a way that was deeply relevant for and meaningful to students. while a discussion like this occurs spontaneously, teachers should pay attention to ethical situations that students raise as meaningful to them, and explore the ethical and structural dimensions of those situations carefully (without judgment) and gently (so that all students in the classroom feel safe as they participate and listen). paying attention to and incorporating into discussion the real-life ethical issues that students think about can be an important way to practice and develop truly practical moral reasoning. learning from the labs 30 4. conclusion as we have argued in this essay, an undergraduate ethics class should not be an exercise in formal, abstract reasoning but rather provide practical tools to enable students to address real-life moral situations. philosophy should follow the lead of science in replacing a “cookbook” method of teaching with a more realistic, experimental approach which requires students to deal with complex situations to which formal rules cannot give perfect guidance. by broadening what constitutes the practice of moral reasoning, ethics classes can provide students with practical ways to address the actual moral conflicts that they will encounter in their lives. notes 1. walker 1998, 52 (italics in the original). 2. ibid., 52–53. 3. tobin 2011, 611. 4. young 2011, 99–105. 5. for discussion of how epistemic or intellectual authority typically (and uncritically) underlies practices of moral reasoning, see walker 1998, 54–55. 6. ibid., 55–56. 7. for an analogous discussion of how even scientific knowledge is conditioned by values and assumptions that underlie scientific inquiry, see longino 1990, 40–45 and potter 2006, 78– 79. 8. callahan 2004, 290. 9. see berg et al. 2003, 354. 10. see hofstein and lunetta 2003, 32. 11. see moskovitz and kellogg 2001, 920. 12. see smith et al. 2004 and brinkmann and ims 2004. 13. young 2011, 112. 14. mill 1978 [1859], 34. 15. see o’connor 2002. 16. smith et al. 2004, 268 (emphasis added). 17. see moskovitz and kellogg 2011, 919. 31 adkins and gosselin 18. ackerman 2011, 7. 19. skloot 2010. works cited ackerman, felicia nimue. 2011. “what we will not discuss in my class.” teaching philosophy apa newsletter 11.1, 7. berg, c., r. anders, v. christina bergendahl, bruno lundberg, and lena tibell. 2003. “benefiting from an open-ended experiment? a comparison of attitudes to, and outcomes of, an expository versus an open-ended version of the same experiment.” international journal of science education 25.3, 351–372. brinkmann, johannes, and knut j. ims. 2004. “a conflict case approach to business ethics.” journal of business ethics 53, 123–136. callahan, david. 2004. the cheating culture: why more americans are doing wrong to get ahead. new york: harcourt. harding, sandra. 1991. “‘strong objectivity’ and socially situated knowledge.” in whose science? whose knowledge? thinking from women’s lives. ithaca, ny: cornell university press, 138–163. hofstein, avi, and vincent lunetta. 2003. “the laboratory in science education: foundations for the twenty-first century.” science education 88, 28–54. longino, helen. 1990. science as social knowledge: values and objectivity in scientific inquiry, princeton, nj: princeton university press. mill, john stuart. 1978 [1859]. on liberty. indianapolis, in: hackett. moskovitz, cary, and david kellogg. 2011. “inquiry-based writing in the laboratory course.” science 332 (may 20), 919–920. o’connor, peg. 2002. oppression and responsibility: a wittgensteinian approach to social practices and moral theory. university park, pa: pennsylvania state university. potter, elizabeth. 2006. feminism and philosophy of science. london and new york: routledge. skloot, rebecca. 2010. the immortal life of henrietta lacks. new york: random house. learning from the labs 32 smith, sherilyn, kelly fryer-edwards, douglas s. diekema, and clarence h. braddock, iii. 2004. “finding effective strategies for teaching ethics: a comparison trial of two interventions.” academic medicine 79.3, 265–271. tobin, theresa, 2011. “the relevance of trust for moral justification.” social theory and practice 37.4, 599–628. walker, margaret urban, 1998. moral understandings: a feminist study in ethics, new york and london: routledge. young, iris marion, 2011. justice and the politics of difference. princeton, nj: princeton university press. the future of classics [expositions 5.2 (2011) 14-17] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 classics in italy and great britain barbara graziosi durham university my contribution focuses on classical literature, and offers a brief discussion of its readers in italy and great britain. i start, however, with a more general observation about that literature. homer, the central author of the classical canon, has continuously featured in education for over 2,600 years. xenophanes observed, in the sixth century bce, that “from the beginning everyone learnt from homer” (fr. 10 dk): we can now trace the history of homeric education from xenophanes to the schools of athens (cf. aristophanes, fr. 233 k–a), the library of alexandria in lower egypt, the first latin translation by the teacher livius andronicus, the scholarly commentaries and notes produced in the monasteries of byzantium, the (largely disastrous) efforts of boccaccio and petrarch to establish the first chair of greek in florence, and the school and university programs that have followed since. homer’s iliad has been translated into all major languages worldwide: young 1 offers a catalogue of homeric translations, from the editio princeps to the year 2000. the catalogue, though not quite as complete as he claims, offers a precious starting point for considering the geography as well as the history of homeric readers. what emerges, of course, is the extraordinary status of the iliad and the odyssey as texts that were, and are, relentlessly passed on – not just across generations, but also across linguistic, cultural and political barriers of all kinds. there are at least two perspectives from which to view the extraordinary status of classical literature. from one standpoint, the centrality of the classical canon may seem like a fact of life. harold bloom, for example, makes the following claim: “everyone who now reads and writes in the west, of whatever racial background, sex or ideological camp, is still a son or daughter of homer.” 2 emily greenwood and i have criticised bloom’s restriction of homer’s influence to “the west,” 3 but even leaving that issue aside, it seems that bloom’s genealogical model of literature unhelpfully plays down the active role of readers in the making of the text. we are not simply born the sons and daughters of homer – and then engage in some oedipal anxiety of influence – we actually become readers of homer, largely through education. and if we take seriously the perspective of educators, the centrality of homer no longer looks like a fact of life, but rather depends on one’s own commitment, evaluation, and choices – as well as on those of other people (colleagues, parents, publishers, and managers in a position to decide what needs to be passed on). this is where a different kind of anxiety sets in – not an anxiety of influence – but an anxiety of extinction. for professional classicists that anxiety quite simply comes with the job: there is a perennial concern that classical literature may not matter, or that it will not matter (and that therefore those who devote their lives to it may not, or will not, matter themselves). generation after generation, specific people invested in classical antiquity and thus perceived the 15 graziosi risk that ancient texts, objects, and ideas may no longer be valued. their lives were sometimes quite literally on the line. when faced with that kind of pressure (or even the lesser pressures of current educational reforms), the resilience and creativity of individuals and institutions become the focus of attention. the status of classical literature is then simultaneously a given, and something that is continuously given, or passed on, between specific people. this dual perspective helps one to approach the specific contexts in which classical authors are read. i offer here some remarks about education (and its effects on publishing) in italy and great britain – two national contexts with which i am familiar – as a contribution to this more general discussion of the future of classics. the principles that inspire italian education are, fundamentally, those of the french revolution: school is conceived of as public, compulsory, and free of charge. while private schools do exist, they are numerically and culturally insignificant: they largely cater to special needs and are, in any case, bound by the national curriculum. employers and higher education institutions recognise only state examinations and, therefore, private institutions prepare their pupils for those (and often struggle to achieve the set standards). in 1940 the riforma bottai created the scuola media inferiore, a middle school for students aged between 11 and 14, which included three years of mandatory latin instruction. after the abolition of schools for professional training in 1962, the middle school became compulsory for all students, and latin requirements were reduced from three years of instruction to two. this means that all those who have been educated in italy between 1962 and 1977 have been exposed to some latin and can – or could, at some point in their lives – translate basic sentences. in 1977, latin was abolished from the middle school curriculum, but classical literature in translation (particularly epic) was, and remains, a core subject. after middle school, italian students can choose between several different options. the most prestigious secondary schools are the licei: the influential riforma gentile of 1923 distinguished between the liceo classico, with an emphasis on the humanities, and a new liceo scientifico with an emphasis on mathematics and experimental sciences. the liceo classico, still arguably considered the most prestigious secondary school in italy, includes five years of compulsory instruction in ancient greek and latin: the final examination includes unseen translation, seen translation of canonical authors and literary interpretation. the liceo scientifico, which gradually gained in popularity over the liceo classico, includes five years of compulsory instruction in latin only, at the end of which students are examined in unseen and seen translation from canonical authors and on literary interpretation. in 2011, roughly 103,000 students graduated from the liceo scientifico and 51,000 from the liceo classico. several other secondary schools, such as the licei delle scienze umane and the licei linguistici, also offer instruction in latin, though not up to the same level as the two traditional licei. today, about one-third of the eighteen-year-old population of italy has studied some latin. the average for the population as a whole is much higher, largely because of universal training in latin between 1962 and 1977. classics in italy and great britain 16 latin and greek do not feature in the national school curriculum in great britain. there is some political pressure to change this (the mayor of london boris johnson, for example, prominently lobbies to add the latin language to the curriculum) but, in any case, the national curriculum plays a more limited role in great britain than it does in italy. private education is extremely influential, not just because those who receive it often go on to hold positions of influence in society (johnson himself being an example), but also because it contributes to the aspirations and values of the state-educated majority. latin and greek are important subjects in the most highly regarded “public” (i.e., private) schools of great britain, such as eton college. eton was the first school to call itself “public,” in opposition to private tuition offered at home, and the education offered by religious schools open only to members of a particular church. latin and greek define the education offered in the public schools and thereby have an impact on the state sector too. there they generally feature as extra-curricular subjects and activities. the work of teachers, volunteers and educational organisations (such as the joint association of classical teachers) is crucial in bringing latin and sometimes even greek to state-educated students: one frequent scenario is that of the inspired and committed instructor and her/his selfselected band of pupils meeting at lunchtime or after hours to learn greek or latin. extracurricular subjects and activities are important in british education, partly because the curriculum is thought of as guarding against deteriorating minimal standards, rather than as defining the highest levels of achievement. the closest british equivalent to the italian licei were the grammar schools: these institutions had their origins in the middle ages and, in the late victorian period, were organized to provide secondary education across the united kingdom (with the exception of scotland, which developed a different system). from the mid-40s, grammar schools became selective, statefunded institutions. in the 1960s and 1970s, the state sector moved to a non-selective system of comprehensive schools, and the grammar schools either closed down, went comprehensive, or became private. greek and latin became marginal subjects in the state sector but – thanks to a visionary group of teachers and university lecturers – the subject of “classical civilization” became an attractive option for students, especially in the last two years of their school education. the focus of the final school exam in classical civilization are the cultures of greece and rome: ancient literature features, in translation, as part of that wider focus. a-level qualifications in classical civilization are proving to be an attractive option for students – to the point that there is now a shortage of teachers, and an increased interest in studying the languages of the greeks and romans as a result of learning about their cultures. publishing responds to school education much more directly than to university programs. in italy, greek and latin grammars are very profitable, as are dictionaries: franco montanari’s new ancient greek lexicon sells over 20,000 copies every year, for example. pocket editions of classical authors, with introductions, facing translations, and commentaries also enjoy a large market: readers who know a little latin or greek often want to check the occasional phrase or sentence in the original, even if they read most of the work in translation. the academic quality of the editions, translations and commentaries published by bur, mondadori, einaudi, carrocci, 17 graziosi and several other italian publishers is usually very high, even though they address the needs of a general, educated readership. daily newspapers sometimes sell editions of classical works as weekly supplements. in short: many italian editions found on the shelves of the most prestigious academic libraries around the world, can actually be bought in italy at street corners, newspaper kiosks, and train stations. trade publishing in great britain works differently: grammars, editions, commentaries, and dictionaries are not profitable: they rely on the support of academic institutions and charities. what does sell – and sells increasingly well – are books on classical civilization. when discussing the future of classics, it is useful to view the academic discipline as part of a wider engagement with classical antiquity. that engagement is fundamentally shaped by national traditions, as vasunia and stephens show in classics and national cultures. 4 in italy, translation of ancient works (in school and in publishing) offers an important means of access to the ancient world. in great britain, people tend to focus more broadly on the civilization of the greeks and romans (again, in education as in publishing). that difference helps to explain the choices of individual academics, as well as broader trends and strategies. for example: my friend and contemporary, lara nicolini, who works in italy, has published a latin grammar and a translation and commentary of apuleius’ metamorphosis: those are her most significant publications in terms of her impact on the general public. for me, working in great britain, my main trade publication is a (forthcoming) history of the olympian gods: that book quotes and discusses a range of classical authors, but within a broader engagement with ancient culture. predictably, my agent pitched it to publishers as a book on classical civilization. beyond the differences, this short sketch of national contexts suggests, perhaps, one thing: that by reading homer and other ancient authors (whether in the original, translation or quotation) we join a vast and diverse community of readers. notes 1. philip h. young, the printed homer: a 3,000 year publishing and translation history of the iliad and the odyssey (jefferson, nc: mcfarland, 2003). 2. a map of misreading (oxford: oxford university press, 1975), 33. 3. homer in the twentieth century: between world literature and the western canon, eds. barbara graziosi and emily greenwood, eds. (oxford: oxford university press, 2007), 1–3. 4. classics and national cultures, eds. susan a. stephens and phiroze vasunia (oxford: oxford university press, 2010). [expositions 6.2 (2012) 23-32] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 what can we know of what the romans knew? jacqueline feke university of chicago in what did the romans know? (2012) daryn lehoux paints a complex portrait of roman intellectual life. ethical, political, and cultural traditions inform the conventions of scientific inquiry and fact-making. he at once presents a broad network of intellectual artifacts – he examines a plethora of texts, such as by cicero, lucretius, ptolemy, and galen – and he offers a deep analysis of how ancient history may inform the philosophy of science, and vice-versa. a common thread through the monograph consists in attempts by philosophers, ancient and modern, to propound realism in the face of skeptical challenges, to assert that scientific theories are true and that it is possible to know that they are true. lehoux adopts a pragmatist theory of truth and justification, and he argues that roman philosophers, mathematicians, and physicians were justified in asserting the truth of their scientific theories. in the following, i examine three components of lehoux’s multi-faceted argument. first, i address his proof of the existence of the concept of natural law in the roman period, well before the sixteenth century, its generally accepted terminus post quem. lehoux divorces the terminology “law of nature” from what he takes to be the concept’s essential content, regularity in nature. once the concept is free of its philological constraints, lehoux argues that historians may justifiably take the account of planetary stations in ptolemy’s almagest, for instance, to function as a law of nature, even though the text does not label it a law as such. i attempt to bridge philology and content by analyzing ptolemy’s accounts of law and reason in on the kritêrion and hêgemonikon and the harmonics. i argue that an analogy comparing law and regularity in nature is consonant with ptolemy’s epistemology and, therefore, despite the fact that ptolemy does not use the phrase “law of nature,” the metaphor suits his philosophy of science. second, i address in what way ptolemy’s epistemology responds to the so-called “skeptical challenge”, as lehoux contends. third, i examine lehoux’s own response to the skeptical challenge. lehoux explores how the ancient historian may justify a realist rather than a relativist position, and i suggest that lehoux’s historiography and philosophy of science are consistent only if we take his historiography, like his philosophy, to depend on a pragmatist theory of truth. laws of nature in his third chapter, “law in nature, nature in law,” lehoux argues that the concept of a “law of nature” is not an invention of sixteenthor early seventeenth-century natural philosophy as is generally supposed. the phrase itself, leges naturae or foedera naturae, occurs in latin texts, and lehoux analyzes passages from lucretius’ de rerum natura and vergil’s georgics to what can we know? 24 demonstrate that these authors not only include the phrase “law(s) of nature” but that they use it to denote strict regularity in nature, which lehoux takes to be the concept’s essential content. lehoux acknowledges that pure philology would not persuade many, perhaps most, philosophers of science that a law of nature is an ancient rather than a modern concept. an intellectual history is necessary, and it must respond to philosophical investigations of the concept. before challenging jane ruby’s and j.r milton’s accounts of what constitutes a natural law, lehoux distills their and others’ criteria into two: (a) they should be specific statements that such-and-such is a law of nature (as opposed to vaguer statements that there just are some laws of nature), and (b) the x in “x is a law of nature” should be descriptive, explanatory, and preferably mathematical. (lehoux 2012, 64) lehoux notes that the first criterion, “the specificity criterion”, dismisses most of the ancient examples he has presented in the chapter. lucretius and vergil observe that nature, broadly conceived, behaves regularly, but they do not articulate specific laws. i would contend that one of the examples lehoux presents might meet the specificity criterion. at de rerum natura 6.906ff., lucretius states that a law of nature is responsible for the attraction between magnets and iron, and he proceeds to explain the attraction by means of atomism. yet, even if this case meets the first criterion, it does not meet the second. the law is descriptive, but what is explanatory is not the law of attraction but the atomism underlying it. moreover, the law is manifestly not mathematical. newton’s laws of motion customarily are taken to be archetypal cases of laws of nature, and lehoux uses their notoriety to his advantage. he examines why it is that newton’s laws are paradigmatic: “so what is significantly new in the principia? there are three possible candidates: (1) newton’s equivalence of axioms with laws: axiomata, sive leges motus. (2) the specificity of the phrase laws of motion. (3) the content of the laws themselves” (lehoux 2012, 68). the first candidate is a lexigraphical innovation, the second is philological, and the third concerns content. lehoux maintains that what is essential to a law of nature is not lexigraphical or philological, for these properties are superficial. instead, it is the content – which lehoux takes to be strict regularity in nature – that marks a law. if one takes the content to be the only essential property of laws of nature, then one may find examples that are laws even if they lack the philological and lexigraphical features. this content-based approach allows lehoux to bring greek texts into the conversation. as lehoux notes, only one reference to a “law of nature” exists in the greek corpus. the opening of the hippocratic text on generation/on the nature of the child reads “law governs everything” (in lehoux 2012, 57). for a law that is descriptive, explanatory, and mathematical, albeit not labeled “law,” lehoux looks to ptolemy’s models of planetary motion and, in particular, his account of planetary stations. lehoux argues that ptolemy’s account at almagest 12.1, h450451, meets the content-based criterion no less than newton’s laws. 25 feke it is true that ptolemy never uses the phrase “law of nature,” but he does examine law, and the institution of the court of law, alongside his epistemological theory. in on the kritêrion and hêgemonikon, ptolemy constructs an analogy juxtaposing judicial adjudication with the criterion of truth, the process by which a human being judges an object for the sake of knowing the truth. although lehoux addresses ptolemy’s criterion in his fifth chapter, “the embeddedness of seeing” (see especially lehoux 2012, 126-128), he does not address it in his discussion of ptolemy’s (tentative) laws of nature. i hope to demonstrate that reference to on the kritêrion, as well as the harmonics, strengthens lehoux’s argument, as it reintroduces the judicial metaphor. it is undeniable that ptolemy does not discuss laws of nature per se but i will make the case that ptolemy’s concepts of law and rational form, especially as manifested in the movements and apparent stations of celestial bodies, are analogous and that the metaphor afforded by the phrase “law of nature” is consonant with ptolemy’s epistemology. in on the kritêrion, ptolemy delineates one-to-one correspondences between the processes of adjudication in the law court and in the soul: criteria in the law court in the soul 1. that being judged: act what is 2. that through which it is judged: presentation sense perception 3. that which judges: chief magistrate intellect 4. that by which it is judged: law reason 5. that for the sake of which it is judged: social harmony truth in the judicial process, a magistrate brings a law to bear on an action in order to judge whether it accords with social harmony. in other words, the law is the means by which a magistrate passes judgment on an action. in the soul, the intellect judges an object by means of reason. as means by which an agent makes a judgment, law and reason are analogous. where would the regularity in nature, such as ptolemy’s account of planetary stations, reside in the epistemological schema? i would argue that it lies not in the schema itself but at its conclusion. it is not a component of the process of judgment; it is the result of the process, the complete, concluding judgment the intellect makes. at first glance it might seem that the regularity might be the object judged, but for ptolemy this first category puts forward a problem to be solved, such as an object’s yet-to-bedetermined size or weight. in the case of planetary stations, the problem to be solved is the manner by which a planet gives the appearance of a station, and the solution, arrived at by way of the criterion, is the geometrical account of how the planet moves along its epicycle, as articulated at almagest 12.1, h450-451. thus far, ptolemy’s account of planetary stations does not seem to correspond to a law. only reason, the means by which the agent makes the judgment, is analogous to law. reason, however, is not simply a property of human souls for ptolemy. acknowledging its broader, generic definition elucidates in what way ptolemy’s account of planetary stations may indeed correspond to a law. in harmonics 3.3 and 3.4 – transitioning from the study of what can we know? 26 harmonics in music theory to psychology, astrology, and astronomy – ptolemy defines reason as a cause that produces order and proportion in matter and movements. in harmonics 3.3, he propounds a trichotomy of causes: “now causes at the highest level fall into three kinds, one corresponding to nature and concerned only with being, one corresponding to reason and concerned only with being in a good way, and one corresponding to god, concerned with being in a good and eternal way.” ptolemy divides reason into three subspecies: “for reason, in general and without qualification, is productive of order and proportion, while harmonic [reason], in particular, is [productive of them] in the class of what is heard, just as is imagistic [reason] in that of what is seen, and critical [reason] in that of what is thought” (ptolemy harmonics 3.3, d92, translation modified from barker). in other words, reason produces a good form, order and proportion, in objects, whether they are audible, visible, or cognitive. the power, or capacity, of harmonia is one form of the cause corresponding to reason. it produces a harmonic form in or among objects. ptolemy explains in harmonics 3.4 that, although this power exists to some degree in all self-moving objects, it exists to the greatest extent in objects with a complete and rational nature (τελειοτέρας καὶ λογικωτέρας φύσεως). according to ptolemy, three sets of objects have the most complete and rational nature and, moreover, display this nature in their movements. in addition to musical pitches, they are human souls and celestial bodies: these [movements], as we said, are those of things that are more complete and more rational in their natures (αὗται δέ εἰσιν αἱ τῶν τελειοτέρων, ὡς ἔφαμεν, καὶ λογικωτέρων τὰς φύσεις), as among the divine are [the movements] of the heavens, and among the mortal [the movements] of human souls, most particularly, since it is only to each of these mentioned that there belong not only the primary and most complete (τελειοτάτης) sort of movement, that in respect of place, but also the characteristic of being rational (λογικοῖς). (ptolemy harmonics 3.4, d95, translation modified from barker) among the most complete and rational of physical objects, celestial bodies display their rational nature in their movements. an account of planetary motion, therefore, is an account of their rational form. if one returns to on the kritêrion and takes some liberty to interpret the judicial analogy as indicating that all reason – not only critical reason but also harmonic and imagistic – is analogous to law, then, i would suggest, an account of a rational form, celestial or otherwise, does correspond to a law. ptolemy’s accounts of the rational movements of celestial bodies, including their stations, are analogous to laws, and one may justifiably consider them, metaphorically speaking, laws of nature. the skeptical challenge in the chapter “the embeddedness of seeing,” lehoux characterizes ptolemy’s and galen’s theories of vision as responses to the so-called “skeptical challenge.” lehoux declares, “we will 27 feke see that both ptolemy and galen adopt identical strategies for meeting the sceptical challenge, where they both put together detailed physical explanations of how seeing happens in the world, explanations that for them close off any potential inroads for the sceptics” (lehoux 2012, 107). it is important to examine in what way, if any, ptolemy addresses skepticism. after all, ptolemy does not explicitly discuss skepticism, as galen does. the pyrrhonist attack on the criterion of truth was robust in the second century, as sextus empiricus’ treatment of the subject attests, but when ptolemy delineates his theory of cognition in on the kritêrion, as well as in harmonics 1.1, he does not address skeptical challenges. a.a. long agrees: no committed idealist or sceptic would be converted to materialism or empiricism by reading ptolemy on the criterion and commanding faculty. his essay not only omits any reference to academic and pyrrhonian attacks on the foundations of knowledge, it also avoids the slightest suggestion that any controversy attends an account of the criterion of truth. never hinting at any of the battery of available arguments for or against scepticism, which were commonplace in his day, ptolemy writes as if the only issue is to settle the relative criterial contributions of sense perception and intellect, from an implied basis of general agreement concerning human accessibility to how things really are. (long 1989, 153) if ptolemy’s epistemological accounts make no reference to skepticism, in what way, if any, does his theory of vision respond to the skeptical challenge? lehoux characterizes ptolemy’s theory of vision as a robust challenge to skepticism mainly, it seems, because it is a physical rather than a representational theory. it is not that a human being creates representations of the external world; rather, the external world impresses itself upon a human being through the capacity of sense perception and its concomitant faculty of phantasia, the medium that transmits sense impressions to the intellect. lehoux implies that the continuous, unbroken physical chain of contact from external object, through the senses and phantasia, to the intellect in ptolemy’s theory bolsters it against skeptical assaults (lehoux 2012, 127-129). it is important to note that ptolemy’s epistemology is informed by several philosophical traditions – including the platonic, aristotelian, and stoic – but the fundamentals of his criterion of truth, in particular the relationships among sense perception, phantasia, and the intellect, derive from aristotle’s epistemology. while ptolemy does not explicitly address skeptical attacks, aristotle does. in metaphysics 4.5, aristotle examines pre-socratic challenges to the possibility of knowledge, and he argues that previous philosophers have fallen victim to a fatal mistake. they have identified being with the perceptual, external objects with appearances. emphasizing the distinctions between the potential and actual, quality and quantity, and special and common sensibles – properties particular to one sense or perceptible by many senses – aristotle divorces being and the perceptual and he affirms that it is indeed possible to know what is true. the concept of special sensibles is especially significant here. aristotle argues that the skeptical claim that an object what can we know? 28 gives rise to contrary appearances at a given time is in fact false. when the intellect examines sense impressions, it can acknowledge that the senses have authority over their special sensibles and, consequently, it will not err when judging what is true. aristotle declares, “but concerning color sight [is authoritative], not taste, and concerning flavor taste, not sight; each of which never says at the same time concerning the same object that it is at once this way and not this way” (aristotle metaphysics 4.5.1010b16-19; cf. aristotle de anima 418a11-14). because special sensibles do not give rise to conflicting appearances, they undermine the skeptical challenge. in on the kritêrion, ptolemy appropriates the theory of special sensibles and he affirms, “certainly, on its own each of the faculties naturally tells the truth whenever it is concerned only with its own proper object…” (la16, translation modified from liverpool/manchester seminar on ancient philosophy). the truth of special sensibles is foundational to ptolemy’s epistemology. because the senses transmit accurate impressions of external objects, knowledge is possible. again, ptolemy does not address skeptical attacks here, when describing special sensibles, or elsewhere, but because aristotle articulates his theory of special sensibles as a defense against skepticism, one could argue that ptolemy’s epistemology responds to the skeptical challenge by extension from aristotle. although ptolemy does not address skeptical attacks, aspects of his epistemological theory derive from accounts that do. eikos muthos: an impediment to epistemic progress? lehoux not only provides an expansive portrait of roman science, but he also reflects on the nature of historical study and its relevance to the philosophy of science. concerning the former, lehoux examines the degree to which the historian can understand ancient scientific thought. after all, lehoux’s portrait of roman science is complex. intellectual, social, and cultural factors contributed to the production of roman scientific texts. how is it, then, that a historian can analyze and interpret, in the actors’ own terms, ptolemy’s models of planetary motion, galen’s pneumatic theory, and the “fact” that garlic is antipathetic to magnets? a pessimist might argue for complete incommensurability, that these theories are untranslatable to the modern perspective. more optimistically, a historian might suppose that through prolonged engagement with these texts she can become increasingly familiar with the several causes of ancient science, that she may slowly but surely gain understanding of the network of contributing factors, and that, therefore, she has the ability to construct an increasingly accurate portrait of ancient thought. lehoux characterizes this impression as follows: at the softer end, approximation, the historian or ethnologist can argue that long-term exposure to another culture can give one ways of seeing its terms, concepts, and categories that allow for at least proximate (and presumably also improvable) translation, and so over time i can come to find ways of understanding and explaining galenic pneuma that do not necessarily imply that i have found some neutral third ground from which to view both 29 feke galen’s world and my own and through which to shuttle material back and forth. (lehoux 2012, 231) lehoux acknowledges that, at best, a historical study approximates the truth. i would add that, if we admit progress in historical study, it is asymptotic. even with increasing familiarity, it remains impossible to know for certain what a historical actor intended by a text. while this uncertainty is not a concern for the critical theorist, it marks the limit of inquiry for the intellectual historian. i would like to suggest that this inherent uncertainty marks the history of science as an eikos muthos, a likely story. for an analogue, one may look to plato’s distinction between certain and likely accounts. in the timaeus, plato’s principal interlocutor affirms that an account of the sensible realm, as opposed to the intelligible, is limited to a likely story. timaeus prepares socrates for his cosmological account with the following warning: don’t be surprised then, socrates, if it turns out repeatedly that we won’t be able to give accounts concerning a great many subjects – on gods and the coming to be of the universe – that are completely and perfectly consistent and accurate. instead, if we can come up with [accounts] no less likely than any, we ought to be content, keeping in mind that both i, the speaker, and you, the judges, are only human in nature. so we should accept the likely tale on these matters. it behooves us not to look for anything beyond this. (plato timaeus 29c-d, translation modified from zeyl; cf. 59c6 and 68d2) according to plato, an account of the sensible realm is at most probable. similarly, the historian may at most present a likely account of ancient scientific thought, but of what, then, would the historian have certainty? lehoux argues for the certainty of epistemic progress. again, lehoux does not limit history to the examination of historical texts. he applies the historical lens to contemporary, twenty-firstcentury sciences, and he asks, what position must the historian, or the historically informed philosopher, take on the debate over scientific realism? a significant hurdle to the realist is the pessimistic induction, the argument that because so many past “successful” theories have since been proven false, the success of current theories does not guarantee their truth, as in the future they, too, will likely be proven false. lehoux takes the pessimistic induction as a serious worry for the realist, and he seems to formulate his position in response. he affirms that the philosopher must not privilege modern scientific theories simply because of their modernity. the philosopher may desire a transhistorical perspective from which to judge the relative truth of scientific theories, and the realist may desire some transhistorical criteria by which to judge the relative truth of scientific theories, but it is impossible to remove oneself from one’s network of contributing causes – the intellectual, social, and cultural conditions, and prejudices, of contemporary science. what can we know? 30 lehoux implies that one may approach, although not assume, this transhistorical perspective by adopting a consistent, singular, historically informed methodology. in order to evaluate the relative truths of scientific claims, one must employ the same methodology when examining roman and twenty-first-century scientific texts. the fear is that this approach will yield unadulterated relativism, and, indeed, lehoux’s realism seems to fight a constant battle with relativism. in the final chapter, “worlds given, worlds made,” lehoux ultimately gestures toward a pragmatist theory of truth. he quotes william james, one of the earliest proponents of pragmatism: “true ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify. false ideas are those that we cannot…. the truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. truth happens to an idea. it becomes true, is made true by events. its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication” (in lehoux 2012, 236; emphasis james’). because a transhistorical perspective is impossible to achieve, lehoux adopts an epistemology that affirms the situatedness of science. it seems that, for lehoux, the only robust theory of truth is a pragmatist one. lehoux uses pragmatism to make a case for scientific realism. he contends that, with a pragmatist theory of truth, it is possible to accept epistemic progress without biasing modernity. he explains as follows: although a jamesian theory would seem to want to conclude that pneuma and sympathy were once true, the fact that they are no longer true is not just a function of our adoption of a different worldview, but instead a function of the nontrivial fact that in the intervening 2,000 years we think we have had experiences that disprove them or render them useless or superfluous. magnetism has built around itself a host of tests and theories that were not part of the verification process available to the romans, and so magnets-as-sympathetic have been shown to be false. this fact may also allow for a (qualified) notion of something like epistemic progress, without the normally attendant triumphalism. (lehoux 2012, 237) when asserting epistemic progress, it is not necessary to privilege modernity. the passage of time is not the crucial factor but, rather, the accumulation of methods of justification. one need not assume a relativist position and judge the antipathy of garlic and magnets to be true for the romans but false for us. according to lehoux’s realism, one may assert that antipathy is simply false, and he may do so because in the intervening period of time human beings have developed means of verification that were unavailable to the romans. it seems that a crucial point for lehoux’s argument is that it is not the case that the types of verification performed in the roman period and the twenty-first century are simply different in kind. if it were, then the historian-philosopher would have no means to compare the relative merits of the two systems, and relativism would win its battle with realism. the question, then, is what criteria establish the superiority of the modern systems of justification over the ancient. lehoux is unclear on this matter, but he seems to imply two: (1) the modern system is larger than the ancient, and (2) the modern is more rigorous than the ancient. 31 feke concerning the first, lehoux observes that the number of methods of verification has increased over time, and he implies that this increase, in and of itself, establishes epistemic progress. a greater number of methods, however, would not establish the superiority, or success, of modern methods over the ancient. it is easy to imagine many unsuccessful methods juxtaposed with a few successful ones. lehoux’s second implied criterion, the comparative rigor of the methods, is necessary to determine their relative merits. lehoux gestures toward this criterion when characterizing the type of truth pragmatism allows: “but if, for the pragmatist, verifiability leads to variability, what kind of truth is that? the pragmatist answer is: the only kind we have. truth is a stamp of approval that we give things as a way of saying that they meet certain – and most rigorous – criteria” (lehoux 2012, 237; emphasis lehoux’s). affirming epistemic progress – and the justifiability of considering certain ancient theories false and twenty-first-century theories true – lehoux implies that today’s methods of verification are more rigorous than the ancient. while i do not know a single person who would disagree with this assessment, it requires justification. lehoux seeks a criterion that is transhistorically indisputable, one that ptolemy, galen, or any other historical actor would accept, but would ptolemy agree that astronomy today is more rigorous than in the second century? would galen concede the superiority of twenty-first century medicine? i believe that they would, but, this speculation aside, lehoux’s historiography could undermine his attempt to establish epistemic progress. if the historical enterprise is at most an eikos muthos, an approximate, albeit likely, account of the past, how can the historianphilosopher justifiably and definitively judge twenty-first-century systems of justification to be superior to the ancient ones? perhaps lehoux’s pragmatism resolves the issue. the historian cannot know for certain that her account of roman scientific theories is accurate, but employing the most rigorous criteria in the history and philosophy of science, one may, following james, validate, corroborate and verify that twenty-first-century science stands as an improvement on ancient science. conclusion lehoux’s what did the romans know? (2012) is an innovative and commendable exercise at the intersection of ancient history and the philosophy of science. i have attempted to reinforce significant portions of his argument against potential challenges, historical and philosophical, and i hope that lehoux’s monograph will inspire ancient historians and philosophers alike to consider the consequences of each other’s disciplines for their studies. what can we know? 32 works cited aristotle. 1967. aristotle. de anima. trans. ross, w.d. oxford: clarendon press, 1961 (repr. 1967). –––. 1970. aristotle’s metaphysics, 2 vols. trans. ross, w.d. oxford: clarendon press, 1924 (repr. 1970 [of 1953 corr. edn.]). barker, andrew. 1989. greek musical writings, 2 vols., cambridge: cambridge university press. burnet, john. 1902. platonis opera, vol. 4. oxford: clarendon press (repr. 1968). düring, ingemar. 1930. “die harmonielehre des klaudios ptolemaios,” göteborgs högskolas årskrift 36, no. 1. lehoux, daryn. 2012. what did the romans know? an inquiry into science and worldmaking. chicago: university of chicago press. liverpool/manchester seminar on ancient philosophy. 1989. ptolemy: on the kriterion and hegemonikon. in the criterion of truth: essays written in honour of george kerferd together with a text and translation (with annotations) of ptolemy’s on the kriterion and hegemonikon, ed. p. huby and g. neal, 179-230. liverpool: liverpool university press. long, a.a. 1989. “ptolemy on the criterion: an epistemology for the practising scientist.” in the criterion of truth: essays written in honour of george kerferd together with a text and translation (with annotations) of ptolemy’s on the kriterion and hegemonikon, eds. pamela huby and gordon neal, 151-178. liverpool: liverpool university press. plato. 1997. timaeus, trans. donald j. zeyl. in complete works, ed. john m. cooper, assoc. ed. d.s. hutchinson. indianapolis: hackett publishing company. microsoft word schmidt proof.docx [expositions 11.2 (2017) 34–56] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 pleading the case: paying attention to works of fiction as well as fictional worlds erik schmidt gonzaga university abstract this essay argues that philosophical literary criticism should take questions about medium, genre, and form more seriously. section one distinguishes between works of fiction and the fictional worlds they realize. section two explains why philosophers should pay more attention to the features of a work of fiction that enable it to realize a fictional world. section three uses shakespeare’s othello to illustrate how one formal feature of a work, dramatic irony, can be philosophically important. “and we would allow her advocates who are not poets but lovers of poetry to plead her case in prose without meter, and show that she is not only delightful but beneficial to orderly government and all the life of man. and we shall listen benevolently, for it will be clear gain for us if it can be shown that she bestows not only pleasure but benefit. plato, republic (607d–607e) introduction fiction plays an important role in philosophy. to see this, we only need to think of such prominent thought experiments as john searle’s story about an isolated person translating chinese characters, frank jackson’s story about a color-blind color scientist, or judith jarvis thompson’s story about awakening to find yourself surgically connected to a violinist in renal failure. these stories, and others like them, figure prominently in a wide range of philosophical efforts to develop counterexamples, illustrate complex concepts, and establish various modal claims.1 35 schmidt fiction also makes an appearance in philosophy in other ways. for example, metaphors play a fundamental role in the way our minds work, generating a range of conceptual entailments that organize our thoughts and experiences.2 we might think here, for example, of metaphors like space as a container, the blank slate, the architecture of knowledge, mind as a machine, or even the various military metaphors that shape the assessment of arguments across many philosophical debates. such metaphors show us that a basic fictional device plays an important role in any philosophical effort to articulate and defend a position. the recognition that fiction plays an important role in philosophy motivates some philosophers to cross disciplinary boundaries and engage in an activity best described as a form of philosophical literary criticism, a practice that explores a range of philosophical questions raised by various works of fiction. this raises a basic question: should philosophers approach works of fiction (e.g., novels, plays, paintings, or films) in a way that differs from how they might approach the simpler stories and thought experiments found in a philosophical text? few philosophers deny that the literary qualities of many works of fiction make them compelling and enjoyable, but are concerns about medium, genre, and form worthy of any special philosophical attention? how far across the disciplinary boundary separating philosophy from english should philosophers be willing to go? in this essay, i defend the claim that philosophers should approach works of fiction in a way that differs from how they approach the counterexamples, illustrations, and thought experiments found in philosophy because concerns about medium, genre, and form are relevant to the philosophical discussion of many works of fiction. i defend that claim in three steps. first, i distinguish between attending to a work of fiction and attending to the fictional world it realizes and i outline how that distinction fits into contemporary debates concerning the cognitive value of fiction. next, i offer a general argument for why it is important for philosophical literary critics to attend to the manner or way that a work of fiction realizes a fictional world. finally, i turn to shakespeare’s othello to offer one example of what this might look like. overall, i hope to defend the philosophical value of attending to the features of the works that enable us to experience various fictional worlds. i hope, in the words of plato’s republic, to plead the case that some works of fiction are not only delightful, but philosophically useful. paying attention to works of fiction as well as fictional worlds 36 1. works of fiction vs. fictional worlds in addition to using well-bounded counterexamples, illustrations, and thought experiments, many philosophers refer to works of literary fiction in their work.3 this tendency is not surprising. it is natural for philosophers who love novels, plays, dramas, and films to engage their favorite works from a philosophical perspective. in the 1980s, however, many anglo-american philosophers began to use works of fiction not only to illustrate or motivate various philosophical positions or claims but to do philosophy.4 this move was noted by arthur danto in his 1984 address to the american philosophical association.5 danto pointed out that in addition to philosophical reflections on literature as a practice (philosophy of literature) and a recognition that philosophical writing counts as a form of literature (philosophy as literature), philosophers now recognize the philosophical significance of literature (philosophy and literature). anthony quinton identified a similar trend in british philosophy in an address he gave to commemorate the opening of the center for philosophy and literature at the university of warwick in 1985.6 in his talk, quinton advocated not only the exploration of philosophy as literature, but also the exploration of philosophy as it is found in literature. he pointed to the wide range of philosophical material found within works of imaginative literature and suggested that while this content is often latent or imbedded in a work, it can be clearly discerned by “a process that goes beyond a straightforward reading.”7 i will call this activity of doing philosophy by engaging a work of fiction philosophical literary criticism or plc for short. plc rose to prominence in anglo-american philosophy during the 1980s through martha nussbaum’s discussion of the insights we gain from a philosophical reading of henry james and stanley cavell’s discussion of skepticism in seven shakespeare plays.8 this rise coincided with several prominent critiques of modern ethical theory and, in many cases, those two trends joined forces. bernard williams, for example, criticized moral theorists for regarding ethical conflicts as a conflict of beliefs that can be resolved through the application of rational principles, rather than conflicts of desire which are not easily resolved and often leave room for legitimate forms of regret.9 as a result, williams argued that we can face tragic dilemmas where we cannot fully meet the demands of two or more conflicting requirements. philosophy, he suggested, should therefore attend to the emotional fabric of human life rather than consistent sets of universal principles. this suggestion motivated some philosophers to focus on the way works 37 schmidt of works of fiction can direct our attention to ethically relevant features of our lives and the conflicts found within them. that move, reinforced by a subsequent rise of work on virtue ethics, moral particularism, and human emotion, remains one driving force behind ethically-oriented plc today. plc is alive and well in contemporary anglo-american philosophy. it ranges from simon critchley and colin mcginn, who offer philosophical readings of shakespeare,10 to the large number of books found in the blackwell philosophy and popular culture series, including such volumes as house of cards and philosophy: underwood’s republic and downton abbey and philosophy: the truth is neither here nor there. admittedly, many efforts to engage popular culture from a philosophical perspective are best seen as efforts to motivate or introduce various skills of philosophical reflection to students and the broader culture by connecting philosophy to something people already enjoy. other instances of plc, however, attempt to do original philosophical work. my argument here will focus on the latter. in this section i want to draw attention to the tendency of plc to focus almost exclusively on the fictional worlds that are realized through various works of fiction. i want to highlight the way critics focus on the characters, events, and environments found in the fictional world that a work of fiction realizes and tend to ignore various literary or formal devices that enable a work of fiction to realize that world. i want to suggest that this is an important oversight and that philosophical critics should pay attention to the works of fiction they engage and not simply the fictional worlds those works realize. we can clarify that distinction between a work of fiction and the fictional world it realizes by defining a work of fiction as a particular realization of a text.11 a work of fiction, on this account, is a text that has been produced or instantiated by being written, sung, spoken, performed, or even just simply entertained. one text can be realized by multiple works. this can be done in a variety of ways, using a wide range of media and formal devices. one can realize the text of hamlet, for example, with finger puppets or through animation or as a picture book just as well as through a staged performance or an edited edition of the play. all those works can, within reasonable limits, count as instances of hamlet since each one realizes the text by instantiating it in the world. the relationship between a text and work, on this account, is the relationship between a type and a token.12 a text counts as a unique abstract object or type that can be tokened or realized in concrete form as a performance, book, or utterance. printed books in different languages, times, paying attention to works of fiction as well as fictional worlds 38 or locations count as tokens of the abstract type of a given text in the same way that staged performances count as tokens of a text. the common english tendency to treat the terms ‘text’ and ‘book’ as interchangeable would be a mistake on the account i adopt here. according to this account, any concrete object or event in the world that tokens the abstract type of a given text counts as a work. individual books and dramatic performances are equally works of fiction since each one is a token of some text. as shakespeare famously reminds us in sonnet 55,13 this relationship between token and type is partly responsible for the enduring power of literary fiction. the need to actualize a text in the world is one source of its durability. it renders texts nearly indestructible because they are so easily reproduced. we can define a fictional world, along these lines, as the imagined space occupied by the characters, actions, and settings specified by the content of a text and realized through a work of fiction. it is the world we enter through our imaginative engagement with a work. this distinction between a text and a work enables me to state my concern precisely: plc tends to ignore the tokenspecific properties of the works of fiction it explores in exchange for a focus on the fictional worlds specified by the texts that are realized through those works. as tokens, works of fiction have many properties that are not properties of the texts they realize. these include the token-specific properties that enable a work to realize the abstract type of a text. the literary qualities of a manuscript or the dramatic qualities of a performance would be examples of such token-specific properties of a work. some of these token-specific properties, like font, line spacing, or paper weight, will usually be unrelated to the contents of the fictional world a work realizes while other properties, like personification, metaphor, and poetic form, may be crucial to the shape or character of that fictional world.14 by ignoring or setting aside those token-specific properties of a work of fiction, plc takes the fictional worlds they realize at face value, treating them as proxies for the actual world. philosophical critics may not fail to appreciate such things as shakespeare’s sophisticated use of poetic form, but such literary features tend not to figure into efforts to show what philosophers can learn from fiction. plc tends to ignore questions related to medium, genre, and form to focus more carefully on the characters and events found in various fictional worlds. i won’t deny that this is a reasonable strategy. like thought experiments, fiction offers up discrete characters and events that have been modified at will through a creative process. they allow us to suspend seemingly universal or unchanging requirements and assumptions, while 39 schmidt holding others fixed in a way that, like the hypotheticals frequently found in legal reasoning, provides the widest possible application or scope to the concepts and assumptions that shape our intuitions and thought. fiction enables us to engage worlds that are inherently subjunctive and flexible, allowing us to bring real intuitions and commitments to bear on worlds that are not limited by the constraints of perfect realism. but unlike the thought experiments of philosophy, fiction does this through well-crafted stories of compelling characters and events. so why not use works of fiction in similar ways, but to greater effect? most versions of plc follow this model, which we can see clearly in the approaches taken by four prominent anglo-american philosophers who defend plc. martha nussbaum approaches plc from a broadly aristotelian perspective, suggesting that by engaging the lives of fictional characters we hone our empathic imagination in ways that can be transferred to the real or actual world.15 gregory curry approaches plc from the perspective of empirical psychology, claiming that fiction enables us to project ourselves into complex simulated situations, which refines our creative imagination and our ability to test and revise a wide range of values in light of their consequences within those imagined situations.16 noël carroll argues that works of fiction can draw on our latent memories, emotions, intuitions, and other resources we bring to our encounter with the fictional world created through a work of fiction and those can resources provide a maieutic argument in favor of various theses suggested by the work.17 peter kivy, finally, argues that literary texts do not provide support for the thematic statements or claims they propose to a reader directly. rather, the evidence they provide is found in the way our experience of a work of fiction involves an extended engagement with both the fictional world that we experience through a work as well as our experience of the actual world that we inhabit as a reader. he argues that we test a theme or claim against a wide range of experiences, both those we experience imaginatively through our encounter with literature as well as those we have in the actual world, while reading or reflecting on a text.18 but we might wonder, what can we learn by engaging a work of fiction rather than the fictional world it realizes? what kind of philosophical work can be done by paying attention to things such as characterization, plot, or perspective? in the next section i explain why i think it is important for philosophers to focus on works of fiction as well as fictional worlds. paying attention to works of fiction as well as fictional worlds 40 2. why philosophical critics should attend to literary features of works of fiction one motivation to focus on token-specific features of a work of fiction is to ensure that plc offers a distinctive way of doing philosophy and not simply a more interesting or aesthetically pleasing context in which to do it. it is helpful to situate this suggestion within the context of two enduring criticisms of the claim that plc counts as a distinct philosophical practice. the first challenge is to show how the philosophical insights plc attributes to a work of literature connect to that work.19 if plc cannot show how the insights it discovers can be based on features of the work it explores then it fails to show that work’s philosophical value. without a clear connection between an insight and a work, the work of fiction becomes essentially dispensable. it is neither necessary nor sufficient to bring about the insight. it is not sufficient since something other than the work was needed to derive the insight and it is not necessary since it is not clear why someone might not arrive at the same insight independent of some engagement with that work. the work of fiction becomes, in an important sense, coincidental to the insight that the philosophical critic associates with it. it plays an autobiographical role, describing how a critic came to a given view. this makes it hard to see how the work could play a philosophical role, explaining how it might generate or support a philosophical insight. the act of plc, on this model, looks less like an act of interpretation than an act of paraphrase, where some theme found in a literary text is rendered into a philosophical proposition that is offered up for independent, or nonliterary, examination.20 one way to respond to this concern is to connect plc’s philosophical insights to features of the work of fiction under consideration and not simply the fictional world that work realizes. this response, however, immediately raises a second concern. does a connection between the tokenspecific features of a work and the insights gained through plc provide us with a reason for thinking those insights are true? does it connect the insights to the work in the right way or in a way that is relevant to the work of philosophy? one important source for this second concern is that fiction does not make claims about reality.21 the point here is not to deny that the contents of a work of fiction can resemble the actual world or that works of fiction do not draw on a reader’s background knowledge of states of affairs about the world. they decidedly do. a work of fiction that made no appeal whatsoever to the world we inhabit as readers or audience would be nearly incoherent. fiction inevitably draws on a wide 41 schmidt range of background experience and knowledge and many authors work hard to ensure that even the smallest details they include are factually accurate.22 nevertheless, this does not show that works of fiction refer to the world since resemblance does not entail reference. it is true that some cases of depiction involve reference through resemblance, but that does not show us that resemblance is either equivalent to reference or able to establish it on its own. the easiest way to see this is that resemblance is symmetrical (if sally resembles mary than the reverse is also true) while reference is not (if the name “sally” refers to some person sally, that person does not also refer to her name). similarly, resemblance is not enough to establish a reference or else twins would refer to each other and forgeries would refer to the objects they resemble rather than fake them. to put this point about the relationship between resemblance and reference in more literary terms, the fact that the fictional world realized by a work of fiction resembles the world we live in does not entail that that work should be viewed as an instance of literary realism just as the fact that some of the events depicted through a work resemble features of an author’s life does not entail that a work of fiction is autobiographical. this point is often neglected by the tendency of many philosophers to treat all works of literature as instances of literary realism.23 simply put, the common philosophical concern about whether fiction can provide us with a reason for thinking that a claim about the world is true may be the wrong question to ask about most works of fiction. after all, the point of a work of fiction is to produce an experience, not a belief. its defining goal is to enable a reader or viewer to experience a fictional world. fictional worlds are clearly similar in many respects to the world we inhabit as readers or viewers but that similarity does not automatically make them descriptions of our world. i am not denying that some fictions are intended to be didactic or to communicate some lesson or claim. what i am pointing out is that even in those cases, the goal of such a work, as a work of fiction, is to produce an experience, regardless of how that experience might be subsequently used or even intended to be used. writing fiction, in other words, is always an act of creation. an author provides us with a written work that enables us to experience a fictional world that is unique, individual, and separate from the actual world we inhabit as a reader or audience. that act of creation is also present in the act of engaging a work of fiction as a reader or viewer. stories are incomplete by their very nature.24 that incompleteness stems from events the author inevitably leaves out. (how many children did lady macbeth nurse? how does isabella respond paying attention to works of fiction as well as fictional worlds 42 to the duke’s marriage proposal at the end of measure for measure?) it also includes important features of a character’s psychology. (how has volumnia shaped coriolanus, as his mother?) it can even extend to the meaning of a given line of dialogue. (at the end of taming of shrew, is katherine’s response sarcastic, showing she will never be tamed, ironic, making fun of petruccio in front of his friends, a con, colluding with petruccio to take his friends’ bet, or an indication she now sees her marriage as a flawed, though stable, contract?) as janine utell puts this important point about the act of creating a story-world, “gap-filling is seen to be a creative process, and literary texts call upon their readers to embrace a certain level of difficulty and complexity, to reject the superficial or straightforward. the gaps and how to ‘repair’ them should not be clean and apparent; that is what enriches a narrative and our experience of it.”25 the act of reading, in this way, is an act of creating that draws on features of the world a reader inhabits as well as patterns in the ways a reader views the significance of those features, which is partly why fictional worlds come to resemble the worlds we inhabit as viewers and readers. but we must remember that resemblance, no matter how interesting or powerful, is not the same as reference and so the creative acts of writing and reading are not best understood to count as acts of description. as samuel johnson puts this in his preface to shakespeare, “imitations produce pain or pleasure, not because they are mistaken for realities, but because they bring realities to mind.”26 this raises a final concern for many philosophers. if works of fiction aren’t in the game of generating beliefs about the world, how can plc tie a philosophical insight to a work of fiction in a truth-relevant way? the answer, i would suggest, is that while works of fiction are not, strictly speaking, either true or false, they can be plausible when they conform to the principles of probability and necessity. fiction, to draw on the greek concept of hypotyposis, aspires to create something that is alive to a reader or viewer. so focusing on the features of a work of fiction that make something plausible [eikos] or alive can be philosophically relevant. liveliness rather than truth may be the relevant force behind plc. to see why, we might notice that some works of fiction explore how various concepts at the heart of our lives (e.g., identity, agency, forgiveness, and commitment) work their way through the various determining conditions (e.g., language, gender, class, and education) that give those concepts their shape and importance. what may be important, therefore, is not just what a work 43 schmidt says about those concepts but how a work presents that content. what enables us to recognize the concepts that are in play in that work and what do the conditions that enable us to recognize them reveal about the role they play in our lives or the lives of people around us? it is important, in other words, to see that the insights plc can provide into certain issues can go beyond showing how certain constructions of those concepts might be possible. fiction can do more than point us in the direction of a circumstance or event that establishes some sort of modal claim about the world. works of fiction, we might say, are no more in the game of confirmation than they are in the game of reference. they are oriented by the goal of recognition. so, when it comes to concepts such as identity, agency, forgiveness, and commitment, a work of fiction can reveal some of the ways in which those concepts are shaped or determined by a wide range of personal and social conditions and those revelations can be important to philosophers. this elevates works of fiction beyond mere thought experiments and provides one reason why plc may require us to do more than imagine the contents of a fictional world. if the goal of fiction is simply to direct us toward a possibility that would confirm a modal claim, then we would only need to focus on the content of the fictional world that a work realizes. if we are interested in the further question of plausibility or in questions about such things as the determining conditions for various ethically and socially important concepts, we will need to look at the conditions that shape those concepts in the work we are criticizing. we will need to identify, in other words, the features of the work that enable us to recognize the plausibility of the way a given concept accounts what we experience as a reader or audience. when philosophical critics engage a work of fiction, therefore, they have reason to focus on that work and not simply the fictional world it realizes, since a philosophical exploration of some concepts through a work of literature will require careful attention to the features of the work that are responsible for our recognition of the conceptual issues it raises. for example, the features of a work of fiction that condition our experience of certain concepts, such as identity, agency, forgiveness, and commitment, may well point us to similar forms of conditioning or conceptual shaping in the world.27 the work of fiction may not refer to those conditions in the world but the work will do more than confirm their possibility. focusing on how certain conditions function within a work of fiction, therefore, can help us recognize how similar features of the world condition or shape a range of important concepts that characterize our lives. paying attention to works of fiction as well as fictional worlds 44 this argument points back to aristotle’s famous discussion in the poetics of the contrast between homeric epics and history. aristotle writes, “it is not the poet’s function to relate actual events, but the kinds of things that might occur and are possible in terms of probability or necessity.”28 fiction describes events that can be credibly imagined. something can succeed as fiction, therefore, even if it is physically impossible. we might think here, for example, of nearly any instance of magical realism, where we encounter such fitting yet bizarre events as frances, in sarah ruhl’s melacholy play: a contemporary farce, being transformed into an almond. we must be convinced as an audience that the events the fiction describes can be plausibly imagined. this also brings us back to plato, a famous critic of dramatic poetry. as glenn most, nikos charalabopoulos, and other contemporary scholars point out, plato was not a critic of fiction but a critic of the unthinking way in which fiction tends to be consumed by cultures that fail to be oriented by a love of truth.29 he was a critic of lying or misleading myths [pseudomythos]. he rejects the use of the attractive or persuasive properties of myth to seduce people to win an argument. but when a myth is situated within the context of a philosophical pursuit of truth, plato was willing not only to endorse the use of fiction as part of philosophical inquiry, he was willing to use it himself. what is important for my thesis is that what distinguishes likely myths [eikos mythos] from lying myths [pseudo mythos] in plato’s dialogues is their form. what makes a myth likely [eikos] is the way it is told. its parts must be alive [hypotyposis]. it must be a microcosm of the world it reveals and the story must be told in the context of a conversation oriented by a love of truth. all three of those conditions come together clearly, for example, in the eschatological myths of the phaedo and timaeus. the way those myths are told enables them to provoke us as philosophers and to support a relationship to fiction that can be characterized as a living tension rather than a purely sophistical competition or contest [agon]. all of this suggests that plc may need to approach works of fiction in ways that differ from the counterexamples, illustrations, and thought experiments we find throughout philosophy since the features of a work of fiction that enable it to realize the fictional world specified by a text may be philosophically important. in such cases, it will be important for plc to focus on token-specific properties of a work and not simply on the contents of the fictional world that work realizes. it may sometimes be important, in other words, for plc to attend to questions about such things as medium, genre, and form. in the final section of this paper i will illustrate how that might work by 45 schmidt offering account of how shakespeare’s use of dramatic irony in othello reveals an insight into the conditions that shape our vulnerability to deception. 3. a case study: othello, deception, and dramatic irony dramatic irony, where the audience knows more than the characters onstage, is a central dramatic device across multiple shakespeare plays. he uses it for comic effect in such plays as the comedy of errors, where the audience is aware of the presence of two sets of twins who were separated at birth, and to enhance pathos in plays like much ado about nothing, where only certain characters onstage and the audience know the full backstory to the events surrounding claudio’s shaming of hero at the altar. indeed, when we look at the development of shakespeare’s plays, spanning the early and mature comedies through the problem plays and romances, we find a consistent development of increasingly sophisticated ways he uses dramatic irony to control a range of other important features of his plays. how does this relate to plc? its relevance can be found in the substantive role dramatic irony plays in characterization, plots that turn on the vulnerability of relationships of trust, and several other philosophically relevant features that shape our experience of the plays. for example, dramatic irony provides an explanation for the gradual moral darkening of shakespeare’s comedies. in the comedies, we find at least three rough levels of knowledge or understanding, ranging from comic characters, such as dogberry, malvolio, and bottom, who have little contextual knowledge or awareness, to romantic heroes, such as benedick, orlando, and orsino, who have a partial awareness of what is going on around them, and finally, heroines, such as portia, rosalind, and helena, who have nearly full contextual knowledge or awareness. one way to capture the increasing darkness of the later comedies and romances, therefore, is to track a hero or heroine’s ability in each play to control the action of the play through superior knowledge. as we move into the late plays, like the winter’s tale and the tempest, we increasingly find heroes who are unable to fully grasp or control the action of the play and we see final comedic resolutions that are more dependent on some magical power or a character with an awareness that rises well above the audience’s. the world onstage becomes darker because, in an important sense, it has become more tragic. the characters find themselves increasingly vulnerable to a world in which the primary forces that determine their fates are increasingly beyond their understanding or control. paying attention to works of fiction as well as fictional worlds 46 noticing this trend and the importance of dramatic irony enables a philosophical critic looking at othello to think more carefully about the role differences of knowledge play in human relations and the role they play in human vulnerability. shakespeare uses at least three theatrical devices to enhance the force of dramatic irony in othello, devices that different productions highlight in different ways. each device heightens an audience member’s sense of anxiety and displacement in ways that enables them to more clearly experience their vulnerability to deception. first, shakespeare introduces the racial tension of a sexual relationship between a black moor and a white venetian. the political dimensions of that tension, as evidenced by the long history of controversy over the play’s performance, has unsettled audiences for generations. second, shakespeare leaves the audience without any comic subplot, which grants the audience little relief from the building tension. third, he deprives the audience of any onstage confidant. there is no horatio or macduff to partially embody the audience’s perspective onstage. even iago’s soliloquy at the end of the first act undermines any chance at confidence. unlike most soliloquies in shakespeare, where the audience is drawn into a character’s honest act of choice,30 iago is indifferent to the actual source of his motivation. his soliloquy reveals what coleridge famously calls “the motive-hunting of [iago’s] motiveless malignity.” he confides what he will do but not why, which prevents him from becoming a confidant or confessant through his soliloquy. all three dramatic devices are important because they heighten an audience member’s experience of the fragility of iago’s trap, which include the flimsy pretexts of a handkerchief and an overheard conversation. one word from any one of several characters would reveal iago’s ruse. the dramatic power of the play turns largely on simple questions that are not asked and simple things that are not said. each audience member becomes a silent physical witness to the fragile string of events that undo othello. this anxiety is reinforced by shakespeare’s fourth dramatic device, the use of nested audiences. for example, in the key scene where iago traps othello into demoting roderigo, there are three audiences onstage, each with differing levels of knowledge about what happened. the audience experiences the vulnerability created by asymmetries of knowledge unfold in front of them in part because they witness several characters gradually become aware of that same vulnerability in themselves. all of this brings out a dramatic feature of deception that we might otherwise overlook. as bernard williams points out, most philosophical accounts of deception rest on what is said or on 47 schmidt what he calls the “fetishizing of assertion.”31 in a traditional case of deception, a person who is deceived assumes that the sincerity of a speaker is a reliable indicator that the speaker intends the listener to accept the content of the stated proposition as true because the listener trusts that the speaker’s belief in the truth of the statement is a source of his or her motivation to speak. the central example of deception, on such an account, is an explicit falsehood presented as the truth. in othello, we see a different form of deception. what iago says is generally not explicitly false but suggestive, incomplete, or misleading. the faulty beliefs that results from iago’s plan do not involve false descriptive propositions as much as inapt characterizations or interpretations of the meaning or significance of what someone sees or hears. this undermines othello’s autonomy not by severing the person who has been deceived from the world through false belief but through a distorted picture of the world. those distortions are achieved through prompted acts of imagination32 as well as telling an explicit truth but not the whole story. it depends on iago’s being able to work with whatever interpretation othello arrives at in each case, which leaves othello vulnerable to the illusion that he controls the outcome. iago is, in an important sense, more street magician than mastermind. this reading of othello diverges from the well-known readings offered by stanley cavell and tzachi zamir.33 following jacques lacan, both philosophers emphasize what they see as othello’s pathological willingness to be deceived. for cavell, othello’s willingness is rooted in his need to deny his own finitude as a man in the face of desdemona’s sexual desire while for zamir it is rooted in his excessive need to maintain a heroic and pure self-image. i am arguing, in contrast, that the fragility of iago’s ruse pushes us not to recognize some underlying pathological willingness on othello’s part but rather a more general vulnerability to the conditions of trust that make communication possible. the play reveals the double vulnerability of any listener. we can be deceived by statements that are explicitly false but stated in a way that the speaker’s motivation appears to be her belief that the statement is true. but we can also be deceived by statements that are true as descriptions but are put forward in a way that distorts our interpretation of the significance or meaning of the facts they describe. it preys on the way all listeners, like all readers, must fill in various gaps in what has been said through a creative act of interpretation. this second sort of deception arises most clearly in cases like iago’s manipulations, where the act someone performs through some statement differs from the act suggested by the content of that statement. the split in this second paying attention to works of fiction as well as fictional worlds 48 case is not between the speaker’s statement and the world but between the content of a statement and what the speaker is trying to do through that statement. two simple examples from the play are iago’s common references to assurance and certainty which serves to reinforce othello’s doubt and iago's consistent use of apparent restraint. he claims, for example, that he would rather have his tongue ripped out of his mouth than to implicate cassio (2.3.221–222), but that statement itself does much of the work to condemn him, since othello now assumes that any gaps in the information iago presents would only further indict cassio. to get a handle on this second type of deception we need to clearly distinguish between the content of what someone says and the act he or she performs through their statement. it is fundamentally a performance, a performance that fails to pay the same respect to the truth as an outright lie. so, there is something we miss if we fail to see the distinction between the two modes of deception that become clear once we attend to the specific ways in which shakespeare uses dramatic irony to enhance the dramatic tension of othello. paying attention to the dramatic features of the play reveals something important about a variety of deception that is inherently dramatic in character and the features of the play that heighten an audience’s experience of othello’s vulnerability to iago points directly at similar conditions that shape our vulnerability to similar sorts of deception in the world.34 the insight gained through this admittedly small piece of plc is grounded in attention to a dramatic performance of a play rather than simply looking at the content of the fictional world that play realized. that attention reveals a performative dimension to certain types of deception that we might otherwise overlook. conclusion the goal of this essay has been to question the way many philosophical critics approach works of fiction. by highlighting a distinction between works of fiction and the fictional worlds that are realized through those works we can see that philosophical critics tend to focus on fictional worlds and they neglect important features of the works that realize those worlds. they treat works of fiction in much the same way that philosophers approach the fictions found in the counterexamples, illustrations, and thought experiments we see across philosophy. i have argued that focusing on works of fiction, rather than the fictional worlds those works realize, will open up 49 schmidt a distinctive variety of philosophical literary criticisms and it will make it easier to plead the case that fiction is not only delightful, but philosophically beneficial. endnotes 1. some philosophers argue that literary fictions count as a species thought experiment. see, for example, elgin and carroll, “the wheel of virtue.” other philosophers call that equivalence into question. see, for example, davies. 2. a full account of the role metaphor plays in human thought can be found in lakoff and johnson. 3. a collection of passages in which philosophers have discussed shakespeare can be found in kottman. 4. we might note that unlike their anglo-american counterparts, continental philosophers have never viewed literary or fictional language as especially problematic. analytic philosophy, in contrast, started with a set of concerns about language that erected a barrier between the cognitive value of description and the literary value of fiction. we see this history, for example, in frege’s pivotal discussion of sense (sinn), reference (bedeutung), and tone (stimmung) and his argument that sense and reference can both have cognitive value while tone can have only poetic value. reference has cognitive value, according to frege, because it enables a sentence to engage the truth conditions of the proposition it expresses. it connects a sentence to the features of the world that it describes. sense, meanwhile, can have cognitive value because individuals can take two different propositional attitudes toward statements that differ in terms of sense even when they share the same referent. tone, in contrast, cannot have cognitive value because we cannot take two different cognitive attitudes toward two statements that share a referent but differ in tone. as he writes in uber sinn und bedeutung, “in hearing an epic poem we are interested only in the sense of the sentences and the images and feelings thereby aroused. the question of truth would cause us to abandon aesthetic delight for the attitude of paying attention to works of fiction as well as fictional worlds 50 scientific investigation. hence it is a matter of no concern for us whether the name ‘odysseus’ has a reference as long as we accept the poem as a work of art” (frege 63; emphasis added). 5. danto. 6. quinton. 7. quinton 275. 8. nussbaum; cavell. the current state of philosophical literary criticsm in the angloamerican tradition of philosophy is well surveyed in hagberg. 9. williams, ethics and the limits of philosophy. 10. critchley; mcginn. 11. this definition of a work of fiction is developed and defended more fully by richard gaskin 28–31. 12. the distinction between type and token has been used in a range of philosophical contexts, including linguistics, ethics, metaphysics, and the philosophy of mind. in this essay, i draw on its use in aesthetics to distinguish between musical works and individual performances. see, for example, davies. 13. “not marble, nor the gilded monuments. of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme; but you shall shine more bright in these contents. than unswept stone, besmear'd with sluttish time.” (sonnet 55, ll. 1–4) 14. the distinction here is not the same as the distinction between form and content or the distinction between what a work represents and the manner in which it does so. fictional worlds and works of fiction both have formal features as well as content. for a more detailed discussion of the form vs content distinction in contemporary angloamerican philosophy of art, see carroll, philosophy of art 125–127 and eldridge. 15. nussbaum. 51 schmidt 16. curry. 17. carroll, “philosophical insight, emotion, and popular fiction.” 18. kivy. 19. this concern is more fully developed and addressed in gibson. 20. literary critics may recognize this as a version of the paraphrase problem, or the fear that describing a text in other terms, although opening rich possibilities of interpretation, always risks distorting that text in fundamental ways. 21. this concern is most fully developed in lamarque and olsen. 22. the relationship between the contents of fictional worlds and the actual world is an important area of ongoing debate in contemporary philosophy. perhaps the simplest way to enter into that debate is to ask, what enables a claim about the content of a fictional world to count as true? claims that identify properties or events that an author explicitly describes have a strong claim to truth, but what about the wide variety of claims we import from the actual world we occupy as readers, including assumptions about human physiology and psychology? the way we answer that question has broad implications for epistemology. we can see this, for example, in nelson goodman’s influential argument that any effort to distinguish between fictional worlds and the actual world is doomed, since any world, real or actual, amounts to a system or a structure and any such system or structure must be created through a process of world-making (55). so, while we can compare various worlds in terms of their consistency, coherence, usefulness, or even plausibility, it makes no sense to think of fictional truth as being fixed by features of the actual world. goodman would argue that any talk about importing claims about the actual world into a fictional world wrongly assumes there exists an independent or uncreated world capable of fixing or determining the truth of those claims. 23. jukka mikkonen argues that this anglo-american analytic emphasis on realism—the claim that works of fiction consist of propositions that represent a fictional world realistically or “as it is”—ignores a wide range of literary fictions and therefore should paying attention to works of fiction as well as fictional worlds 52 be modified or replaced with a theory of fiction that focuses on what he calls literaryfictive utterances. 24. wolfgang iser provides one of the first accounts of the important role that gaps play in narrative. 25. utell 153. utell offers a compelling account of how we achieve completeness and cohesion in the storyworlds we encounter as well as an extended discussion of the ethical implications of that process. 26. johnson 432. 27. this is one area in which anglo-american philosophical literary critics have something to learn from continental philosophers, who have focused for decades on the important role context and embodiment play in the topic of identity. for a defense of the claim that anglo-american philosophy has something distinctive to offer to literary criticism, see escobedo. 28. aristotle 59. 29. most; charalabopoulos. 30. we might think here, for example, of macbeth’s famous “dagger” soliloquy, where he rehearses at least three strong reasons against killing duncan while balancing on the edge of a horrific act that many in the audience secretly hope he will dare to do (2.1.33– 64). or we might think of hamlet’s “to be” soliloquy (3.1.55-89), which begins partly as a performance for the spying polonius and claudius but quickly takes a turn into the darker thoughts that will engulf him. in both cases, shakespeare invites us into the mind of someone making a genuine choice. in this soliloquy, in contrast, iago isn’t even fully honest with himself and he seems indifferent to that lack, which prevents the audience from becoming a confidant. 31. williams, truth and truthfulness 100–110. 32. “would you, the supervisor, grossly gape on, / behold her topped?” (3.3.405–6). 53 schmidt 33. cavell; zamir. one exception to the general tendency of philosophers to focus on the content of othello rather than its dramatic form can be found in rowe. rowe argues that the pivotal temptation scene (3.3) explicitly parodies the elenctic method found in plato’s early dialogues. putting those interpretations together, i would suggest that iago’s surprising power over othello rests on the way he pursues a clear form of antiphilosophy rather than the mind or skill of an evil genius. 34. eula biss develops an unsettling account of a similar phenomenon in her explanation for why she was disturbed by accurate accounts of looting in new orleans after hurricane katrina. she argues that even if all the reports of looting had been true, the articles about the looting would have often been racist because the purpose those articles would belie an underlying racist intent (131–44). works cited aristotle. poetics, trans. stephen halliwell. in aristotle: poetics, longinus: on the sublime, demetrius: on style. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1995. 1–142. biss, eula. notes from no man’s land: american essays. minneapolis: graywolf press, 2009. carroll, noël. philosophy of art: a contemporary introduction. new york: routledge, 1999. ———. “the wheel of virtue: art, literature, and moral knowledge.” the journal of aesthetics and art criticism 60.1 (2002): 3–26. ———. “philosophical insight, emotion, and popular fiction.” in narrative, emotion, and insight, eds. noël carroll and john gibson. university park: penn state university press, 2011. 45–68. cavell, stanley. disowning knowledge in seven plays of shakespeare. new york: cambridge university press, 2003. charalabopoulos, nikos. platonic drama and its ancient reception. new york: cambridge university press, 2012. paying attention to works of fiction as well as fictional worlds 54 critchley, simon. stay, illusion! the hamlet doctrine. new york: pantheon, 2013. curry, gregory. “realism of character and the value of fiction.” in aesthetics and ethics: essays at the intersection, ed. jerrold levinson. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1998. 161–81. danto, arthur c. “philosophy as / and / of literature.” proceedings and addresses of the american philosophical association 58 (1984): 5–20. davies, stephen. musical works & performances: a philosophical exploration. oxford: clarendon press, 2001. eldridge, richard. “form and content: an aesthetic theory of art.” british journal of aesthetics 23 (1985): 303–316. elgin, catherine z. “the laboratory of the mind.” in a sense of the world: essays on fiction, narrative, and knowledge, eds. john gibson, wolfgang huemer, and luca pocci. new york: routledge, 2007. 43–54. escobedo, andrew. “can analytic philosophy and literary criticism be friends?” spenser review 45.3.1 (2016). http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/spenseronline/review/item/45.3.1/ frege, gottlob. “on sense and reference.” in philosophical writings of gottlob frege, eds. peter geach and max black. oxford: oxford university press, 1970. 56–78. gaskin, richard. language, truth, and literature: a defence of literary humanism, oxford: oxford university press, 2013. gibson, john. fiction and the weave of life. oxford: oxford university press, 2007. goodman, nelson. ways of worldmaking. indianapolis: hackett, 1978. hagberg, garry. fictional characters, real problems. oxford: oxford university press, 2016. iser, wolfgang. the implied reader: patterns of communication in prose fiction from bunyan to beckett. baltimore: johns hopkins university press, 1978. 55 schmidt johnson, samuel. the major works, ed. donald greene. new york: oxford university press, 2009. kivy, peter. philosophies of arts: an essay in differences. new york: cambridge university press, 1997. kottman, peter, ed. philosophers on shakespeare. stanford: stanford university press, 2009. lakoff, george, and mark johnson. metaphors we live by. chicago: university of chicago press, 1980. lamarque, peter, and stein haugom olsen. truth, fiction, and literature. oxford: oxford university press, 1994. mcginn, colin. shakespeare's philosophy: discovering the meaning behind the plays. new york: harper collins, 2007. mikkonen, jukka. “the realistic fallacy, or: the conception of literary narrative fiction in analytic aethetics.” studia philosophica estonica. 2.1 (2006): 1–18. most, glenn. “plato’s exoteric myths.” in plato and myth. studies on the use and status of platonic myths, eds. catherine collobert, pierre destrée, and francisco j. gonzales. boston: brill, 2012. 13–24. nussbaum, martha c. love’s knowledge: essays on philosophy and literature. new york: oxford university press, 1990. plato. republic, trans. paul shorey. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1935. quinton, anthony. “divergence of the twain: poet’s philosophy and philosopher’s philosophy.” lecture, official opening of the centre for research in philosophy and literature, university of warwick, 8 october 1985. rowe, mark. “iago’s elenchus: shakespeare, othello, and the platonic inheritance.” in a companion to the philosophy of literature, eds. garry hagberg and walter jost. new york: wiley-blackwell, 2010. 174–192. paying attention to works of fiction as well as fictional worlds 56 shakespeare, william. the complete works, eds. stanley wells, et al. new york: oxford university press, 2005. utell, janine. engagements with narrative. new york: routledge, 2016. williams, bernard. ethics and the limits of philosophy. new york: routledge, 1985. ———. truth and truthfulness: an essay in genealogy. princeton: princeton university press, 2004. zamir, tzachi. double vision: moral philosophy and shakespearean drama. princeton: princeton university press, 2007. microsoft word hepola-final.docx [expositions 8.2 (2014) 79–89] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376   the reality of fictional characters and the cognitive value of literature: some surprising insights from philosophy allison jill hepola samford university 1. learning from literature there are few intuitions as widely shared across the humanities as the belief that we can learn things about the real world and the human condition by reading great works of literature. although texts like novels, short stories, epic poems, and plays are works of fiction, they are nonetheless valuable sources of truths and insights about important features of real life like morality, psychology, society, religion, beauty, love, and culture. by reading pride and prejudice, a reader can learn something about the way otherwise attractive people sabotage their chances at happy relationships. by reading les misérables, a reader can learn something about the complex relationships between justice, duty, and compassion. by reading crime and punishment, a reader can learn something about the psychological effects of guilt and selfrationalization. by reading the color purple, a reader can come to a greater understanding of the despair felt by victims of sexual abuse. by reading moby-dick, a reader can learn something about what life on a nineteenth century whaling ship was like. an almost endless list of similar examples could be given. a large part of the reason why we value works like shakespeare’s and dostoevsky’s is because these texts provide us with more than simply interesting characters and entertaining plotlines; these texts are believed to be sources of profound insights into the human condition. “great” books are, in part, considered to be great because of their cognitive value. meanwhile, literature that appears to teach readers very little or nothing of importance—beach books, romance novels, formulaic thrillers, and the like—is dismissed as “mere entertainment” or “fluff.” when contemporary advocates of the humanities are called upon to justify the inclusion of literature in college curricula, a frequent defense given is that great literature has the power to inform, instruct, and expand the horizons of readers in a special way that cannot be duplicated by more practical or vocational fields of study. on the other hand, acknowledging the unique power of literature to inform and shape readers has also led to the recognition that literature can corrupt and mis-educate readers as well. such concerns, and accompanying calls for censorship, date back to plato’s republic. but what unites bibliophiles and censors, scholars and lay people alike, is the belief some literature, despite being fictional, can teach readers important things about the real world. the reality of fictional characters 80   among contemporary philosophers of art, this view is known as “literary cognitivism” or simply “cognitivism.” cognitivism has attracted many adherents among philosophers; noteworthy philosophical discussions and defenses of cognitivism are found in the works of morris weitz, martha nussbaum, and eileen john, among others.1 at the same time, literary cognitivism has attracted several criticisms from philosophers. one philosophical anti-cognitivist argument points out that literature is not some special source of knowledge, since all of the “truths” allegedly found in fiction can be easily acquired from non-literary sources.2 another anti-cognitivist criticism points out the difficulties in attributing philosophical claims like “compassion to those in need outweighs strict obedience to the law” to literary works like les misérables. such a claim requires a certain kind of philosophical defense, something along the lines of what one would find in a treatise by immanuel kant or john stuart mill. however, literary works like les misérables almost never contain the kinds of explicit philosophical arguments or evidence that is needed to support such assertions.3 but what is probably the strongest philosophical argument against cognitivism is also the simplest one. according to this line of argument, the main reason why we cannot learn anything about the real world from reading literary works is because literary works are fictional. fictional characters do not exist, the things that fictional characters say and do, do not actually happen, and all the things that are gleaned from this—i.e., the profound truths about the human condition we supposedly learn from literature—are based on nothing real.4 for example, antigone is not and never was a real person. her brother’s corpse was not a real corpse that was really desecrated, she did not really bury it, and she did not really die for her defiance of the laws of thebes. how then are readers supposed to learn anything meaningful about real-life things like justice, the dichotomy between the laws of humans and the higher law of heaven, or the culture of ancient greece from the nonexistent goings-on of nonexistent entities like antigone? there is an unbridgeable divide between the nonexistent realm of fiction and real life. because of this, argues the anti-cognitivist, there is no reason to believe any lessons, insights, truths, or morals allegedly gleaned from fiction could be applicable to real life concerns and issues. since cognitivism about literature is such a widely held and important intuition within the humanities, it is worth considering how to respond to this philosophical challenge. interestingly enough there is another view that has developed in contemporary philosophy of literature known as “fictional realism” that, at first glance, appears perfectly poised to respond to the anticognitivist objection just discussed. fictional realism is the claim that fictional characters— things like antigone, hamlet, shere khan, the city of minas tirath, and the like—actually do exist. according to a fictional realist, fictional characters are full-fledged, metaphysically respectable entities. ophelia and minas tirath are as existent and as much a part of the real world as kierkegaard and copenhagen are. 81 hepola    it must be noted that fictional realism did not develop as a specific response to anticognitivism about literature. as a philosophical position it developed completely independently from debates over cognitivism. fictional realism grew out of a late nineteenth-century debate about how to make sense of sentences like “pegasus is a winged horse” that appeared to attribute properties to nonexistent (and occasionally fictional) objects.5 nearly all contemporary philosophical discussion of fictional realism has also treated it as independent and distinct from issues surrounding cognitivism. nonetheless it seems fictional realism should be perfectly poised to respond to anti-cognitivist concerns. the anti-cognitivist argument rests on the assumption that fictional characters, the worlds they inhabit, and the things that they say and do, are not real at all. the challenge for cognitivists then becomes explaining how we still can learn something about the real world from these nonexistent things. and it turns out that it is very difficult to establish contact between the realm of the nonexistent and the real world. but fictional realism easily bridges this divide. it demolishes the distinction between real life and fiction. according to fictional realism, fictional characters are bona fide objects, as much a part of the real world as numbers, atoms, trees, and people. if fictional characters are part of the real world, then surely we can learn things about the real world from them. so initially it appears that fictional realism could provide solid support for cognitivism. however, i will argue here that despite these promising appearances, fictional realism is, in fact, incompatible with literary cognitivism. treating fictional characters as full-fledged, real entities actually makes it more difficult for us to learn anything meaningful about the nonfictional world by reading works of literature. as a result, those who are interested in a philosophical defense of literary cognitivism must look elsewhere for assistance. and those who are committed to fictional realism for other philosophical reasons would do well to consider whether realism’s anti-cognitivist implications are a tolerable consequence of the view. 2. fictional realism fictional realism of course raises a question, if fictional characters are real things just what sorts of things are they? even if we grant that ophelia and minas tirath exist and are as real as kierkegaard and copenhagen, the former still seem to be very different kinds of things from the latter. among fictional realists there is significant dispute about exactly what sort of object fictional characters are. the most popular and influential positions on the matter have been to view fictional characters as meinongian non-existents, as platonic types, or as abstract artifacts.6 it is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss the relative merits and drawbacks of each of these positions. suffice to say, what all philosophers who adopt a fictional realist position seem to agree upon is that fictional characters are abstract objects—that is, non-physical, non-spatial, the reality of fictional characters 82   non-concrete objects. fictional characters would fall roughly into the same category as other abstract objects like numbers, mortgages, and laws. although the number two, a mortgage, and the speed limit on the new jersey turnpike have no mass or physical extension in space, these things are still taken to be real, existing objects that are just as real as physical things like a house or the new jersey turnpike itself. so it is with hamlet, ophelia, ophelia’s willow tree, and other fictional characters. for philosophers, an important feature of an entity’s being a real object is that it definitively has and lacks certain properties. the new jersey turnpike, for example, has the properties of being 122 miles long and being made of asphalt and lacks the property of being made of cotton candy. as a result, statements of predication referring to real entities have truth values; the sentence “the new jersey turnpike is made of asphalt” is a true sentence and the sentence “the new jersey turnpike is made of cotton candy” is a false sentence. under fictional realism, the same applies to fictional characters. hamlet, for example, has the property of being a prince and lacks the property of being a winged horse. the sentence “hamlet is a prince” is a true sentence and the sentence “hamlet is a winged horse” is a false sentence. this simple and rather uninteresting observation is actually quite important for fictional realism. both historically and today, fictional realists have defended their position by appealing to commonly held intuitions about sentences like “hamlet is a prince” and “hamlet is a winged horse.” most people would agree that the first sentence is true and the second sentence is false. however, if one is an anti-realist about fictional characters and says that things like hamlet do not exist at all, these two sentences would no longer be true and false; they would become completely meaningless. for how can something that is mere nothingness truly be or not be a prince or a winged horse? the notion that sentences like “hamlet is a winged horse” are not just false but utterly meaningless seems to contradict ordinary beliefs and everyday intuitions about fiction. fictional realists argue that the only way to account for our intuitions that sentences like “hamlet is a prince” and “hamlet is a winged horse” have truth values is to postulate fictional characters as existent objects.7 3. “according to the story” not all statements of predication referring to fictional characters are the same. fictional realists generally draw a distinction between two contexts in which we say, think, or write things about fictional characters. to borrow terminology used by amie thomasson, we say some things about fictional characters in an “external” context and say other things about fictional characters in an “internal” context.8 the external context is used whenever we speak of fictional characters as fictional characters, recognizing that fictional characters are very different sorts of things from real-life persons and objects. for example, we use the external context whenever we say things 83 hepola    like “hamlet was created by shakespeare,” “fagin is an anti-semitic stereotype,” and “laura wingfield was inspired by tennessee williams’ sister rose.” the internal context is used whenever we speak of fictional characters as they are described by their stories (or by interpretations of their stories). using the internal context always involves a certain amount of pretense. we pretend that characters like fagin and laura wingfield are not fictional characters, but rather real-life, nonfictional, spatio-temporal people who perform certain actions, who think certain thoughts, who can be psycho-analyzed, who can be morally evaluated, and the like. we use the internal context whenever we say things like “hamlet was created by gertrude and the murdered king,” “ophelia probably drowned herself,” “fagin is dishonest,” and “laura wingfield is emotionally troubled.” all of these sorts of sentences are statements of predication; that is, these sentences attribute various properties to fictional characters. now a standard fictional realist move is to say that whenever a statement of predication occurs in the internal context, there is always an implicit “predicate modifier” involved.9 usually this predicate modifier takes the form “according to the story.” what this means is that whenever i use the internal context to say that a fictional character has a certain property, the property i attribute to the character is not exactly the same property that i might attribute to a nonfictional entity, even if i use the same word or words to describe that property. for instance, when i say, “ophelia is danish,” strictly speaking i am not saying that she has the simple, basic property of being danish that a nonfictional entity like kierkegaard has. kierkegaard has the property of being danish simpliciter. but ophelia, being a fictional character, has a different property, the property of being danish according to the story. when i say, “ophelia is danish” what i am really saying—according to fictional realists—is “ophelia is danish according to the story.” i am implicitly attributing a different property to ophelia from the property i would attribute to kierkegaard. ophelia does not have the property of being danish simpliciter, like kierkegaard does. ophelia cannot have the property of being danish simpliciter because she is a fictional character. rather ophelia has the property of being danish according to the story. and, very importantly, the property of being danish according to the story is quite different from the property of being danish simpliciter. another way of looking at this is that for a fictional realist, all the properties that any object might have fall into one of two categories: simpliciter properties and according to the story properties. simpliciter properties are always completely different properties from according to the story properties, even if we use the same words to describe them in ordinary speech, thought, and writing; being danish simpliciter is as different from the property of being danish according to the story as it is different from the property of being blue. as far as fictional characters are concerned, they possess both simpliciter and according to the story properties. the simpliciter properties that a fictional character has are the ones typically attributed to it under the external context of discourse. ophelia has the property of being created by shakespeare simpliciter, and the reality of fictional characters 84   the property of being a fictional character simpliciter. but all of the properties that fictional characters have according to internal discourse are according to the story properties, which are different from their analogous simpliciter properties. ophelia does not have the property of drowning simpliciter, like percy shelley did; she has the separate and distinct property of drowning according to the story. fagin is not dishonest simpliciter like charles ponzi was; he is dishonest according to the story, again an entirely different matter from being dishonest simpliciter. laura wingfield is not emotionally troubled simpliciter like rose williams was; she is emotionally troubled according to the story. and so on. while all of this might sound quite convoluted, there is a very good reason why fictional realists resort to predicate modifiers like “according to the story.” the most common objection to fictional realism is that it commits us to the existence of contradictory and ontologically disreputable entities.10 one of the most glaring contradictions involving fictional characters is that they are said, by fictional realists, to be non-physical, but are also routinely given properties like drowning or being a tiger that only concrete physical entities can have. surely it is incoherent for fictional realists to say that shere khan exists as some sort of abstract object, yet at the same time insist that the sentence “shere khan is a tiger” is true. the property of being a tiger is something only a concrete, spatio-temporal entity can have—it involves possessing specific genes, having a particular musculoskeletal structure, being native to certain areas of asia, and so on. clearly no abstract entity—an entity that by definition has no genes, no muscles, no bones, and no location in space—can be a tiger. but by using a predicate modifier like “according to the story” fictional realists can dodge this problem. whenever one says something like “shere khan is a tiger,” one is using internal discourse where there is always an implicit use of the “according to the story” predicate modifier. shere khan does not actually have the property of being a tiger simpliciter. instead he has the property of being a tiger according to the story. while no abstract entity, like a fictional character, can have the property of being a tiger simpliciter, a fictional character can have the totally different property of being a tiger according to the story. using a predicate modifier also allows fictional realists to deal with characters that have contradictory properties. for example, imagine a story written about the adventures of alexius the round square. it would be quite bad, logically speaking, for fictional realists to have to admit that there really exists an object, alexius, who is both round and square. but fictional realists can respond by pointing out that statements like “alexius is round” and “alexius is square” take place in the internal discourse and involve implicit “according to the story” modifiers. alexius is not round simpliciter or square simpliciter. rather alexius has the properties of being round according to the story and being square according to the story. while it would indeed violate the law of non-contradiction for one thing to be both round simpliciter and square simpliciter, no such contradiction is involved when one thing is both round according to the story and square 85 hepola    according to the story. the latter two properties are completely different properties from the former. 4. cognitivism reconsidered fictional realists must draw a sharp distinction between simpliciter properties and according to the story properties in order to defend the logical integrity of their view. unfortunately it is this use of the “according to the story” predicate modifier that poses serious problems for the compatibility of fictional realism and literary cognitivism. cognitivism claims that by reading certain literary works, we learn something about important features of the real world like morality, society, or philosophy. these profound claims about the human condition are found within the texts of various literary works, usually implicitly but sometimes explicitly. what are some of the important truths, lessons, and insights that great literature imparts to us, according to cognitivism? here i will use an example from jerome stolnitz’s article “on the cognitive triviality of art.” while stolnitz is not a fictional realist and is only concerned with cognitivism in this article, his remarks have a good deal of relevance to my project here. according to stolnitz, from pride and prejudice we can allegedly learn psychological truths like “stubborn pride and ignorant prejudice keep attractive people apart.”11 this is supposed to be a universal and generalizable truth about the human condition. but austen’s text never explicitly says, “stubborn pride and ignorant prejudice keep attractive people apart.” instead this proposition appears to supervene on the fictional characters of pride and prejudice and their properties. one gleans the truth “stubborn pride and ignorant prejudice keep attractive people apart” from the characters darcy and elizabeth, the properties they are said to have, the words they speak, the actions they perform, the emotions they have, and the way in which they interact with each other and other characters. darcy initially appears unfriendly, elizabeth believes wickham’s lies, wickham is superficially charming, and so on. in his discussion of this example, stolnitz notes that all of the things underlying pride and prejudice’s “teaching” that “stubborn pride and ignorant prejudice keep attractive people apart” are purely fictional. as he puts it, elizabeth and darcy’s “motivations and behavior respond to and are thus largely shaped by these other people, fictional all, and to each other, of course, fictional too. [. . .] the psychologies of miss bennet and mr. darcy are fleshed out and specified within the fiction only.”12 put in fictional realist terms, statements like “darcy appears to be unfriendly” and “elizabeth believes wickham’s lies” occur in the internal context of fictional discourse. these statements always contain the “according to the story” modifier. therefore, for a fictional realist, it is not the case that elizabeth believes wickham’s lies simpliciter. instead elizabeth believes wickham’s lies according to the story, an entirely different property. the reality of fictional characters 86   likewise, darcy does not have the property of appearing unfriendly simpliciter; he has the property of appearing unfriendly according to the story. wickham does not lie simpliciter; he lies according to the story. he is not superficially charming simpliciter, he is superficially charming according to the story. where does this leave the “teaching” of pride and prejudice that “stubborn pride and ignorant prejudice keep attractive people apart”? it also appears to be a statement about fiction that takes place in the internal context. it is based on nothing but what happens in the world of the story: what the characters think, say, and do and what happens to them as a result. so this statement also contains an “according to the story” predicate modifier. strictly speaking, then, a reader cannot learn “stubborn pride and ignorant prejudice keep attractive people apart simpliciter” from pride and prejudice. instead all a reader can learn is “stubborn pride and ignorant prejudice keep attractive people apart according to the story.” this is, of course, not the sort of thing cognitivists believe literature can teach us. as stolnitz says, “many of them have insisted that art brings to light, above all, human character—the hidden, unvoiced, perhaps, apart from art, the unknown impulses and affects that stir and move our inner and then outer beings. they will settle for nothing less than psychological truths about people in the great world, truths universal.”13 in other words, cognitivism holds that literary works give readers knowledge of simpliciter truths. stubborn pride and ignorant prejudice keep attractive people apart simpliciter. compassion to people in need outweighs obedience to the law simpliciter. guilt and self-rationalization have such-and-such effects on the psyche simpliciter. but under fictional realism, literature can never make claims to simpliciter truths like these. instead, all that a reader can learn from a work of fiction is what is true according to the story. that includes claims about psychology that are true according to the story, claims about morality that are true according to the story, and claims about philosophy that are true according to the story—in short, all of the valuable insights and truths about the real world and real human condition that cognitivists claim we can access by reading great works of literature. conclusion in this essay i hope to have shown why literary cognitivism is incompatible with fictional realism due to the use of the “according to the story” modifier. according to fictional realism, the only truths a reader can learn from a literary work are statements about what is true according to the story, which undercuts cognitivism. a fictional realist is forced to conclude that we can learn nothing profound about the real world and the real human condition from reading works of fictional literature. whether this consequence is tolerable or not, is something that fictional realists would do well to consider. 87 hepola    an earlier version of this paper was presented at the national conference of the american society for aesthetics in 2012. i would like to extend special thanks to my commenter scott clifton for his valuable feedback on the paper. i would also like to thank joe corabi, chris mettress, dennis sansom, amie thomasson, and one anonymous reviewer for their many helpful suggestions and comments on earlier drafts of this paper. endnotes 1. morris weitz, philosophy in literature (detroit: wayne state university press, 1963); martha nussbaum, love’s knowledge (new york: oxford university press, 1992); eileen john, “art and knowledge,” in the routledge companion to aesthetics, 2nd ed., eds. berys gaut and dominic mciver lopes (new york: routledge, 2005), 417–429. see also noel carroll, “art and the moral realm,” in the blackwell guide to aesthetics, ed. peter kivy (malden: blackwell, 2004), 126–151; carroll, “the wheel of virtue: art, literature, and moral knowledge,” the journal of aesthetics and art criticism 60 (2002): 3–26; jerrold levinson, “messages in art,” in art and its messages, ed. stephen davies (university park: the pennsylvania state university press, 1995), 70–83. 2. jerome stolnitz, “on the cognitive triviality of art,” in philosophy of literature: contemporary and classic readings, eds. eileen john and dominic mciver lopes (malden: blackwell, 2004), 317–323. first published in british journal of aesthetics 32 (1992): 191–200. 3. peter lamarque and stein haugom olsen, truth, fiction, and literature (oxford: clarendon press, 1994). 4. john gibson, “cognitivism and the arts,” philosophy compass 3 (2008): 1–17; colin radford, “how can we be moved by the fate of anna karenina?” proceedings of the aristotelian society: supplementary volumes 49 (1975): 67–80; stolnitz, 318–319. 5. the nineteenth-century debate can be seen as originating with john stuart mill. see mill, a system of logic: ratiocinative and inductive (london: 1843), 66, 103–104, 159, 188, 200. the most noteworthy responses to mill came from franz brentano. see brentano, “the distinction between mental and physical phenomena,” in realism and the background of phenomenology, ed. roderick chisholm (atascadero: ridgeview publishing company, 1960); brentano, “genuine and fictitious objects,” in chisholm; the reality of fictional characters 88   brentano, “presentation and judgment form two distinct fundamental classes,” in chisholm. 6. for a discussion of meinong’s view of fiction, see venanzio raspa, “fictional and aesthetic objects: meinong’s point of view,” in modes of existence, eds. andrea bottani and richard davies (piscataway: transaction books, 2006), 47–80. neomeinongian accounts of fictional realism are found in terence parsons, nonexistent objects (new haven: yale university press, 1980) and edward zalta, abstract objects (the netherlands: reidel, 1983). nicholas wolterstorff advocates a platonic version of fictional realism in works and worlds of art (oxford: clarendon press, 1980). the seminal defense of the artifactualist theory of fictional realism is amie thomasson’s fiction and metaphysics (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1999). thomasson also presents artifactualism in “fictional characters and literary practices,” british journal of aesthetics 43 (2003): 157–183; “the ontology of art,” in the blackwell guide of aesthetics, ed. peter kivy (malden: blackwell, 2004), 78–92; “the ontology of art and knowledge in aesthetics,” the journal of aesthetics and art criticism 63 (2005): 221–229. additional defenses of artifactualist fictional realism are found in david braun, “empty names, fictional names, mythical names,” nous 39 (2005): 596– 631 and nathan salmon, “nonexistence,” nous 32 (1998): 277–319.\ 7. this argument is found in charles crittenden, unreality: the metaphysics of fictional objects (ithaca: cornell university press, 1991), 95; robert howell, “fictional objects: how they are and how they aren’t,” poetics 8 (1979): 152; parsons, 52–54; maria reicher, “two interpretations of ‘according to a story’,” in modes of existence, eds. andrea bottani and richard davies (piscataway: transaction books, 2006), 153–160; thomasson, fiction and metaphysics, 5–6; peter van inwagen, “creatures of fiction,” in ontology, identity, and modality (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2001), 43. 8. thomasson, fiction and metaphysics, 105–111. 9. see david lewis, “truth in fiction,” in philosophical papers: volume i (oxford: oxford university press, 1983), 262; howell, 138; reicher, 154–157; thomasson, fiction and metaphysics, 94–95; achille varzi, “the talk i was supposed to give,” in modes of existence, eds. andrea bottani and richard davies (piscataway: transaction books, 2006), 132. 10. examples like this are discussed in anthony everett, “against fictional realism,” journal of philosophy 102 (2005): 624–649. 11. stolnitz, 318. 89 hepola    12. stolnitz, 319. 13. stolnitz, 318–319.   templeton future of english dept.docx [expositions 6.2 (2012) 55-57] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 the future of the english department erin e. templeton converse college my views on the future of the english department have shifted in a few significant ways since completing my ph.d. and becoming a full-time faculty member, first in a temporary position as a lecturer at my alma mater (ucla), then on to the tenure track at a small women’s liberal arts college, and finally, as a recently tenured and promoted faculty member. i earned my degrees from two large public universities: penn state, university park and the previously mentioned university of california, los angeles. both institutions house massive english departments with well over sixty tenure-line faculty members, several dozen non-tenure-track instructors, and armies of graduate students, most of whom teach and/or grade while earning their degrees. as a graduate student in both departments, i was fortunate to have extensive and varied pedagogical opportunities so that by the time i graduated, i felt fully prepared to leave the nest, so to speak, and walk into a classroom thousands of miles away. i was also very familiar with the demands of maintaining a research agenda. as a graduate student at these two research-intensive institutions, i witnessed the intense pressure to publish that faculty faced. i also witnessed both the accolades that rained down when a piece was placed and the consequences that followed when things didn’t work out. what i didn't know, or really ever stop to consider, was how very different an english department looks at other kinds of schools. like many english faculty, i currently belong to a department that bears little resemblance to the one that trained me. unlike the formidable rosters of sixty-plus tenure-line professors, my department consists of seven full-time faculty members, six of whom are tenured and one who is a long-term full-time instructor. we also have four or five contingent faculty members who teach courses for us from time to time. four of the full-time professors, myself included, primarily teach literature while three teach creative or professional writing. most of us also teach composition. the faculty who trained me typically taught two classes per semester (or the quarter-system equivalent). by contrast, i teach three classes during our fall and spring semesters and one class during our intensive four-week january intercession. my colleagues who do not teach in january teach four classes each in the fall and spring. in addition to carrying a heavier teaching load, being one of four literature professors in the department has forced me to diversify. while i get to teach a course in my research area (transatlantic modern poetry) from time to time, over six years, i have developed more than twenty different syllabi that span the whole of american literature as well as several different anglophone traditions. the wide-ranging subject matter of my courses has the future of the english department 56 given me the opportunity to team-teach with colleagues in economics, musicology, and philosophy, and it has taken me, literally, to ireland and costa rica. in addition to the very different pedagogical demands of my position, i was not prepared for the heavy emphasis on service that is a reality of life at a small college. committee assignments, ad hoc work-groups, task-forces, advisement, recruitment activities, assessment: these are all divvied up across the tenure-line faculty. because there are fewer people to share the workload, we must all contribute. a lot. it is not unusual for tenure-line faculty at my college to spend equal time on service and in the classroom. whereas research-intensive institutions typically weigh publication records most heavily in their evaluation of faculty productivity, pedagogy and service activities are essential components in faculty evaluation at teaching-intensive colleges and universities. in addition, my department does not have the support staff that keep larger departments functioning smoothly. when it comes to administrative tasks, we have two choices: a part-time undergraduate student-worker or diy. what does any of this have to do with the future of the english department? first, the bad news: in short, due to budget cuts, furloughs, and an increased reliance on adjunct and contingent labor, the distance is shrinking between the departments like those research-intensive, doctoral-granting institutions which trained the majority of us and those teachingand service-intensive departments which house the majority of facultymembers in english today. the trend towards fewer tenure-line hires and more part-time faculty does a great disservice not only to students and those faculty who aspire to the tenure-track, but it also is detrimental to those faculty with or working towards tenure. fewer full-time faculty means even more service (and less time to devote to either teaching or research): more advising, more committee work, more administrative work. to clarify, i don’t mind service, but there is a point where it overwhelms our ability to perform our other responsibilities of teaching and research. many of us are rapidly approaching that point if we haven’t reached it already. second, the good news: if you can find your way into an english department as a fulltime faculty member, there are increased opportunities at many institutions for exciting interdisciplinary work, service-learning, and other varied pedagogical experiences. webbased technology has made collaborative work, whether research or pedagogy, as fast and easy as opening a computer file (assuming, of course, that faculty have access to the necessary technology). the academy more generally seems to be moving towards openness: open-access journals, academic blogging and discussion forums, and the evergrowing numbers of faculty on various social networks such as twitter and facebook. english departments have long participated in challenging conventional assumptions, whether about representations of gender, race, or canonicity. curricula at institutions large and small have become more diverse as the canon has expanded to include writers 57 templeton of different ethnicities and experiences. embodiedness and its different manifestations, from sexuality studies and disability studies to experiential learning, has found its way into research agendas and course catalogues. moreover, scholars have also begun to explore more than just the printed word: film and media studies and digital humanities courses are just a few ways that contemporary departments have begun to examine the ubiquitous interfaces of technology and textuality. i find it hard to believe that the demand for the skills that english departments teach – critical thinking, reading comprehension, and of course, writing – will decrease. these are as important as ever as we move from a print to a digital age. we may well have to adapt our methodologies to accommodate the increasing presence and changing role of technology in our students' lives and in our classrooms, and there is no question that technology is changing the ways that our students read and write. but their ability to do so is just as important today as it was twenty or forty or fifty years ago. microsoft word 5 plato ranasinghe article.docx [expositions 11.1 (2017) 138–156] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 socrates’ apology and plato’s poetry: a speculative exegesis nalin ranasinghe assumption college “poetry makes nothing happen” —w. h. auden1 everybody knows that socrates and plato hated the poets. this is distressing enough but a literal reader of plato’s republic could conclude that the truth is even worse. socrates seemingly seeks to banish the toxic power of poetry from his ideal city. if humans were to be good and happy, they had to be saved from contact with reality and fed on what plato shamelessly called noble lies by a proto-totalitarian regime. this canard or some version of it has been leveled against plato for three millennia. it is the basis for a grand coalition of anti-platonists that unites the last pre-socratic aristotle (its originator) with positivists and materialists on the left and religious thinkers on the right. while atheists on the left despise plato’s idealism, the religious right attacks him for offering souls salvation outside their law, church, or umma. while these matters clearly deserve to be addressed at far greater length than that afforded to this article, it is possible to show here and now, with close and constant reference to the apology, that socrates’ so-called quarrel or disagreement with the poets actually has to do with matters that have far more to do with the misuse and afterlife of poetry than with poetry itself. only after this is it possible to turn to the republic and see why plato’s socrates spoke as he did to impressionable glaucon.2 but before closely reading relevant parts of his apology to find socrates’ true views on the place of poetry, we must know what he had in mind when he spoke of poetry. only then can we distinguish between (a) the poetic reality of classical athens that socrates’ dialectic and plato’s poetry sought to deconstruct, (b) the medieval union of elements from aristotle’s technical account of poetry and augustine’s intensely anti-political theology, and (c) today’s solipsistic poetry and 139 ranasinghe its celebration of the lack or loss of meaning. this article only studies the first of these closely related topics. its approach is as playfully speculative as the philosophic poetry it defends. as we turn to the apology it should first be noted that it is the only work that plato stands behind himself. it thus seems to provide the best evidence of what socrates and plato truly believed; no other dialogue includes plato in its dramatis personae. indeed in the phaedo, often seen as the founding text of platonism, its author even explicitly states that he was absent due to illness (phaedo 59b). but just as plato was one of those who offered to pay socrates’ fine and guaranteed his continued literary immortality (apology 38b), so too does he seem to vouch for the accuracy of his rendering of socrates’ apology or defense speech. but this dialogue is not merely a certifiably true account of the trial; despite its seeming monologue-like form, it is actually a dramatic conversation between socrates and a 500-man chorus of jurors standing for the city. in other words, in a way both like and unlike all of the other dialogues, which seem to describe the education of a certain soul in a unique context by a socrates made both young and beautiful by plato’s art (second letter 314c), and thus represent an ordeal or process of learning for one specific psychic regime, the apology tells how an old and ugly socrates confronted athens itself and forced the city to see its diseased soul. socrates controversially claimed to be the only living practitioner of the true political art (gorgias 521d). the apology will show him wash off the poet-painted beauty of the great city and condemn its splendid vices. i will try to show how reading plato’s apology of socrates as a dialogue between political poetry and philosophy sheds much needed light on the essence of both activities. furies and judges by calling his judges “men of athens” (apology 17a) socrates implies that their identity is formed not by their sworn role as individual jurors but by a de-forming prior influence they are all but helpless to withstand. he is trying to turn this angry, mindless swarm into specific souls capable of using athena’s gifts. in contrast to them, socrates, whose name means something like “great enduring power,” is more puzzled than possessed by this force, the persuasive rhetoric that his enemies have deployed against him. yet, as we shall see, this very invulnerability to rhetoric will be seen as added evidence of his vicious estrangement from the city and its regnant pieties. while socrates explicitly detaches himself from the litigious, fury-ridden mindset aristophanes describes so well in his wasps, his enemies and the vast majority of his jurors cannot separate their city from socrates’ apology and plato’s poetry: a speculative exegesis 140 these chthonic powers that play a centripetal role in its quest for justice. as the poet aeschylus foresaw, the darker energies beneath the city were best projected beyond it by foreign wars (eumenides 1006–9); once athens was stripped of its ships, walls, and military resources, its furies would return to divide the city against itself. socrates is like orestes in his tragic attempt to force these furies to stand before the bar of reason. by trying to expel these sacred powers from a hidden cave under the cave, socrates threatens to unmake the foundations of the city and expose its fury-ruled poetry. this is the truest reason behind the charge of corruption made against him. while plato speculated on this theme in the euthyphro,3 the words and acts of socrates in the apology give the best vantage on his views on the use and abuse of poetry. when socrates defends himself against the charge of corrupting the youth, the main basis for his defense consists in saying that his jury, and by extension athens itself, is already corrupted (apology 18b, 19e). he now seeks to reverse the effects of this prior corruption; this is rather like the procedure described in the statesman where zeus reverses the motion of the cosmos (statesman 269c ff.) although the effects will only be felt in a glorified athens created posthumously by plato. but if socrates is correct, how and why were the citizens of athens corrupted? he seems to answer this by making explicit the earlier unwritten charges already made against him, most notably by aristophanes (clouds 225f; apology 18c). socrates exposes the basis for this fury against him by accusing himself, in the name of these furies, of making the weaker argument stronger and investigating matters above the heavens and beneath the earth (apology 19 b–c). the procedure socrates uses here is very much akin to the one he follows in his dialogues with single interlocutors. once the origins of their implicit wisdom is brought out of the cave into daylight, these now apparent weaknesses may be critically examined and duly refuted. the only difference has to do with the great size of his jury. since he cannot interrogate them all individually, socrates himself must speak on their behalf. the jurors’ rare silence here may be taken as tacit acceptance that socrates framed these charges against himself fairly. 141 ranasinghe weak and strong arguments but these charges reveal much more about them than his accusers would otherwise have known or been willing to concede. we are forced to ask on what deeper basis arguments are deemed to be weak or strong; further, this talk of matters above the heavens and beneath the earth suggests that these sensory limits of earth and sky do not pertain to the ultimate truth about things, since there are matters below and above them. these limits are thus, in the most profound sense, artificial. indeed, socrates is having us question the identity and motives of the artisans who built the categories of reality in which we live, dwell, and have our being. just as he cannot be forced to use the righteous, paranoid, and adversarial language of the athenian law courts, and so reveals the artificial or conventional nature of that element, socrates is both acting out the very crimes he has accused himself of committing and also bringing the criminality of these actions into question. it is fair to say that he is also exposing the weakness of the strong (in the sense of persuasive) arguments that his accusers, both old and new, have made against him; beyond the heated atmosphere of the law court these claims seem absurd or at least unworthy of serious attention. the absurdity of the language-game played by the litigious athenians is exposed by socrates’ refusal to play along with them; the seeming necessity of succumbing to the divinized powers of rage and strife is refuted existentially by his conduct. yet this refutation only increases the anger of his foes. by his coolness under fire he is bringing their own conduct into discredit and also implying that their pride in their traditions and institutions is unfounded. by thinking for himself and living a good life beyond the limits set by the city, he reveals much about philosophy, politics, and even human nature itself. by his ability to question the gods of the city, socrates shows athens that these holy origins are not truly divine but mere “clouds” of hot air, just used to impress and awe the demos. if not, he could not have flown above them. once we come to see that the strength of a strong argument comes from its ability to persuade the ignorant many, rather than from any accurate correspondence to the truth itself, we may justly conclude that neither the power of the many or the oily persuasiveness of priests or politicians is sufficient to make an argument into what thucydides once called “a possession for all times” (1.22). the stark inability of pericles’ “school of athens” (2.41) to educate the wily persians or persuade the stubborn spartans showed the ultimate if unwelcome and ugly truth of socrates’ words. although he was called meddlesome and evil, if we are to believe his accusations against himself, something itself thought impossible in the ultra-agonistic atmosphere of the law court, socrates’ apology and plato’s poetry: a speculative exegesis 142 socrates will say that he did little more than use ordinary language where he was expected to emulate the fulsome flattery and ornate speech of the politicians and priests. by this refusal to emulate the ways of a sophist or huckster, socrates is showing athens that his life is based on simple speech and thought (apology 17c–18a); even if he was unable to make the athenians follow him, his words and deeds show them that another way of virtuous life, one independent of mimetic morals and religious superstition, was possible. while his self-evident happiness proved that he was not hated by the gods, socrates’ poverty, humble origins, and ugliness only compounded the scandal by proving that his virtue could be emulated by anyone; simply put, there was no need for one to gain money or power to lead a good life. while many athenians were persuaded by a composite of the fear of death and religious superstition about the afterlife to obey the many and their leaders, socrates showed by his example that a virtuous man did not have to fear death. this is why he is still a threat today to tyrants and theocrats alike. the gods of athens although, on the basis of the evidence we have seen so far, it would be very easy to conclude that socrates was an enlightened atheist who saw through the foolish superstitions of his culture but failed to see that athenian society was incapable of sustaining itself once all fear of the gods was removed, we discover that socrates is indeed a religious man. even though he claims to be devout in a very different way from that of the many (apology 35d), socrates says explicitly that his life and semi-public civic mission was done in obedience to apollo’s oracle at delphi (apology 30a, 33c). the parallel with the tragic hero orestes is striking; like him, socrates takes on false old gods and seeks to purge his city of corruption, even at the cost of death. we shall explore how the apology may be used to establish a new kind of relationship between the divine and human: one that neither manipulates gods nor stifles human freedom and virtue. far from being opposed to philosophy, truly inspired poetry is both essential and complementary to what a real philosopher does. if the origins of poetry are inspired by love, then its visions cannot be regained by rite or method. we should first ask about the matters above heaven and below earth socrates was accused of questioning; whose picture of earth and sky did he seem to reject? here the answer seems quite obvious; as the euthyphro indicates, the poems of homer and hesiod are seen as giving accurate accounts of these matters (euthyphro 6b–c). even if the olympians, the powers behind heaven and 143 ranasinghe earth, are not visible, common sense says that the poets show us just how the supernatural realm is ordered and what pious behavior towards the gods is. the poets socrates criticizes were not the pathetic private pen-pushers they are today; they were primarily paid performers or priests, producers of political propaganda for a predominantly preliterate public. many poets would certainly have agreed with the biblical claim that the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the lord (proverbs 9.10); they preferred to believe that the gods were just as capricious and cruel as the iliad depicted them. odysseus’ lies are forgotten. hesiod bluntly said that the jealous gods “kept livelihood hidden from men” (works and days 42). he warns us that, “only fools defy the stronger for they suffer both defeat and humiliation” (works and days 210– 11). this pessimistic mindset survived the awful peloponnesian war. thucydides tells us how the general nicias, “least deserving of his fate” despite or perhaps because of his obsessive piety, met with defeat, death, and total disgrace along with his massive athenian army at syracuse (7.86); in a like manner, a few years earlier, the defeated melians were cold-bloodedly told by the athenians before being slaughtered that “the strong do whatever they can and the weak suffer what they must” (5.89). thus harshness actually saves the weak from the cruel delusion of hope. poetry as political theology in other words, both ancient poets and recent historians seemed to tell the newly emancipated citizenry of athens that they were still ruled by fierce and irresistible passions (whether gods, godsent, or neither) that could or should not be curbed by reason. even if the gods were distant, as they seemed to be after the peloponnesian war, men had to submit to time-honored conventions interpreted by their betters. these were the poems, the sacred wisdom binding the athenians to their past and their traditions. the terrible results of the last generation’s hubris prejudiced them against free thinkers who sought to defy or escape these bonds. in a sense, both the democrats and oligarchs agreed that collective experience, whether based on popular majorities or pious tradition, was better than individual rational thought. as we shall see, socrates offended both groups by claiming that the gods themselves supported his efforts to question the wisdom of those who ruled the city. while the democrats held that the people’s voice was supreme and resented socrates’ appeal to a higher authority than their sovereign will, the traditionalists were scandalized by his re-reading of homer or hesiod in ways that belittled their own wisdom. only socrates could have made herod and pilate friends. yet in doing so he exposed socrates’ apology and plato’s poetry: a speculative exegesis 144 deep, embarrassing affinities between old enemies that increased their anger at him. he thus set the stage for a new tragedy and the new kind of poetry plato would write. we have suggested that the poets set up a world-view, cultural horizons explaining the axial age to the newly emancipated athenians of the classical age. just as our own culture claims to be rooted in judeo-christian-roman tradition, and chooses to ignore its debts to the classical greeks, the athenians used homer and hesiod in such a way that would emphasize their autochthony and exceptionalism. despite the embarrassing fact that homer’s epics all but ignore athens, his minimal references to the city only serving to underline its insignificant contribution to the trojan war, sixth-century athens was where the homeric texts were definitively codified. further, in a way resembling that by which vergil’s aeneid would link troy’s destiny to rome, aeschylus’ stately orestes trilogy claims that athens’ law and jurors would resolve the massive political issues raised by the trojan war and its aftermath. it may be the case that the book of mormon did something similar with the bible in using the puritans’ veneration for the book as the basis for a pseudo-historical tale linking jesus christ and america. thus, straight roman roads replace the stormy seas of greek poetry and philosophy. this way of turning indubitable cultural debts into false facts created a tale of predestined and “manifest destiny” where inspired poetic genius is seen as insufficient basis to justify a divinized text’s authority. so, instead of a god who casts his bread upon the waters, or the sun which shines on both the just and the wicked, we have an arbitrary god who plays favorites and is partisan to the point of being the origin of an irrational faith of voluntarism. yet the sheer certainty of these crude beliefs is used to logically deduce systems from them. while we now are almost ready to understand how the words of an inspired poet may be used and abused to form the dogmatic basis for a culture, in a way that often rides roughshod over his own intentions, the plot has not yet thickened sufficiently. can a poet be divinely wise? can he be entrusted with the blueprints of god’s plans? how does his divine or poetic foreknowledge affect the meaning of the lives of those less-favored mortals? is his very poetic gift unbecoming evidence of divine caprice and unfairness? but, on the other hand, if we disallow his right to these gifts on the basis of inequity, what would the content of now inscrutable divine wisdom amount to? while we see how democracy is based on belief in the freedom and equality of all, and presupposes the unfairness and impossibility of a preordained divine plan, could the lack of evidence for such a 145 ranasinghe plan, and a resultant belief in benign divine indifference, only justify the power of the strong or persuasive over the weak? theology as democratic poetry how did athens both believe in unfair gods and also affirm the ideas of equality and freedom that are essential to democracy? isn’t the very thinking about these vexing problems or even asking questions about them subversive? one of the main goals of tragedy or hesiod was to teach the lowly not to envy those in places of authority. an oedipus or an orestes had to struggle continually with impossible problems that made them envy the simple piety and mindless security only the lowly could enjoy. a king or poet must stand between the founding epics of a society and its quotidian realities. he must make these timeless works relevant to a particular place and time. meanwhile the common people get to participate in the collective unconscious of their culture. serving like hades (literally a-ides/“no idea”) as a “plutonic” treasury of legends and stories held in common by a people,4 it gave both personal forgetfulness and a thoughtless shared community to those who drank of its lethe-like waters. while aristotle explains in his nicomachean ethics how pleasure and pain felt in the mind as honor and shame could usually override bodily sensations if habituation and good role models were used to make men see through the eyes of their city, it cannot be forgotten that this idea, first ironically described in the notorious republic and then made into mimetic method by aristotle, had already been used by athens’ poets and playwrights to unify the city and link its citizenry with their mythic past. unlike “information” about traditional ways of virtue, which cannot not be retained over time, is hard to rationally justify, and usually unable to master the passions, the performances of rhapsodes and dramatists were remarkably successful in imparting this emotional knowledge and unifying large numbers of people in a way that was both pleasurable and persuasive. this power over the emotions has often been seen as the basis for the so-called quarrel between philosophy and poetry; the rationally stronger argument of the philosopher proves to be existentially the weaker through its inability to command the human emotions, desires, and will. these very parts of man are used successfully by the poets to unify large bodies of men and build cities. the full extent and power of greek tragedy can only be imagined today since we no longer have the music and costumes that completed the collective experience of the gods dionysus socrates’ apology and plato’s poetry: a speculative exegesis 146 enjoyed in the classical athens. what is today a cerebral apollonian experience was both contaminated and consummated by the sensory element felt collectively with an orgiastic intensity that may only be seen today at international soccer games or college football. furthermore, since tragedy combined both religion and mass entertainment, even the dyadic opposition between order and disorder was temporarily dissolved. just as the serene marble statues and edifices of athens were originally painted gaudily and meant to appeal to all, albeit in different ways, the poets unified psychic and social elements in a way that made one out of many. corruption and the cave we are now in a position to understand the most important charge against socrates: the allegation that he corrupted the youth of athens. the greek word used here is diaptheirein, literally “destroy, ruin, cripple, weaken, slacken or dissipate.” in this context it is clear that socrates is accused of weakening the strong, albeit irrational civic bonds formed by the poets. it is also striking and more than a little significant that plato, who was not present, uses a negation of the same word to depict socrates’ calm demeanor at the moment of his death (phaedo 117b). this suggests to us that while socrates’ character was unaffected by the imminent prospect of his bodily disintegration, his enemies accused him of corrupting the youth by separating them from the collective consciousness they formed through their art. we must recall that since the greek word poietes literally means “maker” or “creator” the only difference between the poets and other artisans is that they “make” culture rather than objects. while poetry makes nothing happen, as auden saw, bad poets “make” many confused men into a “thing,” a collective body; filled with confidence in this artificial identity and false “nature,” those making up the many forget their identities as self-moving souls. instead of leading virtuous lives using their innate powers for thought and wonder, they are manipulated to mindlessly identify with the mimetic morality of the city. rather than seeing the beauty of the cosmos, they glut their souls on self-righteous anger, which, as achilles saw, is sweeter than honey (iliad 18.108–10). this is why the many swarm like aristophanes’ wasps against any threat to their insect-like existence; to create and keep their thoughtless unity, they wage endless wars; losing their minds, risking their lives and forgetting their souls for the sake of these artificial “happen”-ings. socrates likened their leaders to pastry chefs who fed the demos unhealthy sweets (gorgias 462d ff.) and 147 ranasinghe corrupted their wits. so, like bad poets, they “make” bad “things,” and worse make bad things “happen” for their profit. in one of the republic’s most vivid images, socrates subtly likens a city ruled by a cadre of false guardians to hades (republic 514a ff.). he draws our minds to what occurs when men forget their souls and instead identify with their images as they are constructed by their manipulative rulers to be seen by others. hinting that most men need not fear death since they already live as though they were in hades, living as mere shades in an enslaved state where they literally have “no idea” of whom they are, socrates seeks to rescue individuals from this state of voluntary servitude by asking questions that reveal the irrational and dangerous nature of the wisdom they have ingested from their state of false consciousness. though a man saved from these illusions cannot ascend to a higher state of existence but still has to live with others who angrily reject the very idea that their core values and beliefs are false, thus risking the rescued man’s life; he can now also see, and may even live and die for, a human potential for nobility that somehow overshadows the cave’s illusions. socrates’ life testifies that one can tend his soul well and lead a life of virtue even while living in the cave and lacking positive wisdom. this accounts for his absurd combination of ugliness and beauty. despite his unattractive physical appearance and poverty, all qualities of the body, he was for some intangible reason found very attractive for what only could be explained as the invisible and powerful beauty of his soul. in this context, like tiresias, he may be likened to the only man retaining his wits in hades (odyssey 10.492–95, meno 100a). it was inevitable that he would be prosecuted by the cave’s rulers, its poets, politicians and artisans, and accused of blasphemy against the city’s gods. we now understand his reference to the futility of arguing with shadows (apology 18d) although we may not yet see why he does so. the mission from god socrates’ claim to be on a mission from god seems even more absurd when we hear that it was based on a response that his batty pal chaerephon got from the oracle at delphi (apology 20e– 21a). when asked if anyone was wise than socrates, the oracle replied in the negative. it was socrates who set out to prove the oracle wrong and thus found the “true” value of human wisdom. as in many other cases involving the enigmatic words of apollo’s oracle, the questioner’s destiny only unfolded from his response to what was said at delphi. we see ex post facto that the pythia’s socrates’ apology and plato’s poetry: a speculative exegesis 148 riddling words give the seeker inner self-knowledge rather than specific data about the future. it is as if one is expected to wrestle with the oracle, as jacob once did with the angel of the lord (genesis 32.24 ff.), and gain a new name and self-knowledge. the best platonic parallel is the tale told by diotima (symposium 203b ff.). socrates is likened by later speakers to a daimon moving between divine and human realms.5 for socrates, the truth seems to be that the wisdom of god cannot be held by us and the divine realm cannot be represented with any adequacy in human categories; this makes euthyphro’s attempts to tie the gods down by rites or definitions that let men outwit or control them far more absurd than any claim socrates made (euthyphro 11b–d). it is better to read homer as we do now for inspired insights into the human condition. another interesting implication of this view is that we should not think of the gods in tyrannical terms; the odyssey certainly suggests that we are of far more interest to the gods in our freedom and capacity for thought and virtue than if we were a pack of programmable playthings or just predestined puppets. it seems also as if it is only with the greatest effort that we can think of the divine without using categories that are not deterministic; every generation must struggle to protect the new testament from becoming the old testament. the children of israel themselves had to struggle with the deep desire to leave moses and return to their fleshpots and slavery in egypt (exodus 16.3). the greeks faced a similar problem when dealing with the relation between the iliad and odyssey; despite the new dispensation offered by the later work, the temptation to prefer sexy achilles to ugly odysseus, and choose bloody glory to confession and civic reconciliation, resides deep in the fallen human soul. even odysseus himself at the very end of the great epic devoted to his rehabilitation, is poised to revert to his old violent self (odyssey 24.537–9); this happens although the odyssey itself seems to struggle against the reification of the tragic lessons of the iliad and even shows how wily odysseus must deconstruct his own myths if he is ever to return home to his wife, son and kingdom. as we suggested earlier, divine powers cannot be made available to man without completely changing the natures of man and god. if power were distributed equally, then we would all be gods and if it were not, apart from being undemocratic, such inequity would be unfair and ultimately dangerous to one having divine favor. even the iliad subtly teaches us this sobering truth about the economy of the soul and the transitory nature of unearned happiness. homer shows how godly achilles, despite receiving every favor from zeus, is yet driven by prideful rage to plot against his 149 ranasinghe own comrades and ends up betraying his lover and best friend. no man felt sharper sorrow, for achilles knew full well that he had brought all of this evil on himself. i have used these illustrations from homer to show how socrates and plato would have read him in a way that would confound literal readers in their time and ours. just as the jews developed a sophisticated biblical hermeneutic system, one that would confound those who stole their texts without understanding how to wrestle with the words of a living god,6 socrates and plato seem to read the poets, especially homer, in a way that would respect the inspired nature of the text and resist the temptation to go far too swiftly from a too-devout literal reading, that worships the very ink and letter of the book, to the other extreme of atheistic free-interpretation and promiscuous word-play that makes a text now mean all things for all people. the gifts of the magi socrates, before concluding that his wisdom comes from awareness of his ignorance, interrogates three kinds of persons held to be wise. he first speaks to the politicians and finds that their wisdom or lack of it was inversely proportional to the opinion they and others held of it (apology 22a). thus, though politicians were well-skilled at persuading others that they were wise, a power that seems to come from persuading “the many” or demos to become one and follow their rule, they did not know how to use this power properly and only ended up believing their own lies. these rulers shamelessly define their rivals as “enemies of the city” in such a way that called civic virtues of the many are but the mindlessly imitated vices of the demagogues. as a result, both the corrupt athenian citizens and their vicious rulers became fixated far more on hating their so-called foes than on tending to their own city or souls. since socrates called himself the only living practitioner of true political art, he does not deny the possibility of true politics but states that the means usually used to persuade the many were as morally corrosive as they are ineffectual. he went on to claim in the gorgias that while the sick and penurious are aware of their state, the corrupt lose the power to know that their own souls are diseased.7 while socrates says that nobody deliberately corrupts those he lives with (apology 25c– e), this corruption can be disguised as holy tradition or denied as a point of sacred honor. while the spartans saw and deplored the restless motion that “diseased” the free athenians, their own corruption resided in a stubborn refusal to admit change their ways or admit error. (thucydides 1.70). meanwhile, athens’ demagogic politicians were unwise, and essentially atheistic to the socrates’ apology and plato’s poetry: a speculative exegesis 150 extent they did not think themselves divine. like many conservative politicians today, they used religion to their own benefit. that they did so in complicity with many tragedians may be assumed, for even the best poets completely depended on political patronage to stage their plays. the problem of poetry and politics becomes more interesting and complicated when socrates then turns to the poets themselves. unlike the politicians, who are pretty much dismissed as frauds, socrates finds that the poets, though sometimes truly divinely inspired, were not at all wise (apology 22b–c). yet again we find an inverse relationship between the poets’ wisest words and their ability to explain them but, unlike the politicians who can explain neither their manipulative art nor their own ignorance, because both disclosures would be shameful, the poets think themselves to be wise even though they are not the source of the divine wisdom that has come through them. as a result, the inspired words of poets were disregarded by them in favor of what was clever or politically expeditious. this inability to rightly apply winged words to human contexts, though once properly interpreted they can be of great value, suggests that just as the gods need human mouths to communicate with man, it is left up to others, barren but with a midwife’s skill (theaetetus 149a ff.), to explain the meaning of poets’ words to us. like midwives, they must explain words and uncover souls, while never claiming or asserting the right of a creator or maker. while the tragic poets are but the means by which the gods are made emotionally present to the many, the harder task of dividing the truly inspired lines of the poets from their baser demagogic chaff and revealing the meaning of these divine insights into our humanity seems to be left to this other type. this is necessary since, while the gods can or will only interact indirectly with men via poets (symposium 203a), poets prefer to pretend at being wise as they join with politicians to “make” caves. here, like the dogs of the republic, we learn to mistrust gods, love our masters, and hate strangers. the swineherd eumaeus explains this pig-headed mindset, saying that the gods take away half of a man’s wits the day he is enslaved (odyssey 17.322). in the cave we give ourselves ample reason to obey but not enough to think freely. socrates finds the true basis for this toxic outlook when he meets the final group of men considered wise, the artisans. by this we mean men who make objects. while they resemble the poets in the sense that the poets view themselves as makers, their task normally involves the making of identical generic things that can be owned and used. just as most americans today cannot grasp the difference between a business run for profit and a college, country, or church, socrates found that the artisans or makers believed that because they knew how to do or make one 151 ranasinghe thing perfectly, they knew everything (apology 22d–e). it is as if they thought reality to consist of artifacts or things. just as the cave’s prisoners were entertained by spectacles and did not wish to be free in any real way, the athenians were convinced by pericles that their hubristic mix of poetry and statecraft “conquered sea and land and left imperishable reminders of their power” (thucydides 2.41). this hints that athens’ poet-politicians, from solon and pericles to cleon or anytus, felt that their citizens and even reality was “made” by the rough magic of persuasion. next, well before god’s ex nihilo creation was believed in, the polis was abolished and all reality came to be seen as a system of subjugated objects ruled by the imperative voice of a god-emperor. later augustine, sometime imperial orator, scorns socratic self-knowledge in the name and voice of a creator who knows us better than we know ourselves.8 we have to choose between the soul’s freedom and its perfection qua divine artifact. rescuing the soul socratic questions corrupted or corroded athens’ golden age of imperial artisanship by forcing individual souls out of a toxic state of thing-hood. he tried to make them aware of an excellence that extended far beyond moving shadows in a cave. instead of being seduced by the wish to emulate a powerful god imposing order upon a herd of thoughtless souls with enslaved bodies, an evil temptation exponentially increased by our technology, socrates merely sought human wisdom and the virtues gained by renouncing divine ambitions and recovering honest speech (apology 20d). his dialectical via media, which avoids both divine imperatival speech-acts and bestial ejaculations, better suits the soul’s fluid nature than the false rationality that hides behind procrustean methods of ordering and categorization; it aims at seeing souls in all their singularity but also uses speech that assumes a shared human solidarity. post-human “things,” whether mobs or unschooled men, refuse self-knowledge in the name of craven new identities; they wear an armor of lies forged by bad poems and worse politics. socrates recognizes neither himself in the speeches made about him nor anyone in the angry mob of armed citizens, instantly springing out of these false grounds and arrayed against him. like a mob, a corrupt city cannot invest in self-knowledge regarding its origins. it prefers to emulate achilles and live for an angry day or gaudy night since it is convinced that the soul is weak and the gods are evil. the danger of a corrupted city learning to love and fear as one demented leviathan is socrates’ apology and plato’s poetry: a speculative exegesis 152 based on the greater evil of morality being seen as an artifice created by so-called owners of intellectual virtues; wise men who exempt themselves from practicing the slave morality they impose on a credulous hoi polloi so that sheep may safely graze. despite the perennial temptation faced by poets to claim divine rather than human wisdom, and rule like achilles as prince of the dead (odysseus’ lying and flattering words must be seen to be true in the sense that the desire to be achilles animated the quick and the dead in both homer’s time and his own), poetry must refuse the desire to make or rule reality. poets cannot exceed the limits of human ignorance and try to make things happen or claim knowledge of the whole without objectifying all they wish to know or rule over. true knowledge is not generic control over dead things. it is vulnerable awareness of many unique souls humbly beheld. likewise, the power of life and death over many can never be equated with the true knowledge that comes from being alongside others. humans must be pried from a common-sensed setting in generic everybody-ness; before a soul becomes somebody worth talking with or about, it must be shipwrecked and undergo odysseus’ experience of being nobody. for this to occur, poetry must open a soul up to the sorrow and fury hidden in its origins. until then a man is but a thing or object, a slave trapped in a cave of its own da-sein, tyrannical and tyrannized, formed and ruled by powers it refuses to know or see. as auden’s winged words reveal, poetry helps make this no-thing or event of un-thing-ing happen; the soul is cast into a sea of forms and sees the excuses, lies, and errors that made its ego. but nihilism is not the end of a poem. true poetry is the midwife of wonder. it nurtures a soul’s receptivity to all things. unlike clichéd anthems and slogans, true poetry plays a vital role in recalling us to the fullness of life. it may be joined with socratic shock therapy in awakening the soul from its dogmatic slumbers, a paranoid state of consciousness spawned when the powers of poetry were misused in the cave to “make” thumotic answers out of erotic forms or questions, and urge ugly necessities on us when the better angels of our nature should be trusted. the questions socrates asks force individual souls to make hard distinctions between the erotic ideas outside the cave and the false but sacralized images within it, thus exposing seams in the cave’s ideology and cracking open the ovate order of the city. a self-proclaimed gadfly from sacred delphi to the corrupt athenians, thus repaying the favor rational athena did poetic apollo by acquitting orestes, socrates acts as a daimon or divine emissary separating the holy from the base. he smuggles holy ignorance and humble wonder into an agora, a place where everything has a price and every man is a thing. it 153 ranasinghe took socrates’ clash with the poets to remind the athenians of the soul’s uncanny dignity, but even this epic agon finally relies on plato’s philosophic poetry to be preserved for posterity. poetry and human wisdom regardless of the final fate of socrates’ soul, plato’s self-deconstructing myths set him in the underworld/collective unconscious of athens exposing the ignorance and mendacity of other famous figures from mythology and history (apology 41a–c). we thus see a poetic philosopher artfully deploy better poetry to clarify, wrestle with, or counter other unwholesome or ill-reified myths about matters above the heavens and under the earth. perhaps the lasting value of poems is not what in they say of gods but in what the gods reveal through them about the human condition. bluntly put, poets do not know gods but may be inspired to see man through the eyes of a god; we can never know gods in themselves but only see their essential powers at work on the soul. the poets’ accounts must always be subjected to critical scrutiny. ultimately, though the poets are both inspired mouthpieces of the gods and makers of profane images, they cannot distinguish the one from the other. easily flattered by wily politicians into thinking themselves wise, they confuse signifiers with what they signify and give dogmatic meaning to once winged images, going on to become manipulated makers of mimetic morality for the muddled masses. they deny what is most crucial to socrates, the idea that the gods do not play favorites but respond to the distinctive if different erotic strivings of every soul. however ineptly it has been acted on, this idea is the hidden basis of democracy. even more importantly, every soul has the power to understand and be part of a conversation about what other mortals said and did in the past. this is a license to participate in the collective unconscious of one’s own culture. education is being initiated into this conversation. this conversation, as fluid as the soul, is the very lifeblood of true politics. yet, since souls are born ignorant, and inspired poems tend to become clichéd over time, much depends on those who wrestle with poems and recover their power to point beyond themselves. since every political regime is based on sacred words about its origins and meaning, these founding poems must be protected by being recalled diligently yet also saved from being reified by a remembrance that is too pious. every citizen must be given an opportunity to participate in this process, one in which words and deeds are put in common to provide both young and old with occasions to live, learn, and interpret their tradition. while the soul’s innate power to wrestle with gods and the poets is socrates’ apology and plato’s poetry: a speculative exegesis 154 the basis of human rights and democracy itself, philosophy is the way by which the erotic spark in each soul is guided to the fullest realization of its potential for human interaction. though philosophy, the love of wisdom, leads the soul from the cave’s security, this quest is only consummated when the wisdom of love brings the soul home and leads it to perform erotic deeds and give birth to new poems. plato finished the process begun by socrates when the old philosopher returned to the cave and died gloriously. inspired by this feat and writing after the great poets had died, his literary resurrection of a socrates made young and beautiful redeemed poetry through the new genre of philosophy. to fully understand plato’s account of socrates’ trial, it must be seen that that the three dialogues euthyphro, apology, and crito make up a dramatic trilogy, with the phaedo serving as a satyr-play that mocks any attempt to turn socrates into a cosmologist or philosophy into an exact science. we first see socrates (like oedipus confounding the sphinx) killing the gods of the city in the euthyphro; their furies then take revenge on him in the apology; and in the crito he receives them back into the city as forms or laws. socrates’ life and death thus form a sublime tragedy, seen fully at its end only by the hero and a few spectators. it is up to them to keep his noble memory alive by their own eros. true philosophy vs. political theology i will end on a provocative note, claiming to have shown that true philosophy, as opposed to cosmology, is much closer to poetry than metaphysics. far more at ease with imperfection and error, it is a human lifestyle that seeks after and serves as a good life for all. it is neither held hostage by dogmatic authority nor made ugly and intimidating by technical jargon. philosophy only becomes a pseudo-science when it forgets its poetic origins and seeks to expunge freedom from the soul to execute a perfect method. seeking to be wise technocrats in imitation of an omniscient god, we only see men as herd animals and lose our self-knowledge. yet while this means that socrates and plato did not claim to be wise, as aristotle did, it follows also that the infallible divine wisdom passed on from aristotle and augustine to anselm and aquinas, with assists from alexander and augustus, hands down sacred data (then used to make men good citizens and now guilty christians) serves the city’s gods and has little to do with socrates. he would send us back with rich eyes and empty hands to wrestle with the best poets: homer, the greek tragedians, the gospels, and shakespeare. true philosophy has scant patience for priests, 155 ranasinghe power, precedents, or protocol. unlike those who venerate the chain of transmission, its playful spirit is better able to recover and enrich the original sublime experience that was poetized. philosophical poetry is best exemplified by how homer’s odyssey revised his iliad before being turned to tragedy by aeschylus’ oresteia and then finally translated to philosophy by plato. while all these works show how the soul battles with the rage and sorrow that gave it life, the hero of the apology would have shocked achilles; socrates looks more like thersites than anyone else. but maybe only his valor and honesty can save the city and recover the divine. even achilles, who tried to sack troy by his unaided efforts, would have admired the old man’s erotic courage as he took on athens and its furies. socrates’ life and death inspired a new poetic genre that restored a city, once drunk on prideful rage, to philosophy. in our age, as fear-based faith allies with technocratic nihilism to raze the roots of christian humanism, perhaps only socratic thought and platonic poetry can relink our souls to the good? notes 1. this line appears in auden’s “ode to w. b. yeats.” see auden 82. 2. strauss provides the reference to xenophon that sets plato’s republic in its proper pedagogic context. see strauss 65. 3. ranasinghe, socrates and the gods 9–66. 4. for this tremendous insight into hades i am greatly indebted to eva brann. see brann 197– 200. 5. ranasinghe, the soul of socrates 144–78. 6. the best explanation of this very complicated issue is found in akenson. 7. ranasinghe, socrates in the underworld 70–71 and 120. 8. this is the main theme of his confessions. see for instance 10.50 in augustine. some of the best examples of augustine’s vitriolic assault on human self-control and selfknowledge are in the city of god 19. see augustine 433–478. socrates’ apology and plato’s poetry: a speculative exegesis 156 works cited aeschylus. aeschylus, volume 2: agamemnon, libation-bearers, eumenides, fragments, trans. herbert weir smyth. cambridge, ma: loeb classical library and harvard university press, 1926. akenson, donald h. surpassing wonder: the invention of the bible and the talmud. chicago: the university of chicago press, 2001. aristophanes. aristophanes, volume 2: clouds, wasps, peace, trans. jeffrey henderson. cambridge, ma: loeb classical library and harvard university press, 1998. aristotle. the nicomachean ethics, trans. harris rackham. cambridge, ma: loeb classical library and harvard university press, 1926. auden, w. h. selected poems. new york, ny: vintage international, 1989. augustine of hippo. selected writings, trans. mary t. clark. mahwah, nj: paulist press, 1988. brann, eva. homeric moments. philadelphia: paul dry books, 2002. hesiod. the homeric hymns and homerica, trans. hugh g. evelyn-white. cambridge, ma: loeb classical library and harvard university press, 1914. homer. the iliad, trans. a. t. murray. 2 volumes. cambridge, ma: loeb classical library and harvard university press, 1924–25. ___. the odyssey, trans. a. t. murray. 2 volumes. cambridge, ma: loeb classical library and harvard university press, 1919. plato. complete works, ed. john m. cooper. indianapolis: hackett publishing company, 1997. ranasinghe, nalin. socrates and the gods: how to read plato’s euthyphro, apology, and crito. south bend, in: st. augustine’s press, 2012. ___. socrates in the underworld: on plato’s gorgias. south bend, in: st. augustine’s press, 2009. ___. the soul of socrates. ithaca, ny: cornell university press, 2000. strauss, leo. the city and man. charlottesville: university press of virginia, 1964. thucydides. the landmark thucydides: a comprehensive guide to the peloponnesian war, ed. robert b. strassler. new york: the free press, 1998. microsoft word paffenroth.docx [expositions 9.1 (2015) 90–95] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 pre-christian classics in the catholic intellectual tradition kim paffenroth iona college i remember vividly the first seminars i participated in as a student, thirty years ago, on plato’s dialogues. the few weeks of seminar that preceded them, on homer, are hazier to me—i think because there is something so intrinsically absurd about achilles, and something so alien about the honor/shame culture these epics presume; but more fundamentally, this quite different impression shows how uniquely transformative the reading of philosophy (and, later in the curriculum, theology) is to someone in early adulthood. however badly we had read and interpreted literature in high school, and however badly it had been taught to us, we had at least read some literary works, even some from ancient greece, and experienced some of their beauty. we could imagine ourselves as either the characters in the books we read, or even as the authors of such books; some of us even dabbled in sophomoric fiction and poetry writing. but who among us could imagine writing a philosophical or theological essay at that age? who among us could imagine being a philosopher (whether the first philosopher we encountered was socrates or confucius), or later on, who could imagine following a life of contemplation or religious devotion, a life far more alien to us than the life of ambition and striving we were raised to expect and excel at? i said before that achilles is absurd, but he was only slightly more absurd to me than hamlet or laura wingfield, whose stories i had read the year before in high school; and part of maturing is to see none of them are any more absurd than i myself was at that age (and beyond). but when i and my classmates first encountered and considered a philosopher or theologian—such people did not just appear absurd, but incomprehensible (to me at least), the way poor mrs. hopewell cannot understand or even speak of her daughter in the flannery o’connor story “good country people”: “you could not say, ‘my daughter is a philosopher.’ that was something that had ended with the greeks and romans.”1 but most eighteen-year-olds are not as deeply committed to false (or any) values, as mrs. hopewell is, and so the confusion that sends her into existential despair instead enthralled and energized many of us when we were younger. i could identify more easily with achilles or antigone, but i instantly wanted to be socrates. as i’ve taught such texts—both philosophical and literary—for the past twenty-one years, i’ve seen such transformation often repeated in my students. indeed, among the best of my students, the transformation has been to a much higher plane of realization and thought than i had at their age: such are the joys of teaching, similar to how cicero described the joys of parenthood, when he said of his son, “you are the only one among all men, whom i would wish to surpass me in all 91 paffenroth things.”2 but the difference in setting is worth noting: i first encountered these texts in a completely secular setting, one that celebrated and studied the works only as products of western civilization, at an institution with no religious affiliation, and with no presumption of any religious commitment on the part of its students or faculty. since then, however, i have always taught them as part of the catholic intellectual tradition at catholic colleges (notre dame, villanova, and iona college). this setting does pose different challenges for these pre-christian works (and these apply equally or more so to those non-western, non-christian works i have likewise often taught at these institutions), because the temptation is always to treat them as partial revelation, as it were, imperfect expressions of the fuller, christian truth that would come later (or elsewhere). studying these works is then a sort of process of plucking out the “christian truth” like a jewel from a faulty, broken setting, or of scraping away all the dirt of pagan, non-christian falsity, until something approximating christian belief can be found, hidden away and usefully (if incongruously) revealed. both styles of reading and studying these works fail ever to consider the truths contained therein on their own: rather than building up to the truth, they seek to disassemble or unravel the work to find the truth, in a process more of creative destruction than following an argument to its conclusion or appreciating an aesthetic experience for its intrinsic, natural beauty. we are like those medievals who used roman and greek buildings and works of art as quarries, mining them for resources but destroying them in the process, overlooking the value and beauty they already had, because it did not fit with their christian worldview. with a “catholic intellectual tradition” already in place, and its truthfulness already taken for granted, it’s as though the seeker already has the truth, and holds it up like a ruler or model next to the object or work under consideration, when the essence of the socratic method is to know that one does not know, that one is on a journey of discovery with fellow seekers—other students, teachers, and even the authors of the works being studied—all of them capable of attaining and recognizing the truth, but none fully or finally in possession of it. these challenges are real, and i’m sure that readers have experienced them too, but let’s also not exaggerate them. after all, how different is the catholic intellectual tradition from any other tradition, any other community of interpretation, that privileges certain readings and interpretations over others? any school of interpretation (left, right, or center) feels the pull—the temptation, we would say as teachers—to sift through the past to confirm and “prove” its previously determined orthodoxy, to show how the past leads triumphantly to the beliefs held at present. we may guard against this as much as possible, and encourage our students’ freedom and openness, but it is almost an epistemological need of our species. for consider: what would we think of someone who returned to a previously analyzed text so open and receptive that she came up with a new interpretation upon each new reading, as though the previous readings had never occurred, or as though she had no connection to her fellow interpreters, or the time in which she lives? we should counsel humility (both individual and corporate) but we cannot assume (nor would we want, pre-christian classics in the catholic intellectual tradition 92 ultimately) disconnected naiveté. (and hence, we older people in the classroom must always remind ourselves: the first encounter with a work really is unique, it is what makes being a freshman so exciting, and what we find so exciting about teaching first-year students, for we are in the presence of a first encounter between a seeker and the truth, something that can never be repeated.) so my misgivings about this process are not based on its catholicity, christianity, or religiosity, but on its present-centeredness, a temptation shared by any hermeneutics i can think of. if anything, the catholic intellectual tradition is considerably broader and more adaptive and flexible than many others in what it allows into the great conversation, and how many interpretive paths or streams contribute to it. if being a part of a tradition is necessary for studying anything, then the catholic intellectual tradition is no worse than most, and better than many others. *** as i considered what would be the right or best way to incorporate pre-christian truths into a curriculum otherwise dominated by christian works, or indeed, how more generally to fit ancient and more modern ideas together in a way that does justice to both, a pauline quotation came to me, “but when the fullness of time had come, god sent his son, born of a woman, born under the law” (galatians 4:4). (and not having been raised as a fundamentalist, or even as a christian, the quotation only came to me gradually, perhaps like the truths i’m trying to tease out here.) what i’m struggling to articulate, and what i think we all struggle to instantiate in our teaching and in our communities, might be relatable to this idea of the “fullness of time.” (and given how wildly different are the translations of this verse, it seems as though it is a hard concept to express.) what paul is saying, i think, is that christ came at the right time, in the right way, at the right place—that that moment, and place, and person were all uniquely suited to bring all humanity closer to god, to fulfill all the purposes that creation has. but the more i thought about it, the more that moment expanded backwards and forwards in my thinking and analysis: if the moment the son came into the world was the completely right moment, then all the moments leading up to it become a part of it—they are all leading up to the “fullness of time,” helping to make it “full” in ways not completely known when they actually occurred (or even after), though partly glimpsed and intuited along the way. and all the moments that come after that “fullness of time” unfold under its influence and as continuation of it. so all of history, all of being, has a part in the “fullness”—a part and a meaning no part can have, if what we have to do with is all just randomly, chaotically, meaninglessly occurring events and temporary, purposeless creatures. because one moment was the “fullness of time,” all moments are right and fulfilling their own unique purpose. that really is the most basic mantra or creed of all education—that the universe is full of meaning, 93 paffenroth and that meaning is graspable by the human mind (indeed, that the human mind is uniquely suited to this task, and only satisfied and fulfilled when seeking such knowledge). though to us that creed may be so natural it needs no defense or articulation, and though everyone may pay lip service to it everywhere all the time, it is anathema to anyone who regards education as instrumental, as means to the true (and only real) goal of procuring employment. for if the universe really has a meaning, that meaning must be much more important and constitutive of human happiness and fulfillment than mere wage earning could ever be. or as one new york times essay recently put it: “unless you share the same existential goals as protozoa, [the pursuit of material well-being] is often flat-out wrong.”3 there really could be no more fundamental disconnect and internal dysfunction than a community that claims there are such objective realities as the good, the true, and the beautiful, and claims to bring people closer to these realities, while simultaneously saying in all seriousness that such a practice admits of quantification and measurement by gathering and calculating the average income of its graduates. *** but does the universe and knowledge of it have to be unified by belief that the son has come into the world? does the kind of education i’ve described and praised thus far have to be “catholic” in the sense of affirming or arising from the beliefs of catholic (or any) christianity? no: the fact that he came into the world and fulfilled all its purposes—this is what unifies all history, science, art, knowledge, and education, whether those who pursue these things acknowledge his sonship or not. i am not longing for something more like a medieval monastery, where education is pursued by the likeminded with much presumed commonality in perspective among students and teachers. (indeed, having been an atheist when i entered college, such a model runs contrary to the very real transformation i saw education accomplish in my own life.) i’m enough of a child of the enlightenment that i will always believe the diversity and contentiousness of the modern world can be enhancements to education. it is not the supposed relativism of modernity that threatens education, but the very ancient devotion to earthly success at the expense of pursuing real, heavenly riches. current challenges to catholic education seem to me the direct descendants of the athenians who killed socrates, much more so than they are the offspring of any modern or postmodern boogeyman that has been proposed. i nostalgically remain influenced and enchanted by my own undergraduate experience, which was very loud and proud about how tutors and students came to the texts with no presumed ideological common ground, no “right” starting point or conclusion that had to be affirmed by the group, beyond faith in reason and dialectic. it is this lower-case “c” catholic in the sense that all people long for this kind of knowledge and liberation, it is universal, that i would insist is the most legitimate and viable unifying purpose and perspective of a catholic college. it is a fundamental pre-christian classics in the catholic intellectual tradition 94 claim about humanity that i think is held with great intuitive, commonsense force by most people— a sense that quite enough of life is taken up by pursuing and worrying about money, that some small space can still be carved out in early adulthood, in which to pursue knowledge and habits of mind that will guide and sustain one for the rest of one’s journey. but if i naively hold out hope that a university could be constituted with as minimal a level of agreement as the proposition that the good, the true, and the beautiful exist and should be pursued, i would have to admit that i have consistently worked in environments where such a concept is ostentatiously praised while being constantly and covertly undermined, ever since i left st. john’s college twenty-six years ago. (and even there, i have seen recently in alumni posts on facebook, there has been controversy over a proposed “rebranding” of the school, so as to make it more attractive and less “bookish,” since many “customers” don’t like books, which may be hurting the college’s plans at growth and success. success at what, one would have to ask, if one has capitulated and minimized the presence of books at the great books school?) like tolstoy, i still cling to the idea of the masses possessing deep, basic goodness and insight—that they, better than elites, see the value and beauty of ideas first articulated by elites. i know the “great man” theory of history is in great disrepute, but let me indulge in it for a moment here at the end. it was sixty-two years ago that hutchins and adler created the britannica great books of the western world, so that office and factory workers such as my father could buy them on a payment plan and have those fifty-four impressive volumes on a book shelf—because such buyers knew, somehow, that ideas matter, and the ideas therein were better, more important, more transformative than others. it was twenty-seven years ago that allan bloom made his cranky splash into the non-academic world by chiding pretty much the whole population for what he saw as the neglect and debasement of appropriately deep thoughts; his critique was eagerly bought up by the many who still agreed that some ideas deserve our attention and devotion more than others. the only similar public intellectual i can think of in the contemporary world is neil degrasse tyson, who i hope does wonderful things to improve knowledge of the physical sciences, but who has on several occasions publically mocked philosophy—in comments that i think would be equally condemning of anyone “wasting” his or her time on any of the other humanities, let alone on something as specious and harmful as theology. so my hopeful speculation is that we need someone with the wit and eloquence to articulate and advocate for what most of our students and their parents know: namely, that education is for something other than job training, that knowledge for its own sake is not just an intellectual decoration, but a fundamental human need that everyone can pursue in its basics, and a few should be encouraged and rewarded for pursuing to its highest levels. 95 paffenroth notes 1. o’connor 1971, 276. 2. cicero 1972, 332. 3. brooks 2014. works cited brooks, arthur c. 2014. “love people, not pleasure.” new york times july 20. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/opinion/sunday/arthur-c-brooks-love-people-notpleasure.html?_r=0. accessed january 24, 2015. cicero. 1972. “fragment of a letter to his son.” in letters to quintus and brutus, letter fragments, to octavian, invectives, handbook of electioneering. ed. and trans. d. r. shackleton bailey. cambridge: harvard university press. 332–333. o’connor, flannery. 1971. “good country people.” in the complete stories. new york: farrar, straus and giroux. 271–291. microsoft word laumakis.docx [expositions 9.1 (2015) 96–105] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 philosophy, theology, and the core curriculum: case studies at the university of st. thomas stephen j. laumakis university of st. thomas, minnesota introduction recently, my colleague bernard v. brady, chair of the theology department at the university of st. thomas, observed: catholic colleges and universities tend to have a strong set of core course requirements, not unlike non-catholic liberal arts institutions. catholic schools, however, frequently include as part of the core a number of theology and philosophy courses. this course of study, the liberal arts with strong theology/philosophy requirements, is said by some to be the catholic intellectual tradition. at the heart of this view is the idea that theology and philosophy provide some context to understand and to integrate the other disciplines. unfortunately, it is the experience of many students in catholic colleges and universities that the core required courses are discrete and unrelated hurdles to jump over on the way to one’s major.1 (emphasis added) perhaps unsurprisingly, this “hurdle” view is exactly what many students at the university of st. thomas experience and report. fortunately, however, it is not what all of them experience— especially, students in our paired courses program. as a result, the purpose of this essay is to explain one practical way that philosophy and theology can serve as “bridge” or linking courses unifying the students’ experience of the core curriculum at a catholic university. my plan is to use my own extensive experiences teaching in the university of st. thomas paired courses program (twelve years) and the latest version of our theology department’s “bridge courses” as case studies showing the kinds of ways that the disciplines of philosophy and theology can serve not only as vehicles for supporting the mission of a catholic university, but as the glue that helps connect and integrate the various elements of a core curriculum. i begin with an account of the aims and goals of our paired courses program—from both administrative and faculty perspectives—and then describe the various forms that paired courses may take. i then briefly report my own experiences teaching in pairs with colleagues in economics, journalism, political science, psychology, sociology, and theology.2 i also explain how our third97 laumakis level theology “bridge courses” work. i conclude with some critical reflections on the strengths and weaknesses of these programs, and assess how they are helping overcome what i take to be two of the major obstacles in a typical undergraduate experience: namely, prematurely focused specialization and an inability to see the “big picture”—or, more precisely, how the various elements of a catholic, liberal arts education fit together. paired courses at ust the administration’s view the paired courses program at the university of st. thomas was initiated in 1995 by the office of academic affairs and the office of academic counseling with one goal in mind: retention, retention, retention. according to the associate dean of academic counseling, there are two key factors involved in retaining students: first, there are the relationships students establish with their peers; and second, there must be at least one significant relationship with a faculty member. in other words, the key factors in predicting whether a student will continue their course of studies at a college or university are their peer relationships—in terms of both quantity and quality—and their connection with at least one faculty member. that, in a nutshell, is the administration’s view of the aims and goals of the paired courses program: it is a vehicle for retention. this is not, however, the faculty’s view of the paired courses program. the faculty’s view the faculty’s view, at least among the colleagues i have taught with, is that the paired courses program is a vehicle for helping students make connections across the courses in the core curriculum.3 more specifically, it is a useful way to help students think through the relationships between the content and methodologies of the various disciplines that constitute the courses in the core. at the university of st. thomas, the core curriculum includes three courses in faith and the catholic tradition (theology), two in moral and philosophical reasoning (philosophy), two in literature and writing (english), a combination of three in the natural sciences and mathematical and quantitative reasoning, three in language and culture (modern and classical languages), and one each in social analysis, historical studies, fine arts, and human diversity. as faculty also will attest, however, while there are important academic benefits associated with teaching in the paired courses program, there are likewise significant costs associated with each of its elements. with respect to teaching, the typical costs include all of the time and energy spent finding a suitable partner—who is both easy to work with and committed to working together—in a relevant philosophy, theology, and the core curriculum 98 discipline, and who happens to be teaching a course at the appropriate level the content of which is meaningfully related to the subject matter of your own course. then there is the time spent preparing with your partner and devising common activities, time spent sitting in on one another’s classes—either occasionally or throughout the semester—and time spent doing the readings and preparing for the other course. and none of these considerations includes either the time and energy needed to talk about the quality of the students’ experiences or the time required to consider pedagogical issues and values. on the other hand, the teaching benefits include the invaluable opportunity to observe other teachers in action, and presumably the chance to improve one’s own practices in light of these observations. as confucius once said, “in strolling in the company of just two other persons, i am bound to find a teacher. identifying their strengths, i follow them, and identifying their weaknesses, i reform myself accordingly.”4 the teaching benefits also include the opportunity to learn about the particular courses in the core curriculum. i personally have had the opportunity to study and learn about the subject matter of introductory psychology, the christian theological tradition, the basic concepts of sociology and criminal justice, the content of both microand macroeconomics, the social scientific principles of politics and government, and the essential skills of the communications and journalism disciplines. not only have i had the opportunity to learn new and interesting things in disciplines outside of my own area of expertise, but i also have had the opportunity to reflect on the relationships among the courses in our core and make concrete connections between the content of my own courses and the other courses in the core. i have more to say on this “big picture” benefit later in this essay. finally, and perhaps most important, the paired courses program has given me the opportunity for extended interactions with my current students and advisees and with colleagues in other departments as well.5 when you see your students five to six times each week in class, and have at least that many chances to get to know them in settings outside the classroom—both before and after class, and in the cafeteria and the library—you cannot help but acquire a better sense of them as individuals. and they have the same opportunity to learn more about who you are as their teacher and adviser and as a person. with respect to the advising component of the paired courses program, there are quite literally no additional costs, and the benefits include, as just noted, the chance to get to know your students and advisees better and more intimately by being readily available to answer their ordinary questions and address their daily concerns. the practical structure of the paired courses program also provides numerous opportunities for non-threatening, non-evaluative interactions with your students and advisees outside of the classroom and office setting. ordinary and daily interactions with your students and advisees provide a perfect opportunity not only to show genuine concern for your students and their academic progress, but also to display compassion as an intellectual mentor and competence as an academic adviser. 99 laumakis the student’s view the typical student view of the costs of the paired courses program with respect to learning includes the obvious fact that there is quite literally nowhere to run to and nowhere to hide from your teacher and adviser. the students learn rather quickly that the only way to avoid their professors and advisers is to skip classes and office meetings, but eventually they come to realize— sometimes with prodding from the office of academic counseling—that such a strategy is a recipe for academic disaster. they also, though seldom, report that they do not like to see “the same old people” in two of their four classes. the student view of the benefits of the paired courses program with respect to learning includes the recognition of the academic benefit of greater student-teacher interactions, especially when students are asked to compare their paired courses experience with their other typical course experiences. the students also usually recognize the social benefits of enhanced peer relationships (in terms of both quantity and quality), which help with the transition to college work and college life more generally. finally, many of them are able to appreciate the benefits of the connections that they see and make among courses in the core. practical advice about how to pair perhaps the most important—in the sense of useful—part of this essay is my practical advice about how to pair your course with another course. i have three suggestions in this regard: first, consider natural connections; second, explore your own intellectual curiosity; and third, be open to trial and error. while i am willing to admit that all courses in the core curriculum are related or connected to other courses in the core (even if remotely or tangentially), it is rather obvious that some disciplines are closer to and more intimately connected with some disciplines than others. for example, it is beyond dispute that philosophy is more closely connected and related to theology, psychology, and political science than it is with, say, mechanical engineering, computer programming, or geology. so the way to begin thinking about pairing courses is to think about which disciplines are closest to your own. second, consider your own intellectual curiosity. what are you interested in? what would you like to learn about or learn more about? what courses were missing from your own undergraduate and graduate education? in which direction or directions would you like to expand your own areas of competence and expertise? how would learning about a related discipline help you improve your understanding of your own discipline and also help you improve your teaching about that discipline? in short, what other disciplines would expand your intellectual horizons? philosophy, theology, and the core curriculum 100 finally, you must be willing to learn—by trial and error—and you must be willing to fail. i think it goes without saying (but i will say it anyway) that every experienced teacher knows that, the first time you try new things in the classroom, things may not and usually do not go as well as planned. the same thing is true about learning: every student knows that some things are easier to learn than others, and some things are just plain difficult to understand, even after hours of dedicated study. experience has taught me that the best approach to both teaching and learning is to be willing to fail, because success or excellence, as aristotle famously suggested, is the result of continuous and unrelenting effort—it is not an act, but a habit, which is acquired through repetition.6 so, do not be afraid to fail! the mechanics of pairing the most difficult part of teaching a paired course is finding a suitable partner. just like dating and looking for a mate, you have to shop around. my suggestions include, first, talking to colleagues (whose opinions you respect) about whom they know or whom they have heard good things about with respect to their teaching; second, talking to your own students about “the word on the street” concerning faculty in other departments and disciplines; third, talking to your chair and your dean, because they tend to know more about the reputations of colleagues outside of your own department; and finally, talking to those in academic counseling or whatever department or office it is that oversees the program—assuming there is a centralized office involved—for their suggestions about possible partners. once you have found a suitable partner, you need to talk to each other about your courses, their content, and your individual pedagogical goals. if you already know the basics of your partner’s discipline, it should be relatively easy to figure out how your courses are connected and how their contents are related to one another. if, though, you do not know much about the content of your partner’s discipline, then you will need to spend more time both learning the basics and figuring out how the contents of your courses are related to one another. once you have a satisfactory understanding of the contents of your courses and how they are related to one another, you should then talk about the kinds of activities that would help your students see and make connections between your disciplines. possible activities could include common readings, in-class debates about common topics, threaded discussion areas on blackboard or other supplemental course sites, and common papers. the key is to find activities that will help your students both understand the contents of each course as distinct disciplines and see and make connections between the disciplines. my own experiences in teaching twelve paired courses has helped me see that in an ideal world your chosen activities ought to accomplish two important things at the same time: first, they ought to help your students learn the content of each course; and second, they ought to teach them how 101 laumakis to anticipate, look for, see, and make connections with other disciplines beyond your own. in other words, the common pedagogical activities ought to help the students in your pair see both the “small picture” of your particular courses and the “big picture” of the core or other parts of the curriculum. paired courses activities what follows is a summary of the kinds of successful activities that have worked in my various pairs. in three paired courses with a colleague in psychology, my partner and i attended each other’s classes, asked our students to keep a journal of their ideas about how what they were learning in each class was related to what they were learning in their other classes, and had an in-class debate on which particular philosophical view of the human person was more compatible with the approach to the person in psychology.7 the in-class debate was moderated by our student orientation leader, who had been working with our first-year students from the beginning of the academic year. we also asked our students to write a final, common paper—i.e., one paper submitted to both professors, graded separately, with a negotiated final grade common to each class—based on their own views about the debate topic. in two paired courses with colleagues in theology, my partners and i sat in on each other’s classes, focused part of our courses on discussions about the existence and nature of the soul in theological and philosophical texts, and had an in-class debate on which particular philosophical view of the human person was most compatible with the approach to the person in theology. again, our student orientation leader moderated the in-class debate, and we also asked our students to write a final, common paper based on their own views about the debate topic. in two paired courses with colleagues in sociology, my partners and i sat in on each other’s classes, agreed to focus discussions on the nature of the person in sociological and philosophical texts, and had an in-class debate on which discipline’s approach to the human person was more accurate in terms of explaining students’ own conception of the nature of the human person. in two paired courses with colleagues in economics, one macro and one micro, i attended all of my partners’ classes (while they visited my classes from time to time throughout the semester), and we had in-class debates on which particular philosophical views of the human person were assumed or at work in the discipline of economics. in two paired courses with a colleague in political science, i sat in on my partner’s classes, we selected readings that focused on the nature of the human person as a political creature, and we had an in-class debate on the political consequences of each particular philosophical view of the human person. finally, in one paired course with a colleague in communications and journalism, my partner philosophy, theology, and the core curriculum 102 and i sat in on each other’s classes, and we had an in-class debate on how the various philosophical views of the human person were related to ethical matters and judgments in journalism. obviously, there are many other ways to go about pairing courses and other kinds of activities that one might employ to achieve the same end as our paired courses program. i offer these samples merely as examples of the kinds of things that have worked well for me and my colleagues at the university of st. thomas. it is also important to keep in mind that not everything we tried worked, or worked as well as we thought it might: for example, sometimes the debates were sluggish and uneven, and the final papers were not uniformly as well-written as we had hoped they would be. in short, we worked by trial and error and learned from our mistakes. theology “bridge courses” i conclude this paper with a final suggestion about a different kind of course that can also help unify the students’ experiences of a core curriculum at a catholic university: namely, theology “bridge courses.” to quote from our undergraduate catalog: in every historical period and cultural context, there are fundamental questions that concern human beings: the nature of the universe, the existence and nature of god, the nature of human beings, the relationship of humans to god and to the world, the nature of evil, and the possibility of redemption. the department of theology has designed a sequence of courses that acquaint students with these questions and assist them in articulating thoughtful responses formulated in light of the catholic tradition and christian faith. these courses contribute to the students’ liberal arts education at the university through the development of writing, reading, and critical thinking skills. the first course, “the christian theological tradition,” introduces students to the theological frameworks that christians have historically used to address questions of faith and human existence. the core readings for the course are from the bible and from classic writers within the christian tradition. the course provides students with an opportunity to reflect critically on the catholic and christian traditions within the context of contemporary life. finally, it provides students with a basic level of theological literacy to prepare them for the second and third-level courses. the second-level courses invite students to practice theology by engaging at a deeper level in the discipline of “faith seeking understanding.” courses at this level 103 laumakis focus on a particular area of the christian tradition, namely: the bible, historical theology, systematic theology, or moral theology. students critically examine core elements of the tradition, such as classic texts, concepts, persons, and events while remaining mindful of the contemporary context. through these courses, students learn the skills and methods of the discipline. these second-level courses then serve as a foundation for the interdisciplinary “bridge courses” at the next level. the “bridge course,” as the third course in the faith and the catholic tradition sequence, will provide an opportunity for students to draw upon their entire program of studies. serving as the culminating point for the curriculum, the bridge course prepares students to build connections between their studies in the liberal arts and the broader world for which their st. thomas education has prepared them. a principal concern of the course is to guide students toward experiencing a sense of vocation in their professional, familial, and social lives […]. the three levels of courses, thus, form an integrated sequence in the faith and catholic tradition core area requirement. the first course introduces the tradition of christian theological reflection. the second-level courses invite students to “do” theology—that is, to engage in reasoning about faith. in the third-level courses, students bring theological concepts and methods into dialogue with other disciplines. (emphasis added) the most important strength of the theology courses at the university of st. thomas is not only the fact that they form an “integrated sequence” in the core area, but also that they help “students bring theological concepts and methods into dialogue with other disciplines.” in both of these respects, the theology courses in general, and “bridge courses” and paired courses in particular, help overcome what i and many educators take to be two of the major obstacles in a typical undergraduate educational experience: namely, prematurely focused specialization, and an inability on the part of the students to see the “big picture,” which is to say to see how the various elements of a catholic, liberal arts education fit together. “bridge courses” and paired courses not only force students to think and reflect on the “big picture”; more positively, they can inspire students to draw their own “big pictures.” nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind that “bridge courses” and paired courses are not without their drawbacks and challenges. these include, among other things, all of the practical problems noted above associated with forming a pair, as well as administrative and employment issues, involving workload, compensation, and how participation in these time-intensive courses is counted toward tenure and promotion. philosophy, theology, and the core curriculum 104 in addition to these challenges, there is the most basic and ongoing problem of finding interested and qualified faculty members who are both willing and able to participate. the key is finding a critical mass, or even just a few dedicated faculty members, with interests in making connections beyond their own disciplines. in fact, experience has taught me that these kinds of faculty members not only model the very goals they are trying to help their students achieve—an integrated vision and comprehensive understanding of the various disciplines of higher education—but also can inspire their students to see the “big picture” themselves, which after all is just what catholic, liberal arts education is really all about. notes 1. brady 2013, 201. 2. in numerical order, i have taught three paired courses with a colleague in psychology, two paired courses with colleagues in theology, sociology, economics, and political science, and one paired course with a colleague in communications and journalism. 3. paired courses come in many forms. “lite” versions are those where the same group of students (the advisees of the faculty pair), as a cohort, just happen to be in two different classes during the same semester but with no common activities. on the other end of the spectrum, “intensive” versions involve various kinds of common activities, including faculty partners who sit in on one another’s classes. 4. confucius 1998, 115–116 (7.22). 5. as a result of these interactions i not only have been able to work with colleagues in other departments, but i also have had the opportunity to work with them on professional conference presentations, workshops, and faculty travel programs. 6. aristotle 1999, 22 (2.4). 7. this is commonly referred to as an “intensive” version of a paired course—where each faculty member commits to attending the other’s classes. this type of paired course is obviously very time-intensive for the faculty partners involved, but from personal experience i can report that the social and academic rewards and benefits in terms of getting to know my students and helping them both adjust to college life and learn how to be college students far outweigh the temporal costs. 105 laumakis works cited aristotle. 1999. nicomachean ethics. 2nd ed. trans. terence irwin. indianapolis: hackett publishing. brady, bernard v. 2013. “on the meaning of the ‘catholic intellectual tradition.’” journal of catholic higher education 32: 189–205. confucius. 1998. the analects of confucius: a philosophical translation. trans. roger t. ames and henry rosemont, jr. new york: ballantine books. microsoft word rose-final.docx [expositions 10.1 (2016) 32–39] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 faculty as moral gardeners: formation rooted in the catholic social tradition margarita m. rose king’s college in his introduction, bernard prusak has crafted a clear, yet challenging, synopsis of the recent development of moral education, and raised the question of whether moral formation can occur in the typically brief, but intensive, college educational experience. it’s my intent to argue here that (1) moral formation can occur through the modeling of ethical behavior by faculty and (2) the catholic social tradition offers a framework for modeling ethical behavior and moral decisions, but (3) the fruits of seeds planted during the college years may not be harvested for years to come. it is the hopefulness of teaching in the context of catholic higher education, however, that enables faculty both to offer our students an invitation to a life of moral deliberation and to accept delayed gratification in witnessing the fruits of our labors. much has been written about the rightful place of moral formation in higher education. admittedly, i am in the camp that believes moral formation can occur in a college environment and, even more so, that colleges and universities have an obligation to assist students with their ethical development. if we do not, educators in colleges and universities create negative externalities by sending students into the worlds of business, government, and other professions without adequate moral preparation, resulting in poor moral decisions that have far-reaching consequences and impose high costs on the rest of society. though the model presented below is primarily focused on the undergraduate experience, it should so permeate the institution to impact all areas. taking for granted that we in higher education have an obligation to teach students how to think ethically and make sound moral judgments, what then is the most effective way to help students learn this skill? with a few exceptions, much of the pedagogy employed in higher education involves modeling preferred behavior. whether it be a model essay that demonstrates the quality of work the instructor expects, the articulation of the correct pronunciation of spanish words, or a mathematical problem solved on the board in the most effective way, faculty often demonstrate by 33 rose their own example what they want students to achieve. accordingly, it seems appropriate and quite familiar to adopt a “pedagogy of example” in the realm of moral formation, though a question remains about how such a pedagogy should be implemented. in a recent lecture at king’s college, the philosopher heather reid made the common observation that “ethics must be learned in practice.” she further contended, however, that students learn to treat others ethically by being treated ethically themselves.1 clearly, the latter point gives some guidance to faculty on how to approach the moral development of students. if the faculty treat all students fairly, applying the same grading standards to all, making the same accommodations for students in need, or adhering to (or relaxing) due dates and assignment requirements for all students, then they are demonstrating a fundamental moral principle of fairness that students generally recognize, expect, and tend to embrace. that said, there are more challenging aspects of moral formation that students may be reluctant to embrace, such as moral courage, and here too faculty have a role to play in helping students through example. take, for instance, faculty who have the courage to challenge mainstream or majority thinking on social issues. while there is general consensus in the academy, evident in faculty handbooks,2 that a faculty member should not use the classroom as a platform for political or religious proselytizing, it is incumbent upon faculty concerned about student moral formation to raise questions of social and economic justice in the classroom. in his 1982 commencement address at santa clara university, salvadoran jesuit ignacio ellacuría made a similar claim when he spoke to the fundamental role of the university in society: there are two aspects to every university. the first and most evident is that it deals with culture, with knowledge, the use of the intellect. the second, and not so evident, is that it must be concerned with the social reality—precisely because a university is inescapably a social force: it must transform and enlighten the society in which it lives. but how does it do that? how does a university transform the social reality of which it is so much a part?3 the transformation of society begins with moral courage. given that most students already have exposure to mainstream thinking on issues of social and economic justice, the faculty member who offers students an alternative view, particularly on a sensitive topic, demonstrates a certain level faculty as moral gardeners 34 of moral courage to students. the lesson is even more significant when the faculty member challenges the mainstream view in more public contexts, perhaps through a talk to the college community, an article in the campus or community newspaper, or even by participating in a public demonstration or protest on behalf of the poor and vulnerable. surely there is an opportunity cost to faculty’s not raising justice issues in the curriculum of a catholic college. not only would most students remain ignorant of social realities (as ellacuría implicitly cautioned), but they also would likely conclude that the sole concerns of an educated person should be abstract ideas or self-reflection. those students who did become aware of economic inequalities and racial injustices outside the academic environment would likely tend towards cynicism and pessimism in the absence of faculty attention to the issues. “how can we solve society’s problems when the most educated among us don’t even acknowledge their importance?” they might wonder. with the nature of the classroom itself changing from a place where information is presented to a setting for analyzing, critiquing, and even rejecting information, it seems even more appropriate to challenge students to delve into economic and social justice issues in their courses. by not addressing social realities, faculty short-change students and are derelict in their responsibility to help students grow in all facets of their lives, particularly their moral development. concretely, a faculty member can aid student moral formation by assigning a learning activity that brings students into direct contact with ethical issues. this can be through a research project or, often more effectively, through a service-learning requirement. in guiding students through the ethical issue, a faculty member helps students to think beyond themselves and to develop some empathy for those directly impacted by social or economic injustice, particularly when students are able to ascribe a name and face to the injustice. a week of working with students at andré house of hospitality in phoenix, arizona reinforced my conviction that educating the whole person means nurturing the seeds planted in course readings through immersion experiences of encounter, especially encounters with those whom society has pushed to the sidelines. i have had few deeper experiences of what it means to be human than teaming with students to engage with hundreds of people who are experiencing homelessness, each with her or his own story. seeing students open their hearts and their hands to help those with mental illness, addiction, trauma, and most often no social network other than the 35 rose community they have formed on the streets and in shelters, offered me a glimpse into what is possible for students’ moral and spiritual formation. though professional staff and administrators of community outreach and service-learning offices possess the expertise to develop and oversee the logistics of these encounters, faculty participation models for students both lived faith and a commitment to reasoned scholarly efforts that can make a difference in people’s lives. meeting those without a home can tug at students’ hearts, but we can show students that the mind must also play a role in in order to understand why people experience homelessness and the types of policies or programs that can assist them and prevent homelessness to begin with. beyond individual commitments to modeling engagement in ethical issues, faculty can contribute to an institutional culture in which they, along with staff, alumni, and even upper-class students, mentor undergraduates on issues of ethics and social responsibility. such mentoring typically takes place outside the classroom setting, but under the aegis of the college. vibrant residential programs provide fertile ground for this type of mentoring, be it through an informal discussion with a faculty member in the residence hall, or an ongoing commitment by a group of residents to a local or far away person or community in need. alumni, whom many institutions now recruit for career mentoring, can also be engaged in the moral development of current undergraduates, as alumni have the benefit of experience in a professional setting and can share concrete examples of right and wrong decision-making at work and among stakeholders. student leaders, typically juniors and seniors, bring their own gifts to the moral formation of younger students, having already encountered some of the ethical pests facing new students in the garden of character-building. those students who lead service or justice-related organizations and those who head alternative-break programs seem particularly disposed to moving newer students beyond discussion of personal moral decisions (plagiarism is wrong; don’t steal from your roommate) towards more challenging social questions (should u.s.-based firms pay workers in southeast asia less than a dollar a day? should our college buy electricity from a fossil-fuelburning electric generation plant?). with faculty and staff guidance, student leaders may become effective agents of moral formation. for, when students are engaged in ethical practice, they not only are learning about ethics; one could add, they also are teaching other students about ethics. while some students, alumni, staff, and faculty may have an inclination to contribute to the moral formation of undergraduates, they may be unable to identify an appropriate framework faculty as moral gardeners 36 within which to discuss both individual and broader social moral questions. the catholic social tradition (cst) provides such a model, particularly though not exclusively for faculty, staff, alumni, and students at catholic colleges and universities. one aspect of cst that makes it attractive to those seeking a structure for discussion of moral issues is that it is rooted in a tradition that has spoken out on injustices for over two millennia. the theologian obery hendricks points out in the introduction to his book the politics of jesus that radical social change that lifts up those at the lowest rungs of society is an essential component of jesus’ message and that commands to be attentive to the needs of the poor are found throughout the bible.4 notwithstanding the church’s own history of injustices, modern cst has articulated clear positions on the preferential option for the poor, as well as the rights of workers and, most recently with pope francis’s encyclical laudato si’, the human obligation to protect the natural environment and those most negatively impacted by climate change. another reason cst provides a valuable framework for moral formation is that its key principles resonate with so many people, regardless of religious identity, in the context of contemporary moral challenges. for example, the sustainable development goals approved by the united nations general assembly on september 25, 2015 identify poverty as a diminution of human dignity.5 in the national context, chicago-based interfaith worker justice speaks with a similar vocabulary to what one finds in cst, invoking solidarity when organizing actions to end wage theft and other abusive labor practices around the united states.6 in brief, cst offers students a lens for examining social conditions, a vocabulary for articulating what they see, a structure for judging the morality of observed conditions, and a moral imperative to act to dismantle injustices and build up a more just world. on a recent visit to northeastern pennsylvania, martha hennessy, granddaughter of servant of god and catholic worker co-founder dorothy day, shared some related thoughts on how faculty and staff can help students integrate catholic worker principles. according to hennessy, we can engage students in catholic worker principles (and, by extension, cst principles) without living in a catholic worker house so long as we demonstrate how we integrate faith and reason in our own lives.7 the merging of reason and faith calls faculty to be present at lectures, as well as at liturgies, and to ask the “tough” questions at campus events, both small discussions and large gatherings, especially when students are present. faculty can teach students habits of hospitality by demonstrating them ourselves—by making our tone and language respectful, inclusive, and 37 rose indicative of a willingness to engage in constructive debate. finally, we can show students the union of contemplation and action by inviting them to join us in both—in and outside of the classroom, perhaps through activities offered by campus ministry. though faculty often require patience to see it happen, they can witness tremendous growth in students through immersion experiences, particularly when students are adequately prepared and given sufficient opportunities for reflection. engagement with cst can be an integral part of this process. ideally, students would prepare for their experience with some acquisition of the vocabulary of cst—solidarity, preferential option for the poor, dignity of the human person, the right to work—then be reminded of it while on site, and finally be asked to use it during reflection at the end of the day, or back on campus. while the principles of cst and their application to contemporary social and economic issues are by no means foreign to my own courses in economics, i lack the assurance that their presence has resulted in the type of moral formation i hope for my students. yet, like other faculty members who consciously integrate cst into their courses, i don’t despair, because we recognize that the fruits of these labors are yet to be seen at the end of four years. we do hope, however, that blossoms start to form in that time frame. at a minimum, we can hope a critical mass of students has acquired some fluency in the language of cst. we trust that exposure to the principles of cst in their college years will yield ripened fruits that are visible in mature alumni buffeted by the sometimes difficult realities of family and work life. on this last point, it has become common practice at most american colleges and universities to engage alumni in more than sporting events, social occasions, and fundraising. many institutions encourage alumni to organize or participate in group service activities, request that they speak to classes and conferences about careers and technical topics, or ask them to serve as professional mentors to current students, either online or in person. these are excellent occasions to invite alumni to share how the seeds of their moral formation, planted during their college experience, have germinated in the meantime. alumni generally like to interact with students about their career paths. why not ask them to share as well their moral struggles and growth? in the spirit of assessment, also ask them what was missing from their college experience. for what moral circumstance were they not prepared? if they are unable to participate in person and on campus, alumni could connect with students through social media, a blog, or a webpage developed for this specific purpose. faculty as moral gardeners 38 one particularly valuable alumni subset for a moral formation project consists of those who have done a year or two of service, such as in the peace corps, americorps, jesuit volunteer corps, mercy volunteer corps, or similar organizations. catholic colleges and universities might invite these graduates back to campus and ask them to reflect on cst, where they saw the principles applied, where they saw them trampled upon, and how those experiences impacted their own moral formation. it is difficult to articulate the intense pride and sense of accomplishment experienced by a faculty member who hears her former student speak of solidarity, justice, and the dignity of each person with facility and conviction after eighteen months of serving those who are experiencing homelessness. a strictly academic education could never effect transformation and maturation of this kind. educational institutions benefit when morally mature alumni return, both to inspire others, not least faculty, and to serve as models of what moral formation rooted in the catholic social tradition can yield. notes 1. reid 2015. 2. see, for example, the king’s college full-time faculty handbook 2015, 47. 3. ellacuría 1982. 4. hendricks 2007, 5–6 and 199. 5. united nations 2015. 6. valente 2015. 7. hennessy 2015. 39 rose works cited academic affairs office. 2015. king’s college full-time faculty handbook. wilkes-barre, pennsylvania. ellacuría, ignacio. 1982. commencement address presented at santa clara university, santa clara, california, june 12. http://cms.scu.edu/jesuits/ellacuria.html. hendricks, obery m. 2007. the politics of jesus: rediscovering the true revolutionary nature of jesus' teachings and how they have been corrupted. new york: three leaves press. hennessy, martha. 2015. “the legacy of dorothy day.” presentation at king’s college, wilkes-barre, pennsylvania, october 22. reid, heather. 2015. “college football's gladiators.” paper presented at king’s college, wilkes-barre, pennsylvania, november 12. united nations. 2015. “sustainable development goals.” https://sustainabledevelopment. un.org/sdgs. valente, judith. 2015. “wage theft, a ‘national disgrace.’” america 213.16 (november 23). http://americamagazine.org/issue/wage-theft-national-disgrace. classics in american schools [expositions 5.2 (2011) 9-13] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 classics in american schools liz gephardt williamsburg middle school, arlington, va for many students in american schools, studying classics means studying latin. depending on available programs, students may elect to study latin as early as elementary school, with the most students starting latin in ninth grade. although the exact number of students currently enrolled in latin in the united states is unknown, the american council on the teaching of foreign languages’ most recent survey estimates national latin enrollment at 205,158, comprising 2.3% of all students enrolled in foreign languages. 1 the number of students taking the national latin exam is somewhat smaller then actfl’s estimate, since not all schools offer the exam. in 2010 138,000 students signed up to take the national latin exam, and the number of students actually taking the exam each year has ranged between 130,000 and 138,000 since 2004. 2 considerably fewer students have access to greek at the high school level with 1,709 students taking the national greek exam in 2010. 3 a significant percentage of high school students pursue college-level coursework in latin, usually after four or five years of study. high school advanced placement courses drive the academic curriculum for two reasons: school systems seek ways to quantify high achievement, and universities prefer to admit students who elect challenging courses. 4 the number of students taking advanced placement exams in latin peaked in 2007 at 8,700. at that time the college board offered two different exams: one exam covering vergil’s aeneid, and a second latin literature exam covering readings from catullus and either cicero, horace, or ovid. since the college board discontinued the latin literature exam in 2009, the overall number of students taking advanced placement latin exams dropped to 6,523 in 2010. 5 from these early numbers, it is difficult to determine whether enrollment in high school latin literature courses has dropped altogether, or whether schools continue to offer catullus, cicero, horace and ovid, but are simply not counted by the college board. in 2012, the college board plans to introduce a revised advanced placement latin exam that covers readings from vergil’s aeneid as well as caesar’s bellum gallicum and bellum civile. teachers, classicists and advocates for the classics are closely following the development of this combined vergil-caesar exam and its impact on latin programs across the nation. the majority of students in the united states does not study latin or greek, but encounter classics in “core curricula” classes like english and social studies. as part of the movement towards accountability in education, individual states have published standards for each discipline, and states are working together toward setting educational standards for the nation. as a result, many states already mandate that the general student population study ancient greek and roman culture. obvious examples of this include world history and literature courses in high schools, but standards relating to classics also appear in the elementary school curriculum. for classics in american schools 10 example, the virginia standards of learning for social studies for third grade stipulate: “the student will explain how the contributions of ancient greece and rome have influenced the present world in terms of architecture, government (direct and representative democracy), and sports.” 6 this indicates that students will not only study ancient architecture, government, and sports, but also describe their impact on modern life. while standards alone do not guarantee successful instruction, making the study of ancient greece and rome a priority in third-grade indicates that we value classics in education and find it relevant to our society. outside of the classroom, avid young readers can easily find classical content in the junior fiction section of the library as well as on the silver screen. readers around the world have encountered latinate spells and classical allusions in j. k. rowling’s harry potter series of books and films (now, even a theme park). more recently, students have discovered greek mythology through rick riordan’s current series heroes of olympus and his best-selling series percy jackson and the olympians, both of which portray greek olympian gods, demigods, and humans interacting in a contemporary setting. a film based on riordan’s first book in this series, the lightning thief, was released in theaters in february 2010 with a sequel, sea of monsters, slated for release in 2012. in addition to greek mythology, the roman military has also captured students’ imaginations. in 2011, the eagle – a film based on rosemary suttcliff’s novel, the eagle of the ninth, first published in 1954 – has increased book sales as well as interest in roman military conquest and, especially, roman britain. taken together, the success of these popular novels and films underscores a general interest among school age children in classics. students may be eager to read about mythology and ancient history, but many simply do not realize that they can pursue these interests by studying latin. other students are unable to study latin due to teacher shortages and program cuts. economic strain has also caused many schools to increase class size and limit after-school activities such as the junior classical league. moreover, some parents and schools pressure students to study spanish, chinese or japanese to prepare for the global job market. these are just some of the challenges that latin teachers face in the current educational environment. popular books and films can help recruit prospective students, but other methods are required to sway the parents, guidance counselors and school administrators who make vital decisions about academic programs. teachers and advocates of classics need to communicate effectively with these groups using current educational terminology. unfortunately, some existing promotional materials for latin and classics use outdated language. even the most up-to-date teachers can find themselves falling back on these well-worn arguments to defend programs: latin is a challenge reserved for “top” students, latin increases sat verbal scores, latin helps students become doctors or lawyers via medical and legal terminology, latin provides “essential knowledge” and entry into the world of the intelligentsia. while i am not questioning the veracity of these statements, i do posit that they are elitist and ineffective in the current educational marketplace. they paint a skewed picture of the latin classroom, filled with brilliant students with giant vocabularies learning mottoes that can help them become a jeopardy champion on the way to law school. in addition, these statements imply that latin competes with other languages for “top” students with “lesser” students settling 11 gephardt for french or spanish, when in fact students with a variety of learning styles can benefit from studying latin. teachers and advocates for classics must take a critical look at posters, pamphlets, and presentations, carefully considering the messages they send about the value of classics in education. how we market the study of latin and classics must reflect our own teaching practices and educational terminology. current educational models for teaching latin bypass these elitist arguments and emphasize the skills that students develop. the most widely used national model was produced in collaboration with the american council on the teaching of foreign languages as a part of the national standards in foreign language education project. 7 since the first draft of these standards were written for teachers of modern languages, the american classical league and the american philological association along with regional classical associations used the same framework to create standards for classical language learning which provided recommendations specific to greek and latin. 8 both of these documents emphasize the same five goals for classical and modern languages: communication, culture, connections, comparisons and communities. these documents have become the blueprint for states’ educational standards, making the five “cs” an excellent guide for marketing latin and classics to the educational community. the task at hand is twofold: to describe the skills that students develop as they reach these goals and to reframe arguments for studying latin around those skills. the first and most important of the five “c’s” is communication. the standards for classical language learning states, “reading, then, is the first standard and the key to communicating with the ancient world.” 9 textbook series such as ecce romani, cambridge latin course and oxford latin course all structure lessons around progressively challenging reading about ancient romans. because reading is integral to the classroom and part of the daily life of latin students, it is important to articulate the skills it develops: comprehension, analytical thinking, and flexible thinking. latin students improve reading comprehension by using root words, prefixes and suffixes to increase word recognition. students also use context clues to define unfamiliar words and interpret words that have multiple meanings. while navigating the matrices of latin morphology and supporting arguments with examples from primary sources, students develop analytical thinking. finally, students exercise flexible thinking by finding synonyms, creating alternate translations and making predictions about narratives. because reading spans academic and work environments, parents and educators alike are eager to hear teachers describe the ways we develop these skills in our students. there are many aspects of greek and roman culture (the second “c”) that fascinate both students and adults. incorporating mythology and history in a way that engages the wider school community is a challenge worth undertaking. two simple ways to use ancient and popular culture to promote the study of classics are displaying novels in the classroom or school library and arranging field trips to films or viewings after school that include the broader student body, parents, and educators. although classics is by nature an interdisciplinary study, it can be difficult to describe its scope and complex relationships to other disciplines. to exemplify the classics in american schools 12 third goal, connections, i imagine a poster with a “classical web” or “classical umbrella” that encompasses studies such as art history, epigraphy, and linguistics. creating materials to illustrate these connections is indeed a worthy endeavor for any teacher, classicist, or committee. until such a poster (or other equivalent) exists, however, students will rely on implicit messages that classicists can pursue multiple interests. in an effort to make the message explicit, some teachers use creative projects to help students understand the interdisciplinary nature of classics, while others engage students in problem solving using examples from archaeology, music, and history. ultimately, teachers and classicists need to find ways to articulate the sub-disciplines comprised by classics as well as related fields of study. as teachers we help students engage in a dialogue between the ancient and modern worlds. students then use comparisons, the fourth “c,” to make latin and classics relevant to modern life and language. these can be cultural comparisons, in the case of virginian third grade history students, or linguistic comparisons that students make between latin and their native tongue(s). in this way studying latin does more than raise sat verbal scores, it expands students’ linguistic awareness. while students do increase their english vocabulary through word study and derivatives, they also develop a deeper understanding of grammar, syntax, and word relationships. these types of linguistic comparisons improve students’ writing in english and also facilitate the study of other languages. rather than competing with other languages for students, the fifth and final “c,” community, recommends that students apply the study of latin to other languages, engaging in a multilingual community. students also bring latin with them to their other coursework, and participate in student networks such as the national and state junior classical leagues. as these students interact with peers, parents and members of the community, they become ambassadors for latin and the study of classics, invigorating programs and becoming advocates and teachers of the future. notes 1. american council of the teaching of foreign languages 2011, foreign language enrollments in k–12 public schools: are students prepared for a global society 2007– 2008: report summary; retrieved from http://www.actfl.org/files/reportsummary2011. pdf. 2. national latin exam 2010, national latin exam participation statistics 1977–2010; retrieved from http://www.nle.org/stats.html. 3. american classical league 2010, results of the acl/ njcl greek examination; retrieved from: http://www.aclclassics.org/uploads/assets/files/ngeannounce2010. pdf. 4. jane miriam epperson brinley, “et tu, college board?” the washington post may 14, 2009, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2009/05/13/ ar2009051303254.html. http://www.actfl.org/files/reportsummary2011.pdf http://www.actfl.org/files/reportsummary2011.pdf http://www.nle.org/stats.html http://www.aclclassics.org/uploads/assets/files/ngeannounce2010.pdf http://www.aclclassics.org/uploads/assets/files/ngeannounce2010.pdf http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2009/05/13/ar2009051303254.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2009/05/13/ar2009051303254.html 13 gephardt 5. college board 2010, ap examination volume changes 2000–2010; retrieved from http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/exam-volume-change-2010.pdf. 6. virginia department of education 2008, history and social science standards of learning for virginia public schools: history 3.1; retrieved from http:// www.doe.virginia.gov/testing/sol/standards_docs/history_socialscience/next_version/stds _history3.pdf. 7. national standards for foreign language education project 1996, standards for foreign language learning: preparing for the 21st century; retrieved from http://www.actfl.org/ i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=3392. 8. american classical league, american philological association, classical association of the atlantic states, the classical association of new england, classical association of the middle west and south 1997, standards for classical language learning; retrieved from: http://www.aclclassics.org/uploads/assets/files/standards_classical_learning.pdf. 9. standards for classical language learning; retrieved from: http://www.aclclassics.org/ uploads/assets/files/standards_classical_learning.pdf. http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/exam-volume-change-2010.pdf http://www.doe.virginia.gov/testing/sol/standards_docs/history_socialscience/next_version/stds_history3.pdf http://www.doe.virginia.gov/testing/sol/standards_docs/history_socialscience/next_version/stds_history3.pdf http://www.doe.virginia.gov/testing/sol/standards_docs/history_socialscience/next_version/stds_history3.pdf http://www.actfl.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=3392 http://www.actfl.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=3392 http://www.aclclassics.org/uploads/assets/files/standards_classical_learning.pdf http://www.aclclassics.org/uploads/assets/files/standards_classical_learning.pdf http://www.aclclassics.org/uploads/assets/files/standards_classical_learning.pdf microsoft word von thaden.docx [expositions 9.1 (2015) 106–113] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 digging down and reaching out: a story of biblical scholarship in the twenty-first century1 robert h. von thaden, jr. mercyhurst university “in the posteverything world it turns out humans can't kick the story habit. homer gets the last laugh.” —glen duncan2 it was 1787, the story goes, when johann philipp gabler (1753–1826) delivered an address that signaled an important step in understanding biblical studies as an academic discipline as distinct from systematic theology in service of a church community. in his “discourse on the proper distinction between biblical and dogmatic theology, and the right determination of the aims of each” gabler, the story simplistically tells us, lays out the differences between studying what the biblical texts meant (in their historical context) and what they mean (to contemporary practitioners of biblical religion). like most stories of beginnings, this paradigmatic moment was one of many as biblical studies developed, especially during the important eighteenth century, into a field of humanistic inquiry rather than the decisive spark. it is similar in kind to fixing the start of the reformation on october 31, 1517 when luther nailed his theses to the door of the university church in wittenberg. the moment stands within a stream of intellectual work and upheaval—its import is retroactively assigned to serve as a symbolic marker that prompts the retrieval of a vast and complicated history of biblical interpretation both before and after gabler.3 the history of modern biblical interpretation can heuristically be viewed through the lens of this simplified gablerian dichotomy. scholars struggle both to contextualize ancient texts in their social and historical contexts as well as wrestle with how contemporary readers (religious or not) make sense of the meaning potential latent in these same texts.4 knowing (and remembering) the history of our guild, i argue, is necessary for biblical scholars as we move the storyline of our discipline forward into the twenty-first century—if only to be reminded of the wisdom of the teacher in ecclesiastes (1:9): “what has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun.” being mindful of this saying can help us avoid the pitfalls of the past, while maintaining an appropriate level of humility as we endeavor to make sense of biblical worlds.5 the resources for studying this history of interpretation are legion. john h. hayes’s two-volume dictionary of biblical interpretation that appeared in 1999 is an indispensible reference tool for this kind of intellectual remembering.6 noteworthy for analyzing scholarship in the half-century following the second world war are the volumes in the society of biblical literature’s “the bible and its modern interpreters” series.7 and for those of us who are 107 von thaden new testament scholars, william baird’s magisterial three-volume history of new testament research8 provides both a sweeping and in depth study of important scholars and trends “from the period of the enlightenment through the first two-thirds of the twentieth century.”9 what all of this scholarship highlights is the importance of locating biblical scholars and their work in their own historical and intellectual contexts in order to make sense of the stories of their contribution. the legacy of scholars from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries is primarily a historical one. they tried to set biblical literature into its own context and take these writings on their own terms. the fruits of their labor can be broadly identified as the historical-critical method. as michael coogan aptly describes it: with its many sub-disciplines, the historical-critical method dominated biblical interpretation through the mid-twentieth century, and it continues to be influential. the scholars [who developed aspects of this method] were immensely learned, often experts in a variety of fields, including philology, textual criticism, comparative literature, and the study of ancient cultures contemporaneous with the biblical traditions. moreover, also in keeping with the intellectual mood of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they were optimistic, in retrospect even overconfident, operating on the assured conviction that with sufficient data and careful analysis of the data an objective, accurate, and complete understanding of the bible was possible.10 since the mid-twentieth century, however, and especially since the last quarter of that century, many began to view the (by then) traditional historical modes of engaging biblical texts as far too limited. as those scholars who developed the edifice of the historical-critical model were “experts in a variety of fields,” so too do contemporary scholars study, master, and use tools from a variety of academic specializations to ask new questions of biblical texts. as carol newsom notes, “in keeping with a trend characteristic of most humanities and social sciences, there has been a strong movement to interdisciplinary conversation.”11 the story of biblical studies in the twenty-first century is moving to include many more voices. biblical scholars laboring in the academy in the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century, then, are heirs to a rich and varied intellectual tradition. the current field is marked both by increased specialization as well as an increased desire (and need) to reach across boundaries for cross disciplinary conversations.12 viewed one way, twenty-first century biblical scholarship looks fragmented and chaotic—a story without a coherent plot.13 viewed another way, it is a vibrant champion of both humanistic inquiry and the promises of digital tools for making sense of vast quantities of data. while the specific iterations of this fragmentation and connection are digging down and reaching out 108 located in the specificities of the twenty-first century academy, if we take the long view of the history of bibelwissenschaft we just might hear the teacher from ecclesiastes once again. if one looks at the current list of program units for the primary academic organization of north american biblical scholars, the society of biblical literature (sbl), one notes a dizzying array of specializations, some focusing on content, others on approaches to the texts, and still others on the social/cultural location of interpreters. these program units also differ in whether they promote scholarship of highly specialized areas (e.g., “early exegesis of genesis 1”) or broader contexts (e.g., “greco-roman religions”).14 and, finally, reading through these program units one notes that twenty-first century biblical scholarship, heir to almost three centuries of diligent academic work, now has the luxury of breaking the meant/means dichotomy that early practitioners worked so hard to erect. thus some scholars intentionally and clearly embrace a focus on the response of current readers to the text based on their location within multiple complex webs of identity formation that dominant groups can take for granted, but which historically marginalized voices must explicitly claim. as steven mckenzie and stephen haynes noted already at the close of the twentieth century, “scholars and scholarship in the field of biblical studies continue to diversify. […] as the process of diversification continues into the future, the need for dialogue between different approaches to the bible and their practitioners will be more acute.”15 the more specialized biblical studies gets, the more we stand in need of having productive conversations with one another—and with the larger academy. the twin trends of twenty-first century biblical scholarship, digging down and reaching out, create a landscape that is shifting and unsettled. this current reality demands a principled means of engaging the texts, their original contexts, and the meanings communities have derived from them over the centuries. brennen breed has recently proposed that biblical scholars become “nomadologists.” he writes, “we study the text wherever it goes, from the ancient near east to the present day, as it moves through a myriad of contexts, both at home everywhere and ultimately at home nowhere, with this question always in mind: what can these texts do?”16 nyasha junior correctly critiques breed’s metaphor of the wandering text by noting that texts do not do things on their own, but, rather, “texts are repurposed, corralled, and coerced into new contexts.” for junior, the important issue is to identify what people do with the texts, rather than assume passive communities upon whom the texts act. “asking ‘how has this text functioned’ is a good question,” she argues, “but to ask ‘who has (re)used this text, how, and for what purpose’ identifies more clearly the particular interpreters and agendas behind these reinterpretations.”17 in short, what twenty-first century biblical scholarship needs are interpretive analytics that (1) make space for specialization that allows for close nuanced readings, (2) allow these readings to be put into meaningful conversation with colleagues in other areas of religious studies and the academy at large, and (3) take seriously the cultural hermeneutical space of the human beings who produced and who continue to make meaning of the texts. 109 von thaden vernon k. robbins argues that methods, as were developed over the past three centuries, are different from interpretive analytics, which are necessary for twenty-first academic work. “the philosophy of a method,” robbins writes, “is grounded in a belief that the true nature of something is ‘in something itself.’ in contrast, the philosophy of an interpretive analytic is grounded in a belief that the true nature of something is exhibited in the way it relates to all other things. this is a difference between a philosophy of essence or substance and a philosophy of relations.”18 the interpretive analytic developed by robbins, socio-rhetorical interpretation, can serve an example of the robust and variegated aspects of such a mode of analysis. the ever increasing specialization in various aspects of biblical scholarship, as mentioned above, also drives biblical scholars into conversation with others since any single scholar cannot do all things. socio-rhetorical interpretation provides a principled means of entering into these conversations. as robbins argues, socio-rhetorical interpretation: invites methods and methodological results into the environment of its activities, but those methods and results are always under scrutiny. using insights from sociolinguistics, semiotics, rhetoric, ethnography, literary studies, social sciences, cognitive science, and ideological studies, socio-rhetorical interpretation enacts an interactive interpretive analytic that juxtaposes and interrelates phenomena by drawing and redrawing boundaries of analysis and interpretation.19 in other words, the interpretive analytic that robbins has developed enacts some of the very things that breed’s proposed “nomadologists” are to perform in their analysis of biblical texts. as initially developed at the end of the twentieth century, robbins’s interpretive analytic explores multiple textures found in texts.20 the textures socio-rhetorical interpretation programmatically analyzes are: inner texture, intertexture, social and cultural texture, ideological texture, and sacred texture. an interpreter engaging inner texture stays within the boundaries of the text under consideration and examines what the language of the text is doing. intertexture moves beyond the boundaries of the language and structure of the text itself and recognizes that biblical texts are dynamically related to phenomena outside of them. social and cultural texture explores both the social and cultural background the producers of the text assume and the prescriptive social and cultural ordering those producers invite the audience to adopt. ideological texture concerns both those who wrote the texts and the reception of texts by later interpretive communities, including the scholar analyzing the text. sacred texture runs throughout the other four textures and enables an interpreter to analyze the specifically religious dimensions of the biblical texts. in this century, socio-rhetorical interpretation has moved into another phase of development that bolsters the analysis of textures by the insights of cognitive science, through the use of conceptual blending theory, and critical spatiality/geography theory.21 thus not only does a digging down and reaching out 110 socio-rhetorical interpretive analytic push the biblical scholar to examine resources outside of the bible itself, but it also enacts interdisciplinary investigations with ease. such an interpretive analytic provides the nomadologist a programmatic means of investigating various ways texts are made meaningful by hearers/readers. as junior reminds us, “nomadic peoples do not roam freely without purpose. they move intentionally.”22 i have used the interpretive analytic of socio-rhetorical interpretation as an illustrative example because it is the exegetical environment in which i feel most at home as a scholar. it allows and encourages investigations into what a text meant in its ancient context as well as what it means to various reading communities through history. or, in the words of robbins, “the approach uses a transmodern philosophical position of relationism to interrelate ancient, modern and postmodern systems of thought with one another.”23 and thus whereas i began this essay by holding up a german scholar as an example of important eighteenth century developments in biblical studies, i end by holding up a german-american biblical scholar as an example of someone who tries to practice an interpretive analytic that befits an interdisciplinary twenty-first century academy. unfortunately, there is another similarity that has run through most of this essay. even in a globalized, pluralistic twenty-first century world, biblical scholars still look overwhelmingly like gabler and me: white, male, and christian (broadly defined). as jeremy schipper notes, regarding the membership of sbl, “a 2014 member profile report indicated that almost 89% of participants identify as of european/caucasian descent and 76% identify as male.”24 the astute reader will have noticed that i have cited the writing of only two women in this essay (newsom and junior) and only one, as far as i know, person of color (junior). this is the reason for my deliberate use of the indefinite article in the subtitle of this piece. it is merely a story of biblical scholarship—one that conforms in many ways to what junior refers to as the “‘standard’ narrative of biblical scholarship.”25 this essay, then, is an example of the challenges faced by the guild of biblical scholars in this century. the stories of biblical scholarship told by women, persons of color, persons living outside of north america and europe, persons whose sexual identities have historically been marginalized, and a whole host of others will undoubtedly look very different from my own. however, it is not my place to pretend to be able to tell their stories. notes 1. my ideas for this essay benefited greatly from discussion with colleagues at the annual meeting (march 12–13, 2015) of the eastern great lakes biblical society—especially susan e. haddox (university of mount union) and bart b. bruehler (indiana wesleyan university)—and the spring collegium (march 13–14, 2015) of the rhetoric of religious antiquity group—vernon k. robbins (emory university), l. gregory bloomquist (saint 111 von thaden paul university/université saint-paul), sheila mcginn (john carroll university), roy jeal (booth university college), alexandra gruca-macaulay (saint paul university/université saint-paul), and bart bruehler. 2. duncan 2011, 30. 3. see baird 1992, 184–87. 4. see the recent essay by brennen breed wherein he uses the threefold distinction of ricouer—“(1) the world behind the text, (2) the world in the text, and (3) the world in front of the text”—as his heuristic lens (breed 2015). an example of how digital technology is helping scholarly conversations: i was alerted to the existence of this essay by reading a tweet posted by nyasha junior. 5. baird 1992, xxii. full disclosure: the new testament program in the graduate division of religion of emory university (my alma mater) devotes a two-semester sequence to the history of interpretation in its curriculum. my training thus informs the significance i give to understanding the disciplinary background of biblical studies. 6. hayes 1999. 7. knight and tucker 1985; epp and macrae 1989. 8. william baird, history of new testament research (minneapolis: fortress, 1992–2013). volume one: from deism to tübingen (1992), volume two: from jonathan edwards to rudolf bultmann (2002), and volume three: from c.h. dodd to hans dieter betz (2013). for the history of hebrew bible/old testament interpretation from antiquity through the twentieth century see the three volume collection edited by magne sæbø, hebrew bible/old testament: the history of its interpretation (göttingen: vandenhoeck & ruprecht, 1996–2015). 9. baird 1992, xiii. 10. coogan 2010, 2221. 11. newsom 2010, 2227. 12. see the editor’s preface in epp and macrae 1989, xxi. 13. see newsom 2010, 2227, where she notes that “it is difficult to give a simple overview of the proliferating approaches to biblical studies since the 1970s.” digging down and reaching out 112 14. for a current list and description of the program units active for the 2015 annual meeting of the society of biblical literature, see http://www.sbl-site.org/meetings/ congresses_programunits.aspx?meetingid=27. 15. mckenzie and haynes 1999, 3. 16. breed 2015. 17. junior 2015. 18. robbins 2009, 5. 19. robbins 2010, 192. 20. this initial development is explicated in robbins 1996a and 1996b. my descriptions of the textures come from these volumes. see also robbins 2010, 196 (online: http://www.religion.emory.edu/faculty/robbins/sri/defns/). 21. robbins 2010, 193. 22. junior 2015. 23. robbins 2010, 192. 24. schipper 2015. he cites this member profile: http://www.sbl-site.org/assets/pdfs/ memberprofilereport2014.pdf. 25. junior 2015. works cited baird, william. 1992. history of new testament research, volume one: from deism to tübingen. minneapolis: fortress. breed, brennen. 2015. “what can texts do?: a proposal for biblical studies.” @ this point: theological investigations in church and culture 10.1. http://www.atthispoint.net/ articles/what-can-texts-do-a-proposal-for-biblical-studies/262/. accessed march 19, 2015. coogan, michael d. 2010. “the interpretation of the bible from the nineteenth to the midtwentieth centuries.” in the new oxford annotated bible: an ecumenical study bible. 4th ed. ed. michael d. coogan. new york: oxford university press. 113 von thaden duncan, glen. 2011. the last werewolf. new york: knopf. epp, eldon j., and george w. macrae, eds. 1989. the new testament and its modern interpreters. sblbmi 3. atlanta: scholar’s press. hayes, john h., ed. 1999. dictionary of biblical interpretation. 2 vols. nashville: abingdon. junior, nyasha. 2015. “re/use of texts.” @ this point: theological investigations in church and culture 10.1. http://www.atthispoint.net/professional-responses/reuse-of-texts/265/. accessed march 19, 2015. knight, douglas a., and gene m. tucker, eds. 1985. the new testament and its modern interpreters. sblbmi 1. atlanta: scholar’s press. mckenzie, steven l., and stephen r. haynes. 1999. “forward to the revised edition.” in to each its own meaning: an introduction to biblical criticisms and their application. rev. and expanded ed. eds. steven l. mckenzie and stephen r. haynes. louisville, ky: westminster john knox. newsom, carol a. 2010. “contemporary methods in biblical study.” in the new oxford annotated bible: an ecumenical study bible. 4th ed. ed. michael d. coogan. new york: oxford university press. robbins, vernon k. 1996a. exploring the texture of texts: a guide to socio-rhetorical interpretation. valley forge, pa: trinity press international. _____. 1996b. the tapestry of early christian discourse: rhetoric, society and ideology. new york: routledge. _____. 2009. the invention of christian discourse, volume i. rhetoric of religious antiquity 1. blandford forum, uk: deo. _____. 2010. “socio-rhetorical interpretation.” in the blackwell companion to the new testament. ed. david e. aune. malden, ma: wiley-blackwell. schipper, jeremy. 2015. “do biblical scholars make ideal nomadologists?” @ this point: theological investigations in church and culture 10.1. http://www.atthispoint.net/ professional-responses/do-biblical-scholars-make-ideal-nomadologists/263/. accessed march 19, 2015. microsoft word hudson-final.docx [expositions 8.2 (2014) 59–78] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 does it matter whether ecosystems are real? robert hudson university of saskatchewan abstract the question whether ecosystems are real has significant implications for what we perceive to be our moral duties towards them. in this paper i examine two environmental thinkers who reject the reality of ecosystems, though for widely different reasons: bryan norton’s (2005) rejection book is based on his philosophical allegiance to a pragmatic anti-essentialism, whereas allan fitzsimmons (1999) simply finds the prevalent definitions for the term ‘ecosystem’ to be circular, confused or empirically baseless. i argue for the claim that fitzsimmons’ approach is preferable, and in fact rightfully leaves open the theoretical possibility that ecosystems are real. 1. are ecosystems real? for the purposes of this paper, i take the primordial sense of “real” to be: has an existence outside of mind, independent of being thought about. many things fail this definition, such as when one says that a conspiracy is not real (it’s all in your head), that sherlock holmes is not real (he exists only in the book), and that the edge of the earth is not real (it’s simply an invention of fearful seafarers). a subsidiary sense of “real” is: has an existence independent of other things that are also outside the mind, to which it is not reducible. many other things fail this definition, such as when one suggests that paintings are not real (they are ultimately just assemblages of globs of paint on a canvas), emotions are not real (they are ultimately just biochemical processes), nor are corporations real (they are simply groups of people). the strongest sense of “real” is then to say that something both exists outside the mind and is irreducible to other things. in this sense one can say, to an approximation, that most real things are just atoms: atoms exist outside the mind, and most things are simply atomic conglomerations. one can resist the conclusion that something is just a conglomeration of atoms, however, if it is an emergent entity—that is, something which has an existence above and beyond the objects (namely atoms) that make it up. it is sometimes said that (great) paintings are objects that are emergent in that they are more than just the paint that makes them up. social groups, too, are sometimes said to emerge, where they acquire an identity that is more than the people that comprise them. and this is something that is occasionally said about ecosystems. for instance, does it matter whether ecosystems are real? 60 the ecologist eugene odum maintains that “the old folk wisdom about ‘the forest being more than just a collection of trees’ is [. . .] the first working principle for ecology.”1 he analyzes what he means by “emergence” as the unpredictability of an object’s properties given its components, using as a rudimentary example of this phenomenon the emergent properties of water given the combination of oxygen and hydrogen atoms.2 in this sense, odum cites as an example of an emergent ecosystem the coral reef at enewetak atoll in the pacific ocean which he studied along with his brother harold odum in 1954, a reef that maintains a high rate of primary productivity despite the low nutrient content of the surrounding ocean.3 so one might argue that ecosystems are real in the strong sense, in that they are both independent of people’s minds (i.e., independent of being thought about) and (so the ecologist eugene odum seems to believe) independent of (in the sense of irreducible to) other sorts of mind-independent objects. of course, odum’s analysis of emergence is not unassailable—it is just an illustration of how one might be a realist in the strong sense. for some writers on ecology, however, saying that ecosystems are real is problematic. for instance, this is the view of bryan norton in his (2005). norton’s vantage-point has nothing to do with ecosystems, per se; rather, it is a product of a general, philosophical skepticism about the powers of human knowers. he calls the view he finds objectionable “essentialism,” though it is simply the primordial sense of “realism” we described above. essentialism, he asserts, is the view that the categories of human thought answer to real, preexisting ‘kinds’ or categories. [. . .] [by assigning] to nature a ‘real’ structure that exists prior to experience or language, [essentialism is] able to support . . . the view that at least on some deep, metaphysical level, the structure of the world is available for discovery.4 speaking as a “pragmatist,” he believes that the way forward [is] to embrace experience as the measure of all things and forever abandon the failed cartesian dream of describing a human-independent reality as it is, corresponding to our assertions about it.5 norton advances various reasons for his anti-essentialism. to begin with, he views it as a philosophic consequence, in a deweyian spirit, of the darwinian realization that natural, biological categories “are not fixed but changing.”6 by extending darwin’s insight to all forms of linguistic categorizations, norton suggests that john dewey showed how essentialism had become untenable after darwin. without essentialism, general words like cat and tyrannosaurus cannot be taken to denote or refer to a fixed and 61 hudson given kind unified by some “essence.” [. . .] [t]he idea of a rational, unchanging reality was inevitably undermined.7 norton also contends that the passage to anti-essentialism is a feature of the later philosophy of the positivist rudolf carnap. as norton reads carnap, after a career of chasing the impossible dream of a single, picture-like language that depicted reality as it really was, carnap finally—in his late fifties and early sixties—recognized the impossibility of such a unique structure.8 carnap was, norton believes, finally “freed of cartesian enslavement to the belief that reality is imposed upon us by the world out there,” and finally convinced after a long philosophic career that the categories we use to study nature are not ‘given’ in prelinguistic reality, [but rather] language itself must give structure to the world as we encounter it and reason about it.9 though norton does not specify the scope of his anti-essentialism, he is clear in his (2005) that all the key ecological concepts—such as environmental sustainability, sustainable development, ecological integrity, ecological health, and so on—must be so understood. as a case in point, it is his view that there are no ecosystems “out there,” waiting to be discovered by ecologists in some “mind-independent reality.” for norton, in the primordial sense of “real,” ecosystems are not real. one might regard this as a somewhat negative position to adopt, a position that would likely startle an ecologist such as odum. however, norton regards this post-modern position as highly liberating and fundamental to a public policy that hopes to solve environmental problems. with language freed from the burden of describing some mind-independent reality, norton believes we can think of language as a creative tool for characterizing and talking about problems and solutions, [. . .] a tool that communities can use to communicate and deliberate, [. . .] [and that] itself [gives] structure to the world as we encounter it and reason about it.10 for him, does it matter whether ecosystems are real? 62 the assertions we make about nature reflect [. . .] a socialized reality in which experience and communication are inevitably intertwined. [. . .] [t]hey reflect the “structure” we impose upon reality when we use language to describe it.11 armed with the ability to “create reality” in our choice of language, we are in a position to seek those “linguistic forms [that] will maximize communication and sharing of experience.”12 indeed, norton regards as the purpose of his (2005) book to ask what language, what descriptive models, and what representations will encourage better communication and more cooperation in the discussion and formation of environmental policy.13 in this sense he describes his approach as “conventionalist” and “pragmatic,” one that deploys a liberalized view of language and communication in service of addressing environmental concerns. another writer who rejects a realist interpretation of ecosystems is allan fitzsimmons in his (1999). the basis for his rejection is less philosophical than norton’s—he simply points to the fact that there is a great deal of imprecision in how scientists and policymakers go about delineating the boundaries of systems. he suggests that a common trait among scholarly books presenting collections of ecosystem studies is the lack of any geographic consistency among the ecosystems serving as units of study,14 and goes so far as to devote an entire chapter (chapter 2 of his 1999) to illustrate how national ecosystem maps of the united states substantially vary depending on which governmental, nongovernmental agency, or ecologist one cites. he attributes this imprecision to the lack of theoretical or methodological requirements imposed by ecology or any other branch of science regarding the size, shape, or location of any portion of the landscape that is to bear the ecosystem label.15 but he does not think this lack of requirements is due to any laziness on the part of ecologists. rather, from arthur tansley, the originator of the ecosystem concept, to the ecologists of the present day, ecosystems have been traditionally been viewed as transient and arbitrarily bounded entities.16 given this indeterminateness in the identification of ecosystems, fitzsimmons draws the conclusion that 63 hudson ecosystems are but mental constructs, a convenient geographic shorthand that analysts use to describe some particular slice of the landscape rather than examples of objective reality.17 in our terminology, we can say that, for fitzsimmons, ecosystems are not real in the primordial sense of “real,” just as they are not real in this sense for norton. now there is clearly room for a realist to contest both norton’s and fitzsimmons’ arguments. norton is arguably wedded to a controversial anti-realism (for him, an “anti-essentialism”) based on a singular reading of the history of philosophy (in terms of a movement away from cartesianism and towards pragmatism), as well as a dubious application of darwinian insights to linguistic categorizations. and fitzsimmons may be jumping the gun in assuming that real objects must have determinate boundaries and invariable constitutions: surely something can be real but mappable in different, even incompatible ways. (note however that if we are trying to ascertain whether something is real in the first place, such an indeterminacy in mapping is an argument against its reality since if the object weren’t real, we’d expect there to be some dispute about its boundaries—our opinions about its boundaries would not be guided or adjudicated by the presence of the real boundaries possessed by the object.) however, let’s put aside their individual reasons for rejecting the reality of ecosystems and focus instead on what they believe their anti-realist positions imply as regards public policy pertaining to environmental (ecosystem) management. as it turns out, comparing the views of norton and fitzsimmons has interesting implications for how we answer the titular question, “does it matter whether ecosystems are real?” 2. environmental public policy fitzsimmons’ view is that since ecosystems are not real, this leaves ecologists, policymakers and everyone else the freedom to delimit as they please what to view as ecosystems. it also leaves them the freedom to fabricate as they like a host of related concepts, such as those listed above— environmental sustainability, sustainable development, ecological integrity and ecological health. what fitzsimmons does is analyze a large variety of published discussions of such environmental concepts, and finds the definitions of these concepts found in these discussions to be hopelessly vague, and sometimes even circular.18 norton himself gets tagged in the critique, having circularly defined sustainability and ecosystem health.19 none of this would be a problem, even for fitzsimmons (as many useful areas of study contain vague, and even circular, definitions), were it not the case that, on his view, the setting of environmental policy (at least in the united states, circa 1999, when fitzsimmons wrote his book) has been excessively does it matter whether ecosystems are real? 64 influenced by the “new paradigmists” according to whom “protecting ecosystem health has become the highest good and that to do otherwise is immoral.”20 it is fitzsimmons’ view that this influence motivates a form of environmental management that abrogates private property rights,21 and does so wrongfully since things like ecosystem health, integrity and sustainability only have value if ecosystems are real (which of course they aren’t, according to fitzsimmons). as fitzsimmons realizes, new paradigmists are doubtfully discouraged by academic arguments regarding the non-reality of ecosystems. as he suggests, “sustainable development,” along with its kindred notions, “has less to do with ecology than it has to do with power. it is fundamentally a ‘political concept.’”22 and when we return to norton’s views of the topic, we find this to be exactly his view on the matter. norton considers the question why he adopts the terms “sustainable” and “sustainable development” in discussing the aims of environmental policy, and he is frank that he chooses these terms not because of the strength or clarity of their current definitions-in-use. [. . .] [the] goal, rather, is to propose [. . .] a definition that is useful in a democratic process of deliberation about what to do. the advantages of the term sustainability are of two kinds, political and practical. politically, this term has been accepted in global forums discussing global problems and policy. some governments have committed themselves to sustainable policies and to achieve development that is sustainable. so [. . .] there is no doubt that sustainability will be a useful term in public discourse[.]23 for norton, it is the usefulness of the terms “sustainable,” “ecosystem,” and the rest—their pragmatic value—that motivates their introduction into discourse about the environment. of course, such an attitude is completely in harmony with norton’s overarching philosophical orientation described above—i.e., his anti-essentialism (anti-realism), combined with his liberal attitude concerning the choice of language as guided by the need to foster cooperation and communication amongst communities, here in service of solving environmental problems. the issue of the “reality” of the objects purportedly referred to by introduced terms is, accordingly, an irrelevant matter for him, having freed ourselves from the “failed cartesian dream of describing a human-independent reality.” instead, the crucial issue when we stipulate, specifically, a definition for the term “sustainable” is that we endow a community with the ability to choose what is important to monitor and what is important to protect. [. . .] the persuasiveness, in public discussion, of any given definition [. . .] will depend upon the plausibility of the arguments, provided by a community group or individual, that a given indicator should be 65 hudson monitored, and certain processes protected, because those process are involved in generating an important social value.24 it is here that fitzsimmons and norton part ways. up till now they have shared—though for different reasons—an anti-realism about ecosystems. they also share what fitzsimmons calls a “people centeredness” in assessing land use management policy—a focus on producing “outputs useful to humans,”25 that is, outputs with pragmatic or social value, as opposed to the bioor ecocenteredness of new paradigmists who attach ultimate intrinsic value to biological or ecological entities. but apart from these points of convergence, norton and fitzsimmons diverge sharply on the question of how pragmatic or social values relate to scientific, ecological inquiry. fitzsimmons bemoans the fact that within ecosystem ecology there is a movement away from an understanding of science as a relatively value-free pursuit of knowledge based on theory, confirmed observation, and verifiable experimentation and to a world wherein work that is distinctly value laden [. . .] is deemed scientific.26 at this stage fitzsimmons pointedly cites norton, quoting a passage in which norton and robert ulanowicz assert that “conservation biology is a normative science [. . .] guided most basically by a commitment to important social values.”27 fitzsimmons does not hesitate to express caution about such an approach, lest it blur “the line between science and advocacy.”28 it is a caution with which norton is familiar, as he recounts at one point being advised by the ecologist david policansky that we should “do our best to segregate factual reports from evaluative prescriptions” since (to paraphrase policansky) we should first get our facts straight before we make up our own minds about what to value.29 to be sure, the attitude that scientists should keep their facts separate from their values is, as norton recognizes, quite common (see 34–37 where he cites a number of expressions of this attitude). in fact, he candidly suggests that his (2005) book is nothing less than a “detailed response to [this] attitude.”30 so the situation we are left with, in the hands of norton and fitzsimmons, is this. on fitzsimmons’ view, if talk about ecosystems and the related notions of ecosystem health, integrity and sustainability is to be meaningful, we need to have precise, non-circular definitions for these notions, and there needs to be empirical support for the claim that the referents for these notions actually exist in the world. only after having accomplished these tasks does it make sense to ascribe value to ecosystems and direct public policy towards their preservation. by contrast, norton maintains that we should, right from the beginning, move to preserve ecosystems, given that communities have made it clear to policymakers that doing so serves various pragmatic, social needs. for instance, sustainability is important for norton because does it matter whether ecosystems are real? 66 we must endow communities with the ability to choose what is important to monitor and what is important to protect. choosing what to sustain is prior to choosing how to measure its sustenance.31 as a case in point, norton considers federal wetlands policy which, in the past, was motivated by the thought that swampy areas are worthless and should be drained, but then, as ecological information came in, [. . .] it became obvious that wetlands perform many important, sometimes essential functions in supporting social values: flood control, nutrient removal, wildlife habitat, and many others.32 in other words, it suddenly became important to sustain wetlands—or to put the point more exactly, considering norton’s anti-essentialism according to which it does not make sense to say that wetlands exist in the world, independently of our minds—it became important to talk (and act) as though there are wetlands needing preservation, because doing so has distinct social benefits for human communities. we need to determine, then, who has properly framed the procedure by which environmental public policy should be developed. as fitzsimmons has it, should scientists first settle the empirical question of whether ecosystems exist, and then leave it to the public and policymakers to address the issue whether ecosystems are the sorts of things that deserve preservation? or, following norton, do we begin by determining what sorts of things are valued by communities, and on that basis frame public policy using the language of “ecosystems,” “sustainability,” and so on, that has the effect of upholding these community values? to start in addressing this issue, let us consider the reasons why, according to norton, in order to do the science that underlies environmental public policy one must keep firmly in mind the social values that are at stake. 3. norton’s infusion of values into facts norton provides three reasons why scientific inquiry into environmental issues should embrace a consideration of social values. the first reason, less developed by him, is that a “serial approach to science and policy,” according to which “the process of gathering scientific data and building models is supposed to be completed in isolation from policy discussion and formation,”33 is an impossibility: “real science,” he says, 67 hudson is not done in value-neutral contexts, and especially practitioners of missionoriented sciences such as conservation biology and conservation ecology cannot seal themselves off from political issues and social values.34 but surely it is too strong to suggest that people are completely unable to set aside their values whenever they make decisions. it may be a struggle, but people often reflect on how their valuational attachments might influence their decision making, and sometimes make conscious efforts to limit this influence. saying that they will necessarily fail at this task is a significant psychological hypothesis that needs empirical backing. it may be, though, that norton’s point is different—it is that any sort of thinking requires the use of assumptions to which one is “attached” in an irrational manner (on pain of a justificatory regress). the matter then turns on the nature of these assumptions, and one might suggest that proponents of the serial view have no objection to the use of assumptions that express commonly-held epistemic values (such as maintaining logical consistency, maximizing one’s access to relevant empirical evidence, and so on), even if they are politically or socially mandated. in other words, even if gathering scientific data and building models must occur in the context of policy discussion and formation, it could still be the case that the policy is exclusively epistemically motivated, if epistemic values are the main focus. so let us turn the second reason why norton believes environmental scientists should affirm the relevance of social values to their research. he suggests that, even if a value-neutral science were possible, it would not be desirable, because value-neutral science has no way of telling what is important information, what dynamics to monitor, or what indicators indicate something important.35 so far norton’s position sounds quite reasonable. environmental policy has as one of its goals the solutions of problems that have been publicly identified—here one might think of the common concern for sustainable waste management which has become pressing because of the overloading of our landfills. as such, if policymakers are going to turn to scientists for solutions to these problems, it is to be hoped that scientists have an idea about what these problems are and what would be socially favorable solutions to them. for example, if environmental engineers study ways of solving landfill problem by considering how high they could build a mound of trash adjacent to city hall, ignoring completely the social value attached to keeping untreated waste outside city limits, then we could rightly criticize them for not paying attention to these social values in their scientific deliberations. let us then fully endorse this reading of norton’s objection to the serial view. so understood, the serial view is does it matter whether ecosystems are real? 68 damaging in that it discourages us from even considering whether and how scientific study and modeling should be guided by policy problems, goals, and objectives. the serial view assumes a one-way flow of information from scientists to the public. but [as norton argues] [. . .] action-oriented, adaptive management requires a multidirectional flow of information among scientists, policymakers, and the public.36 but is this all norton means when he suggests that scientists need to attend to social values in their scientific research? is it simply that scientists, if they are tasked by policymakers to study and present possible solutions to environmental problems, need to be aware of what these problems are and what would be socially valued solutions to them? it hardly seems the case that we need a detour through norton’s reconstruction of the history of philosophy, as a movement towards a pragmatic anti-essentialism, in order to justify counseling scientists that, if they want to solve public problems, they should get straight what these problems are and what would be worthwhile solutions to them. as it happens, norton has a third suggestion for why scientists need to incorporate social values into their research, which we find in his discussion of what he calls “bridge terms,” terms that have empirical, operational, and measurable descriptive content and therefore have a connection to the descriptive discourse and the literature of science, but [that] also connect to social values and our evaluative discourse by embodying or evoking important social values.37 an excellent example of a bridge term, provided by norton, is “obese.”38 when used in medical science, the term “obesity” can be given a precise, empirically-based definition, and on the basis of that definition various correlations can be discovered linking obesity with a host of medical ailments. still, one cannot pretend that in describing someone as obese one is also not making an evaluative judgment: to say someone is obese is also to say he needs to lose weight, to get more exercise, to live more “healthily.” and now the connection with environmental science is clear, for the battery of environmental concepts that norton focusses on—sustainability, sustainable development, ecological integrity, ecological health, and so on—also share the feature of combining descriptive discourse with normative aims. in saying that a forestry practice is unsustainable, we additionally say that it should be stopped; in suggesting that our goal is the preserve the health of an ecosystem, we imply that we are pursuing a worthwhile goal. from here we can give sense to norton and ulanowicz’s assertion, quoted above, that “conservation biology is a normative science,” for some of the concepts of conservation biology clearly have this feature of linking a description with an evaluation. moreover, we can further see the 69 hudson relevance of norton’s pragmatic, anti-essentialist, linguistic philosophy to his assessment of environmental policymaking. he wishes for scientists to recognize, even affirm the normative dimensions of their descriptive discourse, even though engaging in such a task is problematic since normative categories from a strictly physicalist viewpoint have a questionable ontological status. understood normatively, concepts like health, sustainability and integrity seem to have little relevance to the physicalistic categories that scientists typically use—strictly speaking we can’t measure or observe things like health, sustainability or integrity—and in fact it isn’t a far stretch to say that such normative categories are utterly mind-dependent and so, given the primordial sense of “real,” refer to unreal things. it is crucial then, if scientific talk about these things is to be accepted, that we do away with the philosophical tradition that postulates a mindindependent reality and that further sees scientific advance as the task of correctly describing this world. it helps even further if we put in place of this tradition an alternative tradition that is openminded about the linguistic categories that we choose to use, a tradition that (as norton has it) recommends the adoption of categories for the sole pragmatic goal of serving community interests. having so renovated this philosophical backdrop, norton can now make the suggestion that scientists should not only be aware of the prevailing social values that bear on their work, but that they can and even should even infuse these values into their scientific categorizations. there is, from his philosophical standpoint, nothing that makes such an expansion of scientific discourse unreasonable. how then might fitzsimmons, and others who reject the infusion of evaluative judgments into scientific investigation, respond to norton’s position? there are at least three sorts of replies here. 4. problems with norton’s infusion of values into facts to begin with, there is plenty room to question norton’s general philosophical attitude. he provides no compelling reasons for either his assertion that people are unable to arrive at justified conclusions about a mind-independent world, or for his even more startling assertion that there is no justification for a belief in a mind-independent world “out there,” one with its own set of pre-existing, fixed categories. in the end, his argument on behalf of these assertions seems to boil down to an idiosyncratic reconstruction of the history of philosophy, and even if it’s the case that philosophers should buy into this history, i doubt most scientists, laypeople or policymakers have much interest in, much less a stake in this reconstructed history. notably, we would expect the new paradigmists to be especially wary of norton’s anti-essentialism. the new paradigmists are painfully aware of the resistance they meet when they suggest that the health of a particular ecosystem should outweigh someone’s property rights. it is a resistance they counter by suggesting that ecosystems, despite appearances, exist in a mind-independent world and are does it matter whether ecosystems are real? 70 real in the same sense that you and i are real, from which it follows that they are just as morally considerable as you and i. as such, the battle fitzsimmons is engaged in with the new paradigmists concerns whether ecosystems in fact possess this degree of mind-independent reality, and it is arguably a feature of fitzsimmons’ position that, if the new paradigmists were able to make their case by (at least) having a consistent and empirically supported definition for what constitutes an ecosystem, then he leaves it as an option to become a new paradigmist as well. yet none of this debate makes much sense to norton, since on his view there is no (knowable) mind-independent world about which to even argue. much to the surprise of fitzsimmons and the new paradigmists, their controversy on whether ecosystems are real is, if norton is right, actually a debate about who is right as regards how best to serve the prevailing set of community values. the new paradigmists, under the assumption that their view is the minority view (given the strong tradition of property rights in the us), believe that they need to push for the mind-independent, moral considerability of ecosystems if they are to convincingly argue that ecosystems deserve strong protection. however, this is a strategy and point of debate that norton’s pragmatic anti-essentialism pre-emptively rules as illegitimate. the point is that norton could be more charitable in discussing the sorts of ontological issues dividing fitzsimmons and the new paradigmists. secondly, one needs to be cautious in endowing scientists with the power to make value judgments an intrinsic part of their factual investigations, in light of the culture of scientific expertise that typifies our modern, technological society. norton cites a number of scientists who explicitly refrain from the practice of mixing values with facts—the concerns expressed by policansky above are typical. i believe such demurrals are to be praised, and not criticized as being short-sighted, given the astounding technological and scientific advances that characterize modern life. given the high degree of expertise needed to understand these advances, the views of the non-expert can easily be dismissed as simply uninformed. norton asks that discussions about environmental policy be “multidirectional” involving a sharing of information amongst scientists, policymakers, and the public. but think about the relative influence on this discussion by scientists as compared to laypeople, for example, when it comes to a topic such as the technological feasibility of wetlands banking.39 what could a layperson possibly say to a professional ecologist on this topic that would be of any practical significance? or consider once more the question of obesity with respect to its genetic determinants, its effects on the endocrine system, the presence of pathophysiological causes, and so on—what sort of constructive dialogue is going to occur between a layperson and a medical expert when it comes to the scientific fine details of this condition? it is because of this imbalance in both power and knowledge that the expert needs to be especially careful not to import value considerations into her factual pronouncements: sometimes laypeople just don’t have the capacity to distinguish the factual from the evaluative. as such, when i hear policansky, fitzsimmons, and others, counseling that 71 hudson they see the need to separate the factual from the evaluative, for me that is a hopeful sign, as it should be to any non-expert. it means that as a non-expert i won’t be inundated with technical details hosting concealed norms. it means that when it finally comes to an open discussion of values with the technical, scientific details suitably framed, i will actually have a chance to say something productive. one would think, after decades of laypeople being implicitly fed normative judgments concealed in factual descriptions—think of the variety of implicit sexist, racist and homophobic norms that have been passed off as “good science”—that the separation of facts from values would finally be, for us, a practice with incontrovertible merit. nevertheless, let’s suppose that in a particular community there is a synchronicity in the value judgments of scientists, policymakers and laypeople, and a basic agreement occurs regarding what actions to take in addressing environmental problems. this leads to a third problem with norton’s approach ultimately stemming from his non-essentialist, pluralist philosophical orientation—i.e., his basically non-committal attitude regarding what specific steps communities should take in any decision scenario. this non-committal attitude is implicit in what norton calls “community-procedural values” according to which the fundamental goal of a community is to cooperatively arrive at a decision through a process that is “fair and open.”40 in response to the concern that, as norton puts it, the rules for decision making “are all ‘procedural’ and imply nothing about what is valued”, he responds, in a democratic process, substance arises from process and that sustainability commitments must, if they are to guide communities toward effective cooperative action, be perceived as results of a fair and open process.41 the problem in emphasizing procedural fairness to such a degree is that it has the potential to license results that, even though they are arrived at in a procedurally fair manner, are unfortunate in other ways—unfortunate even for the environment. as norton acknowledges, we must face a choice. we must decide whether we are first and foremost environmentalists or first and foremost democrats. [. . .] for my part, given these alternatives, i choose democracy.42 this choice he supports even if we “accept the undeniable evidence that some democracies are environmentally destructive, at least in the short run.”43 my sense is that norton, with his keenness for pluralism, procedural fairness, and democratic ideals, recognizes the hazard of permitting a free-for-all in values. we thus find him repelling this hazard by tacitly advocating a form of teleology whereby, miraculously, democratically governed communities find themselves converging on a unique (and sensible) set of value judgments. for example, he discusses the type does it matter whether ecosystems are real? 72 of values that “emerge on a community scale,” which he calls “community-identity values,” and suggests that they will be of the sort to “create cohesiveness within human communities” and bind “individuals and communities to their natural habitat.”44 when faced with the question whether a community will establish a policy that reduces the economic welfare of future generations, he rejoinders that “it will be a very unusual community that intentionally chooses to reduce the levels of individual welfare over time.”45 when communities consider the potential risk for a nuclear accident in their decision making, norton asserts that “most communities will adopt safeguards against inflicting dangerous and preventable risks on future people.”46 in other words, procedural fairness is leading communities to a particular set of “correct” value judgments, the correctness of which is not due to the fairness of the decision making—otherwise, any result arrived at fairly would be correct—but is rather explained by some prior, unspoken set of substantive values that norton endorses, but won’t openly commit to. norton is thus left with a problem, one faced by any value pluralist: how does one censure those values to which one is opposed, especially in a community which has a policy of supporting whichever values are produced by means of a procedurally fair, democratic process? the quick answer for norton is that he shouldn’t censure them (nor should he resort to a form of teleology that will naturally weed out undesirable values), for if he is truly an anti-essentialist then there is no “mind-independent world” of “true” values to which we must adhere, and if he is truly a pluralist there is not even a preferred set of mind-dependent values to which people ought to be committed. a more nuanced answer for him is to abandon his unrestrained pluralism and anti-essentialism, and allow an incursion into his philosophical mind-set of a small set of substantive, fundamental values (values to which he is likely committed anyway). speaking of environmentalism, this small set could focus on attaching intrinsic value to living entities (which one would naturally suppose to exist in a mind-independent world). all living things share in this value, though we can leave aside a detailed assessment of the quantum of value and the sorts of obligations this value imposes on moral agents—at the very least, there will be a duty to support an environment able to “sustain” these living things. the next question is, what sorts of things do we include in the class of “living things,” and this is where the debate between fitzsimmons and the new paradigmists comes into play, for their debate concerns the question, not just whether ecosystems are living, but whether they are real to begin with. if they are real, though non-living, yet also are fundamentally needed to ensure the sustainability of a variety of living things, then this would impose on policymakers and moral agents generally the obligation to preserve them. on the other hand, if ecosystems are both real and living, then there will be a fairly clear, prima facie obligation to preserve them directly. the point is that attaching intrinsic value (which may itself be mind-dependent) to living things in a mind-independent world should not be thought of as an oppressive gesture. for 73 hudson instance, in responding to the views of laura westra, a classic new paradigmist (and also one of fitzsimmons’ targets), norton asserts that her principled defense of ecological integrity violates an essential precondition of open democracy by holding her views to be “nonnegotiable” and above challenge. [s]he disconnects reason from the political process and is led to embrace coercion in favour of her principles over those of others who may disagree.47 here, norton seems to think that any challenge to the result of a democratic decision process is unfair, and that any attempt to reverse this result non-democratically is an unfair form of coercion. but surely whether this is true depends on what this result is: i suspect that, if a procedurally fair decision process resulted in society’s choice to lay the environment to complete waste, norton, if he had the power to coerce an alternate decision, would do so, and feel justified in doing so. moreover, his pleading impotence in such a case—citing his philosophical commitment to a pluralism (much less an anti-essentialism) about moral principles—would surely be an irresponsible abdication of his moral duty. fitzsimmons, by comparison, despite his railings against westra and other new paradigmists, never comes across as quite so ideological: he simply wants the new paradigmists to provide clear, consistent and empirically grounded definitions for their terms, and once provided with them he might even join their ranks, and try to convince property-owners to do the same. 5. summary of the argument both norton and fitzsimmons are anti-realists about ecosystems, though for very different reasons. norton’s anti-realism is motivated by an idiosyncratic philosophical commitment to a pragmatic anti-essentialism, one that sees natural categories as the product of a social consensus on how to use language with the ultimate goal of enhancing public communication and cooperation. conversely, fitzsimmons’ anti-realism is motivated by his concern that the empirical boundaries of ecosystems, as they are drawn by scientists and policymakers, are indeterminate and arbitrary, and so in all likelihood are simply convenient mental constructions. to an extent, then, their views converge: both see ecosystems as human intellectual fabrications aimed at serving pragmatic, social values. but whereas norton embraces this constructivism as enlightened and liberating, fitzsimmons regards it as regressive and anti-scientific. that is, whereas norton would encourage scientists and policymakers to freely construct ecosystems with an eye to servicing the policy needs of human communities, fitzsimmons recommends that we try to tighten up the empirical analysis of ecosystems, making their boundaries more determinate and less subject to subjective manipulation. the question i propose to address, then, does it matter whether ecosystems are real? 74 is this: in developing an environmental public policy, should we follow fitzsimmons and encourage scientists to first settle the empirical question of whether ecosystems exist (and if so, what their boundaries are), and then leave it to the public and policymakers to determine whether ecosystems are worth preserving in the face of competing moral and public duties, or should we follow norton, first identifying what sorts of things communities value, and then framing a public policy that selectively introduces expressions such as “ecosystem health” and “sustainability” with the goal of upholding this chosen set of community values? the latter half of the paper answers this question by siding with fitzsimmons. as i argue, there are three key problems that afflict the broad value pluralism that results from norton’s pragmatic anti-essentialism, a pluralism that infuses normative content into scientific (here, ecological) concepts (most especially in the case of what norton calls “bridge terms”). i criticize norton’s approach on three grounds. first, it pre-emptively cuts off a certain line of support for certain kinds of ethical perspectives that, for all their foibles, deserve a better hearing. here i have in mind the ethical perspective advocated by the new paradigmists who view ecosystems as existing mind-independently (and so count as “real,” as we are using this term here) and as having a moral considerability comparable to that possessed by human beings (which explains why this view is so harshly derided by some human beings). basically, new paradigmism has no ground to stand on at all if it is denied the ability to say that ecosystems have (as morally considerable) a real, mind-independent existence—yet it is a dialectical position that norton’s anti-essentialism permanently renders illegitimate. secondly, the incorporation of normative features into scientific discourse, such as through the vehicle of bridge terms, raises the hazard of scientists exerting inordinate influence over public policy decisions. this is because laypeople lack the expertise to challenge the work of scientists as regards the framing of scientific concepts, and if these concepts incorporate normative features, laypeople will correlatively lack the expertise to question the normatively significant judgments of scientists. (indeed, one would expect such a concern to move norton with his emphasis on democratic decision making). third, norton’s value pluralism, constrained only by the principle of democratic procedural fairness, runs the risk of being turned into an ethical relativism, one that could lead to disastrous results for the environment. this is hardly a promising result for someone apparently supportive of environmental health and sustainability. by comparison, fitzsimmons’ anti-realism does not suffer from the three flaws described above. to be sure, he is concerned with the imprecision with which ecosystems are often defined, their lack of determinate, fixed boundaries. but this is not an irremediable flaw: distinct and clear empirical criteria for ecosystems could be found, and such criteria may point to the mindindependent reality of ecosystems, thus buoying the new paradigmist, who now at least has a fair chance to defend her view. further, fitzsimmons’ approach is clearly one that shuns the applicability of non-epistemic values to scientific concepts (which, if we accept the presence of 75 hudson epistemic values, does not imply that for fitzsimmons scientific research is value-free). of course, it might be the case nevertheless that non-epistemic values find their way into scientific theorizing. but at least the layperson can be assured that scientists keep as their goal the separation of epistemic from non-epistemic values and strive to ensure the epistemic purity of their work. this is much different from norton’s approach that seeks no remedy for the intrusion of non-epistemic values, and perhaps even endorses this intrusion. finally, there is no commitment on fitzsimmons’ behalf to value pluralism, and so no obstacle to his choosing and advocating the best ethical values there are in considering how the environment should be treated. more to the point, fitzsimmons does not see his perspective work as having any ethical implications—he just wants to get it straight whether ecosystems exist, and if so, what is their extent and basic constitution. once that issue is sorted out, the ethical analysis can then productively begin. so to answer the titular question, it does matter for fitzsimmons whether ecosystems are real as regards the moral imperative to preserve them, just as it matters to the new paradigmists. conversely, for norton, it doesn’t matter whether ecosystems are real (actually, for him, it doesn’t matter whether anything is real in the sense of “real” we are working with here). real or not, it is norton’s view that the moral imperative to preserve ecosystems stems solely from the occurrence of contingent, democratic, procedurally fair, community decisions. in this paper, i have argued against norton’s position and for fitzsimmons’ view: let’s get clear about whether ecosystems exist and what their boundaries are before we formulate public policy about them. endnotes 1. odum 1977, 1289; see also odum and barrett 2005, 8. 2. odum and barrett 2005, 7. 3. first described in odum and odum 1955, 319; see odum and barrett 2005, 7–8. 4. norton 2005, 78 (norton’s italics). 5. norton 2005, 79. 6. norton 2005, 77. 7. norton 2005, 78 (norton’s italics). 8. norton 2005, 555. does it matter whether ecosystems are real? 76 9. norton 2005, 554. 10. ibid. 11. ibid. 12. norton 2005, 556. 13. ibid. 14. fitzsimmons 1999, 24. 15. ibid. 16. fitzsimmons 1999, 25–26. 17. fitzsimmons 1999, 24. 18. fitzsimmons 1999, 142–154. 19. fitzsimmons 1999, 150. 20. fitzsimmons 1999, 7. 21. fitzsimmons 1999, 232–238. 22. fitzsimmons 1999, 149. 23. fitzsimmons 1999, 451 (fitzsimmons’ italics). 24. norton 2005, 364–365. 25. fitzsimmons 1999, 3. 26. fitzsimmons 1999, 142. 27. norton and ulanowicz 1996, 424 (quoted in fitzsimmons 1999, 142). 28. fitzsimmons 1999, 142. 29. norton 2005, 445. 30. norton 2005, 446. 31. norton 2005, 364. 32. norton 2005, 32. 77 hudson 33. norton 2005, 138–139. 34. norton 2005, 446. 35. ibid. 36. norton 2005, 143. 37. norton 2005, 38. 38. norton 2005, 38–39. 39. discussed in norton 2005, 30–42. 40. norton 2005, 366. 41. norton 2005, 367. 42. norton 2005, 251. 43. ibid. 44. norton 2005, 371. 45. norton 2005, 370. 46. norton 2005, 371. 47. norton 2005, 252. works cited fitzsimmons, allan k. 1999. defending illusions: federal protection of ecosystems. oxford: rowman & littlefield. norton, bryan g. 2005. sustainability: a philosophy of adaptive ecosystem management. chicago: university of chicago press. norton, bryan g., and robert e. ulanowicz. 1996. “scale and biodiversity policy: a hierarchical approach.” in ecosystem management: selected readings. edited by fred b. samson and fritz l. knopf. new york: springer. odum, eugene p. 1977. “the emergence of ecology as a new integrative discipline.” science 195: 1289–1293. does it matter whether ecosystems are real? 78 odum, eugene, and gary w. barrett. 2005. fundamentals of ecology. 5th ed. belmont, ca: thomson brooks/cole. odum, howard t., and eugene p. odum. 1955. “trophic structure and productivity of a windward coral reef community on eniwetok atoll.” ecological monographs 25: 291– 320. [expositions 5.2 (2011) 18-22] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 classics in greece nikolaos papazarkadas university of california, berkeley it is not without some hesitation that i offer this contribution. for, i will have in effect to comment on a system that largely accounts for my own education, yet a system i have long left behind me (and i do not mean this in a dismissive way). a system which, paradoxically – and please keep this in mind – does not have one single department officially named “department of classical studies,” “classics,” or something similar. my paper will be to a large extent descriptive and rather superficial and it has to be preceded by a lengthy introduction. the kingdom of greece, the predecessor of the hellenic republic, was founded in 1832, following the greek revolution against the ottoman empire. as happened with most european nation-states that emerged following the french revolution, the identity of the young nation was constantly negotiated. i think i would not err in claiming that as a result of a fierce ideological and political struggle the victorious tenet was the one that saw the modern greeks as the direct descendants of the creators of classical greek civilization. continuity, most visible in aspects of the language, was sought everywhere and had even to be invented where it was actually absent. thus, from the very beginning greece was exceptional in that the classical past was appropriated as an intrinsic element, a vital component of the official ideology, rather than as a distant source of cultural and political norms as happened in the case of other european countries and even of the us. and this scheme is crucial for an appraisal of the status quo of classical studies in greece. when the first greek university, the university of athens, was founded in 1837, the teaching of greek and latin became an essential component of the syllabus. it is worth noting that some of the first professors were german academics who followed to greece the bavarian prince otto, first monarch of the greek kingdom. the first ever lecture given at the university of athens was by ludwig ross on aristophanes’ acharnians and knights. in the same semester, the fall of 1837, ross taught two courses: one on the topography of attica, and another course on horace’s ars poetica and on ovid’s metamorphoses. 1 this german coloring of classical studies in greece was to leave a lasting legacy which has only withered in my lifetime. greece had to wait for almost a century before the foundation of its second university. 1926 saw the opening of the aristotelian university of thessaloniki in what was the capital of the so-called “new countries” (new because until 1912-3 they were territory of the ottoman empire). the first university faculty to open in thessaloniki was that of philosophy, with two divisions, the division of philosophy and that of history and archaeology. it had a very strong classical component, and at least three of the fifteen professors that comprised the original faculty of the university were classical archaeologists. similarly, the first two presidents were both trained classicists, the 19 papazarkadas linguist g. hatzidakis and the archaeologist christos tsountas. what i am getting at here is that classics was never neglected in greek academia. as the greek university system kept expanding after the second world war and in particular after the fall of the greek junta in 1974, so did also the teaching of classical subjects with the foundation of new departments with strong classical components, at the universities of ioannina, crete, thrace, patras, thessaly, and more recently at the universities of the aegean and of the peloponnese. today, greece has a total of twenty-four universities, the major ones amongst which have departments of a classical orientation, usually departments of philology (founded on the premise of the continuity of greek language since homer) and of history and archaeology, but no classics departments as such. this peculiarity poses serious difficulties for any attempt at quantifying classical studies in the context of greek universities. i will use, however, two case studies in order to provide an indication of the numbers involved. the department of philology of the university of patras has an annual intake of three hundred students. traditionally about eighty of them will decide to study greek and latin, whereas the rest will study medieval greek, modern greek, or linguistics. but apparently (according to professor karakantza of the university of patras, to whom i am indebted for all these figures), the number of those opting for classics fell to ca. fifty students in the academic year 2009-10. and instead of ten new graduate students the department admitted five: far from being a coincidence, this sudden decrease may be an indication of the problems to come. my second case study is the department of history and archaeology of the university of athens. it has an intake of four hundred students per year; an approximate 70% will study history and 30% will opt for archaeology and history of art (but i would like to note that twenty years ago, the trends were the exact opposite, with most students aiming at studying archaeology). here again, it is hard to know how many amongst the historians will decide to specialize in graeco-roman history, as opposed to some later period. apparently the ancient historians are a minority, albeit a large one. but all in all, it seems that some 40–50% of the undergraduate students of the department will complete their studies with a degree that we would call a classics degree. (and even those, i should add, who will choose to specialize in, say, the late ottoman empire are obliged to take courses in ancient greek and latin as well as classical archaeology.) one can add to this number some seventy m.a. and ph.d. students admitted every year. all in all, a minimum of eight hundred students pursue some form of a classics degree within the department of history and archaeology of the university of athens. but we have to add to them those studying greek and latin in the philology department of the same university and the numbers will skyrocket to some sixteen hundred to two thousand students. the numbers are impressive, to say the least. but the teaching of classics in greece was not and is not restricted to tertiary education. ancient greek and to a lesser extent latin are also taught in all the public secondary-education institutions. and especially during certain ideologically dubious periods, ancient greek was even taught in primary schools. but if nine-year-olds struggling with the inflection of ancient greek is a thing of the past, the average high school kid in greece is still expected to read a couple of classics in greece 20 tragedies in the original, extensive extracts from epic and lyric poetry, thucydides’ funeral oration, other historiographical passages, and few extracts from latin, mainly republican, prose. yet, despite this prominent position of classical civilization in the official ideology of the greek state, as manifested in the public education system, greece cannot be said to have been at the forefront of classical studies. one will struggle to name prominent greek classicists of the distant past. one possible exception is korais, one of the main representatives of the greek enlightenment, and indeed one of the important philologists of the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century. there is also johannes sykoutris, a student of willamowitz and jaeger, who in his short life produced critical editions of plato’s symposium and aristotle’s poetics. but sykoutris committed suicide in 1937 at the age of 36, and he left no successors. when we move to the field of ancient history things are even worse, for it has long been noticed that greece never managed to create a distinct, let alone distinguished, historiographical school. this strange phenomenon has been attributed, probably rightly, to the nineteenth-century greek intelligentsia’s obsession with establishing continuity from antiquity to modern times: this obsession led to a relative boom in byzantine studies (a field that is considered rather obscure in most of the world), to a surprising neglect of greek history – which, it was probably felt, was being served well by european and american scholars – and to an almost complete disregard for the roman period, which was thought to be an era of decline and misery for the greek nation. (tellingly, what is universally known as the roman imperial period is described in modern greek with the neologism ρωμαιοκρατία, “the roman occupation.”) 2 but if classical literature never really took off in greece, and if high-level classical history had been nonexistent for a long period, the third main axis of classical studies really flourished in greece: and, of course, i am referring to classical archaeology. one could start with the heroic figure of kyriakos pittakys, the first greek archaeologist and greece’s first general keeper of antiquities; recall stephanos koumanoudes, eminent epigraphist and secretary general of the greek archaeological society (who, strikingly, was professor of latin at the university of athens); and also remember, more recently, manolis andronikos, professor of archaeology at the university of thessaloniki, who brought to light the royal macedonian tomb he attributed to philip ii. today the greek archaeological service consists of thirty-nine local departments (or, to use the technical term, ephorates) of prehistoric and classical antiquities and twenty-eight ephorates of byzantine antiquities that annually conduct hundreds of mainly rescue excavations. it also has a handful of archaeological institutes of a research orientation. thus a total of eight hundred people are employed as archaeologists by the state. but undoubtedly, the main body conducting full-scale systematic excavations is the archaeological society at athens, which was founded in 1837 and publishes annually three periodicals, the archaiologike ephemeris, the praktika, and the ergon, as well as several monographs, increasingly often in languages other than greek (think, for instance, of k. clinton’s monumental corpus of eleusinian inscriptions). and i think i am entitled to include in this paper the seventeen or so foreign archaeological schools, the cumulative resources of which (the blegen library, the libraries of the british, 21 papazarkadas french, and german schools, and so on) have rendered athens one of the best centers for classics-related research in the world. last but not least, i have to mention the national hellenic research foundation (the greek equivalent of the french cnrs) with its institute of greek and roman antiquity, which under the vigorous direction of dr. hatzopoulos for almost three decades has produced a series of firstclass publications (primarily in the series meletemata) on linguistics, ancient history, epigraphy, and numismatics, mainly of macedonia and the peloponnese and secondarily of the cyclades. i may have drawn a pretty bleak picture of certain aspects of classics in greece, especially with regard to the study of classical literature, but i have now to rectify this claim. for the situation has improved enormously, almost beyond recognition, over the last thirty years. i could mention several greek classicists with distinguished careers abroad, an unimaginable thing in the past: i will only mention angelos chaniotis, a senior fellow of the center for hellenic studies, and now a fellow at the institute for advanced study at princeton. within greece, pride of place probably goes to the university of thessaloniki, which has long had the reputation of being at the forefront of classical literature within greece. many professors at the aristotelian university now publish their work in internationally acclaimed publishing houses. but good work is being produced in other greek universities as well (e.g., patras, rethymnon, and thrace). what accounts for this sudden improvement? there are several factors. 1. one constant is the fact that greek and latin are taught in schools. this creates job opportunities for classics graduates that are not in large part available to their colleagues in other countries, and explains the relative success of classics-related university programs. the downside is, however, that this is a vicious cycle: it is my humble opinion that high numbers do not mean high quality, and there is no need for so many classics graduates after all. what is more, this close link between secondary and university education does not really explain the recent flourishing of classical studies in greece. 2. another more plausible explanation has to do with the gradual dissolution of the old clientele university system, in which the chairs wielded almost tyrannical power, could nominate their successors, and were not held accountable for their work or lack thereof. 3. in recent years numerous greek classicists received their postgraduate education abroad: my impression is that right now a large number, if not the majority, of greek university teachers of classics have a ph.d. from a non-greek university: germany and france were the preferred destinations in the past, but today most choose either the uk or the us. this more cosmopolitan attitude has enabled greek classicists to get acquainted with the main contemporary trends in classics and to move away from the old-fashioned and, occasionally, sterile textual interpretation school that dominated greek classics for decades. (conversely, this text-based education has allowed many greek classicists to avoid some of the pitfalls of over-theorizing.) but upon their return to greece, these scholars instilled the know-how they had acquired abroad in their own universities and the level of graduate studies in greece itself rose considerably as a result. classics in greece 22 4. a critical reappraisal of the national identity allowed many to break free from the old, uncritical, and eventually counterproductive admiration of ancient greece. with regard to classical philology, this shift materialized as a quantitative and qualitative increase in the study of latin literature and philology. also, greek archaeologists have become more perceptible to the idea of investigating the non-greek material remains, be they roman, slavic, jewish, or ottoman. 5. a fifth factor conducive to the recent progress of classics: simply material wealth. similarly to many post-war countries of the western world, greece experienced financial growth that was accompanied by social changes, not least democratization of education. this enabled many more students to pursue university studies, including, of course, classics. now, one specific aspect of economic growth in greece has an even closer connection with classics. tourism has been justifiably called the “heavy industry” of greece, with 15% of the gross domestic product generated in the touristic sector. and of course classical ruins constitute one of the archetypical public images of greece. this has long inspired successive greek governments and local authorities to embrace archaeological projects with the aim of promoting their public image and thus increasing revenues coming from mainly foreign visitors. all in all, i would say that the 1990s and the 2000s marked the peak of classics in greece. alas, i also think that this peak is a thing of the past and that we have already entered the period of decline. the financial crisis that greece is currently undergoing, a crisis with no end in the foreseeable future, will no doubt affect the field of classics. there are already rumors of university departments being axed. the hiring of new archaeologists has been frozen. the minister of education recently announced sweeping changes in secondary education. this is all bad news. but the crisis may provide an incentive for innovation. digitization and classics is still a sector in which greece lags behind other countries. finally, there is, it seems, a new public that has started discovering modern greece and has shown its eagerness to discover and understand the graeco-roman world as well. i am thinking of the new economic giant, china, collaboration with whom could not only boost classics as such but also remind the increasingly forgetful societies in europe, in the americas, and in australia, that classical civilization still has the potential to inspire. notes 1. see olga palagia, “λουδοβίκος ροσς, πρώτος καθηγητής αρχαιολογίας του πανεπιστημίου αθηνών (1837–1843),” in ludwig ross und griechenland. akten des internationalen kolloquiums, athen, 2.–3. oktober 2002, eds. hans rupprecht goette and olga palagia (rahden: marie leidorf, 2005), 263–7. 2. a very useful presentation of these and related issues can be found in dimitris j. kyrtatas, κατακτώντας την αρχαιότητα: ιστοριογραφικές διαδρομές (athens: polis, 2002), passim, esp. 91–132. microsoft word eodice.docx [expositions 9.1 (2015) 33–40] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 the catholic intellectual tradition and american catholic higher education alexander r. eodice iona college nearly sixty years ago, in the journal thought, msgr. john tracy ellis published a scathing critique of catholic intellectual life in america.1 while he does acknowledge the profoundly negative consequences of a deeply ingrained anti-catholic prejudice in american intellectual culture, which when not downright hostile was at least “aloof and unfriendly to catholic thought,” he argues that it is not primarily this bias that accounts for the poverty of catholic intellectual thought in his time.2 instead, he places the prime responsibility on the shoulders of catholic leaders (clergy included) and catholic colleges and universities themselves. the upshot is nothing short of an indictment of american catholic higher education couched in terms of a number of serious defects. among the defects he cites is an abandonment of a fundamental distinctive feature of the catholic intellectual tradition, specifically, its strong commitment to investigation in theology, philosophy, and the liberal arts generally. as catholic institutions followed every passing intellectual craze—presumably in an effort to be timely and more like their secular counterparts— the secular schools had taken prominence in traditionally “catholic” scholastic thought (e.g., theology at the university of chicago, philosophy at princeton). catholic institutions increasingly separated themselves from the foundational elements of the great tradition of learning in the liberal arts and sciences. so much was this the case that robert m. hutchins, in a talk delivered to a meeting of the national catholic education association (1937) and with due deference to the catholic church as having “the longest intellectual tradition of any institution in the contemporary world,” chastised the catholic educators for having “imitated the worst features of secular education and ignored most of the good ones.”3 ellis suggests that hutchins was right to point out that catholic institutions caved to the expediency of vocationalism and were largely antiintellectual, and that there was no fundamental change in their characteristic lack of commitment to high academic standards, development of the habits of intellectual work, and scholarly research. ellis also claims that among american catholics generally and far too many catholic educators in particular there was an absence of a love of scholarship for its own sake, or in his words “the absence of a sense of dedication to an intellectual apostolate.”4 this defect, he suggests, deprived those working in catholic colleges and universities of the virtues associated with “the admirable industry and unremitting labor in research and publication which characterize a far greater proportion of their colleagues on the faculties of secular universities.”5 he hypothesizes that this may well be the result of an overemphasis on the idea of intellectual humility coupled with a distorted conception of intellectual pride which obscures the valuable lessons of industry and the catholic intellectual tradition and american catholic higher education 34 scholarly labor. (he even likens it to a similar distortion embodied in william jennings bryan’s infamous declaration: “if we come to the stage at which we must decide between geology and christianity, i think it is better to know the rock of ages than the ages of rocks.”6) closely associated with this absence of a sense of dedication to the intellectual life is an overemphasis on the idea of a catholic university as an agency for moral development and an undervaluing of the catholic institution as a place that nourishes intellectual excellence. this is not to say that moral development is not a central function of a catholic institution—or education generally, for that matter—nor that it stands in contrast to intellectual pursuits, but rather that this institutional role is often seen as distinct from the academic life and so might be pursued independently of intellectual excellence. intellectual excellence is itself, however, a virtue from which flows an even more robust sense of morality, a kind of courage required to lead a religious life in a public context and an ability to withstand the pressures associated with leading that life. these defects, along with many other points in his paper, lead ellis to conclude that catholic intellectuals separated themselves from their fellow citizens of other religious faiths and developed a stifling “sense of inferiority induced by their consciousness of the inadequacy of catholic scholarship.”7 who, he asks, is to blame for this inadequacy? his response, devastating as it sounds, is unambiguous. it is certainly not the enemies of the church, as enmity that historically issued in some of the greatest works of catholic scholarship (augustine’s city of god, for instance). “the chief blame,” he writes, “lies with catholics themselves.”8 and in the strongest terms possible, ellis writes: it lies in their frequently self-imposed ghetto mentality which prevents them from mingling as they should with their non-catholic colleagues, and in their lack of industry and the habits of work […]. it lies in their failure to have measured up to their responsibilities to the incomparable tradition of catholic learning of which they are the direct heirs […].9 these are powerful words indeed, but do they still ring true? where have we come in the decades since ellis issued his indictment? over the past twenty-five years or so, there has been a wealth—a massive amount—of extraordinarily self-reflective, deeply honest, and extremely productive scholarship devoted to identifying the hallmarks of a catholic intellectual tradition, clarifying the idea of a characteristically catholic intellectual perspective, and delineating the institutional responsibilities of catholic colleges and universities. the resulting conversation, itself, is one measure of the remarkable progress that has been made over the past fifty years. though not an end itself, the on-going conversation is a necessary step in retrieving the foundational elements of and reaffirming our collective responsibility to the “incomparable tradition of catholic learning,” if we wish to claim ourselves as rightful heirs to that tradition. 35 eodice it is imperative that catholic colleges (like king’s or iona, where i work) enter this conversation and engage in a process of understanding themselves better precisely as “catholic.” we should feel confident in knowing what it means to be catholic in this sense; and, perhaps more difficult, we should be able to articulate this publicly. before others can, in john henry newman’s words, “be made to know us as we are” (“know our religion as it is and not as they fancy it to be”), we must sufficiently know ourselves.10 in coming to this self-understanding, we must grapple with providing some sense of the tradition and what it requires of both those who may be called “catholic” intellectuals and those institutions in which they conduct their work. in this discussion, i want to consider the idea of a catholic intellectual, not so much in terms of holding certain substantive ideas, but rather in terms of adopting a certain perspective. it is a responsibility of those who educate in the tradition to take a certain stand with respect to persons and the world; it is also incumbent upon university and college administrators—deans, provosts, and presidents—to ensure that there is an academic infrastructure sufficient to carry out the teaching and learning associated with that perspective. the catholic intellectual tradition is founded on certain fundamental principles regarding the nature of persons and their relationship to god and the world. i want to be careful here. in saying this, i do not mean to leave the impression that these principles are exhaustive of the catholic intellectual tradition, only that they seem to me to be among the most salient ones. moreover, these principles are not understood here as canonical concepts which combine to form a fully systematized theory, but rather more as guides for the development of a uniquely catholic point of view. first, at the core of the tradition is a sanguine belief in the capacity of human reason to realize the purpose of attaining determinate knowledge; with its human limitations, reason is nonetheless capable of discovering truth and discerning objective moral values. the tradition holds to the ancient idea that humans, by nature, are rational and desire to know and that it would be a peculiar situation indeed if we had the desire but were incapable of the knowing itself. the very desire motivates us to learn, and the learning itself is ineliminable in the process of coming to live well. catholic intellectuals are thus committed to the idea that there is truth and that there is a real objective difference between right and wrong. at the same time, it must be recognized that human reason is not absolute, and thus does not deliver the universe as a whole. while we can proudly know certain truths along the route of inquiry, we are humbled by reason’s limitation. we cannot view the world with a god’s-eye perspective. i should add that critics of the catholic intellectual tradition often see it as dogmatic—and with good reason. there are those who operate within the tradition who believe that reason can get us to the god’s-eye perspective—that it can, in its human form, arrive at some ultimate conclusion. such a suggestion cannot be anything but dogmatic. it is one thing to think about dogma from a theological point of view, quite another to be dogmatic. the catholic intellectual tradition and american catholic higher education 36 a second salient feature of the catholic intellectual tradition is the intrinsic connection between faith and reason. humbled as we might be by the healthy skepticism associated with reason’s limitations, we may also be optimistic about arriving at some kind of understanding from a different angle. reason is continuous with faith; far from being opposed to each other, faith and reason are in a necessarily continuous relationship. reason justifies faith, and faith challenges reason to understand things more fully; but even faith does not get us there completely. as reason and faith are the interdependent ways to find truth, they will, when viewed together, bring us closer to god. the catholic intellectual is thus open to this possibility, open to the idea that the world may present itself in ways that transcend yet complement our capacity to reason. a third feature is the adoption of a particular view regarding the nature of persons. through the dynamic interplay of faith and reason that characterizes human nature, persons are understood as spiritual beings made in god’s image. accordingly, the catholic intellectual tradition requires a respect for the dignity of all persons as members of a community of rational investigators. martha nussbaum, a convert to judaism from protestantism, writes that she feels at home on the campuses of catholic universities because, more than at most secular institutions, they take to heart the intrinsic worth of the human person, which provides “a common language in which we can, without preliminary skirmishing [over whether human beings have intrinsic value], converse.”11 even richard rorty— an avowed atheist and a postmodern anti-foundationalist who has little truck for prioritizing personhood, reason, and objectivity—was moved by this salient feature. he comments that this element in the judeo-christian tradition contains a universal sense of human dignity “gratefully invoked by free-loading atheists like myself.”12 fourth, there is a sense that the objects of academic investigation have what might be called a “sacramental quality.” central to the catholic intellectual tradition is a unique notion of revelation: god is revealed not only through the sacred scriptures, but also through history, tradition, and the products of various human intellectual endeavors.13 scientific discoveries, objects of art, works of literature, etc. may all reveal aspects of god. the catholic intellectual tradition holds that not only can these disciplines be studied, they must be studied, for otherwise we risk missing parts of god’s communication with us. against this background, catholic intellectuals ought to be led away from the highly general to the minutely particular. one of the failures of philosophy in general, and often catholic philosophy in particular, is what wittgenstein called contempt for the particular case. it is not just the conclusions we draw, but the perspective we take to get there that matters— a perspective that catches glimpses of the sacred, so to speak, in the various and particular objects of our understanding. conclusions may shift and change—quite naturally as a result of reason’s limitations and our natural desire to inquire—but this perspective ought not. finally, the catholic intellectual tradition is inclusive. it does not merely tolerate difference, but embraces it. this marks perhaps the most difficult task for institutions as they struggle to articulate their catholic identity and balance this with respect for those who have been traditionally 37 eodice marginalized by a narrow understanding of that identity. nussbaum notes, for instance, that while in her experience at catholic institutions she finds a “deliberative richness” regarding the notion of the intrinsic worth of persons, she cannot but worry about a kind of “deliberative impoverishment” with respect to issues of non-western societies, race, equality of women, and gay and lesbian rights.13 it is my sense that many catholic institutions share this worry, not because they wish to jump on a bandwagon for diversity, but because they struggle to find a way to live up to a traditional ideal of inclusivity by accepting difference and welcoming all reasonable voices in the intellectual community. god’s immanence, the sacredness of objects, is not reserved for catholics alone; the practicing catholic intellectual has much to learn from colleagues of other traditions, cultures, and faiths. intellectuals working in catholic institutions must come to appreciate this mutually. colleges and universities that operate within the catholic intellectual tradition thus must educate from a solid foundation in the liberal arts and sciences and preserve the distinct nature of the academic disciplines, but with a view towards integrating knowledge in a unified view of reality. scholars in this tradition are called upon to engage in rational contemplation about the disciplines and, through imaginative synthesis, come to a more unified conception of persons and the world. educators in this tradition recognize the impact that their teaching has on students and are called upon to help students understand how their knowledge will impact the world. and, finally, students educated in the catholic intellectual tradition ought to be able to integrate what they have learned into a personal philosophy that will guide them through a wholesome and productive life, a life lived well with others. but are catholic colleges and universities ready for this? are they ready for the kind of intellectual activity the tradition seems to require? clearly, i think, we have come some great distance from the place ellis described sixty years ago. but are we where we should be? institutions must ask and adequately answer the question, “what is to be catholic?” many institutions have asked the question, but have they adequately answered it? there are two fundamental ways in which institutions fail, i think, in this regard; each such failure is an attempt by an institution to define its catholicism in terms of functions, which when not fully integrated with the core academic enterprise are extrinsic to that central activity. first: an institution may think it meets the challenge by saying that its catholic nature is defined by its vigorous commitment to campus ministries, to service, etc. while it is difficult to imagine a catholic institution without such a vibrant program, the demands of a uniquely catholic intellectual life are not met solely by pastoral ministry or service. to recall, ellis himself stresses the inadequacy of the concept of the catholic university as fundamentally an instrument of moral development. second: an institution may think of itself as catholic in the sense that the church is merely present on campus, as if it were one among the many items that define the institution, or as if its “catholicism” were a kind of accidental tourist roaming the ivy halls—a saintly statue the catholic intellectual tradition and american catholic higher education 38 here, a crucifix there, mass in the morning—where an otherwise fundamentally secular education is conducted. i am in fundamental agreement with peter steinfels when he writes that catholic identity must be reflected not only in campus ministry, liturgical events, student-life policies, and community service, but also in the central activity of higher education: its intellectual life, the teaching and research agendas of the faculty […]. [further] that catholic identity is something broader than the place and character of theology […]. a history department, a literature department, a sociology department, should offer courses or address questions within courses that one would not be likely to find at the state university down the road. the science faculty should include people ready to engage in discussions at the meeting points of science, faith, and ethics. the economics and business departments should have the capacity to join in examining the interrelationship of commerce, the christian tradition, and social justice.14 a catholic institution’s catholicism must be intrinsic; it must define its very mode of existing— not merely in terms of its ostensible images and not exclusively in terms of what is taught in theology/religious studies departments, but in terms of its course offerings across the disciplines and of the demonstrable support given to faculty to be the kind of scholars the tradition demands. there may be many ways to demonstrate this, but there are a few that are, in my estimation, non-negotiable. the intrinsically catholic college or university must be committed to providing its undergraduate students with a core curriculum that is grounded in the liberal arts and sciences and that is truly integrative. resource allocation must be made both to allow faculty to conduct research in their particular disciplines and to enable them to find points of meaningful convergence among the disciplines. we must value scholarship and encourage its intense pursuit, both for its own sake, as knowledge is an unbridled human good, and for the purpose of advancing pedagogy—and, by extension, student learning, and, by further extension, living well. in these respects we have made significant progress, but we are by no means ready to proclaim the good news that we have achieved our end. a final word of caution: beware of selfcongratulation, now or at any time, and focus on advancing this noble cause, always mindful that there is no finality as long as there are human inquirers. notes 1. ellis 1955. ellis’s paper is also published by permission on the boston college website: see http://www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/offices/mission/pdf1/cu25.pdf. 39 eodice 2. ibid., 354. 3. ibid., 374–375. 4. ibid., 377. 5. ibid. 6. ibid. 7. ibid., 386. 8. ibid. 9. ibid. 10. ibid. ellis quotes these lines from newman’s 1851 lectures to english catholics: “they must be made to know us as we are; they must be made to know our religion as it is, not as they fancy it; they must be made to look at us, and they are overcome. this is the work that lies before you in your place and in your measure” (lectures on the present position of the catholics in england (new york: oxford university press, 1913), 378). in those lectures, ellis notes, newman “challenged his hearers to be equal to the obligation they owed to their non-catholic fellow-countrymen.” this ideal is achieved, no doubt, through effective scholarship as ellis suggests; my point here is that we should first engage in serious scholarly self-reflection. 11. nussbaum 1996, 32. nussbaum’s paper is also available online; see http://www.bc.edu/ content/dam/files/offices/mission/pdf1/cu18.pdf. 12. rorty 1991, 202. see also robert p. kraynak, “justice without foundations,” the new atlantis 32 (summer 2011): 103–120, also available online at http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/justice-without-foundations. commenting on this passage, kraynak notes that rorty’s justification for appealing to this sense of human dignity is “that he is part of a community of moral traditions inherited from judaism and christianity.” so even “free-loading atheists” appropriate salient elements of our religious tradition, but are content to view them simply as “inherited.” the problem for rorty’s view, as kraynak sees it, is “that our belief in god or rationally grounded moral duties turns out to be relevant after all.” it is important, then, to acknowledge the wide difference between rorty’s conventionalist appeal and nussbaum’s claim that we should take as our starting point the objective fact the catholic intellectual tradition and american catholic higher education 40 of the dignity of persons. how could one make sense of such a value without rationally prioritizing personhood in some way? though rorty’s view does attest to the profound influence of the tradition, it is not only influence or inheritance we rely on in an effort to ground the catholic intellectual tradition. 13. nussbaum 1996, 33. 14. steinfels 1996, 38. steinfels’s paper is likewise available online; see http://www.bc.edu/ content/dam/files/offices/mission/pdf1/cu17.pdf. works cited ellis, john tracy. 1955. “american catholics and the intellectual life.” thought 30: 351–388. nussbaum, martha. 1996. “marley’s burden.” boston college magazine fall: 32–35. rorty, richard. 1991. “postmodernist bourgeois liberalism.” in objectivity, relativism, and truth. cambridge: cambridge university press. 197–202. steinfels, peter. 1996. “just say no.” boston college magazine fall: 36–40. microsoft word 7 article barkalow-final.docx [expositions 8.2 (2014) 131–154] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 american paideia: public and private leadership and the cultivation of civic virtue jordan barkalow bridgewater state university critics of statesmanship in democracy make three arguments. first, scholars claim that the idea of democratic statesmanship is, itself, is a contradiction.1 reasoning that there is an inherent tension between popular rule grounded on equality and liberty and the political requirement of decisive action, these scholars hold that elected political officials should simply execute the will of the people. benjamin barber makes the most dramatic argument on this front claiming that statesmanship undermines democratic politics.2 he contends that in an age such as ours, it is possible, safer, more fulfilling, and more just to allow citizens to exercise political judgment. thus, any need democracy may have had for a statesman has run its course. building on this argument, second, democratic theorists contend that statesmanship actually destabilizes democracies as statesmen become a source of factional conflict.3 the concern here is not just that statesmanship undermines the goal of political stability, but that statesmanship will degenerate into tyranny. consequently, statesmanship is not a feature of democracy, but an alternative to democracy. instead of relying on statesmen, all that is needed is effective citizenship which can be achieved by freeing citizens from the restrictions imposed by statesmen. finally, scholars argue that statesmanship is no longer possible. as for why this is the case, scholars identify a host of explanations. gueguen places the blame for america’s faltering leadership on the loss of esteem for public office, the growing apathy that characterizes the american people, and the weakening of america’s moral foundations.4 burns attributes the decline to the lack of a clear standard by which to measure leadership.5 storing agrees with gueguen and burns that the loss of our intellectual roots explains the loss of statesmanship in america.6 the problem, according to storing, is that the political thought of the founders has been replaced by the reign of popular opinion and the rise of scientific management commonly associated with the political thinking of the progressives. despite these three arguments, some democratic theorists contend that statesmanship and democracy are not inconsistent ideas. bruce ackerman provides a vision of statesmanship that emphasizes the promotion of mutual dialogue. the problem with ackerman’s effort is that he effectively reduces the statesman to the political arbiter or political leader.7 as the next section explains, there is a fundamental difference between statesmanship on the one hand and leadership on the other. whereas statesmanship emphasizes the cultivation of personal and civic virtues, leaders are merely responsible for reconciling the interests of the public.8 to the extent public and private leadership and the cultivation of civic virtue 132 that democratic theory draws on the insights of modern political philosophy and not ancient political thought, democratic theory must look to institutions and figures other than the statesman for the cultivation of the capacities and character traits required for self-government. in particular, democratic theory and democracies must look to the public intellectual who, like the ancient statesman, sees to the development of civic virtue. as argued here, ralph waldo emerson not only argues for the necessity of the public intellectual as statesman, he serves as a model for this figure in a democratic society. ancients, moderns and statesmanship despite their differences, a common aspect of theorizing about statesmanship is that it is grounded in ancient political thought. cropsey, drawing on plato’s statesman, views statesmanship as connecting political philosophy and politics.9 the task of the political philosopher is to understand the relation of thought and political life and implement this understanding. paul eidelberg develops an aristotelian model where the statesman coordinates political theory and political practice via constant recourse to the common good.10 this recourse is not simply a rhetorical device, but a reasoned justification for his course of action which people can understand. this reasoned defense is important because it allows the statesman to gradually modify the intellectual and moral horizons of the people from the private to the public. based on his reading of plato’s gorgias, denis bathory contends that the fundamental job of the statesman is to make the people better.11 unlike political leaders who emphasize the diverse needs and wants of men, the statesman’s concern is with teaching and training people to look beyond the satisfaction of their apparent and immediate wants.12 in drawing on the insights of the ancients, cropsey, eidelberg, and bathory highlight the central role of the statesman in the ancient idea of paideia. according to the ancients, paideia is an educational process that aims at the cultivation of the ideal citizen/person.13 the responsibility for this cultivation falls to the statesman. in his statesman, plato argues that the correct regime is characterized by a certain judging and supervising science which is to say that the correct regime is defined by the presence of statesmanship.14 like a doctor, the statesman applies his art to the health of the city.15 the ability of the statesman to bring health to the city, like a doctor’s ability to restore health to the body, depends in large measure on the material they are working with. according to plato, it is necessary that the statesman begins with the best materials possible.16 in the ordering of the city, this requires the statesman to concern himself with the moral quality and development of the citizenry. charged with selecting the teachers who pursue a model of philosophic education devoted to achieving a certain fitting character, the statesman’s ability to successfully weave together the tapestry of society depends primarily on his ability to get the right materials which is the result of proper education. 133 barkalow the philosophic quality of this education cannot be overstated, as jaeger highlights the centrality of philosophy to guide human change.17 the key to this process is morphosis, a term implying that the essential identity of all educational activity is the formation of man.18 in other words, only philosophy has the ability to change man in the appropriate way. plato makes this very argument in his apology where he draws a clear distinction between political and philosophic discourse. according to plato, the former concerns itself with the appearance of justice and the latter with justice itself.19 in concerning itself with the mere appearance of justice, political discourse appeals to human passions instead of reason. like the many whose opinion it panders to, political discourse cares for the wrong things. instead of focusing on truth, wisdom, and the state of the soul, political discourse focuses most on what matters least: wealth, honor, reputation, and political faction.20 as the example of plato shows, the ancient view of statesmanship is essential for the city and individual to reach their full potential. as reid summarizes, statesmanship has its roots in personal virtue, which requires intentional cultivation and a study of nature that leads to a realization of the world’s unity and interdependence. this realization inspires an appreciation of our communities and a desire to serve them, not through rules and punishment, but by helping others to cultivate their own virtue. this help comes primarily through the expression of noble action of the leader’s own virtue, which acts like a magnet to draw the community together and inspire individuals to better themselves.21 the statesman is the centerpiece of the constant care that is paideia and is fundamentally responsible for the cultivation and development of the citizenry’s moral and intellectual virtues.22 this understanding of the statesman stands in sharp contrast to modern political thought’s concern with political leadership. benjamin constant identifies a key aspect of modern political thinking that removes the responsibility for the moral development of the citizenry from the sphere of politics—the public/private distinction.23 for ancients, the highest good is understood in political terms. for moderns, leaders are to take care of the necessary business while leaving space for the rest of us to devote our attention to the private sphere. in developing the public/private dichotomy, modern political thought no longer requires the presence of morally virtuous rulers and removes the responsibility of moral education and development from the hands of politicians. machiavelli, for example, famously tells his reader that to emphasize virtue as do the ancients is to guarantee one’s political failure.24 locke places the responsibility for the moral development of individuals in the hands of the family and makes education largely a private matter.25 this is not to say that the cultivation of a virtuous citizenry does not matter for modern political thought; it is only to say that they do not rely on statesmen public and private leadership and the cultivation of civic virtue 134 to do this. as the example of tocqueville that follows demonstrates, the virtues of citizenship are largely cultivated in the private sphere. central to the ability of democracy to remain self-governing and self-sustaining is the development of proper mores.26 the development of mores, according to tocqueville, is largely a consequence of the indirect effects of religion as america is “still the place in the world where the christian religion has more preserved genuine power over souls.”27 in exercising this power, religion limits the imaginations of citizen and makes the exercise of freedom possible. it limits the imagination in the sense that certain ideas and behaviors are held to be outside of what is morally acceptable. tocqueville explains that “while the law permits the american people to do everything, religion prevents them from conceiving everything and forbids them to dare everything.”28 religion’s ability to restrict and limit is of crucial importance in a country that places so much emphasis on the accumulation of wealth. on this point, tocqueville writes: the principle business of religion is to purify, regulate, and restrain the too ardent taste for well-being that men in times of equality feel; but i believe they would be wrong to try to subdue it entirely and to destroy it. they will not succeed in turning man away from the love of wealth; but they can still persuade them to enrich themselves only by honest means.29 to achieve these desired effects, religious beliefs should be dogmatic.30 the dogmatic quality of these beliefs is necessary so as to “shield” ideas about god, the human soul, and our duties toward god from “the habitual action of individual reason.”31 given the cartesian quality of the american mind, to subject religious beliefs to this extreme skepticism undermines religion’s ability to positively shape mores. in highlighting the importance of religion for the cultivation of proper mores, tocqueville speaks directly to the primacy of the private sphere and, in particular, the role of the american clergy in performing one of the key functions of the ancient statesman—the cultivation of an enlightened and virtuous citizenry.32 according to tocqueville, religion enjoys a “peaceful dominion” in america principally because of the “complete separation of church and state.”33 the clergy not only do not hold public office, but go out of their way to “distance themselves from power” and take “a sort of professional pride in remaining strangers to it.”34 the clergy recognizes that religion must remain within its “proper bounds” and “not seek to leave them” as doing so raises the possibility of religion “no longer being believed in any matter.”35 as the contrast between ancients and moderns makes clear, one should not expect modern, liberal thought to be able to provide the moral education sought by the ancients. in large measure this is because liberalism leaves open the question of the highest human good. ancient political thinking recognizes the centrality of this question as an understanding of the good is necessary if 135 barkalow one is to develop a model of education that facilitates living a morally serious life. even to the extent that liberal discourse does offer a thinner morality, its reliance on skepticism calls into question its own principles of justice and morality. moreover, as long as liberalism continues to assert the separation between the public world of the citizen and the private world of the individual, it denies the educative function of the state and the laws. the lack of statesmanship that characterizes modern political thought requires one to look elsewhere for the model of paideia that makes democratic governance possible. given the public/private distinction, one must look to the private sphere for statesmen. as demonstrated in the next section, ralph waldo emerson recognizes the need for a statesmanlike figure to engage in the moral education of a democratic people and his writings and life are fruitfully interpreted in light of this goal. emerson and the american paideia critics of emerson question the philosophic quality of his essays. they complain that emerson’s argument(s) lack coherence as they illuminate in multiple directions without ever actually settling an issue. stephen whicher argues that emerson is too general, vague, and obvious to provide a comprehensive ethical theory.36 joel porte contends that emerson’s ethical teaching suffers from an inconsistency as he is a radical in some areas (religion, society and literature) and conservative in the area of ethics.37 given these limitations, some scholars go so far as to suggest that emerson is too concerned with power to speak to ethical questions. instead, emerson is thought to evade more difficult philosophical questions in favor of more pragmatic solutions to the problems of the day.38 despite these arguments, the general scholarly consensus is that philosophy and ethics are so central to emerson’s intellectual enterprise that judith shklar refers to emerson as “the american philosopher.”39 as richardson shows, emerson’s life and work represents a continued effort to refute the skepticism of david hume.40 in doing so, emerson takes up the key question of ethical thinking: how shall i live?41 like the philosophic minds he was so interested in, emerson’s primary concern is with how ethics shapes individual thought and action.42 this explains, to a considerable degree, emerson’s fundamental concern with education and his critique of public education.43 according to shklar, emerson: thought the official reason for public education cynical. it was argued that with universal suffrage, even the lower classes needed education to turn them into reasonable, property-loving voters. the character and needs and hopes and possibilities of individual children were of no concern. those attributes would not help their development or power of self-education or help them to become selfpublic and private leadership and the cultivation of civic virtue 136 reliant individuals with minds of their own. to emerson an education that did not attempt more than to constrain was no education at all; it was betrayal.44 as the criticism shows, emerson is concerned with more than the effects of education. he is concerned with developing the moral quality of the american citizenry which is done by providing the incentive for thinking philosophically.45 proof is this is provided by emerson’s support of amos bronson alcott’s temple school. established in 1834, the temple school introduced an entirely new plan of education. based on the transcendental view of education that stressed active intelligence over passive absorption, alcott recommended a method of close questioning of a gentle and persistent sort that closely resembled the socratic method. the objective of the method was to instill self-trust in the students by focusing on their moral development.46 alcott’s position on public education thus mirrors the criticism of higher education provided by emerson in “american-scholar.” both fear the emphasis on conformity that constrains the philosophic discourse necessary for the development of whole individuals capable of thinking and acting for themselves.47 given emerson’s emphasis on philosophic thinking and education, it remains to be determined what emerson’s understanding of philosophic education is and why it is necessary. moreover, it is necessary to determine what the goal of this model of education is. the next section identifies emerson’s diagnosis for what is wrong with the individual and american society. the section that follows lays out emerson’s educational remedy for these problems and the final section responds to a criticism for the argument advanced here from within emerson’s own writings. emerson’s diagnosis of the ills of american democracy and society from his publication of “nature” in 1836 to the publication of a selection of his favorite poems in 1874, one of emerson’s fundamental concerns is with the state of the human soul. as emerson writes, “i only wish to indicate the true position of nature in regard to man, wherein to establish man, all right education tends; as the ground which to attain is the object of human life, that is, a man’s connection to nature.”48 only by properly understanding man’s relation to nature (a term emerson uses interchangeably between its philosophic and aesthetic senses) and building a system of education on this understanding does it become possible for man to know what it means to be human and, consequently, how man should live. the problem, as emerson sees it, is that man is divorced from nature and, consequently, alienated from himself.49 emerson portrays alienated man as the opposite of the child who is described as being whole.50 children are whole in the sense that their inward and outward senses remain truly adjusted to one another.51 this allows the child to be “independent” whereas the divided adult is “clapped into jail” by his or her 137 barkalow consciousness.52 by consciousness, emerson does not refer to the internal mechanism that regulates human behavior. emerson refers to the internal mechanism that regulates human behavior as the moral sense which has been rendered weak and unable to perform this function because of man’s divorce from nature. consciousness, as used here, refers to the external considerations of others as the limits on human behavior and thought instead of one’s own character.53 where the child is independent, man is a conformist. man’s almost exclusive focus on external matters renders him broken. emerson describes man as lacking “unity, and lies broken in heaps” because “man is disunited with himself.”54 man is now “timid and apologetic” because he no longer has self-trust.55 the breakdown of man into “a thing” allows each of us to be defined by the social function we play instead of being and end worthy of moral consideration. thus, emerson’s scholar degenerates into “mere thinker” instead of “man thinking.”56 the problem here is that the act of thinking is divorced from the understanding of what it means to be human. we no longer turn our thoughts inward in consideration of the soul. our exclusive focus lies with the external world. the question to emerge naturally here is why this is the case? emerson answers this question by pointing to certain aspects of society/culture. first, emerson is critical of the emphasis placed on tradition.57 for emerson, the argument in favor of tradition is problematic in that it denies subsequent generations the opportunity to have an original relationship with nature which only adds to the division of man. emerson opens “nature” by asking the following: “why should not we enjoy an original relation to the universe? why should we not have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not by the history of theirs?”58 in asking for a revelation of our own, emerson points his reader to the argument he will make against historical christianity in his “divinity school address.” the first defect of historical christianity, according to emerson, is that it fails to provide a doctrine of the soul.59 instead of emphasizing religion’s relationship to the human soul, historical christianity places too much emphasis on the person of jesus. focusing on the person of jesus suggests that what truly matters for religion is getting the facts about the life and times of jesus correct instead the inspirational quality of his message. this means, second, that religion as practiced in emerson’s new england and taught at the harvard divinity school fails to explore man’s moral nature.60 cumulatively, the two problems with historical christianity have the effect of treating jesus as if he were dead instead of showing how the message of jesus teaches us “the duties of life” and “converts life into truth.”61 to counter the “absence of faith” historical christianity engenders due to historicism’s “coldness,” religion must return its focus to the individual soul.62 at a practical level, this requires every individual to pursue an inherently private and personal relationship with the divine.63 at an intellectual level, this requires the scholar to confront the skepticism that informs historicism and to offer an alternative. the problem with historicism’s extreme skepticism is that public and private leadership and the cultivation of civic virtue 138 it denies the student the ability to “manly” contemplate “the whole.”64 instead, the emphasis on empiricism clouds “the sight of man with the very knowledge of functions and processes” it provides.65 the emphasis on parsimony unnecessarily and dangerously reduces the whole of nature to the simplest explanations. emerson’s problem with skepticism on this front is that it fails to provide a theory of creation. to arrive at a theory of creation, it is necessary to have recourse to areas of thought other than history and science. one needs to look at areas that emphasize creativity—poetry and philosophy.66 emerson says we should accept the truth that “poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history.”67 the poet and philosopher’s concern with creativity, or putting thought into action, serves as emerson’s great response to skepticism. he wants man to think for himself and then to trust his own thought when acting. that emerson desires this is seen in his critique of the reform movements of his day. modern reform, according to emerson, has a large horizon. it is no longer enough for these movements to reform our daily employments, our households, and institutions of property. what is needed is a total revision of our social structure, state, school, religion, views on marriage, trade, science, and understanding of our own nature.68 while emerson commends these reformers for their desire to improve the condition of man, he is critical of the nature of their reform as they miss the proper object of genuine reform—the individual soul.69 emerson rejects the proposition that you can improve man by simply improving his circumstances. modern reform movements see reform in purely political or instrumental terms. for them, reform is a consequence of bringing together a critical mass of men.70 emerson views this in starkly different terms, arguing that what they truly rely on is fear, wrath, and the spirit of party.71 the reformer’s emphasis on power is a response to the fact that the private domain is completely off limits. reform must focus on those things that lie outside of the private sphere. the problem is that there can be no genuine social reform for emerson if individuals are not first reformed themselves. it is the job of reformer, like the ancient statesman, to facilitate the self-cultivation of proper character traits which leads this discussion to emerson’s remedy for the ills he finds in america. emerson’s educational remedy that emerson recommends education, or paideia, as the solution to the aforementioned problems should not be that surprising. he was a leading figure in the lyceum movement which was originally intended to expand the knowledge of young men already employed in mills and other industrial enterprises. while originally to emphasize scientific knowledge, the lyceum quickly extended it range of topics to include history, theology, philosophy and politics.72 delivering a series of lectures in the evening, after then end of the work day, the lyceum speeches sought to improve the education of americans. 139 barkalow according to emerson, the primary task of education is to redeem the soul of man.73 by restoring the world’s original and eternal beauty through the study of nature, man will see and come to believe in the correct understanding of virtue.74 the common view of virtue is that it is not common and that you can distinguish between man and virtue.75 for emerson, this consequence of skepticism contributes to the breakdown of man. it becomes possible to combat this when one recognizes that “what we do not call education is more precious than what we call education.”76 for emerson, an education in nature has the effect of reconnecting man and virtue.77 in the recognition that virtue is a sentiment within all of us, man is able to renounce himself to virtue and in doing so he “comes to himself” and the unity of man is restored.78 this moral education is to be provided through things like the lyceum movement and through popular writing. emerson’s concern with the act of writing and its moral consequences places him in the company of montaigne, bacon, and hume. as ryan patrick hanley demonstrates in his analysis of hume’s my own life, the essayist brings his wisdom directly to a popular audience in a format and language that is more easily accessed and, consequently, has the effect of improving the moral quality of the people.79 employing the imagery of plato’s “allegory of the cave,” emerson’s scholar is to “cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances.”80 finding consolation in the exercise of the highest functions of human nature, the scholar “breathes and lives on public and illustrious thoughts.”81 in doing so, the goal of the scholar is to alter one’s “state of mind” by persuading man to open himself to the internal life of the moral sense.82 this is no easy task as there is something in the nature of man that inclines him to conform and a general resistance to those who, like the scholar, set no value on tradition, but emphasize what one thinks.83 emerson’s scholar, like socrates, will be resisted and must consequently demonstrate courage. “manlike,” the scholar must resist conforming to conventional wisdom in his effort to “inspect its [nature’s] origins.”84 here, the scholar communes with “the most important influence on his mind and he must, for himself, settle the question of what constitutes the value of nature in his own life.”85 consideration of this question distinguishes, for emerson, his thought from the skepticism he associates with hume, natural science and history. in particularly poetic language, emerson writes that man and nature “proceed from one root; one is leaf and one is flower; relation, sympathy, stirring in every vein. and what is that root? is not the soul of his soul?—a thought too bold,—a dream too wild.”86 where hume’s natural philosophy, in recognition of the limits of the philosophic enterprise, stops at a description of how nature functions, emerson calls for the scholar and any man thinking to reform the soul. for emerson, the insights of natural philosophy are merely “first gropings” in an effort to “know thyself” by studying nature.87 when man, inspired and cajoled by the scholar, comes to an understanding of himself he discovers that he is not only inseparable from virtue, but that he must trust that virtue. in chapter six of the conduct of life, entitled “worship,” emerson argues that the moral sense has the public and private leadership and the cultivation of civic virtue 140 power to counterweight the skepticism that results from leaning too heavily on fate, practical power, and trade.88 here, emerson does not argue that we should not be skeptical. he argues that we should give skepticism “as much line as we can” but not so much line that it “breaks down the natural belief” in morality that “we are all born with.”89 the moral sense has the effect of returning man to completeness. no longer distrustful of human virtue, the presence of an active moral sense distinguishes the shallow man from the strong man. where the former believes in luck and explains everything as a consequence of circumstance, the latter denies hume’s conclusion that cause and effect cannot be proven and boldly asserts not only its existence, but its truth.90 the key to this is for the people to recognize that “the moral sense re-appears day-today with the same morning newness that has from of the fountain of beauty and strength.”91 when man recognizes that obedience to our inner moral perceptions (self-trust) is the remedy for the skepticism that divides man against himself, the scholar has fulfilled his highest purpose. the scholar’s continued presence is needed because skepticism is an essential feature of the human condition. filling the void created in modern political thought where the ancient statesman once stood, emerson and his scholar are charged with seeing to the moral health of the nation which can only be accomplished by performing the duties of the scholar.92 as shklar reminds us, education as reform is a two-way street where the scholar continues his own process of self-reform by learning from those he teaches.93 through public oration and writing, the scholar makes interpretation possible and in this he serves as a representative man. as a private figure, the scholar facilitates the ability of the observer to identify with the observed. he is not one of carlyle’s heroes. the scholar is one of us. he employs the same language we do and in his example he embodies the aspiration that is man thinking. the scholar aids us is the rediscovery of our soul and the ethical codes that reside there.94 emerson, like plato’s statesman, recognizes that the great aim of philosophy and education is the soul.95 only when the soul is properly educated is liberation possible and, at a political level, is genuine self-governance possible.96 emersonian prospects the vision of the self-reliant scholar as democratic statesman just laid out is not without its problems. in particular, one has to address the question of whether or not emerson himself retreats from the celebration of intellectual power and freedom in “self-reliance” only to adopt a less optimistic perspective in his later writings? the traditional interpretation of emerson is that he does backtrack from the position he takes in “self-reliance.”97 if this is the case, then emerson himself would reject the argument made above. to determine whether or not this is the case, this section takes up the relationship between “self-reliance” and the text said to contain 141 barkalow emerson’s clearest rebuttal of his earlier position, the first chapter of the conduct of life, “fate.” recall that “self-reliance” is emerson’s clarion call for the individual to throw off convention and to think for himself. emerson writes that you should “abide by your spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility when the whole cry of voices is on the other side.”98 the self-reliant person is only concerned with what he must do and “not what people think.”99 only by discarding the pretensions and propositions of society can man become true to nature’s intention and while emerson’s tone is generally optimistic, the occasional element of doubt can be detected. for example, in the midst of his argument for individualism as the solution to the ills of society, emerson admits to being “ashamed” by how “easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.”100 that emerson’s optimism is somewhat balanced or checked in “self-reliance” is important. to read emerson’s argument as calling for a radical form of individualism is to misread emerson. as dolan, sacks, and kateb recognize, self-reliant activity and thought is not divorced from moral standards.101 instead, self-reliance is framed by moral limits provided by the moral sense. that this is the case is evident when one looks at emerson’s argument in “fate.” emerson begins “fate” by raising the fundamental question of ethics: how shall i live?102 in order to understand this more fundamental question and answer it, emerson indicates that one must first come to terms with a “polarity” that describes the human condition. this polarity is the tension between fate on the one hand and freedom/power on the other.103 in taking up fate, emerson is concerned with the idea of fate as something that tyrannizes the character of man.104 knowing that the primary effect of this tyranny is the division of man, emerson must identify the things that actively tyrannize. emerson refers to these things as fate which he defines as anything that limits the individual.105 of interest here is the imagery emerson employs. describing fate as a hoop that surrounds the individual, emerson provides his reader with a visual image that is quite similar to his understanding of self-reliant activity being limited or surrounded by the moral sense. this suggests that fate is like the moral sense in that it limits or restricts self-reliant activity. to the extent that this is correct, one is left to consider the question of how fate differs from the moral sense. according to emerson, accepting fate compels one to affirm liberty.106 in affirming liberty one also affirms the following: the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty, and the power of character. what is of interest here is the fact that emerson locates character on the side of freedom suggesting that it limits self-reliance in a fundamentally different way than fate does. when emerson takes up the direct relationship between fate and man, he is careful to couch the relationship in terms of fate and thought. he says that “intellect annuls fate. so far as man thinks he is free.”107 emerson’s careful presentation of the relationship suggests that the great danger posed by fate is on the ability of man to think. this is not to say that as long as man thinks he has public and private leadership and the cultivation of civic virtue 142 vanquished fate from his life. emerson knows better than to make this argument because he recognizes that nature, through fate, will always be able to present to man things that have yet to be passed under the fire of thought.108 what distinguishes fate from the moral sense is that the latter has passed under the fire of thought. thus, the limitations or restrictions imposed by the moral sense are not only understood by man, but placed there as a consequence of his own reflection. thus, at the end of the day all one can hope to accomplish is to harmonize freedom and fate which is accomplished through the presence of the moral sentiment. if all that can be done to fate and freedom is harmonize them, then both the pessimistic and optimistic readings of the relationship between “self-reliance” and “fate” fail to consider the possibility that emerson stakes out a middle position. pessimists read passages like the following as evidence of emerson conceding the argument that self-reliance will win the day. he writes, “the forces which we resist these torrents of tendency looks so ridiculously inadequate, that it amounts to little more than a criticism or a protest made by a minority of one, under compulsion of millions.”109 the self-reliant individual is doomed to fail in his quixotic enterprise as society will perpetually remain “servile from want of will.”110 the problem with this reading is the overall balance with which emerson treats the subject. in the midst of his extended pessimistic treatment of fate, emerson slips in a bit of optimism. he says that fate, when properly used, has the effect of lifting our conduct to the loftiness of nature.111 thus, fate brings man back to his proper subject of study (nature) and to the place where he can recover the completeness of his being. all man has to do is recognize this and act accordingly. the same problem characterizes the optimistic reading. richardson, for example, reads “fate” as a bold affirmation of the freedom found in “self-reliance.”112 the optimistic argument places great emphasis on the idea that fate “has its lord” in freedom.113 as its lord, freedom of thinking “takes man out of servitude into freedom” as man is now able to “speak from insight” and capable of affirming “of himself what is true of the mind.”114 the problem encountered here is that emerson never argues that freedom annuls fate. he only argues that “if fate follows and limits power, power attends and antagonizes fate.”115 in concluding that freedom and fate must always coexist, emerson concludes that harmony is the best that can be hoped for in this life.116 instead of being evidence of backtracking as the pessimists contend, this is a consistent position for emerson and one that makes sense when one considers, in more detail, the place of ethics in his understanding of the relationship between freedom and fate. according to emerson, thinking is not the only path to freedom as the moral sentiment also makes us free.117 this is not to say that there are two distinct pathways to freedom, but to say that freedom and the moral sentiment must combine if man is to bring harmony to his life. they must be combined because the perception of truth through the freedom of thought is not, by itself, adequate. it must be combined with the moral sense to instill in one the desire to see that the truth “shall prevail.”118 from this one sees that what ultimately makes self-trust possible is 143 barkalow the blending of intellect and the moral sense. the moral sense confirms the goodness of the insight and, as emerson writes, “insight is not will, nor is affection will. perception is cold, and goodness dies in wishes.”119 when fused together, thought and the moral sense create the will and when the energy of the will is created man is able to recognize the right way to go. seeing it, he “moves on that aim” with the world under him for “root and support.”120 emerson is clear that one must be certain that this is the right way to go suggesting that one has not only thought about all of the possible options, but that the best option has received the blessing of the moral sentiment. once again, emerson limits freedom through self-authorship and it is ultimately the knowledge that this limitation is the right thing to do that instills in man the courage, resolve, and fortitude to combat fate and bring balance to one’s life. in reconciling “self-reliance” and “fate” in this way, emerson agrees with plato that the scholar as statesman plays a central role in harmonizing the human soul and, by extension, society. without this emerson like figure, harmony and happiness are fleeting or what passes for happiness is, upon closer inspection, really a source of misery. conclusion america’s reliance on modern political thought renders the status of the ancient statesman in american democracy problematic. charged with the moral development of the people, the ancient statesman takes advantage of there being no distinction between public and private in pursuit of the good. in its demotion of the statesman to mere political leader, modern political thinking transfers the responsibility of the moral development of the citizenry to the private sphere. as argued above, many of the responsibilities of the statesman fall to the public intellectual. here, ralph waldo emerson serves as a representative model of the scholar/statesman who is responsible for the character development of the american people. through public gatherings like the lyceum movement and the publication of essays, emerson both embodies the responsibilities of the scholar/statesman and plays a critical role in democratic society by continually striving to check the forces that divide and weaken man. when considering emerson in his role as scholar/statesman, it is worth considering the question of whether or not emerson was successful in his efforts. one would have to answer that he was successful and that evidence in support of this conclusion is provided on two fronts. from a literary perspective, emerson strongly influenced the likes of henry david thoreau and walt whitman. in terms of his social influence, emerson had transformed himself from a writer with only regional appeal into a recognized figure on the literary landscape both nationally and internationally.121 emerson makes this transition during the 1840s as a result of his public lectures, the publication of two volumes of his essays, the dial, and his 1847 volume of poems.122 so powerful was emerson’s reputation that when asked to speak to howard public and private leadership and the cultivation of civic virtue 144 university’s law students at the last minute, emerson’s improvised talk on what books one ought to read caused bookstores in boston to sell out of the titles mentioned by emerson.123 as important as emerson was in his day, our own time seems to cry out for a scholar/statesman as the skepticism emerson fought so hard to combat seems to have degenerated into cynicism. simply reflecting on recent polling data on the level of public disapproval of congress suggests that the best understanding of america’s evaluation of congress is cynical. summarizing polling data from gallup, fox news, cbs news, abc news/washington post, and nbc news/wall street journal, real clear politics shows that, on average, only 14.8% of american approve of the job congress is doing while 76.8% disapprove.124 couple these with the political reality of polarization and continual campaigning and we have a recipe for why we should not look to contemporary political leaders to act and serve as statesmen. to the extent that this is true, we have even greater need for someone in the mold of emerson today. the problem is that the public intellectual appears to be an endangered species. while an argument can be made that changes in american culture explain this decline, russell jacoby argues that a better explanation for this decline is the movement from the intellectual into the academy.125 this move is important as an educated, literate public is replaced by professional colleagues as the intellectual’s primary audience. as academics, we write monographs for specialized journals that require us to situate our thoughts within the context of our field and discipline. we do this because our jobs, advancement, and salaries depend on the evaluation of other specialists. this dependence, consequently, affects the questions we ask, the issues we broach, and the language we employ. by shifting our intellectual activity and talents from the public arena to the insular world of the academy we run the risk of failing to transmit our [political] culture.126 all of this raises the following question: has the academy turned its back on its social responsibility? bruce kuklick’s study of harvard’s department of philosophy concludes that this is, in fact, the case.127 a similar conclusion may be drawn about political science and economics. both disciplines, emphasizing complex statistical models that facilitate publication, suffer from a paucity of relevance.128 do we, as scholars, have public responsibilities akin to those of the scholar/statesman? if so, how can we balance these with our professional responsibilities? can this even be done? these are the questions i am left with at the conclusion of this study. even in death, emerson continues to inspire this reader, at least, to consider his place in the nature of things. endnotes 145 barkalow 1. see gueguen 1982, 473–74; danhauser 1980, 119. for a more general overview see ruderman 1997, 761–62. 2. barber 1988, 117; 1984, 24, 235–37. 3. see ruderman 1997, 761–62 and lawler 1987, 713–14. for an argument in opposition to lawler see weaver 1997, 420–446. 4. gueguen 1982, 470. 5. burns 1978, 1–5, 25–27. 6. storing 1980, 88–91, 105, 111. 7. ackerman 1981, 6–7, 13, 19, 269. 8. weaver 1997, 428–429. 9. cropsey 1975. 10. eidelberg 1974. 11. bathory 1978, 3–6. 12. on the emphasis leadership places as reconciling these needs and wants see burns 1978, 4–5, 19. 13. jaeger 1965, 62, 87. 14. plato 2000, 292b–c; see also 250b, 260b–c; and 261b–c. throughout, i follow the standard method of citing platonic dialogues by stephanus number(s). 15. ibid., 293b. 16. ibid., 308c. 17. jaeger 1965, 41. 18. ibid., 87. 19. plato 1984, 17d. 20. ibid., 29d, 30a; also see 28c and 36b. 21. reid 2010, 55. public and private leadership and the cultivation of civic virtue 146 22. see jaeger 1965, 87. 23. see parrish 2010, 76. 24. see machiavelli 1980, 94. for a fuller discussion of machiavelli’s break with ancient philosophy, start with strauss 1978, 54–84. 25. see locke 1989, 80. 26. tocqueville 2000, 275. tocqueville shares common ground with the democratic theorists discussed above who essentially argue that democratic citizenship is achieved through democratic practice. this area of common ground is best exemplified by tocqueville’s analysis of township governments in america. tocqueville differs from these arguments in his contention that something more than democracy is needed. on townships and their effects see 57–65 and 485–489. 27. ibid., 278. 28. ibid., 279. 29. ibid., 422; also see 419. 30. ibid., 417. 31. ibid., 418. 32. tocqueville also points to the centrality of the family on this front and, in particular, the critical role played by women. he argues that religion “reigns as a sovereign over the soul of woman, and it is woman who makes mores.” to the extent that women play a fundamental role in the development of the mores that enable and sustain democracies, the locus of this responsibility is even more private as women, according to tocqueville, remain exclusively in the private sphere. see ibid., 279, 573–77. 33. ibid., 283. 34. ibid. 35. ibid., 419. 36. whicher 1971, 44. 37. porte 1966, 68. 147 barkalow 38. the pragmatic emerson is best seen in robinson 2009, 182; poirier 1988; west 1989; and jacobson 1993. 39. shklar 1998, 101. 40. richardson 1995, 29–32. 41. von cromphout 2003, 1. see also richardson 1995, 16. 42. buell 2003, 211. 43. here, i address emerson’s concerns with education (generally) and below i discuss emerson’s position on historical christianity. education and religion are two mechanisms through which virtue is cultivated in the individual. as already mentioned in the discussion of tocqueville above, the family is another institution that has historically played an important role in this process. i do not address emerson’s position on the family here as there is not adequate evidence to distill emerson’s position on the family and its role, if it has one, in the cultivation of virtue. 44. shklar 1998, 75–76. 45. cavell 2003, 150. 46. richardson 1995, 294; bickman 1994, 389; and sacks 2003, 110. 47. sacks 2003, 123. 48. emerson 1983, 38. 49. ibid., 10. 50. ibid., 260. 51. ibid., 10. 52. ibid., 261. 53. ibid., 261. 54. ibid., 47. 55. ibid., 270. 56. ibid., 54. on the active and lively scholarly debate over emerson’s preferred understanding of self-reliance and how this understanding informs his vision of the public and private leadership and the cultivation of civic virtue 148 american scholar, see kateb 2002, 4, 17, 25, 61–62; buell 2003, 243; richardson 1995, 371; and cavell 2003, 55. 57. ibid, 7. 58. ibid. 59. ibid., 80–81. 60. ibid., 82–83. 61. ibid., 83–84, 85. 62. ibid., 78, 88. 63. ibid., 88–89. 64. ibid., 7. 65. ibid. 66. ibid., 34–36. 67. ibid., 45. 68. ibid., 145–46. 69. ibid., 597, 599. 70. ibid., 162. 71. ibid. 72. jacoby 2008, 56. 73. emerson 1983, 47. 74. ibid., 306. 75. ibid., 74. 76. ibid., 306. 77. see ibid., 395. 78. ibid., 76–77. 149 barkalow 79. hanley 2002, 61. 80. emerson 1983, 63. 81. ibid. 82. ibid., 65. 83. ibid., 264, 259. 84. ibid., 65. 85. ibid., 54. 86. ibid., 55. 87. ibid., 56. 88. ibid., 1055. 89. ibid., 1055–56. 90. emerson 1983, 1065. 91. ibid., 1061. 92. ibid., 316. 93. shklar 1998, 77. 94. emerson 1983, 617. 95. ibid., 638. 96. ibid., 639. throughout this section i employed “scholar” as it is the term used by emerson. the argument made in this section shows, i hope, that this term can be used interchangeably with “statesman.” 97. see buell 2003, 282–283 and richardson 1995, 501–502. 98. emerson 1983, 259. 99. ibid., 263. 100. ibid., 262. 101. see dolan 2009, 15; sacks 2003, 51; and kateb 2002, 136. public and private leadership and the cultivation of civic virtue 150 102. emerson 1983, 943. 103. ibid., 946. 104. ibid., 946. 105. ibid., 952. 106. ibid., 943. 107. ibid., 953. 108. ibid., 958. 109. ibid., 951. 110. ibid., 957. 111. ibid., 954. 112. richardson 1995, 500. for a more extreme reading of the place of freedom in “fate” see cavell 2003, 197, 208, 212. 113. emerson 1983, 953. 114. ibid., 954–955. 115. ibid., 953. 116. hansen 2008, 422–423, 433. 117. emerson 1983, 956. 118. ibid. 119. ibid., 957. 120. ibid. 121. richardson 1995, 522. 122. the dial was a transcendentalist magazine. on emerson’s time as editor of the dial see ibid., 376–380. 123. ibid., 524–525. 151 barkalow 124. “congressional job approval.” http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/ congressional_job_approval–903.html 125. jacoby 1987, 6. 126. ibid., 7. 127. see kuklick 1977. 128. see ricci 1987; seidelman and harpham 1985; and mcclosky 1998. works cited ackerman, bruce. 1981. social justice in the liberal state. new haven: yale university press. barber, benjamin. 1988. the conquest of politics: liberal philosophy in democratic times. princeton: princeton university press. _____. 1984. strong democracy: participatory politics for a new age. berkeley: university of california press. bathory, peter d. 1978. “political leadership” a common search for the possible.” in 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emerson’s ethics. columbia: university of missouri press. weaver, david r. 1997. “leadership, locke, and the federalist.” american journal of political science 41.2: 420–446. west, cornel. 1989. the american evasion of philosophy: a genealogy of pragmatism. madison: university of wisconsin press. whicher, stephen. 1971. freedom and fate: an inner life of ralph waldo emerson. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press. microsoft word chaisson final.docx [expositions 8.1 (2014) 85–95] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 big history’s risk and challenge eric j. chaisson harvard-smithsonian center for astrophysics, harvard university some twenty years ago, a scattered few, intrepid historians began teaching courses on a wider, slightly precarious stage. they realized that much good and valid history extends far back in time, well prior to the ancient civilizations of egypt and sumer thousands of years ago, even beyond the onset of hominins millions of years ago. these “big historians” were thinking expansively, deliberately—in both space and time—identifying and linking many notable events in the deep past, from the origin of the universe to the present day on earth. it was as though, while trekking up a mountain whose summit holds true knowledge, the big historians began realizing there’s much more to history than we had been led to believe by world, global, or traditional historians who have dominated historiography for decades. pioneers like john mears of texas, david christian of australia, fred spier of holland, and cynthia brown of california strove to grasp a broader view of who we are and whence we came. they were searching for humanity’s sense of place in the larger scheme of things, attempting to understand how relatively recent happenings on earth might relate to events that occurred long before any written records. yet hardly a decade ago, those same big historians, much enthused by their new story telling agenda, discovered a different breed of scholars on the other side of the mountain. these were mostly astronomers, uncommonly eclectic researchers who had explored for much of the twentieth century much the same cosmology, relating it in articles, books, and classrooms well earlier than had the big historians. these natural scientists, who subscribe to the modern scientific method and who demand experimental or observational tests of their ideas before proceeding, often call their grand narrative “cosmic evolution,” but it’s also sometimes known as universal evolution, epic of evolution, astrobiology, or simply a s the laterenaissance term natural history. it doesn’t matter who was first or is better equipped to describe the awesome story of our origins. in the metaphor above, most scholars generally advance while hiking the mountain of knowledge; there are many ways to learn about ourselves and our world, including art, music and literature, as well as history and science. although some humanists on one side and scientists on the other draw nearer—not only as the lateral space dividing us literally lessens while approaching the peaked summit, but also as our subject matter and research methodologies increasingly overlap—neither party, indeed no one, will likely ever actually reach the peak; absolute truth is probably unattainable. rather, the very act of questing for answers to deep and abiding inquiry means that serious scholars often gain better approximations of reality. meanwhile, philosophers and theologians, both amused and concerned, wonder wearily from big history’s risk and challenge 86 mountainous ledges how the latest findings might impact their thoughts and beliefs that require no tests. will neither thinking alone nor believing alone, as many scientists like myself profess, ever make the unknown known? the grand scenario of cosmic evolution evolution—ascent with change of nature’s many varied complex systems—has become a powerful unifying concept throughout the sciences. in its broadest sense, cosmic evolution, which includes the subject of big history, comprises a holistic explanatory narrative of countless changes within and among organized systems extending over about fourteen billion years from the big bang to humankind. its working hypothesis is that all complex systems seem governed by common processes and properties, as though simple, underlying (perhaps unchanging) platonic forms pervade the cosmos. this interdisciplinary scenario has the potential to unite the triumvirate of modern learning—humanities, natural science, and social studies—thereby creating for people of all cultures at the start of the new millennium a consistent, objective, and comprehensive worldview of material reality. a handful of natural scientists have long told the cosmic-evolutionary story based on the latest experimental and observational findings; most are scholastic mavericks committed to interdisciplinary research at the frontiers of science. they tend to de-emphasize humanity in the huge sweep of this lengthy and inclusive narrative, giving substantial coverage to galaxies, stars, planets, and other-life forms that surround us on earth (and perhaps beyond). they are especially careful not to state or imply any kind of anthropocentrism, often stressing the “front” of this universal story that has little to do specifically with us yet is vitally important to the whole shebang. for the cosmic evolutionist, the unvarnished origins epic is not just about us—nor even mostly about us—although we are assuredly the current storyteller. in short, if humans did not exist, this grand narrative would still unfold, from quarks to quasars and from microbes to minds all across the universe. the arrow of time that maps this amazing scenario’s prodigious events is not likely pointing at us. by contrast, historians, being humanists largely, emphasize humanity. it’s understandable, given the root his-story, much as pope long ago declared “the proper study of mankind is man itself.” accordingly, even big historians stress human accomplishments and their cultural achievements, relating more recent times near the “back” of the story: “human history in its wider context” (christian 2005) or “an approach to history that places human history within the context of cosmic history” (spier 2011). yet they are also rightly intrigued by salient features of our milky way galaxy, our parent star the sun, our home planet earth, and myriad life forms that specifically (yet meanderingly) led to our ancestors thousands of generations ago. in short, again, if humans did not exist, both big historians and their more limited story clearly starring us would evaporate. to most big historians, big history itself is naturally anthropocentric—to them, it’s unapologetically our story. to compare and contrast this yin-yang take on anthropocentrism, imagine two movies that 87 chaisson project the main events of the same big-bang-to-humankind plot, yet at different speeds. one movie portrays fourteen billion years linearly, treating each billion years of real time in a single minute of screen time; this is the way cosmic evolutionists model the cosmos—so many galaxies over so much time, earth debuting with hardly a third of the film left, and humans appearing within only the last second of the movie. yet some viewers despair; the story is so long, our existence so brief, how can it be? alternatively, we could create for ourselves more than a cameo appearance by running time non-linearly (logarithmically) and here such a movie allows earth and life to enter earlier, indeed ensuring that humankind plays a leading role; this is the way big historians typically view the cosmos—stressing events that are better known and closer to home in both space and time. actually, these contrasting movies need not be merely imagined, for they already exist as short films that are freely accessible at compressed-resolution over the internet: http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~ejchaisson/cosmic_evolution/docs/fr_1/fr_1_intro_movies.html i helped make both of them as part of a course that i’ve taught for nearly four decades, mostly at harvard university. in the mid-1970s, astrophysicist george field kindly invited me to join him in co-creating a course on cosmic evolution that quickly became a huge and popular offering often filling the largest lecture hall on campus. students were clearly “voting with their feet” while searching for an intellectual worldview, and they were also rewarding us for taking the fine art of teaching seriously in a place where that’s not often done. nowadays, i enjoy teaching this same course (suitably revised and updated) in harvard’s extension school, which appeals to smaller audiences of mature adults in interactive seminars. the essence of this cosmic-evolutionary course has been taught at the harvard observatory for nearly a century. harlow shapley, who began teaching what he called “cosmography” in the 1920s, was one of the first to recognize the widespread evolution of animate and inanimate systems throughout the history of the universe. for several decades, he conveyed this scientific story to legions of undergraduates (in the same auditorium where i still teach it now), after which the torch was passed to my observatory predecessor, carl sagan, who famously taught much the same broad theme, initially at harvard and then at cornell, entitling his course “life in the cosmos.” he was not alone; hubert reeves in france, iosif shklovsky in russia, erich jantsch in austria, among a few other pathbreaking scientists in the 1960s and 70s, expansively described the evolutionary epic in words, if not its technical ways and means. sharp students and intelligent taxpayers alike, both seeking rational worldviews that made some sense in today’s rapidly changing, secular times, have warmed to this scientific story even more than many science colleagues, some of whom thought we were hardly more than dabbling dilettantes—or as my department chair told me pointedly in the 1980s, “you’re misallocating your time and effort.” sagan, who was a valued mentor while encouraging me to research broadly and teach enthusiastically, nonetheless warned me of the precariousness of testing the tolerance of university deadwood who value almost exclusively specialized, disciplinary work. big history’s risk and challenge 88 academic attitudes haven’t changed much during my forty-year passion for cosmic evolution. the ancient and honorable community of scholars is still composed of splitters and lumpers—the former, majority specialists and narrow-minded, who toil daily while advancing science incrementally by discovering myriad facts that bolster the bigger picture; and the latter, minority generalists and wide-eyed, who endeavor to synthesize those facts as integral parts of that bigger picture. both philosophies of approach are needed, yet there remains an imbalance; the lumpers who seek unification widely respect the splitters who regularly strengthen their many varied disciplines, yet the converse seems seldom the case, especially in research universities where specialists dominate in numbers, grantsmanship, and perceived value. when will interdisciplinarity become more than a buzzword for central administrators who in principle embrace it yet in practice almost always fail to honor it? new tales of big history the big historians, too, struggle with interdisciplinarity while their more established history colleagues watch, wait, and lightly probe what’s going on. some compatriots seem interested in the fresh genre of big history and most condone it, yet few eagerly commit. are these traditional scholars myopic, lazy, or jealous—or perhaps merely judging it a waste of time? on the contrary, there’s no time to waste. along comes, this year, big history’s first textbook, big history: between nothing and everything (2013). and what a marvelous explication it is by christian, brown, and benjamin. as befitting such experienced authors, the book is mostly well written, organized, and packaged. the writing style is inviting—not too pedantic, yet not too breezy, rather just right for innovative courses at the college/high school interface. each chapter begins with a set of learning goals (posed as questions), boldfaced key terms are found throughout, and the illustrations are colorfully rendered; a brief summary and a few more questions complete each chapter, although the book would have benefitted from more end-of-chapter pedagogical materials. overall, it’s a credible first edition, and i recommend it. having published a similar textbook some twenty-five years ago (yet emphasizing ancient times at the front of the story), and now as an experienced co-author of a widely used text in astronomy, i predict, sadly, that this new big history text will not likely be amply adopted. at the college level, as griped above, universities don’t much value silo-bursting of insular, sometimes archaic research disciplines, and traditional history departments, will be loath to teach this novel subject since they didn’t launch it; at pre-college levels, the text doesn’t make clear how it aligns with national standards. i hope that i’m proven wrong. this new textbook undeniably emphasizes humanity, thus raising again the charge of anthropocentrism. it resembles the pacing of the non-linear temporal treatment in one of the above-mentioned films, heavily weighting humans and their cultural achievements; ten chapters address 0.05% of the full big history story, while only three chapters address the story’s other 99.95% (whose coverage of galaxies, stars, and planets would have benefited from a 89 chaisson critical review by an astute physical scientist, thus avoiding dozens of minor errors). this extreme imbalance is perhaps natural for any big history account, but it needs to be fully recognized; humankind does greatly dominate their exemplum. these skilled authors rightly note that most organized systems display increases in complexity over the course of time, and that it’s probably energy flows within those systems that cause the observed rise of complexity. all complex systems—from twirling galaxies and shining stars to buzzing bees and redwood trees—do seem to function optimally within certain boundary conditions, and not surprisingly also have optimal ranges of energy flows. quantitative studies of cosmic evolution have shown that the vast majority of normalized energy flows for biological systems (including all plants and animals) fit neatly between simpler physical systems (like stars and galaxies) that utilize lesser values of energy (density) and more advanced cultural systems (society and its machines) that have higher such values. i am honored that these big historians have used some of my research regarding ranked system complexity as a main theme of their new textbook. even so, literary annoyances occasionally muddy the description of major phenomena, notably the central role played by energy in fostering changes that select and reject complex systems embedding the big history story. for example, energy optimality is a process that seems favored throughout nature—an empirical finding that i’ve championed for many years in numerous peer-reviewed publications (see: 2004, 2011a, 2011b)—not too little as to starve a system, yet not too much as to destroy it. yet here is where i differ from the big historians, for they (including these pioneering textbook authors) seem inclined to reappropriate such key optimization concepts under the wobbly guise of “goldilocks conditions” or “goldilocks circumstances.” alas, there is no need to re-label the well-principled, scientifically based concept of energy-optimization by appealing to humanistically inspired fairytales. boundary conditions that are not too hot and not too cold, or physical dynamics that are neither too fast nor too slow, etc., but are rather “just right” to create and sustain complex systems, are synonymous with optimal energy ranges (also just right) that have long been employed by natural scientists. to give but one glaring example, some astronomers a few decades ago cast earth’s habitability in terms of southey’s dreamy goldilocks fable—if earth were nearer to or farther from the sun, or if our atmosphere were thicker or thinner, or if it were abundant in this or that element, then earth might be unsuitable for life. shapley had originally called them “liquid water belts,” planetologists now term them “habitable zones,” yet some colleagues, hoping to bolster sales of books, felt the need to vulgarize. (social media are also often implicated, such as when they recently and repeatedly softened the science regarding the discovery of the elusive higgs elementary particle by tactlessly calling it the “god particle,” which in turn stems from another author’s botched attempt to title his book the goddamn particle.) goldilocks-laden descriptions of systems are hardly more than cute restatements that only certain amounts of energy are available to those systems, and that if conditions were different we might not be here. environmental conditions per se are not an underlying reason for complexification; energy flows through systems likely are; energy is the big history’s risk and challenge 90 cause, complexity the effect. if big historians are to make headway, indeed to be accepted by traditional historians let alone natural scientists, they ought to ground their research scholarship in scientifically tested ideas and empirically derived results, where possible, and focus their story on the role of humanity in the one and only universe we know. triple-distilling good, solid science will only unduly dilute the otherwise powerful narrative that big history has to offer. why must big historians reinvent soft terms that invoke myth or fantasy, yet which cheapen the hard science describing real and complex systems observed all along the arrow of time? contention in the ranks confusion and misinterpretation often arise when carefully composed journal articles go unread amid today’s harried world of hasty e-mails, biased internet blogs, and un-refereed papers posted on open-access outlets. needless anxieties also surface when scientists write for nonscience audiences (and likely conversely)—and my experiences with big historians are no different. natural scientists often cringe at many of the qualitative assertions of humanistic and social scholars, while big historians often find daunting the quantitative propensity of modern science. as noted above, a prominent commonality among all complex systems is that energy always seems involved in any transaction that causes change; the origin, maintenance, evolution, and fate of all systems are infused with energy. no unambiguous evidence exists for any event in nature occurring spontaneously, alone, or without energy exchange; energy of some type, at some level, and for some time assures the viability of all physical, biological, and cultural systems. if fusing stars had no energy flows within them, they would collapse; if plants did not photosynthesize sunlight, they would shrivel up and die; if humans stopped eating, we too would perish. energy’s central role is also widely recognized in cultural systems such as a city’s inward flow of food and resources amidst its outward flow of products and wastes; indeed, energy is vital to today’s economy, technology, and civilization. all complex systems—alive or not—are open, organized, non-equilibrated structures that acquire, store, and utilize energy. whether stars, species or societies, a unifying trend seems to link (and rank) all such ordered systems in a consistent, uniform manner. that is the true forte of cosmic evolution: demonstrating quantitatively how everything is related to everything else even within a messy, imperfect universe. yet, when big historians chronicle humanity and its cultural inventions, they sometimes depart literally from the storyline—they start telling another story. some big historians are skeptical about pursuing cosmic evolution into the realm of worldly culture, claiming that the nature of complexity for human society and its built machines differs fundamentally from that of other systems in the universe. they draw a subjective distinction between naturally evolving complexity and human-made “artificial” complexity, arguing that the former appears spontaneously (but it does not) whereas the latter is constructed by us and thus different (yet 91 chaisson artificiality, like intentionality or directionality, are irrelevant in evolution). is this merely anthropocentrism once more rearing its ugly head, hubristically placing ourselves yet again on a platform, a pedestal, or even alas at the apex of the natural world? or might this be another case, much like goethe’s devil dressed in the gown of the scholar faust who prefers to invent new ideas by creating new words, of some big historians opting to divide rather than unify? in contrast, i have always maintained that we too are a part of nature, not apart from it; schemes that regard humankind outside of nature, or worse atop nature, are misguided. if we are to articulate a unified worldview for all known complex systems, then we must objectively and consistently model each of them identically. complex systems likely differ fundamentally not in kind, but only in degree—i.e., degree of complexity manifesting ontological continuity. the critics’ main anxiety is that cultural complexity often numerically (i.e., energetically) exceeds that of humankind, and they are apparently unable or unwilling to accept that some culturally invented gadgets might be more complicated than our biological selves. however, technological devices were not built by nature without intelligent beings, so it’s not unreasonable that some cultural systems’ complexity can sometimes transcend those of biological systems, just as life forms outrank simpler physical systems. perhaps, to embellish pasteur of yesteryear, chance and necessity do favor the prepared mind. cultural evolution is a product of biological evolution, the former building upon the achievements of the latter. provenance counts; networks of bodies and brains within the human web assemble elaborate contraptions. and it is the rapid pace of cultural evolution, in addition to its ability to harness energy intensely, that makes cultural systems so remarkable. accordingly, i expect many cultural products to be typically more complex, naturally so, than the biological systems that produce them. i am also comfortable with the empirical finding that some cultural systems, notably machines, computers, and cities that help in numerous ways to improve our health, wealth, and security are likely more complex than we are; jet aircraft operating in three-dimensions and computing extremely rapidly may well be a hundred times more complex than an actively thinking mammalian organism, as their energy-derived data imply. after all, it is the intricacies of our human brains and social networks that have made machines possible, so why should any machine—including vacuum cleaners and lawn mowers—be less complex or have, by design, smaller concentrated energy flows? try gliding off a cliff with your body, mowing a lawn or vacuuming a carpet with your brain, or even beating an iphone at checkers; machines perform functions that biota cannot, often impressively so, and more rapidly too. function also counts; flying high and computing fast are qualities that humans do not possess. this is not to say that cultural systems are smarter than we are; no claim links our complexity metric with intelligence, rather only cultural systems are arguably more intricate, complicated. for big historians to declare that sentient, technological society is not analyzable in the same way as stars, galaxies, and life itself is tantamount to placing ourselves in some special category or atop some exalted pillar, raising the age-old specter of mystical big history’s risk and challenge 92 rulers and arrogant institutions. it would be as though nature adheres to a universal concordance, creating all known systems in a single, unified, evolutionary way—but only until the big history story reaches us, at which time society and our cultural inventions are alleged to be different, or artificial, or privileged. i reject such teleology, which has so often been detrimental to humankind during much of recorded history. my stance on cosmic evolution very much includes culture and civilization among all natural systems, indeed regards human society and our remarkable technology “on the same page” alongside every type of complex system known in the universe. why, in our copernican-principled day and age, are big historians, much as some biologists and many anthropologists, prone to “split” (hence divide) efforts to “lump” (hence unify) all that we observe in nature, thereby requiring an assorted array of “just-so” stories, much like those of kipling and his fanciful descriptions for each and every animal in the forest uniquely? i urge caution when professing, egocentrically or for reasons of personal belief, that the complexity of social systems differs in kind from that of any other organized system. there is no objective evidence for humankind’s specialness and no need to assert it subjectively. a challenge and a risk perhaps the biggest challenge for big historians is that much of their story is decipherable only by scientific means. virtually all knowledge of what preceded written records (well more than 99.99% of the big history chronicle) derives from the modern scientific method, including everything known about cosmos, earth, and life. to their credit, many big historians aspire to include the latest scientific findings within their developing narrative—“using the best available empirical evidence and scholarly methods,” according to the mission statement of the fledgling international big history association (ibhanet.org)—yet so many of them falter when computing, interpreting, or merely using numerical quantities. admittedly, some of the technical afflictions of big historians stem from poor presentations by scientists (including perhaps some of my own arduous journal papers). an example is a relatively recent book on energy and society that is widely referenced by big historians, yet which has caused untold confusion by calling the very same energy-flow term noted above by at least six different names with six different units—the kind of incoherent scientific writing that often serves to “keep the beginners out” by creating frustration among non-scientists seriously trying to embrace science and technology in the course of their scholarly research. we scientists need to communicate better our subject matter with those not trained in it, yet our present science culture fails to honor such talents. it does seem these days that everyone wants to be a scientist. i recently introduced an undergrad to a colleague as one who studies economics, but she scolded me by exclaiming that her discipline is “economic science.” a dean, who is a political scientist, blurted out defensively in my office last month, “i’m a scientist too, you know.” behavioral science, 93 chaisson sports science, library science, exercise science, psychological science, creation science; even guys who pick up trash by the roadside in my hometown, once called garbage collectors and then sanitary engineers, are now officially entitled sanitary scientists. i’ve always been puzzled why social scholars are so insecure about their subject being called, as it once was, social studies, demanding instead that it be rebranded as social science when they know full well that society is so complex as to make virtually impossible controlled experiments like those done by natural scientists. social scholars should be proud of their research, without trying to repackage it as science; given the plethora of grave issues facing humanity today, social studies might be more relevant for our survival than the natural sciences. in all fairness, i—an experimental physicist by training and empirical materialist by philosophical bent—also find troubling much of what passes for frontier physics today— string theory, superstrings, supersymmetry, multiple universes, eleven dimensions, none of which has even a shred of evidence to support it. a unified understanding of nature need not postulate metaphysical schemes in abstract cosmology or untestable ideas in theoretical physics. a coherent, phenomenological explication of what is actually observed in our singular, four-dimensional universe populated mainly with galaxies, stars, planets, and life comprises a useful advance in comprehending, and to some extent unifying, the extended, diverse world around us. besides, would any intelligent person actually be willing to cross a bridge or fly in an aircraft built on the untested ideas of 11-dimensional string theory? the risk to big history is that its followers, unable to distinguish between real science and pseudo-science, are occasionally fooled by the latter—if only because junk science is often easier to grasp, slickly presented, or matches personal persuasions. today’s society is laden with charlatans propagating idiosyncratic beliefs, fringe elements, and wacky ideas that have absolutely no basis in science or even in logic and rationality. in the interest of inclusiveness (a good goal), big historians seem inclined to embrace all sorts of alternative worldviews that often amount to hardly more than subjective fluff run amuck (a bad outcome). the only big history meeting that i’ve attended to date, in moscow two years ago, was abundant in such new age claptrap, with my own paper on energy-rich technological society surrounded by talks on global spirituality, evangelical religious cures, life extension techniques, and synthetic body-vessels for the mind (causing another scientist, also scheduled for the same session, to withdraw when he realized what was happening). tension does persist among big historians and natural scientists, not from interpreting the big-bang-tohumankind story per se (for there’s much agreement among major narrators), rather from its basic facts and figures clashing with perceived meanings and intentions—the former i can handle, the latter i cannot. why do so many big history advocates associate natural events with “purpose,” “progress,” “magic,” and “meaning,” all of which slippery words are anathema to most physicists who feel they do not aid objective understanding of our material universe? it’s always dangerous when big historians jet about the country proclaiming that their new-found subject grants them the meaning of life—only to be struck mute when asked to articulate that meaning. perhaps the hype is mere overt enthusiasm, as with scientists watson and crick, big history’s risk and challenge 94 who, having discovered the structure of dna more than a half-century ago in the real cambridge, ran straightaway to the local pub to buy a round of drinks—and to announce they had found life’s meaning; yet, when they couldn’t explain it, they consoled themselves (and everyone else present) by buying another round. let’s hope, paraphrasing one of the huxleys, that the slaying of a beautiful story by an exaggerated claim does not become big history’s greatest tragedy. will big history rise to the challenge of genuinely embracing modern science’s central dogma, thereby accepting the need to test ideas while soundly rejecting those that go untested—or will big history fall prey to the risk of alienating the natural sciences that undergird its very own essence, all the while becoming the latest entry in a long line of learned ponderers struggling up the mountain to fathom who we are and whence we came? which will big history become when it grows up: a bright and shining light in the otherwise dark firmament of mysticism, or another mythical contributor to that very same dim and dreaded darkness? the promise of big history big history is not a recounting of imagined fables, magical powers, or belief-based accounts of our origin and evolution. in demonstrable contrast, this ambitious enterprise nobly aims to chronicle natural history writ large, from big bang to humankind, without assuaging potentially the grandest of all narratives with equivocal terms and fictitious notions that sow doubt and misconception, yet skirt serious understanding of how material systems emerge, mature, and terminate. if big historians are to base their awe-inspiring, interdisciplinary story on the empirical evidence of modern science, then they ought to accept some objective, quantitative reasoning without recourse to pseudo-scientific nonsense and without pandering to those clinging to antiquated subjectivity; linguistic distortions intended to soften hard science and renewed calls to place humankind on a culminating pedestal will likely lead to qualitative confusion and needless controversy—ultimately to the detriment of what is perhaps the greatest story ever (to be) told. i for one, and despite the slightly intemperate tone of this essay, surely do hope that big history spearheads a novel methodology that goes well beyond the lofty words of poetry and superficiality of metaphor, thus becoming a profound interdiscipline that genuinely transcends academic barriers and provides an exciting new way to view ourselves and our world in our richly endowed universe. works cited chaisson, eric. 2004. “complexity: an energetics agenda. energy as a motor of evolution.” complexity 9.3: 14–21. 95 chaisson –––. 2011a “energy rate density as a complexity metric and evolutionary driver.” complexity 16.3: 27–40. –––. 2011b. “energy rate density. ii. probing further a new complexity metric.” complexity 17.1:44–63. christian, david. 2005. maps of time: an introduction to big history. berkeley: university of california press. christian, david, cynthia stokes brown, and craig benjamin. 2013. big history: between nothing and everything. princeton: mcgraw-hill. spier, fred. 2011. big history and the future of humanity. chichester, west sussex, uk: wiley-blackwell. [expositions 5.2 (2011) 94-102] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 caring, journalism, and the power of particularism maurice hamington metropolitan state college of denver why do some people donate blood while most eligible individuals do not? why do many selfidentified environmentalists eat meat? why do numerous people who are concerned with social justice ignore oppressive practices affecting women? these questions have both ethical and psychological dimensions. ethics, as it is traditionally understood in terms of rules, rights, and consequences, emphasizes rationality but often reason is not enough to compel moral action. one can make compelling rational arguments with empirical evidence to support donating blood, becoming vegan, and advocating education and aid to assist girls and women in developing nations. yet, cognitive assent is insufficient to change the behavior of many people. until individuals make a personal, affective connection – until people care – creating change and taking moral action are a challenging struggle. one way to view half the sky: turning oppression into opportunity for women worldwide is as a case study for eliciting care within the complexities of contemporary international society. there is a fascinating contradiction of social forces at work today. on a large scale or macro level, evidence suggests that human society is becoming more cooperative, empathetic, and understanding as a matter of survival and communal flourishing. a spate of books has documented this phenomenon. in empathetic civilization, jeremy rifkin views empathy as the basis of civilization: “more complex social structures, then, promote greater selfhood, greater exposure to diverse others, and a greater likelihood of extended empathy” (rifkin 2009, 42). in the age of empathy: nature’s lessons for a kinder society, frans de waal suggests that modern studies of primates reveal an outstanding capacity for cooperation and compassion, not just competition as often portrayed in the ruthless “survival of the fitness” characterizations of nature. de waal describes how, “many animals survive through cooperation, so there is a long evolutionary history to compromise, peaceful coexistence, and caring for others. empathy is part of the survival package, and human society depends on it as much as many other animal societies do” (de waal 2009). despite the historic tide of human cooperation and empathy, there appear to be pockets of backlash against empathy sometimes entangled in efforts to maintain systems of power and at other times tied to complacency and apathy. for example, in the united states, the growing disparity between the wealthy and the poor/working class is in part held in place by rhetoric antithetical to empathizing with those who need social services and thus painting taxes or transfer payments as a social evil even though they fund those services. the anti-caring rhetoric is so strong that president barack obama was criticized for suggesting that a supreme court justice nominee should exhibit empathy (bazelon 2011). in an ironic twist, empathy was 95 hamington characterized as anathema to the ability to carry out justice. of course, international conflict and violence also demonstrate failure to care. amidst the contradictory social forces, nicholas kristof and sheryl wudunn offer a path to caring for women and girls who live in distant lands and cultures. half the sky presents story after story regarding the plight of women facing oppressive practices. these stories allow the reader to enter an imaginative relationship with the girls and women described that is only possible when the abstract is moved to the concrete. kristof and wudunn also offer stories of successful interventions on behalf of women that provide concrete examples and means for the reader to enact care. caring and knowing the particulars care ethics represents a revolution in moral philosophy that began in the 1980s and continues today. it was born out of women’s experience of care being undervalued but has evolved into a robust field of moral theorizing and practice. 1 nel noddings describes that, unlike traditional normative ethics, “in care ethics, our obligation rarely ends with a justified decision or act. life goes on after the decision, and we must tend to the relations we have established” (noddings 2010, 82). like any revolution, there are many critics and resisters of this new way of thinking about ethics. nevertheless, care theorists continue to challenge presumptions that morality can be reduced to an abstract formulation of rules, rights, or formula of consequences. care ethics reframes morality around relationships. accordingly, care represents both action (sometimes referred to as labor) and a disposition. imagination and emotion coalesce to make an empathetic and caring response possible. to fuel imagination and the resultant empathy care integrates epistemology and ethics as knowledge is indispensible to the caring relationship. the more one knows, the more potential for care is present, and, in turn, caring activity creates new knowledge – that is the potentially powerful role for a book like half the sky. one under-thematized aspect of care ethics is its moral particularism: a family of beliefs that variously argue moral principles may represent helpful ethical guidelines but are too general and absolute to be applied universally. traditionally, philosophy has favored a quest for moral universalism, which is the meta-ethical position that ethics must be applied similarly despite an individual’s specific context. philosopher susan hekman characterizes care ethics as part of a modern intellectual “sea change” that is moving away from absolutism and universalism toward particularism and concreteness (hekman 1995, 38). the moral particularist contends that ethics requires the hard work of exploring each situation and understanding the context rather than applying a universal law as definitive judgment. the notion of particularism is a controversial one among traditional philosophers 2 largely because of the dangers of relativism, but there is no question that in understanding the particulars of another person’s situation a connection is made that makes empathy and action more likely (hamington 2004). kristof and wudunn compel readers to care. half the sky takes readers around the world to lands and societies very different than our own. the book does not ignore the significant cultural caring, journalism and the power of particularism 96 differences between people but it finds in the stories of women’s lives themes that resonate with us – desires for health, education, meaningful work, freedom from attack. these are aspirations that we can understand and identify with as fellow human beings. the stories presented are about people who are made real to us. in a sense, the argument of the book is both rational and visceral. take the story of woineshet zebene, an ethopian girl. her plight is recounted in chapter four of half the sky. woineshet merely wanted to stay in school but was the victim of a common practice of kidnapping and rape of young women who might spurn suitors. her story, accompanied by a photograph of her and her father, compel readers – readers who likely can make their own decisions about when to marry and whether to go to school – to sympathize about the struggles of woineshet. in half the sky, oppression is given a name and a face and other narrative particulars that foster an empathetic connection. woineshet’s is just one of many women’s stories brought to life in the book. woineshet is just one person we come to care about. journalism and moral progress one of the challenges for care ethics is the mechanism for caring for distant and unfamiliar others. caring for close and intimate others is much easier. in fact, noddings refers to the care for intimate others as “natural” caring because the actions appear to be instinctive and prereflective. noddings describes care for less-familiar others that requires thought as “ethical caring” (noddings 2010, 16–18). there is little moral praise for natural caring which is something of a social standard. when natural care does not occur, as when a parent fails to care for a child, there are social sanctions applied (unfortunately, frequently with significant gender differences). however, ethical caring is often viewed as morally praiseworthy: for example, when someone goes out of their way to help someone else. of course, natural caring and ethical caring are fuzzy categories that exist on a continuum of caring activity that engage varying levels of effort, thought, and personal risk. the health and well being of global society is in part predicated on pushing or extending the standards of care from natural caring toward ethical caring. building a caring society in part means making more of ethical caring like natural caring – a common and familiar practice. physical distance is not the only challenge to caring. we are living in an era of immense global complexity that includes people living with great prosperity while others face marginalization and oppression. one of the advantages of having wealth is the ability to insulate oneself from the plight of others. modernity’s great advances have not mitigated the need for caring. modern journalism, including all the technology it entails, can be an important vehicle for ethical caring in a complex and disparate world. i am including half the sky as a work of journalism because the authors are journalists and the book is a work of nonfiction that brings attention to contemporary issues. a skilled writer can take the reader to somalia, china, or el salvador and into relationship with individuals who subsequently become real to us and thus rise to our attention over the din of seven billion earth inhabitants. as such, journalism can provide 97 hamington the imaginative link to caring. however, with that reporting comes tremendous moral responsibility. in an era of competitive, commercialized news, journalistic integrity is under great scrutiny. for journalism to be a vehicle of ethical caring, attention to inclusion and voice is crucial. just like the challenges inherent in an accurate ethnography, the choice of whose story to tell, what questions to ask, and what to include in the written piece can have a great deal of influence over the character of the final message. although particularism has the potential to create connection, empathy, and lay the groundwork for action, the dangers of particularism include misrepresenting context and voice. despite the challenges, half the sky exemplifies the potential of the journalist’s spotlight to foster connection and care. empathy is one thing. action is another. it is difficult to imagine reading the stories of srey rath, the cambodian teenager who was forced into sexual slavery, or mahabouba muhammad, an ethiopian woman who was sold to a man sixty years of age as a second wife and was subsequently beaten, raped and suffered from a fistula, and not feel some empathy. can that empathy turn to action? empathy is not enough thus far i have focused on the potential for empathetic care created by half the sky. the particular and contextual knowledge of women and girls provides the imaginative foundation for empathy. i must know the other to make the connection and have a visceral sense of understanding. however, empathy is only part of the equation for care ethics. caring is a disposition and an action. to claim empathy without taking action is morally hollow. caring action is dependent on the knowledge that leads to empathy but empathy is not a sufficient cause of action. once again, traditional ethical systems are not adequate to determine or explain behavior. david hume realized back in the mid-eighteenth century that morality was motivated by emotion but rational approaches to ethics dominated the western tradition (hume 1975). humans must be moved to action – a complex mechanism that may begin with empathy but includes a number of psychological factors including the will and ability to make a difference. carers must be motivated to act – they must have the will to care. 3 for example, a common response to reading half the sky might be deep concern and pangs of empathy accompanied by a feeling of powerlessness or lack of confidence that the reader can do anything about the tragic circumstances described. oppression of women and girls in india, congo, and cambodia seems so far away and perhaps intractable given traditions and systems of power that reinforce it. kristof and wudunn provide pathways to make caring possible. first, the authors feature numerous individuals who have acted in ways to make a difference on behalf of oppressed women. one activist described is jordana confino who as a high school student became a champion of girls learn international, an organization that pairs classes in the united states with classes in countries where girls’ education is poor such as in afghanistan, colombia, costa rica, el salvador, india, kenya, pakistan, uganda, and vietnam. in the program, cross-cultural caring, journalism and the power of particularism 98 information is exchanged while the students in the united states raise money to upgrade the education in the partner class (kristof and wudunn 2009, 230–232). kristof and wudunn offer a model of action and activism that feeds the imagination of the reader regarding the possibility of his/her own caring potential. the same mechanism that works to assist the reader empathize with the girls and women in oppressive regimes also helps the reader empathize with those who are difference-makers. in other words, if a high school student can make such a positive change, why can’t i? confino is one of many activists profiled in half the sky. such profiles do not guarantee action on the part of the reader, but they facilitate the imaginative leap toward action. half the sky also gives direct channels for caring action. the final chapter is titled, “what you can do” and the very final section delineates “four steps you can take in the next ten minutes.” the appendix includes three pages of organization websites that assist women and girls internationally. kristof and wudunn offer a holistic approach to caring. the lives and experiences of women oppressed by violence, human trafficking, female genital mutilation, and misogynistic limitations are narratively recounted to develop an empathetic connection. models of average people taking caring actions that traverse international boundaries are offered and existing channels for more information and action are presented. the reader is left with the understanding that helping women is necessary and possible. the emphasis of the solutions given in half the sky is on direct actions, which tend to be approaches that are less political in nature. this may have been an intentional approach on the part of the authors, but political scientist daniel engster reminds us not to ignore larger systemic policy decisions. he warns, “caring for distant others involves more than just providing individuals with direct aid and infrastructure support; it also entails critically assessing national policies and international law in order to determine whether they hinder the ability of distant peoples to develop responsive governments and care for themselves” (engster 2007, 190). half the sky challenges us to act on behalf of women in distress all over the world but in a representative democracy, action may take the form of electing officials who enact policies that support women. of course, direct action and political action need not be mutually exclusive. just because one works to make changes in the areas and using the resources that one controls does not mean that they cannot also be politically engaged in efforts to make systemic change. furthermore, efforts to make change individually and directly can fuel the motivation and evidence for systemic transformation. 4 feminism: an ongoing need one of the striking implications of half the sky is the ongoing need for feminist analysis and feminist activism. the previous discussion of care theory is a direct result of feminist theory, but feminist analysis also addresses systems of power and privilege. broadly construed, feminism is an effort to empower women, which employs the consciousness that gender matters in our society. although kristof and wudunn attend to financial, social, and certain cultural considerations, masculinity is not discussed. masculinity and femininity seem like intractable 99 hamington constructs, but we know that they are not because they vary so much from time and place. although it is fashionable to periodically declare the death or obsolescence of feminism, kristof and wudunn offer a compelling demonstration that women’s empowerment is far from accomplished. this is not a book about isolated atrocities, but rather a compendium of modern day systemic gender violence. each of the stories offered has a social and cultural context that supports brutality against girls and women. of course, men are the victims of violence as well, and that experience should not be diminished in significance, but the widespread and systematic violence perpetrated against women is overwhelming. kristof and wudunn do the essential work of bringing a spotlight to violence against women, but a sustained feminist analysis is absent. in particular, kristof and wudunn, who are far from claiming a feminist approach, offer what might be labeled a “liberal feminist” analysis: describing violations of individual liberty and bodily integrity in service of strengthening human rights. although there is merit to naming injustice, the full picture of oppression must include a radical feminist analysis of institutional forces at work. systems of patriarchy where men dominate women are hierarchies of power and privilege that are socially constructed and thus must be maintained by a social vehicle such as economics, religion, social convention, or violence. as chandra mohanty describes, “sexism, racism, misogyny, and heterosexism underlie and fuel social and political institutions of rule and thus often lead to hatred of women and (supposedly justified) violence against women” (mohanty 2003, 3). empowering women cannot be entirely divorced from challenging oppressive forms of masculinity in a given context. this is particularly important for lasting change as empowering women can lead to new strategies of oppression if men are not provided with means for change. without a robust feminist analysis addressing the social and political systems at work, the complete picture of women’s oppression is absent from half the sky. another way that half the sky makes the case for feminist analysis is in the picture of international violence against women painted by the text. contemporary feminist scholarship – particularly because of its own inconsistent past – is particularly sensitive to issues of ethnocentrism and racism. current emphases on the intersectionality of identity and global feminism are examples of feminist theorists responding to the complexities of the category “woman.” one might read half the sky as a text that reinforces the notion that human trafficking and severe violence against women are tragedies of “other” countries and not issues for north american or white women. that is of course not the case. 5 a global feminist analysis with sensitivity to local context might have given half the sky a richer analysis of the lives of international women. this might have been achieved through consultation with local activists and scholars. inclusion of representative examples of women struggling with violence and oppression in north america and europe might have mitigated the sense of “othering” violence in developing nations. the feminist critique offered here of half the sky is intended to be proportional. the reader of any text has intellectual responsibilities as do the authors. the reader’s intellectual responsibilities include ongoing pursuit of knowledge. no text has all the answers. half the sky is a well written entre into the issues and that may be its most compelling and useful role. caring, journalism and the power of particularism 100 hopefully, readers will continue to seek answers and ask questions that will lead to deeper analyses of the systemic forces of violence and oppression in the lives of women. conclusion: educating for a cosmopolitan world perhaps one of the most important lessons of half the sky is about what it means to be ethical in the twenty-first century. given the interconnected nature of our world society, contemporary ethics cannot ignore epistemology: knowledge is intimately tied to modern morality. earlier i discussed how knowledge was a necessary (but not a sufficient) condition of caring. however, to be regarded as a caring citizen of the world entails making the effort to learn about others, including international others. a number of factors conspire to keep us from knowing about international crises of violence, including the sheer amount of information available to us through modern technology, busy lives that lack habits of thinking about distant problems, and media that focus on domestic issues (and raise entertainment news to a level of significance). to say that we don’t know about the violence, poverty, and health issues being suffered by others is hardly morally convincing in a world where so much information is available at our fingertips. yet, data suggests that us citizens are woefully lacking in awareness of international affairs. 6 ignorance cannot exonerate us from our role of caring world citizens. part of our moral responsibility as caring citizens of the world is to seek out information about the plights of others. if morality is relational as care ethics proposes, then we cannot simply be passive and wait to form relations, we need seek out a relational understanding with unfamiliar others. in other words, global citizenry in a cosmopolitan world requires sympathetic, connected knowledge of others where we endeavor to form deep and disruptive knowledge of others. such knowledge can be described as “disruptive” in the sense that it jars us from the routines and patterns of our day to draw attention and emotive reactions. 7 however, disruption is not just a power of certain knowledge. it also requires a certain openness to being disrupted and becoming engaged. john dewey favored the term “inquiry” over epistemology, which connotes an active sense of knowledge development. applying dewey’s term to the current context, ongoing social and international inquiry is part of what it means to be a caring human today. caring in a cosmopolitan world requires both taking the time and effort to learning and understanding about others but also the development of empathetic skills or what has been described as emotional intelligence. such inquiry cannot be the responsibility of the curriculum of educational institutions alone. given the dynamics of international affairs, engaging in ongoing awareness and lifelong learning is crucial to have the epistemic basis for caring. reading a single book, like half the sky, clearly does not supply sufficient global knowledge, but it’s a start. 101 hamington notes 1. care ethics has gained acceptance and is being further explored both theoretically (carol gilligan, joining the resistance [new york: polity, 2011]; virginia held, the ethics of care: personal, political, and global [new york: oxford, 2006]; nel noddings, the maternal factor: two paths to morality [berkeley: university of california press, 2010]; michael slote, the ethics of care and empathy [new york: routledge, 2007]) and as applied ethics in areas as diverse as nursing (susan s. phillips, and patricia benner, the crisis of care: affirming and resorting caring practices in the helping professions [washington d.c.: georgetown university press, 1994]); political science (daniel engster, the heart of justice: care ethics and political theory [new york: oxford, 2007]), business (maurice hamington and maureen sander-staudt, eds., applying care ethics to business [dordrecht: spring, 2011]), social theory (maurice hamington and dorothy c. miller, eds., socializing care: feminist ethics and public issues [lanham, md.: rowman and littlefield, 2006]), and animal ethics (josephine donovan and carol j. adams, eds., the feminist care tradition in animal rights [new york: columbia university press, 2007]). 2. see, for example, mark norris lance, matjaž potrč, and vojko strahovnik, eds., challenging moral particularism (new york: routledge, 2008). 3. for an exploration of the mechanisms involved in moving from empathy to action, see maurice hamington, “the will to care: performance, expectation, and imagination,” hypatia 25:3 (summer 2010): 675-695. 4. the philosophy of nobel prize-winning activist and settlement movement pioneer jane addams is an excellent example of local, individual efforts informing larger systemic change. addams would often use her experiences on the streets of her poverty-stricken immigrant neighborhood to fuel her efforts to make policy changes at the state, national, and international levels. 5. according to the us department of education, “contrary to a common assumption, human trafficking is not just a problem in other countries. cases of human trafficking have been reported in all 50 states, washington d.c., and some u.s. territories. victims of human trafficking can be children or adults, u.s. citizens or foreign nationals, male or female.” “human trafficking of children in the united states: a fact sheet for schools,” http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/osdfs/factsheet.pdf. 6. a 2007 report by the pew research center concludes, “the coaxial and digital revolutions and attendant changes in news audience behaviors have had little impact on how much americans know about national and international affairs.” andrew kohut, “what americans know, 1989–2007,” http://people-press.org/files/legacy-pdf/319.pdf. http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/osdfs/factsheet.pdf http://people-press.org/files/legacy-pdf/319.pdf caring, journalism and the power of particularism 102 7. maurice hamington, “hull house: urban epistemology and social action,” southwest philosophy review 25:2 (july 2009). works cited bazelon, emily. 2011. “mysterious justice.” new york times magazine, 20 march. de waal, frans. 2009. “bodies in sync: contagious laughter, yawns, and moods offer insight into empathy’s origins,” natural history, september, http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/features/251555/sept. (adapted from the age of empathy: nature’s lessons for a kinder society [new york: crown, 2009].) engster, daniel. 2007. the heart of justice: care ethics and political theory. new york: oxford university press. hamington, maurice. 2004. embodied care: jane addams, maurice merleau-ponty, and feminist ethics. new york: routledge. hekman, susan. 1995. moral voices, moral selves: carol gilligan and feminist moral theory. university park: pennsylvania state university press. hume, david. 1975. enquiries concerning human understanding and concerning the principles of morals. oxford: clarendon press, 1975. kristof, nicholas d. and sheryl wudunn. 2009. half the sky: turning oppression into opportunity for women worldwide. new york: alfred a. knopf. mohanty, chandra talpade. 2003. feminism with borders: decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity. durham, nc: duke university press. noddings, nel. 2010. the maternal factor: two paths to morality. berkeley: university of california press. rifkin, jeremy. 2009. the empathetic civilization: the race to global consciousness in a world in crisis. new york: penguin. http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/features/251555/sept the impetus for the contradictory term, “homeless chic,” initially emerged on the scene in the spring of 2000, when designer jo [expositions 5.1 (2011) 41-43] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 introduction to the academic roundtable “homeless chic:” the cultural contradictions of representations of the homeless and of homelessness jennifer joyce kissko center for liberal education and the center for peace and justice education villanova university the contradictory term “homeless chic” was initially employed in the spring of 2000, when designer john galliano introduced his “boho-meets-hobo chic” spring-summer haute couture collection for the house of dior in paris. dior models wore newspapers, straightjackets, tin cups, and whiskey bottles. the denigration of homelessness implied by these images caused quite a stir, especially from homeless advocates. by placing abject images of extreme poverty within the context of the privileged world of couture, galliano‟s “art” essentially reinforced an already present separation between rich and poor, othering “them” and comically rendering those experiencing homelessness as almost sub-human and limited in a fixed identity. although he revealed his source of inspiration to be les clochards (homeless people) he passed during his daily runs, and maintained that his intentions were to “expose the pure decadence of the couture by „turning it inside out,‟” his designs shocked the public. 1 met with much negativity from critics who claimed how preposterous it was for him to be exploiting the misfortunes of others in an effort of aesthetics, galliano publicly apologized, quietly retreated, and has since worked to repair the damage done to his reputation by rebounding with many admired collections since. 2 nevertheless, galliano‟s controversial “homeless chic” could not be quickly or easily forgotten when in 2001, hollywood presented the hit comedy zoolander, starring ben stiller as an aspiring male model, as a direct parody of galliano‟s disastrous spring line. the film calls its version derelicte – explained in the movie as “a fashion, a way of life inspired by the very homeless, the vagrants, the crack whores that make this wonderful city [nyc] so unique.” 3 the film‟s satirical attempt to gussy up the word “derelict” and its connotations into a form of upscale chic seemed to represent the commonly held view by the public that galliano‟s vision did not coincide with the sense of cultural sympathy and human identification with the homeless present in the 1980s nor in the beginnings of the new millennium. yet despite a general reaction of shock and repulsion toward the oddity and absurdity of even the mere term “homeless chic,” there still lingered in the media a kind of fascination with such a contradictory and slippery concept. the fashion style first presented by galliano continued to make headlines when tabloids and celebrity magazines like people began dropping the “bohemian” tag and began identifying the fashion choices of hollywood celebrities as “homeless chic.” between 2004 and 2009, “homeless chic” lost its mostly negative connotations and began garnering more positive attention, for a style that rejects the overt display of wealth. 42 kissko in popular culture over the past several years, “homeless chic” has surfaced widely – from television shows and magazine spreads, to even the toy industry. for example, in the february 27, 2008, episode of tyra banks‟ america’s next top model girls experiencing homelessness were invited to the set and given the opportunity to try on couture clothing while the show‟s models, apparently choosing not to interact with their guests, attempted to channel what it might be like to live on the streets as they posed as homeless. in september 2009, the american high fashion magazine w displayed a “paper bag princess” line designed by alex white, modeled by sasha pirorarova, and shot by craig mcdean, in which a “dark, urban portfolio of street style me[t] high fashion.” 4 the photographs depict pirorarova wearing different ensembles of pieces of paper shopping bags from prada and dior, mainly lying down in various urban street settings, and the series was met with rave reviews about the creation of such “great art.” that same year, mattel produced a new limited edition addition to their american girl doll collection, “the wildly successful, extremely expensive brand of faux children that are sold out of a four-story town house in the heart of fifth avenue.” 5 doll gwen thompson‟s back-story included a narrative about her father walking out on the family and gwen living in her car with her mother, all in the name of awareness. yet the doll sold for ninety-five dollars with none of the proceeds directly earmarked for homeless aid. after a much-contested and negative reaction to the product, american girl released a response to the criticisms that cited its fundraising and “ongoing partnership” in the last several years with national non-profit homeless housing group homeaid in “its mission to support the temporarily homeless.” 6 it also removed from its website any mention of homelessness in conjunction with gwen, who is currently sold out. 7 this glaringly contradictory term “homeless chic” offers occasion for critical thinking about the intersections of class, identity, representation, citizenship, and power, and the contributors to this academic roundtable approach the topic from a variety of perspectives. paula mathieu, in “public rhetorics and homeless chic,” offers ways to think about “homeless chic” through the purview of public rhetoric. she asks, and offers tentative, speculative answers, to some particularly productive questions like: “what kinds of publics are being hailed into being under the banner of “homeless chic”? who benefits and who gets hurt from these depictions? and, does our academic attention to this matter enlighten or merely fuel this spectacle?” amanda grzyb examines programs that encourage participants to pretend to be poor as a way of purportedly gaining knowledge of the experience itself. she argues in her contribution, “„homeless chic‟ as domestic poverty tourism: street retreats, urban plunges, and north american class boundaries,” that although perhaps well-intentioned, efforts of advocacy and awareness like alternative spring break experiences of living as homeless and street yoga retreats actually reinforce already-existing class boundaries. in “fashion/ing statements: reading homeless bodies in contemporary fiction,” dorothea löbbermann critiques representations of homeless bodies in literature – how they are described, how they are dressed, and what the relationship between the bodies and their clothes signify. the next contribution is a visual answer to the paradoxes of “homeless chic” that was eventually published in stütze, one of berlin‟s homeless street newspapers, in 2003. three students of berlin university of the arts – introduction to the academic roundtable 43 victoria kirjuchina, caroline scotto and dominik schumacher – reenacted two vogue fashion editorials with actors of a homeless theater group, die ratten 07. finally, my own contribution, “homeless chic in the classroom” examines what happens when these issues of representation, cultural paradox, and rhetorical publics in relation to homelessness become classroom discourse. in the piece, i share some reflections on teaching a course based on the concept of “homeless chic”, and the conclusions drawn by university students about the contradictory and conflicted representations of homelessness present in cultural artifacts such as contemporary literature and film. it is our hope that this academic roundtable on “homeless chic” gives a current and varied perspective on the cultural contradictions of the representations of homelessness present in our world today. notes 1. polyvore, “john galliano,” feb. 15, 2010, http://www.polyvore.com/john_galliano/set? id=5950663. 2. elle.com, “from the sublime to the absurd: john galliano,” january 2001, http://archives.cnn.com/2000/style/elle/05/02/. 3. zoolander. dir. ben stiller. paramount, 2002. 4. “sasha: paper bag princess,” img models blog, august 20, 2009, http://imgmodelsblog.wordpress.com/2009/08/20/sasha-paper-bag-princess/. 5. andrea peyser, “„homeless‟ doll costs $95 (hairstyling extra),” new york post sept. 24, 2009, http://www.nypost.com/f/print/news/national/item_4ic0hc7lacpfo8hqbczsqm. 6. “„homeless‟ american girl doll costs $95,” the consumerist sept. 29, 2009, http://consumerist.com/2009/09/homeless-american-girl-doll-costs-95.html. 7. american girl, “gwen doll and paperback book,” 2010, http://store.americangirl.com/agshop/html/productpage.jsf/itemid/142095/itemtype/toy/webte mplateid/3/uniqueid/609/salegroupid/1123. http://www.polyvore.com/john_galliano/set?%20id=5950663 http://www.polyvore.com/john_galliano/set?%20id=5950663 http://archives.cnn.com/2000/style/elle/05/02/ http://imgmodelsblog.wordpress.com/2009/08/20/sasha-paper-bag-princess/ http://www.nypost.com/f/print/news/national/item_4ic0hc7lacpfo8hqbczsqm http://consumerist.com/2009/09/homeless-american-girl-doll-costs-95.html http://store.americangirl.com/agshop/html/productpage.jsf/itemid/142095/itemtype/toy/webtemplateid/3/uniqueid/609/salegroupid/1123 http://store.americangirl.com/agshop/html/productpage.jsf/itemid/142095/itemtype/toy/webtemplateid/3/uniqueid/609/salegroupid/1123 microsoft word 5 cusimano love 12.1.docx [expositions 12.1 (2018) 60–71] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376     just peace and just war maryann cusimano love catholic university of america just war or just peace? i disagree with this zero-sum premise. in this article, i will explain: (1) why just war tradition (jwt) is insufficient to the task of our time, namely, building peace; (2) what the principles of just peace are, and why just peace is the primary position on issues of conflict and peace; (3) the relationship of just peace with jwt, including the thomistic process that validates just peace; and (4) why jwt, particularly the jus in bello criteria, is still necessary as a minority position in limiting violence.1 empirically, war has declined and peace is expanding. jwt tells us how to limit violence and that force should be a last resort, but it tells us nothing about first resorts, or, in other words, about how to build sustainable peace. this is the province of the just peace approach, the church’s always applicable, majority, default position on issues of war and peace. if jwt is insufficient to address questions of how to prevent war and build peace, why not simply abandon jwt? in brief, jwt is not sufficient, but it is still necessary in limiting remaining wars. jwt, particularly the in bello criteria, has been extensively institutionalized in international laws, from arms control agreements to the genocide convention. these gains should be retained and built upon, not rescinded. yet the critics of jwt are correct that the balance must be recalibrated. an underemphasis on just peace tradition and an overemphasis on jwt must be corrected in order to further the ancient imperative to build peace. what is just peace? i argue that just peace tradition is, and has been, the church's primary position on issues of conflict and peace. just peace tradition is the predating, often overlooked, connective tissue between nonviolence and jwt. just peace principles always apply, in all time periods and to all phases of the conflict cycle, to prevent war, to de-escalate conflict, to mediate it once it occurs or turns violent, and to transform conflict and rebuild war torn communities. just peace applies at all levels of analysis—international, communal, and interpersonal. just peace is the mutually 61 cusimano love constitutive and interactive commitment to and pursuit of social cohesion and equity, in both orientation or aim and action. just peace principles are implemented through a variety of practices, and these practices work together to expand the space, options, and players available for building equitable social cohesion. just peace is relationship-centered, holistic, proactive, and long term. unlike jwt, just peace tradition does not wait until conflict looms to engage. just peace norms apply to people, communities, states, and international institutions, and provide practical guidance even in the midst of horrific, unjust violence, unlike jwt, which too-often is a top-down and statecentric analysis of conflict by people (often academics) outside the conflict zone. just peace is pragmatic and used by people in war zones. there is much empirical evidence of its implementation. while most wars are not just, we have many successful examples of just peace work to build lasting, sustainable, inclusive peace, both to prevent violence and, once violence has broken out, to restore a more robust peace. while implied and often referenced by the just war tradition, just peace principles are separate, and must be pursued in all phases of the conflict cycle, even and especially when the preceding war was quite unjust. just peace principles are the larger category. just war tradition, in contrast, is the smaller category. it applies to limit war, not to build a more expansive peace. emphasizing the primacy of the just peace approach helps us better understand and reclaim the common ground and relationship between jwt and nonviolence. if the two approaches were, as some assume, antagonistic and in zero-sum opposition, then the church for seventeen centuries has been either schizophrenic, internally incoherent, in apostasy, or hypocritical.2 i argue instead that just peace and jwt work together: jwt contributes to limiting violence, while just peace principles bear the larger load of building just social relations to extend peace in space, time, participation, and quality. understanding, nourishing, and reclaiming the common just peace taproot helps us understand that the greater emphasis on peacebuilding in recent decades is not an aberration or new development,3 but a return to the common source, more needed and relevant now in application to current conditions. the christian imperative to build more just peace in all our relationships—in our families, communities, countries, and the world—is not a specialist concern, but the central command of christianity, to love one another as god loves us. the twentieth century debates between nonviolence vs. jwt over extreme emergency situations has eclipsed and distracted from development of this common just peace ground. just peace and just war 62 i offer the following just peace principles: just peace is animated by the just cause of protecting, defending, and restoring human life and dignity and the common good; right intention (aiming to create a positive peace); participation (respecting human dignity means including societal stakeholders—state and non-state actors, women, youth, victims, as well as previous parties to the conflict); restoration (trauma healing and repair of the human as well as the physical infrastructure); right relationship (creating or restoring just social relationships both vertically and horizontally); reconciliation (healing the communal and individual wounds of war); and sustainability (developing structures that can help peace endure over time).4 these principles have associated practices.5 like strands in a rope, the principles work together to strengthen just peace. just peace is possible, practical, and our calling. just peace principles have mutually reinforcing religious, legal, and empirical supports. just peace principles have roots in christian scriptures and also catholic social teaching (cst). they have parallels in international human rights law. empirical studies show the effectiveness of these approaches. grass roots practices show their utility and adoption, thus honoring subsidiarity and solidarity. war declined and peace is expanding, requiring greater emphasis on just peace than just war theory the early and mid-twentieth century was the bloodiest time in human history. when war was frequent and brutal, people understandably turned to jwt to try to limit the horrific violence. thankfully, the world we face today is far different. today, peace is breaking out around the world. but to expand and sustain this fragile peace, we need just peace norms. jwt tells us how to limit war, but jwt tells us nothing about how to build peace, which is the predominant issue of our day. to face the challenges of this century, we need just peace norms. in presenting this argument, i often receive pushback. how can i say peace is breaking out when there is war in iraq, syria, and other places, displayed every day in the news? journalism reports conflict, at the international, national, and community levels. while real, this picture is incomplete and therefore distorted. the media do not report peace, even though it is expanding, because it is not considered “news”; it does not happen quickly, in the last news cycle; and it is not photogenic, generating dramatic pictures.6 despite what you read in the headlines, we are not in a world at war, but we are experiencing more peace than ever before, no matter how you measure it. social scientists have ample empirical evidence supporting this finding. the church and other 63 cusimano love peacebuilders have worked hard around the world to end long-standing conflicts in south africa, northern ireland, the balkans, colombia, and many other places. war is major armed conflict in which more than 1,000 people die in a year. while the numbers of people and countries have been increasing, major armed conflicts have been declining at the same time. this is a long-term, not recent trend. there are now over seven billion people living on planet earth, the largest global population in human history, and we are expected to grow further, to a human family of nine billion persons by 2050. there are more than 8,000 nations, groups of people united by a common language, religion, ethnicity, culture, and/or historical tradition (this number is on the low side offered by linguists; some estimates that account for tribal differences are nearly double). there are 193 countries, internationally recognized sovereign states, more than ever before in human history. combined, these countries command over 20 million soldiers. and there are fewer wars than ever before: currently twelve major armed conflicts on a planet of seven billion people. any way you measure war—the number of major armed conflicts, the casualties of war, the types of war, the geography of war, naval battles, nuclear weapons arsenals—all these are shrinking simultaneously.7 we are currently witnessing the expansion of peace, of just peace norms, and an explosion of new peacebuilding institutions at the national and international levels, even while wars remain in places like syria, iraq, and south sudan, and peace remains fragile in countries emerging from conflict, such as colombia. this expansion of peace is not an accident or a spontaneous, lucky break, but the fruit of decades of hard work building peace, of literally blood, sweat, tears, prayers, courage, and creativity spent working at the front lines to build peace. this growing peace has many authors and, thankfully, many reinforcing positive trends. but it is not an automatic or straight linear expansion. there are spikes and valleys in the general trends. minor armed conflicts, in which 1–999 persons die in a year, increased after the arab spring (although they are again declining). if we do not continue to work to build peace, these peaceful trends may erode or backslide. because war is declining and peace is expanding, greater emphasis on just peace tradition over jwt is needed. just peace and jwt historically most commentators describe the evolution of christian norms on peace and war as a pendulum motion, moving from nonviolence at the time of christ and among early christians, toward jwt just peace and just war 64 from the era of constantine to the twentieth century, back toward a revitalization of christian nonviolence in the latter half of the twentieth century. i argue that history is partially true, but incomplete. lost in that narrative is the common thread of just peace, woven throughout. just peace tradition has been “hiding in plain sight” in the life of jesus in its political and historical context. while it is true that jesus went around galilee not killing anyone, that is a radically incomplete description of his life and ministry. jesus was born in a war zone, and spent his life working to build a just peace and restore a war-torn population. as pope francis notes, peacebuilding is people building; this was the approach of christ. jesus healed war-impacted peoples of the various harms of cycles of conflict in judea—trauma and evil spirits, poverty, illness, and broken social relations. decades of civil war and foreign military occupation left the people of judea, galilee, and syria in conflict, impoverished, and traumatized. jesus reached out to the marginalized, women and children, foreigners, the “throw-away” people always most vulnerable to the harms of conflict, as well as to the powerful—the roman soldiers, the tax collectors and collaborators with the enemy/foreign military occupiers, and the religious and political elites. jesus did more than respond nonviolently to his persecutors. throughout his life and ministry, jesus practiced just peace. he expanded participation and right relationship, and practiced restoration and reconciliation, in service of sustainable, just, positive peace. the principles and practices of just peace are not some late twentieth century innovation, but a return to the norms and practices given to us by jesus christ. these norms and practices were continued by jesus’ followers. in a bold practice of just peace, immediately upon jesus’ death, peter and many of jesus’ followers moved to rome to engage their violent persecutors. they didn’t treat the romans as enemies, but engaged with them as equals in human dignity, invited them to fully participate in their christian community, and worked to restore right relationship and to establish sustainable equity and concord. they succeeded, and rome, once the violent enemy that killed jesus, was transformed to the heart and home of the global christian community. christianity upended ancient practices of the glorification of war and worship of war gods. christians did not conquer rome militarily; constantine was not forced by arms to convert. instead, jwt was a rejection of the glorification of war, the pursuit of war, and warrior religious cults and practices. modern critics of jwt forget its radical roots in obliterating and condemning the common, accepted, “realpolitik” practices of violence, then and now. just peace and jwt 65 cusimano love collaborated in condemning and ending ancient war practices that had been common practice for millennia. the just peace norms and practices of relationship building, community building, and peacebuilding have been the constant heartbeat of the church from its inception; jwt was later added to limit common (and culturally accepted) practices of major violence. historically, early christians espoused nonviolence, following jesus’ example when even during his crucifixion he did not engage in violence in self-defense. after constantine converted to christianity, making christianity the religion of the roman empire, and christians served in the roman army, christian teaching expanded to include the jwt as a way to limit violence, away from the allowance of unlimited war in pursuit of any political purposes. as the roman empire spread, christian norms of peace and war spread with it, replacing or layering over other cultures’ warrior codes. first, the state got religion (when christianity became the official religion of the roman empire); later, the religion became a state. when rome fell, the catholic church took on lands and governance functions that expanded over the centuries. the successor of peter became both a religious leader and a european prince. jwt arose and expanded to address the morality of war and peace when religious and state authority were integrated. abuses of power led to the reformation. later, when the catholic church gave up most papal lands, armies, and governing functions, the church reoriented back toward its original nonviolent roots. both the jwt and historic nonviolence traditions stem from the same root, the mosaic injunction, “thou shalt not kill.” nonviolence interprets “thou shalt not kill” literally: “thou shalt not kill” means no killing, not by individuals, not by states, and especially not the massive, organized, and institutionalized killing of war. jwt agrees with the imperative “thou shalt not kill,” but adds an asterisk: except in terrible emergencies and under strictly limited conditions of last resort; for self-defense and protection of innocents; when nonviolent means of protection of life are not available; as determined by right, public authorities; when the harms of war will not outweigh the peaceful goals; using means that protect noncombatants, do not deliberately target noncombatants, and are proportionate. nonviolence rules out war; jwt rules out almost all war, as jwt criteria are met only in extremely rare circumstances. both traditions historically are framed in the negative; they aim to limit violence, a necessary and important focus. historic pacifism and jwt agree on the imperative to limit war, and both agree that a positive peace must be the aim. but neither offers much development of moral or specific guidance in how to build a just and sustainable peace. that is the contribution of just peace tradition. just peace and just war 66 just peace tradition reminds us that the mosaic code is about more than the fifth commandment, “thou shall not kill.” the mosaic code is a wider recipe for just peace, for right relationships between god and humanity, and among families, neighbors, and generations. regaining this perspective helps us appreciate the primacy of the just peace approach. just peace versus jwt even among jwt theorists, positive peace has been the aim. augustine described peace as the interior harmony of body and soul within persons, the harmony between god and man, and externally, harmonious relationships among mankind, among human communities, and among countries.8 thomas aquinas offers a multifaceted account of peace, describing peace with god, within persons, and among people, communities, and nations/peoples, although the parallel to the present is imperfect as modern sovereign states did not exist until centuries later. yet, as gregory reichberg notes, unfortunately the primacy of peace for aquinas often has been lost to subsequent generations of scholars who emphasize teachings on jwt outside of the larger context.9 we must consider the role of the demographics of christianity in the failure to develop the imperative to build right relationships. a century ago, two-thirds of catholics lived in the global north, at a time when the global north was gripped in horrific cycles of international conflict (wwi, wwii). scholars in the global north emphasized jwt and its limitations of war. the situation today is reversed. two-thirds of catholics now live in the global south, and scholars, clerics, and the church in the global south call for greater development and adherence to just peace principles. they are expanding the tradition through thought and action and blood. as the global south works to emerge from cycles of civil war and poverty, they are the teachers. scholars in the north need to listen. according to monsignor hector fabio henao, at the frontlines of building just peace in colombia, “colombia became a school of peacebuilding for the church and the world.” aquinas used new sources and showed the compatibility of faith and reason. would st. thomas aquinas admit such empirical evidence from new sources? you bet he would. as noted above, jwt has too often been a kind of “top-down” moral reasoning about war from above and beyond the conflict zone. policy-making elites and primarily western, white male academics and clergy typically weigh in on whether a particular conflict or tactic meets jwt criteria, without asking the people who live in the conflict zone or the people working to build peace on the ground (particularly women) what they make of the moral dimensions of the conflict. 67 cusimano love historically, jwt has engaged in a great deal of moral reasoning that peacebuilding ngo practitioners and people in conflict zones characterize as problematically making policy and moral judgments about them without them. in contrast, just peace is not a “top-down” moral assessment. just peace’s principle of participation means an approach that does not decide “about them without them.” in so doing, just peace harvests the rich moral insights and creative approaches of the people who know the conflict best, the women and men working on the ground to build peace and restore communities. the “justice” in just peace is explicitly restorative justice, not victor’s justice or justice as defined by elites and combatants. especially since the debates over humanitarian interventions of the 1990s, and the 2003 iraq war, just war thinkers have been giving greater attention to the question of a just peace. but these discussions primarily center on developing jus post bellum criteria, focusing on post-conflict reconstruction only, rather than the wider conflict cycle. leading just war theorist michael walzer argues that jus post bellum cannot be entirely independent of jus ad bellum.10 gary bass and others concur, noting that the reasons that justified the war “impose obligations on belligerent powers to try, even after the conclusion of the war, to bring about the desired outcome.”11 most theorists follow suit: brian orend, for example, suggests that just cause, right intention, public authority, discrimination, and proportionality should govern the terms of conflict termination and peace settlements. yet while it is appropriate to begin with consideration of jus ad bellum terms in the context of post-conflict reconstruction, it is not sufficient to end there, as these terms do not give adequate consideration to the full range of peacebuilding concerns and the full restoration of the human person and communities. orend’s argument begins with the assumptions that the unjust aggressor has been vanquished and that a just war preceded the post-conflict period.12 this means that, first, the aggression must be reversed (including any unjust gains from aggression); second, the aggressor must be punished (including war crimes trials and compensations to victims; and, third, the aggressor must be deterred from so acting again. these assumptions are highly problematic. to begin with, almost all wars are not just wars. further, most wars are civil wars (international war is always rare), in which labels of “aggressor” and “victim” are often difficult to assign, and moral breaches occur on all sides. in the four decades of conflict in colombia among multiple state and non-state actors, which parties are the just peace and just war 68 aggressors? no parties conducted a “just war.” jus post bellum criteria that do not address the reality of most conflicts around the world are not particularly helpful. efforts to develop jus post bellum criteria are needed and welcome. however, most of the efforts to date have focused on a narrow slice of peacebuilding: the ethics of war termination and peace settlements (orend), and the ethics of occupying powers (iasiello, bass, walzer), including the ethics and importance of specific post-conflict activities, such as war crimes trials (kellogg), lustration or the purging of public office holders from state institutions (meierhenrich), lawmaking and legislative reform in post conflict zones (boon), treatment of prisoners of war, and reparations (kutz).13 many of these approach just peace as they did just war, from the “legalist paradigm,” beginning with international law and the assumption that “sovereignty and territorial integrity of states are the bedrock of international relations.”14 this leads to several distortions. top-down jus post bellum criteria that begin with the ethical considerations of victors often do not fully appreciate the human rights of the victims or those most hurt by the conflict. they often emphasize short time horizons and limited responsibilities of victors in post-conflict reconstruction (bass) and promotion of democratic states (walzer). these jus post bellum criteria spring from important values such as limiting external meddling, restraining conquest, and limiting opportunities for victors to extract revenge or plunder. but brief and limited post-conflict reconstruction obligations do not square with the on-the-ground experiences of peacebuilders, who note that building enduring, sustainable peace takes time and continued attention, including attention to the reconciliation and restoration of individuals and communities, not only sovereign states and state institutions. some religious jus post bellum theorists move away from the legalist, statist, top-down approaches, and more toward the direction of peacebuilders in the field. michael schuck of loyola university in chicago proposed beginning with three principles as part of any jus post bellum: repentance, honorable surrender, and restoration.15 for schuck, restoration focuses on removing the instruments of war, particularly landmines. for the just peace approach, it means much more. in some ways, it seems a bit unfair to criticize these attempts at jus post bellum principles. after all, they were offered as an effort to start discussion, and in that regard they have succeeded. but we must go beyond these limited conceptions. the just peace tradition begins at the other end of the spectrum, with the fundamental dignity of the human person. the twentieth century was the deadliest in human history, with some 200 million dead in wars and conflicts.16 of these, for the 69 cusimano love first time 90 percent of war casualties were civilians (as opposed to 15 percent civilian casualties at the beginning of the twentieth century).17 this alone is a good reason to start with the fundamental dignity of all human life as the foundation of just peace criteria. just peace principles work on a continuum to prevent all sorts of conflicts at various levels of society, to mediate and end conflict, and to restore societies after conflict; just peace criteria are not limited to a narrow timeline or a narrow set of governmental and combatant activities and actors; just peace is the larger category, not a subset of jwt. since jwt is insufficient, why not get rid of it? critics are right that jwt's ad bellum criteria are widely disregarded. yet jwt's in bello criteria are deeply institutionalized in international and domestic law and are daily used to limit remaining wars. every arms control agreement owes a debt to jwt. jwt is deeply institutionalized in the geneva conventions, the genocide convention, the international criminal court, the landmine ban, the cluster munitions ban, the treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons, the u.s. military code of justice, and professional military training to protect noncombatants; these are but a few examples. we need all these limitations on force driven by jwt. building peace is primary, and limiting war is needed; thus jwt should be retained, while we expand just peace norms and further institutionalize them. we need all hands on deck. as pope francis noted, “humanity needs to refurbish all the best available tools to help the men and women of today to fulfil their aspirations for justice and peace.”18 peace is breaking out around the world. just peace norms and practices help build sustainable and lasting peace. notes 1. the arguments here are drawn from my forthcoming books on just peace, speeches given over the last ten years, and the chapter “what kind of peace do we seek,” in peacebuilding: catholic theology, ethics, and praxis, eds. r. scott appleby, robert schreiter, and gerard f. powers (maryknoll, ny: orbis, 2010), 56–91. 2. this is the position of pacifists such as father john dear and eli mccarthy, who argue that christians cannot serve in the military and for the abandonment of jwt. just peace and just war 70 3. as incorrectly contended by george weigel, robert royal, and james turner johnson in our debates over the years: “just peace vs. just war,” manhattan college, march 31, 2017; “just war tradition and the war on terrorism,” remarks at the woodstock forum on “crucial questions: what makes a war just? what makes peace possible?” co-sponsored by the berkley center for religion, peace and world affairs, georgetown university, washington, dc, october 4, 2006; and “just war,” the u.s. naval academy, neh conference, annapolis, md, june 15, 2004. 4. see caritas internationalis, peacebuilding: a caritas training manual, 2006, especially “peacebuilding principles and framework,” http://www.eprpinformation.org/wpcontent/uploads/peacebuilding-caritas-training-manual-1of3-1.pdf; catholic relief services peacebuilding principles, http://university.crs.org/sites/default/files/pb%20principles.pdf. 5. daniel philpott, for example, details six practices of reconciliation. see philpott, “reconciliation,” in peacebuilding, 106–121, and just and unjust peace (oxford: oxford university press, 2012), 4. 6. see maryann cusimano love, “the new bully pulpit: global media and foreign policy,” in the media and american politics, ed. mark rozell, 2nd ed. (lanham, md: rowman & littlefield, 2008), 257–287. 7. see further maryann cusimano love, beyond sovereignty: issues for a global agenda, 4th ed. (new york: wadsworth/thompson, 2011) and global issues beyond sovereignty, forthcoming from rowman & littlefield in fall 2018. 8. augustine, the city of god, trans. marcus dods (new york: random house, 1993), 690– 691. 9. see gregory m. reichberg, thomas aquinas on war and peace (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2017), 3. 10. see michael walzer, arguing about war (new haven, ct: yale university press, 2004). 71 cusimano love 11. gary j. bass, “jus post bellum,” philosophy & public affairs 32/4 (2004): 384–412, at 386. 12. brian orend, “jus post bellum,” journal of social philosophy 31/1 (2000): 117–137, at 128. 13. see walzer, arguing about war; louis iasiello, “jus post bellum: moral obligations of the victors of war,” naval war college review (summer/fall 2004); bass, “jus post bellum”; orend, “justice after war,” ethics and international affairs 16 (2002): 43–56; davida e. kellogg, “jus post bellum: the importance of war crimes trials,” parameters (autumn 2002): 87–99; jens meierhenrich, “the ethics of lustration,” ethics & international affairs 20/1 (2006): 99–120; kristen boon, “legislative reform in postconflict zones: jus post bellum and the contemporary occupant’s law-making powers,” mcgill law journal 50 (2005): 3–41; christopher kutz, “justice in reparations: the cost of memory and the value of talk,” philosophy & public affairs 32 (2004): 277–313. 14. see bass, “jus post bellum,” 386. 15. michael j. schuck, “when the shooting stops: missing elements in just war theory,” christian century, october 26, 1994, 982–984. 16. see milton leitenberg, center for international and security studies at the university of maryland, “deaths in wars and conflicts between 1945 and 2000,” cornell university peace studies program, occasional paper #29, june 2006, http://cf.edliostatic.com/rjvdxuii30tjzuq0sfdfkdtxvpfgczjb.pdf, and matthew white, “wars, massacres and atrocities of the twentieth century: a conservative estimate,” necrometrics, october 2010, http://necrometrics.com/warstats.htm. 17. dan smith, “war, peace, and third world development,” occasional paper, international peace research institute, oslo, 1994, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2294652. 18. pope francis, “message to peacebuilding conference,” april 11, 2016, http://cctn.org/pope-francis-message-to-peacebuilding-conference/. "teaching business ethics" [expositions 7.1 (2013) 42–52] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 what’s the purpose of ethics education? ronald duska business ethics zone consulting the purpose or aim of ethics education seems simple. it should produce good behavior. people use ethics to evaluate actions and practices by determining whether and why they are right or wrong, good or bad, should or should not be done. the point is to lay out a road map to be followed in doing good and avoiding evil. aristotle would agree, with his insistence that “the end aimed at is not knowledge but action” (aristotle 1941, 1.3, 1095a7). this is somewhat puzzling, however, since, presumably, the goal of education is knowledge. but for aristotle, in the case of ethical inquiry, knowledge is gained not for its own sake, but for the sake of bringing about ethical behavior. ethical knowledge, then, is a practical wisdom—a knowing of what one should do so that one will do it. however, we might ask whether ethics education can achieve this goal of improving behavior. there are two possible negative answers to that question. the first would claim that knowledge about ethical matters is not attainable. the second would claim that such knowledge, even if attainable, would have little effect on behavior. so one might argue that ethical education is pointless, since on this negative account it is either impossible or worthless. what should we make of such claims? those who claim that knowledge of ethical matters is not possible, call them “ethical skeptics,” insist that any ethical judgment is either subjective or relative. accordingly, there are only ethical opinions, not ethical knowledge. the second group, call them the “ethical pessimists,” claim that even if knowledge were possible, it would be a waste of time since people are governed by passion and not reason. aristotle cites this fact as a reason why ethics cannot be taught to the young, where passion abounds, but he extends it to anyone old or young who is ruled by the passions. 1 as he says, “to such persons, as to the incontinent, knowledge brings no profit; but to those who desire and act in accordance with a rational principle knowledge about such matters will be of great benefit” (aristotle 1941, 1.3, 1095a9–11). coincidentally, john henry newman, in his idea of a university, might be seen as such a pessimist when he claims: quarry the granite rock with razors, or moor the vessel with a thread of silk; then may you hope with such keen and delicate instruments as human knowledge and human reason to contend against those giants, the passion and pride of man. (newman 1852, discourse 5, 177) 2 for these pessimists, learning and knowing what is good, even if possible, do not guarantee that education in ethics will lead to good behavior. 43 duska in response to these two skepticisms, i will try to show that we do have knowledge of what ethical behavior is and that we can change behavior. after that, there is a third issue to contend with: what are some ways of teaching ethics so that it can be efficacious? i will argue briefly that knowledge of ethical matters is possible, and that it can be effective. after that i will detail two effective ways of teaching ethics. the first i will call “didactic” and the second “educative.” to begin, though, we need to discuss the nature of ethics and whether and how knowledge of ethical matters is possible. ethical knowledge is possible a primary function of ethics is to evaluate or judge actions and practices in terms of their goodmaking characteristics and justice. we do this by determining whether those actions and/or practices are right or wrong, good or bad, should or should not be done. it is important to note that ethics is a public affair, as indicated in the etymology of the word “ethics,” which is derived from the ancient greek word, “ethos.” an ethos is a culture, and cultures exist in communities where certain behaviors (practices) are expected and followed. the existence of ethics arises because all humans are social and political animals raised in communities where they are inculcated into the shared values, principles, and rules of the community’s culture. 3 robert merton described this public nature of ethos succinctly: there are two important elements of social and cultural structures: the first consists of culturally defined goals, purposes and interests, held out as legitimate objectives for all or for diversely located members of the society. the goals are more or less integrated […] and roughly ordered in some hierarchy of value. a second element of the social and cultural structures defines, regulates and controls the acceptable modes of reaching out for these goals. every social group invariably couples its cultural objectives with regulations, rooted in the mores or institutions, of allowable procedures for moving toward these objectives. (merton 1957, 132 and 158) so every culture has its ethics (ethos). but aren’t these just culturally relative positions, held by one group or another, none of which have universal validity? some educators might say this, but it is a position that is impossible to maintain. let us demonstrate. it appears to be the case that those engaged in the business of ethics education, at least those in the areas of applied ethics, are engaged in trying to improve society. they are trying to effect a change. in short, they are promoting a product – a better ethical way to handle a situation. i have yet to meet anyone in this field who is value neutral. as a matter of fact, no teacher is value neutral. every applied ethics teacher believes the material that he or she teaches is important and should be passed on, or the person would not be teaching or studying it. of course, for ethics teachers, this means they have to believe there are actions and institutional practices that are right and wrong and institutions that act ethically or unethically. since these educators devote their lives to teaching applied ethics, they must have some beliefs they think are true. for example, what’s the purpose of ethics education? 44 those who argue against exploitation of child labor by multi-national corporations must believe those practices are wrong or immoral or unethical. and they must believe that cultures that approve of this exploitation are misguided. otherwise, it would not make sense to argue against those practices and chastise companies or cultures that engage in them. there are, of course, those involved in ethics education who might assert that the primary goal of ethics education is to make the student aware of the many different “narratives” and conflicting beliefs and not be judgmental. but they can’t possibly think all narratives are of equal value. if they did think that, it would be relativism, the theory that all beliefs are equally sound. that is untenable, because if all beliefs are ethically sound, ethical argument is pointless. ethics education should help make us ethical, help us do what we should do. but ethics education should also help us “know” what to do. but what is knowledge? the epistemology is simple. the best definition of knowledge is justified true belief. if i think “companies should not exploit children,” i think the statement, “exploiting child labor is wrong” is a true statement. i must also think my belief is justified, since unjustified belief is mere opinion, and if all opinions are equal, then those who think exploiting children is okay are as justified as i am. there is a difference between the claim “i believe x is true” and the claim “i think x is true.” if i think x is true, i think i have evidence to justify my belief and that those who disagree with me are wrong. since knowledge is justified true belief, i must hold that those who disagree simply do not know. they are without knowledge. “gnosis” is the greek word for knowledge. those without knowledge are ignosis or, in english, ignorant. our premise, then, is that anyone who teaches ethics with the goal of improving behavior must necessarily think ethical knowledge is possible, meaning that he or she is justified in believing (read = knows) some things are wrong. two ways of teaching ethics 1. the didactic approach to ethics if, then, we know what to do, what is the best way to teach it? the first way to engage in ethics education is by simply telling the students what to do. in cultures, accepted behaviors (best practices) are developed in two ways. people are told what to do (taught the rules of the culture) and/or trained (conditioned) into what to do (what the culture expects). i will concentrate on the telling. 4 i call this approach, where the teacher presents a list of do’s and don’t’s based on some authority, “didactic” or “doctrinaire.” (didactic means to teach, and doctrines are things that are taught.) the didactic approach involves the educator presenting a set of rules that tell the students how they should behave, what they should do or should not do. it is what we do when we raise young people or inexperienced people facing a new environment where they need to learn the rules. it is a procedure often used in compliance training. the student is taught to be compliant by simply being told which activities are acceptable and which are unacceptable. in didactic moral education, the teacher simply lays out the rules and delivers demands or imperatives. just as one can teach the ten commandments to a group of young people by simply 45 duska laying out the list of shalt’s and shalt not’s, the didactic trainer can simply recite the rules, tell what scope they have, and if need be interpret them according to some canonical reading of them. the students simply need to know what the rules are and are expected to follow them. the need for this didactic approach is obvious. it provides the basic training needed for success at different times and in many areas of life where one is learning how to get along in a group or community. the fact is there are certain times when people need to be told what to do. this is obvious in the case of children. early on in life, children are taught what is acceptable and unacceptable behavior. children are told things such as: “don’t play with matches,” “don’t take things that don’t belong to you,” “don’t cheat,” “share!” this is simply a case of teaching the children the rules by which they are to engage in society, thereby socializing them. if children are not taught the rules for getting along with others, society would collapse and life would be nasty, brutish and short, as the philosopher thomas hobbes famously put it. but such “indoctrination” is not only necessary for children. there are times and situations where it is necessary to instruct adults. adults need to learn the best practices of a group which they join, be it a business or social group. people entering a new environment need to be taught how to behave in that environment. they need to be trained in standard acceptable practices. the purpose of much in-service training is for the trainees to learn what the rules of the game are, and how to play according to those rules. this type of training occurs when people are exposed to codes of conduct that should govern their businesses activities. in fact, companies, governments, and professional organizations all require such ethics “training” and continuing education in ethics. for example, the certified financial planner board of standards requires an ethics course where the code is simply delivered and, at most, interpreted in some fuzzy cases. any revisions to the code go through the board. similarly, the american institute of certified public accountants (aicpa) requires that accountants be independent and objective and then spells out exactly the actions that would meet or violate these requirements, and requires ethics training each year. many industries require “continuing education” courses in ethics so that their members know what they should or should not do. to reiterate, in such didactic training, little or no insight or rationale is given or required. the individual is simply informed about what are right and/or wrong practices. there is no question of the individual deciding what is right or wrong. these are the rules of the group or game in which one is engaging. the answer to the question, “why should we do this?” can simply be, “because that’s the way things are done.” in short, in order to ensure order in a community, proper behavior is essential and rules need to be laid down and followed. there are many such ethics training sessions, and, clearly, they have a certain effectiveness in producing appropriate behavior. further, if a person was trained, he or she cannot say, “no one ever told me we can’t do it that way.” however, this didactic training, though necessary, is not sufficient for ethics education. the reason is that some issues do not lend themselves to resolution by a simple application of the rules, since there may be a conflict of rules or reasons for action. situations may change or become too complex. rules can conflict, or the rules may not always be clear about what should what’s the purpose of ethics education? 46 be done. hence, there are times when circumstances demand more than simply following the rules. in those situations, knowing the ethical principles or reasons which lie beneath the rules is important. the trainees need to understand those principles and reasons so that they can make proper decisions on their own, and/or be able to justify modifying those rules and even, when appropriate, acting counter to those rules. 2. the educative approach to ethics people ask, “why should we do this?” rules conflict or people question the reasons for the rules. people want to know why. this is where the second approach to ethics education comes in, an approach which involves the students in thinking about why the rules are in place, what ethical principles the rules are based upon, and why the rules should be followed. this second approach i call “educative.” in this type of education, the aim is to lead the student out of (education comes from the latin word “educere,” meaning to lead out) mere obedience to the rules to a discovery of whether and why the rules are appropriate and how to decide in different cases what is right or wrong to do. to those familiar with laurence kohlberg’s theories, this would be leading the student out of the mere acceptance of conventional rules to an understanding of the principles or reasons underlying those rules. the student would move from the conventional stage of cognitive moral development, where he or she accepts the rules as they are, to the post-conventional stage of cognitive moral development, where he or she thinks for him or herself and achieves deeper ethical reasoning. the “educative” approach is necessary in order to get the student to appreciate why specific rules exist and whether such rules are justifiable. such an approach should lead students to a point where they arrive at a fuller realization and clarification of what justifications there are for their beliefs about which actions are appropriate, rather than an unreflective settling for the unexamined beliefs they happened to hold before a serious, critical examination. the goal of such education is to help students understand whether and/or why their beliefs are adequate and, if the education is done well, to help students apply their beliefs in difficult as well as novel circumstances. thus, in the educative approach, the role of the ethics educator is to enable the student first to recognize those bedrock assumptions and unexamined beliefs, then to prod him or her to analyze and evaluate them, to see if they are fit for use as accepted personal and/or professional rules of behavior. ethical sensitivity but how is this to be done? one very important element in the educative approach is to create what moral psychologists call cognitive disequilibrium or cognitive dissonance. in that way, the educator helps the students become sensitive to ethical issues they may not even have been aware existed. i use the term “ethical sensitivity” to denote the ability to recognize the existence, extent, and seriousness of an ethical problem in a situation. this is not always an easy task because students, enamored of their own disciplinary perspectives, oftentimes do not even 47 duska recognize the ethical dimension of a certain behavior. some simply do not see that a particular situation raises moral questions. for example, an individual who looks at his job solely from the perspective of selling as much as he can to please his boss and meet company sale quotas, a goal he was taught, might not see that selling to people who can’t afford a product is morally questionable. or a purchasing agent might not see that accepting gifts from certain vendors might constitute a conflict of interest, since everyone does it, and that’s how he was trained, namely, to do as others in his business do. a lawyer might not question his duty to defend his client no matter what the cost to society, or a doctor might invoke confidentiality at the expense of public health. so an initial task of the educative approach is to raise the sensitivity of students to the moral dimensions of an issue they might not have seen. for example, an approach in teaching business ethics might be to get the student to overcome a one-dimensional, tunnel-vision analysis that views only the bottom-line economic components of a situation. of course, there are some situations where it is clear what the right thing to do is and there are good reasons for following certain courses of action. there are a large number of moral imperatives that are unproblematic – for example, don’t cheat, don’t steal, etc. but there are also cases where it is not clear what should be done. in these cases, we need to learn how to make sound judgments. thus, we need two things: a method for developing sensitivity to moral issues and a method for developing sound moral judgment. thus, the task of the teacher of ethics, who thinks there is an ethical way to do things, would be to get the student to look at a situation in such a way that the value at stake manifests itself to the student and the student sees the situation in its ethical dimensions. the function of ethical teaching here is rhetorical. it is to enlighten, sensitize, and, perhaps, change attitudes. further, i would suggest that one of the most effective ways to accomplish these goals is to get students to see the good or bad in a situation in much the same way that a person engaged in teaching art appreciation gets his or her students to see the work of art as he or she does. for example, i might think a picasso is a worthwhile work of art, but, in order to say it is good and not just that i like it, i must tell why it is so (that is, i put myself on record as having reasons for my judgment). but my telling why is done not by telling what criteria it meets (in other words, what rule or rules for good art picasso followed), but by showing how, as it is constructed, the work’s particular lines and colors come together to give me satisfaction, with the assumption that, since my student and i are basically likeminded or have a certain unanimity (sensus communis, in the sense of common sensibilities), if the student sees the situation in the same way i do, the student will then share my appraisal of it. the effective art appreciation teacher finds out where the student is with respect to a picasso, and takes him by the hand and shows him how the teacher looks at it, so that the student can view it as the teacher does. the ethics teacher should do something similar in order to get the student to see an issue as an ethical issue. for example, take the gm plant closing in flint, michigan as portrayed by michael moore in the film roger and me (1989). moore, of course, is engaging our sensibilities to show us that plant closings are unacceptable. moore tries to show us, get us to see, what closing the plant does what’s the purpose of ethics education? 48 to the people and the town. if you want to convince people that plant closings are unethical, you will show the disastrous economic effects the plant closing had on the town and its people. on the other hand, any number of people will argue simply that this plant closing was acceptable. to do that, they will try to show us, which is to say to get us to see, that plant closings are a necessary part of economic change, which must weed out dead wood for the sake of future prosperity. after all, if “x” number of people in flint are jobless, it is also the case that a number of people in mexico will now be employed, and such growth leads to more prosperity overall (it will be argued) down the line. to develop such sensitivity requires the educator to get the student to see the ethical dimensions or aspects of a case – to see anew. this is necessary so the student can overcome what ludwig wittgenstein called “aspect-blindness”: in the case of ethics, the inability of a person to see the situation at hand as having a moral dimension. wittgenstein likened the aspectblind to those who are color-blind or tone-deaf, with the important exception that the aspectblind person can learn to see a problem as a moral problem, for example, whereas the color-blind and tone-deaf lack the capacity to distinguish colors or tones. the aspect blind person fails to “see that” a moral problem exists, but this blindness is of a kind that education can seek to repair (wittgenstein 1953, 193–214). wittgenstein’s point is that if a person lacks the ability to “see as,” i.e., to see the issue as a moral issue, that person lacks moral sensitivity. but we believe most people have this ability, so the role of the teacher is to get students to see an issue as a moral issue and not just as, for example, a jobs issue. josiah royce calls the most important kind of seeing as “moral insight” (royce 1988, 88) and suggests that one achieves this insight by putting oneself in the place of another, seeing things as the other sees them. this is, of course, what lies beneath the golden rule. ethical judgment a first step in the educative process is, then, to develop sensitivity to recognize the moral aspect of situations. however, if the situation is a moral dilemma, where there are good reasons to perform an action and good reasons not to perform the action, we need the ability to evaluate those proposed courses of action from the moral point of view. thus, the development of a decision procedure for making ethical judgments is another purpose of an ethics course. an educative approach to ethics should help the student sort out those reasons and structure them into a decision procedure. moral judgment is simply the process of rationally appraising an action to see whether it is ethically appropriate or not—in other words, of justifying true beliefs. an educative approach to ethics teaches the student how to utilize and prioritize reasons in structuring approaches to a decision. this is the realm of ethical theory, which investigates the reasons most often utilized in ethically evaluating an action. those reasons are as follows: an action is appropriate or acceptable on the grounds that it is either (1) legal, (2) in my and others’ interest, (3) socially acceptable, (4) fair or just, and/or (5) fulfills duties or responsibilities 49 duska generated by one’s commitments. any action, which is in accord with all of those reasons will be unquestionably acceptable. actions contrary to one of those reasons are problematic. we need to judge whether courses of action are respectful of the law, beneficial to us and to others affected, fair to all concerned, and fulfill our commitments or responsibilities. we need to see them from all those perspectives. in the case where some of those aspects which set out the criteria for moral acceptability are not met, or are not in conflict, we have difficult dilemmas. the solution to those might not be easy, but here we can show our students how such situations might have been avoided. it is unlikely such capacities can be developed in one-shot lectures or by purported attempts to integrate ethics across the curriculum. they require for their fruition extended and arduous work by the teacher in sensitizing, providing examples through cases or best-practices sessions, and showing what adequate principles are and how they are to be utilized. but, as we saw, this is an enterprise based on the fact that the teacher does think that some activities are unacceptable. articulating such judgments and defending them, or at least persuading students that such judgments are sound, is not a task most academics are comfortable with. it is the job of a morals salesman. to be done effectively, it cannot be coercive. the teacher must use the best tools available to get the student to “see as” he sees, which is to say, to see that, if he looks at the matter as the teacher does, he will come to agree that certain actions, in cases where it is clear, are ethically acceptable. the student will also come to see where the difficulties lie in cases where there are genuine dilemmas, that is, in cases where there may not be one right way of doing things. as we saw, in at least some dilemmas, you are damned if you do, and damned if you don’t, because there are good reasons for acting in opposing ways. helping the student to distinguish between clear cases and difficult ones and to use the best reasoning possible will hopefully in a small way fulfill the aim of ethics education. it is appropriate to conclude with a final consideration of aristotle’s with respect to the caution that one should follow in ethics education. our discussion will be adequate if it has as much clearness as the subject-matter admits of, for precision is not to be sought for alike in all discussions, any more than in all the products of the crafts. now fine and just actions, which political science investigates, admit of much variety and fluctuation of opinion, so that they may be thought to exist only by convention, and not by nature. and goods also give rise to a similar fluctuation because they bring harm to many people; for before now men have been undone by reason of their wealth, and others by reason of their courage. we must be content, then, in speaking of such subjects and with such premises to indicate the truth roughly and in outline, and in speaking about things which are only for the most part true and with premises of the same kind to reach conclusions that are no better. in the same spirit, therefore, should each type of statement be received; for it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable what’s the purpose of ethics education? 50 reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs. (aristotle 1941, 1.3, 1094b12–27 [emphasis added]) in short, expect only as much clarity and sufficiency of answers in a subject as the subject allows. there are some ethical issues – hard dilemmas – where we cannot definitively say what is right or wrong. what we can say at most is that, in this situation, there are good reasons for acting this way and good reasons for not acting this way. in conclusion, we recommend using both students’ experience with issues and their commonly held beliefs as a way into ethical reasoning. they will appreciate that there are some simple issues where right and wrong are clear. however, they will also appreciate that some issues are complex. what an ethics course can do is to arm them with a set of tools (good reasons) at least to clarify the issues if not always to resolve them. thus, the final purpose of ethics education would be to help students develop modes of assessing and evaluating complex ethical matters in a rationally guided way. notes 1. “a young man is not a proper hearer of lectures on ethics; for he is inexperienced in the actions that occur in life, but its discussions start from these and are about these; and, further, since he tends to follow his passions, his study will be vain and unprofitable, because the end aimed at is not knowledge but action. and it makes no difference whether he is young in years or youthful in character; the defect does not depend on time, but on his living, and pursuing each successive object, as passion directs. for to such persons, as to the incontinent, knowledge brings no profit; but to those who desire and act in accordance with a rational principle knowledge about such matters will be of great benefit” (aristotle 1941, 1.3, 1095a2–11). 2. knowledge and reason can help, but they are delicate instruments contending against the nature of human beings and their susceptibility to incentives and temptations. from that perspective teaching ethics is much like the role of sisyphus. it is why some ethics educators have lost the faith in the possibility of having a good effect. but what we have shown is how ethics education seeks to be effective in bringing about good behavior. but to do that we need to do several things: teach the rules, develop the sensitivity, and educate in the reasons for ethical action. if we do those, ethics education will be of use. 3. how should such ethical training proceed? aristotle insists that ethical knowledge begins by reflecting on commonly held beliefs, what he calls “endoxa” and others call the “sensus communis” or common sense, i.e., beliefs held in common. experience in the classroom invariably shows that students come equipped with commonly shared beliefs. they have significant agreement about the appropriateness or inappropriateness of certain kinds of behavior. such agreement often makes people think ethics training is unnecessary, because it is clear to them what’s right and they believe everyone should know that. indeed, if all ethical 51 duska issues were simple, there would be no need for ethical training. those situations where it is clear some course of action is right or wrong we call “no-brainers.” for example, i usually get unanimous agreement that defrauding another is simply wrong. such shared beliefs make us part of a moral community. those who don’t share them are “outriders” or “anti-social” or some such term. since people are societal beings, they get the initial guiding principles of their life from their society or societies (since we are all part of numerous groups with rules for getting along). those societal rules become inbred, almost second nature. since business is a social institution, it has its own set of rules governing acceptable behavior, which we learn as we mature in business. that becomes part of our endoxa or common sense. it is an interesting phenomenon that, in my business ethics classes, i get almost universal assent to the proposition that “the owner of the means of production of a company is entitled to the profits of that company.” this entitlement claim is an ethical claim to which virtually all my students assent. it is an excellent example of an agreed-upon principle that undergirds our basic tenets of market capitalism. the students were taught it as part of their culture, and they accept it unreflectively. if i ask why owners are entitled, the students answer that the owners took the risk. they have been indoctrinated into a principle of distributive justice without ever asking why that is so. 4. aside from telling the students what the rules are, there is training. to understand training, reflect on how a culture inculcates rules. i will suggest one of two ways. just as non-human animals are trained by the carrot and the stick, young human beings are trained either by punishments (a stick in an era when one believed that a child was spoiled if the rod was spared, nowadays timeouts or grounding) or by rewards for good behavior. that is simple behavioral conditioning which involves operant conditioning because humans behave largely as they are incentivized to behave. just as we stimulate children to behave in certain ways by rewards and punishments, we stimulate older people to behave in certain ways by incentivizing (rewarding and punishing) them. whether one wants to call this type of training ethics education is of little import. this operant conditioning helps fulfill aristotle’s goal of bringing about appropriate action. works cited aristotle. 1941. nichomachean ethics. in the basic works of aristotle. trans. w. d. ross. new york: random house. merton, robert. 1957. “social structure and anomie.” in social theory and social structure. new york: the free press: 185–214. newman, john henry. 1852. the idea of a university defined and illustrated: in nine discourses. project guttenberg, <http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24526.> josiah royce. 1988. selected writings. ed. john e. smith and william klubach. mahwah, new jersey: paulist press. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24526 what’s the purpose of ethics education? 52 wittgenstein, ludwig. 1953. philosophical investigations. trans. g. e. m. anscombe. new york: macmillan. why we read the analects [expositions 5.1 (2011) 30-40] expositions (online) issn: 1747-5376 why we read the analects of confucius wm. theodore de bary columbia university although this essay will speak mostly to why and how i read the analects of confucius, the reason i entitle it “why we read the analects” is not that i claim to speak for everyone but only that my personal reading follows from what others have thought and said about it. ever since confucius’ disciples recorded his sayings, teachings and example in the fifth century ce, later generations have been inspired to pass it on, to share it with others who have read, reflected on it, and discussed it together. thus the analects are still read because they have survived this scrutiny and reexamination over the centuries, which is why we read it today, not because it became part of a fixed canon (though in some places it did) or was required reading imposed by one generation upon the next. i have read and discussed the analects with students in my asian humanities class for 60 years and their response to it is much the same, whether they are majoring in the natural or social sciences or in the humanities. so, for practical purposes, when i speak of “why we read the analects” it means “how i and my students have read the analects together,” and especially how one’s first impressions are formed by the early chapters. indeed it is no different for other audiences of any age or at any level, including adult education. if this is what is meant by “general” education, then the analects speak to the generality of human beings – to their common, perennial, “core” concerns, more than to the farthest outreaches of abstract thought. this is why i avoid speaking of what i do as “teaching” the analects. no doubt a teacher can help students with their reading and reflection upon the text, but basically students are rediscovering it and learning it for themselves. the book teaches itself, as of course most genuine “classics” do. whatever may be done by a teacher is only an enhancement of the reader’s own personal encounter in recognizing that the text speaks directly to him or herself. for me the latest confirmation of this fact comes from the valedictory address of a columbia college graduate in 2008 who chose to sum up his four years’ learning experience by drawing on the model of the analects and some of its key sayings. 1 understandably our valedictorian drew first on the opening lines, which read: the master said: to study and at times to practice what one has learned, is that not a pleasure? to have friends coming from afar, is that not a joy? to be unembittered even if one is not recognized, is that not to be a truly noble person? 2 if one wishes to know more of what our valedictorian made of these lines, one can refer to the proceedings just cited. in what follows, despite my disclaimer of any originality or unique 31 de bary expertise, i shall offer my own thoughts on these lines and other key passages that mark the analects as classic. taken together these opening lines tell us much about the nature and context of the analects. the first lines could be addressed to and understood by any literate human being, but the last line points more specifically to “the noble person [junzi].” here junzi refers to the traditional leadership elite, an aristocratic class born to a privileged status of would-be rulers. but confucius emphasizes the learning process for what it takes to be worthy of a leadership role or become an exemplary person; in other words, what it means to command respect as a person, whether or not one finds oneself in a position to lead or rule. thus he reconceives the traditional concept of junzi from that of “nobleman” to one that emphasizes “the noble man [or person]” as one whose personal character, not status, establishes him as a model to be followed – a true leader in any social role whatever, even if not successful politically. 3 the same multi-faceted expression zi also appears as the very first word in the analects: “the master said [zi yue].” as “master” zi could be applied to other authority figures like laozi and zhungzi, and here it clearly refers to a teacher, but the language that follows marks confucius as distinct from any teacher who is simply dictating or preaching to his students or disciples. note the rhetorical cast of all three of the statements above; they are not outright assertions, much less forceful dictates. they invite and expect an implicit response from the hearer as if one’s own experience would immediately confirm the truth of what confucius is saying – he is only telling them in a sense what they already know, without invoking any higher authority. this is not the thunderous voice of the prophet, or a pronouncement from the pulpit or podium. old testament prophets spoke first of all to god, and then delivered god’s word to his people. confucius speaks directly to us, and asks us to recognize heaven within and around us. his appeal to ordinary human experience is also the ground on which he talks of studying or learning. what he says may be addressed to the individual, calling on one personally to achieve fulfillment as a truly noble person, but his hearers are learning from others as well as from their own experience and practice, and their “others” here include teachers, examples from the past, as well as “friends coming from afar” with whom one can share one’s experience – it is learning that can be gained from (being open to) both the past and others able to confirm and expand on one’s own knowledge. but if i have distinguished confucius’ voice from that of the old testament prophet, this does not mean that there is no common ground between them, both speak to an ideal standard by which to measure and judge the conduct of kings and rulers, and by implication anyone else who bears a responsibility for others – which means just about all of us. in confucius’ case however, the approach is most characteristically on the means of selfcultivation by which one can develop the virtues of the noble person, understood as a fulfillment of the human ideal. and most characteristic of confucianism too is the way the analects explain this as an organic growth following the pattern of ordinary human life. accordingly, in the passage immediately following that quoted above, the analects speak of that process as grounded in the life of the family, wherein, initially by acquiring habits of why we read the analects of confucius 32 respectful conduct toward others – first of all towards parents and then to one’s siblings – one engenders traits essential to human life, whether one’s own – in the self – or in others. thus the second passage concludes, “the noble person concerns himself with the root, when the root is established, the way is born. being filial and fraternal – is this not the root of humaneness?” (1:2). again the rhetorical mode – appealing to anyone’s first experience of life – conveys the sense that the living process is interactive and interpersonal. but here the process is identified as one by which “the way” is born, takes life. and in the context of the preceding passages this is also understood to be the way that a truly noble person follows. at the same time this way is centered in humaneness as the prime virtue of the noble person, a virtue that links the self-fulfillment of the exemplary person to the fulfillment of others. but fulfillment is the product of a sequential process for anyone and everyone. filiality is the seed from which, with due cultivation, the growth process can be fulfilled in the flowering of humaneness or true humanity. in this respect filiality may be considered the genetic virtue of confucianism – important in its priority – but its full fruit or flower is humaneness (consummate virtue). there is a widespread impression that filiality is the most characteristic virtue of confucianism, and this notion is not just a modern misconception or misreading by foreign observers. the early critic of the confucian school, mozi, seized on this family virtue as almost an obsession of the confucians he knew. and the early legalists also took issue with the confucians on this issue, seeing a family ethic rooted in filiality as prejudicial to publicmindedness on a wider scale (as indeed mozi had). moreover the powerful hold of filiality on confucian culture was demonstrated by the resistance it showed to buddhism on the latter’s introduction to china. but before we pursue this issue further, we do well to note another early reference to filiality in the analects. when a disciple mang wu bo is quoted as asking confucius about filiality or filial piety [xiao], the terse answer given is somewhat perplexing in its obliqueness: “parents’ only concern should be lest their children be sick” (2:6). traditional commentators have tended to interpret this as implying primarily an obligation on the child to take proper care of itself – attending to one’s own person in bodily and moral health. no doubt this was a distinct and enduring feature of confucian teaching and practice, and its strong sense of the person as a bodily self is what offered resistance to buddhist questioning of the reality of any substantial self. but one should not ignore the underlying assumption here that the filial child is responding to the loving concern of his parents. filiality is a reflection of parental love. it partakes of the basic confucian principle of reciprocity, in the light of which filiality is to be seen, not as an absolute value requiring blind obedience to parents, but a relative one to the extent that it is qualified and conditioned by a parental love that is taken for granted in the passage just quoted – among the many natural assumptions underlying confucian discourse. another later anecdote in the analects underscores the same point. confucius’ disciple zai wo asked him about the customary three years’ mourning for one’s parents, expressing the 33 de bary thought that one year’s mourning should be enough. confucius asked him, “if you were to eat good food and wear fine clothing, would you feel at ease?” [zai wo responded] “i would feel at ease.” if you would feel at ease [replied confucius], then do it. but the noble person throughout the mourning period derives no pleasure from the food that he eats, no joy from the music that he hears, and no comfort from his dwelling. but you would feel at ease and so you should do it.” after wo went out, the master said “how inhuman yü [zai wo] is! only when a child is three years old does it leave its parents’ arms. the three years’ mourning is the universal custom everywhere under heaven. and yü, was he not the darling of his father and mother for three years? (17:21) in this case confucius shows a basic respect for the essentially voluntary character of ethical behavior while he also upholds the standards of reciprocity that should ordinarily apply. the standard, however, presumes that natural feeling should underlie and prompt one’s actions. it would do no good to make a pretense of virtue. thus natural feelings of reciprocity engendered in the normal process of life, from birth and infancy to maturity, are the root of humaneness as in the earlier example. the primacy of natural sentiments born in the bosom of the family is underscored by another episode in which the duke of she tells confucius: “in our part of the country there is one upright gong. his father stole a sheep and the son bore witness against him.” confucius says: “in our part of the country, the upright are different than that. a father is shielded by his son, and a son is shielded by his father. uprightness lies in this. (13:18) in other words, the intimacy of the family is privileged over the claims of the state, for the state cannot stand if trust within the family – the root of public trust – is undermined. soon after this the primacy of sentiment or feeling over rational discourse was reaffirmed for confucians in the mencius when he defined the goodness of human nature as moral awareness (literally, “good knowing” or natural knowledge [liang zhih]), and further when he defined the basic relationship or bond between parent and child, not in terms of filiality, but as one of “intimate affection” or mutual love, to be cultivated of course in the light of reason (the sense of right and wrong [yi]). but since from the outset of the analects, as in all the literate discourse its readers are engaged in, there is the possibility that verbalization and rationalization might intrude on one’s ordinary conduct, it is important that what one learns and says be guided and informed by both one’s own feelings and one’s consciousness of right and wrong [yi]. thus the analects early exposition of the way of humaneness includes the following: why we read the analects of confucius 34 a young man is to be filial within his family and respectful outside it. he is to be earnest and faithful, overflowing with love for all living beings and intimate with those who are humane. if after such practice he has strength to spare, he may use it in the study of literate culture [wen]. (1:6) although the importance of study and learning had already been asserted in the opening lines, and confucian scholarship became widely known among east asian teachings as the most rational, here the priority of moral cultivation over literate discourse [wen], essential though the latter was to civilized life, is established early on in the analects. we saw in the opening lines how the process of learning started first by interaction with others, but ended with the noble person able to stand, so to speak, on his own. he knew where he stood regardless of the approval or disapproval of others. this is not the same as a radical individuality asserting its complete autonomy, but rather a self in a state of personal balance or poise. the same conception then informs our understanding of other confucian values connected with the noble person as a model of humaneness. in chapter 1:4, one of confucius’ closest disciples is quoted approvingly as follows: everyday i examine myself on three things: in planning on behalf of others, have i failed to be loyal? when dealing with friends have i failed to be trustworthy? in receiving what has been transmitted, have i failed to practice it? among each of these cases there is a connection or continuity that involves more than an obedient adherence to or following of others. “loyalty” (as zhong is usually translated) is represented by the graph for “center” underlain by the graph for “mind-and-heart”; it bespeaks a centered mind and heart, in a state of balance within the self but also balanced with others. it means being true to oneself as well as to others (not just following or obeying the latter). this then connects up with the other two values cited. “trustworthiness” is our rendering here for xin, sometimes also translated as “good faith”, both of which express the idea that one’s actions and conduct are consistent with one’s stated professions, being true to one’s word. 4 this same notion is implicit in confucian “loyalty”, being true at once to one’s self and others, and it connects up with the faithful practice of one’s professions in service to others. another notable passage in the analects speaks of the “man of service” [shi], here roughly equivalent to the “noble person”, in the following terms: the man of service cannot but be stout-hearted and enduring; for his burden is heavy and his way is long. to be truly humane is the burden he bears; is it not heavy? only in death does his practice of the way come to an end; is that not long? (8:7) here the burden of humaneness is heavy because service to others which is also true to oneself, can be exacting and demanding of one’s own inner resources. whether in a position of leadership 35 de bary or sharing in the responsibilities of government, to be truly reliable and trustworthy meant to be fully honest with oneself and unflinchingly forthright in advising others. often it would involve courageous honesty in counseling rulers who might resent hearing the truth, especially about themselves. in the confucian tradition of civil service, especially in ministerial roles, this courageous honesty was the hallmark of true loyalty on the part of those who were “stout-hearted and enduring” even to the point of martyrdom, when the true scholar/official’s way ended in death at the hands of a despotic ruler. but being true to one’s word and professions had an importance beyond the individual in confucius’ whole scheme of things. a prime vocation for the man of service was the business of human governance and the analects has much to say about this. here a few examples may suffice: when a disciple asked confucius about government, the latter replied tersely, “sufficient food, sufficient military strength and the confidence (trust) of the people [are the three requisites].” when asked further “if unavoidably one had to dispense with any of these three, which of them would you forego?” the master replied, “let go of the military strength.” the disciple next asked: if one had, unavoidably, to dispense with one of the remaining two, which should go first? the master said, “do without the food, for from of old there has always been death, but without such confidence (trust) a people cannot stand. (12:7) mutual trust, among the people and their leaders, is thus the most essential ingredient of any human society – a principle that underlies another response of confucius to the question of what is essential to government: should you try to lead them by means of regulations or keep order among them through laws and punishments, the people will evade these and lack any sense of shame. lead them [on the other hand] by personal virtue [de] and keep order among them through rites [li], then the people, having a sense of shame, will correct themselves. (2:3) here confucius’ depreciation of laws and punishment fits with his eschewal of coercive force (“military strength”) except as a possible backup and not as a first choice, in the passage just cited before. for him voluntarism is the basic predicate of any human society, as it had been traditionally in households cooperatively engaged in family-managed agriculture. one can rely better on a person’s or people’s sense of self -respect (the corollary of “the sense of shame” referred to here) to motivate people’s cooperation with their leaders; as the latter’s personal virtue should exhibit exemplary self-respect combined with respect for others. note however that personal virtue and respect alone are not enough; the rites are especially involved and indispensable. this is because rites and proper customs establish practical norms of why we read the analects of confucius 36 conduct that are themselves voluntaristic and cooperative – educational and not coercive. they are the means by which the self, in the normal process of life, engages with others. they give form to things, forms and norms naturally conducive to the harmonious development of human relations or political action. this is the basis for the “harmony” that others have seen as the keynote of confucianism, whether they always understood its voluntarism or cooperation in the same terms. when prince shōtoku in seventh century ce japan tried to incorporate confucianism in its first formal constitution, the first word was “harmony” and it is followed by his exhortation on behalf of a consensual society. much later, after the communists in china recoiled from the vicious class struggle of the cultural revolution, they turned back, at least in name, to confucian harmony as an essential chinese value to undergird “chinese socialism”. much more is said in the analects about the rites (or ritual decorum) in daily life, as it relates to personal and social health. but i am limiting myself in this essay only to a few keynotes one encounters in a first reading that give us initial bearings on what follows in the text. in the remainder of this essay i wish to focus on something no less important to one’s reading of the analects than his key teachings: the image of confucius and his sense of personal vocation and mission. this image of him has shown through the pages of the analects as almost more compelling and memorable even than his teachings and aphorisms, to such an extent that, despite his own disclaimers of his disciples’ attributions of sagehood to him, among latter-day confucians the picture of him as he appeared in the analects became the very model of the sage (though none could hardly boast of emulating the modesty of the sage). the first thing to be noted is his becoming modesty and lack of pretension to great personal authority, already implicit in the conversational mode of the opening lines. he did not claim to be proclaiming any new order or teaching. “i am a transmitter, not a creator” (7:1) he said. whether he was actually creative in the process of transmitting, i.e., in his interpretation and exposition of ancient ideals, is another question, but posterity has generally judged him so. one must also allow for the possibility that, “in transmitting” what he had received from past tradition, he was being more than just conservative. the upholding of past ideals could also seem as a critique of existing institutions that failed to measure up. thus one episode in confucius’ teaching career portrays him, in the course of his travels, sending a disciple to ask directions from a farmer along the way, who when he learns that the disciple’s master is confucius, recognizes the latter as a would be counselor to rulers, going from state to state looking for one who would take his advice. the farmer bespeaks a skeptical view of this mission; he regards the world as so unruly that the best one can do is attend to his own field. “instead following a scholar who distances himself from one ruler after another, it would be better to follow one who withdraws from the whole world of men.” 37 de bary when the disciple reported this to confucius, the master sighed and said: one cannot herd with the beasts or flock with the birds. if i am not to go along in the company of other human beings, with whom should i associate? if the way prevailed in the world, i would not be trying to change things.” (18.6) mere “transmitter” though he was, confucius saw his mission as trying to change things. received tradition itself contained the seeds of reform, the need to rectify evils that would not just resolve themselves. confucius was known in his time as a scholar persistent in his call to be of public service, but equally for his diffidence in serving any ruler whose actions were inconsistent with his own principles. on another occasion someone asked confucius, “why does the master not take part in government?” the master said “what do the documents [the book of history] say about being filial? be filial. just being filial and being friendly with one’s brothers contributes to the government. why should one have to take office to do this?” (2:21). again confucius’s answer is somewhat terse and a little oblique, but it takes us back to where we started in the analects: filiality as the value underlying all social and civic virtue. public service is not performed only by those in office; anyone who practices and promotes such civic virtues is rendering a public service. and indeed the practice of such values is the precondition for anyone who might qualify for office. elsewhere confucius says: one should not be anxious about having an official position but about having the wherewithal to hold office. one should not be anxious about not being recognized [for office] but about not being worthy of such recognition. (4:14) again we are taken back to the starting point of our reading: the noble person who can stand on his own even if he is not recognized. the course he has followed (and we in following the analects thus far) is summed up in confucius’ own brief summation of his life experience: at 15 i set my heart on learning. at 30 i was established in its pursuit. by 40 i had no great doubts [about what i was doing]. at 50 i heard what heaven commanded of me. at 60 i could heed it. at 70 i could follow my heart’s desire without transgressing. (2:4) in the light of our previous discussion we may be able to fill in the spaces in this spare outline of his personal history. that it starts with learning we already know. that it takes time to learn from the past and others’ experience we can readily understand. confucius’ growing from adolescence to increasing security at 30 and maturity at 40 – these are familiar stages in the life process. what may be somewhat unexpected is that only at 50 did he “hear” what heaven expected of him. the language used here for “heaven’s command” is itself not unfamiliar, but earlier it had referred to what is usually translated as “the mandate of heaven” [tian ming], a claim made by rulers or why we read the analects of confucius 38 their spokesman to justify their taking power and exercising authority, ostensibly in the name of heaven. for confucius that claim could only be considered legitimate if in fact the ruler or his dynasty ruled virtuously on behalf of the people. and it is this sense of responsibility attaching to the claim of legitimacy or public trust that is key to confucius’ understanding of heaven’s command or charge. confucius himself was in no position to rule. at some point nevertheless he must have felt that he had some capacity and obligation to make use of what he had learned on behalf of the public good. (whether or not this occurred exactly at 50 in this schematic sequence is not the point.) more significant is that confucius takes this change upon himself personally; it is not just a political concept applying to dynastic rulers, but a charge or commission heaven was entrusting directly to himself. we are already aware from other references to heaven in the analects that confucius felt some personal relation to it – a kind of religious relationship between heaven theistically conceived (divine creator) and its creation. heaven spoke directly and personally to him and he had a filial obligation to listen. confucianism may not be thought of as a “religion” in the usual sense, but confucius bespoke a reverential attitude toward heaven, and the deep respect in which he held all life was a reflection of this. in response to questions put to him by disciples about the noble person, he said: “he cultivates himself with reverence” (14:45), and even more to the point here: “without knowing (or understanding) what heaven has ordained [tian ming], i.e., its charge or command, one has no way to become a noble person” (20:3). indeed, the attitude and virtue of reverence remained a key element in later confucianism. it was not a purely secular ethic as some have supposed it to be. but if heaven charged confucius personally with a responsibility for public service, we know already how conflicted he was about taking office and we can understand the difficulty he might face in trying to carry out that charge. this is perhaps why it took him time (here, another ten years) actually to “heed” what we he had heard earlier, i.e., to find a way to resolve his conscience in this regard. my own supposition is that his resolution of the matter was in keeping with the response he gave to those who had questioned him about his refusal to take office: both in the given circumstances and in the larger scheme of things; taking office was not the only way to fulfill one’s obligation to be of service to heaven and humankind. teaching was also a public service when it contributed to the individual’s and people’s education on behalf of the public trust. finally when we are told that at 70 confucius had satisfied his heart’s desire, we are reminded that at 15 he had “set his heart on learning,” and so the outcome – his satisfaction as a scholar and teacher in lieu of an official career – fulfilled not only that early aspiration but also any political ambitions he might have had, in carrying out heaven’s charge to him. this was not accomplished without struggle of the kind that one might endure who had to bear the burden of 39 de bary humaneness to the end. it was, after all, an end marked by some measure of satisfaction and fulfillment. to be sure this was not exactly a supreme epiphany or sudden moment of enlightenment, but rather a threshold of accumulated learning and experience. nor does it, on the other hand, result from the sort of profound confrontation with evil and suffering that we see, say, in st. augustine or dostoyevsky. in such a range of perspectives, one could see it as a relatively optimistic or even idealistic view of life. but it is reassuring for those who have followed him in the analects to believe that this good man could live out a life worthy of a truly noble man – the goal he set out for himself at the start. epilogue the foregoing is just one among several ways of explaining why or how we read the analects. there are others too. however important it is to read the text directly and personally, the one we read always bears the imprint of the tradition that has passed it on. and if we want to know how others have received and understood it, showing a decent respect for the opinions of readers and writers before us in other places and times, we might go on to consider how it was understood by those who had a major impact on other civilized peoples. this would be especially true of those east asian peoples whose education was structured in the form given by the pervasive neo-confucian movement from the eleventh to the nineteenth centuries. in this long pre-modern period the analects was read as one of the so-called “four books”, a special packaging of the confucian classics mainly attributed to the great neoconfucian philosopher zhu xi (1130–1200 ce). in that form the analects was not the first thing one read. it came after text of the great learning, a chapter from the record of rites [liji] attributed to confucius’ disciple zengzi, which was provided with a special preface and commentary by zhu xi that he thought propedeutic to any reading of the other classics included in the four books. thus how one read the analects itself was conditioned by zhu’s own way of introducing us to “how to read a book.” the book is still a classic, but now the product of a subsequent tradition, so this is not exactly the same as “reading it in the original.” zu xi was now presenting it in a form adapted to his own age, in which “new age” confucians, i.e. neoconfucians, responded to the challenge of mahayana buddhism by providing a metaphysical explanation to accompany the text. the basic message remained the same as zhu xi summed it up in his preface: “self-cultivation for the governance of humankind” [xiuji zhiren], a memorable slogan in later literature. now however it was elaborated on in terms of a new cosmology and a more sophisticated philosophy of human nature [dao xue and xingli xue]. 5 it did not take long however for even this neo-confucian version of the traditional classic to be called into question by text critics in the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, who pointed out differences between these supposed “classic” or traditional four books and the versions that had been “classic” before. this led inevitably to efforts by modern critics to rediscover or reconstruct “the original analects.” if we want to incorporate any of these new versions into our why we read the analects of confucius 40 own core curriculum, however, which are we to choose? no working curriculum that tries to provide a humanities component for undergraduate education (or even alongside graduate training) can get into all of the complexities that this historical development entails. if we read what some modern scholar reconstructs as the original analects, it is not what traditional education in east asia would have recognized, nor what would have entered into the intellectual and moral formation of generations of east asians. it would simply be another academic discovery. there is no perfect solution to this educational dilemma, but if we are wiling to think of working, rather than final, solutions, we can try to provide a repertoire of approaches by which one can adapt these resources to different educational situations and different levels of learning. the important thing is that the first reading be a personal encounter with a classic text (however “classic” may be interpreted), and that it be understood as only a first reading, to be followed up as best one can by more or other readings. notes 1. see proceedings of the conference on classics for an emerging world, columbia university, january 19–20, 2008, published by the university committee on asia and the middle east, new york, 2008. 2. all translations are by the author. 3. in the context of the times one understands that junzi refers most directly to male heirs of the aristocracy, but the second half of the compound –zi is literally “child” and not gender specific. thus later japanese empresses could appropriate to themselves the expression tianzi, normally understood in china as “son of heaven.” they were clearly open to their own hereditary claim to be a “child of heaven” regardless of gender. still later in china jun could be a suffix applied to women as well. 4. ezra pound, as a poet and amateur translator playing around with the analects, notes that the character for xin (trust) included the graph for man or person at the left and the graph for “word” or “saying” bedside it on the right, which suggested to him the felicitous rendering of it as “man standing by his word.” 5. incidentally, this is how the analects was reported on by the american art critic ernest fenollosa, who read it in a japanese edition of the four books and handed it on to people like ezra pound. but this is what we all do – read it on the recommendation of someone else in a form more or less adapted to the latest scene. microsoft word eif-5-final.docx [expositions 8.1 (2014) 50–58] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 evolution and value francisco j. ayala university of california, irvine “man is an ethical animal; in fact he is the ethical animal. his ethicizing is a biological adaptation necessary to success in his way of life.” g.g. simpson, biology and man1 values are a universal attribute of humankind. all humans have moral values; that is, they accept standards according to which their conduct is judged right or wrong, good or evil. people have also other sorts of values: economic, aesthetic, gastronomic, and so on. where do moral values come from? some moral values are widespread and perhaps universal, like not to kill, not to steal, and to honor one’s parents. but the moral values by which people judge their behavior vary at present from culture to culture and have changed in important ways through historical times. different ethnic groups, different nationalities, different tribes, and even different individuals exhibit different moral values and different norms by which they evaluate their actions. think of the difference between a modern american and an islamic fundamentalist with respect to the rights of women, or between most modern americans and the official doctrine of the current russian government concerning homosexuality.2 darwin expressed horror at the burning of widows by hindus and thought absurd the proscription of muslim women to expose their faces. diversity of values occurs also among individuals within a single country or a single cultural group. among modern americans as well as among individuals in other western countries, there is considerable variation, for example, concerning the rights of homosexuals. even with respect to seemingly universal values, there is variation among cultural groups and among individuals when we get down to specifics. the value of human life and the commandment “thou shall not kill” would seem at first universal, but abortion will be accepted by some and not others. when a newborn will face a life of misery because of physical handicaps, or when a child is unwanted by the mother, it would seem, to many but not to all, that abortion is the more ethical option. withdrawing life-support machinery from an unconscious or intensely suffering terminal patient will be judged by many as an act of mercy, not a crime. killing the enemy is perceived as a duty for a soldier engaged in war. ethical values have substantially changed through history and continue to change in recent times. apartheid was the official policy of the government of south africa, and variations of apartheid were practiced for centuries until recently in the south of the united states. our individual and collective responsibility towards nature as a whole has become accepted by people only recently. the philosopher peter singer has argued that people have gradually over 51 ayala the course of history enlarged the range of beings whose interests they value as they value their own.3 and as steven pinker has written, much of our recent social history […] consists of the moralization or amoralization of particular kinds of behavior […]. f]or example […], smoking is now treated as immoral […]. at the same time, many behaviors have been ammoralized, switched from moral failings to lifestyle choices. they include divorce, illegitimacy, working mothers, marijuana use and homosexuality.4 where do moral values come from? i will, first, explore the origins of language, another human universal. all humans, and only humans, communicate by means of symbolic, creative language. animals phylogenetically close to us, for example chimpanzees, communicate by gestures and sounds. humpback whales communicate by seemingly specific sounds. the “language” of the bees and other social insects, as well as the chemical communication of other insects, is symbolic, but it is genetically determined, not creative. it seems that when we consider the origins of human language we may refer to either one of two different issues. one issue concerns the origin of the human capacity for symbolic language. the other issue is the origin of specific languages, such as english, spanish, or chinese. the human capacity for language required the evolution of three novel features that happened in humans and only in humans. first, in order to have human language we need an organ able to produce sounds capable of modulating vowels and consonants; second, humans need to have the means of phonetic and semantic identification so as to associate meaning with specific combinations of vowels and consonants; and third, human language requires the combination of phonetic and semantic units capable of generating an unlimited number of messages subjected to syntactic rules. human language is creative in two different ways. we combine basic sounds, phonemes, to form words; and we combine words to form sentences.5 the second question about the origins of language concerns the origin of particular languages, something that grammarians and other linguists have been investigating for decades. french and spanish are phylogenetically closely related, having a common origin in latin. they are less related to greek languages modern or classic, and still less to persian or ancient sanskrit. darwin saw an analogy between the evolution of languages and the evolution of species: the formation of different languages and of distinct species, and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously the same... we find in distinct languages striking homologies due to community of descent and analogies due to a similar process of formation... languages, like organic beings, can be classed in groups under groups; and they can be classed... naturally according to descent. dominant languages and dialects spread widely and lead to the gradual extinction of other tongues.6 in summary, the human capacity for language is an outcome of biological evolution, depending on the evolution of certain anatomical and physiological attributes associated with the ability to produce precise sounds, but also depending in a most fundamental way on the evolution and value 52 evolution of the advanced intelligence that is distinctively associated with human nature. the origin of particular languages is determined not by biological evolution but by cultural evolution, the preferences and experience of human societies, which are different in different human groups and which change through times. similarly as in the origin of language, the origin of ethical values refers to two different questions. the first question is more fundamental; it asks whether or not human nature is such that we are necessarily inclined to have values, including ethical values, by which (the “moral sense”) we identify our actions as either right or wrong. affirmative answers to this first question do not necessarily determine what values we may have. even if we conclude that people cannot avoid having values, including moral standards of conduct, it might be that the choice of the particular standards used for judgment would be arbitrary. the propensity for having values does not necessarily determine what these values should be, similarly as the capacity for language does not determine which language we shall speak. i propose that humans are value-prone beings by their biological nature. humans make value choices, evaluate their behavior as either right or wrong, moral or immoral, as a consequence of their eminent intellectual capacities that include self-awareness and abstract thinking. these intellectual capacities are products of the evolutionary process, but they are distinctively human. secondly, i argue that the values we have, including the moral norms according to which we evaluate particular actions as either morally good or morally bad (as well as the grounds that may be used to justify the values) are products of cultural evolution, not of biological evolution. the values preferred, including the norms of morality, belong, in this respect, to the same category of phenomena as the languages spoken by different peoples, their political and religious institutions, as well as the arts, sciences, and technology. the existence of values depends on the existence of human biological nature. moreover, the choice and persistence of values is facilitated whenever they are consistent with biologically conditioned human attributes and behaviors. but the values are independent of such attributes and behaviors in the sense that some values may not favor, and may hinder, the survival and reproduction of the individual and its genes, which survival and reproduction are the targets of biological evolution. discrepancies between accepted values and biological survival are, however, necessarily limited in scope or would otherwise lead to the extinction of the individuals and populations accepting such discrepant rules. the existence of values depends on the ability of humans to anticipate the consequences of their own actions. pulling the trigger, eating vegetables, or taking care of the sick have human value only if i can anticipate their consequences. only if i can anticipate that pulling the trigger will shoot the bullet, which in turn will strike and kill my enemy, can the action of pulling the trigger be evaluated as nefarious. pulling a trigger is not in itself a moral action; it becomes so by virtue of its relevant consequences. i choose to eat vegetables for reasons of health and i help a sick person because this will improve that person’s well-being. the ability to anticipate the consequences of one’s actions is closely related to the ability to establish the connection between means and ends: that is, of seeing a mean precisely as mean, as 53 ayala something that serves a particular end or purpose. this ability to establish the connection between means and their ends requires the ability to anticipate the future and to form mental images of realities not present or not yet in existence. the ability to establish the connection between means and ends happens to be the fundamental intellectual capacity that has made possible the development of human culture and technology. the evolutionary roots of this capacity may be found in the evolution of the erect position, which transformed the anterior limbs of our ancestors from organs of locomotion into organs of manipulation. the hands thereby gradually became organs adept for the construction and use of objects for hunting and other activities that improved survival and reproduction, i.e., that increased the reproductive fitness of their carriers. the construction of tools depends not only on manual dexterity, but in perceiving them precisely as tools, as objects that help to perform certain actions, that is, as means that serve certain ends or purposes: a knife for cutting, an arrow for hunting, an animal skin for protecting the body from the cold. natural selection promoted the intellectual capacity of our biped ancestors, because increased intelligence facilitated the perception of tools as tools, and therefore their construction and use, with the ensuing amelioration of biological survival and reproduction. the development of the intellectual abilities of our ancestors took place over two million years or longer, gradually increasing the ability to connect means with ends and, hence, the possibility of making ever more complex tools serving remote purposes. the ability to anticipate the future, essential for ethical behavior, is therefore closely associated with the development of the ability to construct tools, an ability that has produced the advanced technologies of modern societies and that is largely responsible for the success of mankind as a biological species. from its obscure beginnings in africa, mankind has spread over the whole earth except the frozen wastes of antarctica, and has become the most numerous species of mammal. numbers may not be an unmixed blessing, but they are a measure of biological success.7 in addition to being able to anticipate the consequences of our actions, values require the capacity to make value judgments, to perceive certain objects or deeds as more desirable than others. only if i can see the death of my enemy as preferable to his survival (or vice versa) can the action leading to his demise be thought as valuable. if the alternative consequences of an action are neutral with respect to value, the action obviously cannot be characterized as valuable. the ability to make value judgments depends on the capacity for abstraction, i.e., on the capacity to perceive actions or objects as members of general classes. this makes it possible to compare objects or actions with one another and to perceive some as more desirable than others. the capacity for abstraction requires an advanced intelligence such as it exists in humans and apparently in them alone, and it is, therefore, also an outcome of human evolution. there is a third requirement for attributing value to a particular behavior or object; namely, the ability to choose between alternative courses of actions. pulling the trigger can be a value action only if i have the option not to pull it. a necessary action beyond our control is not a value, even if it may be good for us. the circulation of the blood or the process of food digestion are not value actions. evolution and value 54 whether there is free will is a question much discussed by philosophers and this is not the appropriate place to review the arguments. i only will advance two considerations which are common sense evidence of the existence of free will. one is our personal experience, which indicates that the possibility to choose between alternatives is genuine rather than only apparent. the second consideration is that when we confront a given situation that requires action on our part, we are able mentally to explore alternative courses of action, thereby extending the field within which we can exercise our free will. in any case, if there were no free will, there would be no ethical behavior; morality would only be an illusion. the point that i want to make here is, however, that free will is dependent on the existence of a well-developed intelligence, which makes it possible to explore alternative courses of action and to choose one or another in view of the anticipated consequences. in summary, values are attributes of the biological make-up of humans and, hence, they exist as consequences of biological evolution.8 now i turn to the second question: whence do our values come? are they determined by our human nature, that is, are they necessary consequences of biological evolution? the answer is no. human values are not determined by biological evolution, but by cultural evolution. values differ among human societies and even among human individuals, even within the same human population or human social group; and human values change through time, that is, not only in the scale of human evolution (hundreds of thousands or millions of years), but in the scale of human history (hundreds or thousands of years), and even in the scale of a human life (tens of years). religious beliefs, social and political institutions, family traditions and education, all impact the values we hold, and of course we have our own preferences and make our individual choices. in particular, it is often the case that the value systems held by many individuals derive from their religious convictions. there is no necessary, or logical, connection between religious faith and moral principles and other values, although there usually is a motivational or psychological connection. religious beliefs do explain why people accept particular values, because they are motivated to do so by their religious convictions. but in following the moral and other dictates of one’s religion, an individual is not rationally justifying the moral norms that he or she accepts. it may well be that the motivational connection between religious beliefs and ethical norms and other values is the decisive one for the religious believer. but this is true in general: most people, religious or not, accept a particular set of values for social reasons, without trying to justify it rationally by means of a theory from which the moral norms can be logically derived. people accept the values that prevail in their societies, because they have learned such norms from parents, school, or other authorities.9 i should add, however, that value systems, like any other cultural activities, cannot long survive if they run outright contrary to our biology. our values must be consistent with biological nature, because values can only exist in human individuals and in human societies. one might therefore also expect, and it is the case, that accepted values will often promote behaviors which increase the biological adaptation of those who behave according to them. but this is neither necessary nor indeed always the case. 55 ayala notes 1. simpson 1969, 137. 2. as late as 1969, homosexuality was illegal in the united states in every state except illinois. “today homosexuality has been legalized in almost 120 countries, though laws against it remain on the books of another 80, mostly in africa, the caribbean, oceania, and the islamic world. worse, homosexuality is punishable by death in mauritania, saudi arabia, sudan, yemen, parts of nigeria, parts of somalia, and all of iran.” see pinker 2011, 449–450. 3. singer 1981/2011. 4. pinker 2008, 34. 5. see, for example, cela-conde and ayala 2007, particularly chapter 10. 6. darwin 1871, i, 60. 7. see ayala 2010. 8. thomas nagel in his mind and cosmos (2012, 66 and elsewhere) argues that the explanation of conscious life, and indeed of biological evolution on the whole, requires that “there are natural teleological laws governing the development of organization over time […] in spite of the exclusion of teleology from contemporary science, it shouldn’t be ruled out a priori” (emphasis added). first, let me make it clear that teleology has not been excluded from contemporary science. i will adduce as, i hope, definitive exhibit my own extensive writings on the subject; for example ayala 1968, 1970, 1974, 1998, 1999, 2008. teleology and teleological explanations are used by evolutionary biologists in order to account for the functional features of organisms, their “design,” in terms of the goals or purposes they serve. physical scientists do not face similar demands. the configuration of sodium chloride depends on the structure of sodium and chlorine, but no chemist is likely to write that sodium chloride has been designed for certain purposes, such as tasting salty. the revolution of the earth around the sun results from the laws of gravity, but astrophysicists do not state that this happens in order to produce the seasons. an object or behavior can be said to be teleological, or telic, when it gives evidence of design or appears to be directed towards certain ends, goals, or purposes. for example, the behavior of human beings is often teleological. a person who buys an airplane ticket, reads a book, or cultivates the earth is trying to achieve a certain goal: getting to a given city, acquiring knowledge, or getting food. objects and machines made by people also are usually teleological: a knife is made for cutting, a clock is made for telling time, a thermostat is made to regulate temperature. in a similar fashion, i argue, features of organisms have come to be because they serve certain purposes or functions, and in this evolution and value 56 sense they can be said to be teleological: a bird’s wings are for flying, eyes are for seeing, and kidneys are constituted for regulating the composition of the blood. the features of organisms that may be said to be teleological are those that can be identified as adaptations, whether they are structures like a wing or a hand, processes like the regulation of temperature in mammals, or behaviors like the courtship displays of a peacock. adaptations are features of organisms that have come about by natural selection because they increase the reproductive success of their carriers. teleological explanations apply only to features or behaviors that would not have come about were it not for the particular end or purpose they serve. the end, goal, or purpose served is, therefore, the explanatory reason for the existence of the feature or behavior and its distinctive characteristics. a teleological hypothesis purports to identify the function or purpose that accounts for the evolution of a particular feature. of course, teleology and teleological explanations as used by biologists are very different notions from the vague, universal teleology offered by nagel “as possibilities, without positive conviction” (2012, 124). according to him, “if evolutionary biology is a physical theory—as it is generally taken to be—then it cannot account for the appearance of consciousness and of other phenomena that are not physically reducible” (nagel 2012, 14–15). it is apparent in this quote, and indeed throughout the whole chapter on “antireductionism and the natural order,” that nagel fails to distinguish between two kinds of reductionism: ontological reductionism and epistemological reductionism. evolutionists, myself included, and most biologists sustain ontological reductionism, but not epistemological reductionism—a distinction that i explain in the ensuing two paragraphs. organisms are complex self-organizing entities made up of parts: organs, tissues, cells, organelles, and ultimately molecules and atoms. issues about the relationship between organisms and their physical components, or between biology and the physical sciences, arise in at least two domains. reduction questions arise, first, in a domain that may be called ontological, structural, or constitutive. the issue here is whether or not physicochemical entities and processes underlie all living phenomena. are organisms constituted of the same components as those making up inorganic matter? or, do organisms consist of other entities besides molecules and atoms? ontological reductionism claims that organisms are exhaustively composed of nonliving parts; no substance or other residue remains after all atoms making up an organism are taken into account. ontological reductionism also implies that the laws of physics and chemistry fully apply to all biological processes at the level of atoms and molecules. a different reduction question concerns issues that may be called epistemological, theoretical, or explanatory. the fundamental issue here is whether or not the theories and laws of biology can be derived from the laws and theories of physics and chemistry. epistemological reductionism is concerned with the question of whether biology may be ignored as a separate science because it represents simply a special case of physics and 57 ayala chemistry. when philosophers of science speak of reductionism, they generally refer to epistemological reduction. in biology, the question of epistemological reduction is whether or not the laws and theories of biology can be shown to be derived as special cases from the laws and theories of the physical sciences, which i contend they are not (ayala 1968 and 1987). nagel’s mistake is to conclude from the fact that evolutionists are (ontological) reductionists that they therefore cannot explain human behavior (and much else) with their theories. but this does not follow, since evolutionary theories are epistemologically antireductionist. evolutionists use distinctive theories and laws that cannot be reduced to, or explained by, the laws of physics and chemistry. works cited ayala, francisco j. 1968. “biology as an autonomous science.” american scientist 56: 207– 221. _____. 1970. “teleological explanations in evolutionary biology.” philosophy of biology 37: 1–15. _____. 1974. “philosophical issues.” in evolution, by theodosius dobzhansky, francisco j. ayala, g. ledyard stebbins, and james w. valentine, 474–516. san francisco: freeman. _____. 1987. “biological reductionism: the problems and some answers.” in selforganizing systems: the emergence of order, edited by f. eugene yates, 315–324. new york and london: plenum press. _____. 1998. “teleological explanations versus teleology.” history and philosophy of the life sciences 20: 41–50. _____. 1999. “adaptations and novelty: teleological explanations in evolutionary biology.” history and philosophy of the life sciences 21: 3–33. _____. 2008. “reduction, emergence, naturalism, dualism, teleology: a précis.” in back to darwin: a richer account of evolution, edited by john b. cobb, jr., 76–87. grand rapids, mi: wm. b. eerdmans publishing company. _____. 2010. “what the biological sciences can and cannot contribute to ethics.” in contemporary debates in philosophy of biology, edited by francisco j. ayala and robert arp, 316–336. malden, ma: wiley-blackwell. cela-conde, camilo j., and francisco j. ayala. 2007. human evolution. trails from the past. oxford and new york: oxford university press. evolution and value 58 darwin, charles. 1871. the descent of man and selection in relation to sex. 2 vols. london: john murray. nagel, thomas. 2012. mind and cosmos: why the materialist neo-darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false. new york: oxford university press. pinker, steven. 2008. “the moral instinct.” the new york times magazine, january 13, 34ff. _____. 2011. the better angels of our nature: why violence has declined. new york: viking press. simpson, george gaylord. 1969. biology and man. new york: harcourt, brace & world. singer, peter. 1981/2011. the expanding circle. ethics and sociobiology. princeton, nj: princeton university press. microsoft word mack-final.docx [expositions 10.1 (2016) 40–51] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 framing student appropriation of catholic social teachings and tradition heather mack heather mack consulting llc in its attempt to enhance the role of catholic social teachings and tradition (cst) in american catholic colleges and universities, the catholic social teaching learning and research initiative has developed a rubric entitled “student appropriation of catholic social teachings and tradition.”1 the rubric offers a starting point for articulating the expectations a cst program might have for its students. several steps are still to follow in the rubric’s development; the most critical is piloting the rubric to learn what aspects of it resonate, along with what aspects miss the mark.2 this article reviews the development of the rubric, discusses its structure and rationale, and indicates some limitations to its use. the aim is to lay the groundwork for further systematic inquiry into cst-based learning outcomes in higher education. background the catholic social teaching learning and research initiative seeks to enhance college students’ appropriation of cst, particularly through high-quality cst programming. the focus is on how students at catholic colleges and universities—whether they are catholic or not—learn about and appropriate cst. early on, the initiative loosely defined “appropriation” as sustained identification with, and display of, any paradigm’s interdependent components, including but not limited to knowledge, attitudes, and values; actions, decisions, and behaviors; and skills. of the many potential approaches to enhancing cst programming, the initiative took an early interest in assessment. the initiative accordingly sought additional experienced members in institutional research and assessment to complement its cadre of dedicated cst practitioners, instructors, and scholars. the initiative met in april 2014 to welcome new members and to identify priority areas of investigation. the chief objective emerging from discussion was to demonstrate and improve the effectiveness of curricular and co-curricular cst programming for students. 41 mack the initiative set about identifying successful cst programs, intending to begin by collecting the best practices of successful cst programming, and then to communicate these results for the benefit and improvement of cst programming elsewhere. initial research quickly indicated, however, that no criteria could be identified in the scholarship to measure cst programming effectiveness. this lacuna led the members of the initiative to assume responsibility for generating an assessment framework, which could serve as an essential starting point. thus, the creation of a cst rubric became one of the initiative’s key projects. the objective of the rubric team was to design and validate a framework distinguishing levels of cst appropriation. the task at hand appeared to be simple. in order to ask what cst programs could learn from other successful programs, it was necessary to ask which cst programs merited designation as “successful.” this required a common definition of “high achieving.” in academic programming terms, the achievement sought is termed the “student learning outcome” (slo), or in this case cst slo. with no readily available cst student learning outcomes in the literature, the initiative identified “student appropriation of cst” as a way of connoting a student’s grasp of cst principles, the adoption of values informed by cst principles, and the influence of cst principles both in shortand long-term choices and behaviors. in addition to defining success, the initiative needed some way to evaluate the degree to which that success had been achieved. however, appropriation is a process that happens over time in fits and starts, and an institution’s intended degree of cst appropriation by its second-semester freshmen is likely to vary significantly from the intentions it has for its graduates. for instance, one program may intend to bring a student from complete ignorance of cst to a point of openness toward the potential legitimacy of a range of social justice principles, while a different program may intend to facilitate a student’s integration of cst principles exclusively into decisions about career track. framing student appropriation of catholic social teaching 42 43 mack rubric structure intended scope by “appropriation,” the initiative seeks to address (1) the integration of beliefs and values, (2) the adoption of corresponding behaviors, actions, and decisions, and (3) comprehension of the content, tradition, and context of cst principles. the rubric’s scope targets undergraduates enrolled at catholic higher education institutions who have been exposed to at least some formal cst programming delivered by that institution. students with no exposure to cst programming do not figure in the rubric. however, the rubric’s scope may be said to inadvertently target an even narrower pool of students. the targeted students enjoy life circumstances which allow them to access and attend post-secondary school. accordingly, the targeted students for this rubric possess at least some degree of affluence or privilege. furthermore, the rubric will perhaps apply best—if not exclusively—to american undergraduates, as all contributors to date have been contributors to the american catholic higher education landscape. the scope of the rubric is intentionally broad when it comes to faith orientations, in that it purposely does not include a category addressing students’ religiosity. rigorous instruments to measure and interpret students’ faith levels, religious beliefs, and engagement are currently available. the rubric team focused on topics less-represented in the literature rather than duplicating existing contributions. scale the scale describes a student’s degree of appropriating cst or achieving cst slos. the scale does not necessarily correlate to the frequency of a student’s exposure to cst programming. any inclination to presume a student’s level of cst appropriation, based primarily on the quantity or frequency of a student’s exposure to cst programming, should be avoided. framing student appropriation of catholic social teaching 44 categories the rubric includes seven categories. category category addresses student… description of cst framework comprehension of cst’s religious and intellectual contexts recognition of cst principles comprehension of cst content knowledge of history of cst comprehension of cst’s historical context social context/perspectives comprehension of the consequences of oppression decision-making approach application of cst as a personal and civic value acting for justice behavior in response to the consequences of oppression vocational implications application of cst as a professional value intended users and uses the rubric was designed with two primary users and one secondary user in mind. the primary users are faculty and staff who work with cst programming. two uses are intended for this population. the first is to assist cst programs in designing or improving program assessment, so that the assessment better serves the success of the program. the second is for cst programs to consider the rubric in defining, or clarifying, their program objectives and cst slos. the secondary intended users are scholars. the intended uses for scholars are to aid them in exploring new systematic inquiries into cst appropriation and to prod the continued refinement of a common cst appropriation framework across scholarly and practical pursuits. rubric development the initiative formed a voluntary team to design the rubric. the rubric team was chaired by a member with experience designing rubrics. the chair’s role was to provide and facilitate a process to transfer the expertise of the rubric team members into a coherent rubric. work on the rubric began in january 2015 with a review of content-relevant rubrics as well as a review of rubric design practices. the aac&u’s value rubrics served as helpful models.3 the next step was to identify the scale, which was originally envisioned as encompassing three levels. the terms “discovering,” “developing,” and “flourishing” were chosen as labels for these levels. 45 mack the rubric team focused on describing the flourishing level of appropriation. input about topics, categories, and components were solicited from (1) the rubric team, (2) all members of the initiative, and (3) attendees of the rubric team’s presentation during a february 2015 cst conference at the university of notre dame. conference attendees participated in small group discussion, completed a written questionnaire on-site, and received requests for input via e-mail after the session. many of these proposed improvements were incorporated in the developing draft. one rubric team member took the lead drafting the discovering level components. this level was initially crafted without attempting to align each item to the flourishing level. the early discovery level draft was circulated among the rubric team members for revisions. the team members began fitting the discovering and flourishing level components together only after completing independent drafts of both. at one point, the rubric team intended to create a middle level, but eventually the team decided, non-unanimously, to shift to a model of four levels with two middle levels unarticulated. a fourlevel model, it was thought, better reflects students’ encounters with cst. for instance, a student’s experience appropriating cst might challenge her preconceptions and long-held beliefs regarding social privilege and marginalization. she might toggle between embracing and rejecting aspects of cst—in some ways falling closer to flourishing, in other ways closer to discovering. further research is necessary to articulate the supposed “arc” of cst appropriation, calling for the expertise of researchers concerned with young adults’ cognitive and value development. finally, a plenary session at the initiative’s june 2015 meeting was dedicated to a review and discussion of the rubric draft. multiple rounds of revisions followed. expert input participation in the rubric development was open to anyone willing to contribute; national external input was solicited twice. the first solicitation was made at a february 2015 cst conference at notre dame led by several members of the initiative. the second formal request for feedback was emailed through professional networks in october 2015. rubric team members targeted cst experts in faculty, staff, and practitioner roles. responses were received from faculty and staff at eleven institutions. significant themes reverberating through the feedback included the lack of recognition of privilege of the student framing student appropriation of catholic social teaching 46 subject; the omission of issues related to the environment, workers’ rights, and gender; an unbalanced emphasis on cst knowledge over values and action; and undue favoring of individual action over participation in group action. additionally, several wording and editing recommendations were offered. these insights were embraced by the rubric team and efforts to integrate them began in november 2015. the cst experts also offered recommendations for potential uses of the rubric. a majority suggested using it both to establish a baseline prior to students’ participation in cst programming or cst courses and to assess achievement of student appropriation after such participation. this suggestion matched the initiative’s original intentions for the rubric. another common recommendation was to provide the rubric to faculty members as a resource to aid effective integration of cst into existing courses. other notable recommendations included (1) sharing the rubric with students, such as those in a first-year seminar, to make clear the goals of the course of study they were embarked upon; (2) introducing the rubric as a guide at the onset of a partnership with parties whose objectives do not include cst slos as a way to open discussion of intended partnership outcomes; and, finally, (3) applying the rubric to frame the analysis of existing qualitative data previously collected from students in cst programming. lessons from similar disciplines the cst rubric team benefited from assessment work in the fields of community engagement and service learning. on its face, the practice of course-based service learning may appear to be inherently beneficial to all stakeholders. however, research on service leaning community partner agencies reveals that unintended consequences and costs to service learning community partners can be so significant that these consequences outweigh the benefits agencies receive from the partnership.4 unintended consequences can include the overburdening of an agency with more students than it can accommodate, which agencies sometimes allow when they fear that the erection of boundaries might either damage their relationship with the higher education institution in question, or decrease the likelihood of accessing future benefits from it. costs can include the amount of time agency staff spend orienting, training, supervising, and evaluating students rather than attending to the agency’s priorities. another common cost to community partners can be the 47 mack need to pay overtime to staff to be on-site after hours, beyond the standard workday or workweek, in order to accommodate students’ availability. the community engagement (ce) community partnership rubric was designed as a user’s guide to ce partnerships, aimed at higher education practitioners with the best of intentions but without the opportunity to absorb the literature in the field about partnerships.5 essentially, the ce rubric allows practitioners to reflect on and gauge the quality of their partnerships with community agencies, illustrating improvements that might be prioritized. with the lessons of the ce rubric in mind, the cst rubric was designed to offer goalposts to cst programs, to use not only for assessing cst slos, but for reflecting on what the slos should be. limitations motivations the cst rubric does not maintain that students must self-identify primarily with cst in order to be considered “flourishing,” and self-identification with cst criteria is not a criterion for measuring a student’s level of cst appropriation. as was discussed in constructing the rubric, cst shares common values with other thought and belief systems. only the knowledge-related rubric characteristics distinguish between student appropriation of cst and other thought and belief systems. the rubric team repeatedly attempted to interject cst-specific qualifiers onto the observable actions and values, and was repeatedly humbled by the challenge. proponents of different systems may reach similar conclusions or pursue similar actions, leaving on-lookers unaware of differences in motivations and reasoning. the cst rubric includes components that users might feasibly directly measure. the rubric addresses knowledge, attitudes and values, and actions and decisions because all three are essential components of appropriation. arguably, the rubric emphasizes observable behavior and knowledge over attitudes and values. this observation, made by some respondents, points to a tension among rubric team members about the importance of motivation, intention, and selfawareness in defining cst appropriation. framing student appropriation of catholic social teaching 48 structure the decision not to articulate the levels between discovering and flourishing, for better or worse, leaves a great deal of room for interpretation and the harboring of conflicting assumptions about how to identify a student’s location on the scale. for instance, a student who expresses skepticism about cst may be considered by some to be in or below the discovering phase, while, depending on the context, others might see that student as nearing the flourishing stage. interpretations will likely depend on the user’s (1) experiences with students appropriating cst; (2) academic or professional discipline; and (3) personal familiarity with theories of development, conversion, etc. a future step for the development of the rubric could be articulation of levels two and three in the light of scholarly theories of development and the like. rubric team composition the volunteers participating in the initiative were identified through the networks of those who received the initial grant to begin a study on cst in higher education. they personally represent a dominant social perspective, and while their institutions’ student bodies include a variety of points along socio-economic and other social spectra, they are primarily white institutions. the initiative members’ disciplines span across the humanities and social sciences, including women’s studies and peace studies. as of january 2016, the only well-represented marginalized group to contribute to the framework’s development is women. accordingly, it is fair to say that the rubric largely has been composed from a dominant cultural perspective. it does not directly address the perspective of non-dominant cultures, though it has been modified more than once in an attempt to reduce the exclusion of non-dominant perspectives. a current step in the rubric’s development is the intentional recruitment of initiative members with non-dominant perspectives as well as solicitation of input from experts with non-dominant perspectives. it should also be acknowledged that the rubric represents the perspectives of higher education cst experts and practitioners. to date, design and validation of the tool have not included testing with students. this step is planned to begin in spring 2016. tensions and unintended consequences finally, a few cst experts noted sincere concern, bordering on distress, to see cst student appropriation parsed into a rubric. they worried that any framework, not just this one, carries the 49 mack risk of oversimplifying or reducing cst appropriation to the sum of its parts, which they consider to be wholly contrary to the heart of cst. such a negative, unintended consequence could inadvertently undermine the intended impact of the rubric, so it warrants consideration. as it is stated, the concern assumes that the rubric will replace current sensibilities and knowledge of cst efforts in higher education, and that it will stand alone, rather than alongside, existing and developing canon on the topic. in response, one point to note is that the definition of “appropriation” and the inclusion of multiple components are meant to suggest that the components are interdependent. an interesting question here is whether appropriation of some of the components, but not all, would be better or worse than appropriation of none at all. in any event, the rubric team took to heart the concern that the spirit of cst might be stymied from entering the hearts of students once the letter had been “bound” into a table. this concern invites a caution: the rubric is not a substitute for transformative experiences. in the end, the answer to the question of whether this rubric inspires more and better proliferation of cst programming rests in the hands of dedicated faculty, staff, and students. conclusion the cst rubric was designed to begin filling a gap in the literature that prevented the systematic investigation of the quality of cst programming for higher education students. systematic investigation depends on a recognized framework. by offering a framework to the field, the initiative’s intention is both to contribute to the improvement and proliferation of cst programming and to spur a variety of inquiries into existing and future cst slos. as it happens, the creation of the rubric has already achieved one of its goals. the very act of designing the rubric and inviting feedback has elevated discussion regarding the effectiveness and quality of cst programming and student learning outcomes. it is the rubric team’s hope that the public release of its work will fire the further development of this discussion in years to come. framing student appropriation of catholic social teaching 50 notes 1. the “rubric team” consisted principally of heather mack, now of heather mack consulting llc, formerly of loyola university new orleans; bernard prusak of king’s college (pa); jennifer reed-bouley of the college of saint mary (ne); margarita rose likewise of king’s college; and kathleen maas weigert of loyola university chicago. a full list of the collaborators in the catholic social teaching learning and research initiative is available at http://blogs.nd.edu/cstresearch/collaborators/. 2. it is expected the rubric will be finalized at the june 2016 meeting of the cst learning and research initiative. check http://blogs.nd.edu/cstresearch/ for updates. 3. see https://www.aacu.org/value/rubrics. 4. see littlepage et al. 2012; mack 2013; and sandy and holland 2006. 5. see brotzman et al. 2014. works cited brotzman, kelly, joseph deegan, and heather mack. 2014. “community partnerships rubric.” paper presenrted at the meeting of the international association for research on service learning and community engagement, tulane university, new orleans, louisiana, september 28, 2014. littlepage, l., b. gazley, and t.a. bennett. 2012. “service learning from the supply side: community capacity to engage students.” nonprofit management and leadership 22.3: 305–320. mack, heather. 2013. “exploring assumptions: impact of single-event service events on communities and students.” paper presented at the ajcu national conference on justice in higher education, creighton university, omaha, nebraska, august 3, 2013. 51 mack sandy, m., and b.a. holland. 2006. “different worlds and common ground: community partner perspectives on campus-community partnerships.” michigan journal of community service learning 13.1: 30–43. [expositions 6.1 (2012) 52–58] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 the search to be human in dangling man lee trepanier saginaw valley state university bellow’s first novel, dangling man (1944), is about a man named joseph who does not know how to integrate himself in american life without losing the spiritual value of his isolation from society. influenced by the current milieu of the time of modernism and existentialism, bellow presents an alienated hero who seeks to find meaning in a hostile environment. 1 written as a diary, the novel’s principal audience is himself as he details the life of a young man who believes that spiritual enlightenment can be obtained by isolating himself from society in order to study the thinkers of the enlightenment. as the months pass, joseph erupts into anti-social behavior, quarrels with his friends and relatives, and succumbs to outbursts of paranoia and violent behavior. at the end of the novel he admits that his experiment has been a failure and that his search for meaning cannot be conducted in this manner. reduced to the same common physical, social, and historical denominator as everyone else, joseph joins the army to live a life of regular hours and regimentation. initial reviews of the novel were positive and focused on the theme of joseph’s alienation from society: a “dangling hero” who faces the disillusionment of his age. 2 subsequent criticisms have explored joseph representing an alternate set of values for the modern age with his attempts to subvert the idea of an objective reality subscribed by collective assent. 3 other critics have looked at how the work is a continuation of the european form of the novel or how it is a metaphor of america recovering from the great depression and world war ii. 4 however, i want to focus on a theme that joseph baim raises in his criticism where he argues that dangling man should be conceived as a struggle between reason and nihilism with neither succeeding when the protagonist has an ultimate breakthrough in intuitive experience. 5 continuing this theme of baim’s, i will argue that joseph’s search for spiritual fulfillment, to be “human” in the present age, unfortunately fails because, although he finally understands the gratuitous nature of life, he remains trapped within his own rationality and ultimately cannot escape from it – a legacy from his studies of the enlightenment. the theme of the novel is recorded in the two interviews that joseph has with his alter ego, whom he calls tu as raison aussi. in these sessions, joseph denies it is impossible to be “human” in the present age, although the present is not as bad as it has been made out to be: “it’s too easy to abjure it or detest it. too narrow. too cowardly.” 6 however, the “ideal constructions” of the past, noble characters like “the humanistic full man, the courtly lover, the knight, the ecclesiastic,” can no longer serve as useful archetypes to guide people like joseph in the present age (102). ideal constructions are a product of belief and are sustainable only with the conviction that it is part of an enduring reality. to lose such a belief is to ask “what of the gap between the ideal construction and the real world, the truth?” (102). no answer is provided to joseph. the 53 trepanier result is an intellectual and spiritual paralysis from which joseph tries to extract himself in the hope to become “human.” before this crisis, joseph was a man of thought and a reader of books, with a particular interest in the enlightenment. it is crucial to note that throughout the novel joseph refuses to sacrifice his reason, even when his rational hopes in search of meaning collapses: “what were we given reason for? to discover the blessedness of unreason? that’s a very poor argument” (98). the belief in the potency of reason would explain joseph’s special interest in the enlightenment. to perceive and explain the world rationally was one of the great aspirations of the enlightenment and of joseph before his crisis. but the inability to anchor himself beyond his own reason creates the very crisis that engulfs joseph. he resists against the seductions of tu as raison aussi, but, in the end, the case for reason is unable to justify its own existence. with reason unable to support an intellectual and spiritual foundation for joseph, all he is left is the force of his own will: “out of my own strength it was necessary for me to return the verdict for reason, in its partial inadequacy, and against the advantages of its surrender” (47). but joseph avoids the trap of a nietzschean will-to-power when he visits his childhood room in his father’s house where he has a sudden vision. recognizing the transience of both his childhood and of the room, joseph concludes that life is fundamentally one of grace: recently i had begun to feel old, and it occurred to me that i might be concerned with age merely because i might never attain any great age, and that there might be a mechanism in us that tried to give us all of life when there was danger of being cut off […] this rather ordinary, and, in some ways mean, room had for twelve years been a standard site, the bearded persian under the round stones and the water color, fixtures of my youth […] i understood it to be a revelation of the ephemeral agreement by which we live and pace ourselves. i look around at the restored walls. this place which i avoided ordinarily, had great personal significance for me. (139) the mechanism that gives “us all of life when there was danger of being cut off” is the fundamental feature of reality that makes our existence one of surplus, a gift that permits us the freedom to choose our own intellectual and spiritual paths. the childhood room, which joseph usually avoids, has special significance only to him and no one else, an event that transcends one’s reason or will-to-power. human arrangements, the “ephemeral agreements by which we live and pace ourselves” are fundamentally unnecessary and therefore gratuitous in nature. tragically for joseph, this insight does not take root in him. instead of embracing that life is essentially a gift for us to cherish, he returns to his reason to observe that “birds flew this space [his room]. it may be gone fifty years hence. such reality, i thought is actually very dangerous, very treacherous. it should not be trusted” (139). seeking truth, reason must be retreat or face annihilation, for it confronts a reality which it cannot understand. at the end of the novel, joseph admits to himself that he has failed to use his freedom, his gift of existence, and that his selfthe search to be human in dangling man 54 identity has become increasingly fractured as his reason is unable to find ultimate meaning to what it means to be “human.” to preserve himself and his sanity, joseph abandons his reason for society’s arbitrary “agreements” by joining the army. paradoxically, joseph’s reliance upon his reason leads him to emotional outbursts throughout the novel. although he mentions on the first page of the novel that he will not be the stoic hero in the hemingway tradition – he is not going to endure the “inhibitory effect” of “closemouthed straight-forwardness” – but rather express his emotions at length both to himself and to others. 7 however, in trying to express his feelings of who he is and not being inhibited by family, friends, and societal opinion in his journal, joseph fails to find a self in his experimental confinement. instead of discovering a full-formulated self, joseph’s unconstrained pursuit leads to irrational and eventually violent behavior which he records but upon which he does not reflect. it is only when he fights with a fellow boarder does joseph become jolted out of his irrationality and closes his experiment. like joseph’s reason in not being able to provide answers to what it means to be “human,” so does his experiment in unconstrained emotions end in failure. this experiment that marked the beginning of the novel is replaced with joseph enlisting in the army, something that one would expect of a protagonist in a hemingway novel. in fact, joseph recognizes that hemingway’s stoicism is a response to the same question of what it means to be “human” in this present age: great pressure is brought to bear to make us undervalue ourselves. […] we are schooled in quietness and, if one of us takes his measures occasionally, he does so coolly, as if he were examining his fingernails, not his soul […] who can be the earnest huntsman of himself when he knows he is in turn a quarry? or nothing so distinctive as quarry, but one of a shoal, driven toward the weirs. (86) in a world without belief, how does one find a way to live, to be “human”? joseph’s answer suggests the hemingway model could be such a path, even though it is an “ideal construction” that is ultimately is illusionary. 8 the ironic ending of the novel underscores this point: hurray for regular hours! and for the supervision of the spirit! long live regimentation! (140) clearly to be “human” is not to adopt “regular hours” and “supervision of the spirit,” but to recognize that life is one of grace from which we can choose and live a life of the spirit. the tragedy of joseph is that he comes to this realization but later rejects it in the name of reason, but reason is not able to furnish him meaning to his life and thus leads him to surrender to an ideal construction that is neither real nor appealable. the result is he becomes relieved of his “selfdetermination” with his “freedom canceled” for societal authority. 55 trepanier joseph inability to cope with his freedom is a result of his program to become a self-educated man, an ideal construction of eighteenth-century rationalism. but when it comes to reflection upon himself, we find his thoughts are unsorted, with various musings here and there but no concluding statements. instead of philosophical examination, joseph writes of the quotidian, as when he observes himself in the mirror: […] i observed new folds near my mouth and, around my eyes and the root of my nose, marks that had not been there a year before. it is not pleasant to find such changes. but, tying my tie, i shrugged them off as inevitable, the price of experience, an outlay that had better be made ungrudgingly, since it was bound in any case to be collected. (127) the most intellectual passages in the diary are joseph’s conversations with tu as raison aussi that resembles a character from a dostoevsky’s novel. 9 the final exchange is one of selfmockery: “how seriously you take this,” cried tu as raison aussi. “it’s only a discussion. the boy’s teeth are chattering. do you have a chill?” he ran to get a blanket from the bed. i said, faintly, “i’m all right.” he tucked the blanket around me and, in great concern, wiped my forehead and sat by me until nightfall. (123) the lack of an orderly systematic way to organize his thoughts and his fear of abstract discourse in general are a reaction to such thought found in the character jimmy burns. in the past joseph and jimmy had a close working relationship. he is described by joseph as having “dreams of becoming an american robespierre. the rest have compromised themselves to the ears, but he still believes in the revolution. bloods will run, the power will change hands, and then the state will wither away according to the in-ex-or-able logic of history” (22). burns has systematized his rationalism to such an extent that “he had all the critical streets marked in code for cellars and roofs, the paving material, the number of newsstands at each corner that could be thrown into barricades […] he traced them through city hall records […] that’s boy is mad […] he’s never been sane” (22–23). joseph’s encounter with someone like burns, who has organized his thinking to the minutiae of irrelevancy in order to support violence, repelled him to such an extent that he rejects any systemization of his thought, much less abstract thought. he has seen what it has done to his ex-comrade. this conflict between abstract, organized thought and individual existence is manifested when joseph makes a scene to force burns to recognize his existence. initially burns ignores his former colleague in the restaurant, but he is forced to acknowledge joseph’s existence when joseph halts squarely before burns. as much as the ideologue may try, he or she cannot think someone out of existence. reality cannot be ignored. joseph’s failure in systematic, abstract thought therefore is what actually preserves him. although he seeks to discover what it means to be “human” through his reason, joseph’s refusal the search to be human in dangling man 56 to conceptualize his thought in an abstract and systematic manner allows him to be in touch with reality as it exists. whereas jimmy burns has reasoned himself out of reality, joseph remains in touch with the world because the reality of someone like burns repels him from using his reason abstractly. the tragedy for joseph is that he eventually remains locked in the epistemological mode of reason, even when he encounters moments of grace as when he visits his childhood room. the reason he employs may be better than the one burns uses – concrete in attention and unsorted in its manner – but it is unable to furnish any significant meaning for his existence. thus, in his first novel, bellow suggests that the search for spiritual fulfillment, to be “human” in the present age, requires more than the “ideal constructions” of enlightenment reason, hemingway’s stoicism, nietzschean will-to-power, or the unconstrained emotions of nineteenth-century romanticism. as joseph admits, his experiment has been failure. but the experiment failed not because joseph did not find spiritual fulfillment; rather, the experiment failed because joseph refused to reject the “ideal constructions” of reason when he experienced reality’s life-affirming and gratuitous nature when he visited his childhood room. in other words, bellow points out the failure of archetypes to guide us in our lives because the experience of reality will always be greater and more resourceful than any account of it. the irony is that joseph’s failure of thought is what actually preserves him: life’s resistance to complete conceptualization contains an impulse for us to continue to live: “there might be a mechanism in us that tried to give us all of life when there was danger of being cut off,” as joseph reflected in his childhood room (139). the failure of his experiment does not lead joseph to suicide, as one would expect, but to join the army. joseph’s search for his special fate will be conducted in society and not in isolation from it. to be “human” therefore is to be part of a community and not try to escape from it. spiritual fulfillment, to be “human,” is to not to close the “gap between the ideal construction and the real world” but instead to accept the real world as it is (102). the various ideal constructions all fail for joseph in his search to be “human” because reality cannot be idealized or conceptualized. at best, bellow implies in his first novel, one can only experience it with the hope that this experience will be one that is life-affirming and gratuitous in nature. this is where we truly dangle as human beings: in our encounter with reality that reveals its genuine nature to us not as despair but one of hope. notes 1. lehan 1959, 181–83. 2. paige 1944, 244–45 and wilson 1944, 78, 81–82; also de vries 1944, 3; fearing 1944, 5, 15; and heppenstall 1946, 488–89. 3. glenday 1979, 139–48; ikeda 1985, 29–36. 4. brans 1984, 435–47; reichman 1996, 28–42. 5. baim 1970, 28–34. 57 trepanier 6. bellow 2003, 99–100. all subsequent in-text citations will be from this reference. 7. for an interesting comparison between joseph and robert cohn in hemingway’s the sun also rises, refer to baumbach 1965, 36; also wisse 1971, 79–91. 8. it is interesting that bellow cuts short of any further discussion of hemingway’s ideal construction in this novel. it is not visited again until henderson the rain king. in this novel, bellow directly refutes the notion that hemingway’s stoicism can be translated into any type of social ethics. it is only when henderson dispenses with modern philosophies and ethics, e.g., existentialism, is he able to able some spiritual fulfillment when he opens himself up to the divine. refer to cecil 1972, 296–300; majdiak 1971, 125–46; and markos 1971, 193–205. 9. the influence of dostoevsky in bellow’s works is acknowledged by the author himself. bellow has particularly singled out dostoevsky’s performance in the “grand inquisitor” of the brothers karamazov as an outstanding example of thinking in fiction. see bellow 1965, 1446; also lyons 1978, 45–50. works cited baim, joseph. 1970. “escape from intellection: saul bellow’s dangling man.” university review 37 (autumn), 28–34. baumbach, joseph. 1965. the landscape of nightmare: studies in the contemporary american novel. new york: new york university press. bellow, saul. 1965. “where do we go from here: the future of fiction.” in to the young writer, ed. a. l. baker. ann arbor, mi: university of michigan press. ---. 2003. novels 1944–1953: dangling man, the victim, the adventures of augie march. new york: library of america. brans, jo. 1984. “the dialectic of hero and anti-hero in rameau’s nephew and dangling man.” studies in the novel 16:4, 435–47. cecil, l. moffitt. 1972. “bellow’s henderson as american imago of the 1950s.” research studies 40:4, 296–300. de vries, peter. 1944. “portrait in depth of youth suspended between worlds.” chicago sun book week april 9, 3. fearing, kenneth. 1944. “man versus man.” new york times book review march 26, 5, 15. glenday, michael k. 1979. “‘the consummating glimpse’: dangling man’s treacherous reality.” modern fiction studies 25:1, 139–48. the search to be human in dangling man 58 heppenstall, rayner. 1946. “new novels.” new statesman and nation december 28, 488– 89. ikeda, choko. 1985. “hard-boiledness in saul bellow’s dangling man.” kyushu american literature 26 (october), 29–36. lehan, richard. 1959. “existentialism in recent american fiction: the demonic quest.” texas studies in literature and language 1:2, 181–202. lyons, bonnie. 1978. “from dangling man to ‘colonies of the spirit.’” studies in american jewish literature 4:2, 45–50. majdiak, daniel. 1971. “the romantic self and henderson the rain king.” bucknell review 19:2, 125–46. markos, donald w. 1971. “life against death in henderson the rain king.” modern fiction studies 17:2, 193–205. paige, d. d. 1944. “no man is an island.” quarterly review of literature 1, 244–45. reichman, ravit. 1996. “the medical model and the wartime reading of dangling man; or, what can joseph recover?” saul bellow journal 14:2, 28–42. wilson, edmund. 1944. “doubts and dreams: dangling man under a glass bell.” new yorker april 1, 78, 81–82. wisse, ruth r. 1971. the schlemiel as modern hero. chicago: university of chicago press. microsoft word 1 plato trepanier intro.docx [expositions 11.1 (2017) 72–78] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 poetry and philosophy lee trapanier saginaw valley state university of the three branches of literary studies, theory traditionally has been given the most attention by scholars since the time of aristarchus, with philosophy playing an instrumental role in theory’s development and growth.1 however, philosophy itself has been influenced by literature, and specifically by poetry, since its inception.2 although some thinkers, such as dilthey and nietzsche, praise the wisdom of poets and see poetry and philosophy as mutually beneficial pursuits, most philosophers and theorists resent, diminish, or eliminate the importance of poetry in philosophy and theory. this quarrel between philosophy and poetry begins with socrates where he criticizes poetry in plato’s dialogues: as a form of imitation, poetry is removed from the truth and has the power to corrupt people by appealing to the irrational parts of their souls.3 yet, in spite of this danger, socrates does permit certain forms of poetry in his polis as long as they do not distract a person from righteousness, excellence, and truth. while poetry cannot make people wise, it can lead them to wisdom. thus, poetry can exist in socrates’ polis as long as it is capable of serving philosophy’s ends. whereas socrates calls for the censorship of poetry because of its power, aristotle argues that poetry is less of a threat to philosophy than socrates believes. aristotle finds similarities between poetry and ethics and consequently offers practical advice to poets of how to compose their works.4 for example, tragic reversals are not only emotionally and aesthetically powerful but can be ethically illuminating.5 but, for aristotle, poetry ultimately is subordinate to philosophy: he recognizes the value that poetry provides to people but limits the range of forms and claims the poets can make. in this sense, aristotle agrees with socrates that poetry needs to be supervised by philosophers. plotinus, augustine, boethius, and aquinas also acknowledge poetry’s potency and therefore believe that it must be superseded or censored. while plotinus sees poetry as a step on the ladder of the mind towards its journey to fuse with the divine, boethius disregards poetry completely.6 73 trepanier augustine also condemns poetry (and philosophy) as sources of depraved and pagan opinions which must be eradicated in favor of christian truth.7 this position is later modified by aquinas, who, like aristotle, sees a potentially positive role that poetry can play in making people appreciate beauty, albeit it (along with philosophy) subordinate to christian revelation.8 unlike his christian predecessors, vico has a more favorable view to poetry. according to vico, all societies undergo a cycle of historical change from the divine to the heroic and finally to the human with poetry providing wisdom at the beginning and philosophy giving knowledge at the end.9 but the historical event of christ’s incarnation makes the philosopher’s hope reside not in earthly wisdom but in the recognition of divine providence, which transcends what both the poet and philosopher can offer.10 although poetry and philosophy are ultimately subordinate to philosophy, at various moments in time (i.e., the divine and heroic ages) they are acceptable sources for human knowledge and meaning. this rehabilitation of poetry continues in the works of kant and hegel, with the former associating poetry with genius and the latter tolerating it as long as it is under philosophical guidance. for kant, it is human genius that allows individuals to move from nature to poetry, which, as the highest art form, permits access to the phenomenal world and ultimately to god itself via one’s moral feelings.11 by contrast, hegel sees poetry below philosophy: a required step for self-conscious to be fully realized.12 reacting against hegel’s philosophical systemization of poetry, kierkegaard values it as providing humans a sense of longing that can lead them to seek truth.13 but, for kierkegaard, this is the most that poetry can accomplish, for it can corrupt people to be ironic, thereby preventing any genuine ethical or religious experience.14 poetry cannot make the leap of faith that kierkegaard calls for where individuals cross the chasm between their actual lives and the reality of god. it is only in the writings of dilthey and nietzsche where poetry becomes fully rehabilitated. both thinkers reject philosophy and revelation as sources of knowledge and instead place poetry as preeminent among the arts. for dilthey, philosophy is not able to substantiate its claims about metaphysical moods—the intersection between finite existence and an eternal, untouchable world—whereas poetry can,15 while, for nietzsche, poetry, particularly classical greek tragedy, affirms life and offers signposts for the future of great and beautiful souls in the “ever increasing elevation of man.”16 by contrast, philosophy and revelation only offer artificiality, a removal from human instincts and thereby weaken humans to become “slaves of morality.”17 poetry and philosophy 74 heidegger continues in the steps of dilthey and nietzsche by praising poetry. heidegger contends that poetry is the most purely spoken language, something to which people must return in order to escape scientific attempts to understand, control, and manipulate reality.18 like nietzsche, heidegger believes that poetry illuminates (un-conceals) reality as it truly exists, wiping away the layers that scientific and other artificial modes of language have imposed upon it. postmodern philosophers like ferdinand de saussure, paul de man, and jacques derrida continue to argue for poetry’s rightful place as a source of truth.19 these postmodern thinkers search for inconsistencies, ambiguities, and contradictions in the text to show that philosophical claims exist not because of any metaphysical or ontological truth but rather because of arbitrary power relations. the role of these thinkers is to invert these power relations and paint alternative power structures around which people can organize their lives. thus, after more than after two millennia, we have returned to the same place: both poetry and philosophy quarrel with one another in their claims of being the exclusive source of human knowledge and meaning. with this in mind, we have decided to return back to the beginning of this dispute. in this symposium, we explore the relationship between poetry and philosophy in plato’s dialogues. by returning to the start of this quarrel, we hope that we will not only be able to clarify socrates’ views about poetry, philosophy, and politics but also help us understand the history of this debate in a new light. lee trepanier starts the symposium with an examination of how socrates refers to homer in the republic. in “socrates’ homer in the republic: retaining the poetic past and preparing for the philosophic future,” trepanier argues that socrates rehabilitates homer by selectively citing those poetic passages which support his philosophy and modifying or censoring others that are contrary to it. instead of repudiating homeric poetry altogether, socrates recognizes its foundational role in greek civilization and therefore knows it cannot be completely eradicated; otherwise, chaos would result. because of this, philosophy must accommodate poetry but only under its supervision in order for greek civilization to evolve into something better, retaining part of its poetical past while preparing itself for a more philosophic future. “in diagnosing the dissonance of achilles,” alan i. baily investigates socrates’ criticism of achilles in the republic as someone who is afflicted with two contradictory maladies: greed and arrogance. the former is beneath human dignity while the latter smacks of hubris. the question is, how did these two incommensurable vices arise in the same soul? baily contends that this 75 trepanier dissonance in achilles’ soul is not a symptom of poetry’s influence as such but the result of a broader confusion between the orders of values arising from the displacement of heroic civilization with a new political order of monetization. socrates’ criticism of homer’s poetry consequently is more a reflection of this civilizational change than a disparagement of poetry itself. moving away from homer to the tragedians, marlene sokolon defends poetry in her article, “an apology of euripides: defending the poets.” reviewing the two charges that socrates makes against the poets—the poets’ inspiration lacks knowledge and poetry should be replaced with noble, useful lies—sokolon turns to two of euripides’ tragedies to rebut these charges. against the first charge, sokolon looks to suppliant women where she argues that euripides is engaged in a serious investigation of political questions about the best regime, an investigation that resembles a type of reasoning (dianoia) that philosophers employ. against the second charge, sokolon shows how euripides’ ion tells a similar “pleasant lie” that is politically useful, similar to the one that socrates adopts. however, sokolon acknowledges that poetry, particularly tragedy, has a more difficult task than philosophy because it transpires in a public place with a diverse group of people, whereas philosophy does not. poetry therefore will always be distinct from philosophy but, for democratic societies, it may be the most important form of education for its citizens. nalin ranasinghe examines socrates’ views of poetry in the republic and apology in his article, “socrates’ apology and plato’s poetry: a speculative exegesis.” in his analysis of both dialogues, ranasinghe argues that the poets’ inspired teaching should not be read literally or rejected entirely. poetry provides wisdom to the philosophers and this wisdom is needed; otherwise, philosophy becomes nothing more than a pseudo-science. socrates’ animus towards poetry therefore is not directed at the poets per se but to those poets who participate in politics or, worse yet, those who imitate the poets by creating images to manipulate people. the next article, “‘we are the champions’: mousikē and cultural chauvinism in plato’s republic,” rebecca lemoine explores the paradox of socrates’ expressed approval of foreign music at the beginning of the dialogue with his later hostility when discussing the kallipolis. however, upon closer examination, the music of the kallipolis incorporates both greek and nongreek elements in contrast to the athenian segregation of athenian and thracian music during the bendideia. unlike the cultural chauvinism of athens, socrates recommends a musical education that promotes a harmony of cultures that culminates in his myth of er, where a perfect harmony poetry and philosophy 76 of both music and different cultures is found. such music represents the peak of philosophical education rather than its beginning. finally, in “the imitative arts will tear us apart in the republic,” kirk fitzpatrick rejects the canonical interpretation that all constitutions described in the republic have the same number of parts and instead argues that the number of parts in a constitution is contingent. the imitative arts cause the degeneration of the ideal constitution with corrupted forms having many parts. for instance, the ideal constitution only has two parts—reason ruling the appetites—while the tyrannical constitution has five parts—the appetites ruling reason, spirit, and the necessary and unnecessary appetites. the imitative arts play a critical role in tearing constitutions apart as they devolve into more parts. the quarrel between philosophy and poetry has its origins in antiquity and continues today. by examining the origins of this debate, we hope that we offer new ways of thinking about some of the contemporary issues that confront us, like censorship, changing civilizational values, and the treatment of foreigners.20 we do not pretend to resolve these issues but rather contribute our thoughts to the continuous conversation since the greeks about poetry, philosophy, and politics. notes 1. wellek; eagleton; culler. 2. ibid.; also burns and petraki. 3. plato 597e; 601a; 607b. 4. aristotle 1451b1–10. 5. aristotle 1552a11–1453b1; also see rapp. 6. plotinus i.6.3; i.72; boethius i.1. 7. augustine vii, x.27. 8. aquinas i-i, 9ad1; iii, 66, 4c. 9. vico 497–99. 10. ibid. 1095. 11. kant 262–308, 326–27, 344–53. 77 trepanier 12. hegel 523, 1035. 13. kierkegaard, either/or part one i, 50. 14. kierkegaard, the concept of irony 248. 15. dilthey 197–205, 237. 16. nietzsche, human, all too human 99. 17. nietzsche, on the genealogy of morality i.9. 18. heidegger 72–76, 170. 19. saussure; derrida; de man. 20. for example, refer to allen. works cited allen, danielle. why plato wrote. oxford: wiley-blackwell, 2010. aquinas, thomas. summa theologica. new york: benziger brothers, 1948. aristotle. the poetics, trans. w. hamilton fyfe. cambridge, ma: loeb classical library and harvard university press, 1932. augustine. the city of god, trans. r. w. dyson. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1998. boethius. the consolation of philosophy, trans. v. e. watts. new york: penguin books, 1969. burns, timothy w. “philosophy and poetry: a new look at an old quarrel.” american political science review 109.2 (2015): 326–338. culler, jonathan. literary theory: a very short introduction. oxford: oxford university press, 1997. de man, paul. blindness and insight: essays in the rhetoric of contemporary criticism. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1983. derrida, jacques. ecriture et la différance. paris: éditions du seuil, 1967. dilthey, wilhelm. introduction to human sciences. princeton: princeton university press, 1989. eagleton, terry. literary theory. 2nd ed. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1996. poetry and philosophy 78 hegel, g. w. f. hegel’s aesthetics: lectures on fine arts. 2 volumes, trans. t. m. knox. oxford: clarendon press, 1998. heidegger, martin. poetry, language, thought, trans. albert hofstadter. new york: harper and row, 1971. kant, immanuel. the critique of judgment, trans. werner s. pluhar. indianapolis: hackett, 1987. kierkegaard, søren. the concept of irony, with continual reference to socrates, trans. howard v. hong and edna h. hong. princeton: princeton university press, 1989. . either/or part i, trans. howard v. hong and edna h. hong. princeton: princeton university press, 1987. nietzsche, friedrich. human, all too human, trans. r. j. hollingdale. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1986. . on the genealogy of morality, trans. carol diethe. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1997. petraki, zacharoula. the poetics of philosophical language: plato, poets and presocratics in the republic. berlin: de gruyter, 2011. plotinus. the enneads, trans. stephen mackenna. london: penguin books, 1991. rapp, christof. “tragic emotions.” in a companion to ancient aesthetics, eds. pierre destrée and penelope murray. hoboken, nj: wiley, 2015. 438–54. saussure, ferdinand de. course in general linguistics, trans. wade baskin. new york: philosophical library, 1959. vico, giambattista. the new science, trans. thomas goddard bergin and max harold fisch. ithaca: cornell university press, 1984. wellek, rené. the attack on literature and other essays. chapel hill: university of north carolina press, 1982. microsoft word kalmanofsky.docx [expositions 9.1 (2015) 114–120] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 a perspective on the trends and challenges of biblical studies amy kalmanofsky jewish theological seminary before commenting upon the current state of biblical studies, i am compelled to address why a book roughly the size of tolstoy’s war and peace warrants a field of study as vast as biblical studies.1 although overall the hebrew bible tells the religious and national history of ancient israel, it is a collection of books—each with their own compositional history—that is edited over time. the twenty-four books of the hebrew bible are as varied in genre as they are in historical orientation.2 there are the myths of genesis, as well as its patriarchal narratives, the royal annals of samuel and kings, the poetry of the prophets and the psalms, and the wisdom sayings of proverbs and ecclesiastes. a scholar easily can focus attention on a particular book, genre, or historical period, addressing its literary form or its compositional and interpretive history. a scholar can also search for literary or linguistic cognates, and engage in comparative studies with other cultures, histories, and literatures of the ancient world. in this way, biblical studies expands beyond the confines of the hebrew bible to become a varied and rich field of study. despite the vastness of the discipline, biblical scholarship conforms broadly to three distinct types, each defined by a particular focus. scholarship with an historical focus studies the world that produced the bible. scholarship with a textual focus addresses the text itself. scholarship with an interpretive focus considers how the bible has been read and understood over time, particularly within different religious traditions. naturally, there is a great deal of cross-fertilization and overlapping concerns within these types of scholarship. a textual scholar can also be concerned with history, and may engage in comparative semitics and the dating of texts. an historical scholar could undertake a literary reading that notes how much or how little a text reflects historical reality. an interpretive scholar could mine biblical commentaries for more accurate understanding of words and insight into biblical passages. in fact, given how much remains unknown about the bible and the world that produced it, it is arguably impossible, and perhaps irresponsible, for a biblical scholar to silo him/herself in any one inquiry of study without integrating the methods and findings of other inquiries into their work.3 another essential divide in biblical scholarship at the moment is between the modernists and the postmodernists. in significant ways, biblical criticism is a product of modernism developed by figures such as julius wellhausen, hermann gunkel, john bright, and gerhard von rad, who believed that the bible’s textual and contextual history could be revealed by applying scientific methods of inquiry to it. modernist scholars use the tools of biblical scholarship to provide insight into the worlds that produced and compiled the bible, as well as into the process through which 115 kalmanofsky the text was transmitted. postmodernism, which offers a shift in perspective which privileges subjectivity over objectivity, challenges basic assumptions about what can be known about any discipline, but poses particular challenges to biblical studies. postmodern scholars dismiss the notion that there is a single, accessible, inherent meaning to a text (something readers of the bible have assumed for centuries4), and contend that texts have multiple meanings and subtexts— hidden, sometimes conflicted, meanings embedded intentionally or unintentionally within a text. under the weight of the postmodernist critique, bible scholars cannot claim objectivity in their methods, nor can they proclaim the truth of their discoveries. they cannot maintain that they have access to the bible’s inherent truth, nor that such a truth exists. postmodern bible scholars embrace the multiplicity of meaning and seek to elucidate the subtexts in the bible. they strive to understand ideologies that shape the biblical text, and look for ways in which the biblical text supports or challenges these ideologies.5 i provide this schematic of the field not only to introduce the discipline, but also to introduce myself. i consider myself to be a postmodernist bible scholar who is text-centered, and who is engaged in literary interpretation with a particular focus on gender issues. i received my ph.d. in 2005 from the jewish theological seminary where i now teach undergraduate and graduate students, as well as rabbinical students. though my training was secular, not religious, i contend that religious orientation and affiliation does matter in my field, since many biblical scholars train and teach in religious seminaries where the hebrew bible is a revered text. it should not be surprising that religion and politics affect biblical studies in ways and degrees spared other fields.6 as a good postmodernist, i recognize that it is impossible to disentwine completely my academic and personal relationship to the hebrew bible. in fact, one of the challenges to biblical studies i identify below is the difficulty in navigating the intersection between the university and the seminary—between the classroom where the bible is studied, and the church or synagogue where it is worshipped. i offer now a few comments on the state of the field from my perspective as a postmodern, literary, and gender scholar. from where i sit, the field looks strong, inviting, and healthfully evolving. it demonstrates an ability to engage with new ideas and to adapt to current academic trends. feminist biblical studies may have morphed into the more elastic gender studies, but attention still remains upon the biblical representation of women,7 and, from a more modernist perspective, on the reconstruction of women’s lives in the ancient world.8 though women still command interest, masculinity studies has taken off in recent years, paying close attention to the biblical characteristics and behaviors of manhood.9 my own work provides a good indication of what postmodern, gender, and literary scholars like myself currently are engaged in. building on masculinity studies, as well as the influx of queer theory to biblical studies,10 i am examining biblical texts that challenge the bible’s conventional gender norms by presenting characters that embody characteristics and behaviors associated with the opposite gender. a perspective on the trends and challenges of biblical studies 116 as i mention above, biblical studies has always been interdisciplinary—relying heavily on the work done by historians, archeologists and philologists of the ancient world. in particular, literary interpreters, like myself, adopt various interpretive lenses from other disciplines, like queer theory or film theory, and apply them to biblical studies.11 there has been a recent wave of interest in disability studies, as scholars have considered how the bible relates to bodies that deviate from its concept of an ideal body,12 and even more recently, in food studies, as scholars address the religious, social, and economic impact of food and food symbolism.13 trauma studies also has made significant inroads into biblical studies as more and more scholars perceive the bible as a literary response to the trauma of exile.14 the intersection between biblical studies and any one of these theoretical lenses—whether queer, trauma, disability, or food—reflects contemporary social realities and concerns. twenty-first century anxieties related to gender identity, terrorism, or ecological sustainability, have made their way into biblical studies. some modernist bible scholars may find the integration of theory from other disciplines to be distracting, if not anachronistic, to the biblical world. i contend that the integration is testament to the bible’s literary quality, and is in keeping with its interpretive traditions, since, for centuries, the bible has been read through various cultural lenses. above all, the elasticity with which biblical studies can absorb theories from other disciplines is essential to its relevance and to its future. it is the means through which new scholars gain access, and an ancient book is made relevant for its secular and religious readers. speaking as a postmodern, literary, gender bible scholar, overall, i feel optimistic about the future of biblical studies, and my place within it. admittedly, a modernist bible scholar may offer a different and bleaker perspective, lamenting how classical modes of study are no longer in vogue. despite my optimism, i close by addressing challenges facing the field, which i perceive even from my vantage point. i experience an increasing generation divide between those who are trained classically, and whose scholarship relies upon the tools gained in the process, and those, like myself who engage in more theoretically driven scholarship—in other words, between the modernist and the postmodernist scholars. certainly, biblical scholarship has changed over the years to accommodate the cultural shift to postmodernism, but more importantly to the field, i argue, is the ways in which bible scholars have changed. a few generations ago, the typical bible scholar was white, male, and christian. now, bible scholars represent a variety of races, religions, ethnicities and gender identities. this generation of bible scholars identified the biased ideology of their predecessors, perhaps much to their chagrin, and introduced a multiplicity of perspectives into the field, as well as an appreciation for this multiplicity. the question now is how to speak across this generation divide, to enable cross-fertilization, and to foster genuine appreciate for all the work being done. a related challenge is the tension felt within the field between the academic and the religious communities who train its scholars, and who produce and consume its scholarship. when applying to graduate schools years ago, i was advised not to attend a seminary, which was seen as a bastion 117 kalmanofsky of subjective religious sentiment, but rather to attend a secular university. i chose to attend a liberal jewish seminary, one that trains rabbis and scholars, because i embraced its subjectivity, and believed it would provide me with excellent training as a scholar. i have not regretted my decision. now, as a professor at this seminary, i strive to model for my students the ways in which the secular and the religious perspectives can coexist in a healthy and productive tension. not every scholar has to nor should embrace my perspective. there are many scholars who are not part of religious communities, and who approach the bible purely as a cultural artifact. let me be clear: i do not think that biblical studies only belongs in the seminary. but i also do not think it is possible or desirable for biblical scholarship to separate fully from religious communities, both for pragmatic and for idealistic reasons. pragmatic reasons are clear. religious communities provide bible scholars with an audience, with students, and with places of employment. biblical studies is one of the rare disciplines that has an educated lay audience, not unlike the audience that enjoys popular science. this audience attends lectures and buys books. we scholars need them, and should value them because religious communities give biblical studies a future, and shield it from the threat of becoming irrelevant like so many other disciplines that fall within the humanities. the idealistic reasons for encouraging a relationship between the secular and the religious communities that engage in and appreciate biblical studies may be less clear. i contend that the relationship between bible scholars and religious communities is mutually beneficial. bible scholars educate religious communities about the texts they hold sacred, thereby enriching their understanding of these texts, and, at times, complicating their relationship to it. as a scholar who educates and complicates, i have only experienced appreciation from the communities in which i teach. i have found that people appreciate learning more about their sacred texts, and that their relationship to these texts even can be enhanced when complicated. bible scholars may challenge religious communities, but religious communities also challenge bible scholars by forcing us to engage with texts, and to consider their value a part from academic discourse. for example, having first identified and analyzed texts that depict violence against women, feminist bible scholars like susanne scholz now consider how to integrate these disturbing texts into contemporary religious communities in ways that do not white-wash their violence.15 in this way, religious communities not only enable bible scholars to remain relevant, they force us to be relevant. from my corner of biblical studies, i feel optimistic about its future. it is a field that continues to adapt and to grow, and that generates new scholars and scholarship, and a new audience for both. my hope is that scholars be open to various modes of scholarship, and to not be dismissive of scholars that practice differently, or that teach and train within religious communities. i also urge scholars whether religious or not, whether modern or postmodern, to own their perspectives, and to teach and write openly from that perspective. doing so keeps us vital, ensures our future, and makes us stronger. a perspective on the trends and challenges of biblical studies 118 notes 1. the society of biblical literature, the professional guild of biblical studies, counts 8,374 members in 2014. 2. different traditions divide and order the books differently, and some, like the roman catholic or the greek orthodox, include additional books within their canon. 3. for a discussion of the various methods of biblical interpretation, see barton 1984. 4. the certainty that a text contains an inherent meaning is what a. k. m. adam terms the “myth of subsistent meaning”; he writes: “the widely held myth of subsistent meaning treats “meaning” as an immanent property of a text. a text has meaning as a quality independent of particular readers and particular circumstances.” see adam 2006, 3. 5. john j. collins considers the impact of postmodernism on biblical studies in collins 2005. for a current discussion on the relationship between modernism and postmodernism in biblical studies see the jbl forum 2014. 6. since the hebrew bible is a foundational religious text for christians and jews, the impact of religion on biblical studies is expected. politics also plays a role, especially when scholars consider the national origins of israel, and israel’s connection to the land. see finkelstein 2007. 7. see kalmanofsky 2014. 8. see ebeling 2010; meyers 2013; and hamori 2015. 9. see creangă 2010. 10. see stone 2005 and macwilliam 2011. 11. my first book used film theory on the horror genre to understand how the biblical prophets worked to horrify their audience into reform. see kalmanofsky 2008. 12. see schipper 2006. 13. see stone 2005. concurrent with my writing this essay, professor brigitte kahl is teaching a course entitled “idol meat and vegetables: towards a biblical/new testament theology of food” at the union theological seminary in new york. 14. see o’connor 2010. 119 kalmanofsky 15. see scholz 2010. works cited adam, a. k. m. 2006. faithful interpretation: reading the bible in a postmodern world. minneapolis: fortress press. barton, john. 1984. reading the old testament: method in biblical study. louisville: westminster john knox. collins, john j. 2005. the bible after babel: historical criticism in a postmodern age. grand rapids, mi: eerdmans. creangă, ovidiu. 2010. men and masculinity in the hebrew bible and beyond. sheffield: sheffield phoenix press. ebeling, jennie r. 2010. women’s lives in biblical times. new york and london: t&t clark. finkelstein, israel. 2007. “digging for the truth: archaeology and the bible.” in israel finkelstein and amihai mazar. the quest for the historical israel: debating archaeology and the history of early israel. ed. brian b. schmidt. atlanta: society of biblical literature. 9–33. hamori, esther j. 2015. women’s divination in biblical literature: prophecy, necromancy, and other art of knowledge. new haven: yale university press. jbl forum. 2014. journey of biblical literature 133.2. 421–458. kalmanofsky, amy. 2008. terror all around: the rhetoric of horror in the book of jeremiah. new york and london: t&t clark. _____. 2014. dangerous sisters of the hebrew bible. minneapolis: fortress press. macwilliam, stuart. 2011. queer theory and the prophetic marriage metaphor in the hebrew bible. sheffield and oakville: equinox. meyers, carol. 2013. rediscovering eve: ancient israelite women in context. oxford and new york: oxford university press. o’connor, kathleen m. 2010. jeremiah: pain and promise. minneapolis: fortress press. a perspective on the trends and challenges of biblical studies 120 schipper, jeremy. 2006. disability studies and the hebrew bible: figuring mephibosheth in the david story. new york and london: t&t clark. scholz, susanne. 2010. sacred witness: rape in the hebrew bible. minneapolis: fortress press. stone, ken. 2005. practicing safer texts: food, sex and bible in queer perspective. new york and london: t&t clark. microsoft word 1 trepanier fall 2018.docx [expositions 12.2 (2018) 121–131] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376   the public value of higher education lee trepanier saginaw valley state university there has been a renewed debate about the crisis of higher education, particularly about american public institutions, although the nature of this crisis and how best to address it remains unclear. some critics of higher education have followed the concerns laid out in the 2006 spellings commission’s report, a test of leadership, that finds the american workforce is increasingly illprepared for a globalized “knowledge economy” because of the marginalization of undergraduate learning in american colleges and universities.1 works like academically adrift: limited learning on college campuses and we’re losing our minds: rethinking american higher education confirm these fears that american higher education is not providing the requisite skills for a twenty-first-century workforce.2 according to these critics, the crisis of american higher education is its inability to deliver an education for the united states to remain competitive in a globalized economy. a second and related concern is the decline of liberal education as economic considerations have overtaken the primary mission of american colleges and universities. books like not for profit: why democracy needs the humanities, why choose the liberal arts, and education’s end: why our colleges and universities have given up on the meaning of life defend the need of liberal education in an academic environment that is increasingly being defined by economic utility.3 although these authors differ in their reasons as to why liberal education is essential to american higher education, they all agree that liberal education, particularly the humanities, should return to the center of colleges’ and universities’ curriculum—a similar argument that was made more than thirty years ago in allan bloom’s closing the american mind.4 a third set of concerns have looked at the organizational and administrative structure of american higher education.5 faculty need to return to the primary mission of colleges and universities in teaching undergraduate students rather than specializing in arcane scholarship and conducting courses on esoteric topics. whereas faculty need to be encouraged and motivated to focus on teaching, public colleges and universities need to show their communities they exist for the public value of higher education 122   the common good. american higher education needs to change the public’s perception that it is like any other business that looks out only for its own interest and instead demonstrate to people that it is public good for society.6 fourth, questions about access to american higher education has raised concerns about its value: the costs of colleges and universities no longer outweighs its economic benefits.7 the 2011 pew research center report shows that a majority of americans (57%) say that higher education fails to provide students the good value for the money they and their families spend and even a larger majority (75%) say college is too expensive.8 nearly half of college graduates (49%) say that paying off debt makes it harder to pay for other bills and a quarter says it has had an impact on their career choice.9 finally, there is increasingly political polarization about the value of american higher education. republicans have grown increasingly negative about the impact of colleges and universities on the u.s.10 58% of republicans and republican-leaning independents say that higher education have a negative effect on the way things are going in the country, while just 36% says the effect is positive. by contrast, 72% of democrats see colleges and universities having a positive impact on the country. recent events—such as the controversy over free speech and race on college campuses—have given the impression that american colleges and universities are bastion of liberal ideologies, values contrary to republicans and republican-leaning independents.11 it is evident from the concerns listed above that a crisis exists in higher education but there is no agreement about the nature of this crisis or how to address it. perhaps another way to examine this problem is to ask how public colleges and universities can be relevant to their communities. what role and mission should these institutions adopt to show the public its value? but before exploring possible answers to these questions, it would be worthwhile to review the history of higher education in the united states. the american founders desired an educated and self-governing citizenry to keep the new republic intact.12 education was to instill the republican values of liberty and self-government and make american youth future civic leaders. at least ten of the nation’s founders also were founders of academic institutions, with the most famous being thomas jefferson’s university of virginia (established in 1819, opened in 1825). as a nondenominational place of higher learning, the 123 trepanier   university of virginia was “to establish in the upper & healthier country, & more central for the state an university on a plan so broad & liberal & modern, as to be worth patronizing with the public support.”13 although washington, along with other prominent founders, favored the creation of a national university, a system of many state-supported institutions emerged.14 rev. manasseh cutler, an author of the northwest ordinance of 1787, successfully negotiated with congress for setting aside two square miles for a public university. ohio university in athens (founded in 1804) became the first state university west of the appalachian mountains. when new states entered the union, they also received public land for the endowment of a university.15 when the 1862 morrill act was enacted, land grant colleges and universities extended to the west coast with twenty states already having state universities.16 prior to the civil war, the primary mission of colleges and universities was teaching undergraduates to become good democratic citizens and leaders. these institutions offered a liberal arts curriculum because it was believed that a well-rounded individual was necessary for democratic citizenship.17 however, there also emerged institutions that emphasized technical education in agricultural and industrial sciences. the morrill acts of 1862 and 1890 provided land grants and federal funding that stimulated state legislatures to establish agricultural and mechanical colleges and universities. influenced by the german research-oriented university, these types of universities started after the civil war with some of them later becoming leading institutions in american higher education.18 in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, american colleges and universities continued their mission of serving the nation of making democratic citizens and leaders through liberal and technical education. but they also expanded opportunities to previously excluded groups as the concept of democracy itself widen to include equal treatment of students and equal access for all people, including the poor, women, and racial and ethnic minorities.19 adult education programs were established in such places like chautauqua university (1883–92) that pioneered summer sessions, correspondence courses, and extension services. these ideas would in turn influence other institutions, culminating into what would be known in 1904 as the “wisconsin idea.”20 the democratization of american higher education continued throughout the twentieth century with the community college movement, the g.i. bill, the california plan, the civil rights movement, and other federal programs. but it was the emergence and dominance of graduate the public value of higher education 124   institutions around 1900 that redefined the mission of american higher education as teaching, research, and public service.21 teaching was a legacy from the american founding of creating democratic citizens and leaders, while research was influenced by german-style universities and comported well in the practical culture of the united states in the belief that the great research universities would advance basic knowledge and provide technical expertise required by a modern industrial society.22 public service came from the progressive political ideology that sought to combine the teaching and research missions of colleges and universities to transmit higher knowledge to the public through external activities like applied research, off-campus courses, and service learning. the “wisconsin idea” was the most famous articulation of this public service mission and became a model for subsequent schools. the “wisconsin idea” was the university of wisconsin’s commitment to serve the entire population of the state. specifically, university faculty expertise was incorporated into state government planning and the university extension services were made available throughout the state.23 drawing national attention, the “wisconsin idea” influenced many other state universities to elevate public service as part of a university’s core mission.24 critics of this new mission argued that public service was in practice submission to business or state interests. faculty also was concerned about business leaders involving themselves in higher education and universities, patterning themselves after the bureaucratic structures of corporations and the state.25 since this time, this threat of institutional autonomy whether from government or commercial pressures has remained a constant concern for american higher education.26 most of this concern has centered on the source of funding. prior to world war ii, funding for expensive and specialized research came from philanthropic foundations or business corporations. during and after world war ii, the federal government became the dominant patron of major research universities, although private foundations continued to fund research in the social sciences. most recently, starting in the 1970s, there has been a shift from basic and military research to civilian and commercial to meet the needs of a global economy.27 this latest shift from a theoretical model to an entrepreneurial one under the rubric of public service has raised questions about what actually constitutes public service and its rationale. today the american multifunctional university still clings to its three-fold mission of teaching, research, and public service. when looking back at the history of american higher education, these three activities have fulfilled critical functions in society: teaching democratic citizens and leaders, 125 trepanier   research for economic progress, and public service for the improvement of society. however, this mission has become increasingly questioned and criticized. this symposium about the role and value of public higher education is to examine what possible answers colleges and universities can provide to demonstrate their relevance to society.28 the first article, “the character model for the american university,” is my proposal that colleges and universities return to a concept of character development, particularly the cultivation of practical and theoretical reason, in their students. based on aristotle’s understanding of phronēsis (prudence), i explain how the character model forces colleges and universities to rethink what constitutes their core mission. recognizing this proposal is an ideal type, i then show how a general education curriculum could be adjusted to match the character model for higher education and conclude with some thoughts about how faculty and administrators can better align their roles with this model. in “public higher education and the responsibility to invite students to the political,” carol mcnamara argues that public universities must recreate jefferson’s mission of civic engagement by first engaging students in a conversation about political questions and ideas, and then by involving students in a serious discussion about policy issues. such an education constitutes a genuine civic education and prepares students to address the issues confronting them and their communities. a return to the jefferson does not result in political polarization, for this type of civic education promotes a thoughtful combat of ideas rather than intellectual conformity. the third article, luigi bradizza’s “the political role of the public university,” continues this conversation about the role of the university as promoting conversation rather than ideological dogmatism. however, as creatures of the state, public universities are fragile and it is the task of faculty and administrators to recognize this fragility. although their role and place in intellectual history is modest, public universities should be satisfied with the preservation and transmission of past knowledge to the next generation. for public universities to fulfill this mission, they rely upon liberal democracy’s culture of freedom of speech, inquiry, and the press; therefore, this task is inherently political. the university consequently must actively contribute to this culture of liberty to fulfill its mission. finally, claudia franziska brühwiler examines a public european university as a point of comparison and contrast to american ones in her “‘we’ll manage’?–european public universities the public value of higher education 126   and the refugee crisis.” european public universities in switzerland, germany, and other countries have opened their lecture halls to refugees by facilitating admissions, offering stipends, and other accommodations. they have assumed responsibility for refugees who had to abandon studies in their home countries in the hope that refugees can continue their education, thereby raising the broader question of what constitutes a university’s civic duty and public responsibility. as stated in the beginning of this article, higher education, whether in the united states or abroad, is facing a number of challenges that need addressing if colleges and universities wish to be valued and supported by society. of course, the remedies will differ as specific institutions are confronted with different contexts; but still some generalizable proposals can be put forward as ways for administrators, faculty, students, and the public to reflect about the role and value of higher education in their communities. doing just more of the same is no longer a viable option for most public colleges and universities: they need to reimagine and creatively rethink about their place in society to show their value to the public. notes 1. spellings. 2. arum and roska; keeling and hersh. 3. kronman; roche; nussbaum; roth; trepanier. 4. bloom. 5. taylor; riley. 6. apple; giroux, “neoliberalism, corporate culture, and the promise of higher education”; powers; bok; washburn; hill and kumar; tuchman; canaan and shumar; king-white. 7. hacker and dreifus. 8. pew, is college worth it? 5–6, 9. 9. ibid. 10. pew, “sharp partisan divisions in views of national institutions.” 127 trepanier   11. villasenor: a fifth of american college undergraduates say it is acceptable to use physical force to silence a speaker who makes “offensive and hurtful statements.” for the most recent race controversy on college campuses, see quintana. 12. pangle and pangle 4–5; hellenbrand 11. 13. jefferson 175. 14. johnson 129, 147; roseboom 57, 53. 15. brubacher and rudy 154. 16. johnson 127. 17. reading 4. 18. brubacher and rudy 61–64, 288. 19. veysey 62–66. 20. scott. 21. veysey 444. 22. brubacher and rudy 177. 23. ibid. 164–65; veysey 108. 24. brubacher and rudy 166–168; lucas 174–75, 292. 25. barrow 7, 10; perkin 20–29. 26. hawkins xi; axelrod 3–7; giroux, “critical education or training” and “neoliberalism, corporate culture, and the promise of higher education”; gould. 27. slaughter 62. 28. these papers were presented at the 2017 american political science conference, august 31–september 3, san francisco, california, sponsored by the mcconnell center for the public value of higher education 128   political leadership. we would like the mcconnell center at the university of louisville for sponsoring this symposium. works cited apple, michael. “comparing neoliberal projects and inequality in education.” comparative education 37.4 (2001): 409–23. arum, richard, and josipa roksa. academically adrift: limited learning on college campuses. chicago: university of chicago press, 2011. axelrod, paul. values in conflict: the university, the marketplace, and the trials of liberal education. montreal: mcgill-queen’s university press, 2002. barrow, clyde w. universities and the capitalist state: corporate liberalism and the reconstruction of american higher education, 1894–1928. madison, wi: university of wisconsin press, 1990. bloom, allan. closing the american mind: how higher education has failed democracy and impoverished the souls of today’s students. new york: simon & schuster, 1987. bok, derek. universities in the marketplace: the commercialization of higher education. princeton: princeton university press, 2004. brubacher, john s., and willis rudy. higher education in transition. new york: harper and row, 1976. canaan, joyce e., and wesley shumar. structure and agency in the neoliberal university. new york: routledge, 2015. giroux, henry. “introduction: critical education or training: beyond the commodification of higher education.” in beyond the corporate university. edited by henry a. giroux and kostas myrsiades. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield, 2001. 1–11. 129 trepanier   _____. “neoliberalism, corporate culture, and the promise of higher education: the university as a democratic public sphere.” harvard educational review 72.4 (december 2002): 425–464. gould, eric. the university in a corporate culture. new haven: yale university press, 2003. hacker, andrew, and claudia dreifus. higher education? how colleges are wasting our money and failing our kids—and what we can do about it. new york: times books, 2010. hawkins, hugh. the emerging university and industrial america. lexington, ma: d.c. heath, 1970. hellenbrand, harold. the unfinished revolution: education and politics in the thought of thomas jefferson. newark, de: university of delaware press, 1990. hill, david, and ravi kumar. global neoliberalism and education and its consequences. new york: routledge, 2009. jefferson, thomas. “jefferson plans the university of virginia, 1800.” in american higher education: a documentary history. edited by richard hofstadter and w. smith. chicago: university of chicago press, 1961. johnson, eldon l. “the ‘other jeffersons’ and the state university idea.” journal of higher education 58 (1987): 127–50. keeling, richard p., and richard h. hersh. we’re losing our minds: rethinking american higher education. new york: palgrave macmillan, 2011. king-white, ryan. sport and the neoliberal university: profit, politics, and pedagogy. new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press, 2018. kronman, anthony. education’s end: why our colleges and universities have given up on the meaning of life. new haven: yale university press, 2008. lucas, christopher. american higher education. new york: st. martin’s, 1994. the public value of higher education 130   nussbaum, martha c. not for profit: why democracy needs the humanities. princeton: princeton university press, 2012. pangle, lorraine, and thomas pangle. the learning of liberty: the educational ideas of the american founders. lawrence, ks: university of kansas press, 1993. perkin, harold. “defining the true function of the university: a question of freedom versus control.” change 16 (1984): 20–29. pew research center. is college worth it? college presidents, public access, value, quality and mission of higher education. may 16, 2011. http://assets.pewresearch.org/wpcontent/uploads/sites/3/2011/05/higher-ed-report.pdf. _____. “sharp partisan divisions in views of national institutions.” july 10, 2017. http://www.people-press.org/2017/07/10/sharp-partisan-divisions-in-views-of-nationalinstitutions/. powers, joshua b. “commercializing academic research: resource effects of performance of university technology transfer.” the journal of higher education 74.1 (2003): 26– 50. quintana, chris. “a polarized campus struggles to understand how racial tensions became national news.” the chronicle of higher education june 2, 2017. https:// www.chronicle.com/article/a-polarized-campus-struggles/240260. reading, bill. the university in ruins. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1996. riley, naomi schaefer. the faculty lounges, and other reasons why you won’t get the college education you paid for. lanham, md: ivan r. dee, 2010. roche, mark william. why choose the liberal arts? notre dame: university of notre dame press, 2010. roseboom, eugene h., and francis p. weisenburger. a history of ohio. columbus: ohio historical society, 1996. 131 trepanier   roth, michael. beyond the university: why liberal education matters. new haven: yale university press, 2014. scott, john c. “the chautauqua movement: revolution in popular higher education.” journal of higher education 70 (1999): 389–412. slaughter, sheila. “national higher education policies in a global economy.” in universities and globalization: critical perspectives. edited by jan currie and janice newson. thousand oaks, ca: sage, 1998. spellings, margaret. a test of leadership: charting the future of u.s. higher education. washington dc: u.s. department of education, 2006. http://www2.ed.gov/about/ bdscomm/list/hiedfuture/reports/pre-pub-report.pdf. taylor, mark. crisis on campus: a bold plan for reforming our colleges and universities. new york: knopf, 2010. tuchman, gaye. wannabe u: inside the corporate university. chicago: university of chicago press, 2011. trepanier, lee. why the humanities matter today: in defense of liberal education. lanham, md: lexington books, 2017. veysey, laurence r. the emergence of the american university. chicago: university of chicago press, 1965. villasenor, john. “views among college students regarding the first amendment: results from a new survey.” brookings institute. september 18 2017. https://www.brookings.edu/ blog/fixgov/2017/09/18/views-among-college-students-regarding-the-first-amendmentresults-from-a-new-survey/. washburn, jennifer. university, inc.: the corporate corruption of higher education. new york: basic books, 2005. microsoft word eif-2-final.docx [expositions 8.2 (2014) 11–25] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376   the peculiar flavor of nagel’s metaethics regan lance reitsma king’s college, pa “what counts as a good explanation depends heavily on an understanding of what it is that has to be explained.” (thomas nagel, mind and cosmos [2012], 102) “[e]veryone, even in common life, is forced to conduct himself in greater or lesser degree like a scientist […]. [and yet] [w]e don’t know how far we ought to trust our ordinary vulgar methods of reasoning.” (philo, from david hume’s dialogues concerning natural religion [1776], 5) i. a question thomas nagel’s mind and cosmos (2012) has provoked from commentators what at first glance seem to be contradictory objections about, of all things, his intellectual confidence. one reviewer describes nagel as seemingly “unconvinced by his own ideas.”1 others, cited in the introduction to this forum, have found his most significant (anti-materialist, darwin-tweaking, value realist, teleological) conclusions audacious, if not completely unhinged. so, is nagel’s book intellectually modest or intellectually bold? there are grounds in mind and cosmos for both judgments. nagel does make remarkable claims. the subtitle of mind and cosmos is “why the materialist neo-darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false”; value realism strikes nagel as “glaringly” correct; non-realism about value loses credibility because of the “epicycles” it generates in attempting to explain away the seeming reality of value; the materialist’s best attempts to account for consciousness and for some aspects of cognition are “flagrantly implausible”; nagel thinks the universe both has a “cosmic predisposition” to form “life, consciousness, and the value that is inseparable from them” and is, through producing reflective creatures such as us, “gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself.”2 that said, more often than not the tone of mind and cosmos, unlike its subtitle, is notably modest. nagel consistently attempts to reveal his guiding presuppositions, and several times he presents one of his argumentative beginning points as (no more than) an “ungrounded intellectual preference.”3 to give one example, nagel dismisses “intentional” explanations of the origins of human consciousness and cognition (such as that a personal god deliberately created us with the ability to reflect and reason) without claiming to have powerful arguments for this dismissal—he’s remarked more than once that he simply doesn’t “want the universe to be like that.”4 (intellectual preference, indeed!) further, nagel sometimes describes his own exercise in positive theory-construction as “inconclusive,” as providing only an “admissible conjecture” or two, even as speculative.5 the peculiar flavor of nagel’s metaethics 12   so, which is it? is nagel timorous or temerarious? worse, is he, at least in mind and cosmos, scattershot in his judgments? you don’t have to be aristotle to find yourself wondering whether audacious conclusions can sensibly be constructed on a foundation of ungrounded intellectual preferences. what, if anything, justifies—what, if anything, even explains—nagel’s unusual admixture of intellectual modesty and intellectual boldness? is there something, some more or less unified, philosophical outlook that holds together nagel’s higher-order attitudes about his own beliefs and his own theorizing? i think so. though there are most certainly other factors at work, part of what explains nagel’s general bearing in mind and cosmos is his philosophy of philosophizing. nagel is a thinker who finds the world truly puzzling. in his theorizing nagel exemplifies, i will argue, an attitude of irony-tinged critical engagement classically expressed by philo in hume’s dialogues concerning natural religion. nagel’s honesty about his beginning points, his “decision” to give subjectivity and objectivity “equal standing,” his openness to “mystery,” and his complicated views about the power and limits of reason all seem to ground, in his thinking, a certain philosophical license both to challenge what he sees as the intellectual status quo and to speculate. none of this should be surprising. nagel has evinced this general, philo-style outlook before, for instance in his widely-respected, 1971 essay “the absurd.” there he applied a lesson he takes himself to have learned from philo’s reflections on philosophical skepticism to questions about the meaning of life. in mind and cosmos, readers see at work, i think, the same intellectually engaged, truth-seeking, but philosophically bemused mentality applied to topics such as metaethics. nagel’s book is difficult to assess. it raises in my mind big questions about philosophical reasoning itself. for example, after reading his chapter “value,” i find myself asking fundamental questions about metaethical theorizing, such as: how much authority should i give whatever value realist intuitions i happen to have? should i privilege instead, as many nonrealists do, the abstemious impulse to explain as much as possible about the moral life in terms of the categories preferred by modern science?6 or should i be willing to construct, or even to reconstruct, my metaphysical outlook in the light of whatever value realist intuitions i happen to have? even more deeply, how, pray tell, to settle—with even a modicum of intellectual comfort—into a set of answers to such fundamental questions? ii. nagel’s philosophy of philosophizing throughout his career, nagel’s thinking has been characterized by the belief that philosophizing is ultimately grounded in, for lack of a better word, a certain choice about how best to respond to various tensions, especially tensions between subjectivity and objectivity, that arise within our lives as reflective creatures.7 nagel evinces this belief about philosophizing for the first time in “the absurd.” in this section, i attempt to describe (what i’m calling) nagel’s philosophy of 13 reitsma   philosophizing. in the next and last section, i consider the role this broad attitude to the reflective life plays in nagel’s metaethical thinking. “the absurd” is about the meaning of life. but in this essay nagel attempts not so much to answer the question whether life ultimately has meaning as to analyze why, when thoughtful people consider “life as a whole,” they experience—whether episodically or systematically—a sense of its absurdity. this perception can arise, nagel emphasizes, even as we are pursuing our most self-defining, heartfelt, and effective life pursuits.8 for example, for a period of his life, tolstoy felt acutely a sense of the absurdity of all of his bustling activity at the same time that he knew he was writing books of profound intellectual and cultural significance.9 why? what leads reflective people—even some enviably successful people—to this judgment about their lives? first, a question of basic definition. to make it clear why life as a whole can seem absurd, it’s useful to begin with a general idea of what it means to call any situation “absurd.” in ordinary life, nagel says, “a situation is absurd when it includes a conspicuous discrepancy between pretension or aspiration and reality.”10 nagel provides several colorful examples: “someone gives a complicated speech in support of a motion that has already passed; a notorious criminal is made president of a major philanthropic foundation; you declare your love over the telephone to an answering machine; as you are being knighted, your pants fall down.”11 nagel supposes that if life as a whole seems absurd, we must perceive—though perhaps only dimly—“an inflated pretension or aspiration which is inseparable from the continuation of human life.”12 in nagel’s analysis, the philosophical sense of absurdity arises because of a profound “collision within ourselves.”13 we are able to occupy two, conflicting vantage points, both exceedingly difficult to escape. what clashes in us, nagel intimates, is the “pretension” that our lives and their central pursuits are truly important, or perhaps our aspiration to do with our lives something truly worthwhile, and the “reality” that, when we step back from these pursuits, they can seem arbitrary and their importance open to doubt. here’s how nagel speaks of life’s “pretension.” when we live our lives, we generally do so, nagel says, with “seriousness.” we behave as though our choices and our activity truly matter. most of us, as nagel puts it, “sweat” over our appearance, or our career decisions, or our children’s welfare, or how to build god’s good kingdom, or how to get out of work to watch today’s dutch world cup match: “we cannot live lives without energy and attention, nor without making choices which show that we take some things more seriously than others.”14 the issue, nagel emphasizes, is that we “humans have the special capacity to step back and survey ourselves” from perspectives more “objective” than our own personal cares and concerns.15 we can take up, for instance, the vantage point of a spectator.16 there is always, at every moment, the “perpetual possibility” that we can take a backward step away from our lives, our decisions, our cares, commitments, and concerns and wonder, sub specie aeternitatis, whether they truly matter. from such a highly disengaged vantage point, we seem like scurrying ants. like ants, we do, no doubt, “succeed” at some of our pursuits. but the impact on the world of even our greatest successes seems trivial when we look at them from an eternal standpoint. the peculiar flavor of nagel’s metaethics 14   from this view, our lives appear, nagel says, “curious and slightly surprising,” even “sobering and comical.”17 what should you and i do about this? what is the best response, the very best response, to this “inescapable” collision? i imagine some readers might wonder whether the collision is truly inescapable, or whether it can be dispelled by thoughtful reflection. it’s clear that in “the absurd” nagel thinks the perception that our lives as a whole are absurd is “fundamentally correct.”18 if someone senses that his life as a whole is absurd because he feels the force of the judgment that his strivings do not appear, from the perspective of eternity, to be truly significant, then he is glimpsing, nagel thinks, a profoundly important truth about human life. as nagel puts it, this doubt “cannot be laid to rest”; we are “full of doubts” we can’t answer, but also “full of purposes” we can’t abandon.19 and so, if we choose to persist in living, this amounts to “the dragooning of an unconvinced transcendent consciousness into the service of an immanent, limited enterprise like a human life.”20 nagel doesn’t think it the better part of wisdom to ignore this “discrepancy.” perhaps we can’t anyhow. nagel construes us as, at some level, recognizing—though “perhaps dimly”21—the absurdity of our lives. to return to my earlier example, tolstoy, who initially considered questions about the meaning of life childish embarrassments, persistently attempted to set them aside. but against his will, they kept cropping back up. admittedly, most of us, confronted with the problem, do at some level, nagel says, “ignore the doubts that we know cannot be settled, continuing to live with nearly undiminished seriousness in spite of them.”22 but this tensionfilled, half-ignorance doesn’t satisfy nagel. ignoring a tension isn’t the same as resolving it, and in “the absurd” nagel seeks out a better, more lucid, more considered response. how to discover one? here’s one idea. perhaps reflection on ordinary life will lead us to some helpful practical advice. nagel points out that in ordinary circumstances when we find ourselves in an absurd situation, we typically attempt to change things for the better. there are at least three possible ways to escape ordinary instances of absurdity: modify the relevant pretensions and aspirations, change reality so that it better fits the relevant pretensions and aspirations, or abscond. with your pants at your ankles and the queen’s scepter on your shoulder, you’ll need, i suppose, to decide whether you are willing to down-grade your life-long pursuit of being considered an indisputably great man among men; whether you are going to double down to prove, contrary to the present evidence, that you are truly worthy of being considered so; or whether it is time to flee the public eye entirely. any of these three strategies would mean that there is no longer a collision between the way things really are and the way you proudly believe or deeply hope they are, maybe because the relevant pretensions or aspirations no longer exist. is there any useful practical advice here? do any of these three broad strategies provide a good model for those of us who feel, whether intermittently or systematically, that our whole lives are absurd? the brief answer, nagel thinks, is no. the discrepancy that prompts the 15 reitsma   philosophical sense of absurdity is especially difficult to escape, and to the degree that it is escapable, trying to do so is profoundly inadvisable. take the option of modifying our pretensions and aspirations. to modify the relevant “inflated” pretension, it would be useful, first, to be able to identify it very precisely. nagel doesn’t. but he does indicate that if modifying our pretensions is tantamount to not living seriously, we can’t really modify them—at least not without great difficulty and profound (“dissociative”) cost. many of us do have cares and concerns, and some of these cares are inexorable. can you stop caring about your appearance? about wanting to find an aspirin to get rid of your headache? can you drum up in yourself any desire no longer to care about your children’s welfare? further, can we desist treating at least some concerns as basic concerns? nagel suggests: “no,” any choice involves taking something, some goal or end or value, as important. even the would-be suicide who is attempting to flee the life he perceives as absurd can’t escape, at least in his suicidal act itself, the charge of seriousness, as he is taking the absurdity of his life as something that he has reason to flee. how about the second option? can we modify reality? nagel doesn’t discuss this option at much length. at times, nagel seems to operate from the assumption that our behavior, no matter what we do, is not truly important from the most objective vantage point we can occupy; at others, he simply regards this vantage point as raising legitimate, even unanswerable, doubts about the true value of what we pursue. in any case, reading between the lines, nagel’s answer is “no.” no doubt, you can attempt to take on goals that are larger and “more objective.” if what you’ve been striving for to this point in your life is, say, personal leisure or physical beauty, you might wonder whether your pursuits are especially trivial and self-absorbed and whether the best response is to commit yourself to broader pursuits, pursuits that matter from a vantage point more expansive than your own comfort or popularity. some people—hedonists in a mid-life crisis—might decide, accordingly, to commit to morality, a vantage point that attends to the welfare not merely of you but of all people. so, what if we were to suppose that the basic problem is that our lives aren’t being lived in pursuit of sufficiently “large enterprises”? at this point in his argument, nagel doesn’t talk metaphysics, he talks epistemology; he doesn’t claim that nothing truly matters. instead, commitment to larger enterprises, nagel emphasizes, isn’t immune from the same basic doubts that can vex narrower concerns. from a highly objective perspective, we can doubt the importance of whatever we care about from our own subjective perspectives, even an expansive commitment to social justice or to building god’s everlasting kingdom. there is, to recall, a third option: absconding. we could choose to remove ourselves from our absurd lives by fleeing the scene, that is, by committing suicide. nagel discourages this response for several reasons. committing suicide would be, nagel says, “hasty.” true enough, once dead, you can no longer be accused of taking your life more seriously than a disengaged spectator could. collision avoided. but the act of suicide presumes that living an absurd life is, all things considered, not only a bad thing but worse than death. again, that takes something, the desire not the peculiar flavor of nagel’s metaethics 16   to live absurdly, seriously. and nagel might think, though he doesn’t say it, that this presumes that we know, or have very good reason to suppose, that there isn’t anything that truly matters, which we don’t know, or at least don’t know that we know. nagel also discourages us from wallowing. if we think greater objectivity reveals that our activity is meaningless, should we continuously mutter, “life is meaningless. life is meaningless”? or if we grant merely that greater objectivity in the very least raises legitimate doubts about our implicit pretensions of meaningful activity, should we mutter, “i can’t know with certainty that my pursuits truly matter. i can’t know with certainty that my pursuits truly matter”? what good would that do? such a response strikes nagel as unattractively self-pitying. and, at least near the end of “the absurd,” he seems to think this strategy reflects a missed lesson. if nothing truly matters, then the fact that your pursuits don’t matter doesn’t matter itself and so doesn’t call for despair. at the end of his analysis, nagel gestures at what he takes to be the very best response to the philosophical sense of the absurdity of life. to put it tersely, reflection on absurdity shouldn’t significantly change our day-to-day strivings (whatever they happen to be); it should change, instead, our general attitude toward all of our strivings (whatever they happen to be). the philosophical perception of absurdity should suffuse your strivings with “a peculiar flavor,” an attitude that nagel calls “a certain irony and resignation.”23 unable to abandon some of our central pursuits and the seriousness with which we pursue them, “we return to our lives, as we must, [. . .] our seriousness laced with irony.”24 there’s no need to despair, nagel tells us. the aspect of ourselves that leads to questions about whether our life pursuits are truly significant is “a manifestation of our most advanced and interesting characteristics.”25 recognition of absurdity is possible only because “we possess a certain kind of insight—the capacity to transcend ourselves in thought.”26 better to be, in other words, socrates feeling absurd than a pig blithely satisfied, or a lifeless corpse. it’s natural to ask, though, what nagel has in mind when he encourages a life lived in “ironic resignation,” and in what ways it should “flavor” our lives. seemingly for clarification, nagel turns to hume’s philo. philo believes that philosophical skepticism raises more questions about our ordinary beliefs and how we generally form them than “reason” can satisfactorily answer. think about descartes and his meditations. in ordinary life, you and i generally trust, among other things, our sensory perceptions, our memory, and our reasoning faculties, whether mathematical or logical. we build a large edifice of beliefs on the basis of such faith. but should we trust these belief-forming processes? they do, of course, sometimes mislead us. is there then some way to ensure—at least in some cases—that the way the world appears to us is the way it truly is? can we be sure that, when we gaze at what seem to be medium-sized objects at fairly close proximity, this is a veridical perception? that we’re not, for instance, presently dreaming, or being deceived by an all-powerful, all-knowing demon whose sole goal is to trick us into nothing but false beliefs? in the meditations, descartes attempts to argue that our everyday reasoning is trustworthy, even “demon proof.” but as both pascal and hume classically object, in arguing that our 17 reitsma   reasoning faculties, including our logical faculties, are trustworthy, descartes is forced to rely upon the very same reasoning faculties to get the argument off the ground—a clear case of circular reasoning. as philo puts it, “we don’t know how far we ought to trust our ordinary vulgar methods of reasoning,”27 and yet, to form any kind of structure of belief, we find ourselves having to rely on these methods. the upshot is that, as nagel puts it, once skeptical hypotheses are raised, there are inevitably, if we’re lucid and honest, more “frameable questions” than satisfactory answers.28 what to do about this? in his own voice, hume thinks philosophical skepticism can’t erase a kind of unsupported natural confidence we generally display in our ordinary processes of forming beliefs about the world. and in a famous passage, hume indicates his penchant for setting aside these “melancholy” reflections by playing backgammon with his friends for as long as it takes for the unhappy psychological effects of these skeptical concerns to peter out.29 that strategy amounts to ignoring the tension between our earnestly striving for true beliefs and wondering whether we can trust our everyday belief-forming mechanisms. as we’ve already seen in his reflections on absurdity, nagel wants more than ignoring the problem. and so, nagel turns to hume’s philo, who does say a bit more. melancholy reflections about skeptical hypotheses don’t lead philo to a highly revisionary set of beliefs, for instance to a remarkably smaller set. philo does think, however, that reflection on skeptical hypotheses should matter. in his view, a person who has thought intelligently about philosophical skepticism will be different from, wiser than, someone who hasn’t. clear-eyed awareness of skeptical hypotheses does lend to a person’s belief system—here’s the phrase nagel borrows—“a peculiar flavor.”30 so, a similar “collision” occurs in our theoretical life if we reflect upon our reasoning patterns. if i regard my system of beliefs as being well-grounded, but then see that i can’t provide noncircular justifications of some of my most influential assumptions, i might feel a “discrepancy” between my “aspirations” (to true and justified beliefs) and “reality” (my worrying doubts that i am failing to attain them). or, i might see myself as “a very reasonable person,” with a wellgrounded structure of beliefs, then notice that my reasonings are grounded in “unsupported natural confidence,” and wonder whether i’ve been caught, like the vainglorious knight, with my pants at my ankles. and yet, we can’t do without basic assumptions; we can’t do, probably, without a fairly extensive edifice of beliefs. can we quit being “serious” about our believing lives, even as there are more “frameable questions” than satisfactory answers? some skeptical questions, nagel emphasizes, are not particularly far-fetched. we can easily be led to suspect that many of our beliefs are the consequence more of contingent factors such as where we were born than of careful reasoning. we can easily suspect that our vaunted belief in our own freedom is mistaken. and so on. the grounds for doubt can begin to pour in. for better or worse, i confess to being impressed with nagel’s broad reflections, both about skepticism and about absurdity, in “the absurd.” nagel seems to be onto something. not only does the essay bring much-needed clarity to an old puzzle about the philosophical perception of absurdity, it helps us understand what’s so intractable about this perception and why it can arise—forcefully—for most any reflective person. more, a whole philosophical bearing, a whole the peculiar flavor of nagel’s metaethics 18   attitude to practical and theoretical thinking, seems to emerge from this paper. (and nagel’s deft writing lends that philosophical bearing significant attraction.) the reader can sense nagel’s piercing intelligence and his intellectual modesty. his spirit, bemused about the prospects of a life of careful thinking, simply won’t quit seeking out the truth even so, and even if it makes him seem (to himself) a bit ridiculous. that said nagel’s broad philosophical bearing isn’t as clear as we might like. as mentioned, it would be helpful to think very precisely about what “inflated pretensions” we (allegedly) more or less inescapably bring to our lives. and what precisely are we forced to be “resigned” to? is it that for the rest of our lives we will be arguing from basic premises and treating some normative considerations as basic? (i suppose i can live with that; it can even seem to be a banal point.) is it that we are forced to act as though we truly or wholeheartedly believe even when a part of us, and a venerable part at that, does not? acting as though we truly regard our pursuits as of objective value when part of us does not? also, there seem to be some very significant practical lessons afoot. but what are they? clearly, nagel doesn’t want us to quit striving, both after “important” practical goals and after the truth. and just as clearly nagel wants certain second-order attitudes to hover over our “serious” pursuits. which attitudes, though? perhaps intellectual humility. perhaps a properly bemused attitude toward our own strivings should lead us to a certain type of tolerance for other (thoughtful) people, whose strivings have lead them to bend in other directions than we have. if we take our cue from nagel’s allusion to philo, perhaps there is even an edifying lesson about intellectual friendship here. whereas philo and cleanthes, who have very different stripes of mind, are able to converse with “unreserved intimacy,” demea, who demands that his interlocutors agree with his starting points, is cut off from such enjoyable and affirming conversation and friendship.31 i suppose we can all nod our heads at humility, tolerance, and intellectual friendship. but does philo’s outlook also warrant idiosyncrasy in philosophical starting points? re-thinking metaphysics in light of realist intuitions? iii. nagel’s metaethics to understand the worldview at work in mind and cosmos, we need to recognize nagel has changed his mind in at least one important way since he wrote “the absurd.” one of his operating assumptions has been flipped upside down. in “the absurd,” the reader—or at least this reader—is left with the very strong sense that nagel does not think there are objective values. as mentioned, at times 1971 nagel merely insinuates that our “pretension” that what we pursue has objective values is, when we step back from it, doubtable. but at times he seems to assume more: that the taking of the (more) objective viewpoint of the “spectator” of our lives reveals that our central pursuits do not have any claim to be real values. (recall nagel’s argument that since nothing truly matters, there is truly no reason for despair that our life pursuits don’t truly matter.) by the time nagel writes mind and cosmos, his thinking is no 19 reitsma   longer governed by the stronger, more metaphysical assumption. he is a value realist. he continues to think value realism is subject to doubt, but he calls his value realism a “defeasible presumption.” is this, too, a commitment, however seriously it is held, that is to be flavored by ironic resignation? let’s see. as a value realist, nagel holds that there are basic, mind-independent evaluative truths, among them moral truths. in the normal run of human life, we confront a variety of “oughts”: “don’t end a sentence with a preposition,” “don’t chew with your mouth open,” “don’t take a dive in a soccer game,” “don’t torture animals”—in all these cases, we ought not. this type of experience, a confrontation with an “ought,” is a quotidian feature of “the mundane existence…of value in our lives,”32 and it naturally raises the question, sometimes called the normative question, of whether we should grant the relevant “ought” normative authority (and, if so, why). certainly, some “oughts” do not warrant being treated as normative. if the central point of the rules of grammar is to help writers produce clear, flowing prose, the rule against sentence-ending prepositions is invalid: it leads too often to stilted sentences (such as churchill’s witty reductio ad absurdum, “that is a rule up with which i will not put”). and some “oughts,” even if they should be treated as normative, aren’t basic. the moral rule against diving in soccer, let’s suppose, should be followed. but it certainly isn’t a fundamental evaluative or moral rule; it’s an application of a more general moral principle against behaving unfairly. and so, if we were to examine critically the normative question about “don’t dive,” we would need to inquire into the validity of the more basic rule from which the moral rule against diving is derived, along with whatever facts are relevant. in nagel’s all-things-considered view, the “oughts” of etiquette and grammar are not basic, mind-independent, evaluative truths. they’re social constructions.33 and explaining their validity, to the degree that some of these rules enjoy it, requires us to appeal to common human motives and conventions. the reasons we ought to follow them, if we should, are grounded in concerns we bring to the context of practical deliberation.34 by contrast, in nagel’s view some “oughts”—among them moral “oughts” such as “torturing animals is wrong”—are basic, mind-independent, social-convention-independent, and valid. claims such as “torturing animals is wrong” are, nagel says, “just true in their own right.”35 as nagel sees it, the “explanation” for why we ought to follow them is that they are real, objective values; their status as normative does not depend on any attitudes we personally bring to the context of practical deliberation. in nagel’s broad outlook, the hard work of practical deliberation, once the relevant objective values have been glimpsed, is to discern the “actual structure and weight” of these various objective values.36 so it turns out that, in nagel’s complete world picture, the world isn’t bereft of objective values; it’s replete with them. not wanting to be anthropocentric, nagel thinks that many objective values aren’t values that you and i will be able to incorporate into our practical the peculiar flavor of nagel’s metaethics 20   lives; instead, we should commit, most directly, to those objective values that tie to our particular “form of life.”37 how does nagel articulate and defend this view in mind and cosmos? in the philosophical literature, everyday moral practice is sometimes treated as providing prima facie evidence in favor of value realism. everyday moral practice seems to be predicated on realist assumptions. this idea is likewise the starting point for nagel’s thinking: as a value realist, nagel treats everyday moral experience as, in this respect, getting things right. but as we also speak of “truth” when we discuss the rules of grammar and etiquette, we clearly cannot just take for granted that everyday experience is reliable in this regard. this leads to nagel’s claim that value realism is a “defeasible presumption.” and he frames his metaethical discussion in the following way: should we maintain this presumption or regard it as “defeated”? obviously, nagel argues for maintenance. in mind and cosmos, nagel’s metaethical theorizing seems to me to fit into two categories, which initially seem to be in tension. first, nagel attempts to diffuse the various, long-standing objections that value realism is, in some sense, a philosophically extravagant hypothesis. for example, nagel attempts to strip away “metaphysical baggage” often ascribed to value realism, lest it motivate the reductionist impulse to explain away the prima facie intuition that there are “real values.” but second, nagel attempts to reveal the “pervasive” implications of value realism for constructing our best anthropology and our best metaphysics. in other words, value realism should lead us to make (or even re-make, if we’re metaphysical naturalists) our metaphysical outlook. the tension is—to put it in colloquial terms—that the first, diffusing strategy is supposed to lead to the conclusion that value realism isn’t really a big deal, while the second strategy is to reveal what a big deal it truly is. with respect to his diffusionary strategy, nagel remarks that, in any domain in which there are truths, some will be basic. so, assuming value realism, there will be basic evaluative truths. nagel emphasizes that, in his view, value realism does not posit any “new” elements in the universe. evaluative truths “exist” in the same sense that valid logical rules exist: when we try to think carefully through arguments, we recognize that modus ponens is a valid reasoning method, and arguing in a circle isn’t. a basic, valid rule of logic exists only in the sense that it has a certain kind of explanatory or justificatory value: to justify why i accept the conclusion of an argument that has the form modus ponens (and the premises of which are true), i need only appeal to the logical truth that “modus ponens is a valid rule.” likewise, nagel thinks that, to justify why i take aspirin for a headache, i need only appeal to the basic evaluative truth that “pain is bad” (along with the fact that aspirin is a cure). what about the standard objections to value realism? for instance, what about the existence and extent of moral disagreement? nagel isn’t so impressed. he thinks it is common to exaggerate the levels of moral disagreement, at least in the basics. moreover, there are disputes about empirical, logical, and numerical questions, too, but these disputes don’t generally lead us to doubt scientific, logical, or mathematical realism. after all, there are explanations for such disputes other than that such domains lack truths. some disputants haven’t learned to think 21 reitsma   successfully empirically, logically, or numerically, and sometimes irrelevant motives or concerns jigger the thinking. for any valid domain of reasoning, there will be people who don’t learn to practice it successfully, and some of these people will be otherwise intelligent and well-intended. also, nagel relies heavily on an analogy. when it comes to sensory perception and our theorizing about it, nagel is strongly inclined to treat realism about empirical matters as a “defeasible presumption,” one which we do not ultimately have adequate reason to reject even though people disagree, scientists even disagree, sometimes about empirical issues. recall, with respect to our ordinary methods of reasoning, that there are more “frameable questions” than satisfactory answers; but nagel does not regard this skeptical worry as an adequate reason to reject realism about empirical matters. more or less, nagel thinks we should approach evaluative and moral realism in the same way. he chooses to trust, among other “vulgar methods of reasoning,” his value realist intuitions. of course, doubts can be raised, and so value and moral realism “may be impossible to establish decisively”; but sticking with a belief in the original realist intuition is “not unjustified.”38 treat value realism as the default position, and there simply isn’t a compelling reason, nagel thinks, to leave it. to reiterate, nagel’s second strategy is to argue that value realism does have implications, even “pervasive” implications, for our everyday evaluative thinking and for our metaethical theorizing. as noted in the introduction to this forum, nagel accepts the argument made by sharon street that, though the existence of real values isn’t logically inconsistent with darwinism, the thesis is a fifth wheel to a purely darwinian outlook.39 and yet, value realism “seems” to nagel “glaringly correct,” leading him to respond to street’s modus pollens with a modus tollens.40 darwinian mechanisms aren’t, he concludes, the only factor in our development into a morally engaged species. since nagel isn’t disposed to think that the still, small voice of a god has encouraged us to notice evaluative truths, he sees himself as needing an account that explains how we come to recognize such truths. so, from metaethical theorizing, the argument moves quickly, and dramatically, to speculation about the telos of the universe. other “big conclusions” flow into the discussion as breathtakingly quickly as the modus ponens to modus tollens move. we should posit, nagel suggests: (1) that we have a moral sense that is able to discover moral truths; (2) that our moral judgments are able to motivate our behavior independent of desires (such as impartial benevolence); and, (3) that teleological value realism accords, perhaps better than other metaethical theories, with the very slow but steady advance of moral knowledge in human history. i suppose nagel is correct at least this far: “what counts as a good explanation depends heavily on an understanding of what it is that has to be explained.”41 iv. what to conclude? does nagel’s philosophy of philosophizing explain nagel’s striking admixture of intellectual modesty and intellectual boldness? it seems to play a significant role. though nagel regards value realism as “glaringly correct,” he admits it only “seems” so to him. the pose he strikes is the peculiar flavor of nagel’s metaethics 22   of a person who simply hasn’t been able to shake, after considerable flights of reflection, this intuition, which he ends up both defending as an “admissible conjecture” and using as the beginning point of significant psychological, historical, and metaphysical speculation. how better to describe this than as a form of “bemused confidence” in his own theorizing? does this philosophy of philosophizing justify nagel’s thinking? as i stated earlier, i’m not entirely sure what to think about nagel’s metathics. so much seems to turn on how ultimately to assess the realist intuitions that drive nagel to a cascade of big conclusions. (of course, in fairness to nagel, the chapter “value” is probably less a sustained argument for his value realist views and their “pervasive” implications than a distillation of the arguments he’s been making for some time. and so the “big conclusions” come fast and furious partly because he is sketching his views rather than fully arguing for them.) to answer the question, we’d need to think carefully about whether it truly is our lot in intellectual life, as nagel supposes along with other thinkers such as pascal and hume, that we can build our edifices—no matter how intelligent and observant—on nothing much better than an “admissible conjecture” or two. in the end, it’s fairly obvious to me that nagel doesn’t warrant—he is too thoughtful, too intelligent, and too intellectually honest to warrant—some of the condescending accusations demea-like critics have levied at him. philo’s general bearing deserves more respect. notes 1. chorost 2013. 2. nagel 2012, 106, 100, 92, 118, 82, 112. 3. ibid., 25. 4. this claim first appears in the last word (nagel 1997, 130) and is repeated in nagel’s recent “the core of mind and cosmos” (nagel 2013). 5. nagel 2012, 119. 6. admission: i suppose i previously have. though i don’t consider myself a metaphysical naturalist, i’m guilty of what nagel describes as constructing “epicycles” on behalf of humean subjectivism, a form of value non-realism. see reitsma 2014. 7. see avramides 2006. 8. nagel 1971, 720–721. 9. see tolstoy 1905. 10. nagel 1971, 718. 23 reitsma   11. ibid. 12. ibid. 13. ibid., 721. 14. ibid., 719. 15. ibid., 720. 16. ibid., 725. 17. ibid., 725 and 720. 18. ibid., 718. 19. ibid., 721, 725. 20. ibid., 726. 21. ibid., 718. 22. ibid., 719. 23. ibid., 724. 24. ibid. 25. ibid., 726. 26. ibid., 727. 27. hume 1776, 5. 28. nagel 1971, 723–724. 29. hume 1739–1740, 144. 30. hume 1776, 5. 31. sessions 2002, especially chapter 16. 32. nagel 2012, 92. 33. ibid., 99–100. 34. ibid., 93. 35. ibid., 98. the peculiar flavor of nagel’s metaethics 24   36. ibid., 95. 37. ibid., 114–115. 38. ibid., 100. 39. ibid., 105. 40. ibid., 107. 41. ibid., 102. accordingly, i’m not sure i understand why nagel says that value realism “is a metaphysical [theory] only if the denial of a metaphysical position like naturalism itself counts as a metaphysical position” (97). works cited avramides, anita. 2006. “thomas nagel: the view from nowhere.” in central works in philosophy, edited by j. shand, 227–246. durham, england: acumen press. chorost, michael. 2013. “where nagel went wrong.” the chronicle review, may 13. http://chronicle.com/article/where-thomas-nagel-went-wrong/139129/ (accessed july 6, 2014). hume, david. 1739–1740. treatise of human nature. http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdfs/hume1739book1.pdf (accessed july 10, 2014). _____. 1776. dialogues concerning natural religion. http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdfs/hume1779.pdf (accessed july 6, 2014). nagel, thomas. 1971. “the absurd.” the journal of philosophy 68: 716–727. _____. 1986. the view from nowhere. oxford university press. _____. 1997. the last word. new york: oxford university press. _____. 2012. mind and cosmos: why the materialist neo-darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false. oxford: oxford university press. _____. 2013. “the core of ‘mind and cosmos’.” the new york times, august 18. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/the-core-of-mind-and-cosmos/?_r=0 (accessed july 6, 2014). reitsma, regan lance. 2014. “how a modern-day hume can reject a desire categorically.” the european journal of analytic philosophy 9.2: 48–66. 25 reitsma   sessions, william lad. 2002. reading hume’s dialogues: a veneration for true religion. bloomington: indiana university press. tolstoy, leo. 1905 [1882]. my confession, translated by leo wiener. london: j.m. dent and sons. microsoft word edmundson review-final.docx [expositions 10.1 (2016) 99–106] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 edmundson, mark. self and soul: a defense of ideals. cambridge, ma, and london: harvard university press, 2015. 283 pages. $29.95 (cloth). isbn 978-0-674-08820-7. when mark edmundson, university professor of english at the university of virginia, looks out from the front of his classroom, he sees ambitious and talented young people, the best of their generation. but, to his eyes, they lack all conviction. they want to achieve, sure, but their aims are dull, mundane, and self-focused. “achievement” itself is often their sole aspiration. they want to be management consultants. or physicians who will keep terminally ill patients alive for another three days, at great expense. or inventors of apps that will help users upload pictures of their dinners more efficiently. none wants to be a hero, a saint, a thinker, or a poet. none lives for an ideal. on edmundson’s account, his students are typical denizens of the present age. as he argues in self and soul, his eleventh book, modern culture in the west has suffered from a loss of the classical ideals—principally courage, compassion, and contemplation—that would enable people to live self-transcending lives. because we no longer believe in these or any other ideals, we are prisoners of ourselves. or rather, of our selves, for edmundson establishes his argument on the opposition between capital-s self and soul, terms which represent two orientations. on the one hand, there is the focus on satisfying immediate desires, amassing wealth and prestige and seeking to maximize consumption by living as long a life as possible. on the other, there is the life devoted to ideals, a life that may be short and voluntarily impoverished, but one that, at its end, was obviously lived for something. together, the terms self and soul are a pithy expression of a dialectic that has occupied western minds for a long time. roughly equivalent terms from the canon include flesh and spirit, asleep and awake, das man and dasein, and selling out and keepin’ it real. edmundson’s self resembles josé ortega y gasset’s señorito satisfecho or nietzsche’s last man, the smug bourgeois citizen who pictures himself as having summited history and who now, as a trophy, enjoys his “little pleasure for the day, and [his] little pleasure for the night.”1 edmundson has special disdain for the little pleasures of video gaming, football fandom, journalism, and popular music, all of which he believes offer counterfeits of the true ideals. gamers feel a false courage as they direct the avatar of a lone u.s. marine through a ruined city crawling with terrorists; music fans are duped into review of self and soul: a defense of ideals 100 admiring the questionable artistry of the “racket of a garage band or the meanderings of a fulminating rapper” (98). the classical ideals that constitute soul are neither little nor, typically, pleasurable. pursuing them may cost you your life. edmundson explores these ideals in the book’s first three chapters, titled, “the hero,” “the saint,” and “the thinker.” in each of them edmundson turns to ancient literary works to flesh out the ideals and their chief representatives, most of whom died at others’ hands: achilles and hector; the buddha, confucius, and jesus; and socrates and plato. edmundson’s portraits of these figures are (perhaps necessarily) selective. edmundson’s jesus is the man of limitless compassion who, as william blake put it in his poem “on another’s sorrow,” attends our every sigh and tear: o! he gives to us his joy that our grief he may destroy; till our grief is fled and gone he doth sit by us and moan.2 for edmundson, the multiplication of loaves encapsulates jesus’ ministry. jesus sees that the multitude of people he has been preaching to is hungry. taking pity on them, jesus has the disciples pool everything they have and distribute it to the crowd. it isn’t nearly enough, of course, but others in the crowd are moved to compassion and produce whatever store of food they had, too. and so on. all are fed, not because seven loaves were transmuted into thousands, but because one man’s compassion spread like a contagion. in this manner, what jesus saves people from is self (72–74). to edmundson, nothing like this had previously appeared in the jewish tradition, and so he speculates that buddhist compassion made its way to the near east prior to jesus’ appearance (67). to edmundson, jesus is a poor fit within a theological tradition he sees as focused on violent conquest and judgment. edmundson grants that neighbor-love has roots in the torah, but to him, yahweh is too exclusionary and vengeful to endorse it fully. in fact, edmundson faults jesus for not breaking more sharply with judaism (94). jesus’ accepting death on the cross “can look like a concession to yahweh at his most brutal” (93). oddly, edmundson does not see the crucifixion as the ultimate act of compassion, the enactment of isaiah’s call for a suffering servant. 101 malesic edmundson’s casual dismissal of the jewish moral tradition is among a trove of problems with self and soul’s chapter on compassion. edmundson relies mostly on the gospel according to mark for his portrait of jesus. it’s a good choice for a literary scholar; of the four canonical presentations of jesus, mark’s is the most interesting character, a mad preacher and exorcist, running around galilee as if on fire. in edmundson’s hands, though, jesus is reduced to one dimension: a chilledout sage who is completely over the human distinctions that reinforce self. one can arrive at this view only through a tendentious reading of the gospel. ignoring jesus’ frequent refrain that the first shall be last and the last, first, edmundson claims that “at the table that jesus sets no one is thrust away and no one is compelled by rank, age, or gender to eat last” (74). of course, jesus feeds multitudes in mark’s gospel, but just as prominent are jesus’ exchanges with demons, his incomprehensible parables, and his prophecies of the coming of the son of man. there is little compassion evident in his warning about imminent troubles: “woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing infants in those days! pray that it may not be in winter” (mk 13:17–18). despite his avowed aim of rupturing bourgeois self-satisfaction, edmundson sees no economic implications to jesus’ ministry. (one might argue, as recent popes have, that capitalist dogmas prop up the world of self and that jesus undercuts these.) the chains jesus breaks are all spiritual, and the equanimity he preaches is barely distinguishable from that of the stoics. commenting on the parable of the denarius, edmundson writes, “if you are as pure as jesus, you owe nothing to caesar and everything to your conception of god” (85). here edmundson sabotages his own argument, showing that soul, as he understands it, does not ultimately challenge self. devotion to “your conception of god” is in fact the apogee of self. ludwig feuerbach’s critique of christianity was that its theology is really anthropology, which is to say that our conceptions of god express magnifications, even idealizations, of our most flattering self-conceptions. as søren kierkegaard and karl barth argued in feuerbach’s wake, a god who cannot say no to you is an idol. ideals can pose the same problem. we have much to fear from those who strive unchecked toward an image of greatness. edmundson’s selective reading of the gospels casts doubt on his reading of other texts. throughout the book, edmundson makes big claims without earning them through presenting sufficient evidence. for example, in an effort to anticipate the objection that his exemplary thinkers (really, all of his classical exemplars) are men who lived in thoroughgoing patriarchies, edmundson says: review of self and soul: a defense of ideals 102 one has no doubt that as time unspools and women have more opportunity to choose their paths, more and more will take their places as lovers of wisdom and potential guides to their fellows. will their wisdom be substantially different from the wisdom of male thinkers? will they cut new routes toward the center of the major questions? perhaps they will. but it is more likely that as they approach universal questions, issues of gender will matter less to them (though such issues can never disappear) and issues of humanity writ large will matter more. (112–13) “perhaps” women philosophers will raise new questions and look at longstanding ones differently? is edmundson actually ignorant of the entire corpus of feminist thought since simone de beauvoir’s the second sex (1949)? in raising these questions, i am not saying that edmundson ought to have had a chapter addressing the gendered nature of his ideals (though that would not have hurt). rather, i am insisting that he show the virtues of circumspection and humility that mark not just the scholar, but anyone who seeks the truth. (it should be noted that edmundson always capitalizes “truth.”) to edmundson, ideals just are universal, and too much emphasis on particulars will tempt the person toward the private sphere of self. whatever else we want to make of this outlook, it’s a handy cover for intellectual parochialism, which is, ironically enough, a form of self-satisfaction. *** when and how did the west give up on its ideals? edmundson locates a cultural shift in the early modern period. he does not aim at establishing causes (which is just as well), but he looks to literature as a cultural bellwether and focuses on a writer whose ideals are supposed to be completely opaque: william shakespeare. this opacity is an illusion, however, born of the fact that we all believe what shakespeare believes. specifically, we believe that heroism, piety, and wisdom are all hollow, and getting ahead in the world by any means is the only real good. as edmundson puts it, “almost every shakespeare passage comes from the mouth of a character speaking to achieve his or her desires. they speak from desires for and of the self—they articulate, directly or indirectly, self-interested aspirations” (173). shakespeare thus gives voice and spectacle to the emerging merchant class, blessing both its commercial striving and its resentment of the old 103 malesic regime. he parades the noble and warlike across the stage, mocks their ideals, and puts them to death, often at their own hands. edmundson argues in a later chapter that sigmund freud is shakespeare’s great collaborator in knocking down classical ideals, presenting courage as a mask for subconscious fear and neurosis. shakespeare suggests that macbeth is sexually impotent; he compensates on the battlefield. following shakespeare, “freud makes the middle-class people who live by half-measures feel much better, allowing them to understand that the virtues that intimidated them are forms of sickness and that normality—clear-eyed and stable—is the true achievement” (165). edmundson underestimates what an achievement stable normality is, especially on a cultural scale. this is ultimately why the book fails; it laments as a loss what is in fact a change that allows new modes of human thriving—including new ideals. edmundson can only condemn modern literature, modern art, the modern mind, and so on, because his outlook is so narrow. charles taylor has also charted the loss of spiritual idealism in modernity but, in basing his analysis on a closer and fairer reading of culture, resists a declinist narrative. his is a much more enlightening story. at the end of sources of the self, taylor notes that in the modern drive to aim for lower ideals, the west did indeed lose something. he writes that “the highest spiritual ideals and aspirations also threaten to lay the most crushing burdens on humankind.” nevertheless, “stifling” these ideals “too, is a heavy price to pay.” taylor concludes by saying that this dilemma “is in a sense our greatest spiritual challenge, not an iron fate.”3 he takes up the challenge in his second magnum opus, a secular age, in which he outlines the five-century shift from a culture in which religious ideals were taken for granted (if not often realized) to one in which they are among several different ways to orient one’s life. on taylor’s account, ideals did not so much disappear as diffuse throughout western society as the standards of the medieval religious elite were accepted by (or imposed upon) all christians. based on this account, taylor’s assessment of the prospects for self-transcendence in the modern age is both more generous and more plausible than edmundson’s story of self’s triumph over soul. as taylor tells it, modernity does indeed fashion a self where none had been, in part by immanentizing goods, elevating instrumental rationality, and rendering questionable any spiritual reality. we imagine ourselves as individuals within this “immanent frame”; indeed, we are compelled to do so. but the immanent frame isn’t a step down by any means, even to the eyes of review of self and soul: a defense of ideals 104 a committed catholic like taylor. it’s a transformation, one that closes off some possibilities and opens others. even given the cultural hegemony of expressive individualism today, there can be transcendence. taylor asks us to look to poets, thinkers, politicians, and poet-thinker-politicians like gerard manley hopkins, charles péguy, ivan illich, and václav havel—indeed, all european men—for examples of ones who “listen for a voice which we could never have assumed ourselves, whose tone might have been forever unknown to us if we hadn’t strained to understand it.”4 although taylor gives attention to heroic exemplars, he doesn’t blame you and me for our inability to become them, as edmundson does. rather, taylor argues, with nuanced analysis, that the ideal of compassion, which christians adopted from judaism, carries with it an affirmation of the dignity of each person, an affirmation that made it possible to imagine that ordinary life could have meaning despite its lack of heroism, creativity, or contemplation. taylor, then, shows us that a disappointed idealist like edmundson doesn’t just get the remedy to modern ailments wrong, but he has in fact made a false diagnosis. it only looks like the west has abandoned compassion because compassion has in important ways triumphed and been institutionalized. this is not to say that there is an excess of compassion in western societies; genocide, for example, is a modern phenomenon, fueled by the relatively new ideals of nation and race. but in part because we have witnessed the massive cost of pursuing these dubious ideals—thanks to the journalism edmundson laments as having taken over from “authentic thought” (251)—we have stumbled toward an ideal of seeing strangers as fully human and their suffering as something we must attempt to alleviate. post-christian societies like germany and sweden are, as i write this, taking in muslim refugees from syria on a massive scale. granted, the countries have economic reason to do so, as northern europe needs young workers. but that is not the sole case being made, and by welcoming the refugees at all, europe is departing from violent ideals both recent and ancient. we might consider how homeric greeks would have greeted desperate, unarmed syrians who landed on their shores. a form of compassion even effects cultural change in allegedly entertainment-obsessed america. professional football, a sport edmundson claims is our cheap proxy for homeric battle (98, 248), is under growing public scrutiny for its degenerative effect on players’ bodies and minds. that is to say, real compassion, informed by journalism and technical scholarship on brain injury, has caused americans to question why we ask young men to destroy themselves for our amusement. it is too early to make confident predictions about the future of the sport, but if pro 105 malesic football becomes less popular as a result of what we know about concussions, or if youth football is ever banned, then even by edmundson’s standards, we could say that a true ideal, espoused not by an impassioned elite but having slowly become a cultural consensus, will have defeated a false one. it’s true that few of us are terribly courageous or wise. but then, that was true even in the purported heyday of ideals. women, children, and enslaved men constituted the vast majority of society. very few were educated, and most died too young to develop much wisdom anyway. achilles and hector never existed, and even the buddha’s historicity is murky. hardly anyone ever had the ideals edmundson claims have been lost. even those who lived the ideals were few, and some of the best exemplars are fictional. this argument is typical of reactionary idealists. they invent a past that never was in order to condemn the present, the reality of which is presumably harder to hide. but that move only works if we really are culturally bereft. edmundson sees no one living out ideals today, but his eyes are closed. he complains about the inanity of pop music; fine. but has he not heard henryk górecki? or aretha franklin? he says we have lost courage but never mentions the two wars our country fought in the last decade. did the soldiers, all of them volunteers, not aspire to bravery? are civil rights protesters not courageous? isn’t a writer like toni morrison—or tony kushner—wise? isn’t charles taylor? common wisdom says that the right to complain is not absolute. you supposedly can’t complain about politicians unless you cast a vote, and an unwillingness to make things better invalidates any complaint at all. i happen not to accept this view. as far as i’m concerned, edmundson is entitled to complain about our culture. complaint is free. credibility, however, must be earned. you do that through exercising careful argumentation, fairness, and good humor. aristotle taught that. and, on this score, edmundson falls well short of the classical ideal.5 jonathan malesic king’s college (pa) review of self and soul: a defense of ideals 106 notes 1. nietzsche 1954, 130. 2. blake 2011, lines 33–36. 3. taylor 1989, 519–21. 4. taylor 2007, 754. 5. i thank jacob s. goodson for conversation and comments on a draft of this essay. works cited blake, william. 2011. “on another’s sorrow.” in the poetical works of william blake, ed. john sampson. london and new york: oxford university press, 1908. bartleby.com. www.bartleby.com/235/59.html. nietzsche, friedrich. 1954. thus spoke zarathustra. in the portable nietzsche, ed. and trans. walter kaufmann. new york: penguin books. taylor, charles. 1989. sources of the self: the making of the modern identity. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. _____. 2007. a secular age. cambridge, ma: belknap press of harvard university press. microsoft word eif-3-final.docx [expositions 8.2 (2014) 26–37] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 explaining value: nagel on normative realism and the teleology of evolution micah lott boston college in chapter 5 of mind and cosmos, thomas nagel argues that value realism shows that “something is missing from darwinism, and from the standard biological conception of ourselves.”1 a major part of what is missing is the right sort of explanation for the historical process that brought into existence value and beings like ourselves who can consciously recognize value. an adequate explanation of that process, nagel suggests, would be teleological in character, with value as the telos that explains the emergence and evolution of living things.2 as he says, “on a teleological account, the existence of value is not an accident, because it is part of the explanation of why there is such a thing as life, with all its possibilities of development and variation. in brief, value is not just an accidental side effect of life; rather, there is life because life is a necessary condition of value.”3 to some readers, such a teleological explanation of life’s development will seem outrageous, even absurd. in this essay, i will not challenge the possibility of such an explanation. but i wish to raise some doubts about nagel’s claim that value realism calls for historical teleology of this sort. before doing so, i will attempt to clarify nagel’s line of thought. nagel presents his view in conversation with the work of sharon street, in particular her “darwinian dilemma” for realist theories of value.4 street argues that realism is incompatible with a darwinian view of how evolution has shaped our moral and evaluative faculties. nagel agrees with this claim. however, whereas street maintains that we should give up realism, nagel draws the alternative conclusion—we should revise the darwinian account. in spite of nagel’s presentation, i think it is ultimately misleading to interpret his argument in the context of street’s work. in the next section, i will explain why street’s darwinian dilemma is really a distraction from nagel’s chief concerns. with nagel’s argument in better focus, i will then argue that we can accept the sort of antireductionism and value realism that nagel favors, without embracing a teleological account of the process of evolution. darwinism and realism: clarifying the issues as nagel understands it, realism about value is the view that there are fundamental evaluative and moral truths that are true in their own right, and not made true by our attitudes or dispositions. realists maintain that “when our value judgments are correct, it is because our dispositions are in accord with the actual structure and weight of values in the case at hand.”5 nagel contrasts realism with subjectivism, according to which value judgments depend for their 27 lott truth on us—i.e., on our attitudes or dispositions or motivations. the dispute between realism and subjectivism is thus “a dispute about the order of normative explanation.”6 in a series of articles, sharon street has argued that darwinian evolution poses a dilemma for realism. street understands realism in roughly the same way as nagel, as the view that “there are at least some evaluative facts or truths that hold independently of all our evaluative attitudes.”7 street’s argument begins with the claim that evolution has exerted a profound influence on our basic evaluative tendencies, and that these tendencies in turn shape our normative judgments. street then asks: what is the relationship between evolutionary influences on our judgments, and the normative truths posited by realism, which hold independently of our attitudes and judgments? one possibility is that evolution has selected our evaluative tendencies because they help us reliably track the independent normative truths, and thus evolution has been pushing us toward those truths. but this “tracking account” of our faculties is scientifically untenable, for it is much less plausible than the alternative “adaptive link account,” according to which our evaluative tendencies were selected because they promoted reproductive fitness. the other possibility is that there was no connection between evolutionary influences on our faculties and normative truths. what promotes reproductive fitness is one thing, and independent truths normative are another. while scientifically acceptable, this possibility means that it would be a massive coincidence if evolution has in fact shaped us to form reliably true beliefs about normative truths. as street says: of course it’s possible that as a matter of sheer chance, some large portion of our evaluative judgments ended up true, due to a happy coincidence between the realist’s independent evaluative truths and the evaluative directions in which natural selection tended to push us, but this would require a fluke of luck that’s not only extremely unlikely, in view of the huge universe of logically possible evaluative judgments and truths, but also astoundingly convenient to the realist.8 given the improbability of such a coincidence, we should conclude that evolution’s influence on our evaluative faculties was not pushing us toward normative truths, but away from them. in all likelihood, “the fund of evaluative judgments with which human reflection began was thoroughly contaminated.”9 and thus we should conclude that our faculties of normative judgment do not lead reliably to true beliefs. rather, “all our reflection over the ages has really just been a process of assessing evaluative judgments that are mostly off the mark in terms of others that are mostly off the mark.”10 and therefore we should be skeptics about our ability to know normative truths. so realists have two options: embracing an untenable “tracking account,” or embracing normative skepticism. that is street’s darwinian dilemma. although nagel frames his position in relation to street’s argument, he never actually states her dilemma in its complete form. as nagel correctly points out, part of street’s argument is that “from a darwinian perspective, the hypothesis of value realism is superfluous—a wheel that spins without being attached to anything.”11 but nagel doesn’t explain why this superfluity matters to street. the reason is that she believes that, given this superfluity, we have no grounds explaining value 28 for thinking that our judgment-forming faculties are reliable. it would be a massive coincidence if our faculties were to lead us to recognize correctly the independent normative truths. and therefore if normative truths are independent of us as the realist supposes, we ought to conclude that we lack all knowledge of them. moral realism leads to skepticism about moral knowledge. nagel doesn’t spell out these points about coincidence, reliability, and knowledge. nor does he consider the two most prominent types of reply to street’s argument. the first type of reply rejects street’s claim that evolutionary processes have exerted such a thorough-going influence on us that our normative judgments must be seen as the products of evolutionary forces.12 the second type of reply grants a role to evolution in shaping our beliefs, but maintains that our faculties might still be reliable in leading us to normative truth, on account of some “preestablished harmony” or third factor. for example, david enoch argues that it is plausible to suppose that it was evolutionarily beneficial to believe that our survival is good. and thus evolution has shaped us—for reasons of reproductive fitness—to be inclined to believe that our survival is good. however, it is also plausible to assume that our survival is good, in the realist sense. thus, although evolution did not push us toward this belief because it was true, nevertheless evolution shaped us to reliably form the true belief that our survival is good: “the fact that (roughly speaking) survival is good pre-establishes the harmony between the normative truths and our normative beliefs.”13 other authors have made arguments with a similar structure with respect to our beliefs about the moral standing of persons and the badness of pain.14 the crucial point for this kind of reply is that, even without a “tracking account,” we can explain why it is no coincidence that we reliably form true judgments about normative matters. and thus realism need not lead to skepticism. what interests me here is not whether either of these replies to street’s argument (or some combination of them) is successful. rather it is that nagel does not even consider these replies. this is further evidence, i think, that while nagel agrees with street that value realism is superfluous to the darwinian story, he has a different view of why this superfluity is important. for nagel, the significance of the superfluity is not that it threatens to force the realist into moral skepticism. rather the significance is that an adequate explanation of the process whereby value comes about should not make value’s appearance and recognition into a side effect or “lucky accident.” and according to nagel, reckoning with this point leads us toward a teleological account of the evolutionary process. we can identify four steps in nagel’s line of thought. the first step is the very basic assumption that the universe is fundamentally intelligible.15the second step is identifying certain features of the universe as “significant” or “systematic,” such that they require explanation and cannot be seen merely as “brute facts.” the third step is an argument that explaining something requires more than just knowing the immediate cause of an event. rather, “explanation, unlike causation, is not just of an event, but of an event under a description. an explanation must show why it was likely that an event of that type occurred.”16 to illustrate this point, nagel gives the example of tapping “3,” “+,” “5,” and “=” into a pocket calculator, and seeing the figure “8” appear on the screen. we could identify the physical causes of the figure on the screen—e.g., the 29 lott electrons in the calculator’s circuits. but a physical-causal explanation does not yet explain why the calculator gave the right answer—it doesn’t explain its giving the right answer as such. “to explain the result under that description, we must refer to the algorithm governing the calculator, and the intention of the designer to give it a physical realization.”17 these first three steps apply not only to matters of value but to explanation in general, including the explanation of consciousness and cognition (treated in chapters 3 and 4, respectively, of mind and cosmos). joined to value realism, these three steps amount to the idea that the existence and recognition of value are among the significant features of our world that require explanation as such. for nagel, this means having an answer to the question: why is the universe such that it contains value and creatures who can recognize it—and why is it like that under that description? we can make this question more specific, however, by taking a fourth step. this consists in recognizing that value comes into the world with the emergence of life, and indeed that value is coextensive with life, and that different kinds of normative reality correspond to different forms of life. as nagel says: what is the actual history of value in the world, so far as we are aware of it? nothing in this domain can be regarded as obvious, but in the broadest sense, it seems to coincide with the history of life. first, with the appearance of life even in its earliest forms, there come into existence entities that have a good, and for which things can go well or badly. even a bacterium has a good in this sense, in virtue of its proper functioning, whereas a rock does not. eventually in the course of evolutionary history there appear conscious beings, whose experiential lives can go well or badly in ways that are familiar to us. later some descendants of those beings, capable of reflection and self-consciousness, come to recognize what happens to them as good or bad, and to recognize reasons for pursuing or avoiding those things. they learn to think about how these reasons combine to determine what they should do. and finally they develop the collective capacity to think about reasons they may have that do not depend only on what is good or bad for themselves.18 with this picture of value and life in place, we can now refine our earlier question into a more specific one: why did the historical process of evolution, through which life arose and developed, occur as it did, such as to give rise to value and creatures who recognize it? and because value and its recognition demand explanation as such, an adequate answer to this question about the process of evolution will not represent value and its recognition as a “lucky accident,” or as something superfluous to the process. but that is exactly how a darwinian accounts represents value and its recognition, and thus a darwinian account provides an inadequate explanation. in contrast, a teleological view of the evolutionary process explains the existence and recognition of value as such. for on that view, the emergence and development of life took place as it did partly because this process led to value and its recognition. as nagel says, “part of the explaining value 30 explanation for the existence of that process and of the possibilities on which natural selection operates would be that they bring value into the world, in a great variety of forms.”19 it is clear, i think, that we do not need street’s dilemma to articulate the line of thought that leads nagel from value realism to a teleological explanation of evolution. nor do the two most prominent types of reply to street’s dilemma address the points that nagel has in mind. thus i conclude that street’s argument is mostly a distraction from nagel’s own reasons for thinking that value realism pushes us toward a historical teleology. from value realism to historical teleology? having distinguished these issues, we can now ask: how convincing is nagel’s argument that value realism calls for a teleological explanation of the evolutionary process? to answer this question, it will be helpful to consider the over-arching aim of mind and cosmos. that aim is to argue against a materialist (or, equivalently, reductionist) view of the natural order, and to explore the possibilities for non-materialist and anti-reductionist understandings of the cosmos. by materialist, nagel means the view that “everything can be accounted for at the most basic level by the physical sciences, extended to include biology.”20 the materialist claims that reality consists ultimately only of physical facts, and he hopes to explain thought, purpose, and value in terms of such facts. the non-materialist holds that other forms of explanation are needed to understand and explain reality. in brief, “there are some things that the physical sciences cannot fully account for.”21 nagel has long been critical of reductionism.22 but mind and cosmos goes beyond his earlier writings in sketching a positive alternative picture of the natural order. as he says, “even if the dominance of materialist naturalism is nearing its end, we need some idea of what might replace it. […] a genuine alternative to the reductionist program would require an account of how mind and everything that goes with it is inherent in the universe.”23 i believe that what leads nagel to historical teleology is neither antireductionism as such, nor value realism as such, nor the combination of the two. rather it his notion of what “a genuine alternative” to reductionism must look like. i will now try to explain what i mean by this, and then raise some doubts about nagel’s ideal of “comprehensive self-understanding.”24 to see the issue, we can begin with an argument about living things that nagel does not consider, but which has clear antireductionist implications of its own. in recent years, michael thompson has argued that we can conceive of something as living only by viewing it in light of some life-form concept, such as “the monarch butterfly” or “the african elephant.” thompson’s basic argument goes as follows: in order to represent anything as living, we must interpret certain things as vital processes of an organism—as eating, swimming, etc. to be alive just is to be the subject of some vital processes, and thus representing an individual as living requires representing some things as vital processes. however, if an individual is considered in isolation from any conception of its life-form, then there is nothing to determine the appropriate description of what is happening qua vital process. for very different physical-chemical 31 lott happenings can amount to the same life process across different life-forms—e.g., “hunting” or “reproducing” can be instantiated in different physical-chemical happenings in individuals of different species. and the same physical-chemical happening can amount to different vitalprocesses in different life-forms. as thompson points out, mitosis is a part of reproduction in an amoeba, and part of self-maintenance in a human being.25 considered in isolation from an understanding of the life-form in which these processes are occurring, there is nothing to fix the vital-description one way or another, nothing to determine that this physical-chemical happening counts as “hunting,” “reproducing,” etc. thus, to grasp what is going on here and now with an organism, and even to see it as living, we must interpret an individual organism through some conception of its life-form.26 such a life-form conception, thompson goes on to show, can be articulated in a system of “aristotelian categoricals,” which express the characteristic features and activities of the lifeform—e.g., “the bald eagle has two wings,” “tiger moths produce clicks to jam the echolocation systems of predator bats.” aristotelian categoricals express the function of different parts and activities of the life-form: “they articulate the relations of dependence among the various elements and aspects and phases of a given kind of life.”27 an organized system of such categoricals gives “one’s interpretation or understanding of the life-form shared by the members of that class.”28 thompson’s argument is antireductionist insofar as it demonstrates that our understanding of living things can never be reduced to the kind of physical-chemical descriptions that might equally describe non-vital activity. to see something as a vital part or process requires bringing to bear some implicit understanding of the life-form. and every life-form conception involves a grasp (however dim) of the functional relations among the parts and processes of the life-form. thus to view something as living, we must employ some idea (perhaps mistaken) of how various things play a part in the life of this sort of creature. this is a teleological mode of understanding. and thus a teleological mode of understanding is unavoidable for getting anything into view as living. for my purposes here, it does not really matter if thompson’s arguments are convincing. the point i wish to stress is that, in spite of their antireductionist implications, thompson’s claims are fully compatible with a darwinian story of how particular life-forms came into existence. thompson’s reflections show what we are doing when we represent something as living. but these reflections are neutral on questions about how living things came into being, or why the world is such as to having living things at all. if successful, thompson’s arguments demonstrate that any darwinian explanations must presuppose another, non-darwinian form of thought. for we must already employ life-form concepts even to have a topic for darwinian explanations and to provide us with the materials of that explanation. to represent something as a “gene,” for example, is already to engage in life-form thought, since we cannot represent something as a gene apart from some wider context provided by a life-form conception. even so, thompson’s reflections do not challenge the darwinian explanation of the origin of life-forms. and the irreducible teleology of life-form thought certainly does not require the different kind of explaining value 32 teleology that is nagel’s focus—a teleology within the historical process of evolution whereby life-forms came into existence. consider now a different set of antireductionist claims, more directly related to issues of value. in his book the retrieval of ethics, talbot brewer argues that, in order to view something as an action, we must have some sense of what the agent took be good in what she was doing. drawing on the work of elizabeth anscombe, brewer argues that explaining something as an action requires more than identifying certain causes of an occurrence, even if those causes are beliefs and desires. for beliefs and desires will not make sense of the action—not make it intelligible qua action—unless they reveal what the agent took to be good or valuable. as brewer says: [c]iting a desire can contribute to the rationalizing explanation of an action only insofar as it helps us to understand what the agent saw in the action such that it seemed worth choosing. it we can’t see how a performance might be traced to some source of subjective appeal, then we have not yet seen why it counts as an action rather than mere obsession…to bring an agent into view requires that we come to see how the world of value might possibly appear to another, and this interpretive task cannot succeed with just any goal-directed bodily motions.29 brewer goes on to argue that in order to make sense of our lives—and especially of “dialectical activities” such as friendship—we must understand ourselves as (dimly) apprehending objective goods and values. brewer’s arguments are complex, and the details are not important for my point. what matters is that brewer’s position is clearly antireductionist on questions of value. (he says that his own view is premised upon “value realism.”30) however, brewer's view does not seem to require any particular further view of how agents came into existence, or why the world is such as to have agents and the values that they recognize. on a plausible reading of brewer’s position, his claim is of the following form: if we wish to make our actions and our lives intelligible in the fullest way possible, then we must employ a mode of understanding that makes reference to objective values. thus the cost of abandoning value realism is becoming opaque to ourselves as agents, and becoming inarticulate about our activities. understood this way, brewer’s position is analogous to thompson’s point about livings things—it about what we are doing when we represent ourselves as agents. (this does not mean, of course, that values are not real, or that values are merely something we “project onto” the world—just as thompson’s arguments do not show that life is something we “project onto” the world.) with thompson and brewer in mind, let us return to nagel’s argument about evolution and positive alternatives to reductionism. we can now distinguish more clearly between two questions. one question is what forms of intelligibility we require to understand ourselves and the natural order. this is the question that nagel poses to frame the disagreement between materialists and antireductionists. the materialists whom nagel opposes claim to know “that mentalistic, teleological, and evaluative intelligibility in particular have been left behind for good 33 lott as fundamental forms of understanding.”31 on this issue, the positions of thompson and brewer, respectively, place them on the side of nagel against the materialists. with thompson, we can say that understanding living things as such involves a form of intelligibility that is irreducibly teleological, requiring a thought about what plays a part in the life of the organism. with brewer, we can say that understanding agents as such involves a form of intelligibility that is irreducibly evaluative, requiring some grasp of the goodness that an agent finds in what she is doing. a second question is what sort of intelligibility is appropriate to the historical process of evolution. here, nagel suggests we ask: why did the historical process of evolution give rise to value and creatures who recognize it, and why did it do this under that description? and historical teleology emerges as nagel’s answer to that question. but neither antireductionism nor value realism requires us to pose the question as nagel does. we might believe that reality includes organisms and agents and values and irreducibly normative truths, and we might hold that none of these things can be understood using only the concepts of the physical sciences, while at the same time holding that nagel’s question has no answer, or is misguided. now, if thompson is correct, our thought about the historical process of evolution unavoidably involves life-form concepts, since we are thinking about the evolution of living things. but neither this point, nor realism about value shows that in approaching the historical question of life’s origins we should seek a form of understanding that goes beyond the darwinian account. rather, it might be that the darwinian story is all there is to say about the historical question, even though darwinian explanation cannot replace other forms of understanding. on this kind of antireductionism, we simply have different modes of understanding—different kinds of concepts—that are appropriate to different domains of reality and different questions we ask. this is not a concession to materialism or reductionism. it does not show that values or normative truths are not real, or that they are replaceable with other modes of intelligibility. we can still insist that it is mistaken to attempt to replace all “mentalistic, teleological, and evaluative intelligibility” with the intelligibility of the physical sciences. but equally, we might be unable to integrate the different forms of intelligibility into a single mode of understanding, such that the historical account will also explain value as such. this is why i said earlier that what leads nagel to historical teleology is neither realism nor antireductionism as such, nor the combination of the two. this is also why it is potentially misleading to say that “an evolutionary self-understanding would almost certainly require us to give up moral realism—the natural conviction that our moral judgments are true or false independent of our beliefs.”32 for we should distinguish between two claims: (1) that darwinian evolution explains how our species came into existence, and (2) that darwinian explanations are the key to our self-understanding. an antireductionist might accept (1), while insisting that what has come into existence—the now-existing selves that we seek to understand—cannot be made (fully) intelligible with evolutionary forms of explanation. the sort of antireductionism i have been sketching will, i believe, count for nagel as “quietism.” as nagel characterizes it, quietism is an antireductionist position that rests content with an “internal understanding” of our own point of view, rather pursuing a “transcendent selfexplaining value 34 understanding.”33 by “transcendent” nagel means a self-understanding that places our own point of view into a larger perspective in which we have “the fundamental level of explanation of everything.”34 such a perspective aspires to an “all-encompassing form of understanding.”35 for nagel, quietism’s refusal to seek such all-encompassing understanding is untenable: but while internal understanding is certainly valuable, and an essential precondition of a more transcendent project, i don’t see how we can stop there and not seek an external conception of ourselves as well. to refrain we would have to believe that the quest for a single reality is an illusion, because there are many kinds of truth and many kinds of thought, expressed in many different forms of language, and they cannot be systematically combined through a conception of a single world in which all truth is grounded. that is as radical a claim as any of the alternatives.36 i am unsure how to assess nagel’s remarks against quietism and its “pluralistic method.”37 there seems to be a large gap between an “all-encompassing form of understanding,” on the one hand, and something that is mere “internal understanding,” on the other. is it not possible to have various forms of “external understanding,” each of which places our point of view in some more external or “objective” viewpoint, but none of which encompasses or subsumes all the others? if so, it seems nagel is wrong to characterize a pluralistic antireductionism as refusing to seek an external conception of ourselves. that said, i feel the force of nagel’s thought that is terribly unsatisfying to explain the origins of life—and everything that has come with it—in a way that makes it all seem like a lucky accident, or a marvelous side effect of other processes.38 this sense of being unsatisfied is perhaps related to what albert camus identified as the source of the absurd. according to camus, the absurd arises from a confrontation between our longing for absolute understanding and the fact that the world simply is not understandable in the ways we desire it to be. as he says, “this world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. but what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart.”39 for camus, the absurd arises only because human reason is able to understand and explain many things within its proper sphere—the sphere of human experience. efficacious in this sphere, however, human reason inevitably seeks to go beyond it. this is our “appetite for understanding” and “nostalgia for the absolute.” the absurd “is born precisely at the very meeting-point of that efficacious but limited reason with the ever resurgent irrational.”40 it is not hard to imagine camus characterizing the lack of satisfaction that i (and nagel) feel with the “lucky accident” view as the result of asking for a kind of explanation that reason is unable to give. looked at this way, the desire for an explanation of mind and value as such is an instance of desiring a form of intelligibility that belongs to the human sphere, but is just not there to be found in the unreasonable world.41 all of this, of course, does not yet consider the theological possibilities for framing and addressing these issues. 35 lott notes 1. nagel 2012, 111. 2. nagel also considers, and rejects, an explanation of the process in terms of divine intentionality. for considerations of space and simplicity, i set aside here the possibility of divine intentionality and focus on nagel’s own answer to the questions he raises. 3. nagel 2012, 122–123. 4. street 2006. see also: street 2008 and street 2011. 5. nagel 2012, 100. 6. ibid., 102. 7. street 2006, 110. 8. ibid., 122. 9. ibid., 124. 10. ibid. 11. nagel 2012, 109. 12. this line of reply might be developed by casting doubt on the idea that having normative beliefs would actually have been advantageous to our ancestors. see parfit 2011, 534– 542. it might also be developed by arguing that, whatever the evolutionary influences on our evaluative tendencies, these tendencies do not determine the outcome of our normative reasoning. rather, we are capable of “stepping back” from whatever tendencies for belief that evolution has left us with, and our judgments are best explained as outcomes of the reasoning that follows after we have stepped back. see shafer-landau 2012. 13. enoch 2010, 431. 14. see wielenberg 2010 and skarsaune 2011. 15. nagel 2012, 18–20. 16. ibid., 47. 17. ibid., 48. 18. ibid., 117–118. 19. ibid., 121. 20. ibid., 13. explaining value 36 21. ibid., 14. 22. see nagel 1986. 23. nagel 2012, 15. 24. ibid., 29. 25. see thompson 2008, 55. 26. for an in-depth treatment of these issues, see part 1 of thompson 2008. 27. thompson 2008, 78. 28. ibid., 73. 29. brewer 2009, 35–36. 30. ibid., 274. i am unsure how much brewer and nagel agree on the term “realism,” but i don’t think the differences matters for my point. 31. nagel 2012, 20. 32. ibid., 28. 33. ibid., 29–31. 34. ibid., 21. 35. ibid. 36. ibid., 30. 37. ibid. 38. for a nice summary of nagel’s thought on this point, see nagel 2012, 32. 39. camus, 1991, 21. 40. ibid., 36. 41. for nagel’s own early reflections on absurdity and meaning, see his essay “the absurd” in nagel 1991. works cited brewer, talbot. 2009. the retrieval of ethics. oxford: oxford university press. camus, albert. 1991. the myth of sisyphus. translated by justin o’brien. new york: vintage books. 37 lott enoch, david. 2010. “the epistemological challenge to metanormative realism: how best to understand it, and how to cope with it.” philosophical studies 148: 413–438. nagel, thomas. 1986. the view from nowhere. new york: oxford university press. _____.1991. mortal questions. cambridge: cambridge university press. _____. 2012. mind and cosmos: why the materialist neo-darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false. new york: oxford university press. parfit, derek. 2011. on what matters, vol. 2. oxford: oxford university press. shafer-landau, russ. 2012. “evolutionary debunking, moral realism, and moral knowledge.” journal of ethics and social philosophy 7: 1–37. skarsaune, knut. 2011. “darwin and moral realism: survival of the iffiest.” philosophical studies 152: 229–243. street, sharon. 2006. “a darwinian dilemma for realist theories of value.” philosophical studies 127: 109–166. _____. 2008. “reply to copp: naturalism, normativity, and the varieties of realism worth worrying about.” philosophical issues 18: 207–228. _____. 2011. “mind-independence without the mystery: why quasi-realists can’t have it both ways.” in oxford studies in metaethics, vol. 6, edited by russ shafer-landau, 1– 32. oxford: clarendon press. thompson, michael. 2008. life and action. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. wielenberg, erik j. 2010. “on the evolutionary debunking of morality.” ethics 120: 441– 464. microsoft word cullum-final.docx [expositions 9.1 (2015) 19–30] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376   clearing being: donald barthelme’s snow white and the thought of martin heidegger charles cullum worcester state university donald barthelme, one of the foremost writers of postmodern fiction in the mid-to-later twentieth century, was continually engaged in the project of breaking down conventions of all kinds and especially of cutting through the accretion of conventional uses of language. with his 1965 novel snow white, he turned to the ancient genre of the fairy tale to accomplish this goal. while many commentators on the novel claim that barthelme’s treatment of the snow white tale is merely parodic and negative, i maintain that the novel is actually quite positive in breaking through an objectified and rigid version of human being in the character of snow to a much more open horizon of possible being. to make this point, i draw on central aspects of the thought of martin heidegger, who, perhaps more than that of any other philosopher, helped to create the zeitgeist through which postmodern american fiction emerges in the last half of the twentieth century. specifically, heidegger collapses the subject-object dualism of descartes into the wholeness of being itself and conceives for language the role not of simply re-presenting the world to human beings but rather of discovering, or “clearing,” being itself. barthelme chose wisely when he turned to fairy tale to explore new approaches to individual development and to the role of the individual in society. evolving over centuries of oral, and later written, narratives, fairy tales serve as a “prism of the self,” reminding us of who we were and who we have the potential to become (kolbenschlag 3). and they also persist in our cultural memory, “interpret[ing] crises of the human condition” and reflecting the “collective as well as individual experience” (3–4). reaching back for centuries and spanning continents and cultures, fairy tales have been made famous by the familiar names of charles perrault, hans christian anderson, the brothers grimm, and, of course, walt disney. we know these stories: from the opening line of “once upon a time” to the closing words of “and they lived happily ever after,” virtually everyone in western society has read or had read to her repeatedly the words of a fairy tale and believes that she knows precisely what to expect from one line to the next. settled in plot and form, they use language in a formalized and predictable way. indeed, as swiss folklore scholar max lüthi has noted, “the pleasure of fairy tales resides in their form” (qtd. in akins). moreover, they possess the “spatial and temporal indeterminacy” that allows them to be “a forum for timeless ethical imperatives” (pizer 336) while offering a simplistic and idealized representation of reality. yet they are also always rhetorically situated in time and place, often reifying moral and nationalistic norms (336n5). while potentially comforting during any historical barthelme and heidegger 20   era, such a form may appeal especially to persons in contemporary technological societies who may see it, if only temporarily, as “a way out of the burden of various different sorts of information forming one’s value system” (kusnir 32) and for whom it may provide “a stability and order” that can replace “chaos and disorientation” (33). these fairy tale features—including the tradition of moral instruction, the aptness of the characters to symbolic interpretation, the settled and even rigidified status of the tale in traditional western and contemporary popular culture, and the view of the world as idealized and so falsely accommodating to human beings—offer a highly structured and defined background from which to explore the world of mid-twentieth century america. as such, a number of the first generation of american postmodernists were inspired to adapt existing fairy tale motifs and conventions for their own rhetorical purposes. along with robert coover, donald barthelme can be seen as the postmodern writer who most energetically embraced the genre, particularly in his 1965 novel snow white. the tale of snow white, with its beautiful young girl, a malicious older woman, and a combination of magic, evil, love, and transformation, has been called “one our most powerful cultural stories” (tatar, the annotated brothers grimm 243) and snow white herself “the best known fairy-tale character in this country” (tatar, the classic fairy tales 70). part of the classification type atu 709 in the aarne-thompson-uther system (ashliman), it is widely believed that, in the european tradition, snow white’s story has its roots in the italian fabulist giambattista basile’s tale, “the young slave,” which is part of his 1634 framed collection entitled il pentamerone. while aspects of other tales—most notably sleeping beauty and beauty and the beast—can be discerned in this basile story as well, the familiar snow white elements are certainly there: a beautiful but bewitched girl, a jealous other, an absent male, and the triumph of justice and love. a second significant moment in the development of the tale comes several hundred years later in the form of another italian version, “the crystal casket” (surlalune fairy tales). although this time the villain takes the form of snow white’s teacher and the poison of choice is a hair comb rather than a dress, the storyline focuses more specifically on that which we have come to know as particularly snow white’s. while most versions of the story prior to the nineteenth century were written for adults, beginning in 1812, the grimm brothers brought their tale of “little snow white” first to adults and later to children as well. their version also solidifies the presence of snow white’s housemates—who, prior to the grimms’ re-telling, had appeared in variants as robbers, miners, and even as fairies (ashliman)—by establishing their gender as male and their physical form as dwarves. while dwarves were a familiar type in germanic tales, snow white’s unnamed companions were also quite bawdy. tidy in the extreme, they had no need of snow’s domestic services; nonetheless, they urged her to stay, promising to “give you everything you need” (tatar, 21 cullum   cft 84). and, of course, walt disney established the tale in the american consciousness with his 1937 classic cartoon, snow white and the seven dwarfs. throughout the twentieth century, as katalin horn has described, there are at least four symbolic interpretations of the snow white character that came to be seen as conventional. first, snow white represents an initiate going through the “puberty rites” (275) from childhood to adulthood. second, the story recapitulates “sexual phantasies, sexual problems and oedipal conflict,” with the dwarves representing the “reduced but at least multiplied” “paternal penis” (275). third, bruno bettelheim also interprets the tale as an oedipal conflict, one in which the mother figure, the queen, and the daughter, snow white, come into inevitable conflict over jealousy of each other’s attractiveness to the father (203–4). and fourth, the story represents the “process of individuation,” in which the stepmother is both a “negative image of the mother” and also a part of snow white as her “untrue femininity” (275). interest in the snow white tale and the re-affirmation or subverting of convention and standard interpretations of it have certainly not abated since disney. rather, to the extent that fairy tales are a form of popular culture and that “popular culture has become a ‘commodified product of late capitalist production’” (jamison qtd. in kusnir 32), the tale of snow white too has morphed into visual images and products that have taken on a life of their own. this fact has only been amplified with the permeation of mass media into all aspects of daily human existence; for example, the popular abc television show once upon a time, which features snow white as its lead character, garners almost seven million viewers each week (once upon a fan). moreover, it can be argued, as alejandro herrero-olaizola does, that barthelme’s novel follows popular cultural adaptations of the tale more than the older literary sources (7). and, in that context, l. l. lee points out that the novel maintains “the sentimentality and falseness” of walt disney’s cartoon version precisely to “use” it as the “clichéd subject as well as target for attack” (181). indeed, commentary about barthelme’s use of the fairy tale covers a wide range of views: for example, that the novel “incorporates almost all … fairy tale elements [as outlined by max lüthi]” (halden 147) and “fulfill[s] in its own special way the basic situation of the fairy tale” (gilman 30); that the novel “involves fantastications which bring the fairy-tale world into the modern one” (flowers 33); that the novel is “not quite a fairy tale” (lee 180) but that barthelme “force[s] [fairy tale] structures upon the modern world, so that these structures are ‘real’, reflecting our world, and at the same moment ‘unreal’, lies about our world” (181); that the novel “uses “familiar characters and motifs in unfamiliar ways […] to achieve a parodic effect” (herrero-olaizola 7); that the novel “is a negative counterpart to snow white as a fairy-tale, an antitype […]. a real negation or a reversion of the original märchen” (horn 273); and that the novel is an anti-fairy tale because it “suggest[s] the very impossibility” of the “unmediated moral stance” of the fairy tale form (pizer 336). all of these views share the sense, however, that the traditional tale serves as a starting point for barthelme to perform his particular parodic magic on the tale, or, as montresor puts it, that it barthelme and heidegger 22   provides “a basic narrative framework on which to construct his deconstruction of contemporary america” (75). much of the commentary about the novel sees barthelme as being essentially negative, as seen in horn’s view that the novel, “inverts the royal and magic surroundings [of the traditional fairy tale] into a desolate everyday scene of modern new york” (273). by undercutting the meaning expressed either literally or symbolically by the events of the traditional fairy tale plot, by creating characters who do not fulfill traditional fairy tale roles, and by structuring the novel in short, discrete units and using a dissociative narratorial voice, barthelme is thus viewed by many readers as also undercutting meaning, purpose, and structure in human life. this undercutting is perceived in a number of ways. first, barthelme is seen as denying the possibility of significant meaning of any kind. for example, the dwarves do not, as in the disney film, “whistle while they work”; rather, as discussed by lee, their work is “a series of empty gestures” (183). in fact, lee claims that the novel as a whole “suggest[s] meaning” but finally “lack[s] content” (186). pizer says bluntly that the novel “undermines all attempts to find a unified, coherent meaning within its narrative” (331). second, barthelme is seen as denying even a modicum of stability or clear purpose in the human psyche. flowers, for instance, says that the characters engage merely in “psychological introspection” or “know thy neurosis” (35). and halden finds that the prince-figure, paul, evidences “a neurotic reluctance to accept a challenge” (148); that each dwarf “suffers individually” from “mental maladies and misunderstandings” (149); and that heroic action is replaced by “the ramblings of disturbed minds” (150). third, barthelme is seen to recapitulate this sense of rambling or dissociative thinking in the structure and the narratorial voice of the novel. structurally, the novel is comprised of short units, usually of only one or two pages in length, that move one to another with little or no transition from the previous unit. narratorially, most of these units present events or issues through the seeming point of view of one particular, yet unnamed and indistinguishable, character who, by the context, is presumably one of the dwarves and who speaks in either the first person singular, “i,” or the first person plural, “we.” some other of these units are expressed by a third-person narrator who makes what are seemingly objective pronouncements that are nonetheless based on subjective judgment, such as “it was not until the 19th century that russia produced a literature worthy of the world’s cultural heritage” (barthelme 149). moreover, this same narrator can at times be seen as problematical in terms of the accuracy or reasonableness of the events narrated. in fact, flowers goes so far as to state that “the omniscient narrator cannot be trusted” because of the “absurdity” of his narration of events (38). at the same time, however, most observers do acknowledge positive aspects of the novel to some degree. halden, for instance, says that barthelme “reinvigorates” the fairy tale, making it “real” for a contemporary audience (153). and virtually all commentators concede the comic quality of the novel, although often in qualified, off-key terms and phrases, such as “ironic” (pizer 23 cullum   337), “an amusingly refurbished fairy-tale novel of the absurd” (“come back, brothers grimm”), or “essentially, there’s just one joke to grin at” (adams br4). in this more positive direction, a few readers even recognize the novel’s ability as parody to produce enhanced perspective. for example, using linda hutcheon’s views on parody--specifically, that parody “teaches us how the text we are reading is constructed” (7)—herrero-olaizola allows that the novel “invites a wider reading of snow white’s story [and] this opens the possibility of a wider discursive spectrum” (7). and kusnir, also citing hutcheon on parody, specifically her point that postmodern parody is not “mocking” but “neutral” and has the intent of “showing a difference between […] past and contemporary representations of reality” (36), grants that the novel “emphasizes the plurality of discourses, worlds, and understandings of reality” (38). such views that stress openness come closer to what i believe is actually the effect of barthelme’s snow white, that is, while negating or undercutting conventional or simplistic meaning, purpose, and structure in art or in human life, the novel also promotes the discovery of new meaning through its use of language. in making this point, i want to focus specifically on selected elements in the thought of martin heidegger. more than any other philosopher since descartes, heidegger succeeded in offering an alternative to the cartesian dilemma, the fateful division of being into the subjective and objective, that forced humans from their natural home on the earth and among others and into their own subjectivity as the only epistemological perspective possible. descartes’s goal was to locate a foundation for science and ultimately for an understanding about the essence of human being itself. by locating this ground in the intellect—“cogito, ergo sum”—descartes believed that he avoided the vagaries of the senses and of ordinary experience. however, the price of his locating this ground in the human intellect was to create a new dualism between the mind and the body, between the subjective and the objective, between “the world of intellectual intuition” and “the world of phenomenal experience” (fell 4–5). in being and time, heidegger defines “the entity which each of us is himself and which includes inquiring as one of the possibilities of its being…by the term ‘dasein’” (27), or “being-there” (27n1), “there” referring to being-in-the-world. one of the “existentials,” or ways that dasein is aware of itself as existing, is state-of-mind, which heidegger defines as “our mood, our being-attuned” to the world and to our past in it (172). one of the major characteristics of state-of-mind is “thrownness,” our “facticity,” the “that it is and has to be” of dasein (174; emphasis in text), the things that we are physically, socially, and historically over which we have no control. in its thrownness, dasein is already in the world. in terms of the question of a first cause or a ground to human being, then, heidegger asserts the “impossibility of the metaphysical quest for a transcendental, nonrelative ground; the quest contradicts itself by being always already grounded in the experience of the absence of a final ground […] [t]he true and always-prior ground is the clearing, dasein’s own being-in-its-world” (fell 58). in other words, the “primordially given ‘i’ or self is always and already part of the world; and indeed, a barthelme and heidegger 24   world in which other persons are likewise given […] [t]he highly abstract and purely rational ‘ego’ of the cartesian metaphysics is a fiction” (gelven 70–71). the connection of heidegger’s thought, then, to barthelme’s novel is profound. for the major issue explored in snow white is precisely the relationship in art and language and in human life of the subjective to the objective. first, the most obvious case of this issue is the objectification of the character of snow white herself. in the fairy tale, the character is objectified through the color white as a symbol of innocence, virginity, and purity, but also, as tatar points out, through the identification of the medium of snow with coldness and remoteness (the annotated brothers grimm 240). in addition, when she is in the coffin, the anesthetized snow white combines these symbolic aspects of purity and remoteness with passivity and etherealness. furthermore, as discussed, interpretatively, snow white has been seen as symbolic of social/sexual rites of passage, the maturation/individuation process, and various psychological states, in particular, versions of the oedipal drama. in barthelme’s novel, this objectification goes even further. as jeffrey nealon has discussed, the novel enacts “a critique based on the violence of the masculinist appropriative gaze that masquerades as mere appreciation” (128). from the very first page of the novel, on which her beauty marks are described and displayed graphically as black bullets vertically aligned on the page, snow white is portrayed by the ostensibly male narratorial voice as a sexual object. as shown by the focus on these beauty marks, the character of snow white is seen as “nothing more than a collection of fetishized zones” (129). when dan addresses the other dwarves about their mutual concern about snow white’s threatened discontent with their unusual sexual arrangement, he takes this objectification to a comically logical, if insultingly crass and sexist, extreme: what do we apprehend when we apprehend snow white? […] first, two threequarter scale breasts floating toward us wrapped, typically, in a red towel. or, […] we apprehend a beautiful snow-white arse floating away from us wrapped in a red towel. […] what, in these two quite distinct apprehensions, is the constant?….why, quite simply, the red towel. […] we can easily dispense with […] snow white, and cleave instead to the towel. (barthelme 106–07) similarly, paul, the prince-figure, has an objectifying reaction to snow white as he stares through her window looking “at her bare breasts” (154) like, in his own term, a “voyeur” (155): “god almighty […]. she is just like one of those dancers one sees from time to time on bourbon street in new orleans” (154), that is, an exotic dancer. in going beyond cartesian dualism, heidegger warns against this tendency to see human beings—others and even the bodily aspects of the self— in objective terms. in fact, it would be reasonable to say that the thrust of heidegger’s project in being and time may be characterized as his attempt to define and separate the ontological, that 25 cullum   which has to do with being itself, from the ontic, that which has to do with beings as entities. as gelven explains, “the greatest barrier in [making explicit our own existence] […] is the natural tendency of mind […] to render the self as an object. for the question we are asking is a question of the process or activity of existing, not what it is that exists. […] not what kind of thing a being is, but what it means to be at all” (23–24; emphasis in text). snow white clearly understands that there is a particular role that she is expected to play, and that this role is objectified and sexist. to a degree, she even attempts to fulfill this role: “what does she hope for? ‘someday my prince will come.’ by this snow white means that she lives her own being as incomplete, pending the arrival of one who will ‘complete’ her” (barthelme 76). yet within this seeming acceptance of her role, she has stirrings of restlessness: “…it is terrific to be anticipating a prince […] but it is still waiting, and waiting as a mode of existence is […] a darksome mode. i would rather be doing a hundred other things” (83). this restlessness becomes doubt: “is there a paul, or have i only projected him in the shape of my longing, boredom, ennui and pain?” (108). snow white goes on to respond to her situation with “anger at male domination of the physical world” (137) and with a sense that the fairy tale world has changed and can no longer “supply the correct ending to the story” (138). finally, she confronts the issue of objectification head on. after disrobing and examining herself candidly, “tak[ing] stock” and finding, in sexist terms, “nothing but praise for this delicious assortment” (150), she expresses, in explicitly cartesian terms, her awareness too of the larger difficulty with such objectification: “the curious physicality of my existence here on earth is related to both parts of the mind-body problem, the mind part and the body part” (150). she even ponders a kind of pasting over of this dualism: “although i secretly know that my body is my mind. the way it acts sometimes, spontaneously and scandalously hurling itself into the arms of bad situations, with never a care for who is watching or real values” (150–151). what she describes is actually still a priority of body and instinct over mind in the form of physical desire, rather than a heideggerian authenticity. the self, heidegger says, “is […] for the most part inauthentic, the they-self” (225). the “they-self” is an aspect of the existential of fallenness, which heidegger defines as “an absorption of being-withone-another,” or “being-lost in the publicness of the ‘they’” (220). in and of itself, fallenness into the world is not a negative quality; it is simply one mode of being. but to the degree that it becomes, in heidegger’s term, “a constant temptation” (221) to dasein to turn away from its own selfhood, fallenness is a potential problem for personal identity. fallenness is in its basic aspect what heidegger terms “inauthentic.” inauthenticity also is not a categorically negative quality, but rather simply a part of being in the world. heidegger contrasts the inauthentic self to “the authentic self—that is, […] the self which has been taken hold of in its own way” (167; emphasis in text). one comes to authenticity through the existential of understanding, which heidegger defines as “the phenomenological basis for seeing [possibility] as a disclosive potentiality-for-being” (183). in these terms, snow white is still struggling with the fallenness of following a role assigned to barthelme and heidegger 26   her by society or the “they-self” and has not reached the point of making an authentic choice of her own future. however, the discontent, and, more specifically, the “dread” that precipitates the self’s recognition of possibility is stirring in snow white. “dread” is the term that heidegger uses to describe that state of mind that makes us “aware of what is […]. we are thrown in a world. dread brings us face to face with this thrownness” (gelven 118; emphasis in text). for heidegger, dread can be a catalyst for an individual to confront his own future cessation and therefore his ability to make choices that affect that future, that is, to be authentic. at the start of the final section, part three, of the novel, snow white faces dread: “it is true that there is a future in which i shall inevitably perish” (barthelme 142). as part of this confrontation, she reaches a new understanding of her lot, “[…] what is, is insufficient,” and begins to make choices, “from now on i deny myself to them” (141). while snow white cannot be said to have become fully authentic because she does not take her fate completely into her own hands, she can be said to reject the previously inauthentic sexist, objectified role into which she has been cast as part of her thrownness—she originates, after all, as a fairy tale character—and thus to have begun the process of authentic being, a process which she does not quite reach within the confines of the novel and its fairy tale context but does nevertheless aspire to, as reflected at the end of the novel with her “apotheosis” or “ris[ing] into the sky” (187). the second major form of objectification in the novel involves language itself. snow white reacts to her condition of discontent through confusion about her own role but also, significantly, through the role of language in creating reality, as when she laments, “oh i wish there were some words in the world that were not the words i always hear!” (12). these words that she “always hear[s]” are largely stagnant and unsatisfying in terms of her expectations not only as a conventional female fairy tale character, but also as an unconventional 1960’s american female housekeeper and shower room companion of seven men. the common factor in her dissatisfaction would seem to be, then, the sexism of both situations. and snow white relates this sexism specifically to the function of language in her short tirade about the male power expressed in the naming of, appropriately, physical objects: “oh if i could just get my hands on the man who dubbed those electrical connections male and female […]. and if i could just get my hands on the man who called that piece of pipe a nipple” (137). essentially, her point and hope are that old words produced the sexist circumstances that she finds unacceptable and that new words can change those circumstances. that she is searching for such words is implied in her own activity of writing a poem, that is, of finding, creating her own words to give her life a different orientation. cristina bacchilega has examined this point, following sandra gilbert and susan gubar’s particularly feminist interpretation of the mirror in the original fairy tale as embodying the male voice and its controlling power: “confronted with the failure of the script she has been handed, snow white self-consciously decides to write her own and […] challenges the framing power of the mirror” (14). 27 cullum   language, however, looms much larger in the novel than its effect on a single character. the status of language affects the entire society, as seen in dan’s famous disquisition on the “trash phenomenon” and its relation to language. since the “endless” and “sludge qualities” of “ordinary language” have, like the “per-capita production of trash in this country,” continued to escalate substantially and will “soon” achieve “a point where it’s 100 percent.” given that fact, a society can be “blanketed” with and linguistically incapacitated by this “sludgy” language or it can “learn how to ‘dig it’” (barthelme 102–103), that is, to use it in new and positive modes. a number of commentators focus on this image of “the trash phenomenon” and this point about the power of language used aesthetically. lee, for example, says that “words can cover over reality, that is, create an actuality that is false, but they can also create and report the ‘real’ which breaks down isolation—this is the act of the artist” (183). richard gilman, one of the first to comment on the novel in a perceptive early review, declares that in snow white “literature itself is made to expose the bankruptcy of its traditional, normative procedures, so that new literature might be formed on dead ground” (32). and larry mccaffery famously observed that barthelme’s “process […] can be likened to a ‘recycling approach’ in which the drek of familiar, banal language is charged with a renewed freshness via the mysterious sea-change of art” (121). in terms of my discussion, though, i want to bring in heidegger’s concept of language to explain how barthelme’s approach can be seen to be even greater than the “reporting” of the real, the exposure of the bankruptcy of old and the creation of new literature, or the “renewal” of banal language that these commentators claim. for, in fact, barthelme’s language does nothing less than actually expand being itself. that is, essentially, barthelme’s approach to language recapitulates heidegger’s emphasis on the ontological power of language. specifically, in “on the essence of truth,” heidegger discusses the traditional western concept of truth as the correspondence of, first, a statement that is made, or presented, in relation to, second, the thing about which the statement is made. this thing, then, stands apart as an object in what heidegger calls “a field of opposedness” that “takes place within an open region” (121). heidegger says further that whatever is in this “open region” is “not first created by the presenting but rather is only entered into and taken over as a domain of relatedness” (121). this relationship of human beings to other beings and objects, which heidegger terms the “openness of comportment” (122), then, can be seen as the more elemental basis for truth than propositional statement, for “only through [the openness of comportment] can what is opened up […] become the standard for the presentative correspondence” (122). heidegger then connects truth from this openness to freedom and then to the greek word aletheia, or “unconcealment” (125), to arrive at the following definition: “‘truth’ is not a feature of correct propositions that are asserted of an ‘object’ by a human ‘subject’ and then are ‘valid’ […]; rather, truth is disclosure of beings through which an openness essentially unfolds” (127). this unfolding, as heidegger states in “the origin of the work of art,” takes place in and through language: “language, by naming beings for the first time, first brings beings to barthelme and heidegger 28   word and to appearance” (198). and in his famous depiction in “letter on humanism,” heidegger says that “thinking accomplishes the relation of being to the essence of man […] solely as something handed over to it from being. such offering consists in the fact that in thinking being comes to language. language is the house of being. in its home man dwells. those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home” (217). thus, it is through language that human beings “clear […] being itself” (230). it is in this sense, then, that alan wilde, perhaps the most perceptive of postmodern critics, includes barthelme in his category of “generative ironists,” whose use of language performs “broadly creative functions” (157). works cited adams, robert martin. 1967. “with english on the english.” new york times 21 may: br4. proquest. accessed august 23, 2014. akins, ellen. 2015. “tales retold: something old, something new.” ellen akins. http://ellenakins.com/tales-retold-something-old-something-new/. january 21. accessed february 19, 2015. ashliman, d. l. 2014. snow-white. 1998–2013. http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0709.html. accessed june 12, 2014. bacchilega, cristina. 1988. “cracking the mirror three re-visions of ‘snow white.’” boundary 2 15/16: 1–25. barthelme, donald. 1967. snow white. new york: atheneum. reprint new york: simon & schuster, 1996. basile, giambattista. 2010. il pentamerone; or, the story of stories. ed. heidi anne heiner. web. http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/pentamerone. accessed june 12, 2014. bettelheim, bruno. 1977. the uses of enchantment: the meaning and importance of fairy tales. ny: vintage books. “come back, brothers grimm.” 1967. review of snow white by donald barthelme. time magazine. 89.21: 102. academic search complete. accessed august 23, 2014. fell, joseph p., iii. 1979. heidegger and sartre: an essay on being and place. new york: columbia university press. flowers, betty. 1975. “barthelme’s snow white: the reader-patient relationship.” critique 29 cullum   16.3: 33–43. gelven, michael. 1989. a commentary on heidegger’s being and time. dekalb, il: northern illinois university press. gilman, richard. 1992. “barthelme’s fairy tale.” critical essays on donald barthelme. ed. richard f. patterson. new york: g. k. hall. 29–35. halden, judith. 1981. “barthelme's ‘snow white’: the making of a modern fairy tale.” southern folklore quarterly 45: 145–153. heidegger, martin. 1962. being and time. trans. john macquarrie and edward robinson. new york: harper & row. _____. “letter on humanism.” 1993a. basic writings: from being and time (1927) to the task of thinking (1964). rev. and expanded ed. ed. david farrell krell. san francisco, ca: harpersanfrancisco. 213–265. _____. “on the essence of truth.” 1993b. basic writings: from being and time (1927) to the task of thinking (1964). rev. and expanded ed. ed. david farrell krell. san francisco, ca: harpersanfrancisco. 111–138. _____. “the origin of the work of art.” 1993c. basic writings: from being and time (1927) to the task of thinking (1964). rev. and expanded ed. ed. david farrell krell. san francisco, ca: harpersanfrancisco. 139–212. herrero-olaizola, alejandro. 1998. “revamping the popular in snow white and pubis angelical: the residual fictions of donald barthelme and manuel puig.” the journal of popular culture 32: 1–16. horn, katalin. 1983. “‘the hair is black as ebony…’: the function of the märchen in donald barthelme’s snow white. orbis litterarum 38: 271–279. hutcheon, linda. 1988. a poetics of postmodernism: history, theory, fiction. london: routledge. kolbenschlag, madonna. 1981. kiss sleeping beauty goodbye: breaking the spell of feminine myths and models. new york: bantam. kusnir, jaroslav. 2004. “subversion of myths: high and low cultures in donald barthelme’s snow white and robert coover’s briar rose.” european journal of american culture 23.1: 31–49. barthelme and heidegger 30   lee, l. l. 1984. “fairy tale as structure and theme in donald barthelme’s snow white.” litterae et lingua: in honorem premislavi mroczkowski. ed. jan nowakowski. wroclaw, poland: akademii nauk. 179–186. mccaffery, larry. 1982. the metafictional muse: the works of robert coover, donald barthelme, and william h. gass. pittsburgh: university of pittsburgh press. montresor, jaye berman. 1989. “sanitization and its discontents: refuse and refusal in donald barthelme’s snow white.” studies in american humor 7: 74–84. nealon, jeffrey t. 2005. “disastrous aesthetics: irony, ethics, and gender in barthelme’s snow white.” twentieth century literature 51: 123–141. once upon a fan. 2011. web. http://www.onceuponafans.com/apps/blog/show/422116403x20-kansas-ratings-news. accessed august 25, 2014. pizer, john. 1990. “the disenchantment of snow white: robert walser, donald barthelme, and the modern/postmodern anti-fairy tale.” canadian review of comparative literature 27: 330–347. surlalune fairy tales. 2010. web. http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/sevendwarfs/stories/ crystal.html. accessed june 10, 2014. tatar, maria. 1999. the classic fairy tales. new york: w.w. norton. _____. 2012. the annotated brothers grimm. new york: w.w. norton. wilde, alan. 1981. horizons of assent. baltimore, md: the johns hopkins university press. microsoft word 3 kochin.docx [expositions 12.2 (2018) 27–38] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 the cultures of academic philosophy michael s. kochin tel aviv university bryan van norden’s taking back philosophy1 is a polemic, literally an extended op-ed, arguing that american philosophy departments should allocate more resources and especially teaching positions to “less commonly taught philosophies,” especially those from outside the anglo-european world. let me say three things at the beginning: first, i have no objection to van norden’s goal. second, i do not have enough familiarity with american philosophy departments to make informed objections. since getting my ph.d. in political science i have taught for precisely one year in the united states, in political science and directed studies at yale. i spent a sabbatical year in princeton’s alternative philosophy department, the university center for human values, at the wrong end of rockefeller hall. while i studied philosophy and with professors of philosophy, in college, graduate school, and after, and i have published in philosophy journals, i am not within the discipline of philosophy. i have worked with and taught, and even published a little bit, on some of norden’s “less commonly taught philosophies.”2 nonetheless, i am cut off from full engagement with chinese philosophy by knowing no chinese, and with arabic philosophy by knowing no arabic. though i agree that philosophic texts of all cultures should be included in the philosophy curriculum, i certainly do not share van norden’s vision that “in an ideal world, philosophy departments should make their own decisions about their curricula internally” (31). i think this would only be reasonable if the ideal philosophy department were entirely and completely selfsupporting and had no interest in preparing its late adolescent undergraduate students for professional study or nonacademic employment. unlike van norden, i think that in these curricular matters the opinions of the outsiders who pay the professors’ salaries and hire their students should count for something, and my opinion no less than that of the average welder, politician, or professor of surgery. i do not know enough about american philosophy departments, or any philosophy departments anywhere, to know if they offer or require the right amount of any “less commonly taught philosophy.” so neither my agreement nor my disagreement on this point is worth more or less than that of any other colleague or taxpayer. the cultures of academic philosophy 28 third, for reasons i will explain later, i am worried about a potential toxic interaction between multiculturalism in philosophy teaching (which i favor) and identity politics.3 i think that van norden is too soft on identity politics, partly because he is deliberately obtuse about the danger that identity politics poses to scholarly standards and fair administrative procedures. i write this as somebody whose professional success has benefitted as much or perhaps more from the preference for “less commonly taught philosophies” and from identity politics than it has been harmed by them. there are two reasons why we might read a book: because we think it might help us achieve our purposes, or because it might help us clarify our purposes. we might hope for such clarification because the book holds out the promise of showing us new goals or purposes, or because it seems to present concepts that might be alternatives to those in which we have formulated our purposes to ourselves. to read a text philosophically is to read with a view to challenging or clarifying our purposes. van norden claims that “philosophy still reads classic texts with that is known as ‘a hermeneutic of faith.’” he goes on to explain that “those who use a hermeneutic of faith read texts in the hope of discovering truth, goodness, and beauty” (139). i would say, rather, that what is distinctive about a philosophic text is that its author aims to get his or her reader to interrogate and assess the meaning and worth of concepts such as truth, goodness, and beauty. any text can be read philosophically, as part of a conscious and deliberate inquiry into our purposes and their worth, but some texts are philosophic texts, that is, texts whose authors themselves intend to make the reader question his or her purposes or concepts in some ways this book by van norden appears an unpromising occasion for thinking about how to read and especially how to read philosophically. van norden mostly seems to take for granted the disciplinary purposes of american academic philosophers, and this book, van norden tells us, is deliberately pitched at a less scholarly level than van norden’s usual attempts in his writing and teaching (xxiii). it often seems careless in expression and thought. does “any christian,” even those who read their greek bible in greek, or tagalog, know that “2 corinthians” is to be read “second corinthians”? (97) and what are to make of van norden quoting monty python’s john cleese as an authority for the claim that “among dictatorships philosophers have always been among the first people to be silenced” (137)? heidegger and his (albeit non-pharisaical) students flourished under nazism. there was good philosophy at moscow state under stalin. croce was persecuted by mussolini, but gentile flourished until he was murdered by self-described “anti-fascists,” and after a period of exile ortega y gasset 29 kochin returned in 1948 to head an institute of philosophy in franco’s spain. arendt’s claims about the affinity of philosophers for tyranny seem more plausible,4 and perhaps van norden would agree, since he teaches not just at vassar but at wuhan in the prc and nus-yale in authoritarian singapore, instead of giving his full energies to educating students in democratic or “mob-ruled” america (see 4). to treat van norden’s polemic as an occasion for thought, and in particular, for thinking about how and what to read, it might be helpful to attend to certain binary oppositions that come up without being deconstructed or even handled especially deftly. the most important, and a recurrent problematic in comparative philosophy, is the binary wisdom/philosophy: the contrast, if there is one, between the sage and the philosopher (see 30). philosophy, as we all know, means “love of wisdom,” and plato’s socrates is guided by the wise priestess diotima in the symposium to the claim that we love only that which we lack. if philosophers love wisdom (and not merely, as nietzsche cracked, their own wisdom), they must be distinct from those who do not long for wisdom because they already have it. garfield in his preface to taking back philosophy attacks nicholas tambio’s version of the alleged distinction between philosophy and wisdom, but garfield is more interested in scoring debaters’ points than in reconstructing (if only to deconstruct) the most defensible form of such a distinction.5 van norden in the main text seems blithely unaware of it.6 the brings us to the binary religion/philosophy: garfield writes in the preface that “we don’t have departments of wisdom traditions because we don’t value what we take them to be” (xvii). notwithstanding garfield’s remarkably intemperate and ill-informed remark, american universities do have departments of wisdom traditions—they are called departments of religion, faculties of theology, and schools of divinity (van norden acknowledges their existence on page 5.) van norden calls confucianism and taoism part of “a robust and diverse native spiritual tradition” in china (17). yet van norden nowhere provides reasons for why confucianism and taoism belong to the anglo-european category of “philosophy” more than they do to the anglo-european category of “religion.” van norden’s notion of philosophy involves a stark binary division between natural science and philosophy. natural sciences, van norden writes, “are successful precisely because they limit their inquiry to particular aspects of reality using particular methods” (135).7 in their original editorial (quoted in full at 9–10), garfield and van norden assert that whereas “noneuropean philosophical traditions offer distinctive solutions to problems discussed within european and american philosophy, raise or frame problems not addressed in the american the cultures of academic philosophy 30 and european tradition, or emphasize and discuss more deeply philosophical problems that are marginalized in anglo-european philosophy,” yet “there are no comparable differences in how mathematics or physics are practiced in other contemporary cultures.” sharon traweek claimed the opposite in her study of particle physicists in the united states and japan, that significant differences exist in how experimental particle physics was pursued in 1970s american and japan, and that these differences reflected deep differences between american and japanese societies.8 van norden does not mention traweek or any other sociologist of science or philosophy, though he has an index entry for alex trebek. in taking back philosophy van norden does not assert (though he may well believe) that contemporary chinese philosophy is understudied in america. thus the more relevant question for what the book does claim is whether there is something important for contemporary science or mathematics that can be learned from the non-anglo-european scientific and mathematical traditions whether contemporary or not. i have argued that aristotle’s logic offers an analysis of assertions superior to that of modern symbolic logic.9 it would not surprise me if there is something relevant or challenging to say, contemporary observational astronomy, that an american astronomer can learn, or learn most easily, from scholarship on the chinese or indian observational traditions. one also needs to consider the binary philosophic texts vs. nonphilosophic texts. i agree that there is no substitute for reading a text philosophically (5), but at least as an application site for austinian speech-act theory, one can read any text philosophically. i would not contend that my philosophical reading of demosthenes’ oration de corona makes that speech into a philosophical text.10 surely philosophical interpretation of confucius is as legitimate as philosophical interpretation of shakespeare, but is confucius a philosopher? and if so, what are the criteria by which confucius or the author of the analects are philosophers and shakespeare is not? van norden argues at length, and rightly, that something that should be called philosophy existed in ancient china. yet he is cagey or equivocal about when philosophy appears in china, and whether confucius and laozi are philosophers. they are not, according to van norden, “plainly philosophers” and are apparently not the best place to begin teaching chinese texts if your goal is to bring out to students “what is philosophically important about them” (29). van norden does not discuss systematically, even to condemn, the thesis that what confucius and laozi offer is something possibly better than philosophy, namely, wisdom. i am not a philosophy professor in an american department, or in a position to dispute van norden’s scholarship on chinese texts. i therefore want to add a more personal and 31 kochin autobiographical response to van norden’s theses on reading and teaching philosophy, from someone whose career has been worked out at the edges of anglo-european academia and american academic philosophy with occasional forays into what van norden calls “less commonly taught philosophies.” my education gave me a different understanding of how to read philosophic texts, from any culture, than van norden seems to presume. i grew up and began my undergraduate career in the far west of the united states, at the university of washington in seattle, that north pacific portion of america from which east asia was west—and in some ways was closer than the u.s. east. unlike van norden, apart from two grandfathers who served in the u.s. army in world war ii, i have no deep family ties to american history. my mother is the child of immigrants and my father mostly the grandchild. culturally they are both lithuanian jews, litvaks, my father’s family mostly more assimilated and less observant of jewish law than my mother’s. i had a somewhat fragmented traditional jewish education, from age three to age twenty, combined with secular studies in jewish schools and out of them. for me, a particular wisdom tradition, the torah as interpreted by those whom van norden (perhaps following his rabbi, jesus) calls the pharisees (123), was manifestly relevant. other wisdom traditions, and the western philosophical tradition, were not so plainly relevant or worth exploring. in seattle i grew up to some extent with asian-american children of varying origins and degrees of acculturation, though in those years, the 1970s and early to mid-1980s, my chineseamerican acquaintances were immigrants or the children of immigrants from taiwan, hong kong, or the children of “overseas chinese” from the chinese diaspora in malaysia or the philippines: very few or none had any direct experience of communist china. when in 1986 i came to harvard as a sophomore transfer student at 16, i was quite astonished to discover the blatant racism against asian americans expressed by some of the administrators. on the other hand, at harvard those were the days of what harvard’s ezra vogel saw as “japan as number one”: we, students and faculty alike, were impressed, fascinated, and even obsessed with the rising wealth and power of japan, and as a senior i was one of almost 500 students to take a course on sixteenth-century japanese history with the new white australian professor harold bolitho. my teaching assistant in samuel huntington’s comparative democracies course was an exiled chinese dissident and labor leader. nonetheless, prior to the tiananmen square massacre, which happened a few days before my graduation, i, like my fellow undergraduates, gave little thought to china. at harvard i mainly studied mathematics, partly in the philosophy department, and political philosophy. my teachers of political philosophy were harvey mansfield, who encouraged the the cultures of academic philosophy 32 study of arabic philosophy, and muhsin mahdi, the preeminent modern scholar thereof.11 in the philosophy department in emerson hall i took a course on “the philosophy of life” with robert nozick (who made occasional references to indian philosophy) and one on the metaphysics of possible worlds. i studied mathematics in emerson hall too, with the philosophy professors hilary putnam (my b.a. thesis advisor) and warren goldfarb (who examined me on my b.a. thesis). goldfarb, who knew that i planned to leave mathematics for the study of political philosophy, offered me admission into the philosophy ph.d. program, which i refused. my refusal was partly out of ignorance: even though i was personally close to a stanley cavell student, and had heard cavell speak as respondent to allan bloom’s “fellow elitists” lecture,12 i had no idea who cavell was or what kind of things he did. but i did know that the approach to philosophic texts that i had learned from mansfield and mahdi was not pursued in the philosophy department at harvard, or really anywhere in major american philosophy departments. in interpreting a philosophic work, i was taught by mansfield and mahdi to address the arguments in the context of the work as a whole and its intention. the goal of reading was to listen, mahdi and mansfield taught, to open oneself to the voice of a thinker from another time and place, not to quarry the texts for arguments that might be useful for political or scholarly purposes. one attempted to think with plato or hobbes or maimonides or alfarabi by trying to take into account what these authors themselves presented as worth thinking about. the way to do that, mansfield and mahdi taught, was by reading their works as wholes.13 by suspending one’s own judgment—not just about what was true but also about what mattered—in order to understand the author’s, every aspect of one’s own values and purposes was put into question, whether one had opened the republic, leviathan, guide of the perplexed, or the attainment of happiness for the first time or the fifteenth. at that time, the late 1980s, the only admissible approach within leading philosophy departments, especially in regard to the ancient greek texts that interested me most, was to extract the arguments from the texts and analyze them as if they had appeared in the latest issue of mind or the proceedings of the aristotelian society and as if the authors of those texts had the same purposes and the same understanding of philosophy as american philosophy professors in top-ranked departments. van norden still acknowledges and in a way respects the prejudice for arguments as opposed to drama, metaphors, or myths as the test of whether a work or an author is truly philosophical (144–148). i have little doubt, though, that had i chosen to study in the philosophy department in emerson hall i would not have been barred from completing a ph.d. on any philosophic text within or outside the western canon. 33 kochin after harvard i spent a year in israel, nominally enrolled at hebrew university, but mainly studying in a talmudical college or yeshiva. while the students in my yeshiva were american, english, or australian college graduates or college bound, the study of jewish philosophical texts had no formal place in the curriculum. the curriculum consisted almost exclusively of talmud and jewish law, with a little hebrew bible on the side. while two of the teachers had ph.d.s, those were in semitic philology and linguistics, not philosophy. from within the perspective and purposes of the yeshiva, philosophy was not only marginal but questionably worthwhile. jewish philosophy books were on the shelves in the study hall, but we were not taught them or encouraged to read them. the one practical thing i learned in israel was that to maximize my chances for an academic post in israel, my best bet was to go abroad again and take a ph.d. in something that was not israeli or jewish. so in the fall of 1990 i went to the political science department at the university of chicago. at chicago i studied a lot of plato and aristotle, and some alfarabi, averroes, and maimonides, hegel, nietzsche and heidegger; greek, but no arabic and not much german. in political science at chicago, as elsewhere, chinese and indian politics were taught as a matter of course (i ta’d for dali yang and wrote my master’s thesis on the collectivization and decollectivization of agriculture in china and the soviet union with the indian politics specialist susanne hoeber rudolph and the sociologist of china william parish—though i know neither chinese nor russian).14 i also took a great many courses in the committee on social thought. i studied arabic philosophy there with ralph lerner, hillel fradkin, and joel kraemer (none of whom were philosophy professors), and german philosophy with robert pippin. the committee also taught nonwestern literature (despite the legacy there of saul bellow and allan bloom, both of whom ridiculed the notion of a “shakespeare among the zulus”), though i didn’t study it, or much postclassical western literature either. i spent a little time with the philosophy professors who taught greek and even jewish texts, but i did not find their approach to reading congenial. i got more out of reading plato with the classicists arthur adkins and elizabeth asmis, and, though i was pretty thickheaded, from a course on feminist philosophy with candace vogler. i wrote my ph.d. dissertation on gender and politics in plato: the feminist scholars from reading whom i learned the most were the philosophers luce irigaray and michèle le dœuff, and the legal scholar and advocate catherine mackinnon. in any case my education at chicago avoided the narrowness and concern with pedigree of american academic philosophy that van norden both condemns and exemplifies. my education was also, except in the courses with robert pippin and candace vogler, lacking in the cultures of academic philosophy 34 rigor or (it seemed to me at the time) any real feel for philosophic problems. as an undergraduate and graduate student, i read philosophy but not, mostly, with philosophy professors, and i learned to read (which was what was most important to me) but i did not learn much philosophy. i left chicago for tel aviv university in 1995, and after a year there as an instructor spent two years at the university of toronto as a postdoctoral student. my experience studying political philosophy with clifford orwin and thomas pangle and canadian political thought with donald forbes recapitulated the strengths and weaknesses of my chicago education. more important for my subsequent development was reading josiah ober, who presented a radical rethinking of ancient and therefore of modern democracy, and toronto’s own deborah black, who argued that the medieval arab aristotelians had seen rhetoric and poetics as parts of logic.15 influenced by black and ober i moved from political philosophy to the logical and ontological analysis of rhetorical concepts like character, vividness, and proof by example. my philosophical education began again in 1999 when i had my first encounter with irad kimhi, the greatest teacher of philosophy i have ever known. through years of auditing classes and talking with irad, as we call him, i finally gained a grasp of the basic development of philosophy from descartes and spinoza to wittgenstein and heidegger. i learned notions and methods that i could use to work out the analysis of rhetorical concepts that i had already begun. irad also got me to read françois jullien, the french scholar of chinese thought and philosophy. it is unfortunate that van norden doesn’t mention jullien either in this book or in the bibliography on chinese philosophy on his webpage, for jullien brings chinese thinkers to bear on fundamental questions of ontology, society, and politics. jullien thus also helps us to get a better handle on both chinese and non-chinese alternatives to what van norden calls “individualistic metaphysics” (39).16 having been at the margins of economics, philosophy, and rhetorical studies my work since 2008 has moved to the margins of american history. i am still trying to develop the ontological analysis of concepts and structures, but this time applied to international relations concepts like the balance of power, empire, and world order, and to the administrative and bureaucratic apparatus of foreign policy decision-making. it would therefore be unfair for me to blame my failure to discipline myself on the narrowness or other weaknesses of the discipline of philosophy in which van norden has pursued his career. who are “we?” van norden writes that “we are doing philosophy when we engage in dialogue about problems that are important in our culture” (142). yet van norden ever explains who 35 kochin “we” are or what “our culture” is, or whether university and university philosophy departments have or should have some role in transmitting or preserving it. van norden contends against allan bloom that one can take one’s bearings from the books of another culture than the one into which one was born, that there is nothing existentially significant for the individual about that culture that happens to be one’s own. can “we” really furnish “our” soul out of any weighty book whatsoever? one possibility is that we might reject our tradition but fail to be fully initiated into another, and confuse professional attainments in a discipline—demonstrated by a long c.v.—with a well-furnished soul. to avoid that substitution of professionalization for personality, it might help to get clear on the similarities and differences between the use of the word “philosopher” in plato’s republic and the use in the leiter reports and the apa’s jobs for philosophers. there is also the issue of quality, which van norden addresses, but i think in an evasive and bloodless way, partly because that touches on the “third rail” of affirmative action, and partly because he wants more jobs for scholars of “less commonly taught philosophies” but doesn’t want to soil his nonacademic readers with the dirt on the hiring process. i can tell you from twenty years as permanent faculty in a political science department that anytime you decide that covering a subfield is important, that means that you are going to prioritize hiring somebody in that subfield over hiring somebody with the best work or the best credentials. that applies when the subfield that is to be covered is perceived as central as well as when it is to be covered in the name of “diversity.” but since that problem applies across all subfields i think it is not so sticky or ominous. more seriously, when we are talking about how much to teach “less commonly taught philosophies” the discussion often gets conflated with the question of who should teach them (see van norden 34). do chinese scholars have some unique authority in chinese philosophy? do jewish scholars have some unique authority in jewish thought? a paper of mine on jewish political thought was accepted without peer review in a general journal of intellectual history because gentile scholars refused to evaluate it and thus intervene in what they saw as the province of their jewish colleagues. the problem is not so much affirmative action in faculty hiring as identity politics in scholarly assessment. this is something from which every scholar, including myself, who has written on less commonly taught philosophies has benefited in one way or another, though we have also suffered from the narrow-mindedness that van norden condemns. in assessing van norden’s argument, we must keep in mind that diversity is sometimes purchased at the expense of other aspects of scholarly quality, or even at the expense of procedural fairness. moreover, we do our colleagues no favors by assuming they accept the the cultures of academic philosophy 36 worth—much less the conclusions—of the texts with which their upbringing or education has made them familiar. as i have shown, i am too much an outsider to the american philosophy profession to present or even to assess detailed recommendations such as van norden offers about what philosophy departments should do. i have three suggestions, though. first, teach your students enough aristotelian logic (from the arab aristotelians’ “expanded organon” that includes not only the prior and posterior analytics but also the topics and the rhetoric) to understand that, while some truths are demonstrable, any claim worth making in politics is disputable. second, make sure all future faculty hires are people who understand that since “ethics, political philosophy, and philosophical theology” are “inherently controversial” (van norden 135), no matter how well-refuted is some political or religious belief, there is almost certainly a fellow academic philosopher who is smarter, better informed, and with stronger professional qualifications who thinks that anybody who disputes that belief is wildly mistaken, not to say an idiot or a charlatan. third, make sure anybody who passes their doctoral qualifying exam has been humbled by their encounters with philosophical scholarship both within and beyond what is commonly taught. nobody should take pride in what they haven’t read.17 notes 1. bryan van norden, taking back philosophy: a multicultural manifesto, with a foreword by jay l. garfield (new york: columbia university press, 2017). 2. see inter alia kochin, “weeds: cultivating the imagination in medieval arabic political philosophy,” journal of the history of ideas 60 (july 1999): 399–416; “morality, nature, and esotericism in leo strauss’ ‘persecution and the art of writing,’” the review of politics 64 (spring 2002): 261–283; reprinted (in chinese) as the commentary to the chinese translation of “persecution and the art of writing” in the collected writings of leo strauss (beijing: huaxia publishing house, 2012). 3. see daniel bonevac’s prophetic “manifestations of illiberalism in philosophy,” academic questions 12.1 (1998–1999):14–22. 37 kochin 4. hannah arendt, “martin heidegger at eighty,” trans. albert hofstadter, in heidegger and modern philosophy, ed. michael murray (new haven: yale university press, 1978), 301–303. 5. for an attempt to apply the wisdom/philosophy distinction systematically to exclude from philosophy a wide variety of what van norden would consider to be philosophic texts, see george anastaplo, but not philosophy: seven introductions to non-western thought (lanham, md: lexington books, 2002). anastaplo’s formulations are tougher to explode than tambio’s. 6. see, e.g., van norden’s use of “philosopher” and “sage” on 30. 7. the strictly kuhnian picture of natural science that van norden offers is deconstructed by steve fuller, thomas kuhn: a philosophical history for our times (chicago: university of chicago press, 2000). 8. sharon traweek, beamtimes and lifetimes: the world of high energy physics (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1988). 9. kochin, “from argument to assertion,” argumentation 23 (2009):387–396. 10. kochin, “time and judgement in demosthenes’ de corona,” philosophy and rhetoric 35 (2002):77–89. 11. mansfield and mahdi taught me to think in terms of “arabic philosophy” rather than van norden’s preferred “islamic philosophy” or “jewish philosophy,” because the latter terms beg the question as to whether the philosopher under discussion was a faithful muslim or jew. 12. that lecture offers a somewhat different vision of multiculturalism in philosophic education, one that is still worth considering; allan bloom, “western civ—and me,” commentary (august 1990), https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/westernciv-and-me/. a slightly different version is collected as “western civ” in bloom, giants and dwarfs (new york: simon & schuster, 1990). 13. those who have read all of leviathan, for example, know that hobbes, like confucius, thinks that social order rests not just on self-interested avoidance of punishment but on widespread acceptance of the proper teachings regarding the virtues and the sacred; the cultures of academic philosophy 38 contrast van norden 52 ff. with my tel aviv colleague julie cooper’s presentation of hobbes on humility in secular powers: humility in modern political thought (chicago: university of chicago press, 2013). 14. the revised version of that thesis: kochin, “decollectivization of agriculture and the planned economy,” american journal of political science 40 (august 1996): 717–739. 15. josiah ober, mass and elite in democratic athens: rhetoric, ideology, and the power of the people (princeton: princeton university press, 1991); deborah black, logic and aristotle’s “rhetoric” and “poetics” in medieval arabic philosophy (leiden: brill, 1990). 16. i would recommend beginning with jullien, the propensity of things: toward a history of efficacy in china, trans. janet lloyd (london: zone, 1999). 17. thanks to john-paul spiro, daniel doneson, and anna kochin for suggestions and corrections. microsoft word 3 plato baily article.docx [expositions 11.1 (2017) 101–117] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 diagnosing the dissonance of achilles alan i. baily stephen f. austin state university much has been said about plato’s quarrel with poetry, but it may seem strange to claim that the republic includes a “quarrel” with money as well. after all, money cannot talk. yet money does signify, and in book i socrates shows that cephalus’, adeimantus’, and thrasymachus’ understandings of justice rely implicitly on logics of “moneymaking” that belong to the sphere of market exchange. the invention and spread of coinage facilitated greater autonomy for such “transactional” relationships, but plato sought to circumscribe transactional relationships within the civic relationship, the sphere of political justice. thus, there is a parallel between plato’s treatments of poetry and money in the republic. broadly the parallel is as follows: just as plato’s philosophic critique of mimēsis establishes the strictures under which a domesticated version of poetry may be admitted to the kallipolis, his analysis of the market in books i and ii prepares the reader for the proposal that coinage in the kallipolis should be restricted to the “moneymaking” classes, and forbidden to the guardian or ruling classes (who are prescribed a communism of goods and families). in both cases a “quarrel,” or philosophic interrogation, serves as preamble for the philosopher-legislator’s assignment of poetry and money to their “proper” civic offices. like philosophy and unlike poetry, the logic of monetary exchange is abstract and rational. but, like poetry, philosophical discourse transpires in language. in the republic, plato draws on the power of philosophical analysis and poetic language to project a vision of the market domesticated by civic morality. money’s function in the kallipolis is the subject of two conceptual icons. the first is the “myth of the metals”—the noble lie—which is introduced at the end of book iii. this is the myth socrates proposes to replace the authoritative stories told by the poets. the second icon is that of the “stinging drone” in book viii, whose appearance precipitates the decline from oligarchy to democracy, and finally, tyranny. the myth of metals illustrates the proper place of moneymaking in the kallipolis, while the stinging drone associates political decline with an improper mixture of the logics of political justice and market exchange.1 the latter part of this diagnosing the dissonance of achilles 102 article will address the myth of metals, in particular, but first it will be necessary to consider the impact of coinage and literacy, as well as plato’s general approach to poetry in the republic. technologies of abstraction and individuation plato’s treatment of poetry proceeds in two stages. the interrogation and rejection of mimēsis or “imitation” is the first stage, but the second stage is a rehabilitation of poetic symbol-making in the form of a “noble lie” (pseudos gennaion). like mimetic poetry, a noble lie is “metaphysically false,” but unlike mimetic poetry, such a fiction may be “noble” in the sense of being “‘true to its birth,’ the core meaning of gennaios, provided that it leads people to act more or less as they would act if they knew the truth.”2 students of political thought have grappled with plato’s advocacy of deception. however, my interest lies less in this question than in understanding the forces that compelled plato to conceive the idea of a noble lie in the first place. whether the medicine is administered or not, the content of noble lies implies a diagnosis of the maladies they seek to treat. broadly, two phenomena contributed to the malady that plato aimed to treat with noble lies. one was alphabetic literacy, the other, coined money. for all their differences, both social technologies promoted abstraction and individuation. ultimately they facilitated a broadening of human association and a deepening of individual consciousness, but not without producing some dissonance along the way. in many respects, what ong said of writing is true of coinage also: “[technologies] are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word.3 such transformations can be uplifting […] alienation from natural milieu can be good for us and is in many ways essential for human life. to live and to understand fully, we need not only proximity but distance.”4 platonic political philosophy can be understood (in part) as an effort to make sense of changes in society and consciousness wrought by coined money and alphabetic literacy. these technologies militated in favor of more abstract, individuated conceptions of social relations than obtained in “tribal” culture. the differentiation of social relations and individual consciousness deepened human experience but also produced a sense of dislocation. coined money displaced relations of reciprocity and exchange from immediate and interpersonal contexts to the impersonal and abstract intermediary of the market. writing displaced communication from the interpersonal context to 103 baily the intermediary of the text. platonic philosophical writing involves an effort to reimagine, on abstract terms, a “total” social whole that the market and alphabet rent asunder.5 all thinking is conceptual, but literacy intensifies the capacity for abstraction. far more than oral culture, literate culture militates toward abstract notions of society and self-consciousness. plato’s metaphysical idealism and aristotle’s logical syllogism are exemplary fruits of the intellectual changes wrought by literacy, but they are the culmination of a long development that began with the introduction of alphabetic script. indeed, “formal logic is the invention of greek culture after it had interiorized the technology of alphabetic writing, and so made a permanent part of its noetic resources the kind of thinking that alphabetic writing made possible.”6 alternatively, “[oral] cultures tend to use concepts in situational, operational frames of reference that are minimally abstract in the sense that they remain close to the living human lifeworld.”7 literacy also promotes a deeper sense of interiority. again the difference from orality is a matter of degree, not of kind. “[everyone] who can say ‘i’ has an acute sense of self. but reflectiveness and articulateness about the self take time to grow. short-term developments show its growth: the crises in euripides’ plays are less crises of social expectations and more crises of interior conscience than are the crises in in the plays of the earlier tragedian aeschylus.”8 along with literacy, the spread of coinage and markets pushed consciousness in the direction of abstraction and individuation. however, monetization seems more likely to have disturbed rather than deepened the “interior conscience.” as shell has observed, pre-platonic greek literature already displayed signs of discomfort with the institution of coinage, which, in the sixth and fifth centuries b.c., came to pervade greek economic and intellectual life. for the greeks coinage coincided with such political developments as tyranny and such aesthetic ones as tragedy. some thinkers, moreover, came to recognize interactions between economic and intellectual exchange, or money and language. (seme means “word” as well as “coin”).9 just as writing displaced language from the concrete contexts of oral performance and verbal discourse, coinage displaced the exchange of goods from the contexts of gift-exchange and centralized (“palatial”) distribution. coinage—a concrete token of value serving as universal and diagnosing the dissonance of achilles 104 abstract intermediary between hitherto incommensurable goods—widened the sphere of commercial relationships. in tandem, it encouraged thinking about reciprocity in more calculative or “transactional,” rather than personal, terms. this “crisis of reciprocity”10 was most significant in relation to ceremonial gift-exchange, in which the personal status of the giver (and receiver) is identified with the gift. “the implication of the giver in the thing given is not a metaphor: it involves a transfer of soul and of substantial presence. it translates the fact that the bond between giver and recipient is personal, exclusive and intense. the community is the global fabric of these unique and local relationships.”11 seaford sees achilles’ dissonance as a reflection of the crisis of reciprocity brought about by coinage, and a prefiguration of pre-socratic philosophy. achilles’ rejection of the gifts offered by agamemnon, in combining the logic of money with aristocratic superiority to it, has two unusual (for homer) consequences. firstly, it induces the expression, in concrete terms, of something close to the idea of an unlimited amount of goods. secondly, it makes achilles separate his own psuchē with its supreme value (timē) from the various material manifestations by which it may seem constituted but with which it is in fact incommensurable. in thus putting his soul beyond an innumerable amount of goods, i.e., beyond all exchange value, he prefigures both the heraclitean unlimitedness of the soul and the sublimating separation by parmenides and plato of abstract being, exclusive to the isolated mind or psuchē, from the unlimited circulation of goods (12b). this prefiguration occurs nowhere else in homer.12 in gift-exchange the giver’s identity is implied in the thing given. in oral culture the singer and the muse are virtually identical because the muse’s authority is manifested in and through the singer’s memory. havelock describes the epic poem itself as a “tribal encyclopedia,” made alive in “a performative utterance on an ambitious scale which both describes and enforces the overall habit pattern, political and private, of the group […] to become and remain standardized it had to achieve preservation outside of the daily whim of men.”13 however, just as the transactional logic of commerce subverted the traditional identity between achilles’ psuchē and “the various material manifestations by which it may seem constituted,” the logic of writing subverted the traditional 105 baily identity between the epic singer and the muse, as well as the identity, in tribal culture, between nomos (law) and ethos (folk-way). these developments reveal the same processes of abstraction and individuation at work. plato’s treatment of poetry plato did not reject poetic or symbolic expression as such. his objections pertained specifically to imitative expression (mimēsis). plato’s rejection of mimēsis is bound up with the philosophical critique of oral consciousness. as an articulate representative of literate consciousness, which privileges abstraction and “objectivity,” plato recoiled at the “total loss of objectivity” necessitated by practices of “poetic memorization” which were essential in oral culture.14 per scholars like havelock, and ong, “plato’s entire epistemology was unwittingly a programmed rejection of the […] mobile, warm, personally interactive lifeworld of oral culture […] platonic form was form conceived of by analogy with visible form. the platonic ideas are voiceless, immobile, devoid of all warmth, not interactive but isolated, not part of the human lifeworld but utterly above and beyond it.”15 from havelock’s and ong’s perspective the literacy-driven evolution from concrete to abstract consciousness was a deterministic process and plato was its amanuensis: “plato of course was not at all fully aware of the unconscious forces at work in his psyche to produce this reaction, or overreaction, of the literate person to lingering retardant orality.”16 this determinism helps account for the vehemence of plato’s rejection of poetry, which seems extreme to many modern readers. but this perspective plays down the evidence that plato was consciously aware of the differences between orality and literacy and that it informed his philosophical writing. such evidence is available in the phaedrus and the “seventh letter,” among other texts. allen has offered a more sophisticated reading of plato’s critique of mimēsis, one that draws on havelock’s insight but gives more weight to plato’s literary and political agency. instead of construing plato’s project as the creation of a “text-based culture of his own devising” to rival that of the poets, allen sees plato’s writing as an effort “to change athenian culture and thereby transform athenian politics”17 by reforming “the athenian ‘system of value,’ that is, the ethicopolitical nexus of concepts that organized athenian political life.”18 for a few reasons, allen’s reading improves on havelock’s. first, orality and literacy are taken up explicitly in some platonic writings, suggesting that plato was not wholly unwitting in his diagnosing the dissonance of achilles 106 reaction against mimēsis. second, poetry took both oral and written forms, and although certain “features of the oral universe align well with the targets of platonic philosophical and cultural critique […] this is an accidental rather than a necessary alignment.”19 third, by the time plato wrote, there was a small but significant circle of readers whose literacy had developed beyond merely utilitarian functions such as recordkeeping; plato hoped to leverage the durability of writing to influence this audience as well as future audiences. “plato could imagine a general reader for his dialogues, and […] [develop] a mode of philosophical writing that anticipated such readers even in advance of their general emergence.”20 plato’s writing, then, was not merely a representative literate’s reaction to the oral predecessor culture but also a conscious effort to enlist the “surplus power” of language in a text, in service to plato’s overall ethico-political project. like havelock, allen affirms that plato’s “political” project aimed chiefly at athenian educational culture (paideia). “what is political in the republic, and the rest of the dialogues, is not plato’s creation of a utopian plan but his effort to refashion athenian political language. the utopian image is a tool used for the latter purpose.”21 plato consciously exploited linguistic power, drawing upon the unique possibilities of literacy to reform athens’ existing “system of value” from within. in the republic, plato’s linguistic pragmatism is manifest in his construction of literary models designed to leverage the efficacy of symbols to produce social meanings and influence action. for allen, this is the essence of plato’s “pharmacology,” and it “entails above all understanding how abstract concepts and their rhetorical conveyance […] shift the horizons of understanding and expectation and the normative commitments both of the individual and the social group with consequences for lived experience.”22 although they are poetic models rather than dialectical practices, platonic noble lies do offer an alternative means of conveying philosophical truth. the basic notion is that certain fictions can produce the truth-effect of philosophical dialectic in spite of the reader being unaware of philosophic truth and the fiction being literally false. the efficacy of such fictions testifies by itself to the pragmatic insight that language can have political effects through its power to shape beliefs. but only certain types of fiction can have this effect. there are on the one hand shadows or eidōla, which are what poets produce. socrates repudiates these. but there are also useful and valuable images, which he 107 baily endorses. socrates refers to the latter with terms like: theoretical models (paradiegma logōi, 472c), paradigms (paradeigmata, 361b, 472c), types (tupos, 443c), images (eikones, 487e, 488a, 588b–c), paintings (zōigraphiai, 472d, 488a, 501a–b), sculptures (andriantopoioi, 540c, also 420c–d), patterns after the divine pattern (paradeigmata en ouranōi, 592b), and diagrams (diagrammata, 529d–e). socrates himself produces such images and teaches his interlocutors to do so also. but for all his emphasis on visuality, socrates produces these images with words, as the poets do their shadows.23 plato’s word-images serve to make visible what is invisible.24 they may take the form of schemata such as the tripartite division of the soul, or they make take the form of imitation, so long as only or virtuous characters and actions are imitated. in other words, the purpose of platonic fictions is to body forth invisible principles such as justice and virtue. literary images and theoretical models are two means of conveying concepts; but the latter appeal to our sensuous experience and the former, our intellectual senses. plato’s dialogues include both conveyances.25 in either case, philosophical writing is more than an “unwitting” reaction against poetry. for plato aimed not only to critique the poets but “to displace [them]. and he expected this displacement to have cultural effects and, because cultural effects, political effects.”26 allen’s reading of the republic looks forward to the effects of plato’s writing. what follows is informed by this reading but it looks in the opposite direction. what made plato’s writings appeal to the nascent community of readers? plato’s writing certainly had an impact on subsequent cultural and political discourse, but it was also a response to semantic innovations led by presocratic philosophers and early historians—especially herodotus27—who were themselves grappling with the consequences of revolutionary changes brought about by literacy and coinage. if epic performances and gift-exchanges were indeed “total” social phenomena that sustained the community’s identity over time through rituals and relationships involving immediate, personal, presence then we might say that literacy and coinage “split the atom” of tribalism by disembodying the discursive order and disembedding the distributive order. it seems likely that these two developments are deep sources of achilles’ dissonance. if the iliad presents achilles’ symptoms, the republic proposes an implicit diagnosis in the form of a remedy (pharmakon): the noble lie. diagnosing the dissonance of achilles 108 the noble lie: plato’s myth of the metals the republic is replete with literary images, and in a sense the entire dialogue may be an elaborate “noble lie.” however, only one fiction is designated in the dialogue as the noble lie (414c)28 and that is the “myth of metals.” after purging the city of the old poetry, socrates entertains the possibility of instituting a new myth “to persuade, in the best case, the rulers, but if not them the rest of the city” of their duty to “guard over enemies from without and friends from within—so that the ones will not do harm and the others will be unable to” (414b–c). the content of the myth of metals is as follows: all of you in the city are certainly brothers […] but the god, in fashioning those of you who are competent to rule, mixed gold in at their birth; this is why they are most honored; in auxiliaries, silver; and iron and bronze in the farmers and the other craftsmen. so, because you’re all related, although for the most part you’ll produce offspring like yourselves, it sometimes happens that a silver child will be born from a golden parent, a golden child from a silver parent, and similarly all the others from each other. hence, the god commands the rulers first and foremost to be of nothing such good guardians and to keep over nothing so careful a watch as the children, seeing which of the metals is mixed in their souls. and if a child of theirs should be born with an admixture of bronze or iron, by no manner of means are they to take pity on it, but shall assign the proper value to its nature and thrust it out among the craftsmen or the farmers; and again, if from those men one should naturally grow who has an admixture of gold or silver, they will honor such ones and lead them up, some to the guardian group, others to the auxiliary, believing that there is an oracle that the city will be destroyed when an iron or bronze man is its guardian. (415a–d) the myth of metals plays upon a “language of metals” that was already well established. hesiod had spoken in this dialect of ages and races of men that corresponded to a hierarchy of metals from gold to iron. although it does not rely on abstract concepts, it is fair to call hesiod’s metaphorical system an aristocratic “ideology.” later, “herodotus, at least in part, seems to appropriate the traditional aristocratic system, appropriating metals and coinage as signifiers within a moral 109 baily discourse based on essentialism. yet while the text of herodotus exploits the signifying value of the language of metals, the narrator tends to maintain an ironic distance from his characters’ metallic forays.”29 herodotus’ ironic distancing from hesiod’s metallic dialect reflects the revolutionary effects of both writing and coinage. for, writing introduces a gap between the narrator and the text that enables ironic distancing. while herodotus, through his characters, does imitate the traditional system he also occupies a narrative persona, which allows the historian’s “position [to shift] and [waver] with different anecdotes and narratives.”30 within that gap, herodotus plays on the social tensions brought about by coinage. in particular, herodotus’ portrayal of characters illustrates the tension between a “hard” aristocratic ethos (associated with gift-exchange) and a “soft” demotic ethos (associated with commercial calculation). “the ‘hard’ and uncomplicated scythians maintain the pure affinity between talismanic gold [hesiodic agalmata] and kingship, while the lydian king kroisos (at the ‘soft’ end of the spectrum) incongruously links the symbolism of gold with the precise calculations of the kapēlos [retailer].”31 herodotus’ audience included aristocrats and democrats opposed to one another in a discursive conflict over coinage. the gap between narrator and character, and the implied equality of reader and author, make space for herodotus to approach the conflict ironically. importantly, ironic distancing allowed herodotus to abstract from the conflict between aristocracy and democracy, or gift and commerce, to the ultimate conflict over which side may lay claim to the “embedded,” long-term transactional order, as opposed to a short term, “disembedded” order. the embedded order is positively valued, the disembedded, negatively valued. traditionally, aristocratic or “heroic” gift-exchange was associated with the long-term order, while the innovations of coinage and kapēlia belonged to the short-term order. but the rise of the polis intensified the confusion between transactional orders and with it the discursive struggle over money’s meaning. traditionally, commerce was associated with the short-term order, but, as nomisma, coinage encouraged an association between commerce and the long-term transactional order represented by the polis.32 “for every greek polis that issued its own coin asserted its autonomy and independence from every other greek city, while coinage also functioned as one institution among many through which the city constituted itself as the final instance against the claims of an internal elite.”33 thus, as herodotus shows us, “[both] the aristocratic elite and the polis lay claim to the good, ‘embedded’ economy for themselves, and both vilify the other side by representing it not as diagnosing the dissonance of achilles 110 an alternate order but as disorder—socially ruinous disembedding perpetrated by selfish economic interests.”34 the myth of metals is plato’s main intervention in this discursive conflict. what literary device does he employ? in the phaedrus, socrates lamented the confusion and “madness” that result from literacy’s unmooring of the word from its oral context. but rather than attempt to put back together what our tools have rent asunder, he suggests that philosophical discourse can reconcile the effects “bad carving” through techniques of “good carving.” these discursive techniques are, “[first], the comprehension of scattered particulars in one idea […] which whether true or false certainly [gives] clearness and consistency to the discourse […] the second principle is that of division into species according to the natural formation, where the joint is, not breaking any part as a bad carver might” (265d). plato’s myth of metals is understood best as a philosophical exercise in good carving. the myth aims to reconcile in discourse three orders of value—commodity, honor, and intelligence—whose autonomy was intensified by literacy and coinage. this differentiation sowed confusion, but also offered the opportunity to judge more clearly among the orders, in terms of the goods appropriate to each and their proper relations to one another. philosophical discourse does this by gathering the “scattered particulars” comprising the city/soul under the comprehensive idea of political justice, and assigning to each part (moneymakers, auxiliaries and rulers, in the city) its appropriate virtue (prudence, courage and wisdom). the comprehensive idea of justice pertains to the relations among these parts and their respective virtues, and the philosophic “constitution painter” takes care to arrange each particular “according to its natural formation.” as a philosophical text, plato’s myth illustrates in extremis the ironic and transvaluative power of both literature and money. the language of metals on which the myth relies obviously belongs to an aristocratic imaginary but plato’s revisionism turns that dialect on its head. the myth teaches that every citizen of the kallipolis is “earth-born,” affirming the isonomic logic of the polis and the market. the hierarchical logic of aristocracy is retained along with the language of metals, but more importantly the link between abstract and concrete agalmata is severed. indeed, only the bronze and iron souls—the “moneymakers”—are permitted to acquire actual gold and silver. 111 baily we’ll tell [the auxiliaries] that gold and silver of a divine sort from the gods they have in their soul always and have no further need of the human sort; nor is it holy to pollute the possession of the former sort by mixing it with the possession of the mortal sort, because many unholy things have been done for the sake of the currency of the many, while theirs is untainted. but for them alone in those of the city it is not lawful to handle and touch gold and silver, nor to go under the same roof with it, nor to hang it from their persons, nor to drink from silver and gold. and thus they would save themselves as well as save the city. (416e–417b) as the final sentence indicates, plato’s myth retains the traditional association between coinage and the short-term transactional order; however, the market is subordinated to the long term order circumscribed by the comprehensive virtue of political justice. the hierarchical relation among the kallipolis’ constituent parts reflects their division “into species according to the natural formation, where the joint is.” the strikingly unworkable suggestion that children born to parents of differing “metals” should be reassigned to the appropriate class indicates the limits of philosophical myth-making. in terms of the myth the policy makes sense, and it reinforces the association between isonomia and social mobility. still, to carve the classes of the city/soul along the appropriate metaphysical “joints” without interfering with the articulation of the whole body is much more easily accomplished in speech than in deed. the same goes for the radical proposal that auxiliaries and rulers should live communally, sharing property, wives and children, and never touching earthly silver or gold. when adeimantus suggests that “you’re hardly making these men happy” (419a), socrates reminds him that in “founding the city” in speech “we are not looking to the exceptional happiness of any one group among us, but as far as possible, that of the city as a whole” (420b). the kallipolis is a speculative “tyranny of the good” in which each subject’s happiness is sacrificed to the whole city’s happiness, as prescribed by the ruling philosophical logos. because of this, the “social mobility” allowed within the kallipolis is for the city’s benefit not the subject’s. plato proffers the “noble lie” as the sort of “strong medicine” needed to facilitate such a tyranny. but it is unlikely that plato aimed to institute this regime in practice; it is more plausible to read the myth as a literary paradigm of political justice whose “vividness” lies chiefly in its diagnostic and therapeutic usefulness.35 diagnosing the dissonance of achilles 112 within the broader context of the republic the myth serves to clarify the confusions over “justice” raised earlier in the dialogue. in book i, the relations of justice were confused with more narrow relations characteristic of commercial partnerships (by cephalus) and martial alliances (by polemarchus). these confusions culminate in thraymachus’ exasperated rejection of the idea of political justice and his claim that “justice” is merely a rhetorical means of legitimating predation upon the weak by the strong. if the republic’s first book portrays the dissonance resulting from differentiations in social relationships that were intensified by literacy and coinage, then the myth of metals is an imaginative reconstitution of the social whole, on the ideal plane. conclusion one measure of an institution’s claim to embody the long-term good is its ability to compel sacrifices. the myth of metals portrays the kallipolis as free and happy precisely because its members are enslaved to the good. in other words, the myth envisages the whole array of sacrifices that a radical tyranny of the good would require. but the myth is only one vision, and it comes at the end of a series of representations of sacrifice. the first representation of sacrifice comes out in socrates’ interrogation of cephalus. socrates asks about the value of wealth. cephalus, an old man, replies that wealth is most valuable for settling debts with gods and men: “to the man who is conscious in himself of no unjust deed, sweet and good hope is ever beside him—a nurse of his old age, as pindar puts it […] the possession of money contributes a great deal to not cheating or lying to any man against one’s will, and, moreover, to not departing for that other place frightened because one owes some sacrifices to a god or money to a human being” (330e–331b). cephalus’ reply to socrates demonstrates the relationship between human morality, which compels sacrifice, and the “imperceptible goods” that legitimately merit sacrifice. allen glosses this passage: stories of the after-life […] provide the first example of cognizable conceptions about imperceptible things; such conceptions have a controlling influence on human morality […] socrates jumps on [cephalus’] connection between the fear of death and a desire to meet obligations and claims that the issue at stake is whether cephalus understands justice rightly. socrates thus draws out a subtle point. when 113 baily human beings begin to wonder whether stories about what happens at or after death are true, their minds also turn to questions of justice and injustice. the question of life after death raises the prospect of punishment after death. in the face of epistemological uncertainty about any afterlife, human beings lose hold of whatever peace of mind they may have achieved, the dialogue suggests. cephalus clearly has only one resource to help him contemplate what happens at death: poetry[.]36 this is a powerful insight. yet allen overlooks that cephalus has one other means to the peace of mind he seeks: coin. in its mute signification of value, coinage supplied the peace of mind that poetic invocations of afterlife spurred cephalus to seek. for cephalus, then, poetry and coinage close the moral-metaphysical circle that inscribes mortal life without the intervention of philosophical discourse. as soon as socrates abstracts from cephalus’ remarks the assertion that justice is “speaking the truth and giving back what one takes,” cephalus himself departs “to look after the sacrifices” rather than remain for the dialogue, as if he has no need for the discussion and the mythmaking that follows. perhaps this is because, for cephalus, money also puts gods and mortals on a curiously equal footing, since debts to both gods and men may be discharged in coin. here we glimpse the radically leveling implications of market rationality. yet as the dialogue progresses an opposing implication emerges: that the wealthy are to the poor as gods are to mortals. for the wealthy can afford “sacrifices” or can pay others to sacrifice on their behalf, while the poor face poetically-heightened anxieties of mortality without any such consolation. book i presents a series of incommensurable understandings of justice, beginning with the moneymaker’s justice, proceeding through the warrior’s justice, and concluding with the sophist’s denial or rejection of justice as a comprehensive idea. the flawed definitions of justice in book i expose the fault lines created (or at least, considerably deepened) by coinage and literacy. thrasymachus finally articulates a predatory vision of human association: whether the power backing it is physical or intellectual, he claims, “[justice] and the just are really someone else’s good, the advantage of the man who is stronger and rules, and a personal harm to the man who obeys and serves. injustice is the opposite, and it rules the truly simple and just; and those who are ruled […] make him whom they serve happy but themselves not at all” (343c–d). diagnosing the dissonance of achilles 114 thrasymachus’ sophistic argument suggests a paradigm of social relations where intellectual, physical, and economic predation is the metaphysical norm. in this paradigm rulers are “wolves” rather than “sheepdogs.” but, as socrates exposes, this is to deny any distinction between justice and the art of gain. thrasymachus’ tangled argument is structurally similar to the dissonance of achilles. like an intellectual achilles, thrasymachus’ position “[combines] the logic of money with aristocratic superiority to it.” when socrates exposes his confusion thrasymachus is enraged, just like achilles. in the iliad, achilles’ dissonance “[combines] […] the logic of money with aristocratic superiority to it.” in a different way, so does the unbridled sophism of thrasymachus in the republic. for, thrasymachus’ claim that “justice is the good of the stronger” combines the logic of the polis with the intellectual’s superiority to it. unlike the aristocratic achilles, thrasymachus is a new man and a sophist, comfortable in the “human” world of the polis, but apt to put himself outside the community on account of his superior cleverness. if achilles’ alienation from the human community reflects his sense of semi-divine superiority, thrasymachus is alienated for the opposite reason: too clever to accept the claim of political justice, he likens the mass of men to sheep, while clever men are like wolves that prey upon them in the guise of protecting them. the myth of metals completes socrates’ answer to thrasymachus. practically, its utopian “tyranny of the good” is no more workable (and barely more desirable) than thrasymachus’ dystopian tyranny of predation. but it is not a practical plan; it is a hypothetical paradigm. hypothetically, the myth saves [the guardians] as well as the city by persuading each class to make the sacrifices necessary for the whole to be just and happy. “surely the most terrible and shameful thing at all is for shepherds to rear dogs as auxiliaries for the flocks in such a way that due to licentiousness, hunger or some other bad habit, they themselves undertake to do harm to the sheep, and instead of dogs, become like wolves” (416a). notes 1. at the extreme this mixture terminates in tyranny, which erases the boundary between wealth and political authority. 2. allen 21. 115 baily 3. etymology attests to the similarity between money and language; for example, logos is translated as “account” and even today modern greeks call an invoice “to logoriasmo.” 4. ong 81. 5. to emphasize the simulative role played by material culture does not necessarily imply cultural materialism. rather, it can shed light on some peculiar and defining features of plato’s moral and intellectual project. among these are plato’s interrogations of money as a measure of all value and of poetry as the chief vehicle of greek paideia. 6. ong 51. 7. ong 48. 8. ong 174. beyond alphabetic literacy, the introduction of print in the early modern era and, today, digital computing has intensified further the sense of subjectivity, even as it has knit humanity together through ties of institutional interdependence and instantaneous communication. still, in the sweep of humanity’s existence on earth, the most radical change in consciousness was wrought by alphabetic writing. 9. shell continues: heraclitus, for example, described the monetary exchange of commodities in a complex simile and series of metaphors whose logical exchanges of meaning define the unique form of simultaneous purchase and sale of wares that obtains in monetary transfer. and plato criticized the sophists and presocratics as merchants of the mind […] because they were producers of a discourse whose internal exchanges of meaning were identical to the exchanges of commodities in monetary transactions. plato feared the political tendency of their moneyed words, and represented their discourses in his dialogues as the audible symptom of an invisible invasion into language of a tyrannical form destructive of wisdom. plato’s critique extended to the ideal form itself: was not even socratic dialectic, he wondered, pervaded by the monetary form of exchange? was not dialectical division a kind of money changing, and dialectical hypothesizing a kind of hypothecation, or mortgaging? the upsetting confrontation of thought with its own internalization of economic form motivated thought to become the self-critical discourse of philosophy. (2) 10. seaford 34. 11. henaff 127. 12. seaford 302. 13. havelock 42. 14. havelock 45. 15. ong 79. diagnosing the dissonance of achilles 116 16. ibid. 17. allen 4. 18. allen 162. this is not to deny the influence of literacy. “in an oral culture, havelock argues, one can remember say, an epic poem only by ‘learning the lines’ as an actor does; in havelock’s view, plato saw this feature of an oral culture as giving oral poets excessive power to shape the souls of their fellows.” 19. allen 172. 20. allen 5. 21. allen 18. 22. allen 21. 23. allen 29. 24. allen 35, 57–59, 73–76. 25. allen 74–77. 26. allen 77. 27. according to kurke, herodotus preserves oral tradition of approximately one hundred years preceding his researches (so, 550–450?) on both sides of the struggle [over the meaning of coinage]. furthermore, herodotus offers us a text that is uniquely capacious in content as well as in sources: thus he explicitly discusses many of the topics central to our inquiry for the first time. this can be demonstrated in miniature simply by a list of relevant words that occur for the first time in herodotus’ text: in addition to nomisma, herodotus gives us our earliest extant instances of banausiē (together with sophocles’ ajax), dokimos, hetaira used for a courtesan, and kapēlos/kapēleuō (aside from a single occurrence in hipponax)” (31). 28. allan bloom translates the relevant phrase (ti hen pseudomenous) as “some one noble lie.” all quotes from the republic are from bloom’s translation. 29. kurke 60. 30. kurke 60–64. 31. kurke 63–64. 32. “[whether] we etymologize it […] as ‘process or result of lawful distribution’ or […] as ‘convention,’ the term nomisma points to the political function of coinage, either as a means of effecting retributive justice or as an institution of consensus. this political 117 baily function […] is what crucially distinguishes coinage from other forms of wealth (both of which are designated indiscriminately by chrēmata)” (kurke 41). 33. kurke 13. 34. kurke 32. 35. this is not to suggest that the myth offers a “yardstick,” if a yardstick is an absolute standard or template for measuring justice. it is more like a paradigm or heuristic to aid in understanding various socio-political relations. 36. allen concludes: “the opening scene of the republic thus presents poetry as dwelling in the cognitive space where human psychology and epistemology combine to generate metaphysical conclusions that sustain particular notions of justice” (33–34). works cited allen, danielle. why plato wrote. oxford: wiley-blackwell, 2010. havelock, eric a. preface to plato. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1963. hénaff, marcel. the price of truth: gift, money, and philosophy, trans. jean-louis morhange. stanford: stanford university press, 2010. kurke, leslie. coins, bodies, games, and gold: the politics of meaning in archaic greece. princeton: princeton university press, 1999. ong, walter j. orality and literacy. london: methuen, 1982; repr. london: routledge, 2002. kindle edition. plato. phaedrus, trans. benjamin jowett. in the works of plato, ed. irwin edman. new york: modern library, 1956. 379–449. plato. republic, trans. allan bloom. new york: basic books, 1991. seaford, richard. money and the early greek mind: homer, philosophy, tragedy. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2004. shell, marc. money, language and thought: literary and philosophic economies from the medieval to the modern era. berkeley: university of california press, 1982. microsoft word 4 plato sokolon article.docx [expositions 11.1 (2017) 118–137] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 an apology of euripides: defending the poets marlene k. sokolon concordia university one of the main prosecutors of socrates on charges of impiety and corruption in 399 b.c.e. was the poet miletus. in plato’s version of his apology (22b), socrates defends himself by pointing out that poets are merely inspired and their audiences are better at explaining their poems.1 this critique of poetry is found and developed across plato’s corpus, especially in the republic (604b– 608d) where socrates ends the ancient quarrel by exiling the poets from the city and philosophic education. this banishment, however, unleashed a new quarrel as to the meaning of socrates’ critique of poetry, especially in light of his generous use of poetic elements in plato’s dialogues. generally, this debate has examined whether socrates’ critique is ironic from the philosopher’s perspective. in contrast, this analysis takes up socrates’ explicit challenge in the republic (607e) for a defender (prostatēs) to give apology of poetry demonstrating that it is not simply pleasant but beneficial to regimes and human life. offering two of euripides’ plays in defense—suppliant women and ion—the article investigates euripides’ poetic contribution to understanding two enduring questions of political philosophy: what is the best regime; and what is the role of myth in political origin. importantly, euripides provides a serious account of such questions and reveals that a poetic education may be not only beneficial, but essential in any democratic regime. socrates’ critique of the poets in plato’s apology, socrates’ critique of the poets appears in the context of his defense against his old accusers. on a “mission” to disprove the delphic oracle’s pronouncement that there was “no one wiser than he” (apology 21a), socrates turned first to the politicians only to discover they did not know what they claimed to know; he then turned to the poets to learn what he could from their carefully composed poems: he was “astonished” to discover that any member of his jury could “speak better” (beltion elegon) than their authors about the meaning of the poems (apology 22b). he concluded that poets “made poetry not by wisdom but by means of nature (phusei) and divine possession (enthousiaontes) such as prophets and speakers of oracles” (apology 22b–d). 119 sokolon furthermore, because rich young men followed his example by exposing those who claim knowledge, powerful men like poet miletus became hostile to him and philosophy (apology 23c– d). this critique of poetry is similar to the phaedrus (244b, 245a), where poets compose with a kind of divine madness; or the ion (533e) where a rhapsode says nothing “until inspired and standing outside his senses with his mind is no longer in him.” hence, as he restates in the gorgias (502a–e) the poets are really rhetoricians, who flatter and gratify audiences without concern for what is best or beneficial. the implications of his critique are twofold. first, even though an average person better understands the poem than its maker, poetry still reveals some kind of potential knowledge. second, whatever the poem’s meaning or potential wisdom, the most important human agent is not the poet but the listener or interpreter of the poetry. plato further develops this critique in the republic as part of a political, then philosophic education. at first, the poets (and other artists such as musicians) are censored because their depiction of the gods as flawed, deceitful, and overcome by passions is damaging to a young guardian’s education (republic 391d; 401a–d). in other words, rather than composing through inspiration, the poet should be guided by reason and teach young spirited souls to be courageous, moderate, and wise. later in book v, he suggests that lovers of spectacles (philotheamones) and hearing (philēkooi), such as those drawn to the “seeing place” (theatron), are similar to philosophers because both love to learn: however, they learn only opinions, not truth (republic 475d–78e). finally by book x, socrates offers the most derisive critique of tragedian poets (and other artists such as painters) who make images of images, which are three-times removed from what is (republic 597b–599a). hence, the problem is not only their inability to provide a rational account of their makings, but also their poems nourish the part of our soul that destroys calculation and, at most, provide phantoms of imitations of the truth (republic 605b). for anyone concerned with justice and truth, poetry ought to be banished from the soul as poetry is dangerous and not serious (republic 608b). plato’s critique of poetry, of course, is far more complex and problematic than this straightforward presentation of his censorious comments. although a subject of intense debate, the ironic reading highlights two categories of issues.2 most obviously, rather than consistently critical of poetry, socrates is often deferential to poets, most notably homer. in addition, plato’s use of narrative in the dialogue undermines a literal interpretation of his critique. what is more ironic, for example, then plato’s imaginary interlocutor socrates criticizing poets as dissemblers for an apology of euripides: defending the poets 120 putting imaginary words in another’s mouth. finally, plato consistently uses poetic devices throughout his corpus: the phaedrus (253c–254e) suggests the soul is a chariot; the gorgias (523a –524b) ends with a myth of judgment as does the apology (40c–41e); and, the republic contains many of his most memorable poetic images such as the cave (514a–520a), the divided line (509d– 511e), and myth of er (614b–621c). although the debate is complex with a great deal of nuance, the ironic reading can be categorized in two broad strokes. first, taking seriously the idea that poets are neither the source of their own inspiration nor able to articulate the meaning of their poetry, plato’s philosophy can be seen as an example of how the philosopher can, and potentially must, incorporate poetry to turn souls towards the truth. hence, poetry is a necessary supplement, especially for the young and the masses who require more than philosophic persuasion to engage them in the ascent towards a genuine education.3 significantly, this reading reinforces the dichotomy in which philosophy rules educationally-challenged poetry. second, rather than reinforcing the dichotomy, the dialogue with all its allegories and myths can be seen as a kind of philosophic-poetry which engages not only rationality but also our passions in the pursuit of truth.4 thus, as the philosopher-poet, plato overcomes his own critique of poetry as his dialogues provide a rational account (and certainly better than the average juror could) directed not merely at images that flatter, but at the truth itself. importantly, these conclusions regarding the seriousness of the quarrel between poetry and philosophy are all derived from a platonic perspective. even the most generous reading for poets that plato offers a philosophic-poetry still reforms poetry in such a way as to ensure philosophy regulates poetry. as such, the concerns of philosophy essentially displace the gods as its inspiration. the task remaining is to take up plato’s challenge as a defender (republic 607d) to examine whether plato’s “charges” against the poet’s art or his poetic reforms hold up under the scrutiny of a poet’s apology. case one: what is the best regime? socrates’ “charge” against the poets really asks whether poetry is beneficial to cities and souls or, as socrates asks, can we “learn something” (apology 22b)? in other words, does euripides provide a serious examination of important political questions or offer nothing more than a pleasant or even potentially dangerous distraction? first, euripides’ suppliant woman provides an overt example of a poet dealing with a typical political question: what is the best regime? this was a 121 sokolon politically salient question that was explored by many ancient political philosophers (see plato, republic 544d–569c; xenophon, hellenica books i–ii; aristotle, politics 1279b1–10 and ne1160a35–61a10). in this play, euripides raises the question in a formal debate (agōn) between theseus (the athenian mythological king who united the territory of attica) and a messenger from the rival city of thebes. significantly, although euripides reflects similar content to philosophic explanations, because he contextualized this question within a larger dramatic story, he exposes potential limits of a purely rational account of such questions. euripides’ suppliant women focuses on the aftermath of battle of the seven against thebes, in which oedipus’ son polynices led an argive army against his own brother and city. as fated, the brothers die at each other’s hands and their uncle creon famously decrees that the enemy dead are to remain unburied. sophocles’ antigone focuses on consequences of this decree in thebes; this play tells story from the argive perspective, beginning with the supplication the athenian king theseus by the widows of argive generals. at first, theseus rejects their supplication as the attack on thebes was insolent and impious, but his mother convinces him to pursue glory and reject quietism (hēsuchoi) for the sake of justly punishing those who violate the panhellenic custom regarding the dead (195–250; 300–355). into this charged atmosphere, a theban herald arrives to convince athens to reject the supplication; he lands into immediate trouble, however, by asking to see the sole ruler (turannos) of the land (399). insulted, theseus replies that he spoke falsely (tou logou pseudōs), because athenians are a free people who hold offices in turn and equally share honors (403–08).5 thus begins euripides’ debate concerning the “best regime.” like many of euripides’ agōnes, critics have condemned this debate as stilted and irrelevant to the plot. somewhat awkwardly, the first part of the debate focuses on the superiority of one-man rule versus the rule of the many, and does not explicitly include oligarchy, the most common regime in this period and the most realistic alternative to athenian democracy.6 this inattention is likely due to the setting of the play in the mythological era of founder kings. furthermore, as the herald’s critique focuses less on supporting tyranny than on the short-comings of democracy, his argument reflects similar points made by the oligarchic faction. the second part of the debate moves to the question of whether athens should intervene on behalf of the suppliants. also, somewhat awkwardly, but potentially significant to interpretation, the debate is transposed with a founder king supporting the rule of the many and a commoner celebrating the rule of one man.7 an apology of euripides: defending the poets 122 the herald makes several points against democracy. first, he retorts that equality of holding offices in turn is a “game of luck,” whereby ruling fell to anyone regardless of qualifications (409– 25; 465–510; 566–80). in a one-man rule, he continues, the city is safe from demagogues who manipulate the people for personal advantage; it also does not rely on the judgment of the common man, who neither speaks convincingly nor knows how to properly guide cities; since learning and ruling require leisure, even when a poor man is intelligent, he lacks the time to devote to these tasks. in addition, the best men in democracies tend turn away from politics because popularity comes from facile speeches rather than real accomplishments that benefit the city. finally, turning to why the athenians are busybodies (polupragmon), he points out that the original battle was impious and did not involve athens: in such situations, being a “quietist” (hēsuchos) is wise and courage requires discretion.8 in contrast, theseus makes several points in support of democracy (403–8; 426–62; 514–62; 566–84). unlike the unjust law which benefits one man, democracy establishes equality of written law (isonomia) which allows poor men to win just cases against those stronger and richer. in addition, democratic freedom consists not only by ruling in turn, but in allowing all men to hold their peace or participate and win fame by speaking freely (isēgoria). all citizens can benefit by acquiring wealth for their families rather than for the ruler. furthermore, unlike tyrants who cut down young talent out of fear, democracies celebrate and promote their ablest young men. and, in his final rebuttal, theseus stresses that democracies always defend the just cause, by going to war, if necessary, to uphold panhellenic law. the main points of this argument were most likely familiar to euripides’ late 420s audience and were a preoccupation of philosophic thought. like the herald, an anonymous author of a text known as the double arguments criticizes the athenian practice of allotting positions by lottery because, like any skill, politics requires both knowledge and training.9 in the constitution of the athenians, the old oligarch challenges theseus’ praise of amassing wealth, because it encourages the abuse of allies and bribery in the legal system. similar to socrates’ analysis of the decline of democracies into tyranny (republic 558a–d; 565d), the old oligarch echoes the herald’s objection to equality of speech: it allows the many to follow the demagogue, no matter how immoral, if he promises them advantages. later philosophers, such as aristotle, examine the question of the best regime in a similar analysis that lists both sides of this debate. aristotle recognizes that the rule of one man, if he is virtuous, is beneficial to the city (politics 1284a1–20); however, in the exact 123 sokolon same metaphor as theseus, tyrants are the worst possible rulers, because they cut down outstanding citizens like stalks of wheat and ensure no one is wealthy enough to challenge him (politics 1311a20–30).10 aristotle also praises the rule of law and the judgment of the many, which can be less corruptible then the tyrant; yet, like the herald, aristotle argues that if the democratic assembly is sovereign over the law, the many are manipulated into believing the opinion of the demagogue, rather than the best men (politics 1292a). this position is also found in the republic (567c), where demagogues convince the people to turn against and exile the best among them; or, in the gorgias (521e), where anyone with real knowledge of politics is compared to doctor brought to trial by a candy maker in front of a jury of children. or in the apology (31e), when socrates states that he only lived as long as he did because he avoided democratic politics. euripides’ agōn reflects many of the exact same debating points concerning best regime as the philosophical debates during the classical period. one possible interpretation is that euripides is simply inserting a philosophical debate, which is in no way poetic, into his tragedy. thus, similar to plato’s use of poetic elements in his dialogues, euripides is a sophist or “rationalist” absorbed in philosophic arguments.11 hence, socrates’ critique is not directed at euripides’ agōnes per se, but against the more sensational aspects of his plays. this interpretation, however, relies on dissevering the agōn from his overall plot.12 yet, such a reading is undermined by examining the agōn in the larger dramatic context. first, for example, immediately prior to the arrival of the herald, theseus previously rejected the suppliants; yet, his mother is able to change his mind by pointing out the personal glory of performing labors (like heracles) on behalf of panhellenic law. similarly, at the end of the play, athena appears deus ex machina to prevent theseus from the error of demanding nothing but gratitude from the argives (she demands a one-sided alliance). thus, in the dramatic context of the play, theseus reveals the inadequacy of the personal judgment of his one-man rule. second, when presented as pure debating points such as above, the agōn appears dispassionate, but theseus is anything but consistent or composed. portrayed anachronistically as some sort of king in the role of “democratic first man,”13 on the one hand, theseus praises athenian freedom of speech as recognizing the right of all men regardless of status (430–5); yet, on the other hand, he berates the common herald for being too talkative (567), insolent (575), and not simply repeating “what he has been told” (460). he also prevents the argive king from speaking by telling him to “shut up” (sig’ eche stoma) (514), since it is not his place to speak. the debate ends on the an apology of euripides: defending the poets 124 topic of whether to intervene in the suppliants’ cause, and although theseus says he will not be angry, he dismisses the debate with the herald as “accomplishing nothing” and sets off to war, confident his demos will follow him in “whatever he wishes” (394). in contrast, it is the herald who calmly agrees to disagree on the question of the best regime and continues to speak his mind, despite theseus’ hostility toward open and honest debate (465–66). such dramatic elements reveal a potential challenge to a straightforward interpretation of rational debating points. as representative of the democratic position, theseus reveals instances of poor political judgment, susceptibility to arguments of personal glory, and aggression towards those who oppose his views, and he leads with the confidence that the people will do “whatever he wishes.” he is an embodiment of the herald’s critique that democracies are susceptible to political rulers who lead the people “this way and that” for his own advantage.14 yet, euripides also presents theseus as exercising good judgment to retrieve the bodies, attempting to end that conflict with negotiation first, and engaging in a limited war without sacking the city; he even washed the bodies of the common soldiers for burial (670–5; 720–25; 767). this opposing perspective reinforces both theseus as an ideal king and athenian self-interpretation as an active defender of justice.15 on the other hand, although the herald supports one-man rule, his entire argument presents a challenge to the view a common man could not rationally attend to the city’s business. could the herald’s self-contradiction indicate support for democracy? thus, the dramatic context invites us to explore the question of the best regime beyond the content of debating points and consider the dramatic context of character and plot as crucial to judgment. in other words, one has to consider not only what the characters say, but to whom they say it, how they say it, and, most importantly, whether their actions are consistent with their speech. significantly, euripides appears to employ the tragic genre to examine this important political question in a format which can only be done within a dramatic work. considering the complexity of his plot and characterization, it is difficult to be convinced that euripides wrote from pure inspiration without understanding how his plot could challenge his audience to think beyond the content of rational agōn. this approach to answering such questions can only be somewhat approximated in the dialogue form of philosophic writing. although careful attention to how socrates speaks differently to different interlocutors can reveal new meaning, there is neither plot nor anything to “see.” socrates may still retort that whatever is learned from poetry relies on the capacity of “anyone of jurors” (apology 22b) to be the agent of understanding and explain the 125 sokolon poem’s meaning. in addition, he might dismiss the complexity of euripides’ treatment of this question, which offers no clear answer by remaining unresolved and uncertain, as offering no knowledge beyond the many ambiguous opinions concerning questions like what is the best regime (republic 475b; 478d–480a). case two: does a noble lie still taste as sweet? as mentioned previously, plato’s dialogues do not simply banish poets and depict rational discourse; instead, socrates embraces poetic elements from myths of the afterlife to allegories of ships of state and chained prisoners in the cave. one of the most memorable is the myth of the metals which he presents as a noble lie—gennaion pseudomenous (republic 414a–6e). plato’s myth of the metals is a story of autochthonous origin. for the greeks, autochthony could emphasize, as it did for thucydides, the uninterrupted continuity of a people who “ruled always” (aei) without invasion over their land (1.2); or literally referred to a people born from the earth itself (auto-chthōn).16 euripides’ ion recounts a story of autochthonous origin that similarly involves falsehoods and ends with a divine lie called a “sweet belief”—dokēsis hēdeōs (ion 1602). taken together, these two founding myths allow for a comparison of poetic versus philosophic insight into the useful lies and beliefs at the heart of political community. the comparison also challenges the interpretation that poetry requires guidance of philosophy or that a philosophically reformed poetry provides a superior form of education.  plato’s myth of the metals: the useful lie plato’s introduces his autochthonous tale in the context of training guardians. the myth is noble or well-born, because it is necessary, even if it requires a great deal of persuasion (republic 414c15e). the first part of the lie, similar to the theban sown-men, reveals that all citizens were fashioned along with their arms and implements deep within, and born from, the earth-mother. this part creates unity and solidarity in the city; since all citizens (politikōn) are born of same mother-earth, they are brothers who will defend each other and their mother-land. second, the citizens will be further told that a god mixed gold in the souls of those competent to rule; silver in the souls of the guardians; and iron and bronze in souls the craftsman and farmers. furthermore, since children will not always be born with the same metal soul as their parents, the rulers are required to move children to the group performing the function of their metallic souls. finally, an an apology of euripides: defending the poets 126 oracle will be set up prophesizing the destruction of the city if ever a bronze or iron man becomes its guardian. thus, the second part of the lie further supports the established unity and solidary by ensuring that brother-citizens will perform their natural function. glaucon admits no “device” (mēchanēn) exists that would allow the first generation to believe such a ridiculous and outrageous lie but, with repetition by word of mouth (phēmē), future generations believe such traditional foundation stories (republic 415c–d). importantly, the myth is a “device” used to buttress socrates’ earlier opinions regarding the origin of cities and justice. in book ii, socrates suggests that “political communities come into being, in my opinion (ōs egōmai) because each of us happen not to be self-sufficient, but need much” (republic 369c). later in book v, socrates suggests that what divides cities is when “not all give the name “my own” to the same thing, but different men give it to different things […] which introduces private pleasures and griefs” (republic 464c). since the origin of political community rests in our common need for each other, the noble lie is useful as it ensures each citizen views all others in the community as “my own.” similarly, the second part of the myth of metals provides an allegorical explanation for socrates’ earlier statement that “nature is not the same in each, but it varies as one man naturally can perform his function, another performs another function” (republic 370a). hence, our metallic souls reflect that natural function that each of us perform because “we are in need of much.” most importantly, if all citizens performed the one natural function of our metallic soul, the community would be organized according to socrates’ definition of justice: “this or something like this, as it seems to me (ōs emoi dokei), is justice […] to do the thing belonging to one and to not be a busybody” (443a–b). finally, the noble lie reinforces this understanding of justice as the city will be destroyed if bronze or iron men become busybodies by attempting to become guardians or rulers. although there are many good reasons to argue that the city in speech is not intended as an ideal city but as an examination of the limitations of justice, this ironic reading does not undermine the symmetry between socrates’ development of the city in speech and the noble lie. the mythological story of the noble lie is an allegorical repetition of the argument of the city in speech. it is possible that plato crafts this myth as an example of philosophy ruling or directing a new kind of useful mythology. the gods in this story, for example, do not rape human women but helpfully mix metals into the souls of citizens which make them useful to each other. conversely, plato’s noble lie could be seen as assimilating or absorbing mythology as a necessary aspect of his philosophical 127 sokolon examination. hence, the irony of plato’s censorship is that poetry is a useful “device” of philosophic thought. with either interpretation, the symmetry between socrates’ rational argument and the myth of metals is not coincidental and the ultimate utility of the myth is that it provides philosophy with a superior education. the autochthonous athenian: euripides’ new and improved ion as much as plato’s noble lie is one of his most famous passages, euripides’ ion is a lesser-known play about a virtually unknown character. ion was the progenitor of the “ethnic” greek sub-group of ionians, who were distinguished, at least according to thucydides (peloponnesian war 1.2, 1.63), by common dialect, clothing style, and shared religious festivals. the athenians and most, but not all, of the poleis of their empire were ionians, as opposed to their dorian enemies—the spartans and corinthians.17 we know very little about ion beyond this play. in a fragment from hesiod, ion is the true son of creusa and xuthus; herodotus suggests ion was a general who led his people into attica and beyond. euripides’ play is a complicated reimagining of athenian mythological origins which reinvents ion as a semi-divine founding father, while simultaneously undermining the function and utility of such mythologizing. the ion retells the story of athenian autochthony.18 in this version, the autochthonous lineage was traced to erechtheus, a child born of the earth when it became fertilized in hephaestus’ failed attempt to rape athena; creusa is his only surviving descendant. the play opens with hermes telling the backstory: apollo’s rape of creusa; her exposure of the child and his rescue to delphi; her marriage to the foreigner xuthus after he saved athens from invasion; and their subsequent childlessness. hermes also reveals an essential element of the plot: xuthus will be given a false prophecy that he is ion’s father (1–81). the play proceeds in a typically convoluted euripidean fashion. at first, creusa and ion fail to recognize each other. xuthus is told apollo’s lie; he, in turn, decides to deceive creusa by concealing that ion is “his” son. enraged at what she thinks is xuthus’ plan to overthrow the athenian autochthonous line, creusa and her tutor try, but fail, to kill ion. he is prevented from killing creusa in retaliation by the delphic priestess and the mother and son finally come to recognize each other. in the finale (1553–1625), athena arrives deus ex machina to confirm ion’s parentage and his future lineage: his sons will be the eponymous founding fathers of the ancient ionian tribes; creusa and xuthus will also have two sons together. finally, athena commands that xuthus continue with the god’s “sweet belief” that ion is his son. an apology of euripides: defending the poets 128 contrary to aristotle’s suggestion that tragedy should reverse good to bad fortune (poetics 1452b), according to the chorus all ends well since “the noble hold what they deserve and the bad, as is their nature, will never do well” (1620). although potentially overlooked by modern readers, the significance of athena’s prophecy would not be lost on euripides’ fifth-century audience.19 the four sons of ion—geleon, hopletes, argades, and aigikores—are the founders of the traditional four tribes (phulē) of ionian athens (cleisthenes’ democratic reforms replaced these four with ten new electoral tribes that cut across traditional class and regional divisions). importantly, they are also the founders of the ionian tribal diaspora that stretched into asia minor. euripides’ revisions firmly place an autochthonous athenian king as the patriarchal forefather of most of their subject states. second, the new improved ion becomes the semi-divine, older half-brother of dorus, the founding father of their dorian spartan enemies. again, in more typical mythology, dorus and xuthus are both sons of hellen (not the helen of the trojan war, but zeus’ son) and ion is the true son of xuthus. thus, he is dorus’ nephew and a generation further removed from divinity. in this case, the spartan founder is fully human and three generations removed from divinity. in contrast, euripides’ retelling gives the athenian founder a mythological upgrade and improves their justification for hegemony over not only its allies, but their greek rivals. from this perspective, euripides recreates a patriotic tale that not only reinforces the unity of the autochthonous athenians but also constructs a rationale for the superiority of this athenian identity.20 if, however, the audience gives the plot a sober second glance, euripides provides clues that contest this easy celebration of athenian patriotism. first, despite portraying the gods as violent rapists and deliberately deceptive, euripides’ play is as unapologetically critical of unjust gods as socrates (republic 391d; 401a–d). echoing plato’s critique, for example, ion frankly and directly reproaches apollo for prescribing laws for mortals, when he “pursues unjust pleasures without penalty and teaches men to be wicked rather than good” (430–50). more subtly, by granting creusa a strong voice to express her pain and shame, euripides provides a rare example of portraying the victim of a god’s attention as a sympathetic agent rather than mere vessel of divine lust.21 in addition, beyond the violence of creusa’s rape, the gods deliberately tell falsehoods: apollo lies to xuthus and athena orders this “sweet belief” to continue. the reason for this deception is not obvious. human men often knowingly raised the gods’ progeny and xuthus will have his own true sons. it is possible that euripides is using the plot to criticize the delphic oracle which openly 129 sokolon sided with sparta during the war.22 however, the knowledge that the prophetic god deliberately lies raises an important subsequent question: about what else has he lied? are we subject to a “sweet belief” that ion is his son and, as the boy suggested, was this tale merely a cover-up of a more realistic illicit human affair? is athenian autochthony of earth-born ancestors false—as the husband of the autochthonous heir bluntly puts it: “the ground does not bear children” (540)? would the people, those jurymen of socrates, see the lies embedded in origin stories, no matter how often repeated by word of mouth (phēmē) or how sweet? second, euripides’ story also undermines a straightforward reading of athenian patriotic superiority. plato’s version of autochthony was noble because it was useful and necessary: it expands the identification of “my own” beyond the natal family and solidifies broader communal unity. euripides’ version of autochthony can be read as taking this idea a step further. on the one hand, ion is re-born as semi-divine founder of the autochthonous lineage of all ionians, which could be seen as a useful lie that justifies athenian supremacy; on the other hand, the deus ex machina finale simultaneously changes the genealogy of dorus and achaeus from his uncles to his half-brothers. this sleight of hand establishes the main founders of the greek tribes as all sons of creusa, who are equally autochthonous brothers of the same earth. to state the obvious, euripides’ re-identifies “my own” not with plato’s narrow xenophobic view of the polis community, but with a broader greek identity. although the exact dating of this play is unknown, it most likely was performed sometime between the failure of the peace of nicias and oligarchic coup.23 as such, rather than justifying athenian domination, the play can be read as a critique of their increasingly brutal suppression their ionian brothers who made up most of the city-states of the empire. it could also be a critique of the breakdown of greek norms of war committed by both sides. thus, depending on the date of production, the emphasis on the brotherhood of greeks could be a thinly veiled dismissal of athenian annihilation in 415 b.c.e. of the neutral melos (a dorian colony of sparta) or their subsequent ill-treatment by syracuse following their ill-fated expedition: if we are to believe plutarch’s life of nicias,24 the only survivors claimed they were saved by singing euripides’ choruses. since the peloponnesian war degenerated into similar greek-ongreek atrocities, by emphasizing the common blood between the spartans, athenians, and their allies, euripides could be promoting an anti-war message as a signal for peace among the warring brothers. an apology of euripides: defending the poets 130 thus, although plato’s autochthonous myth was many written years after the ion, euripides’ portrayal challenges socrates’ lie on its stated purpose: its utility. plato’s myth is useful because it creates a political community in which we do not meddle in the work of the others, especially those ill-suited to ruling. euripides’ play, which points beyond the polis to a larger greek identity, unveils the dark underbelly of such foundation myths. not only do these myths hide the violence and falsehoods of the founding but they also conceal the dangers and contradictions at the heart of such inventive mythologizing.25 plato’s myth, for example, creates an artificial unity by reclassifying “my own” to all citizens which ensures its well-trained standing army is fierce with enemies; in contrast, euripides’ play reveals the real consequences of such narrow, xenophobic political identity to the larger greek community, which was at war for most of his adult life. we, of course, would want to take euripides’ critique much further to question how nation-state political identity is at odds with the reality of modern immigration patterns and a peaceful global community. neither plato nor euripides hint at such a global world view and socrates is openly critical of collapsing distinctions between citizen and foreigner (republic 462e). importantly, euripides’ version of the autochthonous origin myth is multifaceted and multidimensional. it can be understood as story of political origin reflecting a rather platonic “sweet belief,” wherein the gathered athenians and their allies at the great dionysia festival watched a new version of ion’s story that established as the semi-divine progenitor of their empire. yet, euripides’ autochthonous lie also challenges such a one-dimensional interpretation by revealing the dangers of a myopic view of political identity. importantly, this sober second questioning of a straightforward reading is found not only in the textual dialogue but in the dramatic context. euripides’ audience, again, not only hears ion’s critique of unjust gods but also the effect of their actions on victims such as creusa. in addition, the audience is left to deal with the uncertainty of how to understand the deus ex machina of athena (not apollo who continues to conceal himself) revealing ion’s identity, the revamping greek tribal genealogy, and the ensuring the continuation of the “sweet belief.” taken as a defense of poetic storytelling, euripides’ tragedy provides a rich and complex story that challenges the necessity for a platonic reformed poetry. conclusion in the two these examples of euripides’ tragedy, the poet has provided what appears to be a serious investigation of political questions such as the best regime and the tensions at the heart of political 131 sokolon origin stories. in both cases, possible interpretations arise from not only from what aristotle would call the “reasoning” (dianoia) or speech that the agents employ (poetics 50a) in the tragedy, but from specific aspects of the tragic genre, such as plot, characterization, and style. it may be possible that such complexity is simply reading into euripides’ play a meaning unknown or unintended by the poet. this was, of course, socrates’ main critique of the poets: that an average juror could understand the play better than the poet himself. in contrast, poets merely gratify their audiences without knowledge or concern for what is beneficial. considering socrates’ statement more carefully, however, his critique may speak more to the explicit audience of tragedy, rather than a serious dismissal of the poets’ capacity to understand or articulate the meaning of their poems. importantly, euripides’ primary audience was the same as socrates’ jury: the adult, male citizen community of athens. the point of the tragic poetry was not for the poet to explain the meaning of his poem, use it to articulate a particular perspective, or espouse his own opinion regarding important political questions; instead, the poet used the public space of the theater to raise such important questions and present diverse views for consideration by his fellow democratic citizens. the point of tragedy, hence, is not to present a rational argument with a definitive answer, but to make the audience the agent of meaning. in other words, the poet provokes the jurors to think. thus, the comic playwright aristophanes was able to portray his own character euripides in the frogs as stating his plays were intended to teach the spectators “to think, to see, to understand, to be challenged, to plan, to see the bad, to think through everything” (955–60). even if tragedy inspires its audience to think, the kind of thinking may not be sufficient to overcome socrates’ critique of the poets. after all, socrates never suggests the poets are incapable of inspiring their audience to think, only that their education is at best insufficient and at worst corruptive. thus, the lovers of spectacles, at most, learn opinions about the world of coming into being and passing away (republic 475d–79c). in other words, the quarrel between poetry and philosophy remains if poetry cannot guide the spectators beyond opinions of the particulars to a consideration of an objective standard of the beautiful, the noble, or the good. euripides’ final retort might be that it is no coincidence tragedies were performed at the “seeing place” during the festival of the god dionysus, a god of contradiction and paradox. as shown above, his plays asked the same important questions as philosophy, but presented it in the form of contradictions and paradox not to foreclose the answer to such questions, but in order to draw the audience into “critical thinking” in order “to grasp and recognize” (frogs 975).26 in this way, euripides’ an apology of euripides: defending the poets 132 education reflects a contemporary approach to interpreting plato’s dialogues as neither presenting a doctrine nor system of thought, but as teaching the activity of thinking seriously about the enduring questions of human existence, such as what is the best regime or what is the origin of political community.27 plato was careful, after all, to qualify socrates’ pronouncements of the origin of community or justice with phrases like “in my opinion” (republic 369c) or “it seems to me” (republic 443a). as such, even though tragedy is embedded in the world of particulars, since euripides’ plays foster a similar activity of thinking he turns out to be a kind of poetic-philosopher in the same way as plato is often viewed as a philosophic-poet.28 despite this potential similarity, however, an important distinction remains between tragic poetry and philosophy. to return to euripides’ intended audience, the spectators of the great dionysia festival were primarily the multitude of athenian citizens. as salkever points out, socrates is critical of mass education because it is unable to educate different souls differently and the multitude “can never be brought to accept the existence of an objective standard of the beautiful or noble that is different from their own desires.”29 in addition, the tragic poet’s attempt to educate the masses fails because the multitude is always more persuaded by what is already pleasing to them than by what is true or good. in other words, even if euripides was a poetic-philosopher, his audience was too large and too diverse to foster a serious questioning of the community’s cultural norms; poetry could never lead the many from opinions to objective standards. euripides’ plays, however, reveal his poetic education was neither straightforwardly pleasing nor an uncontestable celebration of athenian cultural prejudices. theseus, for example, could be viewed as an ideal ruler upholding the athenian self-congratulatory perception of defending the weak and upholding justice; yet, because theseus’ behavior is often at odds with his stated support of democracy, his character allows for serious thinking about how democratic leaders manipulate their supporters. the story of the ion similarly could support athenian hegemony or be seen as undermining it. it is not illogical to assume that different audience members left the festival with different interpretations of the meaning of the play. some citizens, of course, may see only what reflects and confirms their opinions and norms, but others may question and think through the limitations of athenian political norms or particular ideas. in the end, the weakness of a poetic education proves to be its strength: tragic education was not found in philosophic schools like the academy or limited to the leisured literate. it exists in regimes not ruled by philosophers and can reach the multitude of citizens, especially those that had little time to study or consider such 133 sokolon questions. in the end, since democracies must require their citizens to think about and make judgments concerning which policy is good or bad or what is just or unjust, poetic education may prove to be the most indispensable form of education in any democratic regime. notes 1. all in text citations are the author’s translation of the greek text in the loeb editions. 2. the literature on this debate is voluminous. for examples of recent volumes see elias; levin; naddaff; destrée and herrmann; petraki. for some examples of plato’s critique as ultimately a serious critique of poetry’s capacity to educate, see partee; hatab. 3. for some examples see strauss; bartky; levin. 4. for some examples see elias; naddaff; petraki; burns. 5. for discussion see lloyd; conacher. 6. for further discussion on oligarchy and reasons for inattention see carter; storey. 7. morwood. 8. for discussion of the athenian foreign policy debate between the “quietist” and “activists”—those who were “busybodies” see carter). 9. for a discussion of the sources see de romilly 215–6. 10. this image of the tyrant cutting down the talented like wheat comes from herodotus (histories 5.92) story of thrasybulus the tyrant. see smith. 11. for a discussion of this perspective see ford. 12. for discussion see storey; lloyd. 13. morwood; carter. 14. carter. 15. mills. 16. loraux; zacharia. 17. for a discussion of ionianism and alternative versions of ion’s story see, hall; saxonhouse, “myths and the origins of cities.” 18. for more discussion of the complicated and contradictory origin stories of athens see zacharia; hall; rosivach. an apology of euripides: defending the poets 134 19. for more discussion of the more typical stories of the lineage of the ancient tribes and euripides’ potential innovations see loraux; zacharia. 20. zacharia. 21. swift. 22. zacharia. 23. swift. 24. plutarch 29. 25. rosivach; saxonhouse, “myths and the origins of cities”; loraux; kasimis. 26. zacharia would suggest that “euripidean pluralism is his statement of a truth about the world” (176). 27. for example, craig; saxonhouse, “the socratic narrative.” 28. or at least a sophistic-poet. see allan. 29. salkever 284. works cited allan, william. “euripides and the sophists: society and the theatre of war.” illinois classical studies 24–25 (1999–2000): 145–56. aristophanes. the frogs, trans. jefffrey henderson. cambridge, ma: loeb classical library and harvard university press, 2002. aristotle. the nicomachean ethics, trans. harris rackham. cambridge, ma: loeb classical library and harvard university press, 1926. ___. the poetics, trans. w. hamilton fyfe. cambridge, ma: loeb classical library and harvard university press, 1932. ___. the politics, trans. harris rackham. cambridge, ma: loeb classical library and harvard university press, 1944. bartky, elliot. “plato and the politics of aristotle’s poetics.” the review of politics 54.4 (1992): 589–619. burns, timothy w. “philosophy and poetry: a new look at an old quarrel.” american political science review 109.2 (2015): 326–338. carter, david m. the politics of greek tragedy. exeter: bristol phoenix press, 2007. 135 sokolon carter, l. b. the quiet athenian. oxford: oxford university press, 1986. conacher, d. j. “rhetoric and relevance in euripidean drama.” in oxford readings in classical studies: euripides, ed. judith mossman. oxford: oxford university press, 2003. 81–101. craig, leon harold. the war lover: a study of plato’s republic. toronto: university of toronto press, 1996. destrée, pierre, and fritz-gregor herrmann, eds. plato and the poets. leiden: brill, 2011. euripides. ion. in euripides, volume 4: trojan women, iphigeneia among the taurians, ion, ed. and trans. david kovacs. cambridge, ma: loeb classical library and harvard university press, 1999. 322–511. ___. the suppliant women. in euripides, volume 3: suppliant women, electra, heracles, ed. and trans. david kovacs. cambridge, ma: loeb classical library and harvard university press, 1998. 12–140. ford, james e. rationalist criticism of greek tragedy: the nature, history, and influence of a critical revolution. lanham, md: lexington books, 2005. hall, jonathan. ethnic identity in greek antiquity. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1997. hatab, lawrence j. “writing knowledge in the soul: orality, literacy, and plato’s critique of poetry.” epoche 11.2 (2007): 319–32. herodotus. the histories, trans. robert strassler. toronto: anchor publishing, 2009. kasimis, demetra. “the tragedy of blood-based membership: secrecy and the politics of immigration.” political theory 41 (2013): 231–56. lloyd, michael. the agon in euripides. oxford: clarendon press, 1992. loraux, nicole. born of the earth: myth and politics in athens, trans. selina stewart. itaca: cornell university press, 2000. mills, sophie. theseus, tragedy and the athenian empire. oxford: clarendon press, 1997. morwood, james. “euripides and the demagogues.” the classical quarterly 59.2 (2009): 353–63. naddaff, ramona a. exiling the poets: the production of censorship in plato’s republic. chicago: university of chicago press, 2002. partee, morriss henry. “plato’s banishment of poetry.” the journal of aesthetics and art criticism 29.2 (1970): 209–22. petraki, zacharoula. the poetics of philosophical language: plato, poets and presocratics in the republic. berlin: de gruyter, 2011. an apology of euripides: defending the poets 136 plato. the apology, trans. harold north fowler. cambridge, ma: loeb classical library and harvard university press, 2005. ___. the gorgias, trans. w. r. m. lamb. cambridge, ma: loeb classical library and harvard university press, 1925. ___. ion, trans. harold north fowler. cambridge, ma: loeb classical library and harvard university press, 1925. ___. the phaedrus, trans. harold north fowler. cambridge, ma: loeb classical library and harvard university press, 2005. ___. republic, volume 1, trans. paul shorey. cambridge, ma: loeb classical library and harvard university press, 1930. . republic, volume 2, trans. paul shorey. cambridge, ma: loeb classical library and harvard university press, 1935. plutarch. nicias. in lives, volume 3, trans. bernadotte perrin. cambridge, ma: loeb classical library and harvard university press, 1916. romilly, jacqueline de. the great sophists in periclean athens, trans. janet lloyd. oxford: clarendon press, 1992. rosivach, v. j. “autochthony and the athenians.” the classical quarterly 37 (1987): 294– 305. salkever, steven g. “tragedy and the education of the demos: aristotle’s response to plato.” in greek tragedy and political theory, ed. j. peter euben. berkeley: university of california press, 1986. 274–303. saxonhouse, arlene w. “myths and the origins of cities: reflections on the autochthony theme in euripides’ ion." in greek tragedy and political theory, ed. peter j. euben. berkeley: university of california press, 1986. 252–73. ___. “the socratic narrative: a democratic reading of plato’s dialogues.” political theory 37.6 (2009): 728–53. smith, wesley d. “expressive form in euripides’ suppliants.” harvard studies in classical philology 71 (1967): 151–170. storey, ian c. euripides: suppliant women. london: duckworth, 2008. strauss, leo. the rebirth of classical political philosophy. chicago: university of chicago press, 1989. swift, laura. euripides: ion. london: duckworth, 2008. thucydides. the history of the peloponnesian war, trans. c. f. smith. cambridge, ma: loeb classical library and harvard university press, 1919. 137 sokolon xenophon. hellenica, trans. carleton l. brownson. cambridge, ma: loeb classical library and harvard university press, 1918. zacharia, katerina. converging truths: euripides’ ion and the athenian quest for selfdefinition. boston: brill, 2003. microsoft word 2 article trepanier final.docx [expositions 8.1 (2014) 100–121] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 aristotelian pluralism and diversity: the conditions for civic education and the common good lee trepanier saginaw valley state university with the decline in social capital and the rise of the immigrant populace in the united states, there is renewed interest in civic education as a way to provide a meaningful understanding of citizenship and thereby greater civic integration into american political life.1 although public education is often seen as a repository and conveyance of civic education, it is also transmitted through institutions in civil society, such as the family, religious organizations, and the mass media.2 however, scholars focus on public schools because studies have demonstrated that they are the most effective institutions in delivering civic education.3 furthermore, most states have an explicit mission to prepare students for citizenship by requiring some sort of civic education in their schools. it is only in schools where a deliberate type of instruction about civics takes place, resulting in a substantial increase in students’ understanding of their roles and responsibilities as citizens.4 given the importance of public schools in civic education, it would appear that spartan and socratic models of education would be preferred. in both regimes, the political community removes the institutions of civil society, like the family, from the civic education of children so there are no obstacles to the state teaching them. substituting itself for their families, the political community provides a civic education that is common to all children, as opposed to the athenian version where education is practiced privately, yielding disparate lessons about citizenship. by contrast, the spartan and socratic regimes offer an education where all children know their civic roles and responsibilities because there is no discordant voice. at first it would appear that the spartan and socratic regimes would serve as a model for the united states to revitalize civic education for its citizens. but these regimes actually undermine the very conditions that would make a meaningful civic education possible. as aristotle points out, by not respecting the plurality of institutions and the diversity of goods that exist in the political community, both the spartan and socratic regimes are not able to cultivate virtues like piety, civic friendship, and generosity, which are required for the common good to exist and be sustained. although the aims of the household, as an institution of civil society, are ultimately subordinate to the aims of the political community, it must be allowed to flourish so as not to eliminate the conditions that make a genuine civic education possible. instead of being its greatest advantage, the elimination of civil society is the greatest weakness in spartan and socratic civic education. the result is not virtuous citizens but a bestial and divisive people. this examination of the household, and more broadly of civil society, as the required conditions for civic education is neglected by aristotelian scholars; rather they focus on the 101 trepanier relationship between the common good of civic education and the happiness of individual flourishing (eudaimonia).5 what i contend is that the plurality of institutions and the diversity of goods that exist within the political community are the conditions that enable citizens to recognize the common good, and thereby become more fully integrated into the regime. civic education is having citizens learn to balance among their personal interest, the regime’s peculiar ends, and virtue itself within their own souls and in their judgments about the common good. contrary to its spartan and socratic counterparts, the aristotelian political community requires plurality and diversity for these excellences to exist. this is one of a series of paradoxes for aristotle in his account of the conditions needed for civic education: philosophical truth and public piety requires the family; civic friendship and generosity depends upon private property; the political justice of the community presupposes the natural justice of the household; and devotion to the common good arises from private friendship. it is the preservation of the plurality of institutions and diversity of goods that enable citizens to become part of the commonality of the regime. it is these paradoxes that make possible a civic education dedicated to the common good. spartan education according to aristotle, one of the great fallacies of understanding politics is that “there is no difference between a large household and a polis” (politics 1252a12–13).6 this fallacy explains aristotle’s criticism of “those who think the same person a fit statesman, and a king, and a household head, and a slave-master” (politics, 1252a7–9; 1260b22–1261a22). although the political community is the most architectonic of human associations, political authority is not to supplant domestic authority—whether the father, husband, or master—in the ruling of its proper subjects—the child, the wife, or the slave. for aristotle this differentiation in authority is required because of the differences in the character of the appropriate subjects: political authority governs over citizens, domestic authority administers over the household, and the despot rules over its subjects (politics 1259a37–1259b17; 1260a12–14). those who blend these types of authority rather than differentiate them create a political community that is contrary to human flourishing, especially in civic education. for the promotion of civic education, aristotle maintains that good laws are critical because of their compulsory nature: they ensure obedience (ne 1180a18–21). the lawgiver therefore should “attend to such matters as our nurture and pursuits […] and were to do correctly” (ne 1180a25–30). however, the problem is that political authority is incapable of making the particular distinctions required for good education. because of the political community’s incapacity to address the particular needs and demands of every child in its upbringing, domestic authority is desired, since “greater accuracy will result when care is private and directed to the particular case, for then each is more likely to receive what is suitable” (ne 1180b11–13). thus, the best education is one which is attentive to individual needs while, at the same time, being aristotelian pluralism and diversity 102 directed by someone “who possesses legislative art” (ne 1180b13–25). the political community continues to have a role in education for aristotle, but it must work with domestic authority. while the political community should not supplant the household’s role in its education, it is also equally important that domestic authority be awaken from its complacency in education. for aristotle, domestic authority is specifically best equipped to “help their own children and friends in the pursuit of virtue” (ne 1180a31–34). domestic authority has a more commanding strength than civic laws in children’s obedience, owning to the natural affection that exists in the household. political authority does not have access to the interior principles of motivations that domestic authority does: it must rely upon coercion to compel its citizens.7 by contrast, domestic authority can inculcate habits that are internally motivated and therefore become part of a child’s character. aristotle’s reliance upon domestic authority in the rearing of children highlights the problems of sparta’s civic education.8 although it is a renowned example of a regime taking interest in education, where education “must be common instead of along private lines,” sparta’s civic education ultimately makes its citizens “bestial and coarse” rather than courageous and martial (politics 1337a22–26, 31–32, 1138b11–14, 32–36; ne 1180a24–26). in fact, sparta’s political leaders do not even seek to discover whether their training actually cultivates courage in its citizens (politics 1338b16–17). the result is that spartan citizens may be acting courageously— as nobody knows or is willing to discover—out of state coercion rather than being internally motivated, i.e., becoming ethically virtuous. instead of fostering virtue, sparta’s civic education serves as an example of how not to educate citizens. although sparta’s civic education is in “common,” its defects outweigh its gains due to its removal of domestic authority in education. instead of replacing it, the political community must preserve and help the household in education. specifically, political authority must help elevate domestic authority out of its own primordial tribalism like the cyclopes, each of whom “lives as he pleases, laying down the law to his children and wives” (ne 1180a24–29; politics 1252b22– 23).9 the cyclopean education is antithetical to sparta’s: each parent determines for itself how best to educate its children, thereby making political community impossible. between these two extremes is aristotle’s golden mean: the complementary contributions of both political and domestic authorities to education.10 the preservation of its plural institutions enables the political community to avoid both primordial tribalism and civic indoctrination of its citizens. socratic education this reliance upon the golden mean for education also explains aristotle’s criticism of plato’s republic where socrates prescribes a political unity that reduces the polis to the household and, thus, destroys the political community as such (politics 1261a21–22).11 socrates proposes that all citizens regard one another as siblings by sharing family life and property communally, which, in turn, would reconcile conflicts of interest that destroy political communities (republic 464a4– c4). however, for aristotle, the political community evolves out of many households, with a 103 trepanier household outside the political community existing only imperfectly. only when the household is part of the political community is it complete or perfect (telestheises), achieving its proper end (politics 1252b9–39, 1253a18). if one does what socrates proposes—makes a household out of the political community—then the political community would not be a political community per se, for “it is evident that virtue must be the care of the polis that is truly, and not merely for the sake of the word calling it so” (politics 1280b6–8, 1253a23–25). aristotle’s objection to socrates’ proposal is that it disrupts both the political community and the household from achieving their proper ends. by abolishing the family, socrates creates a communal, civic education to promote political unity. the problem with this type of education for aristotle is that it is limited in its effectiveness. socrates’ guardians will become spirited (thumos) but eventually will fight among themselves: “the manner in which socrates selects the rulers is hazardous, for the same persons always rule. but this is a cause of faction even in the case of those lacking notable qualities, and it certainly will be the case among spirited and warlike men” (politics 1264b6–10). furthermore, and more importantly, the guardians will not become philosophical, which was why they required education in the first place (republic 375e9–376c5, 525b8–9). thus, the community’s existence is precarious, as it depends upon the guardians who are spirited and warlike but unphilosophical. this failure to develop the guardian’s philosophical capacity is due to socrates’ reliance on the household as the model for civic education and political organization. because the guardians are all siblings to one another, they cannot claim what is most important to them other than the polis, thereby preventing them from acting out of public piety. for piety, according to aristotle, requires one to transcend what is most important to a person for the sake of philosophical truth: “it would seem to be a better thing, and also part of our duty, to forsake even what is close and dear to us (ta oikeia) in order to preserve truth, especially insofar as we are lovers of wisdom (philosophous ontas); for although both of them are dear, it is pious to honor the truth first” (ne 1096a14–17).12 philosophical truth cannot exist in socrates’ regime because the guardians are unable to challenge what is closest and dearest to them, as everyone and everything belongs to one another. for aristotle, citizens who have the greatest capacity for philosophy are made to care for their own political community at the expense of their households, just as they are to care for philosophical truth at the expense of their own opinions. thus, socrates’ regime is similar to sparta’s in that philosophical education is impossible because there is no distinction between the political community and the household. citizens from both regimes are defective in virtue: they lack character, as they are not internally motivated except through state coercion, and they are unphilosophical, as they are unable to distinguish from what is important to them and what is important for truth. but what may be even more disturbing is that these arrangements make citizens incapable of critical virtues required by the political community: civic friendship, generosity, public piety, and political justice. aristotelian pluralism and diversity 104 civic friendship, generosity, and public piety at first glance, socrates’ communal arrangement seems to promise “wondrous friendship” among everyone (politics 1263b15–18). but, as aristotle argues, this arrangement actually undermines civic friendship (homonoia), a type of concord among citizens (ne 1167b2–3, 1155a22–28). according to aristotle, homonoia arises for fellow citizens when “concerning what is of common interest they share a like judgment, chose the same things, and act on common resolutions” (ne 1167a26–28). but saying the same thing is not indicative of homonoia, for citizens may speak not out of personal conviction but out of external pressure (ne 1261b16–32). in socrates’ regime, this problem becomes particularly manifest. it is impossible to know what belongs specifically to each citizen because everyone is part of the same family: “each of the citizens comes to have a thousand sons, though not his personally (hos hekastou)” (politics 1261b38–39). the clarity of personal interest is obscured because nobody knows who specifically belongs to whom. citizens are not able to partake in homonoia because they do not know their personal interest and therefore cannot overcome it for the common good of the political community. it may appear contradictory that attachments to specific personal interests are required for the common good; however, these attachments of personal interests oblige citizens to weigh their self-interests against the community’s, allowing them the opportunity to transcend their parochial concerns for shared ones. by contrast, the claim of all saying “mine” rings hollow in socrates’ regime, for merely saying the same thing is not sufficient for homonoia. if all the citizens proclaim that they will rule, the result is civil war rather than civic friendship. homonoia exists when the whole political community deliberates about a particular person to be political ruler, if he or she is willing (ne 1167a30–34). because citizens are not saying the same thing—the ruled call for a specific ruler, and, in turn, the ruler says he or she will rule—civic friendship exists. by saying different but concordant things, citizens are able to partake—and be educated—in civic friendship. this preservation of disparate interests not only clarifies personal interest but paradoxically provides deliberation about the common good.13 this is also why aristotle divides the property of each citizen who resides in the best political community: one part safely in the city and the other part perilously near the frontier (politics 1330a14–20). the citizen has a personal interest in both places and consequently for the political community as a whole. public policy therefore can be based on common personal interest rather than factional ones. by dividing citizen’s property, aristotle evaluates the concerns of the household not by transforming them into ones of the political community but instead by offering citizens the opportunity to transcend their particular perspectives for the common good. this preservation of private property also provides the opportunity for citizens to practice the virtue of generosity. contrary to socrates’ abolishment of private property for the guardians, aristotle’s defense of it enables citizens to partake in civic friendship by being generous. the citizen accomplishes this task by having his private property used in common, although aristotle 105 trepanier rejects proposals to have property used in common by either possession or usage, as these ideas tend to result in neglect, abuse, and overconsumption (politics 1262b37–1263a3). kept legally private, property is made common by virtue (politics 1263a26–27, 1263a37–39). since human beings are naturally political animals and thus belong to the political community, they must be willing to overcome their self-love for the common good (politics 1253a3–4, 1263a41–b5).14 although it is natural to love (philia) oneself, it is unnatural to love one’s possession as oneself. this person is incapable of partaking in the civic friendship of the community (ne 1155a22–28).15 by contrast, the person who is able to practice generosity with his private property is able to participate in civic friendship and thereby become a flourishing citizen.16 this also applies to familial love (philia). another problem with socrates’ regime is that he fundamentally mishandles erotic love (eros). because nobody knows his/her natural family, socrates’ regime permits incest and other unnatural sexual acts to transpire (politics 1262a25– 27). these acts have the greatest impropriety for aristotle. by eradicating the household family, socrates allows eros to pervade the entire political community to the extent that familial love cannot arise and develop without contamination of incestuous eros. it can be inferred then that eros has no place in familial love for aristotle except between husbands and wives. unlike socrates’ regime, aristotle believes that familial love of children and siblings needs to be nurtured and developed in an environment that is protective rather than sexualized. this environment is only possible if both the political community and the household are preserved. the result is that children remain with their natural parents so that both the political community and the household can work together in the care of them (ne 1180a29–b13). while parents are able to provide philia to their children without eros, the political ruler can provide laws and conventions (nomos) that support and supplement parental rule over children. in turn, parental support of these laws adds to children’s piety of political authority (ne 1180a18–24, 1180b3–7). since parents have access to the interior principles of motivation of children that political authority lack, they are able to provide a more robust education for children to respect the political community than what the regime’s law can do.17 good parents are better at inculcating virtuous habits in their children not only because of children’s affection for them but also because parents know the particular context and situations of their children and respond accordingly, whereas the political community cannot. thus, both the political community and the household mutually reinforce each other in the civic education of children in civic friendship and public piety. natural and political justice the differentiation between the political community and the household also makes possible a civic education in political justice.18 however, the political justice of the community presupposes the natural justice of the household. aristotle makes the distinction between political justice, which requires the conditions of freedom, equality, sociability (koinoia), self-sufficiency, and aristotelian pluralism and diversity 106 law with other forms of natural justice: household (between husband and wife), paternal (between father and son), and despotic (between master and slave) (ne 1134a26–30; politics 1134b8–18). although political justice requires an understanding of freedom and equality, these concepts are not learned first in the political community but in the household where natural justice is performed (ne 1162a16–18).19 for instance, even though they are not citizens, children and wives are free people in the household; and husbands and wives practice a form of proportionate equality among themselves (politics 1259a39–b1, 1260b18–20; ne 1160b25– 61a25; ee 1241b33–41). these types of relationships in the household allow inhabitants to learn about freedom and equality as a part of natural justice and, in turn, prepare them to practice political justice. in fact, aristotle claims that natural justice would exist even if the political community were absent: “a person is characteristically not a solitary but a social animal with those whom he shares a natural kinship (physei syggeneia). there would therefore be a sociability and some justice (dikaion ti) even if there were no political community” (ee 1242a24–28). it is the household where justice and politics originate and becomes a model for political regimes (ee 1242a24–28, 42b1–2; ne 1160b23–24). thus, by existing temporally before the political community, the household serves as a training ground for citizens in political justice, making the type of natural justice of the household correspond to the type of political justice in the regime.20 thornton lockwood provides a schematic of different aristotelian households corresponding to different types of regimes.21 for correct regimes that are governed for the common good, paternal rule resembles monarchy, with both the father and the monarch ruling asymmetrically for the good of their subjects. the rule of husband and wife is similar to aristocracy as a form of proportionate equality and governance based on merit. the camaraderie of siblings is similar to timocracy with governance based on the exchange of ruling and being ruled. likewise, deviant households match deviant regimes, those which are governed in the interest of the ruler: the household of the master and the slave resembles tyranny; the unequal rule between marital partners based on power or wealth corresponds to oligarchy; and the household without a master is similar to democracy as a type of anarchy. the type of household determines not only the type of natural justice, or its deviant, but also influences the form of political justice, or its deviant, in the regime. as a form of natural justice, parental governance resembles monarchial justice as both are asymmetrical in their relationships between ruler and ruled. each form of justice corresponds to each other but remains distinct in their character and community. political justice does not strictly exist in the household because “there is no injustice in an unqualified sense towards one’s own possessions […] and a child, until it reaches a certain age and is separated, is, as it were, a part of one’s self” (en 1134b9–12). but children will eventually become partners (koinonoi) in the political community and are to be ruled as free persons; therefore, they need education in the household to prepare them for this role (politics 1260b20–21; 1259a40). children must learn to rule and be ruled in order to become citizens who practice political justice (politics 1332b36– 33a1). this exchange—ruling and being ruled—transpires first in the household where parents 107 trepanier provide children their existence and education, and, later, when children take care of their parents in old age and continue the familial line.22 in spite of its asymmetrical character, parental governance rules in the best of interest of its children, unlike the tyrannical household where parents treat their children no better than slaves (ne 1160b28–32; politics 1160b25–26; 1252b7– 8). the natural justice between husband and wife resembles the political justice found in aristocracy where citizens treat one another with proportionate equality and according to merit. although it is clear that aristotle believes there are fundamental, even biological, differences between males and females, it does not necessarily result in the conclusion that husbands and wives should be treated unequally.23 the marriage of husband and wife resembles aristocracy in that each partner governs over the things that each one should. it is only when a husband tries to govern everything, doing things of which he is not capable, or when a wife governs because of her wealth and power and not because of her virtue, that the aristocratic resemblance becomes an oligarchical one (ne 1160b32–61a4). the aristotelian marriage is the golden mean between the oligarchical partnership where spouses overstep their authorities and the socratic arrangement where all husbands and wives belong to one another. it is the differences between husbands and wives that makes possible for natural justice to exist and prepare them for political justice. finally, the natural justice of siblings matches the political justice of timocracies (politics 1161a4–7). the relationship between siblings is characterized by a form of equality because of similarities in age and education, thereby allowing them to speak frankly with one another and ruling and being ruled in turn (ne 1161a6–7, 26–31; 1162a13–14). this characterization also resembles the citizens of the polity where their equality forms the basis of them ruling and being ruled (1161a28–30). these forms of equality therefore become the basis of both natural and political justices among siblings and timocracies. political justice requires the conditions of freedom, equality, sociability, self-sufficiency, and law; however, it is unable to provide these prerequisites unless the household exists. it is only the household that can socialize citizens into these habits because familial members have access to internal principles of motivations that the state lacks. natural justice therefore does not only demand that the household be preserved but it also requires that differences among familial members persist for different forms of justice to be practiced. unlike socrates’ proposal, which abolishes these differences, aristotle recognizes that the plurality both within the household and the political community enables citizens to be best educated in political justice. private friendship, public results the similarities between political and natural justice paradoxically rests upon the fundamental distinction between the political community and the household. political justice consequently presupposes and looks past the household in the direction of civic education. aristotle believes that the household offers the advantage of access to internal principles of motivation, such as love and respect among familial members; but ultimately the political community is the model of aristotelian pluralism and diversity 108 civic education because citizens must forgo their personal interests for the common good and thereby become virtuous. those who remain defective in virtue are confused in the understanding of their interests, which can negatively overspill into the political community, causing social disorder (ee 1248b27; ne 1169a21–2). for aristotle, these people need to change their motivations in understanding both their parochial and political interests. according to aristotle, moderation is the antidote for excessive personal attachment to one’s own interests (politics 1267a10). moderation is not the restriction or limitation of self-interest but the transformation of it so that people no longer see themselves as competitors over scarce resources but partners in the same political community. this requires the formation of a reasonable person who will not want too much, i.e., to understand that one’s self-interest is not to accumulate but to share external goods, for accruing too much would destroy the very conditions that enable one’s happiness (politics 1267b6–8). but how does one change the motivations of a person to become reasonable and moderate? how does one get this person to understand what goods he or she actually needs to live virtuously (ne 1094b11, 1103b27, 1179b1–4)? by moving people from defining themselves as their possessions to an understanding based on virtuous relations, aristotle believes this change will form reasonable and moderate people (ne 1095a22–23). most people understand their relations as a form of material equality, thereby reducing all relations to a type of business contract of narrowly defined self-interest (ne 1158b3, 1163a30–35). aristotle wants to move beyond this understanding to one that gives a motive for people to choose the common good because their happiness depends upon it. rather than having possessions define one’s happiness, aristotle argues that virtuous relations is the appropriate criteria for human flourishing. paradoxically, to engage in virtuous relations forces one to recognize one’s dependency on the various communities to which one belongs.24 the person must decide whether to fulfill one’s responsibilities and duties to one’s dependencies in the household and the political community. if the person is delinquent in these activities, then the person not only damages one’s own chance for happiness but also the community on which one depends. this is why friendship is so critical in aristotle’s account of ethics and politics.25 virtuous friendship activates a type of awareness (noein) or perception (aisthanesthai) in the person about what should be pursued for happiness (ne 1170b1–5, 1170a18).26 with the aid of virtuous friends, a person will be able to determine what is truly good: this is the reason why friends are the greatest good for a person (ne 1169b10). friendship does not create a scarcity of resources, as with material possessions, but a surplus of virtue that satisfies ethical and intellectual demands. it makes people reasonable and moderate in their claims, thereby precluding social disorder in the political community (ne 1137b34–1138a2). friendship consequently is important not because what one possesses but because it satisfies what one lacks.27 aristotle’s quote of heraclitus—“it is opposites that help each other” from which the “sweetest harmonies” arise— reveals that it is inequality and incommensurability that make virtuous friendship possible (ne 1155b4–6). it is diversity and not socratic unity that provides the conditions for human flourishing. 109 trepanier private virtuous friendship corresponds to civic friendship. as there is more virtuous friendship, there is more civic friendship; as there is more civic friendship, there is more political justice in the regime; and as the regime becomes more just, civic friendship, in turn, increases (ne 1167b2–5). with this improvement in political justice and civic friendship, it becomes more difficult for citizens to be unreasonable and immoderate. however, this directional relationship is one-way for aristotle: civic friendship cannot be transformed into virtuous friendship.28 this is what socrates attempts when he abolishes the family and private property. virtuous friendship must always remain pre-political. by remaining private, virtuous friendship paradoxically is able to awaken people to their political responsibilities and duties. reasonable and moderate citizens will understand that their self-interest is dependent upon the common good and therefore will act accordingly. the political community becomes the model of civic education where citizens sacrifice their personal interests for the community’s in order to be virtuous. thus, aristotle’s civic education starts in private friendship but it ultimately yields public results. by having virtuous friends, people are able to recognize what they lack, moving from a self-definition of possessions to a selfunderstanding based on virtuous relations. education’s dual aims if the household plays a critical role in the cultivation of citizens, so does the political community in directing the aims of education. for aristotle, the education of children is the preeminent concern of the political community because they determine the continuity and stability of the regime (politics 1337a10–18).29 however, there exists a tension as to what type of education children should receive. paralleling the tension between the good citizen and the good person, aristotle argues that education should correspond both to a political community’s peculiar ends, e.g., a democratic education for democracies, and to virtue itself (politics 1276b16–1277b32, 1337a10–21; also 1332a33–34). but it is not immediately clear what aristotle means: for instance, what happens in a democratic regime if a teaching about virtue comes into conflict with an instruction about democratic values? how should this situation be resolved? aristotle further complicates his view of education by claiming that education should be “one and the same for all,” since the political community as a whole possesses a single end; consequently, the supervision of education should be conducted by the state (politics 1337a21– 26). but aristotle’s insistence that education should be supervised by the political community does not equate into abolishment of the household, like in socrates’ proposal; rather, the household cannot dictate what the aims of education should be. it would be an invitation to anarchy, as in athens or among the cyclopes, if every household could determine for itself the ultimate purpose of education of its children. the objective of education and its final supervision is determined by the political community but, as argued above, the community needs the household to deliver part of that education. thus, “one and the same for all” is in reference to the aristotelian pluralism and diversity 110 ultimate objectives and supervision of education and not the replacement of the household with the political community. with the differentiation between the political community and the household intact, aristotle’s proposal that education should aim for virtue, while, at the same time, for the peculiar ends of a political community can be better understood. while speaking about how political communities should educate children for its own peculiar ends, aristotle concludes that “the best character (ethos) is always a cause of a better political community (politeias)” (politics 1137a16–17). aristotle seems to suggest that political communities, which are not the best ones, are capable to evolve into something better if the character of its citizens changes (and corresponding devolves into something worst if the citizens’ character becomes corrupt).30 but from where does this source to produce the best character come? it cannot come from the political community, as it undoubtedly aims to educate children for its own peculiar ends. the best character therefore must come from the household, or more broadly, civil society.31 civil society potentially can offer a civic education that improves the character of its children, who over time will influence the nature and aims of the political community. when aristotle states that education should aim simultaneously for the political community’s peculiar ends and virtue, he is reserving a space for better characters to be cultivated in civil society which, in turn, will aid the political community. ultimately it will be left to the prudence of political leaders to determine whether these exceptions should be permitted to flourish in civil society.32 in this sense, aristotle selects the golden mean in the aim of education between the extremes of political indoctrination and political indifference. by targeting both virtue and the peculiar ends of the political community together, aristotle avoids both stagnation and anarchy in his civic education. an example from american history might be useful to illustrate this point. at one time, the united states codified racial slavery and segregation, indoctrinating its citizens in support of this belief. however, abolitionists and civil rights leaders looked outside the political community’s education—civil society—to cultivate a more just character among its citizenry.33 when they were able to persuade political leaders and a majority of citizens that all people in the united states should be afforded equal treatment and rights, the united states became a better political community. conceding that this transformation took over a century, and even may not yet be completed today, it is an example of aristotle’s point that education should aim for both virtue and the peculiar ends of a regime at the same time in the hope that “the best character is always a cause of a better political community.” plurality and diversity the common good of the political community therefore is both its peculiar ends and virtue. this is the final aim of civic education for aristotle. properly educated citizens consequently have to balance, among their personal interests, the political community’s interest, and virtue itself in their determination for the common good. the diversity of these goods—personal interest, peculiar ends, and virtue—is only possible if pluralistic institutions and a diversity of goods are 111 trepanier preserved. without any one of these elements, a person remains defective both as a citizen and as a person. thus, not only is the common good both unitary and diverse simultaneously but so is the person’s own soul. the diversity of goods required for the citizen to be virtuous underscores aristotle’s earlier point that virtuous friendship are rooted in what one lacks. virtuous friends activate an awareness in the person about what should truly be pursued for happiness (ne 1170b1–5, 1170a18). just as people need friends who are different from them, so does the individual person need different goods within one’s soul to be able to see what would be best for oneself and the community together. if a person only had one good in its soul, it would be impossible to know whether he or she were defective in the possession of any other goods. this diversity of goods in the citizen’s soul gives more credence to aristotle’s insistence that all citizens cannot be of similar character, especially with respect to virtue (politics 1277a1). the political community is composed of dissimilar citizens, like the goods in the citizen’s soul, because those who rule require a different type of education than those who are ruled (politics 1277a29–31). if citizens were of the same character by receiving the same education, they would not be able to discern whether they are defective because they have no point of comparison. nor would they be able to transcend their personal interests for the common good, as all citizens would share the same self-interest. unlike socrates’ regime, aristotle understands that the common good is maintained only if there is a diversity of citizens and a plurality of institutions. aristotle’s preservation of this pluralism, particularly the household, allows access to the internal motivations of people which the political community does not have. this is the problem with spartan and socratic civic education: by abolishing private ownership, the political community can only rely on coercion and abstract appeals to motivate its citizens. the result is bestial and coarse citizens in the case of sparta, and civil strife combined with incestuous relations in the instance of socrates. both regimes have removed conditions that prevent any opportunity for people to overcome their personal interest for the common good. philosophical truth, piety, civic friendship, generosity, and familial love without erotic danger are absent in these regimes. the preservation of the household also makes it possible for its inhabitants to practice natural justice as a type of preparation for political justice: parental authority resembles monarchial rule, spousal rule corresponds with aristocratic governance, and sibling governance is similar to timocratic government. but the motivation to practice political justice at the expense of personal interest only comes from virtuous friendship which is a pre-political relationship. in such friendships, the person recognizes what one lacks, and thus for what one should strive, realizing that one’s ultimate personal interests depends upon the common good of the political community. by making the common good the object worthy to be loved, friendship resolves not only private disputes but public ones, too (ne 1155a3–17). but it is important to remember for aristotle that the household exist only as a part of the political community and its specific virtue exists only as a part of virtue as a whole (politics 1260b8–24). although the household exists prior the political community, the political aristotelian pluralism and diversity 112 community must exist conceptually before the household. education in the household must be ultimately supervised by the political community. but this does not necessary translate into political indoctrination. aristotle allows the possibility that a prudent superintendent could incorporate lessons from the household to improve the character of the regime, even if those teachings were contrary to the peculiar ends of the political community.34 by preserving the household and providing civic education a dual aim, aristotle allows the common good to be defined diversely with personal interest, political ends, and virtue, all seeking equilibrium in both the community and the citizen’s soul. the plurality of institutions and the diversity of goods are the necessary and sufficient conditions for civic education to flourish. rather than encouraging discord and anarchy, these conditions promote unity and concord among citizens. without diversity and plurality, a civic education of philosophical truth and civic friendship would not be possible. thus, the path to integrate citizens more fully into the political community paradoxically requires one to respect the diversity of goods and the plurality of institutions that persist in society today. endnotes 1. for social capital, refer to putnam 2001; for civic integration, refer to ravitch and viteritti 2001; galston 2001, 2005; huntington 2005; macedo 2005; levinson 2012. 2. finkle 2002. 3. sherrod, flanagan, and youniss 2002; torney-purta 2002. 4. gutman 1987; hess 2009. 5. galston 1991, 2002; macintyre 1999; nussbaum 1996 and 2001; smith 2001; collins 2004, 2009; salkever 2007. 6. all in-text citations of aristotle and plato are from loeb classical library editions: politics for politics (aristotle 1932); ne for nicomachean ethics (aristotle 1934); ee for eudemian ethics (aristotle 1935); republic for republic (plato 1930). translations are my own. 7. velleman writes in length about external versus internal factors in motivation (velleman 1996). 8. for more about aristotle’s account of sparta, refer to de laix 1974; david 1982; schütrumpf 1994. 113 trepanier 9. for a contrary interpretation of aristotle’s understanding of the cyclopes, refer to lindsay 1992. 10. for more about the relationships among the household, the political community, and the common good, refer to kronman 1979; booth 1993; smith 1999; keys 2006. 11. for more about aristotle’s criticism of plato, refer to bornemann 1923/24; frank 1940; cherniss 1944; flashar 1977; saxonhouse 1982; dobbs 1985; mayhew 1993a, 1996, and 1997; simpson 1991 and 1998. 12. aristotle considers piety a virtue but under the category of justice (broadie 2003). 13. for more about aristotle’s views of private property, refer to mathie 1979; dobbs 1985; irwin 1991; mayhew 1993b and 1995; frank 2002 and 2005; miller 2005. 14. mulgan 1974. 15. if property were kept entirely private, there could be no sharing of it and therefore no possibility of generosity and civic friendship. aristotle names such a disposition as stingy or money-loving (ne 1121b12–16). 16. in fact, aristotle notes that greatest pleasure comes from helping friends, guests, and comrades from one’s own private property (politics 1263b5–6). 17. for more about emotions in aristotle’s thought, refer to nussbaum 1996 and 2001; koziak 2000; abizadeh 2002. 18. for more about aristotelian political justice, refer to miller 1995; frank 1998; lockwood 2006. 19. miller also makes this point: miller 1995. 20. the household exists prior to the political community temporally but not conceptually (politics 1253a19–25). 21. lockwood 2003. 22. todd 1994. aristotelian pluralism and diversity 114 23. for more about aristotle’s views of men and women, refer to horowitz 1976; morsink 1979; smith 1983; francis 1985; saxonhouse 1985; levy 1990; salkever 1990; swanson 1992; tess 1992; mulgan 1994; dobbs 1996. 24. salkever 1990; swanson 1992. 25. for more about aristotle’s account of friendship, refer to price 1989; cooper 1996; belfiore 2001; jacquette 2001; sokolowski 2002; smith 2003; heykin 2008; salkever 2008. 26. jacuette 2001; heyking 2008. 27. bickford 1996. 28. yack 1993, 110–14. 29. for more about the contents of aristotle’s education for the best regime, refer to lord 1982 and 1996; shaw 2005. 30. this would partly explain why 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polity 15.2: 202–19. –––. 1985. “aristotle: defective males, hierarchy, and the limits of politics.” in women and the history of political thought. new york: praeger. schütrumpf, eckart. 1994. “aristotle on sparta.” in the shadow of sparta. edited by anton powell and stephen hodkinson. london and new york: routledge. sherrod, lonnie r., constance flanagan, and james youniss. 2002. “dimensions of citizenship and opportunities for youth development: the what, why, when, where, and who of citizenship development.” applied developmental science 6.4: 264–272. shaw, elizabeth c. 2005. “philosophers for the city: aristotle and the telos of education.” modern age 47.1: 30–36. shiner, roger a. 1994. “aristotle’s theory of equity.” loyola los angeles law review 27: 1245–64. simpson, peter. 1991. “aristotle’s criticism of socrates’ communism of wives and children.” apeiron 24: 99–114. –––. 1998. a philosophical commentary on the politics of aristotle. chapel hill, nc: university of north carolina press. smith, nicholas. 1983. “plato and aristotle on the nature of women.” journal of the history of philosophy 21: 467–478. smith, thomas w. 1999. “aristotle on the conditions for the limits of the common good.” the american political science review 99.3: 625–36. 121 trepanier –––. 2001. revaluing ethics: aristotle’s dialectical pedagogy. albany: state university of new york press. sokolowski, robert. 2002. “friendship and moral action in aristotle.” journal of value inquiry 35: 501–520. sparshott, francis. 1985. “aristotle on women.” philosophical inquiry 7: 177–200. swanson, judith. 1992. the public and the private in aristotle’s political philosophy. ithaca: cornell university press. tress, daryl. 1992. “the metaphysical science of aristotle’s generation of animals and its feminist critics.” review of metaphysics 46: 307–41. todd, stephen c. 1994. the shape of athenian law. oxford: oxford university press. torney-purta, judith. 2002. “the school’s role in developing civic engagement: a study of adolescents in twenty-eight countries.” applied developmental science 6.4: 203– 212. trepanier, lee. 2013. “a philosophy of prudence and the purpose of higher education today.” in the relevance of higher education. edited by timothy simpson, 1–23. lanham, md: lexington books. velleman, david j. 1996. “the possibility of practical reason.” ethics 106.4: 694–726. yack, bernard. 1993. the problems of a political animal. berkeley: university of california press. microsoft word macbeth final.docx [expositions 9.2 (2015) 80–87] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 waiting for the revolution danielle macbeth haverford college in the summer of 1900 bertrand russell attended the first world congress of philosophy in paris. there he met the italian mathematician giuseppe peano and learned of peano’s work in logic. in the fall of that year russell extended peano’s monadic predicate calculus to a complete logic of relations. russell was euphoric. my sensations resembled those one has after climbing a mountain in a mist, when, on reaching the summit, the mist suddenly clears, and the country becomes visible for forty miles in every direction. for years i had been endeavoring to analyze the fundamental notions of mathematics, such as order and cardinal number. suddenly, in the space of a few weeks, i discovered what appeared to be definitive answers to the problems which had baffled me for years. and in the course of discovering these answers, i was introducing a new mathematical technique, by which regions formerly abandoned to the vaguenesses of philosophers were conquered for the precision of exact formulae. intellectually, the month of september 1900 was the highest point of my life.1 in 1905 russell developed his theory of descriptions, the theory frank ramsey would later characterize as “that paradigm of philosophy”; and in 1910 the first volume of russell and whitehead’s principia mathematica appeared.2 thus was begun the intellectual movement that would come to be known as analytic philosophy. the fundamental idea of analytic philosophy, at least at first, was to assume that philosophical difficulties arise because we fail adequately to understand the notions on which those difficulties are based and then to resolve those difficulties by providing conceptual analyses of the problematic notions, analyses that would reveal their underlying logical form. mathematics provided the model. much as the confusions and difficulties surrounding, for example, the notion of a limit in calculus were resolved by the epsilondelta definition due to cauchy, bolzano, and weierstrass, so our philosophical confusions and difficulties were to be resolved by our coming to clarity about various nonmathematical concepts. but although analysis is clearly central to the practice of mathematics—because it is the means by which mathematicians develop the conceptions 81 macbeth they need to support rigorous reasoning in their proofs—the role of analysis in the practice of philosophy has turned out to be much less clear-cut. first, as eventually became apparent, philosophy has nothing like the complex system of checks and balances that exists in the practice of mathematics and ensures that one has significant, though not complete, cognitive control over putative developments. and this lack of any system of checks and balances in philosophy has led many philosophers to question whether intuition—by appeal to which, it is supposed, one assesses the fruits of one’s philosophical analysis— can have any role at all to play in the practice of philosophy. and if the success of any putative philosophical analysis is to be assessed by appeal to one’s intuitive sense of its success, then perhaps philosophers should investigate empirically, as (so-called) experimental philosophers do, what intuitions not only philosophers but also nonphilosophers actually have in regard to this or that question of analysis. a second problem the practice of analysis in philosophy has had to face—as quine famously argues in “two dogmas of empiricism”—is that it is not at all clear in the cases of concern to philosophy where meaning ends and fact begins. because and insofar as the concepts of concern to philosophers are ineluctably caught up in the everyday world of which we speak, and are subject to the vicissitudes of our changing experiences, the traditional a priori methods of philosophy, including the method of philosophical analysis, have come to seem deeply problematic. and this has effected in turn just what quine has urged, “a blurring of the supposed boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science.”3 the upshot, philosophy naturalized, is armchair science, philosophy as little more than speculative science. the quinean idea that there is no longer room for the practice of philosophy distinct from and in addition to the practice of empirical science has been hugely influential. and it has been so influential at least in part because it is reinforced by a conception of the history of philosophy and empirical science according to which the discipline of philosophy serves as little more than an incubator for the various other disciplines, other disciplines that, once they are sufficiently robust, can be separated off from philosophy to become autonomous fields of inquiry. physics, for example, was at first a branch of philosophy but after the seventeenth century came to be contrasted with philosophy insofar as it is an experimental science. psychology, the empirical study of the mind, and linguistics, the empirical study of language, similarly began life non-empirically, as branches of philosophy. and most recently the emergence of, first, cognitive science and then also neuroscience have seemed to many to have shown that philosophy has nothing left with which to concern itself. if consciousness, the last great mystery of the natural world, is now amenable to empirical investigation thanks to recent technological advances—for example, in brain imaging—then perhaps there really is nothing left for waiting for the revolution 82 philosophers to do. to this way of thinking, the sort of non-empirical inquiry that philosophers have traditionally engaged in had seemed viable as a form of intellectual inquiry only because, and so long as, we did not yet have the resources that are needed to engage in properly empirical investigations into the relevant phenomena. because all questions have been revealed to be empirical questions, save, perhaps, for properly mathematical ones, there is nothing left for the philosopher to do. philosophy no longer has any place in the intellectual culture. of course there are philosophers who disagree. indeed, there are those who do not merely reject the idea that the empirical sciences can and should take over whatever questions remain in philosophy; they hold that the empirical sciences have nothing at all to contribute to their philosophical work. this is true, for example, of those analytic metaphysicians who develop theories that have in principle no empirical significance or consequences. it is also true of at least some neo-aristotelians aiming to recover the ancient greek conception of ourselves as rational animals in the world that was eclipsed by the rise of modern science. both philosophical movements have been criticized, the first as an intellectually irresponsible game of wits to no purpose, the second as an intellectually naïve attempt to pretend that modernity never happened, that the rise of modern science can be ignored. there is surely something right in these criticisms: philosophers cannot simply turn their backs on the extraordinary developments in the sciences that have transformed not only our everyday lives but our very conception of the universe. (for the record, i am nonetheless deeply sympathetic to the spirit of the neo-aristotelian movement.) suppose, then, that we do take the full measure of the practice of modern science. is there, even so, a way forward for philosophy? russell thought he had discovered “a new mathematical technique” that would enable philosophy finally to embark on the sure path of a science. russell was wrong. philosophy is not a science—not even, pace kant, an a priori science alongside mathematics. let us, for the purposes of argument, say that it is, as bernard williams characterizes it, a “general attempt to make the best sense of our life, and so of our intellectual activities, in the situation in which we find ourselves.”4 the philosopher, in other words, aims not so much to know as to understand: to understand how it all hangs together, what it all means, whether it is in fact true, and why we should even care. and because philosophy aims in this way to understand, it cannot in the nature of things be replaced or superseded by the empirical sciences. its questions are not empirical questions. they are questions that will remain even after all the empirical questions have been answered. simply put, we need both, both philosophy and the empirical sciences. the problem is to understand how, exactly, this is to work. 83 macbeth after more than a century of the efforts of our ablest philosophers, the practice of analytic philosophy has failed to deliver of its promise of clarity and insight. despite an impressive array of technical results, the major problems of philosophy have remained essentially untouched. and nowhere is this more evident than in the philosophy of mathematics. over the course of the twentieth century, the philosophy of mathematics came to be so detached from, and so completely irrelevant to, mathematical practice that practicing mathematicians are no longer willing even to talk to philosophers if they can possibly avoid it. in response, a small group of philosophers of mathematics has emerged calling for a radically new approach in the philosophy of mathematics, an approach one central feature of which is the wholesale rejection of logic as a tool for understanding mathematical practice. this is incredible. how could it possibly be that logic, the concern of which is reasoning, is irrelevant to our understanding of mathematical practice, at the core of which is reasoning? surprisingly, the question has an answer. although frege is often cited as the father of modern logic, modern logic would have developed pretty much as it did had frege never existed.5 and as i have argued, in fact frege was doing something quite different from what russell and the analytic tradition following him took him to be doing.6 beginning with russell, frege’s strange twodimensional notation was systematically misread as a notation of the logic bequeathed to us by russell, and because it was, frege’s truly revolutionary work in logic remains to this day almost completely unknown. fortunately, the general idea of frege’s logical language, as it contrasts with our standard logical languages, is evident already in the positional system of arabic numeration as that system contrasts with the system of roman numeration. reflecting on that latter system thus enables us to gain some insight into the former. roman numeration is a system of written signs that was devised for recording how many things there are in a collection. it is based on a primitive tally system in which one makes one mark for each thing in the collection resulting in a collection of marks that is in a oneto-one correspondence with the collection of things. the difference between such a tally system and the system of roman numeration is only that in roman numeration abbreviations are introduced: ‘v’ for a collection of five things, ‘x’ for a collection of ten things, and so on. collections of such marks are then read additively: ‘xvii’, for example, is ten and five and one and one, that is, seventeen. (it is a late modification, and one that will not concern us here, to write, say, ix instead of viiii, for nine, and so to distinguish ix, that is, nine, from xi, eleven.) in such a system, each sign means what it means independent of any context of use. the sign ‘v’ inevitably stands in for five things in the system of roman numeration, ‘x’ for ten things and so on; it is merely a convention to waiting for the revolution 84 write the letters in a particular order. one could as easily write, for example, seventeen, xvii, as, say, vixi. arabic numeration is more interesting insofar as although one can read it as a system very like that of roman numeration, one can also read it differently, as a radically different kind of numeration system. consider, for example, the numeral ‘647’ of the positional system of arabic numeration, and suppose, first, that just as in the case of roman numeration each primitive sign of this system has its meaning independent of any context of use. the digit ‘6’, for example, just is the numeral ‘6’ on this reading; it is a name for the number six. and so for the other digits: each just is the relevant numeral, a name for some particular number, zero, or one, or two, and so on up to nine. what the position of the numeral tells one, on this reading, is what it is that one is counting, whether units, or tens, or hundreds, and so on. the position of the ‘6’ in ‘647’ tells us that it is counting hundreds: there are six hundreds. the position of the ‘4’ tells us that it is counting tens: there are four tens. and the position of the ‘7’ tells us that it is counting units: there are seven units. the whole is then to be read additively: there are six hundreds and four tens and seven units. on this reading, the system of arabic numeration is essentially similar to roman numeration. obviously in this case, the order of the numerals matters because that is what is telling one what it is that is being counted. nevertheless, the overall idea of the system is the same as that of roman numeration: the collection of signs serves to record how many in a collection of things. but we can also read the system of arabic numeration differently. on the alternative reading we take the individual digits, ‘0’ through ‘9’, to function as numerals, as names for numbers, only within a context of use. independent of any context of use, the primitive signs of the language, the individual digits, only express what we can call fregean senses; independent of a context of use the primitive signs do not designate or mean or name anything. now we put some primitive signs together to form a complex sign for some number. we take the digits ‘6’ and ‘4’ and ‘7’, for example, to form the complex sign, the numeral, ‘647’, which is a name for the (one) number six hundred and forty-seven. in this way, the digits do not function independently as numerals, as names for numbers; it is only in combinations that collections of the primitive signs (in the limit, a “combination” of only one digit) function as numerals, as names for numbers. because, on this reading of the language, the primitive signs only express fregean senses independent of any context of use, because they do not designate except in a context of use, complexes of those signs such as ‘647’, although they do designate some one number (here, the number six hundred and forty-seven), do so through complex fregean senses, senses that can serve as the basis for mathematical calculations precisely because they are complex. because there are rules governing the manipulations of the primitive signs that together form complex signs for 85 macbeth numbers, reasoning according to those rules can reveal truths about the numbers that are designated by the relevant complex expressions. roman numeration serves merely to picture collections of things. one cannot reason mathematically in such a language; one can only manipulate the signs mechanically, as one might manipulate the things collected, for instance, combining them or dividing them up into smaller collections. the positional system of arabic numeration, by contrast, though it can be read merely mechanically, as essentially like the system of roman numeration, can also be read as a properly mathematical language. it can be read, that is, as exhibiting the contents of mathematical ideas, what it is to be, say, six hundred and forty-seven, and exhibiting that content in a mathematically tractable way, in a way enabling rigorous reasoning in the system of signs. exactly this distinction applies also to different logical languages, in particular to our standard logical language as it contrasts with the language frege devised in his 1879 logic. the logic that is bequeathed to us by peano, peirce, russell, and others is a language the primitive signs of which function just as the signs of roman numeration do, to designate independent of a context of use. the language serves to record or picture states of affairs, truth conditions. frege’s logic is different. it is a language within which the primitive signs only express senses independent of any context of use, and hence can be combined to form complex names for concepts on the basis of which to reason. what we need if we are to make real progress in philosophy is just such a fregean logic because, as i show in realizing reason, it is this logic, as contrasted with standard logic, that radically transforms our understanding of the space of possibilities within which our thought can move. if analytic philosophy is to become the vibrant and productive discipline it once held out promise of being, we need to begin anew with frege’s logic. we need to revisit developments in the nineteenth century, particularly in the practice of mathematics, so as to come to a better understanding of the great intellectual advances that were made in that century, and we need to recognize that those advances offer a new way forward, one we have hitherto failed to consider. it is in just this way that we will come to see that frege’s logic is something essentially and radically new, in just this way that we will come to see that, unlike standard logic, frege’s logic provides rich and powerful resources for addressing the traditional problems of philosophy, problems about, for example, our capacity for knowledge of the world around us, about the relationship of mind and body, and about the reality of objective values.7 we also need sharply to distinguish between mathematical languages— paradigmatically, the diagrammatic language of euclidean geometry, the symbolic language of arithmetic and algebra, and frege’s logical language begriffsschrift—and the logics that govern them, on the one hand, and everyday language and reasoning (including waiting for the revolution 86 philosophical reasoning), on the other. we need to stop trying to apply standards of rigor and perspicuity that are appropriate to mathematics also to everyday life—including the everyday life of mathematicians—and to our attempts to achieve an adequate philosophical understanding of that life. and we need explicitly to recognize that the empirical sciences are neither the arbiter of all things nor merely something we do. we must take the full measure of the ways in which the rise of modern science has been transformative of our self-understanding while at the same time recognizing that the sciences are not and cannot be the wellspring of our deepest self-understanding. and we need, finally, to return to the history of philosophy, not because the answers we seek are there but because hegel was right: we cannot understand where we are and need to be until and unless we understand how we came to be here. philosophy is not a science among sciences. it has always been and at its best remains still today a rogue discipline within which anything can be called into question as reason sees fit, a discipline that has no particular subject matter and no particular method, a discipline powered only by a relentless, resolute, and passionate desire to understand. and there will always be practitioners of this discipline, thinkers who are conversant with the works of the great philosophers of the past, thinkers who are, in equal measure, intellectually curious and intellectually serious, thinkers who are willing to take risks and to question received wisdom and entrenched values. there are such thinkers, such philosophers, still today. many of them one knows; some one does not. but one will. come the revolution, one will. notes 1. russell 1975, 147. 2. russell published his theory of descriptions in russell 1905. ramsey makes his remark about that theory in “philosophy” (1929; repr. 1990). cambridge university press serially published the three volumes of principia mathematica in 1910, 1912, and 1913. 3. quine 1951, 20. 4. williams 2000, 479. 5. both hilary putnam and w. v. o. quine make this point, putnam in putnam 1982, and quine in quine 1995. 87 macbeth 6. see macbeth 2005 and 2014. 7. again, see macbeth 2014 for an extended elaboration and defense. works cited macbeth, danielle. 2005. frege’s logic. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. _____. 2014. realizing reason: a narrative of truth and knowing. oxford: oxford university press. putnam, hilary. 1982. “peirce the logician.” historia mathematica 9: 290–301. quine, willard van orman. 1951. “two dogmas of empiricism.” philosophical review 60: 20–43; repr. in from a logical point of view, cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1953, 20–46; rev. 2nd ed., 1961. _____. 1995. “peirce’s logic.” in peirce and contemporary thought: philosophical inquiries, ed. kenneth l. ketner. new york: fordham university press, 23–31. ramsey, f. p. 1990. “philosophy.” philosophical papers, ed. d. h. mellor. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1–7. russell, bertrand. 1905. “on denoting.” mind 14.56 (october): 479–93. _____. 1975. the autobiography of bertrand russell. london: george allen and unwin. williams, bernard. 2000. “philosophy as a humanistic discipline.” philosophy 75: 477–96. microsoft word mccarthy intro print [expositions 13.2 (2019) 1–6] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376   introduction: the future of nonviolence in catholic social teaching eli s. mccarthy georgetown university i give you a new commandment, that you love one another as i have loved you. –jesus1 to be true followers of jesus today also includes embracing his teaching about nonviolence. –pope francis2 surveying the signs of the times we can see the urgent need for engaging the theme of nonviolence more deeply. nearly 66 million people are displaced by war and violence, which comes out to one in every 113 people, with children making up half of all refugees.3 the yemen war has killed over 100,000 civilians plus one person every hour dying from cholera,4 not to mention wars in south sudan, libya, drc, somalia, etc. the u.s. has spent over $6.4 trillion on war since september 11, 2001.5 in addition, there are massive costs from war, such as indirect deaths, trauma, suicide, domestic violence, sexual assaults and rapes, environmental damage, blowback violence, and the drafting of child soldiers. other related issues are the environmental crisis, rising economic inequality, poverty, military spending, sexual violence (including in the church), gun ownership, racism, etc. so, we are compelled to ask, what is the future of nonviolence in catholic social teaching, which also has implications for practice and advocacy? over the last two years, the passion and dialogue around this issue has expanded across the globe and in the u.s. the 2016 nonviolence and just peace conference in rome was a key stimulus. that 85-person, multi-dimensional group of catholics from around the world produced an appeal to the catholic church to re-commit to the centrality of gospel nonviolence.6 since then, thousands of others have been cultivating the ground for the harvest of nonviolence in the catholic church. over 250 organizations and thousands of individuals have endorsed the the future of nonviolence in catholic social teaching 2   appeal, including the catholic conferences of bishops in japan and belgium, the justice and peace commission of the usg/usig (international religious superiors), pax christi international, the u.s. catholic mission association, the u.s. leadership conference of women religious, and the u.s. conference of major superiors of men. cardinal peter turkson, who is the head of the dicastery of integral human development, has been a key leader at the vatican supporting this effort and creatively moving it forward. pope francis expressed his solidarity in the 2017 world day of peace message “nonviolence: a style of politics for peace.” over the last two years, the catholic nonviolence initiative (cni) has generated numerous dialogues in the catholic community and beyond on these topics. there have been u.n. events, regional events around the world, and many events in the united states. for example, at the university of san diego, cardinal turkson and bishop robert w. mcelroy (among others) conducted a high-level dialogue with military representatives in 2019. there were other university and college events at seton hall with cardinal tobin, as well as at georgetown, santa clara, san francisco, creighton, depaul, st. michael’s, and marquette. there were presentations at academic conferences, such as the society of christian ethics and catholic theological ethics in the world church, and at national advocacy conferences such as the catholic social ministry gathering, ecumenical advocacy days, ignatian family teach-in, and alliance for peacebuilding. there have been numerous publications, journal articles, blogs, and books, such as choosing peace (orbis, 2018) and a just peace ethic primer (georgetown, 2020), which developed from this initiative. in 2017–2018, we completed five global roundtable dialogues on key topics, such as the bible and nonviolence, theology of nonviolence, new moral framework, power of nonviolence, and integrating nonviolence into the life of the church. they have collectively produced a large, synthesizing document which was presented to the vatican in a spring 2019 conference, with the hope of forming a basis for an encyclical on nonviolence. many educational resources and action guides have been developed and a global education committee has been formed to deepen the collection of these resources and stimulate more peace studies programs at catholic educational institutions.7 initiatives focused on nonviolence have been strengthened at seminaries as well as the archdioceses of chicago and baltimore under the leadership of cardinal blase j. cupich and archbishop william e. lori.8 nonviolent direct action, including civil disobedience, has increased with more official support, such as bishop john stowe's presence and support for the 2018 catholic day of action with dreamers at the u.s. senate, as 3 mccarthy     well as cardinal tobin's presence and support for the 2019 action in new jersey with local activists and the catholic nonviolence campaign for immigrant children.9 cni participants have helped to increase the energy for scaling-up key nonviolent practices such as unarmed civilian protection at the u.s. state department. through this extensive dialogue and these initiatives, we have deepened our understanding and commitment to nonviolence: as the positive reverence for dignity and life; as the power of love in action; as the path to fuller truth; as a spirituality, way of life, and distinct virtue; and as an effective method and constructive force for social change, transforming conflict, challenging all forms of violence, protecting all people and the earth, and building sustainable peace. our initiative on nonviolence and the question about the future of nonviolence in the catholic church is robust and broad. it is not merely or even primarily a question about war and just war theories. it is not merely about direct violence, but also structural and cultural violence. when we take this broader and deeper view, we believe we can see better not only these specific types of violence, but also we can better assess specific traditional responses such as just war approaches. a “re-centering” or a shift to nonviolence is a shift in imagination, practice, and commitment. a shift to nonviolence and just peace goes beyond re-stating the preference or priority of our way of being, and rather invites catholics to an alternative path, field of play, type of harmony, or set of fresh wineskins (matthew 9:16–17). this iteration of expositions: interdisciplinary studies in the humanities will focus on this broader and deeper view of the future of nonviolence in catholic social teaching. in this context, the authors will address some of the arguments raised about supporting just war, which has been an area of recent focus for some scholars in expositions and elsewhere.10 others, such as cardinal turkson, have argued that the development of understanding and practices of nonviolence may be distracted or obscured by the ongoing commitment to just war in the catholic community, even when that is not the stated intention.11 there are also significant questions about the consistency of just war with jesus’s way, how just war has primarily functioned to justify or enable war, how it has been an inadequate or ineffective constraint on war, how it still gets us stuck in vicious cycles of violence even when war appears just, and how it has failed to form us, particularly as peacemakers.12 for example, in 2017, bishop mcelroy said that the just war principles have “become only a little bit less than a green light” for war, and that the church must “recognize the the future of nonviolence in catholic social teaching 4   increasing incapacity of the just war tradition to be an effective constraint on warfare in the modern age.”13 meanwhile, other scholars who support the elaboration and refinement of a just war ethic have made various arguments. some claim that the church simply needs to do a better job of formation in just war thinking, in part because it already in theory prioritizes nonviolence. others claim that we need some ethic to guide questions about war and to offer to policymakers, and thus, just war theories are necessary for the church. some focus their support for just war in extreme situations which fall under the somewhat wavering international norm of a responsibility to protect. a smaller minority still make the claim that the scriptures either support a just war ethic or at least do not rule it out. collectively, the authors in this forum will undertake to address many of these arguments. however, it will not only be an analytical exercise of doing so with a more robust and deeper understanding of nonviolence, but also with a vision to elaborate and expand on the future of nonviolence in catholic social teaching. thus, they elaborate on the following possibilities: a way of describing nonviolence and its multi-dimensional character for the church; on the distinct role of the church in relation to nonviolence and witnessing to a church of mercy; on nonviolence as a tradition of moral praxis; on nonviolence as truly living the works of mercy; on the consistency of nonviolence with scripture and for building gospel-based communities; on nonviolence and pope francis’s peacebuilding pedagogy; on developing catholic teaching and nonviolence; on the potential and effectiveness of nonviolence for activists and policymakers; on how nonviolence and a just peace ethic could transform the military institution, such as nonviolent civilian-based defense and in dire situations of a “responsibility to protect”; and on other issues. notes 1. john 13:34. 2. pope francis, “nonviolence: a style of politics for peace,” the holy see, january 1, 2017, https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/peace/documents/papafrancesco_20161208_messaggio-l-giornata-mondiale-pace-2017.html. 3. “war, violence, persecution push displacement to new unprecedented high,” united nations high commissioner for refugees (unhcr), june 19, 2017, 5 mccarthy     https://www.unhcr.org/en-us/news/press/2017/6/5943ec594/war-violence-persecutionpush-displacement-new-unprecedented-high.html. 4. hollie mckay, “nearly 100,000 have been killed in ongoing yemen war, report finds,” fox news june 19, 2019, https://www.foxnews.com/world/100000-civilians-killedyemen-war; bethan mckernan, “yemen: almost one death per hour as cholera epidemic spreads like wildfire,” independent june 9, 2017, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/yemen-war-deaths-choleraepidemic-dying-every-hour-a7782341.html. 5. neta crawford, “united states budgetary costs and obligations of post 9/11 wars through fy2020: $6.4 trillion,” costs of war, watson institute for international and public affairs, brown university, november 13, 2019, https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2019/us%20budgetary%20 costs%20of%20wars%20november%202019.pdf. 6. “an appeal to the catholic church to re-commit to the centrality of gospel nonviolence,” catholic nonviolence initiative, 2016, https://nonviolencejustpeace.net/final-statement-an-appeal-to-the-catholic-church-to-recommit-to-the-centrality-of-gospel-nonviolence/. 7. “resources on nonviolence and just peace,” catholic nonviolence initiative, 2019, https://nonviolencejustpeace.net/resources/. 8. cardinal cupich launched an anti-violence initiative and created a diocesan office for violence prevention. archbishop lori wrote a pastoral letter, “the enduring power of dr. martin luther king’s principles of nonviolence,” archdiocese of baltimore, february 14, 2018, https://www. archbalt.org/kingpastoral/. 9. eli mccarthy, “cardinal tobin emboldens catholic nonviolent risk-taking,” ignatian solidarity network, september 16, 2019, https://ignatiansolidarity.net/blog/2019/09/17/cardinal-tobin-catholic-nonviolent-risktaking/. 10. “ethics in focus: special issue on the future of just war in catholic social teaching on war and peace,” expositions: interdisciplinary studies in the humanities 12.1 (2018), https://expositions.journals.villanova.edu/issue/view/159. the future of nonviolence in catholic social teaching 6   11. cardinal turkson said “it [just war theory] can undermine efforts to develop alternative capacities and tools for conflict to be overcome and transformed,” quoted in christopher lamb, “pope urged to abolish creed of a ‘just war,’” the sunday times april 24, 2016, https:// www.thetimes.co.uk/article/pope-urged-to-abolish-creed-of-a-just-war-spm5jzjg8. 12. eli s. mccarthy, “the gospels draw us further: a just peace ethic,” in expositions 12.1 (2018): 80–102, https://expositions.journals.villanova.edu/article/view/2322. 13. joshua j. mcelwee, “pope condemns possession of nuclear weapons in shift from church’s acceptance of deterrence,” national catholic reporter november 10, 2017, https://ncronline.org/news/vatican/pope-condemns-possession-nuclear-weapons-shiftchurchs-acceptance-deterrence. microsoft word 2 trepanier fall 2018.docx [expositions 12.2 (2018) 132–151] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 the character model for the american university lee trepanier saginaw valley state university the collapse of confidence in american higher education highlights two public concerns about its value: the cost no longer outweighs its economic benefits and colleges and universities have become havens for liberal ideologues whose values are at odds with most americans. according to a 2011 pew research center report, a majority of americans (57%) say that higher education fails to provide students good value for the money they and their families spend and even a larger majority (75%) say college is too expensive.1 although 86% of college graduates say that college has been a good investment for them personally and on average earn $20,000 more than those who did not graduate from a four-year college, they are burdened with student debt.2 nearly half of college graduates (49%) say that paying off debt makes it harder to pay for other bills and a quarter say it has had an impact on their career choice.3 for adults age 18–34 who are not in school and do not have a bachelor’s degree, two-thirds say a major reason for not continuing their education is the need to support their family and nearly half (48%) say they cannot afford college.4 this should come to no surprise as college and university tuition and fees have tripled since 1980–81, even after accounting for inflation.5 republicans have grown increasingly negative about the impact of colleges and universities on the u.s.6 58% of republicans and republican-leaning independents say that higher education has a negative effect on the way things are going in the country, while just 36% say the effect is positive. by contrast, 72% of democrats see colleges and universities having a positive impact on the country. this partisan gap can partially be explained by how the two parties see the purpose of college: to teach specific skills and knowledge for the workforce (58% republicans compared to 43% democrats) or an opportunity for personal growth (28% republicans compared to 43% democrats). other recent events—such as the controversy over free speech and race on college campuses—have given the impression that american colleges and universities are bastions of liberal ideologies, values contrary to republicans and republican-leaning independents.7 133 trepanier in spite of republicans’ skepticism about the political, social, and cultural value of american higher education, a majority of them (62%, compared to 73% of democrats) say higher education does a good job preparing students for the workforce.8 this emphasis on preparing students for the workforce is shared by the american public as the primary mission of higher education: 47% say that colleges should teach workforce skills and knowledge and only 39% say that college is to help students grow socially and intellectually.9 college and university presidents likewise agree that making students productive members of the workforce is the most important societal role for higher education (74%).10 interestingly, citizenship (73%) and access to higher education (72%) were a close second and third objectives for presidents, priorities not considered by either political parties or the american public.11 the consideration of liberal education is not explicitly considered by any of the surveyed groups, although there may be an association between liberal education and the objectives of personal and intellectual growth, which was lowly valued (28% republicans; 43% democrats; and 39% american public).12 although college and university presidents see citizenship and access to education as societal priorities for higher education, the public instead sees higher education as essentially a business that is more concerned about its own well-being than educating students or serving communities.13 in response to rawlings’ editorial, “college is not a commodity. stop treating it like one,” selingo criticizes higher education for promoting the economic benefits of a college degree, the mismatch between curriculum and student success, and the growth of administrative staff at the expense of faculty to make the four-year degree into an “assembly line” experience for students.14 for selingo, american higher education is primarily responsible for the public seeing colleges and universities as a business that only looks out for their own interests: students are customers, faculty are employees, and alumni are financial donors. for faculty, they now exist in an era of technological change, globalization, and deteriorating work conditions: a decrease in financial resources and employment opportunities and an increase of being subject to a variety of accountability and assessment metrics.15 “core” faculty—those who are employed as tenured or tenure-track—continue to diminish as “independent contractors” (e.g., adjuncts, post-doctoral fellows) increase, thereby diminishing the faculty’s role in university governance.16 faculty currently spend more time on learning new technology, committee work and meetings, and preparing for teaching while simultaneously face a falling-off in funded research.17 faculty also have noticed a decline in autonomy, with tenure being a particularly the character model for the american university 134 contentious issue with respect to accountability, evaluation, and post-tenure review.18 finally, the trend of specialization in both content and role among faculty has only accelerated in the past decade, making the university more fragmented in governance, curriculum, and scholarship.19 the result is a professoriate that is increasingly treated as an employee rather than a colleague in university life. american higher education consequently needs to adapt and adjust to the new circumstances that it currently confronts if it wants to preserve its value as a public good that is neither republican nor democratic in character. college and university presidents must demonstrate to the public that the values like citizenship and access are equally important to workforce preparedness. colleges and universities must devise strategies to show that higher education is not a business that operates only out of its self-interest but as a public good where students are treated as learners, faculty as colleagues, and alumni as part of a community that transcends economic considerations. if american higher education wants to be and be perceived as a public value, it must discover new and creative ways to reinvent itself in today’s neoliberal, globalized era.20 i suggest a possible model—the character model—for public colleges and universities to consider in this new age of american higher education.21 this model is based on the aristotelian understanding of phronesis (prudence) which combines both theoretical and practical reason in the development of character.22 in this article i will explain how phronesis can be at the core of a college’s or university’s mission and then show how the general education curriculum could be adjusted to match this new model, for a revision of the general education curriculum is vital not only for student success but also for the mission and purpose of the college and university. i conclude the article with some thoughts about how faculty and administrators can better align their roles with the character model. i recognize that this proposal is an ideal type and may not work or even be feasible if implemented. but even if it were not to succeed, i hope that it will at least move the conversation of higher education to a rethinking about what constitutes its core and mission as a public value. the public value of american higher education, particularly its public institutions, has reached a tipping point. it is incumbent upon those who work and believe in the public value of higher education to make a new and different case for it. failure to do so merely continues the gradual deterioration of one the great public institutions this country has created.23 135 trepanier the character model aristotle’s understanding of phronesis is a form of practical reason while simultaneously connected with theoretical or scientific thinking to guide particular action. phronesis paves a middle path between theoretical reason, which is too rigid and abstract to solve specific problems, and pragmatic calculation which is focused only on what works without understanding why.24 aristotle defines phronesis as the “ability to deliberate well about what sorts of things conduce to the good life in general,” but one can produce “no demonstration” of its first principles, even though “particular actions were true in practice.”25 phronesis can never become a science (episteme), which is concerned about first principles that are always the same and true, because its attention to particulars precludes one from starting from universal premises or ending with comprehensive conclusions. given its variable character, aristotle instead categorizes phronesis as a deliberate intellectual virtue. this exclusion of phronesis from the category of theoretical or scientific reason makes any positivist attempt to evaluate its effectiveness defective: there are no axioms from which one can reason to conclusions or first principles. yet phronesis is not a type of circular reasoning. it is connected to theoretical reason by its intuitive recognition of first principles. for example, a person recognizes that murder is wrong because his or her moral intuition recognizes it as such, although the person does not possess scientific certainty about the wrongfulness of murder. this is different from circular reasoning—a person believes his or her view that murder is wrong because the person believes it to be true—for it does not confuse first principles when a person validates what he or she immediately apprehends. of course, a person could work himor herself into a state of doubt about the wrongfulness of murder, but aristotle would say that such a person is being foolish because these types of experiences are starting points and not the conclusion of inquiry.26 the inability of a person to distinguish and defend first principles is to acknowledge he or she is an incomplete being when compared to the morally experienced or mature person (phronimos). but what happens if there is no phronimos to whom one can turn? for aristotle, the answer resides in character formation. the community educates its young in pre-rational versions of virtues that are necessary for social stability and continuity, for, as aristotle observes, such habituation “teaches right opinion about the first principle.”27 this pre-rational education orients young people towards phronesis where they eventually form an attachment to it. this incomplete or pre-rational the character model for the american university 136 phronesis is a person’s “common sense” that preserves both himor herself and the community but not enough for either the person or society to achieve excellence. while americans value higher education, they value character even more. asked what it takes a young person to succeed in the world, 61% say a good work ethic is extremely important and 57% say the same about knowing how to get along with people—only 42% say a college education.28 the character model, based on a deliberative intellectual virtue that is both practical and theoretical, is therefore uniquely suited for american higher education to make its case for its public value. furthermore, the formation of character as both practical and theoretical reason allows american institutions of higher education to distinguish themselves from their societal competitors. both businesses and governments employ theoretical reason but ultimately for pragmatic ends (i.e., economic, political): theoretical reason is reduced to a practical activity. by contrast, colleges and universities can orient students’ practical reasoning to theoretical ends without losing sight of the world of particulars, something which liberal education tends to neglect.29 navigating between the extremes of unprincipled pragmatism and detached theoreticism, the character model highlights what american higher education can do better than other societal institutions: cultivate a character in students that requires both theoretical and practical reason.30 given the diversity of institutions in american higher education, there is no need to impose a single normative standard on all colleges and universities. religious colleges may wish to incorporate theology into their understanding of a character, while public institutions may choose to focus on a responsible and engaged democratic citizenry. the character model allows flexibility for colleges and universities to select an understanding of what constitutes a flourishing human person for that institution and orient students, faculty, and administrators to cultivate practical and theoretical reason towards that end. what is critical is that the model forces colleges and universities to consider what type of character they want to foster in their communities. this is not to deny that colleges and universities should provide the skills and knowledge for their students to be productive members in the workforce or responsible and active citizens. these goals are important but should be secondary to the fostering of character, as only colleges and universities are uniquely situated in society to do this. the character model therefore calls for a normative understanding of human flourishing specific to american higher education that includes both theoretical and practical reason, and to orient 137 trepanier colleges and universities in their teaching, research, and service towards that end. other societal institutions, such as businesses and governments, lack a combination or balance between theoretical and practical reason and consequently are deficient in their understanding of human flourishing. institutions of american higher education are uniquely suited for this task because they have the resources to cultivate a specific character in their students and they can encourage their faculty and administrators to partake in this ethos. within the university itself, the character model can help bridge the gap between programs that are too theoretical (e.g., liberal education) and practical (e.g., professional training). the need for both theoretical and practical reason obliges faculty and administrators to learn from each other and thereby overcome the programmatic fragmentation and content specialization that characterizes today’s higher education. the character model thus forces students, faculty, and administrators to think about what should constitute the core mission of their institution and explain it to a public that already believes character is the critical factor for a person’s success. by making character central to their mission, colleges and universities can not only organize themselves intellectually and practically around this objective but also make a public case about the value of higher education that is different from workforce preparedness or democratic citizenship. colleges and universities cannot compete with businesses and governments in these economic and political goals because these activities primarily employ practical rather than theoretical reason, whereas the higher education can do both. by informing the public that only they are uniquely suited to cultivate a certain type of character that requires both theoretical and practical reason, colleges and universities can hopefully improve the public’s understanding of their value in society. general education general education programs are to impart to undergraduate students basic knowledge, or at least exposure, to a variety of disciplines in order to know how to study and live in a meaningful way. the first american institution of higher education to offer a general education curriculum was harvard in 1825: students were free to choose courses according to their interests in subjects, although the range of choice was limited and the type of courses were liberal arts rather than professional or vocational ones.31 over time general education has become the primary mode to introduce students to a college’s curriculum and often is conflated with liberal education itself. steiner defines general education as “common education” for any person and that liberal the character model for the american university 138 education, “being education for democracy, hence is general education.”32 thus, the decline of the value of liberal education in the united states is also a decline in the value of general education itself, prompting several colleges and universities to revisit these programs because student learning outcomes are not being met and the failure to create a clear and consistent identity among faculty and students.33 besides a core or a great books curriculum, the alternative to general education program is competency-based education where students learn one skill at a time, which is a small component of a larger learning goal, before proceeding to the next competency to master.34 students can skip learning modules entirely if they can demonstrate they already have mastery of them as evaluated by a form of testing. unlike general education programs, competency-based education does not rely upon the credit hour for a student’s degree completion and has been adopted by some forprofit universities.35 although there has been criticism of competency-based education, it is increasingly becoming a viable alternative to general education programs at american colleges and universities.36 in the near future, colleges and universities will have to confront the choice of whether to retain and reform their general education programs or abandon them and instead adopt competency-based education. by ending general education programs, colleges and universities would devote themselves to practical reasoning at the expense of theoretical or scientific thinking, as competency-based education is more suitable for professional and vocational training. it would also align colleges and universities to the singular goal of preparing students for the workforce rather than character development, civic engagement, personal and intellectual growth, or other non-economic objectives. for some institutions of higher education this may be a necessary or a forward-looking move, while for others it might be contrary to their institution’s mission, student body wishes, faculty interest, and alumni demands. for those institutions who do not want to adopt competencybased education, it is essential for those colleges and universities to reform their general education programs in such a manner to provide a public reason why general education is preferable to competency-based education. while most colleges and universities share a common set of learning outcomes that entail a broad range of skills and knowledge, there has been no increase of greater understanding of these goals among students.37 to remedy this situation, there has been an emphasis on integration of knowledge, skills, and application in general education programs, although fewer than two in five 139 trepanier require experiential learning.38 this integration usually was an applied or digital project (e.g., eportfolios) that was conducted at the end of the general education program with most schools employing the distribution model.39 however, this recent emphasis on integration reveals that students are not able to synthesize what they have learned in their general education programs. as a result, students—and the public—do not see the point of taking general education: they are just requirements one needs to fulfill before the real work begins in one’s major field. this need to integrate knowledge comports with the character model in two ways. first, depending upon what type of character a college or university wishes to cultivate, all the courses in the general education program would be oriented towards that conception of character or human flourishing. for example, if a college decides that it wants to cultivate a responsible, democratic citizenry in its students, then a course in the sciences would have to be taught in that context: the study of biology in a general education program would not be isolated to its own discipline but presented in the context of a responsible, democratic citizen. this does not necessarily mean a “dumbing down” of content in biology—students would still need to master the fundamentals of that science—but students would be required to think beyond the narrow disciplinary parameters of their courses to the larger question of character. the courses in the general education program therefore would be given a context where students would be able to integrate their knowledge from specific classes. in other words, colleges and universities would require the theme of character to make their general education programs intellectually coherent to students. to accomplish this, faculty would be required to revise their courses and coordinate with one another to provide a seamless and comprehensible general education program. faculty should be encouraged and allowed to innovate to see what type of teaching pedagogies and techniques would be most effective, whether teamteaching, bimonthly meetings, coordination of syllabi in terms of themes and approaches, and reserving time in each course for students to integrated what they have learned from other classes with their current course content. another possibility is to remove the disciplinary designation for general education courses (e.g., bio 101) and instead mark them as general education (i.e., gen 101), allowing faculty from any discipline to teach them. a third idea is to have a seminar as the capstone course of the general education program where students would have to synthesize their knowledge. regardless of how it is implemented, the general education program will only be the character model for the american university 140 successful if faculty are willing to step outside their disciplinary boundaries and coordinate and communicate among themselves. second, the character model allows integration of skills, knowledge, and application not only across the general education program but also within courses by having students learn both theoretical and practical reason in their course. students would be required to learn the theoretical knowledge of a subject but also learn how to practice or apply it, as in a laboratory, internship, service-learning, or civic engagement activity.40 for instance, a geography student would not only learn the foundations behind gis but then show how to use it in an assignment, like mapping violent crimes in a local city. the student would also be required to demonstrate how his or her theoretical and practical reason is related to the larger question of character. thus, the student learns not only theoretical and practical reason in a specific subject but is given a larger context to understand how these skills, knowledge, and application are valuable. by having students learn both practical and theoretical reason in a general education program that is intellectually coherent and oriented by the college’s or university’s mission, the character model can make a public case for the value of american higher education. the public is already primed favorably towards character and colleges and universities are uniquely situated to teach character in a way that is different from other societal institutions, thereby demonstrating their value to the public. this “product differentiation” should be embraced by american colleges and universities if they wish to retain their public value. and there is no greater opportunity to demonstrate this product than a reformed general education program that emphasizes the character model to students and the public. conclusion besides playing an instrumental role in reforming general education programs, how else would faculty and administrators fit into the character model for american higher education? for faculty, the character model can provide an orientation in their research and service. faculty can continue in their disciplinary research and service but also could explore the scholarship of teaching and learning (sotl) which could not only contribute to the mission of colleges and universities in teaching students but also demonstrate to the public the value of higher education. the value of teaching is a value that the public can understand and accept. faculty therefore should consider 141 trepanier undertaking research in sotl to not only become better teachers but show the value of their research to the public.41 while sotl may be a politically strategic way to communicate the value of colleges and universities, this proposal also has potential problems. first, there is some research that does not fit either in the sotl or stem (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) paradigms.42 scholarship in the liberal arts disciplines, like kantian epistemology or medieval choral music, would particularly be susceptible to not being supported. and although this type of research would continue, the emphasis of sotl and stem may devalue this type of scholarship within academia and the public which, in turn, raises questions about career advancement like tenure, promotion, and grant applications. these and other issues is where administrators, along with faculty, will have to determine what is to be valued at their institution and whether those values align with their understanding of character. creating the conditions where excellent teaching, research, and service can occur is the fundamental task of a college or university administrators. they will have to work with faculty, students, and the public to determine what type of character, what kind of human flourishing, their institution should cultivate. this may require some difficult changes, as the selection of one type of character will inevitably be at the expense of others and thereby potentially alienate and anger certain communities. but even with the costs of selecting a type of character to orient the college or university, it is a better option than choosing a character that is broadly-defined, ambiguous, and, in short, means nothing because it could be interpreted as anything (e.g., “the future leaders of tomorrow”). for the character model to be successful, it has to be specific to an institution so students, faculty, administrators, and the public know exactly what that college or university is, even if they have reservations or disagreements about it. administrators and faculty therefore may consider changing the work conditions of the academic profession, such as encouraging teaching general education or restructuring departments for interdisciplinary studies.43 these and other reforms may return colleges and universities to their primary mission of teaching undergraduates, with faculty paying more attention to teaching than to receiving recognition from their peers in specialized publications. administrators may examine the best practices at other institutions of higher education and society to see how best to create work conditions to promote their mission of cultivating character in their colleges and universities. the character model for the american university 142 the character model consequently is to ask the various communities in higher education—the public, administrators, faculty, and students—what type of human person they want to foster and promote in society. the answer will vary according to institution and community but a serious reflection upon what it means to be human, what type of character one should cultivate, returns american higher education to an activity for which it is uniquely suited rather than imitating the branding of businesses, nonprofits, and governments. american higher education needs to rethink and reclaim what makes it different from other societal institutions, if it wants to show its public value. again, i do not claim the character model is the answer to this problem—i am open to better and different ideas than the one presented—but it is an answer that draws upon the tradition and resources of higher education. for it may be the case that for american higher education to move forward, it has to reflect upon its own past. notes 1. pew, is college worth it? 5–6, 9; also see riley; newfield, the great mistake; clynes; caplan. 2. ibid. 6–10, 36–37, 45. americans owe approximately $1.3 trillion in student debt in 2017, more than two and a half times more than a decade earlier. pew, “five facts about student loans”; also see pew, “six key findings about going to college.” 3. ibid. 4. ibid. 28–29, 39–40. 5. ibid. 26–27, 32. 6. pew, “sharp partisan divisions in views of national institutions”; also see newfield, “the nation’s electoral divisions highlight questions about the role of public universities.” 7. a fifth of american college undergraduates say it is acceptable to use physical force to silence a speaker who makes “offensive and hurtful statements” (villasenor). also see slater; ben-porath; chemerinsky and gillman; scruton. for the most recent race 143 trepanier controversy on college campuses, see quintana; see also byrd; ross. although the actual impact that faculty have on students’ ideologies is minimal, the public perception is otherwise; see gross and simmons. 8. pew, “sharp partisan divisions in views of national institutions.” 9. the remaining 14% believe both missions are equally important; see pew, is college worth it? 48–49. 10. pew, is college worth it? 61–63. 11. the other objectives are conducting research to solve national problems (54%), contributing to regional economic development (52%), providing continual education to adults of all ages (37%), and providing cultural enrichment to the local community (17%). ibid. for more about access to higher education, see hacker and dreifus. 12. the literature about the challenges confronting liberal education, particularly the humanities, and possible remedies is enormous. for a summary, see trepanier, why the humanities matter today ix–xvi. 13. for more about how the neoliberal university perceives itself no longer as a public good, see apple; giroux, “introduction: critical education or training” and “neoliberalism, corporate culture, and the promise of higher education”; gould; powers; bok; washburn; hill and kumar; tuchman; canaan and shumar; kaufman-osborn; king-white. 14. rawlings; selingo. 15. warner; srigley, “dear parents”; finkelstein, et al. 7, 12–18, 245. 16. ibid. 96; also see ginsberg. 17. ibid. 241–65; also see flaherty. 18. ibid. 298–307; also see kaufman-osborn; srigley, “whose university is it anyway?” 19. ibid. 450–67. the character model for the american university 144 20. for more about american higher education existing in an era of globalization, see ibid. 378–482 and mittleman. 21. the exclusion of private colleges and universities is that their missions and strategies do not necessarily have to take the public into account, whereas public institutions by their very nature do. the rise of for-profit colleges and universities are another challenge which public institutions have to address and have failed to do so far. hentschke and lechuga; angulo; cottom. 22. trepanier, “a philosophy of prudence and the purpose of higher education today.” 23. nearly four out of ten college and university presidents say that higher education is moving in the wrong direction (38%) and only one out of five presidents say the u.s. system of higher education is the best in the world. pew, is college worth it? 57–58. 24. beiner; barber; salkever; steinberger. for more about phronesis, see trepanier, “a philosophy of prudence and the purpose of higher education today.” 25. aristotle 1140a24–1140b30; 1142a11–30; 1146b35–1146a7. translations are my own. 26. ibid. 1095b6. 27. ibid. 1151a15–20. 28. pew, is college worth it? 50. 29. trepanier, why the humanities matter today. 30. religious institutions also may be able to play a public role similar to the universities in cultivating a character in its members that uses both practical and theoretical reason. however, public support for religion has declined whereas higher education institutions, albeit questioned, has not. putnam and campbell; jones. 31. herbst 223; kimball 332; fitzpatrick. 32. steiner 6. 145 trepanier 33. harvard and duke are the latest universities to revisit their general education programs. flaherty. for more about the decline of the value of liberal education, see trepanier, why the humanities matter today ix–xvi. 34. voorhees; daugherty, davis, and miller; rasmussen, northrup, and colson. 35. cooper; fain. 36. for more about the criticisms of competency-based education, see fitzpatrick. 37. hart 3–5. the skills to be imparted to students by the general education programs are writing; critical, analytic, ethical, and quantitative reason; oral communication; civic engagement; intercultural and research skills; and information literacy; and the types of knowledge were classified as science, mathematics, humanities, global culture, sustainability, american history, technology, foreign languages, and the arts. ibid. 15. 38. ibid. 6–9. 39. ibid. 12–13. 40. for more about service-learning and civic formation, see trepanier, “a philosophy of prudence and the purpose of higher education today” 14. 41. for more about this problem and how sotl might ameliorate it, see trepanier, “the relevance of political philosophy and political science” and “sotl as a subfield for political science graduate programs.” 42. the stem paradigm is understandable and valued by the public because of the utilitarian benefits it brings to society. 43. taylor; schaefer. works cited angulo, a. j. diploma mills: how for-profit colleges stiffed students, taxpayers, and the american dream. baltimore: johns hopkins university press, 2016. the character model for the american university 146 apple, michael. “comparing neoliberal projects and inequality in education.” comparative education 37.4 (2001): 409–23. aristotle. nicomachean ethics. cambridge, ma: loeb classical library and harvard university press, 1990. barber, benjamin. the conquest of politics: liberal philosophy in democratic times. princeton: princeton university press, 1988. beiner, ronald. political judgment. chicago: university of 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mcmillan. lower ed: the troubling rise of for-profit colleges in the new economy. new york: the new press, 2017. 147 trepanier clynes, tom. “peter thiel thinks you should skip college, and he’ll even pay you for your troubles.” newsweek february 22, 2017. http://www.newsweek.com/2017/03/03/ peter-thiel-fellowship-college-higher-education-559261.html. daugherty, lindsay, van l. davis, and trey miller. competency-based education programs in texas: an innovative approach to higher education. santa monica, ca: rand corporation, 2015. fain, paul. “american public u’s new competency-based degrees do not rely on credithour standard.” inside higher ed march 16, 2016. https://www.insidehighered.com/ news/2017/03/16/american-public-us-new-competency-based-degrees-do-not-rely-credithour-standard. finkelstein, martin j., valerie martin conley, and jack h. schuster. the faculty factor: reassessing the american academy in a turbulent era. baltimore: johns hopkins university press, 2016. fitzpatrick, kirk. “the third era of liberal education.” in why the humanities matter today: in defense of liberal education. edited by lee trepanier. lanham, md: lexington books, 2013. 1–36. flaherty, colleen. “rethinking gen ed.” inside higher ed march 10, 2016. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/03/10/undergraduate-curricular-reformefforts-harvard-and-duke-suggest-theres-no-one-way. ginsberg, benjamin. the fall of faculty: the rise of the all-administrative university and why it matters. oxford: oxford university press, 2011. giroux, henry. “introduction: critical education or training: beyond the commodification of higher education.” in beyond the corporate university. edited by henry a. giroux and kostas myrsiades. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield, 2001. 1–11. _____. “neoliberalism, corporate culture, and the promise of higher education: the university as a democratic public sphere.” harvard educational review 72.4 (december 2002): 425–464. the character model for the american university 148 gould, eric. the university in a corporate culture. new haven: yale university press, 2003. gross, neil, and solon simmons. professors and their politics. baltimore: johns hopkins university press, 2014. hacker, andrew, and claudia dreifus. higher education? how colleges are wasting our money and failing our kids—and what we can do about it. new york: times books, 2010. hart research associates. recent trends in general education design, learning outcomes, and teaching approaches: key findings from a survey among administrators at aac&u member institutions. association of american colleges and universities. january 19, 2016. https://www.aacu.org/publications-research/publications/recent-trends-generaleducation-design-learning-outcomes-and. herbst, jurgen. “the yale report of 1828.” international journal of the classical tradition 11.2 (2004): 213–231. hentschke, guilbert c., vicente m. lechuga, and william g. tierney, eds. for-profit colleges and universities: their markets, regulations, performance, and place in higher education. sterling, va: stylus, 2010. hill, david, and ravi kumar. global neoliberalism and education and its consequences. new york: routledge, 2009. jones, robert p. the end of white protestant america. new york: simon & schuster, 2016. kaufman-osborn, timothy. “disenchanted professionals: the politics of faculty governance in the neoliberal academy.” perspectives on politics 15.1 (2017): 100–15. kimball, bruce. the liberal arts tradition: a documentary history. lanham, md: university press of america, 2010. king-white, ryan. sport and the neoliberal university: profit, politics, and pedagogy. new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press, 2018. 149 trepanier middleman, james h. the implausible dream: world-class universities and the repurposing of higher education. princeton: princeton university press, 2017. newfield, christopher. “the nation’s electoral divisions highlight questions about the role of public universities.” insider higher ed november 18, 2016. https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2016/11/08/nations-electoral-divisions-highlightquestions-about-role-public-universities. _____. the great mistake: how we wrecked public universities and how we can fix them. baltimore: johns hopkins university press, 2016. pew research center. is college worth it? college presidents, public access, value, quality and mission of higher education. may 16, 2011. http://assets.pewresearch.org/wpcontent/uploads/sites/3/2011/05/higher-ed-report.pdf. _____. “six key findings about going to college.” february 11, 2014. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/02/11/6-key-findings-about-going-tocollege/. _____. “five facts about student loans.” august 24, 2017. http://www.pewresearch.org/facttank/2017/08/24/5-facts-about-student-loans/. _____. “sharp partisan divisions in views of national institutions.” july 10, 2017. http://www.people-press.org/2017/07/10/sharp-partisan-divisions-in-views-of-nationalinstitutions/. powers, joshua b. “commercializing academic research: resource effects of performance of university technology transfer.” the journal of higher education 74.1 (2003): 26– 50. quintana, chris. “a polarized campus struggles to understand how racial tensions became national news.” the chronicle of higher education june 2, 2017. https://www.chronicle.com/article/a-polarized-campus-struggles/240260. rasmussen, karen, pamela northrup, and robin colson. handbook of research on competency-based education in university setting. hershey, pa: igi global, 2016. the character model for the american university 150 rawlings, hunter. “college is not a commodity. stop treating it like one.” washington post. june 9, 2015. https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/06/09/ college-is-not-a-commodity-stop-treating-it-like-one/?utm_term=.0c238b642c2f. riley, naomi schaefer. the faculty lounges, and other reasons, why you won’t get the college education you paid for. lanham, md: ivan r. dee, 2011. ross, tom. blackballed: the black and white politics of race on america’s campuses. new york: st. martin’s press, 2017. salkever, stephen g. finding the mean: theory and practice in aristotelian philosophy. princeton: princeton university press, 1990. scruton, roger. “the threat of free speech in the university.” modern age 59.3 (summer 2017): 7–16. selingo, jeffrey j. “higher ed as a commodity? colleges have only themselves to blame.” washington post june 16, 2015. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/ 2015/06/16/higher-ed-as-a-commodity-colleges-have-only-themselves-toblame/?utm_term=.9f00a87df402. putnam, robert, and david campbell. american grace: how religion divides and unites us. new york: simon & schuster, 2010. slater, tom. unsafe spaces: the crisis of free speech on campus. london: palgrave, 2016. srigley, ron. “dear parents: everything you need to know about your son’s and daughter’s university but don’t.” los angeles review of books december 9, 2015. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/dear-parents-everything-you-need-to-know-aboutyour-son-and-daughters-university-but-dont/#!. _____. “whose university is it anyway?” los angeles review of books february 22, 2018. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/whose-university-is-it-anyway/. steinberger, peter j. the concept of political judgment. chicago: university of chicago press, 1993. 151 trepanier steiner, elizabeth. “toward a conception of the role of the arts in liberal education.” studies in art education 26.1 (1984): 5–13. taylor, mark. crisis on campus: a bold plan for reforming our colleges and universities. new york: knopf, 2010. trepanier, lee. “a philosophy of prudence and the purpose of higher education today.” in the relevance of higher education. edited by timothy simpson. lexington books, 2013. 1–23. _____. why the humanities matter today: in defense of liberal education. lanham, md: lexington books, 2017. _____. “the relevance of political philosophy and political science.” in why the humanities matter today: in defense of liberal education. edited by lee trepanier. lexington books, 2017. 127–44. _____. “sotl as a subfield for political science graduate programs.” journal of political science education 13.2 (2017): 138–51. tuchman, gaye. wannabe u: inside the corporate university. chicago: university of chicago press, 2011. villasenor, john. “views among college students regarding the first amendment: results from a new survey.” brookings institute. september 18, 2017. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2017/09/18/views-among-college-studentsregarding-the-first-amendment-results-from-a-new-survey/. voorhees, richard. measuring what matters: competency-based learning models in higher education: new directions for institutional research. san francisco: jossey-bass, 2001. warner, marina. “why i quit.” london review of books september 11, 2014. https://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n17/marina-warner/diary. washburn, jennifer. university, inc.: the corporate corruption of higher education. new york: basic books, 2005. microsoft word 2 taliaferro.docx [expositions 12.2 (2018) 15–26] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376   less manifesto, more philosophy karen taliaferro arizona state university why should american philosophy departments assign non-western philosophers? there are at least two justifications for doing so. the first revolves around diversity: one might argue that assigning non-western philosophy can serve as an antidote to white privilege or as a necessary adjustment to changing demographics and an increasingly globalized world. another argument could begin from the nature of philosophy itself. partisans of this angle might suggest that the finitude of the human mind requires that we examine sources from not only across time but also across space and cultures. the love of wisdom, in other words, requires that we cast a wide literary and cultural net in order to attain our goal; truth is not the purview of one civilization or heritage. bryan w. van norden’s taking back philosophy: a multicultural manifesto primarily argues from the first angle, suggesting that the primary problems with those philosophers (as well as politicians) who close themselves off from non-western sources of wisdom are their presumed racism, chauvinism, and general closed-mindedness. at the same time, however, his book provides an exploration of such timeless questions as, what is philosophy? where can we seek wisdom? how do we read a tradition? in so doing, it suggests—albeit in a quieter way than his explicit “manifesto” against white privileged faculty lounges—that those who love wisdom must also look beyond their own city walls to find it. the book’s five relatively brief and eminently readable chapters detail van norden’s critiques of american universities’ nearly universal tendency to ignore or outright reject non-western philosophy as worthy of the moniker “philosophy,” thereby excluding such sources from their departmental course catalogues. but van norden also tackles what he sees as trends in contemporary public discourse—particularly right-wing political discourse—to denigrate multiculturalism (chapter 3, “trump’s philosophers”) as well as philosophical study and thought in general (chapter 4, “welders and philosophers”). out of these combined critiques emerges a vision for a truly globalized society and academy, one that heeds van norden’s call to “take less manifesto, more philosophy 16     inspiration” from the biblical narrative of jericho, in which the walls dividing two peoples miraculously fell down (108–109).1 of course, as anyone familiar with the book of joshua knows, the walls of jericho came tumbling down so that the israelites could defeat, not engage or befriend, the canaanites inside—and even that sort of meeting of civilizations required divine intervention. this is hardly a model for multiculturalism, and one wonders why van norden, who must certainly be aware of the joshua narrative, invoked it for a multicultural project. perhaps it is a subtle hint that van norden’s vision is less easily realized than one might hope, that perhaps walls do not come down so by education alone. indeed, in his attempt to tear down the walls that divide cultures, van norden himself retains and even fortifies walls that exist within american culture itself, as i discuss below. nor is this entirely unintentional, it would seem: van norden states outright that his work is intended to be “polemical” and “cheeky.” he admits to being “openly partisan” and deliberately prescinds from the level of formality characteristic of normal academic work “in the hope that [the book] will incite discussion and raise awareness” (xxiii–xxiv). this cheekiness does indeed incite, and the book delivers strong punches against critics who would disagree. but one is hard pressed to know exactly who these critics are. in other words, where exactly do we locate the xenophobic problem that van norden identifies? is it at the level of the academy, as his general criticisms of syllabi and hiring practices (chapter 1) seem to indicate? or is it restricted to the general public, to whom van norden seems to be addressing his cheeky tone and relaxed standards of argumentation? the answer to this question is not entirely clear. had van norden limited his audience to academic philosophers, his critique would have been damming indeed: as he points out, only six of the top fifty ph.d.-granting philosophy departments in the u.s. have at least one full-time faculty member who teaches chinese philosophy (2), and figures are hardly more promising for other non-anglo-european traditions. however, his treatment of non-western philosophy weaves in and out of the academy, sometimes entreating “fellow philosophers” to lend their ears (108) and sometimes addressing politics or public discourse in general (see the book’s the numerous discussions of the 2016 republican presidential primaries). for instance, chapter 1 spills a good portion of its ink responding to the comments section of van norden and jay garfield’s new york magazine article that argued for diversity in philosophy departments’ teaching repertoires. the comments certainly did reflect an 17 taliaferro   animus towards non-western philosophy (e.g., labeling van norden and garfield’s impetus “an ooshy gooshy need to pretend that all cultures are equally advanced”; another asks “does anyone want to fly in a plane built with non-western math?” (11–12)), but they in no way implicate actual academic philosophers or philosophy departments (except in those rare cases in which the commenting reader identified herself as an academic philosopher). likewise, “trump’s philosophers” and “welders and philosophers” (chapters 3 and 4, respectively) deal with mainstream partisan politics, whether in america or china, and only tangentially addresses the university at all, sometimes veering so far as not to seem relevant to the topic of the book. “trump’s philosophers,” for instance, includes discussions of the republican party’s track record on lgbt issues as well as elite universities’ legacy admissions practices (106–107), giving the appearance that the manifesto may be more political than philosophical—and thereby less relevant to academic philosophy departments. of course, there is the possibility that van norden aiming at both the academy and public discourse with one blow—and that he is doing so precisely because he sees a link between the two: namely, that public discourse is informed by elite academic culture. stating this outright, though, would have raised what may be the strongest obstacle for van norden’s thesis, namely, that while students should (absolutely!) be exposed to and take seriously the thought and philosophy of cultures not their own, there is still reason, in an american university, to favor western2 philosophy—the simple reason being that western philosophy is more salient in the roots of american life and consequently to the lives of american students. thus, if part of the task of a university is to educate students to function well as members of society, it seems reasonable that they be educated to function first (but not exclusively) well in their society.3 but here, van norden would likely disagree. he comes close to addressing this point in his comments on allan bloom’s the closing of the american mind, which called for an education grounded in a traditional liberal arts education largely informed by western texts. bloom wrote that “men must love and be loyal to their families and their peoples in order to preserve them” (103, citing bloom 37). van norden labels this belief “ethnocentrism” (103), and then accuses bloom of a “fundamental incoherence” when, in advocating reading the bible, bloom adds that one might substitute “a book of similar gravity” in order to supply the student’s mind with what it needs to assist her as a citizen. to van norden, this escape clause gives the lie to bloom’s westerncentric argument—what matters is not that we read the books that have informed our civilization, less manifesto, more philosophy 18     but that we read good books of any culture. “if reading the bible intently and seriously gives breadth and depth to one’s mind,” van norden asks, “why not also the mengzi? or the bhagavad gita? or chūshingura? there is more than one ‘great conversation’ in the world, and more than one way to furnish a soul” (105). van norden’s statement is certainly true, and i take no issue with it as such. but in the context of bloom’s book and the challenges it poses to van norden’s project, it misses the point. bloom suggested that a person must love first her family and her people in order to preserve them—not, importantly, that she remain ignorant of other families or peoples, nor that there might not be something more to life and civilization than preservation alone. rather than betraying the “ethnocentrism” of which van norden accuses bloom (103), i submit that bloom’s view simply acknowledges the embedded nature of human life. we are incapable of participating in the lives and cultures of distant peoples to the same extent that we participate in the lives of those around us—and efforts to pretend otherwise often end in violence of some sort. acknowledging this embeddedness in no way precludes engagement with other cultures; it simply aims to equip students and citizens to live in and serve their own communities well. as an illustration, an american mother may speak to her son exclusively in french in the hopes that he will grow up bilingual, yet be nevertheless more concerned that he learn english because that is the language of the culture and society in which he will (most likely) live the majority of his life. none of this requires that she consider english to be a superior language, nor america to be superior to france; she simply wants her child to be equipped to live in the world in which he lives and to understand its heritage without translation. van norden’s charge of ethnocentrism against bloom may seem like a small matter, but i think it is rather a telling indicator of his approach in this book—as well as an indicator of what i termed earlier “relaxed standards of argumentation.” laying aside jay garfield’s introduction (xiii), which labels an anonymous critic as emblematic of white privilege (without knowing this individual’s own ethnicity—nor, more importantly in my view, did garfield take on the critic’s actual charge), van norden suggests that all philosophy departments not teaching non-western philosophy are “ethnocentric” and challenges their “chauvinism” without bothering to demonstrate that their lack of non-western offerings are due to ethnocentrism or chauvinism rather than, say, a dearth of qualified scholars on the market.4 such labeling is irresponsible in the current political climate, in which explicit ethnocentrism and chauvinism have made significant gains in recent years; it is 19 taliaferro   important that actual chauvinism not be minimized by accusations against those who teach kant in place of krishna in their classrooms. but beyond the political implications, is van norden not concerned that his argument—viz., that american philosophy departments are largely chauvinist—is not backed by sufficient evidence (say, interview or survey data beyond the comment sections of a magazine)? if not—if this “manifesto” is intended only to “raise awareness” and “incite discussion” without leading to any particular conclusions—then it is unclear why we are talking about philosophy rather than politics, rhetoric, or even journalism. but if van norden is concerned about the standards of argumentation of his discipline, then the tendentiousness that appears at various points in this otherwise thought-provoking book is a problem. van norden’s invocation of the late justice antonin scalia’s dissent in obergefell v. hodges is exemplary. there, as van norden notes, scalia lampooned the majority opinion as “having descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of john marshall and joseph story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.”5 to van norden, this fortune cookie reference signals clear western centrism. why? because chief justice anthony kennedy had quoted two great thinkers of antiquity, confucius (551–479 bce) and cicero (106– 43 bce). “notice,” van norden advises the reader, “that scalia said nothing that could might be interpreted as an aspersion upon cicero; only confucius earned his contempt” (12–13). but of course, scalia mentioned nothing of either thinker; rather, he merely decried the legal reasoning of the court as equal to “the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.” upon closer examination of scalia’s dissent, the move from “fortune cookie” to “confucius” is even less justified, which would have been clear had van norden cited the entire footnote in which scalia’s alleged “contempt” against confucius appears: if, even as the price to be paid for a fifth vote, i ever joined an opinion for the court that began: “the constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity,” i would hide my head in a bag. the supreme court of the united states has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of john marshall and joseph story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie. less manifesto, more philosophy 20     the “mystical aphorism” referred to here is not the quotation from confucius but the rather what scalia considered “silly extravagances … of thought and expression” contained in the court’s official opinion. it is admittedly possible that somewhere in scalia’s mind, knowingly or unknowingly, it was really the confucius quote that had so stoked his ire (and van norden is not alone in assuming that it was). given the difference in substance between chief justice kennedy’s ratio legis and that of scalia, however, it seems more plausible—and certainly a more charitable reading of the late justice’s dissent—to assume that this was not the case. nor is it fitting of a philosopher, who certainly knows that correlation (kennedy refers to chinese thinker, scalia disparages allegedly chinese “fortune cookie” aphorisms) in no way equates to causation (therefore it is the chineseness of kennedy’s opinion that provoked scalia’s comment—and, furthermore, that scalia holds confucius in “contempt”). again, van norden is explicit about the partisan and polemic nature of this work, so in some respects this tendentious argumentation should not come as a surprise; he is not aiming for scholarly standards. still, i question the merit of this tactic for achieving the desired end, at least if we understand the ultimate end of writing a “multicultural manifesto” to be not merely provoking discussion for discussion’s sake but to change the minds of those who are not yet convinced that philosophy departments ought to teach non-anglo-european philosophy. in other words, my chief complaint with the “manifesto” aspect of this book is that it makes the overall project less likely to succeed. i should note that in my own case, van norden is preaching to the choir; i already incorporate non-anglo-european sources from my own area of study (islamic philosophy) as well as those i am less comfortable teaching, including confucianism and hinduism, into my syllabi. i also share most, if not all, of his objections to popular (and partisan) disdain for philosophy and confusion over its merits. even as such, i found the tone and direction of the book sufficiently offputting that i, a sympathetic reader, was more inclined to look for ways to disagree with van norden than ways to agree with him, which is hardly promising for the book’s potential to change minds of less sympathetic readers. in fairness, van norden does acknowledge that lack of awareness of non-western philosophy is not only a conservative problem (e.g., 13); still, his engagement with those with ideological and, to put a finer point on it, political, convictions that clash with his own rarely goes very deep. this is most evident in the opening chapter but borders on hypocriticism in chapter 3, “trump’s philosophers,” which purports to take to task all those who want to distinguish the west from the 21 taliaferro   rest (or between china and the rest, or between any one alleged civilization and any other): “they,” van norden writes, “are all in the business of building walls.” this is followed on the very next page by a criticism of president donald trump’s supporters for “separat[ing] ‘us’ from ‘them’” (86–87). while it is fair to criticize those who seek to divide civilizations, as this is the project of the book, van norden’s polemic itself tends towards divisiveness. the label “they” to capture a wide intellectual and political swatch of people, philosophers and not, is telling; one wonders whether it is helpful to lump an ardent supporter of the proposed physical wall between the u.s. and mexico together with a philosopher who wants to stress the importance of classical western sources in philosophy curriculum. likewise, later in chapter 3, van norden moves between terms like “contemporary conservatives” and “fundamentalist” homeschooling parents and free market enthusiasts without considering whether there might be important differences among these categories. this partisan, polemical tone of the book is a great shame, though, because beyond the “manifesto” aspect, van norden’s book is a fascinating read that serves as an excellent entrée into chinese and confucian philosophy for the lay person who, like myself, would like to incorporate more chinese thought into her syllabi but who lacks the expertise to conduct more than a cursory reading on her own. the book is at its strongest in the second chapter, “traditions in dialogue,” which demonstrates, through exegesis and analysis of well-chosen texts and topics, that chinese philosophy and western philosophy can be woven seamlessly together, whether in teaching or scholarship. most notable, perhaps, is van norden’s detailed exploration of the idea of weakness of will (akrasia). van norden draws from the neo-confucian text the great learning in showing how a distinction between “genuine knowledge” and “common knowledge” can inform the debate—present in the neo-confucian sources as in plato and aristotle—over whether weakness of will exists (see 72ff). this chapter deals a strong rebuke to van norden’s critics and other skeptics of non-western philosophy and thought; his comparisons of various aspects of chinese philosophy and politics with their analogues in the west betray a love of both in such a way that van norden could likely win over even the most anglophile of philosophers. the book leaves the reader wanting to revisit the analects with a fresh eye and certainly recommends his excellent list of less commonly taught philosophies on his website. chapter 2, then, achieves through enactment what van norden sets out to achieve through argumentation in the rest of the book, namely, to persuade the reader that non-western thought less manifesto, more philosophy 22     can be just as philosophical as western thought and therefore merits a place within the halls of western universities’ philosophy departments. but this raises a basic question behind van norden’s entire project, one he leaves unanswered: what is at stake in labeling a given figure a “philosopher” rather than a “thinker”? van norden seems to conflate definitional and qualitative distinctions; that is, he seems to take disputes over what philosophy is, or what types of activities fall into the category of philosophy, as disputes over what forms of thought and literature are good and worthwhile. for instance, he takes to task both heidegger and derrida for claiming that philosophy, properly speaking, is greek or european in origin; in derrida’s words, “china does not have any philosophy, only thought” (cited in van norden 25). this, to van norden, is equivalent to “condescending … talk of ‘noble savages.’” but is it really? if it is, then there must be something very special about philosophy that elevates it over all other forms of thought, or at least over those forms of thought that derrida and heidegger saw in china. this may be true—but it may not; one need only recall medieval disputes over the proper ordering of philosophy and prophecy (see, e.g., maimonides, aquinas, and al-ghazali) to see that this is not to be taken for granted. in any case, it would be helpful if van norden had explained what was at stake in specifically identifying (in this case) chinese “thought” as specifically “philosophy.” why, in other words, can’t we read both “philosophy” and other forms of “thought” and consider them both important? should we not read confucius and proverbs (and plato, and ibn rushd, and kant) because these texts and the ideas in them are in some important way texts and questions worthy of our attention—because they raise and address timeless questions about human nature, political life, existence, knowledge, etc.—rather than because they are “philosophy”? i anticipate two objections to my suggestion. first, one may point out, those texts that raise important questions about existence, knowledge, and politics are almost always categorized as philosophy. but surely this is not true. even restricting ourselves to prose, innumerable thinkers fall outside of philosophy as a discipline but address these exact issues. alexis de tocqueville, for instance, has never really been considered a philosopher (a sociologist, usually—but also a “travelwriter,” i have been told), yet his insights into democratic life rival those of any bona fide political philosopher. friedrich nietzsche, likewise, was a philologist whose works range from the aphoristic to the short story to the rant—hardly typical forms for philosophy—but his insights into the philosophy of language and its implications for both epistemology and ethics are beyond dispute. in other words, it seems that the fact of being philosophy is neither a necessary nor 23 taliaferro   sufficient condition for something to be worth reading. so why does it matter if we label confucius or plato or heidegger a philosopher or something else, so long as we read them? but this question leads directly into what would likely be van norden’s own rejoinder: calling confucius a “philosopher” is a prerequisite for his appearing on philosophy departments’ syllabi, and this, in turn, will inform the broader culture’s exposure to and understanding of the thought/wisdom/philosophy of non-western cultures. true. however, it would seem that doing so requires us to come up with a definition of philosophy, which is no easy feat. van norden does eventually proffer one such definition, though he rather curiously waits until the final chapter to do so. (curious, that is, because the primary argument of the book seems to be that non-western thought should be considered by philosophers to be philosophy—whatever that is.) and even then, he is careful to stress that his definition pertains to philosophy as we practice it today and is not a timeless definition. philosophy, then, is “dialogue about important unsolved problems” (142, emphasis van norden’s), where “unsolved” means a lack of agreement on method (143).6 van norden contrasts philosophy with other disciplines in which “there is (generally) agreement about what counts as reliable evidence, good arguments, and well-established conclusions” (143). philosophy, he implies, is prior to this. in other words, philosophy is a meta-discipline; we practice philosophy when we dispute those questions which we do not have shared criteria for answering. for instance, asking “what is the good life?” requires agreement over what constitutes “good” and “life,” both of which are themselves issues of contention. but does this definition work? two problems arise when we place it under the microscope. it would seem that philosophy, as a discipline, does have some shared notions of what constitutes a good argument and reliable evidence, at least to the extent that other non-empirical disciplines can be said to have such criteria. the basic rules of logic, including truth of premises and validity of reasoning, could be starters.7 even if one takes issue with these criteria, she would have to answer how there can be departments of philosophy with their own journals, graduate students, university press editors—the very disciplinary contours which, by taking aim at them, van norden implicitly accepts as existent. the second problem with van norden’s working definition of philosophy becomes clear when we operationalize it. if philosophy as such has no general agreement as to what counts as reliable evidence or good arguments, there is no immediate reason why either confucius or plato should be either included or excluded—and consequently the debate over whether something “counts” as less manifesto, more philosophy 24     philosophy is beside the point. again, by petitioning those within the philosophy guild to admit such worthy members as confucius and dai zhen (14), van norden thereby acknowledges that belonging to the guild means something; in other words, there must be some “agreement about what counts as reliable evidence, good arguments, and well-established conclusions” (143, above), after all. i suggest that we should read confucius (and al-ghazali, augustine, gandhi, du bois, et al.) not because their works qualify as philosophy, or because doing so helps us check our required diversity boxes, but because they write things worth reading. philosophy, whatever else it might be, should be at least the love of wisdom. if this serves as our guide, we have a globe’s worth of thinkers and writers to consider, and we are, i submit, least likely to be concerned about walls— whether building them to cordon off our own civilization from others or tearing them down prematurely in strained attempts to force assimilation where some measure of embedded, localized differences might better prevail. if, on the other hand, we read confucius and gandhi either because they “count” as philosophy in the same ways that kant and aristotle mysteriously “count,” or because we need our syllabi and library shelves to reflect a certain cosmopolitan diversity, then we will end by chasing ever-shifting goals, never sure that we have struck the right representational balance or avoided the sins of imperialism or cultural appropriation. this latter approach is also likely to prove a trojan horse, importing a new divisiveness inside its attempt to unite, for in order to ensure appropriate representation of the different origins of philosophers, one must create labels for them (“chinese philosophy” and “islamic philosophy,” for instance), labels that distract and reinforce notions of “us” and “them” even as their partisans—including van norden—may initially intend the exact opposite. overall, taking back philosophy provides a valuable exposition of the contribution, both in itself and in comparison, of non-western philosophy. van norden’s bilingual and bicultural expertise is in lamentably short supply in philosophy (and other) departments across the country, and students and scholars alike would benefit enormously from reading “traditions in dialogue” with him. unfortunately, because this book is heavy on the manifesto side and regrettably light on the very comparative work such scholars as van norden are uniquely fit to do, it seems that its impact will remain limited to “inciting discussion and raising awareness”—and likely ire, among some readers—rather than making a genuinely philosophical case for a topic worthy of philosophical treatment. 25 taliaferro   notes 1. see joshua 5–6. 2. i find this a fraught term but it carries sufficient cachet that i will adopt it here; the reader will likely be well acquainted with reasons why the term “western” falls apart upon closer scrutiny. the salient point is that one should be educated in those texts that have most strongly influenced her own civilization—a civilization that, in america, is still referred to as “the west.” 3. this does, it is true, disregard the case of foreign students who will leave the u.s. after their studies. still, a similar case could be made: if a student leaves his own country to study in another, it is presumably because there is ultimately something distinct about that country or its heritage that the student finds desirable and therefore worthy of study. 4. in the introduction (xii), garfield assures the reader that answers are forthcoming, in van norden’s book, to non-chauvinistic objections to teaching non-western philosophy, including lack of expertise in the relevant languages, or sufficient knowledge of the sources to judge the scholarship of job candidates who might be able to teach them. while garfield promises that van norden address these “carefully and in detail,” as far as i can tell van norden spends one paragraph (33–34) on “the pipeline problem,” noting that the society for asian and comparative philosophy has over 600 members, “there are enough strong scholars currently doing research that we could double the number of top institutions teaching asian philosophy overnight if there were the will to do so.” perhaps, but as anyone who has sat on a failed search committee knows, numbers alone do not guarantee a hire. 5. antonin scalia, dissenting opinion in obergefell v. hodges 576 us 8n22 (2015); https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/576/14-556/dissent5.html. 6. van norden eventually revises this to add that “‘importance’ ultimately gets its sense from the question of the way one should live” (151). 7. starters, that is, because i do not here wish to take up van norden’s (cheeky and polemical) claim that any “philosophy graduate student who casually threw around terms such as less manifesto, more philosophy 26     ‘logical reasoning’ and ‘empirical’ as if they were unambiguous and uncontroversial would be given a remedial reading list including the works of pierre duhem, gaston bachelard, thomas kuhn, jean-françois lyotard, paul feyerabend, michel foucault, w.v.o. quine, wilfrid sellars, donald davidson, and richard rorty, for starters” (13). microsoft word 4 article caspar final.docx [expositions 8.1 (2014) 145–167] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376  cicero and america timothy w. caspar hillsdale college at the time of the american founding, marcus tullius cicero (106–43 bc), the roman orator, statesman, and political philosopher, exerted a profound and important influence.1 cicero’s writings constituted a key part of the classical educational curriculum found in almost every grammar school, college, and university of the era, the aim of which “was the moulding [sic] of liberally educated youths through access to the contents of the classics.”2 higher education especially “became gradually a training ground for the application of aristotle, cicero, polybius, and other political scientists of old to the debates over the declaration and constitution.”3 leading americans, including many key figures of the american revolution, regularly consulted the classics, including cicero, for lessons applicable in their own day. it is true that a few founders came to doubt the utility of the classics for a modern, selfgoverning republic—most vocally benjamin rush, who emerged after the signing of the constitution as “the principal opponent of classical learning as useless knowledge for america.”4 yet, it is precisely this opposition that distinguishes rush as the exception rather than the rule. indeed, contrary to rush, “education in the first century of america, predominantly theological and classical, was mainly prized for its usefulness” in shaping the character of those who benefited from it.5 as the historian carl richard has noted, “the founders always endorsed classical education on utilitarian grounds, [and] they defined ‘utility’ in the broadest possible manner. in addition to the writing models, knowledge, and ideas which the classics furnished, the founders contended that they were an indispensable training in virtue.”6 in the end, the failed efforts of rush and others to “dethrone the age-old sovereignty of latin and greek” emphasized just how entrenched the classical curriculum was, which by 1800 in “the traditional grammar schools and the colleges remained virtually unchanged.”7 in a recent essay, historian daniel walker howe memorialized the ubiquity of the classics in early american life and education (while also lamenting the virtual absence of the classics in contemporary america, a “state of affairs [that] would come as a shock to the founders”). howe observed that the founders “believed that if a modern citizenry were to benefit from the lessons of history, its members had to know the history of greece and rome.”8 as meyer reinhold noted, rome in particular served as a model for the founders of the new nation: “it was preeminently the roman republic that was their exemplar, serving as a timeless model in which the civic virtues as well as corrupting vices stood out with classical clarity.”9 it was cicero, of course, who had long been celebrated as the greatest individual embodiment of those ancient roman civic virtues. what is more, given the deep sense of admiration that is on display in the writings of so many renaissance and enlightenment political thinkers—for whom cicero “of all ancients was possibly the most esteemed and influential,”10 and to whom the american founders cicero and america 146 also looked quite frequently for inspiration and guidance—it is no exaggeration to claim that cicero was one of the most influential figures in the american revolution of any age, ancient or modern.11 however, as howe noted, except for a few rare and notable exceptions, the classics in general and cicero in particular are hardly studied today, if they are even thought of at all. how is it that a political thinker formerly held in such high regard could in our time have fallen so low? by contrast, what was it about cicero’s political thought that the founders so much admired? even if we today are unable—whether for lack of will, or proper education, or both—to fathom the esteem in which cicero was held in those days, it seems it would behoove us to make the attempt, if for no other reason than that a better understanding of what it is we are rejecting should provide us with a firmer grasp of what we have embraced in its stead. in so doing, we may yet rediscover truths applicable in our own age. to that end, this article will offer an overview of cicero’s decisive impact on western political history, up to and including the america founding, followed by a consideration of cicero’s de officiis (on duties), one of three books—along with de re publica (on the republic) and de legibus (on the laws)—in which cicero explicitly treats his characteristic teaching or theme of the natural law.12 since de legibus and parts of de re publica were also known to the founders, this article will also include brief concluding comments on these two books. there are at least two reasons for a focus on de officiis in particular: first, the theoretical concept or idea of natural law considered in that book plays a decisive role in the american revolution, most notably in the declaration of independence and by extension the constitution. as richard gummere observes, the pre-revolutionary american colonists regarded as “fundamental” the ancient idea that “the law of nature [...] took precedence over any man-made legislation.” this idea “was the higher law, and it became the focus of all colonial appeals, culminating in the declaration of independence.”13 de officiis is an important source for our understanding of one of the key ideas at the heart of the american political tradition. the second and more practical reason is that, of cicero’s political-philosophical writings, de officiis, along with the tusculan disputations, “were the most widely read by early americans, either as a college text or in translation.”14 an examination of one of the texts that early americans themselves turned to most often to learn about the natural law, written by one of the most celebrated and revered classical authors of the day, should give us a clearer picture of what they thought they were doing in making a revolution in the name of that ancient doctrine. and this fact gives rise to a third reason: cicero writes in his own name in de officiis, which he presents as a letter to his son. this dramatic convention—a father who had achieved supreme political glory and been hailed as a savior of the roman republic, offering philosophical advice to a son about how to live a morally virtuous life—underscores the intended educative or character-shaping aspect of the work. in other words, not only does the book treat the idea of natural law in its theoretical dimension, it is meant to show the fundamental connection of that idea to moral virtue, and thereby to illustrate cicero’s belief in the unbreakable link between political theory and political practice. for cicero, as well as for the american founders, it is 147 caspar impossible to understand fully or completely the one apart from the other. de officiis has the effect, and purposely so, of shaping the souls or characters of those who read and take seriously its teaching. which is in fact what happened in america at the time of the revolution: the founders were steeped, or rather steeped themselves, in a ciceronian natural law tradition that simultaneously prepared them for republican self-government while also indicating to them the vital importance of educating future generations in what could properly be called the theory and the practice of the natural law. in this sense, cicero’s work offers us a view, admittedly through a roman window, into the soul—that is, the motivating principles or ideas as well as the habits or moral virtues—of those who founded the american regime. it is difficult for us today to appreciate the high regard in which previous ages held cicero. only a handful of contemporary scholars would be likely to echo the sentiments of the english classicist j. l. strachan-davidson, writing in 1894, just as cicero’s reputation was entering a steep decline: “if we were required to decide what ancient writings have most directly influenced the modern world, the award must probably go in favour [sic] of plutarch’s lives and of the philosophical works of cicero.”15 nevertheless, cicero’s voluminous writings—which include letters, speeches, and works of philosophy, politics, and rhetoric—and his ultimately doomed efforts to save the roman republic have captured the minds of numerous intellectual and political figures since his death at the hands of the second triumvirate in 43 bc. regarded as a serious philosopher, he was also seen as a model of the virtuous statesman and orator that he celebrated in his own writings.16 admiration for cicero has not, of course, been universal, though perhaps no dissenter of any age has been as severe as his contemporary political enemy mark antony: plutarch reports that antony, after having insisted on cicero’s assassination, ordered the head and hands of his tormentor fastened over the rostra in the roman forum, presumably as a visible warning to others who might be tempted to cross him. and yet by contrast, augustus caesar, also complicit in cicero’s murder though apparently only reluctantly, when he came upon his grandson trying in vain to hide one of cicero’s books that he had just been reading, said, “my child, this was a learned man, and a lover of his country.”17 notable among his early admirers are the roman rhetorician quintilian—“a devoted follower” who considered cicero to have been “both the roman demosthenes and the roman plato”—as well as the pagan writer macrobius, who wrote a commentary on the dream of scipio that would be influential in the middle ages.18 various fourth and fifth century “christian ciceros” felt his strong influence or even modeled their work on his, including minucius felix, cyprian, arnobius, lactantius, ambrose, jerome, and augustine.19 yet theirs was not an unqualified embrace: “a famous passage in st. jerome’s letters (xxii.30) tells how, in a grave illness, he seemed to himself to be taken before the heavenly judgment-seat and, on claiming to be a christian, to receive the answer, ‘mentiris: ciceronianus es non christianus. […] in consequence he foreswore, if but temporarily and ineffectually, the delights of the pagan authors.”20 indeed, this episode did not dissuade jerome, who “began his concentrated study of cicero after he had received his fateful warning.”21 cicero’s writings were less well-known in cicero and america 148 the middle ages—despite the fact that all of “cicero’s extant philosophical works survive in carolingian manuscripts.”22 particularly admired in the field of rhetoric, he was as “a rule” thought of—at least until the twelfth century—as a “philosophical recluse” and was “disguised as a monastic scholar.”23 later, “dante cites or alludes to cicero some fifty times, and almost always as a philosopher,” at one point describing him as “rome’s ‘best aristotelian.’”24 with the discovery of many of his writings in the fourteenth century—first and most importantly by petrarch, an early renaissance luminary who recovered the letters to atticus and several speeches, but also by such intrepid archaeologists of antiquity as poggio bracciolini, coluccio salutati, and boccaccio—and their subsequent publication and dissemination, cicero’s reputation and influence began to arc toward its zenith.25 it was in the renaissance that cicero assumed his “new place as a guide to life,” and came to be revered as a great statesman and philosopher who could serve as a virtuous model for imitation.26 indeed, renaissance humanists “were delighted to take cicero as their model, for as they came to see him, cicero had both preached and practiced the maxim that a good orator is a man of good character who employs his rhetorical resources in the public service.”27 and it was this new view of cicero that made such a deep and favorable impression on later enlightenment thinkers—such as jean bodin, hugo grotius, james harrington, john locke, voltaire, diderot, montesquieu, rousseau, adam smith, and david hume—whose appreciation for cicero seemed only to grow in intensity in comparison to their renaissance predecessors: “cicero the thinker in action remained the enlightenment’s ideal, the man who more than anyone else embodied the vita activa.”28 neal wood describes the eighteenth century as the “peak of cicero’s authority and prestige” and “a ciceronian century.” cicero himself was a “leading culture-hero of the age: revered as a great philosopher and superb stylist […] a courageous statesman and dedicated patriot, the ardent defender of liberty against tyranny.”29 a.e. douglas notes that over these 400 or so years, roughly from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries, “every educated man had studied something of cicero’s philosophical writings at school or university,” and as a result his “influence is past calculation or analysis.”30 which brings us to the american founders, who inherited what was by the time of the revolution a longstanding tradition of reverence for not only the classics in general but for cicero in particular as a philosopher, statesman, and orator, a tradition that resonated deeply with americans at all levels. as meyer reinhold wrote, “evidence abounds for an american cult of antiquity during the eighteenth century.” perhaps the most important aspect of this deep admiration—not to say worship—of the classics “was the tireless and purposeful reading by early americans of the classics as a repository of timeless models for guidance in republicanism and private and civic virtue.”31 the americans sought out examples not only of good republican ideas but good republican behavior that could be honored as well as imitated. although there were “numerous” such “classical role models” whose good character might serve as models for emulation in the young republic—e.g., cato or cincinnatus—“pride of place was given above all to cicero.”32 consider john adams, to take but one of many possible examples, who wrote, “as all the ages of the world have not produced a greater statesman and philosopher united than 149 caspar cicero, his authority should have great weight.”33 the americans, like so many of those who preceded them, were drawn to cicero because of his noble and heroic example—the great statesman offering principled resistance to tyranny in defense of republican government. but perhaps even more important for our purposes, cicero’s political philosophy provided them with an explanation and defense of the natural law—a doctrine or idea that lay at the heart of the american revolution and guided the subsequent attempts to found a republican form of government—and of the vital connection of that law to moral virtue and prudent statesmanship. a noted scholar of the political thought of the american founding, charles r. kesler, has written, “the language and logic of natural law run throughout the major documents and debates of the period.”34 meyer reinhold concurs: “indeed the classical doctrine of ius naturale enjoyed immense prestige in eighteenth-century america, as counter-claim overriding repugnant enactments of the crown and parliament.”35 as early as 1764, in the first major pamphlet to appear following the passage of the much despised stamp act, james otis argued that all men, including the king and parliament, were subject to a natural law that forbade the trampling of the natural rights of the colonists. otis was convinced that his brethren across the ocean would eventually see the error of their ways, and so counseled obedience in what he believed would prove to be the interim.36 eventually, of course, as it became clear there would be no admission of wrongdoing and the situation only continued to deteriorate, obedience to a higher law would trump obedience to the so-called british constitution or british civil law, and the result was the declaration of independence.37 it is here that the natural law makes its most obvious, but also most important, appearance: the declaration’s argument relies explicitly on “the laws of nature and of nature’s god” as its guiding principle.38 edward corwin, in his indispensable little book the “higher law” background of american constitutional law (1955), shows that the notion of natural law or a higher law, while it may have entered the american political tradition most directly or explicitly through the writings of john locke, has deep and important roots in the writings of cicero. corwin traces a continuity of thought, at least in terms of natural law or a higher law, from the ancients to the american founding.39 indeed, we can look to thomas jefferson himself, the principal author of the declaration, for confirmation of both the continuity and the ciceronian influence: when asked to cite the sources to which he looked when writing the document, jefferson pointed to “the elementary books of public right, as aristotle, cicero, locke, sidney, etc.”40 though he mentions two ancients and two moderns as his primary sources (never mind the rather pregnant “etc.”), what unites these authors in jefferson’s mind is their common concern for public right or the right of the public to have a say in who rules them. in other words, cicero’s political teaching about “public right”—whose characteristic feature, to repeat, is the natural law—constitutes one of the american founding’s essential classical roots. what does cicero have to say about natural law in de officiis?41 in the introduction to the work, cicero tells his young son marcus, who at the time was studying in athens with cratippus, the leading peripatetic philosopher of the day, that this kind of topic is “preeminently suitable to your age and my authority” (de officiis 1.4). but the work is not meant only for his son, rather it cicero and america 150 is “also directed at others, particularly young romans of the governing class.” cicero believed that his “philosophical teaching could have a beneficial effect, particularly on the young.”42 on the one hand, cicero addresses those aspiring gentlemen of any age who, like his son, must be taught that the purpose of philosophical study is to prepare oneself to serve the republic. as cicero notes, it is “contrary to duty to be drawn […] away from practical achievements” by a “devotion” to “the learning of truth.” instead, he says, “all the praise that belongs to virtue lies in action” (de officiis 1.18–19). this lesson was certainly not lost on the american founders, for whom the study of the classics was, as we have seen, of great value for its “usefulness” in shaping the kind of character necessary to perpetuate freedom and republican government.43 on the other hand, given the political crisis facing rome in cicero’s own day, it would not be surprising if cicero also means to address those who may have studied aristotle’s teaching regarding the great-souled or magnanimous man with peripatetic teachers like cratippus but drawn the wrong lesson. when aristotle writes in his nicomachean ethics that the great-souled man is “like a rule and measure of what is beautiful and pleasant,” he suggests or implies that such a man is above or beyond conventional law or the laws of the regime, and that he deserves the greatest kind of honor (ne 1113a29–36). this teaching could have the ill, if unintended, effect of encouraging men like caesar, who hold to a defective or perverted view of magnanimity, to sacrifice the common good for the sake of their personal quest for political glory. as cicero notes, “it is a hateful fact that loftiness and greatness of spirit all too easily give birth to willfulness and an excessive desire for preeminence. similarly, the more outstanding an individual is in greatness of spirit, the more he desires complete pre-eminence, or rather to be sole ruler.” and this “desire to surpass all others” leads one to sacrifice the demands of justice, to be willing to tear the political society apart in pursuit of this selfish ambition to rule without constraint (de officiis 1.64). cicero seeks to educate such men that to have a truly “brave and great spirit” one must first have “disdain for things external,” and secondly one should seek to aid the republic by doing “deeds which are great” and “above all beneficial” while also undertaking on its behalf “difficult and laborious tasks” that “endanger both life itself and much that concerns life” (de officiis 1.66). in other words, greatness of soul is achieved by putting the common good ahead of one’s personal ambitions, and this is true whether one has read aristotle on magnanimity or not. cicero wants to turn these men away from the immoderate pursuit of personal political glory—which can only lead to a competition for rule, the gradual destruction of superintending and moderating political institutions, and finally to the kind of tyranny that in fact occurred under caesar. rather, anyone who seeks pre-eminence will “devote himself entirely to the republic […] and will protect the whole in such a way that the interest of none is disregarded.” he will “adhere to justice and what is honorable” no matter what the personal cost may be (de officiis 1.86). cicero is not speaking here to the truly magnanimous or great-souled man as described by aristotle. indeed, he makes it clear at the beginning of the book that he speaks not to the man capable of “perfect” duties, but rather he speaks to those “medium” men who fall short of perfection, who seek to do their duty but may occasionally stumble or even be tempted to turn 151 caspar away from true virtue toward a beguiling but ultimately corrupting imitation of it (de officiis 1.8; 3.13–15).44 this is why he critiques the kind of defective magnanimity or pride that he sees so much in evidence in his own day, and he recommends in response that “men whom success has made unbridled and over-confident should be led into the training-ring of reason and learning,” there to have their overzealous pride broken and eventually harnessed by justice and moderation (de officiis 1.90). it is all too tempting, when blinded by the immoderate pursuit of glory, to deny that reason gives “commands” to human “impulse” (de officiis 1.101). but a proper understanding of human nature will reveal that this nature is in fact subject to a “law of nature,” a law that commands “obedience” and submission “to reason” (de officiis 1.102; cf. de re publica 3.33, de legibus 1.18 and 2.8). this lesson, too, would have resonated deeply in america at a time when the colonists had become convinced that the king and parliament were seeking a kind of political triumph or glory at the expense of the natural rights of the colonists. in response to this situation, the americans—taking their cue from cicero, as well as many others, as jefferson later noted—appealed to a natural law that, they believed, governed all human beings, even a sovereign king and his complicit parliament. it was because of his repeated and egregious violations of “the laws of nature and of nature’s god,” catalogued in the declaration of independence, that the signers of the declaration assailed king george iii as “barbarous” and therefore “totally unworthy” to be “the head of a civilized nation.” because the king displayed such a tyrannical “character,” he was declared “unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” in other words, it is only through obedience to the natural law that an individual or a political community may become civilized and come to possess the character appropriate to freedom and republican self-government rather than to the kind of tyranny and slavery so emblematic of barbarism in general and of this barbarian king in particular. conversely, if individuals or political communities are civilized and possessed of good character (and the argument of the declaration indicates the americans think of themselves as such), they will seek constantly to live up to the natural law and to obey it. indeed, obedience to this higher law may even require a people to disobey the civil or conventional law under which they live. or, to put it in the language of the declaration, “prudence” may “dictate” that “the right of the people to alter or to abolish” their government has now become a “duty” or obligation to the natural law “to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.” to engage justly in a revolution of this type, that is, in a revolution that is not simply willful or an act of force but rather an act commanded by the right reason that is natural law, requires not only a careful study of the natural law—that is, knowledge of principles or doctrine—but also habits of behavior that are consistent with and even demanded by those principles or that doctrine, habits that when properly and fully developed are nothing other than the moral virtues. given that cicero’s response to the kind of defective pride he seeks to tame and re-direct is to propose, in sum, that it obey the command of reason—in other words he seeks to moderate it—it is perhaps not surprising that the first explicit mention of the law of nature (lege naturae) occurs in the context of the discussion of the virtue of decorum or seemliness, cicero’s new or at least re-defined and expanded version of moderation, which he equates with the whole of virtue, what cicero and america 152 he calls honestum or the honorable (de officiis 1.102). cicero writes that the “essence” of decorum “cannot be separated from what is honorable: for what is seemly is honorable, and what is honorable is seemly” (de officiis 1.93) what this means is that every virtuous act—whatever the particular virtue of soul that is on display—necessarily also entails obedience to the natural law and a corresponding display of seemliness or decorum, that is, an outward manifestation of the moderation that is wrapped up with every virtue of soul. the fact that the natural law applies to all human beings causes cicero to emphasize the “medium” nature of his discussion, and of his audience (de officiis 1.8, 3.13–15). he writes, “therefore this seemliness of which i speak relates to the whole of honorableness; and it is related in such a way that is it not seen by esoteric reasoning (ut non recondita quadam ratione cernatur), but springs ready to view” (de officiis 1.95). the individual virtues may be separated from decorum in thought, as indeed they so often are by those philosophical speculators whom cicero very much means to chastise: those dogmatic philosophical sects of his own day, of which he was so often critical for spending all their time getting lost in “esoteric reasoning” at the expense of their duty to the roman republic. as walter nicgorski has written, cicero thought this kind of dogmatism—which necessarily leads to abstruse and apolitical philosophical inquiries—to be a serious “failing,” and he sought instead to speak to “all erudite readers.”45 but virtues that may be separable in theory turn out to be inseparable in everyday life, in life as lived by “medium” men in pursuit of medium virtue. one need not be capable of “perfect” (perfectum) duties, in other words, to be able to see and understand a display of healthy virtue, which by its very seemliness or decorousness will offer a kind of proof of its own inherent goodness. cicero’s teaching is in this sense anti-aristocratic and as such would likely have constituted another element of its appeal to the founders of the american republic: wise and magnanimous human beings—or those kings and aristocrats who pretend to be such—are not the only ones who can recognize, and hope to imitate, the virtues necessary for the success of a democratic republic. rather, cicero very much seeks to exhort good men who give “any indication of virtue,” who are not “perfect” and not “clearly wise,” and who possess not true virtue but “images of virtue” (simulacra virtutis), to live honorable or virtuous, lives (de officiis 1.46; 3.13–15). indeed, as publius noted in federalist 55, a virtuous populace is the sine qua non of republican self-government: “republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities [i.e., the moral virtues] in a higher degree than any other form.”46 now, it is true—and makes sense in a work devoted to knowing and doing one’s duties within the larger context of “public right”—that de officiis gives primary emphasis or pride of place to justice, which cicero calls “the most illustrious of the virtues” (virtutis est splendor maximus), and on account of which “men are called good” (viri boni) (de officiis 1.20; cf. 1.153–160). indeed, cicero says later in the work that justice is “the mistress and queen of virtues” (de officiis 3.28). what is more, it is only through adherence to justice that one might achieve true and lasting glory: greatness of soul that seeks personal advantage at the expense of the common good is “empty of justice,” and is therefore no virtue, but “a vice” and a “savagery which repels all humaneness (humanitatem)” (de officiis 1.62; cf. 1.63–65, 86, 92, 157; 2.31–43; de re 153 caspar publica 6.20–29). but de officiis as a whole is striking in its emphasis on the virtue of moderation or what cicero calls decorum, an aspect of the work that would have been particularly appealing to american colonists who thought the recent acts of the king represented the height of political immoderation. the declaration’s indirect suggestion that only god may hold all three powers of government, and its indictment of the king for attempting to do the same, is an accusation of the worst kind of immoderate pursuit of political glory—not to mention injustice—which could only eventuate in the destruction of consent by the governed and would necessarily culminate in the worst kind of tyranny.47 a natural law that emphasizes political moderation would then have been particularly well-received. not only has cicero told us that the “essence” of decorum “cannot be separated” from honestum, that is, from the entirety of virtue, in the same passage he elaborates on this virtue’s comprehensive nature by describing its various component parts: a sense of shame (verecundia), the appropriate embellishment or decoration of life (ornatus vitae), temperance (temperantia), modesty (modestia), a calming of perturbations or agitations in the soul (sedatio perturbationem animi), and due measure (modus) in all things (de officiis 1.93). in keeping with his aim of speaking to “medium” men, cicero does not speak precisely about moderation, but instead emphasizes its broad or all-encompassing character. along those lines, it should be noted that this approach constitutes a rejection of plato’s equation of the virtue of moderation with knowledge—which may be helpful for the philosopher but is not of much use for cicero’s “medium” man—but also goes beyond aristotle’s circumscribed definition of moderation as being concerned only with bodily pleasures.48 or perhaps it is better to say that these older definitions of moderation are incorporated within cicero’s broader understanding of decorum, a virtue which now becomes the primary virtue of the gentleman who is the explicit object of this book.49 decorum becomes the outward and necessary manifestation of any particular virtue of soul and whatever honorable act may follow from it. honorable actions, whether having to do with the proper use of reason and speech, justice, or courage, are by definition decorous or seemly actions as well (de officiis 1.94). the virtue of decorum is evidence of a life lived in accordance with nature, which “has imposed on us” our “role” (personam), which “greatly excels and surpasses that of other creatures” (de officiis 1.97). in fact, nature’s imposition takes two forms: “one is common, arising from the fact that we all have a share in reason and in the superiority by which we surpass the brute creatures.” cicero is here emphatic: “everything honorable and seemly is derived from this” (a qua omne honestum decorumque trahitur). employing the very reason that distinguishes us from the lower animals enables us to play our proper “role” and discern what is truly honorable. but we must also be mindful of differences between and among individual natures or “souls” (animis) (de officiis 1.107). though we should never act “contrary to universal nature,” we must always keep in mind and “follow our own nature, so that even if other pursuits should be weightier and better, we should measure our own by the rule (regula) of our own nature” (de officiis 1.110). universal nature or reason may suggest the best possible choice or action in a particular situation, but the “rule of our own nature” may force us to abandon the best in favor of cicero and america 154 the choice or action of which we are individually capable. such a choice is no less honorable for failing to be perfect, a teaching in line with the overall aim of de officiis, which is to produce a certain type of “gentleman” (liberali) who understands the difference between universal and particular natures and seeks to carry out his particular duty to nature as best he can in his own life (de officiis 1.96; cf. 1.8, 46; 3.13–15). in other words, the “role” that “nature” imposes on each of us is nothing other than our “duty” to do what our universal and individual natures, taken together, command in any given situation. this means that, in the case of a human nature that is “two-fold” (duplex), divided into reason and appetite, one part of that nature, reason, must “command,” and the other part, appetite, must “obey.” to live life in this way, where reason rules and each and every action we take can be explained by that reason, is “practically a definition of duty.” cicero had earlier said that nature “imposed” (imposuit) our proper roles upon us; now he makes nature’s imposition or command explicit: “the law of nature” demands that the appetites or passions obey reason (de officiis 1.100–102; cf. 1.97, 131–132). the natural law that governs all human beings in every age and in every nation makes its first explicit appearance in the context of cicero’s discussion of decorum or the seemly, the proper manifestation or outward appearance that honestum or the honorable must necessarily take. every human being, and every political community, thus has a duty to nature itself to submit the passions to reason, to obey a natural law that commands certain rules of decorum, in all areas of life. the natural law demands of all those who seek to display these virtues—not only moderation, but also wisdom, justice, and courage—that in their pursuit of honestum they never forget that an appropriate decorum is also required. the natural law first comes to sight as a teaching about political moderation. the fundamentally moderate aspect of the natural law would not have been lost on americans of the founding generation. neither would cicero’s conclusion in the third book of de officiis that the law of nature justifies the killing of a tyrant, an act that at first glance is striking for its seeming immoderation (de officiis 3.19, 32). how does the most reasonable of laws, the law of nature, lead to—indeed command—such a violent outcome? in the third and final book of de officiis, cicero’s subject is the resolution of apparent conflicts between the honorable (honestum—the subject of the first book) and the useful or beneficial (utile—the subject of the second book), a conflict that could only come about in the case of “medium” men in pursuit of their “second-rate” (secunda) duties, but never in the case of the wise man for whom such a conflict would not be possible (de officiis 3.15).50 to resolve such conflicts, cicero derives a corollary from the law of nature discussed above, which he calls in latin a formula. this formula, when applied to seeming conflicts between the useful and the honorable, will allow those who employ it to “pronounce judgment without error.” he is emphatic about the reliability of this formula: “if we follow this when comparing courses, we shall never fall away from duty (ab officio)” (de officiis 3.19). the application of this formula will show—inexorably if properly applied—that whatever is honorable is also useful, and whatever is truly useful will necessarily be honorable as well (de officiis 3.20). 155 caspar cicero’s definition and ensuing discussion of his formula emphasize the fact that it is derivative from the law of nature, which commands the impulses to follow reason. “now then: for one man to take something from another and to increase his own advantage (commodum) at the cost of another’s disadvantage (incommodo) is more contrary to nature than death, than poverty, than pain, and than anything else that may happen to his body or external possessions” (de officiis 3.21). in other words, to seek one’s own personal advantage at the expense of the political community would lead only to the destruction of “the common life and fellowship of men” (convictum humanum et societatem), which fellowship is “most of all in accordance with nature” (de officiis 3.21). the reason of nature itself (naturae ratio)—which cicero equates in this context with the “law of nations” (iure gentium) as well as the “divine and human law” (lex divina et humana)—therefore commands us never to harm another person for the sake of our own advantage, and those of us who seek to “live in accordance with nature” will obey this command (de officiis 3.23). indeed, “a man who is obedient to nature cannot harm another man” (de officiis 3.25). any human being who follows the dictates of his reason, or the law of nature, understands that to seek personal glory or advantage at the expense of the common good is contrary to human nature. it is to act in a way that is less than fully human. it is to act more like a beast—or, as in the case of king george iii, a barbarian—than a man. to put this lesson positively, nature itself commands “all men” to seek “one object,” which is that the “benefit (utilitas) of each individual and of all together should be the same” (de officiis 3.26). cicero’s formula measures utility or usefulness by a political standard: in terms of its relation to the entire regime. any act that is truly useful for the entire regime, as opposed to one part of that regime, may be considered honorable. when a “medium” man has cause to “doubt” whether a particular course of action that would be beneficial could also be considered honorable, cicero’s formula serves to reveal whether there is merely an apparent, or an actual, conflict. it is notable that the formula itself is in fact useful for the type of “medium” gentleman in actual regimes who must constantly resolve real or apparent conflicts between the honorable and the useful. this formula—like medium duties themselves—is “shared, and widely accessible” (de officiis 3.13–15, 18). if cicero’s formula aids us in the discovery of our duty, then “the law of nature” commands us to carry that duty out, which could include, depending on the circumstances, the duty to kill a tyrant (de officiis 3.27, 30, 31; cf. 1.102, 3.69, 72, 81). cicero suggests tyrannicide is one of those troubling cases in which there is “doubt” whether an act that is seemingly beneficial is also honorable. though the citizens suffering under the tyrant’s yoke may have no doubts about the honorableness of the action, nevertheless, it is not to be undertaken lightly, especially given the fact that the tyrant’s murderers will likely be those closest to him, his real or at least his pretended friends. but, at the end of the day, tyrannicide is an “example” of an act that is “generally and customarily considered to be dishonorable” but upon closer inspection “is found not to be so” (de officiis 3.19). why? because the tyrant has violated the most sacrosanct of the laws of nature that governs the political community: his political success embodies the most extreme violation of the natural law that commands us to seek what is useful or advantageous for cicero and america 156 the entire political community, and not just for ourselves. the tyrant triumphs at the expense of every other member of the regime, leading cicero to declare that “there can be no fellowship between us and tyrants—on the contrary there is complete estrangement” (de officiis 3.19). the community that existed between and among the tyrant and the other members of the society is, in effect, dissolved. indeed, if the citizens of the regime do not act to “amputate” this unhealthy “limb,” which flourishes at the expense of the remainder of the body politic, the body itself is in danger of dying. it is the tyrant’s immoderation that threatens the well-being of the regime; killing the tyrant would restore the moderate balance necessary to continued political life. from this point of view, tyrannicide—obeying the natural law rather than the civil law of the tyrant— aims at a restoration of the kind of political moderation that the natural law demands (de officiis 3.32). it should be noted that cicero speaks of the killing of a tyrant as an “example”—perhaps the starkest kind of example—“that can be more widely applied” (de officiis 3.19). regime change in the direction of the natural law does not necessarily imply the literal death of tyrannical rulers, only their political demise. but the natural law does justify their killing if they resist attempts to depose them and to restore “public right.” the american founders seem to have taken both lessons, or implications, of the natural law to heart. the declaration of independence accuses the king of england of barbarian acts that mark him out as a tyrant, which justifies the american people when they act “to dissolve the political bands which have connected them” with great britain and “to assume among the powers of the earth” a “separate and equal station.” the americans believe that “the laws of nature and of nature’s god entitle them” to this “station.” the natural law is the foundation or source of the “self-evident” truths that “all men are created equal” and “that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.” the king has violated that equality and trampled on those rights, and he is therefore in violation of natural law. in other words, the americans thought their claim was eminently just, and they had a right to separate to escape the tyranny under which they found themselves. they thought they had a right to effect peaceful regime change, in the somewhat innocuous language of the declaration, “to dissolve” the current political arrangement. however, they also made it clear that if the king wanted a fight, they believed the natural law imposed on them a “duty” to defend their rights, and to risk their “lives,” their “fortunes,” and their “sacred honor.” if it came to it, they thought themselves justified in killing the king or his soldiers, in defense of their freedom, which they ultimately saw as a defense of the natural law itself, and a defense of the most moderate kind of political order. cicero’s de officiis offers a kind of training manual in virtue for the young and ambitious members of any regime, who, if they take the book’s lessons to heart—lessons grounded firmly in the law of nature—will be educated in a manner consistent with the good of the whole regime, or with what jefferson called “public right.” cicero’s book on duties helps to clarify and deepen our understanding of the natural law doctrine utilized by the founders in making their revolution, while simultaneously establishing the indissoluble link between the natural law and the moral virtues. in that sense, de officiis is not only a theoretical work of political philosophy, it has the 157 caspar honorable and beneficial effect of fostering and encouraging the moral virtues in those who read it and take its teaching about natural law seriously. in the best case, latter-day students of cicero will be led to see that taking the law of nature seriously means doing one’s best to live up to that law by striving to exhibit all the virtues, and doing so with the kind of moderation or decorum that characterizes all true virtue. this individual or personal moderation or decorum may then serve as the basis for proper political moderation or decorum in the regime and its institutions. cicero completes this teaching about natural law and political moderation in de re publica and de legibus. the fragmentary text of de re publica that we have today would not have been known to the founders during the revolution. as john adams lamented in a letter to thomas jefferson, the loss of this work was “as much to be regretted as that of any production of antiquity.”51 however, they did know some fragments of the work that had been preserved in other sources. historian carl richard noted that james wilson cited his “idol” cicero “more often than any other author in his 1790 lectures to law students at the college of philadelphia (now the university of pennsylvania),” including an explicit quotation from de re publica: “true law is right reason, consonant with nature, spread through all people. it is constant and eternal; it summons to duty by its orders, it deters from crime by its prohibitions.”52 in keeping with the teaching of de officiis, natural law or the “true law” is nothing other than reason itself, giving correct commands to the appetites or passions. notably this law dispenses “orders” or commands (iubendo) which merely “summon” or call (vocet) us to do our “duty” (officium). likewise, this higher law only “deters” us from criminal violations of it through its “prohibitions,” but does not possess the ability to inflict what are commonly thought of as punishments. this means, as cicero goes on to explain, that only “good” people will obey this law’s commands and prohibitions, but the “wicked” are not moved by them. the natural law is thus a law for the gentleman of de officiis who cares about virtue and who seeks to live in a just regime. it is only this sort of person who will realize that he has violated the natural law, and will then find he is living “in exile from himself.” if the gentleman “scorns his nature” in this way, he will be acutely aware that he is paying “the greatest penalty,” or the gentleman’s penalty, which is his inner knowledge of wrongdoing. the natural law can only have an effect on the wicked insofar as it is incorporated into conventional law and given political teeth. thus, cicero in de re publica begins to sketch a model or “example” (exemplum) of the best and most practicable republic, to give an institutional home to the political moderation he celebrates in de officiis, by connecting the virtue of the gentleman to the virtue of the republic (de re publica 1.70, 2.66). most importantly, cicero’s best republic is a mixed republic, a mix of the three pure forms of regime—monarchy or the rule of one, aristocracy or the rule of a few, and democracy or the rule of the many—which cicero praises as most stable and most moderate precisely because it avoids the faults endemic to each pure form (de re publica 1.43–45, 54, 69). the character scipio is emphatic: nothing (nihil) is more moderate (moderatius) than this type of arrangement (de re publica 1.52). in other words, such a mixed regime hews most closely to the standard of decorum or political moderation demanded by natural law. though a mixed regime, it will be led primarily by the “authority” of the best men of the regime whose cicero and america 158 institutional home will be the senate (de re publica 1.57; cf. de legibus 3.28). the education prescribed in de officiis is meant to produce cicero’s “model statesman,” to use walter nicgorski’s phrase—or the rector rei publicae—who will seek to rule prudently in this senate on behalf of the people as a whole (de re publica 2.51).53 as j. g. f. powell has written, “the roman senatorial order ideally functions as a reservoir of good and prudent rectores rei publicae, or in plain english, of statesmen, any of whom can take the helm when required.”54 the centrality of the institution of the senate and the natural law statesmen who will populate it links the book on duties and the book on the republic with de legibus, in which cicero legislates the establishment of the institutional home of political moderation or decorum.55 cicero writes several times in de legibus that he is legislating for scipio’s mixed republic as described in de re publica (de legibus 1.20; 2.14, 23; 3.4, 12), legislation he grounds firmly in the same natural law that calls us to do our duty in our study and practice of the moral virtues, and then in the establishment of the mixed republic that both reflects and fosters those virtues. the foundation of cicero’s legislation is “highest reason, rooted in nature (ratio summa, insita in natura),” which commands or orders us to do those things “that ought to be done (quae facienda sunt),” while at the same time prohibiting “the opposite things (contraria)” (de legibus 1.18). reason, he writes later in the book, impels us to do right things and calls us away from wrong ones (de legibus 2.10). furthermore, in de legibus he emphasizes the crucial importance of honestum (what he had equated with decorum or the honorable in de officiis), which he mentions no less than 13 times in his discussion of the natural foundation of all just laws (de legibus 1.10, 32, 37, 41, 44 [2], 45 [2], 46 [2], 48, 54, 55). only if the senate is in fact a model of virtuous behavior (specimen) and free from vice (vitio)—only if it embodies the honestum and so also the decorum that is the aim of the education in de officiis and which is so characteristic of the aristocracy that rules or guides the regime of de re publica—will cicero’s natural law republic be possible. it is notable that no citizen may enter the senate except by popular approval, a stipulation that preserves the mixed character of the regime, but also demands a populace virtuous enough to approve only those qualified for the task. indeed, the bar is set quite high for the entire republic: as the character marcus notes in de legibus, the present speech (oratio) refers not to men of the present day but to those of the future (futuris), “if any of them will wish to obey these laws.” and they will only wish to do so if they are the recipients of “a certain education and training,” of the kind described especially in de officiis. cicero’s three-part teaching about politics suggests that the founding and perpetuation of the natural law republic will not be possible unless it is solidly grounded in moral virtue or honestum (de legibus 3.27–29). the american founders surely learned much from their study of de officiis—as well as de re publica and de legibus. perhaps no lesson was more important for them than the fact that an unchanging human nature serves as the source of an eternal or timeless natural law that commands us to do our duty both individually and on behalf of the political community. cicero sums up this duty in his concept of honestum or honorableness—right or appropriate action in every situation, no matter the virtue, or virtues, on display. the founders were likely to have 159 caspar seen in cicero’s view confirmation of their own view that human life takes place within fixed moral boundaries or limits that no one may rightly or justly cross. the attempt by the king of england to violate those limits, to disobey the law of nature, imposed on the founders a duty to defend that law, and in so doing to defend human nature itself. in our own time, it is no accident that cicero and the american founders are held in such low regard. beginning in the nineteenth century, german historians—especially theodor mommsen and his predecessor wilhelm drumann, whom one scholar dubbed cicero’s “most diabolical detractor”—working under the influence of the founder of historicism, georg wilhelm friedrich hegel, launched an attack against cicero from which he has yet to recover.56 for them, the hero of ancient rome was the world-historical figure of julius caesar. by contrast, they saw cicero the politician as a cowardly if eloquent defender of aristocratic privilege (i.e., of his own selfinterest) who failed to save the tottering roman republic, and they dismissed cicero the political thinker as unoriginal and an eclectic transmitter of mostly greek ideas. following the rise of historicism, cicero, and classical learning more generally, virtually disappeared from educational curricula in america in the twentieth century.57 only recently has the study of cicero begun to make a very slow and gradual recovery. likewise, the political thought and practices of the american founders came under heavy attack in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by politicians and political scientists who had also been heavily influenced by german historicism. leading figures such as woodrow wilson, theodore roosevelt, john dewey, herbert croly, frank goodnow, and many others attacked the founders’ principles as outdated and peculiar to their own age, which in turn served as a basis for rejecting the founders’ political practice, especially their ideas of separation of powers and limited government.58 the american founders understood, in no small part because of their reading of cicero, that “the natural law character of the constitution was essential to its remaining a limited constitution. natural law was the ground of the limited constitution.”59 the founders also understood that this same natural law commanded the practice of the moral virtues on the part of those citizens who live under a limited constitution. limited government and moral virtue are two sides of the same natural law coin. if we as a nation are ever to return to a limited constitution of the kind the founders established, we will have to rediscover the idea of natural law—and take seriously once again the moral virtues—upon which such a constitution is necessarily based. the task for proponents of a limited constitution is thus in one sense quite clear: they must engage in a type of political-philosophical archaeology, which if pursued with diligence and thoughtfulness will lead them back through many and varied sources, to be sure, and if pursued all the way to its very roots must lead them eventually to one of the greatest teachers of natural law, marcus tullius cicero. cicero and america 160 endnotes 1. richard 1994, 1–11, provides a concise overview of the “classical republican” school of historiography, which did much to focus the attention of scholars on the classical influences on the american founding, but which “seldom focused much attention upon individual ancients and their relationship to the founders’ thought.” richard laments that historians of this school “devote […] little attention to the founders’ classical reading.” 2. reinhold 1975a, 3–6, quote at 4–5; cf. richard 1994, 19–38. 3. gummere 1985 [1963], 69; cf. 66: “the record of the signers of the declaration of independence and the constitution, with their frequent invocation of classical testimony, reveals the close connection between their studies and their political activity. twentyseven men with college backgrounds out of fifty-six at the congress supported the declaration […] and twenty-three out of thirty-nine […] committed themselves to the constitution.” 4. reinhold 1975b, 126. 5. ibid., 108–109. 6. richard 1994, 37. 7. reinhold 1975b, 116, 125; cf. 128: much more typical of the founders is the reaction of john adams to rush’s attack, who wrote to thomas jefferson, “classics, in spite of our friend rush, i must think indispensable”; jefferson himself “retained an active and committed love of the classics to the end of his life.” see also adams 1856, 10: 105. richard 1994, 196–231, takes this question up at length, in a chapter titled, “the myth of classical decline.” 8. howe 2011, 31. 9. reinhold 1979, 225; cf. 233: the “paramount model for the founding fathers […] was the constitution of rome.” 10. wood 1988, 1–2. 11. see gay 1995 [1966], 259: “one obvious reason why the renaissance and the enlightenment seem, and are, so much alike is that both admired classical antiquity, 161 caspar especially ancient rome.” what is more, the “family resemblance” between these two eras “was confirmed by a common admiration for cicero.” 12. all in-text citations are from the works listed as follows: de officiis for on duties (cicero 1913); tusculan disputations for tusculan disputations (cicero 1927); de res publica for on the republic (cicero 1928); de legibus for on the laws (cicero 1928); de oratore for on the orator (cicero 1942). also, ne for nicomachean ethics (aristotle 1934); charmides for charmides (plato 1927); republic for republic (plato 2013). translations are my own. 13. gummere 1985 [1963], 97. 14. reinhold 1975a, 58. 15. strachan-davidson 1894, 369. 16. for summaries of cicero’s posthumous treatment—and mistreatment—see: douglas 1965, 157–166; lacey 1978, 170–176; mckeon 1950, 1–9, 19–20; rawson 1983, 299– 308; wood 1988, 1–13, includes numerous additional source references; cf. slaughter 1921; nicgorski 1978; douglas 1979 [1968]; and holton 1963. 17. plutarch 1992, 439, 441. cf. nicgorski 1978, 73–81, for a discussion of the “fabric of criticism” of cicero that stretches back to plutarch himself. 18. lacey 1978, 170. 19. mckeon 1950, 3–4. 20. douglas 1965, 157. 21. gay 1995, 219. 22. douglas 1965, 158. 23. ibid., 169n30; baron 1938, 79. 24. douglas 1965, 162. 25. gay 1995, 261–262, recounts the dramatic story of the re-discovery in various monastery libraries of several manuscripts, written by cicero and others, that had been lost or at cicero and america 162 least unknown for several centuries. bolgar 1977 [1954], 526–529, provides a table of translations of cicero’s works into vernacular languages prior to 1600. 26. douglas 1965, 163. 27. gay 1995, 261. 28. ibid., 192. 29. wood 1988, 3. 30. douglas 1965, 164. 31. reinhold 1975a, 2. 32. reinhold 1979, 229. 33. adams 1851, 295. 34. kesler 1996, 549; brennan 1992, 975, writes that “the founding generation almost universally accepted natural law.” 35. reinhold 1979, 226. 36. otis 1975 [1967], 28–33. 37. gummere 1985, 103, notes: “many ideas in the declaration of independence are anticipated by james otis.” 38. citations of the declaration of independence are in hillsdale college politics faculty 2012. 39. see, generally, corwin 1955, but especially 9–17. 40. ford 1904–05, 342–43. 41. kries 2008, especially 380–82, 391–93, suggests a close reading of de officiis reveals the work to be anti-stoic, contrary to the prevailing scholarly view; see, e.g., griffin and atkins 2008 [1991], xix–xxi. nicgorski 1984, especially 560, 569–571, and colish 1985, especially 151, also question the supposedly stoic nature of cicero’s natural law 163 caspar teaching. notably, koester 1968, especially 521–522, 527–530, demonstrates that there is virtually no evidence that the term “natural law” occurs in greek before cicero’s time; rather, the stoics spoke of a “reason of nature” that applied to the wise man alone. martens 2003, 13–30, does not dispute koester’s findings—cicero was in fact the first to use the term “lex naturae” on a “regular basis”—but he nevertheless wishes to claim a stoic origin for natural law, despite what he admits is scanty or even non-existent evidence. for further discussion of this question, see caspar 2011, 8–12. 42. griffin and atkins 2008 [1991], xvii–xviii. 43. reinhold 1975b, 108–109. 44. cf. de officiis 1.4: “a book about duties (de officiis) is not directed to a small group of philosophers or great-souled men but has “the widest application.” 45. nicgorski 1984, 571. cf. barlow 1987, 371–372; de re publica 1.2; de oratore 1.56– 57, 2.61; tusculan disputations 2.5–8. 46. rossiter 1999 [1961], 314. 47. kesler 1996, 555–556; jaffa 1978, 131–132. 48. plato, charmides 166e–167a; aristotle, ne 1117b23–1118b9. plato’s republic describes a more comprehensive virtue of moderation that stretches throughout all parts of soul and city, at 430d–432a, but even in this more political book the typically platonic equation of virtue and knowledge is not abandoned. 49. cf. tusculan disputations 3.16, where cicero says of sophrosune, the greek word for moderation: “i am accustomed to calling it temperantia, but also moderationem, and sometimes also modestiam.” as noted above, cicero refuses to be forced into narrow philosophical corners. 50. cf. de legibus 1.34: in a community of wise men, there are no “distinctions” or “differences” and “everything is equal.” 51. gummere 1985, 194, quoting adams 1856, 104. 52. richard 1994, 175; richard 2003, 189; wilson 2007, 523; cf. richard 2004, 88–89; de re publica 3.33. cicero and america 164 53. nicgorski 1991, 238–245. 54. powell 1994, 22, 27. 55. reinhold 1979, 226, writes that “the classical roots of the american appeal” to natural law “notably” included de legibus. 56. slaughter 1921, 123. 57. howe 2011, 36, notes that by 1900 only half of public high school students in the united states were taking latin, and “then began a long, gradual decline.” 58. see, e.g., pestritto 2005. 59. kesler 1996, 561. works cited adams, john. 1851. the works of john adams, second president of the united states: with a life of the author, notes and illustrations, by his grandson charles francis adams. volume 4. boston: charles c. little and james brown. adams, john. 1856. the works of john adams, second president of the united states: with a life of the author, notes and illustrations, by his grandson charles francis adams. volume 10. boston: charles c. little and james brown. aristotle. 1934. nicomachean ethics. cambridge, ma: loeb classical library and harvard university press. barlow, j. jackson. 1987. “the education of statesmen in cicero’s de republica.” polity 19: 353–74. baron, hans. 1938. “cicero and the roman civic spirit in the middle ages and the early renaissance.” bulletin of the john rylands library 22.1: 72–97. brennan, terry. 1992. “natural rights and the constitution: the original ‘original intent.’” harvard journal of law and public policy 15: 965–1029. 165 caspar caspar, timothy w. 2011. recovering the ancient view of founding: a commentary on cicero’s de legibus. lanham, md: lexington books. cicero. 1942. on the orator. cambridge, ma: loeb classical library and harvard university press. –––. 1913. on duties. cambridge, ma: loeb classical library and harvard university press. –––. 1927. tusculan disputations. cambridge, ma: loeb classical library and harvard university press. –––. 1928. on the republic. on the laws. cambridge, ma: loeb classical library and harvard university press. colish, marcia l. 1985. the stoic tradition from antiquity to the early middle ages, vol. 1: stoicism in classical latin literature. leiden: e. j. brill. corwin, edward s. 1955. the “higher law” background of american constitutional law. ithaca: cornell university press. douglas, a. e. 1965. “cicero the philosopher.” in cicero. edited by t. a. dorey. new york: basic books. douglas, a. e. 1979 [1968]. cicero. oxford: clarendon press. ford, paul leicester, ed. 1904–05. the works of thomas jefferson. “federal edition.” vol. 10. new york: g.p. putnam’s sons. gay, peter. 1995 [1966]. the enlightenment: an interpretation: the rise of modern paganism. new york: w. w. norton and co. griffin, m. t. and e. m. atkins. 2008 [1991]. “introduction.” in cicero, on duties. edited and translated by m.t. griffin and e.m. atkins, ix–xxviii. cambridge: cambridge university press. gummere, richard m. 1985 [1963]. the american colonial mind and the classical tradition. westport, ct: greenwood press. hillsdale college politics faculty, ed. 2012. “declaration of independence.” in the u.s. constitution: a reader, 5–9. hillsdale, mi: hillsdale college press. cicero and america 166 holton, james e. 1987 [1963]. “marcus tullius cicero.” in history of political philosophy, 3rd edition. edited by leo strauss and joseph cropsey, 130-150. chicago: the university of chicago press. howe, daniel walker. 2011. “classical education in america.” the wilson quarterly. 35.2: 31–36. jaffa, harry v. 1978. how to think about the american revolution. durham: carolina academic press. kesler, charles r. 1996. “natural law and a limited constitution.” southern california interdisciplinary law journal 4.3: 549–565. kries, douglas. 2003. “on the intention of cicero’s de officiis.” review of politics 65.4: 375–93. lacey, w. k. 1978. cicero and the end of the roman republic. london: hodder and stoughton. mckeon, richard. 1950. “introduction to the philosophy of cicero.” in marcus tullius cicero, brutus, on the nature of the gods, on divination, on duties. translated by hubert m. poteat, 1-21. chicago: the university of chicago press. nicgorski. walter. 1978. “cicero and the rebirth of political philosophy.” the political science reviewer 8:63–101. –––. 1984. “cicero’s paradoxes and his idea of utility.” political theory 12.4: 557–78. –––. 1991. “cicero’s focus: from the best regime to the model statesman.” political theory 19.2: 230–51. otis, james. 1975 [1967]. “the rights of the british colonies asserted and proved.” in colonies to nation 1763–1789: a documentary history of the american revolution. edited by jack p. greene, 28–33. new york: w. w. norton and company. pestritto, ronald j. 2005. woodrow wilson and the roots of modern liberalism. lanham, md: rowman and littlefield. plato. 1927. charmides, alcibiades 1 & 2, hipparchus, the lovers, theages, minos, epinomis. cambridge, ma: loeb classical library and harvard university press. 167 caspar –––. 2013. republic. cambridge, ma: loeb classical library and harvard university press. plutarch. 1992. lives of the noble grecians and romans. translated by john dryden. edited and revised by arthur hugh clough. new york: the modern library. powell, j. g. f. 1994. “the rector rei publicae of cicero’s de republica.” scripta classica israelica 13: 19–29. rawson, elizabeth. 1983. cicero: a portrait. london: bristol classical press. reinhold, meyer, ed. 1975a. the classick pages: classical reading of eighteenth-century americans. university park, pa: the pennsylvania state university. reinhold, meyer. 1975b. “the quest for ‘useful knowledge’ in eighteenth-century america.” proceedings of the american philosophical society 19.2 (april 16): 108–132. reinhold, meyer. 1979. “eighteenth-century american political thought.” in classical influences on western thought: a.d. 1650–1870. edited by r. r. bolgar, 223–246. cambridge: cambridge university press. richard, carl. 1994. the founders and the classics. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. rossiter, clinton, ed. 1999 [1961]. the federalist papers. with a new introduction and notes by charles r. kesler. new york: mentor books. slaughter, m. s. 1921. “cicero and his critics.” the classical journal 17.3: 120–131. strachan-davidson, j. l. 1894. cicero and the fall of the roman republic. london: g. p. putnam’s sons. wilson, james. 2007. the collected works of james wilson. edited by kermit l. hall and mark david hall. indianapolis: liberty fund. wood, neal. 1988. cicero’s social and political thought. berkeley: university of california press. microsoft word 7 mccarthy 12.1.docx [expositions 12.1 (2018) 80–102] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 the gospels draw us further: a just peace ethic eli s. mccarthy georgetown university would the catholic church benefit from focusing on a just peace moral framework? if so, how do we most effectively move toward this goal? in my response to these two questions, i will focus on three areas: 1) the purpose of the catholic nonviolence initiative; 2) a just peace moral framework and how it applies to a conflict case; and 3) key questions on mass atrocities and the just war ethic. purpose of the catholic nonviolence initiative (cni) in april 2016, the vatican’s pontifical council for justice and peace, members of the justice and peace commission of the global leaders of women and men religious institutes (uisg, usg), u.s. conferences of women and men religious leaders (lcwr, cmsm), pax christi international, and more than eighty-five representatives (including six bishops) from around the world were all part of a wonderful conference focused on gospel nonviolence and just peace.1 many participants came from contexts of violence and war—e.g., democratic republic of congo, uganda, south sudan, iraq, afghanistan, palestine, sri lanka, philippines, and colombia. our focus was on active nonviolence in order to help the catholic community develop a deeper understanding and commitment to nonviolence as the power of love in action; as the path to fuller truth;2 as a spirituality, way of life, and distinct virtue; and finally as an effective method and constructive force for transforming conflict, challenging all forms of violence, and protecting the vulnerable. we heard from catholic leaders, such as archbishop odama and francisco de roux, s.j., who negotiated with very violent armed actors such as the lord’s resistance army in uganda and the farc and paramilitaries in colombia. we also heard from sr. matty nazik from iraq who called us to stop the militarization of her country, to stop bombing, and to rely on nonviolent strategies.3 81 mccarthy mairead maguire, who is a nobel peace prize winner from ireland, and father de roux both spoke about how the just war mentality is getting in the way of developing nonviolent practices.4 in the end, we crafted an appeal to the catholic church that included asking pope francis to write an encyclical on nonviolence, to scale-up key nonviolent practices and education, to initiate a global conversation, to shift to a just peace ethic, and no longer to use or teach “just war” as a catholic approach.5 the cni website offers many resources, such as frequently asked questions, expert background papers, and a page to endorse the appeal as an individual or organization.6 other u.s. catholic ethicists, theologians, and thinkers who participated in the conference or endorsed the appeal include gerald schlabach, marie dennis, ken butigan, lisa sowle cahill, terry rynne, sister joan chittister, sister marianne farina, father john dear, david cochran, dan cosacchi, john sniegocki, and robert meager. in addition to u.s. leadership conferences of religious institutes, more than a hundred individual religious orders in the u.s. have endorsed the appeal.7 the national bishops’ conferences of japan and belgium also have endorsed the appeal. a just peace moral framework a just peace ethic is rooted in an understanding of creation as a sacred gift, the biblical notion of shalom that “justice and peace shall embrace” (psalm 85.10), the sermon on the mount, catholic social teaching, and the vocation to be missionary disciples. it reminds us that peace requires justice-making, but also that peacemaking is the way to true justice. as pope francis stated, “justice never comes from killing.”8 jesus modeled this approach. living under military occupation, he became vulnerable, cared for outcasts, loved and forgave enemies, challenged the religious, political, economic, and military powers of the day, and finally risked and offered his life on the cross to expose and transcend both injustice and violence.9 thus, this just peace approach is consistent with gospel nonviolence. and according to pope francis, “true discipleship must embrace jesus’ teaching about nonviolence.”10 the sermon on the mount diagnoses the traditional righteousness that is good as far as it goes but still gets us stuck in or even perpetuates vicious cycles. jesus thus proposes transforming initiatives, such as asserting our dignity and loving enemies.11 the beatitudes call each of us to a way of life that includes the virtue of active nonviolence.12 this virtue of active nonviolence realizes the goods of conciliatory love that draws enemies toward friendship and the truth of our ultimate unity and equal dignity.13 related virtues include mercy, compassion, empathy, humility, the gospels draw us further: a just peace ethic 82 hospitality, solidarity, courage, and justice. nonviolence specifies courage as suffering out of reverence for the dignity or sacred gift of others, without distorting our own dignity by possessing or killing others, and focuses on justice as restorative justice.14 against this background, pope francis called the sermon on the mount the “manual” for peacemaking and challenged political and religious leaders to apply the beatitudes in the exercise of their responsibilities.15 a just peace ethic also builds on the trajectory of contemporary popes’ teaching and statements. in the early 1960s, pope john xxiii wrote that “war is not a suitable way to restore rights.”16 paul vi linked peace and structural justice and said the “church cannot accept violence, especially the force of arms.”17 john paul ii said that “violence is evil, it violates our dignity, it is the enemy of justice,”18 and called us “not to follow those who train us in how to kill.”19 the compendium of social doctrine drew on john paul ii in its call to “reject definitively the idea that justice can be sought through recourse to war.”20 benedict xvi called “love of enemies the nucleus of the christian revolution”21 and said that it is “impossible to interpret jesus as violent.”22 pope francis focuses us on mercy. he has claimed that “the true force of the christian is truth and love, which means rejecting all violence, so faith and violence are incompatible,”23 “war is the negation of all rights and does grave harm to the environment,”24 and “war is never a necessity.”25 he told us “not to bomb or make war on isis”26 and claimed that “the door is always open to dialogue, even with isis.”27 more details about this trajectory, nuances, and lingering dilemmas around armed force in catholic social teaching can be found in lisa sowle cahill’s background paper to the 2016 conference.28 in addition, the world council of churches called for turning to a just peace approach in 2011,29 as did interfaith leaders in 2012.30 drawing on this trajectory and the work of other scholars like gerald schlabach, i propose a just peace ethic with three distinct, yet overlapping spheres: 1) the virtues and skills for engaging conflict constructively (jus in conflictionis); 2) practices and transforming initiatives to break cycles of violence (jus ex bellum); and 3) ongoing actions and policies to build more sustainable peace (jus ad pacem).31 in the first sphere, the key virtues of active nonviolence, mercy, compassion, empathy, humility, hospitality, solidarity, courage, and justice can help us to focus on developing the character 83 mccarthy necessary for the practices of a just peace ethic. with these virtues, we will be better motivated and prepared to imagine nonviolent ways to transform conflict and to choose and stand by those ways through difficult situations. virtues also help us to integrate or keep consistent means and ends: that is, to observe what jarem sawatsky calls the principle of reflexivity.32 as a virtue approach, this understanding of nonviolence goes beyond pacifism, which is often understood as a rule against violence.33 sphere two includes practices and transformative initiatives that entail both constructive peacebuilding and nonviolent resistance. for example, one set of guiding practices is nonviolent direct action, which includes creative nonviolent resistance to injustice, unarmed civilian protection, and nonviolent civilian-based defense. nonviolent resistance has worked against ruthless dictators, and research of 320 cases over the last hundred years has proven that nonviolent resistance has been over two times more effective in accomplishing political objectives than violent resistance, and even more at least ten times more likely to yield durable democracy.34 in large part, this is due to nonviolence’s humanizing each party, diminishing key sources of power, and getting broader, diverse participation.35 another set of transforming initiatives includes the goals of drawing adversaries toward partnership and addressing root causes of conflict.36 practices in this regard include acknowledging responsibility for harm; identifying the human needs of all actors; and independent initiatives to cultivate trust, heal trauma, and work toward restorative justice. an additional set of transforming initiatives focuses on significantly reducing weapons and the arms trade, toward what pope francis called “integral disarmament.”37 one particular practice worth elaboration is unarmed civilian protection. this practice is offered by about fifteen organizations such as nonviolent peaceforce, christian peacemaker teams, cure violence,38 and operation dove, which is a catholic organization. in south sudan, nonviolent peaceforce’s protection, which engages all armed actors, has reduced sexual assaults and rape by armed actors from regularity to zero in the areas np patrols and directly saved fourteen people from an armed militia attack. this attack was occurring in a u.n. protection site. as people were running and being shot, fourteen women and children rushed into a mud hut with two np officers. three different times, the armed militia came in demanding that the np officers leave, but each time they refused, saying they were unarmed and non-partisan. amazingly, the fourteen women and children survived the attack.39 the gospels draw us further: a just peace ethic 84 sphere three operates at all stages of conflict. normative guidelines to help build sustainable peace through policies and ongoing actions include cultivating healthy relationships and reconciliation, ensuring environmental justice, building a robust civil society and just governance, illuminating human dignity and ensuring human rights, fostering an economy with a focus on the marginalized and vulnerable, and finally outlawing war through the u.n. vatican ii made a profound statement that it was “our clear duty to strain every muscle as we work for the time when all war can be completely outlawed.”40 the key questions to ask in order to implement these norms of a just peace ethic are: what habits (virtues/vices) and skill-sets are needed to engage conflict constructively? what are the root causes of the conflict? what just peace practices and transforming initiatives hold promise to break cycles of violence? what actions and policies could help build sustainable peace?41 as we discern how to respond to these questions for specific contexts, the just peace ethic calls us to choose acts that enhance rather than obstruct the various norms in each of the three, overlapping spheres discussed above. by way of example, if we look at syria, a just peace approach would clarify the root causes of the conflict and suggest some of the following transformative initiatives:  being attentive to the virtue of active nonviolence calls us to humanize all parties. accordingly, we would exercise humanizing rhetoric towards all to defuse the violence and see more clearly the path toward just peace. further, in accord with participatory processes, we would focus on diplomacy that attempts to include all key stakeholders, both armed and unarmed.42  we would increase funding for local, nonviolent civil society organizations, particularly led by women. through these organizations, we would offer creative forms of trauma-healing and training in nonviolent civil resistance. for example, jesuit refugee services has offered trauma-healing that has prevented young men from joining the civil war.43 trauma-healing is vital not just for children, but for people directly involved in or connected to political negotiations, as well as those involved in armed action. examples of nonviolent resistance against isis include muslim leaders encircling a sacred site in mosul, which prevented isis from destroying it, and a muslim woman marching to isis headquarters for thirty day straight demanding release of political prisoners, which isis finally did.44 85 mccarthy  economic pressure would be applied on all armed actors fueling the flames of war, such as those buying oil from isis. rather than mostly ad hoc attempts, a more coordinated strategy would be developed for using credible messengers to entice defections from armed groups such as isis. further, significant reduction in the flow of arms would be promoted. we ought to note that ninety-two percent of civilians in syria who lived in isis territory opposed the u.s.-led bombing, and fifty-six percent opposed it in iraq.45 key questions and implications for the church in such violent situations, but particularly in mass atrocities, what might be the role of the church? to answer this question, we should recall that the mission of the church is to draw people to a loving relationship with god by illuminating god’s way in the person of jesus. this calls the church to be a sacrament of our ultimate unity as children of god and with all creation. hence, cardinal peter turkson has said that “all killing is fratricide,”46 or the killing of a close family member, and that no war is “morally good.”47 using a pastoral approach when a large-scale lethal threat is near and grave, what if the church —as the people of god—focused on active nonviolence by using a just peace ethic before, during, and after such events? further, what if the church advocated for nonviolent strategies for protection of those at risk and for transforming the conflict while also pointing to societies’ underinvestment in developing these strategies? if governments or the u.n. decides, based on international law, in favor of military action in situations where atrocities are being committed, the church’s role should be to insist that the answer is not war or killing, but protection and transformation.48 further, the church should name the atrocities and the violent response of military action as a tragedy, or as the world council of churches said “a failure and obstacle on the way of just peace,”49 and make clear that they are both inconsistent with human dignity and a culture of human rights for all. as pope john paul ii said, “violence is evil” and “violates our dignity.”50 the church does not need to and should not either provide explicit justification, or even signal legitimation for violent responses.51 when the level of dehumanization is so high, what is necessary is more creativity together with the willingness to risk one’s life, without killing, for the sake of the dignity of all people. in brief, the church’s role should be to keep a just peace ethic front and center. thus, the church would not be abandoning the gospels draw us further: a just peace ethic 86 the responsibility to protect. instead, it would be shifting the focus to how we might protect communities consistent with methods that better ensure sustainable transformation of the conflict. the just peace ethic would likely better enable us to protect all life, but even more so illuminate the sacred dignity of all persons and creation. now that i have explored what a just peace ethic looks like and how it might function for the catholic church, i can engage more directly and effectively the question about the future of the just war ethic as a catholic approach. in order to have clearer eyes in analyzing the just war ethic, i think it is crucial that we name just some of the costs of war today. nearly 66,000,000 people are displaced by war and violence, which comes out to one in every 113 people, with children making up half of all refugees.52 the syrian war has killed about 475,000 people, the iraq war more than 268,000, the afghanistan/pakistan war more than 160,000, the bombing of isis at least 9,000 civilians, and the war in yemen more than 10,000 civilians, plus one person every hour dying from cholera.53 the u.s. has spent over $5.6 trillion on war since 9/11.54 in addition, we have to reckon with the significant amount of indirect deaths, trauma, suicide, domestic violence, sexual assaults and rape, child soldiers, environmental damage, and blowback violence, such as isis attacks in numerous countries. in this reality, a just peace ethic likely would better enable us to transform conflict by addressing structural and cultural violence. by cultural violence, i mean those aspects of culture that can be used to justify or legitimate either direct or structural violence. examples include language, conflict habits, symbols, ideology, moral frameworks, media, racism, and sexism.55 the very language of “just war” too often functions, even if unintentionally, as a form of cultural violence that legitimates direct and structural violence. further, the just peace ethic also poses less risk of abuse than the just war ethic does, which has mostly functioned to justify or enable war. 56 this has too often occurred in the political arena, despite catholic leadership’s drawing, at times, on a restrictive account of what constitutes just war. the issue here is more about the concept of war as morally justifiable and all that flows from it and less about versions of a just war ethic.57 the crucial point is that the just war approach has not adequately fulfilled the intended effect to prevent and limit war. recently, u.s. bishop robert mcelroy claimed that just war principles have “become only a little bit less than a green light” for war, and that the church must “recognize the increasing incapacity of the just war tradition to be an effective constraint on warfare in the modern age.”58 it is true that all moral frameworks are 87 mccarthy susceptible to abuse; however, with the just war ethic, we not only have strong evidence of consistent abuse over the last sixteen hundred years, but enormous and horrendous consequences from such abuse.59 even wars that appear “just” to some based on just war criteria still inevitably get us stuck in vicious cycles of violence, as we saw with wwii leading to the cold war and numerous proxy wars, such as korea, vietnam, and afghanistan in the 1980s. that war in afghanistan yielded the resentment and conditions that gave birth to al-qaeda, the blowback of 9/11, the ongoing war of seventeen years in afghanistan, the growth and spread of al-qaeda, the misguided frenzy to attack iraq in 2003, and the eventual morphing of much of al-qaeda into isis.60 breaking these vicious cycles is precisely a key focus of the just peace ethic. some argue that, even if the ad bellum criteria have been mostly abused, the in bello criteria have proven useful to limiting killing in wars. the in bello criteria may have restrained some actors in militaries as well as contributed to the development of international law, and this of course is a good thing. however, the gains achieved by limiting some violence in war are still outweighed by the rampant abuse of the in bello criteria, the legitimation of war, and the overall immense suffering caused by ongoing wars. for example, wwii had about seven times more civilian deaths than wwi as well as two to three times more civilians killed than military persons.61 in the early 1900s, about ten percent of deaths in war were civilians; since 2000, about eighty-seven percent have been civilians.62 these numbers do not even include indirect deaths of civilians—about three to fifteen times more than direct deaths—from lack of clean water, sewage, electricity, and medical supplies.63 meanwhile, proportionality as used in a just war framework is ambiguous and vague, and thus too often easily abused.64 it is also arguably inconsistent with the orientation of christian scripture.65 further, relying on these criteria, as well as expending energy on enhancing and refining them, likely will distract us from the church’s explicit call to “strain every muscle” to “outlaw war.” in contrast, the just peace ethic could function to limit war (and strengthen international law) as the in bello norms intend, but likely more effectively, more broadly, and more sustainably, while supporting the movement to outlaw war. some have responded to the limitations and abuses of the ad bellum and in bello by articulating post bellum and even ante bellum criteria.66 i would argue that some of the concepts and values inherent in these developments could be integrated into the just peace ethic, rather than embellishing the just war framework and possibly justifying war. likewise, lisa sowle cahill the gospels draw us further: a just peace ethic 88 describes such developments, “combined with the continued scourge” of war and violence, as ultimately opening “the door to ‘just peace’ as a more adequate way to respond to military and societal violence than the application of just war theory, both from a christian and from a political or humanistic standpoint.”67 another advantage of the just peace ethic is that it is less likely to cultivate the structural violence that is perpetuated by massive preparations for war. these preparations divert and consume massive resources. the u.s. spends over $600 billion a year on the pentagon, a sum that is going up, and only $50 billion a year on the department of state, which is getting cut along with both domestic and international poverty programs. consider as well the development of increasingly destructive and autonomous weapons, the arms trade, and a war system increasingly embedded in our economy and politics. the just peace ethic will better help all of us, but particularly catholics, to imagine, develop, and commit to nonviolent practices. thus, it will better form us as peacemakers. gerald schlabach argues that “just-war theory cannot be counted as useful if it only works consistently among specialists, and not to mobilize stringent scrutiny of warfare in pews and populace.” just-war theorists, he goes on, “must […] recognize the theory’s failure to help the people of god scrutinize and resist unjust war.”68 some just war supporters will argue that we just need better formation programs. that may help a bit. however, if the just war ethic has been the primary moral framework for the catholic church over the last sixteen hundred years and we still haven’t figured out effective formation methods, it seems eminently reasonable if not urgent to seriously consider another moral framework. not only has the just war ethic largely failed to form us as peacemakers, but the ongoing legitimation of it by the catholic church at least distracts from or even obstructs the development and commitment to nonviolent practices. for example, we spend little if any time trying to imagine how to humanize or illuminate the dignity of our enemies, which is not only a gospel mandate but an essential step in overcoming mass violence. when pope francis said not to “bomb or make war” on isis, most u.s. catholic press and many political and religious leaders discerned some openness to some military action. the catholic community would have better faced the call not to “bomb or make war” by seeking to identify creative nonviolent responses.69 a just peace ethic better avoids such distraction and obstruction because it is more clearly consistent with jesus’ call to love the way he loved us. with a clearer grounding in the scriptures, 89 mccarthy this ethic helps us to see jesus’ concrete way of nonviolence, to put on the “mind of christ,”70 and to become nonviolent peacemakers in our daily lives. it calls for love of friends and enemies in concrete, visible, and comprehensible ways, not merely by way of good intentions or emotions.71 thus, we are drawn to creative nonviolent responses rather than killing enemies, because they too remain our neighbors and have sacred dignity. cahill puts it more bluntly: “killing is patently incompatible with love of neighbor and the example of jesus.”72 others might argue that we need to prioritize the most vulnerable in conflict situations, which may entail choosing to kill the aggressive party. i would respond that, while we may take greater risks for those who are most vulnerable, we recognize that the sacred dignity or “that of god” in every party involved is honored and illuminated by relying on creative nonviolent risks.73 overall, a just peace ethic is more likely to prevent, limit, and move us toward outlawing war.74 thus, it may better fill the space pope francis named as the church’s “efforts to limit the use of force by the application of moral norms.”75 further, it also better transforms conflict, breaks cycles of violence, builds more sustainable peace, and is more clearly consistent with jesus’ call to love the way he loved us. in light of these significant advantages and the urgent needs in our society for creative nonviolent transformation of conflict, my argument is that the catholic church should at least shift its focus and primary moral framework to a just peace ethic. this corresponds with lisa sowle cahill’s argument that “just peace, not just war, should be the distinguishing mark and calling of the global catholic church.”76 bishop mcelroy goes a little further in saying “we need conversion from the logic of war to the logic of peace.”77 in this process of shifting or conversion, i suspect that we will discover that the just war ethic at a minimum distracts and too often obstructs us from more fully living the nonviolent ways of a just peace ethic. more important, it also appears to distract and obstruct the catholic church from more fully living its mission to illuminate and draw people to loving relationship with jesus, the merciful one of god. in turn, i suspect we will soon discover the need for the catholic church to let go of the just war ethic as a catholic approach. if the catholic church lets go of the just war ethic, then the norms from the just war tradition would still remain in international law at least in the near-term. however, catholics would be invited and challenged to focus on a just peace ethic in our education, mobilization, investments, and advocacy.78 this would help the global community and political decision-makers to move toward scaling up nonviolent initiatives and abolishing war.79 the gospels draw us further: a just peace ethic 90 conclusion i will end with two instructive and hopefully inspiring quotations from leaders of very different institutions. u.s. general douglas macarthur fought in wwi, wwii, and the korean war. after these experiences, he realized “you cannot control war; you can only abolish it […]. those who lack the enterprise, vision, and courage to try a new approach when none others have succeeded, fail completely the simple test of leadership.”80 more recently, pope francis proclaimed, “in the silence of the cross, the uproar of weapons ceases and the language of peace is spoken.”81 into this holy silence, i pray that the catholic church might better embody the courageous nonviolent creativity of the gospels by shifting to a just peace ethic. notes 1. “about the nonviolence and just peace conference,” https://nonviolencejustpeace.net/about/. 2. this characteristic is based on the recognition that each person has a piece of the truth to offer. gandhi used the term satyagraha, meaning “clinging to truth,” to describe his nonviolent movement. thus, if we kill others, we make it more difficult to see the fuller truth. 3. see rose marie berger, “game changer,” in sojourners, december 2016, 17–23, on sister nazik’s contribution to the conference. as berger quotes her: “which of the wars we have been in is a just war? in my country, there was no just war. war is the mother of ignorance, isolation, and poverty. please tell the world there is no such thing as a just war. i say this as a daughter of war. we can’t respond to violence with worse violence. in order to kill five violent men, we have to create ten violent men to kill them. this encourages the spiral of violence up and up. and the people are so exhausted because they don’t know what’s happening. it’s like a dragon with seven heads. you cut one and two others come up [...] [so] we try to create an environment of nonviolence.” 4. see videos from the conference at https://nonviolencejustpeace.net/videos-nonviolenceconference-fishbowl-sessions/. 91 mccarthy 5. the specific nonviolent practices identified were nonviolent resistance, restorative justice, trauma-healing, unarmed civilian protection, conflict transformation, and peacebuilding strategies. see “an appeal to the catholic church to re-commit to the centrality of gospel nonviolence,” april 13, 2016, https://nonviolencejustpeace.net/final-statement-an-appealto-the-catholic-church-to-re-commit-to-the-centrality-of-gospel-nonviolence/. 6. catholic nonviolence initiative, www.nonviolencejustpeace.net. 7. “organizational and individual endorsements of the appeal,” https://nonviolencejustpeace.net/organizational-and-individual-endorsements-of-theappeal/. 8. pope francis, “no matter what the crime,” catholic news agency, march 20, 2015, https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/pope-francis-no-matter-what-the-crime-thedeath-penalty-is-inadmissible-89127. 9. luke 6:20, matthew 5:21–26, 25: 31–46; mark 1.40–45, 8:34–38; john 18: 36–38. also see glen stassen and david gushee, kingdom ethics: following jesus in contemporary context (downers grove, il: intervarsity press, 2003); dan harrington, historical dictionary of jesus (plymouth, uk: scarecrow press, 2010), 7; n.t. wright, “kingdom come: public meaning of the gospels,” christian century, june 17, 2008, https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2008-06/kingdom-come; and walter wink, “beyond just war and pacifism: jesus’ nonviolent way,” review and expositer 89/2 (1992): 197–214. for more explanation of these claims about jesus, see eli s. mccarthy, becoming nonviolent peacemakers: a virtue ethic for catholic social teaching and u.s. policy (eugene, or: wipf and stock, 2012). 10. pope francis, “nonviolence: a style of politics,” world day of peace message, january 1, 2017, https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/peace/documents/papafrancesco_20161208_messaggio-l-giornata-mondiale-pace-2017.html. 11. glen stassen, “the fourteen triads of the sermon on the mount (matthew 5.21–7.12),” journal of biblical literature 122/2 (2003): 267–308. consider, for example, mt 5:38–42: an eye for an eye gets us stuck in a vicious cycle of retaliation or violence, so we need to the gospels draw us further: a just peace ethic 92 assert our dignity, i.e., turn the other cheek, to throw the oppressor off balance and initiate a nonviolent social movement. 12. pope francis signals this sense of nonviolence as a virtue by calling us “to cultivate nonviolence in our most personal thoughts and values” and “daily gestures.” see his “nonviolence: a style of politics.” 13. see further mccarthy, becoming nonviolent peacemakers. 14. see christopher marshall, beyond retribution: a new testament vision for justice, crime, and punishment (grand rapids, mi: eerdmans, 2001), and howard zehr, the little book of restorative justice (intercourse, pa: good books, 2002). 15. pope francis, “nonviolence: a style of politics.” 16. pope john xxiii, pacem in terris, april 11, 1963, §127, http://w2.vatican.va/content/ johnxxiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_j-xxiii_enc_11041963_pacem.html. 17. pope paul vi, “on evangelization in the modern world,” 1975, §37, http://w2.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/apost_exhortations/documents/hf_pvi_exh_19751208_evangelii-nuntiandi.html. 18. pontifical council for justice and peace, compendium of social doctrine of the church (2004), §496, http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/justpeace/documents/rc_pc_justp eace_doc_20060526_compendio-dott-soc_en.html. 19. pope john paul ii, homily at drogheda, ireland, sept. 29, 1979, https:// w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/homilies/1979/documents/hf_jp-ii_hom_19790929 _irlanda-dublino-drogheda.html. yet, in 1993 he did affirm the international “duty to disarm the aggressor” in situations where populations face unjust aggressors. see his “address to the diplomatic corps,” january 16, 1993, §13, https:// w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/speeches/1993/january/documents/hf_jp-ii_spe_ 19930116_corpo-diplomatico.html. how the aggressor is disarmed becomes the challenge to be worked out. 93 mccarthy 20. pontifical council for justice and peace, compendium of social doctrine of the church (2004), §438. cf. pope john paul ii, centesimus annus, 23: aas 83 (1991), 820–821. 21. pope benedict xvi, midday angelus, february 18, 2007, https://w2. vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/angelus/2007/documents/hf_ben-xvi_ang_20070218. html. 22. pope benedict xvi, angelus, march 11, 2012. benedict acknowledges the emerging principle of responsibility to protect, but calls for it to be implemented in “innovative ways.” see his caritas in veritate (“on integral development in charity and truth”), 2009, §67, http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_benxvi_enc_20090629_caritas-in-veritate.html and his “address to the general assembly of the united nations,” new york, april 18, 2008, http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedictxvi/en/speeches/2008/april/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20080418_un-visit.html. 23. pope francis, angelus, august 19, 2013, https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/angelus/2013/documents/papafrancesco_angelus_20130818.html. 24. pope francis, laudato si’, §56, http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papafrancesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html, and speech at the united nations, september 25, 2015, http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2015/september/documents/papafrancesco_20150925_onu-visita.html. 25. pope francis, message to sant’ egidio, zenit, september 8, 2014, https://zenit.org/articles/pope-francis-message-to-sant-egidio-international-peacemeeting-in-antwerp/. 26. francis rocca, “pope francis: i would visit iraq to help stop the violence,” catholic herald, august 19, 2014, http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2014/08/19/pope-francisi-would-to-iraq-to-help-stop-violence/. the gospels draw us further: a just peace ethic 94 27. stoyan zaimov, “pope francis says door of dialogue should never close,” christian post, november 26, 2014, https://www.christianpost.com/news/pope-francis-says-doorof-dialogue-with-isis-should-never-close-warns-fighting-terrorism-leads-to-deaths-ofinnocents-130277/. 28. lisa sowle cahill, “official catholic social thought on gospel nonviolence,” april, 2016, https://nonviolencejustpeace.net/framing-papers/. 29. world council of churches, “ecumenical call to just peace,” 2011, http://www.overcomingviolence.org/fileadmin/dov/files/iepc/resources/ecjustpeace_eng lish.pdf 30. see susan thistlethwaite, ed., interfaith just peacemaking (new york: palgrave macmillan, 2012). 31. gerald schlabach uses the categories of jus in conflictionis, jus ex bellum, and jus ad pacem. 32. jarem sawatsky, justpeace ethics: a guide to restorative justice and peacebuilding (eugene, or: wipf and stock, 2008), 12–13. 33. further, this sphere would include sustaining spiritual disciplines, such as fasting, meditation, and prayer, including a eucharistic prayer that explicitly names jesus’ love of enemies and rejection of violence. see rev. emmanuel mccarthy, the nonviolent eucharistic jesus: a pastoral approach (wilmington, de: center for christian nonviolence, 2011). also critical would be training and education in nonviolent communication and resistance, forming nonviolent peacemaking communities and institutions, and generating participatory processes. 34. maria stephan and erica chenoweth, why civilian resistance works (new york: columbia university press, 2011), 7, 213–214. this research focused on cases with political objectives to end a regime or an occupation and to gain self-determination. yet, the judgment that nonviolent resistance is ten times more likely to yield durable democracy may actually be an underestimation. this is because, of the three cases given as “successful” violent revolutions that led to basic “durable democracies,” at least two are 95 mccarthy quite questionable and certainly not promising models. the bengali campaign in 1971 saw major political corruption, coups, and military leaders for twenty years afterwards. the jewish resistance in 1948 has been followed by significant habits of violence, both direct and structural, such as the occupation of palestine. by contrast, the costa rica campaign ending in 1948 was quite short and mixed with significant nonviolent action, but ultimately costa rica decided to disband its entire military, which still holds today. 35. some of these sources of power include: (1) authority—the belief among the people that the regime is legitimate, and that they have a moral duty to obey it; (2) human resources— the number and importance of the persons who are obeying, cooperating, or providing assistance to the regime; (3) skills and knowledge—needed by the regime to perform specific actions and supplied by the cooperating persons; (4) intangible factors— psychological and ideological factors that may induce people to obey and assist the regime; (5) material resources—the degree to which the rulers control or have access to property, natural resources, financial resources, the economic system, and means of communication and transportation; (6) sanctions—punishments, threatened or applied, against the disobedient and non-cooperative to ensure the submission and cooperation that are needed for the regime to exist and carry out its policies. see gene sharp, how nonviolent struggle works (boston: albert einstein institute, 2013), 5–6, http://www.aeinstein.org/wpcontent/uploads/2014/01/how-nonviolent-struggle-works.pdf. 36. these are associated with a conflict transformation approach as distinct from conflict resolution. see john paul lederach, the little book of conflict transformation (intercourse, pa: good books, 2003). 37. see jim fair, “pope stresses need to halt nuclear arms,” zenit, november 10, 2017, https://zenit.org/articles/pope-stresses-need-to-halt-nuclear-arms/. 38. cure violence works in both the u.s. and in other countries. it hires credible neighborhood messengers, who have lowered shootings and homicides by 40–70 percent and even 88 percent in honduras. see http://cureviolence.org/results/scientific-evaluations/. the gospels draw us further: a just peace ethic 96 39. one of the np officers said, “if we had a gun we would’ve been shot immediately; so without arms we can find other ways.” see https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=9&v=_wcfwpcimce. 40. pope paul vi, gaudium et spes (“pastoral constitution on the church in the modern world”), december 7, 1965, §81, http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vatii_cons_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html. 41. more specifically, the actions chosen must enhance or at least not obstruct the different norms in the three spheres. 42. civil society groups were largely left out of negotiations as well as certain armed groups. 43. see jesuit refugee service, “syria: finding community at the alberto hurtado centre,” https://en.jrs.net/campaign_detail?tn=project-20170317103615. 44. see see srdja popovic and raphael mimoun, “how to beat the islamic network through nonviolence,” foreign policy, march 14, 2016, http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/03/14/howto-beat-the-islamic-state-through-non-violence/; “isil deserters speak out,” aljazeera, october 13, 2016, http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/witness/2016/10/isil-desertersspeak-161012114646472.html. maria stephan, “resisting isis,” in sojourners, april 2015; and alia braley, “this talk is not about isis,” tedxtv, april 12, 2017, https://tedxtv.blogspot.com/2017/04/this-talk-is-not-about-isis-alia-braley.html. another example is local businesses going on strike in aleppo, which slowed down the isis operations and led to electricity’s being restored. 45. paul shinkman, “poll: syrians, iraqis believe u.s. created isis, don’t support war,” u.s. news and world report, december 18, 2015, https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015-12-18/poll-majority-of-syrians-iraqis-dontsupport-obamas-anti-isis-war-believe-us-created-extremists. reportedly, the u.s. killed over 9,000 civilians in our “liberation” bombing of mosul, which is likely more than isis fighters killed. see associated press, “freedom from is in mosul costs lives of 9,000 plus 97 mccarthy civilians,” washington post, december 20, 2017, https://wtop.com/middleeast/2017/12/9000-plus-dead-in-mosul-cost-to-oust-islamic-state-group/. 46. cardinal peter turkson, “welcome address,” at conference entitled nonviolence and just peace, hosted in rome, italy, april 11, 2016, http://www.justpax.va/content/giustiziaepace/en/attivita1/presidente/2016/conference-onnonviolence-and-just-peace--welcome-address-by-car.html. 47. cardinal peter turkson, “christian nonviolence and just peace,” at the conference entitled the catholic church moves towards nonviolence? just peace/just war in dialogue, hosted by the university of san diego, october 7, 2017, http://www.sandiego.edu/news/detail.php?_focus=64613. 48. any protection effort must be concretely consistent with and serve a larger goal to become more virtuous people; address key human needs of all actors, including adversaries; and promote the welfare of the entire human community, including those in adversary nations. focusing on a just peace moral framework and drawing the broader society and governments toward that framework will likely better enable these commitments. 49. world council of churches, “ecumenical call to just peace,” 2011, §23, http://www.ucc.org/justice/just-peace/pdf/ecjustpeace_english.pdf. acknowledging the authority of the u.n. and international law, the document states that, “as christians we feel obliged to go further” and challenge “any justifications for use of military power.” see §§22–23. 50. pontifical council for justice and peace, compendium of social doctrine of the church (2004), §496, quoting pope john paul ii, september 29, 1979. 51. by “signal legitimation,” i include the tactic of identifying criteria for when war or killing might be legitimate: e.g., pointing to just war criteria. 52. united nations high commissioner for refugees, “war, violence, persecution push displacement to new unprecedented high,” june 19, 2017, http://www.unhcr.org/news/press/2017/6/5943ec594/war-violence-persecution-pushdisplacement-new-unprecedented-high.html. the gospels draw us further: a just peace ethic 98 53. bethan mckernan, “yemen: almost one death per hour as cholera epidemic spreads like wildfire,” independent, june 9, 2017, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middleeast/yemen-war-deaths-cholera-epidemic-dying-every-hour-a7782341.html. 54. watson institute of brown university, “costs of war,” http://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures. 55. johan galtung, “cultural violence,” journal of peace research 27/3 (1990): 291–305. 56. see robert j. delahunty and john yoo, “from just war to false peace,” chicago journal of international law 13/1 (2012): 1–45. this article shows that consistent abuse can be traced from cicero and the roman empire (7–10), through medieval times with the popes and crusades (12–13), the years of conquest in the “new world” (14–15), and the modern period with the “sovereign state” logic of war (16–17). even hugo grotius acknowledged that “just war theory contributes to the likelihood and ferocity of war” (19). for other resources to look at this issue during the twentieth century, see johan verstraeten, “the just war tradition and peace thinking 1914–1964,” in from just war to just peace: catholics between militarism and pacifism in historical-theological perspective, eds. roger burggraeve, et al. (leuven: universitaire pers, 1993), 89–112. see also jonathan glover, humanity. a moral history of the twentieth century (london: pimlico, 2001). 57. gerry powers, who supports restrictive just war, still affirms the point that it is too often used to endorse war. see interview with gretchen crowe, our sunday visitor, april 20, 2016, https://www.osv.com/%22/osvnewsweekly/vatican/article/tabid/719/artmid/13626/ articleid/19722/powers-catholic-social-doctrine-is-‘just-peace’-.aspx%22. see my response to his interview, “shifting the lens: just peace and nonviolence,” huffington post, august 2, 2016, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/eli-s-mccarthy/shifting-the-lensjust-pe_b_11286824.html. 58. joshua mcelwee, “pope condemns possession of nuclear weapons,” national catholic reporter, november 10, 2017, https://www.ncronline.org/news/vatican/pope-condemnspossession-nuclear-weapons-shift-churchs-acceptance-deterrence. 99 mccarthy 59. gerald schlabach argues that “the logical principle that abusus non tollit usum (misuse of something is no argument against its proper use) is simply not convincing as applied to the just-war theory. for in order to override both the plain words of jesus and early christian scruples against all bloodshed, and to justify exceptional recourse to violence in order to prevent more violence, the best and perhaps only argument has always been some claim of greater realism. but […] the persistent manipulation of just-war discourse is itself a data point concerning reality, a ‘hard fact’ with which its advocates must grapple far more. to evade such grappling by insisting it could still work in theory is something of a bait and switch.” see his reply to readers’ letters in commonweal, september 20, 2017, https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/letters-more-just-war. 60. consider that about 3,000 people were killed on 9/11; meanwhile more than 160,000 have been killed in the following war in afghanistan. 61. estimates have about six million jews killed by the holocaust and about another forty million civilians killed in the war. military deaths were about fifteen million. see “documenting numbers of victims of holocaust and nazi persecution,” united states holocaust museum, https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?moduleid=10008193; and “research starters: worldwide deaths in world war ii,” national wwii museum, new orleans, https://www.nationalww2museum.org/students-teachers/studentresources/research-starters/research-starters-worldwide-deaths-world-war. 62. see center for systemic peace, “global conflicts trends,” 2017, especially figure 8, http://www.systemicpeace.org/conflicttrends.html. 63. todd whitmore, “peacebuilding and its challenging partners,” in peacebuilding: catholic theology, ethics, and praxis, eds. robert j. schreiter, r. scott appleby, and gerard f. powers (maryknoll: ny, orbis, 2010), 163–167. 64. examples of claimed proportionality include the atomic bombs in wwii, the “shock and awe” bombing of iraq in 2003, and the israeli bombing of gaza in 2014 that decimated the area. see johan verstraeten, “from ‘just war’ to ‘ethics of conflict resolution’: a critique of just war thinking in light of the war in iraq,” ethical perspectives, 11 (2004): 2–3. the gospels draw us further: a just peace ethic 100 65. examples include: “no one return evil for evil” (1 thes 5:12–18); “you have heard an eye for eye but i say to you […]” (mt 5:38–42); “not return insult for insult, but give a blessing” (1 pet 3:9); and “feed your enemy” (rom 12:17–21). 66. see mark j. allman and tobias l. winright, after the smoke clears: the just war tradition and post war justice (maryknoll, ny: orbis, 2010) and “growing edges of just war theory: jus ante bellum, jus post bellum, and imperfect justice,” journal of the society of christian ethics 32/2 (2012): 173–191. for a fuller response to some of allman and winright’s concerns about the 2016 rome conference, see my article with marie dennis, “jesus and ‘just war?’ time to focus on just peace and gospel nonviolence,” huffington post, october 1, 2016, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/eli-s-mccarthy/jesusand-just-war-time-t_b_12389472.html. 67. lisa sowle cahill, “catholic tradition on peace, war, and just peace,” forthcoming in eli mccathy, ed., just peace ethic: virtue-based and case refined (washington, dc: georgetown university press, 2019). 68. gerald schlabach, “just war? enough already,” commonweal, may 31, 2017, https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/just-war-0. 69. we also rarely hear u.s. religious and political leaders speak about or promote nonviolent resistance, especially boycotts, strikes, and civil disobedience, etc., to injustice and violence. we offer little or inadequate resistance to enormous military spending. the depth and range of education on nonviolent theory and practice is much better in mennonite or quaker schools compared to most catholic institutions. some might argue that the just war’s last resort criterion should in theory minimize distraction or obstruction. however, the evidence suggests otherwise. 70. romans 12:10, 13:4, corinthians 2:16, philippians 2:5. see fred broom, o.m.v., “put on the mind of christ,” catholic exchange, june 14, 2016, https://catholicexchange.com/putmind-christ. 71. lisa sowle cahill, love your enemies: discipleship, pacifism, and just war theory (minneapolis: fortress press, 1994), 31. 101 mccarthy 72. lisa sowle cahill, “catholic tradition on peace, war, and just peace,” forthcoming in just peace ethic. 73. john 8:1–11 tells a story of jesus risking life by using creative nonviolence to protect a woman caught in adultery from a violent crowd. my understanding of nonviolence does not exclude some types of physical force, such as pushing someone out of the way of a threat, blocking, impeding, tackling, etc. 74. it might be asked: “if war gets outlawed, how would we enforce it?” this is a topic for another paper, but here are some preliminary comments. there are many social mechanisms involved in “enforcing” laws: political, economic, legal, cultural. the catholic church could focus on just peace methods and on scaling up unarmed policing mechanisms as some countries already have (england, norway, new zealand, ireland, scotland). the church need not condemn those who rely on armed police, but neither must it explicitly justify killing. we might conceive of armed policing as a temporary step within a process of progressive disarmament, or what pope francis calls “integral disarmament.” see jim fair, “pope stresses need to halt nuclear arms.” 75. pope francis, “nonviolence: a style of politics.” 76. lisa sowle cahill, “a church for peace?” commonweal, july 11, 2016, https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/church-peace. 77. bishop robert mcelroy, “we must do no less,” paper presented at the conference perspectives for a world free from nuclear weapons and for integral disarmament, rome, italy, november 10–11, 2017. 78. the rome conference appeal of 2016 proposes that catholics “no longer use or teach just war theory.” the latter phrase is addressed in the faq section of the catholic nonviolence initiative’s website: https://nonviolencejustpeace.net/frequently-askedquestions/#nolongeruse. “the appeal is to all catholics, but the initial focus is on the pope and magisterium. the hope is that the pope and magisterium would integrate the appeal fully into our official teaching, including no longer validating the just war theory as catholic, as it does in the catechism, various bishop conference statements, and as regular the gospels draw us further: a just peace ethic 102 bishop or other catholic organizations do as part of their advocacy. however, this doesn’t mean that catholic academics or others are being asked to not talk about just war in classes or even publications. catholic academics might still discuss just war as a historical fact of the church’s tradition, still debate its value, but also spend more time and resources on teaching and developing just peace and peacebuilding consistent with gospel nonviolence. if the pope and magisterium were to change the teaching then academics at least would hopefully no longer describe just war as a valid official catholic teaching.” 79. david cochran has identified historical analogies when the lateran council of 1215 officially rejected trial by ordeal and then later in the 1300s it faded away in practice. also, the council of trent banned dueling in 1536, for it to fade away in practice in the 1800s. see catholic realism and the abolition of war (maryknoll, ny: orbis, 2014), 119, 125. 80. macarthur, speech to massachusetts legislature on july 25, 1951, in general macarthur: wisdom and visions (nashville, tn: turner publishing, 2000), 152. 81. pope francis, homily, at vigil prayer for peace, september 7, 2013, https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/homilies/2013/documents/papafrancesco_20130907_veglia-pace.html. microsoft word 3 article diluzio revision.docx [expositions 8.1 (2014) 122–144] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 the civic education of cicero’s ideal orator joseph a. diluzio baylor university scarcely five years after the roman people hailed him as “father of the fatherland” for his role in saving the republic from a revolutionary plot, cicero was banished from rome. a violent and demagogic tribune, backed by a cabal of ruthless senators including julius caesar and pompey the great, had arranged for his removal. though he would return the following year, rome’s leading orator increasingly found himself politically hamstrung and the republican system plagued by dysfunction. intent on remedying the ills of the republic, cicero took to writing philosophy. he began, significantly enough, with on the ideal orator (de oratore), the first of three dialogues written over five years, all of which aimed to defend and encourage the teaching of republican values among the roman nobility. all senators were orators capable of addressing the courts, the senate, and popular meetings; through their speeches, they set policy, advocated justice, shaped public opinion, and won popular acclaim. since the end of the second century bc, however, rome’s republican consensus had faltered, and a number of powerful orators had used their education and natural abilities to stir unrest for their own political ends. cicero had noted this fact in the introduction to his youthful de inventione, a rhetorical handbook. despite the differences in style and content, the prologue of de inventione adumbrates several themes that would feature prominently in his later de oratore, among them, the essential role of oratory in establishing and sustaining the republic and the need for orators to possess wisdom and eloquence (inv. 1.1–6).1 after considering the political crises that prompted the composition of de oratore, the following paper will examine the role of civic education in the formation of cicero’s ideal orator. as part of a broad education that includes the study of ethics and rhetoric, cicero advises aspiring orators to look to roman law, custom, and the experience of distinguished leaders for practical knowledge and ethical formation. in this way, cicero hoped to produce the kind of leaders under whom a once unified rome had flourished. the context of cicero’s de oratore within and without, political crisis proves the impetus for cicero’s first dialogue. in the prologue to the first book of de oratore, the author laments the current political situation. unlike senators of the past who were able to engage in political activity without danger (in negotio sine periculo) and to enjoy leisure with their standing intact (in otio cum dignitate), cicero explains to his brother quintus that the harsh developments of their times and the various misfortunes that have befallen them have frustrated his own hopes for rest and study. what he alliteratively characterizes as a monstrous mass of troubles (maximae moles molestiarum) and the most violent 123 diluzio storms (turbulentissimae tempestates) arrived in waves: as young men, he and his brother happened to witness the very upsetting of the old order (ipsam perturbationem disciplinae veteris); during his consulship, they entered into a high-stakes struggle to decide the fate of the whole republic (devenimus in medium rerum omnium certamen atque discrimen); ever since then, though they succeeded in preventing the destruction of the entire community, the waves recoiled upon the brothers personally. still, the author pledges to devote as much of his free time as the crime of his enemies, the causes of his friends, and the republic itself will allow him (de orat. 1.1–3). the opening lines of the dialogue reference a series of disasters that have shaken the republic to its core and disrupted the lives of cicero and his brother. the troubles reportedly began in their youth when, according to cicero, the old order was overturned. significantly, the author uses disciplina, whose primary meaning is “instruction,” to refer to the manner in which politics are conducted (tll 5.1.1325.75–1326.73).2 its educational connotation underscores the relationship between education and politics, a central theme of de oratore. while the ipsa perturbatio disciplinae veteris refers to the political crises that plagued rome between 91 and 80 bc, there were more immediate reasons that, when writing de oratore in the mid-50s bc, cicero could neither “engage in politics without danger” nor enjoy “leisure with his standing intact.” as one of two consuls for 63 bc, he had entered upon his office amid a tense political situation and general economic malaise.3 rumors of a conspiracy swirled, and portents were reported. that summer, a frustrated former praetor l. sergius catilina (pr. 68 bc) conspired with a disgruntled former centurion to bring about a violent revolution. when word of the planned uprising reached cicero and the senate, the body enacted the senatus consultum ultimum instructing the consuls to see that no harm come to the republic (dio 37.31.1–2; sal. cat. 29.1–2).4 during the initial phase of the crisis, which he would later describe as the “struggle to decide the fate of the whole republic” (rerum omnium certamen atque discrimen), cicero faced a dilemma: on the one hand, he as consul had an obligation to protect the republic, and, with its decree, the senate had signaled its support for whatever he and his colleague decided to do; on the other hand, recent history had shown that, if he had the conspirators arrested and executed without trial, he could be liable to prosecution for violating the rights of citizens. cicero waited until december, when documentary evidence of a conspiracy finally surfaced. though catiline had earlier fled the city and would later fall in a pitched battle, cicero rounded up the conspirators who remained behind. he summoned the full senate to review the evidence and put to them the question of what ought to be done with those in custody (cic. cat. 3.8–15, 4.5; plut. cic. 19.1–4, 20.3–21.4; sal. cat. 46.6–47.4, 50.3–53.1). despite the opposition of one of the praetors designate, c. julius caesar (cos. 59 bc), the senate voted to execute the conspirators. cicero promptly carried out the senate’s wishes and, having overseen the executions in the roman prison, he made his way to the forum and announced to those assembled there, “they have lived.” the crowd erupted in a combination of celebration and the civic education of cicero’s ideal orator 124 relief. they hailed cicero as “father of the fatherland” (pater patriae) and escorted him to his palatine home in a torchlight procession (app. b. civ. 2.7; dio 37.38; plut. cic. 22.2–23.1). the apparently broad political support for his actions proved short-lived. while cicero had managed to preserve the republic from general destruction, his actions provoked a backlash. only days later, two of the newly installed tribunes of 62 bc began to attack cicero over the executions, and one of the tribunes prevented him from delivering his customary farewell address as consul. over the next four and a half years, the attacks over his handling of the catilinarian conspiracy gradually increased until cicero was forced to leave for exile in 58 bc. the individual directly responsible for his exile was p. clodius pulcher (trib. 58 bc). clodius was a member of the prominent claudii, a patrician family whose long history featured more than its share of impudence.5 the young clodius was no exception. his arrogance was in evidence in 62 bc when he profaned the sacred rites of the bona dea—“the good goddess.”6 the rituals were open only to women and took place at the house of the pontifex maximus, at the time julius caesar, whose wife oversaw the proceedings. clodius allegedly entered the house dressed as a female flute player to carry on an affair with caesar’s wife—pompeia. according to plutarch, clodius’ voice gave him away, and upon being found out, he fled into the night. claiming that his misconduct threatened to bring the wrath of the gods upon the community, clodius’ political enemies insisted that he stand trial, but, as a member of the claudii, the accused had powerful friends. when the senate voted to recommend that the roman people establish a special court to hear the case, dissident senators politicized the issue.7 they railed against their colleagues in public meetings, and clodius himself held multiple meetings at which he attacked the senate and the man who had, for many, come to represent its overweening authority—cicero (cic. att. 1.16.1). cicero responded in kind and so began their enmity. the ensuing trial took place amid an atmosphere of intimidation.8 a crowd of the defendant’s supporters disrupted the challenging of jurors with shouts and erupted again when cicero rose to testify that, contrary to the claims of the accused, he had seen clodius in rome on the night in question. the following morning, the jury refused to return to court unless provided with an armed guard. upon receiving the requested escort, the jury reconvened and acquitted the defendant by a narrow margin. the events surrounding the bona dea trial demonstrate the kind of ruthless factionalism that plagued rome’s senatorial order in the late republic. when they did not prevail in the senate, certain politicians resorted to inflammatory rhetoric at public meetings to whip up popular resentment. frequently, they also used violence and intimidation to disrupt the proper functioning of the republic’s institutions. the informal political alliance known as the first triumvirate further challenged the supremacy of the senate by bringing together three figures of exceptional audacity, wealth, and popularity who were prepared to use (or at least tolerate) the use of violence when it suited their ends (dio 38.6.1–3; plut. cat. min. 32.2; cf. pomp. 47.5). clodius initially cooperated with the triumvirate, and caesar oversaw clodius’ adoption by a plebeian family, which cleared the way for the latter’s tribunate and cicero’s exile.9 125 diluzio two months into his term as tribune, clodius sought to get even with the former consul who had earlier testified against him. in the years since the bona dea affair, cicero and clodius continued to trade abuse (cic. att. 2.1.5).10 now, as tribune with the power to introduce legislation, clodius promulgated a law banishing anyone who had put to death a citizen without trial.11 the tribune declared that he would drive cicero into exile, and in a series of public meetings, he threatened the former consul with prosecution (dio 38.16.5).12 one by one, cicero’s allies abandoned him. one month after clodius promulgated the bill, it became law, and cicero departed for exile. his home on the palatine was subsequently ransacked and demolished, and in its place clodius erected a shrine to liberty.13 for cicero, the rise of clodius and the triumvirate were but symptoms of a general dysfunction plaguing the senatorial class. in the years immediately following his consulship, the orator lamented the fact that the senate’s leadership had shown a lack of tact when it alienated the business class (equites); he also charged certain leading conservatives with fecklessness as well as harboring resentment toward himself (cic. att. 1.17.8–10; 1.18.2–3, 6–7; 1.19.6–8; 1.20.2–3; 2.1.6–8).14 by early 60 bc, alienated from much of the senate’s leadership, cicero increasingly aligned himself with pompey, a move that only widened the gulf between himself and the powerful bloc of senatorial conservatives. despite his political maneuvering, cicero continued to claim that his political principles remained unchanged.15 the advent of the triumvirate in 59 bc tested the strength of these assertions. cicero ultimately chose to withdraw from politics, but not before criticizing some of caesar’s acts as consul. whether caesar and pompey engineered clodius’ adoption in order to silence cicero or it was merely the price the dynasts had to pay for clodius’ support, the pair would soon reverse course and arrange for the orator’s return the following year.16 cicero triumphantly returned to rome in september 57 bc, but the senate’s conservative leadership continued to view the former consul with suspicion, especially now that he was indebted to pompey for arranging his return.17 some months later, he attacked caesar and his legislative record in both the senate and courts, but caesar would have none of it. following their conference at luca in 56 bc, the troika prevailed upon cicero to cease from his criticism and either to tow the party line or to remain silent. during caesar’s tumultuous consulship three years earlier, cicero had chosen the latter, and his inaction had proven costly. not wishing to leave himself vulnerable again, he publicly embraced the triumvirs. one month later, cicero conceded in a letter to his friend atticus that his reversal was rather disgraceful, adding: “farewell to upright, true, and honorable deliberations!” in the same letter, he went on to criticize the leading members of the senate for having abandoned him. he explained, “i wished to bind myself to this new alliance so that i could not fall back to those who, even though they ought to pity me, do not cease from envy […] since those who have no power do not wish be friends, let us work hard to be liked by those who do have power” (cic. att. 4.5.1–2).18 his reference to the power of the triumvirs hints at his concern for his personal safety. more or less contemporaneous with his letter to atticus, cicero reports in the prologue of de oratore the civic education of cicero’s ideal orator 126 that he, unlike the men of old, cannot engage in political activity without danger, nor can he enjoy leisure consistent with his status.19 that other letters of cicero from this period convey similar sentiments suggests that he has not simply adopted a literary persona for the purpose of his dialogue. in a letter to another former consul, cicero writes that, having attained high office, he had hoped to have a certain standing in senatorial debates and freedom in politics, but, as it is, such consular standing is a thing of the past (cic. fam. 1.8.3–4; att. 4.18.2).20 he observed that the entire order of the senate, the courts, the entire republic had changed. two years later, he would be even more blunt: “there is no republic in which i can take delight and find rest.” cicero continued to plead cases, but he had lost his political autonomy. at about the time he was working on de oratore, the orator complained to a certain marcus marius that, in the past, he was permitted to decline cases he did not wish to plead. now, he has no life to speak of: he is busy and forced to defend those who do not deserve his services at the request of those who do.21 thus, his pledge in the prologue of de oratore—to devote as much of his free time as the crime of his enemies, the causes of his friends, and the republic itself will allow—is thematically consistent with the rest of the introduction: the republic’s dysfunction has cost the author his freedom. yet in the prologue, cicero traces the origin of his and the republic’s recent troubles back to something that occurred when he and his brother were still boys—“the very upsetting of the old order” (ipsam perturbationem disciplinae veteris). violent civil strife characterized the years between 91 and 80 bc: it disrupted cicero’s education, delayed the launch of his career, and claimed the lives of nearly all of the men who feature as interlocutors in de oratore (de orat. 3.2–10).22 cicero sets his dialogue, a work of historical fiction, on the eve of this crisis. the occasion of a public festival provides his characters with an opportunity to retire from rome to the country estate of l. licinius crassus (cos. 95, cen. 92 bc). in addition to the host, q. lutatius catulus (cos. 102 bc), c. julius caesar strabo vopsicus (aed. 90 bc), p. sulpicius rufus (trib. 88 bc), q. mucius scaevola augur (cos. 117 bc), and m. antonius (cos. 99, cen. 97/96 bc) are present at various points over the course of three days. on the first day, the characters discuss the current political crisis involving the italian allies, only to turn to the subject of oratory on the second day (de orat. 1.26–9). despite the idyllic scene of friends retiring from the city to enjoy one another’s company, a sense of foreboding hangs over the dialogue. given the upsetting of the old order that would soon follow, cicero depicts a scene of the republic at twilight, and it raises the question as to whether the author or his readers believed the sun would ever rise again. with the benefit of hindsight, we can see that the old republic was quickly coming to an end, but cicero probably did not perceive the situation to be as hopeless as he would later under caesar’s dictatorship.23 indeed, the themes of the present dialogue and those that follow—de republica and de legibus—suggest that the orator had embarked upon a program of civic renewal intended to foster a republican renaissance. in his first dialogue, notionally on the ideal orator but actually on the ideal statesman, cicero casts the teachers of his youth as mentors for his audience.24 in the mid-90s, cicero’s father had brought cicero and his younger brother to rome to receive instruction (disciplina) at the houses 127 diluzio of crassus and antonius—the main interlocutors in de oratore. at the time of the dialogue’s setting, cicero and his brother were under the tutelage of both men so that, for the boys, the subsequent political disasters amounted to a literal perturbatio disciplinae—“a disturbance of instruction.” fifteen years old in 91 bc, the young marcus cicero undoubtedly looked forward to completing his one-year “apprenticeship in the forum” (tirocinium fori) with crassus the following year. by 90 bc, however, the political situation had led to the death of crassus, the absence of antonius, and the suspension of most (if not all) of the public courts (cic. brut. 303– 5).25 by alluding to this first wave of troubles—ipsa perturbatio disciplinae veterae—cicero connects the beginning of his own troubles with that of the senate and republic as a whole, and the tragic turn of his own career with those of his characters (cf. de orat. 3.13–14). the formation of the orator and its importance to the republic despondent and having lost his political independence, the former consul turned his attention to writing de oratore sometime in 56 or 55 bc. like the other dialogues he wrote over the next five years, de republica and de legibus, politics pervades the work. in de oratore, cicero argues that the orator ought to be technically proficient as a speaker and receive a broad education.26 among other things, the ideal orator ought to read poetry, know history and philosophy, learn law, and “acquire knowledge of the conventions of the senate, the order (disciplina) of the republic, the legal rights of our allies, treaties, pacts, and the policies related to our empire” (de orat. 1.158–9). while providing an overview of rhetorical theory, cicero’s de oratore seeks to revive an ancient, if not mythic, ideal of the roman orator as one who combines wisdom and eloquence in the service of the republic. to this end, cicero advocates a form of education grounded in the social and political conventions of the republic, and this process of deliberate enculturation, in turn, aims to produce orators who appreciate and defend the essential qualities of their community. this, of course, includes the political community, the focus of his subsequent dialogues de republica and de legibus. together, the three works form a program that sees civic education as integral to political renewal. but why begin such a program with a work on oratory? indeed, the subject probably strikes us, no less than cicero’s original audience, as peripheral to politics. in the first century bc, works on rhetoric—the art of persuasion practiced by orators—were typically technical handbooks that set forth the principles, methods, and commonplaces of rhetoric and represented the collective know-how of greek theorists accumulated over hundreds of years.27 though de oratore does contain technical elements, the work is not a handbook that aims to teach the would-be orator how to formulate and deliver arguments, but a philosophical dialogue that argues for a particular approach to educating the orator. for most elite romans, the purpose of an education was to train orators who could gain a reputation as an advocate in the criminal courts and later as a member of the senate. though elite males would study greek literature and especially poetry, it was primarily a means of fostering an aesthetic sense and an understanding of proper usage and grammar in preparation for the the civic education of cicero’s ideal orator 128 study of rhetoric.28 as one scholar has remarked, “utilitarian to the backbone, the ordinary roman […] parent wanted his son to get on in life; it was only the parent of a higher class who sacrificed anything to the muses, and then chiefly because in a public career it was de rigueur that the boy should not be ignorant or boorish.”29 once they entered public life, orators used their speech to formulate policy, advocate justice, influence public opinion, and win popular acclaim. while advancing their careers, orators inevitably shaped the political discourse—the system of ideas, opinions, concepts, ways of thinking and behaving that constituted the republic and contributed to its perpetuation. though modern signifiers like “discourse” and “webs of interlocution” would have been foreign to cicero, de oratore suggests that he appreciated the crucial role of the orator in founding, shaping, and sustaining republican culture. in part, the author argues that the orator ought to receive a broad education, not so much to avoid being ignorant or boorish, but to contribute constructively to what joy connolly has aptly termed “the state of speech.”30 while rhetorical education in the late republic focused on preparing the orator to address narrow questions (hypotheses) related to specific persons, events, and circumstances, antonius argues in de oratore that this kind of education proves inadequate for training orators whose range of duties include “encouragement, consolation, moral instruction, and admonition” (de orat. 2.64). as opposed to being able merely to argue specific cases or issues, antonius maintains that the ideal orator must be prepared to address a wide range of general questions (theses) relevant to politics and human behavior—“things that are good or evil, that are to be sought or avoided, that are honorable or shameful, that are expedient or inexpedient, about virtue, justice, self-control, prudence, greatness of spirit, generosity, dutifulness, friendship, faithfulness, duty, and all the other virtues and their corresponding vices […] and likewise regarding the republic, empire, military affairs, the political order, and human behavior” (de orat. 2.64–68; cf. 3.121–22). for cicero (speaking later through crassus), eloquence—speech that is, among other things, “brilliant in words and substance”—requires broad knowledge to create and sustain the republic: “the power of eloquence is so great that it encompasses the origin, essence, and transformations of all things, virtues, duties, and the whole of nature that includes human customs, spirit, and life. the same power sets out traditions, laws, and legal arrangements, governs the republic, and addresses with distinction and copiousness everything pertaining to anything” (de orat. 3.53, 76). given the power of oratory in political life, the formation of the ideal orator serves as a natural starting point for cicero’s program. an ostensible dispute with his brother prompts cicero to compose the dialogue: while his brother quintus has previously maintained that eloquence is the product of innate talent and practice and does not require the refinement of education, cicero himself contends that “it depends on the accomplishments of the most learned men” (eruditissimorum hominum artibus contineri) (de orat. 1.5). the use of the latin ars—“art”—admits of ambiguity. given the context and a long-standing controversy among philosophers and rhetoricians over the relative merits of theory (ars), nature (ingenium), and practice (exercitatio) in rhetorical education, the reader rather expects ars to refer to the ars rhetorica—the systematic body of (mostly greek) 129 diluzio knowledge and practical techniques related to persuasion and the subject of rhetorical handbooks.31 over the course of the second half of the second century bc, the application of greek rhetorical theory revolutionized elite roman education (de orat. 1.14–15).32 in the prologue, cicero describes how romans at first pursued eloquence through a combination of talent and reflection because they did not suppose any “rules of art” (praeceptum artis) existed for oratory. only after the romans encountered greek orators, had come to know their writings, and retained them as teachers did they desire this form of learning with its basis in theory. nonetheless, quintus’ insistence that one does not need “the refinement of education” (elegantia doctrinae) to be eloquent suggests that the author is here using ars in a more general sense, adumbrating one of the dialogue’s main arguments: eloquence requires more than innate talent (ingenium) and practice (exercitatio), and it also requires more than the application of rhetorical theory (ars).33 thus, he concludes his synopsis of the history of roman rhetorical education, “but indeed this thing [sc. eloquence] is something greater than men suppose, an accumulation of more arts and pursuits (pluribus ex artibus studiisque conlectum)” (de orat. 1.16).34 practical experience (usus) and the forum apprenticeship (tirocinium fori) looking back on his own education, crassus laments that he was not exposed to greek learning until after he had embarked upon his public career and was serving in the east. his early entry into public life at the age of twenty-one apparently prevented him from studying the ars rhetorica. as a young man he instead relied on his talent (ingenium), which was then honed through experience: “i had the forum for my instruction (disciplina), and my teacher (magister) was practical experience (usus) with the laws, the institutions of the roman people, and the traditions of our ancestors” (cui disciplina fuerit forum, magister usus et leges et instituta populi romani mosque maiorum; de orat. 3.74–75).35 in his remarks, crassus contrasts the greek form of education, which relies on experts and a curriculum, with a form of instruction in which the youth gains knowledge through practical experience. though the romans probably established schools early in their history, the proliferation of greek schools and tutors over the course of the second and first centuries bc changed how much of the roman elite prepared for public life. a traditional feature of elite roman education, which persisted into the late republic, was the “apprenticeship in the forum” (tirocinium fori). as part of their apprenticeship, roman youth observed, imitated, and interacted with leading members of the governing class as they conducted public business. prior to the advent of greek rhetoric, oratorical training probably consisted of little more than providing youth with these kinds of opportunities, at home and in public, to observe and imitate experienced practitioners. by the first century bc, the tirocinium fori occurred after a boy had completed his studies in rhetoric and donned the toga of adulthood (toga virilis).36 as part of his apprenticeship, he would follow a distinguished advocate as he argued cases and conducted public business in the forum. through constant accompaniment and observation, the aspiring orator aimed to reproduce the the civic education of cicero’s ideal orator 130 gestures and speech of his model.37 at the same time, the young man would take part in the physical exercises of the campus martius so that, when he turned seventeen, he was prepared for his military apprenticeship (tirocinium militiae).38 though an aspiring senator in the early and middle republic was not eligible to stand for office until he had served ten years in the army, this requirement seems to have been dropped early in the first century bc. nonetheless, wouldbe senators were still expected to perform some military service. thus, a father would arrange to have his son appointed to the staff of a commander in the field, generally for one year. as part of the commander’s retinue, the youth would spend his military tirocinium much as he had his earlier apprenticeship in the forum, accompanying a high-ranking individual and observing his methods and habits for purposes of emulation. in both forum and field, young men had the opportunity to observe how their chosen models conducted themselves socially and to interact with them. during such exchanges, the difference in age and status naturally led the youth to imitate the social habits of his elder as a means of ingratiating himself. imitation had benefits for both the young man and society as a whole. not only did elite youth learn how to behave from distinguished members of their class, they were engaged in a practice apt to win the favor of their elders. charles colton famously observed, “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” the natural result of which is, as the dutch psychologist ap dijksterhuis points out, “social interactions in which the participants imitate more than usual are characterized by more rapport.”39 the system of tirocinia with its emphasis on emulation, therefore, aimed not only at social reproduction,40 but also the strengthening of relationships between one family and another and between one generation and the next. as opposed to greek experts who presented the theory and application of their respective artes in a systematic way and usually within the context of a school, the tirocinia featured the transfer of practical knowledge from one generation to the next through a combination of demonstration and social interaction. just as crassus refers to the forum as a place of instruction (disciplina) and practical experience (usus) as a teacher (magister), so antonius refers to the forum as a school (ludus) where the budding orator can find a variety of teachers (magistri) on which to model his style of delivery. when mentoring young men, antonius advises mentors to converse (loquamur) with their students in such a way that they impart no more than what experience (usus) has taught them, since they themselves are unable to teach the better things (meliora). given the context, particularly the contrast drawn with practical experience, the “better things” is almost certainly an ironic allusion to the greek arts. for his part, antonius demonstrates a thorough knowledge of the ars rhetorica throughout the dialogue, belying his claim that he is unable to teach “better things.” roman chauvinism explains his feigned ignorance. to many romans, the greeks had a reputation for being effeminate, flighty, impractical, dishonest, and arrogant.41 though roman elites increasingly learned the greek language and availed themselves of greek experts over the course of the second and first centuries bc, public figures like antonius and crassus risked being cast by their critics as “little greeks” (graeculi) for their excessive learning and lack of old-fashioned roman virtue. cicero 131 diluzio reports that both crassus and antonius pretended to be ignorant of greek culture so that it was widely believed they had little or no knowledge of its language, arts, or philosophy: “each was of the opinion that he would carry more authority, the one if he seemed to despise greeks, the other if he seemed not even to know them” (de orat. 2.1–4).42 indeed, when several of the other characters finally convince crassus to engage in a philosophical discussion about whether there is an ars of speaking, he begs his interlocutors not to publicize his “trifles” (ineptiae, a standard criticism of greek philosophy) and says that he will answer in such a way that he does not seem like an expert teacher (magister atque artifex) but as just another togate roman, a man not altogether unrefined, modestly qualified from his practical experience in the courts (ex forensi usu). that the orator must subordinate his greek learning, whether in the form of an art or philosophical inquiry, in favor of roman practice is an important theme of de oratore.43 the dialogue itself exemplifies the proper appropriation of hellenic culture. while his work does not take the form of a lecture or rhetorical handbook, its dialogue form seems at first to suggest that cicero has merely exchanged one greek genre for another—ars for philosophia.44 yet cicero sets his discussion within a distinctly roman frame. with the more distinguished crassus and antonius carrying much of the conversation and the younger interlocutors c. aurelius cotta and p. sulpicius rufus mostly listening, de oratore gives the impression of a tirocinium fori, one to which cicero’s elite readers are invited.45 discussion of greek rhetorical theory with reference to practical experience occurs within the context of a discussion concerning the socialization of the orator—one of the purposes of the tirocinium. each of the main characters play their assigned role: antonius denies his mastery of rhetoric and advises others to impart no more than what experience (usus) has taught them; having declared that eloquence requires things greater than the ars rhetorica (de orat. 1.109), crassus seeks to portray himself, not as a greek rhetorician, but as one who speaks from his experience in the courts (ex forensi usu). custom (mos), character (mores), and the law (lex) in lieu of the greek arts, the young crassus received his instruction (disciplina) in the forum where his teacher (magister) was practical experience (usus) with the laws, the institutions of the roman people, and ancestral custom (mos maiorum). ancestral custom (mos maiorum) represented a range of time-tested, mostly unwritten practices, policies, and rules that governed the conduct of both individuals in public and private and the community (i.e., the senate and roman people) at home and abroad.46 without a written constitution, the republic relied on a consensus based on knowledge of and respect for such norms. traditional methods of education played a role in the perpetuation of this system. besides the tirocinia, fathers passed on knowledge to their sons, and leading senators mentored the body’s junior members (e.g., gell. na 14.7.2; plin. ep. 8.14.4–6). in each case, senior practitioners served as conduits of cultural information. the civic education of cicero’s ideal orator 132 in de oratore, cicero maintains that the orator must learn the customs and character of his community in order to be effective and to lead the people responsibly. just as one who offers advice in the senate must know how politics are conducted (nosse rem publicam), so antonius declares that, to speak credibly before the people, an orator should know the character of the citizenry, which often changes (nosse mores civitatis, qui […] crebro mutantur; de orat. 2.337).47 that the citizenry’s character is prone to frequent change suggests that antonius is referring rather to its emotional state than its enduring character. yet the two are in fact related. to manipulate the people’s emotions requires the orator to know the community’s values, opinions, and tendencies. of the three rhetorical appeals—reason, emotion, and the character of the orator—cicero (like plato and aristotle before him) recognized that appeals to emotion were unmatched in their effectiveness. knowing the character of a crowd and having gauged its disposition, the orator would tailor his speech to suit the crowd and the circumstances. antonius observes how this sometimes requires rousing the people to hope or fear, to pursue desire or glory, or to call them back from recklessness, anger, hope, injury, resentment, or cruelty. likewise, crassus observes that “when the people are faint or wavering, [the orator can] rouse them to honor or lead them from error, incite them against the wicked or pacify them when stirred up against good men” (de orat. 2.337, 1.202). the comments of crassus, particularly that an orator ought to lead the people to honor and away from error, imply that ethics must govern the exercise of persuasive power. indeed, later in the dialogue, the elder statesman contends, “the greater the power, the more it must be joined with integrity and the utmost prudence. for if we pass along the full resources of speech to those who lack these virtues, we will certainly not have made them orators, but will have put weapons into the hands of madmen” (de orat. 3.55; cf. plat. gorgias 457a3–c2). as opposed to simply teaching social and political norms for the purpose of rhetorical manipulation (something a greek expert could do), senior members of the governing class had to ensure that aspiring orators were properly socialized so that they would deploy their skills as “good men” on behalf of other “good men.”48 one of the primary aims of early childhood education was the cultivation of good character. adults were expected to refrain from foul language and inappropriate topics in the presence of children. fathers routinely made use of aphorisms to convey teachings on a range of subjects, especially morality.49 in addition, evidence suggests that, particularly early on and in the countryside, boys were subjected to austere conditions as a means of fostering virtus—the quality of toughness or manliness, especially in battle.50 when they had come of age and were ready to begin their tirocinium fori, antonius advises their would-be mentors to evaluate their character. if a young man shows exceptional potential and impresses him as “good,” antonius declares, “i will not only encourage him […] i will also plead with him—so great do i judge the distinction bestowed on the entire community by an eminent orator who is also a good man” (de orat. 2.85). others ought to be discouraged. if an individual clearly seems unfit and lacking in sense, if he rants without regard to the limits of propriety and his ability (clamare contra quam deceat et quam possit), antonius will advise him either to restrain himself or to pursue something else. though the issue appears to be merely one 133 diluzio of style, how one speaks serves as an indicator of his character.51 for a young man raised and educated in elite circles at rome, a lack of decorum cannot be attributed to ignorance. it rather implies a deliberate disregard of social norms, and, for this reason, antonius advises the young man to restrain himself (se contineat) or to find another pursuit rather than “resorting to hucksterism (as catulus once said about a certain bawler) to gather together as many witnesses of his foolishness as possible.” his comments, especially the accusation of hucksterism (praeconium domesticum) to attract a crowd, almost certainly allude to the style and tactics regularly employed by popular demagogues in the late republic. clodius stood as only the most recent example of one whose chief power lay not so much in the influence he carried with other members of the senate as the effect his oratory had on the crowds who attended public meetings known as contiones. while the senate had a great deal of authority in the republic, the roman people alone had the power to enact laws. popular demagogues, who had been elected to the tribunate, could (and, on occasion, did) circumvent the senate in order to put their proposals directly before the people. not only was this an affront to established norms, the vehemence and antagonism that characterized their oratory further strained the republic’s consensus.52 the style of such demagogues suited their ends. almost without exception, those who addressed contiones in the late republic portrayed themselves as champions of the people, and antagonism toward those they identified as enemies of the people characterized their oratory.53 though crassus and cicero did adopt a vehement and indignant style of oratory when necessary, cicero implies that they did so in the service of the republic—the senate and people of rome.54 politicians like clodius, on the other hand, used their speeches to stir unrest for their own political gain, and they often did so at the expense of the senatorial establishment, whom they portrayed as threatening the rights, privileges, and welfare of the roman people. as such, these demagogues stood as the antithesis of cicero’s “good men.” consequently, when a would-be orator approaches antonius and rants without regard to propriety, the elder statesman interprets his unorthodox performance as an indication of his political leanings and reproves the youth for his own benefit and that of the community. along with custom, the laws also served as sources of knowledge, morality, and social stability. in the prologue to de republica, cicero describes the relationship between education, custom, and law as well as the virtues they produce—dutifulness, religious observance, justice, good faith, fairness, a sense of decency, self-control, a desire for honor and praise, and endurance. he contends that these virtues originate in nature and enter the community through those who establish its original laws; instilled through education, cicero notes how some virtues are strengthened by custom and others enshrined in law (rep. 1.2, 3.33; leg. 1.18). the laws function in tandem with custom and education as a means of moral edification and a link to what cicero regards as the ultimate human source of civic virtue—the mythic “ancestors” of the republic. as part of his broader argument that the orator ought to know the subjects of which he speaks, crassus in the first book of de oratore insists that orators, who plead cases in the forum, propose the civic education of cicero’s ideal orator 134 legislation, and address the senate, ought to have a thorough knowledge of the law (de orat. 1.166–203).55 like knowledge of the community’s character, both practical and moral benefits accrue to the one who has mastery of the law. not only does knowledge of the law equip him to argue cases, it also serves as an aid to understanding the character of the community and contributes to shaping his own. for these and other reasons, it seems to have been not uncommon for roman boys to memorize the twelve tables—rome’s archaic law code—though, as cicero observes in de legibus, the practice had become obsolete by the late republic (cic. leg. 2.59; cf. de orat. 1.194–96; plaut. mostell. 126). likewise, in de oratore, crassus implies that contemporary orators lack the legal expertise of their ancestors: there are fewer who know the law and can effectively advise their fellow citizens and more whose ignorance threatens the welfare of others.56 cicero thus posits a correlation between the decline of legal knowledge and the republic’s increasing lawlessness. according to crassus, roman law surpasses philosophy in its capacity to provide moral instruction: “from the laws we see that we ought to seek honor (dignitatem maxime expetendam videmus) […] while the vices and crimes of men are punished […] and we are taught (docemur) […] to hold our passions in check, to restrain every lust, to protect what we have, and to keep our thoughts, eyes, and hands from others” (de orat. 1.194–95). what is more, crassus contends that the twelve tables provides the whole of constitutional knowledge (civilis scientia) for it describes all organs of the state and their function. together with the body of common and religious law, the tables also offer a full portrait of the ancients: “the distant antiquity of the words can be seen there, and certain types of legal formulas testify to our ancestors’ customs and way of life” (de orat. 1.193; cf. leg. 1.58). as we have already seen, ancestral custom (mos maiorum) played an important role in defining normative conduct for the individual and the community at rome. the fact that a practice was considered ancestral lent it moral authority, since, at the level of the household and the wider community, the romans regarded their ancestors (maiores) as objects of worship and emulation. in so far as the ancestral was the object of legal study, the activity had ethical implications for the orator: it facilitated emulation by describing ancestral custom, and, like ancestral worship and the observance of the mos maiorum in general, its study showed pietas.57 the suggestion that the study of the law is an orator’s patriotic duty becomes more explicit later in the same passage, when crassus declares that, if one delights in his country, as he ought to, he must know its mind, custom (mos), and instruction (disciplina), “either because our country (patria) is the parent (parens) to us all, or because we ought to consider the wisdom employed in framing the laws as great as the wisdom employed in acquiring the enormous power of our empire” (de orat. 1.196).58 crassus’ personification of the country as a parent with a mind and a method of instruction suggests a father who is equipped to instruct his children and entitled to their devotion—pietas. as one’s patriotic duty, the study of law reveals the wisdom of the ancestors, a thesis that cicero sets out to demonstrate in his subsequent de republica and de legibus. in both dialogues, the orator rejects plato’s purely theoretical approach to the question 135 diluzio of the ideal state and argues using a combination of theory and historical practice that the ancestral roman republic represents the ideal state, “not established by one man’s talent, but many; and not in one person’s lifetime, but over many centuries and generations” (cic. rep. 2.2).59 whether in the law courts, the public meetings, or the senate, the orator—indeed, the ideal statesman—must have “the whole record of antiquity, the authority of public law, and knowledge of the methods of governance” at his disposal in order to serve the republic. “indeed, in our discussion here,” crassus affirms, “we are not seeking some shyster, shouter, or bawler. the man we are searching for is, first and foremost, a high priest of his art” (de orat. 1.201–2). conclusion: restoring the roman republic equipped with knowledge of greek rhetoric and roman custom and law, cicero imagines a new generation of orators capable of restoring the republican consensus. in de oratore, cicero criticizes the narrow scope of contemporary rhetorical education, which leaves students illprepared for the expansive role of the orator-statesman in public affairs. by focusing on preparing students to argue specific rather than general questions and ignoring ethics, politics, law, and the writing of history, rhetorical training in the final decades of the republic emphasized form over content—how to speak rather than what to think and say. according to crassus, it produces “people who judge that they have embraced the entire power of oratory through the precepts of so-called rhetoricians […] but who have not yet been able to understand what role they are taking or what they profess” (de orat. 3.54).60 were it not for his own program combining rhetoric with knowledge of roman practice, cicero would have indeed agreed with the philosopher charmadas, whose diatribe crassus recounts in the first book of the dialogue: “he was saying that all aspects of this knowledge (i.e., related to founding and governing republics) must be sought from philosophy and that the practices established in a republic concerning the immortal gods, the education of the youth, justice, endurance, selfcontrol, the manner of everything, and the remaining things without which communities are unable to exist or be of good character, were not able to be found anywhere in the little books of rhetoricians” (de orat. 1.85). the present conflict between philosophy and rhetoric did not always obtain. to the contrary, the greeks of old, according to crassus, referred to the method of thinking and speaking well (cogitandi pronuntiandique ratio) as wisdom (sapientia). this approach also emphasized right actions along with good speech (et recte faciendi et bene dicendi): peleus, the father of achilles, had entrusted the young hero to phoenix to be his companion in war and to make him a speaker of words (orator verborum) and a doer of deeds (actor rerum) (de orat. 3.57).61 later, it produced greek lawgivers like lycurgus, pittacus, and solon, and, later still, a similar combination of knowledge, virtue, and oratorical skill characterized men like c. fabricius luscinus, ti. coruncanius, scipio aemilianus, and cato the elder, under whose leadership rome became mistress of the mediterranean (de orat. 3.56–7).62 these great men of the past the civic education of cicero’s ideal orator 136 learned how to speak alongside everything that was relevant to human conduct, life, virtue, and the republic (de orat. 3.72). but, in greece, the advent of the philosophers, especially socrates, led to a division of this original unity between “the knowledge of judging wisely and speaking with distinction […] a division, as it were, between the tongue and the brain” (de orat. 3.60–61). first in greece and later at rome, students attended different teachers for thinking and speaking, philosophers for the former and rhetoricians for the latter. what is more, philosophy itself devolved into different schools, each of which emphasized different aspects of socrates’ teachings (de orat. 3.61–69). hence, the original division of wisdom produced a division of studies, which in turn led to a divided community. in greece, wise men like lycurgus, pittacus, and solon first established laws and customs to preserve harmony in their respective poleis, only to have socrates and his followers challenge established custom by shunning the public good and devoting themselves to philosophy. with its advent at rome, rhetoric became the focus of roman education to the virtual exclusion of ethics, history, custom, and law, with the result that certain romans used their oratory to foment lawlessness and factionalism. popular demagogues rose to prominence, among them cicero’s nemesis clodius and p. sulpicius rufus—one of the young interlocutors in de oratore. after the dramatic date of the dialogue, sulpicius used a combination of violence and intimidation as tribune to overturn the senate’s arrangements related to the command of l. cornelius sulla.63 the move touched off a period of violence and civil strife (including the purge of 87 bc) that ended with the dictatorship of sulla and the proscription of his enemies. of all the interlocutors, it is this same sulpicius who appears least persuaded by crassus: “i do not feel a need for that aristotle or carneades of yours, or for any of the philosophers, and you are free to believe that i despair of being able to master such things, or that i despise it, which i do. for me a popular knowledge with the ordinary affairs of the forum is more than sufficient for the kind of eloquence that i have in mind” (de orat. 3.147). sulpicius uncharitably rejects the kind of education that crassus has been advocating and, in the process, signals his demagogic intentions: he only desires enough “popular knowledge” (volgaris cognitio) so that he can play to the “crowd” (volgus). by contrast, a renewed roman republic requires orators with the wisdom and character of earlier generations. the ideal orator ought to be skilled in speech and expert in the same areas as those distinguished romans of the past under whose leadership the republic flourished at home and abroad in the third and second centuries bc. cicero’s choice of models—crassus, antonius, cato the elder, and scipio aemilianus—indicates that he does not wish to rid roman education of greek influence but to see it properly oriented in relation to roman practice. the orator must observe roman practice as set forth in law and custom, not only to persuade others, but also to preserve the social fabric of the republic. as crassus contends, “the leadership and wisdom (moderatio et sapientia) of the perfect orator provide the chief basis, not only for his own dignity, but also for the safety of countless individuals and of the republic as a whole” (de orat. 1.34).64 137 diluzio endnotes 1. all primary source abbreviations follow the conventions set forth in the most recent edition of the oxford classical dictionary (4th ed.). unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 2. thesaurus linguae latinae. 11 vols. berlin, 1900-. hereafter abbreviated as tll. 3. mitchell 1979, 178–88. 4. on the controversy over the senatus consultum ultimum in the late republic: gaughan 2010, 110–21. 5. e.g., ap. claudius decemvir and ap. claudius pulcher (cos. 143 bc), who defied the senate and the veto of a tribune to celebrate a triumphal procession. 6. tatum 1999, 62–6; asc. 49.11–7, 52.25–53.4c; cic. har. resp. 37; plut. caes. 9.1–10.4. 7. tatum 1999, 71–80. 8. tatum 1999, 74–85; cic. att. 1.14.5, 1.16.3–6; plut. caes. 10.5–6. cicero writes to atticus that with the retreat of the boni and the forum full of slaves, twenty-five jurors faced the utmost danger and showed such courage when they voted to convict clodius, preferring to die rather than to lose everything (§5). caesar thought better of testifying against clodius; when called as a witness, he pled ignorance. 9. in his defense of antonius, cicero apparently offended caesar by criticizing the acts of his consulship: app. b. civ. 2.14; cic. dom. 41; dio 38.10.1; suet. jul. 20.4. this might have been what prompted the pontifex to oversee the adoption of clodius by a plebeian family, since patricians could not stand for the tribunate: app. b. civ. 2.14; cic. dom. 34–42; sest. 15–6; dio 38.12.1–2. on clodius’ complicated relationship with the triumvirs, see tatum 1999, 108–13. 10. in clodium et curionem 2–3 (in crawford 1994). 11. tatum 1999, 154. 12. at one public meeting, clodius invited prominent supporters of cicero ostensibly to debate the issue. the crowd, however, which the tribune himself had presumably gathered, greeted the speakers with violence and abuse. this was a typical popularis strategy: morstein-marx 2004, 161–72. 13. tatum 1999, 156. the civic education of cicero’s ideal orator 138 14. mitchell 1991, 122–23. cf. att. 2.5.1; 2.9.3; 2.16.2; 3.7.2; 3.9.2; 3.15.2–3; fam. 1.9.17, 21; sest. 42. 15. for cicero’s insistence that his political principles were unchanged: cic. att. 1.19.8; 1.20.2–3; cf. 2.5.1; fam. 1.9.8. on his political hiatus in 59 bc: mitchell 1991, 120–22; cic. att. 2.4.4; 2.5.2; 2.6.1–2; 2.7.4; 2.13.2; 2.14.1; 2.16.3. 16. tatum 1999, 108, 170–85; mitchell 1991, 116–20, 136, 146–57. 17. mitchell 1991, 181–203. 18. on the so-called “palinode” speech in support of caesar: shackleton bailey 1965, 2.233– 34; cf. mitchell 1991, 185. 19. though once dated to april/may, att. 4.5 is now generally dated to the summer of 56 bc. in att. 4.13.2, dated to mid-november 55 bc, cicero refers to his work on oratory (de libris oratoriis), which he has been working on for some time (diu multumque in manibus fuerunt) and which atticus can copy out (describas licet). this last remark suggests the manuscript is suitable for publication: fantham 2004, 10–15; leeman and pinkster 1981, 17–21. 20. cf. q. fr. 3.5.4; fam. 1.7.10, in which cicero relates—“provision for our safety (salus) must not be made without considering our standing (dignitas), nor our standing without considering safety.” 21. pompey, in particular. cic. fam. 7.1.4–6. cf. att. 4.6.1–2; fam. 1.9.18; q. fr. 3.5.4. 22. crassus died shortly after the dramatic date of the dialogue, having fallen ill after a confrontation with l. marcius philippus (cos. 91 bc), who had threatened him personally and insulted the senate. antonius, scaevola, catulus, and julius caesar strabo would all perish in the purge of 87, when the forces of marius and cinna retook rome following sulla’s departure for the east. the radical tribune sulpicius rufus had died at the hands of sullan partisans the previous year. 23. baraz 2012, 9–10; gildenhard 2007, 46–63; schmidt 1978–79, 119–21. 24. stroup 2010, 146–60. 25. badian 1969, 452–65. on the tirocinium fori, see below. 26. cf. cic. rep. 3.5; leg. 1.62 (regarding the philosopher). 27. kennedy 1963, 54–57. in his youth, cicero himself wrote a rhetorical treatise on invention (de inventione), the process of discerning the most relevant and advantageous grounds on which to argue a case. 139 diluzio 28. corbeill 2001, 266; eyben 1993, 135; rawson 1985, 66–76, 156–69. 29. fowler 1909, 187. 30. connolly 2007. on “discourse,” mills 2004, esp. 10, 15. for “webs of interlocution,” taylor 1999, 36. cf. inv. 1.2–3; brut. 53. 31. leeman and pinkster 1981, 209–11; shorey 1909. 32. cf. de orat. 1.187; suet gram. 2.1–2; bloomer 2011, 22–23; griffin 1994, 690–91; bonner 1977, 23–24. 33. leeman and pinkster 1981, 33. 34. the other arts undoubtedly include at least some of the so-called liberal arts (artes liberales), which at the time included grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, music, and mathematics—de orat. 1.72, 3.125. 35. the fact that magister is singular would indicate that leges, instituta, and mos all modify usus. cf. 1.192, crassus’ remark that everything related to the law is to be found “in daily experience (in usu quotidiano), in the gathering of men, and in the forum.” 36. marino 1993; fowler 1909, 192–4. 37. bonner 1977, 84–85; tac. dial. 34; quint. inst. 10.5.19. 38. on exercises in the campus martius, bonner 1977, 99–100; cic. cael. 11. on tirocinium militiae, rosenstein 2010, 139; mitchell 1979, 9 (example of cicero). 39. colton 1824, 1.217 (114). dijksterhuis 2005, 209–10, with bibliography. 40. on social reproduction: corbeill 2007; bourdieu and passeron 1990. 41. vasaly 1993, 199–205; balsdon 1979, 30–54. cf. de orat. 1.45, 56, 105, 3.127–8. 42. other examples of feigned ignorance: 1.82, 91, 208. 43. zetzel 2003. cf. de orat. 3.57, 123. 44. indeed, the author’s decision to compose his work in the form of a dialogue owes much to plato. the greek philosopher had composed two dialogues critical of rhetoric—the gorgias and the phaedrus—and de oratore engages with plato’s earlier criticism at various points. 45. stroup 2010, 154–55; narducci 1997, 32. cf. atkins 2013, 26. the civic education of cicero’s ideal orator 140 46. lintott 1999, 4–7; hölkeskamp 2010, 17–18. while the singular mos is often translated as “custom” and applies to a collective, the plural mores tends to be translated as “character” with reference to an individual: tll 8.0.1524.5–13. 47. an allusion to arist. rhet. 1.8.1 (1365b22–25) explains the ambiguous use of mores civitatis. aristotle maintained that one must understand the customs of each type of constitution (i.e., mores civitatis)—monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy—in order to persuade and give good advice. 48. cicero used “good men” (boni) as a political catchword to refer to those devoted to the republican social and political order. hellegouarc’h 1972, 484–505; lacey 1970, 10–16; wirszubski 1961, 13–4. 49. fowler 1909, 168; plut. cato mai. 20.5; juv. 14.38–58. on aphorisms, many of which were attributed to cato the elder: bloomer 2011, 142–55; cic. planc. 59; rep. 1.36. 50. plut. cat. mai. 20.4, 6; varro catus de liberis educandis frag. 19 (ed. riese 1865, 250) = non. 108, s.v. ephippium. 51. connolly 2007, 20–21. 52. morstein-marx 2004, 271, with bibliography. 53. morstein-marx 2004, esp. 204–40. 54. note the ends to which antonius and crassus endorse appeals to emotion at de orat. 1.202, 2.337. 55. cf. rep. 5.5: scipio aemilianus asserts that a political leader will have sought to learn common law and statutes (ius et leges) and examine their origins. 56. crassus cites a number of examples of shameless orators who do not know the law and so jeopardize their clients’ cases (de orat. 1.166–75l; cf. 2.101) as well as pointing to kind of political leader who puffs himself up (se effert) if he knows only one thing— eloquence, law, or military affairs (3.136). by contrast, men like cato the elder (1.171, 3.135), p. licinius crassus dives mucianus, cos. 131 (1.170, 216, 239–40), p. licinius crassus dives, cos. 205 (3.134), ti. coruncanius, cos. 280, dict. 246 (3.56, 134), m’. manilius, cos. 149 (3.133), and sex. aelius paetus catus, cos. 198 (1.198, 212, 3.133) were effective orators who were learned in the law, accomplished statesmen, and, in some cases, effective military commanders. 57. i.e., “dutiful behavior,” especially toward the gods, one’s country, and one’s parents. 141 diluzio 58. rather than res publica, which seems better suited to the context, crassus instead chooses patria, a play on parens, to underscore the filial relationship of a citizen toward the republic. 59. the interlocutor p. cornelius scipio aemilianus (cos. 146, cen. 142 bc), recalling what cato the elder had once said. cicero’s purpose in writing the dialogues is to present a theoretical argument for the roman republic and its laws. cf. rep. 1.70, 2.1–3; de orat. 3.95, 123. 60. cf. the importance of understanding one’s role (persona) at kopff 1999, 12—“denied these stories by the present education system [i.e., the story of their nation and civilization as a coherent narrative], students have become like the anti-heroes of modern novels: people trapped in a world they cannot understand, bit players in a drama whose basic themes remain a mystery to them.” 61. cf. il. 9.438–43, esp. the final line—μύθων τε ῥητῆρ’ ἔμεναι πρηκτῆρά τε ἔργων. on the ideal of the young prince and his tutor: martin 1984. 62. lycurgus, pittacus, and solon were the lawgivers of sparta, mytilene, and athens respectively. ti. coruncanius (cos. 280, dict. 246 bc) was an accomplished military commander and jurist, who served as the first plebeian pontifex maximus; c. fabricius luscinus (cos. 282, 278; cen. 275 bc) and cato the elder (cos. 195, cen. 184 bc) were both legendary for their traditional virtue; p. cornelius scipio aemilianus africanus minor (cos. 147, 134 bc) oversaw the final defeat of carthage in the third punic war and was known for his greek learning. cf. de orat. 3.134, which lists three chief priests (pontifices maximi)—p. licinius crassus dives (cos. 205 bc), ti. corucanius, and p. cornelius scipio nasica corculum (cos. 162, 155 bc)—as examples of wise roman men. 63. on sulpicius: app. b. civ. 1.55–9; plut. mar. 34–5; sull. 8–9. on sullan dictatorship: gaughan 2010, 131–4; flower 2010, 117–34. 64. trans. may and wisse, with modifications. works cited atkins, jed w. 2013. cicero on politics and the limits of reason. cambridge: cambridge university press. badian, ernst. 1969. “quaestiones variae.” historia 18.4: 447–91. the civic education of cicero’s ideal orator 142 balsdon, john percy vyvian dacre. 1979. romans and aliens. chapel hill: university of north carolina press. baraz, yelena. 2012. a written republic: cicero’s philosophical politics. princeton: princeton university press. bloomer, w. martin. 2011. the school of rome: latin studies and the origins of liberal education. berkeley: university of california press. bonner, stanley f. 1977. education in ancient rome: from the elder cato to the younger pliny. berkeley: university of california press. bourdieu, pierre, and jean-claude passeron. 1990. reproduction in education, society, and culture. translated by richard nice. thousand oaks, ca: sage press. colton, charles c. 1824. lacon, or, many things in a few words: addressed to those who think. london: s. marks. connolly, joy. 2007. the state of speech: rhetoric and political thought in ancient rome. princeton: princeton university press. corbeill, anthony. 2001. “educating in the roman republic: creating traditions.” in education in greek and roman antiquity. edited by yun lee too, 261–287. leiden: brill. –––. 2007. “rhetorical education and social reproduction.” in a companion to roman rhetoric. edited by william dominik and jon hall, 69–82. hoboken: wiley-blackwell press. crawford, jane w. 1994. m. tullius cicero: the fragmentary speeches. oxford: oxford university press. dijksterhuis, ap. 2005. “why we are social animals: the high road to imitation as social glue.” in perspectives on imitation: from neuroscience to social science, volume 2: imitation, human development, and culture. edited by susan hurley and nick chater, 207–220. cambridge, ma: bradford books. eyben, emiel. 1993. restless youth in ancient rome. new york: routledge. fantham, elaine. 2004. the roman world of cicero’s de oratore. oxford: oxford university press. flower, harriet. 2010. roman republics. princeton: princeton university press. 143 diluzio fowler, w. warde. 1909. social life at rome in the age of cicero. new york: macmillian. gaughan, judy e. 2010. murder was not a crime: homicide and power in the late republic. austin: university of texas press. gildenhard, ingo. 2007. paideia romana: cicero’s tusculan disputations. cambridge: cambridge philological society. griffin, miriam. 1994. “the intellectual developments of the ciceronian age.” in cambridge ancient history, volume 9: the last age of the roman republic, 146–43 bc. edited by j. a. crook, andrew lintott, and elizabeth rawson, 689–728. cambridge: cambridge university press. hellegouarc’h, joseph. 1972. le vocabulaire latin des relations et des partis politiques sous la république. 2nd ed. paris: les belles lettres. hölkeskamp, karl-j. 2010. reconstructing the roman republic: an ancient political culture and modern research. princeton: princeton university press. kennedy, george a. 1963. the art of persuasion in greece. princeton: princeton university press. kopff, e. christian. 1999. the devil knows latin: why america needs the classical tradition. wilmington, de: intercollegiate studies institute books. lacey, walter k. 1970. “boni atque improbi.” greece and rome 17.1 (april): 3–16. leeman, anton, and harm pinkster. 1981. m. tullius cicero de oratore libri iii. kommentar. heidelberg: university of heidelberg press. lintott, andrew w. 1999. the constitution of the roman republic. oxford: oxford university press. marino, r. 1993. “tirocinium fori: il rapporto civis-miles.” mythos 5: 91–6. martin, richard p. 1984. “hesiod, odysseus, and the instruction of princes.” transactions of the american philological association 114: 29–48. may, james, and jakob wisse. 2001. cicero: on the ideal orator. oxford: oxford university press. mills, sara. 2004. discourse. new york: routledge. mitchell, thomas n. 1979. cicero: the ascending years. new haven: yale university press. the civic education of cicero’s ideal orator 144 –––. 1991. cicero: the senior statesman. new haven: yale university press. morstein-marx, robert. 2004. mass oratory and political power in the late roman republic. cambridge: cambridge university press. narducci, emanuele. 1997. cicerone e l’eloquenza romana: rhetorica e progetto culturale. rome-bari: laterza. rawson, elizabeth. 1985. intellectual life in the late roman republic. baltimore: johns hopkins university press. riese, alexander, ed. 1865. m. terenti varronis saturarum menippearum reliquiae. leipzig: b. g. teubner. rosenstein, nathan. 2010. “military command, political power, and the republican elite.” in a companion to the roman army. edited by paul erdkamp, 132–147. malden, ma: blackwell publishing. schmidt, peter l. 1978–79. “cicero’s place in roman philosophy: a study of his prefaces.” classical journal 74.2: 115–27. shackleton bailey, d. r. 1965–1968. cicero’s letters to atticus. 4 vols. cambridge: cambridge university press. shorey, paul. 1909. “φύσις, μελέτη, ἐπιστήμη.” transactions of the american philological association 40: 185–201. stroup, sarah c. 2010. catullus, cicero, and a society of patrons: the generation of the text. cambridge: cambridge university press. tatum, jeffrey. 1999. the patrician tribune: publius clodius pulcher. chapel hill: university of north carolina press. taylor, charles. 1999. sources of the self. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. vasaly, ann. 1993. representations: images of the world in ciceronian oratory. berkeley: university of california press. wirszubski, ch. 1950. libertas as a political idea at rome during the late republic and early principate. cambridge: cambridge university press. zetzel, james. 2003. “plato with pillows: cicero on the uses of greek culture.” in myth, history, and culture in republican rome: studies in honour of t. p. wiseman. edited by david braund and christopher gill, 119–138. liverpool: liverpool university press. microsoft word 3 van es interview.docx [expositions 10.2 (2016) 37–54] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376   interview: bart van es, oxford university john-paul spiro villanova university bart van es is professor of english literature and fellow and senior tutor at st. catherine’s college, oxford. he is the author of spenser’s forms of history (2002), shakespeare in company (2013), and shakespeare’s comedies: a very short introduction (2016), and the editor of a critical companion to spenser studies (2006). shakespeare in company is a major contribution to the study of shakespeare as a theatrical professional, showing how profoundly shakespeare’s work was influenced by his acting company, his rival playwrights, and his material context. as the interview below indicates, he is continuing his work on acting companies but also exploring new genres and subjects while remaining focused on the intersections between history and literature. i had the chance to sit down with him in early july 2016 – a week after the brexit vote – in his office at st. catherine’s college. we discussed his life and work, shakespeare studies at oxford and elsewhere, the peculiarities of shakespeare in his historical moment, and current events. below is a transcript of that conversation. spiro: what brought you to the study of shakespeare and english renaissance literature? van es: i think those are two different questions. i did start thinking about shakespeare as something i wanted to do my doctorate on, but i was advised off it and told that it was much better to start in something “properly renaissance” like spenser. so that’s what i did as an undergraduate dissertation at cambridge with catherine bates. i was at peterhouse at that time. that was a work on archaism in spenser, [a topic] which fascinated me, its kind of timelessness. i did it as an undergraduate dissertation, and often those things then just blossom into an m.st. dissertation, as it was called then, and then a ph.d. so it was, in particular i suppose, a fascination with the renaissance as a period that gained a new kind of consciousness of its own place in history. i’ve always been very interested in those kinds of questions, a period’s sense of its own period, and overlapping discourses of how a period speaks about itself and then how we speak about the interview: bart van es 38 discourse. so [my book] spenser’s forms of history, it took a long time to turn into those various chapters which are about different modes of historiographic writing in the renaissance. it grew out of that question about how somebody could write something deliberately archaic, and what they might be doing when they were doing that. shakespeare was not really part of that at all. i taught shakespeare but wasn’t researching on shakespeare. i wrote a spenser book, and i did the critical companion to spenser, and i was writing a larger book – i’m always quite interested in the books that you don’t end up writing – i was writing a large book about verse history called historians in verse, which i’ve never actually written, starting with the mirror for magistrates. i wrote a couple of articles related to that. at the same time i got my professorship here, my permanent job in oxford, and i was asked to do a lecture series on shakespeare that related shakespeare to his contemporaries, because people had this tendency to write undergraduate work that didn’t really consider shakespeare a renaissance writer, or they just looked at shakespeare studies as a self-enclosed category. so i set about preparing for that lecture series by thinking about shakespeare alongside his contemporaries: marlowe obviously, jonson, middleton, webster, etc., and i started thinking about “how does shakespeare fit into that?” it was a great occasion, where i was thinking about a lecture series that then turned into a book. my initial sense was, while early on in shakespeare’s career, works like titus andronicus and the early history plays felt to me very easily connectible to his contemporaries and full of rhetorical parallels and also institutional parallels, co-authorship and so on, that fit very well with his contemporaries. and then later on i was immediately struck by lots of parallels with people like fletcher and shakespeare. but the middle bit of shakespeare didn’t seem to me to relate at all easily to shakespeare’s contemporaries. that became a sort of question i was interested in in that lecture series, which i did partly through parallel passages that i would put up and say, “look at how remarkably similar late shakespeare is to lots of romance drama that’s being put on,” above all, john fletcher, but also bits of beaumont, even bits of jonson. and the early stuff seemed very similar. that then became this kind of core question to me, which relates to the question i was interested in about spenser in a way, as somebody who feels part of his time but out of his time, too. so that was the kind of core question i got interested in addressing in shakespeare in company, was, “why did the middle bit of shakespeare not fully feel like a renaissance author?” 39 spiro so that was a seven-year project of reading all of renaissance drama and starting to ask a very different set of questions about the institutions in which shakespeare functions. i didn’t really know very much at all about how acting companies worked at the beginning, and what kind of archives i would have to look at. so i started doing that, which was kind of scary, because you just think, in academia you get more and more professionalized early on and i sort of knew what i was doing in renaissance history writing, and in the learned cultures of the society of antiquaries and the ars historica, and i had done quite a lot of work on james’ interest in and reaction to classical historiography. so i was doing a lot of that sort of stuff, and then suddenly this was quite a different world, that of early of actors and acting companies. but i decided to follow that up and write the other book. spiro: will you return to the book on verse history at some point? van es: i always end up getting distracted by other things. i might. now i’m doing something utterly different, which is not even a renaissance book. i am doing a couple of other renaissance things, like part of the oxford nashe projects, and writing about children’s acting companies, which is yet another thing that i ended up – that i got very interested in in the shakespeare book – i thought to do something big on children’s acting companies from the court of henry viii up until the abolition of child impressment under james. it seemed a good idea. but then more recently i ended up doing something utterly different, which as i say is not a renaissance book at all. it’s a kind of work of factual creative writing which at core is a sort of biography of a relative of mine who was a jewish girl who went into hiding in the netherlands during world war ii, and who was adopted by my grandparents, and then subsequent to that, following a raid on my grandparents’ home, ended up traveling across holland and hiding in different households in the course of world war ii. i didn’t actually know her at all; she was this rather disconnected, awkward figure in the family. she actually rejoined the family after the war but then we lost contact. she’s eighty-three and living in amsterdam and i ended up getting back in contact with her. i did a lot of hours of interviews with her, and went through the letter archive from her family, between her and my family. the book is partly the story of her life, but also the story of my journeys through the netherlands, tracing that and thinking about the history of the netherlands as i do that. so it’s kind of a book of three things: it’s a biography, it’s a history of the netherlands, and it’s a book about families and how they work in modern europe, today. a interview: bart van es 40 completely different kind of thing, which is yet another thing stopping me from writing the verse history book! spiro: does this feel like an utter departure from your work in the renaissance? van es: yes, if shakespeare in company was a bit of a departure from step one, this is a completely different form of writing, though it’s still kind of archival. i’ve just come back from two weeks in the netherlands looking at the files of postwar prosecutions of dutch policemen who were, of course, the people were hunting her during world war ii. so there is a lot of archival research in it. but particularly for her life, i’m writing it in a novelistic way, which is something i’ve not done before. it’s a different kind of project. spiro: a project that sounds on one level extremely personal, yet in another way, you’re acting as a historian and considering modes of history at the same time. do you feel you’d like to be doing that, or do you think you’ll keep juggling several balls in the air? van es: it has changed how i think about my own work. i think i would like to write more for a wider readership in the light of doing that. partly also in the light of writing silly little things like one of these very short introductions, which i think is just addressing people a bit outside of academia in general. so i have another lecture series – my books seem to come out of lecture series – i did a lecture series called “six ways of thinking in the renaissance.” so that sort of idea of “six ways of thinking” is a book that is again sort of bubbling up, and i’ve been thinking i can make that more of a general book about what literature is, and how it might involve thought, how literature might allow us to think in different ways. so the “six ways of thinking” include allegory, and how pastoral, for example, is a mode of thinking. so they’re about modes, and actually that lecture series had quite a lot on the visual arts as well. if i were to try and bet what i’m going to do now, i would say i’m going to write this book called the cut-out girl, and then i’ll try and write a book called six ways of thinking, which may actually become six ways of thinking in literature, rather than in just the renaissance, if i can achieve that. spiro: it sounds like a curious dialectic of people asking you to do things, and then you do what they ask you to do, and it then turns into some new area of research. you must feel a great deal of intellectual freedom if you get to move in all these different directions. 41 spiro van es: i think that is a good thing about oxford as an institution. oxford has downsides as an institution, one of which is that we’re not really a faculty. spiro: that’s been a recurring theme in these interviews. van es: we just don’t see each other in an institutional way very much, though i’m very good friends with my colleagues, but often i end up seeing them maybe occasionally at social events or at conferences. we live in these little colleges which feed us and provide us with nice offices, but that also means that there’s no corridor. there’s very little sense of a collective faculty identity, which can be tricky for our undergraduates and still more tricky for our graduates. and it can make it difficult for people to develop their careers; people can kind of go into little pockets. but the positive side of it is that you are very free, and there’s no head of department who tells you what you ought to be doing. there’s no sense of a collective faculty interest that would make somebody go, “what are you doing? this creative writing thing that you’re doing is very unprofessional and might not work for the ref [research excellence framework], might not fit in with our specialisms.” so in that sense it’s a great place to work. spiro: that begins to answer one of my main questions, which came from my own awareness when i was first looking at graduate schools and then advising undergraduates, there are certain places where, if you want to study shakespeare, you should go there. for many years it was berkeley, and there was a berkeley way of doing things, and harvard with its harvard way of doing things. and it seems for a very long time in the uk, it was places like liverpool or leeds or warwick or what have you, but now i find myself telling students that i keep noticing that so much of the new interesting shakespeare scholarship is coming out of oxford right now. and that was not always the case. so many good people are here – yourself, tiffany stern, simon palfrey, emma smith, laurie maguire, colin burrow, and so – and i wonder whether or not this is deliberate. it sounds like it’s not planned; it just seems a bit of happenstance. but even if you don’t all see each other very often or even feel like a faculty, i wonder if there is an “oxford school,” a particular approach to shakespeare. van es: it’s interesting. i think, contrasting oxford with cambridge, cambridge felt to me – i was a cambridge undergraduate and a cambridge ph.d. – cambridge felt to me always a place that knew much more what it was doing and that had a faculty identity, which was a sort of cool, interview: bart van es 42 “renaissance ironist” school, something like that. it was very dominated by colin [burrow] and by john kerrigan when i was there, and anne barton was still there. they were wonderful close readers with a kind of historical frame. they were particularly interested in rhetoric in complicated ways, always very interested in the literary artifact, but fixing it in reading cultures of the period, and a sort of “cambridge cleverness” that came with that. oxford, on the other hand, is receptive partly because it didn’t have that kind of very clear culture, and cambridge i think tended to pick its own cleverest people and employ those and maybe i wasn’t amongst those because i got my jrf [junior research fellowship] here rather than in cambridge. so if i sort of think of the people who were there, i think they all feel to me closer to the fit, people like jason scott-warren or gavin alexander or raphael lyne or andrew zurcher. they fit it much more, i guess. people often interested in sort of translation in various ways, classical reception. they seem to me, at least more in retrospect, to have a united way of working with each other and thinking which i think is still very true if you visit cambridge. they’re closely connected. here, it’s not like that at all. right from the beginning. i think colleges are just institutionally stronger in oxford than they are in cambridge. you don’t have offices in the faculty, whereas they do in cambridge. those physical things make a difference. so, “what is it that keeps oxford together?” is kind of an interesting question. i think that, i personally have been very influenced by tiffany [stern]. i think quite a lot of us have. i would rate tiffany as one of the really generative people. for example, simon [palfrey] took tiffany’s work in one kind of direction. i co-teach with tiffany on the m.st. i think her completely innovative way of thinking about how you can read the archives, how you can read the material culture of renaissance theater, and actually bring it together with real thought about theatrical production, rather than, i think, theater history being this complete backwater in renaissance studies. i would really credit tiffany with that kind of innovative thought. she is a real current theater person as well, who’s in touch with actors, who’s interested in drama and performance, that is doing that in a way that is really fundamentally historicist, and one of many great things about tiffany is she’s also very generous in letting other people do stuff with her work. because she doesn’t actually do close reading, and she kind of says that herself, that she’s in a way not interested in literature. i mean, she is interested in literature, but she doesn’t ask those kinds of formal questions about how artifacts function as things of beauty, i suppose. but on the other hand she just endlessly produces these really major discoveries and 43 spiro asks some really profound questions about them as well, as she theorizes them. it really invites people to engage with it. so i’ve definitely thought that it was actually reading tiffany’s stuff while i was asking that question about “where does shakespeare fit within his time?” i didn’t have the answer to it but then reading tiffany’s work on rehearsal i realized that this could be part of it. i think simon has done that in a different way. i think maybe it’s pushing it to say that laurie [maguire] and emma [smith] would acknowledge the same kind of influence from her. but maybe laurie and emma are also part of some kind of history in oxford of doing that kind of archives-based literary work that maybe, and i’m not very conscious of how these things work, but people like john pitcher, even ann pasternak slater, back in the day, her work on rehearsal, i think it influenced tiffany. katherine duncan-jones is another person who is very connected to drama and does it in a kind of archival way. so i think there’s maybe been that kind of oxford empiricism that sort of is interested in asking these local questions, in having a philological, historical way of working with documents that is subtly different from that kind of cambridge/new critical strand. so i think it’s kind of a mad melting pot that is oxford. tiffany herself was very influenced by john jones, who i guess is another kind of really free oxford person, starting in law, ending up then asking this different set of questions. so yeah, i guess there’s a sort of combination of, maybe a set of core oxford intellectual modes to do with empirical, language-based history questions, and the institutional freedom of colleges that maybe produce a set of people doing those kind of documentary things that then, they produce a kind of interesting work in a post-theory age. spiro: the post-theory part interests me. it seemed that people for a while people became, if not quite hostile to shakespeare and literary authors, but rather that they were was being very rigorously questioned or “interrogated” for their roles in things like empire and structures of oppression. it’s not that we’ve forgotten that, but it’s not the question that we’re asking. what you said about empiricism is perfect because our concerns have become: “what were those original conditions in which those works were produced? what were the theaters like? what were the audiences like? how did the playhouses work? how did the companies work? what did the audiences know that we don’t know? how did it get to us?” so it ties, for example, to emma smith’s work on the history of the book. interview: bart van es 44 van es: the history of the book is another version of that kind of materialism. what’s happened, at least with me, is that i’ve been asking in a way similar kind of empirical questions about the performance as object, as people ask about book history when they think about the book as object. you try to think of artifacts as being mediated by circumstances which include audience, which include the material theater, actors, all those kind of things. various artifacts. spiro: i wonder if also all of this is something of a reaction to this deified shakespeare that we still live with, this “original genius.” shakespeare in company is one of the best books that addresses how collaborative his art form was without taking anything away from him. he did not work in a vacuum, although i’m curious, you bring up that shakespeare’s middle period has less collaboration than many of his contemporaries. we can still speculate about how much of his work includes collaboration from his fellow actors, how much he’s responding to audience preferences, censors, and so on. even your conclusion in shakespeare in company reads as quite tentative, on the question of what it means to think of him as an author. van es: i think my work is quite unfashionable, in a way, in having come to a kind of romantic reading of shakespeare through material culture. i think some of the negative reaction to the book has felt that it’s a throwback to a kind of coleridgian shakespeare in certain ways because i actually end up saying that, in a paradoxical way, a certain kind of collaboration removed him from the crowd, removed him from that de-authoring tendency of renaissance drama. so i’m actually quite hostile to a lot of the current trends in shakespeare studies, which have tended to talk a lot about stylometrics as a way of pulling apart the canon. [for example,] gary taylor printing bits of macbeth and measure for measure in his collected works of middleton, or people like ross clarkson who were very negative about the book early on, or grace ioppolo, who all sort of feel that i’m returning to an isolated, native genius shakespeare. and, actually, i am unhappy about a dominant discourse which is very unwilling to make aesthetic judgments about shakespeare in comparison with his contemporaries, and i basically think that shakespeare’s literary work is immensely superior to his contemporaries. i want to stick to a romantic insistence on the remarkable kind of unity of tone and characterization in shakespeare that i don’t find in shakespeare’s contemporaries. my argument is that those unities, which is a very unfashionable word because we’re in an age of fragmentation and multiples, i think the unity comes from shakespeare’s ability to control his literary artifact and work with that set of actors. 45 spiro i don’t think shakespeare just kind of is a divinely-created figure, in the way that coleridge did. i think what happened in 1594 is that shakespeare was shocked out of a fairly conventional renaissance humanist arc, which did involve collaboration, it involved a kind of imitatio-based creativity, into this amazing hybrid of native drama, of the arden of faversham kind, and that much more elite humanist culture. i think he had that learned culture behind him but he joined a set of actors who were really from much more of that kind of native traveling-player tradition and that he suddenly had this new kind of control over his work and that from that came a really different form of drama from his contemporaries. i think it’s always a kind of dangerous thing to start thinking yourself into the mind of shakespeare – “what did shakespeare think he was doing?” – but i don’t think that shakespeare was somebody who was just playing to the market. i think there is a really profound sense of intellectual experimentation and interest in the human that you get in shakespeare that is a product of that special kind of culture that i was also trying to replicate but never had the institutional ability to do that. so i always sort of feel that, though i’ve learned a huge amount from, say, the way that arden 3 now packages shakespeare, always in multiple texts and refusing to make any judgments on which is a superior text, i think there is a kind of loss that comes from that way of thinking about literary work that always thinks about, say, lear as split between a history and a tragedy, or hamlet as existing in all these multiple forms, and that is as interested in quarto 1 hamlet as quarto 2 hamlet. i really respect that work but i also kick against it, because i think why i’m interested in shakespeare is he did something transcendently beautiful and i’ve always been kind of interested in those old-fashioned questions, in spite of an apparent academic culture which on the whole isn’t very interested in those questions. spiro: you said, “interest in the human.” one thing that has emerged in these interviews is the prior generation’s reading of not just shakespeare but all literature had gotten incredibly political, and we are less obviously political but there’s a very subtle ethical reading of shakespeare going on right now. we ask questions of empathy and recognition and attentiveness to human pain. whereas there was an arch-ironic reading of, say, king lear, now we can admit that the play is supposed to make you weep. van es: yeah, exactly. i’m by no means alone in it. there is another clear trend that sometimes goes under an umbrella of eco-criticism, or a turn back to the aesthetic, or that whole ethical movement. i am very interested in those kind of questions. that sort of sense that simon talks interview: bart van es 46 about, “possibility” in shakespeare. so, yeah, i’m very interested in trying to fit my kind of work into those frames, and to acknowledge that that specialness of that literature. we had derek attridge here as a visiting fellow last term and attridge’s kind of big questions have always been “what is the literary?” i really enjoyed talking to him about that, actually being resistant to – there are patterns of resistance out there – but a slight resistance to an interesting other trend in the discipline which is to endlessly expand the canon and start getting very interested in big data and collecting huge amounts of information out of the ’70s, those kinds of things, which is all kind of interesting but deliberately excludes value-judgments from how you bring work together, how you edit it. so lots of interesting editorial projects, like, say, colin burrow’s oxford edition of shakespeare, is interested in bringing things together that were published with shakespeare and saying, “we’re going to publish the whole of the passionate pilgrim, because it tells you about this.” colin was always really key to me in being interested in the aesthetic. i think colin’s always been really interested in that, and he writes so well on literary effects. so i think there are people who are asking those kind of questions, from a cognitive science point of view; from a philosophical point of view; from a sort of return of theory, adorno-led, eco-criticism that thinks about the text as some kind of environment that one does not want to violate with the act of criticism. so i would never talk in quite that high-falutin a term, it never sits easily with me, but i am interested in those kinds of questions. spiro: this sounds like a good bridge to your new project. van es: yeah, i think because i’m concerned with the literary artifact i’m trying to create one as well, in my modest way, a work that is consciously literary and will come out with publishers outside of academic publishing. it needs to fit that mode of writing. spiro: you mentioned thinking about a more public audience. i spotted this in your very short introduction to shakespeare’s comedies, which is, by definition, meant for a larger audience without a high level of familiarity with the subject matter. you also showed a casualness in an interview where you compared shakespeare and woody allen,1 and you have the section in the comedies book about how the plays really are set in something like american high schools. as a graduate of an american high school, i can vouch for that. you’re not wrong! in a “very short introduction,” you can’t go long into anything, but you say that the understanding of gender in 47 spiro shakespeare’s time and in his works, his views of gender and sexuality are a bit less flexible and a bit more flexible than our own. can you expand on that as well as what you call the “dream-like worlds” of shakespeare’s comedies? the comedies are set in several places at once, while the histories and tragedies are trapped in particular places. the comedies have this elasticity, this “light and purposeless wit” as you call it, and this greater flexibility about things like gender and sexuality. van es: i started that book by asking that kind of question – “how do you define shakespearean comedy?” – and on one hand it seems this endlessly expandable term that then also shrinks to nothing if you start setting a set of rules, and you start asking “which are the really festive shakespearean comedies?” but then i thought, actually, having pondered it for quite a while, i thought there are these five unifying ways of thinking about what shakespearean comedy is, so i have the category of world, the category of wit, and to go to your first question, thinking about love – and, as part of that, thinking about gender – before going on to time and finally character. the gender stuff is really interesting because one could start off thinking that shakespeare might in certain ways be more enlightened or non-binary about gender than we are today, and that’s what i was doing by comparing the comedies onstage with movie versions of the comedies. if you compare, for example, taming of the shrew to ten things i hate about you, or still more so, comparing twelfth night with she’s the man: you look at she’s the man and one of the core narrative concerns there is how is someone going to pass themselves off as a boy if they’re a girl, and the gender difference is seen as massive and you have to learn all these things like to strut in a particular way suggesting sexual experience, and all of these things, so actually there’s a really essentialist assumption about gender difference in the movie that isn’t actually there in the same way in the play and isn’t there in the same way in early modern culture more widely which assumes an enormous closeness between female children and male children, and women as a category. all of them are “cattle of one color,”2 to quote that line from lisa jardine. so initially you might say, “okay, within that kind of galenic way of thinking about gender, gender is an evolving process, that its ‘masculine heat’ is this momentary phase in one’s identity that kind of burns out the feminine, but as the flame fades later on in life, that old men might be rather effeminate, that young men might also have an effeminacy, and so a lot of those rigid categorizations of gender identity are not there in early modern thinking.” interview: bart van es 48 but of course the other element of the venn diagram center that connects women and children and young boys is a much more patriarchal one that really says, “all of these are versions of ‘imperfect’ man,” so i don’t think we should move from recognizing that shakespeare’s assumptions about gender are less hard-set than our own to a notion that that is necessarily “progressive” or “liberating.” it can also be very value-laden and the place for misogyny, and even though they entertain a possibility of homosexual desire and so on, this is always seen within a progressive arc towards heterosexual and there are inevitable hierarchies that place male above female. so i was thinking about that in that chapter about love, as something that i do think is a unique contribution that shakespeare gives to drama. again, i do keep thinking about ways that shakespeare is different from his contemporaries, and i don’t think you find that kind of focus on romantic love in other drama. so at times you get these glimpses of a kind of humanism in shakespeare, which is what the romantics found in him, but it’s a humanism you have to bracket and historicize, too. that’s one thing, and then to answer your “worlds,” question, that’s in the first chapter of the book, saying i suppose what i most immediately think unifies the comedies is the forest-like quality of them, which is not to say that they’re literally set in forests, but that they operate with a concept of space that is wonderfully elastic. you see it even in the most urban of the comedies, that you very rarely can talk about them as having a setting. i was interested in even something like comedy of errors, which at the outset – actually if you look at it in arden 2 it feels all the more rigid, because the arden 2 notes say, “this is classical, and there’s a backdrop of the houses, and everything plays out in public space” – but actually you look at that play and you say, “no, somehow shakespeare manages to create interiors and he manages to create actually a tremendously forestlike experience of a greek city.” so that’s very interesting and that allows you to see these little pockets of comedy within other genres, like the world of eastcheap in the henry iv plays is a kind of comic realm. so i’m kind of intrigued by that quality of “world” in shakespeare and also his ability to play with first world against second world, as in merchant of venice, where belmont is interestingly different from venice, although neither is straightforwardly “walled.” spiro: in comedy of errors there are also those cartographic references through the work, reminding you of the whole world, the indies, america, etc. 49 spiro van es: yeah, absolutely. i really like helen cooper’s work, who’s somebody whose lectures i went to when i was in cambridge; they were part of a graduate program there, and who influenced me partly because her “med-ren” [medieval-renaissance] way of thinking was also very useful for spenser, but what she did with shakespeare, thinking about the presence of medieval romance in shakespeare, it was very interesting. her work on comedy of errors i found incredibly interesting, in the english romance and time, where she says that actually this is a world suffused with the “cartographic scope” of the romance, even while maintaining this absolutely regimented chronology, apparently, and what feels like a plautine specificity of space. it’s always really interesting to compare shakespeare to his sources, and go, “okay, there are parallels here, but what does he add, what does he change?” if you compare it to the menaechmi, actually, you go, “yeah, of course, all the plot elements are there but the mood is so different.” spiro: you used the terms “enlightenment” and “progressive,” and something always in my experience as a teacher, and you can feel it reading people’s work on shakespeare, is the question of measuring him against us, measuring his time against our time. the bias is entirely towards our own time. so the thing about shakespeare is he didn’t say what one is supposed to say about all the different kinds of outsiders and underdogs of our culture and of his. it doesn’t come up frequently in your work but it came up a bit in the comedies book and a bit here in our conversation, dealing with shakespeare not being a twenty-first century progressive. van es: i am always interested as a teacher in defamiliarizing shakespeare with my students who tend to come in with – much more so with shakespeare than with any other literature, i find – with a very ethical frame in relation to him: either quite crassly judging shakespeare for his patriarchal diktats, or just flatly celebrating shakespeare for, particularly, i suppose, an apparent freedom around gender and, to a degree, also a positivity in race, compared to… they’re not really comparing him to his contemporaries, but they tend to draw lessons out of shakespeare and that’s something that i’m always kind of quarreling with them about. whichever way they go, i end up pushing the reverse. but i think actually shocking students a bit with the cruelty of early modern culture and the way those things find their way into shakespeare can be very interesting. so, for example, i really liked [andrew] höfele’s book [stage, stake, and scaffold: humans and animals in shakespeare’s theatre]; it has some really great stuff there on suddenly drawing attention to this affective cruelty interview: bart van es 50 in shakespeare. i remember going through those archives in dulwich college, and you see this little hand-drawn poster, “come and watch the whipping to death of the blind bear.” those things are so profoundly alienating, when you actually talk about a “humanist literary culture” and you notice things like “alençon and elizabeth took a break from their courtship negotiations to go and poke the eyes out of a bull and thought that was great.” spiro: cat-burning and such. van es: cat-burning, yeah. and you notice those lines in the middle of a midsummer night’s dream, or various other kind of moments where there are hunts, and the pleasure of pain in shakespeare. i’m intrigued by those little half-lines in twelfth night about bear-baiting. so suddenly kind of confronting people with the things that cut against these easy modern ethical assumptions is quite a powerful and useful thing to do, to say, “look, this is not your culture. the past is another country.” those kind of things. so i think those things are important to do, and that’s one of the things that i’m doing quite a lot in my other current project about children, child acting companies, which is a question that has come up in the light of recent world political events for me, the stuff on child abuse and institutional pedophilia and these very difficult questions. but actually i think there are pedophilic affects in early modern drama that people haven’t really confronted and that were absolutely concrete, institutional elements of theater that we’ve ignored to a considerable degree the reality of child impressment. admittedly, we have just the one case of thomas charles being taken off the street, but actually those court documents run in for quite a while, the star chamber documents, a lot of other actors are named as having been seized off the street. there are quite a lot of references if you run through court discussions about the abuse of boys that occurred within the theaters. i’ve got quite interested in the world of john lyly and the really cruel, sexually exploitative nature of those plays i think has not really been recognized. particularly a play like galatea which i think is endlessly drawing the viewer’s eye to the way in which the plot itself, with its gender transformations, matches the institution of theater which can take boys and turn them into girls, and can capture boys and turn them into girls. that’s the most recent article that i’ve actually finished, it was on child impressment in lyly and then midsummer night’s dream, and what that 51 spiro child is doing there, and how it’s being related to, and why are we not more troubled by oberon and titania’s fixation on this loved boy. there are lots of lies in the play around that boy. it cannot be the case that oberon and titania are both speaking the truth about him. either oberon is taking that child from titania, who she has seen grow up from youth, or titania has stolen him from an indian king and is wanting him for her sexual purposes, and oberon wants to take him. so there’s a deliberate, and it’s very unusual in a shakespeare play, that there’s an unresolved truce in this play about who this boy is, and it’s a play that’s full of strange and masochistic sexualities, and the child is part of that. it’s a really troubling thing and i found it quite disturbing to work on as well because it’s not really an idiom for discussing it. we talked partly about the aestheticization of sexual violence, which i think is there in lyly, and how do we think of shakespeare in relation to it? in certain ways a midsummer night’s dream is progressive in that it might in certain ways be parodying that kind of pedophilic eroticism that you get in marlowe, for instance, very much so in dido, queen of carthage. i think by saying “this is an adult troupe; we don’t do that sort of thing,” that’s partly what the rude mechanicals play is doing. but on the other hand it’s still there in that play, that kind of effect. there are still those kinds of jokes about “the body’s boy beneath the woman,” and actually that stuff is more restrained in shakespeare than in most of his contemporaries, partly because he didn’t write for children’s companies, which i think did keep returning to that motif. that’s one of the things i’m most interested in pursuing in that book. if you look at the induction to cynthia’s revels, it’s full of these jokes about boy actors being ingalls and courting the favor of the gentleman. you see it in poetaster as well. these are the questions, and this is the wonderful thing about doing historical research that has an ethical bent as well: you can say, “okay, as our own culture changes, we start seeing new things in the early modern.” just as the much maligned new historicism suddenly roughed up the renaissance by bringing us accounts of hangings and colonialism and so on, and suddenly you can start saying, “yeah, there is a discourse of colonialism of some kind in the tempest” or “there are racial subtexts to othello,” that none of the critics of the ’70s noticed. now in the post-catholic church scandals and bbc scandals, you look at these plays, and you go, “okay, how are children represented in them? what did this culture hide in its attitude to children?” that’s a set of questions i’m concerned with at the moment. trying to read the archives, and i’m reading quite a lot about [the earl of] oxford, who was accused of child interview: bart van es 52 abuse in quite extensive documentary ways. the earl of oxford who was patron of the children of the revels, and you have to look at those little momentary glances of what is never going to be set out in chapter and verse about the sexual agenda of the period. so i’ve been interested in looking back at [stephen] orgel’s work on that. but i don’t think orgel quite asks the questions that i’m asking, or that i’m now beginning to ask. spiro: in a way you have been saying this all along, but let me try to get a straight answer about what you see in shakespeare and early modern studies as particularly promising. what would you like to see people doing in coming years? you think of students who come in and say “surely the work has already been done,” and you can say “no, someone can work on that.” van es: there’s so much good new work being done. i think, for example, religion is being treated in a far better way than it has been previously. brian cummings has thought about the language of religion and that combination of thinking about translation and how that combines with religion, it connects to our thinking on ethics and literature now. some of the best graduate work i read at the moment is on religion in early modern drama, and also in other early modern work. that’s a really interesting way of thinking historically about things that are complex, and allusion is part of that. a lot of good work there. obviously, i would like to see more just work relating the canonical literature to what sits alongside it. there’s amazingly little work on that still. i think a great ph.d., for example, would be on samuel daniel and shakespeare. i’m surprised how few actual bits of influence-study have really been done on shakespeare. the older default is always to take some set cultural category and map it onto shakespeare, to say, “shakespeare and barber-surgeons” or whatever, “shakespeare and this,” but actually thinking more about how shakespeare relates to another creative presence in his own time, i’d like to see more of that. i happened to see some recent work by megan andrews which i thought was really interesting, thinking about shakespeare and drayton, for example. she really plots this very intriguing way in which drayton quotes shakespeare and then adopts in relation to shakespeare new modes. interesting stuff is being done on collaboration that’s on the whole still quite stylometric in focus, and i would like to see it more a little bit escaping that. i’m kind of unhappy fundamentally at stylometrics as a methodology, which is unfashionable, but i think actually the nature of dramatic manuscripts doesn’t lend itself to that simple separation. there has been really great stuff written on collaboration, it’s fairly old now, the jeff masten stuff is brilliant, and people who are doing 53 spiro that kind of work, there have been a whole series of interesting books about collaboration. i really enjoyed richard preiss’s work on clowning and authorship, and i think some of [james] bednarz’ work on the poets’ war is really great, what bednarz did with the passionate pilgrim as well, or on the phoenix and the turtle. that is really actually properly collaborative work, to say, “here’s a contemporary poet, and how do they relate to shakespeare?” and it doesn’t even have to be shakespeare, it can also be, say, jonson’s literary circle. that kind of work has never been done, because pre-new historicism, or preall the theory movements, there was still fundamentally a romantic notion of the author who was the greater for his isolation. so literary relationships, clusters of various kinds. a big thinker who has always interested me, who i’m always thinking about is [bruno] latour. latour’s thinking about networks has massive literary payoff. so people who might be interested in, for example, the ho plays or something, and saying, “how does that collaboration work? what is the nature of the interaction across those plays?” or, similarly, following some track, which is partly what i was going to try to do in the verse history stuff, on the kinds of conversations that were being had between people like drayton, daniel, and, later, phineas fletcher. those literary communities seem to me really interesting. spiro: everybody is talking about collaboration and i still feel like we’re just skimming the surface. my last question is about the happenstance of this week, the brexit vote, and particularly what you think the implications of this week’s vote will be on higher education, but also because you’re dutch, i think your perspective will be quite valuable. van es: yes, i am personally, utterly depressed about the vote and i regard it as a national tragedy. so i’m not sure i can talk dispassionately about it. i think the implications for the university [of oxford] will be quite threatening. it’s such an international culture and it signals that to come off something like this is very negative. it probably affects [the department of] english a little bit less than other disciplines. the sciences, of course, are very obviously institutionally collaborative in the eu. english, partly because it depends on such a facility with language, is actually pretty walled off from the continent already; it’s already a kind of brexit subject. you don’t really get eu applicants for our courses very much at all, or if you do, they tend to struggle, mainly because of the language barrier, and maybe also a little bit but actually european universities are so different in how they think about literature. it’s interesting but also leads to an awkward relation between the two. i don’t find much connection with what dutch universities do with english interview: bart van es 54 literature or renaissance studies very much with what we do. so in that sense it probably affects us less. we really are such an american, a north american discipline, english literature. that’s where all the big conferences are. there’s always trans-atlantic conversations, but those conversations are carried out in the us. but what does that say about brexit? it’s a kind of culmination of a reassertion of the national in a post-cold war age. we’ve got all these mini-nationalisms bubbling up across europe. you’ve got to remember that it’s a tiny victory, really a few percentage points, because britain is tremendously international, or at least 48% are tremendously international. that kind of thinking about nation was tremendously productive, in that lots of the stuff on nationhood i found really interesting, and again it’s one of those instances where literary discussions are opened up by contemporary events. once you start critiquing the nation-state in interesting ways, you start saying, “what is englishness in shakespeare’s plays? how english are the english history plays? why is the four captains’ scene of henry v so rich?” so, who knows, maybe the politics of brexit will force people to ask different kinds of questions about the political aspects of literature in early modern england, early modern england’s own sense of itself as an island apart in some ways, post-reformation, especially postthe loss of calais. so maybe i can slightly recover from my deep depression by saying it can open up new kinds of questions. but i will do so with a slight sense of… i suppose i’ve always had a little bit of a sense of being a foreigner studying english, which may be helpful in some ways. maybe i’m a bit more of a foreigner now. notes 1. prospero. “becoming shakespeare (the q&a: bart van es).” the economist (blog), september 9 2013. http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2013/09/qa-bart-van-es. retrieved november 15, 2016. 2. jardine, lisa. “‘as boys and women are for the most part cattle of this color’: female roles and elizabethan eroticism.” still harping on daughters: women and drama in the age of shakespeare. totowa, nj: barnes and noble books, 1983. 9–36. microsoft word eif-4-final.docx [expositions 8.2 (2014) 38–49] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376  dissolving the debunker’s puzzle terence cuneo university of vermont there is a two-fold dynamic at work in chapter five of thomas nagel’s mind and cosmos.1 the first dynamic consists in nagel conceding that what evolutionary biology (as it’s standardly understood) implies about the origin and nature of moral judgment is incompatible with his favored version of non-naturalistic moral realism. the second dynamic consists in nagel’s resisting the conclusion that moral non-naturalism is false. rather than concede that moral nonnaturalism is false, nagel would conclude that what evolutionary biology (as it’s standardly understood) implies about the origin and nature of moral judgment is incorrect. i share nagel’s sympathies with moral nonnaturalism.2 so, i applaud his resistance to concluding that this position is false on the basis of what evolutionary biology appears to imply about the origin and nature of moral judgment. i believe, however, that nagel concedes far more than he should when he says that what evolutionary biology (as it’s standardly understood) implies about the origin and nature of moral judgment is incompatible with non-naturalistic realism. the better response to so-called evolutionary challenges to non-naturalist realism, i believe, is to point out that, even if we concede the standard evolutionary picture, these challenges have little bite against these realist views. in this short essay, i sketch two reasons why. the debunker’s puzzle let me begin by stating the central puzzle with which nagel is concerned, what i’ll call the evolutionary debunker’s puzzle—or the debunker’s puzzle, for short.3 the puzzle consists of these three claims: (1) moral non-naturalism: there are non-natural moral facts, including reasons to act in certain ways. (2) moral knowledge: we have some moral knowledge. (3) evolutionary influence: evolutionary forces have not only determined which cognitive faculties we have but also considerably shaped their workings, including the workings of the moral faculty, which is simply that ability (or cluster of abilities) by which we form moral judgments. a comment regarding each of these claims is in order, beginning with moral non-naturalism. while non-naturalists hold that there are non-natural moral facts, there is little agreement about what a non-natural moral fact would be. in what follows, i’ll assume only that, were such 39 cuneo facts to exist, they would have four distinguishing characteristics.4 first, many of these facts would be strongly mind-independent in the sense that they exist, but not in virtue of our valuing or desiring (or being such that we would value or desire) non-moral features of the world. in this regard, they differ from the fact that yo-yo-ma is an admired cellist, which does depend on the attitudes of admiration that people take toward him. second, these facts would not play (or be reducible to any facts that play) explanatory roles in the usual sciences, such as physics, biology, or chemistry. third, and relatedly, these facts would be causally inert, not (in any direct sense) entering into the causal flow of nature, as they would be abstract entities. and, fourth, these moral facts would be (or would necessarily imply) reasons of various sorts. some of these reasons would be categorical in the sense that they apply to agents regardless of what desires, goals, or social allegiances they may have. in his presentation of his view, nagel affirms all four of these claims.5 as for moral knowledge, in what follows, we can remain relatively non-committal regarding what it is, assuming only the following. first, states of moral knowledge would be constituted by moral judgments or beliefs. and, second, moral judgments would be candidates for moral knowledge only if they have the proper sort of etiology: they could not be the product of luck, accident, or the like but must be “well-formed” in the sense of being reliably formed or the product of cognitive faculties that are working well in a congenial environment. moral knowledge probably requires more than this, but i’ll assume it would involve at least satisfying this “well-formedness” condition. while nagel has little to say about the nature of moral knowledge, he also accepts both these claims.6 as for the evolutionary influence on our cognitive faculties, i will assume that, according to the picture that evolutionary biology bequeaths us, natural selection has rewarded whatever cognitive traits that caused our pleistocene ancestors to maximize the relative representation of their genes in the gene pool over generations, often doing so by promoting their survival. in many cases, i’ll also assume, we have excellent reason to believe that natural selection has given us cognitive capacities that track independent truths about the world with reasonable accuracy, such as truths about midsized material objects in our visual field. nagel agrees with this last claim, but holds that it has no direct bearing on whether our moral judgments, which are practical, are also likely to be reasonably accurate.7 these introductory comments having been made, we can see that the three claims stated above yield a puzzle. according to this puzzle, moral knowledge requires that some of our moral judgments be well-formed, which is what claim (2) tells us. but it is difficult to see how these judgments could be well-formed if the forces of natural selection have deeply influenced the workings of our capacity for forming moral judgments, which is what claim (3) says. these forces, after all, are geared toward producing not true beliefs but maximizing the relative representation of the genes of ancestral humans in the gene pool over generations. in certain cases, as already noted, it is plausible to hold that this resulted in cognitive capacities that accurately track independent facts in our environment, such as ordinary midsized material objects in our visual field. but if there were non-natural moral facts, it is very difficult to see how dissolving the debunker’s puzzle 40 the forces of natural selection would have influenced the workings of our moral faculty in such a way that we reliably grasp them. the difficulty that faces non-naturalists is described in different ways. sharon street, whose version of the debunker’s puzzle nagel accepts, holds that since, as a conceptual matter, there could be any number of moral systems, we have little reason to hold that evolution would have “pushed” us toward the correct one.8 given that non-natural moral facts are not the sort of thing that could enter into causal relations and, hence, be tracked by our moral faculty, there seems to be little prospect of offering any kind of account according to which, surprisingly enough, our evolutionary heritage put us in a good position to track them. something, it appears, has to give. responses to this puzzle fall into three broad categories. some philosophers, such as richard joyce and jonas olson, propose that we reject claim (2), giving up the idea that there is any credible account of how we would gain moral knowledge if there were moral facts.9 these philosophers embrace moral skepticism. other philosophers, such as david copp and peter railton, recommend that we reject claim (1), embracing metaethical naturalism according to which moral facts are ordinary natural facts that our moral judgments could track by bearing causal relations to them.10 these philosophers reject moral non-naturalism in favor of moral naturalism. finally, other philosophers, such as nagel, propose to reject claim (3), at least when it is understood to incorporate the assumption that the forces of natural section select, in the first instance, not for true beliefs but traits that maximize the relative representation of genes in the gene pool. these philosophers, then, reject the deliverances of the standard evolutionary picture.11 in nagel’s case, this rejection is accompanied by a positive explanatory hypothesis—what he calls “the teleological hypothesis”—that is supposed to explain how, given our evolutionary history, we might have arrived at moral knowledge. according to this hypothesis, “the natural world would have a propensity to give rise to beings of the kind that have a good—beings for which and of the things can be good or bad.”12 these beings, nagel says, “are all the actual and possible forms of life. they have appeared through the historical process of evolution, but part of the explanation for the existence of that process and of the possibilities on which natural selection operates would be that they bring value into the world, in a great variety of forms.”13 nagel continues: this is a revision of the darwinian picture rather than an outright denial of it. a teleological hypothesis will acknowledge that the details of that historical development are explained largely through natural selection among the available possibilities on the basis of reproductive fitness in changing environments […] the teleological hypothesis is that these things may be determined not merely by value-free chemistry and physics but also by something else, namely a cosmic predisposition to the formation of life, consciousness, and the value that is inseparable from them.14 41 cuneo in sum, given the teleological hypothesis, it would be no surprise that, if there were conscious beings (as there are), then there would also be values realistically understood. and given that there are such values—including moral ones—it would be no surprise that we could, when all goes well, know them. that, too, would be a result of the “cosmic predisposition” that drives the evolutionary process. i believe that we should reject each of these three ways of responding to the debunker’s puzzle. rather than surrender any of the claims that constitute the puzzle, the best strategy, in my view, is to dissolve it, contending that it fails to generate any reason to reject moral nonnaturalism. if one is a non-naturalist, as nagel is, the reasons for pursuing this strategy are at least these. for one thing, non-naturalists should find all three claims that compose the debunker’s puzzle very plausible, albeit for different reasons. any non-naturalist, after all, must assent to the first two claims, while our best science supports the third claim. secondly, while i am not prepared simply to dismiss nagel’s teleological hypothesis, it would be unwise for nonnaturalists to embrace it in order to solve the debunker’s puzzle. to the contrary, sound philosophical methodology would counsel non-naturalists to take a more conservative approach, not taking on additional controversial commitments that they don’t have to. in the next two sections, i contend that non-naturalists needn’t take on such commitments. dissolution: the first strategy i have already noted that the version of the debunker’s puzzle on which nagel has his eye is that formulated by sharon street. in her formulation of the puzzle, street claims that there are no conceptual constraints on what counts as a moral system, writing: according to the normative realist, there are normative truths that hold independently of all of our evaluative attitudes. moreover, as a purely conceptual matter, these independent normative truths might be anything. in other words, for all our bare normative concepts tell us, survival might be bad, our children’s lives might be worthless, and the fact that someone has helped us might be a reason to hurt that person in return. of course we think that these claims are false—perhaps even necessarily false—but the point is that if they are false, it is not our bare normative concepts that tell us so.15 this thesis, which i’ll refer to as the no content thesis, plays an important role in street’s argument. given that there are an untold number of incompatible moral systems, it would be a massive stroke of luck, according to street, if evolutionary forces were to have directed us to the correct one. dissolving the debunker’s puzzle 42 in one place, nagel concedes the no content thesis to street.16 in my judgment, he ought not to, since any minimally eccentric moral system that concerns beings like us in a world such as ours must have moral content of a certain kind. to see why, let me unpack the terminology introduced in the last sentence.17 suppose we say that a minimally eccentric moral system is a reasonably comprehensive and consistent body of moral propositions that apply to beings like us in a world such as ours. by a reasonably comprehensive body of moral propositions, i mean an array of propositions that concern nearly all situations that agents might find themselves in and imply, often in conjunction with empirical propositions, a range of moral assessments and recommendations for those situations. beings like us are mortal, embodied, not subject to daily bouts of complete amnesia, susceptible to physical, emotional, and other psychological pleasures and pains, capable of introspection, of friendship, of self-esteem, possessed of some degree of empathy and sympathy, and able to reason deductively, inductively, and abductively in at least minimal ways. finally, a world such as ours is one that can sustain life, one in which people do not pop in and out of existence willy-nilly, one in which the future is not known to be in all respects perfectly identical to the past, one in which material objects are observable—in short, one that is regulated by laws of nature and broad empirical statistical generalizations that are at least close to the ones that obtain here on earth. non-naturalists, i claim, should hold that any minimally eccentric moral system must include an array of propositions that russ shafer-landau and i have elsewhere called the moral fixed points, propositions such as:  it is pro tanto wrong to engage in the recreational slaughter of a fellow person.  it is pro tanto wrong to break a promise on which another is relying simply for convenience’s sake.  it is pro tanto wrong to humiliate others simply for pleasure.  it is pro tanto wrong to torture others just because they have inconvenienced you.  it is pro tanto wrong to impose severe burdens on others simply because of their physical appearance. these apparent moral truths, i suggest, are excellent candidates for being a species of conceptual truth in the sense that nothing could be a moral system that failed to include them (or something very much like them) and, were someone to deny a sufficient number of them, that would be strong prima facie reason to hold that that person suffers from a conceptual deficiency. such a deficiency would, presumably, consist in an agent’s: (i) lacking the relevant concepts, such as the concept ‘being wrong’; (ii) having an inadequate grasp of them, failing to see that they apply to some paradigm cases; (iii) having a confused grasp of them, perhaps holding that the concept ‘being wrong’ fails to apply to acts taken toward those who belong to some “out group,” such as 43 cuneo those of another ethnic group; or (iv) failing to appreciate or acknowledge the manifest implications of the concepts in question, owing to some aspect of his psychology or situation that inhibits him from acknowledging that actions such as recreational slaughter are wrong (even though they may seem to him to be wrong). these claims, it is worth emphasizing, do not imply that, when an agent suffers from a conceptual deficiency, she must be conceptually confused; there are a variety of ways to suffer from such a deficiency that do not consist in being confused. moreover, the claim that any minimally eccentric moral system must incorporate the moral fixed points is compatible with there being many different normative systems, such as those embraced by hedonists, egoists, and nietzscheans. not every normative system, however, is a moral system. if the claims articulated in the preceding paragraph are correct, it follows that the no content thesis is false. for, contrary to what street claims in the passage quoted above, there are contentful conceptual constraints on what can count as a moral system (for beings like us in a world such as ours), and the moral fixed points provide them. since any such system must of conceptual necessity incorporate the moral fixed points, they are guaranteed to be elements of the uniquely correct minimally eccentric moral system. let me also note that appeal to the moral fixed points helps to neutralize a further argument that street offers, wherein she claims that it is no use to appeal to rational reflection as a way to correct the distorting influence of evolution since “the fund of evaluative judgments with which human reflection began was thoroughly contaminated with illegitimate influence.”18 if this is supposed to be a claim about our moral thinking, then it is false. for, if the view i am sketching is true, to be a competent moral cognizer would require one to affirm the moral fixed points. by relying on the moral fixed points, however, one could correct for at least some malign evolutionary influences, subjecting the rest of one’s moral beliefs to critical scrutiny, certifying some, and rejecting others. in this sort of scenario, the moral fixed points would function as epistemic anchors, providing the means not only to arrive at moral knowledge but to also to engage in processes of rational belief revision, such as reflective equilibrium. there is much more to say about the role of the moral fixed points, and i do not want to give the impression that appeal to them settles all questions that the debunker’s puzzle might raise. (appeal to the moral fixed points, for example, doesn’t settle any issues regarding whether moral reasons are authoritative.19) nor do i want to deny that certain versions of the debunker’s puzzle might deny the no content thesis. my claims are more modest. i maintain only that the version of the debunker’s puzzle that nagel accepts appeals to the no content thesis, and that nonnaturalists should reject this thesis. a satisfactory response to the debunker’s puzzle, then, requires non-naturalists neither to reject its third claim nor to embrace something as controversial and speculative as nagel’s teleological hypothesis. dissolution: the second strategy dissolving the debunker’s puzzle 44 in the last section, i quoted a passage in which street claims that “the fund of evaluative judgments with which human reflection began was thoroughly contaminated with illegitimate influence.” in his discussions of the debunker’s puzzle, william fitzpatrick has argued that this claim needs to be carefully evaluated.20 for while nearly everyone party to the discussion of whether our moral judgments are well-formed accepts that evolutionary forces have influenced the workings of our cognitive faculties, including the moral faculty, the crucial question is to what extent evolutionary forces have influenced the workings of the moral faculty and whether its influence has been counteracted by other influences, such as reliable moral reflection. here are two possibilities. on the one hand, the debunker’s puzzle may rely on a very strong claim, such as the: extreme explanatory claim (eec): the content of our moral beliefs across the board: (i) reflects deep shaping by evolutionary forces that operated on the moral belief-forming dispositions of ancestral humans, according to principles insensitive to the truth of the content of moral beliefs, and (ii) does not reflect any independent influence from developed forms of moral reflection guided by independent moral facts as such, through a grasp of their grounds as such. on the other, the debunker’s puzzle may rely on a significantly weaker claim, such as the: modest explanatory claim (mec): some familiar but suspect moral beliefs, such as those that concern racial purity, rigid gender roles, and clan loyalty, plausibly reflect only evolutionary influences unguided by the moral facts (and conditioned by cultural influences operating equally independently of the moral facts), which are thus unlikely to be reliable and, hence (given our knowledge of this) are likely unjustified instead.21 in principle, when claim (3) of the debunker’s puzzle tells us that evolutionary forces have “considerably shaped” the workings of the moral faculty, it could express either of these claims. the question that faces non-naturalists is whether they should interpret (3) to state (eec) or (mec). following street, nagel interprets claim (3) of the debunker’s puzzle to express (eec). this strikes me as a mistake for two reasons. first, although street presents her argument as if it turns on widely accepted scientific claims, the relevant sciences, such as evolutionary biology, do not tell us or imply that (eec) is more likely to be true than (mec). these sciences, after all, have nothing to say about moral facts. how, then, would a discipline such as evolutionary biology give us good reason to believe that the workings of the moral faculty does not reflect any independent influence from developed forms of moral reflection guided by independent moral 45 cuneo facts, through a grasp of them or their grounds? second, proponents of the debunker’s puzzle such as street cannot simply assume at the outset that (eec) is true, for that would be to assume what needs to be established. what we need at this point in the dialectic is a compelling argument that non-naturalists should accept (eec) rather than (mec). while there might be such an argument, it is worth noting that, to this point in the discussion, advocates of the debunker’s puzzle have not produced it—the main reason being that they have not distinguished (eec) from (mec), as fitzpatrick does. now consider (mec), which is (in one respect) considerably more modest than (eec), since it does not imply that our moral beliefs have been saturated by distorting evolutionary influences. while (mec) implies that some of our moral beliefs are suspect, it is compatible with other of our moral beliefs being reflective and informed, the result of our having grasped the moral facts, such as the moral fixed points, and employed reliable strategies of refining our beliefs, such as reflective equilibrium. as fitzpatrick points out, (mec) is modest in another important sense, since it requires rather little of evolution. for, while nonnaturalists must hold that the moral faculty yields a range of well-formed moral beliefs, they needn’t defend the further thesis that evolution furnished this faculty. all that’s needed is for evolution to have given us [t]he basic raw materials—reflective, intellectual, and emotional potentialities— necessary for us to develop reliable moral belief-forming dispositions ourselves, by developing those potentialities through the right forms of experience, training and reflection in rich cultural contexts, in such a way as to come reliably to track moral truths through gaining understanding. this is directly analogous to our cultural development in other domains of reliable capacities to track truths about non-linear algebra or quantum non-locality or metaphysical modality, none of which played any more role in the evolution of pleistocene human cognitive capacities than moral truths did.22 in fact, if i am right to hold that the moral fixed points are a species of conceptual truth, then to acquire some moral knowledge, evolution need only have equipped us with the ability to grasp to a sufficient degree moral concepts such as ‘being wrong.’ with such abilities at our disposal, we could thereby come to know a variety of fundamental moral truths. conclusion let us return to the debunker’s puzzle, which, you’ll remember, includes the following three claims: (1) moral non-naturalism: there are non-natural moral facts, including reasons to act in certain ways. (2) moral knowledge: we have some moral knowledge. dissolving the debunker’s puzzle 46 (3) evolutionary influence: evolutionary forces have not only determined which cognitive faculties we have but also considerably shaped their workings, including the workings of the moral faculty, which is simply that ability (or cluster of abilities) by which we form moral judgments. suppose you were to accept, as nagel does, the no content thesis and the extreme explanatory claim (eec). if you wished to resist rejecting moral non-naturalism, that might require you to reject claim (3) of the puzzle, offering an alternative explanation of how, given our evolutionary history, we might have arrived at moral knowledge.23 in response, i’ve argued that we should prefer a more conservative approach. we should accept all three claims of the debunker’s puzzle but reject both the no content thesis and the extreme explanatory claim (eec). notes 1. nagel 2012. 2. i have reservations about some of the claims that nagel attributes to non-naturalists, but these differences will not matter for present purposes. 3. variations of the puzzle can be found in greene 2008, joyce 2006, kitcher 2005, 2011, locke 2014, ruse 1998 (ch. 6), and street 2006, 2008a, forthcoming. 4. defenders of non-naturalism include cuneo and shafer-landau 2014, enoch 2011, fitzpatrick 2008, 2011, parfit 2011, scanlon 1998, shafer-landau 2003, 2006, and wedgwood 2007. 5. nagel 2012, 98–113. 6. nagel 2012, 107–09. 7. nagel 2012, 108. 8. street 2006, 121. 9. see joyce 2001, 2006 and olson 2014. 10. see copp 2008 and railton 2010. 11. see nagel 2012 and, somewhat differently, plantinga 1993, 2002, and plantinga and tooley 2008. 12. nagel 2012, 121. 13. ibid. 47 cuneo 14. nagel 2012, 123. 15. street 2008a, 208. this claim is assumed as well in street 2006, passim. 16. nagel 2012, 107. 17. in what follows, i sketch the approach developed and defended at greater length in cuneo and shafer-landau 2014. 18. street 2006, 124. 19. although, i believe that appeal to them helps; see cuneo 2014, ch. 7. 20. see fitzpatrick 2014a, 2014b. 21. cf. fitzpatrick 2014a. 22. fitzpatrick 2014b, 245. 23. although, see enoch 2011, ch. 7 and wielenberg 2010. works cited copp, david. 2008. “darwinian skepticism about moral realism.” philosophical issues 18: 184–204. cuneo, terence. 2014. speech and morality: on the metaethical implications of speaking. oxford: oxford university press. cuneo, terence, and russ shafer-landau. 2014. “the moral fixed points: new directions for moral nonnaturalism.” philosophical studies doi 10.1007/s11098–013–0277–5. enoch, david. 2011. taking morality seriously. oxford: oxford university press. fitzpatrick, william. 2014a. “debunking evolutionary debunking of moral realism.” philosophical studies doi 10.1007/s11098–014–0295-y. _____. 2014b. “why there is no darwinian dilemma for moral realism.” in challenges to religious and moral belief, edited by michael bergman and patrick kain, 237–255. oxford: oxford university press. greene, joshua. 2008. “the secret joke of kant’s soul.” in moral psychology, vol. 3, edited by walter sinnott-armstrong, 35–80. cambridge, ma: mit press. joyce, richard. 2001. the myth of morality. cambridge: cambridge university press. dissolving the debunker’s puzzle 48 _____. 2006. the evolution of morality. cambridge, ma: mit press. kitcher, philip. 2005. “biology and ethics.” in the oxford handbook of ethical theory, edited by david copp, 163–185. oxford: oxford university press. _____. 2011. the ethical project. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. locke, dustin. 2014. “darwinian normative skepticism.” in challenges to religious and moral belief, edited by michael bergman and patrick kain, 210–236. oxford: oxford university press. nagel, thomas. 2012. mind and cosmos: why the materialist neo-darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false. oxford: oxford university press. olson, jonas. 2014. moral error theory: history, critique, defence. oxford: oxford university press. parfit, derek. 2011. on what matters, vol. 2. oxford: oxford university press. plantinga, alvin. 1993. warrant and proper function. oxford: oxford university press. _____. 2002. “the evolutionary argument against naturalism.” in naturalism defeated? essays on plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism, edited by james beilby, 1–14. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. plantinga, alvin, and michael tooley. 2008. knowledge of god. oxford: blackwell. railton, peter. 2010. “moral camouflage or moral monkeys?” the new york times, the stone, july 18: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/moral-camouflage-ormoral-monkeys/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0 ruse, michael. 1998. taking darwin seriously. oxford: blackwell. scanlon, t.m. 1998. what we owe to each other. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. shafer-landau, russ. 2003. moral realism: a defence. oxford: oxford university press. ______. 2006. “ethics as philosophy: a defense of ethical nonnaturalism.” in metaethics after moore, edited by terry horgan and mark timmons, 209–233. oxford university press. _____. 2012. “evolutionary debunking, moral realism and moral knowledge.” journal of ethics and social philosophy 9: 1–38. 49 cuneo street, sharon. 2006. “a darwinian dilemma for realist theories of value.” philosophical studies 127: 109–166. _____. 2008a. “reply to copp: naturalism, normativity, and the varieties of realism worth worrying about.” philosophical issues 18: 207–28. _____. 2008b. “constructivism about reasons.” in oxford studies in metaethics, vol. 3, edited by russ shafer-landau, 207–245. oxford: oxford university press. _____. forthcoming. “objectivity and truth: you’d better believe it.” wedgwood, ralph. 2007. the nature of normativity. oxford: oxford university press. wielenberg, erik. 2010. “on the evolutionary debunking of morality.” ethics 120: 441–64. microsoft word dintersmith interview [expositions 15.1 (2021) 50–64] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 what colleges can learn from covid-19: a conversation with ted dintersmith kaley m. carpenter villanova university former venture capitalist ted dintersmith first grew concerned about the state of american education when he compared the subjects and skills his own children were learning at their private, college-preparatory school to what he had been taught over thirty years before (they were the same). he was subsequently galvanized into education reform when the innovators he professionally funded confirmed his suspicions that those very same subjects and skills were already becoming obsolete in the digital age. since then, dintersmith has organized international colloquia at the united nations, written two books, and produced an award-winning film—all documenting the destructive consequences on students from school days narrowly structured around standardized measurement instead of deep, experiential learning. rather than exclusively embracing stem (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education as a remedy, however, dintersmith advocates an interdisciplinary, liberal arts, and project-based prescription for the stasis plaguing u.s. schools. with covid-19’s quarantine exposing traditional curricula’s limited engagement and effectiveness, and the virus’s displacement of standardized testing as the (increasingly contested) measure to evaluate schools and their students, dintersmith believes that the u.s. has an unprecedented opportunity to reexamine, and reform, its education system. he presents project-based learning as not only the pedagogical way forward through the pandemic but also as the best way to equip learners, from grade school through college, to thrive in its aftermath. he argues that university co-eds and their institutions that successfully leverage both virtual and local networks now—not to study obsolete things better but to learn entirely different things—will become the intellectually engaged problem-solvers most able help their fellow citizens in the future. he explains how in an edited august 26th–27th, 2020 conversation below. 51 carpenter ted dintersmith: i went to the college of william and mary in the 1970s, and i heard my junior year about the ability to do an independent research project—to propose something you actually cared about to your faculty advisor who would approve it, if it was thought worthy. i was taking about half physics courses and half english courses at the time, so i said, “i really want to do that!” i proposed two such projects. in the past, however, dual projects had only been done in fields that you could readily combine (history and english, biology and chemistry, for example). but i wanted to do english and physics, even though, at first glance, there’s not really an intuitive way to combine them. to my faculty members’ credit, instead of telling me, “no, we don’t want to set the wrong precedent,” or “that’s probably more than you can take on,” they said yes to my proposals. so that’s what i did. what i write about and push for was true for me: that chance to say, “this is a problem i’m interested in, and i’m going to try to come up with something creative and different to make a contribution.” i checked in regularly with each faculty member and, in physics, i ended up as an undergraduate with two publications in the journal of physics—something most ph.d.s in physics don’t do. i now help rising college juniors who pitch something similar, giving them funds to travel for research (we’ve had students go to the louvre for art history and to petra for archeology) and for presenting or publishing their papers. we crowd-source among alumni and support the faculty advisors financially as well. now, over ten percent of the college’s students participate. we all know this is different from the large lecture courses that should have been done away with years ago. so what if kids can’t take those big lecture classes now? imagine if you said, “it’s a pandemic. it’s a botched-up time, but we want to give all of our juniors and seniors the opportunity to replace ‘normal’ with one or several cross-discipline, ambitious initiatives.” the students would be responsible for recruiting one or more faculty mentors/advisors. alums could be asked to step up: “would you put in some time?” students could also find somebody outside of the university community who has expertise. their entire school experience during junior and senior year could be dedicated to creating these bold initiatives that make a tangible contribution beyond just their gpas. their learning experience would be much better, even if they couldn’t be on campus—they would still learn a ton. and it would be much better life-preparation than what they’re going to do otherwise. interview: ted dintersmith 52 to be sure, that’s a hard pivot. i know some faculty will say, “my three hundred-person course is so invaluable that it would be horrible if instead they took it on coursera and edx or something.” but, honestly, wouldn’t that kind of student-directed, civically relevant, community-supported project be a bold pedagogical response to the pandemic for a university? here’s what it could look like. supposing we gave academic credit to college students who can’t be on campus for finding children in their community who are desperate for instruction. they could organize a pop-up school and help them do exactly the kind of things we’re saying. create initiatives. cut across disciplines. do great projects. they would learn so much about teaching! they could then report back to a faculty member weekly with reflections with analyses—complete with videos of the progress the kids are making. you could do this in any field. take history. capture consequences of the pandemic in real time in your community. there are so many things unfolding in this enormous arc of history right in front of our eyes. capture it. describe it. do a podcast on it. write a book about it. if you’re a physics or chemistry major, help your local community figure out its testing strategy. these kinds of initiatives seem to be the biggest of all opportunities today. and they all show what education can be. kaley carpenter: what you’ve just said relates directly to the effects of covid-19 on students’ academic and personal lives. their academic plans or professional tracks were affected. these disruptions included cancelled internships, study abroad trips, campus summer research programs, clinicals, medical professional shadowing, elective minors, and other academic course credit. while students had undoubtedly invested time and energy to secure these now-lost opportunities, what you described could serve as alternatives to them. even the clinical medical shadowing could happen with technological assistance. with the right kind of willing office or practice, students could gain expertise/academic credit, perhaps even for helping to strategize the digital alternative or work-around. whatever system the students helped structure and test could then be used for others in the future—e.g., to help include patients’ remote family members in health-care discussions. but it all goes back to students being ready and willing to take ownership of an educational situation instead of passively acquiescing to it. is that the essence of problem your work is trying to address? 53 carpenter ted dintersmith: i’ve talked to many college seniors, and i’ve asked them what i think is a good question: “if you wanted to, what career path would you create for yourself?” they look at me and—whether they say it, or if it’s just in their facial expression—their response is, “that’s like, you mean … that’s an option?” imagine making that option a reality for them instead of just jumping through all these hoops—and they’re really great hoop jumpers, right? of course they are, because that’s what we value in our current educational system—even at the college level. we want the most agile and speedy hoop jumpers we can find. but then they get to senior year, they go to the career services office, they sign up for interviews, and i think they often end up in jobs they don’t really want. they’re not that happy doing them, and they’ve lost a chance to discover a greater purpose and mission in the process. kaley carpenter: another concern in what schools could be,1 your most recent study of kcollegiate education reform, is the connection between american education and civil society. in addition to equity in education, you explicitly mention the 2016 election as revealing other deep fissures in our country, “[a] society breaking down as it struggles to analyze critically, to debate thoughtfully, to see seek and value truth, a civil society that’s beginning to fracture.”2 it’s now four years later, in 2020, after six months of this pandemic, an economic recession, civil unrest that is on par with what erupted in the 1960s, and with another presidential election coming. what would you like to see in education to help heal our civil society? ted dintersmith: are we setting goals and policies for schools to really launch students into lives of purpose, or are we putting them through a hamster-wheel type of experience that largely ranks them on the basis of their ability to perform certain capabilities, certain tasks, that really bear no relationship to what will make them successful as an adult? i’m firmly convinced it’s the latter. i visit a lot of places. i interview a lot of people. i observe a lot. and the reality is that, for the most part (it’s always difficult to say this to somebody in higher education), school is about preparing students for test taking and for more school and not for preparing students for what they’re going to encounter in life. i believe that we are impairing their future by doing this. when i’ve talked to students who are crushing it academically, there’s a sense of emptiness and discontent they have, because they feel like they’re doing a lot of things they don’t care about. and it’s there when i’ve talked to the other 90% of students who are not viewed as gifted interview: ted dintersmith 54 intellectually—who, in addition, have heard year-in and year-out that they are not “one of the smart kids.” it’s a gross injustice to the futures of essentially all of them. one of my high school classmates said, “i hated school. school told me i was really dumb. i got terrible grades. it was pure misery.” now he’s a master glassworks blower with a store in massachusetts and an amazing portfolio of artwork. even without a college degree back then, he at least could graduate high school and scramble and find his way forward. it’s much harder to do that today. when you start taking away what there was back then when i went to high school— shop classes, home economics—courses that are largely gone because they’re not the “right thing” to have today—it is hard to see how there are still a lot of hands-on endeavors that students can do. one of the things i push for at the middle school, high school, college, community college level— you name it—is this: out of all the time students are putting into studying, could we peel off some of it so that they develop a proficiency that creates a kind of a safety net for a career afterwards? if ten year-olds in west virginia are getting good at something that would let them make threetimes minimum wage, then it stands to reason that years of non-stop studying is not the only way to economic or vocational success. i’m a big advocate for the liberal arts. you could be a philosophy major at villanova—i actually like young adults with the self-confidence to pick a major with which everybody else says you could never get a job. be a philosophy major, but then minor in copy editing, or fact-checking. tie an intellectual passion with a minor that’s a hirable proficiency so that you’re not working at starbucks, so that you’re doing something you find reasonably fulfilling, that’s aligned with your passions, so you can support yourself and make a contribution in the labor market while still having time to pursue your interests without asking the daily, dreaded question, “can i actually feed myself and my family?” that should not too much to ask of collegiate education. yet i inquired of a former college president, “what if you just offered one course with pragmatic skills, like how to master excel spreadsheets or salesforce.com—one course out of forty, or 2.5% of a student’s time at college, to get good at something that, day one when they’re hired, they’ve got something that qualifies as a skill?” the answer was, “that’s a great idea, but i think my faculty would run me out of this office if i brought that up.” the message was, “far be it from us to stoop to the level of a pedestrian employment branch. we are pursuing lofty goals.” but when students 55 carpenter spend four years and $75,000 to $300,000 to get what is essentially a paper certificate, it would be nice if they were good at something and, on the first day after graduation, they could hit the ground running. two and a half percent of credit hours amid the 97.5% of time dedicated to lofty goals doesn’t seem to me like an outrageous request. back to the question about how this all connects to civil society. i find that not many talk about it in this context, but if people put their faith in education to help them get ahead and don’t see that happening, then kids leave high school, leave community college, leave college without a single proficiency that the adult world values, and they just feel demoralized because they’re unemployed or they’re about to be unemployed. they don’t see a great way forward; they don’t feel like their child will have the same chances as the child of someone who is wealthy. what do they do? i wrote before the 2016 election that they’d be willing to throw grenades into the ballot box. the last blended poll said 38% of adults in america think that the current administration has been effective in dealing with the coronavirus. but when every other developed country in the world is showing six, eight, ten deaths a day, and we’re showing 1,200; when every other developed country in the world has schools reopening safely, and our school districts are afraid to; when the per capita adjusted death rate for the united states versus any other developed country in the world is running fifteen times or worse—that’s evidence. that’s data. those aren’t subject to personal interpretation. the fact is that, six months into it, we’ve failed and other developed countries have largely succeeded in protecting their citizens, but polls show that almost 40% of adults in america report that we’ve done a good job of dealing with the coronavirus. our websites all say in our schools—high schools, colleges—that we are to teach our students to weigh evidence to think critically, to deal with complex information. but if we can’t look at data and make responsible, logical conclusions, then something needs to change. kaley carpenter: if we’re concerned about equipping students not only to understand the complexities of assessing our country’s pandemic response, but also to navigate the pandemic’s changing economic and educational landscape, then it’s going to take agile faculty as well, right? during the onset of the covid-19 pandemic, here at villanova, all faculty were offered multiple training opportunities and resources for on-line teaching within days of the announced closure of regular classrooms, and the majority of classes were successfully conducted through web platforms the very next week. so there’s evidence of a concerted faculty effort to switch delivery methods interview: ted dintersmith 56 and begin offering quality on-line education essentially over a weekend. but a statistical minority of faculty had serious difficulties with the adjustment, feeding stereotypes that what is taught inside college classrooms—and, now, how it is taught—fails to meet the needs of the world outside. how can we change this at the university level? ted dintersmith: you just mentioned statistics—let me give an example of how inertia in teaching like you describe has parallels in college admissions. i gave a talk a couple years ago to about 250 college admissions heads. i asked, “would anybody in the room prefer a student who had taken statistics over calculus?” no one said yes. so, i replied, “you know, i’ve spent six years trying to find one adult in america—just one—who uses what’s taught in high school calculus. the answer is that no one does.” mind you, i’ve been the lead author on published physics papers and 1975 and 1976. back then, you had to do these integrals by hand. so i understand that calculus used to be something important—just like it used to be important to be able to drive a stick shift. it used to be important to know how to use the slide rule. in the 1940s, you couldn’t be an engineer if you didn’t know how to use a slide rule. we don’t teach kids to use a slide rule today, but we still teach them to do integrals by hand. so i say to the room of college admission heads, “nobody uses calculus. but statistics is an enormously powerful career door-opener. it’s essential for being an informed citizen, and it enters into almost every personal decision you make (aside from whom you fall in love with and marry), like investments and healthcare. so, i just need to understand how you can look yourself in the mirror every morning saying, ‘i want kids taking something no one uses,’ when, generally, the consequences of that is they don’t take statistics, which is vital for career citizenship and personal decisions.” the college admissions heads’ response? it said it all, i think: “the smart kids today are taking calculus. it’s an easy, convenient way for us to rank them against each other.” so, we care a lot more about ranking kids and care nothing about whether they’re working on something that’s meaningful or will help them as adults. instead, we should care about kids working on what will actually benefit them down the road in adult life. until we do that, we live in this world of ap courses and gpas and kids jumping through meaningless hoops. kaley carpenter: where else have you seen the pandemic reveal the limits of secondary and collegiate education that you’ve documented in your books and film? where is the pandemic 57 carpenter opening up new possibilities of convincing others that there’s a better way to teach and engage students? ted dintersmith: i circle back to the places i wrote about in what schools could be, which are schools that intentionally worked hard to empower kids to set a lot of their learning agenda, to equip kids with the skills to manage their own learning and to draw on resources as needed. they get kids comfortable and actually eager to take on bold initiatives that cut across disciplines, that deal with lots of ambiguity, and that will undoubtedly lead to setbacks and dead ends. their students take those on nonetheless and just persevere until they’ve completed something that they’re proud of, something that they can explain and present to others. these are places of studentdriven learning, or taking on authentic challenges that, in some way, shape, or form, make their world better. when i connect back with them and ask, “how’s it going during the pandemic?” their answers are always the same: “there are issues that are real hardships, particularly for kids in poverty. they miss their friends. they miss being with other people. they miss after-school. but they’re learning as much—or more—than they ever did.” when i talk to other educators who are more in the command-control vein of education, expecting students to be on the receiving end of the lecture, taking notes, and cram-jamming for a test, they say, “oh, my god! nothing’s working! distance learning is an oxymoron! it was hard enough to keep their attention when they were in front of us. now that they’re at the other end of a zoom screen, it’s impossible.” i use the familiar analogy: the schools that viewed their job and responsibility as teaching kids how to fish suddenly find that, if the kids can’t fish in their normal fishing hole, then they’re finding different fishing holes, and they’re still fishing. the schools that focused on merely feeding kids fish found that not only was it hard to make them eat fish in person, but it’s also very few kids who want to eat virtual fish now at all. there’s just a wide disparity. we’ve talked about all sorts of gaps in education, but i would say that this pedagogy gap, this gap in learning experiences, is just sky high right now. so one of the things we’re working quite intensely on is to try to get some resources available by the middle of september. in some places, kids are coming back to school, and maybe they’ll be interview: ted dintersmith 58 there all school year … but maybe they won’t. if i were betting, i’d say that, for most kids who restart school in person, it’s just a matter of weeks before they’re all sent home. what do you do during those weeks? do you say, “oh, my gosh! they didn’t eat as many fish as we wanted them to eat in the spring. let’s make them gorge out on fish this fall!” or do we say, “now’s our window of opportunity to help them learn how to fish—because not only will that be great for them if, in fact, we close and it’s all remote. not only will that be great if we open partially. it will be great if we open fully—and it will be great for them as adults.” to me, that’s the opportunity: teaching kids how to fish versus jamming fish down their throats. ideally, i’d like it to be better fish instead of worse fish. i’ve got strong views on that—on what can really be taught in grades k through 16. but how often do we actually ask kids, “what do you want to learn?” how often do we then respond with, “we’re going to empower and support you to learn that. we will give you credit for what you learn if you can convince us you really made a contribution and mastered what’s behind that contribution.” kaley carpenter: the new york times’ columnist david brooks watched your film, “most likely to succeed,” and criticized what he described as project-based education’s sacrifice of factual acquisition or content for developing lots of team work, grit, and self-confidence.3 he argued that facts, definitions, and concepts are the foundation upon which pattern recognition, usable knowledge, paradigm shifts, and finally wisdom is formed. how would you respond to someone who sees this tension or trade off in what schools could be? in it you write, “it’s important to distinguish between teaching someone a subject and helping them to learn to think like an expert in the field. should our kids study history facts or learn to think like a historian? memorize scientific definitions or learn to think like a scientist? answer canned questions about a poem, or learn to think like a literature critic? drill on math microtasks, or learn to think like creative mathematician?”4 don’t you need both? ted dintersmith: yes, you need content, but it starts with engagement. and the engagement leads to the content acquisition. but when you reverse that—which traditional education does—and you say, “no, you need years and years of factual acquisition. and, by the way, even though we’re going to put years into that, and we’re going to build our entire testing infrastructure around it, we’re never really going to find the time or the money to just check to see if it’s retained (despite 59 carpenter the fact that the college board has a billion dollar annual budget). dartmouth, to their credit, did this kind of testing. in an experiment, every freshman who had taken ap psychology was, within that same year, given the intro to psychology final exam the first day of the class, and they all failed it. their scores were compared to with other intro psych students who never had any prior psychology. there was no difference in performance. it was as though they had never taken ap psychology.5 when i interview most high school kids who’ve taken history (particularly ap u.s. history) and ask them, “what did you learn?” their answer is, “i learned i never want to take history again.” do they remember anything? why is it two-thirds of americans can’t name the three branches of government? despite the focus on content, they didn’t learn anything. they just went through the motions. but if you’d said instead, “learn how to think like a historian and start with capturing the history of your community, or the history of somebody you admire—it could be a family member, somebody in your community, or somebody famous. pick something of interest and do the research and communicate to us, not just the facts of that history but how that history influences them and the world around them—and you—to this day.” eighth graders in fargo, north dakota are required take state history. some of the students i’ve met there decided to study fargo’s historic downtown buildings, and they ended up creating documentaries for them, building a website to house those films, learning graphic design for signage and qr codes (for display in the building themselves), and submitting their work to the fargo film festival. were they learning the same sets of things they would have learned in an eighth grade class on the history of north dakota? no. but if those students who took the history in north dakota don’t remember any of it, and these kids are suddenly really interested in history, because each building served as a window into it …. my bet is that, if in a year you had the students who took the traditional north dakota history class retake their final, and you compared their scores with the downtown fargo building film makers, the fargo kids would do as well or better. so, i don’t think that just because it’s experiential means no content. kaley carpenter: so, what, exactly, do you think that colleges and universities should consider in admitting students? do you think personal essays are important? what are some of the alternatives? interview: ted dintersmith 60 ted dintersmith: i’m a big supporter of a different way to apply to colleges, called the coalition for access, and in theory it looks at real examples of student work. when i was in business, i didn’t care where anybody went to college. i just asked for three writing samples that would tell me what i should know about you. i know how long it takes to read those writing samples: it does not take very long. and if somebody’s best work that he or she sends you isn’t very good, then you know your answer. if it’s really good, then it’s interesting and fun to read. i believe that colleges would be better off saying, “show me you at your best.” it could be a critical analysis of literature; it could be interesting interpretations of history. it could be a science experiment. it could be a useful application of math. it could be something interdisciplinary. it could be an initiative—it could be anything. if the world values young adults for being creative and distinctive, then college admissions should value them for creative and distinctive things they’ve done, that they’ve cared about, and that they’re proud of. but if instead it’s all around ap test scores and sats and grade point averages, then i think the message is: “crank out a bunch of numbers you’re not very excited about in a process that’s required to do well in that task, and that task alone.” it really is a question of whether we care more about the data that makes it easy to rank students against each other, or whether we care more about powerful, deeper ways to learn and a sense of purpose in the education. kaley carpenter: how would colleges and universities gauge academic ability in stem fields, for instance, without standardized tests? ted dintersmith: i think the standardized test tell you nothing about stem abilities. philip sandler, a tenured professor at harvard (which most people think is the best school in the world) was skeptical that students there or at mit had learned much useful science or engineering. now, they’ve all taken ap physics and gotten a five, taken ap calculus bc and gotten a five, gotten 800 on their math sats, and a 4.5 or higher ap-adjusted gpa. they get to mit, they’re there, taking a bunch of engineering courses. to make his point—this is what the video shows6—on graduation day, student after student is offered a light bulb a wire and a battery. they’re asked, “can you light up a light bulb with a battery and wire?” and some of the students are indignant. but then student after student can’t light up the light bulb with a wire and battery.7 61 carpenter the point that professor sandler wanted to make is this: students are memorizing coulomb’s law. they’re memorizing kirchhoff’s law. they’re facile with manipulating algebraic equations, but they have no idea how things work in the real world. the same professor said that mit used to take a lot of kids from rural america—the kids who worked on farms—because they actually do a lot of great engineering there. if you could take apart a tractor engine, and put it back together, then that’s a great leading indicator for being a fabulous engineer. but—back to college admissions—while mit used to accept lots of kids from farms, today they take almost none, because those kids aren’t drilling on ap courses and sats. i think that’s an enormous missed opportunity for many, many kids in our country. i think it’s sort of a false signal about what it actually means to understand science and engineering issues. so, i’m a big advocate for alternative, real-world ways to find meaningful work in this world. if you’re interested in being an electrical engineer, then get an internship with a master electrician. don’t do test prep for the ap physics class. kaley carpenter: as a counterargument to getting rid of standardized tests, do you think there is a way to re-create the tests to be able to evaluate more than just a narrow view of what academicreadiness is? ted dintersmith: this gets back to the question of personal essays. you’re trying to get at something important, something nuanced. if it’s nuanced, then it’s easy to generate the questions, and it’s very hard to grade them. so, let’s start with something fairly simple that you think would be a useful indication of a student’s potential: for 12 years, it was the sat written essay, from which came 800 out of the test’s 2400 points. the reality is that it’s actually pretty easy to write an essay about something you know. students would take the essay, and they’d write it with proctors in the room. and i think it was actually a really good thing to do. the problem was that the sat and the college board decided they had to actually give a number to that essay. so you think that your essay is going to be graded by some long-term, experienced english teacher who’s going to spend thirty minutes on your essay and come up with a really nuanced evaluation: “oh, gosh! i’m agonizing, but this is somewhere between a 685 … and a 705. i’m going to give it a 695 and then spend a half an hour on the next one.” interview: ted dintersmith 62 well, that’s not at all how it’s graded. people have looked into how it’s actually evaluated. what did the college board do? they hired unemployed people off of craigslist. they were compensated by the number of essays they grade per hour. they will tell you that they don’t even read the words; they scan them. what do they look for? they look for four to five paragraphs, four to five sentences per paragraph, varied sentence structure, and some vocabulary words. if you do that, you’re at 750 or higher. and people have debunked those tests by having really great writers take them and write pure gobbledygook. they write something that’s completely incoherent but with five paragraphs, fourto-five sentences per paragraph, varied sentence structure, and some unusual vocabulary words. sure enough, they get in the seven hundreds every time. so it’s the grading and the evaluation of anything that’s important in life that gets hard. this session is showing us a little bit of what most adult organizations say they value: employees who can ask really interesting questions. well, how much of school is around asking really interesting questions? how do you really put a score on questions that are interesting? that’s very hard. it’s nuanced. you can have an opinion about whether somebody else’s question is interesting, but if you try to turn it into a standardized test, it gets very difficult. the other issue with the standardized test is the fact that the only way you can standardize it is if everybody’s studying the same material to take the same exam, which takes [out] all the ability to go deep into something, to explore it in your own way, to be creative. if you talk to any sat test tutor, which i do, there are two big pieces of advice they give out. first, never do anything unusual, creative, or out-of-the-box—that’s too risky. think formulaically, because it’s designed to be scored by a computer. so, the advice is to think like a computer. the second piece of advice is: if you have a question that’s really hard, or that’s going to take you a long time to figure out, skip it. i don’t know, but i think that kind of advice makes for some pretty miserable life lessons. kaley carpenter: speaking of those life lessons, especially in our covid-19 era, how is the pandemic changing the way colleges will evaluate students in the future, especially with regard to these standardized tests? ted dintersmith: fortunately, i think the grip of the sat and act is starting to loosen. i think that’s encouraging. the university of california system—ucla, berkeley—which gets more 63 carpenter applications in any school in the country (over 100,000 a year) just announced they’re not using sats or acts anymore.8 if, in fact, the world is begging for people who are creative, for people who have distinctive, unusual strengths, then that seems to me to be sounding alarm bells about how much we want to adhere to a standardized education. college admissions could (1) stop saying they want every student to take the same thing in order to compare them, and (2) start saying, “we want students who can blow us away with creative distinctive work.” the argument against this is that it would cost money. don’t tell me that that would cost some money, because if the future of civil society depends on that, then spend the money. stop spending the millions of dollars dictated by the automatic mailing lists generated from the psats for sending out all these brochures to get more people to apply so you can turn down more people and look more selective. instead, spend a little bit more money on evaluating real-life examples of student ability. spend admissions money looking more carefully at what students actually created, invented, developed, or made happen that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. that’s a more authentic way to evaluate a person’s potential. but i also think it makes for a more authentic high school experience. i think college admissions has a lot of work to do, because they’re not a helpful agent in this process. i think the fastest way to change the high school experience today is to have colleges change their application process. if colleges said, “we’re looking for x instead of y,” then k through 12 schools would start doing x instead of y. they could indeed—just like that—change the high school experience. this is why i go to great lengths to try to encourage colleges to think about it that way. so, i think not only is covid-19 changing standardized testing, i think it’s going to make a lot of people step back and ask, “what is the essence of school? what should we be doing? how should we engage with students in their learning? should we be giving them more voice and leading the way, choosing what they want to learn, and evaluating more on creative and different things they create instead of taking the same test?” and i think if that happens, then that’s all to the good. interview: ted dintersmith 64 notes 1. ted dintersmith, what schools could be: insights and inspiration from teachers across america (princeton: princeton university press, 2018). 2. ibid., 18. 3. david brooks, “schools for wisdom,” the new york times october 16, 2015, https://www. nytimes.com/2015/10/16/opinion/schools-for-wisdom.html. 4. dintersmith, what schools could be, 70. 5. alexandra tilsley, “advanced placement, not credit,” inside higher ed january 18, 2013, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/01/18/dartmouth-end-use-advanced-placementscores-credit. 6. matthew schneps, “can we believe our eyes,” (annenberg/cpb math and science project and harvard-smithsonian center for astrophysics, 1997), https://www.learner.org/series/minds-ofour-own/1-can-we-believe-our-eyes. 7. “improving math and science education so that no child is left behind,” hearing before the subcommittee on research committee on science (house of representatives, one hundred seventh congress, first session, may 2, 2001), serial no. 107–27, http://commdocs.house.gov/ committees/science/hsy73337.000/hsy73337_0.htm. in his testimony, philip sadler, ph.d., director of the science education department at the harvard-smithsonian center for astrophysics, describes the television program from which the above video above is excerpted. “minds of our own” aired as part of the center’s television programming on the annenberg/cpb channel, with the goal of providing professional development for elementary and upper-level science teachers. sadler notes the surprising results from the center’s interviewing harvard and mit students regarding their understanding of basic science: “only half of mit students when given a light bulb and a battery and a piece of wire can make the bulb light up” (31). a second documentary produced by harvard-smithsonian center for astrophysics and the annenberg foundation, “a private universe,” shows harvard graduates, faculty, and alums struggling to correctly describe what produces the earth’s seasons: matthew schneps, “a private universe” (annenberg/cpb math and science project and harvard-smithsonian center for astrophysics, 1989), https://www.learner.org/ series/a-private-universe. 8. see the school system’s admission page at https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admissionrequirements/freshman-requirements/exam-requirement/. 9. thanks to margaret casson, ryane farrell, aidan mcinerney, colt schnabel, shannon smith, and mason wesley for their assistance with this interview. microsoft word 3 mcnamara fall 2018.docx [expositions 12.2 (2018) 152–175] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376   public higher education and the responsibility to invite students to the political carol mcnamara arizona state university on november 10, 2016, just following the presidential election of donald trump, the atlantic magazine published one among many articles asking the “how could this happen” question. how could donald trump, a man who does not appear to feel either the constraints or the heavy responsibility that constitutional government imposes on our leaders, have been elected president of the united states? the article, then, raises the possibility that the problem lies with a deficiency of civic education in american schools: public schools are failing at what the nation’s founders saw as education’s most basic purpose: preparing young people to be reflective citizens who would value liberty and democracy and resist the appeals of demagogues. in that sense, the trump phenomenon should be a sputnik moment for civics education. just as soviet technological advances triggered investment in science education in the 1950s, the 2016 election should spur renewed emphasis on the need for schools to instill in children an appreciation for civic values and not just a skill set for private employment.1 the authors, kahlenberg and janey, argue that “the costs of neglecting democratic values in education are now glaringly apparent on several levels.” they maintain that only those tutored in the principles of democratic government can both understand and put into practice democratic values. they also point out that “in recent years, democracy has been given short shrift in american public schooling.” partly, this neglect derives from an old understanding that the constitution is essentially self-sustaining, that the rule of law maintains itself, and that there is no need to teach and cultivate informed citizenship and leadership. as a result, in many cases, the emphasis in education has shifted more in favor of producing career-ready students, with little to no discussion 153 mcnamara of what is required to educate democratic citizens and leaders capable of understanding the ideas and principles at the core of and necessary to sustaining a healthy constitutional democratic order. this practical impulse in education is as old as american constitutional democracy, but, in fact, the most practical education has always been one that educates and prepares the young for their responsibilities as informed and active citizens and leaders in a representative democracy. it is not, however, quite the case that civic education has been eradicated from the realm of higher education policy. in fact, during the presidency of barack obama, the administration issued a “national call to action” that resulted in the creation of a “national task force on civic learning and democratic engagement.” the report the task force produced and disseminated in 2012, “a crucible moment: college learning and democracy’s future,” concluded that it was necessary to “reclaim and reinvest in the fundamental civic and democratic mission of schools and of all sectors within higher education,” by reversing “the current national narrative that erases civic aims and civic literacy as educational priorities contributing to a social, intellectual, and economic capital.”2 the “crucible moment” report is correct that public universities in particular offer an obvious venue for providing this education to students who are coming of age politically—that, in fact, public universities have a civic responsibility to engage students and the community in a discussion of the ends of self-government and the means that are required to sustain the responsible and wellinformed populace on which a healthy, functioning constitutional democracy depends. if public education, especially the public university, is not the place where students refine their learning of the principles and practice of liberal democracy, and learn how to discuss the most important political questions and pressing public issues of their time, then, where else can we expect them to learn about ideas, to acquire the knowledge of politics, and acquire an understanding of the first amendment principles of free speech that is necessary for the open exchange of ideas and the classical liberal tradition that has informed american democratic institutions since the nation’s inception? the task force clearly believed it was reforming and reinstituting the importance of civic education for a new cadre of college students entering a new age of “u.s. and global interdependence.” the report paid respect to the importance of understanding american history and fostering “progressively higher levels of civic knowledge, skills, examined values, and action as expectations for every student.” and yet, after the 2016 presidential election, there are still calls to revive and strengthen civic learning. so, it seems necessary to consider why, after the efforts of the responsibility to invite students to the political 154   the obama administration department of education and the special task force it created, both the political left and right remain discontented, although for very serious and different reasons, with the state of civic education in the united states. expressive individualism and identity politics it is possible that donald trump’s election will have the salutary effect of providing a real “sputnik moment” for civic education, but what form should that education take? the authors of the atlantic article call for the reinstitution of “democracy back into education.” and they argue rightly that “rigorous courses in history, literature, and civics would cultivate knowledge of democratic practices and a belief in democratic values.”3 but, again, this was the siren call of the “crucible moment” report, the need to reinstate the sort of civic liberal education in “the traditional academic disciplines” that produces serious, thoughtful human beings capable of assuming the weighty responsibilities of american—and, the report adds, global—citizenship. it is in the next part of the atlantic article’s argument, however, that the authors stray into calling for the study of american history, politics, and government informed by identity group and movement politics, the direction and content that has in part led us to our current predicament: the study of “the brutal suppression of african americans and other minorities, women, workers, and gays, but also the movements to abolish slavery, gain women’s suffrage, establish labor laws and civil rights legislation.” the study of slavery, the women’s suffrage movement, and the subsequent political movements often modeled on their success are indeed important themes in the study of american history, but, in fact, those are the subjects that most american history textbooks continue to address. what is missing is the education that the atlantic authors seem to call for initially, a truly liberal civic education that forges us as a community of citizens involved in a common enterprise. this education would include the study and critical assessment of the ideas and documents that both inform and have influenced american constitutional democratic institutions and government in the past and the present—and will continue to do so in the future. such an education provides americans of every background with common principles and language and serves as a source of unity, both in public k–12 schools, on which the atlantic article chiefly focuses, as well as in american public universities. the atlantic authors, much like the authors of the “crucible moment” report, believe they are calling for a high-minded civic education that will teach the 155 mcnamara young to understand the principles of liberal democracy and to resist the siren call of demagoguery. so, what accounts for the discrepancy between the liberal civic education the atlantic authors think they want and the civic education the country needs? and where do we go from here? this essay addresses these questions by considering both the problem, of which the atlantic and “crucible moment” authors are aware, and the civic education that would be required to address fully the crisis they identify. a great number of recent publications address the disunity and fragmentation of american public life, articles and books written both prior to and certainly in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election.4 it is, however, mark lilla’s the once and future liberal that pinpoints most directly and polemically what he calls “identity liberalism” as in great part to blame for the crisis of civic education in america. lilla argues that the crisis afflicting american political life across the political spectrum, but particularly on the democratic left, has its foundation in a crisis of civic education at american universities. like the atlantic authors, lilla first voiced his concern in a post-2016 presidential election opinion editorial, in which he excoriates the democratic left for dividing their electorate into grievance-based identity groups which provide no basis for unity in support of a common set of political goals or governing principles.5 lilla observes that the left should not be surprised that in response to the ubiquitous “rhetoric of identity,” “white rural, religious americans” began during the 2016 presidential election “to think of themselves as a disadvantaged group whose identity is being threatened or ignored.” lilla warns liberals that those “who play the identity game should be prepared to lose it.”6 in the once and future liberal, a pamphlet—a cri de coeur in book form, really—lilla elaborates his concern that the “identity-based social movement”-centered politics, the legacy of the new left in the 1970s which dominates campuses today, is to blame for the fragmented learning occurring in contemporary higher education and, as a result, in american public life.7 in the chapter entitled “pseudo-politics,” lilla explains the development of “identity liberalism” by taking us back to the politics of the 1970s and the new left. the slogan of the new left was that the “personal is political.” many interpreted the slogan to mean that “there are no spheres of life exempt from the struggle for power,” but lilla argues that the understanding of this slogan that took hold, “that what we think of as political action is in fact nothing but personal activity, an expression of me and how i define myself,” is responsible for the splintering of american political life into tighter and narrower factions and interest groups.8 the responsibility to invite students to the political 156   lilla contends that the post-world war ii era of peace and prosperity left baby boomers and, especially, their children, with an identity crisis. lilla’s observation is not new. tom wolfe coined the phrases the “me generation” and the “me decade” to describe the phenomenon of self expression movements that took hold among americans of every kind in the late 1960s and 70s. relieved of financial insecurity and many menial tasks by a strong economy and new technology, americans had time on their hands. people sought meaning in their lives through self-fulfillment and self-help groups, among a vast variety of activities, in search of a meaningful life.9 at american universities, students incorporated this quest for authenticity and meaning in their personal lives into their studies. lilla argues that many, including students, became increasingly less concerned about engaging with the practical details of government and politics—for example, managing the practical institutions of american democracy—and more involved in what lilla calls “movement politics.” the midcentury coalition on the political left that began with the civil rights and then feminist movements provided models for successful social and political movements. but lilla explains that the coalition could not hold. differences within the alliance began to splinter the coalition into narrower and narrower identity groups, with each faction focused more intently on the diverse grievances afflicting it and less on common goals. lilla laments that “citizenship dropped out of the picture,” while people began “to speak instead of their personal identities … a unique little thing composed of parts tinted by race, sex, and gender.”10 the old unifying political principles gave way to the racial and gender divisions inspired by identity politics. the common desire for justice gave way to demands for racial and gender equity even within the new left movement: african americans “complained that most leaders were white …. feminists complained that most all were men…”11 lilla explains that “[t]he only meaningful question for individuals became a deeply personal one: what does my country owe me by virtue of my identity?”12 lilla turns next to explain the manner in which this focus on the self has manifested itself on the university campus. he argues that when republicans dedicated themselves to working in the trenches to regain political power, democrats and the new left retreated to the universities. lilla, a self-identified liberal democrat, does not deny that tenured liberal radicals indoctrinated students with ideas on the left, but he claims that this was not as damaging for the political health of the polity as the fact that they “passed on to students a particular conception of what politics is.” instead of the quest for knowledge that encourages “engagement with the wider world,” university 157 mcnamara education in the social sciences and humanities came to exhibit the more limited aim of bestowing and fortifying a particular, narrow identity on each student. as lilla observes, each student finds as a result of her studies that “her identity confers on her the status of one of history’s victims” one way or another. consequently, the student might find a campus group dedicated to the movement work supporting and reinforcing her identity. the effect is to cocoon each student in a mutually reinforcing group of similarly identifying students who have little to do with other students, with the groups becoming increasingly narrower associations. lilla focuses our attention, again, for example, on feminism. today, he contends, according to third wave feminism, there is no distinct common perspective or set of issues that apply to women as a group. instead, students are taught “that one cannot generalize about women since their experiences are radically different, depending on their race, sexual preference, class, physical abilities, life experiences, and so on.”13 the troubling result of “identity liberalism” for political life, according to lilla, is that if every political or policy issue is a diversity issue, an issue involving rights or absolute moral principle, as every identity claim is, then, there is no room for moderation or compromise, or even discussion, and no issues on which consensus is possible.14 instead, every different group, on the left and the right, locks itself into the narrow, self-reinforcing sphere of its members. it is, therefore, no surprise to lilla that the democrats are falling behind in electoral politics. “national politics in healthy periods is not about ‘difference,’ it is about commonality,” lilla validly insists.15 similarly, from the political right, yuval levin, in his recent book, the fractured republic, identifies an increasing tendency since the mid-twentieth century towards liberalization in american society as the chief source of decentralization and disunity, “be it toward a culture of expressive individualism or toward market economics.”16 here, levin is referring to an understanding of individualism described by alexis de tocqueville in his work, democracy in america, which, i would argue, also anticipates the phenomenon of the personalization of the political lilla describes. a keen observer of american institutions and the democratic way of life they created, tocqueville differentiates “selfishness … a passionate and exaggerated love of self that brings man to relate everything to himself alone and to prefer himself to everything,” from “[i]ndividualism,” which he describes as “a recent expression arising from a new idea.”17 tocqueville explains that the responsibility to invite students to the political 158   [i]ndividualism is a reflective and peaceable sentiment that disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of those like him and to withdraw to one side with his family and his friends so that after having thus created a little society for his own use, he willingly abandons society at large to itself.18 levin focuses on the increasing isolation of individuals, which tocqueville foresaw as an inevitable tendency of democratic society, and he is fully aware of the relationship of individualism so understood to lilla’s concern with the narrowing of identity groups and the danger of the ensuing fractured and polarized disunity that results in american public life. levin argues that while the post-world war ii mid-twentieth century was a time of homogenization that prioritized “solidarity and unity” in american society, during “the past half-century and more, our culture has been moved by an increasingly individualistic ideal, and so by a drive for greater distinction, more customization, and the elevation of personal choice and identity.”19 levin explains that the “ethic of our age” is “expressive individualism.” the term is apt at explaining the dual desires at work today: the desire to be completely free of constraint to chart one’s own path in life, and also to articulate “one’s own identity.”20 one consequence is that our experiences are customized “around our individual preferences.” our social lives become more decentralized by our self-selection and we are less likely to encounter, either online or in our social circles, those from whom we are very different or with whom we disagree substantially. levin celebrates the liberation of individuals, formerly constrained by society’s conventions and biases, to live openly and freely as they choose in american society. he warns us, however, that with this new expressive freedom and individualism and the subsequent smashing of the mid-twentieth century moral consensus also comes a civic responsibility to find the means, some new but perhaps also the recovery of some older solutions, to create a sense of national unity and purpose. levin warns against conservative nostalgia for the more unified, consolidated society of the mid-twentieth century because “midcentury nostalgia will not do as a guide for action in our time,” and, furthermore, it was not without its defects. both lilla and levin call for what levin identifies as “a reinvigoration of the middle layers of society and a resuscitation of our mediating institutions.” for levin, “the mediating institutions” that are broken or fraying are “family, community, and civil society.”21 here, levin calls for what he describes as a thick form of 159 mcnamara american citizenship that takes place through civic knowledge of and participation in private communities and state and local institutions of government and society, which most closely affect the character and quality of our daily lives. this “robust” idea of american citizenship is based upon the original shared ideals in the declaration of independence, the idea of a “free society rooted in an understanding of liberty that depends upon our institutions of moral formation and on the kind of person they produce,” who is dedicated to the principles of equality and liberty and the willingness to put them both into practice. for lilla the answer also lies in reviving an understanding of and education for citizenship as a concept central to our democratic politics, creating “a bond linking all members of a political society over time, regardless of their individual characteristics, giving them both rights and duties.”22 such an education would teach students to read broadly, think seriously, and engage with the ideas that exist across the political and intellectual spectrum. free speech and civic education on the university campus a complementary line of inquiry recently emerged from a commentary magazine symposium, which asked its contributors to answer the question, “is free speech under threat in the united states?”23 predictably, most of the participants believe that it is, and to a large degree, their concerns focus on the troubling challenges to free expression on university campuses, where the necessity of free speech is perhaps of the greatest importance if the free exchange of ideas informed by viewpoint diversity is to contribute to the acquisition of knowledge. robert zimmer, the president of the university of chicago, reminds us in the final contribution that “free speech is not a natural feature of human society.” he explains that we are all too likely to have a preference for our own opinions and inclined to succumb to the desire to impose this preference on others. zimmer believes that it is the responsibility of universities to provide leadership about the value of free speech “within society more broadly,” by demonstrating that free speech and debate on campus contribute to a more “powerful and deeply enriching education” for students. adam white adds alexis de tocqueville’s admonition that “the instruction of the people powerfully contributes to the support of a democratic republic.” tocqueville’s argument is that democratic citizenship requires instruction, literacy, and the continual practice of self-government.24 zimmer, white, and de tocqueville all make the argument that freedom and self-government are not self-sustaining the responsibility to invite students to the political 160   and that without cultivation and practice in society at large, a people could lose the civic habits necessary for both. the founding documents of american political life, the declaration of independence and the constitution of the united states, establish a set of fundamental principles and shared ends derived from universal natural rights, which, then, inform the civil order to which their protection gives rise. the declaration and the constitution provide the basic legal structure of our government, but more than that, they determine the foundation and means for uniting us in our american way of life. the declaration of independence asserts our equal human natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. it differentiates american republican government from previous political regimes, including the ancient democracies, by leaving us free to make our own decisions about the content of our happiness within the limits the constitution proscribes for a principled legal structure that provides us with what some would call an ordered liberty. but, as we suggested above, the legal structure alone is insufficient to sustain a constitutional democracy, to develop the sort of knowledge and practice of politics and government that cultivate healthy democratic civic life. as a result, every constitutional democracy, perhaps especially an extended, diverse, multiracial, multi-ethnic republic, founded on shared principles and ideas rather than a long, shared history, language, and culture, requires a rigorous and sustained program of civic education. it is the sort of civic education abraham lincoln famously called for in his “lyceum address,” “a political religion,”25 an education that inculcates a common set of shared principles and ideals, the habits of civic understanding and responsibility that encourage civil, active debate, discussion, and informed, even enlightened, citizenship. american democracy needs the sort of common civic education that provides sufficient unity of civic purpose to prevent us from fracturing further into the isolated identity groups, socioeconomic classes, and individualized pursuits that authors like lilla and levin describe, that leave us with a diminished shared civic understanding and public-spirited principles and goals. my argument is that it is the responsibility of the public university to invite students to the proverbial political table. i will turn next to a brief discussion of the traditional understanding of civic education at the time of the american founding and why the founders, like lincoln, believed such an education was an essential foundation to the american political experiment. the article will, then, address the transformation of traditional civic education, informed by a rigorous liberal education curriculum composed of the history of political thought, history, and ideas of the 161 mcnamara western tradition, and accompanied by american history, government, institutions, and political thought and constitutional principles into what universities call “community engaged learning” or “service learning,” an effort inspired by the educational theories of john dewey to make civic learning more active, as well as more local and community-based, but with perhaps the unintended consequence of narrowing the intellectual horizons and depth of the civic education and the intellectual experience a true civic education for a complex democracy requires. the founders and the necessity of civic education to ensure the success of the american experiment in republican government george washington was among the leading voices advocating the creation of a national university that would “cultivate the habits and mindset in citizens and public officers” necessary to ensure the success of america’s experiment with republican government.26 washington had two concerns. first, he believed that democratic citizenship and thoughtful statesmanship required broad civic learning based in the liberal arts and sciences. this civic education would cultivate the ability to think through the challenges of public life carefully by relying on the study of history, government, literature, and science. the argument was, as george thomas puts it in his essay “liberal education and american democracy,” that there is a crucial link between the habits of mind cultivated by liberal education—“the ability to grasp and evaluate arguments and evidence and to articulate and defend ideas in a reasoned manner”—and training for democratic citizenship. washington hoped that by establishing the national university in what would become washington, d.c., “[s]tudents with political ambitions will deepen their understanding of both principles and practice, if allowed the opportunity to observe congress and, in the best case, to come to know some of the national leaders personally.” the broad liberal education he envisioned would provide “the theoretical defense of republican government,” while the students would learn the practice of government through washington’s early conception of a congressional internship program.27 second, and building on this argument, was washington’s concern that a liberal civic education, according to the most traditional understanding of it, was the means by which to liberate the minds of thoughtful citizens and potential leaders from the parochial opinions of their particular towns, cities, and states. such an education would produce a mind capable of the sort of independent and critical thought that shapes human beings capable of providing leadership, who could take into account but also transcend local concerns to address national challenges. washington’s most the responsibility to invite students to the political 162   pressing worry was one he shared with others, including alexander hamilton and james madison, at least at the time of the constitutional convention and state ratifying conventions, that local prejudices and intolerance could undermine the effort to unify americans into an enlightened people with a shared dedication to the universal principles of liberty and equality secured by the government created through the constitution.28 washington, hamilton, and jefferson were aware that they faced a new kind of challenge. the united states was a nation derived from what hamilton, in federalist 9, called “the science of politics.”29 in the past, nation-states grew organically in place based upon the attachment of the people to a piece of land, a language, a culture, and a shared way of life serving as the components of unity and patriotism. the united states was a new kind of country, built around the idea that well-constructed institutions of government, created with the goal of protecting and promoting the principles and practice of liberty and equality, were the true foundation of a just political order. they knew that emotion attached people to the land, while educated reason would attach the thoughtful, the leading citizens, to the ideas on which the success of the united states depended, strengthening “national unity by promoting ‘the assimilation of the principles, opinions, and manners’ of americans.”30 the goal would be for the education of those invited to the national university to have a leading influence on the civic education of the american people as a whole. the idea of a national university persisted for some time but ultimately failed to pass congress, despite its illustrious parentage. while in theory congressional legislators supported the idea of a national university, they were concerned about the “large sums of money” such an endeavor would require. they suspected that their constituents would not look favorably on such large expenditures by the federal government, even for education.31 lorraine and thomas pangle also raise the question whether a national university was entirely compatible with religious toleration and democracy. the aim was to create a “nonsectarian national university” that would achieve preeminence over the regional and local, often sectarian universities, with the goal of educating the next generation of national leaders “in every field but especially in politics, by providing a thorough training in american political principles and law,” that would transcend the bounds of a particular state or section of the country. but the united states was a nation of many religious denominations. would it be possible to create a university that provided the moral foundation considered necessary at the time of the founding without including religious education?32 and, i would add, would a national institution of higher learning, reserved for the training and education 163 mcnamara of an elite core of leaders, earn and maintain the support of the many people in a democracy? the conundrum seems to have proved insurmountable. instead, public universities at the state level became the focus of attention for those hoping to provide venues of higher education for liberal, civic, and leadership education. thomas jefferson, in fact, believed that there needed to be public education for all citizens if american democracy was to succeed indefinitely. this public “primary education” should aim at educating americans both to succeed in their daily practical lives and to understand the principles and responsibilities of american citizenship. the first goal was literacy to ensure that every citizen had the ability “to calculate for himself, and to express and preserve his ideas, his contracts and accounts, in writing.” the chief goal of the primary education, however, was to “instruct the mass of our citizens in these, their rights, interests and duties, as men and citizens …”33 primary education, jefferson believed, would provide the foundation for a higher education at a public institution like the university of virginia, the establishment of which he dedicated his final decades. he hoped that the university would serve as a place to enlarge the minds of students through the study of ideas and books in the liberal arts, math, and the new and advancing sciences, and liberate them from the parochial opinions washington perceived as an obstacle to the unity of purpose necessary to sustain a large, diverse country. jefferson also expected the university of virginia to fulfill the public-spirited purpose washington had envisioned for a national university, that it would cultivate the habits of reflection that produce educated human beings, open to the freedom of thought and expression necessary to shape knowledgeable and active citizens and leaders. in addition, this civil and liberal education would form “the statesmen, legislators and judges, on whom public prosperity and individual happiness are so much to depend.” the higher education would teach these public leaders ancient and modern languages, math and the sciences, the law of nature and nations, history, ideology, general grammar, political economy, and ethics, among other subjects, all with the purpose of ensuring the ability to expound the principles and structure of government, the laws which regulate the intercourse of nations, those formed municipally for our own government, and a sound spirit of legislation, which, banishing all arbitrary and unnecessary restraint on individual action, shall leave us free to do whatever does not violate the equal rights of another; the responsibility to invite students to the political 164   and also to develop the reasoning faculties of our youth, enlarge their minds, cultivate their morals, and instill into them the precepts of virtue and order; …. and, generally, to form them to habits of reflection and correct action, rendering them examples of virtue to others, and of happiness within themselves. jefferson believed that through a broad liberal education in all of the classical subjects, in addition to some practical sciences, students would learn how to think and reason in a way that informed the art of government and legislation, “the principles and structure of government … and a sound spirit of legislation,” which he trusted would inculcate the students with knowledge of the equal rights and freedoms that tend toward public prosperity and happiness.34 like washington, jefferson understood that an adequate civic education would begin with the study of language and ideas about the nature of a good political order, good citizenship, and good leadership, how they come into being and how they are sustained. only then could students begin to value, discuss, and debate those ideas, with the goal of understanding its value to the perpetuation of american institutions and democracy. community engaged service learning in contrast to washington’s and jefferson’s conceptions of a public-spirited education inculcating civic learning through the study of the traditional works in the history of political thought, history, and literature that address leadership and political order, is the newer conception of civic learning and activity at the university. instead of telling and teaching the common american story of american political and economic history in theory and practice, american public universities have turned to a different form of civic education, “service learning” or “community engaged learning,” which seeks to teach and encourage civic engagement by involving students in their communities and teaching them social responsibility. those who advocate service learning agree that the neglect of civic learning is detrimental to civic participation. at this point in the argument, we have considered the traditional approach to civic education that teaches students to understand and think critically about the political and economic thought, history, and ideas that inform and 165 mcnamara have contributed to the formation and development of american institutions and the practice of constitutional democracy. but what is “service learning” or “community engaged learning”? in the mid-1990s, universities started to offer what is now called “service learning.” service learning is variously described as “a teaching and learning strategy that integrates meaningful community service with instruction and reflection to enrich the learning experience, teach civic responsibility, and strengthen communities.”35 the fayetteville state university “definition of service learning” website describes the mutually beneficial activity of service learning, through which “course learning objectives are lined up to meaningful human, safety, education, and environmental needs that are co-determined with community partners and service recipients.” students work on real world problems in the community that bring their classroom education to life. and, at the conclusion of the service learning experience, the students are asked to reflect on the experience. the stanford university community engaged learning program promises opportunities for students “to critically examine public issues, or explore one’s civic identity.”36 other service learning and community engaged learning sites repeat similar language. for example, the university of utah bennion center promises that community engaged learning, which “is an integral component of the new u student experience,” will “ensure that all u students have a transformative undergraduate experience” by gaining “vital experience outside the classroom.”37 in every case, the university promises the student opportunities to meet unmet community needs that simultaneously provide high impact, practical learning experiences applied to and derived from classroom learning. these programs provide genuinely admirable efforts to engage students in finding solutions to problems in their communities. it is the sort of community engagement that could, in fact, lead students to become active citizens, problem solvers, and community leaders in local, county, and state government. students do learn how to solve practical problems, but the learning is all practical, with no foundation in the sort of liberal education and civic learning that gives these students the intellectual tools with which to understand the causes of human behavior, the ends of human action, and how we choose to govern ourselves. the students learn how to conduct a survey, for example, but they often do not learn how government works and how working together in a community on a variety of issues through the political process can bring about citizenship that is thoughtful about the goals under consideration and strong communities. a case in point occurred at an institution i know well in which a group of students ran a survey for the responsibility to invite students to the political 166   a local group that promotes backyard chicken legalization. it put the students in the middle of the most persistently contentious issue in the community. the students learned how to run a survey to gather the opinion data that the pro-backyard chicken group needed to make their case, but did the students learn how to navigate this thorny issue in a democratic setting? the fact is that once the survey was complete, so was the students’ work. they missed an opportunity to see local democracy at its most interesting, functioning as it is meant to do. the students conduct the survey or the community project in which they are involved, they do some good, and they earn credit for meeting challenges. then, they are required to reflect on how successful the project was, and how it gave them a better sense of their personal “civic identities.” but there is no indication that service learning has substantial academic content, that they have read texts that lead them to consider what the nature of civic identity is in general, what it should or could be, and how to bring it about. they are not reading, for example, aristotle’s nicomachean ethics, which examines the moral and political virtues of the human beings who claim to be exemplary citizens and leaders, and how those virtues inform the content of human happiness, individually and as a community. they do not often read montesquieu or alexis de tocqueville’s democracy in america about the importance of community and civic activity to maintaining a vibrant democratic republic and a free people. in fact, it is not clear what they have learned that gives them the knowledge they need to understand even their own civic identity more fully, beyond their own reflections. service learning is practical learning and it encourages commendable volunteerism, but it does not produce civic literacy. like lilla’s feminist student, these service learning students are taught nothing about civic governance or the ideas that inform the organizations and democratic institutions of city or state governments. instead, each student is sent to reflect with no material but his or her experience as a resource for how that experience has contributed to the development of a civic identity. the focus ends up on the individual identity of the student, an isolating experience, rather than on the common good and the student’s relationship to it. service learning has its antecedent in the educational philosophy of john dewey. dewey introduced a new idea of pragmatic or “progressive education,” which he contrasts with “traditional education.” whereas “traditional education,” according to dewey, imposed merely obedience and learning from above by a teacher on children, a central tenet of progressive education was that it encouraged “expression and cultivation of individuality,” and that rather than relying wholly on “learning from texts and teachers,” it emphasized “learning through 167 mcnamara experience.”38 dewey dismisses traditional education as a kind of “acquisition of what already is incorporated in books and in the heads of the elders.”39 for dewey this learning is static and passive, without the active participation and choice of what to learn exerted by the students, limiting rather than promoting “the intellectual and moral development of the young.” and dewey has a point. if learning consists of reading dry summaries of old books, classical-traditional education will alienate students from the texts that should introduce them to the study of ideas and a dialogue concerning the questions an educated human being and citizen should ask and discuss. by contrast, dewey argues that the new “education emphasizes the freedom of the learner,” but freedom with a view to learning what? dewey emphasizes this contrast between what he calls “traditional education” and progressive education in his brief book experience & learning, but, interestingly, this book is actually aimed at his own disciples, those implementing the progressive education he advocates. the challenge dewey confronts in this book is that of what he calls “either or,” or, to speak more colloquially, throwing the baby out with the bath water. dewey seems to be trying to pull progressive educators back from certain imprudent excesses. for example, at the end of his introductory chapter, dewey argues that the traditional education is so dedicated to the study of “facts and ideas so bound up with the past as to give little help in dealing with the issues of the present and future.” the problem is that dewey finds that his progressive teachers are standing on the sidelines passively watching the students supposedly acquire knowledge and truth on their own. dewey seems to confess here that his theory of education has left the teachers unclear “just what … the role of the teacher and of books [is] in promoting the educational development of the immature?”40 he suggests here that the progressive teachers consider that there may be something to learn from the past that informs the present. the suggestion is that there also may be, after all, a role for books and teachers after all, in addition to experiential learning. in fact, dewey is clearly sounding an alarm of some kind in this book. he warns the progressive educators who have emerged from his own school of educational thought that if they have no theory or philosophy of subject matter or education that they can apply to experiential learning, they will find that they are “at the mercy of every intellectual breeze that happens to blow.”41 in other words, the teachers must have standards that determine when an experience is educational and when is it just an experience. and they must have real content that informs the experiential education the children are receiving. in experience & learning, dewey tries to establish these standards for his acolytes after the fact by explaining that experience must have continuity, that it the responsibility to invite students to the political 168   must respond to problems that stimulate thinking, and that it must arouse “in the learner an active quest for information and for production of new ideas.” here, we see the source of the experiential learning practiced at contemporary universities described above. under this progressive model of education, civic education becomes problem solving, without any reference to the serious study of the ideas and knowledge of human nature, politics, government, history, and society discovered and wrestled with in the texts of writers of the past or the present, and guided by teachers, which should provide the materials for acquiring a liberal education and civic literacy as a foundation for civic action and experience. the students are left with no intellectual context or standard by which to judge the wisdom or prudence of their contributions to civic life, except for their own reflections on their civic involvement. the result is, more often than not, a shallow, self-referential experience that fails to teach the students about the fundamental ideas, documents, and institutions of government that inform civic life and self-government in america, or to involve them in the larger debates and discussions about the alternative ideas across the spectrum of political life for addressing public policy challenges in a way that provides unity of purpose or contributes to the common good. it is this sort of service learning which most of all informs the study that results from the obama administration department of education’s “national task force on civic learning and democratic engagement” which produced the aforementioned report entitled “a crucible moment: college learning and democracy’s future.” the task force set out to discover how, confronted with the neglect of civic education in the k–12 schools and universities, and the disengagement of american youth from political life, they could “lead a national dialogue that would result in recommendations about strengthening students’ civic learning and democratic engagement as a core component of college.”42 in part, the goal of the national task force was to address the apolitical nature of the new field of service learning, to put democracy back in civic education, and to ensure that students received an education in the serious content of civics learning and activity at university, again, especially at public universities. the goal was to prepare university students to be “informed, engaged, and globally knowledgeable citizens.” to a certain extent, with perhaps the exception of the global perspective, the stated goals of the task force were similar to the traditional civic education we have discussed. even the additional component of taking civic education beyond the study of books to “hands-on, face-to-face, active engagement, in the midst of differing perspectives about how to address 169 mcnamara common problems,” sounds something like george washington’s desire to mix the theory of government with the practice of politics in a national university curriculum. the “crucible moment” report claims to be concerned with reinstating the theory and practice of politics and democracy into civic education. it essentially argues that there is a continuum of civic engagement that scholars have to do with students, from learning to read the constitution, to doing internships, to planning rallies on behalf of a political cause. but the “crucible moment” report takes what tradition might call “old style civics as a given,” and then focuses on active citizenship and political engagement and even activism. “crucible moment” argues that “civic learning and learning in traditional disciplines are complementary, rather than competitive.”43 understood from the perspective of correcting the apolitical tendencies of service learning, one could see that the intention of the report to reinstate the political into civic education is laudable. the report argues that “[t]oday’s education for democracy” needs “to be informed by deep engagement with the values of liberty, equality, individual worth, open-mindedness, and the willingness to collaborate with people of differing views and backgrounds towards common solutions for the public good.”44 the difficulty is that the “crucible moment” report assumes that students are reading the constitution, the federalist papers, and learning about american institutions as a foundation for their activism on the left or on the right, but this assumption is, in most cases, too optimistic. in fact, as i argue above, we cannot take for granted that public universities are teaching the classical and canonical documents, ideas, and history that continuously inform and shape american political life. while some teach community engaged learning, beginning with a study of the american constitutional government and institutions, there are many academics in fields like psychology and criminal justice who often supervise service learning but who neglect the serious content of liberal education as a foundation for civic engagement, either because they lack the academic resources themselves to teach it, or because they do not understand its importance. they believe that what matters most is the individual experience of participation for each student and their personal reflections on those experiences. the deficiency of civic education so conceived is that there is very little serious academic content and understanding that the students gain about the meaning of citizenship, leadership, and civic life. instead, the experience sends them to reflect on their own thoughts, experience, and civic identity, without teaching the importance of political community, the rule of law, and the virtue of political participation by informed and civically the responsibility to invite students to the political 170   educated citizens and leaders. conclusion public universities must recreate the jeffersonian civic engagement effort by two chief means: first, by providing students with a truly liberal and civic education, which includes the critical skills necessary for careful thinking, reading, and writing well, and teaching them how to use these skills to pursue knowledge of the ideas and science of politics and government at the heart of civic life that inform the principles and structure of american government; and, second, by building on that educational foundation to engage students in a serious discussion of the political, social, and policy issues confronting them, their communities, and their country today. liberal education is an education that introduces students to the texts and ideas that compel them to challenge and question the opinions of their time and to think seriously in a way that transcends political and intellectual trends about what it is to be a serious, educated human being, a good citizen, and a good leader. such a rigorous education that teaches students to take ideas seriously should be a source of humility. no one individual has the answer to our political challenges and hence moderation is required for us to work together to find the answers. in this way, liberal civic education is the beginning or the source of civic unity, not because it brings about consolidated opinion or agreement necessarily but because it submits political opinion and partisanship to examination and instills in students the necessity of considering that there are perennial human challenges that persist throughout time, including the tribalism that afflicts our society currently, or the democratic tendency towards political equality that breeds the individualism against which tocqueville warns us. this liberal education that focuses on the great books and ideas of human civilization does not replace the professional practical degrees students need to be economically successful and self-sustaining but it teaches students to think clearly about what a successful civic life and a robust democracy require. this mission is both timeless and contemporary, and can be accomplished in a nonpartisan manner through the learning of political and economic thought and history and the serious study of government and public policy that begins with the study of the foundations of western civilization in the works of plato and aristotle and extends to shakespeare and the american founding. higher education should introduce a conversation that produces not conformity of thought but rather the thoughtful combat of ideas. only students so equipped will rise to the defense of free speech and the debate of difficult ideas and concepts. it is the answer to 171 mcnamara the challenge of our times—the need to provide students with an education that takes them beyond particularized identity and debilitating partisanship to teach them about the content of a serious life as a human being and as a citizen that makes it possible for them to exercise the wisdom and judgment necessary to take the lead in public life. notes 1. kahlenberg and janey. 2. fayetteville state university. 3. kahlenberg and janey. 4. among the many books on the subject of american disunity in the early twenty-first century are haidt; hochschild; murray; brooks; levin; vance; and cowen. 5. lilla, “the end of identity liberalism.” 6. ibid. 7. lilla, the once and future liberal 77. 8. the first understanding of the slogan, according to lilla is “that there are no spheres of life exempt from the struggle for power” (ibid. 75). 9. for these arguments, see, in particular, “the me decade and third great awakening” and “funky chic” in wolfe. 10. lilla, the once and future liberal 67. 11. ibid. 76. 12. ibid. 67. 13. ibid. 81–86. 14. ibid. 113. the responsibility to invite students to the political 172   15. lilla, “the end of identity liberalism.” 16. levin 97. 17. tocqueville 482. 18. ibid. 19. levin 147. 20. ibid. 148. 21. ibid. 98, 100. 22. lilla, the once and future liberal 88. 23. abrams, et al. 24. tocqueville 291. 25. lincoln. 26. thomas, “liberal education and american democracy.” 27. pangle and pangle 150. 28. thomas, the founders and the idea of a national university 32–35. 29. hamilton, madison, and jay 48. 30. pangle and pangle 151. 31. ibid. 150. 32. ibid. 147, 149. 33. jefferson. 34. ibid. 35. fayetteville state university. 173 mcnamara 36. stanford university. 37. university of utah. 38. dewey 19. 39. ibid. 40. ibid. 22–23. 41. ibid. 51. 42. the civic learning and democratic engagement task force 1. 43. ibid. 44. ibid. 3. works cited abrams, floyd, et al. “symposium: is free speech under threat in the united states?” commentary april 2017. https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/free-speechthreat-united-states/. brooks, arthur. the conservative heart: how to build a fairer, happier, and more prosperous america. northampton, ma: broadside books, 2015. the civic learning and democratic engagement task force. “a crucible moment: college learning and democracy’s future.” u.s. department of education. october 5, 2011. https://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/research/pubs/college-learning-democracys-future/cruciblemoment.pdf. cowen, tyler. the complacent class: the self-defeating quest for the american dream. new york: st. martin’s press, 2017. dewey, john. experience and learning. new york: free press, 1938. the responsibility to invite students to the political 174   fayetteville state university. “what is service learning?” office of civic engagement and service learning. november 2018. https://www.uncfsu.edu/faculty-andstaff/departments-and-offices/office-of-civic-engagement-and-service-learning. haidt, jonathan. the righteous mind: why good people are divided by politics and religion. new york: pantheon books, 2012. hamilton, alexander, james madison, and john jay. the federalist: a commentary on the constitution of the united states. new york: the modern library, 2000. hochschild, arlie russell. strangers in their own land: anger and mourning on the american right. new york: new press, 2016. jefferson, thomas, james madison, et al. report of the commissioners appointed to fix the site of the university of virginia. epilogue: securing the republic. the founders’ constitution. volume 1, chapter 18, document 33. august 4, 1818. http://presspubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch18s33.html. kahlenberg, richard d., and clifford janey. “is trump’s victory the jump-start civics education needed?” the atlantic november 10, 2016. https://www.theatlantic.com/ education/archive/2016/11/is-trumps-victory-the-jump-start-civics-educationneeded/507293/. levin, yuval. the fractured republic: renewing america’s social contract in the age of individualism. new york: basic books, 2016. lilla, mark. “the end of identity liberalism.” the sunday review of the new york times november 18, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-ofidentity-liberalism.html. . the once and future liberal: after identity politics. new york: harpercollins, 2017. lincoln, abraham. “the perpetuation of our political institutions: address before the young men's lyceum of springfield, illinois (lyceum address).” january 27, 1838. http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/lyceum.htm. 175 mcnamara murray, charles. coming apart: the state of white america. new york: crown forum, 2013. pangle, lorraine smith, and thomas pangle. the learning of liberty: the educational ideas of the american founders. lawrence, ks: kansas university press, 1993. stanford university. “community engaged learning/cardinal courses.” n.d. https:// undergrad.stanford.edu/programs/community-engaged-learning-cel. thomas, george. “liberal education and american democracy.” the american interest august 24, 2015. https://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/08/24/liberal-educationand-american-democracy/. _____. the founders and the idea of a national university: constituting the american mind. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2017. tocqueville, alexis de. democracy in america. translated and edited by harvey c. mansfield and delba winthrop. chicago: university of chicago press, 2000. university of utah. “community engaged learning at the u.” lowell bennion community service center. 2018. https://bennioncenter.org/faculty/archive-faculty-section/learning/ index.php. vance, j. d. hillbilly elegy: a memoir of a family and culture in crisis. new york: harpercollins, 2016. wolfe, tom. mauve gloves & madmen, clutter & vine. new york: bantam books, 1999. microsoft word 9 powers 12.1.docx [expositions 12.1 (2018) 126–141] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 our vocation is peacebuilding (construo pacem est nostra vocatione)1 gerard f. powers university of notre dame “our vocation is peacebuilding.” that would be a fitting theme for a new synod and apostolic exhortation. this synod could address the future of the just war tradition for the catholic community, and do so in a way that situates the just war tradition where it should be: as just one, relatively marginal element of a much wider and more important project of strengthening peacebuilding. with the sermon on the mount at the center and drawing on a rich tradition of reflection on war and peace, the synod could offer a spiritual, theological, moral, and pastoral template for a catholic community animated by a deep and abiding commitment to peacebuilding. as i envision it, the synod would insist that moving peacebuilding from the margins to the center of catholic identity and practice is necessary for the catholic community’s integrity as well as its capacity to work with other religious and secular actors in addressing the world’s most pressing challenges to peace. a proposed synod on peacebuilding parallels pax christi’s call, following its 2016 conference on nonviolence with the pontifical council for justice and peace, for a synod on nonviolence and just peace. while an encyclical would be welcome, a synodal process, preferably including diocesan and national synods leading to an ordinary general assembly, would permit the wide consultations needed to address the varied and contingent dynamics of conflict and peace around the world. and the process itself would help achieve one of the goals of the synod: to broaden and deepen catholic engagement in peacebuilding. like pax christi’s proposed encyclical, the synod would take a “just peace approach [that] offers a vision and an ethic to build peace as well as to prevent, defuse, and to heal the damage of violent conflict.”2 but the theme of the synod would be the vocation of peacebuilding: just peace is the vision and moral framework; peacebuilding is what we are called to do; and peacebuilders are what we are called to be if the world is to move toward a just peace. peacebuilding reinforces the idea that a just peace is not a static end-goal achieved by implementing a set of principles or developing just structures. rather, just peace is something that we must constantly build and rebuild, a dynamic process of contingent efforts to achieve 127 powers communities of right relations in many different places and at many different levels of society.3 unlike pax christi’s proposal, a primary purpose of this synod would not be to commit the church “no longer [to] use or teach ‘just war theory.’” the synod certainly would contribute to the increasing emphasis in the church’s teaching and practice on the importance and efficacy of nonviolence. but it would be clear that “gospel nonviolence” is just one element of peacebuilding. peacebuilding is not an alternative to the church’s restrictive approach to the just war tradition, but a necessary complement to it. the synod would highlight the need for both adherents of nonviolence and just war to enlarge the conversation by reflecting much more seriously and systematically than either have done to date on peacebuilding, an area where they should be able to find common ground. in this essay, i will first argue that a synod is needed to address gaps that keep peacebuilding on the margins of the church. i will then address four ways a synod could address those gaps in an effort to become more of a peacebuilding church: (1) renewing a commitment to the vocation of peacebuilding, (2) further developing a peacebuilding ethic informed by practice, (3) understanding the distinctive contributions of catholic peacebuilding as a basis for broader engagement with the world, and (4) clarifying the complementary relationship between peacebuilding, nonviolence, and the just war tradition. why a synod? if catholic social teaching is the church’s best kept secret, peacebuilding is catholic social teaching’s best kept secret. much as laudato si’ did for the environment, a synod on peacebuilding would help address gaps in catholic teaching and formation and help mainstream peacebuilding practices that, while impressive, are mostly marginal activities within the church. one gap is the literacy gap. from the sermon on the mount and official catholic social teaching to spiritualities and sacraments, peace is a central theme. yet, few catholics, even clergy and laity with formal training in theology, know the church’s rich tradition of peace and understand how it might apply to today’s world. how many graduates of catholic universities have even a cursory understanding of this tradition? how many priests and bishops have taken a seminary course on the subject? an increasing number of catholic universities have peace studies programs, but, as with other academic disciplines, engagement with the catholic intellectual tradition and practice is often minimal and ad hoc. the relatively few catholic dioceses and parishes that address issues our vocation is peacebuilding 128 of war and peace usually do so during national debates about u.s. military intervention, a “teachable moment” that easily dissolves into political polarization, not enhanced understanding of the tradition. a second gap is that, despite the church’s rich tradition, important aspects of a peacebuilding ethic are underdeveloped. just as just war norms are often racing to keep pace with new technology and new strategies of warfare, a peacebuilding ethic needs to catch up to the practice of peacebuilding.4 a synod could solidify, clarify, and deepen existing teaching by reflecting on the insights gained from a wealth of peacebuilding experience. moreover, it could catalyze further reflection on today’s new challenges of peace, from the moral dilemmas involved in sustainable peace processes to issues of self-determination and nation-building, which are at the heart of some of the world’s most intractable conflicts. finally, perhaps the major gap is that the practice of catholic peacebuilding is so rare. no doubt, the catholic peacebuilding slate is hardly blank. within the catholic community, as with other faith communities and secular actors, peacebuilding has become a kind of cottage industry, with a proliferation of programs that seek to nurture, expand, and professionalize the kinds of peacebuilding activities in which the church has long been involved. sant’egidio’s peacebuilding work in mozambique and elsewhere is a notable example, as are endless kinds of peacebuilding activities by church peace and justice entities, from parishes and religious orders to episcopal conferences and the holy see. less well known are the peacebuilding activities of catholic relief services and other caritas agencies, which have developed well-funded, long-term peacebuilding programs.5 as impressive as this work is, however, much of it consists of relatively modest, ad hoc initiatives run by a relatively small group of bishops, specialists, activists, and programs. for many catholic faithful and institutions, peacebuilding is not considered integral to their christian identity or mission and does not enjoy significant commitment of resources. the united states remains mired in afghanistan and iraq, the two longest wars in its history, yet, with a few exceptions—e.g., occasional statements by u.s. bishops and a few catholic peace and human rights groups, and humanitarian aid and refugee resettlement programs—the catholic community, like most americans, acts as if the nation is at peace. to help address these gaps, a synod could highlight four main topics: (1) the vocation of peacebuilding, (2) a practical theology of peacebuilding, (3) the distinctiveness of catholic approaches, and (4) the complementarity of nonviolence, just war, and peacebuilding. 129 powers peacebuilding is our vocation the central theme of the synod would be peacebuilding as vocation. no development of the tradition is needed for peacebuilding to be considered integral to an understanding of the christian vocation and therefore central to the church’s mission. in his exhortation after the african synod, pope benedict summarized the link between faith and peacebuilding as follows: christians will thus become peacemakers (cf. mt 5:9) to the extent that, grounded in divine grace, they cooperate with their maker in creating and fostering the gift of peace. as reconciled men and women, the faithful will also promote justice everywhere, especially in african societies divided and threatened by violence and war, yet hungering and thirsting for true justice […]. open to the prompting of the holy spirit who continues to awaken different charisms in the church, christians must pursue or undertake with determination the path of holiness, and thus increasingly become apostles of reconciliation, justice and peace.6 robert schreiter suggests three mutually reinforcing dimensions of the vocation of peacebuilding: (1) a spiritual vision of peace; (2) a set of tasks and practices of clergy and laity that correspond to the offices of teaching (e.g., education for peace), shepherding or governing (e.g., facilitating peace processes), and sanctifying (e.g., rituals of forgiveness); and (3) a set of spiritual disciplines (e.g., the sacraments, prayer, maintaining hope).7 understanding the dynamics of conflict, training in conflict resolution skills, educating to change attitudes, and developing strategies of social change are essential. but understanding peacebuilding as vocation gives this work a depth and texture that are essential for effective, sustained peacebuilding, especially amidst seemingly hopeless, intractable conflicts. understanding peacebuilding as vocation also enriches the church’s wider teachings and practices, from sacraments and systematics to human rights and development. drawing on its broad consultative process, the synod could highlight concrete examples of how the vocation of peacebuilding is being lived out around the world through a wide variety of charisms. it could highlight bishops and priests who engage in what secular experts would consider mediation or conflict transformation, but which the bishops and priests consider pastoral engagement or accompaniment. in sudan, for example, our vocation is peacebuilding 130 church leaders did not consider themselves to be “peacebuilders.” they considered themselves pastors and shepherds, whose first obligation was to reflect christ’s fidelity to the church through their own fidelity to the people. as pastors, they created and sustained communities of faith that could absorb suffering, embody forgiveness and reconciliation, maintain hope, and advocate for justice. as shepherds, they gave voice to the voiceless and spoke truth to power.8 unfortunately, this kind of pastoral engagement is too often the exception, especially in places where violent conflict is not a daily reality. that is the main reason it is necessary to revive peacebuilding as vocation. a synod could remind the clergy that too many priests and bishops are not responding to pope francis’ insistence that they escape the confines of their comfortable rectories and chanceries and get out into the streets. the synod also could address challenges that arise when bishops and priests are out in the streets. frequently, catholic clergy and institutions are called to play leading roles in official truth and reconciliation or human rights commissions, constitutional reform initiatives, election monitoring, and negotiations between conflicting political parties or armed groups. because these roles are inherently political, clergy sometimes decline to accept them. especially in countries like congo and south sudan, however, where the church is one of the only functioning and widely respected institutions and where there is a dearth of educated laity, clerics often reluctantly take up the mantle under the rationale that the extraordinary circumstances justify what is sometimes referred to as a “substitute political role.” when they do so, they must walk a tightrope between the religious and the political. this kind of direct political engagement by church leaders can be necessary and effective in the short-term. but it always carries the risk of politicizing religion and clericalizing peacebuilding. a synod could mine the experience of the church around the world in these situations and further elaborate ecclesiological and practical criteria for when it might be appropriate for the institutional church or individual clerics to play this substitute political role and when to refrain from doing so. by far the biggest challenge a synod could address is that revitalizing the peacebuilding vocation depends on revitalizing the lay vocation. revitalizing the lay vocation, in turn, requires overcoming the strong tendency in the church and the wider society to privatize religion, to create a sharp separation between what people pray on sunday and what they do on monday. inculcating 131 powers peacebuilding as a vocation is possible only if catholics can accept that social teaching and action are integral to their faith. lay catholics are meant to be the vanguard of a peacebuilding church because, as “ambassadors of christ” (2 cor 5:20) in the public sphere, they have the principal responsibility for transforming the social order in light of the gospel through their work, family, and civic engagement.9 the synod could illustrate the lay vocation in action with concrete examples of the variety of ways in which lay people and lay organizations have embraced, nurtured, and lived out the peacebuilding vocation. the synod also could acknowledge that too often the laity are missing-in-action when it comes to peacebuilding. it could cite the bishops of the great lakes region of africa, who have rightly identified the problem as one of evangelization. in a strategic plan approved by the six national and two regional episcopal conferences in the great lakes region, they bemoaned the fact that “[w]e have not always done what we could in order to form the laity for life in society, to a christian vision of politics and economics. a protracted absence of the lay faithful from this field has led them to believe that the faith has nothing to do with politics.”10 they concluded that action to promote peace and reconciliation requires finding “the language and methods which are necessary to form communities in an active faith which brings about a social and political revival.”11 just as the bishops of the great lakes region committed to re-evangelize the laity regarding the lay vocation, a synod should commit the church to a renewed church-wide effort of formation. a synod could applaud the proliferation of peace and justice initiatives at all levels of the church since gaudium et spes called for undertaking “an evaluation of war with a new attitude,” strengthening programs to study peace, and renewing efforts to construct peace by international catholic associations.12 in the same spirit, it could call for a renewal of the church’s commitment to peacebuilding with an entirely new attitude. among other things, a synod could commit to new programs of priestly and episcopal formation to reinforce the centrality of peacebuilding in their ministry. it could call on catholic institutions, from episcopal conferences, dioceses, and parishes to caritas agencies, educational institutions, and religious orders, to do an audit of the role of peacebuilding in their work and to develop plans for making it more integral to that work. moreover, it could encourage lay movements to do more to integrate peacebuilding into their work and could call for a proliferation of lay catholic groups, such as sant’egidio and pax christi international, that have special competencies in peacebuilding. our vocation is peacebuilding 132 a practical theology and ethic of peacebuilding revitalizing the vocation of peacebuilding is the critical foundation for becoming more of a peacebuilding church, but further development of the tradition is needed to address new challenges. a synod could contribute to and call for further development of what robert schreiter calls a practical theology of peacebuilding, “an ongoing practice of reflection and action that keeps theory and informed practice in constant conversation with each other.”13 the synodal process of world-wide consultation would enable the catholic community to undertake a systematic reading of the peacebuilding “signs of the times” that would deepen understanding of the nature of contemporary conflicts, contribute to mapping and analyzing the mostly unheralded peacebuilding work of the catholic community, and identify ways in which existing teaching can be enriched by insights from practice and practice can be enriched by developments in teaching. while it is hard to predict in advance what issues would emerge from a synodal process, the catholic peacebuilding network (cpn), a network of two dozen catholic academic institutes, development agencies, lay organizations, and episcopal conferences, has identified several areas where further development of a practical theology of peacebuilding is needed.14 one area is the role of conflict resolution and dialogue. kenneth himes suggests that the presumption against war and the positive conception of peace found in catholic teaching is not matched by “a comparable set of theological and ethical principles to guide conflict resolution.”15 according to himes, catholic communitarianism is overly optimistic about the efficacy of dialogue in overcoming deep-seated conflicts and, thus, remains underdeveloped in conflict resolution, despite its engagement in such efforts around the world.16 catholic social teaching could benefit from more engagement with the fields of international relations and international law, as well as the newer disciplines of conflict resolution and conflict transformation, in developing more substantive norms for what is called “track one” or government-to-government diplomacy, as well as the church’s own rather impressive record of “track two” diplomacy, which involves non-state actors. much has been written on the sant’egidio community’s role in ending the mozambique conflict.17 also ripe for reflection are the ways in which theology, social teachings, rituals, and pastoral practices contribute to formal and informal peace processes in colombia, the philippines, uganda, congo, sudan, and elsewhere.18 a synod could also address such recurring moral dilemmas as finding the right balance between justice (holding bad actors accountable so as to end a culture of impunity and break the cycle of violence) and peace (granting 133 powers amnesties and power sharing in order to achieve a peace agreement). finding the right balance has to be done on a case-by-case basis, but these kinds of issues are a largely unexamined dimension of catholic peacebuilding that warrant at least as much reflection as they are given in the secular literature. a second issue that deserves fuller treatment is self-determination and nation-building. the religious-ethnic-nationalist conflicts since the end of the cold war have generated a substantial literature on religion and violence, religion and ethnic-national identity, and the legitimacy of humanitarian intervention. but the issue that is at the heart of so many of these conflicts—disputes over self-determination and secession—has not been addressed to the same extent. the church has been deeply engaged in debates over self-determination and secession in individual cases, but there is little in official catholic teaching on the topic.19 a synod could lead to the development of a more consistent and coherent moral framework to guide the church’s engagement. nuclear disarmament is a third issue. the nuclear age has generated an abundance of church statements and scholarly reflection on the ethics of nuclear weapons. relying heavily on just war arguments, pope francis recently condemned not only the use, but also the possession of nuclear weapons.20 this statement and the holy see’s ratification of a new treaty banning nuclear weapons are part of a long-standing strategy of the holy see to delegitimize nuclear weapons. the continued success of this strategy will require the development of an ethics of nuclear disarmament that is as sophisticated as the ethics of nuclear use and deterrence. for example, more reflection is needed on what forms of deterrence would be morally acceptable to deter nuclear breakout in a world near or at zero nuclear weapons, as well as on the elements of an ethic of cooperative security that could make “global zero” feasible.21 more reflection is also needed on the pastoral implications, especially for catholic policymakers and military personnel, of the church’s recent condemnations of both nuclear use and nuclear deterrence. these and other issues marry political ethics, economic ethics, business ethics, environmental ethics, international law, and cultural norms, all of which must find expression in institutions. what is needed, therefore, is greater attention to an ethic of institutions that can translate norms into fair and effective structures and processes that are essential to building a just peace. this involves a multifaceted, building block approach to peacebuilding that a synod can model and encourage. our vocation is peacebuilding 134 a distinctive catholic peacebuilding since pacem in terris, social encyclicals have been addressed to all people of good will, not just catholics. in laudato si’, pope francis not only addressed the whole world, but also quoted leaders of other faiths. similarly, a new synodal process and apostolic exhortation could include religious leaders and reference texts of other faiths to highlight the importance of ecumenical and interreligious peacebuilding, as well as the distinctive contributions of other faiths and secular specialists. at the same time, a synod could emphasize what is distinctive about catholic approaches to peacebuilding. given the prevalence of conflicts with a religious dimension, a synod would have to reiterate the frequent denunciations of the new holy wars—religious violence and religious nationalism— by religious leaders. it would also have to address the prevailing secularist paradigm, which tends to view religion mainly as a source of conflict and division and thus seeks to remove it from the public square and marginalize and privatize it. the synod would make the case that strengthening religious peacebuilding is an obvious antidote to both contemporary holy warriors and the secularist paradigm. it could welcome scholars and policymakers who are enhancing their literacy on religion, conflict, and peace. it could make the case that marginalizing religion impoverishes peacebuilding because elements of peacebuilding, such as forgiveness, reconciliation, and solidarity, either are not prominent in secular policy discourse or become rather “thin” when separated from their religious and moral roots.22 “thick” religious contributions to peacebuilding require greater attention to single-identity peacebuilding. developing common ground and common action on conflict and peacebuilding is essential, but the quality of ecumenical and interreligious peacebuilding is a function of the quality of intra-denominational and intra-religious peacebuilding. according to scott appleby, the church relies on a “distinctive set of teachings, practices, sensibilities, and institutional resources” that might not be “exclusive” to catholicism but that come together in a special way in catholic peacebuilding.23 the process of holding a world-wide synod would, itself, exemplify one distinctively catholic dimension: the church’s “ubiquitous presence.” as john paul lederach, a prominent mennonite peacebuilder, points out, this presence gives the church a “unique if not unprecedented presence in the landscape of the conflict.” especially in majority catholic countries like colombia, he adds, few religious or secular institutions have the infrastructure or ecclesiology that “so neatly aligns with the multilevel and multifaceted demands of peacebuilding.”24 a second 135 powers distinctive aspect of catholic peacebuilding is the role of the catholic social imaginary, including ritual, sacrament, and spirituality. schreiter argues that a secular bias in peacebuilding has mostly ignored the role of ritual in conflict prevention, transformation, and reconciliation.25 a synod could urge the catholic community to revitalize and deepen its understanding of the distinctive role of sacraments in catholicism and how they offer deep spiritual grounding for the church’s peacebuilding. in addressing what is distinctive about catholic peacebuilding, a synod would have to avoid any hint of triumphalism, exclusivity, or parochialism. but further plumbing of the spiritual, theological, and pastoral depths of catholic peacebuilding is essential if the peacebuilding vocation is to be an animating feature of lived catholicism and if the church is to make her most authentic and fullest contribution to the world’s wider peacebuilding project. peacebuilding, nonviolence and the just war tradition finally, as noted earlier, a synod need not dwell on the well-trod debate over just war and nonviolence, nor need it take a page out of the mennonite confession of faith, discard the just war tradition, and embrace nonviolence as the sole christian option. instead, it could expand on and reinforce the growing importance of nonviolence in catholic teaching, explicitly reject permissive approaches to the just war tradition in favor of a highly-restrictive one, and elaborate on the inherent complementarity of nonviolence, restrictive just war, and a broader theology and ethics of peacebuilding. since vatican ii and especially since the end of the cold war, nonviolence has received greater emphasis and legitimacy in official church teaching. papal and other statements are replete with condemnations of the “savagery” and “scourge” of war, descriptions of war as “an adventure without return” and a “defeat for humanity,” and hortatory appeals, such as “war never again” and “war is not the answer.”26 the experience of total war in the twentieth century, the threat of a nuclear holocaust, and the fact that civilians have increasingly been the main victims of war have led the church to be deeply skeptical of the ability of modern war to meet just war criteria. at the same time, successful nonviolent change, from the demise of marcos in the philippines to the mostly peaceful dissolution of the soviet bloc, has demonstrated the efficacy of nonviolence.27 nevertheless, nonviolence has been considered an option for individuals, not governments. a synod could call on the catholic community to give much greater attention to nonviolence as a our vocation is peacebuilding 136 core element of its identity. without rejecting the just war tradition, a synod could call on governments to take their obligation to develop institutions, strategies, and means of nonviolent conflict resolution at least as seriously as they take their responsibility to develop their capacity to defend the common good through military means.28 such clarity about the obligation of governments to pursue nonviolent means of conflict resolution would significantly raise the threshold for the resort to force. it also would reinforce the church’s long-term vision of strengthening international law, international institutions, and means of conflict transformation to the point that war will become obsolete. while highlighting nonviolence, a synod could at the same time emphasize that the church’s restrictive approach to just war is not an impediment to peacebuilding, but is an element of it.29 a permissive approach to just war too readily justifies war and is prone to misuse, but the church’s restrictive just war approach, when followed, places severe constraints on the use of force. it helps delegitimize the holy war claims of religious terrorists or religious nationalists. it is a form of conflict prevention when jus ad bellum criteria are used to oppose military interventions, as was done by the vatican, episcopal conferences, and pacifists, too, in opposing u.s. intervention in iraq in 2003. finally, jus in bello norms are elements of peacebuilding insofar as they seek to limit the civilian suffering that fuels cycles of violence and makes it much more difficult both to end conflicts and to promote post-conflict reconciliation. last but not least, a synod could elaborate on the ways in which nonviolence, restrictive just war, and a broader theology and ethics of peacebuilding complement each other. neither nonviolence nor restrictive just war nor even a combination of the two is capacious enough to address the most difficult peacebuilding challenges. theories of nonviolence and just war contribute little to post-conflict nation-building, trauma healing, and reconciliation in countries torn asunder by civil wars. both nonviolence and just war can ground condemnations of religious violence and religious nationalism, but much more is needed to address the roots of terrorism, conflicting claims of self-determination, and deeply-rooted sectarianism. moreover, theories of nonviolence and just war offer little guidance for understanding the relationship between the ethics of intervention and the ethics of exit. for example, while it may have been immoral for the u.s. to intervene in iraq in 2003, it was not immoral for the u.s. to stay given the new obligations it incurred as the de jure and then de facto sovereign. in sum, the credibility and validity of both nonviolence and restrictive just war depend on whether they are tied to an ethics of peacebuilding 137 powers that can address these and other broader challenges of war and peace. conclusion the catholic community around the world is doing courageous work for peace in some of the world’s most war-torn places, but this work tends to be unheralded, unknown, and underanalyzed—and mostly operates on the margins of church life. a synod on the vocation of peacebuilding would bring new visibility to this peacebuilding and would seek to move peacebuilding from the margins to the center. a synod process with the vocation of peacebuilding as its animating principle, a practical theology of peacebuilding as its method, and a commitment to exploring the complementarity of nonviolence, restrictive just war, and an ethics of peacebuilding would contribute to what scott appleby calls “a conceptually coherent, theologically sophisticated and spiritually enlivening” approach to catholic peacebuilding that can begin to match the sophistication of catholic thinking on the ethics of war and peace.30 a synod also would enable the catholic community to move closer to becoming a peacebuilding church in an authentically catholic way. notes 1. an earlier version of this essay, “peacebuilding is my vocation: 50 years after pacem in terris,” was presented at the anniversary of pacem in terris conference, university of notre dame, march 24–26, 2011. this article also draws on gerard powers, “from an ethics of war to an ethics of peacebuilding,” in just war to modern peace ethics, eds. heinz-gerhard justenhoven and william a. barbieri, jr. (berlin: de gruyter, 2012), 275– 312; and gerard powers, “catholic peacebuilding,” in a vision of justice: engaging catholic social teaching on the college campus, eds. susan crawford sullivan and ron pagnucco (collegeville, mn: liturgical press, 2014), 113–137. 2. pax christi international, “an appeal to the catholic church to re-commit to the centrality of gospel nonviolence,” https://nonviolencejustpeace.net/final-statement-anappeal-to-the-catholic-church-to-re-commit-to-the-centrality-of-gospel-nonviolence/. our vocation is peacebuilding 138 3. kenneth himes, “peacebuilding and catholic social teaching,” in peacebuilding: catholic theology, ethics and praxis, eds. robert j. schreiter, r. scott appleby, and gerard f. powers (new york: orbis, 2010), 265–299, at 269. peacebuilding is preferable to peacemaking because the latter is often defined narrowly as mediation or conflict resolution. while peacebuilding sometimes is defined narrowly as post-conflict reconciliation, i use a broader concept of strategic peacebuilding developed by lederach and appleby, which includes efforts at all levels, involving a broad range of actors and factors, to promote peace before, during, and after violent conflicts. see john paul lederach and r. scott appleby, “strategic peacebuilding: an overview,” in strategies of peace: transforming conflict in a violent world, eds. daniel philpott and gerard powers (new york: oxford, 2010), 19–44. 4. to be sure, there is a growing literature on a theology and ethics of peace, but it is not nearly as well developed as the literature on just war and nonviolence. see, e.g., r. scott appleby, the ambivalence of the sacred: religion, violence, and reconciliation (lanham, md: rowman and littlefield publishers, 2000); mary ann cejka and tomas bamat, eds., artisans of peace: grassroots peacemaking among christian communities (maryknoll, ny: orbis, 2003); atalia omer, r. scott appleby, and david little, eds., the oxford handbook of religion, conflict, and peacebuilding (oxford: oxford university press, 2015); glen stassen, just peacemaking (louisville, ky: westminster/john knox press, 1992); and susan thistlethwaite, ed., a just peace church (new york: united church press, 1986). 5. for an overview of crs peacebuilding, see william r. headley and reina c. neufeldt, “catholic relief services: catholic peacebuilding in practice,” in peacebuilding, 125–154. 6. benedict xvi, africae munus, 2011, §§170–171, http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedictxvi/en/apost_exhortations/documents/hf_ben-xvi_exh_20111119_africae-munus.html. 7. robert schreiter, c.pp.s., “peacebuilding as vocation,” paper delivered at new challenges for catholic peacebuilding seminar, pontifical council for justice and peace, rome, may 29–30, 2012, 7–9. 139 powers 8. john ashworth, hharuun lual ruun, emmanuel lowilla, and maura ryan, the voice of the voiceless: the role of the church in the sudanese civil war, 1983–2005 (nairobi: paulines publications africa, 2014), 241. 9. benedict xvi, africae munus, §128. 10. catholic episcopate of the great lakes region, final declaration: “god has entrusted us the ministry of reconciliation” (2 cor 5:18) (peace and reconciliation conference, king’s conference center, bujumbura, burundi, october 19–21, 2010), quoting african synod of bishops, 1994, §33, https://cpn.nd.edu/assets/228991/2010_burundi_final_declaration.pdf. 11. ibid., §6. 12. pope paul vi, gaudium et spes (“pastoral constitution on the church in the modern world”), december 7, 1965, §80, §82, §90, http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vatii_cons_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html. 13. schreiter, “a practical theology of healing, forgiveness, and reconciliation,” in peacebuiding, 366–397, at 366. 14. more information on cpn is available online at http://cpn.nd.edu. 15. himes, “peacebuilding and catholic social teaching,” in peacebuilding, 282. 16. ibid. 17. see, e.g., andrea bartoli, “mediating peace in mozambique: the role of the community of sant’egidio,” in herding cats: multiparty mediation in a complex world, eds. pamela aall, chester a. crocker, and fen osler hampson (washington, dc: u.s. institute of peace press, 1999), 245–273. 18. see, e.g., john paul lederach, “the long journey back to humanity: catholic peacebuilding with armed actors,” in peacebuilding, 23–55, at 29. our vocation is peacebuilding 140 19. one of the few efforts in a church document to define universally-applicable criteria for self-determination is found in the united states conference of catholic bishops’ the harvest of justice is sown in peace (washington, dc: usccb office of publishing, 1993), 28–29. 20. pope francis, “prospects for a world free of nuclear weapons and for integral disarmament,” address to international symposium, the vatican, november 10, 2017, https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2017/november/documents/papafrancesco_20171110_convegno-disarmointegrale.html. 21. see gerard powers, “from nuclear deterrence to disarmament: evolving catholic perspectives,” arms control today 45/4 (may 2015): 8–13, and michael desch and gerard powers, “no more nukes?: an exchange,” commonweal, february 23, 2018, 12–17, https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/no-more-nukes. 22. see, e.g., amitai etzioni, security first: for a muscular, moral foreign policy (new haven: yale university press, 2007), 152; monica toft, daniel philpott, and timothy shah, god’s century: resurgent religion and global politics (new york: w.w. norton, 2011); task force on religion and the making of u.s. foreign policy, “engaging religious communities abroad: a new imperative for u.s. foreign policy” (chicago council on global affairs, 2010), http://keough.nd.edu/wpcontent/uploads/2015/12/engaging_religious_communities_abroad.pdf. 23. r. scott appleby, “peacebuilding and catholicism: affinities, convergences, possibilities,” in peacebuilding, 3–22, at 12; see also schreiter, “future directions in catholic peacebuilding,” in peacebuilding, 421–448, at 422–425. 24. lederach, “the long journey back to humanity: catholic peacebuilding with armed actors,” in peacebuilding, 50–51. 25. robert schreiter, “the catholic social imaginary and peacebuilding: ritual, sacrament, and spirituality,” in peacebuilding, 221–239. 26. pontifical council for justice and peace, compendium of the social doctrine of the church (washington, dc: u.s. conference of catholic bishops, 2005), §497. 141 powers 27. john paul ii, centesimus annus, 1991, §23, http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paulii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_01051991_centesimus-annus.html. for john paul’s teaching on war, see drew christiansen, s.j., “catholic peacemaking, 1991–2005: the legacy of pope john paul ii,” the review of faith and international affairs 4/2 (fall 2006), 21–28. on the efficacy of nonviolent resistance, see, e.g., erica chenoweth and maria j. stephan, why civil resistance works: the strategic logic of nonviolent conflict (new york: columbia university press, 2011). 28. united states conference of catholic bishops, the harvest of justice is sown in peace, 5. 29. see christiansen, “catholic peacemaking, 1991–2005,” 24. 30. appleby, “catholic peacebuilding,” america, september 8, 2003, 12–15, at 12. microsoft word 1 bate interview.docx [expositions 10.2 (2016) 1–21] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376   interview: jonathan bate, university of oxford john-paul spiro villanova university sir jonathan bate is professor of english literature and provost of worcester college, oxford. as the interview below indicates, he has wide-ranging research interests in shakespeare and renaissance literature, romanticism, biography and life-writing, eco-criticism, contemporary poetry, and theater history. he is a governor of the royal shakespeare company and engages frequently with literary questions in the public square. i had the chance to sit down with him in early july 2016 – a week after the brexit vote – at the provost’s lodgings at worcester college. we discussed his life and work, shakespeare studies at oxford, the place of the humanities in higher education, his struggles with writing a biography of ted hughes, and current events. below is a transcript of that conversation. spiro: what brought you to the study of shakespeare? bate: well, i think, like many literary scholars and, perhaps, humanities academics of all disciplines, great teaching. i was lucky enough in secondary school, high school, to have some brilliant english teachers and a very good drama teacher as well. and so i sort of got hooked on poetry, english literature, at age fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. i was keen on theater as well. i played macbeth as a sixteen-year-old and there’s nothing like acting in a shakespeare play for internalizing the language. i think i still know the whole of that play by heart. and so it was fairly obvious that an english degree was going to be the thing for me. when it came to a choice of doctorate, i was actually torn between shakespeare and w. b. yeats. i had done my undergraduate dissertation on yeats, but in the end i went for shakespeare, i think, just because i felt that it led out in so many different directions. one of the other things that was crucial to my development as a shakespearean was when i was at cambridge – i was an undergraduate at cambridge university – in my final year there was a new option on the history of shakespeare’s influence, shakespeare’s reception, and the chosen topic interview: jonathan bate 2 for it in its first year was shakespeare and romanticism. and i did that, and thought, “this is a really great field.” and that became my ph.d. topic. what then happened was i got a harkness fellowship and went to harvard for a year, and this was the time where [harold] bloom had fairly recently published the anxiety of influence and there was a very strong sense at harvard at the time, 1980–81, that yale was making all the running, so to speak. so i got very interested in bloom’s work, but actually also interested in the work of my namesake – no relationship – [walter] jackson bate, whose work the burden of the past and the english poet actually seemed to me a historically more nuanced account of literary influence than bloom’s anxiety of influence. and then reading the work of bloom and his protégés, they were all obsessed with this idea that there was an oedipal struggle between milton and the romantics: blake writing about milton being “the poet of the devil’s party without knowing it,” keats saying that he gave up hyperion because of the power of milton’s language. this just got me thinking that it was very different from the relationship between shakespeare and the romantics, that although shakespeare was an inhibition in the writing of verse drama, and of course, all the english romantics, like many of the european romantics, did write verse dramas in the style of shakespeare, but those of the english romantics are notable disasters. i don’t think that’s unfair. i think byron is the one who actually can write for the theater. but in terms of the way that shakespeare provided a model for ideas of the imagination, ideas of some world beyond the natural world, the supernatural, the sublime, and above all, the way that shakespeare’s linguistic inventiveness shaped the lyric poetry of the romantics. i thought, “what about developing a kind of model of benign influence, as opposed to a bloomian model of malignant influence?” that became my ph.d. topic. i went back to cambridge to do the doctorate, and wrote about shakespeare and the romantics. well, it seemed to me, in writing that, i sort of fell under the influence of christopher ricks, who was one of my teachers in cambridge, who was particularly interested in poetic allusion. what happens when poets use the words of previous poets? and so a lot of that thesis, which became my first book, shakespeare and the english romantic imagination, was about allusion and its effects. but then it seemed to me there was a linked question, which is, “how recognizable allusions are by readers.” there’s no point in making a literary allusion unless your reader is going to pick it up and think about it. and in order to explore that, i started looking more widely at how widely known shakespeare was and the uses of shakespearean quotation in the wider culture of 3 spiro the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century, and got particularly interested in the theater history of the time, but also in shakespeare and popular culture. i did quite a lot of work on the uses of shakespearean quotation in political caricature at the time. my second book, which was called shakespearean constitutions, probably the least well-known, least-read of my books, it explores shakespeare’s wider shaping influence on english culture between 1730 and 1830, which really was the time when shakespeare rose to his status as national poet, universal genius, and so forth. that book was very much about the political uses of shakespeare. and i think it sort of played a part in an interesting move towards reception history within shakespeare studies, and perhaps also was part of a move in shakespeare studies towards an end of the old war between people interested in theater and those of a more strictly literary-textual sort, because theater history and theater criticism became a big part of that book. spiro: a few questions about shakespeare. i was rereading your soul of the age, and i watched being shakespeare, which you wrote for simon callow, and i participated in the mooc that you just did [shakespeare and his world, with the shakespeare birthplace trust]. there’s this wonderful part of soul of the age where you give short biographies of all of shakespeare’s contemporaries. they are like sad obituaries. so many of them died in debt, were involved with violence, ran afoul of the law, and it’s another one of those ways where biographically shakespeare seems to be exceptional. what are we to make of that? everybody else looks for trouble or trouble looks for them, but not shakespeare. katherine duncan-jones [in ungentle shakespeare] has made shakespeare out to be a very ruthless figure, and others make him sound cagey and careful. it is noteworthy that artistically his is one of the most eventful lives ever, but personally he really did manage to keep his nose down. bate: yes, keeping his head down and his nose clean. one of the early anecdotes about shakespeare which circulated in the theater world, and quite often theater anecdotes can be trusted, was that he wasn’t very sociable. it is notable in some of those poems that people like beaumont and jonson write about the mermaid tavern: you do have a very strong sense of the sociability of people in the theater world. people in the theater world always go to the pub after the show! but the anecdote said that shakespeare, when invited for a night in the tavern, would often plead that he wasn’t feeling well and just stay at home. i do think he seems to have been quite a solitary figure. there are quite a few references to him, going back to the defense of shakespeare after interview: jonathan bate 4 greene attacks him the the groats-worth of wit: they always mention his genteel manner, his grace, but people don’t seem to speak of him in terms of warmth and sociability. consider the very fact that he made that very shrewd business decision to invest as a shareholder in the lord chamberlain’s men. the other actors went with their share of the profits, they tended to buy themselves nice homes in smart london suburbs, away from the plague but close to town. shakespeare, until the very end of his life, never buys property in london. he’s investing in property back home. and if he’s investing that much in property back home he must be spending a fair bit of time back home. so it was that thought that led me in the soul of the age book to think about a shakespeare who was semi-detached from london, semi-detached from his own theater company. i was just very struck, piecing together the bits of evidence that we have, that they actually can be interpreted rather differently from the conventional narrative of shakespeare’s life. the conventional narrative has “shakespeare retires to stratford in 1611, 1612,” but actually looking at his disappearance around 1606, 1607, from the records of the players in the lord chamberlain’s men, by then the king’s men, knowing also that the theaters were closed for plague quite a lot of the time during those jacobean years, looking at the slowing in the rate of production of his plays but the increasing length of plays like lear, antony and cleopatra, coriolanus, i suggested an alternative model where shakespeare semi-retires to stratford much earlier than we’ve imagined, maybe just a couple of years into the reign of king james, slows his rate of production, spends more time engaged in his property deals and financial speculation in the provinces, but does continue writing. and of course it’s not true that he retired in 1611. he buys that london property in 1613, and he’s co-writing henry viii, two noble kinsmen, cardenio, in 1612, 1613, 1614. so that was a rather different model of shakespeare’s development. and in some senses it goes with the idea of his elusiveness, his ability to keep out of trouble. because there were some moments of real danger. i write at length in soul of the age of the performance of richard ii that would have been potentially fatal for shakespeare and his theater company, the performance commissioned by the earl of essex, and there are other examples where things could easily have gone a little bit wrong. if one thinks, for example, of the bishops’ ban on satiric and erotic poetry in 1599, if, say, more of shakespeare’s sonnets had been published by then, he could well have been in trouble over the homoeroticism of the sonnets, but no, he kept the 5 spiro sonnets privately circulated. similarly, there was the great controversy over the play that his company put on called the tragedy of gowrie, which was about this plot against king james when he was king of scotland. it was closed down after a couple of performances. you just think, “why did shakespeare let the company even put on two performances of that play?” spiro: a question about the early part of shakespeare’s life. you’ve written in several places about what you call “the tudor educational revolution.” i’ve not seen this as emphasized in other people’s work. i do see in your work how crucial it was for the earl of leicester to institute a humanistic education to be available for the boys of the middle class. this fosters the generation that then follows. i would like to know if you have more to say about that, and of course also while i mention this i can’t help but think that you’re making a statement about education now. bate: you’re absolutely right. on that move, lisa jardine has co-written a book called from humanism to the humanities. i do think our defense of the humanities, which i’m sure we’ll come on to, follows in a direct line from what i call the “the tudor educational revolution.” i think it’s enormously important. one of the things that makes me so angry about the so-called antistratfordians is this idea that shakespeare’s plays must have been written by an aristocrat, like the earl of oxford, who didn’t actually go to school! the characteristics of shakespeare’s plays are entirely consistent with those of a grammar school education, as are those of so many of the other dramatists of his period. this pattern of the explosion of grammar schools, which really begins in the short, difficult reign of king edward [vi], it’s bound up with protestantism, but it’s also bound up with the so-called tudor revolution in government. when i use that phrase, “the tudor educational revolution,” i’m alluding to geoffrey elton’s idea of the tudor revolution in government. the detail has been contested, the extent to which thomas cromwell was the architect of the whole thing has been argued about, but the fact is that the mid-sixteenth century does mark a period of extraordinary change in both local government, national government, the beginnings of what we would now call an administration or civil service, the beginnings of a more recognizably modern legal system: that was how the tudors governed. it has to do with taking power to the center away from the barons and the regions, and for that they needed a cadre of what we would now call civil servants. and that’s why you need education. that’s why middle class boys are put through grammar school. i do think there is a line from that right through to the victorian public school idea, where you educate your young interview: jonathan bate 6 gentlemen so they will go out and administer your empire. and then even through to the post-1945 ideal in britain that meritocratic selective grammar schools will create social mobility and bring bright children of both sexes into the elite, into the political class, the professional classes. so i am very fascinated by that. i suspect biographically the origin of this may well be that my father was a teacher of the classics. he was a latin master. i suppose at school, as the child of a teacher one is always in a slightly embarrassed position, susceptible to being teased. traditionally latin teachers have always been mocked. shakespeare mocks them himself in both love’s labor’s lost and the merry wives of windsor. so in some sense i’m sure a freudian reader of my scholarly career would see that being some kind of defense of my own father’s profession in this interest. but i do think it’s enormously important. obviously i really started exploring it in the shakespeare and ovid book. having done those two books looking at shakespeare in the romantic period, shakespeare in the eighteenth century, how shakespeare was constructed, how he was received, i then wanted to flip and go back and look back to shakespeare’s origins, how shakespeare was made, and shakespeare was initially made in school. and then his love of reading: ovid was undoubtedly the poet he loved reading most. that then of course got me interested in early shakespeare, and when in the mid-1990s the arden shakespeare series was being restarted, richard proudfoot, the general editor of the arden, read my book on shakespeare and ovid and thought i was the obvious person to edit titus andronicus. that work of doing a scholarly edition was a very important moment for my scholarly development: my view is that, at some point in their career, all literary scholars should have a go at editing. because editing, you have to have all the skills. you have to know about the texts, origins and transmission of texts, the role of the printing house. but you also, in writing your glossary, your explanatory notes, have to develop detailed close reading of language, an ability to compare the language of one text with others of the same age. then in writing your introduction, one has to look at different theoretical approaches to a text. in the case of a play, one has to look at the stage history. there’s nothing like doing an edition for rounding out one’s toolkit, and i’m enormously grateful i was asked to do that titus edition. and i think it did, along with one or two key productions of the play, play its own small part in a revival of interest in and admiration for that early shakespearean tragedy, that for generations had been something of an embarrassment to scholars. 7 spiro spiro: you are also the general editor of the rsc [royal shakespeare company] shakespeare [the rsc shakespeare: complete works, co-edited with eric rasmussen] and you have done some editing of other texts. i am curious about your process as an editor. bate: the rsc edition was an interest of mine, because i’ve always, perhaps going back to that schoolboy performance of macbeth, and directing a lot of plays when i was a student, always been interested in the theater and always thinking about shakespeare writing for the theater. so round about the time i moved from the university of liverpool to the university of warwick, i was asked to go on the board of the royal shakespeare company, and quite a lot of the teaching work i did at warwick involved forging links between the rsc and the university, thinking about the ways in which some of the techniques of the rehearsal room could be used as a form of open-space experimental teaching, not just of shakespeare but of other things as well. and at that point, when i was on the board of the rsc, they said that they were unhappy with their endorsement of the old penguin edition. it wasn’t really to their benefit. there wasn’t really a connection between the penguin shakespeares and the rsc, even though the penguin shakespeare at that time carried the rsc logo. they said they’d like to do their own edition and would i be interested in being the general editor of it? i thought about this, and i thought, “well, i’ll only be interested in doing it if can be a bit different from other complete works of shakespeare. it’s a big time commitment.” and so i looked at all the other editions and it seemed to me that there were two deficiencies to all the other collected shakespeares on the market. one was just in terms of on-the-page glossarial explanation, it seemed to me that most of the editions – other than the huge double-column, largeformat editions like the riverside – most of the others, most of the readily handle-able editions, were very weak with on-page glossarial explanation, which people now need. the oxford shakespeare, for instance, had absolutely none whatsoever; it just had a glossary at the back. and then, secondly, i thought in terms of the textual approach, there was no modern-spelling edition of the first folio, which is really rather extraordinary. and that of course takes one into the whole history of shakespeare editing. through the four folios down to nicholas rowe’s edition of 1709, the starting-point for editing shakespeare was the first folio, the book of his collected plays put together by his fellow actors, who knew him, knew them, had acted in them. but then from the 1720s onward, when pope and theobald really get to work on the quarto texts, and one began to see the differences between quartos and folios, through the eighteenth century you get the idea, interview: jonathan bate 8 very much influenced by the editing of the classics at the time, that the copy-text should be the earliest text. so you began to get hybrid collected works, with some quarto texts, some folio. and, of course, there’s a very strong case for that, in terms of getting back as close as we can to the play as shakespeare wrote it. but the folio is nevertheless the most extraordinary literary monument in the western canon, and delightful as it is to read a facsimile of the folio, or have an old-spelling edition… well, an old-spelling edition, i don’t see the point of such things now that digital facsimiles are so readily available. but it seemed to me a modern-spelling edition of the folio with a rule that you only emend where it doesn’t make sense, where there is clearly a printing error, that would be a very valuable addition to the body, the huge shelf, of editions of shakespeare’s complete works. i genuinely think that ours was the first modern-spelling edition of the folio since nicholas rowe inaugurated modern-spelling shakespeare editing in 1709 with what, for him, was a modern-spelling edition of the folio. spiro: two more topics i’d like to discuss. one that we don’t have to dwell on is the antistratfordians. the other is the public humanities. really this is one question: you engage with the public. i recall the film, much ado about something, which proposes that marlowe was the author of shakespeare’s plays, where there’s footage of you gardening and containing some exasperation. bate: yes, by an interesting director, michael rubbo. spiro: in the shakespeare uncovered series as well, the episode on richard ii, you address it. but also i want to talk about your work for the general reader. if a person only has a casual understanding of shakespeare, perhaps goes to see a movie or a play every once in a while, but then wants to check out what’s available without buying a shelf of books, that person will see your face a lot of the time. i wonder how much you see that as a kind of personal responsibility, as well as making the argument in the public square about the importance of the humanities. and you have the edited collection out as well [the public value of the humanities]. bate: yeah, it all connects. i was talking about my interest in the tudor educational revolution, and actually, my next book, which i’m just finishing now, it’s a short book called shakespeare’s classical imagination, which is a development of some lectures i gave at the warburg institute. a couple of years ago now, they asked me to deliver the inaugural e. h. gombrich lectures in the classical tradition, and i gave three lectures on aspects of shakespeare’s classical inheritance. i’m 9 spiro expanding that into a book about various dimensions of the classical inheritance and how it shaped shakespeare. so of course that is taking me back to the tudor educational revolution. but i was saying in an earlier answer that at some level that must be bound up with my own education, my father being a latin teacher. the greek teacher at my school, under the employ of my father, was this extraordinarily gifted man called frank dawson, who then changed his name to “lewis edward mithras alexis”: “lewis,” as the anglicization of “ludwig,” because beethoven was the greatest of all composers; “edward,” he announced to us in class when he came in, having said he had changed his name, because shakespeare’s plays were written by edward de vere, the 17th earl of oxford; “mithras” because he was fascinated by gnosticism and the mithraic cult; and “alexis,” i think probably because he was a classicist rather fascinated by schoolboys, and the name “alexis” had associations with the homoerotic relations of greek and roman pastoral. but passing rapidly over that, he was an extraordinary mixture of great scholarly gifts and wild conspiracy theories. so one of my tasks at school was to seriously investigate, could edward de vere really have been the author of shakespeare? so i suppose that’s how my interest in the authorship controversy began. what then happened was when that titus andronicus edition was published, i was asked to write a book on shakespeare for the general reader. this is mid-1990s. i think i can genuinely say that there had not been a kind of crossover book, a trade book on shakespeare trying to get out beyond the walls of academe, for quite a time. subsequently there was a huge explosion of them. that was the book that became the genius of shakespeare, published in 1997. when i wrote an afterword to it, for a reprint ten years later, i suggested that there was an explosion of popular books on shakespeare soon after that, not least because the film shakespeare in love was so successful, and then there was baz luhrmann’s romeo + juliet. suddenly shakespeare did become popular. and then you’ve got all sorts of books. there was harold bloom’s not-very-good book [shakespeare: the invention of the human] selling huge amounts, and then a terrific string of books, like charles nicholl’s wonderful the lodger, james shapiro’s equally illuminating 1599, and the list goes on. but when i wrote the genius of shakespeare there hadn’t been such a book for quite a long time. i didn’t want just to write a straight biography of shakespeare, because straight biographies of shakespeare are never really very interesting. so what i tried to do in that book was partly revisit and popularize and internationalize some of my work on shakespeare in the eighteenth and interview: jonathan bate 10 nineteenth centuries, in particular looking at the idea at how our modern notion of genius, which emerged in the eighteenth century, was very much a way of accounting for shakespeare. but also i wanted to look at how shakespeare became shakespeare, so i started talking there about his education, about his relationship with marlowe’s plays, his use of his sources, and it did seem to me at that point i really needed to address the authorship controversy. so i just did a chapter, laid out all the evidence that shakespeare clearly was shakespeare, but also talked about why the authorship controversy emerged in the nineteenth century, suggested that it was a kind of epiphenomenon of the romantic cult of shakespeare. once you elevate shakespeare to the status of a divinity, inevitably you get heresy. the moment there’s an orthodoxy, there has to be a heterodoxy, as it were. nobody bothered with an authorship controversy until the midvictorian period because it wasn’t until the romantic period that shakespeare was thought to be so very, very special. but i do think there’s a scholarly responsibility towards truth-telling, towards historical veracity. if you don’t look at the evidence with hard-nosed respect for historical facts, that’s a very, very dangerous thing. and then i think, because a lot of my work is committed to the public square, committed to the idea that it is possible to write seriously and in a nuanced way about great literary texts, humanities traditions, in a way that is accessible to a wide audience, given that the authorship controversy is the first thing the taxi driver always asks you about in relation to shakespeare, it seemed to me there is a responsibility to engage. and that engagement then does relate to some of the work i’ve done around the survival and the importance of the humanities more generally. one of the advantages of british academic life, rather more than in america, actually, is that if you publish quite a lot, if you get a high profile professorship, you inevitably you get pulled into the world of public service. so i found myself sitting on the arts and humanities research council, which is the arms-length government agency that gives out money for humanities research. this was at a time when public finances were under pressure, and we would have a government minister coming in, saying, “i have to go to the treasury to protect the budget for my department, my research budget. what do i say to the senior civil servant or government minister who says, ‘i don’t lie awake at night worrying about giving taxpayers’ money to medical research; i do lie awake at night worrying about giving taxpayers’ money to humanities research.’” and he quoted the senior civil servant who said, “i like riding my horse, but i don’t expect the taxpayer to 11 spiro subsidize me to do so.” this was also around the time that a rather philistine minister in the blair labour government, or the brown government, a man called charles clarke, said that “medieval history was merely a hobby, not something the public purse should support.” so the arts and humanities research council asked me to gather a group of humanities scholars and put together a collection of essays that could be placed into the hand of a government minister or a civil servant, giving some arguments and some case histories as to why the humanities deserve public support. and that became the collection on the public value of the humanities. spiro: i was looking at your very short introduction to english literature, and i felt that, thinking about this connection you’re talking about, that there had not been this public engagement until the mid-1990s. that book is not just an introduction to english literature but it also is a defense of the pleasure of reading. i could feel a dialogue with roland barthes throughout. first of all, that we don’t have to make authors into gods but it is important to know things about them and about their times. but also, that there is a very particular, unique pleasure in reading, and i wonder if for some time one had to apologize for enjoying reading novels and plays, especially if those works could be associated with things like empire and oppressive structures, and so on. you account for that, while at the same time saying, “not only do i like reading this, but edward said admits to liking reading this stuff as well.” i wonder what more you have to say about this, this defense of pleasure. bate: i have to say that’s an incredibly smart question because you’ve absolutely there put your finger on what i was trying to do in that book, and until this moment i hadn’t realized that was what i was trying to do. so thank you. and the other thing that’s incredibly smart about it is your reference to roland barthes, because you need to remember that i came of age as a critic, a scholar, a teacher of literature in the early 1980s, which was the age of high theory. so when i was a graduate student, we were all reading all this stuff. we were all reading [jacques] derrida, [paul] de man, we were all reading [edward] said. we were all reading [michel] foucault. and of all those french theorists, the only one i really got on with was roland barthes. i just think that barthes was such a brilliant writer, and a brilliant sensibility. even before i went to university, a very clever friend of mine pressed a copy of barthes’ mythologies into my hand. just his style of writing, his way of analyzing … i just love all of barthes. of course i love the pleasures of reading, the pleasure of the text, and his great book about love [a lover’s discourse] which is really a interview: jonathan bate 12 book about reading. even barthes’ book on michelet is – one of his early, little-known works – a huge influence on me. and he’s actually seen most direct in my only novel, which is my book the cure for love, which is a novelization of the life of william hazlitt, who is my other great hero. hazlitt, in many ways the english barthes, an essayist… just as barthes can write about all-in wrestling as well as racine, so hazlitt can write about the game of fives as well as shakespeare. and there’s a lot of barthes in that cure for love novel, which is a book about the love of reading, and how books that you love lodge themselves in your memory and become part of your identity. it’s a book about a man who gets amnesia and when he recovers his memory he’s become hazlitt. but i had not seen that the way that i approach this sort of hilariously impossible task of writing a short introduction to the whole of english literature in a hundred and fifty pages was to take a barthesian pleasure in it, but you are absolutely right, that is what i did, so thank you. spiro: i love that you start the book with children’s literature, and it was reminiscent to me of the way that dr. spock’s book baby and child care begins, “you know more than you think you do.” and you begin with “you already know a lot of english literature. you have been reading it your whole life.” you even do a quasi-bloomian reading of the way that children’s literature is a tradition that’s self-conscious and people interact with one another. and it made your book itself a pleasure to read. when i was in graduate school in the 1990s, we would sometimes confess in secret that we enjoyed reading literature, but we felt we were not allowed to. as you say, “the time of high theory,” everyone keeps saying that it’s “over,” but it’s not clear what has replaced it. so i have a macroquestion about the trends in criticism and scholarship, but also a more local question, which is: when i advise students who want to study shakespeare, i have noticed that whereas in the past the best places to study shakespeare were berkeley and harvard, but that now, oxford really has so many very good people, very interesting work is being done by a long list of people. yourself, and tiffany stern, simon palfrey, colin burrow, emma smith, bart van es. is there a kind of oxford way of doing shakespeare now, consciously or not? and, also, what do you think of the larger macro-trend? bate: taking the macro-trend first, and again answering it slightly autobiographically, as i say i came of age as a scholar in the 1980s, and the big turn during the ’80s, which was obviously bound up with it being the thatcher-reagan era, was a turn against deconstruction and french theory, 13 spiro towards the new historicism. i had a lot of sympathy for that, a lot of the new historicist work on shakespeare, because i do think shakespeare needs to be grounded in his period. i have a huge admiration for [stephen] greenblatt and many of his followers. where i was less happy with that new historicist turn was in work on romanticism. because i had done that thesis on shakespeare and romanticism, i had always had that twin interest. so i got impatient with the strand of work in romanticism that was really crystallized in jerome mcgann’s book the romantic ideology, because it didn’t cohere with my sense of wordsworth’s development. the argument of romantic ideology is that wordsworth’s return to the lake district, wordsworth’s appeal to nature, was a form of reaction that came from his disillusionment with the french revolution. that didn’t actually seem to me a correct account of wordsworth or indeed many of the other romantics. it seemed to me in thinking of some of the traditions of both social activism – i’m thinking of someone like ruskin – and of environmental awareness – where i’m again thinking of ruskin, but also i’m thinking of the origins of the national trust and the national parks movement – all that emerged out of wordsworth, wordsworth saying in the guide to the lakes that the lake district is a sort of national property. so actually wordsworth’s development is better thought of as a development politically from red to green, rather than from red to dark, tory blue. so that led me to write a short polemical book, deliberately echoing the title of romantic ideology, called romantic ecology. that was published in 1991, and i think it played a small part in the ecological turn in criticism. i followed it up with what i think is my best book intellectually, the song of the earth. it seems to me the emergence of eco-criticism, along with a sort of broader turn towards place, geography, a lot of that work around the thinking about world literature, thinking about globalization and literature, that does seem to me to be the most significant new approach that’s really taken root in the twenty-first century. it is a way of making, of responding to the literature of the past in a way that is simultaneously highly prescient, relevant to the problems of the present, but also grounded in history. even with shakespeare, i’m thinking of that strand of work on globalization, the move towards global history, atlantic history. that’s something that i’m very interested in. one of the things that i most enjoyed doing in my academic career was working for neil macgregor of the british museum, co-curating the exhibition to coincide with the london olympics, shakespeare: staging the world, where we took the idea: as the world comes to london in 2012, let’s look at how london saw the world, and indeed how the world did interview: jonathan bate 14 come to london in 1612. how the age of shakespeare was the first age of globalization, international trade, and so forth. i think that strand of work is some of the most exciting stuff in shakespeare studies at the moment. i think one of the best people writing about shakespeare and his age at the moment is jerry brotton, who has written so much about trade, globalization – his recent book is about islam in britain, really important stuff. so i think eco-criticism and what we might call globalization-criticism, the new geographic criticism, those are really interesting, new, post-theory developments. as to the other part of your question about oxford: oxford is this wonderful, but incredibly disorganized place. it has a federal structure where the colleges are autonomous. so i’m the head of a college, but actually a very peripheral figure within the english faculty. you’re right that now there’s an extraordinary amount of the highest quality shakespeare work coming out of oxford. tiffany stern, i think her re-investigation of the material world of the shakespearean theater is second to none. and all those other scholars, colleagues you mentioned, are doing really fascinating work. the extraordinary thing is, until perhaps ten years ago, there was hardly a shakespearean to be seen in oxford. emrys jones, the very distinguished professor, had retired. there wasn’t a senior shakespeare professor in oxford. i had a very happy thirteen years holding the king alfred chair at liverpool, which is a chair with great shakespearean credentials – a. c. bradley had held it, and kenneth muir, philip edwards – and i had a lot of graduate students who would come and say that the liverpool english department is far better than oxford or cambridge. but then as if by serendipity, a number of college appointments were made, and all of a sudden oxford now does seem a sort of epicenter of really interesting shakespearean work. but it’s not systematic in any sense, that there is an “oxford school.” although some of my colleagues have worked collaboratively, simon palfrey and tiffany stern have done this fascinating work on the parts [shakespeare in parts], the way that shakespearean actors learned their parts, and laurie maguire and emma smith have worked together. but i think there isn’t an oxford school; there’s just lots of very good people, and of course, amazing resources. spiro: i see an attention to the original dramatic conditions, not just in tiffany stern’s work, but many people here at oxford have a great concern with what it was like when the plays were first performed, the books were first read. but that is of a piece with your own work on reception history and what shakespeare means for us now. i’d like to hear more about where we’re going. you have 15 spiro been doing eco-criticism for quite some time. you’re also doing a mooc on literature and therapy. bate: yeah, that is an interesting new direction. just going back for a moment to the previous question, i think you’re absolutely right, again you’ve asked a really good question, the thing that does hold these various oxonian shakespeare people together is attention the original theatrical context, and then the theatrical history of the plays. that is possibly the most cheering thing that has happened in my thirty-five-year career, is that the old divisions between laborers in the academic vineyard and theater people really have disappeared. i think when i started out, stanley wells was almost a lone voice, saying, “we must always think about shakespeare in the theater.” the way that i was taught shakespeare was very influenced by [william] empson and [g.] wilson knight, people like that, fantastically attuned to the poetry but not interested in the performance. and there was that mutual suspicion between shakespeare theater people and shakespeare academics, whereas now, though there are occasional moments of bafflement, on the whole it’s a fantastically positive relationship. one of the things that most pleased me about the reception of the genius of shakespeare book was the way that so many actors and theater directors valued that book. that’s meant an enormous amount to me. so that’s all good. in terms of where i’m going next in my work, i’ve actually got two quite big projects that i’m starting on, at an early stage. one is i do want to have one more go at the romantics, and the sense in which so many aspects of modernity seem to me to have their seeds in the romantic period. and environmental consciousness is one of those, but only one of them. when i started doing my prep as it were before moving to oxford five years ago, never having any connections with oxford, i thought, “i need to read some of the books of the great oxford humanists.” so i started reading a lot of isaiah berlin, and i had not really realized how central romanticism was to his thinking about intellectual history, political history. those essays of his that were published posthumously on the roots of romanticism, in which he says that romanticism is the greatest revolution since the reformation, and so many aspects of how we are, how we think, are shaped by romanticism. i think he’s right about that, so i do want to write a big sort of comparative book about romanticism. i don’t want to think of it as my last testament – i’m not sixty yet – but it will be a bit of a summation of that strand of my work. i struggled for a long time to find the right focus to interview: jonathan bate 16 unify it, but have now come to see that it will work best as an innovatively-structured and contextually wide-ranging biography of wordsworth. the other strand that i’ve increasingly got interested in, is the whole area of literature and mental health. this really goes back to john clare. one thing leads into another. when i wrote the song of the earth, it became absolutely clear to me that the key writer for thinking ecologically about poetry – thinking about ecology’s demand that we “think globally, act locally”; thinking about ecosystems and small communities; thinking about the importance of a particular wood, a particular wildflower; thinking about how communities are changed when the environment is changed, as with the enclosure acts – absolutely clear that clare was the central figure for all this. clare was at the center of song of the earth. and then, having done that, i thought, “well actually, people still really don’t know about john clare. i need to edit a selection of his poems and i need to write a biography of him,” because there was no good biography of him. and the john clare biography is a book that i am very proud of, and it emerged out of that ecological thinking. but of course the more deeply one got into the life of clare, the more the question of his mental state takes center stage … i’m pretty convinced that he had what we now call bipolar disorder. the poignancy of john clare in the lunatic asylum, that haunted me. and again you can see how things connect. thinking about poets engaging with nature. ted hughes was the obvious next biography to write, after clare. i like writing biography, and so many of my intellectual interests, literary interests come together in ted hughes. he was obsessed with the classics: his tales from ovid, his translation of the alcestis, and so forth. he was a great environmental activist, involved in campaigns to clean up rivers, and so forth. he wrote a lot for the theater, the radio. so many strands of my work came together in him. when i first began reading poetry, when i was a teenager, hughes was always very important to me. so that seemed like a really great project. but of course working on hughes meant working on plath, and really reading deeply in plath’s journals, and getting to know more about sylvia plath, not least through getting to know olwyn hughes, ted’s sister, and just thinking, plath is just such a brilliant poet and prose writer. such a funny prose writer as well. if only those other novels had survived or had been completed. then one of the other strong influences on the very short introduction was dr. johnson: it has a section on him, and one of my great teachers at school was obsessed with dr. johnson, and so i’ve 17 spiro always at some level wanted to write a book about dr. johnson and the life of the reader-writer. and of course dr. johnson’s depression, which he called his “black dog,” was so important to his work. so i want to write a book called the black dog, which will look at depression and creativity, going right back to the anatomy of melancholy, perhaps hamlet, but coming forward, and just thinking about the different ways in which writers have self-described the relationship between their mental turmoil and their creativity. so that’s going to be the other big project. that’s also bound up with some work i’m doing with my wife, paula byrne, around the value of poetry – and this does go back to the public value of the humanities – the value of poetry as a form of stress management. so paula has recently started a new charitable foundation, devoted to a rather simple idea, that the attentive, slow reading of poetry can have the same kind of complementary therapeutic value as mindfulness. there is lots of evidence that mindfulness can work for people as a form of stress management in this incredibly fast, high-stress world we all live in. a poem can be the same thing. it’s like the idea of the “poems on the underground” phenomenon, in london and many cities, that a poem can be an oasis of calm in a world of stress. i suspect in some ways what we’re looking at here is a sort of secular version of what prayer, and indeed worship, has traditionally been. that is part of a world that has in many places been lost. so we have published this little anthology called stressed, unstressed: classic poems to ease the mind, with some suggestions as to how mindful reading of short poems can be of value in the doctor’s waiting room, or in the hospice bedside. in connection with that, we’ve co-taught a massive online course on literature and mental health, looking at a different condition each week, one week on stress, another week on depression, another week on dealing with dementia, and that’s had an enormous impact on a lot of people. i’m very interested in the phenomenon of the mooc because of the way that it can create this online community of learners who learn from each other, who share experience. there are dangers that come with that, “trolling” dangers as it were, but nevertheless it is i think a form of public education that has great value. that course seems to have struck a chord. i’m about to do a talk for resurgence, the environmental charity. resurgence and the ecologist magazine recently merged. resurgence is partly about spiritual renewal but it’s also about ecology. they have got a big fiftieth anniversary conference coming up in september [2016], and i’m giving a talk for that, suggesting that in some ways the eco-critical and what one might call the interview: jonathan bate 18 “therapeutic” approach, they’re actually much closer than one might think. they’re both holistic, and one is about ways of dwelling harmony with the earth, and the other is about ways of dwelling in harmony with the self. and actually that’s a deeply romantic, wordsworthian idea, isn’t it? wordsworth’s poetry is so much about self-knowledge, but also nature-knowledge. spiro: i don’t know if it’s common here [in the uk], but in the states it’s very common for students to rent their books, or buy their books and then sell them right back at the end of the semester. i have at times told students, “no, keep that book, because you may need it in the middle of the night at some point in your life.” many of them have never thought of a book that way. you mentioned the ted hughes biography, which seems to have been a labor of love. there was a public agonizing about the writing of it, and some hostile reactions when it came out. bate: yes, it was a labor of love. the origin of it really was when his selected letters were published, i just read these letters and i thought, “i don’t think there’s any other english writer, save for john keats, whose letters are so revelatory of the inner life and the literary development of a major writer.” and i knew these were selected letters, i thought, “there’s got to be a book, there’s got to be a biography in this.” i then thought, “well, if i’m going to do it, it needs to be a literary biography looking at the development of hughes’ work.” my own feeling about hughes was that i loved his early works. they were very formative for me. i thought his work went through a terrible dip, particularly around the time of the laureateship, but then i was very cheered by and fascinated by his late resurgence with tales from ovid, which, obviously, with my own ovid work, struck a chord; and then birthday letters. so i thought, such an interesting career, and i knew there were lots of manuscripts at emory [university], in atlanta. i thought, “this is going to be a great project.” but in order to do it, i’m going to need lots of quotations, so it needs to be a faber and faber book so that i don’t have a problem about expensive quotation. faber and faber commissioned it, and the estate, which is ted’s widow, carol, said that she would provide full cooperation, but it was not to be called “an authorized biography.” it was “a literary life,” not a biography. we talked a bit about what that meant. the ground rule i proposed is that those things in the life that i could demonstrate were formative of the poetry, i would write about. other things that were invisible in the poetry, i would not write about. so that was agreed, and carol was very helpful. i went down to court green, the 19 spiro house that ted and sylvia bought, where carol still lives, and she showed me around. she gave me photocopies of vast numbers of manuscripts, and then permission to see all the manuscripts in emory and the second archive that was just being catalogued at the british library. a daunting task. i spent a year reading as many of the manuscripts as i could, as well as working through all of hughes’ hundred or so books, and then carried on with the research while thinking about the structural problems of the biography. where retrospective personal writing is such an important part of the story, it’s a very difficult thing to structure biographically. i discovered in the archive he’d been working on those birthday letter poems for nearly 30 years. so you’re talking about events that take place in the late 1950s, poems written variously in the 1970s and ’80s, but only published at the very end of his life in 1998. where do you put them in the structure? i was wrestling with all that. i then got this new job running an oxford college, which is a fairly timeconsuming operation. so i found that i had to ask faber for a year’s extension. faber were relaxed about that but i had said that i would show draft chapters to them, for them to be happy that the book was having the shape and taking the progression that they and the estate wanted. they asked to see some chapters, but i still hadn’t had the chance to write any chapters. and then, in one of those strange ironies, i was just about to send off about a hundred pages of draft material, just finalizing it over christmas 2013, when a letter came in from faber saying that the estate had decided to withdraw its cooperation, and obviously what that meant was that faber couldn’t do the book. i sent the chapters down to the estate anyway in the hope that perhaps they might change their minds, but they didn’t. so i was then in this position of having to think about the book rather differently because i knew that without the permission of the estate, the quotation would have to be much more selective. it would have to fall within the remit of quotation that was not substantial – “substantial” is in quotation marks, it’s a key legal word – or that fell within the provision of what in the uk is called “fair dealing,” and in the us is called “fair use.” that rather changed the nature of the book. it was also the case that since the faber contract was canceled, if the book was to be done, it would have to be done with a trade publisher who would not be likely to want me to exclude some of the biographical material that was very significant for hughes’ life but that perhaps a purely literary biography could legitimately have omitted. so when the book eventually came out, there were interview: jonathan bate 20 some passages, not that many, but some passages, about hughes’ extramarital sexual relationships, which both the estate and some reviewers felt were inappropriate. my feeling is that a book of that magnitude needed to try to be as full and honest as it could. and it did seem to me that, reading all of hughes’ work, especially reading a lot of his unpublished work, sexual passions, sexual energies, and sometimes even an element of violence associated with sexual desire, was a huge part of his story. if it hadn’t been, i don’t think he would have been interested in translating ovid who is all about those things! therefore it seemed to me a duty to include that. i think there are profound illuminations that come from a treatment of the contradictions and agonizings of his sexual life. they do say something about his work. the book includes a lot about the importance for him of robert graves’ theory of the white goddess, and his own reconfiguration of that into his main prose work, shakespeare and the goddess of complete being, his theory that the key to shakespeare is found in the dialectic between, essentially, tarquin the rapist in the rape of lucrece and venus, the fecund beauty in venus and adonis. if venus and tarquin are at the heart of hughes’ vision of shakespeare, i don’t apologize for writing about his sex life. spiro: do you have anything to say about brexit and its implications for higher education? bate: the implications of brexit for higher education are potentially dire. we live in a globalized academic world where the free movement of ideas and intellectual labor is of enormous importance. in britain we have the good fortune to have the second-best collection of great universities in the world, after the us, but australia, china, india, are coming up very fast. our ability to employ academics from europe, and especially to recruit students from europe, is of paramount importance to the future of our best universities. at the moment, students from the eu pay the same fee as students from the uk. they are classed as “home students” and there’s no issue around movement. if they finish a doctorate, they can then work in any eu country. in addition to that, the erasmus scheme of student exchange is of enormous importance for british students going to european universities, learning languages, which is something that is really dangerously in decline in this country. european research funding underpins so much of our higher education. here at the university of oxford we have the good fortune to have the largest and best medical school in europe; it’s actually rated the #1 medical school in the world at the moment. it gets huge amounts of funding from the eu. now, some countries outside the eu, such as switzerland, have negotiated a role in the erasmus student exchange scheme and are available for 21 spiro some european scientific funding, but it’s by no means certain that britain will be able to negotiate those things, and there’s a genuine risk of brexit leading to us very rapidly declining down the league table of great world universities. and that’s something that the politicians seem to be extraordinarily casual about. our higher education leads the world in the same way as our creative arts. one of the main reasons london is the city in the world where financial capital comes is that it is a capital of culture. it’s because of the theater, the opera, the music, the art galleries, the museums in london. the new director of the british museum is german. it’s because of that sense of london as a world city – we were exploring that exhibition at the british museum – that’s why london is the hub, the core of the british economy. the arts and culture, education, universities, are a huge part of that. i think these aspects of british greatness have been sold horrendously short by politicians on all sides. so, i am profoundly troubled and pessimistic. microsoft word 5 article jividen-final.docx [expositions 8.2 (2014) 90–112] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 presidential statesmanship as civic education jason jividen saint vincent college *editor’s note: this is part two of a two-part symposium. part one, which includes the introduction and contributions by trepanier, diluzio, and caspar, was published in vol. 8, no. 1 (2014). acting as statesmen, american presidents sometimes offer, in both word and deed, a powerful source of civic education for the american public. in this article, i examine the notion that the greatest presidential statesmen have periodically sought to educate the american people about the most important of political questions. while an exhaustive account of such a topic is certainly beyond the scope of this article, we can at least paint in broad strokes and begin to examine the issue by discussing alternative civic “lessons” offered by several u.s. presidents. i focus primarily upon abraham lincoln, woodrow wilson, and franklin roosevelt. i choose these presidents in particular because, first, it is generally understood that each of them ably used the rhetorical possibilities of the executive as a vehicle for civic education. second, in the circumstances confronting them, each offered a political rhetoric that dealt thoughtfully and forthrightly with foundational questions about the nature and scope of popular government rightly understood. i argue that each president’s view of civic education, and the president’s potential role in fostering that education, is shaped by his understanding of human nature, the nature and basis of rights, and the proper ends and means of american democracy. differences in first principles lead to very different civic “lessons.” this article is divided into several sections. in the first section, i examine some of the relevant literature on the notion that the best presidents are necessarily civic educators. in the second section, i very briefly discuss the american founders’ take on the relationship between the executive and public opinion, particularly as it relates to the political science of the federalist papers. in the remaining sections, relying particularly on their public rhetoric, i explain and compare civic “lessons” provided by presidents lincoln, wilson, and franklin roosevelt.1 by comparing the fundamental ideas presented in their respective writings and speeches, we can discern an important development in the character and content of presidential civic education. we find an education rooted in remembering the natural rights principles of the american founding (best articulated by lincoln) transformed into an education aimed at the progressive overcoming of those same principles (best articulated by wilson and later modified by fdr). i argue that such comparisons are important because they prompt us to consider alternative 91 jividen answers to fundamental questions not only about executive leadership, but about american democracy more generally. “taking the people to school”: great presidents as civic educators we frequently hear that the best american presidents are, among other things, civic educators. by virtue of their inherent visibility, and their claim to be the sole national officer elected by the great body of the people, presidents are in a position to teach citizens about policy, institutions, and ideas through both word and deed. for some, like presidential scholars marc landy and sidney milkis, at least one mark of good statesmanship resides in a president’s willingness and ability to offer the american people such an education.2 identifying the great u.s. presidents as washington, jefferson, jackson, lincoln, and fdr, landy and milkis suggest that each provided answers to the question of what the regime should be; each offered the people a civic teaching on the proper ends and means of american democracy. landy and milkis thus claim that great presidents have historically taken “the people to school.”3 this language of the president-as-teacher is, of course, not uncommon. it became a staple of studies on presidential behavior after the publication of richard neustadt’s seminal 1960 book, presidential power. when neustadt referred to “presidential teaching,” he referred mainly to a rhetorical strategy in which presidents seek to garner support for policy proposals while maintaining prestige among congress, party, and the people.4 landy and milkis seem to suggest that “taking the people to school” includes at least this much, but they also go farther. great presidents are civic educators, they argue, when they find a way to move the people, mobilize party, succeed in their legislative agenda, and when they articulate policies of reform (in service of regime maintenance) with reference to the established principles and institutions of american republicanism.5 elvin lim also posits that great presidential leadership and presidential teaching go hand in hand, and he rightly observes that this idea of a “pedagogical” presidency “pervades scholarly conceptions of leadership.” he points us toward arthur schlesinger, erwin hargrove, william muir, fred greenstein, and mary stuckey, all of whom have suggested that a large of part of presidential leadership resides in the ability to teach or educate.6 like landy and milkis, lim appears to single out fdr as the prime example of the president-as-civic educator here. lim reminds us of roosevelt’s claim that, by pursuing popular support for his policy agenda, the president is “persuading, leading, sacrificing, teaching always, because the greatest duty of a statesman is to educate.”7 one need only consider the fireside chats to see the point here. likewise, in her account of twentieth century presidential speechwriting, carol gelderman argues that fdr understood that “the essence of political leadership in a democracy was presidential statesmanship as civic education 92 teaching.” as the country’s “foremost civic educator,” roosevelt called the room where he held press conferences “his ‘schoolroom,’ the budget, his ‘textbook,’ his speeches, ‘seminars.’”8 for lim, landy and milkis, gelderman, and others, fdr may have emerged as a great civic educator, as a statesman-rhetorician of the highest order, but he did not do so in a historical vacuum. that is to say, roosevelt built upon a foundation laid by previous presidents. perhaps great presidents, those we can confidently call statesmen, have always engaged in civic education through political rhetoric. perhaps all have “taken the people to school.” but, as jean yarbrough observes in her review of landy and milkis’ book, “it would seem to matter just what ‘school’ [the people] attend.” while landy and milkis suggest that all great presidents offer a civic teaching that builds upon or reaffirms our founding principles, yarbrough asks, “how can roosevelt’s interpretation of the founders’ principles be right and also jefferson’s and jackson’s?” what about lbj’s, or reagan’s?9 yarbrough’s point is well taken. insofar as we grant that great presidents indeed attempt to be civic educators, what kind of education do they offer? do presidents provide different, perhaps even competing schools of civic education, or are the lessons fundamentally the same? it is some of these disagreements on first principles—and the consequences of these disagreements for presidential civic education—that we will examine below. to understand how, and in what sense, presidents have come to be characterized as civic educators, we must begin at the beginning, with the american founders. the founders: civic education, institutions, and leadership in their letters, speeches, and writings, the american founders often spoke to the need for civic and moral education to help preserve and transmit the american regime to future generations. a general diffusion of knowledge, particularly in the rights and duties of citizenship and the proper ends of government, combined with an understanding of virtues such as moderation, selfrestraint, humility, liberality, and courage, would help to form good republican citizens and foster attachment to decent republican institutions. yet, as is often noted, the cultivation and administration of such things were left largely to the prudential authority of state and local governments, private families and institutions.10 we might ask, from the founders’ point of view, what role presidents might have in educating citizens through statesmanship and political rhetoric. the founders did see a role for the president in civic education of a fundamental sort, and we know that presidents of the early republic performed such a function. this is seen most clearly in the use of presidential proclamations, declarations, open letters, and inaugural addresses. landy and milkis remind us that long before teddy roosevelt coined the term, washington took advantage of the “bully pulpit” to teach the nation about the requisites for healthy republican government in his farewell address, the “most overtly didactic of all presidential utterances.”11 93 jividen president jefferson, despite his ambiguity on executive authority, would help to continue the same course, particularly in his explanations of the “revolution of 1800,” in his first inaugural address, and through the louisiana purchase. when washington and jefferson did speak to the people, they largely articulated and reflected upon the principles and structures of republican government and american constitutionalism.12 yet, when one turns to the federalist papers dealing with the executive, there is little said about presidential education of the public, at least not explicitly. the separation of powers, the president’s mode of election, his enumerated powers, his tenure of office, and absence of votes of no confidence against the president all combine to help provide what hamilton refers to as “personal firmness” in the executive. in situations where short-term, hasty, and perhaps overly passionate public opinion might call for policies harmful to the common good, presidential independence and firmness allow the cool and deliberate sense of the community to reassert itself. hamilton thus focuses on the executive’s independence from public opinion in light of the danger of demagoguery and faction.13 this is not the common twentieth-century depiction of “visionary” presidents educating, or leading the people toward expanded ideas of liberty, equality, and justice. rather, the federalist characterizes the president as a kind of conservator or agent of moderation. and, here at least, that function seems to rely mainly upon the constitutional structure of the presidency and its place within the separation of powers. the founders’ views here are predicated on fundamental assumptions about human nature, rights, and the legitimate purpose of government. their political science rested on the notion that, by nature, human beings are equally endowed with inalienable rights, and that the purpose of government is to secure those rights. given that we possess these rights equally as a fundamental fact of human nature, no man has a claim to rule over another man without his consent. governments thus derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. these ideas, held to be true everywhere and always according to the laws of nature and nature’s god, are most succinctly expressed in the declaration of independence, but they are found throughout the state constitutions, public documents, and sermons of the day. moreover, as madison noted in federalist paper 51, since human nature is everywhere and always complicated and imperfect, we are in perpetual need of government. for the same reason, it is simply too risky to trust any one man or group of men in that government with absolute, arbitrary power over our lives, liberties, and possessions. good governments are thus constitutionally balanced, limited, and structured.14 this view of a timeless, imperfect human nature informed the founders’ design of various institutions and structures to help secure our natural and inalienable rights. the biggest threat to our safety and happiness, the founders reasoned, is the problem of faction. the founders’ view on the persistence of faction is best expressed in federalist 10. the seeds of faction, madison argued, are sown in the nature of man. presidential statesmanship as civic education 94 to remove the causes of faction would thus require the impossible: that we change human nature by finding a way to extinguish our self-love, our diverse and unequal talents, abilities, and interests.15 human nature offered permanent political problems that could not be eliminated by institutions, education, or progress; the best we can hope for is control the effects of faction in the best manner possible. the founders’ understanding of executive leadership and civic education ought thus to be understood in light of their broader understanding of human nature and the ends and means of healthy republican government. for the founders, however useful excellent individuals might be, as madison famously suggested, enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.16 and worse than the absence of greatness is the presence of demagogues, the flatterers who exacerbate and feed upon the problem of faction in popular government. leadership, for the founders, was intimately related to the problem of demagoguery and faction. we know from reason and experience that, just as human beings are endowed with reason and capable of virtue, we are also prone to recklessness and vice. our shared and imperfect human nature suggests that, just as leaders are prone to flatter, the people are prone to flattery.17 one thus gets the sense that, for the founders, if presidents are to provide civic lessons to the people, among those lessons might be the following: presidential leadership might sometimes be useful, desirable, or necessary; it might even be crucial in helping to educate citizens in republican virtue and first principles. but prudence dictates that that we not rely too heavily upon such leadership. a healthy republican government would do well to rely primarily upon institutions, and the character of its citizens, rather than upon the character and rhetorical leadership of presidents as the chief means of securing our natural and inalienable rights. lincoln: civic education as remembering first principles aside from fdr, when academics, journalists, and politicians characterize the president as the nation’s civic educator-in-chief, they will perhaps most often point to abraham lincoln. this is a consequence not only of the profound crisis lincoln faced in leading the nation through the civil war and emancipation. it is also a consequence of the political rhetoric he left behind. it’s been said that the actions of statesmanship consist largely in “saying something,” and lincoln, perhaps more than any other american president, had a gift for saying things that stick with us.18 clearly an adequate account of lincoln’s, or of any great president’s, efforts at civic education would require much more space than we can indulge in here. we are again forced to settle down on what we take to be the most illuminating and representative examples and themes. lincoln’s sweeping response to secession and his eventual pursuit of emancipation illustrate the profound sources of presidential authority embedded within the founders’ energetic executive. presenting his case to congress in his message to congress in special session, and to 95 jividen the people in his first inaugural, lincoln defended his actions primarily, though not exclusively, through an appeal to the provisions of the u.s. constitution and the principles of the american founding, particularly as expressed in the declaration of independence. more importantly for our purposes here, the war itself might call into question the adequacy of the founders’ solution to the problem of faction as expressed in the federalist. if that solution resides primarily in mechanical, institutional arrangements (particularly the extended territory and multiplicity of interests) and not in leadership, those mechanisms only served to stave off the war. and once the war came, some might argue, it was primarily the leadership of a great presidential statesman that guided us through the crisis. yet, if lincoln held to such a view, he certainly never said so explicitly.19 rather, even in his tenure as president, lincoln never appeared to abandon the civic teaching on leadership he offered as a young man in his 1838 lyceum address. at the lyceum, lincoln argued that history suggests popular governments are always prey to demagogues and that, insofar as leadership is necessary, america had always been fortunate that chance circumstances offered the most gifted and ambitious of political men opportunities to put their talents to good use. and the people themselves once had an outlet for the worst of their passions in a common foe during and after the revolution. but new circumstances re-expose timeless dangers. the people themselves, without an outlet to siphon off the most destructive of passions, turn those passions on one another. the ostensible topic of lincoln’s speech was the growing problem of mob violence and disregard for the rule of law in 1830’s america. but the fundamental problem, lincoln argued, was not destruction of life and property, but the detachment from the principles of the declaration, the constitution, and the laws that mob violence engenders. a people detached from the founding principles and institutions are ripe for demagoguery. without such a grand project, to borrow the language of the federalist, the most ambitious of men might commence demagogues and end tyrants, seeking to tear down the regime the founders built. only through a political religion of law-abidingness and a rededication to the constitution and the principles of the declaration could a free people resist the temptations of demagogues and defend itself from the most dangerous of leaders.20 lincoln’s views on leadership here are not unlike those of the founders. his account of the dangers of demagoguery, and its contribution to the problem of faction, is premised on the notion that leaders and the people alike share an enduring and imperfect human nature. lincoln once suggested that “human-nature will not change. in any future great national trial, compared with the men of this [the civil war], we shall have as weak, and as strong; as silly and as wise; as bad and good.”21 a sober acknowledgment of our own nature suggests that we guard against demagoguery by guarding against our own destructive passions. lincoln’s solution resides in a thorough-going civic education in the principles and institutions of the american founding. according to lincoln, reverence for the laws must be taught in the schools and seminaries, presidential statesmanship as civic education 96 preached from the pulpit, passed on from parents to children, proclaimed in legislative halls and enforced in the courts of justice.22 of course, we might add that presidents may be called upon to help foster this civic education. in great national crises, such statesmanship might be especially necessary. but for lincoln, like the founders, the ultimate object of our civic veneration is not the leadership of a president, but the principles of the declaration, the constitution, and the rule of law. we see something of lincoln’s own efforts at civic education prior to assuming the presidency, particularly in his speeches on the slavery crisis of the 1850’s. with the spread of slavery into the western territories, the kansas-nebraska act, douglas’ popular sovereignty doctrine, and the dred scott decision, lincoln became increasingly concerned that a new and dangerous idea was creeping into our political discourse. coming out of political retirement, lincoln would argue that a new and invigorated slave interest had abandoned the intention of the founders by seeking not to keep slavery on the path of ultimate extinction, but rather by declaring moral indifference to the institution (douglas) or by even declaring slavery a positive good for both slave and master (calhoun). this attempt to change public attitudes toward slavery could only be accomplished, lincoln claimed, by rejecting the first principles of american democracy. in his 1856 speech at a republican banquet, lincoln suggested: our government rests in public opinion. whoever can change public opinion, can change the government, practically just so much. public opinion, on any subject, always has a “central idea,” from which all its minor thoughts radiate. that “central idea” in our political public opinion, at the beginning was, and until recently has continued to be, the equality of men.23 in response to the slave interest, proper statesmanship would require a war of ideas. above all, it would require an attempt at civic education in first principles, particularly in the idea of natural equality. lincoln repeatedly reminded his audiences that government by consent of the governed presupposes that all men, everywhere and always, are equally endowed by nature with the same inalienable rights; that no one is, by nature, wise or virtuous enough to rule over another without that other’s consent. the principle of natural equality, lincoln argued, is the very sheet anchor of american republicanism.24 this the slave interest emphatically denied. but, for lincoln, rejecting the principle of natural equality had profound consequences for american public philosophy, for it ripped the theoretical grounding from any principled, objective defense of limited government by consent of the governed. 97 jividen this was the essence of lincoln’s oft-repeated argument that the institutions of the u.s. constitution could not be disentangled from the principles of the declaration of independence. the constitution, lincoln argued, was framed to secure the principles set forth in the declaration. indeed, these principles justified the american people’s very right to form and maintain a government the first place. lincoln’s speeches of the 1850s, especially the peoria address, the lincoln-douglas debates, and his response to the dred scott decision, are filled with statements to this effect. lincoln argued that, at bottom, the slave interest was attempting to reeducate the american public to forget that the central defining idea of american republicanism is that all human beings are, by nature, created equal. and when the war came, as president, lincoln would often remind the american people (in speeches like his first and second inaugurals and the gettysburg address) about the founding principle of natural equality, that the war really was about the moral status of slavery, and that the war had a ultimately had a philosophical cause.25 for lincoln, combating the slave interest required that the american people be reminded of the centrality of the principle of natural equality to the very notion of government by consent of the governed. like the founders, lincoln saw civic education as consisting primarily in remembering the first principles of america republicanism. and like some of the founders, while lincoln did not explicitly or directly comment on the president’s role as civic educator, he repeatedly performed that function through his political rhetoric. yet if lincoln and the founders saw presidential civic education as promoting this remembering of first principles, later presidents would offer an alternative view. beginning in the progressive era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, we witness the beginning of a very different take on the president-as-civic educator, one that focuses not so much upon civic education as remembering first principles, but rather upon redefining and transcending those principles. wilson: leadership, progress, and civic education in discussing the idea of a “pedagogical” presidency, lim argues that the notion of president-ascivic-educator was present at the founding, but that the case for the pedagogical president is best made by considering the “theories and practices of the founding rhetorical presidents,” tr, wilson, and fdr. the rise of the modern, rhetorical presidency marks a change in the way presidents speak to the american people, a change in how often they speak, and a change in what they speak about. by the early twentieth century, in support of their policy agendas, presidents would increasingly appeal directly to the people (as opposed to congress or party) through speech making. by going around congress and directly to their constituents, presidents can pressure legislators to acquiesce in the presidential agenda, often by discussing not only the principles of republican government, but the finer points of policy and presidential leadership presidential statesmanship as civic education 98 itself. if the founders’ fear of presidential demagoguery is not dismissed, it is at the very least muted.26 yet, when it comes to presidents and civic education, the rise of the rhetorical presidency coincides with, and is intimately related to, something still more fundamental than the frequency of presidential speechmaking, going public, the bully pulpit, etc. the founding of the twentieth century rhetorical presidency was inextricably bound up with a reevaluation of the principles and institutions of the american founding. to the extent that the founders and lincoln saw the presidency as a resource for civic education, that education was meant to be provided in service of transmitting the principles and institutions of the founding to future generations. this need for civic education, indeed much of the content of that education, was understood in light of certain first principles: a timeless and imperfect human nature, that all men are equally endowed by nature with inalienable rights, that the purpose of government is to secure those rights, that faction is the greatest danger to securing those rights, that good government is necessarily limited and balanced government, etc. the rhetorical presidency as we understand it today is a product of american progressivism, the first intellectual and political movement in the united states to feature as its central characteristic a critique of the founding principles mentioned above. we can thus expect that it is not merely the method by which a president educates that changes with the progressives (i.e., increased public addresses, press conferences, going public etc.). the content and character of that education also changes. although many look to tr’s use of the bully pulpit as a prime example of the rhetorical presidency, the broader and more fundamental relationship between the progressive critique of the founding, statesmanship, and civic education is perhaps best expressed in the speeches and writings of woodrow wilson. inspired by hegel’s philosophy of history, wilson believed the idea that there might be trans-historical truths that apply to all men at all times was mistaken. such ideas were merely expressions of the american mind in a particular historical epoch. wilson sought to help bring forth the modern, rational, bureaucratic state in america, and to keep abreast of progress with a capital “p,” proper statesmanship would require a direct engagement with the principles and limited government institutions of the american founding.27 key to wilson’s analysis of the founders’ constitution was a critique of separation of powers, what he referred to as the spirit of “checks and balances.” according to wilson, while such a view might have been appropriate for the eighteenth century, this understanding of the constitution had become dangerously behind the times. a constitution read in the spirit of checks and balances unnecessarily inhibits and restricts energetic, active government. old political formulas, such as the spirit of checks and balances, “do not fit the present problems; they read now like documents out of a forgotten age.”28 new economic problems exist in twentiethcentury industrial america and we must overcome the spirit of checks and balances if we are to keep pace with the times. according to wilson, the old theory of checks and balances 99 jividen does not work because it mistakenly conceived of government as a machine. the problem, wilson argued, is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. it falls under “the theory of organic life.” wilson urged that government “is accountable to darwin, not to newton. it is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life. no living thing can have its organs offset against each other, as checks, and live.”29 above all, wilson claimed, our understanding of the constitution tended to inhibit the emergence of competent and energetic political leadership to solve social and economic problems. wilson thus sought a means by which to craft a new notion of statesmanship for the twentieth century, a vision of leadership for a new age. according to wilson: a great nation is not led by a man who simply repeats the talk of the streetcorners or the opinions of the newspapers. a nation is led by a man who hears more than those things; or who, rather, hearing those things, understands them better, unites them, puts them into a common meaning; speaks, not the rumors of the street, but a new principle for a new age; a man in whose ears the voices of the nation do not sound like the accidental and discordant notes that come from the voice of a mob, but concurrent and concordant like the united voices of a chorus, whose many meanings, spoken by melodious tongues, unite in his understanding in a single meaning and reveal to him a single vision, so that he can speak what no man else knows, the common meaning of the common voice.30 according to wilson, such leaders have a kind of oracle into history, for they see the direction in which the progress of history is moving and they can understand the common opinion more completely and more accurately than the people themselves. perhaps the greatest virtue of wilson’s leader of men is his unique ability not only to read and interpret public opinion but to articulate that opinion back to the people in a readily understandable and palatable form. the leader of men must prepare democratic citizens for the next stage of national progress. although the leader can see over the next horizon, the people cannot. thus, the leader must not get too far out in front of the people in his policy proposals or his arguments and justifications for them. the leader of men is thus, above all a political rhetorician, of the first order. he must “read the common thought: he must test and calculate very circumspectly the preparation of the nation for the next move in the progress of politics.”31 wilson eventually turned to the presidency as the most fertile ground for this visionary progressive leadership. he came to argue that the american president is not only a party leader and chief executive officer under the constitution, but is also the only national office elected by the entire nation, and thus, the only office capable of legitimately claiming a national mandate. presidential statesmanship as civic education 100 compared to congress, the president enjoyed a greater visibility and a closer relationship with the entire american people, better able to lead public opinion through political rhetoric.32 wilson’s president is the chief legislator for the nation, tightly connected with congress, energetically pursuing a national policy agenda. yet wilson’s presidency moves beyond the energetic executive envisioned by hamilton and the american founders.33 the constitutional presidency of the american founders was designed in accordance with the notion that while executive authority was ultimately and fundamentally derived from the sovereignty of the people, in civil society that authority is defined, structured, and limited by the people’s constitution as fundamental law. as mentioned above, to help guard against the dangers of faction and demagoguery, the founders created an energetic executive independent from congress and temporary whims of short-term public opinion. these dangers could not be transcended or overcome by historical progress because they were the consequence of an imperfect and unchanging human nature; they were enduring political problems. and the founders constructed their political institutions—including the presidency—accordingly.34 but, with wilson, the energy and independence of the american executive is seen in a different light. for wilson, institutional limitations on government were on the wrong side of history. insofar as human nature can evolve and develop over time—as wilson’s progressive historicism posits—institutions designed in light of the notion of a necessarily imperfect and unchanging human nature are obsolete and counterproductive. wilson posited that the seeds of faction are not forever sown in the nature of man. contrary to the political theory of the federalist, the very causes of faction could be overcome by history. as history progresses and human nature improves, the most controversial of political questions will have been agreed upon and the emphasis in government turns from politics to administration.35 clearly, wilson’s vision of the president as a leader of men speaks explicitly to the idea of the president-as-civic educator. with the details of governing handed over to a federal bureaucracy of administrative experts, one of the key responsibilities of wilson’s president is to articulate and defend far-reaching, transformative policy to the people. in short, wilson’s president would serve as a civic educator of progress. wilson was explicit in suggesting that such leadership would require a confrontation not only with the founders’ constitution, but also with the principles of the declaration of independence. wilson understood that the notion of natural and inalienable rights serves as the foundation of limited government. and, for wilson, part of what the best presidents must undertake is to reeducate the people about the nature and basis of liberty, to offer a new civic education that redefines our fundamental political principles in light of a progressive notion of history. wilson asserted that, although we tend to think of the declaration of independence as a highly theoretical document, “except for its assertion that all men are equal, it is not.” although the document “names as among the ‘inalienable rights’ of man the right to life, liberty and the 101 jividen pursuit of happiness,” wilson claimed, “it expressly leaves to each generation of men the determination of what they will do with their lives, what they will prefer as the form and object to their liberty, in what they will seek their happiness.” in brief, wilson argued, “political liberty is the right of those who are governed to adjust government to their own needs and interests.”36 on wilson’s reading, liberty is thus no longer understood with any reference to pre-political, natural and inalienable rights, but is rather the continually changing, conventional result of a deal between the government and the governed.37 as the result of conventional agreement, and devoid of any basis in nature, the meaning of liberty is not subject to any limitations or guidelines save the will of the parties at the time of that agreement.38 whereas lincoln had once declared “all honor to jefferson, to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times,” wilson reads the idea of timeless natural and inalienable rights out of the american political tradition.39 for wilson, this effort was to be guided by american presidents, as the chief moralpolitical educators of the people, leading the nation toward the next stage in the development of american democracy. to meet this challenge, as leaders of men, the best presidents must help to reeducate the american people about the proper ends and means of american democracy. presidential civic education, on this view, resides not so much in helping the people to remember or the maintain the principles of the founding, as it does in prompting the people to reevaluate, or perhaps even reject, those principles in the name of historical progress. fdr: civic education and statesmanship as the redefinition of rights woodrow wilson was the chief intellectual architect of the modern rhetorical presidency, and his vision for executive leadership—indeed his vision for american democracy—rested fundamentally upon the president’s role as a civic educator. yet, as we have seen above, when scholarly commentators discuss presidents as civic educators, franklin roosevelt often emerges as the example par excellence. in facing the profound challenges of the great depression and world war ii, it would fall to fdr to institutionalize wilson’s model of presidential leadership, the administrative state, and civic education. through his political rhetoric, roosevelt found a way to make sense of the challenges facing the american people in a palatable and reassuring form. with regard to the great depression, perhaps the most significant and far-reaching aspect of fdr’s political rhetoric was his characterization of statesmanship as the perpetual redefinition of rights in light of changing political and economic circumstances. we will focus on this aspect of fdr’s statesmanship here, for it speaks directly to the notion that the best presidents are first and foremost civic educators charged with teaching the people about the legitimate ends and means of american democracy. presidential statesmanship as civic education 102 in response to the great depression, fdr routinely argued that the federal government and its president are duty-bound to regulate increased segments of the national economy, to intervene into the relationship between capital and labor, and to establish economic safety nets for the young, the sick, and the elderly. in his public speeches and writings, fdr routinely explained his new deal policies as solutions to a potentially regime-threatening economic crisis. but beneath the new deal, indeed fundamental to it, was a civic teaching about the purposes of american democracy and the nature of statesmanship itself. campaigning for the presidency in 1932, roosevelt delivered an address to san francisco’s commonwealth club that laid out the political theory of the new deal. here roosevelt would claim that the profound economic crises of the great depression required that the national government must take on a more active, more “positive” role in securing the social and economic well-being of the people.40 roosevelt framed his proposals in light of a progressive economic history, and his chief concern here was the regulation of banking and business, along with increased social welfare policy. we had once given free rein to “financial titans” to help build up the american economy, but current economic conditions call for a “reappraisal of values.” roosevelt claimed that today’s task is not seeking out new resources and producing new goods. our industrial plant is built, he urged. today’s task is rather “administering resources,” dealing with the problem of under-consumption, “adjusting wealth and products more equitably,” and “adapting existing organizations to the service of the people.” roosevelt summed up the matter by famously declaring, the “day of enlightened administration has come.”41 roosevelt sought to work with business to help create an “economic declaration of rights, an economic constitutional order.”42 the declaration of such rights, roosevelt argued, was nothing more than a redefinition of the terms of the declaration of independence, a rewriting of america’s social contract. he explained: the declaration of independence discusses the problem of government in terms of a contract. government is a relation of give and take, a contract, perforce, if we would follow the thinking out of which it grew. under such a contract rulers were accorded power, and the people consented to that power on consideration that they be accorded certain rights. the task of statesmanship has always been the redefinition of these rights in terms of a growing and changing social order.43 roosevelt here followed woodrow wilson’s reading of the declaration, with the terms of the social contract (which would seem to include not only the means but, importantly, the ends of government) capable of being continually renegotiated. our most fundamental rights, rights once claimed to be natural and inalienable, become rights “accorded” to us as the result of a deal struck between the people and their rulers.44 the formulation of the social contract as we find it 103 jividen in the declaration suggests that governments are instituted among men to secure their natural (i.e., pre-existing, pre-political) and inalienable (i.e., non-negotiable) rights. roosevelt’s reading of the declaration obscured this fundamental premise, and thus departed significantly from the founders’ and lincoln’s understanding of the first principles of american government. as such, the ends of government are open to perpetual redefinition and any principled limits to the means we might consent to in pursuit of those ends no longer have any objective basis. the means of government would be increasingly fashioned by administrative agencies, while politics would turn increasingly toward civic education and opinion leadership by the executive. insofar as our most fundamental rights must be perpetually re-defined, it helps if we have a proper leader, wilson’s rhetorically gifted “man of the people,” to see into the future, discern the movement of history, and point us in the direction we must tend. although roosevelt began to sketch out his economic declaration of rights in the commonwealth club address, these rights are enumerated in more detail in his famed 1944 state of the union address. here roosevelt argued that our republic began “under the protection of certain inalienable political rights,” but as our “our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.” today “true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. ‘necessitous men,’” roosevelt claimed, “‘are not free men.’”45 over time, certain “economic truths have become accepted as self-evident.” he called for a “second,” or economic bill of rights. among these new rights are: the right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation; the right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation; the right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living; the right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad; the right of every family to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health; the right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment; the right to a good education.46 “all of these rights,” roosevelt suggested, “spell security. and after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.”47 in principle, roosevelt’s view of statesmanship consisted in redefining the right to pursue happiness into a right to happiness itself, at least happiness understood as material well-being or security.48 roosevelt’s economic bill of rights clearly does not demand an equality of results in presidential statesmanship as civic education 104 any unqualified sense. what it does do, however, is call for equality in particular or specific results in that pursuit (gainful employment, decent wages, etc.), elevating them to the status of “rights,” or more accurately stated, entitlements.49 as landy and milkis suggest, these rights were best understood as “programmatic rights,” secured through the pragmatic administration of the economy and a government freed from the “demands of formal constitutionalism.”50 roosevelt’s elevation of these rights certainly resonated with the american people. landy and milkis rightly suggest that, after the roosevelt era, nearly every major public policy is characterized as a “right,” asserted to automatically confer constitutional status to programs like social security, medicare, and food stamps. according to landy and milkis, the attempt to secure these rights required a “relentless government identification of problems and the search for methods by which these problems might be solved.”51 this never-ending seeking after problems to solve in the name of securing perpetually redefined rights is the very essence of the new deal’s pragmatic liberalism. in effect, through such highly visible rhetorical pieces like the commonwealth club address and the 1944 state of the union, roosevelt attempted to educate the people toward a new understanding of equality, in which the national government can no longer rest content to merely secure the conditions whereby individuals might pursue happiness. rather, government must actively seek to secure at least a minimal or baseline equality of condition. and the engine of this change resided in a growing administrative bureaucracy and an increasingly powerful rhetorical presidency, in which the executive would redefine our most fundamental rights, and perpetually reeducate the american people, in light of changing historical and economic conditions. roosevelt’s view of the presidential statesman as civic educator thus owes more to wilson’s political theory than to that of lincoln or the american founders. it is often noted that part of roosevelt’s and his speechwriters’ (particularly adolf berle’s) rhetorical prowess was the ability to offer a radically new teaching about rights, and the very nature and scope of government, that looked like the old liberalism that the new deal sought to supplant.52 roosevelt’s rhetoric works more comfortably with the language of rights than that of his progressive predecessors. but the focus on the redefinition of founding ideas, and the primary emphasis on the administrative state and executive leadership of public opinion, reveal just how indebted to wilson fdr’s depiction of statesmanship and civic education really is. fdr once suggested that lincoln transfused the concepts of the framers with new meaning. landy and milkis rightly suggest that, in doing so, fdr offers insight into his own understanding of statesmanship.53 that fdr saw statesmanship in these terms, that he saw statesmanship as residing fundamentally in giving new meaning to old ideas seems correct. however, whether lincoln, or for that matter the founders, saw statesmanship in that light is another question, a question that, in my opinion, landy and milkis do not adequately consider. presumably, fdr meant by this statement that, by applying the idea of natural equality to blacks, 105 jividen lincoln gave new meaning to the founders’ principles. indeed, landy and milkis suggest as much.54 however, lincoln repeatedly suggested that his duty was not to give new meaning to old ideas, but to resist the slave interest’s attempt to transfuse the principles of the founding with new meaning. and like the founders, lincoln did not claim that the statesman’s duty is to educate and guide the people toward the redefinition or overcoming of first principles, but to assist the people in the maintenance of those principles.55 the argument that fdr was forced to reinterpret the american constitutional in order to save it is indeed a powerful one, but, arguably, it does not attach enough weight to the fact that roosevelt’s recasting of the declaration denatures the rights professed therein and robs the declaration and constitution of any theoretical, objective defense of limited government. insofar as this teaching is a key part of fdr’s civic teaching, that teaching is more fundamentally indebted to wilson and the progressives than to the founders or to lincoln. conclusion the foregoing discussion briefly examines some of the civic teachings offered by just three u.s. presidents. again, any exhaustive account of such matters would require far more than one can offer here. nor do i wish to imply that the founders’, lincoln’s, wilson’s, or fdr’s political thought can be merely reduced to the ideas presented above. but i do think these ideas are nevertheless fundamental to their views on statesmanship and civic education and i do think we can draw some useful conclusions. insofar as presidents are civic educators, it does matter what lessons they offer. examining the civic lessons of lincoln, wilson, and fdr are instructive because each offers arguments that force us to consider the nature and basis of rights, the limitations of human nature, the proper ends, and the necessary means of american democracy. one would be hard pressed to deny fdr’s lasting influence on our expectations of presidential speechmaking, and on our expectations about the kind of civic education presidents should offer to the american people. his rhetoric of leadership and economic rights should certainly resonate with us today. yet, whatever one might think of fdr’s institutionalization of the progressive rhetorical presidency, or his economic bill of rights, these things rest fundamentally upon a far-reaching critique of the political theory informing lincoln and the founders’ understanding of popular government, and the president’s educative role in it. by rejecting the natural rights and limited government constitutionalism of lincoln and the founding, this transformation came at a great cost. if we understand our most essential rights as no more than the result of a tentative bargain with the national government, and there are no trans-historical limitations placed up the objects of our consent, then we’ve arguably sacrificed any objective, principled defense of limited government by consent of the governed. the presidential statesmanship as civic education 106 necessity of this moral-theoretical foundation for american democracy is what lincoln saw so clearly in his dispute with the slave interest. thus, it should be clear by now that when we refer to presidential statesmen as civic educators, we mean by civic education something broader and substantially more significant than a particular president’s attempts to persuade citizens of his policy agenda. while such things are surely important, in its most serious sense, civic education is a part of liberal education, that is, an education worthy of a free human being. as such, civic education points us toward the question of how we ought to live together. through our careful reflection upon them, presidential speeches and actions can serve as enduring sources of civic education well beyond a president’s tenure in office. the civic lessons offered by the founders, a lincoln, a wilson, or an fdr, for example, are just as available to citizens today as they were during the slavery crisis, the progressive era, or the great depression. their arguments are guided by first principles, and through their rhetoric those principles are articulated to us. by weighing and comparing their arguments, we contribute to our own civic education today. indeed, today, when it seems we expect as a matter of course that presidents will offer the nation moral and civic guidance on even the smallest of concerns, we are better able to evaluate and judge that guidance if we have considered well the civic lessons of the great american statesmen of the past. endnotes 1. portions of this article, especially the sections on wilson and fdr, are adapted from arguments made in my book, jividen 2011. 2. landy and milkis 2000, 6. also see landy and milkis 2009. 3. they borrow this phrase from felix frankfurter’s characterization of fdr. see felix frankfurter to franklin roosevelt, august 9, 1937, corcoran papers, box 210, library of congress. cited in landy and milkis 2000, 6. 4. see neustadt 1990, 84, 87–90, 108, 188–91. 5. landy and milkis 2000, 233. 6. lim 2008, 117–120. see hargrove 2000 195; muir 1995, 13–17; greenstein 2000, 195; stuckey 1990, 97. 7. rosenman 1938–1950, 1:756. cited in lim 2008, 119; landy and milkis 2000, 158, 234– 35. 107 jividen 8. gelderman 1997, 11. lim points us toward similar statements in schlesinger 1957, 539; leuchtenburg 1995, 15. also see leuchtenburg 1963, 330. here leuchtenburg suggests that fdr’s many press conferences “served […] as a classroom to instruct the country in the new economics and the new politics.” 9. yarbrough 2001, 143–44. 10. see, for example, peek 1954, 83–92; peterson 1975, 332–46; allen 1988, 469, 521–22; padover 1953, 313–14. 11. landy and milkis 2000, 33. 12. see ibid., 40–79. see esp. 41, 71, 78–79 on jefferson as civic educator; also see bailey 2007. 13. cooke 1982, 482. 14. ibid., 349. 15. ibid., 58–59. 16. ibid., 60. 17. the term “leadership” is mentioned twelve times in the federalist. of those, eleven times the term is used disparagingly. only once is the term used favorably and it is in reference to the leaders of the american revolution. see ceaser 1979, 192–97. 18. see frisch and stevens 1983, 4. 19. compare with the (in)famous and admittedly esoteric reading of the lyceum and temperance addresses in jaffa 1959. 20. see basler 1953, 1:108–15. 21. ibid., 8:101. 22. ibid., 1:112. lincoln’s words here are especially reminiscent of john adams’ advice to the colonies in response to the stamp act in his “dissertation on the canon and feudal law.” see padover 1954, 3–21. 23. ibid., 2:385. 24. ibid., 2:266. presidential statesmanship as civic education 108 25. see, for example, ibid., 4:168–69, 258, 438; 7:23; 8:333. 26. see lim 2008, 6–12; ceaser, thurow, tulis, bessette 1981; tulis 2009; tulis 1987. on the argument that elements of the rhetorical presidency have always been part of the american political tradition, see nichols 1994, medhurst 2008. 27. on wilson’s historicism and the principles of the american founding, see pestritto 2005, esp. chapters 1–2; kesler 1984; kesler, 1989. 28. wilson 1908/1961, 57; wilson 1913/1961, 19–20, 41. 29. wilson 1913/1961, 42; cf. wilson, 1908/1961, 5657. 30. link 1966–1993, 19:41–42. 31. ibid., 6:659. 32. wilson 1908/1961, 68. milkis and nelson 2003, 231–35; ceaser 1979, 170–212. 33. ibid., 57 (54–81 more generally). see ceaser 1979, esp. 192–97; tulis 1984, 117–44. 34. for example, see federalist papers 10, 51, 63, and 71 in cooke 1982. 35. see wilson 1908/1961, 54–81; link 1966–1993, 5:357–58. wilson 1889, 631; pestritto 2005, 209–210, 221–52. 36. ibid., 4; cf. wilson 1913/1961, 42–43. 37. ibid., 5. 38. kesler 1984, 115–16; kesler 1989, 157–58. 39. basler 1953, 3:376. 40. rosenman 1938–1950, 1:742–56. 41. ibid., 1:752. 42. ibid., 1:752. 43. ibid., 1:753. 44. ibid., 1:754. here i closely follow kesler 1989, 161–63. see wilson 1908/1961, 4; wilson 1913/1961, 42–43. 45. ibid., 13:40–41. 109 jividen 46. ibid., 13:41. 47. ibid., 13:41. 48. see frisch and stevens 1983, esp. 330–334; landy and milkis 2000, 158, 193–95. 49. see eden 1993, 137n204; mansfield 1991, 56–59, cf. 31–34, 93–95, 185–86, 196–200; mansfield 1993, 96–111. 50. landy and milkis 2000, 194. 51. ibid., 194. 52. see, for example, eden 1993. 53. rosenman 1938–1950, 5:68. see landy and milkis 2000, 157–158. 54. landy and milkis 2000, 114–15, 157–158, 242–243. 55. see, for example, basler 1953, 2:398–410, 3:220. works cited allen, william b., ed. 1988. george washington: a collection. indianapolis: liberty fund. bailey, jeremy d. 2007. thomas jefferson and executive power. cambridge: cambridge university press. basler, roy. d. 1953. the collected works of abraham lincoln. 9 volumes. new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press. ceaser, james w. 1979. presidential selection: theory and development. princeton: princeton university press. ceaser, james w., glen e. thurow, jeffrey tulis, and joseph m. bessette. 1981. “the rise of the rhetorical presidency.” presidential studies quarterly 11 (spring): 158–171. cooke, jacob e. 1982. the federalist. hanover, nh: wesleyan university press. eden, robert. 1993. “on the origins of the regime of pragmatic liberalism: john dewey, adolf a. berle, and fdr’s commonwealth club address of 1932.” studies in american political development 7 (spring): 74–150. presidential statesmanship as civic education 110 frisch, morton j. and richard g. stevens, eds. 1983. american political thought: the philosophic dimensions of statesmanship. 2nd ed. ithaca, il: peacock publishers. gelderman, carol. 1997. all the president’s words: the bully pulpit and the creation of the virtual presidency. new york: walker and company. greenstein, fred i. 2000. the presidential difference: leadership style from fdr to clinton. princeton: princeton university press. hargrove, erwin c. 2000. the president as leader: appealing to the better angels of our nature. lawrence: university press of kansas. jaffa, harry v. 1959. crisis of the house divided: an interpretation of the issues in the lincoln-douglas debates. chicago: university of chicago press. jividen, jason r. 2011. claiming lincoln: progressivism, equality, and the battle for lincoln’s legacy in 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system, 9th ed., 91–123. washington, d.c.: congressional quarterly press. _____. 1987. the rhetorical presidency. princeton: princeton university press. presidential statesmanship as civic education 112 wilson, woodrow. 1913/1961. the new freedom: a call for the emancipation of the generous energies of a people. englewood cliffs, nj: prentice-hall. _____. 1908/1961. constitutional government in the united states. new york: columbia university press. _____. 1889. the state. boston: d.c. heath and company. yarbrough, jean m. 2001. review of presidential greatness by marc landy and sidney m. milkis. the journal of interdisciplinary history 32:1 (summer): 142–44. microsoft word butigan print [expositions 13.2 (2019) 7–26] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 renewing catholicism: toward recommitting to gospel nonviolence throughout the roman catholic church ken butigan depaul university i grew up under the brutal dictatorship of idi amin. after my high school seminary education, i decided to join the “liberation war” to fight idi amin. it was only by god’s grace that i was saved from this lie of liberation through violence. the “liberation war” ended, but then the liberators soon became dictators and we needed another “liberation war” to get rid of the “liberators.” this is a story that is repeated all over africa. it is a lie. violence does not end violence—it only creates endless cycles of violence. nonviolence is a calling, not simply because it “works” but because it is the way of god. –fr. emmanuel katongole, uganda1 introduction jesus proclaimed a universal ethic of nonviolence rejecting violence and killing, returning good for evil, healing divisions, and putting sacrificial love into action for a just, peaceful, and reconciled world.2 in its first three centuries, the roman catholic church publicly practiced the nonviolence that jesus taught and lived, and since then the spirit of gospel nonviolence has been kept alive by particular individuals, communities and movements within the church. too often, however, the institutional church has perpetrated or failed to prevent egregious violence, reinforced by a theological, pastoral, and ecclesiastical culture that has often permitted and even sanctified violence. in our own time, though, the church has begun to make a critical shift from this culture of justified violence. over the past half century the church has taken steps to re-affirm the foundational ethic of nonviolence in papal and episcopal statements, in an expanding body of theological research and biblical exegesis, and in the experience and commitment of catholic renewing catholicism 8 individuals and communities throughout the world who have been consciously living the nonviolent life as a spiritual journey and as a courageous witness for justice, peace, and reconciliation. in this spirit, pope francis has underscored nonviolence as a core value of the church in many public statements and, most significantly, in his 2017 world day of peace message entitled, “nonviolence: a style of politics for peace.”3 this growing reassertion of gospel nonviolence is not an accident. in an era of global direct, cultural, and structural violence—and at a time when the church itself is grappling with its own violence, including clergy sexual abuse—it is no wonder that the church is actively rediscovering jesus’s nonviolence. we are living in a time when the church is being inspired to embrace the way of faithful nonviolence and, in turn, to urge the larger world to discover the power of nonviolent options to address the monumental crisis of violence and injustice it faces today. this renewed exploration of gospel nonviolence was underscored by a landmark conference co-sponsored by the holy see’s then-pontifical council for justice and peace (now subsumed into the dicastery for the promotion of integral human development) and pax christi international in rome in april 2016. the conference—attended by theologians, peace practitioners, and some church leaders from around the world, including from places grappling with extreme violence— concluded by calling on the church to “recommit to the centrality of gospel nonviolence.” it urged the church to integrate jesus’s nonviolence throughout the life of the church, promote nonviolent practices and strategies, and to initiate a global conversation on the power of nonviolence. this paper offers a general framework for imagining how such a recommitment could take place and what integrating nonviolence at every level of the institution could entail. it does this, first, by defining nonviolence in general and then underlining how gospel nonviolence, for christians, deepens this general notion of nonviolence by rooting it in how god calls us to live; exploring how this nonviolent way of life calls us to renounce the theology of justified violence and to unleash creative and disciplined ways to challenge violence and to make peace; and presenting an overview of concrete steps that could be taken to re-embrace jesus’s nonviolence throughout the life of the church and as part of its mission in the world. what is nonviolence? although nonviolence has often been dismissed as passive, ineffective, and otherworldly, we are currently in the midst of a revolution in our understanding of this powerful reality.4 definitions of 9 butigan nonviolence abound, including: the love that does justice (martin luther king, jr.),5 transforming power (alternatives to violence),6 and cooperative power (jonathan schell).7 nonviolence is a force for transformation, justice, and the well-being of all that is neither violent nor passive (pace e bene).8 it is a stand against violence without violence (stellan vinthagen).9 it is an active form of resistance to systems of privilege and domination, a philosophy for liberation, an approach to movement building, a tactic of non-cooperation, and a practice to transform the world (war resisters league).10 the following general framing of nonviolence synthesizes this spectrum of ideas: “nonviolence is a constructive force, an active method, and a way of life that challenges violence without using violence, transforms and resolves conflict, and seeks justice, peace and reconciliation for all.”11 gospel nonviolence this sunday’s gospel has one of the most typical, yet most difficult, teachings of jesus: love your enemies (luke 6:27). jesus delivered this address in galilee, at the beginning of his public ministry: it was something of a “manifesto” presented to everyone, which christ asked his disciples to accept, thus proposing to them in radical terms a model for their lives […]. this page of the gospel is rightly considered the “magna carta” of christian nonviolence; it does not consist in surrendering to evil—as claims a false interpretation of “turn the other cheek” (luke 6:29)—but in responding to evil with good (romans 12:17–21), and thus breaking the chain of injustice. it is thus understood that nonviolence, for christians, is not mere tactical behavior but a person’s way of being, the attitude of one who is convinced of god’s love and power, who is not afraid to confront evil with the weapons of love and truth alone. loving the enemy is the nucleus of the “christian revolution.” –pope benedict xvi12 gospel nonviolence shares many elements of general nonviolence. at the same time, for christians, jesus’s life and teaching deepens and radicalizes it. gospel nonviolence begins, not with strategies or methods, but with a foundational understanding of god—and god’s vision for humanity. jesus made visible the nonviolence of god, who created the universe not out of violence renewing catholicism 10 but out of love. creation is good, as the book of genesis tells us, and human beings are made in the image of the god who declares this goodness. nonviolence is the nature of creation and points us toward the “new creation,” where all will be reconciled.13 in his age rife with structural violence, jesus proclaimed a nonviolent reign of god rooted in the unconditional love of god. jesus called on his disciples to love their enemies (matthew 5:44); to offer no violent resistance to one who does evil (matthew 5:39); to become peacemakers; to forgive and repent; and to be abundantly merciful (matthew 5–7). jesus embodied nonviolence by actively resisting systemic dehumanization, as when he defied the sabbath laws to heal the man with the withered hand (mark 3:1–6); when he confronted the powerful at the temple and purified it (john 2:13–22); when he peacefully but persistently challenged the men accusing a woman of adultery (john 8:1–11); and when, on the night before he died, he commanded peter to put down his sword (matthew 26:52). in his preaching and his life, jesus revealed that god calls us to the nonviolent life: to make peace with one another; to resist the violence and injustice that threaten or destroy this peace; and to foster a church and world where the fullness of just peace is the birth right of all. as pope benedict xvi declared: [jesus] came with only the strength of love, totally without violence, even to the point of going to the cross. this is what shows us the true face of god, that violence never comes from god, never helps bring anything good, but is a destructive means and not the path to escape difficulties. he is thus a strong voice against every type of violence. he strongly invites all sides to renounce violence, even if they feel they are right. the only path is to renounce violence, to begin anew with dialogue, with the attempt to find peace together, with a new concern for one another, a new willingness to be open to one another. this is jesus’s true message: seek peace with the means of peace and leave violence aside.14 christian nonviolence is a spiritual path rooted in the gospels and a counter-intuitive strategy for the transformation of the world. 11 butigan from just war to just peace war is the mother of ignorance, isolation, and poverty. please tell the world there is no such thing as a just war. i say this as a daughter of war. we can’t respond to violence with worse violence. in order to kill five violent men, we have to create ten violent men to kill them. –sr. nazik matty, iraq15 in my catholic country, our nuns and priests joined the guerrillas because of the just war paradigm. the catholic paramilitaries pray to the virgin before slaughtering people because of the just war paradigm. –fr. francisco de roux, s.j., colombia16 in its first three centuries, the church wagered that jesus was utterly serious when he said, “love your enemies” and “peace be with you,” and therefore consistently sought to incarnate the way and discipline of spiritually grounded nonviolence. the early church offers us a critically important and timely lesson. in our contemporary age of global violence, searing injustice, and catastrophic climate change, the catholic church is called to be a global leader and model for powerful nonviolent alternatives. but it can only be this beacon for mainstreaming nonviolent options if it clearly hews to nonviolence itself and explicitly rejects what the late scripture scholar walter wink called the “myth of redemptive violence.”17 this not only means making amends for its own violence, but also using the lens of gospel nonviolence to renew vibrantly its life and mission, including its spirituality, formation, sacramental theology and practices, pastoral life, ministry, and catholic social teaching. as one part of this renewal, the church will be invited to renounce its adherence to and application of just war theories. considering such a move will no doubt prompt debate, but this dialogue will likely generate the creative tension by which the glaring internal contradictions just war theories pose can become clearer; by which nonviolent options can be more seriously considered; and by which the church’s commitment to living the way of jesus can become more integrally coherent. it will also invite a more robust exploration of a qualitatively different framework: nonviolent “just peace.” renewing catholicism 12 such a shift—from just war to just peace—will be part of a larger call to concretely embrace jesus’s nonviolence as a matter of faith, as a process of church-wide conversion and healing, and as a way to imagine, educate, and activate the nonviolent life at every level of the church. the “just war” tradition obscures and undermines the heart of jesus’s message by legitimating violent combat (and, by implication, the infrastructure, training, resources, and spiritual dedication to making such combat a reality) and, by extension, by providing a foundation for legitimating violence in general.18 gospel nonviolence is broader than pacifism or only the refusal to do harm. an active force for peace, justice and reconciliation, nonviolence calls us to:  renounce our belief in violence  take a stand against violence  break the cycles of retaliatory violence  pursue nonviolent options just war theories undermine each of these. by institutionalizing the admissibility of the violent option, it reinforces a general, if often unconscious, belief in the power of violence. this belief is at loggerheads with a foundational faith in the god of peace and nonviolence that jesus proclaimed and that the early church professed. such a belief has consequences. it weakens our resolute stand against violence. it limits our resolve and capacity to interrupt the cycles of retaliation and escalation. and it too often inhibits our inclination to exhaustively explore nonviolent alternatives. under just war theologies, the logic and emphasis are on both limiting violence and at times justifying violent means, even though some versions are more restrictive than others. in turn, it too often undermines accounting for one’s own violence; stopping the cycle of violence; and pursuing the full range of creative nonviolent options. gospel nonviolence opens the space for life-giving alternatives; trains us for active love and healing rather than for fear and killing; and becomes a sign and channel of god’s nonviolent love for the church and the world. by leaving open the possibility of justified violence, just war theories undermine these facets of gospel nonviolence. reliance on just war theories retards the development of nonviolent options; trains us to expect that christian faith can accommodate 13 butigan violence; and stands at cross-purposes to the key mission of the church: being a sign and channel of god’s nonviolent love. we seek to live nonviolently because that is the way god calls us to live. at the same time, the way of nonviolence can often create possibilities for ending violence and for nurturing the seeds of peace and justice, as nonviolent engagement in contexts of enormous violence and injustice throughout the world has increasingly revealed. to reaffirm the centrality of gospel nonviolence does not mean retreating from conflict, violence, or injustice. indeed, it is often the most effective and robust response.19 were the church to embrace gospel nonviolence in a thoroughgoing way, it would prompt both spiritually-grounded and practical alternatives—within a growing culture of jesus’s nonviolence within the global catholic community—for standing against violence, including in circumstances for which just war theories are often invoked. in faithfulness to jesus’s nonviolence and in response to the worldwide crisis of violence, we are called to nurture a new identity as nonviolent people in a nonviolent church, with a clear and deliberate commitment to preaching, teaching, activating, and boldly proclaiming the dynamics of jesus’s nonviolence at every level of our global communion. to return good for evil, to break the chains of escalatory violence and revenge, to stand up to systemic injustice not with violence but with determined love, and to fully trust the god of love and truth rather than the power of violence—were these dimensions of the theology and spirituality of gospel nonviolence more deliberately integrated into the life of the church we would more clearly recognize the sacred way and work of peace, reconciliation and nonviolent transformation in our time of monumental crisis and opportunity. it is in this spirit that the 2016 nonviolence and just peace conference urged the church to no longer use or teach just war theories. as the conference document declares, the word of god, the witness of jesus, should never be used to justify violence, injustice or war. […] too often the “just war theory” has been used to endorse rather than prevent or limit war. suggesting that a “just war” is possible also undermines the moral imperative to develop tools and capacities for nonviolent transformation of conflict.20 renewing catholicism 14 when reflecting on the role of just war teachings, cardinal turkson, prefect of the vatican’s dicastery for the promotion of integral human development, said, in that case, pope francis would say: “you don’t stop an aggression by being an aggressor. you don’t stop a conflict by inciting another conflict. you don’t stop a war by starting another war.” turkson continued, “it doesn’t stop. we’ve seen it all around us. trying to stop the aggressor in iraq has not stopped war. trying to stop the aggressor in libya has not stopped war. it’s not stopped the war in any place. we do not stop war by starting another war.”21 as part of its work, the 2016 rome conference directly challenged the implicit assumption that violence is justified because “there is no other way” and, instead, promoted, the new moral framework of “nonviolence and just peace.” just peace includes building a culture of active nonviolence and using and spreading a wide range of nonviolent “best practices” now existing that can be deployed even in the midst of intractable conflicts, including third-party unarmed accompaniment, unarmed civilian protection, peacebuilding strategies, restorative justice processes, social-movement building, and solidarity work. as the conference document put it, “a just peace approach offers a vision and an ethic to build peace as well as to prevent, defuse, and to heal the damage of violent conflict. this ethic includes a commitment to human dignity and thriving relationships, with specific criteria, virtues, and practices to guide our actions. we recognize that peace requires justice and justice requires peacemaking.”22 but a church-wide recommitment to nonviolence will extend well beyond the question of just war. nonviolence in general, and gospel nonviolence in particular, are not limited to issues of war and peace, or even narrow issues of social change. nonviolence is a paradigm of the fulness of life that challenges—and supersedes—the paradigm of violence. it is an orientation and power fundamentally deeper than the orientation and power of violence and invites us to live lives that challenge violence and build constructive, nonviolent options. in spite of the catastrophe of violence we face today, numerous facets of the nonviolent life are growing and deepening, including nonviolent communication, compassionate listening, restorative justice peace circles, peaceful parenting, trauma healing, anti-racism training, diplomacy and nonviolent communitybuilding for personal and interpersonal transformation. nonviolence is the process of building the 15 butigan infrastructure for nonviolent lives, relationships, communities, and cultures. it includes education and training; violence prevention and intervention; restorative and distributive justice; just peace and just peace approaches, including nonviolent peacemaking and peacebuilding, unarmed civilian protection, and civilian-based defense; nonviolent action and social movement-building; and the long-term process of fostering just civil societies and cultures of peace and nonviolence. as the church increasingly explores embracing the spirituality and practice of nonviolence, it is invited to reflect on how these and many other facets of the nonviolent life can be developed and deepened within its universal communion. integrating nonviolence throughout the church we need a clear message from the church—from the pope to the grassroots—that the church stands for nonviolence. […] the church is a mother and has a strong weapon: love for everybody. in south sudan, the church has been with all the people but never ever advocated for weapons. […] the church has to be a place where there are no guns, and no fear. whenever i am asked to turn over my weapons [at a checkpoint], i say: “my lord has already come and taken them all away.” –bishop paride taban, south sudan23 pope francis is increasingly inviting the church to re-commit itself to jesus’s nonviolence. in a letter to cardinal blase cupich of the archdiocese of chicago, illinois (u.s.a.), pope francis wrote: “the consistent practice of nonviolence has broken barriers, bound wounds, and healed nations.”24 in his 2017 world day of peace on nonviolence, the pope pointed out that nonviolence is what jesus taught and modelled, saying, “to be true followers of jesus today […] includes embracing his teaching about nonviolence.”25 and toward the end of this message, he committed the church to translate this resolve into action when he declared, “i pledge the assistance of the church in every effort to build peace through active and creative nonviolence.”26 in commenting on this landmark text, terrence rynne writes, “the pope is signalling a true return to the sources for the catholic church: sacred scripture and the traditions of the early church. just as the return to the sources (ressourcement) by theologians such as henri de lubac, yves congar, and karl rahner fuelled the renaissance of catholic theology and the magnificent renewing catholicism 16 documents of the second vatican council, so also today the pope is returning in a fresh way to the sources.”27 indeed, the vatican ii documents were magnificent—but it took many steps and much effort to begin to translate the impulses toward reform embedded within these towering declarations into concrete changes within the church, a transformation that in many ways is still ongoing. similarly, a shift which would see the church affirm the centrality of jesus’s nonviolence—moving nonviolence from the periphery of catholic thought to the center of its life of faith—will require much commitment, creativity, and labor. one effort in this direction for several years has been undertaken by the catholic nonviolence initiative, a project of pax christi international, which has been exploring the advancement of gospel nonviolence in the church.28 most importantly, this possibility will be rooted in our openness to the movement of the holy spirit, and our prayerful response to our god who calls humanity to the way of peace and nonviolence. as the 2016 nonviolence and just peace conference’s final statement put it, “in every age, the holy spirit graces the church with the wisdom to respond to the challenges of its time. in response to what is a global epidemic of violence, which pope francis has labelled a ‘world war in installments,’ we are being called to invoke, pray over, teach and take decisive action.”29 in this spirit, we invite the church to:  integrate gospel nonviolence explicitly throughout the life and work of the church, including in its preaching, education, formation, and ministries at every level of the institution: its dioceses, parishes, agencies, schools, universities, seminaries, religious orders, and voluntary associations; supporting these initiatives by establishing an office focused on nonviolence and just peace within the vatican (for example, at the dicastery for promoting integral human development) and in each diocese around the world;  develop nonviolence educational programming in catholic universities (including departments, majors, and institutes in nonviolence and peace studies), seminaries (training in nonviolence preaching, theology, ethics, and pastoral formation), high schools, and elementary schools throughout the world;  encourage catholics worldwide to study nonviolence and to engage energetically in the development of more effective nonviolent practices for protecting vulnerable 17 butigan communities, preventing violent conflict, transforming structures of violence, and promoting cultures of integral peace inside and outside the church;  research and spread the biblical foundations of nonviolence in the hebrew bible and the christian scriptures;  recover and elucidate the contribution of nonviolence to classical themes of christian theology, including creation, anthropology, christology, pneumatology, and ecclesiology;  articulate and promote a new moral framework based on active nonviolence and just peace (including in the catechism) that will enable the language of the institutional church as a moral authority to be more consistent with the nonviolent creativity of the gospel and its transformative initiatives which break the vicious cycles of violence, including on the church’s teaching on war and peace;  advocate both inside and outside the church for increased investment in key nonviolent practices, such as restorative justice, nonviolent communication, unarmed civilian protection, trauma-healing, nonviolent resistance, and nonviolent civilianbased defense;  call on the world to develop comprehensive nonviolent approaches to the monumental challenges of our time, including war, nuclear weapons, the arms trade, poverty, economic inequality, racism, sexism, climate change, and environmental destruction; and  learn from and partner with the world’s religions to spread and activate nonviolence for peace and justice between religious communities and throughout the world. here are four foundational elements that would advance gospel nonviolence in the church: (1) a major church statement on nonviolence; (2) nonviolence and pastoral life; (3) methods of nonviolence; and (4) reflections on church’s violence and nonviolence. major church teaching: a foundation for the nonviolent shift building on papal and church statements and teachings on nonviolence and peace promulgated over the past half-century,30 a new major church teaching on nonviolence (for example, an encyclical or other authoritative document) could provide a comprehensive theological, pastoral, renewing catholicism 18 and ecclesiastical framework for the universal church at every level to renew its commitment to the nonviolent way of jesus. while the process of affirming and embracing the centrality of nonviolence to the life of the church could happen in various ways, an encyclical would boldly invite the church, and the larger world, to focus clearly and thoughtfully on this foundational ethic. this document would:  invite the church to recover the paradigm shift of nonviolence to which jesus called us two millennia ago and invite the larger world to mainstream nonviolence in response to the crisis of monumental violence and injustice facing our planet.  call on the entire church to embark on a spiritual journey of conversion, transformation, and healing rooted in a renewed commitment to the way of faithful nonviolence as lived out in so many facets of the christian life.  engender numerous initiatives within the church, including, for example, language in the catechism affirming the centrality of nonviolence; the proclamation of a holy year of nonviolence; and a call for a global formation process rooted in gospel nonviolence.  provide a clear framework from which to address innumerable monumental challenges of our time, from the violence of rampant poverty to the catastrophe of war; from the destruction of the amazon to the threat of nuclear weapons; from the systemic oppression of migrants to the unspeakable suffering caused by human trafficking; and many others. nonviolence is a theological and practical framework that provides an integrating horizon or links these and many other forms of violence, and an encyclical could illuminate this.  offer a clear moral compass for christians and non-christians alike in confronting the realities of direct, cultural, and structural violence around the world, supported by specific approaches for transforming and healing this violence. this major pronouncement would deepen and broaden the church’s teaching on nonviolence and form the basis for accelerating its theological research, catechesis, formation, and pastoral engagement in this regard. it would offer a comprehensive vision, but also lay out practical steps forward for explicitly fostering gospel nonviolence at every level of the church. 19 butigan gospel nonviolence and pastoral life the nonviolent renewal being imagined by the universal church will come fully alive when it is deeply rooted in the local parish. following in the footsteps of jesus and the early church, each local parish is called to be a nonviolent community, inspired and formed by the call—and challenge—to live gospel nonviolence. the nonviolent parish is a space for worshipping the god of peace and nonviolence, learning the ways of nonviolence, supporting one another in living the nonviolent life, and being a resource for nonviolent transformation in one’s neighborhood, larger community, and world. the nonviolent parish is supported liturgically (worship services, preaching, sacraments, and paraliturgical practices illuminating jesus’s nonviolence), pastorally (spirituality, formation, retreats, and trainings in the principles and methods of gospel nonviolence, restorative justice, and conflict resolution), and ministerially (integration of nonviolence principles and methods in the parish’s spectrum of direct service programs or social justice projects). developing theology, programming, preaching resources, and training curricula to support these and other components of the nonviolent parish will be key to advancing gospel nonviolence in the church. promoting and spreading the methods of nonviolence imagine all catholics being trained to transform conflict and prevent violence in their families, their neighborhoods, their workplaces, their cities, and even in their churches.31 imagine strong catholic participation in programs for unarmed civilian protection around the world. imagine if catholics everywhere were encouraged to study and consciously join or even organize strategic nonviolent campaigns to achieve the just and peaceful world and the healthy planet for which we all long. imagine if catholics advocated actively for less spending on military and for increased investment in diplomacy, unarmed civilian protection, early warning systems, trauma healing, trauma-informed programs, and training in conflict transformation, as well as on just and sustainable development, education, and environmental healing. affirming the centrality of gospel nonviolence to the life and mission of the church would more fully open these and many other possibilities of living the faithful, nonviolent life of jesus in this time of crisis and opportunity. renewing catholicism 20 the church’s violence and nonviolence to call on the church to embrace gospel nonviolence means also respectfully urging it to grapple with its own violence. as the final document from the nonviolence and just peace conference declared, “we confess that the people of god has betrayed this central message of the gospel many times, participating in wars, persecution, oppression, exploitation, and discrimination.”32 to affirm gospel nonviolence is to confess our own violence and to perennially open ourselves, as people and as church, to conversion to the way of jesus’s nonviolence. at the heart of gospel nonviolence is a spiritual journey comprised of renouncing our belief in violence, of breaking the chains of retaliatory violence, and of integrating this spirituality of transformation and healing at every level of our lives and our church. to urge the world to take up nonviolence requires the church to humbly address its historical and contemporary violence. bringing the spirit of the nonviolent jesus to every level of the church would include reckoning with clergy sexual violence and other patterns of violence and injustice by confessing this violence, acknowledging the harm, engaging in restorative justice, and opening to metanoia including personal and structural dimensions. it is gospel nonviolence that calls us to this process of conversion, new life, and restored community. to live gospel nonviolence includes acknowledging our violence, seeking forgiveness, making amends, praying for healing, and seeking to foster unity and reconciliation. conclusion the final statement of the 2016 nonviolence and just peace conference in rome declared, we live in a time of tremendous suffering, widespread trauma and fear linked to militarization, economic injustice, climate change, and a myriad of other specific forms of violence. in this context of normalized and systemic violence, those of us who stand in the christian tradition are called to recognize the centrality of active nonviolence to the vision and message of jesus; to the life and practice of the catholic church; and to our long-term vocation of healing and reconciling both people and the planet.33 21 butigan we stand at a crossroads. were the church to embrace nonviolence in a robust and thoroughgoing way, it would reclaim the nonviolence of jesus and the early church at the heart of its identity and spiritual journey in the twenty-first century. at the same time, it would likely contribute powerfully to a global shift mobilizing many nonviolent solutions to the monumental challenges of our time. by deliberately recommitting to the core gospel value of nonviolence and taking concrete steps to bring it alive throughout the institution and the world, the church could help the entire global community step back from the brink of catastrophic violence and begin to move more forthrightly toward building a culture of just peace and environmental healing. notes 1. emmanuel katongole, “the challenge, complexity and failure of violence,” a presentation at “path of nonviolence: toward a culture of peace,” a seminar held at the vatican april 4–5, 2019. dr. katongole is a professor of theology and peace studies and the university of notre dame. 2. this paper summarizes and excerpts the content of the catholic nonviolence initiative’s unpublished research document, “advancing nonviolence and just peace in the church and the world: biblical, theological, ethical, pastoral and strategic dimensions of nonviolence” (july 2019), including its “executive summary” and “introduction” (authored by marie dennis, rose berger, and ken butigan) and the chapter entitled, “integrating nonviolence throughout the catholic church” (authored by felix mushobozi, boniface mendes, marie dennis, rose berger, and ken butigan). 3. pope francis, “nonviolence: a style of politics for peace,” the holy see, january 1, 2017, https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/peace/documents/papafrancesco_20161208_messaggio-l-giornata-mondiale-pace-2017.html. 4. the word “nonviolence,” while it has a long history in other traditions, is a relatively new term in christianity. increasingly, however, theologians, church leadership, and christians in many parts of the world have come to see that this word most effectively characterizes jesus’s way—a way that combines both an unmistakable rejection of violence and the power of love and truth in action for justice, peace, and integrity of creation. nonviolence is a paradigm of the fullness of life, which its etymological roots shine light on. renewing catholicism 22 nonviolence is the english translation of the sanskrit term “ahimsa” (literally “nonviolence”). gandhi drew on this ancient term to convey his powerful, active, and deeply grounded approach. as nonviolence scholar michael nagler writes in the search for a nonviolent future (novato, ca: inner ocean publishing, 2004), in sanskrit abstract nouns often name a fundamental positive quality indirectly, by negating its opposite. thus, courage is conveyed by “abhaya,” which literally means “non-fear”; or we encounter “akrodha,” “non-anger,” for “kindness,” and the buddha’s “avera,” “non-hatred,” meaning “love.” the reason ancient india’s great thinkers expressed themselves in this apparently oblique way is that phenomena such as love, absolute courage, and compassion are primordial things that cannot be fully expressed in fallible, conditioned human language. […] “ahimsa” is not really a negative term […]. “ahimsa” suggests something profoundly positive, which would not be possible to name directly. “ahimsa,” a kind of double negative, actually stands for something so original that we cannot quite capture it with our weak words. 5. greg moses, revolution of conscience: martin luther king, jr. and the philosophy of nonviolence (new york: the guilford press, 1997). 6. “transforming power,” alternatives to violence project international, 2019, https://avp.international/section/section-1-the-building-blocks-other-workshopcontent/transforming-power/. 7. jonathan schell, the unconquerable world: power, nonviolence, and the will of the people (new york: metropolitan books, 2003). 8. “why nonviolence?”, campaign nonviolence: a project of pace e bene nonviolence service, https://paceebene.org/whynonviolence. 9. stellan vinthagen, a theory of nonviolent action: how civil resistance works (london: zed books, 2015). 10. “nonviolence 101,” war resisters league, https://www.warresisters.org/store/nonviolence-101. 23 butigan 11. “the power and practice of nonviolence,” a chapter in “advancing nonviolence and just peace in the church and the world: biblical, theological, ethical, pastoral and strategic dimensions of nonviolence” (july 2019). this same chapter offers this more detailed overview of some of the facets of nonviolence: nonviolence has increasingly been unleashed to create powerful social change. as gandhi said, “nonviolence is as old as the hills.” humanity has been exercising this power from its beginning and has therefore survived and transformed the destructiveness of escalating and retaliatory violence. beginning in the twentieth century, this momentum accelerated with gandhi’s application of nonviolence to win indian independence and with the use of disciplined nonviolence by the u.s. civil rights movement. these and other pioneering campaigns have inspired countless nonviolent struggles. some examples include successful pro-democracy movements in spain and portugal (1970s), the philippines (1986), chile (1980s), argentina (1980s), soviet bloc states including the velvet revolution in czechoslovakia, poland, east germany, etc. (1989); the thwarted coup in the u.s.s.r. (1991); south africa (1980s–1990s); indonesia (1998); east timor (2000); serbia (2000); georgia (2003); ukraine (2004); liberia (2005); and tunisia and egypt (2011). these are not isolated cases. the global nonviolent action database has documented over 1,000 nonviolent campaigns, with many of them successfully achieving their objectives. but nonviolence is not limited to civil resistance or large-scale social change. it is a transformative process applicable to all dimensions of life. it is personal, interpersonal and social-structural. it mobilizes nonviolent approaches, nonviolent resistance and nonviolent action for social change—but also the everyday techniques and practices of nonviolence. 12. pope benedict xvi, “angelus,” the holy see, february 18, 2007, http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/angelus/2007/documents/hf_benxvi_ang_20070218.html. renewing catholicism 24 13. for a fuller discussion of these formulations, see “biblical foundations of nonviolence,” a chapter in “advancing nonviolence and just peace in the church and the world: biblical, theological, ethical, pastoral and strategic dimensions of nonviolence” (july 2019). 14. pope benedict xvi, interview, the holy see, april 11, 2011, http://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2011/april/documents/hf_benxvi_spe_20110422_intervista.html. 15. dominican sr. nazik matty, presentation, nonviolence and just peace conference, the vatican, april 11–13, 2016. 16. francisco de roux, sj, presentation, nonviolence and just peace conference, the vatican, april 11–13, 2016. 17. walter wink, engaging the powers: discernment and resistance in a world of domination (minneapolis, mn: augsburg fortress press, 1992). 18. see david carroll cochran, catholic realism and the abolition of war (maryknoll, ny: orbis, 2014) for a systematic critique of the catholic church’s just war theology. see also the case for just peace as a “new moral framework” replacing just war in two chapters of “advancing nonviolence and just peace in the church and the world: biblical, theological, ethical, pastoral and strategic dimensions of nonviolence” (july 2019): “a new moral framework for catholic theology” and “a new moral framework applied.” 19. empirical research has demonstrated that nonviolent approaches are twice as effective as violent ones. see erica chenoweth and maria stephan, why civil resistance works: the strategic logic of nonviolent conflict (new york: columbia university press, 2011). see also documented “just peace” case studies in appendix 2, “examples of the new moral framework applies, in “advancing nonviolence and just peace in the church and the world: biblical, theological, ethical, pastoral and strategic dimensions of nonviolence” (july 2019). 20. “an appeal to the catholic church to re-commit to the centrality of gospel nonviolence,” catholic nonviolence initiative, 2016, https://nonviolencejustpeace.net/final-statement-an-appeal-to-the-catholic-church-to-recommit-to-the-centrality-of-gospel-nonviolence/. 21. joshua j. mcelwee, “cardinal turkson: ‘we do not stop war by starting another war,’” national catholic reporter september 20, 2016, 25 butigan https://www.ncronline.org/news/people/cardinal-turkson-we-do-not-stop-war-startinganother-war#.v-gi-c6wiru.twitter. 22. “an appeal to the catholic church to re-commit to the centrality of gospel nonviolence.” 23. bishop paride taban, presentation, nonviolence and just peace conference, the vatican, april 11–13, 2016. 24. letter from pope francis to cardinal blase cupich, april 4, 2017. 25. pope francis, “nonviolence: a style of politics for peace.” 26. ibid. 27. terrence rynne, “why pope francis’ world day of peace message is such a breakthrough,” catholic nonviolence initiative, 2017, https://nonviolencejustpeace.net/2017/04/10/why-pope-francis-world-day-of-peacemessage-is-such-a-breakthrough/. 28. the vatican has co-sponsored two important gatherings advancing nonviolence. from april 11–13, 2016, the holy see’s pontifical council for justice and peace (now the dicastery for promoting integral human development) and pax christi international coled a landmark conference at the vatican entitled “nonviolence and just peace.” from april 4–5, 2019, the dicastery for promoting integral human development and pax christi international’s catholic nonviolence initiative co-sponsored a follow-up gathering entitled “path of nonviolence: towards a culture of peace.” the 2016 conference brought together participants from around the world who represented a broad spectrum of church experience in creative nonviolence and peacebuilding to contribute to a renewed catholic understanding of nonviolence. in the wake of this gathering, pax christi international launched the global catholic nonviolence initiative (cni), which has played an important role in moving these possibilities forward and has seen many developments over its first three years. pope francis’s 2017 world day of peace message was the first ever on nonviolence, a theme that was proposed by conference participants. many regional and local conferences on nonviolence have been held around the world, including at a series of catholic universities. curricula and publications promoting the way and methods of nonviolence have been produced. and since the 2016 conference, pope francis has energetically called for nonviolence throughout the world in many statements and renewing catholicism 26 interviews. beginning in 2017 the catholic nonviolence initiative organized an international popular process of discussion, discernment and research on key themes related to nonviolence and just peace, involving theologians, academics, peacemakers, and some church leadership. the purpose of this process, encouraged by vatican officials, was to gather and produce material that could be a resource for a potential encyclical or other major church teaching. the april 2019 rome consultation focused on these findings. 29. “an appeal to the catholic church to recommit to the centrality of gospel nonviolence.” 30. for an overview of these documents, see “the voice of the church on nonviolence— papal statements and church documents,” a chapter in “advancing nonviolence and just peace in the church and the world: biblical, theological, ethical, pastoral and strategic dimensions of nonviolence” (july 2019). 31. this section is from marie dennis, “integrating nonviolence throughout the catholic church,” chapter in catholic nonviolence initiative’s unpublished research document, “advancing nonviolence and just peace in the church and the world: biblical, theological, ethical, pastoral and strategic dimensions of nonviolence” (july 2019). 32. “an appeal to the catholic church to recommit to the centrality of gospel nonviolence.” 33. ibid. microsoft word corcoran prooftext.docx [expositions 13.1 (2019) 31–45] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 the return on investment of a non-profit career william d. corcoran frequently, after i had made a presentation about my work with a major international relief agency, people would congratulate me on having the job of their dreams. often, they waxed on about how fulfilling it must be to get up each morning for a job that meant something, that had purpose. many yearn for employment that makes them feel as if their lives are making a difference. it seems that fewer employees, especially millennials, are willing to punch a time clock and make widgets simply to put food on the table. more positively, they seek a satisfying job and one that leaves the world better for it. in the context of employment, “service” embodies what most of them are trying to articulate. they are willing to work long hours and sacrifice certain amenities if there is a point to the effort. students are particularly desirous of investing themselves in worthy enterprises. if that is the case, should catholic institutions of higher learning encourage and empower these aspirations? and how can that be done in a responsible manner? premise the primary impetus of most colleges and universities is to make students better equipped to secure adequate employment. but the catholic ethos, that man does not live by bread alone, indicates that we also seek something additional. what further is it that catholic colleges and universities seek for their students, and how is it concretized in a business curriculum in particular? personal perspective as a practitioner before outlining some options for future graduates and job applicants, let me provide some insights into my background in order to contextualize my recommendations. i am not going to attempt to articulate academic solutions to issues like job satisfaction or the optimal tool kits for future graduates. instead, i am reflecting on 20 years of service in relief and development agencies, both based in the united states and overseas, and from staff and leadership positions. the return on investment of a non-profit career 32 the most recent post was as chief executive officer of american near east refugee aid (anera); i led this non-governmental organization (ngo) for ten years. once it was a sleepy charity focused on health care, infrastructure, agriculture, and education in the war-torn arenas of gaza, the west bank, jordan, and lebanon. in my ten years, we grew from 55 staff to 150 and from revenue of $35 million to $67 million. because of that rapid growth, there was an everpresent need for re-tooling. we expanded from four senior staff to eight, undertook three strategic planning processes, unveiled three new web site designs, and undertook a massive capital campaign. the point is that, in a brief period, this ngo was forced to revolutionize its mode of operation. survival required significant upgrading of its systems and staff. however, that was not peculiar to anera and probably represents a recurring picture of the non-profit world. decades ago, it struck me as very different from the for-profit world. now i am not so sure. non-profit segment of the economy in the search for a job with meaning, many are drawn to the non-profit world. for my purposes, this includes any agency that is registered with the irs as a tax-exempt organization qualifying under federal tax law 501c3. this could include soup kitchens, most hospitals, animal shelters, most colleges, and ngos. in 2013, the total number of u.s. non-profits reached 1.41 million organizations. contrast that with the number of non-profits in 1970, estimated to be only 380,000.1 likewise, revenue in 2013 skyrocketed to $2.26 trillion. “the non-profit sector employed over 14.4 million people (estimated) in 2013 […]. the non-profit sector has experienced a period of sustained growth over the past decade.”2 in 2013, this translated into an ever-expanding 10.6% share of the national economy.3 a think-tank report comments further, “the non-profit sector has grown by 20% over the last 10 years in contrast to a growth rate of 2–3% in the for-profit sector.”4 in brief, in contrast to other niches of the economy, non-profits offer a wide variety and an increasingly larger volume of opportunities for new graduates. sophistication there once was a common, gross oversimplification that non-profits were sloppy with revenue generation and, similarly, with cost containment and tracking. some people spoke of church bake sales and non-profits in the same breath. regardless, the sheer magnitude of money entering non33 corcoran     profit coffers has prompted a wave of structural enhancements in the form of tighter strictures sparked by a number of quarters. 1. federal government—every non-profit with a 501c3 status must file an irs form 990 annually as a reporting mechanism. a series of recent revisions demand substantially more financial details than had been the case even fifteen years ago. moreover, the filing is now easily accessible to the public. the expanded filing includes details on the compensation of top executives and board members. more important, it requests compliance with a list of “best practices” including regular meetings by the board of directors, annual reviews of the ceo, and outside auditing by qualified cpas. 2. donors/funders—during the same period, individual contributors and professional funders acquired a greater appetite for in-depth information. specifically, it has become commonplace for individual donors to elicit materials over and above those presented in public materials like annual reports. meanwhile, funding agencies, which run the gamut from small family foundations to federal entities like usaid, are seeking more clarity or mandating methodologies for reports. an entire industry has developed simply to provide training for the unique charts of accounts, procurement systems, and qualification of expenses demanded by federal grants. that has prompted the hiring of banks of specialists. at anera, 10% more staff were required to comply with usaid regulations alone. moreover, anera placed on retainer an attorney who specialized in nothing but federal specifications under usaid. in total, funder regulations and oversight have evolved into quite rigorous infrastructures. 3. watchdog agencies—the arrival of guidestar in 1994 and charity navigator in 2001 has put teeth into the system, particularly for individuals. functioning like consumer reports, those organizations assess program and financial effectiveness for donors. under a rating system they devised, some comparison is available for the philanthropic shopper. this has forced non-profits to be more vigilant, especially regarding the all-important ratio of overhead expenses the return on investment of a non-profit career 34 to programs. moreover, the watchdogs track best practices to ensure that nonprofits evaluate staff performance, assess program effectiveness, and establish strategic plans. now, consumers/donors can be significantly better informed in their decision making. this trend toward standardization and accountability will only increase as non-profit competition for donor dollars accelerates. thus, i contend that non-profits, in their rapid advancements, are closing the gap with for-profit businesses when it comes to professionalism. technology will further drive efficiency. the narrow margins of non-profits have forced them to adopt more time-savers and economize on staffing where possible. greater usage of technology provides that opportunity. illustrating the effects of hi-tech on non-profits, allow me to list what anera adopted in software or apps, only in the past five years:  salesforce—for fundraising and customer relations management  abila mip—for general accounting and project tracking  target analytics—for overlays of donor files with wealth indicators  eventbrite—for event planning  classy—for event planning and crowdfunding  hootsuite—for social media monitoring  moz—for search engine optimization for web site enhancement that list doesn’t even cite the ubiquitous systems of microsoft office, facebook, and various outsourced providers of pensions, payrolls, etc. that are located in the cloud. all of this mandates a staff highly proficient in it and versatile on multiple platforms. if someone does not possess a working knowledge of a particular system, he or she must display the readiness and capacity to learn, rapidly. in retrospect, my judgment is that the non-profit world has enlisted standards of accountability, marketing, transparency, and technology that mirror most of what is found in comparably sized private corporations. thus, the non-profit market deserves greater respect in business circles. moreover, the core business qualities of a successful non-profit employee are now similar to those of for-profit staff. 35 corcoran     job satisfaction another commonality between the two markets is the jarring effect that rapid change has foisted on employees, especially older ones. most staff surveys cite heightened stress among employees as both markets demand constant re-invention. where the two markets continue to differ is on job satisfaction. regardless of employee age, non-profit employees note greater contentment in their posts than their confrères in business. “according to a tiaa survey, three of four employees and eight in ten managers choose to work at their non-profit organizations, and stay there for years, because they’re committed to making a difference in people’s lives.”5 further, “managers think an organization’s values and mission (76%) and its ability to offer satisfying work (64%) are two advantages non-profit organizations have compared to for-profit companies.”6 this becomes more apparent when comparing staff retention. “a majority of employees and managers (65% and 74%, respectfully) have worked in the non-profit sector for six or more years. this is nearly two years longer than the median tenure for employees across all industries (4.2 years), according to the u.s. bureau of labor statistics.”7 these data are consistent with my experience at both anera and child fund (where i served as vice president from 2001 to 2006): at both organizations, the average tenure for employees was significantly higher at eight years. when employees were asked what attracted and kept them, responses began with the mission, which resonated with their personal philosophy or theology. yet it was the overall work environment that kept employees engaged for years. the process of decision-making was of particular importance. a participative system was perceived as a recognition of employees’ personal value: they appreciated being offered a possibility to impact agency direction. this was immediately apparent in our anera organigram, which stressed a more flattened chart in contrast to the traditional hierarchical pyramid. as may be expected, salary is not the primary element of satisfaction for employees of nonprofits. in advance, employees at anera and child fund anticipated the industry stereotypes of business paying higher wages/salaries but more frugal benefits. they mentioned that they perceived the non-profit emphasis on health care packages as evidence of their serious appreciation of employees. here the stereotype is borne out by facts. as one report notes, “non-profits generally pay less for comparable jobs than for-profit companies but […] non-profits often have a richer set of benefits.”8 that said, in recent years, this gap has dissipated in many job categories. those positions that are replicated in the for-profit world face stiff market demand and, as a result, reach the return on investment of a non-profit career 36 parity. at anera, we discovered that the toughest competition was for accountants, it specialists, communication experts, and social media managers. the old salary disparity remains profound only at top levels for cfos, ceos, and vice presidents. it remains common for ngo executive pay to be only 50% to 60% of his or her peers in the for-profit world. part of this difference is attributable to charity watchdogs that monitor and publish senior management compensation packages. but this contrast would not be a concern for entry-level employees and, in fact, may be an incentive. having a narrow pay range at anera spoke to millennials of a community rather than a hierarchy. opportunities oddly enough, the frugality of staffing in non-profits may provide extra opportunities for employees. for instance, at anera, we sought to maintain expenses at a rate under 7%. that single digit made us more marketable with donors and funders. at the same time, it forced us to be very creative in utilization of resources. this actually proved to be a benefit for new employees who deliberately sought a variety of experiences. our job descriptions heavily accented the final clause, “and other duties as required.” this meant that jobs were rarely cookie-cutter roles with minutely delineated tasks. instead, they actively encouraged cross-training in various other disciplines. this enabled us to supplement overtaxed departments during peak periods, supplant individual staff during illnesses, and stretch existing staffing before justifying a new position. thus, a secretary could become a procurement officer, fundraisers might help design a school construction project so that it was appealing to donors, and an intern could become a lead negotiator because of his or her language skills. we had to utilize talents regardless of strict job titles. another attractive feature stemmed from being an agency with international projects. both anera and child fund had the occasional need for staff who could volunteer for temporary posting overseas. this tdy (temporary duty) or seconding was quite popular for many who were unencumbered and sought the work or travel experience. all of this served to build an atmosphere where staff felt valued in the present and encouraged to continue professional and personal growth for the future. 37 corcoran     from adventure to service often, our new hires would exhibit huge fascination with the drama and glitter of geopolitics and international travel. based in washington, d.c., our work involved regular elbow rubbing with foreign ambassadors, state department officials, and wealthy donors. that glitz attracted many to jobs in relief and development. yet, you can imagine their perspectives soon changed. what transformed them was the first trip overseas to meet recipients and inspect projects. examining with school teachers the debris of a recently bombed out kindergarten in gaza tends to make things real. likewise, meeting a twenty-year-old syrian woman who lost her husband because he was executed focuses the idealism. these encounters personalized the work and gave employees something tangible as a purpose. no longer were they striving only for an ideal. now they could work extra hours and sacrifice when necessary for the benefit of real people who had touched their lives. at this point in their employment, we would observe a transformation from rather naïve and even selfish motives to a dedication to service. to assist this journey, we created opportunities for new hires to process what they had observed. debriefings conducted by several staff would allow someone to digest a wide array of emotions. some struggled with guilt because they felt so fortunate to be living in the u.s. others expressed anger and hatred for those who were responsible for unjust conditions. still others were grappling with the very basic realization of evil in the world. in those discussions, we were able to clarify their feelings and motivations for service despite the now apparent forces battling against them. servant leadership understandably, non-profit careers are attractive to many who seek a life of service. yet developments in management theory have made deeper purpose in work a possibility for students inclined to the for-profit world as well. the rather hackneyed term “servant leadership” was popularized in 1970 by a former executive for at&t, robert greenleaf. according to the center for servant leadership, it is “a philosophy and set of practices that enriches the lives of individuals, builds better organizations and ultimately creates a more just and caring world.”9 greenleaf first developed the concept in his essay “the servant as leader.” the initial hurdle that he found was that this phrase struck most listeners as an oxymoron. in traditional discourse, the two cannot co-exist. the leader must be in charge and, the return on investment of a non-profit career 38 thus, not at the whim of the masses. but since the 1960s, societal trends toward participation and equality broadened the outlook of how people view power and authority. thus, from greenleaf’s point of view, this novel approach became not only possible but a necessity for the truly successful leader. for those from a christian perspective, the idea of servant leadership should not be shocking. a concordance of the bible lists the word “leader” six times, whereas the word “servant” appears 900 times. business school professors sen sendjaya and james sarros acknowledge that “[i]t was the founder of christianity, jesus christ, who first taught the concept of servant leadership.”10 nevertheless, despite numerous examples, the apostles did not comprehend this novel management style. the evangelist mark records a situation when they were bickering with each other about who was the heir apparent to jesus. in a moment of correction, “jesus called them together and said, ‘you know that those who are regarded as rulers of the gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. not so with you. instead, whomever wants to become great among you must be your servant.’”11 later, jesus reiterates this teaching with nonverbal action at the last supper. washing the feet of the apostles was demeaning and not to be performed by honored guests, but by slaves or servants. yet this action was not one of a groveling, insecure man, but one who was self-possessed enough to deliberately place himself at the disposal of others. greenleaf’s 1977 book, servant leadership: a journey into the nature of legitimate power and greatness, proposed the following: a fresh critical look is being taken at the issues of power and authority, and people are beginning to learn, however haltingly, to relate to one another in less coercive and more creatively supporting ways. a new moral principle is emerging, which holds that the only authority deserving one’s allegiance is that which is freely and knowingly granted by the led to the leader in response to, and in proportion to, the clearly evident servant stature of the leader. those who choose to follow this principle will not casually accept the authority of existing institutions. rather, they will freely respond only to individuals who are chosen as leaders because they are proven and trusted as servants. to the extent that this principle prevails in the 39 corcoran     future, the only truly viable institutions will be those that are predominantly servant led.12 this prescient thought from 1977 seems to be more valid now. greenleaf’s vision presumes, however, that each manager will undergo a metanoia, or transformation, in his or her style of decision-making. simply to change structures would be insufficient. greenleaf expects that adopting this model in a thorough way requires its philosophy to be integrated in the leader’s daily personal style. then, personal conduct will feed the new organizational mentality and not be an artificial overlay. authenticity will encourage other managers to adapt and other staff to respond in a cooperative manner. it cannot be simply a nine to five business approach. sendjaya and sarros put the point this way: “th[e] being and doing attributes of servant leadership represent a significant paradigm shift in the act of leadership, which comprises the leader’s self-concept and primary intent.”13 this admonition segues to another feature of servant leadership as envisioned by greenleaf. servant leaders should possess an ancillary and, as circumstances require, perhaps unspoken goal of transforming society in the course of achieving business success. greenleaf writes, “businesses are asked not only to produce better goods and services, but to become greater social assets as institutions.”14 a business led by a servant leader has the potential to catalyze ripple effects across society in the form of heightened societal expectations of transparency, participative decisionmaking, rewards for group sacrifices, and respect for individuals. in extremis, the corporate world can feel exempt from these expectations. but the expanding popularity of servant leadership in business, especially but not only in the non-profit world, can create a momentum that even the most profit-seeking of corporations might find difficult to ignore. merger of two worlds personally, i think we are seeing a convergence of major segments of the traditional for-profit and the non-profit worlds. as i observed above, part of this convergence is triggered by technology and core competencies mandated by both sectors. but part has also been a by-product of pioneers like greenleaf and stephen covey who popularized the servant leadership concept in business circles. the return on investment of a non-profit career 40 an additional ingredient to muddying the waters has been the appearance of social entrepreneurs who fostered for-profit businesses with servant leadership mentalities. for many, tom’s of maine, founded in 1970, was the harbinger of this novelty. a producer of natural toothpaste built on a family-like atmosphere, tom’s became so successful that colgate palmolive purchased it in 2006 for $100 million. before that sale, it developed a cult-like for its open management style and allocation of millions by employee selection to various charities. the titles of tom chappell’s two books, the soul of a business: managing for profit and the common good (1996) and managing upside down: the seven intentions of values-centered leadership (1999), clearly indicate his bent. by no means averse to making money, he advocates a more christian way of doing so. it is no mistake that tom himself graduated from harvard divinity school. of more recent vintage is toms shoes, established in 2006 by blake mycoskie. this california firm skyrocketed to success with the business model that, if you buy a shoe, it will donate a shoe to a child.15 the altruism of shopping to save the world, so to speak, was especially appealing to millennials. additionally, mycoskie ran the operation in a very horizontal fashion. during my tenure as ceo of anera, we developed a sustained partnership with toms. it used anera as its distributor of free shoes in gaza, the west bank, and lebanon. over the years 2012– 2017, toms donated $8 million of footwear to our children alone. in 2015, i inspected the company’s headquarters outside of los angeles. in a very “laid back” californian style, toms had retrofitted an old warehouse with an open concept. an espresso bar, firemen’s poles to the lower floors, and animal-friendly sections were among the amenities. but toms truly surpassed the frills and incorporated a collaborative style that attracted and retained employees. moreover, even though it was a for-profit venture, its philanthropic approach fed many of the staff with the satisfaction that they were in fact making the world better. i see this new generation of business entrepreneurs as routinely incorporating into their businesses features of what previously had been considered a strictly non-profit mentality. gradually, the executive washrooms and separate dining areas are being eliminated as all employees mingle. the net result will be a shrinking number of firms that embody the old-school mentality of business operations. 41 corcoran     a new world for future managers i have recounted that the non-profit and for-profit worlds which once ran in parallel universes are now in direct competition for many resources. charity watchdogs and federal regulations will only accentuate that trend as they force the rapid professionalization of charity operations. simultaneously, a full employment economy, as we have now, heightens the competition for employees. employers must provide superior packages, but in return they will ask for superior skill sets. the question arises then: how do colleges and universities outfit students who seek a career of service during this shifting reality? one initial response has been to focus directly on incorporating business disciplines into novel forms of non-profit studies. a cursory search reveals 212 schools that offer credit courses and advanced degree programs in non-profit management. johns hopkins university and virginia commonwealth university produced master’s programs that have filled a niche in the washington non-profit job market, particularly for ngos. throughout the country, other programs have emerged with variations on a theme. harvard boasts a master’s in public administration (mpa), which leans more heavily to government service but in recent years has begun catering to ngo executives. notable graduates include ban ki-moon, general secretary of the united nations; david petraeus, former director of the central intelligence agency; and kathleen sibelius, former secretary of health and human services. other monikers for similar programs are master’s in public affairs or master’s of public policy and administration. still other schools have created more boutique offerings, like philanthropic studies, managing mission-driven organizations, and strategic fundraising. and some catholic universities have responded in kind by developing uniquely catholic solutions, like a master’s program in church administration (mca), as offered by villanova university and catholic university of america. i worry, however, that most of these efforts are highly specific to niche segments of the workplace—segments that may not endure. i fear that they train people to answer the tailored needs of either ngo, church, or government sectors, but severely limit the recipient’s mobility. for example, i know from personal experience that recruiters in the for-profit industry or even those in secular non-profits balk at applicants with a distinctly churchy background. some such employers have admitted that they were uncertain about the transferability of work experience and education. moreover, they quietly feared that the value system of a “church employee” would not mix well with a secular environment. the return on investment of a non-profit career 42 conversely, in the washington, d.c. environment, recruiters at ngo agencies were very hesitant to interview mpa graduates. first, they were thought to be interested in government policy rather than administration or operations. second, their education and work experience tended to be more “macro” than the daily needs of ngos. third, government employees had no experience in the fundraising or marketing necessary to sell an agency’s wares. fourth, they were stereotyped as less “hungry” and probably unwilling to work hard or for long hours. for all those reasons, they were routinely placed at the bottom of the cv pile. thus, students who pursue, for instance, an mpa or mca may find their later career choices highly restricted. if students are thoroughly convinced that their entire life will only be spent in one sector of society, so be it. but considering human nature, i suspect that most people cannot plan out all of their life choices in their twenties. moreover, the volatility of our economy recommends optimal flexibility. versus our parents, the average american has many more careers. “according to the bureau of labor statistics, the average worker currently holds ten different jobs before age forty, and this number is projected to grow. forrester research predicts that today’s youngest workers will hold twelve to fifteen jobs in their lifetime.”16 of the two sectors, for-profit business is undoubtedly more volatile at this point and for the foreseeable future. technological revolutions alone are forcing rapid reconfiguration. an article on “america’s 24 dying industries” has some surprises.17 the dying industries range from the predictable loss of bookstores and textile mills to the demise of recording studios and harbor operations. its most startling feature was the rapidity of decline. since 2007, most of the industries in question have plummeted in employment totals by more than 45%. unpredictable fluctuations of societal tastes, technological ripple effects, and economic necessities will force both for-profit and non-profit markets into quicker transformations over the next years. current students should be prepared. recommendations for the future first and foremost, i highly recommend non-profit jobs as a means of discovering unparalleled satisfaction. in particular, the experiences of international ngo work provided me with insights into life which could not have been garnered elsewhere. even years later, i revel in the knowledge that i built schools and fresh water systems, provided jobs, and delivered medicine that saved lives 43 corcoran     in some of the most war-torn corners of the world. students should be thoroughly exposed to the magnificent potential for fulfillment through non-profit careers. second, i suggest that catholic institutions also promote non-profit careers as worthy vehicles for living out the gospel in a spirit of service. if students desire an opportunity to sacrifice for a higher goal, there are few better ways. while agencies like catholic relief services are specifically crafted on biblical principles, even secular non-profits labor in ways that will transform an individual and society. overseas, i was particularly struck by groups like international rescue committee and the aga khan foundation which always had notable impact. third, while i heartily suggest that universities encourage dreams of changing the world, the shifting plates of our economy caution that they do so with an air of practicality. even a wellintended desire to be thoroughly immersed in a specific discipline can handicap later options. consequently, i advise that those considering a non-profit career should not follow the route of full specialization in non-profit studies. to prepare for an uncertain future, students should entertain a master’s in business administration. the core skills necessary for non-profit work, the generation of revenue and its appropriate spending, are precisely what an mba hones. most of that knowledge would be transferable to non-profits. moreover, the big picture offered by an mba is highly valued at the executive level by boards of directors, many of whom are business leaders themselves. if a student matriculates at a university with diverse course offerings, it would be advisable to salt an mba program with various electives in non-profit management or project design and programming. that exposure would at least introduce the student to the vocabulary of the nonprofit industry. in the end, if a promising non-profit career is interrupted by external factors, at least, the employee has the tool kit to enable a shift to for-profit firms. finally, the majority of business students will undoubtedly be attracted to the for-profit sector. that being the case, the inculcation in the curriculum of greenleaf’s theory of servant leadership, later popularized by covey, would seem to be consonant with the catholic world view. promoting authority based on service, even in the private sector, could act as a leaven against more utilitarian approaches. the return on investment of a non-profit career 44 conclusion students hunger to leave their mark. naturally, some may yearn for name recognition, power, or monetary success. it would be refreshing to challenge that drive with an authentic christian spirit of service. it strikes me as appropriate that alternatives be offered, at catholic colleges and universities, in more places than campus ministry. there are ample reasons for infusing academic disciplines with our spiritual outlook on people, authority, and responsibility. active promotion of non-profit careers and servant leadership are rational means of accomplishing that goal. in the seminal book small is beautiful, e.f. schumacher entitles one chapter “buddhist economics,” which articulates an eastern religious perspective on commerce.18 considering our rich tradition of catholic social teaching, it would be heartening to see biblical concepts become a source of positive values that could seep into the economic milieu of the country. in the process of observing these principles, graduates may achieve the jobs of their dreams. notes 1. colin b. burke, “nonprofit history’s new numbers (and the need for more),” nonprofit and voluntary sector quarterly 30.2 (june 2001): 174–203, at 180, https://journals. sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0899764001302002, accessed april 5, 2019. 2. brice mckeever and marcus gaddy, “the nonprofit workforce: by the numbers,” nonprofit quarterly 23.3 (fall 2016): 12–17, at 14, http://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/407546/ downloads/digital_magazine_issues/2303_npq_fall_web.pdf. 3. ibid. 4. “nonprofit sector growing faster than any other,” 501c agencies trust, https://www. 501ctrust.org/nonprofit-sector-growing-faster-than-for-profit/, accessed april 5, 2019. 5. paul clolery, “nonprofit managers, staying put,” the non-profit times september 20, 2018, https://www.thenonprofittimes.com/human_resources/nonprofit-managers-staffstaying-put/, accessed april 5, 2019. 6. ibid. 45 corcoran     7. ibid. 8. steve mcdonnell, “salary difference between corporate and nonprofit industries,” chron, 2019, https://work.chron.com/salary-difference-between-corporate-nonprofitindustries-24453.html, accessed april 5, 2019. 9. see “what is servant leadership?” robert k. greenleaf center for servant leadership, 2016, https://www.greenleaf.org/what-is-servant-leadership/, accessed april 5, 2019. 10. sen sendjaya and james c. sarros, “servant leadership: its origin, development, and application in organizations,” journal of leadership and organization studies 9.2 (2002): 57–64, at 58. 11. ibid., 59. see mark 10: 42–45. 12. robert greenleaf, servant leadership: a journey into nature of legitimate power and greatness (new york: paulist press, 2002), 23–24. 13. sendjaya and sarros 59. 14. ibid., 61. 15. see further “company information,” toms, 2019, https://www.toms.com/about-toms, accessed april 5, 2019. 16. scott marker, “how many jobs will the average person have in his or her lifetime?” linkedin, february 22, 2015, https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-many-jobs-averageperson-have-his-her-lifetime-scott-marker, accessed april 5, 2019. 17. sam stebbins and evan comen, “america’s 24 dying industries,” 24/7 wall st., december 8, 2017, https://247wallst.com/special-report/2017/12/08/americas–25-dyingindustries-2/7/, accessed april 5, 2019. 18. e.f. schumacher, small is beautiful: economics as if people mattered (new york: harper & row, 1973). microsoft word hughes final.docx [expositions 11.2 (2017) 91–94] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 kotsko, adam. the prince of this world. stanford: stanford university press, 2017. 225 pages. $22.95 (paper). isbn: 978-1-5036-0020-1. from the opening paragraph of adam kotsko’s book, the reader forms a clear impression of the trajectory it will follow. kotsko relates the testimony offered to a grand jury by ferguson, missouri police officer darren wilson after he shot and killed the unarmed michael brown. “it looks like a demon,” he said. the implication is clear—the depersonalized association of an unarmed black man with the demonic shares in the responsibility for his senseless death. this book attempts to develop an account of how that demonic simile came to be possible in the mind of a ferguson cop. the attempt takes us back to the hebrew biblical tradition and then on a whirlwind tour through the new testament, the early church, and into “monasticism and medieval christianity,” where the figure of the “medieval devil” “is essentially the same devil handed down to secular modernity and therefore the devil best known to contemporary western culture” (109). kotsko then changes course; the second half of the book sketches the outlines of the biography of that medieval devil, from fallen angel to the “earthly city” to life in hell. this book covers quite a lot of territory in a very short time. it therefore skips like a stone through the very deep swell of the waters of jewish and christian theology, politics, and eschatology. kotsko writes with wit, intelligence, and the sure-footed pace of an author who knows he is right and knows that it matters. this book bears a scholarly sensibility, very much in the spirit of giorgio agamben, whom kotsko has frequently translated into english. but by the end, it is clear that kotsko has written his own apocalypse, condemning our demonic world order (206) and inviting his readers toward a new vision of that world order overturned, of the devil saved. theological and philosophical study in the last twenty-five years has been rife with genealogies, from alasdair macintyre’s whose justice? which rationality? to john milbank’s theology and social theory to charles taylor’s a secular age and thomas pfau’s minding the modern. what these genealogies share is an interest in the birth of modernity. kotsko’s genealogy aims more narrowly and more deeply, returning genealogy to its foucaultian roots. he aims to unearth the symbolic frameworks and developments that create the christian demonic imaginary. he chooses to write a genealogy instead of an intellectual history because the method of the latter “can never allow them to answer the deeper and more urgent question of why such ideas emerged review of the prince of this world 92 and developed in the way they did” (9). it is essentially an anti-theology, one that kotsko writes with the urgent zeal of an evangelist. “on one level,” he says, “theology has always been a victim blaming discourse” (3). he concedes that it has also served as a “weapon against oppression and injustice,” but that is not the tradition he is trying to expose, and, to get at this destructive “long theological heritage,” “one must learn to read texts as strategies, as interventions in a power struggle. it means accepting, with foucault, that knowledge is not separate from power or even a mere tool of power but a form of power—and a particularly powerful one at that” (11). kotsko grounds this discipline and obedience in what he describes as a “methodological credo,” nietzsche’s famous depiction in the genealogy of morals. having articulated these tenets of faith, kotsko is prepared credere ut intellegere, to believe so as to understand. when seen through the lens of genealogical faith, the discourses of satan, of political theology, of the problem of evil, of the atonement, of eschatology, all emerge as strategies of power. the task of this book, then, is to trace the particular lineaments of these several theologies that, he argues, all center around the figure of satan. the shape of the argument, to simplify an account that takes many parallel tacks as it goes, is something like this: monotheistic traditions, given their structure, have to wrestle with the problem of evil. this speculation leads to the crafting of a figure of satan, an adversary to god’s will and authority. however, strict monotheism constrains the power of this figure, as satan cannot in any sense be an equal and opposite force to the monotheistic god. so, in the context of israel’s experience of oppression and suffering at the hands of external oppression, first pharaoh and then antiochus epiphanes provoke speculation on a hostile other who is both opposed to god and yet still subject to god’s authority. kotsko recasts the standard von radian division (without citation) between “prophecy” and “apocalyptic” as different ways of accounting for this enemy. it is striking here that kotsko does not cite or discuss much of the relevant literature on the development and definition of ancient apocalyptic, for which there is an abundant literature that would call some of these bifurcations into question. the apocalyptic schema, which answers the problem of evil by casting it forward into a final conflict and judgment, is transformed in the constantinian age. (note, the edict of milan, such as it is, was written in 313, not 318, as the book reports (72).) the dawn of christian establishment, to kotsko, mandates the displacement of demonic authority, “the great world-historical reversal whereby the devil becomes a tool of the oppressor rather than the oppressed” (75). kotsko goes 93 hughes on to argue that, in the hands of athanasius and, even more clearly, much later in anselm, god adopts the role of satan. he notes, e.g., that anselm critiques the “rights of the devil” theories of atonement, and proposes “the notion that christ, rather than being a ransom offered to the devil is now a sacrifice offered to god” (97). christ’s death becomes “the ransom paid to god” (96). kotsko does not trouble to consider the differences, cultic and scriptural, between “ransom” and “sacrifice,” and instead equates them absolutely. this becomes a pivot point around which “god becomes the devil” (103). “in short, the god of medieval christianity is a god who delights in suffering, a god who has become demonic” (103). this medieval god “has become indistinguishable from the arbitrary and cruel rulers against whom the apocalyptic tradition protested […] he has become the devil” (105). and, at the same time, the demonic is displaced onto the marginal and the powerless—onto jews within and muslims without, onto women, mystics, witches, and heretics within, “but also the increasingly repressed and reviled demands of the physical body itself” (105). for kotsko, this is the deep truth of medieval politics and culture. this seems to be the energy that is driving kotsko’s narrative, and the rest of the book is devoted to exploring how this plays out in western culture. these later sections are more explicitly in conversation with foucault and agamben, even as kotsko engages augustine, dante, and luther, among others. here kotsko has landed on something worth exploring, but it is something that has been explored in several venues already. r. i. moore’s formation of a persecuting society comes to mind as perhaps the most significant critical challenge. a disappointment of this book is that kotsko shows no awareness of this literature, or much else on apocalyptic thought, satan, antichrist, or so many of the other dimensions of his argument. perhaps this could be attributed to kotsko’s preference for genealogy over “intellectual history,” but it leads too often to superficial, cliché, or imprecise descriptions, e.g., of the monastic account of the body, of anselm’s doctrine of the atonement, of predestination, and so on. kotsko’s passion is striking, but the critical power of his argument is often obscured by this lack of depth of field. he often will be found reinventing the wheel (say, in his discussion of the demonization of the marginalized) or missing fundamental elements of argument (such as anselm’s distinction between ransom and sacrifice). so much time and space is covered, so quickly, that it is hard to absorb that critical force. to manage a genealogy of this magnitude in one short book is quite a challenge. and, indeed, kotsko has doubled down on the challenge, because, as i mentioned above, the book is composed review of the prince of this world 94 of two parts, and each is its own sort of genealogy, related to but distinct from the other. that, plus the sort of prophetic urgency that suffuses the book, make for an overall sense of compression. kotsko can be incisive and creative in his readings of texts—his typology of political theological paradigms in the hebrew bible into deuteronomistic, prophetic, and apocalyptic is both provocative and helpful—but every reading seems to move too quickly and without sufficient argument. one can appreciate this book as a prophetic cri de coeur, and with the author we can desire and hope for a world in which even the devil may be saved. but the roots of that hope are sunk just as deeply in the soil of ancient and medieval christian sources, in the subversive (though too often subverted) claim that it is finally love, and not power, “that moves the sun and other stars.” kevin l. hughes villanova university microsoft word pichanick review of umphrey.docx [expositions 11.1 (2017) 191–203] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 umphrey, stewart. natural kinds and genesis: the classification of material entities. lanham, md: lexington books, 2016. 186 pages. $80.00 (cloth). isbn 978–1–498–53141–2. stewart umphrey opens his book, natural kinds and genesis: the classification of material entities, with a description of jorge luis borges’ account of a possibly fictional ancient chinese encyclopedia entry that presents a humorous, yet troubling, taxonomy of animals. […] animals are divided into the following kinds: those belonging to the emperor, embalmed ones, those which have been trained, suckling pigs, mermaids, fabulous ones, stray dogs, those included in this classification, those trembling as if they were mad, innumerable ones, those drawn with a fine camel’s hair brush, others, those having just broken a flower vase, and those resembling flies from a distance. (1) the absurdity of this classification seems self-evident to us. it is hard to take such a list seriously; indeed, it is hard not to think that the list was only intended in jest. the list provokes laughter, in part, because it shows what happens when “taxonomy goes on a holiday” (1). but the list also might provoke a deeper worry, hidden behind our laughter—a deep angst about our other potential classificatory schemata. might it be the case that all such classifications of so-called natural things are arbitrary and based on nothing but mere convention? could it finally be true that all attempts to carve up the natural world into categories will make cuts that are so constrained by the assumptions, biases, and prejudices of the ones wielding the knife that they will fail to capture anything we might call nature itself? the question presses upon us not only as a metaphysical and epistemological conundrum, raised by a borges-inspired thought experiment. it emerges for us in our politics and ethics, whenever we draw boundaries between individuals and groups. it is thus of the utmost importance to ask the three fundamental questions that guide umphrey’s book: (1) what is a natural kind? (2) are there reasons to suppose that there are natural kinds? (3) which, if any, are the natural kinds? there are three resources umphrey turns to in order to undertake this inquiry: common sense, scientific theory, and the philosophical tradition (6). umphrey proceeds under the guide of review of natural kinds and genesis 192 common sense in chapters 2–5 of natural kinds and genesis, and then under the guide of scientific theory in chapters 6–7. a forthcoming companion volume entitled the aristotelian tradition of natural kinds and its demise explores the third resource. the goal of the current book is thus to turn to common sense and scientific theory to discover what it is to be a natural kind and to find reason to believe that such kinds exist. umphrey claims that his book is “[…] short on doctrine […] [and] does not, for example, present anything like a complete theory of natural kinds” and he offers instead a “map of the rugged conceptual landscape on which all natural philosophers today must proceed whether they like it or not” (10, cf. 158). umphrey puts forward this map as “but a draft” offered to guide others “in their own effort to understand natural kinds and to draw a better map” (10). the invitation, clearly genuine, to make such a map both introduces and closes the book and a map is a fitting image to pair with the opening taxonomy from borges. drawing such a map is the opening step in answering the metaphysical and epistemological angst (with its associated political and ethical perplexity) threatened by the apparent arbitrariness of our classifications of nature. readers of umphrey’s book should follow his invitation to further explore natural kinds, but his inquiry into the matter is done with such precision and depth, that the map he has drawn here should serve as a long-standing map for other such investigations. in drawing the map, umphrey makes use of three initial hypotheses supported by common sense: h1. reality does not depend on how we think or speak about it. h2. there exists a natural world. h3. the way we ordinarily think and speak about it has heuristic value. (14) after giving detailed responses to anti-realist and naturalist objections (14–26), umphrey goes on to tentatively propose h4: “there are universals, i.e., non-spatiotemporal multiply-exemplifiable entities which are somehow in or beyond the spatiotemporal things which exemplify them” (36). it is important to note that none of h1–h3 is incompatible with h4. in chapter 3, umphrey thus turns to ask whether natural kinds can be seen as universals, and how such universals relate to the particulars that exemplify them. he argues that several difficulties confront this proposal. 193 pichanick first, supposing some natural-kind types to be genuine universals, is there a secondorder universal (namely, natural-kindhood) which they and they alone exemplify? if so, is it yet another natural-kind type? second, should we be pluralists or holists with respect to natural kinds themselves? third, if there are non-eidetic as well as eidetic conditions of exemplification, are not tokens of natural kind types likely to be exemplary manifestations of them? (38) umphrey does not suggest that we try to answer these questions, and rather moves on to the particulars themselves. but it seems that even if we can conceive of natural kinds as classes and as types, and if we can think of natural kinds as universals, when we turn to particulars we still can not decide whether “such particulars are irreducibly thick or not, and if not, whether they should be regarded as trope clusters (as a thing-ontologist would) or as states of affairs (as a fact-ontologist would). regarding what seem to be natural kind tokens […] our inquiry so far has led us into an impasse” (43). umphrey responds to this impasse by distinguishing natural kinds and universals and initiating a new inquiry into the nature of “continuants” in chapter 4. we call continuants “entities that remain the same while changing” (49). umphrey suggests as the exemplary continuant a living thing, and invites us to consider what continuants actually are and whether there are any. what follows is a wonderful narrative of a squirrel who visits umphrey and his wife in their backyard. umphrey presents the narrative of this visiting squirrel not only to demonstrate the nature and possibility of continuants, but also to illustrate the nature and difficulties of natural philosophy itself: [the] natural history of a continuant [includes] what distinguished it from the others, what it had in common with individuals we call [by the same name], and what it had in common with continuants more generally. naturalists are interested in characteristics of all three sorts. many, however, are little interested in characteristics of the third sort, whereas a few are very interested in them. the former are naturalists in the narrower, more usual sense of the term: squirrel watchers, bird watchers, ant watchers, as well as hunters, farmers, and the like. the latter are natural philosophers […] natural philosophers are wondering what it is to review of natural kinds and genesis 194 be an individual and whether [the individual living thing] really is the individual he appears to be. (50) the most pressing difficulty for the natural philosopher is the nature of her object of study: continuants are “essentially beings-in-becoming” (55). that is, for continuants like umphrey’s backyard squirrel, “variation and invariance, multiplicity and unity, or dependence and independence are both intrinsic to it” (55). umphrey distinguishes this kind of involvement with the world from other material entities and calls that of the continuant grade ii, as opposed to grade i or grade iii involvement. if a natural thing is such that its variation, multiplicity, or dependence on other natural things is extrinsic to the thing itself, then its degree of metabolic, compositional, or situational involvement is grade i. if its invariance, unity, or independence from other natural things is extrinsic, then its degree of metabolic, compositional, or situational involvement is grade iii. and if variation and invariance, multiplicity and unity, or dependence and independence are both intrinsic to it, then its degree of metabolic, compositional, or situational involvement is grade ii. (55) the challenge for the natural philosopher is therefore to explain grade ii involvement without assimilating it to either grade i or grade iii or their sum (56). in an aristotelian move, umphrey suggests that the life-activity is the nature of the continuant (64). such a proposal makes a good deal of sense for living things, and it allows him to adopt the hypothesis h5: “there are continuants” (67). whether such continuants are the objects of scientific study is a question to which umphrey returns in chapter 7, when he treats of biological kinds. but having now clarified what continuants are and having given reason to hypothesize that they exist, umphrey turns in chapter 5 to define a natural kind: a natural kind, i say, is a class whose members are all and only those continuants that exemplify, in virtue of their essences or natures, a single type. alternatively, a natural kind is a type whose tokens are all and only those continuants that exemplify 195 pichanick it in virtue of their essences or natures, and that constitute, therefore, a single natural class. (71) the definition further makes clear what the account of universals in chapter 3 aimed to establish— that natural kinds should be distinguished from universals—and why it is necessary for umphrey to elucidate the nature of continuants and hypothesize their existence in chapter 4. the essence of the natural kind is derivative upon the essence of its individual members: these continuants are “amphibious beings-in-becoming”; these continuants and the classes that include them seem to be irreducible in our thought, which the definition makes clear. it is in this way that umphrey answers his first guiding question. umphrey must still show that this definition has real application, and thus answer his two remaining questions (are there reasons to suppose there are natural kinds? what, if any, are the natural kinds?). there are four possible responses to the claim that there are natural kinds: unqualified realism, qualified realism, unqualified anti-realism, and unqualified anti-realism (77– 81). all four options have difficulties and all four are compatible with h4 and h5; therefore, umphrey inclines towards realism for the sake of putting forward the claim that there are naturalkind classes, and maybe natural kind-types, as a hypothesis, h6. h6. there are natural-kind cases, and maybe natural-kind types, in the primary sense of the term. (82) this is not a hypothesis without its reasons. for starters, common sense strongly favors it and we seem to have some possibly innate abilities to recognize universals in particulars. also, there seems to be some cross-cultural agreement about which animals belong to which kinds (82). but umphrey is quick to point out that these claims, even taken together, are not sufficiently compelling to make us accept the hypothesis that there are natural kinds. most damning of all to these appeals to our common sense or to our innate abilities and shared agreements regarding nature is the observation that our sciences seem to get along perfectly well without natural-kinds concepts: it seems that for the scientist natural kinds concepts may have no theoretical use at all, and that their justification would be purely pragmatic (84). but umphrey suggests that “then the kinds we take to be natural in everyday life are really pragmatic kinds, baconian idols which are review of natural kinds and genesis 196 helpful if not absolutely indispensable for the perpetuation of homo sapiens, the specific kinship group to which we belong and which we tend naturally to confuse with the specific resemblance class we call ‘human-kind’” (84). it is indeed this seemingly more elevated notion of human-kind that seems to be lurking behind umphrey’s inquiry, and its existence is most assuredly threatened by the objections to the inquiry he is undertaking. is the haunting, if humorous, classification of animals presented by borges so haunting because it makes us fear our ignorance of our own nature, or because it presents the daunting thought that there is no human nature to know? could it, in fact, be the proper task of the natural philosopher, finally, to give us reason to believe that there are, or are not, proper human activities appropriate to the natural kind that is “human kind”? the failure of natural philosophy to achieve this goal would then have significant ethical implications. umphrey now finds himself at a juncture. having defined a natural kind, he can continue down the path of pre-scientific naturalism or turn to scientific inquiry. for the remaining two chapters umphrey takes the latter approach, turning to the physical and biological sciences in order to seek an answer to his second leading question. his claim is that scientific theory provides an affirmative answer, but the kinds acknowledged by science are not those normally acknowledged by common sense (85). umphrey himself provides a caveat. those interested in metaphysics of natural kinds, but unfamiliar with some of these theories, will find what follows hard going in places. for them i have tried to keep technical matters to a minimum. those well acquainted with one or another of these theories will find what follows to be rather superficial in places. i ask them to bear in mind my major aim, which is to show how scientific theory does and does not support an affirmative answer to the question whether there are any natural kinds in the primary sense of the term. (92) umphrey, if successful in achieving his major aim, would give us reason to accept h6. umphrey’s account of scientific inquiry begins with chemistry and asks whether elements and/or their compounds can be natural kinds. in examining the example of h2o, umphrey argues that it is a genuine continuant (95). this proposal is not without its difficulties, but some of them appear to be the same difficulties that confront our understanding of the visiting squirrel as a genuine continuant. but what if we look at the atomic constituents of molecules themselves? could 197 pichanick it be that the periodic table is a “natural kinds realist’s dream come true” (96)? in response to this possibility, umphrey raises what we can call “potentiality, isotope, and decay problems” (97), all of which make it difficult to suggest that the mutable elements presented on the periodic table are natural kinds according to the definition umphrey has proposed. it is not clear how to address these problems, and umphrey leaves them unresolved. the problems thus raise a further question “with respect to the basic tokens of elemental kinds, does chemistry or physics offer the more accurate account of them as they are in their natures?” (97). in response, chemists agree that one must turn to physics. umphrey’s discussion of physics moves from particles to fields. it is in this section of the book that i find his earlier caveat to be most applicable. for his argument will perhaps be best understood by those who have spent some significant time studying quantum physics. but in my view, umphrey still has an unparalleled ability to weave together insights he has gleaned from quantum physics, chemistry, biology, and analytic philosophy with depth, precision, and technical mastery. he concludes his analysis by showing that quantum physics yields to us an unquantified diversity of fermionic fields underlying all matter (103). if such fields are now our candidates for natural kinds, then we do not know how many there are. other problems follow as well: perhaps most problematically, physicists today are searching for a more comprehensive theory and umphrey explains well how the potential future advances in physics do note bode well for natural kinds realism—superstring theory reduces kinds to changes in state, multiverse theory makes it unlikely that kinds exist outside our own universe, and structural realism threatens the very disappearance of things (104–106). structural realism poses a challenge that umphrey explicitly takes up before finally turning to the study of biological kinds. it is a scientific way of conceiving the world that “takes relations to be prior to objects so related” (106). on the face of it, it seems flatly contradictory to “individual realism,” which puts things prior to relations and seems more consistent with our everyday way of conceiving the world. but there are scientific essentialists (umphrey focuses on brian ellis) who argue that these two views can be combined. the difficulty that emerges from this unstable combination emerges, however, when we juxtapose the aristotelian tradition of natural kinds with galilean tradition of natural law: review of natural kinds and genesis 198 the aristotelian tradition of natural kinds focused primarily on human beings, horses, and the like. such things were thought to be entities (substances), some of them belonging to discrete species in virtue of their inner natures. in this tradition the key metaphor is eidos, a term ordinarily associated with seeing (knowing) and what can be seen (the forms of things). exemplary kinds include humankind, horses, and water, but not bodies or movables. by contrast, the galilean tradition of natural law focused primarily on the motions of falling bodies, pendulums, and the like. such occurrences were thought to exhibit universal patterns in virtue of their inner connectedness. here the key metaphor is lex, a term ordinarily associated with rules governing or regulating behavior in a civil society. (107) further, umphrey defines a law of nature as “an invariant universal relation (connection, nexus) whose relata are quantifiable event-types and whose proper representation is an equation or the like” (108). how then should we compare natural-law realism and natural-kinds realism? naturalkinds realism depends on the invariance of “enduring things amid qualitative, quantitative, and relational changes. it does not require necessary connections among events,” but natural-law realism “requires necessary connection among events. the invariance to which it looks lies here, in these very connections” (109). umphrey suggests that these two outlooks on the world are indeed different, but could be complementary rather than contradictory. but in order to reconcile them, one has to face the burden imposed by the reductionism born out of the galilean natural law tradition, and defend the possibility of substantive emergence. from its beginnings in the seventeenth century, natural science has tended to reduce the more phenomenological to the more theoretical, the derivative to the fundamental—which means in effect to reduce the biological to the chemical, the chemical to the physical, the heterogeneous to the homogeneous, the classical world of enduring things and their kinds to the quantum world of fields whose interactions are governed by laws. (111–12) 199 pichanick in the face of this reductionism, we are faced with one of two options: give up individual realism or reconcile individual realism with structural realism by showing that “a theory of everything could not be a theory every thing” (112) and to do this, a scientific essentialist has to show that substantive emergence has occurred. umphrey claims that brian ellis, for example, has not done so and turns to provide an outline for a defense of substantive emergence in his final chapter. biology might ultimately seem to be the most natural place to look for an inquiry into natural kinds. our common intuition, as evidenced by umphrey’s discussion of his visiting squirrel, takes animals and plants as “the foremost natural kinds” (119) and aristotelians agree, calling species “a class of animals or plants whose members exemplify the same substantive kind in virtue of their intrinsic forms” (119). darwinians, whose account of species “prevails in biological theory,” disagree. for a darwinian a species is “a group of living things whose members are all descended from a common ancestor” (120). umphrey designates the differences between aristotelian and darwinian species as typological species (speciest) and genealogical species (speciesg). if the latter are the candidate for natural kinds according to evolutionary theory, then they are not like continuants at all and thus fail to meet the definition of natural kinds umphrey has put forth, “for so caught up are they in evolutionary processes that there appears to be no fact of the matter enabling us to determine when any of them begins or ends” (121). in addition, there is serious disagreement about what constitutes the unity of a speciesg among biologists today. it seems that as far as speciesg is concerned, anti-realism may be the stronger position (122). what then about speciest? umphrey argues persuasively that geneticists are, in fact, concerned with speciest rather than speciesg. this has been true ever since “mendel posited heritable factors, later called ‘genes,’ which he took to be responsible for the various traits of a living thing or its parts […] the genes themselves are discrete both as tokens and as types” (123). biological reductionism thus manifests itself in the tendency to see “macroscopic things as derivative upon their micro-constituents, and to regard things generally as relative to one another in space and time” (129). but although codons may be talked about as the fundamental blocks of reality, the true biologist not only rejects but also accepts the reality of organic individuals because of her combined analytic and holistic bent: biological science thus prompts one to reject realism with respect to organisms. but it also prompts one to accept it. for in no other natural science do self-terms review of natural kinds and genesis 200 (“self-organization,” “self-regulating”), auto-terms (“autocatalyzing,” “autoimmunity”) and homeo-terms (“homeostasis,” “homeodynamic”) seem indispensable […] biological science is of two minds about the reality of organic individuals—its analytic bent inclining it to antirealism, its holistic character inclining it to realism. (130) why does this not lead to self-contradiction for the biologist? umphrey contends that we are safeguarded against such a self-contradiction by distinguishing between the methodological “dividualism” that prevails in biology from the metaphysical “dividualism” that is erroneously believed to be thereby entailed. organismal realism takes some if not all living things to be metaphysically individual. organismal antirealism takes all them to be metaphysically dividual. one cannot accept both. in biology, however, it is methodological dividualism that prevails, and will continue to prevail, in evolutionary theory and ecology as well as molecular and developmental biology […] methodological dividualism does not entail metaphysical dividualism. therefore, one can be relentlessly analytic in one’s study of living organisms and remain an unwavering organismal realist. (131) is this then a missing step that investigators of emergence need in order to explain how substantive emergence could even be possible? for investigators of emergence are “hampered by their inattention to the distinction between substantial and nonsubstantial [emergence], and by their reductionist tendencies more generally” (135). these reductionist tendencies, and this inattention, could both be mitigated by this distinction between metaphysical and methodological dividualism, which could lead to a real recognition that biologists and chemists are taxonomists of natural kinds. which natural kinds are they exactly? umphrey offers a summary list of exemplary ones discovered by his investigation into the sciences: […] they include the class whose members are all and only hydrogen atoms, provided they are isotopic; the class whose members are all and only h2o molecules, provided they are essentially isomorphic as well as isomeric; and 201 pichanick perhaps even a class whose members are polyploidal organisms belonging to the species galax urceolata, or beetleweed, provided they resemble one another in virtue of their natures. (136) umphrey concedes that these kinds may not be of much interest to chemists or biologists. but if indeed he is right, and i believe he is, then he has established that “notwithstanding some residual difficulties, natural kinds realism appears to be true” (136). according to two paths of inquiry, one guided by common sense and one guided by scientific investigation, umphrey’s conclusion gives us reason not to be haunted by borges’ image of arbitrary classifications with which the book opens. and even though scientific investigation elucidates natural kinds that are not those of common sense, there can be a hint of overlap if one can show how substantive emergence has occurred, which umphrey’s argument helps to begin make clear. but there is a third resource available for us in order to defend natural kinds realism and that is the philosophical tradition. in fact, it is the philosophical tradition that could pose the most serious threat to any argument for natural kinds realism and could render moot the evidence brought forward by science or common sense. although umphrey reserves a fuller discussion of the philosophical tradition for his forthcoming companion volume, he provides an epilogue to his discussion here beginning such an inquiry, but it mostly makes clear why such a fuller exploration is needed. umphrey points out first, and perhaps surprisingly, that philosophers for the most part have not been natural kinds realists, with the exception of aristotle (145). for example, thales himself, who took all things to be water (recall that h2o molecules, provided they are essentially isomorphic as well as isomeric, turned out to be a natural kind), was “[not] trying to identify the nature of things in terms of token and type or class and class-member […] [to him] the very idea of a natural kind was irrelevant” (145). one might perhaps think that plato was a natural-kinds realist, but consider the following: yet platonic forms (eidê) are not natural-kind types, since the things partaking of them are not beings-in-becoming; and although the different groups (gene) into which these quasi-continuants fall may seem to us to be natural-kind classes, they review of natural kinds and genesis 202 are not well defined apart from the classificatory activities (divisions and collections) of someone’s mind. (146) one might wonder why there have been so few, if any, natural kinds realists (or for that matter, natural philosophers) after aristotle. part of the reason is that there have been, according to umphrey, four crises for natural philosophy in its history, all of which were potentially devastating to the enterprise and all of which have prompted a different response. the four prime movers of these crises were “parmenides, socrates, medieval schoolmen, and kant” (154–155). for parmenides, “nature is incoherent inasmuch as it rests on a refusal to distinguish strictly between being and nonbeing” (155). socrates, according to plato’s phaedo, makes a turn from “sensory experience and becoming to arguments based on hypotheses about what things are” (155). on the account given in this dialogue, for socrates the proper subject of this study is the human being itself, for the sake of which one studies nature. natural philosophy is secondary to political philosophy. the hellenistic philosophers responded to this challenge with wide disagreement, but none became natural kinds realists. the medieval schoolmen “subordinated natural philosophy primarily to the authority of church doctrine, and secondarily to the authority of aristotelian physics” (156). natural philosophy was no longer guided by its own lights, but became the twin handmaidens of revelation according to the church and the inherited aristotelian science. in the seventeenth century, this twin haidmaidenship came to be severed as aristotelian physics was rejected. this paved the way for the fourth major crisis, kant’s claim that world is empirically real but transcendentally ideal. such a claim can “secure the foundations of newtonian physics against hume’s skeptical attack […] and find room for moral freedom in a deterministic world. but if nature is transcendentally ideal, if its very reality depends on the a priori structure of the human mind, then all earlier physicists, and many since have been fundamentally mistaken […] the investigation of nature (empirical reality)is the job of scientists alone […] there is no longer any place for natural philosophy” (157). kant’s distinction now shows up in what umphrey earlier calls in chapter 2 “protometaphysical antirealism” and “philosophical naturalism”. how should one carry forward with natural philosophy in the face of such crises? it is not so clear, and a deeper investigation of the causes and effects of these crises as well as the contrasting aristotelian tradition of natural kinds awaits umphrey’s fuller inquiry in his forthcoming companion volume. umphrey is also rightly agnostic about the future twists and turns that natural 203 pichanick philosophy may potentially take (158). but it is even clearer now why we need a clear map of where we have gone and where we are, to see which paths lead to various pitfalls, traps, and dead ends. looked at in this way, umphrey’s map is an exemplar for all who wish to travel in search of natural kinds. alan pichanick villanova university microsoft word 2 bergman 12.1.docx [expositions 12.1 (2018) 8–19] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 preventing unjust war: the role of the catholic church roger bergman creighton university 1. setting the ecclesial context in his world day of peace message of january 1, 2017, pope francis addressed the topic of “nonviolence: a style of politics for peace.” the pontiff argues that [v]iolence is not the cure for our broken world. countering violence with violence leads at best to forced migrations and enormous suffering, because vast amounts of resources are diverted to military ends and away from the everyday needs of young people, families experiencing hardship, the elderly, the infirm and the great majority of people in our world. at worst, it can lead to the death, physical and spiritual, of many people, if not of all.1 the alternative is the nonviolence taught and exemplified by jesus: “when he stopped her accusers from stoning the woman caught in adultery (cf. jn 8:1–11), and when, on the night before he died, he told peter to put away his sword (cf. mt 26:52), jesus marked out the path of nonviolence. he walked that path to the very end, to the cross, whereby he became our peace and put an end to hostility (cf. eph 2:14–16).” therefore, says the pope, “to be true followers of jesus today […] includes embracing his teaching about nonviolence.” jesus’ “command to love your enemies (cf. lk 6:27) is rightly considered the magna carta of christian nonviolence. it does not consist in succumbing to evil […], but in responding to evil with good (cf. rom 12:17–21), and thereby breaking the chain of injustice.” nonviolence, furthermore, is not only an evangelical imperative. instead, in the twentieth century it was proven to be a practical strategy. in francis’s words again: [t]he decisive and consistent practice of nonviolence has produced impressive results. the achievements of mahatma gandhi and khan abdul ghaffar khan in 9 bergman the liberation of india, and of dr. martin luther king, jr. in combating racial discrimination will never be forgotten […]. nor can we forget the eventful decade that ended with the fall of communist regimes in europe [.] […] reflecting on the events of 1989 in his 1991 encyclical centesimus annus, my predecessor [saint john paul ii] highlighted the fact that momentous change in the lives of people, nations and states had come about “by means of peaceful protest, using only the weapons of truth and justice” […]. pope john paul went on to say: “may people learn to fight for justice without violence, renouncing class struggle in their internal disputes and war in international ones.” nonetheless, despite this rousing affirmation of nonviolence, pope francis stops short of endorsing pacifism as a universal requirement of christian discipleship or of national security policy. he refuses, that is, to jettison the just war tradition, as was called for by “an appeal to the catholic church to re-commit to the centrality of gospel nonviolence,” the statement issued at the conclusion of the april 2016 conference in rome sponsored by pax christi international and the pontifical council on justice and peace (since renamed the dicastery for integral human development). here are the pope’s exact, if parsimonious, words from his world day of peace message: “peacebuilding through active nonviolence is the natural and necessary complement to the church’s continuing efforts to limit the use of force by the application of moral norms” (emphasis added). in other words, the church does not face an either/or choice between nonviolence and the just war tradition—here characterized as “the effort to limit the use of force by the application of moral norms”—but can embrace both/and. there is no contradiction here, as the just war tradition has long endorsed nonviolent means of conflict resolution. witness st. augustine’s statement that “[p]reventing war through persuasion and seeking or attaining peace through peaceful means rather than through war are more glorious things than slaying men with the sword.”2 this attitude eventually became codified in the just war tradition as the criterion of last resort, as articulated, for example, in the u.s. bishops’ 1983 pastoral letter the challenge of peace: “for resort to war to be justified, all peaceful alternatives must have been exhausted.” in what they must have realized was an understatement, the bishops went on to observe that “[t]here are formidable problems in this requirement.”3 preventing unjust war: the role of the catholic church 10 2. posing the question the question i intend to address in this paper is how the just war tradition might be made more robust and stringent in its implementation so that last resort becomes ever more remote. according to the statement of the rome conference, “there is no ‘just war’. too often the ‘just war theory’ has been used to endorse rather than prevent or limit war. suggesting that a ‘just war’ is possible also undermines the moral imperative to develop tools and capacities for nonviolent transformation of conflict.”4 i take a different perspective. the first part of my thesis is that the problem is not the just war tradition; the problem is the unjust war tradition, the propensity of nations to engage in aggression, oftentimes rationalizing it by specious use of just war language, which might in fact justify a war by other nations to defend human life and human rights against such aggression. yes, every war is unjust on at least one side. but no, not all sides are always unjust. how might the just war tradition contribute meaningfully to preventing, and not only responding militarily to, unjust war? i confess, i do not know that it ever has. but perhaps this is a new moment. having set the ecclesial context, my argument proceeds in two stages. in the first, i present in summary fashion the argument of philosopher jeff mcmahan of oxford university, who in his book killing in war, published in 2009, has provided the most substantial alternative to michael walzer’s famous and seminal book on the just war convention, as he calls it, just and unjust wars, first published in 1977. according to the editors of a book of essays titled reading walzer, mcmahan is “unquestionably the most influential critic of the tradition represented in walzer’s just and unjust wars.”5 mcmahan’s 2014 essay “the prevention of unjust wars” is my principal source. in my argument’s second stage, i apply mcmahan’s ideas to the catholic church, an application that mcmahan himself does not envision, as he writes as a wholly secular philosopher. to be clear, i do not propose that the catholic church could or should be solely responsible for implementing mcmahan’s proposal, but rather that it can play a significant role in developing a practical global ethic against unjust war and, in so doing, provide much-needed guidance especially to catholics in the military, and even to catholics in government, faced with making decisions about going to war (jus ad bellum). 3a. the doctrine of permissibility of participation mcmahan’s argument itself proceeds in three major steps. first he outlines and critiques “the doctrine of permissibility of participation,” his name for the traditional view that combatants have 11 bergman no personal responsibility for judging the morality of the war in which they are ordered to fight, but only to refuse to disobey illegal or immoral orders within whatever war they are participants. this, of course, leads to the curious situation in which combatants on both sides of a war, only one side of which can be just, have moral equivalency, so long as they abide by the rules of war, which mainly means not targeting civilians. combatants on both sides have the moral right to kill combatants on the other side. mcmahan puts this provocatively: “those who accept the permissibility of participation […] accept that while political leaders cannot themselves permissibly kill or order the killing of soldiers in another state who have not attacked them […] it nevertheless becomes permissible for their solders to kill other soldiers when their leaders impermissibly order them to.”6 simply put, an impermissible act becomes permissible when it is carried out under orders. it is possible for combatants, but not for leaders, to fight an unjust war justly. it is because mcmahan rejects this paradoxical core doctrine of the war convention, as canonically expressed by walzer, that mcmahan’s work has become the focus for debate on this issue. i will not rehearse fully mcmahan’s rebuttal to critics who argue for the impracticality of his position. in brief, however, he argues that we can reject the moral doctrine of permissibility of participation and the moral equivalency of combatants (1) without rejecting the legal protections that all combatants should enjoy, (2) without undermining the capacity of nations to field the necessary military resistance to aggression against their territory or people, and (3) without giving undue advantage to those states that do not allow for conscientious objection to particular wars by individual soldiers. at least, as mcmahan says, the “risk of reduced military efficiency in just wars must be weighed against the potential benefits of a widespread rejection of the permissibility of participation […]. as long as we continue to accept [this doctrine], we will deprive ourselves of an important resource for the prevention of unjust wars: namely, the moral conscience of individuals” (238). that sentence succinctly articulates a second part of the thesis of this paper. crucially, unsuccessful attempts to prevent unjust wars by encouraging acts of personal conscientious refusal need not threaten the capacity to wage just wars in response. conscience cuts both ways. but how is this resource to be tapped effectively, given the understandable reluctance of individuals under authority to break ranks when national survival is proclaimed to be at stake, preventing unjust war: the role of the catholic church 12 however speciously? this brings us to the second stage of mcmahan’s argument, to his “practical proposal.” 3b. mcmahan’s practical proposal mcmahan acknowledges that the just war tradition needs greater clarity in its definition of what constitutes “just cause” if it is to “provide soldiers, political leaders, and the global public generally with authoritative guidance in matters of jus ad bellum”—the justice of going to war or not. it is not surprising that he sees this as “a task for moral philosophers.” i would add moral theologians and scholars of the catholic just war tradition. “the next step” in this practical proposal, according to mcmahan, “should be to codify our improved understanding of jus ad bellum in a body of deontic principles stating prohibitions, permissions, and perhaps requirements concerning the resort to war and the continuation of war” (242). he believes it is possible for such principles “to lack the authority of law while nevertheless being more than merely hortatory.” the third step takes us to the heart of the matter: “to establish a court or court-like institution that would interpret and apply the principles to particular cases” (242). even if this court lacked legally-binding authority, its moral authority could inform public debate and influence governmental decision-making, perhaps making it harder for a government to begin or continue what the court judged an unjust war. such a court would not have the responsibility to enforce its findings against individual combatants in a war the court judged unjust. the aim of an ad bellum court, rather, would be to achieve and maintain a reliable degree of independent epistemic authority and therefore of trans-national moral authority (245). mcmahan addresses how such a court could be implemented. first, it would have to be “a congress of eminent and respected authorities [of diverse national and religious (including nonreligious) backgrounds (247)] on international law and just war theory” (246). second, it “would have to be procedurally constrained to ensure that its judgments would be epistemically justified” (247). third, it would “invite submissions from belligerents and welcome briefs from amici curiae [friends of the court]” (247). judges “should be required to recuse themselves from cases involving any state to which they had close ties, such as citizenship” (248). mcmahan acknowledges that such a court might be unlikely to exert much direct influence on “the deliberations of government,” but holds that “it is possible that many soldiers could be persuaded to refuse to fight by the judgment of an ad bellum court that their war was unjust, particularly if 13 bergman the doctrine of permissibility of participation had been discredited in their culture” (248). in short, “the central practical effect of the court would thus be on the consciences of individuals, including soldiers, civilians, and perhaps even a few government officials.” (248) furthermore, mcmahan speculates, “if states could anticipate that a ruling against them by the court might provoke resistance to their unjust war from their citizens and soldiers, thereby threatening their domestic legitimacy, the court could have a significant deterrent effect” (248). mcmahan addresses several problems this court would face, which i mention only in brief. if asked to rule on a war in progress, or a war imminently to begin, the judges might be forced to “compromise between the values of rapidity and soundness of judgment” (249). further, the court “might lack access to empirical information that would be critical to its ability to evaluate a war” (249). here is my own understatement: states have been known to misrepresent facts on the ground to justify putting boots on the ground, from the gulf of tonkin incident during the vietnam war to the question of weapons of mass destruction before the 2003 invasion of iraq. and then there is the issue of classified information, sometimes claimed to justify entry into war on behalf of a citizenry asked to trust their political leaders in a time of alleged national crisis. mcmahan strikes the right note in all this, it seems to me: despite these epistemic challenges, “the important question is not whether an ad bellum court would be infallible, but whether its judgments could be reasonably believed to be more reliable than those of any state or individual” (250). to buttress its epistemic authority, the court could have “its own research staff, each of whom would be a recognized specialist in the history, politics, or culture of a particular state or region” and who would be “on call” to assist the court in its information gathering and analysis (250). mcmahan also addresses some procedural matters. the court “might not issue a judgment that a war was just but only judgments of unjust or not unjust,” so that the court was not perceived to become a party to any war, even one manifestly, to most informed observers, just. the court’s responsibility would be to help resist unjust wars, not to promote just wars. judgments could be issued on the strength of a simple majority vote, but a unanimous or near-unanimous vote would produce “a high degree of credence” with conscientious soldiers faced with making an extremely difficult decision. a strongly divided court would have, of course, the opposite effect (252). with all these procedural challenges to be faced, mcmahan argues nonetheless that “an international, impartial, and disinterested ad bellum court […] would at last offer a reasonable prospect that a war satisfy not just the letter but also the substance of this traditional just war requirement” (253). preventing unjust war: the role of the catholic church 14 however preliminary and speculative this proposal, mcmahan concludes that “we should agree that young people who are commanded by their rulers to risk their lives in order to kill others deserve moral guidance that we know they will not receive from those who seek to use them in this way” (253). james m. dubik, ph.d., lieutenant general (three stars), u.s. army, retired, now senior fellow at the institute for the study of war, articulates compellingly what is at stake for soldiers in such a context: war sometimes involves sacrifices made in vain. losing a battle or engagement, fighting a battle that is unconnected to a larger purpose, being killed or maimed in an unjust, or imprudent, or unnecessary battle or war—any of these can give rise to a sense of betrayal. from any one [of these] can emerge a sense of having one’s life used for no good purpose. any one of these can give birth to a sense of being suckered into losing or risking the most precious thing a human being has—his or her life—or worse: being suckered into ending someone else’s life for no good reason. this kind of smoldering resentment illuminates a deep moral truth: each of us—even our enemies—is a human being, not an object. as human beings, each of us has moral worth beyond our instrumental utility to a task or to society. demanding that a soldier risks his or her life for no good reason is to treat that soldier as an object, not a human being. this is, perhaps, the ultimate moral injury, another manifestation of war’s hellishness.7 in effect, it is to avert such “ultimate moral injury” that mcmahan’s proposal, and my response to it, are addressed. 4. the role of the catholic church in this final section, it remains to sketch out what contribution the catholic church might make in bringing to reality this proposal by jeff mcmahan for preventing unjust war—and therefore war itself. i do so in nine observations. first, it should be remembered that since the time of bishop ambrose of milan in the late fourth century and bishop augustine of hippo in the early fifth century, the church has been the primary carrier and developer of the just war tradition that 15 bergman informs mcmahan’s proposal, even as that tradition has been secularized in international law and in the work of moral philosophers like walzer and mcmahan. second, i believe it is fair to say that no ethical tradition gives higher value and authority to personal conscience than does catholicism, at least in theory. there is a straight line from the primacy of conscience as articulated by thomas aquinas8 to the catechism of the catholic church, which quotes cardinal john henry newman’s assertion that conscience is “the aboriginal vicar of christ.”9 according to aquinas, in james keenan’s paraphrase, “it is better to die excommunicated than to violate our conscience.”10 third, the church has in recent years begun the no doubt long struggle to discredit within its own culture what mcmahan calls “the doctrine of permissibility of participation” by officially endorsing the right of selective conscientious objection, as evident in many documents of the u.s. bishops during and after the vietnam war and in the compendium of the social doctrine of the catholic church published in 2004 during the reign of john paul ii.11 in brief, the church’s teaching on the primacy of conscience in all matters and the church’s teaching on the ethics of war have now been joined. whether this new position is being taught in catholic parishes, schools, seminaries, or universities is a different matter. such a sea change in church practice, however, is clearly the logical inference of the teaching itself, if that teaching is to be taken seriously. fourth, the catholic church has become truly global and is the largest religious affiliation in the world, with over a billion adherents, many of whom serve in governments and militaries on six continents. in terms of demographics and centralized authoritative teaching, the church is positioned like no other human entity to influence world affairs around issues of war and conscience. fifth, the church has within its ranks untold numbers of experts and scholars in the various disciplines mcmahan argues should comprise an ad bellum court of international, impartial, disinterested judges. imagine the congress of such persons that could be assembled just from the hundreds of catholic universities in the united states alone. sixth, i am not arguing, however, that a catholic version of the world court mcmahan proposes would in itself instantiate fully what he has in mind. he explicitly calls for a court made up of diverse perspectives, religious and non-religious. such a court would have the advantage of speaking at least potentially to all peoples, of all religions and none. if the catholic church were to establish its own jus ad bellum court, its priority would be to provide guidance to catholics, especially those serving in the military or in governments. i see it as a matter of institutional integrity that the church would provide such guidance to its young, as mcmahan rightly advises preventing unjust war: the role of the catholic church 16 cannot be expected from governments. a transnational and trans-religious court could and should still be established, along the lines of mcmahan’s proposal. two courts might indeed be better than one, although the potential for disagreement and competition cannot be denied. catholics would then have to decide which authority and which argument were most persuasive. what mcmahan says about disagreement within a court would itself be edifying, if only to demonstrate the difficulty of making judgments about the justifiability of a pending or current war. seventh, the church is clearly in a moment of ferment regarding the future of the just war tradition and the practice of nonviolent peacebuilding, as suggested not only by the 2016 conference in rome but also by the second vatican council’s call more than fifty years earlier “to undertake an evaluation of war with an entirely new attitude.”12 that new attitude has remained unspecified, unless it can be identified with the recent popes’ increasingly skeptical perspective on the practice of war in the modern world. there has never been an encyclical on just war, nonviolence, peacebuilding, and the role of conscience, but perhaps now is the time. eighth, in the dicastery for promoting integral human development (formerly the pontifical council on justice and peace), the church has in germ the kind of ad bellum court mcmahan calls for. perhaps the council does not itself take on the role of the court, but rather takes responsibility for establishing, staffing, and supervising such a court, whose judges would be drawn from all the relevant disciplines, from many countries and cultures, representing diverse political perspectives—but all united by a critical loyalty to the catholic just war tradition and its continuing development and real-world application. my ninth and final observation is that when franz jägerstätter of austria became the first officially recognized martyr of the catholic just war tradition, beatified by pope benedict xvi in 2007 as a conscientious objector to the wars of nazi germany, his “reference group,” over and against the politically compliant churches of germany and austria, was the church of the martyrs of the early christian centuries. his witness was indeed solitary, if not unique.13 perhaps the second miracle needed for his canonization could be that the catholic church of the twenty-first century takes the just war tradition as seriously as he did. to blessed franz’s ancient church of the martyrs could be added a modern court of catholic moral authority. to paraphrase mcmahan in this new context: “we should agree that [catholic] young people who are commanded by their rulers to risk their lives in order to kill others deserve moral guidance [from their church] that we know they will not receive from those who seek to use them in this way” (253). this would be precisely the 17 bergman type of moral guidance young germans and austrians did not receive from their bishops and pastors in the 1930s and 1940s. 5. a concluding counterfactual narrative to conclude, let me pose this counterfactual scenario, as a way of concretizing how a catholic jus ad bellum court might play out. shortly after the close of the second vatican council, let us imagine, pope paul vi established a catholic court of war and peace, made up of widely respected jurists and legal scholars, international affairs experts, and moral theologians, with responsibility to evaluate imminent and current wars according to the catholic just war tradition, which it articulated in newly robust and precise terms. suppose that by the turn of the millennium, this court had achieved a substantial degree of credibility in its epistemic and moral authority, as it weighed in on various wars across the globe, whether or not it had definitively prevented or halted any of them. suppose that in the run-up to the invasion of iraq in march, 2003, this court was empowered by the pope to publish a deeply informed judgment about the justifiability of the proposed u.s.led war against saddam hussein. suppose further that the court issued a near-unanimous decision that such an invasion would be unjust, for all the reasons that were in fact advanced by catholic and other just war ethicists at the time, but with the kind of credibility and global influence that not even the pope on his own, in ad hoc commentary, could muster. suppose, perhaps even more boldly, that selective conscientious objection had been taught in catholic high schools and colleges throughout the united states. suppose that teachers, pastors, and even some parents urged catholic men and women in uniform not to assume that they had no choice but to deploy as ordered, if such orders did in fact come. suppose that public surveys revealed that a not insignificant number of catholics, and others as well, were planning to refuse, and that they had the support of many citizens, pastors, and bishops. would president bush have proceeded anyway? suppose that catholics in the military understood that serving in an unjust war risked not only their lives and limbs, but also their moral integrity, over against “the ultimate moral injury.”14 but the point, of course, is not to imagine stopping a disastrous war that has already happened. it is to stop the next unjust war. does anyone seriously doubt that the occasion will arise? inspired by its own newly robust moral engagement with the problem of war, the catholic church could make a significant contribution to world peace—by being true to its own tradition. preventing unjust war: the role of the catholic church 18 notes 1. pope francis, “nonviolence: a style of politics for peace,” january 1, 2017, https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/peace/documents/papafrancesco_20161208_messaggio-l-giornata-mondiale-pace-2017.html. the following several quotations all come from this address. 2. augustine, letter 189.6 (to the roman general boniface [418 c.e.]), in louis j. swift, the early fathers on war and military service (wilmington, de: michael glazier, 1983), 115. note that i do not mean to suggest, anachronistically, that augustine was anticipating gandhian methods of nonviolent resistance. 3. national conference of catholic bishops, the challenge of peace: god’s promise and our response, may 3, 1983, http://www.usccb.org/upload/challenge-peace-gods-promiseour-response-1983.pdf. 4. “an appeal to the catholic church to recommit to the centrality of gospel nonviolence,” http://www.paxchristi.net/news/appeal-catholic-church-recommit-centrality-gospelnonviolence/5855#sthash.xmzfnxlk.dpbs. 5. yitzhak benbaji and naomi sussman, eds., reading walzer (london: routledge, 2014), 229. 6. jeff mcmahan, “the prevention of unjust wars,” in reading walzer, 233–255, at 236. subsequent citations to this chapter will be indicated parenthetically within the text. 7. james m. dubik, foreword: “expanding our understanding of the moral dimension of war,” in nancy sherman, afterwar: healing the moral wounds of our soldiers (oxford: oxford university press, 2015), xv. italics in original. 8. aquinas’s fullest treatment of conscience is in truth, vol. 2, qq. 16–17 (chicago: henry regnery, 1953), 300–337. 19 bergman 9. the catechism of the catholic church, http://www.vatican.va/archive/eng0015/__p5y.htm. the article on moral conscience is part 3, section 1, chapter 1, article 6. 10. james keenan, s.j., “st. thomas aquinas and ethics today,” blackfriars 75/884 (july/august 1994): 358. 11. see roger bergman, “conscientious objection to unjust war: from augustine to john paul ii,” journal of religion and society supplement 14 (2017): 28–43, https://dspace2.creighton.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10504/109258/2017-7.pdf. 12. gaudium et spes, 1965, §80, http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vatii_cons_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html. 13. see my “toward a sociology of conscience: the example of franz jägerstätter and the legacy of gordon zahn,” journal for peace and justice studies 23/2 (2014): 73–97. 14. this paper does not address the question of making selective conscientious objection a legal right. obviously soldiers would be less inclined to refuse deployment if that meant facing courts-martial. but if the numbers of scos were significant and threatened to overwhelm a military court system, the deterrent effect would be substantial, and refusals in even modest numbers would raise unavoidable public concern and debate about the war in question. this subject deserves much fuller treatment than can be given here. but see andrea ellner, paul robinson, and david whetham, eds., when soldiers say no: selective conscientious objection in the modern military (farnham, uk: ashgate, 2015). microsoft word renna charlemagne.docx [expositions 9.2 (2015) 35–79] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 saint louis ix and holy roman emperor frederick iii thomas renna saginaw valley state university (emeritus) abstract throughout the middle ages the french and the germans have vied with each other in their attempts to integrate the figure of charlemagne into their perceptions of national identity. both legacies envisioned charles the great as a prototypical christian ruler, crusader, pilgrim, and promoter of the arts of civilization. but for the french, as exemplified by st. louis ix (1226–70), charlemagne remained primarily a role model for their monarchs, including the valois, and a hero of the chansons de geste. for the germans, as personified by the habsburg emperor frederick iii (1440–93), charlemagne embodied the roman empire and the german nation. he was a saint with historical roots going back to the trojans. far more than the french, the late medieval germans emphasized the imperial traditions as they were represented in the memory of karl der grosse. “your holiness is sovereign in rome, but i am emperor of rome.” —to pope pius vii, 13 feb 1806 “i am charlemagne, the sword of the church, and their emperor [the people of rome][.]” —to cardinal fesch, 18 feb 18061 exactly two years earlier in 1804 napoleon announced that he was emperor of the french. throughout that summer the moniteur ran articles which compared napoleon to charlemagne as the restorer of the glory of france, the arts of civilization, and the equality of all people.2 at once the emperor had combined the french and german understandings of the memory of charlemagne. he produced an amalgam of the french, german, and roman traditions. how in fact did the french and the germans incorporate charlemagne into their national saint louis ix and holy roman emperor frederick iii 36 identities during the later middle ages? how did these two traditions differ? it is argued here that charlemagne was for the french monarchy primarily a role model for their kings. but for the germans charlemagne was used to integrate the nation, the roman empire, and the core of the holy roman empire, germany. charlemagne is unique in the history of western political thought because of his sizable presence in the national narratives of both france and germany during the late medieval era. in each instance this son of pippin was absorbed into their mutual search for a national identity. the first question concerns the nationality of charles himself. many of the carolingian-based chansons de geste naturally portray him as “french,” on the assumption that french and frankish are synonymous.3 if we assume that the germans were also franks, we can accept charles as french of some kind, even if his first language was probably german. as the capetians sought to clarify their distinct qualities as the descendants of the (west) franks, they generally preferred to think of charlemagne as an ethnic frank.4 that he was an ancestor of the capetians was a given, even if this assumption required some adjustment of the chronicles.5 the early rivalry between the robertians and the carolingians was not permitted to interfere with the carolingian ancestry of the capetians. thirteenth-century chroniclers, however, were more interested in the bloodline of the capetian family than in the “nationality” of the son of pippin.6 the french tradition with regard to france, why did charlemagne become tied to saint louis ix (1226–70) more than any other french monarch in the middle ages? this connection was likely inevitable, since the idealization of king louis would naturally be juxtaposed to the most eulogized of all previous rulers after constantine. prior to louis ix the myth of charlemagne had long been identified with: 1) a lost golden age, which might someday return, or at least provide a standard for future leaders. the various biographies of charlemagne, chronicles, and frankish annals kept alive this memory of this blissful era of peace and plenty.7 2) this paradise of yore was also a time of the franks, a folk who were endowed with every virtue. 3) there were many vernacular accounts of charlemagne’s adventures, such as the descriptio qualiter,8 the oxford chanson de geste, the charroux privilegium, vita karoli magni,9 pseudo-turpin,10 and numerous tales of the king’s adventures in spain and southern 37 renna france, not to mention the holy land. the memory of charlemagne in thirteenth-century france was inescapable. in addition to this vast body of tales about the “french” emperor there were the persistent echoes of the last emperor, who will lay down his weapons on mount moriah prior to the end-time. while these esoteric prophecies were more prevalent in germany, they also circulated in france.11 although the association of louis ix with this collection of source material about the wanderings of charlemagne was not strong, it can be assumed that louis’s contemporaries made these connections, especially with charlemagne’s pilgrimages to jerusalem. in the legends charles was the prototype crusader and pilgrim. 4) thirteenth-century french chronicles expanded the links between the capetian ancestry and its “founder” charlemagne.12 for the french polemicists who advanced the eminence of saint-denis, the royal abbey became a sort of alter-aachen.13 an elaborate series of techniques was devised to cement the bond with the carolingians and saint-denis, with its royal necropolis and mystique of monarchy. it took some chutzpah to make the patron (st. denis was the patron saint of the realm, while st. genevieve was the patron of paris) of the kingdom, charlemagne, into the protector of the capetian dynasty. fanciful genealogies were devised to merge the capetian line with that of the carolingians. the ancient trojans were counted among the capetian ancestors.14 5) a peculiarity of capetian myth-making was the absorption of the venerable symbols of the kingdom of the west franks into the royal heritage. the images of the fleur-de-lys and the oriflamme were integrated with the symbols of the capetian dynasty.15 yet, despite the parallels between louis ix and charlemagne, the adoption of “carolingian” symbols of authority was sparse, as the capetians tried to define their own identity and unique mission in history. many of louis’s seals portray him more like roman caesars or staufen emperors (with suggestions of the carolingian/ottonian christ-in-majesty motif) than the carolingian types.16 the use of the traditional title of rex francorum could be ambiguous enough to suggest an imperial self-perception, given that the restriction of the royal title to the “west” franks had been abandoned centuries earlier. louis did on occasion adopt the more “nationalistic” rex francie,17 a residue of the former duchy of francia, and now extended to the entire kingdom of the franks. the use of francia implies a much smaller version of the original empire under charlemagne. in the vast literature written during and shortly after the reign of saint louis, the direct identification with charlemagne is not saint louis ix and holy roman emperor frederick iii 38 pronounced.18 the partisans of louis show little interest in charlemagne the saint or in his imperial ambitions. they sometimes portray the french king as the defender of the pope against bad emperors, such as frederick ii.19 the king might be emperor in his own realm, but the french sources prefer to render imperator in the classical sense of “authority” rather than in the sense of territorial dominion. the french, to be sure, often portray charlemagne as a saint, imbued with virtue, zeal for the faith, and devoted to sacred relics.20 but, although the french had little trouble with the manner of charlemagne’s canonization (he was declared a saint by an antipope in 1165),21 they generally depict charles’s virtues as secular, a mighty warrior who fights for god and church.22 louis, as the second charlemagne, is hardly noticeable in the hagiographical and canonization sources. there was no attempt to make charlemagne a prototype for the election of the king or the royal succession. there was no “election” in 1226; philip iii succeeded his father louis by hereditary right in 1270, not by election. there was no french equivalent of the german custom of the seven electors who chose the king of the romans, afterwards duly crowned at aachen.23 few if any thought of the twelve peers of france of the chansons de geste as anything but a charming fiction.24 if there were models for louis’s behavior, according to the hagiographical sources, it would be solomon, david,25 or josiah.26 what, then, are the carolingian virtues which accrue to the capetian rex? they can be reduced to three: dispenser of justice, giver of the law (or, more accurately, affirming existing custom, although in practice this could have the effect of making law), and crusading. in the hagiographical sources for louis, charlemagne appears more as the prototype sovereign than as the archetypical christian king. for the christian virtues as such, the french authors refer more often to holy scripture, saints’ lives, church fathers, and more recent christian authors, such as bernard of clairvaux.27 this reticence to associate charlemagne too closely with the capetian saint can be seen in the canonization literature and propaganda which emanated from the court of his grandson, philip iv the fair.28 one way to partially bypass charlemagne as a dynastic ancestor would be to return to king clovis as the founder of the royal line, as the valois monarchs would often do. since the valois had to distinguish themselves from their capetian predecessors, they often juxtaposed “saint” clovis to louis ix as a founder of the french monarchy. clovis too was made a prototype christian and ideal ruler. charles vii even elevated himself to a second clovis.29 but while the literary references to charlemagne continued to proliferate in france during 1300–1500, the impact on political thought was minimal. one would have to wait for the french kings charles v,30 charles viii,31 francis i,32 henry iv,33 and louis xiv34 for more explicit attempts to elicit 39 renna charlemagne as an ancestor or dynastic founder. in 1475 louis xi declared january 28 the feast of saint charlemagne, who possessed great virtue and performed saintly deeds. from that day until to 1790 when the revolution abolished it, the parlement of paris officially celebrated this feast, although in practice the cult of saint charlemagne always remained tepid in france.35 in 1454 a painting of the crucifixion which included the figures of charlemagne and saint louis was placed in the great hall of the royal palace, meant to symbolize the triumph of divine justice. the french higher clergy never recognized the canonization of 1165.36 interestingly the university of paris in 1478 requested the translatio studii—a contentious issue since the thirteenth century, when the french generally conceded the translatio imperii to the germans in exchange for the transfer of learning to the more civilized french—to be taken from the university of athens to paris. charlemagne in the view of the arts faculty of the university of paris had translated learning from rome to paris. charlemagne could never quite shake loose from the merry ole soul of the chansons de geste. charlemagne remained for the french mainly an exemplar for their kings, capetian and beyond. and, even then, the great frank was not always a paragon of virtue; he is sometimes portrayed in the chansons as erratic and tyrannical, capable of cruelty, as in the chanson d’aspremont37 and the huon de bordeaux.38 oddly some of these unflattering images of charlemagne made their way into german translations in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.39 thus the association of saint louis with charlemagne during the capetians’ reign was rather casual. there were attempts to claim charlemagne as a blood ancestor or in some sense ethnic “french” or frankish. charlemagne was vaguely seen as a universal monarch and as a conqueror. contemporary or near contemporary vitae portray louis as the just ruler who maintained the peace, both within and outside the realm. during the period of the hearings of the canonization, 1277–97, the miracles testify to his manner of living. these texts focus on his ascetic behavior and humility. the king was zealous in defending the church and the faith; raised his children in the true religion; distributed alms; lived chastely; attended mass and liturgical offices frequently; prayed privately; showed compassion to the needy; meted out justice; confessed often; legislated wisely; showed devotion to holy relics; washed the feet of the poor, and fed them at his table; built sainte-chapelle; hated oath-taking and blasphemy; wore a hair shirt and performed many bodily penances, including fasting. the canonization documents, divine offices in his name, sermons, lives, and a multitude of anecdotes reveal a model christian ruler and prototype lay christian.40 the oblique allusions to charlemagne affirm these christ-like qualities, with little hint of a “theory” of kingship or empire. there is barely a suggestion of ecclesiastical restraints, although louis is zealous in protecting the church and its possessions. saint louis ix and holy roman emperor frederick iii 40 louis’s publicists display little interest in importing a prominent imperial concept of the staufen emperors, that of “honor.” the idea of the honor imperii permeates the registers of frederick i, henry vi, and frederick ii.41 some of the canonization texts refer to this notion of honor but they decline to pursue the possibilities of imperial reach for the french king.42 jacob of lausanne contrasts the honor of the king’s earthly rule as a mirror of the honor of his “rule” in the kingdom of heaven. louis in effect governs as christ the king on earth, referring to solomon as his model. this idea of honor, made almost in passing, stands in contrast to the german emphasis on the emperor, who acted as a stand-in for his ancestor charlemagne, as the embodiment of the honor imperii in the aristocratic courts of the staufen emperors, in particular frederick barbarossa. for the next two centuries after louis ix his literary image in france was based primarily on the canonization documents, particularly those of geoffrey of beaulieu, william of nangis, william of chartres, and yves of saint denis, as well as the liturgical tradition.43 perhaps the royal court during the hundred years war did not find the pious louis an adequate model for the valois monarchs in wartime. the immensely popular chansons de geste which included charlemagne seemed difficult to integrate into the legacy of the cultic louis. besides, charlemagne was too closely identified with notions of empire and universalism, which seemed extraneous during the country’s struggle for survival against the english nemesis. not coincidentally the memory of charlemagne began to receive more attention during the times of recovery and expansion of louis xi, charles viii, and francis i. (philip the good, duke of burgundy, saw in charlemagne, clovis, and the trojans the origins of his order of the golden fleece.44) try as they might to transpose charlemagne into a prototype french rex, the emperor was, in the end, just that, an emperor. one might say that for the french the name of the great charlemagne was tied (prior to the sixteenth century) to the idea of a national king. while for the other descendants, the germans across the rhine, charlemagne remained wedded to the notion of a universal imperator. charlemagne was for the capetians less an emperor than a “king of france.”45 it might be added parenthetically that well into the fifteenth century (and beyond) the french and the germans continued to quarrel about the nationality of charlemagne. the german tradition the german tradition of charlemagne after 1300 is in some ways similar to the french. in the literature of the holy roman empire [hre] karl der grosse was often portrayed as a national (ethnically german, as imprecise as this designation can be, as well as a speaker of “german,” however one describes the language in the rhineland c. 800); as a model ruler (typified by his 41 renna enforcement of good laws and the rendering of sound justice); as “holy” in the sense that he was canonized a saint, anointed by a leading prelate, and practiced christian virtue; as the protagonist in numerous chansons de geste; as in some sense “roman” since he utilizes roman law and compares himself to some roman emperors of old. but these similarities are superficial. the charlemagne of the french chansons was substantially different from the german imperator as a latter-day karl. the point of divergence is that charlemagne is above all an emperor in german political thought. the german emperors during 1300–1500, it is argued here, integrated charlemagne into their theories of the hre in ways the polemical writers considered specifically german. the culmination of this synthesis of charlemagne and german traditions occurred during the reign of emperor frederick iii (1440–93), after which time the universalist component of the hre became more prominent. the received tradition of the process of the incorporation of charlemagne into german imperial thought in the fifteenth century centers on the germanization of charles after the great schism. the classic expression of the heritage appears in the works of robert folz,46 whose interpretations continue to be cited almost without qualification. but the term “germanization” is vague. it claims too much and too little. too much, because many german sources in the early habsburg era do not insist on charlemagne being an ethnic german, and often give otto i the great the honor of being the first truly german emperor. too little, because there were other elements in the notion of the hre which gave the imperium its unique cast, in particular, the way in which the emperor was elected. in hindsight it was perhaps inevitable that germany became the place of extensive writing on political ideas during the later middle ages. the amount of tracts on basic political concepts— which might be called the origin of western “political science”—during 1250–1500, and especially 1300–1360, is large, in contrast to the sparse quantity of political literature in france at the same time. the reason for this big bang of words is not hard to identify: 1) there were ambiguities in all three attributes of the hre and how they related to each other. there was little agreement on even the name of the hre!47 it was called simply the empire or the kingdom, or even the hre of the german nation. 2) the constant interaction with the papacy, not to mention the endless discussion about the details of the papal coronation and its implications. 3) the relationship between germania48 (loosely defined as most of the empire, excluding burgundy, austria, and some eastern principalities) and italy. saint louis ix and holy roman emperor frederick iii 42 4) the powers and electoral function of the prince-electors. 5) the relationship between the electors and the other estates of the empire. 6) the translation of empire. 7) the relationships with france and the byzantine empire, always sources of tension. 8) the odd amalgam of hereditary and/or elective succession. not only were the boundaries of the empire in flux, but so was the connection between the ruler’s ancestral lands and the other parts of the imperium. after 1300 imperialists relied more on history (mainly by means of chronicles) than on canon law, roman law, scripture and scriptural exegesis, church fathers, theological tracts, and homilies to make their case for the emperor. hence the almost inevitable high status attributed to the prototype charlemagne, who was ready-made for any proposal in favor of augmenting imperial potestas. indeed it could be argued that the figure of charlemagne was the pivot around which late medieval german imperial-papal thought revolved. our concern here is with the narrow issue of the place of charlemagne in the attempts to give a “german” stamp to the hre during the fifteenth century. any assessment of the role of charlemagne in fifteenth-century german political thought must begin with the nature of the sources that the imperialist authors utilize. writers in the previous century seem to assume that historical fontes have legal force, almost like english common law. to bypass the papalist appeals to church councils, canon law, scripture, exegesis, and theology, imperialist polemicists during 1330–60 looked to chronicles—local as well as “world”49—to demonstrate how charlemagne’s actions were relevant at the time they were writing. lupold of bebenburg constructed a grand theory of imperial power to counter both the electors and the popes. of course historical texts, like any texts, could be interpreted in different ways; lupold’s creative reading of the carolingian chronicles was typical of his time.50 lupold might have been surprised to know that his own writing would be used extensively in the next century as a “historical” source!51 he was a moderate imperialist who resisted the extreme claims of the electors—that they were solely responsible for the choice of emperor and his constitutional powers—and the papalists, who insisted that only the papal unction and coronation (and papal approbation) conferred on the emperor-elect his power and even his right to exercise this power. lupold’s approach was to virtually identify the realm of “germany” with the reich,52 as if the hre were a normal state just like, say, the regnum of france. he cut the gordian knot of how to reconcile king and emperor by making charlemagne the originator of both. lupold’s controlling 43 renna idea is that charlemagne possessed full imperial authority—in burgundy and italy as well as germany—before he was crowned imperator by pope leo iii in rome in 800.53 germania was the core (to use the modern parlance of empire-speak) of the hre, with the “additions” of burgundy and italia.54 (this is an effective approach for polemical purposes, for it permits lupold to “save” otto i as the one who “recovered” burgundy and italy for the empire as it was during the mythic time of karl der grosse; otto thus keeps his venerable role as the first truly “german” emperor.) thus germany was a bona fide principality in its own right. but the pope’s coronation is necessary because a) by this act the empire is transferred from the greeks to the franks55 (who are “german,” but the full translation to the germani would have to wait until otto i), and b) the title of emperor (later, emperor of the romans) was now bestowed on the rex romanorum (a later usage). lupold would have charlemagne the beneficiary (and his descendants) of hereditary succession,56 although the function of election would later be assimilated with dynastic right; some combination of hereditary and election was necessary to account for both procedures following the ottonians. by the time of frederick iii this notion of full imperial power by virtue of the selection of the german princes at frankfurt was a given, which effectively precluded the necessity of a papal crowning. fifteenth-century writers often cited lupold as a definitive source. another oft-cited chronicle was that of sigebert, a monk of gembloux (1030–1112), whose world history had several continuations by several authors. perhaps reflecting opinions in his native brabant, sigebert vigorously opposed the intervention of pope gregory vii, and in response upheld imperial authority. his chronicle was highly regarded in the german late middle ages. he places charlemagne at a turning point in world history, when the empire passed to the franks, inaugurating a new era of justice and christian piety. charles possessed the full imperial potestas even before the pope crowned him emperor in 800. with his carolingian successors, charles began a new mission for the german volk, which was continued successfully by the ottonians and the salians. (the capetians of course assigned this ongoing imperial mission to their own line of kings.) when the pope anointed charlemagne, the line of succession began;57 when he crowned him, the latter was already imperator.58 charlemagne was made emperor by acclamation;59 the pope’s coronation simply confirmed charlemagne’s imperial status when he gave him the title of caesar and augustus.60 the imperial title of frederick iii, it might be noted, was associated with that of karolus magnus.61 to minimize the constitutional effect of the coronation of 800, the translatio imperii was sometimes described as a series of stages. the flores temporum (1300)62 would have a succession of three popes, as would martin of troppau.63 another common approach was to deny any transfer saint louis ix and holy roman emperor frederick iii 44 of empire, attributing the empire of charlemagne or otto i as either a direct descendant of ancient rome or as an empire acquired by just war. nicholas of cusa is typical in denying the translatio— and indeed denying the authenticity of the donation of constantine—to charlemagne from the greeks by means of the pontiff. cusa simply sidesteps the question of transfer by assigning charlemagne’s temporal power to wars of conquest; after all, the classical imperator means “one who rules.” the romans transferred their power to the emperor but retained their superiority over him; they later made otto i emperor.64 one of the most widely cited authorities in the german later middle ages was godfrey of viterbo, who wrote extensively at the time of frederick barbarossa. godfrey uses a variety of sources—sometimes fictional—to link the german emperor with charlemagne and his predecessors, the roman imperatores.65 the implication is that barbarossa possessed complete imperial power prior to the papal coronation. the peculiar belief that the concept of the right of the german princes (eventually fixed at seven electors, later expanded by the habsburgs) was a gift of pope gregory v was cited by godfrey of viterbo, who conveyed it to later centuries.66 imperialists in the fifteenth century did not conceive of this papal grant as a threat to imperial authority. they viewed it as simply the papal confirmation of a pre-existing right (a right which preceded the events of christmas 800). the important chronicle of johann (jacob) of königshafen (1336–1420)67 translated the power of the emperor to charlemagne, who communicated it to his imperial successors.68 there were many other chronicles and vernacular works during 1100–1300 which glorify karl der grosse and his connections with the hre.69 a typical chronicler is heinrich of herford, who makes charlemagne the first emperor of the germans, who bestowed many privileges on his “homeland” and aachen.70 the poet lohengrin carries on this tradition as the cause of the translatio imperii to the germans.71 the influence of these earlier chronicles on the fifteenth century can be seen in the famous nuremburg chronicle (1493), which illustrates how deeply the carolingian heritage had penetrated early habsburg historical writing.72 the author, hartmann schedel, has otto i complete the transfer of the empire, begun by charlemagne (german by birth), to the germans.73 charlemagne’s latest successor, frederick iii today, continues to rule the “germans.” when frederick iii was crowned at milan and rome, he brought with him from nuremburg some of charlemagne’s possessions: podium, sword, scepter, orb, crown. later, maximilian i too was crowned with the diadem of charlemagne, as designated by the golden bull.74 schedel is careful to specify the rank and order of the princes, who are supposed to rule the empire in harmony with the emperor. many of these tracts were well known at imperial courts at the time of sigismund and frederick iii. it goes without saying that many of these pre–1300 works make charlemagne a german or 45 renna franco-german.75 the implication is that charlemagne translated the empire to the germans, and that he did so by virtue of his nationality/ethnicity as a german, although the validity of the latter is left ambiguous. the seemingly esoteric issue of ethnicity—the standard evidence given is that he was born in ingelheim—was not academic, since some german authors felt compelled to counter the claims of saint denis, the “french” charlemagne of the chansons de geste, and the carolingian ancestry advanced by the partisans of louis ix. it must be emphasized that the fifteenth-century contentious question of charlemagne’s germanness had a firm basis in wellknown writings, considered authoritative, such as those of alexander of roes, vincent of beauvais, sigebert, martin of troppau, godfrey of viterbo, and lupold of bebenburg. after 1400 the need to integrate the historical charlemagne intensified because of new challenges to the integrity of the hre: the emperor’s relationship to the general council, particularly basel; the internal threat of dissents such as the hussites in bohemia; the external danger posed by the ottoman turks in the east; the growing demands of the electors and estates; the rising power of austria in the hre—and the uncertain status of hungary—and its relation to germania; the justification for the emperor to be the arbiter between pope and council(s). understandably the imperialist writers sought to strengthen the imperial authority in the hre. given the penchant for historical argument at the time, the blessing of charlemagne would be supportive. the trick was to make charles a german without magnifying the powers of the princes, who seemed to quarrel endlessly. the resolution lay in making the election of the emperor a specifically “german” ritual, without however diluting his auctoritas vis-à-vis the electors or the estates or the supreme priest in rome. the defenders of frederick iii obtained help from an unexpected source: the humanists, given their fascination with geographical places in the classical quellen. a common solution to the problem of what constituted the quidditas of the hre was to designate the german electors as the defining characteristic of this unique empire.76 the authors strive mightily to make this special group the source of imperial power, and the centerpiece of executive, legislative, and judicial authority without sacrificing the emperor’s rights. in the chronicle of hermann korner (1365–1438) charlemagne is a germanic frank who transferred the empire to the franks.77 the empire passed to the germans under henry i, but otto i was the first german-speaking emperor, with the same imperial potestas as charlemagne.78 not all the chronicles make leo iii the instrument of the translation of empire to charlemagne. some assign this role to stephen.79 it must be noted that the function of otto i is not diminished by these allusions in the chronicles to charlemagne as the means of the transfer of imperial power from the greeks to the franks or germans. there was a veritable cult of otto i in the fifteenth century as saint louis ix and holy roman emperor frederick iii 46 the prototype of the german emperor, who was often seen as the restorer of the carolingian empire.80 one of the literary masterpieces of this genre of attempting to define the hre in its relation to the electors is the treatise (1460) of peter of andlau (1420–80), which might be compared to the de iuribus of lupold of bebenburg for its scope and originality. a professor of the two laws at basel, peter tried to make the positions of the emperor and the electors relevant to the era following the council of basel; to rally support for a crusade to recover constantinople; to call for reform of the german church, a major theme in the hre after 1440; to prod frederick iii, the electors and the princes, and the new pope, pius ii, to cooperate for the common good. he gives considerable attention to charlemagne’s part in translating the empire from the greeks to the germans, while defending the church and the faith.81 following a commonly held belief, charles is portrayed as the patrician who translated the empire to the germans.82 king charles became emperor in rome in 800; he established a wide-ranging government of princes and scribes in germany and italy.83 he rules the “kingdom of germany” with his princes.84 peter rejects the suggestion that pope leo transferred the empire to the germans. charlemagne, who was born at ingelheim, was after all a german,85 who ruled over many other regions which had been parts of the roman empire. citing godfrey of viterbo, peter notes that karl had a roman mother and a german father.86 that the germans were destined to rule the empire was prophesied by saint peter. the exceptional virtues of the german people can be traced to their ancestors, which included the trojans, who even gave them their language.87 the high virtues of the romans and the trojans were passed on, by way of charlemagne’s translatio imperii, to frederick barbarossa and otto i, to german counts and barons—and to the habsburgs of today!88 special status in imperial administration goes to the princes of the palatine, brunswick, lotharingia, and swabia, and the various dignitaries, both ecclesiastical and secular, under them. thus charlemagne’s translation effectively combines a moral component—the right to rule—and a legal one (the right to elect and to govern for the public welfare). the great karl stamps the hre with an indelible mark. but while the hre may be a regnum like any other kingdom in some sense (as had argued lupold), it is unique because of the institution of the seven electors. in a clever tour de force peter minimizes pope gregory v’s “gift” of this electoral procedure by inserting it in a process which started with charlemagne himself.89 for the institution was simply one part of the gradual translation of the empire to the germans. initially there were four elector-princes, which were among other princes, including marquis, counts, barons, and cities. later charles iv confirmed this tradition of election in his golden bull.90 the empire is holy because emperors and princes together swear to defend the church and the faith. charlemagne was of course not elected emperor 47 renna by the germans, whether electors or otherwise. (historians still debate the meaning of “german” in the eighth century.) but when karl transferred the empire to the germans he in effect transmitted the right to elect along with it. with his imperial title he united the germans and the romans, thereby making possible the later title imperator romanorum.91 thus the practice of choosing the rex romanorum at frankfurt was not an invention of otto i or otto iii, but part of the historical process in which the empire was given to the germans. gregory v’s grant was in fact a mere recognition that the germans already possessed this right to elect (and then the anointment and crowning at aachen) their king, a king who thereby held full imperial power. and the seven electors are not only electors, but representatives of all german princes. the establishment of the electors is peculiarly german, and cannot be used to select a non-german.92 for peter, the two coronations in milan and rome following the events at frankfurt and aachen93 confirm the power bestowed on the emperor by the german princes. on the delicate question of whether the electors vote as individuals or as a corporate group (collegio),94 peter opts for the latter, which he sees as somehow participating in imperial administration. (he probably would have had second thoughts about this suggestion when he passed away in 1480, after which time the electors posed a greater threat to frederick’s authority. after 1500 maximilian i would learn to tame the electoral college.) the intensity of the discussion about the identity and purpose of the electors and the reichstag is indicated by the literature and artistic depictions after 1450. the intensity of the discussion about the identity and the function of the electors is evidenced by the literature95 and artistic depictions96 after 1450. thus charlemagne was the major historical figure who was responsible for translating the hre to the germans, and indirectly giving them their uniquely german institutions of election and coronation (at aachen). for peter of andlau, karl der grosse was the prototype ruler with a strong centralized authority, while permitting maximum participation of the princes in administrating the empire, reforming the church, upholding the catholic religion, arbitrating disputes within the hre, and, by implication, organizing a crusade against the infidel. what is important for our purposes here, the german writers often use charlemagne to connect the hre to the traditions of the electors; to translate the empire to the germans; to shore up central power; to expand territorial boundaries (by diplomacy and marriage in addition to armed force); and to confer privileges on aachen. typical is dietrich of niem (1340–1418), who, like lupold, refers to the emperor as “imperator vel rex romanorum.”97 the germans were born warriors who equaled the romans. it is fitting that the nobles—including the electors—carry on the roman and carolingian traditions to the germans, who would emulate charlemagne the german, who was born at ingelheim.98 he anticipated the transferal of the empire to the saxons under the ottonians. charles’s privileges to saint louis ix and holy roman emperor frederick iii 48 aachen gave a special status to the saxons in the kingdom of alemania.99 god instituted the principle of princely election of the emperor for the good of the church and the christian people.100 like many writers in the fifteenth century, peter of andlau and dietrich emphasized the need for cooperation between emperor and pope, the general council having declined as an authority. a widespread tendency of the time was to model empire and church on each other, as largely separate administrations of spirituals and temporals. neoplatonic paradigms could be used to construct arguments in favor of bolstering the central authority of the emperor in the face of challenges from the princes, hussites, turks, hungarians, the principalities in the eastern and western sides of the empire, and the rivalries in italy. (not even the austrians were immune from rebellion, as frederick iii was to discover early in his reign.) supporters of imperial auctoritas sometimes allude to the memory of charlemagne. an instance of this memory is the tract (1430s) on imperial and papal power by antonio roselli (1380–1466), who attributes the translatio imperii to the germans as an act of charlemagne.101 yet this action is closely tied to the papal coronation in 800. some years later (1500), jacobus of middleburg cannot seem to decide between charlemagne and otto i as the translator of empire to the germans.102 this willingness to acknowledge the validity of both claims was in fact common in fifteenth-century writings. although charlemagne was accepted as german, the empire was generally portrayed as being somehow more fully removed to the germans by the elected otto i. thus the elected frederick iii is a true emperor of the “germans,” a grouping which often seems to suggest all residents of the hre outside italy. (even frederick iii called himself “german.”) there are many other writers in the quattrocentro which make charlemagne or otto i or both the efficient cause of the transfer of the imperium to the theutonici. there were different opinions about the nationality of charles and his providential function, and about the significance of his conquests, elections, and coronations. but there could be no doubt as to his decisive historical role in making the translatio imperii possible. there were of course many ways to associate charlemagne with imperial authority in germania. if one preferred to emphasize the continuity of the roman empire, the place of the supreme pontiff could be excluded in this transfer. for those who sought to minimize the church’s involvement in the possession of temporals, it would be more effective rhetorically to have karl acquire germany by other means. nicholas of cusa insists that charles in his position as patrician acquired the territories of the empire outside his ancestral lands, an idea widespread in the early fifteenth century.103 thus the emperor bestowed temporals on the papacy and not the other way around. charlemagne received these lands not from the pontiff, but from rightful conquest. as patrician, he was the “father of the pope in temporal matters.”104 nicholas portrays the imperial 49 renna electors not as representatives of the german but of the roman people, who in effect elect the emperor. this notion of the superiority of consent in both church and state is fundamental to cusa’s vision of parallel hierarchies of the temporal and spiritual authorities. cusa’s charlemagne provides historical precedent for mediating differences between basel and rome, and for strengthening imperial government as it strives for church reform, the ecclesiastical union with constantinople, the mediation of disputes in europe, and the expulsion of the turks. for the humanists at the time of frederick iii the memory of karl der grosse as the rex teutonicorum germany was an idée fixe.105 in an unusual composite work which combines a eulogy (with reservations) to frederick iii with a history of austria, aeneas sylvius piccolomini makes charlemagne as king of the germans the holder of complete imperial authority.106 aeneas’s discussion of the coronation of frederick iii in 1452—preceded by his crowning as king of the germans in aachen and the iron crown of the lombards in milan—has sometimes been interpreted as a mockery of the event, which supposedly the humanist presents as an empty ceremony.107 in point of fact aeneas describes the papal coronation as the classic “german” event: the crowning of the king at aachen (as ruler of the regnum alemaniae) transmitted to the full de iure imperial power.108 when the pope anointed and crowned him as imperator romanorum he in effect acknowledged or confirmed the power which the king of the romans had received since the time of charlemagne.109 this perspective becomes clearer when placed in the context of aeneas’s previous treatment of frederick barbarossa,110 which seems prima facie to be an odd place to begin the history of “austria.” modern historians seem to have missed the significance of this apparently casual account of barbarossa—no austrian, he—as background to frederick iii; the connection between fredericks i and iii is easily overlooked, given the conventional nature (most of this section is copied from other sources, such as otto of freising and john of viktring) of this part. this complex character of aeneas’s history111 notwithstanding, aeneas clearly attempts to associate frederick iii with his prototypes: frederick i and charlemagne. in his treatise on the roman empire—on the origin and authority of the roman empire (1446)—aeneas follows a common humanist line by having charlemagne as “patrician” come to the aid of a beleaguered rome.112 when the grateful pope crowned him augustus, the “roman empire was translated to the germans. passed through various hands, finally, it passed to you, divine caesar frederick [iii], by legitimate election,”113 thus conferring supreme power in temporal affairs. the pope did not bestow this power; he merely affirmed the potestas charlemagne already possessed by virtue of being patrician and his just wars. charlemagne, a “german by birth,”114 is thus the successor of the roman emperor with full power to maintain peace, arbitrate disputes, establish laws, and administer justice. aeneas’s ideal emperor is the saint louis ix and holy roman emperor frederick iii 50 universal roman emperor who rules the fourth of daniel’s kingdoms;115 he has no need to consult the german electors or anybody else. aeneas’s idealized latter-day roman empire did not fare well against the quarreling electors and estates after 1470. the situation with the hungarians and the ottomans worsened as frederick attempted to establish a balance with the princes. moving around his capitals of vienna, linz, and graz, he tried to counter the reichstag of the estates with the demands of the electors. the numerous visual portrayals116 of these constitutional arrangements testify to these efforts to establish order, a prerequisite for collecting taxes and raising armies. charlemagne’s uncertain role in these discussions can be seen in the fascination with ancient descriptions of geography, such as tacitus’s germania,117 and the move to germanize the primitive folklore tradition of charlemagne as a “wild man.”118 it is understandable that writers would romanticize and idealize the great karl during the difficult reign of frederick iii. even living and recent emperors were depicted as charlemagne, often with allusions to the principalities within the empire. while albrect dürer’s pictures of sigismund and frederick iii are justly famous, there were others. did frederick himself attempt to identify with his renowned predecessor? as the sources make clear, he frequently wore the figurative cloak of charlemagne. he often stopped at aachen119 and made it a point to extend its privileges and connections to the holy site, including the marienschrein and its relics.120 there are references to charlemagne in frederick’s registers, beginning early in his reign. when at frankfurt in june 1442 he refers to the crown of karl.121 in his dealings with his rival louis xi, he summons charlemagne, a not-so-subtle allusion to carolingian claims to burgundy.122 frederick was fond of referring to the golden bull as a way of establishing his legitimacy and asserting his preference for dealing with the seven electors rather than with the larger political bodies such as the reichstag.123 on the whole, the references are not especially many, given that imperial decrees are brief and specific.124 yet the fact that these references often appear in places where they seem extraneous indicates that the emperor and his staff determined that they should be there. what, then, are we to make of the german fondness for the legacy of charlemagne throughout the fifteenth century? perhaps there is significance in the very diversity of the responses to the iconic “german” in the varied types of sources. it was as if karl were summoned to resolve the many ambiguities in the nature and purpose of the hre. he was called upon to give credence to the three components of this unwieldy political entity: holy, roman, empire. yet he had to be german and connected somehow to the land area called germania, a word difficult to define at any time in the later middle ages. (modern writers continue to debate its meaning.) but mutatis 51 renna mutandis the memory of the great charles had to be integrated into the method by which his successor emperors acquired their powers, in particular the institution of the election of the german rex or king of the romans. the papal coronation of course could not be omitted as a part of the myth of charlemagne, but it had to be reduced in constitutional significance; it did not confer imperial powers on the emperor-elect. with the growing power of the state in the west following the hundred years war, the spirit of charlemagne would remain, whatever the french might think, on the east bank of the rhine. paradoxically charlemagne could not be too german, lest he relinquish his claims to burgundy, lands to the east, and above all italy. he must be “imperial” and trans-german, not to mention his authority, at least de iure, over the church. saint charles had to be at once a defender of the faith and the church, especially the roman church, and the supreme head of the church temporals, at least casualiter. and for frederick iii, charlemagne had to be associated with the habsburgs and their austrian ancestral territories. somehow he was obliged to be both king and emperor. unlike france, the ambiguities in the constitutional formation of the hre virtually ensured much speculation about political ideas. by default, charlemagne was the only candidate who could be simultaneously a german, a king, and a roman emperor. no one else in the past, including the prototype otto i the great, could make such claims. charlemagne was the divinely-appointed ruler who indirectly created the imperial system of the ottonian emperors. conclusion and herein lies the historical significance of the role of charlemagne in the french and german traditions. in valois france the contingencies caused by the war with england and burgundy disposed the french to search for role models, who were both military and sacred. there was less need for imperial archetypes, except for the traditional—since the early thirteenth century— emperor in his own realm. charles the great was the prototype king, crusader, and pious christian. he embodied the “french” nation first, the would-be empire second. charlemagne the hero of the chanson de geste survived as the archetypical king of the french. by contrast, the germans had a more formidable task: conjure up a model who was simultaneously king and emperor. at the heart of the hre was a tragic flaw: the undefined, or rather ever-changing, nature of rex and imperator. in the fourteenth century many imperialist authors realized that the universal emperor must be in the first instance a bona fide monarch, similar to a valois one. hence the germans looked to the legendary karl der grosse to embody the two aspects, and demonstrate how this union could be effected nowadays, at the time of frederick iii. the imperialist writers who sought to strengthen both the universalist and saint louis ix and holy roman emperor frederick iii 52 particularist sides of the hre after 1330 were not dabblers in abstract political theory, but practical individuals who wanted immediate remedies to the empire’s problems at the time. thus the different national traditions—particularly the french and the german—were conditioned by the political exigencies of the day. the college textbook cliché that would have charlemagne the first holy roman emperor may be questionable historically, but the german penchant to idealize him was just that: the originator of the uniquely german phenomenon in central europe. late medieval political theorists endeavored to make this literary heritage into workable visions of action. it is fitting that frederick iii’s most distinguished protagonist, aeneas sylvius piccolomini, should bear the same name as the founder of ancient rome. the future pope (pius ii) made charlemagne the second aeneas, who integrated the romans (and the trojans) with the germans, and the papal coronations of 800 and 962. medieval political thought about popes and emperors began with karl der grosse. charlemagne was the first post-roman emperor of the west; napoleon was the last. endnotes 1. see masson 1908, 63–89, 126–34. 2. see morrissey 2003, chapter 7, 250–65; rowell 2012, 1, 27–31, 59. 3. see durand-le guern and ribémont 2009, 80–126. 4. see latowsky 2013, 215–37; gabriele 2011, 22–33. 5. see latowsky 2013, 220–36; van de kieft 1958; spiegel 1978. 6. see stuckey 2006, 164–76 (mostly philip augustus and louis viii); spiegel 1971; brown 1990; jones 2007, 62–82. 7. see latowsky 2013, 16; gabriele 2011, chapter 1. 8. a product of the royal abbey of saint-denis or perhaps the court of philip i, the descriptio (1050) is an excellent example of how charlemagne’s legendary ventures to the east were adapted to capetian needs. although the descriptio is a composite of various stories, the relevance here is how the parts were adjusted to the link with saint-denis; there is no attempt to make the french king into an “emperor.” see rauschen 1890 (descriptio). 53 renna 9. although the vita karoli magni (1170–80) was probably compiled in the chancery of frederick barbarossa, it was widely used in france. virtually all of the influential descriptio (1080) is reproduced in the vita. what is pertinent here are the extensive descriptions of charlemagne (and constantine) and his journeys to jerusalem and constantinople. thus there were plenty of imperial themes in the legends of charlemagne which were available to the panegyric writers at the court of louis ix. see rauschen 1890, 1–93; latowsky 2013, 69–91, 189–99; folz 1950, 214–22; stuckey 2008. 10. again, the legends of charlemagne in the pseudo-turpin—which were widely diffused in france, flanders, and germany—were virtually ignored by the promoters of the cult of saint louis. the flemish and german courts exploited these legends for their imperial themes. see folz 1950, 215–25, 223–25, 281–82; latowsky 2013, 212–13, 238, 247–49; spiegel 1995. i use the old french translation of walpole 1976 and the edition of wulff 1879–81. many of these old french editions are available by print books on demand from google books and elsewhere. 11. while the prophecies of the last world emperor were in the courts of the staufen emperors, the french—except obliquely for louis vii—showed little interest in them. see latowsky 2013, 110–26, 141–59; gabriele 2011, 115–28; verhelst 1973. 12. see spiegel 1971, 43–69; durand-le guern and ribémont 2009, 153–55; favier 1999, chapter 23, 651–59 (charlemagne), 659–71 (capetian ancestry); folz 1964, 246–53 (charlemagne and capetians). 13. see beaune 1991, chapter 1, 20–69; jones 2007, 164–69; hallam 1980, 135, 176–79, 261; folz 1950, 179–81; waldman 1990, 191–97; latowsky 2013, 221–25. 14. the ties with the trojans continued into the later dynasties of the valois and the bourbons. across the rhine the germans did much the same, as can be seen in the multi-faceted genealogies compiled by godfrey of viterbo for his patron, frederick barbarossa. see huppert 1965; potter 1995, 19–29; durand-le guern and ribémont 2009, 150–53; for the period after saint louis, see beaune 1991, 228–44; tanner 1993, 97 (charlemagne as the new aeneas). 15. for the legacy after louis see contamine 1975, 179–244; on the fleur-de-lys see beaune 1991, chapter 7 (oriflamme on 53–55); prinet 1911; durand-le guern and ribémont saint louis ix and holy roman emperor frederick iii 54 2009, 158–61; gaposchkin 2008, 233–36. 16. saint louis’s seals (often larger in size than his predecessor kings’) typically present him in the style of christ-in-majesty, a characterization passed on by the carolingians and ottonians. louis wears a toga-like garment with a fleur-de-lys in both hands, one at the top of a scepter. the inscription reads “francorum rex ludovicus dei gracia [gratia]” (louis king of the franks by the grace of god). but this semi-imperial (and roman) motif finds little place in contemporary french sources. it should be noted that there are no representations on the seals of divinity or any ecclesiastical intermediary. see moffit 2007, chapter 16. it is possible that these ottonian themes were introduced by french iconographers (cf. sainte-foi of conques). louis’s seals may have been influenced by courtiers who wanted to counter the imperial pretensions of frederick ii hohenstaufen. there is a stained glass window in saint louis cathedral in new orleans which portrays louis surrounded by freemasons, with the seal of solomon. the king holds the plans of sainte-chapelle by the master mason pierre de monterau. ironically the masonic solomon would have fit well with a contemporary image of louis, given his fondness for the historical solomon, although the association with the anti-catholic and cult-bound freemasons would have been less well received! 17. the new kingdom of “france” (francia) appears even in liturgical texts, as well as coins. see gaposchkin 2009, 58; note references to david and solomon. see also gaposchkin 2008, 25n33: ludovicus, francie rex illustrissimus. on louis’s gros tournois he is simply rex. philip iii and philip iv are also called kings of francia. the commonplace adage, since the time of innocent iii, “the king is emperor in his own realm,” can be transposed into the narrower “france”: see jones 2003. edward iii and the subsequent english kings during the hundred years war called themselves kings of england and france. after clovis, “francia” was simply one of several kingdoms which were parceled out among his sons. in time, the term was applied to the region around paris. saint louis in effect applied this mini-regional name to the entire kingdom of the franks. the point is that louis showed scant interest in the “imperial” side of his ancestor charlemagne. the modern île-de-france is approximately the same geographical area as medieval francia. parisians today usually call it the “paris region.” interestingly, modern italians refer to france as francia. 18. see beaune 1991, chapter 3; morrissey 2003, chapter 2; durand-le guern and ribémont 55 renna 2009, 164–81; gaposchkin 2008, chapters 2–4. charlemagne is virtually absent in the canonization texts. see gaposchkin 2012, 106–58, especially the beatus ludovicus (written shortly after 1277). also see gaposchkin and field 2014. understandably boniface viii in his bull gloria laus (1297) emphasizes louis’s defense of the faith and the church; gaposchkin and field 2014, 40–1, 55–7, 160–72; gaposchkin 2003. the life of william of saint-pathus remains basic to the canonization collections; de saint-pathus 1899. i omit joinville in my considerations since his life of louis was largely unknown for centuries. even in primat’s grandes chronicles, the capetian relationship to the carolingian imperial legacy remained ambiguous. see jones 2007, 146–64. understandably, the heritage of saint louis remained strong for the capetians. during the valois era before charles viii, the figure of louis in the development of a national consciousness was not paramount. so too the memory of charlemagne in this evolution was never emphasized. see monfrin 1964–65. 19. see jones 2007, 62–102. 20. see durand-le guern and ribémont 2009, 29–58. 21. see folz 1950, book 3, chapter 3, 203–25; folz 1967; folz 1971. 22. see gaposchkin 2008, 185–88; le goff 1996, 527–28. 23. actually there was not a consistent procedure of selecting german emperors in the middle ages. emperors would attempt to establish dynasties, and on occasion succeeded for a time. all aspects on the nature of the election and what it signified were sharply debated from the time of otto i the great to frederick iii. for his election in 936 otto is said to have succeeded by hereditary right from his father henry i, assigning a role of approval to the designated electors (eventually fixed at seven, and later expanded by the habsburgs). see widukind of corvey 1965, 2.3: 25, lines 6–9. many imperialists insisted that the king of the romans possessed full imperial powers even before the pope crowned him emperor of the romans in rome. the king was crowned no less than three times (aachen, establishing the link to charlemagne; milan or pavia as king of italy; rome as the emperor of the romans). unlike france, the german rulers sometimes changed their ancestral power base. after the passing of the staufen in 1254, saint louis’s supporters sometimes cooperated with the popes—who were determined to reduce the german presence in italy—in influencing the election and even promoting a capetian challenger saint louis ix and holy roman emperor frederick iii 56 to the imperial title. louis’s claim to “imperial” potestas did not derive from the holy roman emperor but from capetian tradition. 24. see the many collections of these stories, such as church 1902; bulfinch 1863. 25. see gaposchkin 2008, 17, 122–23, 130–32, 232, 236; gaposchkin 2012, 248–99; le goff 1996, 304–12, 458, 478, 525–26, 563, 576. 26. louis was compared to josiah in addition to solomon and david; le goff 1996, 257–58, 309–14, 371–72, 374, 576, 690–91; gaposchkin and field 2014, 69–73, 126–27, 131–32; gaposchkin 2008, 111–12, 130. the promoters of louis’s canonization would not have known it—since this is a trend in modern biblical exegesis only since the 1940s—but the historical books of the hebrew bible portray josiah as a second david. it might be added that when a pope compares a contemporary king to david or solomon, the inference is the opposite: that the secular ruler is subservient to the supreme pontiff. cf. wood 2003, 160–67. 27. see the sources gaposchkin cites in her editions and studies of the canonization texts in gaposchkin 2008; gaposchkin and field 2014; and gaposchkin 2012. see also folz 1971. 28. see brown 1980; brown 1984; brown 1990. also gaposchkin 2002; jones 2007, 169– 78; hallam 1982; hallam 1980, 308–13. 29. see beaune 1991, 77–89, 79 (charles vii) and beaune 1977. also krynen 1981, 228–41. 30. see morrissey 2003, 96–7, 139; beaune 1991, 64–7, 112, 116; gaborit-chopin 1977. but charles v was careful to distance himself from the legacy of louis ix, who was remembered as the champion of tax relief, except for the nobility. charles wanted to raise taxes, not lower them! see durand-le guern and ribémont 2009, 173–81. 31. see morrissey 2003, 102–08; gaposchkin 2008, 239; potter 1995, 33. french kings in the fifteenth century could always conjure up the name of charlemagne to legitimize military action, including crusades against the turks. see gilli 1997, 10, 15–6, 107–11, 119–44, 178–79 (philolphe and saint louis). 32. see morrissey 2003, 108–10; gaposchkin 2008, 242n12; tesseyre 1980; auzas 1976. 33. henry iv traced his lineage to saint louis; gaposchkin 2008, 241; morrissey 2003, 138– 57 renna 42. he preferred hercules to charlemagne as his model. the bourbon former huguenot could not appear overly catholic at first. 34. see knobler 1996; neveu 1988; gaposchkin 2008, 241; tietz 1983; morrissey 2003, 156–57, 167–71, 211. 35. see morrissey 2003, 97; de mandrot 1894–96, 1: 323. morrissey in chapter 3 argues convincingly that the french during the reigns of charles viii, louis xii, and francis i gradually adapted the myth of charlemagne to visions of a new french empire and a national identity. morrissey is certainly correct in seeing this process from 1300 to 1600 as slow and uncertain. 36. but allusions to saint charlemagne can be found in the fifteenth century. see, e. g., philippe de commynes, mémoires, 1: 145. 37. see durand-le guern and ribémont 2009, 132–35. 38. durand-le guern and ribémont 2009, 136–40. 39. see folz 1950, 467–74. 40. for the continuity of the ideas of french kingship used by primat and william of nangis, see lamarrigue 1999; krynen 1993, 385–86 (emphasizes how french kings tried to make their kingdom independent of the hre); chazan 1999. 41. the bibliography is immense. see especially görich 2001 and 2011. also see renna 2014. 42. see gaposchkin and field 2014, 37, 112, 132; gaposchkin 2012, 253, 255. jacob of lausanne seems unaware of the implications of his use of honor as lordship and as a mirror image of the heavenly kingship as a model for the earthly. 43. see gaposchkin 2008, chapter 8. 44. see tanner 1993, 6–7, 57–8, 98, 100, 146–53, 210–12. 45. see jones 2007, 146–59. 46. in particular folz 1950, especially book 5, chapters 1–4, 423–561, 47. see scales 2012, chapters 3, 4; and scales 2010; nonn 1982; schubert 1979. saint louis ix and holy roman emperor frederick iii 58 48. see thomas 2000; müller 1925. the title hre was first used in 1254. after 1300 “of the german nation” was occasionally added, and officially adopted in 1452, 1486, and 1509/12, but even then often not employed by the habsburgs. 49. see krüger 1976; grundmann 1969; johanek 1988; flores temporum 1879, 232, 242–46. 50. lupold cites a variety of chronicles, such of godfrey of viterbo, annalista saxo, historia francorum, frutolf of michelsberg, martin of troppau (opava), vincent of beauvais. in terms of the influence of the carolingian tradition, his de iuribus regni et imperii (1340– 41) is the most important. critical edition in lupold of bebenburg 2004. for convenience i cite from lupold of bebenburg 2005, with facing german. 51. lupold’s views on the empire were well known in the fifteenth century, even among humanists. his tract probably influenced nicholas of cusa’s concordance. while the influence of the notion of the german king crowned at aachen as having full imperial powers is the most obvious carry-over to cusa, there is no modern study, as far as i know, which explores his views on charlemagne, election, and germania. i intend to pursue this topic in a future study. see klippel 1954. 52. see lupold of bebenburg 2005, chapter 1: 28; 1: 30, 32, 38; 2: 40, 42, 44; 3: 50, 52, 54, 56, 62, 64, 68; 4: 72; 5: 86, 88, 92, 96, 98, 100; 7: 108, 118, 120, 122; 8: 130; 9: 140. for germania in the de zelo, see lupold of bebenburg 2004, 414–16, 423, 430–33, 446, 453, 457, 462–63, 467–69, 475, 481, 489, 498, 501–05. 53. lupold of bebenburg 2005, especially the prologue, chapters 1–5, 7, 8, and letter to archbishop baldwin of trier, 14–26. 54. lupold of bebenburg 2005, chapters 1, 2, 4, 5. 55. actually leo iii, according to our author, did not transfer the empire to charlemagne, for the king of the franks already held full imperial powers by right of conquest. but now, after the papal coronation in st. peter’s, he governs his emperor with the title of emperor. it is because of this quasi-compromise that many modern historians classify him among the “moderate” imperialists. as i will discuss below, the function of charlemagne in the much-debated translatio imperii never reached a consensus among imperialists in the late german middle ages. some historians have paid attention to the political circumstances at the time lupold wrote his tract (1340–41). see miethke’s excellent introduction to the 59 renna mgh edition (lupold of bebenburg 2004, 1–148), and the afterward to c. h. beck edition (lupold of bebenburg 2005, 280–328). see also the classic study by most 1941, 444–85; wittneben 1997; krüger 1971. 56. lupold of bebenburg 2005, chapters 3 (52–4), 5, 17 (266–68). cf. de zelo in lupold of bebenburg 2004, chapter 6. in his eight questions on the power of the pope william of ockham sharply criticized lupold’s preference for hereditary succession, as opposed to election by the princes, favored by the englishman (who was at the time residing in or around munich.) actually lupold is not consistent, for he wants it both ways: heredity to undercut the claims of the declaration of rhense and the pope, and election to preserve the german character of the empire. 57. see sigebert de gembloux 1844, 332–33. 58. sigebert de gembloux 1844, 337. 59. sigebert de gembloux 1844, 336. excellent treatment of the evolution of charlemagne’s role in german history and in sigebert, chazan 1991, 217–53, 471–83, 490–94, 505–39. see also deploige 2014. 60. sigebert de gembloux 1844, 336, line 15: leo crowned charlemagne caesar and augustus; 336, lines 19–21: the franks seized the crown when the imperial seat became vacant (by irene). the assembly of franks and romans acclaimed charles emperor; the pope merely affirmed its decision. 61. sigebert de gembloux 1844, 404, 411. 62. flores temporum 1879, 236, 242–43. 63. martin of troppau (or of opava, of poland; d. 1278), chronicon pontificum et imperatorum lists emperors and popes on facing pages, in the dialectical fashion of the day; for charlemagne, see martin of troppau 1872, 427. the message is in the medium, for this juxtaposition of the two world “emperors” magnifies the place of charlemagne in the continuity of roman emperors. (this method of listing emperors is a way of implying that the current german emperors are in a line going back to the roman emperors, as in the kaiserchronik.) it also suggests that the harmony between the two is natural, desirable, and divinely ordained. saint louis ix and holy roman emperor frederick iii 60 64. see nicholas of cusa 1996, book 3, chapters 3, 4; nicholas of cusa 1959–68, 337–52. the notion of translation of empire was denied by many authors, such as william of ockham. 65. see godfrey of viterbo 1872; speculum regnum, 21: 35, 22: 5, 24: 27 (to show that frederick i is in the lineage of charlemagne); pantheon, 107–307 at 124: 30, 125: 5, 139: 40, 145: 5, 150: 35, 197: 45, 200–09, 139: 40, 145: 5, 150: 35, 197: 45, 281: 15, 298–302; memoria seculorum 99: 5, 102: 5, 104: 40, 106: 15; gesta 307: 35–9 (ytalie rex). 66. possibly the famous name of our godfrey got confused with the chronicle of martin of troppau, who also alludes to this tradition of gregory v; martin of troppau 1872, 466, lines 15–25. see godfrey of viterbo 1872, 256, 287. see weber 1994. the kaiserchronik—well known in the fifteenth century—implies that charlemagne’s “brother” leo iii merely confirmed his de facto power; myers 2013, 322–33. see also von den brincken 1988. it may not be coincidental that martin’s chronicle was later included in the same mgh ss 22. further, the link with godfrey may be the result of his mention of the stall of st. peter; pantheon, godfrey of viterbo 1872, 156, which ended up in the hands of the very archbishops (trier and cologne) who would elect the king of the romans. see wilks 1965, 80–1; latowsky 2013, 198–212. the attribution of gregory v as the occasion of the handing over of the custom of the german electors of the rex romanorum was a commonplace in the fifteenth century. see dietrich von nieheim 1956, 5.1, 18–19, where the transferal of electio is linked to charlemagne’s translatio imperii to the germans. a typical german response to the gregory v legacy is that this pope merely gave his consent to an arrangement which was made by henry ii “by common agreement of all the germans”; this arrangement was in any case the result of “natural and divine law” and not from positive law “nor from any man.” see nicholas of cusa 1996, book 3, chapter 4, 230. 67. see jacob of könighafen or twinger (strassburg), in hegel 1870, especially chapters 8, 9. copies at university of michigan (film, list 17, no. 3 (8) and st. louis university vatican film library (bav st ross. 548). available online wikisource. for jacob, charlemagne transferred the empire to the germans, but it was the later electors (at the time of gregory v) who made the election “german”; hegel 1870, 404. 68. see especially twinger, hegel 1870, chapter 8, 402–03, 422, 465; chapter 9, 621–24. 61 renna also hillenbrand 1982, 449–50, where johann of viktring (1275–1347) holds up charlemagne as a model for louis of bavaria to pursue reconciliation with the princes and the church. 69. see weiland 1877, vol. 5 (contains 5 chronicles) 125, line 5 [125: 5]; 143: 20; 147–52; 154: 10; 164: 5; 167; 180: 5; 188: 30; 189: 30; 201: 20; 202: 5; 205: 5; 227: 10; 229: 1; 270: 20; 274; 279: 5; 286: 5; 300: 35; 357; 398: 120; 420: 1495; 461–64; 472: 1065; 491: 2535; 521: 4985l; 534: 6000; 540: 6535; 577–78; 582: 2; 591: 50; 605: 15. many of these writings are adaptations of french chansons and charlemagne’s wars. there is never a doubt that he was german. see kienast 1975, 513–27; emphasizes the cross-borrowing and interaction between the french and german traditions of charlemagne. for a summary of many of these german chronicles down to maximilian i, see ed. maschek 1936; ratkowitsch 2004. 70. potthast 1859, 45; also 40–45, 54, 77–8; numerous references to charlemagne as german. henry (1300–70) often cites sigebert gembloux and godfrey of viterbo among other historians. 71. see thomas 1973, 169–72. 72. see the stunning new edition of schedel 2010, based on the seven ages of the world. on charlemagne, see 20, 35, 36, 44, 76, 79, 101, 138, 184 (frederick i), and especially 487, 552. 73. see nuremburg chronicle, vol. 4, ccxlviiir. cf. emperor sigismund, 430–32. 74. nuremburg chronicle, 4: 552. frederick i was equal to charlemagne, but he persecuted the church; 184 (the implication is that frederick iii and max i are greater than barbarossa). the “sacred electors” share power with the principes alemmanie; 532. although during the papal coronation of 18 mar 1452 frederick, out of humility and respect for the vicar of christ, agreed to allow him to act as the groom holding the horse’s bridle; 487. note that schedel stresses the “german” essence of the hre, even though frederick iii and max i are austrians. charlemagne is the conduit of the transfer of empire. 75. see moeglin 2002. saint louis ix and holy roman emperor frederick iii 62 76. the tradition of the origin of political power in the action of the electors goes back at least to frederick i. see renna 2014. this idea was developed by lupold and others in the fourteenth century, and underlies the rhense declaration of 1338 and the golden bull of 1356, and even louis of bavaria’s modification in 1338. see schubert 1977 and 1975; becker 1973. the uniquely german nature of the election of the king of the romans is axiomatic for lupold, peter of andlau, aeneas sylvius, nicholas of cusa. 77. schwalm 1895. 78. folz uses the leipzig 1723 edition. i cite from the schwalm 1895 critical edition. i include both page and image numbers (from the online version) for references to charlemagne and the germans: 4, image 53 [4/53]; 21/70; 59/108; 137/186: incipi insuper opus hoc a temporibus julii (caesaris), quae ipse primus romanorum; 534/584 (translation to the germans); 269/318; 578/627; 532/581 (election of sigismund in 1435: principes electores sacri imperii seculares et ceteri principes alemanne ac marchiones); 579/628; 587/636; 591/640. 79. such as jean hug, quadruvium ecclesiae [compilation of imperial and canon laws], f. 29, 115–16; cited in folz 1950, 548, 555. see also the later chronicle: diemer 1909, 1: 58– 61. available online. gerstenberg (1457–1522) makes charlemagne a german of the german nation, although he concedes that the pope transferred the empire. 80. see jank 1979. 81. müller 1998, part 1, chapter 13, 138 [i: 13, 138]. facing latin and german. 82. müller 1998, i: 13, 136. see nicholas of cusa 1996, iii: 3, §§313–33, 223–27. 83. müller 1998, i: 13, 140–46, passim. 84. müller 1998, i: 13, 144. see miethke 2007; hürbin 1897. 85. müller 1998, i: 13, 144. 86. see appendix to müller 1998, i, 317–31. 87. müller 1998, i: 14, 148–58. 88. müller 1998, i: 16, 164–68. see walther 1989. habsburg polemicists in the fifteenth 63 renna century traced this lineage to the trojans, as did the french and others. genealogies were concocted to make charlemagne the ancestor of the habsburgs. see hughes 2004; mutschlechner 2011. see also tanner 1993. 89. müller 1998, i: 16, 164–82. peter gives much attention to the electors—as well as the other princes of the empire—who are associated with the german natio, the german charlemagne, and the translation of empire of the hre. they function as a sort of papal curia, even if they rarely come to court, or a fortiori like the electors of the golden bull, if somewhat idealized. they administer the empire in harmony with their emperor, who can raise armies and collect taxes. peter envisions the electors as associates in frederick iii’s central government. peter did not, of course, foresee that twenty years after he wrote his tract (1460) these very electors would subvert the emperor’s drive to centralize power. many at the time bemoaned frederick’s political weakness. see nicholas of cusa 1996, iii, chapters 25–39. 90. müller 1998, i: 16, 168. 91. müller 1998, ii: 1, 170–74. 92. müller 1998, ii: 3, 182–86. although frederick iii had a strong sense of being austrian, the designation of being german could be quite elastic. 93. müller 1998, ii: 6, 194–96. on the triple crowning: ii: 6, 196–98, 210–12. the fourth coronation (at arles) was not usually performed, although frederick would later recover burgundy (by marriage). 94. müller 1998, ii: 3, 186–94. for historical context see hoffmann 1982; heckmann 2002; schubert 1975. 95. see wolf 1990; becker 1973, chapters 1–3; begert 2010, chapters 4–7; schubert 1977, 285–338; kaufmann 1975–76. 96. see hoffmann 1982, chapters 2–4 (many examples); ziehen 1962 (examples of quaternionen); schubert 1993, 50–63; putzer 1996 and putzer 1997, 62–72; cohn 2006, 295–307. 97. see dietrich von nieheim 1956, 4, lines 13, 17; 5, lines 3, 19; 7, lines 17, 23. saint louis ix and holy roman emperor frederick iii 64 98. dietrich von nieheim 1956, 1, line 13f. for charlemagne in dietrich see heimpel 1932, 222–43, 258–71; influence on charles iv, 164–69. cf. rex et imperator in müller 1998, 142. dietrich’s praise of german military prowess was in fact common in fifteenthcentury german imperialist writing. see scales 2003, 47–52 (charlemagne); karl (along with otto i and barbarossa) was the imperial model of former military might. 99. see heimpel 1932, 258–65. 100. see dietrich von nieheim 1956, 18, lines 11–17. typical of german writers, dietrich notes that pope gregory v’s grant of the institution of the seven electors was merely a passive acknowledgment of the divine will. 101. perticone 1944, 33–4, 189. 102. see leupen 1980, 235 (otto i transferred the imperium to the germans), 238 (peter of andlau), 239 (charlemagne the german passed the empire to the germans; gregory v created the seven german electors). also coing 1964, 190 (german use of roman law). 103. see nicholas of cusa 1996, iii, 3: 223–27; cusa 1959–68, iii, 3: 337–44. cf. müller 1998, 136–38. see folz 1950, 553–54. 104. cusa 1996, iii, 3, 223; cusa 1959–68, iii, 3: 338: “pater papae in temporalibus fuit.” 105. see borst 1967; leupen 1980, 238–40; leitch 2010; mertens 1992, 34–7; hirschi 2006; nederman 1993; scales 2012, chapter 7, 295–352. 106. aeneae sylviii piccolominii historia, in pez 1723, 152–54; in many modern reprints on demand, this is the 1723 edition, 4: 3, 637–744, which runs about 222 pages in modern eds. caution: many of these modern reproductions are of mixed print quality, and even omit pages; they generally lack introductions explaining the edition. the correct name of the work is the history of austria, not history of frederick iii as many of these editions are titled. see now the excellent edition of wagendorfer and knödler 2009. 107. for the coronations at aachen and rome, see historia rerum frederici iii imperatoris in pez 1723, 153. some modern authors portray aeneas as bemused by the events of 1452. even if he enjoyed the pageantry, he supposedly viewed them as an anachronistic gesture of no constitutional significance. see toews 1968, 485–87, and toews 1964, 82–4. 65 renna 108. see pez 1723, 152–54; wagendorfer and knödler 2009, 607–17; sarnowsky 2005, 374– 78. aeneas’s history of austria has long fascinated modern historians for its peculiar history of composition and textual transmission. see montecalvo 2000, chapter 2; kramer 1931. 109. sarnowsky 2005, 374: at cum regnum alamaniae ad imperium pleno iure pertineat, placuit in aquisgrani. charlemagne was a “german who had been born and raised in germany.” his descendants reigned in both gaul and germany. “under charlemagne, this race [of germans] earned title to the roman empire”; piccolomini 2014, 185. 110. see sarnowsky 2005, i, chapters 9–32, 50–136; wagendorfer and knödler 2009, 350–95. aeneas’s insertion of the section on the staufen, in which was supposed to be a work on the austrian rebellion at the time of frederick iii, has been discussed by historians since 1872. whatever aeneas’s immediate purpose in adding this background—perhaps as a prod to frederick iii to follow his namesake’s example and launch a crusade against the turks after quelling the rising in austria—the relevance here is how he depicts frederick i as an alter-charlemagne who aggressively crushes dissent within his empire. 111. for the redactional development of the ha, see, in addition to kramer 1931 and montecalvo 2000 above, ilgen 1889; bayer 1872, 15–49. aeneas took many of the sections on barbarossa from otto of freising. see schürmann 1986. 112. piccolomini 2000, 101; wolkan 1909, especially 40, 103–58; kallen 1939. 113. piccolomini 2000, 101. 114. piccolomini 2000, 101. 115. piccolomini 2000, 97–101. 116. in addition to n. 95 above, see wolf 2005, pt. c, 283–534. 117. see hirschi 2006. 118. see leitch 2010. 119. there are by my count about one to five references to aachen in each of the 29 volumes of the registers: koller and heinig 1982. see kraus 1993. privileges to aachen: vol. 13, saint louis ix and holy roman emperor frederick iii 66 reg. 75 (1454), 66; vol. 15, reg. 155 (1464), 112; vol. 17, reg. 271 (1467), 168. 120. see, e. g., regesten friedrichs 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1100–1300. ph.d. dissertation, university of florida. _____. 2008. “charlemagne as crusader? memory, propaganda, and the many uses of charlemagne’s legendary expedition to spain.” in the legend of charlemagne in the middle ages: power, faith, and crusade, eds. matthew gabriele and jace stuckey. new york: palgrave macmillan. 137–52. tanner, marie. 1993. the last descendant of aeneas: the habsburgs and the mythic image of the emperor. new haven: yale university press. tesseyre, charles. 1980. “le prince chrétien aux xve et xvie siècles, à travers les représentations de charlemagne et de saint louis.” annales de bretagne 87: 409–14. thomas, heinz. 1973. “der lohengrin, eine politische dichtung der zeit ludwigs des bayern.” rheinische vierteljahrsblätter 37: 152–90. _____. 2000. “sprache und nation: zur geschichte des wortes deutsch vom ende des 11. bis zur mitte des 15. jahrhunderts.” in nation und sprache. die diskussion ihres verhältnisses in geschichte und gegenwart, ed. andreas gardt. berlin and new york: walter de gruyter. 47–101. tietz, manfred. 1983. “saint louis roi chrétien: un mythe de la mission interieure du xviie siècle.” in la conversion au xviie siècle: actes du xiie colloque de marseille (janvier 1982). marseille: centre méridional de rencontres sur le xviie siècle. 59–69. toews, john b. 1964. “dream and reality in the imperial ideology of pope pius ii.” medievalia et humanistica 16: 77–93. _____. 1968. “the view of empire in aeneas sylvius piccolomini (pope pius ii).” traditio 24: 471–87. van de kieft, c. 1958. “deux diplômes faux de charlemagne pour saint denis du xiie siècle.” saint louis ix and holy roman emperor frederick iii 78 le moyen âge (64): 401–37. verhelst, daniel. 1973. “la préhistoire des conceptions d’adson concernant l’antichrist.” recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 60: 52–103. von den brincken, anna-dorothee. 1988. “martin von troppau.” in geschichtsschreibung und geschichtsbewusstsein im späten mittelalter, ed. hans patze. sigmaringen: thorbecke. 155–93. wagendorfer, martin, and julie knödler, eds. 2009. eneas silvius piccolomini historia austrialis. monumenta germaniae historica (mgh) scriptores rerum germanicarum 24. 2 vols. hannover: hahnsche. waldman, thomas g. 1990. “saint-denis et les premiers capétiens.” religion et culture auteur de l’an mil, eds. dominique iogna-prat and jean-charles picard. paris: picard. 191– 97. walpole, ronald n., ed. 1976. an anonymous old french translation of the pseudo-turpin chronicle. berkeley: university of california press. walther, helmut g. 1989. “gelehrtes recht, stadt und reich in der politischen theorie des basler kanonisten peter von andlau.” in lebenslehren und weltenwürfe im übergang von mittelalter zur neuzeit, politik — bildung — naturkunde — theologie. bericht über kolloquien der kommission zur erforschung der kultur des spätmittelalters 1983 bis 1987 (abhandlungen der akademie der wissenschaften in göttingen, philologischhistorische klasse, dritte folge 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königswahlen und kurfürstenkolleg.” in wahlen und wählen im mittelalter, eds. reinhard schneider and harald zimmermann. vorträge und forschungen 37. sigmaringen: thorbecke. 15–78. wolf, susanne. 2005. die doppelregierung kaiser friedrichs iii. und könig maximilians (1486–93). köln: böhlau. wolkan, rudolf, ed. 1909. de ortu et auctoritate imperii romani, der briefwechsel des eneas silvius piccolomini, vol. 2. vienna: hölder. wood, diana. 2003. clement vi: the pontificate and ideas of an avignon pope. cambridge: cambridge university press. wulff, fredrik amadeus. 1879–81. la chronique dite de turpin, deux anciens textes français. lund: f. berlings boktryckeri. ziehen, eduard. 1962. “das heilige romische reich seinen gliedern: sinnbilder des körperschaftlichen reichsgedankens 1400–1800.” in archiv für frankfurts geschichte und kunst 48, eds. eduard ziehen and hertha ziehen. frankfurt am main: kramer. 5–44. microsoft word squires review of clements [expositions 15.1 (2021) 65–68] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 clements, niki kasumi. sites of the ascetic self: john cassian and christian ethical formation. notre dame: university of notre dame press, 2020. 288 pages. $65.00 (hardcover). isbn: 978–0–268–10785–7. this study continues the popular trend of reading ancient authors through the lenses of gender, feminist, and queer theories (4). the subject of this particular work is john cassian, the early fifthcentury writer who imported egyptian desert asceticism to gaul, and thereby laid the foundation for the western monastic tradition that would flower with benedict of nursia. the author’s central claim is that the heart of cassian’s literary project is not radical self-renunciation, but a plan for ethical formation. the text is divided into two parts: the first is titled “constructions of ethics in asceticism,” and the second is titled “practices of ascetic formation.” the first chapter establishes the theoretical conditions for assessing cassian’s writings. it pays particular attention to ethics as a way of life, rather than abstract knowledge as often is the case in the study of ethics or philosophy today. it continues by reviewing theories of embodiment, affectivity, and social formation for agency. this, clements says, helps “illuminate historical texts and how historical texts can help change theoretical discourses to recognize the contingency of their own categories” (29). she briefly discusses how many current scholars (bernard williams, martha nussbaum, pierre hadot, charles taylor, and edith wyschogrod) have used ethical systems from antiquity as critiques of contemporary “code-based” morality (30). clements sees her own project as continuing this trajectory. chapter 2 investigates cassian’s biography and historical contexts. it summarizes basic parts of cassian’s life while ignoring others. she states that he was born in dobrudja (45), but this is not certain. little is said about his time in egypt, and even less is said about his time in constantinople and rome. clements continues by reviewing what is known about cassian’s three texts (his institutiones, collationes, and de incarnatione), his involvement in the so-called semi-pelagian controversy, his influence on the development of monasticism, his fourth-century context, the vita activa and vita comtemplativa, the monastic concepts of praktike and theoretike, the connection between the “interior life” and the “exterior life,” and the transformative role of biblical exegesis in the life of the monk. chapter three succinctly reviews cassian’s understanding of the relationship between human free will (liberum arbitrium) and god’s grace (gratia) (67). cassian’s exploration of this review of sites of the ascetic self 66 question—discussed in institutio 12 and collatio 3, but most importantly (and exclusively addressed here by clements) in collatio 13 (de protectione dei)—resulted in a cloud of suspicion over his head during his own lifetime, because prosper of aquitaine in gaul saw him as barely distinguishable from the pelagians (73–76). in certain circles, this cloud continues to loom until today. cassian tried to find the virtue between pelagius (whom he concluded overly emphasized the agency of the will), and augustine (whom he concluded overly emphasized the necessity of god’s assistance). for cassian, there is a necessary (and mysterious) interplay between the action of both god and the individual. much like a seed that requires both the rain that comes down from the heavens as well as the farmer tilling the soil, so also the sinner needs god’s intervention as well as his own initiative to choose the good (66). the next chapter investigates how different practices of the body—such as manual labor and ritualized prayer—shape ethical practice, especially in response to the vice of acedia. this vice, the noonday demon, plagued desert monks in the ancient world, and, as dom jean-charles nault has so eloquently said in his book the noonday devil: acedia, the unnamed evil of our times,1 that now plagues contemporary western culture, especially in the restlessness of married couples who often fall to the temptation of divorce, a lack of openness to children, a rejection of the mystery of life, and the incessant search for novelty. the first bodily practices assessed are dietary. cassian offered the dietary practices of the egyptian monks as models for monastic practice in gaul. this diet included, in its most basic form, two pieces of hard bread, a drop of oil, a mixture of salt and water, and a restricted amount of water intake (96). more importantly than cassian’s descriptions of what they ate were their moderate fasting practices. he also anticipated benedict of nursia when he prescribed manual labor, such as collecting wood, making ropes, weaving baskets and mats, and farming as necessary for shaping the monastic practice (98). prayer, as one would assume, is also necessary. the physicality of prayer through different postures—such as standing, sitting, and kneeling—is just as important (if not more so) than mental prayer, such as the lord’s prayer. the fifth chapter engages how reading practices of moral exemplars help shape ethical formation. these practices, centered around reading, recitation, and imitation of the exemplars, are the preferred method of formation for gallic monks. the imitation of exemplars falls into three categories: imitation of biblical figures (especially those in the psalms), imitation of the abbas, and imitation of the young cassian and germanus as they struggle to make sense of the ascetic life (115). imitation in this way is so central for cassian’s pedagogical objective because he knows 67 squires that his audience of gallic monks cannot move across the mediterranean to sit at the desert monks’ feet to learn directly from them. if cassian can’t bring the gallic monks to the egyptian desert, the next best thing is for him to bring the egyptian desert to gaul through texts. the final chapter explores how communal practices of friendship, spiritual direction, and liturgy shape the ethical response to pride, the worst of the spirits (137). the import of friendship is displayed in the relationship between the young cassian and germanus. their friendship persisted over a long duration and multiple geographic locations. most importantly, it flowered because of their shared pursuit of spiritual perfection (142). their friendship helped them each persevere during temptations. a more common relationship in ascetic community is one between novice and elder. after the novice shares with the elder his most intimate thoughts, the elder discerns for the novice which thoughts come from the novice himself, and which ones come from either god or demons. this process, over time, allows the novice to become less embarrassed by these thoughts, which then promotes spiritual progress. liturgy offers the most important communal practice for formation. the offices throughout the day, evening, and night are foundational for the egyptian monks, and should be imitated in gaul, which, at the time cassian wrote, did not have a standardized practice. meditatio and psalmic recitation were at the heart of the synaxes. in the end, i’m not left with an overly positive or negative assessment of this book. on the one hand, it plays the contemporary academic game as well as it can be played. the author quotes all of the names that are found in scholarly journals and monographs today, such as michel foucault, judith butler, and amy hollywood, my own former professor at the university of chicago. for that reason, this book probably will win several prestigious awards. on the other hand, i am unclear about the significance of the contribution that it makes. while i agree that cassian’s project is centrally concerned with ethical formation, i’m at a loss as to how that insight is noteworthy. from the first century until today, the lives of all christians have been about exploring the nature of a flourishing life. it is unsurprising, then, that cassian’s project was little more than a detailed exploration of that issue. stuart squires university of st. thomas (houston) review of sites of the ascetic self 68 note 1. jean-charles nault, o.s.b., the noonday devil: acedia, the unnamed evil of our times, translated by michael j. miller (san francisco: ignatius, 2015). microsoft word delio.docx [expositions 9.1 (2015) 56–68] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376   identity and the catholic university: culture or epistemology? ilia delio, o. s. f. georgetown university higher education is undergoing major revisions today due to a number of factors including changing demographics, online education, financial constraints, and a selective job market. how to educate for today’s world has become the crucial question. the catholic college or university finds itself in the same competitive sphere of higher education as it secular counterparts: jobs, attractive majors, tuition costs, and online versus onsite teaching are frequent topics of faculty and administrative meetings. survival of the four-year undergraduate college or university, religious or secular, has become a competition of the fittest—or at least the richest. the fact that catholic schools of higher learning find themselves on the same racetrack as their secular peers raises the question: does the catholic college or university have anything distinctive to offer to today’s world? does catholic education make a difference? this paper argues that catholicism does have a distinct approach to learning and that the catholic intellectual tradition can make a valuable contribution to higher education today. to do so, however, the catholic intellectual tradition must find its own voice and epistemology. the jesuit charism, with its deep incarnational commitment, coupled with the jesuit mission of education, has yielded some outstanding thinkers in this regard. here i focus on several jesuit thinkers of the twentieth century who have contributed to a deepened understanding of the catholic intellectual tradition in the modern age. their names are familiar to many—john courtney murray, walter ong, bernard lonergan, john haughey—but the one name not usually associated with higher education is pierre teilhard de chardin. yet, it is teilhard’s evolutionary paradigm of christianity that allows the catholic intellectual tradition to acquire a new vision. my thesis rests on the relationship between catholicity and cosmology: unless we educate for a cosmos in evolution, and thus the work of god in evolution, we shall not know where we are going or how to get there. our jesuit thinkers map some new paths for the future of catholic higher education in an evolutionary age, and it is to them that i now turn. murray, ong, longergan, haughey john courtney murray is best known for his insights regarding church-state relations; however, he was keenly aware of the critical role catholic higher education plays in secular society. he was concerned that a narrow catholicism could deaden the spirit, and he countered that the purpose of catholic education is not to shrink the soul but to widen its capacity for the unity of truth. 57 delio   according to murray, the catholic scholar, rooted in the catholic tradition, must be open to all streams of thought in the modern world.1 without broad knowledge that can engage pluralism and complexity, catholic education risks being insular and thus impotent to effect real change in the world. murray asked: “is the catholic scholar a self-enclosed spiritual monad in a secularist world? is the catholic institution of learning simply a citadel, a fortress of defense, or an asylum of escape?”2 in his view, all knowledge moves dynamically toward an ultimate horizon, and educators must foster that movement. the christian educator is “a ‘midwife’ who helps to bring to birth the full humanity of the students.”3 murray’s hope was that the catholic university could create a new unity between the sacral and the secular realms, a unity fully respecting the integrity of both orders. in this way, the catholic university could create an “intellectual apostolate” to nurture both mind and soul, producing spiritually mature, committed young scholars who would be a leaven to the world they enter upon graduation. this apostolate would require a sincere engagement of catholic thought with modern developments in science, literature, history, philosophy, and the social sciences.4 the catholic university would be a place of enlarged dialogue characterized by a healthy secularity—that is, openness to and engagement with the secular world—and a community of teachers, scholars, students, and administrators explicitly committed to sharing an intellectual journey. grounded in an incarnational commitment to intellectual and spiritual wholeness, the catholic university would engage real conversation in pursuit of the wholeness of truth.5 closely aligned with murray’s thought (befitting a former student of murray), jesuit theologian john haughey has argued for an expansive understanding of what it means to participate in the catholic intellectual tradition. his explorations have focused specifically on developing an epistemology for catholic higher education. his thesis is a response to the question: is all knowledge the same, regardless whether it is sacred or secular, or is there a particular “catholic” way of knowing? haughey locates the root of the word “catholic” in the “letter to the smyrnaeans” composed by the second-century bishop ignatius of antioch (d. ad 110), as he was on his way to martyrdom.6 in this letter, ignatius reflected on the divinity of christ, the eucharist as medicine of immortality, and the relationship between bishop and church, and he exhorted the faithful to gather together as the one body of christ. he used the greek word katholikos (καθολικός), meaning according to (kata-) the whole (holos), or more colloquially, “universal,” to identify the purpose of the early christians. building on this greek word, haughey unpacks the word “catholic” as a dynamic principle of “wholemaking” in a way that is consonant with murray’s thought.7 the word “catholic” describes movement toward universality or wholeness. hence the term “catholicity” means openness in contrast to what is incomplete, partial, sectarian, factional, tribal, and selective. it connotes a dynamic principle of gathering together what is fragmented or separated. the philologist walter ong likened the dynamic of catholicity to the parable of the yeast (mt 13:33) or the gathering identity and the catholic university 58   together into the one loaf of bread described in the didache (9.4): “even as this broken bread was scattered over the hills, and was gathered together and became one, so let your church be gathered together from the ends of the earth into your kingdom.” ong wrote: “catholic” is commonly said to mean “universal,” a term from the latin universalis. the equation is not quite exact. if “universal” is the adequate meaning of “catholic,” why did the latin church, which in its vernacular language had the word universalis, not use the word but rather borrow from the greek the term katholikos instead, speaking of the “one, holy, catholic and apostolic church” instead of the “one, holy, universal and apostolic church”?8 ong states that universality, as used historically by christians, was not often an inclusive concept because everything that was not in the circle of universality was excluded from it. the word “catholic,” by contrast, simply means “through-the-whole” or “throughout-the-whole,” like yeast which leavens bread. it connotes an active presence of wholemaking or leavening the stuff of life to create a greater whole. haughey sees the work of epistemology as “thinking that makes greater wholes.” by “whole,” i understand him to mean greater unity, connectedness, depth, and insight. our understanding is always partial and thus open to more depth and breadth which occurs when the mind can explore the uncharted territories of knowledge freely. an epistemology of “wholemaking,” or what might be called a “catholic” epistemology, requires an openness of the mind, such that the mind does not have pre-set ideas to be verified, but is open to the experience of concrete reality. the word “mind,” in this usage, includes the range of intellect and emotions that comprise personhood and can expand and change.9 the knowing process is an orientation to the real and the potentialities of being, but one must be conscious of and open to being. following bernard lonergan, thinking begins with a subject’s grasp of oneself as open to the real. the best route to knowledge is to develop a strong grasp of one’s own subjectivity and of the operations of one’s own consciousness rather than seeking more and more information about stuff “out there.”10 by contrast, our educational system is like cardboard boxes in a room that someone fills with mental stuff. in an information-laden age, information overload counters true knowledge by preventing the gathering of insights into new horizons of meaning; hence, we know more and more about less and less.11 knowledge which forms from the dynamism of the mind’s thought processes is not simply information-gathering and certainly not storing concepts in a mental warehouse; rather, knowledge flows from that deep center of desire within the human person who is searching for truth. haughey speaks of “catholicity” as the gathering of fragments into greater wholes, a “virtue of ceaseless wonder” that, by nature of its own inner spiritual dynamism, cannot be controlled or manipulated.12 this gathering process is the work of the creator spirit in our lives. it is the spirit 59 delio   of god co-laboring with us to create anew, as we seek ultimate meaning and truth. hence catholicity is also an orientation toward the one, true, good, and beautiful, a grace-filled orientation toward god. as a dynamic engagement of the mind, catholicity is bound up with personal authenticity, having a grasp of one’s own self and self-consciousness. this exploration of the mind, seeking to form wholes out of thought fragments gained from experience, intelligence, and judgment, is an ever deepening of love. god is the name of genuine unrestricted love bubbling up at the heart of life, attracting more insight, wonder, and creativity. catholicity, accordingly, is a way of knowing by which we enter more deeply into love. catholicity and cosmology the jesuit emphasis on catholicity as the dynamism of the mind toward making wholes is highly consonant with the original meaning of catholicity as the greeks first conceived it. to understand the greek notion of catholicity is to realize that the word emerges with the new consciousness of cosmos. for the greeks, catholicity and cosmology were integrally related. the word “cosmos” emerged in the axial period (900–200 b.c.e.). beginning in the hellenic ages, the universe came to be seen existing apart from human action and possessing a kind of wisdom that humanity did not have. the word “cosmos” rose among the greeks and referred to the “whole” or that which makes the world a “world.” the pre-socratic philosopher heraclitus of ephesus (c. 540–c. 480 b.c.e.) referred to ta panta (the “all things”), which another pre-socratic, empedocles (c. 490–430 b.c.e.), transformed into the singular to pan, or “the all.” the greeks’ most innovative step was the formulation of a special word for the world. the word they chose, kosmos, was first used in homer’s iliad to mean “in good order” or the order which gives rise to beauty, such as an ornament. (hence, the word “cosmos” is related to “cosmetics”!) the ancient greek separation of “human” from “world” allowed the greeks to discover a “cosmos” that could provide humans with models of perfection to gaze upon (cosmology) and natural spaces to define and conquer (cosmography). in this context, “world” was as much a concept as a concrete place; it meant not just physical creation but also the environment in which humans function. prior to the axial period, the “world” was thought to be a flat, two-tiered structure, with the sky above and earth below. the greeks conceived of the cosmos as threedimensional with height, depth, and width. one could suggest that awareness of a spatial, threedimensional cosmos impelled the ancient greeks to separate “human” from “world” in a way that allowed them to discover a “cosmos.” in other words, the human was no longer part of an interdependent nature; now the human had “self-consciousness” and consciousness of “other” that was called “world.” catholicity was coined to describe a consciousness of the whole, as awareness of the cosmos other than human but to which the human was connected. catholicity is not a physical order or a spiritual one; it does not connote geographical extension. kath’ holou identity and the catholic university 60   (according to the whole) is not the same as kata pantos (according to all things). catholicity belongs not to the phenomenal and empirical, but to the noumenal and ontological plane; it describes the essential nature of reality, not the external manifestations. catholicity is an orientation of being toward wholeness; for the greeks it was how the human stood in relation to the stars and attended to the stars as mediators of the good. this is to say that the cosmos was a mirror for human action. the human was not simply in the world; the world was also in the human. it gave rhythm to our history, defined our aspirations and directed our physical structure. the human was to contemplate superior things, intelligible things, the harmonious disposition of which was taken to reveal profound mysteries.13 plato’s cosmology influenced thinkers of late antiquity and the middle ages; the cosmos influenced what one ought to be and what one was to do.14 justice was the result of the agreement between cosmos and humanity, each with its own nature, instilled by god. as rémi brague writes, “cosmology had an ethical dimension. in turn, the task of transporting such good into the here below where we live enriched ethics with a cosmological dimension.”15 the mechanistic university it is not difficult to see why early christians appropriated the greek word “catholic” to describe the early church. just as the incarnation fulfills the potential within creation for union with god, so too catholicity (as an epistemology) fulfills the mind desire for unity. we see this virtue of “catholicity” played out in the life of jesus, shown in the way he brought people together— physically, emotionally, and spiritually—and healed them of their divisions. he preached oneness of mind and heart, centered in god, and spoke of the reign of god as a dynamic process of relatedness by which the world could move forward to a new level of unity, with god dwelling in its midst. jesus was a “wholemaker.” he directed himself to those in need of being made whole: the brokenhearted, the captives, those in darkness, the prisoners, those who were mourning and grieving, the poor, the blind, and the oppressed. he indicated that his mission is not one of abusive power but a different type of power, one of healing or making wholes through the “the spirit of the lord,” the spirit who anointed jesus to reach out to those who are broken or disconnected from the fullness of life.16 we see catholicity in the early church in the way christians gathered around the bishop and eucharist, a consciousness of part of a new creation in christ. that mindfulness of unity was compromised, however, in the constantinian era as the battle over arianism was bitterly fought. the inner dynamic of catholicity was compromised as wholemaking succumbed to orthodoxy. over the centuries, catholicity has narrowed its field of gathering power. the rise of university in the modern period followed the paradigm of newton’s world, as the rise of mechanistic structures made possible a systematic program of education. the cosmology of the modern 61 delio   university reflects a mechanistic model, a newtonian order, of interacting parts. catholic universities have followed suit, developing along the cosmological lines of newton’s world, that is, along the lines of an established fixed order (cosmology) of mechanized and specialized parts. individual departments, tenured faculty, and a hierarchy of positions from staff to president, comprise the parts of the university “machine.” students are encouraged to succeed in their individual studies rather than search for the wholeness of truth. everything has its niche, its fixity of place, space, and function within the established order. if a part wears out (retires) or breaks down (tenure denied), it can be replaced with little to no disturbance of the machine’s overall operation. such a model cannot adequately embrace the inner dynamic of catholicity because there is no room for this spirit-filled epistemology to expand the mind in its desire to gather knowledge into greater wholes. interestingly, newton’s world held little room for god because the internal laws of the machine world were believed to be regulated according to the natural laws of time, space, and motion. god governs the world from above, but god is not necessary to the daily operations of the world. similarly, one could make the argument that the university does not need god as the animating core of its life; rather, god is governor of the whole operation in which each part (or department) operates according to its own internal laws and demands. instead of educating to know the universe as a web of interconnected life, consonant with contemporary big bang cosmology and quantum physics, education has become the study of highly specialized fields.17 not only do students concentrate in a discipline, but they do so to the exclusion of others. the whole idea of developing human identity integral to the cosmos is subsumed in the drive for mastery and success. elaine ecklund notes, “movements to secularize the academy have relegated religious perspectives to the sidelines, or shut them out altogether.”18 systems thinking has changed the way we consider the relations of parts to wholes and undergirds the shift from mechanism to holism. we are beginning to see that the world not is not a collection of isolated objects but a network of phenomena that are fundamentally interconnected and interdependent. whereas in the mechanistic paradigm parts are autonomous units, in the holistic, open system, a part is a pattern in an inseparable web of relationships. the properties of parts, therefore, are not intrinsic properties but understood only within the context of the larger whole. a brief comparison of mechanistic and holistic systems shows that the difference between linear and holistic thinking results in a difference of values:19 identity and the catholic university 62   thinking values mechanistic holistic mechanistic holistic rational intuitive conservation expansion analysis synthesis competition cooperation reductionist integrative quantity quality linear nonlinear domination partnership although open systems now mark just about every level of biological life, the training of the mind on the level of higher education still follows the closed system paradigm. teilhard on thinking and evolution if catholicity is a function of cosmology, as the greeks originally conceived it, then we have some rethinking to do. our cosmos today is not static and fixed; it does not operate on mechanistic principles. rather, we find ourselves in a 13.8 billion-year-old universe that is large, dynamic, and interconnected. evolution is term that best describes the ongoing development of life, from simple isolated forms to complex, self-conscious species such as our own. evolution means that nature does not operate according to fixed laws but the dynamic interplay of law, chance, and deep time; that is, one cannot understand natural processes apart from developmental categories. evolution is a general condition from which all theories, systems, and hypotheses must conform and which they must satisfy if they are to be thinkable and true. it is not background to the human story; it is the human story. what makes the world in which we live specifically modern—what distinguishes it from past worlds—is evolution, a word which now defines virtually every science as a history of systems.20 teilhard de chardin wrote:   they truly are blind who do not see the scope of a movement whose orbit, infinitely transcending that of the natural sciences, has successively overtaken and invaded the surrounding fields of chemistry, physics, sociology, and even mathematics and history of religions. drawn along together by a single fundamental current, one after the other all the domains of human knowledge have set off toward the study of some kind of development […]. evolution is a general condition, which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must submit to and satisfy from now on in order to be conceivable and true.21 teilhard saw evolution of the human person as part of the whole natural process of creativity and generativity. the human person is integrally part of evolution in that we rise from the process, but in reflecting on the process we stand apart from it, as well. he defined reflection as “the power 63 delio   acquired by a consciousness of turning in on itself and taking possession of itself as an object endowed with its own particular consistency and value; no longer only to know something—but to know itself; no longer only to know, but to know that knows.”22 thus the human person is “the point of emergence in nature, at which this deep cosmic evolution culminates and declares itself.”23 the human person is the arrow of evolution. by locating the human person as the growing tip of the cosmic evolutionary process, teilhard saw a link between epistemology and evolution. he did not view mind apart from matter; rather, mind is the “withinness” of matter, from the beginning of evolution. consciousness, for teilhard, is active at all levels of reality. thus, he considered matter and consciousness not as two substances or two different modes of existence but as two aspects of the same cosmic stuff. the within is the mental aspect and the without is the physical aspect of the same stuff; physical and psychic are corelated in the evolutionary movement of convergence and complexity. teilhard also held that knowledge and faith are critical to the direction evolution will take. to form the first living cell, the elements had to reach beyond their individual identity, beyond what was “given.” he asked, “are not nature’s countless experiments all variants of a single act of faith?”24 within the inner dimension of every being there is a desire for more being; hence, on every level of existence there is yearning for greater unity or wholeness. similarly, on the level of the human person, there is an implicit faith in ultimate wholeness, that is, for more being and life through a deepening of consciousness. attracted by the desire to create greater wholes, the mind seeks to create new unities by reaching beyond simple recognition of the “given” of experience. teilhard’s epistemology is consonant with the catholicity of murray, lonergan, and haughey. teilhard warned against abstract knowledge divorced from physical reality; abstract knowledge, he claimed, is a faded reality compared to boundless presence. it forms ideas but leaves the physical world adrift. such knowledge can only lead to fragmentation. even among physicists, he noted, the advent of quantum physics and the non-deterministic nature of reality has led to the recognition of the primacy of thought in interpreting the shifting patterns of phenomena.25 in other words, knowledge is not for oneself alone but shapes the way one participates in the evolution of self and world. teilhard was concerned that knowledge was being sought apart from physical reality and said that true knowledge must engage all levels of reality, including physical reality, because this reality is the basis of who we are. knowledge is essential to the ongoing process of evolution. to know is to dynamically participate in the concrete experience of reality. the cosmology of the catholic university how do we make sense of this dynamic principle of catholicity on the level of the catholic university? to ask, “what forms a catholic university” is to recap the insights of our jesuit scholars. for murray and haughey, catholicity is epistemological. the word “catholic” does not identity and the catholic university 64   connote so much what a person is but what a person does. a “catholic” is one who gathers or unites. as an epistemology, it is a way of knowing by co-laboring with the spirit of god, seeking to unify the partials of what we know into greater wholes. how do we educate for a world in evolution where we know ourselves increasingly to be part of an interconnected web of life? how do we educate to evolve toward a sustainable future of life? the starting point for rethinking the catholic university is awakening to the fact that we no longer live in a mechanistic universe. ours is an evolutionary universe. mechanisms can operate efficiently but they cannot evolve toward more being and consciousness. teilhard relentlessly argued that christianity is not only compatible with evolution; it is a religion of evolution.26 by its very nature, it demands a new way of thinking and acting. catholicity is an incarnational commitment to thinking as a way of contributing to the development of life—an epistemology that evokes more being and consciousness of god at the heart of life.27 this type of catholic thinking should evoke a new zest for life, a “waking up” to the presence of god who is empowering evolution towards a new future. in light of teilhard, i would suggest that a catholic institution must be a system open to creating a new future through new relationships, consciousness, and a deepening of love. the aim of the institution is to advance knowing as a spiritual act, instilling knowledge as the contemplative dimension of being itself. in a world saturated with information, catholic education has the capacity to transform “flatland thinking” (exponential amounts of information that flatten out interior depth) into interior thinking, where depth and the mystical dimensions of reality become integral to the knowing process. thinking is the work not only of the human spirit but god’s spirit. each time the mind comprehends something it unites the world in a new way.28 “to discover and know,” teilhard wrote, “is to actually extend the universe ahead and to complete it.”29 we pursue knowledge not to gain information or control life but to deepen and unify life toward the fullness of christ. the catholic university, grounded in its incarnational commitment, has the capacity to breathe new life into the educative process by inviting new ways of knowing through engagement, participation, and dialogue. discovery of the world is ultimately self-discovery and discovery of god. the human’s evolving consciousness must be seen as integral to the physical world, and the physical world must be seen as integral to the human’s desire to know. murray noted over fifty years ago that all knowledge moves dynamically toward an ultimate horizon, and educators must foster that movement. knowledge must be both deep and wide, a dynamic spirit of engagement that undergirds the richness of diverse disciplines and worldviews. one sees deeply into a truth when one sees it in relationship to other truths, in all its premises and conclusions, in all its applications to life. a deep knowledge, therefore, is nourished by fact and structured into a system of knowledge.30 65 delio   this type of integrative knowledge does not dismiss specializations within disciplines but calls for less bounded disciplines and more integration via dialogue across disciplines. it also calls for a new vision of education where prayer and meditation are enfolded into the core curriculum so that the mind can focus on the priorities of wisdom. in an information-saturated age, we are losing the capacity to think and thus the capacity to unify. teilhard believed that christianity could evolve the world towards a new humanity, a new unity, and a new future in god. what better place to begin this evolution than on the level of catholic education? notes 1. garcia 2012, 893. 2. murray 1949, 40. 3. murray 1994, 124; garcia 2012, 892. 4. garcia 2012, 895. 5. murray 1994, 124. murray was clear that catholic higher education is to be based on the doctrine of the incarnation. 6. ignatius 1900. 7. haughey 2010, 40. 8. ong 1990, 347. 9. contemporary neuroscience is revealing a new understanding of mind that includes the emotions and environment. for a current scientific understanding of mind, see gazzaniga, ivry, and mangun 2002; varela, thompson, and rosch 1991; damasio 1995; damasio 1999. 10. haughey 2010, 42. 11. jonah lehrer notes that too much information can actually interfere with understanding in lehrer 2009, 164. 12. haughey 2010, 44–46. 13. brague 2003, 101. identity and the catholic university 66   14. ibid., 105. 15. ibid., 121. 16. see delio 2011a, 64–9; haughey 2010, 47–49. 17. einstein’s theory of relativity changed our understanding of space and time. today, cosmologists indicate that the universe came into being about 13.8 billion years ago, rapidly inflated, and subsequently began cooling, marked by expansion. for a discussion of big bang cosmology, see frank 2009, 146; singh 2004, 120–128. 18. ecklund 2010; delio 2011b, 16. 19. capra 1996, 10. 20. for a broad discussion on evolution and its use in non-scientific areas, see phipps 2012. 21. teilhard de chardin 1999, 152; italics added. 22. ibid., 110. 23. teilhard de chardin 1969, 23. teilhard’s position on human evolution put him at odds with church teaching, primarily because he rejected the idea of original sin in light of evolution. the church has taken a moderate position on evolution, accepting it as a plausible explanation for the physical body, but maintaining that the soul is created immediately by god. in his 1950 encyclical humani generis, pope pius xii wrote: “the teaching authority of the church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter—for the catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by god” (emphasis added). see pope pius xii 1950, §36. 24. teilhard de chardin 1964, 179. 25. ibid., 5. 26. teilhard de chardin 2002, 207–208. 27. haught 2008. 28. king 1981, 36. 29. ibid., 35. 67 delio   30. garcia 2012, 896. works cited brague, rémi. 2003. the wisdom of the world: the human experience of the universe in western thought. trans. teresa lavender fagan. chicago: the university of chicago press. capra, fritjof. 1996. the web of life: a new scientific understanding of living systems. new york: anchor books. damasio, antonio. 1995. descartes’ error: emotion, reason, and the human brain. london: quill. _____. 1999. the feeling of what happens: body and emotion in the making of consciousness. new york: harvest. delio, ilia. 2011a. the emergent christ: exploring the meaning of catholic in an evolutionary universe. new york: orbis. _____. 2011b. “faith and the cosmos.” america 204 (april 4): 15–19. ecklund, elaine howard. 2010. “religion, science and the academy.” harmonist september 20. http://harmonist.us/2010/09/religion-science-and-the-academy. accessed september 14, 2014. frank, adam. 2009. the constant fire: beyond the science vs. religion debate. berkeley: university of california press. garcia, kenneth. 2012. “‘reversing the secularist drift: john courtney murray and the telos of catholic higher education.’” theological studies 73.4: 890–908. gazzaniga, michael s., richard b. ivry, and g. r. mangun. 2002. cognitive neuroscience: the biology of the mind. 2nd ed. new york: norton. haughey, john c. 2010. where is knowing going? the horizons of the knowing subject. washington, dc: georgetown university press. haught, john f. 2008. “more being: the emergence of teilhard de chardin.” commonweal june 1. http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/more-being. accessed september 14, 2014. identity and the catholic university 68   ignatius of antioch. 1900. “the epistle to the smyrnaeans.” the epistles of st. ignatius. trans. j. h. srawley. london: society for promoting christian knowledge. early christian writings. http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/srawley/smyrnaeans.html. accessed september 19, 2014. king, thomas m. 1981. teilhard’s mysticism of knowing. new york: seabury. lehrer, jonah. 2009. how we decide. new york: mariner books. murray, john courtney. 1949. “reversing the secularist drift.” thought 24: 36–46. _____. 1994. “towards a christian humanism: aspects of the theology of education.” in bridging the sacred and the secular. ed. j. leon hooper, s. j. washington, dc: georgetown university press. 124–32. ong, walter j. 1990. “yeast: a parable for catholic higher education.” america april 7: 347– 63. phipps, carter. 2012. evolutionaries: unlocking the spiritual and cultural potential of science’s greatest idea. new york: harper perennial. pope pius xii. 1950. humani generis [some false opinions threatening to undermine the foundation of catholic doctrine]. http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xii/encyclicals/ documents/hf_pxii_enc_12081950_humani-generis_en.html. accessed september 14, 2014. singh, simon. 2004. big bang: the origin of the universe. new york: harpercollins. teilhard de chardin, pierre. 1964. the future of man. trans. norman denny. new york: image books. _____. 1969. human energy. trans. j. m. cohen. new york: harcourt brace jovanovich. _____. 1999. the human phenomenon. trans. sarah appleton-weber. brighton: sussex academic press. _____. 2002. christianity and evolution. trans. rené hague. new york: mariner books. varela, francisco j., evan thompson, and eleanor rosch. 1991. the embodied mind: cognitive science and human experience. cambridge, ma: mit press. microsoft word 8 o'neill 12.1.docx [expositions 12.1 (2018) 103–125] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 must the “violent bear it away”? a restorative critique of just war william r. o’neill, s.j. jesuit school of theology of santa clara university so many in these days have taken violent steps to gain the things of this world— war to achieve peace; coercion to achieve freedom; striving to gain what slips through the fingers. we might as well give up our great desires, at least our hopes of doing great things toward achieving them, right at the beginning. in a way it is like the paradox of the gospel, of giving up one’s life in order to save it.1 —dorothy day in a world riven by religious terror and casual slaughters, what will we say of the just war? is the very notion of a just or justified war a contradictio in adjecto in late or post-modernity—war having finally become, in clausewitz’s words, “theoretically limitless”?2 such is the conclusion of the recent “catholic nonviolence initiative” of the nonviolence and just peace conference in rome sponsored by the pontifical council for justice and peace and pax christi international.3 or, as michael walzer urges, is war still a “rule-governed activity, a world of permissions and prohibitions—a moral world,” even “in the midst of hell”?4 the norms of just war, after all, remain a stubborn inheritance, an “overlapping consensus” of permissions and prohibitions enshrined in international positive law, i.e., the geneva conventions and protocols.5 but how are we to make sense of such a consensus? in these pages, i will argue (1) that the framework proposed initially by the u.s. bishops for assessing just war and pacifism in their pastoral letters the challenge of peace and the harvest of justice is sown in peace will no longer suffice. in the second section (2), i will propose a hermeneutical reading of the justum bellum from the emerging perspective of restorative justice that, i argue, better illumines what the bishops call the “dual tradition” of pacifism and just war. in the final section (3), i consider the implications of adopting such a perspective for both public policy and personal discernment in the face of the gospel paradox. a restorative critique of just war 104 the just war redivivus? in the harvest of justice is sown in peace, the u.s. bishops write, “an essential component of a spirituality for peacemaking is an ethic for dealing with conflict in a sinful world. the christian tradition possesses two ways to address conflict: nonviolence and just war.”6 in assessing this “dual tradition,” the bishops recur to their earlier analysis in the challenge of peace where they assert: “the moral theory of the ‘just war’ or ‘limited-war’ doctrine begins with the presumption which binds all christians: we should do no harm to our neighbors […].”7 the bishops follow here the work of james childress.8 in a series of seminal articles, childress, following in turn w.d. ross, developed the implications of such a deontological theoretical framework. childress began with the presumption that, as a “rule governed activity,” war “must be justified” by reasons sufficiently weighty to override the presumption or “prima facie duty of non-maleficence.” in childress’ words, “the phrase ‘prima facie’ indicates that certain features of acts that have a tendency to make an act right or wrong claim our attention; insofar as an act has those features, it is right or wrong. but our actual obligation depends on the act in its wholeness and entirety.”9 our prima facie duty of non-maleficence can thus be overridden only in the face of other, more stringent prima facie obligations, in this case, the “serious and weighty” duties “to protect the innocent from unjust attack, to restore rights wrongfully denied, or to reestablish a just order.”10 these obligations are further qualified by the other ad bellum and in bello criteria, e.g., war remains “the ultima ratio, the last resort.”11 in childress’ words, “just war theory indicates when the prima facie duty not to injure or kill others can be overridden or outweighed by the prima facie duty to act justly and to pursue justice.”12 moreover, even though overridden, the prima facie duty of non-maleficence, says childress, leaves “traces,” with the upshot that “the conduct of the war should be as compatible as possible with the overridden prima facie obligations,” e.g., constrained by the in bello norms.13 such a formal framework of prima facie duties appears to provide for an ecumenical convergence of the “dual tradition” of nonviolence and just war. in childress’ words, christian pacifists and advocates of the just war [b]oth share the same starting point—war is at least prima facie wrong and thus requires justification. they differ however because absolute pacifists deny that war can ever be justified, while just warriors hold that it can sometimes be justified.14 105 o’neill childress acknowledges that the proposed framework departs significantly from the substantive moral arguments of augustine and aquinas. indeed the “formal function of the criteria is hardly what traditional just-war theorists expected, for they developed their criteria within substantive theories of justice and the common good.”15 yet such theories, grounded in comprehensive teleological doctrines, fall prey to what john rawls calls the “reasonable pluralism” of our age, characterized by differing, even incommensurable conceptions of the good. justice, says rawls, must be political, not metaphysical, much less religiously inspired; and so too the just war. but does the framework of prima facie duties and reasoned exceptions in fact give us an ecumenical and secular (political) convergence? critics like james turner johnson and george weigel object that the prima facie duty or presumption against war is “is radically at odds with the classical idea of just war,” displacing the original and proper presumption against injustice.16 lisa cahill takes the opposite tack, arguing that “to phrase the prohibition against war as a ‘presumption’ is already to contemplate the inevitability of exceptions.”17 for helmut baer and joseph capizzi, the “prima facie just war system” plagues both houses, inasmuch as it “generates convergence by asking the representatives of the different traditions on war to misconstrue or distort their basic commitments.”18 pacifists, argue baer and capizzi, must adapt their stance to norms of rule-governed behavior (the prima facie duties of non-maleficence and justice), thereby permitting exceptions.19 further, the framework of prima facie duties, conversely, compels “the just war theorist to relinquish his basic conviction that the forceful exercise of political power is an integral part of god’s providential care for creation.”20 in failing to account for “the place of force in politics,” say baer and capizzi, childress relegates the just war to the penumbra of moral decision-making. now such objections to the proposed framework of prima facie duties are, i believe, telling yet incomplete. let me elaborate in terms of three further criticisms regarding (1) the eclipse of the biblical vision in prima facie duties; (2) the dubious status of moral traces of prima facie duties; and (3) the epistemic limits of a framework of prima facie duties. (1) prima facie duties laudable as appeal to prima facie duties for the sake of ecumenical convergence is, the price is steep. the u.s. bishops’ pastoral letters recall gaudium et spes’ teaching that “peace is not merely the absence of war” but “‘an enterprise of justice’ (is 32:17),” and affirm that a “theology of peace a restorative critique of just war 106 should ground the task of peacemaking solidly in the biblical vision of the kingdom of god.”21 one wonders, though, how much of the vision of “justice and peace” kissing (ps 85) survives in conflicting prima facie duties no longer grounded in substantive theories of justice and the common good.22 for šhalôm is now reduced to non-maleficence and defined so that it could be overridden by a prima facie duty of justice. yet the “šhalôm” of the kingdom entails far more than the mere absence of violence. as the scripture scholar john donahue observes, the “biblical term for peace, šhalôm” implies wholeness, completeness, or health. for this reason, in certain important biblical texts, especially those describing the effect of the just use of royal power, or in eschatological expectations of a restored kingdom, peace and justice are closely linked; for example, “justice will bring about peace; right will produce calm and security” (is 32:17, in the new american bible translation); “kindness and truth shall meet; justice and peace shall kiss. truth shall spring out of the earth and justice shall look down from heaven” (ps 85:11f.).23 indeed, the semantic fields of justice and peace overlap: “in general terms the biblical idea of of justice,” writes donahue, “can be described as fidelity to the demands of a relationship.” in this relationship, “concern for the defenseless in society” is “rooted in the nature of yahweh […] who is defender of the oppressed.”24 for a people born of exile, the touchstone of covenant fidelity will be the welfare of the widow, orphan, and stranger (migrant), those most vulnerable in a kinship society. (2) prima facie duties it is not only the eclipse of the biblical vision that inspires doubt. for it is by no means clear how “traces” of an overridden “prima facie duty not to injure or kill others” can be said to persist or retain normative force, whether indirectly “by mandating the ultimate object of peace” or “directly as in the protection of certain classes, avoidance of unnecessary suffering, and care for combatants who are hors de combat.”25 for if a prima facie duty does not oblige, how can it generate actual restrictions or duties?26 further, if it is curious that a prima facie rule that does not oblige should leave moral traces, it is curiouser and curiouser, as alice might say, that a prima facie rule that is 107 o’neill rightly overridden should. not only, then, does appeal to a theoretical calculus of prima facie duties fail to encompass the fullness of the biblical vision of a just peace; such duties, once overridden, leave but vanishing traces. the presumption “we should do no harm to our neighbors” binds at best pro tanto, only to be superseded by justice. (3) a framework of prima facie duties the crux of the difficulty, i believe, is that childress, following ross, conflates two logically distinct senses of duty. in ordinary speech, duties may figure as reasons for acting, as when we invoke a maxim of non-maleficence in deliberation. conversely, duty may signify the practical conclusion of such deliberation: all things considered, i ought (or ought not) to do harm. in thomistic teleology, general duties like non-maleficence, in the first deliberative sense, may serve to justify duty in the latter, practically rational sense: in deliberating, says aquinas, the general precepts of the decalogue, precisely inasmuch as they preserve “the common good” and “the very order of justice,” admit “of no dispensation whatever.” but such general, secondary precepts of the natural law must be interpretatively specified to determine what action i ought to do here and now. for aquinas, “killing is forbidden in the decalogue, in so far as it bears the character of something undue.”27 yet whether a given instance of killing is undue cannot simply be inferred; we must look to the morally relevant circumstances, e.g., grave threats to the commonweal. while we must always revere life, in extremis, “foes of the commonweal can be slain.”28 the specificatory maxim of non-maleficence holds, then, but not always; sometimes it may be outweighed by a more stringent duty. for aquinas, following aristotle, practical wisdom differs from theoretical reasoning precisely in this concrete, deliberative specification of what justice requires—what, here and now, in the practically rational sense, i ought to do. for while theory, as in physics, seeks the “ultimate universal,” practical reason looks to the “ultimate particular,” i.e., the circumstantial determination of that act that best satisfies the order of justice.29 in proposing a framework of prima facie duties, however, childress, like ross, seeks to pattern moral “principles after scientific principles.” as a. i. melden observes, a system of prima facie duties assimilates “moral principles or precepts” to “universally quantified propositions about what ought to be done,” where “prima facie” qualifies “ought” as permitting exceptions.30 agreement of the pacifist and just warrior obtains, then, for childress, inasmuch as both are bound by universally quantified, prima facie duties. differences emerge only with the substantive a restorative critique of just war 108 specification of the “actual” duty in question. in childress’s words, the just-war criteria, deriving from prima facie duties of non-maleficence and justice, “constitute a formal framework within which different substantive interpretations of justice and morality as applied to war can be debated.”31 but a framework of prima facie duties rests on a fatal ambivalence. for in building exceptions into the very notion of duty, we give with one hand (what “ought” to be done, e.g., nonmaleficence, is universally quantified), yet take with the other (but exceptions obtain, so that sometimes it is the case that i ought to do harm). putative agreement turns on just this ambivalence; for, although duties like non-maleficence may commend a general course of action in our deliberation, and command a specific action in judgment, they cannot do both at once. better to follow aristotle and aquinas in distinguishing general moral precepts from their concrete, circumstantial application in determining the “ultimate particular.”32 the departure from aquinas turns out, then, to be more significant than childress realized. indeed, if limited convergence is to be found between christian pacifism and just war, it will rest, not in bracketing “substantive interpretations of justice and morality,” but in the thick, narrative tradition from which both interpretations emerge. for tradition does not bequeath us a meta-theory or formal decision-procedure, but a narratively embodied system of beliefs. there is, indeed, no single “theory of just war, but rather a complex casuistry giving rise to the ad bellum, in bello, and post bellum norms. as modern hermeneutics tells us, the sense or meaning of such rules is a function of the history of their application—what hans-georg gadamer calls wirkungsgeschichte, the history of effects.33 and in the working of tradition, multiple variations have been wrung on the just-war norms. consider the genealogy of the justum bellum in the west. for augustine, war was a tragic necessity, the consequence—and remedy—of fallen nature. the “love of enemies” admits “of no exceptions,” yet the “kindly harshness” of charity does not “exclude wars of mercy waged by the good.” inspired by the “severity which compassion itself dictates,” such “wars of mercy” presumed that those inflicting punishment had “first overcome hate in their hearts.” neither ambrose nor augustine permitted violent self-defense; for only defense of the innocent neighbor could satisfy the stringent claims of charity.34 thomas aquinas recognizes the normative primacy accorded caritas in-forming justice, posing the quaestio in the summa theologiae ii-ii, q. 40, “whether it is always sinful to wage war?” harking back to their thomistic heritage, the renaissance spanish 109 o’neill schoolmen francisco de vitoria and francisco suárez fashioned the just-war tradition ordained, in vitoria’s words, to “the common good of all,” including that of one’s enemies. in the augustinian-thomistic tradition, we begin, then, not with simple premises or prima facie presumptions underlying “the concept of a just war,” but rather with a grammar embedded in a complex web of belief, i.e., nested values, ideals, tales, and tropes. yet much modern rhetoric of just war betrays a different “deep grammar.” indeed, with the eclipse of the religiously-inspired ideal of the bonum commune in early modernity, the justum bonum is annexed to quite different purposes. in hobbes’s militant rhetoric, nor instance, the “state of nature”—no longer naturally pacific—is aptly “called war, as is of every man against every man.” and in that inglorious “tract of time” we call history, “wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known,” we have but one right, that of “self-defense”—the very right ambrose and augustine denied!35 in a nominalist vein, hobbes opposes liberty—as a man’s “right of nature” (jus naturale) “to use [his] power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own nature”—to the “law of nature” (lex naturalis) which “determineth, and bindeth.”36 once human nature is stripped of grotius’ natural sociability, it is “the foresight of their own preservation” that leads “men who naturally love liberty, and dominion over others” to submit to “that restraint upon themselves (in which we see them live in commonwealths).”37 in sum, violent self-preservation, no longer a “stain upon our love for neighbor” in ambrose’s words, is our natural right, writ large upon the “artificial person” of the state. moreover, leviathan does not sacrifice this right even under the rule of international law. for hobbesian “realism” legislates for general self-preservation in the form of laws of nature, the force of which depends upon general compliance. in a state of partial compliance, governed by weak international law, “reason” will abide by the laws of nature, e.g., of the justum bellum, only to the degree that they promote self-preservation. accordingly, with the eclipse of the christian narrative’s “ontology of peace,”38 the criteria of proportionality, reasonable hope of success, and last resort are ordered no longer to the “common good” (including the good of enemy civilians) as a final end, but rather to the limited aims of strategic self-interest. and so the “violent bear it away” (mt. 11:12)—less by abjuring the norms of just war, it should be emphasized, than by incorporating or schematizing them within a putatively realist narrative. hobbesian logic is inscribed within a “moral world”; to preserve this world, we betray the very tenets that make it moral.39 a restorative critique of just war 110 a restorative framework in the preceding section, i questioned whether pacifism and just war can be reconciled under the rubrics of prima facie duties. we saw that a rapprochement on the model of scientific theory (universally quantified propositions) bracketed the substantive interpretations of justice and morality that differentiated this “dual tradition.” indeed, a thin, theoretical rapprochement, i believe, remains illusory. but might the very thickness of tradition, unfolding as a complex web of beliefs, ideals, tropes, and tales shed light on our differences? in the next section, i will argue that recent appeals to restorative justice offer us a post-metaphysical framework for assessing differing interpretations of just war and christian pacifism in the working of tradition.40 looking back in his incisive book in defense of war, nigel biggar laments the modern confusion of “the whole of just war theory with only the late modern part”: that is, the assumption, exemplified in david rodin’s work, that national self-defense, justified on the analogy of individual self-defense, is “the central ‘just cause’” of just war theory.41 as we noted above, early christian reflections on the just war imagined otherwise. in biggar’s words: throughout it first millennium and beyond, christian just war thinking has taken as the paradigm of just military action the defense of the innocent neighbor against injustice. accordingly, it approves the state’s self-defense only insofar as it comprises the defense of the common good against unjust aggression.42 biggar joins a chorus of earlier christian writers (augustine, aquinas, cajetan, vitoria, suarez, molina) in elaborating “a variety of ends” justifying military action: to fend off and stop injustice, to vindicate actual victims and reassure potential ones, to deter other potential wrongdoers, and to bring home to these wrongdoers the significance of what they have done for the sake of their own moral and spiritual health.43 111 o’neill the family resemblance of these writers’ respective theories, however, admits significant differences as to how these ends are specified and integrated. biggar himself favors a punitive or retributive interpretation, even while acknowledging that the “early christian tradition […] displays quite some variety in its view of the punitive nature of just war.”44 biggar likewise differs from other modern theorists, like oliver o’donovan, in offering a broad interpretation of punitive war as “being a hostile response—whether defensive or offensive—not merely to damage, but to injustice.”45 o’donovan differentiates punishment from defense and reparation, yet argues that “[a]ny concrete act of armed force […] will combine defensive, reparative, and punitive objectives.”46 biggar, by contrast, subsumes all these ends, “defensive, vindicative, deterrent, and reformative,” in a “punitive response” equated with retribution.47 this essay does not permit me to engage biggar’s interpretative gambits in framing the just war in punitive or retributive terms. for the moment, though, let me note that biggar himself has adumbrated a more comprehensive framing of just war in terms of the regulative ideal of the common good—aquinas’ political “translation” of augustine’s caritas. in the early christian tradition, “the common good of all” both inspired and constrained “wars of mercy”; and only with the eclipse of the ideal of the bonum commune, as we saw most notably in hobbes, was the right of self-defense enshrined in modern just-war theory. looking forward i have argued at greater length elsewhere that the emerging perspective of restorative justice offers a critical, pragmatic retrieval of the ideal of the common good.48 for what is to be restored, whether in the context of criminal justice, transitional justice, or, i shall argue here, in redressing violence, is the common good of all affected, victims and perpetrators alike. in the words of archbishop desmond tutu, chair of the south african truth and reconciliation committee (trc): retributive justice—in which an impersonal state hands down punishment with little consideration for victims and hardly any for the perpetrator—is not the only form of justice. i contend that there is another kind of justice, restorative justice […]. the central concern is not retribution or punishment but, in the spirit of ubuntu, the healing of breaches, the redressing of imbalances, the restoration of broken relationships. this kind of justice seeks to rehabilitate both the victim and a restorative critique of just war 112 the perpetrator, who should be given the opportunity to be reintegrated into the community he or she has injured by his or her offence.49 now, in interpreting such breaches of the common good, the modern rhetoric of human rights is not rejected, but rather encompassed within a broader interpretative framework.50 in this framework, basic human rights to security, subsistence, and civil-political liberties are less properties of sovereign selves, abstracted from the ensemble of social relations (as in modern liberalism), than a moral grammar of dissent against systemic violence and atrocity. rights thus play a critical or deconstructive hermeneutical role in disclosing systemic inequities, e.g., genocide, ethnic cleansing, politically motivated rape, etc. in this richer, communitarian interpretation, moreover, rights imply correlative duties, not merely of forbearance, but of substantive provision and protection. rights, then, figure not only critically in disclosing systemic violence, but generate systemic imperatives of institutional redress. to the critical hermeneutical use of rights there thus corresponds a constructive use in establishing a rights regime in which basic claim-rights are suitably redeemed and protected. in the wake of atrocity, what must be restored is not the status quo ante, but the rights-based common good of mutual respect and recognition. our rights talk must be rich enough to name both victim and offender while essentializing neither. under the rubrics of the common good, moreover, our moral entitlement to equal respect justifies preferential treatment for those whose basic rights are most imperiled. combining the critical and constructive uses of rights, a regime of rights must thus reconstructively embody a legislative or juridical preference for victims of racial, ethnic, and gendered violence. in interpreting the ethical ideal of the common good, the threefold hermeneutic of rights thus discloses systemic inequities, integrating interpersonal and systemic redress. as such, i believe, restorative justice provides a template for reappraising both pacifism and just war. for under the rubrics of the rights-based common good, both salient affinities and differences emerge. critically, both pacifist and just warrior must recognize systemic rights’ violations—not only overt violence, but systemic inequities culminating in overt violence and warfare. peace is never merely the absence of violence, but the justice mandated by šhalôm—the tranquillitas ordinis of rightly ordered peace. constructively, both pacifist and just warrior must acknowledge systemic duties, not only of forbearance but of protection and provision entailed by a rights regime. such 113 o’neill systemic imperatives govern not only overt conflict, e.g., in protecting potential victims against aggression, but inequities preceding conflict, e.g., precursors of genocide, and the exigencies of social reconciliation in the wake of conflict, e.g. transitional justice. reconstructively, both pacifist and just warrior must “take the victims’ side” in interpersonal redress. for both, a preferential option for the most vulnerable guides conduct and policy prior to, during, and after the cessation of conflict. now such a restorative framework, i believe, permits us to redress the lacunae noted above of a system of prima facie duties. (1) while prima facie duties reduce the biblical motifs of justice, peace, and love to the propositional content of universally quantifiable propositions, a restorative framework exhibits their complex interrelation. for neither pacifist nor just warrior are prima facie duties of justice and peace (non-maleficence) opposed. both pacifist and just warrior live under the sign of the psalmist: “just and peace shall kiss.” differences remain, as the regulative ideal of a just peace (augustine’s tranquillitas ordinis) is interpretatively specified—whether in a strict maxim of non-maleficence or one permitting exceptions. for just warriors, restorative justice underwrites the variety of ends justifying force: preserving justice, vindicating victims, deterring aggressors, etc. pacifists, conversely, acknowledge such ends, e.g., protecting potential victims from aggression, but deny the legitimacy of lethal force as a means of realizing them. (2) while prima facie duties conflate general precepts with propositional validity claims (“you ought to do a”), the rubrics of the common good preserve the reasongiving force of the great biblical injunctions. in an augustinian vein, for both pacifists and just warriors, violence always remains tragic—even if, for the just warrior, a just peace permits violence in extremis. but violence is tragic not because a prima facie duty of maleficence is overridden, or because a “trace” of the overridden norm persists. violence is tragic because the love of enemies allows for no exceptions; because the “hard sayings” of jesus must, as aquinas and augustine say, be kept “in readiness of mind.”51 a restorative critique of just war 114 (3) finally, while a system of prima facie duties subsumes pacifism and just war under universally quantifiable duties, a restorative framework identifies differences within the working of a common narrative tradition. as donald davidson observes, “disagreement and agreement alike are intelligible only against a background of massive agreement.”52 only such “massive agreement”—fidelity to the psalmist’s demands of justice and peace—permits us to assess salient differences, e.g., the permissibility of lethal violence. implications tradition does not, then, bequeath us a simple decision-procedure, be it the norms of just war or christian pacifism. our restorative hermeneutics rather lets us assess what is “handed on” as an extended argument in which multiple variations are wrung upon both strains of the dual tradition. novel historical circumstances dictate new readings of just war, e.g., vitoria’s defense of indigenous rights and denial of religious difference as a casus belli; pius xii’s narrowing of just cause in the face of modern weaponry; and john paul ii’s further restricting of just war to humanitarian intervention. yet the family resemblance of such interpretations is not infinitely malleable; certain interpretations belie the rights-based common good. as we saw in section (1), just warrior and pacifist alike must reject realist distortions of the tradition that reduce the common good of all to the narrow, strategic exigencies of national security. so too, a restorative turn reveals the variety of pacifisms. cahill distinguishes “compassionate pacifism” grounded in the gospel mandate of neighbor love from “obediential pacifism,” modeled on obedient witness to “the nonviolence, and in some respects even nonresistant, example of jesus.”53 and just as a realist inflection of just war belies the hermeneutic criteria adumbrated above, so a strict, non-resistant strain of pacifism falls short of the constructive and reconstructive imperatives of healing breaches. further differences emerge among pacifists. christian pacifists in the anabaptist tradition abjure the sword; yet some follow the schleitheim confession in ordaining the sword for “worldly magistrates,” at least in the exercise of “guarding and protecting the good” in police work.54 gerald schlabach and others have developed the latter theme, proposing “just policing” as an alternative to war;55 and glen stassen and duane friesen have elaborated “ten practices of just peacemaking” amenable, they believe, to “the original intention” of “just war theory and pacifism.” these 115 o’neill practices—all presuming a rights-based appeal to the common good—include “cooperative forces,” e.g., ngos; promotion of “democracy, human rights, and religious liberty”; and “peacemaking initiatives,” e.g., nonviolent direct action and partnership conflict resolution. such practices do not exclude force per se, but invite just-war advocates “to spell out what resorts must be tried before moving to the last resort.”56 pacifism too, then, exhibits variations, not least in the possible legitimation of humanitarian intervention assimilated to the peace-making of domestic police. pacifists, as stassen and friesen urge, must “be what their name, derived from the latin pacem-facere, means: peace-makers.”57 for even if pacifism is not strategically justified, it must be strategic in intent, favoring those nonviolent practices and strategies best suited to protect the innocent. where such nonviolent practices are effective in providing protection, they would be preferred even on just-war grounds (for which violence must be the last resort). pacifists are part of the rights-based argument, as the lives of dr. martin luther king, jr., dorothy day, and desmond tutu attest. in a world where violence is naturalized, the “spirituality and practice of active nonviolence,” advocated by the catholic nonviolence initiative, surely has its place. stanley hauerwas would doubtless dismiss a rights-based retrieval of the just war tradition; but his opposition turns more on a mistaken critique of rights, identified narrowly with political liberalism. he too, i believe, would recognize the duties of forbearance, protection of the most vulnerable, and provision mandated by šhalôm and sedaqah (righteousness). conclusions i have argued that tradition bequeaths us a complex argument in which pacifist and just warrior play distinct yet complementary roles. their differences remain, and remain significant. yet a degree of complementarity emerges, first inasmuch as both nonviolent spirituality and just-war casuistry are subject to the biblical imperatives of peace and justice. in neither the augustinianthomistic tradition of just war, nor in christian pacifism, do we begin with simple premises or prima facie duties. rather, both emerge incrementally, as a grammar embedded in a complex web of belief, i.e., nested values, ideals, tales and tropes. second, while such a background of agreement falls short of theoretical rapprochement, it allows for reciprocal influence: e.g., of nelson mandela and desmond tutu; or dietrich bonhoeffer and martin luther king, jr. and dorothy day. yet neither acknowledging biblical imperatives nor reciprocal influence fully resolves our a restorative critique of just war 116 initial dilemma: whether these two ways of addressing violence are finally compatible in a “dual tradition.” for the very biblical ideals that make influence possible may make condemnation necessary. is the sword “outside the perfection of christ,” as the schleitheim confession declares; or is “the same sword” now “ordained to be used by the worldly magistrates”? certainly, no theory of universally quantified propositions will allow us to say that the “sword” is both divinely ordained and not ordained. but what then do we confess? must the opposing parties shun one another for infidelity, or at least falling short of the gospel, as today we would shun those advocating crusade? is pacifism but “wishful thinking,” or just war a constantinian betrayal? let me respond by telling a personal story. in 1995, i visited rwanda in the wake of the genocide. the killings had begun on the evening of easter wednesday, april 6, 1994, and continued for three months. by the end, more than 800,000 tutsi as well as hutu opposing the genocide were massacred. between the second week of april and the third week of may, it is estimated that the daily rate of killing was at least five times that of the nazi death camps. three quarters of the rwandese tutsi population fell victim to the genocide; the elderly, children, and the infirm were killed, nor was there any haven. churches offering sanctuary were the first places to be attacked.58 as i visited these churches, filled with bodies still, bodies left as a memorial, my own pacifist convictions were deeply challenged. for had u.n. peacekeepers not summarily been withdrawn at the behest of the u.s. and the former colonial regimes, countless lives most likely would have been saved. in racist fury, neighbor killed neighbor, often with simple machetes. a show of force, akin to policing, may have sufficed, but none was offered. i remain a pacifist, in part as a consecrated religious jesuit. but i am not prepared to condemn those who think otherwise, e.g., troops who would defend the innocent. indeed, i would endorse their doing so. have i abandoned my pacifism? i think not, for it remains plausible, as i argued above, to distinguish the waging of war from just policing. but there is still a deeper question: might we not err precisely in assuming that one or another has erred? for if, as i have argued, both christian pacifist and just-war advocate are bound by the exigencies of discipleship—the biblical imperatives of justice and peace—might not our differences emerge not in deliberation over whether just war or pacifism is more consistent with the gospel, but rather in discernment of what the particular moment calls for? here, we hark back to the very origins of christian reflection on just war, for not all were ordained to fight. as ronald bainton observes, “the prime transmitters of the nonmilitary tradition 117 o’neill of the early church were the monks.”59 in ambrose’s words, “it was not the clergy’s business to look to arms but rather to the forces of peace”; and augustine counsels boniface that “[t]hey occupy indeed a higher place before god who, abandoning all these secular employments, serve him with the strictest chastity, but ‘every one’, as the apostle says, ‘hath his proper gift of god, one after this manner, and another after that’ (1 cor 7:7).”60 for aquinas, too, the “higher” calling of clergy and religious precluded resort to lethal force: “although it is meritorious to wage a just war, nevertheless it is rendered unlawful for clerics, by reason of their being deputed to works more meritorious still.”61 with vatican ii’s universal call to holiness, such hieratic distinctions of higher or lesser meritorious roles no longer obtain. neither does appeal to legitimate authority justify citizen soldiers’ obedience to what augustine called “unjust commands” of “temporal masters.”62 in the hard grace of discipleship, none is spared discernment or the deliberation it entails.63 in elaborating the “place” of discernment, karl rahner distinguishes essentialist and formal existential ethics, figuring respectively in the first and second week of st. ignatius’ spiritual exercises.64 in rahner’s spirituality, essential ethics defines the sphere of universal norms, while a formal existential ethics pertains to discerning the particular call of god to the disciple as “individuum ineffabile, whom god has called by name, a name which is and can only be unique.”65 like dante’s virgil, moral deliberation brings us to the brink of discernment; but in the formal existential ethics of the second week’s election, we are summoned by name to respond to god’s gracious invitation. this is, in other words, one’s “selving” before god. for rahner, not all moral decisions are mapped onto practical syllogisms. discernment is necessary just because it is possible, because god does graciously invite one to a particular state, which need not be, per se, morally superior to another. might it be thus with christian pacifism and just war? not a question of theoretical inference, or even of practical, “essentialist” reasoning, but of graced discernment? if so, i may fully trust in my vocation, yet not be compelled to condemn yours. condemnation, of course, is warranted where we fail to discern, or much worse succumb to hobbesian “realism.” but if, as i have argued, discernment is a function of discipleship for pacifist and just-war advocate alike, then our differences emerge within a complex web of nested biblical values, ideals, tales, and tropes. and if we need not condemn, then perhaps we may learn each from the other. in a world so riven by violence, both christian pacifist and just-war advocate must acknowledge a restorative critique of just war 118 the tragic aspect of discipleship, inspiring a hermeneutics not of righteous vindication, but of lament. for the proponent of just war, killing is severely constrained by the systemic imperatives of peace and justice in-forming the use of just-war (ad bellum, in bello, and post bellum) norms. yet killing remains tragic. for christians engaged in what st. paul calls public magistracy, the wisdom of pacifists remains an all too cogent admonition against hybris. and the pacifist too must lament the killing and atrocity that could not be deterred by nonviolent practices and strategies. but always, re-conciliation—the healing of breaches—remains the end of the “dual tradition”; this is the hope “binding all christians.” and forgiveness, which is always graced, transcending legal and moral duties and hence never exacted, may finally be indispensable for a future with hope. edmund husserl spoke in his transcendental phenomenology of epochē, a bracketing of existential judgment. might not spiritual epochē be required here, in a community of disciples who must discern, even in the midst of lament? may we witness rather than judge in healing our breaches? is not humility required of both sides? perhaps, as dorothy day reminds us, “in a way, it is like the paradox of the gospel.” notes 1. robert ellsberg, ed., the selected writings of dorothy day (new york: alfred a. knopf, 1988), 280. 2. karl von clausewitz, on war, trans. edward m. collins, in war, politics, and power (chicago: henry regnery, 1962), 65; cited by michael walzer, just and unjust wars: a moral argument with historical illustrations, 3rd ed. (new york: basic books, 1977), 23. 3. the pontifical council for justice and peace and pax christi international, “catholic nonviolence initiative,” https://nonviolencejustpeace.net/final-statement-an-appeal-tothe-catholic-church-to-re-commit-to-the-centrality-of-gospel-nonviolence/. 4. walzer, just and unjust wars, 36. walzer speaks of the “moral reality” of war as “a rulegoverned activity.” 5. for the ideal of an “overlapping consensus” see john rawls, political liberalism, rev. ed. 119 o’neill (new york: columbia university press, 1996), xlvii ff., 133–172; and “the idea of public reason revisited,” in the law of peoples (cambridge, ma.: harvard university press, 1999), 164–180. 6. u.s. conference of catholic bishops, the harvest of justice is sown in peace: a reflection of the national conference of catholic bishops on the tenth anniversary of the challenge of peace, november 17, 1993, http://www.usccb.org/beliefs-andteachings/what-we-believe/catholic-social-teaching/the-harvest-of-justice-is-sown-inpeace.cfm. 7. u.s. conference of catholic bishops, the challenge of peace: god’s promise and our response, in catholic social thought: the documentary heritage, expanded edition, eds. david j. o’brien and thomas a. shannon (maryknoll, ny: orbis books, 2010), §80, 624. 8. the principal episcopal author of a challenge of peace, joseph cardinal bernardin, notes the bishops’ debt to childress, among other protestant theologians, for having “greatly contributed to our understanding of the content and capacity of just-war ethics to evaluate public policy.” childress is cited in note 35 in the text. see joseph cardinal bernardin, “the challenge of peace: ecumenical roots and relationships,” http://homepage.accesscable.net/~dpoirier/sfo84txt.htm, accessed december 19, 2017. james turner johnson writes that “the challenge of peace, without reference to the logic of prima facie duties, replicates the structure of childress’ argument exactly: just war theory begins with a presumption against war, and the just war criteria function to override this presumption (or to show that it should not be overridden) in particular cases.” see “just war, as it was and is,” first things 149 (january 2005): 14–24, at 19. 9. james f. childress, “just-war theories: the bases, interrelations, priorities, and functions of their criteria,” theological studies 39 (1978): 427–445, at 430, 434. 10. ibid., 436. 11. ibid. 12. james f. childress, “‘nonviolent resistance: trust and risk-taking’ twenty-five years later,” journal of religious ethics 25/2 (1997): 213–222, at 216–217. a restorative critique of just war 120 13. childress, “just-war theories,” 435. 14. childress, “‘nonviolent resistance,’” 216. 15. childress, “just-war criteria,” in war or peace? the search for new answers, ed. thomas a. shannon (maryknoll, ny: orbis books, 1980), 40–58, at 51. 16. james turner johnson, “just war: the broken tradition,” national interest 45 (fall 1996): 27–36; cf. “just war, as it was and is,” first things 149 (january 2005): 16. 17. lisa sowle cahill, love your enemies: discipleship, pacifism, and just war theory (minneapolis: fortress press, 1989), 13. 18. helmut david baer and joseph e. capizzi, “just war theories reconsidered: problems with prima facie duties and the need for a political ethic,” journal of religious ethics 33/1 (2005): 119–137, at 123. 19. baer and capizzi move too quickly, i believe, in assuming that “the pacifist would be adopting just war language for an ostensible strategic gain, while tacitly admitting that, on its own terms, pacifism is politically irrelevant.” see ibid., 124. for childress, however, pacifists deny that there can be exceptions to the “prima facie rule,” but the denial need not be justified strategically. 20. baer and capizzi, “just war theories reconsidered,” 124. 21. u.s.c.c.b., the challenge of peace, §68, citing gaudium et spes, §78; and the challenge of peace, §25. 22. for criticism of the bishops’ appropriation of scripture, see quentin quesnell, “hermeneutical prolegomena to a pastoral letter,” in peace in a nuclear age: the bishops’ pastoral letter in perspective, ed. charles j. reid (washington, dc: catholic university of america press), 3–19. 23. john donahue, what does the lord require, rev. ed. (st. louis: institute of jesuit sources, 2000), 70–71. 24. john donahue, “the bible and catholic social teaching: will this engagement lead to 121 o’neill marriage?” in modern catholic social teaching: commentaries and interpretations, ed. kenneth r. himes (washington, dc: georgetown university press, 2004), 9–40, at 14. 25. childress, “just-war theories,” 441 (emphasis mine). 26. ibid., 430. 27. aquinas, st i-ii, q. 100, a. 8. 28. ibid. 29. aristotle, nicomachean ethics 1141b14–22, 1142a3014–30. 30. a.i. melden, rights in moral lives: a historical-philosophical essay (berkeley: university of california press, 1988), 92. 31. childress, “just-war criteria,” 51. 32. as melden observes “of ross’s use of the expression ‘prima facie’”: instead of speaking of “tending-to-be-oughts” rather than “oughts simpliciter,” we should speak of the fact that the moral reason specified by some moral precept or maxim may or may not be sufficient to determine what it is that one ought to do in some specific case to which it applies. (96) 33. see hans-georg gadamer, truth and method, 2nd revised ed., trans. joel weinsheimer and donald g. marshall (new york: crossroad, 1989), 300–307. 34. cf. epist. 189, and 209, 2; de civitate dei, xix, 12–13, xxii, 6; quest. heat. vi, 10, sel., xxviii, 2, p. 428, iv, 44, csel, xxviii, 2, p. 353; de libero arbitrio, v, 12, migne, pl, xxxxii, 1227; contra faustum, xxiii, 76 and 79; epist., 138, ii, 14. cited in bainton, war and peace, 91ff. 35. thomas hobbes, leviathan, ed. c. b. macpherson (london: penguin books, 1968), 185– 186. 36. ibid., 38–39. hobbes thereby separates what suárez merely distinguishes. 37. ibid., 52. a restorative critique of just war 122 38. jean bethke elshtain, “reflections on war and political discourse: realism, just war, and feminism in a nuclear age,” in war in the twentieth century: sources in theological ethics, ed. richard b. miller (louisville, kentucky: westminster/john knox press, 1992), 395–416, at 400. 39. ibid., 407. 40. our interpretation of the common good, that is, does not depend upon an aristotelian/thomistic teleological metaphysics, but, as in rawls’ political liberalism, looks to an overlapping, pragmatic consensus on dignity and human rights. 41. nigel biggar, in defense of war (oxford: oxford university press, 2013), 149. 42. ibid, 154. 43. ibid., 169. 44. ibid., 163. 45. ibid., 164. 46. oliver o’donovan, the just war revisited (oxford: oxford university press, 2003), 53, as cited in biggar, in defense of war, 164, n. 82. 47. biggar, in defense of war, 169, 170. 48. see william o’neill, “imagining otherwise: the ethics of social reconciliation,” the journal of the society of christian ethics 25 (2002): 183–199. 49. desmond tutu, no future without forgiveness (london: rider, 1999), 51. “ubuntu,” says tutu, “speaks of the very essence of being human.” it “means my humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up” in that of others. “we say, ‘a person is a person through other people.’ it is not ‘i think therefore i am.’ it says rather: ‘i am human because i belong.’ i participate, i share.” see 34–35. 50. many modern theorists oppose interpretations of the common good to modern interpretations of individual natural or human rights. modern roman catholic social 123 o’neill teaching offers a via media: pacem in terris glosses the premodern, perfectionist teleology of mater et magistra (depicting the common good as “the sum total of those conditions of social living, whereby [we] are enabled to achieve [our] own integral perfection” [§65]) in deontological terms of the “rights and obligations” implied by persons’ natural dignity. “it is agreed that in our time,” says pope john, that “the common good is chiefly guaranteed when personal rights and duties are maintained.” see pacem in terris, §§53–66, 132–41; gaudium et spes, §§25ff., 30; dignitatis humanae, §§6–7; populorum progressio, §§22– 24, 43–75; sollicitudo rei socialis, §§38–40. 51. aquinas, st ii-ii, 40 a. 1; citing augustine (de serm. dom. in monte i, 19). see augustine, “letter 138, to marcellinus.” 52. donald davidson, “radical interpretation,” in inquiries into truth and interpretation (oxford: clarendon, 1984), 137. see also “thought and talk,” 155–170. 53. cahill, love your enemies, 13–14, 151. 54. “schleitheim confession” in baptist confessions of faith (chicago: judson press, 1959), 22–31, at 27. 55. gerald schlabach, ed., just policing, not war: an alternative response to world violence (collegeville, mn; liturgical press, 2007). 56. duane friesen and glen stassen, “just peacemaking,” in christian peace and nonviolence: a documentary history, ed. michael g. long (maryknoll, ny: orbis books 2011), 277–81. 57. ibid., 278. 58. see gérard prunier, the rwanda crisis: history of a genocide (new york: columbia university press, 1995), 237–68; africa rights, rwanda: death, despair and defiance, rev. ed. (london: africa rights, 1995); human rights watch, leave none to tell the story (new york: human rights watch, 1999), 1–30. cf. philip gourevitch, we wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: stories from rwanda (new york: farrar straus and giroux, 1998), and samantha power, “a problem from hell”: a restorative critique of just war 124 america and the age of genocide (new york: basic books, 2002), 337. 59. roland bainton, christian attitudes toward war and peace: a historical survey and critical re-evaluation (nashville: abingdon, 1960), 89. 60. ambrose, “duties of the clergy,” cited in james f. childress, “moral discourse about war in the early church,” journal of religious ethics 12 (1984): 12; augustine, “letter to boniface,” clxxxix, in nicene and post-nicene fathers, vol. 1, the confessions and letters of augustine, with a sketch of his life and world, first series, ed. philip schaff, trans. j.g. cunningham (peabody, ma: hendrickson, 1994), 552–54, at 553. 61. aquinas, st ii-ii, 40, a. 2; cf. ii-ii, 64, a. 4. 62. augustine, commentary on psalm 125, in expositions on the books of psalms, vol. 5, trans. h. m. wilkins, vol. 37 of a library of the fathers of the holy catholic church (london: f. & j. rivington, 1835), 543. 63. bernard prusak argues that legal recognition of selective conscientious objection would constitute “an important resource for the prevention of unjust wars.” see bernard g. prusak, “a right not to fight: making the case for selective conscientious objection,” commonweal, december 1, 2017, 13–15, at 13 (quoting jeff mcmahan). 64. karl rahner, “on the question of a formal existential ethics,” in theological investigations 2, trans. karl h. kruger (baltimore: helicon, 1963), 217–234. see also rahner, “the ‘commandment’ of love in relation to the other commandments,” in theological investigations 5, trans. karl h. kruger (new york: seabury, 1966), 439–459; “theology of freedom”, in theological investigations 6, trans. karl and boniface kruger (new york: seabury, 1974), 178–196; and “reflections on the unity of the love of neighbor and the love of god” in the same volume, 231–249, where rahner observes that “freedom is not simply the capacity to do this or that but (formally) a self-disposing into finality” (240). 65. rahner, “on the question of a formal existential ethics,” 217–234. essential ethics, as we have seen, refers to the set of universal, action-guiding moral norms ascertained by natural reason (e.g. respect for persons’ basic rights); we need not assume that such norms rest 125 o’neill upon a foundationalist or essentialist metaphysics. microsoft word 2 plato trepanier article.docx [expositions 11.1 (2017) 79–100] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 socrates’ homer in the republic: retaining the poetic past and preparing for the philosophic future lee trepanier saginaw valley state university homer is acknowledged by socrates as the educator of hellas, “the most poetic of the poets and the first of tragedians” who provides the model around which the hellenes order their lives (rep 607a).1 the first references to homer in the republic confirm the poet’s commanding civilizational influence on the hellenes when both socrates and adeimantus speak of homer in the context of what people have learned from him. in his refutation of polemarchus’ definition of justice, “helping your friends, harming your enemies,” socrates points out that this definition of justice makes a just man a kind of thief, something which polemarchus must have learned from the odyssey where homer admires odysseus’ grandfather, autolycus, for excelling all men “in thievery and perjury” (rep 334a–b; odyssey 19.395–96). polemarchus is not to be blamed for this misconception of justice, for, as adeimantus recounts, the poets teach the hellenes that justice is praised only for its beneficial consequences. adeimantus cites the odyssey as evidence of this teaching: even as when a good king who rules in a god-fearing way, upholds justice, and the black earth produces wheat and barley, and his trees are laden with fruit his flock increases and the sea teems with fish. (rep 363b–c; odyssey 19.109–13) people should be just for the rewards and reputations it brings and not for its own sake—the challenge that glaucon and adeimantus propose to socrates to prove. socrates’ proof that one should be just for its own sake is contrary to what homer teaches. for instance, homer shows the gods granting misfortune and evil to just people and their opposites a contrary life and mendicant priests and soothsayers swindling the rich with their claims that they socrates’ homer in the republic 80 can expiate their family’s misdeeds and harm their enemies with spells and enhancements (364b– c). these things are all possible because, as homer states, the gods can be easily manipulated: the gods themselves may be swayed with sacrificial feasts and soft prayers, libations and incense when men have gone too far and done wrong. (rep 364d–e; iliad 9.497–501) thus, homer teaches the hellenes that a person should be just not for its own sake but for the rewards it brings; a just person can suffer from misfortune while an unjust one can be blessed; and the gods, the dead, and the living can be influenced by magic, sacrifices, and prayers. as glaucon’s story of gyges’ ring illustrates (rep 359d–360b), and as adeimantus highlights, the “main point” is for socrates to show why the just life is worthy for its own sake and superior to a life where one “seems” just while actually living unjustly (rep 362d–363a). socrates’ challenge is immense, as homer appears to teach the hellenes exactly the opposite: one should seem to be just to reap the rewards that a just reputation brings but in fact live an unjust life for the benefits that such a life offers. with the hellenes raised in these values, what stratagem, adeimantus asks socrates, could be devised “to persuade a man with birth, wealth, or strength of body or soul that he ought to respect justice and not snicker at the very word?” (rep 366c). for homer’s influence on the hellenes is more than cultural, social, or political: it is foundational.2 homer’s poetry is the mythical, cultural, and existential fabric that makes the hellenes a people.3 without these stories, there are no hellenes. given this, how can socratic philosophy succeed in showing the just life is superior to the unjust one? this “ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry” seems to place an insurmountable burden on philosophy to prove its preeminence over poetry (rep 607b).4 one option for socrates is to eradicate homeric poetry completely in the civic education of the guardians and leave only philosophy.5 however, such a strategy would not only deprive the hellenes the civilizational fabric that makes them a people, but it also may not be effective in civic education, especially in the teaching of children who are not entirely receptive to reason.6 another approach is to leave homeric poetry alone and prepare only a few for philosophy: philosophers would provide lipservice to the public about their beliefs in homeric teaching while in private pursue a life of 81 trepanier reason.7 a final possibility is to create a rival myth that combines philosophy and poetry together in order to supplant homer’s place as the educator of all hellas.8 socrates’ myth of er in book x, and the dialogue the republic itself, would be the types of philosophical myths that re-found the hellenes as a people with a new set of values and way of life. in this article i argue that socrates seeks to rehabilitate homeric poetry as much as philosophy will permit by his selecting those passages that support his philosophical aims and censoring or modifying those excerpts that are contrary to it.9 instead of repudiating homer’s poetry altogether, socrates recognizes that the foundational role his stories have for the hellenes and therefore knows that they cannot be eradicated entirely; otherwise, the hellenes would not exist as a people. philosophy consequently must accommodate homer’s poetry but only under its supervision in order for citizens to become just. by retaining the passages of homer’s poetry that are compatible with his philosophy, socrates is able the preserve the foundational role that homer plays for the hellenes, while, at the same time, prepare them for a more philosophic future. this reading of the republic is compatible with previous scholarship on this question: socrates does eliminate homer’s poetry from the city but not all of his poetry; socrates expects only a few to be able to study philosophy but leaves poetry for the many; and socrates’ own poetry, like the myth of er and the republic itself, are a new type of philosophical myth but still anchored in the foundational fabric of homer’s poetry. according to this reading, socrates is neither a philosophical radical nor a political revolutionist but a pragmatic reformer who works within the cultural milieu of his civilization to make it more receptive to a life of philosophy. although he had failed in his own time, socrates’ attempt provides a blueprint for us today as we wrestle with the questions like national identity and civic education in our own country.10 i. socrates’ first criticism of the poets, including homer, is they make false claims about the gods, spirits, heroes, the dead, and just people. when discussing the education of the guardians, socrates condemns the stories that homer tells—“false stories which are told and still being told”—because they misrepresent the nature of the gods and heroes (rep 377d–e). stories like uranus, zeus, and cronus chaining and castrating each other and swallowing their children or those of “hera enchained by her son and hephaestus hurled by his father out of olympus for trying to defend his mother, and the battle of the gods that homer tells” will not be permitted in socrates’ polis (rep socrates’ homer in the republic 82 377e, 378d–e; iliad 1.586–94).11 these stories need to be censored because they will permanently damage the character of the young, who are easily impressionable and vulnerable to “any stamp one wishes to put on them” (rep 377b). socrates’ first law for religious speech and writing therefore is that the god is the cause only of good (rep 380c; 379c). socrates does not tolerate the poets’ error that the gods are responsible for both good and evil, as homer states: two jars of lots stand in zeus’ hall one of good, the other of evil. and to whomever zeus gives a mixed portion, he “falls now into good, now into evil,” while one who receives unmixed evil is “driven by misery over the entire earth.” (rep 379c; iliad 24.257– 32). socrates also suppresses the homeric lines that call zeus “a dispenser alike of good and evil to mortals”; when the gods goad the trojan hero, pandarus, to violate his oath that could have potentially have led to the peaceful return of helen of troy; and other such tales (rep 379d–e; iliad 4.866ff). any portrayal of the gods other than the cause of good would be censored by socrates. socrates’ second law for religious speech and writing is that the god is absolutely simple and truthful in both word and deed (rep 382e).12 the god does not change or deceive others by visions, words, or sending signs to those awake or asleep, and the gods are not to be portrayed as sorcerers who change their shapes or become liars who mislead (rep 383a). socrates again specifically cites passages from homer as examples of what type of poetry should be censored: the gods take the shapes of strangers as they visit the cities of mortals. (rep 381d; odyssey 17.485–86) other examples socrates includes are the transformations of proteus, thetis, and hera as well as zeus sending a false dream to agamemnon (rep 383a; iliad 2.1–34). socrates next moves to the poets’ portrayals of the dead and spirits. when the poets depict death, they should do so in a way to make the guardians less fearful of it in order that they may 83 trepanier become brave (rep 386b). when the poets do the contrary, those passages are to be deleted, like the homeric excerpt when the shade of achilles speaks to odysseus in the underworld: i would rather toil the soil, a serf to another to an indigent man without land than rule and be king over all the dead who have perished. (rep 186c; odyssey 11.489–91) socrates continues to list a number of homeric passages that depict the afterlife as “horrible, noisome, and putrid” (rep 186d; iliad 20.64–65); “deprived of one’s senses and understanding” (rep 186d; iliad 23.103–4); a life of “shadowy phantoms” (rep 186d; odyssey 10.495) where one “wails its doom” (rep 186d; iliad 16.856–57) and act like a “gibbering soul” (rep 387a; iliad 23.100) that “squeaks and gibbers” (rep 387a; odyssey 24.6–9). fearful names of the underworld also should be suppressed and the opposite should be portrayed (rep 387c). the guardians should be taught that death is not to be fear and that slavery is even worse than death itself (rep 387b). the representations of the gods as simple, truthful, and responsible only for good, along with the portrayals of death as something not to be feared, are the models for which the guardians are to emulate. for socrates, these stories about the gods, the dead, and spirits are to encourage citizens to honor them, their parents, and to value and love each other (rep 386b). it also introduces the concepts of agency and responsibility for one’s own actions.13 the guardians will not be able to blame external forces, such as the gods, spirits, or a fear of death, for their deeds, if these teachings are to be believed. socrates acknowledges the potency of homeric poetry and the potential danger it brings to citizens—the “more poetic they are the more dangerous”—unless it is supervised by philosophers. homer is to be admired for many things but not for his depictions of the gods as responsible for evil or that death is something to be feared (rep 383a). because of its foundational influence, homeric poetry is not altogether banished from socrates’ polis but it is modified to align with the new form of civic education that is required. socrates’ homer in the republic 84 ii. socrates continues his censorship of poetry with how the gods, heroes, and people should be portrayed. poets who claim that the unjust are happy and the just the opposite, that there is profit in injustice, and that justice is another person’s good and your own loss will be prohibited in socrates’ polis with only the contrary teachings proclaimed (rep 392b). the poets also will be barred from depicting heroes from doing shocking deeds, like the abductions of helen and persephone (rep 391c–d) or the various examples of achilles’ impious behavior: rebuking the gods apollo and spercheius (rep 391a; iliad 22.15, 20; 23.141–52), disobeying and fighting a god (rep 391a; iliad 21.232ff), desecrating hector’s body (rep 391a; iliad 24.15–18), and slaughtering captives (rep 391a; iliad 23.175–76). as a hero, achilles should not be shown as someone filled with the two conflicting impulses of slavish greed and overbearing arrogance towards gods and humans (rep 391b–c).14 such representations are harmful because they corrupt the young and people would excuse their own evil, being convinced that such things were being done to them (rep 391e). the poets should also show that the gods cannot be bribed, as homer claims with “gifts move gods and gifts persuade awesome kings” (rep 390e; iliad 9.515–23) or his portrayals of achilles accepting agamemnon’s gifts out of greed, his refusal to release hector’s body without payment (rep 390e–391a), or listening to the counsel of phoenix who urges achilles to defend the achaeans if he receives gifts (rep 390e; iliad 19.278–81). however, socrates misrepresents homer’s account of achilles, for achilles has little interest in gifts and is not as greedy as socrates accuses him to be. achilles’ objection to agamemnon was one of justice understood as a type of honor— “but whatever we took by war from the cities have been distributed, and it is not right to take this back from men”—instead of greed (iliad 1.124–27). likewise, achilles does not return hector’s body because of want of payment but rather because of his grief over patroclus. it is only when he overcomes his grief when meeting priam does achilles return hector’s body to his father (iliad 24.507–15). this misrepresentation of achilles is an example of socrates modifying homer’s poetry for his own philosophical ends. socrates may not be interested about the real reason why achilles refuses to defend the achaeans but invokes this episode to illustrate a larger philosophical point about agency and responsibility: if the poets teach the gods can be bribed, then one can excuse one’s behavior and thereby responsibility for one’s deeds. another reason why socrates misportrays 85 trepanier achilles is that he finds achilles’ understanding of justice incomplete: the proper distribution of honor after victory in war. instead of directly attacking achilles’ definition of justice, a hero whom the hellenes admire, socrates depicts him as greedy and arrogant—a character attack that indirectly questions achilles’ understanding of justice. the notion that the gods can be bribed undermines agency and responsibility for oneself, thereby making civic education impossible.15 this is why socrates also censors poetry that portrays gods and heroes exhibiting emotional distress, whether it be achilles (rep 387d–388b; iliad 24.10–12; 18.23–24), priam (rep 388b–c; iliad 22.414–15), thetis (rep 388b–c; iliad 18.54), or zeus (rep 388c–d; iliad 22.168–69; 16.433–34). this also applies to depictions of laughter, when gods and humans are overcome with it (rep 389a; iliad 1.599–600). such representations of the gods and heroes do not make citizens temperate, teaching them that it is permissible not to control oneself (rep 388d). for socrates, homer is particularly at fault among the poets for not promoting temperance. he represents zeus lusting after hera, forgetting all his plans, and making him want to lie with her on the ground rather than go to their bedroom (rep 390c; iliad 14.294–341). homer also teaches that “hunger is the most piteous death” (rep 390b; odyssey 12.342) and describes odysseus having said that the best things in life are “tables filled with bread, meat, and full cups of sweet wine” (rep 390b; odyssey 9.8–10). but, as shorey points out, socrates’ recitation of the odyssey is misleading, for odysseus thinks of music rather than food and wine as the best thing in life.16 but this misrepresentation, again, is a way for socrates to illustrate his larger philosophical point about the need for temperance in civic education. by showing one of the hellenes’ heroes, odysseus, lack of temperance, socrates is able reorient hellenic civilization towards a more philosophic and virtuous future. another instance when socrates modifies homer poetry for his own philosophical aims is when he approves of homer’s characterization of diomedes, who says: friend, be quiet and attend to my words and what follows: in high spirits, the achaeans march silently fearing their leaders. (rep 389e) socrates’ homer in the republic 86 by citing homer, socrates underscores the importance of temperance to be installed into the guardians; however, the two passages do not follow one another, as socrates claim. the first lines are from book 4 of the iliad where diomedes silences sthenelus after agamemnon criticizes them (4.412). the lines that follow, “friend, be quiet and attend to my words,” are below: i do not blame agamemnon, shepherd of the people, for encouraging the achaeans to battle. it is he who receive glory if the achaeans defeat the trojans and take scared troy, and he, likewise, will receive all the blame if the achaeans are slain. but come, let us call take the thoughts of spirited valor. (iliad 4.413–18) this passage does not speak of temperance but about the burdens of leadership and the call for valor. in the second line, “in high spirits, the achaeans march silently fearing their leaders,” socrates splices two different passages from the iliad into a single one: “in high spirits, the achaeans march silently, eager at heart to come and aid each other” (3.8) and “all silent as they were through fear of their commanders” (4.431). the first line is referring to both the achaean and trojan armies advancing to each other for battle before paris proposes single combat with menelaus; the second line refers to the same two armies but after the oath is broken. although one could speculate about the significance of socrates splicing lines from before and after the oath is broken, my task here is more mundane. by modifying homer’s poetry to show how temperance is needed in his polis, socrates indirectly shows that homer’s poetry cannot be completely eradicated because of foundational role that homer’s poetry plays in making the hellenes a people. socrates therefore must resort to censoring those passages of homer that do not comport with his philosophical project and modify and adopt those passages that do. admittedly, it is possible that socrates just misquotes homer; but i think it more likely that socrates wants to retain some homeric poetry because it is impossible to banish it entirely without dire consequences. 87 trepanier iii. in spite of his criticism of homer, socrates does endorse some of his poetry when it suits his philosophical aims. an example is when homer describes odysseus as a model of self-control: he stuck his chest and chided his heart, endure, my heart, for worse you have endured. (rep 390d; odyssey 20.17–18) socrates also praises homer as a resource from which the philosophers could learn in the training of gymnastics for the guardians (rep 404b). socrates cites homer’s portrayal of heroes on military campaigns as ones the guardians should emulate: eating only roast meat with fire, as it is the easiest meal to prepare, and not fish, broiled meat, sweets, or any food that comes from pots (rep 404b– c). soldiers also should accept the medical treatment afforded them without complaint: nobody finds “fault with the girl who gave the wounded eurpylus pramnian wine sprinkled with barley and grated cheese, inflammatory ingredients” or “censured patroclus who oversaw the case” (rep 405e–406a). this type of physical endurance is held in contrast to a polis where its citizens have become bloated with self-indulgence and disease. in this city, doctors are required not to cure some common illness but for aliments brought about by an indolent life (rep 405a, 405d).17 socrates praises these homeric passages because they align with his philosophical and pedagogical goals of civic education (i.e., teaching guardian children temperance and endurance). and, like previous episodes, socrates incorrectly recounts homer’s story by substituting eurpylus for machaon (iliad 11.611–54), a story that he correctly tells in the ion (538b–d). machaon is a surgeon and medic, the son of asclepius who is the god of medicine, while eurpylus is a great soldier, having entered the trojan horse. this character substitution allows a better way to appeal to the warrior ethos of the guardians by providing a model of one who is temperate, self-controlled, and capable of enduring the hardships of war. again, i believe the modification of these homeric lines are deliberate rather than accidental and underscores the pedagogical and civilizational importance that homer plays among the hellenes. socrates also praises homer when discussing thumos (spiritedness) and the need for temperance to control it. in book iv socrates repeats homer’s description of odysseus as a model of socrates’ homer in the republic 88 temperance—“he stuck his chest and chided his heart”—but in the context of understanding the various parts of the human soul (rep 441b–c, 390d; odyssey 20.17–18). here homer teaches that the spirited part is separate and better than the irrational or desiring parts. because the spirited part is superior to the irrational part of the soul, it must learn temperance in order for the guardians to know friend from foe. in their training of gymnastics and poetry, odysseus is one of the models that the guardians can imitate to be temperate (rep 441d–442d). the topics of thumos and homer returns when socrates discusses how one can identify and honor outstanding soldiers. socrates cites homer as a possible resource to teach them: “even homer agrees that is it is just to honor the young men who are good” (rep 468d). an example would be when homer describes ajax, who had distinguished himself in war, as being honored with the whole backbone of a boar as the proper reward for his bravery (rep 468c–d; iliad 7.321). in this matter, socrates says “we’ll believe homer in that much”—an acknowledgment that homer can teach philosophers about how to identify and honor outstanding soldiers—and reward those soldiers with “seats of honor and meat and full cups of sweet wine (rep 468d, 390b; odyssey 9.8– 10). earlier in the dialogue socrates cites the same passage from homer, faulting him for not promoting temperance among citizens, while now he recites the same lines but to praise exceptional soldiers (rep 390b, 468d). although he refers to the same homeric lines, socrates’ use of them is different because of the new context of conversation: the discussion of warfare and how to distinguish and honor the best soldiers, whereas previously socrates was examining what type of poetry is best suited for guardian children. one could assume that soldiers raised with philosophically-guided gymnastics and poetry as well as being taught the first two waves (i.e., the sexes are equal and women and children are to be held in common) that they would already be temperate and therefore could safely be seated at “tables filled with bread, meat, and full cups of sweet wine.”18 another instance when socrates recites the same homeric lines uttered earlier in the republic is when he describes how the prisoners in the cave “confer offices, honors, and prizes” to those who are sharpest at spotting the passing shadows on wall (rep 516d). when observing what his previous inmates are doing, the escaped prisoner feels like achilles in hades who would rather “toil the soil, a serf to another / to an indigent man without land” than be honored among the prisoners for best spotting the shadows (rep 516d–e; odyssey 11.489–90). although socrates does 89 trepanier not repeat the concluding line of the homeric passage, “than rule and be king over all the dead who have perished,” his point is the same: it is better to be a serf outside of the cave than a ruler in it. iv. even when socrates calls for a clean slate when founding his polis, he still refers to homer. in his analogy of the philosopher as a painter, who looks at the just, beautiful, temperate, and other virtues as models when painting cities and people, socrates says their judgment is based on “the likeness of humanity which homer also called divine and god-like when it appeared in humans” (rep 501a– c). it is not possible for the philosopher to found a polis or educate a people ex nihilo because there is no cultural and civilizational material from which to draw. socrates acknowledges this situation when he calls homer as the “educator of the hellas” (rep 607a). homer’s poetry is always present and, for socrates, pervasive with the result that it must be tolerated but not entirely accepted as is. while we have seen earlier when socrates recites homeric passages to support his philosophical aims, he returns to criticizing homer in book x, going back to his initial assessment of his poetry in books ii and iii. although he speaks with “a certain friendliness and reverence for homer that he has held since childhood,” for he is “the first teacher and beginner of all lovely tragedies,” socrates honors truth before humans (rep 595c).19 socrates’ primary objection to the poets in book x is that their poetry is a thrice-removed imitation of reality, with some people believing what the poets tell them is real even though the poets themselves do not truly know (rep 599a). homer is particularly to be blamed when he writes about the greatest and finest things: war, generalship, political rule, and the education of people (rep 599c–d). socrates issues a series of challenges to homer to ask what polis acknowledges him as its lawgiver and benefactor, what war was fought under his leadership, what public service in practical affairs did he do or inventions did he create, or what school of thought he left behind: is homer reported while he lived to have been a guide in education to people whose pupils cherished his companionship and handed down a homeric way of life, just as pythagoras was honored for this and his disciples, even to this day, call it the “pythagorean way,” which distinguishes them from everyone else? (rep 599c– 600e) socrates’ homer in the republic 90 the answers implied in socrates’ rhetorical questionings are “no.” but, after closer examination, the correct answer could also be “yes”: as the “educator of hellas,” homer has established the civilizational foundation from which politics, war, education, and private affairs have developed for the hellenes. although there is no homeric city, no homeric way of war, no homeric philosophy, the poet’s influence is so ubiquitous among the hellenes that is appears invisible.20 however, this is not the heart of socrates’ criticisms of homer. the problem with the poets is that they create thrice-removed images (phantoms) from reality which have “no hold on truth” (rep 601a). the poet’s phantom is thrice-removed from reality because the poet imitates an imitation of reality and thereby is farthest from the truth when compared to the craftsman or philosopher (rep 601a–602c).21 for example, the platonic form of the table is known to the philosopher but is only illustrated by the painter, which is twice-removed from reality (rep 507a– c; 605a–c). using the painter’s illustration as a model for his poetry, the poet’s verses are thriceremoved and therefore further away from the truth than either the painter or philosopher. thus, “all poetic imitators from homer since” imitate phantoms of everything, including virtue, “but never touch the truth” (rep 601a). furthermore, the poets promote the irrational part in the soul, destroying people’s refinement and putting the rabble in charge of the polis (rep 605b).22 because of the potency of poetry, it can “arouse, feed, and strengthen” the irrational part of the soul where people can distinguish “neither larger nor smaller but thinks the same things now large and now small” (rep 605b–c). homer is especially good at this with a grief-stricken hero: delivering a tirade filled with laments or singing a dirge, while he beats his breast we are thrilled with pleasure; we surrender ourselves to the mood, sympathize with his suffering, and praise the poet as excellent who can most affect us in this way. (rep 605d) but as a “maker of phantoms who stands far away from truth,” the poet can neither tell the truth nor promote reason but install “an evil regime” (rep 605b–c). the poet therefore is to be barred from the polis, unless you want “pain and pleasure” to reign instead of “law and principles that are accepted by the community as the best” (rep 605b; 607a). 91 trepanier although socrates only allows “hymns to the gods and eulogies for good humans” into his polis, he does not disparage homer directly in book x. advising glaucon, socrates recommends whenever you run into people who eulogize homer as the educator of hellas, who say that he is worth studying for the governance and refinement of human affairs, and that every person should model one’s life after this poet, you must love and salute them for being the best people they can possibly be, agree that homer is the most poetic of poets and the first of tragedians[.] (rep 606e–607a) socrates recommends not to criticize homer directly, for homeric poetry cannot be completely eradicated in “this ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry” (rep 607b). socrates therefore must resort to a different strategy of praising homer while coopting those homeric passages that support his philosophical goals and censoring those that do not. v. besides censoring some of the content of homer’s poetry, socrates also discusses how his poetry should be presented.23 socrates classifies three types of styles of poetic presentation: pure narration, imitation, and a combination of the two (rep 392d). pure narration is reported—not direct—speech and action; imitation is direct speech or impersonation of people or gods; and the third style is a combination of pure narration and imitation.24 to illustrate the difference between pure narration and imitation, socrates cites the homeric passage when chryses asks agamemnon to release his daughter (rep 393a–b). when describing chryses, homer speaks as himself, an example of pure narration: and prayed in supplication to the achaeans and most of all to the sons of atreus, the twin commanders of the army. (rep 393a; iliad 1.15–16) but what follows is imitation, when homer speaks as chryses rather than as himself (rep 393b– c). socrates’ homer in the republic 92 instead of concealing himself in his poetry, homer should only employ pure narration. showing how homer should have portrayed chryses rather than speaking as if he were him, socrates states: the priest came and prayed that the gods might give them safely and the destruction of troy, but they should accept the ransom and release his daughter out of reverence for the gods. when he had spoken, the others consented in reverence, but agamemnon grew angry and told him to depart and not help him at all. his daughter would not be released, he said, but would grow old with him back in argos. he ordered him to leave and not upset him, if he wished to get home unharmed. in fear and silence, the old man left, called on apollo by his names, and reminded him of past favors—sacrifices and temples he had built. in return for these things he prayed that the achaeans should suffer for his tears by the god’s arrows. (rep 393e–394a; also see 601b) with the qualification that this example is without meter, socrates illustrates how homeric poetry that is imitative in style can be transformed into pure narration (rep 393d). just as he has “described in homer,” socrates also permits a combination of the two styles— pure narration and imitation—for his polis but with the understanding that there little imitation and much pure narration (rep 396e). imitation is needed for poetry to be effective but must only be a small portion of it because of its potential bad influence in promoting the soul’s irrational part as well as providing bad models for people to emulate. socrates points out that a worthless person will imitate anything with little or no narration, illustrating the power and problem that imitation poises to the philosopher (rep 397a–b).25 since the human nature demands that one can only do something well if one imitates only one thing, the guardians should shun “clever imitations of slavish or shameful acts as they would act themselves (rep 395c). the guardian children should imitate the qualities that make a good guardian: courage, temperance, liberality, reverence, etc. (rep 395c). imitation therefore is an effective and “enchanting” pedagogical practice, but it should be employed sparingly and modeled only after virtuous people (rep 607d). however, the republic appears to be a style of poetry that socrates bans from his polis.26 the dialogue is either imitation—socrates recollecting past events and impersonating himself and other 93 trepanier people—or a combination of pure narration and imitation but with much more of the latter than the former. but socrates is not a poet (or, at least, he claims not to be). it is possible that he could be an “advocate” of poetry, as he describes below: and we would have advocates who are not poets but lovers of poetry to defend in prose and show that she not only delightful but useful to regimes and human living. and we’ll listen favorably, because we will profit if she is shown to be useful as well as pleasant. (rep 607e) the advocate is someone who recognizes the power and influence of poetry as well as knows how to reform it. socrates could be such a person as he attempts to show glaucon and adeimantus that the just life is superior to the unjust one. although not a work of poetry, one of the most poetic passages in the republic is the myth of er, which describes the soul’s immortality and that its genuine character can be known (rep 612b). this passage is invoked by socrates to directly refute homer’s teaching that the unjust life is better than the just one. in this myth of reincarnation, socrates weaves characters from homeric poetry to show how living a philosophical life reaps its own rewards: thamyras (iliad 2.595–600), ajax, agamemnon, atalanta, epeius (iliad 2.211–77), thersites (iliad 2.212–43), and odysseus (rep 620a–d) are all shown in making their choices for their next lives. instead of erasing them from his concluding myth of the dialogue, socrates incorporate these homeric characters as lessons of how one should choose justice. he has transformed what he has inherited from homer into a new mythical founding for hellas. socrates does not have the option of sending poets “off to some other polis” while he will stick to his own “austere and cheerless storyteller because he is beneficial,” imitating only speeches of a righteous person (rep 398a–b). the influence of homer cannot be eradicated. socrates therefore must rehabilitate homeric poetry as much as philosophy will permit in his re-founding of hellenic civilization. in this way, socrates is able to preserve the foundational role that homer plays for the hellenes while simultaneously prepare them for a life of philosophy. today in the united states, and perhaps even in the west itself, we are confronted with ideological polarization, political unrest, and social conflict.27 some have argued for a return to the past of traditional values, while others seek to repudiate it entirely, dismissing it as racist, socrates’ homer in the republic 94 misogynist, and fundamentally misguided. but these paths of reactionary politics or political revolution are ultimately dead-ends, for what both camps neglect is that our past is neither an arcadia nor antiquated. our past makes us who we are as a people. we can neither return to it nor can we transcend it. we must learn from socrates who preserves and reforms what he could from his homeric past in order to show his countrymen a possible, better future. notes 1. all in-text citations are my translation of the greek text in the loeb editions. 2. jaeger; burkert; veyne; voegelin; ahrensdorf, “homer and the foundation of classical civilization.” for more about homeric values, refer to adkins; gagarin; holway; hammer; ahrensdorf, homer on the gods and human virtue; for more about foundational myths, refer to haarmann and sweeney. 3. for more about the role of how a people’s identity centers around myth, refer to gadamer 43; burkert 119–25; veyne; voegelin 93–107. 4. murdoch; elias; annas, introduction to plato’s republic; nichols. 5. partee; annas, “plato on the triviality of literature” 11; danto 6, 9, 194; edmundson 7; ferrari; morgan 156; burnyeat 255; nehamas 251–78. 6. brisson 75; zuckert 475–76; avgousti 21–41. 7. strauss 61; bloom; most; burns, “philosophy and poetry.” burns interprets homer as engaging in the same task as the philosopher with an exoteric teaching for the many and an esoteric one for the few. 8. brisson; naddaff; tanner; collobert; destrée; kastely; also refer to destrée and herrmann. 9. halliwell and mitscherling adopt a similar approach as mine. however, halliwell looks at several dialogues without detailed analysis, while mitscherling seeks only to demonstrate that socrates does intentionally misquote homer, with no explanation as to why. altman employs a different type of reading, comparing homer and socrates but as being confronted with similar philosophical choices. for more about socrates’ relationship to homer and the gods, refer to burns, “friendship and divine justice in homer’s iliad”; planinc; lutz; van riel; ahrensdorf, homer on the gods and human virtue. 10. for more about hellenic civic education, refer to nightingale; ober. 11. like aristotle (politics 1260b38–1261a17) and contrary to strauss and bloom, i assume the republic is read as offering an ideal polis. 95 trepanier 12. socrates also argues that lying is useful only for humans and not gods, if humans act like doctors and treat lying as a type of medicine. thus, rulers can lie on account of enemies or citizens for the good of the state but citizens themselves should not lie. if any citizen does, he or she will be punished, “whether a prophet or healer or joiner of timbers” (rep 389b, 489d; odyssey 17.383–84). strauss, bloom, and others interpret this passage as evidence of socrates’ exoteric and esoteric teachings. however, it is equally possible that lying for the good of the state is an act of statesmanship to preserve the polis from its enemies, while citizens should not lie because it is unjust and appeals to the irrational part of their souls. although the two readings differ in their interpretation, they are not necessarily incompatible with each other. 13. tanner 45–48; also refer to gaskin. 14. for an interpretation of achilles in the context of changing civilizational values, refer to baily. 15. another example when socrates emphasizes human agency and responsibility is when he discusses the correspondence between the types of human characters and the regimes, asking glaucon whether regimes are derived from human characters or from inanimate, insensible objects, as homer claims (rep 544d; iliad 22.126; odyssey 19.163). 16. shorey highlights this in plato, republic i 217nd; also see aristotle’s politics (1338a28). 17. socrates later return to medicine with reference to homer, when he speaks of a civicminded asclepius and his sons who all practice a medicine that only cures diseases and do not prescribe what their patients need to eat or drink because they already possessed temperance. the doctors only “sucked the blood, and applied soothing drugs” (rep 408a; iliad 4.218). they did not think that a naturally sick or self-indulgent person should be treated, as they were worthless to themselves and others. even if they were richer than midas, the doctor would not treat them (rep 408b). 18. furthermore, as shorey had noted, socrates incorrectly recites this passage from the odyssey, for odysseus thinks music instead of food or wine as the best things in life (cf. note 16 above). 19. socrates also speaks respectfully of homer elsewhere in the republic, even when he is about to censor his poetry. some examples are: “we’ll admire homer for many things, but not for making zeus send a false dream to agamemnon” (383a); “we’ll have to ask homer and the other poets to forgive us for excising all such lines” (387b); “ask a favor of homer and the rest of the poets” (387d); and “for homer’s sake i’m reluctant to say it” (391a). these qualifications of socrates’ criticisms of homer reveals the power and hold of homer’s poetry among the hellenes. the philosopher therefore cannot completely banish homeric poetry from his polis but instead cite and modify those passages that support philosophical aims and dismiss those that are contrary. 20. refer to note 2 above. 21. nehamas 251–78. socrates’ homer in the republic 96 22. for more about the parts of the soul, refer to annas, “plato on the triviality of literature” 7–10; burnyeat 223, 228; fitzpatrick. 23. i do not discuss the musical styles in the republic as lemoine does for this symposium; also refer to kennedy; thaler. 24. pure narration also refers to all literary representation, including direct speech. however, in this article i call pure narration as only reported speech and literary representation as all literary representation. 25. however, a righteous person does not hesitate to 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through homer: poetry and philosophy in the cosmological dialogues. columbia: university of missouri press, 2003. plato. republic, volume 1, trans. paul shorey. cambridge, ma: loeb classical library and harvard university press, 1930. . republic, volume 2, trans. paul shorey. cambridge, ma: loeb classical library and harvard university press, 1935. . statesman, philebus, ion, trans. harold north fowler and w. r. m. lamb. cambridge, ma: loeb classical library and harvard university press, 1925. rosen, stanley. plato’s sophist: the drama of original and image. new haven: yale university press, 1983. saxonhouse, arlene. “the socratic narrative: a democratic reading of plato’s dialogues.” political theory 37.6 (2009): 728–53. strauss, leo. the city and man. charlottesville: university press of virginia, 1964. sweeney, naoíse mac, ed. foundation myths in ancient societies. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, 2015. tanner, sonja. in praise of plato’s poetic imagination. lanham, md: rowman and littlefield publishing, 2010. socrates’ homer in the republic 100 thaler, naly. “plato on the philosophical benefits of musical education.” phronesis 60.4 (2015): 410–35. van riel, gerd. plato’s gods. london: ashgate, 2013. veyne, paul. did the greeks believe in their myths?, trans. paula wissing. chicago: university of chicago press, 1983. voegelin, eric. order and history, volume 2: the world of the polis. collected works of eric voegelin, volume 15, ed. athanasios moulakis. columbia: university of missouri press, 2000. zuckert, catherine. plato’s philosophers: the coherence of the dialogues. chicago: university of chicago press, 2009. microsoft word snyder.docx [expositions 9.1 (2015) 125–137] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 paul beyond the jew/gentile dichotomy: a perspective from benjamin glenn e. snyder indiana university/purdue university indianapolis pauline studies is a distinct subfield in biblical studies. since at least the 1960s, two research programs have dominated pauline studies in north america: one is a traditional christian research program that studies paul with a database of all of the thirteen letters included in the “new testament,” plus the narrative in the canonized acts of the apostles (occasionally adding the epistle to the hebrews); the other is a modern historical research program that studies only seven “undisputed” pauline letters (rom, 1 cor, 2 cor, gal, phil, 1 thess, and phlm),1 normally with selective use of acts. each of these research programs works with its determined database of primary source materials, rendering its data into evidence for its observations, analyses, and conclusions. circumscribed by these presuppositions, most advances in pauline scholarship2 have occurred by analyzing texts materially and linguistically, locating one or more texts in the appropriate historical contexts, selecting and using comparative materials, and/or critiquing ancient or modern categories of analysis.3 for this “roundtable discussion” on biblical studies, i would like to reflect critically on a particular category of analysis used in pauline studies: the jew/gentile dichotomy. pauline studies is an important subfield in biblical studies, because it is one of the sites where scholars debate ancient and modern definitions and identities of judaism and christianity, jews and christians. the canonized gospels,4 as short biographies of jesus,5 are often assumed to be the earliest and/or most reliable sources of data for the origins of christianity. but the authentic letters of paul would have been written between the late 40s to early 60s c.e., whereas extant forms of the gospels were produced no earlier than 70 c.e. the pauline letters are therefore the earliest witnesses to one or more kinds of “christianity.”6 but who was paul, and why do his letters matter? formerly a “pharisee of pharisees,” paul claimed to have seen the once-dead jesus, an experience that changed his life. thereafter, he traveled through rome’s eastern provinces (modern day greece and turkey), establishing ekklēsiai (greek, “assemblies,” normally translated “churches”) and communicating with them via visits, messengers, and letters. of those media of communication, only paul’s letters remain as evidence for who paul was, what his experience may have been, and how and why he may have proclaimed “the gospel” to the peoples he visited. a traditional christian perspective—sometimes labeled “traditional,” “old,” “protestant,” or “lutheran”—is that paul converted from one religion (judaism) to another religion (christianity), and that he proclaimed his new religion (christianity) as good news for all people, including both jews and gentiles. a perspective that paul beyond the jew/gentile dichotomy 126 developed basically in the 1970s—sometimes labeled “the new perspective”7—is that paul converted within the religion judaism from one kind of judaism (e.g., the pharisees)8 to another (e.g., the christians), and that he called either all people or only gentiles to a new way of life. the study of paul and his letters is thus related to and determined by the categories used by scholars, including “the jew/gentile dichotomy.” scholars in pauline studies normally assume that paul divided humanity into two groups based on ethnicity, religion, geography, politics, language, and/or some other category. one of most common dichotomies ascribed to paul is between “jews” and “gentiles,” so i am using the phrase “the jew/gentile dichotomy” to refer broadly and loosely to the division of paul’s diverse greeklanguage terms into two categories of social groups. one category is normally labeled “jews” (or “judeans”): it is labeled according to interpretations of the masculine singular and plural terms ioudaios and ioudaioi, but it normally includes the collective singular israēl, “israel,” and the masculine singular and plural israēlitēs and israēlitai, “israelite(s).” the other category is normally labeled “gentiles” (or “nations”): it is labeled according to interpretations of the plural term ethnē, but it normally includes singular and plural terms hellēn and hellēnes, “greek(s).” four related terms occur only in galatians: three are ascribed to the first category (the verb ioudaizō, gal 2:14; noun ioudaismos, 1:13, 14; and adverb ioudaikōs, 2:14), and one to the second (the adverb ethnikōs, 2:14). these categories are conceived and function differently for various interpreters, jewish, christian, and otherwise. but common to practically all interpretations is the segregation of humans into two groups—a categorization that both describes and determines a scholar’s own interpretive perspective, while ascribing its dichotomy to paul and prescribing it for others. one option has been to understand “jews” as an ethnic category that refers genealogically to insiders: jews are a “we” who (at least in theory) are descended physically from common ancestors. on this interpretation, the term “jews”—normally equated with “israelites”—refers to a distinct ethnic group, whereas “gentiles” is the category that groups together all others: gentiles are the “not us” of the jews. most pauline scholars work with this particular form of the jew/gentile dichotomy. scholars from an “old” perspective view paul primarily as a religious christian who was sent to both jews and gentiles, whereas scholars from a “new” perspective view paul primarily as an ethnic jew who was called either to both jews and gentiles (similar to the “old” perspective) or only to gentiles (a so-called “radical” new perspective, which is sometimes complemented with a positive valuation of judaism as a religion for ethnic jews). a related but distinct interpretive option has been to understand “jews” as a social or cultural category that refers to people who identify themselves as jewish: jews are a “we” who have affiliated themselves with israel’s ancestors, at least in story and normally also in beliefs, practices, socialization, etc. on this interpretation, one’s “ethnic” identity is malleable, fluid, adaptable, 127 snyder multiple, hybrid, or even exchangeable, so that some gentiles (who are ethnically non-jewish) may become partly or even wholly “jews.”9 other interpretive options abound. many scholars have understood “jews” to represent primarily a religious category, so that “gentiles” are by definition the people(s) who are not religiously jewish.10 on this interpretation, gentiles remain the “not us” of jews, but since jews are defined primarily by their religion, gentiles can convert religiously to become jews. other scholars, often with reference to contemporary non-pauline materials, have understood “jews” to represent the people associated with ioudaia, the feminine singular normally translated “judea” (or “judaea,” to approximate the latin iudaea). on this interpretation, “jews”—ethnic and/or religious—are understood also in relation to a geographic region. moreover, some scholars have argued that ioudaios and ioudaioi are so geographically-based that the terms should not be translated as “jew(s),” because in their opinion the english term “jew(s)” normally connotes ethnicity and/or religion; rather, according to these scholars, ioudaios and ioudaioi should more accurately be translated as “judean(s),” in order to communicate that the people were historically associated primarily with the roman province ioudaia, “judea.”11 at least three types of arguments have been proposed for (re-)translating the greek terms ioudaios and ioudaioi as “judean(s)”: geopolitical, ethnographic, and religious. first of all, during most of the second temple era (516 b.c.e.–70 c.e.), neither the borders nor jurisdiction of the land were autonomously determined by its inhabitants.12 in particular, during the mid-first century c.e., the geographic region of ioudaia was politically, legally, and economically a roman province (iudaea in latin). irrespective of their ethnicity and/or religion, inhabitants of ioudaia were labeled by the romans as ioudaioi (iudaei in latin).therefore, to be an ioudaios was not necessarily to be a jew ethnically or religiously; it was to inhabit or to originate from ioudaia. according to this geopolitical argument, ioudaia was either one of or was distinct from other ethnē, “nations.” second, not all citizens of ioudaia were ethnically jewish (to use the modern category); and occasionally some ethnic jews claimed to renounce their provincial citizenship, including the particular rights, privileges, and nomos (“custom; law”) of the land of ioudaia.13 hence, the labels ioudaioi and jews do not “map” each other ethnographically, even if most of the ioudaioi were ethnically jews.14 third, it has occasionally been argued that “judaism(s)”—at least, the kinds of rabbinic judaisms represented today—did not develop to maturity until sometime after paul: either after the destruction of the israelite temple in jerusalem in 70 c.e., after the end of the bar kokhba uprising in 135 c.e. (when the romans officially renamed the region palaestina), or even later (e.g., in the fourth or seventh centuries).15 so if there was no religion “judaism,” the argument claims, neither were there religious “jews.” according to this argument, the translation “jew(s)” is anachronistic to the religions of mid-first-century judea. for these and other reasons (e.g., agendas to decrease christian anti-judaism), some scholars have argued for translating ioudaios/ioudaioi as “judean(s).” 16 paul beyond the jew/gentile dichotomy 128 but the arguments for using “judean(s)” in translation have not been received well by all, perhaps especially by jewish scholars. some scholars17 have argued against (re-)translating ioudaios/ioudaioi consistently as “judean(s),” since many if not most of the ioudaioi were ethnically and religiously jewish—or, at least, were the biological and religious ancestors of jews. to translate ioudaioi as “judeans,” it is argued, would be to write jews out of early christian history and hence, perhaps for some readers, to write off the anti-jewish reception histories of these texts, if not also to further some contemporary forms of anti-judaism. others have rebutted these objections,18 arguing that the translation “judeans” is no more (or less) inaccurate or unethical than other categories used to describe different times and/or places in jewish history, such as the ancient categories of “hebrews,” “the sons of israel” (“israelites”), or “judahites,” or the modern category of “israelis.”19 most scholars who intentionally and explicitly participate in this debate about the translation of ioudaioi share two goals: accurate historical description and ethical contemporary interpretation. but opinions differ about whether, when, why, where, how, and by and for whom it is accurate and/or ethical to translate ioudaioi as “jews” or “judeans.” these differences of opinion have been based on a variety of factors, including the historical and/or contemporary interests, questions, concerns, etc., of the scholars in question, as well as their own ethnic and/or religious identifications. for some, it is no less than the identities and relations of judaism and christianity, jews and christians, that are at stake. a few scholars have argued that, in order to reinscribe the difficulty of translation, it is preferable not to translate but to transliterate the greek terms; some prefer to translate ioudaios and ioudaioi consistently as “jew(s),” and others as “judean(s)”; and yet others have preferred to translate the terms differently based on the contexts of particular occurrences.20 many of the issues and options for these preferences are intrinsic to the art of interpreting and translating ancient, foreign-language texts into modern english. for, at least implicitly, every translation requires a reconstruction of the historical author(s) and/or reader(s); identification of imagined contemporary readers; determination of the scope, goals, and contexts for the translation; valuation of “word-for-word” versus “thought-for-thought” philosophies of translation, as well as preferences for the source language (an “emic” translation) or target language (an “etic” translation); and so forth. the debate about whether and how to translate ioudaioi is also related to how to interpret other terms whose functions have normally been reduced to playing parts in a jew/gentile dichotomy. normally on the same side of ioudaios and ioudaioi are the collective singular israēl, “israel,” and singular and plural demonyms israēlitēs and israēlitai, “israelite(s).” often these designators are equated sociologically, so that israelites are jews/judeans and jews/judeans are israelites. but occasionally a distinction has been made: for example, israēlitai as an ethnic designator versus ioudaioi as religious, or israēlitai as ethnic versus ioudaioi as geopolitical.21 regardless, terms on that side of the dichotomy are often interpreted and translated in context of and by contrast to one 129 snyder or more terms on the other side: the plural term ethnē and/or the singular and plural terms hellēn and hellēnes, “greek(s).” some participants in the paul and politics group of the society of biblical literature have argued that paul’s contrasts between ioudaioi/israēl(itai) and ethnē are evidence for a geopolitical distinction between judea and other nations and/or for the subordination of all nations, including ioudaia, under the colonizing imperium of rome.22 others—for example, select volumes in the recent paul in critical contexts series by fortress press—have argued that, as part of his own postcolonial discourse, paul portrays his own and others’ ethnic identities as multiple and hybridized.23 but whether jews and gentiles or judeans and nations, there is a tendency in pauline scholarship to dichotomize paul’s greek-language terms, interpreting and translating these terms with ancient and/or modern categories of geography, politics, religion, and/or ethnicity. how will pauline studies be able to advance beyond its current perspectives? in my opinion, division of paul’s sociological (and related) terms into a jew/gentile dichotomy is a practice that unnecessarily delimits the sociological and other historical possibilities for interpreting paul and his letters. therefore, rather than continuing a practice that is common to both research programs and most interpretive perspectives, i propose that further historical and comparative work should be done on paul’s contrasted terms, in order to adduce categories that are more accurate for interpreting the authentic letters of paul. in particular, i propose that the key to unlocking paul’s sociological (and related) categories is to begin with his own identity-formative statements and rhetoric. for, not once does paul explicitly identify himself as a ioudaios (pace gal 2:15);24 and 1 cor 9:20 may even imply his denial of such an identity (“for the ioudaioi i became [as] a ioudaios”). instead, paul identifies himself generally as an israelite and specifically as a member of the tribe of benjamin (rom 11:1, israēlitēs, phylēs beniamin; phil 3:5–6, ek genous israēl, phylēs beniamin).25 the perspective of the historical paul was thus determined by his identity as a benjaminite, a tribal identification that he used both to identify with a broader ethnic group (israēl, “israel”) and also to differentiate himself from another of its tribes (ioudaia, “judah”). according to the stories preserved in the hebrew bible,26 benjamin was the only one of israel’s twelve legendary tribes to submit to judah’s rule after the death of david’s son, king solomon of yǝhûdāh (hebrew, “judah”; d. 928/922 b.c.e.). through the assyrian crisis (722 b.c.e.), the destruction of the southern kingdom (586 b.c.e.), the deportation to babylon (586–539 b.c.e.), and the subsequent repatriations and reformations of the occupied territory called yahud (persian era, 538–332 b.c.e.), ioudaia (greek era, 332–63 b.c.e.), and also iudaea (roman era, 63 b.c.e.–135 c.e.), judah had claimed authority over benjamin in particular and israel in general. but according to paul, the contemporary state of ioudaia, including its nomos (“custom; law”), was not the ideal for “israel” (hebrew yisrā-’ēl, “god rules” or “may god rule”). for, irrespective of its temple in jerusalem, ioudaia had been conquered by and was subordinated to rome. rather, paul’s hope for israel was paul beyond the jew/gentile dichotomy 130 that an anastasis (greek, “uprising”; cp. latin superstitio) had been initiated in jesus, whom “the rulers” had executed on account of political sedition but whom god resurrected. now “anointed” (christos) and declared “son of god” (huios theou) and “lord” (kyrios), paul proclaimed that this jesus was the davidic king whose heavenly arrival and earthly triumph would end in god’s rule, with justice for all who were saved from the lord’s wrath (rom 1; 1 cor 15; 1 thess 4–5). it was as a benjaminite that paul proclaimed this message to peoples outside the land of ioudaia, in order to call for the reunion of “all israel” (rom 9–11; cp. gal 6).27 i have proposed this “benjaminite perspective” as a new way to interpret the greek-language terms28 formerly divided into “the jew/gentile dichotomy.” for, this theory explains how paul was strategically positioned as a benjaminite to affirm his affiliation with israēl (intraethnically) but also to critique contemporary ioudaioi (intertribally, including geopolitically, religiously, etc.).29 my hope is that the benjaminite hypothesis will advance our collective goals—as historians, jews, christians, and other interested peoples—of accurately describing and ethically interpreting the letters of paul. notes 1. within “the” christian new testament, thirteen greek-language letters are written in the name of paul (greek paulos, based on the latin paulus, “little, small”). the categories “disputed” and “undisputed” were invented in order to label these canonized epistles according to generalizations about their authenticity of authorship. six letters were labeled as “disputed” based on some scholars’ valuations of the kinds, quantities, and qualities of arguments made against their authenticity: these are the three “deutero-pauline” letters (eph, col, and 2 thess), plus the three “pastoral” letters (1 tim, 2 tim, and tit). the other seven letters were grouped together as “undisputed” (rom, 1 cor, 2 cor, gal, phil, 1 thess, and phlm). precisely how, when, where, why, and by whom these categories were produced and popularized is beyond the scope of this contribution. 2. for general studies of the subfield, see, for example, baird 1992–2013; zetterholm 2009; given 2010; marchal 2012; wright 2015. 3. accuracy, thoroughness, precision, and innovation are the criteria most valued in contemporary pauline scholarship; and most “innovation” occurs by applying the interests, values, questions, theories, and methods of other disciplines to pauline studies. for an introduction to theories and methods for biblical studies, see, for example, hayes 2004; adam 2000; and the guides to biblical scholarship series by fortress press. see also given 2010 and marchal 2012. 131 snyder 4. “gospel” is an old english term for “good news,” which is a literal translation of the greek noun euangelion. originally untitled and anonymous, the four narratives later included in most collections of christian scripture have been titled “the gospel” according to matthew, mark, luke, and john since the second century c.e. dozens of additional “gospels” were composed in similar and differing genres. 5. the greek iēsous is normally rendered as “jesus” or “joshua” in english, but it is a transliteration of the hebrew yēshūa‘, “he will save.” 6. the term “christianity” is anachronistic to pauline studies. derived from a latin suffix (ianus, -a, -um), the greek term christianos originally referred to an alleged “partisan of christos.” within the history of israel, occasionally someone was elected for a particular function or position (e.g., king, priest, prophet) through a ritual of anointing and was subsequently called “anointed” (hebrew māshîach; greek christos). some early followers of jesus understood him to be “anointed” as a prophet, priest, and/or king, and on this basis they were labeled—perhaps originally and pejoratively by outsiders—as “christians” (latin christiani; greek christianoi). 7. see, for example, dunn 2007; wright 2013; westerholm 2004; and nanos and zetterholm 2015. according to most histories of the discipline, antecedents for the development of the new perspective(s) were works by krister stendahl and e. p. sanders in the 1960s and 1970s. but the new perspective(s) was also developed to propose alternate explanations for what heikki räisänen had presented as insoluble “internal conceptual problems” within a traditional perspective: see, for example, gager 2000. 8. in addition to “pharisaic,” scholars have labeled paul’s former and/or continuing judaism with terms such as rabbinic, palestinian, essene, zealot, diasporic, hellenistic, apocalyptic, etc. for a helpful introduction, see engberg-pedersen 2001. 9. see, in general, cohen 1999; within pauline studies, see especially buell and hodge 2004; hodge 2007; hodge 2005; garroway 2012; concannon 2014. 10. a religious interpretation of “jews” normally occasions debates about the “religions” judaism and christianity. was “judaism” a religion in paul’s era? if so, how many judaisms were there, and what made a religious “jew” jewish? similarly, was “christianity” a religion? if so, how many christianities were there, and how did it/they relate to judaism(s)? a related site for such debates is paul’s “call” and/or “conversion.” normally assuming that judaism and/or christianity was a religion, the debate has been: when paul experienced his vision(s) of jesus, did he stay a jew and/or become a christian? paul beyond the jew/gentile dichotomy 132 11. see, for example, esler 2012 and mason 2007. 12. exceptions may have occurred during parts of the hasmonean era (164–63 b.c.e.), part of the reign of herod “the great” (37–4 b.c.e.), and herod agrippa i (41–44 c.e.). 13. smallwood 1981; williams 1998. conspicuous is the case of the old man whose penis was inspected for the marker of circumcision by domitian. 14. to map the categories ethnographically, two boolean sets would overlap. most of the smaller set of ioudaioi would be within the larger set of jews; but part of the set labeled “ioudaioi” would be outside the set “jews,” indicating that other ethnicities may be ioudaioi, and some of the set labeled “jews” would be outside the set “ioudaioi,” indicating that some ethnic jews did not identify as ioudaioi. (for the sake of analogy, consider an ethnographic model for modern israelis and jews: today, most israelis are jews, but some are not; and today, many jews are not israelis. would it be sociographically accurate to substitute an original-language reference to “israelis” with an english-language interpretation of “jews”? according to this argument, such a substitution would be inaccurate as a general principle for translation.) 15. see, for example, boyarin 2004. 16. crossley (2014) has noted that some scholars have argued for the same retranslation with very different motives. for example, in several publications bruce malina has argued that in paul’s letters (and other early christian literature), ioudaioi should be retranslated “judeans” in order to distinguish the ancient people from modern day “jews.” for, based on a form of the khazar theory, one of malina’s presuppositions is that many modern-day jews (including israelis) are ethnically unrelated to ancient israelites. that theory is a marginal and minority opinion. 17. see schwartz 2011 and levine 2006. 18. see, for example, mason 2014. 19. for a recent history of scholarship, see the series of articles by david m. miller in the currents in biblical research (especially vols. 9.1 [2010] and 10.2 [2012], but also 12.2 [2014]). for a representative selection of positions, see also “jew and judean: a forum on politics and historiography in the translation of ancient texts” (august 26, 2014), available at http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/jew-judean-forum/. participants in marginalia’s forum were adele reinhartz, steve mason, daniel schwartz, annette yoshiko reed, joan taylor, malcolm lowe, jonathan klawans, ruth sheridan, and james crossley. 133 snyder 20. see, for example, schwartz 2007; see also his contribution to marginalia’s forum “jew and judean.” 21. see, for example, stanley 2011, especially 118–20; staples 2011, especially 374–78. 22. see, for example, selections in horsley 1997; horsley 2000; and horsley 2004. for two distinct perspectives on romans, compare the “new” perspective in stowers 1994 and the “roman imperial” perspective in elliott 2010. 23. in addition to some of the volumes in the fortress press series, see also the works cited in n. 9 above. 24. see the forthcoming article by jeremy hultin (working title, “who rebuked cephas? a new interpretation of gal 2:14–17”). based partly on the verbs eidon and eipon (which, as first aorists, are morphologically either the first person singular or third person plural), hultin argues that the statement “we (who are) by nature ioudaioi” is not paul’s claim (i.e., the first person singular, as normally interpreted) but rather is ascribed to the people from james (i.e., third person plural). 25. for “(non-)boastful” comparison with israēlitai, see also 2 cor 11:22. another lineal phrase used twice in “undisputed” letters is “abraham’s seed” (rom 11:1, ek spermatos abraam; 2 cor 11:22, sperma abraam). whether paul conceived his call to include the non-israelite “seed of abraham” (i.e., the descendants of the sons of hagar and keturah, and/or the sons of jacob’s elder twin brother esau/edom) is an interesting question, which would affiliate paul with yet broader “ethnic” identity. 26. practically all of the writings collected in the hebrew bible (tanakh/old testament) preserve the stories of israel from the perspectives of judah, including some benjaminites and levites. historically, it is uncertain to what extent these texts were coextensive with the nomos (“custom; law”) of ioudaia in the mid-first century c.e., but it is clear that diverse opinions were represented by groups such as the pharisees, sadducees, essenes, “fourth philosophy,” sicarii, “zealots,” etc., many of which accepted additional and/or different sources of authority. 27. according to the so-called new perspective, paul was a jew who was called as a prophet only to ethnic gentiles (i.e., non-jews). but according to this benjaminite perspective, paul’s call to peoples outside ioudaia was not necessarily a call to non-israelites: paul’s call for the reunion of israel may even have been that of a shepherd recalling his flocks, the dispersed, non-judahite tribes of israel. using intertexts from hosea and jeremiah to interpret rom 9–11, staples (2011) has argued that paul understood “ephraim” (including paul beyond the jew/gentile dichotomy 134 the other tribes from the former northern kingdom) to be dispersed and “intermixed” with other peoples, so that paul’s gathering of ethnē was part and parcel with collecting the dispersed tribes of israel. 28. translation is another matter. for the benjaminite hypothesis, “judah,” “judahite,” and “judahites” are probably the most useful translations for understanding paul’s references to ioudaia, ioudaios, and ioudaioi in the proposed tribal, geopolitical, and religious contexts. but ethnē is more difficult to interpret and to translate, as it is used variously to refer to peoples (geographically outside the land of ioudaia, and in paul’s opinion geopolitically outside the boundaries of its nomos) who are not in allegiance with israel’s “lord.” 29. in the canonized acts, paul is portrayed even at the end of his life as a member of the pharisees—one of the political parties in ioudaia between the 150s b.c.e. and 70 c.e. but in the undisputed letters, particularly gal 1 (where his former allegiance with the pharisees is implicit) and phil 3 (where it is explicit), paul seems to have separated from the pharisees. whether paul’s separation with the pharisees may also imply a renunciation of citizenship in ioudaia is unclear but is worth considering. works cited adam, a. k. m., ed. 2000. handbook of postmodern biblical interpretation. st. louis: chalice press. baird, william. 1992–2013. history of new testament research. 3 vols. minneapolis: fortress press. boyarin, daniel. 2004. border lines: the partition of judaeo-christianity. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press. buell, denise kimber, and caroline johnson hodge. 2004. “the politics of interpretation: the rhetoric of race and ethnicity in paul.” journal of biblical literature 123.2: 235–51. cohen, shaye j. d. 1999. the beginnings of jewishness: boundaries, varieties, uncertainties. berkeley: university of california press. concannon, cavan w. 2014. “when you were gentiles”: specters of ethnicity in roman corinth and paul’s corinthian correspondence. new haven: yale university press. 135 snyder crossley, james. 2014. “what a difference a translation makes! an ideological analysis of the ioudaios debate.” the marginalia review of books august 26. http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/difference-translation-makes-ideological-analysisioudaios-debate-james-crossley/. accessed june 2, 2015. dunn, james d. g. 2007. the new perspective on paul. rev. ed. grand rapids, mi: eerdmans. elliott, neil. 2010. the arrogance of nations: reading romans in the shadow of empire. minneapolis: fortress press. engberg-pedersen, troels, ed. 2001. paul beyond the judaism/hellenism divide. philadelphia: westminster john knox press. esler, philip f. 2012. “identity matters: judean ethnic identity in the first century c.e.” the bible and interpretation. http://www.bibleinterp.com/opeds/esl368002.shtml. accessed june 2, 2015. gager, john g. 2000. reinventing paul. new york: oxford university press. garroway, joshua d. 2012. paul’s gentile-jews: neither jew nor gentile, but both. new york: palgrave macmillan. given, mark d., ed. 2010. paul unbound: other perspectives on the apostle. peabody, ma: hendricksen publishers. hayes, john h. ed. 2004. methods of biblical interpretation: excerpted from the dictionary of biblical interpretation. nashville: abingdon press. hodge, caroline johnson. 2005. “apostle to the gentiles: constructions of paul’s identity.” biblical interpretation 13.3: 270–88. _____. 2007. if sons, then heirs: a study of kinship and ethnicity in the letters of paul. new york: oxford university press. horsley, richard a., ed. 1997. paul and empire: religion and power in roman imperial society. harrisburg, pa: trinity press international. _____, ed. 2000. paul and politics: ekklesia, israel, imperium, interpretation: essays in honor of krister stendahl. harrisburg, pa: trinity press international. _____, ed. 2004. paul and the roman imperial order. harrisburg, pa: trinity press international. paul beyond the jew/gentile dichotomy 136 levine, amy-jill. 2006. the misunderstood jew: the church and the scandal of the jewish jesus. san francisco: harpersanfrancisco. marchal, joseph a., ed. 2012. studying paul’s letters: contemporary perspectives and methods. minneapolis: fortress press. mason, steve. 2007. “jews, judaeans, judaizing, judaism: problems of categorization in ancient history.” journal for the study of judaism 38.4–5: 457–512. _____. 2014. “ancient jews or judeans? different questions, different answers.” the marginalia review of books august 26. http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/ancientjews-judeans-different-questions-different-answers-steve-mason/. accessed june 2, 2015. nanos, mark d., and magnus zetterholm, eds. 2015. paul within judaism: restoring the firstcentury context to the apostle. minneapolis: fortress press. schwartz, daniel r. 2007. “‘judean’ or ‘jew’? how should we translate ioudaios in josephus?” in jewish identity in the greco-roman world. eds. jörg frey, daniel r. schwartz, and stephanie gripentrog. agju 71. leiden: brill. 3–27. schwartz, seth. 2011. “how many judaisms were there?: a critique of neusner and smith on definition and mason and boyarin on categorization.” journal of ancient judaism 2.2: 208–38. smallwood, e. mary. 1981. the jews under roman rule: from pompey to diocletian: a study in political relations. 2nd ed. leiden: brill. stanley, christopher d. 2011. “paul the ethnic hybrid? postcolonial perspectives on paul’s ethnic categorizations.” in the colonized apostle: paul through postcolonial eyes. ed. christopher d. stanley. paul in critical contexts. minneapolis: fortress press. 110–26. staples, jason a. 2011. “what do the gentiles have to do with ‘all israel’? a fresh look at romans 11:25–27.” journal of biblical literature 130.2: 371–90. stowers, stanley k. 1994. a rereading of romans: justice, jews, and gentiles. new haven: yale university press. westerholm, stephen. 2004. perspectives old and new on paul: the “lutheran” paul and his critics. grand rapids, mi: eerdmans. williams, margaret h. 1998. the jews among the greeks and romans: a diasporan sourcebook. baltimore: johns hopkins university press. 137 snyder wright, n. t. 2013. pauline perspectives: essays on paul, 1978–2013. minneapolis: fortress press. _____. 2015 (forthcoming). paul and his recent interpreters. minneapolis: fortress press. zetterholm, magnus. 2009. approaches to paul: a student’s guide to recent scholarship. minneapolis: fortress press. microsoft word 4 cavanaugh 11.1.docx [expositions 11.1 (2017) 44–59] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376   coerced proximate contingent material cooperation: an analysis of the hhs contraceptive mandate t.a. cavanaugh university of san francisco then the pharisees went and took counsel together so that they might trap him in speech. and they sent to him their disciples with the herodians, saying, “teacher, we know that you are truthful, that you teach the way of god in truth, and that you do not concern yourself about anybody. for you are not a respecter of persons. so, tell us how it seems to you: is it right to pay tax to caesar or not? but jesus, knowing their malice, said, “why do you test me, hypocrites? show me the coin used for the tax”; so they showed him a denarius. and he said to them, “whose image and writing is this?” they said, “caesar’s.” then he said to them, “give back to caesar, caesar’s; and to god, god’s.” hearing, they marveled; leaving him, they went away. (matthew 22:15–22) jesus amazes. for, he shows that just as caesar and legitimate authority more generally have claims upon those things on which their image and writing appear, so also does god. of course, god’s image is the human being; his writing one finds in the conscience of each person. jesus plainly states that one can be just towards caesar and just towards god. both have their due; neither do their dues conflict. for their images and writing occur on different entities. while the question i address broadly belongs to the territory found in the above gospel passage as it bears on the relation between the religious and the state, it differs in one crucial respect: justice. for my topic concerns caesar making an unjust request. specifically, may an employer comply with the requirements found in the u.s. federal health and human services (hhs) contraceptive mandate? before proceeding, a brief explanation of the mandate is in order. as authorized by the 2010 patient protection and affordable care act (aca; sometimes also referred to informally as “obamacare”), in 2011 the hhs mandated that an employer provide, via its insurance policy, all food and drug administration (fda)-approved contraceptives to its 45 cavanaugh employees or face confiscatory fines of $100 a day per employee.1 while exempting employers such as churches and places of worship, the mandate requires religiously-affiliated employers such as hospitals, colleges, and universities to comply or face the imposition of fines. notably, the mandate is just that: a command. moreover, it is highly coercive. for most conscientiouslyobjecting employers would find the fines prohibitively onerous, ultimately leading to insolvency. yet, can one in good conscience comply with the hhs mandate? this question concerns complicity in another’s wrongdoing. to analyze complicity, one relies on the criteria employed to assess what moralists refer to as cooperation. in what follows, i propose to do the same. in this instance, the wrong at issue is the use of a contraceptive as a contraceptive (and not, for example, to treat endometriosis, a legitimate use of some of the relevant drugs). it may be helpful to begin with a brief history of the concept of moral cooperation. saint alphonsus ligouri’s theologia moralis serves as the locus classicus for the moral analysis of cooperation, especially as he distinguishes cooperation from other conceptually nearby acts (such as, for example, inducing another to wrongful action). further, alphonsus distinguishes formal (always unacceptable) from material (sometimes acceptable) cooperation as follows: that is formal which concurs in the bad will of the other, and it cannot be without fault; but that is material which concurs only in the bad action of the other, beside the intention of the cooperator.2 while the formal/material distinction does not originate with saint alphonsus (1696–1787)—he himself relies on predecessors such as hermann busembaum, s.j., (1600–1688, also spelled busenbaum) to whose work his own theologia moralis began as an annotation (in 1748)—he does (in the above-quoted text) offer what comes to be regarded as the definitive treatment. in that account and following a long tradition, alphonsus employs thomistic and, following aquinas, aristotelian terminology. indeed, the ears of any student of aristotle’s perk up at the mention of a distinction between material and formal elements. similarly, one who reads alphonsus in his original latin cannot help but be reminded of st. thomas’s famous treatment of double effect (found in summa theologiae, iia iiae q.64, a.7) when one encounters alphonsus speaking of “praeter intentionem cooperantis” or “beside the intention of the cooperator.” accordingly, to coerced proximate contingent material cooperation 46 understand st. alphonsus’ account, and thereby the distinction between formal and material cooperation, a consideration of this terminology is in order. 1.1 coming to terms: “cooperation” perhaps one best begins by noting that cooperation by definition involves wrongful action on the part of at least one agent, the principal. “cooperator” refers to the other agent, the moral character of whose act one analyses. the cooperator’s act furthers the principal’s unethical act. accordingly, we face a moral question concerning the status of the cooperator’s act: namely, may the cooperator so act given his awareness of the wrongness of the principal’s act? note that the account concerning cooperation addresses situations in which the cooperator knows or reasonably expects that the principal acts unethically. one puts to the side cases in which one does not know or reasonably expect the other to act wrongly. for example, it is not an act of cooperation for a hardware store owner to sell a ladder to a customer who will use that ladder unbeknownst to the hardware store owner to rob a house. it would, however, be an act of cooperation were the hardware store owner to sell spray paint to a known graffitist. in addressing this kind of question, alphonsus offers the distinction between material and formal cooperation. a slight discursus on the aristotelian origin of these terms serves to elucidate alphonsus’ distinction. 1.2 coming to terms: “material”/”formal” aristotle analyzes natural entities such as water, olive trees, and goats, into two aspects: one of which he refers to as its hulē (the greek word for lumber, what comes to be called a thing’s “matter”) and another which he refers to as its morphē (the greek word for structure, what comes to be called a thing’s “form”). hence, his account comes to be called a hylomorphic account. one could call it a form/matter account. considering a house, we would have the lumber or matter out of which one constructs the house and the shape the lumber takes. to borrow aristotle’s own example, when we analyze a sculpture, we have the bronze of which the work is made and the shape the bronze takes. note that, as aristotle’s use of “lumber” (hulē) to refer to the matter indicates, matter need not be entirely without form. rather, it has the character of being capable of a variety of forms, just as out of wood one can frame a house, build a ship, or make a chest. as capable of taking many forms, bronze and lumber have the character of matter. similarly, when we consider our acts, we might think of the already somewhat structured stuff out of which the act 47 cavanaugh is made, say the picking up of a cup of coffee and the various further structures it can take, such as the different intents with which we pick up the cup of coffee: namely, to drink coffee ourselves or to serve coffee to another. in this respect, one might think of the act of picking up a cup of coffee as material with respect to the acts of drinking or serving a cup of coffee. of course, the act of picking up a cup of coffee, just as in the case of lumber, already has a form or structure as an act. intent forms the act and makes it to be one of picking up a cup of coffee (and not, for example, one of clearing the table, which it, of course, could be, were that one’s intent). just as lumber can take on further forms (house, chest, or boat) and hence be considered as matter with respect to those further forms, so also can an act already structured by the agent’s intent take on further intentional structures. accordingly, one can regard an act that has its own form as matter with respect to further forms of which it admits. 1.3 coming to terms: “praeter intentionem” and material cooperation as suggested above, the formal or structural aspect of an action is the agent’s intent. here we recall that alphonsus defines formal cooperation as “concurring in the bad will of the other.” in material cooperation, the cooperator does not concur in the bad will of the other, but only in the bad act of the other. this concurrence is “praeter intentionem” or “beside the intention” of the cooperator. here, as noted, we must recur to st. thomas aquinas, on whose account of intention saint alphonsus relies. aquinas’ account repays many readings and admits of many considerations. for our purposes, it suffices to recall that aquinas pithily notes that to intend is, as the word “intendere” suggests, to tend towards. one tends towards an end through the means. hence, st. thomas suggests that one wills health; one chooses medicine; and one intends (intendere) health through medicine (summa theologiae, iaiiae, q. 12). our will bears on the end, our choice bears on the means, and our intent bears on the complex end-via-means (health-through-medicine). we intend both the end and means; we intend the end in itself and for itself and the means in itself, but not for itself (as means) but, rather, for the end. hence, intent concerns ends and means. now, consider st. alphonsus’ use of the term “praeter intentionem” in his definition of material in contrast to formal cooperation. one finds the locus classicus for the concept “praeter intentionem” in st. thomas aquinas’ treatment of a private individual’s homicidal act of selfdefense, in summa theologiae, iiaiiae, q.64, a.7. due to the complexity of his account, i will put it to the side while elaborating upon the meaning of “praeter intentionem.”3 coerced proximate contingent material cooperation 48 st. thomas introduces the phrase “praeter intentionem,” literally “beside the intention,” to capture voluntary (known and willed) aspects of actions which the agent does not intend either as an end or means. consider an example from contemporary medicine. an oncologist and his patient will the patient’s health; they choose a specific chemotherapy as a means to health; they intend health by means of this chemotherapy. chemotherapy being what it is, however, they also know and will (as an unavoidable concomitant) the hair loss, nausea, and debilitation that comes of the chemotherapy. these aspects of the chemotherapy are beside their intentions (in aquinas’ phrase, praeter intentionem) as the doctor and patient foresee but do not intend these characteristics of their actions. note that the doctor and patient are entirely aware of these deleterious side effects. moreover, they volitionally prefer the hoped-for health via chemotherapy allied with these obnoxious concomitants to alternatives, such as no chemotherapy/no restoration of health or less deleterious/less effective forms of chemotherapy. the patient and doctor have responsibility for the obnoxious effects of the chemotherapy insofar as they act voluntarily. of course, were there an efficacious chemotherapy without such harmful concomitants, the physician and patient would choose it. as is at times the case, however, there is not a comparably effective yet harmless alternative. life confronts us with such circumstances. aquinas proposes that we understand concomitant effects of what we do intend as praeter intentionem. we might accurately refer to such side effects as voluntary but not intended. importantly—and in keeping with such effects being voluntary—aquinas does not regard praeter intentionem effects as morally insignificant. indeed, because they are voluntary, he thinks one must have a justification for effecting them. (i, of course, speak of harmful effects.) he does, however, regard them as justifiable in a way in which they would not be were one to intend them as an end or means. consider our chemotherapy example again. imagine a doctor who intends and seeks to sicken and debilitate his patient by means of chemotherapy. he would employ the drug in order to nauseate, weaken, and sicken the patient. were he to regard healing as an obnoxious concomitant and simply a guise for his deleterious acts, his act would be a dark isomorph of doctoring. of course, such an act would be malicious, sadistic, and highly objectionable. this is precisely aquinas’ point in differentiating what is intentional from what is besides one’s intention. two consequentially comparable acts could have quite different intentional structures such that one could be an act of healing and another an act of sickening, depending on the diverse intentions of the agents. while one would evaluate the healing act of administering chemotherapy allied with 49 cavanaugh obnoxious effects as justifiable in light of the intent to heal and the prospect of doing so, one would assess its isomorph as sadistic, ethically out of bounds, and, in principle, not justifiable. allow the above to suffice as an elaboration of what alphonsus means by something being besides one’s intention (praeter intentionem) as it bears on material cooperation. now, consider formal cooperation. 1.4 coming to terms: formal cooperation by formal cooperation, alphonsus means that the cooperator intends the morally objectionable act at issue. the cooperator’s act entirely concurs with that of the principal. given the ethically out of bounds character of the principal’s act, so also one must assess the (formal) cooperator’s act as out of bounds. the judgment follows logically: if it is wrong of the principal to φ, by parity of reasoning, it is wrong of cooperator to concur in the principal’s φ-ing. consider an alteration to our hardware store example. say that there were a specific type of spray paint especially useful for spraying graffiti. the hardware store owner knows this. he knows that graffitists favor this spray paint. moreover, because it is a lucrative trade, he seeks to sell this paint to graffitists. were the owner to stock and sell this paint insofar as graffitists favor it, his act would be one of formal cooperation. for the owner’s acts of seeking out this kind of spray paint, stocking, and selling the same would be ordered towards the act of spraying graffiti. alter the case, however. what if the owner knows that graffiti vandals do favor this paint, but so also do boaters as the paint works well in a marine environment? because his store is nearby a marina, the owner stocks the paint, but not with the intent of selling it to graffitists, but, rather, in order to sell it to boaters who use it legitimately. the owner also knows that some customers buy the paint intent on spraying graffiti. he, however, does not share this intent. for he does not order or stock or sell the paint insofar as it is suited to spraying graffiti. hence, his acts of ordering, stocking, and selling this paint would be instances of material, not formal cooperation. furthering acts of graffiti would be beside his intention. because the hardware store owner voluntarily (knowingly and willingly) sells the spray paint to customers who—as he suspects—do use it to vandalize property, our analysis does not end with the judgment that his act is one of material (and not formal) cooperation. of course, were it formal cooperation, were he to intend to further the defacing of property in order to make a profit by the sale of paint, we would appropriately evaluate his act as out of bounds. indeed, it would be out of coerced proximate contingent material cooperation 50 bounds just as spraying graffiti is out of bounds. for it would be the act of assisting another in the spraying of graffiti. given that we cannot rule out the cooperator’s act as one of formal cooperation, how ought we to further assess its ethical status? 2.1 further criteria for assessing the morality of material cooperation: proximate/remote here, alphonsus and other moralists suggest certain salient features of the act of material cooperation to which one attends when assessing the act’s moral character. of course, one cannot reduce prudence (practical wisdom) to a set of rules applicable to diverse circumstances. one can, however, as thinkers who employ these criteria attempt to do, attend to important aspects of acts that moral tradition suggests repeat themselves over many lifetimes. amongst those salient features moralists consider, one especially finds emphasis placed upon proximate in contrast to remote and necessary in contrast to contingent material cooperation. additionally, ethicists attend to how one’s material cooperation might set a bad example for others who might (understandably) misunderstand one’s act as an endorsement of the acknowledged wrong act of the principal and themselves so act. the issue here is scandal. as becomes clear, these criteria bear principally upon the weightiness of the justification one offers for the, in principle, justifiable act of material cooperation. as each of the criteria admit of differences of degree, the burden to be justified varies. hence, as will become evident, the less proximate, necessary, and scandalous the cooperator’s act, the less weighty the justification needed. conversely, the more proximate, necessary, and scandalous, the greater the justification needed. “proximate” and “remote” suggest spatial and temporal relations between the act of the principal and that of the cooperator. of course, we constantly have recourse to such concrete terms in our attempt to get at more abstract relationships. be this as it may, one best understands the consideration of proximity or remoteness not in terms of actual physical distance or time between the act of the cooperator and the act of the principal, but in terms of how practically ordered the act of the cooperator is to the act of the principal. with this sense of proximity in mind, one attends to how determined the act of the cooperator is to the act of the principal. is the cooperator’s act so specified as to admit of few acts other than objectionable ones such as the principal’s, or is it of a character so as to admit of advancing numerous other acts, amongst which one finds that of the principal? 51 cavanaugh the selling of spray paint—to have recourse to the spray paint example once again—lends itself to many further acts by others, very few of which are objectionable acts of vandalism. people purchase spray paint for countless legitimate reasons. hence, the hardware or paint store owner’s sale of spray paint to an individual whom the owner judges as likely to abuse the spray paint counts as remote. because (as the spatio-temporal metaphor suggests) something can be more or less remote and, correspondingly, less or more proximate, changes to the imagined example will effect changes to this judgment concerning proximity. so, to consider an earlier suggested instance, imagine the kind of spray paint being, due to the design of the spray fount, etc., especially suited to “tagging” (the name for gang-related marking of territory using spray paint). for the sake of the example, stipulate that this design of the spray paint reduces its suitability for many legitimate purposes. were this the case, the sale of such spray paint, while still material cooperation (unless the owner stocked it in order to cater to graffitists in which case the cooperation would be formal), would be more proximate than the previous example. to reiterate, proximity and remoteness, although suggesting spatial or temporal aspects of the principal’s and cooperator’s acts, ought to be understood as indexing the extent to which the cooperator’s act has (in the case of proximity) or lacks (in the case of remoteness) an ordination to the principal’s act. 2.2 further criteria for assessing the morality of material cooperation: necessity/contingency as noted above, another prominent criterion employed in the evaluation of an act of cooperation concerns how crucial a role the cooperator’s act plays in furthering the principal’s. moralists often refer to this criterion as that of necessity or contingency. while terminology can vary, necessity attends precisely to the causal dependence of the principal’s act upon the cooperator’s.4 this is, of course, a highly reasonable criterion upon which to focus. for, were the cooperator’s act necessary for the success of the principal’s, then by not cooperating, the cooperator could prevent the objectionable act. given one’s (defeasible but real) obligation to prevent objectionable acts, the more the principal’s act depends on the cooperator’s, the greater the justification required of the cooperator to act. conversely, the less requisite the cooperator’s act is for the principal’s, the less justification the cooperator needs to act. considering the ubiquity of spray paint and the many stores from which one can acquire it, the merchant’s sale of spray paint is contingently, not necessarily, related to the act of spraying graffiti. coerced proximate contingent material cooperation 52 2.3 further criteria for assessing the morality of material cooperation: scandal a third salient criterion attended to as one evaluates the justifiability of an act of material cooperation concerns the possibility of (passive) scandal. for many people, “scandal” names a highly popular contemporary television series. for moral theologians, it refers to what we might more commonly refer to as “setting a bad example.” aquinas, as is often the case for moral theologians, provides the locus classicus, in summa theologiae iiaiiae, q. 43 a. 1–8. as the adage “monkey see, monkey do” suggests, our acts serve as models for others’ acts. hence, when assessing the justifiability of cooperating in another’s wrongful act, one attends to the likelihood that others might understandably misunderstand one’s in principle permissible act of material cooperation as wrongful for a variety of reasons. for example, a third party might think that the cooperator intends to further the act of the principal. alternatively, one might judge that the cooperator, while not seeking to advance the principal’s wrongful act, does not regard the principal’s act as that objectionable. 2.4 further criteria for assessing the morality of material cooperation: the goods at issue and the justification of material cooperation finally, to justify an act of material cooperation, in light of the previous criteria, one considers the reasons for performing the act of cooperation with those for not so acting. if one’s reasons for acting have proportionate gravity to those for foregoing cooperation as related to the aforementioned criteria, one may act. in light of the above criteria, a merchant’s selling of spray paint to otherwise legally entitled purchasers whom he suspects will use it in acts of graffiti is justified, as follows. first, selling spray paint is an ethically wholesome act by which the merchant seeks to make a living while meeting the needs of legitimate customers. important goods such as the earning of a livelihood and the provision of necessary household products to legitimate customers are at issue. second, the merchant does not intend the illicit use of the paint; this is beside his intention. hence, the cooperation is material. third, selling the paint serves numerous legitimate ends of the merchant and of his typical customers. hence, it lacks ordination or determination towards vandalism. it is remotely—not proximately—related to acts of graffiti. fourth, were the merchant not to sell spray paint to those whom he suspects of using it illicitly, they would readily come by 53 cavanaugh it otherwise. hence, his selling of the spray paint is contingently related to their abuse of it. fifth, by publically refusing to sell spray paint illegally to minors (by ensuring that those who purchase it are of age, etc.), reasonable observers will not be led to think that the merchant condones vandalism. hence, the sale of spray paint will not scandalize third parties. hopefully, this example illustrates the application of the concept of cooperation adequately. with these criteria limned, let us consider a conscientious religious employer confronted with the hhs mandate. how would one employing these criteria analyze such an employer’s compliance? 3.1 analyzing compliance with the hhs mandate prior to the aca and the hhs mandate, religiously-affiliated employers who found contraceptive coverage morally objectionable simply did not offer health insurance with such coverage. the mandate, however, requires that all health insurance cover fda-approved contraceptives. hence, the mandate removes the prior option of providing insurance without the morally objectionable contraceptive coverage. as a putative workaround for those who object to providing contraceptive coverage, the government proposes that objecting employers certify both their eligibility to object and their objection in writing to a third party. this written certification itself would then serve bureaucratically in the provision of the objectionable services to the employer’s employees. hence, in a catch-22-like fashion, the document by which an employer seeks to register a religious objection to the provision of contraceptive coverage at once serves as a link in the provision of that very coverage.5 that their objection itself becomes the means by which third parties provide contraceptive coverage to their employees troubles the consciences of numerous religious employers. how would one evaluate the act of an employer who files the relevant document? 3.2 analyzing compliance with the hhs mandate: coercion initially, one notes that the hhs mandate involves government coercion. the employer can either cooperate with the mandate, or face prohibitive fines of $100 per day per employee, approximately $26,000 a year per employee. needless to say, an employer cannot afford to absorb such confiscatory fines. additionally, full-time employment often comes with health insurance. thus, employers would find it difficult to find employees absent the provision of health insurance. moreover, under the aca, employers (of fifty or more employees) who do not offer health coverage face penalties of about $180 per month per employee. of course, employers coerced proximate contingent material cooperation 54 understandably regard the provision of health care coverage a positive benefit to provide to their employees. but for the mandate, objecting employers wish to provide health coverage. while the coercive aspect of the hhs mandate does not settle the question, absent the cooperation being formal, the presence of coercion, of course, counts towards justifying the cooperator’s act. 3.3 analyzing compliance with the hhs mandate: formal or material? of course, were an employer’s act of certifying the organization as eligible and as objecting to the contraceptive coverage itself an act of providing such coverage, the certification, regardless of its (duly noted) coercive aspect, would amount to formal cooperation and would, thereby, be morally out of bounds. is such certification formal cooperation? the answer to this question is not immediately obvious. perhaps in answering the question it helps to note that we here consider a bureaucratic act in contrast to what we might refer to as a personal act. that is, we consider an employer’s filing of a form or written notice. to capture the nature of the act, one must think in terms of how written documents function and play causal roles. in the words of the ebsa form 700, the “form or a notice to the secretary [of hhs] is an instrument under which the [health care coverage] plan is operated.” this sentence states that the form or notice is a tool by which one operates the insurance plan. the operation of the insurance plan concerns the provision of care, not the act of the employer objecting to that care. in this respect, the filing of the form serves as a causal link in the provision of contraceptives. at the same time, by means of the form, the employer attests that the organization is eligible and objects to providing such coverage. were the form only an instrument of the plan, to file it would be an act of formal cooperation. for it would be nothing more than a form required for the provision of contraceptive coverage to an employee. were the form only the means by which one objected to providing such coverage, no well-formed conscience would find it objectionable. the difficulty arises from its joint role as an instrument of the plan and as the means by which one certifies both an employer’s eligibility and religious objection. given that the form or notice does serve as the means by which one certifies an employer’s religious objection (and eligibility to object), the filing of the form does not amount to formal cooperation. however, as noted, were the form not serving a dual purpose, this would not be the case, and the filing of the form would be formal cooperation. for the form would solely be an instrument of the plan by which the plan provides the objectionable coverage. thus, certification amounts to material cooperation, not formal. for a 55 cavanaugh good-willed employer files the form as a means of objecting, not as a means of providing contraceptive coverage. 3.4 analyzing compliance with the hhs mandate: proximate or remote? having determined that the filing of the form amounts to (as noted, coerced) material cooperation, how does one assess the degree of proximity involved in this act? given the form’s function as an “instrument of the plan” by which the plan provides contraceptive coverage, the cooperator’s certification is proximate material cooperation. for the filing of the form (or note) has a high degree of determination in the scheme of providing employees contraceptive coverage. as an instrument of the plan, the certification serves as a legally necessary document in the provision of such coverage. hence, the certification is proximate material cooperation. how necessary is the employer’s act in the provision of contraceptive coverage to employees? in answering this question, one notes that there are, at least, two aspects under which to analyze what role the certification plays in an employee’s use of contraceptives. first, there would be the employee’s use of contraceptives under the employer’s insurance plan. in this respect, the certification plays a necessary role in the employee receiving contraceptives as an employee of this employer, as it were. absent certification, the employee as an employee of this employer would not receive contraceptive coverage. hence, in this respect, the act of certification plays a necessary role. albeit not decisive, this has import, especially as it bears on scandal. for the employer could prevent employees, as employees of this religiously affiliated employer, from objectionable acts. the second aspect under which to evaluate the cooperator’s act in terms of necessity concerns not the employee receiving coverage as an employee, but, rather, the employee simply receiving contraceptives. that is, absent the employer’s certification, would an individual be capable of securing contraceptives? given their ubiquity, relative inexpensiveness, and the government’s commitment to provide them widely, one reasonably concludes that an individual not covered via insurance could readily secure contraceptives. hence, in this second aspect, the cooperator’s act would not be necessary; rather, it would be contingently related (and highly so) to an employee’s actually using contraceptives. accordingly, while the cooperator’s act is necessary as it bears on an employee qua employee taking contraception, it (very) contingently bears on the more primary wrong of an individual using contraception. in light of this analysis, the coerced proximate contingent material cooperation 56 act of certification (as currently structured) amounts to coerced proximate contingent material cooperation. a number of further considerations remain, including scandal, to which i now turn. 3.5 analyzing compliance with the hhs mandate: scandal as noted, for the employee (as an employee) of a religiously-affiliated employer to receive items to whose use the relevant religion objects, potentially scandalizes others (both members of that religion and those who do not practice it). to avoid scandal, it will be important for such employers to publish their efforts not to be implicated in the objectionable acts. moreover, such employers must continue strenuously to object by legal, political, and other means of suasion to the government’s coercion. informed people will understand that the religiously-affiliated employer has acted in accordance with a well-formed conscience. 3.6 analyzing compliance with the hhs mandate: the goods at issue in light of aforementioned criteria thus far, i have argued that an employer who files the written certification required by the hhs mandate cooperates in a material, coerced, proximate, and contingent fashion without undue risk of scandal. as proximate, the cooperation requires serious reasons in order to be justified. as noted, absent cooperation, the employers face the prospect of no longer being capable of continued operations, crippled either by confiscatory fines or by the inability to offer the most basic employment benefits. as religiously-affiliated employers, almost all of whom operate as nonprofits, the apostolic work at hand has great import. it instances myriad works of spiritual and corporal mercy. these are, indeed, serious goods at issue, including, as it bears on educational institutions, the intellectual, moral, and spiritual formation of the next generation. no institutions other than religiously-affiliated colleges and universities will offer such formation. hence, noncompliance certainly threatens profound goods. moreover, as the above analysis bearing on contingency indicates, the goods jeopardized by compliance would remain significantly threatened were the employer not to cooperate (non-compliance). thus, while non-compliance certainly risks goods (religious formation of the youth, etc.), it does not as certainly preserve (other) goods (e.g., prevent recourse to contraception). these considerations suggest that an employer can file the required certification in good conscience. 57 cavanaugh 4.1 moral theology, law, and judgments concerning material cooperation: a concluding note in the above, i argue that cooperation with the hhs mandate amounts to permissible coerced proximate contingent material cooperation. how does this conclusion fit with the vociferous objections with which some religious employers have met the hhs mandate? to find cooperation with the hhs mandate permissible does not equate to opposing vehement opposition to the mandate. diverse reasonable people find the hhs mandate morally and politically objectionable. so, also, they regard the attempt to force religiously-minded employers to comply with the mandate wrong and, perhaps more importantly, foolish, unimaginative, ham-handed, and gratuitous. as reputedly said of napoleon’s behavior on one occasion, “c’est plus qu’un crime, c’est une faute” (“it is more than wrong, it is an error”). those admirable, religiously-committed employers who have contested the mandate in court may disagree, of course, with my judgment concerning the moral permissibility of complying with it. my conclusion, however, does not lead one further to conclude that one need or ought not oppose the mandate’s imposition, and this for a number of reasons. first, one has an obligation to avoid material cooperation. were one not earnestly to strive against compliance with the mandate, one would be failing in this moral and religious duty. second, and a point allied to the first, when confronted with the prospect of cooperation, the scandal one might give to others looms large in determining the permissibility of cooperation. (of course, this point particularly bears on religiously-affiliated employers who—ideally—serve as exemplars for right-conduct.) if one heroically contends in court, as the employers have, against the imposition of cooperation, one thereby significantly reduces scandal. for, if one complies after unsuccessful extensive legal contention, one obviously does so only under coercion. third, and finally, as one account has it, the law often amounts to “what is boldly asserted and plausibly maintained.” our legal system has an agonistic character. were one not zealously to oppose instances of material cooperation imposed by the state, one would certainly face more profound intrusions on the exercise of one’s religion. hence, for these and numerous other reasons, from a judgment concerning the permissibility of cooperation, one cannot conclude that one lacks obligations to oppose the imposition of that very cooperation if one can. simply, the two judgments differ and, therefore, can diverge. coerced proximate contingent material cooperation 58 notes 1. fda-approved contraceptives include standard (low-dose) oral contraceptives (“the pill”), intra-uterine devices (iuds), high-dose levonorgestrel (emergency contraceptives or “plan b”), and ulispristal acetate (“ella”). while controverted, some of these methods—perhaps all; the evidence is ambiguous and the fora that might permit greater clarity polarized— that do prevent conception may also act as abortifacients by preventing implantation of a fertilized ovum in the uterus. of course, if the contraceptives do have abortifacient effects, that constitutes a more grave injustice than contraception, as a homicide ending life is worse than an act that prevents it from beginning in the first place. because all parties to the dispute acknowledge the contraceptive character of the drugs at issue, in what follows, i bracket the issue concerning the possible abortifacient character of some (or all) of the drugs and focus on cooperating in the provision of contraceptives as contraceptive. 2. st. alphonsus liguori, theologia moralis, volume ii, 63: “illam esse formalem, quae concurrit ad malam voluntatem alterius, et nequit esse sine peccato; materialem vero illam, quae concurrit tantum ad malam actionem alterius, praeter intentionem cooperantis.” the initial work of 1748 is entitled medulla theologia moralis r. p. hermanus busembaum societatis jesu theologi cum adnotationes per rev. patrem d. alphonsum de liguori; subsequently, in 1753, it comes to be titled theologia moralis concinnata a r. p. alphonso di liguori. during the saint’s lifetime, the work went into nine editions; the ninth was published in 1785. 3. for an extended consideration of aquinas’s account, see t.a. cavanaugh, double-effect reasoning: doing good and avoiding evil (2006, oxford: clarendon press), 1–37. 4. one notes that a papal document contrasts “cooperationem necessarium et liberam”: a difference between the necessary and the “free.” see responsa ad quaesita conferentiae episcopalis americae septentionalis circa sterilizationem in nosocomiis catholicis, sacra congregatio pro doctrina fidei, 13 march 1975, available online at http:// www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19750 313_quaecumque-sterilizatio_lt.html. 59 cavanaugh 5. as of august, 2014, employers can use an employer benefits security administration (ebsa, a division of the u.s. department of labor) form 700certification that they will then send either to their insurer or tpa (in the case of the self-insured), or employers can notify in writing the secretary of hhs of their eligibility and their objection. microsoft word renna papal approval proof.docx [expositions 11.2 (2017) 57–90] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 papal approval of holy roman emperors, 1250–1356 thomas renna saginaw valley state university napoleon needed papal approval. when he crowned himself emperor of the french on 2 december 1804, napoleon received a sort of approbatio in that pope pius vii was present at the coronation in notre dame in paris.1 he explicitly linked the event to charlemagne’s crowning at aachen, and by implication (through his “election” by the french) charlemagne’s election at frankfurt. he persuaded the pope to agree to be present by, we may surmise, threatening to abrogate the concordat and excluding his holiness from the papal states.2 the papal attendance was in effect an affirmation of the concordat. pius vii surely caught the implied reference of the “emperor of the french” to the “emperor of the romans,” the traditional title of the crowned holy roman emperor. symbolically, the supreme pontiff approved of the transfer—indicated by the venerated translatio imperii—of the imperial power from the romans or franks to the french, and by extension the lands the new emperor was about to conquer. one might say that pope leo’s approval in 800—medieval imperialist writers often interpreted the papal coronation as merely a confirmation of the authority charlemagne already possessed—was the first exercise of papal approbation, while napoleon’s bizarre coronation with a vicarious papal blessing was the last. what makes a king? that all political authority comes from god was about the only thing kingmakers in the middle ages could agree upon. lacking a written set of rules for how a ruler receives his potestas, the ancient roman and byzantine methods fluctuated among personal designation, heredity, the roman citizens, the army, palace coups, the senate, or happenstance. who makes the german emperor? this question was intensely debated from the eleventh through the fourteenth centuries. it was realized that the vicar of christ played a special role in the process, since he claimed the right to crown the successor of charlemagne imperator. in time the german sovereign was entitled king of the romans (and emperor-elect), later to become the crowned emperor of the romans.3 the answers to the question of who makes the king and the emperor would affect virtually every facet of the german-based empire and indeed much of papal approval of holy roman emperors 58 medieval political thought. within the larger problem of how the supreme priest creates the emperor is the central issue of “papal approbation,” a formal liturgical rite which elicited much controversy because of its implications for the origins and functions of both imperial and papal temporal power. but historians have perhaps not appreciated the impact this papal practice had on the nature of the imperial office. in particular, not enough attention has been given to the influence the double elections of 1257 and 1314 had on the theories of empire, especially on the concepts of imperial elections. it is argued here that during 1330–1356 the defenders of pope and emperor finally moved toward a compromise and reconciliation of competing claims. the golden bull of 1356 was less a victory of emperor over pope, as is commonly said, than the triumph of the notion of full imperial powers imparted in the election at frankfurt and the coronation at aachen. the origins of the papal approbatio lie in two events, or rather a non-event and a real one. (1) the non-event was recorded in the donation of constantine, a forgery which would profoundly shape the course of political thinking for four centuries after the investiture controversy. since pope sylvester had crowned constantine emperor, the pope implicitly retained the right to designate the next ruler and also judge his fitness to reign. by the twelfth century the supreme pontiffs were using the donation to justify their choice—or their influence of the choice made by the electors of the emperor, however indirect.4 since the emperor granted the western empire to the pope and the latter crowned him emperor, the curial argument went, subsequent popes had the right in some sense to select the ruler and specify his official purpose. (2) the real event was, of course, the coronation of charles the great in 800, with the implication that the pope somehow picked or at least acquiesced in the choice. the acclamation of those present in st. peter’s, as later imperialist proponents would have it, merely gave their consent to a papal fait accompli. thus, the curialists interpreted the event as imparting power to the pope and asserting his supremacy over the emperor. the imperialists, for their part, saw the opposite: the supremacy of the temporal ruler. it is amazing how this christmas event became the subject of so much discussion throughout the middle ages. the right of papal approval, however, actually developed as a response to the imperial claim, starting in the ninth century, of confirming the choice that was made by the electors of the pope in rome.5 the emperor gave them permission to proceed with the election, and afterwards expected 59 renna to be informed. pope nicholas ii objected to this custom as lay interference in ecclesiastical affairs, and so created the college of cardinals in 1059. henry iii had chosen no less than three popes in a single year (1046). gregory vii retorted that the king had it backwards; it was the pope (who alone was the vicarius christi; the king being merely a vicarius dei) who should approve the choice of the monarch!6 witness the approval of the princes’ nomination of rudolf to succeed the excommunicated henry iv.7 it was at this time that the approbatio began to acquire its formal attributes as expressed in elaborate liturgical rituals performed in the sanctuary of a church.8 in practice, the effect of the approbation on the actual election and coronation of the king of the romans led to endless disputes. frederick barbarossa proclaimed his election at frankfurt and subsequent coronation and consecration by the archbishop of mainz (or cologne, trier as the third archbishop-elector); mainz represented germany in the empire. for barbarossa the papal coronation of the king of the romans in rome merely confirmed divine selection.9 the pope for his part emphasized that the election at frankfurt and the coronation at aachen made the sovereign merely the “emperor-elect,” downgrading his authority to the status of a “german” king.10 frederick i may have been the first monarch to maintain that the frankfurt election conferred on him imperial powers, a claim which was expanded in the fourteenth century. the subsequent coronations in milan (or pavia) and rome added only titles, not power. the principal issue was the potestas given by the princes at frankfurt. but no coherent theory on the meaning of these elections and coronations emerged during the twelfth century. any interpretation of the significance of the electio would have to deal with related problems, such as the extent of imperial authority in italy and imperial rights over the church, including the roman church. and how does the position of the king of the romans differ from that of the emperor of the romans? even among the canon lawyers there was little agreement.11 the turning point in the evolution of the papal approbation came with pope innocent iii’s intervention in the disputed election of otto of brunswick and philip of swabia, and then between otto and frederick (ii). of particular importance for the approval rite was the decretal per venerabilem,12 which attempted to provide a theological and legal basis for the pontiff’s arbitration. this pontiff tied the approbation to the papal fullness of power, as lord of spirituals and indirectly in temporals. the pope’s relationship with the german empire, moreover, was a papal approval of holy roman emperors 60 special case, in that the imperator governed the roman empire and all temporals, at least de iure. it was the holy see’s responsibility to ensure that temporal concerns were directed toward higher ends and the good of the church universal. pope innocent iv was more explicit in associating the approbatio with the papal plenitudo potestatis.13 the imperialists were compelled to prepare a defense, but they were uncertain how to reduce the approbation ritual to a ceremony without constitutional substance. while they would prefer to retain the traditional coronation in eternal rome, the city of peter, they were divided as to the meaning of the crowning of the german king in aachen, the city of karl der grosse.14 exactly why is the election by the princes at frankfurt the preeminent circumstance which creates the king of the romans? how is this act different from the election of other kings, such as the rex francorum west of the rhine? is election somehow more sacrosanct than heredity? what gives the vicar of christ the right to approve the election of a german emperor? the period between the staufen dynasty and the death of henry vii in 1313 experienced a prolonged crisis for the holy roman empire. to the dismay of many germans, several popes threatened to give away the imperial crown to anybody-but-a-staufer. suitable candidates included non-germans! this threat to locate the imperator outside of germania—an ambiguous but much used term—partially explains the defenders of the empire’s propensity to dwell on the “german” character of the imperial office, and on the germanness of their “founders,” charlemagne and otto i the great. during the confusing era 1250–1273, the so-called interregnum, popes often used the approbation to obtain their preferred choices, as would-be emperors competed to secure the endorsement of rome. the events leading to the double election of 1257 illustrate how an aggressive pontiff could expand the latent force of the approbatio. following the deposition of frederick ii, pope innocent iv requested that the german electors to pick a new king, ignoring the claims of conrad iv. in 1246 the holy father, in effect, directed the princes to choose henry raspe, landgrave of thuringia.15 he wooed german bishops away from the staufen and towards the “king of the priests,” as henry was labeled.16 but henry’s death in february 1247 brought forth no fewer than five candidates! innocent iv engineered the choice of william of holland (1247–1256) at a council dominated by prelates—at worringen, not frankfurt.17 the archbishop of cologne, conrad, crowned william at aachen in 1248. but innocent iv never crowned him emperor of the romans, as the conflicts in germany and italy 61 renna intensified after the death of frederick ii in 1250. although william’s position became stronger, he never exercised effective authority beyond the rhineland. indeed, his relations with innocent iv and his successor alexander iv deteriorated, as did his dealings with the various princeelectors. it did not go unnoticed that william was an outsider, not connected to the electors, although henry raspe was considered a german. if papal policy was intended to prevent the encirclement of germany (in particular, swabia) and sicily, the ostensible reasons innocent iv gave for his assertion of approbation was to have a defender of the church and a promoter of the crusade.18 innocent iv expanded on the meaning of the papal confirmation in innocent iii’s venerabilem. it should be emphasized that the pope’s extensive involvement in the negotiations of 1256–1257 went far beyond the approval alluded to in the venerabilem. innocent iv effectively claimed the right to request the prince-electors to proceed with the election; to designate the suitability of a candidate; to withhold approval until the would-be candidate agreed to the papal terms; to permit the coronation at aachen; and to crown the king as emperor in rome. all these conditions follow from his right of approval and confirmation of the imperator.19 contemporaries could not help but notice the pope’s political concerns, as he maneuvered to obtain a favorable ruler in sicily, who was also linked to the imperial crown in germany. so too, the temporal nature of the approval—as opposed to the vicar of christ’s commitment to spiritual matters—was evident in the enormous amount of money and privileges which passed to the two candidates (richard of cornwall and alfonso x of castile) and their supporters. the purpose of the approbatio—to find the best advocatus ecclesiae—seemed hollow. the pope’s right to approve gave him great leverage over matters affecting virtually all of italy and the empire, not to mention france (with its concerns for burgundy, the low countries, sicily, the guelphs, and milan). the blatant politicization of the papal approbation was made evident during the double election of 1257. popes alexander iv and urban iv seemed unable to decide between the two candidates, as their priorities shifted with changing circumstances. as the pontiffs dangled promised concessions before both richard and alfonso, they carefully weighed papal interests in sicily and italian cities, not to mention their tense relations with kings henry iii and louis ix. ironically, the popes eventually abandoned both candidates and supported the habsburg rudolf in 1273, although he was never crowned emperor of the romans. during 1250–1273 no king attained recognition throughout the holy roman empire. papal approval of holy roman emperors 62 although the use of papal affirmation during 1245–1273 seems to have been reduced to a blunt political weapon in papal aspirations to control parts of italy, especially sicily, this period is of much importance in the development of the theory and future application, particularly after 1314. some of these consequences: 1. the curial position was further clarified, as can be seen in the papal bull qui caelum (1263),20 which was a considerable advance over venerabilem. it affirms the papal right to approve an election, since the emperor is the special protector of the church. innocent iv’s notion of the papal fullness of power is incorporated into the approbatio. the bull specifies the procedure of election and coronation, and the subsequent papal crowning in rome. 2. the role of the electors in choosing the king of the romans was strengthened. the electors assert their traditional right in reaction to the curial claim. 3. the germans now searched for a solid basis on which to defend the necessity for the king of the romans to be german. they strongly affirm the right of the empire to derive from god alone. they also affirm the right of the ancient romans to “acclamation” by the army. 4. the princes emphasized the imparting of full imperial potestas by the election in frankfurt. the spiritual authority of the king of the romans comes the archbishop who crowns the king at aachen under the chandelier of barbarossa. the newly crowned king—some would say the prior event of election at frankfurt—can immediately begin to administer his temporal holdings. but this question of immediate administration did not receive much attention among imperialists until after the disputed election of 1314. 5. the king of the romans as a german monarch was to some extent separate from the papally crowned emperor of the romans. 6. the territories in italy gradually became less significant for the german emperor. henry vii’s dramatic descent into italy caught contemporaries by surprise. louis of bavaria’s forays into the south were relatively minor. it might be noted that the papal exercise of the approbatio during the interregnum 63 renna was limited almost entirely to italy, in that the pope’s conditions usually involved some of the papal claims in italy. in terms of the evolution of the theory of papal approbation, as opposed to the popes’ actual ventures into the diplomatic entanglements associated with the imperial candidates, the period of the interregnum and rudolf of habsburg was as important as the decretals and the precedentsetting events of 1245–1257. having said that, the next seventy years after 1250 produced a number of treatises on imperial issues, some of which would become classics in political thought. perhaps no writings were more important for the notions of the german character of the imperial office than those of alexander of roes.21 precisely, why is the crown uniquely german and thus beyond the need for papal approbation? what is specifically german about the election and the coronations, and indeed about the electors themselves? with regard to the papal approbation of emperors, the constitutional balance between pope and emperor remained as ambiguous as ever. popes traded concessions for their approval of particular aspirants for the imperial office. electors and german kings became used to rulership without the subsequent coronation in st. peter’s. the supreme priest did not crown a king from 1250 to 1312, when he crowned henry vii as emperor of the romans. pontiffs expected rudolf i (1273–1291),22 adolf of nassau (1292–1298), and albert i of habsburg (1298–1308) to swear to avoid the papal states and sicily, and to take the cross. for the popes, italy was always the main consideration. in desperation albert even promised to obtain the papal approbation before he was crowned at aachen.23 german thinkers wrestled with the fundamental questions about the empire: in what sense was it german? roman? can the empire be both without the approval of the bishop of rome? in hindsight it is clear that the opposing views of papal approval and the imperial power bestowed by the electing princes at frankfurt influenced each other’s development; a symbiotic relationship marked every stage of their mutual evolution. it took another jolt—the double election of 1314—to force the imperialists to explain the pope’s role in the choosing, approving, and “instructing” of the king of the romans. the following period—1314–1356—is the golden age of imperial-papal thought, when opinions about the fast pace of conflicts between kings (and anti-kings) and pontiffs and their supporters outside avignon rapidly multiplied. the new pope, john xxii (1316–1334), pushed the notion of approbation to papal approval of holy roman emperors 64 its limits, a notion given legitimacy in numerous tracts.24 he claimed not only the right to approve the candidate (either louis or frederick) but also to give the electors the permission to elect; to evaluate the candidate’s qualifications (beyond the customary imperial function as the advocatus ecclesiae); to determine precisely when the newly elected king of the romans can begin to administer his realm and exercise his rights in italy; to set the conditions for the next constitutional step, the march to rome to become crowned emperor of the romans (by the pope or his appointee); to nominate and impart authority to the papal and imperial vicars in italy. innocent iii would not have recognized his own modest claims for the papal approbatio! his venerabilem was after all an occasion-piece to deal with a specific election, with only a light coating of legal and theological justification. but new conditions after 1314 compelled defenders and detractors of the approbation to demand clarification. john xxii declared that he would not decide on the legitimacy of the rightful candidate unless the latter met the curial conditions. only then would he agree to crown him emperor of the romans. the supporters of louis of bavaria responded to pope john with a barrage of statements, with the papal side responding in kind. while louis had to answer the radical augustinians, the latter had also to refute the invective of marsiglio of padua. the concept of papal approbation was central to these arguments about imperial-papal relations. on the papal side, augustinus triumphus25 and others26 rushed to defend the temporal claims of john xxii. they linked the approbation to the papal fullness of power in both spirituals and temporals. the imperialists, for their part, tried to refute this argument with appeals to scripture, canon law, scholastic reason, history, and german customary legal practice; but they came to realize that this point-by-point rebuttal was getting wearisome, ineffective, and overly abstract. by the late 1330s all sides were becoming impatient with the impasse on the status of louis of bavaria. a landmark event occurred on 16 july 1338 when the german prince-electors issued the declaration of rhense,27 which excluded the papal approbatio from the election of the king of the romans. caught off guard, louis of bavaria proclaimed an approval of the declaration, while asserting his own divinely assigned powers and ultimate authority over the entire empire.28 louis resisted both the electors and the pope. there was widespread exasperation with the civil wars, as europe endured war, disease, famine, and external attack. some polemicists, such as lupold of bebenburg, kept returning to a basic issue: the right of the german electors to confer full imperial authority on their 65 renna ruler by virtue of the election at frankfurt. how could a case for this view be made on the basis of the coronation of charlemagne as emperor? the extreme positions taken by both imperialists and papalists after 1314—the beginning of phase two in the controversy over the meaning of papal approbation—required a solomonic solution which both sides could accept. but the emperor’s adherents needed a positive defense of the election of the rex romanorum which could rest on a firm theological, legal, and historical base, while at the same being sufficiently “german.” the imperialists realized that any interpretation of the papal approbatio would have to include the pope’s participation in the choice of the holy roman emperor. it would be a serious misreading to assume that the backers of louis of bavaria desired to eliminate the role of the pontiff altogether. we should not see the events of 1340–1356 from the vantage of hindsight, as if the golden bull of 1356 were an inevitable outcome of the conflicts between louis and the papal curia. it would be simplistic to view the vigorous exchange of ideas as merely a legitimizing facade for the clash of personalities with their territorial claims. it would be a more accurate assessment of this turbulent period to envision the time after 1340 as the search for a solution to end the warring factions. the uncompromising louis faced three uncompromising popes: john xxii, benedict xii, and clement vi. the crisis of 1338–1340—when a compromise suddenly appeared in reach, due to the efforts of several german prelates—produced numerous literary responses, most notably the works of lupold of bebenburg, william of ockham, and conrad of megenberg. the tract of lupold was destined to become one of the classics of late medieval political thought. the work’s central argument is that the successors of charlemagne held full imperial rights in germany and italy by virtue of their election and crowning by the prince-electors.29 the core of the holy roman empire is germania, which was held by charlemagne by right of conquest prior to the events of 800; the kingdoms of burgundy and italy were added later. the coronation by pope leo iii merely attached the imperial title to the de facto power of the king of the franks.30 papal approval was still necessary but added no further authority to the elected german monarch. the newly crowned king at aachen can legally start to administer his realm even before he receives the papal approbatio and coronation in st. peter’s basilica.31 lupold rejected the revolutionary claims made by the princes at rhense, and affirmed the function of the approbation rite in order to reach for a working cooperation between avignon and munich; while he never states this papal approval of holy roman emperors 66 explicitly, this is the implication, given the contrary position taken at rhense. the constitutional effect of the approval was further reduced by the practice of selecting german kings by hereditary succession, although this did not exclude the occasional change of dynasties. louis of bavaria was after all from the house of wittelsbach, and his predecessor, henry vii, was of the house of luxembourg. the weak link in lupold’s argument was the relationship between the german election of the king of the romans and papal approval. suppose the pontiff refused to approve the choice made by the seven electors at frankfurt? what if the newly elected rex flat-out refused to seek the approbation, or if the electors demanded or requested that the king not receive the pontiff’s confirmation (a word often synonymous with approbation)? since the emperor-elect already possessed complete imperial auctoritas, why was the subsequent approval necessary? indeed, why go through the trouble of having a papal coronation—with its implicit association with the approbation—at all? following the double election of 1314, the question of the legal import of the princely election at frankfurt was a heated topic in germany. the hapless lupold believed he had found a via media—in the tradition of john of paris—which everyone could accept. but alas, his reasonable compromise was dismissed by both sides as too conciliatory. (such was the fate of numerous attempts at compromise during the tumultuous reign of louis of bavaria.) the imperialists in particular objected to the role of the papal coronation in conferring the emperor’s rights over matters ecclesiastical in the church militant. another irritant was the papalists’ insistence on making the approbation in some sense a logical consequence of the popes’ translation of empire to the germans by charlemagne or otto i. a fierce response from the imperialist camp followed. for more than two decades after the disputed elections of 1314, the papalist-imperialist exchanges were heavily influenced by the poverty controversy which resulted in part from john xxii’s attacks on franciscan interpretations of apostolic and rule-based povertas in 1317–1318 and 1322–1323, and also by the appearance of marsiglio’s defender of the peace in 1324. the vociferous franciscan in exile, william of ockham, began moving away from the defense of poverty after 1332 and towards a critique of papal pretensions of plenitudo potestatis. when ockham came across the text of lupold of bebenburg’s treatise on empire—although he may have heard about lupold’s opinions and indeed may have engaged him in public debate in c. 1340—he reacted strongly with his eight questions on the power of the pope,32 a work he may 67 renna have intended to expand afterwards. ockham vehemently attacked the treatise of the venerable lupold in the guise of defending it! he assaulted his “master” for undermining the twin pillars of the empire: (1) the roman character of the empire, and (2) the elective nature of the imperial office. there is no “core” (to use our modern term when describing empires), german or otherwise, of the indivisible roman empire (think of engelbert of admont or dante), which continues down to today, if only de iure, in some parts of the empire, such as italy. ultimately the emperor’s power derives from his descent in the line of ancient roman emperors. his authority comes from god alone; the pope confers no constitutional rights by his coronation and unction. ockham tries to connect the german kings with the roman emperors by means of the electors, but not in any constitutional sense. the need for the electors is simply practical, a typical ockhamist twist, given his mistrust of all institutions. he rejects any constitutional function of the papal approbatio, which he contrasts with the princely election which operates as the instrument by which the de facto right by which the “king or emperor” (ockham often juxtaposes the two titles, as does lupold, as if to designate imperial power to the new king of the romans) begins to administer his temporals.33 ockham’s theory of approbation is a typical mix of his “regular” and “occasional.” the emperor is chosen by free election, not by hereditary succession. the electors represent not only all germans, but also all “romans,” including and especially the citizens of the city of rome.34 (we are not sure what ockham thought about louis’s unorthodox “election” in rome in 1328, but he probably did not approve, since the rightful german electors were not involved.) if this view sounds contrived, it is a logical result of ockham’s insistence, against lupold, that the german emperor and the means by which he became “king and emperor” are genuinely roman. the role of the papal approval is simply to provide an occasional check on the emperor’s abuse of power, ockham implies, but possesses no constitutional necessity. nowhere does ockham call for the abolition of this papal rite, however vehemently he attacks the misuse of power by john xxii and benedict xii. ockham’s general point is that the approbation is merely an occasional device to keep the two universal powers—roman/german emperor and pope—in balance for the common good. intervention in either spiritual or temporal matters is always necessitated by some immediate crisis, not some abstract theory. it is significant that one of the most radical critics of the papacy of the time would insist on some role for the popes in the matter of how the newly elected german king governs his empire. it was absurd that the papal defenders made the approbation a moral and papal approval of holy roman emperors 68 canonical expression of the papal doctrine of the fullness of power. ockham’s popes and emperors intervene in each others’ domains as concerned individual catholics, not by virtue of their formal offices. it is not surprising that ockham does not attack the venerable tradition that a pope (usually gregory v) had originally created the institution of the german electors of the king of the romans.35 ockham, unlike lupold, emphasizes the emperor’s roman heritage more than the german. in sum, the approbation is for ockham simply a useful device to drive home the interdependence of emperor and pope, without in any way adding to the temporal claims of the vicar of christ. it is just that, a practical man-made instrument of no constitutional significance. in 1346 ockham must have been shocked at the news that pope clement vi had secured the deposition of louis of bavaria and the elevation of charles of bohemia as king of the romans, henceforth dubbed the “priests’ king.”36 even more disturbing was the way the pope had managed the election (in effect, making separate arrangements with the various electors, in the grand manner of papal policy during 1245–1257) and the justification he used: the papal right of approbatio! clement vi made the extraordinary claim that popes have always judged the qualifications of candidates, and had given the electors permission to make their choice. he offered an elaborate explanation—which suggests he was aware of the novelty of his application of the approbation tradition—of how the electing princes were actually affirming his right of approval.37 he emphasized that the approbatio not only gave the electors their right to proceed with the election, but the very act of the rite actually created the king of the romans. it was the pope, not the electors, who bestowed full imperial potestas on the king of the romans who then also became the emperor-elect. the declaration of rhense had stated that the election by the princes created the king of the romans with no need of papal approval. the subsequent raising of the new king to the imperial crown was now expected, although it may well be that the pope had no intention of proceeding to this next step.38 it would be easier for clement to manipulate charles’s policies in his lower status as german king. (charles iv, a czech, was not german, but this designation remained the conventional usage.) in the following years the pope may not have realized that charles iv’s cult of charlemagne undercut the constitutional effect of the approbation in that the king as an alter-charlemagne gave him a sacred status without reference to any requirement of a papal approval. the identification with the legendary karl der grosse, who was crowned but not “approved” by a pope, gave charles a historical legitimacy by itself.39 it could be argued that one 69 renna of the reasons charles fostered this ideology of the frankish king was precisely to undermine the claims of clement vi. there is no question that the pope intended his former student to be subservient to avignon, particularly in matters involving italy and the french-english conflict. but, in fact, almost immediately after the death of louis of bavaria, charles iv pursued policies which were often at variance with the wishes of the papal curia. not exactly the priests’ king he was alleged to be. it should come as no surprise that the papal approbation is not mentioned in the golden bull of 1356.40 the bull could be misunderstood as an attack on the extreme interpretation that clement vi put on the approbatio in 1346.41 for the pope, the electors in effect merely “approved” the choice of the royal candidate that the pope had already made! clement’s reading of the approbation runs counter to the venerable german tradition that the electors confer full imperial power on their choice of king of the romans and emperor-elect. but in fact the bull was a compromise in the sense that charles intended to secure at least the partial acquiescence of the papal curia. charles had to fend off the framers of rhense who would have preferred to declare explicitly that papal approval and indeed the coronation in rome were unnecessary. it is unlikely that the bull caught innocent vi by surprise; he was realistic enough to realize that the insertion of papal approbation in the bull was politically impossible. indeed, charles negotiated with the curia to obtain at least a grudging acceptance of the bull.42 there are clues that the bull was partially intended to mollify avignon: the bull does not attack the papacy as a cause—as would lorenzo valla later—of the turmoil in the empire43; the newly elected king of the romans is also the “emperor-elect,” implying that the papal coronation is expected; the election of the king of the romans and the “future emperor”44 should be held in frankfurt and the “first” coronation in aix45 (implying the “second” in rome or pavia; the ambiguity was probably intentional), although the king of the romans possesses imperial powers which he can exercise immediately, he was elected both emperor (meaning emperor-elect) and king, the now conventional reference to “king and emperor”; the oath taken by the archbishop of mainz46 does not exclude a future approval by the pope when the latter crowns the king emperor of the romans; the carefully worded allusions to the three archbishop-electors’ role in the procedure prior to the actual election at frankfurt are vague as to how the archbishop (in particular, that of mainz) approves the candidate in advance, and then only in the general sense of declaring the right to proceed with election; to offset the papal approval of holy roman emperors 70 constitutionality of the recent approbation (1346), the bull justifies its electoral procedure on the basis of venerable custom. innocent vi, who may have disapproved of the high-handed manner clement had obtained the election of charles iv, was anxious to retain the good graces of charles, whose position grew stronger every year. why insist on the approbatio which was certain to alienate many german princes, including the electors? charles, moreover, would have preferred to remove a possible impediment to the succession of his son, wenceslas; the pope, in exchange for omitting the approbation in the bull, would be given a free hand in the papal states—including post-rienzo rome—and milan. the situation in the papal states, not to mention france, was unstable. in short, the golden bull should be seen less as a victory of emperor over pope, than as a compromise which would maintain the cooperation of prague and avignon in the interests of both—and the church militant. once it became clear that the declaration of rhense in 1338 had accomplished little in bringing peace to germany or in reconciling the courts of munich and avignon, the complaints against louis of bavaria steadily increased. and when the removal of louis did little to ease these concerns, many prelates decided enough was enough. this exasperation with the endless conflict between king and pope—and their proxies—can be seen in the political writings of the time. the black death must have seemed a divine disapproval for this sorry state of affairs. the most prominent papalist writer was conrad of megenberg (1309–1374),47 who lamented the woeful condition of the church in the empire48; these laments can be seen in the planctus or lacrima tracts of this time. while his writings dealing with the relations of papacy and empire seem on the surface to be extreme statements of the curial viewpoint, they are in fact attempts to reconcile the two universal powers in the interest of the church. conrad was acutely aware of the building tensions between charles iv and pope innocent vi, which must have been distressing given the great hope placed in the new king of the romans. doubtless conrad was cognizant of the diplomatic exchanges between imperial and papal curias, and the activities in munich to devise a document which clarified the procedure of the election of the king and of the role of the papal approval. in two monumental works, the yconomica (1353–1363) and the de translatione imperii (1353–1363), conrad, who wrote in opposition to ockham and lupold, developed the most extensive analysis of the approbatio since the bulls of innocent iii. if read in the context of the problems of the time, conrad’s views fit well with the general tendency to find a workable solution 71 renna to the problems affecting pope and emperor. the essence of conrad’s elaborate theory is that the pontiff must retain some role in the choosing of an emperor, since this bond would more likely result in cooperation in matters both temporal and spiritual. harmony at the top will bring harmony in the middle (princes and prelates) and at the bottom (religious orders and secular clergy). he realized that after the death of clement vi in 1352 the danger to the german church came not from faraway avignon, but from the princes, some of whom were wary of the new emperor. would charles iv and innocent vi pursue the aggressive centralizing policies of their predecessors? conrad aimed two works at both pope and emperor and their courts, as well as at all princes and bishops in germany. these writings are not papal hierocratic fantasies, but well-considered reform programs. when his ideas of papal approbatio are placed in this wider context, they seem plausible and practical. the foundation of conrad’s doctrine of papal approbation is the function of the emperor as the defender of the roman church, a function tied to the pope’s transfer of empire to the franks and then to the germans.49 since the pope transferred the empire regulariter and de iure—contrary to lupold’s only de facto—he is obligated to approve the candidate for the imperial office.50 the pope has the right to nominate and approve the candidate before the prince-electors elect him king of the romans.51 although conrad cites venerabilem frequently, he is more detailed than innocent and grants the pope virtually unlimited power over the candidate before and after the princes elect. the pontiff cites ten virtues he demands the king possess, with defensor ecclesiae heading the list.52 the king of the romans cannot administer his temporals until the pope gives him permission to do so—the central issue in the imperial-papal conflict since 1314.53 if this domination over the royal/imperial election seems excessive, it is because the relationship between pope and emperor is unique: they are the two universal powers in christendom, one over spirituals, the other over temporals.54 while another christian may succeed by hereditary right, only the king of the romans is elected, and this election follows directly from the translation of empire.55 even though the king has been elected by the princes, he is only a “hypothetical” king until the pope gives his approbatio.56 the election by the princes is, in effect, merely an after-the-fact acclamation to a decision the pope has already made. he is the real “elector” of the king of the romans. conrad seems unable to let go of his theory of approbation. in his yconomica he elaborates on papal approval of holy roman emperors 72 the bonds between the approbatio and the translation of empire.57 he integrates the theory into the classic images of the two swords and the two luminaries, as if to suggest that the emperor’s power as the universal ruler in temporals is in no way diminished by the papal action. the contemporary emperor is in the tradition of the ancient roman emperors, even if the empire has been transferred to the germans. above all, the approbation is closely linked to the emperor’s right to begin the administration of his temporals. conrad explores many theological, canonical, and natural law associations with his notion of papal approbation. but why does conrad give so much attention to papal confirmation of the election of the rex romanorum? the events of 1346 were long ago. the new pope, innocent vi, probably had no interest in a rite which he would probably never perform, as charles iv appeared firmly in charge. innocent had enough to think about with the upheavals in rome and throughout the papal states. his first priority in germany was to maintain good relations with the increasingly powerful charles iv, who for his part needed curial support to prevent the princes, great and small, from reverting to the bad old days of louis of bavaria. the king desired a role for the new pope in his soon-tobe-released golden bull, which he devised not only as an electoral procedure, but as a program for governing the empire. perhaps modern historians have understated the conciliatory motives of conrad’s seemingly extreme rendering of the papal approbation.58 it is likely that conrad’s accommodating approach was in fact a common view among german prelates after 1352. he may have partially intended his two treatises—the translatio and the yconomica, both written after 1352—for the curia of charles iv as a plea to include some place for the papal approbation in the coming golden bull. conrad feared that the antipapal (and anticlerical?) attitude of the declaration of rhense would be integrated into the new document. it would be naive for us to imagine that conrad thought it was a realistic possibility that innocent would “approve” the choice of wenceslas prior to the election at frankfurt. quite the opposite. the papal approbatio of the next imperial candidate would be simply an expression that the pontiff in avignon retains the traditional interest in the ecclesiastical affairs of germany and italy. but conrad was also trying to communicate a message to the electors and charles iv. the princes should not fear imperial or papal interference in their realms. charles should take his obligations to the german church more seriously. he should remain in contact with all levels of the clergy in germania. conrad was alarmed that the writings of his nemesis ockham might impede royal-papal cooperation. the 73 renna antipapal works of ockham, marsiglio, and others would weaken the hierarchy of the church everywhere. although conrad might not have agreed, the prominent roles of the three elector-archbishops in the golden bull were intended by charles to be a kind of surrogate approbation. the three prelates confer or least confirm spiritual authority on the king of the romans. the emphasis in the bull is on the election, not on the coronation at aachen, which is mentioned almost in passing.59 this episcopal trinity of electors effectively represents the entire german church. but the bull is more than an electoral decree. it is a veritable constitution of how the empire should be administered. the curia is, of course, not mentioned, since these administrative duties involve temporal concerns, beyond the purview of avignon (with an implied rejection of the more extreme of curial views on the papal plenitudo potestatis). charles iv’s vision was that the seven electors would act as a sort of central advisory group in the larger empire of principalities and cities. (the kingdom or empire in the bull is analogous to the modern united nations security council and also the european union.)60 the emperor would keep in contact with the princeelectors on matters of common interest. clearly, charles did not expect the estates to complete their responsibilities once the royal election was made. the bull begins, after all, with a sharp condemnation of the divisions in the empire. the new procedure—supposedly based on ancient germanic custom—was intended to minimize these disputes. conclusion what, then, is the significance of the papal approbation during 1338–1356 for the holy roman empire? too often in modern scholarship, this era is seen as the end of the great game of popes battling emperors. the papal blessing is seen as but one element in the conflicts between the two universal powers. the golden bull is envisioned as the imperial checkmate of his opponent. the implication is that this exercise in power politics did not take the justifications—canonical, theological, historical precedent, german traditions, natural rights, and the legacy of the translation of empire—seriously; they were largely rhetorical cover for the practical issues of papal control of the election of the king of the romans (already referred to as the king of germany or the germans) and subsequent influence in italy. the approbatio was mainly a support for the papal approval of holy roman emperors 74 scramble for picking the right king; the double election of 1257 would be an example of the dominance of political motives in the competition for royal election. realpolitik carried the day. this view of the approbation as a power ploy might be dubbed the “vatican model.” (although the popes did not reside in the vatican until 1378, the image is apt for it points to the expected coronation in st. peter’s; the curial perspective is that the king of the romans is above all an “emperor-elect.”) this symbol posits the pontiff’s attempt to exact concessions from the imperial candidate, particularly from his position in italy. but this paradigm has its limits, since it ignores the thought processes behind it and why contemporaries did not take approbation lightly. it implies that the assumptions on which it was based changed little over four centuries. it is unlikely that contemporaries of louis of bavaria viewed the approbation as simply a crude political weapon. moreover, the model is too static to take into account the increased pressure after 1314 to tie the approbatio to the right of the prince-electors to confer imperial powers on the king of the romans, and also to the papal right to determine when the emperor-elect can begin to administer his temporals in germany and in italy through vicars. a more useful paradigm might be labeled the “aachen model.” in this perspective, the kings and princes developed a concept of imperial election and imperial potestas, which was partially shared by the popes’ claim to approve the german king and emperor (the twin titles are often used together). this archetype has the advantage of focusing on the full imperial powers which the king received at the election of the seven princes at aachen and the subsequent coronation by the archbishop of mainz (usually); the latter was a sort of approbatio of the previous constitutional act in the church of st. bartholomew in frankfurt. it must emphasized that the notion of the papal approbation evolved into a symbiotic relationship with the ongoing struggles between popes and emperors (and prince-electors). the theory and practice of this canonical right and rite are comprehensible only in this wider context of imperial-papal dialogue, sometimes amiable, sometimes hostile. interestingly, both papalists and imperialists were ambiguous about the “roman” element of the election, coronation, and approval of the german king. the curialists were fearful of the emperor’s claims to the city of rome, the “romans” in italy (that is, claims to the former roman empire), and the church at large. the imperialists, for their part, had never forgotten the claims of popes gregory vii and innocent iii that the papal crown implied subservience to the roman church, and that the empire was merely “german” with no rights in 75 renna italy or the church universal. ironically, the imperialists reacted to the claims of the papal approval (and the fiasco of the installment of an emperor in 1328 by the citizens of the city of rome) by stressing the “german” component of the makeup of the holy roman empire. the events of 1338–1356 reveal a growing separation of papacy and empire. it was axiomatic that the successor of peter was the supreme head of spirituals, and the successor of constantine was the apex of matters temporal, if only de iure. there was widespread grumbling that the vicar of christ was too engaged in secular affairs, and that the emperor was too quick to meddle in spiritual concerns. while the notion of papal approbatio looks in theory like a flagrant intervention in imperial business, everyone realized that in practice it was becoming less effective, especially after 1328. the astounding and exceptional intercession of clement vi in the raising of charles iv in 1346 had the ironic result that this papal victory would undermine still further the practice of papal approval in the minds of german princes and prelates. but one could argue that the relative ease by which clement—assisted by louis’s enemies—was able to accomplish his objective is evidence of the widespread conviction that there should be some degree of papal involvement in removing a “despotic” ruler. after the turmoil of the 1320s there was an increased sentiment that the papacy and empire had become too disjointed, contrary to god’s plan. many saw in the relatively harmless papal approbation a means to keep both universal powers in unison for the common good of christendom. the assumption of the electors was that the papal approval would be excluded from the election and coronation of the king of the romans at frankfort and aachen, but that it would continue as a potent symbolic rite in the papal coronation in st. peter’s in rome. this diplomatic move was better than war to resolve the impasse between king and pope. in a bizarre way, the exclusion of the approbation in the golden bull represents a victory of the spiritual over the temporal. the message to the curia in avignon was that the curia should confine itself to the church’s spiritual things. the message to the german electors was that the holy roman empire was fully spiritual and fully temporal. the golden bull is an ecclesiological vision as well as a procedure for electing a monarch. except in matters of necessity, the holy roman empire had no need of direction from outside. when the second charlemagne crowned himself in 1804 he effectively reinvented the emperor of the romans. the holy roman empire and the “approving” papacy were about to end. papal approval of holy roman emperors 76 afterward when the papal approbation was excluded in the golden bull, it should not be assumed that it disappeared. it continued to be debated during the great schism and throughout the fifteenth century. the rite continued to be discussed during the elections of 1376 and 1486, and especially 1400,61 1410–1411, 1440, and 1448. major political thinkers, such as peter of andlau,62 discuss the approbatio at length, with emphasis on the right of the king of the romans to administer his temporals. the influence of lupold of bebenburg was felt throughout the fifteenth century. by the time of maximilian i (1493–1519) the approbation had become irrelevant, since the king of the romans was ipso facto the emperor with full imperial powers. endnotes 1. see masson, le sacre et le couronnement de napoleon 53–89, 126–134. 2. the rumor that napoleon at the last minute snatched the crown from the pope’s hands, reminiscent of einhard, is probably untrue. this gossip was probably started by the duchess d’abrantes. in fact, napoleon planned every detail of the coronation following his visit to aachen and the senate’s decree on 18 may 1804 giving him the title of emperor of the french. the point historians seem to overlook is that napoleon insisted on the pope’s presence. the problem was how to get pius vii to accede to napoleon’s terms. see porterfield and siegfied part 1; also, masson and myrback. it is doubtful that napoleon had in mind charlemagne’s crowning of his son louis in 813. 3. the term sacrum imperium was first used by frederick barbarossa in 1157. in 1254, conrad iv was the first to refer to the holy roman empire, a title which was soon widely adopted but not exclusively used. the addition of “of the german nation” appears after 1300, and would become official by 1509. but, again, at no time between 962 and 1806 was a single title used either for the ruler or the empire, not even by the habsburgs. 77 renna 4. see vian chapter 2; maffei; laehr; herklotz. 5. see krieger, könig, reich, und reichsreform im spätmittelalters; mitteis chapters 4– 6; erkens. 6. see müller-mertens, regnum teutonicum 388–390. 7. see miller documents 23 and 26; emerton books 3–6. 8. see unverhau chapter 2 (gregory vii) and 3 (lothar iii to conrad iii). 9. otto of freising 3:184–186, 193; unverhau chapter 4; renna 56–58, 63. 10. since gregory vii, the emperors increasingly insisted on the “roman” character in imperial rule. for the interplay of the german and roman imperial aspects of the holy roman empire, see scales chapter 4. ironically, as the german element in the constitutional makeup of the empire increased after 1314, the popes had to keep shifting their justification of the approbation of “roman” emperors. 11. in addition to note 5 above, see ertl; wolf, die entstehung des kurfürstenkollegs and “von den königswahlen zum kurfürstenkolleg” 48–60. 12. constitutiones 2:398 (506); regestum innocentii iii 12.62 (166–172); friedberg columns 79–82. see also unverhau 247–278. for venerabilem and translation of empire, see folz 272–277; goez 157–165. on approbatio: erkens, kurfürsten chapter 5 at 54–66; kempf 48–55, 105–134; laufs; mitteis 132–141; bayley, formation 124– 128. 13. see bayley, formation 142–152, 217; innocent iv folio 129, passim; engelmann 48– 51; kempf 3:110, 122. 14. in the two centuries prior to the golden bull of 1356 there was an ongoing discussion about the constitutional effects of the election at frankfurt—the form of the electio was itself in flux before 1300—and of the coronation by the archbishop of mainz, who represented germania at aachen. the debate was complicated by the frequent claims of hereditary right. see bayley, formation 85–88, 128–130, 151–175. the tendency papal approval of holy roman emperors 78 after the passing of the staufen was to attribute full imperial power to the elected king before he was crowned in aachen cathedral. this emphasis on the “imperial’ powers granted to the elected king of the romans—particularly by barbarossa—was due partly to counter the curial claim that the coronation rendered him only the status of emperor-elect before his papal coronation in rome. the papalists found it easier to tie the approbatio and the translation of empire to the event in rome. the imperialists realized that the trek to rome was not always possible, and that the papal coronation gave more credence to the king’s claims to italy, burgundy, and ecclesiastical rights. the king had to demonstrate that he was more than a mere teutonic ruler. 15. see bayley, formation 9–22; kaufmann 14:1287–1288. 16. later, william of ockham, a supporter of louis of bavaria, ridiculed charles iv as a rex clericorum because of pope clement vi’s heavy-handed role in getting him elected. 17. bayley, formation 21–55; and bayley, “the diplomatic preliminaries of the double election of 1257 in germany” 459–460. 18. the classic justification for the approbatio as the affirmation of the emperor’s role as advocatus of the roman church had been made in innocent iii’s venerabilem. it was not difficult for innocent iv to expand the perimeters of “protection.” innocent iv emphasizes his rights as imperio vacante, granted him in the absence of an emperor. this notion of the pope acquiring imperial authority in the absence of the emperor would be a major theme in the writings of pope john xxii and his defenders. innocent iv affirms his right to appoint an advocate of the church and to act as the emperor in the case of an imperial vacancy. “que ab eo possit appellari ad papam, et suger appellatione licite aliae literae impetrari. (ad tuam) hoc ius habet episcopus in terra, quod ad eum appellatur, sed ad papam iure imperii appellatur. vacante hoc est propter defectum imperii…quia papa eum consecrat et examinat, et est imperator eius advocatus, et iurat ei, et ab eo imperium tenet […] quod in iure quae ab ecclesia romana tenet succedit papa, imperio vacante” (apparatus 2:10, folio 198v). (this is folio 129 in the lyons 1577 edition, cited by bayley, formation 142–145. the frankfurt edition is available online: http://works.bepress.com/david_freidenreich/46, 79 renna with interesting marginal notes.) see melloni’s excellent study of innocent iv’s fullness of power. 19. “quod si imperator coronam in loco debito recipere non possit, nihilominus authoritate ministrandi ab archepiscolo colon. posset recipere, vol suam authoritatem habet ex elctione, non credimus necessario examinationem faciendam, noc properter exciptionem diffenerdam, quia consequitur ad priora, et quia ibi sit manus impositio […] ante sunt confirmati et administrant (examinatio) in examinatione venit ll iuste electo (non alii) id est, illegitmem […] sed eis negligentibus eligere imperatorem papa eligit, et si plures elegerunt, papa de iure cognoscet inter eos […] papa factum erat de phil. duce. sed non confiramavit electorem regis o (tto) et ideo reservavit contradictoribus potestatem dicendi in formam, et personam, et tunc intermim debent eum habere propter coronam, quam acceperat a colonen archiepiscopo aquisgrani” (apparatus folio 66rv). see bayley, formation 69–77, 139–159; stutz. 20. constitutiones 2:405 (522–532). 21. see especially von roes. these german themes also appear in his noticia seculi and other works. the popes’ machinations in imperial elections from 1245 to 1314 fostered feelings of national sentiment in the empire. many writers during this period, such as ptolemy of lucca and dante, sought to give more clarity to the nature and historical purpose to the empire. 22. see constitutiones 83; unverhau 298; von wretschko; engelmann 56–60; krieger, rudolf von habsburg 87–88. 23. see constitutiones 3:588–590 and 4:8–10; unverhau 311–313; mitteis 211; engelmann chapter 4, 64–76; deussen 31–42. 24. see unverhau 21–35, 327–377. unverhau’s monumental study is actually an exposition of the theory and practice of john xxii’s approbation and louis of bavaria’s response. he emphasizes how the pope’s attack on louis was a logical expression of the papal doctrine of fullness of power. the implications for the rhense declaration and the golden bull are barely alluded to. see also the fundamental study papal approval of holy roman emperors 80 by hans e. feine (charles iv, 80–84; boniface viii, 89–94; henry vii, 94–98). 25. de ecclesiastica potestate, especially 1:37 (translatio imperri and its relation to the transfer to the germans, and the papal approval) and 1:38 (imperial election and coronation, and papal approbation). i use the rome (1584) edition in the vatican library (bav), one of the best editions. there is no modern edition, and it is not included in st. louis university vatican film library. 1:39 (imperial administration) is central to augustinus’s theory of approbation. 26. several writers—such as william of cremona, hermann von schildesche, guido terreni, sibert of beek—at the request of john xxii attacked the six errors of marsiglio of padua, which center on the papal right to hold temporal power and possessions. they emphasize the pope’s right to permit the newly elected german king to administer his temporals. papal approval is strongly implied in all their arguments. 27. quellen zur verfassungsgeschichte des römisch-deutschen reiches im spätmittelalters 28; quellensammlung zur geschichte 126(b):54–56. for the broader context of rhense and louis of bavaria’s response, see stengel chapter 4, parts 4–6 (112–169). 28. louis issued his licet iuris on 6 aug 1338; quellen zur verfassungsgeschichte 33:290– 93; constitutiones 7.1.458 (270–271). see zeumer; becker. 29. lupold von bebenburg chapters 5, 6, passim; another edition: mgh 4: politische schriften des lupold von bebenburg, ed. jürgen miethke. hannover: hahnsche, 2004. 30. von bebenburg chapters 1, 3, 4, 7. 31. von bebenburg chapters 7, 8, 12. lupold is adamant that the translation of empire (from the greeks or franks to the germans) confers no power de iure on the emperor. there is no need for papal approval because the king already possesses imperial power. 32. ockham 1:15–217, especially q. 4 (122–154). this work, which was apparently well known during the great schism and throughout the fifteenth century, deserves more attention by modern ockham scholars. 81 renna 33. ockham q. 4, chapters 9–10 (146–154). ockham’s argument is not always easy to follow, since he often cites lupold and other opinions before offering his own, which can be repetitive and mixed with historical precedent. unfortunately, there is little on the approbation in his dialogues (1334–1347), which he left unrevised and unfinished. and it is in his maddening “recitative”—as opposed to his “assertive” style, in the terminology of modern scholars—mode, making his own opinions at times hidden. ockham’s other works touching on empire—short discourse on tyrannical government, against benedict, on the power of emperors and pontiffs—offer little on the ideas on approbatio in the eight questions, which is our main interest here since it responds directly to lupold. but ockham’s reasoning in the eight questions is fairly clear and consistent. 34. ockham q. 4, chapter 6 (136–142) and chapter 9 (150–151); q. 8, chapter 4 (187–196). papal approval is not needed to transfer the empire or imperial powers. the princeelectors transfer power “mediately,” not “immediately,” since the actual power derives from the “the roman people or the army” (the classic expression from roman law). the electors simply confirm the rights granted by the natural law, a vintage ockham joiner. see q. 8, chapter 4 (192). the maverick ockham seems determined to annoy both imperialists—by granting the pope certain powers per accidens—and papalists— by denying the pope his traditional rights over the empire regulariter or principaliter. 35. neither is it surprising that the arch-critic of the temporal authority of the papacy, marsiglio of padua, also gives the pope similar powers, since he had little interest in the german origins of the empire. pope leo viii (sic) transferred the empire from the franks to the germans in the person of otto i. see marsilgio chapters 11 and 12 (80– 81). the tradition of the bestowal of the elector-princes appears in the highly respected chronicles of godfrey of viterbo and martin polonus. marsiglio uses the chronicle of landolf of colonna as his starting point. 36. the pfaffenkönig. see william of ockham’s comment in de electione karoli chapter 5 (358); listed as conrad of megenberg, tractatus contra wilhelmum occam 2:346– 363. papal approval of holy roman emperors 82 37. the clearest exposition of clement vi’s view on approbation is in collatio of 6 november 1346; constitutiones 8.100 (142–163). fine exegesis in wood 156–176; note that wood lists this collatio (100) as no. 40 in her analysis (wood 215). i have also consulted clement’s sermons in bn 3296 and bibliothèque sainte-geneviève 240, the better copy. see also clement’s other letters and proclamations on his approbatio of charles: constitutiones 8.95–104, 125–171 (from 1346), especially 101–104. 38. according to wood 168, an opinion to which i concur. 39. see rosario chapter 3; god and charlemagne, not the pope, “approve” the emperor. also opačić; machilek. 40. the ernest f. henderson english translation (1896) is conveniently located online on the avalon project at the yale university law library (http://avalon.law.yale.edu/ medieval/golden.asp). text: quellen zur verfassungsgeschichte des römischdeutschen reiches im spätmittelalter (1250–1500) 314–393. see petersen. 41. there is virtually nothing on the bull and approbatio in the recent collection of studies: die goldene bulle: politik—wahrnehmung—rezeption; articles in these volumes by michael lindner, michael menzel, and jean-marie moeglin deal with charles iv and louis of bavaria. see also miethke, “die päpstliche kurie des 14. jahrhunderts und die ‘goldene bulle’ kaiser karls. iv. von 1356”; begert chapter 6. 42. stengel suggests that there was a dialogue among charles iv, the curia, rudolf losse, and archbishop-elector baldwin of trier prior to the golden bull on the question of the approbation (161–169, 204–224, 237–241). 43. see prologue to the bull; avalon project yale law school. the bull blames the princes, including the electors, and not the pope. 44. bull chapter 2. note that the emperor is the temporal head of the world and the christian people. the curia would have had no objection to these traditional titles. the emperor is still the defensor ecclesiae, albeit not on the pope’s terms. it is clear that the emperor’s duties to defend the faith and the christian people derive from his election 83 renna as king of the romans, and not from any future coronation in rome. it is not clear, however, if these christian duties devolve from the election at frankfurt or the coronation at aix. charles seems to be making concessions to both spiritual and secular electors, who have been arguing since the 1250s about who has seniority. 45. bull chapter 29. 46. bull chapter 2. 47. steer; miethke, “konrads von megenberg kampf mit dem drachen: der tractatus contra occam im kontext” 93 (approbation). 48. lacrima ecclesie; planctus ecclesiae in germaniam. 49. this theme of the imperial duty to protect the church as a consequence of the translatio and the approbatio runs throughout conrad’s treatise on the translation. see de translatione romani imperii 2:251–254, 258–259, 279, 295, passim. 50. de translatione 281, 284, etc. 51. de translatione chapter 11, 283–288. 52. de translatione 289. 53. de translatione 290–294. 297–302. 54. de translatione 291–293. 55. de translatione 295–297. 56. de translatione 304: “quoniam electus ante confirmacionem suam tantum est rex ypotheticus et condicionalis, videlicet, si per papam fuerit approbatus; que condicio in omnibus electis per hanc addicionem electus connotatur.” 57. yconomica 3.5/2, book 2, chapters 1–14, 31–74, 87–122 (against marsiglio, et al.). 58. the general surveys of the approbation often present the development of the rite as a steady increase in papal demands since innocent iii’s venerabilem. the golden bull papal approval of holy roman emperors 84 is seen as an end-point in which the approbatio suddenly expired as a historical ingredient in the constitutional evolution of the empire. see, e. g., miethke, “approbation der deutschen königswahl”; deussen; bosl; lückerath; schmugge; müller-mertens 587–588. 59. golden bull, quellensammlung chapter 29 (178). the imperium is “sacrum”; prologue (159), chapter 1 (160); the king has full imperial powers (160), and governs “pro salute populi christiani” (163). 60. see e. g., “european disunion done right.” there is a tendency in modern scholarship after the 1960s to emphasize the positive internal workings of the habsburg empire after 1500. see whaley. 61. deutsche reichstagsakten unter könig ruprecht 1–123. see the survey of hans e. feine. 62. peter von 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and ideas of an avignon pope. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1989. von wretschko, alfred. “der einfluss der fremden rechte auf die deutschen königswahlen bis zur goldenen bulle.” deutsche zeitschrift für geschichtswissenschaft 20 (1899): 164–207. zeumer, karl. “ludwigs des bayern königwahlgesetz ‘licet iuris’ von 6 august 1338.” neues archiv der gesellschaft für ältere deutsche geschichtskunde 30 (1905): 85–112, 485–487. microsoft word trancik spr20 [expositions 14.1 (2020) 51–63] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 forming moral agents in bioethics education “after morality” emily trancik ascension health care network alasdair macintyre’s analysis of the conditions of contemporary work in his ethics in the conflicts of modernity is, unsurprisingly, descriptive of a u.s. medical system plagued by bureaucracy making it difficult for clinicians to live up to the ideals of their practice.1 education in bioethics should respond in ways that prepare a practitioner to safeguard her moral agency and promote the ends of her healing practices. the question an ethics course or training program needs to answer is, “how will this education equip students to be moral agents and to care for patients ethically in the complex settings in which they will work?” the first task of creating an ethics education program is to understand the kinds of challenges students will face in their future practice. here i will begin by describing the forces at work in modern medicine. i will then describe the state of typical bioethics education. i will show how bioethics, much like academic philosophy, “marched off in the wrong direction.”2 i will argue that bioethics education is overly focused on principles and quandary ethics, and that an approach to ethics education focused on growing in virtue would be a more effective way to promote ethical practice. to conclude, i will suggest the types of programs in moral formation and ethics training that need to be more prevalent in medical schools and residency programs. 1. a macintyrean diagnosis of the problem of contemporary medicine clinicians practice the healing art of medicine within an increasingly complex set of institutional requirements dictating the way they must provide care at the bedside. among many elements putting pressure on health systems to operate efficiently, the affordable care act (aca) has emphasized the need to provide high quality, low cost care. in particular, the values-based purchasing program—whereby federal funding is provided based quality, efficiency, hospital consumer assessment of healthcare providers and systems (hcahps) patient satisfaction surveys, and meaningful use of electronic medical records (emr)—has necessitated reforms in health care operations over the past decade.3 against the background of the litigious culture in the u.s. compelling providers to practice defensive medicine, caregivers are under an enormous amount of pressure. each of these realities places demands on clinicians that are in addition to the forming moral agents in bioethics education “after morality” 52 responsibility of caring for patients. i will give a brief overview of some of the ways the external stressors of practicing medicine today affect clinicians. as they develop curricula, educators need to be mindful of this context. unsurprisingly, the extensive reimbursement and compliance-related information that must be documented in the emr is associated with more time in front of a screen and less time spent faceto-face with patients. one estimate is that, for every hour of time spent with patients, physicians are spending another one to two hours on documentation, and the time spent documenting often bleeds into clinicians’ personal time.4 the increased “clerical burden” distracts from the real meaning of the work of medicine,5 which is why the emr is a likely factor in physician burnout.6 particularly striking is one study that found that physicians would grade current emr systems an “f” in usability (against a standard metric for usability of technology).7 although the shift to keeping records electronically was theoretically intended to improve communication, patient safety, and quality, those outcomes have yet to be achieved, and discouraging errors still occur.8 nonetheless, the emr has now become a necessity and requirements for documentation are likely to continue increasing.9 as they are juggling the administrative aspects of their job, clinicians are also acutely aware of the satisfaction surveys their patients will receive after their visits, which are often used as a measure of quality care. the hcahps survey includes questions on communication with clinicians, pain management, experience of the hospital environment, and satisfaction with discharge and medication information.10 organizationally, reduction in funding is a serious consequence of low patient satisfaction. further, a facility’s hcahps scores in part affect funding from centers for medicare and medicaid services (cms), incentivizing high patient satisfaction scores. however, caregivers working in hospitals serving minority populations tend to have lower hcahps scores, creating a feedback loop making it more difficult for them to get funding that could improve patient satisfaction,11 and ultimately putting more pressure on the caregivers doing this difficult work. clinicians have always been mindful of patient satisfaction because of the risk of litigation. even if the prosecution is unlikely to win a case, the stress and cost of a lawsuit are themselves burdensome, given their potential impacts on reputation, financial stability, and well-being.12 as a result, physicians have to practice defensive medicine, which is often incongruent with what they 53 trancik believe to be optimal care.13 defensive medicine is also an obstacle to good communication,14 which is ironic since communication issues are a key cause for lawsuits in the first place.15 all of these stressors are external to the practice of medicine, and the activities required of clinicians in response to these realities fall outside the scope of the practice of medicine itself. macintyre identifies the problems that go along with working in this kind of climate. he notes two types of activity in work, “one a mode of practice in which workers are able to pursue ends that they themselves have identified as worthwhile, in the pursuit of which they hold themselves to standards of excellence that they have made their own, the other an organization of activity such that their work is directed toward ends that are the ends of administrators and managers imposed upon their activities.”16 later, he notes that “it matters that [workers] understand what they are doing and that their standards are ones that they have made their own, not standards imposed by external managerial control.”17 physicians enter the practice of medicine for the healing activity of the work, but find themselves accountable to the demands that the healthcare system puts on them, which were not the same as the standards they imposed on themselves. at its worst, macintyre warns that individuals could be used as “cost-effective means to ends imposed by others for the sake of high productivity and profitability.”18 yet, according to macintyre, growth as a moral agent is contingent upon participation in activities that an individual herself values.19 she cannot exercise her moral agency if she feels like a cog in a machine rather than, in this case, a healer. this tension can affect practice to the point where the pursuit of the original ends of medicine is compromised. this sort of bureaucracy in medicine is nothing new. even in the 1970s, macintyre lamented the ways in which the doctor-patient relationship had suffered because of it.20 externally-imposed expectations for high productivity and efficiency lead to changing practice in a way that physicians know does not comport with their ideal practice of medicine. the more “efficient” the care, the less actual care can be provided.21 patients and families want real care, and clinicians want to give real care, but the structure makes it difficult to do so. unsurprisingly, the results are moral distress and burnout. moral distress is unlike other forms of ethical dilemmas because it happens when an agent knows the morally correct thing to do, but a constraint prevents him from carrying out the action. in the case at hand, a physician knows what the goods of his practice of medicine are, and the time that needs to be spent to provide compassionate care, but the system prevents him from being able to practice in that way. without using the term, macintyre describes moral distress: “exploitative forming moral agents in bioethics education “after morality” 54 structures […] make it often difficult and sometimes impossible to achieve the goods of the workplace through excellent work.”22 it is at this point when clinicians start to burn out. burnout is a current crisis in medicine, with about half of physicians reporting it.23 aside from the toll burnout takes on the individual experiencing it, in clinical settings it is linked to reduced quality of patient care.24 it places the vocation of a physician at risk and is dangerous for patients. the prevalence of moral distress and burnout is a large-scale ethical crisis to which ethics education must attend. it is tempting to scapegoat healthcare leaders and institutions for creating the conditions under which clinicians suffer moral distress and burnout. however, it is important to note that healthcare organizations themselves have their hands tied. healthcare leaders are under their own kind of external constraints, as the institutions are under financial pressures to ensure their ability to provide care into the future. this reality is unlikely to change, and macintyre, once again, gives us a reason why. he notes that cooperative institutions that are focused on the common good, as health care institutions are, will inevitably encounter conflicts with the dominant culture, because they are calling into question that culture’s values.25 this happens frequently in nonprofit health systems, wherein a mission to care for the poor and promote healthy communities is prioritized above maximization of profits. so long as the general culture values financial success above all other goods, countercultural institutions will need to compete to continue living their missions while exercising good stewardship of resources. for health systems, that necessarily involves introducing the external pressures described above. 2. the current state of ethics education in medical schools and residency programs the threats to moral agency i have detailed make it more difficult for clinicians to offer optimal care from both a medical and an ethical perspective. ethics education in medical schools and residency programs, however, has not been adequate in preparing students for the threats to their moral agency that they will face. first, not enough time is dedicated to ethics education. second, the kind of bioethics that is taught when such training occurs focuses too much on principles and quandary ethics and lacks necessary resources to help morally form a person. not enough time is dedicated to ethics education, but that is not because students lack interest. studies have shown that residents are not satisfied with the amount of time given for learning ethics, and they know they need more.26 one needs assessment showed that the education being 55 trancik provided is not succeeding at helping clinicians become more comfortable managing ethical dilemmas.27 the authors developing these studies are doing good and important work, but the type of ethics education they propose in response is not the kind that will help clinicians become better moral agents. unsurprisingly, a survey by edmund pellegrino, whose work on the virtues of medical practice has been foundational, found moral values “are rarely changed by courses in ethics.”28 there is an overemphasis on traditional didactic case-based education and moral analyses,29 and a lack of content intended to help students become better moral agents under the external pressures they will face. often, “ethics education” for medical students and residents consists of a description of a moral quandary of some sort, an acknowledgment of the four principles of bioethics (autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice),30 and then a discussion on how those principles apply to the case. these conversations can be excellent tools to help early career clinicians imagine what it would be like to encounter a particular ethical dilemma and help them understand nuanced ways to respond. ethics education using cases and principles can push students who are comfortable learning science, where clear distinctions between right and wrong answers are more common. through the complexities of ethics, they get exposure to grey areas. but this type of education is not sufficient. the mid-level principles of bioethics often do not give direction, as they often conflict, and there are not typically clear reasons to prioritize one principle over another. in an essay dating from 1978, “what has ethics to learn from medical ethics?”, macintyre writes: the way in which the role of the physician had been put into question by recent developments within medicine...[has] left the physician with a set of inherited rules which turned out on many types of important occasions to enjoin incompatible types of action. hence the problems of medical ethics appear as a series of dilemmas in which moral agents look for good reasons to give weight and authority to one rule rather than another in situations of conflict.31 macintyre was reflecting on developments in medicine since the early 1900s, but the same kinds of changes can be cited in post-aca contemporary medicine. he continues: forming moral agents in bioethics education “after morality” 56 what we cannot discover, however, within the stock of justifications advanced within recent moral philosophy are any grounds for giving some rules preference over others in any situation in which two or more rules provide conflicting injunctions. we therefore are left with genuine dilemmas: an agent in each type of case considers what to do on a particular occasion and has no means of deciding between rules. this is the form in which such problems are presented in most books and articles on medical ethics. presented in this form the problems appear rationally insoluble. presented in this form the problems are rationally insoluble. so the student of medical ethics turns to moral philosophy.32 he goes on to describe the failures of moral philosophy to respond to this kind of dilemma, and he concludes that good ethics education needs to form the moral character of the person so that she is equipped to respond to whatever comes her way.33 not only is every medical ethics case different depending on particularities of the situation, but the kinds of quandaries that arise are often completely unpredictable. consider the following common case example. last week, when he was in and out of consciousness, a patient said he was “ready to go” and that, if his heart were to stop, he would not want any cpr. this conversation was documented, but no one was sure if he had decisional capacity and no formal advance directive exists. today, the patient is declining, and will likely be in cardiac arrest within hours. his family is saying he did not understand what he was saying last week and is threatening to sue if the medical team does not attempt resuscitation. the team wants to continue discussing why he would have wanted “everything done,” but the clock is ticking and eight other patients are waiting to be seen. training on autonomy and nonmaleficence can help someone explain why physicians are unsure if they should perform cpr in this case, but what is really needed to provide good care in this circumstance is not knowledge of the principles of bioethics. what will actually help is being the kind of physician who is patient and a good communicator with the relational skills necessary to be attuned to the emotional needs of grieving families. the physician needs to spend the time to do good advance care planning, and to give compassionate care to patients and families—which is exactly where it has been found residents struggle, given the pressures of efficiency.34 57 trancik as a nursing ethics professor has noted, “the realities of illness, hospital care and the effects of diminishing social health care funding are far too complex and particular to be covered by the available moral theories and abstract concepts that are still standard fare for courses in health care ethics.”35 typical ethics education does not address a response to the underlying pressures in medicine described in the first section of this paper, which cause so much difficulty in ethical practice. nor does it encourage a critical view on what is morally problematic with our current systems,36 or train students to become good moral agents by forming their own concepts of the ends of their practice while resisting external systems’ attempts to make their ends a physician’s end.37 in other words, ethics education needs to prepare clinicians to be moral agents in a medical system that is not set up for their flourishing. 3. what should healthcare ethics education be like? what would an ideal education in ethics for medical professions be like? my first recommendation is obvious: more time needs to be dedicated to ethics in training. that is especially the case given that we need to deepen ethics education beyond principles and quandaries. second, i propose that, in addition to a diagnosis of the problem in health care, macintyre also gives us the foundational content for reforming education. in what follows, i will use macintyre’s work to suggest ways in which ethics education can change. macintyre identifies “sociological self-knowledge” as a precondition for fully developing moral agency. sociological self-knowledge is knowing “who you and those around you are in terms of your and their roles and relationships to each other, to the common goods of family, workplace, and school, and to the structures through which power and money are distributed.38 further, it is to “have a grasp of the nature of the roles and relationships in which one is involved, of the shared assumptions of those with whom one interacts, of what in those roles, relationships, and assumptions obstructs the exercise of rational agency, and of what the possibilities are of acting so as to transform them are.”39 more briefly, sociological self-knowledge is a kind of awareness that improves an individual’s ability to navigate systems as a moral agent. by being conscious of the forces, pressures, and values of the dominant social order, a moral agent can develop the ability to rise above or at least resist that social order’s expectations and make better decisions in accord with her own values.40 for medical students and residents, developing sociological self-knowledge forming moral agents in bioethics education “after morality” 58 must mean having a deeper understanding of the pressures they will face working in the u.s. healthcare system. such an understanding is a precondition for resisting the system’s pressures. another way that ethics education in health care can improve is through a commitment not only to teaching students about virtue ethics (as most textbooks in medical ethics do), but also to fostering their growth in virtue. macintyre proposes that virtues “are to be understood as those dispositions which will not only sustain practices and enable us to achieve the goods internal to practices, but which will also sustain us in the relevant kind of quest for the good, by enabling us to overcome the harms, dangers, temptations and distractions which we encounter […].”41 internal goods are those goods that can come only through the practice of an activity. external goods are likewise the results of a practice, but they are not achieved solely by practicing that particular activity. external goods often come in the form of financial compensation and prestige. they are limited resources that provoke competition, on the grounds “that the more someone has of them the less there is for other people.”42 goods internal to the practice of medicine include promoting health and healing, developing trusted healing relationships with patients, and honoring their human dignity. external goods like financial stability and the esteem that comes from a successful, prestigious career are indeed goods, but growth in virtue leads to healthy detachment from excessive desire for them. to be clear, the formation of virtues is unlikely to happen in a single ethics lecture, case discussion group, or ethics course. but meaningful transformation can happen through ongoing facilitated conversation, and students can learn tangible practices like asking for and receiving feedback, for “we characteristically need the judgement of perceptive and ruthlessly critical friends” to act well.43 even learning mindfulness techniques like noticing a behavior and assessing whether or not it is consistent with a chosen virtue can have powerful transformative effects. literature and film can be tools for reflection on oneself and for deepening solidarity with others. likewise, studying work from the disciplines of narrative medicine and medical humanities can aid moral formation. reconceptualizing ethics education as moral formation would impact both the clinician’s experience of practicing medicine and patient care. imagine a clinician who develops the humility and sociological self-knowledge it takes to recognize and reduce a bias informing the way someone cares for patients with addiction. surely her care for patients with intravenous drug use would improve. as a further example, a hospitalist may recognize that the time needed to develop good 59 trancik relationships with a family and engage in advance care planning is worth resisting the pressures of efficiency. virtue education could also have larger-scale organizational results, empowering individuals to fight against unjust systems.44 for example, a group of cardiologists sharing the virtue of solidarity could decide to join together and create a practice with a greater proportion of medicaid patients, even if it means a reduction in their personal compensation. cultivating virtues will be countercultural, as it “may and often does hinder the achievement of those external goods which are the mark of worldly success.”45 although they are few in number, programs doing this formative work already exist. the physician’s formation program through the neiswanger institute for bioethics and healthcare leadership at loyola university chicago and duke university’s theology, medicine, and culture fellowship both provide in-depth formation opportunities for healthcare professionals. the program at loyola continues through four years of medical school and helps students explore the idea of medicine as a vocation. duke’s fellowship also offers the opportunity for reflection on professional practice from a spiritual perspective. these programs are focusing on teaching goods internal to the practice of medicine, and they encourage their students to trust that a commitment to pursuit of those goods will make a difference in their institutions.46 if macintyre’s critique of contemporary modern moral theory is indicative of the pressures of modern day medicine in the way i argue here, the only way out of the darkness is through the creation of more programs like these. notes 1. my focus here will be primarily on medical students and residents, as their extensive training can provide the grounds for comprehensive ethics education, but the points i make also apply to nursing education and the training of other healthcare professionals. 2. see bernard prusak’s introductory essay. 3. see “what are the value-based programs?” centers for medicaid & medicare services, 2020, accessed january 6, 2020, https://www.cms.gov/medicare/quality-initiativespatient-assessment-instruments/value-based-programs/hvbp/hospital-value-basedpurchasing 4. m tai-seale, et al., “electronic health record logs indicate that physicians split time evenly between seeing patients and desktop medicine,” health aff (millwood) 36.4 (april forming moral agents in bioethics education “after morality” 60 1, 2017), https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2016.0811, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ pubmed/28373331; c. sinsky, et al., “allocation of physician time in ambulatory practice: a time and motion study in 4 specialties,” ann intern med 165/11 (december 6, 2016), https://doi.org/10.7326/m16-0961, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ 27595430 5. t. d. shanafelt, et al., “relationship between clerical burden and characteristics of the electronic environment with physician burnout and professional satisfaction,” mayo clin proc 91.7 (july 2016), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mayocp.2016.05.007, https://www.ncbi. nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27313121 6. e. r. melnick, et al., “the association between perceived electronic health record usability and professional burnout among us physicians,” mayo clin proc (november 12, 2019), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mayocp.2019.09.024, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ pubmed/31735343 7. melnick, et al., “the association between perceived electronic health record usability and professional burnout among us physicians.” 8. a. j. holmgren, et al., “assessing the safety of erlectronic health records: a national longitudinal study of medication-related decision support,” bmj qual saf 29.1 (january 2020), https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjqs-2019-009609, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ pubmed/31320497; c. s. kruse et al., “barriers to electronic health record adoption: a systematic literature review,” j med syst 40/12 (december 2016), https://doi.org/ 10.1007/s10916-016-0628-9, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27714560 9. n. l. downing, d. w. bates, and c. a. longhurst, “physician burnout in the electronic health record era: are we ignoring the real cause?” ann intern med 169.1 (july 3, 2018), https://doi.org/10.7326/m18-0139, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29801050 10. “hcahps: patients’ perspectives of care survey,” centers for medicaid & medicare services, 2019, accessed october 19, 2019, https://www.cms.gov/medicare/qualityinitiatives-patient-assessment-instruments/hospitalqualityinits/hospitalhcahps 11. m. n. elliott, et al., “understanding the role played by medicare’s patient experience points system in hospital reimbursement,” health aff (millwood) 35.9 (september 1, 61 trancik 2016), https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2015.0691, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ 27605650 12. e. r. carrier, et al., “physicians’ fears of malpractice lawsuits are not assuaged by tort reforms,” health aff (millwood) 29.9 (september 2010), https://doi.org/10.1377/ hlthaff.2010.0135, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20820012 13. d. m. studdert, et al., “defensive medicine among high-risk specialist physicians in a volatile malpractice environment,” jama 293.21 (june 1, 2005), https://doi.org/10.1001/ jama.293.21.2609, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15928282 14. e. ferrand, et al., “discrepancies between perceptions by physicians and nursing staff of intensive care unit end-of-life decisions,” am j respir crit care med 167.10 (may 15, 2003), https://doi.org/10.1164/rccm.200207-752oc, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ pubmed/12738597 15. g. b. hickson, et al., “factors that prompted families to file medical malpractice claims following perinatal injuries,” jama 267/10 (march 11, 1992), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih. gov/pubmed/1740858 16. alasdair c. macintyre, ethics in the conflicts of modernity: an essay on desire, practical reasoning, and narrative (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2016), 131. 17. ibid., 170–171. 18. ibid., 172. 19. ibid., 131. 20. alasdair macintyre, “medicine aimed at the care of persons rather than what …?” in changing values in medicine, eds. eric j. cassell and mark seigler (washington, dc: university publications of america, 1979), 83–96. 21. see j.p. bishop, j.e. perry, and a. hine, “efficient, compassionate, and fractured: contemporary care in the icu,” hastings cent rep 44.4 (jul-aug 2014): 36, https://doi.org/10.1002/hast.330, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24920076 22. macintyre, ethics in the conflicts of modernity, 237. 23. c. p. west, l. n. dyrbye, and t. d. shanafelt, “physician burnout: contributors, consequences and solutions,” j intern med 283/6 (june 2018), https://doi.org/10.1111/ joim.12752, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29505159 forming moral agents in bioethics education “after morality” 62 24. west, dyrbye, and shanafelt, “physician burnout: contributors, consequences and solutions”; e. s. williams, et al., “the relationship of organizational culture, stress, satisfaction, and burnout with physician-reported error and suboptimal patient care: results from the memo study,” health care manage rev 32.3 (july-september 2007), https://doi.org/10.1097/01hmr.0000281626.28363.59, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ pubmed/17666991 25. macintyre, ethics in the conflicts of modernity, 110. 26. j. byrne, et al., “evaluation of ethics education in obstetrics and gynecology residency programs,” am j obstet gynecol 212/3 (march 2015), https://doi.org/10.1016/ j.ajog.2014.12.027, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25530598; j. e. chamberlain and j. a. nisker, “residents’ attitudes to training in ethics in canadian obstetrics and gynecology programs,” obstet gynecol 85/5 part 1 (may 1995), https://www.ncbi.nlm. nih.gov/pubmed/11660144 27. d. b. wayne, j. c. muir, and d. a. darosa, “developing an ethics curriculum for an internal medicine residency program: use of a needs assessment,” teach learn med 16.2 (spring 2004), https://doi.org/10.1207/s15328015tlm1602_13, https://www.ncbi.nlm. nih.gov/pubmed/15276898 28. edmund d. pellegrino and david c. thomasma, the virtues in medical practice (new york: oxford university press, 1993), 176. 29. l. a. schuh and d. e. burdette, “initiation of an effective neurology resident ethics curriculum,” neurology 62/10 (may 25 2004), https://doi.org/10.1212/01.wnl. 0000125252.41096.59, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15159507; s. m. vertrees, a. g. shuman, and j. j. fins, “learning by doing: effectively incorporating ethics education into residency training,” j gen intern med 28/4 (april 2013), https://doi.org/ 10.1007/s11606-012-2277-0, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23179971 30. see tom l. beauchamp and james f. childress, principles of biomedical ethics, 8th ed. (new york: oxford university press, 2019). 31. macintyre, “what has ethics to learn from medical ethics?” philosophic exchange 2.4 (1978): 42. 32. ibid., 43. 33. ibid., 46. 63 trancik 34. see bishop, perry, and hine, “efficient, compassionate, and fractured: contemporary care in the icu.” 35. suzanne m. jaeger, “teaching health care ethics: the importance of moral sensitivity for moral reasoning,” nursing philosophy 2 (2001): 131. 36. see macintyre’s commentary on business ethics in his “the irrelevance of ethics,” in virtue and the economy: essays on morality and markets, eds. andrius bielskis and kelvin knight (new york: routledge, 2015). 37. macintyre, ethics in the conflicts of modernity, 173–174. 38. ibid., 211. 39. ibid., 213. 40. ibid., 211–212. 41. macintyre, after virtue: a study in moral theory, 3rd ed. (notre dame, in.: university of notre dame press, 2007), 219. 42. ibid., 190. 43. ibid., 113. 44. t. p. daaleman, “the medical home: locus of physician formation,” j am board fam med 21.5 (september-october 2008): 4, https://doi.org/10.3122/jabfm.2008.05.080083, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18772299. 45. macintyre, after virtue, 198. for a more comprehensive assessment of the value of virtue ethics education in medicine, see pellegrino and thomasma, the virtues in medical practice. 46. farr curlin and michael mccarthy, paper presented at the american society for bioethics and humanities, pittsburgh, pa, october 27 2019. microsoft word joseph.docx [expositions 9.1 (2015) 138–141] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 the frankenstein of biblical studies? alison l. joseph villanova university when i read mary shelley’s frankenstein with my first-year seminar students we focus much of our discussion on questions of advances in technology and the ethics of progress. just because we can, should we? even though victor has found a way to animate the inanimate, should he? i ask the same question of the technological advances that help(?) us read the biblical text better. advances in archaeology and carbon-dating contribute to our understanding of the biblical text’s historical context, of daily life in ancient israel, and of the provenance of inscriptions. all of this information (seemingly) makes us better readers of the text with greater understanding of the text’s context, but does it? have we become complacent in our reading because we rely on these modes of empirical, scientific evidence so much that we lose our connection to the text? almost thirty-five years ago robert alter lambasted biblical scholars as “wrong-headed or extravagantly perverse” for the lack of literary “critical discourse on the hebrew bible” to understand the bible beyond the “excavative,” in order to “uncover original meanings.”1 at the time, he called the attempts at literary readings inadequate.2 while today, even alter would agree, these “excavative” methods are essential to our understanding the biblical text, but i wonder at the same time if while using them is something in our potential reading lost or inhibited? excessive reliance on extra-biblical evidence in the service of simplistic historical inquiry (did it happen?), of which archaeology is one facet, leads us to ask the wrong questions of the text. we become so focused on biblical inerrancy vs. biblical errancy, rather than on a fine-grained understanding. is this form of simple biblical historicism hijacking our conversation? has the “public face” of biblical studies become news about discoveries of evidence of the existence of a king or the historicity of some biblical settlement? because the archaeological findings, which we usually are apt to trust because of its “scientific” and “objective” evidence, cannot prove or disprove that king david existed, should we care? in my research on deuteronomistic historiography in kings, i address the topic of the process of writing history.3 it should not matter whether an event or a figure is historical or historically accurate, but that the author chose to write about it or him in such a way. perhaps it is even more interesting and enlightening when the biblical narrative represents something differently from what the “objective” record, demonstrated by the use of technology, tells us. instead i advocate for a greater appreciation of the elegance and the simplicity of the literary. what is lost when we depend on external information to inform our reading of the biblical text? considering the process of 139 joseph historiography is a more sophisticated understanding of history that is not about fact, but rather more about the creation of memory and its literary function within ancient israel. in portrait of the kings: the davidic prototype in deuteronomistic poetics i consider the way that the biblical historian constructs the portraits of his kings, comparing them to a literary depiction of david. whether david was or was not historical is not the point. even if david did exist, i argue that the depiction of him in kings is entirely different from the portrayal in his own story in samuel. so which is the real david? david of the historian’s imagination, one who faithfully observes the deuteronomistic covenant, is necessary to the historian’s goals in promoting a specific brand of theology. is the “real” david the flawed hero of samuel? or another person all together? characters, even if they were historical, are constructed in the way that the historian saw fit. he relies on sources and historical memory, but casts them consistent with his theology, whether it matches the historical figure or not. in december 2014 a mississippi state university archaeological team published the discovery of six iron age seal inscriptions. they contend that these bullae found at tell el-hesi date to the late eleventh through mid-tenth centuries b.c.e., suggesting that there was a “level of politicoeconomic activity that has not been suspected recently for the late iron age i and early iron age iia.” they argue that this evidence attests to the existence of an early israelite “state” dating to that period.4 news and social media outlets touted these small pieces of clay as evidence to the historical existence of kings david and solomon,5 but this is not necessary, and perhaps even detrimental to our reading of the books of samuel and kings. while i truly believe that the biblical historians endeavored to write what they deemed a reasonable presentation of the past as they understood it, we should not necessarily read biblical historiography as history, but rather as an author’s interpretation of the past, whether it is historically accurate or not. as such, our inquiry need not be a search for corroborating extra-biblical evidence, but instead a return to the literary reading of the text. what can the text tell us about the people who produced it? this type of simple historicism flattens biblical scholarship. recently biographies on king david have abounded, offering us a better model for reading.6 these volumes by biblical scholars, journalists, and scholastically-minded clergy focus on both the literary and the excavative, considering king david in both the historical record and as represented by the biblical text. this is a step in the right direction, denying our “need” for objective definitiveness, allowing the biblical record to speak for itself as well as what technological advances and extra-biblical evidence can contribute to our understandings. don’t get me wrong, i use the traditional historical-critical approach in my research and the way that i read the hebrew bible. i am a good redaction critic; i depend on advances in our understandings of cognate languages to fully comprehend the meaning of the hebrew. i want to know when texts were composed, redacted, and promulgated, but i am cognizant of the backswing: how can we read texts on their own, gaining our context from what is inductive from the text, the frankenstein of biblical studies? 140 rather than what we bring to it? has the post-enlightenment legacy of the scientific method directed us so far afield from the text itself, considering only the objective and verifiable as valuable readings? i do not advocate for the dismissal of these techniques, but instead a more nuanced, hesitant use of them, with an eye on the text itself. even frankenstein’s creature had the potential for good. he is born with a “soul” and could have become a benefit to society with his great size and strength, intellect, and unique origin, but instead, misused he becomes an evil menace. the creature tells us, “my heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy; and, when wrenched by misery to vice and hatred…”7 we ought not to use these incredible tools to detract from our readings of the text by all but ignoring the text itself, but instead also must appreciate these texts that were composed with specific literary purposes. notes 1. alter 1981, 13. 2. ibid., 14. 3. joseph 2015. 4. hardin 2014, 301. 5. bayot 2014; johnson 2014; mississippi state university 2014; coblentz 2014. 6. mckenzie 2000; halpern 2001; baden 2014; wright 2014; kirsch 2001; wolpe 2014. 7. shelley 2011, 158. works cited alter, robert. 1981. the art of biblical narrative. new york: basic books. baden, joel. 2014. the historical david: the real life of an invented hero. new york: harperone. bayot, asher. 2014. “biblical figures king david and solomon may have actually existed, say archaeologists.” the inquisitr news december 27. http://www.inquisitr.com/ 141 joseph 1708852/biblical-figures-king-david-and-solomon-may-have-actually-existed-sayarchaeologists/. accessed may 10, 2015. coblentz, bonnie. 2014. “msu department announces major archaeological find.” mississippi state university office of public affairs. december 15. http://www.msstate.edu/web/media/detail.php?id=6985. accessed may 10, 2015. halpern, baruch. 2001. david’s secret demons: messiah, murderer, traitor, king. grand rapids, mi: eerdmans. hardin, james w., christopher a. rollston, and jeffrey a. blakely. 2014. “iron age bullae from officialdom’s periphery: khirbet summeily in broader context.” near eastern archaeology 77.4 (december 1): 299–301. johnson, john. 2014. “clay seals suggest kings david, solomon were real.” newser december 18. http://www.newser.com/story/200181/clay-seals-suggest-kings-davidsolomon-were-real.html. accessed may 10, 2015. joseph, alison l. 2015. portrait of the kings: the davidic prototype in deuteronomistic poetics. minneapolis: fortress press. kirsch, jonathan. 2001. king david: the real life of the man who ruled israel. new york: ballantine books. mckenzie, steven l. 2000. king david : a biography. new york: oxford university press. mississippi state university. 2014. “discovery of official clay seals support existence of biblical kings david and solomon, archaeologists say.” sciencedaily december 16. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/12/141216100433.htm. accessed may 10, 2015. shelley, mary wollstonecraft. 2011. frankenstein. new york: w. w. norton & company. wolpe, david. 2014. david: the divided heart. new haven: yale university press. wright, jacob l. 2014. david, king of israel, and caleb in biblical memory. new york: cambridge university press. microsoft word bakhos.docx [expositions 9.1 (2015) 121–124] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376   contribution to roundtable discussion on biblical studies carol bakhos university of california, los angeles a cursory glance at the program book of the society of biblical literature (sbl) annual meeting affords one an opportunity to get a sense of transformations in the field of biblical studies. the number of sessions has increased exponentially, keeping a pace with multidisciplinary work in a variety of intersecting fields. that my own research interests do not reside firmly in rabbinics, but traverse biblical studies, hermeneutics, late antique judaism, and biblical and quranic interpretation is not all that uncommon within the academy. in fact, most members of the sbl, while rooted in one field, have an expertise, or minimally an active interest, in another. there is no indication that this trend, which is part of a larger movement in the humanities, will diminish in the years to come, nor should it. much is gained from the cross-fertilization that takes place with the expansion of intellectual horizons, which is often best achieved when departmental and disciplinary boundary markers are blurred. the building of silos within the academy is by and large no longer considered a worthwhile endeavor. we see this with respect to the collapse of smaller departments into larger units. i do share some concerns of colleagues who fear the effects moving into broader units may have on the quality of programs. i do not, however, regard this trend as the beginning phase of the dismantling of the humanities. while the decline in undergraduate student enrollment in humanities courses across the states is rather alarming, there will always be a desire and need for the cultivation of the life of the mind through critical reading and writing. if done thoughtfully and not merely for economic purposes, the downsizing of departments and the concomitant expansion of broad-based, multidisciplinary programs can actually be an exciting opportunity to create innovative, robust learning opportunities for students yearning for a liberal arts education. and, yet, while there are many reasons to consider this a salubrious change in the humanities in general, how does this affect graduate programs, especially for our purposes those in the study of rabbinics? should we lament the movement away from philological training? the debate that raged when i was in graduate school twenty years ago between those who valued specialization over generalization and vice-versa continues unabated with some significant differences. even those today who maintain that specialization is essential, also admit the indispensability of broadbased knowledge of related textual traditions, as well as methodological sophistication. and, those who endorse more generalized training recognize the necessity of language training. i suspect that we will always have generalists and specialists in our midst, as well as those who privilege the reading of texts over historical exigencies, and vice-versa. scholars of rabbinic contribution to roundtable discussion on biblical studies 122   literature, as their counterparts in biblical studies, cannot afford to sacrifice philological expertise even if one is first and foremost a historian. as carl e. schorske in the introduction of fin-desiècle vienna: politics and culture writes: yet the historian will not share to the full the aim of the humanist textual analyst. the later aims at the greatest possible illumination of a cultural product, relativizing all principles of analysis to its particular content. the historian seeks rather to locate and interpret the artifact temporally in a field where two lines intersect. one line is vertical, or diachronic, by which he establishes the relation of a text or a system of thought to previous expressions in the same branch of cultural activity (painting, politics, etc). the other is horizontal, or synchronic, by it he assesses the relation of the content of the intellectual object at the same time. the diachronic thread is the warp, the synchronic is the woof in the fabric of cultural history. the historian is the weaver, but the quality of his cloth depends on the strength of the color of the thread. he must learn something of spinning from the specialized disciplines whose scholars have in fact lost interest in using history as one of their primary modes of understanding, but who still know better than the historian what in their metier constitutes stout yarn of true color. the historian’s homespun will be less fine than theirs, but if he emulates their method in its making, he should spin yarn serviceable enough for the kind of bold-patterned fabric he is called upon to produce.1 i refer to schorske’s vivid imagery in an attempt to highlight the ways in which current and future scholarly pursuits in understanding rabbinic and biblical literature must be multi-faceted, and must account for historical phenomena that shape the very literariness of our sources, and at the same time require the specialized language training necessary to appreciate the texture of our sources. over the past several years, i have served on the steering committee of the sbl history and literature of early judaism section (i am currently co-chairing the section), and have noticed a considerable move away from paper proposals dealing strictly with passages of midrash, mishnah, or the talmud. a paper that unpacks rabbinic texts with an eye toward how a specific passage works within rabbinic corpora is uncommon. that is to say, the horizon of inquiry has broadened to include adjacent fields and the wider circulatory system of ancient and medieval near eastern literature. it is taken for granted that rabbinic literature be understood within social, religious, and cultural contexts that push the very limits of how we understand “rabbinic” vis-à-vis other classifications. this development did not come about overnight, but in many respects is the product of a process going back to the early 1980s, a watershed period when scholars began to draw on the innovations taking place in literary studies and to apply them to the study of rabbinic literature. no longer 123 bakhos   trained solely within the narrow confines of rabbinical seminaries, scholars of rabbinic literature were exposed to a host of discourses and intellectual crosscurrents. they brought to the study of rabbinic texts a rich array of questions and a broad set of theoretical skills. furthermore, while scholarship in this area advanced on the heels of other fields, it contributed to the study of early christianity, new testament studies, patristic exegesis, and late antique judaism, and continues to do so. in an article that i published in 2009 on current trends in the study of midrash, i quoted richard sarason whose reflections on changes in the field are as apt now as they were almost ten years ago: the cautious, methodologically self-conscious juxtaposition and interweaving of multiple textual loci; of texts and a variety of contexts; of literary, historical, and religious-cultural perspectives and methodologies—all provide the contemporary scholar with fruitful lenses for the interpretation of what more and more is understood to be a dense, richly layered, multiform, and overdetermined (in the freudian sense of being generated by multiple causal factors) literary corpus bearing witness to a complex and dynamic culture that produced and lied behind it. under these circumstances, no single reading or interpretive lens will suffice to do justice to this rich complexity.2 scholars began to read rabbinic texts differently. that is, the self-conscious awareness of reading as a culturally, politically and socially conscribed activity marked a significant shift in scholarly trends. assumptions were explicit, and openness to a variety of approaches contributed to further recognition of the richly layered, multiform nature of the literature at hand. this shift remains ever with us today as we pay far closer attention to the tools we employ and methodological frameworks we create in our research. the multi-disciplinary approach to understanding the relationship between texts and intertexts, between texts and contexts, and between literature and history, characterizes to a large extent the research trends not only in the study of rabbinic literature but biblical studies as well as the humanities at large. a relatively recent development in the study of rabbinic literature, for example, is the resuscitation of the irano-talmudica sub-field which examines the relationship between the babylonian talmud and iranian studies. those invested in this area excavate the talmud for traces of sasanian persian culture and the effects of that imperial context on the talmud’s formation. they attempt to situate the talmud in its sasanian context. others are also turning eastward, toward the literature of the syriac church. rome and western christendom remain vital contexts; however, generally speaking, the scholarly gaze is set on the eastern mediterranean arena. other trends include exploring the margins of the classical rabbinic corpora. sources such as pirque de contribution to roundtable discussion on biblical studies 124   rabbi eliezer or the midrashei ge’ulah are resources for locating the nexus between islam and judaism of the early medieval period. it is hard to ignore how gender studies and environmental studies interact with the study of rabbinic literature. moreover, advancements in the digitization of manuscripts and critical editions has opened up new avenues of inquiry and has forced us to reconsider some underlying assumptions about the very sources under examination. there was once a time when you could readily distinguish between the scholarly hedgehogs from the foxes, but it has become increasingly difficult, though not impossible, to do so. we are required to train our students to be both, to possess the requisite equipment to drill down into texts, and the skills necessary to survey the field in order to situate those very texts within a cultural, social and religious landscape. while it is true that in the past rabbinic studies seemed to lag behind related fields of studies in its embrace of cutting-edge approaches, this is no longer the case and has not been the case since the early ’80s. the rise of jewish studies within the academy played an influential role in ushering in the study of rabbinic literature into the liberal arts domain. the interlocutory role it continues to play within the academy helps to shape the manner in which scholars of rabbinics formulate and address their concerns, and in turn, the changes in the academy, that is, its orientation toward greater cross-, interand multidisciplinary studies, contributes to the future of jewish studies and the subfield of rabbinics. notes 1. schorske 1979, xxii. 2. sarason 2006, 9. i quote sarason in bakhos 2009, 273. works cited bakhos, carol. 2009. “recent trends in the study of midrash and rabbinic narrative.” currents in biblical research 7.2: 272–293. sarason, richard. 2006. “introduction.” in how should rabbinic literature be read in the modern world? ed. matthew kraus. piscataway, nj: gorgias press. schorske, carl e. 1979. fin-de-siècle vienna: politics and culture. new york: knopf. microsoft word 3 capps 11.1-rev.docx [expositions 11.1 (2017) 31–43] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376   religious doctrine and the hhs mandate charles f. capps the university of chicago i. in 2010, u.s. president obama signed into law the patient protection and affordable care act, popularly known as the “affordable care act” (aca) or “obamacare.” the aca authorizes the u.s. department of health and human services (hhs) to enumerate a list of “preventative care” services that must be included in employer-sponsored health insurance plans. qualifying employers who fail to sponsor health insurance that includes such coverage are subject to financial penalty.1 the list the hhs published in 2012 included all food and drug administration (fda)approved contraceptives, including some that some believe can act as abortifacients. a number of employers filed suit, arguing that the hhs mandate violated the religious freedom restoration act (rfra). according to rfra, the federal government may impose a substantial burden on a person’s exercise of religion only if this burden is the least restrictive means of furthering a compelling government interest. in 2014, in burwell v. hobby lobby, the u.s. supreme court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs. being required, under threat of fines, to provide insurance coverage for services they deem objectionable on religious grounds constitutes a substantial burden on employers’ exercise of religion, the court found, at least for employers that are “closely-held corporations.” and the court found further that, even if the government has a compelling interest in ensuring coverage for all fda-approved contraceptives, requiring employers to provide this coverage themselves is not the least restrictive means of furthering that interest. the court pointed to the accommodation that the federal government had already extended to religious non-profits as an example of a less restrictive means. under the final version of this accommodation, which was revised after hobby lobby, if a religious non-profit submits notice to the hhs stating its objections, then the hhs will submit notice to the non-profit’s insurer, upon which notice the insurer will be required to provide coverage for the relevant services without contracting with the religious non-profit to do so. religious doctrine and the hhs mandate 32     in hobby lobby, although the court pointed to an earlier version of the accommodation as a less restrictive means of furthering the government’s interests than the original mandate, it did not rule on whether the accommodation would itself violate rfra. this is the question the court faced in zubik v. burwell. in 2016, reduced to an even eight because of justice antonin scalia’s death, the court made the unusual move of calling for supplemental briefings from the parties regarding a possible settlement in which, if a religious non-profit were to select a plan that does not include contraceptive coverage, the insurer would be required separately to provide free contraceptive coverage for that non-profit’s employees. evidently, the idea was that, under this arrangement, the government would still further its relevant interests, but the religious non-profit would not be required to trigger the provision of coverage of the relevant services by submitting formal notice of its objections to the hhs. the parties’ respective supplemental briefings indicated that, while the petitioners would be willing to accept this compromise, the government was less eager to settle. ultimately, the court vacated and remanded the split appeals court decisions rather than ruling on the merits of the case. at the time of this writing, it remains to be seen whether the change in presidential administration in 2017 will result in the resolution of the dispute. in this essay, i will explore whether, accepting for argument’s sake religious doctrines that prohibit absolutely the use of contraception, compliance with the hhs mandate is intrinsically impermissible—i.e., impermissible regardless of the circumstances. this question is of interest for a number of reasons. most obviously, given the uncertain status of ongoing litigation, it is of interest to executives, whether of religious non-profits or of closely-held for-profit corporations, who accept religious doctrines that prohibit the use of contraception, as well as those who believe that some forms of fda-approved contraceptives can act as abortifacients and who accept religious doctrines that prohibit abortion.2 more broadly, however, it is of interest to lawyers on account of its implications regarding the merits of hobby lobby and zubik, as well as to philosophers on account of the difficult issues it raises in ethics and the philosophy of action. the most prominent religion whose doctrine prohibits absolutely the use of contraception is roman catholicism. as it turns out, catholic moral theologians have also developed a robust framework for assessing the permissibility of cooperation with evil. i will be borrowing the central distinction in this framework—viz., the distinction between formal and material cooperation with evil—for use in my own analysis. doing so has the advantage of facilitating dialogue with catholic 33 capps commentators who have weighed in on the question of whether compliance with the mandate is permissible under catholic doctrine. but it does not thereby have the disadvantage of closing dialogue with everyone else. for although the distinction between formal and material cooperation with evil comes to us from eighteenth-century catholic moral casuistry, it is properly speaking action-theoretical in character and should be acknowledged by anyone who acknowledges a distinction between intention and foresight. slightly more controversial is whether this distinction rightly has the moral salience that it is accorded in the catholic moral theological tradition. in what follows i will assume that the tradition is correct in at least this regard: if -ing is intrinsically impermissible, then acting with the intention that another  is intrinsically impermissible. philosophers who hold that, special cases aside, the intentions with which an agent acts are relevant only to the moral evaluation of her character, not her action, will likely reject this assumption. still, to the extent that the catholic moral theological tradition is representative of the religious convictions of those who object to the mandate, the assumption that, if -ing is intrinsically impermissible, then acting with the intention that another  is intrinsically impermissible, is dialectically innocent. in any case, my conclusion in this essay would stand even if we were to relax this assumption. my argument will proceed as follows. in section ii, i will articulate the distinction between formal and material cooperation with evil in a way that preserves the traditional judgment of catholic moral theologians that formal cooperation with evil is intrinsically impermissible. much of the debate among catholic scholars concerning whether compliance with the mandate is intrinsically impermissible has focused on the question whether it intrinsically constitutes formal cooperation with evil. in section iii, i will examine two common arguments against the view that compliance with the mandate intrinsically constitutes formal cooperation with evil. i will maintain that these arguments are unconvincing because they fail to engage with the best case for the view that compliance with the mandate intrinsically constitutes formal cooperation with evil. still, i will argue in section iv, the best case for this view is unsuccessful. in section v, i will draw the tentative conclusion that it is not the case that compliance with the mandate is intrinsically impermissible, even given religious doctrines that prohibit absolutely the use of contraception. religious doctrine and the hhs mandate 34     ii. the distinction between formal and material cooperation with evil is usually traced back to st. alphonsus liguori, although there is evidence that the terms were already in use by the time of his writing in the eighteenth century. the distinction is usually defined along the following lines: c’s cooperation with p’s impermissible action is formal if and only if c shares the intention of p in virtue of which p’s action is impermissible; and any cooperation with evil that is not formal is material. while this definition may be satisfactory for the purposes of most discussions, it could use some refinement. for one thing, it fails to explicate the notion of sharing an intention. one might worry that intentions are indexed to agents and therefore cannot literally be shared across them. i think we can avoid this concern by speaking instead about ends. there seems nothing problematic about saying that two agents intend the same end, even if their intentions of that end are distinct. the concept of an “end” in play here is intensional: one and the same event might realize two or more distinct ends under different descriptions. in addition, one and the same action can be performed with two or more distinct ends in view. this highlights a second deficiency of our initial formula. suppose that jay is building a machine to destroy los angeles, and he wants to destroy los angeles in order to impoverish kat, whose net worth consists largely in los angeles real estate. liz helps build the machine because she believes that the world would be better off without hollywood. in this case, one and the same action of liz’s counts as both formal cooperation with evil and material cooperation with evil with one and the same action of jay’s, only with respect to two distinct ends jay has in view in performing that action: the intermediate end of destroying los angeles and the further end of impoverishing kat, respectively. formal and material cooperation with evil are thus relative to an end of the principal’s action, something that our initial formula failed to capture. the intensionality of the concept of an end leads to an additional complication that will be relevant later. very plausibly, the fundamental form of expression of an end is, at least in some cases, infinitival rather than propositional. thus: billy intends to eat his vegetables; not (except in a special case): billy intends that billy eat his vegetables. yet when what an agent intends is for another agent to do so something, then it seems that the fundamental form of expression of an end has to be propositional (otherwise, the identity of the other agent would go unspecified). thus: billy’s mother intends that billy eat his vegetables. yet i take it that billy and his mother share 35 capps the same end. therefore, while the intensionality of the concept of an end requires something like identity of description as the criterion of identity of ends, this criterion must be loose enough to admit instances of -ing, intended by a, and that a , intended by b, as identical. a third and final deficiency of our initial formula is that it is in tension with the traditional understanding of formal cooperation with evil as intrinsically impermissible. it is plausible that, for some ends e, the fact that a is acting with e in view constitutes defeasible grounds for holding that a is acting impermissibly. suppose that, in cooperating with p’s pursuit of such an end e, c also intends e. then the presence of a defeater to the impermissibility of c’s acting with e in view but not to the impermissibility of p’s acting with e in view may yield the result that, although c cooperates formally with evil by the formula above, c acts permissibly. e.g., suppose that stealing $1b from jay is necessary and sufficient to prevent him from completing his machine. unmoved by the threat of los angeles’s destruction, max wants to steal $1b from jay in order to make himself rich, but he needs help. surely it is permissible for ned to lend a hand with the intention of saving los angeles by bringing it about that max steals $1b from jay. in the case of ned’s action but not max’s, it seems, the pro tanto impermissibility of intending a theft is defeated by the circumstances and the agent’s further intentions. if so, then we have an action that our initial formula classifies as formal cooperation with evil but that is nevertheless permissible. in light of these considerations, we can reformulate the distinction between formal and material cooperation with evil as follows. if by doing  c is cooperating with p’s pursuit of end e, then (fc)  constitutes formal cooperation with evil relative to e if and only if (a) p’s pursuit of e is impermissible in virtue of the fact that in doing it p intends e, and (b)  is impermissible in virtue of the fact that in doing it c intends e; whereas (mc)  constitutes material cooperation with evil relative to e if and only if (a) p’s pursuit of e is impermissible in virtue of the fact that in doing it p intends e, but (-b) it is not the case that  is impermissible in virtue of the fact that in doing it c intends e. religious doctrine and the hhs mandate 36     this formulation of the distinction has the virtues of rectifying the three deficiencies of our initial formula by (i) circumventing concerns about the notion of sharing an intention, (ii) relativizing the concepts of formal and material cooperation with evil to an end of the principal’s action, and (iii) reconciling an absolute prohibition on formal cooperation with evil with the existence of merely pro tanto prohibitions on acting with the intention of certain ends. further refinement of the distinction may be possible, but (fc) and (mc) will do for our purposes. we are now ready to consider whether compliance with the mandate intrinsically constitutes formal cooperation with evil. with respect to which end(s) of which action(s) of which principal(s) would compliance with the mandate intrinsically constitute formal cooperation with evil, if indeed it does? there are two (compatible) possibilities. first, compliance might constitute formal cooperation with evil with respect to the pursuit, by those who acquire contraceptive coverage as a result of one’s compliance, of the end of using contraception. second, it might constitute formal cooperation with evil with respect to the pursuit, by the officials at the hhs who issued the mandate, of the end that those who acquire contraceptive coverage as a result of one’s compliance use contraception. by the criteria we settled on when considering billy, these ends are identical. therefore, if compliance with the hhs mandate intrinsically constitutes formal cooperation with evil, then— regardless of relative to which action(s) of which principal(s) it does—it necessarily involves intention of the end that those who as a result acquire contraceptive coverage use contraception. hence, if we can show that compliance with the mandate need not involve intention of that end, then we will have shown that it is not the case that compliance with the mandate intrinsically constitutes formal cooperation with evil. iii. many commentators are quick to dismiss the notion that one who complies with the mandate necessarily intends others’ contraceptive use. their grounds for their dismissals fall into two categories. first, some commentators think that intention of an end requires “approval” of, “endorsement” of, or at least a lack of “personal opposition” to that end. because one can comply with the mandate without having such attitudes towards others’ contraceptive use, these commentators conclude, one can comply with the mandate without intending others’ contraceptive use. 37 capps this way of thinking about formal cooperation with evil is common. here is robert miller: in formal cooperation, the cooperating party endorses the wrongful act of the primary wrongdoer.3 given this gloss, it is no surprise that miller thinks it obvious that it is not the case that compliance with the mandate intrinsically constitutes formal cooperation with evil. everyone in the debate agrees that, because the objecting employers obviously do not want to provide the coverage they find objectionable, there is no question of their compliance involving them in formal cooperation with evil.4 because reluctance indicates a lack of endorsement, compliance is not formal cooperation with evil as long as it is reluctant. ultimately, i want to defend miller’s conclusion, which is that it is not the case that compliance with the mandate intrinsically constitutes formal cooperation with evil. i do not, however, wish to rest that conclusion on his reasoning. many, myself included, find dubious the notion that an agent intends only those consequences of her action that, independently of the practical reasoning that issued in her action, she approves of or endorses. elizabeth anscombe, for example, famously identified the order of intention with the order of practical reason.5 according to her, “it is the agent’s [practical knowledge] that gives the descriptions under which what is going on is the execution of an intention.”6 recently, much attention has been given to the contrasts between anscombe’s approach to the philosophy of action and that of the new natural lawyers.7 but at least on this point, anscombe and the new natural lawyers seem to be in agreement. according to john finnis, germain grisez, and joseph boyle, intentions are constituted by acting persons’ reasons for making their choices and by precisely what they choose to do, not by what they feel, or would like, or are reluctant or eager to do, or regret the “necessity” of doing.8 religious doctrine and the hhs mandate 38     if we wish to present a robust defense of the view that it is not the case that compliance with the mandate constitutes formal cooperation with evil, then we will have to do more than point out that one can comply with the mandate without approving of others’ contraceptive use. christopher tollefsen does not subscribe to the conception of intention that lies behind miller’s remarks; he is a champion of the new natural law theory of action. yet he too is quick to dismiss the notion that one who complies with the mandate necessarily intends others’ contraceptive use: where the hhs mandate is concerned, there should be little doubt that formal cooperation is not at issue. if the president of a catholic college is compelled to offer the coverage and complies, it will not be done for the sake of enabling his employers [sic] to contracept, but for the sake of complying with a legally authoritative, even if unjust, policy. accordingly, the form of cooperation at stake is material, not formal.9 tollefsen invites us to consider the orthodox catholic employer who offers coverage for contraception only when compelled by law. presumably such an employer offers the coverage not in order to secure an independent interest in others’ contraceptive use, but rather in order to comply with the legally authoritative mandate, avoid fines, etc. from this, tollefsen infers that the employer complies with the mandate without intending others’ contraceptive use. again, i want to defend the conclusion that it is not the case that compliance with the mandate intrinsically constitutes formal cooperation with evil. but i do not wish to rest that conclusion on tollefsen’s reasoning either. surely the defender of the view that compliance with the mandate intrinsically constitutes formal cooperation with evil thinks just that: that compliance intrinsically constitutes formal cooperation with evil, not compliance only when done in furtherance of an interest that one who complies could just as well not have. on this account, compliance with the mandate involves intention of a teleologically loaded means. intention of such a means entails intention of the ends intrinsic to it. in the case of compliance with the mandate, the account would go, these ends include the end that those who acquire contraceptive coverage as a result of one’s compliance use contraception. while tollefsen may not agree,10 i think that it is at least plausible that a means can be teleologically loaded in this sense. 39 capps in the next section, i will consider whether compliance with the mandate might be intrinsically ordered to others’ contraceptive use in one way in which it is plausible that a means can be intrinsically ordered to an end, viz., the way in which a part of a collective project is intrinsically ordered to the end that unites the project as a whole. although there may be other ways in which one might argue that compliance with the mandate is intrinsically ordered to others’ contraceptive use, this way strikes me as the most plausible. thus, by ruling it out, we will warrant a tentative conclusion that it is not the case that compliance with the mandate intrinsically constitutes formal cooperation with evil. iv. suppose, borrowing a classic example from anscombe, that ann is plotting to assassinate some political leaders gathered in a rural cottage for a secret meeting. she pours poison into the house’s water source. then she pumps the poisoned water into the cistern so that, next time the party leaders go for a drink of water, they will ingest the poison and die. like many actions, ann’s project of assassinating the party leaders divides into parts. she has to acquire the poison; she has to get it in the water; she has to pump the water into the cistern. the sense of “part” here is teleological; not just anything that happens during any arbitrarily chosen stretch of time during which ann’s project is ongoing counts as a “part” in this sense (just as not just anything that occupies an arbitrarily chosen region of a living body counts as an “organ”). the parts of an intentional action, in the sense of “part” i have in mind, are themselves intentional actions performed for the sake of the whole of which they are parts. thus ann acquires the poison, pours it into the well, pumps the water, etc., all with the intention of assassinating the party leaders. intuitively, it seems that the teleological structure of the project remains intact if ann decides to outsource one or more parts to an accomplice. for example, suppose she pays bob to pump the water. intuitively, it seems that pumping the water remains for the sake of assassinating the party leaders even though it is now bob who is doing it. i am not suggesting that bob pumps water with the intention of assassinating the party leaders simply because it is a part of ann’s plan that he pumps water. if bob is the cottage attendant going about his usual job, having no idea that the well is poisoned, then “executing a part of ann’s plan” can hardly be a description under which he is acting intentionally because it is not a description under which he is aware that he is acting at all. and even if bob knows that the well is poisoned, he may not care, and may be going about his religious doctrine and the hhs mandate 40     daily responsibilities without intending to cooperate with ann. in these cases, it is not qua part of ann’s project of assassinating the party leaders that pumping water is bob’s means to his further ends (doing his job, making a living, etc.). but if bob is hired by ann specifically to play a part in the assassination, then he cannot pretend that his means to collecting the money that she offers is anything other than playing that part in the assassination.11 and to play the water-pumping part in the project of assassinating the party leaders just is to pump water in order to assassinate the party leaders. to be sure, the further ends to which bob subordinates this means in his own practical reasoning may not include the death of the party leaders. for example, suppose that bob is paid up-front, as soon as he is finished pumping the water, so that he will receive his pay regardless of whether the party leaders end up dead. in this case, it is true, the death of the party leaders is not itself instrumental in bob’s practical reasoning to the end of making money. but that does not change the fact that pumping water intending the death of the party leaders is instrumental in bob’s practical reasoning to the end of making money. in a case like this, we do not have two intentions in order: pumping water with the intention of assassinating the party leaders, and assassinating the party leaders with the intention of making money. instead, we have two orders of intention: pumping water with the first-order intention of assassinating the party leaders, and all that with the second-order intention of making money. one could argue that the compliance with the mandate is structurally similar to pumping poisoned water as part of the assassination. among the government’s stated objectives in enforcing compliance with the mandate is to promote contraceptive use. getting employers to provide insurance for contraception—or, under the accommodation, getting employers to submit notice the purpose of which is legally to obligate their insurers to provide coverage for contraception—is the government’s means to that end, just as getting bob to pump poisoned water is ann’s means to assassinating the party leaders. true, whereas ann is using the carrot of a reward to motivate bob to play the relevant part in her project of assassinating the party leaders, the government is using the stick of fines to motivate employers to play the relevant part in its project of promoting contraceptive use. but this difference is of no significance. changing the further intention with which one plays a part in a collective project does not change what it means to play a part in a collective project. therefore, one might conclude, just as bob pumps water intending the death of the party leaders, so those who comply with the mandate, whether in its original form or under the 41 capps accommodation, do so intending that those who as a result acquire contraceptive coverage use contraception. this strikes me as the best case for the view that compliance with the mandate intrinsically constitutes formal cooperation with evil. still, i do not think that it is successful. in the waterpumping case, bob’s reward hangs directly on his participation in the assassination. this means calculating his performance of the role that is his to play with an eye to the end that unites the project as a whole (again, this is just what it means to perform a part, in the relevant, teleological sense of “part,” of an action). if bob complies with the letter of ann’s instructions but not their spirit, and ann finds out, then she would correctly hold him in breach of their agreement. so bob does not announce to the party leaders that their water supply is poisoned; nor does he draw attention to the empty poison cans in the garbage; if the poison was deposited in one part of the water source but not another, then he takes care to pump from the poisoned stock; etc. quite generally, assuming that he is indeed playing his part in the enterprise and not double-crossing or otherwise cheating ann, bob calculates his performance to promote the assassination of the party leaders according to plan. this is true even if he does not take additional steps beyond playing his part in the enterprise in order to ensure that it is successful. in the case of the mandate, on the other hand, employers’ immunity from fines hangs not on their furtherance of the objectives that the officials at the hhs had in view in issuing the mandate, but rather on their compliance with the mandate itself. and what it means to comply with a law is independent of the further objectives the lawmaker had in view in enacting it. a law is not an invitation to participate in the projects of the lawmaker; it has a public meaning that is opaque to the further, private intentions with which the lawmaker enacted it. as a result, there is no expectation that employers will calculate their compliance with an eye to promoting contraceptive use. for example, suppose, rather fancifully, that employer x awards the company contract to insurer y even though x’s employees have a superstitious aversion to using contraception purchased under insurance plans issued by y. if the government took x to court for failing to further the ends that the officials at the hhs had in view in enacting the mandate, then the judge would rightly rule in favor of x. as long as x selected a plan that includes coverage of the mandated services, x is in compliance with the law. so it is not qua playing the insuranceproviding part in the lawmakers’ project of promoting contraceptive use, but rather qua complying with the law, that compliance with the mandate conduces to the end of avoiding fines. religious doctrine and the hhs mandate 42     v. where does this leave us? we have ruled out what strikes me as the best case for the view that compliance with the mandate intrinsically constitutes formal cooperation with evil. this is enough to establish a presumption, albeit tentative, against the view that compliance with the mandate is intrinsically impermissible on account of the intentions of the one complying. and it is not as if an unfair or otherwise disproportionate balance of consequences is somehow baked into the concept of compliance with the mandate. i tentatively conclude, then, that it is not the case that compliance with the mandate is intrinsically impermissible, even given religious doctrines that prohibit absolutely the use of contraception.12 that said, for the reasons given in section iii, i do not think that this conclusion is as obvious as some commentators seem to suppose. the philosophical issues it implicates are difficult enough that what i characterized as the “best case” for the view that compliance with the mandate intrinsically constitutes formal cooperation with evil is hardly an unreasonable application of a body of religious doctrine such as that of the catholic church, even if it is, as i have argued, ultimately mistaken. getting clearer on these issues would be worthwhile and would pay dividends for moral theory far beyond resolving questions of relatively parochial interest concerning compliance with the hhs mandate. notes 1. i am grateful to john sauer for reviewing a previous draft of this paper. 2. henceforth, to bracket the question of which if any fda-approved forms of contraception can act as abortifacients, i will speak only of religious doctrines that prohibit contraception, using catholic doctrine as the paradigm example. that said, if indeed any of the fdaapproved forms of contraception can act as abortifacients, then what i say applies also to the many non-catholic religious doctrines that prohibit abortion. 3. robert t. miller, “the hhs mandate, cooperation with evil, and coercion,” public discourse, february 22, 2012, available online at http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/ 2012/02/4817/. 43 capps 4. ibid. 5. g.e.m anscombe, intention, 2nd ed. (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1963), 79–80. 6. ibid., 87. 7. see, for example, matthew b. o’brien, “elizabeth anscombe and the new natural lawyers on intentional action,” national catholic bioethics quarterly 13 (2013): 47–56. 8. john finnis, germain grisez, and joseph boyle, “direct and indirect: a reply to critics of our action theory,” thomist 65 (2001). 1–44, at 8. 9. christopher o. tollefsen, “mandates and bad law,” public discourse, february 20, 2012, available online at http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/02/4779/. 10. see tollefsen, “response to robert koons and matthew o’brien’s ‘objects of intention: a hylomorphic critique of the new natural law theory,’” american catholic philosophical quarterly 87 (2013): 751–778, especially at 752.  11. cf. anscombe, intention, 41–55. 12. this is not to deny, of course, that compliance with the mandate may be impermissible in certain circumstances given religious doctrines that prohibit absolutely the use of contraception. [expositions 13.1 (2019) 121–161] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 a return to w.e.b. du bois’s “the conservation of races” rónké a. òké west chester university forethought1 the world (especially the philosophical world) has not been the same since w.e.b. du bois raised the important question, “what, then, is a race?” and put forth his first and most systematic definition of race in “the conservation of races.” the world has not been the same in two striking ways. first, the world has not been the same because it is literally not the same world. when du bois famously characterized the problem of the twentieth century as “the problem of the color line,” he had no way of knowing about or even conceptualizing rachel dolezal. he knew about racial assimilation and racial passing, and even had to contend with the implication of his fair skin and biraciality. yet, he could not conceive transracialism and the havoc it would wreak on racial discourse. more than sparking a highly divisive discussion on black and trans identity in the era of #blacklivesmatter and #wontbeerased, dolezal’s transracialism made american racial theorists deftly aware of how our current conceptual repertoire is incapable of thinking her identity. this case alone exposed the incoherence of our current philosophical and societal resources within the localized unfolding of american life. dolezal has shown the need for racial identity to be “retheorized:” updated to fit such inconsistencies; reconsidered on the basis of artificial boundaries separating racial groups; and expanded to include a thorough explication of transraciality. additionally, du bois lived in a world with races and we live in a world where we can seriously explore the possibilities that “there are no races” and pose the consideration that barack obama brought with his 2008–2016 presidency, our post-racial present.2 the philosophical world has not been the same since “the conservation of races” because of the series of invective essays kwame anthony appiah began writing in 1985 in response to du bois’s definition of races from that address. there is a way to read the previous twenty-five years of critical philosophy of race discourse as being sparked by the first of appiah’s essays, “the uncompleted argument: du bois and the illusion of race.” in “the uncompleted argument” appiah argues that du bois’s definition of race did not transcend the scientific conception of race a return to w.e.b. du bois’s “the conservation of races” 122 but relies on it, returning race to the domain of biology. by analyzing the six characteristics contained in du bois’s definition—common blood, common language, common history, common traditions, impulses, and strivings—appiah argues systematically that they each refer back to science and systems of heredity. furthermore they are, more or less, all discredited for the same reason: they cannot explain what binds people together. therefore, appiah famously concludes, “there are no races” because there is nothing in the world that can do what we need the concept of race to do or accomplish. since 2006 appiah’s publications have moved away from an explicit focus on race to reflect on the larger question of ethics that, at least for appiah, preconfigure any expressed concern one might have for particular identities. however, one year shy of the thirtieth anniversary of “the uncompleted argument” (1985), appiah published a new book on du bois, lines of descent: w.e.b. du bois and the emergence of identity (2014), signaling, at least for appiah, a necessary return to du bois’s “the conservation of races.” so, why return to “conservation”? for those like myself who are persuaded by du bois’s definition, in its ability to reflect their own experiences, reading “conservation” always offers a fresh reminder of the value of (black) identities at a time when this value is only octothorpically asserted (#blacklivesmatter, #africanlivesmatter, #saytheirnames, #wontbeerased), therefore, canonizing “the conservation of races” as an essential contribution to the theorizing of race. but to a theorist who thinks that the conceptualizing racial project assumes the reality of a concept (race) whose veracity is in question, what do du bois and the emergence of (a racial) identity offer to appiah? what can du bois offer to us, today? this final question is not a trivial one, and i contend, it is the most important question of our time. in, “the figure of du bois as a problem for thought,” nahum chandler offers us a reason why we should read du bois today: du bois’s texts […] have, for the most part, yet to become the object of our full and most patient attention. if nothing else, my suggestion here is that a new reading or rereading of the writings of du bois should or must be undertaken and sustained in our contemporary moment. not only should this be so for the generations of scholars, thinkers, and activists just emerging, but also for those generations at the apogee of their wisdom and understanding; not only within the americas and the caribbean, but globally; not only in europe or africa but also in asia. for du bois 123 òké was truly, in a metaphorical sense, a citizen of the world. and he was an intellectual, a thinker and writer, whose concern was the whole of what we can call our world. his ultimate concern was the possibility of another world, not one that has existed in the past, and not the repent in the future, but another world—one that has not yet been and remains yet to come. i propose that in order to understand this du bois, we must think with him, allowing his questions to become our own. (33) du bois was first and foremost a theorist of race and race-thinking. he “began publishing at the age of 15” and his last published texts were prepared at the age of 95, three days before he died. he published in every major genre of literature, including poetry, drama, and fiction; his collective works include five novels, numerous short stories, a biography and above all, many essays. […] we can estimate that du bois wrote an average of six pages of publishable text each day for some 80 years” putting the total of writings he produced over the course of his lifetime to over 175,000 pages. (chandler 32) in these pages we see him working and reworking his sociohistorical definition of race throughout his life. this paper seeks to return our philosophical gaze back to “the conservation of races” and offers a close and careful reading of the text that will reanimate du bois’s sociohistorical definition of race as the world celebrates the 150th anniversary of his birth. introduction at the inaugural meeting of the american negro academy, du bois presented his proposal to raise the negro race to “higher planes of thought and action.” “the conservation of races,” as he entitled his address, anticipates the new negro, one whose identity was not grounded in the indeterminable physical characteristics that oppressed the negro, but whose place in history was to be found in the common ideals that those of negro descent allegedly share. du bois’s address was an argument to preserve the idea of the negro race on the basis of these common ideals against alternative political projects attempting to counter white supremacy. though he references the a return to w.e.b. du bois’s “the conservation of races” 124 negro race, his employment of race does not engage the term in its conventional uses primarily because “back of most discussions of race with which he is familiar, have lurked certain assumptions as to his natural abilities, as to his political, intellectual and moral status” (gutenberg).3 instead race serves to express a more “human striving” common to a sect of people. in this preliminary discussion of du bois i will detail the structure of “conservation” by explicating the six distinct parts of the address: (1) the announcement; (2) “the final word of science,” or the scientific conception of race; (3) the sociohistorical conception of race; (4) existentialist critical reflections on the predicament of the negro; (5) a defense of a “conservation” of races; and (6) the purpose and credo of the american negro academy. i. the announcement the publication of du bois’s address in the academy’s second occasional papers is preceded by an announcement, probably written by alexander crummell. this announcement is a formal call to order conveying the program of the american negro academy to the wider audience beyond those in the room. it intimates that these papers are a continuation of an ongoing discussion, in which members contribute and extend contemporary debates on race and the status of the negro. crummell imagines his fellow members to be part of a larger historical context and sees the contributions as responding to two great obstacles to the sociopolitical mobility of the negro race. he declares that “the surrounding political situation are crucial to an understanding of his argument” (bernasconi 520) and identifies this situation as “(a) the lack of unity, want of harmony, and absence of a self-sacrificing spirit, and no well-defined line of policy seeking definite aims; (b) the persistent, relentless, at times covert opposition employed to thwart the negro at every step of his upward struggles to establish the justness of his claim to the highest physical, intellectual and moral possibilities” (gutenberg). from these observations we can conclude that all papers presented (and subsequently published) by the academy, including “conservation,” were intended by crummell to serve two purposes: (1) to “uplift the race to higher planes of thought and action” and (2) to prescribe a plan for the “growth and development of the negro along right lines, and the vindication of that race against vicious assaults” (gutenberg). when du bois was invited to address the american negro academy, he was assigned the topic, “the duty of cherishing and fostering the intellect of the race” (bernasconi 525). 125 òké therefore, i begin my analysis of “conservation” with the announcement because it foreshadows the content of du bois’s address. there is a sense of urgency that moves throughout his speech. his topic is the identity and future of the negro race. his plan is to unite three temporal stases: to speak to the highly educated, culturally advanced negro men in the audience about a phenomenon he carries forward historically, towards a future (negro race) they are part of and responsible for. du bois thought the founding members had the same responsibility that “those of the race who have had the advantage of higher education and culture”—the talented tenth4— have to “uplift the race to higher planes of thought and action” suggests that, prima facie, “conservation” serves a primarily ethical role.5 ii. the scientific conception of race the first major section of “conservation” begins with the opening lines of the address (“the american negro has always felt…”) and ends with darwin’s defense of human brotherhood: “it [the final word of science] declares, as darwin himself said, that great as is the physical unlikeness of the various races of men their likenesses are greater, and upon this rests the whole scientific doctrine of human brotherhood” (“conservation” 117). this section includes his discussion of what du bois terms “the final word of science.” du bois does not begin by rehashing the arguments of science. rather, he frames his discussion of the scientific conception of race in terms of the psychosocial effects these ideas have had on the negro spirit. this psychosocial trauma has prevented the negro from claiming “the highest physical, intellectual and moral possibilities” and has prompted them to consider their identity in terms of their “natural abilities” and “political, intellectual and moral status,” underscoring their apprehension about their own identity and future. he magnifies these assumptions in this section. he acknowledges that these “discussions” have had deep-seated effects on the negro sentiment, but presumes his reader’s familiarity with these discussions without explicitly identifying them.6 by the end of this analysis i will show that the content of this address should be attributed to these theories about race amalgamation that predicted the annihilation of the negro race. i argue that du bois used “conservation” to assuage fears that the negro race will become extinct, fears that undergird feelings of inferiority and oppression in the negro community. these fears were exacerbated by rumors that the negro race will become extinct through biological weakness or assimilation. this picture “speaks of human brotherhood as though it were a return to w.e.b. du bois’s “the conservation of races” 126 the possibility of an already dawning to-morrow” (“conservation” 108). the fraternity of races alluded to here does not bespeak the future of race relations but a continuous present where differences are “deprecated and minimized,” bringing about the disappearance of the negro race.7 one proponent of this view was frederick douglass. the future of the negro, as douglass expressed it, “is that he will not be expatriated nor annihilated, nor will he forever remain a separate and distinct race from the people around him, but that he will be absorbed, assimilated, and will only appear finally in the features of a blended race” (45). douglass’s claims, while mollifying some of the apprehension felt in the negro community, were not successful in fostering “calmer moments.”8 douglass’s arguments did not settle the anxiety in the negro community because, as he emphasizes, his discussions about race mixing focus on the future of the negro community without addressing the present state of the negro experience and how they are to cope with, handle, and develop race relations as they currently encounter them. the american negro academy was created two years after douglass’s death in 1895. william h. crogman and richard r. wright approached alexander crummell in 1894 with the idea of a national academy but crummell decided against it possibly because such an organization did not have douglass’s support (moses 275–276). why douglass’s support factored into crummell’s decision is quite perplexing especially considering that they often stood on opposing sides when it came to the issue of racial separatism and the question of whether race amalgamation is the future for negroes. crummell stalwartly criticized the view that assimilation had the ability to end race and racism and equated race amalgamation with extermination9 stating that “[t]he race-problem cannot be settled by the extinction of race” (crummell 48). crummell further argued that an amalgamation of the races, in the sense of an “already dawning tomorrow,” is an inappropriate pretention for the negro and has in fact never occurred.10 du bois’s address responds to the confusion and fear that douglass’s assimilationist comments and crummell’s collectivist and separatist views initiated. their investigations into the “origins and destinies of races” created certain assumptions about the american negro that they “felt were wrong.” when the negro was not incited or confounded by these arguments, that is, “in our calmer moments,” du bois argued that “we must acknowledge that human beings are divided into races; that in this country the two most extreme types of the world’s races have met […]” (“conservation” 108). it is in these words that du bois summarizes his anti-assimilationist views. du bois was against the notion that amalgamation would dissolve the races into one single race by producing a 127 òké singular identity among the vast polity of the human species where no differentiation, no variation exists between peoples.11 he strongly opposed assimilation where identity is left undetermined, serving as a proxy for absorption and substitution—the negro identity replaced by the white identity. du bois believes that douglass advocates a substitution, calling forth an indeterminability that prevents the identity of races to be retained. he affirms a type of amalgamation that merges races while preserving racial identity, a merging of like-striving peoples to form a community. du bois echoes crummell in his refutation of the notion that the future of the negro race will be reduced to extinction because of the burgeoning numbers of mixed race persons. this is why he mentions the variation in color “from the marble-like pallor of the scandinavian to the rich, dark brown of the zulu, passing by the creamy slav, the yellow chinese, the light brown sicilian and the brown egyptian.” and also why it is important that the final word of science includes a theory of racial creation based on the intermingling of races. it is not until he presents the sociohistorical conception of race that he provides a final answer to douglass: “their destiny is not absorption by the white americans.”12 the prescient undertone of his words is not accidental but instantiates the importance of futurism to his analysis. wilson j. moses argues that “conservation” is an instance of “hero worship,” an encomium similar to the eulogy du bois writes for crummell in the souls of black folk entitled “of alexander crummell.” he describes the address as a “specific endorsement of crummell’s ideas and an attack on those of douglass” and calls it a declaration of “his support of the strict puritanical values that crummell had long preached” (281). while i do interpret this text as a fervent repudiation of douglass’s assimilationism i stop short of reading it as an atavistic commemoration of crummell. i do not have the space to detail this position here, but suffice it to say that du bois’s project of “conservation” extends beyond the assimilationist-separationist rhetoric awash in crummell’s writings. even though “conservation” appeases crummell and causes him to describe “conservation” as “essentially good,” “conservation” goes further than crummell could anticipate. du bois subordinates the practical questions and raises the more philosophical pertinent ones causing walter b. hayson to exclaim that “the day for the work of mr. douglass have passed!” (moses 282). this statement was not made in reference to the anti-assimilationist arguments offered by crummell, even though he had given his inaugural address (“civilization, the primal need of race”) (moses 281) the day before du bois presented “conservation.” du bois went further than crummell had in his racial politics. the future was not a foray into a thought a return to w.e.b. du bois’s “the conservation of races” 128 experiment, a place to cast future concerns. the future was a philosophical conundrum, a silence that can never be spoken because to speak about the future is to condemn one to it. although their positions were very different, this is the hubris douglass and crummell appealed to that du bois’s address critiques, their manner of speaking about the future as though it was already in sight, as “an already dawning tomorrow.” in this section du bois signals that his address will be future without ignoring the current sociopolitical climate. as he writes in this section, “the resulting problem as to the future relations of these types is not only of intense and living interest to us, but forms an epoch in the history of mankind” (“conservation” 108). du bois’s address references these debates affecting the negro community and invalidates the conclusions that have been derived from them. he proposes a way to address the present state of the negro experience and provides the means to handle and develop race relations as african americans currently encounter them. he argues that the solution to the negro problem cannot be resolved by focusing first on the material questions. rather, we must rise above the pressing but smaller questions of separate schools and cars, wagediscrimination and lynch law, to survey the whole question of race in human philosophy and to lay, on a basis of broad knowledge and careful insight, those large lines of policy and higher ideas which may form our guiding lines and boundaries in the practical difficulties of every day. (“conservation” 108) in other words, the practical questions must be subordinated to the philosophical questions. du bois takes particular aim at the way the scientific notion of race has been able to extend “certain assumptions as to his natural abilities” to the negro’s “political, intellectual, and moral status.” the continuity between the biological and the psychosomatic was what a trait in both douglass and crummell’s arguments. insofar as biological claims served as the explicit basis for the maltreatment of negroes (and contributed to the legalistic and social separatism called for by the plessy decision and jim crow laws) part of du bois’s concern was that scientific assumptions did not end with the final word but that these arguments were recast to legitimate an ontological conception of the negro, one that united the metaphysical and the ontological. du bois sought to sever this connection, and to minimize the impact the metaphysical had on the ontological, as it has been arrogated by science. 129 òké du bois’s account of the “final word of science” culminates in a reference to determination that “we have at least two, perhaps three, great families of human beings—the whites and negroes, possibly the yellow race” and the supposition that “other races have arisen from the intermingling of the blood of these two” (“conservation” 109). the suggestion that all races are formed through the intermingling of the two or three great families of human beings is connected in du bois’s mind with the extinction question and the mixed race question.13 du bois challenges any suggestion that science has the last word and in particular its use of race to both emphasize and minimize racial distinctions. it emphasizes racial distinctions by essentializing difference, making race a manifestation of different types of human beings on the basis of language, skin color, hair texture, and cranial measurements. it minimizes racial distinctions by establishing a type of human fraternity based on the idea that “out of one blood god created all.” but du bois stops short of denying that “race” is a term that forms our guiding lines and boundaries around and between groups of people. he accepts a certain racial separatism (conservation of racial distinctions) and at the same time sets out to provide a rival account to the scientific view. as he explains: many criteria of race differences have in the past been proposed, as color, hair, cranial measurements and language. and manifestly, in each of these respects, human beings differ widely. […] all these physical characteristics are patent enough, and if they agreed with each other it would be very easy to classify mankind. unfortunately for scientists, however, these criteria of race are most exasperatingly intermingled. color does not agree with texture of hair, […] nor does color agree with the breadth of the head […] nor, again, has the science of language as yet succeeded in clearing up the relative authority of these various and contradictory criteria. (“conservation” 109) the insurmountable problem for science is establishing clearly the criteria for identifying races. the intermingling of blood, according to the scientific mainstream of the day, is what makes it difficult to establish such criteria. appealing to linguistics, the science of language, does not succeed in clearing up the “relative authority of these various and contradictory criteria.” and insofar as subtle forces account for all the variations in history, they are better able to explain racial differences. transcending the limits of biology (natural law) requires a move beyond science to a return to w.e.b. du bois’s “the conservation of races” 130 understand how these inconsistencies operate and constitute the world. du bois introduces the distinction between the “real meaning of race” and “what scientists say it is.” and it is on the basis of this distinction that he develops the sociohistorical conception of race. the first question du bois poses is, “what is the real meaning of race?” he contends that this question must be determined by “what has, in the past, been the law of race development, and what lessons has the past history of race development to teach the rising negro people” (“conservation” 109). by asking this question du bois has given us the means with which to answer to the question of how to understand race. he also institutes a temporal continuity of “race” that charts its development over time, taking into consideration the past (couched in legal decisions, including the decision of the supreme court a year earlier in plessy v. ferguson), its current societal impact, and how these meanings will inform the negro posterity to come. in a way the entire address can be read as a response to this initial question and the six remaining questions he asks throughout “conservation” as elaborations of this central question: what, then, is a race?; what is the real distinction between these nations?; what shall be its [race difference] function in the future?; how shall this [full, complete negro] message be delivered?; what, after all, am i?; and, have we in america a distinct mission as a race, or is self-obliteration the highest end to which negro blood dare aspire?14 the purpose of this first section of “conservation” is to reflect on the future of the negro community and address what he will later describe as the issues of black annihilation and expatriation, as well as the concerns of racial mixing and racial purity. du bois directs his address to this growing negro sentiment under the veil of a conservation of races and a criticism of the biological notion of race. iii. the sociohistorical conception of race the next section of “conservation” begins with du bois introducing a concept that manages to distinguish his sociohistorical conception of race from the scientific conception of race and explain what races are—subtle forces. he writes, “although the wonderful developments of human history teach that the grosser physical differences of color, hair and bone go but a short way toward explaining the different roles which groups of men have played in human progress, yet there are differences—subtle, delicate and elusive, though they may be—which have silently but definitely separated men into groups” (“conservation” 109–110). this section presents all the major tenets 131 òké of du bois’s sociohistorical definition and ends with a final nail in the coffin of the scientific conception of race: the negro’s “destiny is not absorption by the white americans […] is not a servile imitation of anglo-saxon culture, but a stalwart originality which shall unswervingly follow negro ideals” (“conservation” 113). because of its major contributions to racial theorizing this section has naturally received the most attention from its readers. this is understandable because it is in this section that we find du bois’s definition of race. but, as i have shown, there is an important discussion of the scientific conception of race and the historical context that precedes and sets the tone for this infamous discussion of race. beginning one’s reading of “conservation” at the point where du bois defines race is an unsuitable place to commence an analysis.15 furthermore, race is not defined until after history is introduced as a plausible explanation for racial differences. to begin a discussion of “conservation” at this section leads one to overlook the sequence of this text. this is why the divisions in “conservation” i am detailing here are crucial. they allow a more rigorous understanding of du bois’s motivation for defining race with such convoluted criteria. later du bois will reveal the implications of his sociohistorical conception of race as providing a reason for being (similar to the way emmanuel levinas makes the distinction between the struggle for survival and a reason for being in his early writings). for now it is important to understand its placement and its meaning (as he maintains that the “real meaning of race” is the only question which must be considered seriously in this context) keeping in mind that, although part of the larger question of meaning, the definition du bois provides is the conclusion to the metaphysical question of what race is. at this point in the address du bois has officially moved away from the biological notion of race16 and is beginning to investigate its real meaning through “the eye of the historian and sociologist.” he starts with the benefits of the sociologist’s and historian’s perspectives. first, they follow the progression of human history to explain differences and are not only concerned with physical differences, as the scientists are, but also seek to explain “the different roles which groups of men have played in human progress” (“conservation” 109). second, they are not deceived by the “subtle, delicate, and elusive” differences which definitively cause these separations in human groups. third, they do not conceive these differences on individual, biological, or national levels but are able to elevate them to include the larger collective, ideological trends that have been central to human history and human progress. finally, social historians understand that collective ideals override physical characteristics.17 a return to w.e.b. du bois’s “the conservation of races” 132 objections have been raised against du bois’s taxonomy of eight great families of human beings as opposed to three, as if he merely replaces one system for another.18 but these objections are severely misguided. du bois was not erecting a new system of race on the basis of eight races. in fact there was nothing new about his categories of race or his racial definition.19 du bois informs us that he is not responsible for why we can think of eight races where we once thought of three but that history has revealed to historians the existence of eight races. the divisions science relied upon had to give way to history’s determination of the course of events. and it is with the lens of historians and sociologists that du bois instantiates the commonplace use of eight main races, explains the divisions of humans, and responds to the struggle for existence with a reason for being, that is, an affirmation of racial identity in terms of a conservation of race. the word “history” reoccurs most often in this section compared to the rest of the text indicating that history is the operative term in du bois’s analysis of race. before he provides his definition of race du bois does something curious: he relays the purview of history. the “history of the world” he tells us “is the history, not of individuals, but of groups, not of nations, but of races, and he who ignores or seeks to override the race idea in human history ignores and overrides the central thought of all history” (“conservation” 110). history concerns itself with the movement and progression of human groups, and these groups are constituted not by national affiliations but by their racial identities. therefore, the domain of history is the concept of race. and with that explained, du bois defines race: “what, then is a race? it is a vast family of human beings, generally of common blood and language, always of common history, traditions and impulses, who are both voluntarily and involuntarily striving together for the accomplishment of certain more or less vividly conceived ideals of life” (“conservation” 110). kevin thomas miles argues that “conservation” presents du bois’s theory of history and the goal of this theory was to “mobilize black americans in a bid to have them recognized as fully enfranchised citizens in the united states” (19). making a stronger claim than i do, miles argues that du bois is not primarily concerned with rethinking biology, rather his interests lay in “rewriting historiography.” he establishes the parallels between du bois’s and hegel’s notion of history20, in that history for them implies “world history” and history is worked out on a spiritual plane. the du boisian notion of history is revisionist, not simply because he wishes to rewrite the past—biological notions, ideas about the mental, physical, political nature of negroes, etc.—to say something that no one writing on negroes (including hegel) has ever said before, but because 133 òké he wants to write a history (in the present tense) of a people that has not yet come into view and open up a future “silenc[ing] those fabricat[ed] narratives in which black people have no role in history’s past or future” (23). this is the story of a people no one has seen “except for those possessed by the vision of spirit’s goal.” du bois’s mention of the physical suggests his concern with “existential bodies that are shaped by the world that they occupy even while they give shape to it” (26). as i have argued, there is nothing new about du bois’s definition of race and he did not mean it to be understood as new. so if the point of this definition was not to “diverge greatly from the way the term was used by those of his contemporaries engaged in writing philosophical histories,” and if it did not run counter to the “use of the concept of race in ordinary life” (bernasconi 521– 522), what exactly did this definition achieve? the answer hinges on the difference between the scientific notion of race and the sociohistorical. one finds in du bois’s definition of race two definitions of race brought together under one common moniker: the concept of race that apprehends the aspect of race that the scientists have given (vast family, inheritance schemes, common blood and language) and that aspect of race that is “clearly defined to the eye of the historian and sociologist” (common history, traditions and impulses, strivings, and ideals of life) (“conservation” 110). what du bois has done by offering this binomial definition of race is to insist that any examination of the idea of race must take up this fundamental twoness, the presence of “two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in a black body” (du bois, souls 7) and apprehend the permanence of this experience. this fundamental twoness—a psychosomatic dualism in fanonian terms, and the “duality in unity” in sartrean terms—was first mentioned in the opening lines of “conservation” as the prevalence of “certain assumptions” against “feelings that these assumptions are wrong.” he will come to describe this sensation six years later in the souls of black folk as a “strange experience—peculiar even for someone who has never been anything else” (7) to which he ascribes the term double consciousness. double consciousness is the “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others” (7). reading du bois’s definition of race alongside his notion of double consciousness exposes his definition as the very instantiation of this twoness. contained within du bois’s definition of race are the insights that science has given (“a vast family of human beings, generally of common blood and language”) and what sociologists and historians can see (“always of common history, traditions and impulses, who are both voluntarily and involuntarily striving together for the accomplishment of certain a return to w.e.b. du bois’s “the conservation of races” 134 more or less vividly conceived ideals of life”). du bois means for us to see the convergences and divergence, the meaningfulness and imprecision in the concept of race. as he remarks, “the term negro is, perhaps, the most indefinite of all, combining the mulattoes and zamboes of america and the egyptians, bantus and bushmen of africa” (“conservation” 111). and he reinforces this unification of science and sociohistory when he describes the “whole process which has brought about these races differentiations” as “a growth, and the great characteristic of this growth has been the differentiation of spiritual and mental differences between great races of mankind and the integration of physical differences” (“conservation” 111). one can begin to comprehend in the indeterminacy of race the sense that the term “negro” encapsulates a wide swath of “blackness.” this will begin to explain his reasons against douglass’s amalgamation and his argument that the borders of “negro” should be opened up to include mixed race persons. for now he tells us that it requires a keen eye—the eye of the “historian and sociologists”—to “teach that the grosser physical differences of color, hair and bone go but a short way toward explaining the different roles which groups of men have played in human progress” and to know that “yet there are differences—subtle, delicate and elusive, though they may be—which have silently but definitely separated men into groups” (“conservation” 109). more importantly, it requires a keen eye to move beyond kinship schemas of race and understand that what binds nations of people together are “similar habits of thought and a conscious striving together for certain ideals of life” (“conservation” 111). du bois never denies that the sociohistorical view relies on the scientific view; the history of the concept of race requires this relationship. the “deeper differences” of which he characterizes his sociohistorical definition is “are spiritual, psychical, differences—undoubtedly based on the physical, but infinitely transcending” it. what he does believe is that it is necessary to surpass biology in order to allow for the possibility of a future. “turning to real history,” he concentrates on a new opponent: individualism. he writes, “we who have been reared and trained under the individualistic philosophy of the declaration of independence and the laissez faire philosophy of adam smith, are loath to see and loath to acknowledge this patent fact of human history” (“conservation” 110), namely that we have been mesmerized by history to think that individuals make history—the pharaohs, caesars, toussaints, and napoleons. but du bois calls us to remember that “the history of the world is the history, not of individuals, but of groups, not of nations, but of races.” under the “individualistic philosophy” 135 òké we invent human progress as the history of the victors. but this assumption “can not be established by a careful consideration of history” (“conservation” 110). in dusk of dawn he writes that superiority of the races was due to that race which had a history: “which was the superior race? manifestly that which had a history […] africa was left without culture and without history” (49– 50). du bois’s task in using history was not to write the negro into history or to narrate their historical lineages, but to correct an “assumption of which the negro people are especially fond” (“conservation” 110) and assert that they are and have always been a part of history, thus contributing (in a substantially understated way) to human progress. the connection i would like to point to now exists between the precariousness of an internal dualism and the preoccupation with origins and destinies. as argued earlier, du bois sought to demystify competing arguments about the extinction and preservation of a negro future. though du bois contributed to this conversation on the side of crummell his address signaled a different preoccupation than the one crummell and douglass seemed to entertain. the burden to assimilate and the darwinistic omen of natural (un)selection spoke in tones that echoed a struggle to survive. du bois, on the other hand, chose to speak in the theme of a reason for being.21 du bois ties the meaning of race ineluctably to the existential condition of the negro, revealing the implications of this theory of race: the question of what race means, and by extension his definition of race, provides the negro with a reason for being. i want to suggest that similar to how the ontology of race takes priority over the metaphysics of race, his defense of the raison d’etre is also anterior to a definition (or, the metaphysics) of race. in fact, the very vernacular of “race identity”—messages, strivings, ideals of life—all conspire to defend the historicity of the negro and, accordingly, their reason for being. du bois returns to this raison d’etre in the final section of the address, this time in the service of the american negro academy: “this, is the reason for being which the american negro academy has. it aims at once to be the epitome and expression of the intellect of the blackblooded people of america, the exponent of the race ideals of one of the world’s great races” (“conservation” 115). difference is essential to du bois’s characterization of race. from what he has said thus far we know that it is integral to the assigning of group roles in human progress, explains the variances of group history, is clearly observed physically, mentally, and spiritually, and is the shared domain of science, sociology, and history. but what is especially interesting to du bois are the many ways differences are usurped by a force that binds people together with others. this force is primarily a a return to w.e.b. du bois’s “the conservation of races” 136 spiritual one and du bois’s references to the spiritual should not be attenuated. the deeper differences are spiritual and psychical and as he explains, the “[s]ociohistorical races each have a “message” for humanity—a message which derives in some way from god’s purpose in creating races” (appiah, “the uncompleted argument” 25). when we dismiss his “spiritual messages” and the gaze of the social-historian, we ignore the transcendent spiritual criteria informing du bois’s recognition of volk as races. returning to “one far off divine event,” when du bois states that negroes have a spiritual message that has yet to be given it, miles argues that it is “semantically correct but conceptually mistaken” (27) to take this to mean that he has identified a negro race. du bois identifies as negro people who have their identities as a question, those who are not yet conscious of themselves, and those who have not achieved the self-consciousness and freedom that is their history. in order to understand his common history, traditions and impulses, strivings, ideals of life and allusions to “spiritual messages” it is vital to understand that the people are the message. rather than connecting the present to the past miles thinks that du bois connects the present to the future. this is how the present and the future are intertwined. du bois’s notion of history thinks the past, present and future at the same time. and we can hear the interpenetration of temporal states in the following remark: “the history of the world is the history, not of individuals, but of groups, not of nations, but of races, and he who ignores or seeks to override the race idea in human history ignores and overrides the central thought of all history.” and what, then is a race? a “vast family […],” a conglomeration of people. therefore, any denial of race, according to du bois, is ahistorical. du bois defines vast families as a group of “closely related individuals” that reflect the “maximum of physical differences,” and he notes in this historiography that “there were as many groups as families” (gutenberg). there are two points that are necessary to du bois’s familial structure. the first pertains to how these maximally physically different people are bound together, and requires an examination of du bois’s thoughts on the mixed race problem. the second concerns the third question du bois asks in this address—what is the real distinction between these nations?—and will necessitate another look at his sociohistorical criteria—messages, strivings, traditions, impulses, and ideals of life—as well as a consideration of nation-building as it develops out of this familial structure. on the first point we must acknowledge that du bois does not think that a new race has manifested in america22 to be found in mixed race individuals. those of mixed race are not 137 òké products of the diverse elements of the negro, requiring a separation from the race, but share a common blood, language, history, tradition, impulse, and ideal with the negro that allow them to share in the common message that the negro has yet to deliver. the idea that the negro would be “abruptly swept away” was supported by the steady decline in the numbers of “pure” negroes and the vast increase in populations of mixed race individuals (mulattoes, quadroons, etc.). even those in the negro community advocated for the integration of races as a plausible solution to race relations in america disregarding the fear of others that elimination of negroes would come as a result of their absorption and assimilation. so menacing and entrenched were these suggestions that du bois calls for “calmer moments.” to bring the negro into “calmer moments,” two questions need to be answered: (1) how will the negro race avoid extinction?, and (2) how will the negro handle the burgeoning population of mixed race persons? du bois answers these two questions with one answer: include those of mixed race in the greater negro community.23 this resolves the problem in two ways. first, the litmus test employed by society for inclusion into the negro community already presumes “pure” negroes and mixed race persons as part of the same community.24 because the exponential population growth of mixed race persons affords the community they belong to amass a larger populace, the steady decline of the negro race can rebound by adding mixed race persons into their community, resolving the extinction of the race that seems inevitable (and possibly creating a colossal power). second, the survival of the negro race is safeguarded if mixed race individuals are included in the greater negro community. it also has the added advantage of bringing about “calmer moments” as negroes no longer have to fear the intermingling of the races for they now share in the progression and nascence of the greater negro community. however, this answer is not explicitly stated in du bois’s address, but can be read from “conservation.” one way to read his response to negro sentiments as support for the greater negro community is to highlight his response to the race amalgamation problem. another is to focus on the “who” that possesses the common ideals and message that he proposes to conserve. according to the second account, du bois proposes that the commonalities of both groups advocate the inclusion of mulattoes into the negro race. mixed race individuals were not exempt from the prejudices and racism that followed the negro. their biological proximity to negroes afforded them participation into the oppressive circumstances of negro existence. even douglass agreed with this reality.25 their association with whites was not enough to excuse them from the lived a return to w.e.b. du bois’s “the conservation of races” 138 experience of the negro.26 the blood that traveled through their veins were derived from africans who journeyed through the middle passage, however removed they claimed themselves to be. colored individuals share the common blood, language, the history of oppression and discrimination, traditions and impulses that their negro brethren share among themselves. they share similar ideas about the proprieties of life, parallel sentiments about their survival, and endure the daily struggle of their existence as the negro. they are part of the greater negro community. near the end of this section du bois seems to move from using “race” to describe this vast family of negroes, or the greater negro community, to using “nations.” it is clear that, against hegel (and douglass) who privileges “nations,” du bois prefers the descriptor “race.” so why does he then ask, what is the real distinction between these nations, and why is this question posed after he lists the “eight distinctly differentiated races” and the “other minor race groups”? the link between “race” and “nation” is forged by a rather lengthy explanation: the forces that bind together the teuton nations are, then, first, their race identity and common blood; secondly, and more important, a common history, common laws and religion, similar habits of thought and a conscious striving together for certain ideals of life. the whole process which has brought about these race differentiations has been a growth, and the great characteristic of this growth has been the differentiation of spiritual and mental differences between great races of mankind and the integration of physical differences. the age of nomadic tribes of closely related individuals represents the maximum of physical differences. they were practically vast families, and there were as many groups as families. as the families came together to form cities the physical differences lessened, purity of blood was replaced by the requirement of domicile, and all who lived within the city bounds became gradually to be regarded as members of the group; i.e., there was a slight and slow breaking down of physical barriers. this, however, was accompanied by an increase of the spiritual and social differences between cities. this city became husbandmen, this, merchants, another warriors, and so on. the ideals of life for which the different cities struggled were different. when at last cities began to coalesce into nations there was another breaking down of barriers which separated groups of men. the larger and broader 139 òké differences of color, hair and physical proportions were not by any means ignored, but myriads of minor differences disappeared, and the sociological and historical races of men began to approximate the present division of races as indicated by physical researches. at the same time the spiritual and physical differences of race groups which constituted the nations became deep and decisive. the english nation stood for constitutional liberty and commercial freedom; the german nation for science and philosophy; the romance nations stood for literature and art, and the other race groups are striving, each in its own way, to develop for civilization its particular message, it particular ideal, which shall help to guide the world nearer and nearer that perfection of human life for which we all long, that “one far off divine event.” (“conservation” 111) for du bois nations are formed first by their racial identity and common blood, and then by their common history, laws, religion, habits of thought, conscious striving and ideals of life. the story du bois tells us displaces physical similarities and heredity as symbols of nationhood. when families came together to form cities they were constituted on the basis of their lineage and phenotypic continuities, but as more and more families came together “purity of blood was replaced by the requirement of domicile.” so borderlands supplanted the physical differences that used to separate groups of people eventually territorializing the concept of citizen. borders no longer represented individuals but “spiritual and social differences” reflecting the varying purposes and contributions of those within its limits: “this city became husbandmen, this, merchants, another warriors, and so on.” and the differences were not mere variations but sources of “struggle” (du bois will replace “struggle” with “striving”), conflict, discord, reinforcing the necessity of city limits. by the time these boundaries graduated to demarcate national lines they further abated city difference represented the “sociological and historical races of men began to approximate the present division of races as indicated by physical researches,” that is, national spiritual and physical differences coalesced around the concept of race. accordingly, race seems to be a byproduct of nation building but charted alongside human progress in history. at the beginning of this section i argued that du bois does not define race until after history is introduced as a plausible explanation for racial differences. two questions arise: why is history paired with the scientific notion of race? and what does the inclusion of history offer to a definition a return to w.e.b. du bois’s “the conservation of races” 140 of race? this first question was addressed by the rather lengthy explanation in the previous paragraph. however, it seems necessary to add that spiritual and physical differences have always, in tandem, been the cause of the “deep and decisive” differences within racial groups. so du bois is doing nothing more than reiterating the ordinary usage of race that seamlessly pairs sociohistory with biology. but the significance of history, as opposed to the socio-historical mélange, is not as commonplace. from these observations we can conclude that all papers presented (and subsequently published) by the academy, including “conservation,” serve two purposes: (1) to “uplift the race to higher planes of thought and action” and (2) to prescribe a plan for the “growth and development of the negro along right lines, and the vindication of that race against vicious assaults” (gutenberg). not to reverse history but to bring the negro into calmer moments: if we carefully consider what race prejudice really is, we find it, historically, to be nothing but the friction between different groups of people; it is the difference in aim, in feeling, in ideals of two different races; if, now, this difference exists touching territory, laws, language, or even religion, it is manifest that these people, cannot life in the same territory without fatal collision; but if, on the other hand, there is substantial agreement in laws, language and religion; if there is a satisfactory adjustment of economic life, then there is no reason why, in the same country and on the same street, two or three great national ideals might not thrive and develop, that men of different races might not strive together for their race ideals as well, perhaps even better, than in isolation. (“conservation” 113) history “remind[s] us how deeply impersonal racism is, how automatically, unreflectively, race and racism are learned, but they also reveal how strong and tenacious is the struggle to be freed of its imprisoning constructs” (holt 2). dispersed throughout this section of “conservation” are the characteristics from the social historian’s contribution to the definition of race: common history, traditions and impulses, strivings, ideals of life, and message. du bois elaborates on each one and shows how each expands and explicates the ideological development of the concept of race. 141 òké iv. existential reflections on the predicament of the negro what i refer to as “existential reflections on the predicament of the negro” is the shortest section in “conservation.” it begins with the first appearance of the word “situation” (“conservation” 113) and concludes at the end of the paragraph where du bois makes reference to “incessant selfquestioning.” my examination here is limited to the overarching themes presented in this fourth main division of “conservation.” du bois concluded the last section with an incisive proclamation about the future of the negro—“their destiny is not absorption by white americans”—and with a final charge: “if in america it is to be proven for the first time in the modern world that not only negroes are capable of evolving individual men like toussaint, the savior, but are a nation stored with wonderful possibilities of culture, then their destiny is not a servile imitation of anglo-saxon culture, but a stalwart originality which shall unswervingly follow negro ideals” (“conservation 113). this proclamation serves as an answer to douglass’s prediction that the future of the negro is to be “absorbed, assimilated, and […] appear finally in the features of a blended race.” but there is an ambiguity in his response to douglass (and consequently, an ambiguity in his understanding of assimilation) that makes it clear that du bois is going beyond the debate between douglass and crummell over assimilation. recall that du bois was in favor of certain forms of assimilation. as noted, the assimilation he opposed was an assimilationism in the sense that often prevented differentiation and variation between people. in his essay “the ethics of assimilation,”27 eamonn callan discusses the difference between two strands of assimilation: voluntary assimilation and coercive assimilationism. he examines the ethics surrounding this debate over assimilation within the discourse of multiculturalism and the culture of diversity. callan understands assimilation as a person’s decision to leave the culture they are a part of and immerse themselves in another proximal culture. on this basis he defends the voluntary act of assimilating to another culture as ethically acceptable. voluntary assimilation claims that assimilation is not wrong because it is neither harmful to others or to the self. callan goes on to claim “black people do not have a duty to self-segregate, that self-segregation and assimilation pose no dilemma, and furthermore that compulsory racial segregation is unjust” (gines 1). by making the distinction between assimilation and complicity (in oppression) callan brings out the positive transcultural possibilities inherent in voluntary assimilation and presents it as an expected result of cultural proximity over time: a return to w.e.b. du bois’s “the conservation of races” 142 consider for a moment the widely used but little considered metaphor for what is sometimes the intended outcome of assimilationist policies: cultural genocide. the metaphor suggests that coercive assimilation is tantamount to cultural murder. fair enough. but is it also true that voluntary assimilation is an instance of cultural suicide? is assimilation a terrible thing, like death, regardless of the reasons it comes about? should we try to dissuade prospective assimilators as if they were would-be perpetrators of suicide? i would think that the answer to these questions is very obviously no, though the metaphor of cultural genocide might reasonably be taken to suggest otherwise. (callan 473) in her response to this essay kathryn gines argues in “the ambiguity of assimilation” that callan defends assimilation (voluntary) against assimilationism (coercive) “which occurs whenever a dominant social group appeals to the superiority of its culture as the license for its domination and seeks to entrench its power through the selective assimilation of outsiders” (472). gines’s interest in callan’s argument for voluntary assimilation pertains to “the ambiguity of assimilation, the relationship between race and culture (or racial assimilation and cultural assimilation), and finally the relationship between assimilation, assimilationism, and complicity” (gines 1). for these reasons she is particularly interested in his “distinction between people who regard race as something that ‘properly recedes’ with the end of racism and those who value race beyond strategies against racism and for whom ‘the imagined community is cherished in part as an end in itself, a source of belonging and direction in people’s lives whose value would persist beyond the end of racism’” (gines 2). callan contends that what counts as assimilation or not depends on the “self-styled insiders” which draw (and redraw) the boundaries around those imagined communities. in a world of “promiscuous culture mixing” it become untenable to maintain the argument or to read the ethics of assimilation as somehow in conflict with the social idea of diversity (callan 474). the idea of voluntary assimilation suggests a lot of agency, but the role of cultural insiders policing imaginary cultural borders poses a limit to such agency. but, as gines explains, this produces a false dichotomy between racial and interracial solidarity. as she explains, “he [callan] assumes that one would have to reject racial solidarity if one were in favor of interracial solidarity; however, the two forms of solidarity do not have to be mutually exclusive” (gines 2). those who enter a new culture may be as apt to diversify that culture as to passively 143 òké adjust to it. here callan asserts, “there is no conceptual gap between the supposed duty to avoid assimilation and a duty to avoid what cultural insiders take to be assimilation” (callan 481). the main duty du bois advocates is the negro’s duty to conserve race. but as du bois informs us the duty to conserve is not only a dilemma, it is a puzzle. i would like to argue through gines’s critique of callan that this ambiguity is found not only in the multiple uses of assimilation but more primordially in the very possibility of assimilation. stated differently, assimilation can only be a destiny for those beings who are able to have it as a possible free mode of being. the situation of the negro disallows their freedom and limits their possibilities. the destiny of the negro is not absorption because the situation of the negro is one who cannot escape their facticity in either direction—cannot escape to the freedom of originality and cannot escape the condemnation of imitation. neither assimilation nor transcendence are possibilities for the negro. the status of the negro is an inescapability from themselves: “the situation of our race in america renders this attitude [servile imitation or stalwart originality] impossible” (du bois, “conservation” 113). this section is primarily about that situation28—the precarious existential condition of the negro. every black person in america must confront the perils of this situation. du bois writes, no negro who has given earnest thought to the situation of his people in america has failed, at some time in life, to find himself at these cross-roads; has failed to ask himself at some time: what, after all, am i? am i an american or am i a negro? can i be both? or is it my duty to cease to be a negro as soon as possible and be an american? if i strive as a negro, am i not perpetuating the very cleft that threatens and separates black and white america? is not my only possible practical aim the subduction of all that is negro in me to the american? does my black blood place upon me anymore obligation to assert my nationality than german, or irish or italian blood would? (“conservation” 113) we have already heard callan’s answer to these questions—self-separation and assimilation are not duties. curiously enough, du bois does not provide an answer to these questions. instead he returns to the situation of the negro and recasts it as an “incessant self-questioning” and “hesitation” that renders the condition of the negro a sequence of “vacillation and contradiction.” to understand the negro is to understand their perpetual vacillations and contradictions, and to a return to w.e.b. du bois’s “the conservation of races” 144 understand them as an instantiation of an “incessant self-questioning.”29 the negro is an eternal question, the oldest question in history. and “the grappling with indeterminate questions is one of the inevitabilities of life” (moses 280). v. our duty to conserve in section ii of “conservation”—the scientific conception of race—du bois states that we must suspend the practical questions of “separate schools and cars, wage-discrimination and lynch law” in order to attend to the philosophical question of race. his hope is that the philosophical analysis of race, once treated, will “form our guiding lines and boundaries in the practical difficulties of everyday.” having outlined with “broad knowledge and careful insight” his philosophical response (i.e., the sociohistorical conception of race) to the race question he returns in section v of “conservation” to those practical questions he bracketed earlier. this section is marked by (1) a return to practical questions, (2) a definition of racism (race prejudice), (3) a defense of our “duty to conserve,” (4) an emphasis on the “ideals of life,” and (5) the final, but equally salient, guiding question in this address: “have we in america a distinct mission as a race—a distinct—or is selfobliteration the highest end to which negro blood dare aspire?” it begins at the point in the address where du bois asks this final question and ends right before his discussion of the american negro academy (“conservation” 115). this section begins with great intensity, as the frustration and anxiety of being a problem to others and being a question to oneself proves to be inescapable. the heavy exasperation that fills this point of the address is comparable to the burdened cry that hurtles from fanon as he weeps near the end of black skin, white masks. and out of that heaviness du bois asks a most piercing question: “have we in america a distinct mission as a race or is self-obliteration the highest end to which negro blood dare aspire?” the question du bois asks conjures “the destined superiority of a negro” (1877), an essay in which crummell enquires, “is this a race doomed to destruction? or is it one possessed of those qualities, and so morally disciplined by trial, as to augur a vital destiny, and high moral uses, in the future?” (bernasconi 526). bernasconi has speculated that du bois intends to juxtapose the threat of self-obliteration with his proposition to conserve race, and suggests that “conservation” was in fact a response to this final question (bernasconi refers to it as “the question to which “the conservation of races” was the answer” (520).30 i hesitate to accept this interpretation wholesale because it recasts “conservation” in the douglass-crummell debate 145 òké and, as i have argued, i see this essay capable of much more than a response to the question “to assimilate or not.” regardless, it is important to flesh out the implications of bernasconi’s reading for no other reason than to unpack the utility of “our duty conserve” as the focus of these final two divisions. furthermore, emphasizing “the threat of self-obliteration” concretizes du bois’s encouragement to “deprecate and minimize race distinctions” that begins “conservation” (recall that the threat of self-obliteration was introduced at the beginning of the address with du bois’s brief remarks on douglass and crummell). by “self-obliteration” du bois had in mind the after-effects of race mixing. recall that the first lines of the address begin with “intense personal interest in discussions as to the origins and destinies of races.” as i argued in section ii against moses, and in disagreement with bernasconi, du bois was more aligned with douglass than often claimed, and he bought into the idea that race mixing was a possible future for the negro race, but disagreed with the supposed implications of that line of thinking. however, and a point i agree with bernasconi on, the practical concerns made assimilation impossible. du bois was not a pure separatist and his inclusion of mulattoes into the negro race offered more than just a statement that they shared a similar condemnation. similar to how careful du bois is to write the negro into history, he takes equal care to include mulattoes in the “distinct mission of the negro race.” to include them would pose the eventuality of “lighten[ing] the race” or “weaken the race” and could quite easily draw a “wedge between mulattoes and “pure” negroes. however, du bois believed that a more dangerous annihilation of negroes was taking place, one more relentless and pervasive than the slow ascension to a blended race douglass conceived, and one more pernicious to the future history of humanity. because each race had a message to give and that message was for the uplifting of humanity, the obliteration of this message would effectually mean the demise of humanity. therefore, his answer to the question of self-obliteration in the form of the conservation of races spoke to the legality and political atmosphere that suffocated the negro and mulatto alike. it is that they possess protections under the laws that separates white america from black america. as americans, blacks share the same ideals as their white national counterparts but as blacks they do not share the same laws. this is why he returns to the “pressing practical questions.” as he explained, “if there was any statistical evidence suggesting the possible extinction of the negro in america then it was because of the policies being directed against them” (bernasconi 534). the connection between amalgamation a return to w.e.b. du bois’s “the conservation of races” 146 and obliteration could not be understood if we began arbitrarily from the middle of the address, that is, from his definition of race. as noted briefly in section iv, du bois abstains from using the language of “racial purity” to undergird his intervention. when he writes about the negro’s situation in america he selects the language of racial identity and race pride to capture what sustains this group, refusing to engage with the politics of purity. what is most curious about the politics of purity is that it relies more so on the ever-tightening enclosure around the category “black” as it does on the policing and protection of the category “white.” bernasconi reminds us that although “[e]xisting races were defined by their purity […] what was important in the united states was the exclusion of a significant black component” (522). the assimilation debate occludes the root of selfobliteration—the exclusion of blacks—the effects of which play out once the practical concerns are illuminated.31 “our duty to conserve” gestures towards the triviality of assimilationism mainly because, as argued in section iv, assimilation, as douglass and crummell conceived it, was impossible for the negro. it is useless to debate an impossibility; what requires attention are those matters that are actual, pressing, and occurring. racial purity too was an issue that was transpiring, active because it was “not so much inherited as it was a goal to be achieved” (bernasconi 522) and this most pressing concern was enforced by the social program of jim crow and evidenced in the diminishing social status of blacks. so the matter of racial purity differed in kind from assimilationism, and it is the politics of purity that du bois had to contend with. du bois utilized ideas that stem from the politics of purity without the eugenic undertones and the plans to breed out difference they require. appiah is correct to point out (in lines of descent) du bois’s “need for partiality and the value of difference with the recognition of the value of encounter across identities” (“ethics” 33). by “focusing on the ‘ideals of life’ as the primary agents of history he sought to draw attention away from the conviction that racial purity was the main power in history” (bernasconi 523). there was a more powerful historical catalyst—ideology. the conception of racial identity that du bois argued for conserving was based on the racial ideas one might conceive that served to both capture the ideals of life and propel that life into the future. du bois boldly declared, “tomorrow would be black!” (“conservation” 114). pushing back against miles who argues that du bois was primarily concerned with “rewriting historiography” i contend that du bois’s theory of racial identity was forward looking. like an archer who must pull her arrow backwards in order to launch it expansively into the eternal future, du bois looked 147 òké backwards but was directed to the future. because the negro belonged to the future it was not up to du bois to stipulate the content of this unknown future—the negro message and the negro ideals—but to announce it, to address the future as “the conservation of races.” but as i note in my discussion of section i, the future he predicted accomplished two things: (1) to “uplift the race to higher planes of thought and action” and (2) to prescribe a plan for the “growth and development of the negro along right lines, and the vindication of that race against vicious assaults” and it was up to the individual and the community (through race organizations, racial politics, etc.) to usher in that future to come. for du bois the onus of the present is to conserve racial identity. the future of this greater negro community rests in its ability to retain its identity. this identity is lost when it becomes indistinguishable from the identity of other races. it is within this fear of what the future might become that du bois emphatically calls for “our duty to conserve”: it is our duty to conserve our physical powers, our intellectual endowments, our spiritual ideals; as a race we must strive by race organization, by race solidarity, by race unity to the realization of that broader humanity which freely recognizes differences in men, but sternly deprecates inequality in their opportunities of development. for the accomplishment of these ends we need race organizations: negro colleges, negro newspapers, negro business organizations, a negro school of literature and art, and an intellectual clearing house, for all these products of the negro mind, which we may call a negro academy. not only is all this necessary for positive advance, it is absolutely imperative for negative defense. let us not deceive ourselves at our situation in this country. weighted with a heritage of moral iniquity from our past history, hard pressed in the economic world by foreign immigrants and native prejudice, hated here, despised there and pitied everywhere; our one haven of refuge is ourselves, and but one means of advance, our own belief in our great destiny, our own implicit trust in our ability and worth. there is no power under god’s high heaven that can stop the advance of eight thousand thousand honest, earnest, inspired and united people. (“conservation” 114) a return to w.e.b. du bois’s “the conservation of races” 148 referring to this passage in “conservation,” bernasconi points out that “on the one occasion when he used the term conserve in the main body of the essay, he referenced not only physical powers but also intellectual endowments and spiritual ideals” (522). he concludes that to “conserve a race was to conserve all three together” (522).32 this is why his return to practical questions, his mention of racial prejudice (what we now understand as racism), his reification of the “ideals of life” seem to interpenetrate the justification for black existence. but as we must incessantly remember, this justification not only serves the negro spirit, it serves all humanity. in other words, we should collectively accept as a common ideal the preservation of the negro. this is why the existential drama is so essential to “our duty to conserve”—it makes us conscious of the necessity of black life as coextensive with the consciousness of our shared humanity. put in its purest vulgarity, black existence is the justification for our conception of human dignity. halfway through this section du bois rehashes the existential puzzle he introduced in section iv, but this time he employs more definitive terms: we are americans, not only by birth and by citizenship, but by our political ideals, our language, our religion. farther than that, our americanism does not go. at that point, we are negroes, members of a vast historic race that from the very dawn of creation has slept, but half awakening in the dark forests of its african fatherland. we are the first fruits of this new nation, the harbinger of that black to-morrow which is yet destined to soften the whiteness of the teutonic to-day. we are that people whose subtle sense of song has given america its only american music, its only american fairy tales, its only touch of pathos and humor amid its mad moneygetting plutocracy. (“conservation” 114) du bois subordinates nationalism and reifies racial groups. he claims that it is by being negro that we are american, so the order of priority and the order of socialization does not begin with a national identity but with a racial identity. and it is at the end of this declaration that he triumphantly states, as such, it is our duty to conserve our physical powers, our intellectual endowments, our spiritual ideals; as a race we must strive by race organization, by 149 òké race solidarity, by race unity to the realization of that broader humanity which freely recognizes differences in men, but sternly deprecates inequality in their opportunities of development. (“conservation” 114) we can now understand what du bois meant when he said that we “deprecate and minimize our race distinctions.” he did not mean an abandonment of racial identity towards a radical humanism. rather, he intended to deprecate the inequality that disallows the negro race from opportunities because of their phenotypic features. “race could be minimized or it could be emphasized” but du bois saw a “need to emphasize it because until they had fulfilled their mission as a race, african americans would be unable to assert their equality from a position of strength” (bernasconi 523). more than this, as has been the trend throughout the entire address, this duty is necessary for all of humanity. the practical concerns place humanity in jeopardy. the negro’s ability to define what it means to be american is comparable to their contribution to the “broader humanity which freely recognizes differences in men.” if americans are able to engage in a healthy politics of difference they will become active contributors to humanity. otherwise their nationalism is both stifling and insular. du bois ends section v with an interesting turn: the underside of black life. he writes: there is no power under god’s high heaven that can stop the advance of eight thousand thousand honest, earnest, inspired and united people. but—and here is the rub—they must be honest, fearlessly criticizing their own faults, zealously correcting them; they must be earnest. no people that laughs at itself, and ridicules itself, and wishes to god it was anything but itself ever wrote its name in history; it must be inspired with the divine faith of our black mothers, that out of the blood and dust of battle will march a victorious host, a mighty nation, a peculiar people, to speak to the nations of earth a divine truth that shall make them free. and such a people must be united; not merely united for the organized theft of political spoils, not united to disgrace religion with whoremongers and ward-heelers; not united merely to protest and pass resolutions, but united to stop the ravages of consumption among the negro people, united to keep black boys from loafing, gambling and crime; united to guard the purity of black women and to reduce the a return to w.e.b. du bois’s “the conservation of races” 150 vast army of black prostitutes that is today marching to hell; and united in serious organizations, to determine by careful conference and thoughtful interchange of opinion the broad lines of policy and action for the american negro. (“conservation” 114) noting the filiopietism in du bois’s relationship to crummell, william j. moses posits that “racial awareness was not the only concern of this paper [“conservation”]” but that du bois used this medium to articulate “strict puritanical values” as “the first and greatest step toward the settlement of the present friction between races—commonly called the negro problem—lies in the correction of the immorality, crime and laziness among the negroes themselves, which still remains as a heritage from slavery” (moses 282). indolence, self-ridicule, sexual immorality and other perversions were seen as impediments to vitality and needed to be eradicated in order for the negro race to be viable. it is in the final words of this section and in the next that we get the judgmental, moralizing tone of du bois’s black leadership ideology, and, eventually, an insistence on the need for black organizations like the american negro academy and the talented tenth. the insistence that the negro’s “particular message, its particular ideal, which would help to guide the world nearer to that perfection of human life for which we all long, that ‘one far off divine event’” was immersed in the “rhetoric of christian idealism and theological racism” (moses 285) that renders his statements in “conservation” inseparable from his christian beliefs. lastly, our duty to conserve serves as the meeting ground for morality and vitality. this is why appiah’s disregard of the spiritual undertones in “conservation” leads him to miss the thrust of du bois’s argument.33 vi. the american negro academy “conservation” was presented at the inaugural meeting of the american negro academy. in the final section of this address (from “the reason of being which the american negro academy has” to the final lines of “conservation”) du bois defines the purpose and activity of the academy as he understands it. and in this section he proposes a seven-point academy creed. 1. we believe that the negro people, as a race, have a contribution to make to civilization and humanity, which no other race can make. 2. we believe it the duty of the americans of negro descent, as a body, to maintain 151 òké their race identity until this mission of the negro people is accomplished, and the ideal of human brotherhood has become a practical possibility. 3. we believe that, unless modern civilization is a failure, it is entirely feasible and practicable for two races in such essential political, economic and religious harmony as the white and colored people in america, to develop side by side in peace and mutual happiness, the peculiar contribution which each has to make to the culture of their common country. 4. as a means to this end we advocate, not such social equality between these races as would disregard human likes and dislikes, but such a social equilibrium as would, throughout all the complicated relations of life, give due and just consideration to culture, ability, and moral worth, whether they be found under white or black skins. 5. we believe that the first and greatest step toward the settlement of the present friction between the races—commonly called the negro problem—lies in the correction of the immorality, crime and laziness among the negroes themselves, which still remains as a heritage from slavery. we believe that only earnest and long continued efforts on our own part can cure these social ills.  6. we believe that the second great step toward a better adjustment of the relations between races, should be a more impartial selection of ability in the economic and intellectual world, and a greater respect for personal liberty and worth, regardless of race. we believe that only earnest efforts on the part of the white people of this country will bring much needed reform in these matters. 7. on the basis of the foregoing declaration, and firmly believing in our high destiny, we, as american negroes, are resolved to strive in every honorable way for the realization of the best and highest aims, for the development of strong manhood and pure womanhood, and for the rearing of a race ideal in america and africa, to the glory of god and the uplifting of the negro people. (“conservation” 116–117) moses describes the academy creed as “a practical illustration of the ‘idealistic’ belief that race problems could be greatly ameliorated by intellectual activity” and the belief that “the burden of a return to w.e.b. du bois’s “the conservation of races” 152 reform must be carried out by black people working through black institutions” (moses 285). rather than focus on du bois’s credo, an examination that usually overshadows most discussions of section vi, i want to highlight two characteristics of the american negro academy that du bois emphasizes in this section. the first pertains to how the reason for being of the american negro academy is related to yet distinguished from the reason for being of the negro. the second concerns the implications of du bois’s collectivist project that some have interpreted as a radical humanism. to begin with, du bois ascertains that the reason for the formation of the american negro academy was to “determine by careful conference and thoughtful interchange of opinion the broad lines of policy and action for the american negro.” and he identifies the reason that the negro exists is to deliver a distinct message that will uplift humanity. accordingly, when we combine these aims we get the personal and collective goals of life. our collective pursuits should aim to impart “the best thought, the most unselfish strivings, and the highest ideals”; they should be honest, earnest, inspiring and able to unite people towards a divine truth, and should exalt people “by truth—not by lies, by honesty—not by flattery”; they should reform as they transform and should establish laws that express ecumenical standards of policy and right (“conservation” 115). our personal pursuits should articulate ideals of life that place us in proper communion with humanity. they should celebrate the wonderful possibilities of our cultural backgrounds, differences and experiences, fully subjective and unmarred by any badges of insult and discrimination, and they must be rooted in history, our current situation and our hope for the future. the most striking aspect this is that, opposed to the existential drama detailed in section iv, we do not get the image of two warring ideals in one body but compatible political agendas and strategies. though they remain at war their friction is neither problematic nor odd. rather it is productive and necessary. by the end of “conservation” we find that the collective and the subjective have been reconciled. if it is true that the “duty to conserve race was not for all time” (bernasconi 523) then how can i possibly justify the claims just iterated? apparently, “maintaining their race identity was imposed on african americans primarily because of the need to organize in the face of racism and oppression” but it was also “attached to the herderian idea that each people has a mission to fulfill for the sake of humanity as a whole” (bernasconi 523). and if maintaining racial identity was a requirement only for the time being, then like a message once delivered, racial identity would soon 153 òké be inutile. even the american negro academy was included in this impending expiration date. if these statements are true then it is imperative that we end this examination of “conservation” with an inquiry into the purpose of this final section that legitimizes the academy. other than presenting at the inaugural meeting, why did du bois use this occasion to stipulate the american creed when his address would have been complete without this addition and these remarks did not exactly fit into his assigned topic? in other words, why the need for the american negro academy? why use this occasion to defend the existence of this body of intellectuals? i alluded to an answer in my discussion of the first characteristic of the american negro academy above. i contend that this discussion of the academy and adumbration of its credo provides insight into du bois’s collectivism. to be sure, this is not appiah’s cosmopolitanism. du bois’s collectivism is a form of political grassroots organizing that provides us with the type of ingenious interventions to ensure that each individual and racial group can give the full and complete message of their genius, complementing the individualistic portrait necessary to progress human life. the condemning tones he uses to describe (the underside of) black life is extrinsically linked to his desire to transform blacks. this theme hangs over “conservation”; it is the exhortation that whispers quietly after every word in this address, beginning from the first and concluding with the last. moses describes du bois’s desire to rehabilitate the negro, to present a positive account of negro being and identity, and to rewrite the negro back into the story of humanity as an obsession: “du bois, crummell, frances e. w. harper, and numerous other black men and women were just as obsessed as washington was with puritanism as a panacea for the cultural reform of the black masses” (moses 288) and “like crummell, he [du bois] believed that the burden of reform must be carried out by black people working through black institutions” (moses 285). the point here is this: transformation does not occur at the individual level but at the collective level. the individual has an important part to play but they do not and cannot move history. du bois is clear that the academy, as an organizing structure, should devote itself to reformation and transformation, making it the paragon for what collective humanism should aspire. a return to w.e.b. du bois’s “the conservation of races” 154 notes 1. du bois entitled his preface to the souls of black folk his “forethought.” following this du boisian gesture i refer to my reading of his famous address to the american negro academy as my forethought because, like souls, this critical reanalysis of “the conservation of races” is the beginning of my first extended discussion of du bois’s theory of race and racial identity. 2. this article is developed from a paper presented at the panel “what can w.e.b. du bois teach us about contemporary controversies?” at villanova university on november 19, 2018, organized by the villanova center for liberal education. 3. i cite quotations from the version printed in the american negro academy occasional papers archived by project gutenberg as “gutenberg” in my text. quotations from the version printed in the idea of race i cite as “conservation.” 4. robert bernasconi has argued that du bois thought the academy should be inclusive but that he charged the talented tenth as a larger group with this responsibility to uplift the negro race as a whole. see bernasconi ff. 10. 5. this goes against the interpretation lucius outlaw details in his famous retort to appiah. in “‘conserve’ races? in defense of w.e.b. du bois,” outlaw argues that du bois’s project is fundamentally political, and supports this by emphasizing du bois’s references to justice. he contends that du bois’s statement that the “history of the world is not about nations but of races” alludes to a rewriting of history that “prescribe[ed] norms for the social reconstruction of personal and social identities and for self-appropriation by a people suffering racialized subordination, which norms were to aid in mobilizing and guiding members of the race in their efforts to realize emancipatory social transformation leading, ultimately, to a flourishing humanism” (28). i am inclined to see the political undertones in the way outlaw details but am also mindful of the ethical overtones—the mention of spirituality, the allusions to responsibility, and the emphasis on the negro’s reason for being. i think it is more fruitful to consider the interfolding of the ethical and the political, than to read du bois linearly as a political theorist. 155 òké 6. we should follow the instruction of robert bernasconi who encourages us to “restore his lecture to its historical context […] less than one year after the u.s. supreme court had handed down its decision in plessy v. ferguson” in order to understand “that certain social darwinists had recently pressed the issue of the survival of the negro race […] and it was against them, as well as frederick douglass’s pursuit of assimilation through amalgamation, that du bois wrote his essay” (bernasconi 519, 520). 7. kwame anthony appiah takes this idea a bit further in his arguments calling for racial eliminativism. continuing the project of “deprecating and minimizing” differences he argues in “the uncompleted argument” not only for the disappearance of the black race, but because the concept presents a vast array of inconsistences, the disappearance of race altogether. it is only in his essay contribution to color conscious that he tempers his stance and advocates for a racial identity without races. even still this is as pernicious as social darwinism and racial absorption. 8. du bois states that “in our calmer moments, [negroes] must acknowledge that human beings are divided into races; that in this country the two most extreme types of the world’s races have met, and the resulting problem as to the future relations of these types is not only of intense and living interest to us, but forms an epoch in the history of mankind” (“conservation” 84). 9. in “the race-problem in america,” alexander crummell states that the intermixture of blood is taken by some “as the indication of ultimate and entire amalgamation. but the past in this incident is no sign of the future. the gross and violent intermingling of the southern white man cannot be taken as an index of the future of the black race” (45). 10. “amalgamation in its exact sense means the approach of affinities. the word applied to human beings implies will, and the consent of two parties. in this sense there has been no amalgamation of the two races; for the negro in this land has ever been the truest of men, in marital allegiance, to his own race. intermixture of blood there has been—not by the amalgamation, which implies consent, but through the victimizing of the helpless black woman” (crummell 45). a return to w.e.b. du bois’s “the conservation of races” 156 11. this claim would seem to be in conflict with his second proposition in the american negro creed where he writes, “it is the duty of the americans of negro descent, as a body, to maintain their race identity until this mission of the negro people is accomplished, and the ideal of human brotherhood has become a practical possibility” (“conservation” 117). his writings towards the end of his life intimated his pessimism about a near future where race and racial identities were no longer necessary. some readers of du bois, like appiah, have suggested that the futility of this project is what prompted his emigration to ghana. the issue of du bois’s call for radical humanism as an end to racial identity is a related issue that i do not have the ability to explore in this current project. 12. “[t]he advance guard of the negro people—the 8,000,000 people of negro blood in the united states of america—must soon come to realize that if they are to take their just place in the van of pan-negroism, then their destiny is not absorption by the white americans. that if in america it is to be proven for the first time in the modern world that not only negroes are capable of evolving individual men like toussaint, the savior, but are a nation stored with wonderful possibilities of culture, then their destiny is not a servile imitation of anglo-saxon culture, but a stalwart originality which shall unswervingly follow negro ideals” (du bois, “conservation” 112). 13. wilson j. moses tells us that weeks after the inaugural meeting t. thomas fortune and richard t. greener criticized the academy as being “hostile to mulattoes and that crummell was determined to keep them out.” even though he states that crummell denied the charges and pointed to du bois’s address as “an excellent defense of the principle of racial conservation” moses, in his defense of his claim concerning du bois’s hero worship of crummell, suggests that du bois intentionally took on the issue of mulattoes in his address to provide crummell with a counterargument to such claims, even though du bois knew crummell was in fact suspicious of mulattoes (moses 286). 14. “conservation” asks seven questions in total. it is important to add that he rounds these questions with a list of questions pertaining to the “pressing, but smaller questions” he stated we should rise above. by doing this he attended to the philosophical questions before attending to the practical questions. 157 òké 15. as i have mentioned before, this is one of the most perplexing aspects of “the uncompleted argument.” it both stimulates my critique of appiah’s essay as well as my growing suspicion of its sequel, lines of descent: w.e.b. du bois and the emergence of identity. 16. beginning with the first full paragraph on page 108 (the paragraph beginning, “although the wonderful developments of human history”) there is a shift in emphasis from a detailing of the biological assumptions of race to a concern with history and a presentation of the sociohistorical account of race. i argue that du bois’s definition of race contains both the scientific and sociohistorical beliefs about processes of racialization and necessarily does so in order to capture the “two warring ideals in one body.” this is why appiah does not think du bois has transcended the scientific conception of race because he thinks it has been subsumed in the sociohistorical definition of race. 17. it is important to note that appiah hears these concerns in a transcendent way. for appiah collective concerns are the only ones that are important, hence, why he follows up with cosmopolitanism. 18. appiah, in his 2004/2005 address to the w.e.b. du bois lecture series held at humboldt university, he writes, “the three races—black, white and yellow—are replaced once we take this historical view, by eight groups of which only one, the english, is uncontroversially a nation (even though du bois then, more controversially, takes it to be spread over two continents.” (“ethics in a world of strangers” 26). 19. robert bernasconi has argued that du bois’s definition of race was far from original simply because there was no need for him to defend a radical definition as the concept of race was not being “seriously contested.” he also argues that his use of eight main races “was actually not such an unusual concept at that time” (521–522). 20. it is important to note alternative interpretations of du bois’s relationship to hegel. see bernasconi. 21. levinas makes the distinction between the struggle for survival and a reason for being in his essay “on escape” and in existence and existents where he critiques traditional a return to w.e.b. du bois’s “the conservation of races” 158 western philosophy for their obsession with survival without attending to the reason why certain beings exist (while others do not). western philosophy forgets that there is purposiveness (in a non-darwinistic way emphasizing survival) in the very fact of being. he writes that traditionally philosophers have devised elaborate plans of escape—to escape being, to escape death, etc.—but fail to address how we are riveted to being; they cannot deal with the condemnation that being is. i take du bois’s emphasis on a reason for being to be making a similar claim. 22. this question is a variation of a question crummell asked in his essay “the race-problem in america.” du bois was influenced by crummell and many of his comments in “the conservation of races” can be traced to similar remarks made by crummell. the question was, “has a new race, the produce of our diverse elements, sprung up here in america?” (crummell 45–46; see also bernasconi 113). 23. by “greater negro community” i mean the inclusive notion of negro that includes all those with even the least amount of negro blood that the society included as representative of the negro. 24. the one drop rule: this rule stated that a person with as little as one drop of negroid blood in their genotype was to be considered a negro. 25. frederick douglass: “it is only prejudice against the negro which calls everyone, however nearly connected with the white race, and however remotely connected with the negro race, a negro. the motive is not a desire to elevate the negro, but to humiliate and degrade those of mixed blood; not a desire to bring the negro up, but to cast the mulatto and the quadroon down by forcing him below an arbitrary and hated color line” (46). 26. it is not a coincidence that this phrase, found in du bois’s address, also heads the fifth chapter of fanon’s black skin, white masks where he discusses negro identity and where a majority of the material for this current essay draws from. 27. for similar defenses of assimilation see also bernard r. boxill’s blacks and social justice (lanham, md: rowman and littlefield 1984, 1992) and tommie shelby’s we who are 159 òké dark: the philosophical foundations of black solidarity (cambridge, ma: belknap/harvard university press, 2007). 28. the word “situation” appears only four times in “conservation,” and two of those times are in this section. the other two mentions of this term are noteworthy. in the first he reminds us “not to deceive ourselves at our situation in this country” (“conservation” 114), which he begins to pull together the descriptions he has recounted throughout the address, and in the second he condemns the academy to an “immediate work” that must have practical and direct “bearing on the situation of the negro” (“conservation” 116). 29. see also outlaw 30, wherein he provides the same reading of this paragraph. 30. it is unclear whether bernasconi meant quite literally that du bois answered the question, “have we in america a distinct mission as a race […] or is self-obliteration the highest end to which negro blood dare aspire” as a phrase or with an extended argument. in other words, whether he literally retorted with the phrase “the conservation of races” as to imply that our distinct mission as a race was to conserve races, or whether his entire address was his longwinded response and “our duty to conserve” was a mere catchphrase in a larger argument. more than likely bernasconi meant the latter as he implies throughout this essay that the address was framed “with reference to this dichotomy.” my goal in this section is to explore the significance of this phrasing within the larger context of his address and to provide a reading that supports as expressed following the validity of the former option (i.e., “the conservation of races” as a mission statement). it is only by executing this hypothetical that we see the impact of the words “our duty to conserve” reflecting a weighted emphasis on the title of this address. 31. see lucius outlaw’s “w.e.b. du bois on the study of the social problems,” annals of the american academy of political and social science 568, the study of african american problems: w.e.b. du bois’s agenda, then and now (march 2000): 281–297. 32. bernasconi aptly describes each element: “by physical powers, du bois meant above all the virility necessary to perpetuate the race; by intellectual endowments, he meant the fits a race inherits; and by referring to spiritual ideals, he meant to open the race to hop in a possible future, the thought of which would sustain it in unpropitious times” (bernasconi a return to w.e.b. du bois’s “the conservation of races” 160 534). 33. appiah writes in “the uncompleted argument,” “we do not need the theological underpinnings of this argument. what is essential is the thought that through common action negroes can achieve, by virtue of their sociohistorical community, worthwhile ends which will not otherwise be achieved” (25). works cited appiah, kwame anthony. “ethics in a world of strangers: w.e.b. du bois and the spirit of cosmopolitanism.” in justice, governance, cosmopolitanism, and the politics of difference: recofigurations in a transnational world. eds. günter h. lenz and antje dallmann. berlin: humboldt, 2007. http://edoc.hu-berlin.de/humboldt-vl/152/all/pdf/ 152.pdf _____. lines of descent: w.e.b. du bois and the emergence of identity. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2014. _____. “the uncompleted argument: du bois and the illusion of race.” critical inquiry 12.1: “race,” writing, and difference (autumn 1985): 21–37. bernasconi, robert. “‘our duty to conserve’: w.e.b. du bois’s philosophy of history in context.” south atlantic quarterly 108:3 (summer 2009): 519–540. callan, eamonn. “the ethics of assimilation.” ethics 115.3 (2005): 471–500. chandler, nahum d. “the figure of du bois as a problem of thought.” cr: the new centennial review 6.3 (winter 2006): 29–55. crummell, alexander. “the race-problem in america.” africa and america: addresses and discourses. springfield, ma: willey & co, 1891. 37–58. http://edoc.hu-berlin.de/humboldt-vl/152/all/pdf/%20152.pdf http://edoc.hu-berlin.de/humboldt-vl/152/all/pdf/%20152.pdf 161 òké douglass, frederick. “the future of the colored race.” in race, hybridity and miscegenation. eds. robert bernasconi and kristie dotson. vol. 2: the miscegenation debate. bristol, uk: thoemmes, 2005. 44–48. du bois, w.e.b. “the conservation of races.” the american negro academy occasional papers no. 2. washington, dc: baptist magazine print: 1897. project gutenberg. http://www.gutenberg.org/ files/31254/31254-h/31254-h.htm _____. “the conservation of races.” in the idea of race. eds. robert bernasconi and tommy l. lott. indianapolis, in: hackett, 2000. 108–117. _____. dusk of dawn: an essay toward an autobiography of a race concept. oxford: oxford university press, 2007. _____. the souls of black folk. new york: simon and schuster, 2005. gines, kathryn. “the ambiguity of assimilation: commentary on eamonn callan’s ‘the ethics of assimilation.’” symposia on gender, race and philosophy 2.2 (may 2006): 1–6. holt, thomas c. “marking: race, race-making and the writing of history.” the american historical review 100.1 (feb 1995): 1–20. miles, kevin thomas. “‘one far off divine event’: ‘race’ and a future history in du bois.” in race and racism in continental philosophy. eds. robert bernasconi with sybol cook. bloomington, in: indiana university press, 2003. 19–31. moses, wilson j. “w.e.b. du bois’s ‘the conservation of races’ and its context: idealism, conservatism and hero worship.” the massachusetts review 34.2 (summer 1993): 275– 294. outlaw, lucius. “‘conserve’ races? in defense of w.e.b. du bois.” in w.e.b. du bois on race and culture. eds. bernard w. bell, emily grosholz, and james b. stewart. new york: routledge, 1997. 15–38. http://www.gutenberg.org/%20files/31254/31254-h/31254-h.htm microsoft word lambelet print [expositions 13.2 (2019) 76–93] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 nonviolence as a tradition of moral praxis kyle b. t. lambelet emory university the just war tradition, never formally declared as doctrine by the magisterium, has a venerable place in catholic social thought.1 though various other streams have animated the church’s teaching on war and peace at different points of history—pacifism and holy war are the two alternatives most often identified—just war has taken a historic place of privilege. it has achieved this place of privilege through its development over time. it has ancient roots in the writings of aristotle and cicero, but was taken up first by christians with st. ambrose and st. augustine and codified and developed significantly by st. thomas aquinas and the school of salamanca, especially francisco de vitoria and francisco de suarez. contemporary catholic social teaching has reaffirmed repeatedly the principles of just war, even as the magisterium has demonstrated an ever-increasing concern about the capacity of war to attain the approbation “just.” though contemporary just war theory is commonly regarded as a set of principles—criteria governing whether war can be licitly engaged in (jus ad bellum) and the conduct of war itself (jus in bello)— it is best understood as a tradition that draws on a long genealogy of argumentation about the possibilities and limits of pursuing justice and peace through war and violence. charitably, the just war tradition has remained a significant part of catholic social teaching for two reasons. first, and in continuity with its earliest elaborations, just war promises to provide a way of faithfully enacting christ’s command to love our neighbors as ourselves, which has a special relevance to the neighbors among us who are uniquely susceptible to violent domination: the widow, the orphan, and the poor. just war remains a part of catholic social teaching because it allows us to demonstrate our love of neighbor by protecting the innocent from unjust harm by all the means at our disposal, including the use of violent force.2 second, and somewhat more contentiously, just war remains part of catholic social teaching because it promises, along with human rights discourse, to provide a universal lingua franca for speaking in a pluralistic world. even while states might not be expected to take up the “counsel of perfection” to christian nonviolence, so the thinking goes, they may be held to limits set by a series of principles rooted in 77 lambelet natural law. advocates of just war hope that their appeals to the tradition can serve as a check on war-making states, whether they agree with the underlying theological commitments of catholic social teaching or not. the first reason remains, in my judgment, one of the most compelling justifications for considering the ongoing relevance of the just war tradition.3 the second reason, however, surfaces a problem: no such lingua franca currently exists. the vision of an overlapping consensus free of comprehensive visions turned out to be a mirage. while we may work for multi-perspectival moral frameworks that acknowledge points of consensus amidst enduring difference, as well as syncretistic traditions that borrow from and support plural positions, there is no epistemic “view from nowhere” from which to ground normative claims. to be clear, the magisterium has never been seduced by this vision. however, i do think that it is plausible to argue that the catholic appeal to just war and human rights, which are tied together both genealogically and conceptually, is motivated by its promise as a moral language that can speak across contexts and commitments.4 but, if anything is clear in our current age, it is that there is no a moral esperanto that can seamlessly speak between cultures and contexts with equal obligatory weight. rather, as many have argued across the theological, philosophical, and political spectrum, what we are left with are traditions of reasoned inquiry. just war is one such tradition of reasoned inquiry that has enjoyed a long and prominent place in the moral evaluation of war by catholics, as well as by many others. as sometimes happens with venerable traditions, however, the just war tradition has reached a point of crisis.5 in the following, i engage this crisis not by enumerating or developing the list of the deficiencies of the just war tradition. moreover, in this essay i do not aim to displace the just war tradition as the preferred catholic moral theory for thinking through questions of war and peace. such an aim, in my view, is laudable. however, this essay has a more modest goal. in this essay i engage the crisis of the just war tradition by exploring an alternative tradition of the ethics of war and peace, that of nonviolence. in the following, i demonstrate that nonviolence is, similar to the just war tradition, best understood as a tradition of moral praxis. just as the just war tradition should not be reduced to its criteria, neither should the tradition of nonviolence be reduced to a simplistic personal decision about whether or not to use violence. rather, as a tradition of moral praxis, nonviolence draws upon venerable precedents and exemplars; it gathers around common presumptions about what it means to be human, what are the attributes of a good life, and how to nonviolence as a tradition of moral praxis 78 organize our common life; it performs dispositions and improvises repertoires of political action; and in these ways it holds an argument extended across time. nonviolence is an internally plural tradition (it is the tradition of mahatma gandhi and martin luther king, dorothy day and gene sharp), but one in which catholics will find faithful exemplars to follow. in fact, it is the pluralism of this tradition that turns out to be its strength and may, i suggest, provide good reasons for catholics to adopt it more fulsomely. the argument proceeds in three steps. first, i explain more fully what i mean by tradition by engaging the work of moral philosopher alasdair macintyre, social theorist pierre bourdieu, and theologian kathryn tanner. second, i apply this definitional work by explicating nonviolence as a tradition of moral praxis. third, i conclude by considering the current status of the tradition of nonviolence in catholic social teaching and gesturing toward its preferability to other alternatives. what is a tradition? none have argued more perspicaciously for the foundational indispensability of traditions for the possibility of reasoned inquiry than moral philosopher alasdair macintyre. across several significant texts, macintyre not only reconstructs an aristotelian-thomist tradition, but makes a forceful case against the relativist emotivism and fragmentary moral discourse that typifies our contemporary age.6 it is only within traditioned modes of inquiry, macintyre has argued, that we have the epistemic foundations from which to judge what is true, good, and beautiful. famously, macintyre defined a tradition as an “argument extended through time.” rather than a static point of agreement, macintyre defines tradition discursively, as an argument. he expands this definition to state that a tradition is an argument in which certain fundamental agreements are defined and redefined in terms of two kinds of conflict: those with critics and enemies external to the tradition who reject all or at least key parts of those fundamental agreements, and those internal, interpretative debates through which the meaning and rationale of the fundamental agreements come to be expressed and by whose progress a tradition is constituted.7 through the process of discourse, of argument, traditions identify points of agreement and from the foundation of those points engage others both internal and external to the tradition. it will be 79 lambelet immediately apparent to students of just war that the criteria we now inherit are the product of this type of process. the principles of jus ad bellum and jus in bello did not arrive fully developed. rather, they progressed over time through arguments with both allies and enemies. under such a definition, traditions are not static, but are constantly responding to novel problems. “at any point it may happen to any tradition-constituted enquiry that by its own standards of progress it ceases to make progress.”8 when the previous answers fail to respond to novel problems, macintyre argues, we encounter an “epistemological crisis.” in the case of the just war tradition, we could interpret recent developments of jus post bellum and jus ante bellum as either evidence of the ongoing relevance of the tradition, or of its incapacity to respond to our increasing awareness of the ongoing and cyclical nature of violence in plagued communities. in similar fashion, the turn to “just peace” can be celebrated as either a development or displacement of just war thinking. these shifts attempt to respond to the changing nature of war. “new wars,” according to political scientist mary kaldor, are waged against the cosmopolitan aspirations of the emergent world order: rooted in sectarian politics of identity, utilizing the tactics of terror, and financed by a globalized, black market war economy.9 new wars are not the great wars of sovereign states, but are local, intra-state skirmishes that ebb and flow on cycles of non-state violence. the development of these new frameworks to respond to novel situations are the symptoms of the crisis, not the underlying problem. diagnosed by macintyre, epistemic crises emerge when a tradition can no longer answer the novel questions that emerge and rational progress ceases. it may indeed happen that the use of the methods of enquiry and of the forms of argument, by means of which rational progress had been achieved so far, begins to have the effect of increasingly disclosing new inadequacies, hitherto unrecognized incoherences, and new problems for the solution of which there seem to be insufficient or no resources within the established fabric of belief.10 it is my contention, though i can only gesture and not fully argue given the constraints of space, that the just war tradition is in such a moment of epistemic crisis. the deep sources for this crisis are twofold. first, and most immediately present to catholic social teaching, are fundamental changes in the social production of war: technological, economic, nonviolence as a tradition of moral praxis 80 and political changes. what we mean by war changed not only in quality but in kind following the advent of nuclear weapons. even short of the use of nuclear weapons, war today with fighter jets, tanks, aerial bombardments, drones, and more is simply a different social performance than battles with spears, swords, and shields (the technologies in use at the advent of just war theory). moreover, war today is transformed not only technologically but economically, involving vast chains of capital. the cost of war project at brown university estimates that the total costs of the u.s. wars in iraq, afghanistan, and pakistan at $6.4 trillion.11 war making is connected not only to political decisions, but to networks of manufacturing, production, and sales that are invested, quite literally, in ensuring the use of their merchandise. beyond the licit market in weapons, there is a vast underground economy of criminal networks that, as kaldor argues, funds non-state actors in their violence. and, finally, in addition to these technological and economic changes, the geopolitics of war are significantly different in contemporary practice. as kaldor has argued and research projects like the uppsala conflict data program have shown, wars are increasingly fought with and between non-state actors. there are continuities to be sure: the enduring patterns of ethnic and national chauvinism, the noble warrior culture that valorizes violence, and the ever-present temptation to callous disregard of the human dignity of the enemy. still, the changes in the social production of war have been a significant motivating factor for the magisterium’s steadily increasing critique of war making and call for war’s end. the second reason for this epistemic crisis is connected to the first but is more difficult to see. the just war tradition is no longer effective in constraining violence. this is due to reasons i have already mentioned: changes in the social production of war that the just war tradition was meant to analyze and the challenge of pluralism in moral discourse. i have already treated the first so let me take up briefly the second. just war theory fails to effectively communicate across traditions, and thereby fails to constrain the violence it purportedly aims to curtail. this, i believe, is the deeper source of the epistemic crisis of the just war tradition. according to macintyre, traditions in a state of epistemic crisis must do three things to resolve such crises. first, they must invent or discover new concepts that resolve the epistemic crisis. second, those new concepts must explain the reasons for the epistemic crisis. and, third, it must accomplish both of these tasks in a fundamental continuity with the terms of the tradition up to this point. responding to the epistemic challenge of the just war tradition, some theorists have attempted to return to the first principles of just war theory, especially the biblical roots (rather than exclusively natural law). for instance, 81 lambelet some have attempted this approach by commending just war as a practice of discipleship.12 one problem with this retrieval is that it does not resolve macintyre’s second task, adequately explaining the source of the problem in the first place: trying to root the just war tradition more solidly in christian theology does not solve the problem of pluralism. another approach might be to root the just war tradition, again, in natural law. but, this move too runs into similar problems. whether critically, as in samuel moyn’s recent work on human rights, or constructively, as in jean porter’s account of natural law, there is increasing admission that appeals to natural law are theological appeals.13 as i mentioned in the introduction, this challenge of pluralism has become an impasse for the just war tradition, and as macintyre might argue, it therefore requires either the renewal of the tradition or the consideration of alternatives. now macintyre’s definition of tradition, as helpful as it is, has come under critique from various angles. religious ethicist jeffrey stout, for instance, argues that macintyre overplays his hand in his critique of modernity and lament regarding the current state of moral discourse.14 stout, alternatively, argues that democracy should be understood as a kind of tradition, and his subtle appropriation of macintyre is helpful for the case i am making here. catholic scholar of law and religion cathleen kaveny takes this critique further.15 kaveny argues that macintyre’s diagnosis of the intractability of contemporary moral argument misses important dimensions of moral discourse, especially the indictment that happens both within and across traditions. kaveny also makes a secondary critique, namely that macintyre’s proposed therapy of fully formed communities with adequate structures of authority and traditions of reasoning fails to take into account the internal plurality of groups (like the roman catholic church) that seem to fit all of his qualifications. religious communities have “rancorous disagreements” internally—for example, the one playing out here in the pages of expositions—and macintyre grants us few tools to analyze the moral discourse of indictment that often operates within these communities. in addition to macintyre’s failure to adequately engage pluralism, both within and without traditions, i would add a further critique. macintyre’s focus on the genealogy of reasons can obscure the idiosyncratic historical judgments that often add up to a tradition. in the case of just war, it is too seldom remembered that augustine’s articulation of just war theory was nothing of the sort: his “principles” were developed in an essay against the manichean faustus.16 this was not a careful, systematic treatment of the ethics of war. rather, it was a polemical, rhetorical take down of a critic of christianity. in his articulation of the principles of just cause, legitimate authority, and nonviolence as a tradition of moral praxis 82 right intention he could never have anticipated the ways they may have been taken up later. more than a mere historical error, however, macintyre’s definition of traditions as argument can obscure the affective, contingent, and embodied dimensions of tradition guided inquiry. this problem comes to the fore especially when we consider messy cultural practices like warfare that have changed in fundamental ways across time. in order to make good on the original promise of traditions as reason-guided inquiry, we have to look beyond macintyre. social theorist pierre bourdieu offers an alternative to macintyre’s definition of tradition that takes greater account of the socially constructed, complex, and embodied character of inhabiting a tradition. working from a common aristotelian root, bourdieu develops the “logic of practice” by focusing on what he calls “habitus,” which he defines as “systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them.”17 bourdieu’s concern is not traditions per se. rather, downstream of debates in sociology between marxists and weberians about the relationship between social structure and ideology, he aims to account for the structured and structuring function of habituated dispositions, patterns that endure across time. we need not here to go down the rabbit hole of bourdieu’s social theory in order to retrieve his insight. whereas macintyre fixated too narrowly on the history of ideas, bourdieu offers a corrective that enables us to account for the ways that dispositions are formed sometimes without reflexive ordering. bourdieu helps us focus on the embodied nature of moral deliberation: often an expert has a feel for the game without being able to articulate fully why. this bourdieuan sense of cultural and physical embeddedness allows us to think across time with not merely ideas and arguments, but also material culture, exemplary figures and movements, and embodied practices. to bourdieu’s account of habitus, we might add theologian kathryn tanner’s account of tradition as an active constructive enterprise. neither cultural artifacts nor the process of handing down of those artifacts is pristine. rather, such handing down is always subject to human judgment, argument, and conflict. as tanner argues in her book theories of culture, “one stands at a particular place in the ongoing course of […] history and, looking back and across to what others have understood, […] one forms judgments about the consistency of it all so far.”18 again, 83 lambelet thinking with the just war tradition, we should consider distillations of the criteria of just war as just this: distillations at a particular moment in history that look backward for inspiration to discern what to do in novel situations. together, tanner and bourdieu offer a constructive corrective to macintyre’s mostly helpful account of tradition. traditions are embodied arguments, extended across time. they are present not only in discourse but also in dispositions and repertoires of action. points of consensus emerge not only on fundamental principles, but also on which tactics adhere to those principles, and which exemplars (both of individuals and movements) best embody the aspirations of the tradition. the just war tradition, as a tradition, is impoverished when it is reduced to a set of criteria. this impoverishment is doubly the case when we think of the tradition not merely as principles, but as an embodied practice. as an embodied practice, the tradition has primarily functioned to justify wars and the production of cultural and structural violence, in spite of rare moments of constraint and protection of the innocent. the impoverishment of the just war tradition combined with its current epistemic crisis—its dual failure to speak effectively given novel modes of war making and in contexts of pluralism—ought to lead the promulgators of catholic social teaching to consider alternatives. nonviolence as a tradition of moral praxis one compelling alternative for catholic social teaching, the authors of this special issue contend, is the tradition of nonviolence. nonviolence, however, is a notoriously misunderstood concept. often times critics conflate it with absolute pacifism, the abstention from war in any form even in self-defense; or, with non-resistance, the rejection of the use of force in political or personal spheres.19 some have critiqued nonviolence as pathological and racist, and others have argued that it leads to forms of political inactivity and apathy.20 these critiques, varying in quality and accuracy, largely miss the argument of this essay, namely, that nonviolence is not a one-time decision or total way of life, but is a tradition of moral praxis. as such, the tradition of nonviolence is an argument extended across time that draws on common exemplary precedents, returns to common fundamental presumptions, and improvises within a set of political repertoires to actively oppose violence without violence. for christians, gospel nonviolence draws indelibly on the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of jesus the christ. the earliest christians lived as a minority community in the nonviolence as a tradition of moral praxis 84 roman empire, aligning their political fortunes with the jews (of which the first christians were a part). in this context, the hard sayings of jesus recorded by matthew and luke indicate a way of actively engaging injustice in the face of systematic imperial domination.21 jesus was crucified as a political usurper (above him hung the mocking ascription “king of the jews”) and his followers were seen as a political threat. it is certainly anachronistic to turn to jesus as an advocate of nonviolent action as we currently think of it. yes, jesus confronted structures and even organized what we today would call nonviolent campaigns.22 but, he did not have access to the social scientific resources, both theoretical and methodological, that we do today nor the tradition of nonviolence, as i am reconstructing it here. that said, his life, teaching, death, and resurrection have been seen by advocates as one significant paradigm of or precursor to nonviolent praxis. as pope francis recently proclaimed, “to be true followers of jesus today also includes embracing his teaching about nonviolence.”23 drawing the genealogy forward, the modern elaboration of nonviolence began with jesus’s hard sayings. russian novelist leo tolstoy developed an account of non-resistance based in obedience to jesus’s command in matthew 5:39: “resist not evil.” taking this as a starting point, tolstoy advocated a principled approach to nonviolence rooted in the anthropological primacy of love. significantly for our reconstruction of this tradition, it was tolstoy (not thoreau as some claimed) that inspired mohandas gandhi to take up nonviolent methods in his struggle in south africa. gandhi and tolstoy had an extended correspondence, and gandhi incorporated tolstoy’s approach into his own.24 many contemporary accounts of nonviolence begin with gandhi, and rightly so. none have crystalized more clearly and practically the political power of nonviolence than the indian revolutionary. yet, it is significant that in a critical moment of doubt and skepticism, gandhi reported that reading tolstoy’s the kingdom of god is within you “cured me of my skepticism and made me a firm believer in [non-violence].”25 while tolstoy gave inspiration, gandhi’s elaboration of nonviolence combined christian, jain, and hindu sources and improvised something genuinely new. when attempting to name the principle animating the movement in south africa, he held a contest. the winning entry suggested “sadagrah” which meant “firmness in a good cause.”26 developing this idea, gandhi combined two words “satya” and “agraha” to mean truth-force, soul-force, or love-force. while tolstoy’s approach was largely apolitical, gandhi used nonviolence as a strategy to confront the british 85 lambelet empire. he developed a movement of disciplined satyagrahis and successfully forced the british to return the indian subcontinent to the indians. it was the success of this movement that inspired leaders in the black freedom struggle in the united states. through the influence of scholar-activists like howard thurman and james lawson, both of whom made trips to india to study gandhian methods of social change, the civil rights movement’s most prominent representative martin luther king was exposed to and took up the methods of satyagraha.27 african-american activists learned from the indian anti-colonial struggle and applied those learnings in the united states. thurman reported on his indian trip and advocated for active nonviolence in his jesus and the disinherited, a book that king carried, along with his bible, in his briefcase.28 king returned to the christological root of nonviolent action, seeing jesus as the primary exemplar for his activism, even as he drew on new sources, especially the tradition of black church organizing and the christian realism of reinhold niebuhr. the black freedom movement was not the only vector of the development of nonviolence in the united states. the catholic worker movement offers another stream of nonviolence rooted in catholic radicalism. together with her co-founder peter maurin, dorothy day inspired forms of nonviolence that actively confronted injustice through personalist practices of the works of mercy.29 the catholic worker movement endures today and serves as an incubator for various forms of nonviolent resistance. two of the most prominent descendants of day’s nonviolent praxis were phil and dan berrigan, who took day’s personalism and applied it politically in their actions against the vietnam war and nuclear weapons.30 day critiqued the berrigans for their destruction of property, questioning whether it was truly nonviolence, but such internal argument reveals the tradition at work. in the last decades of the twentieth century, the study of nonviolence has taken a pragmatic turn. concomitant with the work of gene sharp and barbara deming, activists have taken up nonviolence for practical reasons, seeing it as an effective mode of political change.31 the fruit of this turn to questions of effectiveness has born out in a recent study by erica chenoweth and maria stephen that found that nonviolent campaigns were twice as likely to succeed than violent campaigns on the difficult political tasks of anti-regime, anti-occupation, and secession campaigns.32 a proliferation of studies of nonviolent change has followed from gene sharp’s intervention, and the topic has been treated increasingly by empirically-driven social scientists.33 nonviolence as a tradition of moral praxis 86 the tradition of nonviolence can claim a genealogy that runs from christian anarchist leo tolstoy to political scientist erica chenoweth. it is an internally plural argument across time, one that is not only about discourse but about repertoires of action. this genealogy betrays no simple agreement on fundamental questions. the tradition of nonviolence is irreducibly plural. yet, there is a continuity betrayed through the handing down of the tradition. what are those points of continuity? let me name four: first, nonviolence is rooted in an account of the irreducible human dignity of each person. it shares this commitment, at least in theory, with parts of the just war tradition, but it radicalizes the affirmation to include even the enemy and illuminates how killing also violates the dignity of the person who kills. because even the enemy is a bearer of dignity, nonviolent movements utilize what barbara deming referred to as the “two hands of nonviolence” when engaging enemies: with one hand honoring their humanity, and with the other taking back what does not belong to them.34 the foundation of this dignity can be variously construed, but for catholics, there are ample resources for affirming such dignity in the wider tradition of catholic social teaching.35 second, nonviolence affirms the basic sociality of the human person. because humans are already bound in networks of mutuality, we should aim to inhabit those networks without doing violence to others. again, catholic social teaching resonates deeply with this affirmation. gaudium et spes is organized around the primacy of relationships: personal, social, institutional, and divine. christians worship a relational god, the trinity, and are drawn into relationships of mutuality with one another. for nonviolence, it is the fact of our relational interdependence that serves as a guide to the methods of engagement in politics. these two anthropological affirmations, human dignity and sociality, generate two additional principles. third, because humans are bearers of dignity and basically social, politics is enabled by the consent of the governed. tolstoy, gandhi, sharp, and chenoweth all agree that when the governed withdraw their consent from structures of power, those structures must change. while this gestures toward a general theory of politics, it is in its most basic formulation consistent with the complimentary principles of subsidiarity and solidarity. fourth, from politics to ethics, nonviolence affirms the unity of means and ends. demonstrated compellingly by gandhi, nonviolence is a prefigurative politics that assumes that the way we conduct our relationships currently generates future congruous outcomes. given the sometimes tortured debates about double effect of the late twentieth century, this principle might be the most 87 lambelet challenging one to square with catholic social teaching. but, it resonates with jesus’s paradigmatic example, especially his instruction to peter that “all who take the sword will perish by the sword” (matthew 26:52b). this list is not meant to be exhaustive, but it gestures toward some fundamental points of agreement: principles that animate nonviolence as a tradition of moral praxis. together, they suggest modes of standing against violence without violence. moreover, i have begun to sketch points of continuity between the tradition of nonviolence and catholic social teaching. to conclude, i turn now to consider the possibility of confluence between the tradition of nonviolence and the tradition of catholic social teaching. nonviolence in catholic social teaching the primary question for some catholic advocates of nonviolence is whether nonviolence can displace just war as the most relevant theological, moral, and political framework for engaging war, peace, and statecraft. a host of fundamental issues lie beneath this question of displacement. can magisterial teaching change? which tradition adheres most closely to the gospel? which tradition better allows the protection of the innocent? if nonviolence is to supersede just war as the framework of preference, significant definitional work will have to be done in order to clarify what nonviolence is. this essay contributes to that work by identifying nonviolence not as a one-time decision, a disposition of passivity, or a mere prohibition. rather, nonviolence is a tradition of moral praxis. the trajectory of catholic social teaching on war and peace gives evidence of two significant developments. the first is the magisterium’s acknowledgement that the material production of war changed drastically in the twentieth century. not only with the advent of nuclear weapons but various other technologies that effectively obliterate the principles of proportionality and discrimination. the second development has been less readily acknowledged, but is an increasing sensitivity to the reality of pluralism and the need to work across religious, and non-religious, traditions. the initial response to this reality, in the mid-twentieth century, was to double down on the promise of natural law as a universal moral language that could sustain human rights commitments and the restraint of war through appeals to the just war tradition. the persuasiveness of this move has lately come under question, as even catholic theologians have identified the nonviolence as a tradition of moral praxis 88 irreducibly theological underpinnings of natural law and secular humanists have critiqued the human rights tradition for the same.36 it is in responding to both of these challenges—the scourge of contemporary warfare and the challenge of pluralism—that nonviolence presents itself as a preferred alternative tradition to just war. and, it should be noted, the magisterium has signaled openness to this possibility. pope saint john paul ii’s centesimus annus (1991) initiated the integration of nonviolence fully into catholic social teaching, as the pope drew on his own experiences in poland with solidarity. the u.s. bishops’ the harvest of justice is sown in peace (1993) continued this trajectory challenging the faithful “to find ways to take into full account the power of organized, active nonviolence.” while the u.s. bishops retained the just war tradition, they significantly limited its sphere of competence and placed the onus on those who wish to use it to justify their use. moreover, they named nonviolence and just war both as traditions. however, they have not yet articulated some of the key elements of the nonviolence tradition as described above, such as its integral relationship to the irreducible dignity of each person. though they did not elect to choose one tradition over the other, it may be that now the bishops might reconsider which tradition best reflects the need for an effective response to violence in continuity with our commitments to following jesus. pope francis has strengthened these moves in his own teaching ministry, especially in his 2017 world day of peace address, “nonviolence: a style of politics for peace.” in the letter issued on the fiftieth world day of peace, francis called for the church to embrace active nonviolence as fundamental to its mission in the world. these are but a few of the many ways that catholic social teaching has already begun to accommodate the positive call to the vocation of nonviolence. such efforts at integration of nonviolence and catholic social teaching ought to continue. i daresay, hewing to the tradition of nonviolence would enable catholics to be both more faithful christians and more open to a pluralist moral theory that includes both religious and non-religious others. ultimately, the magisterium will have to decide whether the just war tradition remains a faithful and effective approach to the constraint of war-making in the contemporary world. given the just war tradition’s liabilities (its overall ineffectiveness, its dubious alignment with the testimony of jesus, and its inability to speak in contexts of pluralism), and the concomitant strengths of the tradition of nonviolence (its increasing effectiveness, its gospel precedent, and its richer internal plurality) i find the latter to be an attractive alternative. 89 lambelet the argument of this essay is that we ought to understand nonviolence as a tradition of moral praxis. catholic social teaching has already begun to participate in this tradition and has the opportunity to extend and develop it significantly. the magisterium can be part of this important work through their teaching vocation, and so too can faithful christians who embody the tradition through lives that improvise with repertoires of nonviolent action. notes 1. todd d. whitmore, “the reception of catholic approaches to peace and war in the united states,” in modern catholic social teaching: commentaries and interpretations, eds. kenneth r. himes and lisa sowle cahill (washington, dc: georgetown university press, 2005). see also matthew allen shadle, the origins of war: a catholic perspective (washington, dc: georgetown university press, 2011). 2. lisa cahill and drew christiansen both make this point in their essays in expositions 12.1, though they come to differing conclusions regarding the ongoing viability of the just war tradition for catholic social teaching. see lisa sowle cahill, “the future of (catholic) just war theory: marginal,” expositions 12.1 (2018): 20–32, https://expositions.journals. villanova.edu/article/view/2318; drew christiansen, “just war in the twenty-first century: nonviolence, post bellum justice, and r2p,” expositions 12.1 (2018): 33–59, https://expositions.journals.villanova.edu/article/view/2319. 3. sr. anne mccarthy’s essay in this special issue, importantly, challenges the compatibility between the just war tradition and jesus’s command to “love your neighbor.” 4. pope saint john xxiii, pacem in terris, the holy see, 1963, http://www.vatican.va/ content/john-xxiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_j-xxiii_enc_ 11041963_pacem.html. see also samuel moyn, the last utopia: human rights in history (cambridge, ma: belknap, 2012). 5. the “crisis” of the just war tradition is a topic of perennial debate. for example, see david gibson essay and matthew shadle’s response following the beginnings of the syrian civil war: david gibson, “is ‘just war’ doctrine another victim of the syrian conflict?,” religion news service, september 11, 2013, https://religionnews.com/2013/09/11/ analysis-is-just-war-doctrine-another-victim-of-the-syrian-conflict/; matthew shadle, nonviolence as a tradition of moral praxis 90 “the just-war tradition in crisis?” catholic moral theology, september 22, 2013, https:// catholicmoraltheology.com/the-just-war-tradition-in-crisis/. 6. alasdair macintyre, after virtue: a study in moral theory, 3rd ed. (notre dame, in: university of notre dame press, 2007); alasdair macintyre, whose justice? which rationality? (notre dame, in: university of notre dame press, 1988); alasdair macintyre, three rival versions of moral enquiry: encyclopaedia, genealogy, and tradition (notre dame, in: university of notre dame press, 1991). 7. macintyre, whose justice? 12. 8. ibid. 361. 9. mary kaldor, new and old wars, 2nd ed. (cambridge: polity press, 2006). 10. macintyre, whose justice? 362. 11. neta c. crawford, “united states budgetary costs of the post-9/11 wars through fy2020: $6.4 trillion spent and obligated,” costs of war, watson institute of international and public affairs, brown university, november 13, 2019, https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2019/us%20budgetary%20 costs%20of%20wars%20november%202019.pdf. 12. daniel m. bell, just war as christian discipleship: recentering the tradition in the church rather than the state (grand rapids, mi: brazos press, 2009); tobias winright, “why i shall continue to use and teach just war theory,” expositions 12.1 (2018): 142– 161, https://expositions.journals.villanova.edu/article/view/2325. 13. moyn, the last utopia; jean porter, nature as reason: a thomistic theory of the natural law (grand rapids, mi: eerdmans, 2005). 14. jeffrey stout, democracy and tradition (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2004), 118–139. 15. cathleen kaveny, prophecy without contempt: religious discourse in the public square (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2016), 15–45. 16. augustine, “against faustus,” in from irenaeus to grotius: a sourcebook in christian political thought 100–1625, eds. oliver o’donovan and joan lockwood o’donovan (grand rapids, mi: eerdmans, 1999). 17. pierre bourdieu, the logic of practice, trans. richard nice (stanford, ca: stanford university press, 1990), 53. 91 lambelet 18. kathryn tanner, theories of culture: a new agenda for theology (minneapolis, mn: fortress press, 1997), 137. 19. david cortright helpfully demonstrates that historically, pacifism was a term that was coined at the beginning of the twentieth century to refer to the transnational social movement that opposed war. it was only between world wars i and ii that pacifism came to be associated narrowly with an absolute, principled rejection of the use of force. see david cortright, peace: a history of movements and ideas (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2008), 8–11. while some advocates of nonviolence do take up nonresistance, such as leo tolstoy, most define nonviolence as an active and contentious mode of politics. 20. reinhold niebuhr issued a famous, and largely helpful, critique of nonviolence. see reinhold niebuhr, moral man and immoral society: a study in ethics and politics (new york: charles scribner’s sons, 1960), 240–256. ward churchill characterized pacifism as pathological, racist, and suicidal, and the same critiques are sometimes levied against nonviolence. see ward churchill, pacifism as pathology: reflections on the role of armed struggle in north america (edinburgh, uk: ak press, 2007). 21. walter wink rendered an important interpretation of the “turn the other cheek” triptych in the sermon on the mount demonstrating that jesus’s approach to injustice was not one of submission but of active and creative nonviolence. see walter wink, engaging the powers: discernment and resistance in a world of domination (minneapolis, mn: fortress press, 1992), 175–193. 22. terrence j. rynne, “an overview of contemporary scriptural exegesis and ethics on jesus’s nonviolence,” catholic nonviolence initiative, may 2016, https://nonviolencejustpeacedotnet.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/contemporary_scriptural _exegesis_ethics_on_jesus_nonviolence.pdf. 23. pope francis, “nonviolence: a style of politics for peace,” the holy see, january 1, 2017, https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/peace/documents/papafrancesco_20161208_messaggio-l-giornata-mondiale-pace-2017.html. 24. leo tolstoy, letter to tarak nath das, “a letter to a hindu: the subjection of india—its cause and cure,” 1908, project gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/7176/ pg7176.txt. nonviolence as a tradition of moral praxis 92 25. mohandas k. gandhi, the essential gandhi: an anthology, ed. louis fischer (new york: random house, 1962), 206. 26. gandhi 87. 27. walter e. fluker, “how howard thurman met gandhi and brought nonviolence to the civil rights movement,” the conversation january 31, 2019, http://theconversation.com/how-howard-thurman-met-gandhi-and-brought-nonviolenceto-the-civil-rights-movement-110148. 28. howard thurman, jesus and the disinherited (boston: beacon press, 1996). 29. dorothy day, “pacifism,” the catholic worker may 1936; “the use of force,” the catholic worker november 1936; “why do the members of christ tear one another?” the catholic worker february 1942; “in peace is my bitterness most bitter,” the catholic worker january 1967; the long loneliness: the autobiography of the legendary catholic social activist dorothy day (new york: harperone, 1997). 30. jason bivins, the fracture of good order: christian antiliberalism and the challenge to american politics (chapel hill, nc: university of north carolina press, 2003). 31. gene sharp, the politics of nonviolent action (boston: p. sargent, 1973); barbara deming, revolution and equilibrium (new york: grossman publishers, 1971). 32. erica chenoweth and maria j. stephan, why civil resistance works: the strategic logic of nonviolent conflict (new york: columbia university press, 2011). 33. i treat this development, and its limits, in my book ¡presente! nonviolent politics and the resurrection of the dead (washington, dc: georgetown university press, forthcoming 2020). 34. deming 207. 35. the documents of contemporary catholic social teaching could easily be said to emerge from this fundamental affirmation. see, for example, second vatican council, gaudium et spes, the holy see, 1965, §§26–27, http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_ vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html; pope john paul ii, evangelium vitae, the holy see, 1995, §34, http://www.vatican.va/content/johnpaul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_25031995_evangelium-vitae.html; pope benedict xvi, caritas in veritate, the holy see, 2009, §11, http://www.vatican.va/ 93 lambelet content/benedict-xvi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20090629_caritas-inveritate.html 36. porter, nature as reason. microsoft word review of prusak's.docx [expositions 8.2 (2014) 155–159] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 prusak, bernard g. parental obligations and bioethics: the duties of a creator. new york: routledge, 2013). 162pp. $125.00 (cloth). isbn: 978–0–415–70333–8. many bioethical issues directly implicate the relationship between parent and child. these issues range from terminating a pregnancy that will, depending on how one views the matter, prevent a child from coming into existence or ending an already extant child’s life to the prospect of altering a child’s genetic constitution such that they come to have certain desirable traits or not have certain undesirable traits. of course, parental obligations do not end upon birth, but continue throughout the child’s growth and development, and perhaps throughout their lifetime. bernard prusak’s careful and detailed analysis of the “duties of a creator” begins with the foundational question of what grounds parental obligations to one’s offspring (chs. 1 and 2). he then addresses some specific bioethical issues, such as abortion (ch. 3), gamete donation and surrogacy (ch. 4), and genetic enhancement (ch. 5). the book concludes with a brief discussion of societal obligations towards children and the intrinsic value of familial relationships (ch. 6). prusak’s project is fundamentally philosophical in nature and will thereby enjoy wide-ranging applicability to a host of ethical issues concerning the parent-child relationship. furthermore, in debating the particular bioethical issues prusak discusses, scholars often presume certain parental obligations without the benefit of a cohesive theoretical framework that grounds various putative obligations. this volume thus offers a valuable contribution to bioethical debate on these and other issues that will invalidate certain argumentative strategies while affirming others. prusak starts off by critically engaging two distinct accounts of what grounds any obligation of a progenitor towards their offspring. the causal account, which prusak affirms, “holds that one acquires parental obligations by having voluntarily acted in such a way that had the reasonably foreseeable consequence of bringing a child into being in the normal course of events” (3). the contrasting voluntarist account “holds that one acquires parental obligations only by voluntarily assuming such obligations, whether explicitly or by so-called tacit acceptance” (4). in this context, prusak must first take on the “non-identity problem,” which states that it is not possible for parents to harm a child through procreation if the only other option would be for that particular child not to exist at all, unless the condition of the child’s life would be so tremendously bad that their life would not be worth living (ch. 1). prusak counters that, although it is true that one cannot directly have obligations towards a non-existent child, there could still be an obligation not to procreate if one does not reasonably believe that they will be capable of, or is not committed to, carrying out their obligations to the child once created (9). to illustrate this point, prusak considers a case in which prospective parents decide to procreate with the intention of giving the child up for adoption. he argues that giving one’s child up for adoption can be a justifiable response when one has procreated and then realized that they would review of parental obligations and bioethics 156 not be capable of fulfilling their parental obligations; nevertheless, this does not render the transfer of one’s parental responsibility to an adoptive couple good simpliciter, as harms may accrue to children whose foundational relationship of unconditional love with their birth parents has been disrupted. while the transfer of parental responsibility in cases of adoption may be the best response a situation in which conceived or born children may be harmed by their parents not being capable of fulfilling their obligations, conceiving a child with the intent to transfer such responsibility runs the risk that the adoptive couple may not in fact fulfill their parental obligations, as well as negating the inherent value of the given biological relationship (19–21). having grounded the existence of parental obligations solely by virtue of having caused a child to come into existence, prusak is now in a position to directly rebut the voluntarist account (ch. 2). against elizabeth brake’s view that parents are only minimally obligated to satisfy basic survival needs, such as providing nutrition and healthcare, as “procreative costs,” prusak argues that parents bear some degree of responsibility for the burdens and risks that life itself will inevitably bring to which the child was not able to consent: having consented on the child’s behalf that they will experience such burdens and risks, “procreators have, at the least, responsibilities to avert the risks, where possible, and to help the child bear the inevitable burdens” (33). fulfilling such responsibilities requires procreators to go beyond the mere prevention of harm by satisfying basic necessities, “but to provide, in person, support, warmth, and affection during the child’s minority and beyond” (37). with a theoretical foundation and defense of robust parental obligations being entailed by consensual procreative activity, prusak turns his attention to the vexed issue of abortion (ch. 3). prusak’s rebuts an argument—also from brake—in support of the conclusion that, if a woman does not acquire parental obligations by virtue of having voluntarily engaged in potentially procreative activity, then neither does a man acquire such obligations by having voluntarily engaged in such activity. in other words, if abortion is morally and legally permissible for pregnant women who have procreated via consensual sexual activity, then men who have procreated through such activity should be free to disavow their putative responsibilities to their offspring as well. if this thesis holds, then it would undercut the causal account of parental obligations. prusak’s strategy is not to deny brake’s conditional, but to show that the antecedent is false by pointing out the fallacy of judith jarvis thomson’s “famous violinist analogy” to abortion upon which brake relies. prusak contends that there is a categorical difference between unplugging oneself, and thereby allowing the violinist to die, and performing an abortive procedure that involves dismembering the fetus in order to kill and extract it from the uterus (49). there are, though, ways of aborting a conceived embryo or fetus—such as the drug ru– 486—that are more similar to the violinist case in that the embryo or fetus is merely extracted from the uterus without being directly killed. nevertheless, as prusak notes, while extractive abortions appear to be more like a case of merely “letting die,” some such cases can be morally 157 eberl tantamount to “killing” (53). in the violinist case, what ultimately kills the violinist is his underlying kidney disease; in the case of extractive abortion, what will kill the embryo or fetus is the lack of nutrition and a supportive environment, which are basic necessities of life that even brake admits fall under the category of “procreative costs.” so, unless there is some other reason to justify men disavowing their procreative responsibilities while denying that pregnant women may do so—and such justification does not appear to be forthcoming—the causal account stands. chapter 4 responds to a challenge to the causal account based on the practices of gamete donation and surrogacy, neither of which arguably entails parental obligations despite the essential causal role played by donors or surrogates. prusak counters that, in such cases, “intended or sponsoring parents, gamete providers, surrogates, and clinicians, technicians, and the like all incur procreative costs by doing what they do” (66). this assertion is premised upon life being a mixed benefit that inherently includes risks and unavoidable burdens. hence, the laudable motive of helping would-be parents, who cannot have their own genetically-related progeny, through gamete donation or surrogacy does not disavow the donor or surrogate from their own procreative responsibilities that follow from having causally participated in bringing a child into existence. it seems that it would be preferable, instead of bringing a new life into being, that infertile couples should look towards adoption of an already conceived or born child whose parents cannot fulfill—or have abandoned—their procreative responsibilities. prusak notes, however, the ardent desire of some infertile couples to have “a genetic tie with the child they are to raise” (74). prusak prudently avoids engaging in any normative evaluation of this desire, which evidently drives the assisted-reproduction industry even when there are a significant number of children lacking a supportive and loving familial environment. nevertheless, there is lost opportunity here to investigate the source of this desire and engage in at least a preliminary assessment of whether the satisfaction of this desire, however valid, is proportionate to any related costs. prusak does assess the case of children born through donation or surrogacy and notes that, while there are documented burdens associated with the lack of social ties to their biological progenitors, the lives of such children are not so disproportionately burdensome to conclude that the practices of gamete donation or surrogacy are inherently bad; however, he still finds the practice problematic for other reasons (76–7). what is lacking in prusak’s analysis is whether the burdens borne by children awaiting adoption disproportionately outweigh the benefits of prospective parents to have genetically-related offspring. of course, this would implicate natural procreation as well as that assisted by in vitro fertilization, gamete donation, and surrogacy; although the burdens prusak cites for the latter two practices, combined with those experienced by children awaiting adoption, may together render those practices disproportionately burdensome compared to the benefits experienced by prospective parents desiring genetically-related offspring. review of parental obligations and bioethics 158 prusak raises significant concerns with respect to the prospect of genetically enhancing one’s child, concluding that “choice of a child’s genetic characteristics could render a parent’s love all too conditional: namely, on the child’s satisfying parental expectations” (5). following john locke, and having argued throughout the previous chapters for various forms of parental obligations incurred through consensual procreative activity, prusak contends that whatever rights parents have with respect to how they raise their offspring, free from interference by the state, are grounded in their responsibilities (86). in other words, parental rights do not exist for the sake of the parents, but are valid insofar as respecting such rights is generally in the best interest of children. a significant question remains, however, whether the aim of parental rights is limited to protecting a child’s putative “right to an open future,” by ensuring that the child will enter adulthood capable of pursuing the greatest range of reasonable lifestyle choices – the socalled “liberal” view championed by theorists such as amy gutmann building on john rawls’s concept of intergenerational justice—or whether parents have the freedom/responsibility to shape a child to develop a specific character imbued with certain cultural and moral values that may have the effect of limiting his range of lifestyle choices, but nevertheless result in a happy and fulfilling life (87–9). framed appropriately, then, the issue of genetically enhancing one’s children is premised upon whether certain enhancements may be one way of fulfilling parental obligations. the primary concern, prusak notes, is that some “hyperparents” may utilize enhancement technology to mold their children according to their own ambitions. prusak is careful to distinguish the different motivations prospective parents may have in electing to utilize enhancement technology for their children and to issue a blanket disapproval of genetic enhancement itself (97–9). nevertheless, a more detailed analysis is warranted insofar as specific forms of enhancement must each be evaluated from the perspective of which are likely to serve as a vehicle for esoteric hyperparental desires, aimed at specific lifestyle options to which the child has not consented, and which would result in an increase of fundamentally basic human goods—such as increased cognitive function, immune responsiveness, and overall emotional and physical health—that would allow children to avail themselves of the widest possible range of objectively fulfilling lifestyle options. the next question would center on whether any approved use of genetic enhancements would fall under the scope of “permissible” or “obligatory” parental choice. if the former, there would be the risk that social pressure may create an implicit mandate to enhance one’s children so that they would not be disadvantaged compared to their enhanced peers. if the latter, the shadow of the historical eugenics movement would darken whatever progress has been made over the past half-century in securing rights to reproductive autonomy, as well as ignoring intercultural awareness of how various qualities may be valued differently in distinct human societies. despite the last concern, there remains a valid argument for a set of basic, objective human goods that may, or ought to, be not only protected and any obstacles to their fulfillment 159 eberl removed, but also enhanced beyond the current natural given. prusak’s analysis appears to be open to such a conclusion in principle, but he rightly cautions that the pursuit of even legitimate enhancements must not disrupt the fundamental good of the unconditionally loving relationship between parent and child. prusak’s analysis centers upon the obligations that individual parents have towards the children they procreate. in the final chapter (ch. 6), he discusses what obligations society may have to support parents in their creation and raising of their children. it is clear from the preceding chapters that the primary obligation to fulfill the needs of children is had by the parents who procreated them; however, in circumstances in which procreators are unable to fulfill their parental responsibilities, they may justifiably transfer such responsibilities to adoptive parents. this is not an ideal situation, though, and so it is incumbent upon society to assist procreators to fulfill their parental responsibilities. natural familial bonds, grounding a child’s initial relationships of unconditional love, are intrinsically good, as well as instrumentally valuable for the sake of a child’s ability to form healthy relationships in the future. hence, social intervention to assist parents in fulfilling their obligations is limited by the inherently valuable familial bond, which cannot be supplanted by any form of communal responsibility for raising children—as envisioned for children born into the “guardian” class in plato’s hypothetical republic (103). the result is that children, born into different families of different socioeconomic status, will not have equal opportunities as a result of their upbringing; but the cost of equalizing the next generation’s future opportunities—that is, by eliminating the familial bonds in which children first experience unconditional love—would deny children a fundamental good that grounds many other goods comprising a happy and fulfilling life. jason t. eberl marian university college of osteopathic medicine indiana university center for bioethics microsoft word deyoung spr20 [expositions 14.1 (2020) 34–50] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 moral education in the classroom: a lived experiment rebecca konyndyk deyoung calvin university [i]t is perhaps the principal task of the political and moral theorist to enable rational agents to learn what they need to learn from the social and cultural tradition that they inherit, while becoming able to put in question that particular tradition’s distortions and errors and so, often enough, engaging in a quarrel with some dominant forms of their own political moral culture.1 what would a course on ethics look like if it took into account alasdair macintyre’s concerns about actually teaching students ethical practices? how could professors induct students into practices that prompt both reflection on their cultural formation and self-knowledge of the ways they have been formed by it? according to macintyre, such elements are prerequisites for an adequate moral education. his criticism of what he terms “morality” includes the claim that most courses don’t even try to teach the right things. he charges that academic teaching has little if anything to do with character formation, whereas thick practices can transform lives in ways mere argument can never do.2 even those of us who appreciate his arguments and agree with his criticisms, however, may find implementing more adequate forms of ethical instruction in the university classroom a tall order. my goal in this essay is to provide a sketch of my own experimental course on normative ethics in order to illustrate what teaching according to a more macintyrean program might look like. following the lead of macintyre’s after virtue trilogy and charles taylor’s sources of the self,3 my course undertakes a review of ethical theories along narrative-historical lines, explicitly framed as a form of reflective self-awareness and dialogical identity-formation. the purpose of such a frame is to help students recognize, articulate, and assess the coherence and cogency of their own moral inheritances. at the same time, students engage in week-long formative practices, reflecting on their own character formation at the end of each. from a better grasp of their own situation, they are able to evaluate their own practical commitments and be more intentional about the habits and virtues they need going forward. 35 deyoung because only so much can be accomplished in a single semester, the course gives students a healthy introduction to such a project, aiming to incentive its ongoing development. that is, i hope to give them an initial appreciation of the long-term payoff, while equipping them with the motivation and tools they would need to continue the project after the course was over. moreover, because i teach the course at a christian liberal arts university,4 i have additional theoretical and practical resources at my disposal. namely, i can articulate substantive goods and a thick anthropology my students already assume, i can incorporate spiritual disciplines into the structure of the course, and i can point students to existing christian churches as communities of practice that students could join. nevertheless, as a philosopher, i am keen to approach even these matters through reflection and reasoned argument. in ethics and the conflicts of modernity, macintyre stresses that moral education requires that students learn “the disciplines of reflective practice.”5 my course is built on that theme, following ideas i had experimented with previously.6 so, on the first day of class, we begin with a reflection on the state of moral theory and how it informs the standard way of teaching ethics, which i call the “moral cafeteria” approach. when adopting this approach, textbooks on moral theory typically outline three to five moral theories and then apply them to various case studies, moral dilemmas, or controversial social issues. such approaches present normative ethics as a body of theoretical knowledge and technical expertise that anyone can apply, regardless of their moral character or stage of moral development.7 in the standard approach’s theory-application model, students learn each theory and attempt to apply it to case studies or moral dilemmas. however, the textbooks then leave them to choose, without any overarching criteria, between the array of theories, and to justify their choices in terms of the theory that best captures their pre-reflective intuitions about how hard cases should be handled. where those intuitions came from and how they are formed is left unaddressed and unquestioned. if different theories justify different outcomes in various cases, students tend to adopt a cafeteria-like approach to the theories, tending toward whatever theoretical justification suits their needs to solve a given moral problem. my criticism of this approach includes the following macintyrean objections: (a) it makes the basis of morality seem arbitrary, or reliant on individual preference (or current social consensus); (b) there do not seem to be any rational criteria on offer to adjudicate between theories; and (c) it is not clear to students why or how they should evaluate moral theories rationally other than by appeal to, say, the standard of internal consistency (and they aren’t sure why internal consistency moral education in the classroom: a lived experiment 36 should trump their own consciences or their sometimes-conflicting moral intuitions about what is right). furthermore, (d) why this particular set of theoretical options is the correct one or the only one on offer remains mysterious, since the standard approach presents them as an ahistorical array of alternatives. both macintyre and taylor contend that, without any historical background, we are at a loss to explain which systems seem appealing, what counts as an ethical problem, and which moral concepts might be used to frame a situation (adequately or inadequately). our answers to these questions depend on where we stand in the narrative of human history and culture. as a last point of objection, (e) moral judgment and choice cannot be captured in or taught as technique to be applied by just anyone (e.g., just any college undergraduate), regardless of moral character or experience. it matters whether people are experts in practical wisdom, or undeveloped apprentices with immature desires, or people whose eyes have been steadily corrupted by vice. the standard approach therefore frequently breeds cynicism, heightens students’ already highly subjective approach to moral questions, and makes them despair of having any good reason to be moral, even if they assume they can “master” a moral system’s technical demands. importantly, the standard approach also neglects altogether several important moral features of the lives of macintyre’s “plain persons,” a category that includes my students. for example, missing topics include what role friendship and common projects might play in a good life,8 and how moral development happens over time (vs. a present-moment “snapshot” conception of moral choices). further, this approach fails to reflect that most of our moral lives centers not on crisis situations or intractable dilemmas, but rather everyday routines and the implicit formation that comes from participating in certain types of communities or institutions. finally, it is notable that ethics textbooks fail to mention how the ethical life relates to religious commitments and the formative influence of religious communities. i introduce our course as an intentional contrast to the standard approach. thus we examine our own moral situation and identity as the result of a long history of inheritances (some of which content is now highly de-contextualized). this means taking a historical approach to our current predicament and fragmented moral identity, following the example of macintyre’s after virtue and charles taylor’s sources of the self. in a parallel way, we assume that our moral lives are themselves an unfolding narrative of formative practices and reflective evaluation in which character develops within a community over time. we assume, too, that we inhabit a metaphysical stance toward goodness and truth that not only enables us to evaluate the deficiencies of modern 37 deyoung moral theories (and their common assumptions about morality), but shows how a religious ethical tradition has the resources to rationally assess the strengths and weaknesses of its rivals, while acknowledging its own status as a self-critical community of practitioners. this is possible in large part because as a tradition—in macintyre’s sense—its lived articulation of the human good is carried on cross-culturally and over a long history, it depends on transcendent standards, and it includes as its main goal personal transformation and apprenticeship into a certain kind of communal life. because most of the students identify as members of this tradition already, they have some of the moral training and experience needed to see where theorizing makes sense of (or fails to make sense of) the shared practices of their families, churches, and communities.9 macintyre insists that students—as practical reasoners and moral agents—will need selfawareness and self-knowledge to reflect and learn from past mistakes as mistakes, especially since we often recognize these only retrospectively. this point inspires our first class exercise. students are given twenty to thirty minutes to work on a “memento mori” exercise.10 in this assignment, they imagine and then write out the eulogy that might be given at their funeral by an honest friend or family member. funerals are one of the few places in contemporary life where people focus on personal character, assessed from a whole-life perspective. (this in contrast to retirement or graduation parties, where successful performances or achievements are the main focus.) the assignment prompts students to ask and answer two questions: who have i become so far in my life?—an assessment of current character—and, who might i wish to become if i had more time?—an articulation of aspirational character. many of the students find themselves unaccustomed to reflection on their lives as a whole, unfamiliar with character assessment in general, and inarticulate about virtue terms and concepts with which someone might capture a person’s character. the exercise implicitly raises questions about the difference between personality traits and virtues of character, how students’ current character might have been formed, who might have most influenced their formation, and what sorts of traits or virtues are worth cultivating going forward. in the discussion after the exercise, i make these points explicit via conversation prompts: 1. how does this exercise focus on different things from a graduation ceremony? 2. how has the family you are a part of, or the school or church community you are a part of, or the culture around you, shaped the character you observe in yourself? moral education in the classroom: a lived experiment 38 3. what makes a trait a virtue vs. a characteristic part of your personality (such as being sarcastic, or optimistic, or being organized, or a leader)? the exercise raises questions of virtue and character to prompt students to recognize for themselves that these sorts of “big picture” questions are both curiously missing from most moral discourse and theorizing and nonetheless implicitly assumed in their own daily practice. through the assignment, they become aware that they have already given—in fact, are already living out— an answer to the question about what is a worthwhile way to live as a human being. their own choices have accumulated into character traits that likely reflect some ordering of goods. as macintyre remarks, “reflective agents thus increasingly understand themselves and others in terms of a certain kind of narrative, a story in which they as agents direct themselves or fail to direct themselves toward a final end, the nature of which they initially apprehend in and through their activities as rational agents.”11 he goes on to say this means that the initial task of theoretical enquiry is to articulate and develop further what is implicit in or presupposed by practice. and it needs to be stressed once again that agents engaged in such theoretical reflection continue to need to learn from each other, albeit not primarily as fellow students of theory, but as fellow agents engaged in achieving common goods in the practice and productive activities of everyday life, so that their moral and political education needs to be very different from that of the academic theorist.12 this college ethics course gives them, like aristotle’s students in the nichomachean ethics, a chance to reflect on their formation so far. after appropriate self-study, they can either endorse what they have become and carry that project forward, or they can embark on further transformation in a revised direction—assuming there are practicing communities to which they can appropriately apprentice themselves. the next section of the course is therefore offered as a response to the existential questions of plain persons: e.g. what sort of person am i becoming? is that a good kind of human being to become? what sort of life am i already living, and what goods does it prioritize? what sorts of character traits does it encourage and reward? is that kind of life in fact a good human life? what 39 deyoung reasons might i give for this picture of the good life being adequate? why do i find obvious the answers that i give to those questions (or that my culture or community gives)? what sorts of reasons do i have that might not be accessible outside my way of life? what alternatives have i not considered? do my answers seem coherent and correct? in part one of the course, we begin with primary sources in eudaimonist (virtue) ethics. first, we read sections of plato’s republic that portray philosophy (i.e., striving after the common goods of wisdom and virtue) as a rival way of life to pleonexia (i.e., acquisitiveness regarding competitive goods). each life has a contrasting ordering of goods and incompatible programs of desire and habit formation. we also study aristotle’s nicomachean ethics, focusing on the training of appetite required for proper self-love, the inter-relationship of virtues of character and practical wisdom, and the friendship books. secondary sources, such as chapters on ancient philosophy and christianity as “spiritual exercises” in pierre hadot’s philosophy as a way of life,13 chapters on “the need to learn and the drive to aspire” in julia annas’s intelligent virtue, and myles burnyeat’s paper “aristotle on learning to be good” on the stages of moral education,14 are also recommended supplementary readings on the syllabus at this point. further, we consider three examples of “cultural translation” of aristotle in later historical periods,15 all from the christian tradition. first, jane austen’s novel, pride and prejudice, offers a narrative portrayal of the three marriages that exemplify aristotle’s three types of friendships based on pleasure, utility, and virtue.16 then we consider what intellectual virtue looks like in augustine (i.e., the well-ordered desire for knowledge vs. curiositas, its prideful and possessive opposite17), and how courage is reshaped by the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love in aquinas. exemplars of virtue shift accordingly: both the citizen-soldier advancing the civic good despite painful obstacles and the martyr who endures persecution, holding fast to the eternal good, meet the aristotelian definition of courage, even if the latter does so in ways that aristotle would not have recognized.18 such examples show how later thinkers both appropriated and adapted this ancient tradition in new social, historical, and religious contexts. moreover, we note ways in which later thinkers worked from vantage points that enabled criticism and correction of earlier versions of a virtuous life. for example, augustinian humility pushes in one way against platonic hubris, and in another way against modern humanism. while we study appropriations of aristotle, we engage in a week-long practice exercise, documenting our own daily efforts to practice the virtue of temperance. the instructions prompt moral education in the classroom: a lived experiment 40 the students to contrast temperance (the virtue) with mere self-control. students also follow instructions to heed aristotle’s advice about hitting the mean of virtue in nicomachean ethics 2.9 by compensating for both human nature (most notably, tendencies toward excess pleasure-seeking) and their own personal proclivities. at the end of a week, they have to submit their journal (a daily log and brief reflection). then they answer open-ended follow-up questions together in classroom discussion groups. in other words, students practice the type of aristotelian virtue cultivation they read about, while reflecting individually and corporately on a specific practice that comprises part of an aristotelian virtue cultivation program. from previous experience, many of the students “knew” that they tended to eat poorly when tired, but the week-long exercise seemed to illuminate and internalize this point: they came away from the week planning ways to mitigate this situation and its attendant temptations. that meant that reshaping their desires for food meant reshaping much more of their lives: eating at more regular times, sharing meals with others/eating communally, cooking food they had purchased themselves, getting more regular sleep, and so on. macintyre highlights “the importance of such habits and their relationship to those institutionalized routines that structure our everyday lives.”19 ideally, such reflection leads both to new personal habits and different communal routines and ways of life. a second practice exercise focuses on the intellectual virtues and the formation of the mind and imagination. iris murdoch makes the point in “vision and choice in morality” that, by the moment any specific moral decision-making happens, most of the moral work has already been done.20 which goods one has in view (in light of a life well lived), the motivations and emotions that vision cultivates and cues up, which situations present themselves as imaginatively possible or as requiring a response from us, all frame the content and character of decisions of the moment— indeed, they have often already sorted whether an explicit decision needs to be made at all. moral philosophy must begin, therefore, by cultivating the moral imagination, by presenting the good, the true, and the beautiful as cornerstones of our characteristic motivational structure and as attractive and inspiring ends to be desired. no moral theory is complete without a “vision of the good,” says murdoch. a principle-application model is therefore only a truncated formal system of decision-making technique. it either lacks such a vision, or (as in macintyre’s depiction of the market) depends on one that is implicit. what possibilities and goods we envision, picture through role models or narratives, and articulate with thick moral concepts deeply form our character and the concrete choices that follow from it. for my students, the worlds of possible human experience 41 deyoung they have imaginatively inhabited and the goods they therefore long for are already set by the films they have watched, the advertisements they think they have become inured to, and the images of a successful life their communities have championed (or omitted). any “mere” decision-making technique will work from and within these ideals, rather than challenging them or reflectively examining their value. inmates i also teach could not envision, or even imagine, at age eighteen or nineteen, when they committed their crimes, that there was a way of life that included lifelong religious commitments, sacrifice of their immediate desires, or educational endeavors that they could find worthwhile and pursue successfully, nor did they have pictures of fatherhood that involved mentoring, attention, prayer, patience, and so on. moreover, such visions are best “caught” and not merely theoretically “taught.” ancient ethics took these visions of the good seriously as the groundwork from which the moral life begins, and it did not confine them to ethics classrooms. this is why plato cares so deeply about poetry and music, and why aristotle thinks pleasureand emotion-training is essential to character development: we have to learn to long for and delight in the right sorts of goods in order to have practical reason’s “good eye” in the moment of deliberation. the next practice exercise engages augustine on intellectual virtue. in his view, the wellordered pursuit of knowledge as a gift involves humble and delighted participation in god’s knowledge, a paradigm that contrasts with human mastery of instrumentally valuable but otherwise inert subject matter. along with the readings, students spend a week memorizing 1 corinthians 13 (on love as the “most excellent way” of life). they are given the option of reading the whole chapter slowly and then memorizing only verses 4–8a, or memorizing the whole chapter. the exercise is called “contemplation as an act of love.” its purpose is to dwell on the same ideas and the same text by repeating them slowly, memorizing and internalizing what we read, and meditating on or contemplating key phrases. most of the reading students do is on screens, in skimand-scroll, rapid information-gathering mode. contemplative reading is a counter-cultural, reformational practice designed to slow them down and get them to sit with a text, returning to it multiple times to see if different insights emerge from multiple readings. the practice is a way of apprenticing oneself to the wisdom of the text, in a mode of receptivity to unfolding revelation, rather than a mode of mastery, possession, and disposable use. much of the content of the passage, moreover, concerns the relationship between knowledge and love (e.g., knowledge without love is empty and vain; knowledge is partial in this life; love brings knowledge to perfection “face to moral education in the classroom: a lived experiment 42 face”). so the act of contemplating a text on love, as itself an act of love, holds together the practice and reflection on it. in this section of the course, we therefore try to understand and live into ways that key figures in the christian tradition translated the ancient eudaimonist/virtue paradigm into its own idiom and framework, theoretically and practically. we devote an entire class period to discussing in small groups what the practice exercises illuminated about our habits and implicit view of the good. the exercises are designed to develop self-knowledge and to raise awareness of how our own formation had been culturally (or “sociologically”) influenced, for better or worse. students often discover, as macintyre predicts, that “the transformation of ourselves that is involved is significantly different from what we had expected.”21 many students take the occasion to comment on how the exercise changed their view of themselves or made them consider more intentionally what goods were worth pursuing. like my incarcerated students, many often conclude that such goods are currently unattainable, since they require maturity that only comes with more practice. the exercise serves as an occasion to self-identify as apprentices in a larger moral community of more seasoned practitioners. this takes humility and trust, since “some of our important ends are such that it would be a mistake to think of them as adequately specifiable by us in advance of and independently of our involvement in those activities through which we try to realize them.”22 furthermore, to achieve certain ends, we at the same time need to become the right sort of person. lastly, david solomon’s “internal objections to virtue ethics” raises objections to the virtue/eudaimonist approach to ethics.23 this essay also includes one “external” criticism of virtue ethics, or at least to an aristotelian (or platonic) version of it. the objection is that such a moral program requires adherence to a substantive and teleological conception of human nature and the human good. but, solomon notes, ancient conceptions have been roundly rejected, and attempts to find substitutes have ended in hopeless controversy—either metaphysical, theological, or both. macintyre sets out the alternatives as “nietzsche or aristotle?” precisely because such debates have typically ended in the conclusion that, because no natures and no objective truth about goods exist, everyone should be left to follow her own preferred “revaluation of values.”24 virtue ethics’ choice of virtues and human goodness seems to require one to inhabit a thick tradition, and one often equally at odds with contemporary ways of life and their theoretical assumptions about morality. 43 deyoung in the next two sections of the course, we track the major ethical theories of the modern period, kantian deontology and variants of consequentialism in hume, bentham, and mill. in keeping with our narrative approach to these ethical developments, we consider each alternative not as an abstract slate of theories, but via primary texts situated in their respective historical and sociological contexts. each theory was developed in response to a particular historical moment and rival ideas. so, for example, kant’s construction of formal systems reacts to post-reformation intractable religious conflict and the inadequacies of resting universal moral norms on humean/human material contingencies, such as feelings of sympathy, desires for social approval, and considerations of utility. both kant and mill think they can capture the vast part of the content of what was previously a christian ethic, while rejecting its (and aristotle’s) metaphysical baggage. again, reading assignments canvas contemporary appropriations, in part to appreciate that functionally we (that is, contemporary north americans) have already incorporated this approach, its characteristic reasoning, and its conclusions into certain parts of our own identities and spheres of contemporary life. for example, debates about abortion and gun ownership are carried out almost exclusively in terms of rights talk, which is grounded in the inviolable dignity and autonomy of each human being and likewise in the sovereignty of rational persons’ free choice of the will. likewise, implicitly and operationally we tend to identify ourselves as individual choosers, autonomous agents, and bearers of rights. this is evident, for example, in the ways we experience angry entitlement (behind the wheel, in the political arena), shopping and consumer habits that revolve around individual choice, and our attitudes toward personal relationships as contracts of consent. students read both thomas hill’s essay on self-respect as a kantian duty (treating hill as a contemporary appropriator of kantian deontology) and robin dillon’s essay (as a critic) on how self-respect duly cultivated depends on a unduly masculinist view of a respectworthy moral self.25 dillon’s essay points out the implicit cultural picture of idealized human nature behind the moral obligations set forth. at the end of her article, dillon comments that human beings learn to respect themselves by being respected by others in a community—an insight that hints at more aristotelian approaches to moral development. we note the ways that key aspects of eudaimonist ethics (virtues and character development over time, friendship and community) seem absent without a second thought in a deontological system. our moral inheritances and sense of self are further shaped by consequentialist conceptualizations of the moral life. from their initial home in social reform movements of the moral education in the classroom: a lived experiment 44 1800s, utilitarian attempts to increase and maximize human welfare were increasingly bureaucratized. especially when dealing with social systems (e.g., health care) and economic distribution over large-scale populations, we now tend to default into consequentialist-style reasoning. it feels natural to us to think that we should weigh or sum overall outcomes when debating what policies to implement. peter singer’s “famine, affluence, and morality” is a signature piece of such reasoning.26 students usually find it intuitively appealing prior to reflection. human welfare is the focus of moral obligation, and costs and benefits must be weighed in a world of scarce resources to maximize overall outcomes. strikingly, singer’s essay is also representative of consequentialists’ gravitation toward consideration of physical needs, in part because these are observable and quantifiable measures of well-being (by contrast, consider macintyre’s commentary on the world happiness database),27 but also because decision-making is thereby done from an ostensibly value-neutral, naturalistic perspective using only instrumental reasoning. from such a (limited) perspective, physical well-being might be one of the few things we can agree are part of the human good. singer’s piece also provides a textbook case of the tyranny of the moral over all other concerns and macintyre’s own description of “morality,” which names a specialized sphere of obligation that trumps other concerns and overrides all other goods. despite the criticism lodged against the consequentialist point of view (we also read bernard williams on the virtue of integrity—a virtue unintelligible to utilitarian reasoners), part of the point of this section of the course, like the other two, is to recognize that utilitarian intuitions and patterns of thinking are in fact already partially formative of our own default moral identities. to prompt critical reflection on utilitarian approaches to the distribution of goods, we practice a week of gratitude. the exercise is framed by robert c. roberts’ chapter on gratitude in spiritual emotions.28 the exercise is designed not only to have students practice expressing gratitude for the good things in their lives, but also to give them eyes to see the world in terms of gifts and goodness they have been (gratuitously) given. the religious perspective roberts articulates shows students the difference between a stance of entitlement amid scarce resources and a stance of grateful receptivity, and the ways in which detachment and attachment to contingent and ephemeral worldly goods are radically reconceived from a christian point of view. in that view, the ultimate and unconditionally given gift of a love relationship to the giver remains the point of central concern, not the accumulation of good things or contingent blessings in this life.29 further, as in griffiths’ work on a rightly-ordered desire for knowledge, the primary stance of the recipient 45 deyoung should be wise stewardship of whatever gifts she has in service of the common good. unlike the model of privately isolated or exclusive ownership, goods are meant to benefit the whole community. not surprisingly, this frame might well lead to similar conclusions as singer’s (i.e., practices of radical giving), but in very different ways, with very different motives. the take-away from the gratitude exercise is that not all practices that appear to be externally similar are the same activities with the same formative effect on desire or the same good as their telos. again, we are trying to capture aristotelian insights: virtue habituation must transcend mere imitation, must be modeled by the practically wise who have a good eye both for ends and means because of their rightly trained emotional attachments and aversions, and must include knowledge of both what one is doing and why. at this point in the course, i sketch out key features of each view, the places in our lives when each moral modus operandi seems natural to us (individually and as political communities) to default to, and the incompatibilities between them. this summation captures the “sociological selfknowledge” that macintyre commends.30 students have now come to see their own identity as a conglomeration of practices and points of views that don’t all cohere and sometimes compete with each other. but they have also been shown that this identity—however fragmented31—feeds and forms their practice. it shapes the character and value of their lives as human beings. if this needs to become more explicit, a reprise of the eulogy exercise can be helpful. the existential predicament for students is now two-fold: first, how can i make my own identity and character coherent, instead of fragmented, and second, around which sort of picture of the human good can i build such a life (with adequate justification)? returning to solomon’s external objection, i raise the concern that we can’t resolve disputes without digging down to metaphysical commitments, but i also suggest a macintyrean way to go forward rationally in the face of incompatible options. we read macintyre’s paper “epistemological crises”32 to explore the thesis that often the only rational way to make such evaluative judgments is to live inside a tradition and see which problems it can solve, which pseudo-problems from other views it can successfully resolve or reconfigure, and which lacunas and insoluble puzzles of its own remain. in addition, i stress, in light of the practice exercises, that every way forward requires both intellectual and practical commitments. given the dialogical character of identity formation and all the implicit formation that shapes our moral character, we can’t live out any option without practice and a thick community of practitioners. moral education in the classroom: a lived experiment 46 the last section of the course revisits the virtue/eudaimonist tradition, but this time from a christian perspective—a historical tradition embodied in thick communities of distinctive liturgies and practices. we read essays on christian virtues and chapters on vices, including pieces on the vice of vainglory and “liturgical sincerity” (i.e., sincerity as a virtue desired in worship practices),33 viewed through this historical and communal lens and undergirded by a picture of human nature and the human good. at the same time, we engage in one last practice exercise, which is the culmination of a daily practice we’ve done together all semester. from the first day of the course, we spend the first three minutes of class time in silence together. i do not guide this practice much, but only instruct students to breathe deeply and be still. if nothing else, i tell them, this will give them practice in pausing before a task to calmly center their attention and intentionally ready themselves for it; ideally, it will be an exercise in living against the culture of busy achievement and the deluge of information that they inhabit the rest of the day. (as one student put it, “i realized that it was the only time of day that i ever stopped doing something.”) we sit together, awkwardly at first, in total silence—without music, a news feed, phone alerts, or conversation. as the semester wears on, the students begin to appreciate and look forward to that time. but during the reading on the vice of vainglory, we try the ancient christian practice of silence for a full week. the instructions give students the option to try a modified form of it—a week of silencing self-talk— to make it possible to live on a college campus and still do the assignment with integrity. in one form or the other, this week is a more intensive version of what we’d been practicing all semester. the insights that come in a week of intentional individual practice are typically different from those that come from intentionally guided communal practice over several months’ time. the upshot of the course is, with macintyre and nietzsche, to reject modern “morality,” or at least put it into serious question, especially in the fragmented, incoherent version of it without adequate foundations that we have inherited and currently practice. but rather than leave students at sea looking for an adequate alternative, we end the course with the theoretical and practical resources of christian theology, inviting students to explore its resources. can this appropriation and translation of the thomist-aristotelian tradition give us metaphysical foundations, in the form of a satisfying view of human nature and the human good (as social beings created for a fellowship of love with god and each other)? can its view of human nature offer reasons why pleonexic expressivist individualism and nietzchean self-creation will not ultimately satisfy us? can it provide—in the form of the local and global church—an arena for embodying virtue practices and 47 deyoung carrying on the tradition (in intergenerational ways that can be adapted across cultures and eras of history)? and, most important, can students envision themselves as its apprentices (now) and its future role models and articulators (later), formed by its signature virtues (faith, hope, and love) and striving to better understand how to live them well? there are obvious limits to what anyone could accomplish in a liberal arts classroom in a single semester. i take macintyre’s point that academic instruction cannot substitute for life-long character formation even in the best of settings. in the worst, it remains “irrelevant.” my goal with the course is to move our study of normative ethics—in terms of the way people live their ordinary lives and engage in daily formative practices—closer to being relevant to moral formation. you might think of the course as a lived experiment into the limits of the potential of the contemporary college classroom experience. a classroom community is comparatively thin; it is also constrained and motivated by powerful external goods—grades, financial aid, scholarships, and student debt, institutional rubrics of success that measure only quantitative results, and other demands on students’ time—that press hard on students’ ability to invest in learning for the sake of lifelong character formation and a well-lived human life. such goods, as macintyre rightly points out in “the irrelevance of ethics,” do not weigh heavily on the scales of short-term gains and are hard to capture in learning outcomes. to compensate, the end of the course does not leave students on their own, but instead points them toward thick communities of practice already in place. such communities, already committed to robust common goods and dedicated to the cultivation of virtue, can plausibly provide opportunities and occasions for the long-term training needed to develop students’ character more fully. in the meantime, the fact that the students and i have been training (with successes and failures) and reflecting regularly on our training together provides a sort of communal bonding experience. many students cite adjusting past the awkwardness of practicing silence together as a challenging but trust-building moment. the class exercises are meant to give them an insider’s view of the power of such disciplines to transform their lives and the benefits of submitting to them. reflection on the practices (in small groups, after each week-long exercise, guided by readings and discussion prompts) points students to how dramatically counter-cultural and intentionally carried out their formation will have to be in some cases. if my experiment to craft a more macintyrean model of ethical instruction is ultimately successful, it incentivizes that project and points students to places moral education in the classroom: a lived experiment 48 where they can continue it—well beyond the walls of the classroom and the time frame of the semester—to make character formation in virtue a way of life. notes 1. alasdair macintyre, ethics in the conflicts of modernity (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2016), 76–77. further citations will be to ecm. 2. alasdair macintyre, “the irrelevance of ethics,” in virtue and the economy: essays on morality and markets, eds. andrius bielskis and kelvin knight (new york: routledge, 2015), 8–9. 3. alasdair macintyre, after virtue (notre dame, in: university of notre dame press, 1981), whose justice? which rationality? (notre dame, in: university of notre dame press, 1988), and three rival versions of moral inquiry: encyclopedia, genealogy, and tradition, 2nd ed. (notre dame, in: university of notre dame press, 1994); charles taylor, sources of the self (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1989). 4. i might add that calvin university explicitly self-identifies as part of a historical tradition (“the reformed tradition”). 5. macintyre, ecm, 90. 6. see rebecca k. deyoung, “pedagogical rhythms: practices and reflections on practice,” in teaching and christian practices, eds. david i. smith and james k. a. smith (grand rapids, mi: eerdmans, 2011), 24–42. 7. edmund pincoffs called doing ethics via hard cases of application “quandary ethics.” in different ways, julia annas (intelligent virtue, oxford university press, 2011) and linda zagzebski (exemplarist moral theory, oxford university press, 2017) have challenged this case-study approach and provided constructive alternatives to it. 8. robert adams, a theory of virtue (oxford: oxford university press, 2009), chapter 6. 9. ecm, 71 and 76. macintyre criticizes moral theorizing as isolated from “political and moral practice” and from inherited “social and cultural tradition[s].” 10. in several semesters when the weather permitted, we drove to a local cemetery, fanned out across the gravestones to find individual quiet spots, and wrote our eulogies there. when i have to do the exercise in the classroom, i play selections from john rutter’s requiem mass (e.g., the “pie jesu”) to set the mood. 49 deyoung 11. macintyre, ecm, 54. 12. macintyre, ecm, 111. 13. pierre hadot, philosophy as a way of life, trans. michael chase, ed. arnold davidson (oxford: blackwell, 1995). 14. myles burnyeat, “aristotle on learning to be good,” in essays on aristotle’s ethics, ed. a. o. rorty (berkeley, ca: university of california press, 1981), 69–92. 15. macintyre, ecm, 87. 16. austen’s example of the virtue friendship between her two main characters, elizabeth bennett and fitzwilliam darcy, shows how moral development requires contrition as well as moral conversion in ways that move her account beyond aristotle into a christian key. 17. augustine’s account shows how the creation-creator relationship makes knowledge a common and participated good, rather than a possession to master and own and display. see paul j. griffiths, intellectual appetite (washington, d.c.: catholic university of america press, 2009) and the vice of curiosity (eugene, or: wipf and stock, 2018). 18. rebecca k. deyoung, “power made perfect in weakness: aquinas’s transformation of the virtue of courage,” medieval philosophy and theology 11.2 (2003): 147–180. 19. macintyre, ecm, 7. 20. see excerpt found in the norton anthology of western philosophy: after kant, vol. 2, eds. james conant and jay elliott (new york: w.w. norton, 2017), see especially 1404. 21. macintyre, ecm, 51. 22. macintyre, ecm, 50. both talbot brewer’s the retrieval of ethics (oxford: oxford university press, 2011) and the recent philosophical literature on “transformative experiences” echo this point in different ways. see l. a. paul, transformative experience (oxford: oxford university press, 2015). 23. david solomon, “internal objections to virtue ethics,” in midwest studies in philosophy, vol. xiii, ethical theory, character, and virtue, eds. peter french et al. (notre dame, in: university of notre dame press, 1988), 428–441. 24. macintyre, after virtue, chapter 9. see also charles taylor’s analysis in the ethics of authenticity (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1992). 25. thomas e. hill, jr. “servility and self-respect,” the monist 57.1 (1973): 87–104; robin s. dillon, “toward a feminist conception of self-respect,” hypatia 7/1 (1992): 52–69. moral education in the classroom: a lived experiment 50 26. peter singer, “famine, affluence, and morality,” philosophy and public affairs 1.1 (1972): 229–243. 27. macintyre, ecm, 194–196. 28. robert c. roberts, spiritual emotions: a psychology of christian virtues (grand rapids, mi: eerdmans, 2007), chapter 9. we compare and contrast his approach to that of robert emmons’ work in positive psychology; see for example the work of the greater good institute, https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/topic/gratitude. roberts thinks, for example, that gratitude involves not just the appreciation of good things one has, but also their attribution to a giver, as well as an ordering of goods one is grateful for (some transcend changes in circumstances, others do not). 29. for example, in the parable of the prodigal son in luke 15, the gracious father’s reply to the eldest son’s complaints about distribution of the inheritance is, in part, that “you have always had me with you.” both sons mistake the nature of the real gift—it’s a relationship of love with their father, not possession of his material wealth. 30. macintyre, ecm, 112–113. 31. see the preface to after virtue. 32. alasdair macintyre, “epistemological crises, dramatic narrative, and the philosophy of science,” the monist, 60.4 (1977): 453–472. 33. we use chapters from my glittering vices (grand rapids, mi: brazos, 2009 [revised and expanded 2nd edition 2020]) and vainglory: the forgotten vice (grand rapids, mi: eerdmans, 2014). see also john d. witvliet, “the mysteries of liturgical sincerity,” worship, may 2018, excerpted at https://www.praytellblog.com/index.php/2018/04/26/the-mysteries-of-liturgicalsincerity/. microsoft word liu final.docx [expositions 9.2 (2015) 88–98] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 the challenge of teaching analytic philosophy to undergraduates1 jeeloo liu california state university, fullerton introduction teaching at a four-year university with no graduate program in philosophy, i often struggle with enrollment in the upper-division courses that i teach on a regular basis: metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of time, and senior seminars on related topics. my department has 100–150 majors, but my analytic courses sometimes face the threat of cancelation due to insufficient enrollment. most of our majors flock to the many courses we offer in the continental tradition and to social/political philosophy courses such as philosophy of race and gender or philosophy of sex and love. some of our majors could complete the program without ever taking any course in the analytic tradition. it seems that many philosophy undergraduates shy away from dipping into the “hard-core” analytic philosophy courses. students perceive analytic philosophy to be “hard”; and more importantly, they find it too abstract, too nit-picking, too technical, and ultimately having no relevance to their lives or their concerns. i teach at a state university in southern california, where many students are working minimally 20–30 hours a week to support their studies. some of them are first-generation college students, and they don’t have the luxury of engaging in abstract philosophical discourse with their peers or among family members. many of them are uncertain about their future, about their job prospects, and about themselves. what could analytic philosophy offer them? how could analytic philosophers speak to them? the alienation between analytic philosophy and the current college student body is not a reflection of the demise of student intellect or the incompetence of instructors, but the current state of analytic philosophy. to begin with, finding the right readings for my students in these analytic courses has always been a challenge. i assign primary texts, as i believe that the best way to enhance students’ philosophical literacy is to have them learn directly from philosophers. however, many articles written by contemporary analytic philosophers are obsessed with reformulation of principles, outrageous counterexamples, and some even with excessive symbolization. at the end of plodding through a long, tedious and technical paper, i often found myself going through a loop just to come back to where i started. if the long analysis could bring me closer to understanding the issue, the effort put into reading is well worth it. however, it is often the case that at the end of the 89 liu paper the author simply reaches a formulation that he or she found to be satisfactory—until the next person comes around to challenge it. i cannot expect my students to be enlightened by reading these articles other than learning to see how these analytic philosophers play their skill of philosophical analysis to the extreme. another challenge for teaching metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language in the analytic tradition is that some recent issues seem to be contrived and jargonladen. there are too many counterexamples that are trite and ridiculous, and too many “isms” or principles introduced just to be refuted. for example, in philosophy of mind, the notion supervenience was at the center of the mind-body problem for a while, and then various definitions of ‘supervenience’—strong, weak, local, global supervenience and even “superdupervenience”—were introduced. the rampant discussion on the conceivability of zombies and its associated problems such as whether conceivability entails possibility does not seem to lead to anything substantive. how do we motivate students to engage in a serious discussion on whether zombies are conceivable and therefore possible? in philosophy of language, all is well before the introduction of possible world semantics. then suddenly we are dealing with primary intensions, secondary intensions, epistemic intensions, epistemic possible worlds, scenarios, etc. how do i expect my students, who already have a hard time grasping the notion of a priority, to appreciate the significance of making these distinctions? in contemporary metaphysics, concepts such as simples, gunk, junk, trope, perdurance, endurance, coincidence, fission, fusion, etc., all require advanced training and knowledge, and it is not easy to prepare my students to get excited about these topics when the upper-division metaphysics course may have been the first (and possibly the last) course in analytic philosophy that they take before graduation. i do want my students to think about the “big and hard” questions in mind, language and metaphysic, but i also want to have an honest assessment of what they could walk away with from these courses. if philosophy majors in a four-year state university will have difficulty reading analytic philosophical papers and being engaged in the contemporary philosophical discourse, then those outside the discipline, including intellectuals in other disciplines in the humanities, are not going to have an easier time either. many contemporary analytic philosophers seem to have forgotten their readers’ receptivity and intellectual interests when they write. this is no surprise, since they are writing for their peers, for the scores of people who are engaged in the same language game. they are trapped in their own circle of analytic philosopher compatriots and forget how to reach out to others, to motivate others to think with them. the challenge of teaching analytic philosophy to undergraduates 90 the narrowing circle of experts with analytic philosophical issues as a philosophical trend, analytic philosophy in the anglo-american tradition is primarily a “problem-solving activity.”2 from the beginning, analytic philosophy “aims to solve particular problems, puzzles and paradoxes, and to build theories in answer to them. it prefers to work upon details and particular analyses, rather than to produce general syntheses.”3 however, the collective “problem-solving activities” within analytic philosophy are primarily performed by the specialists, and for the specialists, on those particular philosophical problems. as neil levy points out, “the analytic philosopher addresses specialists she knows will share her technical vocabulary and her sense of what problems she ought to be concerned with.”4 as a result, many of the papers published in peer-reviewed journals and further selected in standard anthologies are intelligible only to a small number of experts. even analytic philosophers with the same area of specialization would find themselves becoming novices with issues that others have developed into a theoretical labyrinth, not to mention analytic philosophers working in other areas. this “clubbishness” within analytic philosophy creates nepotism and exclusionism that professionals and students alike become outsiders. according to alexander nehamas, “this has led to what i believe is a dangerous fragmentation in the field, with people who teach together in the same department having neither any idea of what their colleagues are doing nor any interest in ever finding out.”5 at the same time, partly due to the time and rigor required to keep up with an ongoing philosophical discourse, but partly also due to the closed-mindedness of some analytic philosophers, any philosophical tradition or issue that is not in the “main stream” analytic philosophical circle is regarded with disinterest, apathy, or even scorn. many contemporary analytic philosophers know very little beyond their own expertise, and their philosophical engagement is restricted only with those in their clique. analytic philosophy isolates itself from the history of western philosophy as well as histories of other philosophical traditions. according to hilary putnam, a feature of anglo-american analytic philosophy is “the exclusion of ‘continental philosophy,” and he remarks, “this indifference of analytic philosophy departments to what interests the other humanities departments is not surprising, however, when one realizes that the self-image of analytic philosophy is scientific rather than humanistic.”6 nehamas also reports that by the late 1940s, analytic philosophers “ceased to think of themselves as part of the enterprise to which their colleagues in literature and history departments were devoted; they started thinking of themselves instead as participants in the enterprise of science.”7 in addition to segregating itself from the rest of the humanities, analytic philosophy also “retreated from the public domain. it no longer saw itself as bearing a direct relation to the world.” once analytic philosophy uproots itself 91 liu from the humanities and humanistic concerns, it also stops being relevant. analytic philosophy stands opposed to “generalism,” but as a result it also risks falling into provincialism. of course, all disciplines aim to develop expertise and their development depends on the interchange among specialists in the field. i am not suggesting that top analytic philosophical works have to be watered down to suit the general public. however, i do think that some contemporary analytic philosophers are self-indulgent when they write long formalistic papers that do not touch on real issues. they don’t seem to care whether their examples could motivate readers to think, or whether their conclusions could really “solve” a problem. as neil levy presents the accusation that others have made of analytic philosophy: analytic philosophy “is a new scholasticism, where the concern for technique overwhelms the very problems that the techniques had originally been designed to solve.”8 the intellectual rigor that defines analytic philosophy should not be translated into arid formulation after formulation of the same position. one rule that analytic philosophers should adhere to, but often do not, is the methodology of analytic philosophy— philosophical analysis that aims to clarify in a concise manner. according to james baillie, “the idea of analytic philosophy clearly rests on some notion of analysis. analysis consists of breaking down a complex system into its component parts, thereby making the underlying elements and the relations between them explicit […]. the aim of philosophical analysis was to become clear about what was being said or thought.”9 what analytic philosophers criticize about the continental philosophical style—obscure, convoluted rhetoric and vacuous verbiage—should be used as a mirror on their own writings. in the current academic environment in the u.s., those universities with a graduate program in philosophy and those without seem to be of two cultures. according to the philosophical gourmet report 2011 by brian leiter, “in the u.s., all the ivy league universities, all the leading state research universities, all the university of california campuses, most of the top liberal arts colleges, most of the flagship campuses of the second-tier state research universities boast philosophy departments that overwhelmingly self-identify as “analytic”: it is hard to imagine a “movement” that is more academically and professionally entrenched than analytic philosophy.”10 this may be true for the research universities and top liberal arts colleges; however, many, if not most, undergraduate programs elsewhere strive to be diversified and pluralistic, and analytic philosophy has a difficult time attracting students when it is not the only tradition offered. graduate programs train future philosophy instructors to be immersed in the analytic philosophical discourse and writing style, but these graduate students would need to readjust their expectation when they begin teaching undergraduate students who are encountering analytic philosophy for the first time. the challenge of teaching analytic philosophy to undergraduates 92 in four-year universities, philosophy courses are often offered as general education courses to non-majors, and many undergraduate students are drawn to philosophy courses because they found them interesting, thought-provoking, eye-opening and even lifechanging. analytic philosophy is not a natural enemy to these students. they can learn to appreciate abstract speculation and meticulous philosophical analysis, but they also need to see the point. to stimulate these young minds and to inspire them to think outside the box, analytic philosophy needs to go back to the basics and restore the charm of analytic philosophy when substance takes precedence over form, and problem-solving activities aim at genuine philosophical problems rather than fabricated linguistic trivialities. there are numerous exciting topics that undergraduates could be fully engaged in because these topics “concern” them—not in the daily pragmatic sense, but on the deeper level of their own existence. back to the basics: investigation of the nature of language and reality in its heyday,11 analytic philosophy provided perspectives that challenged us to reflect on the nature of language and its relation to reality. early analytic philosophers seemed to be more immersed in the history of western philosophy, and their philosophical concerns reached far beyond the trifles of linguistic analysis. they made a point. even if their writings are by no means easier to read, it is a rewarding experience in the end. the key to the future development of analytic philosophy, then, is to reestablish the link to general philosophical problems, to return to the questions that would make people reexamine their common assumptions about the nature of reality, and to find ways to draw in undergraduate students. in my philosophy of mind class, for example, students are eager to learn about the various contemporary theories on the mind-brain relationship, and although many of them came into this course with a cartesian dualist mindset, most would end up defending a form of functionalism, reductive physicalism, or non-reductive physicalism. the issues of qualia and consciousness are especially engrossing for my students, and they would read things outside of reading assignments to be better acquainted with the ongoing discussion. the turing test and whether robots could have intelligence, thought, and emotions are of course the most fascinating topic for my students. from reflecting on the possibility of artificial intelligence, they also begin to examine the nature of mind or mental state. in philosophy of language, i select primarily earlier articles by frege, russell, wittgenstein, austin, searle, quine, davidson, donnellan, putnam, and kripke. frege’s “sense and reference” and the ensuing debate between description theories and direct reference theories constitute the core of my syllabus. the aim is to make students think 93 liu about the following questions: what is the nature and function of language? what do we mean when we speak—is meaning determined primarily by our intentions or by what our words express? how do our words refer to objects in the world? how is the use of proper names established in our language? what is the connection between language and the world? how does language depict reality? what is the connection between thought and speech? is private language possible? how is communication accomplished? how do we ascribe beliefs to others when we are using our words to capture what they have in mind? among these topics, wittgenstein’s ideas about language game and private language, quine’s idea of radical translation, and davidson’s theory of intersubjective interpretation generally draw appreciative nods from my students. in philosophy of time, i probe such questions as: is time real or unreal? does time exist on its own or is it merely a reflection of relations among things? does time “flow” and is there a “passage of time”? what constitutes “the present”? are the past and the future real? is there a single timeline progressing as an arrow or are there multiple timelines in space? is time travel possible conceptually, metaphysically or physically? could there be a “causal loop” such that one goes back in time to cause things to happen for the present? however, i have to admit that other than mctaggart’s challenging but rewarding article on time and david lewis’ fun article on time travel, i have had a hard time choosing the right articles for this course. most anthologies of philosophy of time include highly sophisticated and technical articles that are not intended for newcomers. some articles with intriguing titles end up doing more sophistry than touching on the enigma of time itself. finally, in metaphysics, i begin with the debate between realism and anti-realism, and ask students to ponder these questions: what is “reality”? do we really know the reality? is reality simply what we perceive, or is it what we as humans have created together? is human science advancing toward reality, or are we simply shifting from one scientific paradigm to another? is what we call ‘reality’ constructed out of humans’ conceptual schemes? what is truth? how can ‘truth’ be defined? putnam’s version of realism and his challenge of the fact/value dichotomy generally make students examine their own conception of reality, and goodman’s ways of worldmaking is both shocking and enlightening to my students. once students loosen their grip on reality, they begin to entertain a variety of metaphysical positions. good philosophy makes people think hard because it poses good questions. for analytic philosophers to produce good analytic philosophy, they must remember the primary goal of philosophy: to challenge people to think. philosophical analysis is a tool, and we should not simply stare at the finger and forget the moon to which the finger points. the challenge of teaching analytic philosophy to undergraduates 94 engaging analytic philosophy with chinese philosophy on a personal level, i have been reconstructing chinese philosophy with the analytic methodology for years. analytic philosophy and chinese philosophy are not as incongruent as is commonly believed by philosophers on both sides. there are mutual benefits to gain if we engage chinese philosophy with analytic philosophy: on the side of chinese philosophy, we could employ a language of clarity and lucidity gleaned from analytic philosophy; on the side of analytic philosophy, we could broaden our perspectives of key philosophical issues prominent in the tradition of analytic philosophy. to engage chinese philosophy with analytic philosophy is not to presume that the two traditions are naturally compatible. for one thing, the daoist and the buddhist traditions have always emphasized that one should go beyond linguistic expressions, to seek transcendent truth, to grasp the meaning behind words and to comprehend the teacher’s sayings with one’s intuitive understanding. this is why some people strongly oppose using the analytic methodology on chinese philosophy.12 eske møllgaard argues that the analytic philosophical treatment of chinese philosophy “hampers productive research in this area.”13 bernard faure argues that analytic philosophy “falls under the fascination of a particular kind of purely linguistic approach” and “restricting philosophy to grammar.”14 however, the development of chinese philosophy has a lot to gain from importing analytic philosophical methodology and issues into traditional chinese philosophy. as mentioned before, the methodology of analytic philosophy is philosophical analysis—focusing on the clarification of philosophical concepts, the articulation of reasoning and argumentation, and the precise formulation of principles or definitions. this methodology of philosophical analysis is very useful in the study of chinese philosophy, especially for the benefit of contemporary readers. contemporary interpreters of ancient chinese philosophical texts should aim to assist readers in their understanding, and the precise choice of words along with the clear formulation of views is an effective means. granted, the analytic presentation of chinese philosophy cannot exhaust the whole content of chinese philosophy, but it is a start in the right direction. what analytic philosophy as a methodology can offer to chinese philosophy, is the scholars’ conscious efforts aiming at conceptual clarity and precision of language. the analytic reconstruction of chinese philosophy can help connect contemporary readers with these traditional philosophical issues. for example, the debate on realism and anti-realism is reflected in the daoist conception of language and reality; the conviction of moral realism is implicit in the confucian moral philosophy. there are many others who have engaged analytic philosophical issues or positions with classical chinese philosophy—virtue ethics, moral psychology, political philosophy, and metaphysics are at present the most prominent areas of comparative study. 95 liu at the same time, analytic philosophical tradition challenges every participant to be a problem solver, a thesis presenter, and most importantly, to establish his or her own view. expository work and textual analysis take backstage to the introduction of a novel solution. any budding analytic philosopher is entitled to challenge the received view, as long as he or she has done the groundwork of research and has truly come up with something that can add to the discussion. it is this kind of equality that facilitates an open exchange of ideas in the circle of analytic philosophy. the historical tradition of chinese philosophy, on the other hand, takes the pattern of adhering to one’s own philosophical school, which is marked by the hierarchy of one master and multiple students. ancient texts are often students’ records of the master’s teachings of the classics. this long-held “awe” toward the masters and the classics dominated the intellectual culture of interpretation and reinterpretation, to the extent that even one’s novel ideas were disguised as textual commentary (as seen in the works of neo-confucians). to engage chinese philosophy with analytic philosophy, therefore, one needs to begin with an attitude shift: from “textual interpretation” to “problem-solving,” from speculating on the original author’s intent to developing one’s own voice. the convergence between analytic philosophy and chinese philosophy can take place at various junctures with some aim at lucidity of conceptual analysis and rigor in philosophical argumentation, while some others go for innovative problem-solving as a joint endeavor. both philosophical analysis as a methodology and analytic philosophy as a philosophical interlocutor can contribute to the development of chinese philosophy. the conceptual clarity gleaned from analytic philosophy can enable chinese philosophers to better express their viewpoints. analytic philosophy can also suggest many new topics and problems for the development of chinese philosophy. chinese philosophy, as well as other asian philosophies, needs to be “reinvented” in order to become part of the global philosophical exchange. the analytic approach provides one way to philosophize chinese thought, so that the question whether there is philosophy in chinese history will no longer be pertinent. conclusion: putting analytic philosophy back in the humanities in my opinion, if analytic philosophy is to be a philosophical tradition that can make a cultural contribution to the world in the twenty-first century, then it needs to come out of the ivory tower—the graduate programs that teach exclusively analytic philosophy. analytic philosophers should not think that their profession is only for the analytic elites, that their writings are only meant for trained experts, and that their serious philosophical pursuits are naturally urgent and important to others. they need to rethink the value of their the challenge of teaching analytic philosophy to undergraduates 96 projects and find believable examples to motivate them. if analytic philosophy cannot even reach out to undergraduate students who receive proper instruction from their professors, then it will hardly have any appeal to other intellectuals in our society. as putnam puts it, “good prose, whatever its subject, must communicate something worth communicating to a sensitive reader […]. the demand that we only say what can be said in the sort of prose that bertrand russell wrote, marvelous as that prose was, will, in fact, necessarily limit what one can talk about.”15 nehamas also points out that “[analytic] philosophy needs to take seriously the need to communicate its concerns more broadly and to a larger audience.”16 accessibility and relevance must be constant reminders when analytic philosophers write their prose. furthermore, analytic philosophers need to have a broader philosophical training, so that their discourse makes more connections with other philosophical issues. back in 1959, c. p. snow criticized “the cultural divide” of the times: those in the culture of sciences and the culture of humanities “can’t talk to each other,”17 and he writes: “this polarization is a sheer loss to us all.”18 now even within the philosophy circle, there is still the persistent polarization between analytic philosophy and any other philosophy that is supposedly nonanalytic—continental philosophy, asian philosophy, to list just the obvious. analytic philosophy needs to open its closed door, and analytic philosophers ought to become more informed of philosophical issues and traditions that are not born and bred in the analytic tradition per se. current graduate students in analytic programs need to be more broadly educated in the history of western philosophy as well as in more pluralistic philosophical traditions to make connections with other philosophical concerns. analytic philosophy needs to be brought out of its exclusionist clique and present its philosophical findings in a way accessible to a broader readership. it should return to genuine human concerns and resituate itself in the humanistic departments. i share putnam’s sentiment when he writes, “i am concerned about certain tendencies in analytic philosophy—by the tendency to scientism, the tendency to patronize the history of philosophy, the refusal to hear other sorts of philosophy—but fighting these tendencies is not the same thing as fighting analytic philosophy.”19 i believe that analytic philosophy has a lot to offer to our undergraduates, to the future intelligentsia of our society, but it needs to change its self-image first. notes 1. i wish to thank my colleague andrew howat for his input. 2. levy 2003, 293. 97 liu 3. engel 1999, 222. 4. levy 2003, 296. 5. nehamas 1997, 221. 6. putnam 1997, 201. 7. nehamas 1997, 212. 8. levy 2003, 286. 9. baillie 2003, ix. 10. leiter 2011. 11. by this i refer to what alexander nehamas calls the “canon” of analytic philosophy: works by frege, russell, carnap, ayer, ryle, wittgenstein, austin, strawson, quine, davidson, putnam, and kripke. the list is of course not exhaustive. 12. for example, eske møllgaard argues that the analytic approach “reduces unique thought to arguments and subsumes the specific under abstract categories.” hence, “in the study of chinese thought this philosophy must be rejected” (2005, 321). bernard faure calls professional analytic philosophy “a language game in and of itself,” which imposes a “straightjacket” on our understanding of reality (2004, 33). a chinese scholar fang chaohui also criticizes the approach of analytic chinese philosophy: “employing western disciplinary categories to interpret confucian classics would turn confucianism onto the path of being epistemized and philosophized.” (fang 2007, 12, my translation) 13. møllgaard 2005, 321. 14. faure 2004, 31. 15. putnam 1997, 201–2. 16. nehamas 1997, 222. 17. snow 1961, 17. 18. snow 1961, 12. 19. putnam 1997, 202. the challenge of teaching analytic philosophy to undergraduates 98 works cited baillie, james 2003. contemporary analytic philosophy. 2nd edition. upper saddle river, nj: prentice hall. engel, pascal. 1999. “analytic philosophy and cognitive norms.” monist 82.2: 218– 34. faure, bernard. 2004. double exposure: cutting across buddhist and western discourses. stanford, ca: stanford university press. leiter, brian. 2011. “analytic and continental philosophy.” in the philosophical gourmet report 2011. http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/analytic.asp levy, neil. 2003. “analytic and continental philosophy: explaining the differences.” metaphilosophy 34.3: 284–304. møllgaard, eske. 2005. “eclipse of reading: on the ‘philosophical turn’ of american sinology.” dao: a journal of comparative philosophy 4.2: 321–340. nehamas, alexander. 1997. “trends in recent american philosophy.” daedalus 126.1 (american academic culture in transformation: fifty years, four disciplines): 209–223. putnam, hilary. 1997. “a half century of philosophy, viewed from within.” daedalus 126.1 (american academic culture in transformation: fifty years, four disciplines): 175–208. snow, c. p. 1961. the two cultures and the scientific revolution. the rede lecture, 1959. new york: cambridge university press. microsoft word 6 burley.docx [expositions 12.2 (2018) 69–84] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 “citizens of the universe”: bryan van norden and the taking back of philosophy mikel burley university of leeds, uk van norden’s manifesto among the philosophers cited by bryan van norden in the final chapter of his taking back philosophy: a multicultural manifesto (2017) is bertrand russell, who praised philosophical contemplation for its capacity to expand “not only the objects of our thoughts, but also the objects of our actions and our affections.” such contemplation, russell continues, “makes us citizens of the universe, not only of one walled city at war with all the rest.”1 like joshua’s israelite army at jericho, van norden wants to destroy walls, but not in order to invade the city of a perceived enemy. rather, by shouting and trumpeting the benefits of multicultural philosophizing, van norden is encouraging everyone with a philosophical interest (which may, in some sense, be every human being simpliciter) to tear down the barriers that prevent the broadening of philosophical horizons (159). the barriers, as van norden sees it, are principally those constructed by an ethnocentric “anglo-european mainstream” (2), which tends, largely through ignorance and prejudice, to neglect or disparage philosophical traditions outside the western canon. a consequence of this ethnocentrism is that “less commonly taught philosophies” (lctps) remain underrepresented among the teaching and research activities pursued in philosophy departments, not only in the western world but also in certain nonwestern countries whose educational institutions gravitate towards the western model. (as we know, “globalization” is all too often a euphemism for western cultural imperialism.) van norden also wishes to defend the value of philosophy more generally against attacks from anti-intellectualist politicians—who treat the category of “philosophers” as a paradigm of useless good-for-nothings—and from loudmouth public intellectuals, especially scientists, who vaunt the superiority of science over philosophy, typically on the grounds that science is capable of disclosing genuine truths about the universe whereas philosophy amounts to mere idle speculation. so the burden of van norden’s manifesto is not only to reclaim philosophy from those who would allow its pursuit in academic environs to remain blinkered by a monocultural mindset, but also to rescue philosophy’s humanistic ideal from the “citizens of the universe” 70 misunderstandings fostered by a cultural milieu in awe of the achievements of natural science. as wittgenstein observed in the 1930s, philosophers are as guilty of falling prey to this awe as is anyone else, for many of them “constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does.”2 although van norden does not cite wittgenstein on this point—and would almost certainly take exception to wittgenstein’s vision of philosophy as “purely descriptive”—he does recognize that philosophers share a significant portion of the blame for the widespread perception of philosophy’s futility. instead of continuing philosophy’s ancient legacy of inquiring into how one ought to live, professional philosophy in the modern era has become increasingly academic in the worst sense of the word. card-carrying “analytic” philosophers have frequently busied themselves with authoring arcane thought experiments—or, more often, embellishing existing thought experiments with their own minor tweaks—which encourage hyper-specialization rather than opening up dialogues about what is important in human life. along the way, van norden also takes a swipe at “continental thinkers,” many of whom he considers to be typified by jacques derrida, who, in the opinion of martha nussbaum (among other non-derrideans), leaves the reader hungering for something philosophically substantial beyond all the verbal dexterity and clever textual analysis.3 if one were inclined to wonder whether such second-hand dismissals of continental philosophy are not overhasty, van norden might remind us of the warning issued in his preface: that he has sought to fulfil his editor’s request to inject some cheekiness into his prose, and in doing so has “not shied away from being openly partisan” and more “sardonic” than he would normally be “in the classroom or in a scholarly publication” (xxiii–xxiv). though perhaps lacking in philosophical rigor, then, van norden’s book nevertheless presents arguments that demand to be heard. on the whole, i agree with him. having devoted a good deal of my academic career—and of my life—to the study of philosophies deriving from south asia (in addition to many deriving from europe and elsewhere), i thoroughly concur that such study can be philosophically valuable and life-enhancing, potentially saving one from the perils of an overly narrow perspective on the world and on human modes of engagement with it. for the purposes of this essay, however, i shall focus on elements of van norden’s arguments that need, in my view, to be thought through more carefully than van norden is able to do in the relatively small space that his manifesto affords. i concentrate on two issues in particular. first, in the next two sections, i offer some reflections on the overall impression given by van norden that incorporating non-western material into standard philosophy curricula is not a difficult task and that all it really requires is the will to overcome 71 burley a culturally myopic inertia. while i admit that the difficulties should not be overestimated, i also wish to highlight some reasons why they should not be underestimated either. second, i pick up on a threefold distinction that van norden introduces in his final chapter, between what he calls a “hermeneutic of faith,” various “hermeneutics of suspicion,” and “relativism” (see 139–142). while potentially fruitful as a starting point, the distinction, as van norden articulates it, omits certain possibilities and oversimplifies others. notably, it omits what i, following the wittgenstein-influenced philosopher d. z. phillips, am inclined to call a hermeneutics of contemplation. moreover, by characterizing relativism in the way that he does, but then asserting baldly that it does not deserve to be taken seriously, van norden seems to preclude, a priori, a number of philosophical viewpoints that, i suspect, he would not really want to preclude—such as the perspectivism of nietzsche, the internal realism advocated in some of hilary putnam’s writings, and certain interpretations or appropriations of the jain “doctrine of many-sidedness” (anekāntavāda). even if, after due consideration, one rejects these viewpoints as philosophically untenable, that is a very different matter from refusing to take them seriously in the first place. “bringing into dialogue”: underplaying the difficulties? taking back philosophy’s longest and most philosophically substantial chapter is chapter 2, “traditions in dialogue.” it is here that van norden provides specific examples of how nonwestern philosophical ideas might be discussed in relation to existing issues in the curriculum. noting, for instance, that a philosopher such as descartes merely takes it for granted “that there must be individual substances distinct from all their qualities” (43), van norden recommends invoking as a counter-position the buddhist “ontology of states rather than things” (44). this latter viewpoint is usefully propounded in the form of a dialogue between a bactrian king and the buddhist monk nāgasena in the pāli text known as the questions of king milinda (c. first century bce). van norden’s other proposals include: confronting hobbes’ conception of human nature as ruthlessly competitive with the more benign confucian conception argued for by philosophers such as mengzi (fourth century bce); contrasting an aristotelian understanding of ethical cultivation with confucian, buddhist, and neo-confucian versions; and turning to chinese philosophers to enhance discussions of the problem of “weakness of will” in ethics. while admitting that, on account of his own areas of expertise, his choice of examples leans towards chinese philosophy, van norden is confident that comparable examples could be drawn from other lctps, such as indian, african, native american, african-american, feminist, islamic, jewish, latin american, and lgbtq philosophies (82). this is no doubt “citizens of the universe” 72 true, and the chapter does a convincing job of fulfilling its aim, which is to illustrate the bringing into dialogue of voices from philosophical traditions that were not, originally, in actual dialogue with one another. i am concerned, however, that by cherry-picking examples in the way that he has done, van norden presents an unduly rosy picture of comparative crosscultural philosophy. there are, in my view, also potential difficulties that ought not to be underplayed. van norden’s sanguinity is typified by a comment about indian philosophy. “[a]ny acquaintance with indian philosophy,” van norden affirms, “reveals that, in terms of both methodology and subject matter, it is philosophical even according to the most narrow standards that anglo-european philosophy might supply. just open a book!” (82). in response to this, i should like to emphasize: it depends on which book you open. one of my own principal areas of expertise is the darśanas (roughly, “schools” or “viewpoints”) of classical indian philosophy known as sāṃkhya and yoga. the most authoritative texts of these schools are commonly referred to as the sāṃkhyakārikā and yogasūtra, respectively, both of which date from around the fourth or fifth century ce. if one were to naively open either of these texts, it is unlikely that one would be able to make much of them, even in english translation, without a good deal of surrounding contextual and interpretive information. the sāṃkhyakārikā comprises a series of seventy-two two-line stanzas, each of which, despite forming a coherent semantic unit, is extremely dense. and the yogasūtra is composed in the style typical of many classical indian philosophical treatises, which involves the stringing together of a series of pithy statements or half-statements, each being an individual sūtra (literally, “thread” or “suture”) that is often barely intelligible without an accompanying commentary. indeed, recent scholarship has suggested that the 195 sūtras (or 196, depending on which version one consults) that constitute this text were never presented in manuscript form independently of the commentary known as the yogabhāṣya, the combined text-plus-commentary being designated the pātañjalayogaśāstra.4 owing to the difficulty of understanding either the sāṃkhyakārikā or the yogasūtra, even when—or sometimes especially when—read in conjunction with traditional commentaries, the vast majority of modern scholarship surrounding these texts, both in india and in the west, is primarily exegetical in nature: it is an attempt merely to understand what the texts are saying, which is, of course, a necessary prerequisite for undertaking any philosophical engagement with them. my own approach has included drawing comparisons with aspects of western philosophy, such as kantian transcendental idealism and the phenomenology of brentano and husserl, for the purpose of explicating what i take to be the most coherent interpretation of the 73 burley indian material. provided one avoids simply imposing western models upon the original sources, such comparisons can be illuminating. there is a sense in which this comparative approach brings western and indian philosophies “into productive dialogue,” yet it does so primarily for exegetical ends, not in order to set up an argument between two or more rival philosophical positions. furthermore, the exegetical enterprise also demands several other factors, most notably a high degree of competence in the language in which the sources were composed—in this case classical sanskrit—plus a thorough acquaintance with the philosophical milieu out of which the sources arose. competence in the language is vital because texts such as the sāṃkhyakārikā and yogasūtra contain numerous technical terms that lack any straightforward english synonym. for example, the yogasūtra defines its central term, yoga, as citta-vṛtti-nirodha. but what does citta-vṛttinirodha mean? the range of possible translations is extensive. citta is something like “mind” or “consciousness”; a vṛtti is, literally, a “turning” (related to latin vortex), and hence can denote a “whirl” or “ripple” in a body of water. in view of what comes later in the text, cittavṛtti can be understood to mean “changing states of mind”5 or, in one influential early translation, “the fluctuations of mind-stuff.”6 nirodha, meanwhile, derives from a verbal root meaning “to hold back, stop, hinder, shut up, confine, restrain, check, suppress, destroy,”7 thus suggesting that yoga consists in the “stilling” (bryant) or “restriction” (woods) of the states or fluctuations of the mind. but arriving at an approximate translation such as this hardly resolves the question of meaning. to understand what, for the school of philosophy known as yoga, “stilling the mind” amounts to requires a detailed study of the text as a whole and probably of several commentaries on it as well. with regard to the philosophical milieu out of which sāṃkhya and yoga arose, available historical evidence is extremely thin. we have the names of authors to whom the primary texts have traditionally been attributed: īśvarakṛṣṇa in the case of the sāṃkhyakārikā and patañjali in the case of the yogasūtra. but we have no reliable biographical information about them. and neither of them claims to be the originator of the philosophies presented in the texts. the author of the sāṃkhyakārikā states explicitly that he is merely expounding doctrines that have been passed down from the “highest seer,” which is generally treated as an epithet of a legendary figure named kapila;8 and the yogasūtra, enigmatically, declares īśvara (roughly, “the lord”— not to be conflated with īśvarakṛṣṇa) to be “the teacher of the ancients, because he is not limited by time.”9 thus, we do not really know when or where the philosophies of sāṃkhya and yoga originated; we can merely speculate on the basis of snippets of information derivable from traditional commentaries, supplemented by comparative analysis of ideas contained in the “citizens of the universe” 74 classical sources and similar ideas expressed elsewhere, including in texts for which we have independent reasons for regarding as historically either earlier or later than the sāṃkhyakārikā and yogasūtra. we may also look to the texts of rival indian philosophical schools, such as those of vedānta, nyāya, buddhism, jainism, and others, to find arguments against the views of sāṃkhya and yoga. but we should be wary of uncritically accepting interpretations of sāṃkhya and yoga put forward by proponents of these rival schools, just as we should be cautious about accepting interpretations of the rival schools presented in partisan sāṃkhya and yoga commentaries. as with any philosophical tradition, the painting of one’s opponents’ views in unfavourable colours can often prove to be a means of bolstering one’s own position that is too tempting to resist. the floors of many traditions are littered with discarded straw men, and that of indian philosophy is no exception. this is why close attention to the original sources is indispensable, which, in turn, is why scholars have gone—and continue to go—to great lengths to furnish as much information, both contextual and based on close readings of the texts themselves, about what the sources are saying. hence, while not all work in indian philosophy is philological and interpretive in nature, a substantial amount of it is. so to imply, as van norden does, that one merely has to pick up a book on indian philosophy and one will immediately see that this tradition is much like that of western philosophy—with which it can readily “be brought into productive dialogue”—is, as it stands, in need of qualification. some indian philosophy lends itself to this purpose, but much of it needs to be studied at considerable length in relation to its own cultural context before it can be utilized for the sort of manufactured cross-cultural argumentative exchanges that van norden illustrates by means of his own examples from buddhist and chinese sources. these points that i have been making about the need for careful examination of original texts, informed by some knowledge of the language in which they were composed and of the cultural milieu from which they derive, bear upon van norden’s response to what he deems to be a “bad argument … against diversifying the curriculum” (32). the purportedly bad argument takes the form of the question “what would you have us cut? we can barely cover western philosophy as it is!” van norden’s response acknowledges that the coverage of western philosophy would indeed have to be reduced, but adds that covering all of western philosophy was never a realistic prospect in the first place; since compromises are already being made, the replacement of some western philosophy by content drawn from non-western or other lctps would not be a radically new departure in this respect. but is the argument to which van norden is responding really so bad? in my view, van norden’s response overlooks a significant 75 burley difference between, on the one hand, introducing new material into a curriculum from within the philosophical tradition that is already being predominantly taught and, on the other hand, introducing material from a very different philosophical tradition. i shall elaborate this point below. philosophizing within and across traditions having admitted the importance of comprehending “how doctrines and practices of argumentation are situated in their particular cultures,” van norden observes that “it is equally important to avoid the misconception that philosophy in the west is monolithic” (30). this is true, and it is a poignant reminder that there is no absolute differentiation between what we might call intra-traditional and cross-traditional philosophizing, respectively—intratraditional being the discussion of philosophical topics with reference to only one tradition (e.g., “western philosophy” or “chinese philosophy”) and cross-traditional being the discussion of such topics with reference to two or more traditions. traditions, after all, are rarely sharply bounded: they tend to be both porous and internally variegated, frequently blurring into one another. as van norden highlights in chapter 1, there has in fact been crossfertilization between, for example, chinese and european philosophy since at least the seventeenth century. so the idea of discrete and entirely heterogeneous philosophical traditions is naïve. it does not follow, however, that distinctions between different traditions cannot be made, for even if they have fuzzy edges, traditions may nonetheless be distinguishable in rough and ready terms. indeed, any contention that philosophies from non-western traditions ought to be integrated into the curriculum presupposes that traditions are distinguishable. my point is not that cross-traditional philosophizing should be avoided, but that the potential challenges it poses should be properly appreciated. in some instances, finding ways of overcoming these challenges—or of simply recognizing their existence—is apt to make crosstraditional philosophizing all the more worthwhile, for doing so may, among other things, reveal philosophical possibilities (including possible understandings of what philosophy is) that would not otherwise have come to light. but entering into cross-traditional philosophizing with the blasé expectation that, in practice, it is no different from intra-traditional philosophizing carries the risk of being counter-productive. it carries this risk because, if students expect to be able to understand arguments from two or more traditions and to bring those arguments into dialogue when their knowledge of all but one of the traditions is extremely limited, there is a danger that an injustice will be done to the arguments from the less wellunderstood tradition or traditions. “citizens of the universe” 76 needless to say, defining what a tradition consists in is no easy task. but in the case of philosophy, one of the common characteristics is its broadly conversational nature. it is no accident that plato presented the bulk of his philosophy in dialogue form, for philosophy is typically pursued through communication with others: ideas are sharpened and arguments are refined by subjecting them to interrogation and contestation. even when a philosopher, such as descartes, adopts the conceit of having sought to devise a philosophical system “from first principles” by sitting alone in an isolated room,10 there nevertheless comes a point when the system must be tested out in the public arena and responded to by fellow philosophers, whether in face-to-face dialogue or in written form. thus, when alfred north whitehead described “the european philosophical tradition” as “a series of footnotes to plato,”11 he was, in part, emphasizing (albeit by means of deliberate exaggeration) the extent to which this tradition constitutes an ongoing succession of responses and counter-responses. novel thoughts may arise from time to time, but not in a vacuum: they are invariably stimulated by ruminating upon the thoughts of others, even if those others lived and died several hundred years earlier. western philosophy, we might say, is, like art or culture in general, a conversation over time.12 when communicating with one another, philosophers “count on mutual understanding insofar as they exploit a shared heritage, refer to a common canon, and use a common language (even if their language is broken into different dialects).”13 and something similar may be said about, for example, the philosophical traditions of china and india, and about other traditions as well: there need not be a common language in the sense that all contributors to the conversation must speak, say, classical chinese or sanskrit, but the tradition gains its coherence from a certain shared heritage and set of reference points. a consequence of the conversational nature of philosophical traditions is that one’s understanding of current discussions in philosophy is likely to deepen by studying the history of the subject, for current discussions—when pursued competently—will be aware of, and will be responding either explicitly or implicitly to, ideas that have come before. hence, one’s insight into kant will be enhanced by studying the thought of descartes and hume, and one’s comprehension of heidegger improves from learning about aristotle, kierkegaard, and husserl. in the case of chinese philosophy, the work of mengzi and zhu xi will be better understood if one also studies confucius. and in indian philosophy, one needs to have some acquaintance with abhidharma and yogācāra buddhism, and with classical sāṃkhya and yoga, if one is to appreciate how śaṅkara, in his commentary on the brahmasūtra, tries to differentiate his own nondualist philosophy from those other viewpoints. so, too, will one need some familiarity with the upaniṣads, and perhaps the bhagavad gītā as well, to grasp the 77 burley background of śaṅkara’s own thought. in turn, knowledge of śaṅkara’s nondualist version of vedānta is needed if the later vedāntic systems, such as the “qualified nondualism” of rāmānuja and the dualism of madhva, are to be adequately interpreted. and so on. again, none of this rules out the possibility of incorporating non-western philosophy into the curriculum, but it does suggest that gaining a genuinely rich understanding of many important philosophical works will require learning about the traditions in which they are embedded. that takes time. and learning about a different tradition takes more time than learning about another work within a tradition with which one is already familiar. the investment of such time is apt to be well rewarded, for it facilitates not merely a new viewpoint within an existing set of disputes but, potentially, a radically new vista upon a divergent disputational landscape—a way of seeing things from a different cultural as well as a different philosophical perspective, perhaps one that deploys a markedly different conception of what, from a western point of view, has been called philosophy. but the investment of time is significant, and this significance ought not to be glibly dismissed on the grounds that compromises are already being made in the coverage of western philosophy. building a philosophy curriculum that is cross-traditional and multicultural should be done. but doing it well is not easy. hermeneutics and neglected options turning now to van norden’s concern with philosophical methods, i want in this penultimate section to consider the threefold distinction that van norden adumbrates—between what he calls a “hermeneutic of faith,” various versions of a “hermeneutic of suspicion,” and, thirdly, “relativism.” according to van norden, a hermeneutic of faith consists in reading texts with an attitude of hope that one may discover in them qualities of “truth, goodness, and beauty,” whereas a hermeneutic of suspicion involves seeking motives behind a text “that are unrelated to its truth or plausibility”—motives such as economic or political advantage “as well as sexist, racist, or imperialist conceptions of the world” (139). without wishing to reject either of these hermeneutical orientations, van norden proposes that a focus on suspicion has become pervasive in the humanities and social sciences, and that departments of philosophy “are often the last refuge of the hermeneutics of faith” (140). although van norden does not cite paul ricoeur in this connection, it is from ricoeur that the distinction between a hermeneutics of faith (or a “hermeneutics of recollection”) and a hermeneutics of suspicion derives. for ricoeur, these notions have specifically religious implications: a hermeneutics of suspicion is an interpretation that strives to demystify religion “citizens of the universe” 78 (in the manner exemplified by marx, nietzsche, and freud) whereas a hermeneutics of recollection is one “that tries to grasp, in the symbols of faith, a possible call or kerygma”14— a religious message that speaks to one personally. evidently, van norden is extending these terms beyond the sphere of religious texts and symbols to encompass approaches to the interpretation of texts more generally. what both he and ricoeur neglect is the possibility of an approach that, while being properly philosophical, endeavours neither to demystify and debunk nor, necessarily, to discover values to adhere to. the neglected approach, which has been dubbed by d. z. phillips a hermeneutics of contemplation,15 is one that prioritizes understanding the variety of ways of being human over the advocacy or condemnation of any of those ways in particular: it aims to disclose “possibilities of sense” within human forms of life and discourse, salvaging them from the tendency, especially common among philosophers, to prematurely foreclose certain possibilities in the haste to develop general theories. as with wittgenstein’s note of caution about philosophers being beguiled by the methods of science, a hermeneutics of contemplation eschews the “craving for generality” in favour of giving due attention to particular cases.16 far from ignoring matters of truth, goodness, and beauty, a contemplative hermeneutics would investigate the variety of meanings that the concepts of truth, goodness, and beauty can have in multiple contexts, instead of assuming from the outset that each of these concepts must have an essential and uniform meaning across all contexts of use. given its opposition to essentialism and its emphasis on the recognition of a plurality of ways of being human, a hermeneutics of contemplation is well suited for cross-cultural philosophical inquiry. it is concerned, precisely, with finding “intriguing conceptual possibilities,” which is part of what van norden himself aims to achieve in his exposition of alternative philosophical perspectives (82). so, i submit, a hermeneutics of contemplation deserves a place alongside the hermeneutics of faith and of suspicion in the list of options available to the multicultural philosopher. van norden’s own third option, however, is what he calls “relativism.” yet it is not really a third option in van norden’s eyes, since he considers relativism to be philosophically worthless—not even deserving to be taken seriously (140). despite this, van norden does go to the trouble of distinguishing two varieties of relativism: cognitive and ethical. cognitive relativism is the view that the truth-value of any proposition “depends upon the perspective from which [it is] evaluated” (140). the view has long been recognized to be incoherent, van norden remarks, because it undermines itself: if it is held to be objectively true, then it asserts, 79 burley inconsistently, that there is at least one nonrelative truth; but if it is held to be true merely relative to the proponent’s perspective, then it provides no basis for anyone else to accept it. ethical relativism, meanwhile, “asserts that the truth or falsity of evaluative claims (and only evaluative claims) depends upon the perspective from which they are evaluated” (141). it is unclear to me why van norden refers to “evaluative” rather than merely ethical claims here. if he means to include all evaluative claims—such as aesthetic, legal, political, and religious, as well as ethical ones—then the form of relativism at issue would be more aptly named evaluative relativism or value relativism. but, in any event, van norden, while admitting that the view is not incoherent in the way that cognitive relativism is, considers it to be “a banal dead end in philosophy” (141). it is a dead end because it affords no practical guidance about what, ethically, to think or do. if one maintains that the truth-value of ethical judgments is relative to individuals, then no help is offered for someone trying to make an ethical judgment; and if one maintains that the truth-value of such judgments is relative to cultures, then no help is offered in cases where divergent judgments are present within the same culture (and trying to determine which “subculture” one belongs to is unlikely to help either, van norden adds). if one were to claim that ethical relativism fosters tolerance towards other peoples and cultures, then one would have overlooked a crucial implication of ethical relativism itself—that whether one should be tolerant is dependent on one’s own (cultural or individual) perspective. all of these are fair points. in fact, one might get the impression that, by making them, van norden comes close to appearing as though he is taking relativism seriously as a position, or set of positions, that deserve to be countered. but van norden’s self-confessed grumpiness about relativism seems out of step with his overall openness to conceptual possibilities. indeed, his characterizations of relativism are so quick and dirty that they run the risk of foreclosing discussion about more subtle positions that many would call versions of relativism—positions which, even if one disagrees with them, undoubtedly do deserve to be treated with philosophical seriousness. (as van norden says in connection with buddhist, confucian, and neo-confucian philosophers, “it’s fine to tell me that you don’t agree with them, but philosophy is not about teaching only figures whom you agree with” (82). the same applies, i am contending, to the work of sophisticated philosophical relativists.) i do not have space here to go into detail about versions of relativism that warrant serious philosophical scrutiny, but, as a starting point, one might mention the “perspectivism” of nietzsche, the “internal realism” of hilary putnam, and certain interpretations of the jain “doctrine of many-sidedness” (anekāntavāda). in the case of nietzsche, we are confronted with an eloquent and provocative non-systematic thinker who revels in metaphor and hyperbole. “citizens of the universe” 80 notoriously, when railing against “positivism”—which he characterizes as the insistence that “there are only facts”—nietzsche replies, “no, facts are precisely what there is not, only interpretations. we cannot establish any fact ‘in itself’: perhaps it is folly to want to do such a thing.”17 by van norden’s lights, the claim that there are no facts, only interpretations, would appear to suffer from the incoherence of cognitive relativism: if what is asserted is to be taken as true, then, in effect, what we are being asked to accept is that it is true—and hence a fact— that there are no facts, which is incoherent; alternatively, if we treat the assertion as the mere expression of an interpretation, which overtly disavows any claim to be factual, then we are left wondering why we should accept it. this would be a tempting way of evading the challenge that nietzsche, in his work more generally, poses; for if we take the time to go beyond superficial readings, we are apt to find a multifaceted thinker who, in certain places, strives to carry through a radical rejection of the very norms of rationality upon which the superficial readings depend. for instance, in many places, nietzsche celebrates the affirmation of life over the affirmation of truth: in these moods, nietzsche regards the essential question as being not whether a judgment is true or false—or even coherent (by conventional standards)—but rather “to what extent it is life-promoting.”18 this shift of priorities—from truth to “life,” or indeed, in other places, from truth to power—is profoundly unsettling for the philosopher who can see no purpose in philosophical argumentation if it is not directed towards truth. but that capacity to unsettle us—and not infrequently to advance a startlingly perceptive observation about life or the world (which, ironically, may strike us as all too true)—is part of the wonder of reading nietzsche. relativist or not, he deserves to be taken seriously—and i suspect that van norden would agree (not least because he cites nietzsche several times in his book). as for putnam, he put forward his internal realism in the early 1980s as an alternative to metaphysical realism, which he defines in terms of three main theses: first, that “the world consists of some fixed totality of mind-independent objects”; second, that “[t]here is exactly one true and complete description of ‘the way the world is’”; and third, “truth involves some sort of correspondence relation between words or thought-signs and sets of things.”19 internal realism, by contrast, maintains that the question “what objects does the world consist of?” makes sense only within what putnam variously terms a “theory of description,” a “scheme of description,” or a “conceptual scheme.” on this view, it makes no sense to suppose that objects could exist as objects independently of any conceptual scheme, for it is the conceptual scheme that divides up the world into distinguishable objects. while some commentators would construe this as a form of antirealism, putnam calls it internal realism because it maintains that the objects we, as individuals, perceive and think about do really exist independently of our 81 burley own thoughts and perceptions, albeit not independently of the conceptual scheme within which our perceiving and thinking are occurring. in effect, then, putnam’s theory—which, admittedly, he later came to modify and partially disavow—amounts to a form of conceptual relativism: what counts as an object (how we conceive of it), and hence also the truth about any object, is relative to a conceptual scheme—that is, to a system of concepts that operates within a given human community. again, as with nietzsche’s perspectivism, putnam’s internal realism seems to fall within van norden’s definition of cognitive relativism, for it does indeed assert that “the truth or falsity of all claims depends upon the perspective [in this case, the conceptual scheme] from which they are evaluated.” and yet, i presume van norden would agree that the numerous philosophers who have engaged, whether sympathetically or critically, with putnam over this view—including putnam himself—are not thereby making the mistake of taking seriously something that does not deserve to be. finally, it is worth mentioning here the jain anekāntavāda, which translates as “nononesidedness [hence: many-sidedness] doctrine.” although most scholars agree that this was not, in its original form, a doctrine of cognitive relativism, it has nevertheless lent itself to overtly relativist interpretations or appropriations. the classic exposition of the doctrine utilizes the well-known parable of the blind men and the elephant, in which several blind men each touch part of an elephant and assume, on that basis, that they know what the whole elephant is like.20 clearly, what the parable does not illustrate is the absence of objective truth; indeed, the implication is that a fully enlightened individual—a jina—would be capable of seeing the whole elephant and hence knowing the whole of reality. but since the achievement of such enlightenment is, for most of us, a very long way off, the parable, and the doctrine it illustrates, is generally understood to promote a strong form of epistemic humility according to which all views should be treated as merely partial and perspectival. this radical perspectivalism has, in certain instances, been construed in relativist terms, which is in fact how it is articulated on one of the most prominent jain websites, according to which “jainism developed the theory that truth is relative to the perspective (naya) from which it is known.”21 my point is not that such interpretations ought to be accepted uncritically, but simply that they should not be dismissed out of hand. “relativism” is itself a many-sided doctrine—or multiplicity of doctrines—and van norden’s perfunctory repudiation on the basis of a crude typology does not do justice to the variety. concluding remarks “citizens of the universe” 82 in sum, then, i concur with van norden that philosophical contemplation can enable us to become, in russell’s phrase, “citizens of the universe” as opposed to being parochially preoccupied with only a miniscule portion of it. diversifying our philosophical interests to encompass traditions beyond the euro-american mainstream can contribute significantly to that widening of horizons, and, yes, students ought to be given “the opportunity to be inspired by [for example] buddhism in addition to platonism, or confucianism in addition to aristotelianism” (van norden 101). we should not, however, presume that the task of curriculum expansion is an easy one, not least because learning about a philosopher, or a school of philosophy, from another tradition demands—if it is to result in more than a superficial or distorted understanding—contextualizing that philosopher or school within the larger tradition itself. this amounts to more work than simply introducing another western philosopher into an existing western-focused curriculum. moreover, i have contended, we should be open to methodological pluralism, too, and recognize more hermeneutical options than the binary picture of “faith” versus “suspicion” sketched by van norden. and finally, this openness should preclude casual dismissals of complex and ramified philosophical positions—such as the multiplicity of relativisms—on the basis of cursory definitions that fail to consider actual versions of the positions at issue. notes 1. bertrand russell, the problems of philosophy (indianapolis: hackett, 1990), 161; quoted in bryan w. van norden, taking back philosophy: a multicultural manifesto (new york: columbia university press, 2017), 154. 2. ludwig wittgenstein, the blue and brown books: preliminary studies for the philosophical investigations, 2nd ed. (oxford: blackwell, 1969), 18. 3. martha c. nussbaum, love’s knowledge: essays on philosophy and literature (new york: oxford university press, 1990), 171; quoted in van norden 152. 4. philipp a. maas, “a concise historiography of classical yoga philosophy,” in periodization and historiography of indian philosophy, ed. eli franco (vienna: publications of the de nobili research library, 2013), 53–90. 83 burley 5. edwin f. bryant, the yoga sūtras of patañjali: a new edition, translation, and commentary with insights from the traditional commentators (new york: north point press, 2009), 10. 6. james haughton woods, the yoga-system of patañjali (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1914), 8. 7. monier monier-williams, a sanskrit-english dictionary (oxford: clarendon press, 1899), 553. 8. mikel burley, classical sāṃkhya and yoga: an indian metaphysics of experience (abingdon: routledge, 2007), 51. 9. yogasūtra 1.26, trans. bryant 103. 10. rené descartes, rules for the direction of the mind, in the philosophical writings of descartes, vol. 1, trans. john cottingham, robert stoothoff, and dugald murdoch (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1985), 15. 11. alfred north whitehead, process and reality: an essay in cosmology, eds. david ray griffin and donald w. sherburne (new york: free press, 1978), 39. 12. richard rorty, philosophy and the mirror of nature (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 1979), 389–394. 13. adriaan theodoor peperzak, thinking about thinking: what kind of conversation is philosophy? (new york: fordham university press, 2012), 86. 14. paul ricoeur, freud and philosophy: an essay on interpretation, trans. denis savage (new haven, ct: yale university press, 1970), 343. 15. d. z. phillips, religion and the hermeneutics of contemplation (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2001). 16. cf. wittgenstein 18; d. z. phillips, faith and philosophical enquiry (london: routledge & kegan paul, 1970), 63, 87. 17. friedrich nietzsche, the will to power, trans. walter kaufmann and r. j. hollingdale (new york: vintage books, 1968), §481. “citizens of the universe” 84 18. friedrich nietzsche, beyond good and evil: prelude to a philosophy of the future, trans. walter kaufmann (new york: random house, 1966), §4. 19. hilary putnam, reason, truth, and history (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1981), 49. 20. jeffery d. long, jainism: an introduction (london: i.b. tauris, 2009), 117–118. 21. “anekantvad,” jainworld.com, http://jainworld.com/education/seniors/senles16.htm. microsoft word 3 cahill 12.1.docx [expositions 12.1 (2018) 20–32] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 the future of (catholic) just war theory: marginal lisa sowle cahill boston college introduction i envision that just war theory will continue to have a place in catholic social teaching (cst) and social ethics, but that its role will become increasingly marginal to the positive advocacy of peacemaking or peacebuilding. this is already evident in the “growing edges” of just war theory, such as jus post bellum, just ante bellum, just policing, and the reinvigorated nuclear disarmament movement.1 all of these iterations of just war theory make its role restrictive, stringent, and even prohibitive in relation to the use of armed force. they push its function away from the justification of war and toward alternative methods of avoiding or resolving conflicts, with an emphasis on the moral imperative of protecting or reconstituting just and peaceful social life. even more indicative is the increasing emphasis of cst since vatican ii on the christian responsibility and the realistic possibility of finding diplomatic and other nonviolent ways to avoid and end conflicts. recent popes in particular have made extremely strong statements against the political use of armed force. an important historical factor is that the dominant type of conflict in today’s world is no longer “war” in the sense of conflicts between or among nation-states. these have declined since world war ii. today most conflicts occur within nation-states, or across their borders, including civil wars, insurgencies, religious and ethnic conflicts, and terrorism. of course, such conflicts can be fueled by and become proxy wars for national governments, including those of the nations in which they occur. nevertheless, “just war” criteria formulated for use by heads of states and their advisors are no longer adequate to this changed situation, both because national governments have diminished control of armed force and because those who do control it are not always motivated by concerns of justice as just war theory defines it. due to the proliferation and intransigency of sub-state and trans-state conflicts, the salient area in which cst still retains a place for armed force is humanitarian intervention. however, even in cases in which it is clear that massive human rights abuses are resulting from the inability or unwillingness of a state to protect its citizens or resident aliens, the use of force by outside powers 21 cahill   has only a tenuous ability to bring long-lasting peace.2 outside force may be the only alternative to stop killing, for example in rwanda (where a failure of international will permitted ongoing genocide), east timor (where force stopped military violence against civilians and led to independence), and potentially in myanmar (where military violence has, as of early 2018, killed over 7,000 and displaced over 600,000 people belonging to the rohynga muslim minority). on the other side, however, the 1999 nato bombing of kosovo in response to serbian ethnic violence against the albanians exacerbated ethnic tensions and led to more violence; the 2003 u.s.-led invasion of iraq destabilized the entire society and increased anti-western terrorism; and more recent interventions in libya and syria were in important ways misguided and ultimately failures. for these practical reasons, as well as because of the formative, long-standing, and gospel-based commitment to forgiveness, reconciliation, and peace, catholic social teaching since the second vatican council, especially papal teaching, has constantly reiterated the immorality and selfdefeating character of violence. it has urged nonviolent solutions to political conflicts and to armed violence actually occurring. catholic social ethics and activism increasingly highlight the importance and promise of constructive peacemaking or peacebuilding toward the goal of a just peace.3 this trajectory is captured in the title of pope francis’s 2017 world day of peace message: “nonviolence: a style of politics for peace.”4 while the popes do not completely eliminate the idea or possibility of justified use of armed force, they minimize its effectiveness and moral acceptability. instead, they train their attention on nonviolent conflict transformation as a concomitant of christian identity, a moral obligation, and a social-political strategy that can be effective and successful.5 restrictive just war theory the christian just war ethic (and most of its secular counterparts) has evolved over sixteen centuries to include two categories of criteria: jus ad bellum (justice in going to war) and jus in bello (justice in war). the criteria within these categories can be formulated in somewhat different ways, but standard versions include, within jus ad bellum, defense of the peace and common good, last resort, right intention, proportionality of destruction caused to good results, and legitimate authority in declaring war. within jus in bello, the primary criteria are noncombatant immunity and proportionality of means used to the objective.6 in a “classic” assessment, john courtney the future of (catholic) just war theory: marginal 22     murray defines the purposes of the just war ethic, especially as a christian ethic, as the condemnation of war as evil, the limitation of the evil war entails, and the humanization of the conduct of war as far as possible.7 regarding this definition, two fairly obvious points may be made. first, the premise of the entire just war tradition and its criteria is that war is a tremendous evil, to which the fundamental moral response is not “justification,” but limitation and restraint. second, in reality, neither this premise nor the limiting functions of just war criteria that murray envisioned have always governed the popular conception of just war theory or its use by warmaking governments. many would aver, to the contrary, that what passes for just war theory and criteria is often a thinly veiled rationalization of national or group self-interest. a keynote for the emergence, since world war ii, of a more skeptical catholic stance toward the justifiability of war and the possibility of keeping war’s conduct within just parameters is certainly john xxiii’s pacem in terris (1963). asserting that international disputes “must be resolved by negotiation and agreement, and not by recourse to arms,” the pope warns that “it no longer makes sense to maintain that war is a fit instrument with which to repair the violation of justice.”8 a special threat for this pope, writing at the height of the cold war, is the danger of nuclear weapons (including the economic burden of the arms race), plus “the terrifying destructive force of modern weapons” in general. to these we can add the unrestrained violence and atrocities that inevitably accompany all war and have been among the intentional means of means of war in conflicts such as those in the former yugoslavia, the democratic republic of congo, guatemala, and cambodia. following john xxiii’s lead, the united states bishops, in their 1983 peace pastoral, the challenge of peace: god’s promise and our response,9 maintain that pacifism and just war theory are united by a presumption in favor of peace and against war. this means that the burden of proof is on those who would justify war, and that such justification must meet a very high bar.10 militarism and the militarization of international problems are thus ruled out. as gerard powers maintains, “war is the failure of politics, not its extension […]. the resort to military force is sometimes necessary, to be sure, but it is not a primary means of achieving even a negative peace.”11 a negative peace is one in which violent conflict has ended or subsided, but access to basic needs, and just and participatory institutions of civil society and government, may be lacking. a positive peace is peace with justice: rule of law, human security, and equitable social institutions and structures.12 in the perspective of cst today, war or more limited types of armed force can be 23 cahill   justified only if, as a last resort, they are the most viable way to achieve a just and sustainable peace. however, since war ordinarily destroys the social trust, infrastructures, and material goods necessary to a just peace, it also ordinarily is not “just.” according to powers, the presumption against war creates a “hermeneutic” for the use of just war criteria in which they do not “readily justify war,” but instead “severely limit it.” the restrictive just war hermeneutic “reinforces the notion that just war criteria are strict restraints on when, why and how to use force, and it creates a heavy obligation to find and pursue nonviolent means of resolving conflict—i.e., to develop an ethic and praxis of peacebuilding.”13 in fact, powers even regards just war theory so conceived as an essential part of preventing war and building peace, insofar as it both provides rationales against the use of force that does not meet strict criteria such as last resort, proportionality, reasonable hope of success, and protection of civilians and also requires securing the conditions of just and peaceful social life going forward. the growing edges of just war theory it is precisely such considerations that have led to the recent development of new categories of just war theory, especially jus post bellum, but also jus ante bellum.14 these categories support and extend the restrictive hermeneutic of just war criteria, and serve as a set of brakes on the advance toward war, rather than as a further impetus or set of rationalizations. the foremost theological proponent of jus ante bellum is maureen o’connell.15 jus ante bellum envisions whether a particular use of force will or will not be conducive to a later just peace. yet, similarly to the criterion of last resort, it also demands that pro-active peacemaking measures are adopted before war occurs, with the purpose of averting resort to force in the first place. jus ante bellum, more than last resort, calls attention to structural violence and ongoing lower-level conflict and the need to find creative solutions. thus jus ante bellum can be seen as a positive approach to building relationships, practices, and structures of peace. jus post bellum has been developed for christian social ethics preeminently by mark allman and tobias winright.16 allman and winright remind us that just cause and just intention have an inherent relation to the effects of any particular use of armed force. if defense of the common good and a lasting peace are really the cause intended by the wagers of war, then the relevant decisionmakers will also be invested in ensuring that post-conflict conditions will be conducive to social restoration. for example, the means of war must not destroy sources of livelihood and material the future of (catholic) just war theory: marginal 24     and social infrastructures requisite to the later building of a just peace. in addition, the war must be concluded on just terms (in brief, no victor’s justice). just punishment that avoids an ethos of impunity, but does not feed back into cycles of vengeance, is imperative. social processes of reconciliation must be consciously and formally undertaken so as to heal the wounds and rifts of war. this involves the repatriation, reintegration, and rehabilitation of former combatants, even in cases in which atrocities have been widespread. in light of these criteria, it is obvious that the justice of war is always an imperfect justice. for, how rarely will the criteria of justice after war be met! with this in mind, the criteria of jus post bellum serve as a warning that it is extremely difficult to meet the criteria of just war. therefore, this new just war category likewise works as a warning light against justifying war. humanitarian intervention humanitarian intervention was validated by the united nations in 2005 under the rubric “the responsibility to protect” (r2p).17 although sovereign states have the right and the duty to protect their own populations, other nations and the international community as a whole have a responsibility to intervene fairly and effectively in the face of atrocities such as occurred in rwanda and kosovo. john paul ii was the first pope to acknowledge this obligation when in 1993 he declared that state sovereignty “cannot constitute a screen behind which torture and murder may be carried out.” in the face of unjust aggression against innocent civilians, “states no longer have a ‘right to indifference.’”18 such interventions must be subject to the same criteria as any other use of armed force, including noncombatant immunity and reasonable hope of success and, by implication, the ability to secure the ongoing safety of the populations at risk.19 again, this sets a high bar. the u.s. bishops warn that humanitarian intervention could devolve into an excuse for “imperialism” or lead to “endless [and often fruitless] wars of altruism.” what the bishops call “effective nonviolent means” are always preferable and better the serve the end goal of establishing a just peace.20 elias omondo opongo, s.j., is a scholar and practitioner of transitional justice and post-conflict reconstruction. he heads the hekima institute of peace studies and international relations in nairobi, kenya. taking the example of intrastate conflict in africa, he shows some of the pitfalls of humanitarian intervention, which he does see as justified in cases of “gross violation of human rights.”21 but what may be justified in theory is not easy to put into practice. the use of force by 25 cahill   external parties with limited familiarity with the complexities of local situations will have limited success in the challenge “to settle grievances and disputes; end political, ethnic, and economic marginalization; and prevent genocide.”22 these are no doubt huge challenges for any would-be interveners, so opongo recommends local alliances of intervention, for instance, forces sponsored by the african union, as preferable. at the same time, “the historical evidence of military intervention indicates that there are limited success stories to demonstrate their effectiveness,” no matter who undertakes them.23 papal teaching the possibility of using armed force has not been entirely excluded, with popes paul vi, john paul ii, benedict xvi, and francis all leaving the door open to limited justifications of humanitarian intervention or self-defense.24 however, this permission is far from central to their outlook. instead they are motivated by the hope, expressed by gaudium et spes, that positive peace and justice can result from human cooperation inspired by the gospel and humanity’s highest values.25 the integral connection of peace and justice was affirmed in the landmark exhortation of paul vi, who declared that, “if you want peace work for justice,”26 and that “the new name for peace is development.”27 in fact, and even paradoxically, the popes frequently make statements that seem to rule out armed force entirely. this serves to underline the immense priority of peacebuilding and reduce the likelihood that armed force will be considered a reasonable option. in a line repeated by every successive pope up to and including francis, paul vi exhorted the united nations, “no more war, war never again! peace, it is peace which must guide the destinies of people and of all mankind.”28 ultimately, “the church cannot accept violence, especially the force of arms.”29 benedict xv, pius xii, john xxiii, and paul vi all had experienced war and were extremely critical of “the utility of widespread violence,” even “at the service of defending or restoring an order of justice.”30 they reinforce the presumption against war as a just and effective means to gain political objectives. they stress the self-defeating nature of violence and the vocation of peace. this trend gains momentum under john paul ii, benedict xvi, and francis. john paul ii insists that “[v]iolence is evil,” “a lie,” and “the enemy of justice.”31 he titles his 1987 world day of peace message “development and solidarity: two keys to peace.”32 yet, like the popes of the two world wars, john paul ii is influenced by specific experiences of violence in his own era. he the future of (catholic) just war theory: marginal 26     validates the new concept of “humanitarian intervention,”33 and allows for a nation’s right of defense against terrorism.34 following john paul ii, benedict endorses humanitarian intervention under the rubric “responsibility to protect.”35 yet caritas in veritate (2009) adds that the responsibility to protect must be implemented “in innovative ways.”36 he calls “love your enemies” the gospel’s “magna carta.”37 “violence never comes from god.”38 benedict insists that peace cannot exist without justice, as confirmed in his world day of peace messages (2009, 2010, 2011). pope francis likewise calls international parties in conflict to seek peace by dialogue, reconciliation, negotiation, and compromise, for war is the “suicide of humanity.”39 taking forward themes of pacem in terris, he denounces not only the use of nuclear weapons, but also their possession.40 given the possibility of a 2013 military intervention in syria by u.s. and french “superpowers,” francis is insistent that “war brings on war! violence brings on violence.”41 in a potent symbolic move, he led a peace vigil for syria at the vatican that attracted over 10,000 people. francis is strong on the importance of putting all possible efforts into nonviolent methods of addressing conflict. even in the case of the so-called islamic state or isis, he calls for stopping aggression through less than lethal force. “the means by which [the unjust aggressor] may be stopped should be evaluated. to stop the unjust aggressor is licit, but we nevertheless need to remember how many times, using this excuse of stopping an unjust aggressor, the powerful nations have dominated other peoples, made a real war of conquest.”42 pope francis’s most important statement on peace is his 2017 world day of peace message, which underlines the futility of violence in bringing just and sustainable peace. active nonviolence, faithful to the gospel, is “a way of showing that unity is truly more powerful and more fruitful than conflict.”43 “‘the name of god cannot be used to justify violence. peace alone is holy. peace alone is holy, not war!’”44 in conclusion the presence yet marginality of the just war framework in post-vatican ii papal teaching is evident from the fact that, without prohibiting armed force as immoral in every case, the popes do not dwell on or amplify the criteria of just war, nor do they present any specific use of force as justified. instead, the emphasis is unequivocally on peace, nonviolence, justice, and peacebuilding. it is undoubtedly the case that some catholic theologians and social ethicists will continue to refine 27 cahill   just war thinking and criteria, but the direction in which such work is heading is clearly toward more vehement critiques of war and more energy around peacebuilding, even when advanced under “just war” criteria, such as jus post bellum. in fact, it is debatable whether the best way to characterize these developments is as refinements of just war theory, rather than as ethical collaboration under a bigger umbrella, such as just peace or peacebuilding. it is certainly conceivable that some catholic ethicists will propose armed force as an appropriate and necessary response to specific atrocities, now or in the future. even so, it might be better (or at least more consistent with the direction of recent papal thought) to understand such arguments, not as expanding “just war theory,” but as applications of positive concepts of cst such as human dignity, the common good, and sustainable just peace. it is difficult to imagine that either the popes or mainstream theologians would in the foreseeable future justify “war” in the sense of the full-scale military engagement of nation-states, especially given the danger of nuclear weapons. for now, just war theory is not totally out of the magisterial or social-ethical picture. but it is marginal to the enterprise of reducing global violence and establishing justice, peace, and internationally cooperative societies in the present volatile and dangerous century. in fact, as exemplified by francis’s 2017 world day of peace message, the vocabulary and framework of cst’s approach to intranational and international conflicts centers on just peace and nonviolence, not just war. this positive, constructive, peace-oriented social-ethical vision is key to the promotion of nonviolent conflict transformation and peacebuilding as realistic political possibilities and not only ecclesial ideals. the catholic church has a countercultural message about military force, but it is not a sectarian “peace church.” the purpose of cst, including its peacebuilding profile, is to contribute to more just societies and to increase justice in civil society and governance globally. notes 1. mark j. allman and tobias l. winright, “growing edges of just war theory: jus ante bellum, jus post bellum, and imperfect justice,” journal of the society of christian ethics 32/2 (2012): 173–91. in this essay, i will focus on the explicit expansion of just war the future of (catholic) just war theory: marginal 28     categories (jus ante bellum and jus post bellum). for just policing, see gerald schlabach, just policing, not war: an alternative response to world violence (collegeville, mn: liturgical press, 2007) and tobias winright, “just policing and the responsibility to protect,” the ecumenical review 63/1 (2011): 84–95. 2. independent international commission on kosovo (2000), kosovo report, available at http://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/6d26ff88119644cfc125698900 5cd392-thekosovoreport.pdf. 3. see the website of the catholic peacebuilding network (https://kroc.nd.edu/research/religion-conflict-peacebuilding/catholic-peacebuildingnetwork/), and robert j. schreiter, r. scott appleby, and gerard f. powers, eds., peacebuilding: catholic theology, ethics, and praxis (maryknoll, ny: orbis books, 2010). 4. see pope francis, “nonviolence: a style of politics for peace,” january 1, 2017, https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/peace/documents/papafrancesco_20161208_messaggio-l-giornata-mondiale-pace-2017.html. 5. see erica chenoweth and maria j. stephan, why civil resistance works: the strategic logic of nonviolent conflict (new york: columbia university press, 2012); maria j. stephan, “how the catholic church can bolster alternatives to violence: as the vatican considers a shift on ‘just war,’ nonviolent action could be key,” november 1, 2017, united states institute of peace, https://www.usip.org/index.php/publications/2017/11/how-catholic-church-can-bolsteralternatives-violence; as well as other works on nonviolent resistance on the website of the usip (https://www.usip.org/people/maria-j-stephan). 6. for a historical discussion, see james t. johnson, “just war: international law,” encyclopedia britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/just-war. johnson is a major historian of christian just war thought. 7. john courtney murray, s.j., “remarks on the moral problem of war,” theological studies 20 (1959): 40–61. 29 cahill   8. john xxiii, pacem in terris, april 11, 1963, §§126–127, http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-xxiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jxxiii_enc_11041963_pacem.html. 9. see united states conference of catholic bishops, the challenge of peace: god’s promise and our response, may 3, 1983, http://www.usccb.org/upload/challenge-peacegods-promise-our-response-1983.pdf. 10. ibid., §51. 11. gerard f. powers, “from an ethics of war to an ethics of peacebuilding,” in from just war to modern peace ethics, eds. heinz-gerhard justenhoven and william a. barbieri, jr. (berlin and boston: walter de gruyter, 2012), 289. 12. see kenneth r. himes, o.f.m., “peacebuilding and catholic social teaching,” in peacebuilding, 268–273. 13. powers, “from an ethics of war,” in from just war to modern peace ethics, 289. 14. see allman and winright, “growing edges of just war theory.” 15. maureen o’connell, “jus ante bellum: faith-based diplomacy and catholic tradition on war and peace,” journal for peace and justice studies 21/1 (2011): 3–30. 16. mark j. allman and tobias l. winright, after the smoke clears: the just war tradition and post-war justice (maryknoll, ny: orbis, 2010). 17. united nations office on genocide prevention and the responsibility to protect, http://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/about-responsibility-to-protect.html. 18. john paul ii, “address to the diplomatic corps credited to the holy see,” january 26, 1993, §13, https://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paulii/en/speeches/1993/january/documents/hf_jp-ii_spe_19930116_corpo-diplomatico.html. 19. see kenneth r. himes, o.f.m., “humanitarian intervention and the just war tradition,” in can war be just in the 21st century? ethicists engage the tradition, eds. tobias winright and laurie johnston (maryknoll, ny: orbis), 61–64. the future of (catholic) just war theory: marginal 30     20. united states conference of catholic bishops, the harvest of justice is sown in peace, november 17, 1993, §4, http://www.usccb.org/beliefs-and-teachings/what-webelieve/catholic-social-teaching/the-harvest-of-justice-is-sown-in-peace.cfm. 21. elias omondo opongo, s.j., “just war and its implications for african conflicts,” in can war be just in the 21st century?, 150. 22. ibid., 146. 23. ibid., 154. 24. the tone is set by paul vi, populorum progressio, march 26, 1967, §31, http://w2.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_pvi_enc_26031967_populorum.html. 25. gaudium et spes, december 7, 1965, §78, http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vatii_const_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html. 26. paul vi, 1972 world day of peace message, january 1, 1971, https://w2.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/messages/peace/documents/hf_pvi_mes_19711208_v-world-day-for-peace.html, citing the 1971 synod of bishops’ justitio in mundi, §6. 27. paul vi, populorum progressio, §87. 28. paul vi, 1965 address to the united nations general assembly, october 4, 1965, https://w2.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/speeches/1965/documents/hf_pvi_spe_19651004_united-nations.html. 29. paul vi, evangelium nuntiani, 1975, §37, http://w2.vatican.va/content/paulvi/en/apost_exhortations/documents/hf_p-vi_exh_19751208_evangelii-nuntiandi.html. 30. himes, “peacebuilding,” in can war be just in the 21st century?, 279. 31. john paul ii, homily at drogheda, ireland, september 29, 1979, §§18–20, https://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/homilies/1979/documents/hf_jp31 cahill   ii_hom_19790929_irlanda-dublino-drogheda.html; quoted in the 2006 compendium of the social doctrine of the church, no. 496. the pope further comments that “violence destroys what it claims to defend: the dignity, the life, the freedom of human beings.” 32. john paul ii, 1987 world day of peace message, “development and solidarity: two keys to peace,” january 1, 1987, https://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paulii/en/messages/peace/documents/hf_jp-ii_mes_19861208_xx-world-day-for-peace.html. he entitles his 2002 world day of peace message “no peace without justice, and no justice without forgiveness,” which extends paul vi’s phrase “no peace without justice” in a way that clarifies justice as restorative and further illuminates the meaning of just peace. 33. john paul ii, 2002 world day of peace message, january 1, 2002, §11, https://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/messages/peace/documents/hf_jpii_mes_20011211_xxxv-world-day-for-peace.html. 34. john paul ii, 2002 world day of peace message, §5. 35. benedict xvi, address to the general assembly of the united nations, new york, april 18, 2008, http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedictxvi/en/speeches/2008/april/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20080418_un-visit.html. 36. benedict xvi, caritas in veritate, 2009, §7, http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedictxvi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20090629_caritas-in-veritate.html. 37. angelus address, february 18, 2007, https://w2.vatican.va/content/benedictxvi/en/angelus/2007/documents/hf_ben-xvi_ang_20070218.html; see also good friday message, april 22, 2011, http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedictxvi/en/speeches/2011/april/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20110422_via-cruciscolosseo.html. 38. benedict xvi, angelus address, 2007. 39. pope francis, “war is the suicide of humanity,” vatican radio, june 2, 2013, http:// media01.radiovaticana.va/audiomp3/00374893.mp3. the future of (catholic) just war theory: marginal 32     40. see gerald o’connell, “nuclear disarmament now a ‘moral imperative’ as pope francis rejects deterrence,” america, november 13, 2017, https://www.americamagazine.org/ politics-society/2017/11/13/nuclear-disarmament-now-moral-imperative-pope-francisrejects. 41. pope francis, angelus address, september 1, 2013, https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/angelus/2013/documents/papafrancesco_angelus_20130901.html. 42. pope francis, 2014 press conference, during return flight from south korea, as quoted in francis x. rocca, “pope talks airstrikes in iraq, his health, possible u.s. visit,” catholic news service, august 18, 2014, https://www.ncronline.org/news/world/pope-talksairstrikes-iraq-his-health-possible-us-visit?_ga=2.180740327.1546312816.15113057912123628133.1507130389. 43. francis, “nonviolence: a style of politics for peace,” 2017, §6. 44. ibid., §4. microsoft word sanford.docx [expositions 9.1 (2015) 41–55] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 newman and the virtue of philosophy jonathan j. sanford franciscan university of steubenville every curriculum needs an organizing principle, something that gives it shape and purpose. this claim can be understood in two ways. the first is as a statement of ontological fact whereby one notes that necessarily there is a starting point, an archê, by means of which a complex thing is made one. second, it can be understood as a normative claim that provides the basis for the obligation to be good caretakers of the aims of genuine education by means of ensuring that we have given sufficient attention to the archê that ought to organize it. i am especially concerned with the latter, and within the context of the curriculum of a catholic institution of higher education. where does one find such a thing? is it something that catholic universities had and then lost, or is it still preserved? is it the preserve, then, of core curricula? or, is there rather a more definite course of studies that prepares someone to articulate and hand it on? if so, to which field ought one to turn for that? given the religious identity of a catholic college, one might expect the discipline of theology to provide such a principle. given the increasingly specialized nature of much academic philosophy, and the popular reputation of philosophers as obtuse and aloof, the last place one might think to look for it is philosophy. against this background, that blessed john henry cardinal newman argues that philosophy supplies and is the proper caretaker of the organizational principle for general education in a university setting, and further that it is philosophy which justifies the role of theology within that curriculum, may seem paradoxical. nevertheless, there are good reasons for thinking that newman is right to turn to philosophy for this principle, given a proper understanding of what he takes philosophy to be. what he takes philosophy to be, at least in the sense relevant to this role of an organizing principle of university education, is neither a specialized discipline, nor the animating principle of a core curriculum—at least, not merely that. it is, i think, best understood as a virtue. it is to newman’s idea of a university that we turn to find this virtue articulated and its proper work defined. like other works of lasting significance, the universal value of the idea of a university necessarily emerges from its particularity, and in this case the particular challenges of establishing a catholic university at a place and in a time which was in many respects indifferent, and sometimes even hostile, to that effort. our own challenges are not exactly the same—though there are more similarities with newman’s circumstances than might at first meet the eye—but those challenges do not need to be the same to appreciate the idea of a university that newman offers us, or the virtue of philosophy he describes therein. toward a partial defense of the claim newman and the virtue of philosophy 42 that newman’s virtue of philosophy retains its relevance as an integrating principle within a catholic university’s curriculum,1 i first consider some of the challenges to which philosophy is proposed as an answer, and then turn to a consideration of what newman means by philosophy and how it relates to disciplines within a university, and especially to theology. i. the archbishop of armagh, dr. cullen, who was well connected in rome and had received a mandate to make provisions for the establishment of a catholic university in ireland, had prevailed upon newman in 1851 to serve as the new university’s first rector, a post he would eventually hold from 1854–1858. the preparations for this position were fraught with many difficulties, not the least of which was the need to articulate the aims and principles of a specifically catholic university in such a way as to win the full support of the irish bishops and representatives of the state of ireland. the nine discourses newman delivered in 1852, which compose the first half of the idea of a university, sought to do just that. these were followed in 1854 with ten lectures which sought to extend his 1852 discourses, and which have come to compose the second half of the idea of a university. one could well argue that a work written more than a hundred and fifty years ago and intended as a corrective to many of the pressing and particular troubles afflicting higher education in newman’s day would have little to say to us in our own day and age, especially when we consider university education as the thriving industry it seems to be. but does, in fact, university education thrive in our own times? the answer to that question depends on the standard applied to judge it, and it is to newman that we can turn for a pointed critique of false success in university education and an eloquent defense of the true measure of educational health. the central challenges newman sees for catholic university education are not unique to catholic universities, but to university education in general. this becomes clear when in his introduction to the idea of a university newman reminds his audience of the changes that protestant university education in the previous fifty years had undergone. these developments, by and large the result of attempts to overcome criticisms that university education was both useless and needlessly religiously partisan, resulted in a university education that stressed utility and downplayed the role of particular religious confession within a university curriculum. newman’s effort to outline the principles and aims of a catholic university had, then, at the same time to seek to correct what he considered two of the more outstanding threats to university education. on the one hand, cultural opinion had moved in the direction of thinking the purpose of a university education primarily to be the development of particular skills and proficiencies by means of which a graduate can get along in what many today like to refer to as the “real world.” newman’s observation is that the universities in his own day, so as not to be out of step with the times, bowed 43 sanford before this judgment. on the other hand, public opinion had it that the peculiar beliefs and practices of any particular religion ought to have no hold on a university’s curriculum. private belief is well enough, but university education can and ought to be a secular affair. the idea of a university was intended, amongst other things, to serve as antidote to these changes in university education which newman considers motivated by popular sentiment rather than considered reflection. two key claims, the defense of which extends through much of the the idea of a university, are meant as direct rejoinders to the interconnected challenges of instrumentalizing and secularizing university education. first, newman contends that any knowledge worthy of its name is its own end,2 and its value is not and should not be judged by its utility.3 second, newman contends that theology is not only just as much a science as any other discipline, though it is that, but that this discipline has a particularly vital role to play in a university curriculum.4 newman contends that the exaltation of useful knowledge and the abandonment of particular religious confessions within a university’s curriculum give birth to two additional challenges to genuine university education.5 the first is what we might call the balkanization of the disciplines within a university curriculum.6 the second is the loss of a sense of the distinction between the mere possession of knowledge on the one hand and genuine learning on the other.7 without a way to recognize the unity of the different sciences, and indeed without even a will to see them unified, standards external to the central life of the university soon make their way into the driver’s seat of university practices. pressures are put on professors to prove to outside adjudicators that they are imparting useful knowledge to their students, and students begin to learn that what is really important about their university efforts is the passing of tests, the completion of courses for credit, and the establishment of a respectable gpa. i think newman’s concern on these points is best seen as one of emphasis: when external measures for assessment take a primary rather than secondary or even tertiary position, then an untoward focus given to hoop-jumping of various sorts results in but the temporary mastery of parts of subjects without the development of those lasting habits of mind that are proper to liberal ideals of learning. none of these four challenges are unique to newman’s day. if anything, and as alasdair macintyre has recently argued in the latter chapters of god, philosophy, universities: a selective history of the catholic philosophical tradition, their prevalence in university education has become far more steadfast. what has made possible the unchecked growth of these dangers is the failure to recognize them as perils at all. in point of fact, what newman regarded as signs of decay are today often lauded as achievements. in newman’s day, as in ours, there are many voices holding out utility as a primary measure of university success—such as when placement records are held to be of primary importance, or when one reads the latest volley of objections to studying the liberal arts. there are many voices celebrating the marginalization or complete cessation of theological studies within a university education—even to the point of academics arguing that newman and the virtue of philosophy 44 religious universities should not be accredited.8 and there are many voices facilitating the stress on specialization and equal footing given to the many disciplines composing today’s “multiversities” and welcoming with open arms external measures of educational efficacy with little or no attention given to the preservation of a unifying vision of education and the cultivation of proper habits of mind.9 more often than not, these challenges do not come piecemeal, but rather are championed by the same individuals in a collective effort. whether the developments are for good or ill all depends, as recent graduates of our universities will be quick to tell you, on your own particular perspective. this state of affairs points to a fifth challenge facing those who intend to take seriously newman’s diagnosis: by means of what standards do we attempt to persuade those most in need of convincing that the challenges enumerated by newman and facing us today are indeed challenges? with so much ground already lost for the traditional ideals of liberal education, it can be hard to find a foothold when discussing educative goals with contemporary academics and administrators, and harder still when defending those ideals to parents of university students who want to see a good return on their investment of tuition dollars. although these challenges are not unique to catholic universities, catholic universities have a unique role to play in the effort to meet them. this role, which is best seen as a responsibility, falls to the catholic university because of the tradition it can draw from and the magisterial direction it receives. what these two sources of inimitable wealth provide are the means required to address the five challenges enumerated above. newman exhorts catholic universities to be what they once were: the standard bearers for what it means to be a university at all. catholic universities possess a unique power to embody fully the idea of a university, but too often they have degenerated into parochial and ghettoized simulacra of secular universities. our aim as catholic institutions ought not to become the catholic harvard of the north, south, east, or west, for we have something different, other, and indeed better to offer than can be found at a secular institution. of course, we ought to strive to be outstanding institutions of research and instruction, but we must also strive to be outstanding institutions of character and faith formation. moreover, we have in fact good reason to think that these two goals, that of excellence in academics on the one hand and excellence in character and faith formation on the other, contrary to the prevailing sentiments of a half century ago, are not merely not opposed to each other, but in fact are complementary. although there have indeed been and still are many catholic institutions that are weak in one or the other area, the complete idea of a catholic university fully incorporates both goals. every catholic college and university has then a gem of great price: the means for making a thorough defense for the point and purpose of a liberal arts education. catholic colleges and universities also employ enough educators still connected to the catholic intellectual tradition to pull such an education off well. but it will take some focused and protracted effort to reeducate 45 sanford ourselves sufficiently in this tradition, and thus we find a sixth challenge facing catholic universities: that of being true to their vocation. ii. it is, then, from within the context of thinking through the aims and principles of a specifically catholic university that newman seeks to redress the problems of university education in general, and it is to philosophy that he turns to make his case. straightaway, however, most readers cannot help but call to mind objections to the recourse to philosophy, for the discipline of philosophy has itself over the last one hundred and fifty years been, in large measure through its own fault, marginalized in university education. what i am referring to is that tendency in academic philosophy to focus exclusively on special problems, and to do so in an obscure and jargon-filled way that is inaccessible to non-specialist observers. many of the problems dealt with in this manner, and one can readily find examples on both analytic and continental sides, are those that are rightly seen as leftovers from the other sciences. add to this the philosophical penchant for disputativeness, and these days philosophers can often seem like dogs fighting over scraps. there are, of course, special problems left to philosophy, and there are good reasons to deal with these problems in the manner of specialists, but a difficulty arises when this problem-solving approach to philosophy is identified and defended as the sole purpose of philosophical reasoning: namely, we lose sight of philosophy herself. instead, we find philosophy of mind, and philosophy of love; philosophy of language, and philosophy of history; philosophy of religion, and philosophy of biology; philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of aesthetics. philosophy of this, and philosophy of that. these are all, at least in some ways, well and good, and newman himself in contexts other than the idea of a university swims deeply within some of these subdisciplines.10 we find also the main branches of philosophy we typically identify with university education, i mean ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics. these major areas of philosophical inquiry, as well as their subdisciplines, must nevertheless be subject to a still broader sense of philosophy identified by newman. this is philosophy herself, an inquiry into one’s whole way of life—the sort of inquiry which, as pierre hadot has reminded us so well,11 everyone took philosophy to be from the time of socrates through at least the patristic period and which survived under different names through the medieval period; the sort of comprehensive inquiry which aristotle in the introduction to his parts of animals tells us is requisite to our becoming generally well-educated, clear-thinking adults.12 it is precisely this broadest and classical sense of philosophy that newman both invokes and builds his case upon in the idea of a university. he defines it in discourse iii as follows: newman and the virtue of philosophy 46 [t]he comprehension of the bearings of one science on another, and the use of each to each, and the location and limitation and adjustment and due appreciation of them all, one with another, this belongs, i conceive, to a sort of science distinct from all of them, and in some sense a science of sciences, which is my own conception of what is meant by philosophy, in the true sense of the word, and of a philosophical habit of mind, and which in these discourses i shall call by that name.13 philosophy in the sense just defined is described as the science of sciences. what does newman mean by that? it is important to observe that newman is using science in the classical sense of scientia, in which any legitimate discipline the inquiries of which result in knowledge can be called scientific. this broad meaning, as opposed to the narrow one more familiar to us as a byword for “natural science,” encapsulates the varieties of precision and methodological principles which are pertinent to disciplines as diverse as literature and mathematics. a second way in which we might misunderstand the phrase “science of sciences” is if we take it in the sense of “paradigmatic,” such as can happen when a champion of a particular discipline—physics, for example—contends that this discipline is the best possible example of what it means to be a science. newman does not, in fact, argue that other sciences should model themselves on philosophy. if we are thinking of “science” in the narrow sense, then it can make little sense to speak of a science of sciences, and if we take science of sciences in a paradigmatic sense, then we might think newman to be engaged in blustering on behalf of a favored discipline. but what sense then can really be made of describing philosophy as a science of sciences? perhaps thinking about what newman does not mean by philosophy will help. newman makes it clear that what philosophy does not entail is a mandate to prescribe to the other disciplines how they are supposed to go about their business. it is not the task of the philosopher to tell the biologist, chemist, mathematician, or historian, how to do his or her job. the successful performance of each of these respective jobs, however, contributes parts to the whole of wisdom, and it is the task of philosophy as the science of sciences to bear witness to that whole of which all the sciences contribute in their particular ways. it is because each of the other disciplines are a part of philosophy in this broad sense that, historically, degrees granted in these other disciplines were considered degrees in one or another concentrated area of philosophy. we still today retain the vestiges of that older order of things. consider that our mathematicians, biologists, historians, political scientists, psychologists, and physicists with terminal degrees all have doctorates in philosophy. though philosophy as the science of sciences does not perform the task of telling particular specialists in other disciplines how to go about their business, it does have the job of making sure each of them stick to its own business and does not meddle in the business of others. positively, 47 sanford this is a matter of making sure that each legitimate discipline is given, in the words of newman, its “due appreciation.” negatively, it is a matter of employing categorical distinctions which determine, in the words of newman, “the location and limitation and adjustment” proper to each science. philosophy does this by means of thinking through the subject-matter, aim, and methodology proper to each of the disciplines; that done, it can ensure that no discipline begins to dictate to another. biologists, qua biologists, have no business telling historians how to do their work; and psychologists, qua psychologists, have no business telling chemists how to do theirs. nevertheless, historians have much to learn from biologists, and chemists have much to learn from psychologists, and vice-versa in each case. but how does such learning take place? it is through the mediation of that common language, that common science, that science of sciences, philosophy herself. but once again, what exactly is this science of sciences which newman describes, and how does one acquire it? recall that in the quotation above newman characterizes philosophy as a science of sciences on the one hand, and a habit of mind on the other. what sort of relationship can there be between a science and a habit? quite a bit, as it turns out, but some recovery of the language of virtue is needed to appreciate newman’s point. we are familiar with the description of moral habits as virtues, but newman is working from a tradition that also sees the possession of different bodies of knowledge, whether of a theoretical or technical sort, as perfections of a person and so as virtues. this tradition is rightfully still our own, grounded as it is in an aristotelian framework of ethical reflection which continues to structure discourse in the catholic intellectual tradition, and there are a number of reasons to bring it more to the foreground, not the least of which is that it provides us a means by which to make sense of the overarching telos of university education. philosophy as newman describes it is an intellectual virtue in the aristotelian sense, but one that is unlike other intellectual virtues insofar as its acquisition requires substantial immersion in many fields of human inquiry rather than the mastery of just one. its acquisition also requires weighing the distinctive subject matter and methodology of each of those various fields against the others with an eye to the whole. this virtue is the result of persistently asking how all things hang together. as with other virtues, it is not simply the result of diligence and native talent, for it is interdependent on the other virtues, the moral no less than the intellectual, and the theological virtues as well if it is to be fully nurtured and best exercised. its development in students on catholic campuses requires not only outstanding courses in special disciplines and a core that works to animate and synthesize the life of the mind, but a comprehensive campus culture that encourages living righteously and deepening a genuine friendship with god. the sort of integrative principle that the virtue of philosophy is in a catholic university curriculum is just one feature of the integrated whole that newman envisions for university studies, as he explains in his sermon “intellect, the instrument of religious training,” preached in 1856 before the catholic university of ireland: newman and the virtue of philosophy 48 it will not satisfy me, what satisfies so many, to have two independent systems, intellectual and religious, going at once side by side, by a sort of division of labor, and only accidentally brought together. it will not satisfy me, if religion is here, and science there, and young men converse with science all day and lodge with religion in the evening. it is not touching the evil, to which these remarks have been directed, if young men eat and drink and sleep in one place, and think in another: i want the same roof to contain both the intellectual and the moral discipline. devotion is not a sort of finish given to the sciences; nor is science a sort of feather in the cap, if i may so express myself, an ornament and set-off to devotion. i want the intellectual laymen to be a religious, and the devout ecclesiastic to be intellectual.14 the catholic intellectual tradition never was, and never can be, merely an intellectual affair. nevertheless, the catholic intellectual tradition is an intellectual affair, and we could use to flesh out still further the content of newman’s programmatic reflections on the virtue of philosophy. what sort of language does this science employ, and what is its methodology? though he is not usually regarded as a peripatetic, at least not in the narrow sense of being an interpreter of aristotle’s texts, newman endorses aristotle as supplying a sort of universal language by means of which we might profitably pursue the acquisition of the science of sciences: while the world lasts, will aristotle’s doctrine on these matters last, for he is the oracle of nature and of truth. while we are men, we cannot help, to a great extent, being aristotelians, for the great master does but analyze the thoughts, feelings, views, and opinions of human kind. he has told us the meaning of our own words and ideas, before we were born. in many subject-matters, to think correctly, is to think like aristotle; and we are his disciples whether we will or not, though we may not know it.15 this view of aristotle as the shaper of a common and familiar language by means of which to make sense of the world, our experiences, and ourselves, may not fit with the typical undergraduate’s efforts at reading a work of aristotle’s for the first time. it is, as many of us know so well, hard going. but, at least in my experiences of reading and teaching works of aristotle, once one has surmounted the difficulties of wrestling with aristotle’s unfamiliar modes of expression, one can begin to make sense of him precisely because of a certain familiarity in thought. that is, we do often discover ourselves already to be thinking like aristotle, even if it is not our intention to think according to the mind of aristotle. that at least is one reason why his relevance remains. another is that, even if we stopped teaching any works of aristotle in our 49 sanford universities, we could not avoid the echoes of those works. the language of change, substance, accident, categories, act, potency, abstraction, the virtues and vices, the nature of the soul and its relationship to the body, the division of sciences, scientific taxonomy, and indeed, the very forms of argumentation all owe their origins to aristotle. this common language of academic life is what i think newman is pointing to in recommending to us aristotle, and the universality of that language is meant by him to be a complement of the universality of the virtue of philosophy. the virtue of philosophy is universal first and foremost because it belongs to each person generally and no person exclusively. the intellectual virtue of philosophy does not belong to any discipline in particular, not even to academic philosophy, but rather to each and every participant in university education, and it is precisely the acquisition of this philosophical habit of mind that marks what it is to be liberally educated. the acquisition of this virtue is, it seems then, in large measure tantamount to the aim of a catholic liberal arts education, for this aim recognizes that knowledge, in whatever subject, is always an intellectual excellence, and so an end in itself which at the same time enriches all other knowledge.16 it would be a profound misinterpretation to see in these words of newman, or anywhere else in his defense of philosophy as the science of sciences, an attempt to stifle or downplay the significance, potency, and rich goods that are to be found in any of the particular disciplines. nothing could be further from newman’s intentions. he has a deep respect for the learning to be had by each of the sciences, and argues for each to have its home within university education. the point, rather, is that without the common language that philosophy provides, there can neither be a university nor the distinct disciplines that compose one. what one would have, instead, would be at best a collection of disconnected investigations, a mere heap of discrete bits of learning. indeed, newman wants to see each of the special sciences, including theology, to thrive as the distinct disciplines they are. that is only possible, however, if their practitioners are not onedimensional researchers who can only see the world through their own discipline’s glasses. if professors are to help shape this virtue in their students, they will need in some significant manner to possess it themselves. by means of this virtue, not only do educators achieve a deep appreciation for other disciplines, but this virtue also enables its possessors to see with greater clarity what makes their own discipline distinctive and worthy of a lifetime of focused inquiry. iii. where, it ought to be asked particularly of catholic colleges and universities, does theology find its role vis-à-vis the virtue of philosophy? acknowledging both the importance of the division of the sciences, as well as their unity when brought into relation to each other, necessarily presupposes that the universe itself is unified. it is in this sense that the university is a reflection newman and the virtue of philosophy 50 of the universe as a whole, for it embodies within itself inquiry into each of the subjects available to us through the universe as it manifests itself both in parts and as a whole. but, is this presupposition of the unity of the universe a justifiable one? certainly pagan philosophers as diverse as pythagoras, parmenides, and heraclitus, not to mention plato and aristotle, each had insights into a universe which is a cosmos, an order, and not a chaos. however, none of these thinkers could explain why our universe must be a cosmos. we have to turn to theology to be able to speak with the conviction of newman in discourse v: i lay it down that all knowledge forms one whole, because its subject-matter is one; for the universe in its length and breadth is so intimately knit together, that we cannot separate off portion from portion, and operation from operation, except by a mental abstraction; and then again, as to its creator, though he of course in his own being is infinitely separate from it, and theology has its departments towards which human knowledge has no relations, yet he has so implicated himself with it, and taken it into his very bosom, by his presence in it, his providence over it, his impressions upon it, and his influences through it, that we cannot truly or fully contemplate it without in some main aspects contemplating him.17 to catch a glimpse of the unity of the universe is to catch sight of, albeit in a refracted manner, the unified source of that universe. the greeks suspected as much. jews and christians know as much. without question, then, the discipline of theology holds an elevated significance for newman. all the same, newman provides a philosophical defense of the legitimate status of theology as a science within a university. like each of the other sciences, theology has its distinctive object and methodology, and this goes for both natural and sacred theology. newman argues, moreover, that given the preeminent importance of its subject-matter, theology as a discipline ought to have a prominent place within a university’s course of studies. to be sure, philosophy’s governance of theology is a methodological and procedural one. it cannot boast of reaching deeper than theology, but without philosophy, theology could never plumb the depths. moreover, and this touches on that interdependence of the two disciplines that john paul ii elaborates on in fides et ratio, philosophy cannot do her work if she does not drink deeply and continuously from the flask of theology. this is so, as the last quotation attests, because it is only through theology that philosophy is invigorated, indeed is enthused in that platonic sense of enthousiazein, with that vision of the unity of all things which makes possible its own role as the science of sciences. deprived of this dependence on theology, philosophy swiftly degenerates into what newman characterizes as the religion of philosophy. it is fitting to bear in mind his warning on this score, a warning that needs to be heeded in order to keep the science of sciences in her own proper place. the dangers of this religion of philosophy are evident wherever philosophy is taken to provide the 51 sanford chief means by which humanity is to achieve its purpose. newman argues that pride, arrogance, a gnostic cast of mind, esotericism, and sophistry all rear their ugly heads when philosophy is not tethered to faith. what is missed by the so-called religion of philosophy is the interdependence of this virtue on the others. philosophy unwoven with the other virtues may look and sound like the genuine article, but is in fact a sham. the decline and decadence of the religion of philosophy is perhaps most evident in the area of moral philosophy, as newman remarks in discourse viii: under the shadow indeed of the church, and in its due development, philosophy does service to the cause of morality; but, when it is strong enough to have a will of its own, and is lifted up with an idea of its own importance, and attempts to form a theory, and to lay down a principle, and to carry out a system of ethics, and undertakes the moral education of the man, then it does but abet evils to which at first it seemed instinctively opposed.19 it is, i would submit, elizabeth anscombe who best names the consequences of a philosophical ethics divorced from faith when in her 1958 essay “modern moral philosophy” she argues that what characterizes all the varieties of what she calls modern moral philosophy is a vulgar and shallow consequentialism.20 it is wise, then, for us to bear newman’s warning in mind: philosophy fed by theology can be the science of sciences, whereas philosophy divorced from theology can be a seed of corruption within university education and indeed culture at large. plato, from whom we receive the very word “theology,” and his student aristotle glimpsed something of newman’s warning in their polemics against the sophists and in their shared conviction that what justifies the whole order of things and human inquiry into it is a divine principle, even a divine being. so much the more should those beneficiaries of the fullness of revelation and the gift of faith bear newman’s warning in mind. iv. newman’s efforts at envisioning what precisely the order and purpose of university education is endows philosophy with a responsibility the discharging of which seems too heavy for any discipline to bear. that’s because it is. to appreciate newman’s vision we have to remind ourselves more than once that the intellectual virtue of philosophy as the science of sciences is not the possession of any special discipline, or even all disciplines considered together. this is why i think it best to speak of “the virtue of philosophy,” rather than just “philosophy,” when it is the virtue that is meant and not the discipline. the virtue of philosophy is a perfection of the well newman and the virtue of philosophy 52 educated person. by means of it we can recognize that, to quote newman in discourse vii, “though the useful is not always good, the good is always useful,”21 and so it is not the utility of knowledge that makes knowledge good, but rather the goodness of knowledge itself that makes it useful. virtues make their possessors good and make their work done well, and the virtue of philosophy is no exception. the possession and proper exercise of this virtue would seem them a matter of the first importance for all those involved in catholic higher education. my reflections on newman’s conception of philosophy insofar as it is central to his vision of university education have focused on a paradigmatic description of the virtue of philosophy. as with other virtues, anyone’s possession of the virtue of philosophy can be more or less complete, and i take it as a safe assumption that no reader of this essay is in perfect possession of it. i hope that i have, at least, gone some way in making the case that it is a virtue we should admire and strive to possess more fully. i at least am convinced that, the greater the extent to which we as academics and administrators embody and communicate this virtue of philosophy, the closer we will be to making real the idea of a university. notes 1. in the discussion that followed the presentation of this paper at the conference, “the idea of a catholic college: charism, curricula, community,” at king’s college, several interlocutors suggested that “philosophy” can no longer be separated from the disciplinespecific manner in which it is typically discussed. if that is the case, and i do not say that it is, then we would still need the virtue that newman describes to integrate a curriculum, but just under a different name. 2. though the defense of that claim is concentrated in discourses v and vii. 3. in my experience, this is a claim that those formed in the franciscan tradition, particularly that part of the tradition in which st. bonaventure is regarded as a paradigm, struggle with in newman’s approach (consider, for instance, vision iii, discussion 7, in bonaventure 1934). inspired by bonaventure, they ask: “does not all knowledge point to god? how then can knowledge be valuable for its own sake?” the presupposition seems to be that the language of “for its own sake” is exclusionary on the one hand and leads to self-centered efforts at knowing on the other. in our own core discussions over the last decade and a half, disagreements over whether knowledge can ever be for its own sake have proven to be of critical importance for moving forward with our new core curriculum, which was approved by majority faculty vote in 2012, and which is more extensive and more integrated than our previous core. 53 sanford 4. on these points, newman 1927, discourses ii, iii, and viii, are especially important. 5. for an incisive reflection on newman’s idea of a university, as well some challenges facing university education today, including some of the challenges canvassed here, see macintyre 2009, especially chapters 16–19. 6. to which especially newman 1927, discourses iii and iv, are responses. 7. to which especially newman 1927, discourse vi, is a response. 8. see for instance conn 2014. conn targets wheaton college in particular, which is an evangelical college in illinois with a reputation for outstanding undergraduate education. see jones 2014 for a response to conn. 9. it is clark kerr, first chancellor of the university of california, berkeley, who coined the term “multiversity,” in a series of lectures at harvard, and later published in kerr 1963. 10. most notably, in newman 1979, which wrestles with empiricism, the limits of logic, and the need for a speculative equivalent to aristotle’s practical intellectual virtue of phronêsis, which newman calls the “illative sense.” 11. see especially hadot 2004, as well as hadot 1995. 12. “every study and investigation, the humblest and the noblest alike, seems to admit of two kinds of proficiency; one of which may be properly called educated knowledge of the subject, while the other is a kind of acquaintance with it. for an educated man should be able to form a fair judgement as to the goodness or badness of an exposition. to be educated is in fact to be able to do this; and the man of general education we take to be such. it will, however, of course, be understood that we only ascribe universal education to one who in his own individual person is thus able to judge nearly all branches of knowledge, and not to one who has a like ability merely in some special subject. for it is possible for a man to have this competence in some one branch of knowledge.” aristotle 1984, i.1, 639a1–12. 13. newman 1927, discourse iii, chapter 4, 68. 14. newman 1904, 13. 15. newman 1927, discourse v, chapter 5, 127. 16. ibid., discourse v, chapter 2, 121. 17. ibid., discourse v, chapter 4, 67–68. newman and the virtue of philosophy 54 18. that is, “to be inspired by a god,” and so to be drawn out of oneself in ecstasy as the highpoint of philosophical inquiry, as socrates describes in his second speech in phaedrus. see also pieper 1999. 19. newman 1927, discourse viii, chapter 8, 221. 20. anscombe 1958. 21. newman 1927, discourse vii, chapter 5, 184. works cited anscombe, g. e. m. 1958. “modern moral philosophy.” philosophy 33: 1–19. aristotle. 1984. parts of animals. trans. w. ogle. in the complete works of aristotle, the revised oxford translation. vol. 1. ed. jonathan barnes. princeton, nj: princeton university press. bonaventure. 1934. s. bonaventurae collationes in hexaëmeron. ed. r. delorme. florence: ad claras aquas. conn, peter. 2014. “the great accreditation farce,” chronicle of higher education, june 30. http://chronicle.com/article/the-great-accreditation-farce/147425/. accessed april 15, 2015. hadot, pierre. 1995. philosophy as a way of life: spiritual exercises from socrates to foucault. trans. arnold davidson. hoboken, nj: wiley-blackwell press. _____. 2004. what is ancient philosophy? trans. michael chase. cambridge, ma: belknap press. kerr, clark. 2001. the uses of the university, 5th ed. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. jones, stanton l. 2014. “all knowledge starts somewhere in faith,” chronicle of higher education, july 3. http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2014/07/03/all-knowledgestarts-somewhere-in-faith/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en. accessed april 15, 2015. 55 sanford macintyre, alasdair. 2009. god, philosophy, and universities: a selective history of the catholic philosophical tradition. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield publishers. newman, john henry cardinal. 1904. sermons preached on various occasions. london, new york, and bombay: longmans, green and company. _____. 1927. the idea of a university, defined and illustrated. ed. daniel m. o’connell. chicago: loyola university press. _____. 1979. essay in aid of a grammar of assent. notre dame, in: university of notre dame press. pieper, josef. 1999. enthusiasm and divine madness: on the platonic dialogue phaedrus. 3rd ed. south bend, in: st. augustine press. microsoft word prusak spr20 [expositions 14.1 (2020) 1–8] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 after “morality”: alasdair macintyre and the teaching of ethics bernard g. prusak king’s college (pa) the university of notre dame’s recently revised core curriculum does not require that students take a course in ethics. this might be thought ironic. after all, notre dame was the home, for the first decade of this century, of one of the most distinguished moral philosophers of our time, alasdair macintyre.1 but consider this passage from a recent paper of his: ethics has of course been in vogue for quite some time: medical ethics, legal ethics, journalistic ethics, the ethics of this and of that. whenever there is serious malpractice, the cry goes up: bring on the teachers of ethics! so courses, programmes, academic appointments, centres, have multiplied. there is now money to be made in ethics, even if not all that much.2 the title of the paper from which that quotation is drawn is “the irrelevance of ethics.” macintyre’s focus there is business ethics, but he expresses as well his skepticism of “the academic teaching of ethics in general,” which he claims “has little or nothing to do with the formation of moral character and is ineffective as an instrument of moral formation.”3 (he contrasts in this regard boarding schools for juvenile offenders and basic training camps for the u.s. marine corps.) from his perspective, business ethics has the further strike against it that “its teaching is a dangerous distraction from enquiry into the nature and causes of what is morally flawed in our economic institutions and activities.”4 on second thought, then, notre dame’s decision not to require students to take a course in ethics might be considered, not ironic, but consistent with macintyre’s thinking. away with the ethicists! they are only corruptors of youth, etc.5 but the story is messier. a closer reading of the last quotation above suggests that macintyre’s skepticism about teaching ethics is targeted rather than global. for apparently there is an important ethical enquiry to be done, namely, “into the nature and causes of what is morally flawed in our economic institutions and activities.” macintyre’s complaint is that this is not done in business ethics courses as they are typically conceived and conducted. the upshot is that it is perhaps fitting that the notre dame committee after “morality”: alasdair macintyre and the teaching of ethics 2 charged with examining ethics in the curriculum, though it did not argue for a required course, concluded by indicating ambivalence.6 this iteration of the forum “ethics in focus” takes as its subject the relevance of macintyre’s work to the teaching of ethics to college students (and, in one instance, medical students). the contributors have been asked to focus in particular on the most recent of macintyre’s books, ethics in the conflicts of modernity: an essay on desire, practical reasoning, and narrative, published in 2016, a year after “the irrelevance of ethics.” one of macintyre’s theses in that book is that “academic philosophy at some point in its past history took a wrong turning, marched off in the wrong direction, set itself the task, if i may borrow a metaphor, of climbing the wrong mountain.”7 the metaphor is borrowed from derek parfit, who does not appear by name in the book.8 parfit’s gigantic, two-volume on what matters argues for the claim that “kantian contractualism implies rule consequentialism.”9 against what he characterizes as the widely-held belief that there are “deep disagreements between kantians, contractualists, and consequentialists,” parfit submits that in fact “[t]hese people are climbing the same mountain on different sides.”10 interestingly, macintyre does not appear in the index of either volume of on what matters—evidence that, while parfit and macintyre belong to the same discipline, they understand and practice it very differently. the opening chapter of ethics in the conflicts of modernity constructs an argument between expressivism and what macintyre terms neoaristotelianism over evaluative judgments and the nature of practical reason. toward the end of the chapter, macintyre acknowledges that, “from the standpoint of most […] academic practitioners of contemporary moral philosophy,” this argument must seem “not just mistaken but absurd.”11 for it neglects “the work of the most influential contributors” to the discipline—contributors like parfit—and does not address “most of what they take to be its central problems.”12 (peruse the table of contents of on what matters.) but macintyre has an answer to readers puzzled by the idiosyncrasy of his project: the largest single difference between [most academic practitioners of contemporary moral philosophy] and me is perhaps this, that they find what they identify as the subject matter of their enquiry as unproblematic, while i do not. that subject matter they take to be morality, a set of rules, ideals, and judgments concerning duties and obligations that are to be distinguished from religious, legal, political, and aesthetic rules, ideals, and judgments.13 3 prusak macintyre explains that he capitalizes morality in order to distinguish it from the moralities—the sets of rules, ideals, and judgments—studied by anthropologists. but he goes on to claim that morality is in fact “the morality of advanced modernity,” rather than what most academic practitioners of contemporary moral philosophy take it to be, namely, “a set of impersonal rules, entitled to the assent of any rational agent whatsoever,” which for macintyre is only the most basic of its “pretensions.”14 and this is not all. according to macintyre, contemporary philosophical theorizing about morality, “instead of illuminating the realities with which we have to deal as rational agents,” not only “misleads and distorts,” but even “has the social function of misleading and distorting.”15 the puzzle macintyre asks us to consider is why the norms of morality—more or less a strict kantianism with allowance for reasonable consequentialist excuses—enjoy a generally recognized authority when its “most acute theorists, utilitarian, kantian, and contractarian, remain in permanent disagreement” about the basis of that authority.16 in other words, there is or at least appears to be a general consensus about the norms of morality, a consensus that makes a synthesizing project like parfit’s project conceivable.17 but how can this consensus be when even projects like parfit’s multiply rather than resolve disagreements about what reason there is “for adopting the impersonal standpoint of morality or […] according an overriding importance to its claims”?18 macintyre’s answer is that the norms of morality, which parfit takes for granted in the elaborate and even fantastical thought experiments he uses to develop his synthesis,19 are embedded within and integral to the economic and political systems of late modernity. on what matters, to use the same example, is quasi-otherworldly in its abstraction from economic, political, and cultural realities. the cover photographs of st. petersburg without any people are telling in this regard. the conflicts and complexities of late modernity are out of the picture, literally and figuratively. against this background, recall macintyre’s criticism of business ethics as “a dangerous distraction from enquiry into the nature and causes of what is morally flawed in our economic institutions and activities.”20 on macintyre’s account, philosophical theorizing like parfit’s is no better. it has the social function of misleading and distorting by abstracting and thereby distracting from the social and political order that is its home. readers should go to ethics in the conflicts of modernity to decide for themselves whether they find persuasive macintyre’s account of the “structuring of desires” by what he terms the ethics-ofafter “morality”: alasdair macintyre and the teaching of ethics 4 the-state, the ethics-of-the-market (both “parodies of ethics”), and morality.21 suffice it to say here that macintyre himself finds expressivism “convincing” about morality: “each contending party’s moral judgments give expression to underlying prerational commitments, to attitudes and sentiments that find expression in the unargued premises of [the parties’] arguments.”22 neoaristotelianism, he recognizes, has problems and challenges of its own—new for macintyre, bernard williams figures as a formidable critic as well as an ally23—but macintyre counts as among its advantages that it is grounded in the study of moralities,24 or otherwise put the practices of “plain persons,” who appear so often in the book that they should have had an entry in the index. attention to practice, macintyre proposes, has “as one of its outcomes a conception of the practical life as a life of enquiry whose evaluative conclusions at each stage of that life accord with or fail to accord with the facts concerning human flourishing, that is, are true or false,” over and against both expressivism and the quasi-realism that has succeeded it.25 as macintyre elsewhere puts the same point more simply, “it is only at the level of practice that we can become aristotelians” who recognize both standards of goodness independent of our feelings, attitudes, and choices and our need for the virtues in order to flourish as human beings in the particular situations of our lives.26 macintyre presents thomas aquinas as a teacher of teachers. according to macintyre, the first and second parts of the second part of the summa theologiae “provide […] instruction as to how to educate in practical reasoning.”27 macintyre himself may be considered a teacher of teachers. as a review of ethics in the conflicts of modernity remarks, “the methodology of contemporary moral philosophy is almost as important an issue for macintyre as the substantive ethical theory he defends. he thinks that much of what we produce in the academy, in the field of moral and political philosophy, is sterile and insignificant.”28 and he means for us to do better, both in print and in the classroom. ethics in the conflicts of modernity is studded with asides about moral education. for example, macintyre is emphatic about the need for what he calls sociological self-knowledge: knowledge and understanding of one’s roles and relationships and “what in those roles and relationships is consonant with the exercise of rational agency and what through the contingencies of an imposed set of structures inhibits or distorts that exercise.”29 he notes that “[e]ducation into the virtues consists in key part in making those so educated aware in detail of the possibilities of error and of the errors to which each of them will be particularly inclined,” at which point he discusses the recent work of several social psychologists.30 he comments that “[a]n education focused too 5 prusak exclusively on skills, on means, leaves [students] without an adequate sense of the ends that should be theirs as contrasted with the ends that others for their own purposes impose on them,”31 and he laments that “[t]he education of [students’] preferences is taken to be no part of their schooling.”32 finally, he states, parenthetically, that “[o]ne test of whether a particular academic course in ethics is or is not being taught in a morally serious way is whether or not its students are taught that a close reading of certain novels is indispensable to their learning […].”33 those reflections seem to permit the conclusion that the academic teaching of ethics, decried in “the irrelevance of ethics,” is not purposeless or hopeless—that even a general education ethics course in a core curriculum might do some good for its students in the hands of a studied practitioner, in any event one who has learned from macintyre. but what such a course would look like and involve, other than perhaps the reading of certain novels or at least the injunction to read certain novels, is by no means clear from macintyre’s book. to be more specific, after morality, what would a business ethics course or a bioethics course look like and involve? a more fundamental question is of course whether a teacher of ethics has reason to reform her or his courses in light of macintyre’s criticisms of morality, which is also to ask whether that criticism, and macintyre’s own neoaristotelianism, are persuasive. the contributors to this iteration of “ethics in focus” are rebecca konyndyk deyoung, professor of philosophy, calvin college; ashleen menchaca-bagnulo, assistant professor of political science, texas state university; regan reitsma, professor of philosophy, king’s college; daniel p. rhodes, faculty coordinator of contextual education and instructor in social justice, institute of pastoral studies, loyola university chicago, and m. therese lysaught, professor, neiswanger institute for bioethics and health policy, stritch school of medicine, and institute of pastoral studies, loyola university chicago; jordan rodgers, visiting assistant professor of management, king’s college; joel shuman, professor of theology, king’s college; and emily trancik, director of ethics integration, ascension health care network. notes 1. macintyre remains, in his nineties, a research fellow at the de nicola center for ethics and culture at the university of notre dame. after “morality”: alasdair macintyre and the teaching of ethics 6 2. alasdair macintyre, “the irrelevance of ethics,” in virtue and the economy: essays on morality and markets, eds. andrius bielskis and kelvin knight (new york: routledge, 2015), 7–21, at 8. 3. ibid. 4. ibid. 5. compare elizabeth anscombe, “does oxford moral philosophy corrupt youth?” in human life, action and ethics: essays by g.e.m. anscombe, eds. mary geach and luke gormally (exeter, uk: imprint academic, 2005), 161–167. anscombe answers no, oxford moral philosophy does not corrupt youth, but her reason is that youth are already corrupted by the times, with which “oxford moral philosophy is perfectly in tune” so that it “might be called the philosophy of the flattery of [the] spirit” of the times (163, 167). 6. see “report of the catholic mission focus group,” october 11, 2015, 20, recommending “incentives to increase courses in ethics” and requesting “the oversight of the core to include a review of the extent to which we are succeeding in educating students in ethics,” available at http://curriculumreview.nd.edu/assets/183213/nd_core_curriculum_review_committee_c atholic_mission_focus_group_final_report.pdf. 7. alasdair macintyre, ethics in the conflicts of modernity: an essay on desire, practical reasoning, and narrative (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2016), 34–35. 8. but see also the allusion on 66. 9. derek parfit, on what matters, ed. samuel scheffler, vol. 1 (oxford: oxford university press, 2011), 417. 10. ibid., 419. 11. macintyre, ethics in the conflicts of modernity, 64. 12. ibid. 13. ibid., 64–65. 14. ibid., 65, 68. see also 77, where he characterizes “‘morality’” (here in scare quotes) as “the presently dominant moral system in advanced societies, which [contemporary philosophical theorizing] presents as morality as such,” and 114–115, where “the name ‘morality’” is given to “the moral system peculiar to and characteristic of early and late capitalist modernity.” 7 prusak 15. ibid., 78. see the following discussion of hume’s moral philosophy, 79–85. 16. ibid., 119. 17. see ibid., 136. 18. ibid. see also 138. 19. macintyre comments, “technicolor examples […] are by now stock cases in many moral philosophy classes.” see ibid., 116. 20. macintyre, “the irrelevance of ethics,” 8. 21. see macintyre, ethics in the conflicts of modernity, 124–136. see 128 for the characterization of the ethics-of-the-state and the ethics-of-the-market as “parodies of ethics.” 22. ibid., 140–141. consider in this regard the app for ethical decision making developed by the markkula center for applied ethics at santa clara university. see https://legacy.scu.edu/ethics/ethical-decision/. the app asks its user to evaluate a possible course of action in terms of its utility, its bearing on others’ rights, its justice (that is, whether it gives each person her or his due), its effects on the community as a whole, and the character traits it exhibits or is likely to develop. after the user has “weigh[ed] each perspective,” the app gives the proposed action a score on a scale of 0–100 and judges it as “probably ethical,” “questionable,” or “not liv[ing] up to your values and criteria.” 23. williams figures as a critic for his questions posed to aristotle’s ethics; see ibid., 158–165 and 220–231. he figures as an ally for his criticism of what he called, peculiarly, “the peculiar institution” of morality. see bernard williams, ethics and the limits of philosophy (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1985), chapter 10, 174–196. 24. see ethics in the conflicts of modernity, 117–118 for the contrast between neoaristotelianism and morality. 25. ibid., 40. 26. see alasdair macintyre, “on having survived the academic moral philosophy of the twentieth century,” in what happened in and to moral philosophy in the twentieth century? philosophical essays in honor of alasdair macintyre, ed. fran o’rourke (notre dame, in: university of notre dame press, 2013), 17–34, at 27. 27. macintyre, ethics in the conflicts of modernity, 89. after “morality”: alasdair macintyre and the teaching of ethics 8 28. richard kraut, review of ethics in the conflicts of modernity: an essay on desire, practical reasoning, and narrative, by alasdair macintyre, notre dame philosophical reviews, january 17, 2018, available at https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/ethics-in-the-conflictsof-modernity-an-essay-on-desire-practical-reasoning-and-narrative/. 29. macintyre, ethics in the conflicts of modernity, 211. compare his paper “social structures and their threats to moral agency,” philosophy 74 (1999): 311–329. 30. ibid., 191. 31. ibid., 173. 32. ibid., 174. 33. ibid., 219. the paragraph that this sentence concludes references jane austen, george eliot, virginia woolf, iris murdoch, and d.h. lawrence. microsoft word prusak intro prooftext.docx [expositions 13.1 (2019) 18–19] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 editor’s introduction: two papers from the king’s college conference on “the horizons of business education” bernard g. prusak king’s college (pa) what are the horizons against which a business school ought to teach its students? in other words, what sorts of jobs and careers—and what sorts of contributions to the world—ought a business school prepare and point its students toward? one tried-and-true possibility is for-profit corporate america, but there are paths less taken as well. the march 2019 conference hosted by king’s college on “the horizons of business education” had a threefold purpose: first, to come to a greater understanding both of non-profits and of social entrepreneurship; second, to learn about initiatives to prepare business students for the possibility of jobs and careers in non-profit organizations and as social entrepreneurs; and third, to learn about non-profits and social entrepreneurs currently making a difference in northeastern pennsylvania and beyond.1 expositions publishes two papers from this conference. the first, by william corcoran, president and ceo of american near east refugee aid (anera) from 2007 to 2017, makes the case that, while the “return on investment” of a career in the non-profit sector can be tremendous in terms of job satisfaction, students interested in such a career should consider developing the business skills honed in an mba program. there are at least two reasons: first, spurred by intense competition for donor dollars and heightened donor expectations, “the non-profit world has enlisted standards of accountability, marketing, transparency, and technology that mirror most of what is found in comparably sized private corporations”; second (and consequently), “the core business qualities of a successful non-profit employee are now similar to those of for-profit staff.” corcoran’s rich paper also reflects on recent developments in management theory, in particular the theory of servant leadership, which he submits has “made deeper purpose in work a possibility for students inclined to the for-profit world as well.” 19 prusak the second paper, by nicholas santos, s.j., assistant professor of marketing at marquette university, focuses on the paradigm of business education now dominant in the united states. according to santos, that education is focused on the pursuit of profit maximization, as milton friedman notoriously argued, 50 years ago, publicly-traded corporations should be.2 the upshot, santos submits, is that business education “does not allow us adequately to do anything about the dire situation of the world around us except in a very peripheral way: service-learning projects, immersion experiences, faculty consultations, etc.” from this point of view, the incorporation into the curriculum of courses in business ethics and modules on corporate social responsibility is not nearly enough. instead, “what is needed is a shift in the focus of business education,” namely, “from the traditional profit-based firm-centric model to an outcome-based society-centric one.” santos closes his paper by discussing a joint project, aimed at bringing about precisely that shift, of the international association of jesuit universities, the international association of jesuit business schools, and colleagues in jesuit business education. another way to frame the king’s college conference where these papers were first presented is that it sought to bring the discourse of the humanities to bear on business education. business students acquire impressive technical skills. to what end those skills should be deployed is not a technical question. it is a question of practical wisdom that, in this era of global climate change among other challenges to human existence, we ignore at our peril. notes 1. see the conference program available at https://www.kings.edu/academics/special_programs/mcgowan-ethics-center/horizonsconference. 2. milton friedman, “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits,” the new york times magazine, september 13, 1970, 33, available at https://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/business/miltonfriedman1970.pdf. microsoft word zurek-final.docx [expositions 10.1 (2016) 17–31] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 “justice matters”: a multi-faceted implementation of catholic social teaching across the curriculum jerome zurek cabrini college a group of first-year students sat around a table, slightly nervous because this was to be their first contact with someone who knew from within the crisis they had studied. he had just arrived from honduras, the departure point of unaccompanied minors fleeing north. they had studied this humanitarian situation that made headlines, but now they were to speak with someone who would be able to confirm their expertise—or expose their deficiency. this someone was the catholic relief services country director for honduras, juan sheenan. the students had not only studied the crisis, but devised a simulation and performed it with several hundred participants. now they were to meet a man who dealt with this issue every day. at first, he explained the origins of the crisis, the current state of things, and how crs was working to address systemic issues of poverty, job opportunities, and safety. he then asked the students why they became involved, which is to say their motivation. each student explained how he or she had been personally touched in the class in some way. time and again the students made the issue their own. several said that they imagined the unaccompanied minors to be their own younger brothers and sisters. one student said, “i know i would never be able to make that journey, and i definitely know my little sister wouldn’t be able to […]. and i know i wouldn’t want to leave my home the way they were forced to leave their homes […]. i put myself in their shoes, and i wanted to do something about it. it’s not fair for them to leave their homes when they shouldn’t have to” (emphasis added). a second student recounted how what had been at first a distant issue became something closer and more personal. it not only touched her, it called for her response: “i was of the mindset that this was something awful that was happening but something that was happening in another country. but when i learned how involved we in the us actually are in the problems […], i felt that we had – that i had – this obligation to then go in and help. it was no longer something just happening just in another country” (emphasis added). a third student recounted how she developed knowledge and views different catholic social teaching across the curriculum 18 from what she had absorbed prior to coming to college: “when we first started studying unaccompanied minors, i thought that they were coming in and taking our jobs. that was my mindset because what was how the adults in my life saw it. but learning and reading [the book] enrique’s journey and other articles, it really opened my mind and broke my heart” (emphasis added). for her, the experience of learning and participating in engaged learning activities not only gave her a new way of thinking, but touched her deeply. this group of first-year students expressed that they each had developed a personal, moral, and perhaps even spiritual connection to the issue at hand. the object of our studies was no longer distant and abstract, but called for their involvement. these students are examples of young adults ready for and prepared to develop a set of values. what might be the role of catholic social teaching (cst) in their moral formation? can a single course do more than raise questions, open minds, introduce vocabulary, provide a beginning? or is a coordinated series of experiences needed to lead students to a life-long commitment to social justice? the challenges to faculty committed to the role of cst in the formation of students are many and major. to begin with, is the formation of students in line with cst beyond the scope of what can or should be accomplished? should we be content with mastery of the material, as we would be with many other subjects? or are we hoping to influence attitudes, values, and behavior? if so, to what extent? further, what are effective inputs in the instructor’s control within a course? within a program? within four years? what are the myriad variables in a student’s life that affect attitude and behavior? and then, of course, how do we assess effectiveness of the student’s mastery and development, of the course, of a program, of a cohort at graduation, and of alumni’s lives after graduation? what are the markers of success at each stage? what collegiate experiences will be needed, in a course and afterwards, to help these students mature so that cst guides choices and actions in their future lives? cabrini college has committed itself over the last six year to modifying its curriculum, cocurricular activities, and institutional climate to address some of these questions. the following discussion briefly outlines some of the approaches cabrini has taken in the hopes that they might prove instructive for faculty and student life professionals at other catholic colleges and universities. the experience after six years of focused effort indicates that course work, experiential learning, and a variety of curricular and co-curricular opportunities must be pursued 19 zurek in order to cultivate students’ dispositions and develop their desire to pursue a commitment to social justice. the college’s mission catholic social teaching is explicitly taught in cabrini’s religious studies department. but beyond instruction in this department, on a cross-college level, beginning in 2014 the vocabulary and values of cst were embedded in the learning outcomes of core curriculum courses. cabrini’s approach starts with its mission statement, titled “an education of the heart,” a phrase from st. frances cabrini’s informal philosophy of education. the phrase suggests the importance of character formation and values as part of the purpose of education. there is no doubt that education for st. frances cabrini involved the formation of values and character and attention to a student’s soul.1 the mission statement is just two sentences long but contains several phrases relevant to our discussion: “cabrini college is a catholic institution of higher education dedicated to academic excellence, leadership development, and a commitment to social justice. the college welcomes learners of all faiths, cultures, and backgrounds and prepares them to become engaged citizens of the world” (emphasis added). this mission statement is clear about particular goals: a commitment to social justice and producing engaged citizens. it has provided guidance for the multiple extensive ways this college has implemented those goals in the curriculum, faculty development, and co-curriculum. core curriculum the core curriculum is central to cabrini’s approach to cst. in 2008, the faculty approved a core curriculum that came to be called “justice matters.” the centerpiece of the curriculum consists of three required, developmentally linked core courses, called “engagements with the common good” (ecg), followed by a senior capstone in a student’s major, all focused on the common good and social justice. each course approaches the common good from a different perspective. the firstyear course gives primacy to self-reflection and exploration of the multiple communities of which one is a part. the sophomore-year course emphasizes the student’s engagement in the community, with community partners, and a growing understanding of “how power, privilege, and difference catholic social teaching across the curriculum 20 affect solidarity, equality, and dignity,” as well as the process of social change. the third course deepens the student’s understanding of the root causes of injustice and enables students to contribute to community partners through research and advocacy. finally, in the senior capstone in the major, students are encouraged to “integrate the practice of social justice with their personal, professional, and career goals.”2 the learning outcomes of the engagements courses in the core have gone through two iterations. the first set of learning outcomes from 2008 was written in rather general terms: “students will critique their personal philosophy of social justice grounded in dignity, equality, and solidarity.”3 the second, revised learning outcomes, implemented the 2014–15 academic year, include terms and concepts from cst. for example, the following learning outcome is from ecg 300: students will demonstrate—by articulating how their disposition to the mission of cabrini college has changed since they took ecg 100 and ecg 200—if and in which ways efforts towards a more inclusive and socially just worldview reflect their own beliefs and the lens of terms and concepts like human dignity, right relationships, solidarity, human rights, environmental sustainability, concern for the needs of the poorest and most vulnerable, and the common good.4 every cabrini student since 2009 has taken this required course sequence as part of the core curriculum, with its essential focus on social justice and the common good. now with the revised learning outcomes, the key concepts of catholic social teaching are embedded in each course. faculty development it is important to point out that these engagements with the common good courses are taught primarily by full-time faculty drawn from departments across the curriculum. faculty members may propose topics for approval by a curriculum committee. a wide variety of topics are taught on the three levels. while the topics are broad, all courses must serve common learning outcomes. for assessment, all students are given a common assignment and must submit a signature assignment that demonstrates the learning outcomes. the signature assignments in the core are assessed on a rotation. (the new signature assignments that incorporate the language of cst introduced in 2014–15 have not yet been assessed.) 21 zurek clearly, to teach social justice courses rooted in cst requires considerable faculty development. in the most recent semester, twenty-five mostly tenured or tenure-track instructors (out of a faculty of eighty-four) were teaching these courses. faculty development has paved the way for such significant involvement. faculty members see these courses to be at the heart of the college.5 the college allocates significant resources to faculty development, with special attention to development for mission. the principal means of faculty development for mission has been what is called the faculty mission academy. this is a voluntary, three-phase exploration designed to prepare instructors to understand the college’s mission and to introduce cst as a resource for their courses, particularly the ecg. accordingly, two of the goals of the academy are focused on assisting faculty to understand cst. faculty are to “explore the core principles of catholic social teaching within their own belief system” and to “articulate how their courses relate to cst concepts such as the dignity of the individual realized in community, the common good, the option for the poor.” the academy consists of three phases over the course of a year. each phase is three days and two nights off-site. the first phase, in may of the first year, focuses on learning and exploring. in this phase, faculty study common documents such as doing faithjustice by fred kammer and j. milburn thompson’s introducing catholic social thought. particular attention is paid to how faculty from various faith traditions other than catholic might relate to and participate in a curricular lens based in cst. the second phase of the faculty mission academy, also two nights and three days but now over the christmas break, immerses faculty into several hands-on experiences. most recently, faculty have participated in the snap food stamp challenge for three days, in which they budgeted, purchased, and shared meals on the $4.50 allotted for food stamp purchases. additionally, faculty participated in community-based programs that serve people who are without reliable housing. finally, faculty did political advocacy for low-income housing. during this phase, learning and discussions continues around cst and community engagement. in particular, faculty study catholic relief services’ model of integral human development to guide their observation of and immersion in communities. this model emphasizes understanding the multiple dimensions of assets a community possesses.6 the third and final phase of the faculty academy, two nights and three days after commencement, provides an opportunity for reflection “to enable faculty to apply their catholic social teaching across the curriculum 22 foundational understanding [of mission and cst] to their curriculum, advising, research, and teaching” in order to “build the foundation for continuing and deepening professional development on the intersection of mission and discipline.” it should be noted that the three phases of the academy parallel in an abbreviated manner the experiences and learning that form the three ecg courses. nearly half of the full-time faculty have participated in the academy. ninety-two percent of the first cohort reported they understood the core principles of cst after participating in the academy. such extensive and committed buy-in by a broad range of faculty across disciplines to the mission of the college, to social justice, and to values and concepts rooted in cst provides instructors in our core curriculum with a common vocabulary, a common set of readings and discussion, and common experiences similar to those in the three engagements courses. the faculty mission academy has had a profound effect upon cabrini’s faculty. the faculty has long had a commitment to a core curriculum dedicated to social justice. in the early 1990s, cabrini was among the first colleges in pennsylvania to incorporate engaged learning in the community. when the requirement was introduced as part of a junior-year course twenty-five years ago, the faculty explicitly distinguished it from community service and stipulated that the purpose was to learn from communities and to study systemic injustices and long-term solutions. so when the core curriculum was revised and the number of social justice courses was increased from a single course, the faculty was receptive, though not all faculty were comfortable with the explicit attention to cst. however, beginning in 2001, cabrini developed a deep relationship with catholic relief services (crs), including a formal partnership signed in 2005. cabrini faculty collaborated with crs personnel to work on mutually beneficial projects. at least annually, crs personnel would meet with cabrini instructors to discuss how an organization can be catholic yet embrace employees from diverse faith and value traditions. crs became for cabrini a model of an institution that lives a social justice mission rooted in cst but explicitly open to members of all faith traditions.7 against this background, the faculty mission academy became for cabrini faculty the forum within which individuals could negotiate their own understanding of how they could maintain their individual values yet collaborate in a common endeavor around the college’s mission.8 23 zurek department curriculum as noted above, the justice matters curriculum implements a focus on social justice through a coordinated sequence of developmentally linked courses taken in the first, second, and third years, known as engagements with the common good. a fourth course in this sequence is located in each student’s major as the senior-year capstone course. this course is designed to provide “a coherent, mission-informed high impact learning experience at the undergraduate level” (middle states report 2015). the communication department, of which i am a member, has had extensive experience with a social justice capstone course. throughout the first decade of the 2000s, the capstone project was implicitly on a topic of social concern. however, beginning in 2009, the department introduced a new learning outcome named communicating for the common good: “students, through their media creations, should be able to promote understanding, compassion, and action for the common good. as a result of their courses and projects in the core curriculum and major, they should exhibit the integration of the theory, values, practices, and advocacy of social justice in their communication work” (communication department learning outcomes 2009). the communication department takes seriously the role media play in shaping the vision and values of media consumers and believes that cst can provide a life-long ethical framework for media practitioners. as the accu’s vision statement points out: “the goal of incorporating cst across the curriculum can serve as one way of deepening the dialogue between the disciplines in which each makes its own ‘distinct contribution in the search for solutions.’ (ex corde ecclesiae, 32).”9 all courses in the major contribute in some way to preparing students to meet the communicating for the common good learning outcome, but the outcomes are best seen in senior students’ capstone projects.10 all senior projects are group-produced multimedia websites on some significant social justice issue. professor cathy yungmann, who has taught a section of the capstone since the social justice learning outcome was implemented, describes the capstone this way: “designed both as a portfolio piece for students and as an assessment tool for department learning outcomes, the required communication department capstone course could be considered the culmination of the college’s four-year engagements with the common good (ecg) core curriculum. students spend considerable time researching a social justice issue, interview primary sources, and create multiple media about the topic. they then publish their work as a web site” catholic social teaching across the curriculum 24 (see examples at cabrini.edu/convergence). to prepare students for this culminating project, department faculty draw on students’ knowledge of social justice gained in the core ecg courses. when social justice and cst become integral to students’ majors, a new and transformative dynamic is introduced. while all students take three ecg social justice courses, for many students through their junior year, those courses remain “just” core courses. the major, for most students, is what is actually important. in the capstone, communication department faculty try to show how the wedding of one’s major with a deep understanding of difficult societal issues can benefit one’s career. when students understand that knowledge of social justice issues and production of media pieces on these issues can help their career, at least some students no longer consider cst merely as information acquired “over there in the core,” but as skills significant to their future. in this context, cst can be taught as a useful observational and analytic tool to examine societal problems. instead of analyzing issues just from the viewpoint of politics or economics, students use the lens of cst to understand the impact of issues on the most poor and vulnerable, the effect on the planet, and whether human dignity is enhanced. by way of example, a recent project focused on systemic causes and solutions to hunger in america. a website produced by the team of seniors in 2015 won a national silver davey award in the category of social responsibility media (servingfoodsolutions.com). in preparation for major projects, the department has developed a worksheet based on cst themes to help students undertake a systemic analysis of social justice issues. another senior capstone course, focused on underserved students in higher education, systematically uses cst themes as heuristics to examine the issue of access to higher education. using the theme of human dignity, for example, students might observe: “underserved students deserve equitable access to, participation in, and successful completion of, educational programs that will put them on a path to upward mobility and opportunities for a better life” (worksheet from prof. dawn francis’s com 472 course fall 2015). using the theme of preferential option for the poor, students might respond: “we must pursue—and urge people in power to pursue—educational reforms. we have to champion new policies and practices that seek to end disparities in educational outcomes among underserved student populations in higher ed. we need to evaluate the impact of these reforms to be sure they’re truly serving the underserved.” in preparation for senior year capstone projects, each student each semester meets with his or her adviser to discuss progress in meeting the department learning objectives, including 25 zurek “communicating for the common good.” the students use a worksheet to organize their progress. in the fall, students must write and discuss: (a) goals this year to develop this competency; and (b) steps you will take to achieve these goals. in the spring, they must write and discuss: (a) what knowledge and skills did you develop this year as you took the steps to achieve this competency? (b) what portfolio pieces did you produce this year related to this competency? list them. and, (c) what goals do you have for next year related to this competency? thus, each year in their major, all students will discuss their understanding of social justice and progress toward producing media that “promote understanding, compassion, and action for the common good.” finally, communication faculty assess the work of seniors each year, using a rubric based on the social justice learning outcome. in the first assessment of this learning outcome in academic year 2010– 11, sixty-eight percent of students scored unsatisfactory. but after implementing the more thorough individual reports, in academic year 2012–13, only thirty percent of the students scored unsatisfactory. engaged pedagogy: simulations the first day of class in august with a new group of first-year students in a core social justice class poses many challenges. cst and social justice are among the furthest things from the mind of an 18-year-old on the first day of school. roommates, fitting in, nostalgia for the beach, sports, and pop culture pretty much fill the mind of most new arrivals. one approach that has proved successful, however, has been to involve the class in constructing a simulation of an issue. one ecg course, titled our interdependent world, focuses on issues of global justice. drawing on the resources of catholic relief services (crs), the course attempts to expand students’ horizon of concern and to “foster education about the realities that impact the global poor and invite a deeper commitment to act on behalf of all people who live on the margins” (see http://education.crs.org/get-involved-with-crs/crs-programs/). the students quoted at the beginning of this essay were in this course studying, among other topics, the sudden influx of unaccompanied minors from central america. the primary text for this portion of the course was enrique’s journey. supplementing this book were numerous news articles and political, social, and legal analyses to provide a multi-faceted understanding. as students grappled with dimensions of the crisis and learned about systemic causes, cst became a catholic social teaching across the curriculum 26 major lens through which to think about what was happening and to analyze how the u.s. government and individuals were responding. the students were given the challenge to construct a simulation in which they would role-play key aspects of what they learned in order to convey the complex reality of unaccompanied minors to a generally uninformed audience. to prepare this simulation, they had three weeks until cabrini day in mid-november, on which the entire college participates in mission-focused activities. they were told how much space and time they would have to interact with participants and given guidelines about how role-playing simulations work, a small budget for materials, and general goals they should try to achieve with participants. they also learned that portions of the six classes leading up to the day could be devoted to problem-solving and rehearsals, but that considerable group work and study outside of class would be necessary.11 the class was divided into three equal groups, with care that sufficient leadership was present in each group. class discussion led to a division of labor. group 1 focused on the “push factors” of immigration and systemic causes—like gang violence and extreme poverty—that were forcing families to send their children out of honduras, guatemala, and el salvador. group 2 focused on conditions at the u.s. border, in particular how the legal system and detention centers treated the minors. group 3 focused on reflection and advocacy, in preparation for a period of time at the end of the simulation when students would guide participants to reflect on the experience. the students in each group were asked to construct an activity to instruct and motivate others about the crisis. empowered to instruct and engage others, they themselves increased their own engagement.12 their hope was to interest several hundred participants to learn more and to respond by advocating to congress and the president. (this simulation was awarded a grant by crs and the association of catholic colleges and universities in order to document it and make it available as a model for use by other groups. see refugeesseekingsafety.org). this was not the first time that simulations had been attempted as means to interest and activate first-year students. one year students created a simulation on migration; in 2015, they created a simulation on climate change, using the resources of the crs faculty learning commons and pope francis’s encyclical laudato si’. several key factors should be noted that contribute to the powerful effect these social justice simulations have on students’ learning: 27 zurek 1) a supportive group or community; 2) a classroom coach who models leadership and passion for social justice; and 3) a public platform that requires students to take a personal stand on what they are learning. as for (1) a supportive group or community: in the simulation concerned with the crisis of unaccompanied minors from central america, it was crucial that each group saw itself as essential to the success of the whole. it also made a difference that the simulation was to be performed with several hundred participants. peer pressure to achieve is strong. relationships, so important to first-year students, figure as another important motivator. as one student put it: “we push each other to keep going.” another student reflected that, in addition to understanding that it was an important project to do, there was a social aspect to the work. they were doing the project with their friends whom they didn’t want to disappoint. as for (2) a student classroom coach: an older peer can be an invaluable asset. an upper-class student who has had several social justice courses and who is involved in campus social justice activities can be a model of someone with independent motivation for social justice. as one student noted about her class’s coach, “she was so passionate about social justice issues, it lit a fire in me because she lit up the room when she spoke about these issues.” as for (3) a public platform: to perform a simulation in public requires that students speak convincingly to others who may be less informed or even in disagreement. accordingly, the students must put themselves in the mindset of their audience. the students also have to think through their own values as they are developing a public voice. for, in public, they must “own” what they say. somewhat paradoxically then, giving students a public platform makes them more reflective about themselves and what values they really want to embrace. the students who constructed the simulation concerned with the crisis of unaccompanied minors from central america had the opportunity to repeat it on two other occasions. in the second and third iterations of the simulation, the stakes were even higher, with the audience consisting of people who had expertise in the subject of unaccompanied minors and in cst. the feedback the students received required them to learn more and become more expert.13 how appropriate that the students first conducted their simulation on cabrini day, in honor of st. frances cabrini, patron saint of immigrants! catholic social teaching across the curriculum 28 leadership development as students move through the core curriculum and develop knowledge of cst and social justice issues, some seek a deeper engagement. the crs ambassador program provides opportunities for deepening knowledge of cst. within the ambassador program, cabrini is piloting advanced opportunities for social justice leadership by initiating “global justice peer educators.” global justice peer educators are leaders within the crs ambassador program who develop resources, lead programs, and train others about issues of global justice. concretely, they might develop educational modules to present in classes, lead residence hall programs, or do outreach to high school and parish groups. the student prepare to do this work by participating in at least three semesters of education in the crs faculty learning commons, which offers online course materials, drawn from crs’s extensive programs around the world, for use by faculty to supplement existing courses.14 the ultimate goal of the global justice peer educator program is to increase the depth of knowledge and commitment of students in working for the common good. post-graduate graduates tell us that one of the greatest challenges they face after graduation is finding a new environment rich in ideas and values, a supportive community like the one cabrini has provided, and further opportunities for growth. when they graduate, alumni are too often on their own. keeping graduates connected to and growing in the values of cst is an important contribution a college can make. to this end, cabrini has launched an alumni program that also draws upon the resources of the crs faculty learning commons. like the theology on tap programs found in parishes and at some colleges and universities, cabrini offers global justice on tap. topics offered by crs in the faculty learning commons include climate change (fall 2015); fair and ethical trade (spring 2016); and catholic peace building (fall 2016). 29 zurek conclusion the tradition and mission of each catholic institution, the composition of its faculty, the priorities of administrators, the background of its student body, and the shape of its curriculum all provide constraints and opportunities for the introduction of cst. cabrini’s model was shaped by facultydriven leadership, nurtured by an administration willing to invest in faculty development, and advanced by the college’s special relationship with crs. the result has been a multi-faceted approach in which social justice and cst run through the fabric of the institution. notes 1. see sullivan 1992. 2. see http://www.cabrini.edu/academics/core-curriculum-justice-matters/engagementswith-the-common-good/. 3. cabrini college 2013. 4. ibid. 5. on the importance of faculty for implementing a college or university’s mission, see heft 2015. 6. see heinrich et al. 2008. 7. see laver 2008. 8. see hodge 2011 on the importance of drawing upon the spiritual traditions of all faculty. 9. association of catholic colleges and universities 2012. 10. compare kecskes and kerrigan 2009. 11. see smith and boyer 1996 for best practices for simulations. catholic social teaching across the curriculum 30 12. see meyers and jones 1993. 13. francis and colbry 2016, in press, analyzed the leadership development that occurred in this simulation. 14. see harrison et al. 2010. works cited association of catholic colleges and universities. 2012. catholic higher education and catholic social teaching: a vision statement. washington, dc. cabrini college. 2013. undergraduate catalog 2013–14. https://www.cabrini.edu/ academics/resources-and-support/~/media/files/academics/undergraduate-catalog/ 2013-14-undergraduate-catalog-cabrini-college.ashx francis, dawn m., and stephanie l. colbry. 2016 (in press). “campus community integration on a mission: transformative learning for social change.” in integrating curricular and co-curricular endeavors to enhance student outcomes, eds. laura a. wankel and charles wankel. bingley, uk: emerald publishing group. harrison, yvonne d., kevin kostic, suzanne c. toton, and jerome zurek. 2010. “globalizing social justice education: the case of the global solidarity network study e-broad program.” internet and higher education 13: 115–126. heft, james l., s.m. 2015. “advancing the mission with or without a mission officer: the role of faculty.” a mission officer handbook: volume two, collaborating with partners, eds. m.j. james, et al., 23–28. washington: association of catholic colleges and universities. heinrich, geoff, david leege, and carrie miller. 2008. a user’s guide to integral human development (ihd). baltimore: catholic relief services. 31 zurek hodge, d. r. 2011. “spirituality and social justice: theoretical frameworks, exemplars, and pedagogical implications.” in educating for social justice: transformative experiential education, ed. j. birkenmaier, 51–74. chicago: lyceum books. kecskes, kevin, and seanna kerrigan. 2009. “capstone experiences.” in civic engagement in higher education: concepts and practices, ed. barbara jacoby. san francisco: josseybass. 117–139. laver, mary s. 2008. “shared mission: catholic higher education in partnership with catholic ngos.” journal of catholic higher education 27.1: 159–170. meyers, chet, and thomas b. jones. 1993. promoting active learning: strategies for the college classroom. san francisco: jossey-bass. smith elizabeth t., and mark a. boyer. 1996. “designing in-class simulations.” ps: political science & politics 29.4: 690–694. sullivan, mary louise. 1992. mother cabrini: “italian immigrant of the century.” new york: center for migration studies. microsoft word eifler and gordon.docx [expositions 9.1 (2015) 69–77] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 imagining how to be christ-like together karen eifler and charles gordon, c.s.c. university of portland abstract catholic colleges and universities wrestle with how to keep the vision and charisms of their founding orders vibrant in the face of shrinking numbers of vowed religious on campuses. the center described in this paper offers a replicable set of strategies for inculcating catholic mission and identity across disciplines and throughout the institution: structured social events, strong sense of sacramental imagination infusing the work, and priority given to developing deliberate collegial relationships outside the usual locations of catholic identity (theology and philosophy): sciences, arts and humanities. our work follows from the following premises. first, to be catholic is to aspire to be christ-like. to be christ-like requires evidence of what christ is like. therefore, catholics habitually seek evidences, instances, or presences of christ to inspire and inform their efforts to be like him. catholic convictions about the real presence of jesus christ in the eucharist have accustomed them to expect to encounter the presence of christ by means of their senses in other contexts. this catholic expectation has given rise to a characteristically catholic sacramental imagination. our work at the garaventa center for catholic intellectual life and american culture at the university of portland is essentially an ongoing effort to promote, facilitate and cultivate this sacramental imagination. the center serves a number of constituencies. as regards our service to our own university community, we use sacramental imagination to empower lay people to be the generative successors of our founding religious community, the congregation of holy cross. we do not see our efforts primarily as a response to the declining number of holy cross religious at our university. we are not crafting a “second best” alternative to the way things were done in the “good old days.” on the contrary, we believe our work is integral to the holy cross mission, as it has always been lived. we are doing what holy cross has always done. we have no ambition to impose anything upon anyone. rather, we seek to unfold the manner in which sacramental imagination animates the spiritual and professional aspirations of our colleagues. rather than preach christ to them, we seek to discover and celebrate christ in them. building relationships is essential to our success. imagining how to be christ-like together 70 in this paper, we offer instances of how we have built upon these premises. we believe these illustrations will prove portable to other contexts. from the outset we aver that “small is good”; it may even be crucial. one of us recently heard a campus tour guide assuring an audience that “because we are catholic we don’t….” but, of course, catholicism is not best understood as a list of strictures to which we submit. we advocate a more expansive conception of catholicism—not just to prospective students, but for those who have staked their professional lives with us. as catholics we maintain that there is nothing that does not have the potential to reveal an aspect of christ. as dante held, god is even in hell, loving the damned. what is required is the sacramental imagination to perceive christ and the grace to embrace him. sacramental imagination is earthly, tangible—employing all the senses. our infinite god provides avenues to be known in an infinite number of ways. while there is no such thing as catholic chemistry or catholic physics, a catholic approach to these and other academic disciplines is to cultivate senses attuned to the sacred mystery whom catholics know as the way, the truth, and the life. we have found this to be an effective starting point for engagement with those who may not see a natural link between their professional fields and the holy cross mission of our university. note that we refer specifically to a holy cross mission. we are convinced that our endeavors will fail if they are, or are perceived to be, attempts to “do catholicism” in the abstract. all christians are called to be christ-like in this world, but not on their own—not alone. we pray the “our father,” not the “my father.” catholicism gives particular emphasis to the communal dimension of the life of faith. we are one body, one spirit, in christ. canonized saints afford examples of how to be christ-like under the particular circumstances of their lives. they offer us valuable examples to draw upon as we strive to work out how to be christ-like in our own individual existential situation. but, again, we do not merely stand alone before god. religious communities—orders, congregations, dioceses, their histories often replete with saints and blesseds and venerables of their own—testify to how to be christ-like together. a religious community and its traditions constitute a distinctive path to communal christlikeness. a religious community’s spiritual disciplines, its customs and quirks, its habitual ways of being in the world, taken in their entirety, are a way to be holy together. to participate in the mission of a catholic college is to situate one’s professional endeavors in the context of a specific tradition. this is true whether or not one is catholic or a believer of any sort. one of us has a physicist friend who remarked jokingly after long association with the collegium program, “i used to be a jewish atheist. now i’m a catholic atheist.” this is something like what we mean, though without implying that it is necessary to renounce one’s own spiritual heritage. the idea is that to participate in the mission of a particular catholic college is to be in some sense a franciscan catholic or a benedictine baptist or a jewish jesuit. in fact, there is a further distinction to be drawn. each institution has its own history of the engagement of its founding charism with a particular, evolving, social and cultural context. local ways of doing things have their own 71 eifler and gordon validity. so, for example, after more than a century in both places, our way of being holy cross in portland, oregon differs legitimately from the way they do it in south bend, indiana. sometimes, for example in the case of jesuit or benedictine institutions, the founding spiritual and educational traditions have long been set out explicitly in written form. other times they have to be teased out by careful observation of the way they have been, and are being, lived. let us again take holy cross as an example. our congregation was founded to help revive the ravaged church of post-revolutionary, post-napoleonic france. born to address an acute crisis, holy cross had little opportunity at the outset to elaborate a formal spirituality or educational philosophy. it was necessary to plunge immediately into the work. with too few religious and inadequate resources, there was no choice but to rely upon divine providence and boundless zeal. a line from a letter by our founder, blessed basil moreau, expresses the urgency of the situation: “let us hurry, to be about the work of the resurrection.” we have been hurrying ever since, with, until recently, little time or inclination for self-definition. but over the years a distinctive holy cross way has emerged from the crucible of our lived experience. the zeal and trust in divine providence remain. the fact that there have never been enough of us to do the work has spared us the illusion that the work is ours alone. from the beginning, lay collaborators have been integral to the mission. they are we. long service to the church in the united states has inculcated in holy cross religious an informality that is characteristically american. at some point we learned that it is not necessary to stand on one’s dignity in order to have dignity. we let people into our lives, so that it becomes evident to them that we are flawed, sometimes idiosyncratic, human beings. along the way we have become known for hospitality. these and other traits constitute the particular holy cross manner of being like christ. they find expression in the lives and work of those who share in the holy cross mission today. we imagine that something like this situation prevails at other catholic educational institutions where the founding community’s way of being like christ has not found comprehensive expression in writing. it is learned by being lived. and where the founding community has been inarticulate in giving systematic expression to its way of life, their lay collaborators can employ the tools of their own academic disciplines to do the job. we turn our attention now to the practicalities of that endeavor. relationships are paramount let’s take a look at the emmaus story (luke 24:13–35). it had been a rough few days for the disciples; their hopes and dreams had just been crushed. but rather than stay home and draw sustenance from their core support system, cleopas and peter were seven miles away from jerusalem. jesus, his identity still veiled to their dejected eyes, drew their sad story from them with the most understated invitation imaginable (“what things?”), then ignited their hope and conviction at table in emmaus, as he broke bread and shared it with them. in that moment, the imagining how to be christ-like together 72 audacious miracle of christ’s resurrection was illuminated for them and they hurried back to jerusalem, ready to get to work spreading the gospel. it was the twin actions of listening to the stories and sharing a meal that made the dazzling light turn on for them, and we argue that this same pairing is the pulsing heart of inspiring colleagues in professional programs to take on the charge of implementing their institution’s catholic mission. how does the emmaus story map onto a college’s professional programs in this regard? in an era of fierce competition for shrinking financial and human resources, academic silos might feel like the solution for keeping individual interests secure. it’s every department and professor for themselves in the battle for tuition dollars, grant monies, institutional influence. that is just at the department and division levels; individual professors clamor equally for position and the safety of tenure and increasing rank. we tend to stack our scholarly work into piles of “least publishable units,” increasingly esoteric and specialized in our studies. even as we bemoan our students’ obsession with grades, to the detriment of their education, we don’t appear to be very far behind them in narrowing our scopes of investigation, curiosity and wonder to the products most likely to result in securing tenure and making us promotable. the walls between the english or philosophy departments and schools of nursing, engineering, and education, even on small college campuses, appear impermeable as professors and programs become more specialized. this is exacerbated by the relentless demands of professional accreditation cycles, with their insatiable appetite for data and documentation of minutiae that seem so far away from the actual practice of teaching, nursing, or creating water filtration systems. professors, chairs, and deans look every bit as downcast as those two disciples headed toward emmaus, away from the community that could be offering a haven, a place to integrate the disparate elements of days that are frenetic without being truly productive. the silos that have come to feel inevitable on our campuses may not be necessary, and we might look to a dimension of the recent past—the presence of large numbers of religious men and women of our institutions’ founding orders—as a model for “de-siloing.” when those priests, brothers, or sisters lived in community, academic silos were obviated by the very nature of members’ shared lives. in their common life, theologians dined at the same table as mathematicians and nurses and philosophers, as a matter of course. the interdisciplinary discourse that we so value these days that we will pay to attend national conferences to engage in it was just “dinner conversation” not too long ago. not only did the religious community members take part in talk that meandered among all the disciplines, but because these men and women shared, for example, their benedictine, norbertine, or holy cross heritage, each of their disciplines was naturally refracted through the lenses of the religious, sacramental imaginations at the heart of those communities. beyond these quotidian interdisciplinary encounters making it habitual for economists to know what was going on in psychology, the visible presence of religious men and women on campuses served to transmute the abstraction of catholic mission and identity into something concrete: the 73 eifler and gordon attractive, approachable, ultimately human face of christ. and as they did their work, teaching, uncovering truth and revealing beauty to their students and to their lay colleagues, religious did not just look like christ, they acted as christ in the worlds of their campuses. of course, this sketch could be dismissed as nostalgic, even sentimental. we do not mean to suggest that if we could all just increase the numbers of vowed religious on our campuses, questions of catholic mission and identity would be resolved. that is magical thinking. however, we do assert that the common table, shared meals and listening deeply to one another’s stories— the very elements that catalyzed the dejected disciples into exuberant evangelists—are not the exclusive domain of the religious orders that founded our institutions. they are, in fact, absolutely replicable, portable constructs available to all of us, regardless of our station in life, who answer the call to live the catholic missions of our institutions: to be christ-like, to inculcate in one another and in our students a sacramental imagination. and it makes a virtue of the small size of many of our campuses, where it is actually possible for all faculty to know each other, given the right circumstances. let us turn now to the logistical aspects of that proposition. there is no such thing as a “faculty dining room” at the university of portland. the holy cross priests and brothers open their communal dining hall to every employee, staff and faculty alike. financially, it’s the best deal for a full meal on campus, and all are welcome to bring their own brown-bag lunch as well. this echoes the insistence of their founder, blessed basil moreau, on hospitality as a defining charism of his young religious community. holy cross staff and faculty mingle with their lay collaborators at each table, lingering over conversations that touch upon every dimension of the intellectual life and popular culture. for those raised in another or in no faith tradition, and even for cradle catholics who might harbor dusty ideas about the exotic, distant lives of priests and brothers, these daily instantiations of the charisms of holy cross are not threatening or even very remarkable most of the time. the straightforward daily interaction of breaking bread at a shared table and taking in one another’s answers to the question “how is your day going?” allow lay staff and faculty to see holy cross life not as a set of constraints, but as what it is to the priests and brothers who live it: a way to be christ-like as they live the life of the mind. the same life of the mind, in all its variety among the disciplines and professions, unfolds even when there are no holy cross present, illuminating english professors about life as a nursing preceptor and the view from the perch of a student teacher supervisor. once again, we note that this part of the model leverages the fact that so many of our campuses have under three hundred faculty members. two telling vignettes so embedded is the holy cross charism of hospitality into campus life that it dictated the first official act in our tenure as directors of our center for catholic intellectual life and american imagining how to be christ-like together 74 culture. while we were settling into our new office on a friday morning in mid-august, unpacking boxes lost its luster. we had also noticed a certain ennui among the few people who had not escaped campus for a last respite before the onslaught of meetings, orientations, and classes. we pooled the cash in our wallets, made a quick trip to a discount store for wine and cheese and sent an email blast to all faculty and staff to drop what they were doing that afternoon to stop by and see our new digs. again, our small size makes such an endeavor manageable. the monthly ritual of “thirst fridays” was born that day: a time for any adult on campus to come by for ten or ninety minutes of simple refreshments, convivial conversations with people whose paths they would ordinarily never intersect … a gentle destruction of silos as french professors chat with residence life staff, the provost with the grounds crew, nurses with engineers. a ceramic bowl with the plaintive sign “please help save us from boxed wine” generates enough funds to replenish the board each month. we have been, as jesus suggested, “as cunning as serpents and as gentle as doves” (matthew 10:16) in creating this space for generating agenda-free interdisciplinary conversations: we’ve lined the walls with sticky notes of potential program ideas, laid out colleagues’ recent publications and watched these small tendrils blossom from mere conversationstarters into fruitful cross-divisional collaborations. we continue to imitate jesus’ temperate, invitational example from his walk to emmaus with his two despairing friends: “tell me about your day” is a no-cost, no-risk, thoroughly catholic strategy for creating buy-in to the mission of a place. breaking bread and enjoying wine together, even day-old bread and bargain-basement wine, elevates it to the sacramental. for those whose work demands that they think in terms of “deliverables,” three specific programs whose geneses were conversations at a thirst friday illustrate the potential of this simple campus rite. first, the faith and intellectual life discussion group (fildg) is an endeavor that has done as much as anything to promote the role of catholic intellectual tradition and identity among staff and faculty from every unit on campus. two professors—one catholic, the other non-religious— reflected that many academics came into higher education because they love the life of the mind, savoring and mucking about with the world of words and ideas, and yet the demands of teaching and research seem to preclude intellectual playfulness. they were also interested in contributing to the catholic mission in the holy cross tradition. they tapped the power of the personal invitation and rounded up a cadre of colleagues who committed to two gatherings each semester to read and discuss an article or a chapter of general interest, accessible to people from any discipline. the meetings are held friday afternoons and always include wine and cheese, thanks to a small annual budget from the provost’s office. readings have addressed everything from sacramental imagination to environmental politics to the slowness movement. one member of the group has appointed himself the official “poetry hound” and finds a thematically related poem to accompany each reading, along with a piece of art to have on the screen during the discussions, as ways of honoring multiple ways of revealing truth. anyone who has ever attended even one 75 eifler and gordon gathering receives a personal “save the dates” bookmark invitation in summer, to ensure that fildg makes it onto people’s calendars before the deluge of other responsibilities. that simple personalized appeal has proven pivotal in nurturing the sense of community among the three dozen regulars, who come from every academic and professional program among faculty and staff. carving out this time and making the commitment to listen deeply and respond sincerely to one another is another example of holy cross and their lay collaborators heeding the exhortation of their founder, blessed basil moreau, to “take care, lest you speak least about what matters most.” another example of a signature mission-related endeavor that was born out of a thirst friday conversation is our “pre-play primer” series, a collaboration between the professional theater program and multiple academic units on campus. “what shows will you be doing this year?”—an obvious dialogue opener—yielded a slate of lesser-known plays. a professor of greek philosophy sidled into the conversation and noted that he might have some things to say about their production of euripides’ alkestis. the head of the feminist discussion group on campus also noted the potential for illuminating dimensions of that play and another on the slate, shakespeare’s cymbeline. the shows’ costume designer wanted a platform to showcase the conceptual framework of the colors and lines he had selected for the productions. and so it came to pass that before the saturday performance of each main-stage show, a trio of experts from a range of disciplines provides a taut series of eight-minute talks affording insights to the audience that open their eyes and ears to a richer experience of the play than they would have had unaided. wine and cheese are provided with funds from the departments involved. all this happens under the aegis of our center for catholic intellectual life and american culture, quite possibly the last campus unit with which the head of the feminist discussion group or the professional theater program’s head of costuming might have expected to find themselves collaborating. not only has this opened up the intellectual dramatic experience afforded to theater patrons (eminently consistent with the objectives of any endeavor on a campus animated by two millennia of catholic intellectual tradition), but it has re-shaped the professional theater department’s way of thinking about its potential material. prior to these collaborations, discussions of their season’s slates might have echoed the young tour guide’s assertion, “well, we can’t do that play, because we’re on a catholic campus.” now, when selecting plays to perform, the theater department gives consideration to shows that lend themselves to several intellectually fruitful lenses, anticipating which campus experts they might tap to illuminate various facets of whatever they select. a final case that illustrates the combined powers of the personal invitation and of breaking bread together is the growing collaboration between our center and the office of residential life. all adults from any profession are welcome at thirst fridays. residence hall staff were eager early adopters of this policy, and we soon found out that a principal reason for their avid attendance was the opportunity it afforded them to speak with people over the age of twenty-one about a host of engaging topics. on the one hand, they were intellectually lonely, and this monthly ritual gave imagining how to be christ-like together 76 them a way to engage with the academic mission of the university. on the other hand, the presence of residence hall staff at thirst fridays allowed professors to put a face to a side of student life of which they had little direct experience. rather than volleying email blasts between unknown busy hall directors and unknown busy faculty members, beth was able to call kate directly to pitch an idea. she wanted to share her professional interest in the camino de santiago with residents in beth’s hall for whom she was responsible for creating mission-related programming. chris got karen to give a talk on opportunities for post-graduation service programs in education after they uncovered a shared interest in that subject one thirst friday. a successful large grant application to cultivate initiative among student leaders began with a simple back-and-forth one thirst friday among faculty and staff members from five different buildings on campus. these three programs are snapshots capturing the essence of our principal argument for how catholic colleges, especially small ones, can successfully promulgate their mission into diverse academic and professional programs: eat together, draw out people’s stories and listen deeply to them. however, as fundamental as genuine hospitality is to our endeavor, we will fail if we are not intellectually credible. the work demands that its practitioners be intellectually nimble, curious enough about all the units on their campuses to see and to forge connections among them. they must be willing and able to engage with anyone about any discipline if they are to undermine silos. our center, like its analogues on other campuses, enjoys the advantage of a “bird’s-eye view” of academic disciplines and professional programs throughout the institution. we have gifted colleagues, alongside whom we have toiled to satisfy accreditation requirements, make good departmental hiring decisions and meet the diverse needs of millennial students. the same intellectual instruments that they (and we) have honed in pursuing our individual disciplines are the ones we can enlist to develop programming, publications and grant projects that promote our catholic mission and identity. the key to doing this is, again, to foster amenable humane relationships in which, taking the risen christ as our model, we walk with our weary colleagues and draw out their stories. we break bread and pour wine with them, reflecting back what they have told us, and then, more often than not, good fruit comes forth: new courses, articles, collaborations, even just renewed zeal for the work already in front of us all. if we could offer a final bit of insight from lessons we have learned in this work, it would be to emphasize the need to consider who the most unlikely collaborators for our work are and draw them into the heart of it. engineers, dramaturges, and nurses historically had no natural connection with the center for catholic intellectual life before they started intersecting informally at thirst fridays. the feminist discussion group and play selection committee might in the past have chafed against the constraints—real or perceived—placed on their flourishing by virtue of being housed in a small catholic university. targeting those unlikely collaborators was among our best investments of imagination. why? because their presence at the heart of our work provoked a lot of curiosity among their skeptical colleagues, and the full, appreciative audiences that have 77 eifler and gordon emerged for their work as a result of our partnerships have removed traces of a perceived “catholic curse.” artists in particular seek the transcendent in their work. they tend to work at this publicly, and so a public showcase such as the pre-play primers and all the conversations leading up to the implementation of that program is a cogent example of an instance when a function of art overlaps naturally with a consequence of the catholic sacramental imagination. what’s needed is to elucidate and celebrate that overlap. in short, that is the charge of a center such as ours: not to create new work for people, but to illuminate and enliven that which is always present but often overlooked: grace already happening in our midst. combatting gnostic heresies in the second century ad, irenaeus wrote “the glory of god is man fully alive” (adversus haereses 4.20). this is a fitting assertion on which to conclude. no college president, dean or chair worthy of their title could want anything less than for their faculty to fully flourish, bringing all their gifts to bear on the work of educating the young men and women who fill our classrooms. we contend that catholic colleges come closest to doing this, and therefore are closest to revealing god’s glory, when faculty walk, talk and eat together. what’s needed are imagination and courage to animate those three simple actions. microsoft word cochran print [expositions 13.2 (2019) 27–44] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 the realism objection to setting aside just war theory: a response david carroll cochran loras college in april 2016, participants in the “nonviolence and just peace conference” called on the catholic church to place greater emphasis on nonviolent peacemaking and to no longer recognize the possibility of a just war.1 in the exchanges that have followed, one line of objection has been to endorse the first goal but reject the second as dangerously unrealistic. while supporting more work to promote nonviolent conflict resolution, mark allman and tobias winright point to cases of military aggression, ethnic cleansing, and genocide where “reallife challenges” mean nonviolent methods might not be effective enough, leaving armed force as the only way to save innocent lives. for them, “even if the case for just war is rare, such cases still occur.”2 similarly, peter steinfels surveys the world’s war-torn regions and concludes that while “such brutal realities” call out for as much “nonviolent peacemaking” as possible, “did the conference really imagine that nonviolence alone would stop all this bleeding?”3 and in his contribution to the special issue of expositions dedicated to the future of just war thinking following the april 2016 conference, robert latiff is sympathetic to its call for greater peacemaking efforts, but he argues that “officially abandoning just war teaching would be a terrible outcome for the catholic church.” on his account, such a move, while “well-intentioned,” ignores how military force is sometimes “necessary to protect people who need protection” and is therefore “extraordinarily naïve and potentially dangerous.” it is “wishful thinking” to reject the need for “options to use force” if nonviolent alternatives prove ineffective.4 this is an important objection. many people sympathetic to the increasing emphasis on nonviolent peacemaking in catholic teaching on war and peace are nonetheless reluctant to completely close the door to the possibility of a just war. they believe that since nonviolent alternatives may not always work, sometimes armed force is still necessary to uphold justice and protect innocent people from aggression, tyranny, or mass violence such as genocide or ethnic cleansing. in such situations, countries or threatened groups are still morally permitted to take up the realism objection to setting aside just war theory: a response 28 arms to defend themselves. and, if they are too weak to do so, members of the international community are still morally permitted to do so on their behalf under the traditional principle of humanitarian intervention or, more recently, the international legal norm of a “responsibility to protect.”5 i believe that ethical and theological reflection on the incompatibility of war with catholic moral principles and their gospel foundations should ultimately carry the most weight in the case for the catholic church to, as the conference participants urge, “no longer use or teach ‘just war theory.’”6 i also recognize, however, that for many an important obstacle to supporting such a step is the sense that it is unrealistic to completely rule out justified war when sometimes it may be the only effective tool available. this concern deserves a response. effective at what? peace results from that order structured into human society by its divine founder, and actualized by men as they thirst after ever greater justice. –gaudium et spes7 true peace therefore is the fruit of justice, that moral virtue and legal guarantee which ensures full respect for rights and responsibilities, and the just distribution of benefits and burdens. –pope john paul ii8 this is largely a disagreement about means rather than ends. the authors of the “nonviolence and just peace conference” statement identify themselves as “christians committed to a more just and peaceful world.” believing that “peace requires justice,” they challenge “militarism,” “economic injustice,” “dehumanization,” and “persecution, oppression, exploitation, and discrimination,” offering instead a gospel-inspired vision of a nonviolent social order marked by “human dignity and thriving relationships.”9 such an order is also the basis for arguments to keep some room for justified warfare in the catholic tradition. kenneth himes, for example, grounds his case for the moral permissibility of some humanitarian interventions in a vision of a “political order” that provides “just laws,” protects “public safety,” cares “for the poor and infirm,” and upholds “each person’s basic rights.” on his account, sometimes protecting the kind of just order that upholds human dignity in these ways requires the “armed force” necessary to “depose tyrants, stop genocide, or deter aggression.”10 29 cochran this, then, is the key question: what is the most effective way to build and maintain this common goal of a just and peaceful order—one that upholds human dignity and basic rights, promotes human flourishing, and protects persons from aggression, tyranny, and mass violence? war is actually not very effective recourse to violence, in fact, aggravates existing tensions and creates new ones. nothing is resolved by war; on the contrary, everything is placed in jeopardy by war. the results of this scourge are the suffering and death of innumerable individuals, the disintegration of human relations and the irreparable loss of an immense artistic and environmental patrimony. war worsens the sufferings of the poor; indeed, it creates new poor by destroying means of subsistence, homes, and property, and by eating away at the very fabric of the social environment. […] recent history clearly shows the failure of recourse to violence as a means for resolving political and social problems. war destroys, it does not build up; it weakens the moral foundations of society and creates further divisions and longlasting tensions. and yet the news continues to speak of wars and armed conflicts, and of their countless victims. how often have my predecessors and i myself called for an end to these horrors! i shall continue to do so until it is understood that war is the failure of all true humanism. –pope john paul ii (italics in original)11 one hallmark of war’s history is the tendency to overestimate its effectiveness, which is why leaders, especially of large military powers, routinely get mired in disastrous wars that fail to achieve their original aims. this historical trend is also true of domestic armed resistance and external interventions over the last century, both of which have proven far more likely to fail than succeed, usually just extending violent conflicts and making the emergence of an oppressive regime at its conclusion more rather than less likely.12 this shouldn’t be surprising, since, given its nature, war is a poor candidate to sustain a just and peaceful order. war’s original meaning is discord, and erasmus characterized it as a state of disorder where “the laws are compelled to silence, charity is laughed at, justice has no dwelling place.”13 as hugo slim catalogues in excruciating detail, war zones create spikes in poverty, famine, disease, looting, extortion, assault, corruption, and the suppression of human rights. they tear families apart and produce streams of refugees vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. for people in war zones, fear, humiliation, and hopelessness are constant companions.14 rape is so common that st. augustine called it a “customary evil” of war.15 as eileen egan points out, a good definition of war is the corporal works of mercy in reverse.16 the realism objection to setting aside just war theory: a response 30 wars, even ones conducted by professional militaries with clear rules of engagement, kill shocking numbers of civilians, primarily because of the lethality of the weapons involved, the low threshold for using them, and uncertainty about the status of targets, what dave grossman, in his study of lethal violence in war, calls “gray-area killings.”17 war’s levels of killing, whether of combatants or noncombatants, relies on systematic dehumanization of its targets to justifying their slaughter, as well as the dehumanization involved in training soldiers to suppress mercy and their resistance to killing in order to do their job.18 and, of course, for soldiers and civilians who do survive war, the legacy is often a lifetime of physical and emotional wounds. war, then, is the opposite of an order marked by human dignity, security, and flourishing. it is itself a disorder of mass violence, suffering, dehumanization, and injustice. this is why while it is rare for a war to successfully stop instances of genocide or ethnic cleansing; genocides and ethnic cleansings themselves almost always occur only when wars are already underway, creating an environment of mass violence that allows them to emerge.19 it is also why even when war appears effective in the short-term, its long-term impact is to usually unleash continuing cycles of more armed conflict. warfare, in the words of john paul ii, “leaves behind a trail of resentment and hatred, thus making it all the more difficult to find a just solution of the very problems which provoked the war.”20 for example, the culture of violence and resentment caused by world war i led directly to world war ii, which, in turn, largely produced the cold war and its many proxy wars around the world. to follow just one of these proxy wars, the soviet invasion of afghanistan was met by american-backed mujahideen fighters, fueling a civil war that saw the rise of the taliban and osama bin laden’s al-qaeda, leading in turn to the attacks of september 11, 2001 and subsequent u.s. wars in afghanistan, iraq, and elsewhere across the middle east, which themselves have spun-off new civil wars. other regions and historical periods reveal similar patterns of armed conflict, where even the seemingly successful resolution of one war only sows the seeds for ones to follow. indeed, the vast majority of contemporary wars are actually continuations of previous ones, civil wars in which their participants are caught in cycles of chronic stop-and-start armed conflict.21 interventions by outside forces are more likely to exacerbate these conflicts rather than end them, as illustrated by the 2011 nato military intervention in libya, the first authorized by the u.n. under the responsibility to protect principle, which seemed a shortterm success when it toppled the dictator muammar gaddafi, but only fueled ongoing cycles of 31 cochran armed conflict that have continued to devastate the country since. again and again, war proves itself an especially unfit tool to fashion an enduring just and peaceful order.22 nonviolent alternatives are surprisingly effective in the most local and ordinary situations and in the international order, may nonviolence become the hallmark of our decisions, our relationships and our actions, and indeed of political life in all its forms. –pope francis23 in this way, the solidarity which we propose is the path to peace and at the same time to development. for world peace is inconceivable unless the world's leaders come to recognize that interdependence in itself demands the abandonment of the politics of blocs, the sacrifice of all forms of economic, military or political imperialism, and the transformation of mutual distrust into collaboration. this is precisely the act proper to solidarity among individuals and nations. –pope john paul ii24 fortunately, there are better options. a range of nonviolent tools have a much better track record at creating, protecting, and sustaining a just and peaceful order. they can do so in two ways. first, they can defend vulnerable persons against aggression, tyranny, and mass violence better than armed force. second, they can reduce the instance of war itself, since, after all, it is in warzones, especially those areas of the world with endemic warfare, that human dignity, rights, and flourishing are so threatened and that aggression, tyranny, and mass violence are so common. if fighting wars is not an especially effective way to uphold a just and peaceful order, fighting war actually is. one of the most significant political developments of the last century is the emergence of nonviolent civil resistance movements as a way to challenge and defeat domestic dictators and foreign occupiers. all regimes, even brutal ones, depend on widespread cooperation to function. police and army personnel, government bureaucrats, financial institutions, workers, and everyday citizens on the streets all must to do what they are told and contribute to the regime’s ongoing operation. this is the vulnerability nonviolent civil resistance exploits. it withdraws the active cooperation any regime, whether domestic or occupying, needs to exercise power. when such noncooperation becomes organized and widespread enough, the regime’s power collapses as its leaders issue orders nobody carries out. from africa (tunisia) to asia (philippines) to europe the realism objection to setting aside just war theory: a response 32 (serbia) to the americas (chile), nonviolent civil resistance has proven itself a powerfully effective force.25 the effectiveness of nonviolent alternatives to armed force by people under threat is supported by empirical research. oliver kaplan details the techniques vulnerable civilians in war zones use to successfully protect themselves from armed groups.26 adrian katatnycky and peter ackerman’s study of how dictatorships end concludes that compared to armed rebellion, nonviolent methods are far more successful in removing tyrants and establishing lasting democracy.27 and, in their landmark study, erica chenoweth and maria stephan analyze over 300 cases going back to 1900 of either armed struggle or nonviolent civil resistance to domestic dictatorships or foreign occupation. they find that nonviolent campaigns are nearly twice as effective as violent ones, that this success does not depend on how brutal a regime’s response is, and that even among the increasingly small percentage of armed struggles that do succeed, they are far more likely to slip back into dictatorship and civil war in their aftermath.28 summarizing other findings since their study came out in 2011, they report that regimes are less likely to deploy mass violence against civilians when facing nonviolent versus violent movements challenging their rule; that even when regimes do react with mass violence, the likelihood of a nonviolent resistant movement’s success does not go down; that when a largely nonviolent campaign adds a violent “edge” or “flank” in a mixed approach, its effectiveness drops; and that while the success rate for nonviolent movements has dipped somewhat in the last few years as more and more groups, including some underprepared ones, undertake them and regime leaders adjust their responses, the success rate for violent ones has dropped even more, meaning that now nonviolent civil resistance is three times as likely to succeed as armed struggle.29 just as there are effective nonviolent tools for oppressed peoples to deploy themselves, the international community has a range of alternatives to warfare when acting to deter aggression, prevent mass violence against vulnerable groups, and reduce the frequency of war itself. these tools exist as part of an infrastructure of global governance that catholic teaching has long supported.30 contrary to conventional wisdom, international relations are not a struggle of all against all with armed force the only thing countries ultimately respect. while countries do often pursue their own interests, political scientists have demonstrated that international institutions and norms strongly shape the behavior of individual countries, including how they understand their interests and the options available for pursuing them.31 this is what allows countries to cooperate 33 cochran in regulating a range of issues that cross borders, such as mail delivery, criminal extraditions, free trade, or endangered species, and to reform or abolish practices once considered only internal matters, such as capital punishment.32 it can also help shift behavior when it comes to armed force. for every country that has acquired nuclear weapons in the last half century, another has given them up.33 countries no longer consider war an option for collecting international debts, even though it was once a routine justification for going to war.34 and, as the european union shows, closer institutional integration certainly does not eliminate conflicts among countries, but it can remove warfare as a plausible way to address such conflicts, even among countries that were once chronically at war with each other.35 indeed, just belonging to intergovernmental organizations, even seemingly minor ones such as those regulating fisheries, reduces a country’s risk of engaging in war.36 in this international system, countries have a range of methods to shape each other’s behavior and prevent armed conflicts. for shaping behavior, a mix of incentives (integration into regional bodies, beneficial trade agreements, debt relief, economic aid, and technology transfers) and sanctions, especially those targeting regime leaders and their financial backers (blocking financial transactions, asset freezes, travel bans, import/export embargoes, and expulsion from regional bodies) can be effective in reducing external aggression and increasing internal democracy and respect for human rights, especially if these efforts are multilateral, have clear goals, and are used as part of negotiations rather than campaigns for regime change.37 when it comes to preventing countries from launching attacks on each other, diplomatic exchanges can successfully construct cycles of reciprocal restraint that help adversaries establish lasting peace, and a rising trend toward mediation and arbitration efforts, whether by intergovernmental bodies, such as the u.n.’s international court of justice, or nongovernmental actors, such as the sant’egidio community, are increasingly effective.38 since the majority of wars today are chronic civil wars that go through cycles of stopping and restarting, the best way to reduce warfare, and the military aggression and mass violence that it unleashes, is to help break this bloody cycle. fortunately, there are effective tools the international community can use to help negotiate a war’s end and prevent it from resuming, tools that, compared to military interventions, have a much better success rate at helping a more just and peaceful order emerge and endure.39 the realism objection to setting aside just war theory: a response 34 using a mix of incentives and sanctions, it is possible to push parties in a conflict toward a ceasefire and eventually a negotiated settlement with the help of a trusted moderator. this is important, since wars that end with a formal negotiated settlement have a better chance of producing a lasting peace.40 with the end of active combat, the quick presence of third-party monitors of the peace agreement’s implementation can quickly help local leaders and civil society groups implement steps that studies show significantly reduce the risk of war breaking out again, such as resettling refugees or transitional justice mechanisms.41 crucially, the greater the involvement of women in each of these steps, the greater their likelihood of success.42 in addition to these shorter-term interventions, the data show the potential of a longer-term commitment by the international community to work for the kind of economic and political development catholic teaching has long supported.43 poor countries are at a much higher risk of war, so development assistance that helps address poverty, education, health outcomes, and infrastructure can not only improve human flourishing in general, but significantly reduce the odds of armed conflict as well.44 similarly, political institutions that are inclusive, accountable, and responsive; that protect the rule of law; that guarantee and civil and political rights, especially for women; and that make space for a vibrant and pluralist civil society are not only more consistent with human dignity, but also significantly lower the risk of war.45 importantly, trying to impose such political institutions by armed force is much less effective than the slower process of promoting democratic reform through diplomatic pressure, incentives and sanctions, and support for local activists and civil society groups.46 the evidence, then, is clear. if the goal is a just and peaceful order, one that upholds human dignity and basic rights, promotes human flourishing, and protects persons from aggression, tyranny, and mass violence, including the mass violence of war itself, then nonviolent alternatives are more effective than warfare.47 the realism of repudiation and abolition never again war, never again war! –pope paul vi48 war should belong to the tragic past, to history, it should find no place on humanity’s agenda for the future. –pope john paul ii49 35 cochran unfortunately, war’s nonviolent alternatives are not guaranteed to succeed. sometimes they do fail, at least in the short term, to stop aggression, tyranny, or mass violence. and sometimes armed force has stopped these things, at least in the short term. for some people, the fact that we can point to apparent cases of nonviolent failure (e.g., tiananmen square) or military success (e.g., kosovo) means that we should not put our faith in nonviolent alternatives to war. but, of course, it is a rigged comparison to demand perfect success from nonviolence while overlooking war’s own poor success rate. when assessing each, it is important to hold them to the same standards of overall effectiveness, and when we do so, we have just seen how nonviolence comes out ahead. a related mistake is to argue that because nonviolent alternatives do not always work, people might suffer and die unless they resort to war or others do so on their behalf. it is true that nonviolent alternatives to war cannot guarantee nobody will suffer or die. this will often be the case even when they succeed. but, obviously, war cannot make that guarantee either. even effective wars see plenty of suffering and death, and since most wars fail, this suffering and death is usually in vain. the sad truth is that suffering and death are common when resisting violent attack or injustice no matter the means of resistance. the happy truth is that nonviolent means do usually lower the overall levels of suffering and death, while also giving resisters better odds of success. those who criticize calls for catholics to “no longer use or teach just war theory” might acknowledge all of this. they might stipulate that a fair comparison shows that war is more likely to produce greater suffering and death and end in failure compared to its nonviolent alternatives, which is why nonviolence should be the default position and church teaching should emphasize it more. if a physician treating an ill patient knows of drugs that are more effective and have fewer side effects, of course she should start with them rather than going right to a drug that is more dangerous and less effective. but sometimes patients don’t respond to the usual treatments, and in such cases physicians may try a treatment that is normally more dangerous and less likely to succeed because it may seem the only thing left with any chance of working at all. in the same way, while war is usually a more destructive and less effective option, maybe we should nonetheless hold it in reserve for those extraordinary cases where it may be the only option. nonviolent alternatives may be more effective than war, but why not have both in humanity’s toolkit just in case? the realism objection to setting aside just war theory: a response 36 the most important reason is that by keeping war on the table, the church signals that it is a legitimate option, which has two harmful effects. the first is to feed the myth of war’s righteousness and effectiveness, one that often leads humanity to put too much faith in war while systematically overlooking its more effective nonviolent alternatives. sometimes leaving a dangerous and less effective drug on the market, especially if it is one that has long been in wide use and thought the only effective treatment for a range of illnesses, can lead physicians to overprescribe it and patients to overuse it, causing more harm than good and crowding out safer and more effective alternatives. the second is that keeping war open as a legitimate option requires building militaries to be ready when the need arises. this means diverting wealth from pressing social needs such as education or healthcare, directing scientific knowledge and industrial capacity toward armaments, and, most significantly, recruiting people, especially the young, for training in how to kill. all of this gives violence a place of privilege in our culture, obscuring the damage that it does and normalizing war. as the old saying goes, if you put so much effort into building a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail. if war is actually ineffective in building, protecting, and sustaining a just and peaceful order, and is in fact a primary threat to such an order, then it is a mistake for catholic teaching to continue to legitimize it by carving out room for its moral use. the better, more effective, and, yes, more realistic path is to commit to fully delegitimizing war itself as part of the church’s stated goal of eliminating it from the earth. if one important strand in catholic teaching on war and peace over the last century is its growing emphasis on nonviolent peacemaking, another related one is its shift away from seeing war as an inevitable part of international behavior, where the main moral question is whether or not particular armed conflicts meet just war criteria, to developing a powerful moral critique of war itself, leading the church to emerge as an important voice in calls for its abolition.50 the reason delegitimizing war as a path toward its abolition is a more realistic way to work for a just and peaceful order is that we have seen the process before. the ways humanity abolished other forms of institutional violence such as chattel slavery, dueling, or trials by ordeal and combat were complex, but a key part of each was a collapse in the institution’s legitimacy following a campaign of consistent and total repudiation by abolitionist voices. these voices focused on the wrongness of the institution itself, on its being unwarranted for any reason whatsoever, rather than its misuse in particular cases. it was the spread of these views that allowed a tipping point towards abolition to emerge 37 cochran and the institution to become socially untenable. moral repudiation drove the social delegitimization that led to abolition.51 of course, abolishing war seems daunting, but so did abolishing chattel slavery, dueling, and trials by ordeal and combat in their day. and most people don’t realize the progress humanity has already made. news accounts of wars around the world obscure the longer-term trends in the decline of armed conflict. while the measurements are complex and the data has short-term fluctuations, the overall trend in the last few centuries is toward fewer wars and fewer people per capita dying in them. thanks primarily to the spread of anti-war norms and the effective use of the alternatives to war we saw above, progress in the last seventy-five years has been particularly dramatic, with interstate wars to capture new territory or colonies and redraw national boundaries becoming extraordinarily rare by historical comparison. much of the world is already essentially war-free, areas where there is still plenty of injustice and where countries still may have plenty of disputes, but where turning to war to address these things is simply not a conceivable option. there is still much to do to extend the elimination of war to the remaining areas of the globe where it is still present, but the evidence shows that it is certainly a realistic possibility.52 a truly realist understanding of war recognizes that the most effective way to secure a just and peaceful order is to abolish war itself in favor of its nonviolent alternatives, and that such abolition requires consistent and straightforward repudiations of war that deny it any legitimacy. this is a role catholic teaching can, should, and is well-suited to fill. there is even a recent and familiar template for doing so. for most of human history, capital punishment was accepted around the globe as a widespread, routine, and legitimate punishment for a wide array of ordinary crimes. doing without it seemed unrealistic and naively dangerous. yet, in just the last century, it has been abolished in almost every country on earth and restricted to a rare number of cases in the handful of countries that still use it.53 this is a remarkable historical shift in worldwide criminal justice practice, and catholicism has played an important role in making it happen. by turning against capital punishment—by gradually shrinking any permissible use to zero while shifting its focus to repudiating the institution itself as immoral and ineffective—the church helped delegitimize its use and pave the way for its widespread, though still incomplete, abolition. the same formula is possible for war. repudiation is the realistic path to abolition, and it is one catholic teaching is ready to walk. the realism objection to setting aside just war theory: a response 38 notes 1. catholic nonviolence initiative, “an appeal to the catholic church to re-commit to the centrality of gospel nonviolence,” april 2016, https://nonviolencejustpeace.net/finalstatement-an-appeal-to-the-catholic-church-to-re-commit-to-the-centrality-of-gospelnonviolence/. 2. mark allman and tobias winright, “protect thy neighbor: why the just war tradition is still indispensable,” commonweal june 17, 2016, https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/protect-thy-neighbor. 3. peter steinfels, “the war against just war: enough already,” commonweal june 16, 2017, https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/war-against-just-war. 4. robert latiff, “jumping into combat without a parachute—on purpose?” expositions: interdisciplinary studies in the humanities 12.2 (2018): 72–73, 76, https://expositions.journals.villanova.edu/article/view/2321/2225. 5. terry nardin, “the moral basis of humanitarian intervention,” in the morality of war: a reader, eds. david kinsella and craig carr (boulder, co: lynne rienner, 2007), 196– 205; gareth evans, the responsibility to protect: ending mass atrocity crimes once and for all (washington, dc: brookings institution press, 2008). 6. catholic nonviolence initiative, “an appeal.” 7. second vatican council, gaudium et spes, the holy see, 1965, §78, http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vatii_const_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html. 8. pope john paul ii, “no peace without justice, no justice without forgiveness,” the holy see, january 1, 2002, §3, http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/messages/peace/documents/hf_jpii_mes_20011211_xxxv-world-day-for-peace.html.  9. catholic nonviolence initiative, “an appeal.” 10. kenneth r himes, “humanitarian intervention and the just war tradition,” in can war be just in the 21st century?: ethicists engage the tradition, eds. tobias winright and laurie johnston (maryknoll, ny: orbis books, 2015), 51–53. 11. pope john paul ii, “if you want peace, reach out to the poor,” the holy see, january 1, 1993, §§4, 11, 39 cochran http://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/messages/peace/documents/hf_jpii_mes_08121992_xxvi-world-day-for-peace.html. 12. john g. stoessinger, why nations go to war, 9th ed. (belmont, ca: wadsworth, 2005); jens ringsmose, “when great powers lose small wars,” global security 22.3 (2008): 411–418; erica chenoweth and maria j. stephan, why civil resistance works: the strategic logic of nonviolent conflict (new york: columbia university press, 2011); erica chenoweth and maria j. stephan, “how the world is proving martin luther king right about nonviolence,” the washington post january 18, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/01/18/how-the-world-isproving-mlk-right-about-nonviolence/; adrian katatnycky and peter ackerman, how freedom is won: from civic resistance to durable democracy (washington, dc: freedom house, 2005); patrick m regan, civil wars and foreign powers: outside intervention in intrastate conflict (ann arbor, mi: university of michigan press, 2000). 13. desiderius erasmus, “an essay on war,” in bellum: two statements on the nature of war, ed. william royall tyler (barre, ma: imprint society, 1972), 20–21. 14. hugo slim, killing civilians: method, madness, and morality in war (new york: columbia university press, 2008). 15. quoted in slim, killing civilians 60–61. 16. eileen egan, “the beatitudes, the works of mercy, and pacifism,” in war or peace?: the search for new answers, ed. thomas a. shannon (maryknoll, ny: orbis, 1980), 173–175. 17. john tirman, the deaths of others: the fate of civilians in america’s wars (oxford: oxford university press, 2011); joshua s. goldstein, winning the war on war: the decline of armed conflict worldwide (new york: dutton, 2011), chapters 9–10; dave grossman, on killing: the psychological cost of learning to kill in war and society, rev. ed. (new york: little, brown and company, 2009), 199–201. 18. grossman, on killing; joanna bourke, an intimate history of killing: face to face killing in 20th century warfare (new york: basic books, 1999). 19. slim, killing civilians chapter 3. 20. pope john paul ii, centesimus annus, the holy see, 1991, §52, http://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jpii_enc_01051991_centesimus-annus.html. the realism objection to setting aside just war theory: a response 40 21. joseph j. hewitt, jonathan wilkenfeld, and ted robert gurr, peace and conflict 2010 (boulder, co: paradigm publishers, 2010); paul collier, the bottom billion: why the poorest countries are failing and what can be done about it (oxford: oxford university press, 2007); paul collier, “postconflict economic policy,” in building states to build peace, eds. charles t. call and vanessa wyeth (boulder, co: lynne rienner publishers, 2008), 103–117. 22. i develop the case against war’s ability to uphold a just and peaceful order in more detail in david carroll cochran, catholic realism and the abolition of war (maryknoll, ny: orbis, 2014), section ii. 23. pope francis, “nonviolence: a style of politics for peace,” the holy see, january 1, 2017, https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/peace/documents/papafrancesco_20161208_messaggio-l-giornata-mondiale-pace-2017.html. 24. pope john paul ii, sollicitudo rei socialis, the holy see, 1987, §39, http://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jpii_enc_30121987_sollicitudo-rei-socialis.html. 25. for the theory and tactics of nonviolence, see the classic gene sharp, waging nonviolent struggle: 20th century practice and 21st century potential (boston: extending horizons books, 2005) and the more recent srdja popovic, blueprint for revolution (new york: spiegel, 2015). for case studies of it in action, see peter ackerman and jack duvall, a force more powerful: a century of nonviolent conflict (new york: palgrave, 2000). 26. oliver kaplan, resisting war: how communities protect themselves (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2017). 27. katatnycky and ackerman, how freedom is won. 28. chenoweth and stephan, why civil resistance works. 29. chenoweth and stephan, “how the world:” erica chenoweth and evan perkoski, preventing mass atrocities (denver, co: sie cheou-kang center for international security and diplomacy, 2017). 30. see, for example, pope john xxiii, pacem in terris, the holy see, 1963, §§137–141 and 144, http://www.vatican.va/content/john-xxiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_j-xxiii_enc_ 11041963_pacem.html; second vatican council, gaudium §82; pope paul vi, populorum progressio, the holy see, 1967, §78, https://w2.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/encyclicals/ 41 cochran documents/hf_p-vi_enc_26031967_populorum.html; world synod of catholic bishops, justice in the world, 1971, §65, https://www1.villanova.edu/content/dam/villanova/ mission/justiceintheworld1971.pdf; united states conference of catholic bishops, the challenge of peace, 1983, §§96 and 241–242, http://www.usccb.org/upload/challengepeace-gods-promise-our-response-1983.pdf; united states conference of catholic bishops, the harvest of justice is sown in peace, 1993, http://www.usccb.org/beliefs-andteachings/what-we-believe/catholic-social-teaching/the-harvest-of-justice-is-sown-inpeace.cfm; pope john paul ii, “pacem in terris: a permanent commitment,” the holy see, 2003, §6, http://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/messages/peace/documents/ hf_jp-ii_mes_20021217_xxxvi-world-day-for-peace.html; pope john paul ii, “an ever timely commitment: teaching peace,” the holy see, 2004, §5, http://www.vatican.va/ content/john-paul-ii/en/messages/peace/documents/hf_jp-ii_mes_20031216_xxxviiworld-day-for-peace.html; and pope benedict xvi, “the human family: a community of peace,” the holy see, 2008, §§11 and 13, http://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/ en/messages/peace/documents/hf_ben-xvi_mes_20071208_xli-world-day-peace.html. 31. alexander wendt, social theory of international politics (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1990; peter j. katzenstein, ed., the culture of national security: norms and identity in world politics (new york: columbia university press, 1996). 32. ethan a. nadelmann, “global prohibition regimes: the evolution of norms in international society,” international organization 44.4 (1990): 479–526; peter andreas and ethan nadelmann, policing the globe: criminalization and crime control in international relations (oxford: oxford university press, 2006); sangmin bae, when the state no longer kills: international human rights norms and the abolition of capital punishment (albany, ny: state university of new york press, 2007). 33. steven pinker, the better angels of our nature: why violence has declined (new york: viking, 2011), 272–273. 34. goldstein, winning the war 225. 35. james j. sheehan, where have all the soldiers gone?: the transformation of modern europe (boston: mariner books, 2008). 36. bruce russett and john oneal, triangulating peace: democracy, interdependence, and international organizations (new york: w.w. norton, 2001). the realism objection to setting aside just war theory: a response 42 37. david cortright, “sanctions and stability pacts: the economic tools of peacemaking,” in peacemaking in international conflict: methods and techniques, rev. ed., ed. i. william zartman (washington, dc: united states institute of peace, 2007): 385–418; george a. lopez, “don’t just do something: getting sanctions right,” commonweal june 6, 2008, https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/dont-just-do-something; goldstein, winning the war; oona a. hathaway and scott j. shapiro, the internationalists: how a radical plan to outlaw war remade the world (new york: simon & schuster, 2017). 38. charles a. kupchan, how enemies become friends: the sources of stable peace (princeton: princeton university press, 2010); jacob bercovitch, “mediation in international conflicts: theory, practice, and developments,” in peacemaking in international conflict, 163–194; richard d. bilder, “adjudication: international abritral tribunals and courts,” in peacemaking in international conflict, 195–226; goldstein, winning the war; cynthia sampson, “religion and peacebuilding,” in peacemaking in international conflict, 273–323; mario marazziti, “lessons in peace: the relevance of mozambique’s peace agreement 20 years later,” america, november 19, 2012, https://www.americamagazine.org/issue/5159/article/lessons-peace. 39. james dobbins, et al., the u.n.’s role in nation building: from the congo to iraq (santa monica, ca: the rand corporation, 2005); james dobbins, testimony: a comparative evaluation of united nations peacekeeping (santa monica, ca: the rand corporation, 2007). 40. michael w. doyle and nicholas sambanis, making war and building peace: united nations peace operations (princeton: princeton university press, 2006); peter wallensteen, understanding conflict resolution: war, peace and the global system, 2nd ed. (los angeles: sage, 2007), chapter 2. 41. goldstein, winning the war; collier, “postconflict economic polity”; barnett r. rubin, “the politics of security in postconflict statebuilding,” in building states to build peace, 25–47; doyle and sambanis, making war; dobbins, et al., the u.n.’s role; dobbins, testimony; tricia d. olsen, leigh a. payne, and andrew g. reiter, transnational justice in balance: comparing processes, weighing efficacy (washington, dc: united states institute of peace press, 2010); wallensteen, understanding conflict chapter 7. 43 cochran 42. marie o’reilly, why women?: inclusive security and peaceful societies (washington, dc: inclusive security, 2015). 43. see, for example, pope john xxiii, pacem §§122–123; second vatican council, gaudium §60; pope paul vi, populorum §§10, 14–17, 20, 34–35 and 47; world synod of catholic bishops, justice §15; pope paul vi, octogesima adveniens, the holy see, 1971, §41, http://www.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/apost_letters/documents/hf_pvi_apl_19710514_octogesima-adveniens.html; pope john paul ii, sollicitudo §§1, 15–16, 29–30, 32–33, and 35; pope john paul ii, centesimus §29; and pope benedict xvi, caritas in veritate, the holy see, 2009, §§11, 18, and 23, http://www.vatican.va/content/benedictxvi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20090629_caritas-in-veritate.html. 44. collier, the bottom billion; charles kenny, getting better: why global development is succeeding—and how we can improve the world even more (new york: basic books, 2011); joseph k. young and michael g. findley, “can peace be purchased? a sectorallevel analysis of aid’s influence on transnational terrorism,” public choice 149.3–4 (2011): 365–381; roger c. riddell, does foreign aid really work? (oxford: oxford university press, 2007); goldstein, winning the war. 45. daron acemoglu and james robinson, why nations fail: the origins of power, prosperity, and poverty (new york: crown, 2012); g. shabbir cheema, building democratic institutions: governance reform in developing countries (bloomfield, ct: kumarian press, 2005); o’reilly, why women?; gary a. haugen and victor boutros, the locust effect: why the end of poverty requires the end of violence (oxford: oxford university press, 2014); wallensteen, understanding conflict chapter 6. 46. michael mcfaul, advancing democracy abroad: why we should and how we can (lanham, md: rowman & littlefield, 2010); tamara cofman wittes, freedom’s unsteady march: america’s role in building arab democracy (washington, dc: brookings institution press, 2008); daniel deudney and g. john ikenberry, “the myth of the autocratic revival: why liberal democracies will prevail,” foreign affairs 88.1 (2009): 77–93; steven w. hook, democratic peace in theory and practice (kent, oh: kent state university press, 2010); thomas carothers, ed., promoting the rule of law abroad: in search of knowledge (washington, dc: carnegie endowment for international peace, 2006). the realism objection to setting aside just war theory: a response 44 47. i develop the case for the effectiveness of war’s nonviolent alternatives in more detail in cochran, catholic realism section iv; and david carroll cochran, “war and the surprising realism of catholicism’s peacemaking agenda,” the journal of catholic social thought 11.1 (2014): 105–125. 48. pope paul vi, “address of pope paul vi to the u.n. general assembly,” the pope speaks 11.1 (1966): 54. 49. quoted in united states conference of catholic bishops, challenge of peace §219. 50. cochran, catholic realism chapter 4. 51. i develop the case for war’s abolition and its parallels to other forms of institutionalized violence in more detail in cochran, catholic realism sections iii and iv; david carroll cochran, “what slavery, ordeals, duels, and lynching can teach us about abolishing war,” waging nonviolence, may 8, 2015, https://wagingnonviolence.org/2015/06/slaveryordeals-duels-lynching-can-teach-us-abolishing-war/; and david carroll cochran, “a world without war: why it’s no fantasy,” commonweal january 8, 2016, https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/world-without-war. 52. hathaway and shapiro, internationalists; goldstein, winning the war; pinker, better angels chapters 5–6; john mueller, the remnants of war (ithaca, ny: cornell university press, 2004); robert jervis, “theories of war in an era of leading-power peace,” american political science review 96.1 (2002): 1–14. 53. bae, when the state. microsoft word mccarthy print [expositions 13.2 (2019) 113–136] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376   catholic nonviolence: transforming military institutions eli s. mccarthy georgetown university how do we build a robust, comprehensive future of nonviolence in the catholic church? first, i will explore how a catholic commitment to nonviolence as a “style of politics for peace” could function to orient and transform military institutions as we begin to re-imagine protection mechanisms. second, in this re-imagining i will draw on a eucharistic orientation for an inquiry into actual and possible nonviolent protection mechanisms in the 1994 rwandan genocide. third, in order to create more space for such nonviolence, i will respond briefly to some recent scholarship that critiques my thinking on the just war framework. my core argument is that if the catholic church commits to offering a sacramental imagination of nonviolence to the world, then we will more effectively transform military institutions toward trans-armament and offer more credible nonviolent forms of defense. the recent trajectory of the catholic church has been steadily moving toward a more robust affirmation of active nonviolence. the power of active nonviolence in many or most conflict situations is often affirmed by scholars who argue for the continued use of just war thinking. militaries themselves increasingly recognize their own limits and the need for more nonviolent strategies. recognizing the good faith of conscientious and stringent just war thinkers, i want to begin here by building on some of what we have in common as we transform the church together. my primary purpose in this essay, therefore, is to lay out a thought experiment imagining what it would look like for catholics working to transform the world’s militaries according to a just peace ethic. a quick summary of the just peace ethic i am referring to includes: (1) developing virtues and skills to engage conflict constructively through spiritual disciplines, key virtues,1 nonviolent education and skills, participatory processes, and the formation of nonviolent peacemaking communities; (2) breaking cycles of violence via reflexivity (i.e., keeping means and ends consistent), re-humanization, conflict transformation and dialogue, nonviolent direct action, and integral disarmament, and the acknowledgement of responsibility for harm2; (3) building catholic nonviolence: transforming military institutions 114   sustainable peace through relationality and reconciliation, robust civil society and just governance, respect for human dignity and rights, ecological sustainability, as well as economic, racial, and gender justice.3 a nonviolent just peace ethic: transforming the military institution if the catholic church develops its official teaching on nonviolence, how would a just peace ethic enable catholic advocates to impact and transform military institutions? the “nonviolent horizon,” grammar, or logic of this ethic includes the outlawing and ending of war.4 however, as we transition in ways consistent with and toward this horizon, this ethic can better enable military institutions to take key transformative steps. this ethical orientation would draw the military community to increasingly speak out and directly advocate for growing investment, resources, and strategic commitments to nonviolent approaches. for example, this might include promoting a normative shift for governments to a “right to assist” nonviolent resistance campaigns as central for preventing mass atrocities.5 it is often said that the military community is the most reluctant to engage in war, so to the degree there is truth in that claim this ethic will better enable such tendencies. in the area of strategic doctrine, the just peace ethic encourages the military community to change core strategic questions toward: how to engage conflict well, how to break cycles of violence, and how to cultivate the conditions for sustainable peace. engaging conflict well, i.e., constructively rather than destructively, orients the military to help identify root causes and key needs of all actors, cultivate virtuous habits, as well as engage in intersectional, racial, and gender analysis of conflicts. breaking cycles of violence rather than focusing on winning wars allows the military to re-humanize adversaries, to transform conflicts rather than merely end them, to better acknowledge responsibility for harm done, to turn adversaries into future partners, and to increasingly practice reflexivity, i.e., using means consistent with ends. such reflexivity is crucial to considering how to contribute to rather than obstruct the conditions for sustainable peace. rather than mere stability, this shift to a lens of sustainable peace enables the military to at least not obstruct environmental and structural justice, to step back and enable space for civil society, and to make clear commitments to outlaw and end war, not simply to avoid crimes during war. the u.s. army insurgencies and counterinsurgencies field manual provides an example of how the seeds of some just peace norms are already present and ripe for further development.6 for 115 mccarthy     example, the authors use the term “generational engagement” and relations between the population and government to identify how peacebuilding, or the norms of dialogue and relationality, can be actualized at all stages of conflict, even in high threat situations.7 they also explicitly point to the norm of participation regarding youth and civil society. the manual identifies the norm of sustainability and attending to root causes as in its discussion of economic development plans as well as the importance of defections. in a more indirect way, it refers to the pillars of support, which are key to strategic nonviolent resistance. these include “land reform” and “debt” as examples of the material resources pillar.8 however, the authors of the field manual do not actualize the norm of participation because they exclude adversaries or “enemies” whom they intend to “isolate” or destroy.9 they also fail the norm of nonviolent skillsets by excluding a needs-based analysis. instead of simply seeking to “isolate” the enemy or hope they lose “desire,” counterinsurgents could identify the enemy’s deeper needs and devise strategies that draw them toward these needs. some of these needs might be respect for self and religion, livelihood, meaning, connection, effectiveness, inspiration, etc. this would also be essential to stimulating and sustaining adequate defections. furthermore, the field manual does not actualize the norm of sustainability since counterinsurgents are not attending adequately to environmental damage of their military training and engagements. their indirect references to strategic nonviolent action are insufficient since their present methodology is too saturated with cultural and direct violence. in turn, a nonviolent just peace ethic would identify and cultivate these seeds for potential growth, but would not signal moral legitimation of cultural, structural, or direct violence. building on this approach, this ethic would enable the military to construct new pilot programs. for example, drawing on their stated commitments to protection, this ethic invites and challenges them to pilot an unarmed protection unit. the proven practice of unarmed civilian protection (ucp) by international organizations, such as the nonviolent peaceforce (np), peace brigades international, and cure violence, can serve as models and resources for such a pilot. for instance, in south sudan, nonviolent peaceforce’s protection units, which engage all armed actors, has reduced sexual assaults and rape by armed actors from regularity to zero in the areas np patrols and directly saved fourteen people from an armed militia attack. this attack was occurring in a u.n. protection site. as people were running and being shot, fourteen women and children rushed into a mud hut with two np officers. three different times, the armed militia came in demanding catholic nonviolence: transforming military institutions 116   that the np officers leave, but each time they refused, saying they were unarmed, non-partisan, and humanitarian. amazingly, the fourteen women and children survived the deadly attack. one of the np officers said, “if we had a gun we would’ve been shot immediately; so without arms we can find other ways.”10 in addition, there are instructive examples from other militaries, such as the australian department of defense.11 further, the u.n., including the department of peacekeeping, already has some unarmed elements in their deployments and is increasingly endorsing this methodology more formally and broadly, even at the u.n. security council.12 some might wonder if this would make soldiers less secure and less capable of protecting others. this is an important concern. however, much of this dynamic depends on what else the government or other parts of their military is doing. for example, if the government of this unarmed protection unit is enacting crippling sanctions on the people, extracting resources, dehumanizing the leaders, and even bombing other parts of the country, then such a unit will be much less secure, and their protection impact will be impeded but not necessarily insignificant. a key characteristic of unarmed protection is being and working with credible messengers in the social context. hence, civil society organizations are more often much better positioned to offer unarmed protection. nevertheless, if the destructive actions mentioned above and other similar approaches are absent, such unarmed programs would enable persons in the military to build better trust with key stakeholders on the ground, to gather more credible intelligence to prevent violence, to better de-escalate destructive conflicts, to create more space for nonviolent civil society leaders and campaigns, to displace less communities and refugees, and, thus, to ultimately protect more people over the long-term.13 as lessons are learned from the pilot programs, potential shifting of military resources as well as expansion in partnerships and types of conflict situations can ensue. furthermore, drawing on the just peace norms and the military’s stated commitment to defense, advocates could promote a pilot program in nonviolent civilian-based defense (cbd) as some countries have done. nonviolent cbd entails using nonviolent resistance to defend against military invasion, occupation, or coups d’état. for instance, the resistors do not necessarily physically prevent invading troops from entering their territory. at the same time, most people in some way participate in the resistance, taking more responsibility for their own defense rather than simply delegating it to an elite group.14 this primarily entails strategic noncooperation with some orders from the opponent and perhaps the creation of parallel institutions or government, to the point of making it inconvenient to nearly impossible for the occupying force to benefit or even 117 mccarthy     remain. when such a large-scale, coordinated nonviolent refusal to resource the opponent’s governing ambitions is clearly demonstrated in advance, some opponents may even be deterred from an attack in the first place.15 nonviolent cbd has taken different forms and been developed a number of times in the past century, and some governments recently incorporated it into their defense planning. past examples include the 1923 resistance to wolfgang kapp’s attempted coup d’état in germany, the norwegian and danish resistance against german occupation during world war ii, the czechoslovakian resistance against soviet occupation in 1968, the people power revolution in the philippines in 1986, the drive for independence in the baltic countries in 1990–1991, and russians preventing the soviet coup attempt in 1991.16 sweden, austria, switzerland, and lithuania have incorporated cbd into their defense planning by providing research and development funds to create nonviolent methods to prevent military occupation.17 others have written about such a strategy from a gandhian perspective, or more recently, as a way to counter russian hybrid warfare.18 for instance, robert j. burrows, drawing on gandhi, explains that any cbd approach must not rely too much on elites and limited system reform. any form of “nonviolent defense” should assist civil society organizers and ordinary people in their struggle to satisfy human needs.19 orienting such defense toward identification with all humans will decrease fear and create more space for the necessary courage for nonviolent defense.20 key tactical elements would include more dispersion than concentration, contingency plans, advance personal contact with opposing troops to reduce their fears and counter any de-humanization of the occupied population, the generation of resistance or defections in such troops, and the alteration of the will of key social groups in the domestic constituencies of the opponent’s elite or those in allied countries. nonviolent cbd is less likely to produce significant casualties in part because it can foster a more trusting political climate, less threatening physical circumstances, and a reduction in negative emotional states as well as increased humanization.21 much more study and experimentation can and should be done in this area. a nonviolent just peace ethic will better explore and sustain such transformation of defense approaches. however, the transformation of overall military strategy and structural programs can only go so far unless formation is significantly addressed. a just peace ethic would form people to enter more nonviolent institutions and careers; however, it could also considerably enhance the formation of all persons who otherwise end up in the military. one of the key issues in military catholic nonviolence: transforming military institutions 118   training is the de-humanization of adversaries in order to increase the willingness of soldiers to kill. yet, this de-humanization of others also contributes to the de-humanization of the soldiers themselves, such as through displacement of responsibility and decreasing empathy.22 the just peace norm of re-humanization as well as the norm of dignity and human rights would challenge this intentional strategy to de-humanize others. it would also supplement this with formation in key just peace virtues such as compassion, humility, and empathy.23 will this make soldiers much less willing to kill? yes. but it will also enhance critical thinking, emotional intelligence, and habits of creative, nonviolent actions to sustainably accomplish legitimate objectives that a defense institution may have. this ethic will also help us recognize that killing itself distorts and violates our human dignity. the advancing scientific acknowledgement of trauma, perpetrator induced syndrome, moral injury, and brain damage from killing illustrate this reality.24 thus, the just peace ethic enables a deepening and clarifying of the virtue of courage to the practice of suffering out of reverence for the dignity of others (and self) by risking, perhaps even giving one’s life, without killing. although it may be a dilemma to refuse to kill in difficult, rare situations, human flourishing and just peace norms, especially virtues, dignity, and the ever-surprising, creative dynamics unleashed by nonviolent action, draw us to risk life rather than to take life, especially if we are christian. pope john paul ii called us “not to follow those who train us in how to kill,” because “violence destroys our dignity.”25 pope francis said, “the commandment, ‘thou shalt not kill’ has absolute value, and concerns both the innocent and the guilty, and even criminals maintain the inviolable right to life, the gift of god.”26 in turn, a just peace ethic can cultivate healthier action choices and tactics by military personnel when they operate in conflict zones. a just peace ethic can cultivate healthier action choices and tactics by military personnel when they operate in conflict zones. several common military actions will not meet the just peace norms, but soldiers could strive towards these norms and, at a minimum, make much less harmful choices. nonetheless, catholics and other just peace advocates would maintain high standards. for instance, bombing a set of tanks or armed vehicles with military persons in them during a war might be less distance from the just peace norms than bombing a hospital. it may be “less harmful,” but it would not satisfy the just peace norms, and thus would not be considered morally justified.27 just peace advocates would instead promote a broad set of creative, nonviolent actions. in contrast, a just war framework could describe such an 119 mccarthy     action as morally justified, and thus perpetuate supporting components (structural violence, cultural violence, cycles of direct violence, “collateral damage,” etc.) that normally attend such choices. but, more importantly, catholics would call persons in the military to actions during violent conflict which are in accord with the just peace norms. soldiers have prior experiences with these alternatives and would be more inclined to pursue them. for example, some soldiers do talk with respect and empathy to the people they encounter, such as ordinary civilians, in a violent conflict zone. some soldiers do include local people in some decision-making about how to proceed in a community. some do help build schools, electric grids, bridges, houses, etc. some do converse deeply with enemies or prisoners and develop some empathy. some do try to avoid harming essential, life-giving infrastructure. some do stay back and let local nonviolent resistance campaigns have social space. some do advocate for governments to invest more in peacebuilding and diplomacy not only before but during violent conflict. some do lay their weapons down when engaging with some individuals, families, or groups in order to build trust and lower the sense of threat. some do transport internally displaced persons (idps), and refugees to safety. the just peace ethic would enable these actions to happen much more often and give more moral legitimation for them as we sustainably transform both the conflict and the military institution at the same time. one might respond that such formation could be helpful, but soldiers still need to be trained and willing to kill in today’s militaries. otherwise, how would militaries be an adequate threat to violent aggression? or, how would they actually stop such violent aggression? there is solid empirical evidence to at least question if not considerably doubt the overall effectiveness of violent responses.28 however, my point here is that the role of catholics, if not all christians, is not to morally justify, legitimate, or label such killing necessary. for militaries, there is a domestic and international legal system in place which claims to permit, manage, and limit armed conflict. as we work to solidify a commitment to nonviolence in the catholic community, there must also be persistent efforts to mainstream just peace norms in the legal system.29 this would include a clear commitment to outlaw and end war. thus, as part of the transformation of military institutions, we can increasingly reduce and perhaps at some point root out their killing. however, the role of catholics, and perhaps all christians, would shift to a nonviolent just peace ethic to guide our actions and to gradually but steadily transform the military.30 catholic nonviolence: transforming military institutions 120   this transition process is oriented by a commitment to trans-armament, i.e., the process of preparing a society structurally and culturally to move from a military-based defense to a nonviolent civilian-based defense. pope francis uses the term “integral disarmament” to refer to the internal disarmament of our hearts, sensibilities, and habits as well as the external disarmament of weapons and militaries. while catholics work to transform military institutions from within as one key line of effort, an essential complementary part will be for the catholic church to work outside military institutions to build on these nonviolent practices, such as unarmed civilian protection and nonviolent civilian-based defense, as their own models in our communities and countries. this will be necessary for militaries to “see” what is going on around them and the impact these practices can have to motivate their own internal transformations. the catholic community has significant resources and institutions to do this work, especially in coalition with other religious or civil society organizations. there is a broad network of educational institutions that can do the research and consistently teach the upcoming generations. there is major convening power of the vatican and other catholic institutions to bring key stakeholders together. there are significant advocacy institutions in the vatican’s diplomatic corps, national bishops’ conferences, and religious/lay advocacy organizations. i sense that catholics have an urgent call to scale-up local peace teams that offer unarmed civilian protection, as well as the international ucp organizations that deploy to conflict zones. these include especially the nonviolent peaceforce, cure violence, peace brigades international, christian peacemaker teams, and operation dove. catholics can support and pilot more nonviolent civilian-defense programs in towns, cities, countries, and internationally. it is crucial for catholics to attend to these creative, nonviolent practices of protection and national defense as we see similar trends in international relations scholarship. for instance, richard jackson explains that “it is more likely that in employing violence to protect a group of innocent people in the present, the long-term effects will be to reinforce the discourses and psychological mechanisms that encourage future resorts to violence and the entrenchment of an ongoing cycle of violence, thus perpetuating rather than relieving the suffering of the innocent.”31 as catholics reflect on the more general need to protect all life in the context of salvation history, we might more clearly envision healthy protection mechanisms through the lens of the eucharist. the eucharist is god’s expression through jesus of nonviolent love, risking and offering life for others without killing. jesus risks his life to save and protect us from the ultimate death of being 121 mccarthy     disconnected from god, and thus models for us ultimate and sustainable protection. when we participate in the eucharist, we are empowered and called to embody this kind of risking of life for others. this represents jesus’s saving work to the world and thus draws us all further into the way of salvation, which is the authentic protection of our lives and the illumination of our sacred dignity. “in the silence of the cross, the uproar of weapons ceases and the language of reconciliation, forgiveness, dialogue and peace is spoken.”32 with this focus on risking of life without killing, catholics would promote the saving of every life as the constitutive orientation for any institutional mechanism focused on protection.33 an inquiry into the rwandan genocide such a eucharistic orientation toward protection approaches would increase our attentiveness, open our imagination, and deepen our commitment to creative, nonviolent initiatives even in highly difficult situations. i will not provide a full analysis of the rwandan genocide in 1994, but i will reflect briefly on this case with this eucharistic orientation and a nonviolent just peace ethic to draw out a few reference points for further consideration. one of the first steps in such an inquiry is to become adequately aware of the root causes of the horrible spike in violence that occurred in april 1994 in rwanda. the just peace norms of nonviolent skills and conflict transformation includes such an analysis. like many conflicts in africa, this one has roots in the violent habits formed through colonialism. for example, paul kagame, the present president of rwanda, grew up in nearby uganda after his parents fled hutu violence in 1959 during rwanda’s struggle for independence from colonial rule. later, he joined an armed group in uganda which deposed its president. shortly afterwards, in the late 1980s he and other tutsi leaders plotted the overthrow of the hutu government in rwanda. meanwhile, the french had been the political, economic, and military supporters of the hutu government, particularly in the early 1990s. in 1990, kagame studied at the u.s. army command college in kansas. after a failed attack by the rwandan patriotic front on the hutu government, kagame soon became the leader of the rwandan patriotic front (rpf). these attacks continued on and off in the early 1990s, with various attempts at negotiations. the french support and presence of military forces empowered hardline hutu elements to continue their violence (including the killing of civilians) and propaganda, and ultimately the intense spike in bloodshed known as the 1994 genocide. meanwhile, u.s. and ugandan support for the rpf and catholic nonviolence: transforming military institutions 122   kagame perpetuated their ongoing campaign of violence, which stoked the fear of ordinary hutus and enabled the success of their propaganda to attack tutsis more broadly. both france and the u.s. had many points along this violent conflict cycle when they could have pressured their proxies, withdrawn economic/political/military support, mitigated the violence, and ultimately prevented or defused the genocide. for instance, french banks were instead complicit in transferring funds for the rwandan government during the genocide.34 the citizens of these democratic countries also had opportunities to influence their governments to pursue more positive strategies. the just peace norms of reflexivity (consistency of means and ends) and just governance would be particularly helpful to stimulate such activity. for example, both the hutu political and military sectors as well as the tutsi-dominated rpf were clearly starting to train and mobilize civilians to use arms against the civilians of the adversary. this began in late 1990 for the hutus as a “self-defense” operation along with more formally trained militias. the rpf also did this, especially in early 1994 before the genocide. after the assassination of rwanda’s hutu president on april 6, 1994, which followed the october 1993 assassination of burundi’s hutu president, there was another clear moment for potential nonviolent intervention. within the next twenty-four hours key moderate hutu leaders, including the prime minister, were killed by the government’s armed forces. these figures were central levers for maintaining previous negotiations.35 as the killing again escalated, france evacuated french citizens but also evacuated highranking rwandan government officials from the regime involved in the killings while refusing to evacuate tutsis, even those who worked at the french embassy.36 likewise, other western countries, including the u.s., evacuated their own citizens and generally refused to evacuate tutsis. however, if the just peace norm of human rights and human dignity was followed, hundreds if not thousands of tutsis and others could have been saved. another key driver of the killing was the de-humanizing propaganda, which is common to all wars and violates the just peace norm of re-humanization. in this case, the rwandan government, military, and other hutus used the radio to condition and exacerbate the killing of tutsis.37 another plausible and meaningful nonviolent intervention would have been to cut off that radio signal. the u.s. department of defense considered this but chose against it primarily due to respecting national “sovereignty.” this sort of propaganda and other types of rumor-spreading before and during the 1994 genocide was key to creating fear and the willingness to kill. notable examples 123 mccarthy     are known of intentional rumor-spreading by officials leading to civilians killing other civilians even back in 1990.38 a proven practice for dispelling rumors and preventing them from causing or escalating violence is the practice of unarmed civilian protection, which fits the just peace norm of nonviolent direct action. organizations like peace brigades international and nonviolent peaceforce use ucp to generate trust and lines of communications with all actors. this practice could have been implemented to mitigate and prevent the spreading of deadly rumors before and during the 1994 genocide.39 this would have been particularly pivotal after the assassination of the president. furthermore, at times this practice can also offer direct protection, especially for civilians. as mentioned above, two nonviolent peaceforce officers directly protected fourteen women and children during an armed militia attack at a u.n. compound in south sudan. we also know of this spontaneously happening in rwanda, whether it was some courageous hutus protecting tutsis, such as hutu muslims using mosques40 and the story of hotel rwanda, or the catholic sisters of the missionaries of charity who protected many tutsi children.41 these were the kinds of nonviolent actions that could have been better resourced, coordinated, and promoted by key governments like the u.s. and france but also by civil society leaders within and outside rwanda. for instance, too many catholic leaders in rwanda who were credible messengers in their community failed to offer such unarmed protection, and even at times enabled and directly participated in the killing.42 a number of such key social groups could have been strategically engaged to join in nonviolent defense and noncooperation to reduce the violence.43 meanwhile, kagame’s rpf, which appeared to play a key role in ending this genocide, was still involved in massive human rights violations before, during, and after the 1994 genocide. foreign policy journalist james traub describes, as a “typical episode,” the rpf kidnapped refugees, many of them women and children, and brought them to a camp, allegedly under the pretext of returning them to rwanda. the refugees were then brought out in small groups. from the report: “they were bound and their throats were cut or they were killed by hammer blows to the head. their bodies were then thrown into pits or doused with petrol and burned. the operation was carried out in a methodical manner and lasted at least one month.”44 catholic nonviolence: transforming military institutions 124   although the genocide of 1994 seemed to subside, the cycles of horrendous violence which predated the genocide were mostly simply displaced and continued afterwards, particularly moving into the democratic republic of congo (drc) where the carnage continues even today. of course, access to congo’s rich supply of minerals offers an economic boon to western companies, especially from the u.s. hence, most analysts recognize the connection between kagame’s military training in the u.s., his violent expansion into the drc, and the economic interests of the u.s. in that region.45 protection of all life certainly has not been the primary, if even a significant driver in the responses to violence by this collection of armed actors. this brief inquiry into the rwandan genocide illuminates the critical contributions of a eucharistic orientation to protection and a nonviolent just peace ethic. at minimum, it complexifies a situation that is often portrayed as a binary choice between violent intervention and being a bystander to genocide. furthermore, it better illuminates that violence which appears “justified” or “humanitarian” to some still leads to indefensible, ongoing cycles of bloodshed. but, more importantly, the eucharistic orientation and just peace ethic offers analytical methods, norms, and creative, nonviolent protection mechanisms that we may miss or under-value. for catholic advocates and even those catholics in government, this invites and challenges us to better commit and focus on these alternatives. the institutional church and catholic advocacy organizations have a critical opportunity to fully embody and offer to the world this sacramental imagination of nonviolence. in some rare situations of extreme difficulty, it may not be appropriate for catholics to morally critique certain actors who may resort to violent protection, including “lethal force.” but rather than being a voice of justification, legitimation, or endorsement of violence, this is a call to focus our formation, discernment, resources, advocacy, intervention, and bodies to accompany such persons toward creative, nonviolent approaches that prevent and defuse violent conflict even in such difficult situations. recent discourse on just war in order to create more space for such nonviolence, i will respond briefly to some scholarship referencing my arguments related to a just war framework. i have discussed some of my concerns about the just war approach in a previous expositions essay.46 here i would like to clarify some of this thinking and address some subsequent arguments on this topic in order to further shed light 125 mccarthy     on the need to move us closer to the catholic church fully embodying and offering to the world a sacramental imagination of nonviolence. in my previous article, i identified the concern about how the just war criteria have mostly been used to justify rather than prevent or limit war. there appears to be considerable agreement about this, even from perspectives that still uphold the just war concept.47 however, some of these same supporters have gone so far to claim that i and others fail to see how just war theory has been used to argue against war and to restrain war.48 they further suggest that since it has been used in this way, then this legitimates the ongoing use and refinement of just war theories. yet, i and others have previously said that the just war criteria have “mostly” or “too often” been used, not always been used, to justify rather than prevent or limit war.49 i recognize that some scholars, religious leaders, and political leaders have drawn on just war criteria to speak out against a particular war or actions in war.50 however, even though this happens, it still primarily has functioned to create the social conditions for the likelihood of war and to endorse wars. hence, i have quoted bishop mcelroy, who said the “just war principles have become only a little bit less than a green light” for war.51 further, gerald schlabach has argued that “just war cannot be counted as useful if it only works consistently among specialists, and not to mobilize stringent scrutiny of warfare in pews and populace.” just war theorists, he goes on, “must [...] recognize the theory’s failure to help the people of god scrutinize and resist unjust war.”52 he responds directly to scholars who argue that the misuse of something is no argument against its proper use: [this] principle […] is simply not convincing as applied to the just war theory. for in order to override both the plain words of jesus and early christian scruples against all bloodshed, and to justify exceptional recourse to violence in order to prevent more violence, the best and perhaps only argument has always been some claim of greater realism. but as i argued, the persistent manipulation of just war discourse is itself a data point concerning reality, a “hard fact” with which its advocates must grapple far more. to evade such grappling by insisting it could still work in theory is something of a bait-and-switch.53 in other words, they argue that just war is a necessary concession to the reality of the human condition in a so-called fallen world, i.e., it would work better than the alternatives, but then they catholic nonviolence: transforming military institutions 126   appeal to its value as an ideal. this is a bait-and-switch: it is either realistic or it isn’t.54 the strong evidence of consistent abuse over time to the ad bellum and in bello criteria has led to enormous, ongoing, and unacceptable consequences for countless people and the earth.55 in addition to the reality that the just peace ethic could better prevent and limit war, as some had hoped the just war tradition would adequately do,56 these tragic realities significantly de-legitimate this moral framework as an official teaching in the catholic church, even if some specialists try to use it primarily to speak out against war. in addition to a pattern of enabling direct violence, the just war approach too often functions to enable structural and cultural violence, as i alluded to briefly in my previous essay.57 a moral framework focused on whether violence is morally legitimate, even in a restricted form, too often enables governments to expend significant energy on preparing to win a possible “just war” rather than invest in nonviolent resources or other basic human needs. this structural violence often includes the arms trade and a war system increasingly embedded in our economy and politics. also, this ethic frequently enables cultural violence in the form of de-humanizing social habits generated by training for war, media propaganda to support preparation for war, and generational trauma from the experience of war. further, such structural and cultural violence often exacerbates the root causes of violence and inhibits sustainable peace. others have suggested that i claim anyone who uses just war theories to assess war are trying to “prepare” for or “seek a just war.”58 this is not an accurate portrayal of my position. it is normally governments that directly prepare for “just wars.” my position is that too often when we utilize just war theories to assess wars, we risk signaling to others the possibility of a just war whether we intend to or not, and whether we are arguing against a specific war or not. this provides cultural legitimization that functions in a society and a government to generate mental, emotional, material, and institutional resources to prepare for the possibility of a just war. for instance, international relations scholar helen dexter argues that this discourse of “just war theory” has “made it increasingly difficult to oppose war.”59 whether we intend it or not, our collective moral imagination for nonviolence gets truncated through the cultural legitimation of war and the cultural violence mentioned above. some scholars have responded to this by expanding their personal imagination and then using it to further develop a just war framework.60 however, i am not saying that any imagination is limited by utilizing the just war approach. i am referring to the moral imagination for the adequate range of nonviolent 127 mccarthy     possibilities, and more precisely the collective moral imagination more so than the personal imagination.61 rather than “providing no evidence,” as some have claimed,62 for how this limiting of nonviolence has been playing out in the catholic community and beyond, i and others, such as fr. francisco de roux, s.j., of colombia, have offered several examples.63 for instance, too many spend little if any time trying to imagine how to humanize or illuminate the dignity of our enemies, which is a gospel mandate and essential to overcoming mass violence. we rarely hear religious and political leaders speak about or promote nonviolent resistance, especially boycotts, strikes, and civil disobedience, etc., to injustice and violence. when pope francis said not to “bomb or make war” on isis, most u.s. catholic press and many political/religious leaders left out this phrase. they fixated on his call “to stop the aggression” and claimed an openness from the pope to some military action, focusing their discussion on how much. instead, the catholic community may have better faced the call to not “bomb or make war” by working together to identify creative, nonviolent responses. another example is how the depth and range of education on nonviolent theory and practice is much better in most mennonite or quaker schools compared to most catholic institutions. we could look in recent history to see more evidence for how this framework has functioned to limit nonviolent potential by catholic leaders. u.s. leaders, such as the united states conference of catholic bishops (usccb), limited nonviolent imagination and options by supporting the war in vietnam as a “just war” during the 1960s.64 in the gulf war of 1991, u.s. catholic leaders, including bishops, offered various positions despite the criticism of pope john paul ii. for example, cardinal bernard law expressed clear support for the war effort. the lack of a consistent message too often enabled the status quo and the subsequent cycles of violence that continued twenty-five years later through destructive economic sanctions and further war in iraq. additional examples also exist.65 although the turn to a just peace ethic would significantly enhance our nonviolent imagination, development, and commitment, some argue that this ethic simply increases the threshold for last resort and thus should simply fit within the broader just war framework. yes, it would to some extent increase the space for nonviolent action; however, cahill argues that attempts to incorporate just peace components into a just war framework in our present context of continued violence “opens the door to ‘just peace’ as a more adequate way to respond to military and societal violence catholic nonviolence: transforming military institutions 128   than the application of just war theory, both from a christian and from a political or humanistic standpoint.”66 further, when placing a just peace ethic within the just war framework it would also get co-opted in a way that continues to perpetuate many of the other previously discussed social and political problems too often enabled by the just war framework. not to mention that many of the just peace norms, such as reflexivity, virtues of mercy and empathy, conflict transformation, human dignity, etc., are inconsistent with just war logic. there are, of course, some positive elements in the just war tradition that should be and are incorporated and transformed in the process of shifting to a just peace ethic, such as right intention, just cause, accountability, and preventing and reducing violence.67 perhaps as a signal to the broader church, lisa cahill points out that the modern popes “clearly envision their role as christian leaders and teachers, not as elaborating justifications of armed force, but as maximizing the visibility, appeal, uniting power, and effectiveness of nonviolence and just peace.”68 conclusion in this essay, i offered an example of how a nonviolent just peace ethic could contribute to the transformation and trans-armament of military institutions. reflecting on how such transarmament relates to re-imagining protection mechanisms in the light of the eucharist, i offered a brief inquiry into the case of the rwandan civil war and the genocide of 1994. in light of this potential for nonviolence, i responded to some recent discourse around the just war framework to help create more space for the church embodying a sacramental imagination of nonviolence. the central argument is that if the catholic church commits to offering a sacramental imagination of nonviolence to the world, then the church will not only get closer to becoming a church of mercy and a sacrament of nonviolence,68 but we will more effectively transform our military institutions toward trans-armament and offer more credible nonviolent protection mechanisms. notes 1. such as mercy, empathy, humility, courage, nonviolence, solidarity, and compassion. 2. including restorative justice and trauma-healing. 3. eli s. mccarthy, “a virtue-based just peace ethic,” journal of moral theology 7.2 (june 2018): 92–101. for a fuller elaboration, see a just peace ethic primer: building 129 mccarthy     sustainable peace and breaking cycles of violence, ed. eli s. mccarthy (washington, dc: georgetown university press, forthcoming 2020). see also “just peace ethic,” handout at path of nonviolence conference at the vatican, april 4–5, 2019, https://nonviolencejustpeacedotnet.files.wordpress.com/2019/04/jphandout_cni_workshop_2019.pdf. 4. pope francis quoted in gerald o’connell, “pope francis to theologians in naples: one cannot do theology without freedom,” america june 21, 2019, https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2019/06/21/pope-francis-theologians-naples-onecannot-do-theology-without-freedom. 5. peter ackerman and hardy merriman, “preventing mass atrocities: from a responsibility to protect to a right to assist campaigns of civil resistance,” international center on nonviolent conflict special report, may 2019. 6. the united states counterinsurgency field manual: u.s. army field manual 3–24: marine corps warfighting publication 3–33.5 (washington, dc: united states department of the army, 2014), https://fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-24.pdf. 7. ibid. 10–2. 8. ibid. 10–61. 9. ibid. 10–26. 10. “np workers andres gutierrez and derek oakley on their experience of the violence in south sudan,” youtube, may 12, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wcfwpcimce. 11. they endorsed this practice of soldiers being unarmed in bougainville, papua new guinea in the late 1990s. they said, “relying on the people to ensure the safety of the peace monitors reinforces their responsibility for peace” and “although it caused some angst in the soldiers, there were a number of occasions when things could’ve been worse if they were armed and when the people assisted patrols in difficult circumstances,” quoted in rolf carrière, et al., civilian peacekeeping: a barely tapped resource, ed. christine schweitzer (belm-vehrte: sozio-publishing, 2010), http://www.nonviolentpeaceforce.org/images/publications/cp_a_barely_tapped_resour ce.pdf. catholic nonviolence: transforming military institutions 130   12. united nations, high-level panel on peace operations, uniting our strengths for peace: politics, partnership and people, june 16, 2015, http://peaceoperationsreview.org/wpcontent/uploads/2015/08/hippo_report_1_june_2015.pdf; u.n. women, “preventing conflict, transforming justice, securing the peace: a global study on the implementation of united nations security council resolution 1325,” 2015, http://wps.unwomen.org/en; united nations, general assembly, report of the special committee on peacekeeping operations, a/72/19 (2018), https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/1627951/files/a_72_19en.pdf. in addition, the concept was included for the first time in a united nations security council (unsc) mandate in 2016, with unarmed civilian protection in the south sudan mission mandate. in addition to advocating for investment in stand-alone unarmed civilian protection organizations, advocates have pushed for peacekeeping troops and u.n. civil affairs staff to be trained in and to utilize unarmed civilian protection (“strengthening civilian capacities to protected civilians: unarmed civilian protection,” https://www.unitar.org/event/full-catalog/strengthening-civilian-capacities-protectcivilians-unarmed-civilian-protection-0). 13. mel duncan and john ashworth, “living just peace in south sudan: protecting people nonviolently in midst of war,” in a just peace ethic primer. 14. michael nagler, is there no other way? the search for a nonviolent future (berkeley, ca: berkeley hills books, 2001), 252–253. 15. jack salmon, “can nonviolence be combined with military means for national defense?” journal of peace research 25.1 (1988), 71. 16. gene sharp, waging nonviolent struggle: 20th century practice and 21st century potential (boston: porter sargent, 2005); and nagler, is there no other way? 17. sharp, waging nonviolent struggle 516; sharp, civilian-based defense: a post-military weapons system (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 1990), 125; gravina miniotaite, “lithuania: from nonviolent liberation towards nonviolent defence?” peace research: the canadian journal of peace studies 28.4 (1996): 19–36. 18. robert j. burrows, the strategy of nonviolent defense: a gandhian approach (albany, ny: state university of new york press, 1996); and maciej bartkowski, “nonviolent civilian defense to counter russian hybrid warfare,” white paper, international center for nonviolent conflict, johns hopkins university, march 2015. 131 mccarthy     19. burrows 161. 20. burrows 205. 21. burrows 240–243, 256–264. 22. lt. col. david grossman, on killing: the psychological cost of learning to kill in war and society (boston: little, brown & co, 1995); jessica wolfendale, “developing moral character in the military: theory and practice,” presented at international symposium for military ethics, springfield, va, january 24–25, 2007, http://isme.tamu.edu/isme07/ wolfendale07.html. 23. another key virtue is mercy, which is especially relevant for christians, as leo guardado argues in his essay in this volume. jim keenan, s.j., describes mercy as the willingness to enter into the chaos of another so as to answer them in their need; see his moral wisdom: lessons and texts from the catholic tradition (lanham, md: rowman & littlefield, 2004), 124. 24. rachel macnair, perpetration-induced traumatic stress: the psychological consequences of killing (lincoln, ne: praeger/greenwood publishing, 2005). 25. pope john paul ii, quoted in pontifical council for justice and peace, compendium of social doctrine of the church (london: continuum, 2004), 496; and in “holy mass in drogheda, ireland,” the holy see, september 29, 1979, http://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/homilies/1979/documents/hf_jpii_hom_19790929_irlanda-dublino-drogheda.html. however, in a 1993 address to the diplomatic corps, he did affirm the international “duty to disarm the aggressor” in situations where populations face unjust aggressors. how the aggressor is disarmed becomes the challenge and what role the catholic church has in that situation is where a just peace ethic should come into play. 26. quoted in “pope calls on international leaders to abolish death penalty,” catholic herald february 22, 2016, https://catholicherald.co.uk/news/2016/02/22/pope-calls-oninternational-leaders-to-abolish-death-penalty/. 27. “the gospels draw us further: a just peace ethic,” expositions 12.1 (2018), 85–86, https://expositions.journals.villanova.edu/article/view/2322. 28. see david cochran’s essay in this volume. catholic nonviolence: transforming military institutions 132   29. part of this is happening with the sustaining peace agenda at the u.n. see youssef mahmoud and anupah makoond, “sustaining peace: what does it mean in practice,” international peace institute, april 2017, https://www.ipinst.org/2017/04/sustainingpeace-in-practice. 30. duane friesen, “in search of security: a theology and ethic of peace and public order,” in at peace and unafraid: public order, security, and the wisdom of the cross, eds. duane k. friesen and gerald w. schlabach (scottsdale, pa: harald press, 2005), 73. 31. richard jackson, “pacifism and the ethical imagination in ir,” international politics 56.2 (april 2019): 212–217. 32. pope francis, “vigil of prayer for peace,” the holy see, september 7, 2013, http://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/homilies/2013/documents/papafrancesco_20130907_veglia-pace.html. 33. this paragraph is largely drawn from the catholic nonviolence initiative’s unpublished research document, “advancing nonviolence and just peace in the church and the world: biblical, theological, ethical, pastoral and strategic dimensions of nonviolence,” july 2019. 34. fiona cumberland, “france: proud of her role during the rwandan genocide?” einternational relations june 4, 2012, https://www.e-ir.info/2012/06/04/france-proud-ofher-role-during-the-rwandan-genocide/; tracy mcnicoll, “french bank had role in rwandan genocide,” the independent july 10, 2017, https://www.independent.co.ug/ rwanda-french-bank-role-rwandan-genocide/. 35. “the rwandan genocide: how it was prepared,” human rights watch 1, april 2016, https://www.hrw.org/legacy/backgrounder/africa/rwanda0406/4.htm. 36. rene lemarchand, “reconsidering france’s role in the rwandan genocide,” africa is a country, june 13, 2018, https://africasacountry.com/2018/06/reconsidering-frances-rolein-the-rwandan-genocide. 37. ibid. 38. ibid. for example, the killing of hundreds of tutsi in the kibilira commune. 39. rolf carrière, “rwanda’s genocide @ 21: a reflection,” nonviolence peaceforce, april 13, 2015, https://www.nonviolentpeaceforce.org/blog/420-rwanda-s-genocide-21-a-reflection. 133 mccarthy     40. “hutu muslims saved tutsis during rwandan genocide,” al jazeera april 7, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0u5azfsbrc. 41. carrière, “rwanda’s genocide.” 42. conor gaffey, “catholic church apologizes for role in rwandan genocide,” newsweek november 21, 2016, https://www.newsweek.com/catholic-church-apologizes-rolerwandan-genocide-523289; “rwanda genocide: catholic church sorry for role of priests and nuns in killings,” guardian november 20, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/21/rwanda-genocide-catholic-churchsorry-for-role-of-priests-and-nuns-in-killings. 43. robert j. burrows, “a nonviolent strategy to defeat genocide,” global research june 21, 2017, https://www.globalresearch.ca/a-nonviolent-strategy-to-defeat-genocide/5595512; and “nonviolent defense/liberation strategy: strategic aims,” june 4, 2016, www.nonviolentliberationstrategy.wordpress.com. 44. james traub, “foreign policy: holding rwanda accountable,” npr september 7, 2010, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyid=129696478. 45. juan carrero, “u.s./u.n. coverup of kagame’s genocide in rwanda and congo,” global research september 21, 2010, http://whale.to/c/carrero.html. 46. eli s. mccarthy, “the gospels draw us further: a just peace ethic.” 47. gerald f. powers interviewed by gretchen crowe, our sunday visitor, april 20, 2016, https://www.osv.com/article/tabid/493/artmid/13569/articleid/19722/powerscatholic-social-doctrine-is-%e2%80%98just-peace%e2%80%99-.aspx; mark allman and tobias winright, “protect thy neighbor: why just-war tradition is still indispensable,” commonweal june 2, 2016, https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/ protect-thy-neighbor; response to allman and winright by marie dennis and eli mccarthy, “jesus and ‘just war?’ time to focus on just peace and gospel nonviolence,” huffington post october 1, 2016, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jesus-and-just-wartime-to-focus-on-just-peace-and_b_57ec6282e4b0972364deab50. 48. anna floerke scheid, “christian peace ethics: trends in the international (anglophone) debate,” jahrbuch fur christliche socialwissenschaften 59 (2018): peace and justice, 272– 273. catholic nonviolence: transforming military institutions 134   49. mccarthy, “the gospels draw us further: a just peace ethic”; gerald w. schlabach, “just war? enough already,” commonweal may 31, 2017, https://www. commonwealmagazine.org/just-war-0; schlabach, “appeal to catholic church to recommit to the centrality of gospel nonviolence,” catholic nonviolence initiative, april 11, 2016, https://nonviolencejustpeace.net/final-statement-an-appeal-to-the-catholic-church-to-recommit-to-the-centrality-of-gospel-nonviolence/. 50. for example, some point to the restrictive use by the u.s. conference of catholic bishops to question the 2003 iraq war. but they did not clearly resist it even when the pope was against it and this enabled the conditions for ongoing abuse in iraq including the rise of isis. yet, the usccb also legitimized the 2001 war in afghanistan resulting in the ongoing war that continues eighteen years later. 51. mcelroy quoted in joshua j. mcelwee, “pope condemns possession of nuclear weapons in shift from church’s acceptance of deterrence,” national catholic reporter november 10, 2017, https://www.ncronline.org/news/vatican/pope-condemns-possession-nuclearweapons-shift-churchs-acceptance-deterrence. 52. schlabach, “just war? enough already.” 53. schlabach, “letters: more just war: schlabach replies,” commonweal september 20, 2017, https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/letters-more-just-war. 54. further explanation from schlabach in email exchange with the author. 55. mccarthy, “gospels draw us further” 86–87. in the early 1900s, about 10% of deaths in war were civilians but that climbed steadily to about 87% in wars since 2000; see center for systemic peace, “global conflicts trends,” 2017, especially figure 8, http://systemicpeace.org/conflicttrends.html. these numbers don’t even include the enormous numbers of indirect deaths of civilians, at a rate of about 3–15x more than direct deaths, due to the lack of clean water, sewage, electricity, and medical supplies. see todd whitmore, “peacebuilding and its challenging partners,” in peacebuilding: catholic theology, ethics, and praxis, eds. scott appleby, robert j. schreiter, and gerard powers (maryknoll, ny: orbis, 2010), 163–167; geneva declaration, “global burden of armed violence,” 2008, http://www.genevadeclaration.org/fileadmin/docs/global-burden-ofarmed-violence-full-report.pdf. see also robert j. delahunty and john yoo, “from just 135 mccarthy     war to false peace,” chicago journal of international law 13.1 (2012): 1–45. consistent abuse can be traced from cicero and the roman empire (7–10), through medieval times with the popes and crusades (12–13), the years of conquest in the “new world” (14–15), and the modern period with the “sovereign state” logic of war (16–17). even hugo grotius acknowledged that “just war theory contributes to the likelihood and ferocity of war” (19). for other resources to look at this issue during the twentieth century, see johan verstraeten, “de bellum iustum traditie en het vredesdenken 1914–1964,” in van rechtvaardige oorlog naar rechtvaardige vrede. katholieken tussen militarisme en pacifisme in historisch-theologish perspectief, eds. roger burggraeve, et al. (leuven: universitaire pers, 1993): 89–112. 56. mccarthy, “gospels draw us further.” 57. mccarthy, “gospels draw us further” 86, 88. 58. scheid, “christian peace ethics” 275, 278. 59. helen dexter, “pacifism and the problem of protecting others,” international politics 56.3 (december 2017): 243–258. 60. scheid, “christian peace ethics” 273–274, referring to winright. 61. cardinal peter turkson said, “it [just war theory] can undermine efforts to develop alternative capacities and tools for conflict to be overcome and transformed.” quoted in christopher lamb, “pope urged to abolish creed of ‘just war,’” sunday times april 24, 2016, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/pope-urged-to-abolish-creed-of-a-just-war-spm5jzjg8. 62. scheid, “christian peace ethics” 273, referring to winright’s argument. 63. examples can be found in my earlier essay “gospels draw us further” 88, as well as on the catholic nonviolence initiative website on the faq page. another prominent example is fr. francisco de roux, s.j., of colombia, who explained, “in my catholic country, our nuns and priests joined the guerrillas because of the just war paradigm […]. the catholic paramilitaries pray to the virgin before slaughtering people because of the just war paradigm. this is awful. help us to stop this paradigm and build up a new one” (nonviolence and just peace conference, the vatican, april 11–13, 2016, https://nonviolencejustpeacedotnet.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/nonviolence-justpeacesession-3-transcript.pdf). catholic nonviolence: transforming military institutions 136   64. don lattin, “‘the vietnam years’: how the conflict ripped the nation’s religious fabric,” religion news service, sept. 8, 2017, https://religionnews.com/2017/09/08/thevietnam-years-how-the-conflict-ripped-the-nations-religious-fabric/. 65. more examples could be cited regarding afghanistan in 2001, iraq in 2003 (usccb raised questions without clearly refuting and organizing against), and libya in 2011. 66. cahill, “catholic tradition on peace, war, and just peace,” in a just peace ethic primer. referring to similar refinements of a just war framework, such as jus post bellum, she suggests that “even so, it might be better (or at least more consistent with the direction of recent papal thought) to understand such arguments, not as expanding ‘just war theory,’ but as applications of positive concepts of cst such as human dignity, the common good, and sustainable just peace” (cahill, “the future of (catholic) just war theory: marginal,” expositions, 12.1 (2018): 26–27, https://expositions.journals.villanova.edu/article/view/2318). 67. “advancing nonviolence and integral peace in the church and the world”; mccarthy, “a virtue-based just peace ethic.” for more on key concerns about just war framework, see mccarthy, “the gospels draw us further” and catholic nonviolence initiative, “key concerns about just war framework,” 2019, https://nonviolencejustpeacedotnet.files.wordpress.com/2019/09/ what-are-key-concernsabout-the-catholic-church-continuing-to-legitimate-the.pdf. 68. lisa sowle cahill, “catholic tradition on peace, war, and just peace,” in a just peace ethic primer. 69. leo guardado, “nonviolence: the witness of a church of mercy,” in this volume. microsoft word 5 brühwiler fall 2018.docx [expositions 12.2 (2018) 191–205] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 “we’ll manage”?—european public universities and the refugee crisis claudia franziska brühwiler university of saint gallen introduction: europe’s refugee crisis “[our] great universities simply cannot afford to remain islands of affluence, self-importance and horticultural beauty in seas of squalor, violence and despair.”1 thus declared ira harkavy, the founder of the netter center for community partnerships at the university of pennsylvania, and reaffirmed his belief that universities were responsible for more than providing excellent research and education. in his eyes, universities are required to take care of the communities within which they operate and they need to teach their students what it means to be responsible citizens. while “horticultural beauty” is seldom a feature setting public2 universities in german-speaking europe apart from their environs, they were and are in fact increasingly challenged to (re-)define their role in society and to acknowledge the necessity to take on more than an educator’s stance. these changing expectations became particularly apparent in the context of the most recent, still persistent crisis3 that europe—and germany more than most other countries—is facing. in recent years, western europe has been confronted with events that will lastingly affect the livelihoods of its citizens, yet no one can tell them what changes to expect or what consequences to bear. the eu, its member states, and other european countries had for a long time been trying to hold up the streams of migrants intent on reaching the continent via the mediterranean sea. in 2015, however, it became evident to citizens and governments alike that the status quo could not be upheld and that a beloved fiction had to be abandoned: the dublin ii agreements stipulate that refugees and migrants have to apply for asylum in the country through which they first enter the eu. as a consequence, countries like germany should, in theory, not have to process applications by migrants taking the mediterranean route. however, with italy and greece being overburdened by the number of applicants, it has for a long time been tolerated that authorities let migrants pass through italy and submit their application in another member state. once the main refugee and migrant route shifted to the balkans and numbers kept rising, the breach of the dublin agreements had disastrous consequences for member countries like germany and austria:4 in 2015, germany european public universities and the refugee crisis 192 became the destination of 1.1 million asylum seekers, more than a third of them from syria.5 the numbers remain high, with 745,545 asylum applications filed in 2016, and nearly a 100,000 submitted within the first five months of 2017.6 in switzerland, which is not a member state of the eu yet party to both the schengen and dublin agreements, numbers pale in comparison, as 2016 saw 27,207 people seek asylum.7 at the same time, switzerland is one of the primary recipients of asylum seekers in relation to its own population.8 with a view to these migrants and refugees, experts expected a considerable number to be highly qualified, having already graduated from university or been forced to abandon their studies. with a better integration of these new arrivals in mind, the role of the universities suddenly became topical: should they not contribute to overcoming the challenge of integration by welcoming qualified refugees as their students? were they not morally obliged to open their doors to those in pursuit of knowledge? many students, administrators, and professors agreed and reacted to the influx of refugees with a remarkable level of dedication. in what follows, the activities they engaged in will be briefly outlined. more importantly, though, the article will inquire whether it was indeed the responsibility of universities to react to such circumstances—and, if this was the case, where limits should be drawn to a university’s activism. refugees welcome?—the reaction of german and swiss public universities in 1956, thousands of hungarians fled their home-country in reaction to the soviet union’s violent suppression of the popular uprising. among them were students, many actively resisting the socialist regime, who had to leave their academic life behind. however, western europe received them and the other hungarian refugees with great solidarity. at many a german and swiss university, including the university of st. gallen, plaques commemorate the generosity with which refugee students were met. some university administrators went beyond simply admitting refugee students to their student body; for instance, the university of st. gallen’s vice president travelled to vienna in person to pick up 200 refugee students.9 past examples of such charity and dedication would often be referenced during the height of the ongoing refugee crisis during which universities were trying to write a new history of campus charity. german universities were the first to respond to the increasing numbers of refugees during the summer of 2015 and launched different initiatives to support prospective students. as a survey by the german rectors’ conference (hochschulrektorenkonferenz, hrk) showed, of its 268 member 193 brühwiler institutions10 sixty responded that they had either already set up services for refugee students or that they were in the course of defining such services. today, most major german universities and smaller institutions of higher education have established procedures that define how to deal with refugee students interested in continuing their education. these commonly include, as the table below shows, courses tailored to the needs of these prospective students that shall enable them to follow academic courses. in addition, universities admitted refugee students to the regular courses as auditors, i.e., refugee students may attend regular lectures and seminars, but they cannot earn any credit points towards a degree. in the case of the german university of siegen, help went beyond the mere integration of refugees into the student body, by offering parts of its campus for a different purpose than originally intended: the university’s gymnasium served as a shelter for one year, a temporary home for up to 450 people.11 for the university’s president, professor holger burckhardt, it was beyond any doubt that the university had to step in when the municipality needed its support: “it is our duty as a university to help. that’s the most important thing. we are taking on this responsibility, it is our desire to make a culture of welcome—a willkommenskultur—our own.”12 in switzerland, no university went as far as siegen, but the majority of the country’s twelve public universities opened their doors to refugee students. in comparison to germany, they launched their initiatives with some delay, probably because the situation in switzerland was less dramatic and therefore did not trigger the same sense of urgency. moreover, cautiousness defines swiss politics and public relations in general which, combined with a strong belief in the principle of subsidiarity, may slow down initiatives by public institutions and instead encourage civil society to step in. consequently, the first university to admit refugee students as auditors, the university of basel, primarily did so in response to a student-driven project. students rather than administrators take care of the applications and make sure that the prospective auditors receive guidance in the choice of courses.13 in other cases, it was a mixture of individual initiatives and an inter-institutional consensus that led to action: swissuniversities, the swiss counterpart to germany’s hrk, reached out to its member institutions, informing them that the unhcr was urging universities to grant refugees easier access and admonishing them to step up to this challenge.14 at my own alma mater, the university of st. gallen, this coincided with an individual senior professor suggesting to our president that we address the refugee situation as an institution and academic community. as a result, a taskforce migration was founded in fall 2015 and would european public universities and the refugee crisis 194 eventually be coordinated by myself. we started exploring ways and means to help the region in its efforts to integrate refugees. among other services, we established a “discovery semester,” i.e., the possibility for refugee students to attend university courses during one term. such discovery semesters seem to have become a staple of university tool kits in catering towards refugee students, as we see such programs both in germany and switzerland. select universities enrollment services for refugees germany university of cologne* 52,132 courses in mathematics and academic german for refugees interested in pursuing university studies; various teaching initiatives for children and adolescents; integration of refugee scholars ludwig-maximilian university of munich 51,052 introductory program that allows refugees to earn ects points; german courses; various initiatives including a refugee law clinic technical university of berlin 34,428 language courses for refugees; regular students as mentors university of göttingen 30,600 language course program “integra” that should enable refugees to commence studies; auditor status for refugees; task force “geflüchtete” (refugees) dedicated to questions of integration; refugee law clinic university of siegen 19,506 pre-college for refugees; peer-mentoring program (refugees helping refugees); 200,000 euros to sponsor student projects aiding refugees leuphana university of lüneburg 9,239 open lecture hall (auditing program); bridging courses; counselling services. 195 brühwiler switzerland university of zurich** 26,356 “discovery semester,” i.e., free access to lectures as auditors for up to forty refugees with previous university experience; regular students as mentors; access to language lab university of geneva 16,484 project “horizon académique” (“academic horizon”) offers discovery years for up to twenty refugees; students as mentors; courses in academic french language skills university of basel 12,852 project “offener hörsaal” (“open auditorium”) launched by students to offer refugees a discovery semester; students as mentors university of st. gallen 8,232 “discovery semester” for unlimited number of refugees; faculty member as mentor; taskforce migration (november 2015–september 2017) as coordinator for research and philanthropic projects * germany’s largest public university; ** switzerland’s largest public university table: an overview of select public universities who opened their doors to refugee students source: the information about the activities has been retrieved from the respective universities’ websites. institutions were selected based on their size and the media attention they received for their efforts. both in switzerland and germany, initiatives for refugee students were met, for the most part, with appreciation and received considerable media attention. with attention, however, comes scrutiny, and some problematic aspects were soon brought forth. as many universities have come to recognize themselves, one major issue lies in the lack of knowledge regarding the educational background of asylum seekers.15 educational backgrounds are usually not recorded during the initial asylum application process, and we have no reliable figures as to what number of refugees european public universities and the refugee crisis 196 would indeed qualify as refugee students. for the german state of bavaria, for instance, between seventeen and thirty percent of refugees older than twenty years claim to have an academic degree16—this seemingly high percentage is, however, not backed by official numbers and it is not reflected in the enrollment in programs for refugee students. establishing the number of potential future students is further complicated by the differences in the respective education systems, particularly when we are looking at germany and switzerland: both countries are known for their so-called dual professional education systems, i.e., well-established apprenticeships combined with formal education that lead to nationally recognized diplomas. in switzerland, only twenty percent of the population obtain an advanced high school diploma (matura), as other, more popular professional avenues lead to successful careers.17 this is further complicated by the existence of so-called university of applied sciences and other institutions of higher education that are not classic universities. consequently, some refugees keen on entering university in their new country would have to turn to other institutions of higher education—and might be frustrated at the prospect, as they regard such avenues as less prestigious. frustration is also the sentiment shared by those who may have finished a discovery semester, but reach a dead-end: as several german universities acknowledge (and as i have come to realize as well for our own efforts), the achilles’ heel of their programs lies at the transition to regular studies.18 on the one hand, some students might realize that either their academic background or their language skills render it impossible for them to further pursue their studies. on the other hand, funding is a key issue for these hopeful students: scholarships and loans are often unattainable, and additional mentoring would require the kind of financial commitment universities cannot agree to, in many cases.19 as a matter of course, such obstacles led to criticism by left-wing student groups who feel that their refugee peers are not given equal opportunities.20 a group of innovative students in germany has therefore developed a new solution to these issues by founding their own university: kiron university offers long-distance courses, moocs, and online seminars designed by partner universities to which participants can eventually transfer, if they pass their online coursework. criticism stems, however, not only from the political left, but also from the other end of the political spectrum. browsing through comments to online reports on swiss university programs for refugees, one stumbles across questions regarding the usefulness and necessity of such efforts. an argument i frequently came across included the fact that only a minority of swiss citizens ever 197 brühwiler attended university and little was done to encourage people with professional diplomas to move on to university. while one could be tempted to dismiss such considerations as potentially xenophobic and an expression of status envy, ignoring them would come at its own risk. after all, public universities draw on one main funding source: taxpayers. blatantly disregarding their concerns would (further) alienate them from the institutions that anyway have to fight a reputation of being removed from and uninterested in the public’s general concerns and fears. welcoming refugees and the mission of a public university: a contradiction? student organizations, ngos assisting refugees and migrants in their efforts to adapt to their new circumstances, individual professors and administrators as well as those in political circles claim that universities are not doing enough to help refugees. in this debate, one question remains unasked: why should universities do more? what requires public universities to become active, to basically act as concerned citizens, and to assist refugees? some will probably quash this question as unwarranted if not cynical and as an expression of a conservative-nationalist mind-set, arguing that it was a mere question of humanity and a moral obligation to help. however, our states and societies have already designated public institutions that are expertly equipped to deal with refugees and questions of integration, which have the experience and expertise most universities as institutions simply lack. why, then, the call for action? one source to turn to for an answer is the law: on the one hand, article 26 of the 1948 universal declaration of human rights stipulates every individual’s right to education which, combined with the 1951 convention relating to the status of refugees, ensures this right to refugees as well. however, this right is commonly interpreted not to go beyond primary education and does not encompass higher education. on the other hand, public universities are subject to statutes, either on the state or federal level, which stipulate the purpose and duties of universities. in the case of my own university, article 7 of the statute defines teaching and research as its primary purpose (§1) which it pursues autonomously (art. 8 §1). the closest the statute comes to defining a responsibility for dealing with wider social issues is in the context of education and academic culture: article 7 §2 requires the university to promote “a personal and social sense of responsibility among its members” and to prepare students to act “according to ethical principles.”21 this is mirrored in international efforts such as the 2009 unesco world conference on higher education in which the participating countries—among them the united states, germany, and european public universities and the refugee crisis 198 switzerland—agreed that the “principal objective of higher education institutions should not simply be to educate the individual but also to provide future generations with the skills and knowledge necessary to address global challenges such as poverty, conflict, and climate change.”22 in sum, the university does not have a legal obligation to engage in social issues beyond being a responsible educator and employer. this does not, however, preclude the university’s right and, potentially, moral obligation to go beyond that. assuming such a moral obligation, though, depends on a certain understanding of a university’s general purpose. said understanding has evolved in the past decades and while some shared, if vague ideas can be identified, cultural differences persist, particularly if we compare the germanswiss and the u.s. perspective. on both sides of the atlantic, universities have moved away from their original set-up as a shielded, singular community of masters and students—an institutional setting that never applied to most american universities and colleges anyway. while the development of european universities depended on the relationship with the state, their american counterparts were early on shaped by various forces, private and public, that came along with different conceptual ideas and visions.23 in germany, the most impactful vision of higher education originated in prussia, with wilhelm von humboldt’s (1767–1835) founding of the university of berlin which would later be named in his honor. as a classic liberal, he defined the university as a space that should be free from state interference and grant liberty and autonomy from interference to those teaching, researching, and learning in its halls. although the educational goal still was the weltbürger, the enlightened citizen of the world, humboldt would deny any institutional responsibility beyond that. this perception is reflected in calls for institutional neutrality by the university. today, breaches with this humboldtian tradition are apparent, both in germany and switzerland. apart from never-ending discussions on whether or not the current academic programs or publication cultures reflect humboldtian ideas, we can see this in the institutionalization of sustainability reporting and other measures that can be likened to a move towards “university social responsibility”24 as the academic counterpart of “corporate social responsibility.” a group of public and private german as well as austrian universities have underlined such a commitment by establishing a network dedicated to, as its name says, “education by responsibility” (hochschulnetzwerk bildung durch verantwortung). the network’s member 199 brühwiler universities claim that higher education influences progress in societies and that they were thus obliged to pass more than skills and knowledge unto the next generations.25 in the united states, the idea that universities cater to more than one stakeholder and are anything but isolated islands of learning seems to have reached the mainstream earlier than in germany and europe. in his seminal treatise the uses of the university (1963), clark kerr—first chancellor of the university of california, berkeley, and former president of ucla—coined the term of the “multiversity” which encompasses “a whole series of communities and activities held together by a common name, a common governing board, and related purposes.”26 among these purposes and communities ranges the relationship with society and the state at large, and thus the question of the university’s social responsibility. harold t. shapiro describes the latter as a dual role, with the university being “society’s servant and society’s critic.”27 specifically, he believes that universities needed to “raise questions that society does not want to ask and generate new ideas that help invent the future, at times even ‘pushing’ society toward it.”28 others go further and promote, like ira harkavy, closer ties between universities and local communities, for instance by letting their students establish a sense of responsibility for the latter through “service learning” and other forms of coursework that forces them to leave the idyllic confines of their campuses. arguably the most dedicated form of social commitment and expression of political views is the call and establishment of sanctuary campuses, i.e., of campuses that offer a safe haven to undocumented students, either by not cooperating with immigration authorities, symbolically supporting these students, or by offering them physical sanctuary.29 good citizen, society’s critic, or a civilly disobedient institution: ideas vary of what the sociopolitical role of a university should amount to. one can, however, roughly distinguish two approaches: on the one hand, the university is considered an intellectual habitat that should allow and empower its members to act responsibly and take on an active role in society, if they so wish; on the other hand, the university is seen as responsible to act and take a stance as an institution. while the latter approach may be viable for private universities or colleges that have committed themselves to a certain worldview and thus may expect or even require faculty and students to commit to the same values (or at least tolerate the consequences of such a strong institutional identity), public universities cannot and should not be able to do the same. as intended by humboldt, they should strive to remain a habitat for a diversity of opinions and approaches, and while they should require adherence to basic liberal principles that define liberal-democratic european public universities and the refugee crisis 200 societies anyway, they cannot and must not expect campus communities to stand as one. universities are not, as we all experience every now and then, democracies. they usually lack forums of deliberation that include all stakeholders. they thus can not articulate the political views of their members, nor should they try to. the university as an institution has to respect the triad of original duties, namely research, education, and public service, as stipulated by their fundamental statutes. that does not preclude, however, that universities can be “society’s critics” or offer services to a designated group of people: providing information on how to get access to higher education and encouraging such steps should generally be considered as part of any public university’s public service, irrespective of the status of those approaching its administrators. so, while we may not expect universities to replace social workers, we must hold them accountable if they foster an environment in which minority students feel unsafe or in which they feel treated unfairly or even discriminated against. the role of a critic, though, should be reserved not to the university as an institution, but to its members: universities have to foster the kind of diversity—ideological and otherwise—among its scholars and other members that society can rely on more than one mirror. particularly in a country such as switzerland, renowned for its direct democracy, universities should cultivate a climate in which debates are possible, in which every member of the academic community can articulate their opinion and agree to respectfully disagree. as in every liberal democracy, there are limits to the freedom of speech when it is abused, i.e., by instigating violence or rewriting historic facts. however, the university should only censor its members in clear cases of such abuse. a unified ideological front, an exercise of groupthink and suppression of dissenting opinions, however commendable the cause may be, is neither in the interest of the public as the university’s owner nor in that of the university itself. conclusion helping others feels good. at the same time, it can instill a sense of righteousness and moral superiority in the good samaritan. looking at the refugee crisis in 2015, acting german chancellor angela merkel expressed optimistically that the country would be able to handle the situation: “wir schaffen das”—“we’ll manage.” the same attitude seems to have pervaded many universities when they decided that they needed to become yet another actor in an intricate web of 201 brühwiler federal and state-level agencies, ngos, and political parties, all of whom had decades of experience in the integration of asylum seekers. while the goals and motives were commendable, some universities may have expected too much of themselves in the services they set up and ignored the context within which they became active. opening lecture halls and keeping admission procedures transparent, un-bureaucratic, and only as demanding as necessary, should be a policy upheld by every public university, irrespective of the group of students that are requesting support. universities should refrain from engaging in the refugee question beyond the triad of original university responsibilities—as institutions, that is. as institutions of higher education, they have to guarantee the freedom of research and learning of their members, including the freedom to differ from what seems to be the dominant attitude towards the situation of refugee students. if a university becomes politically or socially active as an institution, it ignores that fundamental freedom of its members and risks to create an environment that will weaken its members’ ability to uphold one of their most important duties: to be observant critics of society. as such, they may take it upon themselves to enter the kind of research projects and initiate the debates we need to enable our societies to cope with challenging situations. notes 1. qtd. in rice 30. i would like thank professors carol mcnamara, christoph frei, and lee trepanier for their feedback to earlier drafts of this paper. the views expressed in it are my own. 2. in german-speaking europe, most universities are public. for this reason, this article will simply speak of “universities” whenever it refers to public universities. 3. the term “crisis” has been heavily criticized in the context at hand, particularly in comparison to the number of refugees who fled to turkey, lebanon, and other states in the syrian neighborhood. what constitutes a crisis is, after all, a matter of perspective and a social construct. i am still using the term given the shared feeling of many citizens, media outlets, and governments that the wave of migrants reaching europe in 2015 was unprecedented in terms of numbers and the sense of urgency it instilled in the countries that it reached. european public universities and the refugee crisis 202 4. münkler 6. 5. bundeszentrale für politische bildung. 6. ibid. 7. staatssekretariat für migration 3. 8. reimann. 9. schwabach. 10. the hrk includes different types of institutions of higher education, including, for example, so-called schools of education (pädagogische hochschulen), universities of applied sciences (fachhochschulen), and classic universities. its members are listed on the webpage, though only in german: https://www.hrk.de/mitglieder/mitgliedshochschulen/. 11. schopper. 12. universität siegen. my translation. original wording: “es ist unsere aufgabe als universität, zu helfen. das ist das wichtigste überhaupt. diese gesellschaftliche verantwortung übernehmen wir, diese willkommenskultur möchten wir leben.” 13. dawudi. 14. letter by swissuniversities from september 2015; on file with the author. 15. donzé 12. 16. pointner. 17. bundesamt für statistik. 18. kirst 5. 19. bühlmann. 20. bühlmann. 203 brühwiler 21. my translation. there is no official english translation of the statute. original wording in the statute: “art. 7: grundsatz. abs. (1) die universität lehrt und forscht in wirtschafts-, rechts-, sozial-, kulturund politikwissenschaften. abs. (2) sie fördert das persönliche und gesellschaftliche verantwortungsbewusstsein der universitätsangehörigen und bereitet die studierenden darauf vor, in beruf und öffentlichkeit nach wissenschaftlichen methoden und erkenntnissen sowie nach ethischen grundsätzen zu handeln. (…) art. 8: hochschulautonomie und wissenschaftsfreiheit. abs. (1) die universität erfüllt ihre aufgaben im rahmen der gesetzlich gewährleisteten autonomie und wahrt die freiheit der wissenschaftlichen lehre und forschung. (…)” 22. unesco 19. 23. see trepanier for a short summary of the university’s evolution. 24. see vasilescu et al. 4177–4182, on the term and its implications. 25. hochschulnetzwerk bildung durch verantwortung 6. 26. kerr 1. 27. shapiro 15. 28. ibid., 4–5. 29. délano alonso 55. works cited bühlmann, manuel. “salam, der schnupperstudent.” zürichsee-zeitung march 22 2017. http://www.zsz.newsnetz.ch/ueberregional/salam-der-schnupperstudent/story/10796531. bundesamt für statistik. “maturitätsquote.” april 27, 2017. https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/de/ home/statistiken/bildung-wissenschaft/bildungsindikatoren/bildungssystem-schweiz/ themen/abschluesse/maturitaetsquote.html. european public universities and the refugee crisis 204 bundeszentrale für politische bildung. “zahlen zu asyl in deutschland.” july 13, 2017. https://www.bpb.de/politik/innenpolitik/flucht/218788/zahlen-zu-asyl-in-deutschland. dawudi, khaleda. “flüchtlinge an der universität basel: ‘offener hörsaal’, offene zukunft.” neue zürcher zeitung online march 15, 2016. https://www.nzz.ch/karriere/studium/ fluechtlinge-an-der-universitaet-basel-offener-hoersaal-offene-zukunft-ld.135671. délano alonso, alexandra. “sanctuary campus: resistance and protection within and beyond the university.” the avery review 21 (2017), 53–64. http://averyreview.com/ issues/21/sanctuary-campus. donzé, rené. “studieren statt rüebli sortieren.” nzz am sonntag december 13, 2015: 12. hochschulnetzwerk bildung durch verantwortung. memorandum: gesellschaftliche verantwortung an den hochschulen november 22, 2013. http://www.bildung-durchverantwortung.de/documents/memorandum-des-hochschulnetzwerks.pdf. kerr, clark. the uses of the university. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1963. kirst, virginia. “flüchtlings-universität besteht reifeprüfung.” bilanz april 28, 2017: 5. münkler, herfried. “die mitte und die flüchtlingskrise: über humanität, geopolitik und innenpolitische folgen der aufnahmeentscheidung.” aus politik und zeitgeschichte 66.14/15 (2016): 3–8. pointner, nico.“so helfen deutsche unis den flüchtlingen.” welt online october 6, 2015. https://www.welt.de/regionales/bayern/article147254823/so-helfen-deutsche-unis-denfluechtlingen.html. reimann, anna. “wohin die flüchtlinge wollen—und wer sie nimmt.” spiegel online april 28, 2015. http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/europa-wie-sich-die-fluechtlingeverteilen-a–1030879.html. rice, r. eugene. “ernest boyer’s ‘scholarship of engagement’ in retrospect.” journal of higher education outreach and engagement 20.1 (2016): 29–33. 205 brühwiler schopper, boris. “universität siegen bringt 150 flüchtlinge in turnhalle unter.” der westen july 16, 2015. https://www.derwesten.de/staedte/nachrichten-aus-siegen-kreuztalnetphen-hilchenbach-und-freudenberg/universitaet-siegen-bringt–150-fluechtlinge-inturnhalle-unter-id10889379.html. schwabach, thomas. “blick zurück: die ungarnhilfe 1956.” hsg focus 1 (2016). http://magazin.hsgfocus.ch/hsg-focus–1–2016/artikel/blick-zurueck-die-ungarnhilfe– 1956–9381. shapiro, harold t. a larger sense of purpose: higher education and society. princeton: princeton university press, 2005. staatssekretariat für migration. “asylstatistik 2016.” 2017. https://www.sem.admin.ch/dam/ data/sem/publiservice/statistik/asylstatistik/2016/stat-jahr–2016-kommentar-d.pdf. trepanier, lee. “from the multiversity cave: three reforms.” the front porch republic august 10, 2015. http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2015/08/from-the-multiversitythree-reformations/. unesco. world conference on higher education: final report. paris, unesco headquarters, 2009. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0018/001892/189242e.pdf. universität siegen. “flüchtlinge an der universität siegen.” homepage. n.d. https://www.uni-siegen.de/fluechtlinge/?sx=3. vasilescu, ruxandra, cristina barna, manuela epure, and claudia baicu. “developing university social responsibility: a model for the challenges of the new civil society.” procedia social and behavioral sciences 2 (2010): 4177–4182. verband der schweizer studierendenschaften (vss)/union des étudiant-e-s de suisse (unes). positionspapier: hochschulzugang für studentische geflüchtete. prise de position: accès aux hautes écoles pour les réfugié-e-s étudiant-e-s. bern: vss/unes, 2017. https://www.vss-unes.ch/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/vss-positionspapierhochschulzugang-f%c3%bcr-studentische-gefl%c3%bcchtete.pdf. microsoft word 2 stern interview.docx [expositions 10.2 (2016) 22–36] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 interview: tiffany stern, university of oxford john-paul spiro villanova university at the time of this interview, tiffany stern was professor of early modern drama and beaverbrook and bouverie fellow in english at university college, oxford. she is now professor and chair of shakespeare and early modern literature at royal holloway, university of london. she is the author of several influential books on early modern theatrical practice: rehearsal from shakespeare to sheridan (2000), making shakespeare: from stage to page (2004), shakespeare in parts (co-authored with simon palfrey, 2007), and documents of performance in early modern england (2009). in addition, she has edited several editions of individual plays and is one of the general editors of the fourth series of the arden shakespeare. i had the chance to sit down with her in early july 2016 – a week after the brexit vote – in her office at university college. we discussed her life and work, editing and collaboration, shakespeare’s context and theatrical conditions, shakespeare studies at oxford and elsewhere, and current events. below is a transcript of that conversation. spiro: what brought you to the study of shakespeare? stern: when i was a child, i had an uncle who was a director. and he made his money directing a british soap opera called brookside, which is about a little close [a residential street] in liverpool. over the years the characters on the show all would fall in love with one another, out of love with one another, kill one another, commit suicide, get aids… and eventually they had done everything – there was no more that people who are in a close can do with one another – and the soap opera came to an end. but this uncle who was directing that soap opera, his real passion was shakespeare, and he had a shakespeare company. and so whenever he wasn’t directing the soap opera, he was taking his little no-money company around. it was called the original shakespeare company, and the idea was that they did shakespeare in “the original way.” of course, i have quotation-marks around all those words but at the time, i loved the company, i loved my uncle, i 23 spiro got to see tons of shakespeare, and i got to follow the company round. i fell in love with all the actors; i could help out backstage. and, also, this put me by way of thinking, “are they original? what is originality?” what would it be to know all these things? and i think all the questions that shape what i do arose out of that company that i had been following since i was nine or ten. so i owe a great, great deal to my uncle. i also think it means that i always loved shakespeare, and i loved shakespeare before i knew he was supposed to be difficult or arcane or old-fashioned, because i loved performance first, with all the vigor and excitement and energy of that. so that experience also shaped my thought. what became awkward for me was that eventually, over time, i discovered that my uncle’s original shakespeare company wasn’t as original as he thought! and this caused some tensions! [laughs] but i must say here, that though i had to disagree with him, i owe him everything. so that’s how i got into shakespeare. spiro: let’s talk about your work. you sometimes work collaboratively. you and simon palfrey on shakespeare in parts, and you edited shakespeare’s theatres and the effects of performance with farah karim-cooper. and, as we know, in shakespeare’s times, playwrights often worked collaboratively and the actors were very involved. how do you find collaborative scholarship? what is your process? stern: the process is different, depending on who you are collaborating with. you are individual, so when you’re collaborating, you are two individuals putting your individualities together. so, with simon, our collaboration was a difficult one. i think he would agree with me on that. possibly why the book we wrote has tension and urgency and energy is because it’s the product of the fact that we weren’t fully agreeing. we were rigorously reading one another’s bits and rewriting on top of them. we each did our own bits and wrote on top of the other’s, so everything was very peerreviewed. one of the things i hadn’t expected in writing with simon is when we first exchanged passages, i sent a very, very vague, rough version of what i thought was the introduction. and he sent me something and i started reading it, and i was kind of, “oh, he’s also written the introduction. i’ve written the introduction and he’s written the introduction. that’s awkward. we should have said which bits we’d write.” and anyway as i’m reading his bit, i started to think, “oh no, this is really more like chapter one … and chapter two, and chapter six, and the conclusion.’ i said, “i don’t know how to read this. what is it?” i rang simon and asked, “i’ve sent you the introduction. what interview: tiffany stern 24 have you sent me?” and he said, “the book.” and i realized, “oh my! we don’t work the same way at all! because i work sequentially and he writes a little typed bit and he then generates out of it, and expands it.” so we had to work out how to collaborate together. our thoughts are radically different. we had a lot of disagreements. the book is maybe overlong because neither of us would give way on certain things. but as i said, i think what’s good about the book is the urgency that the tension and the disagreement, as well as the agreement, gave us. i think other interesting things i’ve learned from that process of collaborating is, at one point i hoped that… simon has a very vivid, very passionate style. i’m a careful writer. and i thought, “maybe i’ll get some of simon’s tremendousness into me.” but, of course you don’t, because you write the way you write. so i never got that. i also thought, “maybe some version of my careful logic would go into simon.” no. that’s not how we are. but what i did get, which has made think a lot about collaboration, is that everyone has verbal tics. simon had some verbal tics. i’ve got them, i got those: because you’re inside someone else’s sentences, someone’s language structure itself, it becomes your own. that has made me think quite a lot about some of the many problems i find with stylometric analyses. one is that you don’t come out of collaboration unscathed. as i said, i now have some of simon’s verbal tics, and naturally it goes the other way [i.e., he has some of mine]. often you can completely tell which of us generated a sentence because of the content. but if it’s just a bland sentence, if you simply analyzed it for hallmarks, the hallmarks of someone’s style, and you went, “okay, this has all the hallmarks of simon’s style”? maybe i wrote it! but that’s a very particular point of collaboration. i have co-edited a book with farah karim-cooper, and that was a very different process because we think in much more similar ways. so we weren’t trying to persuade the other – and it doesn’t have the persuasive edge of the book with simon. in a way, farah and i were just saving one another time. one of us would have more skills at one thing than another, but there wasn’t the tension. and maybe in that way we didn’t need one another in the way that simon and i did: neither he nor i could separately have written the book that we wrote. it is the odd creature that is “us.” as i said, we’re not very similar. [laughs] i remember saying to simon once, i said, “ours is, this is like a troubled marriage.” and he said, “yeah, it is like a troubled marriage, but look at the kid!” [laughs] 25 spiro spiro: another question about your process. you have edited a lot: the merry wives of windsor, the jovial crew, and at least one or two other plays if i remember correctly. stern: yes, the rivals, the recruiting officer, country wife. my editing keeps up my interest in seventeenth/eighteenth century. spiro: so, what’s your process as an editor? i know there can be very fraught questions about sources and variants and the list can go on. how do you navigate that as an editor? stern: i have a couple of answers to that, because i’m a general editor, general editor of new mermaids and arden [shakespeare] 4. those questions are really questions for a general editor, because when you’re an editor-editor, what you do is follow the guidelines: the guidelines say, “don’t do this, not in this edition.” so, as an editor, you don’t actually have much freedom of choice. you do what the guidelines set by the general editor say. so, while i’m really interested in those questions, it’s not so much a feature of the editing i’ve done, which i’ve done to-rule. but in the position i’m now in, as general editor of new mermaids, which i have been for maybe the last ten years or so, that’s an edition really for high school and undergraduates, so that has very particular questions that go with it. for editions of that kind, you’re not rigorously collating. you are trying to do what it is that a current eighteen-year-old, say, wants. that’s very different from what an eighteen-year-old wanted twenty years ago. and we are slowly rethinking: how much should we have companion websites? we’re just at the starting point of thinking about this. so one thing is, how to use the internet as part of the editorial process. and another thing, and again i’m thinking new mermaids, is that we’re trying to have it as a rule that anything you say about context, source, background, or whatever, should have a piece of close reading that illustrates how you can think about the text differently in the light of that additional piece of information. because a lot of editions just give information because they do, and it just sits there. particularly sources, and even things like theater history, where they say “so, in the eighteenth century, they did it with big wigs.” and you’re thinking, “but why does anyone want to know that? make me want to know it.” so, anyway, we’ve been having these thoughts at new mermaids, but i think where it’s really becoming crucial is that i’m one of the three general editors of arden shakespeare 4, the next iteration of arden, and arden is a very particular, a very important thing. as far as scholarship in the shakespeare community goes, it’s a benchmark, and we’ve got to rethink arden from scratch, interview: tiffany stern 26 because the next arden will have to be born digital. it may also be published in books but the thought has to be digital first. spiro: the arden shakespeare editions have just gotten larger and larger. stern: they’ve got larger and larger, and when you’re thinking of commissioning now for things that will come out… the first will come out in ten-plus years’ time, and you’re thinking of books coming out in twenty years’ time, thirty years’ time: we’re talking about a different world. now it’s really extraordinarily difficult, truly, to have the born-digital thought, and we’re still working it out. amongst the difficulties are these: in a book edition, you can have as many verbal notes as you can fit on a page, whilst still also having some text on a page. so that gives you a natural limit to the length of any note. if you’re online, you could have twenty-eight pages, “pages” as it were, of notes; you could name every fool player ever; you could have a picture of every noun: “and here it is in a museum; and here’s another version of it. and now here’s laurence olivier fighting with it. and now here’s the oed definition of it. and now here’s every eebo book that’s ever mentioned it. and here’s every jstor article that refers to it …” and now you’ve got an archive of the play. you haven’t got a readable text. so we’re still trying to work out how to tell editors – how to create the guidelines which tell editors – what not to supply when they can supply everything, when they’re no longer limited to the word or the length of the page. so, as i said, actually i’ve come up with more questions than answers, that’s because we’re still slowly working through what the answers to these things can be. but editing is going to be very different when you’re not thinking of text as printed word and note as printed word, and once you allow other things in: images, sounds, which are of course as much part of plays as the physical words… that really, deeply changes the thought. and, as i say, we’re slowly working through what that is, and the most difficult thing is not how to get hold of all this amazing information, but how to tell editors how not to get hold of too much amazing information. so editing, one of the major jobs of a future editor… i think editors of the past were trying to get as much as they could in books. editors of the future, the job will be cutting down all the information, giving just the one crucial thing that explains it all. spiro: culling, filtering. stern: yes, it’s going to be an entirely different job. 27 spiro spiro: at the moment there are quite a lot of people here at oxford who do very interesting work on shakespeare. in the recent past, it seemed like the groundbreaking work was being done, for example, at liverpool or berkeley, but now it looks like oxford has become the best place to go for the study of shakespeare. i’m curious: is there an “oxford school?” is there a way that you think of yourself as part of something? or is it just that you happen to have a lot of people here? stern: i should say that i have just resigned from oxford, so i’m moving to royal holloway: i will be part of the university of london, royal holloway. but to answer your question: truly, we happen to have a lot of people. it would be better if there were a different answer. but the actual structure is we all have our colleges, we teach in our colleges, we eat in our colleges, we socialize in our colleges, we have a college-based life – not a faculty-based life. so we joke that we oxford shakespeareans meet one another at the saa [shakespeare association of america]. some of us are independently friends, but we don’t share papers, we don’t give papers to one another, we don’t hang around in a room discussing the future of things. so it is a bit of a coincidence, but i have some thoughts. i don’t think there is an “oxford school of thought.” what i think might be more the case is that england, and oxford, has become “modish.” england was never such a “theory” place as america was. and one reason for that is we’re a small country, we’ve got a lot of rare books, and i think in some way theory filled a gap for very good scholars, who were in kansas, say, and they couldn’t read a rare book. and theory gave them a series of things they could do with a penguin classic. now, the internet has given rare books to everyone, roughly, with eebo and ecco and more manuscripts are getting out there, and that has changed the shape of scholarship generally. and i think in oxford and cambridge, we had always taught bibliography, paleography (in the master’s courses the basic skills are those) which had been outmoded elsewhere in the 80s and 90s, and people weren’t doing them. but oxford and cambridge had been teaching those things, and doing them for years, though they weren’t where the zeitgeist was. but the stuff we’re producing, which arises out of the way we were taught and the way we do teach, is currently the “in” thing. which makes oxford “in.” but i wonder if that isn’t just lucky, a little bit. so the sort of things we do, which are now being done in a sort of post-theory enlightened way, are where the field now is a bit. and i think it maybe helps that at oxford, too, some of the people we’re talking about, laurie maguire, emma smith, me … with more women, there’s maybe less interview: tiffany stern 28 antler-clashing. i mean, the men are still doing that, but with women there’s some more generosity, receptivity, and the flavor of scholarship is a little bit different. so maybe another advantage is that oxford has so many good women. but i will be very intrigued to hear what my colleagues say. spiro: building on that, the return to more “scholarly” work, the use of archival materials, there has been a return to studying the original dramatic conditions. just as you were saying about saying to your uncle, “that’s not the original way,” there is this strong attention to, “what was it like when the plays were very first performed, the words were very first heard? what role did the actors play, and the publishers, and the producers, and the audience?” what’s curious is that this is happening at the very same time that, performance-wise, to do what is called an “original” production is one choice among many others. now it’s standard in some theater companies to set the play in a kind of no-place, or in a particular historical period that is not related to the play – the old west, or feudal japan, or the present day. and there are more serious questions about diverse casting. this seems to be a disjunct between where the scholarship goes, which is so much towards “what was it like in 1597, in the original production? what did they know? how does it help us to know what they know?” that’s my question: how does it help us to think about what they knew, what they first heard, how it was, at those first performances? stern: let me just, before i answer that question, say, i think if you love bach – let’s say you love bach, and you love the b minor mass, and you want as many recordings of the b minor mass as possible. in at least one of them, you want original instruments, to know how it might actually have sounded: everything wooden, everything soft. and you’ll also want a bright, sharp performance, modern instruments, extremely modern abilities, an exciting contemporary conductor: you want both. and you want all the in-between ones as well. same with theater. so i think it’s incredibly important to think about the actual context for which the plays were written. you want to understand, what were the circumstances that made shakespeare write in the way he did? what were the things he was bearing in mind? that has to be one of the important questions. that can also help you teach it to a student now, a student who will go, “well, this seems alien.” and you go, “not if you understand, that what an actor would have been given is this.” so, (a), understanding then helps you understand shakespeare; (b), understanding then helps you understand now; but (c), understanding “then” doesn’t mean that “then” is better than “now,” and that that is how you should do everything. it’s more of a groundwork; it’s “i’m not 29 spiro sure you’re fully understanding shakespeare if you’re not understanding shakespeare’s context.” the context somehow brought shakespeare out, and he brought the context out. so i think context is really important. and you are also right in what you say that we have a lot of concept-led productions these days. ever since the rise of the director, in the victorian period onwards, once you have a director, a director wants to have a concept that shows off him or her, the director. the director’s job is not simply making the words work as best they can. it’s putting something onto them that shows that person, the director. so there is an issue with all concept-led productions that they set up a rivalry between shakespeare and themselves. a modern production is not a director just working to bring out shakespeare. it’s a director seeing how they can twist the shakespeare to be about [e.g.,] iraq. and i have a lot of time for that. it does bring out certain things. but also, there’s a bit of me that thinks, “what a shame it’s no one’s job just to ‘do’ a play. what a shame that that would seem old-fashioned and ‘museum theater,’ or giving up.” so i’m also sad about that. i also think, though, we do additionally have a particular interest in “then,” even in the modern theater. we built the globe in 1997. we’ve just built the sam wanamaker. in staunton, virginia, you’ve got the blackfriars theater. you’ve got lots of little companies who put on plays from “actors’ parts,” which is one of the things that i write about, and that simon writes about, actors’ parts. they do that, a little bit because they’re trying to recover something more about context that might make the plays perform a slightly different way. and, they’re also doing it to save money because they don’t have to pay for a director. still, there isn’t not an interest in original performance. there’s an original performance school, and there’s a director’s school, and i think as teachers as well as academics, we need to negotiate between the two. but, to return to why is it important, i find context very resonant. it helps me understand shakespeare. i also think it’s very teachable. if a student gets a sense of what early modern london was like, what a theater was like, what being an actor was like, now these things that seemed recondite and complicated and weird, now they have a logic for it. and once you have a logic for something, you can like it, and not be frightened by it. spiro: it seems to me that there is a somewhat separate conversation about relevance. “we’re setting coriolanus in iraq.” it’s a way of answering the relevance question. interview: tiffany stern 30 stern: but that’s patronizing to shakespeare. that suggests that he’s not relevant unless you add something that was never there to make it relevant! spiro: right, and it also frustrates what you’re talking about. it’s very useful for a student to try to think like somebody else, to go somewhere else and take on other ideas and assumptions. stern: which is what literature does, after all. spiro: another thing that your work in particular brings out is how much theater is a collaborative enterprise. how much what we think of as shakespeare’s writing is the product of him, not just working with his partners and theatrical collaborators, but also responding to the audience and the censors and the ideas in the air. and not to fall too deeply into questions of authorial intention, but what does this to do our conception of these plays being by shakespeare? there is this sense that the study of original theatrical conditions is taking shakespeare off a pedestal and makes him into some sort of antenna. stern: well, you’re not properly appreciating shakespeare if you have to put him on a phony pedestal and you feel threatened by actual information about how things were. [laughs] that does him no good service. i think, yes, there was an awful lot of collaboration in the theater of the time. that doesn’t stop him being the author of what he was author of. he was a very great author, but you can only understand both how great he was and also what his processes were by understanding how things were then. and that helps you see why he thought the way he did, why he organized his plays the way he did. and, it also helps you see that his process wasn’t uniquely other from the process of anyone else. i hate this “lone genius” thing because, as i say, i find it patronizing and disgraceful to the person who did what everyone else did better. [laughs] so i think, understand him, understand his contemporaries, and i sometimes feel very sorry for incredibly great writers like fletcher who’ve been rather forgotten because of shakespeare. our balance is an imbalance. we have imbalanced things. this is not to denigrate shakespeare in any way. he deserves all the attention we give him, but we have done so at the expense of his period and at the expense of other great writers. and that’s why i’m excited by the sort of work that bart [van es] is doing, which brings back the importance of other writers. shakespeare was highly influenced by other writers and he went on to influence other writers and that’s part of the amazing benefit for us as well, as academics, what 31 spiro we do. we collaborate and influence one another; we influence our students; they influence us. no one’s just alone in some ivory tower, unshaped by all the events happening round them, and the world in which they live. and how outrageous to say that that is the case with, of all people, shakespeare. spiro: what is it that shakespeare’s audience knew that is so important for us to know? i have been to productions where the program notes have to prepare the audience for, for example, the rhetoric games and theological questions that are dead to us. i have heard some directors say that all that stuff should be cut because it means nothing to the contemporary audience. what is it that we don’t know that we should know? stern: one thing to say is, the balance of knowledge was different then, between then and now. for one thing, here is shakespeare coining a lot of words. so there are a lot of his words that are familiar to us that would be unfamiliar to his audience. so we shouldn’t think they were finding shakespeare easier than we are finding shakespeare. there are lots of things that we find easy that they were finding difficult. but i think the difference there is that because years and years of teaching shakespeare has made current audiences think that you should go to shakespeare like you’re going to church, like it’s a liturgy. “you don’t understand it but it’s very important.” that is a very different attitude for an early modern audience going along and when they didn’t understand a word, they will have gone, “fantastic! a new word!” because language was expanding all the time. “let me get out my tablebook, let me note the new word down. i can’t wait to go home and use the new word! my neighbor just won’t know what i’m saying because i’ve used this fantastic new word!” so, i think they would have encountered some of the difficulties we do with understanding it, but i think for them, a new word would have been an exciting present, whereas for us, we’re inclined to say, “no, i give up now. i just didn’t understand that sentence.” so, i think there’s an attitude difference, that in some ways we’re having similar experiences but we’re feeling about them differently. and, as i say, one of the big problems here is the fact that shakespeare has come to be a sort of badge of something that’s nothing to do with shakespeare. you know, shakespeare was funny and bawdy and lyrical and gorgeous and irreverent. we’ve got a mental-deadpan shakespeare that’s just sort of, [deepens voice] “good.” and people go not to be entertained, not expecting a good interview: tiffany stern 32 time, but expecting and feeling, “i’ll be ennobled because i’ve seen a shakespeare play.” so, i’d love to get at that attitude and tear it apart. and that can happen sometimes with really good productions, where people are kind of, “you know, i actually did laugh!” or, “i actually felt moved!” yes, of course you felt moved, because it’s the story of a father making a terrible mistake and his youngest daughter dying, of course you’re moved! back to your question, there are all kinds of things they knew that we don’t know and vice-versa. they were very smelly and all sorts of things. [laughs] they were much nearer to their bodily functions in some ways than we are. they were much nearer to death than we are. most people will have seen death, laid out a loved, dead person. smelled death. they were much nearer to god than we are, a lot of them. their experience of life was… more war, they’re much nearer to illness. death haunted every single person. if you were a woman, how likely were you to die in childbirth? the second you’re pregnant, you’ve got a bomb inside yourself. it’s very likely you are going to die giving birth in incredible agony, or afterwards from some kind of blood poisoning. it’s so likely. that must have made impregnating your wife feel rather different, particularly if you loved her. you could die of toothache; you could die of flu. i think maybe every moment was more precious, was more lived. in the same way, a play had better be good, because you might be dead next week! who knows? you don’t want to have wasted those hours. so, i think maybe they felt life a bit differently. and this is different from, of course, more formal issues: yes, they taught rhetoric at school. wordplay would have been different. but actually, a lot of shakespeare’s word-play, a lot of it is puns. we still love puns. it’s just that his puns aren’t always our puns. so a pun between “sheep” and “ship” doesn’t work so well for us because we say them in different ways, and wouldn’t confuse these words. but, we still find puns hilarious. half our humor is still pun-based. so i think we should remember the differences but also remember the similarities between that audience and our audience. i think when you look at shakespeare, one of the things is, he’s very interested in the underdog: the black person, the jewish person, the bastard, the woman. he’s interested in all of those, and i think to him, they were a bit interchangeable. those things, the underdog, the other, they can be just as smart, as feisty, as witty, as rhetorically sophisticated, as deep, as an allegory. he has that interest. he is confronting the audience with some of its biases, and asking it to think through 33 spiro them. we still have a lot of those biases. not always about the same things, though sometimes… look how racist it turns out england is! we’ve got the same biases! spiro: people have been sharing on social media the passage from sir thomas more about refugees. stern: so much of shakespeare suddenly becomes… shakespeare is being invoked all the time as our country falls apart. “oh look, we’re stabbing each other in the back!” just the day before, when [michael] gove stabbed boris johnson in the back and the papers were going, “et tu, brute?” they can’t stop! cameron as an “over-reacher.” it is interesting, when something big happens politically and we want to reach out, we say “what’s the vocabulary, what’s the context for describing this? this is extraordinary, this is huge, this is epic, this is tragic! where do we look but the bard to explain this?” it’s been happening all through… it would be fascinating to go through the newspapers of the last week – we’re one week into the horrors of brexit – to go through the newspapers and find how often shakespeare has been invoked. spiro: on every side. stern: on every side, yes. as the labour party also falls apart, yes. spiro: it reminds me of 2008, when barack obama was first running for president, and he had to distance himself from his former pastor, rev. jeremiah wright. at first he tried to explain their relationship, but as wright became more embarrassing, obama had to sever ties with him. a friend of mine sent me an article about it with the subject-heading, “i know thee not, old man.” stern: yes! spiro: you had mentioned before to me that you think brexit is going to have serious implications for higher education, for the study of literature. stern: yes, huge. there are practical ones, there are intellectual ones. practical ones: for one thing, our economy is now terrible. spiro: this is my first experience in england with a favorable exchange-rate. interview: tiffany stern 34 stern: yes, you’re a lucky guy! so, in universities that are not oxford and cambridge, it’s going to be way more expensive for academics to travel to europe or the states, so they’re not going to be as present in conferences unless they’ve got private wealth. so, just, england will be a little more out of the game because it won’t have that kind of money. that’s a practical thing. another massive practical thing: universities here got a lot of money out of europe. a lot of grant money. so we won’t have that money, and we won’t have those european collaborations that were, i mean… talk about context: in europe, they’ve got a lot of early modern documents that we don’t have that will help us to understand ours, and ours can help them understand theirs. so all those collaborations you were hoping to have, looking at the spanish theatrical documents and so forth, those things aren’t going to happen. so, again, practical things. but, more, the flow of people back and forth between continental europe and here, with all their rich ideas, their own different contexts and backgrounds. you can’t travel into the past but you can travel into other places, and they get you into another way of thinking. there will be less of that. there will be fewer students, fewer academics from europe, maybe. perhaps you’re going to need visas to travel to these places. we’re only a week in. we know it’s absolutely terrible, really, really bad, for academia across the world. we can only start to think of how specifically bad it is in certain ways, but i think basically the “little england” atmosphere takes us back to shakespeare, of course. the “sceptered isle” idea of england in a global economy, and an intellectual economy as well as financial economy, is a terrible idea. all that is, supposedly, to put the “great” back into britain. but old great britain was a vicious, colonialist power. we should never want to be that again. we also don’t have that kind of money, the money we had when we were an empire. so the people who were voting for brexit were voting for some kind of notional britain that they’ve got off downton abbey or something. it never existed for everyone. it only ever existed for posh people, and it was repulsive when it was victorian and weird. this is just a rant now, but i think it’s really bad for international exchange on every level, financially, intellectually, because it is limiting things. and at a point when shakespeare studies… another reason, maybe, why oxford has become more prominent is because we are more visible in america. we’re at saa. we see all the americans, they see us, once a year. if that becomes less the case, then so does that level of exchange. and then whoever can’t go to those conferences can’t feel where the field now is. 35 spiro spiro: what trends in shakespeare and early modern studies do you find particularly promising or interesting? stern: i’m interested in the material culture trend. but again, i would be. it’s a different way of thinking about context. i’m very interested in “things,” books, material culture. another trend that is bound to happen and maybe is happening a bit is that for a long time … you can see where we now are is a reaction to the angry guy marxists before us. you can see how. everyone was angry with literature, and now we’re very practical, very sensible, scholarly about literature. i think there’s been a long time since we had some positive passion about literature. we haven’t done “appreciation” for a long time. i’m sure there will be a movement that’s kind of aesthetic, appreciative, but finds a way of doing that that’s intellectualized in some way. in a way i think our kind of scholarship, actually, where you find context and then you close-read the literature in the context, is a kind of close reading hidden away as “stuff.” but i think there’s bound to be a kind of new aesthetics, a new appreciation of some kind in the future. i feel like it’s time for that. we all actually like the literature and we shouldn’t be ashamed to say so. spiro: i remember in graduate school we used to confess that we actually loved it and we weren’t supposed to. stern: you weren’t supposed to. you were supposed to spot its tricks. “i see what the book is trying to do to me.” spiro: its “hidden agenda.” and you were saying that shakespeare is interested in the underdog. i remember hearing that he doesn’t take the underdog’s side enough. he’s a symptom of the way we look at the other. you see not necessarily sympathy but interest. stern: he’s interested in it. he is not a solver of problems. he is a displayer of problems. “here you are. then you can go off and think about it.” none of his plays solve. every single conversation you have with a student about a comedy is along the lines of “why is there something a bit bleak about the end of this comedy?” all the comic marriages are all kind of, [shrugging] “i don’t know! i’m not so sure!” they’re all think-pieces that he doesn’t solve, but he puts you in the way of thinking about these things: now you’ve got to have a position in the light of what you’ve seen. you’re going to have a discussion where you’re going to say, “should the friar [in measure for measure] have proposed to isabella?” now we must think about religion, we must think about interview: tiffany stern 36 ruling countries, we must think about rejecting sexuality and becoming nuns, we must think about love of your brother versus religion. it’s a think-piece. he doesn’t come up with any solutions. he just comes up with a load of problems for you to analyze. i think that’s one of the things he’s brilliant at. but anyone who reckons they’ve solved shakespeare – or that shakespeare is solving things – is being simplistic about shakespeare. microsoft word davis-final.docx [expositions 10.1 (2016) 52–79] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 juan luis vives as the “second quintilian”: transforming liberal arts learning into christian piety jeffry c. davis wheaton college (il) for centuries, christian teachers have looked to the ancient roman rhetorician quintilian (35–96 ce) for instructional guidance concerning the liberal arts, reading his institutio oratoria for its recognized wisdom. given its all-embracing system of formative instruction, emphasizing the creation of the “vir bonus dicendi peritus,”1 quintilian’s opus attracted the interest of christians committed to virtue, regardless of the incongruities between pagan and religious ideals; and from the fifth century until the renaissance, the educational views and methods of the institutio greatly influenced western thinking.2 as w. martin bloomer perceptively declares, “the treatise has an unrivaled importance for the legacy of educational thinking.”3 one of the most notable renaissance scholars to be inspired by this ancient proponent of liberal learning and pedagogy was juan luis vives (1492–1540), who became one of the leading humanists of northern europe. quintilian’s sway upon vives’s own thinking and writing proved to be so prominent and consequential that his contemporaries described him as “the second quintilian.”4 vives adapted many of the educational concepts and practices of his roman guide for a distinctly christian purpose, namely the cultivation of piety; and his innovative didactic appropriations, largely overlooked, warrant further consideration. quintilian’s influence on christian educators before vives before examining vives’s work, a brief survey of quintilian’s influence on other christian teachers prior to the sixteenth century is in order, cataloging some of the most notable figures shaped by him.5 the first christian scholar to follow clearly in the steps of quintilian, as evidenced by his writing, was saint jerome (347–420), who in his letter of catechetical instruction to laeta reveals the unmistakable methods of the roman rhetorician, converted for christian purposes.6 similarly impressed was the bishop of hippo, saint augustine (354–430), who “was himself a 53 davis teacher of rhetoric in a school following quintilian’s program.”7 professor james j. o’donnell, corroborating the scholarship of harald hagendahl, affirms that augustine read many latin authors from antiquity, including quintilian.8 additionally, in the early middle ages, the works of isidore of seville (570–636), cassiodorus (480–575), and alcuin (732–804) all exhibit indebtedness to quintilian. however, by the late middle ages, when the only known text of the institutio oratoria had become mutilated, few scholars made reference to the work. one such scholar was john of salisbury (1115–1180), who modeled his educational curriculum in the metalogicon according to the one described in the institutio.9 a little more than a century later, in the early renaissance, we find petrarch (1304–74) paying quintilian a great compliment in a letter, extolling the teacher of rhetoric with these words: “thou hast performed the office of the whetstone rather than that of the knife, and thou hast had greater success in building up the orator than in causing him to excel in the courts; thou wert a great man, i grant, but thy greatest merit lay in the ability to ground and to mold great men.”10 undoubtedly, many renaissance thinkers believed in the importance of quintilian’s educational aim—to equip citizens to actualize good (virtuous) lives via the artes liberales, especially through serious training directed by the trivium. indeed, quintilian’s ideas became born anew when, in 1416, a papal secretary named poggio bracciolini (1380–1459) and two others investigated a dank tower of the abbey church in st. gall, switzerland. “it was not the architectural features of the great medieval abbey that drew the visitors,” writes stephen greenblatt in the swerve: how the world became modern. “it was the library of which poggio and his friends had heard extravagant rumors. they were not disappointed […] he had located an astonishing cache of ancient books.”11 to his great surprise and delight, he made a rare find, as he recounts in his correspondence to two friends, leonardo bruni and niccolò niccoli: “in the middle of a well-stocked library, too large to catalogue at present, we discovered quintilian, safe as yet and sound, though covered with dust and filthy with neglect and age.”12 after painstakingly copying the entire twelve-volume manuscript of the institutio oratoria, a feat that took fifty-four days to complete,13 poggio then reproduced and distributed the work, to the great satisfaction of countless readers.14 the almost immediate result, especially with the eventual aid of the printing press, was that quintilian became celebrated for his educational insights and methods once again. vittorino da feltre (1378–1446) revered quintilian so much that he earned the nickname “quintilianus juan luis vives as the “second quintilian” 54 redivivus,” or “quintilian living again.”15 likewise, lorenzo valla (1407–1457) became such a strong advocate for quintilian that his first work, de comparatione ciceronis quintilianique, written by the time he was only twenty-three, asserted the importance of quintilian’s approach to the training of an orator over cicero’s.16 a mounting fervor for the institutio during the middle of the fifteenth century explains why it was one of the first rhetorical texts to be printed.17 thus, it is understandable that from the time erasmus was born (fifty years after poggio’s celebrated discovery) until the time of his death in 1536, nearly one hundred editions of the institutio oratoria were published.18 the significance of the complete version of the institutio oratoria, and the impact of quintilian on thinkers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, cannot be overstated, as george a. kennedy affirms: “his educational theories profoundly affected schools of the liberal arts, such as that of vittorino da feltre in mantua (founded in 1423), and his rhetorical theory is reflected in such otherwise diverse writers as lorenzo valla, rudolph agricola, erasmus, juan luis vives, peter ramus, and francisco patrizi.”19 considering the first quintilian relative to the second born at the approximate time when christopher columbus landed in the “new world,” vives, a native of valencia, came from the same region of spain as quintilian.20 nonetheless, several noteworthy yet overlooked comparisons between the two men go beyond their common place of origin. both obtained a solid primary education; this included the rigors of grammar instruction in the classical languages, of which they became experts.21 both left their home in their late teens to acquire advanced training in the liberal arts; quintilian went to rome, and vives went to paris. both were shaped by several years of mentoring from prominent scholars of their day; domitius afer became quintilian’s guide, and desiderius erasmus became vives’s. both taught rhetoric; quintilian at a publicly funded school in rome, and vives at louvain and oxford. both faced opposition from ideological foes; quintilian fought the delatores, and vives attacked the pseudodialecticos. both received patronage from powerful, albeit ruthless, leaders; domitian charged quintilian with the job of tutoring his two nephews, who were heirs to the throne, and henry viii (to whom vives dedicated his translation of augustine’s de civitate dei, at the behest of catherine of aragon) commissioned vives to direct the instruction of his daughter, princess mary. both teachers authored landmark educational tomes, which promoted a distinctly moral 55 davis approach to the goal of a student’s formation as a human being, employing writing as a central method of instruction; quintilian wrote the institutio oratoria, and vives the de disciplinis. and finally, both thinkers, although their work has had a definite and lasting influence upon western educational thought and practice, have been largely overlooked or forgotten. despite the similarities between the two men, vives’s ideas should not be perceived as a simple repetition of quintilian’s, just as it would be erroneous to consider quintilian’s views to be a mere rehashing of cicero’s. translator foster watson warns against this reading of vives for several reasons: if the term “second quintilian” were to be taken in the sense of reproducing the views of quintilian or of authors of antiquity solely, a sense in which it was certainly not meant by the sixteenth century, it would be an inadequate description of vives, and we should lose part of its complimentary import. for vives was to the europe of his time what quintilian had been in the first century a.d. to rome. he was the modern quintilian, prepared to incorporate what was best and permanent in humanity from the ancients, but to use the ancient writers as a starting place, and not as a goal, in education and in all other “arts” and branches of knowledge. he had passed over the bridge separating the mediaeval and modern ages, and had entered on the “way-making” side of the modern world. he was the quintilian of the renascence, in looking forward towards the conceptions of the golden age placed in the future, not in the past.22 sensitive to many of quintilian’s basic concerns about education, including questions regarding the ultimate aim of learning and considerations about the best methods to achieve that end, vives sought his own solutions, which in some cases extended or modified quintilian’s ideas and methods for the distinctly religious purpose of the formation of character: “a profound accord between pagan culture and christian piety.”23 like his ideational forebear quintilian, vives became renowned for his intellectual prowess as an explorer of diverse and expansive realms of knowledge, although with some controversy. after studying latin grammar and greek classics in his native valencia, he traveled to the university of paris in 1509, at that time considered “the academic center of the christian world.”24 once there, juan luis vives as the “second quintilian” 56 he threw himself into the study of scholastic philosophy at the collège de lisieux.25 yet, to his dismay, the confining nature of deductive logic, the common staple of university learning at the time, became increasingly frustrating to study and to practice. as vives bitingly explains in one of his earliest books, contra pseudodialecticos (1519), “who is not familiar with the current saying that in paris our youth are taught nothing save to rant and rave in displays of endless verbosity? other institutions have their useless and futile branches of learning […] only in paris does one encounter the most idiotic and frivolous froth to the exclusion of all else.”26 vives had little patience for the dialecticians’ limiting course of study.27 in the humanist-scholastic debate in the renaissance and reformation, erika rummel explains how vives became firmly convinced that serious harm was done to the soul by a theological curriculum that contaminated religion with sophistry.28 ultimately, vives was faced with a choice between medieval scholasticism, with its emphasis on a narrow definition of dialectic, or renaissance humanism, with its affirmation of grammar and rhetoric. as carlos g. noreña comments, “vives repudiated terministic logic because it represented a wasteful and misdirected form of human energy and encouraged the wrong emotional dispositions such as contentiousness, vanity, and lack of concern and interest for the challenges faced by individuals in their private and social life.”29 once vives rejected the life of a scholastic in favor of the life of a humanist, he became an important representative of the northern renaissance as a teacher and writer, winning the esteem and favor of several contemporaries, including sir thomas more and erasmus. corresponding with erasmus in 1519, more asks, after reading vives’s scathing diatribe against the dialecticians in contra pseudodialecticos, “who surpasses vives in number and quality of his studies? […] and who instructs with more clearness, with more pleasure, or with more success than vives?”30 to this, erasmus responds, “as to the ability of ludovicus vives, i rejoice that my estimate of him agrees with yours. he is one of the number of those who will overshadow the name of erasmus. there is no one to whom i am better inclined.”31 regarding this exuberant epistolary interaction, lisa jardine convincingly argues in erasmus, man of letters: the construction of charisma in print that there is a significant backstory not to be overlooked: “vives (like erasmus himself) had taken no formal university degree, and held no university post, so such an introduction is designed to promote vives’s reputation by accumulating printed testimonials from the best print authorities. in other words, it is calculated so as to build a pedigree in print citations as a substitute for diplomas and degrees.”32 this practice of promoting 57 davis a scholarly reputation, along with a particular line of humanist thinking, proved to be a skill at which erasmus had become quite adept, as jardine reveals, especially regarding his own life and accomplishments. she views the letter exchange between more and erasmus (soon thereafter published in 1520 as part of a widely circulated schoolbook, under erasmus’s direction), as a means to claim vives as a part of a select group of humanist scholars.33 consequently, vives clearly had much to gain from this association, especially insofar as concerned the promotion of his own writing: “specialist texts produced within that circle, associated with debates (like that surrounding humanist dialectic) with intellectual (and particularly pedagogic) repercussions throughout the educated world, can then be claimed as belonging to a ‘school’ with a (vague and distant) geographical, rather than institutional, affiliation, and a reality only in print—‘erasmian school at louvain.’”34 obviously, vives never supplanted erasmus as a thinker or writer, prolific as erasmus ultimately became within intellectual history35; yet he did surpass him as a teacher who possessed a keen awareness of the educational exigencies of his era, comparable in this regard to quintilian in his own epoch. the innovative pedagogic aim of the de disciplinis vives demonstrates his own innovative instructional approaches most adeptly in the de disciplinis. describing it as vives’s fullest expression of his “revolutionary ideas on education,” charles fantazzi underscores the fact that the work is dedicated to king john iii of portugal, with the intent of “purging the arts of impious doubts and infusing pagan darkness with the light of the christian religion.”36 commonly considered to be the most systematic and authoritative text on education written in the sixteenth century, just as quintilian’s institutio oratoria is the most methodical and comprehensive educational work of the first century, the de disciplinis actually represents two treatises that were printed together under one title.37 the first, called the de causis corruptarum artium, consists of seven books that examine various factors contributing to the degradation of the arts of knowledge in vives’s day. the second, entitled the de tradendis disciplinis, contains five books that attempt to remedy the problems pertaining to the transmission of knowledge, as presented in the first part. in the preface to the de disciplinis, vives expresses a purpose that is, in some ways, similar to quintilian’s intentions for the institutio oratoria. he begins, juan luis vives as the “second quintilian” 58 when i reflected that there is nothing in life more beautiful or more excellent than the cultivation of the mind through what we call the branches of learning (disciplinae), by means of which we separate ourselves from the way of life and customs of animals and are restored to humanity, and raised towards god himself, i determined to write on the subject, as far as my powers let me, and to do so, if i am not mistaken, in a manner different from what most of our predecessors have done.38 locating himself in the isocratic tradition,39 vives also affirms the central role that the disciplines or arts of knowledge play in distinguishing ourselves from the animals. likewise, quintilian states, “in truth, the sovereign deity, the parent of all things, the architect of the world, has distinguished man from other beings, such at least as were to be mortal, by nothing more than by the faculty of speech.”40 as a christian theorist of liberal arts education and knowledge, however, vives distinguishes himself from quintilian; he links the arts—constructions of language—with humanity and its creator, whom he believes to be the god of israel, who ultimately fulfills his purposes through his son jesus christ. furthermore, vives recognizes that the arts can be vehicles of grace to move humans nearer to god and his ways. as valerio del nero declares regarding vives’s convictions, relative to a validation of the ancient formulation of knowledge, “pagan culture can certainly be purified and made part of christian culture itself.”41 thus, vives gives a distinctly christian conceptualization for his exploration of, and reflection upon, the academic disciplines, serving as a justification to build on the notions of isocrates and quintilian while pointing to the revelation of god, as it is found in the bible. in his extensive bibliographic review of scholarship on vives, carlos g. noreña observes, “vives’s sincere christian fervor has been minimized or denied by those who emphasized his commitment to education and to social justice.”42 vives’s deep christian convictions merit serious consideration in relation to his educational praxis. in the de tradendis disciplinis, vives claims that study, the exertion of discipline to apprehend and employ the arts of knowledge, should ultimately provoke an important question: “for what is the good of fatiguing oneself with this effort, if nothing is gained by desires except fresh desires; if the end of one longing is the beginning of another; if we work continually, and there is no end or rest?”43 the question he raises is an old one. it echoes a query found in ecclesiastes, one 59 davis expressed candidly by the text’s skeptical speaker, who says, “for though someone toils with wisdom, knowledge, and skill he must leave it all to one who has spent no labor on it. this too is futility and a great wrong. what reward does anyone have for all his labor, his planning, and his toil here under the sun?”44 vives acknowledges that his question, like the question of ecclesiastes, has perturbed thinkers in the past: “[it] has exercised the greatest minds more than it has instructed them; in truth, because the human mind, provided with its small lamp, is not able to attain to the conception of the ultimate end, unless it has been enlightened by the end itself.”45 and here a paradox presents itself: the beginning of real knowledge encompasses a consideration of the end of knowledge. recognizably, this is not an idea that is original to vives. for quintilian cites it as the common understanding of his day, that “all arts have a certain definite end to which they are directed,”46 what he earlier describes by the greek term telos, or “highest and ultimate end.”47 for him the telos of the art of oratory, which enlists the other arts to promote its great purpose,48 is the formation of “the good man.” for vives, the telos is not found in human goodness alone, but in the source of all goodness. the beginning and the end of knowledge are found in god, whom vives describes as “the source from which we came, and towards which we are going.”49 elaborating further upon this concept, vives states what he considers to be the greatest possible purpose for knowledge, and the means to attain it: for who is there who has considered the power and loftiness of the mind, its understanding of the most remarkable things, and, through understanding, love, and from love the desire to unite himself with the things of knowledge, who does not perceive clearly that man was created, not for food, clothing and habitation, not for difficult, hidden and troublesome knowledge, but for the desire to know god more truly, for a participation in eternity, and in his divine nature? wherefore, since that is the perfection of man’s nature, and the consummation of all its parts; and since piety is the only way of perfecting man, and accomplishing the end for which he was formed, therefore piety is of all things the one thing necessary.50 as this passage illustrates, vives modifies quintilian’s teleological equation, exchanging the virtue of “goodness” with the distinctly christian life habit that promotes an ever-increasing, intimate knowledge of god—“piety.” juan luis vives as the “second quintilian” 60 piety, love, and liberal learning undoubtedly, the formation of vives’s “pious” student draws upon quintilian’s concept of shaping the “good” student; nevertheless, the motivation for becoming pious is distinct, and it deserves further consideration. in the fourth chapter of the first book of the de tradendis disciplinis, entitled “our highest good,” vives asks, “what can we fix as the end of man, except god himself? or where can man more blessedly repose, than when he is, as it were, absorbed in god and changed into his nature? we must return to him by the same way we came forth from him.”51 the means by which we “return” to god, as vives immediately explains, involves the acceptance of god’s love for us—a love demonstrated by the very fact of our existence; and the release of our love back to our creator is therefore the proper response. this interpersonal exchange of love provides joy, purpose, and meaning. “by that love we have been recalled and raised up, that is to say, by the love of christ,” expounds vives, “by love, i.e. by our love to god, we are to return to our source, which is also our end.”52 our motivation of love for god should rouse us, directing our studies, but only to the degree that we respond to the weighty knowledge of god’s love for us, understood through living a pious life. as vives stresses, “knowledge must precede love.”53 this is a central tenet to vives’s pedagogy for liberal arts in the cultivation of christian piety. this principle exists because our creator predicates his love upon knowledge. “god loved us before we were born,” insists vives.54 why? he offers a simple but profound reason: “he knew [emphasis added] that we had already proceeded from him.”55 similarly, we must possess knowledge before we can truly love. “we exercise love,” reminds vives, “after we are born and have obtained the power and habit of knowing.”56 the bible and the holy spirit serve as our primary sources of knowledge; as we exercise our faith, they help us to determine those things that are worthy of our time, energy, and love.57 “faith will show what things ought to be loved,” declares vives, “since the first and simplest elements of piety have been handed down to each person from god the father of all and his son jesus christ.”58 the practice of piety depends upon vibrant faith that is regularly put into action, which yields knowledge of the divine life. the knowledge of the divine life, which comes to us through intentional pious practices, creates the standard by which all other knowledge is interpreted and judged. vives expounds on how this occurs in this lengthy but important passage: 61 davis this [knowledge of the divine life] ought to be the standard of other principles, just as god is of spirits and man of living creatures; so that every kind of learning may be valued to the extent that by its matter, its end taken as our end, its teachers, its method and its results, it agrees or does not agree with this standard. no subjectmatter, no knowledge is, of itself, contrary to piety. i call that contrary which is at variance with faith and love, that namely which takes these virtues utterly away, or certainly lessens them by bringing into the mind wickedness and sin. for materials of study are taken from things which the good god has made, and therefore they are good. neither is piety adverse to anything good, since it becomes itself the crown of everything good and nothing in us can be good without it, nor can anything be inimical to it, since its author is he whose worship and religion piety professes, and for which it prepares man’s will. indeed, all things, the more exactly they are known, the more do they open the doors of entrance to the knowledge of the deity, i.e. the supreme cause, through his works; and this is the most fitting way for our minds to reach to the knowledge of god.59 the branches of knowledge, then, correlate to aspects of the world that god created, and therefore they prove complementary to the pious life as long as they are studied with the proper end of loving god. so, with a similar sort of fervor possessed by quintilian, who affirms that all disciplines are beneficial in the education of the good orator,60 vives proclaims that all realms of knowledge are efficacious for the pious learner. it must be noted, still, that vives does concede there are ways in which knowledge can be harmful, especially if the ends for which that knowledge is attained are incongruous with the standard that comes from the knowledge of the divine life through piety. he cautions, “there are some things which almost always increase vice, and detract from virtues, e.g. disputations, quarrelsome, contentious books, in which the intellect arms itself against truth, and by an impious affectation of commendation of the truth prefers to hide the truth, rather than to yield to it.”61 one wonders if vives, when writing the foregoing description, was thinking about the dialecticians he encountered while at the university of paris. no doubt his first-hand experience with them left a lasting impression of learning-gone-wrong that only served to deepen his own educational vision for christian liberal learning. juan luis vives as the “second quintilian” 62 after briefly cataloging the divisions of knowledge at the end of book i, and carefully elucidating the vital importance of good books, good schools, good teachers, and good pupils in book ii—all in a manner resplendent with the aura of quintilian62—vives continues the de tradendis disciplinis with a full examination of “language teaching,” the focus of book iii. the essential importance of language study the preeminence vives gives to language, in the context of the many disciplines of knowledge, is shown not only by his devoting a whole book to it in the de tradendis disciplinis, but also by the first chapter’s beginning sentence: “the first thing man has to learn is speech. it flows from the rational soul as water from a fountain.”63 vives immediately provides three reasons why spoken language carries such primary import as a discipline of knowledge: first, it distinguishes us from the beasts; second, it is the “instrument of human society” that allows people to communicate and commune with each other; and third, it is a “gift of god.”64 consequently, language must be taught both at home, by parents, and at school, by teachers, where students should be afforded proper models to imitate “chaste words,” free from “faults of pronunciation.”65 of course, vives draws his sound advice from the very beginning of quintilian’s institutio oratoria, right down to his admonition that both parents and caregivers become learned in the art of speech for the wellbeing of the child.66 vives encourages students to become multilingual, but at the same time he affirms the supremacy of latin. “language is the shrine of erudition, and as it were a storeroom for what should be concealed, and what should be made public. since it is the treasury of culture and the instrument of human society, it would therefore be to the benefit the human race that there should be a single language.”67 the advantage to this, especially for christians, would be a shared language by which people could worship god, improve world commerce, and increase basic knowledge.68 martin elsky notes the significance of latin to vives’s overall educational plan, putting the emphasis back on grammar and rhetoric within the trivium of the liberal arts: “he urges that humanist latin and all it implies replace scholastic aristotelianism as the universal linguistic and intellectual framework of christian unity within a christian empire.”69 reflecting upon the fall of the human race and the proliferation of languages due to sin,70 vives conjectures that adam probably spoke latin—the most perfect of languages—before he ate the forbidden apple; in latin 63 davis he may have named the animals in the garden of eden.71 “it [latin] is rich in words on account of its cultivation by so many men of intellect in their writings,” writes vives, “for they have increased its vocabulary. it is of sweet sound and is weighty in utterance, neither rough nor crude, as is the case of some other languages.”72 just as quintilian asserted the priority of greek study before latin,73 which was the vernacular in his day, vives argues that latin should take precedence as a study over the vernacular languages of his own day.74 vives assures his reader, “if anyone should consider the matter with close attention, he will see that my view of teaching and that of quintilian are alike.”75 culling additional wisdom from the institutio, vives offers the language teacher sage advice. “let him accustom himself to sociability and friendliness,” writes vives, making sure to remain “affable to his pupils, as a father.”76 clearly, vives and quintilian both believe that teachers should promote trust and goodwill in their classrooms so that their students will be free to take risks and to learn without undue fear of failure. furthermore, vives proposes that in addition to knowing the vernacular completely, “the teacher should have an ample and copious equipment of latin words so that his boys may be truly able to draw from him as from a fountain.”77 and lastly, citing his ancient roman compatriot, vives writes these words of admonition: let the teacher remember that very apt image by which quintilian describes the boy’s mind, viz. that it is like a vessel with a narrow neck, which spits out again the too large a supply of liquid which the teacher attempts to pour in. let instruction therefore be poured in gradually, drop by drop. similarly let the teacher offer his pupils in the beginning few and easy matters of instruction; then the boy may become accustomed so as to understand further, greater, and more solid topics. in the first beginnings let the teacher often ask questions, and let him often supply the reasons for what he has got in answer.78 the graduated method of instruction, described above, reflects quintilian’s adherence to the progymnasmata, with its series of carefully coordinated exercises that build, one on another. vives, too, is convinced that this accretive approach establishes the greatest guarantee of the student’s facility with words. juan luis vives as the “second quintilian” 64 listening, reading, writing and speaking, as in quintilian’s classroom, operate in conjunction with one another in vives’s classroom. “the boy should listen intently to the teacher,” he explains, “and fix his look on him except when he has to look at his book, or when he has to write.”79 since hearing represents the dominant “medium” of learning, students who fail to listen carefully, will fail to learn well.80 consequently, students should consider the teacher as a “pure oracle,” poetically speaking, offering an unusual display of words in the classroom; and as students observe the proper use and function of words, they will imitate their master and attain his “virtues,” and even, he warns, his “faults.”81 as for instruction in writing, vives adheres to several of the principles found in book x of the institutio, although he adds his own innovations here and there. “let the pupil learn to write correctly and quickly,”82 he asserts; and here he affirms quintilian’s belief that “by writing well [vives phrases it as “correctly”] we are brought to write quickly.”83 agility becomes secondary to accuracy; it only merits appreciation when the other results simultaneously. and how does the student writer achieve accuracy? vives answers: “the foundations of writing ought to be laid while pupils are being taught to read; they must know what letters, what syllables, what sounds ought to be separated or combined, and keep them ready for use.”84 on this point vives assumes that his reader will make a connection with chapter vi of book i, where he argues for selective reading of the “heathens”: “here avail the instruments of truth, of discovery, of judgment, which help us towards practical wisdom. […] the heathen […] possess every ornament, grace, elegance, and splendor of discourse.”85 notwithstanding the benefits of reading such writers, vives forewarns the christian reader that at times “the sweetest wine is mixed with poison”; and yet, sometimes “skilled physicians use poisons against poisons.”86 it all depends upon the subject-matter, the reader, and the reader’s disposition. therefore, vives advises the use of discretion. the primacy of writing and using a notebook agreeing with the ancient roman writing teacher quintilian, vives asserts the primacy of writing in the work of learning across the disciplines, but more emphatically so. whereas quintilian writes that “writing itself is the principal thing in our studies, and that by which alone sure proficiency, resting on the deepest roots, is secured,”87 vives writes, “let them [students] be convinced that nothing conduces more truly to wide learning than to write much and often, and to use up a great 65 davis deal of paper and ink.”88 it is not sufficient to simply believe in the centrality of writing as a teacher of the liberal arts, according to vives; the students in the class must be “convinced” of this as well. part of the task of the teacher, then, is to persuade students that writing not only matters, but that it proves to be the most effective, and therefore most important, skill that a student can employ in the learning process. vives reinforces this conviction through the instructional expectation of regular composing exercises in a notebook. the idea of a notebook as a useful tool for recording one’s reflections predates vives. as richard yeo states, “of course, glossing texts and making summaries of them in notes had long been crucial in the manuscript culture of the west.”89 for example, pliny the elder, one of quintilian’s roman contemporaries, became renowned for his comprehensive reading appetite, as well as his penchant for simultaneous commentary about the texts he consumed. in his letter xxvii to baebius macer, pliny the younger describes the daily literacy habits of his famous uncle: as soon as he returned home [after business with the emperor each morning], he gave what time was left to study. after a short and light refreshment at noon (agreeably to the good old custom of our ancestors) he would frequently in the summer, if he was disengaged from business, lie down and bask in the sun; during which time some author was read to him, while he took notes and made extracts, for every book he read he made extracts out of, indeed it was a maxim of his that “no book was so bad but some good might be got out of it.” when this was over, he generally took a cold bath, then some light refreshment and a little nap. after this, as if it had been a new day, he studied till supper-time, when a book was again read to him, which he would take down running notes upon.90 pliny the younger goes on to describe for his friend how his uncle bequeathed to him one hundred and sixty volumes of notebooks, containing pages written on both sides in very small handwriting. considering pliny the elder’s feat, john henderson remarks, “reading-and-writing are (as they say) less polarity than mutually constitutive dyad, for to read studiously is to ‘write’ a ‘study’ of the book.”91 in a similar manner, vives affirmed the importance of reading books studiously, with a notebook and pen nearby.92 in fact, the production and distribution of paper and ink in the fifteenth juan luis vives as the “second quintilian” 66 century made it possible for vives to promote “using up a great deal” of the two. in the history and power of writing, henri-jean martin explains that the explosion of words and images from the fifteenth century through the eighteenth century resulted from advanced methods of paper production: “the history of the paper industry shows that paper mills constantly increased in number throughout europe. gradually, every region attempted to produce enough paper to meet the demands of local consumption.”93 vives himself writes about paper and ink in his dialogues. regarding paper, he states, “get for your own use the best paper from italy, very thin and firm, or even that common sort brought over from france.”94 without paper and ink, the notebook, a teaching tool that resides at the center of vives’s pedagogy, would not have been possible. to support his theoretical convictions about liberal arts education, vives offers a pedagogical approach that provides students with the opportunity for regular, meaningful learning-throughwriting in the classroom: composing in a notebook. the idea, standard fare in today’s college classroom, was innovative at the time vives promoted it.95 keep in mind that the purpose of this teaching tool, as vives intends it, is first to allow students to write regularly and much, and second to persuade students of the efficacy of writing as an interdisciplinary skill—making integrative insights regarding various subjects. “therefore,” suggests vives, “let each boy have an empty paper book divided into several parts to receive all that fall from his teacher’s lips, since this is not less valuable to him than precious stones.”96 the notebook, in addition to encouraging the practice and valuing of writing, also functions as a repository for rare or costly things. in the modern sense, it serves as a sort of safe in which to house “precious stones” received from the teacher, which the student can secure and, on occasion, retrieve for examination, pondering their worth. vives recommends that the student divide the notebook into sections that correspond to the different aspects of learning in the liberal arts disciplines. for example, he writes, in one division let him put down separate and single words. in another proper ways of speaking and turns of speech, which are in daily use; and again, rare expressions, or such as are not generally known and explained. in a separate division, let him make history notes; in another, notes of anecdotes; in another, clever expressions and weighty judgments; in another, witty and acute sayings; in another, proverbs; in other divisions, names of well-known men of high birth, famous towns, animals, 67 davis plants and strange stones. in another part, explanations of difficult passages in the author. in another, doubtful passages which are still unsolved.97 the kinds of writing activities specified here are far from mere busywork—they bring unity to res and verba, providing the means of contemplating the fundamentals of knowledge, the very elements of rhetorical invention. for vives, the notebook should function as a heuristic device, a tool to draw upon, especially for the invention of ideas and arguments, allowing the student to organize topoi creatively, with authentic intention. recognizing the import of these categories of thought, peter mack explains, “when vives discusses the practicalities of mediating between arguments for different kinds of good and between the good and the useful, he notes that quintilian said that the art of writing deliberative orations depended on comparisons between things themselves and then on comparisons in relation to person, place and time.”98 vives is so convinced of the value of his notebook approach to writing and learning that he endorses not one, but two notebooks for each student: “a larger book in which he can put all the notes expounded and developed at length by the teacher [… and one for] what he reads for himself in the best writers, or the sayings which he observes used by others.”99 as vives describes it, the notebook clearly encourages the student to observe and to judge. these are the two functions of the mind that, vives argues, are fundamental to liberal learning.100 keeping a notebook—and writing, in general—not only helps a student to organize information creatively and to sharpen the powers of observation and judgment, it also enables the student to recollect what has already been learned, as vives explains: “it is a very useful practice to write down what we want to remember, for it is not less impressed on the mind than on the paper by the pen, and indeed the attention is kept fixed longer by the fact that we are writing it down.”101 once again, the powers of observation and judgment are heightened by the act of composing, forcing the student—in the span of a moment—to process sensory data and cognitive deliberation, resulting in a meaningful and more memorable expression on a page. on the subject of writing and memory, noreña makes an insightful connection between vives and quintilian: vives often recommends the use of notebooks, a significant departure from the medieval stress on oral learning. vives joins quintilian in rejecting plato’s claim that the use of written characters is a hindrance to memory, and he is convinced that the very effort to put juan luis vives as the “second quintilian” 68 into orderly writing the material to be remembered is a powerful way of engraving it more deeply on our memory.102 the advocacy of notebook writing among students was vital to vives’s process of liberal learning. to this day, the notebook—in paper and computer media—continues to serve as a locus for the retention of important written material, both to enhance reflection and to improve memory. on a related point, in his introduction to the de tradendis disciplinis, foster watson laments the fact that vives’s original thinking on the improvement of student writing through use of paper notebooks has largely been overlooked. considering the “conservative methods” of the middle ages, which involved “the learning by heart of intricate grammars,” watson emphasizes the “startling” nature of the notebook in the first half of the sixteenth century, insisting that such “written methods were revolutionary.”103 continuing on, watson observes that long before vives wrote the de tradendis disciplinis (1531) the paper notebook idea was in his head. the evidence watson refers to comes from de ratione studii puerilis (1523), wherein vives provides detailed instructions for a pupil to make a notebook and complete various writing exercises. at the end of the passage, which watson translates from the latin, vives states, “then will thy book alone know what must be read by thee, to be read, committed and fixed to the memory, so that thou mayest bear in thy breast the names thus handed down, which are in thy book and refer to them as often as is necessary.”104 for watson, this passage substantiates the high degree of instructional intention that vives possessed in conceiving the aims of the notebook, and considering its beneficial enhancement of memory. the end becomes the beginning unfortunately, juan luis vives has faded from the collective memory of most educators, even within the liberal arts tradition. as enrique gonzález gonzález laments, “even today, many specialists in the renaissance and humanism continue to have a very vague idea of what his name and writings signified for a long period of time.”105 however, if vives has not received proper recognition for his contributions to liberal learning and instruction, then it must be stated that quintilian, also, has been slighted. for it was quintilian who prompted vives to consider the foundational principles of a comprehensive liberal arts education; and then vives took many of 69 davis quintilian’s ideas and methods, only to convert them for christian purposes. self-effacing and altruistic, they both taught and wrote for ends greater than themselves. for quintilian it was the formation of the “good man,” and for vives, the shaping of the “pious student.” in the words of quintilian, “indeed the whole conduct of life is based on the desire of doing ourselves that which we approve in others.”106 ruminating on this educational principle from the institutio, vives transformed it, pursuing a different sort of “approval” as a motive for liberal learning—one grounded in pietistic devotion to god. near the very end of the de tradendis disciplinis, vives ponders his principle as one of the most crucial to a proper “conduct of life”: certainly there can be nothing more pleasant to him, than that we offer our erudition and whatsoever of his gifts we possess to the use of our fellow men, i.e., of his children, for whom god has imparted those great goods that to whomsoever they are allotted, they should be of use to the community at large. god wishes us to give freely of that which we have freely received.107 these words describe the pious life, fulfilling the initial promise of the de tradendis disciplinis, as expressed in its incipit: “the delivery of instruction on christian principles” for liberal arts learning. furthermore, the pietistic transformation of the enkyklios paideia comes full circle by the end of the work: “the delivery of instruction on christian teaching.”108 thus, the end becomes the beginning, thanks in part to the pagan quintilian, to whom vives remains indebted. notes 1. the “good man speaking well.” 2. golden et al. 2003, 60. 3. bloomer 2011, 109. 4. vigliano 2013, xxxvi–xxxvii. 5. several good analyses of quintilian’s influence exist, including those by james j. murphy (1987, xxxvii–xlv), quintilian: on the teaching of speaking and writing, charles edgar juan luis vives as the “second quintilian” 70 little (1951, 19–25), quintilian the schoolmaster, volume two, and f. h. colson (1924, xliii–lxxxix), m. fabii quintiliani institutionis oratoriae, liber i. 6. see davis 2000 for jerome’s particular appropriations of quintilian. 7. murphy 1987, xxxix. 8. o’donnell 1980, 224–25. 9. honeycutt 2007: “john of salisbury describes in some detail his own education at chartres under the tutelage of bernard, thierry, and william of conches, who patterned their instruction after the program laid out by quintilian.” 10. quoted in little 1951, 21. 11. greenblatt 2011, 177. 12. quoted in bowen 1975, 219. 13. greenblatt 2011, 179. 14. concerning the discovery, thomas m. conley (1990, 112) writes, “the new version contained the parts of the work that had been missing in the manuscripts previously available—important parts, including the preface and opening chapter of book one, the entire section on figures of thought in book nine, and the last half of book twelve. scholars were now able to appreciate and contemplate the most comprehensive treatment of rhetoric ever composed. quintilian’s reputation was considerably enhanced, and such key notions as that of the core relation between virtus and eloquence and that of the universal range of rhetoric took on a new significance. together with the new picture of rhetoric as actually practiced, which the renaissance humanists were able to get from the newly discovered speeches of cicero, the institutes provided them with new inspiration and increased motivation for total devotion to the study of roman rhetoric.” 15. murphy 1987, xli. see also gerald l. gutek (1987, 106) who explains, “following quintilian’s admonitions, vittorino’s methodology emphasized the recognition of individual differences among the students. a child was not to be forced into a line of rigidly prescribed study but was to be encouraged to develop according to his capacity and interests. as soon as he noticed a particular interest in a student, vittorino adjusted the method of his teaching. the school at mantua became a model for other humanist educators who sought to emulate the success of vittorino.” 16. panizza 1978, 79. 71 davis 17. murphy 1987, xlii. 18. this calculation is based upon murphy’s printing history facts: murphy 1987, xlii. 19. kennedy 1980, 198. 20. corbett 1990, 551. note: the distance between calagurris (present-day calahorra), the ancient birthplace of quintilian, and valencia, vives’s birthplace situated on the mediterranean coast, is fewer than 300 miles. 21. edward v. george (1989, xxix) reports that vives studied grammar with two teachers, daniel siso and jeronimo amiguet, at the estudio general in valencia. 22. watson 1971, ci-cii. 23. del nero 2008, 202. 24. george 1989, xxix. 25. enrique gonzález gonzález (2008a, 33) corrects the commonly mistaken view that vives attended the collège de montaigu: “all evidence points to the fact that vives stayed at the collège de lisieux.” 26. quoted in rummel 1995, 184. 27. vives (1908, x) continued to voice his concern for young boys debased by a steady diet of dialectic: “even the youngest scholars (tyrones) are accustomed never to keep silence; they are always asserting vigorously whatever comes uppermost in their minds, lest they should seem to be giving up the dispute. nor does one disputation or even two each day prove sufficient, as for instance at dinner. they wrangle at breakfast; they wrangle after breakfast; before supper they wrangle, and they wrangle after supper […]. at home they dispute, out of doors they dispute. they wrangle over their food, in the bath, in the sweating-room, in the church, in the town, in the country, in public, in private; at all times they are wrangling.” 28. rummel 1995, 185. 29. noreña 1990a, ii. 30. quoted in watson 1971, xxiii. 31. ibid. 32. jardine 2015, 18. 33. jozef ijsewijn (1992) recognizes vives as a central character within the established erasmian circle of friends who often met in the home of franciscus cranevelt, a jurist who juan luis vives as the “second quintilian” 72 studied law at louvain and served on the supreme court of the netherlands; cranevelt collected many of the letters exchanged by this group: “the litterae ad craneveldium.” 34. jardine 2015, 20. 35. enrique gonzález gonzález (2008a, 43) describes a fluctuating degree of friendship, interest and support of vives by erasmus, suggesting that he actually prevented vives’s work from being published in basel. 36. fantazzi 2008b, 4. 37. william harrison woodward (1906, 184) rightly observes, “this comprehensive work, by far the most systematic of those produced by the revival, is not only compiled (as is inevitable) upon the basis of aristotle, plutarch, and quintilian, but also draws from the masters and writers of the fifteenth century, notably from erasmus. but, notwithstanding this dependence, the breadth and the methodical presentation of the de tradendis disciplinis [the second of the two books that make up the de disciplinis] rendered it the standing authority to which authors and workers in the fields of education uniformly turned for a century or more.” 38. vives 1971, 8. 39. in fourth-century athens, the great rhetorician isocrates (1929, 327) wrote in the antidosis, “because there has been implanted in us the power to persuade each other, and to make clear to each other whatever we desire, not only have we escaped the life of wild beasts, but we have come together and founded cities, and made laws, and invented arts.” 40. quintilian 2011, 2:16.12. 41. del nero 2008, 186. del nero clarifies an important distinction between “art” and “discipline” in the de disciplinis: “according to the valencian humanist, ‘ars’ and ‘disciplina’ have culture as their object […]. sometimes these two terms are used synonymously, but much more frequently vives differentiates them with a certain precision. in fact, while ‘ars’ is connected with the moment of development and then of the learning (theoretical and physical) of a precise ability or technique, ‘disciplina’ is related to a semantic field where the aspects of learning, teaching, transmission and communication of a determined content are prevalent” (2008, 183). furthermore, art and discipline move us from the level of animals to that of human beings, the very process of “humanitas.” 73 davis 42. noreña 1990b, ii. 43. vives 1971, 17. 44. ecclesiastes. 2:21–22 (oxford study bible). 45. vives 1971, 17–18. 46. quintilian 2011, 2:17.22. 47. ibid., 2:15.38. 48. quintilian recognizes three different kinds of art: theoretical, practical and productive— rhetoric draws upon all three, but especially the last (2011, 2:18.1–2). 49. vives 1971, 18. 50. ibid. 51. ibid, 28. 52. ibid. 53. ibid. 54. ibid. 55. ibid., 28–29. 56. ibid., 29. 57. ibid. 58. ibid. 59. ibid., 29–30. 60. see quintilian 2011, 1. preface.4–5. 61. vives 1971, 33. 62. allusions to quintilian abound, with more references to him than any other writer cited. 63. vives 1971, 90. note: the second part of this quotation comes from aristotle, politics 1:1. 64. ibid. 65. ibid., 90–91. 66. see quintilian 2011, 1:1.4–11. 67. vives 1971, 91. 68. in this regard, some linguists believe that english may fulfill the role that latin once did. 69. elsky 1999, 404. 70. see genesis 11: 1–9 (oxford study bible). 71. vives 1971, 92. juan luis vives as the “second quintilian” 74 72. ibid. 73. see quintilian 2011, 1.1.12. 74. vives 1971, 98. 75. ibid. 76. ibid., 101; see quintilian 2011, 2:2.4–5. 77. ibid., 103; see quintilian 2011, 2:2.5–8, who describes the teacher as a source of nutrition. it is likely that vives’s suggestion, here, comes as a result of his study with erasmus, whose de copia vives surely read. 78. ibid., 106; see quintilian 2011, 1:2.28. 79. ibid., 107. 80. ibid. 81. ibid. see quintilian 2011, 1.3.1 and 2.4.8–9. 82. ibid., 108. 83. see quintilian 2011, 10:3.10. 84. vives 1971, 108. 85. ibid., 49. see quintilian 2011, 10.1 for similar views on appropriate authors to read. 86. ibid., 49, 51. 87. see quintilian 2011, 1:1.28. note: similarly, quintilian writes later in the institutio (10.3.1) that “practice in writing, which is attended with the most labor, is attended also with the greatest advantage.” 88. vives 1971, 108. 89. yeo 2008, 119. 90. pliny the younger 2001. 91. henderson 2002, 268. 92. stansbury 1999, 53: “by the third century, such devices [notebooks] were also in use in christian circles in the form of testimonia, books of collected biblical citations.” 93. martin 1994, 283. 94. vives 1908, 73. 95. noreña 1989, 100. 96. vives 1971, 108. 97. ibid. 75 davis 98. mack 2008, 247. 99. vives 1971, 108. 100. ibid., 37. 101. ibid., 109–110. 102. noreña 1989, 100. 103. watson 1971, xxxvii. 104. quoted in watson 1971, xxxix. 105. gonzález gonzález 2008b, 359. 106. quintilian 2011, 10.2.2. 107. vives 1971, 283. 108. gonzález gonzález et al. 1992, 182. the heading of the de tradendis reads “ioannis lodovici vivis valentini de tradendis disciplinis seu de institutione christiana liber primus” (“ioannis lodovici vivis valentini on the delivery of instruction on christian principles”); and the ending states “librorum de tradendis disciplinis sive de doctrina christiana finis” (“this is the end of the books on the delivery of instruction on christian teaching.”) works cited aristotle. 2009. politics. trans. ernest barker. ed. r. f. stalley. oxford world classics. new york: oxford university press. bloomer, w. martin. 2011. “quintilian on the child as a learning subject.” classical world 105.1: 109–137. bowen, james. 1975. a history of western education, vol. 2. new york: st. martin’s press. colson, f. h. 1924. m. fabii quintiliani institutionis oratoriae liber i. new york: cambridge university press. conley, thomas m. 1990. rhetoric in the european tradition. new york: longman publishing. juan luis vives as the “second quintilian” 76 corbett, edward p. j. 1990. classical rhetoric for the modern student. 3rd ed. new york: oxford university press. davis, jeffry. 2000. “cultures in conflict: quintilian's conversion by saint jerome.” studies in western civilization 5.1–2: 13–22. del nero, valerio. 2008. “the de disciplinis as a model of a humanistic text.” in fantazzi 2008. 177–226. elsky, martin. 1999. “reorganizing the encyclopedia: vives and ramus on aristotle and the scholastics.” in the cambridge history of literary criticism 3, ed. glyn p. norton. cambridge: cambridge university press. 402–408. fantazzi, charles, ed. 2008. a companion to juan luis vives. leiden: brill academic. ———. introduction to a companion to juan luis vives. in fantazzi 2008. 1–14. george, edward v., ed. and trans. 1989. introduction to somnium et vigilia in somnium scipionis: (commentary on the dream of scipio), by juan luis vives. greenwood, sc: attic press. xxv–xxxvi. golden, james l., goodwin f. berquist, william e. coleman, and j. michael sproule, eds. 2003. the rhetoric of western thought. dubuque, ia: kendall hunt publishing. gonzález, enrique gonzález, salvador albiñana, and victor gutiérrez. 1992. vives. edicions princeps. valència: universitat de valència. gonzález, enrique gonzález. 2008. “juan luis vives: works and days.” in fantazzi 2008. 15–64. ———. “fame and oblivion.” in fantazzi 2008. 359–414. greenblatt, stephen. 2011. the swerve: how the world became modern. new york: w. w. norton and company. gutek, gerald l. 1987. a history of the western educational experience. prospect heights, il: waveland press. 77 davis hagendahl, harald. 1967. augustine and the classics. stockholm: almqvist and wiksell. henderson, john. 2002. “knowing someone through their books: pliny on uncle pliny (‘epistles’ 3.5).” classical philology 97.3: 256–284. honeycutt, lee. 2007. “the history of quintilian’s text.” quintilian’s institutes of oratory. http://www.eserver.org/rhetoric/quintilian/history.html. accessed february 1, 2015. ijsewijn, jozef. 1992. “the litterae ad craneveldium.” in vives. edicions princeps, eds. enrique gonzález gonzález, salvador albiñana, and victor gutiérrez. valència: universitat de valència. 59–66. isocrates. 1929. antidosis. trans. george norlin. vol. 2 of isocrates in three volumes. loeb classical library. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. jardine, lisa. 2015. erasmus, man of letters: the construction of charisma in print. princeton: princeton university press. jerome. “letter cvii to laeta.” in the principal works of saint jerome, eds. philip schaff and henry wace. christian classics ethereal library. http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/ npnf206.v.cvii.html. accessed february 1, 2015. john of salisbury. the metalogicon of john of salisbury: a twelfth-century defense of the verbal and logical arts of the trivium. trans. daniel d. mcgarry. berkeley: university of california press. kennedy, george a. 1980. classical rhetoric and its christian and secular tradition from ancient to modern times. chapel hill: university of north carolina press. little, charles edgar. 1951. quintilian the schoolmaster. 2 vols. nashville: george peabody college for teachers. mack, peter. 2008. “vives’s contributions to rhetoric and dialectic.” in fantazzi 2008. 227– 276. martin, henri-jean. 1994. the history and power of writing. trans. lydia g. cochrane. chicago: university of chicago press. juan luis vives as the “second quintilian” 78 murphy, james j., ed. 1987. quintilian on the teaching or speaking and writing: translations from books one, two, and ten of the institutio oratoria. carbondale: southern illinois university press. noreña, carlos g. 1989. juan luis vives and the emotions. carbondale: southern illinois university press. ———. 1990. introduction to the passions of the soul: the third book of the de anima et vita, by juan luis vives. lewiston, ny: edwin mellen press. ———. 1990. a vives bibliography. lewiston, ny: edwin mellen press. o’donnell, james. 1980. “augustine’s classical readings.” recherches augustiniennes 15: 144–175. panizza, letizia a. 1978. “lorenzo valla’s de vero falsoque bonjo, lactantius and oratorical scepticism.” journal of the warburg and courtauld institutes 41. warburg institute: 76– 107. doi:10.2307/750864. pliny the younger. 2001. “xxvii. to baebius macer.” letters. trans. william melmoth; rev. c. t. bosanquet. the harvard classics, vol. 9.4. new york: p.f. collier & son. http://www.bartleby.com/9/4/. accessed february 1, 2015. quintilian. 2011. quintilian’s institutes of oratory. trans. rev. john selby watson. ed. lee honeycutt. http://rhetoric.eserver.org/quintilian/. accessed february 1, 2015. rummel, erika. 1995. the humanist-scholastic debate in the renaissance and reformation. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. stansbury, mark. 1999. “early medieval biblical commentaries, their writers and readers.” frühmittelalterliche studien 33: 49–82. vigliano, tristan. 2013. “introduction à: juan luis vives, ‘de disciplinis.’” paris: les belles lettres. vives, juan luis. 1971. vives: on education: a translation of the de tradendis disciplinis of juan luis vives. trans. foster watson. totowa, nj: rowman and littlefield. 79 davis ———. 1908. tudor school-boy life: the dialogues of juan luis vives. trans. foster watson. london: j. m. dent and company. watson, foster. 1971. introduction to vives: on education: a translation of the de tradendis disciplinis of juan luis vives, by juan luis vives. totowa, nj: rowman and littlefield. woodward, william harrison. 1906. studies in education during the age of the renaissance: 1400–1600. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. yeo, richard. 2008. “notebooks as memory aids: precepts and practices in early modern england.” memory studies 1.1: 115–136. microsoft word foss-final.docx [expositions 10.1 (2016) 80–98] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 madison, lincoln, and civic education jerome c. foss saint vincent college all political regimes face the challenge of preserving themselves. external threats can be dangerous but in most cases they are also obvious; the more subtle challenge is sustaining the integrity of the regime itself. in a constitutional republic such as the united states, this requires maintenance of political institutions to be sure, but also—and more fundamentally—the proper attachment of the people to the constitution. can such attachment be cultivated without undermining the principles of self-government? while democratic theorists in america going back at least as far as jefferson have worried that enduring constitutional forms prevent authentic democratic rule, my purpose here is to compare two well-known texts that answer the question in the affirmative, james madison’s federalist 49 and abraham lincoln’s lyceum address.1 both texts are covered with scholarly tracks, many of which are enlightening. most debate on each involves placing the respective arguments in the broader theories and careers of their authors. scholars debate, for example, the extent to which madison was a sincere democrat.2 federalist 49 is often pointed to as an example of his hesitancy to endorse popular will without first sifting it through institutional channels. it seems to be the clearest public distancing madison puts between himself and thomas jefferson’s idea that the land belongs to the living.3 likewise, most of the scholarship on the lyceum address involves bigger questions about lincoln’s thought and political aspirations.4 notably, harry jaffa gives pride of place to the address in his crisis of the house divided, arguing that the speech shows us the extent to which lincoln was consciously preparing for the role of savior he would later play as president.5 lincoln, jaffa argues, appreciated the founding but thought it was incomplete. not enough room was left for natural right, making the prohibition of slavery virtually impossible. jaffa sees the young lincoln making the case not just for freedom, but for virtues like magnanimity, prudence, and justice that are necessary to sustain freedom. my reading of the lyceum address leads me to agree that lincoln thought the founding was incomplete, though on a narrower scale than that suggested by jaffa’s early work on lincoln. i 81 foss would not say lincoln was preparing himself for a future political role as savior, but i do think he is thinking seriously about the future preservation of america. that preservation, lincoln argues, depends upon a citizenry capable of appreciating the reasonableness of the constitution, and that this will only happen through a deliberately crafted and thorough civic education. this is not entirely different from madison, who also believed that the people should be attached to their frame of government, but lincoln goes further in calling for efforts at inculcating that attachment. there are few defenders today of the type of attachment to the constitution that federalist 49 and the lyceum address advocate.6 madison’s use of the words veneration and prejudice are likely to strike us as archaic if not offensive. one might be able to get away with venerating democracy or having a prejudice in favor of popular opinion; it is much more difficult to say such things with regard to the constitution. nevertheless, both madison and lincoln insist—at least in these texts—that it is the constitution that should be venerated. what is more, they largely agree as to why americans should revere the constitution. they believe that republican governments are best framed by reason free from the influence of passion. such governments are more likely to provide order while securing liberty, including the freedom to publicly deliberate. reasonable constitutions, however, are rare. they insist that the u.s. constitution approaches the standard of reasonableness in large part due to the favorable circumstances under which it was written that are unlikely to be repeated. they both fear, however, that people will not recognize the improbability of securing a better constitution, and too easily hazard what they have in search of something better. from this both draw the conclusion that americans should come to revere the constitution. neither argues that reverence should take the place of reason or democratic deliberation; rather, both agree that constitutional reverence can support reason and republican self-rule.7 but madison and lincoln do not agree in every respect, particularly with regard to the means of attaching the people to the constitution. madison views the founding as a rare moment of reasonable deliberation likely to be followed by factions passionately vying for power. lincoln argues that the founding was protected by the unique occurrence of a common passion that henceforth needs to be fortified with reason. this difference in emphasis when it comes to attaching the people to the constitution leads them to have different assessments of time. madison sees it as the author of reverence while lincoln worries it is a silent artillery weakening the temple of liberty. to beat this artillery, lincoln pushes a more active form of civic education than madison madison, lincoln, and civic education 82 does in federalist 49.8 lincoln hopes to make the job of maintenance a matter of deliberate action every bit as much as the founding itself. popular attachment to the constitution the argument in federalist 49 stands alone but also makes up part of a larger discussion on separation of powers that begins with no. 47 and ends with no. 51. madison wants to address the anti-federalist objection that the constitution violates “the political maxim that the legislative, executive, and judiciary departments ought to be separate and distinct.” he spends the brunt of nos. 47 and 48 looking at the experiences of the states, ending with the “authority” of “mr. jefferson” from virginia. jefferson, speaking from his experience as governor in his notes on the state of virginia, held that legislatures will draw all powers unto themselves unless the other branches are secured in their independence. madison concludes from this that “a mere demarcation on parchment” of each branches’ powers is insufficient. something more is needed, but what? the answer does not come until federalist 51, where madison famously argues that each branch requires a will and ambition of its own as well as the requisite powers to keep each other within their own prescribed limits. the two papers that come between the question and the answer are odd in that they deal with future conventions more so than the separation of powers. federalist 49 looks at the idea of two of the three branches calling for a convention when it perceives the third violating its boundaries, and no. 50 examines the idea of having periodic conventions at set times. madison thinks both ideas are ill-advised, his reasoning falling primarily in the first of these two papers. the short answer, and how these two essays fit into the nos. 47–51 schema, is that one should not depend upon conventions to correct abuses of power. as no. 51 will make clear, remedies to abuses must be manifest in the system itself. broader picture aside, federalist 49 has an internal integrity that allows it to stand alone as an essay. like no. 51, it makes hardly any reference to the experiences of the states or the confederacy. its point of departure is not spurred by a specific anti-federalist idea, but rather an idea voiced by thomas jefferson that future conventions could be called by two-thirds of any two branches.9 madison gives four reasons for opposing the idea. the first and fourth are both practical concerns, and indeed very similar: the idea will not work because it plays to the advantage of the legislative branch. in the first case legislatures have the means of preventing a convention when it 83 foss is not in their interest, and when it is they are closest to the people and will likely take up most of the posts at the convention. these objections might be avoided in the way that conventions are called and organized. the second and third objections, however, deal more with the principled reason for avoiding conventions unless they are necessary, and are of more importance for purposes of my essay. in the first of the two middle objections madison argues that conventions should be rare. frequent conventions “deprive the government of that veneration which time bestows on everything, and without which perhaps the wisest and freest governments would not possess the requisite stability.” governments rest on opinion and therefore even reasonable governments will not find it superfluous to encourage favorable opinions of themselves. it is not that people are unreasonable so much as their reason is timid and cautious. their minds are reassured when they see that their fellow citizens approve of the constitution, and all the more so when their fathers and grandfathers did likewise. time must be allowed for the attachment of the people to grow. madison explains that we are cautious in trusting our reason because we know that our passions and self-interest often cloud our understanding. if we could learn to look past such distractions, conventions might lead to better and better constitutions. but madison likens this to a nation of philosophers which is “as little to be expected as the philosophical race of kings wished for by plato.” socratic citizens are rare and it is therefore folly to build a system for those who love truth above honor and the common good above their own. therefore even “the most rational government” will find it to their advantage “to have the prejudices of the community on its side.” madison does not mean to suggest that americans will be incapable of philosophic reflection and reasoning, but rather that most of his countrymen most of the time will be disinclined to learn why they live in a reasonable regime. “the americans are an enlightened and a liberal people,” madison said in a 1788 letter to philip mazzei, “but they are not all philosophers.”10 in other words, madison expects americans to be far more like crito than socrates, intelligent but not philosophic. this being the case, their attachment to the constitution will depend upon the development of a salutary opinion in favor of the laws and frame of government, which is to say a prejudice—or pre-judgment—in favor of what has worked decently well for most people over a long period of time.11 the second theoretical objection builds upon the first, and we are told is more serious. constitution-building is of a “ticklish” nature and therefore not to be pursued lightly. in addition madison, lincoln, and civic education 84 to detaching people from their frame of government, conventions also excite public passions. the advantage of allowing a prejudice in favor of the current system to grow is that it fortifies people’s reason. in other words, veneration is not intended to contradict thinking or deliberation. the two go together. conventions tend to excite the passions, because they open up the most fundamental questions about our way of life, and can therefore be harmful to human reasoning. madison defends the constitutional convention of 1787 by reminding us that it took place during a time of danger “which repressed the passions most unfriendly to order and concord.” the revolution, he argues, is still fresh enough in people’s minds that violent factions and party spirit have not replaced the patriotic fervor that united the people of the states against a common enemy. future conventions are unlikely to enjoy this type of concord and the reason that followed it. this interplay between reason and passion is a large theme, arguably the theme of no. 49. madison ends his presentation stating flatly that the goal of good government is to allow the reason of the public, not its passions, to “sit in judgment.” the implication here is that the institutional boundaries marked out in the constitution will provide a process for the public to deliberate on policy choices, whereas the undermining of those institutions that would necessarily accompany frequent conventions could leave the public without a structure for reasonable debate. maintaining the stability of the institutions is thus the best way for passionate appeals to be channeled into rational argumentation over how we are to live as a nation. but again, maintaining them is less the work of reason than the formation of a salutary opinion in their favor. lincoln makes a similar point about reason in his lyceum address. the speech opens looking for a danger to our political institutions. foreign invasion is not much a threat; death by “suicide” is more likely. this would come about, he argues, if lawlessness continues in the country unabated. he calls this “the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions” for the action and judgment of government. lincoln offers these words only eleven weeks after the nearby murder by mob of elijah lovejoy in alton, illinois. to this event, no doubt fresh in the minds of his listeners, lincoln makes only vague reference. instead he recalls mob violence in other parts of the country, probably to avoid enkindling any of the embers either for or against the killing of lovejoy. no one in the room was likely to have strong feelings about gamblers in mississippi or mr. mcintosh of st. louis. lincoln’s speech thus talks about lawless passions without drawing the guard of those in attendance. 85 foss but how is it that mobs and the passions they generate are a danger to the political institutions of the united states? the answer has much to do with the people’s attachment to those institutions. lincoln speaks of two types of people: the lawless and the good citizens. when the first are given room to act upon their inclinations without punishment, they will celebrate the weakness of the government and work toward “its total annihilation.” the good citizens, wanting only to follow the law and be protected by it will become discouraged by the lawlessness that surrounds them and have little incentive to help preserve that which does its job poorly. their lack of attachment provides an opportunity for a third group, the “men of sufficient talent and ambition,” to take power and lay waste to our political infrastructure. the best way to restrain the lawless and the ambitious is to secure the attachment of the good citizens. using religious imagery, lincoln emphasizes the importance of the people’s attachment. every american is called upon to “swear by the blood of the revolution” to uphold the law in every particular and to never tolerate the lawlessness of others. this commitment is to be taught at the earliest of ages and reinforced throughout life: let reverence for the laws, be breathed by every american mother, to the lisping babe, that prattles on her lap. let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges; let it be written in primers, spelling books, and in almanacs; —let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice. and, in short, let it become the political religion of the nation. (italics in original) he goes on to say that all citizens, regardless of wealth, race, or gender, should “sacrifice unceasingly upon [the law’s] altar.” so long as the people share a common religious commitment to the constitution, internal dangers will remain at bay while liberty and order thrive. for lincoln, it is of little surprise that the constitution has survived thus far given the shadow under which it was written and put into effect. the revolution provided americans with two fortunate circumstances that correspond with the two dangerous people that were highlighted in the earlier part of the speech. the passions of the lawless were “smothered and rendered inactive” by a common “hate” of the british nation. at this point lincoln speaks as though this category of people were quite large since human nature is susceptible to many passions like “jealousy, envy, madison, lincoln, and civic education 86 and avarice.” these are all more likely to separate us from one another during times of peace. if allowed they will strike at those institutions that keep us together. as for the ambitious, the revolution created an outlet for their desire for recognition and fame. these great men blazed their own paths understanding that their legacy was tied to the success of the infrastructure they were laying down. if they succeeded they would have cities and rivers named in their honor. working together, the founders labored under the hope for great rewards—fame, distinction, and honor. britain gave them a common system to disdain and rebel against. such will not be the case again, as new honor-driven men arise in search of their own fame. such men will not be satisfied playing a game created by others. they will desire to be founders themselves. and they will have their way however they can manage it, “whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen.” according to lincoln, this makes it all the more important to provide the ambitious with no opportunity for destruction by ensuring that all citizens love that which they have and desire nothing in its place. like madison, then, lincoln finds in the institutions of the constitution the best means of preventing passions—whether they be of the lawless or the ambitious—from disrupting the peace and liberty of the american people. these institutions are bulwarks of freedom. but we are left wondering how lincoln can explain the reasonableness of the constitution in light of his emphasis on the passions of the revolution. how can passion produce such a remarkably rational document? the fact that americans were more or less united in their passions is at least part of the answer, but this is far from fully satisfying since having a common hatred hardly explains the appearance of reasonable boundaries for political life. the more compelling explanation could be found in americans’ shared acceptance of the principles of the declaration of independence, which lincoln understood to animate the constitution.12 the american people did not simply want independence or war in 1776; they wanted a government that would protect their natural rights, particularly the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, recognizing all the while that everyone is created equal. for lincoln, the logic of the constitution proceeds from these principles, upon which the americans justified their passionate response to british rule. however lincoln understands the source of the constitution’s reasonableness, he ends the lyceum address by reinforcing the need to have a civic education that facilitates the people’s attachment to the constitution. the people have thus far been held together, he argues, by their mutual love for those heroes who have bequeathed upon us the blessings of independence and 87 foss liberty, as well as the political institutions for preserving these. thus far every family had access to one of these heroes who were a “living history” of what had transpired between 1776 and 1790. but this history is slowly dying away. “they were a forest of giant oaks,” but even the best timber decays. what is needed now are new pillars “hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason.” passion, lincoln says, helped to establish the government, but it cannot maintain it. intelligence, morality, and “a reverence for the constitution and laws are now needed.” with them the “proud fabric of freedom” can be preserved for time unforeseeable. a constitution for democracy though madison’s and lincoln’s arguments in favor of a popular attachment to the constitution are given in response to different problems, the arguments they make are remarkably similar. most obviously, these arguments come from the perspective of constitutionalism, but it is also the case that both are supports of democratic government. both start with the assumption that democratic deliberation operates best when the ground rules are clear and firm. liberty is best protected when it is properly bound. the best way to preserve popular self-rule is to secure the institutional structures that give form to democracy. this general agreement about constitutionalism and the protection of democracy can be further specified by looking at five areas in which the two texts are fundamentally similar. the first similarity is that both texts hope for a government animated by reason and not passion. as madison says, a good government is controlled by reason and in turn controls the passions. lincoln agrees. a government of reason is the opposite extreme of mob rule, which indulges the passions without consulting reason. rule by reason, both indicate, is the best means of providing order, securing individual liberty, and encouraging public deliberation. while it is difficult to under-emphasize this point, it may nevertheless seem strange. for instance, the most famous part of federalist 49 suggests that we cannot count very much on people’s minds. there is no sense hoping for a nation of philosophers, and therefore we have to depend upon the prejudice of the people rather than their ability to think and deliberate. individuals are often timid and unsure of their ideas without outside support. lincoln’s praise of reason also appears a bit underhanded. he calls it cold and calculating. he also relies heavily on religious madison, lincoln, and civic education 88 imagery. do these authors really trust reason to sit in judgment and hew new pillars for the temple of liberty? the answer is yes—madison and lincoln do trust reason and think that it can guide human deliberation. the problem is giving it the scepter rather than human passion. history and experience both teach that humans have great difficulty acting on the basis of logic rather than their self-interests and desires. to build a government that depends upon philosophers ruling is folly. instead, institutions have to be crafted in such a way that they cool passions and require deliberation. such a government would then approach reason, even if imperfectly. madison and lincoln believe that the mind needs supports not because they distrust reason, but because they distrust passion. the relationship between reason and passion is further clarified by the second similarity. designing a government that is controlled by reason is difficult given the human inclination to act upon passion and self-interest rather than the intellect. very few people, perhaps none, will be philosophers in the full sense of the word. hardly anyone is fully capable of obeying their reason to the exclusion of their desires. if we could, then institutional forms would be far less necessary. something akin to pure democracy would be possible. but both madison and lincoln are sober in this regard. as the former puts it in federalist 51, “if men were angels, no government would be necessary.” the trick at hand is framing a government for humans to be administered by humans. none of this is news to lincoln, which is why he discusses at length the trouble of mob violence. because it is easier to see this when mobs are far from home, lincoln considered it rhetorically prudent not to dwell on the lovejoy affair. what is needed, then, is to move from the spirit of the mob to the spirit of the pre-established law. the first will too easily act on passion. the latter might not be perfect, but it is more likely to result in a reasonable rather than impassioned judgment. these remarks might lead to the conclusion that the authors equate all systems of law over irrational mobs, but this is not the case. explaining why not leads to the third similarity between the authors: namely, that the united states constitution provides a reasonable frame of government that, though not perfect, is good. indeed, this is madison’s (along with hamilton’s and jay’s) burden in the federalist, to show that the constitution is better than the articles of confederation and worth adopting. he makes clear in no. 37 that he does not think it is a perfect document, but a perfect one was not to be expected. this paper in particular shows the difficulties of designing a 89 foss polity. federalist 49 is not as explicit in naming the difficulties of drafting a constitution, but that there are difficulties is one of the reasons for not having future conventions. similarly, lincoln does not put all systems of law on the same level. though he calls for a general veneration of the constitution, he never asks for blind allegiance. he admits that bad laws are possible even in otherwise decent regimes, and america is no different. what he does ask is that laws be respected as laws. individual policies may be misguided or even, to use his word, bad. these he explains should be repealed and grievances corrected using the legitimate formal means. until they are changed, so long as they are not “too intolerable,” they are to be followed out of general regard for the system as a whole. lincoln thus recognizes and encourages his audience to recognize a standard that is higher than the law. without such a standard no law could be called bad. and what he says of the law would apply equally to constitutions. they are not all necessarily good. yet it is quite clear that he believes the constitution of the united states is reasonably good, or at least consistent with that higher standard. we can say then that both madison and lincoln believe that the constitution has considerable merit, but we might wonder why given what they have said about the weakness of human nature in following reason. the fourth similarity is their common way of explaining why the constitution is in fact good, and both point to the revolutionary war against great britain. madison explains that a universal disdain for “the ancient government” prevented a multiplicity of opinions on matters of great importance from becoming violent. though that war is fading into the past, factions and political parties have yet to clearly define themselves, thus allowing the philadelphia convention to conduct its business on the shoestrings, so to speak, of the revolution. lincoln also believes that the revolution was of decisive importance in the crafting of the constitution. under its influence, divisive passions were “smothered” while a common passion against the british directed the people’s energies. writing later in time than madison, lincoln holds that the influence of the revolution has continued to protect the business of the people, though this is fading as its heroes pass away. both madison and lincoln believe that the circumstances that allowed for the constitution to be written as it was are not likely to be repeated. if, then, the conditions for designing a new polity are not favorable, the need to preserve what has already been established—so long as what has been established is in fact reasonably good— becomes all the more important. as a fifth comparison, both agree that the prospect of perpetuating the political system depends decisively on the opinion of the people. their attachment to their madison, lincoln, and civic education 90 political institutions is like fertile soil that preserves the life of the polity. even the most reasonable governments, madison explains, would be instable without the good opinion of the governed. and because it is unlikely that all will in fact recognize the reason for preserving the constitution or any other decent regime, the general prejudice should favor it. lincoln agrees with much of madison’s reasoning about the attachment of the people and why it is necessary. one of the chief risks of mobs, he claims, is that it detaches people from their political institutions. lawlessness desires the incapacity of government, precisely so it can be more lawless. and those who are happy to obey become increasingly wary of a system that fails to protect their lives, liberty, and property. the more the law is disregarded, the greater the potential for a tyrant to shake all restraints to the floor and do as he wishes. the best means of preventing both lawlessness and tyranny are to take great care to ensure that the people are unwavering in their veneration of the constitution. in all of this, however, it is crucial to see that neither author thinks that the constitution is an end in itself, nor are such things as order and liberty. these are great goods, to be sure, but they are good because they are essential for a yet higher good: human life lived in accord with reason. as we saw in the first similarity between the two authors, both hope for a political system that privileges reason and controls passion. if the constitution failed to procure such a good, then it would be an open question as to whether either madison or lincoln would push for the people’s attachment. it may depend upon the prospects of having something better. what is clear is that they do support the constitution and hope others will too, because it stifles passions and makes room for reasonable deliberation. in other words, it successfully secures the conditions for democratic life. neither sees veneration of the constitution replacing reasonable discourse about policies or even the constitution itself. what they do hope to counter is the tendency to want to create something new in the name of democracy and in the process irreparably damage present goods. positive versus passive maintenance though there are striking similarities between the arguments of federalist 49 and the lyceum address, there is an important difference when it comes to attaching the people to their regime. in simplest form, lincoln is more concerned about positive civic education than madison, at least in 91 foss these texts. above i quoted at length lincoln’s call to teach the rule of law from the moment of birth onward. no parallel passage can be found in federalist 49. granted, madison has little need to talk about civic education in his essay. an outburst like that of lincoln’s would do little to placate anti-federalists’ fears. nevertheless, madison speaks of the importance of public opinion without saying anything about shaping it. the impression is that it develops naturally under a healthy system. the longer it continues to produce decent government, the more the people will grow attached to it. the difficulty here is that the federalist generally touts human agency over organic growth. in federalist 1 hamilton argues that the world is waiting to see if government can in fact be created through reflection and choice, or whether we are forever subject to accident and force. in no. 37 madison agrees with this sentiment though he also makes clear that the deliberate crafting of institutions is far from easy and often involves disagreeable compromises. no. 49, however, has a different feel. stability, it seems, requires less reflection and choice and more veneration on the part of the people. he even hedges a bit on the founding itself. it was a deliberate effort, but one made possible under the protective influences of the revolution. endless reflection and choice on our frame of government simply cannot be had. this is not to say that reflection and choice are impossible within the frame. deliberation over policies and laws is required. but why will they be content deliberating on small matters and not the largest? this is the question lincoln hits upon in the lyceum address when he speaks of those who belong to the “family of the lion, and the tribe of the eagle.” those of the highest ambition will not be satisfied legislators when they could be legislators, law-givers, founders. “towering genius disdains a beaten path,” says lincoln, “it seeks regions hitherto unexplored.” he does not see it as a question of if such a person arises, but when. and when that time comes, “it will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs.” it is in preparation for those who find no satisfaction in filling an office created by a predecessor that lincoln calls for robust civic education. the difference between madison and lincoln is deeper than it first appears. though they both think the constitution establishes a reasonable government, they disagree as to whether the founding is best characterized by reason or passion. not surprisingly, the founder madison understands the constitution to be not just a reasonable document, but the product of reason. he has good evidence for this. no one was more eager or attentive at the convention, and no one took madison, lincoln, and civic education 92 such assiduous notes on the proceedings. we know from those notes that, while passions and sectional differences surely did burn at the convention, reasonable compromises were consistently reached. this does not mean everyone was satisfied with those compromises, not even madison. but without the strong influence of reason, deliberation and compromise are impossible. lincoln would not dispute that reason beat out passion at the convention, but he does suggest rather directly that the convention deliberated successfully because the delegates were still under a common passion against britain. during times of peace, lincoln expects the baser passions of human nature to have their influence. external dangers have the advantage of uniting our interests against a common foe. the common disdain of an enemy not only stifled “the basest principles of our nature,” it also caused these otherwise harmful passions to “become the active agents in the advancement of the noblest of cause—that of establishing and maintaining civil and religious liberty.” lincoln’s position is that the revolution did not free the founders from their passions so much as directed them to a common good. on one hand, madison’s and lincoln’s accounts of the founding are not all that different. both recognize that ordinary passions were superseded by the passions of the war, and both saw the product of the 1787 convention as a document capable of sustaining reasonable government. the difference is more pronounced when one looks ahead to their recommendations for maintaining that document. madison sees the founding as uniquely reasonable and believes it must be sustained by relying on a patriotic passion. he speaks of veneration as a “prejudice,” which by definition lacks judgment. lincoln, in emphasizing the spiritedness of the revolution, argues that patriotism can only be maintained if it is supplied with intelligence. unlike passions, however, intellectual habits do not arise of their own volition. they have to be cultivated and taught. succinctly put, madison calls for veneration in order to support reason while lincoln hopes reason will keep alive the spirit of veneration. this difference accounts for their differing remarks about time. madison says that time bestows reverence on everything, even constitutions. lincoln sees time as silent artillery aimed at the regime’s pillars. what will we get if we allow time to do its work? madison hopes to see a people attached to their political institutions while lincoln argues we will get a crumbled edifice unlikely to attract support from anyone except lawless mobsters and ambitious tyrants. madison might be right if the constitution fulfills a natural need for americans, or—to be aristotelian about it—if it helps them fulfill their natures. happy citizens will likely be attached to that which facilitates their 93 foss happiness, and time is the best test of its success. but madison is never this aristotelian. nor is it easy to argue that the constitution is as natural as the greek polis. from this perspective, lincoln seems right in viewing the constitution as an edifice that requires deliberate upkeep. civic education is necessary to combat the effects of time. teaching the reasonable constitution lincoln’s call for an active role in maintaining our political institutions by way of civic education eases the tension in the federalist papers between a constitution crafted through reflection and choice on one hand and venerably accepted on the other. the type of civic education that lincoln is calling for is not one of blind faith, but one that elevates reason and makes reflection and choice continually meaningful. he is opening for himself and future generations a space for human agency that is on par with that enjoyed by madison and the founders. by opening up such a space, lincoln hopes to resolve the problem of ambition in a regime governed by a written constitution. he recognizes in his address that the founders were men of ambition whose reputations were tied to the success of their experiment. they triumphed and “thousands have won their deathless names in making it so.” the problem with their victory is that it leaves nothing but desk work for posterity, nothing to satisfy those with ambition on the same scale as the founders. men like lincoln were born too late to be founders. now what? there is “no distinction in adding story to story, upon the monuments of fame, erected to the memory of others.” the passive maintenance hinted at in federalist 49 will be particularly dreary to those eager to earn the praise of their countrymen. the trick is to find room for these souls to make a name for themselves without endangering the regime. lincoln’s solution, at least in the lyceum address, is to make civic education a means of active maintenance. for this to work the assumption has to be that the constitution is reasonable and that it has its own internal logic discernable through human effort. this assumption does not preclude lincoln’s argument that the founding was animated by passion. that passion is what allowed for a constitution of logic to be written. so long as a patriotic fervor lived through the “living history” of revolutionary war heroes, the preservation of the polity did not depend upon americans’ understanding of its logic. as the founding generation dies, however, the passions of the revolution cannot keep the system afloat. lincoln has to find something exciting about being born madison, lincoln, and civic education 94 too late. he finds it in the fact that his is the first generation freed from the spirit of 1776 so as to appreciate the constitution on the basis of reason rather than passion. what is exciting is that there is much to discover in the constitution. though a relatively short document, it is a boundless frontier for the mind. its ambiguities are like deep caverns to be explored. the tensions within it create puzzles and riddles for the intellect to ponder. it calls for interpretation, yet it has a discernable meaning. how its words apply to new or changing circumstances will be the subject of much debate. and there is honor to be found in getting it right and convincing one’s peers of some new insight. when viewed properly, it yields a field of glory always open to a harvest. is this enough for those of the highest ambition? would an alexander or caesar be satisfied with a supreme court appointment? probably not. but towering genius will always disdain beaten paths. the real question is whether most americans understand the constitution as a reasonable document with a subtle logic worthy of careful study. if so, then those of the tribe of the eagle will find it difficult to damage the institutions that protect peace and liberty, because the people would recognize any such attempt as dangerous, illegitimate, and unreasonable. the type of civic education lincoln is calling for then is not one that will produce a blind faith, a willingness to follow the constitution no matter the consequences. to be sure, he does think a faith in the document is crucial, but not the sort of faith that refuses to ask questions. it is a belief that probes, a faith seeking reason. what is to be believed is not that the constitution was divinely inspired, but that it was the work of reasonable human beings, and he would have us trust in its reasonableness. even those clauses known to be the result of compromise are to be viewed as having a logic to them. this is because the constitution is to be viewed as the product of a deliberative reason rather than the outcome of any one person’s or faction’s desire. it is this reason that lincoln hopes will hold the attachment of the people. one of the key benefits of elevating the constitution’s reason, particularly given our debates today, is that it eases the apparent dichotomy between constitutionalism and democracy. much of democratic theory looks upon established constitutions as arbitrarily imposed by generations long put to rest. from this perspective attachment to an old constitution is an irrational holding-on to the familiar that has to be overcome if democracy is to work. various democratic roadblocks might be pointed out to show the distrust founders had in popular majorities. and certain passages from federalist 49 do little to calm these fears. lincoln’s active maintenance should be welcomed for cooling this debate. he insists that the constitution is not arbitrary. democracy at its best should 95 foss also result in reasonable rather than arbitrary outcomes, and the constitution’s purpose is to help american politics achieve this end. madison and lincoln thus agree that if we want to keep democracy we should be attached to the constitution that frames it. from their standpoint, democracy works best when it is limited and more effort should be spent understanding how those limits make democracy work. lincoln goes further in this regard than madison. he does not think people would form attachments to those limits on their own. reverence is not organic; it must be cultivated. yet neither he nor madison would say that this veneration replaces the mind’s capacity to think about politics in america. rather, both agree that the attachment of the people to their political institutions is a precondition for reasonable government and therefore should be viewed in a positive light. notes 1. both of these texts are easily accessible. my references can be found in madison 1999 and lincoln 2009. 2. compare, for example, matthews 2005 and sheehan 2009. 3. see gish and klinghard 2012, as well as rakove 1999. 4. the lyceum address is a classic for psychoanalysis. for a brief review of these, see curry 2005. 5. jaffa 1959, 183–232. jaffa moderates his positon about the character of the american founding in jaffa 2004. 6. see, for example, ackerman 1991 and levinson 2011. 7. madison might be the harder case here, though jeremy d. bailey helpfully shows how the madisonian case for reverence does not undermine deliberation; see bailey 2012. see also manzer 2001. madison, lincoln, and civic education 96 8. colleen a. sheehan and alan gibson take opposing views on madison and civic education. i am open to sheehan’s argument that madison favored it, but in comparing federalist 49 with the lyceum address, lincoln takes a direct stand on the issue in connection with institutional maintenance. for an exchange between sheehan and gibson see gibson 2005a, gibson 2005b, and sheehan 2005. 9. jefferson did not make this suggestion with reference to the united states constitution, but the virginia constitution. madison treats it, however, as a suggestion that could be applied to the u.s. constitution in order to address the importance of longevity for the proposed plan of government. 10. madison 1977. 11. corrections and additions to this paragraph are greatly indebted to the suggestions given by an anonymous reviewer, to whom i am most grateful. 12. the most telling example of the connection lincoln sees between the declaration of independence and the constitution comes in his january 1861 reflection that the declaration is an apple of gold adorned and protected by the constitution. see lincoln 1953, 4: 168–169. works cited ackerman, bruce. 1991. we the people, volume 1: foundations. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. bailey, jeremy d. 2012. “should we venerate that which we cannot love? james madison on constitutional imperfection.” political research quarterly 65.4: 732–744. curry, richard o. 2005. “conscious or subconscious caesarism: a critique of recent scholarly attempts to put lincoln on the analyst’s couch.” in lincoln’s american dream: clashing political perspectives, eds. kenneth l. deutsch and joseph r. fornieri. washington: potomac books. 147–153. 97 foss gibson, alan. 2005a. “madison on democracy, property, and civic education: a reply to matthews and sheehan.” review of politics 67.1: 69–76. _____. 2005b. “veneration and vigilance: james madison and public opinion, 1785–1800.” review of politics 67.1: 5–35. gish, dustin a., and daniel p. klinghard. 2012. “thomas jefferson’s vision for republican constitutionalism: literary structure, enlightenment methodology, and political reform in notes on the state of virginia.” journal of politics 74.1: 35–51. jaffa, harry v. 1959. crisis of the house divided: an interpretation of the issues in the lincoln-douglas debates. chicago: university of chicago press. _____. 2004. a new birth of freedom: abraham lincoln and the coming of the civil war. lanham, md: rowman and littlefield. levinson, sanford. 2011. constitutional faith. princeton: princeton university press. lincoln, abraham. 1953. the collected works of abraham lincoln, ed. roy p. basler. new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press. _____. 2009. “the perpetuation of our political institutions.” in the language of liberty: the political speeches and writings of abraham lincoln, ed. joseph r. fornieri. washington: regnery publishing. 24–33. madison, james. 1977. “madison to philip mazzei, october 8, 1788.” in the papers of james madison, vol. 11, 7 march 1788–1 march 1789, eds. robert a. rutland and charles f. hobson. charlottesville: university press of virginia. 278–279. _____. 1999. “no. 49: method of guarding against the encroachments of any one department of government by appealing to the people through a convention.” in the federalist papers, eds. clinton rossiter and charles r. kesler. new york: mentor books. 281–285. manzer, robert a. 2011. “a science of politics: hume, the federalist, and the politics of constitutional attachment.” american journal of political science 45.3: 508–518. madison, lincoln, and civic education 98 matthews, richard. 2005. “james madison’s political theory: hostage to democratic fortune.” review of politics 67.1: 49–67. rakove, jack n. 1999. “the super-legality of the constitution, or, a federalist critique of bruce ackerman’s new federalism.” yale law journal 108: 1931–1958. sheehan, colleen a. 2005. “public opinion and the formation of civic character in madison’s republican theory.” review of politics 67.1: 37–48. _____. 2009. james madison and the spirit of republican self-government. new york: cambridge university press. microsoft word 6 plato lemoine article.docx [expositions 11.1 (2017) 157–175] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 “we are the champions”: mousikē and cultural chauvinism in plato’s republic rebecca lemoine florida atlantic university “where then, oh socrates, will we find a good singer of such things, when you leave us?” “hellas is large,” he replied, “oh cebes, and there are doubtless good men in it, and many barbarian races. among them all seek and examine such a singer, sparing neither money nor toil, as there is nothing on which you could more favorably spend money.” –socrates, plato’s phaedo 78a scholarship on plato and the poets often approaches the topic at the meta-level, investigating the reasoning behind the censoring of poetry in the republic as well as the consistency of plato’s treatment of poetry. much ink has been spilt making sense of such tensions as socrates’ selected purging of the contents of greek poetry in books ii and iii of the republic and his apparent banning of all poetic mimesis in book x,1 the censure of poetry in the republic yet the celebration of poetic madness in the phaedrus,2 and the incongruity of a writer as poetic as plato condemning poetry.3 not all commentaries focus on poetry in the abstract, however; some analyze plato’s use of particular poets, notably homer, hesiod, pindar, solon, simonides, aeschylus, and euripides.4 yet in the vast scholarly literature on plato and the poets, plato’s engagement with non-greek poetry has largely gone unexamined. mousikē and cultural chauvinism in plato’s republic 158 in the case of the republic, this represents a major oversight. after all, the dialogue opens with socrates sharing his judgment on greek versus non-greek music. as later discussed in greater detail, it is appropriate when investigating poetry in the republic to consider the role of music more broadly, for the greek word mousikē (for which i will use the translation “music” or “the arts” interchangeably) encompasses poetry. recalling how yesterday he went down to the piraeus—athens’ bustling port city and home to its massive population of mostly non-greek slaves and metics or resident aliens—socrates explains he was there to witness the inaugural staging of the bendideia and “pray to the goddess,” presumably the thracian (non-greek) goddess bendis.5 socrates says he found both the procession of the athenians and that of the thracians “beautiful (καλὴ)” (327a). though little is known of what these processions entailed, athenian processions typically involved athenians of all ages and sexes weaving their way through the city in colorful costume while carrying symbols and ritual objects. along the way, or upon reaching the sanctuary, there would be performances of music and dance in connection with ritual acts of sacrifice. socrates’ judgment of the athenian and thracian processions therefore likely reflects his attitude towards the greek and non-greek mousikē each emblematizes. by thus opening the dialogue, plato alludes to the importance of the intersection between politics, culture, and the arts. he invites readers, in effect, to consider the dialogue’s treatment of poetry, and mousikē more generally, in terms of the arts’ embeddedness within particular cultures. plato’s interest in the political effects of foreign music re-emerges during the crafting of the city of speech. despite socrates’ positivity at the beginning of the dialogue towards incorporating thracian mousikē into athenian society, when it comes to kallipolis he recommends guarding against changes to a new form of music. this is because it is essential to expose citizens to the right music, so once that music is discovered and set down in law there must be no innovation. if the music of kallipolis is truly ideal—that is, if it is best at creating good characters—then it must be preserved; for change from the ideal form of music is necessarily change to a worse form of music. though the guardians must watch for the internal development of any new forms of music, socrates implies that the greatest danger comes from visitors from abroad when he says that if a man “should arrive in our city” expressing the desire to exhibit his skill in imitating all things, he “should be sent away to another city” because “there is no such man in our city among us, nor is it lawful for such a man to arise among us” (398a–b). any poet whose poetry does not conform to the strict musical requirements of kallipolis must, in other words, become or remain a foreigner. 159 lemoine how does one reconcile socrates’ expressed approval of foreign music at the dialogue’s opening with his hostility towards it during the discussion of kallipolis? this article argues that, upon close examination, the music of kallipolis blends greek and non-greek elements. this suggests socrates intends not to exclude foreign poetry, but, conversely, to ensure its inclusion. socrates’ insistence that the ideal city not change from a form of music that, as it turns out, harmonizes the greek and the non-greek makes sense as a response to the athenians’ segregation of athenian and thracian mousikē during the bendideia. in light of evidence that athenians were motivated to sanction the cult of bendis less out of appreciation for thracian culture than out of desire to shore up their own domination, and that greek poetry played a major role in fostering this attitude of cultural chauvinism, kallipolis’ harmonizing of greek and non-greek represents an improvement upon athens’ approach to music. it reveals the sanctioning of the bendideia to be but a half-measure, a token gesture that in actuality betrays the athenians’ unwillingness to harmonize with other cultures. against the backdrop of this false harmony, socrates recommends a musical education that promotes a simple harmony of two cultures. kallipolis is not socrates’ final word, however. rather, it represents a stepping-stone on the way towards the image of the cosmos that replaces the homeric model: the eight distinct notes of the sirens—matching the eight notes of the diatonic scale, each corresponding to a particular culture—forming a perfect harmony as presented in the myth of er. as the reference to the death-luring sirens indicates, such a complex and divine form of mousikē may represent the peak of philosophic education rather than its beginnings. nonetheless, this suggests the philosopher brings to political education the goal of promoting harmony between cultures, if only on a limited scale. i. mousikē, education, and politics the topic of music first arises when discussing the education of the class of citizens whose job it is to guard the city. socrates has just elicited his interlocutors’ agreement that the character of the guardians is like that of a noble dog—spirited when defending its master from enemy attacks, yet gentle towards friends. to this end, socrates proposes that guardians receive a dual education consisting of “gymnastics for bodies, and music (μουσική) for the soul” (376e). the goal of the guardians’ education is to cultivate the proper character by tuning the spirited and philosophic parts of the soul “to the proper degree of tension and relaxation” (412a). if the thumos or spirit is tuned too high, then the logistikon or philosophic part will be drowned out and the guardian will mousikē and cultural chauvinism in plato’s republic 160 be savage and cruel. conversely, if the philosophic part is tuned too high, then the guardian will be soft and weak-willed owing to a lack of spiritedness. it is important, therefore, that guardians receive the proper exposure to music. the assumption that music can be used to shape character would not have seemed strange to most greeks. to understand why, it is necessary first to grasp the meaning of “music” in the ancient greek world. any art over which the muses preside, “music (μουσική)” in the ancient sense refers to a union of instrumental music, poetic speech, and dance.6 hence, when socrates first proposes education in music, he reminds that music consists not merely of rhythm and melody, but also “speeches (λόγους)”— both “true (ἀληθές)” speech and “myths (μύθους)” (376e–377a). asserting the importance of the latter form of speech in educating children, socrates launches into a discussion of “myth makers (τοῖς μυθοποιοῖς)” occupying most of books ii and iii and reappearing in book x. these mythmakers turn out to be the poets whose stories socrates finds in need of censorship. modern readers often struggle to make sense of why during a discussion on music socrates quickly shifts to talking about poetry, yet for plato’s contemporaries the transition would have seemed seamless. while purely instrumental music existed—often accompanying libations, sacrifices, supplications, and other ceremonial rites—music was more commonly thought of in conjunction with poetry, as poets typically performed their stories to musical accompaniment. this is seen in homeric epic, which depicts bards singing the stories of famous heroes. even with the growing popularity of written work in plato’s day, poems were generally still sung in public, performative contexts, such as at symposia or festivals. consequently, when greeks thought of music, they inevitably thought of the performance of famous poems. it is therefore appropriate to think of the dialogue’s censorship of poetry within the larger context of the censorship of music, for poetry is subsumed under the broader category of music.7 both the lyrical and the sonic aspects of music are regarded in the republic as capable of exercising immense influence on the soul. in terms of a musical work’s speeches or lyrics, socrates details at length the damage done to souls exposed at a young age to myths that depict gods and other heroes committing injustices such as egregious acts of violence and deception. hearing repeatedly that the most celebrated beings engage in unjust behaviors habituates one to delight in these behaviors. it is important, therefore, that those training to be guardians hear tales that only celebrate truly just characters so they will gravitate towards good behaviors. equally important, however, is the musical mode or the manner of rhythm and melody. in fact, it may be more 161 lemoine important. as nina valiquette moreau argues, in platonic thought “music assimilates itself to the soul as a kind of extra-rational perception or recognition that, in turn, prepares the soul for reasoned judgment.”8 this occurs owing to the structural similarities of music and soul. even if good tales are told, they cannot have the proper effect if the wrong musical mode accompanies them. singing of a hero’s just actions to a tune that elicits feelings of displeasure would likely orient guardians to develop distaste for justice. hence, both components of music—the lyrics and the musical mode—must work together to produce harmony. without guardians who possess harmonious souls, the city itself cannot be in harmony. socrates makes clear the direct connection between music and politics in the following passage in book iv: so therefore, to put it briefly, the guardians of the city must cleave to this, so that they are not corrupted unawares but may in every way be on guard against it: not to allow innovations concerning gymnastics or music contrary to the established order. […] for one must be aware of changes to a new form of music, taking it to be a danger to the whole. for nowhere are the ways of music (μουσικῆς τρόποι) moved without the greatest political laws being moved, as damon says and i am persuaded. (424b–c) drawing on the work of damon—an athenian music theorist considered the leading authority on the moral effects of music—socrates claims that music is not mere “entertainment,” but rather the foundation on which the entire social order rests. if guardians are not exposed to the right music, their society will develop bad nomoi, i.e., bad laws and customs.9 as robert wallace explains, “in damon’s view (as plato represents it), musical styles not only ‘fit’ behavior, they also determine or shape it, both for individuals and for society.”10 the closest plato comes to explaining the mechanisms by which music influences politics is through adeimantus’ comment that music “ever so little establishes itself, gently flowing underneath into the characters and habits; and from there it emerges larger in contracts among one another, and from the contracts it attacks the laws and regimes with much, oh socrates, licentiousness, until ending with everything private and public turned upside down” (424d–e). this statement accords with the anthropological principle that the city is man writ large. individual education matters because individuals are responsible for making and practicing the rules of their society, and they bring their education to bear on these political mousikē and cultural chauvinism in plato’s republic 162 activities. hence, if music plays a central role in character formation, it follows that music will shape the character of a society. one implication of the close relationship between music and nomoi is that if one wants to understand the nature of any given society, one can discover clues to its identity in its music. in essence, music can serve as a proxy for the general character of the whole society. ancient greeks generally believed that certain musical modes corresponded with particular regions, and that the type of music principally heard was expressive of the dominant moral character of each region. the republic takes this idea further, suggesting a distinction might also be made between societies that feature a single musical mode and those that incorporate multiple modes. on one end of the spectrum lie timocratic regimes like sparta, which generally emphasize a single mode: the spirited melodies and rhythms appropriate for warfare. on the other end of the spectrum are democratic regimes like athens, which embrace all musical modes due to the multicolored dispositions of their citizens. democratic people are the most likely to enjoy sweets from a variety of different lands and, according to socrates, “in likening such food and such a way of life to melody and song in the panharmonic mode and in all rhythms, we would make a correct likeness” (404d–e). regime types translate, in other words, into correspondent musical types. regimes that reject diversity are monoharmonic, while those that incorporate the full diversity of human beings are panharmonic. in the next section, i show why readers must take into account the monoharmonic-topanharmonic spectrum when interpreting socrates’ warning to guard the city against new forms of music. while this warning may seem to operate to exclude foreign music, close inspection of the music of kallipolis reveals it to be a harmony of two sets of myths and musical modes: one greek, one non-greek. thus, when socrates warns against changes to a new form of music, he means changes to either a monoharmonic (single mode) or a panharmonic (all modes) form of music. the music of kallipolis lies somewhere in between, neither rejecting diversity nor indiscriminately embracing all ways of life. as sections iii and iv will argue, this music functions merely as a form of early training, however; guardians must first become habituated to a music that harmonizes two opposing characters or cultures before they can withstand the sublime, panharmonic music of philosophy. 163 lemoine ii. the mousikē of kallipolis: simple harmony though many have written on the republic’s censuring of greek music, often unnoted is that socrates and his interlocutors go on to propose a form of music that harmonizes greek and nongreek myths and musical modes. in terms of the speech content of the music of kallipolis, though socrates approves of certain lines of greek poetry (e.g., 389e, 393a), he implies that if they aim to produce citizens who do not do to their friends what they do to their enemies, they will have to look beyond traditional greek myths. against the greek model of unrestrained violence, socrates recommends a foreign tale of brotherhood, a tale he says is “nothing new […] but a phoenician thing” (414c).11 the tale he tells is one of citizens as autochthonous, or as brothers born of the same earth—an unmistakable allusion to the myth of cadmus. according to this myth, the phoenician king cadmus founded the ancient greek city of thebes by slaying a dragon and planting its teeth in the ground, from whence sprang a race of fierce, armed men called spartoi. since these men posed a danger to him, cadmus threw stones at them until—each thinking a fellow spartoi had hit him—they began fighting each other. the five who survived the slaughter helped cadmus establish the city. socrates’ decision to draw not only on the acceptable parts of greek poetry but also on this nongreek myth in constructing the music of kallipolis is strange for two reasons. first, it is curious that the main myth designed to promote social order is not greek, but non-greek. this might not seem unusual if there were no such myths on which socrates could draw in greek poetry. greek poetry was filled, however, with autochthony myths. the most popular version of the myth posited that all athenians were descendants of erichthonios, who miraculously sprang from the soil of attica. the myth lent a sense of naturalness to the city, as opposed to the artificiality of cities with foreign founders. the athenian myth’s focus on the origination of the same from the same, on the lack of foreign blood in the athenian genealogical tree, points to one of the myth’s central functions: assuring athenians of their superiority over foreigners.12 from this it should be clear just how scandalous it is that socrates recommends that the ideal city draw on the phoenician myth of autochthony, rather than the customary athenian myth. through the device of literary allusion, plato reminds his fellow athenians that they are not the only ones who believe they are indigenous to the land, and that such myths are mere social constructions not to be taken as literal truth. the allusion to cadmus in socrates’ use of the phoenician myth is strange, secondly, because cadmus’ founding of thebes is a story of conflict and loss—hardly a fitting source for a myth mousikē and cultural chauvinism in plato’s republic 164 designed to promote social harmony and communal salvation.13 the noble lie is adopted to convince the guardians, and later the rest of the city, that “as though the land they are in were a mother and nurse, they must plan for and defend it, if anyone attacks it, and they must think of the other citizens as being brothers and born of the earth” (414e). yet, the genesis of the tale reveals that kallipolis cannot thrive without the influence of foreigners, thus calling into question the assumed division between citizens and foreigners. who can justly be excluded from the brotherhood of kallipolis, if the founding myth itself can be traced back to foreigners? might other aspects of the city’s identity be of foreign origin? if so, in fighting foreigners, are the guardians of kallipolis, like the spartoi, in some sense fighting themselves? that plato connects kallipolis’ myth of autochthony with the founding of thebes is additionally illuminating. in greek drama, thebes serves as an “anti-athens” or “mirror opposite of athens,” a place where disorder and tragedy reign.14 thebes is the land of dionysus, descendent of cadmus. typically presented in the greek pantheon as a foreign god, an outsider from the east, dionysus brings chaos everywhere he goes. nothing illustrates this more palpably than euripides’ bacchae, where dionysus’ arrival occasions the destabilization of a formerly well-ordered society. by the end of the play, everything the city considers sacred comes undone. the old become young, men transform into women, and mothers kill their own young.15 like wine, of which dionysus is the god, the foreigner dionysus breaks down all boundaries, making the impermissible permissible. plumbing the depths of socrates’ seemingly off-handed remark that the noble lie is in fact a “phoenician thing” one thus discovers the personification of barbarism at the heart of kallipolis’ educational project. the music used to educate kallipolis’ guardians to act boldly towards foreigners and gently towards fellow citizens draws for its content from the mythology of a place that epitomizes foreignness. in this way, plato subtly exposes the discordance in kallipolis’ treatment of foreigners as natural enemies (470c).16 if there were any doubt after studying its lyrical content that the music of kallipolis blends the greek and non-greek, these doubts are further dispelled when socrates and his interlocutors arrive at a discussion of the second aspect of music: “the manner of song and melody” (398c). specifically, he considers the proper harmonic mode and rhythm, which he says must fit with the speech. given the kind of character the music must inculcate, socrates eliminates the “wailing” modes—namely, the “mixed lydian” and the “tight lydian”—and the “soft” modes “suitable for symposia,” including the ionian and some lydian modes. left are two modes: the dorian and the 165 lemoine phrygian. according to aristotle, the dorian is the mode most capable of inducing one to act “moderately and steadily,” whereas the phrygian has an “inspiring (ἐνθουσιαστικοὺς)” or stimulating effect (politics 1340b1–5). put differently, the dorian is a grave and serious mode typically associated with military music, whereas the phrygian is a wild and playful mode commonly associated with orgiastic ecstasy. aristotle critiques socrates’ decision to include both modes, rather than the dorian alone, on two counts. first, he contends that the effect of the phrygian mode corresponds with that of the aulos; it thus makes no sense for socrates to allow the phrygian mode yet forbid the aulos. second, aristotle argues that the proper mode for education is the dorian, which is “most expressive of a manly character,” unlike the phrygian mode, which is “orgiastic (ὀργιαστικὰ)” and “emotional (παθητικά)” (politics 1342a28).17 the mode is aptly named, as phrygia is often considered the other birthplace of dionysus. despite aristotle’s critiques, plato’s ideal city integrates rather than suppresses the dionysian impulses present in mankind. just as the lyrical content of the music of kallipolis drew on a non-greek myth, the melody incorporates a harmonic mode associated with non-greeks. the music of kallipolis represents a harmonizing, then, of greek and non-greek. in light of the harmony of greek and non-greek present in the music of kallipolis, socrates’ decision to reject panharmonic instruments—or those capable of playing a variety of notes—might seem contradictory. socrates’ prime example of a panharmonic instrument, the aulos, could emit multiple sounds from each aperture as opposed to the singular sound made by striking a string on the lyre. it is therefore rejected. as with the noble lie that formed the speech content of kallipolis’ music, socrates insists, “it’s nothing new we’re doing, my friend […] in choosing apollo and apollo’s instruments ahead of marsyas and his instruments” (399e, emphasis added). this time, however, the reference is not to a phoenician tale, but to a phrygian one (herodotus 7.26). according to the myth, athena invented the aulos, but threw it away when she discovered it ruined her beauty by making her cheeks puff out when she played it. picking up the discarded instrument in phrygia, the satyr marsyas became so proficient at playing it that he dared to challenge the god apollo to a musical contest. judged by the muses, the contest resulted in marsyas’ defeat when, unlike apollo with his lyre, marsyas proved incapable of playing his instrument while hanging upside down. consequently, the satyr was skinned alive and his hide nailed to a tree. again, socrates references a myth whose violence seems to undercut the intended effect of instilling gentleness in the soul through music. in this case, the violence is directed towards marsyas. is it a mousikē and cultural chauvinism in plato’s republic 166 coincidence that, in the symposium, alcibiades compares socrates to marsyas, noting his ability through words alone to send listeners into a frenzy (215a–e)? could the rejection of the aulos actually be a symbol of athens’ rejection of socrates and, by extension, of philosophic discourse, with its capacity to speak in various ways? an indication that this may be so is found in the lines following the reference to the apollomarsyas myth. whereas glaucon swears “by zeus” that they have not done anything new, socrates swears “by the dog” that they have purged the city—a swear unique to socrates that refers to the dog-headed egyptian god anubis, whose job it was to weigh souls in the afterlife (399e). as this shows, socrates speaks a more panharmonic language than would be allowed in a greek version of kallipolis. this self-negation only serves, however, to demonstrate the problem with glaucon’s assumption that kallipolis will be greek (470e).18 returning to the musical backdrop of the republic, the bendideia, the next section shows why it is plausible to interpret socrates’ discussion of the music of kallipolis as an attempt to break the spell that greek poetry has cast on his interlocutors: the spell of cultural chauvinism. the power of this spell is dramatized in three ways: (1) through the separation of athenians and thracians at the bendideia, (2) through the efforts of socrates’ metic interlocutors to blend in by mimicking the evocation of exclusively greek poetry in athenian discourse, and (3) through the prejudice against non-greeks that socrates’ greek interlocutors exhibit even as they critique greek poetry. iii. the cultural chauvinism of greek music to understand why socrates proposes guarding a form of music that harmonizes the greek and the non-greek, one must return to the music that provides the backdrop for the entire conversation—the music of the festival of bendis. the earliest evidence dates the inaugural celebration of the bendideia to around 429/8 b.c. this was a momentous event, as it was the first time a group of foreigners had been granted enktēsis, or the right to own property (ig ii2 1283). generally, athens restricted land ownership to citizens and to exceptional foreigners who had performed great services for the city. allowing thracian residents of the piraeus to own land on which to build a religious shrine was thus a major symbol of their welcoming into the community of athens. according to robert garland, by the end of the fourth century b.c. so many foreign cults had entered athens and received state sanctioning to build temples that this was likely no longer seen as an exclusive privilege.19 though the term “multiculturalism” is anachronistic, the 167 lemoine bendideia represents one of the first major movements towards greater incorporation into athenian society of athens’ growing metic population. yet as socrates’ description of the separate processions of athenians and thracians indicates, in practice the bendideia worked as much to include thracian immigrants as to exclude them. segregating the orgeōnes or cult groups of bendis into citizen-worshippers and thracian worshippers allowed athenians to uphold the thracians’ “otherness” even while elevating their status. as one scholar observes, “two different ethnic groups worship the same goddess, participate in the same sacrifices and festival, are organized into similar associations bearing the same name, yet never mix or fuse into one single group.”20 the visible, public segregation of thracian worshippers into their own procession during the festival is but one obvious manifestation of athenian ambivalence towards thracians. athens’ decision to recognize the cult of bendis itself is strange. whether through the grotesque customs of thracians described in herodotus’ histories or the depiction of thracians committing outrageous acts of violence in tragedies such as sophocles’ tereus and euripides’ erechtheus, greek poetry typically portrays thracians as a “primitive and backward society of fierce fighters” whose “[b]elligerence was matched only by rapacity, perfidy, and drunkenness.”21 thracians were regarded, in other words, as the epitome of barbarism. if they were to be assimilated into athenian society, it would have to be while holding them at arm’s length. if athenians viewed thracians as exceptionally barbaric, then why did they approve of the cult of bendis at all? though much speculation surrounds athens’ motivation for officially sanctioning the bendideia, the decision was likely in large part political. after all, in the face of a war with sparta, the athenians hoped to acquire in the thracians powerful allies abroad. honoring a thracian goddess would have solidified the alliance between athens and the thracian king sitalkes negotiated a few months earlier. athenians may also have hoped to secure the loyalty of the large thracian population residing in athens, many of whom were probably serving in the athenian military. the festival that sets the backdrop for the conversation of the republic therefore signifies less a merging of cultural horizons than an instrumental use of foreigners for the sake of athens’ empire. athens thus exhibits one model for dealing with the novel forms of music that other lands bring. insofar as it suits their political interests, such forms of music are given expression. little attempt is made, however, to harmonize with these different forms of music. the mousikē and cultural chauvinism in plato’s republic 168 thracians remain an exotic other from whom the athenians must keep their distance—an attitude learned through portrayals of thracians in greek poetry. that greek poetry encourages cultural chauvinism is also demonstrated through socrates’ interlocutors. his first two interlocutors, the metics cephalus and polemarchus, both quote greek poets as sources of authority for their understandings of justice. in doing so, they mimic the speech patterns of athenians, performing in a way that renders them virtually indistinguishable from fullfledged citizens. though they would later be persecuted by the thirty tyrants, in the dialogue’s dramatic setting during the peloponnesian war, cephalus and polemarchus represent wealthy, well-integrated metics who understand the unspoken rule that to live in athens they must pass themselves off as best they can as athenians; this means quoting greek poetry, not their native sicilian poetry, despite its flourishing state in this time period.22 moreover, though socrates’ greek interlocutors, glaucon and adeimantus, exhibit greater comfort with criticizing greek poetry, they too continually demonstrate a preference for greeks over non-greeks. in light of all this, the protected harmonizing of greek and non-greek in the music of kallipolis seems like a step towards ameliorating the typical athenian treatment of non-greek music. as i argue in the next section, the music of the cosmos in the myth of er suggests that mature philosophic education builds on this model of musical education as a simple harmony of two cultures, attempting to teach the value of harmonizing with various cultures. iv. the music of philosophy: a complex harmony whereas plato begins the dialogue with the bendideia and its musical model of diversity without harmony, he ends with a more truly harmonic music composed of diverse notes, presented through the myth of er. the myth tells of the death of a soldier named er who returned to life twelve days later to convey what he had seen during his time in the afterlife. as claudia baracchi argues, er is a warrior but he is also “an other image of the philosopher,” for like the philosopher he brings to his fellows a message of striving to learn what makes a good life and to develop the virtues such a life requires.23 plato’s casting of the warrior-philosopher er as “by race a pamphylian” hints that to be a philosopher one must exhibit a panharmonic nature, for “pamphylian” is derived from the greek words πᾶν—the neuter form of the word meaning “all”—and φυλή, which means “race” or “tribe.” er therefore comes from a place of “all races.” why does plato specify er’s origins? what is symbolized by the meaning of the name pamphylia, a region not in greece proper but rather in 169 lemoine asia minor? does it represent the ultimate equalizing of mankind that takes place in death?24 could it signify that er’s myth is a tale for all mankind?25 both of these interpretations suggest a fundamental unity among the world’s myriad cultures, a common humanity. er’s image of the cosmos reiterates the motif of unity with diversity. according to er, there exists a “spindle of necessity” whose whorl, like a nesting doll, contains eight whorls of varying colors lying within one another. from above, the rims of these whorls look like circles and “upon each of its circles stands a siren being carried around with it, uttering a single sound (φωνὴν μίαν), one note (ἕνα τόνον); out of all eight (ὀκτὼ) producing the accord of a single harmony (μίαν ἁρμονίαν)” (616c–617b). around the whorl and equidistant to one another sit the fates—lachesis, clotho, and atropos—who “sing to the sirens’ harmony (ἁρμονίαν)” (617c). plato alludes here to pythagoras’ famous theory of the harmony of the spheres, which holds that the heavenly bodies are separated from one another by intervals corresponding to the harmonic length of strings and that the movement of these bodies produces a celestial music audible only to those who escape the bondage of the sensory world. drawing on pythagoras’ theory, the eight whorls on the spindle of necessity represent the eight notes of the diatonic scale. the highest of all harmonies in the republic thus brings together a series of distinct notes that, played together, make up a single, beautiful chord. most importantly, against the cultural chauvinism that greek music encourages, er’s myth of the afterlife can be seen to promote a harmony of diverse cultures. plato did not need to specify that there were eight different notes; it would have sufficed to mention that the sirens and the fates sing in harmony. again, the detail that eight different notes produce the cosmic harmony most likely serves as an allusion to the diatonic scale. this scale consists of seven different modes and a repeated octave. the name of each mode strikes home the point: ionian, dorian, phrygian, lydian, mixolydian, aeolian, and locrian. these are the names of various greek and non-greek ethnic groups. from this it is hinted that plato imagines cosmic harmony as consisting of some harmonious blend of diverse nomoi. what, however, can bring about this harmony? the myth, and arguably the dialogue as a whole, suggests harmony comes from knowledge. the close relationship between the two is indicated in er’s account of the cosmos through the dual images of the sirens and the fates producing the eight-noted harmony. in homer’s odyssey, the sirens boast, “for we know all in wide troy / the greeks and trojans suffered by the will of the gods / and we know all that happens upon the mousikē and cultural chauvinism in plato’s republic 170 much-nourishing earth” (12.189–91). the sirens are therefore connected with omniscience. likewise, plato portrays the fates as having complete knowledge of everything that has passed, is passing, or will pass. harmony is consequently linked with knowledge. remembering that in the symposium alcibiades also compared socrates to a siren, perhaps er’s image of perfect cosmic harmony symbolizes the final destination of philosophic education. in other words, plato rewrites the story of odysseus’ encounter with the sirens—this time portraying the journey not of the political leader but of the philosopher as involving exposure to the sirens’ panharmonic music. given that the siren song lures sailors to their death, perhaps this serves as an indication that philosophical education is best suited to more mature leaders, as it threatens to lure one away from the body politic. the harmonizing of two cultures in the music of kallipolis thus represents a kind of musical education safe for leaders in training to hear, preparing them for the finale: the panharmonic music of the spheres. notes 1. on the irreconcilability of the two discussions, see annas. some resolve the contradiction by arguing that the dialogue prohibits not all poetry, but only imitative poetry (e.g., greene; collingwood 46–50). more persuasive, however, is the argument that imitation of good characters is permissible, but multifariousness, or representation of all things indiscriminately, is prohibited. for variations of this argument, see belfiore, “a theory of imitation in plato’s republic”; nehamas 215; ferrari 125; janaway; and lear. 2. for an overview of this literature, see büttner. also see gonzalez. 3. one resolution is that plato is not devoid of appreciation for poetry, but thinks it must be harnessed to serve truth and the social good. scholars debate whether this involves poetry simply being overseen by philosophy or being subsumed by it (in which case, plato’s own myths might provide an example of “good” poetry—although this, too, is a matter of debate). see partee; griswold; elias; burnyeat; halliwell; and levin. 4. some examples include thayer; saxonhouse “comedy in callipolis”; belfiore, “‘lies unlike the truth’”; sansone; and planinc. 5. translations of the ancient greek are my own, developed in consultation with bloom’s. 6. for more on music in ancient greece, see lippman; west; and pelosi. for a collection of all of plato’s writings on music, with notes and commentary, see barker (two volumes). 7. for more on the relationship between music and poetry, see landels, especially chapter one. 171 lemoine 8. moreau 197. 9. nomos was also a term in music used to denote a class of traditional melodies. west 215– 217. 10. wallace 258. though much of what we know about damon comes from references in plato’s dialogues, various sources confirm that he was not just a music theorist, but also an important political advisor. according to aristotle, damon “was believed to suggest to pericles most of his measures, owing to which they afterwards ostracized him” (athenian constitution 27.4). it is interesting that plato has socrates recommend the ideas of an ostracized music theorist, given that the ideal city will banish any poet who does not make the right kind of music. could this be another indication that the athenians have cast out and let in the wrong influences? 11. the phoenician tale is not usually regarded as part of the musical education of the guardians. however, socrates links the tale to the discussion of music when he precedes it by referencing “those lies that come into being in case of need, of which we were just now speaking, some one noble lie” (414b–c). justification for these lies appears in two places prior to the telling of the phoenician tale: just after socrates introduces the subject of music, where such tales are explicitly cast as one form the speech content of music might take (377a) and, again, in the midst of their discussion of what the poets should and should not say (389b–d). though midway through book iii socrates claims that “it’s likely we are completely finished with that part of music that concerns speeches and tales” (398b), he continues in book iii to discuss what is right and wrong in the content of greek poetry and to quote from it (404b–c, 408a, 408b–c). it is therefore reasonable to suppose that the phoenician tale is one of the stories to be sung as part of the musical education of the guardians and, indeed, the education of the whole city. 12. for more on athenian autochthony myths, see loraux. 13. even more telling is the term “cadmean victory” (also known as a “pyrrhic victory”), which refers to a victory attained at as great a loss to the victor as to the vanquished—a term evoked in plato’s laws (641c). might this suggest that the founding of kallipolis is but a cadmean victory, i.e., not a true victory? 14. zeitlin 144. 15. for an excellent analysis of these transformations, see saxonhouse “freedom, form, and formlessness.” 16. for other examples of dissonance in kallipolis, see strauss; saxonhouse “comedy in callipolis”; forde; roochnik; and berger. 17. this attitude is shared in plato’s laches by the character laches, who rejects all modes including the phrygian, in preference for the dorian—the “sole hellenic harmony” (188d). for a survey of the debate on why plato includes the phrygian mode, see anderson 107– 109. mousikē and cultural chauvinism in plato’s republic 172 18. against this assumption, socrates muses that the ideal city could be about to arise “in some barbaric place (τινι βαρβαρικῷ τόπῳ) somewhere far outside of our range of vision” (499c– d). 19. garland 108. 20. pache 9. 21. sears 147. on depictions of thracians in tragedy, see hall chapter three. 22. monoson. 23. baracchi 139. 24. deneen 102. 25. cooper 121. works cited anderson, warren d. ethos and education in greek music: the evidence of poetry and philosophy. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1966. annas, julia. “plato on the triviality of literature.” in plato on beauty, wisdom, and the 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stefan. “inspiration and inspired poets in plato’s dialogues.” in plato and the poets, eds. pierre destrée and fritz-gregor herrmann. leiden: brill, 2011. 111–29. collingwood, robin george. the principles of art. oxford: clarendon, 1938; repr. new york: oxford university press, 1958. cooper, barry. “‘a lump bred up in darknesse’: two tellurian themes of the republic.” in politics, philosophy, writing: plato’s art of caring for souls, ed. zdravko planinc. columbia: university of missouri press, 2001. 80–121. deneen, patrick j. the odyssey of political theory: the politics of departure and return. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield, 2003. elias, julius a. plato’s defense of poetry. albany: state university of new york press, 1984. ferrari, g. r. f. “plato and poetry.” in the cambridge history of literary criticism, volume 1: classical criticism, ed. george a. kennedy. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1989. 92–148. forde, steven. “gender and justice in plato.” the american political 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ancient greece and rome. london: routledge, 1999. lear, gabriel richardson. “mimesis and psychological change in republic 3.” in plato and the poets, eds. pierre destrée and fritz-gregor herrmann. leiden: brill, 2011. 195–216. levin, susan b. the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry: plato and the greek literary tradition. new york: oxford university press, 2001. mousikē and cultural chauvinism in plato’s republic 174 lippman, edward a. musical thought in ancient greece. new york: columbia university press, 1964. loraux, nicole. born of the earth: myth and politics in athens. ithaca: cornell university press, 2000. monoson, s. sara. “dionysius i and sicilian theatrical traditions in plato’s republic: representing continuities between democracy and tyranny.” in theater outside athens: drama in greek sicily and south italy, ed. kathryn bosher. new york: cambridge university press, 2012. 156–72. moreau, nina valiquette. “musical mimesis and political ethos in plato’s republic.” political theory 45.2 (2017): 192–215. nehamas, alexander. “plato and the mass media.” the monist 71.2 (1988): 214–34. pache, corinne ondine. “barbarian bond: thracian bendis among the athenians.” in between magic and religion: interdisciplinary studies in ancient mediterranean religion and society, eds. sulochana r. asirvatham, corinne ondine pache, and john watrous. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield, 2001. 3–11. partee, morriss henry. “plato’s banishment of poetry.” the journal of aesthetics and art criticism 29.2 (1970): 209–22. pelosi, francesco. plato on music, soul and body. new york: cambridge university press, 2010. planinc, zdravko. plato through homer: poetry and philosophy in the cosmological dialogues. columbia: university of missouri press, 2003. plato. the republic, trans. allan bloom. 2nd edition. chicago: the university of chicago press, 1991. roochnik, david. beautiful city: the dialectical character of plato’s republic. ithaca: cornell university press, 2003. sansone, david. “plato and euripides.” illinois classical studies 21 (1996): 35–67. saxonhouse, arlene. “comedy in callipolis: animal imagery in the republic.” american political science review 72.3 (1978): 888–901.  ___. “freedom, form, and formlessness: euripides’ bacchae and plato’s republic.” american political science review 108.1 (2014): 88–99. sears, matthew a. athens, thrace, and the shaping of athenian leadership. new york: cambridge university press, 2013. strauss, leo. the city and man. chicago: the university of chicago press, 1978; repr. charlottesville: university press of virginia, 1964. 175 lemoine thayer, h. s. “plato’s quarrel with poetry: simonides.” journal of the history of ideas 36.1 (1975): 3–26. wallace, robert w. “damon of oa: a music theorist ostracized?” in music and the muses: the culture of mousikē in the classical athenian city, eds. penelope murray and peter wilson. new york: oxford university press, 2004. 249–67. west, m. l. ancient greek music. new york: oxford university press, 1992. zeitlin, froma i. “thebes: theater of self and society in athenian drama.” in nothing to do with dionysos? athenian drama in its social context, eds. john j. winkler and froma i. zeitlin. princeton: princeton university press, 1992. 130–67. microsoft word alexander review of frazer [expositions 15.1 (2021) 69–76] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 frazer, elizabeth, and kimberly hutchings. violence and political theory. cambridge, uk: polity press, 2020. 224 pages. $22.95 (paper). isbn: 978–1–509–53672–6. contemporary political theorist sheldon wolin wrote of political theory that it is “a sum of judgments, shaped by the theorist’s judgment of what matters, and embodying a series of discriminations about where one province begins and another leaves off.”1 this description of what political theory entails is especially apt for a book such as violence and political theory, which in an economical fashion seeks to selectively survey, taxonomize, and evaluate the treatment of violence and politics across centuries of political thought. undaunted by this challenge, authors frazer and hutchings clarify from the outset that this undertaking is not meant to be exhaustive, and that even the treatment of a given thinker might “not always do justice to the broader political theory” (7) on offer. the justice to be done, instead, pertains to the subject matter at hand: the relationship between violence and politics, and the variegated theoretical treatment thereof. to this end, frazer and hutchings have offered us, if not a mosaic, then at least a bricolage. from niccolò machiavelli to jacques derrida to elaine scarry, the twenty-six thinkers analyzed are creatively organized and juxtaposed. apart from machiavelli, hobbes, and locke, all early modern theorists, the thinkers treated in this compendium made their mark in either the 19th or 20th centuries. grouped in eight chapters with capacious yet concise titles such as “politics and revolutionary violence,” “politics and state violence,” and “politics and the transformation of man,” the synopsized thinkers and their ideas are situated in fruitful dialogue with each other, circumscribed by edifying introductory and concluding sections. beyond mere curation, the authors engage critically with the arguments proffered in the relevant texts with an eye towards expounding their own political theory of violence. their own theorizing, in turn, flows from examining how the selected thinkers produce and justify the conceptual distinctions made between violence and politics. frazer’s and hutchings’s examination shows how drawing conceptual boundaries between violence and politics inevitably runs into difficulty. the authors claim that “such settlements are inherently unstable and full of tensions” (1). they argue further that these tensions give rise to taxonomical evasions by the theorists in question whenever they attempt to settle these conceptual questions. from their surveying of the literature, it “seems that the framing of violence in political theory necessarily involves slippage between violence and something else” (6). frazer and review of violence and political theory 70 hutchings argue that in these “slippages,” thinkers move from attending to actual practices of violence and the conditions that give rise to them (that is, the politics of violence), to the justificatory structures that divert attention elsewhere. it is to these evasions, and what our authors claim they reveal, that we now turn. in the taxonomy crafted by frazer and hutchings, distinct legitimation structures underpin the theoretical discourses on violence and politics. these justificatory structures differ depending on the thinker, but there are two predominant categories in which these diverse theoretical approaches can be thoughtfully positioned and juxtaposed. one category of justificatory evasions involves instrumental or consequentialist approaches. in these, violence is justified as the means to some political end or set of ends. instead of focusing on the violence itself, attention shifts to the putative ends that these theorists argue justify the violence. for some theorists, these ends relate to overthrowing a tyrannical or colonizing state; to others, it is the very order and stability of the state that requires violence. the second predominate category focuses on questioning when and whether violence is of a virtuous or vicious character (and is thereby justifiable or not). once again, the normative function is to divert attention from actual violence to the virtue or vice that either justifies or condemns it. these are certainly helpful analytical categories, and the book is replete with salient examples and distinctions drawn within them. the structural integrity of their taxonomy becomes suspect, however, as frazer and hutchings further complicate their own organizational schema. the authors note that, while many evasive strategies fall into the categories of consequentialist or virtue justifications, other strategies do not seem to fit neatly into either class. for example, when instrumental reasoning fails due to the uncertainty inherent in predicting outcomes, some theorists turn to construing violence as inextricable from or necessary to politics. on the other hand, there are theorists who employ strategies to depoliticize violence. frazer and hutchings further argue that justificatory strategies are “often heavily dependent on various kinds of analogical and metaphorical reasoning and on the affective work of aesthetic categories,” especially involving “tropes of war and gender” (5–6). moreover, not only do these “slippages between accounts of political violence and discourses on war and gender do a great deal of legitimating work, they are also key to political theorists’ failure to engage fully with conditions and practices of violence” (6). it is unclear, however, if or how the “key” of gender and war tropes unlocks each theoretical failure. indeed, the authors themselves indicate that these justificatory 71 alexander strategies, this gendering of language, and this aestheticization of violence often overlap. this initial lack of clarity is never subsequently resolved, and it remains a question how these tropes function distinctly from the manifold other theoretical patterns and tendencies used to evade confrontation with the reality of violence. what is much clearer in frazer’s and hutchings’s synoptic treatment is how the causes, effects, and relations of political violence have been consistently (but distinctly) underdeveloped within political theory. in this respect, their critique is both revelatory and useful in rethinking how we understand political violence. at a meta-level, violence and political theory allows its readers to consider how political violence is theorized across a spectrum of political thought. in isolating and categorizing these concerns, the authors give the reader a sense of the patterns of evasion that have been developed and the omissions that recur. along the way, frazer and hutchings also offer their readers sharp revelations and adept distillations that do not necessarily pertain to justificatory strategies alone. their appraisal of hannah arendt’s theoretical offerings on violence provides a representative example. in what follows, frazer and hutching elucidate how violence is situated within arendtian categories: violence itself, in the context of politics, is ruled by means-end reasoning. political actors assume that, like the making of an object, the use of certain tools will bring about a particular outcome. the problem with violence, in contrast to that with fabrication, is that the end to which violence is directed is always in danger of being overwhelmed by the means it justifies. all human action, including political action, is unpredictable, but to this unpredictability violence brings a significant additional element of arbitrariness. it might “pay,” but it pays indiscriminately. the most probable change it will bring about is a change to a more violent world. to the extent that the world becomes more violent, the possibilities for politics are reduced and corrupted. (77–78) here, frazer and hutchings place arendt’s insights into violence in the context of her broader political theory. in addition to juxtaposing arendt’s understanding of violence against her conception of power and action, which for arendt are the concepts par excellence for understanding “the political,” the authors also compare violence to fabrication. this begins to lay review of violence and political theory 72 the groundwork for their subsequent claim in the chapter that, for arendt, “the category of violence hovers somewhere between the categories of work and action” (81). for scholars and students of arendt’s political theory, this is a valuable intervention, as it puts into conversation arendtian terms and categories from both on violence and the human condition. if arendt’s category of work applies to fabrication, where with an image in our minds we can then make the world, and action is the spontaneous, generative activity that distinguishes human beings from each other and shapes the stories that retrospectively define them, violence “hovers” yet doesn’t land on either conceptual territory. violence might well seduce us into thinking we can (re)make the world with it, as with fabrication, or become memorialized heroically through it, as with political action. consequently, violence often destroys the very ends it was intended to serve, brought about by a blurring of conceptual lines. the above analysis is but one of many such examples that frazer and hutchings provide readers throughout the book. it is in their erudite ability to distill and comparatively analyze complex political theories that permits, for instance, a treatment of marx and engels spanning fewer than four pages to be worthwhile. this lucidity and insight, however, is interrupted at times by less effective offerings. frazer’s and hutchings’s analytical distillations occasionally run into problems when coupled with arguments made on behalf of their own theory of political violence. this is most often the case regarding the asserted “key” of analyzing how gender and war tropes function affectively and persuasively. for example, the authors write about john locke that: “the exemplary kind of violence at the heart of locke’s justificatory political philosophy is that of the marauder, of the beast who threatens life in the wilderness, and of the thieves and burglars who threaten security and property. the threat coming from the tyrant is construed as analogous to the threat that emanates from these categories” (34). this is an astute observation, and well and good as far as it goes. corresponding observations about george sorel, maurice merleau-ponty, and simone de beauvoir are subsequently made in short succession, culminating in the following argument that binds them all together: the problems and paradoxes involved in arguments that justify violence, whether in relation to outcomes, rights, necessity, or virtue, are addressed through the thinkers’ uses of rhetorical strategies and aesthetic categories so as to secure their conceptual and normative ground. we know that tyrannical violence is beastly, and 73 alexander parliamentary politics dishonest; hence revolutionary violence, as the opposite to these qualities, must be normatively preferable. we know that proletarian violence is masculine and socialist political parties are effeminate; so we already know which form of action is better. (36) the above terms are claimed by frazer and hutchings to be intrinsically gendered and operating affectively as a form of metaphorical reasoning; that is, in lieu of argument, the gendered terminology itself functions rhetorically as a form of persuasion. and yet, there are no ensuing reasons proffered to support these claims; rather, the use of “we know” is doing the analytical work. even assuming that “we know” that proletarian violence is gendered as masculine and socialist political parties as effeminate (and that the masculine is therefore favored), in what way does this relate to “beastly” tyranny and “dishonest” politics? might not “beastly” be construed as masculine, and therefore favored? frazer and hutchings subsequently invoke mythic metaphors of heroically killing dragons as part of the aestheticized, problematic metaphorical language at work. is it “killing the beast,” then, that is masculine and therefore favored? is this functioning rhetorically as both a war trope and a gender trope, and if so, is there more affective work done by the gender or war metaphor? is dishonesty inherently gendered as feminine? what are the claims here, precisely? other examples speak less to the impediment of analytical vagueness than to inconsistency. for instance, when the authors analyze the normative appeal to “sacrifice,” this virtue is understood in one context as feminine, as with gandhi (140), but when analyzing carl schmitt, sacrifice is construed as the heroic, masculine virtue that “feminised” liberals lack (66). further, while gandhi does indeed present sacrifice as a virtue, schmitt does not even use this term, let alone in an explicitly gendered manner; neither does schmitt refer to gender in other contexts. rather, the authors inscribe into his theory the principle of sacrifice based upon the “friend-enemy distinction” he develops, and then construe this principle as related to gender. in these and other such instances, it seems to be the authors themselves who reify gender and fix the meaning of disparately used (or merely implied) terms for their own rhetorical and persuasive purposes. it is certainly true and important to note that language often operates to instantiate, affirm, and reinforce patriarchal (and other oppressive) structures of power. it is also undoubtedly the case that many of the thinkers under examination, and certainly the times in which they wrote, were review of violence and political theory 74 imbued with patriarchal biases. however, this does not mean, necessarily, that the language used in the expounding of a given political theory functions chiefly (if at all) by way of taking advantage of these gendered biases. this claim would have to be demonstrated, rather than extrapolated. instead, support for this through line of analysis is given short shrift. had the authors posited a narrower claim and highlighted as noteworthy the inclusion of gender and war tropes within the plethora of justificatory rhetorical moves made, this would have enriched rather than detracted from the analysis. it is worth noting a few other claims by the authors that would have been better suited to the editorial chopping block; moreover, their inclusion might also explain a correspondingly conspicuous omission. frazer and hutchings assert that, in their view, “feminist reflections on political violence, through debates on pacifism and war, push to its limits the political theory repertoire for thinking about the relation between politics and violence” (175). one might hope that this strong assertion would be accompanied by equally strong arguments to support it. instead, it is appended with yet a further bold, revealing claim. the authors state that, “even more radical than marxist, anarchist, and anticolonial thinkers, feminists make clear how predominant justifications of violence depend on various forms of drawing the line—between means and ends, violence and non-violence, or good and bad violence—that are neither empirically nor analytically sustainable” (175). besides neglecting to clarify or support the vague assertion that feminist thinkers are “even more radical” than marxist, anarchist, and anticolonial thinkers, the declaration itself bizarrely writes out of existence the possibility for and reality of marxist feminism, anarchist feminism, and anticolonial feminism. it is perhaps this same neglect that explains a notable exclusion from the book, an absence that itself seems constitutive. philosopher slavoj žižek, equal parts slovenian and hegelian, enjoys joke-telling as a path into understanding hegel’s philosophical offerings. one joke he especially enjoys telling is meant to help explain the hegelian concept of determinate negation. the joke involves a customer who orders coffee without cream, only for the waiter to respond, “sorry, but we have run out of cream. can i bring you coffee without milk?”2 žižek explains that, in “both cases, the customer gets coffee alone, but this one-coffee is each time accompanied by a different negation, first coffee-with-nocream, then coffee-with-no-milk.”3 materially, there is no difference between the coffee without milk and the coffee without cream, but symbolically there is indeed a difference: two distinct absences (“without milk” versus “without cream”) create two different coffees that exist on the 75 alexander ideational plane of desire and meaning. different negative reference points are constitutive of different realities. one “without” is distinct from another “without,” resulting in a meaningful difference (quite literally, a difference in the realm of meaning). in the case of violence and political theory, the absence that seems constitutive relates to the (under)theorizing of race, racial violence, and white supremacy. according to the authors, their book is meant to evaluate thinkers who “exemplify certain positions on the question of violence and politics in the history of political thought,” and also “continue to provide resources for thinking about the relations between violence and politics in the contemporary world” (7). of the twenty-six thinkers included in violence and political theory, two are people of color: frantz fanon and mohandas gandhi are both included in the chapter on “violence and the transformation of man.” gandhi likely needs no introduction. frantz fanon, the existentialist, pan-africanist, and revolutionary, is renowned for his hegelian and psychoanalytic analysis of white supremacy under settler colonialism. as mentioned earlier in this review, gandhi’s treatment of violence and politics is analyzed by the authors through the lens of how his virtues of nonviolence are gendered. the authors approach and frame fanon’s theorizing similarly. frazer and hutchings note that fanon “exposes how gendering and racializing categories come together in the colonial mindset” (145). the authors go on to detail how gendering categories come together for fanon. they do not, however, reveal, explore, or explain how racializing categories function in fanon’s theorizing. we do not learn about how, in black skins, white masks, fanon describes colonization as involving a racialized process he names epidermalization.4 we do not learn that the revolutionary violence that fanon describes as psychologically cleansing relates to the internalized oppression and inferiority complex created by the racialization process integral to settler colonialism.5 instead, we learn that, “wretched of the earth tells us that colonialism must be violently fought because it emasculates men, and ‘algeria unveiled’ tells us that it must be violently fought because it violates women” (148–149). in this foregrounding, the white supremacy of settler colonialism recedes from view. this is not the only occasion in the book in which this takes places. the authors note in their final chapter that “the rhetoric through which theorists attempt to make their justificatory arguments persuasive locks us into a way of imagining the world order that reproduces rather than challenges familiar hierarchies of gender, race and class” (189). the black marxist feminism that the authors not only ignore, but that they imply would combine mutually review of violence and political theory 76 exclusive categories (of feminism and marxism), is but one theoretical approach that seeks to imagine the world anew, in part by understanding gender, race, and class as intersections that must be theorized together. from arendt we learn that violence is mute. it does not speak, it silences.6 the exclusion of race, white supremacy, and especially black radical feminists from a text suffused with feminist analysis—this too is a kind of silencing, a making mute. this too, might be theorized as a kind of violence. alexios alexander eastern university notes 1. sheldon s. wolin, “political theory as a vocation,” the american political science review 63.4 (1969): 1076. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1955072 2. slavoj žižek, žižek’s jokes (did you hear the one about hegel and negation?) (cambridge, ma: the mit press, 2014), 47. 3. ibid. 4. frantz fanon, black skin, white masks, translated by charles lam markmann (london: pluto, 2008), 4. 5. ibid., 9 and passim. 6. hannah arendt, the human condition (new york: doubleday anchor, 1959), 25. microsoft word schlauraff review of ngai [expositions 15.1 (2021) 77–82] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 ngai, sianne. theory of the gimmick: aesthetic judgment and capitalist form. cambridge, ma, and london: the belknap press of harvard university press, 2020. 416 pages. $35.00 (hardcover). isbn 978–0–674–98454–7. published in a time of social, economic, and political unrest, sianne ngai’s theory of the gimmick explores an aesthetic form that embodies uncertainty. is the gimmick working too hard? or is it working too little? is it attractive or repellant? dynamic or inert? in truth the gimmick is all of these things, and its functionality arises from its contradictions. ngai’s sweeping account of gimmicks in literature, horror films, photography, digital installation art, and advertising, among other things, captures the pervasiveness of an aesthetic category that raises significant questions about how capitalism structures our social interactions and how much longer we can (or should) sustain an economic system that renders certain lives disposable. the gimmick “lies latent in our encounter with every artifact in capitalism,” and while we tend to lose interest the moment we label something gimmicky because of its apparent deficiency, ngai gives us good reason to pay attention (140). her third book, theory of the gimmick continues her project of examining aesthetic categories that have not received adequate or serious scholarly attention because their “everydayness” makes them seemingly inferior to enlightenment categories like the sublime and the beautiful. it is, as charlie tyson has stated, her most explicitly marxist work to date.1 the significance of the gimmick, ngai argues, is that it is an entirely capitalist aesthetic that links value, labor, and time. and yet it does more than simply reflect capitalism’s laws of production; in doing so the gimmick reveals the limitations of a system susceptible to crisis. essentially, ngai positions the gimmick as an aesthetic, economic, and ultimately political object that gives us a new framework for understanding capitalism and importantly reveals its vulnerabilities. when we think of the gimmick, we think of something overrated, overpriced, and deceptive. something that draws us in even as it inspires aversion. and yet, in demonstrating the gimmick’s capacity to make visible the “wrongness” of capitalism, ngai reframes the category as one that is highly relevant to the social issues at the heart of the recent protests across the united states. in doing so she extends the relevance of her project to a much broader audience than those invested in questions regarding economics, labor, or even aesthetics. like her earlier books, theory of the gimmick demonstrates once again the relevance of aesthetics to conversations surrounding review of theory of the gimmick 78 literature, philosophy, history, and ethics, and especially to the kind of rich interdisciplinary work ngai herself performs. as a victorianist whose research focuses on literature and science, rather than aesthetic or marxist concerns, my own interest in ngai’s work derives from her emphasis on the gimmick as an aesthetic category that reveals the “peculiarly asocial kinds of sociality” produced by capitalism (1). while the opening chapter theorizes the gimmick from a principally marxist perspective, the remaining seven chapters focus on artwork that reflects and employs the gimmick in ways that help readers think more dynamically about how our social encounters structure and are structured by value, labor, and time. for instance, the second chapter turns to traditionally non-marxist thinking about the gimmick to explore its manifestation as a technique of enchantment that is both transparent and opaque. in what she describes as a “freestanding prologue” to the subsequent chapter on the novel of ideas, ngai demonstrates how the gimmick prompts us to participate in at least two different acts of imagination: first, we imagine what we can and cannot know about the gimmick’s production. ngai uses the example of alfred gell, who describes being enchanted by a match-stick model of the salisbury cathedral that he both thinks he could easily replicate but also thinks might be harder to produce than it appears. what enchants us is essentially a disappearance of labor, one that, according to ngai, costs or even harms the worker. second, we imagine others’ perceptions of the object, idea, or technique. to declare something a gimmick means to see through its duplicity, but it also means to assume another observer who fails to recognize its deceit. “at their deepest level aesthetic judgments are not about objects at all,” ngai tells us, “they concern our relation to other judging subjects” (95). and in the case of the gimmick, it seems that these judgments and the relationships they give rise to tend to be negative. the most dangerous aspects of these social relationships are apparent throughout ngai’s fourth chapter on the financial gimmick, which she calls “the gimmick of gimmicks” (171). through her analysis of robert louis stevenson’s “the bottle imp” (1891) and the film it follows (2014), ngai not only captures how the gimmick reinforces capitalism’s scheme of “winners and losers,” perpetuating the devaluation of particular bodies, but also demonstrates how the aesthetic manipulates time to delay moments of crisis. both narratives involve characters whose survival depends on transferring their own debts to others, and both conclude with a person deemed economically unproductive winding up with the gimmick. in “the bottle imp,” this person is a convict who purchases an imp that can grant any wish but will ultimately drag him to hell if he 79 schlauraff fails to sell the object at a loss before his death. he makes the purchase knowing this will be impossible because by the time he buys it there is no currency smaller than what he has paid, but also knowing that he is expected to go to hell regardless based on his social position. what this example ultimately does is force readers to confront their own complicity in a system the excludes certain individuals from social protection; those who lack social and political power are more vulnerable to gimmicks, not because their aesthetic judgments are less refined or nuanced, but because they often have to subscribe to or utilize gimmicks as a means of survival, as ngai points out not only in this chapter but also in her introduction. if what distinguishes the gimmick from other aesthetic categories is “its intimate relationship to the social forms capitalism generates ‘behind the backs’ of capitalists and workers on the basis of the same three measurements it uniquely links together,” then attending to it more seriously might help us recognize social forms that receive too little scrutiny because of how fully embedded they are in our everyday lives (36). and while ngai’s inquiry moves across examples from different periods and genres, it is not difficult to imagine how a narrower investigation of gimmicks through the lens of victorian studies, twentieth-century american studies, cultural studies, or any other number of fields might prove generative. “the bottle imp” provides a striking example of how gimmicks sustain the most troubling aspects of capitalist society, and also raises questions regarding the valuation of bodies that ngai takes up in her fifth chapter in relation to marx’s theory of abstract labor. the primary focus of the chapter is robert halpern’s music for porn (2012), a book of war poetry that reveals the distressing position of soldiers as national symbols whose value arises from the depletion of their bodies. in drawing our attention to this particular work, ngai prompts readers to ask: what does it mean when we value an individual more for their death than for their life? is this really the way that we value soldiers? and if so, why? through her account of capitalist abstractions, ngai forces readers to recognize that though we cannot help but perceive and discuss value as an inherent property of individual objects, it is actually “a process and a complex, dynamic relationship among multiple actors” (195). value, even the value of human life, is unstable and negotiable in capitalist society. and while ngai does not address these questions here, she compels us to ask who the “multiple actors” might be at any given moment, how we are complicit in perpetuating ethically suspect modes of valuation, and how we might, instead, become complicit in changing the process. review of theory of the gimmick 80 the difficulty of altering capitalist structures becomes clearer in the next two chapters, where ngai turns more explicitly to how gimmicks reconfigure time. in her sixth chapter, ngai calls attention to the repeated confrontation between viewer and idea in torbjørn rødland’s photography to argue that “ambiguities about value and time in capitalism stem from ambiguities about labor” (209). ultimately, she argues that the juxtaposition of human-contrived and mechanical elements in rødland’s work captures a tension between living and dead labor. what we find in rødland’s photographs are bodies manipulated by external forces that intrude into the frame, resulting in a blend of contradictory temporalities, crisis and stasis, that we cannot resolve. this temporal instability is central to the subsequent chapter as well, which investigates the gimmick as special effect through a consideration of two art pieces titled suspiria, a 1977 horror movie by dario argento and a 2003 dvd installation by stan douglas. the latter serves as the primary focus of the chapter, and reflects douglas’s interest in what he calls “temporal polyphony” (229). suspiria uses a looping and randomizing device that douglas created to generate a seemingly endless series of “recombinant” narratives—distinct stories made by recombining segments from limited source material—that consist of scenes of bargaining and exchange from grimm’s fairy tales running over a grey background of surveillance footage. the dialogue, the behavior of color, which bleeds out of the figures it should inhabit, and the propagation of essentially infinite stories all contribute to ngai’s claim that suspiria reveals, among other things, the illusion that properly timing exchanges can produce new value. unlike rødland’s photographs, douglas’s installation is not obviously engaged with the gimmick or inherently gimmicky itself. however, it relies on a kind of “jerry-rigging” that ngai argues is also at the heart of capitalism. competing temporalities, uncertainties surrounding labor: these qualities underscore how gimmicks, and capitalism at large, keep us on our toes in ways that make it difficult to develop alternative systems. aware that there is something wrong with capitalism, we remain subject to its social structures. the propensity of capitalism to create “asocial kinds of sociality” is evident in the final chapter, which focuses on another kind of narrative looping: a repeated plot about labor and secrecy that recurs in three of henry james’s works. the emergence of this narrative coincides with changes in james’s own production habits as a result of illness, which required him to move from writing long-hand without others present to dictating his work to an employee. whereas ngai’s account of suspiria suggests the futility of altering value by altering time, her analysis of james’s writing 81 schlauraff showcases the difficulty of altering the nature of labor itself, particularly in regards to women. at the heart of james’s narratives is the gimmick. in “the birth place” (1902), the protagonist must develop a gimmick of his own to counter a gimmick established by his employers. in the sacred fount (1901), a similar effort to expose a gimmick (or secret) fails, and ultimately makes the novel itself unsuccessful. in the golden bowl (1903), the gimmick manifests as a disparity between male and female labor. highlighting the unfair burden placed on women, ngai explains how the novel reflects the idea that “feminine work must not be recognized as work, and more covert working must be done to ensure that it remains undetectable” (290). in other words, the women in the golden bowl must work too hard to perpetuate the perception that they work too little. ultimately, ngai suggests that james tells this story, “a person struggling to get to a truth obscured by everyday forms finds herself secretly and even more laboriously reconcealing it,” because he was anticipating changes to labor that would characterize the twentieth century (298). and perhaps ngai chooses to conclude with james precisely because we ourselves can relate to these protagonists, knowing that capitalism is flawed, knowing that there is something repellant about it just as there is something repellant about the gimmick, but drawn to it and prone to preserve it regardless. ngai’s theory of the gimmick contributes significantly to her own field, and also demonstrates how the gimmick might be generative for anyone eager to think more carefully about social relationships. she invites us to think more deeply about how bodies, labor, and artistic production in particular, are valued in the context capitalist culture, building on her account of the cute, the zany, and the interesting2 to address what she persuasively claims is an even larger aesthetic phenomenon permeating our daily lives. the capaciousness of her inquiry is both an asset and an obstacle for readers, allowing her to capture the profound influence of the gimmick in all areas of capitalist life, but also making it difficult for those working within the narrower confines of their own fields to grasp the particularities of the gimmick as it applies to their own source material. of course, this aspect of ngai’s work is also what opens seemingly infinite questions that might be productively addressed by scholars working on anything from victorian literature to philosophy. and whereas the capitalist sublime tends to foreclose conversation, ngai explains, the gimmick “makes us want to talk” (32). kristie schlauraff columbia university review of theory of the gimmick 82 notes 1. charlie tyson, “the professor of gimmicks: sianne ngai is the most influential literary theorist of her generation,” the chronicle of higher education june 25, 2020, https:// www.chronicle.com/article/the-professor-of-gimmicks 2. sianne ngai, our aesthetic categories: zany, cute, interesting (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2015). microsoft word cavanaugh prooftext.docx [expositions 13.1 (2019) 67–80] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 the utopianism of the obvious: a response to mary hirschfeld’s aquinas and the market william t. cavanaugh depaul university i had heard about mary hirschfeld long before i had ever read anything by her. “there’s this theology grad student at notre dame who already has a ph.d. in economics from harvard” went the rumor. we theologians were excited by the idea that someone with a respectable degree in a “real” discipline would come slumming in our field. i picked up hirschfeld’s first book, then, with great anticipation. at last someone would be writing about theology and economics with bona fides in both fields. i was not disappointed. i was, however, somewhat nonplussed as i started reading the preface, where hirschfeld describes her journey into theology and lays out some of her main findings: people are doing more than pursuing their own preferences when they make moral choices (x).1 economic prosperity is not the same as happiness (xii). our wants are not necessarily insatiable (xv). we engage in economic activity in order to pursue the goods we value, so economics requires an account of the good life (xv). for me, the money quote of the preface is this: “in retrospect, this should have been obvious all along” (xv). so many of hirschfeld’s conclusions have the ring of common sense to them. although she retains a clear affection for the field of economics, i could not help but marvel at how that field had trained her to ignore common sense to begin with. rather than simply being impressed by hirschfeld’s learning, which is considerable, i was equally impressed by the amount of unlearning that hirschfeld has had to do in order to put forward an account of a sane economy. it is not economics as a whole that needs to be unlearned; hirschfeld is adamant that economics provides useful tools for analyzing the empirical effects of policy decisions. the problem is that orthodox economics as currently practiced claims to be a purely descriptive science while in fact smuggling in metaphysical claims about the human person that have normative effects. “mainstream economics is tacitly grounded in its own metaphysics” (xviii). the problem is not simply that economics ignores the question of happiness and gives no account of the good life, preferring to simply observe what people in fact prefer. the problem is rather that the pursuit of the utopianism of the obvious 68 preference becomes an ersatz account of happiness and the good life, one which is detrimental to true happiness. mainstream economics would prefer not to talk about happiness at all; rational choice theory is officially neutral with regard to the goals that people choose. hirschfeld masterfully shows how rational choice theory models a peculiar kind of human being. though it tries hard not to make judgments about what really fulfills human life, the goal of mainstream economics is to maximize the satisfaction of preferences, and economics is expected to maximize well-being, so the satisfaction of preferences is tacitly equated with well-being (48, 52). but people make mistakes about what choices will lead to their well-being, and some people make choices based on something other than their own well-being, narrowly defined, giving gifts or even their own lives to others. these apparently irrational choices can be fitted into rational choice theory by simply redefining whatever people choose as rational (46); self-seeking can be defined so broadly as to include giving one’s life away (61). in both cases, rational choice theory is merely tautologous. the more it tries to avoid giving a substantive account of human well-being, the more it simply equates well-being with the satisfaction of preferences, and thus tacitly promotes a normative account of human happiness. hirschfeld brilliantly and clearly shows that, if we assume no objective goal for human desire to arrive at, then the human being is presented as a generator of unending desires. although economists frequently object that rational choice does not require that desire be unbounded, hirschfeld shows that economics is based on the twin ideas that scarcity is inevitable because desires are infinite and that economic growth is always a good. economic growth allows for a continually expanding generation and satisfaction of preferences (62–63). preference is an everascending scale of value, and all goods tend to be collapsed into one type of good—material goods (66). because these goods are subjected to mathematical modeling, they are modeled in terms of money, which makes all kinds of goods interchangeable. although money is intended as a means for the pursuit of one’s preferred goods, money inevitably becomes an end in itself. with no objective end to pursue, we are encouraged to pursue what we are told will allow us to pursue our preferences, whatever they are. because money is the universal means, it becomes the end to which our lives become oriented. we work hard to get money which we think will bring us leisure, but it doesn’t, because we are too busy pursuing more money, which has become the end of our activities rather than the means (129–130). 69 cavanaugh what hirschfeld has done is to show that economists, despite their protestations, are already operating on the territory ostensibly relegated to theologians, that is, the end or goal of human life. despite their claims to the contrary, economists have a fully developed, if distorted, anthropology, and are making normative claims sotto voce about the ends that humans should pursue. once she has located the economists on the theologians’ territory, hirschfeld then puts them in conversation with a real theologian, thomas aquinas, and finds them overmatched. hirschfeld is happy to recognize the economists’ preeminence within their own area of expertise. for example, she dismisses (too hastily, in my judgment) aquinas’s ideas on the just price. for aquinas, those who jack up the price of wood in the wake of a hurricane are unjustly taking advantage of people’s desperation, but economists recognize that the higher price sends a useful signal to distant wood producers to increase production (23). aquinas may not have understood markets, but he understood human desire and the true end of human life. if economists are going to trespass surreptitiously in this territory, they will need an account with the sophistication of aquinas. to restore sanity to economic analysis, hirschfeld turns to aquinas for an account of the human person as one whose well-being is not the satisfaction of an ever-expanding range of preferences, and an account of the good life that is not equated with a rising income. it is easy enough to simply declare that god is in fact the end that humans seek, but hirschfeld gives a sophisticated account of how the notion of a creator god works in aquinas’s thought. it is not as simple as opposing finite goods to the infinite good, who is god. hirschfeld argues that both aquinas and mainstream economists think we are oriented to an infinite good. for economists, however, that good is quantitative: there is always something better out there. for aquinas, on the other hand, human desire is qualitative. we move toward perfection, toward completion, not toward the next desirable thing, whatever it might be. although augustine is not mentioned in the book, we could say that the consumer’s heart is as restless as augustine’s, easily bored with the latest gadget and wanting something new and better. for augustine, and for aquinas, the human heart comes to rest in god. as hirschfeld says, desire for aquinas is analogous to reason, which does not want endless arguments, but wants to arrive at a conclusion to any given syllogism (80). happiness—which is not an emotional state, but a comprehensive state of well-being or flourishing—is not merely subjective. what we desire can be evaluated against an objective standard of what is truly desirable, though in practice this takes careful discernment. discernment of the truly good is not mere preference. all of this follows from aquinas’s metaphysics, which the utopianism of the obvious 70 posits a good creator god in whom all being participates, including those who do not explicitly acknowledge god (82–93). in this turn to theology, hirschfeld never loses sight of material goods and the proper role of economics in the study thereof. hirschfeld deftly shows how aquinas’s metaphysics allows for a fuller appreciation of the uniqueness of material goods, which are not reducible to a uniform monetary value (116), while simultaneously relegating them to their proper place as instrumental means to happiness, not ends in themselves (97). and she brilliantly uses aquinas’s two-tiered account of human action to carve out a place for rational choice theory, which is useful for describing how people behave when they act out of their untutored passions. the incentives favored by economists do often work, because they appeal, as either carrots or sticks, to the lower passions. people are capable of more, however; the virtuous person has no need for such external motivations, but has internalized the pursuit of what is objectively good in her habits (104). there is much more to praise about hirschfeld’s analysis, but my time is probably more efficiently spent in the remainder of this essay commenting on what aspects of her argument could benefit from further exploration. my first set of comments pertains to the empirical claims that rational choice theorists make. the problem with rational choice is not only that it is normative when it claims to be purely descriptive, but also that its descriptions of human behavior are not convincing. here hirschfeld and aquinas could find an ally in work by psychologists who study human choosing. swarthmore professor barry schwartz’s book the paradox of choice, for example, argues on empirical grounds that the proliferation of choices that economists regard as the ideal in fact makes people less happy.2 schwartz uses the term “maximizer” to describe those who try to live up to the economists’ ideal of one who surveys the range of options and makes the best choice. the maximizer does not stop when they find what they need; there is always one more website to check for a better deal. the “satisficer” stops when they find what they are looking for. empirical studies show that satisficers are, on average, happier than maximizers, despite the fact that maximizers will often end up getting better deals, because the maximizer can never be completely happy with the choices they make. the maximizer/satisficer distinction maps onto hirschfeld’s quantitative/qualitative distinction. aquinas is a satisficer, recognizing that happiness requires the completion of desire. schwartz’s work provides empirical support for hirschfeld’s critique of rational choice theory. 71 cavanaugh “you know, the stones said, ‘you can’t always get what you want,’” says harvard psychologist daniel gilbert. “i don’t think that’s the problem. the problem is you can’t always know what you want.”3 gilbert has shown that humans are prone to an “empathy gap” by which we forget how bad our decision making is in “hot” emotional states when we are in a “cold” state. the “empathy gap” is exacerbated by “impact bias,” whereby people base their choices disproportionately on how previous experiences have felt at their extremes, both high and low. we consistently overestimate how happy a new kitchen will make us and how devastating a social snub will be, but in both cases we adjust and start taking them for granted. and we are habitually forgetful of our ability to adapt.4 so we remain on a “hedonic treadmill,” whereby we pursue happiness in novel and better products and experiences, only to find them disappointing, and so we search for new products and experiences. the inevitable disappointment produces regret: “why did i think moving to a big, isolated house would make me happy?” the solution to regret would seem to be to keep one’s options open, to make reversible decisions, but schwartz finds that this makes the problem worse. if one commits to life choices like marriage and community and vocation, one can consider the matter settled and move on. being constantly open to a new intimate partner or a move to a new city or a new job produces anxiety that one is not maximizing one’s choices. schwartz finds that married people who consider their vows irreversible are happier than those who do not, and he concludes “what seems to contribute most to happiness binds us rather than liberates us.”5 binding can only be liberating if we are bound to something outside of ourselves that cures our bad decision making. schwartz and gilbert do not draw this conclusion explicitly, but if we are bad at knowing what we want, then the only solution is some non-subjective standard of good to guide our choices. the work of empirical psychology, in other words, not only questions the real existence of the subject constructed by rational choice theory, but also buttresses hirschfeld’s claim, following aquinas, that the true end of human life is not subjectively determined (82–84). there is an objective reality that is both “out there,” independent of our choices, and simultaneously, as augustine says, interior intimo meo, closer to me than i am to myself.6 my deepest happiness is not simply available to me in whatever i happen to prefer; i don’t spontaneously know what i really want. my true happiness comes in searching and discerning and finding what is true about the universe, the love of god being the most basic truth. the utopianism of the obvious 72 to a christian, the love of god is basic in both the sense of “foundational” and in the sense of “obvious.” discerning what is good and what particular shape happiness is meant to take in one’s life is complicated, but knowing that preference is not the same as happiness should be, to use hirschfeld’s word, obvious (xv). hirschfeld’s book does a masterful job of clearing away the distortions that mainstream economics has introduced to the way that we think about the basic mechanisms of human choice and recovering a richer, saner, and more common sense picture of human desire. once this foundational work has been undertaken, once the obvious has been recovered, however, i wonder what more can be said. what does a specifically christian view of happiness have to contribute to economic life? beyond the belief in a creator god who orders the world in love, and beyond the basic anthropology that comes with that view of god, what do christian theological loci like christology, soteriology, and eschatology have to contribute to economics? perhaps raising these questions simply goes beyond the purpose of the book, which is to critique the distortions of rational choice theory in economics and to offer an alternative account of human desire that working economists can take seriously. what is needed is “finding a language that can bring moral concerns to bear on markets that obey the logic of profit seeking. without a bridging language, ethical or theological critiques seem to be a matter of imposition on the market […]” (2). hirschfeld does not buy the idea that theology and economics are two separate concerns; theology provides one possible framework of higher ends for economics that economics cannot itself provide. theology is useful for believers who are trying to reconcile their faith with their economic life. “but it is of more general value insofar as it serves as a reminder that some comprehensive framework is necessary if we are to remember that wealth is meant to serve us and not to be our master” (3). the modest goal of the book is to open a conversation with secular economists about the need for “some comprehensive framework,” and to suggest that seeing humans as god’s creatures could be one such framework. the modesty of this goal manifests itself in some stern warnings against utopian thinking. hirschfeld identifies the challenge economists present to theologians with a quote from machiavelli that says, in part, “it is so far from how one lives to how one should live that he who lets go of what is done for what should be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation” (4). it is nice to talk about virtues and goods, but how can that talk be practical? “is there any way to craft a theological economics that can take on board the real insights on offer from the hard-headed 73 cavanaugh pragmatism of economists while still contributing a substantive moral analysis?” (9). hirschfeld briefly surveys the various types of theological economics currently available and finds them all wanting. the first bends theology to economics: michael novak says the imago dei endorses entrepreneurial capitalism, while philip wogaman says the same doctrine supports the welfare state. the second limits theology to deciding on ends, while economists come up with the means. the problem here is that most everyone agrees on the ends already; we all want full employment, living wages, affordable housing, etc. the real question is how to get there. the third approach is a theological critique of the premises of economics. this is the approach with which hirschfeld has the most sympathy, but she accuses its practitioners of utopianism. d. stephen long and kathryn tanner are the main culprits here; both offer only wholesale rejections of mainstream economics instead of nuanced critiques. tanner’s critique of the role of finance in our economy omits any account of the function finance could play if it had the right spirit. as a result, there are no tools for pragmatically thinking through what could be done to combat the negative effects she details. correlatively, tanner’s take on financial capitalism is one sided. there is indeed much to critique. but tanner gives us no tools for thinking about how to balance the negative effects of modern capitalism with its beneficial role in, say, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in the past few decades. tanner thereby leaves herself open to the machiavellian charge that this is merely utopian thinking. (22) there is something immediately appealing about this type of pragmatism. we want to be affirmative of the world, and we also want a seat at the table so that we can effect real change. but i have grown increasingly suspicious of typologies that box every other thinker in a field into one or another unworkable paradigm, only to present the author of the typology as the lone voice who solves the problems plaguing the field. i don’t think hirschfeld is fair to long or tanner. more broadly, i worry that hirschfeld has a kind of a priori investment in mainstream economics that may prevent her from getting to the root of the problem. taking cues on pragmatism from machiavelli does not seem like a good place to start. the utopianism of the obvious 74 part of the problem is that hirschfeld’s appeal to the “hard-headed pragmatism of economists” gets dismantled in the course of her own analysis. mainstream economists are not hard-headed in their analysis of the human person, of “how one lives” and “what is done,” to use machiavelli’s words; they are quite drastically wrong, according not only to augustine and aquinas but to empirical psychologists like schwartz and gilbert. they are hard-headed, but in another sense of the term: stubborn and unable to see the evidence in front of them. the idea that mainstream economics is hard-headed realism is an ideological stance that deflects attention from the field’s failure to deliver on grandiose promises to provide a science of human behavior and simultaneously attempts to get people to behave as the economists’ model says they should behave. hirschfeld would do better to avoid feeding that ideology. more crucial than the status of economics is the status of the market economy itself. in bringing moral concerns to bear on the market, hirschfeld seems to take the market as a given, and suggests that we need to work within it to combat injustices. aquinas did not understand the way markets work. he lived in a static and hierarchical society in which people’s consumption levels were set by what was necessary to live becomingly in one’s station in life. hirschfeld chides aquinas for not questioning the gap between the high standards of living of the lords and those peasants who clung to survival (171). she does, however, appreciate the way that a static society capped consumption. today, by contrast, the measure of what we “need” keeps moving. “the plight of the genuinely indigent in faraway places will rouse our sense of concern, but we give far less than we might, and i would argue that this is largely bound up in the way we translate rising income into rising norms for what is necessary in order to live becomingly, which, in turn, has a good deal to do with the otherwise desirable thought that social mobility is a good thing” (173). this analysis is right and important, but it is geared toward “us” who have rising incomes but don’t give to the poor. what is missing is a more fundamental questioning of the division between capital and labor and the contrast between elites and the billions of desperately poor today. aquinas was concerned with giving excess wealth to the poor but did not wonder how some came to be lords and others serfs to begin with. curiosity about primitive accumulation is equally lacking in hirschfeld’s account. i was disappointed that she echoes the frequently-cited conservative talking point about the hundreds of millions lifted out of poverty by capitalism in recent decades. there are several problems with touting this statistic, as any economist should be able to notice. the first is that 80% of the gains have come from just two countries, china and india, and china’s status as 75 cavanaugh a communist country rather complicates the narrative of the triumph of capitalism. the second problem is that the statistic is based on a poverty line of $1.90 per day in 2011 dollars, which is not enough to combat malnutrition and early mortality in most places. many scholars have been calling for a more reasonable poverty line of $7.40 a day; using that measurement, the poverty rate has remained steady at 60% since 1981, and the raw number of poor has swelled to 4.2 billion. the third and most basic problem is that the statistic is based on money income. hundreds of millions of people have been pushed out of subsistence living and into the labor market, but their lives have not necessarily thereby improved just because they now receive and are dependent on wages. the anuak people of ethiopia had little need for money until they were evicted from their ancestral lands by the ethiopian government; they now work the palm oil plantations on that land run by an indian agribusiness for wages that do not compensate for the loss of their traditional sources of food and dignity. enclosures of common lands are not a just an historical footnote, but are at the foundation of the division between capitalists and laborers, and they have accelerated in recent decades.7 the reality behind the happy tale of millions escaping poverty is in fact, as anthropologist jason hickel writes, “a story of coerced proletarianisation.”8 this is the story of primitive accumulation. any hard-headed assessment of the pros and cons of capitalism must begin with the creation of the distinction between capitalists and laborers. the transition to a market economy was not possible without the forcible movement of people from subsistence living into labor markets, and the process is ongoing.9 one cannot fault an author for not covering every possible angle on a topic. my concern is that hirschfeld’s dismissal of “utopian” thinking can block off more foundational critiques of capitalism in a well-intentioned effort to build bridges with economists who simply take the market economy as given. the fundamental question is one of what is given—in other words, the relationship between what is and what ought to be. what is needed to address this question is not machiavelli but christian eschatology; unfortunately there is no explicit engagement with this theological locus in hirschfeld’s book. so she admonishes tanner for imagining a non-competitive economy by pointing out “yet god manifestly did create a world in which some goods are subject to rivalry in consumption. there must, then, be some language that accounts for rivalry and the associated degree of possessiveness that is nonetheless compatible with our call to mirror god’s graciousness” (20). i think it is deeply inadequate to read god’s intentions for creation off of the way things are and adjust our expectations accordingly. one can dismiss the eschatological vision the utopianism of the obvious 76 of isaiah 11:6 by putting a hungry wolf in a cage with a lamb and saying “see what happens? that’s just the way it is.” but christian eschatology is meant to mark the difference between the way things are because of sin and the way things were created to be. there must, indeed, be “some language that accounts for rivalry and the associated degree of possessiveness”; in christian language it is called sin. it is what the messiah came to save us from. there is only one mention of jesus christ in hirschfeld’s book, which comes by way of explaining the three parts of the aquinas’s summa theologiae, the third dealing with christ, “who is our way back to god” (24). given the importance of our way back to god in hirschfeld’s account of economic life, it is surprising that there is not a single citation from the tertia pars. again, i do not want to fault hirschfeld for not covering every locus of christian theology in her book, but i would encourage further work on aquinas and economics that would take into account the importance of jesus christ, our way back to god. i am unsure of what exactly that would look like, but surely christ should make some difference to a christian theological engagement with economics. jesus had quite a bit to say about economic matters, and much of it had a distinctly utopian bent. “do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth” (matt 6:19); “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of god” (matt 19:24); “you cannot serve both god and money” (matt 6:24); and so on. this last quote serves as the opening line of hirschfeld’s first chapter, which is entitled “to serve god or mammon?: the dialogue between theology and economics.” the emphasis on dialogue between theology and economics is important and salutary. for jesus, however, it was not a matter of dialogue between god and mammon; jesus personified money as mammon to emphasize that people were prone to treat money as a rival god to the true god. the theological issue here is idolatry. pope francis rarely talks about the world economy today without talking about idolatry.10 hirschfeld does an excellent job of uncovering the tacit metaphysics that grounds mainstream economics (xviii). but she does not really engage with economics as theology, in the way that jesus invites us to do. a model for further reflection on this theme might be philip goodchild’s book theology of money, in which goodchild unpacks the ways that money today holds the place that god occupied in medieval society—as the omnipotent guarantor of value. the main difference is that money is short on mercy.11 nothing shy of a theology of money seems adequate to address the financialization of the world economy today. i am not convinced that the matter is as simple as elaborating the “function finance 77 cavanaugh could play if it had the right spirit” (22). will the solution be to send people with the right spirit to work on wall street? hirschfeld thinks that a “thomistic perspective” would have helped in the financial crisis of 2008. “a financial environment in which people were vigilant to remember that finance serves the real economy and is only of value to the extent that it promotes real transactions that produce real economic value, and in which they were also vigilant to remember that the abstraction of money can fuel a quest for more that frequently blinds even very smart people to obvious realities, would be less subject to the instability of bubbles and manias” (159–160). it is an admirable goal to make people “vigilant to remember” what is true and good, but those who are too vigilant in this way are likely to face intense pressures to conform or be fired. hirschfeld admits as much in her last chapter, and even describes her vision of a thomist economy as “frankly, a utopian vision of what economic life could be” (192). secular economists are unlikely to buy her theistic anthropology, and a disordered relationship with wealth pervades our society. we might add that mainstream “orthodox” economics is hegemonic even at catholic universities. until mary hirschfeld and others like her are teaching in the economics department at villanova instead of humanities, thomist economics will have little purchase among the decision-makers who oversee the economy. she writes of the obstacles to achieving her vision, and says “this is the world we inhabit, and it might be difficult to see how the thomistic framework is actually useful. we seem to have foundered on the problem that animated the first chapter” (193) where she introduced machiavelli’s warning. she tries in her last chapter to outline what a humane economy would look like, but much of the chapter consists of repeating the critiques of mainstream economists she has made in the rest of the book. the last eight pages attempt to lay out “the implications of thomas’s framework for economic practice.” a thomistic economy would, first, promote happiness, not wealth (209–212), and, second, recognize that economics is not merely descriptive but helps shape the cultural conversation (212–217). ultimately, i am not convinced that hirschfeld has solved the problem of utopian thinking any better than tanner or long or any other thinker. when the inhumane economic system has such a lock on power, and when the obvious has been so well concealed, any vision of a humane economy is going to appear utopian. this is a problem for all of us thinkers, and i don’t think we are going to be able to think our way out of it. the vision is necessary, but unlikely to become reality unless we create alternative economic practices that fit uneasily within the dominant market system as it currently operates. thinking theologically will help get to the root of the problem and expose the the utopianism of the obvious 78 idolatry of the current system that leaves billions in abject poverty. that thinking can best go on within communities of practice that reject market logic and consider the good life for all as the end of any sane economy. pope benedict in caritas in veritate encourages us to challenge the “continuing hegemony of the binary model of market-plus-state” with “hybrid forms of commercial behavior” that combine profit and solidarity, and “micro-projects,” including “microfinance,” that challenge the dominant forces that dehumanize the economy.12 pope francis writes in laudato si’, “liberation from the dominant technocratic paradigm does in fact happen sometimes, for example, when cooperatives of small producers adopt less polluting means of production, and opt for a non-consumerist model of life, recreation and community.”13 both benedict and francis are keen that such spaces remain not merely niches but evangelize the entire economy.14 my suggestions for further exploration are set against the backdrop of my admiration for what hirschfeld has accomplished in her book. she has established grounds for a dialogue with mainstream economics on some very foundational issues. she has given us a thoroughgoing critique of rational choice theory, and replaced its anthropology with a thomist account of human desire that, guided by a good creator god, is capable of being oriented to objective goods beyond itself. in the future i would like to see her develop a critique of the theology of mainstream economics and develop a christian theology and practice of economics based on what the event of christ means for our economic relationships with the material world and with poor persons that embody christ. hirschfeld clearly has more to teach us, and i look forward to her future work. notes 1. page numbers in parentheses are from mary l. hirschfeld, aquinas and the market: toward a humane economy (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2018). 2. barry schwartz, the paradox of choice (new york: ecco, 2004). 3. daniel gilbert, quoted in jon gertner, “the futile pursuit of happiness,” new york times magazine september 7, 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/07/magazine/the-futilepursuit-of-happiness.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm 79 cavanaugh 4. daniel gilbert, stumbling on happiness (new york: vintage, 2005). 5. schwartz 108. 6. augustine, confessions iii.vi.11. 7. for a worldwide survey of recent enclosures, see fred pearce, the land grabbers: the new fight over who owns the earth (boston: beacon, 2012). 8. jason hickel, “bill gates says poverty is decreasing. he couldn’t be more wrong,” the guardian 29 january 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/29/ bill-gates-davos-global-poverty-infographic-neoliberal?cmp=share_iosapp_other 9. for the history, see michael perelman, the invention of capitalism: classical political economy and the secret history of primitive accumulation (durham, nc: duke university press, 2000). 10. for example, evangelii gaudium §55: “we have created new idols. the worship of the ancient golden calf (cf. ex 32:1–35) has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose. the worldwide crisis affecting finance and the economy lays bare their imbalances and, above all, their lack of real concern for human beings; man is reduced to one of his needs alone: consumption” (the holy see, 2013, http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/ apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20131124_evangeliigaudium.html). for further examples and analysis, see my article “return of the golden calf: economy, idolatry, and secularization since gaudium et spes,” theological studies 76.4 (december 2015): 698–717. 11. philip goodchild, theology of money (durham, nc: duke university press, 2009). 12. pope benedict xvi, caritas in veritate, the holy see, 2009, http://w2.vatican.va/content/ benedict-xvi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20090629_caritas-inveritate.html, §41, 38, 45, 47, 65. 13. pope francis, laudato si’, §112. later in laudato si’ he commends the “great variety of small-scale food production systems which feed the greater part of the world’s peoples, the utopianism of the obvious 80 using a modest amount of land and producing less waste, be it in small agricultural parcels, in orchards and gardens, hunting and wild harvesting or local fishing.” in the same section, pope francis calls on civil authorities “to adopt clear and firm measures in support of small producers and differentiated production” (the holy see, 2015, http://w2.vatican.va/ contentfrancesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudatosi.html). 14. e.g., “efforts are needed—and it is essential to say this—not only to create ‘ethical’ sectors or segments of the economy or the world of finance, but to ensure that the whole economy—the whole of finance—is ethical, not merely by virtue of an external label, but by its respect for requirements intrinsic to its very nature” (benedict xvi, caritas in veritate §45). microsoft word 5 ward 11.1.docx [expositions 11.1 (2017) 60–71] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376   presence, privilege, and moral appropriation: reading zubik as an act of protest kate ward marquette university suppose a woman visits a catholic health care facility and inadvertently leaves her purse behind. an employee delivers the purse to the facility’s lost and found, where the patient eventually returns to claim it. if the purse contained birth control pills, has the catholic health care facility cooperated in supplying a patient with contraception? for catholic moral theology, the answer is relatively straightforward. material cooperation has taken place: the facility did, in the matter of the act, provide a woman with contraception. however, formal cooperation—which shares, or cooperates in, the intent of an illicit act—was clearly absent. i believe that evaluating cooperation in the zubik v. burwell case is equally straightforward. specifically, i agree with the zubik plaintiffs that it is reasonable to regard even so seemingly insignificant an act as signing a document as formal cooperation in offering birth control to employees.1 as initially proposed by the department of health and human services (hhs), this act is not simply material cooperation; rather, it does indeed cooperate with the government’s intent to offer birth control. however, as bernard prusak suggests in his introduction to the present forum, determining whether an act is or is not cooperation is not sufficient for determining how one should proceed. agents remain responsible for using the virtue of prudence to balance competing claims and appoint appropriate means to the ends they seek. more than anything else, cooperation reminds us of the world’s moral complexity and the impossibility of avoiding any contact with evil, even as we continually seek to resist it. moreover—as prusak’s introduction goes on to show—the zubik case offers many interesting lessons for catholic moral theology that go far beyond determining if formal cooperation was at issue. for example, as the zubik case proceeded, theologians writing on the catholic moral theology blog debated the risk of giving scandal—inviting others to moral harm—in zubik’s apparent threat to the legitimacy of the affordable care act. if there is a danger of scandal in catholic organizations’ accepting a mandate that violates conscience, might there not also be a 61 ward danger of scandal in opposing a bill with the potential to do so much good over what many americans—including many catholics—see as a misguided emphasis on contraception?2 while this and many other reasonable objections raised during the case’s time on the supreme court’s docket deserve scrutiny, perhaps the most interesting question now before ethicists is what can be learned when evaluating cases that may involve cooperation in the future. toward this end, i propose to evaluate the zubik case as an act of protest. this essay will focus on one plaintiff group, the religious order of the little sisters of the poor, and the way the order used rhetorics of prophecy and opposition in its public participation in the case. the essay will suggest that the little sisters’ engagement provides a model for protest in the face of cooperation with evil, and will draw lessons and cautions about such protest from catholic moral theology. another advantage to a protest reading of the little sisters’ participation in the zubik case is that it allows us to see their participation as an act of agency, agency that was often questioned in public discussion of the case. for example, one commentator argued that the little sisters of the poor were manipulated into serving as the public face of the zubik plaintiffs, rather than bishop david zubik, the group priests for life, and other male members of the church hierarchy.3 this commentator’s feminist critique draws needed attention to the presence of patriarchy in the catholic church, but does so by neatly stripping a group of women religious of their own agency.4 a protest reading avoids negating the little sisters’ agency in this way, instead reading their involvement as an exercise of what rosita deann mathews has called “power from the periphery.”5 whether or not one would have done or recommended the same actions in their situation, there is much to learn from the sisters’ prophetic approach to the zubik case. to begin with, through skillful engagement with the courts and the news media, the sisters succeeded not only in withdrawing their own participation in the provision of birth control, but also in framing the case as one of religious liberty and themselves as prophetic dissenters. the sisters’ protest effectively argues for an engaged catholic presence in the world, against a “neoaugustinian” model of retreat into holy seclusion.6 it presents a model for effective protest that does not simply denounce, but offers alternatives. and it draws our attention to two underappreciated issues in catholic theological thinking on protest: privilege and moral appropriation. reading zubik as an act of protest 62 presence in the world presents occasion for protest it is clear from their public statements that the little sisters of the poor regarded their participation in the zubik case not simply as an opportunity to keep their “hands clean” from participation in the provision of birth control, but, consistent with their order’s mission, as a means of public protest in favor of the value of human life. are they correct to view their participation in this way? recent theological literature on protest has focused on a more traditional understanding of protest as organized, visible nonviolent resistance. for example, kelly brown douglas calls for “moral participation” in resistance to violent stand-your-ground culture. moral participation “involves commitment to a certain way of ‘living and moving and having our being’ in the world […]. it is being the change that is god’s heaven.”7 in a similar key, joerg rieger and kwok pui-lan praise the occupy wall street movement for embodying the democratic, participatory environment the protestors sought for their nation.8 for brown douglas, rieger, and kwok, protests of nonviolent resistance have the power both to communicate dissent and to create a foretaste of the better future the movement seeks. while the protest of zubik v. burwell did not entail direct nonviolent resistance, brad littlejohn aptly reminds us that protest can take place through established channels for interacting with government.9 involvement in a legal case is certainly protest under this definition. despite discomfort with “the unwelcome glare of the public eye,”10 the little sisters of the poor portrayed their involvement in the case as one of prophecy. the sisters’ understanding of prophecy appears to dovetail with that detailed by cathleen kaveny in a recent book: prophets offer social critique and demand social change, from a standpoint informed by the prophets’ relationship with god.11 in an op-ed essay explaining “why we can’t ‘just sign the form,’” sr. constance veit of the little sisters of the poor compared the sisters to the biblical martyr eleazar, who accepted death rather than eat food forbidden by jewish religious laws (2 maccabees 6:18–31). veit invokes the theological term for actions that could lead others to moral harm when she refers to signing the form as possibly giving scandal.12 she writes that just as “eleazar feared the scandal he might cause the younger men,” for the little sisters of the poor to sign the hhs accommodation form “could cause scandal by giving the example that it’s okay to ignore clearly stated catholic doctrine.”13 in addition to viewing their participation as a witness to the sanctity of human life and to the authority of church teaching, the sisters also hoped to use the publicity of the case to draw attention to their charism of supporting the elderly poor and to the needs of that population.14 63 ward some christian ethicists today are skeptical of deep christian engagement with the world, regarding the world as a site of potential contamination where christian witness is unlikely to be effective or even intelligible.15 catholic ethicists more reliably insist that christians have a duty to bring their moral message into the world, even if doing so is messy and exposes christians to moral risk. eric genilo has pointed out the limitations of a clean hands approach: following it, the church may lose the opportunity to partner with other organizations, viewed as morally compromised, in joint efforts toward the common good.16 the little sisters’ act of protest follows the traditionally catholic model of engagement with the world. running a catholic health care facility is a clear message and embodiment of jesus’ care for the poor and vulnerable. in a world in which health care and employment in general are governed by complex federal, state, and local laws, running such a ministry engages a community deeply with the complex politics of a religiously plural society. it is precisely because they did not shy away from such complex engagement that the little sisters were positioned to take on their act of protest. they had a role as plaintiffs because they were catholic employers. had the order at some point decided to pursue “clean hands” by getting out of the health care business, the protest opportunity would have been lost to them. their presence in the health care field presented the opportunity for prophetic witness. effective protest offers alternatives certainly one reason for the success of the zubik case in the courts and in public opinion was its offer of a clear alternative to the proposal it denounced and sought to avoid. the zubik plaintiffs argued publicly that alternatives to their cooperation with the mandate were possible, including insurance companies providing contraception directly or the federal government offering it on health care exchanges.17 catholic protest in the u.s. has not always been clear about its preferred alternatives. accordingly, kristin heyer and bryan massingale criticize early u.s. catholic contributions to the civil rights movement for condemning racial segregation but failing to offer specific policy prescriptions, such as integrating churches or promoting equality of voting access.18 by contrast, heyer and massingale credit gaudium et spes for advocating a new relationship between church and world that inspired many white catholics to embody the just world they wished to see, by marching shoulder to shoulder with african-american civil rights activists.19 christians who protest would do well to emulate such calls to practical alternatives, without reading zubik as an act of protest 64 forgetting to offer broader, but no less necessary alternative visions and values systems rooted in christian understandings of personhood, society, and shared responsibility for all. protest is a privilege while supporters of the zubik plaintiffs sometimes portrayed the little sisters of the poor as helpless nuns opposing a powerful leviathan government, in fact, the sisters were backed by a deep bench of powerful supporters. their legal team, the becket fund for religious liberty, has won respect for its work from an impressive roster of legal experts and religious leaders, including pope john paul ii.20 the becket fund, which also handled media contacts for the little sisters of the poor (quite skillfully), receives funding from such deep-pocketed donors as the knights of columbus and the koch brothers.21 certainly, the united states government is also deeply resourced, but the same cannot be said for the employees of the zubik plaintiffs, many of whom are low-paid healthcare workers. political scientists kay schlozman, henry brady, and sidney verba found that “with the exception of unions, those who do unskilled work have no occupationally based membership groups at all to represent them.”22 of the economic organizations active in u.s. politics, only nine percent represent a group that includes eighty percent of u.s. adults: namely, “lower-level white-collar, blue-collar, and service workers as well as those who are unemployed, in school, at home, disabled, or retired.”23 that the sisters did not claim to represent the views of their employees in their involvement in the case is evident from their explicit admission, discussed below, that employees might wish to seek birth control elsewhere.24 protest is about asserting the power we have, and there is nothing wrong with using the resources available to us to pursue a goal we deem to be right. but the fact that powerful organizations rushed to the aid of the little sisters of the poor is a stark reminder that a majority of u.s. people are unable to command such a privilege. unless they are represented by a labor union, few health-care workers, of whatever skill and income level, have the skills and expertise at their disposal to navigate the u.s. legal system and the media as adroitly as the little sisters did with the support of the becket fund. furthermore, as michael jaycox has pointed out in the context of protest movements involving nonviolent resistance, when those with power and privilege do engage in protest, they may be rightfully distrusted by those with less power. the powerful and privileged may be less effective in movements where the tactic of nonviolent resistance entails 65 ward accepting risk to oneself, because they have more to lose and are often less willing to incur risk.25 whether protest takes place in the streets or through the legal system, it is incumbent upon christians to attend to the role of privilege in protest and to ask whose voices are not being heard. attend to moral appropriation the observation that protest is an act of privilege brings us to the concept of moral appropriation. cathleen kaveny coined the concept of moral appropriation to describe situations, analogous to cooperation with evil, where the agent does not assist in an act of evil but rather benefits from an evil act that has already taken place. moral cooperation is traditionally understood as assisting in an act of evil; thus, the zubik plaintiffs regarded assisting in the provision of birth control to employees as moral cooperation. in moral appropriation, by contrast, agents “take advantage of the fruits or byproducts of someone else’s wrongful acts in order to facilitate their own morally worthwhile activity.”26 while the classical example of cooperation with evil is the servant who holds a ladder so his employer may commit adultery, kaveny’s example of appropriation of evil describes someone who accepts a promotion, knowing that the former occupant of the position was unjustly fired.27 the new employee may not have caused the injustice, but she chooses to benefit from it. while protesting as privileged persons remains an act oriented to the common good, continuing to benefit from privilege that accrues to us unjustly, without attempting to oppose or dismantle structures of privilege, is an act of moral appropriation that should be avoided. that said, there is a much more interesting example of moral appropriation afoot in the zubik case. a key point in the plaintiffs’ case, one that the little sisters of the poor emphasized strenuously in their public communications, was that the employees of the zubik plaintiffs had alternative ways to obtain birth control without the involvement of their religious employer. that is, the plaintiffs made clear that they were not, in fact, trying to prevent their employees from obtaining and using birth control, merely trying to stay out of the system by which employees acquired it. “as the little sisters have argued all along,” says a public statement still available on the order’s website, “the [supreme court] ruling in no way bars the government from providing these services to women who want them as long as the government stops trying to take over the little sisters’ health plan.”28 this wording is a bit misleading, as government does not pay for birth control under the affordable care act—insurers pay for it without direct cost sharing on the part of patients.29 what the little sisters seem to mean here is that the ruling does not prevent reading zubik as an act of protest 66 government from arranging birth control coverage for employees of religious organizations, without involving the employers. this is a clear-cut case of moral appropriation under kaveny’s definition. the little sisters of the poor benefited from the fact that provision of birth control was already taking place. they used this fact to bolster their case in the court of public opinion and before the supreme court. the supreme court decision reflected the sisters’ argument, directing the parties—the catholic employers and the department of health and human services—to “arrive at an approach going forward that accommodates petitioners’ religious exercise while at the same time ensuring that women covered by petitioners’ health plans ‘receive full and equal health coverage, including contraceptive coverage.’”30 as kaveny cautions, moral appropriation does not necessarily mean the appropriator is to blame for the morally evil actions she appropriates, since she may not have intended the morally evil actions in question and may, in fact, have been powerless to stop them. according to kaveny, “it is not necessarily the case that appropriators intend the contemporaneous or future evil acts whose fruits or byproducts they appropriate in order to further their own ends.”31 for example, under normal circumstances, medical researchers who make use of aborted fetal tissue may predict that such tissue will continue to become available through the practice of abortions, but to predict an act is not to intend it: we cannot intend where we exercise no power to control.32 however, what kaveny calls moral “seepage” remains a danger to guard against in moral appropriation. in the example of research on fetal tissue, even if the researchers do not intend for abortions to be performed, it is possible that their reliance on the tissue may soften or otherwise affect their reaction to the practice of abortion.33 along the same lines, the little sisters cannot legitimately be said to intend that the government assist women in receiving contraceptive coverage. nor should they be criticized because their protest did not extend to attempting to stop this activity, but only to removing themselves from cooperation with it. rather, this choice reflects a prudent understanding of the possibilities and limits of prophecy. like the little sisters of the poor, christians engaged in protest would do well to have a clear-eyed view of their goals: to avoid moral cooperation (a goal easily defined, whether or not it is easily achieved); to avoid moral appropriation (perhaps a more challenging goal, given the presence of systemic evil in the world); or to eradicate an evil practice from the world altogether. 67 ward julie hanlon rubio has argued for increased attention to cooperation in catholic social ethics, showing that cooperation (like kaveny’s moral appropriation) appropriately helps us broaden our sense of where we are responsible.34 i agree that cooperation and appropriation direct our attention to our interdependence with others and to the fact that our characters are shaped by acts throughout our lives, but these tools cannot provide a guideline for action in every possible circumstance. the little sisters’ approach to dealing with the realities of moral cooperation and appropriation serves as a model for catholics attempting to live faithful lives in a morally complex world. by joining the zubik case to avoid cooperation, they were able to prophetically witness to their respect for life and the value of religious freedom. moreover, by accepting the moral appropriation of allowing insurers to offer their employees contraception directly, they were able to allow their employees to follow their own consciences and offer the obama administration a solution they could portray as a win. indeed, the sisters themselves portrayed it this way, writing that “[t]he unanimous decision by the supreme court was a big win for the little sisters. but that does not mean anyone lost.”35 this irenic approach is a model for catholic organizations seeking to exercise corporate conscience in a morally complex world where secular and religious laws can at times clash. conclusion the zubik v. burwell case is of interest to ethicists seen through many different lenses, from bioethics to religious freedom to questions of fundamental moral theology, such as cooperation and appropriation. i have suggested that reading the case as an act of protest contains lessons for christians who may be confronted with occasions of moral cooperation in a pluralistic and complex world. one plaintiff group, the little sisters of the poor, exercised agency in framing their participation as prophetic. their successful involvement indicates the limitations of a “clean hands” approach to participation in the world and the effectiveness of protest that offers alternatives. cautions about protest from catholic moral theology include attention to the role of privilege in protest and to the need for prudence in navigating the demands of moral cooperation and appropriation. with their involvement in zubik v. burwell, the little sisters of the poor provide a useful test case for effective christian protest in a morally complex world. reading zubik as an act of protest 68 notes 1. sr. constance veit, “why we can’t ‘just sign the form,’” diocese of madison catholic herald, http://www.madisoncatholicherald.org/guestcolumn/ 6174-veit-column.html. accessed november 4, 2016. 2. dana dillon, et al., “hhs roundtable: cooperation with evil | catholic moral theology,” catholic moral theology, http://catholicmoraltheology.com/ hhs-roundtable-cooperationwith-evil/. accessed january 15, 2017. 3. patricia miller, “‘little sisters’ being sold as face of contraception case,” religion dispatches, march 22, 2016, http://religiondispatches.org/little-sisters-being-sold-as-faceof-contraception-case/. 4. along the lines of maligning or questioning the sisters’ agency, i remember reading an opinion piece at the time of the case, though i was unable to locate it for this essay, which portrayed the sisters as manipulative for wearing their habits (that is, the everyday clothing of their religious order) to the supreme court hearings. to be sure, in the debate over the hhs mandate, it was not only the little sisters of the poor who had their motives impugned, their agency denied, and worse. kristin heyer and bryan massingale remind us that women religious, including cha president sr. carol keehan and members of network, were charged with damaging the church and had their catholic faith publicly questioned by bishops for airing their support of the aca in prudent judgments of conscience. see kristin e. heyer and bryan n. massingale, “gaudium et spes and the call to justice: the u.s. experience,” in from vatican ii to pope francis: charting a catholic future, ed. paul crowley, s.j. (maryknoll, new york: orbis books, 2014), 93–94. 5. rosita deann mathews, “using power from the periphery,” in a troubling in my soul: womanist perspectives on evil and suffering, ed. emilie maureen townes, bishop henry mcneal turner studies in north american black religion, vol. 8 (maryknoll, ny: orbis books, 1993), 92–106. 6. see lisa sowle cahill’s four “streams” of christian ethics in her “catholic feminists and traditions: renewal, reinvention, replacement,” journal of the society of christian ethics 34 (2014): 27–51. 69 ward 7. kelly brown douglas, stand your ground: black bodies and the justice of god (maryknoll, new york: orbis books, 2015), 224. 8. joerg rieger and pui-lan kwok, occupy religion: theology of the multitude (plymouth, u.k.: rowman & littlefield publishers, 2013), 122–27. 9. brad littlejohn, “taxation and christian ethics, pt. 3: what is christian protest?” may 13, 2011, https://bradlittlejohn.com/2011/05/13/2011513taxation-and-christian-ethics-pt-3what-is-christian-protest-html/. 10. sister constance veit, “taking the long view on journey to the supreme court,” pittsburgh catholic, september 25, 2015, http://pittsburghcatholic.org/columns/takingthe-long-view-on-journey-to-the-supreme-court-. 11. m. cathleen kaveny, “appropriation of evil: cooperation’s mirror image,” theological studies 61 (2000): 245. 12. james t. bretzke, handbook of roman catholic moral terms (washington, d.c.: georgetown university press, 2013), 207–8. 13. veit, “why we can’t ‘just sign the form.’” 14. john allen, “little sisters say fight over contraception has been worth it,” crux, august 3, 2016, https://cruxnow.com/uncategorized/2016/08/03/little-sisters-say-fightcontraception-worth/. 15. this perspective is often referred to as “augustinian” or “neo-augustinian”; see cahill, “catholic feminists and traditions,” 29–30. 16. eric genilo, “clean hands,” catholic theological ethics in the world church, http://www.catholicethics.com/forum-submissions/clean-hands. accessed january 14, 2017. 17. “little sisters of the poor v. burwell,” little sisters of the poor, 2016, http://thelittlesistersofthepoor.com/. accessed november 4, 2016. 18. heyer and massingale, “gaudium et spes and the call to justice,” 86–87. 19. ibid., 87–88. reading zubik as an act of protest 70 20. “becket fund mission statement,” becket fund, http://www.becketfund.org/our-mission/. accessed january 15, 2017 21. tony carrk, “the koch brothers: what you need to know about the financiers of the radical right” (center for american progress action fund, april 2011), https://www.americanprogressaction.org/wpcontent/uploads/issues/2011/04/pdf/koch_brothers.pdf; josh israel, “how one religious organization bankrolls america’s social conservative movement,” thinkprogress, december 22, 2014, https://thinkprogress.org/how-one-religious-organization-bankrollsamericas-social-conservative-movement-b2d4a22b9239. 22. kay lehman schlozman, sidney verba, and henry e brady, the unheavenly chorus: unequal political voice and the broken promise of american democracy (princeton: princeton university press, 2012), 326. 23. ibid., 331. 24. see also david e. decosse and kristin e. heyer, “introduction,” in conscience and catholicism: rights, responsibilities, and institutional responses, eds. david e. decosse and kristin e. heyer (maryknoll, ny: orbis books, 2015), xv. 25. michael jaycox, “dangerous memories, dangerous movements: christian freedom in the empire,” catholic theological ethics in the world church, http://www.catholicethics. com/forum-submissions/dangerous-memories-dangerous-movements-christian-freedomin-the-empire. accessed january 14, 2017. 26. kaveny, “appropriation of evil,” 286. 27. ibid., 292. 28. “supreme court rules unanimously in favor of little sisters,” little sisters of the poor, n.d., http://thelittlesistersofthepoor.com/#supreme-court-ruling. 29. internal revenue service, employee benefits security administration, and health and human services department, “coverage of certain preventive services under the affordable care act,” federal register, july 2, 2013, 71 ward https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2013/07/02/2013-15866/coverage-of-certainpreventive-services-under-the-affordable-care-act. 30. per curiam, zubik v. burwell (supreme court of the united states, may 16, 2016), https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/15pdf/14-1418_8758.pdf. 31. kaveny, “appropriation of evil,” 297. 32. ibid., 298–300. 33. ibid., 310. 34. rubio, “moral cooperation with evil and social ethics.” 35. “supreme court rules unanimously in favor of little sisters.” microsoft word bane prooftext.docx [expositions 13.1 (2019) 112–120] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 tracking failures, imagining alternatives: du bois and the myth of guaranteed progress theodra bane villanova university much of what surrounds contemporary controversies along the color line—the central problem of the twentieth century according to w.e.b. du bois—in the popular rhetoric and imaginary is the inexplicability of the problem’s resurgence today after over 50 years of civil rights “victories” and demonstrative “social progress.” there is a cultural narrative of inevitable, collective betterment that appears an inevitable result of the wider acknowledgement and recognition of difference within the culture at large. in this light, our contemporary moment—with its rise in white supremacist violence, xenophobic rhetoric, and entrenched, facile identitarianism—has the illusion of rupture rather than the spirit of continuity. the academy’s promise of liberal education in the face of a “crisis of the humanities” also offers up this narrative of progress as programmatic. on this view, dismissing the power of the liberal arts means undermining an accounting of our guaranteed progress as a society. after all, without the spaces to study and analyze the past, how can we track how far we have come in the present? i turn to this practice within the humanities to think about what such assumptions conceal. what promises of new worlds or future liberations are obscured when we take progress as a given? counter to the an account of ongoing betterment, perhaps a new way forward in the face of present tensions is the tracking of all the failures of human striving that have created the present moment. while this shift may not be popular—or labeled as unduly pessimistic—it is not an unprecedented shift in perspective. both within and without the academy, the thoughts of w.e.b. du bois prove fruitful in combatting the myth of guaranteed progress, or the promise of social evolutionary advancement through understanding alone.1 in this brief analysis, i argue that one of the most important legacies left to us by du bois is his practice of shifting the litmus of understanding from a reliance on a progressive guarantee to the necessity of ongoing struggle. through this new frame, an analysis of power and the recognition of our responsibilities towards others beyond the given horizons of conceptual possibility are 113 bane illuminated by explicitly acknowledging and analyzing our moments of failure. in this way, du bois insisted that a liberal education must contribute towards developing the toolkit of participation and praxis to maintain and advance the work of justice. du bois’s work presents us with a powerful interdisciplinary vision. this interdisciplinarity also offers creative and fruitful engagements that highlight the responsibility of critically reexamining one’s thoughts over a lifetime of work. the development of du bois’s corpus tracks a shift from victorian moralism and “talented tenth” rhetoric to joining the communist party and exploring pan-africanism as a movement. i want to think through this ideological shift as a mark of this critical responsibility on the part of du bois. in particular, this trajectory indicates a willingness to encounter head on where the myth of progress fails. du bois realized the necessity of ongoing critical engagement through scholarship and activism, which lead to the vital recognition that inherently progressive narratives of liberal education are false. as george ciccariello-maher elaborates, the research of du bois “rediscovered something else in the process: a tragic dialectic of reversals, defeats, and missed opportunities; not a long but heroic march toward a brilliant future but ‘a brief moment in the sun’ before retreating, under the weight of white supremacist terror, ‘back again toward slavery’; the ostensible built-in progress of the dialectic of history folded back onto itself, beaten and bloodied” (156–157). in this spirit of rediscovery, i turn to the texts of john brown, darkwater: voices from within the veil, and black reconstruction to analyze how du bois uses the tools of moral imperative, immanent critique, and historical materialism to demonstrate instances of failed progress and promise, providing ample evidence where the promise of progress “fell back on itself,” re-instantiating familiar forms of violence. reframing the analysis in terms of marking failures as opposed to tracking progress expands the horizon of the possible for du bois towards new ways forward. new possibilities of relation with one another emerge as alternatives once we have properly understood our history beyond imposed narrative assumptions of progress. du bois’s analysis of the life and actions of john brown, written in 1909, provides a powerful analysis of failure. the raid on harper’s ferry and attempted insurrection to end slavery in 1859 was a failure in its own standing, and yet was a powerful catalyst towards new liberatory futures beyond the limits of the law. there was a moral power and force to john brown’s character that recognized the urgency of the moment and the necessity of breaking the law to achieve a greater end—that of liberty and justice for all: du bois and the myth of guaranteed progress 114 no casuistry of culture or of learning, of well-being or tradition moved him in the slightest degree: “slavery is wrong,” he said,—“kill it.” destroy it—uproot it, stem, blossom, and branch; give it no quarter, exterminate it and do it now. was he wrong? no. the forcible staying of human uplift by barriers of law, and might, and tradition is the most wicked thing on earth. it is wrong, eternally wrong. it is wrong by whatever name it is called, on in whatever guise it lurks, and whenever it appears. but it is especially heinous, black, and cruel when it masquerades in the robes of the law and justice and patriotism. so was american slavery clothed in 1859, and it had to die by revolution, not by milder means. and this men knew. they had known it a hundred years. yet they shrank and trembled. (john brown 340–341) the mere knowledge that something is corrupt is not enough to encourage action. here, du bois points to the importance of tracking the moral failures of the broader society in response to injustice as a pattern of awareness. the essential status of an eternal moral wrong can go unacknowledged in a moral universe that only considers individual practices as relevant for judgment and consideration. the unique moral fortitude and conviction of individuals taken against an expansive institution raises new questions of morality for du bois. the burden of failure does not fall on the actions of john brown as a morally upstanding individual striving for a liberatory future for all. rather, the burden of failure falls on a society that does not foster or encourage such higher actions. the moral imperative for right action is then no longer a problem of individual resilience. it is expanded into a political question. society fails when the tools and actions to take on essential moral concerns are put aside for the sake of stability. the investigation of john brown as a whole person beyond the singular effort of harper’s ferry opens a vital space to critique the locus of moral imperatives. by fleshing out the fullness of an individual, du bois paradoxically provides an opportunity to theorize against the individualistic limits of the social imaginary. instead of honing in on the solitary exemplar of the man, du bois utilizes brown’s full biography to flesh out the broader stakes of a new moral practice that would facilitate further revolutionary—and necessary—right action: “freedom has come to mean not individual caprice or aberration, but social self-realization in an endless chain of selves; and 115 bane freedom for such development is not the denial but the central assertion of evolutionary theory” (john brown 379). in other words, it is a collective striving and group relation that becomes the marker of moral right action or failure for du bois far more than the individuated exception. as du bois demonstrates through the biographical investigation of brown, he worked with black folk and not merely for them. john brown chose an alternative mode of daily practice beyond the singular, focal action of harper’s ferry. what does this documentation then reveal about the social failures of american life? the moral imperative reaches beyond the kantian rational subject to become a communal effort with an anchored history and immediate demand in the present political moment. society thus needs a broader moral imperative beyond the reduction of morality to the question of singular persons and their behaviors. i would like to pause here on the call that du bois makes to the popular language of his day. the turn to “evolutionary theory” to bolster this new vision of an intersubjective, socially minded morality attempts to enter into the discourse of difference at the turn of the twentieth century beyond the popular model of eugenics, yet still comprehensive within a social darwinist framework. he goes further: this, then, is the truth: the cost of liberty is less than the price of repression, even though the cost be blood. freedom of development and equality of opportunity is the demand of darwinism and this calls for the abolition of hard and fast lines between races, just as it called for the breaking down of barriers between classes. only in this way can the best in humanity be discovered and conserved, and only thus can mankind live in peace and progress. (john brown 395) there is a turn to the guaranteed myth of evolutionary progress to support his arguments for racial equality at this time. this turn toward the lexicon of inclusion into a mainstream discourse is an attempt to fit into a wider ideological framework. while the critique of individualism stands in its own right, there is still an attempt to include this counter-narrative into a larger mainstream discourse. this intellectual move presents itself as a shift towards a diversifying framework of social darwinism to get around overtly racist eugenics. if du bois can make his argument in the language of those who monopolize the discourse towards a shared end, then perhaps the critique du bois and the myth of guaranteed progress 116 will be taken up across the field, and striving for racial equality may become a reality. however, this turn as a tactic did not have the power that he intended. through further engagement and scholarship, du bois realized that utilizing the language of the powerful that performs exclusion and monopolizes discourse is itself a failure—it cannot be co-opted for the effective work of betterment across difference. in darkwater: voices from within the veil, du bois critiques the strategy of incorporation that he once utilized in his own theory. he does this by turning to immanent critique. this methodological pivot from moralism grants deeper arguments to support the claim that it is no longer the responsibility of those “within the veil” to strive to meet an impossible standard. rather, the exclusion of non-white voices is a structural failure within the very terms of discourse: “instead of standing as a great example of the success of democracy and the possibility of human brotherhood america has taken her place as an awful example of its pitfalls and failures, so far as black and brown and yellow peoples are concerned […] america, land of democracy, wanted to believe in the failure of democracy so far as darker people were concerned” (darkwater 28). reasoning one’s way into inclusion or recognition by the means set forth by the dominant discourse is now understood as a logical impossibility. the hegemonic modes of discourse fail by their own standards. by marking the failure of inclusion as an intentional practice, du bois shifted his own practice of writing and thinking. he no longer embraced the language of the current moment for the sake of incorporation, but turned to the practice of immanent critique to make explicit the mechanisms that kept fast the color line. this methodological turn provides deeper explication into the points where inclusion and incorporation fail. the burden of failure has a different locus of responsibility—that of the systemic structures of white supremacy. therefore, any attempt at striving for recognition or inclusion in existing terms is already a failed project. du bois further articulates this turn towards immanent critique in his 1932 speech “education and work”: let there be no misunderstanding about this, no easy-going optimism. we are not going to share modern civilization just by deserving recognition. we are going to force ourselves in by organized far-seeking effort—by out-thinking and outflanking the owner of the world today who are too drunk with their own arrogance and power successfully to oppose us if we think and learn and do. (71) 117 bane it is no longer a failure of being understood by the oppressor that continues exclusion. rather, these failures of incorporation and integration point towards a systemic mode of exclusion. recognizing this structure opens up for du bois—and for us in our own strivings—a different horizon for imagining a future beyond the set terms of guaranteed progress. by tracking the explicit modes of failure within the claim to progress, immanent critique of existing hegemony without a desire to succumb to its terms opens new modes of analysis. although such practices continue to be of great import in combatting the myth of guaranteed progress, the role of immanent critique was not sufficient in capturing the extent of structural failures that left black and brown bodies in the wake of white supremacy. in his magnum opus of research, du bois investigated the complex material conditions and political forces behind the failures of post-civil war racial equality in black reconstruction. published in 1935, this text solidifies the importance of historical materialism as a mode of critiquing failure for du bois. specifically, it is through investigating what actually happened on the ground with an eye to economic factors in the transition from an agrarian to industrial mode of production that the reasons for this failure of racial equality become apparent. du bois reminds us that slavery was an economic system that consolidated power in the hands of a few. he insists that this drive for surplus labor does not vanish after the civil war: it must be remembered and never forgotten that the civil war in the south which overthrew reconstruction was a determined effort to reduce black labor as nearly as possible to a condition of unlimited exploitation and build a new class of capitalists on this foundation. the wage of the negro worker, despite the war amendments, was to be reduced to the level of bare subsistence by taxation, peonage, caste, and every method of discrimination. this program had to be carried out in open defiance of the clear letter of the law. (black reconstruction 670) the law here comes under scrutiny as a doctrine that requires force of action. it cannot be seen as an ensconced object that always fulfills its promise without further labor. beyond the failure of the economic sustainment, the perspective of liberalism within the reconstruction era holds a further difficulty for du bois. the declaration of emancipation is insufficient in itself to improve the du bois and the myth of guaranteed progress 118 situation of the black worker. such realizations are central to the turn to historical materialism. karl marx himself made such an observation in the failure of another drive towards progress: “as ever, weakness had taken refuge in a belief in miracles, had fancied the enemy overcome when he was only conjured away in imagination, and lost all understanding of the present in a passive glorification of the future that was in store for it and of the deeds it had in petto, but merely did not want to carry out as yet” (598). taking up this thread, du bois’s black reconstruction holds the promises of the post-civil war progress up against the archive of material conditions for black folks in the aftermath of slavery as an institution. liberalism, often understood as a space of guaranteed progress, manifests as this space in petto for the newly emancipated. the aspirations of the reconstruction era were seen as un-manifested guarantees rather than a relation that required maintenance, adjustment, and responsibility to shifting historical material conditions. du bois’s shift to historical materialism illuminates the failures of thinking of reconstruction as a mere ideological leap forward. his research demonstrates that what was clearly needed in the moment after the civil war was an economic shift in access, organization, and power in regards to land as well as the means of production. the failure of reconstruction, then, falls on the fundamental misunderstanding of how power functions: “what liberalism did not understand was that such a revolution was economic and involved force. those who against the public weal have power cannot be expected to yield save to superior power” (black reconstruction 519–522). the newfound power of liberated black workers was short-lived because the superior powers over land, resources, and livelihood went unchallenged in any fundamental way after the civil war. without that dismantling of the racialized power dynamics for the service of industry in the north as well as the south, the effort to truly recognize black citizens as equals had no independent force. such a promise was unsustainable without the force of changed material conditions. the rhetoric and promise of emancipatory futures without recognizing the material conditions of the moment marked reconstruction for inevitable failure. du bois does not despair this moment, however. there were upshots in participation through governance, education, and public works that left a legacy of black reconstruction that could not be denied even in the face of defeat: the attempt to make black men american citizens was in a certain sense all a failure, but a splendid failure. it did not fail where it was expected to fail. it was 119 bane athanasius contra mundum, with back to the wall, outnumbered ten to one, with all the wealth and all the opportunity, and all the world against him. and only in his hands and heart the consciousness of a great and just cause; fighting the battle of all the oppressed and despised humanity of every race and color, against the massed hirelings of religion, science, education, law, and brute force. (black reconstruction 708) there is a history of resistance, imagination, participation, and institutional legacies left behind by this moment that prove a fruitful archive for future struggles. the public school system across the south, first black senators, governors, congress-people, and the recognition of great strength and resistance of the black workers was pivotal to the victory of the civil war are but a few powerful legacies of striving that offer strategies and primes against our current adversarial moments. failure only delays the striving, and demands a shift in tactics to meet the new situation. the work of w.e.b. du bois throughout his career indicates the spaces where the liberatory imagination is stifled through misplacing the locus of failure. in this spirit, we can ask again: is the “crisis of the humanities” solely an external campaign of devaluation, or are there also practices within the practices and disciplines that no longer serve us? as i have shown, du bois provides a powerful model of scholarship that would allow us to see both the imperative of asking such a question, and provide tools to make such an inquiry. with these tools of moral imperative, critique, and historical materialism that du bois grants us, we now understand the power and importance of analyzing moments of failure, rather than taking the narrative of progress as a given. it is tracking and investigating the frame of failure that we come to shift both culpability and expectation, and can recognize instances where further and greater action is needed against the status quo that proclaims structures of inclusion as over or inherently on the way out. this framework ensures a method and analysis of ongoing patterns and an archive of practices to combat the current situation. the problem of the twenty-first century continues to be the problem of the color line. it is only by understanding the failures of progress and the denial of such failures through the narrative of guaranteed progress that we can continue in earnest the fight for liberation. du bois and the myth of guaranteed progress 120 note 1. this article is developed from a paper presented at the panel “what can w.e.b. du bois teach us about contemporary controversies?” at villanova university on november 19, 2018, organized by the villanova center for liberal education. works cited ciccariello-maher, george. decolonizing dialectics. durham, nc: duke university press, 2017. du bois, w.e.b. black reconstruction in america 1860–1880. new york: free press, 1992. _____. darkwater: voices from within the veil. new york: dover, 1999. _____. “education and work.” the journal of negro education 1.1 (1932): 60–74. _____. john brown. philadelphia: george w. jacobs & company, 1909. marx, karl. “the eighteenth brumaire of louis bonaparte.” the marx-engels reader. ed. robert c. tucker. 2nd ed. new york: norton, 1978. 594–617. microsoft word 7 plato fitpatrick article.docx [expositions 11.1 (2017) 176–190] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 the imitative arts will tear us apart in the republic kirk fitzpatrick southern utah university the imitative arts are the greatest threat to justice in the constitutions of state and soul in the republic. the members of such arts include music, poetry, and the visual arts. books ii and iii delimit the function of the imitative arts in education and by book x all “imitative” arts are banished from the constitutions. the most serious charge against imitative poetry, in the end, is that “with few exceptions it is able to corrupt even decent people […]” (605c).1 the imitative arts corrupt the constitutions by shrinking the best part and by enlarging the inferior parts (603a). in book iv socrates distinguishes three parts of the constitutions (443d). then, two stephanus pages later, he says that there are “five forms of [state] constitution and five of souls” (445d). since there are as many parts as there are types of constitution, socrates must hold that there are five parts in some constitutions. it seems that socrates equivocates on the number of parts. nearly all interpreters assume what some call the “canonical” interpretation: the text requires all constitutions to have the same number of parts.2 i reject the canonical interpretation and argue that the number of parts in a constitution is contingent. the best constitution has two parts and the imitative arts cause it to devolve. as the constitutions devolve they tend to have more parts. no constitution has four parts. to make room for this interpretation, i show that the imitative arts cause the degeneration of the bipartite constitution and they contribute to the other degenerations. socrates employs two independent criteria to distinguish a “part”: either it is necessary or it can oppose another part. with this distinction, i turn to the claims that there are three parts and that there are five parts in the constitutions. i show that there are two necessary parts and there are at least five parts that can oppose another part. this saves the text from an apparent contradiction. though some of the five parts are not necessary, they are all “parts.” i conclude with a count of the number of parts in each of the constitutions. in this way the text shows that the imitative arts tear constitutions apart. 177 fitzpatrick i. there are many terms translated as “part” in the english translation of the text.3 the text translates various terms as “parts”: “forms” (εἴδη), “kinds” (γένη), “character” (ἤθη), “modes” (τρόποι), and “souls” (ψυχαί). the text rarely uses the term “parts” (μέρος).4 this presents a challenge to translators and interpreters of the text. since socrates does not employ a technical term, or terms, for the concept of a part in a constitution, his account leaves much room for interpretation and disagreement. socrates often employs grammatical or syntactic construction to distinguish the parts of a constitution.5 socrates suggests that it is easier to see the parts of state than to see the parts of soul, since the state is bigger than the soul (368c).6 he expects the homonymous stateand soul-types to have the same number of parts (445c–d). he also expects them to have the same qualities: “and do you realize that of necessity there are as many forms of human character as there are of constitutions? or do you think that constitutions are born ‘from oak or rock’ and not from the characters of the people who live in the cities governed by them” (544d–e). his argument does not assume that the homonymous constitutions have the same qualities; throughout book viii it demonstrates that they do. socrates demonstrates isomorphism: what is true of the parts in one constitution, either state or soul, is true of its correlate constitution insofar as the analogy permits.7 if socrates thinks that all constitutions have one certain and the same number of parts, then he describes his own account misleadingly. in book iv he says the constitutions have three parts and then he says that they have five parts (444b, 445c–d). the transition begins when socrates says, “i suppose we must look for injustice” (444a). the aristocracy is the best constitution and it alone is just. the other constitutions hold “a kind of civil war between the three parts, a meddling and doing of another’s work, a rebellion by some part (μέρος) against the whole soul in order to rule it inappropriately” (444b). each degenerate constitution has one part ruling the other parts. since there are three parts, it seems that there are three constitutions. socrates, however, claims that there are “an unlimited number of forms of vice, four of which are worth mentioning” (445c). there are as many “types of soul as there are specific types of political constitution” (445c). so there are “five forms of constitution and five forms of soul” (445d1). since there are five constitutions and each constitution has a different part of the soul rule the other parts, there must be five parts of at least some constitutions. the imitative arts will tear us apart in the republic 178 the additional parts come as additional parts of the market class in the state and as additions to the appetitive part of the soul. these two new parts raise questions about their relation to the initial three parts. he often refers to appetite as many and not one. it seems that we have two options: appetite is one part of a constitution or appetite is three parts of a constitution. i suggest that there is a third option: in some constitutions appetite is one part; in other constitutions it may have three parts or more. when socrates describes the just man he explicitly mentions the possibility of there being more than three parts in the constitutions. the aristocratic man “harmonizes the three parts” and “binds together those parts and any others there may be in between” (443d7).8 the text reads as a conditional and it opens the possibility of there being more than three parts.9 since he does not insist on there being more than three parts, but he allows for there being more than three parts, i argue that socrates adopts contingency: (a) it is contingent how many parts actually belong to any given constitution, and (b) it is contingent what sort of internal structure each part has.10 ii. we cannot leave out the ideal city. the ideal city is “enlarged” to produce the kallipolis (373b). the ideal city is the “need based” or “healthy” city. it includes a market-place which is populated by the labor class and tradesmen (371b). this class is retained in the other constitutions. the servants are among this class and they are wage-earners “whose minds alone wouldn’t qualify them for membership in our society” (371d). slaves do some of the work, but they do not decide what work must be done. so, there must be members whose minds do qualify them for membership. this class would determine what the city needs: where to build houses, which crops to grow, and what to trade. this class would need to compose the “hymns to the gods” and they would see that the city “bequeath a similar life to their children” (372b, 372d). he names many occupations, but he does not explicitly tell us how many “parts” the ideal city has. it might be that socrates thinks the ideal city has no parts. the account of the ideal city does provide us with two necessary classes that recur in the luxurious constitutions. the luxurious cities have rulers and merchants. the ideal city must at least have masters to direct the activity of the slaves. it also needs, however minimal, a deliberative class. this class excludes labor and includes only ideal members. they decide what work needs to be done. they direct when and where to act in the city. socrates does not distinguish the parts of the corresponding person’s soul, but isomorphism between the accounts of the constitutions allows us to apply the distinctions in the 179 fitzpatrick ideal city to the analogous account of the soul. the deliberative class is analogous to the rational part of the soul and the market-class is analogous to the necessary appetites in the soul. these two parts of the ideal constitutions are necessary. before socrates can find justice in the ideal constitution glaucon interrupts him and insists that he discuss a different city. glaucon wants furniture and “the sorts of delicacies” they have in athens at the time. socrates’ response adds some beneficial delicacies, but this is not enough for glaucon. he claims that socrates has founded a city for pigs (372d). glaucon insists that the city include chairs, “proper couches,” tables, and the “delicacies and desserts that people have nowadays” (372d). socrates’ response to glaucon is vehement and lengthy. he claims that glaucon wants a “luxurious” city and that he is not satisfied with needs. he offers a lengthy list of things that glaucon’s city—the unhealthy and sick city with a fever—will require. it will need things that the ideal city did not need. socrates’ list includes prostitutes, painting, embroidery, perfumers, incense-makers, and other imitative arts. the expansion of the city places the imitative arts at the center: we must increase it [the ideal city] in size and fill it with a multitude of things that go beyond what is necessary for a city—hunters, for example, and artists or imitators, many of whom work with shapes and colors, many with music. and there will be poets and all their assistants[.] (373b) socrates reminds glaucon that “we didn’t need any of these in our earlier city” (373c). the imitative arts are not necessary. glaucon’s request entailed the introduction of the unnecessary appetites, which prominently include the imitative arts. by including the unnecessary appetites the luxurious city requires a new part of the city. the luxurious cities require a military class. socrates carries over the regulators of the ideal city and the market-class, but he now needs to distinguish a military occupation. socrates discusses the guardians or the military class through books ii and iii. at the end of the discussion in book iii he retroactively distinguishes two classes within his previous discussion and within the state. he distinguishes the “complete guardians” or “rulers” from the “auxiliary” or “military” class, where the eldest and wisest of the guardians receive a complete education in dialectic (414b). the luxurious cities require more territory. this causes war and it causes the city to need a military the imitative arts will tear us apart in the republic 180 class. socrates blames the unnecessary appetites for creating the military class, since he is explicit that the ideal city did not require this part (373c–e). it must be that the ideal city did not require a military class. so, the ideal constitutions have two parts: reason and the necessary appetites. iii. in the ideal city, the parts were included insofar as they were necessary. with the expansion of the merchant class and the creation of the military class comes a new criterion to distinguish the parts of the constitutions. he states what interpreters call “the principle of opposition” or po: clearly, the same thing will refuse to do or suffer opposites in the same, a. respect to itself (κατὰ ταὐτόν), b. relation to itself (πρὸς ταὐτὸν), c. time (ἅμα), so that if we ever discover these same things happening in them, then we will know that it is not the same thing but many things. (436b8–c1)11 if this principle is ever shown to be false, he warns, all implications from it are to be abandoned (437a4–9). applying this to a person’s soul, if we find these same things happening, we will know that his soul is not one thing but two (436a8b1). the principle of opposition is not the law of noncontradiction. po concerns contraries not contradictories. there are two main interpretations of po: the realist and the deflationist.12 the realists interpret po to require the division of the soul into different subjects of predication because they think that the attempted predication in terms of time, relation, and respect failed to account for the opposition.13 the deflationists, in contrast, hold that the parts of the soul are predicates of one subject because they think that po requires us to distinguish times, respects, or relations in a soul.14 recently jennifer whiting offered a “hybrid reading” of the parts, “[…] according to which deflationists are more or less right about the appetitive part of the well-ordered souls discussed in republic ii–iv, while realists are more or less right about the appetitive parts of the various corrupt souls discussed in republic viii–ix.”15 according to her interpretation, appetite in book iv is an aspect of the constitutions and the three parts of appetite in book viii are genuine subjects of 181 fitzpatrick predication. an alternative, hybrid reading could hold that realists are right about the three parts in book iv and deflationists are right about the three parts of appetite in book viii. i offer a realist interpretation of the parts. socrates grounds po in the opposites of a thing moving and standing still by asking, “is it possible for one thing to stand still and move at the same time, in the same respect?” (436c). socrates offers three illustrations to help make po clear: a man moving and standing still, a top spinning and staying in place, and the archer pushing and pulling the bow with his hands. socrates asks, suppose someone says that “a person who is standing still but moving his hands and head is moving and standing still at the same time […]” (436c). socrates rejects that the man is moving and still. he argues that one part of the man is moving and one part is not. these parts oppose each other in the same relation, respect, and time. in the example, a man’s head and hands are moving, but which parts are standing still are not specified. we can reasonably suspect that his legs or feet are still. socrates moves the subject from the man to the head, hands, and legs. let’s note that this application of po refers to three parts, not two. why does socrates use three things to exemplify po? the head and hands are moving as one part and they oppose the feet. i suggest that socrates refers to reason with the head, spirit with the hands, and appetite with the feet. reason and spirit oppose appetite. the second example about the top continues the test. suppose someone says that “tops at least stand still and move as a whole at the same time, when the peg is fixed in the same place and they revolve” (436d5–7). socrates responds that it is not in the same respect (οὐ κατὰ ταὐτὰ) that the top moves and does not. it is in one respect that it moves and in another that it does not. he uses a grammatical construction importantly different from the construction about the man. concerning the top, he uses a “κατὰ μὲν … κατὰ δὲ” construction. this means that one thing, a top, is undergoing opposites in two different respects. since there is a difference in respect, we do not divide the subject into two things. the third example concerns the hands of an archer. consider the hands: it is not right to say that the hands push and pull at the same time. instead, socrates responds, the one hand pushes and the other hand pulls. he employs the grammatical construction “ἄλλη μὲν … ἑτέρα δὲ” meaning “the one … the other.” socrates volunteers this case as part of drawing his first division in the soul. the change in subject in this example is clear. we begin with the hands (αἱ χεῖρες) and move to one hand (ἡ χείρ).16 one thing did not undergo opposites with a distinction of respect, relation, or time. he concluded that two different things undergo the opposites. the imitative arts will tear us apart in the republic 182 when he turns from the examples meant to make po clear to the application of po, he applies po to a person having opposite desires. he argues that thirst in the book iv application of po is simply the desire to drink. the qualifications added by much drink or little drink, or by hot or cold drink, are not part of the desire to drink. he focuses on “drink itself,” which is the form of thirst or the desire to drink. it may be true that people desire good drink, but this does not show that the desire simply to drink is a desire for good drink. qualified appetites depend on additions, such as hot, cold, necessary, unnecessary, and lawless. po in book iv restricts the appetites to their necessary part. this allows socrates to treat appetite as one part of the soul in the application of po in book iv. po does not require the restriction to thirst itself that socrates places on its applications in book iv. though socrates restricts the application of po in book iv, nothing prevents po from setting a qualified desire against some other qualified desire.17 so, nothing in po prevents it from applying to the appetites. we need to separate the restriction that socrates places on po in book iv from all possible applications of po. socrates applies po to three cases where a person desires to do and not to do an act without a distinction in respect, relation, or time. the first case is brief and grounded in no particular context. socrates and glaucon note that sometimes a thirsty person also refuses to drink. since the person is thirsty he desires to drink and since he refuses to drink he desires not to drink. socrates reiterates po: “it cannot be that the same thing, in the same respect of itself, concerning the same thing would do opposites at the same time” (439b5–6). this case distinguishes reason from appetite. case two concerns a desire to look and a refusal to look. leontius desires to look at some pale, beheaded corpses. he also refuses to look. so, leontius desires to look and he refuses to look. the third case concerns odysseus. he refers to the case elliptically, citing one line from homer: “he [odysseus] struck his chest and spoke to his heart” (441b6). socrates concludes that homer “clearly represents” two parts of the soul, the rational and the spirited. one limitation of po is that it distinguishes only two things. to help show that spirit differs from reason and appetite, socrates offers two illustrations. in the first case a person believes he has done something unjust and in the second he believes he has been treated unjustly. in the first case he claims that spirit will endure hardships of punishment without becoming angry. in the second he claims that spirit will get angry, endure hardships, and fight for justice. in both cases spirit has a feature or quality that reason or appetite does not have. furthermore, the illustrations initially pit two parts—reason and appetite—in opposition without involving spirit. these 183 fitzpatrick examples also show, he claims, that the spirited part is “by nature the helper of the rational part, provided that it hasn’t been corrupted by a bad upbringing” (441a). he insists that spirit is naturally aligned with reason in the luxurious constitutions. with the help of the three applications of po and the additional arguments about spirit, socrates distinguishes three parts of the soul. iv. before book iv concludes socrates claims there are five constitutions and five parts. the line of argument at the end of book iv is put aside at the beginning of book v and it does not return until the beginning of book viii (543c). there socrates charts the degeneration of the constitutions of each state and soul. his method is to examine a certain state first and then to examine its corresponding constitution of soul. before discussing how the timocracy emerges from the aristocracy, socrates establishes a general claim about devolution: “a simple principle that the cause of change in any constitution is civil war breaking out within the ruling group itself” (545c). the timocracy emerges from the aristocracy because it improperly conceives children. the children are born “through ignorance of these births” (546c). the cause of the ignorance is that the guardians, who had been the natural helpers of the rulers, “neglect the muses” (546d). they come to “have less consideration for music and poetry than they ought, then they will neglect physical training” (546d). socrates identifies changes in music and poetry as the causes of the ignorance, which in turn causes the improper births. civil war breaks out with the aristocratic class opposing the ruling class. the timocratic class hoards money and expands its influence (548a). it becomes more like the oligarchic class than the ruling class. since the timocratic class is between the aristocratic and oligarchic classes, the civil war ends with the timocratic class governing the rulers and the oligarchic class (547c). the timocratic man comes into being in an analogous way. the father nurtures the son’s rational part of the soul, but the mother and slaves nurture the spirited and appetitive parts of the soul (550b). “so he is pulled by both […] when he’s pulled in these two ways, he settles in the middle […]” (550b). he sets the spirited part as ruler of the constitution. the oligarchy is caused by a “lack of education, bad rearing, and a bad constitutional arrangement” (552e5–7). the oligarchic constitution has oligarchs and beggars. the beggars include “pick-pockets, temple-robbers and all such evil-doers” (552d). the rulers keep the evildoers in “check by force” (βία) (552e3). they use either the direct “force of arms” or the force of law against the other classes (551b). the oligarchic man comes to be from a timocratic father. at the imitative arts will tear us apart in the republic 184 first he “emulates his father,” but over time his father loses his honors and his money (533a–b). the son suffers an opposition between the spirited part and the appetitive part. socrates tells us that because the son fears for his life and is “humbled by poverty, he turns greedily to making money” (553b). this places the necessary appetites as governors of reason and spirit. socrates describes how the oligarch renders the worse parts of appetite impotent. it does so by “holding his other evil appetites in check by means of some decent part of himself” (554c). the decent part here is not reason, since he does not control himself with arguments. he controls through “fear [and] trembling for his other possessions” (554d). the necessary appetites control the worse appetites. the emergence of the timocratic and oligarchic constitutions involves just three parts. the emergence of democracy requires the creation of a new part (556e). the democratic “civil war” breaks out because the idle, disenfranchised, poor, and uneducated class grows large. it comes to power by “killing some of its opponents and expelling others, and [by] giving the rest an equal share in ruling” (557a). the democracy is a “supermarket of constitutions,” since it includes every type of constitution (557d). the democratic man is the son of an oligarch. the son indulges the unnecessary appetites and these include the lawless appetites. the son keeps company with people who indulge in “every kind of insolence” (572c). the son suffers a “civil war and counterrevolution within him, and he battles against himself” (559e). he is “pulled in both directions and settles down in the middle between his father’s way of life and theirs” (572c). the democratic man settles on the unnecessary desires, which are between necessary and lawless desires. by taking all classes as equal, the democracy allowed for the emergence of a lawless class. socrates divides the democratic city into three parts: the wealthy, the idlers, and the laborers (564c–565a). labor is the largest class in a democracy and it does not participate in politics. still, civil war breaks out when the oligarchs accuse the laborers of plotting against the constitution. this leads to trials and to a single champion for the people. toward his fellow citizens, he “banishes some, kills others, and drops hints to the people about the cancellation of debts” (555e). he stirs up “civil wars” in the state (566a). the tyrannical man is the son of a democratic man. his father nurtures the middle appetitive desires, which are the unnecessary and lawful desires, but other people help his lawless desires (572e). the son gives into the lawless appetites or eros, which entails drunkenness, shamelessness, and madness (573c). 185 fitzpatrick socrates never explicitly invokes po in book viii, but every devolution that he details involves explicit reference to “opposition” or a “civil war” among the parts. interpreters struggle to render the accounts in books iv and viii consistent. the application of po in book iv considered appetite as required in a luxurious city, but i have tried to show that book viii tacitly applies po to the different parts of appetite. the unnecessary appetites in book viii show that socrates does not follow the restricted application of po in book iv. there he delimited appetite and the other parts to function in the application of po without qualifications. po does not require the limitations that socrates imposes on its applications in book iv, but it does require that the parts oppose each other. socrates can implicitly apply po in book viii by explicitly stating illustrations that do not conform to the restriction on po in book iv but that do conform to the opposition required by po. the parts of the constitutions in book viii are able to oppose the other parts and they are able to rule over all the other parts. the parts of appetite in book viii are parts in the same sense of the term as the parts in book iv. in book viii appetite tears itself apart by introducing the unnecessary appetites. these appetites were originally responsible for the degeneration of the ideal constitution. the unnecessary desires smuggle in the lawless desires. the kallipolis, timocracy, and oligarchy each had three required parts. the move to democracy introduced two new parts, the unnecessary and the lawless appetites. v. to explain imitation in book x socrates returns to furniture (596b). he distinguishes the form of the bed from the physical bed from the imitative artistic representation of a bed. the imitative arts are at third remove from the truth. in book x socrates invokes po explicitly when he discusses the banishment of the imitative arts. the imitative arts employ appearance, which confuses a spectator. for example, a painting that appears concave from one angle shifts to appearing convex from a different perspective. expanding the argument to cover the other senses, he turns to the mind: “[…] we mustn’t rely solely on a mere probability based on the analogy with painting; instead, we must go directly to the part of our thought with which poetic imitations consort” (603b). to distinguish the higher part from the lower parts of the soul, socrates puts the eyes in opposition against the mind. the eyes give the lower parts the belief that the stick is bent and reason holds that the stick is straight. these opposites happen at the same time, in relation to the same thing and in the same respect. the soul believing opposites cannot be one thing, according to po. he says, the imitative arts will tear us apart in the republic 186 “didn’t we say that it is impossible for the same thing to believe opposites about the same thing at the same time?” (602e). socrates uses “ἅμα περὶ τῶν αὐτῶν” (603d2). he explicitly mentions time. then he uses the term “concerning,” or “περὶ,” in reference to the other things, “τῶν αὐτῶν” (603d2). we saw with respect “κατὰ,” and with relation “πρὸς,” but concerning, or “περὶ,” is new. this term must refer to at least two additional things, since “τῶν αὐτῶν” is plural. po in book iv supplies the plurals, respect and relation. socrates has insisted that there is no distinction concerning the three categories of opposition in po. so, he concludes, the part that “forms a belief” opposite reason must be a different part(s) of the soul.18 in book iii we agreed that if the topic arises in stories that “a decent man doesn’t think that death is a terrible thing for someone decent to suffer—even for someone who happens to be his friend” (387d). in book x socrates considers again the case where a father loses a child. stories about such sad affairs depict the person as wailing and lamenting even in public. the lamenting corresponds to the appetitive part of the soul. doing so in public corresponds to the spirited part. socrates reminds us that we censored these stories so that he will not “grieve at all, or, if that’s impossible,” he will be measured in his response (603e). if that is not possible, then “he will fight the pain and put up more resistance to it when his equals can see him” than “when he’s alone by himself in solitude” (603–4). socrates is explicit about the parts in the division. reason is on one side with “spirit and all the appetites” on the other side (606d1–2). the appetites are included in the lower parts as “the whole of the appetites” (πάντων τῶν ἐπιθυμητικῶν) and this is plural (606d1–2). this reference to appetite covers every appetite distinguished in the text. in book x we see that spirit has moved from being with reason to being with appetite, since this division places both appetite and spirit in the lower part of the soul. in book x socrates also “fashions the image of the soul in words,” when he suggests creatures “such as the chimera, scylla, cerberus, or any of the multitude of others in which many different kinds of things are said to have grown together naturally into one” (588c). socrates suggests an image of a person that, when looked at from the right angle, actually shows itself to be a multiheaded beast. this creature has a “ring of many heads that it can grow and change at will—some from gentle, some from savage animals” (588c). the image has reason as a human head and this never changes (588d). the spirited part, in contrast, does suffer opposites in different relations. in book ii the spirited part is both gentle with familiars and fierce with enemies. the spirited part of the soul does not require a division into different subjects, since the opposite qualities are in 187 fitzpatrick relation to different objects (πρὸς). the spirited part of the constitutions is imaged as a dog in book ii, and a lion, snake, and ape in book ix (376a and 590a–b). the spirited part is not imaged as having multiple heads, but the one head it has at any time can alter in its qualities. the spirit is capable of changing, such that the appropriate animal image changes. finishing the image of the multi-headed beast, socrates describes only the appetites as growing many heads at one time (589a–b). it alone fractures into multiple new parts. vi. isomorphism applies a description of the city or soul to the other in the pair. contingency allows that different constitutions may have different numbers of parts. although socrates does not mention rulers or the military class in the ideal constitution, he does mention activities that require two classes. the ideal city functions to regulate deliberation and education, without distinguishing a military class. in the ideal constitution the two tasks of ruling and defending are combined into one. the ideal soul must contain a rational part and the necessary appetites. we saw that the oligarchic constitution renders the worse appetites impotent. so, the kallipolis, the timocracy, and the oligarchy have three parts. the democratic constitution takes all desires as equally worthy of indulgence. so the lawless part of the unnecessary desires is equally worthy of indulgence as any other part. the democratic and tyrannical constitutions require five parts. socrates distinguished these five, but he thinks that among the vicious constitutions there are an “unlimited number of forms” (445c). the additional forms, socrates says, are not worth mentioning. we can now chart all six constitutions: constitutions rule of parts parts ideal reason ruling appetite 2 aristocratic reason ruling spirit and necessary appetite 3 timocratic spirit ruling reason and necessary appetite 3 oligarchic necessary appetite ruling reason and spirit 3 democratic unnecessary appetite ruling reason, spirit, necessary appetite, and lawless appetite 5 tyrannical lawless appetite ruling reason, spirit, necessary appetite, and unnecessary appetite 5 the imitative arts will tear us apart in the republic 188 no constitution has four parts. the parts of the ideal constitutions are necessary, the parts of the first three luxurious constitutions are required, and the novel parts of the worst two constitutions are unnecessary. the ideal city degenerated because of the unnecessary appetites, which entail the imitative arts. this required the creation of a military class. after the devolution of the ideal city, these arts were constrained in the better versions of the luxurious cities. the oligarchic constitution rules the lower appetites by force. eventually, the imitative arts helped cause the oligarchic constitution to devolve into the democratic constitution and the democratic constitution to devolve into the tyrannical. the imitative arts tear the constitutions apart in the republic. notes 1. this paper benefited from comments by participants at the intermountain philosophy conference of 2015. all translations of plato’s republic are from grube. references to the greek text are from burnet’s oxford classical texts edition. 2. one of the few exceptions to this position is whiting 174–208. 3. for a useful discussion of plato’s terminology see stocks. 4. he uses the term first at 444b. 5. harte points out that in the republic socrates offers what he takes to be a sufficient account of parts but he does not offer or even attempt an account of the necessary features. in this way the republic does not contain a theory of mereology (1–2). 6. i refer to the analogy between the constitutions as one between the state and the soul, but this could be misleading. in book ii when socrates introduces the analogy he actually draws it between “a single man” and “a whole city” (368e–369a). in book iv, he asks “if an individual has these same three parts in his soul” and “does the soul have these three parts in it or not?” (435b–c). here he draws the analogy between the city and the soul of a person. 7. moline argues for a similar view, claiming that “nothing less than a structural and functional isomorphism between the polis and the psyche will do” (2). 8. grube does much work with this passage by breaking it up into sentences. in the text the sentence starts at 443c9 and ends at 444a2. 9. “καὶ εἰ ἄλλα ἄττα μεταξὺ τυγχάνει ὄντα,” or “[…] and if there happen to be others in between […]” (443d7). 10. the contingency thesis that i offer is a modified version of whiting’s “radical psychic contingency” thesis. see whiting 175–176. 189 fitzpatrick 11. the passage reads, “δῆλον ὅτι ταὐτὸν τἀναντία ποιεῖν ἢ πάσχειν κατὰ ταὐτόν γε καὶ πρὸς ταὐτὸν οὐκ ἐθελήσει ἅμα, ὥστε ἄν που εὑρίσκωμεν ἐν αὐτοῖς ταῦτα γιγνόμενα, εἰσόμεθα ὅτι οὐ ταὐτὸν ἦν ἀλλὰ πλείω” (436b7–c1). 12. two recent and notable deflationist accounts come from shields and price. two recent and noteworthy realist accounts come from lorenz and bobonich. 13. if the realists are right and the canonical interpretation holds then there cannot be three parts and five parts. 14. if the deflationists are right to take the three parts of the constitutions as aspects, then it seems that the three parts of appetite are aspects of an aspect in the constitutions. in one recent deflationist interpretation christopher shields argues that the principle entails that “if s stands in two opposing relations with respect to some object o, then s must do so in virtue of different internal elements a and b, (call this the principle of opposing relations (por)) (rep 438b8)” (152). shields thinks po means that anything doing or suffering opposites must do or suffer the opposites with a distinction in respect, relation, or time. 15. whiting 202. 16. socrates uses the dual, ἀλλήλοιν, in referring to the rational and spirited parts (412a1). he urges us to think of them as natural duals, such as pairs of eyes, arms, hands, and legs. 17. po applies to appetite, because of the sort of part it is. it does not apply to reason or spirit, because of the sorts of parts they are. 18. socrates mentions assent (ἐπινεύειν) and dissent (ἀνανεύειν) at 437b1 in book iv. though he references the nodding motion of the head, this physical act is an expression of adopting a belief. works cited bobonich, christopher. plato’s utopia recast: his later ethics and politics. new york: clarendon press, 2002. harte, verity. plato on parts and wholes: the metaphysics of structure. new york: oxford university press, 2002. lorenz, hendrik. the brute within: appetitive desire in plato and aristotle. new york: clarendon press, 2006. moline, jon. “plato on the complexity of the psyche.” archiv für geschichte der philosophie 60 (1978): 1–26. plato. platonis opera, volume 4: clitopho, respublica, timaeus, critias, ed. john burnet. new york: oxford university press, 1978. the imitative arts will tear us apart in the republic 190 ___. republic, trans. g. m. a. grube, rev. c. d. c. reeve. indianapolis: hackett, 1992. price, a. w. “are plato’s soul-parts psychological subjects?” ancient philosophy 29.1 (2009): 1–15. shields, christopher. “plato’s divided soul.” in plato’s republic: a critical guide, ed. mark l. mcpherran. new york: cambridge university press, 2012. 147–170. stocks, j. l. “plato and the tripartite soul.” mind 24.94 (1915): 207–221. whiting, jennifer. “psychic contingency in the republic.” in plato and the divided self, eds. rachel barney, tad brennan, and charles brittain. new york: cambridge university press, 2014. 174–208. microsoft word contino review of debary-final.docx [expositions 9.2 (2015) 99–102] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376     de bary, wm. theodore. the great civilized conversation: education for world community. new york: columbia university press, 2013. 416 pages. $35.00 (cloth). isbn 978-0-23116276-0. in 2014 president obama presented professor william theodore “ted” de bary with the national humanities award. in doing so, he gave ritual form to a judgment that many had long held: ted de bary is a national treasure, a teacher and scholar who has made the world a better place by deepening understanding between west and east. he can justly be called the founding father of asian great books, which recognizes the invaluable ways that philosophers, historians, and poets from china, japan, and korea have enriched our common human understanding. the great civilized conversation: education for world community offers an excellent introduction to the life’s work of this great man and an overview of a vocation fulfilled. early in his book, de bary relates the genesis of his vocation. in 1937, a first-year columbia student, he was “attending [his] first class in the core course contemporary civilization taught by harry j. carman (later dean of the college), [and] almost the first thing he said was, ‘of course you realize that when we talk about contemporary civilization, it is just western civilization. some of you should start to think about how we can expand this to asia.’ i took him up on that suggestion, and almost everything on this book flows from it” (vii). how deeply de bary has lived out his vocation! the book’s appendix provides an overview of his “life in consultation and conversation,” from his graduate studies, interrupted by service in naval intelligence during world war ii, to his ongoing work at the age of 96, where he continues to teach, pro bono, as special service professor in columbia’s core courses. in part one, de bary presents essays in which he argues for carefully integrating asian great books into the core curriculum of undergraduate education. each essay sharply reasoned, and marked by clarity and good sense—the reader can imagine de bary tactfully and persuasively making his case on the many columbia curricular committees on which he served. in a 1964 essay, he presciently warns that the term “non-western studies” “tends to perpetuate whatever isolationism or parochialism we have suffered from by suggesting that the significance of other civilizations lies primarily in their difference from european and north american civilization” (14). he reminds his readers that the classic works that comprise the “great civilized conversation” are never static, but perennially read within the context of change: “‘liberal learning’ has always been conscious of change yet at its best has responded to it without being swept away by it” (4). and yet he is well aware that saying “yes” to those classic works that speak enduringly to the human condition will mean saying “no” to others that will likely prove ephemeral: “education in the twenty-first century […] will find itself constrained to make choices within the much stricter limits […]. education will have to [make hard choices]—make judgments as to what is most review of the great civilized conversation 100   essential. without closing the door on intellectual growth, we will have to prepare people to make qualitative judgments as to what is most conducive in the longer run to ‘the good life’ and to what human goods are sustainable” (39). twenty-five years ago, as a new professor at christ college, the interdisciplinary honors college of valparaiso university, two young colleagues and i were charged with presenting a rationale for integrating asian classic works into the first-year “texts and contexts” curriculum. we successfully made our case: mencius and zhuangzi remain part of that splendid curriculum. but back in 1991, i wish we’d had ready access to de bary’s essays, now gathered coherently in this book. part two, “liberal learning in confucianism” brings us to the heart of de bary’s scholarly work on neo-confucian thought. most prominent among these is zhu xi (1130–1200), who himself developed the core “four books of the confucian tradition”: analects, mencius, great learning, the mean. zhu’s wisdom and contemporary relevance become increasingly evident, as de bary highlights the personalist dimension of his thought. as did socrates, zhu xi taught through discussion and interpersonal interaction, rather than lecture, and emphasized the way the learner must inquire, “weigh and sift” the words of the master until she feels they have become her own. in the confucian tradition, learning is always a matter of the intellect and emotions— “the thinking heart”—and the moral compass provided by the tao leads one from “individual perceptivity” (108) to disciplining selfish desires through ritual to heartfelt service of others, be it governmental or familial. confucius affirms “this concept of fully realized personhood” in one of the most famous passages of the analects: at fifteen i set my heart on learning. at thirty i was established [stood on my own feet]. at forty i had no perplexities. at fifty i learned what heaven commanded of me. by sixty my ear had become attuned to it. at seventy i could follow my heart’s desire without transgressing. (138) the personalist dimension of zhu xi reminds me of jacques maritain’s thomist classic the person and the common good. as de bary explains, “‘personalism’ expresses the worth and dignity of the person, not as a raw, ‘rugged’ individual but as a self shaped and formed in the context of a given cultural tradition, its own social community, and natural environment to reach full personhood” (139). in writing this review, i was delighted to discover a new book by catherine hudak klancer, embracing our complexity (suny press: 2015) which brings st. thomas aquinas and zhu into dialogue, highlighting their mutual emphasis upon “humble authority.” surely zhu would have agreed with his christian contemporary, st. bernard of clairvaux, who wrote: “there are many who seek knowledge for the sake of knowledge: that is curiosity. there 101 contino   are others who desire to know in order that they themselves might be known: that is vanity. but there are those some who seek knowledge in order to serve and edify others: that is love.” for zhu xi, service to others remain the telos of “learning for the sake of one’s self”; “self-cultivation [is] the starting point for reaching out to others” (111). a later thinker, wang yangming (1472–1529) shied away from the comprehensive complexity of zhu, and “long[ed] for the simplicity of the ancient sage” (213). wang suffered banishment, and, “pushed to the limit of his spiritual resources” (215), brought confucian ideas into critical dialogue with the mysticism of taoism and chan buddhism (both of which zhu saw as corrupting). wang avoids facile syncretism, yet forges a more contemplative confucianism, avowing the value of non-attachment and “quiet sitting.” nevertheless, for both zhu and wang, “the role of the mind as self-critical and self-renewing” is vital; both “call for man to achieve utmost discrimination and oneness of mind in order to keep himself morally and spiritually attuned to the way” (105), and thus more effectively serve others. later in part two, de bary addresses “the almost revolutionary impact of neo-confucianism on the rest of east asia ” (229), especially in korea, where the implementation of “zhu xi’s political and social thought often [went] beyond anything attempted in china and japan” (276). two essays illumine the way confucian precepts can enrich our understanding of universal human rights and liberalism. these are especially pertinent given china’s increasingly restrictive regime in which, for example, many human rights lawyers and activists have been arrested. xi jinping might be inclined to temper his authoritarian impulses by reflecting upon this dialogue between mencius and king xuan regarding the fate of tyrant zhou: king xuan of qi asked, “is it true that tang banished jie and king wu marched against zhou?” “it is so recorded,” answered mencius. “is regicide permissible?” “a man who mutilates benevolence is a mutilator, while one who cripples rightness is a crippler. he who is both a mutilator and a crippler is an ‘outcast.’ i have indeed heard of the punishment of the ‘outcast zhou,’ but i have not heard of any regicide.” (286) in part three, de bary presents four essays, each drawn from lectures he was invited to give on distinguished scholars, teachers, and friends. the fourth of these, “thomas merton, matteo ricci, and confucianism,” will be of special interest to the readers of expositions. de bary knew the slightly older merton during his columbia days; they hung out in jazz clubs and shared a mutual admiration for dorothy day. and, as the young men matured, both shared a deep love for asian thought and literature. and here is where de bary critiques merton, who “did not engage [world religions] too much on other levels than the contemplative” (353), and, in a “striking omission” review of the great civilized conversation 102   (354), never engaged confucianism with the attention he gave to taoism and buddhism. merton did acknowledge confucianism’s “personalist doctrine” (357) and, in an essay entitled “the jesuits in china,” credits “the sympathetic efforts of matteo ricci to achieve a genuine understanding of confucianism” (359). but as de bary observes, ricci, unlike merton, “did not just dismiss or sidestep [the educated chinese leadership]” and, in his “extraordinary effort to learn and master classical chinese,” even “attempt[ed] to reconcile confucianism and christianity at the highest level” (360). i wonder if the same might be said of ted de bary. in his preface, he implies his own christian commitments in paying tribute to his wife, fanny, and his mother, mildred, both of whom “were notable exemplars of keen intelligence, generosity of spirit, leadership ability, and christian selfgiving in service to family and community” (viii). in the brief time that i spent with professor de bary, at a conference at columbia in 2008, i discerned his practice of these christian virtues. one of the happiest (and surprising) moments in my own academic career occurred a couple of years later, when ted generously invited me to contribute an essay on the taoist writer zhuangzi (beloved by merton) to his edited collection finding wisdom in east asian classics (columbia university press, 2011). i do not read or speak chinese, but ted wanted an essay that reflected the experience of teacher and students encountering the existential claims works like these make upon the reader. each essay in this fine book offers rich evidence of de bary’s own nearly century-long encounter with these classic works, and the countless students whom he has guided, sagely, along the way. paul j. contino pepperdine university microsoft word mccarthy anne print [expositions 13.2 (2019) 94–112] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 nonviolence: building gospel-based communities addressing situations of violence today sr. anne mccarthy, o.s.b. erie benedictines for peace monasteries of the heart in august of 1985 i was with mary lou kownacki, o.s.b., then national coordinator of pax christi usa, at the nevada desert nuclear weapons test site for a civil disobedience action which included trespassing onto the test site property, effectively stopping any testing of nuclear weapons at least that day. the action was part of an ongoing witness at the nevada test site. before we crossed the line, risking arrest with a large faith-based group, the two of us went off to the side and recited together the vow of nonviolence1 which pax christi usa was just introducing. the vow includes six points: ● by striving for peace within myself and seeking to be a peacemaker in my daily life; ● by accepting suffering rather than inflicting it; ● by refusing to retaliate in the face of provocation and violence; ● by persevering in nonviolence of tongue and heart; ● by living conscientiously and simply so that i do not deprive others of the means to live; ● by actively resisting evil and working nonviolently to abolish war and the causes of war from my own heart and from the face of the earth. i had become a postulant with the benedictine sisters of erie a month earlier and this vow of nonviolence was integral both to my monastic vocation and my discipleship journey as a catholic christian. i was not alone. tens of thousands of catholics have made the vow of nonviolence, for a period of time or for life. there have been retreats, liturgies, and nonviolent actions which included the opportunity to make a vow of nonviolence. it is a deeply personal spiritual practice and a communally supported commitment. 95 mccarthy pax christi’s vow of nonviolence is only one expression of catholic nonviolent spiritual tradition and practice. there are many others. at the landmark nonviolence and just peace conference, held in rome in april 2016, participants were reminded of these and many other past and present catholic nonviolent campaigns for peace and justice around the globe. césar chávez’s and dolores huerta’s struggle for justice for farm workers included many prayer processions, usually led by the banner of our lady of guadalupe. solidarity in poland was another struggle rooted in catholic tradition, practice, and teaching. large, public, eucharistic liturgies in the gdańsk shipyard supported the labor union strikers and nourished them as nothing else could have. the u.s. civil rights movement was born, grew, and came to fullness in christian churches; the songs of the nonviolent movement were gospel spirituals which kept marchers focused and nonviolent as they faced beatings and water cannons. the liberation movements in central america were overtly faith-based movements, often originating and strengthened in catholic communities and parishes. st. archbishop romero and his profound, prophetic calls to end the military repression followed by the witness of his martyrdom radically empowered the struggle for peace and justice in central america and the u.s. the witness of the many martyrs of those liberation campaigns radicalized the churches in central america, the u.s., and globally. gandhi is said to have meditated daily on the sermon on the mount; jesus’s teaching shaped his vision, his mission, and his strategy of ahimsa, love in action, and satyagraha, truth force or soul force. in the midst of the world’s greatest refugee crisis, and rising xenophobia in europe and the u.s., the witness of pope francis washing the feet of those fleeing violence is powerful, deeply catholic, and radically nonviolent gesture that greets the refugee with tenderness and, at the same time, critiques the political system that demeans and deports them. nonviolence and nonviolent actions have become part of the catholic liturgical life, spiritual life, and communal outreach as well as memory. it ignites passion and participation at all levels of the faith community. it builds bonds around the globe and across interreligious divisions. the reality of the rich and varied use of nonviolence by the catholic community is only one of the advantages that the tradition of nonviolence has over just war theories. in this article, i will reflect on the gospel basis for nonviolence and catholic social teaching, the central and essential teaching of the church, based in the life and words of jesus. this is in nonviolence: building gospel-based communities 96 contrast to just war theories (jwt) which lack grounding in gospel teaching and the example of jesus. i will look also to critique just war theories as irrelevant to the major causes of violence, war, and oppression in our day, particularly our climate emergency. i will then identify an inherent flaw in catholic just war logic since its origin: it creates a wedge dividing clergy from laity. in reviewing the articles in expositions: ethics in focus: special issue on the future of the just war theory in catholic social thought,2 i noticed a surprising dearth of scriptural references for jesus and nonviolence, even when referring to just peace and nonviolence. noted were passages such as the injunction to love enemies, the beatitudes, and the instruction to peter to put away his sword. but the biblical basis for nonviolence and also for the just peace framework is broader and deeper than that. it’s important to understand this fuller gospel basis for nonviolence and also for just peace, and thus, to see its most crucial difference from the jwt: its integrity to the gospel message—both teaching and practice—of jesus. pope francis teaches in his 2017 world day of peace message that “jesus himself offers a ‘manual’ for this strategy of peacemaking in the sermon on the mount. the eight beatitudes (cf. matthew 5:3–10) provide a portrait of the person we could describe as blessed, good, and authentic. blessed are the meek, jesus tells us, the merciful and the peacemakers, those who are pure in heart, and those who hunger and thirst for justice. this teaching is also a program and a challenge for political and religious leaders, the heads of international institutions, and business and media executives: to apply the beatitudes in the exercise of their respective responsibilities. it is a challenge to build up society, communities and businesses by acting as peacemakers. it is to show mercy by refusing to discard people, harm the environment, or seek to win at any cost. to do so requires ‘the willingness to face conflict head on, to resolve it and to make it a link in the chain of a new process.’”3 with the context of the beatitudes as the overall program, i will examine each of the seven principles of catholic social teaching articulated by the usccb4 and then give a few examples of both the teaching and actions of jesus which exemplify that principle. life and dignity of the human person this belief is the foundation of all the principles of catholic social teaching and it is at the core of the judeo-christian tradition: all humans are daughters and sons of one creator, all created in the 97 mccarthy divine image, and so all have inherent dignity which is not to be violated. pope francis begins the 2017 world day of peace message with this greeting: i wish peace to every man, woman and child, and i pray that the image and likeness of god in each person will enable us to acknowledge one another as sacred gifts endowed with immense dignity. especially in situations of conflict, let us respect this, our “deepest dignity,” and make active nonviolence our way of life.5 the inherent dignity of all life is a basic teaching of nonviolence as well. for example, gandhi translates ahimsa as “love for all living things.”6 teachings of jesus which express the basic belief in the life and dignity of the human person: ● matthew 5:45: "god makes the sun rise on bad and good alike.”7 ● luke 10:25–37: in the parable of the good samaritan, jesus looks to the traditional enemy when creating his hero who models what it is to live the second great commandment—to love one’s neighbor as oneself. he casts as antagonists a priest and levite, both held in great esteem in his society. ● john 1:4–5: “in the word was life and that life was humanity’s light—a light that shines in the darkness, a light that the darkness has never overtaken.” john’s gospel message is summarized in this first chapter as the triumph of love over hate and violence for all humankind. some actions of jesus modeling this concept: ● mark 10:14–15: in a surprising move, jesus welcomes children who were being sent away by his well-meaning friends and disciples. ● mark 1:40–42 (matthew 8:2ff; luke 5:12ff): jesus touches lepers, healing them. ● matthew 9:20–22: jesus encourages and affirms the woman healed after reaching out to touch his garment—a forbidden act as she was considered “unclean.” jesus said simply, “courage, daughter! your faith has healed you.” nonviolence: building gospel-based communities 98 ● luke 23:42–43: jesus, as he dies, meets with compassion and reassurance the convicted person being executed who reaches out to him. and, he pointedly does not return insults to the other convicted and condemned man. these examples show the variety of jesus’s actions and teachings on the inherent dignity of each human life. the strongest and the culmination of jesus’s teaching is that he accepts death at the hands of the empire without retaliation or seeking to escape. as the “first born of those who rise from the dead” (colossians 1:18), the witness of the resurrection is the triumph/transformation of violence and death by love. after his death, the disciples are empowered and inspired to follow his example, risking imprisonment and death in speaking and living the gospel. in experience after experience, their acceptance of suffering is a point of conversion/transformation for others. call to family, community, and participation there is overlap in the principles of catholic social teaching; many of these concepts are similar. this second principle recognizes that all persons are social as well as individual. in organizing economically and politically, we are to seek the common good and the well-being of all, especially the poor and vulnerable. nonviolence analyzes and critiques systemic economic, political, and/or social injustice. nonviolence is a tool and a way of life that seeks to create just systems. in rev. dr. martin luther king, jr.’s teaching, he described the beloved community as “a global vision, in which all people can share in the wealth of the earth. in the beloved community, poverty, hunger, and homelessness are not tolerated because international standards of human decency will not allow it. racism and all forms of discrimination, bigotry, and prejudice will be replaced by an all-inclusive spirit of sisterhood and brotherhood.”8 jesus transformed systems of violence and oppression, rejecting violence and radically empowering the oppressed and vulnerable. examples of this which connect to this principle on the importance of the family, community, and participation include: ● luke 4:17–20: jesus begins his public ministry by proclaiming from the book of the prophet isaiah, articulating his mission and the goals of his movement, announcing 99 mccarthy jubilee: good news to the poor, liberty to captives, recovery of sight to the blind, release of prisoners, and a year of freedom for the land. ● matthew 5:22–26: jesus’s teaching on overcoming anger at another person urges his followers to reconcile with sisters and brothers instead of using judicial institutions. ● john 13:35: “this is how all will know that you are my disciples: that you truly love one another.” ● matthew 12:46–50 (mark 3:35; luke 12:50): jesus proclaims that whoever does the will of god are his mother and brothers and sisters when he is told that his family has come for him. in this, jesus radically expands the closest bonds of kinship to include any doer of god’s will. ● matthew 25:14–30: the parable of the talents can be seen as nonviolent resistance to unjust economic system based on exacting interest on debts. ● matthew 5:42: “give to those who beg from you. and don’t turn your back on those who want to borrow from you.” actions of jesus on the call to family, community, and participation: ● luke 19:1–10: the tax collector, zaccheus, in encounter with jesus, promises to pay restitution to all those he has cheated and harmed. ● matthew 21:12–13: jesus cleanses the temple of the buyers and sellers, outraged because of their preying on the poor and violating god’s commands. ● acts 2:42ff: the beloved community is evidenced in the witness of the early church, following christ, being known for their love of all, sharing of goods, inclusive community and leadership, care for the vulnerable, and healing the sick. ● john 12:14 (matthew 21:5; mark 11:7; luke 19:35): jesus’s triumphal entry into jerusalem on a donkey contrasts to a military ruler arriving on a horse. rights and responsibilities the usccb explains this third principle: “every person has a fundamental right to life and a right to those things required for human decency. corresponding to these rights are duties and responsibilities—to one another, to our families, and to the larger society.”9 nonviolence: building gospel-based communities 100 in king’s teaching, nonviolence is active resistance to evil. it is assertive spiritually, mentally, and emotionally. nonviolent campaigns work for justice without demonizing, harming, or defeating the enemy. in nonviolent actions, priority is given to the protection of all, especially the most vulnerable. and nonviolence believes that the universe is on the side of justice. the nonviolent resister has deep faith that justice will eventually win. nonviolence believes that god is a god of justice.10 the responsibility to protect is one concept that some just war theorists claim as scriptural foundation for the just war principles. an excerpt from a recent commonweal magazine article by mark j. allman and tobias winright articulates this point: a number of just war theologians—from ambrose and augustine to the protestant ethicist paul ramsey and others—anchor their theory of just war in scripture, particularly jesus’s call for love of neighbor, including the enemy. the resort to force should truly be a last resort, but it can be a moral necessity if that is the only way left to protect the innocent neighbor. out of respect for the human dignity of the aggressor, the use of force should be governed by the principles of proportionality and discrimination between combatants and noncombatants.11 extending jesus’s command to love neighbor to include protecting the neighbor is not a stretch. indeed, jesus’s parable of the good samaritan ascribes the role of model “lover of neighbor” to one of his historic enemies of his own people. and the good samaritan goes out of his way to protect the vulnerable: taking them to a safe place, binding their wounds, meeting their needs, and providing for them. but to extend jesus’s command to love neighbor to include participating in war and killing to protect is to stretch beyond the breaking point.12 surely, the vulnerable were being killed in jesus’s time and violent revolutions occurred and were being planned around him. if there was a time for jesus to protect not only himself, but the vulnerable with him, it was in the garden, in the dark of night, when a surprise attack might have interrupted the arrest and provided an opportunity to escape immediate danger and then hide. after all, the potential for the disciples being arrested with jesus in the garden was strong. as jesus was carefully planning for that final, special passover meal with his disciples, he could also have planned a violent resistance to arrest. but that’s not 101 mccarthy what jesus did; he went unarmed into the garden. and when peter drew his sword violently confronting the armed arresting officials, jesus not only rebukes peter, but heals the ear of the servant harmed by peter. surely, this is a definite rebuke of the use of violence even to protect the vulnerable (luke 22:47–50). indeed, jesus loves his enemy here by protecting them from peter’s sword and healing their wounds. while this teaching of loving enemies is clear, it is far from the only example of jesus protecting others while never resorting to violence. teaching: ● matthew 5:10: all the beatitudes exemplify this concept, but especially, “blessed are those who are persecuted because of their struggle for justice: the kingdom of heaven is theirs.” ● luke 9:53–55: when a samaritan town refuses to welcome jesus and his band of disciples as they travel to jerusalem, james and john ask, “‘rabbi, do you want us to call down fire from heaven and destroy them?’ but jesus turned and reprimanded them.” ● matthew 5:39: “when someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn and offer the other.” in effect, this teaching is nonviolent resistance, stopping a superior from backhanding a victim, but also not threatening or retaliating against the oppressor.13 ● matthew 5:40: “if anyone wants to sue you for your shirt, hand over your coat as well.” jesus is teaching a way to dramatize and highlight the suffering and vulnerability of the debtor when they are sued for their very last possession, their shirt. the action would shame the loan shark into dropping their court suit. the teaching here gives oppressed people a way to resist creatively appealing to the oppressor without threatening or demonizing them.14 actions: ● john 8:1–11: jesus intervenes to protect the woman caught in adultery, with a creative action exposing the hypocrisy of the law and those who condemned her. nonviolence: building gospel-based communities 102 ● matthew 26:6–13; john 12:1–8: jesus receives the extravagant anointing by mary of bethany and defends her and her action when judas accuses her of waste. this is only one of many examples where jesus intervenes when others are ridiculed, dismissed, or diminished. option for the poor and vulnerable this principle—that the basic moral test is how the least in society, the most vulnerable, are treated—could not be clearer in jesus’s teaching on criteria for judgment in matthew 25:31–46. the needs of the poor and vulnerable come first. dr. king articulated the “triple evils of poverty, racism, and militarism” as interrelated and systemic forms of violence which exist in a vicious cycle and threaten our society.15 under these forms of violence, the most vulnerable and most in need of gospel-based advocacy are the poor, people of color, and those affected by war. teaching of jesus giving priority to the poor and vulnerable: ● matthew 25: the final judgment is based solely on treatment of the most vulnerable with the clear message that those serving the “least among us” are serving christ. ● mark 9:35: jesus calls the twelve and says, “if any of you wants to be first, you must be the last one of all and at the service of all.” ● luke 4:16; matthew 23:4: religious leaders are excoriated by jesus for adding burdens to the poor, widows, and orphans while they reap the benefits of oppression—expecting public places at banquets. actions of jesus modeling care for those who are poor and vulnerable: ● luke 13:10–17: jesus sees a woman bent from illness and interrupts the sabbath service to heal her. in this he models dealing with those who have internalized the messages of oppression and do not ask or expect freedom or participation in the community. jesus defended her as a daughter of abraham and sarah and called out the hypocrisy of the religious leaders attacking her when her healing has interfered with the sabbath service. 103 mccarthy ● mark 5:40–42: jesus raises the daughter of a synagogue official from the dead. girls were the least in his culture and yet he interrupted his schedule and went immediately to the girl’s aid. ● matthew 14:15–21 (mark 6:35–44; luke 9:12–17): jesus’s compassion in repeatedly feeding large crowds of hungry and tired followers before dismissing them for their journey home is a strong witness of concrete care for the vulnerable. he also makes it clear to his closest disciples that it is their responsibility to provide nourishment for the crowd. the dignity of work and the rights of workers catholic social teaching holds that the dignity of work is to be protected, “that the rights of workers must be respected—the right to productive work, to decent and fair wages, to the organization and joining of unions, to private property, and to economic initiative.” nonviolence critiques systemic violence and has been used in campaigns for worker rights, including the memphis sanitation workers strike during which rev. dr. king was assassinated. many of the victories of nonviolence have been over systemic injustice against workers. jesus’s teachings and actions on the dignity of workers and their need for justice can be seen in stark relief when compared with the norms of his society, which practiced slavery, and strictly enforced hierarchy and oppression. teaching on work and workers: ● luke 1:46–55: the canticles in luke’s gospel are considered to be the oldest hymns of the early christian communities. the words luke puts in mary’s voice are the truth the early christian community both announced and longed for: tyrants deposed and the lowly raised, while those hungry are filled with good things and the rich sent away empty. ● matthew 5:41: “should anyone press you into service for one mile, go two miles.” the teaching of walter wink shows that this passage refers to the specific situation where a roman soldier could command anyone in their occupied territories, which included palestine, to carry their heavy packs for a mile. jesus’s suggestion that one willingly carry the pack for two miles is a nonviolent resistance which both critiques the injustice nonviolence: building gospel-based communities 104 and alters the relationship without violence or threat. the soldier demanding service is forced to ask a peasant to give back their pack.16 ● matthew 5:42: “give to those who beg from you. and don’t turn your back on those who want to borrow from you.” this teaching of jesus is a way out of the debilitating debt cycle of the roman subjects of his time. the exacting taxes owed to rome were the basis of the spiraling debt by which families defaulted on debt and subsequently lost their homes, their ancient plot of land, their possessions, and finally, their freedom. loaning to those in need without interest was a way they might reverse the system and care for each other. actions on the dignity of work and justice for workers: ● mark 6:3 jesus was a common laborer who worked with his hands. it was not a vocation held in esteem, for jesus was dismissed by his townsfolk: “isn’t this the carpenter, the son of mary?” ● john 13:5–15: jesus washes the feet of the disciples, taking the role of the lowest servant, overturning his culture’s norm of hierarchical ordering of “master” and “disciple,” modeling relationships of love and service. and then jesus commanded his disciples to do as he had done. ● luke 10:38–42: mary, sitting at jesus’s feet, listening to him teaching. at the time, women were not permitted to study torah. their role was to be preparing the meal, serving. martha, expecting her sister to share in the work of hospitality, protests her engaging in what was seen as men’s purview: torah discussion and debate. jesus defends mary’s right to choose to study, thereby affirming martha’s right also to choose to join the teaching. ● john 20:11–18: jesus commissions mary magdalene, sending her to proclaim his resurrection to the male disciples, and thus rejecting the system that refused testimony from woman as illegitimate. jesus tasks her with the important role of witness and messenger bringing life-changing evidence to his disciples, including his closest associates. in this, jesus rejects the oppressive constraints on women’s role in his society. jesus models relationships, and even leadership based in love and respect. 105 mccarthy solidarity this principle of catholic social teaching holds that we are one human family, whatever our national, racial, ethnic, economic, and ideological differences. and we have obligations to each other. “loving our neighbor has global dimensions in a shrinking world. at the core of the virtue of solidarity is the pursuit of justice and peace.”17 the possibility of forgiveness and reconciliation is the ever-present hope in nonviolence. through encounter, enmity has the potential to be transformed. in the six steps of nonviolence, as taught by martin luther king, jr, the sixth step is reconciliation.18 love of enemies and forgiveness is a central gospel message and foundational in the teachings in the sermon on the mount (matthew 4:44–48). and jesus models this in a variety of ways. in his relationship with his people’s traditional enemies, jesus enters into dialogue and allows himself to be stretched and expands his ministry: teaching: ● matthew 6:9–12: when asked for a teaching on prayer, jesus responds with an instruction which includes, “and forgive us our debts as we hereby forgive those who are indebted to us.” ● 1 john 4:18–20: this section summarizes the teaching: “there is no fear in love, for perfect love drives out fear. to fear is to expect punishment, and anyone who is afraid is still imperfect in love. we love because god first loved us. if you say you love god but hate your sister or brother, you are a liar. for you cannot love god, whom you have not seen, if you hate your neighbor, whom you have seen.” actions: ● mark 7:24–30: jesus’s interaction with the syrophoenician woman who convinces him, after his first refusal, to heal her daughter. ● john 4:4–26: jesus’s encounter with the samaritan woman at the well begins with suspicion and testing on both their parts but ends with her bringing all in her area into the encounter with jesus, with truth. nonviolence: building gospel-based communities 106 ● luke 7:2–9: jesus responds to requests to heal the servant of a roman centurion, an occupier of jesus’s land. when jesus receives the centurion’s message, “just give the order and my attendant will be cured,” jesus replies, “i have never found this much faith among the israelites.” with this example, it’s important not to misuse this passage as a justification for christians to become soldiers. as the staff of the catholic peace fellowship note, “time and again, luke shows that outsiders, those beyond the normal bounds of acceptability, often hear god’s word with more attentiveness than the insiders.”19 hence, luke’s message is more general in a way that is consistent with jesus’s teaching of nonviolence. ● luke 22:19–21: in a final passover love feast with his disciples, jesus blesses, breaks, and shares bread and wine. then he says, “look! the hand of my betrayer is at this table with me.” jesus does not exclude his betrayer from the table or the meal but does directly confronts the betrayal, exposing that painful reality. ● luke 23:34: jesus, at his death, prays for forgiveness for those who torture and kill him. care for god's creation the current climate crisis has propelled this principle of catholic social teaching to prominence. the usccb explains this principle, “we are called to protect people and the planet, living our faith in relationship with all of god’s creation.”20 pope francis’s 2015 encyclical, laudato si’: on care for our common home, is an in-depth reflection on the dire predicament we all face on this planet. the section “the gaze of jesus” is a survey of the teaching and actions of jesus in relationship to the natural world.21 for example, jesus reminds his disciples that god is parent of all creatures, treasuring the sparrow (luke 12:6). the many references in parables to the natural world show jesus “lending it an attention full of fondness and wonder.”22 the stilling of storms is another confirmation of jesus’s living in full harmony with creation.23 incarnation and resurrection speak most strongly of christ’s intimate and cosmic relationship with the created world: christ’s “becoming flesh and dwelling among us” (john 1:14), and after rising from the dead being present, risen and glorious, in all creation.24 this principle of catholic social teaching shows the integration of the causes of violence and oppression and their solution. laudato si’ also includes a compelling analysis of the interconnections between the suffering of the poor and of the earth, linking it to the other principles 107 mccarthy of catholic social teaching, especially solidarity and the option for the poor: “the deterioration of the environment and of society affects the most vulnerable people on the planet: ‘both everyday experience and scientific research show that the gravest effects of all attacks on the environment are suffered by the poorest.’”25 solutions for the climate emergency need to be integrated as well. the climate crisis is linked to devastating drought, storms, floods, and massive fires. these fuel the global refugee crisis and public health emergencies, as well as the collapse of infrastructure and economic systems. as pope francis writes, “these situations have caused sister earth, along with all the abandoned of our world, to cry out, pleading that we take another course.”26 addressing this global violence is included in pope francis’s call for nonviolence in the 2017 world day of peace message, “nonviolence: a style of politics for peace”: “may we dedicate ourselves prayerfully and actively to banishing violence from our hearts, words, and deeds, and to becoming nonviolent people and to building nonviolent communities that care for our common home. nothing is impossible if we turn to god in prayer. everyone can be an artisan of peace.”27 notice that every person is included in this call for nonviolent action. laudato si’ shows that catholic social teaching and nonviolence point a way forward in addressing the climate crisis. in our climate emergency, a global violence threatening life on the planet, just war theories offer little if any guidance. climate emergency is not the only present issue of violence for which the jwt is unhelpful. in 1991, in an issue of the pax christi usa magazine after the gulf war with reflections on the jwt and nonviolence, i noted that, in the time since the u.s. catholic bishops had issued the challenge of peace: god’s promise and our response, the u.s. government had “mined the harbors of nicaragua and initiated military action against libya, grenada, panama, and iraq. none of those actions have been clearly questioned or condemned by the u.s. catholic church.”28 indeed, eileen egan, co-founder of pax christi usa and friend of dorothy day, declared in the same issue, “just war thinking has become in our time the great myth that we kill by.”29 nonviolence and building the people of god nonviolence and just peace strategy invite, and rely on, participation of wide segments of the community. erica chenoweth and maria j. stephan studied nonviolent movements between 1900 and 2006 and found that “successful nonviolent resistance movements usher in more lasting nonviolence: building gospel-based communities 108 democracies, less likely to regress into civil war […]. in addition, campaigns of nonviolent resistance were more than twice as effective as their violent counterparts.”30 in contrast to the unity of nonviolent movements, the just war theory, from its christian inception, divides the christian community into clergy and laity. rene mcgraw, o.s.b., offers an insightful analysis of this flaw: augustine was the christian thinker who formalized the understanding of the christian to the state. his ingenious, but, from my perspective, fatal solution to the problem was to split the christian community into those who were required to be discontinuous with the world around them and those who were more continuous with the world. those who were henceforth to live as the full christian were the clergy and the religious. those who would take the slow road to salvation were the laity.31 pope francis has called out clericalism and the sense of entitlement that goes with it as being destructive of the catholic community.32 having a two-tiered hierarchy of the followers of jesus is the root of clericalism, which has no basis in the actions and teachings of jesus. a question which the just war theorists must answer: if participation in war is detrimental to the souls of clergy and religious, why imperil the path of any followers of jesus? the division between clergy and laity is nonexistent in nonviolent movements. indeed, one of the benefits of nonviolence is that all can participate. each participates as they are able, and all methods of participation are valued. the examples i began with show the broad participation of the full catholic community in nonviolent campaigns for justice. conclusion the special issue of expositions: ethics in focus: on the future of the just war theory in catholic social thought, explores primarily the benefits of continuing the jwt either with increased education or by strengthening its use. given the depth and breadth of jesus’s teachings and actions which are foundational both for nonviolence and for catholic social teaching, the basis for the just peace ethic, i believe that we are called as a catholic christian community to return to our gospel roots and the traditions that flow from these roots. in addition, in our time, the violence we face 109 mccarthy now and into the future as a global community have interwoven and linked causes, and so the solutions are found in integrated approaches. the climate emergency is a major driver of conflicts and the refugee crisis and will increase in the coming decades. while nonviolence and just peace offer helpful analyses, direction, and guidance for solutions, the jwt with its limited scope is irrelevant in this crisis of interwoven causes. finally, using nonviolence in campaigns for peace and justice strengthens the bonds of community. in contrast, one of jwt's inherent flaws is the divide between the elevated followers of jesus not permitted to participate in war, and those lesser followers of jesus who could be expected to fight with violence. in moving away from just war theories, the catholic community can become a stronger, gospelcentered people of god. notes 1. “vow of nonviolence,” pax christi usa, https://paxchristiusa.org/resources/vow-ofnonviolence/. 2. expositions: interdisciplinary studies in the humanities: ethics in focus: special issue on the future of just war theory in catholic social thought 12.1 (2018), https://expositions.journals.villanova.edu/issue/view/159. 3. pope francis, “nonviolence: a style of politics for peace,” the holy see, january 1, 2017, §20, https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/peace/documents/papafrancesco_20161208_messaggio-l-giornata-mondiale-pace-2017.html. 4. united states conference of catholic bishops, “seven themes of catholic social teaching,” in sharing catholic social teaching: challenges and directions (washington, dc: usccb, 1998) and faithful citizenship: a catholic call to political responsibility (washington, dc: usccb, 2003), http://www.usccb.org/beliefs-and-teachings/what-webelieve/catholic-social-teaching/seven-themes-of-catholic-social-teaching.cfm. 5. pope francis, “nonviolence: a style of politics for peace” §1. this excerpt quotes apostolic exhortation evangelii gaudium §228. 6. “glossary,” mahatma gandhi’s writings, philosophy, audio, video, and photographs, https://www.mkgandhi.org/gsr.htm. nonviolence: building gospel-based communities 110 7. this, and all scriptural references and quotations, come from the inclusive bible: priests for equality (lanham, md: roman and littlefield publishers, inc., 2007). 8. quoted in the section on “the beloved community” explaining martin luther king’s philosophy on the website of the king center, 2019, https://thekingcenter.org/kingphilosophy/. 9. usccb, “seven themes of catholic social teaching.” 10. “the six principles of nonviolence,” the king center, 2019, https://thekingcenter.org/ king-philosophy/. principles are based on martin luther king, jr.’s “letter from birmingham jail” in why we can’t wait (new york: penguin, 1963). 11. mark j. allman and tobias winright, “protect thy neighbor: why just-war tradition is still indispensable” commonweal magazine june 2, 2016, https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/protect-thy-neighbor. 12. lisa sowle cahill also affirms that “killing is patently incompatible with love of neighbor and the example of jesus” even as she names the dilemma in catholic social teaching. in addition, winright’s and allman’s claim above that killing is consistent with human dignity when it is proportional and discriminatory is quite suspect, and it appears challenged by pope john paul and lisa sowle cahill. see pope john paul ii, “homily at drogheda, ireland,” the holy see, september 29, 1979, §§18–20; http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/ john_paul_ii/homilies/1979/documents/hf_jp-ii_hom_19790929_irlanda-dublinodrogheda_en.html: “violence destroys what it claims to defend: the dignity, the life, the freedom of human beings.” see lisa cahill, blessed are the peacemakers: pacifism, just war and peacebuilding (fortress press, 2019), viii, 33, 125. 13. walter wink, “jesus and alinsky,” in the impossible will take a little while: a citizen’s guide to hope in a time of fear, ed. by paul loeb (new york: basic books, 2004), 149– 160. 14. ibid. 15. martin luther king, jr., where do we go from here: chaos or community? (boston: beacon press, 1967). 16. wink, “jesus and alinsky.” 17. usccb, “seven themes of catholic social teaching.” 18. “the six principles of nonviolence.” 111 mccarthy 19. catholic peace fellowship staff, “on the (mis)use of scripture for war,” in the sign of peace: journal of the catholic peace fellowship 3.2 (summer 2004), 14. 20. ibid. 21. pope francis, laudato si’: on care for our common home, the holy see, may 24, 2015, §§96–100, http://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papafrancesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html. 22. ibid. §97. 23. ibid. §98. 24. ibid. §§99–100. 25. ibid. §48. quoting the bolivian bishops’ conference, pastoral letter on the environment and human development, 2012, §17. 26. ibid. §53. 27. pope francis, “nonviolence: a style of politics for peace” §25. 28. anne mccarthy, o.s.b., “time to wake up,” pax christi usa winter 1991, 2. in the 1991 iraq war the catholic bishops conference at least questioned it, but without clearly condemning it. yet, once the war started some bishops clearly supported it. see peter steinfels, “war in the gulf: religious leaders,” new york times january 26, 1991, https://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/26/us/war-in-the-gulf-religious-leaders-cardinal-saysiraqi-s-acts-prove-bush-right.html, and “war in the gulf: the home front; church leaders affirm opposition to war,” new york times february 15, 1991, https://www.nytimes.com/1991/02/15/us/war-in-the-gulf-the-home-front-church-leadersreaffirm-opposition-to-war.html. 29. eileen egan, “war: reversing the works of mercy,” pax christi usa winter 1991, 6; reprinted in this issue. 30. erica chenoweth and maria j. stephan. why civil resistance works: the strategic logic of nonviolent conflict (new york: columbia university press, 2011). the quote is from a summary of the book: https://www.ericachenoweth.com/research/wcrw. 31. rene mcgraw, o.s.b., “benedictinism, nonviolence, and the rule,” in the proceedings of the american benedictine academy convention (st. joseph, mn: liturgical press, 2004), 34. nonviolence: building gospel-based communities 112 32. cindy wooden, “clericalism: the culture that enables abuse and insists on hiding it,” catholic news service august 22, 2018, https://www.catholicnews.com/services/englishnews/2018/clericalism-the-culture-thatenables-abuse-and-insists-on-hiding-it.cfm. microsoft word plantinga.docx [expositions 9.1 (2015) 78–89] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 educating for shalom cornelius plantinga, jr. calvin institute of christian worship no thoughtful person is completely happy with human life. so much is plainly wrong with it. we all know garden-variety frustrations: the first spot in a green arrow traffic lane is taken by some tweeter who lurches forward only after the arrow has come and gone. you buy something that needs to be assembled and the instructions for assembly don’t make any sense. the beethovens of the world lose their hearing and metal heads manage to keep theirs.1 but far beyond these low-level frustrations lie the serious ones. i have in mind the things anybody can see on any day in yahoo news: celebrations of sports victories that then turn violent; middle east strife all over again; terrible suffering from natural disasters, including by people too poor to live anywhere but on a flood plain. we have famine in countries run by horribly corrupt leaders. we have the abuse of women and children, labor and sex slavery, maltreatment of god’s good creation, misuse of antibiotics leading to the emergence of super bacteria that are immune. we have terrorists who kidnap groups of young girls from their schools—all because the kidnappers are solid in their conviction that girls have no business getting educated in schools. we have split churches, split marriages, split friendships. we have angry sports, vengeful movies, music with an attitude. we have the spectacle of a brilliant american philosopher—an atheist named thomas nagel, who claims that if he ever began to believe the nicene creed he would immediately conclude that he had lost his mind. in 2012 oxford university press published nagel’s book titled mind and cosmos: why the materialist neo-darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false. in his book, nagel exposes his deep doubts about materialism and blind evolution, about their weakness when it comes to explaining human emotions, human decision-making, human morality, and human consciousness itself. other atheists went nuts. an atheist who is not a hard materialist? unthinkable! ridiculous! above all, heretical! steven pinker lamented “the shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker.”2 much is plainly wrong in the world, including in the world of academe, and many could draw up a description of it with, i’m sure, more authority and verve than mine. prophets dream dreams of shalom of course the story of trouble in the world is a very old one. the great prophets of the bible knew how many ways human life can go wrong because they also knew how many ways it could go right. and they dreamed of a time when god would put things right again.3 the book of isaiah, in 79 plantinga particular, dreams of a new age in which crookedness would be straightened out, rough places made plain. the foolish would be wise, and the wise, humble. the prophets dreamed of a time when the deserts would flower, the mountains would run with wine, a time when weeping would be heard no more and people could sleep without a weapon on their lap. they could work in peace without fear that somebody would steal their harvest. a wolf could lie down with a lamb, the wolf cured of all carnivorous appetite. all nature would be fruitful and full of the wonder of god; all humans would be knit together in brotherhood and sisterhood; and all nature and all humans would look to god, walk with god, lean toward god, and delight in god. their shouts of joy would arise everywhere, from women in city streets and from men going down to ships. inspired by the prophecies of shalom, the church father irenaeus imagined a time when even the grape vines would be full of joy: “the days will come in which vines shall grow, each having ten thousand branches, and in each branch ten thousand twigs, and in each twig ten thousand shoots, and in each one of the shoots ten thousand clusters, and on every one of the clusters ten thousand grapes […] and when any of the saints shall lay hold of a cluster, another shall cry out, ‘i am a better cluster; take me; bless the lord through me.’”4 all this is what the prophets call shalom. it’s the webbing together of god, humans, and all creation in fruitfulness, justice, and delight. we call shalom “peace,” but it means so much more than just peace of mind or ceasefire among enemies. in the bible, “shalom” means universal flourishing and delight, each created thing a wonder, each created person a source of joy. reigning over it all is the earth’s creator and savior—the one who opens doors and opens hearts and speaks welcome to children.5 shalom includes healthy external relations among people, creation, and god, but also the healthy internal relations that sponsor the healthy external relations. a person who acts justly toward others also has the internal virtue of righteousness that makes him disposed to do justice. a person who acts generously toward others and groups of others also has the virtue of love that makes her disposed to act generously. a person who treats non-human creation in a healthy, respectful way also has the virtue of obedience to god, who has asked us human beings to be good stewards of creation. sad to say, we are now fallen creatures in a fallen world. the christian gospel tells us that sin and misery spoil so much in this corrupt world but also that, in christ, all heaven has come to do battle. christ the victor has come to defeat the powers and the principalities, to move the world over onto a new foundation, and to equip a people to lead the way in righting what's wrong, in reforming what's corrupted, in creating beauty and encouraging delight in it—in other words, a people to do the things that make for shalom. here, i believe, we may find the main role of christian higher education.6 it’s not only the church and para-church justice groups and inner-city housing organizations that are interested in training people to work for reform in the world. with its highly educated and highly trained faculty educating for shalom 80 and staff, with its curriculum and co-curriculum, with all its goods and services, the christian university7 is also wonderfully positioned to form students into agents of shalom, models of shalom, witnesses to shalom.8 relevant knowledge, skills, attitudes but what does this mean practically? how does this great vision cash out in the ordinary business of teaching and studying, of homework and sports and friends and plays and music and rehearsing for baccalaureate? of course, a decent answer to this question would require a lot more than one paper could suggest. but let me make some observations. first, the connection of christian higher education with the great biblical dream of shalom implies that in christian universities we will regularly remind ourselves of the vision itself. we will ask ourselves what the point is of all this money and effort and toil. surely for parents the point isn’t just satisfying their children’s grandparents that the family hasn’t gone worldly on them. surely that can’t be enough. surely the point isn’t just that there are fewer drugs and thugs in christian universities— though, if true, that would be a significant advantage. surely the point isn’t just outfitting young people with the knowledge and skills they need for the job market, though becoming marketable is— especially these days—certainly necessary. surely the point isn’t simply to help strengthen student faith in jesus christ, though that’s a matter so important one could never spend enough for it. these things are all worthy things: it’s fine to maintain a family tradition by sending sons and daughters to notre dame or calvin or king’s. it’s fine to want high quality, dedicated teachers, and a school even marginally less dangerous where substance abuse and sexual abuse and violence are concerned. it’s fine if education makes our children economically viable. and it’s unspeakably fine if, in the course of their education, they are drawn like a magnet to our lord through the modelling of a priest, or the intelligent devotion of a coach, or the young, but stout, faith of their peers. all these are fine things. but none is enough. a bigger goal of christian higher education, i suggest, is equipping young people with the knowledge, the skills, the practices, and the attitudes that can be thrown into the battle for peace, the battle for universal wholeness, justice, and delight. as c. s. lewis once said, we are trying to retake territory that has been captured by the enemy. we are trying to anticipate the eventual coming of the kingdom of god in its fullness by setting off small bursts of shalom all over the place. students will need knowledge, skills, practices, and attitudes for this recapturing program. so (second observation) we teach them what we know of the world. we teach them the functions and beauty of numbers and sets of numbers; we teach them the wonder of cells and of cell division. we teach them that atheism has its orthodoxies, and that they do not include purpose or progress in an evolving creation. 81 plantinga in history, students learn to see the great movements among humans in god’s world, and how these have sometimes been set off by the unexpected acts of lone individuals. more than that, as paul gagnon once observed, we study and teach history in order to develop good judgment.9 we want students to understand from a biblical point of view what’s comic and what’s tragic in a fallen world, and how strikingly often they combine. we want students not to be surprised, as gagnon puts it, when “failure teaches us more than victory does” or when triumph curdles into folly. we want them to distrust simple accounts of complex events and to be prepared for the place human irrationality has in the course of human history. all this equips them to understand the world in which they are to be peace agents. just as no cia agent would be sent to an area of which she was ignorant, so it’s folly to expect our sons and daughters to serve and help transform a world they have not studied. we learn in literature classes the best that’s been thought and said. by reading fiction and biography, students learn, among other things, something about human character. they learn, for instance, how possible it is for great godliness and great wickedness to cohabit in a single person. they learn to appreciate the surprises and ironies of human character—how various it is, how bizarre, how delightful, how sometimes confounding: how could a man known for simple acts of kindness also be so boring that he can light up a room just by leaving it? as they read and ponder and discuss, students’ knowledge of human character deepens and becomes subtle. it’s part of their equipment as peace agents. no business group, no army, no task force, no basketball team is sent out to engage a foe, or serve a client, without knowing their character and habits, without trying to climb inside their skin. and so it is with christian students reading fiction and biography. it’s required training for the peace corps. but (third observation) christian education isn’t only for dispensing knowledge. students gain skills as well. they learn to read both charitably and critically. they learn to write better—not to show off, but in the first place as a mere courtesy to their readers and then, in the end, so as to spread truth efficiently. students may learn a variety of other skills as well:  to form and follow a research plan;  to follow the streams of scripture and neoplatonism that flow through st. augustine’s theology of the trinity;  to understand and speak a second language in obedience to the scriptural summons to hospitality;  to argue without quarreling.10 because shalom includes not just justice and harmony, but also delight given and received, some student skills will come in from the co-curriculum as well: educating for shalom 82  to play a scale in thirds up to tempo;  to hit a topspin lob;  to befriend a loner;  to disappear into a theatrical role;  to lead singing not in your concert voice but in your “start singing, everybody” voice. in these and kindred areas students acquire skills. of course they become equipped for jobs. but, even these competitive days, that’s not the final goal of their christian higher education. the reason is that they will still have to ask themselves what those jobs are for. how will the job i’m preparing for— how will it serve god by serving other people? how will it clean a lake instead of polluting it? how will it offer opportunity to marginalized people rather than crowd them still further out of the center of things? how will it add to people’s hunger for justice and maybe partially satisfy it? in other words, how will the knowledge, skills, practices, and values of my christian education be used to restore a little order within the human madhouse or recover some part of the lost loveliness of god’s world or introduce some novel beauty into society? that is, how do my education and work make for shalom? obviously beyond knowledge and skills (fourth observation) i’m talking now about adding values and developing virtues. i’m talking about the way an education tells us what knowledge and skills are for, why they matter, and to what use god intends them to be put. will we use our education mostly to enrich ourselves, or in some variety of ways to make human life flourish for others? do we use a career to gain a reputation or to regain some kind of well-being in god’s world? is a profession used to play angles and cut corners, or instead to lift and straighten some part of a crooked creation? let me give a homely example. a manufacturer who puts out an honestly-built piece of furniture at a fair price is anticipating and previewing the new heaven and earth. he is fashioning from trees and cotton and synthetic fiber, from metal and glue and rubber—he is fashioning a genuinely useful, and maybe a beautiful, thing and in the process is providing for other women and men a chance to do significant work. but suppose somebody uses his expensive christian education in order to fill orders for financial products he doesn’t understand and which he knows his own company is betting against. suppose he publishes airline flight schedules he knows are hopelessly unrealistic and which will strand and frustrate thousands. suppose he uses his math skills not as a bookkeeper, but as a bookie. one of the things a christian education ought to do is help us at least to question such things. an educated christian will raise the question whether some jobs and some products are important or honest enough to spend years working on. and the educated student will judge their importance and honesty by the likelihood that they will really contribute to shalom. 83 plantinga good practices within the co-curriculum the curriculum in a christian university is very likely to form the student into an agent of shalom, a witness to it, maybe even a model of it to some degree. but (fifth and last observation) the nonacademic side of university life is just as likely to help—and in some cases more likely to help.11 a number of christian educators have lately been talking a lot about the shaping power of various practices on christian campuses. their conviction is that we are more often shaped by our practices than by mere ideas. “what we do with and among others shapes who we become.”12 so a christian university might begin each academic year with the non-academic practice of a community service day. led by staff who have shalom on their minds, students roof, paint, rake, mow, pick up, and generally put things to rights for people who can’t. this is simply the way you start a university year. it’s a ritual practice. the same goes for spring break service trips. a certain number of students each year goes not to daytona beach to party but to the mississippi delta to roof, paint, rake, mow, pick up, and generally put things to rights for people who can’t. the persons who accompany the students are obviously a key. maybe they are faculty or maybe they are staff, but in any case they are critical to the success of the venture. they may have something brief and lovely to say to students about shalom, or the kingdom of god, or “the least of these,” or the common good. but students will be absorbing as well the leader’s attitudes and practices—his respect for students, her respect for the people served, his humor, her faith. there is something about gathering over a shared project in unfamiliar circumstances with a familiar and wise mentor that can be golden for christian university students. “what we do with and among others shapes who we become.” let’s recall paul gagnon’s observation that “failure teaches us more than victory does,” and add that it does so not just in the big movements of history. one of the most formative moments on campus is when a high school high achiever, jostling for position with other former high school high achievers, comes to college and falters.13 she gets cut during cross country tryouts. he gets cut during campus choir tryouts. she receives her first “c.” he tries out for a role in the importance of being earnest and fails. astonishment, dismay, self-doubt, depression—anything might follow the failure, but pain is likely to be ingredient in it. in any properly functioning university, students are told plainly during orientation where to go for help. in a christian university students may expect expanded resources because the chaplain and staff are available, because campus worship includes psalms of lament that nourish our faltering student as does the broken body and shed blood of jesus, and because, even outside the chaplain’s office, residence assistants, counseling staff, and faculty advisors will include some mature christians. mature christian counselors on campus guide our faltering student back toward the light. i won’t try to reproduce their method, but i know it will include unmistakable empathy and kindness. counselors are also unlikely to miss an opportunity to remind students that their worth centers in educating for shalom 84 being a loved child of god, created in dignity with the very image of god—a dignity that failure may scuff but never shatter. above all, the counselor may wonder with the student what may be learned from a dismaying failure. it feels awful, but is it? could this failure be god’s nudge of a student in a new direction? a student who gets drunk and disorderly on a city street may be apprehended by a cop and fined by a judge. a student on a christian campus may be apprehended by a campus safety officer and then counseled by a mature christian in the university’s student life division—a mature christian whose idea of discipline may include a penalty, but will certainly include god’s grace and truth about the meaning of the student’s behavior and the opportunity to learn something from it.14 service days, spring break trips, wise counselors—all of them help students flourish who then may help others flourish. so does a great cross country coach who imbues students with the spirit of eric liddell in chariots of fire (“god made me fast and when i run i feel his pleasure”). so does a campus job under a truly vital and humane supervisor. so does a circle of friends that includes some serious, practicing christians. they may end up in each other’s weddings one day. they may influence each other’s career paths. they may save each other from behavioral risks. they may certainly be a significant part of what parents are buying for their children when parents pay substantial tuition at an excellent christian university.15 or consider a violinist in the university orchestra. she’s good enough to sit outside second stand in the first violin section. after solid practicing she can play much of her orchestra’s repertoire both in tune and up to tempo, and she loves to do it. this phenomenon is a small burst of shalom all by itself. the student’s heart warms to beauty that delights both her and others and is therefore in tune with the creator. just as she delights in an unspoiled toddler or in the velvety ears of her family’s labrador retriever, so our student plays the first motif in mendelssohn’s fourth symphony and it restores her soul. music doesn’t always delight, of course. some music disturbs or alarms. it’s concussive, aggressive, wake-up music. it’s protest music and it reminds us forcefully that we do not yet have shalom. but some music delights, and the student’s conductor sometimes comments that it is no small thing to generate beauty that delights both us and our listeners. in one thursday rehearsal, he helps students to see that by their playing they have the power to move the hearts of other creatures of god, in fact, to become ingredient in their joy. the student starts to get the feeling that in orchestra she is part of a celebration and that, within it, she may even become ingredient in the joy of god. later in the rehearsal, to suggest an appropriate attitude as students begin to play the slow movement of mozart’s eine kleine nachtmusik, the conductor says, simply, “pray.” that night, after the violinist says “our father” and climbs in bed, she imagines a god who revels in beauty, who is almost boyishly enthusiastic about beauty. it occurs to her that maybe her orchestra’s audience is not just the father, the son, and the holy spirit, but also the angels and archangels. also 85 plantinga the saints and martyrs. she wonders whether even when she plays alone she may not be the only listener. so she begins more and more to think of her playing as an offering. most of the time she generates music with others. the sheer fact of ensemble playing adds layers to our student’s delight. she gets to mesh her sound with that of others, including a number of her good friends. violins, violas, cellos, and string basses each have a distinctive range and sound. outside the string section, french horns are flaring, clarinets are doodling, flutes are fluting, and the sole english horn is gently wailing. i can’t quite describe the beauty of this phenomenon and how much it instills unfulfillable longing inside our student, but i can suggest an analogy: god has arranged creation to fill with distinctive presences. an elephant is a ponderous presence. when it speaks it trumpets. a small terrier is a yippy and yappy presence. a pig grunts and roots. a flock of geese in a november fly-by is full of honking. every creature acts in character. they express their presence by trumpeting or yipping or grunting or honking. something similar happens in an orchestra. when the violins sing and the clarinets doodle and the flutes flute and the horns flare and the tympani resonate—each in its distinctive voice but all meshed together—then you have music, a gift of god being represented to god and to anybody else who is listening. by fitting her voice in with all the others, the student is playing in one of the great festivals of creation. her participation forms her right down to blood and bone. she is generating a piece of music and therefore a piece of shalom and she is doing it outside the university’s academic curriculum. sometimes the very atmosphere of life on campus—an atmosphere generated by student organizations centering on justice, by shared assumptions about what christians owe to the glory of god in the common good, by rituals of service, by homilies in campus worship—can become good contagion, touching everybody with a godly infection. students may skip campus worship and never hear a campus homily but still be unable to step outside the university’s christian atmosphere. it’s too pervasive. if you will forgive a personal example: my younger son, adam, graduated from marquette university with an a.b., but also with a jesuit service ethic.16 he caught it at school. so, right out of university, he served for a number of years in the jesuit volunteer corps in houston as a counselor in a refuge for homeless kids. he saw a lot of desolation and waded all the way into it, doing what he could to address it. he has since lived out his marquette education as a cop.17 his attitude toward life on the job would make him an easy member of the reagan family of cops—good catholics, every one of them—in the cbs tv show blue bloods. educating for shalom 86 “i saw the holy city coming down out of heaven” at a good christian university, students learn knowledge, skills, attitudes, and practices that may contribute to shalom. it may turn out that this matters not only for this world but also for the world to come. my reason for thinking so is that scripture appears to teach not only that there shall be a new heaven and earth, but also that it shall be this earth, renewed. in revelation 21 the city of god descends to us. we do not go to heaven; heaven comes to us. in a vision lovely enough to break a person’s heart, john shows us what god showed him, that up ahead of us, after centuries of tribal feuds and racial arrogance, after centuries of xenophobic snapping at each other, after we human beings have silted history full with the debris of all our antagonisms—after all that, the city of god will descend to us, and god will dwell with us, and, once more, god will make all things new. the old testament prophecies of shalom—of perfect justice, harmony, and delight among god, human beings, and all creation—apply neither to the present church (of which in any case they are not true) nor to a future existence in a distant, airy heaven. these prophecies apply to the future of a very solid, tangible, visible earth.18 or to the earth and a number of other planets. saraksan national park in northeast korea will be a part of heaven. so will the coasts of cornwall in england, the schwarzwald of southwest germany, and the great barrier reef off the eastern coast of australia. lake michigan will be included and the islands of indonesia. kenya’s game preserves will still draw visitors, and so will the mighty amazon river. in this vision, one can spot lines of continuity between the work of christ in the present and in the future, between the small whispers and hints now, and the final cosmic renewal and triumph of the lamb. what we do now in the name of christ—striving for healing, for justice, for intellectual light in darkness, striving simply to produce something helpful for sustaining the lives of other human beings—shall be preserved across into the next life. all of it counts, all of it lasts, none of it is wasted or lost. all of it acts like salt that eventually seasons a whole slab of meat, or a seed that grows one day into a tree that looks nothing like the seed at all. for there is both cultural continuity and transformation in the link between this world and the next. as we know, twisted culture now fills the earth. god’s mandate to “multiply and fill the earth” (gen. 1:28) has too often been answered by strip mines, oil slicks, and denuded rain forests; too often by dictatorships and ethnic cleansing; too often by computerized dope distribution schemes. great scientists use their excellent minds to dream up weapons that find their way into the hands of terrorists. tv writers put a good face on godlessness. ministers use their seminary training to preach gospels in which all the difficult bits about sin and grace have been razored away. “fill the earth,” god says in genesis 1. and the earth is now full. the trouble is that it’s full of our trash as well as god’s treasure. 87 plantinga remarkably, god wants the earth anyhow. god wants it back. why? what’s the point? the earth’s trash is, after all, the product of our fallenness, of our disobedience. it’s the product and encouragement of human arrogance. why doesn’t god flush it all away with another deluge? because god has promised to preserve the earth. as you recall, genesis 9 records god’s promise never again to destroy the earth with a flood. the point is that the earth is the lord’s. the point is that the earth in all its fullness is the lord’s. god means to reclaim the fullness. but just as you and i have to be converted, so does all of culture. swords will have to be turned back into pruning shears, switch-blades into paring knives, and spears into garden hoes. high-powered doperunning speedboats—cigarette boats—will have to be reclaimed for teaching poor children to waterski. in the new heaven and earth, intercontinental ballistic missile silos will be transformed into training tanks for scuba divers.19 in a thousand ways, god will gather what’s scattered, rebuild what’s broken, restore what has been emptied out by centuries of waste and fraud. in a thousand ways, god will put right what’s wrong with the glorious creation. in fact, the bible hints that the new heaven and earth may surpass the original creation: marriage, for instance, shall no longer be necessary for human fellowship at its deepest level (mk. 12:25). the earth is the lord’s, in all its fullness. we have corrupted the earth through folly and sin, but god means to restore all things in the harmony, justice, and delight of shalom. this is a sign to us: on the third day jesus christ rose again from the dead, the pledge that one day all things shall be renewed. and god has called the followers of christ to become agents, witnesses, and models for the restoration project that is already in process. these agents need to be educated. more than we could ever think or say, christian higher education is for this project. christian education is the training of special agents of the kingdom of god and the consummation of creation. notes 1. beethoven’s offsetting compensation was, of course, a transcendent and unique ability to compose gloriously though deaf. 2. ferguson 2013. 3. isa 2:2–4; 11:1–9; 32:14–20; 42:1–12; 60; 65:17–25; joel 2:24–29; 3:17–18. 4. irenaeus 1885, 5.33.3. 5. years ago i derived the central part of my understanding of shalom from my teacher nicholas wolterstorff and especially from his 1983 book titled until justice and peace educating for shalom 88 embrace (grand rapids, mi: eerdmans). 6. another idea from nicholas wolterstorff. see wolterstoff 2004, especially chapter 2, titled “teaching for shalom: on the goal of christian collegiate education.” 7. let’s let “university” stand for both colleges and universities. 8. see wolterstorff 2004, 22–26. 9. gagnon 1988. 10. in imitation of g. k. chesterton and his brother cecil: “my brother […] was born when i was about five years old; and, after a brief pause, began to argue. he continued to argue to the end. […] i am glad to think that through all those years we never stopped arguing; and we never once quarreled. perhaps the principal objection to a quarrel is that it interrupts an argument” (chesterton 1937, 196). 11. i am indebted and grateful for much wisdom on these matters to dr. mary hulst, chaplain of calvin college, and to shirley hoogstra, j. d., vice-president for student life at calvin college. both women have educated me in co-curricular matters over the years and, most recently, in conversations of july 2014. 12. see smith and smith 2011, 6. the smiths acknowledge, among others, the pioneering work on practices of alasdair macintyre, craig dykstra, and dorothy bass. 13. mary hulst, conversation, july 10, 2014. 14. shirley hoogstra, conversation, july 11, 2014. 15. mary hulst, conversation, july 10, 2014. 16. in fine phrasing michael j. buckley speaks of the orientation of the jesuit order: “that all of its academic commitments have as an essential dimension a concern for justice within this ravaged world, that somehow or other the education of its students engage the misery that is the lot of the majority of human beings” (buckley 1998, xix). 17. see plantinga 2014. 18. hoekema 1979, 281–87. 19. mouw 1983, 16–20. 89 plantinga works cited buckley, michael j., s. j. 1998. the catholic university as promise and project: reflections in a jesuit idiom. washington, dc: georgetown university press. chesterton, g. k. 1937. autobiography. london: hutchinson. ferguson, andrew. 2013. “the heretic: who is thomas nagel and why are so many of his fellow academics condemning him?” the weekly standard march 25. http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/heretic_707692.html?page=3. accessed september 14, 2014. gagnon, paul. 1988. “why study history?” the atlantic monthly november. http://www.seaprep.org/document.doc?id=5585. accessed september 14, 2014. hoekema, anthony a. 1979. the bible and the future. grand rapids, mi: eerdmans. irenaeus of lyon. 1885. against heresies. trans. alexander roberts and william rambaut. in ante-nicene fathers. vol. 1. eds. alexander roberts, james donaldson, and a. cleveland coxe. buffalo, ny: christian literature publishing co. 309–567. mouw, richard j. 1983. when the kings come marching in: isaiah and the new jerusalem. grand rapids, mi: eerdmans. plantinga, adam. 2014. 400 things cops know. fresno, ca: quill driver. smith, david i., and james k. a. smith. 2011. “practices, faith, and pedagogy.” in teaching and christian practices: reshaping faith and learning. eds. david i. smith and james k. a. smith. grand rapids, mi: eerdmans. 1–23. wolterstoff, nicholas. 2004. educating for shalom: essays on christian higher education. eds. clarence w. joldersma and gloria goris stronks. grand rapids, mi: eerdmans. microsoft word 1 prusak 12.1.docx [expositions 12.1 (2018) 1–7] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 just war or just peace? the future of catholic teaching on war and peace bernard g. prusak king’s college (pa) it is a remarkable fact—if it isn’t a scandal!—that christians have been crucial figures in the development of so-called just war theory. here is one way the story is sometimes told. as two advocates of the rejection of just-war theory write, “jesus’ nonviolence was once normative for the church.”1 the key text here is matthew 5, including the injunction not to resist an evildoer through violence; the key example may be jesus’ submission to his arrest and crucifixion. the story goes on: “the christian community’s programmatic, disciplined and theological nonviolence began to be compromised after emperor constantine legalized christianity in 313 c.e.”2 specifically, we are told, constantine “dispensed with the sermon on the mount and the commandment to love one’s enemies, and turned to the pagan cicero to justify christian violence,” thereby “sowing the seeds” for the development of just war theory by christians like augustine in the fifth century, thomas aquinas in the thirteenth century, and francisco de vitoria and francisco suárez in the so-called second scholasticism of sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.3 the story, in brief, is one of accommodation and decline. the church allowed itself to become “imperial” and “war-making.”4 it succumbed to paganism. it betrayed jesus’ radical rejection of violence. in the words of a theologian who shares this perspective: when the church used the “just war” approach to embody its teaching on issues of war and peace, it lost, or allowed to be muted, the strong, prophetic teaching of the gospels. rarely was the bold call to peacemaking greatness in the sermon on the mount heard in the church. no longer was the example of jesus’ nonviolent life held up for study and emulation. strangled was the call to restless, creative peacemaking.5 the future of catholic thinking on war and peace 2 here is another way to tell the story. there is no doubting that the “[j]ust war tradition began to develop in the age of constantine, and became dominant as christians gained access to and responsibility for government and political power.”6 but it is open to question whether the development of just-war thinking by christians must be considered “paradoxical if not selfcontradictory.”7 in the twentieth century and our own, some christian theologians have argued, on the basis of texts like matthew 5 and accounts of the life of the early church, “that the foundational christian value is […] nonviolence.”8 by contrast, medieval theologians tended to operate with “the presupposition that if there is an apparent conflict between the gospel and the natural law,” with its prerogative to self-preservation, “it is possible to reconcile them.”9 the important point against this background is that medieval natural law theory reflected a fundamental faith commitment to the goodness of creation, rooted in the hebrew bible’s witness “to god’s work as creator and provident sustainer of the visible world.”10 accordingly, medieval natural lawyers could not countenance that christians with political power and responsibility should stand idly by while the blood of a neighbor was spilled.11 from this point of view, though the way of the cross calls us to nonviolent, willing-to-risk-suffering action—in other words, though the way of the cross calls us to practice the peaceable virtues exemplified by jesus12—taking up arms to defend the innocent and the common good nonetheless might be not only morally permissible in some circumstances, but morally imperative. note that, in this second story, the gospel witness to the power of nonviolent resistance is not denied, but neither is the biblical witness to the goodness of creation, which in our fallen world often needs defense. instead, the new and the old stand in tension, and from this tension developed just war theory, which a critic acknowledges “was and is intended primarily to restrain, not validate war.”13 it is also worth noting in this regard that the principles of jus ad bellum—the criteria that need to be satisfied before going to war can be considered morally permissible—and the principles of jus in bello—the criteria concerning morally permissible conduct in war—historically derive from quite different traditions: “jus in bello is the product of the medieval chivalric code, the selfregulation of the warrior classes. jus ad bellum, on the other hand, is the invention of churchmen and lawyers and represents a fundamental challenge to the assumptions build into chivalry,” namely, that “military life and warfare are an acceptable and potentially noble form of activity.”14 readers can probably tell that the author of this introduction is partial to the second way of making sense of the fact that christians have been crucial figures in the development of just war 3 prusak theory. the story of accommodation to paganism and power and abdication of the heart of the gospel seems overly simple and uncharitable to the figures in question. at the same time, it must be acknowledged that just war theory was not formulated with weapons of mass destruction in mind. as thomas merton forcefully wrote more than fifty years ago, in words that feel urgent again today: when a missile armed with an h-bomb warhead is fired by the pressing of a button and its target is a whole city, the number of its victims is estimated in “megacorpses”—millions of dead human beings […]. under such conditions can there be serious meaning left in the fine decisions that were elaborated by scholastic theologians in the day of hand-to-hand combat?15 further, papal teaching over the last fifty years, and especially under john paul ii and francis, has at the very least “recast […] the traditional just war doctrine within a more comprehensive theology of peace and reconciliation.”16 as the catholic theologian lisa cahill writes, “since the 1960s, official catholic teaching has uniformly deplored the destruction and disaster of war, pressing the point that it always represents a moral failure.”17 nonetheless, as she acknowledges, “just-war thinking has never been repudiated”18—or at least not yet—including by pope francis, who opposed u.s. military intervention in syria but affirmed that “it is licit to stop [an] unjust aggressor” such as isis, though he did not specify how.19 this iteration of the forum “ethics in focus” is dedicated to the question brought before the roman catholic church by an important, recent event in its life: the april 2016 conference “nonviolence and just peace,” held in rome and co-sponsored by the pontifical council for justice and peace and pax christi international. a document published by pax christi after the conference asserts that “there is no ‘just war,’” calls on the church “no longer [to] use or teach ‘just war theory,’” and advocates for “a new framework that is consistent with gospel nonviolence”: more precisely, a just peace approach focused on nonviolent practices and strategies.20 to put the question in brief: should the roman catholic church reject just war theory—more fully, eliminate its “elaboration or refinement” as a catholic social teaching project and “[r]eplace it with a theology and ethics of peace and peacebuilding”?21 or is there reason to reject the rejection of just war theory and instead not only to engage in its elaboration and the future of catholic thinking on war and peace 4 refinement, but to advocate for it politically?22 according to cardinal peter turkson, pope francis, who has spoken forcefully against war,23 intends to convene a synod to address just such questions.24 the contributors to this iteration of “ethics in focus” complicate the questions to consider. there are advocates for rejecting just war theory, and there are advocates for rejecting the rejection, but there are also contributors who reject the opposition of just war and just peace principles, who claim that the focus of both camps should be on peacebuilding, who call for renewed attention to the possibility of selective conscientious objection, and who draw attention to the growing edges of just war theory, which as it happens draw the just war tradition closer to its critics. let there be a synod, or even an encyclical, but may it grapple with the many arguments represented here. roger bergman (“preventing unjust war: the role of the catholic church”) is professor emeritus, department of cultural and social studies, creighton university. lisa sowle cahill (“the future of [catholic] just war theory: marginal”) is j. donald monan professor, department of theology, boston college. drew christiansen, s.j. (“just war in the twenty-first century: nonviolence, post-bellum justice, and r2p”), is distinguished professor of ethics and global human development and senior research fellow, berkley center for religion, peace, and world affairs, georgetown university. robert latiff, major general, u.s. air force, retired (“jumping into combat without a parachute—on purpose?”), is adjunct professor, reilly center for science, technology, and values, university of notre dame, and research professor and director for intelligence community programs, department of information sciences and technology, george mason university. maryann cusimano love (“just peace and just war”) is associate professor of international relations, department of politics, catholic university of america, and a fellow of catholic university’s institute for policy research and catholic studies. eli mccarthy (“the gospels draw us further: a just peace ethic”) is adjunct professor, program on justice and peace, georgetown university, and director of justice and peace for the conference of major superiors of men. william r. o’neill, s.j. (“must the ‘violent bear it away’? a restorative critique of just war”), is associate professor of social ethics, jesuit school of theology, santa clara university. gerard f. powers (“our vocation is peacebuilding [construo pacem est nostra vocatione]”) is director, catholic peacebuilding studies, and coordinator, catholic peacebuilding network, kroc institute for international peace studies, keough school of global affairs, university of notre dame. tobias winright (“why i shall continue to use and teach just war 5 prusak theory”) is hubert mäder endowed chair of health care ethics, albert gnaegi center for health care ethics, and associate professor of theological ethics, department of theological studies, saint louis university. notes 1. john dear and ken butigan, “an overview of gospel nonviolence in the christian tradition” (background paper commissioned for the nonviolence and just peace conference, rome, italy, april 11–13, 2016), 1, https://nonviolencejustpeacedotnet.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/our_nonviolence_traditi on.pdf. 2. ibid., 3. 3. ibid., 4. 4. ibid. 5. terrence j. rynne, “an overview of contemporary scriptural exegesis and ethics on jesus’ nonviolence” (background paper commissioned for the nonviolence and just peace conference, rome, italy, april 11–13, 2016), 9–10, https://nonviolencejustpeacedotnet.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/contemporary_scriptural _exegesis_ethics_on_jesus_nonviolence.pdf. 6. lisa sowle cahill, “official catholic social thought on gospel nonviolence” (background paper commissioned for the nonviolence and just peace conference, rome, italy, april 11–13, 2016), 1, https://nonviolencejustpeacedotnet.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/official_cst_on_gospel_ nonviolence.pdf. 7. cahill, “a church for peace,” commonweal, september 9, 2016, 9–11, at 10, https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/church-peace. the future of catholic thinking on war and peace 6 8. see for discussion jean porter, natural and divine law: a thomistic theory of the natural law (grand rapids: eerdmans, 2005), 284. 9. ibid., 292. 10. ibid., 305. 11. see leviticus 19:16. 12. see rynne, “an overview of contemporary scriptural exegesis and ethics on jesus’ nonviolence,” 3. compare eli mccarthy, becoming nonviolent peacemakers: a virtue ethic for catholic social teaching and u.s. policy (eugene, or: pickwick, 2012), 58: “carrying the cross is about voluntarily risking suffering in order to expose and transcend both injustice and violence.” see also 62 on “the willingness to risk torture, imprisonment and even being killed.” 13. cahill, “official catholic social thought on gospel nonviolence,” 2. 14. david rodin, war and self-defense (oxford: oxford university press, 2002), 167. 15. thomas merton, “nuclear war and christian responsibility,” commonweal, february 6, 1962, https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/nuclear-war-and-christian-responsibility. 16. see james l. heft, “john paul and the ‘just war’ doctrine: ‘make peace through justice and forgiveness, not war,’” in religion, identity, and global governance: ideas, evidence, and practice, ed. patrick james (toronto: university of toronto press, 2011), 203–219, at 216. 17. cahill, “official catholic social thought on gospel nonviolence,” 2. 18. cahill, “a church for peace,” 10. 19. see cahill, “official catholic social thought on gospel nonviolence,” 8. 20. see “an appeal to the catholic church to re-commit to the centrality of gospel nonviolence,” https://nonviolencejustpeace.net/final-statement-an-appeal-to-the-catholicchurch-to-re-commit-to-the-centrality-of-gospel-nonviolence/. 7 prusak 21. see cahill, “official catholic social thought on gospel nonviolence,” 12. 22. see, along these lines, peter steinfels, “the war against just war,” commonweal, june 5, 2017, https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/war-against-just-war. 23. see for quotations lisa cahill’s contribution to this forum. 24. cardinal turkson made this announcement at a meeting at georgetown university, may 31–june 2, 2017. microsoft word 4 christiansen 12.1.docx [expositions 12.1 (2018) 33–59] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 just war in the twenty-first century: nonviolence, post bellum justice, and r2p drew christiansen, s.j. georgetown university in the last two years, as we have learned of the russian hacking of the u.s. presidential elections, americans have had new reason to understand the truth of clausewitz’s maxim that war is the continuation of politics by other means. without firing a shot, the russians have disrupted american electoral processes, threatening to undermine the constitutional character of the american republic. cyber-warfare has suddenly become very real.1 we have also learned that american security is threatened not only by other states but also by the mega-corporations that provide our online platforms and digital technology. indeed, we have only begun to see the potential for disruption and destruction that cyberwarfare can create.2 war is taking on different faces. although forms of coercive diplomacy, such as sanctions, applied as an alternative to armed force, reduce the immediate physical damage adversaries can do to one another, they can do long-term harm to the health and longevity of large populations and they impede the ordinary conduct of civilian life.3 so-called “hybrid wars,” where military objectives are attained by shadowy means short of outright war or through non-state actor proxies, have become common.4 all take place outside the normal field of armed combat and tax our assumptions about war as a norm-governed activity. all these trends will require close ethical evaluation, even though they are designed and executed in ways that defy regulation. in these reflections on the future of just war, i want, however, to approach three different issues that have emerged from the past thirty years of conflict and that require further examination and refinement. they are: (1) implications of the tradition and practice of nonviolence for the just war tradition; (2) two issues in the jus post bellum (the morality of concluding war and armed conflict), namely, the duty of reconstruction and the place of forgiveness in securing a just peace; and finally, (3) the responsibility to protect (r2p), a field where just peacemaking and just war intersect and can be mutually supporting. just war in the twenty-first century 34 these topics are on the frontiers of just-war thinking where they touch on the avoidance of war, peacemaking, and the mixed terrain of r2p. my intention in proposing them is to encourage the development of just-war thinking at the growing edges that conform to the basic purpose of the just war tradition to prevent and limit war. in some cases, especially nonviolence and forgiveness, they are far from the habitual concerns of just-war analysts. if by the end of these reflections the reader is not persuaded, as i am, that these developments need to be integrated with just-war thinking, i hope, at least, to have established a base-line for others to pursue further inquiries. i. the nonviolence-just war nexus5 just-war thinkers tend to ignore nonviolence and the related just-peace theory as versions of pacifism. yet while many advocates of nonviolence may lean toward pacifism, not all do. the recent passing of gene sharp ought to remind readers that nonviolence also has a proven practical side which has helped effect significant peaceful change in a many conflicted societies and prevented civil contestation from collapsing into armed conflict.6 likewise, the growth of conflict resolution/transformation and peace studies as independent and accepted fields of study and training suggest that not everything of relevance to conflict may be found in the military field. similarly, the rise of forgiveness and reconciliation commissions suggests that we have tools other than military peacekeepers for establishing a durable peace.7 catholic teaching on just war also has formally recognized the role of nonviolence, and a fortiori just peace, in the avoidance of war.8 pope francis, in his 2017 world day of peace message, “nonviolence: a style of politics for peace,” underscored the complementarity of nonviolence and just war in the practical moral work of preventing and limiting violent conflict. he wrote, “peacebuilding through active nonviolence is the natural and necessary complement to the church’s continuing efforts to limit the use of force by the application of moral norms.”9 “application of moral norms,” of course, refers to the applied use of the just war.10 even more than nonviolence, just peacemaking originated in the hope of moving beyond passive resistance and nonviolent direct action to constructive approaches to the prevention of war.11 as john howard yoder argued in when war is unjust and the u.s. bishops echoed in the harvest of justice is sown in peace, nonviolence and just peace “raise the threshold for last resort.”12 as yoder wrote in the first edition of when war is unjust: 35 christiansen if there are more nonviolent resources available than people have thought about […] then the conclusion is unavoidable that the notion of last resort—one of the classical criteria of the [just war] tradition—must exercise more restraint than it did before.13 the u.s. bishops, for their part in 1993, described last resort in a particularly stringent way: “[f]orce may be used only after all peaceful alternatives have been seriously tried and exhausted.”14 beyond judging last resort, nonviolence and just peacemaking have still wider implications for just-war analysis: they provide tools for helping peace take hold in post-conflict situations, in evaluation of reconstruction (nation-building) efforts, and in assessing the balance between nonviolent civilian peacemaking and military peace enforcement in international policies.15 with so much new information, so many activities underway, and so many institutions now engaged in the nonviolent peacebuilding, just-war analysts can no longer afford to ignore nonviolence in their theorizing and in their analysis of situations of conflict.16 as the u.s. bishops wrote in 1993: such obligations [to seriously utilize nonviolent practices before going to war] do not detract from a state’s right and duty to defend against aggression as a last resort. they do, however, raise the threshold for the recourse to force by establishing institutions that promote nonviolent solutions of disputes and nurturing political commitment to such efforts. in some future conflicts, strikes and people power could be more effective than guns and bullets.17 in short, the development of nonviolent techniques, along with the institutions and trained personnel to employ them, makes it incumbent on just-war analysts to include them in their ad bellum calculations, as yoder insisted, if these calculations are to be credible. recommendation no. 1: nonviolence and even more just peace should be integrated routinely into just-war assessments, particularly with respect to measuring whether the criterion of last resort has been satisfied. (they should also just war in the twenty-first century 36 be applied to issues of jus post bellum, particularly to assessing whether sufficient resources have been allocated to upholding the civilian dimensions of just peace.) excursus: just war as a social system the emergent reality of nonviolent activists, conflict-resolution specialists, institutions, and practices suggests another turn is necessary among just-war thinkers: namely, to cease treating just war as an academic or legal theory only, but rather as a social system. ideas and norms are essential in social systems, but social systems include much more, such as institutions, practices, and trained persons whose duty it is to realize the norms underlying the system. it is not just academic philosophers and theologians, or even law-school professors, who are concerned with the ethics of war and peace. it is military personnel who are liable to indictment for violation of the laws of war, the jag officers who may prosecute them or advise commanders and policymakers on tactics, officers who may sit on courts martial, human rights lawyers who may investigate crimes, prosecutors and judges in international war crimes tribunals, and bishops, clergy, and moral theologians involved in conscience formation. they are all part of a social system dedicated to applying, enforcing, transmitting, and improving just war as a form of practical, i.e., moral, knowledge governing one of the most important aspects of social and political life. unlike aesthetics, logic, or the philosophy of mathematics, just-war thinking influences and shapes life beyond the academy. it has life and death consequences. its applications and interpretations affect foreign military policy, domestic policing, and the accountability of officials entrusted with power over life and death. it should not be taught, learned, and developed in an ivory tower, isolated from outside influences. just war analysts must work with the consciousness of the social and political significance of their work, and conversely, they must be alert to developments in the operational side of the field: in military manuals, prosecutions, treaties, evolving human rights concerns, church teaching, the proceedings of tribunals and the development of nonviolent techniques of conflict transformation. thinking of just war as a social system partakes of the web model of which anne-marie slaughter writes in the chessboard and the web.18 at the same time, while the “punctual” or snapshot analysis of individual acts will continue to have its place in the ethics of armed conflict, just-war thinking will have to evolve to examine the ethics of trends, processes, and policymaking in a complex, dynamic web of relations. consider, for example, wikileaks: what began as an 37 christiansen apparent work of rogue hackers has turned out to have been an exercise in covert hybrid war and political de-stabilization. or again, think of the arab spring: a popular movement with transnational links that began with an individual dissident, it was deliberately exploited by networked tunisian and egyptian activists, resulting in unpredictable and differentiated political change across an entire region. it is not just policymaking, as slaughter proposes, that needs to be carried out in terms of deep connections, but ethics as well. otherwise, ethics will fail to present the guidance that policymakers and the military look for it to give. recommendation no. 2: in defining issues and elaborating just-war ethics, analysts should not treat states and militaries as their sole concern, but treat conflict as an issue in a social system with multiple actors and complex interactions in need of moral evaluation. ii. ius post-bellum: ending conflict justly consideration of the jus post bellum, the morality of concluding armed conflict, arose with the ethno-religious wars in the break-up of the former yugoslavia. while the principle of just settlement goes back to earlier reflection on the injustice of the penalties on germany in the versailles treaty,19 discussion of institution-building, transitional justice, and forgiveness has its roots in the resolution of the rwandan genocide and the civil wars in the former yugoslavia.20 (here i will not deal with transitional justice, but only with institution-building, because it has proved to be an underfunded and controversial goal, and with forgiveness, because its pertinence is too often ignored or rejected.) r2p, a revolutionary concept in international theory, arose out of the same matrix of religioethnic conflict as the expanded thought on the jus post bellum,21 but was soon applied elsewhere, notably in timor-leste. despite african suspicions that it represented a new form of neocolonialism, it was utilized or considered in many african conflicts, frequently through ecowas (the economic community of west african states) and the african union.22 especially since the muddled r2p operation in libya and the failure to apply r2p in syria, its relevance has been questioned.23 it has been also undermined by the collapse of the post-world war ii liberal international order and blocked by rivalries among the security council’s permanent five. nonetheless, it continues to remain relevant, especially for ethnic and civil conflicts where the just war in the twenty-first century 38 great powers do not have conflicting interests. (the international criminal court, though flawed and weak, nonetheless continues to bring war criminals to judgment.24) there is also a long-term need to develop the normative elements of r2p in the interest of a more peaceful world order. there are a number of key points to make in this regard. (1) the rooting of sovereignty in security for human persons, by reason of their human dignity and basic rights, needs to be fortified as part of the international system. (2) the ethics of the use of force needs to focus more on the positive preventative measures that are the first leg of the r2p agenda. (3) theorists need to accent the connection between last resort and military enforcement measures, too often confused, in the popular mind and even among experts, with the whole of r2p. for the purpose of this essay, i will review newer elements of post-conflict justice: institutionbuilding and forgiveness.25 i will not address questions of just-settlement except to note that some issues—like no settlement of conquered territory, which has been tested by the decades-long israeli-palestinian conflict, and especially the rights of refugees from war, which has been a growing problem worldwide made especially grievous by the syrian civil war—are frontline issues that need the world’s attention.26 questions of nation-building continue to be on the international agenda. a donor meeting hosted by kuwait in february, 2018, for the re-building of iraq succeeded in raising only a small portion of the $88 billion goal.27 at the same time, observers are beginning to wonder whether funding can be found to re-build syria after its civil war and the international campaign against isis.28 while the global consensus on nation-building that arose as a consequence of the balkan wars of the 1990s is eroding under the weight of donor fatigue, imperial overstretch, and the corruption of recipient states, nation-building will remain a requisite of global governance for the foreseeable future. without it, the world will become a less stable, hostile place where many millions of people will lack protection and basic rights, planting the seeds of more wars and expanded repression. recommendation no. 3: just-war analysts should be looking at the places where post bellum justice is breaking down to identify pressing problems which need to be discussed in accounts of the just war. these problems include the rights of refugees and repetitive re-building in what have proved to be corrupt and factionridden states. 39 christiansen responsibility for post-conflict institution-building two historical developments led to the recent recognition of nation-building as a requirement of a just peace. the first was the break-up of the former yugoslavia, where both re-construction, that is, physical re-building of infrastructure, and institution-building were seen as necessary for establishing conditions of a stable peace after a series of ethno-religious wars in a region where ethnic divisions still run deep. the second was the 2003 u.s. invasion of iraq, a preventive “war of choice,” in anticipation of which secretary of state colin powell enunciated what he called the pottery barn rule: “you break it, you own it,” specifying u.s. responsibility as an invading power for rebuilding iraq following the cessation of armed combat. of course, the responsibility grew all the graver when it became known that the war was promoted on fabricated intelligence reports of which powell was ignorant, and so for lack of a just cause. as “the war in iraq” broadened to include new insurgencies, like al-qaeda and the islamic state, rivalries between the majority shia and the minority sunni over who controlled the post-saddam state, and ethnic groups like the kurds, assigning responsibility for rebuilding “when the smoke clears” became more difficult, with local actors coming to bear a greater share of the blame for the war. moreover, iraqi factions, including the government, came to bear a greater degree of responsibility because their in-fighting too had done considerable damage to the iraqi state. confusion over assigning responsibility after fifteen years of war is one reason to expect the international community to take the lead in re-building. more important, at a time when the state, like iraq, remains internally divided and regional rivalries keep the situation unstable, the affected population would seem to be better served by the international community as a whole than by either local competitors or by major international protagonists. this is a practical rule-of-thumb in zones of conflict. international responsibility also makes sense, however, on humanitarian grounds. over recent decades, the u.n., other international agencies, and non-governmental organizations have developed an extensive organizational capacity for addressing both humanitarian emergencies and post-conflict transitions. they have the expertise, the personnel, and organizations to assist victims of armed conflict. the principle of the r2p, moreover, makes clear that the primary justification of sovereignty is the protection of people. the international commission on intervention and state sovereignty put it this way: just war in the twenty-first century 40 state sovereignty implies responsibility, and the primary responsibility for the protection of its people lies with the state itself. where a population is suffering serious harm, a result of internal war, insurgency, repression or state failure, and the state in question is unwilling or unable to halt or avert it, the principle of nonintervention yields to the international responsibility to protect.29 the principle affirms, thomas weiss writes, both that “domestic authorities are best placed to take steps to guarantee fundamental rights” and that, in the event of state failure or malfeasance, “a continuum of responsibility” is required for the sake of the people.30 anticipating r2p by decades, beginning with john xxiii’s 1963 pacem in terris, catholic social teaching has affirmed that “the establishment, safeguarding and defense of human rights” is the end of “public authority,” i.e., government, at all levels.31 pope benedict xvi, in his 2008 address to the general assembly, offered this rationale: recognition of the unity of the human family, and attention to the innate dignity of every man and woman, today find renewed emphasis in the principle of the responsibility to protect. this has only recently been defined, but it was already present implicitly at the origins of the united nations, and is now increasingly characteristic of its activity.32 “the principle of ‘responsibility to protect,’” pope benedict added, “was considered by the ancient jus gentium as the foundation of every action taken by those in government with regard to the governed.”33 the humanitarian justification of international responsibility is that the goal of all government is to uphold the rights and dignity of persons. while the state is the ordinary locus of this responsibility, in the event of state failure, responsibility falls to the international community as a whole, whether working through the united nations or other multinational groups, like ecowas. recommendation no. 4: just-war analysts should give greater attention to the justification and elaboration of international responsibility for post bellum justice, including institutional nation-building. 41 christiansen the responsibility of perpetrators and complicit actors the pottery barn rule holds aggressors or initiating powers responsible for re-building after conflict. the u.s. responsibility for re-building in iraq was essential after the 2003 invasion. while later on its full responsibility may have been somewhat attenuated by the other destructive actors (iraqi factions, domestic and international jihadists, the corrupt and ethnocentric iraqi governments), the u.s. still retains some responsibility for re-building when there is a reasonable prospect of success once corruption and factionalism have been curbed. ascertaining the degree of responsibility for an outside party after domestic corruption and factionalism have over time undermined earlier reconstruction efforts is a serious question in the middle east both now and into the foreseeable future. the international order is in disarray, oscillating between the morality of states based on the old westphalian model and a new cosmopolitan morality of human rights and r2p.34 there can be little prospect of a solution of duties to rebuild without a move away from resurgent nationalism. reform of the u.n. security council is also critical, as the veto power of the p–5 has proven an obstacle to the implementation of r2p. even then, as the case of iraq demonstrates, corruption and factionalism are very difficult to overcome. in the meantime, the international community may have to satisfy itself with a mix of outcomes on the spectrum between elementary re-building of infrastructure (in the interest of basic rights of the people) without institution-building, on the one hand, and renewed states with fully developed institutions, on the other. economic sanctions are likely to be counterproductive in hard-to-rebuild states, harming the populace and presenting new opportunities for corruption. until satisfactory reform has been attained, backward, partially re-built states might be better spurred to reform by exclusion from or limited participation in international bodies and programs rather than economic sanctions. returning to the issue of responsibility of various actors, insofar as the u.s. has pursued its own interest in the suppression of isis, it bears direct responsibility for rebuilding towns like raqqa which it leveled to the ground.35 an argument might be made that u.s. duties to populations who were victims of its allies might not be as strong, but because they were allies in the u.s. war on isis, the u.s., arguably, still bears primary responsibility for those populations’ reconstructions. as an ally of the iraqi coalition that re-took mosul from the islamic state, the u.s. would also bear major responsibility for the re-building of that city. just war in the twenty-first century 42 for its part, russia bears greater responsibility for reconstruction in syria due to its backing of the inhumane military policies of the assad regime and its own direct attacks on syrian civilians. as a practical matter, however, reconstruction in syria may be slow and scarce. russia does not have the resources to meet the scale of the work to be done. the usual donor nations, moreover, may be especially reluctant to contribute to reconstruction in syria as long as the assad regime, which so savagely attacked its own people from the beginning to the end of the conflict, remains in place. in the absence of reconstruction, the international community should look seriously at third-country resettlement of syrian refugees. sadly, just as syria was a failure of the enforcement pillar of r2p because it was never applied, it will likely be an example of the failure of the r2p reconstruction pillar, too. recommendation no. 5. against the background of today’s complex wars, the responsibility of aggressors and their allies, especially superpowers, demands careful study, analysis, and publicity as an essential element in political accountability. recommendation no. 6. recent history urges studies of the impact of corruption and factionalism in recovering states on (repeat) obligations to re-build. the place of forgiveness an overlooked factor in bringing justice after conflicts, especially inter-ethnic and interreligious ones, is the need for forgiveness between the former adversaries. following 9/11, pope john paul ii brought the hard-won wisdom of the balkan wars of independence to the u.s. pursuit of alqaeda and the taliban in afghanistan. the pope acknowledged a state’s right to defend its people against global terrorism. he went on, however, to argue that there is “no justice without forgiveness.”36 john paul had exercised a personal ministry of apology and forgiveness, writing numerous letters of apology to groups the church had offended over the centuries, from the victims of the crusades, to protestant reformers, jews, rwandans, and black victim of racism.37 john paul’s ministry of apology and forgiveness culminated in a service of pardon at saint peter’s on the first sunday of lent, 2000, in which the pope and his curial cardinals asked god’s pardon for the sins of churchmen over the past millennium. so, he was personally engaged when he wrote, 43 christiansen “my ministry at the service of the gospel obliges me, and at the same time gives me the strength, to insist upon the necessity of forgiveness. i do so again today in the hope of stirring serious and mature thinking on this theme, with a view to a far-reaching resurgence of the human spirit in individual hearts and in relations between the peoples of the world.”38 john paul had tutored poland’s solidarity labor movement in nonviolence, twice negotiated with soviet presidents to prevent military repression of dissident movements in eastern europe, and after the fall of communism in eastern europe declared that the great lesson of the east european revolutions of 1989 was the resilient strength of nonviolent resisters.39 it was not surprising, then, that he would see forgiveness as a necessary remedy in “situations of conflict which endlessly feed deep and divisive hatreds and a seemingly unstoppable sequence of personal and collective tragedies.”40 that observation pertained to the israeli-palestinian conflict in the wake of the bloody suppression of the second intifada (2000–2005),41 but he could have equally been writing of the balkans or central africa where “deep and divisive hatreds” had led to cycles of revenge marking the previous ten years.42 john paul reasoned that, where the pursuit of justice would otherwise fall into a contest of conflicting rights claims, “a will to let justice and reconciliation prevail” allows the parties “to transcend themselves.”43 another churchman made a similar argument. archbishop desmond tutu was the chairman of south africa’s truth and reconciliation commission. his book no future without forgiveness is an account of the commission’s work and an “apology” for forgiveness as a practice of peacemaking.44 the commission attempted, and to a considerable degree achieved, national reconciliation in south africa after forty-five years of formalized apartheid and thirty-odd years of protest, repression, and guerrilla war.45 the commission paved the way for a post-racialist society, and over the next two decades became a model for truth and reconciliation commissions elsewhere. it represented a break with the retributive justice model set fifty years before by the nuremberg trials in the direction, instead, of restorative justice.46 some forty truth commissions were conducted beginning in 1974; of these, some thirty have taken place from 1990 to the present.47 before the south africa and then post-conflict peacebuilding in the balkans, there had been only a few instances of forgiveness in international politics. forgiveness was regarded as a private and essentially religious act, with no public implications. donald w. shriver, jr., attributed this to the thousand-year “sacramental captivity of forgiveness” in the western world where forgiveness just war in the twenty-first century 44 was a private act confined to the confessional.48 it was compounded by enlightenment individualism, which influenced both european and american societies.49 the united states has had particular difficulty with forgiveness and public apology, as shriver shows with analyses of the ups and downs of formal reconciliation efforts between the u.s. and germany, the u.s. and japan, and the legacy of domestic slavery.50 one group that has been skeptical of the forgiveness and reconciliation approach to postconflict post-building is jurists, especially those committed to transitional justice as central to post bellum peacemaking.51 these more legalistic jurists regard forgiveness and reconciliation, also called the restorative justice approach, as a heresy to their legalist conviction on the need for juridical accountability and retributive justice.52 by contrast, restorative justice approaches including forgiveness have greater appeal to those in religious communities.53 but the field is complex, populated by religious legalists and legal restorers and legal as well as religious capacitybuilders.54 “religious traditions,” as daniel philpott explains, “are generators, hosts, and sources of the distinct concepts of justice, mercy, and peace that reside in reconciliation.”55 they are particularly suited to addressing the primary and secondary wounds borne by the victims of war that formal, legal, and material remedies fail to address.56 just-war analysts, depending on their philosophical and/or theological assumptions, may find themselves similarly divided (and co-mingled) in their stands on the inclusion of forgiveness in treatment of the jus post bellum. but there is already a partially achieved consensus on the inclusion of forgiveness and reconciliation as elements of the jus post bellum, so hope for further a broader consensus is well-founded. to date, progress has been made in understanding both the multiple overlaps between religious and secular post-conflict peace-builders57 and the possibility of rendering religious insights on forgiveness in secular terms.58 philpott makes the case for forgiveness in public life, arguing from the need for certain virtues and attitudes, like respect, reciprocity, and trust, to sustain liberal democracies to the further need for virtues and attitudes, like forgiveness, repentance, and harmony, to heal wounded societies and thereby sustain a stable peace.59 as he writes: if it is legitimate for governments to cultivate the virtues, attitudes, judgments, and outlooks that sustain [liberal] political orders founded on human rights and if the transformations in judgment that […] practices [of reconciliation] bring about help 45 christiansen to cultivate these virtues, then these transformations [in judgment regarding forgiveness] are legitimately pursued.60 that is, if virtues, attitudes, and moral practices necessary for forgiveness support our liberal institutions, then those same virtues, attitudes, and moral practices may be justifiably cultivated in establishing the new relations between former enemies necessary for an enduring political peace. “if virtues are needed to sustain liberalism,” philpott contends, “then they will be all the more necessary to restore or construct liberalism in settings where citizens are divided, embittered, or disheartened on a large scale.”61 accordingly, while forgiveness and reconciliation may have their origins and natural home in religious communities, the overlap in convictions and methods of religious and secular peacebuilders and the adoption of post-conflict trcs by dozens of countries help build a case that forgiveness and reconciliation ought to be included among the criteria of the jus post bellum. recommendation no. 7: in the future, especially as the complex conflicts in afghanistan, iraq, syria, and elsewhere wind down, as the need for just-war analysts to elaborate and apply standards of post-conflict peacebuilding to assessment of reconstruction policies grows more apparent, forgiveness and reconciliation ought to be among the standards they employ. just war in a society of states i have referred already to the cosmopolitan morality of human rights, as elaborated by charles beitz, as a model of international affairs that is suited to a world in which the protection of the rights of persons is the function of sovereignty. cosmopolitan theories emphasize the primacy of persons. according to these theories, the organization of governance is ordered to the service of persons. states are secondary to persons. a related theory of international morality is that of a society of states.62 the “society of states” model retains some features of the westphalian realism of the state system.63 it is the model expressed in r2p: states have the primary responsibility to uphold the rights of their persons, but in the case of failure to protect sovereignty devolves to the international community to supply what the state does not.64 just war in the twenty-first century 46 according to the standard objection to cosmopolitan schemes of governance, given the lack of a world authority (“policeman”) to enforce human rights globally, states must preserve the right to use armed force to do so.65 by contrast, the society of states model preserves the sovereignty of the nation-state conditionally and affirms the right of the international community to assume responsibility to protect a state’s nationals when the state has failed to do so or is itself violating their rights on a wide scale. since, under the u.n. charter, states are permitted to use force for defensive purposes only, the authority to use armed force to protect the rights of foreign nations under r2p resides with the u.n. security council. in just-war terms the security council is the legitimate authority, “the world’s policeman” as it were, with the warrant to authorize the use of force within the territory of a sovereign state for the purposes of preventing genocide and crimes against humanity and defending large populations under threat. new issues of legitimate authority what about situations where the security council is divided or especially when decisive council action is blocked by a p–5 veto? prior to r2p, regional bodies, especially nato, intervened first in bosnia and later in kosovo.66 while the u.n. agencies and even peacekeepers were engaged in these disputes, at critical times military enforcement to protect civilians fell primarily to the neighboring regional defense organization.67 those interventions followed pope john paul ii’s view of humanitarian intervention. according to him, when serious efforts at prevention have failed and “populations are succumbing to the attacks of an unjust aggressor, states no longer have a ‘right to indifference.’ it seems clear that their duty is to disarm this aggressor, if all other means have proved ineffective.”68 as a matter of practical politics, the work of intervention has fallen to coalitions of neighboring states, working through their collective security arms, such as nato or ecowas. (the australian-led intervention in timor-leste [1999–2000] took place under u.n. auspices with u.s. assistance.) the question remains: when the u.n. is blocked from acting, under what authority do states, whether collectively or individually, have the right to intervene in other states for humanitarian purposes? the general logic was already set out by thomas aquinas in his treatment of sedition (summa theologiae 2a iiae, q. 42, a. 2): “those […] who defend the common good and withstand the seditious party are not themselves seditious.” that is, those who are defending the good of citizens 47 christiansen against a failed or repressive state become the legitimate authority insofar as they hold to that purpose. for aquinas, the podestà who ruled for his own profit, or that of his family or clique, was not a legitimate leader, and neither was the maiores, a ruling elite, when it ruled in its own interest rather than for the common good. in such cases, legitimacy devolved to others. by virtue of their crimes, de facto governments have ceded legitimacy to the people, thomas asserted, “the assembly of those who are united together in fellowship recognized by law and [in defense of] the common good.” the same pattern for the devolution of authority may be applied to the modern society of states. along the same line, the international commission on intervention and state sovereignty (iciss) warned: [i]f [the security council] fails to discharge its responsibility to protect in conscience-shocking situations crying out for action, concerned states may not rule out other means to meet the gravity and urgency of the situation […].69 the elements of an understanding of devolved sovereignty also can be found in modern catholic social teaching’s conception of political authority.70 as pope john xxiii wrote, “we must remember that of its very nature, civil authority exists, not to confine its peoples within the boundaries of their nations, but rather to protect, above all else, the good of the entire human family” (italics added).71 john’s teaching contains the fundamental premise, found in aquinas, that all political authority exists for the sake of upholding the common good, understood today as the full enjoyment of human rights. the added entailment, however, is that, when domestic authorities fail, political authorities elsewhere have the responsibility to uphold the rights of their people which have been abused or denied. that, i believe, is how “responsibility of the common good of the entire human family” must be read. a similar notion underlies the international law principle of international jurisdiction. thus, john paul ii, writing before r2p when the notion of humanitarian intervention was still highly controversial, refers not to the united nations, but to “states and the international community” as having a duty to intervene on humanitarian grounds.72 the preference, as the u.s. bishops affirm, is for multilateral interventions “because they enhance the legitimacy of these actions and can protect against abuse.”73 still, when others are unwilling and a state has the capacity to intervene “to disarm the aggressor,” provided the other canons of just-war are satisfied, just war in the twenty-first century 48 that state possesses moral justification to intervene. (the other canons would include especially duties of right intention, particularly not to acquire territory and not to colonize the region, and probability of success, lest those already injured be still more afflicted.) while there is much reason to be suspicious of intervention by a single state, as a very last resort it may be considered. experience has shown it can be quickly followed by international action to secure the peace. while the u.n. charter and r2p provide rationales for u.n. intervention (or authorization of intervention) for humanitarian purposes, we have only sketches of ethical justifications for interventions by states (or a state) acting independent of u.n. authorization or in the wake of the failure of other u.n. efforts at humanitarian rescue.74 therefore, recommendation no. 8: since we may foresee numerous situations in which the absence of security council consensus will prevent intervention in the form of military enforcement of an r2p situation, just-war analysts should articulate the nature and limits of legitimate authority for such interventions, whether by a combination of states, working for the common good, or at the extreme by a single state doing so. the just-war canons as “precautionary principles” some just-war analysts may regard r2p suspiciously because it challenges the state-centric westphalian world-model on which they have been working.75 contrariwise, some proponents of r2p are suspicious of just-war language, fearing it taints the neutral legal language of r2p with the religious roots of the just war tradition in western christianity or with the self-serving pronouncements with which hypocritical world powers have attempted to justify their own country’s acts of aggressive war.76 as i have already argued, r2p is closely linked to the criterion of last resort. i have also indicated how r2p is related to the criterion of success and more broadly to the jus post bellum. here i would like just briefly to comment on how the just war tradition serves the practice of r2p. once a just cause has been ascertained77 and the security council or other authority is weighing intervention, decision-makers are expected to weigh these other factors ad interventionem, with a view to deciding whether or not to intervene. 49 christiansen the “precautionary principles” identified by the iciss are a four-point version of the just-war canons: (1) right intention, (2) last resort, (3) proportionality of means, and (4) prospects of success.78 so, in exercising its authority in humanitarian rescue, the security council (or other authorities) need to apply these norms before and during the application of armed force. the canons, in other words, govern enforcement missions. they bar or open the way to intervention. while humanitarians can be “bullish” about armed humanitarian intervention, wanting to intervene promptly to prevent more death, political leaders, the military, and international civil servants tend to be more cautious about the resort to force, thereby tolerating increased mortality in the interest of limiting the number and expense of interventions as well as attaining consensus around the use of force.79 thus, the precautionary principles put restraints on the option to intervene. r2p also sets a higher standard for just cause: (1) large-scale loss of life, actual or foreseen, or (2) largescale ethnic cleansing, actual or foreseen—higher standards than most activists would want, providing another brake on the humanitarian impulse to take up arms.80 in brief, the just-war canons are already integrated in the r2p system. indeed, if just war is intended for the protection of the innocent, then r2p is an authentic expression of the just-war ethic. given the increase in failed and failing states, the rise of new autocracies, and the problems posed by enormous refugee flows, we can expect the medium and long-term future to be replete with humanitarian crises, and some, at least, are likely to require military enforcement for their resolution. r2p will be part of a multifaceted terrain of warfare in the twenty-first century, alongside stateto-state wars, civil wars, conflicts with terrorist non-state actors, hybrid wars, and cyberwarfare. all those types of conflict will require ethical analysis. but r2p is especially apt for that kind of study because it addresses a fundamental role of all government, the protection of human persons, which is likewise the goal of just war. recommendation no. 9: the practice of r2p needs the attention of just-war analysts and ethicists to see not only where the existing norms are violated or strained, but also where, by the light of experience, the norms need to be refined and re-framed. r2p, in other words, needs its own casuistry. just war in the twenty-first century 50 frontiers nonviolence, post-conflict justice, and r2p are frontier areas impinging on just-war analysis. developments in each of these areas demand further study by just-war thinkers and integration not only into just war theory, but especially into its practice as a social system. in the world of the web, thinkers and actors from many areas will be engaging with one another in the fields of conflict. knowledge and appreciation of the contributions of other disciplines and schools of thought should be the beginning of collaboration in promoting a peaceful world. notes 1. see, e.g., rob knake, “russian hackers were only getting started in the 2016 election,” fortune, january 15, 2017, http://fortune.com/2017/01/15/russian-hackers-2016-electioncyber-war/ and anders corr, “russia’s hack of elections in france requires counterpunch,” forbes, april 27, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/anderscorr/2017/04/27/russias-hack-of-elections-in-francerequires-counterpunch/#5106dd9c2311. many experts would regard election hacking as cyber warfare. see “most infosec pros believe election hacks are acts of cyber war,” help net security, september 11, 2017, https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2017/09/11/election-hacks-cyber-war/. 2. already russian hacking of the estonian and ukrainian power grids has demonstrated that the destructive capacity of cyber-technology is at hand. see ian traynor, “russia accused of unleashing cyberwar to disable estonia,” the guardian, may 16, 2007, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/may/17/topstories3.russia and margaret coker and paul sonne, “ukraine: cyberwar’s hottest front,” the wall street journal, november 9, 2015, https://www.wsj.com/articles/ukraine-cyberwars-hottest-front-1447121671. serious russian attacks on estonia took place as early as 2007. 3. on the negative effects of long-term sanctions, see marc bossuyt, “the adverse consequences of economic sanctions,” global policy forum, june 21, 2000, https://www.globalpolicy.org/global-taxes/42501-the-adverse-consequences-of51 christiansen economic-sanctions.html, and especially david a. cortright and george a. lopez, the sanctions decade: assessing un strategies in the 1990s (boulder, co: lynne rienner publishers, 2000). 4. see my “just peacemaking and hybrid wars,” ethics and armed forces 2015/2 (2015), http://www.ethikundmilitaer.de/en/full-issues/20152-hybrid-warfare/just-peacemakingand-hybrid-wars/. 5. on this issue, see my “the nonviolence-just war nexus” in a co-authored forum “pope francis’s politics of peace and the just war tradition,” horizons, forthcoming summer 2018. 6. see sam roberts, “gene sharp, guru of nonviolent resistance, dies at 90,” new york times, february 2, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/obituaries/gene-sharpglobal-guru-of-nonviolent-resistance-dies-at-90.html. 7. see priscilla hayner, unspeakable truths: confronting state terror and atrocity (new york: routledge, 2001); and william bole, et al., eds., forgiveness in international politics: an alternative road to peace (washington, dc: usccb, 2004). 8. the key document shifting catholic teaching to the integration of nonviolence into its treatment of peace and war was pope saint john paul ii’s centesimus annus (1991), §23, §25, and §52. but the document consciously linking nonviolence and just war was the u.s. bishops’ the harvest of justice is sown in peace (1993). see discussion below. 9. see pope francis, 2017 world day of peace message, “nonviolence: a style of politics for peace,” §6, https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/peace/documents/ papa-francesco_20161208_messaggio-l-giornata-mondiale-pace-2017.html. 10. the holy see seems to avoid using the title “just war” in discussing normative regulation of armed conflict. the catechism of the catholic church (1994) mentions it only parenthetically at the very end of its treatment of war, §§2302–2317, in fine print at §2309. see http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p3s2c2a5.htm. the compendium of the social doctrine of the church (2005) makes no use of the term. just war in the twenty-first century 52 11. see glenn h. stassen, just peacemaking: transformative initiatives for justice and peace (louisville, ky: westminster/john knox, 1992), and stassen, ed., just peacemaking: the new paradigm for the ethics of peace and war (cleveland, oh: pilgrim press, 2008) in the latter version, the techniques of just peace are updated and explained in some detail by a variety of authors who adhere both to the just war and nonviolence traditions. 12. for the language of “threshold,” see united states conference of catholic bishops, the harvest of justice is sown in peace (washington, dc: usccb, 2001), 12; and consult yoder, when war is unjust: being honest in just-war thinking (maryknoll, ny: orbis, 1996), appendix v, v, a-c, pp. 154–155, on last resort. on conditions that undercut the honest use of last resort, see the same volume, 70–71. 13. yoder, when war is unjust, 78. 14. the harvest of justice is sown in peace, 13. 15. thomas weiss defines two intermediate forms of military participation in international humanitarian crises that may warrant ethical assessment: “compelling compliance and providing protection.” see his humanitarian intervention, 2nd ed. (cambridge: polity, 2012), 10–11. 16. on peacemaking institutions, see the excursus “just war as a social system” below. 17. the harvest of justice is sown in peace, 12 (italics added). 18. anne-marie slaughter, the chessboard and the web: strategies of connection in the age of the web (new haven, ct: yale university press, 2017) discusses the demands of policymaking in a polyarchical and polyvalent world where international relations involves multiple actors, acting at different levels for different values. 19. the crushing burden of reparations imposed on germany is often cited as a root cause of nazi re-armament and world war ii. “i believe,” said john maynard keynes, “that the campaign for securing out of germany the general costs of the war was one of the most serious acts of political unwisdom for which our statesmen have ever been responsible.” 53 christiansen see keynes, on the economic consequences of the peace (new york: harcourt, 1920), http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/keynes-the-economic-consequences-of-the-peace. 20. of special note is noah feldman’s what we owe iraq: war and the ethics of nationbuilding (princeton: princeton university press, 2004). 21. on the intellectual and diplomatic history of r2p and its development, see weiss, humanitarian intervention, passim. 22. for critiques of r2p from non-metropolitan (former colonial) states, see rama mani and thomas g. weiss, responsibility to protect: cultural perspectives from the global south (new york: routledge, 2011). cuny’s global center for r2p has produced a series of studies on the application of r2p, including in africa. see http://www.globalr2p.org/. these include studies of regional interventions in africa, presumptively immune from the charge of neo-colonialism. 23. see weiss, humanitarian intervention, 139–142, 170–172; and peter j. hoffman and thomas g. weiss, humanitarianism, war, and politics: solferino to syria and beyond (lanham, md: rowman and littlefield, 2018), 105–112 and 258–274. assessments of r2p ought to include review of the u.n. secretary general’s annual report on r2p. see the latest report at http://www.globalr2p.org/media/files/2017-summary-of-the-secretarygenerals-report-on-r2p.pdf. 24. see, for example, the story for a private suit brought to the icc against filipino president rodrigo duterte for murder and crimes against humanity for his ordering extrajudicial killings of thousands of alleged drug traffickers: isabelle gerretsen, “lawyer calls on hague to charge rodrigo duterte with mass murder,” newsweek, april 24, 2017, http://www.newsweek.com/rodrigo-duterte-mass-murder-charge-lawyer-hague-criminalcourt-588497. for a list of icc indictments, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/list_of_people_indicted_in_the_international_criminal_co urt. 25. for reasons of space, i will not address questions of transitional justice, another topic of post-conflict justice. just war in the twenty-first century 54 26. on the question of refugees, see david hollenbach, s.j., ed., driven from home: protecting the rights of forced migrants (washington, dc: georgetown university press, 2010). a united nations high-level meeting scheduled for december, 2018, is due to consider a global compact for refugees and migrants. despite the enormous size of the problem, however, states seem to have little willingness at the present time to address these issues seriously. the process is also threatened by the likely withdrawal of the u.s. as the donor state under the trump administration’s transaction aid policy of “america first.” 27. see jon gambrell, “kuwait says $30 billion pledged to rebuild iraq,” u.s. news and world report, february 14, 2018, https://www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2018-0214/kuwait-to-give-2-billion-in-loans-investments-for-iraq. 28. see david ignatius, “the rubble in raqqa reminds us of our military might. but what is next?” washington post, october 19, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-rubble-in-raqqa-reminds-us-of-ourmilitary-might-but-whats-next/2017/10/19/98fac87a-b503-11e7-a908a3470754bbb9_story.html?utm_term=.d26b1137e655. 29. cited in weiss, humanitarian intervention, 109. 30. ibid., 110. 31. see john xxiii, pacem in terris, in david j. o’brien and thomas a. shannon, eds., catholic social thought: the documentary heritage, expanded edition (maryknoll, ny: orbis, 2010), §§53–65 and §§136–141. 32. benedict xvi, address to the general assembly, april 18, 2008, http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2008/april/documents/hf_benxvi_spe_20080418_un-visit.html 33. ibid. 34. on the cosmopolitan morality of human rights, see charles r. beitz, political theory and international relations (princeton: princeton university press, 1978); see weiss, humanitarian intervention, 26–7, 105–7 on the morality of “a society of states.” 55 christiansen 35. see note 25 above. 36. see pope john paul ii’s 2002 world day of peace message, “no peace without justice, no justice without forgiveness,” january 1, 2002, http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paulii/en/messages/peace/documents/hf_jp-ii_mes_20011211_xxxv-world-day-forpeace.html. 37. see luigi accatoli, when a pope asks forgiveness: the mea culpas of john paul ii (new york: alba house, 1998). 38. pope john paul ii, 2002 world day of peace message, §10. 39. see john paul’s interpretation in centesimus annus (washington d.c.: usccb, 1991), §23, §25, and §52. 40. pope john paul ii, 2002 world day of peace message, §11. 41. ibid. 42. as i write, the president of the republka srpska is threatening to secede from bosnia to rejoin serbia, and serbia is threatening to take the northern area of kosovo inhabited by ethnic serbs from kosovo which is celebrating its tenth anniversary. see barbara surk, “milorad dodik wants to carve up bosnia. peacefully, if possible,” the new york times, february 16, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/world/europe/dodik-republikasrpska-bosnia.html and andrew testa, “kosova finds little to celebrate after 10 years of independence,” the new york times, february 15, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/15/world/europe/kosovo-independenceanniversary.html. 43. pope john paul ii, 2002 world day of peace message, §11 and §13. 44. desmond tutu, no future without forgiveness (new york: doubleday, 2000). 45. for a succinct account of south africa’s trc, see hayner, unspeakable truths, 40–45. 46. for the place of forgiveness in restorative justice, see jennifer j. llewellyn and daniel philpott, eds., restorative justice, reconciliation and peacebuilding (oxford: oxford just war in the twenty-first century 56 university press, 2014), especially chapter 2, llewellyn and philpott, “restorative justice and reconciliation: twin frameworks for peacebuilding”; and chapter 10, jason spring, “doing justice differently: from revolution to transformation in restorative justice and political reconciliation.” 47. hayner lists five “illustrative truth commissions” (argentina, chile, el salvador, south africa, and guatemala) and sixteen “less prominent commissions.” see unspeakable truths, 32–71. 48. see donald w. shriver, jr., an ethic for enemies: forgiveness in politics (oxford: oxford university press, 1995), 49–52. for an expanded presentation of shriver’s definition of forgiveness, see his chapter 3, “understanding forgiveness in politics,” in forgiveness in international politics, eds. bole, et al., 41–60. 49. shriver, an ethic for enemies, 8–62. 50. ibid., 119–217. shriver also cites several other cases where the u.s. might engage in international apologies: “native americans, mexicans, cuban, filipino, chinese, vietnamese, central american, and iraqi peoples” (72). 51. llewellyn and philpott list the skeptics as “united nations officials, western diplomats, the human rights community and international lawyers.” see restorative justice, 16. 52. see jonathan van antwerpen, “reconciliation as heterodoxy,” 77–117, in restorative justice. in “charting the path of justice in peacebuilding,” aaron p. boesenecker and leslie vinjamuri provide contrasting profiles of “legalists, restorers, and capacitybuilders”; see ibid., 76. (“restorers” are the diplomats and civil society leaders whose primary concerns are the cessation of hostilities and the resumption of normal life and accordingly regard transitional justice as a strain on fragile peace agreements.) the common perspective of the authors whose work is collected in restorative justice is that there is significant overlap between members of the different schools as well as between secular and religious peacebuilders. 53. on the tensions between secular legalists and religious advocates of truth and reconciliation, see restorative justice, 92, 107–108, 246. philpott describes the religious 57 christiansen resources for forgiveness in judaism, christianity, and islam in just and unjust peace: an ethic of political reconciliation (oxford: oxford university press, 2012), 119–167. on the roles of religious actors on behalf of forgiveness in international politics, see forgiveness in international politics, 89–170. 54. see boesenecker and injamuri, “charting the path of justice in peacebuilding,” passim, in restorative justice. 55. philpott, just and unjust peace, 288. philpott’s book is one that every just-war analyst ought to wrestle with in weighing whether and how to include and apply forgiveness as a criterion of the jus ad bellum. it may be the single best book in the field to date. of special pertinence is chapter 5, “is reconciliation fit for politics?” 74–93. 56. see just and unjust peace, 32–47. primary wounds include: violations of the victim’s human rights, harms to the victim’s person, victim’s ignorance of the source and circumstances of political injustice, lack of acknowledgment of the suffering of victims, the standing victory of the wrongdoer’s political injustice, and harm to the person of the wrong-doers. philpott’s articulation of the wounds healed by forgiveness may be one of the single most important developments in explaining the need of forgiveness in peace processes. 57. for an overview of these overlaps (and divisions), see the instructive chart “a typology of actors” in boesenecker and injamuri, “charting the path of justice in peacebuilding,” in restorative justice, 45–48. 58. also, see the discussion of skepticism and secularism in forgiveness in international politics, 120–128. 59. philpott, just and unjust peace, 85. 60. ibid, 87. 61. ibid, 85. 62. see references to weiss in note 29 above. just war in the twenty-first century 58 63. for the reality of state sovereignty prior to r2p under the westphalian system, see weiss, humanitarian intervention, 15–24. on the conditional sovereignty model lying beneath r2p, see 24–27. finally, on the changed geopolitical conditions that opened the way to r2p, see 27–33. 64. for the various arguments for conditioning sovereignty on protection of human rights, see ibid., 193. 65. see michael walzer, just and unjust wars: a moral argument with historical illustrations (new york: basic books, 1977), 98, on the domestic (policing) analogy. see also vatican council ii, gaudium et spes, december 7, 1965, §79, http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vatii_const_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html, which held the same assumption: “as long as the danger of war remains and there is no competent and sufficiently powerful authority at the international level, governments cannot be denied the right to legitimate defense […]” (italics added). pope francis, in response to the suggestion of some pax christi members that he should condemn just war, wrote, “the council recognized that, since war has not been eradicated from the human condition, ‘governments cannot be denied the right to legitimate defense once every means of peaceful settlement has been exhausted.’” see text of the papal message at http://www.paxchristi.net/news/pope-francis-sends-messagenonviolence-and-just-peace-conference/5854#sthash.t3tghglz.dpbs. 66. in the wake of the failure of several efforts to intervene to stop the syrian civil war, movements arose in the u.n. calling for the p–5 to refrain from using vetoes in the event of atrocity crimes. see “u.n. security council code of conduct,” global centre for the responsibility to protect, http://www.globalr2p.org/our_work/un_security_council_code_of_conduct. 67. for the ebb and flow of u.n. involvement in these conflicts, see hoffman and weiss, humanitarianism, war, and politics, 79–97. 68. see pope john paul ii, 1993 address to the diplomatic corps, january 16, 1993, http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/speeches/1993/january/documents/hf_jp59 christiansen ii_spe_19930116_corpo-diplomatico.html, esp. §13; and the usccb, the harvest of justice is sown in peace, 38–41. 69. see weiss, humanitarian intervention, 118. 70. see pope john xxiii, pacem in terris, §61 and §§83–85. 71. ibid, §98. 72. john paul ii, “address to the international conference on nutrition,” origins 22/28 (december 24, 1992): 475, cited in the harvest of justice is sown in peace, 38–39. 73. the harvest of justice is sown in peace, 40. 74. on locating “legitimate authority” in the security council and the intellectual debate over who has authority precipitated by the failure to act in rwanda and kosovo, see weiss, humanitarian intervention, 115–19. 75. this is another instance of the legal-religious tension noted above. 76. there are many examples, but one will suffice: the 1989 u.s. invasion of panama pompously titled “operation just cause.” this was undertaken to arrest panamanian president manuel noriega for drug-trafficking. 77. on just cause, see weiss, humanitarian intervention, 113–114. 78. the term “precautionary principles” is derived from international humanitarian law, where there has been, as noted, a conscious effort to appear to have a legal paradigm distinct from historical (religious, philosophical, and military) sources. see weiss, humanitarian intervention, 115–16. 79. see ibid., 113. 80. ibid., 114. microsoft word shuman spr20 [expositions 14.1 (2020) 64–76] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 the story is the point: alasdair macintyre, reading literature, and teaching ethics joel james shuman king’s college (pa) “a central thesis then begins to emerge: man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal.” (alasdair macintyre, after virtue)1 “moral value, as should be obvious, is not separable from other values. an adequate morality would be ecologically sound; it would be esthetically pleasing. but the point i want to stress here is that it would be practical. morality is long term practicality […]. morality is neither ethereal nor arbitrary; it is the definition of what is humanly possible, and it is the definition of the penalties for violating human possibility. a person who violates human limits is punished or he prepares a punishment for his successors, not necessarily because of any divine or human law, but because he has transgressed the order of things.” (wendell berry, “discipline and hope”)2 last fall 2018, when i was a scholar in residence at duke university divinity school, i taught a course in theological ethics called “illness, suffering, and the witness of the church.” on the first day of class i projected pieter brueghel’s “landscape with the fall of icarus” onto the screen in the front of the room and asked the students to say what they saw, and what the painting might have to do with illness and suffering. after several minutes of fruitful conversation, we read together w. h. auden’s poem, “musée des beaux arts,”3 which narrates brueghel’s painting and sets that narration within a broader reflection on the ways we attend or fail to attend to the suffering of others. more than thirty minutes later, i reluctantly cut the conversation short and moved on. although that conversation (and indeed, that entire course) was unusually fruitful, my approach to teaching it was far from novel. for example, in the undergraduate bioethics course i teach regularly, we discuss biotechnology and medicalization by reading gerald mckenny’s essay “bioethics, the body, and the legacy of bacon”4 and martin heidegger’s “the question 65 shuman concerning technology,”5 but we also attend to nathaniel hawthorne’s short story “the birthmark.”6 when we address death and dying and the moral questions where medicine intersects with the end of life, we study the origins and development of distinctions between proportionate and disproportionate care and those between killing and allowing to die, while also reading wendell berry’s short story “fidelity,”7 leo tolstoy’s “the death of ivan ilyich,”8 and poetry by jane kenyon, vassar miller, and others.9 these are only two examples of courses where i employ literature and visual art to teach ethics, something i’ve done in most of my courses since i started teaching more than twenty years ago. i like to think i learned to do this from alasdair macintyre, both by reading his work, which is replete with references to and examples from literature, and by following the example of those teachers of mine who were most influenced by macintyre.10 in what follows, i want to begin to develop an account of why i think macintyre is correct in claiming that “morally serious” academic courses in ethics ought to include a close reading of certain kinds of literature.11 my account will be based on my regard for three important strands of macintyre’s work: first, his insistence that every ethic presupposes a sociology, which is to say, a particular set of normative social arrangements; second, the emphasis in his work on the significance of exemplars, practices, and apprenticeship in moral formation; and third, his longstanding attention to the significance of narrative in human life. i will conclude, finally, by attending to a particular example of the kind of literature i think macintyre has in mind, suggesting the kind of difference it might make for teaching ethics. 1. every ethic presumes a sociology in a lecture delivered toward the end of her life, the writer flannery o’connor remarked to her audience that “[s]omewhere is better than anywhere.”12 o’connor, whose novels and stories are characterized by meticulous attention to the particularities of the places and cultures—the “somewheres”—where they take place, understood not only that life necessarily unfolds and is lived out in particular places among particular others, but that personal identity is necessarily placed: “the things we see, hear, smell and touch affect us,” she claimed, “long before we believe anything at all.”13 to presume or pretend otherwise is to become lost in abstraction. just so, her observation about the members of a literary gathering she had been invited to speak to, namely, that “[m]ost of them live in a world god never made,” was not a compliment.14 alasdair macintyre, reading literature, and teaching ethics 66 although she may have found its academic pitch off-putting, o’connor would likely have understood macintyre’s claim in after virtue that [a] moral philosophy […] characteristically presupposes a sociology. for every moral philosophy offers explicitly or implicitly at least a partial conceptual analysis of the relationship of an agent to his or her reasons, motives, intentions, and actions, and in so doing generally presupposes some claim that these concepts are embodied or at least can be in the real social world.15 macintyre’s insistence upon the social embeddedness of moral agents and the necessity of attending to the particularities of that embeddedness is one of the bases of his ongoing disagreement with modern moral and political philosophy, especially in its academic guise. for not only has modern moral philosophy become, like most other academic disciplines, highly specialized and esoteric, it has also adopted an account of moral agency that is largely divorced from the realities of everyday life and “the everyday questions of plain persons.”16 in ethics and the conflicts of modernity, macintyre labels the subject matter of modern moral philosophy “morality,” which he characterizes as “a set of impersonal rules, entitled to the assent of any rational agent whatsoever.”17 morality is the ethic of anywhere, held by its proponents to be distinct from and superior to every particular contextual morality. its precepts are purportedly perspicuous to rational agents, irrespective of those agents’ dispositions or social contexts.18 further, the precepts of morality are part of a tightly circumscribed discourse, divorced from the spheres of faith, politics, art, economics, and law.19 macintyre’s argument with morality is not simply that it is founded on a series of fictions, but that its claim to be universally binding on every rational agent obscures that it is in fact the morality of late capitalist modernity.20 more specifically, it is the morality or ethics of “the state-and-the-market,” which functions largely to underwrite existing distributions of power and wealth within the modern capitalist nation-state.21 real moral agents are, of course, not at all like those presupposed by morality. as macintyre insists, the various relationships and roles moral agents occupy and the dispositions they have developed in and through those relationships and roles are constitutive of, rather than incidental to, their practical moral reasoning.22 in contrasting the practical reasoning of morality to that of the thomistic aristotelianism he embraces, macintyre asserts that one fairly stark difference 67 shuman between the two is the former’s concern with managing the competing interests of agents who seek to maximize the satisfaction of their individual preferences, over against the latter’s concern to form agents who recognize that their own interests include the goods they hold in common with those particular others with whom they share a life.23 judgments concerning the actions of such agents, he says, necessarily account for their particular social roles and presuppose “a narrative understanding of both individual agents and institutions,” which is to say that “it is only in the contexts supplied by background narratives that particular actions and courses of action can be adequately understood and evaluated.”24 accordingly, a deep disagreement exists between macintyre’s position, which insists upon the importance of “background narratives,” and that of “anyone whose evaluative and normative judgments are independent of and incompatible with any narrative presuppositions whatsoever, as is the case with judgments made from the standpoint of morality.”25 and here we are brought back to the indispensability of reading certain kinds of literature in the “morally serious” teaching of academic courses in ethics.26 these are narratives that unfold in particular, historied, “somewheres.” they are populated by morally complex characters—virtuous, vicious, and morally ambiguous—who are embedded in relationships and social roles that are constitutive of, rather than incidental to, their identities and agencies. these are stories that instantiate the inseparability of ethics and sociology by showing the inescapable sociality of their characters. 2. exemplars, practices, and apprenticeship it is arguably a truism to say that our identity and character are formed socially; all of us, all the time, are per hap or per force becoming one kind of person rather than another by virtue of our relationships with people and institutions, whether or not we are aware of this becoming. yet we sometimes fail to see just how foundational certain relationships are. rowan williams, the former archbishop of canterbury, writes about this with regard to becoming a person of faith: it starts from a sense that we “believe in,” we trust some kinds of people. we have confidence in the way they live; the way they live is the way i want to live, perhaps can imagine myself living in my better or more mature moments. the world they inhabit is one i’d like to live in. faith has a lot to do with the simple fact that there alasdair macintyre, reading literature, and teaching ethics 68 are trustworthy lives to be seen, that we can see in some believing people a world we’d like to live in.27 what is true of coming to faith is likewise true of the formation of character. much in the same way we become relatively capable users of language before we every study grammar, we come to know a good deal about better and worse ways to live before we ever study ethics.28 this knowing is a product of our seeing and being part of the exemplary lives of others, women and men who have learned to be good at being human and are recognized as such by their communities.29 in her 2017 book exemplarist moral theory, linda zagzebski suggests that exemplars are foundational, not just for the way we live, but for the language we use to describe moral excellence and evaluate our actions and the actions of others; our moral language is “anchored in” exemplars of moral goodness. we identify lives as exemplary not because they satisfy predetermined criteria, she says, but because they elicit in us the emotion of admiration, which is developed through “the telling and retelling of narratives.”30 parents, teachers, and others, themselves potential exemplars, are frequently tellers of stories populated by other exemplars. exemplars, zagzebski says, “not only show us what morality is, but they make us want to be moral and show us how to do it.”31 learning from exemplars how to be moral is not simply a matter of being affected by them, or even of imitating their discrete actions, but also of coming to understand why certain actions are called for in certain situations and not in others, and why, which is to say that we learn from them something of the art of practical moral reasoning. here we may return to macintyre, who has argued that moral enquiry presupposes a commitment to becoming a certain kind of person who reasons in a particular way, which entails “making oneself into an apprentice to a craft, the craft in this case that of philosophical enquiry.”32 the process of apprenticeship begins with the imitation of a master and progresses toward an understanding of how and why the master does what she does when she does it. this entails that the apprentice develops self-understanding, including the ability to recognize his or her mistakes and limitations, “to identify what it is about him or herself that needs to be transformed, that is, what vices need to be eradicated, what intellectual and moral virtues need to be cultivated.”33 among the things the apprentice comes to understand as her learning progresses is that both she and her teacher are part of a particular history. “to share in the rationality of a craft requires sharing in the contingencies of its history, understanding its story as one’s own, and finding a place 69 shuman for oneself as a character in the enacted dramatic narrative which is that story so far.”34 where moral formation is concerned, these narratives may be literary, introducing the apprentice to the kinds of exemplary characters whose lives are accessible to her only through literary narratives. literary narratives grant hearers and readers access to the consciousness of their characters, and the way they deliberate about what to do in particular circumstances given who they are and who they aspire to become.35 3. the significance of narrative macintyre’s considerable regard for narrative as an important category in moral philosophy follows from his and others’ observations and convictions about the narrative character of human existence: our faculty with symbolic language renders us capable of telling stories, which make possible and shape our common lives as political animals.36 as macintyre writes: “man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal.”37 we depend on and use narratives in at least three intertwined ways: (1) they enable us to make sense of the things going on around us at given times in particular places; (2) they allow us make sense of our lives as historied beings whose stories are part of and dependent on the stories of particular others; and (3) they help us make sense of the world by orienting us toward the pursuit of particular ends and showing how those ends may best be achieved. macintyre argues in after virtue that the proper identification of a given human action demands or presupposes attention to context in two ways: actions are rendered intelligible only as the agent’s intentions are located (1) within that agent’s history, and (2) within the history of the setting where the action is performed. to attend to the context of human actions in this way is to narrate them as part of a history, which leads macintyre to assert that “[n]arrative history of a certain kind turns out to be the basic and essential genre for the characterization of human actions.”38 importantly, narrative is not something superimposed on actions to render them intelligible, but something characteristic of actions in themselves. “narrative is not the work of poets, dramatists, and novelists reflecting upon events which had no narrative order before one was imposed by the singer or the writer; narrative form is neither disguise or decoration.”39 instead, narrative “works” as a mode of characterizing the actions of others because human lives are lived narratives.40 to say that a human life is a lived narrative, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, is to say that we are not simply actors in our life stories, but the authors of those stories, as well. our alasdair macintyre, reading literature, and teaching ethics 70 authorship is limited, however, by the fact that our lives, and so our stories, are from the beginning part of a constellation of other lives and stories. we are “born with a past” that remains part of our stories; like all characters in dramatic narratives, we “never start literally ab initio,” but “plunge in media res,” for our stories have in a sense already begun without us.41 just so, our lives are circumscribed by the fact that “we are never more (and sometimes less) than the co-authors of our own stories. only in fantasy do we live the life we please.”42 not only do our stories begin without us, they point as well toward imagined futures shaped and shared by the stories of those whose lives intersect with our own.43 those futures, which give our lives and stories a teleological character, may be inspired by certain “bigger” stories that connect us not simply to those whose lives directly intersect with our own, but to others whose lives have also been shaped by these stories. such stories become over time partly constitutive of moral traditions; macintyre describes a tradition as “an historically extended, socially embodied argument, and an argument precisely in part about the goods which constitute that tradition.”44 insofar as “the individual’s search for his or her own good is generally and characteristically conducted with a context defined by a context defined by those traditions of which the individual’s life is a part,” these stories may come to have a kind of canonical status.45 they suggest the existence of ultimate or final human ends that inform the actions of agents who aspire to lives that can be characterized as good.46 as often as not, these stories are representative of certain kinds of literature. 4. “certain kinds”: wendell berry and his stories of the port william membership at the conclusion of each of the three parts of this essay, i have returned to macintyre’s insistence on the importance of reading certain kinds of literature in the teaching of ethics. (he says novels, but i have taken the liberty of also considering short stories and narrative poetry.) but what characterizes such “certain kinds”? rather than try to answer this question in the abstract, i will turn to a particular example, namely, the fiction of the american poet, essayist, ecological activist, and social critic, wendell berry. berry’s work is exemplary in part because it implicates each of the three points i have tried to make in defending macintyre’s claim about the importance of literature. perhaps more importantly, it is exemplary because, as stanley hauerwas says, “i often think that berry’s novels do what is next to impossible in our time, and that is make goodness compelling.”47 71 shuman berry, who is now eighty-five years old, lives and works near the kentucky town where he was born and raised, on a working farm on the kentucky river near its confluence with the ohio. he has not always lived there; he earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in english literature at the university of kentucky, he was a wallace stegner writing fellow at stanford university, and he was a member of the english faculty at nyu. his move back to kentucky in the mid-1960s and his gradual return to farming became determinative for his writing; nearly all of his fiction, both novels and short stories, is set in an imagined kentucky farming village called port william and is populated by a transgenerational cast of characters who think and speak of themselves as “the membership.” the notion of membership is essential to berry’s fiction. the port william membership is neither exclusive nor insular; it exists and is sustained by the mutual awareness of a common life built upon a variety of reciprocal obligations to people and place. those obligations are sustained by the membership’s love for one another and for the land to which they mutually belong.48 as one of the membership’s pillars remarks, “the way we are, we are members of each other. all of us. everything. the difference ain’t in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don’t.”49 the historian eric miller captures this ethos especially well: far from an exclusive circle, membership in port william comes to mean exactly the opposite: the grateful inclusion of any who live in devotion to the wellbeing of the town and its environs. the membership isn’t self-appointed. but it is selfidentifying. those who are devoted to the place recognize one another by their mutual inclinations and sacrificial practices.50 port william is no utopia, and its membership is far from perfect. the town’s barber, jayber crow, ends his “memoir” by declaring: this is […] a book about heaven, but i must say to that it has been a close call. for i have wondered sometimes if it would not finally turn out to be a book about hell— where we fail to love one another, where we hate and destroy one another for reasons abundantly provided or for righteousness’ sake or for pleasure, where we destroy the things we need most, where we see no hope and have no faith.51 alasdair macintyre, reading literature, and teaching ethics 72 the membership’s history includes all manner of conflict and viciousness. one of the appeals of berry’s fiction is the pathos attending the failures of and conflicts among its characters, as well as its ability to elicit admiration when they reconcile and move forward—or when they simply move forward. as port william’s story unfolds into the late twentieth century, its economy disintegrates, its young move away, and its pillars begin to die, the tone of the stories turns deeply elegiac. but it is never despairing, for the membership endures, in large part because its existence is not solely dependent on the virtue of any one of its living members. it is sustained by hope, and that hope is born of constancy, both experienced and remembered. as the protagonist of berry’s eponymous novel hannah coulter says, “the membership includes the dead.”52 telling and retelling stories of exemplary dead members is essential to the membership’s ongoing life, as well as its connection to the life to come.53 one of the membership recalls his father, not simply as his father, but as one of the membership: in such wanderings and encounters, my father enacted his belonging to his country and his people. he could be as peremptory and as harsh as a saw—we younger ones had all felt his edge—but he knew how to be a friend. one night when he was old, he named over to me all those of the dead who had been his friends. he said, “if they are there, paradise is paradise indeed.”54 thus for berry’s membership, the final good of human life is given and pursued in and through the many proximal goods that constitute their common life. as hannah coulter explains, “and it is by the place we’ve got, and our love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to heaven.”55 even heaven turns out to be a somewhere. consider in this regard berry’s poem “a meeting”: in a dream i meet my dead friend. he has, i know, gone long and far, and yet he is the same for the dead are changeless. 73 shuman they grow no older. it is i who have changed, grown strange to what i was. yet i, the changed one, ask: “how you been?” he grins and looks at me. “i been eating peaches off some mighty fine trees.”56 notes 1. macintyre, after virtue, 2nd ed. (notre dame, in: university of notre dame press, 1984), 216. 2. berry, recollected essays, 1965–1980 (san francisco: north point, 1981), 217. 3. w.h. auden, “musée des beaux arts,” in collected poems, ed. edward mendelson (new york: vintage international, 1991), 179. 4. gerald mckenny, “bioethics, the body, and the legacy of bacon,” in on moral medicine: theological perspectives in medical ethics, 3rd edition, eds. m. therese lysaught and joseph j. kotva, jr. (grand rapids, mi: eerdmans, 2012), 398–409. this essay is a summary of mckenny’s thinking in his book to relieve the human condition: bioethics, technology, and the body (albany: suny press, 1997). 5. martin heidegger, “the question concerning technology,” in basic writings, ed. david farrell krell (san francisco: harper collins, 1993), 307–341. 6. nathaniel hawthorne, “the birthmark,” in hawthorne’s short stories, ed. newton arvin (new york: vintage classics, 2011), 177–193. 7. wendell berry, fidelity: five stories (new york: pantheon, 1992), 107–189. 8. leo tolstoy, the death of ivan ilyich and other stories, trans. louise and aylmer maude (new york: signet, 1960), 93–152. 9. my friend and sometime collaborator dr. brian volck has influenced me considerably here, especially with regard to the particular texts i use in the classroom. 10. i especially have in mind here my dissertation advisor and mentor, stanley hauerwas, who was macintyre’s colleague at notre dame and remains his friend. one of the things that alasdair macintyre, reading literature, and teaching ethics 74 most struck me about the way stanley taught the “introduction to christian ethics” course at duke divinity school was that the class always read novels, written by a variety of authors. 11. alasdair macintyre, ethics in the conflicts of modernity: an essay on desire, practical reasoning, and narrative (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2016), 219. macintyre here insists that “[o]ne test of whether a particular academic course in ethics is being taught in a morally serious way is whether or not its students are taught that a close reading of certain novels is indispensable to their learning what now needs to be learned.” 12. flannery o’connor, “the catholic novelist in the protestant south,” in mystery and manners: occasional prose, eds. sally and roberts fitzgerald (new york: farrar, straus, and giroux, 1969), 191–209, at 200. 13. ibid., 197. 14. o’connor, the habit of being: letters of flannery o’connor, ed. sally fitzgerald (new york: farrar, straus, and giroux, 1979), 125. 15. macintyre, after virtue, 23. 16. macintyre, ethics in the conflicts of modernity, 70–71, at 71. 17. ibid., 65. 18. ibid., 65, 114–115. 19. ibid., 65, 118. 20. on these points, see macintyre, after virtue, 36–78, 109–120; whose justice? which rationality? (notre dame, in: university of notre dame press, 1988), 1–11, 326–348; and ethics in the conflicts of modernity, 114–115. 21. macintyre, ethics in the conflicts of modernity, 124–129. 22. ibid., 218–219. 23. ibid., 214–215. 24. ibid., 218. 25. ibid., 219. 26. ibid. 27. rowan williams, tokens of trust: an introduction to christian belief (louisville, ky: westminster john knox, 2010), 21–22. 75 shuman 28. herbert mccabe, the good life: ethics and the pursuit of happiness, ed. brian davies (london: continuum, 2005), 9. 29. ibid. 30. linda trinkaus zagzebski, exemplarist moral theory (new york: oxford university press, 2017), 17. 31. ibid., 129. 32. macintyre, three rival versions of moral enquiry: encyclopedia, genealogy, and tradition (notre dame, in: university of notre dame press, 1990), 61–65, at 61. 33. ibid., 62. 34. ibid., 65. 35. zagzebski, moral exemplarist theory, 66. 36. see mccabe, on aquinas, eds. brian davies and anthony kenny (london: burns & oates, 2008), 51. 37. macintyre, after virtue, 216. 38. ibid., 208. 39. ibid., 211. 40. ibid., 212. 41. ibid., 215. 42. ibid., 213. 43. ibid., 215. 44. ibid., 222. 45. ibid. 46. macintyre, ethics in the conflicts of modernity, 231–234. 47. hauerwas, from the foreword to wendell berry: life and work, ed. jason peters (lexington, ky: university press of kentucky, 2007), xii. 48. here see d. brent laytham, “the membership includes the dead: wendell berry’s port william membership as communio sanctorum,” in wendell berry and religion: heaven’s earthly life, eds. joel james shuman and l. roger owens (lexington, ky: university press of kentucky, 2009), 173–189. 49. berry, “the wild birds,” in that distant land: collected stories (washington, dc: shoemaker and hoard, 2004), 337–364, at 356. alasdair macintyre, reading literature, and teaching ethics 76 50. eric miller, “reign of love: the fiction of wendell berry,” commonweal, january 4, 2019, https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/reign-love. 51. berry, jayber crow: the life story of jayber crow, barber of the port william membership, as written by himself (washington, dc: counterpoint, 2001), 354. 52. berry, hannah coulter (washington. dc: shoemaker and hoard, 2005), 94. 53. berry’s oft-documented ambivalence towards institutional christianity is shared by the membership, but so is his immersion in and deep commitment to local community sustained by christian hopes and ideals. 54. berry, a world lost (washington, dc: counterpoint, 2008), 136. 55. berry, hannah coulter, 83. compare laytham, “the membership includes the dead,” 176. 56. berry, new collected poems (washington, dc: counterpoint, 2013), 238. microsoft word mcdonough prooftext.docx [expositions 13.1 (2019) 1–17] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 divico in oil and metal: caesar and the helvetians in nineteenth-century swiss painting and contemporary folk-death metal christopher m. mcdonough the university of the south “needless cruelty and bloodshed at times stained his conduct, but these cannot obscure the greatness of his personality or essentially alter the measure of his achievements” (bennett xiii). so wrote classicist charles e. bennett about julius caesar in the introduction to his standard edition of gallic wars (1903). the helvetii (helvetians), an ancient people who suffered much needless cruelty and shed much needless blood at his hands, might have felt differently about the greatness of caesar’s personality. as their viewpoint has no ancient literary account and no standard edition, however, how the helvetians felt about caesar can never be recovered. instead it must be imagined and, as an effort of the imagination, is the work of painters and musicians and not of historians. this essay concerns conjectures about those unrecorded perspectives by two artists who, though separated by more than a century, are united by place: charles gleyre (a french artist of the nineteenth century) and chrigel glanzmann (the frontman and principal songwriter of the contemporary folk-metal band eluveitie) both hail from switzerland, the nation the helvetii once occupied and which even today refers to itself as helvetia or confoederatio helvetica on its stamps and coins. with free use of poetic license in supplying emotion to ancient events, and the employment of unusual supplementary material to add texture to their work, both gleyre and glanzmann try to supply the missing helvetian half of the story told in gallic wars.1 recovering the lives of any ancient people is a daunting task, even more so when those lives have been deliberately effaced by a work like gallic wars, the purpose of which is to justify and even glorify its author. history, as bennett’s quotation above shows, has largely exonerated caesar of his wrong-doing in gaul, and the record beyond his own casting of events is mostly mute about the helvetians. generations of latin students have read caesar in bennett’s edition or others like it and, perhaps beset by the grammatical complexities of the author’s style, not stopped to question the validity of the assumption about “the measure of his achievements.” gallic wars is a book about gaul and war, of course, but even more, it is a book by caesar and about caesar. the nondivico in oil and metal 2 romans encountered in gallic wars, not being the heroes of the narrative, are rendered in quick thumb-nail sketches and, though some notable enemy figures stand out, command no more of our sympathy than do the countless storm-troopers killed in star wars. “propaganda?” asked historian hubert martin, jr., in his treatment of caesar’s text fifty years ago. “certainly, and we can be sure that [the gallic leaders] orgetorix, dumnorix, and ariovistus would have told a different story” (67). what the story might have been for divico, the helvetian chieftain who subjugated the romans in 107 bc but lived to see his own people cut down in retaliation fifty years later, has fired the imagination of both gleyre (1806–1874) and glanzmann (born 1975). to render an alternative version to caesar’s account of the events in a way that is more than simple guesswork requires that recourse be made to evidence beyond what is found in gallic wars. gleyre and glanzmann permit themselves, in the ancient situations described by caesar, to react emotionally, whether it is the schadenfreude of triumph or the fury felt in defeat. in addition, for both of these artists—the one a nineteenth-century painter schooled at paris’s école des beaux-art, the other a broadly-trained musician of both folk and metal—the desire to transcend the limits of the roman sources leads them to incorporate non-traditional “celtic” materials into their work: in his large-scale painting, les romains passant sous le joug (1858), gleyre reproduces weapons known from swiss archaeology to give some sense of local flavor to his work, while eluveitie interweave irish, scottish, and other folk-tunes into their often angry songs narrated from an ancient helvetian perspective. the value of using anachronistic archaeological or musical material in this way will be discussed more fully below. but, while we might rightly question the validity of gleyre’s and glanzmann’s inclusion of rather extraordinary evidence in building up a portrait of divico and the helvetians, another more fundamental set of questions arise: if we do want to know this half of the story—and those who live in the areas once conquered by the romans have always been interested in the prehistory of the indigenous peoples—how, in the absence of evidence, is it possible to be told? if the historical record is known to be incomplete, with what can it plausibly be augmented? consider, for instance, a comic version of this problem. in asterix in switzerland, a 1973 comic book by rené goscinny and albert uderzo, the ancient residents of helvetia are represented as modern swiss stereotypes with a marked fondness for fondue, chocolate, and cuckoo clocks. the projection onto the past is meant to be amusing and, understandably enough, there is no real attempt to visualize the lives of the ancient people.2 but while there is certainly much to learn about modern europe from the 3 mcdonough asterix series—the resistance of the indomitable gauls seems to be more about the local experience of the nazi invasion than that of rome—ancient helvetian ethnography, like so much other ethnographical works, seems inevitably bound up with the subjective position of the ethnographer. if such subjectivity is that of a painter or musician, what of it? what we will see in gleyre’s painting and hear in eluveitie’s recordings are not a portrait of the helvetians and their leader as he was (for caesar has made sure that such a portrait is unrecoverable), but instead a portrait as he might have been, rendered not with the assurance of historical fact but instead in the suggestive media of image and song: we have not a divico of flesh and blood, but rather a divico in oil and metal. before we proceed on to a further discussion of these very different swiss receptions of caesar and the helvetians, let us recall what we find in gallic wars itself about the encounter. as anybody who has read caesar knows, his accounts of military matters are sharp and succinct, but beneath them lurks a larger political agenda.3 so it was that, in 58 bc, the helvetii had sent a delegation to him, the newly arrived commander in gaul, to explain their intention of passing through roman territory, a passage caesar denied them “because he remembered that the consul lucius cassius had been killed and his army routed and sent under the yoke by the helvetians” (gallic wars 1.7.4).4 to send captured enemy soldiers sub jugum, “under a yoke” made of spears, was considered an act of particular humiliation in antiquity, and of course, the death of a consul, the highest political office in republican rome, was especially an outrage.5 but, all of this had happened when divico had been the helvetian chieftain, fifty years earlier, a fact that caesar does not mention. the helvetians are not content with this answer, and feeling strongly the desire to migrate, unwisely decide to push on through. when it comes to caesar’s attention that they are at that very moment crossing the river arar (the modern saône), he takes advantage of the opportunity both to enforce his decision as well as to right a wrong from half a century earlier. although three-quarters of the helvetians had already crossed, caesar fell upon the remaining fourth, a tribe called the tigurini, and destroyed them. “it was this very tribe,” writes caesar “that, in our fathers’ memory, had killed lucius cassius and subjugated his army. so it was either by chance or by divine design that these one, who had brought such calamity upon the roman people, were the first to pay the penalty” (gallic wars 1.12.5). afterwards, caesar adds that a matter of personal honor had been at stake, because cassius had been a member of his wife’s family. the wholesale destruction of a divico in oil and metal 4 largely civilian population would be a shocking event to those back in rome, of course: only a few years later, cato would call for caesar to be handed over to the enemy after another such atrocity, in order to avoid divine wrath.6 but in 58 bc, caesar was careful to depict the attack not as a massacre but rather as an act of reprisal. what we see in the attack on the saône is a strategy of “moral equivalence” that likens, and thus justifies, the roman response: this tribe killed the consul, and so it was killed in turn. as so often happens with the rhetoric of reprisal, however, matters of scale have been deliberately obscured. it is a gambit depressingly familiar in modern history: “the japanese began this war from the air in pearl harbor,” said harry s. truman in announcing the destruction of hiroshima. “they have been repaid manifold.” the fact that 2,300 military personnel were killed on december 7th, 1941, while over 200,000 japanese civilians died as a result of the atomic bombings in 1945 is hidden beneath the president’s faux-biblical “manifold” (taylor 45). in similar fashion, caesar wonders whether the slaughter at the saône took place “by divine design,” not specifically noting that his army slew 90,000 helvetians, mostly unarmed civilians, in retaliation for the death of a consul and one of his officers, killed five decades earlier.7 this utterly disproportionate response is the sort of thing that led charles bennett, in the quotation with which i began above, to remark upon (though not to condemn) caesar’s “needless cruelty and bloodshed.” the death of cassius and the helvetian subjugation of the roman army is the subject of charles gleyre’s les romains passant sous le joug, “the romans passing under the yoke,” a masterpiece of the academic school in which neoclassical topics were rendered in a decidedly romantic manner. a native of lausanne, gleyre had been commissioned by the authorities of the swiss canton of vaud in 1850 to produce a new work that “should visualize an aspect of swiss national history” although “the choice of subject was left to the painter’s discretion.”8 avoiding hackneyed themes such as the legend of william tell, gleyre chose to depict the helvetian chieftain divico celebrating his victory over lucius cassius. a large painting (measuring 94.5 × 75.6 inches), les romains features over forty individual human and animal figures, at the center of which can be seen the humiliated roman soldiers being forced beneath an oxen-yoke alongside the heads of cassius and one of his officers on stakes. around them dozens of helvetians are celebrating—a set of trumpet-blowing warriors in the upper left hand is balanced by a bacchic female group making mocking gestures with singing druid bards in the upper right, before whom are depicted various cherubic children taunting the romans. his face partially obscured by a 5 mcdonough sword-bearing arm, divico himself sits on a horse in a commanding position down front; above him rises a large oak, a tree sacred to the druids, decorated with roman spoils, to dominate the scene. behind the throng of people in the far background is painted the dents du midi, thus situating the scene by the southeastern shore of a just visible lake geneva.9 charles gleyre, les romains passant sous le joug (1858) divico in oil and metal 6 while the passage of gallic wars in which the subjugation is described is brief, gleyre sought to impart to les romains a sense of credibility by the meticulous use of authenticizing detail. in order to supplement the scant literary record, gleyre made creative use of both celtic and classical images in his replication of the scene. most prominent is the face of one of the soldiers, modeled after the capitoline brutus—“the source and the allusion are unmistakable” (1.227), remarks william hauptman, in his magisterial study of gleyre’s oeuvre—but also identifiable is the chimera of arezzo in the form of divico’s snarling dog. other ancient busts, of the emperors nero and caracalla, can be picked out among the soldiers as well. in addition to allusions to classical portraiture, however, gleyre included numerous items of celtic archaeological material in the painting, among them “a variety of helvetian daggers and dagger handles from excavations in vidy and oleyres, both near lausanne, which he has in fact incorporated into the canvas” (hauptman 1.229–230). other objects, including musical horns and sword handles, also derive from verifiable celtic prototypes. much of his knowledge of vaudois archaeology derived from the work of the eminent local historian, frédéric-louis troyon, with whom gleyre apparently conferred at great length. troyon possessed a large personal collection of locally excavated artefacts; in addition, he travelled throughout scandinavia and russia, making sketches and watercolors of ancient celtic weapons and articles of dress that he collected into extensive albums for reference. a careful look at les romains reveals the artist’s clear debt to the images found in troyon’s albums, and indicates visually his ambition to depict the ancient helvetii not as caesar’s exotic tribesmen but as cultural characters in their own right. “gleyre opted to include details that were specifically swiss in origin which added significantly to the local historical consciousness that imbues the imagery,” hauptmann aptly observes (1.230).10 as a sort of cultural pastiche, the older materials from classical and helvetian contexts are masterfully gathered by gleyre into a whole that rises above its collection of individual artistic references to offer an image of national pride that the nineteenth-century swiss, newly liberated from napoleon, took instantly to heart. it was a “painting representing the united resistance of the swiss people against foreign domination in an earlier age, crucially situated in a local (and clearly identifiable) vaud,” as classicist richard warren explains (11). the painting was celebrated with fireworks at his unveiling and remained popular for many decades, but today les romains is not so well-known. when i went to visit the musée cantonal des beaux-arts in lausanne in 2015, les 7 mcdonough romains was no longer on display and museum officials were not quite sure where it had been stored. that is not to say that the picture lacks for admirers, however. when asked about it recently by e-mail, musician chrigel glanzmann called les romains a “really awesome painting” and “one of my favorites.” while for gleyre the story of the romans’ subjugation near lake geneva was an aspect of swiss history to be wrested from its presentation in the gallic wars, the encounters with caesar himself a half-century later have been of greater interest to eluveitie, the band which glanzmann fronts.12 formed in 2002, eluveitie is a contemporary folk-metal band whose music fuses the usual growling, drum, and guitar-work of metal with traditional folk-tunes played on celtic instruments. in 2012, the band released helvetios, a concept album based on the imagined helvetian reaction to the roman incursion of 58 bc, which reached the top ten on the swiss charts, top hundred in other european countries and canada, and #143 in the united states (wikipedia). in helvetios, it seems, a current generation has discovered what older generations had found appealing about les romains, a reimagined engagement with the ancient history of middle europe as told only by its roman conquerors. asked by an interviewer for metal underground about how he imagined fans would react to the album’s subject matter, which is “somewhat removed from our everyday twenty-first-century lives,” glanzmann responded: i would say, in a way, the lyrics are connected to here and now. especially with the songs we’ve written about the gaulish wars, for example. digging into history, it’s kind of striking to see how many parallels to today you can find. it’s sometimes quite shocking to realize how little we learned in the past 2,000 years, because it’s the same crazy things going on, over and over again. so i wouldn’t say the things we’re singing about don’t have anything to do with our everyday lives; i think they actually do. (overkillexposure) at first glance, we might expect to be able to single out one-for-one correspondences between ancient and modern events in eluveitie’s work, the way that warren was able to do with les romains as an anti-napoleonic allegory. when i pressed glanzmann recently to be more specific about the parallels, however, he evaded a direct answer. this is not entirely surprising, for as michelle phillipov remarks, “metal fans’ reluctance to channel their disaffections toward divico in oil and metal 8 identifiable political goals” is a cause of concern among critics, yet remains a defining feature of the genre (58). thus, though a metal band like eluveitie avoids the highly-politicized comments common to punk or hip hop, there remains in their historically-aware, almost erudite lyrics an expression of deeply-felt rage about events in antiquity that fans find entirely applicable to modern society. such passionate anger can certainly be sensed in songs like “meet the enemy,” about the slaughter of the tigurini described above: there at these ominous shores of river saône there at these shores the die has been cast valor and honor were stripped of their meaning we will not know innocence again at somber nightfall the defenseless were bestially run down saône stained with helvetic blood you will not shake hands with arrant beliers you’d rather die than turn into minions. beneath the fury conveyed by the rapid-fire drumming and distorted guitars, it is clear that eluveitie have read and ruminated upon the massacre described so dispassionately by caesar in gallic wars. caesar may well be looking at the helvetians with a cold, strategic eye, but the songs on helvetios reflect a caesar who is a brutal blood-thirsty monster. beyond calling for resistance and channeling rage, glanzmann is also drawing connections with the rest of caesar’s career and making a variety of incisive allusions in “meet the enemy.” a decade after the events sung of here, caesar will famously say alea iacta est, “the die is cast,” upon crossing the rubicon river to initiate the roman civil war. even as he began his tenure in rome, glanzmann indicates, the general was already predisposed toward ignoring legal boundaries. it is a valid point of international relations, as scholars have noted before. “the modern reader, sensitive to legality, notes at once that the war-making crossing of the frontier is set down without a word of apology,” writes classicist john h. collins of caesar at the saône. “[this] would 9 mcdonough suffice to hang him in a modern war-crimes trial” (927). later in the same song, another allusion to roman culture is made: it was like playing ludus latrunculorum the pieces were made of flesh and of blood valor and honor bereft of their meaning the blood on your hands will forever stay the reference to the board-game, ludus latrunculorum, “the game of brigands,” is a surprisingly apt description of caesar’s treatment of the helvetians.13 after they sue for peace, in fact, caesar is quite clear about preventing the migration “because he did not want the place that the helvetii had left behind to be abandoned, for fear that the germans, living on the other side of the rhine, would cross over from their own territories into those of the helvetii” (gallic wars 1.28.3). that is to say, caesar blocks the helvetians as part of a larger strategic desire to preserve a “buffer state” between the powerful germans and roman gaul. in his bitter reference to the ludus latrunculorum, glanzmann is quite right, then: caesar has in fact treated the helvetii as pawns in a game of geopolitical chess. after the attack at the saône, caesar writes, “the helvetians sent a delegation to him, at the head of which was divico, who had been the leader of the helvetians in the war with cassius” (gallic wars 1.13). while it is quite surprising that the old leader would still be living these many years later, he has evidently lost none of his hard-bitten determination, and a tense diplomatic exchange follows. divico warns the roman leader not to make too much out of defeating an unarmed tribe taken by surprise, and indicates that helvetians “fight more with courage than relying upon deceit and trickery.” with sangfroid, caesar proposes that the helvetians ought to offer hostages, given the situation; with equal sangfroid, divico responds that his people were more accustomed to receive than to give hostages. later in “meet the enemy,” glanzmann imagines still further the exchange: it’s not us to go under the yoke of that fact the roman people are witness we will not bow (meet the liar) divico in oil and metal 10 in these lines, it is hard not to think of the ferocious leader with his people gloating over the subjugated soldiers in les romains. whatever happened to divico, beyond his vowing no surrender, we do not know. caesar does not mention his end, and presumably he died in the ensuing battle of bibracte. glanzmann features him again in an eponymous song that, while not found on the helvetios album, was released as a single concurrently in 2012 to great success. in it, glanzmann channels the helvetian chieftain’s thoughts at the end of his days: [choir:] i was king [singer:] like the ancient oak like the raven soaring across your meadows like the bear roaming through your woods [choir:] i was king [singer:] like the ancient oak standing enthroned this old man i have become as with “meet the enemy,” the lines here are sung with the ferocious guttural growl that is characteristic of the death metal subgenre.14 the fury of the vocal style is entirely fitting the subject matter—while the anger in metal can sometimes seem unfocused, eluveitie’s rage rather offers a powerful and appropriate response to caesar’s violent military recklessness. that such fury applies not just to atrocities committed in antiquity seems clear enough, and fans no doubt supply their own analogies to current events. 11 mcdonough it should be noted that, as musicians, eluveitie are interested equally in the genres of death metal and celtic folk: in addition to guitars, bass, and drums, they employ traditional instruments such as fiddles, tin whistles, uilleann pipes, flutes, bagpipes, hurdy-gurdies, bodhráns, and the like. beyond their careful reading of ancient history, eluveitie employs older celtic melodies as a way of conjuring a more vivid sense of the imagined ancient helvetian past. commenting on this phenomenon, glanzmann explained in one interview, of course, old traditions and ancient cultures and especially the one of our ancestors mean a lot to us. but we’re not that much into mead-blessed, corny hymns about brawny, unbelievably brave warriors jumping joyously at war and stuff like that. also regarding musical aspects, i think we stand out from the masses to some degree. our metal is pretty elaborate (for example the riffing) and not “old schoolish” at all (like it is often heard in pagan metal); the “folk aspect” in our sound receives a remarkable large room in our music—it’s on equal footing with the metal instruments and it’s also very important to us, that it’s implemented in a really traditional and authentic way. much in the same way that gleyre was eager to represent his helvetians authentically by incorporating genuine archaeological items, the traditional melodies interwoven into the eluveitie’s songs draw upon the putative “musical remains” of ancient celtic culture in hopes of letting the ancients “speak” for themselves. no doubt this is a controversial, especially as many of the traditional instruments and tunes of the celtic revival cannot be dated to a time any earlier than the eighteenth century, but eluveitie are not alone in such fusion between musical genres. in a recent consideration of this phenomenon, stephen p. ashby and john schofield commented on the incorporation of historically-attested melodies into their work of the pagan metal bands týr and heidevolk as a form of cultural reenactment. as they note, by following týr and heidevolk, young people can enjoy the music, the live shows and the festivals, but they also learn. for the bands, the recorded music, and the live shows, become opportunities to inform, and to promote. […] one should perhaps divico in oil and metal 12 not take this too seriously. this, after all, is entertainment, and many participants will see it only in these terms. but what is also happening here has happened over millennia. old stories are being told and retold, invented, reshaped and recreated. (507) allusions to and appropriations of older poetry or music help to situate newer works like those produced by folk metal bands within a deeper cultural milieu. in this context, we should recall the prominent place given to the druid bards and their instruments in les romains sous le joug. the melodies may well be different, but in all likelihood the themes are the same. while certainly even flagrantly anachronistic, these borrowings can interact with the inherited source material in a pointed and revealing fashion. this process can well be seen in eluveitie’s “divico,” which builds upon a scottish tune called “the haughs of cromdale,” a historical ballad about the battle of cromdale in 1690. this particular battle was a highly emblematic one, representing the final showdown between the scots loyal to the stewart king, james vii, and the english troops fighting on behalf of william of orange. though in fact a humiliating loss for the scots, the ballad recounts that “the great montrose”—james graham, 1st marquess of montrose and chief of the clan graham—appeared suddenly to lead the scottish troops to victory over the english: and the loyal stewarts, wi’ montrose, so boldly set upon their foes, laid them low wi’ hi’land blows laid them low on cromdale. there are two fundamental problems with the historical facts of the ballad, however. to begin with, the scots did not lay anybody low but in fact were, as noted, badly beaten at cromdale. secondly, graham did not participate in the battle, due to the fact that he had died in 1650. as the english folk singer and scholar, ewan maccoll wrote of this ballad, montrose, the hero of the song, was not present at the event. some 45 years before, however, he won a victory at the battle of auldearn against the whig forces, and it 13 mcdonough is probable that the two events have been dovetailed to provide us with a fine, optimistic, if somewhat chronologically inaccurate song. (silverman 56)15 while one can certainly understand the desire of the original balladeers to engage in some wishful thinking about the battle’s outcome, the incorporation—should we call it a sample, an allusion, or a citation?—of “haughs o’ cromdale” within eluveitie’s “divico” suggests an intertextual reading. if one sees the scots as latter-day celts and the english as latter-day romans, then the great montrose stands in as divico himself, the leader who bridges half a century as a reminder of former glory. “curious are the coincidences that throng human history!” frederic stanley dunn had exclaimed in his still-useful study of the helvetian leaders from 1909. “forty-nine years after his first exploits on that same soil divico now came as chief of an embassy to wait on caesar. it is not often that clio, in search of a hero, will turn back through the records of half a century” (194). dunn is right—it is curious that the very chieftain who had defeated the romans half a century before should now appear before caesar, and not particularly credible upon reflection. the implied comparison of montrose to the helvetian leader in “divico” prompts one to wonder whether caesar ever really met with this individual at all. while this is not a matter that has been touched upon by classical historians, the subtle suggestion arising from the musical inference perhaps points to a genuine scholarly question. when i asked glanzmann about the use of “haughs of cromdale” in “divico” recently, however, he responded that he liked the tune, adding that the “original lyrics actually fit quite well too. ;)” it may seem odd, perhaps, to search for a better understanding of an ancient gallic chieftain and his people either by considering a scottish tune embedded within a twenty-first century death metal song or by examining the use of vaudois archaeological material in an anti-napoleonic painting. but in its attempt to comprehend antiquity more fully, classical studies have always benefited from challenging orthodoxies and experimenting with new modes of engagement. for charles gleyre, les romains offered a serious opportunity both to engage with the burden of classical archetypes by redeploying them in a non-triumphant (or perhaps more accurately, a reverse-triumphant) context and to represent local archaeological finds in the then-current genre of academic painting. that his work found a ready set of spectators among nineteenth-century swiss, who took instant pride in a past so credibly and powerfully illustrated, speaks to the success divico in oil and metal 14 of his strategy of representation. a century and a half later, chrigel glanzmann and eluveitie have sought to tap into the emotion of the same ancient past in a manner that resembles that of gleyre. applying their “inimitable brand of mournful, grinding celtic fury,” as metal underground has called it, eluveitie reads between the lines of caesar’s account and fills it out with traditional music to give voice to a dispossessed ancient people; their record sales indicate as appreciative an audience as gleyre found over a century ago, in switzerland and beyond. if one goal of classical studies is to understand how ancient people lived, another is to uncover what has been obscured, like the helvetians’ story, or what has been excused, such as caesar’s own “needless cruelty.” those things that investigations of a strictly scholarly nature may overlook, in other words, investigations of a more imaginative sort often can fruitfully bring to light. the ancient helvetians may not be lost to history entirely if we look beyond the library and search as well in the museum and the mosh-pit. notes 1. the author gratefully acknowledges the help of osman umurhan, matthew taylor, brian swain, and the journal’s anonymous referees for all their insights and suggestions, and admits all errors to be his own. 2. see beard on taking asterix seriously as a matter of reception. see also the inspired chapter of almagor on asterix and classical ethnography. 3. on caesar’s political agenda in gallic wars, see especially collins and riggsby 207–214. 4. all translations from ancient authors are my own. 5. on the ritual of subjugation (i.e., sending “under the yoke”), see versnel 138–140, with discussion of older anthropological views. 6. plutarch, life of cato the younger 51.3–4, where cato proclaims that “it was not the sons of germans or celts whom they ought to fear, but caesar himself if they really thought about it.” 15 mcdonough 7. at gallic wars 1.29.3, caesar reports that, after the battle at bibracte, census records were found in the helvetian camp indicating that the entire population had numbered 368,000. 8. hauptman 2.380. cf. warren 248–249. 9. hauptman 1.218: “although it was never certain that the battle was actually fought on vaudois soil, in gleyre’s time it was accepted as indisputable fact; only later was it determined through archaeological evidence that the battle was actually fought near agen in france.” cf. warren 254 on this matter. 10. see also warren 261 n.5 with further bibliography. 11. for fuller discussion of eluveitie, see matthew taylor, “eternal defiance: celtic identity and the classical past in heavy metal,” in heavy metal classics, eds. osman umurhan and kristopher fletcher (london: bloomsbury, 2019), forthcoming. 12. as cited in suetonius’ twelve caesars: julius caesar 33; see also plutarch’s life of pompey 60.2.9. 13. see richmond for more on ludus latrunculorum. 14. while the death growl vocal style has been mocked as “cookie monster” singing, nonetheless “unlike the garbled sound emanating from the lovable and occasionally frenetic cookie monster, death-metal vocals seem to come from a dark spot in a troubled soul, as if they were the narrator’s voice on a tour of dante’s seventh circle of hell. cute and funny they ain’t” (fusilli). 15. silverman includes the lyrics and maccoll’s remarks, which are to be found originally in “the liner notes of songs of two rebellions, a 1960 folkways recording.” divico in oil and metal 16 works cited almagor, eran. “re-inventing the barbarian: classical ethnographic perceptions in astérix.” in son of classics and comics. eds. george kovacs and c. w. marshall. new york: oxford university press, 2016. 113–130. ashby, stephen p., and john schofield. “‘hold the heathen hammer high’: representation, reenactment and the construction of ‘pagan’ heritage.” international journal of heritage studies 21.5 (2015): 493–511. beard, mary. “bonté gracieuse!” london review of books 24.4 (february 21, 2002): 12–13. bennett, charles e. caesar’s gallic wars: books i-iv. boston: allyn and bacon, 1903. collins, john h. “caesar as political propagandist.” aufstieg und niedergang der römischen welt 1.1 (1972): 922–966. dunn, frederic stanley. “the helvetian quartet: iv. divico.” classical weekly 2.25 (1909): 194–195. fusilli, jim. “cookie monsters of death-metal music.” wall street journal february 1, 2006 http://www.wsj.com/articles/sb113875020821161491 glanzmann, chrigel. personal correspondence with the author. july 7, 2015. gleyre, marc-charles-gabriel. les romains passant sous le joug. 1858, musée cantonal des beaux-arts, lausanne. accessed may 18, 2019 from http://commons.wikimedia.org/ hauptman, william. charles gleyre, 1806–1874. 2 vols. zurich: swiss institute for art research/princeton: princeton university press/basle: wiese publishing ltd., 1996. martin jr., hubert. “the image of caesar in bellum gallicum 1.” classical journal 61.2 (1965): 63–67. overkillexposure (mike s.). “eluveitie frontman: ‘it's shocking to realize how little we learned in the past 2,000 years.’” metal underground march 5, 2012 http://www.metalunderground.com/news/details.cfm?newsid=78117 17 mcdonough phillipov, michelle. death metal and music criticism: analysis at the limits. lanham, md: lexington books, 2012. richmond, john. “the ludus latrunculorum and laus pisonis 190–208.” museum helveticum 51.3 (1994): 164–179. riggsby, andrew. caesar in gaul and rome: war in words. austin, tx: university of texas press, 2006. silverman, jerry, ed. mel bay presents songs of scotland. pacific, mo: mel bay publications, 1991. taylor, arch b. pearl harbor, hiroshima, & beyond: subversion of values. vancouver: trafford, 2005. versnel, h.s. triumphus: an inquiry into the origin, development and meaning of the roman triumph. leiden: brill, 1970. warren, richard. “charles gleyre’s les romains: classics and nationalism in swiss art.” nations and nationalism 22.2 (2016): 248–265. wikipedia. “helvetios.” last modified november 19, 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ helvetios#chart_performance microsoft word 4 bradizza fall 2018.docx [expositions 12.2 (2018) 176–190] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376   the political role of the public university luigi bradizza salve regina university what is a university? the public university has a proper political role: it must, if only for properly self-interested reasons, openly support a culture of political liberty. understanding the proper political role of the public university requires that we reconcile the demands of politics with the proper demands of the public university. if we are to understand the proper demands of the public university, we must first understand what a university is. to understand what a university is, one might think to study institutions that describe themselves as universities and then come to a definition of the term by discerning the essential or common qualities that make an institution a university and not some other thing. unfortunately, such a bottom-up, inductive approach cannot work in our day because of a significant divergence among universities in what they understand their mission to be. some universities are dedicated to liberal education. some are centered on vocational training. some have a religious mission. others see themselves as contributing to societal transformation by means of social justice activism. these aims are so different from each other that the only significant features that today’s universities all have in common, and that continue to distinguish them from other institutions, are professors and students. and therefore, if we try to define what it means to be a university by examining institutions that call themselves universities, we must abstract both from the content of what is taught and from the goal that the university aims at. we must, in other words, abstract from the university’s substantial purpose. and yet, if institutions in general are tools of human construction, then surely, as with any tool, an institution must be most centrally defined with reference to its substantial purpose. because what we call “universities” no longer share a common purpose (if they ever did), we must instead look for a definition, not to what universities are, but to what they should be. universities are the institutionalized form of the highest activity within them. the highest activity is thought and not action. action cannot be the highest activity of the university because thought 177 bradizza does not always lead to, or is not always intended to produce, action. that is, thought can be pursued for its own sake, for the sake of contemplation and not action.1 when action is the goal of the university, thought must guide and evaluate action. however, the converse is not true; when thought is the goal of the university, action need not guide or evaluate thought. and even in cases where action is used to verify thought (for example, when experiments are used to verify scientific theories), action must nonetheless always be evaluated on the basis of thought. in other words, the results of an experiment must be thought through. when bad thought produces bad action, then that bad thought must be replaced by better thought intended to produce better action. thought therefore has a ruling or governing function over action that action does not have over thought. thought is therefore higher or more authoritative than action. the kind of thought that a university properly aims at is knowledge of the truth, which is the highest fulfilment of the human soul, because knowledge of the truth exercises the highest faulty of the soul, that is, the faculty that raises it above the lower, merely animal aspects of the soul. the disciplines of philosophy and theology aim at the most comprehensive truth. of course, philosophy and theology are not the only appropriate subjects of study at a university. we should understand modern natural science as a branch of philosophy. modern natural science is therefore a proper subject of study at a university. approached philosophically, the arts also become fit subjects of study. but as architectonic disciplines, philosophy and theology lay claim to being the highest, most important, and central disciplines of study. if we consider the way in which philosophy is conducted, we can see that by the very nature of philosophy, philosophy’s method and findings rest on a universal, unassisted human reason. the claims of philosophy are therefore open to all people. by contrast, theology is closed to nonbelievers. if theology is to be approached with the greatest seriousness, one must first be open to the faith that a particular theology explores. that is, one must study a religion as if it might simply be true. the claims of theology must therefore be confined to those who have voluntarily accepted the particular faith that underlies a theology. despite this closed nature, theology makes comprehensive claims, and therefore it has a central place in a university. but it makes its claims only to those who accept the faith, and therefore it has no proper place in a public university operating under the strictures of the u.s. constitution’s establishment clause. the university is therefore properly understood as the institutionalization of, or an institutionalized form of, the the political role of the public university 178 philosophic life and perhaps also the life of pious inquiry. and the public university is properly understood as the institutionalization of the philosophic life. but the institutionalized form of the philosophic life is not precisely the same thing as the philosophic life. if a university is to remain an institution—that is, if it is to persist over time—it cannot rely on the appearance of actual philosophers engaged in the philosophic life. such men are infrequent and their appearance is unpredictable.2 the university must therefore rely on professors who are professionally trained from a cadre of students. it is the rare professor who is also a philosopher. but even so, professors who are not philosophers can be capable of transmitting philosophy from generation to generation, and thus they can make more possible the appearance and flourishing of actual philosophers. professors do not, of course, live the philosophic life, in the most thoroughgoing and austere version of that life. in particular, the institutionalization of philosophy in universities means that we cannot expect professors to live like socrates, in “tenthousand-fold poverty.”3 few professors would philosophize in a condition of poverty, and therefore impoverished professors are inconsistent with the continued existence of universities. professors must be paid. as we will see, this fact means that they are exposed to material and professional pressures by some who are unhappy with their ideas. such pressures must be resisted because if it is to remain a university, the university, like the philosopher, must be radically open to truth and radically question all received opinion. in short, it must be socratic. to the extent that a university pursues a socratic mission, it can properly be described as a university. to the extent that it does not, it cannot properly be described as a university.4 with respect to the character of philosophy, we should note that by definition, philosophy is love of wisdom. it is not the possession of wisdom. whether pursued by an individual philosopher or institutionalized in a university, philosophy is subject to corruption when the philosopher or professor loses sight of either its aim or its methods. indeed, philosophy is perpetually at risk of descending into sophistry or dogmatism. and so, the university too is perpetually at risk of sophistry and dogmatism. it is also perpetually at risk of being distracted from its main aim (wisdom) in pursuit of worldly goals.5 as sidney besvinick puts it, “if the university, voluntarily or under duress, undertakes duties and accepts assignments that do not relate to its purposes or detract from them, then the university loses its integrity and, at least in part, steps out of its characteristic role and ceases to be a university.”6 179 bradizza the understanding of a university that i have proposed is somewhat at odds with that of cardinal newman. newman tells us that a university “is a place of teaching universal knowledge. this implies that its object is … the diffusion and extension of knowledge rather than the advancement. if its object were scientific and philosophical discovery, i do not see why a university should have students.”7 he goes on to distinguish philosophic research and teaching: “the nature of the case and the history of philosophy combine to recommend to us this division of intellectual labor between academies and universities. to discover and to teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person. he, too, who spends his day in dispensing his existing knowledge to all comers is unlikely to have either leisure or energy to acquire new.”8 but in fact, no one can properly teach philosophy without the ability to evaluate critically the philosophy he teaches. for otherwise, he merely parrots views that he has not quite understood. the ability to evaluate a philosophy requires the ability to analyze and conduct research aimed at understanding. and so, there is no sharp dividing line between a philosopher and philosophy professor. all philosophy professors (should) aim at philosophic understanding. we can distinguish them from philosophers by noticing that originating (or discovering) a philosophic idea is different from merely understanding and evaluating it. the special problem of public universities as a creature of the government, a public institution must be centrally concerned with the aims of the regime.9 the aims of the regime are, first, self-preservation and, second, the advancement of its distinctive public goals. that is, a public institution is centrally concerned with self-preservation and more generally the preservation of the regime, and with the advancement of justice, as the concept of justice is understood within the context of the regime. we can see this in the typical mission of a public university: research, teaching, and public service, with the last understood as the promotion of a certain public understanding of justice.10 some scholars embrace the public service component of the mission of a public university to such a degree that they make it the central purpose of a public university. we see a striking example of this embrace in the “wisconsin idea” that marries academic research to progressive political reform.11 such scholars fail to see that they have subordinated the noble life of the mind to merely worldly concerns. the subordination of the public university to the aims of the regime raises a problem. a public institution cannot be permitted the sort of radical openness that characterizes the life of the mind, the political role of the public university 180 if that openness threatens the regime. in particular, because all regimes rest on their own particular understanding of justice, no public institution can question the regime’s understanding of justice to the extent that such questioning threatens the regime. in other words, so far as the regime is concerned, with regard to the public university’s mission of research, teaching, and public service, the first two might well come into conflict with the third. and so, we should not be in the least surprised to read accounts of scholars such as dennis fox and ron sakolsky, who complain of political micromanagement of the university of illinois at springfield (formerly sangamon state university) by a republican-controlled state government. the scholars identify themselves as radically left-wing and their school as a radically left-wing institution. as their account makes clear, they alienated their political masters with their radicalism, and earned for their troubles a political backlash.12 we arrive at an apparent contradiction in the notion of a public university. to the extent that a public university is a university, it must be radically open to alternative understandings of justice. to the extent that it is a public institution, it cannot be permitted to threaten the regime’s understanding of justice. some scholars disagree that such a contradiction exists or downplay the contradiction. rebecca lynch is in partial agreement and partial disagreement. she argues that the courts should defend academic freedom for professors: “[c]ourts protect professorial academic freedom rights when restriction of academic expression is not functionally necessary to the state’s legitimate goals.” but surely regime survival is one of “the state’s legitimate goals.” thus, she appears to provide space for government restrictions on academic expression. but she goes on to write: “in fact, where the state's goals are critical democratic education or the promotion of new discoveries, academic freedom is not a hindrance but rather is crucial to the accomplishment of the state's mission.”13 this may be true, but these goals are a narrow part of the proper mission of the university. other goals of the university might well hinder “the accomplishment of the state’s mission” if those other goals are in contradiction to the state’s mission. hannah forsyth makes a stronger claim in defense of academic freedom: “it is obvious to scholars that the public interest is compromised when academic freedom is undermined.”14 the “public interest” is a broader category than “the state’s mission,” and includes within it some understanding of the common good. and the common good is a goal that is higher than “the state’s mission” because it is what any state’s mission should aim at. yet despite forsyth’s claim being stronger than lynch’s, it is simply false for forsyth to write that her claim is “obvious.” it is certainly obvious that research 181 bradizza is compromised when academic freedom is undermined. but to argue that the public interest is compromised is to imply that the research that flows from unimpeded academic freedom is always beneficial to the public. a moment’s reflection shows that this view is false even with respect to the disciplines that most clearly lead to public benefits. for example, the scientific disciplines have given us tremendous benefits in healthcare, communication, and transportation, but they have also given us weapons of mass destruction. it may be true, but it is not at all obvious, that the existence of such weapons is a net public benefit. of course, it could be argued that in terms of philosophy and politics, the university aims at justice, which, unlike technology, is supposed to guarantee its own good use. moreover, the tension between research and public benefits would perhaps not exist if there were a final, certain understanding of justice to which the university could dedicate itself. on this premise, more research would result in greater justice. but any such claim of final and certain status must be seen by the university as dogmatism and not knowledge, and therefore a departure from its goal of wisdom. neither are attempts at incremental improvements in justice guaranteed to produce good results. professors might be in error about their findings concerning justice, and might therefore unleash theories that cause grave public harm. for example (and drawing from both ends of the political spectrum) universities have at various times promoted both “scientific” racism and affirmative action in their efforts to advance the cause of justice. it would be difficult or impossible to find any individual who simultaneously believes that both theories have made america more just. in sum, research is risky to the public. in light of this, we must ask: is free speech truly possible if speech must respect the boundaries of the regime’s understanding of justice? the answer must be no. any dangerous questioning of the regime must take place sotto voce, that is, in a manner apart from the open inquiry typically thought to be necessitated by the university’s philosophical character. public universities, like universities generally, are therefore restricted in what they can say. and as a public institution, the public university presents us with a second problem: it is public, that is, funded by the government and therefore at risk of being co-opted by the government. silence or apparent silence will not fully protect the public university; it must in addition be attentive to the positive demands that the regime and the regime’s instrument, the government, make of it. it is therefore subject to corruption at the hands of the regime to the extent that the regime’s demands conflict with or distract from the proper aims and methods of the public the political role of the public university 182 university. we can see this in complaints from both the left and the right. writing a few years ago, leftist james slevin laments that “[n]onflagship state colleges and branch universities are being amalgamated increasingly to serve the defined purposes of the state (including serving industrial and postindustrial development). states’ interests are expressed and forwarded by legislatures directing, sometimes even micromanaging, educational matters through demands for accountability.”15 from the perspective of the right, we can see a partial co-option of public universities in their support for the administrative state. in the right’s telling, the administrative state is an unconstitutional departure from republican self-government and an unconstitutional violation of the separation of powers.16 public universities have been drawn into propagating these alleged injustices by means of programs in “public administration” which train future administrative state bureaucrats. a public university will therefore have little to no choice but to support with positive action the demands of the government and the aims of the regime. this might seem to make the idea of a public university an impossibility. but in fact, a public university is possible, and perhaps just as possible as a private university, because positive action is called for in the case of both public and private universities if only because, in addition to their higher and distinctive goals, both institutions must aim at self-preservation, and their self-preservation is more possible under some regimes than others. in particular, liberal democracy presents universities with the greatest opportunity for openness while placing the fewest (but not insubstantial) limitations on them. universities therefore have an interest in promoting as open a society as possible, one most conducive to their continued survival. the survival of any university depends on a significant degree of support by the regime for due process, free speech, free press, and a political culture that supports these political goods. in the absence of these political goods, a university is less able to carry out its mission. the good that comes from freedom of speech and freedom of the press is obvious. but due process is also essential. due process directly protects dissident professors and students from persecution by the regime. it also indirectly protects dissident professors and students from persecution by school authorities. that indirect protection is a consequence of the tendency—apparent in our day—to extend the public benefit of due process to universities, both public and private. strictly speaking, private universities should perhaps not be subject to due process requirements. but when public funding supports an institution, the tendency is for citizens to demand that public funds not support 183 bradizza institutions that treat their employees arbitrarily. a culture of legal due process among citizens therefore tends to produce due process protections for intellectual dissidents at both public and private universities. it is therefore in the self-interest of a public university for it to promote constitutionalism and a respect for civil rights and liberties, a self-interest which harmonizes with the interests of a liberal democratic regime. the public university should also promote free speech, freedom of the press, and democracy. indeed, it should promote as open a democratic society as is compatible with public order. an open, democratic society offers the greatest latitude to dissident opinion, if only because, as plato argues in the republic,17 it takes all ways of life to be equally worthwhile. this democratic prejudice concerning openness works in favor of the university, for it permits it its particular concerns unmolested. in particular, philosophers within the public university can privately hold philosophy to be nobler than the regime does. democratic equality leads to a toleration of supporters of nonpolitical aristocratic inequality. speech and press freedoms therefore contribute to the maintenance of aristocratic institutions within a democratic polity.18 the public university’s promotion of democratic openness might generate the objection that it makes the university a partisan of a particular regime. the proposal that i have described does indeed make the public university a partisan of a particular regime: liberal democracy. no university can be indifferent to the sort of regime under which it exists, because the regime quite clearly affects the capacity of individuals and institutions for philosophic reflection. we might here recall that in the apology, socrates was unwilling to leave athens because he knew that he could not practice the philosophic life anywhere else.19 the regime killed him, but, despite not being a liberal democracy in the modern sense, it was the most open of the ancient polities and it permitted him to philosophize until he was 70 years old.20 he was in many ways a critic and certainly not a flatterer of the athenian regime, but he also knew that its value to philosophy exceeded that of any other regime available to him. a related objection would be that a partisan to a regime cannot be truly philosophic. yet being a partisan to a particular regime is compatible with philosophic openness if one refuses to accept that thought and action are necessarily connected. because the highest aim of the public university is thought and not action, it can tolerate and even express support for an imperfect regime and imperfect political action provided the regime tolerates the public university’s highest aim. in other words, a necessarily imperfect liberal democracy is not the highest aim of the public university, the political role of the public university 184 but rather a condition of its functioning. in supporting an imperfect means to its highest aim, the university does not necessarily compromise its highest aim. indeed, it makes its highest aim more possible. by contrast, were liberal democracy to become the highest aim of the public university, then the public university would cease to be a university in the proper sense. so long as the regime is seen as a means and not an end, partisan allegiance to the regime is compatible with one’s ultimate loyalty being to philosophy. moreover, in the case of the american liberal democratic regime, its particular character demands of its citizens a degree of philosophic openness and therefore partisan loyalty to the american regime that significantly overlaps with loyalty to philosophy. alexander hamilton tells us that the american regime is the product of “reflection and choice” and not “accident and force.”21 american citizens therefore have a special obligation to reflect as philosophically as possible upon their regime and the alternatives to it. in other words, the demand for an enriched civic loyalty to the american regime’s origins challenges americans to retrace and reflect upon the statesmanship that produced the regime. and that retracing and reflection should produce a philosophical openness both to liberal democracy and to the alternatives to it that were considered and rejected during the american founding. political philosophy must therefore be a concern of the most thoughtful adherents of the american regime. a further objection to my proposal would note that universities have flourished under prior regimes. and so one would be led to question why a public university must commit itself to one particular regime, liberal democracy. however, this objection is unsound. every regime demands loyalty to itself; no regime is exempt from this requirement. and so no regime has ever been perfectly open. there are many sorts of regimes. but in light of the public university’s interest in the greatest philosophic openness, it should especially support the most open regime. and because any open regime is perpetually at risk of becoming less open, the public university has an obligation to itself continuously to promote political openness and to contribute to a culture of liberty. one might also object that liberal democracy is not necessarily the best regime. perhaps one should favor aristocratic elevation of some people over the alleged flatness of liberal democracy. and so perhaps the university is being too self-interested or partial to itself in promoting liberal democracy. a reply to this objection would be to accept the premise that aristocratic elevation is desirable, and would point to the university as a mechanism for that elevation. provided that a 185 bradizza university advances toward or accomplishes its mission of philosophic reflection and liberal education, it (together with other universities) elevates those best fit for elevation. in other words, the public university can be part of those elements of civil society that aim at broadening aristocratic excellence within a democratic polity. if one aims at the aristocratic elevation of a society, then the alternative to this sort of decentralized, non-regime-based elevation is a regimebased elevation of the society by means of legal compulsion. and that legal compulsion might have the effect of restricting the highest aims of the public university. the public university should oppose such legal compulsion. it should have the self-confidence that it can function as part of a network of institutions of higher education (and, more generally, as part of the various institutions of civil society) in pursuit of the general elevation of society.22 indeed, that proper public goal of higher education was perhaps the central argument of allan bloom’s the closing of the american mind.23 if higher education in our day is unable to contribute to the aristocratic elevation of the society because of its own defects (as bloom’s critique holds), then the response should be an internal reform of higher education, and not the promotion of an aristocratic regime to replace our liberal democracy. this defense of aristocratic elevation within the context of liberal democracy might be met with the reply that liberal democracy may contain within itself the seeds of its own destruction. this is a radicalization of the previous argument, as if to say: not only is liberal democracy low but it is headed for collapse. in a variation on this objection, liberal democracy will make of us nietzschean last men. if this objection is sound, then it is a damning and decisive refutation of liberal democracy, because it implies that in its mature practice, liberal democracy is unjust. this is obviously a question of the deepest importance to liberal democrats. answering it requires the very best scholarship and philosophic reflection, and the public university can be a part of that important research project. if we arrive at the answer that some alternative to liberal democracy is required, then the public university will have contributed to that important finding. in the meantime, a liberal democratic regime can offer public universities the freedom to investigate the defects of liberal democratic regimes. a final objection would point to contemporary campus dysfunctions to help make the general point that the freedom offered by liberal democracy is not always used responsibly, often, and perhaps especially, in universities. this objection certainly hits the mark. in fact, and more generally, any freedom can be abused. in consequence, we permit and support restraints on our the political role of the public university 186 freedom of action because we want to avoid harming each other. actions (including some speech) can sometimes be connected to consequences as cause to effect. where a clear cause/effect connection can be made between actions and harms, we can establish principled limits on how much we restrain the actions of our fellow citizens in an effort to avoid harms. in a liberal democracy, those principled limits are defined by the police power of government, or its power to restrain our actions for the sake of health, safety, and morals. but with respect to speech, caution is here in order. there are no principled limits in attempts to silence dissenting political or philosophic views, including harmful ones. while free speech can be used irresponsibly, legislative authority to stifle irresponsible speech can also be used irresponsibly. whether we choose free speech or regulated speech, we will be exposed to irresponsibility. we must therefore choose the least dangerous of two paths to possible irresponsibility. the solution to cultural decay is a better culture, not legislative action that stifles free inquiry. that better culture can and should have as part of its support our universities, including our public universities. in brief, we should be cautious about giving up on liberal democracy and its freedoms because we don’t like some of the abuses of freedom that we are witnessing in our day. conclusion universities are fragile because it is a short step from philosophy to dogmatism, and from independent thought to conformism. as creatures of the state, public universities are especially fragile. the task of professors and administrators is to recognize this fragility. and it is also their task to recognize that notwithstanding their own very real and exceptional talents and accomplishments, most of them have a modest place in world intellectual history. they should be satisfied to preserve and transmit and, within their capacities, advance civilization by defending the life of the mind that universities have institutionalized. this task is inherently political. having willed the ends, they must will the means. those means include support for liberal democracy, a careful study of alternatives to liberal democracy, and a willingness to resist regime pressures. the life of the mind—the best life—demands nothing less. 187 bradizza notes 1. nemetz 426. 2. strauss, “what is liberal education?” 3. 3. plato, apology 23c1. 4. again, this philosophic mission can encompass modern natural science and the arts. 5. this, in turn, carries with it, among other risks, the risk of mediocrity. see heimberger, especially 1085–1086. 6. besvinick 568. 7. newman ix; emphasis his. 8. newman xiii. 9. this has been a constant idea in public higher education. see chase, especially 65; and west 195–97. 10. john scott counts six missions of universities. his descriptions of each of these six missions overlap sufficiently that all six could be redescribed as simply “public service” (scott 4). 11. garlough and pryor. 12. fox and sakolsky. 13. lynch 1063. 14. forsyth 20. 15. slevin 64. 16. hamburger 2014. 17. see plato, republic 557b2–558c6. 18. tocqueville 668–69 (iii.4.7). the political role of the public university 188 19. plato, apology 37b–38a. 20. strauss, “what is political philosophy?” 36. 21. hamilton 27. 22. this general elevation should be conducted one person at a time. see piel 150. we should be wary of proposals such as that of anthony nemetz, in which the university would lead an otherwise rudderless liberal society. see nemetz 434. 23. bloom. works cited besvinick, sidney l. “integrity and the future of the university.” the journal of higher education 54.5 (september/october 1983): 566–73. bloom, allan. the closing of the american mind. new york: simon & schuster, 1987. chase, harry woodburn. “the state in higher education.” the journal of higher education 2.2 (february 1931): 57–65. forsyth, hannah. “disinterested scholars or interested parties?: the public’s investment in self-interested universities.” in through a glass darkly: the social sciences look at the neoliberal university. edited by margaret thornton. canberra, australia: anu press, 2015. 19–36. fox, dennis, and ron sakolsky. “from ‘radical university’ to agent of the state.” the radical teacher 53 (fall 1998): 13–18. garlough, christine, and anne pryor. “fearlessly ‘sifting and winnowing’: folklore and the wisconsin idea.” western folklore 70.3–4 (summer-fall 2011): 243–253. hamburger, philip. is administrative law unlawful? chicago: university of chicago press, 2014. 189 bradizza hamilton, alexander. “no. 1.” in alexander hamilton, james madison, and john jay. the federalist papers. edited by clinton rossiter and charles kesler. new york: signet, 2003. heimberger, frederic. “the state universities.” daedalus 93.4 (fall 1964): 1083–1108. lynch, rebecca gose. “pawns of the state or priests of democracy? analyzing professors’ academic freedom rights within the state’s managerial realm.” california law review 91.4 (july 2003): 1061–1108. nemetz, anthony. “the university and society: a perspective.” the journal of higher education 32.8 (november 1961): 425–434. newman, john henry. the idea of a university. 6th ed. london: longmans, green, and co., 1886. piel, gerard. “public support for autonomous universities.” daedalus 104.1 (winter 1975): 148–155. plato. apology. in plato and aristophanes. four texts on socrates. 2nd ed. translated by thomas g. west and grace starry west. ithaca: cornell university press, 1998. _____. the republic. 2nd ed. translated by allan bloom. new york: basic books, 1991. scott, john c. “the mission of the university: medieval to postmodern transformations.” the journal of higher education 77.1 (january-february 2006): 1–39. slevin, james f. “keeping the university occupied and out of trouble.” profession (2002): 63–71. strauss, leo. “what is liberal education?” in liberalism ancient and modern. new york: basic books, 1968. _____. “what is political philosophy?” in what is political philosophy? chicago: university of chicago press, 1959. tocqueville, alexis de. democracy in america. edited and translated by harvey mansfield and delba winthrop. chicago: university of chicago press, 2000. the political role of the public university 190 west, thomas g. the political theory of the american founding. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2017. microsoft word boettke and jace prooftext.docx [expositions 13.1 (2019) 46–66] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 creativity and cleverness within discipline in the study of man and the study of happiness peter boettke clara elizabeth jace george mason university once man is conceived in the image of an artifact, who constructs himself through his own choices, he sheds the animalistically determined path of existence laid out for him by the orthodox economists’ model. a determined and programmed existence is replaced by the uncertain and exciting quest that life must be. –james buchanan1 1. introduction in aquinas and the market (2018), mary hirschfeld plays the role of scholarly ambassador between two highly specialized disciplines that too rarely interact: economics and theology. her thorough exposition of economics provides students of theology with a welcome introduction to the discipline well worth a careful reading. we are economists by training, so our criticisms will focus on this aspect of her work. but, her excellent account of the thought of aquinas, it should be acknowledged, will help students of economics learn the relevance of thomist philosophy for their work in the positive analysis of human decision making as well as normative welfare economics. and due to the ease with which hirschfeld negotiates not only between economics and theology, but also engages biblical reading, church doctrine, practical affairs, and a broader culture conversation, aquinas and the market is fit for a much broader audience: parishes, churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, and other communities of faith.2 hirschfeld envisions a thomistic economics in which “the overarching question is how economic life should serve genuine human happiness” (209). we agree that this is the upmost question and hope to show that who answers this question is of upmost importance methodologically, analytically, and social philosophically.3 embracing the thomistic view of happiness as the pursuit of the ultimate good through rightlyordered reason (i.e., virtue) is an ongoing process of solving three kinds of problems: the technical, 47 boettke and jace     the economic, and the moral. discerning the role economics plays in this quest means locating which kinds of problems the discipline of economics is best equipped to address, and how the discipline can contribute to a productive conversation on those problems.4 technical problems are defined as choosing among alternative means to achieve a stated end. these are in essence “engineering” problems, best addressed by decision science, and are wrestled with continuously throughout all levels of society (e.g., firms, governments, families, churches, etc.) by conscious planning and management of organizational activities. the question for social science is not whether to have planning or no planning, but who is doing the planning, how do alternative organizational arrangements impact those planning decisions, and for whom are those decisions to be made.5 economics adds greatly to this conversation by thinking through the situational logic of organizational arrangements. strictly speaking, economic problems are defined by the allocation of scarce resources among competing ends. individuals are best equipped to solve these problems due to “knowledge problems” and “incentive alignment” reasons. conflating the economic problem with the technical problem is a source of much confusion in the scientific as well as broader cultural conversation. economics, as a social science, is not primarily concerned with “allocation” so much as “exchange relationships” and the institutions within which exchange takes place.6 much of hirschfeld’s rightful criticisms of textbook economics stem from this conflation in some presentations of the subject. we hope to highlight how this can be avoided by focusing on exchange and institutions, rather than optimization and allocational efficiency. finally, moral problems involve “the proper exercise of human reason that lies not only in discerning what goods are worthy of pursuit but also in thinking of how to order the infinite goods in our lives into a meaningful whole” (82). despite her rejection of deirdre mccloskey’s narrow reading of prudence, we believe that hirschfeld would ultimately agree with mccloskey that narrow self-interest explanations (what mccloskey dubs “prudence only” explanations7) are not only bad social philosophy, they also reflect bad economic reasoning and cannot explain fundamental issues in commercial life let alone large scale questions such as modern economic growth. but, it is important to balance that critique of prudence only reasoning with an acknowledgement that explanations that are blind to prudence considerations are perhaps even worse exercises in social science and social philosophy. moreover, we would argue that only a human person can make these moral choices, but with the important caveat that we must recognize creativity and cleverness within discipline 48     how communities and cultures play an indispensable role by framing the choice environment within which individuals choose.8 the distinction between the three kinds of problems is not fixed in any real sense, but it gives a clue as to the limits of economics in answering certain questions. this review proceeds as follows. first, we present the main arguments in hirschfeld’s text, paying special attention to the types of problems discussed over the course of the book. second, we enter into direct conversation with our fellow economists to address the valid critiques made by hirschfeld. we suggest that a clear picture of the required reconstruction of a useful economics that can contribute to the cultural conversation hirschfeld wants to cultivate is already latent in the writings of several scholars in economics that she failed to draw on. these are not obscure thinkers, but leading figures in the history of the discipline and nobel prize winning economists.9 finally, we close by introducing a group of thomist economists from sixteenth-century spain: the school of salamanca. this group of professor-priests developed the first body of economic analysis using the scholastic method (of which aquinas is the model) and promulgated their ideas in guides for confessors, merchant business ethics handbooks, public lectures, and letters to the king, among other avenues. it is their role as confessors for merchants that interests us most here, as it is in this capacity that the visions of man-as-he-is and man-as-he-could-be come together most intensely. the overarching point of this review is that the social function of confessors, or moral leaders more broadly, is the key to bringing hirschfeld’s project, thomistic economics, to life.10 2. themes of aquinas and the market hirschfeld’s six chapters can be summed up by three themes: explaining the economic view of the person, juxtaposing it with the thomist view of the person, and providing a positive account for the ways in which thomist insights can be incorporated into economic thought. no economist would take issue with her presentation of the principles, though her critiques occasionally slip back into narrow definitions of self-interest, utility, economic goods, etc. which unfortunately obscure her underlying point.11 hirschfeld’s presentation, it merits repeating, is not restricted to academics but is meant to encourage a deeper cultural conversation about the humane economy. we agree with that message wholeheartedly. in that regard is useful to remember that hirschfeld’s practical discussion bridges not only the academic disciplines of economics and theology, but the lessons from these disciplines for faith communities in general. indeed, the natural law tradition of aquinas has roots not only in his catholicism, but in protestantism (reformed), judaism 49 boettke and jace     (maimonides), islam (averroes), and by its very definition, can resonate with all peoples in all times. in hirschfeld’s preface she describes her initial attraction to economics, “to have smart things to say about human flourishing,” the increasing frustrations she had with the metaphysics implied by the economic view of the person, and her subsequent expedition into “a theological approach to economics based on the thought of thomas aquinas […] a vision of a humane economy” (xvi). instead of reading the book as a critique of economics and the market economy based on aquinas, it should be clear to the reader that hirschfeld is proposing a marriage between economics and theology as a way to seek answers to her own life’s guiding questions. chapter one opens with an investigation: “does [capitalism] promote a culture that is excessively materialistic?” (1). arguing in the affirmative, hirschfeld criticizes the existing separation between economics and theology and presents her vision of a renewed partnership in which theology, the queen of the sciences from the scholastic point of view, takes the lead role again as it did in an earlier time. she goes on to describe the disorder that arises when economics instead supplants theology: “[o]nce the public square is shaped around the shared goal of achieving prosperity, the instrumental character of prosperity becomes obscured. we forget to ask what our material wealth is for […]” (3). the answer to that question cannot be found in economics. hirschfeld herself argues that the economic view of the person “is thus impeded in multiple ways from pursuing happiness as aquinas understands it. insofar as descriptions of practical reason serve as guides to how we live, the rational choice model cannot be seen as neutral” (209). we agree, the economist qua economist is unable “to distinguish between natural and disordered concupiscent desires,” a distinction that is necessary for making a moral judgement (167). consider the concrete case, hirschfeld introduces, of whether or not one should purchase a dishwasher: the question of whether the dishwasher promotes or hinders the flourishing of the household thus depends on what the dishwasher is really ordered to. the key here is that the proper decision making involves looking at goods and service in a larger context, asking what role they play in constructing the shape of our lives. (177– 178) creativity and cleverness within discipline 50     the knowledge required to answer this moral question is concentrated most fully in the individual, though her close friends and faith community can exemplify prudence and remind her to orient her choices toward the ultimate good. on the incentive side, an individual generally has the strongest natural desire for her well-being, though family, friends and close community can once again help her see which choices will actually result in her true happiness.12 hirschfeld makes a rather stark contrast, claiming that “economic logic is a matter of calculations, whereas prudence is a matter of discernment” (179). but she may be overplaying her hand here. calculation is a necessary input into a responsible discerning by a prudent decision maker. critical to advancing the very cultural conversation that hirschfeld is aspiring to cultivate is an intellectual discipline that enables the conversation to move from a discourse over desirable ideals to sorting based on their practical feasibility, and finally to the harsh reality of their financial viability.13 none of this intellectual discipline and weeding out of loose argumentation can happen unless we acknowledge the knowledge problems actors face that must be resolved, the incentive alignment issues that must be tackled by that actors we are studying, and the essential role that economic calculation plays in this resolving and tackling of the social dilemmas faced. the economic point of view does add something valuable to the cultural conversation even in the illustration of a mundane decision— for example, predicting which dishwasher will be chosen given constraints and the relative prices of alternatives offered in the marketplace. let us be quick to remind everyone that hirschfeld’s main point throughout her explanation of the economic way of thinking is that while it certainly has its place, it is a poor substitute for full moral reasoning. but who could disagree? aquinas’s view of the human person and his corresponding argument for what true happiness consists of is central to hirschfeld’s exposition. questions 1–5 (i–ii) of aquinas’s summa theologica consider the various sources of happiness for human beings—such as wealth, fame, power, and pleasure—to investigate whether any of these things can logically be the source of true happiness for humans. he finally concludes that true happiness can only be found in god, thus all human choices will only result in happiness so long as they are aimed at this uncreated, eternal good.14 for aquinas, “it is our act of becoming beings who can pursue these goods in an excellent way that constitutes the full realization of our nature […] our truest happiness lies in the agency we exercise in obtaining them” (108). the virtues—and prudence in particular—enable people to use their freedom to choose most excellently. in sum: “prudence is aquinas’s alternative to the 51 boettke and jace     rational choice theory of economists as an account of the type of reason that can guide us toward genuine happiness” (106). hirschfeld, throughout her text, is seeking to find the common ground for a lasting union between economics and theology, and she believes one promising path is that economists view all human acts as aiming at infinite happiness (utility). however, she asserts that economists are misguided by thinking about it in overly narrow and in explicitly quantitative terms, since aquinas would argue that “reason is not inherently quantitative in nature” but qualitative in that it concerns a fullness, a completion of the human person as he was created to become (80). this undue emphasis on measurable objectives over richer qualities also influences the economists’ obsession with economic growth.15 hirschfeld asks: “we will always be infinitely far from satiety, so what sort of good does economic growth actually achieve?” (63). from a policy perspective, this suspicious view of economic growth makes sense, since trying to orchestrate growth via public policy is an act of extreme hubris. rather, economic growth is desirable because it reflects that wealth is being created—the clever people we are studying are peacefully cooperating and exercising their creativity. they, not us, must have found rules that enable them to live better together than they ever could in isolation. consider that sustainable economic growth is actually just the side-effect of many moral behaviors: saving for one’s future, supporting a family, investing in children, etc. hirschfeld is in favor of exploring broader measures for a country’s well-being. the key is to keep the material, quantitative aspects of wealth creation aligned with the higher human goods. her broad vision of thomist economics is expressed by two basic principles: the first, as we have seen, is the importance of ordering lower ends to higher ends. markets and financial instruments are ordered to the provision of natural wealth, which, in turn, is ordered to human happiness understood as perfection […]. the second basic principle is that our economic exchanges must be just. there should be some rough equivalence in exchange. (133–134) insofar as economic analysis cannot be used to adjudicate between the goodness of ends, this is where moral leaders come into play. economists must humbly step out of the way for this particular endeavor. creativity and cleverness within discipline 52     3. message to economists hirschfeld rightly calls out economists who try to solve moral problems from their economic perspective. though her solution is to replace the economic view with a more theologicallyinformed view of the person—a move for which we have our own hesitations—her criticisms of standard textbook economics and a lot of loose thinking in welfare economics appear to be solidly grounded. consider one of her most incisive arguments: “insofar as descriptions of practical reason serve as guides to how we live, the rational choice model cannot be seen as neutral. economists may deny that their models serve as guides, but their introductory textbooks show otherwise” (209). either economists must acknowledge and act out the position that the rational choice model is meant to describe rather than prescribe actions, or economists must come up with a better guide for human behavior. like behavioral economics, hirschfeld is much in favor of the latter solution. the mainline tradition of economic scholarship (introduced in n9 below) sees both options as compatible within their own spheres. proper use of a tool requires that the craftsman knows its limits. while the rational choice model maps very well onto human problem-solving in both the technical and economic sense, it cannot capture certain important aspects. in other words, though it demands equal dignity and capability across human actors, it leaves key mysteries of the human person unaddressed. hirschfeld writes: the rational choice model cannot account for the creativity involved in entrepreneurship, as the austrian school of economics has long argued […]. but entrepreneurship seems to be nearer this sort of self-creation than a model of profit maximization would suggest […] one could at least say that the fact of entrepreneurship should make economists wary about identifying reason so narrowly with the calculations of a particular sort of instrumental reason. (77–78) at this juncture in her argument, though, she compels us to discuss the missed opportunities for the reconstruction of economics as well as hirschfeld’s opportunity to engage in a more nuanced conversation with other economists who resided at the borderland between economics and theology. consider the case of philip wicksteed. wicksteed was not only a theologian, but a classicist and medievalist as well as an economist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. wicksteed’s the common sense of political economy (1910) was a classic in the development of 53 boettke and jace     early neoclassical economics. for the epigraph to the entire work, wicksteed choose a quote from the german poet goethe that reads: “we are all doing it, though none of know we are doing it.” note here that contrary to the instructive or prescriptive view of the rational choice model and marginal analysis, wicksteed is arguing that in our capacity as human choosers we engage in these sort of decision calculus—both large and small—constantly throughout our days. he provides ample illustrations to make his point, from the housewife organizing the affairs for her family to caesar’s choice of when to cut off his motivating speech to his troops before battle. we are, indeed, all doing it, though none of us know we are doing it. furthermore, as wicksteed argues, there is a “non-tuism” in economic relations. there is nothing degrading or revolting to our higher purpose, he assures his readers, from the economist’s recognition that in the complex division of labor that constitutes modern commercial society individuals will mutually further each other’s purposes because each are interested in furthering their own. paul, we learn in acts, was able to advance his ministry through the production and sale of tents. that his goal was not to secure profits as an end, but instead to advance his ministry and the spread of the word of christ, is perfectly consistent with the economic way of thinking. by overplaying her hand at times and not finding these allies in the history of the discipline, hirschfeld is forced to tread a lonely path. the insights of wicksteed might have changed the way, for example, that hirschfeld discussed the relationship between the firm, the market, and virtue. “the virtuous firm thus attends to profits,” she tell us, “but not with the aim of maximizing them. rather, the aim would be to ensure that the goods and services it produces are of value to the community and that the resources used in the production of those goods and services are being used wisely” (138, also see 154). however, this just brings us back to our distinction between who is to do the planning/management, and who is the responsible actor. hirschfeld’s position is subtle because she is far from an interventionist with a moral purpose in mind. this is not her prescription. but in imagining the humane economy, who is to determine the objective function of the firm owner and/or manager? yes, aquinas’s framework may give us scope for envisioning business practices that are in the service of higher goods that produce genuine human happiness, but who makes that decision in the humane economy? and doesn’t that bring us back not only to the broader cultural conversation that hirschfeld wants to cultivate, but also to a recognition within that conversation of the non-tuism and the essential role of economic calculation in organizing economic life? creativity and cleverness within discipline 54     in our reading, we want to stress as well that wicksteed is not the only missed opportunity for scholarly engagement in hirschfeld’s discussion. frank knight, who first studied theology prior to pursuing economics, is another early neoclassical economist who had a much richer view of the individual as well as the ongoing economic process than is presented in the textbook caricature of both homo economicus and perfect competition. as hirschfeld has already acknowledged in her passing reference to the austrian school, thinkers such as ludwig von mises and f. a. hayek could have been grouped in the same intellectual camp as wicksteed and knight in seeing both the science of economics and the broader social philosophical tradition within which economics developed—what in adam smith’s time was called the moral sciences—as providing scope for the sort of questions her thomist perspective wants to put on the table. as very appreciative readers of her excellent book, we wish aquinas and the market had grappled with this broader history of the discipline—a history where the borderland between economics and theology was often the starting point, was routinely crossed, and where many leading practitioners comfortably resided. the natural law tradition, for example, was part of the educational background of economists and political economists throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and continued into the beginning of the twentieth. the question that motivated the classical economists as well as the early neoclassical economists was to discover what institutional arrangement could, while relying only on the ordinary motivations of individuals with limited cognitive capacities, induce them to realize productive specialization and peaceful social cooperation. their answer was that such a system could be found in the private property and competitive market order. this discovery did not commit them to any wooden conception of laissez-faire. their argument for private property and free competition did not rely on any assumption of full and complete rationality, or any notion of perfect competition. but it did attempt to instill an appropriate appreciation of the cleverness and creativity of ordinary individuals to realize mutual gains from trade, and in the power of “invisible hand” reasoning to unearth the mysteries of the complex coordination of human society. the social cooperation under the division of labor illustrated in adam smith’s discussion of the production and distribution of the common-woolen coat, as well as the power of the price system to guide decisions near and far as illustrated in f. a. hayek’s tin example, are developed to convey a sense of awe in the spontaneous order of commercial life. it was an argument about the utilization of local knowledge and the alignment of incentives. it is precisely through the workings of the 55 boettke and jace     institutional framework of property, prices, and profit-and-loss, that individuals were prodded, guided, lured and disciplined in such a way that the invisible hand proposition about the common good was derived from the rational choice postulate about the pursuit of private interest. the economist dennis robertson (1956) asked rhetorically “what do economists economize on?” his answer, we argue, is critically valuable to hirschfeld’s discussion of economics and theology. we economists, he argued, economize on love in our explanations of the workings of social systems. love is the most precious of all resources. if our explanations of social order required love to make them work, then this precious and scarce resource would be exhausted in short order. but precisely because through the tools of economic reasoning, we can demonstrate how knowledge problems are addressed and incentive alignment issues are resolved through the pursuit of self-interest (rightly understood) within a private property market economy, then love can be conserved and directed toward more valuable pursuits in human society. it is through such a chain of reasoning, one might suggest, how a vision of a humane economy can be moved from contemplation of the desirable to the realm of the feasible and ultimately to the practice of the viable. questions of justice (see hirschfeld 183–186), and the obstacles to justice, become concretely institutional as much as deeply philosophical. institutional problems demand institutional solutions, as well as philosophical speculation. hirschfeld spends a significant time in aquinas and the market discussing the limitations of the basic view of the individual decision maker in textbook neoclassical economics. and while she draws from developments in behavioral economics to make points of criticism, this is not her main tool of intellectual leverage. but once again, we fear she may have missed an important opportunity in her discussion of the model of rational choice and discerning acts as opposed to calculative acts. the reason we believe this is a missed opportunity is not due to a methodological defense of parsimony and “as if” styles of reasoning in defense of textbook models of rational choice. instead, we want to suggest that calculating need not reduce down to a simple exercise in maximizing often for the very reasons that hirschfeld has already identified. calculation in modern economic life is vital precisely because economic actors must choose in a world of uncertainty, and must find coping mechanisms for their ignorance, and to discover various ways to peer through the dark fog of the future to pursue imagined futures. behavioral economics is not very helpful with this since it still leaves the rational choice as maximizing model as the normative benchmark against which creativity and cleverness within discipline 56     fallible but capable human choosers are judged against. instead, hirschfeld could have turned to nobel prize winning economists such as james buchanan and his idea of artifactual man (used as our epigraph), vernon smith and his notion of ecological rationality, and elinor ostrom and her development of the behavioral approach to rational choice theory. these approaches represent a form of rational choice theory as practiced by humans. and these humans are engaged in the agony of choice that constitute the very discernment that hirschfeld discusses. this discerning human chooser is the foundational building block of mainline economics from adam smith to vernon smith. again, the core idea in this tradition of scholarship is that the invisible hand proposition is derived from the rational choice postulate via institutional analysis. context matters. that context in human social interaction is provided by the institutional framework under examination. the constitutive parts of that institutional framework are the formal and informal rules of the social game and their enforcement. rules of just conduct must be every bit as central to the discourse on economic growth as resource ownership, capital accumulation, the allocation of labor talents, and entrepreneurial innovation. furthermore, this knowledge of the interaction between the economic/financial, the political/legal, and the social/cultural must all be incorporated as thoroughly as is possible in the broader cultural conversation that hirschfeld is attempting to cultivate. but, if all is how we say it is with the mainline tradition of economic scholarship, what keeps modern mainstream economists tethered to their narrowly-defined rational choice model, their static models of competitive equilibrium, and their sophisticated statistical analysis of data sets? hirschfeld proposes a theory: “although economists see themselves as generating knowledge for its own sake, the prestige of the discipline is tied up with their ability to offer advice to policy makers on how to regulate markets to pursue various goals” (200). perhaps this desire to be politically valuable also keeps the economics profession from engaging with other disciplines. nearly every economist would acknowledge that other disciplines generate insights into the human condition, though in practice few are willing to engage in anthropology, sociology, history, etc. from aquinas’s point of view, this is inefficient; “a thomistic economics would be explicitly oriented toward interdisciplinary study” (211). we see the tradition of mainline economics, in both its emphasis on intellectual humility and deeper conception of the human person, as a solution to many of the critiques levied by hirschfeld against economists. 57 boettke and jace     4. pragmatic implications: the role of confessor economics as a discipline historically served to put parameters on utopias. political economy at its finest is by definition non-ideal theorizing. given scarcity, thus the necessity of trade-offs, and thus the necessity of negotiating those trade-offs, we rely on aids to the human mind that are provided by the pattern of property rights, relative prices, and profit-and-loss statements. part of hirschfeld’s message which cannot be denied is that incentives are tricky, and there is no morally neutral way for economic policy makers to manipulate human actors through structuring of incentives to induce behavior. strings are definitely attached to all such efforts, whether we are talking about tax and subsidy schemes, stimulants for private investment, or reforms intended to produce efficient governance in the public sector. the deeper cultural conversation must address the tricky nature of incentives, the unintended consequences of even the most public-spirited of initiatives, and the strings attached to the nudging of private and public decisions. being critical of these efforts, however, does not give license to ignore the reality of constraints and feasibility tests. political economy at its finest must be non-ideal theorizing if it is going to help in our public deliberations over improvements in the human condition. at the end of the day, hirschfeld is a trained economist—one who has demonstrated mastery of the economic way of thinking. this is why her desire to reside at the border between economics and theology is so intriguing. an economist who “got religion” and rejected economics would not be that interesting, or at least not any more interesting than a theologian who gave up on grace to embrace the harsh logic of economics. no, what makes hirschfeld’s work so compelling is her desire to reconcile and enrich the conversations from both sides through this intellectual union. as a result, while she is willing to let her mind wander to contemplate the utopian ideal, she comes back to the reality of imperfect humans operating in an imperfect world. hirschfeld makes it clear that she is not interested only in contemplating an ideal of human choice—worthy as that is—but also in how people really act. as we have argued, the individual is not left to her own devices when encountering the moral problems of life. while she alone must ultimately choose, she can assemble a community of prudent friends around her to aid and encourage her in choosing ends that will correspond with her true happiness. this is where the role of a confessor—or close friends, respected moral role models, and other secular substitutes—comes into play.16 one magnificent historical example of confessors in the history of thomist economics is the school of salamanca, a group of professor-priests in sixteenth-century spain.17 many of them were creativity and cleverness within discipline 58     dominicans just like st. thomas aquinas, and all of them studied his thought and wrote in the same scholastic method. the story of tomás de mercado, one of the foremost scholars of the school, exemplifies their tradition. mercado, a dominican priest and lecturer at the university of salamanca, authored one of the first and most famous merchant handbooks at the request of his close merchant friend angelo brunengo. many confessors and scholars at the time viewed merchant activity with suspicion, and the result was contradictory advice in the confessional.18 this confusion led merchants to request formal guidance on their work as new trade opportunities multiplied with the discovery of the new world. mercado saw that the work of transporting goods, drawing up contracts, and changing of currency served the common good and could be justly pursued. he offers this advice to merchants on choosing a confessor: “before you choose one, you should make sure that he is learned, wise and somewhat understood in business, without being too scrupulous…the little learned, inexperienced and scruffy lawyer is not for the merchant.”19 these original thomist economists were ultimately interested in the morality of economic life (being that their primary role was that of confessor), and it was by establishing the first body of economic thought that they were able to better distinguish among the technical, economic, and moral problems facing their parishioners. they supplemented their economic analysis with business ethics based on natural law and emphasized activities that would now be understood as field work and interdisciplinary study. the fruitful partnership between economics and theology illustrated throughout aquinas and the market found its embodiment in the scholars of the school. familiar with the account of the fall in genesis, these scholars recognized that human choice is “not about efficiently getting what we want so much as it is about learning how to want what is genuinely good” (hirschfeld 84). 5. concluding thoughts one of the virtues of the economic way of thinking from a moral perspective is that it teaches its students to focus on the unseen effects of a choice. in aquinas and the market, hirschfeld thoroughly illustrates the disorder that arises when human choice is both modeled and guided by purely material metrics. it need not be so, and hirschfeld offers a vision of a humane economics that is founded upon a richer view of the human person. however, by its nature of a scientific discipline practiced by imperfect human persons, economics will never be able to solve anything more than technical and economic problems, no matter how accurate its model of the human 59 boettke and jace     person. we argue that the mainline economics tradition offers a more fitting approach to the economic view of the person, without stepping into the business of moral prescription. moral problems can only be worked out by the individuals and communities with the necessary contextual knowledge and best-aligned incentives. the school of salamanca contains various elements of what hirschfeld is looking for from economics—the full realism of imperfection married to a vision for a better person. what enabled these scholars to take this approach was the fact that they were active professors, priests, and confessors. for this reason, we see this text bearing the most fruit in faith communities which possess the necessary knowledge and incentives to help one another in living their freedom to choose excellently. let us end with another appeal to hirschfeld regarding the potential opportunity to diagnose the shortcomings of mainstream economics for participating in the cultural conversations she hopes to cultivate. the reason why the mainline economics of adam smith and david hume, of j. b. say and j.s. mill, and of carl menger and alfred marshall was displaced by the mainstream economics of j.m. keynes and paul samuelson in the second half of the twentieth century was, as hirschfeld alludes to, the hubris of economists as social engineers. economics in the process was transformed from a tool of social understanding in the hands of the classical political economists to a tool of social engineering in the hands of the economic scientists of the neoclassical synthesis.20 there were pockets of resistance to this transformation, and hirschfeld’s effort to reconstruct economics along lines that could usefully dialogue with theology might benefit from more engagement with the ideas of these resistors. the challenge to the hubristic excess of modern mainstream economics was not relegated to heterodox edges but finds adherence among notable nobel prize winning economists. in f.a. hayek’s nobel lecture in 1974, “the pretense of knowledge,” he begins by imploring his fellow economists to recognize that they had indeed made a mess of things. he warns that the scientistic attitude which modern mainstream economics had adopted not only threatened to reduce the discipline to the state of charlatanism but places the economists in the position of tyrant over their fellow citizens and potential destroyers of civilization. economists, hayek insists, are students of civilization—never saviors. we must be restricted to this role if we are going to effectively prevent the hubristic tendencies of economists to turn them into dangers to society. prior to his lecture, hayek also made dinner remarks arguing creativity and cleverness within discipline 60     that a nobel prize in economics should not have been created since it gave too much authority to its recipients in matters of public policy discussions. hayek was not alone in calling for humility in our discipline. james buchanan begins his 1986 nobel address by telling the audience that we economists must cease practicing our professional task as if our job was to offer advice to a benevolent despot. this is not our job, and never was appropriate for us to assume this was our job within a functioning democratic society. elinor ostrom, in her 2009 nobel lecture entitled “beyond markets and states,” joined the group of voices calling for a more humble and ultimately more democratic approach to social science and public policy. she sums up what she has learned as follows: the most important lesson for public policy analysis derived from the intellectual journey i have outlined here is that humans have a more complex motivational structure and more capability to solve social dilemmas than posited in earlier rational-choice theory. designing institutions to force (or nudge) entirely selfinterested individuals to achieve better outcomes has been the major goal posited by policy analysts for governments to accomplish for much of the past half century. extensive empirical research leads me to argue that instead, a core goal of public policy should be to facilitate the development of institutions that bring out the best in humans. we need to ask how diverse polycentric institutions help or hinder the innovativeness, learning, adapting, trustworthiness, levels of cooperation of participants, and the achievement of more effective, equitable, and sustainable outcomes at multiple scales.21 humility and a sense of awe at the amazing cleverness and creativity in the face of a wide variety of social dilemmas that the subjects of our studies exhibit must move to the center of our professional mindset and inform the economic contribution to the broader cultural conversation that mary hirschfeld’s aquinas and the market invites us to join. 61 boettke and jace     notes 1. “natural and artifactual man” 110 in what should economists do? 2. “a theological economics is, of course, of immediate interest for believers who worry about how to reconcile their economic pursuits with their faith commitments” (3). 3. it is important to stress from the beginning of our commentary that hirschfeld is primarily talking about the cultural conversation, and not public policy advice. she practices great intellectual humility, and her writing throughout is inviting and open to a multiplicity of perspectives. our criticisms are primarily raising the possibility of “sins of omission” not “sins of commission" that could be important correctives to the dialogue. 4. one of us (boettke) is an author of the textbook, the economic way of thinking from the 10th thru 13th (2003–2014) editions of the book. hirschfeld singles out this textbook (202n25) as equating reason with instrumental reasoning of the means/ends variety of positive economics. the book does spend a lot of time trying to get students to understand the implications of scarcity and thus trade-offs, but the book explicitly recognizes the limits of economics. the original author, paul heyne, as a matter of personal history, traveled a similar path to that of hirschfeld’s though in the opposite direction—from student of theology to student of economics. he wrestled throughout this intellectual career with the dialogue between the two disciplines. see not only the concluding chapter to the various editions on “the limits of economics,” but also his collection of essays “are economists basically immoral?” and other essays on economics, ethics and religion. hirschfeld’s singling out of this work as representative is a missed opportunity we see throughout her book because the approach is a decidedly “catalactic” or “exchange” paradigm rather than an “optimizing” and “allocation” one. the key mantra in this discussion in the economic way of thinking is that economics cannot tell anyone whether profits are deserved or not, but economics can inform on the consequences of various answers to that question. we will return to this theme about what economics can, and cannot, offer to the broader cultural conversation. 5. see hayek, “the use of knowledge in society.” creativity and cleverness within discipline 62     6. see buchanan, “what should economists do?” (1964) in what should economists do?; also see kohn. 7. see the bourgeois virtues, “not by p alone: a virtuous economy,” and bourgeois dignity. 8. hirschfeld points out that, for aquinas, “human actions are also always moral actions […]. an action that does not move us toward our own perfection is a morally bad act, but it would also be inefficient in that it is incoherent to think of an efficient movement away from our proper end” (70). 9. boettke’s living economics and f.a. hayek, mainline economics (eds. boettke, haeffele and storr), and mitchell and boettke’s applied mainline economics have made the distinction between mainline and mainstream economists. hirschfeld is understandably focused on an engagement with mainstream economics as defined over the past halfcentury, but economics has a longer history and a more philosophically nuanced and sophisticated treatment of these issues that is much closer to her own position. we believe she could usefully leverage this tradition so we will discuss this possibility. 10. hirschfeld states: “aquinas, of course, is not addressing an audience of potential policy makers. in the prologue to the summa theologica, he says his intent in writing is to offer a better introduction to theological science than was available. it is meant for the ‘instruction of beginners.’ aquinas’s target audience was young dominicans studying for the priesthood, and the immediate need for a coherent theological treatment was for priests to offer parishioners practical guidance” (200, emphasis added). 11. an example of this: “for aquinas, prudence is not an exercise in constrained maximization […] it is the virtue that perfects all of our decision making, not just those decisions taken in light of our own narrow self-interest” (110, emphasis added). or another case: “a fundamental argument in favor of markets is that they maximize welfare. is that argument as powerful if we pause and remind ourselves that technically all that means is that markets meet consumers’ preferences as well as possible?” (48, emphasis added). there are a few ways in which one could take issue with the understanding of consumer preferences implied in this statement but suffice it to say that for the majority of the world, what 63 boettke and jace     economists describe as “consumer preferences” is a father’s desire for food for his family to a mother’s wish for her daughter’s education. 12. importantly, aquinas acknowledges the primacy of self-love: “accordingly, a man ought, out of charity, to love himself more than he loves any other person” (st ii–ii: 26: 4). 13. in governing the commons, elinor ostrom addresses the intellectual discipline that economic reasoning provides in discussions about social systems of exchange, production and distribution. “as an institutionalist studying empirical phenomena,” she states, i presume that individuals try to solve problems as effectively as they can. that assumption imposes a discipline on me. instead of presuming that some individuals are incompetent, evil, or irrational, and others are omniscient, i presume that individuals have very similar limited capabilities to reason and figure out the structure of complex environments. it is my responsibility as a scientist to ascertain what problems individuals are trying to solve and what factors help or hinder them in these efforts. when the problems that i observe involve lack of predictability, information, and trust, as well as high levels of complexity and transactional difficulties, then my efforts to explain must take these problems overtly into account rather than assuming them away. (25–26) also see where ostrom argues that the metaphor of the prisoners’ dilemma is precisely the wrong metaphor because in that game the prisoners are unable to change the constraints, and what she wants to explore is how the creative and clever actors within potential dilemmas craft new rules to the game that engender outcomes other than “remorseless tragedies” (7). 14. “final and perfect happiness can consist in nothing else than the vision of the divine essence. to make this clear, two points must be observed. first, that man is not perfectly happy, so long as something remains for him to desire and seek: secondly, that the perfection of any power is determined by the nature of its object” (st i–ii: 3: 8). creativity and cleverness within discipline 64     15. note here that a thoroughgoing subjectivism of, say, the founders of the marginalist revolution such as carl menger and especially the development of that subjectivist approach to value, costs, and expectations by subsequent thinkers such as ludwig von mises, f. a. hayek, g. l. s. shackle, and james m. buchanan might avoid some of the pitfalls hirschfeld attributes to textbook neoclassical economics. 16. we are not pursuing this line of thought, but it would be a worthy exercise (in our opinion) to explore the confessor role in moral education with adam smith’s discussion of the impartial spectator in the theory of moral sentiments (1759). 17. see grice-hutchinson and jace. 18. see hirschfeld (200) and the material quoted above in n6 concerning aquinas’s intended audience and his instructional purpose. 19. mercado 51. 20. see boettke, “economics and public administration.” 21. ostrom, “beyond markets and states” 237. works cited boettke, peter. “economics and public administration.” southern economic journal (april 2018): 938–959. _____. living economics. oakland, ca: independent institute, 2012. _____. f. a. hayek: economics, political economy, and social philosophy. london: palgrave/macmillan, 2018. _____, stefanie haeffele-balch, and virgil henry storr, eds. mainline economics. arlington, va: mercatus center, 2016. buchanan, james. what should economists do? indianapolis, in: liberty fund, 1979. 65 boettke and jace     grice-hutchinson, marjorie. the school of salamanca. oxford: oxford university press, 1952. hayek, friedrich a. the road to serfdom. chicago: university of chicago press, 1944. _____. “the use of knowledge in society.” american economic review 35.4 (september 1945): 519–530. heyne, paul. “are economists basically immoral?” and other essays in economics, ethics and religion. indianapolis, in: liberty fund, 2008. hirschfeld, mary. aquinas and the market: toward a humane economy. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2018. jace, clara. “an economic theory of economic analysis: the case of the school of salamanca.” ssrn, november 21, 2018. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm? abstract_id=3288861 kohn, meir. “the exchange paradigm: where to now?” review of austrian economics 20.2– 3 (september 2007): 201–203. mccloskey, deirdre n. bourgeois dignity: why economics can’t explain the modern world. chicago: university of chicago press, 2010. _____. the bourgeois virtues: ethics for an age of commerce. chicago: university of chicago press, 2006. _____. “not by p alone: a virtuous economy.” review of political economy 20.2 (2008): 181–197. mercado, tomás de. deals and contracts of merchants and traders. salamanca: ediciones universidad de salamanca, [1569] 2017. von mises, ludwig. human action. new haven, ct: yale university press, 1949. mitchell, matthew d., and peter boettke. applied mainline economics: bridging the gap between theory and public policy. arlington, va: mercatus center, 2017. creativity and cleverness within discipline 66     ostrom, elinor. “beyond markets and states: polycentric governance of complex economic systems.” mainline economics. eds. peter boettke, stefanie haeffele-balch, and virgil henry storr. arlington, va: mercatus center, 2016. 191–250. _____. governing the commons: the evolution of institutions for collective action. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1990. robertson, dennis h. “what do economists economize on?” economic commentaries. london: staples press, 1956. 147–154. smith, adam. an inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. chicago: university of chicago press, 1977. _____. the theory of moral sentiments. indianapolis, in: liberty fund, 1985. smith, vernon l. “constructivist and ecological rationality in economics.” mainline economics. eds. peter boettke, stefanie haeffele-balch, and virgil henry storr. arlington, va: mercatus center, 2016. 101–190. wicksteed, philip. the common sense of political economy. london: macmillan, 1910. microsoft word wheeler-final.docx [expositions 9.1 (2015) 1–18] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 keeping the faith alive: the tertön as mythological innovator in the tibetan treasure tradition matthew wheeler pacifica graduate institute abstract this paper presents a phenomenological study of how the nyingma school of tibetan buddhism preserves its religious beliefs amidst significant external and internal cultural shifts through an agency of mythopoesis intrinsic to its theological doctrine. the nyingma school is singular in the world of buddhism for its recognition of tertöns, or “treasure revealers,” who are men and women believed to possess mystical powers that enable them to discover and decipher sacred texts and religious relics hidden throughout the tibetan landscape by buddhist luminaries and masters of the past. these teachings and objects, known as terma or treasures, are then shared with the community, monastic and secular alike, to advance their quest for enlightenment and liberation in a world they perceive to be in perpetual decline. this study will demonstrate how the mythopoeic function of the tertön has been efficacious in preserving the nyingma community’s faith in the buddhist mythos as that mythos is communally perceived from their idiosyncratic worldview. from the specific example of the nyingma’s terma tradition, a general conclusion can be drawn that an internal means of mythopoesis is instrumental to the perpetuation of religious and spiritual belief systems whose worldviews become increasingly vulnerable to the momentous changes with which globalization has impacted the modern world. a religious tradition’s inability or refusal to adapt to tectonic shifts in political, social, spiritual, scientific, and environmental circumstances often eventuates in its gradual decline into obsolescence. without an internal means of reinventing or transforming the belief system, the mythological architecture that had formerly housed, grounded, and oriented the existential experience of a particular culture or people will tend to depress towards collapse under the forces of acculturation or harden into the airtight fastness within which fundamentalists and nativists hunker down to shelter from the winds of change. the impacts of globalization and the advancements in science and technology in the twenty-first century have made religious belief systems more vulnerable to disintegration than ever. a belief system, whether spiritual or secular, and the worldview to which it gives shape, is arguably foundational to creating a sense of meaning and purpose in the lives of members of any community. a worldview, thus, enables a person to tertön as mythological innovator 2 experience the world mythically, to find oneself within a mythos. it is a way of seeing, sensing, arranging, and interpreting experience. religious traditions, by and large, have been the principal shapers of worldviews for much of human history—but will they continue to maintain this role in an increasingly multicultural, rationalistic, and environmentally-unstable modern world? this is a popular concern in various fields of study in the humanities, as well as for the stakeholders of religious and spiritual belief systems who may see their worldviews being threatened. this topical imperative, then, merits investigating current examples of religious communities that have been effective in adapting the mythos inherent to their worldview to the physical and cultural changes with which they have been beset by the march of time. before moving on to the specific example with which the remainder of this study will concern itself, i would like to posit a general answer to the problem discussed thus far: a religious tradition must avail itself of an internal agency for mythopoesis to address the existential and spiritual crucibles that cosmic and temporal forces invariably thrust upon its devotees. the term mythopoesis and its adjectival form mythopoeic have been used differently by various scholars in the history of the study of myth, so some explanatory remarks as to its use in this essay are necessary. though doty primarily limits this term to literary applications, i follow his general definition of mythopoesis to mean any act of re-visioning or reinventing earlier mythical concepts and expressions; a “creative making,” as he translates it.1 mythopoesis, then, is the moving of an older mythos into a new configuration, most often one that is anticipatory of or responsive to intuitable sea changes occurring beneath the surface of contemporary culture. it functions as the adaptive quality by which the worldview of a particular community—comprised of a people with a shared sense of history and destiny, of values and hopes—can attune itself to the needs of the historical moment for its own preservation. one religious tradition that has cultivated a mythopoeic mechanism capable of perpetuating the efficacy of its spiritual beliefs and ritual praxis is the nyingma school of tibetan buddhism. in this ancient vajrayana sect, tertöns (gter ston), or “treasure revealers,” are believed to possess mystical powers that enable those who find them to discover sacred texts and religious relics hidden throughout the tibetan landscape by buddhist luminaries and masters of the past and decipher their arcana. these teachings and objects, known as terma (gter ma) or treasures, are then shared with the community, clerical and lay alike, to advance their quest for enlightenment and liberation. though the authenticity of some treasures is sometimes disputed by nyingma authorities and other buddhist sects in tibet, the teachings encoded in these texts have quite consistently invigorated the nyingma tradition throughout the last millennium and are given an especial eminence in the nyingma school that is not accorded to them by other buddhist schools. it is the tertön’s singular capacity to introduce innovative teachings and ritual artifacts into the nyingma tradition that has contributed largely to maintaining its spiritual efficaciousness, soteriological promise, and cultural relevance to adherents of its brand of buddhism. this study is 3 wheeler not intended to evaluate the credibility or veracity of the mythical elements of the terma tradition, namely the much-contested authenticity of the treasures. rather, it will use a phenomenological approach to examine how the treasures and tertöns perform a mythopoeic role in the nyingma school of tibet that has effectively galvanized the religion over the centuries and into the present. 1. the logic of treasure concealment: terma tradition as “expedient means” vajrayana buddhism was introduced into tibet in the eighth century c.e., where its practitioners won the favor and faith of the ruling yarlung dynasty that reigned from the seventh to ninth centuries. among the enlightened sages that traveled to tibet during this time period was the legendary tantric master padmasambhava, often referred to as guru rinpoche, the precious teacher, who is recognized by the nyingma school as its founder and regarded as the second buddha. thondup says of padmasambhava with an insider’s conviction that “he was a manifestation of the enlightened ones in the form of a great esoteric practitioner and master” (emphasis added).2 despite a dearth of historical data to verify the historicity of guru rinpoche’s influence on tibetan buddhism, nyingma legend has it that padmasambhava was summoned from india to tibet by the king trisong detsen (ca. 740–798) to pacify and subdue the demons and malevolent forces that were thwarting the construction of the samye temple that the buddhist king had commissioned santaraksita, the abbot of nalanda, to build.3 during his stay in tibet, padmasambhava performed myriad miracles and helped transform the realm into one of the richest lands of tantric buddhism. among the guru’s most important contributions was his concealment of important tantric teachings, the treasures, in the mind-streams of various disciples, which were to be rediscovered in the future by the tulkus, or reincarnations, of those very students and shared with the tibetan people to deepen their spiritual understanding and offer salvific recourse in a degenerate age languishing in a perpetual state of cosmic decline.4 being an offshoot of the mahayana school of buddhism, vajrayana buddhists believe in cultivating the enlightened attitude of bodhichitta: the dualistic aspiration to achieve buddhahood for oneself and also to devote one’s life to assisting others in attaining buddhahood.5 it is in this spirit of altruism that padmasambhava chose to hide his sacred teachings, for they were never meant to serve the followers of buddhism during the reign of the yarlung dynasty; they were intended to serve the people of various epochs in the future when buddhism would face obstacles and threats entirely unique to the temporal circumstances of those respective time periods. in addition, most of the treasures are tantric teachings, and so are esoteric by nature. as opposed to the strict austerities characteristic of theravada praxis or the eons-long devotion to meditation and meritorious actions taught in the mahayana sutras, tantric buddhism promises, though most certainly does not guarantee, liberation for an accomplished acolyte of a tantric master in a single lifetime, should the acolyte possess immaculate yogic training and his or her karmic circumstances tertön as mythological innovator 4 be favorable to buddhahood. the core tenet of the vajrayana corpus is that an enlightened person can perceive absolute truth (nirvana) through engaging—as opposed to withdrawing from—his or her existential experience in the world of relative truth (samsara) by expedient means. this process is made possible by the empowerment transmitted by a tantric master, a guru, who instructs the acolyte how to transmute samsaric reality into that of bliss and emptiness by effectively harnessing the channels, energies, and essence of the vajra-body6, or the utterly enlightened buddha innate within all sentient beings.7 so profound are the secrets contained within the tantras that they run the risk of being misunderstood and therefore abused or mishandled by a wrongheaded or morally weak practitioner.8 in a scene from the terma text lady of the lotus-born, padmasambhava explains to king dretsen that tantric insight is so powerful that it must be “hid / from narrow minds upon the lower paths.”9 these treasures that the tertön uncovers, then, are no inconsequential artifacts of a bygone era; they are profoundly powerful tools to a person in seek of liberation, and so must be withheld from the world until a predetermined moment in time when the designated tulku is intended to rediscover them. it is around padmasambhava’s concealment of the treasures that the nyingma mythology has developed; and in doing so, it has effectively institutionalized its version of buddhism with an agency of mythopoeia. to begin with, the nyingma school presupposes, with a sound prescience uncharacteristic of many other religious systems, that its idiosyncratic buddhist tradition will at some point inevitably encounter cosmic, societal, or spiritual complications that will imperil its religious efficaciousness and threaten its longevity. with this dire forecast ever looming on the horizon, nyingma authorities at some point near the beginning of the second millennium adopted the terma mysteries and granted them a scriptural primacy not seen anywhere else in the world of tibetan buddhism. only in the nyingma school are the treasure texts accorded the same status as the teachings of the buddha.10 in elevating the terma teachings to the same level of veneration as the classical texts of the sutra or vinaya pitakas, the nyingma have consequently—and, in all likelihood, quite consciously—exalted the tertön to the preeminent role of mythic hero, for it is only by the tertön’s act of revealing a treasure that the nyingma tradition can be revitalized and safeguarded as the degenerate age unspools by uncovering tantric texts and other religious objects intended to serve the people of that particular moment in history. the following survey will examine the intricate process of treasure transmission, concealment, and rediscovery to illustrate the means by which this unique mythological phenomenon affords the nyingma school the mythopoeic innovation needed to sustain its spiritual potency. 2. dispatches from the realm of immortal light: treasure genesis and transmission according to the nyingma school, the terma teachings originate in the same fashion that all buddhist teachings do: from buddha. the treasure transmission paradigm has three stages: (1) 5 wheeler mind transmission, when the primordial buddha (dharmakaya) transmits a tantra from its state of eternal emptiness by spontaneously joining minds with a buddha (sambhogokaya) dwelling in an ahistorical buddha-field; (2) indication transmission, when the sambhogokaya buddha transmits the tantra to the manifestation of a buddha (nirmanakaya) that will enter samsara and manifest in various ways in order to free beings from suffering; and (3) aural transmission, when the nirmakaya buddha, usually padmasambhava in the terma corpus, disseminates the tantra teachings to a group of ordinary human beings in a historical temporality, usually that of eighthcentury tibet.11 the final stage of aural transmission is comprised of three phases of its own: (1) a disciple is appointed by padmasambhava to rediscover a treasure at a predetermined point in the future; (2) the treasure is then embedded in the mind-stream of the disciple, which will follow the disciple through his or her various reincarnations; and (3) the teaching is normally written as a text in a symbolic script and hidden in one of the five elements, where dakinis are entrusted with its protection.12 once the treasures are concealed, they can only be rediscovered by the appropriate tertön, the tulku of the disciple who first heard the teaching from the mouth of padmasambhava. to be certain, in the context of the tibetan treasure tradition, the revelation of a terma text would not be a categorically “new” teaching, since the text had already been written down and concealed long ago. this would mean that the tertön is not at all the author of the tantras or creator of the relics that he or she discovers. the treasures themselves were not even authored by padmasambhava, though they entered into eighth-century tibet through him. the treasures, of course, originate spontaneously from samantabhadra, the dharmakaya buddha. the matter of authorship has important implications to the dynamic of mythopoeia in the nyingma tradition. technically speaking, mythopoeia could not be possible within the nyingma worldview, since the tantric teachings of the terma texts originate in the timeless, ahistorical dharmakaya realm. this is to say that there is no active mythmaking in progress—the myths (i.e., the teachings) have always existed. the tertön, thus, is not engaged in mythopoeic innovation, but merely retrieving fragments of a mythological corpus that has not been fully realized in the empirical, historical realm. that said, when a treasure revelation occurs, the nyingma canon and its very self-conception as a religion nonetheless undergoes an innovative process, albeit with varying degrees of change. though the treasures may not be new to historical tibet, for they were concealed long ago, they are indeed scriptural novelties to the contemporary nyingma community. it is in fact the nyingma school’s capacity to produce a consistent outflow of these treasures over the years that has attracted widespread criticism from other buddhist sects. the treasures do indeed add to or reinterpret the classical buddhist canon. to the greater buddhist community, terma texts tamper with the sacrosanct dharma taught by the historical buddha; but to the nyingma, they enrich and elucidate the buddha’s teachings. with regard to the latter, a brief study of the evolution of the tertön as mythological innovator 6 terma tradition will illustrate how the treasures have consistently bolstered and complemented vajrayana doctrine over the centuries by virtue of their mythopoeic utility. 3. when shafts of light burst into samsara: treasure discovery and classification treasure revelation formally debuts in tibetan history, at least with a nascent system of terma typology, in the writings of nyangral nyima özer in the second half of the twelfth century, though the nyingma tradition traces the first treasure discoveries to the earliest centuries of the second millennium.13 by this time, the former glory of the yarlung dynasty, which collapsed under civil war during the ninth century, had become the epitome of tibetan power and innovativeness to adherents of the nyingma tradition, who by the eleventh century, in a temporary state of decline, had highly mythologized the yarlung reign in their histories and hagiographies as a golden age for tibetan buddhism.14 but contemporaneous with the treasure revelations of the first tertöns, skeptics from the newer buddhist schools arriving in tibet at the time authored polemics denouncing the treasures as forgeries, interpolations, or heretical neologies. thus, an animated religious debate was sparked, with the phenomenon of treasure literature fueling the fire of discourse. as nyingma apologists engaged their detractors and critics in a sustained disputation regarding the authenticity of the treasures, a comprehensive system of taxonomy and hermeneutics evolved that enhanced the nyingma authorities’ evaluative methods of the treasures whenever a revelation occurred, which consequently bolstered the credibility of the treasures in the view of the nyingma community. in other words, the terma tradition was maturing from a mythical phenomenon into an elaborate religious institution. an important hermeneutic developed out of the taxonomical studies conducted by luminaries of the nyingma school: namely, what constitutes a treasure. multiple scribes and exegetics have written copiously on this subject, but one author’s particular denotation of terma offers a telling representation of the general attitude toward treasures within the nyingma community. the fifteenth-century apologist ratna lingpa defines a treasure in the following words: “it is a treasure because it is concealed. it is a treasure because it is hidden. it is a treasure because it is inexhaustible. it is a treasure because it fulfills needs and wishes.”15 this broad definition, which clearly ignores the extraordinary, supernatural phenomena surrounding terma discoveries, situates the revelatory nature of treasures to tertöns within the mainstream of mahayana buddhism, whose canonical pali texts abound in records of sutric masters apprehending profound teachings from epiphanic visionary insights, including none other than sakyamuni himself. in addition, lingpa’s concluding qualification of a treasure is teleological: it is purely something that “fulfills needs and wishes.” such a definition implies that historical authenticity, though certainly a matter of importance, is subordinate to the soteriological efficacy propounded by the revealed tantric text in any final assessment of a treasure’s spiritual value. in other words, the important question for 7 wheeler nyingma authorities regarding treasure authenticity is whether or not it will serve the people of that immediate time and place. thus, the primary grounds upon which the nyingma tradition substantiates the historical and canonical validity of its treasures is to accentuate the inherently buddha-esque means by which these teachings come to be revealed (i.e., enlightened actions), rather than establishing an empirically traceable connection to buddhism’s epicenter in india. andreas doctor articulates this point exquisitely: “the treasure teachings repeatedly emphasize their roots in the transcendent, and the buddha of the origin account is not always a buddha figure connected geographically to india but rather to the principle of enlightenment itself.”16 the twentieth-century tibetan exegetic dudjom yeshe dorje (1904–1987) offers a fitting encapsulation of the general hermeneutic at the heart of nyingma treasure ideology, where a treasure’s lineage to the transcendent, ahistorical dharmakaya buddha is privileged over an established link to the historical sakyamuni buddha: none the less, some jealous persons created discord by, for example, declaring that certain of the ancient tantra had been composed in tibet because they did not exist in india. however the non-existence of those tantras in india did not prove them to be inauthentic. even the tantras which did exist in india did not originate there: they were brought forth by great accomplished masters from the domains of the gods, nagas, yaksas, dakinis and so on…and later they were introduced to india.17 thus, a treasure, like any sutra or tantra, is understood by the nyingma to be a mere reflection of the timeless reality (dharmakaya) that underlies and pervades the ever-turning wheel of samsara. it is the mythopoeic task of the tertön, then, to continue the buddha’s mission of unveiling the dharma to new generations of beings in need of liberation through the revelation of treasures. the discovery, interpretation, and comprehension of a terma text are feats, as gyatso notes, accomplished through a system of semiotics, where signs and symbols are used to provoke some new understanding. the only understanding that buddhism seeks to unveil is that of the dharma, the revelation of the absolute truth underlying all existence. treasure texts, as tantric scripture, are specific paths to arriving at this point of wisdom. one of the distinguishing characteristics of tantric buddhism is that it uses a multitude of semiotic resources to foster an experience of enlightenment for a practitioner, such as the elaborate iconography adorning tibetan temples, the intricate sand drawings of mandalas, and the yidams that are the focus of concentration in deity yoga.18 samsara, the material world of birth and death, is itself a system of sensorial semiotics that a siddha learns to harness in order to transcend the limitations of his or her mortal existence to experience the timeless union of bliss and light, where non-dualistic wisdom shatters all classifications and distinctions. so it should not come as a surprise, then, that the tertön’s undertaking of treasure revelation entails navigating through a network of mythical semiotics. tertön as mythological innovator 8 the process of terma discovery is riddled with variances, though certain patterns do resonate throughout the historical accounts of treasure revelations. appendix 1 provides a detailed catalog of the semiotic aspects of treasure concealment and revelation, and is helpful in parsing out the intricacies and nuances involved in any tertön’s discovery and subsequent deciphering of terma texts. the following discussion of this process, however, will focus on the most conventional steps recorded in the chronicles concerning the unveiling of earth treasures, material texts and objects found in a physical locality and not exclusively transmitted in and revealed in the mental realm.19 when the predetermined moment for a particular treasure revelation arrives, a tertön is directed to the hidden location of the treasure. these prophetic directives are made known to the tertön through any one of a common trinity of special mystical signs: during a meditative experience (nyams), in a dream (rmi-lam), or in the waking state (dgnos).20 oftentimes, a prophetic guide appears to the tertön as a dakini or even an incarnation of padmasambhava. before the tertön uncovers the treasure, he or she will most likely need to pacify the dakinis, nagas, yaksas, raksasas, or other spirits charged by padmasambhava long ago with the guardianship of the treasure. this task is normally completed by performing a feast offering and reciting sadhanas, the latter of which is intended to purify the tertön before he or she can access the treasure. with preparations completed, the treasure is then revealed to the tertön. most often, the treasure is a tantric text inscribed upon what is commonly referred to as a “yellow scroll,” though the paper can be of various colors.21 the scrolls are often found in caskets made of jewels, wood, clay, metals, or stone, though they may be stored in other vessels as well.22 the writing on the scroll is either encrypted in the symbolic script of the dakinis or an indecipherable variation of tibetan, sanskrit, or other indian language, either of which is translatable only to the tertön,23 though there are also accounts of tertöns requiring the sagacity of a great tantric master to assist in the decoding of the script. should the treasures be deemed authentic by the presiding nyingma authorities, then the treasure will be transcribed and codified into the form of a cycle, the corpus of texts that constitute the literary presentation of a treasure discovery to the general nyingma community. a typical treasure cycle includes a collation of the following texts: the tantric scripture itself (i.e., a transcription of the yellow scroll), known as the “root text”; commentaries on the tantric text; sadhanas, usually those recited prior to and after the treasure’s discovery; explanations of relevant ritual and liturgical concerns; and a colophon that details the treasure’s origin, its rediscovery, and biographical information about its respective tertön.24 the visionary aspect of treasure revelations is of paramount interest to the present study of the mythopoeic utility of terma. as has been discussed already, mystical insights are common occurrences in the world of buddhism and accepted as plausible forms of enlightenment, so the sudden appearance of a dakini to a tertön during meditation or a dream is by no means unusual. where this visionary interaction becomes crucial, however, is in the purpose for that incursion: to remind or awaken a long dormant memory in the mind-stream of the tertön, embedded there 9 wheeler centuries earlier by padmasambhava. the memory, of course, is the location of the treasure and the tantric teaching encoded in it. this mystical encounter with a being from a buddha-field serves as testament, at least to the nyingma, that the “expedient means” of padmasambhava and other buddhas are active in the current historical period. gyatso calls this supernatural agency a dynamics of incursion, “an incursion of the primordial and authoritative past into the present moment of the degenerate age”.25 the “new” texts produced in the final treasure cycles, then, not only offer innovative tantric teachings tailored to meet the needs of a particular people in a specific time and place, but they serve as tangible signals of the buddha’s proactive presence in an age tipping further and further into decline and destabilization. 4. liberation without meditation: the mythopoeic utility of non-textual earth treasures but the terma texts are not the only earth treasures that foster faith and hope in adherents of nyingma buddhism. some of the artifacts tertöns discover along with the yellow scrolls—subclassified as material treasures and wealth treasures by kongtrul—are recognized in the nyingma tradition as having curative, apotropaic, or soteriological benefits, and provide another example of mythopoeia in this particular vajrayana sect. two of the items revealed on different occasions by the famous nineteenth-century tertön chokgyur lingpa are illustrative of the nontextual objects that often appear in caches of earth treasures: a statue said “to liberate by sight” and sacred pills made from “all buddhas.”26 the statue (kutsab) and the pills (kyedun) are rather unique relics in the context of buddhist theology. terdak lingpa’s corpus of terma texts classifies such sacred objects as “buddhahood without meditation” (ma bsgoms sangs rgyas), for they are said to liberate a devotee purely through sensorial contact with the artifact.27 in the case of the kutsab, which translates to “representative,” these statues carved in the image of important buddhas, quite often padmasambhava, are not understood to be icons or likenesses of a deified bodhisattva or siddha but their actual equivalents. in other words, to see or touch a kutsab is to see or touch padmasabhava himself, who is said in many treasure histories to have crafted and consecrated these statues so he could be actively “present” for the future generations of the degenerate age.28 according to catalogues in terdak lingpa’s corpus, kutsabs were fashioned by guru rinpoche with materials gathered from celestial domains and sacred places by dakinis; sometimes he may have inserted the personal possessions or organic matter of a seminal figure from the nyingma lineage or even himself into the statues, such as locks of hair, clothing fragments, bone relics, practice substances, blood, or semen.29 to merely see or touch a katsub transmits the blessings of a karmically-endowed siddha, like padmasambhava, to the recipient by virtue of the sacred and sanctified composition of the statue. whereas the katsub offers “liberation through seeing,” the kyedun offers “liberation through tasting.” these pills are reportedly made from the flesh of one born seven times (skye bdun means tertön as mythological innovator 10 “seven births”) as a brahmin, which, according to the fifteenth-century bhutanese tertön pema lingpa, automatically transforms into the flesh of the bodhisattva avalokitesvara.30 according to nyingma mythology, padmasambhava hid this sacred flesh in stores of pills as treasures, recovered later by tertöns when such sacra would be beneficial. though the effects produced by swallowing kyedun have been reinterpreted over time by various tertöns and nyingma authorities, today it is understood that ingesting one of these pills does not automatically trigger liberation, though it is certainly a possible outcome in the buddhist worldview, but “offers the prospect of seven lifetimes of a ‘body endowed with qualities’ after which time [enlightenment] is achieved.”31 what is to be made of these relics that offer seemingly antinomian liberation within a religious system that postulates buddhahood is only attainable through meditation, a robust cultivation of bodhichitta, and favorable karmic circumstances that can take innumerable cycles of death and rebirth to garner? in other words, why would padmasambhava include “shortcuts” to enlightenment among his treasures? gayley posits that relics like the kyedun and katsub are examples of padmasambhava’s use of “expedient means” to help unenlightened beings onto the path of liberation who are born into a degenerate age, when “negativity is rampant, suffering is great, and dharma practice is rare.”32 furthermore, sensorial contact with these artifacts offers the possibility of liberation or a reorientation of one’s karmic disposition towards the path of liberation, but it does not guarantee liberation. gayley postulates that grace-bestowal via sensorial contact with religious relics in the nyingma tradition is determined by three factors: 1. the potency of blessings that radiates out from a sacred object, 2. the occasion of direct contact with it through the senses (i.e., importance of ritual context, such as pilgrimage, temple visit, public initiation, audience with a lama), and 3. the receptivity of the individual based on their degree of faith, moral character and spiritual capacity.33 gayley’s final factor is crucial. buddhahood is only attainable to a mind properly oriented to the experience of awakening, a mental configuration made possible by living like a buddha. in reality, there are no shortcuts to liberation in buddhist doctrine, the nyingma school included, although many nyingma terma texts profess their capacity to liberate by one of the six senses, which chögyam trungpa lists as hearing, wearing, seeing, remembering, tasting, and touching.34 if a person achieves liberation through a sensorial medium, as opposed to meditation, it is because that individual was mentally and morally prepared to do so. an example of this fundamental buddhist principle is made evident throughout the famous treasure text of padmasambhava, revealed by the tertön karma lingpa, known to the west as the tibetan book of the dead. this funerary text is read at the bedside of a person who has recently passed away to guide him or her 11 wheeler through the intermediate state (bardo) between death and rebirth. though this text, which is translated as the great liberation through hearing in the bardo (transliterated as bardo thötröl), declares that it liberates a dying human from the cycle of samsara merely by being heard, the vast majority of it is devoted to accommodating the expiring person’s failure to attain liberation while in the bardo. and though the book of the dead is intended to be recited to a moribund person, lingpa states, “one should read [the bardo thötröl] continually and learn the word-meanings and terms by heart”35 throughout one’s life in preparation for the experience of death, which suggests, rather ironically, that the text does not in fact certainly liberate through any of the senses enumerated by trungpa as it claims to while one is still technically alive. once again, the dying person must be mentally and karmically oriented to attain liberation. early in the book of the dead, karma lingpa recommends to the orator entrusted with reciting the text to repeat the instructions on how to recognize the immortal light personified in the union of samantabhadra and samantabhadri three to seven times so “it will remind [the dying person] of what he has previously been shown by his guru.”36 this demonstrates that though the objective of the bardo thötröl is to liberate the dying person, there is a presupposition that the deceased individual was previously engaged in tantric training under a master and pursuant of siddhahood, thus making him or her predisposed to a favorable passage through the bardo. the above examples of “buddhahood without meditation” demonstrate that earth treasures reputed to generate miraculous karmic outcomes, such as health, wealth, or liberation, through sensorial contact can only confer such blessings if the votary’s moral character and yogic practices are sufficiently in accord with the principles of dharma. much like a system of checks and balances, this class of treasures at the least bestows upon the beneficiary—if it bestows anything at all—the confidence that a life devoted to attaining wisdom and acting with compassion will yield positive karmic consequences, and chart a clearer and quicker course to buddhahood. such treasures, if deemed soteriologically efficacious by those they are intended to serve, have the potential to sustain the nyingma mythological tradition throughout the ages with each new revelation. 5. the golden anchor in the samsaric sea: a coda though the treasure tradition does not preclude the possibility of an individual achieving enlightenment by sheer insight alone, it does imbue terma texts, as gyatso notes,37 with a spiritual gravitas and authenticity not accorded to personal revelation by virtue of their capacity to “[link] the present ‘dark age’ to the celebrated past when buddhism was introduced [to tibet] and the [yarlung] empire was at its zenith.”38 in other words, the terma texts are accorded scriptural primacy in the nyingma school for their historical connection to the golden age when padmasambhava and his disciples brought tantric buddhism to imperial tibet. with every new treasure revelation, this glorious past is united with the dark present, and not only instills in that tertön as mythological innovator 12 dark present a much needed sense of meaningfulness and hope, but offers a customized and nuanced brand of buddhism attuned to the needs of the people in a particular historical time period. if a religious tradition lapses into the doldrums of imaginative stagnation, becomes frozen in doctrinal calcification, or fixates on an irretrievable paradisal past, it dispenses with the visionary foresight and hermeneutical versatility needed to adapt to and accommodate the vagaries and vicissitudes that the future inevitably keeps in store. to weather those periods punctuated by cosmic injustices and spiritual ruts, when the collective ethos has sunk to its nadir, a religious or spiritual belief system must rely on mythopoeic innovation and reinvention to invigorate the lifefurthering, soul-orienting potency it was always intended to effect in its followers. with regard to the terma tradition in tibet, it is indeed possible that as long as tertöns can produce treasures of persuasive soteriological value for the nyingma community that its brand of buddhism will continue to prosper in its corner of the world, animating the faith and hope of the people whom it is meant to guide towards enlightenment and liberation. 13 wheeler appendix 1. aspects of semiotic feats in the concealment and revelation of treasure texts39 aspect description tibetan rendering 1. encryption of treasure treasure is encrypted (usually) in a dakini alphabet following the tantric empowerment ceremony. “type of letters” (yig rigs) 2. presentation of treasure at the appropriate time in the future, the tertön comes into physical or psychological contact with the hidden text through one of three media. “introduce to” (ngo sprod) a. key treasure code is deciphered through a key. “key” (lde mig can) b. external presentation empirical object, person, or event unveils treasure to tertön. “certainty through circumstances” (rkyen las nges) c. internal presentation treasure is hierophanically unveiled by a sudden psycho-spiritual event within the tertön. “without regard for [an alphabet or external circumstances]” (gnyis la mi ltos) 3. revelation of treasure’s meaning the variety of ways the treasure’s encrypted meaning becomes understood to the tertön. “set out” (‘god tshul) a. symbol mnemonic tertön unlocks the treasure’s meaning quickly after identifying a character or symbol in the text itself (i.e., pictorial cue). “just an appearance” (snang tsam) b. evocation two modes by which the tertön unlocks treasure’s meaning after being reminded of its contents from particular cues. “just a support” (rten tsam) i. textual mnemonic tertön unlocks the treasure’s meaning after reading the title, introduction, or some other sections of the text (i.e., literal or phonetic cue). “evocation by a section of text” (dngos skul byed) tertön as mythological innovator 14 ii. memory mnemonic two ways that a tertön unlocks the treasure’s meaning by recalling signaling memories from a past life. “evocation through a recollection” (rjes dran skul byed) ii. a. direct recollection a section of encoded text prompts the reader to recall peripheral events of the time and place when treasure was initially revealed to him/her, normally from a tantric empowerment ceremony with padmasambhava. ii. b. indirect recollection an internal or external event jolts a past-life memory to consciousness prompting an epiphanic unveiling of the treasure’s meaning (e.g., hearing the word “diamond” reminds the discoverer of a treasure concerning vajrasattva, “the diamond being”). c. divine revelation treasure simply “descends” (beb) unsolicited to the tertön and makes its meaning known. “freely put forth” (thar chags) 15 wheeler endnotes 1. doty 2000, 464. 2. thondup 1994, 50. 3. thondup 1994, 53. these menacing spirits and malignant agents are most likely mythologized avatars representing the ministers and pantheon of the bön religion. chapter seven of the padmakara translation group’s version of the terma text lady of the lotusborn, discovered by the tertön taksham samten lingpa, recounts this historical clash in a highly dramatic and fantastical debate between buddhist adepts and bön wizards competing for the king’s sponsorship and consequently the religious sovereignty of tibet. 4. gyatso 1986, 11. 5. watson 1997, 6. 6. thondup 1994, 17. 7. mahaffey 2013, 6. 8. changchub and nyingpo 2002, xxiv. 9. changchub and nyingpo 2002, 21. 10. gyatso 1986, 7. 11. thondup 1994, 46. 12. thondup 1994, 69. 13. there is discrepancy in the scholarship on chronology here. gyatso locates the first revelations in the tenth century (1986, 7), while doctor places them in the eleventh century (2005, 31). 14. gyatso 1993, 113. 15. quoted in doctor 2005, 35. 16. doctor 2005, 41. 17. quoted in doctor 2005, 42. 18. mahaffey 2013, 3. tertön as mythological innovator 16 19. in his anthology of treasure revelations entitled store of precious treasures, the nineteenth-century hagiographer jamgön kongtrul developed the most recent and thorough taxonomy of treasures, which falls into various sub-classifications under two main categories: earth treasures, which are discussed above, and mind treasures, which are revealed purely from the mind-stream of the tertön where padmasambhava originally concealed them, negating the need of a material text or object; see doctor 2005, 26. 20. gyatso 1993, 109. 21. earth treasures, it should be noted, are often a trove of materials found along with the yellow scrolls. for example, in his new treasures chronicle of the great tertön chokgyar dechen shigpo lingpa (1829–1870), jamyang khyentse wangpo records the following inventory of a treasure uncovered by lingpa in the vicinity of sengchen namdrak on june 12, 1857: the cycle of six scrolls of the sacred teaching, a secret manuscript, a crown belonging to padmasambhava, a seal belonging to prince murub tsenpo, robes belonging to the buddha, and spiritual medicine prepared by garab dorje; see doctor 2005, 90. 22. see thondup 1994, 70. for instance, khyentse records that at bumdzong lake the tertön chokgyar lingpa was given a yellow scroll of the embodiment of the realization of the dharma protectors by a naga, who brought the treasure to the surface of the lake in a stone container held between its teeth; see doctor 2005, 91. 23. thondup 1994, 69. 24. gyatso 1986, 8. 25. gyatso 1993, 132. 26. doctor 2005, 91. 27. gayley 2007, 487. 28. gayley 2007, 477. 29. gayley 2007, 479. 30. gayley 2007, 470. 31. gayley 2007, 471. 32. gayley 2007, 491. 33. gayley 2007, 489. 17 wheeler 34. fremantle and trungpa 2003, xi. 35. fremantle and trungpa 2003, 93. 36. fremantle and trungpa 2003, 37. 37. gyatso 1986, 11. 38. doctor 2005, 19. 39. all tibetan terms and their translations are taken from gyatso 1986, 18–21. works cited changchub, gyalwa, and namkhai nyingpo. 2002. lady of the lotus-born: the life and enlightenment of yeshe tsogyal. boston: shambhala. doctor, andreas. 2005. tibetan treasure literature: revelation, tradition, and accomplishment in visionary buddhism. ithaca, ny: snow lion publications. doty, william g. 2000. mythography: the study of myths and rituals. 2nd ed. tuscaloosa, al: university of alabama press. fremantle, francesca, and chögyan trungpa. 2003. the tibetan book of the dead. boston: shambhala. gayley, holly. 2007. “soteriology of the senses in tibetan buddhism.” numen 54.4: 459–499. gyatso, janet. 1986. “signs, memory and history: a tantric buddhist theory of scriptural transmission.” the journal of the international association of buddhist studies 9.2: 7–36. _____. 1993. “the logic of legitimation in the tibetan treasure tradition.” history of religions 33.2: 97–134. mahaffey, patrick. 2013. “3rd class session lecture: vajrayana buddhism.” studies 605: buddhist traditions. pacifica graduate institute, carpinteria, ca. march 12. handout. thondup, tulku. 1994. hidden teachings of tibet: an explanation of the terma tradition of tibetan buddhism. boston: wisdom publications. trungpa, chögyam. 2003. foreword. the tibetan book of the dead. eds. francesca fremantle & chögyan trungpa. boston: shambhala. xi–xii. tertön as mythological innovator 18 watson, burton. 1997. introduction. the vimalakirti sutra. trans. new york: columbia university press. 1–14. microsoft word egan print [expositions 13.2 (2019) 45–53] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 war: reversing the works of mercy1 eileen egan pax christi usa hope surged through the hearts of many millions of human beings as the world entered the last decade of the twentieth century on january 1, 1990. peace had broken out as a seemingly impregnable barrier slashing through the european continent was dismantled by innumerable acts of nonviolence. the stockpiles of weapons directed from west to east and east to west, weapons that threatened humankind, had lost their justification. yet by january 16, 1991, the world was at war. the united states, the remaining super-power, led the fateful move to utilize high technology warfare to dislodge the iraqi army from its occupation of kuwait. “it is a just war,” the president of the united states told the convention of religious broadcasters on january 28, 1991. he spoke as the bombing of iraq was at its height. citing ambrose, augustine, and thomas aquinas, president george bush told the broadcasters that the war in the persian gulf was more than just; it was noble. it was a last resort, and had as its aim “keeping casualties to the minimum.” while the war was not concerned with religion “per se,” the president asserted, “it has everything to do with what religion embodies—good vs evil, right vs. wrong, human dignity, and freedom vs. tyranny and oppression.” an ovation greeted the president’s speech. by contrast, pope john paul ii opposed the gulf war in dozens of public statements, calling it “a decline for all humanity.” the admonition of the u.s. bishops in the peace pastoral of 1983 called for catholics to view war “with an entirely new attitude.” this new attitude must take into account that the protection of noncombatants in wartime has been shown for the fiction that it is. it must take into account that when just war criteria are co-opted by political leaders to serve their war purposes, christians need to live by criteria more ancient than those of the just war in judging the morality of participation in bloodshed. in the early centuries of christianity, the followers of jesus had no just war criteria, only the message of jesus regarding love. this was a new form of love, unconditional and one that reached out not only to neighbor but to the one called “enemy.” the command to love demands expression war: reversing the works of mercy 46 in actions, in meeting the needs of fellow human creatures, feeding the hungry among them, giving drink to the thirsty, sheltering the shelterless, serving and consoling the sick, and visiting those imprisoned. these works of mercy are the means by which the followers of jesus are united with him, but he must be recognized in the identity he chose. “i am the hungry one,” he made clear in the parable of the last judgment, “i am thirsty one; i am the shelterless, suffering one, the one in prison.” mercy, as love under the aspect of need, cannot be withheld from jesus in his most “distressing disguise,” that of the enemy. in past wars, the works of mercy were interrupted. for example, the hungry across an enemy border would not be fed for the duration. in modern war the works of mercy are obscenely reversed, thus hurting non-combatants and putting at risk their future welfare and even survival. the gulf war brought home even more intensely this reality of modern warfare, highlighting what happens to those children of god who happen to be on the opposing side in a war called “just,” a war utilizing “all necessary means” towards a “new world order.” i was hungry food rationing came to the people of iraq in september 1990, a month after the invasion of kuwait. sanctions brought grave shortages to a people dependent on imports for 70% of food needs. the six-week bombardment disrupted the rationing system. not only were food stocks depleted but with almost all railroad and other bridges destroyed, supplies could not be brought to distribution centers. the u.n. survey team found that basic supplies of flour, rice, and vegetable oil were at critically low levels, or in some areas, exhausted. when a baby milk factory was destroyed in a bombing raid, the military defended the action by claiming that it was a disguised chemical warfare plant. that it was an infant formula plant was attested to by the french company which constructed it. mothers were forced to obtain a doctor’s prescription to draw on the drastically limited supply of baby formula. interviews with physicians at hospitals and health care centers by the harvard study, “iraq faces public health catastrophe,” revealed that malnutrition was so widespread that an estimated 55,000 children had perished by early may 1991. in the coming year, they estimated that at least 170,000 children would succumb to the delayed effects of the gulf war, effects related directly to refusal by the coalition partners to lift the trade embargo on iraq. the united states 47 egan attached an extra condition to the lifting of the embargo, namely that saddam hussein be deposed. meanwhile, shriveled infants and children were the victims. should conditions continue without substantial change, the harvard study predicted famine conditions among the eighteen million iraqi people as a whole. on impact assailed the “air of total indifference (that) exists on the part of the u.s. government to respond to questions about the human and environmental destruction.” news from post-war iraq focused not on hunger, however, but on the investigation into iraq’s nuclear potential. while the goal of a nuclear-free middle east is of the utmost importance to a peaceful world, the survival of war-afflicted civilians is also deserving of media attention. i was thirsty the most horrendous act of war inflicted on the iraqi people was the contamination of the drinking water. the harvard study concluded that the “key to the public health disaster was the destruction of the electrical system by u.s. and allied bombing.” water pumping and filtering plants ceased functioning, as did sewage disposal plants. untreated sewage had to be dumped into the tigris river, a source of the water supply. attempts to purify the polluted water by boiling were made difficult by lack of fuel. in some areas the population was reduced to drawing its water from polluted streams or trenches. as a stopgap, the international red cross imported a few tons of chlorine to purify the water supply of baghdad. fifty tons of chlorine a day were needed to make some impact on the water contamination disaster of the country as a whole. the eventual restoration of the water system depends on reconstruction of the power generating system. while at the end of the gulf war, only two of iraq’s twenty generating plants were in operation, a few of the incapacitated power stations were being restored to partial function through cannibalization of equipment from other power plants. “many generating facilities were destroyed beyond repair,” the harvard study reports. only the lifting of the embargo on trade to permit massive imports of spare parts and construction materials for iraq’s electrical power system will make it possible for the people of iraq to satisfy their thirst without imperiling their health. no one ventured to predict when this most basic of human needs would be met. war: reversing the works of mercy 48 i was sick and suffering “bomb now—die later,” accurately described the fate of the iraqi people stalked by cholera and typhoid and served by a devastated medical system. iraq’s health care network, according to the harvard study, was a comprehensive one, reaching more than 90% of the population. it comprised close to a thousand hospitals and community health centers. iraqi doctors, accustomed to the latest medical facilities—many of them trained in the west—spoke of their despair at trying to save lives in hospitals without electricity. the most urgent operations had to be performed by the light of kerosene lanterns. “can you imagine doing a caesarian section in this situation?” a gynecologist asked. one of the kuwaiti atrocity tales recounted as a reason for war was the removal of premature infants from incubators by the iraqis. post-war investigation proved that this had not happened. what did happen was that when electricity failed in a baghdad pediatric hospital after the bombardment, large numbers of premature infants died in their incubators. how much could doctors accomplish in surroundings such as those reported by the harvard team? “in baghdad, basra, and kirkuk, the study team observed neighborhood streets filled with foul-smelling unsanitary sewage and other wastes. children walked and played in stagnant, waste contaminated pools of water. garbage collection also ceased due to a shortage of fuel for trucks, and consequently streets are littered with rubbish.” “sanctions were never designed to make people suffer the way they are suffering now,” were the words of sadruddin aga khan after assessing the humanitarian needs of iraq. the mission he headed pointed to unmet medical needs, reminding the u.n. security council charged with lifting or retaining sanctions, that iraq had normally spent $500 million a year on importing medical supplies. without access to foreign exchange, hospitals were shutting down operating rooms. xray and other urgently needed equipment could not function without replenishment. i was homeless according to the u.n. survey, relatively few iraqis were made homeless by the war action itself— an estimated 72,000 people. however, the tragedy of homelessness that eventually arose from the gulf war reached monumental proportions, affecting over five million human beings. after the iraqi occupation of kuwait and the massing of a half-million u.s. soldiers with alarming war potential in saudi arabia, foreign workers in iraq and kuwait took flight. among 49 egan them were 700,000 egyptians and nearly a million asians, including indians, bangladeshi, and filipinos, along with a quarter of a million jordanians and palestinians. saudi arabia, whose border the u.s. troops were shielding, expelled 900,000 yemeni workers into their poor homeland. some of the yemenis had expressed pro-iraq sentiments; others were suspected of harboring them. there was no judicial procedure, simply a mass expulsion. it attracted little attention, the decision having been taken by saudi authority—an allied state which followed a one-man, one-vote policy—that of king fahd. the personal misery of those in the tidal wave of refugees was compounded by the misery of their families whose very lives depended on the remittances they sent home. liberated kuwait added to mideast homelessness by expelling its palestinian population, many of them kuwaitiborn. iraqi homelessness reached a crescendo that horrified the world when in the wake of the war, the kurds and shiites rose up against saddam hussein. would not the rhetoric of the u.s. president embolden any dissident segment of the population to take up arms? the unfortunates, numbering as many as two million were then forced to take refuge in inhospitable mountain areas of iraq, in turkey or in iran. repentance while millions of americans in communities throughout the u.s. exulted in victory celebrations, there were others who chose to take part in services of repentance. after the great victory parade along wall street on june 10, 1991, members of pax christi metro new york trod the same route to reclaim it for a spirit of peace. their march ended with prayers of repentance at the catholic chapel of new york university on washington square. those who stressed the need for repentance were no less grateful for the safe return of the warriors from the gulf than those who rejoiced in victory. they had not wished that the soldiers’ lives be put at risk in the first place. some would ask, why we should repent? did not iraq, in addition to the invasion of kuwait, commit “emotional terrorism”? the greenpeace report counters with a question, “is it acceptable to destroy a modern society’s way of life through the destruction of electricity production, water purification, and fuel distribution, yet unacceptable to destroy oil wells?” its reply, given in the conclusion of on impact, is one that should make supporters of the just war pause. “people who live in cities, in modern societies, are dependent for their lives, not just for their comfort, on such war: reversing the works of mercy 50 support systems. thus, their destruction is as much de facto terror bombing as destruction of oil wells is environmental terrorism.” since all morality is unilateral, we must take responsibility for the actions done in our name and with our taxes, and repent for them even as we deplore the actions of the other side. surely we should repent for the long drawn out deprivation visited on the noncombatants in iraq. should we not also repent for the grisly death inflicted on some tens of thousands of iraqi soldiers, most of them young foot-soldiers—not elite guards or officers—in the short ground war? deprived of communication by the electrical blackout, many did not know there was a ceasefire. those who emerged hungry and shoeless from their bunkers were suffocated and charred beyond recognition by fire bombs. those who did not know that they were to surrender without their tanks and weaponry were incinerated from above on the “highway of death” leading north from kuwait. their slaughter was such an easy matter that it evoked one of the unforgettable phrases of the gulf war, a phrase describing the killing of those unable to escape: “it was a turkey shoot.” it was six months after the end of the war that a leaked story forced the u.s. army to confirm one of the unspeakable horrors of the ground war—that iraqi soldiers were buried alive in their trenches by tanks and armored combat earthmovers. should we not see these casually killed soldiers, and all drafted soldiers, as hapless victims? the united states, justifiably proud of the low death rate of its service personnel (148 soldiers dead, 48 by “friendly fire”) has not issued even a reliable estimate of iraqis killed in the ground war. for all this mercilessness, we, as followers of jesus, need to repent. we do not need sack cloth and ashes like the people of nineveh, but we must find actions more relevant for our time. reject “just war” the first act of repentance (not forgetting prayer and fasting), would be to publicly reject the just war tradition. more catholics must be reminded, if they ever knew, that ambrose and augustine grafted it on to christian thinking from roman philosophy. they found it in the work of the great cicero. aquinas and others built on their formulations, abstract formulations that have no application to technological methods of destruction undreamed of in the fifth or thirteenth centuries. as adolfo perez esquivel, recipient of the nobel peace prize, stated, “there are plenty 51 egan of just causes for war; what we lack are just means.” just war thinking has become in our time the great myth that we kill by. dorothy day, testifying in 1976, america’s bicentennial year, at a hearing on “liberty and justice for all,” emphasized one word, “repent.” she asked members of the church to repent for “all the wars we have lived through.” the catholic worker, led by dorothy, lived by “the daily practice of the works of mercy,” and did not accept that war should interrupt or reverse them in dealing with the “enemy.” she urged christians to imitate jesus’s method of reconciliation and expunging evil, the acceptance of suffering rather than the infliction of it on others. after resistance by word and deed to the u.s.-engineered descent into the gulf war, pax christi usa raised questions of supreme urgency. it is to be hoped that large numbers of catholics, in particular, citizens of the most powerful military nation on earth, will face the question, “has modern warfare made the just war theory obsolete?” the pax christi statement, “aftermath of war: unanswered questions,” asserts that “the just war criteria provided no clear moral guidance during the persian gulf war.” pointing to the fact that such just war criteria as proportionality, probability of success, and right intention can never be assessed before a war starts, pax christi poses the crucial question, “doesn’t the persian gulf war show that the just war theory is only good for historical analysis?” many have realized that only after corpses are smoldering or vaporized, only after villages and cities have been ruined or the life supports of a people destroyed can there be a decision as to the justice of a given war. sometimes it takes generations for war-making powers to admit that just war criteria were not met; more often, the question is left open for historians to argue over. such evidence for the gulf war was not long in coming. the claim made by the u.s. president that bloodshed was a last resort was disproved within days of the war’s ending. on march 2, 1991, a headline in the new york times announced, “from the first, u.s. resolved to fight.” readers learned that while administration officials were insisting from august 1990 that u.s. troops were simply a desert shield for saudi arabia against iraq, the offensive military campaign of desert storm was being planned. the war was not a last resort, as the president claimed, but a first resort, a crucial fact not revealed to the american people. such revelations are moving many christians to relinquish their trust in just war criteria and the uses to which they can be put by war-making governments. war: reversing the works of mercy 52 the relinquishing of the power that just war thinking has held over the minds of catholics, and in fact over most christian bodies except for the “historic peace churches,” may allow the real evil of war to show its face. it is war that effectively displaces love, and its expression in the works of mercy, from its centrality in christian conduct. it is only when this love, including love of the one called “enemy” is displaced, that opponents can be dehumanized, depersonalized, as the first step to their destruction. totally obscured is the vision of the human person as the image of the creator, as kin to the son of man who out of love took on our flesh and blood and bone. it is only when we recover the vision of each person as one for whom a person died that we can glimpse the infinite inviolable sacredness of each human creature. with this vision, we may see that when we refuse to love those called “enemies,” doing to them, or allowing to be done to them, all possible harm, we cannot claim to love the creator. without this vision, we and they may indeed perish. where can we turn if this vision moves us to refuse to harm or kill any child of god, and if we resist governmental preparations for such evils? we can turn to the already-mentioned pre-just war period of the early church. we can turn to the teachings of the bishops, priests, theologians, and lay christians who spoke for a truly historic peace church. hewing close to the gospel, they saw peace as the central core of the message of jesus. st. gregory, bishop of nyssa, told the faithful, “bear in mind that christ is peace. we shall prove that we are rightly called christians, then, if our life bears witness to christ through the peace that is in us. […] let us reconcile not only those who oppose us from without, but also those which cause inner disturbance in us: flesh and spirit.” such teachings strengthened the soldier-martyrs like maximilian, who chose death rather than to take life in warfare, and martin of tours, who braved death by refusing in the midst of war to kill the enemy. the works of cyprian, lactanctius, and many others helped transform the christians of their times into the “new creature” called for by the gospel of jesus. the contemplation of the lives and teachings of such ancestors in the faith provide the nourishment necessary for the transformation from reliance on violence to trust in the power of god. such transformation, as all spiritual change, can only be fed from the springs of contemplation. 53 egan note 1. published originally in pax christi usa winter 1991, 4–7, 37. eileen egan, co-founder of pax christi usa and long-time member of the catholic worker, was one of those who vigiled in prayer and fasting during vatican ii in rome urging the bishops to condemn war as immoral. [expositions 13.1 (2019) 93–111] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 “of the coming of john”: w.e.b. du bois, lohengrin, and the marriage function of truth stephen andrews grinnell college my history is hidden, these questions are forbidden: to ask from whence i came or seek to know my name. —lohengrin i, iii in the art and imagination of w.e.b. du bois, arnold rampersad devotes chapter four to an analysis of the souls of black folk. in discussing “of the coming of john,” the thirteenth chapter of du bois’s masterwork, rampersad writes the following: “of the coming of john” elaborates the duality of the black soul. there are two johns. one is “brown” and struggling; the other is the white son of judge jones, the main citizen of the small georgia town where they live” (75). it is, rampersad goes on to say, a “tale of miscegenation, murder, and suicide” that “is discreetly but powerfully told” (75). while few would argue with rampersad’s basic summary, most readers of souls would be taken aback, at least initially, at the description of the “other” john as “the white son of judge jones.” as readers of souls know, the surname of the white john and his father, the judge, is “henderson,” not “jones.” such misidentification, had it been heard by the fictive judge henderson, would no doubt have brought his blood to a boil. but we critics should be grateful for whatever force—call it contingency—is responsible for turning “henderson” into “jones.” without that misidentification we might not so readily make the overcorrection of turning “john jones” into “john henderson.”1 in what follows, i propose to turn that “error” into the centerpiece of an interpretation of “of the coming of john” wherein the scandal of the unacknowledged patronym links the jones and w.e.b. du bois, lohengrin, and the marriage function of truth 94 henderson families in ways more intricate and intimate than has hitherto been noted. the unnamed narrator, who narrates in first-person plural, utilizes a series of repetitions, sometimes lexical and sometimes structural, that, “if read with patience,” as du bois had hinted in “the forethought,” positions the reader to appreciate “the strange meaning of being black here at the dawning of the twentieth century” (vii). but here, in the penultimate chapter and the only one cast in the form of a fictional story, du bois attempts what r.a. judy calls a “formal experiment,” something that du bois had elsewhere described as an attempt to “interpret historical truth by use of creative imagination.” in doing so, judy explains, “[i]t is the formal performance that achieves its political significance” (214). part of that “formal performance” involves referencing significant portions of earlier chapters, such as “of the dawn of freedom” and “of the training of black men,” and in positioning the reader for thoughts yet to come in “of the sorrow songs.” du bois’s great biographer, david levering lewis, gives the palm for “strongest academic piece” to “of the dawn of freedom” (283), and he describes “of the sorrow songs” as one of “the best” of the five new essays written specifically for souls, going on to suggest that the songs themselves, as du bois utilizes them in his epigraphs, are designed to “counter” notions of european cultural supremacy (278). my intertextual reading might not convince lewis that “of the coming of john” rises above the “bathos and crimson” to which he consigns it (278), but it might nevertheless prompt readers to understand the story as an integral continuation of the political arguments made in those earlier chapters alluded to above. du bois relies on the elliptical nature of a well-wrought story to link political to aesthetic theory. far from being a come-down, “of the coming of john,” as story, becomes an epitome of what lewis suggests souls itself is designed to do. it makes audible—(“hear my cry”)—the “voices of the dark submerged and unheard” (278). in so doing, it foregrounds experimentation on the part of readers by way of compelling us to focus on formal arrangements that simultaneously say more, and less, than mere surface might suggest. thus the return of john as the putative subject indicated by the title “of the coming of john” is punned by its reproductive double, framed in the form of an implied question, how did john come to be? it is the reproductive frame, wherein is described “the struggle over the control of female sexuality and sexual reproduction,” that prompts hazel carby to criticize du bois for projecting his “imagined black community” as being “determined” by “the struggle of men over the bodies of women” (25). but as we shall see, in “of the coming of john,” du bois has his narrator deploy those “discrete” but “powerful” formal techniques of 95 andrews repetition and parallel construction in order to credit more fully the role that john’s mother, peggy jones, plays in his education. as the story unfolds, we will see that peggy revises slavery’s logic of partus sequitur ventrum (often translated as “the child follows the condition of the mother”), to better ensure that her child follows the conditions laid down by his mother.2 in chapter 6 of souls, “of the training of black men,” du bois proffers one answer to the question of “how john came to be” by reference to what he calls “the panacea of education” (91). from that chapter’s perspective, john’s “coming” is, in part, a product of a liberal education from wells institute, where our unnamed narrator is a member of the faculty. such an education, du bois goes on to suggest, situates lived experience as “a matter of infinite experiment and frequent mistakes” (92) that yet might assist the john joneses to leverage out a place in this world on the basis of something other than the “accidents” of birth or of the “stock market” (91). but in the network of repetitions with which our narrator structures his story, it is possible to make a case that, in this case, the “panacea” is necessarily a function of the willful desire on the part of peggy that her son should have access to just such an education as du bois describes. getting jones to that point where “error” was more a function of experimentation than of ignorance was no easy task. the narrator declares that “up at johnstown, at the institute, we were long puzzled at the case of john jones” (231–232). the “case” before them was “loud and boisterous, always laughing and singing, and never able to work consecutively at anything. he did not know how to study; he had no idea of thoroughness; and with his tardiness, carelessness, and appalling good-humor, we were sore perplexed” (232). “and yet,” as the narrator had earlier recounted, “one glance at his face made one forgive him much,—that broad, good-natured smile in which lay no bit of art or artifice, but seemed just bubbling good-nature and genuine satisfaction with the world” (229). compare that description with the following from “of the training of black men,” where du bois ventriloquizes the belief of the “older south” that “somewhere between men and cattle, god created a tertium quid, and called it a negro—a clownish, simple creature, at times even lovable within its limitations, but straitly foreordained to walk within the veil” (89, emphasis added). the trick, then, was to transform jones, through the alchemy of a liberal education, so that rather than being “foreordained” to life behind the veil, he instead “grew slowly to feel almost for the first time the veil that lay between him and the white world” (234). a precondition, then, of the success of his education was that jones become genuinely dissatisfied with the condition of the world around him. once again, the path led through error. “[o]n account of repeated disorder w.e.b. du bois, lohengrin, and the marriage function of truth 96 and inattention to work,” the narrator relates, the faculty “vote[d]” to suspend jones for a term (232). jones is understandably confused and appalled by this devastating news. but rather than bemoan his situation, as one might expect, with inwardly directed angst, jones is quick to proffer a deal to the dean, cast in the form of a conditional: “if you won’t [write to my mother] i’ll go out into the city and work, and come back next term and show you something” (232). john’s motherfocused reaction to his suspension now brings home for us the extent to which the narrator has left to our imagination the backstory of peggy’s raising of john and his sister, jennie. but even so, the narrator does offer just enough by way of hint to suggest how much of peggy’s willpower and agency are motivating john’s conditional. these hints, spread out through the middle of the story, beg the question of what constitutes a “strong-willed and driven woman,” something that christopher powers suggests “do[es] not appear in the souls of black folk” (66). granted, very little narrative exposition is focused on peggy, but what there is indicates a strength that should not be discounted. john jones does not get to the institute without peggy’s drive and will. at the send-off for john at the altamaha station, we readers are apprised that peggy had held firm in her wish to have her son go to wells institute in spite of insistence from white folks that “it’ll spoil him, ruin him” (230). the idea of spoilage is repeated by way of contrast when the judge brags to jennie about his john going off to princeton: “‘it’ll make a man of him,’ said the judge, ‘college is the place.’ and then he asked the shy little waitress, ‘well, jennie, how’s your john?’ and added reflectively, ‘too bad, too bad your mother sent him off,—it will spoil him.’ and the waitress wondered” (231). clearly, college is reserved for the fashioning of white manhood; as du bois explained in “of the training of black men,” the white southern perspective imagined that “an education that encourages aspiration, that sets the loftiest of ideals and seeks as an end culture and character rather than bread-winning, is the privilege of white men and the danger and delusion of black” (94). such a “delusion” is underscored again in “of the coming of john” as something that would only “spoil” john jones, whom the white community of altamaha had “voted” a “good boy,” and who was deemed to be “a fine plough-hand, good in the rice fields, handy everywhere, and always good-natured and respectful” (230). the adjective “good,” thrice repeated, modifies “boy,” labor, and personality, thus rendering the pre-baccalaureate john the post-reconstruction subordinate 97 andrews par excellence and prompting the reader to reflect that education might well turn black folk into spoiled goods. the negative consequence of such spoilage is further underscored in the judge’s comments to jennie: the repeated phrase, “too bad, too bad,” with which he prefaces his “reflection” places the blame squarely on jennie’s mother, peggy. jennie’s own reaction is simple, but nevertheless intriguing, and begs a question or two. why would the narrator tell us that “the waitress wondered”? and about what, exactly, is she wondering? is jennie wondering if education will, indeed, spoil her brother? or is she herself reflecting on the “reflective” manner in which the judge, who elsewhere speaks “brusquely” (242) or “plunge[s] squarely into the business” (243), comments on her mother? it is too early to do too much with this, but i would ask my reader to keep in mind the interjection—“well”—with which the judge addresses jennie. this will be one of the first of several repetitions with which our savvy narrator will tell a tale that otherwise cannot be told outright. looked at from the perspective of a thicker understanding of peggy’s agency, we can surmise that john’s conditional isn’t necessarily compelled by fear. the agreement rather shows, i think, deep respect on the part of john and the dean, who, at a moment of no little shame and embarrassment, can still “promise faithfully” to abide by its terms (232). (that verb-adverb phrase, “promise faithfully,” will prove even more significant when the narrator takes us to new york to hear and witness lohengrin.) for now, though, what this transaction makes appreciable, if not as visible as some critics would like, is peggy’s labor and defiance—the hours and hours and then the extra hours she must have worked to save enough to send john to the institute, and the quiet strength with which she resolves to defy the codes and expectations of the white community, including the redoubtable judge henderson. in regard to the economic and cultural clout wielded by “five million women” who “are today furnishing our teachers,” du bois in “the damnation of women” (1920) emphasized the impact that women like peggy had on african-american cultural institutions: “if we have today, as seems likely, over a billion dollars of accumulated goods, who shall say how much of it has been wrung from the hearts of servant girls and washerwomen and women toilers in the fields?” (104). in the post-bellum world of the new south, however, we might do well to wonder, along with jennie, why peggy should care what judge henderson thinks, or why he should care in regard to her thoughts. ironically enough, a better case as to the “why” can be made when john jones finally w.e.b. du bois, lohengrin, and the marriage function of truth 98 returns to altamaha. however, we must follow the narrator in deferring that long-awaited arrival in order to better situate peggy’s relationship with judge henderson. for that, we need the backdrop of lohengrin. upon graduation from the institute, john jones accepts an offer from the dean to travel north with the institute’s “quartette.” in a foreshadowing of events that will unfold at the conclusion of the story, jones describes the trip as “a breath of air before the plunge” back into the spaces nearer to home that are patrolled by the codes and conventions of jim crow (souls 235). thus, september finds jones in new york, where, swept along by the crowd, he nearly unconsciously spends five precious dollars on a ticket for a performance of lohengrin. jones unwittingly offends a white man and woman in line behind him who suffer the indignity of bumping up against a black man standing “stock-still, amazed” at what he has just done. the female companion gently chides her “fairhaired escort”: “be careful […] you must not lynch the colored gentleman simply because he’s in your way” (235). it is clear from the escort’s stock response that he is a southerner. “with all your professions,” he declares, “one never sees in the north so cordial and intimate relations between white and black as are everyday occurrences with us. why, i remember my closest playfellow in boyhood was a little negro named after me, and surely no two,—well!” (235). this interjection, with which the speaker cuts short his reply, indicates his recognition that the man seated next to them is the same “negro he had stumbled over in the hallway” (236). the verb “stumbled” affirms the scandal—the stumbling block—of what we will come to see as a massively hypocritical projection of racial transgression, and the young man immediately engages the usher to begin procedures for redress.3 we shall have occasion, in a bit, to draw once more from that “well!”—but for now, as the narrator relates, john jones is blind to all of these proceedings, caught up as he is in the sublime beauty of the opera. as jones “grasped the elbows of the chair,” he “unwittingly” touches the lady’s arm. she “drew away,” but the transgression of the color line has not gone unnoticed by her southern escort. while previous arrangements remain to be enacted, “a deep longing swelled” in jones’s heart (236). the performance of the music opens up in john a series of political questions: “who had called him to be the slave and butt of all? and if he had called, what right had he to call when a world like this lay open before men?” (236–237). as “the movement changed,” jones turns these political questions into resolutions for action directed at “some master-work, some lifeservice” (237). the narrator then relates that when “at last a soft sorrow crept across the violins,” 99 andrews john thinks about his mother and his sister (237). in using that key noun “sorrow,” the narrator is reminding us that this event, wagnerian though it be, is not to be understood as a one-way path whereby european culture is deemed to be the ultimate purveyor of intellectual depth and universal feeling. it need not, as keith byerman suggests it does, “carry with it the corollary of deracination” (33). that key affect, sorrow, reminds us instead that jones is sitting where he is because he has agreed to be a member of a quartet expected to “sing for the institute” (234–235).4 we can infer from the preposition that the tour is intended to raise a little money for the college. now, the narrator makes no claims as to whether the institute quartet are as good as the fisk jubilee singers. indeed, it may very well be the case that they are not. in “the sorrow songs,” the concluding chapter of souls, du bois notes that the fisk singers have been much “imitated,”—“sometimes well, by the singers of hampton and atlanta,” and “sometimes ill, by straggling quartettes” (253). but whatever the quality of this “quartette” might be, it seems clear that du bois is pressing us to imagine more of a reciprocal relationship than many critics acknowledge. sometimes that reciprocity is a function of reading ahead or of reading back. just as the “infinite beauty of the wail” of lohengrin’s swan “lingered and swept through every muscle of [john’s] frame” (236), likewise the jubilee singers are described in the next chapter as having “conquered” europe with “the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side of the seas” (251). understanding that reciprocal relationship adds greater poignancy to the next scene in which the usher finally returns to ask john jones to vacate his seat. it is here that john and the fair-haired gentleman acknowledge each other for the first time as “jones” and “henderson” in a scene that, like double consciousness itself, offers no true recognition. it is shortly after this encounter, riding south on the train, that jones comes to terms with his “manifest destiny,” his “duty” to the black folk of altamaha (238). both johns return to their southeastern georgia town of altamaha. each is alienated in his respective way from comfortably fitting back into the flow of small town life. john jones, however, has made the conscious attempt to do something with his life in spite of his growing awareness that his classical education, achieved by dint of great struggle and rigorous study, has unfitted him, as had been predicted, for the life of obedient subordination: he […] noticed now the oppression that had not seemed oppression before, differences that erstwhile seemed natural, restraints and slights that in his boyhood w.e.b. du bois, lohengrin, and the marriage function of truth 100 days had gone unnoticed or been greeted with a laugh. he felt angry now when men did not call him “mister,” he clenched his hands at the “jim crow” cars, and chafed at the color-line that hemmed in him and his. (234) whereas jones chafes at the thought of being consigned to a life of separate and unequal treatment based on fictions of race and social convention, henderson, coming home from princeton a month after jones returns from wells institute, finds altamaha and his father’s plans for him to be too constricting. the younger henderson wants nothing to do with his father’s “cherished ambition”: “‘good heavens, father,’ the younger man would say after dinner, as he lighted a cigar and stood by the fireplace, ‘you surely don’t expect a young fellow like me to settle down permanently in this—this god-forgotten town with nothing but mud and negroes?’ ‘i did,’ the judge would answer laconically” (244). the judge’s response—“i did”—is one among several structural replacements, or desired replacements, that in this story reinforces the notion of repetition as a proxy for inheritance. the judge wants john to follow in his footsteps, and, if possible, to go a little further than he did. in fact, the political options mapped out by the elder henderson—mayor, legislator, governor (244)—are precisely options foreclosed to jones. the very idea of a “judge jones” is an error not to be countenanced within what judy calls the “socially and legally enforced grammar of segregation” (219). the fact that john henderson is so dismissive of his father’s political desires for his future incites a smoldering anger in the elder henderson that can hardly be contained. as we shall see, the opportunity for release presents itself in the scapegoat figure of the other john. there are structural replications figured by the jones family as well. when john interviews with the judge to take over the teaching position at the black school, the judge makes clear that progress is to look an awful lot like a repetition of the recent past: “now, john, the question is, are you, with your education and northern notions, going to accept the situation and teach the darkies to be faithful servants and laborers as your fathers were,—i knew your father, john, he belonged to my brother, and he was a good nigger. well—well, are you going to be like him, or are you going to try to put fool ideas of rising and equality into these folks’ heads, and make them discontented and unhappy?” (243–244). the judge’s expectation, of course, is that john jones will be “like” his father, who belonged to the judge’s brother. but there’s an interesting slippage here. by first saying like “your fathers” (i emphasize the plural), and then, after a strategically placed em-dash, by 101 andrews repeating and replacing it with “your father” (singular), the judge ostensibly reinforces identification of like to like, of “darkies” to “darkies” and joneses to joneses. but in using the plural fathers, and in establishing that john’s father was owned by judge henderson’s brother, thereby reminding john that it’s all a family affair, the judge also subtly destabilizes the very notion of john’s paternity. john’s sister, jennie, is also implicated in these structures of replication. we are initially introduced to jennie just after we are introduced to the fact of another john in altamaha, the henderson’s john (238). it is in this scene that we are apprised by the narrator that this john, and his “darker namesake,” john jones, were once playmates. while the idea of a “namesake” is suggestive in regard to the point i wish to make, here it also serves as a bit of misdirection. it compels us to focus on the identity of their first names, a fact that is reinforced when the judge asks jennie, “how’s your john?” (emphasis added). jennie figures in another replacement/repetition scenario when, after her brother’s return, she and john both stand overlooking the bluff above the sea, he with his arms around her, and she crying on his shoulder. this is the scene where jennie asks john if “it make[s] every one—unhappy when they study and learn things.” after hearing confirmation from john that the suffering is worth it, jennie pauses, then says, “‘i wish i was unhappy,—and—and,’ putting both arms about his neck, ‘i think i am a little, john’” (242). here jennie’s “putting both arms about his neck” replicates john’s placing “his great arms about his mother’s neck” upon departure to the institute (230). john’s excitement at the train station, and jennie’s unhappiness here, are both expressed in the context of education, but jennie’s case begs the question as to just what kind of education she might be getting that is making her so inexpressibly “unhappy.” for an answer to the matter of jennie’s unhappiness, we have to be willing to entertain one more replacement/repetition, one that begins with a question. given the color line, how is it that john jones and john henderson can have been such close playmates as children? probably because peggy, john and jennie’s mother, worked for the hendersons. why else would the narrator state that the two johns had “played many a long summer’s day to its close” (231)? now the matter of peggy’s employment is not stated directly, but i do believe it is inferred structurally. as rumors begin to swirl as to white folks’ perception of john jones’s various insubordinations, john henderson asks his father “"who is this john?" and he is told, “why, it’s little black john, peggy’s son,—your old playfellow” (245). these three noun phrases can be viewed as appositions, since w.e.b. du bois, lohengrin, and the marriage function of truth 102 all three denominate john jones. the first two are genetically connected and the third is separated, segregated we might say, by the em-dash. the first two—“little black john” and “peggy’s son”— refer to “john jones” in a peculiar way, if the reader will allow the pun: “peggy’s son” denotes the possessive condition whereby “black” john is to be differentiated from his playmate, white john. the “peculiar” condition previously referenced is syntactically reinforced by the em-dash and grammatically highlighted by the possessive pronoun used to bind john jones to john henderson—your old playfellow. one thus presumes that the origins of that relationship are grounded in the close proximity engendered by peggy’s being tied—through servitude and perhaps even through enslavement—to the kitchen of the henderson house. she is thus the missing x in the family structure kept under wraps by judge henderson when jones interviewed for the teaching post: judge henderson’s brother is to john jones’s father as judge henderson is to x. structurally, peggy plausibly fills that void. let me return now to the smallest of the replicating structures, the interjections “well” and “well, well” that are repeated in such a way as to create parallel structures of larger narrative moments. in each of these instances, these interjections are uttered only by the judge or by his white son and no one else. even those who have had the good fortune to arrive with a degree from wells institute do not have access to that interjection. in the textual economy of this story, then, these interjections (shown below) are the exclusive property of white masculinity, and as such, they underscore the extent to which black and brown bodies are at the mercy of white masculine entitlement: “well, jennie, how’s your john?” —judge henderson (231) “[…] my closest playfellow in boyhood was a little negro named after me, and surely no two,—well!” —john henderson (236) “well, john, i want to speak to you plainly.” —judge henderson (243) “—i knew your father, john, he belonged to my brother, and he was a good nigger. well—well, are you going to be like him […].”—judge henderson (243) 103 andrews “very well,—we’ll try you awhile.” —judge henderson (244) “well, i declare, if it isn’t jennie, the little brown kitchen-maid! why, i never noticed before what a trim little body she is.” —john henderson (247) the first two interjections—page 231 and page 236—connect the judge and his son around the telling detail of the two johns having been childhood “playfellows.” in the first scenario, it is the narrator who broaches that fact in advance of the judge bragging about his son being educated at princeton and in advance, too, of the interjection with which he begins his question to jennie about “how’s your john.” in the second, john henderson is using the playmate angle as evidence of the south’s equanimity in regard to race relations, linking father and son, and thus underscoring the heritability of family history as a metonym for southern custom. the interjection in that context serves as an ironic indication of the hypocrisy lurking within that line of reasoning as the very black man he may have wished to “lynch” is assigned the seat next to his female companion. the next three instances occur within a context in which the post-graduate john jones is interviewing with the judge for the teaching position at the black school. we get here the backstory of the extended henderson-jones family saga in relation to the judge’s self-described “friendliness” to john’s “people.” it is noteworthy that these interjections also syntactically frame the only mention of john’s father in this story. this particular scene ends with jones promising to subordinate his liberal educational values, along with his “northern notions,” to southern racist customs—the varying shades of that custom are attested to by the judge’s appositives for black folk that run the gamut in a linear sequence from “your people,” “colored people,” “the negro,” “nigger,” and “darkies.” in the last instance, involving jennie, young henderson sexualizes service in the henderson house by linking jennie’s “brown” skin to her place of service in the kitchen. an additional interjection— “why”—reduces her to “a trim little body.” the reduction of female black body and the presumption of white masculine privilege are both affirmed syntactically and logically by virtue of beginning the sentence with an interjection and ending it with the copula “is.” thus jennie, in becoming the henderson’s “shy little waitress,” has replaced her mother in the henderson household. this replication helps make structural sense of john henderson’s sexual assault on jennie. henderson, refusing to be a “faithful servant” to the judge’s designs for his w.e.b. du bois, lohengrin, and the marriage function of truth 104 political career, nevertheless replicates what had happened again and again in southern slaveholding households, including, i suggest, in the henderson household: he tries to have his way with the help because he feels he is entitled to do so. in “of the training of black men,” du bois declares in an apostrophe to the “southern gentleman” that “[t]he rape which your gentlemen have done against helpless black women in defiance of your own laws is written on the foreheads of two millions of mulattoes, and written in ineffaceable blood” (106). here i would point out that both john (229) and jennie (247) are described as having “brown” skin. because of the larger replicating structures that the narrator sets up by way of these verbal interjections, tracking these interjections allows us to plausibly claim that judge henderson’s son is trying to do to peggy’s daughter what the judge had done to jennie’s mother—or perhaps even begun to do to jennie herself. might this not be the genesis of the “little bit” of unhappiness that jennie admits to her brother, an unhappiness that the narrator takes care to connect to education, just as du bois had done in “of the training of black men?” kwame anthony appiah gets us on the right family track when he links “of the coming of john” to johann gottfried herder’s poem “die brüder.” as appiah glosses it, herder’s is a poem “about a black boy and a white boy who have been raised together—milchbrüder (foster brothers), of course, not blutbrüder (blood brothers)—and whose fraternity is undone when the white brother, grown to manhood, proves to be another ‘white devil’ and turns on his black brother” (48). need i add that i will here insist that john and john are actually blood brothers? du bois had earlier set his readers up for this very possibility in chapter 2 of souls, “of the dawn of freedom.” there, in discussing the difficulties attending the establishment and management of the freedman’s bureau, he proffers a personification of the southern color line in all its pathetic complications: amid it all, two figures ever stand to typify that day to coming ages,—the one, a gray-haired gentleman, whose fathers had quit themselves like men, whose sons lay in nameless graves; who bowed to the evil of slavery because its abolition threatened untold ill to all; who stood at last, in the evening of life, a blighted, ruined form, with hate in his eyes;—and the other, a form hovering dark and mother-like, her awful face black with the mists of centuries, had aforetime quailed at that white master’s command, had bent in love over the cradles of his sons and daughters, and 105 andrews closed in death the sunken eyes of his wife,—aye, too, at his behest had laid herself low to his lust, and borne a tawny man-child to the world, only to see her dark boy’s limbs scattered to the winds by midnight marauders riding after “damned niggers.” (29–30) early on in “of the coming of john,” judge henderson is described as a “broad-shouldered grayhaired” man (231). and as john jones awaits his fate upon the bluff at the conclusion of the story, with the lynch mob bearing down on him, we have every right to presume that their leader, “that haggard white-haired man, whose eyes flashed red with fury” (249), is judge henderson himself, hell bent on making certain that his peggy’s “dark boy’s limbs [are] scattered to the winds.” imagining john jones and john henderson as blood-brothers gives us another angle from which to appreciate the symbolic value du bois ascribes to lohengrin in “of the coming of john.” in act i, scene 3, lohengrin establishes to elsa the ground rules by which their wedding may proceed: elsa, if i become your husband, if i’m to set your people free, if nothing is to tear me from you, to this demand you must agree. my history is hidden. these questions are forbidden: to ask from whence i came or to seek to know my name. stanley brodwin claims that du bois “meant to suggest symbolic parallels between john and lohengrin” in regard to the shared motif of a secret identity. “lohengrin must keep his identity a secret in order to do good,” brodwin declares, “john must find his identity” (317, emphasis added). the identity that brodwin finds for john is that of a “doomed” culture hero, an “individual and ‘collective’ hero” in whom “reside[s] the souls of black folk” (318). russell berman, on the other hand, views lohengrin’s “inclusion” in the concluding scene of du bois’s story as a “reference to w.e.b. du bois, lohengrin, and the marriage function of truth 106 the tragedy of egalitarianism, the elusive possibility of justice, and the desire for a race-blind love” (130). the desire for justice, as well as the quest to find one’s identity, are both exacerbated by the missing patronym that would allow us to acknowledge that “jones” is “henderson.” in that way, lohengrin as culture hero and john jones as culture hero are structurally mirror opposites: lohengrin’s desire to keep his name and lineage a secret so that elsa will love him for what berman refers to as his “absolute specificity as a human” and not for “the secondary attributes of rank or race” (129) meets its mirror double in the figure of john jones, on behalf of whom du bois would have the true patronym revealed, if for no other reason than to expose the hypocrisy of white, patriarchal panic that uses violence to regulate the color line yet continuously transgresses it in what du bois referred to as white concubinage. for robert gooding-williams, lohengrin, within a post-reconstruction american context, portends the “‘impossible marriage’” between the “all too profane world of jim crow” and the “desire” of john jones to “act in that world” (121). the conjugation of that impossibility is exemplified in the twice repeated “swelled” with which the narrator describes the action of jones’s “longing” (236) and, later, the action of the “fuller, mightier harmony” (237). it is difficult to assess whether this tumescence of soul incorporates, and thus controls, the interjecting “well” lodged within its precincts, or whether the interjection, having done its job too well, infects even the longing for spiritual transcendence above and beyond the veil. i reinforce gooding-williams’s point in order to suggest that the “marriage” we are discussing may be impossible but it need not be metaphorical. both blood relationship and moral hypocrisy are tragically exposed by du bois in the chapter’s concluding paragraphs. while walking off the anger and frustration of having been removed from his teaching position by judge henderson, john discovers jennie “struggling in the arms of a tall and fair-haired man,” who is, of course, the younger henderson. “[s]eizing a fallen limb,” and “with all the pent-up hatred of his great black arm,” john jones smites john henderson dead (248). in the post-mortem aftermath, the narrator has jones seat himself on the very same stump on which young henderson had earlier bemoaned the lack of erotic opportunity. as jones replaces henderson atop that “great black stump” (248), what had been henderson’s thoughts of sexual release and his subsequently violent attempt at miscegenation are replaced by “the faint music of the swan,” by a recognition of the necessity, as lawrence kramer figures it, “of freeing desire from ideology, ‘impossible’ though it be in john jones’s america” (62). in commenting on jones’s 107 andrews shift from the music of the swan to that of the bridal march, christina zwarg suggests that john, and by extension, du bois, is shifting from a romance of vengeance toward an “identification with the bride’s provisional state of longing” to “know” her husband’s name and origins (23). here, in the contact zone of the color line, the name of the father was rarely the name of the husband. however, in the hands of du bois’s narrator, jones’s unacknowledged patronym is obliterated by the killing of young henderson and by the educational condition that jones’s mother, peggy, lays out for him. judge henderson may be his blood father after all, but jones, with his liberal education and his refusal to submit passively to the rape of his sister, is indubitably his mother’s son. i wish now to make one more turn on lohengrin, specifically in regard to the bridal march. as has been noted by various critics and in various editions of souls, du bois “misquotes” the opening words by replacing “treulich” (faithfully) with “freudig” (joyfully).5 given the language du bois himself uses to describe what the opera meant to him, the replacement of “faith” for “joy” makes a great deal of sense. in a brief article in the pittsburgh courier in 1936, du bois said of lohengrin that “[i]t is a hymn of faith. something in this world man must trust. not everything—but something. one cannot live and doubt everybody and everything. somewhere in this world, and not beyond it, there is trust, and somehow trust leads to joy” (130). lest we find the value of those words somewhat diminished by virtue of being anachronistic in regard to the publication of souls, we should ask ourselves why, for readers of souls, those words sound so familiar. it turns out that we have heard those words before in reference to the spiritual meaning of the sorrow songs. “through all the sorrow of the sorrow songs there breathes a hope—a faith in the ultimate justice of things,” du bois writes. “sometimes it is faith in life, sometimes a faith in death, sometimes assurance of boundless justice in some fair world beyond. but whatever it is, the meaning is always clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins” (261). the fact that john jones hums that hymn of faith in advance of his suicide is du bois’s way of suggesting that john has found that something worth trusting in, that something worth dying for.6 in the famous conclusion of chapter 6, “of the training of black men,” du bois provides what i think is a compelling rationale for that faith. in that chapter, du bois is speaking on behalf of the benefits of a liberal education. while admitting that the “manual training and trade schools” have their uses, du bois, contra booker washington, claims that they are not enough. “the foundations of knowledge in this race, as in others,” he goes on to say, “must be sunk deep in the college and w.e.b. du bois, lohengrin, and the marriage function of truth 108 university if we would build a solid, permanent structure” (107). for du bois, then, “the function of the negro college” “must seek the social regeneration of the negro” (108). in order to do that, he felt that black men needed to have the opportunity to experience just the kind of transformative learning that john jones had undergone—even at the risk of feeling the kind of alienation, the sense of homelessness or exile, that necessarily attends the assumption of what martha nussbaum, following the stoics, has called the “lonely business” of becoming “a citizen of the world” (83). in such a space, as du bois famously declares, “i sit with shakespeare and he winces not” (109). du bois concludes “of the training of black men” with a matrimonial trope that foreshadows john jones’s humming the song of the bride in “of the coming of john”: “so, wed with truth, i dwell above the veil” (109). in addition to complementing the “song of the bride,” this matrimonial trope resonates with the way du bois’s harvard mentor, william james, discusses the marriage function of truth in “what pragmatism means.” “new truth,” says james, “is always a go-between”; it “marries old opinion to new fact” (35). for james, and i think for du bois as well, “purely objective truth, truth in whose establishment the function of giving human satisfaction in marrying previous parts of experience played no role whatever, is nowhere to be found. the reason why we call things true is the reason why they are true, for ‘to be true’ means only to perform this marriage function” (37). john jones, humming the “song of the bride” as the name of the father bears down on him, is a new truth in the world of altahama, a new fact confronting the ugliness of old opinion. in trying to ensure that jennie might still become the “free woman” that du bois extolled in “the damnation of women,” a woman who has “knowledge” and “the right of motherhood at her own discretion” (96), john jones, even unto his death, becomes a model that bears repeating. notes 1. this article is developed from a paper presented at the w.e.b. du bois and liberal education conference at villanova university, september 14, 2018, organized by the villanova center for liberal education. i wish to thank dr. john doody and assistant director john-paul spiro for being such generous and attentive hosts. and i am especially 109 andrews grateful to john-paul for the patience and generosity which he has consistently extended on my behalf. 2. for an excellent history of the “reproductive logic” of slavery as a function of heritability derived from the mother, see morgan. 3. i rely on david mccracken’s excellent summary of the relationship between the greek word skandalon and its english translation, “stumbling block,” in his “introduction: the offense and us” in the scandal of the gospels. 4. robert gooding-williams is one of the few critics who points out the post-graduate context of the “quartet” in which jones is touring. however, he does not connect that fact to the idea of cultural reciprocity occasioned by the sorrow songs. see gooding-williams 121. 5. i place quote marks around the word “misquotes” in respect of charles i. nero’s fascinating reading of “of the coming of john” in which he posits both “a classically unreliable narrator” and a strategically intentional substitution on the part of du bois of “freudig” for “treulich.” he also mentions the courier item on lohengrin. see nero 263–264. 6. many critics commit to the logic of lynching that the narrator sets up. but i think it makes no sense to have jones wait for the lynch mob with its inevitable emasculating tortures and mutilations—even if that violence is left to our imaginations. in line with rampersad, i think suicide here makes more sense given jones’s stoical conflation of “going north” with freedom and death. it further makes sense in regard to setting, in that he is waiting atop the bluff, so proximate to the very location where he had killed john henderson. the whistling in his ears is the whistling his body makes in its plunge off the bluff—the “breath of air” (235) that his plunge now makes—thereby depriving the lynch mob of the opportunity to turn john jones into sam hose. works cited appiah, kwame anthony. “culture and cosmopolitanism.” lines of descent: w.e.b. du bois and the emergence of identity. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2014. w.e.b. du bois, lohengrin, and the marriage function of truth 110 berman, russell a. “du bois and wagner: race, nation, and culture between the united states and germany.” the german quarterly 70.2 (spring 1997): 123–135. brodwin, stanley. “the veil transcended: form and meaning in w.e.b. du bois’s ‘the souls of black folk.’” journal of black studies 2.3 (march 1972): 303–321. byerman, keith e. seizing the word: history, art, and self in the work of w.e.b. du bois. athens, ga: university of georgia press, 1994. carby, hazel v. “the souls of black men.” race men: the w.e.b. du bois lectures. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1998. 9–44. du bois, w.e.b. darkwater: voices from within the veil. new york: dover, 1999. _____. “lohengrin.” pittsburgh courier oct. 31, 1936. in newspaper columns by w.e.b. du bois. ed. herbert aptheker. vol. 1, 1883–1944. white plains, ny: kraus-thomson, 1986. _____. the souls of black folk. millwood, ny: kraus-thomson, 1983. gooding-williams, robert. in the shadow of du bois: afro-modern political thought in america. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2009. james, william. “what pragmatism means.” in pragmatism: a new name for some old ways of thinking and the meaning of truth: a sequel to pragmatism. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1975. judy, r.a. “lohengrin’s swan and the style of interiority in ‘of the coming of john.’” cr: the new centennial review 15.2 (fall 2015): 211–257. kramer, lawrence. “contesting wagner: the lohengrin prelude and anti-anti-semitism.” in opera and modern culture: wagner and strauss. berkeley, ca: university of california press, 2004. 42–74. lewis, david levering. w.e.b. du bois: biography of a race, 1868–1919. new york: owl books/henry holt and co., 1994. 111 andrews mccracken, david. the scandal of the gospels: jesus, story, and offense. new york: oxford university press, 1994. morgan, jennifer l. “partus sequitur ventrum: law, race, and reproduction in colonial slavery.” small axe 22.1 (march 2018): 1–17. nero, charles i. “queering the souls of black folk.” public culture 17.2 (spring 2005): 255– 276. nussbaum, martha c. cultivating humanity: a classical defense of reform in liberal education. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1997. powers, christopher. “figurations of passage through ‘of the coming of john.’” cr: the new centennial review 15.2 (fall 2015): 59–82. rampersad, arnold. the art and imagination of w.e.b. du bois. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1976. wagner, richard. lohengrin. trans. amanda holden. english national opera guide series, vol 47. ed. nicholas john. new york: riverrun press, 1993. zwarg, christina. “du bois on trauma: psychoanalysis and the would-be black savant.” cultural critique 51 (spring 2002): 1–39. microsoft word sniegocki print [expositions 13.2 (2019) 152–173] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 pope francis, nonviolence, and catholic teaching on war john sniegocki xavier university in his 2017 world day of peace message, “nonviolence: a style of politics for peace,” pope francis issues a call for catholics to “make active nonviolence our way of life.”1 francis grounds this call to nonviolence directly in the person and teachings of jesus: “jesus marked out the path of nonviolence. to be true followers of jesus today includes embracing his teaching about nonviolence.”2 these statements of pope francis represent the latest stage in official catholic social teaching of a lengthy process of rediscovering of the centrality of nonviolence in christian life and have profound implications for the mission of the catholic church in our time. in this paper i plan to explore some of the history of catholic teaching on war, with particular attention to the nonviolent views of the early church, the rise of just war thinking, and the critical rethinking of war that began with pope john xxiii and the second vatican council in the 1960s. i will also explore some reasons why official catholic teaching on issues of war and nonviolence is often so little known at the parish level, put forth some suggestions for how these teachings could be better incarnated by the catholic church in its lived practice, and highlight a few issues in need of further development. early church nonviolence and the development of just war theory leaders of the early christian community strongly emphasized the nonviolent nature of the teachings of jesus. according to church historians, there exists no evidence of christian participation in the roman military until approximately the year 170 ce.3 after this time sporadic accounts of christian soldiers appear in the historical record. many of these earliest christian soldiers seem to have been men who converted to christianity while already serving in the military. according to the apostolic tradition, an early church law code, any person who was already christian or who was in training to be a christian and who joined the military was to “be dismissed [from the church], because they have despised god.”4 those who converted while already serving in the military, however, could remain (the penalty for refusing to serve could be 153 sniegocki death), but they were to refuse to obey any orders to kill: “a soldier […] shall not kill anyone. if ordered, he shall not carry out the order, nor shall he take the oath. if he does not accept this, let him be dismissed [from the church].”5 prior to the time of constantine in the fourth century, we have no record of any church leader explicitly approving of christians joining the military, while there exist numerous accounts of church leaders opposing military service.6 the reasons for this opposition were multiple, including concerns about idolatrous worship of the emperor and the sexual immorality that often characterized military life, but the primary reason given was the conviction that killing constituted a direct and fundamental violation of the teachings of jesus. “we [christians],” the prominent early church theologian origen states, “no longer take up sword against nation, nor do we learn war any more, having become children of peace for the sake of jesus, who is our leader.”7 “the christian lawgiver,” origen explains, “did not deem it in keeping with laws such as his, which were derived from a divine source, to allow the killing of any individual whatever.”8 this nonviolent rationale for opposing military service is further explained in another early christian text, lactantius’ divine institutions: when god prohibits killing, he not only forbids us to commit brigandage, which is not allowed even by the public laws, but he warns us not to do even those things which are regarded as legal among men. and so, it will not be lawful for a just man to serve as a soldier […] nor to accuse anyone of a capital offense, because it makes no difference whether you kill with a sword or with a word, since killing itself is forbidden. and so, in this commandment of god, no exception at all ought to be made to the rule that it is always wrong to kill a man, whom god has wished to be a sacrosanct creature.9 in a movement away from the more principled nonviolence of the early church, christian just war theory began to be developed by augustine of hippo in the late fourth/early fifth century, drawing upon the work of his teacher ambrose and the roman philosopher cicero. these thinkers argued that war could be morally acceptable if certain conditions were met, such as just cause (e.g., defense of the innocent), proper intention, and declaration of war by a legitimate authority. it was at this time that christian participation in warfare first became officially pope francis, nonviolence, and catholic teaching on war 154 accepted by church leaders. as the just war theory took root, the nonviolent ethos of the early christians largely receded from church teaching. in the middle ages the church’s acceptance of violence would extend even to the crusades. following the crusades the just war tradition reasserted its dominant role in christian thought and the criteria for a just war were further refined.10 the dominance of just war thinking and the marginalization of principled nonviolence became so strong in catholic thought that as recently as 1956 pope pius xii could declare that it was morally unacceptable for a catholic to be a conscientious objector to all war.11 pope john xxiii: pacem in terris in the early 1960s, official catholic teaching on war began to undergo a major transformation, recovering a more critical view of war. in his encyclical pacem in terris, issued in 1963, pope john xxiii asserted the inappropriateness of war in the modern world and highlighted the conditions needed for authentic and lasting peace. in light of the destructiveness of contemporary weaponry, pope john declared, “it is contrary to reason to hold that war is now a suitable way to restore rights which have been violated.”12 pope john continued to adhere to the just war tradition but expressed serious doubts as to whether any modern war could meet the just war criteria. focusing attention instead on the conditions needed for peace, pope john emphasized the importance of respect for a broad range of human rights, including both civil/political rights (such as freedom of speech and assembly) and social/economic rights (such as the right to employment, food, housing, education, and health care.) pope john also highlighted the urgency of creating a “worldwide political authority” that would be democratically organized and that would have sufficient power to effectively prevent war, including the authority to enact the social and economic reforms needed for greater equity in the global system.13 pope john’s thought thus helped to consolidate an important shift of focus away from debates concerning justification of war to an emphasis on the responsibility for building structures of peace. the “new attitude” of vatican ii the rethinking of catholic approaches to war that pope john xxiii initiated was taken up and further developed by the second vatican council in the document gaudium et spes. in this document the council proclaimed the need to “undertake an evaluation of war with an entirely new attitude.”14 part of this new attitude included an affirmation of the legitimacy of principled 155 sniegocki nonviolence as a catholic option and a call for governments to provide legal protection for conscientious objectors.15 another part of the new approach was an affirmation of the need to more rigorously apply just war criteria. the council issued, for example, a strong condemnation of attacks directed at civilian populations, such as the atomic bombing of hiroshima and nagasaki. “any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities or of extensive areas along with their population,” the council declared, “is a crime against god and man himself. it merits unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation.”16 the council also critiqued the arms race between the superpowers, which it described in powerful terms as “an utterly treacherous trap for humanity, and one which injures the poor to an intolerable degree.”17 like pope john xxiii, the council viewed the ultimate solution to the problem of war to lie in the creation of a democratically established “universal public authority.” this international authority, the council argued, should be “endowed with effective power to safeguard, on the behalf of all, security, regard for justice, and respect for rights.”18 pope paul vi: “no more war, war never again!” the critical views expressed by the second vatican council concerning war and the need for alternatives to war were strongly influenced by the witness of both pope john xxiii and his successor pope paul vi. it was pope paul’s famous speech at the united nations, in which he passionately declared “no more war, war never again!” that provided the context for the council’s deliberations on war. pope paul’s u.n. speech took place on october 4, 1965. the council began formal discussion of the war and peace section of gaudium et spes on october 5, the very next day.19 one particularly important contribution that paul vi made to catholic reflection on war and peace was his proclamation of january 1 of each year as “world day of peace.” pope paul commemorated the event with an annual world day of peace message. it is essential, pope paul emphasized in his 1978 message, to proclaim “at the top of our voice the absurdity of modern war and the absolute necessity of peace.”20 these papal messages, which were continued by subsequent popes, have become a rich resource for the church’s moral reflection on war. along with discouraging war between states, pope paul also sought to discourage revolutionary violence. in his encyclical letter evangelii nuntiandi, for example, he stated: “the church cannot accept violence […] as the path to liberation, because she knows that violence pope francis, nonviolence, and catholic teaching on war 156 always provokes violence and irresistibly engenders new forms of oppression and enslavement […]. we must say and reaffirm that violence is not in accord with the gospel, that it is not christian.”21 such bold statements in opposition to violence in general (rather than focusing on distinctions between justified and unjustified violence) would become common in the teachings of subsequent popes. pope john paul ii: deepening the rejection of war the tradition of catholic teaching on war and peace was further developed during the papacy of pope john paul ii. key developments included deepened attention to the negative consequences of all wars, a further move away from the use of just war language, and an increased emphasis on the power and effectiveness of nonviolent action. throughout his papacy, john paul ii was a prominent critic of war. his opposition to the persian gulf war of 1991 and to the u.s. invasion and occupation of iraq that began in 2003 are perhaps the most well-known examples, though his rejection of war was expressed in many other contexts as well: today, the scale and horror of modern warfare—whether nuclear or not—makes it totally unacceptable as a means of settling differences between nations. war should belong to the tragic past, to history; it should find no place on humanity’s agenda for the future.22 is it not necessary to give everything in order to avoid war, even the “limited war” thus euphemistically called by those who are not directly concerned in it, given the evil that every war represents, its price that has to be paid in human lives, in suffering, in the devastation of what would be necessary for human life and development, without counting the upset of necessary tranquility, the deterioration of the social fabric, the hardening of mistrust and hatred which wars maintain towards one’s neighbor?23 it is essential, therefore, that religious people and communities should in the clearest and most radical way repudiate violence, all violence.24 157 sniegocki to attain the good of peace there must be a clear and conscious acknowledgement that violence is an unacceptable evil and that it never solves problems.25 violence is a lie for it goes against the truth of our faith, the truth of our humanity [...]; do not believe in violence; do not support violence. it is not the christian way. it is not the way of the catholic church. believe in peace and forgiveness and love, for they are of christ. yes, the gospel of christ is a gospel of peace: “blessed are the peacemakers; for they shall be called children of god.”26 in these passages pope john paul ii clearly sounds like a pacifist, expressing moral opposition to all war and violence. nonetheless, he did not consider himself a pacifist, but rather understood himself as adhering to a strict interpretation of just war criteria. john paul acknowledges, for example, that “peoples have a right and even a duty to protect their existence and freedom by proportionate means against an unjust aggressor”27 but he expresses grave doubt that any modern war could in fact meet this criterion of proportionality. one factor in this assessment, of course, is the high percentage of civilian deaths and injuries that have characterized modern wars. it is commonly estimated, for example, that civilians have constituted about 90% of the casualties of war in the past several decades.28 in addition, john paul highlights a range of other negative consequences of war, including the destruction of infrastructure, the waste of funds that could be used to meet the needs of the poor, the destruction of the environment, the psychological and spiritual impacts of killing on those who kill, and the cycles of animosity and desire for vengeance that wars fuel. reflecting upon the persian gulf war of 1991, for example, john paul contends that war “destroys the lives of innocent people, teaches how to kill, throws into upheaval even the lives of those who do the killing and leaves behind a trail of resentment and hatred.”29 similarly, in his 1993 world day of peace message, he declares: recourse to violence, in fact, aggravates existing tensions and creates new ones. nothing is resolved by war; on the contrary, everything is placed in jeopardy by war. the results of this scourge are the suffering and death of innumerable individuals, the disintegration of human relations and the irreparable loss of an immense artistic and environmental patrimony. war worsens the sufferings of the pope francis, nonviolence, and catholic teaching on war 158 poor; indeed, it creates new poor by destroying means of subsistence, homes and property, and by eating away at the very fabric of the social environment […]. after so many unnecessary massacres, it is in the final analysis of fundamental importance to recognize, once and for all, that war never helps the human community, that violence destroys and never builds up, that the wounds it causes remain long unhealed, and that as a result of conflicts the already grim condition of the poor deteriorates still further, and new forms of poverty appear.30 pope john paul ii also highlights important issues related to the just war criterion of last resort. in particular, he argues that the efficacy of mass nonviolent action in defending violated rights shows that recourse to violence is likely never truly the only remaining option. this emphasis on nonviolence comes to the fore in john paul’s thought especially after the successful nonviolent overthrow of the communist regimes of eastern europe, in which his own support for the solidarity movement in poland played an important role. the end of communism, the pope states, was brought about by the nonviolent commitment of people who, while always refusing to yield to the force of power, succeeded time after time in finding effective ways of bearing witness to the truth. this disarmed the adversary, since violence always needs to justify itself through deceit, and to appear, however falsely, to be defending a right or responding to a threat posed by others […]. i pray that this example will prevail in other places and other circumstances. may people learn to fight for justice without violence.31 “those who have built their lives on the value of non-violence,” john paul states, “have given us a luminous and prophetic example.”32 this emphasis on nonviolence also began to play an increasingly important role in the reflections of the u.s. catholic bishops in the 1980s and 1990s. “nonviolent means of resistance to evil,” the bishops assert in their 1983 pastoral letter the challenge of peace, “deserve much more study and consideration than they have thus far received.”33 in the harvest of justice is sown in peace, published in 1993 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the challenge of 159 sniegocki peace, the bishops return to this theme. they stress that nonviolence, properly understood, is a powerful way of actively challenging injustice: the vision of christian nonviolence is not passive about injustice […]. for it consists of a commitment to resist manifest injustice and public evil with means other than force […]. dramatic political transitions in places as diverse as the philippines and eastern europe demonstrate the power of nonviolent action, even against dictatorial and totalitarian regimes […]. national leaders bear a moral obligation to see that nonviolent alternatives are seriously considered for dealing with conflicts.34 the assertion that governments, rather than only individuals, have a moral obligation to actively consider nonviolent action as a response to grave injustices represented a new insight in catholic social thought. the u.s. bishops in fact recognized it as constituting development of doctrine and requested vatican approval of this material prior to publication. such approval was received.35 with this increased recognition of the power of nonviolence, assert the u.s. bishops, the “presumption against the use of force” is strengthened and the “threshold for the use of force” is raised.36 in other words, recognition of the effective power of mass nonviolent action, i.e., nonviolent force, makes it even more difficult to justify any war. while frequently criticizing all war in very strong terms, it should be noted that pope john paul ii appears to leave open at least the possibility of a legitimate limited use of violent force or threat of violent force to prevent massive human rights abuses such as genocide. any such use of violent force, he stressed, would need to adhere to very strict guidelines, especially concerning noncombatant immunity, would need to be very limited in scope, and would need to be conducted “in full respect for international law, guaranteed by an authority that is internationally recognized.”37 in other words, john paul seems to envision some type of u.n.-authorized peacekeeping mission with authorization to intervene to prevent serious human rights abuses. significantly, such a possible use of violent force is never described by john paul as “war,” but appears rather to be viewed by him as constituting a separate category, perhaps better thought of in terms of international policing. there is therefore no contradiction, in john paul’s mind, between his bold, broad critiques of war and the possibility of support for limited multilateral pope francis, nonviolence, and catholic teaching on war 160 police action in extreme circumstances. and even in this context, john paul stresses that humanitarian intervention and the obligation to “disarm the aggressor” should not be understood as inevitably requiring the use of military force. “the holy see does not cease to recall the principle of humanitarian intervention, that is not necessarily a military intervention, but every other kind of action aimed at ‘disarming’ the aggressor.”38 popes benedict xvi and francis like pope john paul ii, both pope benedict xvi and pope francis have made many blanket comments condemning war. “the church,” said benedict, “emphatically rejects war.”39 “war, with its aftermath of bereavement and destruction,” he asserts, is “a disaster in opposition to the plan of god.”40 prior to becoming pope, responding to a question about pope john paul ii’s outspoken opposition to the iraq war, cardinal ratzinger stated: “there were not sufficient reasons to unleash a war against iraq. to say nothing of the fact that, given the new weapons that make possible destructions that go beyond the combatant groups, today we should be asking ourselves if it is still licit to admit the very existence of a ‘just war.’”41 thus benedict, like john paul, strongly suggests that no modern war can be legitimate. he highlights numerous reasons for this, such as the reality of effective nonviolent alternatives, the overwhelmingly negative humanitarian impacts of war, and, most fundamentally, the ways in which the use of violence undermines human dignity. “to put one's trust in violent means in the hope of restoring more justice is to become the victim of a fatal illusion,” benedict stated in his earlier role as head of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith. “[v]iolence,” he asserts, “begets violence and degrades man. it mocks the dignity of man in the person of the victims and it debases that same dignity among those who practice it.”42 pope francis similarly issues blanket criticisms of war. “war,” francis says, “is the suicide of humanity because it kills the heart and kills love […]. wars are always madness.”43 asserting that war is never necessary, francis declares: [w]ar is never a satisfactory means of redressing injustice and achieving balanced solutions to political and social discord. all war is ultimately, as pope benedict xv stated in 1917, a “senseless slaughter.” war drags peoples into a spiral of violence which then proves difficult to control; it tears down what generations 161 sniegocki have labored to build up and it sets the scene for even greater injustices and conflicts […]. war is never a necessity, nor is it inevitable.44 in his 2017 world day of peace message, highlighted at the start of this paper, francis presents the most lengthy, sustained reflection on nonviolence that has ever appeared in official papal teaching documents. calling upon catholics to “make active nonviolence our way of life,” francis prays that “nonviolence become the hallmark of our decisions, our relationships and our actions, and indeed of political life in all its forms.”45 “to be true followers of jesus today,” francis boldly declares, “includes embracing his teaching about nonviolence.”46 in making this assertion, francis quotes pope benedict xvi: “for christians, nonviolence is not merely tactical behavior but a person’s way of being […]. love of one’s enemy constitutes the nucleus of the christian revolution.”47 francis stresses that nonviolence is a powerful and effective way of actively opposing injustice: “nonviolence is sometimes taken to mean surrender, lack of involvement, and passivity, but this is not the case. […] the decisive and consistent practice of nonviolence has produced impressive results.”48 francis here mentions the efforts of gandhi; martin luther king, jr.; the muslim nonviolent leader khan abdul ghaffar khan, who formed the world’s first nonviolent army in opposition to british colonialism; the women of liberia who led a successful nonviolent movement that helped to remove a dictator, end a civil war, and elect the first woman as president of an african nation; and those who ended the communist regimes throughout eastern europe through active nonviolence. additional examples, such as the overthrow through mass nonviolent action of dictatorial regimes in the philippines, chile, serbia, bolivia, south africa, indonesia, and many other cases, could also be added. indeed, never has the historical evidence for the power of nonviolent action been stronger.49 towards the future: deepening catholic faithfulness to church teaching on war and nonviolence the recent tradition of catholic reflection on issues of war and nonviolence is a rich one, which has much to contribute to the discernment of a christian moral response to the problems that our world currently faces. the challenge for church leaders, educators, and all catholics is to take these teachings seriously and to find ways to make them come alive. currently, many catholics pope francis, nonviolence, and catholic teaching on war 162 are sadly unaware of papal teachings on war, nonviolence, and the building of peace. with regard to the increasingly central role of nonviolence in papal thought, for example, drew christiansen has stated: “the church’s gradual embrace of nonviolence is a well-kept secret in need of much catechizing among ordinary christians and institutionalizing in the life of parishes and dioceses as well.”50 part of the responsibility for this lack of knowledge among catholics of church teaching on war and peace issues has been the failure of many catholic bishops, priests, and other church leaders to publicly proclaim the teachings due to their controversial nature. the war in iraq, begun in 2003, provides a telling example. despite the strong statements by popes john paul ii and benedict xvi asserting that the war was a “defeat for humanity” and was not justified, there were only a very small number of bishops or priests in the united states who expressed public encouragement to catholic military personnel to conscientiously refuse to participate in the war, or who provided public support for those who did. such support for refusal to participate, however, must be an integral part of any serious application of just war principles, which include the firm moral obligation not to serve in wars that do not meet strict just war criteria.51 given comments by recent popes very strongly suggesting that no modern war can be justified, this becomes even more critical. if church leaders are not willing to publicly call for and support such refusal to participate, then what they are really espousing, despite any appeals to the just war tradition, is in reality a type of uncritical nationalism and a tacit acceptance of any war that their country chooses to engage in. a major campaign of education concerning church teaching on war, peace, and nonviolence is direly needed. this could take a variety of forms in parishes, in diocesan media, in elementary and high schools, and in catholic universities. education on the christian call to peacemaking and nonviolent action, rather than being relegated to an occasional program sponsored by a peace and justice committee, must become an integral part of all catholic catechesis and education. one important part of these efforts to deepen the formation of catholic conscience on war and peace issues would be to acquaint catholics with the reflections on war of the pre-constantinian church, thereby helping catholics to see the deep roots of principled nonviolence in the christian tradition, an approach grounded ultimately in the life and teachings of jesus himself. education on the history and theory of nonviolent action and its proven success in overcoming repressive regimes and bringing about needed social reforms throughout the world is also crucial. 163 sniegocki in addition to the widespread effort that is needed to more fully inform catholics about church teaching and to put this teaching into practice, i would suggest that there are also several ways in which catholic thought on war, peace, and nonviolence could be enhanced through further clarification and development. first, there is need for deeper reflection on the question of humanitarian intervention. as we have seen, pope john paul ii, while condemning all war, left open the possible legitimacy of a limited armed intervention in extreme circumstances to prevent genocide or other massive abuses of human rights, even while stressing that humanitarian intervention does not necessarily imply the need for armed force. several of the criteria given by john paul ii for humanitarian interventions were highlighted above, i.e., any such action must be in response to grave violations of human rights, must respect noncombatant immunity, must be in accord with international law, and must be “guaranteed by an authority that is internationally recognized.” pope francis has also affirmed a moral obligation to act to prevent grave violations of human rights. he too has emphasized that this need not entail the use of armed force. “in these cases where there is an unjust aggression, i can only say this: it is licit to stop the unjust aggressor. i underline the verb: stop. i do not say bomb, make war, i say stop by some means. with what means can they be stopped? these have to be evaluated.”52 if any openness to the use of armed force is to be maintained (and it is ambiguous whether francis intends this or not), the criteria certainly require deeper discernment. what constitute the essential differences, for example, between a justified “humanitarian intervention” or “police action” and an unjustified “war”? unless the criteria are sufficiently clear, there seems to be a grave danger that these criteria for “just intervention” can be deeply abused just as the criteria for “just war” so often have been. christian theologian walter wink has argued compellingly that when the church allows for any use of violence, this limited acceptance of violence opens the door in practice to a widespread acceptance of violence that far exceeds what the church intends. therefore, asserts wink, it is essential that the church reject all violence. says wink: i resisted committing myself without reserve to nonviolence for so many years. i have slowly come to see that what the church needs most desperately is precisely such a clear-cut unambiguous position. governments will still wrestle with the option of war, and ethicists can perhaps assist them with their decisions. but the pope francis, nonviolence, and catholic teaching on war 164 church’s own witness should be understandable by the smallest child: we oppose violence in all its forms. […] that means, the child will recognize, no abuse or beatings. that means, women will hear, no rape or violation or battering. that means, men will come to understand, no more male supremacy or war. that means, everyone will realize, no more degradation of the environment. we can affirm nonviolence without reservation because nonviolence is the way god’s domination-free order is coming.53 if the catholic church is to continue to accept the possible legitimacy of catholic participation in some very limited forms of violence (e.g., as part of multilateral “humanitarian interventions”), then it is crucial to explain why and how the negative implications that wink warns against (i.e., a much more widespread acceptance and practice of violence than church leaders intend) can truly be avoided. i would suggest that these implications almost certainly cannot be avoided and that a fuller embrace of principled nonviolence would in fact be the most effective and faithful choice that the church can make. i will respond to some common objections to this claim in the final section of this paper. other important issues needing attention concern the various ways that catholics are currently implicated in war and preparations for war. if the church takes seriously the broad, powerful condemnations of modern warfare and the increased emphasis on nonviolent action that have been articulated in church teaching by pope john paul ii, pope francis, and others, even apart from any fuller, definitive embrace of principled nonviolence, is there any way that traditional national military service (as opposed to service in some type of u.n.-organized peacekeeping force) can continue to be viewed as morally licit? should followers of jesus be forbidden again to join the military as they were in the early church? should rotc training programs at catholic colleges and universities be abolished? if a justified war is essentially impossible in our modern context, as recent popes have suggested, are not catholic-supported military training programs creating contexts in which grave sin is extremely likely? also, how should catholics in nuclear-armed countries respond to their countries’ possession of nuclear weapons, given that pope francis has firmly stated that “[t]he threat of their use as well as their very possession is to be firmly condemned.”54 what concrete actions need to follow for catholics from this and similar judgments? 165 sniegocki increased emphasis on the centrality of nonviolence to christian faith also raises questions about traditional catholic conceptions of natural law. natural law as understood by st. thomas aquinas includes the right to violent self-defense as one of its implications. if increased emphasis continues to be placed in church teaching on a christologically-grounded embrace of nonviolence, as it should, what implications would this have? perhaps catholic thought on natural law could be enhanced here through dialogue with the thought of gandhi, who conceptualized nonviolence as being most in accord with human nature properly understood. “nonviolence is the law of our species,” gandhi states.55 particularly since catholics understand jesus to be the fullest embodiment of true human nature, it seems only fitting that jesus’s example of nonviolence be incorporated more deeply into catholic natural law perspectives. finally, it is crucial for the catholic church to continue to seek to foster a deep spirituality of nonviolence. without a foundation in prayer and without moral formation deeply grounded in the life and teachings of jesus, it seems unlikely that the church’s increasingly strong rejection of war and embrace of nonviolence will ever truly take root. objections and responses the call for a deeper and more unambiguous embrace of principled nonviolence faces a variety of common objections, many of which were articulated in the 2018 special issue of expositions on just war theory and catholic social teaching.56 three such objections are that a call for the church as a whole to embrace principled nonviolence would undermine respect for the goodness of creation, would be naïve and dangerous, and would run the risk of sectarian withdrawal from worldly responsibility. bernard g. prusak, for example, argues that the natural law ethic that undergirded just war theory “reflected a fundamental faith commitment to the goodness of creation,” suggesting that a principled commitment to nonviolence would leave the innocent unprotected and thus not adequately respect this goodness.57 robert h. latiff argues that calls to abandon just war theory are “extraordinarily naïve” and would allow evil to triumph.58 lisa sowle cahill, in an otherwise very insightful essay, adds a comment at the end of her essay seemingly critical of the traditional peace churches, implying that their principled commitment to nonviolence may not reflect an adequate concern for justice. “the catholic church has a countercultural message about military force,” cahill says, “but it is not a sectarian ‘peace church.’ the purpose of cst, including its pope francis, nonviolence, and catholic teaching on war 166 peacebuilding profile, is to contribute to more just societies and to increase justice in civil society and governance globally.”59 to criticize those who embrace nonviolence as not adequately affirming the goodness of the created world, as prusak does, is an odd claim, since it is precisely respect for the goodness and value of life that leads most pacifists to commit not to kill. it is also respect for the goodness of life that has led many pacifists to study, teach, and engage in various methods of nonviolent action in defense of the innocent. as to whether principled pacifism is naïve and dangerous, this claim would appear to rest in part on misunderstandings. latiff, who makes this claim, suggests that pacifists believe that all conflicts can be resolved through diplomacy. clearly, however, this is not the argument that is being made by those calling on the catholic church to embrace principled nonviolence. proponents of nonviolence and of a just peace framework highlight the power of mass nonviolent action to challenge and overthrow even highly repressive regimes, as has been demonstrated in the many historical cases cited above. such as approach does not rely solely on diplomacy or on faith in the good will of repressive leaders. with regard to naivety, proponents of nonviolent action are generally quite realistic about the power and prevalence of sin and injustice. they recognize that this approach can result in martyrdom and acknowledge the possibility even of widespread death, just as those who affirm the justness of military responses acknowledge that many are likely to be killed in war. there is clearly a deeply tragic dimension to life, and there may be circumstances in which neither violence nor nonviolence can bring about needed change in the short-term. in general, though, studies have shown that mass nonviolent action has succeeded in ending repressive regimes more often, more quickly, and with less loss of life than attempts at ending such regimes through violence.60 it should also be noted that those who emphasize a more restrictive version of just war as being preferable to a principled embrace of nonviolence can themselves be criticized for naivety in thinking that such a restrictive version of just war will ever have widespread influence within church or society and be able to fundamentally impact concrete action. the iraq war, as highlighted above, provides powerful counter-evidence. despite the vast majority of christian ethicists and church leaders in denominational statements arguing that the war was unjust, almost no christian soldiers refused to participate and almost no church leaders actively called 167 sniegocki for or pledged concrete support for such non-participation. the opening to violence provided by the theoretical notion of a just war, along with an often uncritical nationalism, triumphed over any deeper critical analysis or prophetic action. only a more principled affirmation of nonviolence, i would contend, has the potential to fundamentally break through such rationalizations. as long as any violence is deemed acceptable, people will always find ways to believe that their violence is or will be the acceptable kind, and christians will continue to tolerate all the evils of war and preparations for war that the popes have so eloquently condemned. while there are risks in embracing principled nonviolence, i would argue that there are far greater risks in not doing so. finally, as to critiques of “peace churches” as demonstrating a sectarian form of withdrawal from responsibility for building a more just world, which cahill implied, this certainly does not hold up as a generalized claim. the quakers, for example, are one of the most prominent historical peace churches and have been in the forefront of nearly every social justice struggle of the past several centuries, from the abolition of slavery to women’s rights to civil rights to immigrant rights and the sanctuary movement, among many others. a principled embrace of nonviolence clearly need not result in social withdrawal or a lack of commitment to social justice. conclusion this paper has explored some of the history of catholic teaching on war, including the nonviolent ethos of jesus and the early church, the subsequent development of just war teaching, and the critical rethinking concerning war that has taken place since vatican ii. this recent rethinking has included a renewed appreciation for principled nonviolence, greater awareness of the effectiveness of nonviolent action in challenging repressive regimes, deep skepticism that any modern war could meet traditional just war criteria, emphasis on the need to address the structural causes of war, and emphasis on the role of multilateral organizations such as the united nations in preventing war and building peace. these powerful themes of recent catholic teaching could profoundly transform the catholic church and the world if they come to be more effectively taught and acted upon. a clearer principled embrace of nonviolence on the part of the church, i have suggested, has the potential to transform the world even more deeply. most pope francis, nonviolence, and catholic teaching on war 168 importantly, it would demonstrate greater faithfulness to the teachings and example of the nonviolent jesus. notes 1. pope francis, “nonviolence: a style of politics for peace,” the holy see, january 1, 2017, §1, https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/peace/documents/papafrancesco_20161208_messaggio-l-giornata-mondiale-pace-2017.html. 2. ibid §3. 3. c. john cadoux, the early christian attitude toward war (new york: seabury, 1982), 97; john driver, how christians made peace with war (scottdale, pa: herald press, 1988), 14. 4. apostolic tradition, quoted in driver, how christians 49. also see paul bradshaw, maxwell johnson, and l. edward phillips, the apostolic tradition: a commentary, ed. harold w. attridge (minneapolis, mn: fortress press, 2002), 90. 5. ibid. 6. in addition to the works cited above, see jean michel hornus, it is not lawful for me to fight: early christian attitudes towards war, violence, and the state, rev. ed. (scottdale, pa: herald press, 1980). 7. origen, contra celsus, quoted in eileen egan, peace be with you: justified warfare or the way of nonviolence (maryknoll, ny: orbis, 1999), 27. 8. origen, contra celsus, quoted in driver, how christians 67. 9. lactantius, divine institutions, quoted in john ferguson, the politics of love: the new testament and nonviolent revolution (nyack, ny: fellowship publications, 1979), 59– 60. 10. for a classic overview of the christian tradition on war and peace, see roland bainton, christian attitudes toward war and peace (new york: abingdon press, 1960). also see lisa sowle cahill, love your enemies: discipleship, pacifism, and just war theory (minneapolis, mn: fortress press, 1994). 169 sniegocki 11. pope pius xii declared in his 1956 christmas message that “a catholic citizen cannot invoke his own conscience in order to refuse to serve and fulfill those duties the law imposes” (“communism and democracy,” in the major addresses of pope pius xii, volume 2: christmas messages (st. paul, mn: the north central publishing company, 1961), 225). 12. pope john xxiii, pacem in terris, the holy see, 1963, §127, http://www.vatican.va/ content/john-xxiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_j-xxiii_enc_ 11041963_pacem.html. 13. ibid. §§137–141. 14. second vatican council, gaudium et spes, the holy see, 1965, §80, http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vatii_const_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html. 15. ibid. §§78–79. 16. ibid. §80. 17. ibid. §81. 18. ibid. §82. 19. the council’s deliberations were also influenced by the moral witness of a group of pacifist women, including dorothy day, who undertook ten days of fasting and prayer in rome and who met with numerous bishops as the section of gaudium et spes on war and peace was being drafted. see egan, peace be with you, 166–180. 20. pope paul vi, “no to violence, yes to peace,” the holy see, january 1, 1978, http://www.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/messages/peace/documents/hf_pvi_mes_19771208_xi-world-day-for-peace.html. 21. pope paul vi, evangelii nuntiandi, the holy see, december 8, 1975, §37, http://www.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/apost_exhortations/documents/hf_pvi_exh_19751208_evangelii-nuntiandi.html. 22. pope john paul ii, “apostolic journey to great britain: homily in coventry,” the holy see, may 30, 1982, http://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/homilies/1982/documents/hf_jpii_hom_19820530_coventry.html. 23. pope john paul ii, “dialogue for peace, a challenge for our time,” the holy see, january 1, 1983, §4, pope francis, nonviolence, and catholic teaching on war 170 https://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/messages/peace/documents/hf_jpii_mes_19821208_xvi-world-day-for-peace.html. 24. pope john paul ii, “address of his holiness pope john paul ii to the representatives of the world religions,” the holy see, january 24, 2002, §4, http://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/speeches/2002/january/documents/hf_jpii_spe_20020124_discorso-assisi.html. 25. pope john paul ii, “do not be overcome by evil but overcome evil with good,” the holy see, january 1, 2005, §4, https://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/messages/peace/documents/hf_jpii_mes_20041216_xxxviii-world-day-for-peace.html. 26. pope john paul ii, “truth: the power of peace,” the holy see, january 1, 1980, §10, https://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/messages/peace/documents/hf_jpii_mes_19791208_xiii-world-day-for-peace.html. 27. pope john paul ii, “peace: a gift of god entrusted to us!” the holy see, january 1, 1982, §12, https://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/messages/peace/documents/hf_jpii_mes_19811208_xv-world-day-for-peace.html. 28. walter wink, the powers that be: theology for a new millennium (new york: doubleday, 1998), 137. 29. pope john paul ii, centesimus annus, the holy see, 1991, §52, https://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jpii_enc_01051991_centesimus-annus.html. 30. pope john paul ii, “if you want peace, reach out to the poor,” the holy see, january 1, 1993, §4, http://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/messages/peace/documents/hf_jpii_mes_08121992_xxvi-world-day-for-peace.html (emphasis in original). 31. pope john paul ii, centesimus annus §23. 32. pope john paul ii, “peace on earth to those whom god loves!” the holy see, january 1, 2000, §4, https://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/messages/peace/documents/hf_jpii_mes_08121999_xxxiii-world-day-for-peace.html. 171 sniegocki 33. united states conference of catholic bishops, the challenge of peace: god’s promise and our response (washington, dc: usccb, 1983), §222. 34. united states conference of catholic bishops, the harvest of justice is sown in peace (washington, dc: usccb, 1993), §1.b1. 35. this information concerning “development of doctrine” is recounted by drew christiansen, s.j., in a lecture entitled “‘no, never again war’: the evolution of catholic teaching on peace and war,” santa clara university, april 28, 2004. 36. usccb, harvest of justice §1.b1–2. 37. pope john paul ii, “peace on earth to those whom god loves!” §11. 38. pope john paul ii, address to diplomats (january 13, 1994), quoted in “war, the u.n., and humanitarian intervention according to pope john paul ii,” la stampa: vatican insider august 26, 2014, https://www.lastampa.it/vatican-insider/en/2014/08/26/news/war-the-un-andhumanitarian-intervention-according-to-pope-john-paul-ii-1.35627007. 39. pope benedict xvi, “address of his holiness benedict xvi to h. e. mr. makram obeid, ambassador of the syrian arab republic to the holy see,” the holy see, december 14, 2006, https://w2.vatican.va/content/benedictxvi/en/speeches/2006/december/documents/hf_ben_xvi_spe_20061214_ambassadorsyria.html. 40. pope benedict xvi, “angelus,” the holy see, july 22, 2007, https://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/angelus/2007/documents/hf_benxvi_ang_20070722.html. 41. for a transcript of the interview in which cardinal ratzinger made these comments, see http://www.zenit.org/english/visualizza.phtml?sid=34882. 42. sacred congregation for the doctrine of faith. “instruction on certain aspects of the theology of liberation,” the holy see, august 6, 1984), §11.7, https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_ 19840806_theology-liberation_en.html. 43. pope francis, “where is your brother?” the holy see, june 2, 2013, pope francis, nonviolence, and catholic teaching on war 172 http://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/cotidie/2013/documents/papa-francescocotidie_20130602_war-madness.html. 44. pope francis, “peace is the future,” the holy see, august 26, 2014, http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/pontmessages/2014/documents/papa-francesco_20140826_messaggio-sant-egidio-paceanversa.html. 45. pope francis, “nonviolence: a style of politics for peace” §1. 46. ibid. §3. 47. ibid. 48. ibid. §4. 49. for books exploring the theory and recent history of nonviolent action, see peter ackerman and jack duvall, a force more powerful: a century of nonviolent conflict (new york: st. martin’s press, 2000); gene sharp, waging nonviolent struggle: 20th century practice and 21st century potential (boston: porter-sargent, 2005). 50. christiansen, “no, never again war.” 51. one prominent exception to this lack of outspokenness concerning the implications of church teaching was john michael botean, bishop of byzantine-rite romanian catholics in the united states. bishop botean issued a pastoral letter declaring that direct participation in the war in iraq would constitute mortal sin. for bishop botean’s powerful letter, see https://www.scribd.com/document/4196399/pastoral-letter-iraq-war. 52. pope francis, quoted in gerard o’connell, “full text of pope francis’s press conference on plane returning from korea,” america august 18, 2014, https://www.americamagazine.org/content/all-things/full-text-pope-francis-pressconference-plane-returning-korea. 53. wink, the powers that be 144. 54. pope francis, “address of his holiness pope francis to participants in the international symposium ‘prospects for a world free of nuclear weapons and for integral disarmament,” the holy see, november 10, 2017, http://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2017/november/documents/papafrancesco_20171110_convegno-disarmointegrale.html. 55. mohandas gandhi, “the doctrine of the sword,” young india august 11, 1920, 173 sniegocki https://www.mkgandhi.org/nonviolence/d_sword.htm. 56. expositions: interdisciplinary studies in the humanities: special issue on the future of just war theory in catholic social thought 12.1 (2018), https://expositions.journals.villanova.edu/issue/view/159. 57. bernard g. prusak, “just war or just peace? the future of catholic teaching on war and peace,” expositions 12.1 (2018): 2, https://expositions.journals.villanova.edu/article/view/2315/2214. 58. robert h. latiff, “jumping into combat without a parachute—on purpose?,” expositions 12.1 (2018): 76, https://expositions.journals.villanova.edu/article/view/2321/2225. 59. lisa sowle cahill, “the future of (catholic) just war theory: marginal,” expositions 12.1 (2018): 27, https://expositions.journals.villanova.edu/article/view/2318/2222. 60. for in-depth examination and comparison of twentieth century violent and nonviolent struggles against repressive regimes, see erica chenoweth and maria stephan, why civil resistance works: the strategic logic of nonviolent conflict (new york: columbia university press, 2011). microsoft word 5 wawrytko.docx [expositions 12.2 (2018) 54–68] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 globalizing philosophy sandra a. wawrytko san diego state university one of the most important lessons i have learned from chinese philosophy is the power of the image, which challenges the logocentrism of amero-eurocentric philosophies. wang bi (226–249 ce) succinctly summarizes the relationships of image, thought and language to underlying meaning: image (xiang) reveals the meaning (yi), and speech (yan) clarifies the image. to exhaust the meaning nothing is better than the image; to exhaust the image nothing is better than speech. speech arises out of images, and we can thus divulge the meaning through the image. . . . therefore, speech is what clarifies the image and must be forgotten once the image is grasped; image is what preserves the meaning and must be forgotten once the meaning is grasped. [speech is] like a snare used to catch a rabbit; the snare is to be forgotten once the rabbit is grasped. [image is] like a net used to catch a fish; the net is to be forgotten once the fish is grasped. thus, speech is the snare of image, and image is the net of meaning.1 accordingly, i was struck by the image on the cover of bryan van norden’s taking back philosophy. the sword-wielding monkey king in attack mode seems to send the wrong message, confirming the fears of our xenophobic colleagues. similarly, the words “taking back” and “manifesto” may easily be read as a declaration of war. is this the true meaning of our multicultural endeavor?2 i heartily agree with van norden that chinese philosophy, like other “non-western” philosophies, has a vital role to play in the world today, and that it has much to contribute to global culture. it is not a mere museum piece or an exotic cultural artifact, but is both relevant to and even crucial for dealing with contemporary crises. it addresses aspects of the human condition and deploys effective methodologies that have been ignored or marginalized. philosophers would do well to learn from the practical research of political scientists regarding the value of diversity: “if 55 wawrytko we’re in an organization where everyone thinks in the same way, everyone will get stuck in the same place. but if we have people with diverse tools, they’ll get stuck in different places. … [d]iverse groups of problem solvers outperformed the groups of the best individuals at solving problems.”3 before we survey the road ahead, we must acknowledgement where we have been and assess how far we have come. the last fifty years of chinese philosophy’s journey in american academia roughly parallels the trajectory of my own professional career. just as kong zi set his mind on learning at the age of fifteen (lun yu 2:4),4 around the same age i set my mind on philosophy, after reading plato’s republic in my latin class. however, as a female undergraduate student in a field dominated by males i soon experienced a sense of alienation. sanctioned by the overwhelmingly negative characteristics found in many esteemed philosophers, from aristotle to hegel and schopenhauer, misogyny was condoned and the innate inferiority of women was accepted as established fact.5 since i was not willing to remain in a discipline that marginalized my existence as a matter of principle, i sought out alternative views of the feminine. venturing beyond the confines of the philosophy curriculum, i encountered the yin-based philosophy of daoism in a religion class. although i was determined to pursue my interests in comparative philosophy as a graduate student, in the 1970s few philosophy departments offered such resources. so i settled for a solid grounding in amero-eurocentric philosophy at a highly ranked campus. when i decided to focus my dissertation on lao zi and spinoza, i met immediate resistance.6 fortunately several faculty members were willing to trust my ability to complete the project. only after i successfully completed my oral defense did the chair of my committee reveal how stiff the opposition to my proposal had been. fast forward to my teaching career: seeking a more receptive environment for pursuing asian thought, i relocated to california from the midwest. friends had warned me about going to “lala land,” where they feared i soon be spending all my time meditating on the beach. indeed there was evidence of non-western philosophy on the west coast, but of questionable quality. one lecturer at my campus proudly added buddhism to her introduction to philosophy class, but her chosen text was the platonic reverie, zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. a tenured professor, and avowed aristotelian ex-priest who had taken an interest in chinese philosophy, decided to add a class to the curriculum. he seemed to assume that an understanding of chinese globalizing philosophy 56 history or culture was irrelevant to interpreting the ancient texts. eventually i inherited that class, which i continue to teach. my first ten years or so were spent offering the standard curriculum, especially introduction to logic. undaunted by the restrictive venue, i added a closing section on asian logic to my classes. after inundating the students with well-ordered aristotelian categories and the pristine certainties of propositional logic, we concluded with the unexpected chinese logic of xun zi and the devastating iconoclasm of the reformed logician nāgārjuna. a similar interweaving of comparative views was added to my introductory classes on values and metaphysics/epistemology. then for another decade or so i divided my time between philosophy and asian studies, which allowed for an exclusive asian focus in some classes. returning to philosophy on a full-time basis, i have been able to expand the curriculum further with new classes on buddhist philosophy, asian philosophies of leadership, global aesthetics,7 and various topics in an upper-division asian philosophies class and graduate seminars. on a campus with more than 35,000 students i remain the sole officially recognized expert on chinese philosophy and am routinely introduced by my colleagues as the department’s asianist. stuck at the crossroads as van norden notes, the challenge of globalizing philosophy begins by reconsidering what constitutes philosophy—not as a mere remnant of ancient greek culture, but as a long-standing human activity practiced in diverse cultures. amero-eurocentric philosophy gets stuck on such issues as free will vs. determinism and good vs. evil. however, these imagined dilemmas are rarely addressed in chinese philosophy, which is more likely to fixate on tensions between loyalties to family and state. as an academic discipline in america, philosophy seemingly has reached an impasse. for decades it has been wandering in a labyrinth riddled with blind passages, including the miasma of logical positivism, the post-mortem of post-modernism and the self-defeating demise of derridean deconstruction. in some departments it has been reduced to the philosophy of x (technology, religion, medical ethics, science, logic, etc.). many observers thus have concluded that the emperor has no clothes! cicero contends, “there is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it.”8 bertrand russell is on the record defining philosophy as “an unusually ingenious attempt to think fallaciously,”9 while henry brooks adams associates philosophy with “unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.”10 57 wawrytko a long line of philosophers inside the european tradition have been disenchanted by its epistemological posturings. for pyrrho (360–275 bce), who was very likely influenced by his exposure to madhyamaka buddhism, the true philosopher was the true skeptic—we don’t even know we don’t know.11 rené descartes (1596–1650) provisionally applied the method of universal doubt (meditations on first philosophy), while david hume (1711–1776) concluded that “all knowledge degenerates into probability” (a treatise of human nature). ludwig wittgenstein (1889–1951) retreated to language, first as a set of universal propositions (tractatus logicophilosophicus) and later as a game (philosophical investigations). when some of the most highly recognized professional philosophers were confronted with the question, “what have we learned from philosophy in the twentieth century?” at the 1998 world congress of philosophy, their responses were deeply disappointing.12 w. v. o. quine dodged the question and its implications, stating “i’m going to have to pass.” peter strawson “became obsessed by the use of the word ‘we’ and whether it was meant to be considered in a collectively or individual sense; ‘if it’s the former, the possibility of any reply seems remote. and if it’s the latter, there is no shortage of replies.’” donald davidson was equally evasive, merely noting how “very american” philosophy had been in the twentieth century, then clarifying, “to be honest, it was mostly harvard.” the sole woman in the group, marjorie grene, also was bothered by the phrasing of the question, focusing on both “we” and “learned,” and then asked “why is it important to do mathematical logic? why?” this led to a condemnation of cartesian dualism as well as its namesake, descartes: “the only true statement he made was that he was born in 1596,” which she stated was also open to debate. her attacks continued further afield: “heidegger was evil and we ought to forget him,” while ethics is “just minding everyone’s business.” karl-otto apel fondly recalled the good old days of neo-kantian abstraction, now dismissed as “nonsense” in the wake of linguistic philosophy, concluding, “the only philosophical thinking left is et cetera.” seyyed hossein nasr offered the only acknowledgement of cultural diversity, noting, “i take it this means american philosophy.” his advice was to adopt a more open-minded approach to the neglected philosophies of india, china, japan, and islam as a means to recover one’s own tradition’s “quest for truth and meaning.” such verbal sparring plays into another stereotype indulged in by journalist terry mcdermott when he described the philosophical activity of philosophy professor john searle (university of california, berkeley) as “boxing with words, a slugfest of minds” in which “the goal is to beat the globalizing philosophy 58 other guy’s brains out. the object is to win.”13 as we all are well aware, the original meaning of the greek term for philosophy derives from the love (philia) of wisdom (sophia, embodied as a goddess). how did love degenerate into an extreme sport? friedrich nietzsche (1844–1900), a voice calling out in the barren wilderness of ameroeurocentric philosophy, has an answer to this question. as a philologist who “philosophizes with a hammer,” nietzsche blamed philosophy’s degeneration on “the problem of socrates”: i recognized socrates and plato to be symptoms of degeneration. … socrates’ decadence is suggested … by the hypertrophy of the logical faculty. … one chooses dialectic only when one has no other means. … it can only be self-defense for those who no longer have other weapons. … [h]e discovered a new kind of agon [contest; competition] …. he introduced a variation into the wrestling match. … it is a selfdeception on the part of philosophers and moralists if they believe that they are extricating themselves from decadence when they are merely waging war against it.14 nietzsche’s complaint was based on his earlier assessment of the birth of tragedy from the spirit of music, crediting the “pacification” of the dionysian and apollonian states with making tragedy possible.15 socrates disrupted this balance, setting the stage for plato’s erroneous “true world.” nonetheless our aspiring zarathustra eventually descended into a dionysian stupor in which he himself took on the identity of dionysos. the inherent flaws of “the hypertrophy of the logical faculty” and hardwired dualism that continue to characterize amero-eurocentric philosophy have been duly noted by chinese philosophers such as li zehou: from the very beginning aesthetic consciousness in the chinese tradition has never been ascetic. far from foreswearing sensory pleasures, it embraces, affirms, and celebrates them. … [t]his affirmation of sensory pleasure is by no means dionysian licentiousness or saturnalia.16 59 wawrytko chinese sages transformed and rationalized the power of the shamans into rites and rituals and interpreted these powers as manifested in music and poetry to be constructive. western scholars considered the powers of the muses attractive and powerful, but whimsical, and a threat to the human’s most treasured faculty: reason.17 chinese models for a harmony of reason and emotion, wisdom and compassion, informed by both intellectual and sensory experiences, is of immense value to philosophers of all schools. it opens new venues for discourse concerning topics as diverse as human relationships, leadership, and the power of the arts. more importantly this nondual approach resonates with what i refer to as the hybrid brain, the two attentional networks in the bilateral brain recognized by neuroscience. taskdriven ventral attention central to linguistic and conceptual processing of information has been privileged in amero-eurocentric philosophies. however, the default of stimulus-driven ventral attention has been denigrated as a manifestation of mere phenomenal shadows in plato’s dark cave. chinese and other philosophies integrate both attentional networks, resulting in a much broader perspective on reality. neuroscientists theorize that these networks work in tandem to maximize mutual efficiency: “task-relevant signals from the dorsal system ‘filter’ stimulus-driven signals in the ventral system [prone to ‘distractibility’], whereas stimulus-driven ‘circuit-breaking’ signals from the ventral system provide an interrupt to the dorsal system [compromised by ‘perseveration’], reorienting it toward salient stimuli.”18 consider nietzsche’s three metamorphoses in also sprach zarathustra. smug-and-satisfied camels (platonists, aristotelians, cartesians, kantians, and hegelians) continue to schlep the burden of the “great minds” of the past. in response, rebellious lions (nihilists, existentialists, post-modernists, and deconstructionists) rage against the past, while still trapped by what nietzsche calls “chain-fever.” today’s lions are often camels in disguise, self-deluded camels who continue to carry the burdens/icons of their chosen masters, all the while proclaiming their iconoclasm. daoist philosopher zhuang zi aptly characterizes such individuals as “the smug-andsatisfied” who “having learned the words of one master, put on a smug and satisfied look, privately much pleased with themselves, considering that what they have gotten is quite sufficient, and not even realizing that they haven’t begun to get anything at all.”19 others have degenerated into predatory hyenas, interested only in delivering the kill shot in their philosophical slugfest. globalizing philosophy 60 nietzsche’s solution lies with the child—“innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred ‘yes.’”20 fang dongmei 方東美 (1899–1977) understood this fully, comparing engagement with chinese philosophy to flying a kite: the whole cosmic power of creativity [is] … displayed in the thin thread as well as the free spirit of the philosopher in the image of the butterfly. … for anyone who wants to engage in the system-building of philosophy, there can be no better way than imitating the child of the story flying a kite, firmly and steadily—besides taking a flight in the air. though unable to mount up to spaces on high, surely one feels the wondrous, all-propelling cosmic creative forces at work through the very delicate thin thread within one’s firm grasp!21 in revisioning philosophy, we would do well to heed the words of søren kierkegaard (1813–1855): “what philosophers say about reality is often as disappointing as a sign you see in a shop window, which reads pressing done here. if you brought your clothes to be pressed, you would be fooled; for the sign is only for sale.”22 our words have been disconnected from meaning for too long. it is time for us to be productive once again, to deliver on our claims. chinese philosophy has many worthy suggestions to offer. how can we draw them forth in a form accessible to our changing world? creative hermeneutics we need to engage our fellow philosophers and our students in the vibrant experience of chinese philosophy that is as dynamic as kite-flying. here alert interaction is mandatory, while the sharing of philosophical big data and algorithms is irrelevant. we must invite, and at times lure in, those conditioned by amero-eurocentric assumptions so they might broaden their horizons and perhaps show the philosophical fly the way out of its self-created fly-bottle. to do so i have adopted a methodology paralleling the creative hermeneutics of charles weihsun fu 傅偉勳 (1933–1996). this five-step process begins with scholarly analysis: (1) textual criticism (what did the original text or author say?), (2) a contextual analysis (what did the text intend to say?), and (3) comparative analyses of the assumed intentions (what might the text have intended to say?). these three steps reflect routine scholarly investigations, equally applicable for 61 wawrytko a museum curator who deals with the dead past. to address a living tradition we must push forward to philosophical synthesis: exploring (4) the best possible means of facilitating communication of its message (what should they have said?) by taking on the role of an adept translator of the original message willing and able to rise above cognitive literalism in rendering that message.23 most risky of all is the final stage, aimed at (5) conveying the contemporary relevance of chinese philosophy, which constitutes what dr. fu has called a “creative inheritance” of the original message (what must we say now on their behalf?). only then will chinese philosophy be able to extend its reach as a global philosophy liberated from any temporal or geographical limitations. in my own teaching i am adamant about demonstrating to my students the relevance of chinese philosophy. i pair three distinctive philosophies deeply rooted in chinese tradition with three pressing contemporary challenges—confucianism and feminism, daoism and ecology, and buddhism and post-modern science. unlike “brain in the vat” thought experiments, current crises provide an opportunity to undertake a sweeping critique of the very values that have created them and offer alternatives from chinese philosophical sources. we can test-drive methodologies that expand the possibilities for all forms of philosophy, not just chinese philosophy, in the twentyfirst century and beyond. 1. confucianism and feminism24 to validate the continuing relevance of kong zi and his philosophy, we must confront a long-neglected fact: no philosophical doctrine can have a legitimate claim to universality if 51% of the human race—constituted by women—is excluded from its scope, or relegated to a merely minor, solely supportive role. if women as a group have no potential for realizing the profound person or jun-zi ideal, how can that ideal presume to carry cosmopolitan force? creative hermeneutics allows us to move beyond the sexist swamp of kong zi’s own time period (stages one through three) by focusing on what he should have said (a clear, unequivocal statement about women’s potential) and what he must say in our present temporal and cultural contexts. nor need this require a violation of his inherent philosophical principles and position. drawing on textual evidence of his openness to change in response to changing conditions, we can make a good case that he would be open to expanding the parameters of the ideal type, the jun zi, to include women. globalizing philosophy 62 2. daoism and ecology25 a daoist approach is sorely needed in the face of mounting ecological crises. to reverse our estrangement from the full range of reality, both egotistical aggressive action, (wei 為) and passive inaction (bu-wei 不為) must be supplanted by non-artificial interaction (weiwu-wei 為無為). thus we can recognize our intimate interconnection to the natural environment, as well as the survival value of being in harmony with dao, flowing with nature itself (zi-ran 自 然). lao zi and zhuang zi alike suggest significant areas for productive engagement by unthinking the needless complications imposed by cunning intellect, and undoing the damage that follows from those dysfunctional assumptions. daoist lessons can address real-life cases such as doomed environmental manipulation (biocontrol) and the inherent hazards of multi-tasking. viable solutions also are offered, as in this creative translation of chapter 19 of the dao de jing: “discard human artifice, abandon profit—/corrupt ceos, polluters, and toxic dumps will cease to exist.” perhaps the most riveting example is a comparison of two water control systems—dujiangyan in sichuan province circa 250 bce and the levee system in new orleans. despite thousands of years of technological advances at their disposal, the army corps of engineers could not keep new orleans safe from hurricane katrina. li bing’s philosophy of going under to “dredge the sand deeper and build the dam lower”26 has proven to be the wisest and most efficient in the end simply because it is the most natural. 3. buddhism and post-modern science27 as scientists delve ever deeper into the subatomic quantum world and reach into the farthest reaches of outer space searching for the ground of reality, they are increasingly forced to face the fact of primal emptiness. emptiness has proven to be much more than an idiosyncratic notion common among philosophies of an asian persuasion. the buddhist chan philosopher hui-neng deconstructs our fixations on thought (nian 念), memories (xiang 相 ), and finally on attachment or fixation itself (zhu 住 ): “don’t create a bunch of delusions.”28 without (wu 無) these fixations we are liberated from the confines of mere thought, liberated from materialism, and liberated from even the concept of liberation (emptying emptiness). no longer held in thrall to conceptual or perceptual reification/thingification, the philosopher stops going in circles, like the yak in love with its own tail (our distinguished group from the world congress of philosophy?). accordingly, we no longer disappoint kierkegaard by offering misleading claims concerning reality. 63 wawrytko parting thoughts when modernization was confused and conflated with westernization in the twentieth century, it provoked many destabilizing trends. this epistemological error should not be repeated in the twenty-first century. globalization need not entail reductionism. why should chinese philosophy need to prove it can fit the amero-eurocentric template of philosophizing, when the validity of that template itself is suspect? writing from the vantage point of psychology, anthony j. marsella voices similar concerns: there is a growing international recognition that north american and western european scientific and professional psychology is a “cultural construction.” … the recognition is not new, but it is growing in proportion and consequence. in my opinion, this recognition needs to be nurtured and sustained given the changing political, economic, and cultural power-shifts occurring in the world. i say, let us learn, understand, and respect the many different psychologies of the world rather than accept as dogma the psychology of the west that has dominated education and practice for so many decades.29 while marsella wisely points to the political and moral consequences of ignoring conceptual imperialism, we must add to these the social, ecological, and even economic consequences sketched briefly above. dysfunctional epistemologies and metaphysics do matter, and not just to philosophers! the profession of philosophy in america today, which continues to be enmeshed in the aftermath of plato’s “true world” reverie, seems to be emulating the titanic on course to hit the iceberg of reality. it remains fixated on the surface while ignoring the underlying depths. like the titanic, it has been warned of what is ahead by numerous philosophers, but has chosen to disregard the impending disaster. many continue to rearrange the deck chairs oblivious to the impending demise, or, like the titanic’s orchestra, provide a musical accompaniment as philosophy sinks into a watery grave. however, we need not book passage on this doomed vessel. we can abjure the temptations of its impressive size, highly-flaunted technology, and ostentatious accoutrements. the critical crossroads can be transformed from a place of frustration to a meeting place, a venue for a true meeting of minds. globalizing philosophy 64 i would like to close with a contemporary example of creative hermeneutics that was selfselected by students in my buddhist philosophy class in spring 2010. on the final examination they were asked to identify the most upāyic image from the many we had sampled in class, that is, the image that most skillfully conveyed the underlying message of buddhist philosophy. the overwhelming choice was a poem by the pulitzer prize-winning american poet and environmentalist gary snyder, entitled “avocado.” living in california, all the students could readily relate to the evocative image, which challenged them to draw a connection with the buddhist concepts we had been discussing all semester. the fluctuating relationship to the avocado also resonated with their own experiences. snyder may not be a philosopher himself, but he did more than provide the kind of misleading sign kierkegaard disparages. his verse serves as a finger pointing to the moon, allowing each student to discover the underlying meaning for her or himself: the dharma is like an avocado! some parts so ripe you can’t believe it, but it’s good. and other places hard and green without much flavor, pleasing those who like their eggs well-cooked. and the skin is thin, the great big round seed in the middle, is your own original nature pure and smooth, almost nobody ever splits it open or ever tries to see if it will grow. hard and slippery, it looks like you should plant it—but then it shoots out thru the fingers– gets away.30 65 wawrytko notes 1. wang bi, “ming xiang,” in zhou-yi lue-li [a brief discussion of some basic philosophical ideas of the yi jing], trans. charles wei-hsun fu. 2. portions of this essay are derived from a presentation, “applying creative hermeneutics to chinese philosophy in american academia: the path to globalization,” at a conference on the development of chinese philosophy in recent 30 years: retrospect and prospect sponsored by the international society for chinese philosophy at wuhan university, prc, june 2010, and subsequently published in a chinese translation. 3. scott e. page, the difference: how the power of diversity creates better groups, firms, schools and societies (princeton: princeton university press, 2007). 4. roger t. ames and henry rosemont, jr., the analects of confucius: a philosophical translation (new york: ballantine, 1998), 76–77. 5. in the days prior to affirmative action, male faculty made no attempt to hide their sexist views. at my first interview with the graduate advisor i was asked if i would be specializing in ethics or aesthetics, the only two fields of philosophy which he presumed were within the limited range of the female mind. he was quite astounded when i declared my preference for metaphysics. when i was about to graduate he refused to provide the same assistance offered to male graduates in finding a job because in his mind my true vocation was marriage (at the time i was not even engaged). 6. “the philosophical systematization of a ‘feminine’ perspective in terms of taoism’s tao te ching and the works of spinoza,” subsequently published as the undercurrent of feminine philosophy in eastern and western thought (lanham, md: university press of america, 1981). 7. the official title of this course is non-western aesthetics, imposed by a department chair who encouraged me to write the proposal. only later did i realize his true motive—to prevent me from sullying the “real” aesthetics class i previously taught with asian content. globalizing philosophy 66 8. cicero, de divinatione, trans. w. a. falconer (cambridge, ma: loeb classical library and harvard university press, 1923), 2:119. 9. bertrand russell, “philosophy’s ulterior motives,” unpopular essays (new york: touchstone/simon and schuster, 1950), 45. 10. the education of henry adams (boston: houghton mifflin, 1918). 11. see adrian kuzminski, pyrrhonism: how the ancient greeks reinvented buddhism (new york: lexington books, 2008). 12. sarah boxer, “at the end of a century of philosophizing, the answer is don’t ask,” new york times august 15, 1998, b9. 13. terry mcdermott, “no limits hinder uc thinker,” los angeles times december 28, 1999, a23. 14. friedrich nietzsche, twilight of the idols, in the portable nietzsche, ed. and trans. walter kaufmann (new york: viking press, 1968), 474–475, 477–478. 15. friedrich nietzsche, the birth of tragedy, trans. francis golffing (new york: doubleday anchor, 1956), 26. 16. li zehou, the chinese aesthetic tradition, trans. maiji bell samei (honolulu: university of hawai’i press, 2010), 10. 17. li zehou and jane cauvel, four essays on aesthetics: toward a global view (new york: lexington books, 2006), 26. 18. michael d. fox, et al., “spontaneous neuronal activity distinguishes human dorsal and ventral attention systems,” pnas 103:26 (june 27, 2006), 10046. 19. zhuang zi, the complete works of chuang tzu, trans. burton watson (new york: columbia, 1968), 275–276. 20. friedrich nietzsche, “on the three metamorphoses,” in the portable nietzsche, ed. and trans. walter kaufmann (new york: viking press, 1968), 137–139. 67 wawrytko 21. thomé h. fang, the spirit of chinese philosophy, http://thomehfang.com/suncrates/ spirit5.html. see also fang, prologue to chinese philosophy: its spirit and its development (taipei: linking publishing co., 1981). 22. søren kierkegaard, either/or, trans. walter lowrie (new york: anchor books, 1959), volume 1, 31. in his letters to aesthete a, the self-avowed non-philosopher, ethicallyoriented b observes, “what unites you [with the philosophers] is that life comes to a stop. to the philosopher world history is concluded, and he mediates. … [t]he philosopher, he is outside, he is not in the game, he sits and grows old listening to the songs of long ago” vol. 2, 175–176. 23. buddhism has a longstanding tradition of hermeneutics particularly relevant to this stage. the four rules of buddhist textual interpretation include emphasizing the doctrine over its propounder, the spirit over the word, meaning over interpretation, and direct wisdom over discursive consciousness. see étienne lamotte, “the assessment of textual interpretation in buddhism” in buddhist hermeneutics, ed. donald s. lopez, jr. (honolulu, hawaii: university of hawaii press, 1988), 11–27. 24. see sandra a. wawrytko, “kong zi as feminist: confucian self-cultivation in a contemporary context,” journal of chinese philosophy 27.2 (2000): 171–186; reprinted in classical & medieval literature criticism, vol. 63, ed. jelena krstovic (blackwell publishing, 2004). 25. see sandra a. wawrytko, “the viability (dao) and virtuosity (de) of daoist ecology: reversion (fu) as renewal,” journal of chinese philosophy 32.1 (march 2005): 89–103. 26. li bing’s “six-character formula” is displayed in erwang temple dedicated to him at the site of the dujiangyan irrigation system in china’s sichuan province. 27. see sandra a. wawrytko, “chinese philosophy’s resonance with post-modern science: chan insights on emptiness from master hui-neng,” international journal for comparative philosophy and culture 1.1 (spring 2002), http://www.thomehfang.com/ suncrates4/8huineng.htm and http://www.purifymind.com/postmodernsci.htm.ta globalizing philosophy 68 28. hui-neng, the platform sutra: the zen teachings of hui-neng, trans. and commentary red pine (emeryville: shoemaker & hoard, 2006), 174. 29. anthony j. marsella, “some reflections on potential abuses of psychology’s knowledge and practices,” psychological studies 54 (march 2009): 23–27. professor marsella has identified ten assumptions that “emerged from history as the uncontested reality of western europe and north america. a reality to be imposed on the rest of the world.” these range from reductionism and scientism to materialism and objectivity. 30. gary snyder, turtle island (new york: new directions, 1974), 61. microsoft word 7 santana.docx [expositions 12.2 (2018) 85–102] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376   mining history carlos santana university of utah we read and teach work by historical philosophers for any number of good reasons. it’s an activity enjoyable in itself. past thinkers can model good reasoning. philosophical texts help us understand and connect to both particular cultural heritages and our shared human heritage. rediscovering the work of less-canonical figures, texts that o’neill1 memorably calls “disappearing ink,” can be a matter of justice.2 and we can’t make sense of human history (and thus the present) without making sense of the history of ideas. for these among other reasons, studying the history of philosophy is worthwhile. we also turn to the history of philosophy as a means to inform our present philosophizing. we mine the writings of our predecessors for philosophical insights, problems, perspectives, and techniques that might otherwise elude us. leaving aside the other significant reasons to study the history of philosophy, my focus in what follows will be on this practice of prospecting in the history of philosophy for contributions of enduring value. this is, in other words, an essay about mining history. i. in the spring of 1850, a wagon train heading from salt lake city to the gold fields of california was delayed in northwest nevada by snow-laden mountain passes. to pass the time, some of the late-to-the-party 49ers explored the local streams and gulches for gold. although they were able to pan a few flakes and nuggets, by their reckoning the local deposits were not as rich as the finds in california were purported to be, so they moved on once the snows melted. the story of gold in those nevada hills soon spread. by the mid-1850s a few dozen disappointed ex-49ers had come to the area for a second chance at fortune. the area was productive at first, but by 1858 panning the local alluvial deposits was no longer lucrative and prospectors began to search for new sources of gold nearby. in 1859 one james finney, known as “old virginny,” established a prospect on a nearby hill, which he and his friends creatively dubbed “gold hill.” mining history 86   early gold recovery on gold hill was promising, but this was no guarantee that the prospect wouldn’t pan out quickly. nevertheless, when local prospector henry comstock saw just how much gold old virginny and his friends were panning, he determined to get in on the business. he and his friend manny penrod approached old virginny and claimed that the gold hill prospect was on land they (comstock and penrod) had already claimed for a ranch. it wasn’t, but old virginny had no way to contest their claim—the local property record was an illegible and frequently scribbled-over book kept at the saloon—so comstock and penrod successfully bullied their way into a 50% ownership of the claim. they accelerated panning at the site, but although they found it rich in gold they were soon frustrated by the fact that the gold was dispersed in a thick, heavy, bluish clay. the weight of the clay made digging and panning it backbreaking work, and its stickiness gummed up their sluice boxes and other equipment. discouraged by the difficulty of working in the unusual clay, comstock and penrod sold shares in the claim for trivial amounts. months later, curious about the strange blue clay, local miner judge jay walsh had it assayed. both its weight and its blue color, it turned out, were owed to silver sulfides! this silver was present in such astonishingly high quantities that the assayer ran the battery of tests twice, thinking he must have made a mistake the first time. walsh then double-checked with a metallurgist friend who confirmed that, indeed, the clay was a silver ore worth $3800 per ton—over $110,000 in today’s currency, adjusted for inflation. walsh visited the gold hill workings and was flabbergasted to see the workers laboriously discarding the clay by the ton to recover a few dollars’ worth of gold. so runs the early history of the comstock lode, which that gummy blue clay made one of the richest mines in american history. the lode was so rich, and its veins ran so deep, that mining it required the development of new techniques, like square set timbering. the wealth of comstock silver also became a sufficient justification on its own for nevada, the “silver state,” to receive statehood in 1864. it’s easy for us to chuckle at the irony of those original workers unknowingly discarding most of the silver ore which made it such a rich lode, but how must they have felt after learning that their focus on the more familiar gold caused them to ignore the bulk of the wealth upon which they stood?3 87 santana   ii. van norden and garfield helpfully catalog many philosophers’ “tired arguments against change” (xii):  “it is too hard to cover the core” (xii)  “there is simply nothing valuable in any non-western tradition” (xiii)  “non-european thought somehow isn’t as good as european philosophy” (12)  “chinese philosophers are playing the intellectual equivalent of minor league baseball, whereas western philosophers are playing major league baseball” (26). drawing on my own experiences teaching what van norden calls “less commonly taught philosophy” (lctp), which in my case includes not only some non-western philosophy, but philosophy written in non-standard genres (e.g., fiction and poetry), philosophy written by figures excluded from the canon (e.g., women in the early modern period), and philosophy written by figures considered to belong to other fields (scientists, politicians, historians, etc.) i can add a couple more i’m getting sick of hearing:  “that’s not really philosophy.”  “are there any women who wrote philosophy in that time period?”  “but students need a strong foundation in the classics!” what these tired attitudes highlight is how, as anglo-american philosophers, we have had tunnel vision. we have focused on picking up the familiar, easily-recognized gold on the surface, while complaining about the sludge we have to sift through to extract it. we tend to content ourselves with selling off a nugget or two large enough to pay tonight’s saloon tab, ignorant of further riches under our feet and thinking “there is simply nothing valuable” there. “are there” any precious ores to be found in the sludge of intellectual history, besides the obvious gold of the canonical philosophers? while the intellectual gold we mine is certainly valuable, it probably makes up the lesser portion of the wealth to be discovered. the history of human thought is a lode of wealth, and we’re not doing ourselves any favors by refusing, in our gold-fever, to exploit it fully. mining history 88   i intend this to be an argument against having a philosophical canon, at least as far as usefulness for mining the history of philosophy is concerned.4 the purported role of the canon in that domain is to highlight what’s worth our time. but it’s far too easy to dismiss something as not being worth our time merely because it doesn’t look like what we think good work looks like, or because we lack the expertise and techniques necessary to recognize and extract its value. but panning for gold is only easier than extracting silver from sulfides because of familiarity. gold panning is its own specialized technique requiring training, practice, and know-how. equivalently, no one is innately equipped to pick up the critique of pure reason and comprehend its intellectual value. it takes a great deal of training in philosophical techniques and knowledge of a specific philosophical history to get the most out of kant’s work (and students lacking that training don’t always hesitate to call its worth into question). but the fact that we teach those techniques alone and only that history is a contingent fact. we could just as well have been teaching the techniques and background necessary to comprehend the intellectual value of some works of lctp. and since canonical western philosophy is only a small fraction of the intellectual wealth available to us, it’s worth developing and teaching those techniques. the sheer diversity of valuable philosophy in human history, however, means that we must jettison the idea that there is one set of figures worth studying above all others. we need to adopt van norden’s “hermeneutic of faith” and assay writings of all sorts to see if they contain “truth, goodness, and beauty” (139). i’m not suggesting that the canon is useless. the canon exists for good reasons, and abandoning it would be a sacrifice. it may be a sacrifice worth making, however, because of the benefits that will accrue to contemporary philosophy from digging more broadly through intellectual history. i’ll also suggest that, contrary to a lot of worries that recent commentators have raised, the sacrifice is not that great. the real questions are how to transition to a model of teaching and reading the history of philosophy that isn’t bound to a canon, and which model we should be transitioning to. i’ll have a bit to say about that after laying out my non-metaphorical case for the value of noncanonical history of philosophy. i should also reemphasize that my arguments against the canon are restricted to what we’re reading and teaching for the purpose of mining history to inform contemporary philosophy, and don’t necessarily apply to canons in other domains. it may be that we should keep canons in some domains for the purpose of preserving cultural history, as a matter of what we owe to thinkers who had priority on an idea, or for other reasons. but it doesn’t follow that a rigid reading list is the 89 santana   best way to look through the history of ideas for thought that will help us improve our present theorizing. in fact, we have good reasons to think that delving outside the restrictions of the canon will pay off. iii. let’s consider what it is that makes a writer worth our time as we mine the history of ideas for philosophical insights. is it that their writing gets it mostly right—that much of what they write is true? doubtful. i happen to think that plato got it wrong on pretty much everything, but still find reading him to be enlightening and worthwhile. ditto for all sorts of other philosophers we generally agree are worth our time, so even if you happen to be more of a platonist than me, i’m sure you can think of an example of someone you disagree with who is worth your time. there must be something besides being right that makes a philosopher worth reading. perhaps it has to do with the quality of their writing? we’re quickly going to run into the same problem. true, some classic philosophy, such as plato’s, is notable for how effectively written it is. but a lot of other philosophy we consider worth our time despite, and not because of, how it is written. (i’m looking at you, kant.) besides, if considerations of writing quality were key, the literary and philosophical canons should overlap much more than they do. nor could the answer be that the canon should be composed of those whose thought is most clear and logical. not only is the canon full of philosophers who are less than clear (sorry, nietzsche), but if logical rigor were the criteria, the recent history of philosophy would have a clear advantage over philosophy written prior to the widespread adoption of first-order logic by philosophers. more plausibly, it might be the philosophers who had the most historical influence who are worth our while. to some extent it makes sense that the best philosophers would have been the most influential. but only to a very limited extent, since prejudices, injustices, and the vagaries of history often prevented good philosophy from having much influence. moreover, the canon has never been a detailed map of causal influence across the history of philosophy, but instead represents the interests of the present. for example, when my grandfather took a course in political philosophy at ucla in 1955, he read a few authors familiar to the standard contemporary course list, such as plato, mill, and hayek, but there are many surprising omissions—no hobbes, locke, or rousseau, for instance. in their place were figures such as mussolini, lenin, and sociologist mining history 90   barbara wootton, who wrote on the welfare state. it’s obvious why, in the early cold war, fascism, leninism, and central economic planning would be seen as central to the canon of political philosophy. the answer isn’t, to give one example, because mussolini’s writings were so influential on the future development of political philosophy. instead, the philosophers who make the cut are those who reflect our current interests.5 and this is largely how it should be, to the extent our goal is to mine the past for insights that will inform our present theorizing. the canon has always been subject to reevaluation on the basis of present interests. think of the recovery of aristotle in medieval europe, the fluctuating importance of hegel to modern philosophy, or the recent recognition of reid as worth reading alongside locke, hume, and berkeley. the mutability of the canon is a testament to the existence of valuable philosophy outside of it. so what is it that makes the writing of some long dead writer valuable to our present philosophical theorizing? the answer is surely multifaceted, but one important feature must be that writing worth our time provides something that we aren’t getting in the contemporary philosophical literature. in other words, what makes old philosophy worth our time is that it is different. different doesn’t mean “better,” “more important,” “more logical,” or “truer.” but it can mean “more creative,” “making distinct assumptions,” “informed by a different history or culture or set of goals,” or “tackled using an alternative method.” it means that what makes a work of historical philosophy worth mining is that it is diverse. “diverse” in the sense of intellectual diversity: plato and i may both be light-skinned men, but part of what makes him valuable as an interlocutor for me is how he challenges my philosophical stances. social diversity (race, gender, language, etc.) will generally track intellectual diversity, but we shouldn’t limit our reevaluation of the canon to implementing some sort of affirmative action program, at least not for the purposes of mining history. it shouldn’t be surprising that intellectual diversity is valuable. in many domains, things which are distinctive, rare, or unique are reckoned more valuable. we evaluate works of art, designate national parks, and even choose what to eat and wear in part by assessing what each object or place contributes in terms of diversity. we do the same when it comes to philosophy. when we review journal submissions, we downgrade papers that fail to be distinctive and promote papers that are original. we assess the value of a contribution to the philosophical discussion in large part based on how it diversifies that discussion. 91 santana   this is an appropriate attitude to take. modern research suggests that intellectual diversity is crucial to the advancement of inquiry. social scientific models, for instance, have indicated that “diversity trumps ability” when it comes to solving problems.6 philosophers of science have provided arguments and models bolstering this claim, premised on the value of an efficient division of labor,7 the utility of having creative “mavericks” exploring new intellectual territory,8 and the way that diversity mitigates the risk of premature consensus on false claims.9 follow-ups to some of this work10 have highlighted that intellectual diversity is especially valuable on the most difficult and intractable areas of research. in philosophy, difficult and intractable problems are our bread and butter (and our naan and ghee, our tortillas and manteca, etc.). experimental work has come to the same conclusion that the value of intellectual diversity isn’t substitutable by pure intellectual ability. these experiments typically use social diversity as proxies for intellectual diversity. a study of gender diversity, for instance, found that it increased corporate profits,11 another study found that racially-diverse groups were better at solving a murder mystery,12 while yet another surveyed the scientific literature and found that papers with coauthors of multiple ethnicities had higher impact and were cited more often.13 diverse groups solve intellectual problems better for several reasons: being confronted with people who think differently challenges us to sharpen our own arguments and evidence, diverse groups bring a broader array of background knowledge to a problem, confronting diverse ideas calls into question previously unquestioned assumptions, and so on. this empirical work complements mill’s argument in on liberty that even wrong ideas should be part of the conversation, because engaging with them improves the ultimate epistemic outcome.14 by putting ourselves in conversation with dead philosophers, we increase the diversity of our philosophical interlocutors, and thus reap the benefits of intellectual diversity. this, i’m suggesting, is the primary feature that makes past thinkers worth our time. even if god revealed to us the list of the thirty objectively best philosophers in history, we would still want to read all sorts of other philosophy, because diversity trumps ability. non-canonical figures can be valuable not only because of their philosophical quality, but because they represent intellectual diversity, exposure to which is good for philosophical inquiry as a whole. if i’m right about this, then i have a straightforward argument against the canon, at least for the project of mining history. the main reason for maintaining the canon is to highlight which authors are worth our time. but what makes authors worth our time is largely that they represent mining history 92   intellectual diversity. in virtue of not being canonical, an author15 represents intellectual diversity. the canon thus doesn’t highlight most of the authors worth our time. therefore, the canon fails to satisfy the main reason for keeping it around. iv. an in-principle argument for the value of looking outside the canon is nice, but the best evidence that we’ve been overlooking other treasures while panning for gold is the success that historians of philosophy who shift their attention beyond canonical figures have been finding. consider, for instance, how attention to philosophers we used to write off as mere scientists has become a fruitful domain of inquiry in the study of early modern philosophy. i’m thinking of examples like work on isaac newton16 and robert boyle17 which have shown that not only do these natural philosophers have interesting things to say about philosophical problems, but also that they were in frequent dialogue with both canonical philosophers (such as descartes and hobbes) and other important but neglected thinkers (e.g., each other, margaret cavendish18). historians of philosophy have also been finding success studying other sorts of lctp including philosophy written as fiction19 and non-western philosophy (which van norden provides excellent examples of). a couple of specific examples of how lctp is worth our time as miners might help illustrate my point. one question looming over most readers of this journal is “how can we defend the value of the humanities and a liberal education?” in two of my recent courses, we have approached this question from the perspective of sor juana inés de la cruz, the seventeenth-century mexican nun and polymath. sor juana’s work checks all the boxes that tend to get a philosopher overlooked: as a latina she’s the wrong ethnicity and gender, as a literary and religious figure she gets dismissed as not being a philosopher, and since her writings belong to diverse genres like poetry, letters, and drama, they’re dismissed as not being serious treatises or essays. but she has a philosophicallygrounded answer to the question of why a liberal education is necessary. in both her open letter “respuesta a sor filotea” and her epistemological poem “primero sueño,”20 she defends a holistic, syncretic epistemology. for sor juana all knowledge is unified, so real understanding requires a broad education. for example, as a nun, she was admonished to leave aside worldly knowledge and focus on the divine. but she counters that to grasp theology, one must grasp the other sciences. to understand the psalms, for instance, one must understand some music theory, and to understand music theory, one must understand some mathematics. even a bride of christ thus needs to study 93 santana   math. moreover, sor juana points out, even when her books were taken away, philosophy remained to her. her mind couldn’t help but consider the architecture of her convent, and contemplating that architecture raised questions of physics and optics. even cooking, an activity more acceptable for a nun than philosophizing, is inextricably tied up with other domains of knowledge. the savvy cook, she argues in “la respuesta,” is an experimental natural philosopher par excellence, and “if aristotle had cooked, he would have written much more.” what good are the humanities? if sor juana is right, the humanities are necessary because no domain of knowledge can stand without the others. her approach and her arguments—even the fact that she feels it necessary to defend the value of a liberal education—provide a diverse alternative to other philosophers of her generation precisely because she, as a woman and a non-european, was forced to fight for her right to a broad education. another contemporary issue that preoccupies my students is the question of whether art should be censored for moral reasons. they’re confronted every day by calls to cancel or boycott television shows that contradict progressive values, by politicians blaming spree killings on violent video games, and by debates over whether the music they listen to is cultural appropriation, or misogynistic, or glorifies violence. canonical figures like plato and kierkegaard have important things to say about the relationship of art and ethics, but i was impressed recently by some students who cast their net a little wider. while working on a class project to build an online encyclopedia of early modern philosophers, these students discovered debates over censorship in early modern china. although women were generally given little chance to publish in china at the time, it was acceptable for women to write poetry. some of these women used this as loophole to engage in philosophical argument. one, wang duanshu, philosophizes in her preface to an anthology of women’s poetry.21 among other things, she argues that censorship of immoral or vulgar poetry would be inappropriate, both because justice to the individual poets requires us to preserve their words and because an accurate picture of women’s contribution to letters requires a full catalog of their writings. my students put wang in dialogue with a slightly later anthologist, yun zhu, who advocated censorship on the grounds that the purpose of women’s poetry is to teach other women their role in society.22 the approaches to censorship of these two chinese philosophers spoke to my students because, like our current cultural controversies, their discussion of art and morality is inflected with issues of social identity. as with the case of sor juana, the diverse cultural and mining history 94   social position held by wang duanshu and yun zhu put a twist on their intellectual contributions that made looking outside the traditional canon worth the effort for my students. successes like these reinforce for me the value of opening up the broader history of human thought to my students—and in my own work. given the type of training philosophy instructors get, working in the bluish clay of lctp may not be as familiar and comfortable as focusing on gold, but we’re not doing the kids any favors if we forbid them to play in the muck. v. having made my case for the benefits of mining outside the canon, let’s complete the cost-benefit analysis by assessing the price of change. a recent review of taking back philosophy by jonardon ganeri in the la review of books23 raises a number of concerns about van norden’s proposal. first, ganeri notes a legitimate concern that broadening the canon might lead us to lose the valuable ability for philosophers to discuss their work with each other regardless of specialization. this is because philosophers share a “basic tool kit for the management of disagreement,” one which comes from both shared principles of reasoning and a common background vocabulary. ganeri worries that van norden’s solution to this problem—a comparative, multicultural approach—reifies cultural differences and elides variation within cultures. as an alternative to this multiculturalism, ganeri proposes a topic-driven cosmopolitanism. instead of, say, teaching a class on comparing indian and western philosophy, ganeri would prefer to see us teach a standard course (epistemology, philosophy of language, etc.) with some relevant indian texts included. i’m sympathetic. by including philosophy traditionally excluded due to gender, genre, or discipline under the heading of lctp, i’m already pushing van norden’s vision towards a more topic-driven cosmopolitanism. in making our assault on the canon not about culture specifically, but about removing any barriers to mining for wisdom, we expand the horizons of philosophy without committing ourselves to cultural relativism or turning syllabus-building into an exercise in checking boxes to make sure we have token representation of arbitrary social categories. viewed this way, leaving the canon behind need not incur the costs that ganeri worries it might. perhaps ganeri and i are too sanguine about how easy or appropriate it would be to take a cosmopolitan approach to adopting works of lctp. in an article entitled “not all things wise and good are philosophy,” tampio argues that a canon inclusive of writing outside the western 95 santana   philosophical tradition “undermines what is distinct about philosophy as an intellectual tradition.”24 that distinctive feature, according to tampio, is the platonic search for truth and wisdom through reason alone, unfettered by “established traditions or religious commitments” or “the love of blood and country.” if we allow for writings from varied traditions and genres to count as philosophy, this objective search for truth will no longer characterize philosophy. tampio’s worry falsely assumes that the western tradition is characterized by an unfettered search for truth. that’s certainly an ideal we western philosophers have sometimes espoused, but it isn’t definitive of good western philosophy. aquinas’ inquiry wasn’t undertaken independent of “religious commitments,” but that doesn’t mean that he wasn’t a real western philosopher. likewise, the racism running through kant’s anthropological work25 belies his supposed cosmopolitanism to reveal the workings of “established tradition” and “love of blood.” nietzsche, to give an extreme example, disavows the disinterested search for truth as a philosophical folly.26 tampio might counter that while, say, kant may not have perfectly practiced the ideal of disinterested truth-seeking, he held it, and that’s what characterizes real philosophy. but if that’s the criterion, then all sorts of lctp also meets it. though they might fall short of the ideal, it’s ludicrous to say that nāgārjuna, gabrielle suchon, jorge luis borges, and so on aren’t trying to seek the truth even if it challenges the traditional assumptions of their societies. so even if we grant to tampio the value of disinterested truth-seeking, that ideal isn’t a razor that cleanly slices out the traditional western canon. tampio has a second, more practical worry. “philosophy departments,” he writes, aren’t “the natural home for scholars of islamic jurisprudence or confucian ethics.” given the structure of the modern university, those studying philosophical works from other cultures fit better in area studies departments, those studying philosophical fiction in literature departments, and those studying natural scientists like newton and boyle in history of science programs. honestly, sometimes when i attend a talk where i have to listen to gettier problem variant number 597, i don’t feel like i’m in my natural home either. but one of philosophy’s strengths is its breadth. philosophers in the same department can work on abstract mathematical theory, applied feminist politics, the metaphysics of fungi,27 and early modern epistemology. to fit all that under one roof, philosophy must already be a big tent, and surely it has room for a scholar of islamic jurisprudence or two. actually, i do in fact have a colleague who is a scholar of ancient chinese ethics, and he’s as at home in our department as any of us. i’m not moved by tampio’s practical worry. mining history 96   also taking the sting out of tampio’s second worry is that opening up philosophy doesn’t necessarily mean juggling around everyone’s departmental appointments. this will become clearer if i say a few words on how i think we might structure philosophy to facilitate taking advantage of intellectual treasure outside the canon.28 vi. to mix my metaphor with the one van norden uses in chapter 3 of taking back philosophy, mining is more about tearing down walls than building them. instead of building walls, mines require the construction of support structures, which allow for extraction without risking collapse. the square set timbering method pioneered at the comstock was so innovative because, as a system of stacked mutually-supporting cubes,29 it allowed miners to follow veins wherever they went, freeing them from traditional limitations on the size of tunnels. what support structures do we need as we build better mines for philosophical wisdom? first, we need better ties to our friends across the university. the trend towards interdisciplinarity in both the sciences and the humanities isn’t something philosophy can avoid and still remain relevant. we can facilitate the teaching and research of lctp by co-teaching and co-authoring with scholars from relevant disciplines, and by inviting them to present at our events. to give one example, at the first penn workshop on non-western philosophical traditions,30 we invited deven patel from penn’s south asia studies department to present on classical indian philosophy of language. this introduction, and conversations with patel at workshop events, was enough to give some of the philosophy grad students who attended a basis to work towards teaching and researching indian philosophy. in other words, by reaching outside our discipline, we were able to construct support structures that facilitated broader philosophical mining. note that this doesn’t require any shuffling around of disciplinary or institutional affiliations, thus avoiding tampio’s worry about where scholars’ natural homes are. the second set of support structures we need might sometimes require some institutional changes, however. to facilitate effective mining outside the canon we need to tear down walls which discourage creative approaches to the history of philosophy. some of these walls are pedagogical: we need not only to offer a broader array of history courses, but to vary the content of the courses we do teach. moreover, we need to find ways to allow students at all levels to count relevant courses as satisfying philosophy requirements. a graduate course on mary wollstonecraft 97 santana   taught by the english department, for instance, might satisfy a philosophy graduate student’s history requirement. given the value of intellectual diversity to inquiry, cases of that sort shouldn’t be exceptional, and should even be encouraged. likewise, we need to consider how the other institutional structures of philosophy, such as journals, conferences, and professional societies, can replace walls with support structures. are we finding reviewers with the necessary expertise to advise editors on whether work on lctp is worthwhile? do we make space for a variety of conference sessions that tread less-familiar ground, or do we tokenize lctp on the schedule? how might our societies encourage teaching and research outside the canon?31 finally, at least for purposes of good undergraduate teaching, specialist-level familiarity with a form of lctp isn’t necessary. what we need are support structures like translated texts, introductory textbooks, and other similar resources for the novice.32 creating these sorts of resources will facilitate over time the production of researchers who will pursue lctp in more depth. vii. having gestured at how and why we should look outside not just the canon, but any canon for philosophical treasure, i’ll close by noting a few added bonuses to being non-canonical:  it allows to have a more accurate picture of intellectual history.33  it facilitates a more cohesive presentation of philosophical topics.34  students enjoy having a more diverse set of readings.  work on lctp will help us forge connections with other disciplines.  if our syllabi aren’t shackled to a standard reading list, we’re freer to teach according to our best pedagogical judgment.  it frees up space for more novel work, rather than epicycles on panned out philosophical work.35 too much work in the history of philosophy doesn’t aim to be anything more than a “footnote to plato.” mining history 98   for these sorts of reasons, we shouldn’t content ourselves with just another revision of the canon. we’ve been revising the canon for as long as there has been a history of philosophy. instead we should untether ourselves from canons altogether. notes 1. eileen o’neill, “disappearing ink: early modern women philosophers and their fate in history,” in philosophy in a feminist voice: critiques and reconstructions, ed. janet a. kourany (princeton: princeton university press, 1997), 17–62. 2. see vera tripodi, “the value of diversity and inclusiveness in philosophy: an overview,” rivista di estetica 64 (2017): 3–17. 3. this history is drawn from the first chapters of grant h. smith and joseph v. tingley, the history of the comstock lode, 1850–1997 (reno: nevada bureau of mines and geology, 1998). 4. not that you’re off the hook if you aren’t a historian of philosophy. there are canons for philosophy’s various subdisciplines—i bet i could guess most of the contents of a random political philosophy or philosophy of language class without having to look at the syllabus. my arguments apply to these facets of the philosophical canon as well as the parts of the canon which cover more temporally distant philosophy. additionally, any subfield of philosophy can benefit from engagement with the ideas of past philosophers, so we all should be mining history, even if we aren’t all historians. 5. for an extended discussion calling into question the role of causal influence in shaping the canon, see lisa shapiro, “revisiting the early modern philosophical canon,” journal of the american philosophical association 2.3 (2016): 365–383. 6. lu hong and scott e. page, “groups of diverse problem solvers can outperform groups of high-ability problem solvers,” proceedings of the national academy of sciences 101.46 (2004), 16385–16389. 99 santana   7. michael strevens, “the role of the priority rule in science,” the journal of philosophy 100.2 (2003): 55–79; miriam solomon, social empiricism (cambridge, ma: mit press, 2007). 8. michael weisberg and ryan muldoon, “epistemic landscapes and the division of cognitive labor,” philosophy of science 76.2 (2009): 225–252. 9. kevin j. s. zollman, “the epistemic benefit of transient diversity,” erkenntnis 72.1 (2010): 17–35; carlos santana, “why not all evidence is scientific evidence,” episteme 15.2 (2018): 209–227. 10. patrick grim, et al., “scientific networks on data landscapes: question difficulty, epistemic success, and convergence,” episteme 10.4 (2013): 441–464; sarita rosenstock, cailin o’connor, and justin bruner, “in epistemic networks, is less really more?” philosophy of science 84.2 (2017): 234–252. 11. cristian dezsö and david ross, “when women rank high, firms profit,” columbia business school ideas at work june 13, 2008. 12. katherine w. phillips, gregory b. northcraft, and margaret a. neale, “surface-level diversity and decision-making in groups: when does deep-level similarity help?” group processes and intergroup relations 9.4 (2006): 467–482. 13. richard b. freeman and wei huang, “collaboration: strength in diversity,” nature 513 (september 18, 2014): 305. 14. john stuart mill, on liberty, in a selection of his works (palgrave, london, 1966), 1– 147. 15. obviously we need some qualifications here. to represent relevant intellectual diversity an author also needs to be writing about a relevant topic and meet some thresholds of intellectual sophistication and originality. 16. e.g., andrew janiak, newton as philosopher (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2008); andrew janiak and eric schliesser, eds., interpreting newton: critical essays mining history 100   (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2012); kirsten walsh, “newton: from certainty to probability?” philosophy of science 84.5 (2017): 866–878. 17. e.g., thomas holden, “robert boyle on things above reason,” british journal for the history of philosophy 15 (2007): 283–312; laurence carlin, “the importance of teleology to boyle’s natural philosophy,” british journal for the history of philosophy 19 (2011): 665–682. 18. i can’t resist sharing an amusing example of cavendish-boyle interaction: in her sci-fi novel blazing world, cavendish represents boyle as a humanoid spider who can’t successfully replicate any air-pump experiments. this is an attack on boyle’s empiricism, and perhaps on the utility of mathematics for science (see alison peterman, “empress vs. spider-man: margaret cavendish on pure and applied mathematics,” synthese (2017): 1– 23). boyle’s friend and assistant robert hooke gets represented as a humanoid louse, in reference to his illustrations of microscopy (cavendish, the description of a new world, called the blazing world (peterborough, ontario: broadview press, 2016)). 19. e.g., silvia g. dapía, jorge luis borges, post-analytic philosophy, and representation (new york: routledge, 2016); carlos santana, “two opposite things placed near each other, are the better discerned”: philosophical readings of cavendish’s literary output,” british journal for the history of philosophy 23.2 (2015): 297–317; and corey mccall and tom nurmi, eds., melville among the philosophers (lanham, md: lexington books, 2017). 20. sor juana inés de la cruz, poems, protest, and a dream: selected writings (new york: penguin, 1997). 21. see kang-i sun chang and haun saussy, eds., women writers of traditional china: an anthology of poetry and criticism (stanford: stanford university press, 2000). 22. see susan mann, precious records: women in china’s long eighteenth century (stanford: stanford university press, 1997). 23. jonardon ganeri, “taking philosophy forward,” los angeles review of books august 20, 2018, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/taking-philosophy-forward/. 101 santana   24. nicholas tampio, “not all things wise and good are philosophy,” aeon september 13, 2016, https://aeon.co/ideas/not-all-things-wise-and-good-are-philosophy. 25. see robert bernasconi, “kant as an unfamiliar source of racism,” in philosophers on race: critical essays, eds. julie k. ward and tommy l. lott (london: blackwell, 2002), 145–166. 26. friedrich nietzsche, beyond good and evil, in basic writings of nietzsche, ed. and trans. walter kaufmann (new york: modern library, 1966). 27. this is a real thing. see daniel molter, “on mushroom individuality,” philosophy of science 84.5 (2017): 1117–1127. 28. katharina paxman suggested to me another pragmatic objection: a canon is inevitable. even if we throw out the present canon, there will still be texts and figures who are widely taught, and these will coalesce into a new canon. i agree that there will always be texts and figures who are more widely read, and there should be! i don’t mean to imply that all writings are of equal worth. but a canon is more than a descriptive list of the most commonly taught and read figures; canons are essentially normative. they ratify their contents as better or more important, they demand that all certified philosophers have familiarity with them, and they implicitly dismiss figures not on the canon as not worth our while. i don’t think these normative implications are inevitable, and we should happily give them up. 29. see http://www.onlinenevada.org/articles/square-set-timbering for illustration and details. 30. mentioned by garfield in the preface of taking back philosophy as helping spark the book. 31. the american philosophical association’s collection of diverse syllabi is one example of an attempt to do this. 32. van norden himself has done an exemplary job of creating these sorts of support structures for classical chinese philosophy, in the form of both a reader (philip j. ivanhoe and bryan w. van norden, eds., readings in classical chinese philosophy (indianapolis: hackett mining history 102   publishing, 2005)) and a textbook (bryan w. van norden, introduction to classical chinese philosophy (indianapolis: hackett publishing, 2011)). 33. susan price, “reviving the female canon,” the atlantic may 13, 2015, https:// www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/05/reviving-the-female-canon/393110/. 34. merold westphal, “the canon as flexible, normative fact,” the monist 76.4 (1993): 437. 35. samuel c. rickless, “brief for an inclusive anti‐canon,” metaphilosophy 49.1–2 (2018), 167–181. microsoft word bergman prooftext [expositions 15.1 (2021) 25–49] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 “you say tertullian, i say augustine”: an essay on intra-catholic dialogue on war, justice, and peace roger bergman creighton university “the lord, by taking away peter’s sword, disarmed every soldier thereafter.” (tertullian)1 “do not believe that it is impossible for anyone to serve god while on active duty in the army.” (augustine)2 1. introduction for decades catholic worker houses of hospitality have held friday night meetings “in keeping with peter maurin’s recognition of the need for ongoing clarification of thought,” as announced in every issue of the catholic worker, the organ of the founding community in new york city. i undertake this essay in that spirit of like-minded partners in social ministry seeking intellectual integrity in their engagement with the wider world, and with one another. theologian david g. hunter has observed that in the twelfth century, when peter abelard wished to exercise the theological ingenuity of his students, he presented them with a series of conflicting “authorities,” the famous treatise sic et non. included among the theses and antitheses was the proposition that “christians are not allowed for any reason to kill anyone, and the contrary [view].” abelard knew, of course, that opinions could be adduced from christian tradition to support both sides of the argument, and he set before his students the task of resolving, if possible, the contradictions.3 you say tertullian, i say augustine. intra-catholic dialogue on war, justice, and peace 26 two recent issues of expositions: interdisciplinary studies in the humanities take up abelard’s professorial challenge. volume 12, number 1 (2018)4 presented nine essays on “the future of just war theory in catholic social thought,” organized, edited, and introduced by bernard g. prusak. one of the authors, eli s. mccarthy, subsequently organized, edited, and introduced nine essays on “the future of nonviolence in catholic social teaching,” which appeared as volume 13, number 2 (2019).5 the argument, sic et non, was provoked by a conference held in 2016 at the vatican, sponsored by the pontifical council for justice and peace and pax christi international, on the theme “nonviolence and just peace.” out of that assembly came a short document titled “an appeal to the catholic church to re-commit to the centrality of gospel nonviolence.”6 a much longer statement produced by the newly formed catholic nonviolence initiative, “advancing nonviolence and just peace in the church and the world: biblical, theological, ethical, pastoral and strategic dimensions of nonviolence,” is at the time of this writing unpublished but is summarized in the essay by ken butigan in expositions 13.2.7 2. a personal perspective: preventing unjust war the crux of the argument is not the centrality of nonviolence to the gospel but the appeal’s call to the church to “no longer use or teach ‘just war theory,’” in keeping with three assertions: (1) “there is no ‘just war.’ (2) too often the ‘just war theory’ has been used to endorse rather than prevent or limit war. (3) suggesting that a just war is possible also undermines the moral imperative to develop tools and capacities for nonviolent transformation of conflict.”8 i can lamentedly affirm (2) while suggesting that (1) is a matter of historical investigation, not simply a truism, and that even one counterexample invalidates the absoluteness of the claim, and that (3) might be but is not necessarily so. i was a contributor to expositions 12.1 with my essay “preventing unjust war: the role of the catholic church,”9 which appears as a chapter in my recently published book, preventing unjust war: a catholic argument for selective conscientious objection (cascade books, 2020). my response to the essays of expositions 13.2 is informed by the argument of the book. here is a précis: why does humankind continue to be plagued by war? catholic pacifists blame the just war tradition of their church. that tradition, they say, can be invoked to justify any war, and so it must be jettisoned. this book argues that the problem is not the 27 bergman just war tradition but the unjust war tradition. ambitious rulers start wars that cannot be justified, and yet warriors continue to fight them. the problem is that warriors are believed not to hold any responsibility for judging the justice of the wars they are ordered to fight. however unjust, a command renders any war “just” for the obedient warrior. this book argues that selective conscientious objection, the right and duty to refuse to fight unjust wars, is the solution. strengthening the just war tradition depends on a heightened role for the personal conscience of the warrior. that in turn depends on a heightened role for the churches in forming and supporting consciences and publicly judging the justice of particular wars. as augustine wrote, “the wise man will wage just wars […]. for, unless the wars were just, he would not have to wage them, and in such circumstances he would not be involved in war at all.”10 although my book was not directly inspired by john howard yoder’s when war is unjust: being honest in just-war thinking (wipf & stock, 2001), i hope readers will agree that it is a substantial proposal that if implemented would put “teeth” in the just war tradition. it is a just war argument for the prevention of unjust war, and therefore of war at all. like the catholic nonviolence initiative, i also have an appeal to make to the catholic church: to strengthen substantially its commitment to “avoiding war,” the heading of the catechism’s discussion of war.11 as the subtitle of the book indicates, i believe it is the currently untapped, even repressed, power of the conscience of the individual warrior, especially but not only catholics, formed and supported substantially by the global church, that offers an alternative to an often abused and seldom legitimately used just war tradition, but also an alternative to abandoning it outright. the church, as indicated in the compendium of the social doctrine of the church (2004), has already endorsed selective conscientious objection (sco): conscientious objectors who, out of principle, refuse military service in those cases where it is obligatory because their conscience rejects any kind of recourse to the use of force or because they are opposed to the participation in a particular conflict, must be open to accepting alternative forms of service. “it seems just that laws should make humane provision for the case of conscientious objectors who intra-catholic dialogue on war, justice, and peace 28 refuse to carry arms, provided they accept some other form of community service.”12 it seems that in the eyes of the magisterium, conscience unites those who refuse to serve in the military in all circumstances and those who serve willingly in the military but refuse to serve in unjust wars.13 in good conscience you say tertullian, and in good conscience i say augustine. i argue, to borrow from g.k. chesterton, that the just war tradition has not been tried and found wanting. it has not been tried. that is, it has not been tried in its 1600-year history in the manner i propose in my book—with teeth. it is a bold proposal, at least as bold as that of the catholic nonviolence initiative, but i acknowledge there is no catholic selective conscientious objection initiative. it hardly rolls off the tongue. i also acknowledge that my proposal will face two staunch opponents: catholic pacifists who can envision no accommodation with any form of just war theory (jwt)—teeth or not, and a deep-seated tradition outside the church that places the highest military value on obedience to the chain of command, except in cases of manifestly illegal orders on the battlefield (such as targeting civilians, as in the infamous my lai massacre).14 i confess it has been a bewildering experience to find myself arguing against the pacifists when i have been mistaken for one throughout my adult life, having opposed most u.s. military interventions from vietnam to the iraq war of 2003, there being one notable exception. in early 1991, shortly after the landslide election (over a field of eleven opponents) of rev. jean-bertrand aristide to the presidency of haiti, i visited chere ayiti for the first of six times over the next 25 years. the mood on the streets was festive, even joyful, as aristide was immensely popular as the candidate of the poor and a real alternative to corrupt politics as usual. seven months later aristide was ousted by a military coup supported by haiti’s wealthy elites, and a period of bloody repression began. i returned to haiti in late 1992 with a u.s. human rights group to investigate up close and personal the state of the people and then to tell their story back in the u.s. eventually some 8,000 citizens were killed by the haitian military, who often left beheaded victims on city streets as a warning to others not to oppose the regime. it was unbearable to read news reports coming out of haiti as one protester after another was viciously silenced by the coup government. it was unbearable to realize, against such entrenched brutality, how little difference local nonviolent resistance or international diplomacy was making. i twice fasted for a week on juices only in response to the call of human rights organizations for a show of support for the 29 bergman suffering haitian people, some of whom i had met and come to admire deeply. finally, in 1994 the clinton administration staged a military intervention, with very little bloodshed, and restored aristide to the presidency to serve the remainder of his term, after which he was reelected, however tenuous his hold on constitutional power would prove to be.15 i had been an active member of the pax christi usa group in omaha during that time. when pcusa came out against the u.s. intervention as a matter of pacifist principle, i had to part company—out of solidarity with the haitian people. it was hardly a full-blown war, but it was a use of military force to achieve justice and peace for a terribly beleaguered people. it was a humanitarian intervention by military means that met all the criteria of the jwt. some might call it “just policing.”16 but as i used to tell my students: be careful in your papers with words like “always” or “never,” “all” or “none.” just one exception undermines your argument. there is no just war? i beg to differ. i’ll offer another exception later. 3. the scriptural background “in reviewing the articles in expositions [12.1],” sr. anne mccarthy, o.s.b. “noticed a surprising dearth of scriptural references for jesus and nonviolence.”17 i would refer sr. mccarthy to §§27– 55 of the u.s. bishops’ pastoral letter of 1983, the challenge of peace, for a substantive discussion of the relationship of scripture, both old and new testaments, to questions of war and peace, including “the value of nonviolence” in §§111–121.18 i don’t think any of the essayists in expositions 12.1 thought it necessary to rehearse this well-informed and theologically grounded argument. in my own teaching, in both the university classroom and the parish hall, i have often engaged my students or parishioners on the scriptural theme of “jesus the peacemaker.”19 i would start with the well-known story from chapter 8 of the gospel of john of jesus and the woman caught in adultery. i would point out that jesus defended the woman against a potentially violent mob without resorting to violence himself, but with wit, word, and gesture—human capacities any of us can employ if we keep ourselves “in readiness of mind,” in augustine’s words. no miracle here, no divine intervention, no supernatural powers on display. then i would turn to the equally famous passage from the sermon on the mount in the fifth chapter of the gospel of matthew about not resisting evil, turning the other cheek, giving your inner garment as well, and going the extra mile. acknowledging my indebtedness to biblical scholar walter wink,20 i would raise questions about the appropriateness of the standard translation of 5:39: intra-catholic dialogue on war, justice, and peace 30 “but i say to you, offer no resistance to one who is evil.” haven’t we just seen in chapter 4 that jesus himself resisted satan in the desert? if jesus does not resist and overcome evil, how can he be considered a savior? if he doesn’t save us from evil, what is it he saves us from? wink offers a better translation, based on the deep biblical background of the key word antistenai, usually translated “resist.” wink points out that throughout the bible it usually refers to violent resistance and that therefore jesus’s saying is better rendered “do not return violence for violence.” then follows wink’s insightful analysis of three examples of how to resist violence without violence. all are addressed to a person of lower social status when confronted by a person of higher social status, as represented by the insult of a back-handed slap, demand for a cloak that had been offered in collateral for a loan, temporary conscription to carry a roman centurion’s heavy pack. in each case jesus offers counsel on how to resist such indignities without violence, which would have been foolhardy. in each case the target of the oppression seizes the occasion and asserts his dignity by surprising nonviolent action that exposes the oppression for what it is. jesus teaches neither fight nor flight but a third way, the way of creative nonviolence. finally, i turn to the most famous of jesus’s parables, the good samaritan, but with a twist famously suggested by ethicist paul ramsey:21 what would the samaritan do if he arrived on the scene when the beating was still going on? in the scores of times i have posed this question to students or parishioners, primed by our previous consideration of jesus’s nonviolent tactics in defending the woman caught in adultery and wink’s revisionist exegesis of matthew 5:38–42, the immediate answers always suggest nonviolent means to intervene: try to talk the bandit out of it, distract him, scream in the hope that potential allies are near. good, i’d say, but what if none of these tactics work? after some more imaginative proposals for action, someone will usually volunteer that if none of these efforts succeed, in imitation of jesus the samaritan ought to throw himself between the bandit and his victim. that is noble, i’d say, even saintly, but what if the bandit is a sociopath and a behemoth and would gladly leave two corpses by the side of the road instead of one? at this point, the participant/observers imagining this moral dilemma with three lives at stake will squirm in their seats. someone will eventually but timidly suggest that stronger measures are called for: reach for a rock or a big stick with which to strike the bandit on the head to prevent him from continuing the beating and potential murder. do you intend to kill the bandit, i would ask? no, but i might, and i still think that’s what i’d do, what the samarian should do, to save his own 31 bergman soul and the life of his innocent neighbor attacked viciously by “an evil one.” much more than a backhanded slap is in play here. i’d conclude by saying that it’s one thing to sacrifice your own life out of love for the enemy when attacked but quite a different thing to suggest someone else do the same when you could come to her aid and resist the attacker. how would jesus have resolved the story if he had taken up paul ramsey’s challenge? i don’t think we can answer that question definitively one way or the other. i don’t think any other scene in the gospels gives us a clear answer. you say tertullian, i say augustine. 4. bilateral or multilateral? biblical scholar stephen mott22 provides a simple analytic framework in which to think about this moral dilemma, how to love my neighbor and her enemy at the same time: “does the injunction against resistance in self-defense cover the question of resistance to injustice done to a third party?” mott’s own answer is that “bilateral nonresistance does not extend to one’s responsibilities for others, but we do not have instructions [from jesus] as to whether resistance to the injustice suffered by others is or is not to include the use of arms.”23 or, “the mere absence of the use of force by jesus [in self-defense: bilateral] does not necessarily mean that force [in defense of others: multilateral] is disapproved of in principle.”24 and as if speaking to the current debate exhibited in expositions 12.1 and 13.2, mott concludes that “nonviolence might prove to be the only legitimate christian position […]. but this must be established through other means than exegesis and exposition of particular passages […]. it is not enough merely to point to the teaching and life of jesus or to call for obedience to canonical scripture.”25 his further conclusion is that “the just war theory […] takes cognizance of the tension between the obligation to do no harm to one’s neighbor on the one hand, and the obligation to protect and lay down one’s life for one’s neighbor on the other…under exceptional circumstances it justifies the use of force to protect the innocent.”26 a dearth of scriptural references to jesus and nonviolence in the essays of expositions 12.1 does not mean that such matters have not been taken seriously by those authors, or 37 years ago by the bishop-authors of the challenge of peace. to his credit, kyle t. lambelet, writing in expositions 13.2 on “nonviolence as a tradition of moral praxis” as an alternative to the just war tradition, acknowledges that “just war remains a part of catholic social teaching because it allows us to demonstrate our love of neighbor by protecting the innocent from unjust harm by all the means at our disposal, including the use of violent force intra-catholic dialogue on war, justice, and peace 32 […]. [this] remains, in my judgment, one of the most compelling justifications for considering the ongoing relevance of the just war tradition.”27 i’d say, the only compelling justification. it should be remembered that the just war tradition begins, in augustine, not with the idea of selfdefense, which he thought inappropriate to the christian, but the defense of others. 5. love your enemies the argument is not about the centrality of nonviolence in the gospel, but what the injunction to love one’s enemies means in the confounding parabolic dilemma investigated above. but perhaps we have not thought hard enough about who the enemies were that jesus enjoined his followers to love. the classic source for scholarly reflection on the question is the collection of essays edited by willard m. swartley, the love of enemy and nonretaliation in the new testament (westminster/john knox, 1992). surprisingly, the opening essay by william klassen, “‘love your enemies’: some reflections on the current status of research,” begins with the statement that love of enemies “has never been considered a basic part of christian theology and never seen as belonging to the kernel of the new testament kerygma.”28 please note that this is in reference not to the just war tradition beginning with ambrose and augustine but to christian thought and proclamation as a whole. klassen’s own book, love of enemies: the way to peace (fortress, 1984), was the first monograph in english on the topic.29 but klassen notes that “in few areas of academic research has the situation changed so radically.”30 in 1992 he has much to report on. was the idea unique to jesus? probably not, but “even if the identical words were to appear in earlier sources, the manner in which jesus laid down his life for his enemies in order to enable them also to partake in the love of god, and the way in which the words were used by the early christian community, make them unique.”31 klassen also observes that “although the command to love enemies is found only twice in the gospels[32], seldom has its authenticity been questioned. furthermore, it is recognized that the idea is found in the epistles without the precise commandment.”33 two seemingly contrary tendencies occur in the second century. on the one hand, “it was the most frequently cited saying of jesus […] especially by the apologists as evidence that the early christians were not haters of humankind.”34 but beginning in that same century (long before the beginnings of christian just war thinking), “the idea has been either relegated to the personal realm or more frequently totally confined to a select group of christians 33 bergman in religious communities, either in monastic orders or, since the reformation, to people generally dismissed as ‘enthusiasts.’”35 the identity of the enemies has been disputed as well by modern scholars. “some have argued that the illustrations [of matthew 5:28–42] point to personal life and therefore one should not think of international or civic enemies.”36 the prolific new testament scholar richard horsely seems to be the primary exponent of the view that jesus was thinking of “’village squabbles’” and not “‘foreign enemies’ or even outsiders as referents.”37 horsely’s analysis of the question, “ethics and exegesis: ‘love your enemies’ and the doctrine of nonviolence,”38 is included in the swartley collection, as is walter wink’s article on matthew 5:28–32,39 horsely’s response to wink,40 and wink’s vigorous rebuttal.41 it’s a heady parley.42 swartley’s own conclusion is that “an increasing number of scholars take echthros [enemies] in its broadest sense.”43 but klassen has the courage to ask, “did jesus love his enemies? matthew 23 seems to suggest he did not, and other events of his life are often cited.”44 matthew 23 is almost completely taken up with seven “woes” directed at the scribes and pharisees, each time described as “you hypocrites.” these prophetic denunciations are followed by this: therefore, behold, i send you prophets and wise men and scribes; some of them you will kill and crucify, some of them you will scourge in your synagogues and pursue from town to town, so that there may come upon you all the righteous blood of abel to the blood of zechariah, the son of barachiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar. amen, i say to you, all these things will come upon this generation.45 i presume these woes, which seem to be out of keeping with the love of enemies, are no doubt sometimes rationalized as intending to bring the scribes and pharisees to a recognition of their sinfulness, to repentance, and to conversion. but i am not aware that such an outcome is anywhere recorded in the new testament. david rensberger, in his essay in swartley, “love for one another and love for enemies in the gospel of john,” is even more direct: “there is general agreement [among scholars] that [the command to love] ‘one another’ in john 13:34–35; 15:12, 7 refers to other members of the johannine christian community, not to humanity in general.”46 the relations of that community to intra-catholic dialogue on war, justice, and peace 34 “the jews” further complicates the issue. rensberger notes that “when we consider the actual theological, social, and linguistic characteristics of the gospel that contains this commandment, we find that in practice love for enemies is not in evidence. john does have enemies, and they are spoken of anything but lovingly […]. we cannot simply assume that the possibility of loving one’s enemies remained open, or even that of hating them was closed off, for the johannine community.”47 i take no pleasure in passing on these darker sides of the gospels as explicated by somber scholars of the text and context. but it does not seem appropriate to ignore them, as they are also part of our christian history. they make easy reference to love of enemies as clear and unambiguous in its meaning today seem untenable. that hardly means giving up the imperative to continue to test jesus’s commandment’s meaning in all our affairs, from our neighbor across the fence to international enemies across an ocean. to give a more positive perspective, let’s turn to rev. john donahue’s essay in swartley on “who is my enemy? the parable of the good samaritan and the love of enemies.” donahue, by the way, was largely responsible for the treatment of scripture in economic justice for all, the u.s. bishops’ pastoral letter of 1986. donahue explicates the historical-cultural context in which to understand how the audience of the gospels would have looked upon samaritans: in brief, “for first-century jews, the ‘samaritan’ was both foreigner and enemy.”48 but “the antipathy between jew and samaritan arose as much out of their shared heritage as from their differences.”49 that intimacy accounts for the intensity of the hostility. donahue then exegetes the parable of the good samaritan in luke; the story of the ten lepers, only one of whom, a samaritan, praises jesus for his healing, also in luke; and the account of the successful mission to the samaritans, in acts, luke’s second volume. the only other new testament book to provide a positive view of the samaritans is the gospel of john, in the well-known incident of jesus’s encounter with the samaritan woman at the well. the parable demonstrates the shocking news that (in the words of bernard brandon scott), “‘the world with its sure arrangement of insiders and outsiders is no longer an adequate model for predicting the kingdom.’”50 in his portrayal of a doubly-disparaged samaritan leper, “luke forcefully says that those who are called enemy and scorned as outsiders are fulfilling fundamental religious attitudes expected of jews and of followers of jesus.”51 “the acceptance of christianity by the samaritans is the counterpart in the acts of the apostles to the favorable picture of the good samaritan and the story of the ten lepers […]. this vision of acts is to lead the church to break through those 35 bergman ethnic and religious boundaries which divide the world into friend and enemy.”52 “for the audience of john, [the woman at the well] is triply disenfranchised: she is samaritan, a woman who converses freely with a man in public, and she is living […] in an adulterous relationship […]. by his dialogue with and acceptance of the samaritan woman, jesus shocks even his own disciples.”53 donahue concludes that “one lasting value […] of the samaritan stories of the new testament is that they challenge continually the tendency to dehumanize people by classifying them as enemies.”54 furthermore (quoting robert w. rieber and robert j. kelly), “‘those qualities which people attribute to enemies […] become the presupposition of violent action toward them.’”55 the samaritan stories in luke, acts, and john of jesus and his disciples befriending the long-time enemies of the jews can be said to offer a prophylactic against the initiation of violence against “the other.” they do not, however, tell us how to respond when the other initiates violence against us. no doubt we are called to continue to “love” them, which surely means not to hate and dehumanize them, who have made themselves our enemy, by hating and dehumanizing and attacking us. jesus left us no explicit instructions for that challenge considered in its multilateral dimensions. 6. the early church do we get any closer to an answer to this conundrum when we move from the witness of the new testament to that of the early church? we have already quoted william klassen on love of enemies in the second century: “it was the most frequently cited saying of jesus.”56 the church historian ronald j. sider enriches this statement considerably in his edited volume, the early church on killing: a comprehensive sourcebook on war, abortion, and capital punishment (baker academic, 2012). sider claims “to provide in english translation all extant data directly relevant to the witness of the early church on killing [… and to] have tried to be as objective as possible.” 57 in full transparency he acknowledges that he “grew up in the anabaptist tradition, which is pacifist. as a christian, ethicist, and theologian, i remain committed to that tradition. but i think it would be fundamentally immoral to choose to slant the historical data to support my ethics and theology.”58 he agrees with klassen that “matthew 5:38–48 is probably the most frequently cited biblical text in the writings collected here,”59 which extend from the didache, c. 80–120, to eusebius’s famous ecclesiastical history, probably first published before 300—so the second and third centuries of the common era. intra-catholic dialogue on war, justice, and peace 36 sider surprisingly notes that citations of the matthean passage on love of enemies “occasionally […] link this passage to a rejection of killing and war, but in most instances they do not.”60 more particularly, in spite of tertullian’s very strong views against christians using the sword or joining the army, he hardly ever connects those views with jesus’s command to love enemies, which he often cites elsewhere. so too origen (d. 254), who refers to jesus’s command to love enemies at least four times but never connects it to his strongly held views that christians dare not kill. nor does cyprian (d. 258) make that connection in his two references to jesus’s teaching about enemies. in his divine institutes, lactantius once alludes to being friendly to enemies in a passage where he says christians are ignorant of wars. but even he does not use jesus’s command to love enemies in his more extensive, uncompromising statements against killing and war. it seems surprising that in more than two dozen references to loving enemies, only justin martyr, clement of alexandria, and (very briefly) irenaeus and lactantius draw any explicit connection between loving enemies and war. on the other hand, neither is there any hint in all these passages that killing and war are compatible with loving enemies.61 indeed, according to sider, “no extant christian writing before constantine argues that there is any circumstance under which a christian can kill.”62 another pacifist historian, george kalantzis, edited an anthology similar to sider’s: caesar and the lamb: early christian attitudes on war and military service (cascade books), also published in 2012. like sider, kalantzis takes partial issue with the often-cited article by david hunter63 in which he reviews recent research (as of 1992) on early christian attitudes toward war and military service and proposes a “new consensus” of scholarly opinion. both sider and kalantzis take exception to the first of hunter’s three points: “the most vigorous opponents (e.g., tertullian and origen) of christian military service grounded their opposition at least as much on the pervasive idolatry in military life as on opposition to killing.”64 in sider’s words, “our authors cite both idolatry and christian ethical demands to love enemies and not kill as their reasons for opposing christian participation in the military. but the latter, not the former, is the more frequently cited 37 bergman reason.”65 so it was with particular surprise that i noted in kalantzis’s chapter on the “acts of the military martyrs (ca. 260–303 ce)”66 that in several pages of primary texts relating the martyrdoms of st. marinus, maximilian, marcellus, julius the veteran, and the saintly dasius, every account speaks of aversion to idolatry and not one speaks of aversion to bloodshed or love of enemies. you say sider/kalantzis, i say hunter. but does it really matter in what proportion to one another these two aversions to service in the roman military accounted for motivation for refusal to serve? for the sake of argument—and clarification of thought—let us grant that aversion to bloodshed was paramount and that the early church from pentecost to the thundering legion incident in 173 ce (explored below) was pacifist, and that its extant writing continued this ethic until constantine and theodosius, ambrose and augustine muddied the waters in the fourth century. should the belief and practice of the small but rapidly growing early church be definitive for the global catholic church in the 21st century? as there was no just war tradition then, should there be none now? sider makes the case that it should: “it seems plausible to suppose that christians much closer to the time of jesus, who lived in a (pre-constantinian) sociopolitical setting more similar to that of jesus than christians living after the reign of constantine, would be more likely to understand jesus’s teaching on loving enemies than those who lived centuries later.”67 if this is true for love of enemies then by analogy and for the sake of consistency, it must be true for other ethical issues as well. take, for example, slavery.68 7. jesus, slavery and war jesus did not explicitly renounce slaveholding nor believing slaveholders (such as the centurion) but in preaching that his followers become “slaves to all,” and in suffering crucifixion like a slave, he emptied slavery of its shameful status. but that left the violent institution of slavery in place. neither did his followers in the early church challenge slavery as incompatible with the gospel.69 christians were both slaves and slaveholders. that does not mean his later followers should not work to abolish slavery as incompatible with human dignity. but striving to be a “slave to all” does not by itself abolish the practice of slavery. christians might legitimately, conscientiously, faithfully disagree on the best way to do that. jesus did not explicitly renounce war-making nor believing warriors (such as the centurion) but in preaching that his followers “love their enemies” and in forgiving his enemies from the intra-catholic dialogue on war, justice, and peace 38 cross he emptied enmity of its hold on our consciousness and conduct. but that leaves the institution of war in place. nor did his followers in the early church before constantine unanimously renounce war; from 173 ce on some served in the roman military. that does not mean his followers should not work to abolish war as incompatible with the right to life. but loving one’s enemies does not by itself abolish the practice of war. christians might legitimately, conscientiously, faithfully disagree on the best way to do that. catholic pacifists, such as those represented in expositions 13.2, argue that since jesus taught love of enemies and the early church was consistently pacifist in preaching if not in practice, the current church should abandon the just war tradition and embrace nonviolence as the only legitimate response to oppression and repression, especially since nonviolence has a better record of achieving its aims than does violence, a claim that jwt adherents might well support and even celebrate. such an absolutist pacifist perspective, however, does not allow other catholics to argue that the just war tradition itself is potentially the best remedy to the problem of war. the pacifist argument misidentifies the just war tradition, not the unjust war tradition, as the problem. the pacifists seem to reject the idea that christians might legitimately, conscientiously, faithfully disagree on the best way to respond to the problem of war. in providing background to his report on recent research, david hunter discusses some of the major publications of earlier decades. he describes a major pacifist argument, jean-michel hornus’s it is not lawful for me to fight (originally published in 1960), as a sustained attempt to prove, first, that “from the very beginning and throughout the first three centuries of the primitive church, its teaching […] was constantly and rigorously opposed to christian participation in military service.” second, he wishes to show that this opposition was based not on the danger of the imperial cult, but “on a fundamental decision: to reject violence and to respect life.” hornus knows, of course, that idolatry was a major problem for christians, especially those in the army. even in this case, he argues, christians were objecting not merely to a religious, but also to a political ritual: “the rite showed that a particular power was totalitarian. its absolute claim was the real idolatry, and it was this the faithful were refusing.”70 39 bergman hunter’s comment is very much to the point in the current dialogue within the church as represented by expositions 12.1 and expositions 13.2: the uncompromising terms of hornus’s statement of purpose should alert the reader to the book’s primary weakness: it assumes that there is one christian position that was held always, everywhere, and by all (faithful) christians. the notion that there might be some degree of legitimate pluralism in christian belief is apparently anathema…my problem with hornus is that he seems to be utterly resistant to the notion that there might be a form of witness which, although different from his own, nevertheless saw itself as faithful to christ, the scriptures, and tradition.”71 hornus is the anti-abelard. you say hornus, i say abelard. 8. christian soldiers recent research demonstrates that this monolithic view is untenable as there is growing evidence from the late second century on that christians served in the roman army. in sider’s account, in approximately ad173, marcus aurelius antoninus, roman emperor from 161– 180, and his troops experienced a “miraculous” victory over a vastly larger army of german invaders near the danube river. much about the incident is uncertain. but credible christian and roman sources tell of an unexpected rainstorm and thunderstorm that saved the exhausted, thirst-stricken, vastly outnumbered roman army […]. whereas the roman sources attribute the miracle to pagan gods, almost all christian writers say the miracle was the result of the prayers of christian soldiers in the emperor’s army.72 not only were there a noticeable number of christians serving in the emperor’s “thundering legion” (the name predated the incident),73 but christian writers appropriated the story to portray the victory as won by their prayers to the christian god. it might have been an occasion for those christian writers to denounce those christian warriors, but they did not. attitudes toward military intra-catholic dialogue on war, justice, and peace 40 service were changing. the same attitudinal shift can be seen from the prohibition against soldiering in the apostolic tradition (probably early third century) to the lifting of the prohibition in the apostolic constitutions (375–380), which echoes john the baptist’s instruction to inquiring soldiers in luke 3:14: “let a soldier who comes be taught to do no injustice or to extort money, but to be content with his wages. let the one who objects be rejected.”74 you say traditions, i say constitutions. i would have a hard time thinking any person of moral independence and integrity, least of all a christian, should volunteer to serve in an imperial army, at least to the extent that the army was used for conquest. that would not be just, so i do not celebrate the fact that christians are known to have served in the roman military from at least 173 ce—a century-and-a-half before constantine. 9. favorite expositions 13.2 sources the drive toward a monolithic view in the current debate is exemplified in the presentation in expositions 13.2 of pope francis’s world day of peace message for 2017, “nonviolence: a new style of politics.” i celebrate this most vigorous to date affirmation of the power of nonviolence by a pope, but i cannot help but notice how the total message has been misrepresented in several of the essays of expositions 13.2. eight of the nine authors cite the pope’s endorsement of nonviolence, but only two tell the whole story. eli mccarthy, butigan, cochrane, guardado, lambelet, and sr. mccarthy reference the pope’s main message, but none mentions this crucial qualification: “6. peacebuilding through active nonviolence is the natural and necessary complement to the church’s continuing efforts to limit the use of force by the application of moral norms.”75 schlabach acknowledges this slightly veiled reference to just war canons but tries to minimize it: “pope francis thus exercises an appropriate vatican savvy as he alludes to the possible uses of ‘just war’ criteria in his 2017 wdp message, but leaves the theory unnamed—for now, neither rejected outright nor defended.”76 it’s almost as if the pope doesn’t mean what he plainly says: nonviolence and just war moral norms are complementary, not contradictory. sniegocki doesn’t cite the passage, but does acknowledge that francis’s predecessor john paul ii “did not consider himself a pacifist, but rather understood himself as adhering to a strict interpretation of just war criteria.”77 sniegocki also (unknowingly) gives a nod to the project of my book: “support for refusal to participate [in unjust wars], however, must be an integral part of any serious 41 bergman application of just war principles, which include the firm moral obligation not to serve in wars that do not meet strict just war criteria.”78 the other favored source in expositions 13.2 is erica chenoweth’s and maria j. stephan’s why civil resistance works: the strategic logic of nonviolent conflict (columbia university press, 2011). it is a sophisticated, groundbreaking, data-driven argument for the superior effectiveness of nonviolence over violence in 323 resistance campaigns between 1900 and 2006: “the most striking finding is that…nonviolent resistance campaigns were nearly twice as likely to achieve full or partial success as their nonviolent counterparts.”79 this is good news indeed. “however, we also know that resistance campaigns are not guaranteed to succeed simply because they are nonviolent. one in four nonviolent campaigns since 1900 was a total failure […]. moreover, more than one in four violent campaigns has succeeded.”80 the focus is on “three specific, intense, and extreme forms of resistance: antiregime, antioccupation, and secession campaigns.”81 not included are responses to military invasion or severe humanitarian crises such as genocide.82 perhaps the closest the authors come to treating invasion is in considering its aftermath in occupation, such as the nonviolent greek resistance against the nazis: “although effective in many respects, the greek resistance alone cannot be credited with the ultimate outcome of the end of nazi influence over greece since the nazi withdrawal was the result of allied military victory rather than solely greek resistance.”83 the same point is made about “the danish people’s resistance to german occupation [… which …] occurred in the context of an allied military campaign against the axis powers, which was ultimately decisive in defeating hitler.”84 eli mccarthy in expositions 12.1 and six of the expositions 13.2 authors—butigan, cochrane, lambelet, sr. mccarthy, schlabach, and sniegocki—cite chenoweth’s and stephan’s majority report (as it were) on the successes of nonviolence but not their minority report on its sometime failure and the success of the necessary military resistance that stopped the nazis during world war ii. chenoweth and stephan address “the claim that nonviolent resistance could never work against genocidal foes like adolph hitler and joseph stalin.”85 they describe this as “the classic straw man” argument which “is not backed by any strong empirical evidence.”86 furthermore, “collective nonviolent struggle was not used with any strategic forethought during world war ii, nor was it ever contemplated as an overall strategy for resisting the nazis.”87 a straw man argument attempts to deflect attention from a strong argument to a weak one more easily defeated. it boggles my mind to think that anyone would seek to diminish the existential threat posed by intra-catholic dialogue on war, justice, and peace 42 these two totalitarian rulers, who between them were responsible for the deaths of perhaps 40,000,000 people. there is strong empirical evidence for that, but none for the counterfactual fantasy of defeating nazism nonviolently. this is the one but astonishingly false note in chenoweth’s and stephan’s brilliant and welcome book. 10. clarification of thought as graced discernment as frequently argued in expositions 12.1, all the popes from john xxiii to francis have at least questioned whether a war fought with weapons of mass destruction can be just; all have decried the horrible destruction and suffering of modern war, with its savage disregard for the principle of discrimination (noncombatant immunity); all have called for a strengthening of international institutions to make war increasingly an outlawed enterprise; all have exhorted for the respect for universal human rights which would make war unthinkable. but none have renounced the just war tradition. it does seem like debate within the catholic church ought to allow room for the recent popes’ consistent message that an increasing commitment to nonviolence is complementary to an increasingly strict understanding and application of the moral norms of the just war tradition.88 dr. martin luther king, jr., wrote that “i am no doctrinaire pacifist. i have tried to embrace a realistic pacifism. moreover, i see the pacifist position not as sinless but as the lesser evil in the circumstances. therefore i do not claim to be free from the moral dilemmas that the christian nonpacifist confronts.”89 similarly, fr. william o’neill, s.j., writing in expositions 12.1, confesses that “i remain a pacifist, in part as a consecrated religious jesuit. but i am not prepared to condemn those who think otherwise, e.g., troops who would defend the innocent.”90 in the spirit of dr, king, he asks us, the expositions 12.1 and expositions 13.2 authors and the constituencies we represent, “might not our differences emerge not in deliberation over whether just war or pacifism is more consistent with the gospel, but rather in discernment of what the particular moment calls for?”91 that is an irenic invitation which i am happy to accept. 11. a final note this essay was substantially completed on march 24, 2020, the fortieth anniversary of the murder of archbishop oscar romero. in his third pastoral letter, “the church and popular political organizations,” saint romero offers “the judgment of the church on violence.”92 crucially, romero delineates five types: 43 bergman (1) “institutionalized violence” exploits through economic and political structures the impoverished majority by the privileged minority; (2) “the repressive violence of the state” attempts to crush the legitimate aspirations of the people by unleashing the violence of the state security forces against them; (3) “seditious or terrorist violence” in response to exploitation and repression itself becomes indiscriminate and shuts off alternative means of structural change; (4) “spontaneous violence” occurs when attacks on protests, for example, provoke desperate reactions that offer no hope of meaningful change; (5) “violence in legitimate self-defense” seeks to neutralize unjust aggression.”93 “the church makes a different judgment on different types of violence.” romero offers a précis of the just war criteria regarding legitimate self-defense and the church’s condemnation of “institutionalized violence, repressive violence by governments, terrorist violence, and any form of violence that is likely to provoke further violence in legitimate self-defense.”94 the archbishop also briefly praises “the power of nonviolence”95 and its “constructive dynamism.”96 i close by offering a vigorous amen! to these irenic words from saint romero, to whom, along with blessed franz jägerstätter, my book is dedicated: even in legitimate cases, violence ought to be the last resort. all peaceful means must first be tried. we are living in explosive times and there is a great need for wisdom and serenity. we extend a fraternal invitation to all, but especially to those organizations that are committed to the struggle for justice, to proceed courageously and honorably, always to maintain just objectives, and to make use of nonviolent means of persuasion rather than put all their trust in violence.97 notes 1. louis j. swift, ed., the early fathers on war and military service (wilmington, de: michael glazier, 1983), 41–42. 2. ibid., 126. intra-catholic dialogue on war, justice, and peace 44 3. david g. hunter, “a decade of research on early christians and military service,” religious studies review 18.2 (april 1992): 87. for a description of a course on christian ethics of war and peace inspired by abelard’s challenge to his students, see chapter 6 of roger bergman, preventing unjust war: a catholic argument for selective conscientious objection (wipf & stock, 2020), henceforth abbreviated as preventing unjust war. 4. https://expositions.journals.villanova.edu/issue/view/159. 5. https://expositions.journals.villanova.edu/issue/view/182. 6. https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/peace/documents/papa-francesco_ 20161208_messaggio-l-giornata-mondiale-pace-2017.html. 7. ken butigan, “renewing catholicism: toward recommitting to gospel nonviolence throughout the roman catholic church,” expositions 13.2 (2019): 7–26. 8. catholic nonviolence initiative, “an appeal to the catholic church to re-commit to the centrality of gospel nonviolence,” 2016: https://nonviolencejustpeace.net/finalstatement-an-appeal-to-the-catholic-church-to-re-commit-to-the-centrality-of-gospelnonviolence/. 9. roger bergman, “preventing unjust war: the role of the catholic church,” expositions: interdisciplinary studies in the humanities 12.1 (2018): 27–44, https://expositions. journals.villanova.edu/index.php/expositions/article/view/2317/2221. 10. city of god 19.7, in swift, ed., early fathers 116. 11. catechism of the catholic church §§2307–2317. 12. pontifical council for justice and peace, compendium of the social doctrine of the church §503, quoting gaudium et spes §79; italics in original, emphasis added. 13. the second chapter of preventing unjust war traces the development of catholic thinking on sco from augustine through aquinas, vitoria and suarez, grotius, the u.s. bishops during the vietnam war, and finally to the compendium, published during the tenure of pope john paul ii. 14. but see the appendix to chapter 5 of preventing unjust war: “innere fuhring in the postwar german military.” see also herbert c. kelman and v. lee hamilton, crimes of obedience: toward a social psychology of authority and responsibility (new haven: yale university press, 1989) for an in-depth investigation of the my lai massacre, including widespread public support for its main protagonist, lieutenant william calley. 45 bergman 15. see roger bergman, “recent u.s. perceptions of haiti and haitians,” journal for peace and justice studies 5.2 (1993): 133–144, for an analysis of how u.s. news media, including the new york times, the boston globe, and the miami herald, grossly mispresented the contrasting human rights records of aristide’s brief tenure before the coup and of the coup regime itself. 16. see gerald w. schlabach, ed., just policing, not war (collegeville, mn: liturgical press, 2007). schlabach authored one of the essays in expositions 13.2. 17. sr. anne mccarthy, o.s.b., “nonviolence: building gospel-based communities addressing situations of violence today,” expositions 13.2 (2019): 96. 18. national conference of catholic bishops, the challenge of peace: god’s promise and our response, may 3, 1983, https://www.usccb.org/upload/challenge-peace-godspromise-our-response-1983.pdf. 19. for a judicious, comprehensive review of the entire scriptural canon, see john. a. wood, perspectives on war in the bible (macon, ga: mercer university press, 1998). 20. wink’s most accessible presentation of his exegesis of matthew 5:38–42 is in chapter 5, “jesus’ third way,” in the powers that be: theology for a new millennium (new york: doubleday, 1998). his most scholarly presentation is “beyond just war and pacifism: jesus’ nonviolent way,” review and expositor 89 (1992): 197–214. a version of this article appears in willard m. swartley, ed., the love of enemy and nonretaliation in the new testament (louisville, ky: westminster/john knox press, 1992); see note 36. 21. paul ramsey, the just war: force and political responsibility (new york: scribner’s, 1968), 142–143. 22. stephen c. mott, “after all else—then arms?,” chapter 9 in biblical ethics and social change (oxford: oxford university press, 1982). a revised edition was published in 2011. 23. ibid., 173. 24. ibid., 179. 25. ibid., 183. 26. ibid., 188. 27. kyle t. lambelet, “nonviolence as a tradition of moral praxis,” expositions 13.2 (2019): 76–77. intra-catholic dialogue on war, justice, and peace 46 28. william klassen, “’love your enemies’: some reflections on the current status of research,” in swartley, ed., love of enemy 1. 29. ibid. 30. ibid., 2. 31. ibid., 7. 32. in matthew and luke, which points to a common origin in the q-source. it does not appear in mark or john. 33. klassen, “current research” 8. 34. ibid. 35. ibid. 36. ibid., 10. 37. ibid., 11. 38. richard a. horsely, “ethics and exegesis: ‘love your enemies’ and the doctrine of nonviolence,” in swartley, ed., love of enemy 72–101. 39. walter wink, “neither passivity nor violence: jesus third way (matt. 5:38–42 par.),” in swartley, ed., love of enemy 102–125. 40. richard a. horsely, “response to walter wink,” in swartley, ed., love of enemy 126– 132. 41. walter wink, “counterresponse to richard horsely,” in swartley, ed., love of enemy 133– 136. 42. although he argues against a universalist interpretation of love of enemies in the new testament, horsely notes at the conclusion of his article as originally published that “by religious disposition and conviction i too have been a pacifist and a practitioner of nonviolence since my mid-teens” (journal of the american academy of religion 54.1 (spring, 1986): 27). this seems to me to strengthen the credibility of his scholarly perspective, although it doesn’t make it unassailable, as demonstrated by wink’s critique. 43. klassen, “current research” 11. 44. ibid., 13. 45. matthew 23: 34–36 (new american bible). 46. david rensberger, “love for one another and love for enemies in the gospel of john,” in swartley, ed., love of enemy 304. 47 bergman 47. ibid., 307. 48. john r. donahue, “who is my enemy? the parable of the good samaritan and the love of enemies,” in swartley, ed., love of enemy 138. 49. ibid., 142. 50. ibid., 144. 51. ibid., 147. 52. ibid., 148–149. 53. ibid., 149. 54. ibid., 151. 55. ibid., 150. 56. klassen, “current research” 8. klassen’s source is a work in german by helmut koester. 57. ronald j. sider, the early church on killing: a comprehensive sourcebook on war, abortion, and capital punishment (grand rapids, mi: baker academic, 2012), 14. 58. ibid. 59. ibid., 171. 60. ibid. 61. ibid., 173. 62. ibid., 168. 63. hunter, “decade of research” 93. 64. sider, early church 169. 65. ibid., 177; but remember sider’s comments on the infrequent junction between military service and the love of enemies in these same authors. 66. george kalantzis, caesar and the lamb: early christian attitudes on war and military service (eugene, or: cascade books), 154–169. 67. sider, early church 13. 68. the following section is based on and inspired by the enlightening little book by jennifer a. glancy, slavery as moral problem: in the early church and today (minneapolis: fortress, 2011). the argument by analogy is entirely my own. 69. the one notable exception is gregory of nyssa (c.335–c.395), who “composed what is probably the most scathing critique of slaveholding in all of antiquity,” and did so as a result of meditating on genesis 1:27: “so god created humankind in his image.” this is a intra-catholic dialogue on war, justice, and peace 48 sad commentary on the power of culture to defeat the most basic tenets of biblical revelation (glancy, moral problem 96–100). 70. hunter, “decade of research” 92. 71. ibid., 92–93. 72. sider, early church 137. 73. ibid., 139; quoting john helgeland, christians and the roman army from marcus aurelius to constantine (new york: walter de gruyter, 1979), 771. 74. ibid., 123. 75. pope francis, “nonviolence: a style of politics for peace”: https://www.vatican.va/ content/francesco/en/messages/peace/documents/papa-francesco_20161208_messaggio-lgiornata-mondiale-pace-2017.html; emphasis added. see john paul ii, “we are not pacifists,” origins 20.36 (1991): 625. 76. gerald w. schlabach, “what it will take: learning from pope francis’s peacebuilding pedagogy,” expositions 13.2 (2019): 138. 77. john sniegocki, “pope francis: nonviolence, and catholic teaching on war,” expositions 13.2 (2019): 157. 78. ibid., 162. 79. erica chenoweth and maria j. stephan, why civil resistance works: the strategic logic of nonviolent conflict (new york: columbia university press, 2011), 6–7. 80. ibid., 11. 81. ibid., 13. 82. i once served as facilitator for a national conference in pasadena, ca, of the civilian-based defense association. sadly, it was poorly attended. i regret that i am not aware of any successful example of cbd resisting a military invasion. in his essay in expositions 12.1 william o’neill writes movingly, even as a pacifist, of how the use of armed u.n. peacekeepers might have greatly limited the rwandan genocide: o’neill, “restorative critique,” expositions 12.1 (2018): 116. 83. chenoweth and stephan, civil resistance 14. 84. ibid., 20. not mentioned is the fact that danish resistance included sabotage. 85. ibid. 86. ibid. 49 bergman 87. ibid. 88. the essays by powers and winright in expositions 12.1 are particularly persuasive about the complementary relationship of nonviolence and jwt. 89. martin luther king, jr., “pilgrimage, to nonviolence,” in a testament of hope: the essential writings and speeches of martin luther king, jr.,” ed. james m. washington (san francisco: harpercollins, 1986), 39. 90. o’neill, “restorative critique” 116. 91. ibid. 92. archbishop oscar romero, voice of the voiceless: the four pastoral letters and other statements (maryknoll, ny: orbis), 105. 93. ibid., 106–107. 94. ibid., 106–108. 95. ibid., 107. 96. ibid., 109. 97. ibid., 110. chapter 1 of preventing unjust war presents the story of jägerstätter as a selective conscientious objector—he was not a pacifist—and martyr of the just war tradition, as well as gordon zahn’s powerful sociological analysis of what made that possible—in contradistinction to the total capitulation of the german catholic bishops to hitler’s unjust wars. microsoft word rhodes lysaught spr20 [expositions 14.1 (2020) 97–125] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 whose revolution? which future? the legacy of alasdair macintyre for a radical pedagogy in virtue daniel p. rhodes and m. therese lysaught loyola university chicago most readers of alasdair macintyre do not take him to be a revolutionary. if one reads only his works from the past thirty years, one might easily categorize him as a conservative. no doubt due to his sustained critique of modern liberalism, many of those labelled today as neoconservatives have embraced this ersatz version of his thought.1 yet as becomes clear in his most recent book, ethics in the conflicts of modernity, macintyre’s aristotelianism and his critique of liberal moral theory are not rooted in a reactionary longing for a golden-age past.2 they derive, on the contrary, from his deep engagement with that bane of all economic and moral conservatives, karl marx, and his interest in marxist revolution. of course, macintyre is no “vulgar marxist.” instead, his work stands as revolutionary in its own way. as walter benjamin once wrote, amid unleashed and overwhelming capitalism, revolutions may be more like an attempt “to activate the emergency break” than to launch history forward.3 as we narrate in §1 below, there can be no doubt that we all now live in a time of capitalism run out of control. thus, to resist the new brand of nihilism emerging from capitalism’s unceasing stream of “creative destruction” will require new ways forward that are nothing short of radical. macintyre, we suggest, might just be the revolutionary we need. or, to be more precise, the counter-revolutionary. in this article, we argue that at the heart of macintyre’s work is not a template for visions of isolated communities of restorationist reactionaries. rather, he points us toward a radical pedagogy dedicated to the creation of thickly-engaged communities of virtue capable of resisting the fragmenting, isolating, and vicious forces of capital. to make this case, we bring macintyre into conversation with others who share this vision, in particular paulo freire, and we connect macintyre’s agenda with the creation of communities of practice, as prototyped by the base communities of liberation theology. in conclusion, we argue that what macintyre has sought so thoroughly to develop over the entire course of his career is a moral theory capable of sustaining a revolutionary alternative to the alienating and dehumanizing operations of capitalism located in the basic elements of shared concrete practices. thus, virtues are the elements of a the legacy of alasdair macintyre for a radical pedagogy in virtue 98 radical praxis of freedom, a freedom that counters the imperialism of the capitalist, liberal state through the collective practice of a self-possessed, unified ethical life. to make this argument, we first describe the social impact of capitalism, particularly in its latest, most aggressive neoliberal version. we then revisit macintyre’s marxist roots and his sustained critique of capitalism as a way of illuminating what he takes to be the deeper problem with liberalism and its correlative ethic of expressivism. finally, we connect macintyre’s thesis to the radical pedagogy of paulo freire and the examples of base communities in order to contend that communities of practice epitomize the kind of ethical and tradition-based revolution at the heart of macintyre’s project. 1. cultural dissolution, moral irresolution: the fruit of neoliberalism’s silent revolution as we move toward the quarter mark of the twenty-first century, our society lurches at an everincreasing pace toward a dystopian order under the late twentieth-century ascendance of neoliberalism. termed “the silent revolution” by oxford economic historian avner offer, the fragmenting and deconstructive effects of this new, distinctive, deeply disseminated rationality came into its own around 1980. while it has vastly increased the wealth of the few—wealth on the level the world has likely never seen before—for the many, it has mostly left a path of destruction in its wake.4 insofar as it has also profoundly permeated our social, individual, and moral infrastructures, neoliberalism has invisibly and profoundly shaped the self-understanding of the students who sit in our classrooms, the infrastructure of their families and their futures, and increasingly the discourse and policies of the colleges and universities in which moral theologians and philosophers seek to transmit traditions of moral inquiry. a number of contemporary theorists have charted the economic, social, psychological, and cultural effects of neoliberalism, chief among them david harvey, wendy brown, naomi klein, and wolfgang streeck.5 bruce rogers-vaughn summarizes some of these effects succinctly in his important book, caring for souls in a neoliberal age. drawing on robert putnam’s 2015 analysis of the impacts of neoliberalism on port clinton, ohio, entitled our kids: the american dream in crisis, rogers-vaughn details the corrosive effects of neoliberal ideology and its attendant growing economic inequality on class, communities, families, and education in the united states.6 just a few of those effects include: a decline in manufacturing jobs from roughly 50% to 25% of total employment in a short period of three decades; a gradual decline in real wages; longer 99 rhodes and lysaught commutes to replace lost wages, stressing families and fragmenting communities; a doubling to quadrupling of the divorce rate depending on location; a jump in childhood poverty rates from 4% to 35%; increasing class segregation; declining educational levels; declining social mobility; and marked increases in juvenile delinquency.7 this social fragmentation has been attended by extraordinary increases over the past forty years in rates of mental illness,8 opioid addiction,9 suicide,10 and suddenly, after rising for decades, a three-year decline in life expectancy due to increasing mortality rates for middle-aged persons.11 for rogers-vaughn, these effects are due not only to the direct economic effects of neoliberalism—i.e., the increase in economic hardships for most people and rise in economic inequality—but as importantly to the socio-cultural commitments embedded in the neoliberal framework, particularly what he names deinstitutionalization, desymbolization, and desubjectification. centered in extreme individualism, neoliberalism seeks the dismantling of cultural institutions (such as public schools, universities, government, or churches) as well as collectives that nurture interpersonal relationships.12 equally, neoliberal culture erodes and flattens any symbolic language, images, or values that “have the ability to resist those of the market.”13 finally, neoliberalism desubjectifies persons, leading to what christopher bollas has named the “normotic personality,” indicating “an individual [who] suffers a numbing or erasure of subjectivity, experiencing herself as a commodity in a world of commodities.”14 what is more, with the ascendency of cultural capitalism, the production of culture itself, from movies and music to literature, child-rearing, and marriage are increasingly commodified and individualized. social fragmentation and dissolution of civic participation have been well described by sociologists like robert putnam, robert bellah, daniel bell, and theda skocpol.15 broad atomization has resulted in the decline of membership in civic and broader social institutions as well as severely weakened the social bonds that knit a society together. work is more unstable and more fluid. social relations become more virtual; social bonds less enduring. churches, unions, local clubs, and all other social organizations are on the decline, even as tertiary associations (political mailing lists or online communities) and lifestyle enclaves expand. is it coincidence or prescience, then, that the first edition of macintyre’s after virtue appeared in 1981? here macintyre prophetically adds to the above landscape an abiding concern with the epistemic crisis of the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. on the cusp of the sociocultural fragmentation detailed above, macintyre boldly named the already-unfolding the legacy of alasdair macintyre for a radical pedagogy in virtue 100 fragmentation underlying an emergent cultural reality: the irresolvability of moral disputes. in the memorable opening pages of after virtue, macintyre echoes the science-fiction novel a canticle for liebowitz,16 asking his reader to imagine a situation where the field of science has been entirely destroyed, disbanded, and prohibited. those trying to revive the tradition have only fragments, lacking any unifying theory to make sense of their significance or how they integrate. as a result, “arbitrariness” dominates the field due to the fact that no agreed upon premises give shape to the remnants of fragmented scientific expressions.17 macintyre reprises this scenario to propose what was at the time his radical thesis: the hypothesis i wish to advance is that in the actual world which we inhabit the language of morality is in the same state of grave disorder as the language of natural science in the imaginary world which i described. what we possess […] are the fragments of a conceptual scheme […]. we possess indeed simulacra of morality […]. but we have—very largely, if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.18 thus, interminable dispute pervades our moral discourse; any possibility of rational agreement has vanished. in the place of ethics, our discourse is now entirely shaped by emotivism, the theory that “all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling,” and therefore cannot be either true or false.19 as such, differences between moral perspectives cannot be resolved rationally—i.e., through a mutual process of face-to-face discussion that entails giving reasons that stand “independent of the relationship between speaker and hearer.”20 rather, moral disagreement devolves into little more than assertion and counter-assertion, a mere clash of arbitrary wills that can only be resolved, in the end, “by producing certain non-rational effects on the emotions or attitudes of those who disagree with us”—in other words, through various exercises of power, such as manipulation, legal action, or bureaucratic processes that identify who can decide.21 as such, contemporary moral discourse is, in effect, little more than managerial technocracy or nietzschean will-to-power. macintyre offers as the only real alternative aristotelian virtue theory cultivated through practices—namely, those “coherent and complex form[s] of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that 101 rhodes and lysaught form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human concepts of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.”22 as bleak as the landscape seemed when he penned the first edition of after virtue, over the last forty years, the social state of moral discourse has devolved even further. in 2016, macintyre returns to these themes in ethics in the conflicts of modernity. here, he opens not with a description of culture and moral discourse catastrophically fragmented. instead, he posits a different problematic, that of “lives that go wrong on account of misdirected or frustrated desire.”23 depicting a number of scenarios that echo the fragmented, despairing lives rogers-vaughn describes, macintyre zeroes in on the moral paralysis or despair experienced by so many. again, he suggests, emotivism—now renamed “expressivism”24—has a choke-hold on the moral selfunderstanding of those in western culture. yet to dislodge expressivism’s grip, in this text he takes a different tack from that of after virtue, granting to desire a critical role in moral reasoning and moral action while continuing to argue that arisotelian virtue theory—now renamed neoaristotelianism—provides a better account of the role of desire in moral reasoning. chasing an aristotelian-styled inquiry, beginning with everyday questions at hand and proceeding through various stages of justification for his position, macintyre lays out a case for a neoaristotelian alternative to the defective histories and limitations of expressivism. for our purposes, three aspects of this account are most pertinent. first, the development of moral agency, for macintyre, requires the cultivation of prohairesis, the term used by aristotle to designate “desire informed by reason or […] reason informed by desire.”25 the tension between desire and reason generates the intertwined questions, “what do i want?” and “what do i do?”—pressing self-conscious beings to question the genesis of our desires and if they are really our own.26 secondly, here reason has a particular shape—it is associated with the determination of objective goods. for macintyre, moral action is the result of acting rationally, that is, to act with a good reason or, in other words, “for the sake of achieving some good or preventing or avoiding some evil.”27 as reason is informed by the desire for the good, equally, rationality must shape desire into the full maturity of virtue through practice. this iterative, recursive, never-ending process not only develops ethical discernment, or phronesis, as one of the cardinal virtues of the person, but also allows her to learn and progress as a moral agent over the course of her life.28 the legacy of alasdair macintyre for a radical pedagogy in virtue 102 what distinguishes the virtuous person, within an aristotelian perspective, then, is not merely that she does the right thing, but that she does the right thing, at the right time, for the right reason, in the right way, with rightly formed desires or affections. thirdly, this is never an individual pursuit or process. in fact, what makes humans peculiar kinds of animals is that we are social creatures possessing unique capacities to alter and transform our environment. for aristotle, this unique power is essentially encapsulated in the human capacity for language, zoon logon echon. not only does language give us the unique capacity for reflection, this unique human ability to communicate makes possible deeper and more complex forms of collaboration and association and, critically, the mutual identification and pursuit of common goods.29 the tense structure of language also provides for the possibility of envisioning alternative futures. this allows humans to set goals and embark on mutually shared objectives, creating expectations of one another as well as leading to a sense of satisfaction or disappointment with the eventual outcomes.30 finally, language offers a vehicle through which to recount stories about lives, the challenges faced, the accomplishments achieved, the failures endured, and the endeavors taken. such narratives offer a greater extent of personhood.31 enabling a distinct form of collective life, linguistically comprised communities are necessary for growth and formation in virtue, providing a platform for identifying mistakes and what can be learned from them. thus, collective life, for neoaristotelians, becomes an extended enquiry into how best to live, or, a dilated argument in pursuit of truth and good.32 macintyre’s neoaristotelian view, accordingly, poses a full-throated critique of contemporary moral theory. the “morality” that at present prevails in modernized societies, for macintyre, is one based on profoundly misguided premises and fictional concepts: predominantly, utility and human rights.33 thus, despite the gains that may have been made for certain groups, the basic presuppositions of this ethical system carry an insidious genetic deformity that renders the system as a whole incoherent and corrupted.34 in after virtue, macintyre notes suggestively that this deformity must have been rooted in a catastrophic social event—except that, surreally, in the case of moral discourse, the precipitating cataclysm was not recognized as such. in fact, from the standpoint of academic history, the event “must remain largely invisible.”35 it is only in ethics in the conflicts of modernity that macintyre brings it fully into view. that insidious flaw is, we discover, the possessive individualism of capitalism traceable to its tumultuous emergence in the eighteenth century. 103 rhodes and lysaught 2. the destructive forces of capitalism: macintyre as anti-anti-marxist harking back to some of his earliest writings, in ethics in the conflicts of modernity, macintyre returns to marx to unveil the socio-economic and political conditions that gave rise to emotivism. as he argues, people did not all of a sudden—sometime between 1630 and 1850—discover that they had feelings or lose the function of their rational faculties. rather, the emergence of expressivism, and the shift away from an aristotelianism that had held sway in western culture for the better part of two millennia, was the result of a larger social shift. this transformation was catalyzed by the introduction of powerful forces in the late 1700s that altered the entire culture, reconfiguring human interactions, thought, and moral considerations.36 while in after virtue macintyre largely narrates this shift almost entirely via the influences of various philosophers and their thoughts and arguments, in ethics at the end of modernity, he finally tells the other half of the story—in fact, the most important half. here he zeroes in on the real culprit behind the catastrophic transformations of “modernity” for ethics: the unparalleled force of capitalism. macintyre proceeds in two steps. in the first, he more closely examines the work of eighteenthcentury empiricist philosopher david hume, the progenitor of all expressivists. while hume figures in the narrative of after virtue, in the present volume macintyre digs deeper, unmasking a critical and often overlooked aspect of hume’s work. hume’s position originates from a utilitarian logic that reductively equates good with pleasure and evil with pain, rejecting the aristotelian distinction between objects that merely attract and those that are ultimately good.37 any greater ends or goods which may not exactly pique immediate desire or titillate one with pleasure are discarded. in a deft sleight of hand, hume then asserts that pleasure and pain as the content of good and evil provide a universal—and universally agreed upon—structure for morality. this general and universal agreement in sentiments and affections, for hume, precedes the standards societies derive for moral action and practical reason.38 per his empiricism, his ethics proceeds as a cataloging of habits, sentiments, and affections natural to humankind. these provide the universal code of morality. but was it? macintyre notes how radically hume’s account differed from the account of morality that had held for centuries, in which human virtue and flourishing were deeply interwoven with both individual and common goods necessarily achieved through specific social roles, the local political order, and contextual relationships.39 such a position continued to be held by many the legacy of alasdair macintyre for a radical pedagogy in virtue 104 in hume’s context, particularly by those in different social classes, who accounted very differently for desires, sentiments, and more importantly goods.40 what is more, macintyre unveils hume’s subtle bias toward wealth. he highlight’s hume’s essay “of the rise and progress of the arts and sciences,” where hume simply asserts a correlation between pleasure or positive desires and riches, stating: “avarice, or the desire of gain, is an universal passion, which operates at all times, in all places, and upon all persons.”41 or, as macintyre continues: in his treatise [on human nature, hume] had asserted that “nothing has a greater tendency to give us an esteem for any person than his power and riches,” and he had explained “the satisfaction we take in the riches of others, and the esteem we have for the possessors” by referring first to the possessions of the rich “such as houses, gardens, equipages” and the like, which “being agreeable in themselves, necessarily produce a sentiment of pleasure in everyone, that considers or surveys them,” secondly to our “expectation of advantage from the rich and powerful by our sharing of their possessions,” and thirdly to “sympathy which makes us partake of the satisfaction of everyone, that approaches us.”42 as macintyre notes further, whenever hume comments on economic questions, be it progress that has been made from less sophisticated agricultural societies to his contemporaneous commercial, mercantile context, it appears that “there is rarely a hint that the continuing and growing prosperity of the rich and powerful has invited anything other than the applause and approbation of the less prosperous.”43 in other words, not only does hume conflate pleasure/good and pain/evil and then blithely assert that desire for gain is “natural” and that wealth is universally perceived as a source of positive sentiments, he then subtly embeds economics at the heart of his moral system. in presenting a decontextualized, yet highly peculiar, account of putatively “natural” and “universal” morality, hume at best fails to acknowledge the import of his own social context and location on the very theory of morality he promotes. even as he promotes it as universal common sense, hume’s moral theory arises within a specific context—namely, the eighteenth-century british social and economic order—and bears all the trappings of that social location.44 105 rhodes and lysaught macintyre then zeroes in on a key point: what i am suggesting is not only that some of hume’s claims were mistaken, but also that one effect of his advancing them in the way that he did was to conceal and disguise from his readers the importance of certain facts about the condition of their social and economic order […]. [his supposedly universal morality] functioned so as to conceal from the view of many of his contemporaries the underlying moral and social conflicts of their society and by doing so sustained the workings of the agricultural, commercial, and mercantile economy to the profit of the some and to the detriment of others, others who are for the most part invisible to hume.45 in other words, from the outset, modern moral theory was engaged in a process of concealing and disguising its role in supporting and sustaining the radically new social and economic institutions that emerged in britain in the latter part of the eighteenth century and continued to morph in increasingly destructive ways since. in doing so, morality veils as much as it informs, providing an ethical patina for the social processes of a regnant capitalism. based on the frail tethers of a fabricated consensus, from hume and kant to mill, gibbard, and ultimately rawls, modern ethics, for macintyre, is plagued by a degenerative and disorienting ailment, a condition that leads in the end to a nietzschean will-to-power. thus, not only does expressivism perpetuate fragmentation and un-ending moral disagreement. it is equally unable to acknowledge its own socio-historical conditioning, ill-equipped even to see the force of capitalism as a socio-cultural power that shapes its basic commitments. but not only is it unable to see these dynamics—it also simultaneously conceals, veils, and disguises them. for expressivism is, by design and from its inception, the moral theory capitalism requires, enabling this economic mutation to function invisibly, inexorably, insidiously. for macinytre, the theorist who can best help us see these dynamics is karl marx, or at least the marx of the first volume of capital, whom macintyre views as following an aristotelian trajectory.46 in ethics in the conflicts of modernity, macintyre makes his lifelong indebtedness to marx all-the-more evident by dilating on three essential components of the current situation to be learned from marx. first, marx’s theory of surplus value exposes the exploitative nature of capital as an accumulative regime. for macintyre, following marx, deception is at the heart of capitalism. the legacy of alasdair macintyre for a radical pedagogy in virtue 106 it is “a mode of presentation of relationships that disguises and deceives,” one of the main deceptions being the theory of surplus value.47 “surplus value”—that fiction by which capitalists generate profits—is nothing other than “unpaid labor” (a.k.a., theft). but this fact is concealed from the laborers: those whose labor power had thus become a commodity did not recognize themselves as, and even now generally do not recognize themselves as, having become in this respect commodities to be exchanged for money, to be bought and sold at whatever rate the relevant market dictates. they thought and think of themselves in quite other ways and understandably so […]. the relations of exchange through which those who own the means of production appropriate the unpaid labor of productive workers are disguised by their legal form as the contractual relations of free individuals, each of them seeking what she or he takes to be best for her or himself.48 as such, secondly, capital reshapes moral anthropology and our understanding of society—how people have to learn to think about themselves and their relations to others if they are to act in accordance with the operations of capital. that is, marx uncovers how capital disciplines its denizens for participation in the market.49 in order to understand the emaciated ethics that pervades modern societies, one must grasp the complete system of dissimulation that characterizes capitalism, depleting and displacing the true goods of life and wizening politics. thirdly, for macintyre, following marx, a critique of the field of economics and the education it provides is essential. capitalism is not merely the organizing structure of one isolated segment of human existence; rather, its dominant logic, anthropology, and view of social relations legitimate its expansion into all areas, solidifying it as an entire, ordered way of life.50 as a result, macintyre’s critique of modern liberalism sees the processes of capitalism—as well as the theories and theorists that legitimate these processes and disseminate its rationality—to be deeply at odds with the kinds of goods intrinsic to the development and practice of the virtues. beyond its “completely weberian” composition, capitalist society can only foster an anemic morality.51 while philosophical critique of these dynamics is essential, macintyre again points us beyond a simply philosophical solution. as kelvin knight contends, 107 rhodes and lysaught the conclusion to which macintyre was moving, and to which he had already long been moving as a marxist, was that nietzschean theory and capitalist practice had to be opposed in the name not of some theoretical or future ideal, but of some actual and present kind of practice.52 and for macintyre, practice can only be embodied in communities. he notes in ethics in the conflicts of modernity that, to counter the moral theories of hume and others, any challengers had to present “not just an alternative body of theory, but the possibility of an alternative way of life to the capitalist way of life.”53 but he had likewise stated this as early as 1960: the individual then cannot win his freedom by asserting himself against society; and he cannot win it through capitalist society. to be free is only possible in some new form of society which makes a radical break with the various oppressions of capitalism.54 thus, the answer lies not in philosophy alone but in a revolutionary praxis borne out in ethical communities joined in their desire for the higher goods and emancipated to pursue those shared ends. 3. macintyre, radical pedagogy, and new communities of practice all along, then, the question for macintyre with his turn to virtue has been: “so in what direction should radical critiques of capitalism move?”55 or, better, in a state of “capitalist unfreedom,” how do we cultivate the “revolutionary discipline” needed to achieve freedom?56 at the end of after virtue, he can see his first attempt at an answer, though as through a glass darkly. as he now famously stated there, recalling the historic events of the sixth century: a crucial turning point […] occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. what they set themselves to achieve instead—not often recognizing the legacy of alasdair macintyre for a radical pedagogy in virtue 108 fully what they were doing—was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained […]. what matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.57 in 1981, macintyre gestured vaguely toward a new, “but doubtless very different” st. benedict. this has led prominent religious conservatives to martial macintyre’s thought in support of proposals for founding new enclaves marked by social isolation and retreat from contemporary culture. insofar as these proposals call for a very similar st. benedict, they proceed on poor readings.58 rather, as knight has demonstrated, what lies at the heart of macinytre’s entire oeuvre is a sustained commitment to marx’s notion of “revolutionary practice.”59 thus, while macintyre’s philosophy is aristotelian, as knight notes, he is not interested in conserving political order as was aristotle, but with how to change and transform it.60 macintyre’s notion of politics is one of active teaching and learning, not irrational dominance. “politically, locality is important,” knight comments, “because it can afford participation in rational deliberation and decision-making to all.”61 the ultimate goal of macintyre’s ethical philosophy, then, is to provide a moral theory for the marxist pursuit of overcoming the alienation, fragmentation, exploitation, dehumanization, and social disfigurement that come with capitalism. in ethics in the conflicts of modernity, macintyre makes more explicit what valid sorts of challenges to capital’s morality might look like. contrary to orthodox marxists who have privileged party power and the revolutionary working class as agents of social change, creating a false binary between institutions or spontaneity, he sides more deliberately with the english distributists whose thomistic precepts, articulated through the work of leo xiii initiating the tradition of catholic social thought, gave view to “a series of genuinely local political initiatives through which the possibilities of a grassroots distribution and sharing of power and property could be achieved.”62 against the total depravity capitalism engenders across all layers of society, macintyre sees such micro-political experiments as necessary for the resurrection of virtue and the reconstruction of human flourishing. 109 rhodes and lysaught macintyre is joined in this conclusion by other critics of neoliberalism.63 but while these figures all gesture toward new local experiments in community or collectives as the answer, none talk about how to begin building such entities. in this section, we offer one practical, pedagogical way to do just this. we argue that macintyre’s impressionistic trajectory toward social practices cultivated among local communities should be read in consonance with the kinds of “base communities” associated with freirean radical pedagogy and action. such communities of practice inculcate new collective visions of the good while building power and taking account of the experience of those oppressed by the regnant system. macintyre himself seems to be grasping at this conclusion when he argues in his 1995 “preface to marxism and christianity”: in this situation [of global capitalism] what is most urgently needed is a politics of self-defense for all those local societies that aspire to achieve some relatively selfsufficient and independent form of participatory practice-based community and that therefore need to protect themselves from the corrosive effects of capitalism and the depredations of state power.64 what macintyre calls for, in essence, are local, transformative, and educational communities of practice. rather than a statist focus, which may have characterized his earlier marxian views, macintyre’s mature thought looks to the creation and sustaining of local ethical communities where collective identity and meaning derived from emancipatory self-activity in pursuit of a real common good can be conducted.65 in substance, macintyre’s project dovetails well with twentieth-century brazilian educator and philosopher paulo freire, who stressed the need to generate radical educational communities of praxis. born in 1921 in recife, brazil, freire was no stranger to the poverty and misery of the region. he came of age during the fallout from the 1929 great depression, which threw his own middle-class family into destitution. thus, his experience of living under social, economic, and political domination and oppression led him to the field of education as a critical site for the struggle of liberation. only eight years macintyre’s senior, he too was deeply influenced by marxist thinkers of the time and took his doctorate in education at the university of recife in 1955. the focus of his life’s work was the development of a radical pedagogy for those on the bottom of the legacy of alasdair macintyre for a radical pedagogy in virtue 110 society, aimed at learning with them in direct engagement with the concrete realities of their oppression in order to liberate them and together to transform their world.66 he describes this radical program for education in his pedagogy of the oppressed, a work that, as we will demonstrate, shares many similarities and overlaps with macintyre’s own project. moreover, we contend, freire’s philosophy of education provides a way of generating the kinds of critical, alternative communities of practice aimed at transformation that macintyre’s virtue ethics seeks to promote. for freire, the essence of this revolutionary work is to foster dialogical action.67 dialogue here is not uninterested discourse, or remote communication over sustained distance, or hostile argument. rather, it is the forging of a collective rationality and consciousness through the development of deep relational connections. distinguished from the monological postures that pervade situations of domination wherein “some name on behalf of others,” dialogue for freire “is an encounter among women and men who name the world […]. [i]t is an act of creation.”68 he continues, “dialogue cannot exist […] in the absence of a profound love for the world and for people,” because, as an encounter of “united reflection and action,” dialogue moves to transform a dehumanizing and oppressive structure in order to make it more human and fulfilling.69 in the same way that macintyre despises the reign of managerialism, freire too sees such top-down, professionalized modes of learning as inherently problematic. what freire adds to macintyre’s more philosophical argument is a mode of pedagogical encounter for not only building the skills to engage in the sort of moral discourse macintyre seeks, but also for creating and building the kinds of transformative communities that cultivate identity, purpose, shared rationality, and common goods. nowhere is this more evident than in freire’s connection to and investment in catholic ecclesial base communities (comunidades eclesiales de base). challenging a church establishment (even in its modernizing version) that was unwilling to critique or break with the status quo, freire’s close relationship with the “red bishop” dom hélder cámara and the radical columbian priest camilo torres set him on the side of peoples’ movements which embraced and utilized his problem-posing and dialogical approach.70 as a result, he also deeply influenced the liberation theologies emerging at the time, shaping the involvement of clergy (catholic and protestant) in their engagement with campesinos (or working people) of their towns and villages. these local communities gathered in a freirean-mode of learning practice to constructively challenge the hierarchy and socio-political 111 rhodes and lysaught exploitation of the capitalist state all across latin america. and it was in concert with these communities that a whole network of ecclesial base communities arose. gathered to pray and to reflect upon and discuss scripture as well as new social thought documents coming out of vatican ii, the participants in these communities sought to forge a new society of justice and freedom consolidated in their shared identity and mutual pursuit of shared goods.71 following freire’s radical curriculum, these base communities worked against the shaping forces of a capitalist state and its mode of domination. first, they resisted the deep fragmentation and isolation inherent in the individualizing dynamic of capitalism. they did this by presenting an alternative: communion in dialogue, where “sharing something deeper” gave rise to the possibility of “common action” based in a deeply relational, shared ethical identity.72 second, such a community required the capacity to reason together about crucial human goods, that is, to cultivate a shared rationality through the process of “conscientization” (conscientização) aimed at practice and action. in this way, knowledge was deepened and grew through a co-investigatory process of radically democratic education.73 thus, finally, not only did communities consolidated in such a way learn to address the economic, social, and political realities they faced and to discard the fabulations of oppressive exploiters, but they did so in a way that forged a shared identity in an ethical community capable of cultivating shared goods and virtues. over and against forms of education that merely reproduce the status quo in the service of the dominant regime by silencing, manipulating, and dividing the oppressed, freire argues for a form of dialogical pedagogy that instills critical consciousness and builds cultural action between teachers and the people as the road to revolution. while the former is anti-dialogical, freire puts forth a radical mode of pedagogy that moves cooperatively, based in an ongoing dialogue with the people that begins from their experiences, helps them to begin to problematize the given, and works together to build a unified pursuit of an alternative way of life.74 dialogue rejects dehumanization and begins the movement toward liberation in communion. on this central tenet, macintyre and freire deeply overlap. it is not incidental that for aristotle, and thus for macintyre, education is at the heart of virtue. a society structured by virtue requires a people educated and formed to engage in the politics of the good. but too often contemporary virtue theorists—many of whom claim to be macintyrean—forward a conservative mode of education. indeed, macintyre himself may be responsible for this due to his extensive focus on mentorship and apprenticeship. too frequently, apprenticeship calls to mind the forms of the legacy of alasdair macintyre for a radical pedagogy in virtue 112 education, even when practical or technical in nature, that paulo freire memorably labeled “banking.”75 a set compendium of knowledge known by the instructor is recited to the student, who passively accepts the knowledge and later regurgitates it. such forms of knowledge tend toward paternalism, hierarchy, and stasis and are better fitted for crafts than instilling the knowledge of ethics. as such, these approaches are incapable of forming students in the skills of rationality, virtue, and ability to advance fundamental human and social goods through shared practices. macintyre, of course, registers this. indeed, the whole of macintyre’s work, as romand coles has suggested, points to the centrality of “contingency, conflict, difference, heterogenous traditions, and a version of dialogical enlightenment and politics.”76 one may even see the similarities in the structure of macintyre’s argument in ethics in the conflicts of modernity, wherein he begins by questioning what is presumed and then proceeds to chart a conversational path toward the ultimate question of what does it mean to live well. macintyre’s appeal to tradition and reason is neither descartes’s pure geometry nor hegel’s end of history, but instead recognizes that the heart of a community of virtue is continuous argument and deliberation.77 to quote coles again: [macintyre’s] hope is that if we can initiate spaces, sensibilities, and practices through which to cultivate particular traditioned rationalities and genuine contestation here, these might (through numerous political struggles) eventually spread to the public sphere and throughout society.78 thus, for macintyre, as for the oppressed subjected to domination, the problem is monological uniformity that denies the pursuit of more ultimate, if contested, goods. macintyre tends to envisage the catholic university as an ideal space for recovering this dialogical practice.79 but traditional university structures as well as their contemporary neoliberalized deformations mount significant barriers to his project. moreover, given their selfenterprising and transitory nature, engrafting university students into base communities remains challenging. yet we believe a contemporary possibility for advancing a macintyrean mode of revolution requires collaborative, participatory experiments that bridge academic and community divides with the aim of reconsolidating alternative forms of local life. just such a freirean educational approach can provide a means for generating the kinds of micro-political experiments 113 rhodes and lysaught necessary if we are to introduce students to and thereby cultivate the sorts of ethical communities to which macintyre gestures. mary ann hinsdale, helen lewis, and maxine waller recount an example of such experiment in their documentation of a five-year (1987–1992) community development process in ivanhoe, virginia.80 charting the story of a small, rural community in the appalachian mountains, they offer an account of “the creative survival techniques that people developed” as they faced the postindustrial decline of their town and the emerging socio-economic pressures associated with the expansion of neoliberal capitalism.81 beginning with community education and problem-posing inquiry, the experiment in ivanhoe brought academics and community members together in a process of participatory research aimed at rebuilding their community and transforming their situation. with the aim of reconstituting ivanhoe’s way of life, they recognized that this goal could not be achieved through professional techniques of planning but must come by way of “people development and community building: education, building self-esteem, understanding history, mobilizing people in all their diversity.”82 they describe the effort, no less, as springing from the formation of an “appalachian base-community.”83 while the ivanhoe community continues to struggle to define its own future, we suggest that this kind of micro-political experiment provides an example for the kind of community reconsolidation and transformation central to both freire and macintyre. even more, working at the base of american society through a process of participatory and collaborative education, ivanhoe provides a tangible example of how communities of practice (cops) embody the kind of radical pedagogical relationships between academics and local communities necessary for staving off the corrosive and corrupting tides of aggressive capitalism and transforming the teaching of ethics.84 let us quickly highlight four ways that this communities of practice approach responds to macintyre’s insights on prohairesis, community, virtue, and social change. first, proharesis stands at the center of communities of practice. cops acknowledge the legitimate role of desire. for freire, such participatory modes of learning engage the desires of those involved in a shared process of consciousness-raising that enlivens their aspirations, identifies where those aspirations are being frustrated or negated, and then activates a social mode of learning to enact the needed changes. but they also help practitioners (community members, students, and faculty) move beyond simple emotivism or expressivism. springing from a problemposing origin, cops draw practitioners into the pursuit of knowledge aimed at a shared good. the legacy of alasdair macintyre for a radical pedagogy in virtue 114 through co-creative, participatory inquiry, they recursively bring practitioners’ desires into an intentional, rational, analytical relationship with those goods. this not only moves practitioners beyond solipsistic understandings of desire. further, as macintyre notes, “to discover what we share with others, to rediscover common desire, is to acquire a new moral standpoint.”85 second, cops by their very nature begin to rebuild community in a variety of ways. they train practitioners in a constellation of constitutive core practices requisite for establishing a shared venture. facilitating the social production of knowledge, basic practices of dialogue and discussion allow participants to negotiate insights and differences while developing shared rationalities for the essential practices of their community. these ethico-political practices iteratively deepen community. when configured in freirean fashion, this cooperative inquiry fuses conscientization with the kind of relationship-building needed for the practice of a shared way of life and the collective theorizing inherent to it. within such communities, people discover the power they have to work from their own knowledge and to engage in their own research, thus activating them together to pursue higher, common goods.86 third, as is already evident, the social activity of learning conducted within such cops advances the growth of virtue in practitioners by involving them in the communal pursuit of excellences of practice. whether it be literacy training, scripture reading, prayer, developing sustainable farming practices, or generating micro-economic alternatives, cops involve participants in the active inquiry necessary for performing such endeavors well. as collaborative learning groups, cops intertwine the various experiences and competencies of both academics and community members in a mutual process of refinement, adjustment, and even change that begins to build a social fabric capable of sustaining that knowledge and practice.87 and when set as freirean-informed base communities, they move from the people up, generating the changes needed to make these virtuous practices possible and enduring without succumbing to stale and rigidly uniform bureaucratic structures.88 finally, via cops, participants also embark on the longer-term task of challenging the pervading structures of capitalism and the managerial state by generating ethical social alternatives. in other words, cops work to build the kind of socio-ethical relations necessary to pursue a collective good and sustain that pursuit over time. marx taught that real freedom is the deepest challenge to capitalism. like any imperial regime, capitalism thrives on the backs of its captives, growing its accumulation on their stunted and immiserated lives. freirean-informed cops aim to alter this 115 rhodes and lysaught structure through the intentional activation of the base of this disfigured society, deploying a radical pedagogy of consciousness-raising that moves these communities out of passive silence and into the communal process of building their own ethico-political alternatives.89 against the fragmentation, atomization, dehumanization, deinstitutionalization, desymbolization, and desubjectification wrought by neoliberal capitalism, freirean-informed cops provide a collective mode of socio-cultural transformation wherein those subjected to exploitation and the captivity of capitalism can begin to redefine and reconfigure their world. thus, they can function as radical monte cassino-like outposts in a struggle of education against the inculcation of neoliberalism’s principles and logic. 4. revolutionary pedagogy for a twenty-first century ethics communities of practice are the kinds of elemental social learning systems where an alternative, even revolutionary, way of life can be cultivated and performed. while not nearly as comprehensive as those envisaged by macintyre and freire, these embryonic communities of practice offer a starting point for students and faculty to begin to learn the practices and habits necessary for reshaping pedagogy, themselves, and their communities toward new forms of society that can counter the oppressions and fragmentations of capitalism they both name as the root of our current social and moral malaise. based in the conviction that learning is a social phenomenon, communities of practice are the kinds of participatory units wherein new identities are forged.90 they “can be thought of as shared histories of learning” that provide new possibilities of collective identity.91 as sites for the cultivation of “revolutionary discipline,” they can function as a radically new approach to teaching ethics by seeding the recovery of virtue, the conscientization of participants, the pursuit of freedom, and the rebuilding of community, toward the end of real social change. creating time for such micro-politics, for tending to the goods of humanity, for cultivating lives worth living, they offer the opportunity of slowing things down, possibly giving enough space for us to re-collect our history from its currently headlong trajectory into the dead end of global capitalism. when set within a freirean radical pedagogy, these kinds of basic social learning systems become radically democratic arenas for the cultivation of the kinds of virtues and prophetic witness called for by macintyre.92 to freireans, thus, macintyre’s work on virtue could be a helpful guide for building up the communion so central to their common pedagogical project, even as freire’s the legacy of alasdair macintyre for a radical pedagogy in virtue 116 emphasis on dialogue might refine the hierarchical interpretations of macintyre’s valorizing of apprenticeship. both, in parallel and, we think, in ways that deeply overlap, seek “a new kind of society rooted in the centrality of a better humankind,” consonant with the catholic commitments they share.93 both believe education is not neutral, and therefore, hope to inspire communities of practice hat challenge the status quo and pursue transformation. freire offers a method to macintyre’s substance: a participatory pedagogy for the cultivation of virtue. both are revolutionaries of a peculiar kind. theirs will be a slow revolution, not a decisive and catastrophic break. but if we do not wish merely to replace an order (or disorder) of fragmentation and sheer competition with a new one of more of the same, we will need the time to cultivate in our students the skills for building community, shaping an alternative rationality, and cultivating the correlative human virtues so as to capacitate them to reprise these processes more permanently wherever they go. and as we teach, so will we be taught, as this new approach to pedagogy holds the promise of radically reshaping how faculty inhabit our own universities and communities— capacitating us to be not only those who create new knowledge, but those who likewise catalyze and engage in social change. true revolution, after all, means revolution for everyone. notes 1. some prominent examples of conservative misappropriations of macintyre include rod dreher, host of the american conservative blog and author of the benedict option: a strategy for christians in a post-christian nation (new york: sentinel press, 2017); r. r. “rusty” reno, editor of first things; and the new york times’s columnist ross douthat. 2. alasdair macintyre, ethics in the conflict of modernity (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2016). 3. walter benjamin, “on the concept of history,” in selected writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940, eds. howard eiland and michael w. jennings (cambridge, ma and london: belknap press, 2003), 402. 4. bruce rogers-vaughn, caring for souls in a neoliberal age (new york: palgrave macmillan, 2016), 8, citing chris hedges, wages of rebellion (new york: bold type books, 2015), 76–80. no doubt a contested term that many have suggested lacks precision, we use “neoliberalism” to name an ideology and rationality that envisions the market as 117 rhodes and lysaught unknowable and yet remarkably powerful for organizing ever-increasing aspects of human social and individual life. identifying this otherwise invisible assemblage of state, corporate, finance, and market powers is an essential first step to dethroning it, we believe, and thereby worth the risk of some imprecision. 5. see david harvey, a brief history of neoliberalism (oxford: oxford university press, 2007); wendy brown, undoing the demos: neoliberalism’s stealth revolution (brooklyn, ny: zone books, 2017); naomi klein, the shock doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism (new york: picador, 2007); and wolfgang streeck, buying time: the delayed crisis of democratic capitalism, trans. patrick camiller (new york: verso, 2014). 6. robert d. putnam, our kids: the american dream in crisis (new york: simon and schuster, 2015). 7. rogers-vaughn, caring for souls in a neoliberal age, 8–14. 8. per robert whitaker, anatomy of an epidemic: magic bullets, psychiatric drugs, and the astonishing rise of mental illness in america (new york: crown publishers, 2010), mental illness rates have doubled since 1987 and increased six-fold since 1955. see: https://www.counterpunch.org/2010/04/28/the-astonishing-rise-of-mental-illness-inamerica/. 9. sarah deweerdt, “tracing the u.s. opioid crisis to its roots,” nature september 11, 2019, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02686-2. for another localized narrative that ties many of these themes together, see nicholas kristof, “who killed the knapp family?” new york times, january 9, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/ opinion/sunday/deaths-despair-poverty.html. 10. from 1990 to 2007, suicide rates in the u.s. increased 33%, now ranking as the second leading cause of death for 10–34 year-olds and the fourth leading cause of death for people ages 35–54. see kirsten weir, “worrying trends in u.s. suicide rates,” monitor on psychology 50.3 (march 2019): 24, https://www.apa.org/monitor/2019/03/trends-suicide. 11. linda carroll, “u.s. life expectancy declining due to more deaths in middle age,” reuters november 26, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-life-expectancy/ us-life-expectancy-declining-due-to-more-deaths-in-middle-age-iduskbn1y02c7. 12. rogers-vaughn, caring for souls in a neoliberal age, 124. the legacy of alasdair macintyre for a radical pedagogy in virtue 118 13. ibid. rogers-vaughn quotes here edward farley’s book, deep symbols: “what appears to be new in postmodern societies is not a displacement of old symbols for new ones but a weakening if not elimination of all words of power. all deep symbols now appear to be imperiled by postmodern discourses, societal traits, and sociologies of knowledge […]. but with the loss of the words of power, quaintness applies to all such terms: thus ‘tradition,’ ‘duty,’ ‘conscience,’ ‘truth,’ ‘salvation,’ ‘sin,’ ‘god.’” see deep symbols: their postmodern effacement and reclamation (harrisburg, pa: trinity press international, 1996), 13–14. 14. rogers-vaughn, caring for souls in a neoliberal age, 2, citing christopher bollas, the shadow of the object: psychoanalysis of the unthought known (new york: columbia university press, 1987), 135–156. 15. see robert d. putnam, bowling alone: the collapse and revival of american community (new york: simon & schuster, 2000); robert n. bellah, et al., habits of the heart: individualism and commitment in american life (berkeley, ca: university of california press, 2008); daniel bell, the cultural contradictions of capitalism, 20th anniversary edition (new york: basic books, 1996); and theda skocpol, diminished democracy: from membership to management in american civic life (norman, ok: university of oklahoma press, 2003). 16. alasdair macintyre after virtue, 3rd ed. (notre dame, in: university of notre dame press, 2007), 1–5; and walter m. miller, a canticle for leibowitz (new york: j.b. lippincott and co., 1959). 17. after virtue, 1. 18. ibid., 2, emphasis added. 19. ibid., 11–12. 20. ibid., 9. 21. ibid., 11–12. 22. ibid., 187. 23. ibid., 1. 24. macintyre, ethics in the conflict of modernity, 59ff. 25. ibid., 38; and aristotle, nicomachean ethics, book vi. 26. ibid., 1–4. 119 rhodes and lysaught 27. ibid., 8. 28. ibid., 38–40. 29. ibid., 26. 30. ibid. 31. ibid., 26–27. 32. ibid., 32. 33. ibid., 77. for macintyre, rights are moral fictions rife with contradictions and insufficiently rational to establish substantive claims. as he argues in after virtue, while rights are presented as universal properties, they in fact emerge within a very specific historical and social context. thus, just as with utility, this theoretical formulation is nothing but an unsuccessful attempt to rescue the “autonomous moral agent from the predicament in which the failure of the enlightenment project of providing him with a secular, rational justification for his moral allegiances had left him” (68). 34. macintyre, ethics in the conflict of modernity, 77–78. 35. macintyre, after virtue, 4. 36. for an in-depth and insightful account of this transformation, see michael perelman, the invention of capitalism: classical political economy and the secret history of primitive accumulation (durham, nc: duke university press, 2000). 37. macintyre, ethics in the conflict of modernity, 79. 38. ibid., 80. 39. ibid., 82. 40. ibid., 82–83. 41. ibid., 82. 42. ibid., 82–83 (emphasis in original). 43. ibid., 83. in his extended discussion of hume in whose justice? which rationality (notre dame, in: university of notre dame press, 1988), macintyre provides a much more extensive analysis of the economic commitments underlying hume’s moral theory. he notes how hume reduces justice to the protection of property and how the moral psychology he provides to ground his accounts of the foundational virtues and vices (pride, humility, love, and hatred) are shaped by possession-based social standing. as macintyre notes: “pleonexia has at last made a social world for itself to be at home in, acquiring for the legacy of alasdair macintyre for a radical pedagogy in virtue 120 itself that esteem that timē once conferred. hume’s values and the values of that english and anglicizing society for which hume speaks represent a striking reversal of what as recently as the latter part of the seventeenth century has been inculcated in scottish universities through the reading of the nicomachean ethics and the politics. and that reversal could not have occurred without the social and economic changes of karl polanyi’s ‘great transformation.’ but it could not have been presented in an intellectually cogent manner without hume’s elaboration of a radically new way of conceiving both the relationship of reason to the passions [reason being now the slave of the passions] and the nature of the passions” (313). 44. hume, of course, was not alone in this. macintyre traces the same patterns in adam smith, finding that these similarities “suggests that their absence [of any conception of economic activity as capable of being cooperatively and intentionally directed toward the achievement of common goods, as aristotle and aquinas understood them] was a matter of the general culture share by hume, smith, and those educated contemporaries in scotland, england, france, and the netherlands who were their readers and who provided the political, mercantile, commercial, and academic leadership of their societies. they shared a way of life which no longer had any place for that conception or that thought. so the sentiments that smith and hume catalogue and describe with such care and wit are in part not sentiments shared by all humankind, but sentiments praised and cultivated by eighteenth-century commercial and mercantile humankind and often enough by their present-day heirs” (ethics in the conflict of modernity, 92). some, however, have argued that smith was not as bad as hume in this regard, maintaining that he, in fact, should be considered the “last of the virtue ethicists.” see, e.g., deirdre mccloskey, “adam smith: the last of the former virtue ethicists,” history of political economy 40.1 (2008): 43– 71; samuel fleischacker, stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, s.v. “adam smith's moral and political philosophy,” https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/smith-moral-political/; and jeffrey p. bishop, m. therese lysaught, and andrew michel, chasing after virtue: neuroscience, economics, and the biopolitics of morality (notre dame, in: university of notre dame press, forthcoming). 45. macintyre, ethics in the conflict of modernity, 84, 85. macintyre makes clear how hume’s position differs from contemporary emotivism in whose justice? which rationality? (300– 121 rhodes and lysaught 307), but insofar as hume has become the forebear of all emotivists, finding this in his philosophy is critically important. more intriguingly, here macintyre deepens his account of hume’s tendency toward concealment and disguise (if not outright duplicity) both with regard to his relationship to religion and as to his identity as a scot. macintyre narrates how hume avowed hostility to religion both in private and in his published writings while “in social life he presented a different front” (282). he also details hume’s strenuous attempts to anglicize his life and identity, even crafting his anonymously published a treatise of human nature to give the impression that its author was english (283–284). 46. macintyre, ethics in the conflict of modernity, 94. 47. ibid., 95. 48. ibid., 97. 49. ibid., 96. 50. ibid., 102–105. 51. macintyre, after virtue, 109. readers who are familiar with this important text will recognize that macintyre makes this statement at the beginning of the central chapter in the book. sans a collective view of the common good and a positive vision of freedom, macintyre asserts there are only two possible ways forward for a society trapped within the “iron cage” of management and bureaucracy that has filled the void left by the absence of these unifying goods: nietzsche or aristotle. 52. see kelvin knight, aristotelian philosophy: ethics and politics from aristotle to macintyre (cambridge, uk: polity press, 2007), 126. initially a member of the communist party and then a son of the new left movement in england following on the heels of vatican ii and the 1968 uprisings, macintyre’s entire project is deeply informed by the works of marx, even as his growing affinity for aquinas has put him more and more at odds with marxists. one can follow this development of his thought in paul blackledge and neil davidson, eds., alasdair macintyre’s engagement with marxism: selected writings 1953–1974 (chicago: haymarket books, 2009). 53. macintyre, ethics in the conflict of modernity, 98. as he further notes: “capitalist investment combined with technological invention to produce industrial revolution after industrial revolution, developing productive capacities and powers and raising standards of living as it did so. but it also, as marx had observed and predicted, destroyed or the legacy of alasdair macintyre for a radical pedagogy in virtue 122 marginalized traditional ways of life, created gross and sometimes grotesque inequalities of income and wealth, lurched through crisis after crisis, creating recurrent mass unemployment, and left those areas and those communities that it was not profitable to develop permanently impoverished and deprived” (100). 54. alasdair macintyre, “freedom and revolution,” in macintyre’s engagement with marxism, 130. 55. macintyre, ethics in the conflict of modernity, 107. 56. macintyre, “freedom and revolution,” 131. 57. macintyre, after virtue, 263. 58. dreher is only the most recent of these. in his book the benedict option: a strategy for christians in a post-christian nation, he presents the image of the benedictine monastery as a place of refuge and tradition in the face of a degenerating society and culture. beyond the thematic connection, however, there is little overlap between dreher’s project and that of macintyre. dreher not only misunderstands the metaphor and the connection between tradition and virtue for macintyre, but even more, he profoundly misreads the context in a way that, maybe intentionally, elides any of the marxist critiques of liberal society so intrinsic to macintyre. set next to macinytre’s ethics in the conflicts of modernity, the difference cannot be missed. while both macintyre and dreher appeal to an image of benedict, the important questions remain: which benedict—the monk of nursia whose created new possibilities for christian community at monte cassino (macintyre), or the reform at cluny which consolidated power via hierarchy and consolidation of the legal code (dreher)? thus, the option dreher delineates really never is an option. in fact, macintyre might say that the idea of this “option” is itself an extension of the capitalist logic and framework that shape so much of society. after all, dreher’s community of retreat may be just another, more intense, lifestyle enclave. more generally, the conservative cooptation of macintyre fails to recognize the revolutionary register for his practical rationality. captured by a culture wars framework that only tangentially touches on the contradictions of capitalism (usually in the form of the hypersexuality that comes with commodification or the excessive materialism associated with conspicuous consumption), readers like dreher utterly fail to grasp the deeper critique of the capitalist 123 rhodes and lysaught state so integral to macintyre’s view, in part because they are simultaneously in thrall to the god of capitalism. 59. knight, aristotelian philosophy, 122. 60. ibid., 3. 61. ibid., 180. 62. macintyre, ethics in the conflict of modernity, 108. 63. for example, for rogers-vaughn, the first step in countering the corrosive effects of neoliberalism is to enable people to find their voice, to tell their story, to tell their narratives. this not only helps them move beyond the isolation imposed by commodified individualism; it also helps to rebuild the fabric, “the living human web,” in which we all are embedded. in other words, effective therapy requires the transformation of pathological sociopolitical structures. when it comes to how to do this, rogers-vaughn comes to the limits of his vision. he argues for “the cultivation and strengthening of collectives” (caring for souls in a neoliberal age, 208), perhaps even “religious collectives” (220), but precisely how to move forward remains undefined. additionally, one of the most prominent appropriations of macintyre’s work has been by the theological ethicist stanley hauerwas. yet, while hauerwas offers a vision of the church as just such an alternative community, he does not discuss how to get such a community of the ground. see his a community of character: toward a constructive christian social ethic (notre dame, in: university of notre dame press, 1981). 64. alasdair macintyre, preface to marxism and christianity, 2nd ed. (london: gerald duckworth & co., 1995), xxvi. 65. through his engagement with marxism, macintyre’s thought matured and he came to realize that, pace marx, advanced capitalism did not lead to the solidarity of the working class but to further fragmentation. hence, party politics with their center of gravity lodged in the state were doomed to failure and, indeed, only served to increase the managerial and bureaucratic tendencies of the capitalist state. see blackledge and davidson, “introduction: the unknown alasdair macintyre,” in alasdair macintyre’s engagement with marxism, xxxviii. 66. richard shaull, foreword to paulo freire, pedagogy of the oppressed, trans. myra bergman ramos, 30th anniversary edition (new york: bloomsbury academic, 2014), 30– the legacy of alasdair macintyre for a radical pedagogy in virtue 124 31. see also james d. kirylo and drick boyd, paulo freire: his faith, spirituality, and theology (boston: sense publishers, 2017), 3–4. 67. freire, pedagogy of the oppressed, 160. 68. ibid., 89. 69. ibid., 88–89. while freire’s framework of radical pedagogy has at times been harnessed to the statist projects of intellectual-activists (some of whom were his conversational partners), his embrace of marxism, like macintyre’s, was not a full embrace of the notion of party and the framework of the state. see gerard huiskamp, “negotiating communities of meaning in theory and practice: rereading pedagogy of the oppressed as direct dialogic encounter,” counterpoints 209 (2002): 73–94. 70. james d. kirylo, “chapter seven: liberation theology and paulo freire,” counterpoints 385 (2011): 172–173. 71. ibid., 178–179. 72. cristóbal madero, s.j., “theological dynamics of paulo freire’s educational theory: an essay to assist catholic educators,” international studies in catholic education 7.2 (2015): 126–127. 73. freire, pedagogy of the oppressed, 106. 74. see ibid., especially chapters 3–4. 75. ibid., 72. 76. romand coles, beyond gated politics: reflections for the possibility of democracy (minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press, 2005), 80. 77. coles, beyond gated politics, 89; and macintyre, after virtue, 206. 78. coles, beyond gated politics, 95. 79. macintyre, god, philosophy, universities: a selective history of the catholic philosophical tradition (lanham, md: rowman and littlefield publishers, 2011), particularly chapter 19. macintyre is keenly aware of the way capitalism has misshaped the contemporary university. and he calls for catholic universities in particular as the descendants of a thicker philosophical tradition, to recover within themselves—through the reorganization of their curricula—a commitment to such an alternative program. increasingly, however, it would seem that catholic universities have only succumbed to the neoliberal models of education described by wendy brown in undoing the demos, 125 rhodes and lysaught specifically chapter 6. further documentation of this trend was offered recently in an article published by david sessions, “how college became a commodity,” chronicle of higher education january 14, 2020. 80. mary ann hinsdale, helen m. lewis, and s. maxine waller, it comes from the people: community development and local theology (philadelphia: temple university press, 1995). 81. hinsdale, et al., it comes from the people, 1. 82. ibid., 333. 83. ibid., 302. 84. while his notion is wider and more inclusive, we draw the language and conceptual development of communities of practice (cop’s) from etienne wenger. for a more thorough discussion, see wenger, communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1998). 85. macintyre, “notes from a moral wilderness,” in macintyre’s engagement with marxism, 65. 86. freire, pedagogy of the oppressed, 86. 87. wenger, communities of practice, 10–11. 88. for more expanded discussion of the activities and sociology of freirean-informed base communities, see daniel h. levine, popular voices in latin american catholicism (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 1992) and johannes p. van vugt, democratic organization for social change: latin american christian base communities and literacy campaigns (new york: bergin & garvey, 1991). 89. freire, pedagogy of the oppressed, 66–67. 90. wenger, communities of practice, 3–4. 91. ibid., 86–87. 92. kirylo, “chapter seven,” 184ff. 93. madero, “theological dynamics of freire,” 122. microsoft word 10 winwright 12.1.docx [expositions 12.1 (2018) 142–161] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 why i shall continue to use and teach just war theory tobias winright saint louis university in their “appeal to the catholic church to re-commit to the centrality of gospel nonviolence,” issued in april 2016, some eighty activists and scholars, whose gathering at the vatican was cosponsored by pax christi international and the pontifical council for justice and peace, bluntly called into question the future of just war theory in catholic social teaching.1 their statement implored catholics to revive and reestablish “gospel nonviolence” as the church’s approach for dealing with conflict, and it urged pope francis to write an encyclical on nonviolence and peacemaking in order to show official, magisterial support for their proposal. as for the future of just war theory, specifically, the declaration exhorted the catholic church “no longer [to] use or teach ‘just war theory.’” why? the participants asserted, “we believe that there is no ‘just war,’” because just war theory has been “used to endorse rather than prevent or limit war,” and because it “undermines the moral imperative to develop tools and capacities for nonviolent transformation of conflict.” in this essay, i, as a catholic “just war” theological ethicist, offer a critical response to the appeal.2 while i acknowledge that just war theory, of course, has been misused historically, i disagree with the appeal’s call for the catholic church to jettison this important framework for the ethics of war and peace. for, as kenneth r. himes, o.f.m., has rightly put it, “announcements of the irrelevancy, demise or uselessness of the just war tradition are commonly made,” but “the number of books published in recent years that take just war thinking seriously and offer thoughtful exposition, commentary and revision of the tradition suggests there remains a large audience of readers who find the wisdom of that politico-moral tradition still worth considering.”3 accordingly, in what follows, i mostly examine some antecedent calls by catholics to reconsider just war theory in order to show what’s not so new, as well as what’s new, about the appeal’s imploration, before i identify a number of problems with the appeal’s critique of just war theory. i then conclude with an autobiographical account of why i will continue to teach just war theory, and i propose “integral peace” as an ethical framework that encompasses not only “active 143 winright nonviolence on the road to just peace” (to use the language of the appeal) but also the moral reasoning traditionally referred to as just war theory.4 not the first to do so: antecedent calls to reconsider just war this is not the first time that just war theory has been called into question by catholics, including over the last century or so, particularly in connection with modern, total warfare. indeed, in 1932, during the period between world wars i and ii, cardinal michael von faulhaber observed: we live in a period of transition; and just as in other questions, so, too, in the question of war and peace, a change of heart will be effected […]. even the teaching of moral theology in regard to war will speak a new language. it will remain true to its old principles, but in regard to the question of the permissibility of war, it will take account of the new facts!5 these words from the archbishop of munich, germany, were quoted several years later by the american benedictine monk, virgil michel, o.s.b., as a springboard for his own treatment of the ethics of war in his book, the christian in the world, published in 1939, a year after his untimely death at the age of 49. michel was especially appalled by the devastation of modern, total warfare. “never before,” he wrote, thinking of the first world war, “was there such destruction by war of lives and families, cities and towns, whole countrysides with all that was in them.”6 and in the wake of that devastating war, michel keenly observed the festering suspicions and accompanying arms races that moved him to warn of “the coming of another world war in our century […] [that] will be much worse in every way than the last one.”7 michel emphatically condemned deliberate attacks against non-combatants by “airbombs, poisonous gases and death-dealing germs.”8 such atrocities led him to ask “a most important question: that of the justice of war today.”9 accordingly, after enumerating the traditional just war criteria, michel scrutinized each one in view of the changed conditions of warfare in modern times. because of “the powerful weapons of destruction that modern science and technic” have produced, he observed that it has become too difficult to avoid killing non-combatants.10 moreover, determining whether or not an act of aggression is unjust no longer was “so clear-cut” since most conflicts actually have “roots and causes going back into why i shall continue to use and teach just war theory 144 history.”11 these concerns caused michel to question the moral legitimacy of any war whatsoever in the modern era. still, michel neither attacked just war theory nor jettisoned it. indeed, it was just war reasoning and principles that led him to make these critical judgments about modern war. still, michel wrote that “even a legitimate war of self-defense must be considered a great evil (even if not a moral evil, or a sin), for it, too, will be fraught with all the horrible consequences that modern warfare entails.”12 to be sure, such a just war, in his view, was much less likely in the early decades of the twentieth century. moreover, michel was ahead of his time when he called upon nations to respect and legally recognize absolute pacifists who adhere to christ’s “counsels of perfection” and thereby oppose all wars.13 at the same time, michel recommended that individual citizens be ever vigilant, carefully investigating via just war principles the moral rightness of a conflict, and consulting with their spiritual advisors for prudent counsel. if there’s any doubt about the moral justification of a particular war, according to michel, the citizen should be able to refuse to take up arms—what is now referred to as selective conscientious objection, although it does not yet have the same legal recognition as does so-called general conscientious objection.14 in the end, michel offered what faulhaber called for: a heartfelt, honest, and stringent application of the just war tradition’s “old principles” in light of the “new facts” of modern, total war. in doing so, though, michel did not discard just war theory. in many respects—not only on war and peace but also on liturgical renewal—michel anticipated significant developments at the second vatican council (1962–1965).15 its final document, gaudium et spes, called upon the entire church to “undertake an evaluation of war with an entirely new attitude” (§80).16 not only does this line echo faulhaber’s words from decades earlier, but, as we shall see, it is also evidence of what the 2016 appeal calls a “different path [that] is unfolding in recent catholic social teaching.” as part of this reevaluation, the council broke new ground and emphasized that all christians should work toward the establishment of peace, which “is not merely the absence of war” (§78). drawing on isaiah 32:7, the council bishops said that peace is “an enterprise of justice,” which is “never attained once and for all, but must be built up ceaselessly.”17 thus, in an unexpected departure from previous official catholic teaching, the council praised those, including laity, “who renounce the use of violence in the vindication of their rights and who resort to methods of defense which are otherwise available to weaker parties too, provided this can be done without injury to the rights and duties of others or of the community 145 winright itself” (§78). moreover, the council did another first by adding that governments should legally recognize conscientious objection. even with these significant steps, however, vatican ii neither abandoned just war thinking nor made nonviolence the norm for all catholics. indeed, the council did not revoke the traditional right of national self-defense: “as long as the danger of war remains and there is no competent and sufficiently powerful authority at the international level, governments cannot be denied the right to legitimate defense once every means of peaceful settlement has been exhausted” (§79). although the council did not explicitly mention “just war,” it invoked the traditional jus ad bellum criteria of legitimate authority, just cause (i.e., legitimate defense), and last resort. aggressive wars that seek to subjugate other nations were forbidden, which would be a violation of the criterion of just cause for war. similarly, the council expressed strong concerns about the development of “scientific weapons” during the cold war arms race that “can inflict massive and indiscriminate destruction far exceeding the bounds of legitimate defense” (§80). modern total warfare, which by its very nature encompasses and indiscriminately harms civilian population centers, was condemned unequivocally by the bishops as a crime against god and humanity. in addition, the council presciently warned about terrorism as a new method of waging such indiscriminate warfare, and it also prohibited soldiers’ blind obedience to unlawful commands. in these latter concerns, and again even though it did not use the names, the council employed the traditional jus in bello criteria of discrimination (i.e., noncombatant immunity) and proportionality. the council’s use of such principles is evidence that the “evaluation of war with an entirely new attitude” does not mean a total rejection of the just war tradition but rather a more serious application of it. as such, the council’s teaching is much like michel’s, as well as in sync with the words he uses from faulhaber, though they are not cited. at the same time, it is noteworthy that the section of gaudium et spes in question is subtitled “the fostering of peace and the promotion of a community of nations,” indicating the council’s emphasis on a just peace, even if it did not use that term either. earlier in 1965, pope paul vi pleaded to the united nations general assembly: “no more war, war never again.”18 accordingly, the council called for the abolition of war through international institutions and law, declaring: “it is our clear duty, then, to strain every muscle as we work for the time when all war can be completely outlawed by international consent” (§82). it went on to call for “the establishment of some universal public authority acknowledged as such by all, and endowed with effective power to safeguard, on the behalf of all, security, regard for justice, and respect for rights” (§82). in other why i shall continue to use and teach just war theory 146 words, the council recognized the need for an international institution—akin to an international police force19—to enforce the law outlawing war in order to protect against unjust threats to human security and human rights. the council left open, however, whether or not this “effective power” was to be unarmed and nonviolent. these developments from vatican ii inspired subsequent catholic teaching, including the u.s. catholic bishops’ 1983 pastoral letter the challenge of peace: god’s promise and our response. there the bishops wrote, “peacemaking is not an optional commitment. it is a requirement of our faith. we are called to be peacemakers, not by some movement of the moment, but by our lord jesus.”20 peacemaking, however, does not entail only absolute pacifism or nonviolence, for the bishops added that it is “the how of defending peace which offers moral options.”21 indeed, on the one hand, the bishops applauded those christians who renounce the use of violent force and instead employ methods of active nonviolent resistance to defend the innocent from aggression. in the words of the bishops, “we believe work to develop nonviolent means of fending off aggression and resolving conflict best reflect the call of jesus both to love and to justice.”22 on the other hand, the bishops, acknowledged that “the fact of aggression, oppression and injustice in our world also serves to legitimate the resort to weapons and armed force” in defense of the innocent.23 ten years later, in the wake of the nonviolent velvet revolution in eastern europe, the u.s. bishops, in the harvest of justice is sown in peace, extended their affirmation of nonviolence from individuals to movements, even as they also expanded the scope of armed defense from national self-defense to humanitarian interventions in cases like rwanda.24 in short, the bishops continued to hold together both nonviolence and just war as ethical approaches for the legitimate defense of the innocent. reflecting on these developments, drew christiansen, s.j., summarizes catholic teaching as having become “more stringent in its application of just war thinking and more accepting of nonviolent alternatives even by the state.”25 and, yet, not all catholics were satisfied by this twofold approach that holds onto the possibility, limited as it has become, of just war. indeed, a half century after michel and just over a quarter century after vatican ii, in 1991, an unsigned editorial, “modern war and christian conscience,” appearing in the jesuit periodical la civiltà cattolica, went further by calling for the abandonment of just war theory because “the theoretical categories and moral judgments that applied to past wars no longer seem applicable to modern warfare.”26 according to the editorial, because modern war has become total, it cannot be conducted according 147 winright to the criteria of the just war tradition, such as distinguishing between combatants and noncombatants. especially with the development of nuclear arms, entire populations have become targets. such weapons, “perfected by scientific inventions,” cannot be subject to restraint; they necessarily lead to escalation and indiscriminate devastation, planting the seeds, moreover, of future wars. for these reasons, the editorial called for the abandonment of the just war tradition.27 at the same time, the editorial’s objections to the atrocities of modern warfare, much like michel’s, were actually made using just war criteria. after all, to say that today’s weapons are “indiscriminate” is to use the jus in bello criterion of discrimination. in addition, the editorial acknowledged later that a justifiable war would be “a war of pure defense against an aggression actually taking place,”28 which is an application of the jus ad bellum criterion of just cause. hence, for the editorial, the possibility of just war is much narrower and limited—but nonetheless still a possibility, even as the editorial asserts that there has been “a development of the christian conscience regarding the absolute immorality of war.”29 seemingly similar to the editorial, cardinal joseph ratzinger, now pope emeritus benedict xvi, when asked in 2003 about whether the u.s.-led war against iraq fits “within the canons of the ‘just war,’” responded: “[w]e must begin asking ourselves whether as things stand, with new weapons that cause destruction that goes well beyond the groups involved in the fight, it is still licit to allow that a ‘just war’ might exist.”30 yet, when he, as pope benedict, in 2007 in his second world day of peace message,31 devoted attention to “certain recent situations of war” (§14), he continued to affirm, on the one hand, that “[i]n christ we can find the ultimate reason for becoming staunch champions of human dignity and courageous builders of peace” (§16) while, on the other hand, he called on “the international community [to] reaffirm international humanitarian law, and apply it to all present-day situations of armed conflict, including those not currently provided for by international law […]” (§16). indeed, he called upon nations to establish “clearer rules” and “norms of conduct” for defending the innocent and limiting “the damage as far as possible,” while concurrently he repeated the refrain that “war always represents a failure for the international community and a grave loss for humanity” (§16). with regard to the “clearer rules” or “norms of conduct” for which he urged, though, what might they look like? here benedict footnoted the section of the catechism (§§2307–2317) that lists “the traditional elements enumerated in what is called the ‘just war’ doctrine” (§2309), which he regarded as offering “strict and precise criteria” (§16, endnote 7). again, we have here what drew christiansen, s.j., describes as a “hybrid why i shall continue to use and teach just war theory 148 approach” or “as a composite of nonviolent and just-war elements” in catholic teaching on war and peace today.32 with pope francis, i think this trajectory is being honed even further.33 the april 2016 gathering at the vatican and its appeal are evidence of this. nevertheless, the appeal’s explicit call for the church to no longer use or teach just war theory, i think, goes too far.34 the appeal and just war theory with this background and context, it is worth noting, first of all, that the two-page appeal’s criticism of just war theory actually presupposes just war principles in order to critique how most, if not all, wars have been initiated and conducted. to be sure, the appeal explicitly mentions “just war” and “just war theory” only four times, with scare quotes bracketing each reference—probably because, as the statement’s signatories confess, “we believe that there is no ‘just war.’” why? because just war theory has “[t]oo often […] been used to endorse rather than prevent or limit war.” in other words, the jus ad bellum criteria for evaluating when going to war is morally justified have not succeeded in saying “no” or preventing war, and the jus in bello criteria for the morally just conduct of war have failed to limit it. but to make these claims, the appeal uses just war reasoning and principles. if these are no longer to be taught or used, how will moral criticisms be made about going to and fighting war? plus, it simply isn’t true that just war theory has been used only to endorse war, failing to prevent or limit it. even if governments might use it as a “smoke screen” to rationalize unjust war, in the months before the invasion of iraq, most christian ethicists and theologians scrupulously criticized, on just war grounds, the u.s.’s plans for preemptive war.35 similar critical analysis continued during the fighting of those wars, as well as after the shooting supposedly stopped.36 likewise, the u.s. catholic bishops issued public statements and letters to government officials, including president bush, that drew on just war criteria in order to raise “moral concerns and questions” about the war in iraq.37 at the time, pope john paul ii and other vatican officials, including italian cardinal pio laghi who was sent by the pope to meet with president bush on march 5, 2003, also expressed serious reservations about whether u.s. military action against iraq would be a just war.38 moreover, when the u.s. ambassador to the vatican invited american catholic michael novak to give a lecture there on why the iraq war would be just, most attendees 149 winright were not persuaded on just war grounds.39 thus, there have indeed been catholic theologians, ethicists, clergy, and even popes who employ just war reasoning seeking to prevent or limit war.40 the appeal also problematically assumes that there is—in theory and in practice—only one “just war” theory. instead, i would use scare quotes for a different reason, namely, that historically and at present there are multiple “just war theories.” even among christians, including catholics, there are more “hawkish” and more “dovish” versions of just war theory.41 as the previous section demonstrates, catholic magisterial teaching—like most catholic theological ethicists today, i would add—is in the “dovish” camp. even if debate has continued about whether nonviolence and just war share a presumption against war and for peace, most just war theorists now understand just war as directed by and aimed at a just peace. for example, during the 1990s and subsequently, many just war theorists have collaborated with pacifists and advocates of nonviolence to contribute to a project on “just peacemaking” practices that can effectively minimize the likelihood of war.42 this development, along with recent just war theorizing about jus post bellum—justice in the wake of war—is counterevidence to the appeal’s assertion that just war “undermines the moral imperative to develop tools and capacities for nonviolent transformation of conflict.”43 therefore, i agree with the appeal’s call for “the catholic church [to] develop and consider shifting to a just peace approach,” but it is important to recognize both that this shift has already been underway and that just war theorists, too, have been contributing to it. further, i wish that the appeal had explored the meaning of shift. when the appeal calls for the church no longer to use or teach just war theory, shift seems to mean switch from.44 instead, i would understand shift as meaning pivoting, analogous to a pivot foot in basketball. the pivot foot could be nonviolence, but the other foot still allows for the possibility of armed force in accordance with just war reasoning and principles, with both feet being used towards the goal of just peace. admittedly, the problem we have is practice—in other words, moral formation, not only with nonviolence but also with just war. as patrick t. mccormick has noted, the actual “default position” of the “vast majority of american catholics and christians” is that they evidently “approach the moral analysis of every call to arms with a strong presumption in favor of war.”45 even just war theorists recognize this to be a serious problem. regrettably, the appeal makes just war adherents their opponents rather than teammates. this is odd, moreover, given that active nonviolent methods must likewise be governed by moral reasoning and criteria. after all, in gaudium et spes, the council qualifies its support of why i shall continue to use and teach just war theory 150 nonviolence: “provided this can be done without injury to the rights and duties of others or of the community itself” (§78). the council’s support is conditional—implying that nonviolent methods sometimes can be harmful and thus morally problematic, even unjustified. as lloyd steffen has observed, “just war thinking is itself an expression of a more basic approach to ethics,” one that includes elements of deontology, consequentialism, and virtue ethics.46 put differently, there is an “ethic that lies behind just war” that can be “applicable to all kinds of ethical issues,” as well as for uses of force other than war.47 indeed, steffen isn’t alone in making such an observation. the influential bioethicist james childress, who has also written groundbreaking analyses of both nonviolent civil disobedience and just war theory, has noted: the “just war doctrine” offers a set of considerations for determining when war is justified, and analogous criteria must be employed in determining when civil disobedience is justified, although perhaps it is more accurate to suggest that civil disobedience is subject to the same general demands of morality as any other action rather than that it is illuminated by just war criteria. however that may be, certainly the appropriate criteria for evaluating civil disobedience coincide to a great extent with traditional just war criteria such as just cause, good motives and intentions, exhaustion of normal procedures for resolving disputes, reasonable prospect for success, due proportion between probable good and bad consequences, and right means.48 this makes sense if we take into consideration reinhold niebuhr’s classic point that it is a mistake to assume “that violence is […] intrinsically evil and nonviolence intrinsically good.”49 both are coercive, and even nonviolent methods can harm others. niebuhr highlights some examples and concludes, “it is impossible to coerce a group without damaging both life and property and without imperiling the interests of the innocent with those of the guilty.”50 the appeal, however, dichotomizes between “creative and active nonviolence” and “all forms of violence,” and between “nonviolent resistance strategies” and “violent ones.” it assumes just war is violent, and it conflates as synonymous “violence, injustice, or war.” at the same time, it recognizes that a “just peace approach” requires “specific criteria, virtues, and practices to guide our actions.” but, won’t these be the same criteria, virtues, and practices that daniel m. bell, jr., has argued ought to frame and 151 winright inform just war?51 for his part, steffen writes, “the ethic that underwrites just war thinking may appear to be focused on the coercive force of violence, but the normative guide against using force applies not only to uses of force that are destructive and violent but to any use of force.”52 he shows how gandhi and martin luther king, jr., both recognized this, and how they used just war reasoning, even if not explicitly or by name, when arguing that nonviolent resistance, which is a form of coercion, must be morally justified in response to an injustice (just cause), resorted to after non-coercive means have failed (i.e., persuasion), and the like. this attention to the deeper ethic behind just war or armed force, and as well active nonviolence or unarmed force, may serve as a helpful springboard for the future of not only just war theory but also active nonviolence. an autobiographical conclusion and a call for “integral peace” as “just peace” why do i care about this so much? a lot of it has to do with my own experience. the appeal shares that the april 2016 gathering was comprised of “lay people, theologians, members of religious congregations, priests, and bishops” from “africa, the americas, asia, europe, the middle east, and oceana,” with many of them practicing “justice and peace” while living “in communities experiencing violence and oppression.” perhaps, then, another reason why the appeal refers to just war as “theory” rather than as an ethic or a tradition is that it assumes just war theorists have been too theoretical, maybe too abstract, and thus not applicable in the real world. this may be the case for some, but not for me. i grew up in a blue collar, working family—farmers and factory workers—and then my mother became a police officer. as a child, i dreamed of becoming a number of careers: priest, politician, lawyer, soldier. raised catholic, i admired saints like francis of assisi and fervently sang “let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.” but i also played “army” with my toy soldiers and with my neighbors and our toy guns. i remember, too, how my grandmother, grandma hug, once told me, “war is bad.” as an undergraduate student, and as a first generation college student in my family, i worked full-time for the local metropolitan sheriff’s department where my mother worked. i was also in army r.o.t.c. and even trained a bit at fort benning in georgia. at the same time, though, i wrestled with the ethics of the use of force. i saw first-hand, as the appeal puts it, “communities experiencing violence and oppression.” not only did i witness unjust use of force (i.e., “violence and oppression”) by some of my fellow officers and by the criminal justice system; i also saw the unjust use of force that people commit against each other. one of my why i shall continue to use and teach just war theory 152 professors had introduced me to catholic just war teaching, which i found helpful for framing when and how the use of force is morally justified with regard to both the military and law enforcement. at the same time, i stumbled across and read some books by the protestant pacifist theologian stanley hauerwas, which i found provocative and appealing.53 thus, when i graduated with my b.a., i resigned from the sheriff’s department and went to duke divinity school to be challenged and become more informed on this question in christian ethics. after that, i went to the university of notre dame, where i studied with, and was graduate assistant for, the mennonite pacifist theologian john howard yoder, who had influenced hauerwas to become a christian pacifist. like hauerwas, yoder challenged me to be, as the subtitle of one of his many books puts it, more honest about just war theory.54 just as yoder took christian just war theory seriously, i took—and continue to take—pacifism and nonviolence seriously. indeed, as a professor for the past two decades now, whenever i teach about pacifism and nonviolence in the classroom and at parishes, students and church members often express their surprise to find out that i am not an absolute pacifist. in addition, i have taken students to northern ireland and to nicaragua to meet and learn from people who have lost loved ones and who have been scarred either by violence inflicted upon them, or by violence that they have inflicted upon others, what we now refer to as “moral injury.”55 at the same time, for a couple of years after i first became i professor, i was also a reserve police officer, teaching ethics for a metropolitan police department while also patrolling part-time for it. i have endured violence, and i have used force. i am not pro-war. i am not pro-violence. i am not pro-militarism. but i am not a pacifist. nor am i a catholic who puts all of his eggs in the nonviolence basket. this side of the coming of god’s kingdom in which justice and peace perfectly embrace, i am a “both/and” catholic who continues to hold that, even as we rightly place more emphasis on nonviolence and “just peace,” we must be able to keep a space—narrow and limited, yes—for armed force. whether we continue to call it “just war theory” or “legitimate defense” or “the responsibility to protect” (r2p) or “just policing,” there needs to be a mode of moral reasoning accompanied by criteria, virtues, and practices for the ethical use of force, armed or not. as ralph potter once put it, when “any use of force” is subjected to moral analysis and evaluation, “some analogue to the just war doctrine emerges.”56 153 winright in short, catholics should avoid the extremes of, on the one hand, “laxism” that might slide into some form of permissive hawkish “realism” and, on the other hand, restrictive dovish “rigorism” that is too absolute. there is traditionally a place for “gradualism” allowing for the laity to “gradually adhere to it.”57 in the meantime, we all ought to work toward a “just peace.” a catholic approach, in other words, might seek to “integrate” these efforts—much as pope francis has called for with an “integral ecology,”58 or pope paul vi did with “integral human development.”59 a “just peace” will be an “integral peace” by integrating just peacemaking and peacebuilding practices, active nonviolence, and just use of unarmed and armed force.60 notes 1. all quotes within this essay’s introductory paragraph come from the two-page “appeal to the catholic church to re-commit to the centrality of gospel nonviolence,” available at pax christi international’s website, http://www.paxchristi.net/sites/default/files/documents/appeal-to-catholic-church-torecommit-to-nonviolence.pdf. 2. elsewhere i have already written two such responses that raise concerns other than the ones i examine in this present essay. see mark j. allman and tobias winright, “protect thy neighbor: why the just-war tradition is still indispensable,” commonweal, june 17, 2016, 7–9; and tobias winright, “just war and imagination are not mutually exclusive,” with drew christiansen, s.j., laurie johnston, and mark j. allman, in “theological roundtable: must just peace and just war be mutually exclusive?” horizons, june 2018, forthcoming. 3. kenneth r. himes, “traditional wisdom,” review of war’s ends: human rights, international order, and the ethics of peace, by james g. murphy, s.j., america, february 9, 2015, https://www.americamagazine.org/issue/culture/traditional-wisdom. 4. it should be noted that just war is not a theory that is statically set in stone; instead, it is a living tradition that is composed of many theories (secular, christian, philosophical, nonwhy i shall continue to use and teach just war theory 154 western, etc.) and that has developed and continues to do so in light of new circumstances, technologies, and insights. 5. quoted in virgil michel, o.s.b., the christian in the world (collegeville, mn: liturgical press, 1939), 184. 6. ibid., 181. i first wrote about michel’s treatment of war in my article, “virgil michel on worship and war,” worship, september 1997, 451–462. 7. michel, the christian in the world, 181. 8. ibid. 9. ibid. 10. ibid., 183. 11. ibid. 12. ibid. the parenthetical clarification is his. 13. ibid., 185. 14. for a recent defense of selective conscientious objection, see bernard g. prusak, “a right not to fight: making the case for selective conscientious objection,” commonweal, december 1, 2017, 13–15, https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/right-not-fight. 15. indeed, michel is often described as being ahead of his time, with many emphases of his liturgical reforms in the earlier decades of this century being implemented twenty-five years after his death in the promulgation of sacrosanctum concilium at vatican ii. on michel’s liturgical legacy, see r. w. franklin and robert l. spaeth, virgil michel: american catholic (collegeville, mn: liturgical press, 1988), 105–120; john r. roach, “the prophetic vision of virgil michel,” in the future of the catholic church in america: major papers of the virgil michel symposium (collegeville, mn: liturgical press, 1991), 5–6,17; godfrey l. diekmann, “is there a distinct american contribution to the liturgical renewal?” worship, december 1971, 578–587; and kenneth r. himes, o.f.m., 155 winright “eucharist and justice: assessing the legacy of virgil michel,” worship, may 1988, 201– 224. 16. gaudium et spes, in the documents of vatican ii, ed. walter m. abbott, s.j. (piscataway, nj: new century publishers, 1966). references to this document will be included parenthetically in the text and cite paragraph rather than page numbers. 17. pope paul vi later rephrased this claim as the title of his 1972 world day of peace message, “if you want peace, work for justice,” january 1, 1972, http://w2.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/messages/peace/documents/hf_pvi_mes_19711208_v-world-day-for-peace.html. 18. quoted in eileen egan, peace be with you: justified warfare or the way of nonviolence (maryknoll, ny: orbis books, 1999), 166. 19. for more on international policing, see tobias winright, “community policing as a paradigm for international order,” in just policing, not war: an alternative approach to world violence, ed. gerald w. schlabach (collegeville, mn: the liturgical press, 2007), 130–152. 20. national conference of catholic bishops, the challenge of peace: god’s promise and our response (washington, d.c.: united states catholic conference, 1983), §333, http://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/human-life-and-dignity/war-and-peace/nuclearweapons/upload/statement-the-challenge-of-peace-1983-05-03.pdf. 21. ibid., §73. 22. ibid., §78. 23. ibid. 24. united states conference of catholic bishops, the harvest of justice is sown in peace (washington, dc: united states conference of catholic bishops, 1993), http://www.usccb.org/beliefs-and-teachings/what-we-believe/catholic-socialteaching/the-harvest-of-justice-is-sown-in-peace.cfm. why i shall continue to use and teach just war theory 156 25. drew christiansen, s.j., “after sept. 11: catholic teaching on peace and war,” origins 32.3 (may 30, 2002): 33–40, at 36. 26. editorial, “coscienza cristiana e guerra moderna,” la civiltà cattolica 142 (1991) 3–16. this is an anonymously written piece that attracted wide attention; an english translation by william shannon, “modern war and christian conscience,” appears in origins 21 (december 19, 1991): 450–455, with the above quote appearing at 451. while possessing no official magisterial authority, such editorials in this jesuit periodical published in rome rarely contradict the pope’s position. see tim mccarthy, “was magazine’s opinion on just war just that?” national catholic reporter, august 16, 1991, 14. 27. “modern war and christian conscience,” 453. 28. ibid., 453–454. 29. ibid., 454. 30. ginni cardinale, “interview with cardinal joseph ratzinger: the catechism in a postchristian world,” 30 days in the church and the world, april 2013, http://www.30giorni.it/articoli_id_775_l3.htm?id=775. 31. pope benedict xvi, “the human person, the heart of peace,” world day of peace message, january 1, 2007; http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/messages/peace/documents/hf_benxvi_mes_20061208_xl-world-day-peace_en.html. subsequent references to this document will be made parenthetically within the text. 32. drew christiansen, s.j., “whither the ‘just war’?” america, march 24, 2003, https://www.americamagazine.org/issue/427/article/whither-just-war. 33. see tobias winright, “the vatican on military intervention in defense of the innocent,” catholic moral theology, august 13, 2014, https://catholicmoraltheology.com/thevatican-on-military-intervention-in-defense-of-the-innocent/. 34. my historical survey here admittedly has omitted attention to other prominent figures in u.s. catholicism, including john a. ryan and john courtney murray, s.j. for a helpful 157 winright account, see todd d. whitmore, “the reception of catholic approaches to peace and war in the united states,” in modern catholic social teaching: commentaries and interpretations, ed. kenneth r. himes, o.f.m. (washington, dc: georgetown university press, 2005), 493–521. 35. scott mclemee, “100 christian ethicists challenge claim that preemptive war on iraq would be morally justified,” the chronicle of higher education, september 23, 2002, http://m.chronicle.com/article/100-christian-ethicists/115370; peter steinfels, “churches and ethicists loudly oppose the proposed war on iraq, but deaf ears are many,” the new york times, september 28, 2002, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9802e5d61638f93ba1575ac0a9649c 8b63. 36. tobias winright, “just cause and preemptive strikes in the war on terrorism: insights from a just-policing perspective,” journal of the society of christian ethics 26/2 (fall/winter 2006): 157–181; mark j. allman and tobias l. winright, after the smoke clears: the just war tradition and post war justice (maryknoll, ny: orbis books, 2010); david e. decosse, “authority, democracy, and the iraq war,” heythrop journal 45 (2004): 227–246; brian v. johnstone, c.ss.r, “pope john paul ii and the war in iraq,” studia moralia 41/2 (december 2003): 309–330. 37. united states conference of catholic bishops, “statement on iraq,” november 13, 2002, http://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/human-life-and-dignity/global-issues/middleeast/iraq/statement-on-iraq-2002-11-13.cfm. subsequent statements reiterated the same questions and concerns. see “statement on iraq” by bishop wilton d. gregory, president of the usccb, february 26, 2003, http://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/human-lifeand-dignity/global-issues/middle-east/iraq/statement-by-bishop-gregory-on-iraq-2003-0226.cfm; “toward a responsible transition in iraq” by bishop thomas g. wenski, chair of the usccb committee on international policy, january 12, 2006, http://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/human-life-and-dignity/global-issues/middleeast/iraq/statement-by-bishop-wenski-toward-a-responsible-transition-in-iraq-2006-0112.cfm. why i shall continue to use and teach just war theory 158 38. frank bruni, “pope voices opposition, his strongest, to iraq war,” new york times, january 14, 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/14/international/europe/14pope.html; gerard o’connell, “when bush put john paul ii’s letter on the side table without opening it,” vatican insider, september 17, 2011, http://www.lastampa.it/2011/09/17/vaticaninsider/eng/world-news/when-bush-put-johnpaul-iis-letter-on-the-side-table-without-opening-ithv7tybqmgntokcoj7our9h/pagina.html. 39. david willey, “catholic theologian says iraq ‘just war,’” bbc news, february 10, 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2747199.stm. 40. a classic example is by john c. ford who was critical of indiscriminate obliteration bombing towards the end of world war ii; see his “the morality of obliteration bombing,” theological studies 5/3 (september 1944): 261–309. indeed, eric marcelo o. genilo notes that ford’s article is considered “the most influential article in the journal’s history.” see eric marcelo o. genilo, john cuthbert ford, s.j.: moral theologian at the end of the manualist era (washington, d.c.: georgetown university press, 2007), 1–2. i have used ford’s analysis as a basis to address cluster munitions; see tobias winright, “predictably horrific: the afterlife of cluster bombs,” commonweal, march 25, 2011, 11–12. for recent applications of just war analysis in connection with syria and iran, see tobias winright, “a just war ‘no’ on attacking syria,” the tablet, august 31, 2013, 4– 5; and tobias winright and patrick j. lynch, s.j., “iran: the challenge to peace,” the tablet, november 3, 2012, 4–5. 41. tobias winright, “hawks and doves: rival versions of just war theory,” christian century, december 12, 2006, 32–35; https://www.christiancentury.org/reviews/200612/hawks-and-doves; and tobias winright, “two rival versions of just war theory and the presumption against harm in policing,” the annual of the society of christian ethics 18 (washington, dc: georgetown university press, 1998), 221–239. i would consider michael novak and george weigel as belonging in the “hawkish” camp of just war theory, as demonstrated in their efforts during the lead-up to the 2003 war in iraq. 159 winright 42. glen stassen, ed., just peacemaking: the new paradigm for the ethics of peace and war, rev. ed. (cleveland, oh: pilgrim press, 2008). for my review of an earlier edition of this book, see christian century, february 26, 2008, 46–50, https://www.christiancentury.org/reviews/2008-02/blessed-are-pacifiststhe-horrors-weblessjust-peacemaking. 43. on jus post bellum, see mark j. allman and tobias l. winright, after the smoke clears: the just war tradition and post war justice (maryknoll, ny: orbis books, 2010); mark j. allman and tobias winright, “when the shooting stops: criteria for a just peace,” christian century, october 5, 2010, 26–29, https://www.christiancentury.org/article/201009/when-shooting-stops. 44. admittedly, the appeal is a consensus document, not a carefully-argued academic article. plus, some participants subsequently have nuanced their respective views regarding the appeal’s remarks about just war. see, for example, gerald w. schlabach, “just war? enough already,” commonweal, june 16, 2017, 11–14, https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/just-war-0; and lisa sowle cahill, “a church for peace? why just war theory isn’t enough,” commonweal, september 9, 2016, 9–11, https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/church-peace. 45. patrick t. mccormick, “violence: religion, terror, war,” theological studies 67/1 (march 2006): 159. 46. lloyd steffen, ethics and experience: moral theory from just war to abortion (lanham, md: rowman & littlefield, 2012), 33. 47. ibid., 15. 48. james f. childress, civil disobedience and political obligation: a study in christian social ethics (new haven, ct: yale university press, 1971), 204. childress’s most wellknown essay on just war is “just-war theories: the bases, interrelations, priorities, and functions of their criteria,” theological studies, 39/3 (1978): 427–445. 49. reinhold niebuhr, moral man and immoral society: a study in ethics and politics (new york: charles scribner’s sons, 1932), 172. why i shall continue to use and teach just war theory 160 50. ibid. 51. daniel m. bell, jr., just war as christian discipleship (grand rapids, mi: brazos press, 2009). 52. steffen, ethics and experience, 52. 53. stanley hauerwas, against the nations: war and survival in a liberal society (minneapolis: winston press, 1985), and should war be eliminated? philosophical and theological reflections (milwaukee: marquette university press, 1984). 54. john howard yoder, when war is unjust: being honest in just-war thinking (maryknoll, ny: orbis books, 1996). 55. tobias winright and e. ann jeschke, “combat and confession: just war and moral injury,” in can war be just in the 21st century? ethicists engage the tradition, eds. tobias winright and laurie johnston (maryknoll, ny: orbis books, 2015), 169–187. 56. ralph potter, war and moral discourse (richmond, va: john knox press, 1969), 49–50. for a more detailed treatment of the ways in which the modes of ethical reasoning for justifying and constraining the use of force in just policing and in just war are similar or analogous, see tobias winright, “the challenge of policing: an analysis in christian social ethics” (ph.d. diss., university of notre dame, 2002), 212–336. my earliest effort to wrestle with this question in print may be found in the first paper i wrote for a class with yoder: tobias winright, “the perpetrator as person: theological reflections on the just war tradition and the use of force by police,” criminal justice ethics 14 (summer/fall 1995): 37–56. 57. james f. keenan, s.j., a history of catholic moral theology in the twentieth century: from confessing sins to liberating consciences (london and new york: continuum, 2010), 147. 58. pope francis, laudato si’, june 18, 2015, §225, http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papafrancesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html. 161 winright 59. pope paul vi, populorum progressio, march 26, 1967, §14, http://w2.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_pvi_enc_26031967_populorum.html. 60. i first suggested this in tobias winright, “your ‘just peace’ reading list,” national catholic reporter, december 21, 2016, https://www.ncronline.org/books/2017/08/yourjust-peace-reading-list, and i reiterated it in tobias winright, “peace on earth, peace with earth: laudato si’ and integral peacebuilding,” in all creation is connected: voices in response to pope francis’s encyclical on ecology, ed. daniel r. dileo (winona, mn: anselm academic, 2017), 195–211. gerard powers, too, has encouraged an “integral catholic peacebuilding” in his “toward an integral catholic peacebuilding,” the journal of social encounters 1/1 (2017): 1–13, http://digitalcommons.csbsju.edu/social_encounters/vol1/iss1/2. i am grateful to powers for bringing to my attention via a private email message pope pius xii’s use of the term “integral peace” n his christmas message of 1942, “the internal order of states and people,” http://www.papalencyclicals.net/pius12/p12ch42.htm. while pius did not understand “integral peace” in the way i am calling for, he did apply it to both a country’s internal national and external international peace. microsoft word 4 palfrey interview.docx [expositions 10.2 (2016) 55–90] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376   interview: simon palfrey, university of oxford john-paul spiro villanova university simon palfrey is professor of english literature and tutorial fellow at brasenose college, oxford. he is the author of several books on shakespeare: late shakespeare: a new world of words (1997), doing shakespeare (2004; revised and extended 2nd edition, 2011), shakespeare in parts (co-authored with tiffany stern, 2007), the connell guide to shakespeare’s romeo and juliet (2012), shakespeare’s possible worlds (2014), poor tom: living king lear (2014), and the “critical fiction” macbeth, macbeth (co-authored with ewan fernie, 2016). he is also the founding editor (with ewan fernie) of shakespeare now!, a series of innovative “minigraphs”published by continuum. though palfrey’s work is deeply informed by an awareness of the historical and dramatic conditions of shakespeare’s plays in performance, he is perhaps the greatest practitioner of intense “close reading” among all current writers on shakespeare. i had the chance to sit down with him in early july 2016 – a week after the brexit vote – in his office at brasenose college. we discussed his life and work, shakespeare studies at oxford, literary criticism as an art form, the nature of shakespeare’s language, and current events. below is a transcript of that conversation. spiro: what brought you to the study of shakespeare? palfrey: the study of shakespeare… the very beginning of this was when i was… i grew up in australia and wanted to get out, and the only way to get out was to get a scholarship to europe, and the scholarship for that was a rhodes scholarship and i had to invent from nothing a research proposal. the first time i went for the scholarship i wanted to do something with yeats, an irish poet, and i didn’t get it. i hadn’t yet finished my degree; it was a bit premature. and the second time i decided i wanted to go for shakespeare. and the reason, the single thing which prompted me, was a moment in the tempest which was when the drunks, trinculo and caliban are there, and trinculo says something like, “they say there’s but five upon this isle: we are three of them; interview: simon palfrey 56 if th’ other two be brained like us, the state totters.” and i just thought it was this incredible, incendiary moment, explosive, and i thought that no one ever pays any attention to that. and i thought, “somehow, there’s a different kind of epitome here. there’s a different moment from which everything radiates and into which everything enters,” and i thought, “i want to explore those kind of energies.” so that was the initial impulse to then begin working on the late plays of shakespeare. so it was that. that was the thing. spiro: was that resonant, personal moment connected to australia? palfrey: i realized… i didn’t know at the time. i never linked it to me. it just interested me, and i had, i suppose, a slightly – not aggressive, but slightly – impatient feeling that the whole critical industry was a little bit decorous and it was pre-empted by all sorts of assumptions which were fundamentally political assumptions, and to do with being on the inside. but it wasn’t until a few years ago that i had to write this thing for a book called shakespeare and i which was part of the shakespeare now! series that i edit, and i very reluctantly agreed to write an essay, and i had nothing to say. i thought i had nothing to say because most of the people who were writing were writing about the influence of shakespeare on their youth or going to the theater with their father, this sort of stuff. and i had zero… i hadn’t even been to a shakespeare play when i was in australia, ever. i didn’t go to one until i was in my early twenties. so i thought i had nothing to say about shakespeare’s relationship to me. i thought it was just purely an interest because i enjoyed the plays and it was separate from my life. and i thought there were all sorts of other stuff that i’m more intimately engaged with personally, to do with music or certain novels or whatever. but, anyway, i began to think about this and began to write about it, and through the act of writing i discovered pretty much what you just said: a kind of very simple identification with these moments which were to do with growing up on the edges, in these sort of liminal… almost off the map, growing up in hobart, in tasmania, which really doesn’t exist for most people, and being sort of perfectly happy, lots of friends, but also fundamentally separate within that environment. and there was something about the combination of that, a kind of separate intellectual, imaginative life, within a place that’s separate, that attracted me to something about the fierce energy in these excluded moments in shakespeare. 57 spiro so that moment in the tempest is one of them. there are other moments, like in cymbeline when guiderius chucks cloten’s heads down the stream. i just thought it was incredible. he’s sending an embassy to his mother! and it was the mix of violence and irreverence that i loved. or the figure of autolycus [in the winter’s tale] who i thought… no one has ever really engaged seriously with autolycus as a genuine, like this kind of vector of all the energies of the play. and i realized, i recognized there was a large degree of autobiography in it. and i actually think that the figure of caliban was the most important for me. i used to think a lot about the scamels.1 you know, the scamels which no one knows about? and they don’t exist. and i just thought that was perfect, this kind of invented crustacean or something. and i just loved the idea of entering those tiny, forgotten or semi-excluded moments or objects and discovering life in them. spiro: going back through your work, i see that it’s always personal. it always has a “this is what i want to do” sort of tone, which some people never take. they just write as if they don’t exist. but that’s present in late shakespeare: “this is what i’m going to do, and this is why i think one should do it.” but then, coming to things like macbeth, macbeth, i think, “this is not the way you’re taught to write about shakespeare in school.” that’s a book which seems saturated with so many of your own preoccupations. it’s not autobiography, but it is a deeply personal work of criticism. it’s staking new ground with criticism, and all the more wonderfully complicated because it’s a collaboration with ewan fernie. is there a manifesto of the personal in your writing? is it really important to have a distinct voice in criticism? palfrey: is it a manifesto of the personal? that’s a complicated question. the answer is complicated because in one sense i could say that it’s almost the opposite, in that… what i’m going to say here has to be sort of strategically or rhetorically ironic, so with that caveat i’m going to say what i’m going to say. so in one sense, i think that what i most want to do is to tap the possibilities in the things that i’m engaging with, and to recover or discover them through acts of imaginative inhabiting. an imaginative inhabiting in which the act of writing is fundamental. it’s not that i think things and then write them out. so one of the reasons why we, ewan fernie and i, were led into, sort of semireluctantly, writing a response to macbeth in the form of a “critical fiction” was that we needed to attain a de-personalized voice, a voice that had something of the… a voice that was able to countenance multiple and often contradictory possibilities. one of the inspirations there was not interview: simon palfrey 58 fiction – it was fiction, but it was also kierkegaard, who was a huge influence on that. i’ve done some critical work on kierkegaard and shakespeare and found his work inspiring. i loved and took seriously his polyonymity; i took seriously that as an avenue to truth, and the way in which you can say things, having this sort of subjunctive approach to actuality. that’s the crucial modality i think for me, and for shakespeare that matter: the subjunctive, the sense of “if,” or “would,” hazlitt’s “would.” he’s a poet of “would.” and so writing fiction allowed us to inhabit points of view, inhabit bodies, inhabit places, minds, situations that were not simply one’s own. in the same way that it’s a collaboration also does that. collaboration allows a third voice which isn’t one’s own and it’s astonishingly liberating because you can countenance fugitive or scandalous or really difficult thoughts and you can take that thought or that possibility to the end. one of our mantras was this idea of going to the end of a thought, which i think criticism almost never does. it euphemizes; it cleans up. so it was that. now that critical mode could also be seen as, clearly could also be understood as, a sort of disguised way or an occluded or a sort of distributed way of being more fully oneself as well. and i think that’s also true, that you can begin to release, and again, discover the multiple staging-posts of one’s own responses to a text like macbeth but also to life. so [we were] getting rid of any professional hats in a way and just saying, “i don’t recognize myself in a specific ‘professional’ sense of a kind of decorum where certain things are simply not said, are not permitted.” but at the same time, the alternative is that, yes, there is a sort of manifesto of the personal. i wouldn’t quite use those terms, but i think it’s partly to do with my background, actually. you grow up fundamentally without any peers. i mean, i don’t mean that… i obviously had football and cricket and had lots of friends and girlfriends. so i was entirely socialized, but my intellectual, imaginative life was private and it was unshared. i had no colleagues, no friends that i had ever shared it with, ever, and so there’s some sense in which you’re always following some kind of private little flame or being led by that. and it’s the same here. so i come to oxford, and, you know, i don’t belong here in any sense. i really don’t belong here. i don’t feel at one with the place. i feel separate. i enjoy the job and i like the students and all that sort of stuff, and i like the place in lots of ways, but i don’t feel, you know, “born to be here.” i’m not that. so this is that separateness. and so i feel zero… i feel no pressure to do what others do. i feel no pressure to please others. i don’t mean that in an arrogant way. i just don’t. but i don’t feel pressure. people 59 spiro don’t pressure me. people never try and tell me what to do. i don’t know why. [laughs] they just don’t. so there’s a constitutional, temperamental independence that i have, but there’s also a critical thing. it’s also to do, as i said before, with trying to do justice to the things that i’m trying to think about. and that, combined with my particular perverse or proud or just whimsical personality, those two things together have led me to do what i’ve done. but it applies also to the stuff that tiffany [stern] and i did, which is very interesting. it was a very different sort of collaboration. and in some ways that it was a strategic collaboration, in that we liked each other, we were friends and thought, “why don’t we just go out and have a few drinks and discuss what might be possible?” without really having any idea, but just knowing that we respected each other and thought, “we’re different, but we’re both kind of young and bright.” that was about it. and we went out and we both shared some ideas and came up with the topic at the end of an evening, basically. but it was strategic in the sense that tiffany had expertise in theater history, i had expertise in kind of reading and thinking about the dramatic moment, and we thought, “that will work.” and so the element of strategy was there, but also there was some really, really interesting way in which you could become someone other, in the act of sharing the act of a sentence, sharing a sentence, which we did, and which is really hard, because tiffany and i are so different in our approach to language, and our sentences do not resemble each other. so we had to come upon a third way of writing, as with ewan, but very differently. so it was a way of writing which was kind of pared of my metaphoricity, and the elements of theory and metaphor which infuse a lot of my work, i kind of pared away, but also it developed more pace and a slightly more leaping quality than tiffany usually has. it made connections and it went beyond the strictly evidentiary. tiffany’s work isn’t just that; she makes big leaps as well, speculative leaps. so her mix of historical speculation with my mix of imaginative, critical, hermeneutic speculation creates something different again. writing something like that collaboratively was in its own way quite as much of a departure from what’s normally done as macbeth, macbeth, in a different way, because of the shared responsibility for every single thought. and people think they can tell who wrote which bit but they’re often wrong. they’re not always wrong, because tiffany wrote most of the history stuff, but i wrote some of it. there are quite a few, even the bits where i don’t know anything, but interview: simon palfrey 60 i wrote it! [laughs] i don’t really mean that, but you know, there are bits where it’s her expertise, but then i troped upon that and developed possibilities, there in the history sections. likewise, not all the interpretive stuff is mine. tiffany’s in there as well. so there’s a personal element to it in the sense of writing something, wanting to think something and make something which hasn’t been done before, and wanting to go beyond comfort zones. one of the things i loved about the [shakespeare in] parts book was just the idea of writing this thing about something that doesn’t exist. it was wonderful… there’s no such thing as a shakespeare part. they don’t exist. we don’t know what any of them were. so there’s this act of imagination, and i really liked that. and i liked the way in which it was at one and the same time a book of exact and scrupulous historicism, but also an act of pure imagination. and that’s what made it liberating, again. spiro: i’d like to think about your relationship to the reader. you have made the act of writing and the act of reading almost impossible to distinguish. when i read your writing, it’s like i’m listening to you read, which then makes my experience very different, because i start reading you with the same level of attentiveness that you’re showing to shakespeare, and then i read shakespeare with the same level of attentiveness you show to him. what do you think of your own reader? do you think about your reader at all? and what do we think about the reader of shakespeare, if we should at all? but let’s start with what you think of your reader. palfrey: there isn’t a single reader in my mind, and i don’t write with the idea of… i don’t have a particular face in my mind’s eye, or something like that, or even a particular type of person. although i have done that: i’ve written the odd thing, a short book on romeo and juliet [the connell guide to shakespeare’s romeo and juliet] which i wrote especially for sixteenand seventeen-year-olds. but i found that all i did there was just wrote directly, really, with just a kind of directness. i didn’t hold back on any of the ideas. but it varies. i think sometimes i simply want to… there’s a silent addressee in my mind that’s the true addressee, and that’s the addressee that’s trying to… that addressee is sort of coterminous with my own questioning. so the implied addressee is that virtualized individual who wants to know what’s happening, or wants to know how this works. 61 spiro i very often feel, in my critical work – and macbeth, macbeth was the same – often there’s this feeling of wanting to reach a destination, and that destination is, as though, the end of a sentence. or the destination is being able to articulate the point, say. but i very often find the most trustworthy, the most reliably true, to my mind, form of writing and thinking is when that movement from the starting point to the end point is remarkably full of byways and divagations and it’s never straight. it involves this kind of parenthetical or sub-clausal thing. it might end up being a long section or it might being quite a short section with lots of bits. when i’m working with a bit of intensity, that’s the reader that i’m working with. it’s a reader who’s almost the same as me, because i don’t always know. i don’t know how i’m going to get there. i think there are, broadly speaking, two ways of writing. one is to do the research and work out the thinking and then, as it were, just articulate that. “i’m going to write out my thesis over the next three months and i’ve done the research.” i just can’t… i simply can’t work that way at all. that’s a form of writing where you’ve got a very clear idea of the reader, and that reader might be an examiner or it might be a bunch of students or whatever, where you’re speaking to them, and it’s a rhetorical act in that way. that’s not how i write. but having said that, for example, in shakespeare’s possible worlds i was very clear there that as much as it had lots of bits like you talk about – you’re listening to a process of reading, it had a lot of bits like that – i was also very keen in that book because it had a lot of heavy material, and philosophical material, i was very keen to communicate. and so lots of that has been tested in lectures to undergraduates, has been derived from examples that i discovered in class, or students discovered, so that when i say in the little preface to that book that the most important interlocutors were these undergraduate students, that was absolutely true. even the most apparently complex ideas were spoken, and i wanted to have this quality. and then, with macbeth, macbeth also, it was very interesting: one of our basic rules was that everything should be written for the spoken voice. and if when you read it to an audience who have never heard it before and it sounds heavy in the mouth or stilted, then it’s wrong. it’s got to be inhabitable by the speaking voice. i try to do the same with my critical writing as well, and a lot of people who know me say that about what i’ve… particularly in the last few years, “it sounded like you talking.” i get that a lot, actually. interview: simon palfrey 62 so there’s different levels of it. you get a sort of inward state of trying to discover the thought or work toward the destination, and then there’s a secondary process of making the thought clearer and editing and creating a bit more space and thinking, “who might actually read this?” so for macbeth, macbeth we had… our ideal reader was something like a restless seventeen-year-old. i think that was our ideal reader, because that’s what we were when we read dostoevsky. we were restless seventeen-year-olds in the middle of nowhere thinking, “this is amazing.” that kind of erotic, metaphysical hunger. thinking, “there’s more to the world. there’s more to life.” that’s our ideal reader. but equally an ideal reader might be… the book has only just come out but we’ve met a couple of, not elderly so much as “elderly” women, like sixtyor seventy-odd-year-old women who love it and who read with this… i tell you what: the best reader for that is the completely unjealous reader. it’s very hard to be an unjealous reader. when you write criticism you know that almost every reader is going to be interested in good ways and bad ways. and it’s very hard… i do this, too. i don’t read criticism always generously. you might read a book and think, “can i learn from this?” or “does it threaten me? does this challenge me in good or bad ways?” you know what i mean? that way in which you might read slightly defensively. i think that’s the bane of the academy is that you don’t.... it’s hard to be genuinely generous, and it’s often people who are not totally invested professionally who are the most generous readers. i think for macbeth, macbeth the ideal reader was the interested but generous reader. we say, “just relax and don’t worry about macbeth. don’t come in here thinking, ‘ah, that’s an allusion to act 3 scene 4.’” spiro: which is of course what i was doing. i had to learn to stop. palfrey: yeah, yeah. because it’s also that. but the way to discover, the truest way to read that book, is just to allow it. and i think criticism is slightly different… no, i think it’s similar in criticism. because at the beginning of doing shakespeare, i think… i haven’t look at in a while, but in the second edition of that, i think i just said, let’s just imagine that we’ve never been here before. let’s imagine that these are completely new. just try to undress yourself of all your presuppositions.2 i think that’s what i try to do when i write. and that’s, again, why shakespeare in parts was so nice, because you can pretend that you’re the first readers of these parts. that’s a beautiful liberation. and i think that’s with students as well, like in school or something, i say, “forget shakespeare or the big authority figure.” 63 spiro so all that implies a particular kind of reader who is open and hungry and wanting to discover things. open, not so much for revelation as – well, maybe to revelation – to discovery or astonishment, or that sort of thing. and maybe also something to do with the experiential nature of… an experiential as opposed to an evidentiary form of criticism as well. i think that’s important, where you’re trying to make the experience of reading the book closer to the experience of reading or experiencing the play. because i think that… i do think that literary criticism – or, say, dramatic criticism, just talking about plays for a minute – i think it’s undervalued, and i think its uniqueness is undervalued. i actually don’t think it is simply a derivative or second-order kind of creation. i think it’s a first-order creation. what i mean by that is that there are ways of realizing meaning and realizing possibility that only criticism can do. so compare it to… say, with shakespeare, the performance of shakespeare is wonderful, can be great, whatever, but there’s no way that a single performance of shakespeare can do what certain forms of criticism can do. there are forms of expressivity and meaning and significance that can only be released, can only be embodied, in an act of criticism, i think. the time you have, the space you have, the ability to return, to draw out, all this sort of stuff. so when i advocate forms of super-close reading, i see this as fundamentally performative, as an alternative form of performance, really. so that again implies a particular kind of reader, or an addressee or an auditor, i prefer these kinds of terms. spiro: an actor has to make choices in the moment that a critic doesn’t. a critic can return to the same moment ten times. palfrey: yeah, an actor has to make choices in the moment, and also any performer is indentured to time and to linearity. the plays… shakespeare is constantly trying to find ways of overcoming that, and scrambling time. so criticism can pay attention to that. and it’s not just about close reading of individual words; it’s about thinking about the whole thing. so i suppose if i had to summarize in terms of literary criticism: the reader is like a really interested witness of a play, but instead of an auditor or spectator in a theater, this person is a sort of auditor-cum-reader-cumwitness-cum-fellow-traveler in a performance, in a critical performance. not a “critical performance” in the sense of showing off, but a critical performance in the sense of trying to bring it to life, trying to animate it. interview: simon palfrey 64 spiro: i was thinking of that, looking back at tiffany stern’s book rehearsal from shakespeare to sheridan. particularly the moments of rehearsal in shakespeare, particularly in a midsummer night’s dream… the rehearsal of a play, if you’ve ever worked on a play, can be so much more interesting than a performance because a rehearsal is exactly what you’re talking about, these moments of trying something on, realizing it, experimenting. when you do make a final choice it should be after you have explored so much. palfrey: i think there’s all sorts of problems with… i think rehearsal today is very different from then, which is one of tiffany’s main points. i think in terms of performance, what shakespeare needs is i think we need to break away almost entirely from the model – we won’t, i don’t think it’s possible, but i think it would be really good – if certain theaters just broke entirely from of the model of the twoor three-act performance with a break in the middle, and began to try it, “so how can we actually embody, animate this scene?” you would absolutely need to do it over and over again. i did that a bit. this also relates to the critical challenge here. i think there’s a problem with propositional thinking, also, in criticism. what i mean by that is that the idea that the act of reading or the act of writing literary criticism is satisfied by moving toward a proposition: so, “this is the case,” or “here is the case,” “here is the case.” it’s not just shakespeare. lots of writers are like this, where there’s a sort of disjunct between the very reason why literature or plays or poems exist, why they exist, and the idea of a critical proposition. if you could – this is just an obvious point, in a way – if you could speak this particular truth in a proposition, you wouldn’t need the thing at all. how can criticism truthfully register that and respect that? seeing criticism as a way of trying to articulate or discover the life in something, or how something works… how can you do it? short of a borgesian repetition of the thing, which doesn’t do it anyway, of course. so macbeth, macbeth is partly an answer to that, or it’s one answer to that. criticism hasn’t really managed very well with macbeth, and there are lots of reasons for that. one is because it has to engage with collateral context, and ignore the… new historicism and all that didn’t really get anywhere with macbeth at all because it had to avoid the existential scandal, the phenomenological difficulty of the play, the experiential challenge of the play. all of this stuff couldn’t be faced because it doesn’t work through cultural analogy or whatever. it doesn’t work. if you try to explain the play through propositions, you end up with counter-propositions, because it’s a play which is 65 spiro built upon chiasmus or paradox as its basic working trope. so it disables criticism, i think, because it’s too smart and too close to the difficulty of living. so one way of getting to that is through the idea of a critical fiction, where you recognize that truth is probational, not propositional. it’s an essay in the sense of montaigne’s version of the essay, where you’re trying things out, you’re testing things, you’re tasting possibilities; everything is necessarily unfinished and incomplete. so the act of criticism can be a concatenation of these unfinished moments, or inadequate moments, which then become an attempt to… a kind of repetition of the play’s own methods or something. where we begin to try to explore the way the play works. and it doesn’t resolve into a series of statements or propositions. then another way of doing that was in my poor tom book where i, in various ways… i had one mini-chapter which just listed, i can’t remember how many, seventy or something statements. lots of them are self-canceling, but they accumulate as propositions about what tom is. but tom is this. he can’t be all these things but, of course, he is all these things. so the idea is that the proposition is at one and the same time spoken but ironized or problematized by the accumulation. or the chapters where i look at the cliff scene and give, whatever, twenty-five ways of blocking it, a single moment, over and over again. the moment of gloucester’s jump: where exactly is edgar or tom at that moment? i was thinking there of how shakespeare writes his scenes with this sort of recursive, recessive, or shuttered way where something happens and then it happens again and again and again in slightly different ways. it’s at one and the same time simultaneous and consecutive or something like that. and thinking of how you can have a moment which is happening over and over and over again, so the fact that it happens over and over and over again which is its reality, that’s the reality of the moment. that’s the reality of the play, isn’t it? they’re premised upon their own forward repetition. that’s the reality of that moment in terms of its trauma, and its existential provocation, in terms of the terror of a son witnessing his father trying to kill himself, and the idea of the impossibility of cognitive shutdown, but the need to. all this stuff. shakespeare is engaging with this all the time. and then the way it’s scripted to allow for these possibilities – the generosity of shakespeare’s scripting but also the challenge – where he’s constantly again and again and again at crucial moments leaving it up to actors or readers or directors, whoever, to make decisions, but know that every decision is revocable or returnable, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. so what does criticism do interview: simon palfrey 66 in the wake of that? you can do a stephen booth-style thing like with the sonnets where you accumulate the so-called ambiguities, that’s one way of doing it, or you can try and sculpt or shape these possibilities into something which is a kind of cooperative but complementary form, and that’s what i’ve been trying to do. does that make sense? spiro: that makes a lot of sense. i think of stephen booth a lot when i read your work, because i often come back to his statement that criticism is “a complex description of a complex object.” and he doesn’t give you problems that he solves for you, but he begins something for you that you can continue. you see what he’s done and you realize one could do this for a long time. i see that as well in your poor tom book. is all this space for life and possibility unique to shakespeare? you have suggested that other authors do this as well. or is this one of the very particularly shakespearean phenomena? palfrey: i think that what i’m calling the “generosity of scripting,” the invitational nature of shakespeare’s scripting, is unique to shakespeare in his time and place. i don’t think anyone else writes like that. i think there are some anticipations of some of it in marlowe, but not many really, because i think marlowe is mainly about the… the meaning is always within the grasp of the charismatic actor in marlowe. the line between actor and character almost disappears, and his main techniques are things like the aside, where everything is given to the actor and given to the audience. so i think that’s very different. i think the combination in shakespeare of ellipses, gaps, opacities, lacunae – within the line, between speeches, in the plot in terms of motive, all this sort of stuff – the combination of that, that sort of lacunal kind of script which requires inference on the part of the listener or the reader, that is mixed with the over-determination of all of the signs in shakespeare. every single metaphor in shakespeare is also a pun, a multiple pun; there is not just lexical but grammatical ambiguity everywhere, all over the place. and then the way in which… the main point of the possible worlds book, the biggest single thing there, was not just shakespeare’s words that are shooting with possibilities but every single instrument he uses is alive, is a kind of language, a kind of organism or something. and he was so much, so absolutely embedded and immersed in the instrumentality of theater, but the conventional notions of the materiality of theater were hopelessly inadequate because they can’t get at the expressive nature of materiality in shakespeare. that’s why i went 67 spiro back to people like herder. so i think all of that is utterly unique to shakespeare. i don’t think any other playwright does that at all. i think this is why shakespeare is writing for the future, always writing for futures, because it requires… i think that something of the same kinds of possibilities, to use that word i was using, is there in other writers in other art forms, so i think for example… i shouldn’t talk about other art forms, though i do think… i’m not an expert at all in music, but it is interesting to see it in someone like beethoven. you listen to that and you just think, “this guy never stops.” i listen to his stuff and i just think, “he just keeps going,” and that reminds me of shakespeare. the way in which you think it’s going to resolve and there it goes again, and it goes again. there’s that sort of thing, and the idea that any kind of moment of appeasement is a temporary thing. rest is… i love leibniz’s stuff about “there is no such thing as stillness, there’s no such thing as silence, there’s no such thing as rest. these are just temporary abatements and the moment actually can’t end.” in literature, the ones that occur to me that have some sort of similarity to shakespeare are people like faulkner, i think. he comes to mind very powerfully. i’ve been reading him quite a lot lately, and i think he, in different ways… in absalom, absalom! or light in august, they’re unbelievably shakespearean, not just in being influenced by shakespeare all over the place, which clearly they are, but in the sleeplessness of faulkner’s prose, the recapitulative energy. but also the other thing which shakespeare has much more than any other playwright – and it’s something that, say, is in there in the faerie queene – is the permeable boundaries between different characters. that mix of allegorical and naturalistic characterization. shakespeare’s not the only one who does that. that element is there in middleton to a lesser, to a different degree, but that’s there in faulkner as well. and the other thing which is really interesting is – one of the things i love about shakespeare is – how you get, how say, a single character… characters don’t simply arrive in shakespeare. you have these graduated arrivals and graduated disappearances and so they can be differently present at different moments. present to themselves, present to others, present to the story, and they can come in and out of focus, whatever, they move at different speeds. it’s a quantumized kind of world, i think, shakespeare’s. i don’t think anyone else does that. so in marlowe, they just selfannounce: “here we are!” in jonson, the same thing, they’re like little fragments of characters, but that fragment is absolutely present and never gets any bigger or any smaller. it’s just what it is. i think that faulkner does that as well. i think he has characters… some characters are always in interview: simon palfrey 68 the shade, like joe christmas in light in august, who’s like this kind of weird silhouette who then suddenly emerges into light in this lurid, horrifying immediacy and then disappears again. he’s there in the kitchen in that terrifying relationship with that woman, that sort of spinster… he goes up to her room and has sex with her and he goes into her kitchen like a cat and he gets milk from a bowl and he licks it. he’s there and there’s this incommensurable relationship between his body and the kitchen; he’s like an ontological invader or something. i think that element, that sense in faulkner that you’ve got to be absolutely alert to the possibility that different creatures are made differently, that not everyone’s made of the same substance, that people can be differently present. i’d love to write about faulkner. i haven’t written a word about faulkner. but i think that is something which is like shakespeare. spiro: as i lay dying is like that as well. when addie finally speaks from beyond death. that clarified the ghost in hamlet for me. palfrey: oh, right. i have to confess that i haven’t ever finished as i lay dying, even though it’s so much shorter and easier! i’m going to read it but that’s just purely accidental. it has to do with having children, you know what i mean? i’ve read the other ones a few times. spiro: that’s also funny because that’s the most narrative-driven of faulkner’s novels. it has a straightforward story. palfrey: yeah, i know, it is. i can see it, really. i’ll read it tonight. i think in english literature, it’s interesting to compare. i’ve been reading the romantics a lot lately, and looking at things like… not just romantic poetry, but their dramas, whether for the stage or not for the stage. and they’re quite interesting to work out why they fail, or whether they fail… like wordsworth’s borderers, which has got a shakespeare quote every second line. it’s very strange. it doesn’t really work as a play, but it’s clearly trying to… it doesn’t work as a play mainly i think because wordsworth has no clue about the instrumental nature of theater. he’s got no understanding of or knowledge of or feeling for the cogs and springs that make a performance. and so everything’s a simulacrum in that play, in that poem. but as a thing which is trying to create a compass of characters and working with all these shadows and repetitions, it’s really interesting. he uses the model of theater to allow for this layered, modular approach to characterization, which he also gets from shakespeare, i think. 69 spiro spiro: does that also apply to shelley’s la cenci? palfrey: that’s more like webster or something, isn’t it? [shelley’s] prometheus unbound or something is more like [milton’s] samson agonistes, but it’s an amazing piece. it’s multi-voiced, it’s like a symphony or something, but it’s a different kind of polyphony than the shakespearean polyphony. i’ve come to think that shakespeare’s complexity or polyphonic nature is to do with a political or ethical vision of life. it’s hard to talk about this without saying… it’s not about apprehending different possibilities or just saying, “shakespeare sees all sides.” i think there’s something different. i’m thinking of shelley, with this very powerful political vision, which is inarguable. you have to recognize that, and then there’s a sort of pitilessness in shelley’s vision where he allows for… he has to countenance certain forms of violence as necessary. he has to have these sort of mystifying forms of… he’s against corruption so he has to mystify certain things because everything is necessary in the end… blake, similarly… i think that there’s that mixture of very overt political arguments about modern love and freedom and so forth, but then also trying to redeem experiences, redeem experience as it is suffered as somehow already sacred. the idea that, just because you’re miserable and powerless and dying or dead doesn’t mean that it’s nothing. the idea of wanting, “i think it’s so great that it [suffering] sometimes leads to these mystical visions.” i don’t think shakespeare does any of that. i think that shakespeare’s fundamental eye is always upon living, the experience of living. and sometimes that living is dying, but dying is form of living, living is a form of dying. i think that he never takes refuge in mystical consolation or metaphysical consolation, ever. there’s no metaphysical consolation in shakespeare, as there is in shelley. metaphysical consolation. i think that means that it’s really important not to reify shakespeare’s forms or it’s important to – it’s important to shakespeare; it’s the most unique thing in shakespeare – it’s important to treat everything as if it’s for real in shakespeare. to take everything literally, to allow its reality, allow its facticity, allow its possibility, everything. as a kind of aspirant for or to life. this is what attracted me to leibniz, his monadology, which is the idea everything, that all of these things, you have things that are possible, things that are impossible, but they all exist. i think in interview: simon palfrey 70 shakespeare, to take this very simple example of shakespeare’s figurative density: what does it mean to write in such a way that you have, say, three or four different possibilities, each of which generates further possibilities in shakespeare? and what do we do with that? the claims, the demands of performance, theater performance or television performance or whatever, the demands of teaching, the demands of writing critical books, all these things are arguing... and the demands of coherence, plot coherence, all demands you to say, “this is the main meaning, and these are kind of ancillary or subsidiary things,” so they become a kind of footnote where the real thing is… they become a footnote if they become anything at all. but always there’s this idea to taxonomize and hierarchicalize shakespeare’s meanings. i don’t think he works… clearly there are certain meanings which generate and which recuperate the plot and work in the plot and all that sort of stuff, and express emotion and all that, but it seems to me that shakespeare is not going to be surprised by… if you find latent meaning in some speech of macbeth or something, if you told shakespeare that, he wouldn’t be surprised by that. he’s sort of hyper-alert to this, almost insanely alert to the whispers in words and the latency and all this sort of stuff, and he sees it, he sees the possibilities. it just seems to me that this is political and ethical, in the basic sense that these are… lives. i see these as lives, really. i don’t mean just individual, i don’t mean lives as in “joe blond’s here.” i mean “life-energies” or something. it’s interesting to think about in shakespeare that question about whether… what grants something existence in a playworld? how do we know something “is” in a world? and does that depend upon its recognition? does that mean that if you don’t recognize something, it doesn’t exist? or is it possible that acts of recognition, that the idea that recognition confers not just identity but recognition confers existence is itself an unethical proposition. and i believe the latter. i think the basic contract shakespeare makes with his auditors is, “i will give you a pleasurable, interesting, moving story with all of these figures and so forth, but at every moment you’re going to realize you’re missing things. at every moment there will be implications that you cannot address in that moment.” nobody else writes like that. nobody else writes in such a way that moment by moment you realize that things are being spoken that you can’t understand. at the same time, at that moment, it’s absolutely clear emotionally. you know exactly… but every moment in shakespeare when that’s happening is very strange. you think about, “why would a popular playwright write in such a way? why can’t he just thin it out a bit? why can’t he write… 71 spiro why does he have to write so figuratively all the time? why does every figure of speech, why does every metaphor, have to invoke types of wordplay which then go off in different directions?” so the basic contract is one of generosity and withholding. the basic contract is one where you’re in the moment, sharing the moment, sharing this world and creating it together with whoever else, with words, with actors, whatever. but at the same time, there’s this other stuff which you’re not sharing, or that if you do start to share, other stuff has to go on without you. so you can sit there pondering, and if you temporalize a play, and think of it in those terms, as soon as you want to rest a bit in this particular line, think about this line, then the rest of the play is gone, it’s moved ahead. and you’re there. “hang on, wait!” it won’t wait. so why would someone with shakespeare’s, as it were, intelligence write like that? he doesn’t write like that not knowing what he’s doing. so he takes that seriously that he can write whatever he wants and what does it mean? it’s not simple logistical things. so he’s writing this way. why? because he wants more performances? because he wants to create an industry of shakespeare scholars? i don’t necessarily disagree with either of those. but he’s certainly writing worlds in which there is more life than can be ever recognized. and so the identification of meaning is not the creator or manipulator or the imprimatur of existing. so i think that becomes a really fundamental… the ontology of life in shakespeare… being is not the same as knowing in shakespeare. there’s being without knowing. again this is another way of saying that there is more to be discovered. but it’s there. i want to argue that it’s there. in that sense it might be something like a leibnizian “plenum,” a world that’s full. but we cannot even begin… scientists know this, that we don’t know enough, we don’t know all that we will know in the future. it’s the same in shakespeare. but i think it’s there. i think it’s an ethical-political point about recognition. that you begin to… the more you listen, the more you realize that there’s suffering, that there’s unacknowledged suffering. there are feelings, there are centers of feeling everywhere. that’s what i think when i listen to shakespeare. it’s just amazing to do… like, just the other day, you get these students, you look at a bit of macbeth, or it could be anything, just the discoveries are just amazing all the time. the students discover stuff or notice things. sometimes they’re not quite keyed in, but very often they are. interview: simon palfrey 72 so i think it’s to do with the real distinctiveness, the real uniqueness of shakespeare, or one of the unique things about shakespeare, is this dispensation in which you get the delivery of life which may be latent or obscured or occluded, turning in these tiny little circles, vibrating in strange, unacknowledged elasticity or something. that’s happening, that’s there. you get the supernova of plot or story riding roughshod over, but within that there’s this little bit of unacknowledged life. shakespeare thematizes this, like in henry v or something where you get this huge story and then it zooms in on single moments where people are trembling before the battle. it’s really important. or poor tom, that’s what poor tom is. poor tom is that tremble. poor tom is that unacknowledged, individuated, particular life. i think this is something that you can biographize. you can turn it into a living, life-size character, or you can see it happening in a cue-space. and a cue-space is alive with the same kind of energy and the same kind of located sense of dyadic possibilities. and i think there’s that feeling for life in all things human and non-human, formal and material, and so forth. i think shakespeare’s kind of a weird… i see shakespeare increasingly as having this very strange kind of tactility, where he just feels the life in everything, like a sensorium or something. i don’t mean in a sentimental way. but i mean that… i remember years ago antony sher said about macbeth… he said he played macbeth as a raw man, as a man without any skin, stripped.3 and that’s fantastic. that’s exactly it. i see shakespeare as a raw man. he feels everything. and he feels the pathos in his own forms as well. i think that’s the message… what i try to get at in the possible worlds book is that. it’s the pathos of form, really, and to try to imagine what it would be like to be a cue, or to be a metaphor, or to be an implication of a polysemic expression which no one gets. and just, “that’s what you are.” and just, listen. you’re sort of there. and what if somebody gets it? there’s a recognition. it’s a very strange thing. that’s why milton is amazing with his… he has incredible control, but there’s always a sense that there’s a correct meaning in milton. it’s sort of self-disciplining. you get one meaning at the end of one line, and then the next line, and then the sentence resolves it into what it should be. i don’t mean this as a stanley fish thing, but there is this sense in which you’re experiencing forms of errancy and then you come upon correctness. he learns a lot from shakespeare but i think he wants to discipline him. he wants to discipline shakespeare. 73 spiro so, yeah, i see it as a form of hyper-realism or something. i don’t know if anyone else writes quite like that. i don’t know. what do you think? spiro: the only poet i’ve read with that level of what you’re describing, that attentiveness to the polysemic, where you know you’re missing things and you have to keep going back, is emily dickinson. she does it in these tiny little units. but you can keep going back and it’s a different poem. palfrey: yeah. i was looking at her yesterday actually, and i think that’s right. but it’s a very different thing in a play, though, isn’t it? you can see it in wallace stevens or somebody, or geoffrey hill who died yesterday. there’s a very different sort of thing. that’s more to do with deciphering and working out. but there’s something very odd and unique about writing something which is designed to be popular, appealing to a popular audience, which is happening in the moment and yet having all of this latency. and then asking about… and then trying to think about that in a way that’s not… it doesn’t seem enough to say, “ah, he’s writing for readers.” that’s not enough. or, “he’s writing for super-clever auditors.” i absolutely think that when he’s writing, he’s anticipating lots of different types of listeners or witnesses. i think that’s the case but, again, that’s not enough. i think that the argument on the basis of the phenomenology of attendance is important, and i think the argument in terms of the anticipated forms of publication or readership is relevant, but it’s not enough. i think there’s a sort of active politics, an active metaphysics in the act of writing like this. spiro: can we go back to your point about shakespeare writing for the future? in doing shakespeare and some of your other works, you – like a lot of other people here at oxford – you think about the first time these words were said. you think about the original performance and production, the actors, the playhouse, the audience, all the original conditions. you get back into the original context. a lot of people are doing this really good work on the intellectual currents of the time, what the audience expected, what was shakespeare’s education, what were the familiar rhetorical forms, so as to get into the minds of the original auditors and actors. you do this, but then you show that shakespeare is for the future. you refer to leibniz and kierkegaard and yourself in your own particular moment. i’m curious about the dialectic of getting back into the original audience’s heads, while also projecting forward to only what we get that they couldn’t get, and then into the future. interview: simon palfrey 74 palfrey: i haven’t tried to think about shakespeare’s audiences. i’m less interested in a way about thinking about the particular or the likely or the probable assumptions or tastes or whatever of shakespeare’s audiences. i don’t really think about that. what i think about are limit-conditions or the basic permissions of the context, of the circumstance or the situation. i think about that. so, for example, i think about the fact of… i think questions of literacy or otherwise are pertinent because i think it’s useful to remind ourselves that drama is a fundamentally oral medium. so that’s interesting in terms of the importance of listening to shakespeare. and that shakespeare’s expectation is the words will be attended to, that you might close your eyes, that you might not be able to see, that you might be five foot tall and you can’t see a bloody thing. and then there’s the forms of word pictures or the distributive ekphrasis of shakespeare’s creation or whatever. so using the basic limit condition as it were, or the basic sociological demographic fact, and then thinking about the kind of writing, the kind of art form that might be answerable to that and generated out of that. or thinking about the whole stuff about original performance and so forth with the parts… it is interesting to think about – using that information technology, as it were – thinking hard about what that might have done, but not so much so as to try to say “this is what burbage or whoever would have thought,” but rather to try to identify the kinds of relation that the actor might have with the words given, or with other actors, the kind of field of possibilities that are being opened up by this basic technology as we can reconstruct it. which goes to say that, and recognizing that, one thing i’ve come to more and more realize is that shakespeare wrote in such a way… i think shakespeare always exceeds any recoverable context we can get. so a couple of examples of that. i spent a lot of time in the past really thinking about the ways in which shakespeare writes for particular actors, but then again and again recognizing that he’s always got the actors in mind but only in such a way that he may be writing beyond the actors. he writes words that the actors can do nothing with other than speak the words. they can’t possibly disentangle the words. they can’t express the words physically. they just have to speak them. he gives actors words that they are unlikely to understand. he gives actors words which have got nothing to do with their character. things like that, that’s one example. and he writes in such a way that when i say he’s writing for the future, one thing that shakespeare is clearly writing is… i gave a bunch of lectures a few weeks ago, public lectures in oxford, about death – relating to the bodleian exhibition, “moments of dying” – and i had a couple, like, two or 75 spiro three actors with me, and we just went through various scenes of dying. mercutio’s dying or desdemona’s dying or whoever’s, and we just talked about it. and with tiny little snapshots like that, we were showing the multiple ways in which this moment might be acted. the multiple ways in which the act of dying or the act of killing might be modulated or orchestrated in relation to the words given, the pauses, and those things. so shakespeare’s always writing in such a way that it demands more than one performance. he’s writing in such a way that no single act-ing, no single performance, can ever be the thing. it’s never… there’s never a secure or completed identity between any act and any action, as it were. there’s always a really interesting sense in which you’re a ghost: you haunt the moment, rather than you’re identical to the moment. i think the more you historicize or try to recover the original context of these plays, the more you realize that they exceed them. they’re written for futures. this equally applies to any available… whether we’re talking about political institutions or political theory, for example, or literary institutions or literary theory, or whatever, there’s no literary theory of the late sixteenth century that can speak to what shakespeare does. the closest i can think of is actually the winter’s tale, which i think theorizes drama with more sophistication than anything else. but it’s hopeless. the same with political theory. there’s no… plays like richard ii or something are so sophisticated in the way they dramatize institutions. so, in other words, my interest in trying to recover the conditions of possibility for shakespeare’s writing leads me into a sense of the absolute necessity of anachronism as a critical tool, as a methodological tool, because the writing itself is always anachronic. i mean by that, not simply “anachronistic,” in the sense that shakespeare gives a clock in cymbeline, that’s interesting enough but that’s not the main thing. but anachronic in the sense that it’s always overlaying multiple times, both in the larger historical sense but also in a single moment of speaking. in the sense that, whatever the idea, it’s so alert to the genealogy of that idea or action, the genealogy in the sense of its past, its present, and its future, that the possible futures of say, something like kingship, or the possible futures of friendship, or whatever, these are all kind of apprehended in the moment. so i think there’s a sort of pure logic in reaching for subsequent theorists or philosophers or whatever in trying to come to terms or trying to find a language for what shakespeare does because the work is always anachronic. the work is never settled in its own historical moment. interview: simon palfrey 76 there are multiple ways you could see this. you could see this in a really basic, almost positivistic way. if shakespeare looks at a thing, and that thing might be an institution like monarchy or family or marriage or justice… he looks at a thing and it kind of turns, and the whole thing, all its facets get revealed. which means that every imaginable lifeline of that thing is… in plays like measure for measure or merchant of venice or something, the plays already anticipate all of the future possibilities for justice or tyranny or anti-semitism or democracy or whatever. if you want to think in those terms, you’ll discover it, because he thinks to the end of the idea. what i’m really saying is that, for me, historicism – trying to pay attention to the conditions of production, put it that way – leads necessarily into the future. i’m not sure i can quite say that only we can get it, as it were. that’s not quite what i mean. i don’t quite mean that shakespeare is writing in such a way that only twenty-first-century audiences can understand what he said. i don’t quite think that because i’ve got no doubt that there are all sorts of things that shakespeare said that we no longer get. that we miss things. it’s more like that walter benjamin thing where he talks in “the origin of german tragic drama,” his version of the origin, his version of the ursprung [“origin”] or whatever it is, is that the origin of something isn’t simply its moment of springing-up, but something which is this… it’s a spring that might be intermittently springing over centuries and not have a power of recognition at different moments. the idea of a spring that keeps springing, and to do with things coming-true irregularly and intermittently. i think part of that might be that the particular insurgency, i’ll say, or the eruptive possibilities of a moment, might disappear. it’s not that all of them will be always co-present, and so right now we get this amazing, orgasmic recognition of all of shakespeare or whoever. i imagine if you… it’s interesting reading about oliver cromwell, the ways in which he was talked about in 1660s – i was just reading about this [laughs] – there’s an incredible feeling for the restoration, the people who applauded the king’s return, they’re painting him as an absolute diabolical, a figure of evil, of satanic majesty, as though there’s been a kind of era-monster that’s gone mad and taken the form of… you can have a feeling, the energy of things, it’s very hard to recover the sense of cromwell as a monster. there’s an interest in subsequent writers to do with... it’s partly just trying to find a language. i was thinking for a while of playing with the idea of a second nature. everyone goes on about shakespeare being the “poet of nature” and so forth and i think about taking that on for real. i 77 spiro don’t know enough science to do this, but there’s the idea that the coordinates in shakespeare, the physics of shakespeare or something, trying to think in those terms, that maybe this idea of shakespeare as the poet of nature is true because his works, however they do it, kind of apprehend the way things actually were in the world, the natural, actually were in nature. spiro: is it that shakespeare does these amazing things with words, or is he showing us the way that words actually work? not that he saw things that we can’t see, but that with his help we can see them. i’m trying to avoid the deifying of him. he seemed to understand things about physics that had yet to be codified, but he was aware of copernican theory. he knew the people who brought it to england, even though he didn’t write about it. i thought about this a lot while reading macbeth, macbeth: is there a qualitative and quantitative difference about shakespeare’s words? or is he just making us more attentive, in an almost childish way, to the all the ways that our words mean things that we don’t think we mean? like when you make an accidental dirty pun. palfrey: it’s such an interesting question because it’s tempting to say that they’re the same thing, but i think that they’re also not. i always think that with shakespeare, more than any other writer, he has this super self-reflexive quality, where the words are commenting upon their own employment all the time. in richard ii, that remarkable scene where richard’s wife is there and there’s all that stuff about pregnancy and so forth and giving birth, and the whole thing seems to be apostrophizing what’s about to happen, as though it has already happened. that’s a model of how shakespeare often works. he incorporates hermeneutic guides to his own work all the time. it’s also to do with the vision, the apprehension that shakespeare always seems to have of the history of words, where they come from. i don’t think shakespeare’s particularly interested in latinate or hebrew or greek – we all know he didn’t know this – etymology in that sense that george herbert often plays with, or milton. but i do think that shakespeare is always attuned to the physical folk-activity which is activated or latent in words. so when othello talks about “there where i have garnered up my heart,” what does he mean by “garnered”? you just have to think… as soon as you begin to think of a granary, the whole thing comes to be true... the idea of seeds in a granary and so on. i think there’s a sense in which shakespeare is constantly mobilizing an available democratized history in his words. when i talk about the best way to read shakespeare is to read him literally, i mean that. you’ve got to read his metaphors literally, and i simply mean interview: simon palfrey 78 you just have to realize them. what is the physical activity? he’s always got that in his mind’s eye, i think. so that gets back to your question about what words are. i think words are active in shakespeare in multiple ways. i don’t think they illustrate or represent an interior reality, but i think they absolutely generate and procreate, this sort of thing. they’re generative also in a recovering way, where they generate action which derives from the past so as to move into the future. what i mean by that is that i don’t think he writes in an abstract way. i don’t think he writes in an approximate way. i think abstraction and approximation are kind of the enemies of shakespeare. so i think that what he does is… he uses language: metaphor, metalepsis, metonym, whatever, the basic categories, the basic shakespearean personifications and so forth, he uses these ways… he wants us to realize the meanings in those words. now that means that he writes in such a way as to be working against the simple approximations of everyday expression. he works against the forms of dead metaphor that shelley goes on about in defense of poetry. what shakespeare is always trying to do is revitalize metaphor so that it’s not so much the commonsensical meaning but the daily, vernacular, emptied-out meaning of words is partly… it’s always going to be active, but it’s never the main purpose, it’s never the main meaning. his attention to, as it were, the physical folketymology of words, that’s the thing you’ve got to attend to, and you recover that, and you dynamize that, and that’s where you get the active. it’s that imagined activity which has futureenergy, and that’s the thing where you get these spools of possibility. i think that’s where it comes from. and that also characterizes… that’s where you get the emotional, expressive, individualizing implications of the language. it comes from that, from the particular speaker, and of course there can be meanings which go above and beyond or beneath the speaker’s own intentions or knowledge. so all the time there’s… getting back to your distinction between doing something strange with words or showing how words actually work, i think it’s both. i think it’s like a holographic thing or something, where you see a word or a phrase... not just individual words: it’s phrases or lines or ends of lines. i have done quite a lot of thinking about the end of a line in shakespeare, and the idea that the end of a line, the space between the end of a line and the beginning of the next line, is always alive in shakespeare. it’s full of these adumbrated possibilities because the phrase pushes out. there might be disappointed possibilities, or there might be 79 spiro consummated possibilities, but you won’t know, quite. they’re always there. so it’s doing something strange with words by a form of realism, “realism” in the sort of medieval sense of the word, the scholastic. there’s a form of realism in shakespeare which insists upon the reality of the word with its own history. not just the word, but its own tendrils, a kind of rhizomatic… each word has these rhizomatic relationships to possibility or to history. and history, of course, is the recoverable thing. i think this is also why conventional models of history are inadequate for shakespeare. conventional historicism is too static, it’s too positivistic. it’s not mercurial enough. it doesn’t move quickly enough. it doesn’t allow for simultaneity. things like one of my favorite bits in the possible worlds book is looking at the opening speech of henry iv part one, looking at the unbelievable traversing of time and space. it has all these false starts, and he’s mucking around so much with cause and effect. there’s all kinds of things going on there. you need to have a sense of recognizing that shakespeare’s apprehension of history is as labile and as portable and as superimposing and so forth as his own forms are. history isn’t a long-distance continuum, or it’s not just a long-distance continuum, and it’s not just a present state of affairs. it involves many different agents and apprehensions and often competing, coterminous in a single mind. and then you’ve got the complexity of a single mind, and then room for other people, for each of them. spiro: you have collaborated with tiffany stern, with emma smith, and with ewan fernie. there are a lot of people at oxford doing good work on shakespeare right now. and i think i can say that that wasn’t always the case. for a time, the major places were berkeley and harvard in the united states, and at times liverpool or sussex or other places in the uk, but there are a lot of people here now. tiffany stern, emma smith, bart van es, colin burrow, jonathan bate, laurie maguire, lorna hutson, and so on. oxford is a good place in which to study shakespeare. i’m curious if you’re self-aware about that, and if there is a current “oxford school” of shakespeare that approaches things a particular way? in the same way that berkeley and other places have had their own specific schools of thought? palfrey: there are clearly overlaps, mini-overlaps. clearly there’s been a big influence… tiffany and i came to oxford before shakespeare in parts was published, but it was on the way, and they knew it was on the way. we got our jobs partly because of that book. there was also this interesting little thing where we got – at the time, back in 2005 it was – where yale invited us. they had one interview: simon palfrey 80 of their searches; they wanted to find the up-and-coming shakespeareans. they invited tiffany and i and lukas erne out there, supposedly to give a lecture that turned out to be a job interview. and i went out there on the weekend after tiffany had been there and i already knew it was a job interview, and on the monday i was going to start my job here, and i said, “look, i’m just not going to come. i can’t… my kids are one and three.” so there was some sense in which this book was interesting. shakespeare in parts had a big influence on bart [van es], not just shakespeare in parts but tiffany’s work, documents of performance [in early modern england]. those influenced bart’s book shakespeare in company. so in that sense… tiffany and bart have been doing an m.st. course together, and tiffany and i did one a few years ago on scenes and plots and stuff. and certainly there’s a way in which even the work that i’ve gone on to do, like say, shakespeare’s possible worlds, one way of seeing that book is it takes all the multiple, all the fragments, seeing each and all of the constituent particulars of shakespeare as having their own expressive life, expressive purpose, and so forth: that’s an extension of the basic shakespeare in parts model. it’s an extension of tiffany’s work on the fragmented play-text. it does it in a very different idiom, and its philosophical and political interests are nothing particularly – tiffany’s not interested in that sort of stuff – but it pays on the promise of some of that, or it takes some of these premises and just explodes them. and also it takes some of the stuff about writing to the plot or writing for the part and thinking about the implications of that. so stuff that tiffany and i… we thought briefly about doing another collaborative book but we just couldn’t bear the thought. it would have been based around this m.st. course we did. so our work remains partly coordinate. i think the critical work remains partly coordinate, although it’s more like a premise that there’s more to be done. the models of thinking had been a bit moribund and we can explode them a bit. i don’t think… with the others [here at oxford], with emma and so forth, we did the exhibition together [“shakespeare’s dead” at the bodleian library, in celebration of the 400th anniversary of shakespeare’s death], because we were good citizens, really. nobody particularly wanted to… it was just “here’s another thing we have to do,” but then it turned out to be good fun. it was good fun and we worked well together, but it was more “let’s get the job done.” the book 81 spiro [shakespeare’s dead (2016)] was written very quickly. and it wasn’t… we weren’t trying to influence others. spiro: the spirit of fun in it wasn’t expected, given the subject matter. i got the sense you were both having a really good time. palfrey: yeah, it was good fun, but that was written… i wrote a bit more than emma. she did a lot of the work on the pictures and stuff. it was written a bit like you’re writing for school. or like doing shakespeare but slightly less intense. it was like that. so there’s not really… there are kind of synergies and friendly helping but it’s not really a deep intellectual partnership with emma or with laurie [maguire], though we’ve begun to talk about doing some stuff. and i don’t think there’s any… for me, anyway, there’s nobody in oxford that i’m working with on the kind of macbeth, macbeth stuff, on the creative stuff. although it’s interesting because i’m doing another project at the moment, the faerie queene project called demons land, which is getting a lot of support within oxford. and that’s been interesting. so tiff’s moving, she’s going to royal holloway [of the university of london]. it’s interesting that we still, in ten years, we keep on finding ourselves in the same… we’re the one who have been hauled up to give reports about… we’ve both got these torch fellowships: she’s doing king lear, on nahum tate’s king lear, and i’m doing this thing on the faerie queene. we both have these fellowships which are about interdisciplinary work and working with other practitioners and so forth. it’s interesting, our work is divergent but coordinate in curious ways. i think it’s more, not direct collaboration with tiff, but there’s a way in which there’s this instinct for doing something a little bit different, and trying to push it a bit. that’s been there. but specifically on the creative, fictional stuff, that’s been very much my own thing within oxford. no one else has been… i think if i have to generalize about oxford, i’d say that the dominant… well, it’s impossible within oxford to get any perspective upon it. one of the things i like about oxford, is that you’re nobody. right, you know what i mean? within oxford, you’re nobody. it’s brilliant. spiro: no. what do you mean? palfrey: what i mean is that it really is a sort of democracy. you’ve got all these different colleges, and everyone’s got their students, and everyone’s got their responsibilities. you don’t have star professors who get out and don’t have to do examining and don’t have to sit on committees. you interview: simon palfrey 82 get no such thing. we could be at other places and be that person, but here, it’s not like that. so i quite like it, but you don’t have any perspective that you don’t feel particularly important or you don’t feel particularly known or anything like that. but i know, i sometimes can get a little bit of perspective upon my colleagues, like the ones you have mentioned, that elsewhere they’re seen as big people, important people within the field, but within oxford it doesn’t really work that way. spiro: tiffany joked that you all just run into each other at the shakespeare association of america conference. palfrey: yeah. “we must get together.” because you’re so busy, and everybody’s got their own responsibilities within their own little world and so on. to the extent that there’s a recognizable oxford thing, i think it would be things like, you’ve got emma’s book on the first folio [the making of shakespeare’s first folio], you’ve got bart’s shakespeare in company, you’ve got shakespeare in parts and tiffany’s documents of performance. that stuff is… where it’s, i suppose, some attempt to move… if there’s a distinctive thing it might be to do with trying to link… i don’t really know, actually! i’m just making it up. there was an interesting way in which i think the shakespeare in parts book was unusual because it connected theater history with original interpretation, and usually it’s one or the other. bart tried to do something similar with shakespeare in company where he tries to bring theater history and interpretation together. but i don’t think anyone else within oxford is doing the kind of work that i’ve been doing with poor tom and possible worlds or macbeth, macbeth. i think it probably has more affinities with work… i don’t know who it’s got affinities with, to be honest. maybe there’s certain people, there’s the odd person in the states or cambridge, in different areas. but not really, it’s more singular than that. ewan fernie is more, for me, the most present collaborator in the sense that his own work is very different. it’s his own thing. there’s the shakespeare now! stuff we’ve done for ten years. and that’s been just an idea to try and shake things up a bit. spiro: and his shame in shakespeare book and your work have an overlap in the interest in the ethical. you both reclaim the practice of taking shakespeare’s characters as real people, that real things happen to them. and think about them in a more humane way as opposed to they’re just within discourses of power or a collection of language. 83 spiro palfrey: yes, the shame book predates my friendship with him. i didn’t even know him then. but yeah, i think so. so it’s interesting. it’s a sort of thing that you’d have to ask… people on the outside might know. because it’s probably not like berkeley. it’s probably not like that. it’s more that there’s that kernel of stuff, but certainly with me, you ask about this idea of singularity or personal stuff, and i think that i don’t want to do the same thing over and over again. you kind of know that some people wish you would. some people would like you to do, “can’t you just do doing shakespeare kind of stuff?” “doing more shakespeare.” or doing others: write a book about non-shakespearean playwrights in the same vein. and that’s attractive, it would be good fun. i’ve half-written a book on the romantics in the same vein, the romantic poets, because it’s good fun. but i think there’s a restlessness where you want to push at stuff, and shakespeare is a good writer to do that with because you know that shakespeare can take it. shakespeare’s always better than anything you can do. although i might do, it would be good to do a non-shakespeareans book. spiro: i’d love to see someone devote more attention to thomas dekker or james shirley. i don’t think anybody has taken them as seriously as they should. palfrey: no. well, you could do it! spiro: my favorite thing about doing shakespeare is the absence of footnotes. you just read closely as if no one has ever done it before. palfrey: [laughs] yeah. that annoyed some people. i remember there was a review of it by somebody, michael taylor wrote something, i can’t remember it exactly, “palfrey disdains the priesthood.”4 that sort of thing. “he only wants elbow room for his own flights of fancy,” or whatever. spiro: that could be a blurb. palfrey: [laughs] yeah. that was good in that book, just writing off the cuff, really. and genuinely off the cuff. and that was also good with shakespeare in parts; we had an absolute permission not to read anything, not to read critics, because we were pretending we were at the origin. so that’s quite nice. interview: simon palfrey 84 spiro: where do you see early modern studies going? what might be promising? you were saying before that there’s still work to be done. do you have a sense of the trajectory of things? what would you like to see more people doing? palfrey: it’s hard to answer that question because there’s different ways of thinking about it. i think there’s a tendency to think that it’s been done and that we all somehow understand shakespeare and milton and all the rest of them. or that the things to be written about have been written and therefore people go into this collateral context and they write about whatever. so milton or shakespeare or whoever else becomes a symptom of some prior or some contemporary discourse, this sort of thing. a lot of the cleverer stuff in shakespeare in the last few years has been written not about the plays themselves but about the history of their publication. the subsequent textual history, really clever stuff by zach lesser and jeremy lopez, these sort of people, who write with this forensic and slightly imaginative way, and theoretically informed, but they’re casting their eyes upon the quirks of editors and readers and so on. but if you get students who say, “i’d like to read a good piece of criticism,” and you mentioned these other dramatists, try and find something decent written about anyone apart from shakespeare. it’s really quite hard. anything that’s real, rather than an introductory book about renaissance dramatists which are often just banal. nothing’s really happening in them. i sort of think the same about milton, actually. the readers, the writers who want to really take it on, they’re few and far between. so i’d like more of that. think of ben jonson, there’s an amazing, fantastic new cambridge edition, but there’s a real paucity of work on jonson. or any of these. there really is. but taking it on in a way that’s not old-fashioned formalism. so i think that to the extent that i’d like to… you can think in a sort of vainglorious way that, that maybe, in five, ten, fifteen, twenty years that people will… your own work takes ages to filter out into a way that might be influential. and it’s quite interesting that books have a history. it’s quite interesting that stuff you wrote ten years ago can still be read. that’s not very long, but it is still being read. and books that feel quite current are actually nearly ten years old. people still think that shakespeare in parts is new. i think the possible worlds book is the most ambitious book i’ve written. i think there’s a theory there of playworlds and the unique ontology and instrumentality 85 spiro blah blah blah of playworlds, which absolutely can be taken far beyond shakespeare. i think there’s stuff there which, if people did take a sort of permission from it... “this book takes a few risks and does a few things curious things on purpose,” and then you think, “one of the things it’s trying to do is model a way of approaching play-texts or playworlds that is not theme-driven and that is not prioritizing words as signs above all other things, that is beginning to recognize that a play is… it is taking seriously that a play is collaborative, formally collaborative, and that each individual bit within a play might have expressive potentiality.” that sort of stuff. so as a hermeneutic model i think it is quite interesting, and you can do it. you’d have to adapt it because it’s craft-specific and it’s author-specific and that sort of stuff. i don’t think anyone’s quite written something like that. and i think it would be quite good to have that, paying fresh attention, technically-informed and imaginative engagement. i don’t think people do that very often. and the thing that struck me in writing that book [shakespeare’s possible worlds] is just how almost nothing has been done. almost nothing has been said. i’ve said nothing. you know what i mean? it’s just a tiny, tiny fraction of what you might, just the tiniest fraction. i always ask students just to take it on. take on this stuff and try and work out why it matters. what’s it for? what’s it doing? not just seeing it as symptomatic of something else. but if literature matters, then why? because it does seem to matter. but the creative stuff is interesting as well, i think, because i think you can ask questions about history and the future and about politics and about the basic existential questions. i think it’s sometimes difficult to explore those questions in, as i’ve already said before, in conventional propositional criticism, because you can end up sounding hectoring or too certain or didactic in unhelpful ways. not that i’ve got anything against polemical writing, but i’m interested in ways of writing – not just writing, but also productions – which seek to recover, discover, re-energize the works of the past in ways that the work you do can, as it were, be animate with those same energies. so the critical work is a kind of imminent criticism, in which the critical points, the engagement with the thing, is discovered in the experience of the reading rather than in anything else. and that’s an example of the kind of thing i’m doing with the fairie queene, actually. the premise of that work, the question is, “what would it mean for a poem to come true?” and the interview: simon palfrey 86 critical, imaginative conceit is that the faerie queene is a seminal text, has been a seminal text in subsequent western history, which has been repeating differentially in all these different places. imperfectly, differentially coming true again and again and again. it’s interesting to think of what would it actually mean for a world or a society or an individual life to be, as it were, true to the faerie queene. what would it actually mean? and that might be utterly terrifying. and to actually try to realize the experiential, existential, political, et cetera implications of writing poetry at all. what would it mean if a society or a world or a life was organized like a poem? in stanzas or rhymes or whatever. to think in those terms, you can begin to get really inside the strangeness of poetry, rather than taking it for granted that we all know what it is or what its implications are. it’s not just about chastity or something. i think there’s some really wonderful criticism of spenser but it can sometimes be trapped in allegory. but then actually to think about what it means to be an allegory, for example. what might that mean? spiro: to think of your own life as being part of an allegory. to know that it is. like when you read dante and you realize, “this is not just an allegory. these people know they’re in an allegory. they understand the universe that way.” the people in dostoevsky may be the same way, and that’s why they seem insane. palfrey: i’m very interested in the idea that the allegory is true. that the deception is “the naturalized idea.” that’s the deception. you’ve got to translate what you’re seeing into the truth. everything here is “fallen,” not in the christian way, but “fallen” in a kind of neoplatonic way or something, where everything in the world is a simulacrum waiting for a translation into its truth. it’s very strange. i’ve been thinking about all that sort of stuff, just imagining spenser in ireland. what did he see? what did he see when he saw the irish catholics? did he just see these reprobates who were lost? they’re so reprobated they don’t even exist. they didn’t even have reality. something like that. one of the things that’s nice to teach, that’s good fun, is to try to… i think the only way to bring literature to life is to try and recover experience, express its particularity, it’s specific it-ness in the world, and i think that requires you to estrange it. you’ve got to estrange. i think it’s partly allowing students to become familiar with it, and feeling confident, entering it, taking it on, but it seems to me you mustn’t euphemize and familiarize and say, “let’s make this relevant” or 87 spiro something. not “relevance” in a way where you’re presupposing what “relevance” might mean. “relevance” is a dead word, it seems to me, rather than some sort of “coming home,” “coming through” strangeness. you read something like clarissa. it’s just an unbelievable novel, just amazing. i can’t make the students read it, you know. you have to take on this strange, almost repellent virtue of clarissa, and not just judge it, but just kind of enter it. i think the path to understanding is through making strange, allowing strange. i want to say about shakespeare, you’ve got to understand it is difficult, that’s not the point. if you don’t think it is, you’re missing something! at the same time, it’s available, and it’s accessible, but it’s also difficult. but yeah, strangeness. so i think critical work which can somehow admit that, enter it, perhaps replicate it, with the idea of wanting to come home experientially or sensuously or something, i think that’s nice. i think that is an answer to… because i think the question of the future, as it were, of early modern studies is also the future of education. i think those are inextricable, those questions, partly. i think the question of what we might do, how do you justify being in a university, working in one, how do you justify writing books? there’s got to be some kind of… it’s just the old justifications for reading and thinking. spiro: those questions don’t go away. it may be more urgent now than it was before. palfrey: no, they don’t. i think it gets more pertinent all the time when you… just the shambles of public life. the last few weeks [i.e., the brexit vote] in britain, it’s just utter shambles. based upon mendacity, gullibility, this blunt and puerile rhetoric holding sway, and just the fear of thinking, the debasement of language. and actually the ones who won the argument, the european argument, were boris johnson and michael gove, who are the two most rhetorically adept people. they’re the ones who can use language. they used it in a deeply dishonest way, but they were effective. but then, more really it’s just an ignorance. it’s just ignorance. and i think that’s a battle that’s not going to be won. in tiny ways you can try to begin to… this is a very unequal society, britain, today. it’s been a curious thing. the whole referendum, it’s the strangest event in my political life, as it were, partly because of things like… i don’t think most of the leaders of the leave campaign… nobody believed they’d win. they all thought somehow, in the end would prevail. i don’t think interview: simon palfrey 88 they [the remain campaign] actually wanted to win, most of them. most of the people who voted for it didn’t believe it would win, and so they felt free to do this sort of protest vote. now the main aim of the negotiations is to try to recover as much as possible of what’s been lost. so there’s this very curious way in which… it was like imagining that it was a signifier without a signified. they’re just saying things. it was a kind of illocution without any possible perlocutionary force. it’s like that. “we can say things which have no consequence.” like a vote has no consequence. spiro: like being a fool. palfrey: right, or just like doing that [makes obscene gesture] to a passing police car. as long as they don’t see you, it makes no difference. but it’s come home, and it’s just terrible, it’s awful! [laughs] and then the only people who have benefited are these disgusting people who now feel they’re licensed in racist abuse. and now you’ve got millions of people who feel unwelcome. it’s just shambolic, dreadful. but at the level of discourse and understanding and the power of rhetoric and the imperative that some people can somehow think. think. it’s more important than ever. i don’t know what to do. it’s just terrible. spiro: do you see the implications of the brexit vote for higher education, here or elsewhere? palfrey: nobody knows. yes, they can’t be good, particularly for the sciences. there’s travel, there’s loads of cooperative… the european research council is huge influence upon grant money. there’s loads of collaborative stuff going on. it’s a calamity, really. it’s just unbelievable. there’s nothing good about it. i don’t think there’s anything good about it. i don’t think they can do anything, the immigration thing. now they’re trying to say, “can we still have free movement?” well, no, you can’t have free movement. it’s not going to happen. but in the light of that, what can anything do… i don’t know what to do. so, the press, for example… you weren’t here during the campaign so you didn’t see it, the papers. the daily mail, the daily express, the sun, the daily telegraph, every single day. they’re the four or five biggest-selling papers in the country. every single day their headline was an antiimmigrant headline. no, that’s not quite true. the daily mail, daily express, every day. daily telegraph every day had some kind of thing about, “rah rah rah boris johnson or michael gove.” so you just had this constant stream of belittling, racist, or not even directly racist… you have one group of people appealing to the home counties, the retired baby boomers and older who just look 89 spiro after themselves, and then the other one appealing to the non-educated or the poorly educated, who were just, “yeah, the reason why my life is fucked is because of remainers, and the remaining fruit-pickers,” or whatever. so you have this deeply debased political discourse, really terrible. and then the leaders of the leave campaign surfing on this wave of bigotry. but then against that, you had the remain campaign was totally hamstrung by the fact that they were fighting for something they were ambiguous about, because of course there are problems. the labour party didn’t exist. corbyn deserves what he’s getting now because he was hopeless. the whole thing was shambolic. it was a lesson in what not to do. obviously this isn’t very relevant to what we’re supposed to be talking about. it is interesting though, because a lot of people are saying this is like a bad dream. it’s like you’ve done something… there was this funny thing about michael gove: john crace in the guardian said he looked like someone who had awoken from a bad trip to see that he had murdered his best friend.5 something like that. it’s got that quality to it. the whole thing, it was like a poem, or it was like a scene from the faerie queene or from kafka or something, where you’ve entered this space, this world of false speaking. the mitigating thing is what’s come home to roost is decades of absolute neglect of the towns, particularly in the north. complete neglect. big cities, manchester and so forth, are okay, but these places like hartlepool and bury, stoke, just kind of nondescript places that no one’s got anything… they have been treated with contempt by everybody. so there’s a lot that needs to be done. the post-industrial world… britain has a service economy and it’s got fantastic arts and stuff, but in terms of what it gives to the world, you’ve just got this industries, the wool industry, or the textile industry, or the coal industry, or mining, all those, shipbuilding, it’s all gone. and then what replaces it? nothing. a few spa shops. notes 1. “i'll bring thee/ to clustering filberts and sometimes i'll get thee/ young scamels from the rock.” the tempest 2.2.170-172. interview: simon palfrey 90 2. “let us imagine that we are entering these plays for the very first time. we have never been here before. we do not know what world we are in, its rules or coordinates, or where we are from moment to moment. we cannot be sure what counts as life. all we can trust is that every last part of this playworld is potentially animate with mind, motion, emotion” (xi). doing shakespeare. 2nd ed. london: bloomsbury, 2011. 3. “he was extraordinary […] like meeting someone who's missing a layer of skin, so that any breeze, any touch, would hurt him. a raw man.” john walsh, “the best of the bad guys.” the independent april 30, 2000. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/ profiles/the-best-of-the-bad-guys-277971.html. accessed september 27, 2016. 4. “palfrey […] scorns the critical priesthood. he doesn’t want anything coming between him and his imagination and the good book (shakespeare’s works).” “shakespeare and the new.” shakespeare survey 59 (2006): 349. 5. “over to you, says puffy-eyed cameron as the brexit vultures circle.” the guardian june 24, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/24/over-to-you-sayspuffy-eyed-cameron-as-brexit-vultures-circle. accessed september 27, 2016. microsoft word schlabach print [expositions 13.2 (2019) 137–151] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376     what it will take: learning from pope francis’s peacebuilding pedagogy gerald w. schlabach university of st. thomas context it is not too soon for those advocating for a shift from a “just war” to a just peace framework within catholic social teaching and practice to anticipate the challenge of “reception”—the need, that is, for a wide consensus of catholics across the church to embrace church teaching in order to authenticate it. pope francis and his advisers in the vatican’s dicastery for promoting integral human development clearly are listening to the call for such a shift. but for the vast and complex faith community that is the global roman catholic church to shift indeed, the church is going to need more than signals from the magisterium—even if those signals take the strongest possible form, an encyclical on gospel nonviolence such as advocates are calling for. while affirming their efforts, francis also has a message to those advocates. so, if they hope to succeed, they—we—must do our share of listening too. in his 2017 world day of peace (wdp) message,1 francis offers the strongest papal mandate yet for catholics to make active nonviolence normative in their response to injustice and violence in the world, but he does more than that. yes, in at least three ways, he joins his voice to the argument that catholic peace activists and thinkers have been making for decades: (1) he draws upon and promotes a growing body of biblical exegesis that rescues the sermon on the mount from easily dismissible idealism; (2) he recounts some of the many under-told histories of nonviolent campaigns and points toward the sociopolitical dynamics that account for their remarkable success; (3) he appeals to a consensus (which has come to include stringent just war thinkers) that recognizes that even putatively “just” wars inevitably contribute to vicious cycles of further violence, which call for creative transforming initiatives to escape. but while catholic proponents of active nonviolence have already been doing all of these things themselves, francis also challenges them with additional points of agenda: (4) he sends a clear signal that any church-wide reception of gospel nonviolence will require more than learning from pope francis’s peacebuilding pedagogy 138 critique of the just war theory, but must positively fill the space that just war theory has historically intended to fill. to do this, (5) they must anticipate the tasks of actually governing, through a “politics for peace.” unless nonviolent activists are prepared—both psychologically and strategically—to help govern on “the day after” a tyrant falls or a regime changes, the politics of nonviolent change will remain unfinished, and reception will falter. anticipating the need for “reception” in his 2017 world day of peace (wdp) message, francis unmistakably demonstrates that he has listened to the appeal for clearer teaching on gospel nonviolence issued at a historic conference co-sponsored by pax christi international and the pontifical council on justice and peace (now folded into the new dicastery) in rome the previous april.2 three years later, the dicastery hosted a follow-up meeting,3 and with some regularity francis continues to highlight not only the preferability but the power of nonviolence.4 all of this only begins to address the challenge of church-wide reception, however. to notice why, let us imagine that the holy father indeed responds further to the april 2016 “appeal to the catholic church to re-commit to the centrality of gospel nonviolence” not only by issuing an encyclical but by moving church teaching away from a “just war” to a just peace framework. what then? what will prevent such an encyclical from going the way of humanae vitae—pope paul vi’s 1968 encyclical on contraception, which broad swaths of the catholic world have not “received” except with controversy or even cynicism? fortunately, pope francis’s wdp message itself charts a path toward church-wide reception. but advisers who assist the holy father in drafting any future encyclical, as well as activists who seek to amplify papal signals, will need to attend closely to the markers he charted there. anyone who reads catholic church documents learns to recognize a certain kind of savvy rhetorical strategy. the vatican’s carefully finessed language may sometimes be frustrating in its nuance but it can also serve to balance considerations and forge consensus in a complex global community. pope francis thus exercises an appropriate vatican savvy as he alludes to the possible use of “just war” criteria in his 2017 wdp message, yet leaves the theory unnamed—for now, neither rejected outright nor defended. 139 schlabach what pope francis names instead is the space that the vatican and catholic moral theology have historically hoped the “just war” theory would fill. section 6 of the wdp message begins this way: peacebuilding through active nonviolence is the natural and necessary complement to the church’s continuing efforts to limit the use of force by the application of moral norms; she does so by her participation in the work of international institutions and through the competent contribution made by so many christians to the drafting of legislation at all levels. now because “just war” theory has long provided the framework for those efforts of the church to “limit the use of force by the application of moral norms” (and indeed has helped build the architecture for international law along the way), this sentence might seem to validate its continued use. and yet the papal restraint that left “just war” theory here unnamed also recalls the unease that once prompted cardinal joseph ratzinger—later pope benedict xvi—to wonder out loud whether “today we should be asking ourselves if it is still licit to admit the very existence of a ‘just war.’”5 after all, francis is not done here. francis joins the arguments of peace activists while the space for church engagement in international diplomacy and public policy work stands in a mutually supportive relationship with active nonviolence according to section 6 of francis’s 2017 wdp message, what the pope does next is breathtaking. he insists that “jesus himself offers a ‘manual’ for this [integrated] strategy of peacemaking in the sermon on the mount.” such a claim points to the need to bring fresh and insightful exegesis together with historical evidence and social scientific analysis in a hermeneutic circle both informed by the biblical text and further illuminating it. biblical exegesis to rescue the sermon on the mount two things were at work in francis’s calling the sermon on the mount a “manual” for strategic peacemaking. first, his use of the word “manual” is a most intriguing word choice. “manualism” had been the neo-scholastic mode of catholic moral deliberation ascendant from the seventeenth learning from pope francis’s peacebuilding pedagogy 140 century until the second vatican council. drawing on st. thomas aquinas’s carefully reasoned reflection on the natural law, the manualist mode sought to rival enlightenment rationalism. whatever its virtues, it tended therefore to de-emphasize biblical sources and thus offered a comfortable home for “just war” casuistry. to now, instead, call the sermon on the mount (matthew 5–7) the church’s manual for peacemaking hardly seems to have been an accident. in any case, a second signal is unmistakable: after reflecting briefly on the beatitudes as a template for the virtues that any authentic peacemaker will embody, pope francis describes the sermon on the mount and the beatitudes as “also a program and a challenge for political and religious leaders, the heads of international institutions, and business and media executives” to apply amid “the exercise of their respective responsibilities.” the manual that the sermon on the mount provides, in other words, is not just for the personal lives of particularly saintly christians. it applies to the public realm.6 it elicits, as the wdp title has already announced, a “style of politics for peace.” here, though, is where we must especially anticipate the challenge of reception. active nonviolence is not simply protest and certainly not passivity, as pope francis himself notes.7 yet the unformed, uninformed assumption of many is going to be that practicing the sermon on the mount in public affairs is a lofty but idealistic notion and no more. to rescue the sermon from an idealism that eventually leads to its dismissal as politically irrelevant,8 more than assertion or biblical proof-texting is necessary. just as the phrase “to be or not to be” has circulated in popular culture among many people who know it comes from shakespeare but have never seen hamlet, jesus’s injunctions to “turn the other cheek” or “go the second mile” have taken on a life of their own. many people— certainly in the culture at large but even among devout catholics—may vaguely associate such phrases with jesus but have never studied the sermon on the mount carefully. serious biblical exegesis, however, recognizes these teachings as paradigmatic models for a sophisticated practice of active nonviolence that counters injustice with the creativity needed to transform social processes. following the exegesis of the sermon on the mount by new testament scholar walter wink9 and christian ethicist glen stassen,10 another key to reception, therefore, will be to explain the social dynamics of active nonviolence by which courageously “turning the other 141 schlabach cheek” or otherwise loving enemies can expose injustice and turn the tide of bystander complacency into support. telling the under-told stories pope francis certainly knows the power of active nonviolence. in section 3 of his 2017 wdp message, he characterizes jesus’s message as a “radically positive approach,” not just a negative refusal of violence. he then goes on to pair jesus’s teaching about love of enemies with his stopping the unjust accusers who were about to stone a woman caught in adultery—thus underscoring that nonviolent peacemaking is inseparable from work for justice. he also reiterates his predecessor pope benedict’s characterization of enemy love as “the nucleus of the ‘christian revolution’” and the “magna carta of christian nonviolence.”11 here then is where francis collates biblical exegesis with historical examples. in section 4 he outlines examples of how the “decisive and consistent practice of nonviolence has produced effective results” in campaigns by the hindu mahatma gandhi, the muslim khan abdul ghaffar khan, and the christian dr. martin luther king, jr. to be sure, gandhi and king are iconic, sometimes to the point that hagiographic veneration disempowers their legacies. fortunately, francis continued with further examples of otherwise ordinary people wielding the power of active nonviolence: women in particular are often leaders of nonviolence, as for example, was leymah gbowee and the thousands of liberian women, who organized pray-ins and nonviolent protest that resulted in high-level peace talks to end the second civil war in liberia. nor can we forget the eventful decade that ended with the fall of communist regimes in europe. the christian communities made their own contribution by their insistent prayer and courageous action. even while citing “the ministry and teaching of saint [pope] john paul ii” in these events, francis follows the lead that his predecessor himself took when he wrote his 1991 encyclical centesiumus annus. john paul had given credit not so much to his own geopolitical leadership but—as francis now quotes him—to “the non-violent commitment of people [at the grassroots] learning from pope francis’s peacebuilding pedagogy 142 who, while always refusing to yield to the force of power, succeeded time after time in finding effective ways of bearing witness to the truth […] using only the weapons of truth and justice.”12 escaping vicious cycles through transforming initiative amplifying pope francis’s message by tirelessly recounting these and many more such histories is obviously one key way to invite a wide reception of gospel nonviolence. but for a truly wide reception by which jaded opinion-leaders, or parishioners anxious about their nation’s security, take a second look at pope francis’s wdp message now—and hopefully an encyclical later—we must turn historical anecdote into global narrative by integrating biblical exegesis with social analysis. again, though, the holy father charts a path in his wdp message, though this time perhaps more by papal intuition rather than explicitly. at various points throughout the document pope francis argues for active nonviolence by citing cycles of violence and the need to escape them. the “horrifying world war [being] fought piecemeal” in the twenty-first century has resulted from violence upon violence, he notes. the pope certainly does not deny that war may sometimes respond to injustice. yet, he asks, “where does this lead? does violence achieve any goal of lasting value?” no, it leads “to retaliation and a cycle of deadly conflict” rather than any “cure for our broken world” (§2). that is why “the force of arms is deceptive” (§4). gospel nonviolence is the truly revolutionary alternative, therefore, because “responding to evil with good” rather than “succumbing to evil” by responding in kind means “thereby breaking the chain of injustice” (§3). pursuing this line of reasoning should widen reception of the magisterium’s growing body of teaching on gospel nonviolence because the diagnosis of vicious cycles is something that practitioners of “just war” theory have already agreed upon. no one these days expects any war to end all wars, after all. even anxious security-minded parishioners who are not well-versed in the theory, but expect the church to allow wars in their name one way or another, will be more likely to give gospel nonviolence a hearing if the argument is not about whether the causes that are dear to their heart are ever just. politicians often whip up support for dubious causes, of course, and one tact for peacebuilders is to deconstruct their jingoistic claims. but those who argue that war can never be just are unwise to imply that deeply-held causes are never just. instead we will be wise to frame our arguments within a diagnosis of vicious cycles: in war, even 143 schlabach winners lose. wars that are supposedly just still plant the seeds of new resentments, and thus new rounds of mutually reinforcing injustice. building on a wider consensus and acknowledging the legitimate concerns of those whom one is seeking to persuade are not simply smart rhetorical strategies; they were part of jesus’s own pedagogy in the sermon on the mount itself. as the late christian ethicist glen stassen, a leading advocate of “just peacemaking” theory, demonstrated, jesus’s teachings in most of matthew 5–7 come as a series of fourteen triads that reveal jesus’s very approach to moral reasoning. jesus’s consistent pattern was to first name the people’s “traditional righteousness” or morality, then demonstrate its inability to escape some vicious cycle, then offer a “transforming initiative.”13 his focus was not on dismantling traditional righteousness per se; a standard teaching such as “eye for an eye” was commendable so far as it went—in this case by limiting immediate violence. but traditional righteousness did not go far enough, as he made clear by diagnosing its inherent flaw in the vicious cycles that it failed to end. instead, jesus’s focus was thus on “transforming initiatives” such as those paradigmatic acts of active nonviolence that resist evil but not in kind. still, that did not mean he fully disparaged the transitional contribution of traditional righteousness nor the willingness of those schooled in it to begin diagnosing its limited ability to escape vicious cycles.14 francis’s challenge to catholic peace activists the space that the church has long hoped “just war” theory would fill does need filling. educating more and more catholics about the demonstrable power of active nonviolence and training them in its practice will certainly be a major part of the work toward reception. yet one reason that the “just war” theory has long seemed necessary is that it offers a form of discourse, a lingua franca across worldviews and ethical frameworks. even those who doubt the justice of any war have sometimes needed to use it as a second language in order to counter calls for specific wars. thus have they too engaged in those “continuing efforts to limit the use of force by the application of moral norms” that francis identified in his wdp message, as they participate in “the work of international institutions” or contribute “to the drafting of legislation at all levels.”15 ultimately, though, the need that requires filling is not merely for a common language. it is the need to govern. learning from pope francis’s peacebuilding pedagogy 144 for what if we actually win? as i have observed or participated in various social movements over four decades—reformist and revolutionary, violent and nonviolent, christian and secular— neglect for this question has often been the great lacuna that has tripped them up. working from the margins and struggling against hopelessness, they often have reason to be cynical about established institutions. an oppositional or “prophetic” stance may then become so much a part of their identity that it serves as the only psychological home in which they feel comfortable, and the “compromises” they might have to make in order to actually run things all feel like selling out. absorbed in the urgent tasks of resisting unjust powers-that-be, activists may feel as though the task of specifying how they would actually exercise power in order to enact the changes they are calling is a luxury. but it never is. however compelling may be the record of nonviolent campaigns in resisting injustice and bringing down tyrants, after all, and however superior their record of preparing for and enabling democratic governance in comparison to that of violent insurrection,16 the record of nonviolent governance is spottier. thanks to the development of gandhian nonviolence in the twentieth century, peace activists rightly point to far more victories overthrowing tyranny than either standard history books admit or popular imagination recognizes. but having won independence gandhi’s own india became one of the first nation-states in what was then called the third world to develop nuclear weaponry. why? to “overthrow tyranny” is merely a double negative. while a double negative may equal a positive in pure mathematics, in social affairs a nonviolent revolution overthrowing marcos in the philippines or even the soviet empire in 1989 does not yet offer a positive model of nonviolent governance. we cannot expect to replace the just war tradition in the roman catholic church unless and until we unreservedly embrace the challenge of governing on “the day after.” having been formed as a mennonite in one of the so-called historic peace churches (hpcs), then entered into full communion with the catholic church in 2004 and been a leader in mennonite-catholic ecumenical dialogue, i sometimes hear my fellow catholic pacifists expressing a kind of peace-church envy. but “beware what you ask for—you might get it.” the experience of hpcs is instructive, particularly as they have moved from more sectarian and apolitical social postures to an engaged social ethic embracing active nonviolence in contrast to what they formerly called “biblical nonresistance.”17 the centuries-long pattern of church 145 schlabach alliances with princes, kings, and nation-states that peace-church thinkers term “constantinianism” is suspect if not anathema to many of them. historically and even today— perhaps especially among peace-and-justice activists—hpc members who work within the state have sometimes been suspect. yet the more that social-justice advocacy succeeds, the more it invites a counter-invitation to participate first in policymaking and then in governance. and in every human community i know, governing requires some kind of enforcement, coercion, policing, even if it is nonlethal policing. one option for avoiding the dilemma has been principled christian anarchism, which seems to offer a way to impact the larger society perpetually from the margins, through perpetual prophetic critique and small-scale local alternative patterns of life. but this only defers rather than avoids the challenge. for, logically, one must either abandon all hope that anyone else will actually listen or else must anticipate the question, “so will you help us do what you’ve been calling us to do?” not all christian pacifists have avoided this challenge. for about five years in the early 2000s i served on an advisory committee on peace issues for the international program of mennonite central committee (mcc), the relief, development, and peacebuilding collaborative arm of various mennonite churches. during that time the committee commissioned a three-year special project. prompting it in part was the insecurity many felt following the events of september 11, 2001. but the more important prompts were questions that mcc workers and partners around the world had been facing for years in conflict zones and failed states where “order” and “institutionality” and “security” were not necessarily code words for oppressive regimes. rather, they named dreams of functioning civil society or even shalom. the goal, then, was to articulate within the framework of mennonite thought and pacifist ethics a positive theology of order and governance that might even take back that word “security” from militarists.18 admittedly, what was most controversial about the project among mennonites was its willingness to consider (even if not yet endorse) a concept i had independently begun to interject into ecumenical conversations between mennonites and catholics—that of “just policing.”19 initially as a resource for the historic international dialogue between mennonite world conference and the pontifical council for promoting church unity from 1998–2003, i had sought to narrow the gap between just war and pacifist traditions by arguing that learning from pope francis’s peacebuilding pedagogy 146 if the best intentions of the just war theorists were operational, they could only allow for just policing, not warfare at all. if christian pacifists can in any way support, participate, or at least not object to operations with recourse to limited but potentially lethal force, that will only be true for just policing. just policing— and just just policing.20 my goal on the mennonite side was not to convince them to abandon their historic pacifism, but to press them and other pacifists to fill a major gap in their theory and practice: either define the very limited circumstances in which violence might be justified in demilitarized policing, or better yet, recover and design strategic models for nonlethal and nonviolent policing. none of this need be so controversial among catholics, however—even among catholic pacifists. however much we ought to repent of all the dubious ways in which catholics from prelate to pew have misaligned their allegiances to emperors, princes, and nation-states down through the centuries, we need not have the same allergy toward governance that some hpcs have had. as pope francis has affirmed on various occasions, “politics, though often denigrated, remains a lofty vocation and one of the highest forms of charity, inasmuch as it seeks the common good.”21 historically, just war thinking and “constantinianism” have been the downside to a catholic upside—the embrace of governance and protection of the vulnerable as responses to the legitimate concern for security that seeks to allow everyone “under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid” (micah 4:4). catholic peace activists will only complete the transformation of catholic peace theology if we embrace rather than dismiss that challenge. yes, of course, we must highlight the histories of those double-negative social movements that have demonstrated the power of active nonviolence to resist oppression and overthrow tyranny. continuing to develop pilot projects of the sort that christian peacemakers, nonviolent peaceforce, peace brigades international, operation dove, and other organizations are doing for the protection of vulnerable populations, in hopes that they will eventually be scaled up by governments as institutions for civilian-based defense and nonviolent humanitarian intervention, will be another especially crucial part. but we must do still more. whether our hope is to provide alternatives to every form of violence, or render the exceptional use of lethal 147 schlabach violence truly exceptional by limiting it to just policing according to the rule of law, we must develop active nonviolence as a positive strategy not just for resisting nonviolently but for governing with less and less recourse to violence. conclusion pope francis sees a “natural and necessary complement” between “peacebuilding through active nonviolence” and this continuing engagement. many catholic peacebuilders see “just war” theory as a distraction if not an obstacle to both. if we follow jesus’s lead, though, we will not need to wait until all catholic theologians, bishops, or other opinion-leaders are convinced to abandon their “traditional righteousness” and agree that there is no “just war.” church-wide reception of gospel nonviolence and just peace can take root simply by moving on, as jesus’s did, to those second and third points—the diagnosis of vicious cycles as proper complement to the social power and moral imperative of transforming initiatives. catholic peacebuilders can be grateful that the vatican is listening, but we should also learn from pope francis’s pedagogically savvy rhetorical strategy. if we expect the pope to take down the “just war” theory at one fell swoop in an eventual encyclical, we may be inviting disappointment. everything in church history and the development of doctrine suggests that the magisterium is loath to say that great christian authorities of the past were outright wrong. rather, popes and church councils look for other clever ways to just move on. my prediction is that the “just war” theory will be damned with faint praise or die a death of a thousand cuts. our best and quite realistic hope is the “just war” will continue going the way of capital punishment, which pope john paul ii did not quite reject in theory but did reject for modern societies.22 reception has obviously not been unanimous—how could anything be unanimous in the world’s largest religious body?—but it has been significant enough to move the public-policy needle in many countries. pope francis’s 2017 world day of peace message, and section 6 in particular, is exactly what that process is going to look like. the job of catholic peacebuilders is to amplify the signals— but first to be sure they are attending to all of those signals. learning from pope francis’s peacebuilding pedagogy 148 notes 1. pope francis, “nonviolence: a style of politics for peace,” the holy see, january 1, 2017, https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/peace/documents/papafrancesco_20161208_messaggio-l-giornata-mondiale-pace-2017.html. 2. “an appeal to the catholic church to re-commit to the centrality of gospel nonviolence,” catholic nonviolence initiative, 2016, https://nonviolencejustpeace.net/final-statement-an-appeal-to-the-catholic-church-to-recommit-to-the-centrality-of-gospel-nonviolence/. 3. “‘path of nonviolence’ workshop concludes in vatican,” vatican news april 6 2019, https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican-city/news/2019–04/nonviolence-dicasteryintegral-human-development.html; joshua j. mcelwee, “vatican’s second conference on nonviolence renews hope for encyclical,” national catholic reporter may 3–16 2019; pax christi international, “faith leaders, peace practitioners deepen church’s commitment to nonviolence and peace,” april 6, 2019, https://www.paxchristi.net/news/vatican-city-faith-leaders-peace-practitioners-deepenchurchs-commitment-nonviolence-and-peace. 4. most recently in the news at the time of this writing, francis told a meeting of theologians that they “should also look to non-violence as a horizon” and make it one of the “constitutive elements” of theology (gerard o’connell, “pope francis to theologians in naples: one cannot do theology without freedom,” america june 21, 2019, https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2019/06/21/pope-francis-theologians-naples-onecannot-do-theology-without-freedom). 5. “cardinal ratzinger on the abridged version of catechism compendium expected out in 2 years,” zenit news agency may 2, 2003, https://zenit.org/articles/cardinal-ratzinger-on-the-abridged-version-of-catechism/. 6. to be sure, this insistence on the public applicability of nonviolence is not an innovation by francis. while the second vatican council had made a breakthrough recognition of the legitimacy of nonviolence by affirming the right to conscientious objection in gaudium et spes §78, the refusal of violence even for purposes of self-defense here was 149 schlabach essentially a matter of commendable personal holiness, and initially no more. by 1991, however, as pope john paul ii reflected in his encyclical centesimus annus on the events of 1989 in which nonviolent movements had brought down the soviet empire, active nonviolence had won definitive recognition as applicable in public affairs. drew christiansen, s.j., has traced this trajectory in numerous writings, e.g., “after september 11: catholic social teaching on peace and war,” origins may 30, 2002: 33, 35–40; “whither the ‘just war’?” america march 24, 2003: 7–11; “the ethics of peacemaking: the genesis of called together to be peacemakers, report of the international mennonite-catholic dialogue (2004),” journal of ecumenical studies 45.3 (summer 2010): 385–416; “nonviolence, the responsibility to protect and peacebuilding,” origins september 29, 2011: 265–70. 7. pope francis, “nonviolence: a style of politics for peace”: “nonviolence is sometimes taken to mean surrender, lack of involvement and passivity, but this is not the case” (§4). 8. the most famous spokesman for this widespread assumption remains the twentiethcentury protestant theologian reinhold niebuhr; see, for example, “why the christian church is not pacifist,” in christianity and power politics (new york: charles scribner’s sons, 1940), 1–32. 9. see walter wink, the powers that be: theology for a new millennium (new york: doubleday, 1998), which provides a condensed version of his three-volume series on naming the powers, unmasking the powers, and engaging the powers, published by fortress press, 1984–1992. 10. glen h. stassen, living the sermon on the mount: a practical hope for grace and deliverance (san francisco: jossey-bass, 2006), 91–98. also note additional resources from stassen in footnote 13. 11. pope benedict xvi, “angelus,” the holy see, february 18, 2007, http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/angelus/2007/documents/hf_benxvi_ang_20070218.html. 12. pope john paul ii, centesimus annus, the holy see, 1991, §23, http://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jpii_enc_01051991_centesimus-annus.html. learning from pope francis’s peacebuilding pedagogy 150 13. stassen laid out his exegetical evidence in greatest detail for biblical scholars in “the fourteen triads of the sermon on the mount (matthew 5:21–7:12),” journal of biblical literature 122.2 (summer 2003): 267–308. his most accessible elaboration for a general audience is living the sermon on the mount. also see glen h. stassen and david p. gushee, kingdom ethics: following jesus in contemporary context (downers grove, il: intervarsity press, 2003); glen h. stassen, “healing the rift between the sermon on the mount and christian ethics,” studies in christian ethics 18.3 (2005): 89–105; and glen h. stassen, a thicker jesus: incarnational discipleship in a secular age (louisville, ky: westminster john knox press, 2012). 14. see my own extension of stassen’s work in this direction: “‘confessional’ nonviolence and the unity of the church: can christians square the circle?” journal of the society of christian ethics 34.1 (2014): 125–44. “a ‘manual’ for escaping our vicious cycles,” journal of moral theology 7.2 (june 2018): 86–91; “a ‘manual’ for escaping our vicious cycles: the political relevance of enemy-love,” modern theology (2018), https://rdcu.be/bfwne; and the final two chapters of a pilgrim people: becoming a catholic peace church (collegeville, mn: liturgical press, 2019). 15. pope francis, “nonviolence: a style of politics for peace” §6. 16. this is one of the statistically backed arguments in erica chenoweth and maria j. stephan, why civil resistance works: the strategic logic of nonviolent conflict (new york: columbia university press, 2011). note, however, that the focus of chenoweth and stephan is nonetheless on nonviolent civil resistance, prior to governance, more so than robust nonviolent governance. although they do find statistical relevance in how the former cultivates the habits and political conditions for significant characteristics of nonviolent governance, such as participation, consensus decision-making, resilience, creativity, and nonviolent structures, etc. for more on fostering nonviolent governance, see véronique dudouet, “powering to peace: integrated civil resistance and peacebuilding strategies,” international center on nonviolent conflict, special report series 1 (april 2017), https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/ icnc-special-report-civil-resistance-and-peacebuilding.pdf; and nadine bloch and 151 schlabach lisa schirch, synergizing nonviolent action and peacebuilding: an action guide (washington, dc: u.s. institute of peace, 2018). 17. see leo driedger and donald b. kraybill, mennonite peacemaking: from quietism to activism (scottdale, pa: herald press, 1994). 18. i dare say that the resulting book that i co-edited with duane friesen, at peace and unafraid: public order, security and the wisdom of the cross (scottdale, pa: herald press, 2005) would offer many leads and lessons for catholic peace activists. 19. see gerald w. schlabach, “just policing: how war could cease to be a churchdividing issue,” journal of ecumenical studies 41.3–4 (summer-fall 2004): 409–30; “just policing, not war,” america july 7–14, 2003: 19–21, or schlabach et al., just policing, not war: an alternative response to world violence, with drew christiansen, s.j., et al. (collegeville, mn: liturgical press, 2007). 20. schlabach, just policing, not war 3. also see schlabach, “just policing: how war could cease to be a church-dividing issue” 410. 21. pope francis, “nourish the planet: energy for life,” video message of his holiness pope francis on the occasion of the meeting of national and international representatives: “expo of ideas 2015—toward the milan charter,” the holy see, february 7, 2015, http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/pontmessages/2015/documents/papa-francesco_20150207_video-messaggio-expomilano.html. 22. pope john paul ii, evangelium vitae, the holy see, 1995, §56, http://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jpii_enc_25031995_evangelium-vitae.html. microsoft word picariello review.docx [expositions 12.2 (2018) 206–214] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 hollander, paul. from benito mussolini to hugo chavez: intellectuals and a century of political hero worship. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2016. 338 pages. $29.99 (paper). isbn: 978–1–1074–1507–2. reading paul hollander’s from benito mussolini to hugo chavez: intellectuals and a century of political hero worship brings to mind mark lilla’s wonderful essay entitled “the lure of syracuse,” from which hollander quotes before his first chapter. in “the lure of syracuse,” lilla introduces us to “a new social type”: “the philotyrannical intellectual,” who placed himself in the service of, and used his abilities to defend, one or another of the twentieth century’s tyrannical regimes.1 the existence, not to say prevalence, of the philotyrannical intellectual raises the question: “what is it about the human mind that made the intellectual defense of tyranny possible in the twentieth century?”2 hollander’s book takes its bearings from similar questions. says hollander: “there is considerable evidence … indicating that many well-known twentieth-century intellectuals admired dictators of various ideological persuasion, as well as the political system they represented. such admiration, often merging into hero worship, was an integral part of a substantial body of political misjudgments” (2).3 the question is: why? this question is all the more important, says hollander, because “we do not expect intellectuals to sympathize with dictators, let alone admire them”; rather, “we expect them to possess sound political and moral judgment” (10). to shed some light on this question, as well as to illuminate “broader questions about politics and intellectuals,” hollander takes us through a century of what he calls “political hero worship” on the part of intellectuals, beginning with the admiration expressed by some european and american intellectuals for italian fascism and ending with contemporary intellectuals’ support for various current or recent tyrannical regimes. hollander begins by cataloging support on the part of intellectuals both within italy and beyond for mussolini’s fascist rule. he concludes this chapter by suggesting an answer to his central question, one that he had also raised in the book’s preface: “while deteriorated objective conditions” contribute significantly to the propensity of intellectuals in such circumstances to defend or admire tyranny, “in the final analysis, modern political hero worship” is “nurtured by dormant religious impulses that surface in the virtual deification of the dictators here discussed” (82).4 in the following chapter on hitler’s germany, hollander focuses on “misgivings about 207 picariello modernity” on the part of heidegger and others, some german and some not: the sense that “hitler and his system could repair the damages of modernity, and create, or recreate, a more communitarian and just society … free of the symptoms of the corrosive moral decay or decadence they diagnosed and experienced in their own societies” (100, 116). hollander next turns to twentieth-century communism as practiced in stalin’s soviet union, mao’s china, rakosi’s hungary, and pol pot’s cambodia. in hollander’s account, many intellectuals supported these regimes for reasons similar to those that prompted intellectuals to express affinity for hitler’s germany and mussolini’s italy. some of these reasons have primarily to do with individual psychology—religious or secular-religious impulses, self-importance and susceptibility to what hollander calls the “techniques of hospitality” (flattery, misleading tours, etc.), desire for “purity”—while others we might call more ideological in nature, such as the rejection of decadent modernity or inhumane capitalism, dissatisfaction with the styles of leadership available in democratic regimes, and what tony judt called “distaste for the lukewarm” (115, 182, 21). in hollander’s telling, the attractions of tyranny on the left are quite similar to the attractions of tyranny on the right. what twentieth-century communism provided, and twentieth-century fascism lacked, was a coherent and thoroughly elaborated ideological system. thus, communism presented for intellectuals a uniquely intellectual temptation, a total and totalizing framework through which to experience and analyze the world. this comes through in hollander’s discussion of the hungarian intellectual georg lukacs, who (here hollander quotes leszek kolakowski) “accepted communism whole-heartedly as a moral, intellectual, and political solution …. he believed that marxism was the final answer to the problem of history, that communism guaranteed the final reconciliation of all human forces … that the conflict between the individual and society … had in principle been resolved” (151). because of his hold on absolute intellectual, political, and moral truth, lukacs was able to overlook—in hollander’s account, felt compelled to overlook—the often brutal realities of communism as practiced in the twentieth century. hollander here discusses a phenomenon that characterized the relationship of many intellectuals to both stalin’s ussr and mao’s china: the indifference to evidence that might run counter to one’s intellectual or political commitments. a statement that hollander attributes to lukacs captures this admirably: “that even if every empirical prediction of marxism were invalidated, he would still hold marxism to be true” (151). review of from benito mussolini to hugo chavez 208 from here, hollander takes us to revolutionary cuba. from the previous chapters on twentiethcentury communism, we carry the theme of “the appeal of lofty ideals,” which caused smitten intellectuals to “suspend critiques of … repressive political systems,” as well as the “entitlement to ruthlessness conferred by … strongly felt good intentions” (189; 241).5 the theme of hero worship, even infatuation, also carries into this chapter and here reaches its apogee in the breathless tributes paid to fidel castro and che guevara by their many (contemporary and, in che’s case, posthumous) admirers.6 what’s new is the striking way some of the psychological factors previously discussed—“a belligerent and resentful estrangement from his own country and … inflated notions of selfrealization,” as hollander says of norman mailer—combined with infatuation and ideological consonance to produce the strongly personal connection some intellectuals felt, in hollander’s account, with cuban communism (218). for instance: hollander brings to our attention a book authored by the sociologist c. wright mills in which mills adopts “the voice of the cuban revolutionary” (218). here mills becomes “the representative voice, alter ego, and self-appointed spokesman of cuban revolutionaries,” expressing “authentically their feelings, thoughts, and ideas,” an “unusual instance in role-playing that probably reflected the longings of mills to be part and spokesman of a revolutionary community” (218, 208). hollander also shines a spotlight here on the support expressed by mailer, jean-paul sartre, and others for the “empowering, redemptive, invigorating, and therapeutic” violence that appeared in the cuban revolution and in other leftist, anti-colonial revolutions across the developing world (222). in hollander’s penultimate chapter, he draws our attention to the support expressed by intellectuals for a wide variety of more or less contemporary tyrannical regimes. the regimes and leaders discussed in this chapter span the ideological spectrum; thus, with a couple of notable exceptions (hugo chavez’s venezuela, for example), we see fewer ideological affinities between intellectuals and regimes than was the case in earlier chapters. but psychological factors remain: for hollander, “it is safe to say that the impulses and illusions that in the past gave rise to political hero worship persist, at any rate in an attenuated form” (245). many of the intellectuals discussed in this chapter seem also to share a distaste for the united states, which, hollander suggests, may have prompted some of them to find admiration for america’s enemies, regardless of their ideological bent. 209 picariello in his final chapter, hollander sums up the factors that he says drove intellectuals to suspend “the use of their critical faculties” and support dictatorial leaders and regimes, and he singles out one explanation that appears at various times throughout the book: “the individuals who were inclined to make the political misjudgments and admire the dictators, harbored, and sought to gratify, unacknowledged religious needs and impulses” (266, 291). thus “the roots of the political attitudes and illusions here dealt with may be found at the intersection of conflicting personal and political impulses and concerns,” so that “the political commitments of intellectuals are colored by their emotional disposition” (312). hollander does not mean (i don’t think) to reduce intellectuals’ political concerns to reflections of their personal or emotional lives, nor does he mean to conflate the two; rather, i think he means to suggest that in attempting to explain the persistent phenomenon that is the focus of his study—support on the part of intellectuals for tyrannical regimes and leaders—both political or ideological factors and emotional or psychological factors must be considered, and both come to our attention when we examine what these intellectuals say and how they say it. the several explanations hollander offers for the question his book poses—why did so many twentieth-century intellectuals admire tyrannical regimes and leaders, even in the face of evidence about the unsavory (to say the least) nature of such regimes and leaders?—are both plausible and satisfying. returning to lilla’s “the lure of syracuse,” we might say that hollander’s account tends toward the notion that intellectuals’ support for tyrants and tyrannical regimes follows from (in lilla’s words) “religious impulses” and the “irrational passions that had migrated from religion to politics.”7 this does not mean that hollander overlooks the “heartless intellectual rationalism” that characterized some of the intellectual support for tyranny discussed above: lukacs, for instance, seems certainly to have believed that “all moral and political questions have only one true answer,” which answer was “accessible through reason” and in his possession.8 if anything, hollander pushes us to collapse the distinction between “irrational passions” and “religious needs and impulses,” on the one hand, and the irrational devotion to various forms of political rationalism, on the other.9 but there is one more point that emerges from hollander’s accounts, and it’s a point that i think bears further discussion. this point also brings us back to lilla’s essay, and to plato, who, in lilla’s telling, was tempted, against his better judgment, to try to affect a conjunction of philosophy and review of from benito mussolini to hugo chavez 210 political rule in the sicilian city of syracuse. i speak here of an awareness that “the psychological force that draws certain men to tyranny … is the same force … that draws other men to philosophy,” such that the “philosophic life,” as exemplified by socrates, “is the noblest one because it is supremely self-aware of”—and resists—“its own tyrannical implications.”10 plato recognized, says lilla, the “connection in the human mind between the yearning for truth and the desire to contribute to ‘the right ordering of cities and households,’” and therefore understood that intellectuals would always be tempted to try to actualize their ideas, and would be drawn to regimes that offer, in hollander’s words, the realization of “the perennial desire of intellectuals, namely the linking of words and deeds.”11 this is not the “compromise” that socrates reaches with his interlocutors near the start of plato’s republic—“a mixture of powerless wisdom and unwise power”—but rather what appears to be “the absolute rule of wisdom,” political rule that takes its bearings, not from the “tangle and variety of experience,” but rather from a set of philosophical truths about how human beings ought to live together.12 this sort of rule opens up the possibility for human life to be reshaped in accordance with an idea, for human nature and the human soul to be rebuilt and—this time—perfected.13 this is a point that waller newell makes in his book tyrants: a history of power, injustice, and terror, about what he calls “millenarian tyranny,” the distinctly modern sort of tyranny that characterizes the regimes and leaders on which hollander focuses. the millenarian tyrant, says newell, sees himself as a “sculptor of human souls” or “engineer of human souls”; millenarian tyranny is concerned with reshaping human beings and human communities so as to create a “miracle man” suited for a miracle society.14 such tyranny takes its bearings, not from the limits imposed on politics by human nature—not, for example, from aristotle’s “nuts-and-bolts” sort of objections to socrates’ ideas that he raises in book ii of the politics, or from james madison’s sober assertion that the need for government itself is “the greatest of all reflections on human nature”—but rather from its sense of the infinite (or nearly so) malleability of the human soul.15 the figuring of the tyrant or dictator as educator, “gardener,” “artist,” molder and shaper of souls, appears often in hollander’s account.16 many of hollander’s intellectuals share a “conception of human nature, or rather the implicit denial that there was such a thing”; they therefore placed great hope in regimes and leaders “committed to the fundamental and coercive transformation of societies and human beings,” based on “the premise that human beings are malleable, their character easily shaped …” (305–306).17 the tyrannical regime dedicated to such 211 picariello a transformative project promises to close the gap between political thought and political action, to infuse the idea into flesh, to make the thought real. the intellectual therefore has a special connection to this sort of tyrannical regime, as such a regime begins, not with reality on the ground, but rather with the idea—often an idea of a future that is immeasurably better than the present—and acts upon the raw material of human life so as to fit it to this idea. for the intellectual, this kind of regime offers the tempting possibility that all impediments to progress may be swept away, that the ideal may be actualized now that obstacles to this actualization—so persistent in free societies—may be eliminated.18 the irony of this special connection is that tyrannical leaders seem to think little of intellectuals, and seem to have little notion of the value (as opposed to the use) of intellectuals for their transformative projects. hitler ridiculed intellectuals as “‘eggheads and ‘despondent weaklings,’” and speculated that “we might one day … exterminate them,” while lenin’s “hatred of the intelligentsia … runs like a thread through his persona and public life” (86, 102).19 intellectuals may sense for themselves a special place in the plans and projects of tyrannical leaders, but these leaders themselves seem to believe otherwise. as plato learned in his encounters with dionysius of syracuse, tyrants don’t often care to receive philosophical instruction; rather, they prefer to instruct others. intellectuals, like tyrants, may fancy themselves “engineers of souls”—but intellectuals’ flirtations with tyranny less often transform ideas into reality than saturate ideas with blood.20 hollander’s book reminds us that the regrets of the twentieth century should serve as a salutary warning for the twenty-first. damien k. picariello university of south carolina sumter notes 1. lilla 197. 2. lilla continues: “how did the western tradition of political thought, which begins with plato’s critique of tyranny in the republic and his unsuccessful trips to syracuse, reach the point where it became respectable to argue that tyranny was good, even beautiful?” (198). review of from benito mussolini to hugo chavez 212 3. many of my quotations from hollander in this review include hollander’s quotations from other authors. no distinction will be made here, and the interested reader is invited to consult hollander’s book for further detail. 4. “the new emphasis on ‘political hero worship’ … was intended to highlight the secularreligious components of the attitudes i have been interested in for a long time. i expected that comparing the converging appeals of leaders of different political systems legitimated by different ideologies would lend support to the idea that the attitudes of the intellectuals here examined had more of a religious, or secular-religious, than political inspiration” (ix). 5. “sartre and merleau-ponty declared that ‘we should judge communism by its intentions and not by its actions’” (291). hollander says that marxist theory imbued many twentiethcentury intellectuals with “a conviction that a largely flawless social system can be created and that its creation demands and justifies … violence and repression” (43). 6. this is perhaps most ironic in the case of che, who, as paul berman notes, “was an enemy of freedom and yet … has been erected into a symbol of freedom. he helped establish an unjust social system in cuba and has been erected into a symbol of social justice” (204). 7. lilla 200–202. 8. ibid. 9. lilla 202; hollander 291. 10. lilla 208, 213. 11. lilla 214; hollander 214. 12. bloom 312; oakeshott 6. 13. hitler described national socialism as “the will to create mankind anew”; sartre, says hollander, saw in revolutionary violence the potential for “a reborn humanity” birthed through “heroic acts of will” (87, 194). 14. newell 164–166. 213 picariello 15. madison 319. 16. as mussolini said of lenin, “lenin is an artist, who has worked with human beings as other artists work with marble or metal,” and of himself, “the most important thing is to rule the masses as an artist dominates his material” (hollander 75, 71). according to stalin, “man must be grown carefully and attentively as a gardener grows his favorite fruit tree” (122). western supporters of communist china believed in the creation of the “new maoist man”; che guevara, says hollander, was dedicated to the creation of a “new socialist man” (198, 239). hitler was described as “the great master of the education of his people,” who “has in a few years transformed our souls” (90). 17. hollander says that “the dictatorships which appealed to many western intellectuals … were not ordinary authoritarian regimes but, as a rule, totalitarian ones, which proclaimed commitment to … the sweeping transformation of social institutions and even human nature” (16). 18. hollander quotes the journalist walter duranty on the soviet reorganization of agriculture: “future historians … may well regard the russian struggle for collectivization as a heroic period in human progress … whether the villages preferred their dirt and ignorance to progress or not, progress would be thrust upon them” (124). 19. mao, says hollander, “had little appreciation of intellectuals” (166). general omar torrijos of panama, considered a “close friend” by writer graham greene, said: “intellectuals are like fine glass … which can be cracked by a sound” (260–261). 20. the full quotation comes from a book hollander cites about the french writer romain rolland: “by forging a community of mental and manual labor, the soviets showed their understanding of the seminal role of the politically active writer, those ‘engineers of souls’ who helped to ‘inaugurate a more just, freer, better ordered humanity’” (135). the cuban revolution, too, promised “a special relationship between the state and the intellectual” (228). hollander also quotes thomas sowell about intellectuals in general: “their vision of the world is … a vision of themselves as a self-appointed vanguard, leading toward a better world” (13). review of from benito mussolini to hugo chavez 214 works cited bloom, allan. “interpretive essay.” in the republic of plato. trans. allan bloom. new york: basic books, 1991. lilla, mark. “the lure of syracuse.” in the reckless mind: intellectuals and politics. new york: new york review of books, 2016. madison, james. “no. 51: the structure of the government must furnish the proper checks and balances between the different departments.” in the federalist papers. ed. clinton rossiter. new york: signet, 2003. newell, waller r. tyrants: a history of power, injustice, and terror. new york: cambridge university press, 2016. oakeshott, michael. “rationalism in politics.” in rationalism in politics and other essays. indianapolis, in: liberty fund, 1991. microsoft word haglund final.docx [expositions 11.2 (2017) 1–33] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376   the function of pantagruelion in rabelais’s quart livre timothy haglund ashbrook center at ashland university abstract the praise of the famous pantagruelion herb that occupies the last four chapters of rabelais’s tiers livre bears on the narrative of the quart livre. although apparently frivolous or superfluous, the use of pantagruelion as a blow-tube places it in the same class of beings as the other physeter in rabelais’s text—the whale that later appears in chapters 33 and 34 of the quart livre. pantagruel’s preparedness for the whale, compared with the misplaced fear of panurge and overconfidence of the pantagruelic artillery, rests in part on his knowledge that physeters are governed by necessities, by natures. connecting pantagruelion to the whale in this way reveals an order in nature, one that requires belief despite appearances. pantagruelion supplies or inspires such belief. nature and the pantagruelion herb φύσις: origin, growth, nature, constitution φυσητήρ: a blowpipe or blowtube, the blowhole or spiracle of a whale like many of rabelais’s passages, the praise of pantagruelion that closes the tiers livre has a generative capacity, encouraging interpretation. there rabelais cryptically describes the plant to be brought on board in preparation for the search for the dive bouteille, which supposedly holds the final answer to panurge’s marriage question, initially raised with the end of the war against the dipsodians and the onset of political peace in the tiers livre. the plant’s qualities seem to have little to do with this quest. i will suggest that, on the contrary, the pantagruelion plant is well-suited to answering the question of whether panurge should marry and to further educating panurge by giving him the right disposition toward his future and his happiness. the interpretive history of the pantagruelion plant is expansive. in 1956, verdun-louis saulnier the function of pantagruelion in rabelais’s quart livre 2     identified eight scholarly theories about pantagruelion as worthy of consideration.1 donald frame’s 1977 study catalogued four more.2 saulnier developed what has since been called the hésuchiste theory, which presents rabelais’s prudential recourse to shrouded speech and imagery (such as that of the lauded herb) as a way of communicating with fellow évangeliques in the face of religious persecution.3 this interpretation prevailed until the 1960s, when scholars began to examine the rhetoric of the pantagruelion encomium, its comical, paradoxical, digressive character, and its lyrical quality. these latter studies consider the pantagruelion chapters as one whole to be examined independently of the rest of rabelais’s writings.4 louis-georges tin reminds us that, after all, the ending of the tiers livre may perhaps be “un texte sur rien, faisant surgir ex nihilo aliquid.” but tin himself—like so many readers, including me—cannot resist probing the rhetorical, hermeneutical, and poetical aspects of the pantagruelion chapters.5 the reading offered here connects pantagruelion to the narrative of the quart livre by showing that the plant, a living thing, serves a purpose in the quest for the dive bouteille, during which panurge will encounter nature. under the circumstances of this quest, panurge cannot discount nature as mere tradition, moralizing, or bloviating as he had discounted the expert consultations of the tiers livre. nature’s tutelage or correction of panurge occurs most obviously in chapters 33– 34 of the quart livre when the company, then at sea, spots a whale or physeter—think of the false cognate φύσις6—approaching. pantagruelion, also a physeter, provides the key to understanding the questers’ encounter with the sea creature. and pantagruel’s thoughtful response to the monster makes use of his knowledge of physeters as a class of things, all similar though different. the following argument contains three sections. the first considers a question that occurs after reading the description of pantagruelion in chapter 49 of the tiers livre: is pantagruelion analogous to homer’s moly plant? (homer is one of the most cited of rabelais’s antique sources.)7 an equivocal answer to this question leads to deeper digging. for, aside from providing a physical description of the plant, rabelais writes that pantagruelion has a “use” that moly lacks. the second section explains the significance of this use, which the narrator describes through a riddle. via reflection on this riddle, two possible “uses” present themselves: (1) philosophy, or dialectical reasoning, and (2) belief. or is it (3) both, combined in a kind of platonic πίστις?8 that is, perhaps saulnier’s hésuchiste theory was right: pantagruelion symbolizes belief, but belief in the necessity of things—belief that there is such thing as a mostly invisible and yet intelligible necessity, an 3 haglund   ordering of the cosmos and a setting of limits on each part of the cosmos—and not religious belief despite persecution by the authorities. such belief would mean ignoring or looking past the appearance of things in the world. it would mean focusing instead on the principles that often underlie those things which are not so readily available to the eye. this type of belief in necessity is evident not only in the text of the pantagruelion chapters, nor only in the likeness of pantagruelion to homer’s moly plant, but also in the function of pantagruelion in the quart livre as a physeter, or blowhole, to match that greater physeter, the whale. this function, discussed in the third section of the argument, accounts for the appearance of the goddess of necessity, atropos, in both episodes.9 understanding the function of pantagruelion in the quart livre not only verifies the coherent design of rabelais’s books, but lends credence to the view that panurge undergoes a series of events intended to lead him to accept his circumstances rather than to try to control his future. not least of all, the presence of the physeters in the tiers and quart livres suggest a rabelais advocating a view of nature deserving of or commanding human deference. rabelais’s books serve as a timely reminder in an age of both heady, scientific ambitions and resurgent religiosity. this is why i end my argument by connecting the events of the physeter episode with the immediately prior tale that rabelais’s narrator recounts (ql 29–32) about the children of physis and antiphysie. the characters of these episodes are etymologically kindred, and they in fact relate to the same theme of nature and of our dispositions toward nature. pantagruelion as moly: “rough and hard to get at” (tiers livre 49 and odyssey x) the praise of pantagruelion in the tiers livre begins when the narrator reports pantagruel is preparing the number of ships that “ajax de salamine avoit jadis menées en convoy des gregoys à troie” [ajax of salamis long ago brought the greeks as a convoy to troy].10 this is only the first hint that homer’s poetry serves as a signpost for these chapters. the narrator drops more breadcrumbs when he lists the attributes of the plant. he notes that pantagruelion “a racine petite, durette [...]” [has small and tough roots [...]].11 and later, at the beginning of chapter 52, he attests that the truth about pantagruelion is “d’accès assez scabreux et difficile” [rather rough and hard to get at].12 as we shall see, this is the verbiage hermes uses to describe the nature of the moly plant to odysseus in the odyssey. rabelais’s mimicry may suggest the pantagruelion plant functions in the function of pantagruelion in rabelais’s quart livre 4     rabelais’s book just as the moly plant functions in homer’s book. the possibility would lend importance to pantagruelion. seth benardete claims the very “peak of the odyssey” occurs when hermes descends to odysseus.13 hermes intervenes in odysseus’s situation in the odyssey after his group’s arrival on aiaia, an island inhabited by the powerful goddess circe. odysseus had seen a fire in the distance and decided to send a team headed by eurylochos to investigate.14 eurylochos alone returned and reported the fate of the others who had happened upon the household of circe, accepted “malignant drugs” from her, and “took on the look of pigs.” the last eurylochos knew, his men had been driven by the dread goddess into a hog-sty.15 just before hermes appeared to reveal the nature of the moly plant, odysseus and eurylochos had disagreed about how to proceed. odysseus wished to retrieve the men and eurylochos advised abandonment. but odysseus felt a strong “compulsion” and determined to save the company.16 odysseus then set off to find his companions. hermes, in the likeness of a man in the bloom of youth, appeared to odysseus and provided him with a “good medicine” to work against the “malignant medicine” circe had used on the investigators. he told odysseus to enter the house of circe and wait for her to try to strike him with her wand. at her movement he was to draw a sword and rush at her. when she, in fear, would invite odysseus to bed, odysseus was not to refuse but rather to obtain her oath to desist. with these instructions delivered, hermes “administered” the medicine. benardete points out the medicine works not through its administration to the body, but through hermes’ “explaining” its “nature” [φύσιν] to odysseus: so spoke argeiphontes, and he gave me the medicine, which he picked out of the ground, and he explained the nature of it to me. it was black at the root, but with a milky flower. the gods call it moly. it is hard for mortal men to dig up, but with the gods all things are possible.17   in relating this story, odysseus called hermes by one of his many epithets, argeiphontes. the name refers to another instance where hermes counteracted hera’s magical transformation of zeus’s lover, io, into a cow. hera afterward enlisted the giant argos to guard the enchanted animal. later, hermes slew argos, hence the name argeiphontes [argos-slayer]. yet hermes himself never uses magic. hermes works or thinks through the way things are, their being, telling odysseus about 5 haglund   these things presumably at greater length than odysseus discusses them with us. as this study of nature applies to the moly, without hermes’ help odysseus may possibly have seen only have seen the plant’s white blossom. the root, “hard for mortal men to dig up,”18 would have remained hidden. thus odysseus would not have realized that the white blossom and black root belong together, just as the human body and mind, though also disparate, go together.19 the root and the flower differ in more than color, however. the root works to keep the plant grounded in one place. the flower, on the other hand, is not only visible but effortlessly gives off pollens that travel and reproduce the plant in scores elsewhere. the reproductive capacities of the flower point to the universality of its nature; the roots, to its particularity. and whereas the flower has a soft beauty about it, the black roots look ugly. moly is “hard for mortals to dig up,” but not because digging it requires superhuman physical strength. a more plausible answer is that the beauty of the moly petals leaves onlookers content with the visible part of the plant, or that it compels them to snap the plant at the stem and take what they see. either way, the root is simply not recognized or desired. the root goes overlooked as inessential to the plant or as subordinate to the flower. knowing about this ugly thing requires considerable will to see beyond the visible. hermes’s lesson is not only that nature combines diverse parts into wholes, but also that people keep to the surfaces of things out of an intellectual weakness or blindness. this blindness prevents them from seeing the whole. in this case, being blind means seeing and holding to a prettier picture of life. the difference between what is invisible and visible, apparent and real, was very important to rabelais. as george mallary masters writes, all rabelaisian images play on appearance and reality. they embody a dynamic relationship between external form and intrinsic meaning. they at once express the dialectic of opposites and they are that dialectic. [...]. but, at the same time, the images also signify something else—they point beyond the apparent to an idea.20 my contention about the pantagruelion plant mirrors masters’s view of rabelais’s work on the whole. the pantagruelion plant acts to point beyond itself and to a more general idea. this is how it functions as rabelais’s “moly.” and as in homer’s odyssey, rabelais’s characters discover this the function of pantagruelion in rabelais’s quart livre 6     dialectical aspect of pantagruelion through a literal (but also intellectually important) quest. as masters concludes, “it [pantagruelion] represents the wisdom of the sage pantagruel and symbolizes the quest for self-knowledge.”21 and just as odysseus was aided in his quest with knowledge of the moly plant, which transformed into self-knowledge, pantagruel and panurge will be aided in theirs by knowledge of the pantagruelion plant, which will facilitate the same transformation—by showing them their standing within and in relation to the rest of the cosmos. in the cases of both moly and pantagruelion, in other words, the plants reveal and teach the operations of nature. odysseus learned the relationship between disparate parts and the whole— that things that seem not to go together in fact belong together, when the larger entity they belong to is considered. as for pantagruel and panurge, they will learn about another equally important aspect of nature: beings that differ in size and appearance can belong to the same class, once their basic functions come into focus and once one finally looks past what is most obvious to the eye. this is the deeper quest that pantagruel and panurge will endure—not the physical one of visiting far flung places in the world, but the philosophical one of more deeply understanding the world through dialectics. if rabelais’s pantagruelion plant is anything like moly, then the narrator’s description should produce a view or understanding of nature like the one found in book x of the odyssey. for the sake of comparison, here is the narrator’s full description of the nature of pantagruelion: 1. pantagruelion may be “prepared” and put to use. 2. pantagruelion has small, shallow roots (though “petite” and “durette”) with a blunt white point. 3. its stem is concave, with a green outside and white inside. 4. pantagruelion derives its worth from its fiber. 5. its height ranges from 5’ to that of a lance (roughly 10’). 6. the pantagruelion herb dies yearly. 7. it does, however, have evergreen leaves with spikes. 8. these leaves number 5 or 7 in each row, “tant-l’a cherie nature, qu’elle l’a douée en ses feueilles de ces deux nombres impars, tant divins et mysterieux” [so much has nature cherished it that she has 7 haglund   endowed in its leaves these two odd numbers, so divine and mysterious]. 9. the odor of the plant is too strong for delicate noses. 10. but “estainct en l’home la semence generative, qui en mangeroit beaucoup et souvent” [it extinguishes the generative seed in anyone who should eat many of them often]. greeks used these seeds for desserts. 11. the female has a milky flower.22 although this list shares a few things with odysseus’s description of moly, differences are evident. odysseus’s details were scant. he mentioned only moly’s colors, its two parts, and the roughness or softness of those parts. here readers get many details to organize. first, the pantagruelion’s roots are white, shallow, and small—not black (though still “petite” and “durette”). pantagruelion’s roots are similar to those of moly in that their shortness suggests that harvesting pantagruelion does not require great physical strength but strength of another kind—strength of intellect or of constitution. point 9 reinforces pantagruelion’s moly-like difficulty of access. the strong odor of the plant keeps weak people away. only those able to ignore its stench can handle the plant. in addition, spikey leaves (point 7) suggest a need for thick skin. this plant too is hard for mortals to dig up. the third item, the fact that pantagruelion is concave, will gain importance during the questers’ encounter with the physeter in the quart livre—more about which below. even if moly serves as a kind of literary model for pantagruelion, the meaning of rabelais’s plant exceeds that of moly. consider point 1. odysseus did not “use” moly when he entered circe’s household except in the sense that it gave him a knowledge of his nature that enabled him to remain firm against circe’s seductions. simply by being what it was, moly helped odysseus to realize who he was—a human and not a pig. but chapter 51 of the tiers livre will suggest that humans use pantagruelion in ways that improve and change conditions for themselves. this point will be revisited and examined more closely below. the yearly death (point 6) of pantagruelion speaks not only to its mortality but also to its continual recurrence, or to the fact that a blueprint for this plant exists somewhere. its individual specimens inhabit a realm of becoming and perishing, but pantagruelion keeps becoming and the function of pantagruelion in rabelais’s quart livre 8     perishing because of its residence in the realm of being. point 10 is, however, enigmatic. the seed of pantagruelion “extinguishes the generative seed in man.” (this extinguishing of desire is what panurge most needs in the tiers livre, and various attempts to extinguish that “generative seed” are made through the consultations, formal and informal.) on a literal reading one might compare pantagruelion with those plants and drugs responsible for cases of sexual impotence, erectile dysfunction, and the like. medical researchers know that certain forms of plant life are capable of these effects. the early interpreters of rabelais accordingly emphasized the sterilizing effects of the hemp seed in their readings of the pantagruelion chapters.23 yet this literal reading does not explain why rabelais pairs this effect with the apparently unnecessary detail that the greeks, of all peoples, ate this anti-aphrodisiac for dessert. keeping this odd pairing in mind, a few interpretive options arise. such a dessert may represent philosophy, the life dedicated to the cultivation of and adherence to reason (any subsequent reference herein to philosophy indicates such a way of life), for which the greeks were so well-known. living a philosophic life means grasping or trying to grasp things as they really are, not as they are expounded by human authorities, nor as they appear to be at first glance. implying such independent activity, philosophy represents the culmination of learning. it is, so to speak, the last course of one’s intellectual development. in its deepest manifestation, philosophy’s intense focus on discovering the truth about the cosmos decreases other non-philosophic loves. philosophy “‘estainct en l’home la semence generative” by taking erotic focus away from immediate, particular things and connecting the lover of truth to eternity. and the narrator does note that pantagruelion is of philosophic importance. he expresses surprise that the benefits of pantagruelion were “hidden for so many centuries from the ancient philosophers.”24 on the note of the narrator’s surprise about pantagruelion’s belated discovery, this dessert might also be belief.25 for belief reached the greeks after philosophy did, and so may be the true final course. christianity opened up god’s covenant with the jews to the gentiles in athens, corinth, thessaly, and elsewhere in the hellenic world. further, just as philosophy makes the lover of wisdom un-erotic with regard to this world by turning attention to the eternal world of intellect, belief makes the faithful un-erotic by turning their attention from this world—often an autonomous and proud attention aimed at figuring out the physics of this world, or an infatuation with its 9 haglund   material pleasures—to the future, the next world, or afterlife. an indication of just this “extinguishing of the generative seed in man” can be found in genesis 1:28 (esv): “and god blessed them. and god said to them, ‘be fruitful and multiply [...].”’ it is indeed an otherworldly kind of human community that needs to be commanded to this sort of activity. as the narrator discloses more about pantagruelion, these competing interpretations, philosophy or reason on the one hand and belief on the other, must be weighed against each other or reconciled. a sound interpretation will not only fit the description given of the plant in the final chapters of the tiers livre, but will also explain how pantagruelion helps the company during their journey in the quart livre. i take steps toward refereeing these interpretations by briefly considering the various uses of pantagruelion offered in tiers livre 51, and ultimately settle on the answer that pantagruelion suggests to the reader belief in natural regularities dispersed throughout the cosmos, as well as in human reason’s ability to decipher these regularities. in this sense, pantagruelion would resemble homer’s moly plant; it would be used as an introduction of sorts to the mysterious but coherent workings of nature, so “rough and hard to get at.” philosophy and belief: the uses of pantagruelion (tiers livre 51) chapter 51, which purports to explain the reason for the plant’s name, and which deviates to explain the uses of the plant, supplies the reasons for suspecting that pantagruelion encourages the synthesis of reason or philosophy with belief.26 the chapter begins with a moral observation, which presents the reader with the first of a series of themes related to these “uses” of pantagruelion to consider. thieves, we are told, hate the plant because it can “oppiloit les conduictz, par les quelz sortent les bons motz, et entrent les bons morseaulx, plus villainement que ne feroit la male angine et mortelle squinanche” [stop up the passages by which good remarks come out and good morsels come in, more banefully than would a bad choking spell or mortal quinsy]. in short, pantagruelion acts as a “hart” [halter] and “cornette” [cravat].27 it delivers death, especially to the deserving. the narrator equates this aspect of pantagruelion with the work of the greek goddess atropos.28 traditionally, atropos was the oldest of the three fates and had the job of ending life and ensuring cosmic justice.29 in plato’s republic, socrates similarly (but not identically) mentions atropos in his telling of the myth of er as the governess of “what is going to be.”30 thus pantagruelion, like atropos, signifies death, inevitability, and necessity, but also the the function of pantagruelion in rabelais’s quart livre 10     future and eternity—something that, as la rochefoucauld later wrote, “ne se peuvent regarder fixement” [cannot be looked on fixedly].31 in rabelais’s text, however, some can look at death more fixedly than others. pantagruelion disturbs mainly the unjust. and on the other hand, pantagruelism promises to cultivate callousness toward one’s future32—callousness towards atropos, or an ability to disregard one’s fate. because of the narrator’s focus on thieves as the most fearful of pantagruelion, one might conclude that the moral, or the law-abiding, can look on death more fixedly. but if the bad fear punishment then the good anticipate rewards. the predispositions of the unjust and the just, combined with the definition of pantagruelism as contempt for fortuitous things, leads to the conclusion that beholding death fixedly requires transcending morality altogether, or looking on death philosophically (from outside of convention, or from outside of good and bad). at this juncture one cannot ignore what that rondibilis first brought up in his consultation with panurge earlier in the tiers livre: socrates’s famous formulation of philosophy as “meditation de mort” [meditation on death].33 more evidence of pantagruelion as a subject appropriate to philosophy accrues throughout the chapter. here is the most prominent piece: the narrator observes that planters harvest pantagruelion during the draught season, when the sun “rend tout le monde troglodyte, et constrainct habiter es eaues et lieux subterrains” [forces everyone to live in caves or cellars or other underground places].34 these draught conditions cause thirst, rabelais’s emblem for the desire for wisdom.35 the underground dwellings that rabelais’s narrator describes may remind readers of the cave or shadow world described in book 7 of plato’s republic. but in the pantagruelion chapters, the people are not born and reared in the cave with its questionable customs, as in the account of plato’s socrates,36 but head down into them because of the harsh conditions above ground. in a literal sense, the sun’s heat might push people to live underground. in another, figurative sense, the “heat” of the governing authorities’ rule can push freethinking and dedication to reason underground. although advocates of liberalism and individual rights may blame this kind of “heat” for causing science to wither on the vine, pantagruelion flourishes in draught conditions. perhaps philosophy withers when generously watered. great philosophers have sprouted, after all, in persecutory ages. pantagruelion as belief may be read as a competing alternative to pantagruelion as a philosophic occasion. that is, the harsh conditions that surround pantagruelion as philosophy may 11 haglund   affirm the need for belief as a supplement. indeed, interpretations of pantagruelion as belief are not new.37 here i merely suggest that this belief may not be particularly religious faith, but—in a fitting twist for rabelais—faith in reason or philosophy. hence my suggestion that readers should investigate a reason/belief duality in the meaning of the plant. these possibilities need to be considered, then, and can be, by thinking about a list of disparate uses of pantagruelion that rabelais provides. the uses on this list support a second-order interpretation of pantagruelion as belief. although not literal, this interpretation is still warranted by the textual evidence.38 rabelais describes the uses for the plant by painting a dreary picture of human life without it. without pantagruelion, 1. “[...] kitchens would be a disgrace, tables loathsome.” 2. beds would be “without delight.” 3. millers could not carry wheat to the mill. 4. plaster could not be carried to the workshop 5. water could not be drawn from the well. 6. the art of printing would perish. 7. human beings would not be clothed. additionally, 8. it protects armies against cold and rain. 9. it provides netting for fishermen. 10. it shapes shoes, strings bows, bends crossbows, and makes slingshots.39 11. dead bodies are always buried with it. 12. it arrests invisible substances.40 plant materials can explain each of these riddles well enough. linens adorn and give charm to kitchens and tables; blankets give beds delight; bags contain wheat and plaster; rope pulls up water; printing requires paper. and of course plant materials of various kinds are used to produce clothing, weaponry, death shrouds, and sails. but the quality or virtue of belief explains the genesis or origin of each use, and it is the genesis that seems to be at stake. as tristan vigliano writes, “en réalité, the function of pantagruelion in rabelais’s quart livre 12     dans le pantagruélion sont réunies toutes les caractéristiques du pantagruélisme entendu comme illusion. il existait avant que son utilité ne fût découverte, et certains continuent à en faire mauvais usage. [...]. il ne peut être réduit à néant : comme l’illusion, dont nul ne viendra jamais à bout. il entretient et développe l’activité humaine : comme l’illusion, qui est vivifiante.”41 although i refer to pantagruelion as a source of belief rather than as an illusion (as vigliano does), i agree that pantagruelion might be conceived of as such a belief-inspiring illusion if readers consider it as the driving motivation behind each of the inventions mentioned. more than any of the other uses for pantagruelion, however, points 11 and 12 on the list above suggest that pantagruelion either stands for or supplies belief. these points, read allegorically, also support (of course with the risk of speculation, and therefore without an authoritative claim), a second-order interpretation of pantagruelion.42 for if pantagruelion symbolizes belief, then bringing fabrics and clothing with oneself to the grave [point 11] implies belief of the highest order—belief in the afterworld.43 the final point, moreover, turns from the realm of the grave and back to another, equally deep sort of belief. although one can literally interpret the arrest of invisible substances as the arrest of winds by sails [point 12], this usage also demonstrates belief in the regularity and beneficence of nature.44 such belief takes explorers to new worlds far more than do the sails themselves. alternatively, a plausible reading of “invisible substances” includes an arrest of human souls. because rabelais writes of intellectual activity as the human vocation most capable of making such an arrest (think again of socrates’ “meditation de mort,” mentioned, to reiterate, in tiers livre 31), this usage of pantagruelion also suggests a link between belief and reason. a sound interpretation of pantagruelion should maintain consistency with the end of chapter 51. this section reports that the olympian gods feared pantagruel’s children would invent or discover an “herbe de semblable energie” [an herb of similar energy] and invade the heavens after seeing humans putting pantagruelion to its various uses. it ends by stating that the gods convened a meeting about how to respond to the human threat.45 rabelais’s story may be derived from those warnings against collective human efforts found in aristophanes’ speech in plato’s symposium or in the babel story of the book of genesis.46 regardless of rabelais’s source, however, it is likely that the worry among the divinities that he writes about originates in something stronger than plant material, such as the belief underlying each of the uses. to see how pantagruelion supplies belief, 13 haglund   readers must examine its function in the quest of the quart livre. the questers’ uses of pantagruelion in the quart livre thinking about the function of pantagruelion in rabelais’s narrative means returning to basic questions. the turn from established authorities in the tiers livre to an independent quest in the quart livre does not of itself explain the pertinence of the pantagruelion chapters. the additional fact that pantagruelion is mentioned only twice in the quart livre—once in a restatement of the ending of the tiers livre, and once in a droll way—seems to further diminish the plant’s purpose. here is what the narrator describes panurge doing with the pantagruelion plant in chapter 63: “panurge avecques la langue parmy un tuyau de pantagruelion faisoit des bulles et guargoulles” [panurge, through a tube of pantagruelion, was blowing bubbles with his tongue].47 nothing more is written about pantagruelion. there may be no need for more. as edwin duval has written, the design of the quart livre gives weight to the appearance of another bubble-blower: the whale or physeter who appears to the questers in the middle of the book.48 the greek term φυσητήρ means a few things. it may refer to (1) an instrument for blowing, a blowpipe, or tube, (2) the blowhole or spiracle of a whale, or (3) to a kind of whale. but of course, as we have just seen, panurge later (in ql 63) uses the pantagruelion plant as a physeter—a blowhole. rabelais prepares for this apparently frivolous use of pantagruelion as early as chapter 49 of the tiers livre, where, as noted in my earlier discussion of pantagruelion’s qualities, the narrator discloses that the stem of the plant is concave.49 rabelais’s plan stews for some time, and for such an odd reason. the difficult question is what all of this means. pantagruelion’s use as a bubble-blowing device is best understood against the backdrop of the other ways of understanding the other bubble-blower—the whale—that are on offer. pantagruelion and the whale both stand for natural things, or for living beings that grow. these physeters are specimens of physis or nature. yet the very blower of the blowhole, panurge, seems not to understand this. when the whale approaches the boat, panurge shouts out in fear and bemoans the coming of the “leviathan descript par le noble prophete moses en la vie du sainct home job” [the leviathan as described by the noble prophet moses in the life of that holy man job].50 in other words, panurge understands the physeter not according to its nature, but as presented through the the function of pantagruelion in rabelais’s quart livre 14     holy revelations. by making this comparison, panurge is showing that he understands the whale in religious terms, not philosophic ones. according to his analogy, panurge believes the whale to be capable of anything, not limited by its nature or necessity. the rest of the chapter consists of pantagruel’s explanation to panurge of what the physeter is and the narrator’s description of how pantagruel confronted and defeated the creature. in other words, pantagruel appears to panurge as a kind of homeric hermes, who arrives to instruct his odysseus, panurge—who had described himself as such during his first appearance in rabelais’s books.51 duval demonstrates beyond doubt that rabelais uses job 41 as his source text for the questers’ encounter with the beast. he points out that each of pantagruel’s actions in his battle against the leviathan correspond to the rhetorical questions that god poses to job.52 god asks, for example, whether anyone can put a cord through the animal’s nose or pierce its jaw with a hook; pantagruel does just these things.53 but pantagruel’s behavior has heretical ramifications. for according to church tradition, each of god’s questions were to be answered firmly in the negative. here is what thomas says about the matter in his expositio super iob ad litteram (literal exposition on job): [...] lest it be believed that man can overcome the devil by his own power he begins to exclude this belief under the figure of leviathan, concerning whom he shows first that he cannot be overcome through the method by which fish are caught. hence, he says, “or will you be able to draw out, namely, from the waters, leviathan with a hook?” [...] and by this verse is signified that no man can either draw the devil away from his malice or even tie him so that he may not proceed in his malice.54 to save rabelais from heresy, duval reads pantagruel as a christ-like “fishhook” who may legitimately bind the leviathan.55 although the savior could rightfully take that kind of action, pantagruel does not act as the savior would. rather than claim that he alone possesses divine power to overcome satan, pantagruel reinterprets the leviathan as an exclusively physical creature and denies one of its main attributes as a devilish leviathan. compare job 41:19–21 with what 15 haglund   pantagruel says about the whale. here is the relevant portion of the account in job: out of [the leviathan’s] mouth go flaming torches; sparks of fire leap forth. out of his nostrils comes forth smoke, as from a boiling pot and burning rushes. his breath kindles coals, and a flame comes forth from his mouth. and here is how pantagruel assuages panurge’s fear of the “leviathan”: si telle est (dist pantagruel) vostre destinée fatale, comme naguieres exposoit frere jan, vous doibvez paour avoir de pyroeis, heoüs, æthon, phlegon celebres chevaulx du soleil flammivomes, qui rendent feu par les narines : des physeteres, qui ne jettent qu’eau par les ouyes et par la gueule, ne doibvez paour aulcune avoir. jà par leur eau ne serez en dangier de mort. par cestuy element plus toust serez guaranty et conservé que fasché ne offensé.56 several parts of this speech strike the eye. first, pantagruel refuses to join panurge in calling the animal a leviathan, the designation given it by the biblical tradition. he in fact introduces the taxonomic term physeter. second, he goes out of his way to deny that this whale shoots flames as both the biblical leviathan and the mythical horses of the sun do. pantagruel appears not as a soteriological hero, but as a student of nature whose knowledge of nature gives him a proper measure of confidence or belief—belief that this physeter, a natural thing, is no leviathan. he does not extinguish this leviathan’s fire (on thomas’s view, symbolic of the devil’s capacity to stir passions) but instead demystifies the leviathan57 and denies that it has fire at all.58 guy demerson writes in his article on the nature of water in rabelais that the element is au moins aussi pernicieux que l’autre élément dit ‘agressif,’ le feu. [...] pantagruel rappelle les deux malheurs subis par enée : l’incendie de troie et une ‘horrible tourmente sus mer’ (t 14, 608) et, déjà au début de tiers livre, lorsque panurge évoquait les pires the function of pantagruelion in rabelais’s quart livre 16     dangers qui peuvent assaillir quelqu’un, il désignait l’inondation avec l’incendie et l’assassinat : ‘au feu, à l’eau ! au meurtre ?’59 demerson’s observations are important because, at least at this point in rabelais’s writing, pantagruel’s and panurge’s reactions to or understandings of water seem to be similar. pantagruel’s understanding of pantagruelion may then account for his new and different attitude in the quart livre.60 now, anybody familiar with whales knows all these things that pantagruel points out. but judging by the reactions of panurge and the others, those in the company do not seem as though they had this same familiarity. pantagruel’s possession of this knowledge is not explicitly mentioned in this text, although his father’s wish for him to become an “abysme de science” [abyss of knowledge], as rabelais’s narrator elsewhere describes him,61 means that he likely possesses knowledge that the others lack—or at least that he is likely to possess a certain way of applying newly learned facts. through this learning, pantagruel knows not only about what the whale is, but can also abstract and think through its properties as a physeter—a being that belongs in the class of beings that pantagruelion also belongs to. in many ways the whale and pantagruelion are nothing alike. one is a plant and the other an animal. one lives on land and the other in the sea. one stands as tall as a human and the other stretches “the size of four acres.”62 but pantagruel teaches that these differences must not deceive. to the unschooled it is the height of folly to approach the “leviathan” with any less fear than panurge and the others approach it with, but through dialectical reasoning, pantagruel knows the nature of physeters and so he knows their natural limits. rabelais’s description of panurge’s bubble-blowing occurs twenty-nine chapters after the physeter encounter, but presumably pantagruel has seen panurge idling away time by blowing bubbles with a tube of pantagruelion before. if it had been silly to fear panurge’s bubbles, then it would be silly to fear the whale’s bubbles. the differences run surface deep. in fact, the whale spiracle and pantagruelion tube operate according to the same principles. pantagruel is right. as the physeter nears the ships, it begins “ject[ant] eau sus les premieres à pleins tonneaulx, comme si feussent des catadupes du nil en æthiopie” [spouting water on them by the barrelfuls, as if it were the cataracts of the nile in ethiopia].63 there is no fire, hence no leviathan. the whale blows bubbles with its spiracle just 17 haglund   as panurge blows bubbles with the pantagruelion stem. pantagruel’s demystification of the leviathan suggests his scientific view of the world, one that rejects the help of revelation. this view has a few important implications. the demystification process—the rejection or removal of the world of spirits—makes the physical world appear as the merely physical world, something within human understanding and so not as grand and mysterious as the magical world that preceded it. lest humans take newfound confidence in their relatively elevated place in this world too far, rabelais compares two possible ways of mastering the physeter, one failure and one success. first the failure: l’artillerie tonnoit et fouldroyoit en diable, et faisoit son debvoir de le pinser sans rire. mais peu profitoit : car les gros boulletz de fer et de bronze entrans en sa peau sembloient fondre, à les veoir de loing, comme font les tuilles au soleil.64 whereas the biblical view (which thomas expounded above) asserts that humans cannot master themselves or the external world unless god grants them power to do so, the artillery embodies the human conceit (and a characteristically modern one) of thinking that the world can be overpowered or mastered. this attempt at mastery is the likely alternative to leaning on divine help, especially if the world is hostile to human life. clearly, though, rabelais does not support this solution. as duval writes, “even the most advanced modern weaponry is powerless to frighten off the beast or to penetrate its skin.”65 human contrivance cannot best the power of the physeter. readers have to look to pantagruel for another way forward. were it not for pantagruel’s intervention in the physeter encounter, the failure of modern artillery might speak to the superiority of thomas’s religious view over that of the modern view which, like pantagruel’s, is also demystified. the pantagruelic solution is one of these three possible alternatives. rabelais’s description of pantagruel begins with the prince diogenically watching the artillery unload for some time. as he looks on he considers “l’occasion et necessité” [the occasion and necessity] of the situation. that is, he thinks about the nature of the whale. then he steps forward with his bow and arrow and pierces the physeter through the forehead to close its blowhole.66 he continues to shoot arrows through each of the whale’s eyes, its tail, as well as three through its spine. pantagruel finishes the job by putting fifty arrows in each flank. “adoncques the function of pantagruelion in rabelais’s quart livre 18     mourant le physetere se renversa ventre sus dours, comme font tous poissons mors [...].” [thereupon the physeter, dying, rolled over its back, belly up, as do all dead fish [...].]”67 the physeter remains subject to the same necessities as all specimens of its kind. given pantagruel’s consideration of the occasion and necessity of the whale confrontation, it is fitting that the reappearance of atropos also links the pantagruelion and physeter episodes. back in chapter 51 of the tiers livre, rabelais’s narrator equated pantagruelion with this goddess of death and necessity.68 atropos is not mentioned again until the physeter episode, when panurge notes that he sees the death-sister appear “sus la hune” [above the topmast], “avecques ses cizeaulx de frays esmouluz preste à nous tous coupper le filet de vie” [with her scissors newly ground, ready to cut the thread of our lives].69 fittingly, the goddess of death looks on as pantagruel brings the physeter belly up in the manner of all dead fish. whereas panurge responds fearfully to atropos, according to his thievish disposition, pantagruel responds philosophically to atropos, or rather to necessity, knowing that the physeter is limited. if pantagruel serves as a hermes to panurge in his explanation of the physeter, here he acts as odysseus himself, firm (as odysseus was when faced with circe) because he is sure of what he is dealing with.70 the method of archery combined with the presence of atropos proves that power has little to do with pantagruel’s defeat of the physeter. this combination instead suggests that knowledge of the physeter and above all of its limitations is the decisive factor. lacking this knowledge, the artillery utterly misplaced and wasted its power. among the most important things that pantagruel does is consider the “necessité” of the situation. it seems to be no mistake that the first move he makes is to shut the whale’s spiracle. this was a thoughtful action, one based on the nature of the specific animal he faced. yet one might still object that pantagruel’s archery differs from artillery only in its comparative simplicity. both are forms of technology. this objection may be correct. what, then, is the virtue of simplicity? rabelais dwells on the point. he attributes adroitness, expertise, deftness, cleverness, and dexterity to various individuals and groups (respectively: commodus, an indian archer, the franks, the parthians, and the scythians) known for their abilities with the bow and arrow.71 archery depends on certain virtues including tranquility and harmony, but the artillery does not. the bow and arrow require a steady hand. all of the archers mentioned are noted for their incredible accuracy and intense focus. moreover, archers do not shoot arrows haphazardly but aim specifically for the most vulnerable part of the enemy. knowing to aim for 19 haglund   the vulnerable part (and what that vulnerable part is) is related to the presence of atropos that panurge detects above the topmast. whereas atropos strikes fear in the panurge’s heart and reminds him of his contingency, the goddess prompts pantagruel to remember that everything has a nature and is governed by necessities. this nature cannot be changed or overcome, but it can be realized and used. this usage works through mind, not power, a dichotomy that reminds readers that rabelais’s description of pantagruel’s defeat of the physeter excludes the most reputed of the archers: the thoughtful odysseus, who shot an arrow through twelve axe heads in a contest against the other suitors for his wife.72 thus in pantagruel’s thoughtful employment of his bow against the physeter, he also shadows odysseus as he employs pantagruelion in this use of the plant: “par elle sont les arcs tendus les arbelestes bandées, les fondes faictes” [by it are bows strung, crossbows bent, and slingshots made].73 this too connects pantagruelion with moly. fastilent and the children of physis and antiphysie (quart livre 29–32) the story of the physeter is not the only important text about nature in the quart livre. in fact, rabelais introduces the theme of nature in the episode that immediately precedes the encounter with the whale. this episode does not contain any allusions or references to pantagruelion, but it nevertheless concerns plants and maintains the same basic teaching suggested by the study of pantagruel’s famous herb. nearing the middle of the quart livre, pantagruel and his friends pass by the island of coverup (tapinois), ruled by fastilent (quaresmeprenant). their guide, xenomanes, is familiar with this strange king. upon hearing xenomanes’s low opinion of fastilent, pantagruel says he would like to know more: “you’ll give me pleasure if even as you have described to me his vestments, his clothes, his way of acting, and his pastimes, you would also explain to me his form [sa forme] and body in all its parts.”74 in other words, pantagruel wants to think about fastilent’s nature. subsequently, xenomanes details the king’s outer and inner parts at great length, and with great wit and humor. the list of parts described has a certain movement, and ends with an account of the various aspects of fastilent’s intellect: la memoire avoit, comme une escharpe. le sens commun, comme un bourdon. l’imagination, comme un quarillonnement de cloches. the function of pantagruelion in rabelais’s quart livre 20     les pensées, comme un vol d’estourneaulx. la conscience, comme un denigement de heronneaulx. les deliberations, comme une pochée d’orgues. la repentence, comme l’equippage d’un double canon. les entreprises, comme la sabourre d’un guallion. l’entendement, comme un breviaire dessiré. les intelligences, comme limaz sortans des fraires. la volunté, comme troys noix en une escuelle. le desir, comme six boteaux de sainct foin. le jugement, comme un chaussepied. la discretion, comme une mouffle. la raison, comme un tabouret.75 each of these similes ridicules fastilent’s mind in some way, mostly by speaking to its frailty or subservience. the last image of reason as a footstool is especially noteworthy. fastilent is the antiphilosopher. his reason is instrumental. its very location is inverted. it is not located inside the head, but sits under the feet. given that much of the episode reads as a satire of catholic practices, this description of reason as a footstool may be derived from thomas’s well-known formulation of reason as the “handmaiden” of theology.76 two chapters later, xenomanes concludes his description of fastilent through a series of similar inversions: travailloit rien ne faisant : rien ne faisoit travaillant. corybantioit dormant : dormoit corybantiant les œilz [...]. se baignoit dessus les haulx clochers, se sechoit dedans les estangs et rivieres. peschoit en l’air, et y prenoit escrevisses decumanes. chassoit on profond de la mer, et y trouvoit ibices, stamboucqs, et chamoys.77 fastilent inhabits a world without nature. his life consists of contradictions and impossibilities— or at least that is what most people would call his activities. xenomanes’s description of fastilent brings to pantagruel’s mind “old stories” featuring the children of two characters he refers to as physis and antiphysie. these stories have been long forgotten. frère jean says he knows nothing of them.78 they consist of an ancient wisdom that has been covered up. in the tales, the children of antiphysie have perfectly round skulls, with distorted 21 haglund   ears, eyes, and appendages. they do cartwheels and always go around with their legs above their heads.79 antiphysie praises these children of hers and succeeds in convincing “les folz et insensez en sa sentence” [the fools and madmen] (perhaps a large group) that her offspring imitate the “createur de l’univers” [creator of the universe], given that their hair is like the roots of a tree, their legs like its branches, and so on. the story is clearly framed as a critique of religion. among those persuaded by antiphysie are the papelars and “les demoniacles calvins, imposteurs de geneve” [the demoniacal calvins, impostors of geneva].80 true to his form, rabelais does not discriminate here. he attacks both catholics and reformers. but aside from these satirical punches pulled, the story also condemns any effort, religiously motivated or not, to override nature. nothing about antiphysie is inherently religious. antiphysie, according to pantagruel, has simply always been adverse to and envious of physis. as rabelais writes, this animosity dates back “de tout temps” [from all time].81 antiphysie was not born of christianity or any other particular religious sect. there is something about humans—at least there is something about a part or faction of them—that does not want to be subjected to nature. in the following chapters, the pantagruelic company’s varied reactions to the physeter (especially those of panurge and the artillery), more and less mindful of the creature’s nature as a member of this class, depict the contents of the story of physis and antiphysie. a positive teaching pantagruelion embodies the theme or question of nature, which was already being established during the consultations of the banquet in the tiers livre. there hippothadée had denied the reality of “nature,” which is rather god’s “pleasure.”82 rondibilis, on the other hand, suggested the inscrutability of nature. although he did exhort panurge to become “an architect of natural consequences,” such an architect learns to deal with nature’s mysteriousness.83 but if the beginning and middle of the tiers livre give a negative teaching about nature, then the ending of the tiers livre and the middle of the quart livre offer a positive teaching. the passages about pantagruelion and the physeter found in those segments of rabelais’s books discourage readers from attempting to overpower other beings or nature itself, as the questers’ artillery had attempted to do. yet they also discourage lying prostrate before others’ displays of power. the presence of nature means that one’s place in the world is not determined by power relations. discerning one’s the function of pantagruelion in rabelais’s quart livre 22     true place in the order of nature means thinking about limitations. this has the double-advantage of instilling humility (when grasping one’s limits) and granting belief or trust (when grasping others’ limits). the belief in nature (or πίστις) for which pantagruelion stands, and which pantagruelion inspires, is exemplified in the unlikely scenario of the physeter, an animal that is much more powerful than the pantagruelic comrades but that is nonetheless governed by atropos— as panurge unwittingly revealed by blowing into his stick of pantagruelion, the other physeter. of the three views presented in the physeter episode (the religious, the modern, and the pantagruelic), only the pantagruelic view respects and takes its bearings from nature. there is a certain kinship between the religious and modern views in that both deny nature its rule. the consequences of these views of course differ. the religious view grants that the “leviathan” may do anything—though a water animal, it may shoot fire. the modern view opposes the power of nature with the power of art. both are nonetheless children of antiphysie. as a child of physis, pantagruel observes pantagruelion and, through it, sees harmonious principles at work in the world. these principles may not be simply intuitive. it takes much thought to see that the pantagruelion and physeter are more alike than not. reflecting on the “occasion and necessity” of a given situation, one may begin to see that the limits of nature are different—perhaps more accommodating of human life, less hostile—than had been expected. still, one gains wisdom from pantagruelion with difficulty. the meaning of the plant proves “rather rough and hard to get at.” endnotes 1. saulnier, “l’énigme du pantagruélion” 51–56; see also saulnier, rabelais i. 2. frame 62. 3. louis-george tin writes, for example, that the hemp plant (which pantagruelion is compared to) was used during the reign of francis i to suppress lutherans in france (tin, “qu’est-ce que le pantagruelion?” 130). 4. tetel, étude sur le comique de rabelais; losse 62–3; rigolot 61. 23 haglund   5. tin, “qu’est-ce que le pantagruelion?” 126. more recently, tin has revised his position, now making the provocative and exciting insight that, as pantagruelion is made from hemp, it culminates in the book of pantagruelism itself, and therefore does represent a certain human industry and progress of the kind rabelais participated in. see tin, “le pantagruelion” 124. 6. see kinser 93n1. 7. for a list of rabelais’s homeric references and allusions, see silver. 8. that is, both reason and belief combined in a kind of trust or belief in the orderliness of the cosmos. see plato, republic 190 (510a4–6). 9. the goddess atropos is also mentioned in quart livre chapter 27. françois rabelais, oeuvres complètes, quart livre chapter 27, 603. huchon is referred to hereafter by abbreviated references to each book: ‘p’ (pantagruel), ‘g’ (gargantua), ‘tl’ (tiers livre), ‘ql’ (quart livre), and ‘cl’ (cinquiesme livre). book abbreviations are followed by chapter number and page number. i consulted frame’s english edition alongside huchon’s french. françois rabelais, complete works 496. i refer to frame hereafter as ‘cw’ followed by page number. deviations from frame’s translation reflect my interpretation of rabelais’s french. subsequent citations to both editions are placed in footnotes and separated by a forward slash. for example, ql 27, 603 / cw 496. there pantagruel insists that the threat she poses is overstated, and in fact that “all human souls are exempt from the scissors of atropos.” in tiers livre 51 and quart livre 33, which contain the episodes examined in this article, atropos appears as an active character in the text, and one more capable of harm—at least from the narrator’s and panurge’s perspectives. in tl 51, the narrator corrects those who have blamed pantagruel for having them “by the throat,” for it was, he says, truly pantagruelion (with which atropos is associated). in ql 33, panurge claims that he sees atropos above the topmast of the ship, ready to take the lives of the crew. these differing views correspond well, we shall see, to the different dispositions of each character in the physeter chapters. the function of pantagruelion in rabelais’s quart livre 24     10. tl 49, 500 / cw 402. 11. tl 49, 501 / cw 402. 12. tl 52, 509 / cw 409. 13. benardete 84. 14. homer 156–158 (10.155–220). 15. ibid. 158–159 (10.235–260). 16. ibid. 159 (10.260–270). 17. ibid. 160 (10.302–306). italics mine. see also benardete 86. lattimore translates θεοι δέ τε πάντα δύνανται as “the gods have power to do all things.” 18. cf. the description of pantagruelion at tl 52, 509 / cw 409. 19. this is a summary of benardete’s argument. see benardete 86. 20. see masters 18. 21. masters 23. 22. tl 49, 501–502 / cw 402–403. 23. saulnier, “l’énigme” 51; see also tin, “qu’est-ce que le pantagruelion?” 129. 24. tl 51, 508 / cw 408. 25. surprisingly, the use of dessert as an emblem of philosophy or belief was not typical during the renaissance. it cannot be found in the writings of erasmus, for instance. as far as i can tell, this emblem may be a unique contribution of rabelais’s. 26. tin observes that a literal understanding of the plant does not account for its being named after pantagruel. i do not agree with him on all points about pantagruelion, but 25 haglund   this is an important insight. see tin, “qu’est-ce que le pantagruelion?” 130. 27. tl 51, 506 / cw 406. 28. tl 51, 506 / cw 406. see the online lsj definition of άτροπος: “not to be turned, unchangeable, eternal” (273). 29. see hesiod lines 218–223: “also night bore the destinies and ruthless avenging fates, clotho and lachesis and atropos, who give men at their birth both evil and good to have, and they pursue the transgressions of men and of gods: and these goddesses never cease from their dread anger until they punish the sinner with a sore penalty.” that atropos and her sisters punish the gods suggests necessity or nature limits or stands above the gods. 30. plato, republic 300 (617c4). 31. see la rochefoucauld 406 (maxim 26). the translation is mine. 32. or, “gayeté d’esprit conficte en mespris des choses fortuites” [gaiety of spirit confected in contempt for fortuitous things]. see ql, prol 523 / cw 425. 33. tl 31, 451 / cw 353. compare with plato, phaedo 34 (64a7). 34. tl 51, 506 / cw 407. 35. see tl prol, 349 / cw 257: “[...] drinking i deliberate, i discourse, i resolve and conclude.” italics mine. critics note that terms related to drink do have an equivocal meaning for rabelais, however. thomas greene states it plainly: “the impulse to drink is not consistently represented as appealing.” see greene 181. andré winandy writes, for another example, that to drink is “to have a certain pondered yet exalted openness to the fullness of human experience, that of bodily functions and that of mental, spiritual aspirations [...].” he also recognizes that rabelais’s “‘honest boozer’ [...] becomes a seeker of the obvious, but also of that which is hidden from him.” ultimately, though, these “hidden things” pertain to the “discovery of the body.” see winandy 10; 16; 11; 10; 17. for a book-length study of the theme of drinking in all of the function of pantagruelion in rabelais’s quart livre 26     rabelais’s five books, see weinberg. other critics point out that there is a sense in which drink, in the gargantua prologue, is referred to somewhat pejoratively or at least nonchalantly as “mere” drinking. see cave et al. 709–16. among many others, see also walker 130 for more examples of this reading of the prologue. 36. plato, republic 193–196 (514a–517d). 37. “the repeated claim,” writes duval, “that fire actually purifies and whitens asbestine pantagruelion [...] suggests an analogy between pantagruelion and faith, whose symbolic color is white and which is traditionally said to be tested by tribulation as gold is tested by fire ” (duval 210). 38. marie-luce demonet has recently written a compelling chapter on the force and importance of literally interpreting rabelais’s body of work. she not only calls attention to the flightiness of critical efforts to seek the “plus haut” meaning of rabelais’s writing, but also finds value in the literal as such. at the least, readers should never close off their openness to these various levels of reading, if they feel inclined to one or the other. see demonet 211–236. 39. this use of pantagruelion is addressed in my discussion of the physeter. 40. tl 51, 507–508 / cw 407–408. 41. see vigliano 634. [“in reality pantagruélion puts together all the characteristics of pantagruelism understood as an illusion. it existed before its usefulness was discovered and certain people continue to put it to bad use. [...] it can’t be reduced to nothing: like an illusion, of which nothing will ever come to fruition. it undergirds and develops human activity: like an illusion, which is life-giving.”] italics mine. 42. i heed duval’s understanding of the pantagruelion plant as a “test of pantagruelism in the reader.” see duval 212: “the reader who treats it as either an enigma to be deciphered or as errant foolishness is to be condemned as a panurgian reader [...].” 43. ancient philosophers such as aristotle treated the afterlife seriously. see aristotle 16– 27 haglund   18 (1100a23–1101b10). for more on aristotle regarding the afterlife, see pritzl 101– 111. apocryphally, rabelais’s dying words are said to have been “i seek a great maybe.” this disposition would not only suggest belief, but the synthesis between belief and reason. 44. even the use of pantagruelion to capture wind echoes the odyssey. odysseus receives the gift of bagged winds from aiolos just before arriving at aiaia and meeting circe. if the events there are any indication, humanity’s ability to use pantagruelion to capture wind is not simply good. the bag of winds episode emphasizes the human misuse of wind-power. see homer 152–153 (10.19–27). 45. tl 51, 509 / cw 409. 46. see quint 167–171. 47. ql 63, 687 / cw 579. 48. ql, 33–34. see duval 21–22. 49. see point 3 on the above list of pantagruelion’s nature. 50. ql 33, 616 / cw 508. 51. p 9, 249 / cw 166. 52. duval 130–131. 53. ql 34, 619 / cw 511. 54. aquinas, the literal exposition on job 454–455. 55. duval 133. frank lestringant, on the other hand, connects the physeter to rabelais’s anti-catholic disposition. “il [the physeter] se trouve donc naturellement du côté de quaresmeprenant” [it is found, naturally, on the coast of quaresmeprenant], he notes. 56. ql 33, 617 / cw 508–509: “if such,” said pantagruel, “is your ill-fated destiny [that is, the function of pantagruelion in rabelais’s quart livre 28     being destroyed by the leviathan’s fire], as frère jean was stating a while ago, you should be afraid of pyroeis, eous, æthon, and phlegon, the famous flammivomous horses of the sun, who breathe out fire through their nostrils; but of physeters, which spout nothing but water from their blowholes and from their throats, you should have no fear at all. never from their water will you be in danger of death. by that element you will rather be made safe and preserved than troubled and harmed.” italics mine. 57. for similar readings, see smith 113; williams 61. for the contrast between panurge’s and pantagruel’s reactions in the episode, see tetel, “le physetère bicéphale” 58–59. 58. myriam marrache-gouraud has noted that the theme of fear plays a most prominent role in the quart livre. although much of the book, on this reading, is about correcting panurge’s misplaced fear, it is important to note that it is not always panurge who is fearful and pantagruel who is brave. on the contrary, pantagruel shows fear—but only when reasonable. panurge, on the other hand, sometimes expresses confidence when fear would be more proper. see marrache-gouraud 136ff. 59. demerson 20. water is “at least as pernicious as the other element deemed ‘aggressive,’ fire [...]. pantagruel recalls the two misfortunes suffered by aeneas: the trojan fire and a ‘horrible storm above sea’ (t 14, 608), and already at the beginning of the tiers livre, when panurge evoked the worst dangers that can attack someone, he equated the flood with fire and murder: fire, water! murder?” 60. pantagruel’s transformation reflects, in an inverse way, an adage of erasmus (quoted by demerson in this connection) that begins with the declaration that the fire, the sea, and woman are three evils. but as erasmus’s adage proceeds, water is said to be more fearful than fire, and woman more fearful than water. pantagruel, by contrast, views water as a thing to be feared less than fire, and has been in the process, of course, of purging panurge’s fear of women. see erasmus ii, 2, 48. 61. p 8, 245 / cw 161. 62. the size that thomas attributes to the whale on pliny’s authority. see aquinas, job 29 haglund   454. 63. ql 34, 618 / cw 509. 64. ql 34, 618 / cw 509: “the artillery hurled thunder and lightning like the devil, and tried its best to prick it and not in jest. but this was doing little good; for the iron and bronze cannonballs, as they sank into its skin, seemed to melt, to see them from a distance, as tiles do into the sun.” 65. duval 130. 66. ql 34, 618–619 / cw 509–511. 67. ql 34, 620 / cw 511. italics mine. 68. tl 51, 506 / cw 406. 69. ql, 33, 617 / cw 509. 70. this is all the more fitting in light of panurge’s need to be educated, given that panurge foolishly likened himself to odysseus in his debut in rabelais’s work. see p 9, 249 / cw 166. 71. ql 34, 618–619 / cw 510. 72. see homer 319 (21.409). 73. tl 51, 507–508 / cw 407–408. see point 10 on the list describing pantagruelion’s “uses” in the discussion of pantagruelion as belief. 74. frame translates sa forme as “his physique.” 75. “he [fastilent] had a memory like a scarf. common sense, like a drone. his imagination, like a carillon of bells. his thoughts, like a flight of starlings. his conscience, like an unnesting of young herons. his deliberations, like a pouchful of barley. his repentance, like the carriage of a double cannon. his enterprises, like the the function of pantagruelion in rabelais’s quart livre 30     ballast of a galleon. his understanding, like a torn breviary. his notions, like snails crawling out of strawberries. his will, like three walnuts in a dish. his desire, like six trusses of sainfoin. his judgment, like a shoehorn. his discretion, like a mitten. his reason, like a footstool.” ql 30, 610 / cw 502. italics mine. 76. aquinas, “summa theologica” 9 (q. i, art. 5). 77. “he worked doing nothing, did nothing working. he had eyes open sleeping, slept with his eyes open. [...]. he bathed on top of high steeples, dried himself in ponds and streams. he fished in the air and there caught decuman crayfish. he went hunting in the depths of the sea and there found ibexes, wild goats, and chamois.” ql 32, 614 / cw 506. 78. ql 32, 614 / cw 507. 79. ql 32, 614 / cw 507. 80. ql 32, 614 / cw 507. 81. ql 32, 614 / cw 507. italics mine. 82. tl 30, 446 / cw 350. 83. tl 32, 453 / cw 355. works cited aquinas, thomas. the literal exposition on job: a scriptural commentary concerning providence, trans. anthony damico. atlanta, ga: scholars press, 1989. _____. summa theologica. in introduction to st. thomas aquinas, ed. anton c. pegis. new york: modern library, 1948. aristotle. nicomachean ethics, trans. joe sachs. newburyport, ma: focus, 2002. 31 haglund   benardete, seth. the bow and the lyre: a platonic reading of the odyssey. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield, 1997. cave, terence, michel jeanneret, and françois rigolot. “sur la prétendue transparence de rabelais.” revue d’histoire littéraire de la france 86 (1986): 709–16. demerson, guy. “rabelais et la nature de l’eau.” in actes des conférences du cycle: rabelais et la nature, organisé durant l’année 1994, ed. francis métivier. études rabelaisiennes 31. genève: librairie droz, 1996. 11–29. demonet, marie-luce. “le sens littéral dans l’oeuvre de rabelais.” in rabelais et la question du sens, eds. jean céard and marie-luce demonet, with stéphan geonget. études rabelaisiennes 49. librairie droz: genève, 2011. 211–236. duval, edwin m. the design of rabelais’s tiers livre de pantagruel. études rabelaisiennes 34. genève: librairie droz, 1997. erasmus, desiderius. les adages d’érasme, ed. la societé d’édition des belles lettres et le groupe renaissance âge classique (umr 5037), 2010. https://grac.univ-lyon2.fr/lesadages-d-erasme-682790.kjsp frame, donald. françois rabelais: a study. new york and london: harcourt brace jovanovich, 1977. greene, thomas. “the hair of the dog that bit you: rabelais’s thirst.” in rabelais’s incomparable book: essays on his art, ed. raymond c. la charité. lexington, ky: french forum, 1986. 181–94. hesiod. theogony. in the homeric hymns and homerica, with an english translation, trans. hugh g. evelyn-white. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1914. homer. the odyssey, trans. richmond lattimore. new york: harpercollins, 2007. kinser, samuel. rabelais’s carnival: text, context, metatext. berkeley and los angeles: university of california press, 1990. de la rochefoucauld, françois. “réflexions ou sentences et maximes morales,” ed. 1678, in the function of pantagruelion in rabelais’s quart livre 32     oeuvres complètes, ed. jean marchand. paris: gallimard, 1964. lestringant, frank. “l’espace maritime du quart livre.” in en relisant le quart livre de rabelais, vol. 35, cahiers textual, eds. nathalie dauvois and jean vignes. paris: université paris diderot, 2012. 29–42. losse, deborah n. “frivolous charm and serious bagatelle: lyrical and burlesque paradox in the works of francois rabbelais.” the sixteenth century journal 10 (1979): 61–68. marrache-gouraud, myriam. “leçon d’agrégation: la peur dans le quart livre.” in rabelais, aux confins des mondes possibles: quart livre, ed. myrian marrache-gouraud. paris: puf, 2011. masters, george mallary. rabelaisian dialectic and the platonic-hermetic tradition. albany, ny: state university of new york press, 1969. plato. phaedo, trans. peter kalkavage, eva brann, and eric salem. newburyport, ma: focus, 1998. _____. the republic, trans. allan bloom. new york: basic books, 1968/1991. pritzl, kurt. “aristotle and happiness after death: nicomachean ethics 1.10–11.” classical philology 78 (1983): 101–111. quint, david. origin and originality in renaissance literature: versions of the source. new haven and london: yale university press, 1983. rabelais, françois. the complete works of rabelais, trans. donald frame. berkeley and los angeles: university of california press, 1991. _____. oeuvres complètes, ed. mireille huchon. paris: gallimard, 1994. rigolot, françois. “rabelais’s laurel for glory: a further study of the ‘pantagruelion’,” renaissance quarterly 42 (1989): 60–77. saulnier, verdun-louis. “l’énigme du pantagruélion, ou: du tiers au quart livre.” études rabelaisiennes 1. librairie droz: genève, 1956. 48–72. 33 haglund   _____. rabelais i: rabelais dans son enquête. paris: sedes, 1983. silver, isidore. “la prima fortuna di omero nel rinascimento francese,” convivium 29 (1956): 30–49, 560–578. smith, paul j. voyage et écriture: etude sur le quart livre de rabelais. génève: droz, 1987. tetel, marcel. étude sur le comique de rabelais. florence: leo s. olschki, 1964. _____. “le physetère bicéphale.” in writing the renaissance: essays on sixteenth-century french literature in honor of floyd gray, ed. raymond c. la charité. nicholasville, ky: french forum, 1992. 57–64. tin, louis-georges. “le pantagruelion: réflexions sur la notion d’exégèse littéraire.” in rabelais et la question du sens, eds. jean céard and marie-luce demonet, with stéphan geonget. études rabelaisiennes 49. librairie droz: genève, 2011. 113–124. _____. “qu’est-ce que le pantagruelion?” études rabelaisiennes 39. librairie droz: genève, 2000. 125–135. vigliano, tristan. humanisme et juste milieu au siècle de rabelais: essai de critique illusoire. le miroir des humanistes. paris: les belles lettres, 2009. walker, john. review of the wine and the will: rabelais’s [sic] bacchic christianity by florence weinburg. renaissance and reformation 10 (1974): 130–131. weinberg, florence. the wine and the will: rabelais’s bacchic christianity. detroit: wayne state university press, 1972. williams, wes. monsters and their meanings in early modern culture: mighty magic. oxford: oxford university press, 2011. winandy, andré. “rabelais’ barrel.” yale french studies 50 (1974): 8–25. microsoft word hart interview.docx [expositions 12.2 (2018) 103–120] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376   interview: kevin hart, university of virginia bing lyu zaozhuang university kevin hart is an anglo-australian theologian, philosopher, and poet. he has taught at monash university and the university of notre dame and is currently edwin b. kyle professor of christian studies at the university of virginia. hart has received multiple awards for his poetry, including the christopher brennan award and the grace leven prize for poetry twice. his most recent book is poetry and revelation: for a phenomenology of religious poetry (london: bloomsbury, 2017). bing lyu: professor, your previous scholarly book, kingdoms of god (2014), is highly recommended by choice and described as “a beautifully conceived and creative work, one that presses the relationship between phenomenology and theology further and outlines potential future directions for this relationship.”1 and your new book, poetry and revelation, examines this relationship more deeply from the perspective of literature. do these two books belong to the same set of ideas? kevin hart: i intended kingdoms of god and poetry and revelation to be a diptych: the one would use my inflection of phenomenology to elucidate the revelation of the kingdom of god in and through jesus christ, and the other would examine a range of poems in order to show how some poetry deals phenomenologically with the christian revelation. in each case “revelation” is used in a twofold manner: first and foremost, it is revelation in the sense of ἀποκάλυψις (apocalypse), a divine uncovering of what is the case beyond worldly appearances (e.g., the lordship of god), and, second, it concerns the different ways in which phenomena reveal or manifest themselves. in the first of those two books i was interested in showing that the divine revelation of the kingdom comes by jesus disclosing to us, often by way of parables, that there is an anterior divine call to enter and help build up the kingdom of god, one that has already been uttered in the hebrew bible and that is silently before us in creation. and in the second book i interview: kevin hart 104 wanted to attend to “religious poems,” a category that, in english at any rate, is often used to consign many fine poems to the status of minor poetry. once we examine the assumptions in play when regarding religious poetry in this manner we can discharge those assumptions, and then we can read some religious poetry more freshly. we can see that lots of religious poetry is not primarily about ideas (let alone dogma) but about individual relationships—real or imagined, desired, recollected, or whatever—with god, relationships that have inner and sometimes outer dramas. now i think that a third book, one that follows and extends my the dark gaze (2004), which i am calling blanchot encore, will turn that diptych into a triptych. it will seek to examine the ways in which maurice blanchot, a consequential atheist, refigures phenomenology and revelation alike in his narrative and critical writings. bing lyu: harold bloom quotes your words in the western canon that “western culture takes its lexicon of intelligibility from greek philosophy, and all our talk of life and death, of form and design, is marked by relations with that tradition.”2 and you cite maurice merleau-ponty in poetry and revelation that “literature has never been as ‘philosophical’ as it has in the twentieth century, never has it reflected as much upon language, truth, and the significance of the act of writing.”3 does merleau-ponty’s “philosophy” mean “greek philosophy”? why did he emphasize the twentieth century? if we stretch the timeline from renaissance to postmodernism, what is the relationship between philosophy and literature? kevin hart: in book delta of the metaphysics aristotle provides a lexicon of forty or so words that do not merely enable us to grasp metaphysical questions and discussions but, in addition, allow us to make sense of the world and our place in it. even if one does not know any philosophy, one still uses words such as “cause,” “nature,” “being,” “one,” “many,” and so on, each and every day; other words, such as “principle” and “substance,” are often in the background of our thought and talk. this means that, in the west, even if we are doing something believed to be very far from philosophy, such as reading or writing poems, painting a portrait or looking at one, it is marked to a greater or lesser extent by philosophical—indeed, metaphysical—terms. martin heidegger and jacques derrida have shown this very clearly. there is a sense, then, in which all western philosophy is indebted to greek philosophy, even when it heads in another direction. we never get past reading plato and aristotle, even though we would do well to read plotinus and the stoics more often and more deeply and so be exposed to other ways of thinking of philosophy. 105 lyu when i say “in the west” i do not mean to designate a geographical area. that used to be possible, but for a long time now “the west” has been leaving a mark in the middle east and asia, and not always in the same way or to the same extent. obviously, there would be important differences to specify with respect to china and north korea, for example. yet “the west” has power not only if it is welcomed, absorbed, and re-set but also if it is shunned and rejected (and, of course, covertly relied upon), and it too changes over time. in many ways much that has been excellent in “the west” has changed. our intellectual world has weakened, especially in the humanities. one no longer looks to germany for intellectual brilliance in philosophy and theology, france too has been fading in that regard; perhaps only in the united states are there major universities that preserve western intellectual methods and values, and perhaps not for very long. already one senses the grandeur of judeo-christian thought and writing beginning to slip from sight among undergraduate and graduate students, in part because professors (and especially administrators and, increasingly, the boards of foundations that fund tertiary institutions) have other hiring priorities. needless to say, some of these new priorities are very valuable; others remain within the fashions of the day. i should add that one change in “the west” is the way it gets enriched and re-directed from “the east.” twentieth-century american poetry, for example, wouldn’t look as it does now without pound’s cathay (1915), even though pound didn’t know chinese and worked from japanese versions of classical chinese poems. to return to your question: merleau-ponty reflects on a literary situation in france in which some writers—certainly not all—have persistently and variously sought to overcome the heritages of classicism, neo-classicism, and even romanticism. dada and surrealism might be regarded as “terrorist” groups in the field of literature, if i may cite jean paulhan’s les fleurs de tarbes (1941). even here, there are appeals to philosophy: think of the uses to which andré breton put hegel when articulating the surrealist revolution. practitioners of la nouvelle roman question linear narration and naturalist assumptions about society and psychology, even though they may have little or no formal training in philosophy; poets from stéphane mallarmé to eugène guillevic, yves bonnefoy, and andré du bouchet test what can be done in and by poetry. their poems do not simply declare, “i am a poem!” by dint of theme, form, and mode, but also ask, each in its own way, loudly or quietly, “what is a poem?” or “what are poets for?” (think of guillevic’s euclidiennes (1967), which makes us ask ourselves what place a geometrical figure, of all things, has in a lyric poem.) the first question comes to us, at least in its form, directly from socrates, interview: kevin hart 106 and the second one reaches us by way of hölderlin and his experience of the greeks. to some extent this reflexive experience of literature is more common in french writing than in writing in english, since philosophy permeates french culture more generally than it does in britain and the united states. the classe de philosophie is something we don’t have in british or american secondary education. the situation that merleau-ponty discerns is one that is clearest in twentieth-century literature but is not limited to it. one does not find philosophical questions associated with poems so clearly in the work of victor hugo or paul verlaine, say, which is not to say that there are no profound philosophical issues in french poetry of the nineteenth century, even if these are not asterisked for attention until the following century. one has only to recall benjamin fondane’s baudelaire et l’expérience du gouffre (1947). sometimes one finds a strong form of negation in the poetry of the twentieth century, negativity being something far more important to modern german and french philosophers than to the greeks. bonnefoy and du bouchet offer competing examples. the young bonnefoy, author of du mouvement et de l’immobilité de douve (1953), places his poem under the sign of the life of the spirit beginning only with death, a key theme of hegel’s phenomenology of spirit, while du bouchet develops, with glances towards paul celan, ways of using lyric poetry as a means of countering expected ways of articulating our experience of the world. yet we should always be cautious. for example, when bonnefoy writes about la présence, as he does so often, we should not be too quick to assimilate it to the philosophical categories in play in the formative years of his writing life: it is not what heidegger calls anwesenheit, for example. it is closer to what he calls anwesen, coming into being and passing out of being, which returns us to a sense of greek thought that was more familiar to heraclitus than plato, of more interest to plotinus than aristotle, and about which we have heard very little in recent decades. not all of this modern and even contemporary french poetry is explicitly oriented to philosophy, though: francis ponge, for one, has little or no taste for philosophy, even though his work as a whole has considerable philosophical interest. i am thinking of henri maldiney’s le legs des choses dans l’oeuvre de francis ponge (1974) and derrida’s signéponge (1984). other poets, such as philippe jaccottet, have no particular interest in philosophy, yet one can see his work, especially airs (1967), as concerned with what i call “weak phenomena,” namely those phenomena whose being is exposed to being overlooked, reduced, or bypassed in this busy world of ours. jaccottet 107 lyu broke through to the poetry of airs by reading japanese haiku in english translation, and we can come to read his poetry in terms of sustaining weak phenomena only because the work of jeanluc marion and jean-yves lacoste allows us to see such a thing. (neither has written on jaccottet, though.) if we studied the situation thoroughly, we would find layers of “philosophy,” coming from zen buddhism, passively entering the west by way of poetry in translation and being read by way of western philosophical traditions, which would include philosophies of translation, both lexical and cultural. the relation between philosophy and literature changes many times from the renaissance to postmodernity, and it is not congruent in english, french, german, italian, and spanish literatures. one could write a long book on the shifting relations in each of those national literatures over the period you specify, and even within the period of modernism. sometimes there is crossfertilization, sometimes not. there’s not just one modernism, even in english literature; we would need to distinguish the “high modernism” of eliot and pound from the “low modernism” of frost and bishop. and we simply can’t expect “modernism” to have the same starting points and desired endpoints in french, spanish, and italian literature. the sort of thing that we value in federico garcía lorca in the late 1920s, for instance, is not going to be found in giuseppe ungaretti or guillaume apollinaire; sometimes it’s quite the opposite. the revival of gypsy ballads by lorca was irruptive in spanish literature, and one doesn’t expect to find philosophical questions to the fore there, even though lorca was finding a new way for poetry to speak the truth about human life. similarly, when apollinaire spoke of l’esprit nouveau a decade earlier he was more concerned with μῦθος (mythos) rather than λόγος (logos), while also committing the poet (in an extended sense of the word) to speak the truth. bing lyu: when explaining the title of poetry and revelation you observed that it is a phenomenological study of religious poetry. could you talk about the relationship between phenomenology and literature, especially poetry? what is the advantage for us to understand literature in terms of phenomenology? kevin hart: phenomenology is usually, and rightly, said to begin with edmund husserl’s logical investigations (1900–01). there we find a shift from asking the questions “what?” and “why?” to asking the question “how?” husserl urges that we need to ask how phenomena give themselves to us. we need to get away from pre-packaged problems and confront “the things themselves,” he interview: kevin hart 108 says, and the how-question helps us to do just that. phenomena do not give themselves to us in the same way. if i think of the number three, it gives itself to me wholly by way of cognition, but if i perceive three apples on my table they give themselves to me in profiles, so that to gain a full perception of them i would have to look at them from all perspectives. i cannot gain that full perception without using my body. if i think of being in antwerp later this year, the city of antwerp gives itself to me both in memory (i’ve been there before) and in anticipation; yet come december it will give itself to me also in terms of perception. i might look at photographs or paintings of it, and find that it gives itself to me by way of representation as well. now husserl was concerned with the threat he felt that came to european culture from all the various forms of relativism that were prevalent in his youth, historicism and psychologism being the main ones. he worked extremely hard to show that logic and mathematics have very high levels of evidenz, selfevidence, and that this gives us a firmer epistemic ground than was made available by the logic and mathematics of his day, which was, he felt, overly impressed by symbolic notation, which can be moved around by purely formal means to solve a problem without thinking it through in rigorous, philosophical fashion. yet not all phenomena give themselves to us with such high levels of self-evidence: perception does not (often we have to look, listen, touch, smell, or taste again and again before we are even half-way sure of something), memory does not, and anticipation does not. in imagination we have extremely high levels of evidenz, but a great many imagined things have no correlatives in the world. and affects come with high levels of evidenz: i cannot doubt that i am joyful or sad when those states come upon me, when awake or in sleep, but also i might not be able to make them evident to you. husserl developed phenomenology in the intellectual climate of neo-kantianism, and within the discipline of philosophy, especially in logic and epistemology. yet he was also aware that less scientific modes of phenomenology had been available since the greeks. he recognized that, in some respects, the philosopher and the poet live in the same neighborhood, although he held that the poet is loath to reduce his or her empirical consciousness all the way to transcendental consciousness. to do so would be to eliminate poetry altogether. similarly, he recognized that poets do not reduce language so that it is pure expression, as philosophers will try to do. to do that would drain language of all the empirical elements that make satisfying poetry, not only euphony but also ambiguity. poets are not cornered by the questions “what?” and “why?” they also ask the question “how?” they are not concerned to establish firm epistemic grounds for 109 lyu anything, although lyric poets in particular are prized for dealing with affects that supply high levels of self-evidence to themselves and, through their art, to others. one shouldn’t think, though, that those high levels of evidenz are simply transmitted in poems. not at all: as soon as someone begins to write of erotic love, that individual feeling becomes entangled in immensely complex themes, modes, and structures that precede an individual poet at the moment of writing. there is primary passivity, in which my earlier experiences become unified with my current experience, and there is secondary passivity, in which i pick up things from the inter-subjective world in which i participate. and that world might be both immense and partial. so if i write a love poem, my feeling of love, for which i might have the highest degree of selfevidence, becomes inflected and deflected by way of poems by catullus, anonymous poets from the han dynasty whom i have read in translation, sonnets by sir philip sidney, and lyrics by juan ramón jiménez. phenomenology allows us to understand better the wide range of intentional relations we have with the world and the beings in it, and it allows us to see also the passive constitutions involved in encounters with those beings. i think literary critics can learn a great deal from husserl, although that does not mean one must become a husserlian of strict observance. his project of grounding philosophy, of making it a science (in the sense of wissenshaft), must be jettisoned, which means that affects, for instance, need not be founded on perceptions. once one loosens up phenomenology a little, as has happened with heidegger, lévinas, derrida, and marion, among others, it becomes a very supple way of understanding literature. at its best, phenomenology offers the possibility of total reading; it is able to incorporate formalist and non-formal responses to a text in the one enterprise. yet it is unlikely in the extreme that there will be a new “phenomenological literary criticism”: the material is far too demanding for anyone without philosophical training to master in a short time. phenomenology can itself ask the question “what is philosophy?” or “what does philosophy do best?” and so re-orient itself. that might be good for thinking about literature, which is hardly going to be enriched by having people formalize lyric poems in propositional or predicate calculus. perhaps it is also good for philosophy. phenomenology is perhaps more open to reflecting on metaphilosophical questions than some contemporary analytic philosophy is, which tends to be committed almost single-mindedly to argumentation. it takes the clarity and rigor of the hard sciences and seeks to apply them to philosophical problems yet, unlike those sciences, is never interview: kevin hart 110 able to come up with any agreed conclusions, in fact seldom able to persuade any one of its number to change his or her mind on an issue; and so, in a surprising way, analytic philosophy becomes a contribution to contemporary nihilism. it makes us doubt the efficacy of reason. bing lyu: choice mentioned in the review of your last book that there is a renewed interest in god among european thinkers due to the recent “theological turn” in continental philosophy.4 and some critics said it is your approach rather than marion’s approach to the relationship between philosophy and theology corresponds to the core concerns of the second generation of the “theological turn” of french phenomenology.5 could you talk about the “theological turn” of phenomenology? kevin hart: i sometimes wonder if there ever was a “theological turn” in phenomenology. even before husserl, before the descriptive phenomenology of the logical investigations, chantepie de la saussaye was developing a phenomenology of religion, and of course hegel, in his own way, was dealing with theological concerns in his phenomenology of spirit (1807). husserl himself talks often in the nachlass of god, a highly philosophical understanding of the deity, to be sure, although he recognized that lev chestov was onto something important when he refused the god made available by philosophy regarded as wissenshaft. in the early 1920s heidegger explored a phenomenology of religious life, and for the first and only time sought to use phenomenology to read the scriptures. that project is being revived only in our own time, although, to be sure, not quite in the key in which heidegger worked. dominique janicaud detected what he called a “theological turn” in french phenomenology in the work of jean-louis chrétien, michel henry, emmanuel lévinas, and jean-luc marion in 1991, and the expression was meant to be derogatory (much as the description la nouvelle théologie was in an earlier generation). the debate was joined by those accused of making illegal moves with phénoménologie et théologie (1992), and it lasted, at least in france, until 1998 when janicaud published his la phénoménologie eclatée. paul ricoeur stood somewhat to the side of the debate, recognizing difficulties of putting classical phenomenology to use in religion at large; and it is worth noting that janicaud exempted lacoste from criticism: his early work, note sur les temps (1990), did not make what janicaud thought to be illegitimate moves in philosophy. for husserl, although god must be the final and most difficult theme of phenomenology, there can be no phenomenological theology in his terms; for god transcends the world, he says in ideas i §58, in 111 lyu a way that exceeds the sort of transcendence with which phenomenology can deal. yet he left open a possibility: that the divine transcendence is always and already in absolute consciousness. we might think of husserl’s remark as a river stone marking a phased counterpart to descartes’s ontological argument in the meditations. so when lévinas began to speak of god and autrui, and marion to evoke revelation as saturation to the second degree, janicaud became very nervous. perhaps his understanding of phenomenology was too narrow to deal with the new interest in the divine. marion and others, by contrast, asked themselves why phenomenality should be limited in the first place, whether to objects or to being. isn’t the proper philosophical procedure to grant the possibility of phenomenality across the board, and then see the different modes of manifestation in the world, no matter what they are or if they are? not that marion, to name the person who became the main representative of the first generation of “the theological turn,” made theological claims under the guise of phenomenology. he has always been clear that he speaks of essences, not actualities, in his analyses of religious events. (even so, his critics become enflamed when they see scripture cited in what appear to be philosophical essays.) the first generation of people associated with the “theological turn” is far from homogeneous. henry and lévinas are miles apart in their understandings of phenomenology, for example. and the second generation of that movement is similarly diverse: emmanuel falque is primarily a philosopher, and i am primarily a theologian, although to be sure we share many interests, not least of all the medieval tradition of contemplatio. yet i am not so sure that talk of generations is all that useful. my first book on the topic, the trespass of the sign, came out with cambridge university press in 1989, seven years after marion’s dieu sans l’être (1982) and eight years before his étant donné (1997). true, my first book engaged with mystical theology, for the most part, and used derrida as a way of attaining a better comprehension of it; and marion has been far more intrigued by general revelation, even when it comes through the spirituality of devotion to an icon, and kept himself at a distance from derrida once he was no longer a student of his. especially in the united states, a version of the “theological turn” continued because of derrida’s explorations of apophatic theology, “religion without religion” and religion at the limits of reason alone. one might say that this was a “theological turn” in derrida, although it took place at the very edge of transcendental phenomenology where husserlian investments in pure phenomenological life interview: kevin hart 112 begin to fail and the border between life and death begins to become divided and equivocal. but although they debated in public, derrida and marion were never centrally engaged in the same issues to do with theology and phenomenology. perhaps marion and i differ most clearly in our understandings of reduction. for marion, it is the “third reduction” that is the most important, the leading back to gegebenheit, whereas what presses on me is what i call the “basilaic reduction.” to my mind, marion continues a thinking of reduction that begins to appear in neo-platonism, and is apparent in the young augustine, and which reaches an extreme version with the third reduction. this is a history of passing from without to within, from transcendence (in one or another sense) to immanence (in one or another sense), even when, as for heidegger and marion, there is no transcendental consciousness but only an empty structure (dasein for heidegger, l’adonné for marion). on the other hand, i propose that jesus of nazareth performs an original mode of reduction, especially in his telling of the parables. one is not led deep within the self or to a structure that stands in place of the “self,” but to an anterior state where the divine call to participate in the kingdom can be heard. bing lyu: when analyzing hopkins’ work in poetry and revelation you conclude by citing husserl’s opinion that god would be “experienced” only in the understanding, which reminds me of augustine’s wisdom that you mentioned once: seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand. people don’t usually associate husserlian phenomenology with god, but he actually talked about god as “limes,” “pol,” “entelechie,” “urfaktizitat,” and so on. so could the existence of god win a place in the realm of phenomenology? kevin hart: the crucial question is what husserl means by “god” and whether this can be correlated with the god who is revealed in the bible. certainly husserl was drawn to think of god early and late in his writing life, and allusions to the deity multiply in the nachlass. at times he seeks to approach god as other by way of empathy, just as he does the human other in the fifth of the cartesian meditations. almost always, though, god for husserl is the “all-consciousness” or “infinite telos,” and anyone approaching the question of god from the bible, not from aristotle or hegel, would find this metaphysical speculation puzzling and more than a little arid. when husserl and chestov first met, husserl responded to the very sharp criticisms that chestov had made of his phenomenology in print. husserl defended himself by pointing to the need to overcome deficiencies in our account of knowledge—to save it from relativism in all of its modern forms— 113 lyu in order to avoid a complete breakdown of confidence with respect to knowledge, an overcoming that would place knowledge on a secure foundation, even if it meant putting god outside our ken, just as kant had done over a century earlier. chestov responded by saying that rather than shore up the rickety structures with firm scaffolding (appeals to evidenz), one should kick them and make them topple, and then perhaps the biblical god could be witnessed once again. i think this is a false division. the task is not to fit the biblical god into a philosophical frame, as has been done time and again since philo of alexandria, or to seek to free theology entirely from philosophy, as ritschl and barth attempted, but to recognize that jesus of nazareth makes god concrete and meaningful in his parables and, more generally, in his life, suffering, death, and resurrection. i don’t think, then, that phenomenology can prove the existence of god, certainly not in any classical sense of “prove.” besides, there are no proofs for the existence of god—neither the ontological argument nor the “five ways” of aquinas—that i find satisfying. (i recall that anselm set his “proof” in the context of a prayer, and i don’t think that aquinas intended the five ways to be proofs but rather glosses on what “god” must mean to anyone who conscientiously uses the word.) phenomenology, however, can remove god from the sphere of the intolerably abstract to concrete situations in our lives, from the meaningless to the meaningful. the parables and acts of jesus show us that god can be concrete and meaningful as father, that we are always and already in a relationship with him, one that jesus makes clear to us. we do not choose to be in relation with god; if one is a son or a daughter one is already in a relationship with a father. rather, we can choose to make something of that relationship, of living coram deo, here and now. it is this way of thinking that, as you say, is close to augustine’s use of isaiah 7: 9 in the vetus latina. only if we begin by regarding god concretely, as made manifest by jesus, can we begin to understand what god asks of us in life. bing lyu: is the phenomenological reduction the first and foremost step when analyzing religious poetry? to what extent can we differentiate theological reduction from philosophical reduction? kevin hart: husserl distinguished six species of reduction, and his 1923–24 lectures on the theory of reduction, along with his voluminous reflections on it in his nachlass, are very rewarding. but they also tend to make reduction seem like a very mysterious operation. in my view, reduction is common. as soon as one begins to write a poem, one has already made a reduction of some sort; one has allowed oneself to be led back to a state anterior to ordinary speech, especially if one interview: kevin hart 114 draws upon meter and figural language. when auden writes, “wandering lost upon the mountains of our choice”6 or geoffrey hill writes “undesirable you may have been, untouchable / you were not,”7 each has already passed from the “natural attitude” to another attitude, call it the “personalistic attitude” or the “phenomenological attitude.” that is, one is allowing phenomena to give themselves without a prior framing in terms of the expectations of the positive sciences, the social sciences or even “common sense”; other logics, other possibilities, other feelings, are opened and may be explored, even if the move away from the natural attitude is really only quite modest. so many modern poems, for example, stay close in their language and logic to the natural attitude only to slip away from it at a certain point in order to disclose something that cannot be satisfactorily thought within that attitude. think of james wright’s short lyric “lying in a hammock at william duffy’s farm in pine island, minnesota”: only with the final line do we shift from one attitude to another, and wright accomplishes this without changing his colloquial voice. this sort of shift away from the natural attitude does not happen in all poetry these days: language poetry, it seems to me, solicits what husserl calls the theoretical attitude; it goes in a direction opposite to that of the phenomenological attitude. much “religious verse” passes from the natural attitude, to be sure, but the most engaging poems we call religious also shift from what i call the “supernatural attitude.” the supernatural attitude is widespread in christianity: it conceives everything to do with the divine as either similar to our world or as a contrast to it. yet god is not other than the world; the very idea makes no sense, since “same” and “other” name a relation within the world, as aristotle saw very clearly in his categories. god would be other than anything that can be contained within the distinction between “same” and “other.” when one passes from the natural or the supernatural attitude, one enters another sphere, sometimes only very briefly, where other pressures, other logics, other delights and anxieties, come into play. i would not wish to distinguish too sharply between philosophical and theological modes of reduction, in part because i think it is misleading overly to theorize reduction. we can find early, non-thematic modes of reduction in augustine, for instance (“do not go abroad. return within yourself. in the inward man dwells truth” he writes in de vere religione.8) and we can see that same tradition figured in slightly different ways in hugh of st victor’s commentary on the celestial hierarchy of pseudo-dionysius and in bonaventure’s de reductione artium ad 115 lyu theologiam. these need to be kept in mind when reading husserl on the theory of reduction, simply for us to remain aware that reduction can occur from varying directions, with different degrees of strength, and leads to different places. what i call “basilaic reduction” occurs primarily in the parables and acts of jesus, but one can also find it in some religious poems when they make us think of an anterior state to living comfortably in “the world” when desire for “the kingdom” was apparent. that desire never goes away; it is always present in the longing for justice and peace, but it gets clouded over by concern with and for “the world,” that stage on which we act out much of our lives. many lyrics in george herbert’s the temple (1633) strike me as having this capacity, and it can be done in all sorts of ways. remember too, though, that one can find it outside lyric poetry, in stories, homilies, movies and songs, even conversations. i have been speaking of writing poetry, for the most part, but reduction occurs also when reading it and when writing about it. here the attentive reader is quietly led by a poem outside the natural attitude cultivated in primary, secondary, and tertiary education. (a movement away from the natural attitude happens even when reading naturalist literature, as roland barthes showed in his s/z (1970), although with other ends in view.) of course, a poem can be read wholly within the natural attitude or even the naturalistic attitude, as happens with some semiotic and structural analyses, or these days by way of “distant reading.” yet if one thinks that poetry helps us to live, that it offers as geoffrey hill says, “a sad and angry consolation”9 (or, one hopes, not always sad and not always angry), then one will allow oneself to be led by a poem beyond the natural attitude. bing lyu: in poetry and revelation you choose both english poets, such as t. s. eliot, g. m. hopkins, and geoffrey hill, and non-english poets, such as philippe jaccottet and eugenio montale, as your sample, poets whose works belong to the modern and contemporary periods and cover multiple western languages. do you intend to indicate the universality of phenomenological method in literary criticism? what characteristic do they own that could highlight the advantage of phenomenology? would you like to talk about your criterion of how to choose an appropriate target for phenomenological criticism? kevin hart: in poetry and revelation i had two main things in mind: to overcome some common prejudices about “religious poetry” and to show how phenomenology, at least as i practice it, can be of help when reading poetry, religious or not. i’ve already said something about the first ambition, but let me add this, using a distinction that derrida drew when writing about one of interview: kevin hart 116 blanchot’s récits in his parages (1986). “religious poetry” is not the name of a genre or sub-genre of poetry; there are poems that participate in religious exploration, which may involve doubt, anxiety, and criticism as much as belief and personal commitment, yet which do not belong to any institutional or religious formation. i think this is more apparent in some of the lyrics of philippe jaccottet and eugenio montale than in the english tradition of lyric poetry. also, i suppose, those chapters serve to show that phenomenology is not restricted to any national literature. classical phenomenology, as practiced by husserl, has nothing to do with reading and writing. his philosophy of language—his desire in the logical investigations to minimize indicative features of language to expressive features—is one index of that. as i have mentioned, heidegger was the first to use phenomenology to read a text: paul’s letters to the thessalonians. to some extent, he also drew upon phenomenology while writing those remarkable essays on german poets in the 1940s. derrida positioned himself at the very limit of transcendental phenomenology where he found new ways of thinking about reading and writing. to my mind, he never abandoned phenomenology but questioned husserl’s uncritical commitments to full presence or self-presence and to conceptions of presence as life. so he expanded the realm of phenomenology very considerably. in the united states, however, derrida’s work, under the rubric of deconstruction, was taken to be opposed or contrary to phenomenology; and that is partly because people did not read his first books with attention, especially his incisive commentary on a book he translated from the german, husserl’s l’origine de la géometrie (1962), and la voix et le phénomène (1967), and partly because phenomenological criticism, as advocated by georges poulet, was all that was known of the conjunction of phenomenology and literary criticism. when derrida came to the states, to speak at a conference at johns hopkins in 1966, his paper “structure, sign, and play in the discourse of the human sciences” dealt a firm blow to structuralism before it had even got to first base here and also, when people started to reflect on what he had said, it demolished the sort of phenomenological criticism that poulet was advocating at hopkins. yet literary criticism learned little or nothing from derrida: “deconstruction” was packaged, by jonathan culler and others, as little more than a set of tricks one could perform with literary texts. bing lyu: poetry and revelation records montale’s opinion what almost all western philosophers and theologians refuse to countenance is that the world is nothing more than an illusion generated by human subjectivity. why do they deny this claim? you find the inspiration of some of montale’s 117 lyu work comes from tolstoy who inherited schelling and fichte’s idea, so from romanticism to modernism, what kind of transformation did the term “subject” experience? does phenomenology give it a proper harbor? kevin hart: phenomenology begins, even before husserl articulates it, with descartes’s meditations and so with the thought of the cogito. with husserl we find consciousness, the very ground of “the subject,” raised to a very high level: transcendental consciousness, he says, is absolute and therefore irreducible. yet with sein und zeit (1927) this idea of the subject, as something calmly viewing the world in a theoretical manner, is pushed aside. heidegger does not offer criticisms of husserl so much as propose another way of thinking of the human being, that is, as dasein. for heidegger, husserl is concerned less with a subject calmly contemplating the world about him than with being preoccupied with one mood among others, tranquility. he draws attention to other moods that come upon us, especially dread and deep boredom, and thereby has his readers look back to kierkegaard and pascal rather than kant and fichte. now i think that heidegger’s treatment of husserl is not quite fair. on the one hand, husserl does revive a mode of contemplatio, most likely without knowing much about its tradition; but, on the other hand, he is very far from proposing phenomenology as calmly reflecting on essences. he is deeply concerned with a crisis coming upon europe, one stemming from different forms of relativism (including species relativism), and as we know he sees its darkest moment in the rise of nazism, and feels the deepest betrayal in heidegger’s endorsement, however temporary and with whatever arrière pensées, of the nazi party. the crisis represented by the rise of hitler and hitlerism was more than philosophical—it was also idolatrous, for one thing, even before we get to talk about economics and national and international politics—but husserl was surely right that the thought of the day, from historicism to philosophy as no more than weltanschauung, contributed to the possibility of unleashing its dark energies. besides, husserl’s concept of the self is far more complex than heidegger allowed: his phenomenology of internal time consciousness yields a more subtle understanding of the self as subject than one might think from just reading ideas i (1913), and of course heidegger tended to disregard husserl on internal time consciousness, rather unfairly, i think. from heidegger to lacoue-labarthe and marion, we can see a progressive weakening of the idea of the self as subject. jean-luc nancy’s who comes after the subject? (1991) offers a interview: kevin hart 118 comprehensive idea of the range of thought in france on the topic. you might say that it is a passage from the subject as ground (by way of cogito (descartes), transcendental unity of apperception (kant) or transcendental consciousness (husserl)) to subjectivity as effect. the emptying of the self as subject is not restricted to french philosophy, however. think, for example, of the oxford philosopher derek parfit whose concept of the self is closer to what one finds in buddhism than anything one might find in the tradition that runs from descartes to husserl. bing lyu: why does jaccottet say that the expression “negative theology” is misused when applied to his writing? you use “iconoclasm” instead of “negative theology” when analyzing his works. is this a consequence of postmodernism? kevin hart: i think philippe jaccottet, much like tomas tranströmer (who says something similar), is far too modest a person to appeal to what must seem to him to be august theological categories or to countenance them with respect to his writing or his religious beliefs. he may well think that reading some of his poems by way of apophatic theology would risk burning them to ashes by having too powerful a lens brought to bear on them. again, i would speak of participating rather than belonging. jaccottet’s poems, especially in airs, do not belong to the discipline of apophatic theology—they do not stand side by side with writings by gregory of nyssa or pseudodionysius the areopagite, for example—but they participate in it. some of jaccottet’s poems bring us to a point where what he wishes to designate exceeds what can be said. this is not because he is speaking of the god of judeo-christianity but because he wishes to attend, as closely as possible, to a singular situation or state. apophaticism comes into play when dealing with either mode of transcendence, that is, with transascendance or transdescendance. (the distinction is jean wahl’s.) much modern writing is concerned with the latter and not the former, but it solicits a counterpart to apophatic theology in order to deal with it. the ineffable can be anterior to phenomena as well as beyond phenomena, and (as jean hyppolite points out in his logique et existence (1953)) it can even be the singular. to my mind, we can speak strictly of apophatic theology only when dealing with the absolutely singular, god, but it is sometimes solicited when a poet merely glimpses something relatively singular (an ermine vanishing in snow, say), understanding that this particular event is unlikely ever to recur in his lifetime. bonnefoy inclines to this view in many poems and essays. 119 lyu iconoclasm is more acceptable to jaccottet because his poetics, unlike bonnefoy’s, are situated in a long tradition of unease with the image. in byzantium there were fierce struggles over icons in the eighth and ninth centuries, long before the reformation, though jaccottet probably gains his distrust of images by way of calvin. bing lyu: i notice the last part of poetry and revelation is entitled “morning knowledge,” which is identical to your last collection of poetry, morning knowledge (2011). what is the meaning of “morning knowledge”? does the expression mean the same thing in both places? kevin hart: i take the expression “morning knowledge” from augustine’s literal commentary on genesis. a very good reader, someone who did not gloss over difficulties in scripture, augustine was puzzled when he read the verse “and there was evening and there was morning, one day” since, for him, day begins in the morning and ends with the close of evening. (he did not know that the jews think of day beginning in the evening.) so he sought an explanation for the phrasing. like other fathers of the church, augustine was deeply interested in angelic cognition, and his explanation turns on how angels received knowledge of creation. at first, he tells us, god showed the angels creation according to what we would call the natural sciences, how everything acted perfectly with respect to the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology, and of course the angels were in awe of the order, balance, and beauty of what god had achieved. this is called “evening knowledge” because it was the first knowledge that the angels received of creation. then, however, so the story goes, god showed the angels how everything he had created is suffused with his love; and, on seeing this, the angels fell down in adoration of the lord god. this second knowledge of creation, awareness as thomas aquinas beautifully puts it that god loved the world into being, is known as “morning knowledge.” the final section of poetry and revelation is concerned with poems that are explicitly sacred, poems about mary the mother of jesus, or about silence and poetry, and so i wanted to call it “morning knowledge.” i called my last individual collection of poems morning knowledge (2011) for two reasons. first, as the title poem indicates, my father died in the early hours of the morning: i learned that he had passed away in brisbane about 3 am, the news coming to me a little later, about 1:30 pm (est) in charlottesville. half an hour before the telephone rang, i had felt a terrible coldness blow through my bones; and so, when i took the call, i realized that event coincided with his passing. some of the poems in morning knowledge are elegies for my father, and there are interview: kevin hart 120 more of them in my new book, barefoot (2018); but there are also poems that affirm our sensuous engagement with life, and so i quoted as an epigraph david henry thoreau’s question in his journal for july 16 1851, “have you knowledge of the morning?” (that is, do you know what it is to be alive?) also, morning knowledge has poems that are prayers, that celebrate divine love, and so the expression “morning knowledge” was appropriate in that way as well. notes 1. beth ritter-conn, review of kingdoms of god, anglican theological review 4 (2015), 695. 2. harold bloom, the western canon: the books and school of the ages (new york: harcourt brace, 1994), 10. 3. maurice merleau-ponty, signs (evanston, il: northwestern university press, 1964), 157– 158; quoted in hart, poetry and revelation 79. 4. c. s. seymour, review of kingdoms of god, choice: current reviews for academic libraries 11 (2015), 1856. 5. kevin hart is the editor of jean-luc marion: the essential writings (new york: fordham university press, 2013), which marks marion’s status as france’s most influential living philosopher. see bradley onishi, “between a saint and a phenomenologist: hart’s theological criticism of marion,” sophia 1 (2017), 15. 6. w. h. auden, “a time of war: sonnet 27,” in auden and christopher isherwood, journey to a war (london: faber and faber, 1939). 7. geoffrey hill, “september song,” new and collected poems, 1952–1992 (boston: houghton mifflin, 1994). 8. saint augustine, “of true religion,” earlier writings, ed. and trans. john h. s. burleigh (philadelphia: westminster, 1953), 262. 9. geoffrey hill, “148,” in the triumph of love (boston: houghton mifflin, 1998). microsoft word santos prooftext.docx [expositions 13.1 (2019) 20–30] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 integrating non-profit leadership and social entrepreneurship into catholic business education nicholas j.c. santos, s.j. marquette university here is the twitter version of my thesis: if catholic business schools are to prepare their students for careers in non-profit and social entrepreneurial organizations as well as for-profit organizations, it will result in catholic business education becoming more catholic. and here is a longer version: integrating non-profit leadership and social entrepreneurship education into the traditional business school curricula enhances the value offering of the catholic business school. however, given that many non-catholic and secular business schools have stellar programs in non-profit leadership and social entrepreneurship, what is the distinctive rationale, if any, that we as catholic business schools might have for such integration? here, my answer is that the integration of non-profit leadership and social entrepreneurship education into traditional business education enables the catholic business school to provide a business education that is better aligned with catholic social thought (cst), particularly with respect to its vision of economic activity as contributing to the common good. so, let me begin with some context. we live at a time of amazing technological, medical, and scientific advancement. we have nanotechnologies, self-driving cars, robotics, machine learning, blockchain technologies, etc. and yet, the sad truth that confronts us is that a vast majority of the world have no access to these advancements and in fact wage a daily battle for survival. in 2017, oxfam issued a report stating that eight men owned the same amount of wealth as the bottom half of the world’s population.1 this level of inequality is undoubtedly staggering, but what is even more discomforting is the substantial number of people who have no access to clean water, sanitation, nutritious food, healthcare, transportation, etc. consider some of these statistics:  about 5.4 million children under the age of five die each year, roughly about 15,000 deaths per day. more than half of these are from conditions that could 21 santos be prevented or treated with simple interventions. about 45% of these deaths are from malnutrition.2  an estimated 2.8 billion people do not have access to clean cooking facilities. about 2.5 billion rely on solid biomass. 120 million use kerosene, and 170 million use coal; both of these known to cause health problems.3  as of 2015, 2.3 billion people lacked a basic sanitation service with about 892 million practicing open defecation.4  as of 2016, 1.1 billion people or 14% of the global population did not have access to electricity.5  according to the united states interagency council on homelessness, as of january 2018, pennsylvania had an estimated 13,512 people experiencing homelessness on any given day.6 those of us involved in catholic business education cannot be unmoved by this situation. and yet, the dominant business education paradigm, which is aimed at preparing our students for careers in for-profit organizations, does not allow us adequately to do anything about the dire situation of the world around us except in a very peripheral way: service-learning projects, immersion experiences, faculty consultations, etc. let me illustrate this point with an excerpt from the nobel prize-winning economist milton friedman, in a much-debated article that appeared in the new york times magazine dated september 13, 1970 and titled “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.” friedman begins that article thus: when i hear businessmen speak eloquently about the “social responsibilities of business in a free-enterprise system,” i am reminded of the wonderful line about the frenchman who discovered at the age of 70 that he had been speaking prose all his life. the businessmen believe that they are defending free enterprise when they declaim that business is not concerned “merely” with profit but also with promoting desirable “social” ends; that business has a “social conscience” and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of integrating non-profit leadership and social entrepreneurship 22 reformers. in fact they are—or would be if they or anyone else took them seriously—preaching pure and unadulterated socialism. businessmen who talk this way are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades.7 friedman ends his article with a quote from his 1962 book capitalism and freedom:8 there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud. the relentless pursuit of profit maximization that friedman promotes unfortunately has been the dominant paradigm of business education for the last many decades. in the wake of the corporate scandals at the turn of the millennium, the late professor sumantra ghoshal wrote an insightful piece that was published posthumously in 2005, placing the blame for many of the worst excesses of management practices on the ideas and theories that emerged from business school academics. ghoshal laments that “by propagating ideologically inspired amoral theories, business schools have actively freed their students from any sense of moral responsibility.”9 ghoshal also approvingly cites thomas kochan’s observation that the root cause of the scandals was the overemphasis placed on maximizing shareholder value without any regard for other stakeholders.10 sadly, even a decade after ghoshal’s assessment, ethics scandals continue to rock the corporate world. consider the emissions scandal of the german automaker volkswagen,11 or the faulty airbags case of the japanese airbag manufacturer takata,12 or the fake accounts scandal of the u.s. banking company wells fargo.13 yet, despite calls to reform business education, the dominant model remains focused on profit maximization and shareholder primacy. this is not to say that many business schools have not incorporated courses on business ethics and corporate social responsibility (csr) into their curriculum. but as ghoshal rightly pointed out, such an approach is not enough.14 what is needed is a shift in the focus of business education. at the annual macromarketing conference in 2016, dr. tina facca-miess from john carroll university and i delivered a presentation titled “a social entrepreneurship-oriented business 23 santos education” in which we proposed moving the focus of business education from the traditional profit-based firm-centric model to an outcome-based society-centric one. our position is that, as long as the metric of success is the profitability of the individual firm, all attempts at incorporating ethics and csr will be futile. instead, the metric of success should be the positive social outcomes in terms of the social problems that the firm is attempting to address. this proposition is not as outlandish as it might appear. consider the growth of benefit (or b) corporations over the last many years in the u.s. these are for-profit companies that: “(1) have an expanded purpose beyond maximizing share value to explicitly include general and specific public benefit; (2) are required to consider/balance the impact of their decision not only on shareholders but also on their stakeholders; and (3) are required to make available to the public, except in delaware, an annual benefit report that assesses their overall social and environmental performance against a third party standard.”15 pennsylvania is one of more than 30 states that has legislation supporting benefit corporations. consider also other movements such as conscious capitalism, conscientious capitalism, servant leadership, economy of communion companies, community interest companies, etc. friedman accused businessmen who promoted the idea of business as having social ends or a social conscience as advocating socialism. perhaps business education has shied away from considering the social ends of business for fear of being labeled as socialist. but this can no longer be the case. consider one of the trends that deloitte identified in its survey of companies across the world in 2018: being “social” in the sense of recognizing that the company operates in an ecosystem consisting of customers, stakeholders, communities, business partners, and employees.16 a remarkable 77% of respondents to the survey rated “citizenship and social impact” as critical or important, though nearly 50% also claimed that executives were not ready to deliver. the value offering of incorporating non-profit leadership and social entrepreneurship into the regular business school curriculum is that it interjects a common good focus that both these fields have and that traditional business education lacks. consider the definition of social entrepreneurship proposed by professor paul light: an effort towards “sustainable, large-scale change through pattern-breaking ideas in what or how governments, non-profits, and businesses do to address significant social problems.”17 my own definition of a social entrepreneurial organization is “one that aims at co-creating social and/or ecological value by providing innovative and lasting solutions to social and/or environmental problems through a process of empowerment integrating non-profit leadership and social entrepreneurship 24 and in a financially sustainable manner.”18 benjamin huybrechts and alex nicholls point out that there are three features of social entrepreneurship that are common to most definitions.19 the first is the primacy of social and environmental outcomes over profit maximization. the second is an innovative mindset that is manifested in new organizational models and processes and in new ways of framing societal challenges to arrive at new solutions. the third feature is market orientation. according to the national center for charitable statistics, approximately 1.56 million nonprofits were registered with the internal revenue service (irs) in 2015, an increase of about 10.4% from 2005.20 while non-profit organizations have existed for a number of years, social entrepreneurial organizations are a more recent development. unfortunately, there is not a clear irs designation for social entrepreneurial organizations; hence, counting them is tricky. nevertheless, there is no doubt that the number of these organizations is substantially large. given the number of non-profit and social entrepreneurial organizations in the u.s. as well as globally, starting degrees in non-profit leadership and social entrepreneurship makes sense from a business perspective. however, there are stellar programs in many non-catholic and secular universities in both non-profit leadership and social entrepreneurship. for instance, the u.s. news & world report rankings in 2019 for schools with the best non-profit management programs did not have a single catholic school in the top twenty.21 the top five schools were indiana university, bloomington; syracuse university; purdue university; university of southern california; and the university of minnesota. likewise, some of the schools offering social entrepreneurship degrees include duke university, babson college, and american university.22 the increased offerings in non-profit leadership and social entrepreneurship courses is also driven by a shift in student preferences. in a paper published in the journal of jesuit business education in 2013, david mccallum and laura horian point out that business school graduates increasingly are concerned not just about getting a job, but also about making a difference in the world.23 these students want to be part of transformative change that leverages resources to make a difference for a greater number of people, particularly the poor and marginalized. the growth of ashoka-u, an initiative of ashoka, the world’s largest network of social entrepreneurs, is indicative of student interest (www.ashokau.org). since its launch in 2008, ashoka-u now recognizes about forty-five campuses across the world as changemaker campuses. marquette university was one of the early changemaker campuses, attaining changemaker status in 2010. 25 santos so, there are two main motivating factors for incorporating non-profit leadership and social entrepreneurship education into business schools. first, it increases career opportunities. second, students are not interested in an exclusive focus on the financial bottom line and are concerned about environmental and social issues. while a number of business schools are influenced by these two factors in opting for non-profit leadership or social entrepreneurship programs, i think that catholic business schools should consider these as opportunities for redefining traditional business education rather than just following the pack in starting programs or degrees in non-profit leadership and/or social entrepreneurship. let me elaborate this point. in a paper published ten years ago in the journal of catholic higher education, stephen porth, john mccall, and joseph diangelo assessed the state of business education at catholic colleges and universities. they used a two-pronged research method. the first was a survey that was sent to the heads of the business schools in all the 169 catholic universities and colleges in the united states, which resulted in forty-two responses for a 25% response rate. the second prong was an analysis of the websites of the population being studied. the conclusion reached by porth and colleagues was that business education at catholic colleges and universities was not sufficiently distinctive. they proposed that two concepts from cst could enable distinctive student outcomes: respect for the dignity of the human person and the purpose of business as oriented towards the common good.24 however, as michael naughton at the university of st. thomas in minnesota points out, the integration of cst into business education is a complex undertaking. naughton highlights three dimensions of this complexity. the first is the catholic intellectual tradition itself, which has theological, moral, and philosophical elements. the second is “the increasing complexity of managing and leading business institutions within a global environment and the growing specialization of various disciplines in business education.” and the third is “the situational complexity of different catholic universities around the world with their own unique cultures, histories, geographic locations, and their increasingly pluralistic environments.”25 in a faculty survey done in the fall of 2014 on cst in catholic business schools in the u.s., andrew gustafson and matthew mccarville from creighton university found that, at most of the forty-three schools that responded, only a very small minority of faculty were considered versed in cst.26 surely this should be considered a problem. the pontifical council for justice and peace, which is now part of the dicastery for integral human development, published not quite a decade integrating non-profit leadership and social entrepreneurship 26 ago a reflection entitled “vocation of the business leader.” deep in the text, in §86, the document states: business students are informed by powerful theories and highly trained in technical skills; but some unfortunately leave university without the ethical and spiritual formation that would ensure that their insights and skills are used for the welfare of others and the support of the common good. indeed, some leave with a formation that predisposes them to live the divided life rather than giving them the fundamentals for an integrated life.27 one way of overcoming this problem might be to have faculty training in catholic social teaching. i am, however, skeptical of this approach being very successful. a more successful approach might be to begin by refocusing the purpose of our business education towards training our students to be successful in non-profit and social entrepreneurial organizations, as well in for-profit organizations. such a refocusing would introduce considerations of the common good, human dignity, and solidarity into the curriculum, without having to mandate remedial training in cst. of course, leaders of catholic business schools would do well to be guided, or at least inspired, by cst in re-orienting the curriculum! it is significant in this regard that the international association of jesuit universities (iaju), together with the international association of jesuit business schools (iajbs) and colleagues in jesuit business education (cjbe), has embarked on an ambitious project of both envisioning an alternative paradigm of business and economic development and providing students at jesuit business schools with an alternative paradigm of business education. the iaju was founded in july 2018 and has more than two hundred members. one of its six priority areas is environmental and economic justice.28 while the iajbs and the cjbe have regularly featured topics of sustainability and ethics at their annual meetings, these have not made a significant impact on business education. it is to be hoped the iaju joint project will lead to fundamental change. i conclude with a quotation from the document “considerations for an ethical discernment regarding some aspects of the present economic-financial system,” released by the congregation for the doctrine of the faith and the dicastery for promoting integral human development in may 2018. in §17, the document states: 27 santos what is demanded is an initiative, above all, for the renewal of humanity in order to reopen the horizons towards that abundance of values which alone permits the human person to discover himself or herself, and to construct a society that is a hospitable and inclusive dwelling place with room for the weakest, and where wealth is used for the benefit of all—places where it is beautiful for human beings to live and easy for them to have hope.29 notes 1. oxfam briefing paper, “an economy for the 99%,” january 2017, https://wwwcdn.oxfam.org/s3fs-public/file_attachments/bp-economy-for–99-percent–160117-en.pdf, accessed april 4, 2019. 2. world health organization, “children: reducing mortality,” september 19, 2018, https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/children-reducing-mortality, accessed april 4, 2019. 3. international energy agency, “energy access outlook 2017,” october 19, 2017, https:// www.iea.org/access2017/, accessed april 4, 2019. 4. unicef, “universal access to sanitation—unicef data,” july 2017, https:// data.unicef.org/topic/water-and-sanitation/sanitation/, accessed april 4, 2019. 5. international energy agency, “energy access database,” https://www.iea.org/ energyaccess/database/, accessed april 4, 2019. 6. united states interagency council on homelessness, “pennsylvania homelessness statistics,” https://www.usich.gov/homelessness-statistics/pa/, accessed april 4, 2019. 7. milton friedman, “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits,” the new york times magazine september 13, 1970, 33, https://graphics8.nytimes.com/ packages/pdf/business/miltonfriedman1970.pdf, accessed on april 4, 2019. integrating non-profit leadership and social entrepreneurship 28 8. milton friedman, capitalism and freedom (chicago: university of chicago press, 2002), 133. 9. sumantra ghoshal, “bad management theories are destroying good management practices,” academy of management learning & education 4.1 (2005): 75–91, at 76. 10. ibid., 81. see thomas a. kochan, “addressing the crisis in confidence in corporations: root causes, victims and strategies for reform,” academy of management executive 16.3 (2002): 139–141. 11. russell hotten, “volkswagen: the scandal explained,” bbc december 10, 2015, http://www.bbc.com/news/business–34324772, accessed april 4, 2019. 12. hiroko tabuchi and danielle ivory, “takata discarded evidence of airbag ruptures as early as 2000,” new york times february 12, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/13/ business/takata-discarded-evidence-of-airbag-ruptures-as-early-as–2000.html?_r=0, accessed april 4, 2019. 13. matt levine, “fake accounts still haunt wells fargo,” bloomberg october 13, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018–10–23/fake-accounts-still-hauntwells-fargo, accessed april 4, 2019. 14. ghoshal 88. 15. see “what is a benefit corporation?” b lab, 2019, https://benefitcorp.net/faq, accessed april 4, 2019. 16. josh bersin, “the rise of the social enterprise: a new paradigm for business,” forbes april 3, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2018/04/03/the-rise-of-the-socialenterprise-a-new-paradigm-for-business/#6db75f0271f0, accessed april 4, 2019. 17. paul c. light, “reshaping social entrepreneurship,” stanford social innovation review (fall 2006): 47–51, at 50, http://www.nyu.edu/social-entrepreneurship/news_events_ resources/pdf/paul_light.pdf, accessed april 4, 2019. 29 santos 18. nicholas j.c. santos, s.j., “social entrepreneurship that truly benefits the poor: an integrative justice approach,” journal of management for global sustainability 2 (2013): 31–62, at 39, https://epublications.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1136& context=market_fac, accessed april 4, 2019. 19. benjamin huybrechts and alex nicholls, “social entrepreneurship: definitions, drivers, and challenges,” in social entrepreneurship and social business: an introduction and discussion with case studies, eds. c.k. volkmann, k. ernst, and k.o. tokarski (wiesbaden: springer gabler, 2012), 31–48, at 33. 20. brice mckeever, “the nonprofit sector in brief,” national center for charitable statistics, january 3, 2019, https://nccs.urban.org/project/nonprofit-sector-brief, accessed april 4, 2019. 21. u.s. news & world report, “nonprofit management programs,” 2019, https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-public-affairs-schools/nonprofitmanagement-rankings, accessed april 4, 2019. 22. giselle weybrecht, “how business schools are creating social entrepreneurs,” aacsb best business schools’ blog, october 11, 2016 https://bestbizschools.aacsb.edu/blog/ 2016/october/business-schools-creating-social-entrepreneurs, accessed april 4, 2019. 23. david c. mccallum, s.j., and laura horian, “a leadership education model for jesuit business schools,” journal of jesuit business education 4/1 (2013): 37–52. 24. stephen j. porth, john j. mccall, and joseph a. diangelo, “business education at catholic universities: current status and future directions,” journal of catholic higher education 28.1 (2009): 3–22, at 10. 25. michael naughton, “a complex mission: integration of catholic social tradition with business education,” journal of catholic higher education 28.1 (2009): 23–44, at 25. 26. andrew b. gustafson and matthew mccarville, “catholic social thought in catholic business schools in the u.s. today: a survey and conclusions,” journal of religion and integrating non-profit leadership and social entrepreneurship 30 business ethics 4 (2017): 1–31 (article 2), https://via.library.depaul.edu/cgi/ viewcontent.cgi?article=1105&context=jrbe, accessed april 4, 2019. 27. pontifical council for justice and peace, “vocation of the business leader: a reflection,” 4th ed., november 2014, §86, https://www.stthomas.edu/media/catholicstudies/center/ ryan/publications/publicationpdfs/vocationofthebusinessleaderpdf/pontificalcouncil_4. pdf, accessed april 4, 2019. 28. international association of jesuit universities, “environmental and economic justice,” https://iaju.org/working-groups/environmental-and-economic-justice, accessed april 11, 2019. 29. congregation for the doctrine of the faith and the dicastery for promoting integral human development, “‘oeconomicae et pecuniariae quaestiones’: considerations for an ethical discernment regarding some aspects of the present economic-financial system,” may 17, 2018, §17, https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/bollettino/pubblico/2018/05/ 17/180517a.html, accessed april 4, 2019. microsoft word long prooftext.docx [expositions 13.1 (2019) 81–92] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 humanizing economics theologically: mary hirschfeld’s aquinas and the market d. stephen long southern methodist university since publishing divine economy: theology and the market in 20001 i have found myself engaged in many conversations, debates, conferences, and seminars with economists. these conversations almost always bear a family resemblance. at some point, the economist will critique the moral and theological considerations brought to bear on economics by saying something like, “you theologians and ethicists are naïve and utopian. you do not understand how markets work and while your concerns are well intended the consequences of implementing them will be disastrous to the poor that you intend to help.” whether the issue be rent controls; a just, livable wage: a wealth tax; or criticisms of economic concepts like scarcity, opportunity costs, and the marginal rationality that undergirds economics as a discipline, the arguments are nearly always the same. if theologians and ethicists adopted marginalist rationality, which some economists use to explain nearly everything, then they would not be so naïve and come to adopt the economist’s point of view. this all too familiar economist’s critique begs the question because the issue is whether one should adopt the economist’s point of view, and the “should” here is intentional. it questions one significant defense many economists make of their discipline when moral or theological questions are put to it. they are just giving us the facts; theirs is a positive science and while we need normative sciences that attend to values, the economists’ data and rational models provide neutral, arms-length analyses of the costs involved to those values. the economic prescriptions, however, that result from this conversation are also predictable. the only way to help the poor is more economic growth unhindered by well-intended regulations. let the market do its work, and in some distant future, we will reduce poverty, increase standards of living, bring in the wealth of nations or get to that three-day week work keynes promised us nearly a century ago. but these prescriptions resulting from marginalist rationality are more a matter of “should” than “is.” they are normative political and economic judgments. if that is the case, then the rationality theologians humanizing economics theologically 82 and ethicists are asked to adopt is not so innocent. it already imports moral and theological evaluations into the construction of the discipline. it asks us to abandon forms of theological and moral reasoning and view the world through marginalist rationality. these conversations are so predictable that they are tiresome, which is why mary l. hirschfeld’s aquinas and the market: toward a humane economy2 is such a breath of fresh air. when theologians and ethicists question the basic form of practical reasoning that much of economics and contemporary business practice assumes, they are easily dismissed with, “but you don’t understand economics.” (i’ve also discovered that business persons use a similar argument against economists, “but you have never run a business.”) no one can dismiss hirschfeld on similar grounds. a harvard ph.d. in economics, who taught it for fifteen years, hirschfeld found herself dissatisfied with aspects of her discipline, converted to catholicism, and shifted into a theological vocation. she left a tenured teaching position to pursue a master’s degree and ph.d. in moral theology at the university of notre dame, completing her second dissertation under the supervision of the well-known moral theologian jean porter on the relationship between thomas aquinas and neoliberal economics. (her first dissertation was supervised by lawrence summers and jeffrey g. williamson.) her 2018 publication is the fruit of a journey that began in 1989 with her ph.d. in economics and followed by eight years of study in theology. it is a splendid work, the best book on theological economics available in english. in fact, along with kathryn tanner’s christianity and the new spirit of capitalism3, those of us invested in the conversation between theology and economics now have some of the best resources available for consideration. these two works deserve to be read in tandem. tanner’s and hirschfeld’s works offer similarities and contrasts that should be the state of the question for theological economics today. i will conclude this review with some suggestions on what that state might be. hirschfeld’s dissatisfaction with economics and her conversion to theology does not appear to have been some damascus road experience. in fact, her story is not one of conversion from economics to theology. her original attraction to the scientific rigor of economics and its potential to contribute to human flourishing remains very much reflected in her criticisms of economics. she does not dismiss economics and finds some of the criticisms levied against it to be either misunderstandings or satisfactorily addressed by economists. she takes us through a number of these inadequate criticisms. first, the problem is not with the economist’s anthropology, the assumption of homo economicus who correlates reason with rational choice models. for 83 long hirschfeld, this anthropology and model are more or less obvious. they tell us nothing more than that “people efficiently calculate how best to achieve their desired ends.” here is not a reason for dissatisfaction; on occasion, we all make such calculations. second, the criticism that rational choice theory fails because its modeling assumes agents are fully informed misses the point of economic modeling. that human agents lack omniscience poses no problem because rational choice can still model human action sufficiently while recognizing that people will always “lack information.” rational choice is a species of formal practical reasoning. third, the criticism that the predictive modeling economists make through “complicated mathematical formulations” does not correlate well with everyday reality misses how economists do their work. their abstract and formal form of practical reasoning seeks little more than to predict as best as possible future decisions. fourth, nor does it matter that people “make systematic errors in judgment.” in other words, contra rational choice theory people do not always act in their own interest. while this is true, economics has means for taking it into account. if theologians or ethicists critique economics for any of the above reasons, hirschfeld suggests, their critiques lack justification. the strength of economics, she tells us, is “its ability to map a wide range of motivations into formally identical mathematical equations” that can explain both the actions of bernie madoff and mother theresa (41–42). economic models that explain madoff’s or mother theresa’s actions continue to attract her, but economics’ strength is also its limitation. the inability to distinguish between madoff and mother theresa disillusioned her. that economics remains “silent” about the ends its formal, abstract version of practical reasoning serves led to her dissatisfaction. the criticisms noted above, then, are not completely misguided. they reflect an inadequacy not only with economics but more importantly with the political and economic structures that they assume. she writes: “the resilience of critiques about the excessive materialism and injustice of modern market economies reflects the incoherence of a society that de facto treats the instrumental good of economic prosperity as the highest common good” (3). the confusion of these two goods, and the inability for modern political arrangements to identify the good that the instrumental good of economics serves, entails that the limited ends its formal, practical rationality should serve has no limits. the problem, then, is not economics per se but that it has no end that would properly limit it. its version of practical reasoning has a role in seeking the highest common good, but without proper limits it takes on the role. it cannot function well as the only form of practical reasoning. humanizing economics theologically 84 having identified her dis-satisfaction with rational choice theory, hirschfeld’s next two steps point first to theology and then to economics. she begins chapter one with jesus’s words that one cannot serve both god and money (matt 6:24). she does not give us an apology as to why we should begin with scripture. her work is unapologetically theological. the difference theology brings to economics is that it names the ends for human flourishing. for this reason, theology should be the “dominant partner” in any conversation between theology and economics (3). hirschfeld asks if this conversation has yet been done well. if it has, of course, there would be no reason for her work. she could simply point in the direction of others and tell the reader to look into their work. i am delighted that she points to my own work and uses it well to present three approaches to the relationship between theology and economics. first, economics is the “dominant partner” in the conversation. second, there is a “complementary” relationship between them, and third, theology is privileged as an “independent lens” to evaluate economics (9). one of the highest recommendations of hirschfeld’s argument i could give is that i find my own work ably presented by her. this recommendation is not because she simply points to my work as the way forward. she thinks that i, and kathryn tanner, have the proper disposition to make theology the dominant partner but fail to execute it. chapter one quickly sets forth the state of the question on the relation between theology and economics, acknowledging as many of us have that the conversation between them is primarily one-sided. theologians read and examine economics. economists seldom sense any need to return the favor. i have no idea if hirschfeld’s argument will generate a more interesting two-sided conversation, but the richness of her arguments provides reason for hope. although she is unapologetically theological, her book is written for both theologians and economists. the “fundamental dilemma” of theology and economics is that if theology is to set the proper limits for the economists’ unlimited, formal version of practical reasoning, theology would have to be granted a privileged role. my and tanner’s work sought to do this, but we are too opposed to economics. she cites a central text that structures my 2000 publication in which i represent my preferred approach, “the residual tradition,” in opposition to marginalist rationality. she finds my work too oppositional and offers this critique: “the problem is that capitalism is too complex to be either embraced or rejected whole-heartedly” (17–18). at first, i thought this was a misunderstanding because my critique was of marginalism not capitalism in general (i originally titled my 2000 work out of the margins, which was changed—and rightly so—by the editors), but 85 long as i read further, i came to agree with her critique. she would agree with me that marginalist rationality defines economics as a discipline. she would agree with me that it has taken on too large a role in contemporary culture. whereas i sought an alternative to it without conceding it any place in theology she seeks a proper place for it by incorporating it within aquinas’s practical reasoning. her ingenious argument is that the closest approximation to marginalist rationality is what thomas recognized human agents share with animal agents. both act from incentives. marginalism, then, has a role but a limited one. by refusing to grant it this limited role, i left marginalist rationality to its own devices. she adds, “long, ironically, ends up ceding too much power to economic thought when he seeks out an approach which is simply in opposition to it” (18). i would agree. oppositional discourses tend to collude with what they oppose. while i think her critique of me is valid, i was less convinced of her critique of tanner. she agrees with tanner that the competitive logic of economics does not name an “effectual truth of human nature” but a contingent social practice. yet tanner’s noncompetitive “economy of grace” concerns non-scarce “spiritual goods” and ignores the scarcity of material goods. she neglects an adequate economic model of “rivalry in consumption.” adopting her role as economist, hirschfeld writes, “if i eat the apple, you cannot also eat that apple.” while that is a truism and i would add an undeniable metaphysical claim—two temporal, material goods cannot be in the same place at the same time—it is less a compelling critique of tanner because it does not address any reasonable context within which someone would eat an apple at the expense of others. there is no reason why a humane economy grounded in the virtues would be anything other than deeply critical of someone who coming upon a single apple decided to eat it herself rather than sharing it. it is always possible to cut the apple into pieces and share it non-competitively. hirschfeld makes this very argument later in her work in a compelling discussion of virtue as the perfection of a disposition. here she also draws on the desire for food and how those desires need to be properly habituated. she writes, “as a child i wanted all the candy for myself. as an adult i really could not enjoy the candy if i did not offer to share some with those around me” (103). should not the same be said of eating apples? tanner’s point is not about the metaphysics of a universe in which only a single apple exists. her concern is how we describe what are contingent social realities of production and distribution. much as adam smith begins the wealth of nations with people who find themselves in a pinmaking factory without any consideration for how they got there—what convinced them to move humanizing economics theologically 86 off the commons to spend their days performing a single operation?—hirschfeld’s example foregoes any description of the production and distribution of the apple. it is just there to be eaten in its entirety by one at the expense of the other. but this does not describe well apple-eating. from where did the apple come? if someone owns the apple tree from which the apple came, and you cannot eat that apple except under the conditions defined by the market relations within which the owner buys and sells, then the fact that one person eats the apple and others do not reveals very little about “rivalry in consumption.” if the profits for eating the apple primarily accrue to shareholders who sell the apple on a global market for a price that exceeds what the apple pickers can command as a wage because their comparative advantage is nothing but their labor, then the fact that someone eats the apple in pennsylvania and someone does not eat the apple in china tells us more about contingent social realities to which alternatives could and should be made. setting forth “contrasts” in these circumstances does not let economics “set the agenda” (18). it asks for imaginative thought about alternative possibilities to contingent social realities. perhaps hirschfeld would agree with the much of the above criticism. the purpose of the first chapter is less to set out her theological economics and more to critique theologians who set theology and economics in opposition. she concludes the first chapter by pointing in the direction of the difference thomas aquinas makes for rational choice theory. it is not diametrically opposed to thomas’s practical reasoning, but his version sets marginalist rationality within a more humane and complex version. thomas agrees with modern economists that “the human quest for happiness involves a longing for more.” his disagreement is twofold. first, the “infinite desire” human agents possess cannot be satisfied through the accumulation of finite goods; it can only “rest” in god. second, happiness is not the “satisfaction of desires” but a “perfection” (24–25) of them. she will return to these important points when she constructs a thomistic “humane economy” in chapters three through seven. before engaging in that constructive work, she turns in chapter two to “the perspectives of economists on their central model of human behavior, the rational choice model” (35). hirschfeld subjects three “key features” of economics to critical examination. the first is its “distinctive concept of practical rationality” based on homo economicus. as previously noted, hirschfeld is less concerned about homo economicus than most theological and ethical critics. likewise, she acknowledges a role for the economist’s practical rationality. only when this anthropology and its reasoning are placed within the second and third features that she examines 87 long does it go awry. the second feature is a sharp distinction between positive and normative economics. she tips us off in the preface that she was dissatisfied with this distinction when she tells us, “one of the core arguments of this book is that economics is not value neutral” (xviii). economics fails to be value neutral because the role “efficiency” plays. efficiency depends on the “equation of a consumer’s willingness to pay with her marginal benefit and the seller’s willingness to sell with his marginal cost.” the marginal benefit is the “utility function” and a dilemma arises at this point. on the one hand, the utility function is nothing more than “consumer preferences.” on the other hand, the efficiency of the market serves the purpose of the consumer’s “well-being.” thus, we are left with a tautology that what the agent desires or prefers constitutes the agent’s well-being (48). equating well-being with desires or preferences is neither value neutral nor reasonable, especially when it is placed within a third key feature in economics that “wants are unbounded” (36). if wants have no limit and are at the same time the basis for well-being, then there can be no rest, no end to our consumption, no adequate satisfaction even of our preferences. hirschfeld names well the consequence of combining these three features of economic activity. “if there is no theoretical content limiting what can constitute all-things-considered preferences, we are left with a tautology: when people act purposively they do so in a way that seems best to them” (59). that is not high praise for homo economicus and his practical reasoning. economics cannot claim its innocence with respect to having “strong ethical and metaphysical commitments,” and those commitments do not lead to human flourishing (67). having made a compelling case for the limitations of the theological and ethical criticisms brought to bear on economics in chapter one, and the limitations of the practical reasoning undergirding economics including its putative ethical and metaphysical innocence in chapter two, hirschfeld begins her constructive argument for a thomistic theological economics in chapter three. chapters three and four compare and contrast the practical reasoning of aquinas with that of economics. chapter three does so by attending to the “metaphysical backdrop” for thomas’s “distinctively human exercise of practical reason.” chapter four attends to “virtue and prudence” for that same exercise. hirschfeld places thomas’s practical reasoning within the “perfection of our being.” it is the metaphysics necessary for thomas’s practical reasoning and it exceeds the capacity for the rational choice model to render intelligible. her argument is that thomas’s practical reason is sufficiently “capacious” to accommodate rational choice as a lesser form, but rational choice is incapable of accommodating thomistic practical reasoning. in other words, if humanizing economics theologically 88 thomas is correct about our teleological ordering, then the happiness for which we act will never be satisfied through maximizing utility. the latter is an “unbounded quest for more.” because our true end is the beatific vision, “an enjoyment of the infinite good, which is god,” the economists’ model has some plausibility. both are oriented “toward an infinite good.” yet the difference between them is decisive. for the economist’s model, the infinite good is quantitative and extended (80). for this reason, its model always requires more, more growth, more consumption. it cannot be satisfied until everything is consumed. she hints toward but does not “take up” questions of environmental sustainability. the logic of her critique, however, finds her making common cause with pope francis’s laudato si in questioning the “energy-intensive lifestyles” driving modern production (152–153, 160). chapter four opens with an acknowledgement that the perfection of the human being is “beyond our natural capacities” (97). perfection is found in god and thus requires more than the acquired virtues; it involves the theological ones as well. she briefly discusses the contested relationship between our temporal and eternal happiness in thomas, a relationship that is crucial for her interpretation of his practical reason. the two ends are not on a “continuum” as if one leads to the other. nor are they completely unrelated. in other words, they are neither univocal nor equivocal. instead, they are analogical. the analogy resides in humanity created imago dei that makes us, like god, the “‘principle’ of our actions” (99). virtue, especially the virtue of prudence, allows human agents the “self-mastery” necessary to “order” their lives “into a coherent pattern of life.” she offers a succinct but masterful interpretation of the acquired virtues and correlates them to temporal well-being, highlighting the role of prudence. prudence is “aquinas’s alternative” to the economist’s practical reasoning, an argument found in a section entitled “prudence versus rational choice” (109). it is through the exercise of prudence that human agents properly flourish. hirschfeld draws upon jean porter’s nature as reason4 for her account of flourishing. humans have the “special role of directing themselves” via prudence. hirschfeld states, “it is our act of becoming beings who can pursue these goods in an excellent way that constitute the full realization of our nature. the pursuit of goods, then, is the material on which we exercise that excellence. that is to say, while a life filled with goods is desirable, our truest happiness lies in the agency we exercise in obtaining them” (108). the acquired virtues do so much work in this section of her argument that one wonders what happened to her previous discussion of the infused virtues (102)? she also cites christopher franks’s he became poor5 which, contra porter, takes the evangelical 89 long counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience as the “paradigmatic form of the happy life” rather than porter’s “ordinary conception” of it, and the theological virtues as the “paradigmatic form of virtues.” franks interprets aquinas as a christological thinker for whom the natural, human action concerned with wealth finds its proper end in the “poverty of christ.” hirschfeld acknowledges that franks’s interpretation, to which she is “sympathetic,” generates “some tension” with porter’s. however, the tension here is not decisive. hirschfeld claims it to be a “difference in emphasis more than anything else” (242n44). yet i wonder if more needs to be done with this tension and the difference it makes for a thomistic theological economics? it would require further conversations. one would be on the infused virtues. hirschfeld begins this conversation in her section “what is a virtue?” virtues are “intrinsic principles or internal sources of actions.” so far, so good. both aristotle and thomas would agree. they can also be, she notes, “infused by god.” now things get complicated. for thomas, an infused virtue is an external principle that can at the same time be an internal source of human action. aristotle, i think, would at least find this confusing. it is what allows thomas to set forth the virtue of charity as friendship with god, something that hirschfeld makes central to her theological economics in chapter five. but the emphasis on the acquired virtues and the unresolved tension between porter and franks leads me to question how the analogy between god and creatures in their actions works. what does she need from thomas that she could not get from aristotle, especially when there is so little christology and pneumatology in her book? she notes its centrality for thomas (see 24). having noted it, it seems to contribute too little to a humane economy. there may be reason for this, and it may have to do with audience. one of the curious but delightful aspects of aquinas and the market is the ambiguity as to whom the audience is. at times, hirschfeld seems to be interpreting theology for the economists. at other times, she interprets economics for the theologians. and still at other times, she addresses both at the same time. another conversation would be the relationship between divine and human agency. she recognizes this and states, “in this analysis i do not deal with the vexed question of how we understand our agency vis a vis god’s agency” (235n2). if the theological virtues are to play more of a central role in a thomistic humane economy (and how can they not if our true end is the beatific vision?), then more will need to be done here. of course, not everything that should be done can be done in a single volume. to indicate what needs to be done next is the sign of a successful work. humanizing economics theologically 90 hirschfeld’s theological economics is thoroughly catholic, which makes it contrast nicely with tanner’s thoroughly protestant anti-work ethic in her christianity and the new spirit of capitalism. hirschfeld works with aquinas; tanner works with (and against) weber. tanner has offered the clearest and most lucid presentation of finance capital that i have read either by economists or theologians. we are fortunate to have these two works before us at this critical juncture when growing income inequality and environmental degradation threaten social existence. both express grave concerns about making efficiency the driver behind economic relations, and about the disciplining power of capitalist rationality. both intervene in economics and market relations theologically. tanner’s work sounds more of an alarm than does hirschfeld. it takes on much more of an apocalyptic tone. she holds forth little promise of reforming capitalism. we need to “radically break” with it, and christian theology could provide such a break. more so than her previous economy of grace, tanner sees capitalism generating vicious chains to the past through debt, asking for “total commitment,” all the while acting in the world as if only the present matters. her approach is more dialectical than analogical. christianity offers a “radical time discontinuity.” it places all our projects under suspicion. she writes, “every single present project of mine is to be repudiated to some extent or other (some of them more than others)—just to the extent such a project becomes a sinful interference to wholehearted orientation to god and god’s will for the world.”6 a reformed total depravity haunts all our pretensions to perfection. tanner finds arguments based on perfection to be dangerous. they “homogenize” human existence collapsing difference into an untenable sameness.7 given the either-or within which our convictions operate, there is no place for any means-ends calculation.8 faith entails total commitment. contra hirschfeld’s virtue of prudence, tanner is critical of the language of selfproduction, even when it is found in marx rather than aristotle or thomas. she states, “there is no reason to think, as the anthropology of production typical of capitalism (and its marxist critique) does, that we can produce ourselves only by producing other things. some sort of work on things is needed to generate the material well-being that is part of our imaging of god’s life of supreme well-being. but christians associate hand hard work and especially hard labor with the fall.”9 hirschfeld is less apocalyptic. she finds much to applaud about capitalism. she critiques tanner for being unable to account for capitalism’s “beneficial role in, say, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in the past few decades” (22). yet no statistics are cited and the poverty graphs that have circulated based on the united nations’ millennium campaign and “our world 91 long in data” statistics often cited by bill gates and others, have been subjected to devastating critiques.10 with 60% of the world’s population living in poverty and most of the decrease in poverty occurring in china, it is unclear that capitalism has decreased poverty as successfully as some have claimed. if we measured poverty based on $5 per day rather than the $1.08 currently used, things look much bleaker. given current economic inequalities, the “lifting” that would be necessary for a rising tide to life all boats would require the average income of the world’s wealthiest one-third to be $1.3 million per year so that the poorest two-thirds can live on $5 per day.11 if these statistics are correct, then tanner’s apocalyptic tone is more warranted than hirschfeld’s. yet hirschfeld gives us more of a practical way forward than tanner. tanner is certainly correct that arduous labor is not the basis for human dignity. her anti-work ethic is not only a laudable contribution to contemporary theological ethics but a necessary one especially as work itself may experience significant changes in the next decades. yet there are ways of thinking about forms of material production by which we also produce ourselves as hirschfeld’s emphasis on the virtues, and especially prudence, suggests. what makes a virtue a virtue rather than a technical means is that the action affects the character of the agent. hirschfeld’s aristotelianthomism has more room for marx’s insights than tanner’s (modified) calvinist-weberianism. hirschfeld provides a way to make better sense of the fact that we need material goods, they can be means for our perfection, that grace can perfect nature rather than constantly contradict it. hirschfeld convinced me that some incentives, some means-end calculation is intrinsic to our animality. it is part of our good, created nature. yet it our (fallen) nature is radically incomplete and needs the infused virtues. hirschfeld’s aquinas and the market is thoroughly researched, well-written, carefully developed, and presents a compelling vision of how we might go forward in conceiving a theological economics. it is a must-read for anyone interested in theology and economics, practical reasoning, or the development of a humane economy. notes 1. d. stephen long, divine economy: theology and the market (london, routledge, 2000). humanizing economics theologically 92 2. mary l. hirschfeld, aquinas and the market: toward a humane economy (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2018). 3. kathryn tanner, christianity and the new spirit of capitalism (new haven, ct: yale university press, 2019). 4. jean porter, nature as reason: a thomistic theory of natural law (grand rapids, mi: eerdmans, 2004). 5. christopher a. franks, he became poor: the poverty of christ and aquinas’s economic teachings (grand rapids, mi: eerdmans, 2009). 6. tanner 88. 7. tanner 217–218. 8. tanner 162. 9. tanner 207. 10. see jason hickel’s the divide: global inequality from conquest to free markets (new york: norton, 2018). 11. hickel 56. microsoft word reitsma spr20 [expositions 14.1 (2020) 9–33] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 on being quite a few things to quite a few people: ethics pedagogy as stratified, personal, utopian nudging regan lance reitsma king’s college (pa) “without a vision, the people die.” (proverbs 19:28) “i don’t believe any more than spinoza did in the utility of denouncing vice, evil, and sin. why always accuse, why always condemn? that’s a sad ethic indeed, for a sad people.” (andre comte-sponville, a small treatise on the great virtues)1 “[s]uccess is distant and unlikely, so it’s helpful to have a taste for noble failure and for the camaraderie of the angry few.” (larissa macfarquhar, strangers drowning)2 1. silence and pessimism john haldane describes alasdair macintyre as “the foremost philosophical witness to and interpreter of our conflicted contemporary condition.”3 for almost seven decades, macintyre has been a voice crying out in the desert, calling moral philosophy—calling broader academia, calling “modernity”—to a richer, more coherent, better-grounded worldview, a latter-day aristotelianism redeemed by aquinas and given a countercultural, cutting edge by marx. in good aristotelian form, macintyre has long proclaimed that moral formation is central to human flourishing and that the best moral education comes from living in a good polis. a good community fosters, intentionally and confidently, the inherent moral capacities of its members, helping them to become increasingly adept practical deliberators and to cultivate the moral virtues tantamount to the living of a worthy human life. a broadly sympathetic university-level ethics teacher might wonder what practical advice, for her particular vocation, emerges from a careful reading of macintyre’s subtle, historically and sociologically informed, virtue-oriented thinking. how, if she takes macintyre’s nearseptuagenarian corpus seriously, should her ethics courses be taught? what positive roles might a gentle-as-a-dove, shrewd-as-a-serpent professor sensibly and responsibly aim to play in the moral formation of her college students? ethics pedagogy as stratified, personal, utopian nudging 10 this earnest teacher might find herself, if she takes much of what she reads to heart, dispirited. she could feel left in the lurch. as commentators remark, it’s often easier to discern what macintyre is against than what he is for. though macintyre provides rich, detailed descriptions of being apprenticed into various practices,4 he generally neglects to theorize about the good classroom. macintyre’s “bleak diagnoses of the pathologies” of modern life get most of the ink, along with meticulous historical explanations of our culture’s devolution into unprecedented ethical fragmentation.5 proposals concerning university-level ethics pedagogy, and other conceivable constructive cultural counterpoises, seem to get short shrift. cultural pessimism saturates macintyre’s corpus. as james bernard murphy puts it, “macintyre’s famous opening of after virtue invites us to imagine our contemporary moral life as a post-apocalyptic nightmare in which formerly integral traditions of moral practice and thought have been exploded into mere shards of genuine practices.”6 simply put, modern society isn’t a good polis. instead of a training ground for eudaimonia, our contemporary institutions are dominated, macintyre thinks, by the “ethics-of-the-market” and the “ethics-of-the-state,” cultural forces geared to making us into avid consumers and compliant “citizens.” moral growth requires becoming an incisive, substantive critic of your own desires; corporations prefer you not question your hankerings for glimmery and techy things. in this temper, macintyre is often bluntly negative about university-level ethics curricula. one might have predicted that macintyre, typically a gleeful critic of the modern technocrat, has pathologized today’s educational assessment tools and their sterile vocabulary. instead, he seemingly puts his trust in them: “we have no good reason to believe that the teaching of ethics through academic courses can be effective in bring about moral transformations.”7 more, macintyre often construes the classroom itself as nothing more than an “instrument” of the prevailing, inimical forces: “the moral content of our educational system is simply a reflection of the moral content of our society.”8 perhaps macintyre’s deep-running cultural pessimism explains his pedagogical silence: why speak about “the good classroom” if it is not, in this present darkness, a possible reality? macintyre occasionally speaks more positively about “the teacher,” which might be encouraging. however, he’s called her “the forlorn hope of the western world.”9 given that “forlorn” connotes a sadness-tinged hopelessness, this ersatz encomium—the teacher as the “hopeless hope” of the western world—isn’t ultimately much consolation. 11 reitsma what’s our earnest ethics professor to do? 2. how to respond? a few possible reactions come to mind. our earnest educator might choose to soldier on. camus praises sisyphus as an “absurd hero” for endlessly pushing his rock up the mountain despite his lucid recognition that absolutely nothing will ever come of it.10 likewise, a willful teacher might resolve to labor on absurdly, shaking her fists scornfully at the inexorable forces of society, in heroic defiance of her fate—and perhaps cultivating a “taste for noble failure” and “the camaraderie of the angry few.”11 or, our sincere educator might choose to withdraw, as rod dreher encourages, into a community—a “benedict option” commune, as it were—that attempts to socialize its members, intentionally and confidently, from childhood, partly by sheltering them from, partly by combatting the influence of, the forces inimical to their moral formation.12 or, following stanley fish’s counsel in save the world on your own time,13 she might choose henceforth to “aim low,” staying put in the university system, but eschewing her heartfelt vocation, and newly treating her role as a teacher as nothing more than a “job,” which she must complete adequately to warrant her salary.14 or, in a different stroke of boldness, our teacher might shrug her shoulders, decide her quest for the holy grail of pedagogical advice from macintyre was a misdirected enquiry, double down on her fulsome vocation, and turn macintyre’s “negativity” into a hearty joke, perhaps by placing an ironic placard above the threshold of her introduction to ethics classroom: “abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” macintyre himself has sometimes prescribed that teachers, while resolutely upholding a “utopian” ideal in their own hearts, take the willful, heroic, defiant, rock-pushing, sisyphean course.15 this seems telling: revolutionary moral zeal and cultural pessimism surge deep within macintyre’s philosophical veins. 3. my approach as an ethics professor myself, i find it natural to consider where, within these rival, incompatible positions, to stand. loath to treat the teacher-student relationship as merely transactional, i simply can’t go with fish. even if the best learning outcomes aren’t of world-historical significance, everyday teaching sends profound signals to students; aiming low communicates that sustained ethics pedagogy as stratified, personal, utopian nudging 12 ethical reflection isn’t useful or important. (talk about rank capitulation to prevailing forces.16) good teachers, i trust, can find ways to talk—or to shrewdly nudge—many students into forms of moral reflection conducive to personal growth and better ethical decisions. i also have no intention to plunk for the benedict option. i’m going to keep my current job. when choosing a proper pedagogical approach, context matters, of course. i happen to teach at a small liberal arts college in the holy cross catholic tradition, a college which includes “fostering knowledge of the catholic tradition” among its learning outcomes for core philosophy courses. this means i’m not only licensed but expected to engage the christian moral traditional in the classroom. that said, slightly more than half of my university’s student body identifies as catholic. is my classroom, then, a “half-benedict” situation? “quarter-benedict”? as for the sisyphean mentality, i’m strongly averse to seeing myself in such grandiose terms. i’m not against fighting a good fight when the prospects of success are modest to low, but in my view an attitude of heroic defiance not only ignores the substantial goods a thoughtful teacher can facilitate, it threatens to mutate into self-importance and self-pity.17 in comparison, the jestful strategy strikes me as wiser. in this essay, i intend to steer a steady course between a forlorn, rock-pushing mentality and the jester’s choice. like the persevering jester, i’m simply less pessimistic about both modernity and ethics instruction than macintyre. (my mentality is closer, perhaps, to charles taylor’s. taylor, himself troubled by this secular age’s vices and foibles, simultaneously regards modernity as replete with half-understood virtues and spiritual seeking.18) a thoughtfully constructed ethics course cannot be all things to all students: 45 contact hours over the course of 15 weeks isn’t, i agree, an apprenticeship. but it can be quite a few things to quite a few people. unlike the jesting strategy, though, i won’t treat critical engagement with macintyre as a “misdirected enquiry.” i agree with so much: among other things, macintyre’s desire for ethics pedagogy to cut to the philosophical, existential bone; the corresponding prominence of his “utopian” streak; his emphasis on sociological self-knowledge; and his appeal to the value of narrative and imagination to moral transformation. i’ve struggled to put my finger on what, precisely, i disagree with macintyre about. my sense is: macintyre’s utopianism can feel, too often, like a cudgel. elsewhere, i’ve argued for the theoretical, moral, and pedagogical value of “big picture,” “unattainable” moral ideals, such as the biblical commandment to love neighbor as self.19 one of my basic principles, the foundation of a 13 reitsma pedagogical strategy, reflects the quotations from proverbs and from comte-sponville at the beginning of this essay: students are more likely to struggle—for forty years in the desert, as it were—if they vividly, imaginatively recognize what they are struggling for. macintyre doesn’t really do aspiration. when he speaks of his utopian ideals, it’s often to note how far short of glory our society has fallen. start with macintyre’s bluntly negative appraisal of contemporary ethics courses, add his remark that “we need a utopian concept of the curriculum […] in order to provide an instructive measure of achievement,”20 and his can seem a sad ethics, indeed. 4. stage setting as i read macintyre, i find myself continuously asking, but uncertain how to answer, at least three broad, highly salient questions about how to interpret his thinking about ethics education. the first: what does macintyre take “students these days” to be like? of course, a good teacher needs to know her subject matter—in this case, what counts, broadly speaking, as (less than) exemplary ethical reasoning. she also needs to know her audience.21 to discern good pedagogical strategies, it’s helpful to have significant insight into what her students’ particular needs, mental habits, and aspirations are, as well as what “epistemological framework and evaluative standards” they often think and act from.22 the contemporary college student isn’t a character that populates macintyre’s philosophical prose—except, of course, as yet another creature addled by modernity. rich accounts of the moral lives of contemporary teens and young adults do exist. in a 2001 profile of high achieving ivy league students,23 the journalist david brooks describes his regular encounters with the “organization kid” (ok), a student who is affable, tolerant, hard-working, highly scheduled, smart, and career-oriented, but whom he finds somewhat troubling. for all her undeniable virtues, the ok is also deferential to authority to the point of conformist, as well as “blinkered” in the sense of being absorbed in her own life and significantly unaware of what’s happening in the broader world. most notably, this sort of student lacks a “robust ethical vocabulary.” when moral questions arise, the affable oks—skittish about giving offense—change the subject. when they do reflect upon the ethical trajectory of their lives, oks speak in terms of their hopes for future “love, success, and happiness,” not with robust concepts such as justice, mercy, and humility. in his extensive, qualitative research, the sociologist christian smith paints a strikingly similar picture of many american teenagers and young adults.24 whatever their academic credentials and ethics pedagogy as stratified, personal, utopian nudging 14 work habits, many contemporary u.s. teenagers and young adults are, in an important sense, “moralists.” in a faint allusion to moral traditions such as aristotle’s, they accept that “central to living a good and happy life is being a good, moral person.” in their sensibility, this means being nice, pleasant, tolerant, respectful, and responsible. it’s important, they believe, to work hard to make something of oneself. fluent in many subjects, these teens and young adults are, similar to the oks, notably inarticulate about ethical (and religious) topics. though “kids these days” are not all of a piece, and new cultural trends are emerging,25 brooks and smith present a fairly accurate picture of many of the secondto fourth-year students who take my ethics courses. a salient question—for me, and i suspect for many other teachers—is how best to engage such a student? how strong are the prospects, if we show a bit of insight and ingenuity, for helping these particular people grow? what—from within their mentality—can we as teachers intelligently and responsibly use as leverage? my second interpretive question: how does macintyre conceive of university-level ethics pedagogy? macintyre is critical of contemporary ethics courses, but he doesn’t overtly describe them. a highly plausible guess is that, since macintyre thinks the modern university to be— infelicitously—an instrument of the prevailing ethos within modernity, “morality,” he presumably supposes ethics courses reflect the broad contours of this complicated mindset. macintyre generally presents morality—or “the morality system”—as an “unwieldy product of modern social and ideological changes, given intellectual standing by three centuries of unwitting theorists.”26 morality is presented as a set of impersonal rules or maxims that, e.g., prohibit the violation of moral rights and require a degree of truthfulness, tolerance, and altruistic benevolence. morality treats these norms as rules to which any rational agent whatsoever ought to give assent. within the morality system, there are competing answers to the question why these norms deserve universal assent. there’s the kantian idea, grounded in a fundamental commitment to human equality and dignity, that obedience to such maxims by others is something that as rational agents we cannot but will, and so consistency requires that we also take those maxims to govern our own actions. the utilitarian answer, grounded in fundamental commitments to impartiality and benevolence, is that compliance with such maxims maximizes society-wide well-being or happiness or utility. a contractualist answer is that these maxims represent social expectations it’s reasonable for us to foist on others and for others to foist on us.27 15 reitsma extrapolating from this, a morality-based ethics course would describe utilitarianism, kantianism or some other form of “deontology,” and social contractarianism, perhaps with a few classes also devoted to talking about the merits and demerits of ethical relativism. these theories might subsequently be applied to case studies or to culturally contentious ethical questions. the student might be asked not only to describe and apply the competing theories, but to reflect on which theory she finds most sanguine. the course likely ends, literally and philosophically, there. for the sake of ease, let’s call this the “standard” ethics course.28 fish applauds the standard course. macintyre is peeved by it, for principled reasons. first, such a course is historically and sociologically mute, and so doesn’t compel a student to interrogate the ethical environment she inhabits.29 second, it is blithely monistic in its philosophical mindset. utilitarianism, kantianism, contractarianism, and relativism take the complexity of morality, with the many distinct values morality promotes and protects, and attempt to boil this complexity down into a theory with a single, fundamental value: human dignity or utility or deference to prevailing cultural codes. in doing so, morality “does not illuminate the particularities, textures, and valences of moral […] considerations as we experience them.”30 in ethics in the conflicts of modernity, among other places, macintyre implicitly raises a third objection to the standard course: he calls for forms of moral socialization that treat students not merely as brains that need to think a bit more clearly, but as persons for whom narrative can have transformative value. on these three points, i agree fully with macintyre. as a confession, i have occasionally taught the standard course. at the very beginning of my career, i did so ham-fistedly, but i grew past it in pursuit of pedagogy philosophically, rhetorically, and psychologically more subtle. more recently, when i taught in an international context and couldn’t anticipate what my students would be like, i followed a fishier syllabus that “aimed lower.” (that decision continues to seem sensible to me.) my third and final interpretive question concerns the “depth” of macintyre’s cultural pessimism, though i don’t know how to put the question very precisely. just “how strong”—how causally powerful, how determinative—does he take the forces of global capitalism and political liberalism to be? do these forces make moral growth impossible for most anyone, not merely for students within the contemporary university system? on the flipside, just how strong is macintyre’s “it takes a polis” thesis? of course, people have never lived in perfect moral ethics pedagogy as stratified, personal, utopian nudging 16 communities, and yet some people do seem—even today—to live worthy human lives. i certainly have students who strike me as morally committed and thoughtful. there are elements of macintyre’s thinking that could mitigate his pessimism about the prospects of ethics pedagogy. macintyre’s brand of aristotelianism is made “neo” partly by his belief that “the ways in which human capacities can be realized are diverse and that the range of considerations relevant to human flourishing [are] also variable.”31 the idea is that, though human flourishing always requires the cardinal moral virtues, eudaimonia can manifest in otherwise strikingly different human lives and contexts. this pluralistic commitment makes macintyre less elitist than aristotle himself. and given that it posits multiple paths to a well-lived life, it would seem to be grounds for greater hope. i wonder why this idea doesn’t seem to qualify macintyre’s bluntly negative commentary on ethics teaching. macintyre’s answers to my three broad questions form the backdrop for his assessments of contemporary ethics instruction, but it’s not always easy to know what his answers are. from time to time, i will simply need to hope i haven’t misinterpreted him. 5. a critical analysis of macintyre on university education in a broadly admiring but ultimately sharply critical appraisal of macintyre’s thinking about contemporary university education, murphy describes the ambient mood of macintyre’s writing as “quixotic pessimism,” which strikes me as spot on. macintyre’s thoughts on university education form more of a “collage” than an integrated philosophy of education.32 but there are notable themes alongside his neo-aristotelian thomist philosophical and ethical convictions, his marxist analysis of our contemporary economic situation, and his emphasis upon our culture’s fragmented moral vocabulary. first and foremost, there’s macintyre’s idiosyncratic form of idealism. committed to the liberal arts, ethics teachers generally express high aspirations for student learning and development. in murphy’s view, though, macintyre is not merely a garden-variety idealist; he’s a “resolute moralist,” and in two important senses. first, his reflections on education are dominated by a desire that the university be an instrument of revolutionary social and moral reform.33 second, macintyre sometimes seems to set the bar exceedingly high for counting as having a properly virtuous sensibility. the supreme court justice sandra day o’connor, who seems to have lived a highly admirable life, apparently fails to measure up, on the grounds she didn’t adequately scrutinize the 17 reitsma fundamental—and fundamentally decent—moral and political commitments she assiduously and effectively devoted her life to.34 no doubt, authentic moral formation, a process of socialization much broader than schooling, includes the transformation of desire and an increased talent at consistently making good choices.35 does living virtuously require morally unassailable foundations? does it require being able to articulate, with philosophical sophistication, why they are? such exacting intelligence strikes me as a profound strength, but not a necessity for moral goodness. what, we might wonder, are the pedagogical implications of macintyre’s high-minded, sometimes intellectualist, revolutionary moralism? let’s say an ethics teacher succeeds in helping several oks become considerably more comfortable speaking up about moral questions. or in helping a student inarticulate about justice approach fluency in the complex, specialized language of moral rights. or let’s say her student, initially committed to a vaguely conceived conception of tolerance, comes to recognize, first, that tolerance is a “limited virtue”—there are times when a tolerant person should choose, not to forbear, but to act out—and, second, that he must adopt a broad, coherent moral outlook if he is going to decide judiciously where the relevant line is to be drawn. even though these advances don’t revolutionize society, and they don’t guarantee fullyfledged practical wisdom in the relevant student, these seem to be small, hard-won victories. would macintyre deny their value? macintyre’s quixoticism sometimes manifests as a penchant for diminishing the value of his own relatively modest, but sensible practical advice. this raises important questions: for example, whether a teacher’s primary focus should be on changing society or, instead, on fostering the inherent moral capacities of her students. the answer seems obvious. and it seems as though it should be clear to macintyre, too, given that the second part of what “makes his aristotelianism ‘neo’” is aquinas’s correction of aristotle that “progress toward good judgment and rightly directed desire is often partial and uneven, so that someone who exemplifies them admirably in some area […] may fail miserably […] in some other area.”36 when a teacher facilitates partial moral progress, it is progress, and it is consequential, as it disposes the student to make substantively better ethical decisions and to form stronger personal relationships. in any case, in murphy’s final analysis, quixotic pessimism is precisely what you would experience if you were to adopt macintyre’s blend of revolutionary idealism, with its uncompromising, intellectualist standards, and his deep-going cultural pessimism. this sensibility ethics pedagogy as stratified, personal, utopian nudging 18 leads—inexorably—to “burden[ing] schooling with impossible expectations and then wonder[ing] why we are always so disappointed.”37 6. macintyre and the irrelevance of ethics murphy’s 2013 analysis of macintyre is strongly confirmed by a close reading of macintyre’s 2015 essay, “the irrelevance of ethics.” all of the elements of macintyre’s quixotic temperament are starkly present: the deep-in-the-bloodstream cultural pessimism and anti-modernist spirit; the forlorn, “utopian” moralism; and the penchant to diminish the value of his own (sensible) proposals. these are joined, i might add, by gestures at a “we-know-not-what” socioeconomic world that would be meaningfully better than ours (and would not simply trade one set of human, foible-filled institutions for another). in “the irrelevance of ethics,” macintyre’s skepticism about the efficacy of university-level ethics courses is especially brusque and dismissive. when an ethics scandal rocks the financial or political world, there is invariably a public outcry: “bring on the ethicists! make students take more ethics courses!” macintyre responds, paraphrased: “don’t bother.” macintyre’s specific target in his essay, though, is university-level business ethics. macintyre judges such courses “at best” distractions from what truly matters, an investigation “into the nature and causes of what is flawed in our economic institutions and activities.”38 his more robust conclusion is that business ethics courses, and the business schools that require them, unwittingly send their fledgling graduates unawares into the fowler’s snare: “the financial sector as a whole” is “a school of bad character,”39 for which a b+ in a standard ethics course imparts to graduates a false sense of ethical security. in macintyre’s judgment, business ethics instructors proceed—mistakenly—as though their students can have both moral and financial success. in reality, they confront an existential choice between their souls and their wallets: “we may measure ourselves and our activities by the standards of wisdom and temperateness, [that is,] by the standards of virtue, or by the standards of money, but we cannot do both. we have to choose between them.”40 to illustrate, macintyre asks his reader to compare the mental habits of a morally virtuous person and a “successful” financial trader. first, consider four, interrelated moral virtues. a good person has a “tempered [socratic] realism” about herself; she won’t overestimate her powers or think she knows what she does not know. her just estimation of herself disposes her to judge risks 19 reitsma with a clear and judicious mind. with courage, she acts neither rashly nor cowardly in the face of true risks. more, if the common good truly calls for it, she will put skin in the game; it’s not an act of courage to risk other people’s hides. in good aristotelian form, macintyre ends by commenting on the morally virtuous person’s disposition to see her life as a whole. accordingly, she will not be guilty of ungrounded “time biases,” such as giving up her own soul for the piece of bread that will sate only this quarter’s hunger. macintyre presents the successful financial trader—successful by “the standards of money”— in glaring contrast. confronting the complexity of the market, a sensible person will not think, nor insinuate, she knows its future.41 however, the financial trader needs to project self-confidence so as to earn and keep the trust of clients. in other words, he “can’t afford” to be properly selfquestioning or self-doubting. also, a good financial trader shifts risks away from himself; he doesn’t put more skin in the game than strategically necessary. a good financial trader, one who plays by the rules of the trading world, need not be a thorough-going egoist, but he will be a “group chauvinist” who favors the interests of self, company, and shareholder, a pursuit which does not demand sensitivity to the common good. he will also accede to a “time bias,” namely, the prevailing demand to meet short-term earning goals. in sum, for the successful financial trader to take on the project of becoming morally virtuous would, macintyre contends, create an “insuperable disadvantage” to his continued professional success. without argument, macintyre judges it’s legitimate to extrapolate to other business professions; within our economy, virtue and mammon don’t mix. in macintyre’s judgment, this unhappy reality needs to be directly confronted, and the pedagogy of business ethics isn’t up to the task. the spirit of standard business ethics courses is severally misguided: first, it presumes a falsely benign view of the global market; second, it operates with a crimped conception of moral obligation, supposing moral goodness doesn’t demand “training in desire” or a robust devotion to the common good. so long as an accountant or store manager obeys legal restrictions and various moral side constraints, he’s done his duty. what, according to macintyre, should be done about all this? at times, macintyre’s prescriptions are vague and defeatist. sounding more resigned than heroically defiant, macintyre writes, “the most we can hope to do is […] understand the limitations of our present moral and intellectual condition, and then ask how we can best live and act in that condition.”42 at other points, macintyre gestures at specific but relatively modest proposals. a blithe market ethics pedagogy as stratified, personal, utopian nudging 20 triumphalism—with its “all boats, rising tides” aphorisms— dangerously pervades the thinking of some business students. business faculty would do well to highlight, not merely the social benefits of a market economy, but the morally serious costs. also, macintyre notes a common fallacy: ordinary non-philosophical people, whether inside or outside of the business world, often infer, from a fancy title or a well-tailored suit, that the bearer must be an admirable person. a good ethics course could challenge such deference to wealth, which permits the wolves of wall street to hide in plain sight. very thoughtfully, macintyre alludes to a form of profound confusion ordinary nonphilosophical people often feel. for the manufacturing class whose jobs have gone overseas, the global market—a force which gives, and a force which takes away—is a “great big incomprehensible.”43 against a disciplinary tendency to conceive of economic factors as impersonal forces, macintyre claims economic networks are human constructs and are built by human decisions. if that truth is recognized, it becomes possible to reconstrue market relationships and activities in moral terms, even in the language of moral virtue. it is people who ship people’s jobs overseas; “when,” business faculty should get in the habit of asking, “are their deliberations proper?” these strike me as excellent suggestions. there are many others. ethics courses that ask students to reflect on the moral limits of markets44 and nudge them to distrust the manufactured neologisms of corporations and politicians, and ethics courses that raise the question what type of moral character, and what type of personal habits, it takes to be a whistleblower—these, too, strike me as worthwhile. these are conversations that will prime some graduates to gird up against the fowler’s snares to come. in “the irrelevance of ethics,” macintyre’s penchant for pulling the carpet from under his own counsel emerges. the essay ends on an infelicitous note: “ethics will once again become relevant” only when principles “very different from those of either a wholly free market economy or of the state-and-market economies of present day europe” are ascendant.45 until society is profoundly reformed—macintyre’s word choices suggest—our thinking will be so hopelessly fragmented that we won’t be able to think in ways that are “relevant.” in this context, macintyre gestures at a better socioeconomic world. but he doesn’t say much about what it would be like, beyond that it would be a realm in which “thinking about virtues and thinking about money” would be “reconnected.” macintyre needn’t be so quaint as to proclaim that this new economic reality would flow with milk and honey, but his vision of what “should 21 reitsma be” threatens to become—even for the sympathetic, inquiring, earnest ethics instructor—yet another “great big incomprehensible.” macintyre hasn’t given her much sense of what moral vision she is to teach towards. 7. a few curiosities some, seeing greater virtue in the liberal state and the market economy, will be put off by macintyre’s marxist critique. i’m not much of a market triumphalist, but i can’t say, when i work to improve my students’ marketable skills, i’m doing so only because of my job description. i’m happy to enhance their writing and communications skills so they’ll come to write better memos and conduct smarter, tighter meetings—a too rare skill. in any case, in this section i will note several other contestable elements of macintyre’s arguments. first, a question about macintyre’s own argumentative strategy. macintyre tells us he devotes ethics in the conflicts of modernity to the “plain nonphilosophical person,” a character who emerges in the book’s second sentence.46 macintyre subsequently sets up a dialectic that presumably leads this person from the (naïve realism of) morality to expressivism, and then from (antior quasi-realist) expressivism to his ultimate conclusion, an aristotelian form of critical realism. as usual in macintyre’s philosophizing, the way a person is able, reasonably, to choose between “incompatible rival positions” is to find what questions a particular tradition of thought raises but can’t itself answer. the “better” tradition is superior because it’s able to explain, powerfully, why the competing tradition can’t move beyond its inherent lacunas. macintyre ultimately expresses confidence that ordinary reflective people, at least those who earnest consider how they should live, are “covert aristotelians.”47 their best convictions and practices implicitly commit them to this type of critical realism.48 curiously, if a teacher were to follow macintyre’s (quasi-hegelian) script, elements of the standard ethics course would be necessary, not irrelevant: a vital propaedeutic, at least within modernity, to his neo-aristotelianism. macintyre’s expressivist-style critique of morality can’t get off the ground if his readers are unfamiliar with the basic elements of the mindset being critiqued. accordingly, macintyre himself should cry out, “bring on the ethicists!” more curiously yet, macintyre, in drawing his battle lines so starkly, seems to embody a strikingly un-ecumenical spirit. to begin with, won’t utilitarians and kantians find themselves rather surprised that they’re mere instruments of the ethics-of-the-market? such thinkers might ethics pedagogy as stratified, personal, utopian nudging 22 remark that macintyre’s own moral critique of the primary causes of the 2008 global financial collapse are often deeply consistent with elements of morality. a kantian will point out that fine print and subprime loans do not treat customers with dignity. further, a blinkered focus on self, company, and shareholders and a fixation on short-term gains over long-term fiscal viability don’t square with the long-term, pragmatic, impartial heart of utilitarian thinking. only emasculated forms of these theories, forms of kantianism and utilitarianism that go totally mute at selective points, will serve so blithely as tools in the hands of global capitalism. this raises the question whether macintyre is guilty of treating half-allies as complete enemies. the morally virtuous person in thomist thinking, lacking morality’s “monistic” disposition, isn’t a thorough-going utilitarian or a pure kantian. but she will care intensely about the moral values at the foundations of utilitarianism and kantianism, namely, impartiality, benevolence, and human dignity. so, why tilt at useful windmills? put pedagogically, our earnest ethics teacher might have guessed that if our cultural climate is fragmented, some of the bits and pieces might serve as small, archimedean rocks, from which we might leverage students to better views. to treat kantianism and utilitarianism as mere enemies is not only philosophically charitable, it cuts off a more positive, constructive pedagogical approach. if the brooks-smith image of “kids these days” is true of a significant number of college students, they’re already committed to values such as tolerance, equality, respect for human dignity, and benevolence. when my own students read brooks, they intuitively sense that the oks are “good people” in whom “something is missing.” naturally, some of these students begin to wonder whether they, too, lack a “robust ethical vocabulary” and a broad, underlying moral sensibility geared to helping them discern, among other things, when (not) to exercise tolerance. they begin to wonder, too, whether they have grasped the real-life, possibly life-altering implications of a serious, consistent commitment to equality, moral rights, and benevolent concern. 8. teaching as stratified, personal, utopian nudging macintyre hasn’t explicitly prescribed that teachers openly betray an attitude of quixotic pessimism to their students. and he doesn’t overtly claim university professors must treat the central dialectic of ethics in the conflicts of modernity as the central script for ethics curriculum. (does macintyre imply it should be, though, when he prescribes, rather narrowly, “certain novels”—by oscar wilde and d. h. lawrence—as necessary for any “serious” ethics course?) 23 reitsma even so, let’s consider how cut-down-to-the-bone, “utopian” ethics courses could be taught more optimistically and constructively. if we’d like a course that asks students to confront profound existential choices and taps positively into moral imagination, what form might it take? no doubt, there’s more than one possibility. one option is to follow linda trinkaus zagzebski’s proposal to give pride of place, in our moral theorizing and in moral education, to moral exemplars.49 from a young age, much moral development occurs through the imitation of virtuous models: a caring mother, a thoughtful teacher, a good coach. despite this, philosophical treatments of ethics have often paid little attention to theorizing about people who are morally admirable and whose exemplary traits motivate others to emulate them; the utilitarian, kantian, and social contract traditions do not emphasize this idea. this common oversight prompts zagzebski to present a competing theory that “serves the same purpose as deontological, consequentialist, and virtue theories.”50 her “exemplarist” view defines the meaning of a wide range of moral concepts in terms of traits we admire in exemplars. as zagzebski points out, one pedagogical advantage of her theory is that there is wider agreement about who counts as an exemplar than about which particular moral values—utility or dignity, say—should be given the greatest priority within practical deliberation. reflection on moral exemplars naturally privileges narrative.51 and zagzebski’s (plausible) hope is that a student’s admiration will have the power to create a yearning to emulate goodness. another possibility is to follow the lead of ethics teachers who structure courses in the spirit of much ancient greek philosophy, with its socratic emphasis on the question, “how ought i to live?” such a course might ask students to imagine themselves, trenchantly, into the mental and moral lives of epicureans, stoics, socrates himself, aristotelians, various medieval thinkers such as augustine and aquinas, or broad-minded, humanistic contemporary thinkers. this idea reminds me of the book five great philosophies of life,52 originally titled from epicurus to christ, by william dewitt hyde, president of bowdoin college from 1885–1917. the book, whose pages are occasionally spotted by unhappy elements of its early-twentieth century sensibility, has several redeeming pedagogical virtues. for example, dewitt hyde skillfully picks out epicurean and stoic themes in the best poetry and literature of his day, which enriches his argument and helps his readers feel the (continued) compelling force of some ideas at the heart of these “ancient” philosophies. for a second virtue, dewitt hyde’s book, with philosophical charity, constructively “builds” towards a broad, coherent ethical outlook. dewitt hyde makes a point of drawing positive ethics pedagogy as stratified, personal, utopian nudging 24 and compelling lessons from each worldview he ultimately critiques. as he constructs a subtle picture of a way of life—a christian worldview with strong marks of new england protestantism—he finds an important place for such lessons. alongside somewhat dated prescriptions, there’s considerable wisdom; and in a philosophy class, dewitt hyde’s controversial conclusions can themselves be substantively critiqued. in my view, it can be very powerful for students, even students strongly averse to a book’s ultimate conclusions, to witness what it looks like for an incisive thinker to sketch a broad picture of the moral life. it helps them to envision how having a coherent, reflectively grounded worldview can answer questions they themselves confront in the run of life. this approach is, i think, one significant antidote to what ails the affable, tolerant, respectful oks who mumble about ethics. 9. a puzzling phenomenon and my own pedagogic practice in civilization and its discontents, sigmund freud argues it’s a very bad idea for a person to strive to live up to, and for a society to prescribe for its citizens, the biblical commandment “love your neighbor as yourself.”53 if a reader happens to enjoy the tweaking of an old piety, she’s likely to find freud’s arguments, which have a relentless, pithy, streetwise charisma, great fun. freud argues that striving to love every “inhabitant of the earth” equally and intensely would come at serious, unrequited personal costs. it would, predictably: anger your friends and family, who justifiably expect you to love them more than strangers; “stretch you thin” emotionally; and, worse, imprudently leave you susceptible, when you turn the other cheek, to being twice bruised. given his pessimistic view of human nature, and so his belief that most of our “neighbors” are “aggressive creatures” not given to love, freud predicts you’ll fail—miserably, in both outcome and mood— to live up to the principle, which will eventually make you resentful of morality and its unreasonable demands. in its stead, for you and for society, freud prescribes a principle of tit-fortat reciprocity, “do unto others as they (intend to) do to you,” which he finds more self-protective and so more reasonable. when students in my college-level ethics course are confronted with “freud against neighbor love,” many publicly express agreement with him, at least initially. by this point in my career, i know their “yeah, he’s rights” are coming; but their response repeatedly surprises me. many of the very same students who nod at freud’s punchy arguments also describe themselves as christians. 25 reitsma one might have guessed such students would dig in their convictional heels. instead, they give off the impression of capitulating to freud’s acidic cynicism. after eliciting the students’ first reactions, the classroom dialectic continues. we tease out freud’s assumptions and begin to raise objections to his arguments and to the underlying worldview that gives rise to them. as it turns out, the case against freud against neighbor love is fairly strong, and almost as punchy. freud’s arguments lack balance: he neglects to put his own tit-for-tat principle under the type of scrutiny he subjects neighbor love to; he doesn’t contend with any of neighbor love’s sharper, more sophisticated advocates. he’s often (demonstrably) guilty of misconstruing what agape is, and he ignores—or implausibly denies—its positive effects, personal and social. freud also operates with a strikingly narrow conception of the purpose of morality, and so he fails to recognize the theoretical and moral value of “unattainable” moral ideals such as “love neighbor as self.” once these objections are laid out, many students—predictably—express that they ultimately disagree with freud’s reasoning. in the span of two or three classes, something akin to a quorum of young scholars swings, pendulously, from being seemingly oblivious to a freud-style critique to being pro-freud to being anti-freud. the general trajectory of this classroom discussion of freud is one example of a familiar experience i have in teaching philosophy. pendular swings are common. if you frame a debate by asking certain questions, you can prompt students to express one set of convictions. if you ask certain other questions, you can prompt them to deny, implicitly or explicitly, the very same convictions. this is true, i find, when classroom discussion turns to relativism, to the question whether we all have a moral right to our own beliefs, and so on. fragmentation, indeed. what explains these swings? a few explanations come to mind. the one i tend to favor is that (many) students are highly impressionable. the students in my ethics courses are—similar to the students described by brooks and smith—often earnest, respectful, and, by perfectly sensible standards, bright. many give the strong impression they take their schooling, if not invariably their broader education, very seriously. and if we accept the analysis i’ve favored, perhaps the students’ willingness to change their minds reflects a measure of intellectual virtue, or at least the absence of a particular intellectual vice: a petty, reactionary, partisan close-mindedness to new arguments. that said, my students’ rapid-fire philosophical waffling raises hard questions for me as a teacher. it makes me ethics pedagogy as stratified, personal, utopian nudging 26 worry that, among other things, they’re highly susceptible to being pushed around, not only by well-meaning teachers who gently suggest sensible conclusions, but by advertisers, managers, and demagogues, whose intentions aren’t so civic. when i think of what a strong graduate of a liberal arts education is like, i imagine her to be open-minded, but not credulous and easily manipulated. i’m with macintyre here: an ideal graduate has developed a strong sense of who she is, with a developing, well-grounded sensibility, one that helps her to be resolute when she confronts ideas that oppose her most commendable underlying convictions. how to help a student begin to find her convictional bearings? and how to do so in a responsible manner?54 the standard ethics course doesn’t do this. aspiring to do better, i’ve taken to structuring my “ethics and the good life” syllabus in accordance with the dewitt-hyde-like argumentative arc of a more recent book. in a small treatise on the great virtues, the french moral philosopher andre comte-sponville construes the principle “love neighbor as self” as a profound “summary” of the entirety of “the moral law.” he understands the moral life to be, at its very best, an attempt to strive to become more and more agapic: in his view, agape is an unswerving, heartfelt commitment to a form of justice seasoned by generosity and mercy. comte-sponville is an atheist in terms of his metaphysic, but deeply invested in the new testament—as well as aristotle, pascal, spinoza, and kant—in terms of his conception of morality. sponville’s agapic picture of morality is crucial to his understanding of moral virtues such as tolerance, courage, fidelity, justice, and generosity, each of which he calls “a feeble approximation of love.” in my course, we talk about many topics independently of sponville, but over the semester the course “builds,” partly by following a trajectory that reflects sponville’s “hierarchy” of moral virtues, from chapters about “less exalted” moral virtues such as tolerance, to greater moral virtues such as justice and generosity. comte-sponville’s book is rhetorically rich, substantive, chock full of smaller insights. it is also replete with metaphors and digressions. not all teachers will find his somewhat messy, digressive style right for them.55 sponville’s broad argument and his overarching agapic commitments are also, in our contemporary environment, controversial. but we don’t let comte-sponville off the hook. one reason we read freud is to think through his “punchy” objections to neighbor love. what comte-sponville, similar to dewitt hyde, does well is construct a “big picture” conception of the moral life that is geared up to help any devotee make (better) quotidian decisions. it also self-consciously paints the moral virtues in an attractive light. 27 reitsma 10. concluding remarks scholastic education, macintyre is correct, is superficial in comparison to a lengthy process of apprenticeship. moreover, some college students simply aren’t prepared for cut-to-the-bone reflection. in other words, no ethics course can be all things to all people. but a well-constructed course, working at “different levels,” can be quite a few things to quite a few students. in my “ethics and the good life” course, ordinary learning outcomes are certainly met. all students have the opportunity to improve their writing skills; their critical thinking skills, by tangling with arguments about topics such as relativism, tolerance, and moral rights; and their interpretive skills, partly by fighting through, with guidance, comte-sponville’s metaphorand digression-rich style. for the students who have ears to hear, “ethics and the good life” intimates greater things. it consistently asks them to scrutinize their ethical environment and to confront their self-reported “value commitments.” they are asked to consider whether their commitments to tolerance and respect for humanity compel them to contextualize these virtues within a broader moral outlook. over the course of the semester, comte-sponville, among others, models sustained, worldvieworiented ethical reflection. in the final analysis, comte-sponville turns out to be a “utopian realist,” an idealist in terms of his moral vision, generally unimpressed with human moral character. macintyre’s cudgel is present, for comte-sponville also employs the moral virtues as “instructive measurements of achievement.”56 a clear conception of justice and of generosity, he remarks, will tell us how unjust and ungenerous we generally are.57 however, comte-sponville also sounds other, more aspirational notes. gentle, shrewd,58 incisive, historically-informed, book-length reflection upon moral virtue can draw many ordinary people upwards—in his view, towards neighbor love and towards the relationships neighbor love makes possible. not such a sad ethics. notes 1. andre comte-sponville, a small treatise on the great virtues (new york: holt, 1996), 1. 2. larissa macfarquhar, drowning strangers: impossible idealism, drastic choices, and the urge to help (new york: penguin books, 2015), 16. 3. john haldane, “macintyre against morality,” first things, may 2017, https://www.firstthings.com/article/2017/05/macintyre-against-morality. ethics pedagogy as stratified, personal, utopian nudging 28 4. for a good summary, see christopher h. toner, “maritain and macintyre on moral education,” in jacques maritain and the many ways of knowing, ed. douglas a. ollivant (washington, dc: catholic university press, 2002), 224–241, especially 232–239. 5. haldane, “macintyre against morality.” 6. james bernard murphy, “the teacher as the forlorn hope of modernity: macintyre on education and schooling,” revue internationale de philosophie 2 (2013): 183–199, at 189 (emphasis mine). 7. if the statistical data of pedagogical technocrats don’t ground macintyre’s pessimism, what does? see alasdair macintyre, “the irrelevance of ethics,” in virtue and economy: essays on morality and markets, eds. andrius bielskis and kelvin knight (london: routledge, 2015), 1–21, at 16. 8. alasdair macintyre, “against utilitarianism,” in aims in education, ed. t.h.b. hollins (manchester: manchester university press, 1964), 1–23, at 1. 9. alasdair macintyre, “the idea of an educated public,” in education and values, ed. graham haydon (london: university of london press, 1987), 15–36, at 16. 10. albert camus, the myth of sisyphus and other essays, trans. justin o’brien (new york: alfred a. knopf, 1955). 11. larissa macfarquhar, drowning strangers: impossible idealism, drastic choices, and the urge to help, 16. 12. rod dreher, the benedict option: a strategy for christians in a post-christian nation (new york: sentinel, 2017). 13. stanley fish, save the world on your own time (oxford: oxford university press, 2008). 14. gregory bassham summarizes fish’s arguments in this way: “what professors should be doing in the classroom is (1) introducing ‘students to bodies of knowledge and traditions of inquiry that had not previously been part of their experience,’ and (2) equipping ‘those same students with the analytical skills—of argument, statistical modeling, laboratory procedure—that will enable them to move confidently within those traditions and to engage in independent research after a course is over’. what professors should not be doing in the classroom is (1) consciously aiming to shape students’ moral, political or civic values, or (2) taking partisan stands, endorsing contestable ideas or policies, or advocating any values other than those that are immanent in the academic enterprise itself (honesty, thoroughness, 29 reitsma rigor, and so forth) […] fish’s ‘purified’ academy is thus a values-free zone in which instructors never step over the line between is and ought.” in his critical remarks, bassham emphasizes the “limited” power of professors to shape their students’ values and behavior, but also that “limited” does not equal “no” power. see gregory bassham, “fish’s purified ivory tower,” journal of college and university law, 36.1 (2009), 287–293. 15. macintyre, “alasdair macintyre on education: in dialogue with joseph dunne,” journal of the philosophy of education 36.1 (2002): 1–19, at 15. 16. fish revels in the role of provocateur. if he enjoys his spot of fun, i don’t begrudge him. but perhaps fish has—in the form of a good paycheck and his desired notoriety—received his reward. 17. for a similar judgment, see thomas nagel, “the absurd,” mortal questions (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1979), 11–23, at 23. 18. charles taylor, a secular age (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2007), 487. see also james k. a. smith, how (not) to be secular: reading charles taylor (grand rapids, mi: eerdmans, 2014), 79–91. 19. regan lance reitsma, “on the usefulness of being unrealistic,” in from banality to genocide: perspectives on evil, ed. kanta dihal (leiden, the netherlands: brill/rodopi, 2019), 195–219, https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004409262_011. 20. macintyre, “alasdair macintyre on education: in dialogue with joseph dunne,” 14. 21. as joseph dunne puts it, teaching is a “triadic relationship” between a teacher, the subject matter, and a student. see dunne, “alasdair macintyre on education,” journal of the philosophy of education 36.1 (2002): 1–19, at 9. 22. christian smith, “moral therapeutic deism as u.s. teenagers’ tacit, de facto religious faith: a summary,” princeton lectures on youth, church, and culture (princeton, n.j.: princeton theological seminary, 2005). this summary can also be found on the catholic education research center website: https://www.catholiceducation.org/en/controversy/common-misconceptions/onmoralistic-therapeutic-deism-as-u-s-teenagers-actual-tacit-de-facto-religious-faith.html. 23. david brooks, “the organization kid,” the atlantic, april 2001, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/the-organization-kid/302164/. ethics pedagogy as stratified, personal, utopian nudging 30 24. christian smith, with melinda lundquist denton, soul searching: the religious and spiritual lives of american teenagers (oxford: oxford university press, 2005). 25. arthur brooks registers a beware-what-you-wish-for warning. he relates that he used to complain about yesteryear’s “student relativists,” who are, in his view, being replaced by today’s upsurge of “student social justice warriors.” these students, in his accounting, are morally committed, but shrill and immature. see brooks, love your enemies: how decent people can save america from a culture of contempt (new york: broadside, 2019), 1– 18. 26. haldane, “macintyre against morality.” 27. macintyre, ethics in the conflicts of modernity: an essay on desire, practical reasoning, and narrative (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2016), 65. 28. how frequently college-level ethics course map onto this picture, i’m not sure. but ethics textbooks have commonly been structured in roughly this way. 29. simon blackburn, being good (oxford: oxford university press, 2001), 1–8. 30. haldane, “macintyre against morality.” 31. ibid. 32. james bernard murphy, “aquinas’ critique of education,” in philosophers on education, ed. a. o. rorty (london: routledge, 1998), 95–108, at 96. murphy himself argues for a philosophy of education closer to john henry newman’s. according to cardinal newman, the university’s special role is to foster intellectual culture, and so to help students develop intellectual virtues, not moral virtues. this doesn’t imply that ethical questions are ignored within university education, but that the goal of ethics courses would be to learn how to think ethically. 33. in “the idea of an educated public,” macintyre opines that, in recent times, only scotland in the eighteenth century has passed muster in producing broad, social results. 34. macintyre, ethics in the conflicts of modernity, 264–273. 35. macintyre also frequently strikes a wistfully authoritarian note. the only type of community that can enact the proper level of discipline these days is the military academy or the reform school. 36. macintyre, ethics in the conflicts of modernity, 51. 37. murphy, “the teacher as the forlorn hope of modernity,” 198. 31 reitsma 38. macintyre, “the irrelevance of ethics,” 8. 39. ibid., 12. 40. ibid., 1. 41. ibid., 14. 42. ibid., 12. 43. see, for example, farah stockman, “becoming a steelworker liberated her, then her job moved to mexico,” new york times, october 14, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/14/us/union-jobs-mexico-rexnord.html. 44. see, for example, debra satz, why some things should not be for sale: the moral limits of markets (oxford: oxford university press, 2010), and michael sandel, what money can’t buy: the moral limits of markets (new york: farrar, straus, and giroux, 2012). 45. macintyre, “the irrelevance of ethics,” 20 (emphasis mine). 46. macintyre, ethics in the conflicts of modernity, ix. 47. ibid., 30. 48. personally, i’m not convinced a naïve realist needs to take a route through expressivism to become a critical realist. why can’t she simply become less naïve? if a student, for example, were to confront arguments for relativism, recognize the serious shortcomings of relativist thinking, and in the process deepen her understanding of the proper role of moral virtues such as intellectual humility, open-mindedness, and tolerance, her realism has become more critical without any foray into expressivism. 49. linda trinkaus zagzebski, exemplarist moral theory (oxford: oxford university press, 2017). 50. ibid., 3. 51. to prompt students to reflect on whether there are important limits to the value of reflecting on moral exemplars, a zagzebski-inspired course might consider susan wolf’s arguments that striving to be a moral saint is a bad idea, as well as robert adam’s critique of wolf’s arguments. see susan wolf, “moral saints,” the journal of philosophy 79.8 (1982): 419– 439; and robert adams, “saints,” the journal of philosophy 81.7 (1984): 392–401. 52. william de witt hyde, the five great philosophies of life (new york: macmillan, 1904). ethics pedagogy as stratified, personal, utopian nudging 32 53. sigmund freud, civilization and its discontents, trans. james strachey (new york: norton, 2010), section v. 54. if you happen to ask whether it’s unduly manipulative to “nudge” students to consider “big picture” moral outlooks such as agapic ethics, i’d answer—in good macintyre-style—that many advertisers won’t be wringing their hands about what’s best for the same students when they push them about. but more importantly, the course scrutinizes comtesponville’s thinking and the substance of his agapic morality. and the course doesn’t deny that other big picture ethical perspectives might have power and insight. my immediate aim is to get the students into the game of thinking big picture. 55. personally, i find comte-sponville’s text to be an excellent teaching tool, partly because he makes what i regard as “pedagogically useful mistakes.” there is just enough insight in his writing for it to be worth fighting to discern what he’s saying, and there are just enough puzzles and problems to make it feel as though we are, as a class, piercing through these puzzles and problems to thoughtful solutions. see further regan lance reitsma, “being moral, being polite,” in evil and human wickedness, ed. alexandra cheira (oxford: interdisciplinary press, 2012), 23–34; “tolerance and intellectual humility,” the conference proceedings of the international society for the study of argumentation 7 (2010): 91–99; and “against humility as informed contempt,” in this thing of darkness, eds. claudio v. zanini and lima bhuiyan (oxford: inter-disciplinary press, 2016), 83–94. 56. macintyre, “alasdair macintyre on education: in dialogue with joseph dunne,” 14. 57. comte-sponville says, “some will regard [my writing of a book on moral virtues] as presumptuous or naïve. the latter reproach i take as a compliment; as for the first, i’m afraid it is nonsense. to venture to write about the virtues is to subject one’s self-esteem to constant bruising, to be made acutely aware, again and again, of one’s own mediocrity” (5). 58. yes, shrewd. to give one example, comte-sponville encourages his reader to become more generous not only because it will do others good, but because it will benefit her significantly, too. the generous person is not “possessed by” her possessions (93), and so she enjoys profound freedom, a mastery over her “desires, and over jealousy and envy” (95). furthermore, to be generous is to be able to give “when so many seem only to know 33 reitsma how to desire, to demand, to take” (95). to paraphrase: “do you yearn to be popular? well then, give, give, give. who doesn’t, after all, admire a generous person?” microsoft word 1 seltzer.docx [expositions 12.2 (2018) 1–14] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376   taking back philosophy—through reform, not revolution david seltzer drexel university taking back philosophy is a popularly-written but seriously-intentioned book by noted chinese philosophy scholar bryan van norden. the book is interesting because of its combination of radicalism and conservatism. on the one hand, van norden suggests making two radical changes to academic philosophy as it is commonly practiced in america: (1) vastly expanding the canon to include chinese, indian, and other non-mainstream forms of philosophy; and (2) changing the main focus of philosophical inquiry from specialist debates in metaphysics and epistemology to the practical question of how to live one’s life. on the other hand, van norden argues for these changes on the grounds that they are demanded by a consistent application of the standards of mainstream western philosophy and have precedent in the past of mainstream western philosophy. this mix of radicalism and conservatism allows van norden to keep the best of both worlds. he moves beyond the exclusivism of mainstream philosophy without sacrificing its intellectual rigor. the book arose out of two circumstances. the idea for the book started with a half-joking suggestion by jay garfield that mainstream philosophy departments should rename themselves “department of anglo-european philosophy.” van norden liked the idea, and garfield and van norden developed it into a short online piece for the stone. that piece ignited an online firestorm, which threatened to leave the realm of academia and enter the popular consciousness, and convinced van norden (garfield had other obligations) to develop it into a book advocating for the place of asian philosophy and other less commonly taught philosophies (lctp) within the mainstream philosophical canon.1 this topic would eventually become the focus of chapters 1 and 2. chapter 1 looks at the arguments made against including lctp in philosophy and shows that none of them hold. chapter 2 then shows the benefit of expanding the canon by providing examples of chinese-western comparative work and the developments to which it leads. while van norden was at work on the book, a second major event took place: the election of president trump. this made it important for intellectuals to enter the public sphere and engage taking back philosophy—through reform, not revolution 2   with ethnocentrism in the wider world, and to defend the importance of the liberal arts in what figured to be, and has been, a hostile political climate. at the same time, it also showed the need for soul-searching on the part of the progressive left. these became the topics of chapters 3 through 5. chapter 3 draws the analogy between intellectual wall-building within the philosophical profession and physical wall-building in the wider world, from trump’s wall to china’s great wall. chapter 4 then defends the relevance of philosophy for practical economic gain, civic engagement, and against scientism. chapter 5, finally, develops a conception of philosophy that will allow it to best address the world at large. in chapter 1 van norden lays out the arguments made against including lctp in the canon. these arguments generally fall into two main strands. the first is quality: critics hold that lctp doesn’t measure up to the standards of mainstream western philosophy. they generally support this claim by citing a few out-of-context examples of apparently nonsensical asian thought, and sometimes also by maintaining that western philosophy uses logical argumentation to address carefully defined problems in core subdisciplines while asian philosophy consists of sages sitting on mountaintops dispensing obscure and quasi-mystical pearls of wisdom for their followers to meditate upon.2 van norden takes evident delight in showing that canonical western figures like heraclitus and parmenides can be made to look nonsensical when taken out of context (3, 45); that chinese philosophy sometimes proceeds in rigid syllogistic form while major western philosophers such as plato often rely on poetic suggestion to make their point (144–147); and that the ancient chinese engaged in highly technical discussions about topics in logic and the philosophy of language that western philosophy has only recently begun to address (6–7). mainstream philosophers who doubt the merit of lctp either haven’t read any at all, or have looked briefly at a few of the less approachable texts (van norden mentions the analects, daodejing, and changes, but the upanishads are equally puzzling at first) and then given up without bothering to consult commentaries or secondary sources, as we would do with any major western philosopher we didn’t understand. those who do put in the effort to understand lctp invariably find much of value (16, 28–29). the second argument is definitional: “philosophy” is a greek word which refers to a particular intellectual tradition beginning in ancient greece.3 to counter this argument, van norden looks back into the history of ideas to show that what we think of as the established philosophical canon 3 seltzer     is actually a quite recent invention. in the enlightenment, philosophy was generally understood to begin in either egypt or india and to include chinese confucianism (19–21). i would add that the enlightenment canon also included women like margaret cavendish and anne conway, whose views leibniz described as close to his own,4 that moses mendelssohn associated with the leading figures of the german enlightenment5 and that ibn tufayl’s hayy ibn yaqzan was translated into english in 1708 as a forerunner of enlightenment natural religion.6 the exclusion of african and asian thought from the canon began in the 1800s due to a combination of factors. outside the academy, as europe shifted from trading with other cultures to colonizing them, it became less important to understand these cultures on their own terms and more important to justify colonialism by showing the superiority of western culture. within the academy, a group of kant scholars realized they could increase the value of their intellectual capital by rewriting the canon to make kant the culmination of enlightenment thought. over time this new canon ossified to the point that philosophers now take it for granted and no longer recognize it as the product of deliberate choices made on philosophically irrelevant grounds (21). this history helps to explain the vitriolic and sometimes silly nature of the responses to garfield and van norden’s editorial, such as the person who argued that they wouldn’t fly in a plane made with non-western math, not realizing that our numbering system comes from india via arabia (11–12). actual differences of interpretation can be resolved through calmly reasoned academic debate; when debate becomes shrill, it is often a sign that something else is really at stake. garfield and van norden’s editorial challenged established power structures both within academia and in the wider world. it was this, rather than the actual call for the inclusion of lctp, that provoked the response. the history of the canon also helps to explain why garfield and van norden got such a huge reaction to a partially tongue-in-cheek editorial. institutional resistance—which van norden (150), following lyotard, calls a form of terror—can always overcome rational arguments, but is far more vulnerable to humor. the idea that philosophy departments should rename themselves makes van norden’s point in a clever way that sticks in the mind as a reasoned argument would not. thus the popular and often “cheeky” (xxiii) tone of taking back philosophy does serious work: it helps to dislodge us from our habitual and nearly invisible assumptions. it’s important to note, however, that van norden uses humor fairly. he answers serious arguments with serious counter-arguments, and only mocks statements that are obviously false or stupid. taking back philosophy—through reform, not revolution 4   having rejected the objections to studying lctp, van norden can talk about the benefits it would bring. in the wider world, china and india are increasingly becoming powers that can influence our daily lives (as the threat of a trade war with china has shown), and one way to better understand these societies is to understand their philosophical underpinnings. van norden shows that confucianism, buddhism, and daoism still exert a significant influence on modern china (3– 4). the same may be true in india: i’ve had international students tell me the caste system is far from dead in practice. the study of islamic philosophy helps to counter the image of islam as a religion of fundamentalism and terror, and the narrative of a clash of civilizations falls apart when we realize medieval islamic philosophy is in fact a branch of western philosophy. in the classroom, students are increasingly diverse, and they connect with writers like beauvoir and fanon in a way they don’t with white male writers. in my own survey classes, i’ve often seen beauvoir and fanon generate the most class discussion, and i’ve had multiple students thank me for teaching them. at the faculty level, teaching lctp will encourage more women and minorities to enter the field, which is particularly important given that so much of philosophy depends upon thought experiments designed to clarify our basic intuitions, and a diverse field will help to ensure that those intuitions are broadly held, and not just the unquestioned background assumptions of a particular group. the main benefit, however, is that studying lctp opens possibilities for interesting comparative work. in chapter 2, van norden gives several examples of comparative philosophy using his specialization, chinese philosophy. the key for this kind of comparative work is to find two traditions that “are similar enough for comparisons to be legitimate, but different enough for both traditions to learn from each other” (5). some of van norden’s examples work better than others. there is really no need to appeal to buddhism to critique descartes’ conception of substance and the soul when hume’s criticisms will work equally well. it would be much more interesting to see a discussion of buddhism and hume, or hinduism and descartes. similarly, it would seem to make more sense to compare hobbes with xunzi, han feizi, or mozi than with mencius, and any anglo-european communitarian could make a relatively similar critique of hobbes coming out of aristotle. the most interesting parts of chapter 2 are the sections on ethics and weakness of will, in which van norden runs aristotle and the communitarians against mencius and the neo-confucians. in these sections, because the philosophers’ views are suitably close, we are forced to see differences of nuance, and comparative philosophers have invented new 5 seltzer     concepts in order to describe these differences, such as the distinction between development, discovery, and re-formation models of ethical cultivation (66). the key point is that these concepts can then be turned around and used to understand aristotle. thus comparative philosophy also helps to improve our understanding of western thought. it’s worthwhile to think about the benefits of reading lctp within the canon in more detail. lctp is a catch-all category, and different branches of lctp have different relations to mainstream (mctp?) philosophy, which means that they will have different effects when added to the canon. at one extreme, van norden discusses chinese philosophy, which has, as far as we know, no significant historical connection to mainstream western philosophy. the same is true of the indigenous philosophies of the americas, australia, and the pacific islands before contact with the west, and of african philosophy before the introduction of christianity and islam. in these cases, because there is no historical connection, comparative work must necessarily be organized around some problem to which historical figures from various traditions reply. this is how van norden organizes chapter 2, with sections on metaphysics, political philosophy, ethics, and weakness of will. he also suggests the same comparative approach when talking about african philosophies and the philosophies of the indigenous peoples of the americas (83, 149). on the one hand, this kind of comparative work should produce many new concepts because of the juxtapositions it creates. on the other hand, it does not contribute to our understanding of the development of the history of philosophy. the same is true in the classroom: these types of philosophy could be integrated into a problems-based course, but because they are not part of the same story, they are hard to fit into a chronologically-ordered historical survey course. at the other extreme are works that fit seamlessly into the mainstream canon but were excluded for reasons that had nothing to do with merit. a good example is beauvoir’s mid-1940s ethical writings. these were explicitly intended as philosophical works along the same lines pursued by contemporaries like sartre and merleau-ponty. they are clearly works of the first order: the ethics of ambiguity stands as the main statement of 1940s french existentialist ethics. they engage with canonical figures like kant, hegel, marx, husserl, and heidegger, and address central issues in philosophy like ethics, political philosophy, phenomenology, and ontology. including these works in the canon would give us a more accurate picture of the history of continental philosophy. they also fit easily into survey courses on ethics or the history of philosophy. (i have taught the ethics of ambiguity many times and “moral idealism and political realism” once, generally to favorable taking back philosophy—through reform, not revolution 6   reviews.) finally, we might get a better translation of the ethics of ambiguity. having said that, while there are important differences between beauvoir’s ontology and sartre’s, they are so closely related that reading beauvoir as well as sartre will not create the same type of juxtapositions as cross-traditional work, and thus will not lead to the same conceptual advances. the same could be said, in a previous generation, for cavendish and conway—their work fits nicely into the enlightenment canon as two alternative replies to the mind-body problem.7 contemporary africana, feminist, and lgbtq philosophies are historically grounded in mainstream western philosophy, although it’s worth noting that they are often grounded in western continental philosophy, and that many of the schools van norden (163n8) mentions as teaching africana philosophy have continental or at least pluralistic departments. reading these works as philosophy clearly enriches our understanding of them because it allows us to see the connections to the western tradition. it also highlights the need for philosophically competent translations: the parshley translation of the second sex was notoriously bad. at the same time, these works not only respond to the western tradition but also help to advance it. for instance, the early continental tradition tends to conceptualize self-other relations in abstract and thus symmetrical terms, whether we look at hegel (the reconciliation of consciousnesses), sartre (an endless oscillation between subject and object), merleau-ponty (all consciousness is embodied), or even levinas’ account of politics. the best statements of an asymmetrical notion of the other really do come from beauvoir and fanon. both recognize that, beneath the abstract symmetry between all people, there are concrete asymmetries, which prevent symmetrical relations from developing in practice. in chapter 3 van norden moves from exclusion within academia to exclusion in the wider world. the chapter is synthetic in character: van norden sees the resistance to including asian philosophy within the canon as reproducing, in microcosm, the resistance to globalization in the wider world. van norden starts with trump’s promise to build a wall along the mexican border. he easily shows that the wall has no rational justification and is instead a cynical attempt to appeal to racist and nationalist sentiment. in this sense, trump is not an outlier within the republican party, but rather the logical outcome of the “southern strategy” which the republican party has used, in a far less overt form, since richard nixon’s campaign in 1968 (85–89). i would add that trump’s success is actually part of a much larger phenomenon, on all sides of the political spectrum, which 7 seltzer     also includes the brexit vote, the election of far-right nationalists in hungary and poland, the nearsuccess of the scottish independence referendum and the subsequent overwhelming victory of the snp in parliamentary elections, and the failed catalan independence movement, among others. van norden cleverly juxtaposes this western nationalist turn with a discussion of a similar phenomenon in china. china is rapidly expanding, it is ethnically diverse, and cracks are forming in the social fabric. to hold his country together, newly-appointed dictator-for-life xi jinping cynically uses the chinese canon to appeal to nationalistic sentiment (91–97). van norden’s discussion of china forces us to see wall-building from the other side: not only are we building walls against the world, but the world is building walls against us. conservatives from edmund burke to allan bloom defend this kind of wall-building because it promotes adherence to the norms of one’s own society and culture. van norden, however, responds that the most vibrant cultures are constantly evolving. they hold strong communal norms, but they constantly question, evaluate, and refine those norms (99–105). they are also outward-directed. the early ming dynasty mounted massive maritime expeditions, rome was cosmopolitan, and america was built by immigrants. societies only build walls when they have started to decline and want to hold on to what they already have. this attempt to hold on to the past only serves to accelerate the decline: the ming dynasty was successfully overthrown shortly after constructing the iconic sections of the great wall,8 and trump’s attacks on immigrants will deprive america of cultural exchanges and the innovations that arise from them. instead, van norden claims, history shows that societies which do not make gradual and intelligently guided adaptations eventually change cataclysmically and disastrously. this is what happened in the french revolution, the russian revolution, and mao’s cultural revolution (102). as in the macrocosm so in the microcosm. taking back philosophy repeats the warning from the stone editorial that the philosophical field must voluntarily change before change is forced upon it. in this sense, taking back philosophy is not really a call for change: the change will happen regardless. instead, taking back philosophy is a call for the professoriate to intelligently integrate lctp into the philosophical canon, using the standards and methods learned from mainstream philosophy, before this change is forced on them by poorly-informed student agitators and moneyhungry administrators.9 taking back philosophy—through reform, not revolution 8   chapter 4 seeks to defend the value of philosophy and the liberal arts generally. philosophy has come under attack from right-wing anti-intellectuals, but also from scientists who don’t see the value of the liberal arts given that science seemingly furnishes a better tool for understanding the world, and most concerningly from students (or, more likely, parents) who don’t see why they should spend god-knows-what on tuition only to leave college with a major that appears to have no practical value. some of the attacks are easily dealt with. marco rubio’s claim that welders make more than philosophers is simply an alternative fact (1–2, 110–111). the idea that philosophy has no practical value is also mistaken. philosophy may have almost no direct practical value, except to the few people who go to graduate school, but it is particularly effective at developing a set of general skills—reading, writing, and reasoning—that are essential for advancement in almost any career (113–114). at a deeper level, the liberal arts are necessary for democratic citizenship. democracy places substantial power in the hands of the people; it is therefore necessary for the people to be able to think critically and independently and to be used to encountering views beyond their own. this observation has its darker side. van norden, like john dewey and plato’s right-wing straussian interpreters, recognizes that the liberal arts can serve as a tool for manipulation. if the study of the liberal arts becomes a luxury confined to the elite, they could use it to control the masses, who would be given the technical training to serve the elite but not the critical thinking skills to question the status quo. at the extreme level, the antiintellectual rejection of the liberal arts produces blind faith, conformism, and intolerance: it is consistent with, and leads to, fascism (127–130). as for the critique that science renders philosophy obsolete, van norden’s strongest response is that philosophy is a form of what thomas kuhn would call pre-paradigm science.10 that is, we do philosophy when we haven’t yet developed a method for investigating a particular question. over time, as various fields of inquiry become more systematized, they break off from philosophy and become their own disciplines. the discipline of philosophy, as we define it today, is simply what is left over (133–134, 142–143). thus “philosophy is like a glacier: it moves so slowly that it appears to be going nowhere, but in the long run it radically transforms the world you live in” (143). van norden also, however, thinks that some of the problems of philosophy, and the liberal arts, are self-inflicted, and he discusses these in chapter 5. in the first place, van norden thinks that philosophy has become overly technical and remote from daily life. analytic philosophy, at its worst, can become an exercise in solving abstract thought-puzzles; continental philosophy, at its 9 seltzer     worst, can become an exercise in using complex jargon (151–153). van norden doesn’t exactly say so, but this is probably connected to the rise of the academy and the subsequent cloistering of philosophy within academia. this created a situation where academics write to impress other academics; they are positively rewarded for displays of intellectual virtuosity while the topic they display it about is unimportant. the anti-intellectualism van norden (119) notes in american culture might be a reaction to this tendency. it’s important to remember that, until the rise of the modern research university (which took place in the late 1800s in america), most philosophers worked outside the academy and wrote for an educated but non-academic audience. philosophers like locke, mill, marx, and sartre wrote not to impress their fellow academics but to persuade people to change the world. even professional academics like dewey and (when he wasn’t being fired) russell devoted a considerable amount of their work to influencing public opinion. to address the problem of relevance van norden suggests that philosophy should focus on the question “what way should one live?” this does not mean that we should entirely neglect philosophical thought-puzzles, but rather that we can never allow these thought-puzzles to become ends in themselves, apart from the practical concerns which motivated them. it is important to note that this suggestion is not particularly new. van norden correctly traces it back to socrates (151– 153), but it motivates much of ancient and hellenistic philosophy down to augustine and boethius. philosophers of that time saw philosophy primarily as describing a way of life, and sometimes even withdrew from society in order to live an alternate, philosophical way of life. the same approach can be found in the existentialists, as well as in chinese and indian philosophy. van norden also, importantly, shows that the question of how to live our lives motivates some of the most seemingly abstract and technical thinkers of recent times. bertrand russell was motivated by a kind of mystical experience; rawls’ conception of justice was motivated in part by seeing the aftermath of the atomic bombs; hare’s prescriptivism was motivated by his experience as a japanese prisoner-of-war in world war ii (153–156). thus, by focusing on how to live our lives, van norden does not seek to change philosophy so much as to restore its original meaning. van norden also thinks the liberal arts have become intellectually lazy. based on his experience, van norden thinks that most fields in the liberal arts have been colonized by some combination of the hermeneutic of suspicion and relativism. the hermeneutic of suspicion attempts to find the interests—economic, psychological, or otherwise—that are served by the text. the hermeneutic of suspicion can be a valuable tool when used in conjunction with other methods, taking back philosophy—through reform, not revolution 10   but when used exclusively, it spares us any need to critically evaluate what the text actually says (139–140). relativism—from the medieval “two truths” doctrine of siger of brabant to contemporary individual or cultural relativism—goes even further by holding that every person or group is entitled to its own opinion, and thus eliminates the need to think at all (18, 140–142). to address the problem of intellectual laziness, van norden suggests that philosophy is distinguished by a hermeneutic of faith, or, more simply, by the principle of charitable reading. in other words, we start with the assumption that the author may actually be right, and that it is therefore worthwhile to figure out what the author actually said. of course, different authors take different positions, so we also need to understand and evaluate the reasons that various authors give for their own positions and against rival positions (159). the hermeneutic of faith explains the practical usefulness of philosophy: philosophy is particularly good at teaching general critical reasoning skills because the hermeneutic of faith holds philosophers to high standards of critical reasoning. philosophy as van norden conceives it also has a canon: a more or less defined (but never fixed) set of texts from its history that are acknowledged to be of the highest merit. the evaluative character of the canon—a canon implies that some works are better than others—is justified by the hermeneutic of faith; its historical character is justified by the pre-paradigm nature of philosophy. of course the canon van norden suggests is much broader because it includes lctp, but the lctp supplements the mainstream canon rather than replacing it. in contrast to “manicheans” who insist that we should entirely eliminate dead white men from the curriculum, van norden (159) holds that we should study all works of the highest quality, including both those written by (now-)dead white men and those that were not. van norden’s (124, 195n40) expansive canon includes theists, both from the history of philosophy (descartes, berkeley, leibniz, kant) and from more contemporary times (anscombe, macintyre, charles taylor). it also includes thoughtful conservatives. thinkers like burke, matt lewis, and allan bloom play by the rules of the hermeneutic of faith and advance serious arguments for their positions, so they deserve the same consideration from us. of course taking an argument seriously, and teaching it, is very different from agreeing with it (82). the inclusion of thoughtful theists and conservatives, at the very least, prevents the pronounced left-leaning tendency of the liberal arts profession from hardening into what mill calls dead dogma.11 at the most, they may sometimes be right. transferred from philosophy to the wider world, van norden’s position implies that we should take seriously qualified candidates like george h. w. bush, bob dole, and john mccain (again, 11 seltzer     taking a candidate seriously is very different from voting for him), although it does allow us to reject out of hand politicians like donald trump, george w. bush, ronald reagan, and sarah palin (119–121, 125–126). i find van norden’s position appealing because it allows for change without falling into the pitfalls of some of the more naïve attempts at reforming the curriculum. van norden doesn’t exactly say so, but it is possible to construct a kind of history of the liberal arts from his remarks. in the past, most fields in the liberal arts had canons that were as limited as the philosophy canon still is. literature meant american and european literature; religion meant catholicism, protestantism, and perhaps judaism; women’s studies and africana studies didn’t exist; and so on.12 the reasons motivating this limitation were, again, probably a combination of cultural imperialism and battles over intellectual capital. then at some point these fields underwent the kind of sudden, undirected change van norden warns about in chapter 3. because excluded voices couldn’t gain a fair hearing according to the old standards, the most obvious solution was simply to get rid of the standards. the liberal arts shifted from being reflexively and uncritically eurocentric to being reflexively and uncritically left-wing. relativism and the hermeneutic of suspicion replaced the hermeneutic of faith. van norden refers to the excesses of this period in his book: he was a graduate student at stanford when the undergraduates agitated to eliminate the western tradition from the curriculum (102–103). philosophy is the last holdout. thus philosophy, the most intolerant of the liberal arts, is also the most academically rigorous.13 allan bloom would feel vindicated. only afterwards did the problems of this revolution become apparent. with no point from which to gain a critical purchase, postmodernism proved easy to subvert. if everything is discourse, then why shouldn’t russian bots make up an alternative discourse? if science is defined by its institutional practices, then why not eliminate global warming by firing the scientists? if men and women have different values, then what is wrong about excluding women from cutthroat boardrooms? or, to take an example a bit closer to home, if we should all avoid offending one another in the name of tolerance, then why shouldn’t a christian claim to be offended by an art installation of a crucified frog, and demand that it be taken down in the name of tolerance? the student agitators of the 1960s can hardly have wanted trump to become president, but they may have inadvertently helped to create an intellectual environment which made the trump presidency possible. taking back philosophy—through reform, not revolution 12   van norden points to a third way. rather than sudden, undirected change coming from below, we could have intelligently directed gradual reform led by the professoriate. this gradual, deweyan reform would give us the best of both worlds: it would both expand the canon and preserve the standards of the philosophical field. because it preserves the high standards of the field, van norden’s conception of philosophy would be able to teach general thinking skills and develop informed citizens. because it insists on arguments, van norden’s conception of philosophy provides a critical purchase. the bare assertion that we should adopt multiculturalism can easily be countered by the bare assertion that we should not. the argument that we should adopt multiculturalism because it leads to innovation and critical self-reflection is much harder to refute. (it also leads to a much richer notion of multiculturalism as cultural interchange instead of bare coexistence). and, because van norden’s conception of philosophy is oriented toward questions that affect everyone, not just philosophers, it should be relatively easy to communicate these arguments to a general audience. the only question is whether van norden’s reform can come about. at a purely logical level, there is no reason why it could not. in fact, as van norden shows, if we consistently applied the standards of the philosophical field, we would have to make these changes. but the philosophical profession runs on institutional logic rather than philosophical logic. van norden writes mostly about top-50 philosophy departments (as determined by brian leiter) or sometimes just doctoral programs (2–3, 162–163n3–8). at this level, the prospects for change appear relatively bleak. because these departments judge themselves mostly in terms of their academic prestige in the eyes of other researchers, they are relatively insulated from the external forces which van norden thinks will drive change, such as student demographics and the rise of china and india. at the same time, because these departments already occupy the top positions in the field, they have the most incentive to preserve the status quo. thus most top programs will probably continue to emphasize analytic metaphysics and epistemology for some considerable time. at lower levels, however, the equation changes. prestige is less important; meeting the needs of students becomes more important. thus the change van norden refers to may already have happened. my department head at la salle university works in all three medieval traditions with a focus on islamic philosophy. my catch-all program head at penn state abington specializes in the history of buddhist medicine. i previously taught at rowan university, which includes an asian philosophy specialist in a permanent faculty of seven. the rise of untenured teaching faculty 13 seltzer     and adjuncts, problematic as it is, also creates space for exploration. if a tenure-track faculty member researches in lctp it costs the department prestige. the faculty member could always, as van norden (34) suggests, work to develop an area of competence in an lctp, but even this takes away from the time they could be writing. in contrast, if a teaching professor or adjunct with no research expectations offers a class and it attracts enough students to run, the class can be considered a success, regardless of the topic. in my own experience as an adjunct, i have never encountered obstacles to offering lctp courses. penn state abington allowed me to offer a course in asian philosophy, simply because the course description was on the books, and it turned into a regularly-offered course. my program director at drexel university hired me to teach critical reasoning, but regarded my area of competence in asian philosophy as an advantage, and supported my efforts to offer special-topics courses in arabic philosophy and jewish philosophy. of course, all of these opportunities could also be viewed as a sad reflection on the state of higher education: as the institution of the university itself breaks down, the institutional resistance to lctp is breaking down with it. notes 1. bryan van norden, taking back philosophy: a multicultural manifesto (new york: columbia university press, 2017), xxiii–xxiv, 8–11. 2. nicholas tampio, “not all things wise and good are philosophy,” aeon september 13, 2016, https://aeon.co/ideas/not-all-things-wise-and-good-are-philosophy; jay garfield, foreword to taking back philosophy by bryan van norden (new york: columbia university press, 2017), xvi; van norden, taking back philosophy, 12–13. 3. tampio; garfield xiv–xv; van norden 19. 4. margaret atherton, ed., women philosophers of the early modern period (indianapolis: hackett, 1994), 2–3, 47. 5. see, for instance, alexander altmann, introduction to jerusalem by moses mendelssohn, trans. allan arkush (hanover, nh: university press of new england, 1983), 26–27. taking back philosophy—through reform, not revolution 14   6. ibn tufayl, abu bakr muhammad, the improvement of the human reason, exhibited in the life of hai ebn yokdhan: in which is demonstrated, by what methods one may, by the meer light of nature, attain the knowledg of things natural and supernatural; more particularly the knowledg of god, and the affairs of another life, trans. simon ockley, 1708, www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/16831. 7. atherton 5. 8. arthur waldron, the great wall of china: from history to myth (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1990), 160, 164. 9. jay garfield and bryan van norden, “if philosophy won’t diversify, let’s call it what it really is,” the stone may 11, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/05/11/opinion/ifphilosophy-wont-diversify-lets-call-it-what-it-really-is.html; van norden 36. 10. thomas kuhn, the structure of scientific revolutions (chicago: university of chicago press, 1962), chapter 2. 11. john stuart mill, on liberty (london: john w. parker and son, 1859), chapter 2. 12. garfield xx. 13. garfield xx; van norden 139. microsoft word rodgers spr20 [expositions 14.1 (2020) 77–85] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 teach the stories, not the debates: on macintyre’s suggestion to use novels to teach ethics jordan rodgers king’s college (pa) teaching ethics is a thoroughly questionable activity. after all, a teacher in a university is typically meant to have earned the right to teach students in a subject by virtue of having developed a certain expertise in that subject. but most of us, i think, would balk at the idea that teachers of ethics are “ethical experts”1: we are not necessarily any better than the average person at being ethical,2 and if we are to be distinguished from the common run of people in anything it is likely to be simply in understanding a bit more deeply how conceptually difficult it is to determine what being ethical amounts to. and so it is natural to make the ethics class about that—to teach students not how to be good, but how to think in a careful and analytically rigorous way about debates about being good. of course, in doing so, the ethics teacher need not abandon the properly ethical goal entirely. indeed, she may tell herself, not totally implausibly, that the ability to think carefully about ethical debates, even if it does not itself amount to a good life, is at least a contributing element, and anyway that it is an ability the teacher is actually capable of developing in her students. an ethics teacher inclined to this line of thinking will not find much encouragement in the writings of alasdair macintyre. one of macintyre’s key lines of thought, which has been prominent throughout his writing career, undermines the link on which this self-justification depends. this line of thought stems from the observation that the debates we moderns have about political and moral controversies are interminable and mostly unproductive. the different sides of these debates appeal in their basic premises to fundamental norms and values that are different from and indeed incommensurable with the fundamental norms and values of the other side of the debate.3 modern moral philosophers, in macintyre’s view, have not sought to understand why this is so. they have primarily set about clarifying the concepts involved in those fundamental norms and values. many no doubt sincerely believed that conceptual clarification could resolve some of those debates, but in fact the result has been further entrenchment of opposing sides. such a result is bad enough for moral philosophy, but it is potentially disastrous for the teacher of ethics, if she wants to hold onto the idea that what she teaches will contribute in some way to the real moral education of her students. for if the best material available to her to teach presents on macintyre’s suggestion to use novels to teach ethics 78 only more intellectually sophisticated versions of the familiar disputes, then she runs the serious risk of teaching her students not that they should take care when thinking about ethics, but that they should take care to sound sophisticated when talking about ethics. after all, if philosophical analysis does not actually move the debates toward resolution, what’s the point? ethics then appears to the student not as a serious attempt to grapple with the problems of life, but as a source of lofty-sounding potential justifications for whichever position she was already inclined towards.4 it would, in a way, be better if students found that to be pointless. in all likelihood, they will instead find that such a source of rationalizations is all too useful for them in their professional lives. the problem, of course, is that if macintyre is right it is difficult to see what to do about the situation. one way to avoid giving students this impression is to insist that the debates do terminate … in one’s own position. but that doesn’t solve the problem. then the teacher is not a teacher at all (at least not of anything philosophical), but simply one more shrill voice in the interminable moral debates of modernity. but how can one avoid the pitfalls of dogmatism without falling back into the feeble project of merely teaching the debate? i want to argue that one way of navigating through this particular scylla and charybdis is suggested by macintyre in ethics and the conflicts of modernity (ecm), in the parenthetical remark that “[o]ne test of whether a particular academic course in ethics is or is not being taught in a morally serious way is whether or not its students are taught that a close reading of certain novels is indispensable to their learning what now needs to be learned.”5 the claim about novels is a toss-off in the book; macintyre doesn’t try to explicate its meaning there or elsewhere in the book. but a reader familiar with his views about the role of narratives in human life, whether from ecm or his earlier work, will have some guesses. macintyre’s view, in brief, is that narrative structure is a necessary condition for the intelligibility of human action. when we seek to understand ourselves and others, to understand what goods we are or ought to be pursuing, we must understand our actions and those of others in the context of some kind of story in which those actions make sense. such enacted stories are, for macintyre, essentially open-ended but also teleological: i.e., they are stories that are necessarily unpredictable and subject to revision, but they are also stories about attempts to find and achieve some good (or avoid some evil).6 in macintyre’s view, a great deal of the impoverishment of modern moral discourse and the philosophy that stems from it is due to the forgetting of this point. the interminability of our debates is due in part to an “emotivist” or “expressivist” culture, one 79 rodgers which understands moral debates not as communal attempts at reaching a shared conception of some commonly held good, or in other words as episodes in a shared and ongoing narrative, but simply as warring expressions of subjectively held value judgments, in which both sides seek to exert their own will on that of the other side by whatever means necessary. for their own part, modern moral philosophers don’t tend to try to understand their own activity in narrative terms, either. thus macintyre’s familiar claim that modern moral philosophy has forgotten the historical conditions which gave rise to it. modern moral philosophy, even when it seeks to provide antiexpressivist arguments, is nonetheless ideologically expressivist and anti-narratival—it seeks to assert that formally valid arguments are more effective weapons in the morality wars than mere insults and exhortations, but it does not try to understand why we are warring in the first place and whether it is good for us. macintyre suggests novels as a way of teaching ethics in a “morally serious way.” macintyre doesn’t seek to define “moral seriousness,” but it is clear that he means something other than sophisticated and rigorous philosophical argumentation.7 what is dangerous about modern moral philosophy (and about foregrounding it in ethics classes) is that it encourages us to confuse moral seriousness with the application of admittedly valuable but limited analytic skills to the questions of ethics. moral seriousness for macintyre is instead a matter of seeking to face squarely the root causes of our moral problems, especially under conditions in which it is tempting not to.8 it is here that the idea of lives as enacted narratives proves indispensable. moral seriousness consists in insisting on asking oneself the question, in relation to one’s actions, “of what story or stories do i find myself a part?”9 and that requires thinking about one’s actions in relationship to others, and in relation to the sociological and historical conditions in which one finds oneself. why might novels help students to learn to ask that question? it might be tempting here to give a simple and universal answer, namely, to suggest that reading novels is just in itself morally salubrious. novels are themselves narratives, of course, and thus reading them is bound to make students think in narrative terms, and thus perhaps apply that thinking to their own lives. it has even been argued that reading literary fiction improves the human ability that researchers call “theory of mind,” i.e., the ability to understand the beliefs and desires of people distinct from oneself.10 but it is important to see that macintyre’s claim about the value of using novels to teach ethics is not universal in scope.11 he stresses that it is not the reading of novels as such, but only of “certain” novels, that will help. earlier in the same paragraph, macintyre suggests that different on macintyre’s suggestion to use novels to teach ethics 80 kinds of novels will form people in different kinds of ways, and contrasts the way novels like those of austen or eliot would inform moral development with the way novels like those of woolf or murdoch might.12 and in both ethics in the conflicts of modernity and after virtue, macintyre points to sartre’s la nausée as an example of a novel whose primary import is precisely to undermine the points about narrative macintyre is keen to stress.13 nor will it do to advance the familiar argument that novels (or fictions generally, including short stories, films, etc.) serve well in an introductory capacity for ethics and other philosophy subjects, since they are accessible entry points. it is true, of course, that authors of these fictions generally intend to appeal to wide audiences, and so the barrier to entry tends to be lower than for, e.g., technical philosophical prose. but first, we can repeat the previous point: if this were all there was to it, any novel would do, so long as it dealt with moral problems in some way or another. and second, this line of argument undermines macintyre’s key claim that reading novels is a necessary condition for the moral seriousness of the course of instruction, a seriousness we are likely to avoid unless we are forced to develop it. if the novel is to have special pedagogical value, it will not lie in its accessibility but in its peculiar ability to help us tackle the problems of living an enacted narrative; those are problems that persist even at the highest levels of moral development. indeed, the ways in which macintyre himself makes use of examples from novels in his own philosophical work suggests that their usefulness persists even at relatively high levels of development of moral reflection (presuming that macintyre’s reflections themselves evince just such a high level of development). and so, a good ethics instructor will have to select the novel or novels to be used with a great deal of care, and the fact that the novels present a serious challenge to her students, or at any rate are not universally accessible, will often be a point in favor of choosing them.14 for example, a novel could invite students to compare their own way of life with that of a character in a very different social and historical situation, which lacks some of the problems endemic to their own situation but includes different and unfamiliar ones. another novel might present the challenge of seeing written out in black and white the dangerous implications of a certain kind of evaluative judgment to which they are inclined, or which is encouraged by or even taken for granted in the culture in which they live or the institutions within which they work. and certainly any novel that will develop the kind of moral outlook macintyre promotes will present the challenge of needing to understand what character traits allow the characters to understand and respond well to the 81 rodgers problems of their own situation, and how the reader herself might cultivate those same traits in herself. of course, a particularly good novel might present all of these challenges in one and the same story. such a story would require for its proper understanding the meeting of many imaginative and moral challenges, but would also hopefully provide some of the materials necessary for meeting those challenges. it is, i think, for this reason and not because of any romanticized devotion to the “great books” that the “certain novels” macintyre likes to recommend (e.g., the novels of jane austen and george eliot) tend to fall into the fairly small range of classic, realist novels from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and novels from later periods that are obviously influenced by their example (e.g., the novels of virginia woolf and iris murdoch). part of what is distinctive about these novels is their sociological ambition: novels like persuasion, middlemarch, and crime and punishment seek not just to tell a story about individual characters, but to do so in the context of a larger world whose social, political, and economic conditions place constraints on action, and thus whose (often explicit) description is itself part of the novelist’s task.15 such novels are particularly apt to encourage their readers to develop what macintyre likes to call “sociological self-knowledge”: roughly speaking, the knowledge of how one’s own individual narrative fits in with the current social, political, and economic situation and its history.16 but the other part of their distinctiveness lies in the fact that they don’t conceive of their descriptive ambition in purely theoretical, value-free terms. a good novel can describe, in one and the same story, what a society is like and how individuals make moral choices within it. in so doing, it can implicitly praise or condemn certain kinds of social structures, encourage certain kinds of responses to it, and (most important for macintyre) help to identify the virtues most needed to navigate the problems it poses.17 thus, the distinctive pedagogical value of the novel lies in the combination of sociological selfknowledge and unflinching treatment of moral dilemmas in one narrative whole. that is valuable because it reflects the fact that a human life actually is a narrative whole, and not a series of detachable parts. a key part of macintyre’s critique of modernity is that it encourages modern individuals to compartmentalize their lives based on their various social roles and their competing obligations.18 if macintyre is right that human lives are morally charged narrative wholes, then in order to understand my life, i have to tell one story with one character at its center (myself); otherwise, any deviations from what i take to be my basic obligations can simply be understood on macintyre’s suggestion to use novels to teach ethics 82 as required by the obligation of some different role, which allows me to ignore altogether basic questions about what kind of person i should be, what character traits i should develop, what goods i should pursue. one duty of an ethics instructor is to encourage students who are going into various professions not to allow the norms, whether formal or informal, of the (corruptible) institutions in which they work to undermine their commitment to more basic ethical values.19 but, as i said above, it can be difficult to convey this to students without reverting to dogmatism, e.g., by simply appealing to some basic ethical value that the student ought to endorse. if one is unconvinced, as macintyre is, that modern moral philosophy can effectively solve this problem simply by providing a rigorous and clearly articulated set of debates about these issues, then the appeal of novels is evident. the dramatization a novel provides can suggest answers to moral dilemmas, and invite certain moral reactions, without didactically insisting upon them, all while providing the background information necessary for understanding how those moral issues arise from modern life in the first place. they thus provide a model for seriousness in moral thinking very different from that of modern moral philosophy, and one arguably more appropriate to the problems of moral life. notes 1. for some recent discussion of this question in one of its most practically urgent forms (viz., bioethics), see david archard, “why moral philosophers are not and should not be moral experts,” bioethics 25.3 (2011):119–127; and john-stewart gordon, “moral philosophers are moral experts! a reply to david archard,” bioethics 28.4 (2014): 203–206. 2. see, for example, the study of eric schwitzgebel and joshua rust, “the moral behavior of ethics professors: relationships among self-reported behavior, expressed normative attitude, and directly observed behavior,” philosophical psychology 27.3 (2014): 293– 327, and a replication study by phillip schönneger and johannes wagner, “the moral behavior of ethics professors: a replication extension in german-speaking countries,” philosophical psychology 32.4 (2018): 532–559. 3. see macintyre’s after virtue: a study in moral theory, 3rd ed. (notre dame, in: university of notre dame press, 2007), 6–11. macintyre’s examples are debates about just war, abortion, and universal access to education and health care. 83 rodgers 4. a particularly striking example of the phenomenon: i had a precocious, brave, and especially open student once who told a very personal story in class about her father’s death, and how among other things it inspired in her a strong commitment to the value of human dignity. but she resolutely refused to take that insight as valid for anyone other than herself (i.e., refused to take it as an insight at all). it was her own strongly held view, but holding it strongly did not for her imply that others should hold it, too. and it is hard to blame her for this strange position: she took it not (or at least not merely), as some college teachers seem to think, because of some deep relativism baked into her generation’s dna, but in part, i think, because the standard presentation of competing ethical theories (along with other cultural forces, of course) suggested to her that acceptance of a value orientation is rather like picking which sports team one will root for. 5. macintyre, ethics in the conflicts of modernity: an essay on desire, practical reasoning, and narrative (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2016), 219. 6. see especially macintyre, after virtue, 204–218. 7. this is not to suggest, of course, that macintyre does (or we should) regard careful, rigorous philosophical argumentation as anything other than a good thing, ceteris paribus. 8. it is worth noting that macintyre comes close here to one component of existentialist conceptions of the relationship of human beings to value: namely, the idea that our everyday lives are often based on deep contradictions, which require ever more sophisticated evasions (which sartre collectively calls “bad faith”) if we are to save ourselves the trouble of trying to resolve them. we might thus compare macintyre’s “moral seriousness” with, e.g., sartre’s emphasis on responsibility or kierkegaard’s use of the term “earnestness.” compare john j. davenport, “towards an existential virtue ethics: kierkegaard and macintyre,” in kierkegaard after macintyre: essays on freedom, narrative and virtue, eds. john j. davenport and anthony rudd (chicago & lasalle, il: open court, 2001), 276–283. of course, while the (sartrean) existentialist sees the evasion of responsibility as the human plight in general, macintyre will insist that this is a problem local to modernity, and in principle capable of solution. in this he is closer to marx. 9. macintyre, after virtue, 216. 10. see david comer kidd and emanuele castano, “reading literary fiction improves theory of mind,” science 342.6156 (2013): 377–380. on macintyre’s suggestion to use novels to teach ethics 84 11. the claim that novels make people morally better is misleading anyway. good literary fiction, when it touches on moral subjects, rather obviously does so in a complex rather than a didactic way. we can say of it what nietzsche said of great pain: “i doubt that [it] makes us ‘better’—but i know that it makes us deeper”; see friedrich nietzsche, the gay science, trans. josefine nauckhoff, ed. bernard williams (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2001), 6–7. of course, all other things being equal, it might be better to be “deeper,” and that is part of what macintyre might mean by moral seriousness. but this hardly implies that those who read lots of literary fiction will tend to be higher on the ethical scoreboard. whatever else it does, literary fiction is bound to complicate us in ways that make us less, rather than more, predictable. insofar as we conceive of being “morally better” as predictably performing (or refraining from) a certain predefined set of actions, we will certainly have to deny that literary fiction makes us so. 12. macintyre, ethics in the conflicts of modernity, 219. 13. see ibid., 232–233; compare macintyre, after virtue, 214. 14. of course, any good teacher will give some thought to accessibility, since it is simply a pedagogical error to present students with challenges they are not equipped to face. an instructor has to think long and hard about how to avoid that error, and can only do so if she knows who her students are. all i am trying to do here is to undermine the familiar thought that the usefulness of novels lies primarily in their accessibility. the kind of usefulness it seems to me that macintyre wishes to attribute to them depends upon their presenting certain (hopefully surmountable) moral and imaginative challenges. 15. of course, capitalism in particular and something like the marxist description and critique of it loom large in macintyre’s own philosophical analysis of modernity. see especially ethics in the conflicts of modernity, 93–101, but also his “the irrelevance of ethics,” in virtue and the economy: essays on morality and markets, eds. andrius bielskis and kelvin knight (new york: routledge, 2015), 7–21. given this, it is no surprise that many of the novels he recommends are set in the centuries of capitalism’s early development. it is also worth remembering here the well-known influence of the novelist balzac on the theorizing of marx and engels, the latter of whom famously said that “i have learned more [from balzac] than from all the professional historians, economists and statisticians put together.” see engels’ letter to margaret harkness, april 1888, in marx and engels on 85 rodgers literature and art, eds. lee baxandall and stefan morawski (st. louis: telos press, 1973), 115. 16. for further discussion of sociological self-knowledge, see macintyre, ethics in the conflicts of modernity, 111–112, 211–213. to have it, he says, is “to know who you and those around you are in terms of your and their roles and relationships to each other, to the common goods of family, workplace, and school, and to the structures through which power and money are distributed” (211). 17. it is worth noting that on this point macintyre was critical of marx, who was famously hesitant to provide a specifically moral critique of capitalism: “marx […] supposed that if individuals in their social and economic roles act out their parts with systemic regularity, they cannot be called to account as responsible moral agents for what they do. but this is a mistake. for at key points the system can be successfully resisted and even changed. and a first condition of its being so resisted, of knowing when and how to resist it, is that its workings are understood in moral terms.” see macintyre, “the irrelevance of ethics,” 17. 18. the theme is introduced in macintyre, after virtue, 204; for a fuller treatment see his “social structures and their threats to moral agency,” in ethics & politics: selected essays, vol. 2 (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2006), 186–204. 19. for this reason, there is not necessarily any need for a business ethics class to use novels about business, or for a medical ethics class to use novels about medicine, and so on. indeed, such a selection might encourage rather than diminish the compartmentalization impulse. what is important is to find a story that dramatizes the more general moral challenges that a person working in the modern business or medical world will have to face (e.g., challenges with how to value money and efficiency, how to deal with tragic conflicts between respecting the value of individuals and following the norms of institutions, and so on). microsoft word nielsen [expositions 15.1 (2021) 1–24] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 alcibiades on socrates’s silenic ways: a gadamerian-inflected hermeneutical interrogation of socrates as a dialogue partner cynthia nielsen university of dallas introduction although most readers of plato’s symposium find alcibiades’s speech humorous and delightful to read, commentators are divided on how to interpret it. a particular point of contention centers on alcibiades’s critical assessment of socrates. for example, some interpret the speech through alcibiades’s moral failures and thus, in essence, dismiss his critical remarks about socrates.1 others contend that alcibiades’s depiction of socrates is both plausible and offers significant insights into socrates’s philosophical eros.2 this essay aligns with several conclusions of the latter group. in particular, it takes seriously alcibiades’s portrait of socrates as a satyr whose peculiar philosophical eros gives rise to a philosophical practice that simultaneously attracts and repels. despite alcibiades’s flaws, the accusations that he levels against socrates reveal tensions in the philosopher that are worth interrogating. alcibiades’s speech, which both condemns and praises socrates, proffers a complex picture of the challenges of the philosophical life and socrates’s particular enactment of that life. the multiple textual clues in the symposium—for example, plato’s staging of alcibiades’s speech as truthful and the stark contrast between alcibiades and apollodorus3—indicate that alcibiades’s censure of socrates should be read with critical attentiveness and seriousness since the questions it raises are philosophically, not to mention ethically, significant. by refusing to allow either socrates or alcibiades the last word, plato’s text could be read as inviting his readers to participate in an ongoing interrogation of both figures— figures whose complexity and (dis)harmony of opposites continue to enchant and offend. the notion of not having the last word is a common theme in hans-georg gadamer’s writings. for gadamer, this means, among other things, that to engage in a genuine, reciprocal dialogue, one must remain open to the real possibility that one’s position is wrong or perhaps needs rethinking. this essay dialectically examines socrates’s interactions with alcibiades in the alcibiades on socrates’s silenic ways 2 symposium to see whether socrates himself is, in fact, a good dialogue partner in gadamer’s sense. my strategy is to offer a close reading of relevant passages of the symposium in order to make manifest the dialectical and ethical tensions within the text, especially in the interaction of socrates and alcibiades. my aim is not to offer a detailed reading of gadamer’s reading of specific platonic dialogues;4 rather, my aim is to articulate, as it were, a gadamerian-inspired framework whose main structures include genuine dialogical openness to the other, anticipatory listening, risk, a willingness to put one’s own views to the test, and an embrace of one’s finitude, and then to show how socrates’s engagement with alcibiades falls short of what gadamer throughout his corpus emphasizes as hermeneutical virtues. alcibiades’s interrogation of socrates and socratic irony let us begin near the end—namely, with alcibiades’s abrupt, disruptive, dionysian entry into the festivities even as the participants are still applauding socrates’s speech so loudly that aristophanes is unable to make himself heard. apparently, aristophanes wants to follow up with something that socrates had said about him in his speech. however, alcibiades’s splashing entry with his drunken entourage and a shrieking flute-girl quickly takes center stage. having been carried in by his acquaintances—likely because of his inebriated condition—alcibiades gathers himself and announces that he has come to crown agathon with a wreath currently atop alcibiades’s handsome head. agathon invites the latecomer to recline next to him and, as alcibiades makes his way to his seat, his attempt to remove the wreath causes the ribbons and ivy to cover his eyes, temporarily blinding him. consequently, he fails to see that socrates, who had been sitting next to agathon, has cleared a space for him on the couch. once the blinders are removed and his head turns, alcibiades realizes that he is sitting next to none other than socrates! the language here reminds us of the prisoners in the cave, who now freed of their bonds, turn to see the fire casting shadows on the cave wall and thus begin to become aware of the reality of their situation (republic 515c–e). their experience is one of pain and a sense of confusion; yet, this uncomfortable disorientation opens, at least potentially, the path to liberation. interestingly, when alcibiades sees the reality or truth symbolized by socrates’s presence, he does not perceive it as liberating, but rather, like the prisoners, as painful and disorienting. for example, he says “[i]t’s socrates! you’ve trapped me again! you always do this to me—all of a sudden you’ll turn up out of nowhere where i least expect you!” (symposium 213c). even so, alcibiades does not flee but 3 nielsen ultimately engages socrates head on. although inebriated and quite the character, alcibiades is willing to be vulnerable with socrates, openly acknowledging his moral failures and calling out socrates’s inordinate disdain for human things. one could interpret alcibiades’s critique of socrates, as i hope to make clear, as a failure to embrace his finitude. socrates’s rejection of finitude puts him at odds with gadamer’s positive emphasis on finitude and its corollary—namely, our need for genuine, reciprocal dialogical encounters. after a few tense exchanges between socrates and alcibiades—with socrates at times speaking indirectly to alcibiades through agathon—alcibiades decides to crown socrates as well, taking back some of the ribbons from the crown with which he gifted agathon. in spite of his already inebriated state, alcibiades demands that more wine be brought in, of which he quickly puts away more than two quarts and offers the same amount to socrates. however, as he tells the group, the wine doesn’t seem to faze socrates, who drinks with the best but never gets drunk (symposium 214a). of course, eryximachus, representing apollo’s attempt to re-gain control, cannot be silent in the midst of this dionysian take-over. accordingly, he proceeds to censure alcibiades’s excessive drinking and to reestablish the order and propriety of the speeches. having explained that the participants had been offering encomia to the god eros, eryximachus invites alcibiades to join in. alcibiades, however, says that socrates would react violently if alcibiades praised “anyone else in his presence—even a god!” (symposium 214d). this charge of impiety provokes a response from socrates. after the two go back and forth, the good doctor intervenes and suggests that alcibiades present a speech in praise of socrates. our intoxicated latecomer accepts and proclaims emphatically that his account of socrates will be truthful and urges socrates to interrupt and correct him should he find anything inaccurate (symposium 215a). given his state, alcibiades acknowledges that he might confuse the order of events and will speak in something of a streamof-consciousness manner. however, he insists that what he will say about socrates is true; it is worth noting that socrates never interrupts alcibiades’s speech, which is a significant departure from socrates’s typical eagerness to accept a challenge to pursue truth. at the beginning of his speech alcibiades says that he will use an image to describe socrates and emphasizes that the image “aims at the truth” (symposium 215b). the image, or rather images, he employs are a silenus and the satyr marsyas. as pierre hadot observes, “[i]n popular imagination, sileni and satyrs were hybrid demons, half-animal, half-men, who made up the escort of dionysos.”5 alcibiades’s description of a silenus focuses on how the exterior or appearance alcibiades on socrates’s silenic ways 4 differs from what is within. the silenus was a hollowed-out statue which was split down the middle and inside contained miniature statues of the gods (symposium 215b4). both the sileni and marsyas are often depicted or associated with the flute (more precisely, the aulos). marsyas’s musical skills were so extraordinary that he challenged apollo to a musical match, the consequence of which was his being skinned alive.6 by drawing upon these images, alcibiades highlights important parallels between marsyas and socrates. like the hubristic and impudent marsyas, socrates—despite his regular feigning ignorance—is acutely aware of his extraordinary intellectual abilities and is willing to challenge anyone who will engage him. however, socrates doesn’t need a musical instrument to enchant; his enchanting power comes through “words alone.”7 the picture that alcibiades paints reminds the reader of aspects of aristophanes’s speech.8 for example, alcibiades emphasizes that the silenus was split down the middle, which recalls the punishment that the original circular humans received after they challenged the gods. since the image of the silenus points to socrates, alcibiades intimates that socrates too exhibits a type of hubris.9 to substantiate alcibiades’s accusation, one might point to socrates’s claim to have been given a divine calling, which requires him to interrogate and judge the speeches and deeds of his fellow citizens. in light of alcibiades’s particular frustration with socrates, the charge of hubris more likely pertains to socrates’s disdain of human things and his (true, rather than feigned) sense of intellectual superiority over most humans. stanley rosen claims that even though both socrates and alcibiades “are exceptional men,” the only trait they share in common is hubris,”10 and that hubris was, in fact, what drew socrates to alcibiades. “socrates’s offer of assistance is not simply ironical, but expresses frankly his interest in hybris. socrates loves in alcibiades that which he shares with him: a kind of madness through which each in his way transcends his contemporaries.”11 this hubristic madness, however, is not the same for each man.12 alcibiades wants to rule the world and dominate in all things human. socrates is unconcerned with the world, indifferent, and at times even callous, when it comes to human concerns, emotions, and interpersonal relations. given his pleonexia, alcibiades is open about his desire to be godlike and rule over all humankind. his charge against socrates seems to be that the philosopher’s hubris also shows itself in a desire to be like a god, that is, to transcend all things human, which results in neglect, dismissal, and disparagement of human relationships, bodily desires, and honor. in other words, 5 nielsen alcibiades’s view of socrates’s moderation or temperance involves two aspects: (1) moderation as (an almost superhuman or perhaps anti-human) strength, and (2) moderation as (subhuman) indifference. as one intoxicated by power, alcibiades sees his failed seduction as a failed conquest. he has not been able to overpower the philosopher with one of his chief weapons, viz. his good looks. in this sense, socrates’s moderation and ability to resist alcibiades is viewed as an awe-inspiring strength (or advantage) that he can hardly comprehend. yet, at the same time, socrates’s utter insensitivity to alcibiades, coupled with socrates’s feigned romantic interest, point to something strange about socrates that indicates an unhealthy disdain for human life in this world—a life characterized by embodied and emotional needs and desires and that likewise requires friendships of genuine reciprocity in order to thrive and flourish.13 here again, alcibiades challenges socrates’s peculiar irony. for example, he states that socrates’s claim to know nothing but his own ignorance rings as hollow as the sileni statues: “he [socrates] likes to say he’s ignorant and knows nothing. isn’t this just like silenus?”14 in this same context, alcibiades draws attention to socrates as a dissimulator when it comes to matters of the heart. that is, even though he plays the role of an older, wiser man, seeking young, beautiful boys—in short, the lover (erastês)— socrates could care less about their physical beauty. whether a boy was beautiful, wealthy, or famous was of no consequence to socrates: “he considers all these possessions beneath contempt, […] in public, i tell you, his whole life is one big game—a game of irony” (symposium 216d8– 216e5). alcibiades’s accusation can be interpreted as a condemnation of philosophical eros gone awry. that is, the philosopher’s erotic quest can become so all-consuming that his or her embodiment and significant relationships with others are despised and seen as obstacles to overcome. rather than accepting and embracing his incarnate being, socrates, as martha nussbaum observes, “in his ascent towards the form, has become himself, very like a form—hard, indivisible, unchanging.”15 granting alcibiades’s own problematic way of relating to socrates, several questions remain worth asking. does socrates stand against the charge of exhibiting a cold, stone-like indifference in his interaction with alcibiades? does socrates not, as nussbaum puts it, engage in a “dissociation of his body”—or even more strongly put—a disparagement of his embodiment? does socrates have room for human others whom he considers as genuine equals? or is it the case that with those, like alcibiades, who actually challenge socrates to examine his views and being-in-the-world with others, does socrates resort to dialogical or sophistic games? alcibiades on socrates’s silenic ways 6 lastly, does socrates, as gadamer might put it, approach the other expecting to learn something and with a willingness to put his own views at risk? according to alcibiades, socrates’s “game” seems to be to lead young, potential beloveds (eromenoi) to believe that he is interested in an amorous relationship, yet his true intentions remain (at least for a time) masked. both the feigned ignorance and romantic overtures are mere dissimulating appearances, akin to the “outsides of those statues of silenus” (symposium 216d4– 5). so why play such elaborate, even deceptive games? perhaps socrates’s ultimate goal is to better his younger counterpart. if so, he has no qualms with using misleading, sophistic tactics to achieve his ends, which is precisely what alcibiades is exposing. (to be sure, alcibiades simultaneously exposes his own character flaws.) socrates’s ploy is to enact a role reversal, wherein the beloved becomes the lover who is willing to go to any lengths to win his beloved. alcibiades attests that such a reversal occurred in his case; yet, socrates refused alcibiades’s romantic advances, leaving the latter humiliated. despite alcibiades’s lack of moderation, his interest in socrates was not merely or even primarily with the physical dimension of a romantic relationship.16 he tells us that he was also pained as a result of what he learned during his time with socrates—pain that he compares to a snakebite but much worse: “[s]omething much more painful than a snake has bitten me in my most sensitive part—i mean my heart, or my soul, or whatever you want to call it, which has been struck and bitten by philosophy, whose grip on the young and eager souls is much more vicious than a viper’s and makes them do the most amazing things” (symposium 218a2–7). alcibiades then describes this experience as one of participating “in the madness, the bacchic frenzy of philosophy” (symposium 218b3–4). at some point, alcibiades had been “bitten by philosophy,” and this apparently happened during his time spent in philosophical conversation with socrates. according to his report, he had become so mesmerized by socrates’s passionate pursuit of wisdom that he broke with convention, took up the role of lover (erastês), and attempted, yet failed, to seduce socrates. rather than dismiss alcibiades’s account of his botched seduction as merely the confused ramblings of a disgruntled, spurned lover—which is not to deny that he is a disgruntled, spurned lover—it is worth considering how his account dramatizes his conflicting desires and ultimately derailed him from achieving a more integrated life, whether a life of contemplation or practical wisdom. on the one hand, he claims that he had come to realize his inability to accomplish his goal by himself; thus, he acknowledges his need for socrates’s help in order to reach his highest potential, of which 7 nielsen he says “nothing is more important” (symposium 218d2–3). on the other, he thinks that he can achieve this goal through seducing and possessing socrates as his “beloved.” socrates’s response to alcibiades’s overture (which alcibiades describes as spoken “in that absolutely inimitable ironic manner of his” [218d8–9]) is reminiscent of his retort to agathon, in which the poet implored socrates to sit next to him so that by merely touching the philosopher, he might become wise.17 socrates’s reply intimates that alcibiades has misunderstood both socrates’s maieutic role and the object of his erotic yet unattainable pursuit, wisdom. that is, socrates does not have the power to make alcibiades virtuous. for that to occur, alcibiades’s eros must be re-directed. in his rebuff, not only does socrates suggest that alcibiades’s proposal is not a fair exchange, but he also, and perhaps more importantly and less ironically, draws attention to alcibiades’s wanting more than his “proper share” (symposium 218e6). here we have an instance of alcibiades’s hubris, which elsewhere socrates’s explicitly states is characterized by a desire to have “absolute power” and influence over “all mankind.”18 in short, alcibiades’s speech both expresses and dramatizes his various erotic conflictions. his eros for power over others, dramatized in his attempt to “conquer” socrates, ultimately subverts his at least nascent eros to pursue the love of wisdom. however, socrates too exhibits incongruities and tensions that are worth exploring and to which we now turn. alcibiades’s self-awareness, socrates’s blindness, and reading plato against socrates one could interpret socrates’s statement that alcibiades wants more than his proper share as socrates’s reminding alcibiades of his pleonexia, about which presumably the philosopher had warned a young alcibiades and which at this point in his life has more or less “won the day.” in fact, alcibiades seems to openly acknowledge that socrates had rightly identified his character flaws and that he himself is acutely aware of his misplaced and conflicted desires. “i know perfectly well that i can’t prove he’s wrong when he tells me what i should do; yet, the moment i leave his side, i go back to my old ways: i cave in to my desire to please the crowd.”19 here alcibiades describes what aristotle later identifies as the incontinent person. that is, he knows what he ought to do; however, due to his conflicting and competing desires, he chooses what he knows will harm him and experiences regret. as he goes on to say, “when i see him [socrates], i feel deeply ashamed, because i am doing nothing about my way of life, though i have already agreed with him that i should.”20 alcibiades’s problem doesn’t appear to be a lack of knowledge alcibiades on socrates’s silenic ways 8 or inability to follow socrates’s arguments; rather, he suffers from an unstable character and eros gone astray.21 not only does alcibiades admit to haven been bitten by philosophy—a bite whose truth still has the ability to cause him to feel shame—but also in his exchange with socrates just prior to the former’s speech he indicates his awareness of philosophical topics, which he and socrates likely debated on previous occasions. for example, he says that he will not willingly tell a lie, and he emphasizes that he will use images to communicate truth—a subject matter discussed at length in the republic.22 although inebriated, alcibiades’s precisely worded commentary shows that he knows how to get socrates’s attention and that he is cognizant of the significance of these key, socratic philosophical themes. furthermore, the fact that socrates’s claims made such an impression on alcibiades indicates that he had no trouble following socrates’s arguments, but rather understood precisely their implications and what they meant for his own life. alcibiades’s ability to grasp socrates’s philosophical claims, affirm their truth, and yet willingly turn away from them, may signal plato’s own questioning of an intellectualist view of ethics.23 whatever the case may be, by his own admission, alcibiades’s misdirected eros resulted in a neglect of self-care and a sense that his life was not worth living.24 socrates, of course, is famous for his notion of socratic ignorance—that is, he is cognizant of his own ignorance. however, when socrates actually engages others in dialogue, he seems fairly confident that he does, in fact, know what, for example, justice and beauty are. his elenctic method regularly pulls others up short, but one wonders how frequently socrates himself is pulled up short? for all of alcibiades’s flaws, and there are many, his intellectual acumen combined with his hubris and eros results in his being unafraid to challenge and interrogate socrates, calling out his inconsistencies, interpersonal failings, his un-at-homeness with his own bodily existence. concerning the latter, recall that earlier alcibiades likened socrates to marsyas, whose hubris led him to challenge the god apollo to a musical duel, thus resulting in his being skinned alive. as we have indicated, socrates exhibits an uneasy relationship with his body. perhaps alcibiades’s remark regarding marsyas’s flaying is meant to highlight socrates’s desire to transcend his body, to be, as it were, free of the flesh that imprisons him.25 as alcibiades’s account of socrates’s irony and feigned romantic interest in him makes clear, socrates has no qualms with utilizing “ironic” deception to achieve his dialogical goals, so long as he judges the end to be good. here it is worth asking, what are socrates’s dialogical goals? taking our cue from both the apology (36b) and alcibiades’s speech, socrates engaged in his philosophical midwifery in order 9 nielsen to “generate” genuine thinking and a concern for self-care, both of which are, for most philosophers, indeed good ends. unlike, for example, the tyrant’s use of deception to satisfy his desires and attain his objectives, socrates uses irony and sophistic tactics to bring about positive ends—namely, the moral and intellectual betterment of his dialogue partner. yet, as alcibiades’s example indicates, there is no guarantee that the result will be positive.26 genuine risk, as gadamer reminds us, is characteristic of true dialogue. to be open to the other and to engage in anticipatory listening is to put oneself and one’s beliefs at risk; it is to be vulnerable and willing to admit one’s failings and misguided views. we often encounter socrates’s dialogue partners, including alcibiades, openly admitting their logical inconsistencies and more importantly, given our present aims, their failure to live an ethically consistent life of personal and interpersonal flourishing. granting that socrates speaks about his ignorance, do we see him, especially in the symposium, dialogically interact with others such that he genuinely puts himself and his views at risk? i am inclined to answer in the negative. when socrates’s maieutic activity does its work, it often produces a crisis in his interlocutor; this was certainly the case with alcibiades. here we return to socrates’s dissimulating irony, which hadot discusses at length. drawing on the work of otto apelt, hadot writes, “socrates splits himself into two, so that there are two socrates: the socrates who knows in advance how the discussion is going to end, and the socrates who travels the entire dialectical path along with his interlocutor.”27 as the two go back and forth, socrates eventually gets his dialogue partner to admit that his position is flawed or even contradictory. what his interlocutor thought he knew or understood prior to his dialogue is now revealed as unfounded and his former value-system and way of life is called into question. here, too, the interlocutor is split in half: “there is the interlocutor as he was before his conversation with socrates, and there is the interlocutor, who, in the course of their constant mutual accord, has identified himself with socrates, and who henceforth will never be the same.”28 we see what hadot calls socrates’s “ironic self-deprecation” in his feigning to be interested in learning something from his conversation partner. but isn’t socrates’s feigning a kind of intentional distance or detachment, which prevents him from, to use hadot’s language, truly identifying with his interlocutor or entering wholly into his discourse?29 reminiscent of aristophanes’s account of the halved humans seeking but never quite finding unity and wholeness, socrates’s divided interlocutor is pained by his lack and must confront the source of his pain. a case in point is alcibiades’s description of his own experience of selfalcibiades on socrates’s silenic ways 10 splitting, which, unfortunately for him, ends in doubt and despair. alcibiades tells us that socrates’s words so upset him that he came to see his life as worthless and was ashamed both of his lack of self-care and his succumbing to his desires to please the crowd.30 but do we ever see socrates pained by his lack or doubt? could one say that split or division in socrates, to put it provocatively, is between his word (speech)—the claim of socratic ignorance—and his deeds— how he actually conducts himself in his dialogical engagements with others? one of the chief claims of this essay is that alcibiades is not the only conflicted human being in this dialogue, but that socrates as well has his own incongruities, tensions, and shortcomings. here we recall diotima’s portrayal of eros as a conflicted being, possessing traits from both parents. like his mother, penia, he is poor, tough, physically unattractive, and “always dwelling with neediness.” like his father, poros, he is “always weaving devices, desirous of practical wisdom and inventive, philosophizing through all his life, a skilled magician, druggist, sophist” (symposium 203d–e).31 the in-between, ambiguous character of eros exhibits clear associations with socrates and openly includes the descriptor “sophist.” is plato inviting us to interrogate socrates’s silenic ways? again turning to hadot, rather than a “harmonious figure combining divine and human characteristics in delicate nuances,” we find the character socrates to be “ambiguous, troubling, and strangely disconcerting.”32 our investigation has shown that socrates has no qualms employing dissimulating, sophistic tactics in his interactions with others so long as he judges such strategies fitting, just, or for the ultimate good of his interlocutor.33 but what if socrates’s misguided, extreme disdain for human things results in a skewed way of seeing the world and others, an inability to delight in the beauty of the particular for its own sake, not to mention his detached, emotionally cold way of relating to and with others that presumes to know, despite feigning ignorance, what is best for his dialogue partners? with these questions in mind, is it fair to say that socrates’s dialogical interactions—at least to some degree—could be likened to performative noble lies, which, like eros, combine incongruous elements that both attract and repel? rather than raise doubts about the trustworthiness of alcibiades’s portrayal of socrates, plato has taken pains to legitimate his claims, thus encouraging his readers to puzzle through them.34 for example, being inebriated, any restraint that alcibiades might employ is no longer operative. unlike the sycophantic apollodorus of the opening dialogue, in the final dialogue, alcibiades, though full of wine, offers both a cogent self-assessment of his own shortcomings and a persuasive critical evaluation of socrates. having once been a disciple(beloved)-in-training who 11 nielsen spent significant time with socrates, alcibiades has both the nearness and distance required to offer both praise and criticism of socrates.35 lastly, as previously mentioned, socrates does not question or refute the veracity of alcibiades’s exposé of socrates’s behavior and way of life. given his typical agonistic dialogical engagement when such challenges are issued, socrates’s silence is telling. socrates and eros as lack and atopos before closing our discussion of the symposium and turning more directly to discuss my gadamerian critique of socrates, i want to highlight alciabides’s description of socrates as atopos. as we will see, there are many aspects and meanings associated with socrates and placelessness. one meaning, which hadot offers, is that socrates does not fit any of the established and celebrated human types. that is, he is neither a noble, courageous warrior like achilles, nor a clever statesman like nestor.36 socrates has no place within this schema; thus, he is a-topos and more like the nothuman or even the monstrous—the sileni.37 to explore additional dimensions of socrates as atopos, let us turn to socrates’s conjured mouthpiece, diotima.38 in diotima’s retelling of the myth of eros, we have a presentation of eros that emphasizes both its lack or poverty (penia) and its wealth (poros)—that is, the wholeness, even if fleeting, it provides when one experiences it. love as essential lack is always on the move, ever dissatisfied with its momentary or partial satisfaction. that one desires is both indicative of one’s poverty and the condition for the possibility of movement beyond the “place” of one’s present contentment in the hope of achieving greater wholeness, satisfaction, or fulfillment; however, the attainment of this temporary “wealth” leads one back to poverty. thus, diotima’s myth suggests that a constant return to poverty (penia) from wealth (poros) is inevitable. as many commentators observe—hadot included—eros and socrates share several common features. like eros, socrates is not beautiful—that is, he lacks physical beauty. however, does he possess “inner beauty”? if we focus on the structural similarity just mentioned—the ongoing dialectic of poverty and wealth—one does not get the impression that socrates would describe this all-too-human condition as beautiful. in other words, poverty continually haunts socrates even if it serves as the dialectical “engine,” moving him ever beyond his present place (topos) but never granting rest or repose. both eros and socrates are, it seems, a-topos, lacking a place of rest; they are, in a word, homeless. and yet this not having, this lack, this being place-less is, ironically, potentially generative and burgeoning with possibilities. but alcibiades on socrates’s silenic ways 12 again eros, as socrates’s mouthpiece diotima states explicitly, is not beautiful, nor is socrates. just as socrates portrays the neediness and painful reality of eros against its, as we might say today, romanticized appearances, alcibiades offers us a realistic picture of socrates (or at least a fuller, more human portrayal of socrates)—namely, one that includes his ugliness and failings as well as what makes him so appealing. socrates has diotima state that eros inherits cleverness from his father poros (symposium 203d). as mentioned earlier, i follow nehamas’s and woodruff’s claim that diotima is socrates’s mouthpiece who was created specifically for this dialogue. here we have perhaps additional support for this view. would it not be more accurate to say that penia (poverty) shows cleverness and ingenuity in her ensnaring of poros? poverty herself—apart from any co-mingling with poros—is resourceful. this is not an endorsement of penia’s actions, but rather it draws attention to the fact that the traits attributed to penia and poros are not as clear-cut as socrates via diotima claims. moreover, if diotima had her own voice and were a genuinely subversive figure in the allmale dialogue, would she not highlight penia’s cleverness, boldness, and ability to be resourceful (cf. symposium 203d)? eros instigates, as does socrates; both are always on the way but never “there” since both are atopos. both beckon and even seduce others to themselves and yet pull back, hide, or otherwise allude such that fulfillment and, as a result, wholeness can never be fully achieved. socrates’s silenic ways, we might say with a nod to hadot, consist in pointing beyond himself, signaling an opening of possibilities—as hadot observes, the etymology of poros is a “means of access or a ‘way out.’”39 socrates, as we have seen, uses sophistry and seduction and his, all-too-often, stilted and one-sided dialogues do not sit well with the reciprocity that gadamer emphasizes as a requirement for genuine, transformative dialogue. socrates’s coldness and statue-like response to his interlocutor’s emotional needs hinders dialogical effectiveness. this is especially the case with a dialogue partner like alcibiades, who is not afraid to take socrates to task. the potential for socrates to be transformed, challenged, and shown his shortcomings is heightened with these types of dialogue partners. yet socrates’s engagement with alcibiades in the symposium falls short of what gadamer outlines as genuine hermeneutical experience. 13 nielsen socrates’s use of sophistry perhaps an aspect of socrates’s constant critique of the poets—especially in the republic—is motivated by an unacknowledged similarity between the two. that is, like the poet, the philosopher employs linguistic creative ingenuity to communicate in imaginative and rhetorically compelling ways. but could we not make a similar claim about the sophist? that is, does the sophist not also play with language in creative, innovative ways to serve his or her end of persuading others? as sarah kofman observes, sophistic discourses are those which create a disorienting effect “by weaving together contradictory theses” which serve as traps for his interlocutors.40 the sophist, too, is characterized by metis, a cunning intelligence employed for self-serving ends. the platonic dialogues, no doubt, criticize the sophist’s deceptive discourses and unethical practices. a platonic critical characterization of the sophist might be summarized as follows: a sophist is one who uses cunning intelligence for the purpose of self-serving persuasion of others at the expense of truth and lacks concern for the good of others and the community. yet socrates engages in at least some of these sophistic strategies; however, so the caveat goes, he does so in an ironic and, therefore, ethically acceptable key. should we let socrates off the hook so easily? socrates’s use of sophistry, even if he believes it a necessary yet unpleasant means to a good end, leaves the reader uneasy and at times disappointed and disheartened. for example, consider the figure of diotima. in the symposium, socrates describes diotima as speaking “in the manner of a perfect sophist” (208c2). this is itself a doubly ironic claim given that diotima is a fictional character, whom socrates is at pains to present as if she were a real, historical figure, and one who taught socrates everything he knows about the art of love (symposium 201d5). diotima, however, is socrates’s fictitious mouthpiece, employed for his own dialogical purposes. consequently, any hope that a woman might truly have a voice in the dialogue, or that socrates is here engaging in a countercultural, subversive move is shattered, since the character diotima is simply socrates himself speaking through the mask of diotima. this act of ventriloquism does not negate tout court diotima’s contributions to the dialogue. as gadamer would quickly point out, the meanings of a text always exceed the author’s intentions. but it does call for a critical reading of diotima’s conclusions, especially those that seem all too convenient for socrates’s aims. it is worth asking: do sophistic means (or tactics) justify the end (the betterment of his interlocutors)? is this model of philosophical dialogical something in the neighborhood of a noble lie inflected through ironic stratagems? as the case of alcibiades testifies, such tactics can also alcibiades on socrates’s silenic ways 14 lead to a dizzying despair similar to that produced by genuinely sophistic discourses.41 my claim is not that socrates is a straight up sophist (as defined above), but rather that he, too, is human, “on the way” and riddled with shortcomings, although his devotees too often respond to him as if he were divine. by including alcibiades’s critique of socrates in the symposium, the text invites us to interrogate the philosopher’s life, to see whether his words and dialogical deeds cohere. in doing so, we find that socrates is indeed, as alcibiades claims, a complex, silenic figure, who simultaneously repels and attracts. in the opening dialogue, we find socrates standing alone, motionless on a neighbor’s porch, unresponsive to the call of the other. what at first seems a rather odd, yet insignificant scene now burgeons with significance. is socrates the best dialogue partner? does he, as gadamer requires, listen to the other expecting that that other has something to teach him? in order to answer these questions, we must examine gadamer’s analysis of different types of hermeneutical engagement and consider whether socrates attains what gadamer identifies as the highest type of hermeneutical engagement or experience or whether he falls short. a gadamerian refiguring and critique of socrates’s atopos as we have seen, socrates contends that eros is not beautiful, since eros is essentially lack and thus is always seeking to possess what it does not have. a gadamerian refiguring of socrates’s description, which in fact opens a new and fruitful site for dialogical encounter, claims that the movement of eros seeks what it does not have, yet it does not aim to possess the other but rather to learn from the other. here again the emphasis is on mutual and reciprocal engagement in which both dialogue partners put their views at risk and both open themselves to new ways of thinking and being. all too often socrates’s stilted dialogical exchanges feel more like monologues, wherein socrates baits his interlocutor having already decided that his position is deficient or that the interlocutor fits a specific type—e.g., the thumos-driven statesman. if socrates has already concluded what kind of “soul” his interlocutor possesses and what his interlocutor needs in order to stay the proper course, will he not ask skewed questions and expect, in advance, certain answers? if so, what we have is not a dialogue but something closer to a monologue. perhaps a more accurate description of these types of interactions is to characterize them as asymmetrical dialogues such as one finds in conversations among parents and their children. clearly, these types of dialogical engagements are not without value and can be extremely beneficial, rewarding, and even lifechanging depending upon the situation and the quality of the relationship. however, because of 15 nielsen the asymmetrical power and/or knowledge differential, these dialogical engagements fall short of what gadamer considers to be the highest type of hermeneutical experience (erfahrung). in truth and method gadamer sketches three types of hermeneutical experience that have analogues in three types of i/thou encounters. importantly, in an i/thou relationship, the “thou is not an object” but rather “relates itself to us.”42 the problem with the first type of experience gadamer describes is that it ultimately remains detached and uninvolved with its subject-matter, which is similar to an i/thou relationship in which the thou is approached as an object of study and is in the end instrumentalized. gadamer’s example of this type of i/thou interaction is when one “tries to discover typical behavior in one’s fellowmen and can make predictions about others on the basis of experience. we call this a knowledge of human nature. we understand the other person in the same way that we understand any other typical event in our experiential field—i.e., he is predictable. his behavior is as much a means to our end as any other means.”43 the corresponding hermeneutical experience is “naïve faith” and reliance upon certain methods (the elenchus for socrates?) and procedure-following which results in treating the subject-matter as an object and comporting oneself toward it in a distant, detached, “uninvolved way.”44 in context, gadamer has in view the methods employed in the social sciences. however, one can apply the insight to socrates, since he is frequently considered an astute “reader” of personality types, who interacts with his dialogue partners in accord with his evaluation of whether they are ruled by appetite, spiritedness, or are budding philosophers. again, approaching the other or the subject matter in this way has its place in certain circumstances or as a point of departure; yet, on gadamer’s view it falls short of the highest sort of reciprocal dialogical engagement. what about the second i/thou experience and its analogue in hermeneutical experience? here we have a step up from the previous type in that the thou is not treated as an object but is acknowledged as a person; however, a genuine concern for the other’s good is missing and the interactions are agonistic because mutual recognition has not been achieved to the degree that allows for hearing the other as other and the other of oneself. as gadamer explains, “[t]o every claim there is a counterclaim. this is why it is possible for each of the partners in the relationship reflectively to outdo the other. one claims to know the other’s claim from his point of view and even to understand the other better than the other understands himself.”45 gadamer goes on to say when one purports to know the other in this way “one robs his claims of their legitimacy. […] the claim to understand the other person in advance functions to keep the other person’s claim at a alcibiades on socrates’s silenic ways 16 distance. we are familiar with this from the teacher-pupil relationship.”46 does socrates embody this type of i/thou relationship with some, most, or even all of his dialogue partners? for example, in the republic does he engage with glaucon or adeimantus expecting that they have something valuable and insightful to say? or does he expect that their answers will be inadequate, having already classified them as certain character-types who are in need of his instruction? finally, we arrive at what gadamer identifies as the highest type of hermeneutical experience and its i/thou analogue. of the latter, gadamer says the following: in human relations the important thing is, as we have seen, to experience the thou truly as thou—i.e., not to overlook his claim but to let him really say something to us. here is where openness belongs. but ultimately this openness does not exist only for the person who speaks; rather, anyone who listens is fundamentally open. without such openness to one another there is no genuine human bond. belonging together always also means being able to listen to one another.47 gadamer adds that such openness does not mean that one slavishly capitulates to what the other says, nor when understanding takes place does it mean that we now, as we might put it today, “get” the other person, as this would be to deny the other’s alterity. instead, “[o]penness to another includes therefore the recognition that i must accept something within myself that is against myself, even if there were no one else, who would raise it against me.”48 putting these two passages together, we see that openness to the other is an acknowledgment that i belong to the other and the other belongs to me; however, hermeneutical openness does more than simply acknowledge this belongingness; it moves toward the other in an ongoing intentional act of anticipatory listening. having also acknowledged my finitude and limitedness, i approach the other with the expectation that my own prejudgments may be wrong—i.e., that which is “within myself that is against myself”—and am willing to have, as difficult and even painful as it might be, my views corrected. similarly, in the highest type of hermeneutical experience, one allows the other—whether a text, tradition, or work of art to “say something.”49 this type of experience, having on multiple occasions experienced its lack and limitations, is committed to staying open to the other’s claims to truth. in short, for gadamer, “hermeneutical consciousness culminates not in methodological sureness of itself, but in the same readiness for experience that distinguishes the experienced man 17 nielsen from the man captivated by dogma.”50 it should be clear that the kind of experience (erfahrung) that gadamer has in mind is not reducible to one’s private, subjective, momentary experience (erlebnis) of this or that; rather, experience is something accumulated over time through various practices and engagements with others. one who is experienced (erfahren) is, for gadamer, one who has through various experiences (erlebnisse) been made aware of her “finitude and limitedness.”51 one could argue that socrates is, indeed, aware of his finitude and limitedness, but one does not get the impression that he has accepted it, much less embraced it. alcibiades’s criticisms of socrates, as i have tried to argue, bring this lack of acceptance into sharp relief. in a section of truth and method entitled “the model of platonic dialogue,” gadamer highlights socrates’s claim to know that he does not know. as gadamer explains, this statement sums up “the famous socratic docta ignoranta,” which “opens up the way to the true superiority of questions.”52 however, a question that i want to pose to both gadamer and plato’s socrates is whether simply knowing that one does not know is enough. or is it rather, appealing to gadamer against gadamer, that one must approach the subject-matter or the other (if one is engaging with a human dialogue partner) not only knowing that one does not know or that one’s knowledge is only partial but also and perhaps most importantly deciding to listen to and really hear the other as other and believing—making a leap of faith—that the other might have something to teach me. as gadamer would be the first to point out, such hermeneutical openness and anticipatory listening does not mean that we must first rid ourselves of our biases and pre-judgments, many of which we are not even aware. rather, it means that when unfounded and distorting biases and pre-judgments surface in and through our dialogical engagements with others, we follow the truth of the subjectmatter at hand, allowing it to lead us, to expand and, when appropriate, to correct our views. in his discussion of the logical structure of openness vis-à-vis the platonic dialogues, gadamer stresses the priority of the question—namely, how difficult it is to ask good questions, questions that disclose and bring the subject-matter into the open. regarding plato, gadamer states that he offers us “a profound recognition of the priority of the question in all knowledge and discourse that really reveals something of an object. discourse that is intended to reveal something requires that thing to be broken open by the question.”53 the type of dialectic that makes possible genuine and potentially transformative dialogue is one saturated with questions that bring the subjectmatter “into the open. the openness that is in question consists in the fact that the answer is not settled.”54 a question that is properly posed both grants this openness but at the same time also alcibiades on socrates’s silenic ways 18 provides a limiting horizon. such horizons permit one’s prejudgments about a specific subjectmatter to surface so that they can be recognized and tested. thus, a rightly posed question both breaks open the subject-matter and simultaneously properly limits the horizon of the discussion thus allowing interlocutors’ prejudices to be put in play and challenged. given socrates’s often skewed questions and his failure to achieve what gadamer outlines as both the highest hermeneutical experience and the highest i/thou engagement, socrates—and especially so in his interaction with alcibiades in the symposium—does not approach the other in openness or in a mode of anticipatory listening. concluding remarks having peeled back socrates’s masks, i conclude that plato’s socrates is on many occasions not the ideal dialogue partner. even so, the reading that i have offered intimates that plato himself recognized the possibility of philosophical eros going awry—that is, a longing for escape from this world that fails to appreciate and be attuned to the beauty, profundity, and fragility of human relationships and emotional connections. if this the case, then plato is willing to risk and to expose the dangers or pitfalls of a certain kind of philosophical life. along these lines, i have argued that in the symposium plato does not allow socrates, as it were, the “last word” as the series of speeches do not end after diotima’s (i.e., socrates’s speech).55 such risk and openness to subject the philosopher’s life and way of being-in-the-world with others to the test resonate with the hermeneutical virtues that gadamer extols and open up the possibility of genuine hermeneutical experience. if so, it seems that plato, in refraining from offering a “last word” and opening up a space for the ongoing critique of philosophical practices and the philosophical life, is a better dialogue partner than plato’s socrates. notes 1. see, for example, nightingale, genres in dialogue, esp. chapter 3. according to nightingale, “[s]ince alcibiades’s character distorts his perceptions, we must be especially wary when he claims to reveal the ‘inner’ socrates” (123). see also nichols, “philosophy and empire: on socrates and alcibiades in plato's symposium.” 19 nielsen 2. see, for example, metcalf, “the trial of socrates in plato’s symposium.” see also rosen, plato’s symposium, esp. chapter 8. although metcalf’s and rosen’s analyses of alcibiades’s speech share important overlaps, rosen’s commentary on alcibiades paints the latter in a more negative light. contra rosen, this essay argues that alcibiades has at least tasted the fruit of a contemplative life, which makes his fall even more tragic. 3. see halperin, “plato and the erotics of narrativity,” for a fascinating study of apollodorus’s dramatic role in the symposium. 4. it is worth noting that although gadamer wrote extensively on plato, to my knowledge he does not offer an extended study of plato’s symposium. rather, one encounters passing references to specific passages of the symposium such as his mention of aristophanes’s myth in his essay “the relevance of the beautiful” (see, for example, 31–32). 5. hadot, “the figure of socrates,” in philosophy as a way of life 148. 6. see, for example, plato, symposium 65 n.101 (nehamas and woodruff trans.) nehamas and woodruff note that satyrs possessed inordinate sexual appetites. as rosen observes, alcibiades need not focus on every characteristic of satyrs to communicate his point. alcibiades makes clear that the analogous features of socrates and satyrs (and sileni) that he will discuss are the following: (1) the opposition between their exterior qualities or behaviors and what is concealed within, and (2) their ability to enchant and “conquer.” see also rosen, plato’s symposium 296. 7. plato, symposium 215d1. 8. rosen contends that alcibiades, not socrates, “is another instance of the hybristic circlemen, who imitate completeness by a harmony of opposites” (plato’s symposium 280). my claim is that both socrates and alcibiades are hubristic and exhibit tensions within themselves that manifest in their actions. 9. in fact, both agathon (at symposium 175e7) and alcibiades (at 215b10) explicitly call socrates hybristês. 10. rosen, plato’s symposium 281. 11. rosen, plato’s symposium 282. 12. rosen, for example, distinguishes between a purely human madness and a divine madness. on his view, the former characterizes alcibiades, the latter socrates. see plato’s symposium chapter 8. alcibiades on socrates’s silenic ways 20 13. for similar remarks concerning socrates’s insensitivity and contempt for bodily desires and the human condition, see bruns, hermeneutics ancient and modern 44. 14. plato, symposium 216d3–4; see also rosen, plato’s symposium chapter 8. rosen highlights alcibiades’s critique of socrates’s feigned ignorance and (human) eros: “socrates is neither the one nor the other (216d2–5). his temperance is a scorn for human things and so for ‘us’ mortals as well (216d7–e4)” (plato’s symposium 301). see also nussbaum’s comments on the “stone of socratic virtue” (the fragility of goodness 195). 15. nussbaum, the fragility of goodness 195. 16. rosen, for example, cites favorably plutarch’s claim that “alcibiades’s lovers appealed to his love of glory and reputation rather than to his sensuality” (plato’s symposium 280). 17. it was precisely here that agathon called socrates hybristês. see symposium 175e8. 18. plato, alcibiades i 105b7–c4, 559 (complete works, ed. cooper). 19. plato, symposium 216b3–6. 20. ibid., 216b7–9. 21. as martha nussbaum observes, “[e]nergy and intellectual power had made him [alcibiades] one of the best commanders and strategists athens had known, one of the most skillful orators ever to enchant her people” (the fragility of goodness 165). 22. see, for example, 214e8–9–215a1–3: “for as far as my will goes, i shall not lie. now if in reminiscing [anamimneskomenos] i speak of one thing and then another, don’t be surprised; for it is not at all easy for me in the condition i am in to enumerate fluently and consecutively your strangeness [atopia] (benardete trans., 45) and 215a5–7. see also, corrigan and glazov-corrigan 170–71. 23. whether this is the case or not, aristotle’s development of the categories of continence and incontinence indicate that a more nuanced view is needed. 24. see, for example, symposium 216a1–216c5. 25. this insight was suggested by an anonymous reviewer. 26. see also rosen, who says rather provocatively that given the doubt that socrates’s engagements with alcibiades produced, one can consider socrates “with some justice as the corrupter of alcibiades. the initial enchantment of contact with socrates produces confusion and self-doubt, but not virtue” (plato’s symposium 290). 27. hadot, “the figure of socrates,” in philosophy as a way of life 153; emphasis added. 21 nielsen 28. ibid.,154. 29. ibid. 30. see, for example, symposium 216a–c. on alcibiades’s shame and the impact of socrates’s logoi, see also, metcalf, “the trial of socrates in plato’s symposium.” that alcibiades still experiences shame in socrates’s presence—a presence that stands for the “bite of philosophy”—suggests that he understands (rather than lacks understanding or knowledge of) his character flaws. 31. benardete trans., 33–34. in a subsequent section, i claim that socrates’s/diotima’s description of the traits of penia and poros is not as clear-cut as he/she suggests. 32. hadot, “the figure of socrates,” in philosophy as a way of life 147–48. 33. see also kofman, “beyond aporia?” kofman highlights the genealogical connections between the philosopher and metis and contends that the philosopher’s metis “is at least as cunning as that of the sophist” (11). 34. see also, metcalf, “the trial of socrates in plato’s symposium.” 35. see also rosen, who makes a similar point. “alcibiades is our best witness concerning the nature of socrates, better than apollodorus and aristodemus, whose discipleship makes them suspect as accurate observers of the elusive ironist” (plato’s symposium 290). 36. hadot, “the figure of socrates,” in philosophy as a way of life 158. 37. ibid. 38. as nehamas and woodruff observe in n.77, diotima’s reference to [aristophanes’s] speech [at 206e5] makes it hard to believe that socrates is reporting a conversation he actually had with a woman named diotima and lends credence to the hypothesis that diotima is a character socrates dreamed up for this occasion” (symposium 52.) 39. hadot, “the figure of socrates,” in philosophy as a way of life 162. 40. kofman, “beyond aporia?”15. 41. however, on my account, it is also the case that alcibiades grasped the truth and implications of socrates’s claims regarding the former’s life and nonetheless chose otherwise. 42. gadamer, truth and method 358. 43. ibid. 44. see ibid., 358–59. alcibiades on socrates’s silenic ways 22 45. ibid., 359. 46. ibid., 360. 47. ibid. 48. my translation. the german reads: “offenheit für den anderen schließt also die anerkennung ein, daß ich in mir etwas gegen mich gelten lassen muß, auch wenn es keinen anderen gäbe, der es gegen mich geltend machte” (gadamer, wahrheit und methode 367). 49. gadamer, truth and method 361. 50. ibid., 362. 51. ibid. 52. ibid. 53. ibid., 363. 54. ibid. 55. granted, the dialogue ends with a scene in which socrates flirts with agathon for the seemingly sole purpose of annoying alcibiades, who from this point on is absent from the festivities. most of the guests have either passed out or have excused themselves and gone home. the three remaining central figures are socrates, agathon, and aristophanes. once again dionysian revelry is in full swing and our poets and philosopher take turns imbibing from a large cup filled with wine. again, socrates drinks excessively, out-drinking both agathon and aristophanes, and yet does not become drunk. moreover, we are told that socrates was “trying to prove to them that authors should be able to write both comedy and tragedy” and that “[h]e was just about to clinch the argument,” but his drunken interlocutors were not able to follow his reasoning and eventually fell asleep, aristophanes nodding off first and then agathon (symposium 223d). what is the significance of socrates’s walking away with only his sycophantic disciple aristodemus following him and then resuming his daily activities as if overdrinking and lack of sleep do not faze him? given what i have argued, whatever it means it does not give socrates the “last word” but rather reemphasizes his otherwordliness, his disparagement of the body, and his inability or refusal to enter into a dialogue with alcibiades, which comes across as even more callous given alcibiades’s feelings for socrates. 23 nielsen works cited brown, norman o. “birth of athena.” transactions and proceedings of the american philological association 83 (1952): 130–143. bruns, gerald. hermeneutics ancient and modern. new haven, ct: yale university press, 1992. corrigan, kevin, and elena glazov-corrigan. plato’s dialectic at play: argument, structure, and myth in the symposium. university park, pa: pennsylvania state university press, 2004. gadamer, hans-georg. hermeneutik i: wahrheit und methode: grundzüge einer philosophischen hermeneutik, gesammelte werke band 1, 4. auflage. tübingen: j. c. b. mohr [paul siebeck], 1975. _____. “the relevance of the beautiful: art as play, symbol, and festival.” in the relevance of the beautiful and other essays, edited by robert bernasconi and translated by nicholas walker. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press, 1986. 3–53. _____. truth and method. 2nd ed. translated and revised by joel weinsheimer and donald g. marshall. new york: continuum, 2004. hadot, pierre. philosophy as a way of life. spiritual exercises from socrates to foucault. translated by michael chase. oxford: blackwell publishing, 1995. halperin, david m. “plato and the erotics of narrativity.” in plato and postmodernism, edited by steven shankman. eugene, or: wipf & stock, 1994. 43–75. hesiod. theogony & works and days. translated by stephanie nelson. newburyport, ma: focus publishing, 2009. kofman, sarah. “beyond aporia?” in poststructuralist classics, edited by andrew benjamin. london: routledge, 1983. 7–44. alcibiades on socrates’s silenic ways 24 larivée, annie. “eros tyrannos: alcibiades as the model of the tyrant in book ix of the republic.” the international journal of the platonic tradition 6 (2012): 1–26. lesher, j. h., debra nails, and frisbee c. c. sheffield, eds. plato’s symposium: issues in interpretation and reception. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2006. mcneill, david n. “human discourse, eros, and madness in plato's republic.” review of metaphysics 55 (2001): 235–268. metcalf, robert. “the trial of socrates in plato’s symposium.” epoche 14 (2009): 39–55. nichols, mary p. “philosophy and empire: on socrates and alcibiades in plato's symposium.” polity 39 (2007): 502–521. nightingale, andrea. genres in dialogue: plato and the construct of philosophy. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press, 1995. nussbaum, martha. the fragility of goodness: luck and ethics in greek tragedy and philosophy. updated edition. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press, 2001. plato. complete works. edited by john m. cooper. indianapolis: hackett, 1997. _____. plato’s “symposium.” translated by seth benardete. chicago: university of chicago press, 2001. _____. symposium. translated by alexander nehamas and paul woodruff. indianapolis: hackett, 1989. roochnik, david. beautiful city: the dialectical character of plato’s republic. 2nd edition. ithaca, ny: cornell university press, 2008. rosen, stanley. plato’s republic: a study. new haven, ct: yale university press, 2005. _____. plato’s symposium. south bend, in: st. augustine’s press, 1999. microsoft word 4 silva revised.docx [expositions 12.2 (2018) 39–53] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 professional philosophy, “diversity,” and racist exclusion: on van norden’s taking back philosophy: a multicultural manifesto grant j. silva marquette university this following essay uses bryan w. van norden’s taking back philosophy: a multicultural manifesto (2017) to articulate several reasons for why diversification efforts in professional philosophy face an uphill battle. besides methodological, material, and “ideological” obstacles, diversity initiatives in academic philosophy are often commandeered and result in tokenization rather than diversification. on top of that, many professional philosophers view calls for diversification as an additional burden levied upon philosophy departments, one that comes not from genuine philosophical interests but from a cultural atmosphere that is increasingly under the influence of political correctness and identity politics. as such, diversification is antithetical to the furtherance of “real philosophy” and often amounts to a waste of time and money. methodologically, or so the thought goes, one cannot find a discipline that is more disserved by administrative efforts, or the vociferous complaints of members of philosophy departments, to “diversify.” some of these claims manifest in van norden’s book, and as nonwhite mexican-american in professional philosophy, i must admit that i am happy to see more “mainstream” (read “white”) philosophers willing to engage in this type of metaphilosophical debate. that being said, whereas taking back philosophy poses a series of internal challenges to professional philosophy, it pales in comparison to the critical work on the diversification of philosophy done from the margins of academic philosophy, from the decolonial, latin american, indigenous, feminist, and africana thought of the past three decades. these traditions are not only “diverse,” but they also problematize and critically challenge the professionalized practice of philosophy today. i therefore find it frustrating (but am not surprised) that van norden’s book garners professional uptake whereas the work of nonwhites, women, and philosophers from the “formerly” colonial world remain relatively ignored. this book’s success, in this sense, is also its failure. you might be thinking that this line of thought is slightly unfair given that van norden’s comparative endeavors are primarily between eastern and western perspectives (as he admits throughout the book). to hold him accountable for not working in the aforementioned traditions is professional philosophy, “diversity,” and racist exclusion 40     off the mark. therein lies the problem. it is unfortunate, bear with me, that van norden specializes in chinese philosophy and strives to work from those traditions he is most familiar with. “unfortunate” because this will reinforce the idea that taking back philosophy is essentially about the need for more chinese philosophy (or, generally speaking, “asian” philosophy) in our profession. while of course valuable to the profession, “asian philosophy” is the most tolerable form of “diversity” in professional philosophy today; it is many a philosopher’s go-to interpretation of “nonwestern” or “comparative philosophy.” in saying this, i do not mean to disregard the philosophical systems and longstanding traditions/debates that fall under the umbrella of “asian philosophy,” but i am frequently shocked by how this area of specialization is fetishized and used for ideological purposes by professional philosophers, as i explain below. i can put this concern in the form of a question. van norden’s book is clever enough to succeed in making some philosophers uncomfortable to the point that they take the plunge into what passes for “comparative philosophy” in the profession these days. would van norden’s book be as effective if its main point of comparison was the experience of people of color in the united states, nahuatl thought (the philosophy of the “aztec” people), or even feminist philosophy, rather than chinese philosophy? would van norden’s argument, particularly constructed with chinese philosophy in mind, work for latin american philosophy? while van norden calls for a truly global and not globalized conception of philosophy, to borrow language from david hall,1 it is a call that, unfortunately, will fall upon orientalist ears. (just to be clear, i mean edward said’s use of “orientalism.”) unless van norden’s claims are taken farther, they might not help achieve the goals his book sets out to accomplish. moreover, in terms of the text itself, there is an unspoken tension between the call for diversification and his attempt to demonstrate the value of philosophical inquiry in the sociopolitical and historical contexts of today (the social contexts that led to trump!). this is a tension that many will exploit in order to evade diversification efforts, a point i return to in my closing. overall, while the book is a start (albeit a late one) to the debate about the value of “philosophy” in a rapidly changing world, taking back philosophy fails address the deeper reasons for why diversification efforts are stymied. it also fails to adequately address the complexity of the issues surrounding “diversity” in professional philosophy today. 41 silva   diversity and philosophy: on suicidal tendencies taking back philosophy problematizes the supposed (and self-assumed) universality of angloeuropean philosophy (chapter 1). it provides an excellent example of what comparative philosophy ought to look like (chapters 2), and points out the racism, xenophobia, blatant ethnocentrism, and fear operative in academia today (chapter 3). it also helps to explain the anti-intellectualism of our present cultural and political climate (chapter 4) and aspires to restore a sense of philosophy as vocation (chapter 5). succinctly put (at least when it comes to chapters devoted to the diversification of professional philosophy), van norden’s central claim is that “[p]hilosophy must diversify or die.”2 throughout my relatively short tenure in academic philosophy, i have relied upon this slogan time and time again with mixed results. i am sad to say, however, that if faced with the option between diversification and departmental “death,” the latter is what many, if not most, tenured philosophers would prefer.3 indeed, if my experiences in professional philosophy have taught me anything, it is that many, especially those who are resistant to change, would rather see the ship sink, so to speak, than keep it afloat with women, racialized minorities, members of lgtbq communities, and/or nonwestern philosophical interests at the helm: “it just would not be philosophy anymore!” (of course, this is not true of all departments or tenured professors of philosophy, but a lot—i would wager a majority.) the reasons for such a stark claim are manifold. probably the most important stems from a collective conflict of interests shared by many professional philosophers. a majority of persons occupying tenure-stream positions in departments and universities throughout the globe—especially in english-speaking countries and former colonial metropoles—have professional, economic, and personal investments in the philosophical status quo (in which diversity is minimally important). they are disincentivized when it comes to diversity since, in the eyes of many professional philosophers, it would entail the loss of tradition and “prestige,” the abandonment of rigor (or so it is assumed), and the dissolution of the aura of sophistication and deference that is often evoked upon mentioning to someone that one is a professor of philosophy (or some other vain reason). absent these, or so the idea goes, much of the money allocated to departmental budgets, faculty lines, salaries, and competitive research grants would be lost (since who would ever find philosophy attractive or take it seriously in its new multicultural garb?). diversification efforts are seen as a direct attack on philosophical specialization, even though one can argue it will lead to new specialties and the broadening of philosophy on the whole (these efforts might even attract new crops of undergraduates into the discipline who might then find more “mainstream” areas interesting). on top of all this, professional philosophy, “diversity,” and racist exclusion 42     subjective preferences and biases, and indeed racism, sexism, and other forms of prejudice disallow “diversity” efforts to be full realized; they are often commandeered or result in tokenized hiring. revealing a nefarious conflation of self and community, many philosophers are threatened by change, such that if one’s department or the field as a whole rapidly transforms then their individual status as a “philosopher” is called into question. in order for one to thrive as the philosopher she or he is today, professional philosophy has to remain the same (if not even be made great again!).4 for these reasons (and others), nothing short of generational turn-over, via retirement or other means, will allow for the widespread adoption of what van norden writes of: the replacement of one species of philosopher with another altogether,5 or, at the very least, a new crop of philosophers less invested in the way things are. diversification efforts require the full support of administrators, including deans and provosts. they often have to force change. perhaps flying the face of van norden’s attempt, you will not convince many philosophers to do right in terms of the inclusion of racialized minorities, women, and lgbtq communities—a telling and sad point that echoes the antiintellectualism he describes. arguments pertaining to the well-being of philosophy departments or the need for attracting majors will rarely work (again, sink the ship!). neither will clever gambits that ask philosophers to own up about the fact that they speak on behalf of only a portion of humanity and not all of it, as van norden and jay garfield dared to suggest in their new york times op-ed. for diversification to be successful, you need as much faculty support as possible, financial investment and commitment from colleges and administrations, and the blatant disregard of racist, sexist, and homophobic perspectives (there should not be any reasoning with the unreasonable—i have seen department chairs commit this folly only to reveal their own conservative preferences in the process). you cannot learn from or find value in another individual when you do not view them or their identity as a valid locus for knowledge-production. to make matters worse, forcing one to think in your terms typically results in their work being derivative not to mention inauthentic. methodological blinders and the white light attempts at “diversifying” professional academic philosophy take many shapes and forms. some of these attempts seek to increase the number of people of color and/or women in the field but keep in place the current research interests, the types of courses offered by philosophy departments, and the range of experience or sources for knowledge considered pertinent to philosophical inquiry. other attempts at diversification paint a more global picture of philosophy and strive to expand the variety or range of questions considered “philosophical” but are not necessarily concerned with changing the 43 silva   face of philosophy. the best forms of philosophical diversification do both, that is, they increase the number of people of color and women in professional philosophy as well as incorporate more “projects of color” (see below) into the mainstream. they also do not demand the complete overlap of the two—that is to say, they do not leave it up to the minorities and women to do all the work. that being said, increasing the number of white people (men in particular) studying “non-western” philosophy does not diversify philosophy; neither does offering admission into “club philosophy” to racialized minorities, women, and those from the “formerly” colonized world albeit on terms requiring their assimilation into well-established philosophical questions, methods, and problematics. philosophical diversity requires a change in personnel as well as thematic adjustment, the type of which the pervasive whiteness of professional philosophy will not allow for. in “philosophy raced. philosophy erased,” charles mills explains that philosophers of color face an assortment of challenges upon entering the ranks of professional philosophy.6 some of these include implicit and explicit racial/gender biases, microaggressions, double standards, forms of tokenization, and outright hostility or animosity. all of these, unfortunately, have come to be expected by racialized minorities entering academic philosophy (which does not make them right). the most perplexing and unique challenge faced by philosophers of color, mills continues, is the relegation of the types of interpersonal, structural, and historical issues faced by racialized minorities to the status of “non-philosophy.” in particular, mills has in mind questions on race and processes of racialization, but one can easily add racism, sexism, colonization, slavery, various forms of objectification and denigration, political marginalization, economic exploitation (as women and/or people of color), and more, all of which i referred to as “projects of color” above. the relegation of projects of color to the status of non-philosophy comes from certain metaphilosophical commitments and specific ideals about the end goal of philosophical thought. in comparison to other fields, such as literature, sociology, or history, philosophy aspires to ask perennial questions, those that span space and time and place one on a discursive level where they can think alongside of the great minds of history. “philosophy is supposed to be abstracting away from the contingent, the corporeal, the temporal, the material, to get at necessary, spiritual, eternal, ideal truths,” writes mills.7 from this perspective, the range of questions that fall into the domain of philosophy ought not include those that lack broad appeal. questions devoted to race and processes of racialization, therefore, are of limited relevance to “philosophers” on account of being “local,” particular, too corporeal (as it were), and mostly of interest to “minorities.” it is not that white philosophers altogether lack interest in any of the above concerns; many do work on and find such professional philosophy, “diversity,” and racist exclusion 44     topics interesting (such that my use of “projects of color” might even be offensive to some). nevertheless, mills’ analysis centers on the way questions connected to race are considered (at best) “applied” issues, “special topics,” the ever so charitable “non-ideal theory,” or whatever term is used to confer peripheral, tangential, outlier-status as not really philosophy. a major reason (but definitely not the only one) for this type of marginalization is the fact that the hegemonic group of individuals traditionally associated with being “philosophers” lack the range of perspective or experiences often shared by people of color. to make matters worse, this group also inhabits positions of racialized normativity. using political philosophy as an example, mills explains that the experiential starting point for people of color, generally speaking, runs contrary to the basic assumptions about political subjectivity maintained by “mainstream” thinkers. he writes, “your moral equality and personhood are certainly not recognized; you are not equal before the law; and the state is not seeking to protect but to encroach upon your interests in the interests of the white population.”8 in the contexts of the united states racial imaginary, african americans are fundamentally viewed as criminal and dangerous; the existence of latinx peoples is predicated on tropes of “illegality.” while the rights of blacks and hispanics might be protected nominally, these protections are not automatically granted in our society but must be continuously fought for and asserted, a point that gives new meaning to the idea of racial privilege. all this is to say, a metaphysically stable and legally secure political subjectivity is something political philosophers can take for granted only when the class of individuals who make up professional philosophy are treated the same by the law, show up in similar ways in terms of political representation, and also share a similar range of normative concerns. thus, when relying upon one’s (white racial) self as a frame of reference for discussion of rights or political organization (or even when designing syllabi!), it is quite possible that, in academic contexts where a majority of peers inhabit more or less the same circle of privilege as you, the particularity of your view is obscured and the experience of “unraced” whites becomes the norm, as mills puts it. i offer the question of political justice as it relates to undocumented immigrants or irregular migration as a classic example. at the onset of a theory of justice, john rawls explains that his main object of inquiry is justice, the basic structure of society.9 seeking a simple conception of justice, rawls limits his project in two ways (one of which is important here): “i shall be satisfied if it is possible to formulate a reasonable conception of justice for the basic structure of society conceived for the time being as a closed system isolated from other societies”.10 in the law of peoples, he adds “this position views society as closed: persons enter only by birth, and exit only by death.”11 in 45 silva   political liberalism (1996), rawls continues: “that a society is closed is a considerable abstraction, justified only because it enables us to speak about certain main questions free from distracting details.”12 besides reducing the plight of undocumented peoples to a “distracting detail,” rawls’ restriction betrays his own principles by providing too much information regarding the persons behind the famed “veil of ignorance.” when formulating the basic principles upon which the structure of society will depend, we may not know if we are rich, poor, black, white, able-bodied or not, male or female, gay or straight, but we do know that everyone behind the veil will be a “citizen” or, at the very least, have regular status. through this restriction rawls limits justice, in its most basic form, to those who are formal members of the body politic, a move that in the context of the united states alienates upwards of twelve million undocumented people from the basic structure of society (i.e., justice). unless such a limitation is justifiable, which is to say that the burden is upon rawlsians to show how citizenship is not an arbitrary starting point for a theory of justice (again, appealing to rawls’ own standards), how can the range of justice, in its most basic form, be so narrow? in asking the above, my goal is not to engage the burgeoning literature on the ethics of immigration. instead, building upon what mills writes, i demonstrate how many of the assumptions that “mainstream” philosophy rest upon, like taking citizenship or more abstractly “membership” for granted when constructing a theory of justice, reflects a rather particular perspective committed to a specific set of normative concerns. now, imagine this happening in the aggregate, adding things like prestige and pedigree, canon formation, the weight of tradition, and the “need for rigor” into the mix.13 one can easily see how many of those intellectual endeavors that might attract and welcome more nonwhite people into the philosophy are jettisoned (i am tempted to say “deported”) to ethnic studies, area studies, women and gender studies, etc. before moving on, it is important to underscore that philosophers of color are not only interested in so-called projects of color. neither is it the case that all minorities in philosophy think in essentialized ways that correspond with race, gender, or sexuality. to make such an assumption would be as oppressive and totalizing as the other injustices nonwhite philosophers put up with. nevertheless, my concern is with those individuals who would argue that race has nothing to do with philosophy; with those who dismiss the epistemic salience of social identity in philosophy altogether. moreover, it is not merely the numerical overrepresentation of whites that leads to the alienation of minorities in philosophy. mills’ ultimate concern is with gate-keeping methodological constraints and “border-building” tactics that simultaneously curtail the diversification of philosophy as well as the obscure the particularity of those concerns passing themselves off as “universal.” through this professional philosophy, “diversity,” and racist exclusion 46     process, professional philosophy remains overpopulated by white people (men in particular) and dominated by white interests passing themselves off as race-less philosophical concerns. for additional support take plato’s republic. on my read, this book is essentially about justice as it unfolds at both the political and individual levels, and the justification for why reason ought to govern nonreason. for plato, justice amounts to a kind of harmony or balance. a properly aligned or “balanced” psyche means that one’s reason dominates their more beastly parts, i.e., their passions/spirits and physical needs. similarly, a just society requires an organic social totality wherein the rational parts of the body-politic command the non-rational. plato’s right, in my opinion, to think that what you put into a society you get out at the individual level: if society is just, the people in it will be just. i believe the inverse is also true. if your society is predicated on injustice, the people within it will be incapable of a “balanced soul.” in this sense, think of w.e.b. du bois’ idea of doubleconsciousness. an african-american man who lived during that time in american history when black people were emancipated but nevertheless unfree (1868–1963), du bois describes the feeling of having a split or fractured self in his seminal work the souls of black folk. he writes, “it is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. one ever feels his two-ness,—an american, a negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”14 du bois has his self-consciousness, his “self,” but when introspecting he’s also forced to factor in the opinion of others, namely whites. while some might think that this is something all people do, that is, we all have to factor the opinion of others into our identity-construction, not all do it equally. imagine being black and having to filter all of one’s exchanges with whites knowing that they view you first and foremost as threatening, criminal, or rapacious. from this perspective, of what value is a balanced soul when suffering from double-consciousness? can du bois achieve harmony of the soul without one part of his “self” dominating the other? in a racialized context burdened by white supremacy, allowing “reason” to command “nonreason” means something quite different than what plato had in mind. following mills, my point is to demonstrate how the experiential starting-point for much of philosophy is white normativity. those inhabiting white normativity are privileged to only have to deal with problems of the mind and not those problems generated by the racist minds in their midst. and even though a case can be made that white people too are incapable of achieving a balanced soul in a society predicated on white supremacy, they are capable of evading this question in most 47 silva   philosophy courses. the sense of whiteness that permeates profesional philosophy is a byproduct of methodological assumptions that run deeper than simply suggesting that if philosophy departments do not diversify, then they should own up to their ethnocentrism. garfield captures what i mean when he writes that “ignoring non-western philosophy in our research, curriculum, and hiring decisions is deeply racist, and is a practice we cannot endorse in good faith once we recognize this.” (too bad he walks this claim back).15 the semiotics of “diversity”: on philosophical orientalism while it is one thing to “diversify” philosophy, it is quite another to empower “epistemes” of difference. van norden’s argument for why chinese philosophy deserves greater coverage in u.s. universities needs to be considered in light of this claim. he offers a valid argument that hinges on china’s increasing relevance on a global scale, the richness of this tradition, and the overwhelming whiteness of philosophy in english-speaking contexts.15 in addition to the question i asked above, that is, would this argument work if we swapped “chinese philosophy” for latin american or africana thought, let me pose another. does chinese philosophy deserve more uptake in the united states than, say, africana or latin american or asian american philosophies? given that “students of color are confronted with a curriculum that is almost monolithically white,”16 as van norden writes, why not ask these students to study philosophical traditions that serve them or their interests better, and not just assume that their professor’s appreciation of “asian thought” will suffice in terms of exposing students to difference? why not draw from, and philosophically empower in the going, the range of experience of these students of color? a response might be that by introducing students to a “non-western” perspective, like chinese philosophy, one exposes them ways of thinking that go beyond their sociohistorical contexts and thus do them some good: the broadening of epistemic horizons. while i agree with this, my rejoinder is the following: first, are we really doing students of color (particularly black, latinx, and indigenous students) a service by having them study a perspective that is, to some extent, completely irrelevant to their point of view? again, i do not mean this as a knock against chinese philosophy. nevertheless, given the current racial, gender, and ethnic demographics of professional philosophy, most students of color already occupy a position of marginality or “otherness” relative to professional philosophy. by studying anglo-continental philosophical traditions these students are, in a sense, being exposed to a different tradition. they are already becoming “worldly” (and, in fact, due to their lack of privilege are forced to). my assumption here is that growing up nonwhite in a white dominated social professional philosophy, “diversity,” and racist exclusion 48     context(s) grants one a type of double-consciousness or mestiza/o or “border” consciousness that gloria anzaldúa writes of.17 regardless, if the exposure to epistemic difference or getting outside of one’s comfort zone is not working for these students now, i.e., when nonwhite students study “white philosophers,” why assume that asking these students to think about chinese thought will be better? it might do white students some good, but does it help nonwhite students? second, a central premise of much comparative philosophy (especially the east-meets-west variety) is the notion that comparative philosophy gets one into the mind of an “other.” i think this assumes a type of mastery over others that is quite oppressive. instead of assuming we now understand the world from a different point of view, why not decenter the self in a way that allows for a world of others to be possible? this should be the main goal of comparative philosophy. however, as it is currently taught, admittedly not by people as prepared as van norden (and i say this because of his second chapter is a great example of what comparative philosophy ought to look like), “getting into the minds of the other” is how many philosophers (and administrators) think of comparative or “nonwestern” philosophy. when comparing ideas across cultures, especially when one attempts to transverse time as well as space, as one does when studying nahuatl (“aztec”) philosophy for instance, a cautious and selfreflexive approach is best. rather than perpetuate debates as to whether or not one is accurately portraying the thought practices and philosophical systems of conquered or foreign peoples, or for that matter debates about whether or not one can transcend their own epistemic framework and avoid the charge of cultural chauvinism or the problem of incommensurability, comparative philosophical practices are better appreciated for their reflexive capabilities. in light of a lingering skepticism about whether or not transcultural meanings exist, comparative philosophers are better off gaining a sense for how the comparative process challenges one’s preconceived views for what constitutes philosophy in the first place. in short, comparative philosophy ought to assist more in decentering or destabilizing the self rather than understanding “the other,” as counterintuitive as this might seem. while i do not mean to obviate the importance of or dismiss the possibility of cross-cultural communication, one jeopardizes the significance of this methodological approach if one seeks to get inside the mind of other people. returning to my point, while van norden’s argument is complex and multifaceted, most of those who read it will only see or hear the need to study “oriental” philosophy. the book will garner a halfhearted read, one that works in ideological ways to reify professional philosophy’s self-conception as well as several of its vices when it comes to comparative work. that is to say, given that van norden 49 silva   personally works in eastern traditions, his examples and demonstration for how to do comparative philosophy will eclipse his larger message. when professional philosophers see “non-western” philosophy, most think about buddhism, confucianism, or daoism and seem to only have the so-called far east in mind, never mind the indian subcontinent or southeast asia. not only does such an image of “non-western” philosophy lead to the exclusion of amerindian, africana, latin american, and caribbean traditions, since many of these have one foot in the west (which thus analytically rules them out as “non-western”), but it also reinforces an image of historical progress articulated by g. w. f. hegel who was famous for thinking that world history travels from “east” to “west.” when anglo-european philosophers study eastern traditions they often understand themselves as glimpsing images of philosophy’s past. or, seeking to rebel from the judeo-christian underpinnings of occidental culture (but nonetheless fans of “spirituality”), many professional philosophers are attracted to the religiously diverse aspects of eastern thought (believe it or not, i have seen petty academics purport to be “buddhist” only to frustrate those who claim to be catholic). all this is to say, when looking “east,” western philosophers catch a glimpse of their pre-approved past (assuming one does not venture too far east!). most of what they see challenges western thought in ways permitted by western thinkers: the move from orthodoxy to orthopraxy; from essentialist, substantialist or static metaphysics to process ontologies; from philosophy as love of wisdom to contemplative and esoteric understandings of “philosophy”; and more. all of these take place within a range of intellectual developments that, although different enough to make possible points of differentiation, there remains enough overlap such that comparisons can be made. when confronted with “radical difference,” the type of difference that runs counter to the narrative of historical development, one can start to view the dangers and risks involved in comparative endeavors. if western philosophers were to take africana, native american, latin american, and caribbean traditions seriously, especially in terms of analyzing their philosophical perspective and values, one would be making quite the political statement: it is to say, contrary to some of the most hallowed voices of the western philosophical canon, that africa is not a continent devoid of reason; that mestiza ways of knowing constitute real philosophy; that nahuatl-speaking peoples, amidst the fact that some might have engaged in human sacrifice, were capable of practicing formal philosophical investigation. such a statement would undermine the sense of historical progress that undergirds western philosophy. the native american philosopher vine deloria jr. puts it the following way, professional philosophy, “diversity,” and racist exclusion 50     tribal people have traditionally been understood by westerners as the last remnants of a hypothetical earlier stage of cultural evolution, and this so-called “primitive stage” of human development is a necessary preamble to any discussion of human beings and the meaning of their lives. indeed, the stereotype of primitive peoples anchors the whole edifice of western social thought. we need the primitive so that we can distinguish western civilization from it and congratulate ourselves on the progress we have made.18 deloria notes the difficulties he and others face when trying to explain how it is possible that indigenous peoples practiced “philosophy.” recognizing the reasoning skills of indigenous peoples necessarily undermines the narrative of “progress,” “civility,” and “sophistication” that undergirds western modernity, an idea reliant upon relations of domination, processes of racialization and enslavement, as well as the de-historization of indigenous peoples and their subsumption into “universal” (read european) history. all of these (and more) were the means through which the reasoning faculties of non-western cultures were covered-over and reduced to a caricature, one that, as deloria notes at the end of the above passage, bolsters the superiority of the western modern subject. towards a liberating philosophy for me, when one speaks of diversity, the state of professional philosophy is not only at stake. i see the debates about the nature of philosophical diversity as part of attempts at epistemic justice in light of european colonization and the ways in knowledge is racialized, gendered, and politicized today. influenced by liberation philosophy (broadly construed), i believe that philosophy is not an end in itself but part of the struggle against multiple forms of dehumanization and oppression. this is why, historically, some of the best works in philosophy (cross-culturally speaking) are dialogues where neither of the interlocutors are reducible to the other but represent differing points of view. here, taking philosophical diversity seriously, empowering and acknowledging the possibility that from where you think and who you are matters to philosophy, can lead to the “liberation” of philosophy. van norden believes in such an ideal, too. seemingly taking a page out of liberatory philosophy, the last chapters of taking back philosophy provide arguments aimed at the sense of antiintellectualism that pervades “american” culture and claims about the uselessness of philosophy. 51 silva   liberation philosophers put it the following way, even if it is considered “the pursuit of truth” or “love of wisdom”: philosophical praxis should never be reduced to the pursuit of truth or love wisdom for its own sake.19 in order for philosophy to be a praxis that contributes to society, one has to take it out of the over-specialized manifestations that have formed inside of academia. i am not saying that specialization in philosophy is irrelevant. however, it needs to be contextualized, as van norden explains using bertrand russell’s work.20 such an approach to a very nuanced understanding of philosophy restores a sense of sociality to philosophy. i mean “sociality” in the sense of bringing into conversation the philosophical points of view of different cultures, thus the expansion of philosophical thought and not just the demand that “others think like me.” but also “sociality” in the sense making sure philosophers can explain to themselves and society at large the importance of their work. that being said, there is an unspoken tension in the book that arises in light of van norden’s emphasis on helping philosophy combat the anti-intellectualism of the current day, not to mention his desire to restore philosophy to the sense of vocation held by socrates, confucius, or the nahuatl-speaking tlamatinimi, quetzalcoatl. how can we afford to the do the former when immersed in a fight about the importance of critical thinking, that is, when the very idea of philosophy is called into question? manipulating the call for philosophy to be more practical, many philosophers will find this to be a reason why diversification needs to be put off. you can only do so much, or so the claim will go. yet, as i hope to have explained above, practical relevance in philosophy, if such a goal is desired, is achieved by meeting students where they are, by broadening philosophical horizons in ways that take philosophers “outside” of themselves. on top of that, if the goal is to factor in more minorities and women into the field, or indeed philosophers from outside the english-speaking world, then demonstrating what philosophy can do to help combat totalizing forms of social identity and even colonization might do to some good. notes 1. with “global” and “globalized” i am drawing from the late comparative philosopher david hall. see hall, “jut how provincial is western philosophy? ‘truth’ in comparative contexts,” social epistemology: a journal of knowledge, culture and policy 15.4 (2001), 285. professional philosophy, “diversity,” and racist exclusion 52     2. bryan w. van norden, taking back philosophy: a multicultural manifesto (new york: columbia university press, 2017), 8. 3. while some might find my comments “pessimistic,” they are not intended to be so. i am trying to be “real” in the sense of derrick bell’s “racial realism.” see bell, faces at the bottom of the well: the permanence of racism (new york: basic books, 1992). on top of that, i have made a commitment to myself to be as honest and forthcoming as possible in academia, even to the point of it being brutal and vicious. i offer no apologies. 4. much of what i have to say about professional philosophy parallels what i have to say about the state of racism and white privilege in the united states today. see grant j. silva, “racism as self-love,” radical philosophy review (forthcoming). 5. my comments here reference what frantz fanon suggests will be necessary for decolonization to come into effect. see fanon, the wretched of the earth (new york: grove press, 1963), 35. 6. see charles mills, “philosophy raced. philosophy erased,” rethinking the practice of philosophy: bodies of color, bodies of knowledge, ed. george yancy (albany: suny press, 2012), 45–70. some of what follows in this section comes out of grant j. silva, “on the difficulties of writing philosophy from a racialized subjectivity,” american philosophical association newsletters: hispanics/latinos in philosophy, 18(1), 2-6. 7. mills, “philosophy race. philosophy erased,” 60. 8. ibid, 61. 9. john rawls, a theory of justice (cambridge, ma: belknap, 1971), 3. 10. rawls, theory of justice, 6–7. rawls’ second limitation is that he wishes to “examine the principles of justice that would regulate a well-ordered society.” he continues, “everyone is presumed to act justly and to do his part in upholding just institutions” (8). this is called “strict compliance theory,” an idea that has generated a comprehensive academic literature. 11. rawls, the law of peoples (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2001), 26. 12. rawls, political liberalism (new york: columbia university press, 1993), 12 (emphasis added). 13. ofelia schutte, “attracting latino/as to philosophy: today’s challenges,” rethinking the practice of philosophy, ed. george yancy (albany: suny press, 2012), 71–86; jorge j. e. gracia, “philosophical 53 silva   canons and philosophical traditions: the of latin american philosophy,” rethinking the practice of philosophy, ed. george yancy (albany: suny press, 2012), 86–102. 14. w. e. b. du bois, the souls of black folk (new york: dover thrift edition, 1994), 8. 15. taking back philosophy, xix. doing the proverbial walk back, garfield goes on to explain that he does “not mean to suggest that our colleagues in philosophy individually harbor or act upon racist views,” since that would be “irresponsible” and “false” (xix). instead he reveals in the gulf between interpersonal and structural forms of racism and writes, “a social structure can be racist without any individual who participates in it being racist when it serves to establish or to perpetuate a set of practices that systematically denigrate—implicitly or explicitly—people of particular race.” not only is such a stance unnecessarily exculpating, but it also means that we can have “racism with no racists,” to borrow a line from the sociologist eduardo bonilla-silva. garfield’s understanding of interpersonal racism is obviously predicated on intentional acts of hatred and ignorant of the ways in which the perpetuation of injustice is just as bad as being the source of it. it is also why many philosophers of race shifted from volitional to consequential accounts of racism. again, see silva, “racism as selflove.” 16. taking back philosophy, 3–8. 17. ibid, 7. 18. see du bois; gloria anzaldúa, borderlands/la frontera: the new mestiza, 3rd ed. (san francisco: aunt lute books, 2007). 19. vince deloria, jr. “philosophy and tribal peoples,” american indian thought, ed. anne waters (malden: blackwell, 2004), 3–12. 20. see ignacio ellacuría, “the liberating function of philosophy (1985),” essays on history, liberation and salvation, ed. michael e. lee. (maryknoll, ny: orbis books, 2013), 93–119. see also grant j. silva, “the americas seek not enlightenment but liberation: on the philosophical significance of liberation for philosophy in the americas,” the pluralist 13.2, 1–21. 21. taking back philosophy, 153–155. microsoft word guardado print [expositions 13.2 (2019) 54–75] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 nonviolence: the witness of a church of mercy leo guardado fordham university theologians, activists, clergy, laypersons, and anyone concerned about the complex forms of violence that permeate daily existence continuously wrestle with one of the fundamental ethical questions of humanity, perhaps most pithily stated in modern times by kant—what ought i to do? if we shift this individual question to a communal framework, such as that of the church, we may ask, what ought we the church to do? any attempt to answer this question must inevitably engage the equally complex question of identity—who am i? who are we? doing and being, two categories that conceptually and practically implicate each other, are ever present in how we respond to violence. in an ecclesiological key, these two categories can be understood as the mission and nature of the church—what the church is called to do and what the church is. in a world that has made violence a seemingly defining feature of existence, what the church does or does not do bears witness to what the church claims to be or not be. with violence as a category and challenge for understanding what the church is and ought to do, some scholars have reasonably argued that the church’s call is to build peace.1 gerard powers, for example, has argued for understanding our catholic vocation (identity and practice) as one of peacebuilding.2 the primary intention of his reflection is to encourage a new vatican synod and apostolic exhortation on the question of peace. the hope for such a synod and papal document is widely shared and would be a fitting echo from pope francis to st. francis of assisi, the twelfth century icon whom pope francis has referred to as “a man of peace, a man of poverty, a man who loved and protected creation.”3 one can argue that while pope francis has given substantial attention to both the question of poverty and creation (for example, his texts evangelii gaudium and laudato si’), a more substantial text on the question of peace is yet to emerge. if such a document were to emerge from the vatican in the years to come, there is an open question as to how pope francis would deal with the long tradition of the justification of war, even as a last resort, and additionally, how he would deal with the even longer tradition of nonviolence, and how both relate to the desire for peace. 55 guardado     in powers’s reflection and recommendation for a synod, he argues for the vocation of peacebuilding as constituted by an inherent complementary relationship between nonviolence and the just war tradition. nonviolence is not, he says, the “sole christian option,” and a possible synod on peace would not have to reject the just war tradition that has undergirded roman catholic thinking. for powers, a synod and a papal document would elaborate on the need of nonviolence, restrictive just war, and peacebuilding as necessary elements of catholic identity and practice. while i will not rehearse what powers calls the “well-trod debate over just war and nonviolence,”4 this essay will not affirm an inherent complementary relationship between just war (restrictive or not) and nonviolence, for violence, even when intellectually or theologically justified, does not cease to be incompatible with christian faith.5 perhaps this generation, like every generation of roman catholics, is called to consider the possibility that nonviolence may in fact be the sole christian means for peace. if a major vatican synod takes place or a document on peace is produced, part of the challenge will be the task of continuing to incorporate nonviolence into capacious theological frameworks, or, phrased differently, it will be necessary to continue developing the theological frameworks of nonviolence. in this essay i suggest that mercy can serve as a key theological concept for ongoing reflection on nonviolence and the catholic church. my thesis is that nonviolence becomes a genuine constitutive element of the church’s nature and mission, of what the church is and is called to do, if and when we also come to understand and accept that mercy is, as pope francis says, “the very foundation of the church’s life.”6 from that theological and ecclesiological vantage point, nonviolence becomes a defining mark or sign of the church’s authentic existence and not only an ethical demand. first, i show that pope francis’s recent efforts to re-center nonviolence in the church are more fully understood when read in light of his attempts to make real and present a church of mercy. thus, i provide an analysis of his recent key texts on mercy, which organically bridge with his text(s) on nonviolence. i then enter more deeply into the logic of mercy and the implications for the church using the theological insights of jon sobrino, whose writings have arisen out of the context of ongoing violence in el salvador and latin america. lastly, i shift to a more direct examination of mahatma gandhi’s key principles to demonstrate the resonance between the conceptual horizon of nonviolence and a church of mercy. nonviolence: the witness of a church of mercy 56     pope francis’s vision for a church of mercy pope francis has made mercy the central theological category of his papacy. in his first sunday angelus message in march 2013, when reflecting on the story of the woman accused of adultery and condemned to death (john 8:1–11), pope francis spoke of god as the merciful one and of christ as the mercy of god made flesh.7 in that angelus message pope francis reveals that cardinal walter kasper’s recently published book on mercy had done him much good.8 since those first days of his papacy, mercy has continued to mark francis’s understanding of the church. perhaps the most public manifestation of francis’s focus on mercy is the jubilee year of mercy he inaugurated to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the closing of the second vatican council. it is in the midst of his reflections on mercy that francis has also begun to write about nonviolence, with the most important text marking the fiftieth anniversary of the first world day of peace that took place in 1967. i begin by providing an analysis of francis’s texts on mercy and on nonviolence to show how they invite a rethinking of catholic identity and practice. francis’s insights on mercy introduced during his first sunday angelus appearance find their fuller expression in misericordiae vultus (“the face of mercy”), the 2015 document written to mark the beginning of the holy year of mercy.9 the name of the document is a reference to jesus christ whom the pope affirms is the face of the mercy of god. unequivocally, the document states in its opening section that mercy is the divine nature, in other words, that god is mercy itself.10 this reality has been manifest throughout salvation history through the presence of jesus and the holy spirit who as he previously stated in the angelus message, gives “inner wisdom focused on god’s mercy.”11 for this pope, mercy is the fundamental category of all other categories that can express the divine trinitarian presence in history, thus he speaks of it as “the ultimate and supreme act,” “the fundamental law,” and the “bridge” between the divine and the human.12 mercy then, is the very means and ends of the christian life, and the holy year of mercy was meant to help the church become “a more effective sign”13 of the mercy of god. that pope francis instituted an “extraordinary jubilee of mercy” points to the significance of mercy for commemorating the event that was vatican ii, which marked “a new phase” in the church’s history and “a new way” of proclaiming the gospel.14 like other jubilee years in the church’s history, they are meant to be a time of pardon, of remission of penalties, of interrupting cycles of injustice and violence, so that persons and communities can heal relationships with one another and with god. the spirit of reconciliation undergirds jubilee years, and the ritual of 57 guardado     opening a church’s door so that all may enter points to what francis has called a “culture of encounter”15 where we come face to face with the other and with the holy other. this jubilee ritual of opening doors may even be tied to the ancient practice of persons seeking sanctuary in churches to flee violence,16 a practice that in the early church was referred to as “fleeing to the mercy of the church.”17 a jubilee year of mercy is a symbolic and literal opening of the doors of the church, and for francis it was also an opening for the spirituality of the council to be made present for a new generation. pope paul vi proclaimed at the council’s closing address on december 7, 1965 that “the old story of the good samaritan has been the model of the spirituality of the council,”18 and fifty years later pope francis renewed the efforts for the followers of christ to become a samaritan church, a church whose identity and mission is defined by an active mercy that goes out to encounter those who suffer the effects of violence.19 in misericordiae vultus, pope francis moves from an affirmation of god’s nature as mercy, to jesus’s mission as that of revealing mercy, and ultimately to the implications of this reality for the church. he writes that “the signs [jesus] works, especially in favor of sinners, the poor, the marginalized, the sick, and the suffering, are all meant to teach mercy. everything in him speaks of mercy.”20 even the calling of the disciples is interpreted as a sign of mercy—jesus reaching out into the lives of ordinary persons and calling them to follow the way of mercy. according to pope francis, what jesus’s life and his teachings reveal is that mercy is a “force that overcomes everything,” including all limits one can conceive or erect to reject mercy.21 thus, followers of jesus, then and now, exist as followers to the degree that their life is overcome by mercy, for as pope francis writes, “it becomes a criterion for ascertaining who his true children are” and is “an imperative from which we cannot excuse ourselves.”22 all of this is a process of concretizing mercy in history, making it “visible and tangible,” expressing it in “intentions, attitudes, and behaviors” of daily life.23 the church, the people of god who bear witness to jesus’s life and teaching, becomes historically credible when mercy is its foundation and its end. but this requires a radical reframing of mercy as the church’s identity and mission, and to use pope francis’s words, “perhaps we have long since forgotten how to show and live the way of mercy.”24 behind these words is francis’s concern that a focus exclusively on justice leaves no room for grace, god’s very self, to enter. conceptually, francis locates justice both as an initial moment, and as a dimension of mercy, without conceiving of them as contradictory realities but rather as “two dimensions of a single nonviolence: the witness of a church of mercy 58     reality that unfolds progressively until it culminates in the fullness of love.”25 while there is much philosophical and theological nuance to be explored in these affirmations of the relationship between mercy and justice, francis’s emphasis is on remembering the primacy of mercy, a mercy that does not do away with justice but which goes beyond it into the mystery of god. one of his most profound statements is that “god’s justice is his mercy,”26 a stunningly beautiful and pithy way of communicating a forgotten truth drawn from the history of salvation as expressed in scripture. a credible church, a church that is believed because it lives according to the witness of jesus christ, is one whose justice is its boundless mercy made historically concrete. lacking mercy, the veracity of the church, whose “first truth is the love of christ,” is at stake.27 the church’s vocation then, is to enflesh mercy, to reflect the divine nature that is our human end.28 misericordiae vultus, despite being a relatively short text, provides a capacious theological lens for ongoing discernment on what it means to be a church reconfigured by mercy. keeping this text in mind, i now shift to a brief message that pope francis wrote in april 2016 during the jubilee year and on the occasion of the conference on nonviolence and just peace that took place in the vatican. in that message the pope echoes misericordiae vultus by locating mercy as the source or foundation for peace.29 additionally, the document states that “humanity needs to refurbish all the best available tools to help the men and women of today to fulfill their aspirations for justice and peace,” and says to the conference participants that “your thoughts on revitalizing the tools of nonviolence, and of active nonviolence in particular, will be a needed and positive contribution,” for the historical moment in which we are living is a “world war in installments.”30 a literal translation of the spanish version of the document, which would be in the pope’s native tongue, says that it is “necessary to renew all of the instruments that are most adequate to make concrete the aspirations for justice and peace,” and that “reflection to relaunch the way of nonviolence, and especially of active nonviolence, constitutes a necessary and positive contribution.”31 while not a major difference from the english translation, the shift from “refurbish” to “renew,” from “tools” to “instruments,” and from “revitalizing the tools of nonviolence” to “relaunching the way of nonviolence,” lends a qualitatively different tone to that which is being brought forth. in particular, pope francis emphasizes “active nonviolence.” the qualification of “active” is not unlike francis’s various qualifications of mercy as a concrete reality and not an abstract idea.32 at the heart is an attempt to retrieve the living and creative force that must give life to these words if they are to be enfleshed. francis further speaks of “the active witness of nonviolence as a ‘weapon’ to 59 guardado     achieve peace.”33 here one finds another distinction between the english and spanish translations of the text, for the literal translation of the spanish says, “the active witness of nonviolence as ‘weapon’ for achieving peace.”34 a key difference is that the spanish construction does not need an article (“a” or “the”), while the english translation uses an article that some readers may want to emphasize. in other words, whereas in the english translation one can more easily argue that nonviolence is simply “a” weapon among other legitimate weapons, this point is more difficult to make in light of the spanish translation where nonviolence is simply “weapon.” whether one wants to emphasize that nonviolence is “a” weapon or “the” weapon for achieving peace is perhaps fundamentally not as relevant as it initially appears because one can argue that in fact, from a christian perspective, there is no other way for achieving what can genuinely be called peace. leaving aside these details that may have been lost in translation, pope francis’s document directly locates nonviolence as intimately bound to peace, and in light of his understanding of mercy as the foundation for peace, a question about the relationship between mercy and nonviolence begins to arise. his comments on nonviolence and peace echo the well-known phrase, “if you want peace, work for justice,”35 but perhaps with an invitation for the hearer to consider another formulation— “if you want peace, live nonviolence,” or, “if you want peace, work for justice nonviolently.” in all cases, for francis, mercy remains the fountain that nourishes the historical possibilities. in the same document pope francis indirectly elaborates on active nonviolence by addressing conflict, indifference, and the inherently political aspect of mercy. in addition to saying that conflict must be faced and not ignored or concealed, a point previously addressed in evangelii gaudium (§226), he emphasizes the figurative and tangible “wall of indifference” as the greatest obstacle for resolving or transforming conflict. to respond with the force of mercy to indifference is to imitate god, and such mercy he adds, “is so to speak ‘political’ because it is expressed in solidarity, which is the moral and social attitude that responds best to the awareness of the scourges of our time and of the interdependence of life at its different levels.”36 these are points pope francis had already made in the 2016 world day of peace message,37 but now he contextualizes them in relation to the active witness of nonviolence as work for peace. increasingly, one finds a convergence between the active and creative force that is mercy and the way of nonviolence that like mercy, is considered a force capable of ultimately overcoming everything. before publishing the 2017 day of peace message, francis wrote an apostolic letter to close the jubilee year of mercy that further sets the context for his historic 2017 message on nonviolence. nonviolence: the witness of a church of mercy 60     in that letter he expresses in new ways much of the spirit of misericordiae vultus by emphasizing that mercy constitutes the church’s very existence and that it is through mercy that “the profound truths of the gospel are made manifest and tangible.”38 throughout his writings pope francis continues to connect mercy to truth and speaks of it as that which brings about the veracity—the truthfulness—of the church inasmuch as it expresses the true spirit of the gospel. there is a performative dynamism at play in the pope’s understanding of mercy. in speaking of sacramental life and prayer, he says that in the church’s prayer, “references to mercy, far from being merely exhortative, are highly performative,39 which is to say that as we invoke mercy with faith, it is granted to us, and as we confess it to be vital and real, it truly transforms us.”40 one can also speak of this dynamism as an incarnational logic that historically enfleshes that which in faith one believes to be true. in other words, the invocation of mercy is not merely or primarily about words spoken, but about performing the truth that is mercy. to perform mercy is to imitate god and locate ourselves where god is already present—in the midst of violence and suffering. francis writes that “the desire for closeness to christ requires us to draw near to our brothers and sisters […] by its very nature, mercy becomes visible and tangible in specific and powerful acts.”41 if it is mercy, by its very nature it is active even when it seems to be passive. for example, in this letter francis speaks of silence by saying that “it is not true that silence is an act of surrender; on the contrary, it is a moment of strength and love.”42 silence can be an authentic reply to violence and suffering if it is a silence not out of fear or indifference, but out of a participation in a more powerful force that manifests the reign of god already present in our midst. in the logic of mercy, what appears as weakness may in fact be strength, and what appears passive may in fact be the most creative force in creation. thus it is no surprise that francis says that “now is the time to unleash the creativity of mercy, to bring about new undertakings, the fruit of grace.”43 as new forms of violence arise to undermine humanity, a culture of mercy requires resisting what francis calls “a temptation to theorize ‘about’ mercy” without also performing, enfleshing, and actively participating in the creative movements of mercy. nonviolence is the creative movement of mercy, and its strength is being unleashed. the emergence of nonviolence within the horizon of mercy on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the first world day of peace, and after the formal conclusion of the extraordinary jubilee of mercy, pope francis issued the text, nonviolence: a 61 guardado     style of politics for peace. given the message’s proximity to the other texts published for the year of mercy, which were a continuation of the spirituality of vatican ii, pope francis’s message on nonviolence is perhaps best read in relation to his reconfiguration of a church of mercy. the title of the document already begins to reveal that pope francis is proposing a new spirituality—a way of life.44 the use of the word “style” has to be understood in terms of its etymological roots pointing to a way of living, to conduct or behavior. similarly, the use of the word “politics” in the title cannot be limited to the electoral dimension of most contemporary “politics,” but rather, to a way of life in the “polis” (the city) in relation to various publics and governmental structures. with these qualifications in mind, another manner of expressing the title could be “nonviolence: a way of life for peace.” while the phrase “style of politics” may appear peculiar, francis’s texts have arisen in the midst of profound social movements on a global scale and among an ongoing contestation of what constitutes genuine political power. also, let us remember that the pope has a vested interest in an ongoing encounter between grassroots sociopolitical movements and church leadership, as is evident by his establishment of the world meeting of popular movements begun during his first year as pope. thus, his papacy is marked by an effort to contribute to the reclaiming of politics by “the people.” in his 2016 message to the meeting of popular movements he writes: the breach between the peoples and our current forms of democracy is growing ever greater, due to the enormous power of the financial and media sectors that would seem to dominate them. popular movements, i know, are not political parties, and i would say that, in great measure, this is what makes them so valuable, since they express a distinct, dynamic, and vital form of social participation in public life. but do not be afraid to get involved in the great discussions, in politics with a capital p[.]45 in light of this background, to speak of nonviolence as a style of politics is to bring into focus the varied and creative ways that communities in precarious situations are performing their right to exist now and into the future, even when the violence of political structures relegate them to the peripheries of society or beyond.46 nonviolence: the witness of a church of mercy 62     in the opening statement of his 2017 world day of peace message, pope francis invites all people, from heads of state and government, to religious and civic leaders, to “make active nonviolence our way of life.”47 as already noted, to speak of a way is to point to a style of life, to a conduct or behavior, or what in theology is referred to by the term “spirituality,” a manner of living according to the spirit.48 akin to the earlier analysis of mercy, nonviolence is not a vacuous feeling or passive ahistorical concept, but rather a reality that is incarnated in relation to others and which has its root in the god of mercy who heals our “violence within.”49 citing pope benedict xvi, francis stresses that “for christians, nonviolence is not merely tactical behavior but a person’s way of being, the attitude of one who is so convinced of god’s love and power that he or she is not afraid to tackle evil with the weapons of love and truth alone.”50 in the same way that pope francis’s texts seek to reclaim mercy as more than the works of mercy (e.g., corporal works of mercy, spiritual works of mercy), but as a fundamental principle or as divine nature itself, so too this most recent text on nonviolence seeks a more capacious embrace of nonviolence as more than tactics, but as a whole horizon—spiritual and theological—that marks the life of the church and all persons. in previous documents pope francis connected mercy to truth, and in this document it is nonviolence that is placed in relation to truth. not only is the “force of arms” referred to as “deceptive,” but francis also cites the late pope john paul ii in saying that in the late 1980s europe’s “momentous change in the lives of people, nations, and states had come about ‘by means of peaceful protest, using only the weapons of truth and justice.’”51 to further illustrate the veracity of active nonviolence pope francis alludes to the “decisive and consistent practice of nonviolence” achieved by persons such as mahatma gandhi, abdul ghaffar khan, martin luther king, jr., and leymah gbowee—a hindu, a muslim, a baptist, and a lutheran—all of whom worked tirelessly within and beyond their particular faith traditions to encounter and accompany the victims and survivors of multiple forms of violence. if violence is the way of death and nonviolence the way of life,52 if “violence profanes the name of god,” if “the name of god cannot be used to justify violence,”53 then nonviolence as a way of and to life must constitute a universal path of holiness that witnesses to the truth of god’s mercy that overcomes all violence.54 active nonviolence is the logic of mercy that transforms the logic of violence. in his message on nonviolence pope francis writes that “an ethics of fraternity and peaceful coexistence between individuals and among peoples cannot be based on a logic of fear, violence, and closed63 guardado     mindedness, but on responsibility, respect and sincere dialogue.”55 he adds that conflict must be faced “constructively and nonviolently, so that ‘tensions and oppositions can achieve a diversified and life-giving unity,’ preserving ‘what is valid and useful on both sides.’”56 earlier i highlighted the performative logic of mercy, a transformative force whose truth of being is manifest as it is invoked and practiced. and not unlike the performative logic of mercy, the truth of nonviolence is enfleshed through its practice, as it comes face to face with violence without surrendering to fear. the performance of nonviolence as an expression of mercy is a form of dialogue in the flesh, an embodied diplomacy that, like silence, can be a powerful and constructive reply to the destructive nature of violence. the church of mercy that pope francis seeks may in fact only come about if we continue to reconstitute the relationship between mercy and nonviolence, for nonviolence is the means of mercy, the way through which mercy walks in this world. pope francis asks that we become “nonviolent people” and build “nonviolent communities,”57 and to the degree that we as church do so, we will also become a church of mercy. mercy as the means for what is truly human so far, i have analyzed some of the key texts of francis’s pontificate in relation to mercy and nonviolence. although early on pope francis emphasized the influence of cardinal walter kasper’s book on mercy on his own thinking, i want to suggest that the insights of theologian jon sobrino, especially on what he calls “the principle of mercy” and on being a samaritan church, further elucidate the inner logic of mercy. sobrino’s 1992 book, el principio misericordia (the principle of mercy) is a collection of his essays on the reality of the church in latin america in light of suffering, modern-day crucifixion, colonialism, solidarity, and martyrdom, among other topics. but it is the opening section, after which the book is titled, that provides the ground and lens for reconfiguring theology and the church in relation to mercy. by going deeper into the inner-logic of mercy we can also begin to more explicitly see its fundamental relationship to nonviolence. sobrino is unambiguously clear that when speaking of mercy, he is not speaking simply of a sentiment, of works of mercy, or of addressing individual needs; rather, he is speaking of a principle, of a structuring reality of love that goes to the very root of all reality. he writes that “mercy is a basic attitude toward the suffering of another, whereby one reacts to eradicate that suffering for the sole reason that it exists, and in the conviction that, in this reaction to the oughtnonviolence: the witness of a church of mercy 64     not-be of another’s suffering, one’s own being, without any possibility of subterfuge, hangs in the balance.”58 as a re-action to another’s suffering that has been interiorized within oneself, this praxic love generates the condition for authentic being, for the very possibility of humanity. the suffering of the other implicates not only an ethical question—what ought i/we to do?—but also an ontological one—who/am i? who/are we? to be fully human, sobrino argues, is to let our lives resemble jesus’s own life by reproducing the very structure of his life, a life whose most radical structuring element was the principle of mercy that revealed the divine. the story of the good samaritan, then, is the story of the total or complete human person. without the reaction of mercy, “the human is vitiated in its root, as occurred with the priest and the levite who ‘saw him and went on.’”59 mercy stands at the origin and at the end of a truly human, and thus divine life— it is the minimum and the maximum principle, the first and the last. if mercy is the most structuring element in jesus’s life, a church of jesus must also have this as its basic structure. in a world of mercilessness, or what sobrino calls anti-mercy, a church that merely practices works of mercy and/or proclaims words about mercy will be tolerated, but a church that is reconfigured by the principle of mercy will face the violence of all that opposes mercy. to be reconfigured by mercy is for the church to be “de-centered” by the wounded one, for the church to “think itself” from outside itself, from the road where the victim of multiple forms of violence lies.60 while recognizing the great variety of wounds of which one can speak and attempt to universalize, sobrino is clear that, quantitatively, the most serious wound on a global scale is poverty, thus echoing those famous words attributed to mahatma gandhi that “poverty is the worst form of violence.”61 a church that reacts to this violence and all its related forms in order to eradicate it will be “threatened, assaulted, and persecuted […] contrariwise, the absence of such threats, assaults, and persecutions demonstrates that, while the church may have managed to perform works of mercy, it has not allowed itself to be governed by the principle of mercy.”62 the following of jesus and the proclamation of the reign of god inevitably entail a willingness to self-suffer for the truth of one’s witness to the god of mercy who overcomes violence at its root. to put it simply, the church too, if it is church, must risk bearing the marks of a wounded and crucified flesh. at the very least, this “mark of mercy” will make the church credible. in sobrino’s words: a church of consistent mercy is at least credible. if it is not consistently merciful, 65 guardado     it will seek credibility in vain through other means. among those who are weary of the faith, agnostics, or unbelievers, such a church will at least render the name of god respectable. that name will not be blasphemed by the church’s own actions. among the poor of this world, the church will awaken acceptance and gratitude […] consistent mercy, then, is a “mark” of the true church of jesus.63 i previously claimed that active nonviolence is the logic of mercy that transforms and overcomes the logic of violence, and in light of sobrino’s insights on the principle of mercy, it can be said that active nonviolence is a mark of the true church of jesus that does not replicate violence and the suffering it causes, but eradicates it through its own willingness to suffer in the struggle against violence. nonviolence as the means of mercy throughout this essay i have attempted to weave together mercy and active nonviolence using texts primarily drawn from pope francis and the life of the church. i have mostly refrained from directly incorporating the philosophy of nonviolence, especially as expressed by gandhi, although his spirit has haunted certain formulations and emphases used throughout. his practical idealism of active and principled nonviolence certainly continues to live in communities across the globe who struggle and suffer in their non-cooperation with violent structures that dehumanize, humiliate, and crush all who dare bear “the mark of mercy.” but i would be remiss if this essay did not let what has been in the background come to the fore, even if toward the end. thus, i turn to gandhi’s philosophy more directly in order more firmly construct the shared positive horizon of mercy and nonviolence. nonviolence was gandhi’s style of politics and the means through which he faced the violence of colonialism and the hope for liberation of both the oppressor and the oppressed. while a traditional realpolitik framework tends to dismiss his approach as idealistic and thus unrealistic for addressing violence and war,64 his theoretical formulations are one of the most practical intellectual archives65 we have for “becoming a nonviolent people” and “building nonviolent communities”66 capable of transforming “politics with a capital p,”67 which too often justifies fighting violence with more violence. at the heart of gandhi’s vision for transforming a world enmeshed in cycles of violence was a scientific rigor and method for living out “experiments in nonviolence: the witness of a church of mercy 66     the practice of truth and nonviolence.”68 this practical method is traditionally termed “satyagraha.” joan bondurant describes satyagraha as “an instrument of struggle for positive objectives and for fundamental change—a technique more widely used than understood and one which yet called for testing in the field of social and political action.”69 with these words bondurant points to the sense of ambivalence that surrounds this term, for even in gandhi’s time persons would use the term to name their actions or popular movements regardless of the means they employed or the objectives for which they struggled. gandhi was killed before he could systematize his method for resolving conflicts, but in her classic study of gandhi’s philosophy, bondurant examines truth, nonviolence, and self-suffering as key interrelated principles of the method. the very word “satyagraha” is comprised of both truth and nonviolence. gandhi writes, “truth (satya) implies love, and firmness (agraha) engenders and therefore serves as a synonym for force. i thus began to call the indian movement ‘satyagraha,’ that is to say, the force which is born of truth and love or nonviolence.”70 in these few words about the origin of his method and movement one finds a close conceptual relationship between notions of truth and love and the nonviolent force they generate to address violence. satya (truth) derives from sat (“being”), and agraha literally translates into “firm grasping,” thus satyagraha is often referred to as “holding on to truth or ‘truth force.’”71 for gandhi, truth has an ontological density and one is not able to grasp absolute truth in this life. as he states, “to find truth completely is to realize oneself and one’s destiny, that is, to become perfect. i am painfully conscious of my imperfections, and therein lies all the strength i possess.”72 it is the realization that we are not fully realized persons, that we are not absolute truth, which necessitates a recognition of our partial truths and of our unfinished becoming, and thus, of a reflexive means of engagement with others that mutually allows for a growth in the grasp of truth. in social relations love is the means that can allow for growth in truth, growth into a true or authentic self, and for gandhi this social manifestation of love is nonviolence.73 essentially, love or nonviolence is the means in the struggle for truth—the only means whose veracity does not contradict or undermine that for which it struggles.74 at its core, nonviolence is a positive love. the word that is generally translated in english as nonviolence is ahimsa, which for gandhi was not merely a renunciation of the will to kill or to damage, but a positive state of love.75 however, gandhi is clear that such a positive state of love does not mean passivity. he writes, “i accept the interpretation of ahimsa namely that it is not 67 guardado     merely a negative state of harmlessness but it is a positive state of love, of doing good even to the evil-doer. but it does not mean helping the evil-doer to continue the wrong or tolerating it by passive acquiescence.”76 quite the contrary, gandhi advocates for a forceful response to evil that resists and transforms the conflict. however, the means of such resistance must be the force of love and nonviolence that does not undermine the very truth (e.g., justice, goodness, dignity, etc.) out of which and for which one struggles. bondurant explains that “truth, judged in terms of human needs, would be destroyed, on whichever side it lay, by the use of violence. nonviolence, or ahimsa, becomes the supreme value, the one cognizable standard by which true action can be determined.”77 or, in gandhi’s words, “truth is the end, love a means thereto. we know what is love or nonviolence, although we find it difficult to follow the law of love.”78 in gandhi’s philosophical and/or theological horizon, truth and love are inseparable, for nonviolence is the way to truth, to being, to the verification of one’s humanity. here we hear echoes of sobrino’s argument when speaking of mercy, that “in this reaction to the ought-not-be of another’s suffering, one’s own being, without any possibility of subterfuge, hangs in the balance.”79 nonviolence, like mercy, is not simply an ethical response (“what ought i to do?”), but implicates a whole ontology (“who/what am i?”). if for sobrino to be fully human is to resemble the structure of jesus’s life, a life structured by mercy, for gandhi to be realized as a person is to walk the way of nonviolence that leads to truth. in both cases the way is difficult, but both mercy and nonviolence hold promise as insurmountable forces capable of ultimately overcoming all forms of violence. it must be added, though, that for gandhi as well as for sobrino and pope francis, love or nonviolence entails a willingness to suffer. self-suffering is the alternative to inflicting violence upon others. a willingness to suffer is not the same as cowardice and an inability to inflict violence, and it is certainly not suffering for its own sake. rather, one is willing to suffer in one’s re-action to another’s suffering because it is a re-action that holds firmly to one’s truth without undermining oneself or others through violence. for gandhi, “satyagraha postulates the conquest of the adversary by suffering in one’s own person.”80 from a christian perspective, jesus’s own willingness to suffer persecution and ultimately death for proclaiming the reign of god—good news to the poor, release for captives, liberation to the oppressed (luke 4:18–19)—stands as the paradigmatic example. to live in the shadow of the cross in the struggle against all forms of violence is also to live into the truth that the violence of the cross has been and continues to be conquered through the force of love that is nonviolence: the witness of a church of mercy 68     nonviolence. in one of his most striking statements about the relationship between self-suffering and nonviolence, gandhi writes that “just as one must learn the art of killing in the training for violence, so one must learn the art of dying in the training for nonviolence.”81 to learn the art of dying is to overcome the fear of dying, a process that liberates a person and community to live unto its true vocation. in a world profoundly marked by violence it is a process of being liberated unto the creativity of nonviolence as the means for transforming history. essentially, learning the art of dying is a process of overcoming fear through love, violence through nonviolence, indifference through mercy. in an ecclesiological key, this is the willingness of the church to suffer as it forcefully resists violence and points toward a different way of being and becoming a samaritan church on the path of nonviolence. in gandhian philosophy the means are ends in the making, and thus, there is a primacy to means that are inseparable from ends. bondurant writes that “perhaps the most characteristic quality of satyagraha is the flexibility in ends which an emphasis on means implies.”82 while ends may be unpredictable and beyond our control, the means must be accessible and firm. thus, gandhi writes, “means to be means must always be within our reach, and so ahimsa is our supreme duty. if we take care of the means, we are bound to reach the end sooner or later. when once we have grasped this point, final victory is beyond question.”83 for gandhi, the means of nonviolence was the creative ground that carried the surest possibility of a fundamental transformation of conflicts and the cultivation of social conditions capable of generating a more human, and thus divine, society. for the church, it is a matter of shifting its gaze from particular ends that seem to be reached only through the justification of violence, and towards an endlessly creative nonviolent means that paradoxically may be the only way of reaching the desired ends. in other words, to affirm with pope francis that nonviolence is a style of politics for peace is to affirm that nonviolence is a means for reaching that peace, the only christian means, but that such peace, like the reign of god, is never fully reached by our human efforts. a christian church that seeks to overcome violence in all its forms can only do so by the means of nonviolence, for it is in this way that it verifies that it is in fact following jesus, the mercy of god made flesh, whose grace overcomes all violence. nonviolence as source for theology if pope francis writes an encyclical on peace, not only will he complete the echo to his twelfth century namesake, but his papacy will also provide the church with a text that will likely, and 69 guardado     perhaps ironically, be fought over. relaunching the tradition of nonviolence as the christian means for peace will require nothing short of a radical revolution—a turning back to the very roots of our christian faith. the pope’s writings on mercy have provided a fertile context upon which to continue to tradition the church unto nonviolence, but the work of theologians committed to incarnating the spirit of nonviolence and not justifying violence with theology is required. in june 2019 when speaking to theologians in southern italy, pope francis spoke of nonviolence as “a horizon and wisdom […] to which theology must look upon as its own constitutive element.”84 nonviolence is constitutive for theology because it is constitutive for a christian life. in both theology and in the life of the church, in reflection and in praxis, nonviolence is the horizon that reveals the church of christ, and that makes a church of mercy credible. notes 1. robert j. schreiter, r. scott appleby, and gerard f. powers, peacebuilding: catholic theology, ethics, and praxis (maryknoll, n.y.: orbis books, 2010). 2. gerard f. powers, “our vocation is peacebuilding (construo pacem est nostra vocatione), expositions 12.1 (2018), 126–141, https://expositions.journals.villanova.edu/article/view/2324. 3. pope francis, “audience to representatives of the communications media: address of the holy father pope francis,” the holy see, march 16, 2013, http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2013/march/documents/papafrancesco_20130316_rappresentanti-media.html. 4. powers, “our vocation is peacebuilding” 135. 5. in his august 18, 2013 angelus message, pope francis said: “the christian’s real force is the force of truth and of love, which involves renouncing all forms of violence. faith and violence are incompatible! instead, faith and strength go together. christians are not violent; they are strong. and with what kind of strength? that of meekness, the strength of meekness, the strength of love” (the holy see, http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/angelus/2013/documents/papafrancesco_angelus_20130818.html). 6. pope francis, misericordiae vultus: bull of indiction of the extraordinary jubilee of nonviolence: the witness of a church of mercy 70     mercy, the holy see, april 11, 2015, §10, https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_letters/documents/papafrancesco_bolla_20150411_misericordiae-vultus.html. 7. pope francis, “angelus,” the holy see, march 17, 2013, http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/angelus/2013/documents/papafrancesco_angelus_20130317.html. 8. walter kasper, mercy: the essence of the gospel and the key to christian life (new york: paulist press, 2014). 9. the document was released on april 11, 2015 and the holy year of mercy officially began on december 8, 2015. 10. pope francis, misericordiae vultus §1, §6. 11. pope francis, “angelus,” march 17, 2013. 12. pope francis, misericordiae vultus §2. 13. ibid. §3. 14. ibid. §4. 15. see pope francis, “vigil of pentecost with the ecclesial movements: address of the holy father francis,” the holy see, may 18, 2013, http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2013/may/documents/papafrancesco_20130518_veglia-pentecoste.html. 16. see pedro tafur, travels and adventures: 1435–1439 (new york: routledge, 2004), 38– 39. 17. council of serdica, canon 8 from the latin version; hamilton hess, the early development of canon law and the council of serdica (new york: oxford university press, 2002), 217. 18. pope francis, misericordiae vultus §4. 19. the notion of a samaritan church was emphasized in the 2007 latin american episcopal conference (celam) document of aparecida, of which cardinal bergoglio, future pope francis, was a key author. see aparecida sections 26, 135, 176, 491, 537. 20. pope francis, misericordiae vultus §8. 21. ibid. §9. 22. ibid. §9. 71 guardado     23. ibid. §9. 24. ibid. §10. 25. ibid. §10, 20. 26. ibid. §20. 27. ibid. §12. 28. ibid. §25. 29. see misericordiae vultus §2. 30. pope francis, “message of his holiness pope francis to the cardinal peter k. a. turkson on the occasion of the conference on ‘nonviolence and just peace: contributing to the catholic understanding of and commitment to nonviolence,’” the holy see, april 6, 2016, https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/pontmessages/2016/documents/papa-francesco_20160406_messaggio-non-violenza-pacegiusta.html. 31. the spanish text reads: “es necesario renovar todos los instrumentos más adecuados para hacer concreta la aspiración a la justicia y a la paz de los hombres y de las mujeres de hoy. así, también la reflexión para relanzar el camino de la no violencia, y en especial de la no violencia activa, constituye una aportación necesaria y positive,” https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/es/messages/pontmessages/2016/documents/papa-francesco_20160406_messaggio-non-violenza-pacegiusta.html. 32. see misericordiae vultus §6. 33. translation from spanish my own. pope francis, “nonviolence and just peace.” 34. the spanish reads: “contribuir a la renovación del testimonio activo de la no violencia como ‘arma’ para conseguir la paz.” 35. pope paul vi, “message of his holiness pope paul vi for the celebration of the day of peace: if you want peace, work for justice,” the holy see, january 1, 1972, http://w2.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/messages/peace/documents/hf_pvi_mes_19711208_v-world-day-for-peace.html. 36. pope francis, “message of his holiness pope francis to the cardinal peter k. a. turkson.” 37. pope francis, “message of his holiness pope francis for the celebration of the xlix world day of peace: overcome indifference and win peace,” the holy see, january 1, nonviolence: the witness of a church of mercy 72     2016, http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/peace/documents/papafrancesco_20151208_messaggio-xlix-giornata-mondiale-pace-2016.html. 38. pope francis, “apostolic letter misericordia et misera of the holy father francis at the conclusion of the extraordinary jubilee of mercy,” the holy see, november 20, 2016, https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_letters/documents/papa-francescolettera-ap_20161120_misericordia-et-misera.html. 39. emphasis in the original. 40. pope francis, misericordia et misera §5. 41. ibid. §16. 42. ibid. §13. 43. ibid. §18. 44. the document mostly uses the term “nonviolence” instead of “non-violence,” the latter of which had been used in the previous vatican message on nonviolence from april 6, 2016. in literature on nonviolence both spellings are used. 45. pope francis, “address of his holiness pope francis to participants in the third world meeting of popular movements,” the holy see, november 5, 2016, http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2016/november/documents/papafrancesco_20161105_movimenti-popolari.html. 46. for more on how various experiences of precarity are giving rise to embodied nonviolent movements that claim communities’ rights to exist, see judith butler, notes toward a performative theory of assembly (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2015). 47. pope francis, “message of his holiness pope francis for the celebration of the fiftieth world day of peace, nonviolence: a style of politics for peace,” the holy see, january 1, 2017, https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/peace/documents/papafrancesco_20161208_messaggio-l-giornata-mondiale-pace-2017.html. 48. see gustavo gutierrez, we drink from our own wells (maryknoll, ny: orbis books, 2003), 80–89. 49. pope francis, “nonviolence: a style of politics for peace” §3. 50. ibid. §3. 73 guardado     51. ibid. §4. 52. ibid. §4. 53. ibid. §4. 54. since vatican ii the universal call to holiness specified in lumen gentium chapter 5 has served as a means of reflection on living holiness in the modern world. though there are varied paths, there is one holiness: “the classes and duties of life are many, but holiness is one—that sanctity which is cultivated by all who are moved by the spirit of god, and who obey the voice of the father and worship god the father in spirit and in truth. these people follow the poor christ, the humble and cross-bearing christ in order to be worthy of being sharers in his glory. every person must walk unhesitatingly according to his own personal gifts and duties in the path of living faith, which arouses hope and works through charity” (pope paul vi, lumen gentium, the holy see, §41, https://www.vatican.va/archive/ hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19641121_lumengentium_en.html). similarly, one may argue that nonviolence is a path to holiness that must mark all paths. as pope francis said on the feast of all saints in 2013, “the kingdom of heaven, indeed, is for those […] who are not violent, but instead merciful and who seek to be architects of reconciliation and peace” (pope francis, “angelus,” the holy see, november 1, 2013, http://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/angelus/2013/documents/papafrancesco_angelus_20131101.html). see also “saintliness is a vocation for all,” vatican news service, november 4, 2013, http://visnews-en.blogspot.com/2013/11/saintliness-isvocation-for-all.html. 55. pope francis, “nonviolence: a style of politics for peace” §5. 56. ibid. §6. 57. ibid. §7. 58. jon sobrino, the principle of mercy (maryknoll, ny: orbis books, 1994), 18. 59. ibid. 18. 60. ibid. 21. 61. while widely accepted as words of gandhi, it has been difficult to locate a specific citation for what was the reality for most of india under british colonial rule. 62. sobrino 23. nonviolence: the witness of a church of mercy 74     63. ibid. 26. 64. for an analysis of gandhian politics in relation to political realism, see karuna mantena, “another realism: the politics of gandhian nonviolence,” the american political science review 106.2 (2012): 455–470. 65. boaventura de sousa santos considers gandhi an “archivist of the future” because of his amazing ability to engage in intercultural and interpolitical translation in his time, practices that are necessary for the ongoing global struggles against new forms of colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy. see the end of the cognitive empire: the coming of age of epistemologies of the south (durham, nc: duke university press, 2018), 209–246. 66. pope francis, “nonviolence: a style of politics for peace” §7. 67. pope francis, “address of his holiness pope francis to participants in the third world meeting of popular movements, november 5, 2016. 68. mohandas k. gandhi, selected writings of mahatma gandhi (boston: beacon press, 1951), 240. 69. joan bondurant, conquest of violence: the gandhian philosophy of conflict (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 1958), 4. 70. mohandas k. gandhi, satyagraha in south africa (india: navajivan publishing house, 1950), 172. 71. bondurant 16. 72. gandhi, cited in bondurant, conquest of violence 17. 73. bondurant 18–19. 74. here one finds a parallel with pope john paul ii’s words at drogheda, ireland in 1979: “i proclaim, with the conviction of my faith in christ and with an awareness of my mission, that violence is evil, that violence is unacceptable as a solution to problems, that violence is unworthy of man. violence is a lie, for it goes against the truth of our faith, the truth of our humanity. violence destroys what it claims to defend: the dignity, the life, the freedom of human beings. violence is a crime against humanity, for it destroys the very fabric of society” (pope john paul ii, “homily at drogheda, ireland,” the holy see, september 29, 1979; http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/homilies/1979/documents/hf_jpii_hom_19790929_irlanda-dublino-drogheda_en.html). 75. bondurant 24. 75 guardado     76. gandhi, cited in bondurant 24. 77. bondurant 25. 78. gandhi, cited in bondurant 25. 79. jon sobrino, the principle of mercy (maryknoll, ny: orbis books, 1994), 18. 80. gandhi, cited in bondurant 28. 81. gandhi, cited in bondurant 29. 82. bondurant 34. 83. gandhi, cited in bondurant 25. 84. translation my own. the spanish text, like the italian, reads similarly: “en este punto pienso, como horizonte y sabiduría, en la no violencia, a la que la teología debe mirar como elemento propio constitutivo.” the english translation of the text says the following: “and here i think of nonviolence as a perspective and way of understanding the world, to which theology must look as one of its constitutive elements.” the english translation does away with equating nonviolence as a horizon and as wisdom, and specifies that it is “one” of theology’s constitutive elements. see pope francis, “meeting on the theme of ‘theology after veritatis gaudium in the context of the mediterranean,” the holy see, june 21, 2019, http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2019/june/documents/papafrancesco_20190621_teologia-napoli.html. microsoft word bagnulo spr20 [expositions 14.1 (2020) 86–96] expositions (online) issn: 1747–5376 desire, conflict, and tradition in ethics in the conflicts of modernity ashleen menchaca-bagnulo texas state university 1. introduction in the myth of er at the end of plato’s republic, we are permitted to pick from many forms of life for our return to the world. the order in which we are permitted to choose is given to us by lot (necessity), but our judgment is displayed by our choice of reincarnated form (virtue, or the lack thereof).1 plato uses a narrative within a narrative to show the limitations of polities governed by substantial knowledge of the good. the person blessed with the first choice of lives in the netherworld was similarly blessed on earth by citizenship in the best of regimes. both blessings were conferred on him by chance and not merit. er recounts that even given the fortune of a good education and happiness on earth due to participation in the best regime, and the opportunity to choose first among all souls, this person makes the worst choice. he “immediately chose the greatest tyranny, and due to folly and gluttony, chose without having considered everything adequately; and it escaped his own notice that eating his own children and other evils were fated to be a part of that life.”2 even though he was “one of those who had come from heaven, having lived in an orderly regime,” he participated in virtue only through “habit” and not by understanding. in fact, “not the least number of those” who chose tyranny came from such regimes, “because they were unpracticed in labors.” alasdair macintyre departs from other critics of modernity—including adrian vermeule, patrick deneen, and to a lesser extent, pierre manent—because, in his attempt to retrieve the resources of pre-modernity, he prioritizes the importance of learning from the “labors” of its less than perfect account of the human good in order to choose wisely in the post-modern present. like those interlocutors, macintyre rejects the idea that there is any value neutrality inherent in liberalism, a suggestion macintyre has found misguided from his marxist days onward.3 however, unlike other critics of modernity, he affirms the separation of the state from visions of the good life: “for the contemporary state could not adopt a point of view on the human good as its own without to a significant degree distorting, degrading, and discrediting that point of view. it would put those values to the service of its own political and economic power and so degrade and discredit 87 bagnulo them.” as examples, macintyre points to two regimes whose hegemony rested on the power of the roman catholic church: franco’s spain and de valera’s ireland.4 in this essay, i argue that macintyre’s thinking rescues us from reactionary, anti-liberal strains of contemporary political thought and contemporary politics that do not know how to accommodate viewpoint diversity in the ethical life. in order to establish this claim, first, i briefly review what i call the “after virtue project,” in which i present what is distinctive about macintyre’s critique of liberalism. then, i turn to the role of conflict in ethics in the conflicts of modernity. macintyre draws attention in this work to what many contemporary critics of modernity do not want to admit. conflicts about the final human good are “interminable,” or as he says elsewhere in this work “philosophical theories are only rarely, if ever, refutable by knockdown arguments.”5 macintyre’s decision to make his latest, and perhaps last, major contribution to philosophy an explanation of the role that conflict plays in the ethical life provides his most complete answer to what the st. benedict he urged us to wait for in after virtue looks like. for macintyre, benedict does not escape the world or withdraw from modernity in the face of conflict, but takes it in and responds to it. conflict appears on at least three levels in macintyre’s thought. there is the familiar conflict within us, namely, the conflict that our (sometimes warring) desires might cause. there is conflict that we encounter in the form of obstacles presented by events, society, or other persons. finally, there is the conflict among traditions that currently manifests in the apparently interminable disagreements of modernity. the flourishing of the aristotelian/thomistic tradition itself is indebted to conflict, whether it be the kind of productive conflict evidenced by thomas’s synthesis of aristotle, his islamic interpreters, st. paul, and augustine,6 or the uncoupling of many of aristotle’s benighted prejudices from the structure of his thought.7 2. the “after virtue project” as a unique critique of modernity recently, patrick deneen has provocatively argued that liberalism fails precisely through the achievement of its goals. in why liberalism failed, deneen claims that, “[a]s liberalism has ‘become more fully itself’ […], it has generated pathologies that are at once deformations of its claims yet realizations of liberal ideology.”8 deneen explicitly acknowledges that any anti-liberal political program must admit liberalism’s accomplishments and refrain from proposing any simple return to the past.9 in this way, he desire, conflict, and tradition in ethics in the conflicts of modernity 88 resembles macintyre. however, as an example of the political arrangement he envisions, deneen endorses the kinds of small communities detailed in rod dreher’s benedict option, a book named after macintyre’s invocation of st. benedict at the end of after virtue.10 by contrast, macintyre has distanced himself from the benedict option as an interpretation of his political project.11 further, whatever regime macintyre envisions as fitting, he emphasizes, as we have seen, the importance of some amount of state neutrality when it comes to the question of the good life: so by a very different route we have arrived at very much the same conclusion as that reached both by classical liberals and by modern liberals: the state must not be allowed to impose any one particular conception of the human good or identify one such conception with its own interests and causes. it must afford tolerance to a diversity of standpoints. but liberals generally have arrived at these conclusions because they believe either that the state ought to be neutral between different rival conceptions of the good or that states ought actively to promote the liberty and autonomy of individuals in making their own choices. i have argued by contrast first that the contemporary state is not and cannot be evaluatively neutral, and secondly that it is just because of the ways in which the state is not evaluatively neutral that it cannot generally be trusted to promote any worthwhile set of values, including those of autonomy and liberty.12 for macintyre, it seems, learning from modernity involves cultivating a modicum of the institutional neutrality that deneen sees as fundamentally disruptive of good politics. like deneen, adrian vermeule shares with macintyre a concern for the ravages of the market on society, yet unlike deneen he also shares with macintyre an interest in conflict. more radical than deneen, vermeule claims that all conflict is ultimately “theological.” consequently, liberalism’s most primary problem is “that its anti-authoritarian ethos of belief, its compulsion to celebrate the overcoming of political rule, is ultimately inconsistent with its own claim to rule.” liberalism cannot recognize that it is itself “sacramental,”13 requiring a faith in its authority that its privileging of intellectual skepticism conceals. unlike deneen, vermeule envisions a politics much more imperial in its scope, welcoming the “providential” fact that liberalism, despite itself, has prepared a state capable of great tasks, as a 89 bagnulo legacy to bequeath to a new and doubtless very different future. according to vermeule, “the vast bureaucracy created by liberalism in pursuit of a mirage of depoliticized governance may, by the invisible hand of providence, be turned to new ends, becoming the great instrument with which to restore a substantive politics of the good.”14 such a politics turns to the ragion di stato tradition studied by carl schmitt, a tradition the aim of which “was to elaborate natural principles by which a ruler could secure the threefold hallmarks of common good, ‘abundance, peace, and justice,’ and thereby secure his own ‘firm rule over people’—giovanni botero’s famous definition of the ‘state.’”15 with the most nuance of the alternative critics of modernity we are considering, pierre manent characterizes the modern experiment as lacking the ability to satisfy the deepest human longings, in part because it privileges equality too greatly. according to manent, the political needs glory to thrive16—the kind of glory that is incompatible with the humility privileged by macintyre in his account of aquinas.17 notably, manent accuses macintyre of being insufficiently political,18 which reflects a difference between the men on the role of humility in politics—a difference that is evident in macintyre’s critique of the megalopsychos, the magnanimous man.19 modernity, according to manent, suffers from the fact that it suppresses the two greatest human inclinations: the desire for the transcendent, embodied most perfectly by the church as an empire, and the desire for the “common thing,” or the political, particularly as represented by the ancient greek polis.20 the suppression of these impulses is a symptom of one of modernity’s primary aims: the triumph of the many over the few.21 like other critics of liberalism, macintyre views modern morality as frustrating many of human being’s most fundamental longings. however, unlike other critics, he recognizes the extent to which practices that form virtues are instantiations of times and places, and that it is difficult to disentangle pre-modern political enterprises from their prejudices.22 it turns out that the conflict that occurs when rival conceptions of the good, in theory or in practice, clash is part of what enables the separation of prudence from prejudice. this ability to balance the universal and the particular makes macintyre more subtle than other critics of modernity. moved by the question of the apparently interminable philosophical conflict of the contemporary world, macintyre undertook a fuller description of what the after virtue thesis entails, defending and modifying his work.23 through this inquiry, he embraced thomistic aristotelianism. yet once he recognized the answers to the questions posed in after virtue in desire, conflict, and tradition in ethics in the conflicts of modernity 90 aquinas’s work, he was confronted with a difficulty: how does one persuade a hostile world, what he calls “the culture of advanced modernity,” to accept a moral philosophy toward which it bears nothing but animosity? and how does one make a philosophy that is situated in a particular historical and cultural context translatable to a different time? for answers, he turned to the process of his own philosophical inquiry. consequently, macintyre’s work since 1981 may be divided into a diagnostic phase, where he examines contemporary moral philosophy as undergoing an epistemological crisis, and a prescriptive phase, where he responds to this epistemological crisis using the resources of his own philosophical journey, traditional thomism, and the most salient points of the nietzschean critique. the subsequent “after virtue project” attempts to rescue not just moral philosophy, but the world of “plain persons,” from the disaster macintyre perceives in the culture of advanced modernity. in after virtue, macintyre argues that “in the actual world which we inhabit the language of morality is in [… a] state of grave disorder.”24 the reader famously comes to a crossroads. nietzsche correctly questions the obligatory nature of a morality of rules, rather than a morality of fulfillment. yet, if the aristotelian conception of reason and telos is recoverable, nietzsche is not right to suppose morality is dead along with god. one must concede either that the enlightenment era’s rejection of aristotelianism was misguided, or that morality is just a matter of perspective. macintyre decidedly opts for the former. after virtue famously concludes with the invocation of “another st. benedict” and a call to readers, both plain and learned, to launch a “stubborn, persevering, and hopeful but realistic effort to re-create in adverse social and political circumstances the perennial conditions for the good life.”25 macintyre’s adherence to aristotelian thomism is earliest dated at 1985, but the seeds of his contemporary theoretical position are present from his youth. his concern for incommensurability grew out of his early experience of the world as a reflective young man caught between warring traditions. a capacity for belief as well as a capacity for negative critique is evident within his account of his intellectual life. he spent his youth immersed in a strong gaelic oral tradition that emphasized the importance of roles, loyalty, and narrative. in contrast, he simultaneously experienced a culture of “bourgeois” values, competitive learning, and worldly success.26 plato’s philosophy persuaded him to abhor contradiction, but at the same time his undergraduate studies increased his inability to think within one coherent tradition. though he had formerly embraced 91 bagnulo christianity on some level, he could no longer sustain belief in god. once incapable of thinking within the confines of a unified tradition, the dictates of faith appeared arbitrary and purposeless.27 at first lights, the constraints of a particular mode of thought as lived and experienced by particular groups can appear destructive to independent thinking, yet macintyre’s personal experience of confusion and incommensurability led him to embrace traditions of inquiry later on in his career. it is also very possible that the appeal of a unified tradition drew him to his first metanarrative, marxism. his struggle with marxism exposed for him the weaknesses of closed systems of thought and emphasized the importance of listening and responding to critics.28 3. productive conflict and the role of desire i have noted that macintyre considers productive conflict an important catalyst for right human judgment, in contrast to other critics of liberalism. like the soul in plato’s myth of er who chooses the life of the tyrant because his desire was never transformed through “labors,” critics of modernity whose inquiry stops at depicting it as a destroyer of virtue or greatness overlook the importance of embedding themselves in practices of enquiry that can disentangle what is perennial about human desire from what is only conventional and even from what is “masked” by human desire as truth.29 doing so requires asking deeper questions about what desires for the good modernity seeks to satisfy, how our particular contexts condition those desires, and how the desires influence our ability to think about what is good. it also requires asking how pre-modern phases of western development failed to account for, or even possibly distorted, human desires. an important part of that process of inquiry is beginning to ask in what ways systems of thought are responses to human desire, even while they create and condition human desire. on this view marxism, liberalism, and what macintyre refers to as “morality” are all attempts to answer human desire that end up disfiguring or repressing it.30 how does engaging in the conflict of traditions of inquiry lead to the transformation of desire that enable to us to move toward wisdom in understanding the good life? macintyre identifies three phases: the rehearsal of objections from other traditions, the reply to objections from other traditions (and if necessary the synthesis of what is useful in those traditions to one’s own), and the presentation of how one’s tradition better satisfies the concerns expressed by the original objection.31 according to macintyre, an important part of the ethics of politics is to create the desire, conflict, and tradition in ethics in the conflicts of modernity 92 conditions for the practices and enquiries that shape and educate desire and help us to pose our questions in wise ways. these conditions are necessarily open to conflict if they are to remain healthy. on this account, conflict is constitutive of truth in inquiry and practice. if there is such a thing as the primary precepts of natural law, explaining why it is the case that the discovery and practice of these precepts is so difficult in modernity is essential. aquinas himself considered such failure “rare and exceptional,” but it is clear that moral disagreement is extensive and characteristic of modernity.32 the dynamic nature of inquiry about the good comports with macintyre’s characterization of tradition as “an argument extended through time in which certain fundamental arguments are defined and redefined in terms of two kinds of conflict,” internal conflict between adherents of the same tradition and external conflict with critics.33 traditions of inquiry are not merely theoretical, because every articulation of the human good (even the ones that suggest there is no human good) requires imagining “what allegiance to it amounts to or would amount to in practice.”34 it is often in questions of practice that members of disparate traditions bump up against one another, because their disagreements about practice may reflect deeper disagreements about the good. how communities respond to such conflict is essential not just to social stability but to the health of traditions themselves. communities that experience disagreement must conduct their conflict in such a way that they avoid two pitfalls: (1) the “evil of suppression, of thinking that one has avoided conflict by somehow depriving one party to it of the means for expressing its attitudes, concerns and arguments”; and (2) the “evil of disruption,” such that any possibility for shared deliberation is precluded. “sometimes,” macintyre comments, “one of these evils is produced by those who are attempting to avoid the other.”35 pointedly, the upshot is that even for adherents of a given tradition there is no philosophical “last word,” so to speak.36 even the aristotelian thomist convinced of modern philosophy’s paucity must anticipate and be open to further challenges. 4. conclusion for macintyre, critics of liberalism must “act against modernity within modernity.”37 an empathetic anti-liberal, learning from aquinas’s approach to conflict between traditions, will seek to understand her interlocutors in their own terms. accordingly, the critic of liberalism who has learned to engage with rival traditions will see in modernity’s attempt to sever the good from the 93 bagnulo political a claim about the failure of authorities (political, religious, or otherwise) to practice the good. let us close by considering an example. recently, macintyre discussed in a conference presentation what the anti-liberal has to learn from the political and social changes in the republic of ireland, as symbolized by its 2018 legalization of abortion. as he remarks, “the most prominent advocates for retaining the ban on abortion were of course the catholic bishops and other representatives of the church, but the greatest and most scandalous failures of the catholic church in ireland—and of course not only in ireland—have been its failures to care for children.”38 in ireland, those failures included not only sexual abuse, but also physical abuse and neglect in orphanages and homes for unwed mothers. while the church claimed to care for children, and to oppose abortion out of such care, macintyre suggests not only that the church’s failures made legal abortion possible, but that they also contributed decisively to ireland’s relatively late secularization. the religious authorities’ failure to practice the good they taught made the moral claims of the church “unintelligible” to the plain person, who now had “an excellent reason for regarding the culture of the church with deep suspicion.” instead of subordinating some forms of desire to the authority of the church in the hope that the desire would be “formed,” the majority of irish people rejected the authority of the church to form their desire. here is the point. instead of viewing ireland’s embrace of abortion as strictly an outgrowth of modernity’s “mythic” assertion of neutrality, or as evidence of the need to unite church and state to control human desire, macintyre casts it as a problem of authority behaving badly and thus losing its legitimacy. the church in ireland failed to attend to its internal problems. internal conflict should not have been suppressed; it would have been so very much healthier. notes 1. see plato, the republic of plato, trans. allan bloom, 3rd ed. (new york: basic books, 2016), 297–303. 2. ibid., 302. 3. alasdair macintyre, “an interview with giovanna borradori,” in the macintyre reader, ed. kelvin knight (notre dame, in: university of notre dame press, 1998), 255–266, at 258. desire, conflict, and tradition in ethics in the conflicts of modernity 94 4. macintyre, “toleration and the goods of conflict,” in ethics and politics, vol. 2 of his selected essays (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2006), 205–223, at 213–214. 5. ibid., 210. 6. macintyre, whose justice? which rationality? (notre dame, in: university of notre dame press, 1988), chapter 10, “overcoming a conflict of traditions.” 7. macintyre, ethics in the conflicts of modernity: an essay on desire, practical reasoning, and narrative (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2016), 87. 8. patrick j. deneen, why liberalism failed (new haven: yale university press, 2018), 3. 9. ibid., 182. 10. ibid., 191. 11. macintyre, “common goods, frequent evils,” presented at the conference “the common good as common project,” university of notre dame, notre dame, indiana, march 27, 2017. 12. macintyre, “toleration and the goods of conflict,” in ethics and politics, 205–223, at 213–214. 13. adrian vermeule, “all human conflict is ultimately theological,” church life journal july 26, 2019, https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/all-human-conflict-is-ultimatelytheological/. 14. vermeule, “integration from within,” american affairs 2.1 (spring 2018), https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2018/02/integration-from-within/. 15. vermeule, “all human conflict is ultimately theological.” 16. pierre manent, metamorphoses of the city: on the western dynamic, trans. marc lepain (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2013), 257, 261. 17. for more on the relationship between humility and virtue in macintyre’s interpretation of aquinas, see mary m. keys, “aquinas and the challenge of aristotelian magnanimity,” history of political thought 24.1 (2003): 37–65. 18. see further nathan j. pinkoski, “manent and perreau-saussine on macintyre’s aristotelianism,” perspectives on political science 48.2 (2019): 125–135. 19. macintyre, dependent rational animals: why human beings need the virtues, rev. ed. (chicago: open court, 2001), 126–127. 20. manent, metamorphoses of the city, 217. 95 bagnulo 21. manent and daniel j. mahoney, seeing things politically: interviews with bénédicte delorme-montini, trans. ralph c. hancock (south bend, in: st. augustine press, 2015), 105. 22. macintyre, ethics in the conflicts of modernity, 85–87. 23. see john horton and susan mendus, “alasdair macintyre: after virtue and after,” in after macintyre: critical perspectives on the work of alasdair macintyre, eds. john horton and susan mendus (notre dame, in: university of notre dame press, 1995), 1–15, at 2; and thomas d. d’andrea, ed., tradition, rationality, and virtue: the thought of alasdair macintyre (aldershot, uk: routledge, 2006), xiv. 24. macintyre, after virtue: a study in moral theory, 3rd ed. (notre dame, in: university of notre dame press, 2007), 2. 25. ibid., 287. 26. macintyre, “an interview with giovanna borradori,” in the macintyre reader, 254. 27. ibid., 256–257. 28. ibid, 258. in ethics in the conflict of modernity, macintyre returns to confront marx and reveals more fully what he takes to be marx’s final role in his own theorizing. for an important interpretation of macintyre as a thinker more in need of marx for sustained inquiry about justice than he knows, see jeffery nicholas, “alasdair macintyre and utopia: an introduction,” international critical thought 9.3 (2019): 411–419. 29. macintyre, “aquinas and the extent of moral disagreement,” in ethics and politics, 64– 82, at 81. 30. nicholas, “alasdair macintyre and utopia,” 413. 31. macintyre, ethics in the conflicts of modernity, 88. 32. macintyre, “aquinas and the extent of moral disagreement,” in ethics and politics, 64– 82, at 67. 33. macintyre, whose justice? which rationality? 12. 34. macintyre, “toleration and the goods of conflict,” in ethics and politics, 220. in this way, objections to a tradition that focus on evils committed by members of that tradition are not sufficient to discredit the tradition. however, it must become clear that such evils are “distortions or imperfections […] only related per accidens to that conception.” 35. ibid., 205–206. desire, conflict, and tradition in ethics in the conflicts of modernity 96 36. macintyre, “rival aristotles: aristotle against some modern aristotelians,” in ethics and politics, 22–40, at 40. 37. macintyre, ethics in the conflicts of modernity, xi. 38. macintyre, “absences from aquinas, silences in ireland,” presented at the conference “higher powers,” university of notre dame, notre dame, indiana, november 2, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsbfvquogmc. all subsequent quotations in the body of the text come from this presentation. 